Page 95 - Blackness News Today

Morrison, what theyre trying to ban is blackness. they want to use dr. king as the kind of symbol of their attack on blackness. the blackest man in the land to this day. so i think that what will happen, however, it will be effective because the anti-blackness is so deeply entrenched. the ability to use black people as the whipping boys and girls of the collective unconscious and to see us as antithetical to democracy when we know the folk on january 6 who stood in that capitol and used that ame...

And their family story, to shy away from some of the details that may be less savory. instead you chose to write about your parents incarceration, writing, quote, my parents unconsciously chased whiteness for most of their lives. prison made them realize they were always closer to blackness. what did your parents struggle teach you about your own identity and why the decision to keep that in the book? >> yes, so first and foremost happy 68th birthday to my mom whos watching, and my parents were ...

Are mutually exclusive. i think on the one hand youre absolutely right, theyre speaking to their audiences, theyre joining up a kind of resistance and a kind of anger at look at this guy talking this kind of stuff, and blackness is much more complicated and look, by the way, hes lighter than us or darker than us and therefore hes not really black. come on. so yeah, theyre playing to the ignorance of their audience. but theyre also, you know, exposing a kind of lethal ignorance about the very nat...

He was so culturally important to us we were ignoring it? >> to be clear, this is about cosby but this is bigger than bill cosby. lots of powerful men have gotten away with sexual assault and rape of women and sort of havent been that closed about it and we sort of had to really like say what are we looking at? we have to pay attention here. i think bill cosby got away with it so long why do we need to hide it? >> you talk about the fact he was the first out of the box in 1960 as a black man doi...

Generated complicated identities. and we know that blackness in terms of its identity ranges from vanilla vitality to chocolate charm. and all ranges in between. so its not about shade. its not about a kind of inherited characteristic of race. race is, as weve been arguing in school and i would advise dr. peterson and brother rogan to take a class. when we talk about race as a social construct, what were saying is its not about a biological determinism. its about an inherited set of beliefs that...

>> listen, do they know better than that? we all speak for a living. thats what i do for a living. at times you screw up. so i like to give people grace when they speak for a living. especially he has a podcast. im not sure how long it is or how long he goes. youre just speaking off the cuff. but one would think youd do your research if youre talking about topics this important. but do they know better or are they just speaking to the people in their audience and just sort of capitalizing on tha...

>> not at all. thank you for having me, brother don. you know, you would hope they were joking because if they werent this exposes the vast lethal ignorance at the heart of so much whiteness. whether intentional or not. we all know that black is not a phenotypical reality. were not talking about a genetic predisposition toward darker skin. were speaking about an existential context. were talking about a philosophical idea. were speaking about rooted cultures in deep histories that have vast trad...

Other parents and students about the efforts to actually ban this book from the curriculum? what were their concerns when they learned that the school district was considering removing it? >> i actually contacted some -- the black a student unions presidents and i asked them their thoughts because i wanted to know from students. and one of the first things that a student told me was that, if theyre trying to ban this book, then why are we reading to kill a mockingbird in eighth grade? why are th...

So joe rogan, youre opening up for a guy who is redefining for many people blackness in the last 15 years and yet youre claiming not to know what blackness is. yeah, i think thats a deliberate willful ignorance and its the unintentional hilarity of a certain kind of whiteness that refuses to own up to what it is because if he refuses to acknowledge my blackness he doesnt have to confront his whiteness. the moment he acknowledges that i am a black man he has to confront the fact that he is a whit...

The black student union presidents and i asked them their thoughts because i wanted to know from students. and one of the first things that a student told me was that, if theyre trying to ban this book, then why are we reading to kill a mockingbird in eighth grade? why are they not banning of mice and men? that was their first thought and they were like, they are never going to ban stories of white savior-ism, only stories of blackness. that will be banned. and i think that is very telling that ...