Afrofuturism #4

YouTube. But it's not. I don't have the control panel.

So we don't want to take a chance of doing an hour so long lecture here that we can't then.

Right, Fine. Got it. So we'll have to try. No, but they're getting ready to switch. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that Google Hangouts is going to be deactivated by the 25th. It says that the app is not. Did not send proper information. So this problem is on their part. Do you have access to our YouTube channel?

Yeah, but it looks like they don't have direct recording. It just ended it in January, it looks like. So the other option I know I've done.

They take time. They. They do it and then. No, I'm talking about to see whether or not it's going through from Webinar Jam.

Oh, on your page.

Yes.

I may not have access to your page now.

All. Which one.

There two views. Probably both me.

So it's recording.

Maybe.

I guess. I guess we can take a chance. Otherwise it'll take us time to do the research to figure out. Yeah, it's recording you. It's just not for broadcasting.

I don't know if people can see.

It once they have the link.

It's live now all we have to.

Do is record the lecture, share the link after the lecture like we do every week.

All right. All right. So we don't know whether or not you can look at this right now. If you can, then we really apologize for the confusion. So this is just the technology of things not working out properly.

This is the first time this site has let us down. So we apologize for the delay in getting this video to you.

And we're going to do this. We're going to go. And if we have to redo it, then we'll redo it. But right now we want to. Because we want to be able to get it to you as rapidly as possible. We're going to go ahead and do this right now and apologies for my obvious irritation with the technology.

And only the technology.

And only the technology. Not my perfect wife, of course, who was just trying to provide a pizza for our son and needed to have food and sustenance.

Nothing to do with the technical glitch. But I was here by. I will point out. But anyway, here we are. This is. I'm actually so sorry that we're not able to do this with the live group. I love the messaging function. Maybe we can have some kind of forum on Facebook after you've had a chance to see the video so you can say all of those things that you would have said during the line broadcast. Because this is going to be such a good broadcast.

Yes, it is.

Free Newsom talking about Steve's great short story 50 Shades of Greys, talking about Kendrick Lamar's all. Our guest is Bree Newsom. You watched her short film Wake. She also climbed up the flagpole at the South Carolina State Building and took down that Confederate flag after the Charleston massacre. So that was a huge morale boost for a lot of us at a time when we really needed a morale boost. It was a horrible time. And also you'll see that the thing that really coalesces here and brings these works together is that there is this nexus between Afrofuturism and social justice. It's not imaginary. Steve, you and I went to Princeton in the fall of 2015. They had a whole conference called Ferguson is the Future where they invited artists and activists, and we all interacted. It was like the biggest family reunion I can think of since we lost Octavia. But also activists like DeRay McKesson and others I follow on Twitter in dialogue about literal world building, literally changing the world. And as you think about it in terms of the futurism, which in a lot of the works, as you've seen, also has an eye toward history. It's no wonder that black American artists have used Afrofuturism as allegory to create images of heroism mythologies to really help us get through the pain of discrimination.

It looks like somebody may have liked our YouTube video. So I'm not sure what's going on.

We can't see you, we can't see your comments, but if you're there, great.

Thank you for waiting. We're so sorry if this is screwed up. So just, you know, welcome to the Afro future, right?

Yeah. Well, I'm not claiming it as Afro future, but welcome to the future technology. So, yeah, this is why I don't want flying cars. Can I just say, for this precise why I don't want.

So listen, so let's kind of get into things and, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna do whatever it takes to make up for this. They're gonna be switching over to a new technological platform as Google Hangouts goes the way of the dodo. I don't know exactly what they're gonna replace it with, but we will have that checked before we do another, before we do our next session. Just, you know, hang in with us right now. I guess the first thing we Want to talk about. We're gonna. We're gonna. Yeah, okay, go ahead. So what's. What's going on?

Well, we're working on our pilot script, which has been very exciting. We're very close to being able to turn in our revision. And again, this is a black lead in the project, and it has horror elements. So we're trying to sort of ride on that wave of Afrofuturism, Afro surrealism that is starting to take off. I think we mentioned even in the meeting they were like, remembering get out when this happened. So could we pace it kind of more like. So people are already using get out as sort of a template.

They're trying to figure out how to make things work. There are plenty of allies out there, and what they really want to know is, if we back your project, will we look good? So it's not like they're just standing there saying, we don't want to do it. Although undoubtedly there are some who don't. Even somebody who thinks, I wouldn't watch this necessarily. If they can get the feeling that if they put this on the air, they will be successful, they might very well be willing to take that chance to do the thing that they're not particularly crazy about in exchange for furthering their career. So your primary responsibility is going to be to create something that will actually make them look good, even if they're not. You know, they could be bigots. And if they know that they're going to be able to, you know, buy the. Pay the mortgage on their mansion, they put you on the air, they'll swallow that pill and do it. But the same way, they could be an ally. And if you don't bring your professional level skills, if they have the sense that it's not going to work, then they will regretfully say no. So your primary responsibility is not to figure out where the bigots are. Their primary responsibility is to be professional, is to make sure that you cross that dividing line between the amateur professional, the person who cannot create a work that would work for a television show. Remember, the television show is going to cost a minimum of a million and a half dollars an episode. Two million, three million. It gets crazy. At this point, you have to be sure that you can say with confidence, if you trust me, I'm going to create something you can use. So we have to bring all of our skills to the script.

One of the things I'm learning personally in this process and looking out at the other works that are succeeding is not to be nervous about being sort of More open about what used to be more hidden messages about racism. You know, you don't have to just use allegory anymore. You can just put it right out there. I mean, look at get out. It's front and center. That's its strength. If he had tried to be coy about that, it wouldn't have been the same project. When I look at Underground, which is set in the slavery era, it's like, okay, we have some slavery references in this piece. Why not amp those up? Why not go right down the middle, down the line?

Well, I think that ultimately you can't create something that's going to work for everybody. So one of the ideas of being a social justice warrior, I say, take care of yourself, love at least one other person, understand history without guilt, blame, or shame in yourself, and find your tribe, find the people who empathize with you. You don't waste the substance of your life trying to convince people who aren't going to be convinced who have a vested interest in staying asleep rather than that nurture the people who are in alignment with you. And the last principle is to succeed. So you have to play the game to win. If every time you try to do something, you stop to try to explain to people, well, what about this? What about this? Some of those people are sincere. Others of them are just trying to slow you down.

Don't want to know.

Yeah, they don't. Not only they not want to know, but they are specifically trying to get you to slow down so that you cannot accomplish a choice. Like somebody, you know, you watch your kid drowning and somebody saying, are you sure that's your kid? Are you sure that's water? Maybe they're just playing, you know, while meanwhile your kid is drowning out there. Now, if you jump in the water and the kid isn't drowning, well, then maybe you got pranked. But the fact is that there are people who literally will enjoy watching you kid drowned. There's somebody who might have thrown your kid in the water. So once you make a decision about a change that you want to make socially, be prepared to deal with the fact that you might be wrong. So you always be ethical, you always be honest, and you always be loving.

A lot of people on Twitter, I follow a lot of people on Twitter. I don't actually agree with a lot of time, but I respect them. So I peek in. It's like trying to see how are other people thinking both to the right and the left of me, you know, just to sort of keep myself aligned in my thinking. So that I'm not relying on, you know, just my own hunches that it's based on actual events. It's based on things I haven't taken into consideration.

And you do need to have other points of view. I mean, especially if you're feeling a lot of anger, a lot of fear. These are issues. I mean, some of you are interested specifically in Afrofuturism. Others of you are interested in the way children and artists of the African diaspora took their anger and took their fear, took their pain, and turned it into art, because you got your own angers and pains and concerns to that degree. I personally don't care what side of the political spectrum you're on, as long as you're dealing with people, with humanity, as long as you're being honest, as long as your ultimate intention is the betterment of our country and our world. If you have a different point of view on these things, let us have a discussion about it. And when you express these things in your art, you're making an argumentation. You're saying, this is what I think the world is. This is how the world looks from my point of view. When you do that, you're providing a service to mankind. As far as I'm concerned. I tried to perform a little service to mankind. In the short story that we're going to be discussing this week.

Maybe we go to that first.

Yeah, let's go ahead. We can segue directly, directly in there.

My baby's brilliant short story, Fifty Shades of Grays. I'm like, why wasn't I campaigning for the Hugos or Nebulas? But rereading it? Because it's.

I don't even know if it's too late.

It may not be. We need to check it.

Yeah, I think that we can do some things with that.

Can you go to the Prezi?

Okay, we will go to the Prezi.

I mean, we'll come back to you during the interview portion. But I did put up.

We're going to screen sharing, and you're going to go there in just a minute. And so. Oh, my entire screen application window. My screen. Let's see. I guess it's my screen and we're going to go here. Yeah, So I see. I see what I need to do because things are a little. Are a little screwy.

If it's too complicated, let's not do it.

Well, because you're like, we're gonna try it.

Okay.

No, no, no. So we're gonna go full screen. Yes.

And here we are. That's just what I was getting for. I know we're go from your real image to your fake image.

Yes.

But any case, this is. I love this photo of you, Stephen Barnes. And also here's the illustration for 50 Shades of Grays. And I remember you talking about the general concept of this short story for years.

Yeah. Let me go back to my picture like this, because we'll make sure there have been, you know, too many errors, you know, over the last. So basically, yeah, so years ago, I first came up with this idea, and it had to do. It came out of the sense that black people haven't been dominated by white people, you know, since our emergence, since we were kidnapped and brought over here. Straighten our hair, lighten our skin, try to do things prefer mates with thin noses and thin lips and so forth, trying good hair, Good hair. In the light skin thing, trying to get, from my point of view is protective coloration. If you take a look at Japan after World War II, women were getting plastic surgery, getting boob jobs. They were trying to look. Take a look at Jackie Chan now, as opposed to when he was younger, he has had plastic surgery done to make his face more appealing to Westerners.

Has he really?

Yes, he has. So, you know, because this is. This is what people do in order to fit into the mainstream. But the trouble is that it's not usually conscious. If you said, I'm doing this in order to make money, I'm doing this in order to have protective coloration or to fit in. That's one thing. But you begin to actually accept the standards of beauty.

Yes.

Okay. And if. If I were. I think that my wife Tananari is insanely beautiful, but she does not look like a white woman. If I was judging her by Caucasian beauty standards, I would look at her differently than I do when just looking at her as a healthy human being with clear skin and symmetrical features, you know, that cute little nose. I mean, so I could look at her like from an African point of view or an Asian point of view or wet or a European point of view. Or I could just look at it from a human point of view, which is what I generally do, from which I just say I see nothing but just pure gorgeousness and sex appeal.

And what's so sad, really tragic, is when various ethnic groups internalize that standard and literally believe that people who look nothing like them are more beautiful than they are.

And it gets even worse if the culture that they are finding appealing has a power advantage over them, because then, you know, especially if you are colonized or in case of black Americans, we're literally stripped of your culture so that black males were denied a lot of the normal human prerogatives of being able to protect, protect your children, protect your woman from loss of chastity and so forth and so on. When you can no longer do those things, you don't have power. And it becomes natural for the women of the group to then look to, how can I appeal to the men of the dominator group? So now you've got a nightmare. You're changing yourselves, but you can't be that other thing. You are finding yourself attracted to the members of the group because power is hugely attractive. Standards of beauty have shifted. Power is attractive. And now the males and the females of the dominated group are not standing together to protect each other, but literally can be at each other's throats. And I think that there's a lot of stress between black men and black women in America that deals with the fact that the power relationships have been totally scrambled. Right now you have black women who are the most educated group in the country, black men who are the most criminalized group in the country. So black women are feeling like they can't find a man that they can literally share their lives with. They have to slow themselves down, act as if they don't have the educations, the ambitions that they have. They find themselves around white males who might very well certainly will be attracted to them sexually. But will they marry you?

Not always.

Yeah, that's right. So it's, it's scrambled in a lot of ways. And so there's a lot of self hate, there's a lot of doubt. And it was all of that stuff that was boiling around in my head when I got this idea about a story about what if aliens did this to humans? Now, it's a great premise for a number of different reasons. I did not write that story. And it wasn't. It was concerned about wondering when that I could, say, sell it. You know, it was like, you know, do I dare spend the time necessary to write that story without having any idea where, you know, where I'm going to find a market for it? And it isn't the specific thing. It isn't the specific thing about, you know, it's too dangerous, it's too political, it's too rhetorical. No, it was literally. I don't write many short stories unless somebody specifically says, will you write a short story for us? Steve? I literally have not been able to afford to do it because I have to be certain that my writing time invested properly. So I get money back out the other end of the day.

That's how you felt up to this point?

That's how I felt up to this point. It's one of the reasons why I have changed the way I want to operate so that I don't. I don't necessarily have to operate like a professional writer anymore. I can operate like an amateur, which.

Is great because you write just something that for you has been a long time.

Exactly.

Dream project. He was solicited, actually.

No.

It was the People of Color Destroy Science Fiction.

Right.

He wanted to submit a story to that. Yes.

I don't remember when that I started that story before then or whether I used that as an excuse to write the story. Do you remember?

I don't remember. My memory is that you read it for that. Okay.

No, I don't think so. I think that it was running around the back of my head, and I decided this is my opportunity.

Well, I just think, you know, what makes this story really sing and I was laughing all the way through while I read it is the humor. So he establishes human characters, a couple, really, and a relationship that is so realistic and psychologically based that the science fiction premise just sort of bounces off of us. We believe in the characters, so we believe in the scenario.

Well, yeah, you have to. And there was a question, well, what's the point of view for it? I said, okay, well, let's have this happen from the point of view of the man who makes it happen. So I had to, you know, market became an important thing. He's an advertising man. So in writing, one of the things that you have to do is the creation of or the expression of or sharing of specialized knowledge. In other words, the reader has to have the feeling that the writer knows more about this stuff than the reader. So I kind of looked at my body of knowledge of what can I tap into that would enable me to add that sense of authenticity, of authority to it? So I decided marketing, because I've done a lot of research on marketing in terms of my Internet business. Now, that's not exactly the same as the kind of marketing they're doing here. I'm looking into direct response marketing and other forms of marketing are not the same thing. However, they map over it. They map over similarly in terms of the psychology and why people buy and so forth and so on. So I was able to fake that part of it, you know, that. That sense of combining that with. With things I've seen in documentaries and in movies concerning advertising companies.

Go ahead and again. It's a very mundane world. It's a character. It's a real character and it's a real job. So. So those things we recognize, and that's what makes, I think, the story so successful on so many levels, is that you sort of burrow in. In a very subtle way. It's just. It's just an assignment at first. A small assignment. Yeah.

I had to ask the question, well, where does the story start? And so I decided to start because it kind of. If I'm going to go start with the beginning. It's a slow boil. So I start with. With the idea that this guy is in a death cell, you know, and there were a couple different versions of that. And then I go back to kind of the beginning of the story. So there's a little bit of jumping back and forth between time. There was originally more of that in the first draft, the story. There's less of it now. And actually I'm working to convert the story to a screenplay. So I have to unpack things there. Because, for instance, I talk about the fact that this particular advertising guy, this marketing guy, was chosen because he was not just black, but because he had specifically done some things to make. I think it was Nigerians appealing visually to Asians, to the top to Thai. I think it was Thais. You know, I don't reread my own stories with the finish. Please, you know, forgive me if I don't remember what. Steve, did you actually write this? No, actually, I commissioned it to writeyourstories.com There's a whole group of people there, and for $49.95 they'll write you anything or Earl Schreib will paint your car. So I. He had made Africans appealing to Asians. And so his agency figured he could make these hideous aliens appealing to Earth people. Now, the implied insult in that is massive. It's massive. But I knew that I could build on that to use something. So I've got all these different levels going on here. I started the story and there's. In a sushi bar. The incident with the 15 spice tuna roll was a story I've been wanting to use for a long. Something that actually happened to me. And I had gone ahead and eaten this blistering hot burning tuna roll because I did not want to seem like a sissy. Now, I turned that around so that he became the person who, once he's committed to doing something, will do whatever it takes to make it happen. Which says something about the depths of his emotional need, his need for Approval that he will hurt himself because it hurt and humiliate himself in order to get the approval of his bosses. So he's out to dinner with his bosses when he does this. Ah, now I can take this incident that was an incident of personal embarrassment and me being macho and use that to say something about this character. And I knew that I'd be able, if I did it right, I'd be able to go later in the story and re reference what had happened earlier. Okay, so I'm plotting out, okay, this. I know the things that happened. I knew what happened in the story. The aliens came. They offered us technology in exchange for making them attractive. They use their technology to help us make them attractive. We be. It began to work.

We would want to be friendly with them.

Very, very, very friendly, if you know what I mean. Very friendly.

More like.

Well, that. That too. But the trick is that. That there's a poison pill in there and that is that once they, they become attractive to us, they become more and more attractive. We become less attractive to each other. So there's a nasty twist at the end where the aliens, it turns out, have done this numerous times on numerous planets and basically depopulated the entire planet within a hundred years, within a couple generations, and then just move in and take the planet. So that is a way of exaggerating a phenomenon that I see going on between black people.

So we basically colonize ourselves.

We basically colonize ourselves. We're getting lighter skinned. I mean, I'm not exactly a Eubanki, if you'll notice. And I know that this relates to choices. Some of them were forcible choices that my ancestors made, but others of them were power differential choices. You know, if it is sexual harassment for an employer to sleep with an employee or for Bill Clinton to hit on an intern or inappropriate for him to receive her advances because of the power differential, how much more so between a master and a slave. So what we're talking about here is black people being assimilated, forcibly, genetically, culturally, psychologically colonized. Psychologically.

I love the way you hit on all of the major ways in which all of us are sort of being psychologically colonized and have been over the years, through film, through advertising, A subtle image.

Yeah, they're music videos using their music.

Yes.

I think there may have been something about food in there. There's clothing, and people are wearing makeup that makes them look alien.

So over time, yes, people are wearing this makeup and it's like a fashion statement, but also it's more than a fashion statement. It's that literally they don't feel attractive if they're not wearing the alien features.

So once I understand what the sequence of events is, then I have to find a character who can plausibly witness this sequence of events, tie those events to their lives. I mean, in War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise had nothing to do with bringing the aliens here, but because he's trying to save his family, you know, it has an impact. We care about him because he is trying to save his family. In this particular instance, this is a man who's trying to save his job and he's trying to create a relationship with a woman. And I then I asked, because I asked myself what somebody needs to be the person who begins to feel this sexual attraction. So I use their relationship for that. So this is all from. It all starts with. With the. The basic what happened? Okay, then who saw it? How did they react to the things that happened? So you start with an outline and you begin to flesh it out. And then you take a look at the thematic elements and you take a look at the speculative elements, and you flesh those things out within the background of a world that is as realistic as you can make it. Human beings are as realistic as you can make them, but you don't try to do it all in the first draft. The first draft was just getting the events down. If I got the events down, I'd be okay. That's where I had to start. So that's not where I stop. Because then you rewrite it and you rewrite and you polish it. And I've read criticisms of the story, and I think that there are always going to be weaknesses in anything. And I take some of the comments seriously and some of them not. But in general, people felt that it was devastating and they got it because it's so painful and because the assumptions culturally really are that light skin, straight hair, so forth and so on really are more attractive. It's, you know, wouldn't. You know, wouldn't you rather be a blonde? And so forth and so on. Once you see a certain amount of this, it becomes the matrix. It becomes this is what it is rather than this is what people have projected onto us. I was breaking that in order to break that a serious story would be too painful because it is asking people to look at the destruction of relationships, asking black people to look at the destruction of relationships. It's asking white people to look at what their culture did. And there the potential for a level of pain that. That creates misunderstanding rather than allowing Us to wake up a little bit and release the pain. That was why the story was designed to be funny. I don't ordinarily write funny stuff, and I can't exactly tell you why I don't, because I can do. I can do it when I want.

To be very funny.

But. But I think maybe because I always had to be sure that my stories and books made money, I took things too seriously. There's always, like, the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head in that sense. But I thought that being playful with the story would be the best bet that the 50 Shades of Grace, which is clearly. Once I decided on that title, which is a play off of a popular book and movie series that deals with sadomasochistic relationships, I then gained another set of image systems. I got more ideas about what his wife, girlfriend would be like, the kinds of things that she would be in. Bring that in. So the title had. There were levels, you know, with the title. There were levels with the characters and levels with the society levels with the speculation. And all these things have to kind of weave together. Ultimately, all you can do is consciously stay aware of the stuff that you can consciously stay aware with and then allow your aesthetic sense to say, this feels right or this feels frightening or this feels funny, because you cannot track all that stuff consciously. It's just too complex. So ultimately, you go from your. I had an intent to say something, and then how do I say this in a story so that will work? And then how do I structure. Structure and write the story? Mostly in the rewrite process, in letting other people read it, getting feedback from them, and then, you know, continuing to work. And continuing to work. So that's. That's how that story came to be. Really? Any questions? No.

Well, I just love the way humor is that bridge to some of the more difficult moments. Like the very, very ending is funny, but also devastating, I think.

Yeah, it had to be. I got more absurd to the end. You have a. You know, have an amoeba name Elvis, you know, and don't think any of that was accidental. You know, talking about cultural appropriation again there. Oh, Steve was having just too much fun.

Levels upon levels.

Yeah, it would take it to a whole other level, you know, And I remember saying to somebody earlier today that I didn't know whether or not Lion's Blood was the best book I was ever gonna write because I don't have the same kind of optimism about what I can accomplish as an individual. Have a lot more optimism about what the culture can do and what the fabulous group of young artists that are coming up can do. But my heart got broken by the lack of wholehearted embracing of that book. But I'm starting to get a sense that, you know something I don't. I don't seem to have suffered a lot of cognitive decline. I seem to be the same person, but I'm a lot more interested, a lot more willing to speak truth at this point. I've kind of run out of bullshit.

Well, I cannot wait to see what you do next. So. And especially in the short story, because people, if you've read Steve's work previously, 50 Shades of Grays has a very, very different feeling than any of his other previously published work. It's that sharpness of the humor. I love the science fiction sensibility and looking at these organisms and their methods and their tactics and how they work and why they work. Some of the tech in there is a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's all just fun. So I mean, what I want you to do is to take your own ideas and, you know, rewind this. Look at the things I've been saying, make notes on these, on these things. It's all about the entertainment value. And the more devastating. If you've got something serious to say, the more important the story is. The story and the entertainment is you have to hear. I can sit back and say, hahaha, just kidding, as I'm not kidding at all. This is really serious. This is really painful. The people have destroyed themselves over this. But hahaha, it's just a joke. So I think that I feel like I have some mastery of my basic craft that I did not have before and can do things that I would not have tried. So that's. You know, we can talk more about this over on life writing, but let's move on to the next.

One last thing I want to say about the story, which is actually a great transition to 13th, Ava DuVernay's great documentary about mass incarceration. That moment in your story where your character is on trial and the judge is wearing alien makeup in the hair and the prosecutor is wearing alien man, you're like, realize, oh my God, I don't have a chance. I am so screwed. If you really think about how that plays out in our actual criminal justice system, you know, I've been. Let me talk a little bit about mass incarceration. The reason I wanted you to watch 13, even though obviously it's not about Afrofuturism, hopefully, is I'm gonna zip off because so much of what these authors are confronting is visible in the way criminal so called justice is conducted in our country. So if you've watched the documentary, you know what I'm talking about. Where do I even begin? Let's just start with this courtroom experience. 95% of elected prosecutors in the country are white. So there's this, and, and huge percentages of the defendants are of color disproportionate to the population. And what Eva has done in 13th is just very soberly laid out the case that starting at the end of slavery with the 13th Amendment, which prohibited basically imprisoning people and slavery except for criminals, that loophole went into effect immediately with arrests for vagrancy, for loitering. You saw the photos of young children in prison strikes back in the 1800s. So you know, a lot of people say, well that was then, but actually this is now. And that's the numbers. President Obama's voice at the very beginning of the document documentary is, fills me with a lot of nostalgia because of course, well, you know why. So no matter what your feelings were about President Obama, we're in such a different place right now in terms of our national leadership that just hearing his voice is almost tear inducing. It's like, oh yeah, that's right. We used to have a president who could put a sentence together, but in his way.

Some might simply say we used to have a president.

And then, you know, and, and there are a lot of black millennials who were not forgiving of the Clinton administration and what they saw as Hillary Clinton's role with using the term super predator, which was in vogue for so long and had such devastating consequences that even the author of the book that actually started the term superpredator later disavowed it because it basically laid out a juvenile so called justice system over building juvenile prisons that we are still, still feeling the effects from even after the original author has disavowed the term and disavowed his own research. So starting with the end of the civil rights era with Nixon, who first used the term war on drugs, then the actual creation of the war on drugs under Reagan, the continuation of the war on drugs under George the first, and then also Bill Clinton, who as a centrist Democrat was really, really pushing that law and order button as a way to try to bring in more white votes, which is still continue to be a struggle with the Democratic party.

It's a version of the Southern strategy.

Yeah, it's a Southern strategy. Nixon started Southern strategy is all. And the documentary lays this all out so if you haven't watched it, please do. I'm not going to go through it step by step. But this is pretty widely understood factual information. This is not just sort of an opinion about how this happened. And when you really extrapolate that out to communities where parents are without their children, children are without their parents, children are without their fathers in particular. But there are a lot of mothers behind bars as well.

And I just want to put back. And this is one of the reasons why I think that it would have been so great if there had been the equivalent of a Truth and Reconciliation panel or Nuremberg trials following the Civil War, because the south was able to push its agenda, was able to push its mythology that slavery had not been this horribly devastating thing. You have to remember that the primary image system of slavery, because when I say slavery was gone with the wind, you know, for. Until Django Unchained or Roots, at least, you know, that's pretty much what it was. Which I don't know if you're familiar with this, which would be roughly the same as if the German propaganda, the Nazi propaganda film, the Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town, had been our primary source of information about the Holocaust. So, you know, it's. You have to understand how important images are, how important art is, how important controlling the story is. This is why we're doing this, class. This is why this is so important to us. Because when someone else controls the story about history, you are at their mercy. And black people have been at their mercy with nothing more than their faith in themselves to fight against the onslaught of images that says, you are not as smart, you are not as pretty, you are not as capable, you are not. You are not even really American citizens. Because Americans would never have submitted to slavery. We have this mythology of being courageous. And, you know, Davy Crockett. The fact that Davy Crockett actually apparently got down on his knees and begged for his life at the Alamo to Santa Anna is not exact. It's not. That's not the movie John Wayne is gonna make.

Right, Right.

So we have the mythology, and then we have the truth. And what we're hoping that each and every one of you will do is to ask the question. This has been leading into our guest today.

Well, eventually. Eventually, yeah.

Leading into the question, what is a hero? We're hoping it's each and every one of you and that you will tell your stories and take control of the narrative.

Speaking of the impact of film, 13th documentary also talks about the devastating impact of the birth of a nation. Which this is the D.W. griffith's birth of a Nation, which really was, a lot of people say, the first modern Hollywood film.

Yes.

So it's the birth of Hollywood. So when we're still grappling with these issues today, it's no wonder. Look where we started. And what happened was basically the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. The film created the image of cross burning, and the Ku Klux Klan took it up. You see what I'm saying? It led to a resurgence.

Really?

Yes, that's what it says. It led to a resurgence in the Klan, a wave of terror in the south that led to the Great Migration. I mean, maybe not all of it directly to the film, but certainly the film.

Really? Yeah. Our president at the time talking about how it looked like history writ with lightning on the screen. You know, so this was happening at the White House.

So it was considered truth. The depiction of especially black men as literally animals that had to be caged. And when you look at the continuing imagery since then of black men, women and children in chains, and by that, I mean on the show Cops, which got run off the air by color change, but not after. Not until after a very long run of seeing black and brown people hauled up behind chains. Look at how many television shows on cable are set in prisons. Never mind our endless diet of cop shows. I won't even count that. But the documentaries about prison life. We are an incarceration nation. It's not okay. It's not okay.

When I was. I'm gonna tell a story on myself. When I was in high school, somebody threw a firecracker into the girls senior boardroom. And a girl picked it up and it went off in her hand.

Okay?

It hurt her face. Now, I was raised on Dragnet and Adam12 and all these things where police officers never made a mistake. Never made a mistake. A good citizen cooperated with the police fully. Never made a mistake. Now, I was a science geek and I knew about. You know, I knew about things. Let's say I was not. My hands were not entirely clean of experimentation. I'd had nothing to do with what happened that day. And I actually told the police that were there from smelling the air, what the composition of the firecracker had been. Needless to say, I became suspect number one. I ended up being hauled in initially on illegal possession of firecracker. They were not able to get me to talk. They thought if I had not done it because I'd actually been making out with my girlfriend at the other end of the hall at the time. And I had two witnesses to prove this.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. So they knew I was innocent, but they began to increase the charge to put pressure on me. Finally, I was held for two nights at the Georgia Street Juvenile hall on attempted murder.

Georgia street, right out of Dragnet, too.

Absolutely. If my mother had not sold the house to John W. Mack, who was the head of the Urban League in Southern California, I don't know how long I would have been there. But they took that case to the judge in the district who looked at this and said, this boy has been illegally booked. There is nothing here. You must let him go. I don't know what would have happened had we not had that kind of strength, that kind of support. Attempted murder attempted. You get that? Because I tried to help the police.

Yeah. And what a different life you would have had.

Totally different. My life could have been destroyed right then, right there for nothing. So this stuff is very real to me.

And I think what happened, especially during the Clinton years when there was some black support for the crime bill and fear even of black children, even by black people, you know, I mean, so this is not just.

None of these cops were black.

I'm sure they weren't. It was not just that white people were in fear of black youth, but some black people were in fear of black youth. And this whole sort of super predator thing emerged. The dehumanization emerged. And it's not okay. Every illegally detained everybody who is. Maybe, maybe they did do something. But why am I going to be in jail for 30 days? Because I can't afford to pay this fine. You know, I'm out of society, I'm not providing for my family or you can't even afford. You take a plea. Which is the majority, I think, of cases right now where you take a plea because you can't risk a 20 year prison sentence over some kind of possession, you know, so you take a plea and you go to jail over something that shouldn't even be illegal in the place first. So there's so much to be outraged about. And before this election, mass incarceration was kind of my pet issue. It's what I talk about a lot on Twitter, have for years talked about it at the Octavia Butler the Reformatory. And I'm working on a novel now that is literally set in a Gemini. Yeah. I had a great uncle who died in the 1930s at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. And if you read about it, just do a quick Google search. Dozier School, Marianna Florida, a lot of needless suffering of young people there, but also other facilities and also continuing to this day, which we get to address a little bit in our pilot. You know, we actually have a boy in handcuffs in a hospital, and the doctor's outraged about it, and we get to discuss our thoughts about.

And we get to set him free.

Yeah, and we get to set him free.

We get to save a boy. You know, we get to save a child.

So this is just an example of, I think, before, as an artist or even as a lover of art, before you can immerse yourself in an artistic experience, it's very useful to understand from whence it comes, you know, this intergenerational issue that is still a problem today. And that's why I wanted you to watch 13th because that's such great context for a lot of these work works you'll read. And I was inspired to make a short film, which I also asked you to watch. Not that I think my short film is on such a craft level that we need to pick it apart frame by frame. But what's more important is this, that I took my iPhone. I wanted to make a short film about mass incarceration in private prisons. And I came up with a sort of a Twilight Zone Y idea. And I just went out a few days, you know, when I wasn't working, when the sun was. When the weather was right. And I did it by myself. I wrote it. I shot. I used a tripod. I bought a cheap little plastic tripod. So I used a tripod. And then, of course, I used the conceited shaky cam, since after.

Found footage.

Found footage, because I, you know, I didn't have a crew and a cinematographer except. And I was the actress, too, so I was directing myself. But my little short film, Lost, ended up getting screened at a Social Justice Assistant comics conference in Oakland, California, where people got what I was doing and they wanted to showcase it as a part of their conference. So that was really exciting for me. And hopefully, please forgive the wig. So people say, oh, I love the wig. I don't believe them. I think the wig. I don't know, maybe the wig was a mistake. But anyway, excuse the wig. Just know that you can do it, too. I loved editing it, and I'm not an editor by any means. There's a jump cut I was just too lazy to fix. So I was like, I'll leave it in. But yeah, I loved just. I did it all on my phone, literally editing it, shooting it. Everything was just on my phone, using the Imovie app for iPhone, which is a lot better than you might think it is. So just.

Yeah, the technology has become remarkable. The truth is that if you're. What if you want to make movies, theatrical motion pictures sell in Hollywood. First thing you do is write yourself a one act play. Even if it's a one person one act play, shoot it on your iPhone, get together with some people from your local dinner theater or local community theater, local drama club, local community college, high school kids in drama class and actually direct them. See what it feels like to have your words spoken by human beings. We'll probably return to this idea later on in another.

Yes, I think we're going to have you guys watch our short film Danger Word next time and read the story adapted it from. And also speaking of horror, let's. Let's bridge to Brie Newsome now whose film awaits. I would say speaking of heroism and heroism, she's both.

She's a real life hero.

I just got to tell this as a story because I feel like I discovered Brie Newsom. I'm just gonna go ahead and claim that. But her work, Wake was a student film. Okay. When she was in film school. So there's that. Just know it's that good. And it was just a student film. But when I was at the at Spelman College as the distinguished visiting Scholar, I had a Black science Fiction film festival. And I don't know how Wake came to my attention, but I said, yeah, we're gonna show Wake. And there was Poomsy. So, you know, I had a few really nice films to show. She was kind enough to sit with me and give me advice when Steve and I and Lucina Fisher were talking about making a film out of the story Danger Word. And so I just knew her kind of as sort of a both a big sister in terms of her experience over me, but also a little sister. She's a great deal younger than I am. She's a very young woman. She's in her 20s. And I knew she had been arrested at a sit in in North Carolina. So I invited her as a guest artist to my second Octavia Butler celebration, which was Octavia and Social Justice. And so she really was not even quite yet comfortable claiming that term activist when she was on their stage. Fast forward a couple years later after the terrible shooting in Charleston. On Twitter, everyone's talking about this young woman who climbed up the flagpole and took down the Confederate flag. And it was a couple hours before I realized that was Brie Newsome. It Freaked. I could not.

I'm getting a comic book.

Oh, yeah, go get.

There's a comic book we have where an artist basically did a rendering of Bree taking down that flag and putting up the black power flag, which, as you'll see in the interview, was something they talked about doing. So in any case, I'm super excited about Brie Newsom on so many levels. She, in addition to being a filmmaker, is also a singer, and she has continued to sing. She hasn't made any films since Wake, but she has become almost a full time activist, as you can imagine. Yeah, this is a rendering. This is a comedy called Halfrocentric. Oh, it's backwards. But anyway, it's called Halfrocentric. And this is the art on the. On the back with a rendering of a woman very much like Bree taking down that flag. So it's about that time that we play our interview with Bree Newsom where we got to talk to her a little bit about what it was like to take down that flag, and also about that relationship between horror, science fiction, fanfare, and social justice that we have talked about so much in this class. Here's Bri.

I'm going to let Tananarive drive this conversation. I want you to know that from my point of view, the context is both your activism and it is because this is an Afro futurism lecture series of lectures. One of the things that comes up is in terms of drama, in terms of fiction, they follow the hero's journey, the question of people who are faced with challenges and then go out to do things. And whether you like it or not, you're a hero. You did a wonderful thing. You did a courageous thing. You placed yourself at risk to do something you thought was of value. So even if it's nothing more than us asking you questions about what motivates you, what you believe in, why you took the action you took, so that people can understand the difference between real life heroes and. And fictional heroes to inform their work, even if it's nothing more than that. I think this conversation is gonna be wonderful. And I just wanted to let you know that as the context for the conversation.

Okay, sure.

And I'll just hold this up again. Comic called Afrocentric. Actually, it'll be backwards, but yeah, this is obviously an image inspired by your heroic climb up the flagpole to take down that South Carolina State House flag after. After the Charleston massacre, you know, such a horrible time for so many of us. And it's so funny because I saw the pictures of you on Twitter before I Knew it was you.

So look at that girl up there.

Like, wait, that's Brie Newsome. She's a filmmaker, She's a writer. She's a singer. What's she doing on the flagpole? So I guess since we're talking about that, we can lead off with that question. Whatever parts of it you're free to discuss, you know, if there's something you are not free to discuss, just let me know. Just move it along, and I will. But, yeah, I just have so much admiration for what you did. And what was it like, the moment you decided that you were going to do that? Something so drastic and public and heroic, and did you waver at all when you were all suited up and ready to go, or what was it like?

So the issue of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, I think that is something that has always personally bothered me and many people. Right. I mean, I grew up seeing that flag regularly. And I don't just mean, you know, the Confederate flag in general, but specifically the one over the state house in Columbia. And it was, you know, my family's from South Carolina. Half my family's from South Carolina. So that was just something we were aware of. You know, there was no mystery about what the flag meant or what it represented or, you know, why it was raised in 1961, you know, in response to the civil rights movement at that time. And so, I mean, I had previously had conversations with the folks who were involved in. There's about 10 to 12 of us involved in the action to remove the flag and had previous conversations about wanting to remove the flag in South Carolina just because it is an issue, you know, here in, you know, southern part of North Carolina and South Carolina. And so once the massacre, you know, happen and the focus just shifted back again to this issue of, you know, the flag in South Carolina. And again, you know, NAACP had been boycotting the state over this. This has been an issue for years. And I just say that again because I think, you know, sometimes the understanding about what happened around the flag action was that it only became an issue after the massacre, you know, when really what it was was that it brought a refocus to the issue. And the flag symbolizes the systemic racism in South Carolina. It symbolizes all the conditions that led to the massacre in Charleston. And so, I mean, I think I was even on social media at that time just saying how I will go back to jail for that. Like, that was something, you know, if we had. If there was an option or, you know, the possibility of removing the Confederate flag. And I participate in that. That was something I knew I wanted to go back to jail for just because, again, the flag being raised by the state, you know, on state grounds, just, again, just symbolize systemic racism. And so I had a friend who was an activist here with me in Charlotte, and he had a friend who actually went down to Columbia and looked at the pole and said, you know, I think somebody could scale to the top and remove the flag. Because one of the main issues we were facing was we just weren't sure how we could remove it. South Carolina had, you know, this 4 foot tall spoked fence, you know, around the flag to protect it, because that's how controversial it was. They had, like an internal pulley system, so you couldn't just like, you know, go up and cut the cord. You know what I mean? There's all these layers of protection that they put in to protect this flag. And so he was the one who looked at it and said, you know, I think somebody could scale to the top and remove it. And he knew a Greenpeace activist who had experience doing that. So I think there was only like four days, really between when we made the decision to remove the flag. When we actually did, it was like a Tuesday. It was a Saturday when we removed the flag, and it was the Tuesday before when we met and talked about it. And so it was really down to about once we agreed that we were going to do it and we knew how, it was really down to about three people who could volunteer to scale the poll. And that really depended on who was physically able to do it, who could volunteer the time to train on it, and who could risk being a race. And there are just some folks who, you know, couldn't place themselves in that position to be arrested. And so once that narrowed it down to about three of us, I was the only person of color. And of course, we recognized how powerful, you know, how powerful that image would be. Yes, because we're attacking this symbol. We're attacking this image of systemic racism. And so to have this image of, you know, a black woman climbing to the top and symbolizing this, you know, struggle over white supremacy, we recognize how powerful that was. And so then that was kind of when we made the decision, okay, well, what do we want to symbolize? And that's when we made the decision for James Tyson. He was the white man who was arrested with me. That's when we made the decision for him to help me over the fence and then stand guard as I climbed. And that was a practical Thing too. I mean, we recognize James is a white man disguised as a construction worker. He's going to buy more time. Recognize that James, as a white man, is less likely likely to experience violence.

From the police in blue collar dress.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And there was even one point where a police supervisor came over and directed the two officers who had been at the bottom up until that time to tase me, which could have electrocuted me. And folks standing around started shouting, and they had their camera phones and everything, and James grabbed the pole and then they backed away. But again, recognizing that, we don't know. Had, you know, had I been a black man, had James been a black man, it might have been a very different, you know, outcome. And so, you know, so we thought through all of those things, and then the, you know, you asked me kind of how I was feeling up the image again. Yeah, I mean, well, that is the feeling. It didn't look as awesome. I mean, it did look awesome. Right. But I mean, helmets are never quite as would have been also kept, you know.

Right.

They should go show the helmet and the safety gear. But.

This is the symbol you created.

That's right.

And you did it. You create a symbol. And that's exactly what this course is about. Afrofuturism.

And I love the fact that your symbol creation was as calculating as it was that it was not a purely spontaneous act. Because the creation of a meme that could travel around the world and stand against this. This heritage, not hate mythology that they've used to protect that image for all this time. You set out to destroy it, and your blow might have been the deciding blow. A lot of people have attacked it. But I have to think that what you did was a dividing line between the past and the future. The south has been able to promote their vision of what the south was in regard to slavery for 400 years. That's an astounding achievement on their part. And it is a wonderful achievement on your part to put your body and freedom at risk, to break that down. Why did you decide that it was worth the risk?

Well, there's so many things. I think, again, the ultimate insult to me was the moment where they were parading the casket of Clementa Pinckney through Columbia, South Carolina, and the Confederate flag was still flying high. They had lowered the American flag to have staff. They lowered the state flag, but the Confederate flag was still flying high. And again, it just so encompassed the blatant disregard for black life. And again, just the denial of the history. Right. We know what the Confederate Flag represents. It has never represented anything other than slavery or jeopardy. I mean, that. That is what it has represented. And the fact that, you know, here is Clementa Pinckney, state representative, and again, you know, the Charleston massacre came in the wake of the Walter Scott case, you know, and Clementa Pinckney had just succeeded in getting body camera legislation passed. So we can't separate these things. Right. Any more than we can separate the dynamics between Medgar Evers being assassinated while doing voting rights work in Mississippi and his connection to investigating the Emmett Till case. Right. And the role that the police play in the. We can't separate any of these things. And so I think the, you know, the creation of this symbol, it was absolutely intentional. And that's why I think it's so important to tell the story behind the fang of it, because a lot of folks still have this image of it being a spontaneous thing that I just got up one morning, you know, and went down and decided to take the flag down. And I think it's important to understand the deliberation that went behind it.

And.

And I think we each who participated in it, did it for our own reasons. For me, it was deeply personal. My family was enslaved in South Carolina. I know my ancestors who were enslaved there. I have their photos, and I know their stories. And so that has always had a deep impression of me, on me. I was also. I have a very close relationship with my grandmother. She really helped raise me in a lot of ways. She grew up in South Carolina, so I grew up with this awareness, you know, hearing the stories of her experiences, you know, as a child growing up. And, you know, my mother, I think, working in education, those are just things that I was aware of, like how close I was to the history of segregation. You know, just being very much aware of that. And also, my family has experienced racist violence. I had a great uncle who was lynched in North Carolina. My grandmother has told me about experiencing, you know, the Ku Klux. And again, I just think it's interesting how the suppression of that and just how much we don't talk about it like it's just a thing, but we don't talk about it. Right. But that is the power that that flag represented. That silence, that fear. Just the fact that, again, the flag couldn't be lowered and the fear of anybody even touching it.

Yes.

Recognizing the violence that could come if you touched it.

I think we're looking at a generation, your generation and those younger than you, of people. It's like, up until this time, up until your Generation, really, I think the civil rights legislation and activism was a matter of going with hat in hand to a room full of white males like little orphan Oliver and Oliver Twist saying, please, we want our rights. Whereas what you're saying is, why don't you explain to me why my children do not deserve 100% of the rights that your children deserve. And if you would like to, we can step outside to discuss this. That seems to be your attitude, and it is. I, I. It's a warrior's attitude. It's an attitude of, I'm gonna die anyway. I might as well die for this. Up until this time, white people have been doing this. You know, if you push this, you're gonna reap the whirlwind. I've actually heard they don't. We've been reaping that whirlwind for centuries. There is. There is as long as the memory of those who came before and fought and died and sometimes had to keep their heads down, some to protect their children. You're the hope and the dream of the slave, your generation, people no longer willing to bow their heads and step off the sidewalk. What do you see as not just your, but your generation's place in the history of black America?

No, I think that totally true. And I think about that a lot, like, why was it this generation that rose up, right? Like, why was it this generation of young people? But I think it makes a lot of sense. So first of all, we wouldn't be where we're at if it were not for the black is beautiful movement. And sometimes it blows my mind, right, to even go back. And it's hard for me to conceive of black consciousness before black is beautiful, but there was a time when there wasn't that consciousness, right? So in a lot of ways, we are benefiting from a lot of that movement. You know, I was born in, like, 85, so in a lot of ways, I benefited from all the efforts that were put into, you know, diversity and image and representation. I actually happened to catch a really good period of time just to bring it back to art for a minute. I really happened to catch a really good period of time in my youth where we had powerful black representation on TV and powerful black women. And so I think that one of the reasons why we are having these uprisings with this generation is because we have an expectation. We kind of grew up with an expectation to be fully American. And I think we were, in many ways, the generation that really elected Obama. A lot of the folks who are activists, who I'm working with, were very active, especially in the first Obama for America campaign. And so I think there is this. My sister had a really good, good way of putting it. She said she called it entitlement. But there was. I'm trying to remember now, how she put it. It was kind of like a deserving entitlement. Right. Like it's what we should be entitled to. Right. So and so. And that's what's so interesting to me about the, you know, the statement black lives matter and why that is. That has been such a lightning rod. Just that statement, black lives matter, you know, because at once it is like this, you know, declarative statement. We're saying our lives matter. But then it's also this kind of pushback against this idea that I have to even prove to you that my life matters. Right. Because a lot like, kind of what you're touching on is like a lot of the way that for better or worse, I don't knock, like, for instance, our ancestors who felt that they could achieve, you know, equal rights by fighting in wars, you know, But I think that in a lot of ways, the history has been the sense that, okay, we prove ourselves as. As upstanding American citizens, then we can deserve equal rights. And I think what's kind of different in some ways with the message today is we're saying we're deserving of human rights, period. Like, I don't have to pass a respectability test. I shouldn't. Because then that's part of how racism works. White people don't have to do that. We never have a discussion around how our rights, or a white person's rights as an individual should be determined by the perceptions of white people in general. Right. We never had that conversation. And so I do think that that is a major difference that's happening now. But, you know, we're the product of everything that came before us. We Black is Beautiful wouldn't have happened without the, you know, the movements that preceded it and be happening be happening now without.

Just to link up the activism and the art a little bit. I see the book Octavia's Brood behind you edited and we'll Social justice Activists writing science fiction. And you were my guest at spelman College in 2014, and I did that activity, Public celebration of arts and activism. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that. Our theme for the course is Afrofuturism, Dreams to Banish nightmares. This is one of those dreams that vanishes a nightmare in a very real way. For me, it Was weight lifted. What does the work of artists like octavia? And it doesn't have to be specifically her, but what does the work like that mean to you, Especially in terms of guiding our dreams Past difficult political terrain?

Well, so on one hand, I think it speaks to one of the things that makes art powerful in general. Right. Which is our ability to kind of take. I think art in general Is kind of an observation of life, at least that's how I tend to look at it. So it's kind of taking what we are all experiencing, you, know, for instance, like, in a moment like this, and then translating it into a way that we can digest and process what we are experiencing. Just like that image that you held up. That's not a photograph of the moment, right. That is taking what folks experienced in that moment, what it symbolized and meant to them, and then putting it back In a way that we can digest what we all experience in watching that moment. And so I think that art has the power to do that. I think science fiction and fantasy in particular, Has a unique power, Because I think sometimes we are most blind to what is around us every day. And, you know, something that just came to mind for me, for instance, Is the way that superhero comics, for instance, Is super nerdy. But.

Here are my friends.

That's right.

You know, in the way that a lot of superhero comics can be used to address real injustices, you, know, in the modern light. But it presents it in a way that people are able to digest it In a way that they might not with a documentary. Right. Or with something that's just presenting right back to them, the world exactly as they are seeing it. But I also think that there's something uniquely. There's something unique about the way that we do that in black culture as well, I think. And I could, you know, I could be wrong about that. It may not be as unique, But I do think that there is something about using art and storytelling, in particular, to kind of process our traumas and, you know, in a way that we are able to deal with it. When I knew that I was going to be, you, know, doing this interview and kind of thinking through some of the things that have influenced me. I mean, one of the books that just continues to haunt me Is beloved, And I think it was just because of the way that she uses this. I mean, it is fantasy in a way. Fantasy, ghost story. But also, you know, in a lot of southern black culture, there's not a whole lot. There's a lot of blending in terms of, you Know the lines between reality, you know, what we consider our Western culture would consider reality. Right. And spiritualism and. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I think one of the things that just kind of blew my mind about that was just how she used that element to really deal with the trauma of slavery, you know, and this kind of literal haunting. So, yeah, I don't want to ramble too much.

No, but that's great, because I do consider that, in fact, a horror novel. She won't call it. Toni Morrison, who wrote that, won't call it a horror novel. But to me, it was a horror novel. But also, I felt after reading it that I understood even more deeply what it felt like to have been a slave. Because, like you said, she ordered it and she gave it a form and. But in any case.

You know, I don't know. I don't remember whether it was Emerson or Thoreau that had the poem about in the cradle endlessly rocking. Who was that? But our childhoods are always with us. And the childhood of a people, the way they began is always with them. The people try to say that slavery was some deep past. You know, forget about it. It was, you know, hundreds of years ago and so forth. Slavery.

1.

My karate instructor was raised by his grandparents who had been slaves. And, you know, my. That history is still there, and it's. It affected the people who raised us, and their fears, as well as their hopes and dreams went into us. So if you're saying that you're standing on the shoulders of these other people who were hip deep in the muck and sometimes underwater, they were standing on the bottom of the cesspool so that somebody could put their feet on their shoulders and get their nose above it so that I could get myself above it, so that you could stand on our shoulders and see even further what's going to happen to the generation standing on your shoulders. That's Afrofuturism.

Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. That's why I love the concept of Afrofuturism. I mean, and there's just so much there to me that can be unpacked. Right. Because it adds another layer to it. We're not just simply fantasizing about the future, but really fantasizing about who we are as black people in the future in a world, you know, I mean, that can be fantasized so many different ways. But just the idea of fantasizing a world where black lives matter. Right. Fantasizing a society that isn't built on the degradation of black life is, for many of us, fantasizing A world we haven't known. One that has. We haven't known in this land, and one that we really haven't known for, you know, maybe 400, 500 years. I think it's also powerful that when you talk about that, you know, the trauma and how that lives through us, like, they're finding that that is a biologically real thing that we actually, like, inherit, you know, you know, the trauma. One of the things that I find really interesting, looking at, you know, kind of the generation that's coming behind, and, you know, I look at, you know, maybe like, my nieces, especially at my nieces, because they didn't. When I look at my oldest niece, her first introduction to a president was Barack Obama.

Yeah.

So that. That is a fact, you know, so that's a fascinating kind. I mean, that is agrofuturism to me, because I remember a world where that was inconceivable. I remember when the idea that we could, you know, elect a black president was inconceivable. She will not know that world, you know, now, I don't know. I'm curious to know what it will be like for her growing up, you know, under Trump and under some of you of these things that she's seeing now. Because that must be a strong contrast as well, right, between being born into a world where a lot of the things around you are symbolizing opportunity and equality and possibility. And yet she's seeing a lot. There's a lot that's going on right now that. Especially when I look at some of the older youth, like teenagers, I think that they are having a lot of difficulty processing because it is. I don't know. I think it is a new thing. It's shocking in some ways for some of those who. They only remember Obama, you know, from Obama to what's happening now. Yeah. At the same time, though, I'm really curious to see how they will develop, because I think, again, kind of similar to the same reasons why I feel like my generation rose up. I think that it's gonna be the same for them as well, because they feel that they are American. I mean, they know they are American, and they don't doubt that, you know, and so they feel fully entitled to all of the rights and privileges of being American. Yes.

I want to talk about horror for a second, because that's the main word. Horror is what occurs to me when you talk about what it must be like to be those young people who didn't know.

It's like, what.

But we just. Our students for this class and also at my UCLA class have watched Wake, your short horror film, which I love. I mean, every time I watch it, it just astounds me that it was a student film. And I want to talk about hard. You know, you've made horror, I'm sure you appreciate it. Now Jordan Peele's get out has crossed the $100 million mark. Why does horror speak to you personally and how does it speak to our times?

Yeah, I love horror and I think it's one of the most underappreciated genres and I don't know why. I don't even think that's only literary. I think in the film world too, I mean, that's just kind of a given thing. It's like people know that horror, horror films rarely win Oscars or any of those things, but I think it's just really an under appreciated genre. And part of what fascinates me about horror is again, kind of similar to fantasy and sci fi. It's dealing with what we are afraid of. Right. It's taking those things that scare us and putting it back to us in a way that we can face our fears. And so some of us can, some people can't tolerate horror because. But I think, you know, yeah, but for those of us that can, it allows us to, you know, kind of deal with those fears and approach those fears. But it's contained in the, you know, in the film box. So, you know, we're kind of able to go through it and process and deal with it. And a lot of horror is dealing with trauma.

Yes.

So I mean, it absolutely is. And with fears of, you know, varying kinds, I mean, we can talk about why are so many films about slashing young white women? I mean, it unpacks that. Right? I mean, I mean that's just one, that's just one aspect of horror that you can unpack. But I think, yeah, definitely the ways that we use horror in black film. And I haven't seen get out yet. I have to see it this week. I have not had a chance to see it yet. I'm glad that I have somehow managed to dodge all the spoils. I've really been trying to. But yeah, I think. And horror can vary too. Right. Obviously you can have, you know, on one spectrum kind of like, you know, slasher, funny horror flicks. And then you can have other horror, horror flicks that are really unpacking deep things like our technology. Right. You know, kind of dealing with things like technology, dealing with things like, you know, we love zombie films. I think zombie films are fascinating because what they basically touch into is just this fear of there being these masses, you know, who are taking over in some kind of way and, you know, in our feeling of isolation and, you know, and losing ourselves somehow and, you know, whatever is taking over.

Well, yeah, and in terms of. For me personally, when I create a protagonist in horror, really, it's to try to create someone who's stronger than I am or I perceive as stronger than I am, who is confronting something way worse, hopefully, than anything I would confront in real life. And I'm looking for clues about, okay, how do you rise up? How do you fight the thing? The thing isn't going to be a zombie, right? Probably, but the thing will be something else. And that, to me, speaks to leadership. And I know you do a lot of work with leadership, so I'm all tied it together, girl. So when it comes to creating these protagonists who give us examples of leadership and real life work in leadership, I wanted to ask you what you think a lot of people are missing about components of leadership, whether they're in activist circles or not. In activist circles, when you talk about leadership, what do you talk about that people are like, oh, I hadn't thought of that. Or is there anything that's specifically like that?

Yeah, I would say so. I think there are a couple key things. I think the first thing that I really emphasize is service leadership. So I think in my mind, there are different types of ways that you can be a leader. Right. But I think in my mind, leadership is really about organizing folks around a goal. So as opposed to organizing around yourself, starting really organizing around a shared belief, something that is bigger than yourself as leader. Sometimes you'll have leaders who, you know, they just want to organize people to follow them and not necessarily leading folks towards something.

A culture, personality.

Absolutely, absolutely. And there's a lot of that now. You know, we have a celebrity culture, so that has just kind of become a part of our culture in general. It's not even just leaders who are celebrities and stars and, you know, kind of have a cult of personality. And then the other thing I think is sometimes I feel like leaders, we can almost overvalue ourselves in a way. So I, you know, I don't know how else to kind of put that. But, you know, I'll see a lot of leaders burning out, you know, from trying to take on too much. And in some ways, I feel like that can almost be an act of hubris because we can feel like, you know, nothing can move forward if we don't do everything or, you know, or we have to hold all of these, these things, you know. And so, you know, again, going back to what you looked at earlier, you know that phrase hero, you know, in real life hero versus, you know, fictional heroes. Well, real life heroes are human.

Yeah, absolutely.

Every real life hero is definitely a human being, not a mutant, not wearing a superhero cape or any of that, you know. And so I think being realistic about what we can hold and knowing when to kind of step back and take care of our so self care has been a huge thing.

I wanted to ask you about that.

Yes. What do you do?

How are you coping? Because I know you were, you were as blown away by the election as anybody. And how do you come back when you feel depleted?

Yeah, I have really been learning how to pace myself. And that has been a process like over the past year and a half for me because typically I go, go, go, go, go, burn out. And so I think for me, even, like really understanding, like this is a long struggle that I have entered into. There's so much excitement, like, you know, when you're in. And that's great. And I even been recently reading John Lewis autobiography. He talks about that, like the, you know, the energy that they would feel from protesting. And I think that's very real. But then you have to really face how long of, you know, struggle it really is and being realistic about that work. And so that really requires me to pace myself. And so one of the most basic things I do sometimes is just, you know, because, you know, especially from social media, because it's going to be a daily thing. I mean, there's, there's going to be something all the time, you know. You know, and that's what revolution looks like, honestly, you know, when we reach a point where there is political revolution happening, it's protests happening all the time over various issues and they all matter. And so, you know, again, kind of being realistic about what I can carry, what I, you know, what I cannot, you know, what Lane am I really trying to work in and then just spending time with my family, having other hobbies and things to remind myself of just the joy of life. That's the other thing I left up to people is how much taking joy for ourselves is also an act of resistance in times like this. And so, yeah, so I'm trying to be better at it. I'm trying to model. What I say is, well, what about.

Your art, my dear? Because you're a wonderful writer, you're a singer. A lot of people don't know that about you. How does your art fit in?

Yes. So I am being more intentional now about making time for creative work. Because I think you invited me to the panel on art and activism. So you talked about this before, but just how there is such a blending between art and activism, Especially for me. However, like, the past year in particular, I have really devoted to activism. And I'm still an artist. Like, there's still a part of me that has to create. And so I think the biggest thing for me recently has just been finding that intentional time a day to be like, okay, you know? And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before as a leader, like, being honest with the people around me. Like, I love y'. All. I love the work we do. I need space to be a writer and an artist, and so, you know, taking time to do that. I've been doing a lot of songwriting this past week and still writing a lot of ideas. I'm gonna be doing some documenting over the next year and a half of the events that are happening in North Carolina. But, yeah, I think, again, it's just something as artists, we have to be intentional about, you know, about creating and making that space to do it. And not stressing myself out too much. Cause I was always such a perfectionist that sometimes I would feel like I had, like, sit down and make the masterpiece, you know, And I realized how much that was hanging me up and creating a, you know, a creative block for me and not just allowing myself to write, you know, just kind of write what comes. Yeah.

I feel like you've kept this conversation almost perfectly on so many different directions. We could go in, but we said between 15 and 30 minutes, and we would rather end this now and have you feel good about it. Would have come back and talk to us again later.

I would love to come back and talk another time.

Definitely your very kind permission. I have one more question that is, is there anything in connection with all this that people have never asked you that you've always wanted to say?

That's a great question. Not really. I think the only other thing that I really lift up and when I try to use my platform to lift up is how important I feel the grassroots level work is. And I just think that we're kind of at that point because our politics are so broken, you know, kind of at every level. And so I just really. My main message, like, whenever I speak is just really asking people to identify what is your thing that you're bringing to the table. Because we all have something that we can bring, you know, in a time like this, a lot of times people feel that, you know, activism only looks like, you know, an action as dramatic as scaling the flag, you know, and it's important to recognize movement is people doing millions of things, you know, at the same time.

So perfect.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Bri, for everything.

Yeah, we really appreciate it. Right on. Sing on, girl.

Take care. We'll talk to you later.

Okay, Bye. Bye.

Bye bye.

She's so awesome.

I know. That was just great. I just. There's so much to say every. Every couple minutes there was something that I wish we could stop and comment on. It just. Your art is political as well as philosophical. It's philosophical if you're expressing your truth, your sense of what human beings are and what the world is. And it's political if you're hoping that that philosophy is going to motivate other people to action.

I managed to rush past without talking about Kendrick Lamar. So I'll wrap up a little bit with Kendrick Lamar and the music video. All right. You saw, actually, she's a nice segue to Kendrick Lamar because that song, all right, became an anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement. And why did we include it here in Afrofuturism? Well, I first saw it in a presentation by DJ Lynae Denise, who is a brilliant musicologist and dj when we were at Ferguson is the Future at Princeton. And she showed that video and she broke it down. So everything I'm about to say is what she said. You know, even that line, all's my life, I had to fight. A lot of you recognize that from Alice Walker's the Color Purple. So here you are, a rapper invoking Alice Walker. What? So Kendrick Lamar is what you call one of those next, next level artists? I've become a huge fan. I always liked alright, but it was only when he dropped his album. Damn aptly named his most recent album, which has the new video for DNA with Don Cheadle. Don Cheadle that I made Steve watch. And he's a great lyricist. And also his rap is about something. That's what I really appreciate about it. He'll talk about fear, he'll talk about God, he'll talk about pain. He's moving away from sort of the mythologized rap experience to using rap as a vehicle to express true emotions. And I really appreciate that about him. And if you look at the Afro surrealism in that video, he's floating. So he's sort of this beacon of Hope floating on top of the street lamp. And the police officer just uses his fingers, not even a real weapon, to shoot him down. And what gives it that positive bent at the very end is that he smiles. So everything will be all right. Yes, there's pain. Yes, there's. There are problems. We'll talk about it more. I miss you guys. So hopefully this platform will get its act together by next week so we can have some more comments and discussion. That. That's half the fun.

Yeah, we will, definitely. I'll jump on this immediately and find out what in the world is going on. If we have to switch platforms, that's what we'll do.

We knew they were going to make some changes at the end of the month, but we didn't realize they would affect us today, so we apologize for that.

So are we meeting next week, or do you have that convention next week?

I do. I think I'm slated to meet even though I have the convention.

Okay, great. So, yeah, you're gonna come home then. All right, so we'll be seeing you then. So that is all for today. Once again, apologies for the problem that, you know, you're just watching this on YouTube, however you're watching it, as opposed to doing it live, where we can actually see your comments. We miss you horribly, and you have a wonderful day. We're going to get this out to you as fast as possible, and then.

I'll also post the homework for next week. So check the website with the syllabus frequently for updates. It'll come piecemeal.

Okay.

All right, well, thank you, everybody. Sorry again about the problems. Enjoy your week.

Take care.