Rev Left Radio - Laundering Black Rage: Capitalism, Empire, and The Mechanics of Co-optation

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Rasul Mowatt and Too Black join Breht to discuss their new book Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. The book is a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State that examines how Black Rage—conceived as a constructive and logical response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings racialized as Black—is cleaned for the unyielding means of White capital. Interlacing political theory with international histories of Black rebellion, it presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that consistently convert Black Rage into a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Laundering Black Rage investigates how the Rage directed at the police murder of George Floyd could be marshalled to funnel the Black Lives Matter movement into corporate advertising and questionable leadership, while increasing the police budgets inside the laundry cities of capital - largely with our consent. Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering. Intertwining stories of Black resistance throughout the African diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the laundering process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and organizers enraged at capitalism and White supremacy laundering their work for nefarious means. Check out The Black Myths Podcast You can find the book HERE (25% Discount code at checkout: EFLY01) Find the (more affordable) e-book version HERE   Essays:   Pt. 1 https://www.blackagendareport.com/laundering-black-rage   Pt. 2 https://www.blackagendareport.com/laundering-black-rage-part-2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Support Rev Left Radio Follow Rev Left on IG   

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on Rasul Mowat and Two Black, who co-authored the book Laundering Black Rage, The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. It just came out a little earlier this month, I think early April, and they are on the show to discuss this book and just have an incredibly wide-ranging, rich and deep conversation and analysis about Black Rage, about the 2020 George Floyd protests, the sort of deep materialist analysis of what those protests actually represented, the co-optive mechanisms of the state and how they kicked in during and after that protest. We go all the

way back to the Tulsa race riots in the 1920s, the massacre that ensued there, doing a lot of corrective work on a lot of the fiction and fantasy built up around that massacre and the advancing of the black Wall Street narrative, which is a mystification of the actual class divisions and the actual concrete material reality of that situation. I found that fascinating. We talk about so much in this episode. The book is incredibly deep and rich in its analysis, and we get some of that here in this conversation, but of course there's never a substitute for the book itself. Luckily, Two Black gave me a 25% off code for the book because the book is a little bit pricey. So I'll link to that in the show notes so people can get just right

off the top 25% off of their book, making it much more accessible, hopefully to more people. I highly recommend people check that out. I highly recommend people check out Two Black's podcast that he does with several other comrades called the Black Mitz podcast. It's incredibly good podcast. I'm not just saying that I genuinely subscribe. to it. I genuinely listen to it. And I highly, highly encourage people right now to go download, subscribe, whatever your podcast app

that you prefer is to the Black Myths podcast. I'll of course link to that in the show notes as well to make it even easier. But yes, this is an incredibly wide-ranging, deep, and important conversation. I could not be happier with the guests and with how this conversation went. I highly recommend everything

in the show notes related to the book and their other work. So without further ado, here is Rasul and Two Black. discussing Laundering Black Rage, The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Prophets. I'm a poet, a organizer, filmmaker, an author, based in the Indianapolis area, and co-author of Wandering Black Rage, and a longtime listener of this show, so happy to be here. Thank you. Russell.

Russell Llewatt, while I am a department head in the Department of Parks and Recreation and Tourism Management at College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University as well as a department head within a division of academic and student affairs, I'm on here today as a professor in critical geography as well as in American Studies, looking more. specifically at cities and their development and their role within a framework of capitalism. Well, it's an honor and a pleasure to have both of you on. I'm a fan of Black Myths podcast, which I'll link to in the show notes as well. And I recently listened to your interview over with our friends and comrades that millennials are killing capitalism, a really great extended interview. I highly encourage anybody who's interested and who likes this interview to go check out that show and check out on that podcast because they always have been doing really principled and important

work the book that we're going to be discussing today is of course called laundering black rage the washing of black death people property and profits and i think the first um the best way to get into this conversation is to kind of give us a basic overview of this book so can you let us know what this book is about what you both aimed to accomplish with it and what the motivation for this project was yeah so at the core this book is a study um i think it's important to highlight that first it's not to survive or anything of that nature. It began with the investigation

now the police were how the police crushing a black man's neck and the subsequent rage it inspires. So you're thinking about black rage and others is converted into seemingly unrelated items

like black capitalism, buy black banking, diversity, representation, corporate marketing, nonprofit, rifting, and even repression, right? And we say unrelated because none of these things

actually resolve then issues such as a poor black man's neck being crushed by the violence workers we call the police or the broader capitalist interests they represent that leave so many black people dead yet so many of us are conditioned to demand a lot of these unrelated things

not all of us but more than too many of us so laundering at its base is taking something dirty and making it look clean our bulk offers a spatial historical analysis and have the conversion of black rage and the black deaths into unrelated items and to these unrelated items I just named.

So it's important, though, I think more importantly, that this analysis is not just about 2020. I think that's something that a lot of people try to couch the book as. 2020 is more of a starting point for us. And when we say 2020, specific to George Floyd being murdered on May 25th by the Minneapolis police, particularly Derek Chauvin, there's just people trying to figure out in just 2020, and I think that's

how we get stuck if we're just trying to figure out what happened, why this didn't happen, why things that we thought were going to be revolutionary weren't or whatever, and we think it's important to actually study the history itself. Um, not just that, just that year, even though we definitely give analysis to that. Um, and then lastly, uh, just to keep it brief, we wanted to get black rage a material basis. So most scholars that are written by black rage usually couched it as either a kind of legal theory or legal defense theory or, uh, psychological study of black dysfunction to try to explain why black people don't quote, unquote behave, um, the way that, um, that white America, just the broader America might think poor black people should behave. You know, so other than maybe like a bail hooks or something,

that hasn't really been like a material analysis of just black rage and rage in general. From what I could find, particularly black rage. So we're not looking to do any kind of psychoanalysis, so we're not looking to obviously prison and have some kind of legal theory. We want to understand black rage as a material response to oppression under capitalism. Black rage is a response. Black rage is not inherently as a response is not inherently revolutionary or reactionary. So it can go either way.

But it does come from a genuine response to oppression nonetheless. So, you know, laundering, which we'll get into more, is a means of throwing black rage off the sense, like we say in the book. So laundering isn't simply. Um, you know, as we'll talk about later, isn't just, you know, we talk about typically, like, the mob or something like that, we have a very different conception of laundering. Um, so Black Rage gets redirected from the core of what caused it to maybe lack of representation or something like that. So this book tries to understand again, that process, that conversion. Absolutely. Russell, do you want to say anything about that first question in your contributions to the project? Only just in the sense that, you know, I think everything that Too Black mentioned is also couchedness need to understand oppression and need to study oppression. I think oftentimes we may either avoid even the term, you know, oppression for, let's say,

the use of racism, you know, as a term. And so this book is also following a tradition of readings. an analysis that we could sort of see at our best sort of represented by maybe Walter Rodney's, how Europe underdeveloped Africa, one of the books that, in particular, two black, really sort of lashed on to, which was Robert Allen, Black, Black Awakening in Capitalist America. And, of course, France-knowned Richard of the Earth. Yeah, absolutely. And so just to reiterate, you know, this is not a psychoanalytic analysis. It is a materialist analysis, and it's not just about the uprisings of 2020 for sure,

but that is a natural starting point and an important flash point in this overall analysis, which is, of course, much broader than just that year and just those events. But kind of starting there, thinking about that event, knowing that this analysis goes beyond it, we're almost four years out from that uprising, and high insight does often give us sort of clarity that we lack when we're in the fog and chaos of the moment. can you talk about what those protests did represent, what its reverberations and impacts have been in the intervening years under your analysis and in your opinion?

Yeah, so to be candid, I think I think Russell would agree that we weren't, neither one of us maybe have the understanding of 2020 that might be popularly understood. I think it was a flashpoint for broader questions. This is not a knock on people who are in the streets, right? Like this is not saying, you know, that people didn't care or anything like that. This isn't a pessimistic view. That's necessarily.

But I just think 2020 for me was more so the end of something, more so than the beginning. So it was, it shows you that the state had adapted to an environment that it hadn't quite adapted to in 2014, particularly August 2014, when, when Mike Brown was slain. down by what's the name, Derek Wilson, I believe, in Ferguson, Missouri in the St. Louis area. So at that time, you know, there wasn't really a class of activists to respond to there. So that's why some of the, even the rhetoric that came out of that era, some of the, you know, the police were clumsy. There wasn't a real apparatus to respond to that specific type of black rage.

In this case, that specific type of uprising. So, you know, you had online silly arguments, but about, you know, whether Black Lives Matter was even an appropriate term. And people say in all lives matter. And this wasn't just conservatives or something. This is just how it was going, you know, more broadly within the American context. And then you don't see nearly as much money unleashed during that time. And then, you know, when you go to that area, there was a, there was a. series of local activists that mysteriously died. Some of them died in burning cars. Some of them,

you know, showed up missing. There was a sling of activists that just died. And then there was people who were nominated after that. And this is also at the time during when we still have our so-called first black president. So people thought that America, at least on the surface, was moving in the right direction. So when some of the civil rights leaders, like I believe Jesse Jackson went over there and even out Sharpton, they were sent home, like the people there didn't want to talk to them because they had kind of watched the process of somebody getting killed by the police. Some pastor, minister came in and said, we're going to march. And people, you know, particularly millennials at that time, were fairly young in 2014, but we're

tired of that process. So you saw an emergence of a new kind of leadership. You saw more diverse leadership within black communities, whether it's queer, black people, or or more black women. There was also a lot of pitfalls that came out of that era, too. And, you know, the way academia steps in and nonprofits, things of that nature. And, you know, there was a lot of things that didn't get corrected from that era either. But you didn't see the as easily of a co-optation like Ferguson was going for a while. And the media didn't even want to talk about Ferguson.

It wasn't even something that anybody wanted even referred to. And it took social media and it took people. will continue to go out in the streets every day to even get there. By the time we get 2020, that's not the environment anymore. You know, the media knows exactly how to cover protests, you know, even with all the rage that was on the streets. So all the corporations were like, we support Black Lives Matter. Jamie Diamond, who was the CEO of Chase's Bank, was kneeling in his board room.

And obviously, you had Congress kneeling in Kintech Klofts. And everybody was down for pandering. And Black Lives Matter signs were popping up in white gentrifiers, you know, land or in their property. And this was something that, you know, was happening at the same time. Wow. Yes, there was hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. But there also seemed to be a tendency to just characterize all those protests, all those rallies, all those uprisings as the same thing. So there were people who were doing some really, you know, important work.

But then there was also videos, you know, of protesters taking, taking people who were, you know, damaging property and literally handing them over to the police, right? Like, that's literally on camera. So, so there's just some of the numbers that we drop in the book. This is just a reader quote out of the book, this show, like, you know, George Floyd is murdered on May 25th of 2000. By early June, this is me quoting from the book, as contagious black rage was charing U.S. cities in response to the three-kinling police murder of George Floyd to see a capital flood of the streets to cool off the raging heat.

So on the government front, the Democratic Party broke their one month online fundraising record raising 392 million just in the month of June alone via Act Blue, including $115 million in the first four days of June. therefore on capitalizing on the rage of Floyd's murder. So there's a direct correlation you see here between yes, there's people in the streets, and yes, police proceeds are burning and people are calling for defund the police and in some cases even abolish the police and on a lesser note,

but I think it should be noted in community control of the police. But while that's happening, you know, $392 million just surges into the Democratic Party. And that was an online fundraising record at 114. just the first few days of June, right? And even on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the conservative side, Republican Party, um, saw the most they had raised up to that point with a hundred and thirty, thirty one million. That's just, that's just a political parties. And we looked at, uh, so-called racial equity funding within the

philanthropic world went from five point seven billion in two, nine to a 16.5 billion to 2020. So again, we see the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, money is clearly, like, the more money is all a sudden finding its way into the streets in response to this. Now, somebody can read that and say, well, that's a positive thing. That means that people want to solve the problem, but I think we can look at four years later and see that that's not the case. And then the Washington Post did a study of just how much money was pledged if they could find at least. So the top 50 corporations pledged 50 billion to so-called

to fight so-called racial inequality and just J.P. Morgan Chase proposed 28 billion of that the most of anyone on that list

and if you think about you look at the front of our book there's a picture of the Chase Bank being that was burned down in La Mesa, California it's literally like a burned down

a bank that happened in 2020 and there's a tag on one of the on some of the rubble that says BLM, but Chase's Bank ultimately involves itself in the laundering. So this picture kind of shows how these two days that should not really be coming together end up coming together. And then lastly, there was another study that we put in the book called Market Response to Racial Obrisings, if found BLM protests generated a windfall of profitability for policing. So these researchers tracked.

like high-profile killings by either white vigilantes or police from 2012 to 2020. So starting with like a Trayvon Martin to a George Floyd. And the study found that policing firms experienced a 7% increase in stock prices relative to the stock prices of non-policing firms in similar industries during the three weeks following Black Lives Matter related events. since firms experienced higher profits in two years following 2020 attributable to an increase of almost $1 billion in sales. So they found in this study that typically after every high-profile police, after every high-profile police killing, these firms who made equipment for the police and even the police themselves got more money.

They actually profited off of this. But 2020 was the most profitable up like to most profitable that any of these firms had ever seen up to that point within that eight year period. That's why I say it was the end of something. It was a perfection of a particular type of model as opposed to being like this moment that I think a lot of us have been taught to remember it as. And I, you know, I admit that, you know, I had my own health issues. I wasn't able to be on the streets as much as I would have liked in 2020, but I was still very connected um to organizations and um you know discussing strategy and things of that nature and you know

even here in indianapolis i was you know we were we were seeing you know the the manifestation some these things whether it was the arts be all of a sudden receiving more money than it ever had and there being as we talk about in the introduction there being a emphasis on um representation in art and black art and being able to just maybe use use art as an out outlet for your rage, which isn't inherently bad, but it tends to not go well when it's not resolving the material conditions that cause this rage in the first place. So what does it mean to say, I'm black and angry in a painting, but the police get more money? You know, what does it mean to say, I'm, you know, I'm, I've, we came from, I think people were sillyly saying in

2020, we went from picking cotton to picking presidents, right? This is some, some of the nonsense that was out there. So what does it mean to be, you know, thinking like that and feeling like you're having an outlet, but, you know, the George Floyd and even locally for us, the Dresjean reads, these things aren't really being addressed, even if one cop may go to prison for that or not. So it does not deal with those conditions, does not deal with the broader conditions of capitalism or anything of that nature. So, again, for us, 2020, again, Russell can give his own take on it. But I'll say, at least for me, I don't think. think, I don't think 2020 was the moment that a lot of us thought it was. It could have been

if we even had better infrastructure in place. I do think there was a window there, but I think we missed that window. Yeah, and really quick before I toss it over to Resoul. The basic point is like this 2020 crescendo, this peak is more of a perfecting of the mechanisms of laundering, of co-option, this massive profiteering that took place. I mean, as like the Democrats are ostensibly supporting slogans like defund the police. The police funding actually goes up. You see these sports leagues, which are of course multi-billion dollar industries like the NFL who just a few years earlier had blackballed, you know, Kaepernick from the league, putting end racism in their end zones for every game and on their jerseys, etc. And so this is the sort of analysis

that comes out of actually looking at who benefited materially from this, from this uprising, not to take away from the grassroots nature and the righteous nature. of these uprisings, but just to point out how the system itself has gotten incredibly skilled at co-opting that movement and that momentum and funneling it back into the maintenance of the system overall. And lastly, when Russell jumps down, the killing by police also went up to, like, you know, killings by the, like Russell can speak to that better than me, but when you look at the numbers, the killings by police went up. They did not go down.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of just my own sort of, you know, thoughts on it that really isn't necessarily in disagreement with two black, it's in the same vein of in some ways belittling 2020. But I think first to even think in that way critically about 2020, you know, we were also influenced by Stuart Hall, the British cultural studies theorists. And he talks about conjunctures, these moments, right, in which there is danger and opportunity both being presented at the same time due to, you know, the risk that empire and capital are both facing from resistance-based forces. And so what ends up happening is there a need to repress those actions to then rearrange itself to better deal with. what has happened, you know, previously. And so junctures can be these different periods of time that we can make note of throughout history, but not necessarily fixed, you know, in the sense that we all must agree upon, you know, all of us must agree upon 1968 as an example.

Like not, that's not, that's not necessarily Stuart Hall's point. Stuart Hall is primarily just giving us the language to think more critically about historical materialism, more in the present moment, right? And so with that mind, I think it's important to scrutinize our valorization of 2020 as some watershed moment. I think we think of it as important, really, when we're honest with ourselves in two regards. One, the look into the field, the look of the numerous crowds and numbers of people that

might have been at various protests and a number sure number of protests that might have been occurring in different places, the feel of the moment, right? The feel of being engaged in something and seeing something occur. But substantively, I think outside of COVID-19, you know, and all that came with COVID-19, whether it was the illness, the deaths, the failure, the health care system, the precarity of employment for many of us. Um, it did not have necessarily more police shooting that particular year than another year, um, previously. But of course, afterwards, they do go up and I'll speak to that, you know, probably later on.

But the police death by knee might have been horrible to see, but not really technically more horrible than any other deaths that has been caught on camera, right? Um, we can think about Philando Castile, you know, we can think about all these, individuals, whether they were shot in the back, shot sitting down in the passenger seat, you know, shot walking down the street, all these types of things, right? Brianna Taylor sleeping in her bed. Sleep in her bed and, you know, and knock on a door. And so police-related policies didn't really change for the better. So if you go back to then Stewart Hall's conjuncture, I think it may be one too early to assess whether

than that 2020 was a conjunction or an important moment, but for right now, especially in at least our analysis, it did not seem like something emerged. And if we remove COVID-19, how many people would have been really sort of connected to the moment? Yeah, you know, the COVID-19 for many of us was the necessary removal of distractions because of quarantine because of maybe some of us working now remote or some of us being laid off. We were also facing then the circumstances of those things, whether it was maintenance of high rent. And so people's level of dissent or willingness to dissent increased at that time. And so 2020, again, really may not not be all that special.

It doesn't mean that nothing happened. And just like Two Black said, it doesn't mean to diminish any of the work and activities that were sort of happening, but to try to treat it as if it's, you know, 1965 and 1968, 1992, you know, all these other particular year, 1994, doesn't mean, I don't know if it holds that particular weight. Additionally, in thinking about just the nature of an uprising, just one of, you know, know, push on that as well, because we have to be honest with ourselves, uprising truly is a revolt or rebellion, period.

I mean, if we understand in literature, we have to be cautious with wanting to sort of frame our own actions bigger than maybe what they may be. So the uprising has to, it is a revolt or rebellion, but it's not a protest or a serious of protest. You know, we can't think of 2020 to hear of uprising and then. attached some year that we know that there was a known slavery vote and call that also uprising. Like the words have to be in the same, right? And so while we have a few examples of the occupation of space after riots that may have

turned into further actions, blockades and barricades, such and then occupations of space in Seattle, Oakland, Portland in particular, there was really such overall nationally uprising and much less we can also think about worldwide. In Minneapolis the night of, there was a clear beginning of what we may call a riot turn rebellion, but remember people went back to work that same week.

That is not what happens in any type of uprising that we can think of at any point in history. And so I think what we had was large scale protest action, whether it was marches and rallies and vigils. But we've seen,

large-scale protests actually before, whether it was in 2015, 2014, the two blacks already talked about, you know, various G7 protests 1992 or 1989, tied to South Africa and even before. So I think these protests still represented something, a possibility, and as two black alluded to maybe a missed opportunity, you know, a possibility of what could happen when there's no distractions in a way, and what maybe could have been lobbied for instead of the laundering schemes that we became a part of or even instigated. Yeah, I think that's incredibly important and sober-minded analysis of the events. One thing that you talk about in the book, of course,

the title of the book involves laundering of black rage. And in the book, you say that black rage is a threat to, quote, the flow of capital and the established order of things, or at least it can be. can you talk about how black rage is a threat to the flow of capital in the established order of things and then maybe you could also touch on this idea of the phases of laundering so we can get a little bit more of an idea of these laundering dynamics and understand them at a deeper level yeah so you don't mind i'm actually want to start with laundering um to kind of just so people will understand what we're talking about because i think generally when we say when people say laundering they tend to think of um you know maybe a tv show they watch like Breaking Bad where you know watch the right takes takes his meth business and tries to legitimize it or they think about somebody they know in their own neighborhood that sells

drugs or does things that are labeled as quote unquote criminal um so so they probably this may not totally be connecting with the listener if we're not clear on what we mean when we say laundering versus of maybe what the popular understanding of it is um so just to get some definitions just to and then try to problematize some of these definitions to give you a sense of where we're coming from. And, you know, we, we note this in the book, but, you know, the basics, and I already said at the beginning of what we call laundering more popularly, and we don't really change the definition. We just expand our understanding of it. But, so there's a financial crimes enforcement network out of the U.S. Treasury Department, and they say money laundering is the process of making

illegally gain proceeds, i.e. dirty money appear illegal. i.e. clean. James Chen, who was a who worked at Chase Bank at the time that we pulled this definition um, I've explained as how dirty money must quote unquote have appear to have come from a legitimate source. The money from the criminal activities considered dirty and the process launders it to make it look clean. So the term laundering itself comes out of, uh, maybe people who would purchase a a car wash or a laundry mat, particularly a laundry mat. And then, you know, these are high cash

businesses, especially, you know, years ago. And the money would go into those laundry mats that were obtained from, say, selling drugs or the racket market, racketeering, or, you know, the numbers racket or something of that nature. And then they would, they would put that money into their front, their business, and then that money would come out on the other side as cling. And there's three phases of laundering, generally placement layering and integration. So that's how people probably probably understand laundering. Again, if you watch just using Breaking Bad as a reference point, there are many other shows, you watch Snowfall, if you watch the Wire, there's this process in which the criminal,

and I put the criminal in air quotes, is trying to. to, um, legitimize their money or get it into the, the quote unquote legitimate financial system, even though it was obtained by doing something dirty. Um, but so there's a few problems with this definition. Again, not necessarily, you know, I'll describe the process, but just maybe it's categories. So if, um, in the case of a watch to write, in the case of the drug dealer, in the case of somebody that does something, you're usually thinking that these, these are the criminals. These are the bad guys. These are the people that don't play the game the way it was supposed to be played. And then the rest of us are the citizens, are the regular people. We have

our banks and we have our financial system. And those things are all legitimate. Those things are all sanctioned by the state. And that's where they're, that's where those so-called criminals are trying to integrate themselves into. But the idea of criminality just doesn't hold up that cleanly, as we know. So to just say that the drug dealer, the criminal, or, or the, um, the guy that, you know, is, is, is, is not paying their taxes, you know, low key, like selling, selling t-shirts on the corner and them trying to legitimize that money is obviously, uh, you know, a certain conception of what we would call crime, you know, and crime is, it's a political, um, category. So for us, if you think about, you know, as Shen talks about the,

legitimate financial system, what makes capitalism a legitimate financial system, right? Like, what makes any of this legitimate in comparison to the drug deal? Like, why is one legitimate and one is the other not? So if we just simply apply the definition that is already out there, we don't have to change it, we don't have to alter it, and the idea of taking something dirty and making it appear clean within the United States and other and other settler. colonies as well and other colonies in general and empires in general but the united states particularly just use this as an example has been laundering from day one you know so it's stole land

it stole resources it stole people um and and and it conquered it conquered people it conquered land it conquered resources um you know we could easily say that that is a quote unquote crime or at the very least it's dirty um and then it built a state on top of it, a state, and our definition, I'll get to that later of the state, is a bit more broad than maybe just as people can see what it is just the government. It built a state on top of it. It built a state of affairs on top of it. It built businesses. It created land trust. It brought in settlers to fill the land. It broke treaties. You know, it slaughtered people. But it built all these things to legitimize it as tax collecting

in a constitution, the name of a country, and propaganda, and Monroe doctrines, and white men's burdens, and all these different things that justify this as a quote-unquote nation. And so the nation just becomes the front for the conquest, right? So just to give our definition of this state, and this is from Ross Sewell's book, his prior book, Geographies of Threat, and the production of violence state and the city in between And so he says, quote, configuration of power of government, corporate interests, classes of elites, and upper levels of bureaucratic management class, they've been missed the ruling classes, goals, and aims and sits at top and accumulated economic base. So he can speak to that more specifically, but that definition isn't just coming out of thin air. That comes out of Gramsci's conception of when he's fighting against the state, Antonio Gramsci in Italy, and he's recognizing that there is just as many private interests involved.

in this process when he's thinking about hegemony things of that nature as there are a quote unquote public public entities.

We can see this manifested in real way like I said like to quote Wata Rodney from from you know

how Europe underdeveloped Africa he says sugar production in West Indies was joined in colonial period by cocoa production

within Africa so that both emerged the chocolate the chocolate industry of Europe and North America

so all of the co-co production that comes from Africa that then merge it's somewhere else is done by what? It's done by it's done through slavery and it's done through colonialism. It's done through the theft of resources and the theft of people and the theft of land and we can

literally see it being laundered from one place to another. So the theft of someone and the theft of resources all of a sudden becomes the chocolate industry. It becomes an industry that could then be sold in the market and that through capital And then people can buy into it.

And then you have, and then you have people who work in it. You have this, as Gerald Horn talks about, this cross-class collaboration between, you know, the white working class and the white capital. So all of this just becomes a front for white capital. And people are bribed to work in it, whether that be the white working class in many cases or even, and particularly nowadays, you know, even so-called people of color or just a more broadly colonized people. you can see this in going back to more ancient time, not ancient, but older times, you can see this in colonial companies.

Like the British East Indian Company or even the Dutch, the Dutch East Indian Company was actually bigger than Google and Apple and multiple corporations put together is the biggest corporation in world history.

But these entities will go to a country. They were made to do various things, but they were often engaging in, you know, they were working with pirates. They were engaging in colonialism. And then they would set up a city that they could then marshal those resources that they took from whoever they colonized, or they set up a settlement that then became the colonial city. And then they would marshal those resources back to the empire, back to the mother country. And then once those companies fell off or they were no longer profitable or suitable,

the crown or the government would just nationalize those companies and they would just take over those resources and they would just keep it going. So you can see here how the quote unquote crime, the bad thing, the dirty money is being washed away into some kind of legitimacy. And as this show, there's a great job of talking about all the different philosophical things I won't get into that come to justify this type of action that gives it, quote, legitimacy to where now we are at a point where the criminal is just the watson white or is just the black dude on the corner or whatever and the criminals that the founded the the nations that we or the places that we call our nations are you know particularly left off the hook um yeah so we come all

the way to black rage i just connect it all um so laundering is um you know the maintenance of conquest so for non fras for known and um and towards the african revolution talks about the cloning situations, first of all, a military conquest continued and reinforced by civil and police administration, right? So you conquer people and then you set up entities to maintain said conquest, and you have to keep doing conquest. You don't just do it one time, right? It continues on.

That's how capitalism maintains itself. So black rage is a response to that conquest at the core, like before it's broken. up into other things. It is a response to that conquest. That response may be adequate. It may be inadequate, but it is a response. So we offer different types of definitions of Black Rage throughout the book. They're kind of subtle. So like there's a quote from Lauren Hill, actually, in a song called Black Rage. She said Black Rage is founded on blatant denial, squeeze economics, subsistence, survival, deafening silence, and social control. Black Rage is founded all wounds in the soul. So that just deals more with the day to day that you got to deal with.

you know, because of the maintenance of this conquest. I wrote Black Rage, the omnipresent force radiating throughout the anxieties and state. It's a boundless threat to the capitalist order. That might sound a little abstract, but that's to get at that. You know you've oppressed people and it's omnipresent in the sense that you don't necessarily know how it's going to pop up. Like you can't necessarily predict. You're trying to predict it. But you don't don't necessarily how it may pop up.

So it just becomes almost a certain kind of anxiety that kind of just permeates throughout society. that you know you've oppressed people and you know that there will be some kind of response and you're trying to get ahead of it and that's where you often see the state become very repressive and then rassoul says because rage directs us to the said rage directs to the lead in the water the shot child the infant biting rats in the apartment complex the closed public school for the sake of a charter school the ever increasingly high rents the demolished hospital and organized abandoned neighborhood, et cetera. So that deals with not just what happens to you as Russell talks about,

but also what happens to those around you, right? What happens to seeing a scene as a collective experience that brings about the rage, not just that I can't get a job or I can't get an opportunity or that I've been stolen from my land or my descendants have been stolen or whatever. But I could recognize that that's something that collectively happens to you. So we talk about the collective response to that. even though we do distinguish some different class, make some class distinctions between, like, a militant black rage and a narcissistic black rage pulling from Bell Hook's book. So, yeah, I could get more into that.

It was a long answer, but I just want people to just have a bit of a bag drop as to, you know, what we're talking about. Because, again, Black rage at its core is a response to that. Um, but often the fronts, the, um, the fronts that are built through laundering, um, structure of black race where it's just, it, it can become only aimed at that. So in the front, there's not enough black representation or in the front, there's not enough hiring of this black people or in the front. There's just discrimination or whatever. And we don't necessarily get behind what's happening at the front.

Um, and those things are all ultimately for the sake of white capital in there. continue to accumulation. Absolutely masterful analysis, and it really resonates in those layered definitions of black rage at the individual level, like you can see in Lauren Hill's lyrics, the collective and community level, and then the system-wide level, or the perspective of the system in this constant state of anxiety, which goes back to the constant state of anxiety of the slaveholder, knowing that his entire wealth and life is built on the labor of slaves, and knowing that that that is an untenable situation, that it could explode in his face at any moment, that

anxiety, I think, is carried through to the system as a whole in modernity, rooted in enslavement and, of course, genocide, et cetera. So I find that analysis incredibly deep and rich. Razul, do you want to add anything to all of that? Very, very, very briefly. I mean, I think just to add, you know, just a slight bit more is just the sense that rage in and of itself is response to oppression. It's a natural response to oppression. It's not unique necessarily to black people, but we, of course, have our own particular histories that sort of speak to ways in which oppression has manifested itself throughout history.

But the important thing when we think about rage as being in opposition or response to oppression, it's not of your own conditions. It's in observation of someone else's conditioned. And when I say someone else is not someone who is tied to you, a loved one, partner, a friend, but it is, you know, you are so irate at what you begin to see from maybe what's done to a homeless encampment or to, you know, a community that has not only lost a hospital, but it's now on the verge of losing a public school. And it's so it's something that it's not common. It's not just simply anger. And it also is not fed by your own sort of personal sort of stake or claim within the conditions of oppression. Because I think oftentimes our own sort of position within oppression can cloud our own judgment and cloud our own judgment and cloud our own sort of responses to what is going on, right?

and that either propels us to either not do anything or it may propel us to only do things for the sake of ourselves or the sake of those that are closest to you. But when we move ourselves past thinking about only ourselves and those who sort of feed us in some way, that makes us then, it's, we become an unknown factor. And so this then comes back to Hall's conjunction in the sense that, you know, it is a, that's the other hand of it. That's the danger. It is something that the state can't account for is people beginning to care. You know, there was this old expression in the wire of giving a, giving the fuck when it's not your turn to give a fuck. And that is at the heart of then that this aspect of rage. It is, you know, you're calling up something innate in you because of what you see is being done to another.

And maybe that's probably the most valuable thing, at least out of 2020, was there was some salience in terms of people's response to seeing. But so the suffocating death, you know, by knee of George Floyd, you know, especially worldwide, it connected to people and not because specifically of George Floyd, but it connected to how invaluable people's lives are on a day-to-day basis and also in the midst of what we were all experiencing at that time, which was COVID-19, and how just completely worthless people's lives were in the scheme of things. And so, so again, I just want to add that little nugget in the air in the sense of that's what it is but it's not pure it is not something that automatically will propel and move people towards greater action but it is a necessary

recipe for greater action yeah if I could add one more thing also I think to kind of add to that I think we do try to wrestle with some of those things that Russell talks about as far as like the rage that the militant rage we use bell hooks briefly, but I think we try to build on it with other sources, but the militant rage of the masses and then the narcissistic rage of the black elite. Now, when we understand this class distinction, it's not necessarily the people themselves, but also can be the aspirations. So you can have even poor people who have very, you know, bourgeois aspirations. But in general, like, it's not a, it's not an exact rule. I just want to say that first. But in general,

you know, you, when, as you move up the, the, the, the class ladder as you become a bit more comfortable, it's easy to be more consumed with the kind of narcissistic version or this, uh, what's happening to me, uh, um, I'm, I'm, I'm the only black person in the room, uh, you know, white people don't want to recognize me and, and my field and, and, and you become very engulfed in what's just happening to you. And we've seen that just to kind of, me and somewhat set up for the next question. but we saw that some of that is what ended up taking place is a lot of folks who didn't feel they were represented or they had gotten their just due and they saw and this became an opportunity for that in 2020 but that's not just a 2020 thing that's that's when we as we study historically throughout the book you see this all the time i mean you know i think one the first times i was really confronted with this reality you know at least through literature i've seen in life many times was um and phanone and wretch of the earth of the pitfalls of national consciousness and he deals with the national bourgeoisie and how after after the national

liberation struggle he talks about how the national bourgeoisie has the tendency to sell out the the new nation they have no ideas they have no creativity and they often as he says become just brothels for europe and that's how you get this neo-colonial model so you see that across the board where the interest of not totally really resolving the contradictions or really dealing with the material conditions are obviously going to be suited for the people who are allowed to receive more bribes, who are positioned to receive more bribs. They have more to lose. They have more of a stake in the natural order, not natural, but the established order of how things already goes. So it's part and partial how things will become watered down or whatever,

but it's this particular group's job to take that more militant rage that is not inherently going to do anything revolutionary. That is all dependent upon the time and space. But as the potential to go in that direction and will help, you know, position that rage. We use up here Bordeaux's concept of social capital. Many ways. will embezzle the social capital created by that rage um you know i i know you i know you wanted me to speak to the um to the phases so this is kind of what we deal with in the phases of black rage is just uh you have the you have the incubation phase where up there is a um where there is this um this is the period in which black rage is simmering it's the built but it's also

where the contradictions are created so on one side you are experiencing in the day-to-day oppression, but then you are also being socialized by that oppression. You are also being conditioned by that oppression at the very same time. That's why we say black rage is at this perfect thing. It comes with all its contradictions because it can be conditioned by the oppression, but the oppression can also condition the actual rage to eventually reach the surface, right? So that's the incubation stage. that's the that's most days as i always say what i explain this to people that's most days that you're

living that is that is the um that is the the property that is the or the school that gets closed that is the uh police brutality that doesn't make it to the viral video but happens you know that is the dirty water that is all that is all those things um eventually in the labor phase, there is an uprising or a kind of response to those conditions. And we categorize it as labor because again, using this social capital model, like that labor does produce an actual like material thing. It produces a base of things that can happen. It opens up new possibilities. It creates a certain cachet for a group. But this is where if things go wrong, When things don't always go wrong, there have been successful revolutions, but if things are laundered away, this is where, like I was saying, the interests of that black elite can come in and move it elsewhere.

And sometimes that fails. Like in Haiti at the beginning, before the revolution, there was a move by the French to give free people of color, equal rights to the colonizers on the island. It wasn't Haiti at the time. and then that didn't go well the slaves didn't settle for that they and they were given they were supposed to be given equal rights so they could manage the population right so they could manage the slaves that had had been having smaller uprisings on plantations prior um it didn't go well the hazy revolution was successful now after the hasty revolution is a different conversation we won't get into that but the actual revolution was successful in overturning slavery in his goals um so

we say if labor is strong if the people that are actually producing the social capital of the rage is strong and organized, they're able to withstand some of these things. If not, it can usually go in that direction where it's about the individual interest of a few people within that group. Like Bordeaux talks about who embezzles the social capital of that group. If they're unsuccessful, then we move to the commodification phase where since you were unable to actually successfully revolt and revoke the means of production and revoke the actual resources that sustain your life, you have no real other thing other than to go back to work and your labor becomes commodified

within whatever is produced from that phase. So, you know, 2020, we've seen some of the most gross expressions of those kind of commodities, whether it's the, you know, all the TV shows that try to pander, you know, whether it's the artist that make money off of it, you know, whether it's the general kind of discipline that comes with those with those commodities that will then be used too disciplined the population that hey there is a chance here hey you can you can make it in America you know the colony is not so bad whatever right like that becomes a commodity phase so I forgot to explain that so I want to get through that quickly again people should read the book there's a lot more there but that's just a kind of and also just to speak to those kind of

distinctions of rage too yeah it's incredibly important and of course an interview like this can only cover some of this stuff and I highly encourage people to actually go out get the book, support the authors, and dive deeper into this stuff because it is endlessly fascinating. I think an incredibly deep, deep level of really important analysis that's only going to continue to gain importance as I think this broader crisis within American society continues to play out. I do kind of want to shift to geography a little bit because I think the question I was going to ask about Black Lives Matter and corporate advertisements and opportunists, et cetera, I think was very much touched on, especially through the point of like embezzling social

capital for individual advancement. We certainly saw some of that. Feel free to, of course, touch on that, but kind of moving forward, an interesting part of this book is the geography and the role that cities play as sites of laundering. I was hoping that you can kind of talk about that, elaborate on the role that geography and large cities play in this analysis, and why it's an important avenue of investigation more broadly, because I think some people might, you know, sort of maybe be confused about the role that geography could play in such an analysis, and I think it's a really important part of it. Two Black, I had already touched on some of that legacy of colonial city projects.

So the colonial, you know, what I call colonial city projects are basically what we think of as the initial settlement that's, you know, placed somewhere probably on the coastline, and it grows from there, whether it was the Spanish Empire, You know, the Portuguese Republic, you know, French Empire, German Republic, British Empire, and so forth, right? And so when we think of the growth of these cities and a lot of this, you know, I pull from Daniel Nemser in another particular book, but still helps to inform, you know, our work here is that with Daniel Namser, he looks at the development of Mexico City under the Spanish Empire and how much how much the Spanish Empire. constructed the city in response to needing to manage populations and populations needed to be managed because the city itself, the whole purpose of the colonial city or the settlement even before the city even formed was to manage the extraction process of resources back to the crown.

Something was mined and in the city there was either refinement or packaging and it would leave the city on some state road and go towards some pier and then be shipped off. And then cities grew from there to create infrastructure around the lives of the people who were in the city, working the city in various capacities. So whether it's the different types of residency, the people needed to sort of, you know, dwell within the lifestyle-based offerings, whether it was the barbershop. the religious center and so forth, the marketplace. So when we get to laundering, it's just a part of continuing that process of what the cities are

for, which are for extraction, right? And so I know that may be a bleak sort of understanding of a city, but nonetheless, that's how we're sort of contextualizing. And so not only does the city erase the indigenous presence that was, you know, know, there by nature of sort of squatting on that territory and then expanding outward. But it also then brings in those indigenous populations and converts them from whoever and whatever they are to becoming subjects and being named whatever the crown may see themselves needing to name them, whether it's savages, Indians or whatever else have you, right? And so that, by nature, is the oldest laundering scheme that has taken place and how the cities have remained and remained and remained.

Interestingly enough, of course, in the United States, it's not just that these cities, you know, took shape of reform, but so many of them are actually, you know, corrupted sort of names of indigenous names, right? And so it's some way of sort of saying what was there, but will not return in many ways. So it's a different way to think about cities, think about cities in a way that we oftentimes do not think about it. Because, in fact, we usually think of cities in four different ways, at least two of which are probably the more common. One, that cities are sites and locations of opportunity. And again, this is where, you know, we've seen, you know, the ongoing list of the top 10 cities for growth and the top 10 cities for, you know, affordable rent and top 10 cities for festivals or top 10 cities for summer travel and these types of things. These cities are then just these simple things for personal opportunity that are framed in a certain way. And then another sort of social way that people begin to define cities that centers for opportunity for design.

So not personal and social-based opportunity, but there are opportunities in which people can experiment with their ideas of how people can move to and from. So this is where electric buses and green roofs and a number of different sort of projects are sort of instituted. upon the population changing ways of which people move, you know, from work back to home with not, oftentimes about their own consent or input. And so these two things oftentimes what are dominating our mindset of cities as if we know that they're governed, but in a sense, governance is hidden in our day-to-day lives, if that kind of makes sense. and so this is then where the two other sort of points of view of cities are become important

because then they provide some measure of criticality on those other two cities are conflict zones where strikes and riots and rebellions constantly are happening homelessness is present gentrification is present displacement coming from gentrification may be present so cities are then again these conflict zones that are happening sometimes that could still be you know there could still be some issue and just seeing them as conflict zones as if the conflict is a surprise you know but actually it still at least is something that says that we know that the issues that we see are not just social and not just political but they are grounded in the spaces in which we have and have to have. habit. And then the place I think that we're both coming from in terms of laundering black rage is that cities are the center for capital and the center for population governance, period. And so, you know, laundering is nothing more just an extension of how to, you know, move that capital as well as to govern people because laundering works in both capacities.

It helps to maybe move around money, move around resources, disguise resources that have been used for, you know, unethical reasons and unethical means. But at the same time, laundering also helps us to be completely fine with unethical governance, governance that has not cared for the people in a particular way. And so laundering works within both of those capacities of the city being in the center for capital and the center for population governance. And, you know, and so, so at least for me, geography was key. Yes, we, you know, the relage, the book that we produced the relage is technically, you know, under the sort of real estate land, you know, grouping. But nonetheless, it still was a helpful way. way to situate laundering away from, you know, easily discussions that could have gone down the road of what people are doing what, what organizations are doing what, and more so really seeing

at the end of the day that, you know, all actors that are engaged or involved in laundering are still subserving into a greater role, a greater purpose. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Two Black, do you have anything to add to that? Not much. I think, I think part of I always make sure that this comes up whenever we're a question about as far as the city park I think it's easy to and I totally understand

things that get caught up in the things that we all kind of are familiar with regards like Russell said what people are doing the scandal here or the scandal there but I think that cities helps us see that there's something already happening before

the scandal ever occurs you know before the the person, the grifter, the whatever that we tend to associate with the activists that doesn't distribute the funds or the pastor who's corrupt, cities help to see that there's this like broader operation in place that is that is constantly emulsion. Like I remember one time I was telling Rasul, like, when you look at like semi-trucks going down the street, you know, for those who are familiar with a kind of laundry terminology, there's a term for laundering called mules.

And those are the people who will drive the drugs maybe across state lines or whatever the products are that are being, you know, that are quote unquote illegal. They will drive them across state lines, you know, into usually a city or some kind of location to drop off the products. So they can then be distributed. But we only tend to associate that with, again,

the quote unquote illegal activity. But when you look at the streets, what is always on the streets are semis, right? And this is not a condonation of semi-truck drivers or anything as individuals. That's not what we're getting at. But just more so, you can always see the products of capital moving from one destination to another. And although these people can be on highways and stuff of that nature, even roads and highways are all built and circuited to come into a city where things will be dropped off. and then distributed, you know, to whom, whether it's something that consumers bought,

that, you know, that's for another business or things of that nature. That might seem real, you know, it might not seem like there's any real threat there or there's anything wrong with that, but that's part of what cities do is they just make that seem like a natural order when, again, where did those, where do those resources come from, you know, the stuff that, like, we talked about, you know, if it's a thing about, like, with the Congo, where does the, where does the Coltrane and the co-box that goes and powers the battery and your phone come from? So someone has a dig up that mine, get those resources, refine it, and then it ends up on a semi-truck somewhere that delivers the phone to your door, right?

Like, it's very much built like that, but cities are the best instrument in helping that, that it helping with that extraction, right? And when we think about even with labor, you know, know, when we think about Arasul's does good work or like the spatial, the spatial conception of, um, a racialization. So you have certain populations that are set up to be in certain parts of the city. So even like, uh, businesses and corporations know to recruit from certain neighborhoods and what kind of job they usually want those type of people to do, you know, quote unquote, airport type of people. Um, so it gives you a sense of how to give you a sense of the, of a division of labor and just how to organize capitalism.

And if you didn't have cities, if you didn't have geographic physical locations, a lot of the things that we tend to maybe notice that are, that are, you know, usually bad or ugly, you know, are often a result of living in a space, living in cities or living in, you know, living in spaces that are police, spaces that are, you know, governed by certain policies like this stuff doesn't just come out of thin air so even the police coming all the way back to george floyd being there on that day to show up and do what they did to him just to step on his neck to you know to finish off his life and to murder him that is a construction of a city that deploys police to an area like that that says oh if someone robbed someone in that area

allegedly, you know, that's already a person that we've been taught to believe doesn't really deserve much humanity versus if someone had stole, had had counterfeit money in a different area of the city, not just the race of the person, but in a different area of the city that is a little bit more wealthy or prominent. The police don't even show up in that manner. They don't even show up with that kind of energy typically, you know, so because that part of the city has been designated as an area where that kind of thing just doesn't happen. You treat the population differently there than you do over here. So the cities really help a lot of the other ideas

that eventually become kind of our consciousness of the world. It's cities that really help, I think, develop those ideas. But what even a stereotype of a person or what, you know, what we should think of people come from like the neighborhood they're from in the area and that's something that cities help orchestrate over and over again as they're, you know, laundering the different extractions of capital, you know, whether that's to the customer or to the business. If I can also just sort of, you know, ask some more to this point as well, is that, you know,

just as a sort of a megachurch aids a pastor, right, and sort of hiding or distracting the people from clearly the extraction from people's paychecks from their donations, right, and so forth. Mayors and city councils, as well as governors, utilize interstates and stadiums and parks and these types of things as also distractions. And these distractions, of course, are part of that laundering. So when we sort of think about in particular art projects, whether it was the street murals that were pretty popular and noted it all throughout multiple cities in 2020 as well as 2021, that's an example of something that has to happen in a space and has to happen in the space of the city for it to do the work of distracting the populace away from the original issue. which was a killing to the need for art, the need for our joy as an expression,

the need for the dignity of artists to be celebrated as our leaders in self-expression as an example. And I'm just saying art because art is, you know, the more current ways in which we can see dollars, being funneled in for all the purposes of moving people away from core issues and core in basic needs. But of course, 20 years ago, we can think about sports, in sports stadiums, sport teams, and things that sort, even though they still are a player dominant role, it's not as much as

as art. And in other sort of generations, there were other sort of schemes that worked in that particular way. And so the city does that work of housing. the sites and locations that are most likely viable to get people's buy-in to go along with the laundering. Because laundering won't work if you do not have people who are willing to work the laundering, as well as people to accept the laundering as occurring. And so I think that, you know, again, thinking spatially about these things, one moves us away from these sort of criticisms about personalities, but also more importantly, it really, gets us to think more concretely about how it sort of manifests itself, you know, in our daily lives and how we even sometimes are complicit within it because, you know, we like the park or we like the, the nightlife or the street art that is sort of erected in the name of whatever, not knowing that there's this whole sort of series of productions and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

and, you know, commodifications that are happening behind, you know, behind the scenes to give us this as opposed to give us what we truly need. Absolutely. Yeah, incredibly important stuff. And again, I highly encourage people to get the book and dive even deeper into this analysis. Moving forward a little bit in one of the chapters that I found particularly interesting myself, as I had just recently within the last year or so, visited Tulsa in Chapter 6 titled Laundering a Massacre from Black Wall Street, to black capitalism. You discussed the Tulsa Race riots and massacre and the subsequent class and ideological laundering dynamics of that particular event and of black capitalism writ large.

I was hoping that you could discuss this historical event, the idea of Black Wall Street, and your criticism of Black capitalism in the role it plays in all of this. Yeah, I apologize ahead of time about getting annoyed. Not because anything you said, this one always, this particular myth or the idea of Black Wall Street can get some of my nerves. So that's that. But yeah, so again, just to give people a baseline before I get into any criticisms or anything or what we were even more broadly getting at is there was the Tulsa Massacre, May 31st, 1921,

and in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was, there was, there was, that's, that's what we were getting at. We're talking about Laudry and Massacre. occur, but more, I guess, just to give a little historical context of just that area, there was, that people tend to refer to as a black Wall Street, you know, that we'll get to how that's not necessarily what it was called at the time, but, so there was a neighborhood in Tulsa, a segregated neighborhood. It's important to say where black people lived, and it was one, it was, I think it was one of three neighborhoods, and that was the biggest

neighborhood in in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And even, even to go further back, Tulsa, Oklahoma had just been, or Oklahoma as a state had just been founded not much, maybe a few years, maybe I think maybe about 20 years or so before, before this, it originally, it was actually a pact between indigenous people and black people at a time to try to make it a socialist state. And I think Robin Kelly talks about how the flag, a red flag, could not be flown in Oklahoma anymore because of that to just give even a broader history of it. But to come back to Tulsa, so yeah, this neighborhood, Greenwood.

And then within this black segregated neighborhood, there is a much smaller business district within this neighborhood. I think I think Russell was someone, one of the interviews we did was referred to as a magic city, but people nowadays call it black Wall Street. There's no real basis for it, honestly. There's people who said that Booker T. Washington, and even that is very highly disputed, referred to it as Negro Wall Street. And Bookerty Washington was another, again, for those who don't know, was another,

or was a prominent black leader for better or worse, during that time but so there is this area called Magic City but the people I believe and then also but it gets referred to in our era as Black Wall Street

and there's myths that start are to emerge about this area called Black Wall Street now so but we pull from like what Russell was talking about with this with cities this is just an area within a city and Black Wall Street is

this position is this position just should us slightly off of downtown Tulsa. So on the day of the massacre, May 3.34th, 1921, there was a black young man named Dick Rowland, who was a shoe shotter, and he was accused of rape being a white girl named Sarah Page. He was shoe shining in a building that, you know, four white folks and then he was uh he had to use the bathroom so you weren't allowed to use the

bathroom in that building because he was colored quote unquote so they had a colored bathroom that you had to go across the street for which is a ridiculous city of itself but uh so he had to go to go across the street to use this bathroom and back there elevators had people that manned them so the white girl Sarah page was a person manning the elevator and allegedly she screamed and then he was accused of of rape. The Tulsa Tribune has the headline shortly after that, that

you know, Nab Negro for attacking girl in elevator. So now all these white citizens, you know, march down to the jail downtown and they're ready to kill Dick Rowland for

allegedly raping a white girl. There's no evidence that he did that, but as many black men during that era, it didn't matter if there was evidence. So there were World War I veterans, black men, who went downtown, you know, with rifles and shotguns to defend him from this lynching. And this happened. They went downtown twice.

They went downtown the first time with a smaller unit to check on him, even offered the police who were trying to protect Roland at the time, at least one of them were. from the citizens the white citizens swarming the building while they were trying to protect him they offered that they would protect him as well and then they eventually come down later about 75 of them

come back as even more of a crowd had emerged because all the white citizens had you know went home they grabbed their liquor and they grabbed their guns and more of them is showing up for this fabricated story of rape. So when the black men went downtown, again, these are veterans, and they went to defend him,

they got into an altercation with the white folks outside of the building. Several shots went off. And then from there, the white folks went from, we want to just kill Dick Rowland for this made-up, rape to we're going to kill all of them or at least we're going to try to. So there

was Tulsa police acting as special deputies and then there was a white volunteers who wanted to act as police and they were this is according to the report the Tulsa massacre were saying to each other get a gun and get a nigger. So out number 20 to 1

the black men who who went downtown to try to say roll and now we're racing back to the neighborhood of greenwood and we're you know racing back and they're being chased by these white folks and then they were able to fight some of them all but then later that later that next day in the morning there was actually a whistle that goes off the story is wild so i'll just be telling it there's a whistle that goes off the white folks are stationed around the neighborhood of greenwood a whistle goes off in the morning and then they all just swarm the neighborhood as slaughter takes place you're talking about businesses homes families are being torn apart people are being killed we honestly probably

don't have a real count of how many people died for that on that day they say 300 but we'll never really know uh well i would say we'll never really know there are like reports of graves that have not actually been dug up uh so about 12 500 homes were damaged under 991 businesses 300 people were killed many people ran out of the city and there was just this idea um of again we talked about black rage earlier as this kind of like something that is a thread or something that is co-opted but in something else we tried doing this book to talk about black rage as a as a moral panic as some kind of like i talked about a little bit earlier like this anxiety so this idea that black men were going to come down town with guns and

defend another black man against against, uh, you know, white racist, uh, you know, citizens or vigilantes was, was just not something that could be tolerated. So black rage became, it becomes a moral panic and just made up. Like they were just trying to defend this one man. They took it and, and the rumors spread that all these black people were, um, were rising up. And there's the black people from other neighborhoods and black people from or the cities were going to descend and there was going to be this Negro uprising against white folks. This is totally a fantasy. But often black rage from the perspective of, you know, white people and perspective of even capital can be totally, totally obscured and made up. So it

doesn't just mean, so we talk about it obviously as a response, but then the response can be made up as this response to oppression, but the response could be made up or fantasize as this, you know, all they're going to kill all of us. You know, We've seen them do this with the concepts of what happened in Haiti. And they just, they tend to want people want to focus on the violence. So it's that there's just these bloodthirsty black people who are, who are, who are, who are, who have no intelligence or sensibility to their raid. They just want to kill the next white person that they see. And then that's also a way of ramping up repression and things of that nature.

So that's what actually happens is that black men come downtown to defend a, a young black man from being killed for being accused of rape and then the white people overreact and decide to burn down an entire neighborhood and within that neighborhood are businesses but somehow that story becomes a story about black wealth that was destroyed and these black people that have this utopia almost this Wakanda city um that you know white folks were jealous of and they took from us so the story of resistance is totally left out of it or it's or it's minimized and we focus on this black business district that once you actually look at the statistics you find that most of those black people were poor just like

most people during in 1921 were um 95% of them lived in subsistice housing housing with no plumbing um and there was a very elite class of black people who were able to benefit from those businesses most of those black people worked for white people they did not work within this neighborhood this kind of utopia like self-sustaining black neighborhood that's not what it was even though it's often told that it's that and Tulsa was a city of um it had an oil boom and black people who often worked in the service industry for the people who worked worked on the oil mines and things of that nature um so there was no black utopia the quote unquote black wealth that did exist was primarily gained from the fact that it was a segregated neighborhood, which if you are a business owner in a segregated neighborhood where people are not allowed to shop elsewhere, you have a monopoly on that population, and you're going to be able to make a little bit of money on the side, where you're going to be able to, you know, create a bit of wealth for yourself. But that's tolerated within the colony

of the United States or in this case, a total of home because you are servicing the people that we need to work in the service industries, the maids, the janitors, the shoe shiner, the people, the people of that nature, you're servicing those people. So we'll allow you to have a little monopoly on that. And you can have your businesses and things of that nature because that doesn't really threaten us. Now, when we study more closely, we also find at the time that, you know, white folks have been murdering even their own people as far as like folks who were labeled as criminals or whatever. And there was also a drop in the price of oil, I believe. So there was some economic anxiety there where if I don't like the term economic anxiety, but that's how people

will describe it. So the history is a lot more complicated, but it gets updated today to be about black people returning to this era where we have these black Wall Street. And this comes out. The reason we focus on it, one of the reasons, this emerges right after George Floyd is killed and the uprisons happened. One of the one of the, one of the ridiculous ideas was all let's focus on black business. And if black people can, um, can can make some money through business, then we can, um, possibly, I don't, I don't really know what the logic is. I think, I think we wrote it's the idea that we can somehow buy a George Floyd out of a chokehold. Like, we can accumulate enough wealth. We can liberate the George Floyd's by having businesses. Um, and it's an absolutely ridiculous idea because black businesses have no real impact on the economy. They make up about 0.3%. of all receipts so there's no real impact they don't really help most black people they're usually people that have side hustles most black businesses don't have any real impact

in fact black businesses you take all black businesses and put them together all the like businesses that exist they have less revenue than Walmart has as a company just to give people some perspective on just how small they are in the grand scheme of things and then there's this idea about black banking again and chase bank who's on the front of the book has more has more wealth than all all not just black banks but all my quote unquote minority banks put together just chase bank alone made more money in a year than all those banks did put together so monopoly and the older god believes in capitalism ultimately run the day and there's no there's no space for black businesses to flourish, even if you believe in that kind of thing,

but somehow the overall idea of black capitalism, whether it is banking businesses or that nature, becomes the selling point. Like, we tracked how Black Wall Street had more searched. It had been searched. That term had been searched more in 2020 and 2021 than it had ever been searched before. By black, an idea that black people should support black businesses and white folks who feel guilty about it should support black businesses too was searched more in 2020 than it ever had been before so as someone is being killed by the police and people are angry about it and raised about that we're telling people oh we should just go buy black and that will resolve the problem even though black businesses

and black banks and have no real shape or control over the material lives of most black people And even if they do, they tend, as we see with Tulsa, they tend to benefit, you know, a minority of business owners as capitalism does in general, you know. And it's a very just paternalistic and I think, you know, insulting suggestion that we should focus on black business when someone is killed by the police, you know, and it gives everyone an easy out. It gives a black leader an easy to be out. And it gives white liberals an easy out to support black business. business and say we gave money to it and we all can walk away like we did something about the problem it um yeah absolutely it's fascinating uh you know summarization of of a crucial historical event and then just um elaborating on on that sort of ideological co-optation that occurs and what it does is among many other things and of course you point this out it obscures these these class divisions um you know like after i remember after 9-11 george bush came out and said the best way you can help this country is is to go back and start shopping again and then after 2020 we hear

you know support support black businesses as if supporting black businesses especially in the light of the the relatively small role they play in the overall economy is somehow helping black people you know more broadly and and i think that that obscures class divisions within the black community and of course it obscures class divisions in the broader society because the implicit idea is that by supporting black businesses you support the quote unquote black community writ large. And that's a false, obviously, idea. And it re-entrenches the ideology of capitalism more broadly, which is, of course, the center around which this entire system revolves. Razul, do you have anything to add to all of that? Oh, we're going to... Oh, go ahead.

You and then Russell would jump in. Yeah, I think that's a good point on the George Bush thing, that goes shopping, things of that nature. And I do want to know, it's not, this hasn't received hardly any pushback among, you know, among most black people because it's, most of us are not educated, and I don't mean this in a demeaning way, like, we're not smart. I'm saying we're not educated by the people presenting these solutions.

We're not told or informed about the actual numbers and the data. So logically, it would seem to make sense. If you support business, you own, you know, black businesses, you own your community, you have more control, and then you can have more said, you're dated a life. Like it would make sense, but like I said, the chapter really shows

when we crushed the numbers, like, you're not, it's not close. But we'd also reference a poll or a survey, I should say, and surveys are always, you know, have their contradiction. So, you know, take it with a great saw, but it was a survey that said that,

you know, where black people were, were polled and the, and they thought that, black business was the next to voting was the best way to achieve or buying black specifically was the best way to achieve racial equality, you know, was next to voting over, even over protesting or things of that nature. They thought that that was the best way to achieve it. Now, I don't know, you know, I looked at the sample size of it, so I don't know who they all

talked to. I could only get some sense of it. But that just also goes to show like what Russell talked about with cities. And just in general, when we're talking about law, wondering, there's a level of consent that has to take place. Because if everyone would clear on the level of how ridiculous this is and how insulting this was, this doesn't work. Like, you know, it would be insulting to say, hey, they just killed a black man. Let's go by black. So that's insulting.

Right. But other people, you know, see some kind of, you know, light in it. And because a lot of those interests are entrenched in our communities, in our neighborhoods, those class interests. And then there are people who, even if they are not a part of those classes, have been given a propaganda that makes them ask, wants to aspire to be in those classes. It tends to make sense. And it's, it's an easy thing to unite upon. And nobody's threatened. Nobody has to go out on the streets.

Nobody has to put their life on the line. You know, it's just all I got to do is, is go to a flea market thing and buy black or I got to, I can order the thing online. And it's not to say people should not do those things. Right. I buy, I do those things myself sometimes, but I don't buy black with the idea that I'm liberating anybody. I just like the thing you sell, you know what I'm saying? Or I just like whatever you're doing.

I don't have a, I don't have any, any like, oh, man, I'm, no, if I know you, you got a business and I like it, yeah, I'll support you. Or if I know that there's a way that maybe this particular business has some good politics and might use some of their surplus to help. community, sure, I have no problem doing that. But more broadly, it's insulting to suggest that this can somehow, you know, resolve any bigger issues that we face. And it's unfortunate that many of us have been, you know, conditioned to kind of buy into that, you know. Yeah. Really quick before Rezul gives his two cents. I just, when you were talking to Black, it makes me think of

figures like, you know, Kevin Hart teaming up with Chase Bank to launch a financial literacy. campaign for black communities. Killer Mike coming out and talking about black owned businesses all the time and telling, you know, rioters or protesters to not destroy businesses because some of those businesses are black or even like Jay-Z reifying this idea of being a black billionaire and how that's somehow, you know, edifying or liberating for for black people as a whole. Are these people like just sincerely sort of confused? They think they're helping people? What are your thoughts on figures like that and the role they play in all of I don't think they're confused, no.

They may not know the data as well as what we presented, but I don't think they're confused. I mean, Killer Mike, it's interesting you bring him up. Killer Mike was actually involved in starting a bank bald Black Wall Street, like an all-line bank. It's in the chapter, and the idea, it was started with him and Gray's Anatomy actor Jesse Williams, and where did the most of their money come from?

Chase Bank. You know, it was actually called the Greenwood Banking app, which is the neighborhood of that this so-called area of Black Wall Street was positioned in. Right. And then when you track what this has done since, nothing. It's not a real bank. It's just an app. They don't, they're not like literally you're taking money from Chase. You're just proving your own concept on its face, you know, like you're not pushing any, you're not creating any kind of autonomy or or independence, right?

like it's coming directly from the same companies that have as we also talk about in the chapter helped obliterate the little bit of black wealth that had been built you know and in the 2008 financial crash you know about 53% of black wealth was was was totally removed because it was so much of black wealth was concentrated in um in in in um in real estate and even the idea of wealth and all that i don't we could go down on tangent could be unpacked as far as what that even means but like but no I think I think these guys are just I'm not saying that these guys meet in a room somewhere and they're ordered to go out on the streets and sell this stuff I don't think it's that simple if it were it would actually be fairly easy to resolve that but I don't think that they're confused for the most part on what it means I think that they I can't speak to anybody's personal you know aspirations because I don't I don't know these people but I think it just fits well within their interests like you know j z can say look at me i made it and if it's within the general white capital's interest and said hey look at j z he made it like you put him on the

screen you know um you know killer mike who's always talking about out of both sides of his mouth uh like is is very well is very invested in that similar kind of kind of narrative right so um you know i i think that when they when they preach this stuff they always package it and this is what lets me know that this isn't necessarily sincere in my opinion they always package it as it being like liberating for everyone like my success is your success if i do well you do well then why do you have a billion dollars and i don't like it's a very simple question like why do you why are you rich if i and i'm not if your success is tied to my success right like it just doesn't make sense um so

So, no, I think that that class of black people is incredibly damaging, but they hold our attention because they make good music, or at least we think their music is good, or they make good movies, or whatever they tend to engage in. And we can get caught up on one character over the other, but again, I think it's better to think about the class and even coming all the way back to cities to think about how, you know, these interests are situated within our daily lives. And if it's not one rapper or one celebrity, it'll be another, because that's the kind of thing that is promoted by the broader society, you know, of capitalism, right? So Killer Mike's able to, you know, get through or whatever because Chase Bank does see some value because we talk about, to kind of close out to the answer this question. But like in Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert Allen describes a very similar phenomenon in 19. 68 69 so this isn't a new strategy you know you saw the same kind of thing where you know um at the time you was different sets of corporations because you know they were um like um zero rocks and things of that nature they all you know uh decided to funnel a bunch of money into black

businesses right and and they and they called it black power and they made you think that by having black business it was black power you know and and nick and the ford foundation put a bunch of money and the core and others to try to push this idea that, yeah, we agree with black power, as in a sense of black people control their own resources, and they took the idea of black power that was a more radical idea, and they just started into black capitalism. So you're seeing it now, even though people may not be using the term black power, is a very similar kind of bait and switch, where this idea of black wealth and black community control, which speaks to a kind of ideal black power

is situated in okay if you can get your money up you know you can make it and and you know Nixon uh we talk about in the book two exploits this and he says you know the real militant just wants to have a piece of the action he doesn't want to burn anything down he just wants to have a piece of the action

so basically everybody's just mad because they don't have a piece of the action right so that's that's been a long strategy of trying to push this so they just roll this shit out you know whenever whenever necessary and there's always people willing to buy into it and i think some of these guys do actually believe this stuff but that doesn't make it any less harmful right you know yeah great point uh russell do you want to add anything to any of that um just i mean i think really briefly on a supporting end which is the need for narratives um in myth-making I know, of course, two Black and his colleagues from Black Mills podcast, you know, of course, did a, you know, remarkable episode on Black Wall Street that I encourage people to, well, two episodes back to back that people should, you know, check out.

Yeah. But I think, you know, the more and more, we have been sort of confronted by thinking about this question and the importance of Black Wall Street now in context of the book, I'm starting to, honestly too black, I'm starting to think about it less than a myth and more of a fantasy. That's fair. You know, because I think, you know, when we think about

myth and how important myth making is, one, there is some agreed upon sort of aspects of a myth. The myth is formally taught as well as informally supported. People have, there's dimensions about it that

people have some sense of it and they sort of elaborate on it. And the unfortunate thing here is Black Wall Street, as people wanted to want to call it, that as opposed to the Tulsa massacre, they really don't know

the details, but yet they know the shade or the sort of the under the carpet shape of the body of what Black Wall Street was to then be able to then

expound upon it and exploit it for whatever particular end. Stuart Hall, yet again, sort of makes this notification of the importance of mass culture being a commodity. And it's important that that's part of our, you know, phases of laundering is commodification, right? And so how is how is a process developed to produce that commodity? And then who is the

market that that commodity is being prepared and made for. And so when we think about the fantasy, not even the myth, the fantasy of Black Wall Street, we see, you know, the graphic novels that have been made. The random episodes of TV shows, I don't mean just even HBO's Watchbin, but I mean random shows, because of course, in the book, we use an episode, image of an episode from the Equalizer with Queen Latifah in it and it was around, it was connected

to Black Wall Street. They were supposed to do an investigation about stolen goods from the Tulsa Massacre. So it appears in all of this fiction. I had this take on the task of reading the number of

books that have been published and ironically you see this time period where it's like late 90s, early 2000s, just a very handful of books, and then there's an explosion of books from 2018, 2019 to the present. And the vast majority of these books are self-published. Some of them are, a lot of them are children's books, you know, and then some of them are fictionalizations, you know, so making up a person who was,

seven years old and what was her experience from fleeing or a person who was 30 and in the process of getting married and what was the experience of losing their partner? So it has blown up into all these things and it's not that they even depart from the truth, which a myth would do. They never were even grounded on even any aspects of truth. You know, you have cases in which in these books, literally they treat Greenwood as a suburb of Tulsa as opposed to inside Tulsa. And I mean, I have to be honest, like before the internet, and I remember, you know, when I was an undergrad, you know, just to age myself, I remember being given a sense of it and taking on a sense of it, not, you know, being as if it was a suburb and not actually even.

And so this is, this has been developing for some time. Yeah, I used to, just real quick, I used to think it was an entirely different city. Yeah. Like you said, like a suburb or somewhere else, it wasn't even in Tulsa at all. Like, that's how it was given to me once upon a time. And this is not like our mistake and understanding literally. This is what was conveyed. And so that's why you can't really see it in the present day because the suburb no longer exists.

But, you know, that that's not grounded. That's not departing from reality. That's not starting in reality and just kind of like taking a turn. That's never starting in a particular space. If you understand it to be close to downtown, then you do understand the labor relationship to that district to then the rest of the city. It couldn't be independent. I mean, no neighborhood really can be independent anyway, but it really couldn't be. Anything that's proximate, especially to downtown, is in service to downtown.

That's the whole point of the proximity to downtown, especially at that time for most cities. in the United States. So many black communities were close to downtown because that was the labor for the hotels and for, um, you know, other types of, you know, industries was, you know, it's still to this day you can, you can walk by downtown at late at night and you have a bunch of, you know, typically older black people, black men and women who are working as security, you know, at the front desk, you know, while the whole building is either dark or lit up with some custodial service worker going from, you know, floor to floor.

But that's still, that was the case back then, you know. And so so there is this experience, need of fantasy to develop. So it doesn't then service a person to like determine their own self-worth by using this history for self-recognition. By moving off of fantasy, you never are grounding yourself in any, you know, concrete material reality. And so all of these types of fictions just continue to build upon that, creating, you know, an inaccuracy on top of an inaccuracy and on top of an inaccuracy. When we sort of get so many of the details about the fantasy, about the wealth,

it's not grounded as, you know, to Baguaglia articulated in any factual evidence. of the census data, and it doesn't result in the complete destruction, you know, 10 years, literally 10 years afterwards, it pretty much came back. And so, so we robbed ourselves of then this story of working class people building theaters and taverns independently of having considerable wealth. That's a more remarkable study, you know, this sort of study and sort of story as opposed to

this sense of, you know, a whole bunch of people who were black happen to be wealthy, who lived in the area. We have accounts from people who were interviewed 10 years later for the report, you know, one of the earlier

reports, who he himself, he was black, he was wealthy, he and his sort of recall mentions the things that are now part of the fantasy, the air attack with the bombs being dropped. No other person sort of really comments on bombs being factually dropped. Planes, yes, we, yes, definitely flying. Not everybody is 100% sort of, you know, indicating that shots are being fired from the plane, but that some people do make note of that.

But this one person is the one that, you know, makes these sort of, you know, creative, you know, additions to the story because he's a property owner in the area. He was not a part of the veteran group that went to try to deal with Dick Rowland. You know, he was, you know, hauled up in one of, you know, his properties looking to try to escape to another building, you know, for his own safety. And he's also the one that also creates this, you know, myth of the poor whites were envious of this, you know, wealth gain of this community. There's no other reporting of it. There's no white testimony, you know, that had ever spoken of before or afterwards indicating some sort of,

this is the basis for why we did this thing. This is what we perceive of this particular community. you know and so fantasy is so important and mass culture and in another self is such an important thing to commodify because people are not going to push themselves to know the detail more what Two Black was mentioning about the numbers, you know, that's something that people may need assistance to get and to gather. But when it pertains to just the basic details, I mean, people can go to the Wikipedia page. I mean, it literally can give you at least some basic information. But most people, all they know is that there was this thing called the Tulsa Rape's where I had Tulsa Massacre and it destroyed Black Wall Street. If you press most people, they can't give you the year, much less the month and a day.

And so, again, I just want to add that little. little sort of, you know, point to this is that so much of this is dependent upon these things. And then it plays out in relationship to the other continued narrative, especially in some of these books. A lot of those books also, I forgot to mention, were about wealth making wealth establishment, generational wealth development, you know.

And I think there's two other, if I'm not, you know, correct me if I'm wrong to black, I think there's like least two. other banking related ventures. One is a debit card by, I think, United Bank or something like that. Yeah, it's a black-owned bank. Yeah, and they make these allusions to, I mean, preying off of people's basic ignorance of one United Bank. And they sort of play off of people's lack of understanding of debit cards. Like, debit cards are not wealth generators. You know, So I mean, just in general, you know, but the guy who owns the bank has a whole video where, I mean, he goes through this long explanation about why it's important to open, you know, an account with this debit card and how it could really, you know, in one generation, really establish you towards eventually owning property and what you can pull a pass down to other children.

And I'm like a debit card. It's just a debit card, you know. And they call it, they call the, you open the greenwood. The black Wall Street checking. That's what, you know. And again, you know, I mean, it's, I mean, these are the places where it is hard to sometimes not mention people. But, I mean, it's, it's just one of those things where, I mean, it just keeps going and going.

But that's why, you know, I'm just sort of thinking that it can not even be a myth. It really may be a fantasy because at least a myth starts from something that actually was happening. And not just in general, there's a large event that was happening, but a certain person or certain group of people did a certain thing. And then there's this elaboration. There's this creative license that then is executed on those things. And in this particular case, it just seems to be where it's just a fantasy. And so, you know, in closing real quick, I just remember. Um, when the first episode of HBO's, um, the watchtman came on and, you know, it ends with the Tulsa massacre and, uh, and you have a bunch of people, you know, um, reacting to like not knowing about it. And you had an outcry of, you know, certain sort of black gatekeepers who were, um, sort of expressing, uh, this sense of that's a shame that you all don't know about this history.

And and my point is, you know, most of them did not know this history, especially if they're calling and get Black Wall Street. And that's the danger that, unfortunately, with this. And so, you know, I know, I'm not trying to say information is automatically something that is transformative. But I have noticed that people have gravitated to this particular chapter and just the evidence, within it to really, you know, it does, has shaking them up in terms of like, oh my goodness, like, you know, like how much, you know, it does, has, it has brought people in to be complicit into a lie, you know, in essence. And so, yeah, so I just wanted to kind of add that part to the Black Wall Street. Yeah, I think that's, that's so crucial. And it's fascinating

because, you know, even from my own perspective, I consider myself a reasonably informed person. I try my hardest to understand history at a deep, deep level. And I had a lot of these delusions about, you know, what actually happened in that event. And it was precisely this chapter and this subsequent conversation that is genuinely corrected that falsehood and that sort of, as you said, fantastical understanding of the actual history for myself. And that threshold between myth into fantasy is really interesting because, you know, to your point, even like, you know, we think of ancient Greek and Roman myths, they're rooted in actual natural phenomena and an attempt to explain them through mythmaking. So the reality there is the natural phenomena,

like, you know, let's say like the ocean, and then you have Poseidon or whatever as a sort of anthropomorphized version of that natural force to try to understand it and contend with it. Even that stuff is rooted in at least actually existing facts. And then, of course, this myth is built over it. But that threshold when myth stops being myth and goes into complete and utter fantasy I think is is fascinating and worthwhile in the way that popular culture and fiction solidifies those false narratives because I too watched the watchman in that year when it came out and I saw and I remember talking to my wife in detail about that event that they portrayed and so it's just fascinating to learn the actual facts behind it and see how popular culture

continues to mystify and sort of solidify that mystification and that fantasy yeah I'm sorry if you were still going um yeah i think yeah i mean we could we could do all episodes just on this chapter because there's a lot there but um but yeah i think part of um part of the myth is it's not it's like it started with you know like russell was saying like before it became popular it was kind of a almost a or like you call it fancy and i don't i think that's actually more accurate but it became almost an urban legend. I know at least within, you know, certain neighborhoods and places I would go to, like, it became almost like this urban legend.

You can be in a barbershop or you can just kind of be in an all casual conversation. And this is before Watchman or any of that. I'm talking about before that. And you would hear about, yeah, there were, being black people had airplanes and we had all these businesses and we ran the whole. thing. I remember, I think my art teacher, it was a black man in high school, the first person ever told me about it. And that's part of how I got this impression. And he was, he was cool people. He was actually a pretty good teacher, but he was walking around saying it. So it became

a kind of folklore that, you know, but again, to your point, even then, usually a folklore is based on something. And then, and then it, and once they hit name, mainstream media and mainstream culture and it informed a lot of folks that obviously didn't come up in those kind of circles that were referring to. It took on even worse, I think, kind of life. But there were already these kind of foundations prior to the explosion of it. They had kind of been building. And you've had business guys that were black business guys that would, they all referenced Black Wall Street. So like we know it in the chapter by the time. you get to 2020, 2021, now you have the White House literally saying, we want to rebuild Black Wall Street. And it becomes a way of pandering to voters that we support black business and we want to bring back a Black Wall Street or we want to bring Black Wall Street to your communities and you or you go to local events and people are saying like, yeah, we're going to build a Black Wall Street. It's taken on an entire life that again, when you look at the

facts is just not anywhere close. Like Russell, you don't have to know about the data numbers about, you know, the receipts on black business and the how much economic, I guess, revenue that the, that banks bring in. Like, that is stuff you have to kind of be a little bit more versed on. But, you know, on its face, I would say on the black business question, most people work that are businesses. So it doesn't make sense to me.

why we would focus on a minority of people to be business owners because most people work. That's just a fact of capitalism and really a fact of life. So why is there an emphasis on something that a minority of us will inherently be in anyway? Even if black business did have more of an impact on the economy, most of us aren't going to, like, own the business. We're going to work at it. So they're never, these business owners are never forced to prove that your wages, will be higher or you'll have more benefits with us or anything they just can simply say it's a black business but i mean if walmart was owned by black people that the material reality is

the exact same so you know like you still have to get food stamps to work there you know like that's just what is if if if amazon was owned by a black man the materiality is still the same if if jeff bezos was black nothing changes like literally nothing changes you know other than maybe or i would argue might even be worse because now you can present uh jeff basil some kind of success story to black people that he's not you know just as a white man but nothing's going to get any better at least right so but black wall street is where all these different talking points find they're kind of like they all converge like black wall street is a point of reference for you know white capitalist is point of reference for

you know, black people who think they're capitalist. It's a point of reference for some even like more black, you know, black nationalists and even people who mean well. It's a point of reference for white folks who think that they're helping. It's a point of reference for a lot of different groups, you know, whether they're on the left, right, or anything. It becomes a kind of universal point of reference and it does not hold up under any scrutiny. Absolutely. And of course, it is, as you've mentioned, an extension of this. representational idea that if there's one black person in a power, in a position of power in politics or in the economy, that that somehow is good for the entire community at large.

We see that in politics. We see it in economics. We see it in the world of sociality, etc. So always to be skeptical of that. Now, we are over a two hours here. I've absolutely love this discussion. I cannot urge people to get the book itself because, of course, as I've said, this discussion can only cover so much. And this is really a rich, rich investigation from beginning to end. But I want to kind of go to the conclusion and then wrap up this conversation. In your conclusion, you argue for reverse laundering, and you argue that, quote, instead of using the fronts to legitimize black rage through bribery, we should flip the bribes of the capitalist state and fund the anti-colonial, anti-imperial measures

as so religiously outlaws. And then you add, quote, the answers rest in our collective black rage, the conspiring rage of every conquered and oppressed people, and our ability to organize it all toward a life-affirming post-Western communist world. Can you please summarize your conclusion for us and let us know where you point as a vision for where we can go going forward? Yeah, I mean, some of this, I think we also know, you know, some of the solutions cannot be, you know, quantified in a book. And I think we say you cannot formalize what is illegal. So there's just some things that can't be said. but um at least publicly but at the same time i think um on his on his on his on his basis like okay

we're on the premise of reverse laundering again coming back to these kind of formal definitions now you don't really have to change them you just have to expand kind of the concept of where they can go um reverse laundering just as a basic definition is to say um the opposite of laundering in the sense that you take something that is legitimate to fund something or to resource something that is illegitimate. So I'll give a negative example of this is Iran-Contra with the United States and the CIA.

They sold weapons to Iran illegally. Like they were off the books. Now, this is in the 80s, in the late 70s into the 80s. and they use the guns they use the proceeds obtained from from those selling those guns to fund a war

against communists in Nicaragua and this became what was called the Iran Contra scandal once this was exposed Reagan claimed he didn't know anything blah blah Oliver North took the fall whatever

and that same war was the United States and particularly the CIA looking the other way, you know, when the Contra's sold cocaine into the United States and that of cocaine eventually becomes crack. And often there's this conspiracy that crack cocaine was put in the black community. And that there's, that's, that's a whole other conversation. It's not exactly worked.

It didn't exactly work the way that maybe the kind of broader public talks about it. But it is true that the money that was sold in black community or the, crack that was sold in black communities often could have been financed by anti-communist and the CIA and that was a way to raise money for the war because they weren't supposed to be able to actually conduct this war like Congress and not sanctioned this war and this is a time where Congress was a little bit more a little bit more serious about overseeing what was sanctioned as a war than it is today where it's totally doesn't even matter um so they used to fund wars that were illegitimate.

They weren't really supposed to be. The United States was not supposed to be involved in this. Now, because it's the state, it was able to just, you know, part in itself and move on. But that's, again, that's a negative example, but it shows that sometimes you can take things from the legitimate side, the things that are, quote, unquote, sanctioned by the broader society and then funnel those things into things that are not sanctioned.

Now, I want to be clear, especially as long as air, I'm not saying to go fund a war with whatever money you have. I'm not saying that. If that's what you choose to do, that's you. I'm not going to say that. I'm not saying that on air. But there is something to be said that the money transfers through your hands, the resources transfer through our hands when we do the laundering. Like when we talk about bribes, we talk about the grants that come through, when we talk about the jobs that we have, when we talk about the opportunities that some of us get. it has to go through your hands.

This is how capitalism works. In general, people have to work. That's why we understand, like, the point of production and how if workers can organize, they can attack certain points of production and create real problems for capital, or it can just be kind of, you know, co-opted into a very mild-mannered union.

But it all depends on how we organize, right? So when you think about the stuff that has to come through our hands, like we talked about 2020 was amissed opportunity. We're not saying we would have totally overthrown capitalism, but you could at least probably, if there would have been more organization in place, shifted some of the balances of power a little bit better to create a better situation for people to ultimately overthrow capitalism, but at least you could have shifted the balance of power at the very least.

There wasn't an organization in a place to do that, so things often, you know, went some other direction. But you can take the resources that come through your hands or if you are aware of resources that are going through people's hands and you can make sure that those resources come back to finance to resource something that the state is not currently sanctioned, that the state is not really interested in building. That doesn't mean the reverse. It's laundering. I mean, the Panthers are a positive example, the Black Panther Party where, you know, they would go up to local business owners and they would basically tell them they would ask them for donations to the food programs if those local business owners did not do that there were consequences

sometimes their store may not be in the best of shape sometimes it might be boycotted you know something might happen because you didn't donate to the program right you know and those programs are made to feed the people those programs even though they eventually are co-opted by the treasury the The Department of Architecture, or agriculture, excuse me, you know, at the time they were met for the people. They were met to not just feed people, but to also politicize people and bring people into the party and things of that nature. So that's an example as well. But I think more broadly just gets at this sense of, I think there's an issue we are always trying to legitimize what we do and trying to make it popular and make it something that everybody needs to be involved in and it needs to be. But when you do that, you open up, you open yourself up to a certain level of exposure that you may not organizationally be prepared to deal with.

So maybe everything doesn't need to be so loud. Maybe everything doesn't need to be our front street. Maybe we need our own front sometimes. You know, maybe we need to be doing things that isn't openly and explicitly staying the most radical thing for the sake of performance. Maybe sometimes you just need to go do that work and you need to take the resource that you have and fund. network as opposed to trying to get it legitimized and well-oiled because that comes with current contradictions that lead to the many of the day that we talked about today. You know, it puts you in a position where you, even if you're a well-meaning person, you may not be able to control

the level of laundry that may happen or the level of co-optation that may happen, you know, because you've put yourself in this NGO model or this really huge nonprofit model, and now there's only so much that you can even navigate in the first place. So I understand. people need resources. I understand people need money to take care of themselves and that's the that's the contradiction that capitalism puts us in. But sometimes we need to think about ways that we can, you know, resource things and, you know, because the state ultimately cannot cover all grounds. We're seeing this today with various things where the state is struggling to squash and deal with the various challenges that it's created for.

against itself. Capital is struggling to figure out how to put all these things down. So that does create openings because they're trying to cover too much territory quite literally. So we need to notice where those points of openings are and then try to figure out ways that we can, you know, extract from that and help, you know, take care of things that, you know, need to be taken care of. And I would suggest people do that organizationally, not just send a individually, but sometimes if you're in a position, that's all you can do is do it individually. So you work with what you can, but I would say it's more sustaining when we do that in ways that bring us together, not some kind of, you know, secret agent that you tell yourself that you are,

you go out and do stuff, but you're not sharing this with anybody else. Like, you should be in community with other people. Yeah, I could not agree more. And right now the empire is overextended. It's trying to fight wars. in Europe. It's trying to defend the Israeli settler colonial apartheid project. It's threatening Taiwan. There's huge, you know, sort of protests here at home that is trying to squash. It has an inter-ruling class dispute between the Trump and Biden factions of the ruling elite. And so, yes,

this is a moment of extreme crisis. This is a moment of, of course, brutality, but it's also a moment of opportunity for those willing to take it. And I appreciate your subtlety as well as your your general point, I think it is spot on. All right. Well, I really appreciate both of you so much for making this book, for coming on and sharing your knowledge with me and my audience. I can't recommend people check it out enough. I can't recommend people immediately right now. Go subscribe to Black Myths podcast. I'll link to it in the show notes, of course. I think your last two episodes you have on Rasul as your guest, but you have Joy James, you have Dr. CBS, so many other really, really important episodes. It's a great podcast. Can't recommend in the

enough. Before I let both of you go, though, can you please let listeners know where they can find your book and each of you and your work online? Yeah, so the book can be found on Rutledge.com. I'm going to send you a discount call because I don't know if you're familiar with Red Litch. They didn't mark their prices up a lot too much for me. So I'm going to send you a 25% discount code that that's for people to use that will help with some of that. nice um so and that so that link at everything can be in the the show notes in terms of our um uh i guess you know people were interested in us doing any kind of interviews or book talks or anything of that nature you know just reach out um you can just reach out to me on social media

or reach out to me on my website or anything of that nature under two black uh and i'll send you the info so i don't have to repeat all of that and then there's um the black miss podcast again, well, I'll just see you all the information that you can link to it, but you know, people can find that under Black Power Media on YouTube. We're part of a broader or conglomerate that's currently doing some restructuring. And then they can also listen to it on any

kind of streaming, you know, podcast streaming sites as well. And then I would say I didn't, we didn't mention this, but I would also, just a shout out, I worked, organized from political prisoners here in Indiana. The Penalton 2, Christopher Naim Trotter, and John Ballagoon Cole, and I would just, I would really push people to look up that case. I won't get into it now because I know we're running over time. The Penelton 2.com, and that's the word penelton number 2.com, because those are two political prisoners who did.

We talk about reverse laundering, and we use them as an example in the book. They did do that, and they did it with very little resources. They did it as prisoners to save a man's wife from a white supremacist guard gang. So we're currently trying to help get them out, obviously, and free them. So any resources that, you know, you have to send money to the campaign, to sign petitions or anything of that nature, they both got over 200 years for doing this, even though no one died. So I always want to make sure I shout that out and just encourage people to look up more of that case. I made a full documentary about it.

So you can view that on the website as well. Other than that, again, thanks for just having us. Again, I do, like, genuinely listen to this show. I'm not just saying that because I'm on here. I don't get to hear, I don't get to listen to everything. And similar to Black Mists, sometimes, you know, y'all have really long episodes. I know sometimes it's hard to get through it.

Yeah. But I do appreciate all of the, I just want to say it on record. I appreciate the way y'all get into the concepts that it becomes so easy. easily just, you know, kind of just washed over, like, people don't want to really dig into the weeds of it. Like, I really appreciate that. I mean, we've, we've used it and referenced it in our episodes, but when we did one on Marxism, the myth that Marxism was Eurocentric, all the deep dives into philosophy. I had to do a talk for something this past week, and I was actually

preparing for an interview, an interview we got rescheduled, but I was just trying to get a better sense of classical liberalism and I was listening to a debate that you had done, Brett, with the liberal, it was a fairly sensible one. I can't remember the name of that episode. It was actually an older one. Long time ago, yeah. Yeah, 2010's. But, you know, but just to get a better sense of it, so I always come back to the show sometimes. If I don't have time to read the full text sometimes, I will come back to this show to just give me at least a pretty strong overview of the information, so I just want to, you know, say I do appreciate this pod and, you know, thank, and happy to be on here. Thank you, man. That means the world to me. Very appreciative of

that. It's very cool to hear. Rasul, do you want to say anything before we wrap up? No, just to extend the point that political education is so vital and, you know, appreciate you all here for reading our book. I mean, that's not the only reason why political education is important just because you've all read our book, but because, you know, people, are out there needing information and information that could maybe jumpstart them to a series of information to move away from fantasy, but to actually deal of our material reality. So really appreciate you all to work here. And yeah, I'm similar to two black.

We're both notoriously affordable in terms of promotion. So yes, you could find, you know, I don't see as well in terms of it to Graham and Lake did. And I guess Facebook, if I know my password, you know, anymore. But I think more than anything, I think Two Black and I just want to appreciate the readers out there. And the more we can engage with readers. So please reach out to us and tell us, you know, if the book has been helpful. And if, you know, more dialogue is necessary, which, you know, as Two Black alluded to, please reach out to him if you want the two of us to come and.

speak to a group that you all may have. So thank you for your time. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you both so much. It's been a real honor, real pleasure. I'll link to all of the relevant stuff in the show notes, including that discount code to get the book at even a cheaper price, which I appreciate. And yeah, both of you, just keep up the amazing work. And Rev. Left Radio is always here for both of you. If you ever have any projects in the future you want to promote or anything you want to come on and talk about, we're always here. You have my email. Thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I'm going to be able to be.