#RolandMartinUnfiltered - Mass Shootings & Anxiety, DOJ Finds AL Neglects Black Residents, Remembering Harry Belafonte

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

5.8.2023 #RolandMartinUnfiltered: Mass Shootings & Anxiety, DOJ Finds AL Neglects Black Residents, Remembering Harry Belafonte  The decades-old water and sewage crisis in Alabama's "Black Belt," Lowndes County.  The Department of Justice found a pattern of neglect from Alabama's  Department of Public Health had a pattern of neglect and failed to act on the county's water problems.  I'll talk to the Rural Development Manager of the Equal Justice Initiative about how black Alabama citizens have disproportionately been impacted. It's Mental Health Awareness Month.  I'll talk to a licensed professional counselor about how the rise in mass shootings affects people's daily lives and mental well-being.   Actor Richard Dreyfuss faces backlash after defending blackface and expressing regret over being unable to play a Black man.  We will show you the video of him criticizing diversity standards in Hollywood. And we're still remembering legendary performer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte.  I'll show you one of my favorite interviews I had with him. Download the #BlackStarNetwork app on iOS, AppleTV, Android, Android TV, Roku, FireTV, SamsungTV and XBox  http://www.blackstarnetwork.com The #BlackStarNetwork is a news reporting platforms covered under Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. the recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like, uh, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it.

Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. We have one aisle six. And aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into through the grocery store. We have one aisle six. And aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out.

Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Today is Monday, May 8th, 2023. Coming up on Roland Martin Unfiltered, streaming live on the Black Star Network. The decades-old water and sewage crisis in Alabama's Black Belt, Lowndes County, is now hopefully being solved. The DOJ found a pattern of neglect from Alabama's Department of Public Health,

and they failed to act on the county's water problems. I'll talk to the Rural Development Manager of the Equal Justice Initiative about how black Alabama citizens have been greatly impacted. It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and I'll talk to a licensed professional counselor about how the rise in mass shootings affects people's daily lives and mental well-being. Actor Richard Dreyfuss faces backlash after defending blackface and expressing regret over being unable to play a black man. We'll show you the video that has him pissed off with the Oscars diversity standards. Plus, we'll play for you a one-on-one interview

I did with Harry Belafonte. Our first sit-down interview. It's one you do not want to miss. It's time to bring the funk on Roller Mark Unfiltered on the Black Star Network. Let's go. He's got it. Why don't the music go out?

He's on it. Whatever it is, he's got the scoop, the fact, the fine. And when it breaks, he's right on time And it's rolling, best belief he's knowing Putting it down from sports to news to politics With entertainment just for kicks He's rolling, yeah It's Uncle Roro, yo

Yeah, yeah It's rolling, Martin, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Roland Martin. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rolling with Roland now. Yeah. He's funky, he's fresh, he's real the best. You know he's Roland Martin now.

Roland Martin. Folks, late last week, the DOJ released the findings of its first environmental justice investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It's in an area of Alabama that's called the Black Belt. According to the DOJ, the investigation uncovered evidence that the Alabama Department of Public Health had a pattern of neglect and failed to act on water problems in Lowndes County, about 30 miles southwest of Montgomery, the state's capital. 51,000 homes in Lowndes County, 60% of them have inefficient sewer systems. Sewer Systems. Catherine Coleman Flowers is the CEO of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. She joins me now from Huntsville, Alabama. Catherine, glad to have you here. This is a perfect example, Catherine, of an environmental issue that's a race issue

that involves the Department of Justice. Christian Clark was there last week where they announced those findings. Let people know again how the life of black folks impacted by an inadequate water sewer system. Well, first of all, Roland, thank you for having me here. I grew up in Lowndes County, so I know what it's like to have a failing septic system. I know what it's like to use an outhouse. But a lot of people, I was surprised when I moved back to the area to find out that people were still living like that. And what's even worse now is that if you're living in a home where your septic system is failing, usually what people do when it fails, it comes back into the home. Or it will be outside of the home, or people disconnect it,

and that's when you see the toilet paper and so forth outside the home. Then there are a lot of people that can't afford them because they're so expensive, and they just have it growing into a pit, as you see in one of the photos that's there. We've gone to places where we've just seen sewage all over the areas because people didn't have treatment. There are also cases and examples where we've seen they have sewage lagoons where people are living right adjacent to where all the sewage from the community goes into this one area. And we did a study back in, that was released in 2017, a peer-reviewed study where we found evidence of hookworm and other tropical parasites.

And when this study was released, the state health department put on this website that it was not valid because we used PCR technology, which was not approved by the FDA. To see those photos, again, people might be thinking, oh, this is 1920s, 1930s, and not 2023. Oh, this is definitely 2023. A lot of those pictures were taken in 2023. And if you go to a lot of the homes, you can see this. And I guess the reason that we were able to share this over the course of the time I've been doing this work is because I am a native and I grew up seeing a lot of this, too. A lot of people are embarrassed by it and didn't want to really talk about it. But they shared this information with us because they're ready for a solution.

And we're glad that the DOJ took up our complaint and saw validity in what we were. And I've been working on this issue since 2002. So we filed the complaint in 2018. And fortunately, somebody heard us and were able to, using Title VI and civil rights law. And what I think is the most appropriate place, which is Lowndes County, because most of the settlement to Montgomery March goes through Lowndes County, is also home to the original Black Panther Party, which was founded there. So I think that if history bears us out, maybe we can also make additional history by making sure that no other rural community throughout the South would have these kind of long-running situations because we're hoping that this could be a model for how we address these issues. 26% white. So what is this decision by the DOJ?

What is it going to do? What is it going to cause? What is going to change? Well, hopefully what it would change is that most of the families that are impacted by this, which are families that are African American, most of the families will find a remedy finally where they don't have to worry about either

sewage running into the backyards where the children are playing around it or coming back into their homes. So we're hoping that out of this, we can find technological solutions that work. Places like Whitehall, Alabama, where people are living closer together, we're hoping instead of them being, because the pictures that you're seeing now are in Whitehall, actually that family family, their great grandmother provided the campsite for the marches when they marched from Selma to Montgomery. It is a travesty that people that gave so much for the right to vote are now being put in a situation where they have to live like this. And hopefully what we could find is that there will be funding that will be directed to them that will allow them to have centralized sewer

where centralized sewer can be or having septic systems that work. And again, they'll be suspending criminal penalties and liens. They will also suspend enforcement of sanitation laws that could result in criminal charges, fines, jail time and potential property loss for residents in Lowndes County and coordinate with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to measure the level of health risk of different populations experienced from raw sewage exposure.

They also agreed to work collaboratively with the CDC to adopt any public health recommendations provided by the CDC. They will be also launching a public health awareness campaign and will develop a public health awareness campaign using radio, print ads, flyers, mailers, door-to-door outreach, and other appropriate ways to ensure residents receive critical health and safety information related to raw sewage exposure. Also providing public health educational materials for Lowndes County health care providers by creating or have supplemental educational materials for health care providers for Lowndes County residents, including school-based health care centers and community-based organizations to provide more information on symptoms and illness related to raw sewage exposure.

Also, they will be conducting assessments to determine appropriate septic and wastewater management systems by conducting a comprehensive assessment of the appropriate, again, management systems for homes within Lowndes County and use that information to prioritize properties to receive systems based on risk of exposure to raw sewage. And Alabama Department of Public Health cannot use this information for criminal penalties or liens. That is really important there, Catherine. That's very important because what keeps a lot of us connected to the county is that our families own property there.

And when they came up with this lien law that would allow them to put liens on people's properties, note that that's the only place in the state of Alabama where it would apply, in Lowndes County. There are 67 counties in the state of Alabama, and they had that special law just for Lowndes County. So we feel that the way they were just so punitive in terms of going after people who were in a situation that was not through their own makings was hard. And I'm glad that the Justice Department stepped in and listened to our complaint and is helping us get to a place where this can finally be resolved. All right, then. Catherine Flowers, thanks so much. Great work, and keep fighting.

Thank you so much. Come and visit us. Indeed. I'll be in Alabama soon. Thank you. Take care. Thanks a lot. All right, folks, when we come back, I'll talk to my panel about this.

I'm Roland Martin, unfiltered on the Black Star Network. YouTube folks, hit that Like button. Also, download our app, Apple Phone, Android Phone, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, Samsung Smart TV. Join our Bring the Funk fan club. Your dollars make it possible for us to do what we do. Send check-in money orders. PO Box 57196, Washington, D.C., 20037-0196. Cash App, Dollar Sign, RM Unfiltered.

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Download your copy on Audible. I'll be right back. Hatred on the streets, a horrific scene, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence. On that soil, you will not regret that. White people are losing their damn lives. There's an angry pro-Trump mob storm to the U.S. Capitol. We're about to see the rise of what I call white minority resistance.

We have seen white folks in this country who simply cannot tolerate black folks voting. I think what we're seeing is the inevitable result of violent denial. This is part of American history. Every time that people of color have made progress, whether real or symbolic, there has been what Carol Anderson at Emory University calls white rage as a backlash. This is the rise of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys. America, there's going to be more of this.

There's all the Proud Boys. This country is getting increasingly racist in its behaviors and its attitudes because of the fear of white people. The fear that they're taking our jobs, they're taking our resources, they're taking our women. This is white fear. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things.

Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

You say you'd never give in to a meltdown, never let kids' toys take over the house, and never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule, never lick your thumb to clean their face, and you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there,

no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Up next on The Frequency with me, Dee Barnes, our special guest, Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. We're going to discuss her new book,

The Purpose of Power, how we come together when we fall apart. We live in a world where we have to navigate. You know, when we say something, people look at us funny. But when a man says the same thing less skillfully than we did, right? Right. Everybody blocks towards what they said, even though it was your idea. Right here on The Frequency on the Black Star Network. Hi, I'm B.B. Winans. Hi, I'm Kim Burrell. Hi, I'm Carl Paney. Hey, everybody, this is Sherri Shepherd.

You're watching Roland Martin Unfiltered, and while he's doing Unfiltered, I'm practicing your wobble. All right, folks, welcome back. My panel, Dr. Amakongo Dabinga, professorial lecturer, School of International Service, American University, based out of D.C. Renita Shannon, former Georgia State representative out of Atlanta. Dr. Niambi Carter, associate professor,

University of Maryland School of Public Policy out of D.C. Glad to have y'all here. I will start with you, Niambi. This is a perfect example of, again, why elections matter. Having a Biden-Harris Department of Justice Democrat leading, having Kristen Clark there going after a red state Alabama where they have been screwing over black people, impacting their health. This is how environmental racism combines with the deal DOJ does to affect change. This is a huge, huge deal. Absolutely. huge, huge deal. Absolutely, Roland. It's super important because it's not just this sort of

issue of just having this sewage. It's all of the other things that come with it as your previous guest talked about. Alabama's had a hookworm problem. That's something you don't really see in this country anymore. Yet this is happening in the 21st century because you have a history of neglect.

You have these rural communities and others that don't have proper sewage, that don't have access to clean water. All of the things that we deride developing nations and other countries for, but we never stop to look at rural America. And it's not just the water. It's also the things that we dump.

It's the trash collection sites and where they're placed. It's all of this stuff. And it is making black communities in Alabama, in Lowndes County sick and sicker by the day because there's also less health care access in those same places. So it's just a sort of perfect storm of problems that are collecting in this community. And thankfully, the Department of Justice has done something toward trying to remediate this issue, but this is going to take a really long time

to get this together. You know, the thing here, Renita, we talk about this all the time, why civil rights groups matter, why lawsuits matter, why holding people accountable. The reality is Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, we can go down the line. When Republicans are in office, these red states know we can do pretty much what the hell we want to do.

And, you know, there's somebody out there who will say, you know, what have they done for black people? 72.5% of Lowndes County is black. Now, you may have a working toilet or bathroom in your house, but trust me, this decision by DOJ to come down on the Alabama Department of Public Health. This has a direct impact on the lives of black people. This absolutely has far-reaching consequences, and this is a great example of what we mean when we talk about environmental racism. You're absolutely correct. You know, this situation with Lowndes County, unfortunately, is not the first time that we've seen a Republican majority-controlled state just allow a black county to just languish and have environmental issues. And as you said before, this, you know, I'm thankful that the DOJ stepped in.

But as you talked about before, this really has far-reaching consequences. You know, tonight I'm wearing a shirt that says Black Birth Matters, and this is actually supporting a group of black doulas in New Orleans that works to make sure that those who are giving birth are having good health outcomes. But when we talk about environmental racism and what's happening in Lowndes County, these two issues don't look connected, but they are. You cannot have healthy, successful pregnancies if you are not able to drink clean water and have air that is appropriate to breathe. And so I know that environmental issues usually don't rank high when people think about who they're going to vote for and when they think about what are top priority issues. But I can guarantee you the folks who are living in Lowndes County are definitely, this is ranking high with them because it's

just essential for life. It's essential for growing healthy, happy black families to have clean water and clean air. Sounds so basic, but as you can see, this is not the only example that that actually is something that is not very basic when it comes to supporting counties that are majority black. Last thing I'll say is I have not seen a situation where any state in the nation has allowed

a majority white county to languish. You might have some poor areas within a county, but you are not going to see a majority white county be allowed to languish from an environmental perspective the way that Lowndes County has been allowed to languish. And it's sad. Omokongo. You know, this really has me thinking a lot about, to be quite honest, 2024, because Ms. Flower said that she started this campaign in 2002. And here we are in 2023. All of this effort to get to this point tonight, an effort that, mind you, Roland, as you know better than nobody else, no other news network is talking about in terms of bringing this to the forefront. And I'm just thinking about what happens in 2024 if Biden loses the election.

All of these efforts go away. Kristen Clark, all of these people are gone. So when we see these types of efforts being made, we push the Justice Department to do these types of things and they act, we have to continue to push further, because this can easily disappear. And to be quite honest, Roland, I think policies like these and actions like these by the Department of Justice are the reasons why people are saying Biden has low numbers. I think people are feeling like he's done enough for the Black community, Katonji, Kamala, you know, all of this that's going on, these actions. And people are like, come on, man, it's enough. But we can't stop.

We have to keep demanding more because it's clearly leading to results. And lastly, I will say, Roland, you've been talking about Selma multiple times and how the condition is left in Selma. And people are not talking about an economic plan for Selma, black folks in particular. When we talk about that economic plan, it has to include counties like Lowndes County, because she talked about that connection to the civil rights movement. So we have to applaud the DOJ for what it's doing. We have to stay engaged to make sure that we can get 2024

so we can get more of this going into 2024 and beyond. And we also have to make sure that we as black people are going back to snatch up our communities that have such a powerful legacy and making sure we're doing our best to take care of them economically as well. Oh, absolutely. And again, this is one of those things where I've said repeatedly that the Biden administration should be pushing, should be touting and not just, you know, just having DOJ send items out. And part of the deal in politics, Niamey, ain't just what you do,

it's how you sell it. You gotta tell folk what you did. Absolutely. And I think this is something you've chided Democrats a lot on. They don't really do a good job of talking about the things that they've done. I mean, I think for many of us

who lived through the recovery of these last few years, I mean, talking about the things that they've done. I mean, I think for many of us who lived through the recovery of these last few years, I mean, talking about being able to get rapid COVID tests in your home, like that was not a small achievement. Thinking about some of these moratoriums on in rental assistance, other kinds of things, these were not small things. And these were not inconsequential things for Black Americans. Yet, I think Democrats have a real problem with saying the things that they actually have done and have done well. And I think this is going to be one of those things, unfortunately, to Dr. Dabanga's point just a moment ago and yours also, is that this is not a small thing. I mean, environmental justice, if we're really going to

be honest about it, is a Black issue. It's something that started with black communities, and it was black people laying down in the street in Warren County, North Carolina, that moved this thing that we call environmental justice to the fore. Yet we talk about environmental concerns as if they're not black issues, but we know they rank high in black communities all over the country, whether you're talking about Newark or you're talking about Selma. So we know this is an important thing for our communities. Our communities are hotter, more underserved. We have poor temperatures, I mean, poor air quality in our community. So all of these environmental issues matter to us. Yet you have here a Department of Justice stepping into a place like Lowndes County, which has multiple, multiple health violations. And this will probably barely get a mention

from the Democratic field, whether we're talking about just President Biden, but even his surrogates and others who were sort of on the ground and in these states. This will probably not rate highly, although we know this is an important move for Black people. We don't just care about police brutality. We don't just care about, you know, affirmative action and all these things. We care about the air we breathe. We care about the water we drink. We care about the paint and all of the groundwater, all those things that are vital to our life. So, you know, the Democrats will probably fall short yet again.

I mean, I don't know how many times we can tell them, you can tell them, all these folks can tell them that you need to start with your strongest points first. But it just seems that, you know, tooting their own horn, if you will, is just not something they want to do. And I don't know why for the life of me, they don't want to take credit for the actual wins that they have. Absolutely. And Renita, again, going to the 24th, they better do a hell of a lot more. This is also, to me, this is one of those things that Karine Jean-St-Pierre should be talking about from the White House podium.

I hope that she will, because as I said before, people don't think about environmental issues until it's a problem in their own backyard. But these really are life and death issues. I think when it comes to Democrats, one of the long problems that we've had is that Democrats have been too busy sort of doing things and then telling people to be grateful for it. What they need to do in this next election cycle is listen to the public on what they want as priorities. But as you said, also lift up things like this to say, hey, we have your back. Even when you have not said, hey, we want to make sure that we have clean water and clean air as a complete top priority, we're stepping into areas that may

not have your best interests at heart, like a Republican-controlled state. We're stepping in and making sure that they do the right thing. And so this is something that I really hope that the press secretary will bring to the forefront, because as I said before, what happened, what is happening in Lowndes County, this is not the only county that has faced this. You see over and over and over again where majority Black counties are just left to languish when it comes to infrastructure, environmental protections, and just overall basic safety. Omicongo, if you don't toot your own horn, ain't nobody else going to toot it for you.

The Biden-Harris folk better realize this because, look, the ABC poll that came, ABC Washington Post poll, look, they have an uphill battle. It ain't going to be easy. That's right. For reelection. It's not going to be easy going against and twice impeached, disgraced, indicted at least one time for now. President who said you can grab women wherever they want and justified it in a court deposition just last week. But yet it's still not going to be easy. Biden administration cannot take this for granted. And they need to really focus on getting more, you know, people who have already been engaged, engaged,

but these newer voters, all of these young people coming out of Tennessee, places like Wisconsin, what happened was always Zephyr in Montana, but also as Renita and Dr. Carter said, the environmental justice issue. How many of us in our communities have grown up with asthma and diabetes? A few weeks ago, I was in Rosedale, Mississippi, which is the poorest city in the poorest state of the United States.

Majority Black people who I'm seeing there as well. And we can turn those people into voters if we start seeing what's happening as it relates to bragging and talking about what's happening in our communities and what the Biden administration is doing better. And so, as you said earlier this weekend on, I believe it was MSNBC, you said, you know, we got to obliterate the Republican Party as it stands now. And the only way we're going to do that, Roland, is to get out there and vote and bring new voters into the fold. If the Democrats make the same mistake again, they're trying to just only going after white suburban women, they are going to fail. It's amazing that Biden might actually lose against Trump. But if the Democrats go with the same old playbook, hire the same old consultants and don't pay attention to black media and pay attention and brag about these stories, it can really be a toss up as relates to what could happen. So really, at the end of the day, the Biden administration has its work cut out for them,

and they have a powerful record to go on. Black unemployment, the lowest it's ever been. Are they talking about that? We're not seeing that. If they don't step up, it might be too late, but we got to stay on them. Absolutely. All right, folks, hold tight one second.

We come back. Mass shooting in Texas. We've had more than 100 this year already. The toll it is taking on the mental health of Americans. We'll discuss that next right here on Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Blackstar Network. That was a pivotal, pivotal time.

I remember Kevin Hart telling me that. He's like, man, what you doing, man? You gotta stay on stage. And I was like, yeah, well, I'm like, I don't know. You know, I'm young. I'm thinking, I'm good. And he was absolutely right. What show did you go to?

This was one-on-one. Got it. During that time. And I was telling you, so you're doing one-on-one. Yeah. Going great. Yeah. You're making money.

You're like. I'm like, I don't need to leave. I don't need to leave from, you know, Wednesday, Thursday to Sunday. You know, I just didn't want to do that. You know, it was'm like, I don't need to leave. I don't need to leave from Wednesday, Thursday to Sunday. I just didn't want to do that. It was just like, I'm going to stay here. Or I didn't want to finish work Friday, fly out, go do a gig Saturday, Sunday.

I was like, I don't have to do that. And I lost a little bit of that hunger that I had in New York. I would hit all the clubs and run around. Sometimes me and Chappelle or me and this one or that one, we'd go to the Comedy Cellar at one in the morning. I mean, that was our life. We loved it. You know, you do two shows in Manhattan,

go to Brooklyn, leave Brooklyn, go to Queens, go to Jersey. And I kind of just, I got complacent. I was like, I got this money, I'm good. I don't need to go, I don't need to go chase that because that money wasn't at the same level that I was like, I got this money, I'm good, I don't need to go, I don't need to go chase that because that money wasn't at the same level that I was making, but what I was missing was that training. Yes.

Was that, was that. And it wasn't the money. It was the money, you know, it was that, that's what I needed. We're all impacted by the culture, whether we know it or not. From politics to music and entertainment, it's a huge part of our lives. And we're going to talk about it every day right here on The, with me, Faraji Muhammad, only on the Black Star Network. Hey, I'm Antonique Smith. What up? Lana Wells, and you are watching Rolling Martin Unfiltered. All right, folks, it is May 8th, and already there have been 15 mass shootings in America in the last eight days.

As these shootings become increasingly more common, so has anxiety surrounding the likelihood of these events. Folks, this week. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher.

Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best.

You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. We have one aisle six and aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out.

Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council again we saw what took place in Texas seven people shot and killed at a mall in Texas Robin May joins me now from Lithonia Georgia Robin is a licensed professional counselor and Robin I must tell you it is I mean I've seen social media posts where there are people who said they have adjusted what times they go to public events. When they go to the mall, they've adjusted what they wear, how they walk, where they park. And that's a whole lot to think about when you're just trying to just go out.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, Roland, what's interesting, even when you were just giving those statistics, I found myself having to take a deep breath in just the reality. What's so interesting is that it was just a mass shooting here in Atlanta and also in Texas, where I am from. And so I even find myself, I do this for a living. I help people navigate this terrain for a living. And I find myself looking over my shoulders, watching people a little bit closer, trying to figure out what's going on.

And I wanna say this to everybody who's watching me. I've said this before on your show, Roland, and I'm just going to have to be the poster child for this. I want us to understand that our souls, hear me, our souls have a capacity. There's only so much we can carry. And so because we cannot control all the environments, it is wise to figure out what you can do to make yourself feel safe, and not only yourself, your family members. And so one of the things I'm doing tonight, my daughters don't even know this, we're having a Come to Jesus meeting, and we're going to sit down and talk about what is the strategy for safety for our household. But there's something

else I think we need to do, and I want you to hear me. I want everybody listening to hear me. What often happens is that we wait for the crisis to start dealing and tending with our hearts and our souls and our anxiety. What I want all of us to do is start making wholeness and wellness a lifestyle so that you can begin to release some of that stuff that we're carrying because we shouldn't have to carry all of this.

And so that starts with learning how to take breaks and to set boundaries from all of this information that we're taking in. I am looking here. There's I'm looking at this particular tweet here. And it's just crazy. A six year old want to understand the impact of this. A six-year-old, y'all might, I think we might have a scene, maybe on my screen. A six-year-old lost his mom, dad, and three-year-old brother in the Texas mall shooting. Only he survived and was just released from the ICU. There's a GoFundMe. They were trying to raise $50,000.

So far, they raised $581,000. And this is the thing here, Doc. You got folks who are just, I mean, they, I know some people who literally, they are scared to death when their children leave home. Because places that we used to think, I mean, I remember when parents were like, drop the kids off at the mall, everything will be fine. Now, another case, oh, they can go to the park. Nope. I mean, again, movie theater. Nope. And it is just this culture of guns in the society is just utterly ridiculous. You know, Roland, it's interesting because when I was thinking about our conversation,

I was thinking about where do I feel that you can go where there's not going to be an issue. My husband and I pastor a church here in Latonia, Roland. I don't even know that you can say that you're safe at church. And if you don't feel safe at church, everywhere is a place where we can feel uncomfortable. And, you know, Roland, I think this is what's happening. I believe this is a larger problem. And if I had the opportunity to speak to the decision makers in our government, I would say this. This really boils down to a worldview, because as long as we believe it's just me, myself, and I, that's the only thing I have to worry about, I don't have to worry about anybody else, we won't begin to make the gun laws that

are necessary to make a change, because there is no reason that people should have access to guns so easily. And I'm saying this from a mental health perspective. Let's put as many boundaries in place. I don't want to take anybody's right. I am woman. Hear me roar. I want all of my rights. But let's put some boundaries in place so that we can start to mitigate some of this. And if we don't do that, if we continue to have the worldview that it's just me, myself and I, I believe these things will continue to happen. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, what's interesting to me is when you look at some of these people who are complaining and who are who are upset, I've got a lot of these these right wing folk and they were so mad and upset. What I said over the weekend on MSNBC.

And I said, you know, we've got to take these Republicans out. They must be defeated. When you have people who refuse to do anything about guns, and in fact, their responses, here's what's crazy to me, their responses are, oh, no, let's just do open carry. I mean, in Tennessee, the response to the mass shooting in Tennessee was to say, oh, no, let's let people just be able to carry guns without a permit. That's unbelievable. Listen, OK, OK, can we can you and I just sit here for a minute, just talk about what is the challenge? Again, I want

everybody to hear me. As a mental health therapist, my job is to make sure that people feel safe, to express fully what they feel and what they believe. And personally, I believe we all have our rights. But what is wrong with just saying if there are 10 steps right now to get a gun, and quite frankly, I think it's about three, but if there are 10 steps right now to get a gun, and quite frankly, I think it's about three, but if there are 10 steps right now to get one of these weapons, what's wrong with just putting 15 steps in place just to make sure that somebody doesn't get their hands on it who isn't ready or who can't handle it or who has evil intentions? But again, I want to say this, Roland, let me jump back to this mental health aspect for all of us, because while we're waiting to make change, we have to figure out what we can

do for ourselves. So I really want to encourage people to create their own strategy. What can you do to feel, now you can't control it all. Let me say that again. You cannot control it all, but you can do some things to make yourself feel as safe as possible. Even if that means, like I said, sitting down with your family and talking through what time do we need to all be home? How do we check in with one another? What is our code word? When we go places, what are we looking out for? That is one of the ways that you can take some semblance of control back.

Renata, your question for Doc. Well, thank you for talking with us tonight. I guess my question is really around what are people supposed to do as far as relieving the chronic stress that they're living under due to these mass shootings? stress because there are things that have gone unresolved in our communities, which are also a part of this issue, like police brutality, police just, you know, killing black people with guns. So there are already chronic stress issues that we deal with. You mentioned before about taking a break. But the problem is, even when you take a break, the minute you come back to real life, you turn on the news, you go online, and you see there's been another mass shooting. So what is a realistic way to balance the chronic stress that people are now having to deal with, understanding that these shootings can and do happen anywhere at any time?

So I'm so glad you asked me that question, because can I tell you what I believe the crisis is? Again, I said this a little bit earlier. What I find when people come into my office virtually and they sit on my virtual couch, what I find is that we want to start implementing crisis management in our hearts and in our souls and our lives once the crisis happens. What I want us to realize is that we have to create a lifestyle of taking care of our souls. Listen, I know that there's this popular mantra now of self-care, and I believe in self-care, but often we minimize that to getting our nails done and getting our hair cut. What we need to understand is self-care has

to go a little bit deeper. We need to start looking into soul care. What are the ways that you care for your soul? I can't tell you how to do that, but we have to begin to identify that. But I'm going to give you the very first thing that I tell anybody I talk to, hold space for yourself. Hold space for yourself. Because what often happens, particularly in the Black community, we ignore what we feel. We ignore what we feel and we brush it to the side and we push it to the side. But I'm going to tell you something. That feeling is going to show up. It's going to show up in how you respond to your kids. It's going to show up whenever you're driving down the street and you're

blowing your horn. So we've got to hold space for ourselves. We have to have a space where we can say, I'm tired. I'm overwhelmed. I'm shook. I can't do this right now. We have to learn to set those boundaries and not be afraid of setting the boundaries. Omokongo? So, Dr. May, I want to talk about the kids, high school students, middle and elementary school. When I was a kid and there were shootings that would happen, there would always be stories about there's going to be

grief counselors at the school. And in the hood, we were like, they're never coming to our schools. You know, they were going to like the white schools, the suburbs and the like. And so I'm wondering from your experience, is there a particular type of stress that is different in the Black community in terms of how therapists and counselors should be responding to these mass shootings? Because following up on part of what Renita was saying, you know, some of us in our communities are already dealing with other types of violence, including individual targeted gun violence as well.

So should counselors be taking a generic approach to how they deal with all young people in these mass shootings, or should they look at it a little bit different as it relates to our communities? Well, any therapist worth their they're sought, what they're weighed, understands that you cannot have a generic approach. You know, I am not a child psychologist, but I will say as a mama to children in each age group, elementary, middle school, and high school, I will say that I know that any therapist that has done the work understands that we do need to create strategies that are appropriate for our culture. And what that looks

like can be different because, you know, we are not a monolith. And so what that looks like can be different. One of the first things I believe, though, is helping children be able to identify feelings, helping children be able to identify feelings, particularly in our community. And listen, that can be as simple, if any parent is watching me right now, that can be as simple as pulling out your phone, Googling a feelings wheel.

I'm giving you a strategy right now. Pull out your phone with your child, pull out and Google feeling wheels and help your child learn how to identify what they are feeling and not watch this because this is what often happens in our community. We'll tell them to suck it up. Tell them it's nothing wrong with what they are feeling. Another strategy that can work with young people. This is what I do with my own children. I admit age appropriately what I am feeling, age appropriately what I am feeling. And then I share with my children what I'm trying to do to deal with it. Because what that does,

and my husband does this as well with the children, what that does is help to normalize what they are experiencing. And then lastly, remember when I said earlier to create space for yourself? I need everybody to learn to create the space for their children. And what does that look like?

Even if, now I know this is gonna sound pie in the sky to some folks, but I want you to trust me, even though you don't know me. I want you to consider setting a time one day out of the week where you and your children just sit and talk about what you're feeling. Ask them what they know about what has been on the news. Give them the space without retribution,

without getting in trouble, without telling them to suck the news. Give them the space without retribution, without getting in trouble, without telling them to suck it up. Give them the space to be able to communicate what they are feeling. You'll be blown away with their insight into what they're experiencing. Neambi? Yeah, so I wanted to talk about how we don't conflate mental wellness, mental illness with violence. Because I think every time these events happen, we always say, well, the person was mentally ill, the person was mentally ill, it's obvious. But there are lots of people who are struggling with mental illness who are not violent, who do not resort to shooting people in the mall or at the grocery store or church. So how can we have a more responsible conversation around mental illness and whether that motivates shootings

and also these broader, you know, kinds of considerations around mental illness and mentally ill people and making sure those folks get the supports that they need, even ourselves, who are struggling with mental wellness and mental illness for numerous and sundry reasons, from the stress of these shootings, from the stress of being black, from the stress of being women. So how can we have a responsible conversation about this that does not demonize mental illness or cast mental illness in a violent light? Yeah, that is a really intense conversation, and it's one that I've been having with a lot of colleagues. You know, one of the things that I like to say is that multiple things can be true at the same time.

And so you absolutely are right. I work with people all the time, every single day, who have severe mental illness, who have never gone out and performed these types of acts. And so, yes, what happens, and I believe, and this is my first time talking about this on a stage like this because it's such a sensitive conversation, but I believe what often happens is that human nature cannot be, number one, controlled. It cannot be fully understood, and it cannot be put in a neat box. Let me tell you what I mean by that. We want to fully understand all of human nature and be able to say, this is why this person did that. We want to be able to put it in

a neat box so that we can put it on the shelf. And I just have found that it's not that nuanced. It is hard for me to say, watch this. I know this is going to be a big controversy, but I'm here now. It's hard for me to say that somebody that shoots up a mall or shoots up a church or shoots up a school, it's hard for me to say that that person is mentally well. I believe that there is something going on, even if it is something that is undiagnosed or even if it is a person. Now, we can get into mental illness, personality disorders, but that does not equate to the person who is mentally ill also being someone that's going to commit violence. We have to parse that conversation out so that people are not ashamed to come and say that I'm not doing okay.

And I believe that conversation needs to continue to be had in safe spaces because people like me will be hesitant to talk through it because you don't want the backlash, but it's a broader conversation that I believe needs to be had consistently so that everybody can have a greater understanding of mental illness. And I want to say this as well. I believe that mental illness and mental wellness needs to become ingrained from childhood, understanding what that is. I believe it needs to be talked about at church. I believe it needs to be talked about in our colleges so that we can have a broader understanding so that we are not passing judgment on people and causing people to be demonized. All right. Robin May, we appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Folks, coming up next, actor Richard Dreyfuss. Oh, he is so upset, y'all. He cannot wear blackface. And he's angry. He's really upset that the Academy is now demanding diversity. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott.

And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner.

It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher.

Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I know a lot of cops. Apple Podcasts. where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face.

And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out.

Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. He was mighty quiet when white men ruled Hollywood. I'll break it down next

on Rolling Martin Unfiltered on the Blackstone Network. When you talk about blackness and what happens in black culture, we're about covering these things that matter to us, speaking to our issues and concerns. This is a genuine

people-powered movement. A lot of stuff that we're not getting, you get it. And you spread the word. We wish to plead our own cause to long have others spoken for us. We cannot tell our own story if we can't pay for it. This is about covering us.

Invest in Black-owned media. Your dollars matter. We don't have to keep asking them to cover our stuff. So please support us in what we do, folks. We want to hit 2,000 people. $50 this month. Waits $100,000.

We're behind $100,000. So we want to hit that. Your money makes this possible. Checks and money orders go to P.O. Box 57196, Washington, D.C., 20037-0196. The Cash app is Dollar Sign RM Unfiltered. PayPal is R. Martin Unfiltered. Venmo is RM Unfiltered. Zelle is Roland at RolandSMartin.com. On a next A Balanced Life with me, Dr. Jackie, what does it mean to actually have balance in your life? Why is it important and how do you get there? A masterclass on the art of balance. It could change your life. Find the harmony of your life.

And so what beat can you maintain at a good pace? What cadence can keep you running that marathon? Because we know we're going to have, you know, high levels. We're going to have low levels. But where can you find that flow, that harmonious pace? That's all next on A Balanced Life on Blackstar Network. What's up, what's up? I'm Dr. Ricky Dillard, the choir master. Hi, I'm Amber Stephens-West from The Carmichael Show.

Hi, my name is Latoya Luckett, and you're watching Roland Martin Unfiltered. 16-year-old Zannie Valentine has been missing from Columbia, South Carolina, since March 7th. She's 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighs 135 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. Anyone with information about Zannie Valentine is urged to call the Richard County, Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff's Office at 803-576-3000. 803-576-3000. Oh, my God God y'all Oh my goodness Oh my goodness

What happened to the good old days When white men Ruled everything When white men Could act in every movie When we did not have to think About black people And Latinos and Asians and we really didn't

even have to bother with women unless they were just simply some objects over there that we could stare at and ogle at. Well the academy has been contending with the lack of diversity. Remember Oscar So White which was started by April Rain And they have been trying to force the change. There are people who don't like that. They're upset. They're upset because they now don't have the pick of everything. They now don't get to control everything. They're really upset because now they're demanding that you actually have

diversity. Actor Richard Dreyfuss is upset because the Oscars are actually creating rules when it comes to movies nominated for Academy Awards that they have to have a certain level of diversity. Oh, Richard, an Oscar winner. Oh, oh, oh, white man Richard. It's not happy. This is an art form. It's also a form of commerce, and it makes money. But it's an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea idea of what morality is. And what are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people's feelings? You can't legislate that. And you have to let life be life. And I'm sorry, I don't think that there's a minority or a majority in the country that has to be catered to like that. You know, Laurence Olivier was the last white actor to

play Othello. And he did it in 1965. And he did it in blackface. And he played a black man brilliantly. Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they're not Jewish, they shouldn't play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art? This is so patronizing. It's so thoughtless and treating people like children. Do you think there's a difference between the question of representation and who is allowed to represent other groups? For example, as you said, somebody representing the merchant of Venice. And the case of blackface explicitly in this country, given the history of slavery and the sensitivities around black racism, do you think there's a difference between those?

There shouldn't be. Okay, so if y'all want to watch the rest of Margaret Hoover's interview with Richard Dreyfuss, you can go online and check it out. But he said these new Oscar rules make him vomit. But Richard! Did Hollywood's racism make you vomit? When Hollywood refused to cast black men

in the role of Othello, where were you, Richard? Where were you, Richard? Where were you when so many talented black men and black women could not get any roles, could not get hired? Where were you

when Cuba Gooding Jr. talked about after boys in a hood all he got for a decade were thug roles hood roles where were you Richard when Viola Davis talked about not getting paid fair share

I don't recall seeing you coming out saying Lola Davis talked about not getting paid fair share. I don't recall seeing you coming out saying, hmm, we should be paying this black woman her fair share like we are Meryl Streep. Richard, I am not going to be able to play a black man. Well, guess what, Richard? I'm not going to be able to play a white guy. You also are lying because Sir Lawrence Olivier was not the last actor in blackface.

See, you said he was the, he played Othello. Robert Downey Jr. Jr. played a man in blackface in the movie. White chicks. Marlon and Sean played two white women. See, what you will not hear in that interview, you will, oh, we can't legislate

people's feelings. Oh, but we can start demanding there be parity, there be equity. If y'all want to understand why I wrote my book, White Fear, it's Richard Dreyfuss. Always enjoyed his work. But see, the Richard Dreyfusses of the world, what they don't like, see, they don't like the new rules of Oscars, but the reason you have new rules from the Academy is because white men in Hollywood refuse

to actually acknowledge black people and women and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans because they refuse to recognize the talent. Now, oh, it's art. It's art. It's the

art of the job, but what about when black folks wanted to express and show the art Hollywood said oh no no black movies black movies don't do well overseas lie where was Richard where was your concern for black directors black producers

black screenwriters black actors and actresses please Richard explain to me that if I had to sit here right now and name the number Sidney Denzel Jamie Forrest Whitaker I think that's it

if I had to name the number of black women who have won best actress. Hallie, some of y'all watching say, Viola. Nope. She won for best supporting, not best actress. Because that year they chose not to nominate her in the best actress category because they felt it was too steep. So nominate her in the best actress category because they felt it was too steep.

So they put her in the best supporting actress. Ever dawned on you, Richard, that's all we can name? Has it ever occurred to you, Richard, the rampant racism in Hollywood? Richard, has it ever occurred to you, literally, how Hollywood, from its beginning, has been racist? Richard,

please go read, let me go ahead and pull it up, because see, Richard, you and others might think I'm making this up. Oh no, there was an award-winning book,

Richard, that actually dealt with the racism in Hollywood. I've got a copy of it at home, Richard. The book is called An Empire of Their Own. own. How the Jews invented Hollywood. It's by Neil Gabler. It's an award winning book. He details in that book, Richard, the racism in Hollywood from the beginning. He details the sexism in Hollywood from the beginning. He details the sexism in Hollywood from the beginning. And so what have I said to y'all for the longest?

White fear. Their anger. The anger of all these white folks. They're angry about critical race theory. They're angry about diversity, equity, inclusion. They're angry about critical race theory. They're angry about diversity, equity, inclusion. They're angry about multiculturalism. They're angry about affirmative action. They're angry about all these things, and they're angry about these things because they're upset that they don't get to have the white America that they used to have.

See, Richard said, oh, these things will work themselves out. Really? That hasn't gone so well for us, Richard. Things haven't really gone that great for us in that area, Richard. We really haven't worked out. King had a book called While We Can't Wait. And so even though you've had Oscar So White, you still have massive resistance.

Oh, by the way, Richard, and I know you did a movie with Barbra Streisand, but my goodness, how does a movie that she directed be nominated for Best Picture and the director not nominated? Hmm. How many women have won Best Director? I think it's one. So you sit here in your white maleness and you complain against the rules. What you don't complain about is what led to the rules.

See, Richard, if you don't have racism, you don't have new rules. If you don't have exclusion, you don't have new rules. If you don't have the shunting of people off to the hinterlands, then you don't have new rules. Pull the Betsy DeVos tweet. Betsy DeVos wrote a tweet complaining about critical race theory, saying, the reason our kids and the history scores are so low today is because we're teaching CRT. Oh, Betsy, would you really like for us to teach about American history and the Declaration of Independence? Would you really like for us to teach about the Constitution, Betsy? If you do, you really want us to go deep on the founding of America.

Y'all, she calls out CRT. She calls out the 1619 Project. No, Betsy, you don't really want to do that. Just like I don't think Richard Dreyfuss really wants to have a deep conversation about racism in Hollywood. See, Richard, I would more than love for there not to be rules when it comes to diversity in movies. I would love an America for there not to be targets and goals when it comes to contracts. But here's what I do know. In media, $322 billion is spent every single year, and black-owned media gets 0.5 to 1%. What I do know, Richard, the federal government spends $560 billion a year on contracts and black businesses get 1.67%.

What I do know, Richard, is that it's rare as hell for black people to be honored by the Academy Awards. It's actually rare for black men to be lead characters on television and film. Shamar Moore was complaining over the weekend about CBS canceling SWAT, and he said he was the only black male lead of a drama on all of network television in 2023. So Richard, you're a 75 year old white man. And it's very easy for a 75 year old white man to talk about the art, the art, oh my God, the art. It's the art, everything's about the art. When there's been systematic exclusion of black folks

in every facet of this society, including so-called liberal Hollywood. So Richard, forgive me that my violins have taken the night off. Forgive me that I really don't give a damn about your hurt little feelings because the reality Richard we're not going anywhere and white folks like you are going to have to accept the reality that we ain't going anywhere

and you might be a little upset you're actually probably a little pissed off that you don't get the pick of roles that you used to because you now have to share with black and Latino and Asian and Native American actors. Oh, you can talk about the merchant of Venice, but the reality is we've seen folk who are not Jewish play those roles. We've seen individuals who are not Italian play those roles. John Leguizamo was literally complaining about that very same thing.

So this idea that this isn't happening, it's not true. What you don't like is that the academy has finally said to all of white Hollywood, and by the way, Richard, the academy is still more than 80 percent white what you don't like is they've said it's not good enough oh lastly richard you said it's art and it's also commerce richard map that zoom in zoom. Richard, I want to help you out. Black people have lots of money. Latinos have lots of money. Asians have lots of money. A study was done that says Hollywood is losing $10 billion a year

because they failed to accept diversity. Richard, I'm sure Hollywood has now gotten the message that if they don't include black people and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans, we will happily go somewhere else. And they do not want to see other folk make that money and not them. You'll get over it. Because we really don't care. We really don't. That's all I got to say. I'm a Congo. You can weigh in.

You laid it out. That was class right there. It was truly in session. One of the things I talk about in my book, Lies About Black People, was coming out in... I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way.

In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King,

John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette.

MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it.

Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Thanks for the shout out on that book, Roland, as well on the blurb. As I talk about the history of blackface going back to 1830 with Thomas D. Rice,

who was the first person to get out there and do these minstrel shows. He was a B-list actor. But by 1845, he was a superstar in the burgeoning industry. And so we go up to the present, and we can go down the list of so many people that I talk about in the book who have played non-white people, who had played non-white character, everyone from Ramses to Cleopatra. I mean, here's a partial list, Roland, Ben Affleck, Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando, Justin Chatwin, Glenn Close, Sean Connery, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tony Curtis, Johnny Depp, Joel Gray, Alec Guinness. I can go on and on.

Jake Gyllenhaal. The list goes on and on. They have made a fortune off of playing people who don't look like them, while people from all of these other communities, Black, Asian, Latino, get marginalized and don't have an opportunity to make that money. And that is the history of Hollywood. And so now that these guys have to actually compete with people who can actually play the roles that were written for them, it's almost like, oh, my gosh, it's what they call

racism in reverse. And really, at the end of the day, I appreciate the fact that you're saying we don't care, Roland, because we have to be overly assertive in demanding what is ours. This man is talking about going back. Anytime you have a quotation talking about you missed the days of being able to go back to 1965, where you could do something like this, shows how behind you are. But when people are fighting for equality, that's going to look like oppression for people who have been able to dominate the industry for decades, since its inception. And you mentioned

the other book as well. So really, at the end of the day, Black folks who are out there creating, all of these non-white folks who are out there creating and writing, keep doing what you're doing. Keep fighting for the representation. Michael B. Jordan, the diversity writer and the like, because we have to make sure that our stories get told by people who sound like us and look like us who, at the end of the day, are us. So Richard Dreyfuss, you can have several seats because we are not going to stop. Raina?

People like Richard Dreyfuss drive me crazy, and here's why. Every time anybody talks about changing standards to make sure that more communities are included, people like Richard get up and act like their civil rights are being violated because things are changing. And it's just crazy. Winning an Oscar is not something that is necessary in order for you to be able to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, commonly known as breathing. If it was, we'd have lots of dead black actors because we have not

won Oscars to the level that people who look like Richard have. But these people seem to make these new standards to be out almost like they're going to be put in jail. Guess what, Richard? If you want to make an all-white movie, I promise you nobody will put you in jail. You will be okay. The Oscars are just saying they're not going to reward you for that lack of diversity and for having movies like we have seen for hundreds of years, movies that just have nothing but all white people. So, you know, at the end of the day, people like Richard, what their problem really is, is that they see whiteness and white people as the default. They see the white community as a default and everybody else as some type of other or being something different. And that's why they

can't understand why inclusion standards need to change. So at the end of the day, Richard will be strong or don't be strong. Either way, we don't care. Meomby, take us out. Well, I was just gonna say, I mean, I think we should all be concerned when someone is upset about not being able

to put on blackface. What's that really about? And I think for all the reasons that you and my co-panelists have laid out, what this really is about is a white man not having boundaries and getting boundaries probably for the first time in his career and he doesn't like them.

Saying that there are actual people who have darker skin, who are black or who are Asian or who are Latino or who are indigenous, who can play these roles, it never dawns on them, right? Because white people can be everything to all people. White people are the only people that get to play in fantasy and make believe and make movies. But in this case, when the Academy and others are speaking back and saying, you know what, we're not going to do these old practices. We're not going to put people in makeup and prosthetics

to make them look like the actual actors who are alive and who can perform these roles quite well. I think you see the tantrums that people are throwing because what he's also saying is he doesn't believe that black actors or Asian actors or Latino actors or indigenous actors are just as good. Right. That if white people can't compete, if white men like him aren't considered for these roles, then somehow the casting is illegitimate. And hey, we've seen blind casting. It works. It's a thing. But that's not what he's really upset about. He's upset because somebody said that there are boundaries to his white maleness. And that's usually the key to everything in this society, even and still to Hollywood. It's just saying that in this one instance, we're not going to do business as usual, which is to find a white person

and either change the story to make him, the character, less ethnic, if you will, or to change something essential about the character, like their skin color. So, you know, boo-hoo for Richard Dreyfuss, who at his big old age can't figure out how to be interesting and thoughtful and creative absent, you know, dark-skinned makeup.

Yep. So, Richard, we don't care. We really don't. We don't care. Miambi, Renita, I'm a Congo. I appreciate y'all joining us today. Thank you so very much for being on the panel. Folks, coming up next, I sat down with Harry Belafonte in 2012 to talk about his memoir

and his new documentary. It was an amazing conversation. You get to experience it, likely for the first time. You're watching Roland Martin Unfiltered right here on the Blackstar Network. We're about to see the rise of what I call white minority resistance. We have seen white folks in this country who simply cannot tolerate black folks voting. I think what we're seeing is the inevitable result of violent denial. This is part of American history. Every time that people of color have made progress, whether real or symbolic, there

has been what Carol Anderson at Emory University calls white rage as a backlash. This is the rise of the proud boys and the boogaloo boys. America, there's going to be more of this. This country is getting increasingly racist in its behaviors and its attitudes because of the fear of white people. The fear that they're taking our jobs, they're taking our resources, they're taking our women. This is white fear. Hi, I'm Dr. Jackie Hood-Martin, and I have a question for you. Ever feel as if your life is teetering and the weight and pressure of the world is consistently on your shoulders?

Well, let me tell you, living a balanced life isn't easy. Join me each Tuesday on Black Star Network for Balanced Life with Dr. Jackie. We'll laugh together, cry together, pull ourselves together and cheer each other on. So join me for new shows each Tuesday on Black Star Network, A Bal am the Lord of the earth. I'm Roland Martin, and welcome to this special edition of Washington Watch. Harry Belafonte. Just the name itself brings forth powerful memories of the star singer, actor, producer, humanitarian, and close-up witness and participant in the civil rights

struggles of the last half of the 20th century. His life, public and private, is revealed with unflinching honesty in his book, My Song, a Memoir, and in this interview with me in his New York City office. Well first off, Harry Belafonte, so glad to sit before you and to join us here on TV One. It's good to see you again. I read your book, and read your book, my song, A Memoir. And what was really interesting is when you talked about why you needed to do this book, why you needed to do the HBO documentary, because with Marlon Brando, your longtime friend passing away, all of that history died with him. Yes, there's a whole culture in America that's deeply committed to the politics of progress. And a lot of people

play a role in that culture, but they play it quietly. And a lot of them have celebrity status. And Marlon and I grew up together. I met him when I was 19. We were in school together. And our careers kind of, our lives paralleled one another as a matter of fact he introduced me to my second wife and someone who he used to who he was dating yes I met her while he was dating and I said this is too good for you Marlon that's a good friend anyway he did a lot he did a lot. He did a lot with the Black Panthers. He did a lot with SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

He came and met with Dr. King any number of times, came to New York, along with a host of other celebrities to raise funds and to raise consciousness. I think America needs to know that they have citizens who do this on a much larger scale than the press is able to report or chooses to report. So when he passed, I saw the void that was there as far as my soul was concerned because I lost a very good friend. But then I understood that he went away without ever telling America what he did. And America needed to know that there are a lot of citizens that make a difference. So I decided that I would go out and find people

who knew him, knew the history, and could comment on it. And as I started on that path, I ran into a lot of other people that had parallel histories to Marlin, and I thought they should be in this story that I was attempting to tell. And as a consequence, we came up with Sing Your Song. When I got through making the film, I realized that we had about seven, close to 800 hours of interview footage, and we only had an hour and 40 minutes in which to tell the story. So the idea of a book to become more subtextual,

to talk more deeply about the context of the history of the period, was required. So then I went off and started to do the book at a parallel time that we were editing, as we were editing the film. And both came out at the same time? I've always been fascinated with history, but specifically African American history. When Gordon Parks died, when I read these old bits,

and you're sitting here saying, man, he did all of this. And I began to get DVDs and began to get books to really understand who he was. And in many ways, that's how I felt reading this book. I mean, I'm sitting there going, man, I've known a lot of stuff about Harry Belafonte. But wow, this is amazing. And what really stood out was that you literally were at the intersection of so much history. Paul Robeson, W.E.B.

Dubois going to dinner, Dr. King going through SNCC and all of those folks. So when you think back on that, do you even tell yourself, man, those were amazing times? I really didn't get into the fact, oh, I knew there were amazing times as I was living out the history. You can't have over a quarter of a million people show up in the Mall of Washington D.C. and don't know that something's going on. So things like that which were outstanding obviously stood out. And I was aware of the fact that I was with men like Dr. King and John Kennedy and Nelson Mandela and women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks who were, who had their hands on the pulse of our time.

And that to be in their service meant that I was doing something that had historical value. It is in that spirit that I was able to sustain and maintain a life of social commitment that satisfied the earliest instructions that I got from my mother, which was never go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could do to stop injustice and didn't commit yourself to it. She said, make sure you always wake up every day doing something to help enhance justice. And with that instruction, which I got quite young, it just stayed with me all my life

and became the thing that I measured most of what I did my life against. Next, Harry Belafonte's mother may have directed him towards a life of service, but life with her was difficult and damaging. Life with my mother was not easy. I didn't really come to understand her more fully until I'd gone through a whole period of psychoanalysis and began to look back into my life in greater detail to understand what were the things that really what were her obstacles what were the things that she that she had to overcome

and what price did we pay in her attempt to overcome these hurdles i'm clayton english i'm greg lot and this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote.

Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3

on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule.

Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there no it can happen one in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out never happens before you leave the car always stop look lock

brought to you by nTSA and the Ad Council. Hatred on the streets, a horrific scene, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence. You will not. White people are losing their damn minds. There's an angry pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol. We're about to see the rise of what I call white minority resistance. We have seen white folks in this country who simply cannot tolerate black folks voting. I think what we're seeing is the inevitable result of violent denial. This is part of American history.

Every time that people of color have made progress, whether real or symbolic, there has been what Carol Anderson at Emory University calls white rage as a backlash. This is the rise of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys. America, there's going to be more of this. This country is getting increasingly racist in its behaviors and its attitudes because of the fear of white people. The fear that they're taking our jobs, they're taking our resources, they're taking our women. This is white people. Up next on The Frequency with me, Dee Barnes, our special guest, Alicia Garza,

one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. We're going to discuss her new book, The Purpose of Power, How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. We live in a world where we have to navigate. You know, when we say something, people look at us funny, but when a man says the same thing less skillfully than we did, right?

Right. Everybody walks towards what they said, even though it was your idea. Right here on The Frequency on the Black Star Network. You talk about your mother, and that was just a consistent theme from beginning to end. Not only the lessons she taught, but also this struggle between the both of you and this dynamic. Was it painful for you to have to relive that? If I attempted to tell this story some 20 years earlier, I would have found the details of it somewhat painful, visibly so. But by the time I told the story, I had long since sorted out a lot of the pain, a lot of the problems. Life with my mother was not easy.

I didn't really come to understand her more fully until I'd gone through a whole period of psychoanalysis and began to look back into my life in greater detail to understand what were the things that really, what were her obstacles, what were the things that she had to overcome and what price did we pay in her attempt to overcome these hurdles and these obstacles that were put before her. So when I told the story, I could do it with some sense of ease and with some sense of calm. But it has never been easy to talk about my mother. I didn't know when she passed away. When we finally found her, she was in a pauper's grave we had to retrieve her

body to identify her and put her in a place of rest that was a more appropriate but she made life very challenging I none of us seem to have been able to do anything that pleased her. She was in such a pained place as a woman, as an immigrant, and as a person of color. Here's what I found to be interesting. You talk about that pain and her being sort of locked in, and then you doing psychoanalysis. And Terry Williams, in her book Black Pain, she talks about the importance of African-Americans not being afraid to go to therapy. I think there's a particular stamp on the life of black people where they're afraid

to expose their deepest feelings because in those feelings resides a rage that's almost nuclear in its proportions to reality. Black people have always kept their pain in a silent place. On occasion it erupts, and when it erupts, it usually erupts violently. I think most of our culture, most of our lives are spent trying to contain that anger and to try to deal with life in some rational and productive way. It's not easy. And when, especially when it comes to talking about things that my particular brand of analysis

came through the Freudian experience. And in order to understand a lot about your life, there is an aspect of the analytic application where you have to dig deep into your sexuality, into the conflicts of sexuality. And in the black community, we're overburdened with a lot of things that have to do with homophobia, with how we look upon others who may see life sexually different than we do. In my family, for instance, I had an uncle, the youngest of my family, who was gay. And I had another uncle who was a stone gangster.

He ran the numbers business in Harlem, highly regarded in that culture. His name was Lenny Love. He knew Bumpy Johnson. Bumpy Johnson was one of his agents in the street, one of his runners. And he was this macho guy. And every time we had a family dinner and my gay uncle showed up, my Uncle Lenny went into an epileptic moment. He just kind of always choked on the fact that this person sitting across him had effeminate ways, had a style to his life, and had a humor that just didn't fit what he thought a real man should look like. And then what we also have is that whole notion of what constitutes a real man is I have multiple ladies, so therefore multiple children, so therefore that, so my manhood is defined by that.

Yes, absolutely. That's all part of the game. So when I came upon the whole issue of analysis, I wasn't so much looking at how to identify my sexuality. I was looking at how to contain it and how to get away from those things that you constantly substituted sex for when you really have been dealing with

issues on another level. It was an important period for me. So you had all of that in your history, all of that operating in your DNA, and it's a question of, okay, I need to figure out how does this play a role in who I am? I found that that necessity was most critical when I was diagnosed almost at the age of 70 with cancer. I was stunned by the examination and the results that they found when they took sampling. Is that because you were always healthy and you always took care of yourself and always fit? Absolutely. I'm in a culture where, you know, I ride horses with Sidney Poitier and shoot bad guys.

I mean, the life in which we live, you sometimes feel that you are impervious. Right. You know, that nothing can touch you. And when they told me that I had cancer, it absolutely stunned me. And I had to go through that whole thing of looking at why me and what was it about. I decided to become very active in doing consciousness raising around in the black community on the issues of cancer. When I discovered that black men were more exposed to cancer than almost any other tribe, any other group. And in taking a look at why this was, there was an important critical part of that critique

which said homophobia, men's unwillingness to be examined, to have rectal examination and other things. I don't want anybody touching me. And then they bring up the Tuskegee experiment. They bring up every kind of excuse possible. And you're sitting there going, yeah, but you know you could be dying. Exactly.

And I had to just get out and say to black men, went to churches, did a lot of stuff up at the Abyssinia Baptist and other churches around America, talking to the black male community, women as well. I didn't ignore the gender implications but i went after men mostly because they were the ones of the were the most affected numerically and men hard-headed absolutely when we come back harry belafonte on the civil rights leaders who profited from the movement i know a lot of leaders in the civil rights movement

who became very powerful businessmen, who became very rich. A lot of the children of those men became people just got to Wall Street and got to business and that's all they did. They said, we don't need to do that. You all did that. It's another day.

Well, the truth of the matter is that you do need to do that and it's not another day. Because as long as there's poverty, there's going to be struggle. Next on The Black Table with me, Greg Carr. We look at one of the most influential and prominent Black Americans of the 20th century. His work literally changed the world. Among other things, he played a major role in creating the United Nations. He was the first African-American and first person of color to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

And yet today, he is hardly a household name. We're talking, of course, about Ralph J. Bunch. A new book refers to him as the absolutely indispensable man. His lifelong interest and passion in racial justice, specifically in the form of colonialism. And he saw his work as an activist, an advocate for the Black community here in the United States, as just the other side of the coin of his work trying to roll back European empire in Africa. Author Cal

Rastiala will join us to share his incredible story. That's on the next Black Table here on the Black Star Network. On the next A Balanced Life with me, Dr. Jackie, what does it mean to actually have balance in your life? Why is it important and how do you get there? A masterclass on the art of balance. It could change your life. Find the harmony of your life. Why is it important and how do you get there? A masterclass on the art of balance. It could change your life. Find the harmony of your life. And so what beat can you maintain at a good pace? What cadence can keep you running that marathon? Because we know we're going to have high levels, we're going to have low levels, but where can you find that flow, that harmonious pace?

That's all next on A Balanced Life on Blackstar Network. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 What are the points that you made the book when you talked about? I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things.

Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1,

Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown.

Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store.

So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens before you leave the car. Always stop. Look,

lock brought to you by NHTSA and the ad council. That period in the seventies, early to late 60s, when SNCC began to become extremely radical. Black power, want whites out, forget what the civil rights movement was about. And you ask the question in your book, where is that next generation of leaders? The folks who follow in the footsteps of Dr. King, Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, Ella Baker, Faye Lou Hamer. And you made the point that they are more concerned about getting their own financial fruits as opposed to having that consciousness of the previous generation. The present generation and a generation or two even before them, we were hugely preoccupied with reaping the harvest of the struggle that those of us were

engaged in trying to change the game. And in a way we're responsible because we wanted our kids to go to school, we wanted them to get degrees, we wanted them to get into the mainstream. And not to have to face adversity. That's right. And not to have to face diversity. And a lot of them took the call because a lot of them did not want to face diversity. They went off and became, did things that were very self-serving about getting rich, having a position that gave them material power, material acquisition.

And that became the game. And when I looked around at those of us who had been in the struggle, I noticed that in many instances, a lot of the very people who were at the apex of the revolution, of the struggle, soon became very rich. A lot of the children of those men became people who just got to Wall Street and got to business, and that's all they did. They said, we don't need to do that. You all did that. It's another day. Well, the truth of the matter is that you do need to do that, and it's not another day, because as long as there's poverty, there's going to be struggle, and as long as struggle exists, somebody has to be there to going to be struggle. And as long as struggle exists, somebody has to be there

to help with that struggle, overcome the tenets of poverty. In your book, you also offered some advice to artists. And you talked about their responsibility and how they have the voice, the platform, to address these social, cultural issues. Assess this generation of artists, black or white, and are they as involved as you would want them to be on some of the critical issues facing this country and this world? From my perspective, by no stretch of the imagination can I say that the cultural community, the arts community, is anywhere near a commitment to doing things about changing the pain that

exists in a lot of different levels socially. My mentor, Paul Robeson, once said to me that it was a great adventure that I and others were embarking on. So now it's quite young. Ozzie Davis and Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier, all listening to our mentor speak when he came to see a play that we were doing. And he said, you know, artists are the gatekeepers listening to our mentor speak when he came to see a play that we were doing.

And he said, you know, artists are the gatekeepers of the truth, are the gatekeepers of truth. And it is through you that people are going to be instructed about not only where they came from, but where we should be going. And I think if you look at great art, if you look at art that is in the service of social need, you'll find that the greatness of literature, the greatness of the fine arts painting, all those things came from men and women of consciousness who tried to better the plight of human beings. In that context, I've often looked upon the power that we have in what comes out of celebrity. When I first went to Japan to sing, and I found myself before 50,000 Japanese trying to sing the Banana Boat song, I really understood power. I said, my God, here I am in a strange place with a bunch of

people that I didn't know anything about except adversarially because of the war. And I said, here they were singing my song. And what do you do with this platform besides harvest money? How do you use this platform to impart a sense of our common humanity? And I think art that does that has been art that serves us well. And in my generation, we had a large number of people who stepped

to the plate, whether it was Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, or it was Richie Havens, or it was Josh White, or it was Lead Belly. I mean, a litany of people. Sidney Poitier, all the actors of the period that did what they did. It's always about moving the human family ahead. And I think that artists have that power, and they have the obligation to sending out information and to giving ideas and thoughts to people that will help enrich them and get them out of the quagmire in which we find ourselves. If we draw a line, we could draw a line from Ropeson to Belafonte, who do you connect or

hand the baton to? Who can we draw that line with present day? Who is following your tradition, who's following Ropes' tradition? I think there are a number of artists, not just in America, but in other places in the world. I've seen a lot of artists out of Africa that I admire greatly, because they get that message. They are creatures of social thought.

I find a lot of people who nobody's heard of that I find singing in the rap culture, and I find the rap culture the most problematic for me, because I think there was a form, a cultural dynamic that took place that was rooted in social protest, that was rooted in the message. And the minute somebody came along with the jingle and they saw that they could wrap gold around their necks and that the culture could go someplace else, we lost our path. So you saw that period where rap music was sort of like folk music, the music that you really got yourself wrapped into. Rap music is folk music. Right.

Because I'd like my friend Brian McGee would say, it has to be folk music because I never heard a horse sing. Folks sing. Folks tell this. And what I found with the young guys up in the Bronx, Melly Mel, Africa Bombarda et al, were guys that came in in protest and instead of taking a.44 and blowing your brains out and shooting one another, they decided to get together and challenge each other through a cultural dynamic.

That was a very healthy, healthy step for young people to take. But the merchants saw an opportunity to exploit this for gain, for profit, and corrupted the process. Up next, Harry Belafonte on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the struggle for civil rights.

We never, ever lost a battle. I went back and took a look at the whole journey of the civil rights movement. We didn't win the war. We're still in the war. We never lost a't win the war. We're still in the war. We never lost a battle on the way. We talk about blackness and what happens in black culture.

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Well, a lack of opportunities and growth in their profession. Joining us on the next Get Wealthy is Needy Barton-Nillet. She's going to be sharing exactly what nurses need to do and what approach they need to take to take ownership of their success. So the Black Nurse Collaborative really spawned from a place and a desire to create opportunities to uplift each other, those of us in the profession, to also look and reach back and create pipelines and opportunities for other nurses like us. That's right here on Get Wealthy, only on Black Star Network. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 You get a phone call one day, and you're told the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wants to talk with you. And you write that that literally, the beginning of that relationship, literally changed your life. What was it about him that was so unique,

that was so different, so transformative for you? His humility. I was stunned by it. I was sitting in a room with a kid 24 years old when I first met him. And in your book, there's a picture, and you're sitting there. You're only a few years older, but he looks so young sitting at that table. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player,

Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive

content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them.

From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and six on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late.

And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, know it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

But he was. Right. He was 24. And incidentally, I was 26. Right, right. The old man of the crowd. But here we were sitting in this room, and as he unfolded his mission to me, I could not only, I had to handle the fact

that he came with an inordinate intelligence and the way in which he phrased the things he had to say and his vision for them constantly evoked in me a great sense of challenge and a great sense of need and desire. Y'all were sitting there for three or four hours. That's right. And that's where I wanted to be. So in that context, I saw in him the model. I was wide open to violence. I'd come from it. I'd lived in it all my life. I'm quite prepared to apply it at any given moment

if my turf was invaded. You had a lot of that anger bored up inside of you. Yeah, the anger's still there incidentally, because at Dr. King's instruction, he thought anger was a very, very important tool. He said, we first need to be angry at our plight before we will act upon change in our condition. So anger is a necessary force.

It's not so much that you're angry, it's what you do with your anger that finally determines the importance of anger. And what I saw in him was a chance to use nonviolence as a weapon to change the conditions in which we live. And as much as I would have liked to in the beginning poo-poo that idea, my first attraction to it was, I said, you know, tactically speaking, that's not bad. Tactically speaking, you are somewhat disarmed if when I give you love, you give me a slap in the

face. Something is wrong with that equation. The onus is on us who are being attacked and those who are doing the attacking to change what they do. I've long said that one of the most underappreciated aspects of Dr. King, the civil rights movement, is that people don't appreciate the strategizing, that it wasn't just let's go out and take a march. In your book, you really get into the strategy of what's next and how long it'll take and what's the next step and who do we call and who do we work with here and here to make these things a reality i think anybody who has the rebel spirit sees the mission in that context every time we won a campaign and incidentally i have to tell you and i will be challenged by anybody who would like to challenge me we never ever ever lost a battle. I went

back and took a look at the whole journey of the civil rights movement. We didn't win the war. We're still in the war, but we never lost a battle on the way. So anybody who says well that was back then and that was when, I tell you that it's still applicable today. When I look at Egypt and Tunisia, I would look at Occupy Wall Street. That's still us. Well, I see, to me, that's the Poor People's Campaign. That is the Poor People's Campaign. No question about it. And the fact that they have chosen to use nonviolence as the tactic by which to confront the oppressor is to

me one of the most clever one of the most one of the cleverest of applications they could have picked non-violence and in this context I think what dr. King gave us in this in this tool was something that I grew to believe in I began to study non-viol and its deeper tenets and I think it's the best we could have. You saw young people really as that driving force of the movement. Is part of the problem today there was not that mechanism that stayed in place that was driven and directed by young people to pass on from one generation to the next? I have a conversation in the film with

Bandela, and I say to him, somewhere along the line, we who were engaged in the struggle dropped the baton. We did not pass it on to the next generation. And I was eager to hear his response and somewhat touched by the fact that he saw that aspect of our struggle in the same context. He said, yes, we failed. We did not do what we should do. But then when I went back and took a look at the charts of life, if you have never had the right to vote and did not even understand the process of voting, if all of a sudden you wake up one day and all of a sudden you can go into a voting booth

and cast your vote for somebody, the first question you have as a black person coming to that booth is, who do I vote for and why? And when you're looking for who to vote for, you have to have somebody who counsels you or you have a relationship to the community in which you live that tells you who's the most anointed. And I think every time black people went to vote, and a lot of poor people went to vote for the first time,

what they found was that the people they could most trust were the people who were from the civil rights movement. So along came Andy Young, who was required to get into the electoral process. Along came Julian Bond, who was required to get into the electoral process. Along came Julian Bond, who was required to get into the electoral process. Along came John Lewis, who was required to... So all these civil rights leaders that came from these communities flocked to fill the next space that we had opened up for ourselves. We had to have young, bright men and women sitting in places that could run the legislative branch of government, that could sit and write laws and become engaged. And once we got them into that position, we no longer had those people in the community

servicing the growth and the counseling of young Turks coming up. So the grassroots infrastructure became the political infrastructure. Exactly. And there no longer was a grassroots infrastructure there to support what they had already done. Exactly. We're just now getting back to that. And I think we're getting back to that in a very healthy way by what you see going on with Occupy Wall Street and going on in Oakland. It was very interesting to read you talk about the toll your work, in terms of singing and acting, but also your commitment to causes, had on your marriages and your family.

I'm reading a book on Ella Baker and how she essentially, when she got divorced, she married the movement. Explain for folks, and you talked about it in the book, Dr. King as well, explain for folks really what the price families have to pay for freedom fighters to do what they do. I am constantly, constantly confronted with that thought. And it's in my own cultural, my own historic DNA. constantly confronted with that thought. And it's in my own cultural, my own historic DNA. There's no way to serve the cause of, my son says it very succinctly in the film.

He said, we had a problem. He said, we had the family of man and dad had his own family. And he was running between the two like a lunatic. That's exactly what he said. I had to laugh because I had this vision from his perspective as a kid. But I don't think it's possible to do what we do without some sacrifice to the needs of family and to our children growing up. I think there are things I could have done a little differently and maybe took a little

edge off some of the things that I didn't do. But by and large, there is a price to pay. Nowhere for me is this price more fully illustrated than what happened with Dr. King and his family. I think his children paid a terrible price for what happened to Dr. King and his family. I think his children paid a terrible price for what happened to both to Martin and to Coretta, and the constant fear and the constant absence that was evident in their lives. I think that had we done things a little differently

and could we have done things differently, the families might have fared better. But having said that, I'm hard-pressed to think of what it is we would have done differently. I don't think we'd have done very much. When we come back, Harry Belafonte on his profound disappointment with the King Center today. For this moment to have not been clearly a place of study that prepared young

minds to continue the cause of the need of the struggle was for me a great loss and once I saw that there was an entire board of people handpicked by the King family to just further their image and to further the cause of their power base. I just said, there's something wrong with this. It's very interesting. When I tweeted this issue, I said I'm going to be interviewing Harry Belafonte. It was amazing how many people responded by saying, ask him how he really felt and how he feels today

about being disinvited to speak at Coretta Scott King's funeral. Somebody who he supported, he supported her husband and his family. It's very interesting how many African-Americans across this country were offended by that invitation being pulled? The first thing I felt beyond being stunned by the act itself, but I soon got off that, the first thing I looked at is where did we fail? It's almost the same exact question that I asked Nelson Mandela. Where did we fail to pass off the baton? Where did the King family, where did Martin, Coretta, and the rest of us as the extended family,

fail in being able to protect and to care and to help guide those kids towards another level of social embrace, social activism that would have made them behave differently. My great question was how did the movement fail Dr. King and his family by not being there for those kids when they were molding and making up their ideas and what they wanted to do when their time of maturity revealed itself. And I still wonder what we could have done differently to have them behave differently. Are you sad to see the siblings fighting each other and being in court?

It's more than sad. I feel a deep sense of loss. And I feel somewhat responsible. Just recently, MLK the third, in essence, was removed as CEO of the King Center. They put his sister Bernice in as CEO. He then stepped down the following week as president, and he gave conflicting views. While reading your book, you talked about being on the board of the King Center when it was first established. And you basically said not only it didn't lose its way, it started off that way. And I always like to go back to when something goes wrong, can you go back to the beginning, do you believe that that constant drama today is a result

of it not having its firm roots established when it was started? Absolutely no question about it. For me, what was clear with the way in which the board was being instructed, and the way in which those who controlled the environment were headed, was to not only idolize not the king, turn him into a deity, but was to create a temple of worship where they would constantly be at the center of the homage being paid. And I said, I don't think that's what Martin would have wanted. What I saw was clearly an institution of activism rooted in the community, rooted in poverty.

If you want to have a crypt, have a crypt where the poor access it very easily. Have instructions coming from the halls of reflection and analysis and study with scholars and what that helps you continue the rebel cause, helps you continue that the change that was meant to be by what Dr. King had done. I think it's all right to give dinner parties and black tie affairs and give awards for the lifetime achievement and all these titles that we put on things, but for this moment

to have not been clearly a place of study that prepared young minds to continue the cause of the need of the struggle was for me a great loss. And once I saw that there was an entire board of people handpicked by the King family to just further their image and to further the cause of their power base, I just said, there's something wrong with this. JOHN YANG Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro, I thought he was a whiz. I saw in him a lot of heroics in the very beginning that was very, very attractive because he was not the first great leader of a movement that had been called a terrorist or that was unacceptable to the status quo. Dr. King was a terrorist, or that was unacceptable to the status quo. Dr. King was a terrorist and a communist, so was Nelson Mandela, was a terrorist and a communist. And as a matter of fact, it wasn't until just about three years ago or so that America finally took Nelson Mandela off the terrorist list for the State Department as undesirables.

So when I was a young man growing up looking at all the rebellions that were taking place, Ho Chi Minh for the Asian people, Ataman Boyd and Julius Nyerere and other people in Africa, and then you take a look at Michael Manley and people in the Caribbean. He was part of a time and of a global upheaval that I found very, very, very attractive. I'd gone to Cuba for a long time before Fidel Castro became involved. I had a lot of Cuban musicians, a lot of friends, hung out there with many a weekend with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. to have a weekend fling in Havana when

we were working in Miami. So I had a long history with Cuba and Cuba Davis Jr. to have a weekend fling in Havana when we were working in Miami. So I had a long history with Cuba and Cuba's people. And when Fidel Castro stepped in, I was happy for us and for the Cubans. When it began to go adrift, like so much else went adrift within the communist order, we began to have a new set of concerns. I don't think communism in and of itself was what went wrong.

What went wrong was another flaw in which the human race suffers from. Because the best that's even in America and in our Constitution was rooted in a certain kind of evil in its day. Because when I look at a constitution that says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and you look at the minds that could create that phraseology that pushed an idea,

and at the same time, these very same men were holders of slaves and cruelly subjected people to a second class life, a life of second class citizenry, that was an evil, something villainous. And I think that what happened with communism, what happened with the leaders, power corrupted them and corrupted them to the point where they became totalitarian, they became so oppressive that they had to eventually implode, which is what happened. And I think Fidel Castro made a lot of mistakes. But I think in the beginning he was very heroic. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Sure. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios.

Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time.

Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated on the

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule.

Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and

can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart podcast.