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Black Excellence is a sign on a t-shirt and I'm buying two of them but not before I school you on why excellence is a double-edged sword in the Black community.
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Rosa Parks' Husband had a Car and Frederick Douglass had a White Wife, but Still I Rise.
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My first education about Black history did not come in school. It came from the books that were in my household growing up. My mother was a history teacher, and she was also involved in a lot of the Black nationalist movement. And just in general, as a Black Muslim, we had all of these books about Black leaders and Black thought and, uh, one of the favorite Things that we got to watch as children when it came out was this PBS special called Eyes on the Prize.
And I think it was like a five part docu series but it was long and it had a book attached to it too. So we got the book and we watched the videos and we were watching this all the time and it was just the history of the civil rights movement. But we also got to watch a lot of movies about American slavery [00:01:00] and again, black leaders, black pioneers, inventors, et cetera, et cetera.
Jesse Owens, Alex Haley, uh, you know, Garrett Morgan. And that was where I learned about black history first. But then I also went to a black elementary school, junior high school, high school. And so black history month, it wasn't just a month. We were always learning about important facts about black American history.
We were always learning about black Americans. You know, if you had coloring books that were based in black history, there were posters on the wall that summarized important events in black history and important icons in black history. So we were immersed in it. If you didn't go to one of these schools or if you didn't have a parent who had a library, a black history library in their home, then you probably didn't learn anything about black history.
[00:02:00] And so how do you connect with black American history? A lot of us are finding ourselves right now disconnected, disenchanted, disillusioned, and we're seeing all over. The United States, as far as retail is concerned, this push for black excellence.
So we know we have to be excellent, but we don't know why we have to be excellent. I've got some explaining to do. Let's get into it. Hey everybody, welcome back for another episode of Ayanna Explains It All, the podcast hosted by the black Muslim lady [00:03:00] lawyer. Who has an opinion on everything. Yes, I do. I am living in the suburbs of Northeast Ohio and I'm battling the cold in the winter and also another cold.
I don't know if you can hear it in my voice. It's a little hoarse. But, um, Ayana Explains It All is the podcast that's available on multiple streaming platforms, including iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts. We also have our own YouTube channel. Our flagship is Spotify. You can find Ayana Explains It All on Spotify.
Also you can find Ayana Explains It All at our website, www. ayanaexplainsitall. com. a y a n a explains it all. com and do me a favor, share this podcast with friends and family, loved ones who need to be enlightened on certain topics. I do a lot of current events, but I also talk about human interest things like parenting and self care, self [00:04:00] love, empathy, gratitude, all those good things.
But, um, my, one of the things I want to emphasize here is that this is really a, uh, teaching and learning podcast, even though I'm not a teacher, never been a teacher, but I do hope that you will learn something that you will walk away knowing a little bit more than you knew before you turned it on and that you will turn it on and keep it on for the duration of the episode.
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Thank you very much. Let's get into the show. So, it is Black History Month, and I am recording this on Sunday, February 18th, 2024, and there are 11 days, yes, this year February has one extra day. This is a leap year. So we have 11 more days of Black History Month, and let me tell you something. It's been a doozy.
It's been a doozy. I feel like Black people really clock what happens during this month in particular. And we measure our Black History Month by the events that happen involving Black people during this month. Like, uh, Beyonce announcing her country music album. Or, uh, a lot of Black artists winning Grammys this year.
We, we sort of think, okay, well, it's a, it's a good Black History Month because some people have won some things or some people have accomplished some things. And if we see some shenanigans, we always go, [00:06:00] not during Black History Month, please. Can't you wait until March 1st? Like, we think only good things are supposed to happen.
during Black History Month. Only good things. And you know why that is? Because black people have, and this has been since slavery, since American slavery, we have been focused on the excellence. Of our community, making ourselves appear excellent and wise and worth celebrating, that's what we think we're about.
That's what we think we should only be about. And so it's very important for us all the time to be emphasizing the greatness of our community. of our community and the great people in our community, all the historical figures and the great moments and the, the icons and, and the, uh, the winners. We don't talk about the losers, right?
We don't even like to talk about the [00:07:00] losing side or the loser side of the winners. Like we don't like to talk about the bad stuff about Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. We don't like to talk about. You know, the bad stuff about W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, we don't talk about that stuff.
That's the stuff that you learn, you know, when you read beyond textbooks, you learn these things about them. Like for instance, Frederick Douglass was married to a white woman. Who would have even known? And the reason why he was married to a white woman was because he thought that the way to uplift the black race would be through assimilation and race mixing and getting all, you know, getting all of the races together and just making one race.
He thought that making one race of people. Would end racism. That's what he thought. And so he married a white woman and there you go
And now there's [00:08:00] this joke going around that says, um, did you know that Rosa Parks husband had a car? Yeah, he had a car, but she rode the bus. Did people know that men and women didn't go to work at the same time? Of day or that men went to work one way and women went to work another way. So the woman would have to take the bus and the man could drive or maybe there were tasks that a woman had to carry out and her husband wasn't home.
So she had to ride the bus to get to her errands. Do people think about this? Yeah, he had a car, but guess what? The Montgomery bus boycott was actually highly coordinated. Boycotts are done to make a statement, to send a message to a particular person or company, corporation, whatever.
And yes, Rosa Parks was picked. She was picked to be the face of the Montgomery bus boycott. There were other candidates, but [00:09:00] she was the best candidate. She was the most acceptable. It would seem to be the face of the Montgomery bus boycott. Why? Because she was married. She was married. The other candidate, the leading candidate was unmarried and had a child.
They wanted something, someone they did not have to explain to white Americans, someone that they could readily accept as being worthy. As being worthy of this challenge of being worthy of being taken seriously, who's going to say no? Who's going to keep a little, a little, you know, young black woman in jail because she wanted to sit at the front of the bus.
Come on now. They could excuse doing this to a single mom who didn't have a job, who wasn't married. They could justify that because she was, you [00:10:00] know, not exactly the, the pinnacle of decency. You know, back in those days, it was indecent. You didn't even really talk about having a baby out of wedlock. You know, a lot of girls were sent away to special homes and then they would come back without a baby.
Hmm. So you didn't really, you didn't really want someone like that. to be the representative of your boycott of your movement. Now we're still kind of like this. Black people are still like this. We haven't learned anything. We haven't learned nothing. Or maybe we think that because we actually have a lot of excellent Black people to talk about that we want to emphasize this and because we also have all this bad stuff to talk about that We want to de emphasize this but I and I I've said this before We are [00:11:00] all of this.
We are the good the bad the ugly the beautiful The joy the pain that is all of us and I feel like a lot of black people are having a hard time Coming to terms with the ugliness of our past The trauma of our past, the, uh, Yeah, we probably should not have done that incidents. And maybe we should not have picked that person to be our leader or the voice of our movement.
And the, um, maybe we should have jumped on this a lot sooner than we did. Now it seems like we're riding the bandwagon.
And I was having this conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago, but he was saying that he felt disconnected this Black History Month, like he did not feel connected to it. And I'm, and I'm thinking, I'm trying to figure out why it is that some of us feel disconnected, but [00:12:00] then also some of us feel like Black History Month has become so, it has become commercialized to the point that the meaning of it is lost.
Right? So you go to Target stores, for instance, and I applaud them for this. They're uplifting black creators, and they're selling a lot of merchandise. T shirts, sweatshirts, calendars, books, pillows, journals, etc, etc. And this is great! And they have all these cute phrases on the t shirts. I probably did buy a t shirt.
But I didn't buy it from Target. I bought it, I bought it from Five Below. It says black and beautiful, which I thought, I mean, I'm, I, black and beautiful. Yes. Can I also be black and ugly? I can be. I can be black in a lot of things, but I just thought it was cute. Black and beautiful. Okay. Why is it important for us to say that we're black and beautiful?
And when you see these other, the cute phrases on these [00:13:00] shirts at, at Target and it's like, Black girl magic and black sweat and tears and it's a lot of other stuff. It's just like, wow. Yeah, these are things that we would associate with being black in the United States, but a lot of this stuff just kind of misses the mark.
The fact that these things are made by black designers and creators is wonderful. I think that's great. I, I would hate to see black history merchandise that's made in, you know, like, China, for instance, but a lot of these commercialized things like the greeting cards and the, the posters and everything, it, it fails to capture.
The real essence, the real spirit of Black History Month, but it's because so many of us don't want to hear. We don't want to hear and deal with the trauma and the agony and what we had [00:14:00] to overcome. We just want you to see the result is that there are all these black people doing wonderful things and black being black is wonderful.
And black boy joy and black girl joy and black girl magic. And this is all we want you to know. This is all we want you to see. We don't need to get into the gory details, Ayana, but you do, but you do, you can put on a t shirt that says black is beautiful. And you can wear a t shirt that says, uh, it's a black thing.
You wouldn't understand blah, blah, blah. You can make all the money you want to off of merchandise, but it's not going to get us any closer to understanding. Why this is important. Why is it important to have black designers and creators making things for target stores? Why does representation matter? Why does it matter that we're emphasizing black excellence, but we're emphasizing it so much that we forget why it is [00:15:00] important.
It becomes almost cartoonish, you know, it becomes almost like Arrogant, in fact, becomes played out overplayed because we know in the United States now it's harder to teach people the real meaning behind a lot of the black things that we see. Black history, there's a movement against teaching black history in public schools.
If you look at Florida, obviously the most glaring example, and I saw this recently on social media, but there was a Miami Dade school wanted to have elementary school students read a book from their school library. by an African American author. And they had to send permission slips home with the kids so that they could get permission from their [00:16:00] parents to read a book by an African American author.
Because why is that? Why, why, why else would you be doing it? Number one, because it's, It's black history month. I mean, one would expect during black history month that maybe kids could read a book by a black author, but apparently you need permission from the parents because this is somehow an outside activity, having kids read a book, but on the permission slip, it, it emphasized specifically that the book would be from a black author.
It wasn't just, you'll be reading a book. It just, it said, you'll be reading a book from a black author. Parents need to give their permission to do this. And I just thought that was the reason for it. People were trying to explain is because it's an outside activity, but it's not an outside activity.
Reading a book in elementary school is not an outside activity. This is [00:17:00] something that actually is what is supposed to occur in elementary school. And if it comes from the school library, again, it's not an outside activity. Because the school library is part of the school curriculum. This is where the books come from, from that library.
When kids want to read a book, they go to the library and get a book. But the fact that they need permission to read from an African American author is, in my opinion, because of the assault on black history education in that state. And the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion in that state as well.
For some reason, they think that it makes white people feel put upon that blacks have particular classes. Teaching black history and one of the things that you would teach in a black history class, obviously, is the history of slavery in the United [00:18:00] States, the history of bigotry, uh, the antebellum South reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights era, and all of those things emphasize That black people were fighting against a particular force.
And that force just happened to come from white Americans. The fact that white people don't want to face what their ancestors did, or maybe what they did, or maybe what they are doing, says to me that they feel very guilty, but they don't want to be held responsible for it. That they believe that everything's fine now.
Everything is equalized now. So why do we have to keep going back? Why do we have to keep picking this apart again? Picking this apart again? And it is because,
It is because knowing your history is important. Just like any other piece of history, knowing about World War I and the Cold War and the Korean War and [00:19:00] Vietnam War and learning about the great, the first Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution, all these pieces, it's important to know these things, but you can't just pretend like these things spring out of nowhere.
Right? You can't just act as if these events in black history happened because they needed to happen because something happened. You have to be specific. You can't say, well, uh, desegregation was because, um, things weren't equal between the races. What? No, that's not, that's, that's not it. Like, that's a very sanitized version.
of what was happening, but that's not it. White people specifically, and you have to say that, but when you say that people get, you know, turned off. Don't blame me for Jim Crow. Don't blame me for segregation. [00:20:00] Don't blame me. It wasn't me. No, but it was probably your grandfather, your great uncle, it was probably someone related to you.
Just like I can trace my ancestry back to American slaves and enslavers, you could probably as a white person trace your ancestry back to an enslaver or a colonizer. You probably could. Does that make you responsible for what they did? No, but you don't get to pretend like it didn't happen, but black people are also trying to pretend like these things didn't happen when all we want is to hear about the excellence and to see the excellence and to emphasize the excellence and to only remember the good things about our history and to only play up these good, you know, phrases and stories and black girl magic.
And, and it, it just, it puts me in the, Yeah. The mindset of, W. E. B. Du Bois [00:21:00] and his, not just him, but he was responsible for the talented 10th.
After slavery ended, black people were trying to find their way. Essentially we were trying to figure out who the hell we were and who we were going to be in this country and how we were going to earn favor because we were still in bondage essentially because of segregation because of Jim Crow.
Because of even sharecropping, which was another form of slavery, we were still being oppressed. We were still being oppressed, separate but equal. We were still being oppressed. And so we were trying to find ways to earn white favor and get white dollars, right? White dollars so we could go to school, white dollars so we could buy land, so they would give us loans, so they would give us jobs.
Du Bois believed that the way for black [00:22:00] people to be uplifted was through classical education. And classical meant liberal arts and intellectual development. He believed that education should not only focus on practical skills, but cultivating leadership and critical thinking and cultural awareness.
But the way to do it In his mind was through assimilation, make black people adopt this kind of excellent persona where we dressed well and we spoke well and our minds were full of academic mumbo jumbo all the time and we could just kind of blend in with whites and they would be accepting of us because we had shown them.
That we could be smart, that we could be intelligent too, that we knew things too, that we knew history too, [00:23:00] and that we would act right. This was the emphasis on us acting right. This is one of the reasons why when we talk about black excellence all the time, it's like, yeah, I get it. But some of us are just regular average everyday Joes who are excellent just in our homes.
We're not out in the world doing big grand things. And every time a black kid goes to college or gets a scholarship, it makes the news. We want to show the community of our kids that they can go anywhere and do anything and be anybody.
At the same time, there are kids who, who don't go to college. There are kids who will not be that intellectual that W. E. B. Du Bois talked about. There are kids who will be the, you know, the vocational, go the vocational education route, like Booker T. Washington said. But we don't give those [00:24:00] kids the same attention and shine that we do to kids who go to college.
We don't. We do not. A kid wants to go to school, go to a vocational program, to learn to be a mechanic. We don't give them the same shine that we give to kids who, maybe are going to an HBCU. And let me tell you something about HBCUs. And I know I get off on tangents. A lot of the, the things, the institutions that are set up for, to house Black thought and Black education were started by white people to control Black thought and Black education.
HBCUs were started by wealthy whites. to control access to education by black kids. You could go to Fisk, but you couldn't go to Harvard.
You could go to Wilberforce, [00:25:00] but you couldn't go to Ohio state. You could go to Spelman or Morehouse, but you couldn't go to the University of Georgia. These schools were made to be good enough for blacks to hone and teach black thought. and educate black kids because black kids weren't allowed at the other schools.
So, Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational education, but he was still a black person who was tap dancing for white people to get them to give him money for his school. He still thought he had to play this game and pretend to be self deprecating black guy, kiss their ass, do their bidding for them, be the kind of Negro that they found acceptable so that they would give him money for his school.
Frederick Douglass did the same thing. There were a lot of anti racist people who also believed these kind of racist things about blacks, that they needed to act a certain way, that they had to show that they were worthy of the freedom that they were given, that they had to show that black excellence was, we had to emphasize black excellence, that black people were good, [00:27:00] show them that we're good.
This was, this has been since American slavery. that we have been doing this and we continue to do it. We continue to emphasize this, that we have to be excellent and show the world that we're excellent, that we have something to prove and look at the good things that we're doing.
Look at our music artists and, and look at the, the, the athletes and look at us on TV and look at the books that we write and look at, you know, look at all these things that we're doing. Don't you guys like us? And then when something terrible happens and it happens to be a black person, it's like, Oh, this sets us back.
This makes us look so bad. It sets us back. It takes us back to slavery days. And let me just tell you something. There's nothing. Nothing that will ever set us back that badly. There's nothing. A black woman with an attitude, you know, Fannie [00:28:00] Willis gives her testimony at the, uh, the hearing to determine if she should be disqualified from the Trump trial.
And, you know, Fannie has, she has esteem, honey. She has esteem. And she's answering those questions and she's very confident. And one person writes, This sets black women back 500 years. Why? Because she defended herself? Because she wasn't acting grateful and she wasn't speaking in a hushed tone and she wasn't, um, backing down when they were essentially yelling at her?
And they were mischaracterizing her testimony and her personal life. She was defending herself. People are allowed to defend themselves. Black women specifically. We are allowed to defend ourselves without people saying that we have [00:29:00] an attitude or that we're being sassy or that we're being a bitch or we're setting black women back.
No, honey, no, no. There were a few, few black women who would have done what Fannie Willis did back then. Even, even some of the black women who were fighting for equal rights for women and black women, some of them were still placating to white folks. Some of them were still placating to white folks because we always think we have to put on these airs To make them believe us and want us and now we're feeling like we have to write these sanitized Versions of black history again to make white people feel good about the things Whites did to blacks in this country the history of blacks in the United States is a history of trauma [00:30:00] Get over it.
The history of blacks in the United States is a history. Very terrible, awful things that happened to a lot of us, that a lot of us had to survive, that a lot of us had to endure, that a lot of us are still traumatized by, that a lot of us are the legacies of. Trauma survives generations. Trauma affects families, generations of families.
And a lot of us are still dealing with this trauma. Imagine you're slaves and you're freed, you're freed slaves, and you go from being freed slaves on the master's plantation to living in the very poor segregated part, racially segregated part of a city, and you still have to get up every day and go work for white people [00:31:00] who treat you like shit.
Still, you're not a slave anymore, but you're now their servant. You're now their servant. And then you get to go home. Maybe you have to take the train home. You have to sit in the colored part of the train. Maybe you have to take the bus home. You have to sit in the colored part of the bus and you have to be out of the town that you're in before nightfall because it's a sundown town.
And then you get through all of this and you make it home. To your family, you live in the black part of town with the black churches and the colored cemetery and everyone around you was black. And most people are poor. They might own a home maybe, but most people are poor and you all are scratching to scratching and surviving as the song goes.
And then. You have kids and they have kids and they have [00:32:00] kids and finally someone makes it out of that part of Town and they make it, you know, they do the the great migration and they make it westward or they make it northern To you know to Cleveland for instance, but all of that pain all of that anguish all of that trauma They're bringing it with them They're not leaving it behind, they're bringing it with them, all of the pain from segregation.
And then when they get to the West or the North, what do they find? More segregation, more injustice, more separation. They find even the most racially segregated cities are in the Northern part of the United States. They find more of the same. They find they are not welcomed. And so here they are again, enduring.
Having to be resilient, having to fight, having to fight again. [00:33:00] Although maybe this time they're, you know, having to do it without the threat of being lynched, like they were in the South. This time it's a different kind of violence that's being lodged against them. Police violence, police violence, police violence against blacks in the north is, it's, it was incredible.
So to say that everything was different when they came north, it wasn't different, but we still had to play this game. We still had to play this, show them that you're excellent. Show them that you're worthy. Show them that you deserve to be here. Show them that there's a reason they gave you this scholarship, show them that there's a, they don't have any right to say these things about black people because we are actually good people.
And we're always doing this. We're always trying to prove ourselves. But then we don't understand why we have been doing this. We think this is new. This is [00:34:00] not new. Black people have been doing this since slavery. We have been doing this and told that we have to do this even by our own civil rights icons, even by our own black scholars told that we have to do this.
To earn white favor and W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, was a revolutionary for his time, but he was still one of those. You got to act a certain way. You got to talk a certain way. You have to go to college. You have to have a degree to be taken seriously, to be a leader in the black community. So even people you thought were, you know, revolutionaries and who were fighting the good fight.
They were still perpetuating racist thought. A lot of our black heroes and icons were perpetuators of racist thought
it's okay to talk about that. It's okay to acknowledge that it's also okay to acknowledge and talk about the role that Africans [00:35:00] played in the slave trade and that Arabs played in the slave trade These things that people really don't want to talk about they don't want to hear about it
because it makes people feel uncomfortable You have to be uncomfortable. You have to be You're talking about history. You're always going to be uncomfortable. The history of this world, this earth, it's uncomfortable. You can't even talk about Africa without talking about colonization. Every country in Africa was colonized.
You can't talk about France, the history of France, without talking about how it was a brutal colonizer. The UK, the Kingdom, how it was a brutal colonizer. The Dutch, brutal colonizers. Spain, brutal colonizers. The United States even tried colonization. They tried to take blacks back to Africa too.[00:36:00]
They weren't as successful as other places because by the time the United States became a country. Most of the world had been colonized. We managed the Spanish American war gave us, I think it was the Philippines for a bit, but you cannot talk about any of these places. You can't talk about any American president without talking about some form of colonization, slavery, bigotry, hatred, war.
You can't do it. You can't pretend like everything is okay, like everything was okay and we're the result of all of the strife. No, because we're still striving. We're still striving. We're still fighting. Nobody wants to talk about the fight. Everybody just wants to talk about the good stuff. They just want to show the good stuff.
They just want you to believe that being black is always fun and sunny and bright and wonderful and it just fucking isn't. [00:37:00] It isn't. It isn't. It wasn't made to be. We didn't start here that way. We didn't start here that way. And we're only, you know, 70 however many years from the end of something really terrible where we couldn't even sit in the same spot as a white person on a bus.
So if we're still a little angry, that's fine. If we're still a little, you know, chip on our shoulder, that's fine. There's still a lot of racism in this country too. Currently, there's still a lot of racial hatred in this country. And that people aren't talking about it is a problem that when black history rolls around, we only want to talk about the little pieces of it that are easy to digest.
Little known black [00:38:00] history fact, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
I'm fed up. This is me being fed up. This is me being fed up. I don't know how we could be, you know, as a country moving away from the teaching of African American history outside of Black neighborhoods, outside of Black schools, but then wonder why people are still Misunderstanding of Blacks, mistrusting of Blacks, why people are still bigoted, why a woman has to get on the stand and explain why Black people keep stashes of money in her home.
We know to be prepared. I'm not talking about buying cans of cream corn and digging a hole in your basement. No, you keep money [00:39:00] around for emergencies or to pay this person or that person. Or if you're going on a trip, you take cash with you on a trip these are the things that we're still having to explain black culture to white people. We're still having to explain black women to white people.
We're having to explain how a black woman from Texas could do a country album. Like, are y'all serious? But you don't want to know about black history. You don't want to know about black history. You want your children to need permission to read a book. from a black author.
You don't know where we're coming from. You don't know where we've been. Hell, most of us still don't understand where we've been or why it's important or why we feel the need to emphasize our excellence all the time. [00:40:00] A lot of us don't know
because what you get in primary school sometimes is the sanitized version of black history. And unless you go to college or you take your ass to a fucking library, you're not going to read about these deeper, meaningful facts. Happenings, icons, rituals, thoughts from black people in American history.
You're not going to know what really Ended slavery. It wasn't the Emancipation Proclamation. I will tell you that it was black people who decided they were no longer going to be slaves. Either Lincoln was going to free the slaves or the slaves were going to be free. That was it.
But you don't explore this. You don't explore this. A lot of you are not [00:41:00] reading. A lot of you are not reading books. You're just glancing at something. You're scrolling past something that tells you a little bit of something about this person or that person. And then you're moving on. You're immersing yourselves in this ridiculous world of.
Serial reality TV and all of this ridiculous nonsense of and I understand there's a place for all of this kind of entertainment and whatnot. There's a place for all of it. People need to have fun too. But it just seems to me like we're emphasizing fun too much over learning and understanding and analyzing and understanding what's going on in the world around us.
And history is what informs what is going on in the world around us.
And I, I love black history month. I, I it's hard to feel connected to black history [00:42:00] month when you're out of school. Like it, it, it, it is. You have to be actively searching for and studying black history as an adult. You have to be active about it. But I get it. Sometimes you don't want to read about all the traumatic shit all the time.
You want to hear about something joyful. It's about it. You want to read some uplifting stories, some uplifting tales. You want it. You want that. You want to feel good. You want to feel warm, but we need to come to terms with our history. We need to come to terms with it. We can't run from it. We can't hide from it.
It's scary. Listen, I'm, I'm currently reading, um, King Leopold's ghost about the Dutch King who colonized the Congo. It makes me sick to my stomach. [00:43:00] Honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach. But it is so important to know these stories, to know this history, to know why the region is the way that it is now.
The way that it is now is because of this motherfucker. It's because of King Leopold, but you wouldn't know that unless you read something, unless you knew the history, unless you studied it, people right now are angry and upset about what is happening in the Congo, but they don't fucking know why it is like that.
They think, Oh, it's just some corporations are present there and they're robbing the region of resources. No, that is not. Even close. That is not even close. Because that is a free country. Why is a free country allowing this to happen? But then you have to look into the history of that country, where they came from.
It's not just about colonization. They were more than colonized. Right. [00:44:00] A lot of their tribes were just slaughtered, slaughtered for the simple fact of being alive and present on land that a white person wanted.
So it's, it's not as simple as, you know, Oh, they're mining for cadmium or nickel or whatever in the Congo River. It's not that simple. How is this even allowed to happen in the first place? Why did people feel like they needed to do this? How did they get there? there. Why is this like this? Why is the government like this?
Why is this not a stabilized nation in 2024? Why is a lot of the regions of Africa are not stabilized in 2024? Why, why, why, why? You have to know the history. You have to know your history. You have to reconcile with your history and it is traumatic and it will hurt. It's not as [00:45:00] easy as, Oh, it's black history month.
Let me throw on my black and beautiful black girl magic t shirt and my Kunta Kinte, my Kinte cloth, uh, armband, and my Harriet Tubman university sweat pants.
You need to know why these, why these things, why is it important for the fact that Target is using black creators to do this? Why is that important? Not just, oh, representation matters. No, it's deeper than that. It's deeper than that. We all need to dig a little bit deeper, to understand why things are the way that they are now.
We're making this too easy. We're making it palatable. Black history should not be this easily digestible. It shouldn't because it's the history of racism and [00:46:00] trauma and rapes and slavery and segregation and lynchings and financial racism, economic racism, and anytime people hear the word racism, they shudder and they need to, you can do hard things.
We can all do hard things. And this has been Ayanna explains it all brought to you by facts, figures and analysis. Take care. [00:47:00]
