Hey humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Hey Human Podcast.
This is episode 366,
and I had a conversation with Seir Shapiro.
Seir is a writer and a poet, and his company Gang Management,
works with artists like Chief Keef, also known as Sosa,
little Nar Two, rare and More.
He actually mentions a lot of artists in this episode to check out.
He's working on a book and a screenplay titled White Sex,
and he reads an incredible poem that he wrote about conversations
with his grandmother when he was young and how that
affected him.
It's really stunning poem and it's so beautiful.
We talk about generational trauma, oral histories, creativity, music,
poetry, racism so much. It was a great conversation.
I could have talked to him forever.
We really sort of went in a bazillion different directions and
I really enjoyed it. So I'm excited for you to hear this episode.
Check out hey human podcast.com for links.
And to learn more about my guests and the show, check out Susan ruth.com.
To learn more about me and my other artistic endeavors,
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All I ever wanted was everything.
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healthcare practitioner, Mara Edelman, it's on YouTube under Are We There yet?
Podcast show rate review, and subscribe to Hey,
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Be well, be kind, be love.
And here we go. Seir Shapiro,
welcome to Hey, human.
Well, thank you. Thank thanks for.
Being here. Yeah. And thank you, uh, to Rachel Keis who introduced us.
Yes, Rachel, that's my home girl. Good people.
Yeah, she's awesome. I love her. She's great. She's been on the show too.
Well, let's get into it. Where are you right now?
Right now I am in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
I am sitting on the Mississippi River in my car right now.
Nice. I know Wisconsin.
You do. I.
I have people that lived in Baraboo. They've passed, but yeah.
Okay. Yeah, I think I've been through bearable a couple times.
Yeah, it's tiny.
Yeah. Yeah. . Yeah.
It's real tiny. When I was a, when I was a rambunctious youth,
my parents threatened to send me to live with my aunt and uncle in Be .
Oh boy. Oh.
Anyway. Where are you from originally? Where'd you grow up?
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That's where I was born and raised long time ago.
Back in the seventies, medium-sized family.
I got a brother and a sister and my two parents, uh, mom and dad,
they still married. I think it's, uh, 57 years next month.
Yeah. I was the youngest of three. There's,
there's advantages that come with being the youngest and I took advantage of all
of those advantages. .
Yeah. Did you, uh, sneak past all of the, the parental stuff?
I feel as the youngest child myself,
I feel like by the time the youngest comes along, the parents are so exhausted.
They just sort of let you do whatever you do .
That's exactly what happened. And, and it was a situation where older brother,
my older siblings, my brother and sister, they weren't necessarily, well,
my sister was bad, but like, they weren't necessarily bad kids. My sister was,
but they weren't really bad, bad. So it sort of,
like you said, they wore 'em in. They broke 'em in and, you know, I,
I didn't have too much to deal with. By the time it was my time to come along,
it was like a seven year difference between me and my oldest brother. So, yeah,
by the time I came along, it was, it was pretty smooth.
Were you planned? I was not. I was accidental.
And I'm seven years younger than my brother too.
I believe. You know what, I was the only one that was planned.
Yeah. And I get that story a lot. Cause uh,
what happened was my mother didn't want to have anymore.
And my grandfather, her father-in-law, my dad's dad,
he wanted her to have one more. He said, please have one more.
Have me a grandson. And, and that's exactly what she did. And,
and that, that was, uh, that was, that was the actual planning. But she said,
I don't want no more kids. I got a boy, I got a girl. I'm fine with that.
And he said, no, we need one more. Gimme a, gimme a grandson.
And ironically enough,
he died on the way to the hospital to see me the day I was born.
Oh no. How did he pass?
He had a heart attack.
Oh my God. What's his name? So I was, what's his name? I like to honor the,
the people that have passed by saying their names.
Cool. Cause she named me after him. His name is my Christian born name.
His name is Flowers Nash. I was born with my,
I was born named after him. And my dad, his son.
So my full name on my birth certificate was at one point in time,
Royce Riddell Flowers Nash second.
That's a great name.
Thank you.
That's an author's name. , doesn't it like an author's name?
Well, thank you.
Well, here's to Flowers Nash.
That is so nice. Thank you. I was born on the 27th, so this in 70.
I just turned 50 a month ago.
Happy birthday and.
Thank you. And, uh,
I was born on the 27th of April. And that was on a Friday,
Friday night at 7:11 PM And
he had talked my mom through the whole pregnancy because she didn't want to have
a kid. She did have it cuz he wanted one more grandkid.
I'm sure my dad wanted another kid too.
This was before you knew what sexist the kid could,
you didn't know what sex the kid was gonna be. Right. So my mom,
how do you know it's gonna be a boy? Oh, I know it's gonna be a boy. He's,
you're gonna have a boy . And she said, um, like he, he,
they were really close. Like he showed my mom how to drive.
He owned a grocery store. So she would, when she was pregnant,
come to the store and sit with them all day and help out at the store.
He showed her how to cook a little bit,
some different dishes and things like that. She said,
are you gonna babysit if I have this? If I have a baby, gonna baby, yeah.
I'll babysit for you, . Are you gonna change diapers? Yeah,
I change diapers. I'll do it all. I'll do it all.
So I'm born Friday night
and the visiting hours was over with.
So he couldn't come see me the day I was born.
So he was talking to her that night on the phone. What does he look like? Uh,
uh, does he have any hair on his head? How much do we weigh all these questions?
Alright, tell Roy, my father, I'll be out to see him tomorrow.
Tell Roy to come get me in the morning. I'm taking my shower and I,
and I wanna come have him come pick me up.
I'll be out to see my grandson tomorrow. So my mom, okay,
click hang up the phone. Next morning, Saturday morning,
he's on the phone with her. How's the grand baby doing? Blah, blah, blah.
They're going back and forth. Okay, tell Roy I'm ready.
So my mother gets off the phone, tell my dad, your dad said Come pick him up.
He's ready. Said my dad leaves the hospital.
My grandparents didn't live a mile away from the hospital.
And when my father pulled up, the ambulance was already outside.
And my father said he got out the car and his brother was standing outside.
And he said, what's going on? His brother said, daddy died. So he,
I guess my grandfather had went out to the garage to get something out of his
car. Had a heart attack right there in the doorway. Ambulance came,
picked him up, took him to the hospital.
He was in the same hospital that I was in,
except for he was downstairs in the morgue.
I was upstairs where the babies were. So that's how I came into the world.
And, and then, you know, ever since I was little, that's what my, my,
my aunts like my father's sisters and, you know,
his side of the family would always say, we got you in exchange for daddy.
We got you in exchange for daddy. So.
Kind a heavy thing to say to a kid like you were the exchange for the,
the patriarch. How did that tell.
It?
How did that affect you through your life? Did,
was that something that was always sitting on your shoulders as an honorific?
Or did it feel more like a burden?
Uh, it felt more like an honor.
Cause my grandparents migrated from Mississippi in the, you know, they,
they were born in the twenties and the teens, my grandparents were,
my grandfather was born 1913,
and my grandmother was born 1924, I believe it was.
So they migrated, you know,
from basically hell on earth. Extreme, extreme,
extreme, you know,
racism and discrimination and all that type of shit going on in
Mississippi. You know, they migrated in
46, I believe, 19 46, 47.
And they went up north to Wisconsin. You know, there,
there was a big misconception back then that, you know, if you,
if you're black, if you leave the south and you make it up north,
there's some sense of more freedom or justice or whatever the case
may be. And I guess that was because, you know,
you went from not being on a farm literally so close to what slavery was
as a sharecropper in the field.
You went from that to actually being able to get a factory job or a job in a
hotel or a job on the railroad line.
So I guess there was psychologically a little bit more dignity to the, to the,
the positions that were offered up north. But at the same time,
the racism was just as strong, if not stronger, up north,
you know, and there, because the difference is, you know, up north, it,
it goes underground. It's, you know, down south,
they're gonna call you how they feel about you.
We don't like niggers around here. You know, they gonna say that down south,
up north. They're not gonna say it. They're just gonna treat you like it.
So it can be, you don't, you don't really know who your friend is up north.
You know, the lines aren't drawn as clear. So I said,
don't have to say my grandfather and grandmother, when they,
when they migrated the mass migration and they came up north,
they did pretty well for themselves when they got up north.
Very entrepreneurial. And this is why I took the name as an honor,
because he was very entrepreneurial. When they reached Milwaukee,
they bought a home.
They immediately opened up a boarding room for other people who were coming from
the south up north. And they leased out rooms in their boarding room.
That boarding room, uh, expanded into them starting a church.
And especially back in those days, churches were the staple, you know,
of the black community.
So that instantly put my grandmother and grandfather,
mainly my grandmother. Cause my grandfather wasn't really a church man, but it,
it put them in a position of leadership within the black community in Milwaukee.
And, um, and then in the early sixties, he opened up a grocery store.
So he was one of the first black men who ran a business in Milwaukee. And then,
and then that led into him and the rest of his kids, like my aunts and uncles,
you know, everyone got into real estate and they did fairly well for themselves.
So, and he had nine kids, you know what I'm saying? So, you know,
between the church and the, and the renting house rooms out, the boarding room,
housing situation, and the, and the, uh, business that they ran,
it felt like an honor, you know? And, and it, it felt like large,
like the stories that I heard about him was, he was a man's man.
Meaning he was a proud black man. He was proud to be married,
proud to take care of his family, proud to provide, proud to be an entrepreneur,
you know, and not have to work for anyone. So it was an honor.
And creating generational wealth,
which is something that historically in America,
whites have taken from black communities.
They've disrupted the generational wealth. For my listeners,
that's a real important thing to note that in black communities,
that we're building generational wealth, especially after the war,
especially from the, after the Civil War, but after the World War ii,
that then having government come in and steal land or,
uh, not renting out homes or selling homes to black people,
redlining, destroying their property,
setting things on fire, drowning out towns and communities.
I mean, the, the history is deep for that. So I just,
I want that to be really clear for anyone listening that,
that it's so important to note that.
Yeah. And, and just to add on to what you said,
one of the things that was done simultaneously around the country to black
communities was during the sixties
when we decided as a country to, uh,
improve our, our transportation infrastructure.
And we decided to build more highways and freeways and things like that. Well,
if you look around the country, and I'll, I'll,
I'll use Milwaukee as an example,
but this happened in different places in the country.
Wherever there was a large concentration of black neighborhoods or black
communities, those freeways went right through those communities.
And I know in Milwaukee personally,
that disrupted some 8,000 homes and businesses,
people who lost their homes or their business to what real estate
caused imminent domain, you know? And that, you know, again,
was, was something that really disrupted, uh,
our ability to try to build some type of economic infrastructure
within the black community.
Yeah. And imminent domain was responsible for stealing things like waterfront
properties, which of course, today would be so valuable.
Exactly.
I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of coming from, uh,
the south and going to the northern region of
Wisconsin, which feels pretty white.
That had to have been daunting to try and navigate that in
general, because coming from the South,
where I think probably community speaking,
the communities of black families and, you know, outreached further,
then you go to Wisconsin and suddenly those communities haven't been built yet.
Right. Definitely outside of the north side of Milwaukee,
there really isn't any black communities in Wisconsin, you know,
especially back then. I mean, now you can go to, you know, Madison,
you'll find a small black community,
maybe Green Bay lacrosse where I'm at, where I'm at. But it's very,
it's still very, very small. You know?
Did your family keep the stories alive within your
family? Like for example, I've interviewed my parents right,
about their histories because they've lived their own lives separate
from me as mom and dad. Right?
Like your parents have their own histories and their own memories.
And I know there's the poem that you wrote speaks of generational pain
and did, did,
I'm curious to know if your family was open about that or if
it was a family that kept sort of that stuff quiet to protect the kids.
The new generations coming.
Well, you know, I'm, I'm, to answer your question, that shit was kept quiet.
Like, you know, I'm, I'm a history buff. I like my, my degree.
I graduated in 96 from a school in lacrosse called Ver Turbo
Private College. Very small, but I loved, they had a great experience there.
I like history. My degree is in sociology.
So I like knowing how societies became the way they are, how,
how the different interactions and relationships between groups.
How did it get that that way? I love that type of research.
You know, when it comes to a lot of what happened in most black
families that I know of, you know, it's so much trauma and so much dysfunction.
It's especially my age group, it's, it's, it's so crazy how the younger,
like I got kids now and you know,
I gotta tell my kids history because mainstream
society is whitewashing history and they're erasing history.
And our kids don't even know, you know, the struggles we went through,
the fights we had, the fight, the losses we've taken,
the lives that's been taken from us, the leaders that's been taken from us.
A lot of our leaders have been reduced to slogans and, and, you know, know the,
our own people have, and what I mean our own people,
black people as well as Americans,
but black people in particular have no idea of their history.
So I was always big on that. So I would always ask questions,
and I would always ask my mother and my grandmother, you know,
about, you know, where's your father from? Who was his father? Was they slaves?
Who owned them? You know, how, how many kids did they have?
Did they get married? You know, just, or how many times did they get married?
And it'd be so much, it'd be so much, like I said, dysfunction,
abuse, poverty, hard times
that a lot of times they don't wanna relive it, you know what I'm saying?
They don't even wanna talk about it. You know, so you,
you have to probe and ask different aunts and uncles and,
and you might get half a story. Like,
I just found out a month ago that we, I got a uncle who,
a great uncle who they had to smuggle outta, uh,
Missouri because he shot and killed a white man for
disrespecting his wife. I had no idea about that. His,
his last name is Mccr, that's on my mom's side.
She's a Johnson and a Macquarie and yeah. So, you know,
a lot of that shit they don't talk about, cuz they never talked about it,
even from back then. Like, if we gotta smuggle and get Susan out of town,
we not telling the kids about it.
We not telling our friends why we just smuggling and getting her to fuck out of
town. Cuz if they find Susan, they gonna hang her and they gonna kill her.
So the conversation is dead from that moment, you know?
And then you have those few great aunts and uncles who were the, you know,
the outcast, or not the outcasts,
but just the wild cards in the family that don't give a fuck.
And they gonna tell you everything.
They gonna tell you everything they know at least.
So those are the ones I tried to latch onto and get my good information from as
much as possible.
This is my big frustration when I hear the rhetoric that says,
can we just keep the history in the past and let sleeping bones
lie?
And I think there's such a danger in that because by forgetting where we
come from, there's, you know,
that clear and obvious saying we're doomed to repeat the past.
But also I think it's such a disrespect to our history.
You're so on point. I mean, it's amazing what you just said.
I just got into like this fucking emotional,
I hate that I reacted instead of responded,
but I just reacted. And here's another thing.
And society as a black man,
they're gonna label you as angry immediately.
We can't be frustrated, we can't be fed up, we can't be exhausted,
we can't be at our wits ends. We're always angry.
And I, I,
I was frustrated in my response to someone the other day that
basically tried as they're trying to do what you just said,
they're trying to erase history as though it does it, it doesn't matter.
But at the same time, they were speaking and,
and this is crazy cause it was a screenwriter, this is a, he's a,
a fairly successful screenwriter that I'm working with.
And we were talking about a project, a series that I'm working on that's really,
it's, it's really good. And I'm telling,
and it's a series based on my life and I'm telling him my experience.
He's white,
I'm telling him my experience and he's debating me on my experience.
Unbelievable.
Yeah. I'm sorry. That's quite unfortunate. I mean,
it's a weapon for some and for others it's just like, man,
just take a second. You're not a bad person. You're not a hateful person.
Breathe the air of someone else for just two seconds and see
what that would feel like.
The new thing, Susan,
that I've been running into in these discussions with white people,
and this is what actually prompted me to start working on a project I've been
working on. The thing that I've been running to is there's this, this new,
over the last 15 to 20 years,
this new voice emerging from white people.
I don't even know what your name, it's like a group.
I don't know what the name of the group,
but it's this voice that's emerging that's saying,
Hey, get over it. We were oppressed too.
And they go into these examples of how
well my parents or my great grandparents, or we didn't own slaves or,
you know, we weren't rich and we had to work hard. And you know, they, it's,
it's, it's this whole narrative even as far as, um,
one guy says, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm Irish,
I'm half Irish and I'm half Jewish.
And the Irish were, the Irish were oppressed, and the Irish were slaves also.
Mm-hmm. . And, you know, he's,
he's going through this whole line of reasoning and he's,
he's saying all this to say, and then he goes on to say, you know, with,
with black people, I believe there's just a lot of self-loathing
and black people are inherently violent.
Was the word that he used. Exactly. Inherently violent,
A lot of self-loathing. And basically,
you know, quit, quit making these excuses for your condition.
And yeah, I know the government,
he says over the last 30 or 40 years was his, his time range.
The government has used race to,
and black people and race to fracture society as a whole.
Like they just picked black people over the last 30 years, 40 years,
we're gonna use them and use race and we're gonna subject black people to all of
this stuff. But at the same time now,
it's like a self-perpetuating thing and black people are just doing it to
themselves. So there's this emerging voice,
voice that is speaking like, Hey,
what happened to y'all? That shit is old. Get over that shit.
Everyone's been oppressed before. You're not the only ones who've been slaves.
It's very dismissive. And it, it, it gets frustrating. And I'm working on,
because these are things I have to combat daily, you know,
especially in the line of work that I'm in. Like, I just have to combat
people from outside of our culture trying to speak for our culture. And you're,
you're mis you're, you're misrepresenting how we think, how we feel.
You're trying to brain paint us with a broad ass paintbrush and we're all
criminals and we're all this and we're all that. You know?
And it gets, it gets frustrating. I mean,
he went as far as calling me because when he said all these things I said,
you will call black people inherently violent.
But if you study the history of Europe,
and if you study how this country was founded,
it was founded on violence. It was,
it was founded on murder.
Absolute genocide really.
And, and if you look at the treatment in the, in the history of this country,
if you look at, okay,
how have black people treated white people and how have white people treated
black people?
Where can you find footage or books written or history showing or
whatever us lynching white people attacking white people
with dogs, um, coming to their house with,
with mobs and dragging by their houses and killing them. Where, where,
where do you see, you can't find a history of that. So
when you jump to the conclusion that black people are inherently violent
because you see how we treat each other in our communities,
this is why he jumps to this conclusion,
you overlook and you bypass all of the social
engineering and conditioning that went into why our behavior is the way it ends.
You were speaking on her earlier, you overlooking the redlining. Okay,
you're overlooking the discrimination, healthcare, education, uh,
jobs you're overlooking the intentional destruction of the black family with the
welfare system, removing the black man out of the home.
The welfare system was first created,
it was created for white women and there was no shame in it.
It was for white women who lost their husbands in World War ii and they got
these big ass farms and they don't know what to do with it.
And the government subsidized the land and gave them money to not grow food or
gave them money to go to school and learn how to become, you know,
agriculturalists and so on and so forth. Then welfare was fine.
Then once they got on their feet, and now black women need welfare. Okay,
your man can't live with you if you're getting welfare, first of all,
your man can't. So that's taking the black man outta the home.
So they overlooked all of this shit that's done.
They overlooked how crack was intentionally placed in the neighborhood.
They overlooked how fucking aids was intentionally set up on the black
community. They overlooked how back in the sixties it was heroin. And, and uh,
and I mean they overlook all of that and say, well,
this guy in particular overlooked all of that and said they are inherently
violent. And when we saw Will Smith,
uh, mind you, this is a Hollywood director and writer.
So this is someone with influence. This isn't just some fucking dude,
racist dude standing on the corner talking shit.
This is a motherfucker who has influence and power. He says, you know, when,
when we saw,
when we saw Will Smith walk up and smack Chris Rock,
you know what the average white person thought, right? I said, no, what, what,
what did the average white person, once again,
there's two dumbass niggers acting like niggers. I said, wow,
you sure that's not just what you thought you're saying that's what the average
white person thought. No, I, I'm telling you,
I mean this is what the average white person, they may not admit it,
but this is what they thought. Interesting.
I think that person in your life has very much revealed themselves to you.
You know, but they're the same people who have this voice, you know, Hey,
the first girl I fell in love with is a black girl and my best friend,
he's your complexion. He looks just like you. And you know, that's,
that's these white people who it feel like,
cause they weren't slumming with blacks or they had these little experiences.
It's not the up top experience of white culture.
It's the fucked the black girl.
Or I hung out with some black dudes as gang members,
or I smoked weed with the brothers. Those are slumming experiences.
Fetishization of any race does not necessarily mean that you
that you're on their side or you are with them or,
or anything like that. That's, I.
Love how you said that.
That's a historical problem as well.
That's exactly.
That's the other thing is the what about isms?
Is that an Irish person talking about how people truly were
discriminated against Irish were, you know, no dogs, no Irish,
those signs did hang in. Yep. In store windows.
We all know what it's like to be Jewish and in the world during certain times.
And, and antisemitism is certainly on the rise, but it doesn't
saying stuff like that, in my humble opinion, I, you know,
I can only go based on my own experiences,
but it doesn't change the truth of the other thing.
And it certainly shouldn't take away from the truth of the other thing.
The two thoughts can live simultaneously.
Irish people can and have been oppressed.
Fine black people, oppressed violently, Asians,
it all can happen simultaneously.
Right. As it did.
Which doesn't, I, I just, I've never been able to wrap my head around that Well,
but anything that follows that, those two words, well, but
yeah, I've already lost the plot in, in a lot of ways.
Yeah. And I feel like, you know, at the end of the day,
this coming from a white male, you know,
you're trying to diminish my experience, you know,
and you're trying to comparatively diminish it.
And that's where I run into issue because you know,
even if we do talk about what the Irish went through, okay,
we can go back to the Romans. The Romans had slaves. I mean,
we can go back to the Arabs. When they first invaded Africa,
they were the first ones who brought amongst,
they invaded Africa and turned black people into slaves way before Europeans
did. Way before Europeans did. But with all that being said,
there's still a distinct difference in slavery that took place
in North America.
And that distinct difference was this was chattel slavery.
No other slavery had been such an extreme form of actual this
person's property.
Chanel like a hog or a horse or this is
chattel.
And not considered even a full human.
At all when he makes the point with the Irish, okay, sure,
we could go down a long list of people who've been oppressed that has nothing to
do with what we're talking about over here. And if you're comparing the two now,
that's when it's back and forth was really, it, it's a, it's, it's ridiculous.
When he said, I'm half Irish and I'm half Jewish,
my response was, well, Jewish is not a race.
Jewish is a religion. I can be half.
I think it's both. But.
But this is, this is what my response was. I said, Jewish is a religion.
Now there are areas
in Eastern Europe and throughout Europe where they say this is
an area where Jewish people come from.
But that's still a group of people that are practicing of faith and,
and the Hebrew faith. And this is why I say that to my knowledge. Now, maybe I,
you know, I don't, I don't have a monopoly on the information,
but to my knowledge, from what I understand,
the Hebrew faith is what's practiced.
And there are different groups, the Ash, Ashkenazi.
Ashkenazi, Ashkenazi.
Um, the.
Sephardic.
Right?
So there are different groups of people who practice
the Hebrew faith that go by different names. From what I was taught,
the group of people who came out of Europe
that practiced the Hebrew faith are the people who took on the name
Jews.
I think they were considered Jewish long before that though.
See, that's where, that's where, yeah, I, you know,
that's where I will be interested in anyone who did have information.
Cause there's different back and forth that I've heard.
It's a very old religion, very old faith.
But the thing is, is if I'm Irish and Jewish,
I can operate in the world pretty easily, for the most part,
at least today. And even back then, I mean,
I suppose there were certain things that says,
I look like an Irish person or maybe, I don't know.
But black person doesn't get to just sort of turn themselves inside out and
suddenly not, you know what I mean? It kinda shows up a little.
Bit stronger. That's, that's what I told him. I said, you know,
I said the thing is,
is you could be a white gay racist male
and no one would have to know, and you could still, you know,
mistreat people. You know, because you could cover,
you could cover the fact that you're gay up and you can cover the fact that
you're racist up and you know,
or you can say that you're gay and not say that you're racist.
So now you'll get accepted in all of these protected classes,
but at the same time you can perform racist practices.
Cause you can keep the fact that, yeah, I'm a white gay male racist.
You can't hide being black, you know? Yeah.
Even within the black community, there is, there's code switching, right?
And then there's colored tones that make a difference. One of my friends Leah.
Talk about it, girl, talk about it. Girl, you know what you're talking about.
Talk about it. Yes.
She's her mom and dad, black and white. And she is definitely,
I mean, honestly, she's paler than I am.
And so she gets to move in circles that if her skin tone,
her melanin come out a little darker.
But, you know, and that's the,
that's the unfortunate collateral damage in the depths of what racism,
white supremacy has done to black people. I mean, black people,
we discriminate against each other. Do you understand what I'm saying? I mean,
we have these hangups in our head, you know, and I'm 50 years old, so I'm old.
I'm old enough. I,
I'm so grateful for the time that we live cause or that I live.
Cause I live long enough to remember the world before rap music.
I remember before rap. And I remember when rap first started,
I remember when rap was really getting his legs and going,
and then I see where it's at now.
And the reason I use rap music is because that's the first time that as a group
we've had a voice. Ok. Up until before then, you know,
we had our little r b singers, our little disco and pop, you know,
Michael Jackson Prince, things like that.
But we didn't have a voice coming out of our community saying,
this is what we feel. This is what we think, this is what we're going through,
this is what we're experiencing. This is what they're doing to us.
We didn't have that voice.
Raps, origins were of a political nature. They were, uh,
speaking truth to power. And you know,
now of course there's a bazillion different kinds of rap like there is with any
kind of music. And it just depends on, on what you're listening to.
But the true origins of it.
I mean, it was the music of the Youth Rebellion.
It, it was created because in 1973,
studio 54 was the hottest fucking studio on the planet
in New York City. And that's,
that was the biggest disco where everybody's going into Michael Jackson when
he's the hottest, you know, artist. And you know, Elton John,
everyone's in Studio 54,
but with Studio 54 did not let in,
was the local average black person from New York.
They couldn't get in Studio 54, you had to be a celebrity.
You had to be a star or you couldn't get in.
So because they couldn't get in those type of clubs, they said, okay,
fuck it. We're gonna hook up some turntables in the park.
We're gonna run some extension cords from the turntables all the way through a
bunch of extension cords plugged up,
going through somebody window in the project,
plugging into their wall and we're gonna party out here on the park.
And it started off with DJs just catching what they call beat breaks.
So like the beat is going on, then it break breakdown bunch.
They'll catch that and they'll loop it and it just go on and on.
And then it went from them doing that to dudes coming out there.
Now they break dancing and then it came out to the actual mc saying,
wait a minute, we got these beats going on.
Let me come out here and talk about us having a good time. So the first rappers,
when you look at Curtis Blow, the Sugar Hill game,
Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five,
they were the first ones that came with a actual message with a song called The
Message. But when you look at Curtis Bull and the Sugar Hill gang,
they came with Rapper's Delight. When you look at Blindy Rapture rap,
it was all about partying and having a good time.
Then Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five came with the message.
And that's when rap took a turn.
Because that song don't push me cause I'm close to the edge,
I'm trying not to lose my head.
It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.
We was really saying some shit at that point. Okay.
So that's when we started speaking on the social economic conditions of our
neighborhood. We started speaking on the injustices, police brutality.
I remember when NWA came out with their first album when, uh,
ice Cube and, and, uh, Dr.
Dre and e and Mc ran came out with that song Fuck The Police
and Straight Outta Compton. And I remember how the adults,
all they could hear was the profanity. And oh my God, they're cursing.
They're cursing. If you play that album right now,
it sounds like the most prolific politically conscious record
that you could,
that you'd ever heard When you go over the lyrics and listen to what they're
saying when you listen to an ice cube who was 17,
18 years old at the time,
what he was saying about how police are treating the black community and what
they're doing to us. And now we're at the point we're saying,
fuck that we fighting back. We ain't putting up with this shit.
You know what I'm saying? But that's what we were raised on.
We had Chuck D and Public Enemy. They were, they were,
everything they did was a political statement. Everything they did.
So we were raised, we had KRS One, you know,
we had Eric B and Rakim, you know, so these were conscious rappers.
And then we had the party rappers, LL Cool J Run dmc, you know, MC Hammer.
We can party, have a good time to 'em. But then we got,
then we had Tribe Called Quest come along, we can party,
have a good time and learn.
Cause they're gonna give us some afrocentricity shit.
They gonna give us everything. Then you got Nas who, okay,
here's another one that's changing the game.
Cause Nas is speaking from the street corner,
the dude on the street corner who's successful and conscious and aware of his
surroundings and what's going on.
But I still gotta deal with this shit and rise up above this shit.
But these are my people. He's like the son of Rakim. So when Nas came,
this was like one of our prolific thinkers cuz this motherfucker's talking about
these conditions, but he's maneuvering through it like a king.
And he's coming out of it. He's successful and he's winning.
And he's also our articulating our struggle,
our pain, our story, our our our our suffering,
our victories, our love, our hate.
He expressing all of that shit better than Shakespeare growing up in that
period. And growing up, like where I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Like I was there when Jeff, that's why I talk so much about race.
Cause Milwaukee, Wisconsin is one of the most segregated places on the planet.
It's one of, it's historically one of the, the most racist cities. You know,
like I said, Jeffrey Dahmer, I was the other day, Jeffrey Dahmer got arrested.
The infant mortality rate for babies born in Milwaukee County
is worse than anywhere in the country.
And it's worse than some third world countries.
The zip code I grew up in 5, 3, 2, 6.
That zip code leads the nation in locking up black males,
leaves the nation, which means it leaves the world.
Cause America leaves the world in locking up its citizens.
Well I think about the fact that this country was built with the blood,
the sweat and tears of blacks and the Chinese. And,
and then I think, well, okay, and then we have the industrial,
the prison industrial complex,
which is making billions of dollars on what Oh, the blood,
sweat and tears of the black communities. For the most part.
Slavery ain't went nowhere. It's just been refined.
It's just been refined. And as Ani DeFranco said in one of her songs,
you know sure. We've, we don't lynch really anymore.
We've moved on to the electric chair.
Yeah, yeah. You know, we don't call 'em slaves anymore. We call 'em criminals.
Once you're a criminal, we can take all your rights,
we can lock you up and you gotta do what we say, you know,
and you working for free.
And if and when you do get out of prison,
you now have something attached to your name for the rest of your life.
So that getting becoming a a member of in of society
is very difficult, hard to get driver's licenses hard. You can't vote anymore.
So your voice is completely removed.
So whatever it was that created the circumstance that you went to prison in
the first place, even if you do like figure your shit out or,
or whatever, and you get out, your voice is gone.
You don't even get a chance to vote for things that would change the
system.
Yeah, yeah. It's a whole process of being de dehumanized and erased.
And you know, here's the thing though, and I'm gonna keep it real with you,
Susan.
And this is where I bump heads with and get into it with black people a lot.
Okay? Because here's the thing,
we can sit here and pontificate and analyze and go over all of this shit
about what's wrong with everything and how it got this way. Like,
people make a fucking living off of our dysfunction.
Like just studying our dysfunction. And well the blacks, they do this,
they do the, and you know, it's enough information.
We're in the age of information where we can look up and find out anything.
You know, like information has replaced intelligence for the most part. Okay?
So we're in that age. So I'm to this point personally,
black people,
it's time to be accountable for our condition and our shit.
Okay? Reparations, yes, that is an issue that needs to,
all that needs to be addressed,
but it can't be addressed until we are accountable for our shit.
And on the same page, we're so divided and fractured as a people
just amongst ourselves that I,
I find myself moving beyond this whole black thing
and just getting into, look,
there are either miserable people or there are joyful people. That's true.
How the fuck, what color you're,
cause I ran into so many black people who do shit to keep us
in a fucked up position that ain't got nothing to do with white people.
Like your behavior has nothing to do with white people.
How you treat other people, how you act, how you carry yourself,
how you behave, how you talk to people, how you interact, which like,
just all of that shit,
that's a personal choice that you make every day.
And you know, I ain't gonna tell, I ain't gonna sit up here and say,
oh black people suffer from self loathing and blah blah. No,
it's a lot of fucked up shit that's been done to us. And there are some,
some things that need to be repaired, you know what I'm saying?
There are some things we have been fractured to the point where we do need to be
compensated for what's happened to us. But once you get to that point,
okay, you still have to be accountable for yourself. Or if I'm being honest,
you know, I understand the social engineering,
I understand all the shit that's taken place. But at the end of the day,
personal accountability is what I gotta go by. And black people,
we have to be accountable for how we act.
If I can sit up here and say all this other shit about white people about,
and I ain't even talking about white people. I'm talking about what the,
the system who is ran by white people, what it, what it has done to us.
If I can point all of that out, I can also point out, ok,
what are we doing to ourselves?
Well that's my whole point of both.
Things can exist at the same time and other people's oppression
can exist at the same time.
And racist and non-racist can exist at the same time.
I know everybody's exhausted. Everyone has generational trauma.
We all have skeletons in our closet.
There's all this pain that humanity carries.
But I think there has to be a moment where we
hold hands and say, look, this pain is ours. It's not yours.
It's not mine anymore. It's our pain.
It's a collective pain.
You know, I think we have to let people be who they're, you know,
and this is what I've always said,
like if you find some hillbilly white boy from fucking
wherever he's from, that just don't like black people, you know,
like I can't, to me, you can't make people, you know,
to me you cause more problems when you try to force people to be a certain way
that they don't wanna be.
Well we've all seen little kids from all different races interact with each
other and are the human race. Right? They don't, they don't know.
And they're not supposed to like each other. I,
I truly believe that hate and racism is
taught whether it's, I agree, subtle teaching,
whether it's being undermined or whether it's overt teaching.
Like if your grandfather was, you know, in the clan or something. Definitely.
And I, the poem that I spoke of at the top of this is that, you know,
you speak to, you know,
hating white people justifiably you know, from a history where
you are descended from people that were treated like shit.
And that's something that has to be acknowledged.
It's no wonder everyone's running around like fisticuffs,
right? So where do we,
where do we find the intersection where we acknowledge our ancestors,
we honor their pain,
but we release our own at the same time so that we can fucking move forward.
How do we do that?
It it goes back to like what you just said about that poem. Like, you know,
I don't know if you ever watched had to watch the movie Roots when you were
growing up. We had to watch that movie. I don't know,
like that show used to come on once a year at the same time on television.
And this is in the seventies and early eighties. And mind you,
I'm the only black kid in my class. So Ruth will come on,
everyone fucking watch it and now we're coming back to class the next day.
So everyone's fucking looking at me. Right? .
But it's,
my reason for saying that is to say there was a point when my grandmother
used to tell me stuff, or even just when I would experience stuff as a kid,
kids can sense what's fair and unfair quicker than anyone.
And just the unfair treatment that I would receive as a kid being in all white
schools, I used to get so angry.
Okay? And then when you look on,
you look at these programs and you see with dogs getting sick from sick,
dumb people from the sixties and water hoses and lynching. It's like,
how can you treat people like this?
So as a kid my anger was hate. Like,
I hate you now.
That was me looking at TV and seeing what's going on in, in,
in society when I'm at school every day.
I had my little different experiences where, you know,
I dealt with the prejudice and the racism and discrimination and all that,
but I always had one or two white kids that was cool with me.
So it was like this stream of consciousness,
even though I'm seeing everything that's going on,
I always had these one or two that was no,
we're not all like that. No we're not all like that.
Not necessarily them saying it just by how they treated me, how they acted.
They're behaving, they're showing me we're not all like that. You know,
they would speak up when it was some bullshit. No, that's bullshit. You know,
they would put their selves on the line in different situations.
And then another thing like I'm just not a hater.
So when I was a kid I felt like, ooh, I hate,
like I hated that white man who did that. Those white men who did that.
Or if I saw a movie and I hated them, kkk them white people,
I hated them. So I had to understand cause I'm just not a hater.
Like I can't just see, I don't care if you are racist, okay, that's,
that's your shortcomings, that's, that's your shit you gotta deal with.
I feel sorry for you. I don't hate you. I feel sorry for you. I think now,
like once again, the other day in that conversation
I run down all the shit of why black people feel the way they feel and
shit that just, that has been done to us.
And when I get finished saying all of this, the guy tells me, you know what,
you are a racist. He told me I'm a racist. He said, he said,
you're not gonna like to hear this but you hate white people .
And I was so frustrated when he said that to me. I was like, man, fuck you,
fuck this conversation. Fuck. And I just got off off. But after I,
after I,
it's like we can't even explain what happened to us and how we feel
about it without being called racist and we hate white people.
And I'm like, dude, you are projecting right now.
You know the shit that's been done.
I have every right to feel the way you're saying I feel,
but I'm saying I don't feel like that.
I'm saying that when you look at all of these things, it's frustrating,
especially when you're fighting these same battles every day and
people continue to act like they don't get it.
They don't understand or you just making some shit up. It's not like that.
Well and the truth of the matter is when a white guy wakes up in the morning and
he goes about his day, he gets to just go about his day. I imagine you,
you're, I mean you, I can't tell cuz you're sitting down, but you look at,
you're pretty decent sized black guy. You've got braids in your hair, you know,
you operating in your daily life,
I feel like you probably have to look over your shoulder a lot
and how fucking, how is that fair?
And there's nothing you can do about that. Zero.
Well I have to tam, my behavior.
Can't but you. But but what does it even mean? Like,
you don't get to operate as just a human being moving through the world.
And that's the point. It's like the,
the argument that I've heard from a lot of,
let's just say conservative side of it and I try to listen to what everybody has
to say cuz I'm curious about what everybody has to say.
But the idea that if we teach our kids this history that our,
our white children are too fragile, they can't handle it. It's,
they shouldn't have to hear this. To your point,
kids know what's fucking fair and what the truth is.
And the truth of the matter is you operate in the world in a different way
than someone your same age. You know this from,
from Wisconsin,
who doesn't have as much melanin in their skin. It's just a whole nother,
you walk into a bank and I look,
that pains me to say I don't want to believe that to be true,
but I'd be an idiot to not know that's true. Do you know what I mean? Like,
we all have that Pollyanna, well not all of us, some of us don't care,
but there is a Pollyanna want of what the world should look
like. But that doesn't mean that that's the reality.
Mm-hmm .
Again, I'm preaching to the choir as they say, but.
No, but you're, you're, you're making very good points that people need to,
to hear and acknowledge. Cause at the end of the day,
I think you said it earlier, I mean,
there's only one race and that's the human race. It,
it's hard to not know race when that's all
you've been treated by, is your color. Like you said,
when I walk down the street, just even my tone of voice,
I can't get too worked up. I can't get too excited,
I can't get too passionate about anything cause I'm angry now. You know,
I just can't. But if, if I'm a white boy, oh,
he's really fired up or he's so passionate about what he loves.
They could be saying it the same way I'm saying, but if I said, oh,
he seems so angry and why he, he's so upset. You know? So, you know,
just the way we have to, and, and even with the code switch, like,
I mean just, just having to know how to communicate in different rooms.
It's shit that white boys don't have to think about. You can wake up every day,
go out and just do you, you know what I'm saying? And you know,
we learn as time go on how to do us in a,
in a world that's ran by people who don't necessarily, you know, accept us.
You know what I'm saying? So, and it's, it's all good. Like it's,
it's like I never wanted to get it. I never want to get it twisted.
Like I'm sitting here crying and complaining because at the end of the day,
you know, we, we all are responsible for ourselves, you know,
and we all have to work on ourselves before we call ourselves fixing the larger
society. And you know,
we gotta get our own selves right and get our minds right and our behavior
right. And learn how to respond and not react and you know, and,
and we have to want for, you know, other people what we want for ourselves.
It's very simple, you know? So, and, and I also am of the school of thought of,
you know, the conversation that we're having right now.
It's one of those conversations where it's like,
I honestly think collectively the social conscious is moving in the,
in the right direction. Like I think the average person do want better,
the average person. Um, they don't wanna see anyone suffering.
They don't wanna see anyone struggle. Everyone can relate to suffering.
Everyone can relate to, you know, hard times to a certain extent.
Everyone knows what it's like to go through these human conditions, you know?
And we have so much technology.
I mean like we're talking right now and the whole world can hear us.
You know what I'm saying? So I I, I personally,
even though I have to deal with these issues, this is why I'm a writer,
you know, writing is therapeutic for me because you can get these issues out.
You can put 'em out there on the platform, people can discuss them, people can,
you know,
reflect on themselves and their behaviors and their thoughts cause that's where
it starts with us fixing ourselves, you know,
and just being accountable for ourselves.
So I honestly do with everything we've talked about, cuz it's been kind of a,
a heavy load of topics. But with that being said,
I also am very optimistic about humanity because of technology
right now. One, right,
the right conscious thought can switch everything instantly. So.
I agree that's thinking back on what you were saying about the music and how
music was such a great mouthpiece for change,
specifically in rap, right? I think Rachel mentioned.
Well yeah, I work with, uh,
a company gang management, uh,
GMG T can get it on Instagram at Gang mgt.
So G A N g Mgt that was started by my brother,
my close friend, he's my brother. I call him my brother Ris.
His name is Peter Pan and him along with other,
a group of good guys, uh, reg outta New York. Uh, cash out of Philly,
my myself. And, and it is really a, a a solid group of individuals,
but we work with and manage, uh,
some of the biggest artists in the game right now. Mainly, uh, he, my,
my my my partner, uh, Eris, he started managing Chief Keith,
who is, is an icon in the culture. Uh,
he started managing him a little over 10 years ago. We're still working with,
with with Sosa today along with the rest of the guys Gloria Gang.
And these are guys outta Chicago and they have basically been the
trendsetters in a genre of hip hop music known as drill rap.
It's an amazing story of some young black men who really
made it out of a situation and an environment in which death
is an everyday thing, you know, and poverty and you know,
drugs and homicides. That's just an everyday thing.
I've always taken my hat off to these young guys and I've saluted them. Cause
so many of us don't make it out of those conditions. You know,
these guys grew up in the projects on the south side of Chicago,
you know, by the time. They're 9, 10, 11 years old, they're already in gang.
And really before that, they born into that. The families they come from.
That's uncles, brothers, fathers. So you have no choice.
I always tell Sosa, that's what we call Chief Keef. I always tell Sosa,
you know, the ancestors chose you. You know, I mean,
this kid is really a fucking genius. He's not, you know,
if you just look at him when he is rapping, I mean, yeah, he's,
he's good at that. Whatever. If you knew behind the scene,
the work that this kid puts in, you know,
he produces all of his own tracks. You know, I've never seen him write anything.
He just steps up and says his shit. And he's constantly working,
constantly working. I mean, the way everything he got set up, I mean,
he does his own fashion, his own, you know,
his own design on games, just everything, you know, he's constantly working.
He's made a way for himself, his family.
He's taken care of his family since, you know, he got his first deal with Jimmy.
Ive,
in Interscope Records when he was 16 years old and he signed for
6 million and I believe he's 27 now.
So he's been taking care of his family.
He's been the man of the house for the last 12 years of his life,
since he was 14 years old.
I, I mean, 14 a baby, first of it's just so young, 27.
So young still. Yeah. And I read some of his background,
and again, that speaks to this thing of being a voice for, uh,
for a particular group of people and being the mouthpiece saying,
this is our reality. And then as you put it, you know,
having choices as to, you know, there's like that thing, again,
it's that dichotomy of have a choice, but have no choice.
How do you, how do you deal with that? How do you,
how do you move through that world?
And then what responsibility do you have when you, as you say,
are given a gift from God to, to be the spokesperson,
if you will?
And then how do you help Auger change and,
and move the needle a along?
Well, you know,
I think that the thing that is unique and special about Sosa,
you know, and I say this to people all the time at this point in his career,
you know, he's more influential, in my opinion, in my opinion,
he's more influential than Tupac or Biggie.
Wow. That's big. That's a big compliment.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the reason I say that is cause
not only did he, did he godfather in a whole new genre of music,
okay.
But if you look at the controversy that he sustained and that he's
been through before he signed this deal, I mean,
everything from people thought he was dead and got shot and killed by the cops,
to him shooting back at the cops, to being locked up, caught with guns,
you know, just the on and on.
If you just look at all of the controversy that he's
weathered the storm through and sustained,
and to find him now, 10, 11, 12 years later in the game,
and now he's doing capsules with True Religion, Adidas,
uh, rest in peace. Virgil, before he passed on,
they did some things with the Off-White. And to see that he's a leader,
he's still a leader in a trendsetter. If you look at what he's doing,
others are still following mm-hmm. .
And he has a cult like following. And,
and then all of his friends and his cousins that he's brought along with him on
the journey. And like I said, you know,
taking care of his mom and his grandma before she passed, rest in peace,
but taking care, putting his sister through college and, you know, just the,
the, the people, his guys that's locked up that he sent money to in jail.
You know, just all of that shit. This is still a boy. He's 27 years old.
He is a kid. I got kids his age. You know,
so just to show her that responsibility and still be here as a
creative, with all due respect to Tupac and Biggie, like,
I'm not trying to say that disrespectfully, but I'm saying the longevity,
the influence, the overall impact of the culture,
the creation of an entire genre, you know,
and then to still remain relevant amongst his peers.
He's always been a leader, never followed type dude. You know?
And I respect that, you know, so interesting. That's just my opinion.
That's my opinion. Well.
Of course, I I think he sounds fascinating too. Rachel said I,
I need to interview him as well.
Oh, definitely Sosa, definitely. Yeah. And he don't fuck with everybody.
So it would be interesting, I don't know if you looked up any of his interviews,
but.
I haven't seen any of his interviews.
I I only read a little bit on his bio because I knew I was gonna be talking with
you.
Yeah. And he has an interview in particular with a therapist.
Just look up Chief Keef and the therapist. Okay.
You love it. I'll check it out. You'll love it. It sounds fascinating. I mean,
it's not like my everyday world I would ever intersect
with, with a rap star, cuz it's just not the, the world I run in.
But that doesn't mean that it's not somebody I wanna talk to.
It would be just so great if, again,
we lived in a world where everybody's sort of intermingled all the time.
But the reality is that's just not how the world works. Yeah.
But this is the problem. This is why I have a show like this. This is,
everybody needs to hear all these voices because it's the only way we're
gonna see ourselves in each other.
And I think this, this is a solution to the problem, what you're saying.
Cause once again, the technology has allowed us to,
you know, press a couple buttons and you can be on with anyone.
Isn't that bonkers? And then, you know, you.
You, I love it.
You have intersecting friends like Rachel who I adore and you know,
you adore and we're all one person away from everybody
else. That's, that's pretty cool. .
That's amazing. That's amazing. We have Chief Keef, we have, uh,
another artist who's one of the hottest young artists coming up right now.
His name is too rare. He's outta Philadelphia.
The number two r a r e I mean this, this,
this kid is going crazy like on TikTok and Instagram
and you know,
he's always coming up with a new dance and a new song and the kids love him.
So I believe he, I believe he was up for double XL freshman of the year.
He may have won that. I'm not for sure. I gotta check.
We're working with another rapper out of Atlanta named Lil Na.
So we work with everyone from Angie Stone to walk a flock, a flame to.
Freaking love Angie Stone.
Yeah, Angie, that's my girl. I love Angie. Oh, work with her son.
I don't know if you know the, uh, singer DeAngelo.
Of course.
Okay. You know, her and DeAngelo have a son. This dude,
his name is Svo Twain.
S w a y v o t w a i n,
SBO Twain.
The name like that.
I bet he is a good writer cuz you can't take t Twain into your name.
. Exactly, exactly, exactly.
That's a bonkers baby mix. That's, I can't even imagine the level of talent.
Yeah. And he's just getting started.
He just did a remix of his father's song, sbm.
It's nuts. So yeah.
That's some music royalty right there. That's very cool. I'll have to check.
Definitely.
Will you, uh, do me the honor to read the poem.
If you don't wanna read the whole thing, that's okay.
But I would love for you to,
to read the poem you wrote and could you give a little background as to when and
why you wrote it?
Okay. Well, I, a project,
it's, it's, it's a multifaceted, it started off just as a novel
and then I talked to a friend about the novel I was working on,
and he had the idea and said this would make a great series.
So I started writing the screenplay simultaneously as I'm writing a novel,
the story is about,
or the novel is about a story that my grandmother would
tell me sometimes, like laying down,
like when I was spend the night by our house
and we would just start talking about stuff. And like I said,
I was one of those kids that would always ask like, grandma,
where you grow up at? Or what was it like? Or, you know,
maybe something happened on the news.
Like this one story that I'm about to read,
the first time I heard the story was in particular was I was,
I believe about eight or nine years old. And a guy,
a black man in Milwaukee named Ernest Lacey,
had just gotten choked and killed by the police.
And there was like marches and everything because people
were protesting saying that, you know, the police, you know,
sort of like the same George Floyd, the same story, you know,
just some shit like that.
Like they were arresting him and they choked him to death over an arrest.
So I'm working on a project
that's basically my life story
and it's dealing with my
interaction with as, as being, you know,
a black person growing up and, and where I grew up at
and having to deal with, you know,
going to school and living amongst just a lot of racism and prejudice and shit
like that. Just having to deal with that. And
in that process from kindergarten, basically through college,
that was a situation. Like I've never had a black teacher, a black instructor,
anything like that. But throughout that process
I found a connection with white women
and that connection with white women,
it led to
a lot of like problems within my own family.
A amongst people that I grew up with, uh,
definitely amongst black women. And
my connection with white women was something that caused me
to write a book that I'm also writing as a screenplay right now called White
Sex. And it's about the taboos,
the stereotypes, the issues, the, the judgments,
ostracization,
just everything that you deal with as a black man when you deal with white
women. And it also talks about how
it affects, you know,
me and my relationship with black women within my family
as well as, as well as within the black community. So
this, what I'm reading about
is part of the novel White Sex,
but it goes to,
and it's speaking about the psychology behind how America
has had this taboo,
this taboo mentality about white women and black men having sex.
And the, the, the story that my grandmother told me when I was younger
had me so full of hate and rage that
later on in life
when I was a young adult and I found out how upset white
dudes would get when they found out me.
And like definitely if it was one of the white girls that they all liked the,
the popular one or the pretty one.
If they found out that me and her had sex or did anything,
they would get so pissed. They would be, they would be ready to fight me.
In some instances they did.
I saw how much that upset them and that upset
them to the extent that being called a nigger
upset me.
So that whole psychology of do I like
this white girl for real or am I fucking her on some revenge sex to make white
boys upset?
Just this whole confusion about having sex with white girls led to white sex.
So this selection that I wrote
is part of the psychology that I was going through throughout all of that,
what have we done to each other? Where has the humanity and humans gone?
I'm often consumed with issues of race and it's exhausting.
I'm of feeling like I have to continuously defend and justify my existence
where I'm from. We learned early on not to show feelings.
That's a sign of weakness.
What if I cry and complain that'll make everything better?
Nobody cares about my feelings. I'm tired of feeling misunderstood.
I'm so over having to be understanding how I feel and
what I think don't matter to the rest of the world.
Black men aren't valued fuck feelings.
We pay such a large price just to feel worthless. Fuck the world.
Think about what my father and his father and his father had to go through.
Living in a country that thrives upon the love of Hayden and killing black
people, black men in particular
victims of terrorists and living in a system of terrorism.
The stories of murder and torture were often the subject of late nights with my
grandmother when I was still only a child,
no more than seven or eight years old.
I could see that old white racist bastard playing as day right now just
like it was yesterday.
I heard this story at least a hundred times by the time I was eight years old.
But these times she told it, it felt like the first time I heard it.
She was only four years old in 1928 living in Walnut Grove, Mississippi.
When on a late August night a gang of about 13 horsemen wearing white sheets
surrounded the house and demanded that her grandfather came out.
As she would tell the story, I could sense her pain of recalling the situation.
It was though her voice would find a deeper sorrow with each sentence.
The bedroom would be dark and only the streetlights and moon would allow me to
see the tears swelling up in her eyes.
My head would be laying on her stomach for some reason.
I love to hear the sound of her voice through her stomach,
along with all the other little weird noises and sounds that her intestines and
digestive system would make. Her skin would smell like v's.
Vapor rub as she used it on her hands to help with her arthritis.
The arthritis had came from years of cleaning wealthy white people's homes in
Mississippi as a team and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as an adult,
until she finally saved up enough money to open up a diner she'd have
on her nightgown.
And I'd be in my lawn Johns and she'd tell me this story of watching her
grandfather and uncle being dragged out of the house at gunpoint.
It's like she never could get over what happened that night.
Sometimes I feel like maybe I've never gotten over that night and I wasn't even
there. But it felt like I was, each time she told the story,
she had to continue to tell the story.
So we knew what happened and who did it. White people,
she recall how the men in white sheets took the butts of their guns and smashed
out the teeth of her grandfather.
Her stomach would make a noise of hunger pains.
And I could hear the horrifying scream of my great great grandfather's cry.
Like she swallowed the night of his murder and housed it in her belly for
safekeeping.
She explained how others used the butt of their rifles to smash the genitals of
her uncle.
She remembered blood squirting out of her grandfather's mouth and landing on her
face.
I would listen while doodling with the button by her stomach on her nightgown.
I would listen with the sense of terrified anger,
wanting to kill the white man that did this to my grandmother's grandfather I
wanted to kill. And I was only seven or eight years old.
What have we done to each other as my ear will be pressed against her stomach
screeching and eerie sounds at her digestive tract would make,
would turn into the screams of her grandfather and uncle,
both pleading for their lives while being beaten and tied up with both hands
behind their backs and ankles together trapped in her stomach,
screaming from the pain, the agony of vicious blows to the head and body
as she would adjust herself in the bed.
Her old bones would crack and the sounds of her bones cracking would only be
echoes of the breaking bones that cracked in the necks of her grandfather and
uncle being hanged by the gang of racist white Ku Klux Klan members.
And why did they drag my great great grandfather and and Greatuncle out of the
house, beat them and hang them?
Cause they just found out that my great-great-grandfather had purchased the land
that his grandparents,
parents and siblings have been slaves on and worked their entire lives.
He purchased it from the lady who was the last living air of the land and she
sold it to him and moved to the city of Jackson.
Them evil bastards killed Floyd and Milt and cold blood
and told us we better get our black asses outta Walnut Grove.
Or it'll be some more dead niggas swinging from a tree. We ain't go nowhere,
baby. They was gonna have to kill us all.
Papa paid for that land and blood and it stayed in the family.
Nobody was ever charged with those murders, but the whole town knew who did it.
Old Calvin McDonald baby. Don't you ever trust white folks?
You hear me? She'd always say that when she finished the story.
Yes, grandmama, I say unto her belly with tears of anger
and hurt from my grandmother's pain crawling down my face.
What have we done to each other? What have we really done to each other?
First of all, that's extraordinarily beautiful. When you
finished creating that work, what did you read it to your grandmother?
Oh, she's not alive. None of my grandmothers are alive.
What's, what's your grandmother's name that this is.
Lucille Johnson.
Lucille Johnson. When we spoke earlier,
when we speak of generational trauma, I mean the,
you encapsulated it so beautifully and painfully.
How do we,
how do we come out of that pain? Like how do you,
as a kid that was told to not trust white people justifiably so
with the history that runs through your veins.
I mean that's the thing too, right?
It's in our d these traumas are in our D How do
we take that out and move forward?
Is it even possible?
Definitely it's possible. Definitely. You know, it's just work.
You just gotta do the work, you know? And this is the work, you know, these,
these things are, you know,
like I've read that a million times and I've never got like that, you know,
you know, you just have to keep working. You have to work through it.
And I don't know, you, you ask a great question. I don't know.
I mean it, it's tough though. It's tough. It,
it makes it a little bit easier though when you do talk about this stuff
and when you do talk to someone,
I guess that's why therapy is important.
When you talk to someone who understands or listens or you know,
those things are important cause these emotions can be trapped in you and they
can be so suppressed that you could think that they're not there or that you're
okay and that you're fine and then fam outta nowhere, you can be triggered.
You know? So when you find those triggers, just keep working,
just keep doing the work and know that it's nothing that you did.
It's something that has been placed in your programming at some point.
And you have to, you know,
keep working on that hardware until it becomes a software.
You have to have a new software, you know, you know, go from there.
Did you find the answer to your question that you had about
what it was, about the connection you felt toward white women?
Other than if you're sur I mean,
we emulate toward what we experienced, right?
That's one another reason why representation matters. But for you personally,
did you find an answer?
Hell yeah.
I feel like it's so crazy cause I was just talking to my guy about this.
He was like, man, , I remember when he asked,
well I remember when my other guy asked me like, dude,
why you fuck with white chick?
And I used to say it like jokingly because it was a rap lyric
that Nas had said, but it was a lyric that was just really,
it really resonated. And the lyric was,
he said, I got some. He said, I got no game.
It's just some bitches understand my story. He said, I ain't got no game,
it's just some bitches. So I used to say I ain't, and they used say, why you?
I used to say, cause they just understand me, right? They understand my story.
So I used to say that cause of that rap line, I used to repeat that rap line.
But when I started seriously thinking about it,
I mean that was ultimately the truth. And then I started,
I did a deep dive. Like I used to first it started with, okay,
for some reason white chicks just relate to me like they fuck with me.
Like if I explain like if we having a conversation,
I say I feel like this blah blah blah. Ok, they understand how I feel.
Oh I get that. I understand. You know, I like that. You know, it was,
it was no combativeness. Even if they felt differently,
they still would present their different opinion in a harmonious friendly type
way. Being in school, being an athlete,
I mean I was in school in on all white campuses. So just my proximity,
that's what I was around. Like I wasn't at A H B C U, I wasn't at, you know,
there wasn't black women around. So that's what was around.
But to go even deeper and say where I honestly think the connection came
in was
I feel like we were oppressed by the same entity white men.
And that's where we connected and related.
I feel like a lot of shit that, especially when I grew up in the eighties,
the mid to late eighties, nineties, like, you know
that. And that's why I always go back to rap music.
Like rap music did a hell of a lot for race relations and fucking interracial
relationships, you know what I'm saying? But before then, you know,
it was like white girls were told you can't talk to black guys, you know?
And we was told, you better not bring no white girl home.
You know what I'm saying? So, but
our oppression, like white dudes would always do shit to us.
You know what I'm saying?
And those same white dudes that did shit to us would be the ones that's doing
shit to they white women.
So now when me and these women are talking about shit and she's telling me about
how much Brad hates my guts and everything he said about me and why he's such a
prick because he did X, Y, and Z to so and so and so, you know,
now Brad's the asshole, you know, fucking Brad.
So that, that was, I think that was the connection.
And I was just always in that world, you know?
And then black chicks would be like, oh, you act like a white boy.
You know what I'm saying? Or you act like a white boy. So I'm like, whatever,
you know? Okay. Whatever, you know.
But I know the first rule of the game is like, who like you?
So I'm not gonna get caught up in what color you are. If you like me,
I'm gonna figure out what you're all about. And then I think it's a,
and this is what caused me to write the series.
Like my first few girlfriends were black chick, right?
All of them cheated. And I think that did something psychologically.
Cause I know white chicks cheat, everybody cheat. But those first three,
this was like my freshman year in high school, I was in Love Love, right?
, she cheated like a motherfucker. .
And then the next one was uh, my senior year in high school.
And that's when I really thought, okay, I'm in love. Cause
she was in college
and when I graduated high school and chose the college that I was gonna go to,
she even transferred and came to the college I was at and ended up fucking
a dude on my team. This was black chicks. And then look,
each time that happened,
it was always a white chick there that was understanding .
. I we're shaped by our experiences.
I mean that's just hands down what it is.
But you bring up a really interesting point in that women
operating in the world also have to have their head on a swivel
because their prey in a world of predators.
And that's, that's a really interesting comparison.
As a black man, you're, you also are prey.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And and I always go back in history, like white women,
they have been the number one aids and helping like civil rights
movements, anything where people are being oppressed.
White women have always been the ones who stepped up to say, let's help this.
Cause they could always relate because their men have never treated them
as equals. So that's where the whole white sex, what I'm writing is driven on.
And it's because we both had to deal with the white men in that capacity of
you're not gonna be our equals, we're gonna tell you what to do,
what you can do, what you can do, what you can be, what you can't be,
where you can go, where you can't go.
We're gonna tell you all that we're gonna treat you like a child.
And that's where our connection come from. And a lot of white women, you know,
come on man,
there's been a lot of white sex just outta resentment for how white men have
treated them.
I'm gonna go fuck a black dude just cause I know you don't want me to.
But this is where we start talking about again the fetishization of cultures.
Mm-hmm. and race. Exactly.
Yes. And that's what makes this exciting to write. Cause it's so much of it,
I'm sure.
,
I mean it sounds really intriguing and it's one of those topics where,
you know, people whisper in in the quiet places, these same ideas,
but people are scared to say them out loud. Like, what does it mean if X, Y,
Z And for you to understand yourself enough to, to ask the questions.
Why am I attracted.
I'm attracted to beautiful people, beautiful women, right?
But my experience in 19, you know, 91,
I'm in North Dakota and I'm around white girls who've never seen a black
guy before. They've never seen black people before. I feel like a superhero.
She's like, oh my god, can I touch your skin? Yeah, that's a.
Weird to say to somebody.
Yeah, but you gotta rewind the tape. That's not all. It's woke information.
This is 1991.
That's like something things the serial killer says .
You know, when I look back, you're totally right.
But when I was 18 years old and I'm horny and this girl just
wants to do whatever I say do, this is white sex.
I've never seen a black guy. Oh my God, your skin is so soft. Oh my God,
you're here. Oh, you smell. I mean,
and then just to get the conversations and them telling me their background and
where they're from and how they was raised and with their dads and
Oh yeah.
How as a father, you say you have children. Yes.
How as a father has your experiences to now helped you shape
their young minds? And you said they're in their twenties now,
so how has that been seeing how they navigate the world?
Well, I got three black girls, you know,
I've always given it to my daughters in the raw, you know, they know their dad.
I've always treated them like people that are growing up to be
individuals. So I'm gonna be your friend and I'm gonna guide you.
I'm not here to tell you what to do. I think that's the best way to parent.
I think a lot of people think, oh, don't be your kid's friend. Be his parent.
Okay. Yeah. Well one day that parenting, you're always gonna be the parent.
We know that. But if you don't have a relationship,
if you don't have a friendship with your child and you just come in as the
disciplinary to tell you what you can and what you can't do,
then they'll get to, they'll get to a point where they're not sharing with you.
And I want my kids to always share with me,
and I know that they don't belong to me.
I was just an agent for them to get here. They belong to themselves.
So I always want to leave that space of respect
for what they want to do. And you know, and let them know, you know,
you have your own mind, you form your own opinions.
I'm just here to give you information and give you what I've been through for
you to, for, for you to glean off of and learn as much as possible. So,
you know, my oldest daughter, she's doing amazing. She graduated from, uh,
H B C U Clark University down in Atlanta. She's living in Brooklyn,
New York right now. She's just taking her lsat.
So she's waiting on the scores that she wants to get into school that she wants
to go to. I think she just picked one,
but I'm not gonna put that out there right now. My second daughter,
she's just like me. She's a rebel. She made me a grandfather a year ago,
. So you know, she's out here doing her thing. And then my youngest,
she's 12 years old and she's, she's amazing. Just really a good kid.
She's graduating from the sixth grade this week. Uh,
and she's doing amazing and things and swimming.
She's gotten some state qualifying time. So I spend a lot of time with her,
you know, going to swim meets and things like that.
That's cool. I, her generation's gonna save us all. Let's hope .
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Know. And they, I mean, there's, these kids are smart. Yeah.
These kids are very wise. And that's why I'm optimistic. Cause my 12 year old,
my, all of my kids, I mean, these kids are so mature
and they've seen so much and they experienced so much and they
deal with, I mean, look, these kids have been through covid and, you know,
all kinds of shit. You know, they're ahead of their time. They're,
they're gonna make the world a better place. I'm thoroughly convinced.
Amen to that. So bier,
tell people how folks can find you out there in the worldwide web aons of life.
.
You know what, I don't even really do too much. I'm on Instagram, Tobi Shapiro,
S a b i r s h a p i r o. And uh,
that's pretty much the only thing I've, I've put up.
I get it.
Yeah. You know, .
I get it.
It goes back. It goes back. And I always tell my daughter, she's like, dad,
you know everyone, why don't you put up this? Why don't you do that?
And I said, baby. Cause it's like, we live in this era,
y'all era of like, when we came up,
you really had to be who you said you were. You know,
like you had status without putting up a post.
Like you went places and people knew who you were and what you represented
and what you did.
And you couldn't sit behind a keyboard and make up this fake persona and all
these things. So I try not to get caught in it.
Cause I see so many people around me,
especially you would be amazed at how many people that are in the industry that
really get into the likes and the follows.
And they're like so wrapped up in that.
I used to post shit all the time with my stories, but I scale back.
And when this, this, uh, novel wraps up,
I will try to utilize it for what it's, what it,
what it can be beneficial for as far as promoting that and things like that.
Yeah. And you're welcome anytime to come back and talk about the novel.
We didn't really even dig into that very much,
but I feel like we covered so much good stuff. Thank you.
Thank you so much. I had a great time.
It was super fun.
Yes it was.
Thank you for listening everybody. Bye.
Rate review and subscribe to Hey Human podcast on iTunes or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thanks.
Bye.