Meet Sho Nakpodia, founder of Dream Voice and organizer of Dream Week, part of the largest Martin Luther King Day celebration in the country.
Join us as Sho unpacks the power of dialogue and the complexity of identity. He talks about the mission behind Dream Week - a platform that encourages meaningful conversations and cultural understanding. Sho's reflections on his own journey, from his roots in Lagos to a social entrepreneur in America, offer a unique perspective on the importance of language in shaping conversations and perceptions.
But that's not all. Show shares how mentorship and community support have led to profound transformation within the African American community. Hop on this enlightening journey with Show Nakpodia, a man who is not just a dreamer but a doer, making positive change and giving everyone a chance to be heard.
Meet Sho Nakpodia, founder of Dream Voice and organizer of Dream Week, part of the largest Martin Luther King Day celebration in the country.
Join us as Sho unpacks the power of dialogue and the complexity of identity. He talks about the mission behind Dream Week - a platform that encourages meaningful conversations and cultural understanding. Sho's reflections on his own journey, from his roots in Lagos to a social entrepreneur in America, offer a unique perspective on the importance of language in shaping conversations and perceptions.
But that's not all. Show shares how mentorship and community support have led to profound transformation within the African American community. Hop on this enlightening journey with Show Nakpodia, a man who is not just a dreamer but a doer, making positive change and giving everyone a chance to be heard.
What's up everybody once again. My name is Langston Clark. I'm the founder and organizer of entrepreneurial appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting black businesses. And today we have a very special guest, show Nakpotia, who is part of our special series featuring black social entrepreneurs. And so show is the founder of dream voice, which runs and owns and curates part of the largest Martin Luther King Day celebration in the country, known as dream week.
Speaker 1:A lot of people don't know that San Antonio is home to the largest MLK March in the country, but what this brother has been able to do with dream week, I think, in a lot of ways parallels what South by Southwest does in Austin. But dream week is more rooted in conversations for uplift, conversations for dialogue and peace between diverse groups and a number of other things related to social issues and social justice and uplift and the betterment of communities. And so, show, before we get into talking about dream week and dream voice, tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to be in the position that you're in, through who you are as what I believe to be a social entrepreneur well.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, langston. I'm a big fan of all your efforts here locally. I think we need a lot more people like you and to at least spur things on. I'm glad you're doing this well.
Speaker 2:I was born in Lagos, nigeria, as the fourth child. When I was born, my father ended up having 12 children and he had other wives, so with 12 children and all. But I want to start off by saying that my paternal grandfather, my father's father, had 40 children and he had eight wives all at the same time. My grandfather mother's father had five wives and had, I believe, probably about 20 or so children is also just maybe a little bit over 20. My mother was a second to the last child, but my father in my tribe, my father's tribe, my grandmother. When my grandfather died, she was expected to be married off to one of the sons obviously not her child, one of the and that would happen typically because the man would have had several wives and some of the wives might be even half the age of one of his children. But she refused, so she had to go and she basically had to leave the compound and move on, and on my mother's mother's side of it, my grandfather became a Christian and had to choose only one wife of his wife's, so she had to leave as well. So I bring that up because when we think about Africa, especially here when there's not a lot of it that has been told it's just like anywhere else, a lot of complication, and it's not as if people are sitting down and roping women and marrying them. This women had choices and they decided that, and usually in that generation or generation before them you marry into the family. So you decide that, hey, the Clark family is what I want my children to be, clark, and that's the man I marry for everything. So they made those kind of decisions right. So by my father's generation he was married to my mom mother and they were divorced just a year after I was born and he went on and married a couple more but at the end of it he had two wives, or so he had.
Speaker 2:It was a Pruma, but growing up in that environment with 12 children, we grew up in a kind of a middle-class environment. I went to. I seen every Nigerian and it wasn't anything to do with class. We all went to boarding school and in the boarding school, looking back, it was just almost an effort to, because you're young, you don't have a close. What being colonized is, this is your entire world. You didn't have a clue what slavery, what government, what we do. A few white people in there, but they had all the positions of power. We saw them as we used to joke when we were kids that if the white man hasn't seen it, it doesn't exist, because they have to be in a book somewhere and then we'll look at things as kids environment, that they have any correlation in any books or so. So that was part of the way we placed them up. They were just really like God's white folks, because that's it, every single position.
Speaker 2:Like I said, my principal of my school was white and so the ambition was to go and go to where these white folks were, but to learn what they knew. It was important now he wasn't looking at them as to worship them, but to learn what they knew, to figure out, and that's what was pushed on us. So we had to study and I mentioned earlier a lot of what African-American history was and all the heroes, all the way back, I mean whatever it was, book of tea, like I mentioned before, baldwin, harlem, renaissance, everything. We studied, but we also studied all the because, the krumah, the Nureire and the Malmau Mandela, so all of these things were and we're talking about history passages right, and then Mansa Musa and all the great kings of Africa in Egypt. So there was never any situation where we felt that one group or the other had ownership of what it was to be a great, but we understood that the currency was in the West at that point.
Speaker 2:And so in my teens I was, fortunate enough, I was just one of the children my father allowed. I was a second son, so this first son, he didn't allow that but allowed me to go to England or sent me to England. So I went to, did my high school there and went to university and studied engineering. I lost my father in my 20s. He was killed on the streets in Lagos and it was political, and I lost my bearing man, and the one place I thought I needed to go to because I'd always admired it and I visited a couple of times from England, from London, was to come to America, and I was so caught up then that I thought well, you know what I want to be? I really want to be a writer and that's what I'm going to do so.
Speaker 2:I went to New York and I did the whole starving artist in a trove of cab, worked as a security guard and I'll be writing and my very first job when I'm in Java. The first recognition was I went to the school of visual arts for some courses and the professor there said well, I think you see a lot of things a little bit differently, and gave me an opportunity to have two illustrations for the New York Times. Right, I just arrived in New York and because I'll write, it was only the doodles that was of interest to people. And then also I said at that time I said, look, you know what I really want to understand what God is. I decided that God was obviously favored English people, or English-speaking people, and want to find out what's going on here.
Speaker 2:So I read the Bible back-to-back a couple of times. I mean every word and it was when I came out of all of that that I realized that a lot of Christians had even read the Bible and I understand why they would even consider that the word of God if they hadn't read it. That opened my eyes. So I came up to a situation where I suddenly realized that a lot aged, later aged, and most people that nobody knew. I actually thought somebody knew everything. You work your way, you study your way. Somehow you get a few gods really on earth, right, and it was just people just making up stuff as they went along, and some were made sense, some were disproved after a little while or I noticed there were words for that, philosophical and psychological words for that. But at that point I was lost and at the same time I knew it was a clean slate and I could start over again.
Speaker 2:So my sister had moved to San Antonio and I was dabbling in all the dot-com and trades and I did stock options in New York as well and worked as a contractor for Sprint and she said look, I'm in San Antonio, come and visit. I came in here and fell in love with the city San Antonio. I just loved it because San Antonio was the first place I'd been, I'd lived in. I lived in New York, london, lagos and some other smaller cities, but this was the first place where I felt that, okay, the other places seemed completely built up, but this was a place where I think I felt that I could be part of the building and I really liked it. I liked the fact that I could also have different experiences going to the North side, south side, east side, and it just felt like a small version of Europe. And so I said, well, it's going to be a mighty leap of faith to start from scratch here and I started the mighty group agency advertising agency. It was a design agency then, and I was fortunate and got a lot of restaurants, I had a lot of churches and again I knew no one besides my sister and her family and slowly but surely became one of the more recognized advertising agencies in San Antonio.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, I realized that every year I had to do the same thing to prove myself. You had to get a new contract. I wanted something that was lasting, something that I could build on, something that was of more interest to me, and we had a contract to beautify the MLK march, the stretch. And that was when I spent all day looking from beginning to end, at the, what the process was, and I felt that great, I got it.
Speaker 2:There's something magical about this environment that I can't put my foot on. I wonder how many people can be bothered to wake up in the morning and jump to the march but really have something to offer, and that's how dream week started. I wanted first of all to make sure that folks understood that the spearheading of any movement that was led by African Americans and that was channeling their genius would be something beneficial to the entire world, especially if it was and that's why I kind of lean more on MLK's vision. There was more of a peaceful nature of trying to find, but I also wanted to extend that and besides it being spearheaded by African Americans, can it be welcoming to everyone else and allowing people, offer people the platform to actually express themselves and so we can learn from each other. And it took off the last few years. We've had hundreds of events.
Speaker 1:Thousands if you add it all together over the years, thousands.
Speaker 2:So that's it in the nutshell. I just wanted to. I'm fascinated by people. I'm fascinated by how different we are, and I don't think this. I mean, I'm Nigerian, I was born in Lagos, Nigeria, but in the sense, Nigeria is a very complex place. I live in San Antonio and I'm San Antonio, but San Antonio is a complex place and labels are not sufficient, I think, to describe individuals and although they are abbreviations and I think they increasingly getting less useful in trying to describe what an individual is, so talk to us a little bit about what Dream Week is.
Speaker 1:How does it manifest? How do people get involved? What's the structure of Dream Week?
Speaker 2:So Dream Week is a 16 day celebration. Initially we thought about it as a celebration of tolerance, diversity, quality, but really it's turned out to be an environment for civil and civic engagement. It's an environment where you can learn what it is to be LGBTQ, to be an LGBTQ ally. It's there. You can learn what it is to be a Christian or Muslim. In the first few years of Dream Week, we try to create an environment where you can actually just be this flower on the wall and venture. So venture physically, venture intellectually, venture spiritually and just visit and decide what resonates and the things that you definitely don't want to be part of.
Speaker 2:But ultimately, why we've attached it to the idea of the Dream here is who are the MLKs of today? Who are the Mandela's of today? Is it this young boy on the East side who can change the world? And are we creating an environment where those sort of individuals, rather than spend 26 years in prison or be shot just because of who they are? What sort of platform are we creating for those children to actually blossom and give us ideas that would basically help all of us?
Speaker 2:And does that child have to be black? Does that child have to be Hispanic? How, why are we not open to the idea that all these children have the possibility of genius that can actually not even all these children, the individuals who are probably older than every one of us here put together, who are probably going to pass away without sharing something that might have actually made an impact. So that's what we're trying to do is create this channel, create this environment that provides channels for individuals to have a platform to basically express themselves and hopefully introduce something into the society and community that maybe wasn't there before, or, at the very least, something that leads us into a more peaceful coexistence.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I love about Dream Week is that there is equity built into the process. What do I mean by that? I'm a scholar and so, as an academic, we have to submit presentations, articles, reviews or whatever to these, very, all these conferences. It's just hard to get into these conferences for academics, right, there's politics involved. If you know somebody, they know your work, they're going to get you in. There seems to be a level of competition, these academic conferences, and maybe even at South by Southwest. It doesn't exist within Dream Week. So Dream Week is community curated. If you have an event idea, you can submit for it. I don't even think you have to live in San Antonio to do it. Talk about the reasoning for making Dream Week. In some ways and not always sort of open admissions Thing doesn't get accepted because it may not be appropriate. But what was the thought process behind making this something that everyone could contribute to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I mentioned before, I think I'm not sure. I think we're in a generation now where we accept that we're looking for some sort of refreshment of what's out there. The entire psyche spirit just needs this, and it comes. Throughout history Moments like this, something fresh and dynamic happens. How do we make roads and channels where this can actually happen? And so the first thing is that we can make a decision.
Speaker 2:You have to be very, very open minded about this and say, well, I do not know what would this thing would be. I may not even be. It may be something that might even challenge everything, I believe. So for that reason, there can be an expectation and we can even describe what this individual or individuals would look like or think like. If we have to be honest, it's going to be so different, and so, from what I think we already are experiencing and there might be bits of it that maybe it's sort of seeps in so a Malala, for example, the young Pakistani woman now who was shot in the face and who's considered literally a genius right, was a genius before that bullet right.
Speaker 2:And so why do we wait for conflict or a Black Lives Matter revolution to identify leadership in our own environment, for example.
Speaker 2:Why does that have to happen? And so Dream Week is about reaching out to as many people as possible and saying, yeah, they still have the challenge of people being state, having stage fright and being confident, or they feel that maybe the ideas or what they have to say is not really hasn't been well prepared, or so. But ultimately we say look, we're looking for you. You are also relevant that everyone is born with some genius, something to contribute, and we are tired of seeing all these replicas and copies and copies, and we want originality and everyone comes with it and please be part of this. But that also that's why I said is spirited by the African-American genius, because they had no other way to be exactly original. So it's easier, for example, for this sort of thing to happen in America than, say, europe, for example. And so, although we say it's open to everyone, I'm particularly interested in having the African-American involvement as well. I think it's key to all of this.
Speaker 1:I want to backtrack a little bit. I want to go back into the history part of the conversation because I think what you've been able to do here in San Antonio seeing the opportunity in a city I think probably when you came here, san Antonio, san Antonio right now is a tier two city. Now some people get it fitting by that, but I'm saying San Antonio is not New York, chicago, la, houston, it's just not. It's a tier two city, but when you came here, probably a tier three city. Right so you being able to come here to a city that still had space to grow, opportunities to develop and leave your mark, how did you navigate it? What were the strategies that you use to be able to position yourself, to have an impact?
Speaker 2:Right so, that's a good question. Well, I had an advertising agency prior. I still do so. Being able to market or push or promote something was something that I already knew how to do. I was fortunate because I had that. I didn't have to go and raise the kind of money that you would need to market and promote and just start from scratch. So that's in itself tens of thousands of dollars. That gives with AI. Now I'm sure there'll be other opportunities, very similar opportunities, but I just had the tools to actually market it.
Speaker 2:The second thing was the idea itself. I and the MLK commission I have to mention is I wanted just to make this very clear that the MLK commission, san Antonio, are the ones in charge of the MLK march, which has become the largest march in all of America, probably the world. So they've done a tremendous job. We've used that as an anchor.
Speaker 2:But although the MLK commission is in charge of the march, the people of San Antonio individually well, in some cases households collectively decide to wake up in a cold day in January and go to a part of town that at one time wasn't considered so-called fashionable and march. So there's something here in the DNA, here on the city right, that I didn't have any to do with. I believe it's something that is that same DNA that attracted me to this city, attracted me and made me want to stay, and so I was tapping on something that was out there in my environment, but also within me, which is this need to get along. And the more you think about I, remember seeing this. I can't remember his name now, just up top, top of my head, but he was the one that said why can't we all get along? He had a lot of police.
Speaker 1:Now I can't. What's the brother that got beat? Ronnie King, ronnie King, yes, right, we're supposed to know that.
Speaker 2:And so it seemed like a very basic statement and desitations as to why we can't get along. And that's what is really a fascination is I'm designing logos or websites or a TV ad or something like that, and I say, why can't I use all these tools and design something that we can get along in, why can't I use my energy in that direction and something that we can build upon? Right, of course, I didn't think it was going to be that this popular, but there's also an element of I have to make a living. I've invested so much in dream week because I've learned so much the idea of a Trump, for example. If you were a real dream week participant, you would have been able to anticipate that sort of thing happening, the fights and the dichotomies and taking place.
Speaker 2:I wrote again I'm not putting out there some sort of intellectual guru or anything, but I knew that the idea of woman was off for grabs, because so these things, people just dismisses of them, but they're going to be additional terms and being thrown in there because we are the language reviews.
Speaker 2:People are looking back and saying a lot of what that language does doesn't represent me, and some people are privileged, the privileges within the language in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2:So that is what ultimately fired my desire.
Speaker 2:I said, well, I don't know, I don't have all the answers and maybe none of these people do, but collectively, can we sit down and really think this thing through and start off by saying none of us knows anything? Now, can we build up from there and not just have people with half the truth just yelling in one side of the room and the other half? What would it be like if we actually we match together and we have this largest matching nation? How can we have the largest conference of individuals in the world or in America, like towards one goal? Nobody knows the answer and we've all accepted that we are all wrong because we have family, but we want to figure this out. That's really what my vision for the ring is and that's why I feel that is something that I've learned now that it's going to be much bigger than me, and it's not something that I actually even want to be tied to my name necessarily, because I think it just makes it a little bit less per acu. I wanted something that everyone has a stake in.
Speaker 1:How do you see Dream Week growing in the future? You kind of talked about this and you're talking about it now. You kind of talked about it before we started recording, but maybe it's inappropriate for me to say what's your vision for the future of Dream Week, because it's so open, right? Yes, and so I guess maybe a more appropriate question is to ask is how do you see?
Speaker 2:But because I will be interested in your vision. You see, because of your portion of Dream Week, I personally think you're a great person and I want people to know who you are, but I want you to also have a space that is so customized within Dream Week that you're the only one who can actually do that work there, and then maybe somebody else. So that's exactly how I like to position it. So if you talk about a vision, I want a vision where each person has a place, and if you have a dream that is not exclusive of other people, it usually means that that dream itself might be proper. When I mean exclusive, it doesn't say that everything would perfect if those individuals were not, but we're talking about individuals having their place within Dream Week and be able to create something out of it. I think it's so important that someone like you is recognized for what you do and then you can customize them. You don't have a template. It's everything that could come out of. That would be Laksen Clark's thing, and it doesn't really have to be like anything else. That's ever happened before and you have a place. So right now we might not have the audiences that we will have that I expect us to have in the future.
Speaker 2:But I want San Antonio for Dream Week to be a place where people are giving across the dice or, about a subject matter whether it's abortion, gun control actually yell at each other.
Speaker 2:It's okay, you know what's seeing San Antonio, and it's a place where people can come in, maybe not resolve it, but at least attempt to resolve it. So that would be one portion of it. I want people to showcase things that just help us as a people, and it could be global, it could be localized, but that would be a great thing to have happen as well, and just recently I decided to think about it. I would rather have every San Antonio participate and nobody else from San Antonio. To me, that would be fulfilling, because I'm afraid of the idea of it becoming a marketplace for foreign goods Best way to put it Right. So, and which is not a bad thing in itself, but I think you have a lot of those out there already which are like conferences where you have people coming in. I want the community to sort of outcrop whatever this is, and other people can be part of the audience. I want us to be a major stage in San Antonio.
Speaker 1:I think there's some importance in having local ownership of the organization of the event. Dream Week is an event of events, right, yes, and so that's really important. A summit of events, but local. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1:I had an interview with Bobby Blunt that's going to air months before this goes out and we had in that conversation a discussion about I shouldn't say months before this weeks before this one. We had in that conversation a discussion about the importance of focusing locally on supporting black issues here in San Antonio, rather than going to a more popular, well-known national organization NAACP, or maybe even a Urban League that will bring in these national influences but maybe doesn't know what's happening locally in the same way as another organization, a mainstream organization that's here local. And so we talked about the dynamic of man. I want to do black, black, black stuff, but if you go to a black national organization for a support and partnership, it could be good but they may not be able to help you in the same way as a mainstream organization could locally because it's dealing with the local issues. So I think it's important to shed light on the importance of having something scale locally and be just as impactful, or maybe more impactful than having something that scales nationally but has less impact on the environment right around it.
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Speaker 2:I want people to know what's happening in San Antonio. Yeah, absolutely. And but I don't want it to be about the event per se. It's not about, hey look, triumvir, it's happening here. Look, these folks in San Antonio have something that is very original and that's really what it was, and everyone picks up a little bit part of the load, right? So we have people who are given their locations at no charge, we have people who are performing at no charge. I have individuals like you who are setting up events at no charge, and so it lessens the load and it makes it creates a kind of a variety that is very.
Speaker 2:I think this year I had the opportunity to actually go to at least 50 or 60 events and some people know who I am, but in lots of cases nobody knew, and it was very interesting to just be on the other side and just observe it and I can see what for the first time.
Speaker 2:Actually, I actually understood what it felt like to have dream week and how addictive it could be actually, because if you're somebody who seeks knowledge but also we talked about the vision something I'm very concerned about is skewing whatever we're doing to appeal to only one group or the other. So I don't want it to be seen to whatever my politics. I don't want it to reflect it. I want to make sure that liberals and conservatives feel comfortable coming over to present and no one's going to get shouted out. And so that's also part of it and that's a challenge because, being the fact that I'm also African, I don't want it to be that, not being African American, I'm not knowledgeable about what it is that dream week could possibly be, or the possibilities, although we've had a American junior here, so keynote speaker, a few years back. I'll give an example. I think you probably remember this, when Rachel Dollars are.
Speaker 1:I remember that. Yeah, I was cool with her coming to be honest. What was your reason? I think it would have just been interesting to hear what she had to say Personally. Yeah, I might have just even been entertained by the fact that this white lady thought she was black even for that, but like I understand people's concerns about having her come.
Speaker 2:I understood it at the end. Yeah, sisters, that came up to me one evening and we just sat down and I looked at their faces and it just meant so much that to them it was something that was so big it wasn't worth it. These are people I am with here, yeah, yeah, I understand. But I spoke to her several times. My fascination was again coming from my braga and we didn't invite her it wasn't like Dream Voice but for saying, invited her. She had a film out Netflix film.
Speaker 2:I was fascinated by the fact that her children are African American and she adopted an African American who was really kind of a brother, who became and she's a really actually an accomplished artist, went to her and I know the NAACP don't like me to say this, but they had a NAACP in Spokane, right? Yeah, so for me the fascination is that how the generosity of spirit of that's the best way I can put it of the African American that would allow someone like that to be part of them and lead them visually. And what is it that allows everyone to be black if they say they are? And so I wasn't as concerned, I wasn't as interested in. I obviously wanted to hear what she said, but I wanted to understand the psyche of the individuals who thought she was white, because that would never happen any part of where I grew up in Nigeria, for example. She would never. She would be accepted as part of the tribe and be like family, but she would never not be white. Yeah Right, so that was what I thought was important.
Speaker 2:I didn't like the idea and that has happened with the council situation where individuals can't make their own decisions anymore. So you somehow had some engagement, whether it's through media or personally, with this woman, but now I can't make my own decisions. I come to the same conclusion you did you have to make that decision. I thought that was unfair. So I want to have people like that at Dream Week as well in the future, where you get a chance to engage people. We still have to deal with this. If you're going to claim identity, we have to deal with this identity issue. If we're going to self identify or it's going to be something that one is given at birth, as the people, we have to make decisions.
Speaker 1:I think about identity. I'm gonna get to your question about vision for dream week, but I wanna talk about this identity thing. I think earlier this week I was like I identify as a millennial. My wife says we're geriatric millennials because we're almost 40. And I had to think about that. Afterwards I was like I don't identify as a millennial. That was an identity that was ascribed to me, me and Alex Bailey, sent over, didn't come up and say we millennials Somebody who was probably older than us said this generation is millennials and they behave in this fashion. That's right and put us in that box. Yes, if you have people who are outside of our generation.
Speaker 1:I'll never forget I was going to church in Austin and I was going to Bible study and talking about how millennials don't have a place to be innovative in that space and the Deacon who was part of my Bible study group, whom I love dearly it was a great community, great community, right. He was like did you know we're reading books on millennials and how they can out there I was like y'all can't come ask me. You know what I'm saying. You gotta read a book about the people who are actually in your community to understand how they work, how they think, how they function. You could just come do lunch with us on Friday. That takes me to the end of the month.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, so you never describe yourself as a millennial.
Speaker 1:I think I've adopted that because it's been put on me, but I really think about it like they didn't start saying this but what? Five years ago? And so all up until now I hadn't been thinking of myself as a millennial. It's interesting how you operate in a society.
Speaker 2:When they say someone is a millennial, it depends on what controls up in your mind, right? Because there's the whole thing about the language. If you say to me that you're a millennial, and this is just the way, I think it's just blank, it doesn't make any need, there's nothing. I just think okay, younger, yeah, that's it, that's really all it means. Yeah, maybe, but there's a younger group too than the millennial.
Speaker 2:So, I just think about it but I don't know what, where it cuts off and where it starts and whatever it was. So some of those things I don't think. When all millennials die off, would that word die off with them?
Speaker 1:We still call the greatest generation the greatest generation and most. And they're gone. They're gone. Yeah, boomers are leaving. We still call them boomers. All right, we'll yeah, but maybe some new term will come around when we're old, who knows?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know. I think, ultimately, labels, like when you're talking about identity, there's certain things and again, you have interviewed a ton of people, so you might it might be something you've come across, but just the idea that, especially people like me who English was at some point a kind of a colonial language where we had to sort of learn it. I mean, you grew up in a household where they were speaking English and they speak English around you, and it was similar in my case, but there were a lot of other languages that spoke in the right way besides English. So English was something that I had to kind of learn. So when you start to find that within that language and within the narrative because your reality is only when you became conscious, maybe four, five, six years old and you have memory, the rest of it is you have to believe this within a narrative and you have to read it, that you position there. You can't even change that. That is it. If you're born a slave here, or you're born a king, you're born a prince, or your mother was a crackhead or father was a pastor, these are things that are set in language and for some reason they're called trauma, although a different set of labels to describe that individual might have produced a different kind of outcome.
Speaker 2:So our use of language as well is being really tested now, when people say they're not, when folks say that the idea of woman is different from the idea of female, and you start to go okay, so the root of this word? Because every language has to have its own religion, and so we're suffering from the fact that the English language is losing its religion, and it's not the IEM song or whatever it is. It's losing its religion. There has to be something that defines it. It's not a dictionary, but it's like its own spine.
Speaker 2:Where this is so? Because this is what those relationships are, and if you go to biblical past, then women came out of man, which is something that is not observable at all, right, Something that we've observed till now, but that's really what that is. On the other hand, why is male and female not sufficient, like any, all the animal kingdom? Why do we have to have this additional woman label? And do people have to walk around half naked for you to know? Basically identify them through the genitalia? Or, if so-called person presents himself in some fashion, why do they have to conform with what your perception of them is why is your own or is the conception of who they are?
Speaker 1:I want to add that Alex, as founder of Black Outside Inc, he's here in a live audience today for those who are going to be watching this. They also had Camp Founder Girls. I don't know if you're aware of this. Camp Founder Girls is the first Girl Scouts camping community outdoor community organization for Black girls in the country, from what we know, and it was started here decades ago by a Black woman in San Antonio and the organization Black Outside Inc rebooted it and just had a documentary on BET where they featured all of these girls from around the country. Black Outside Inc that's your organization.
Speaker 2:And this documentary is out there now. Yep, and it is. I mean, what's going on? Do?
Speaker 1:we need to have this.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Actually, that's one of the things I was going to. Come up, go ahead, I need an entire list of the individuals. You think that could be part of Dream Week and we want to reach out to them and say, okay, I'm referred by Langston here, because the challenge as well is that I don't want to have a lot of people just speaking right and we say, okay, how are we going to? I want dialogue and.
Speaker 2:I don't know how we can facilitate it, but at the same time, I don't want to be the sole curator of all of this. So I think you mentioned it last year we talked about this.
Speaker 2:Ados situation a couple of times, and then this is two years ago. So I think we should have a panel discussion. I don't necessarily have to be part of it, but it'd be nice to have a round table, the Americans, people from the Caribbean, maybe even some black folks from South America as well, and just talk about what it is. Two years ago, I think, we had a session for the speaker series what is it to be black? What does being black mean? But I don't think it was sufficiently touched on because we're still circling around that and maybe we could have another panel discussion about what it is to be a woman, panel discussion as to what it is to be a Christian, because that's also in play.
Speaker 2:But this being a Christian, because now you think that one group, whether it's the Republicans, are fighting for what they consider Christian values and yet a lot of what the spirit of, at least to some understanding of what it is to be a Christian is at odds with what their own approaches. So even that is an issue. It's like who is a Christian now? Who is more Christian, a Trump or a Biden? So when you have those things, a lot of folks also talking about this demise of, and this is a civilization that is itself. It's kind of eating itself and dying. But I also believe that I think we've reached a point where we're beginning to realize that we're in darkness and that something has to change. That's where I think we are presently and that's why I think some it's like dream week are very important.
Speaker 1:So I got to ask this question before. It was related to the idea of being black in San Antonio and what I see is my role in dream week. It's interesting that you bring up this idea of exclusivity. I've been reading this book called the Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. She talks about there needs to be some sense of exclusivity in your gathering, in your event, so that people know what the boundaries are. And I think in San Antonio in particular, we need spaces for black folks to come together and deal with our issues. I think we have less issues in this city. We have less multicultural issues, cross racial issues than we do interracial issues.
Speaker 1:I absolutely believe that it has been the difference between the community of black male mentorship and investment that I had as a graduate student in Austin. Now, mind you, I was in grad school, so I understand that you're in school, you're going to get poured into in a different way than you are coming into your professional career. But I saw a model where the guy who arguably was the most prominent, powerful black male in the city of Austin and other black males in that circle created an environment that flowed out of the university into the community where you had brothers in their professional circles getting mentored, brothers in their PhD programs getting mentored, brothers at the PWY getting mentored, the HBCU getting mentored. And I come here and I see brothers in the same fraternal organizations, the same black elite groups, and I'm like it's a washout. I go to the same brothers in the same organizations like yo, can we do it? You know these guys are all old and they're worn out by corporate America. You can't really get them.
Speaker 1:But the same group of black males in Austin when I was there they was getting it. I know a brother who was an ex-con, who had a rough life, who got a job at McCombs would go tooth in his mouth because he got mentored in a certain way and cultivated and loved on like that's my guy, like Johnny Hill is my guy and he's a genius in his own way. But the older brothers, who we stereotypically say are more polished, weren't trying to polish him, they just tried to pour into him and not seen his career elevate right, and Johnny's older than me, right, and so in some ways I was Johnny's mentor, in some ways he's been my mentor. But I don't see that same sense of togetherness here in unity and everybody's working in their silos and we all suffer for it. There's a level of brilliance here that doesn't get recognized nationally and it should, just for the sake of what brothers and sisters are doing.
Speaker 2:And I'm not sure if it's specifically African American or black or it happens in other groups, because other groups will say the same thing. Most groups here think that African Americans are so united here. Right, that's what we perceived because of the kind of things. We kind of what? Eight, nine people argue that there's a lot more than that but say, even generously, 12%, 10%. We make a lot of noise in San Antonio. We do For that kind of percentage. There's a lot there. We've had a leading figure and there's a fire department who will visit San Antonio, which is a huge CPS energy, actually female twice. Jaleen as well was there, and so we've had a lot of stars from the African American community.
Speaker 2:The problem is unlike and I think the same thing happened. I remember living in Bestie for a little while. I just remember seeing people, whether it's like hearing about people, whether it was Biggie Clinton Hill where people like Spike Lee opened the shop. He had enough money to open the shop somewhere else. He chose Fort Green, actually not Clinton, they're all bad, they're adjacent.
Speaker 2:I don't think as an African American and my job would be to try and find the funding that would allow this kind of things happen or even just talk to one of those big organizations and say this guy's doing something here and you have all of the year to maybe think about. I want to be able to seed enough individuals who can attract the whether it's the corporations or the big foundations and who say do I work with when I come to San Antonio. I don't want them to work with Dream Voice, I want them to work with the individuals who are creating. The actual Essence Magazine reached out to us. They wanted to have something that they thought might be a kind of a Essence Festival light version of it. Just like you say don't have the bandwidth, I don't want to be the curator because I know that it would just be my thing.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, I might as well just stay on the advertising side. If that's it, there's benefit there, but that's not what I really want. I'd rather have Essence supporting something that is on the ground already and is part of Dream Week and is a two or three day affair and it's big and that's fine. It just grows on its own. That opportunity exists because my biggest challenge so far is finding individuals just like you who are willing to very similar to what you're doing with your podcast. I think I saw. I don't know, maybe I'm exaggerating. I saw my over 50, your podcast so far. Maybe some other channel.
Speaker 1:Oh, it was over 5,. Yeah, we had over 5,000 downloads.
Speaker 2:I mean over you interviewed.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we had about 50.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's what it takes, though they can't just keep plugging away and plugging away, and plugging away and right, and it's a belief that's a difficult thing for me to get a lot of folks to believe in and say, look, just stay the course, just might take a year or two, three, just keep plugging away, so that, if you say what I saw, I knew this was going to be a big challenge. I mean, affected finances, affected relationships, affected, a whole bunch of things just doing what I'm doing. But it's what has made me understand the world I live in, more than anything else, more than any book, more than any individual. It's just the activity here, and seeing what the dynamics is, how people are relating to each other, has given me a great insight into how this world functions.
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