In this conversational segment, JD and Speaker B explore why mainstream claims of diversity often sidestep the deep‑seated harm inflicted on Black culture. JD argues that many people proclaim anti‑racist credentials by highlighting assistance to other non‑white groups while refusing to confront the specific historical and psychological wounds of Black people. The dialogue moves to the legacy of COINTELPRO, noting how early Black community organizations were transformed into criminalized gangs through state repression, which helped sustain a cycle of violence. Speaker B connects this to generational “curses,” emphasizing how the removal of fathers and the breakdown of family structures perpetuate trauma across generations. JD then pivots to a broader economic analysis, describing racism as a form of mass bullying rooted in a scarcity mentality: competition for limited resources fuels a need to dominate, while the physiological reality of melanin limits Black people’s exposure to sunlight, a fact he frames as an overlooked structural disadvantage. He further critiques the concept of “prestige,” arguing that societal symbols of value—elite universities, luxury cars, affluent neighborhoods—are built on illusion and trickery that obscure the truth about Black identity and potential. The conversation concludes that the education system and cultural narratives deliberately conceal these realities, preventing Black individuals from fully understanding and overcoming the constraints imposed upon them.
Chapters
And then on the other side of it, and I saw this, and this was one of the things I really struggled with in Los Angeles especially, is bragging about the diversity but not wanting to heal the harm of Black culture. It's so much easier to say, look, I'm not racist, look at how I help these other brown-skinned people, and look at where, you know, I help the people from India, and even these Africans that came over, or even these people from South America, or whatever, look at what we're doing for them, we're not racist, we want to right? But we don't want to go and look a Black person in the eye and say, okay, what really do you think of me? And what has the harm that we've done? And how can we really repair that? That takes a different type of psychological, uh, you know, effort.
Yeah, that, that's heavy right there. And that's exactly how it is, man. I'm listening to everything you said. You know, like you say, you said something, and I remember talking to this one lady, she wrote a book and I can't remember exactly how she said it, but it, you know, you made me think of it when you said it. Like, y'all didn't make it seem like it's our fault, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, it's, it's our fault. You put us in this situation and then you blame us for what's going on with all the chaos that may be going on and this and that, and then you blame us for it. But this is the situation that you have presented us with. And I know, man, we can go on and on about that, about, you know, times past, taking the man out the house and, you know, for welfare purposes and things like that.
The COINTELPRO efforts, the, the, the, the gang violence that happens now was not how it was going when it— when Black folks were creating those gangs in the, in the beginning. Where, matter of fact, they weren't even called gangs, right? Those were community organizations and other things. And then all of a sudden through efforts of COINTELPRO, police, FBI, and everybody else, and taking those resources away, you start to see that, that type of stuff happen.
Yeah, taking, taking the man out the house. And when you take the man— and that's even today, but that was something that has been, you know, it's been generational, right? So, so sometimes when you have things generational, like they say, generational curses, and things just trickle down. And so if I didn't have my, my, my father there to actually raise me and teach me on how to be a man. And so now I go to the same process because that's my mindset, right? So now I may teach my son the same thing, or I may be absent from the family. But like you say, there's something that y'all created and put on us a long time ago that we still dealing with. So I like that, man. I, I like what you doing. So, so JD, man, tell me, tell me this, on your journey to figure out the root cause of racism What have you found in this area?
So going back to that, um, that, uh, scarcity mentality, right? When you start to want to win something, if you look at them at racism, it's really a massive form of bullying, right? And so now we have this competition thing. And if you look at our economic system, I don't know if you ever took an economics class, but day one in economics they talk about the scarcity of resources We're all competing to control those resources. So, right, not knowing the Earth actually has much more than enough for all of us to share in, to meet our needs and comforts and be able to enjoy our lives. So when we start to look at that scarcity mentality and that approach of how do we win, and we recognize, somebody has to recognize along the way hundreds of years ago that this less melanated skin doesn't allow me to be on the planet, like feet down on the grass, in the sun as long as you. You get to absorb the, the plant, you know, the sun. You get to be out connected to the planet. That's why people with more melanin in their skin are in areas of greater resources than those of us that don't have it. These are just real facts that we don't want to talk about. So I don't like to lessen the word whiteness because it's not white. I'm missing something that's very important to me. To be out in the sun, right? I can only be outside less hours than you and my friends can. And that's a reality. And that's not an advantage. That's not a superior thing. That's not a supremacy thing. But if I'm a bully and you look at bullying when you go to school, something happened to that kid that's bullying others, trying to make them feel less than him because he feels less than them. Well, in this, the same thing happens in mass bullying of white folks. Something goes on inside of us that makes us feel less than, that we have to attack when we feel, oh my goodness, somebody else is shining instead of me. If I can't feel like I can compete at the same level, then I got to do some other things. There's a term, or the word prestige. The word prestige is we hold this in such high regards. But if you look at the definition of the word prestige and you go to the origin of that word, that means trickery, conjuring tricks and illusion, right? So now what we hold in high regards, what we think is valuable— this education system, this is the most prestigious university, Harvard and Yale— and okay, what if they're tricking us and creating an illusion? What if in these wealthy neighborhoods, these ideas that these cars are so much more valuable, this house is so much more valuable because of the people that live here, they're so much better than us because of this prestige, this illusion. And if you think of conjuring tricks, it's not what you can see that tricks you, it's what you can't see. So in our education system, it's not what we're learning. We're not learning the truth about ourselves, and we're keeping Black folks from learning the truth about themselves. That's the trickery, right? Not knowing and understanding that doesn't allow me to be the greatest human that I can be. And recognize, okay, can't be out in the sun as long. Here's the things that I can do naturally to help me, you know, still enjoy my time.
