Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism, and supporting Black businesses. This podcast will feature edited versions of Entrepreneurial Appetite’s Black book discussions, including live conversations between a virtual audience, authors, and Black entrepreneurs. In this community, we do not limit what it means to be an intellectual or entrepreneur. We recognize that the sisters and brothers who own and work in beauty salons or barbershops are intellectuals just as much as sisters and brothers who teach and research at universities. This podcast is unique because, as part of this community, you have the opportunity to participate in our monthly book discussion, suggest the book to be discussed, or even lead the conversation between the author and our community of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. For more information about participating in our monthly discussions, please follow Entrepreneurial_ Appetite on Instagram and Twitter. Please consider supporting the show as one of our Founding 55 patrons. For five dollars a month, you can access our live monthly conversations. See the link below:https://www.patreon.com/EA_BookClub
Entrepreneurial Appetite
The Sword and The Shield, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.: A Conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph
Discover the untold stories and revolutionary ideologies of two of the most iconic figures in the civil rights movement, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., with our esteemed guest, Dr. Peniel Joseph, author of "The Sword and the Shield." Dr. Joseph dismantles the oversimplified narratives that often define these leaders, presenting them instead as complementary forces driving the same revolutionary cause. Uncover how Malcolm X's role as Black America's prosecuting attorney and Martin's radical evolution into a revolutionary figure both played crucial parts in challenging systemic racism and fostering Black dignity.
Explore the global implications of Malcolm X's diplomatic efforts and his profound influence on key international figures from Muhammad Ali to Fidel Castro. We delve into Malcolm's transformative impact on the Nation of Islam and his meetings with world leaders, highlighting how his charisma extended the reach of the civil rights movement beyond American borders. We also draw parallels between Malcolm and Martin's international diplomacy, underscoring their contributions to global power dynamics and their respective roles in shaping the civil rights movement on a worldwide stage.
In our conversation, we emphasize the importance of educating younger generations about Black history through accessible resources like Ibram Kendi's works. We tackle the complex issue of reparations, drawing from historical and modern advocates to build a compelling case for economic redistribution to rectify centuries of racial injustice. Listen as Dr. Joseph shares his invaluable insights and stay tuned for our next episode with Dr. Maurice J. Hobson, author of "The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta." Join us in exploring these significant themes and narratives that shape our understanding of racial justice and societal development.
Hello, this is Langston Clark. I'm a scholar, educator, cultivator of community and founder of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. This podcast will feature edited versions of Entrepreneurial Appetite's Black Book Discussions, which feature live conversations between a virtual audience, authors and Black entrepreneurs. In this community, we do not put limitations on what it means to be an intellectual or an entrepreneur. We recognize that sisters and brothers who own and work in the beauty salons and barbershops are intellectuals just as much as sisters and brothers who teach and research at universities. This podcast is unique because, as part of this community, you have the opportunity to participate in our monthly book discussions, suggest a book to be discussed or even lead the conversation between the author and our community of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. For more information about how you can participate in our monthly discussions, please follow entrepreneurial underscore appetite on Instagram and Twitter. This episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite's Black Book Discussions was supported by the Black Ex-Students of Texas in San Antonio. Best San Antonio is an organization of Black alumni from the University of Texas at Austin living in San Antonio. Professional and social networking events, recruitment and retention support to current and prospective students and serve as a liaison between the University of Texas at Austin and the San Antonio community.
Langston Clark:In the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, social media and news feeds were filled with calls for justice. The streets were painted with the words Black Lives Matter, as corporate America momentarily and superficially adopted hashtag BLM as its mantra for the summer of 2020. Given the long history and contemporary reality of racial injustice in the United States, black folk are often forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. Do we settle for what may be insincere recognition of the value of black lives, or do we take no recognition at all? Similarly, there are also occasions where black folk feel as if we cannot have our cake and eat it too, such as the case with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Such as the case with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. However, in this episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite's Black Book Discussions, dr Peniel Joseph exclaims that, for once, we don't have to settle for the lesser of two evils. We can have the cake and eat it. We can get the best of both worlds. We can have the Radical Malcolm and the Radical Martin. We can have both the sword and the shield.
Langston Clark:Today, we're going to hear from Dr Peniel Joseph, author of the Sword and the Shield. And so I want to begin, dr Joseph, first by thanking you for being here with us today. And this book is significant to me because, with all the murders of African Americans going on right now here in the United States, I was thinking before this meeting, I can't even remember everybody's name, like I'm getting. I'm getting confused, right. Uh, is it Rihanna, floyd? You know what I mean? I'm, because there's just so many names it's so hard for me to keep up with at this point. And so what I'm seeing on social media from friends from high school, from college, undergrad, whatever is it seems like people are choosing Malcolm X, like people are choosing who they think Malcolm X is or who they think Malcolm X was at maybe a very small portion of his life, without understanding what his evolution was. So to me, it's like people are saying I'm team Malcolm.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Langston Clark:And not so much saying that I'm team Martin and don't understand how, as these two African-American men great African-American men evolved in their politics and their understanding of what was best for black folk, that they actually made some radical shifts within their own brand of radicalism. So I was wondering if you could talk about that and then maybe give us a piece of what your inspiration was for writing this book.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, definitely. Thank you, brother Langston. You know, when we think about Malcolm and Martin, we look at them in cliches. We say that Malcolm X is, by any means necessary, dr King's beloved community. Malcolm X is self-defense. Martin Luther King Jr is nonviolence. Malcolm X is really giving white people hell and Dr King is sort of hugging and loving them and loving them. And so I wrote the book. The Sword and the Shield is because that's really wrong. We think of Malcolm as the political sword King, as the nonviolent shield, and they're really both. So you don't really. I wrote the book so that if people could just read one book on Malcolm and Martin, they could just read the Sword and the Shield, certainly inspired by Dr James Cone and his book Malcolm and Martin Dream Versus Nightmare. But I frame them as dual sides of the same revolutionary coin.
Speaker 3:So I make an argument that Malcolm X is Black America's prosecuting attorney. And when we think about that, what do I mean? Well, malcolm is prosecuting white America for a series of crimes against Black humanity, and those crimes start with racial slavery. They include the rape of Black women and men Don't think men somehow weren't raped Boys, girls the killing and murdering of so many thousands who are gone, convict lease system, lynching white supremacy from 1619 to the present, and Malcolm was saying this. So Malcolm had his own 1619 project before the New York Times, before Pewitt's surprises. So that prosecuting attorney is very important for us because Malcolm's not trying to defend Black humanity to white folks. He doesn't care what they think, and so sometimes people have asked me so what is Malcolm X's greatest policy accomplishment? What is the greatest thing? Because Dr King talked about voting rights and I tell Black people that you were all Negroes before Malcolm X. Okay, so that's the accomplishment, right, people were having fist fights in playgrounds, if you call them Black, because they didn't understand that being Black was connected to dignity. Being African was something to be proud of. Malcolm's, the one who goes to Africa Before Stokely Carmichael, before the Black Panthers, it's Malcolm, right. So when we think about Malcolm X, who is he? We were all Negroes before Malcolm X. Malcolm provides us with that pride and that dignity about ourselves and that's why I say he is in pursuit of radical black dignity. And what do I mean by this? He's looking for radical Black political, cultural, economic self-determination that Black people define the problems that are plaguing them and they define the solutions to those problems. His solutions are global in scope. Malcolm is both Harlem's hero, but he connects what's happening in Black political movements in Harlem to Haiti, new Orleans to Nigeria, brooklyn, new York to Bandung, indonesia. That's who Malcolm X is.
Speaker 3:So Malcolm has an office at the United Nations because he knows so many African and international diplomats. He meets up with Fidel Castro in 1960 in Harlem. He goes to the Middle East for the first time in 1959. He meets up with Kwame Nkrumah, the prime minister of Ghana, nnamdi Azikiwe, the prime minister, the president of Nigeria. He meets up with Julius Nyeri, the president of Tanzania. One of his best friends is Mohamed Babu, who's the prime minister of Zanzibar. So that's who Malcolm X is.
Speaker 3:Malcolm is a prosecuting attorney turned global international statesman, and he's pursuing this idea of radical Black dignity. He calls American democracy nothing but American hypocrisy and he is trying to convince the Black community of its own self-worth, of its own history, and that we were not just kings and queens, but that we are human beings and we can resist racism and white supremacy to the death. So that's Malcolm X, now Martin Luther King Jr. I call him Black America's defense attorney. He defends Black lives to white people and he defends white lives to Black people. And what King is doing is looking for what I call radical Black citizenship. He's arguing that we need to end racial oppression, but that citizenship isn't just the absence of racial oppression and it's not just voting rights. King is saying a guaranteed income, universal basic income, guaranteed health care, guaranteed decent housing and the end to racial segregation.
Speaker 3:Because King wants to end to racial segregation? Because racial segregation means economic segregation and we know that when we think about entrepreneurship. Yes, we can build Black institutions and parallel institutions, but we need access to capital and we need access to land. We need access to land, we need access to shared resources, because there is no separate but equal in the United States. There's only racial segregation, anti-black racism, and it's segregation and unequal. That's what it is. And the reason why cops can mob in your neighborhood is because your neighbor ain't white next door, right, you're in a segregated community. You're in segregated, economically deprived neighborhoods and Malcolm was talking about this in the 1950s and 1960s. So one of the things I argue in the Sword and the Shield is that, instead of just thinking about Malcolm as political sword King, as a political shield, we see over time they converge and come to see. You need radical Black dignity and radical Black citizenship.
Speaker 3:I'd say what happens to both of these brothers is they evolve. I wouldn't even say it's a radical shift. I'd say it's like all of us when you're 21, by the time you're 35, you're different. By the time you're 50, you're different Doesn't mean you've betrayed your 21-year-old self. It means you might be a father or grandfather at 50. You know, it just means things are different, so you're taking in more information. That's what Malcolm X said.
Speaker 3:People said are you different now? Because he said that, hey, he met with white Muslims on the Hajj and he felt that sincere white people could be part of the anti-racist struggle, the racial justice struggle, black liberation struggle. They asked him when he came back May 21st 1964, new York City are you him? When he came back May 21st 1964, new York City Are you different? Do you love white people? He said no, I'm not saying that. He said I traveled, and travel broadens your perspective. The more you travel, the more you experience, the broader you get. That's what Heman Sweat does too. Look, going to Africa is going to change you. It's not that suddenly you love or hate anybody. You're changed. You're saying look, I got to go to Africa. Meeting these big time people at Goldman Sachs or Wall Street is going to change you, right. So meeting poor people is going to change you. So, whoever you meet, whatever experience, and that's what happens to Malcolm. So when you think about the sword and the shield, it's not the sword versus the shield, it's both. And so they come to understand you need radical black citizenship and dignity.
Speaker 3:Some key points here 1963, birmingham. King has a letter from Birmingham jail trying to desegregate Birmingham. Malcolm X is in Washington DC. He's usually in Harlem as head of Muslim Mosque number seven. He's head of Muslim Mosque number four, temporarily in DC and he's watching everything that's going on.
Speaker 3:He's constantly criticizing John F Kennedy as a racist, terrible president, not speaking out for black people, criticizing Dr King calling him an Uncle Tom, saying that nonviolence isn't enough, saying that black people should kill, whether it's a two-legged or four-legged dog that attacks them in Birmingham. Because black people are getting beaten and brutalized by German shepherds and fire hoses that are powerful enough to rip the bark off of trees. Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, alabama, in the spring of 1963. So the violence against Black people is so hard. Spring of 1963 in Birmingham. You have French newspapers calling the white folks and law enforcement way before George Floyd the top of their newspaper is calling the white folks and law enforcement way before George Floyd the top of their newspapers calling the white folks savages. They're not calling us savages. They're saying the white folks are savages because it's only savages that send dogs to bite little babies and little girls and little boys. It's not fellow human beings. Don't do that to fellow human beings. So that's what's going on in America in 1963.
Speaker 3:It's important for us to remember that Malcolm sees all that and one of the things I argue is that Malcolm gets certain things wrong about King and King gets things wrong about Malcolm. King thinks that Malcolm is a black supremacist because the Nation of Islam does have a critique against white supremacy. But at times, because they talk about a Black scientist, yakub, creating white people, they can traffic in their own racism, even though they're also anti-racist. Right, this idea that white people are genetically predisposed to committing crimes against us. That's not true. White supremacy as a system does commit crimes against Black people, but it's not about DNA or something inherent to any human being. Now, when we think about King getting stuff wrong about Malcolm, malcolm got aspects wrong about King. Nonviolence was not something that was weak, nonviolence was something that was very, very strong. And Malcolm admits as much when he says look the March on Washington. He agreed with it, but it should have been massive civil disobedience enough to paralyze the city of Washington. What's so interesting, langston, is that in a couple of years, king is going to be saying the same thing. We start seeing how they influence each other.
Speaker 3:Now, by 64, malcolm is no longer with the Nation of Islam. And just to get it straight, why does Malcolm leave the Nation of Islam or is thrown out? It's not because he said chickens coming home to roost about President John F Kennedy's death. And, by the way, right now chickens are coming home to roost in the United States. Malcolm was an old farm boy and chickens coming home to roost means karma, and this is biblical Old Testament. You reap what you sow, that's what it is. So if you are raising children or you're treating people very, very well, they're not going to kill you and attack you. And if they do, they might have some mental illness and you help them out. But if you're treated bad and you constantly mistreat pets, human beings, communities, societies, that's going to come back on you. It might come back on you a generation later, two generations later, a hundred years later. And when Don F Kennedy was assassinated, malcolm X said chickens have come home to roost. Not because he was glad, but he was saying the United States before King was such a huge purveyor of violence locally and globally, the violence had come back to haunt them and kill the American president, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, uses that as an excuse to kick out Malcolm.
Speaker 3:But we're here in an entrepreneurial book club. What was Malcolm messing up for? The Nation of Islam? The money, okay. Malcolm helps them raise millions of dollars, goes from organization 500 to 50,000. But after a while he's messing up with the money. Nation of Islam is a religious group. It's got no taxes. You know, you're tax exempt, right? He wants them to be in marches, demonstrations, the whole nine.
Speaker 3:So basically, malcolm gets replaced by who? His protege? Not Louis Farrakhan, who was one of his proteges. Malcolm's so charismatic and so brilliant and such a genius. All the brothers wanted to be his proteges, including the sisters too. Here's another protégé of Malcolm X, cassius Marcellus Clay, who becomes Muhammad Ali, and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad gives him that name, muhammad Ali, just to take him from Malcolm X, because Cassius Clay joins the Nation of Islam because of Malcolm X. Most people join the Nation of Islam because of Malcolm X. Honorable Elijah Muhammad had set up the whole thing, but the thing, the person who gave it wings to fly, is Malcolm X. That's what we have to understand and that's no disrespect to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Langston Clark:I got a quick question.
Langston Clark:So when I was reading a book related to some of the things that you just said, an underlying theme that came about but wasn't necessarily named as one of the chapters was to me, this idea of like radical or revolutionary diplomacy and like internally as I'm reading a book I live in San Antonio there's a group of us, some of us are really trying to like get get black community here motivated and and have some solidarity, and one of the things that I haven't been thinking about is that like me, little old me, professor at a university, like I can meet with a head of state, like I think of that as something that only you know a senator could do or president could do, or someone who went and got their degree in like international relations or something like that could do.
Langston Clark:And so a powerful statement to me was their impact globally and how that impacted shifts for the United States locally. But then also this idea of like a type of radical, revolutionary political engagement that I was unaware of, particularly about Malcolm X and, in some instances, dr King, like they were engaged in ways that history doesn't necessarily paint them in this picture, and so I thought that that was extremely, extremely valuable as a reader?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we need to, you know. Thank you, langston. We need to know about them and that's why I wrote the book. These are world historical figures, these are global figures. So when people talk about George Washington and Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, those cats don't have anything on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, okay. So when people talk about Gandhi and talk about these, the people who bestride the world historical stage, the global stage, so, just like how people you talk about Mandela as this global figure, so was Malcolm X and so was Martin Luther King Jr. If anything, they just live a shorter amount of time, I argue have a bigger impact than all those cats, because what they do is transform power relations between the global North and the global South.
Speaker 3:And when you think about this radical, this revolutionary diplomacy I've talked about Malcolm and Malcolm certainly visits the Middle East in 1959. He visits with Egyptian Vice President Anwar el-Sadat, who becomes president in the 1970s. He visits with different sheikhs and Muslim imams and kings and princes in Saudi Arabia, including Prince Faisal. He's treated as a dignitary and head of state in 1959 and on his trips in 1964. He meets up with Fidel Castro in 1960. He has access to an office at the United Nations. He introduces Muhammad Ali to all these people who are going to help when Muhammad Ali becomes this truly global figure. After winning the heavyweight championship and also resisting the war in Vietnam, malcolm X speaks out against the war in Vietnam before Martin Luther King Jr. So he's a truly global figure and he's a statesman and that's why him and King and I'll transition to King they meet for the only time at the US Senate on March 26, 1964, because Malcolm is transitioning from Black America's prosecuting attorney still going to charge the United States with human rights violations against Black people at the United Nations. That's what he's doing. And when people are applauding and you see the clip from May 21st he said the audience is going to have to be quiet because his supporters are applauding, because because he's saying we charge genocide, we charge human rights violations, and Malcolm is both coercing and aligning with African nation states, saying you got to join us in this petition because you can't be about pan-African solidarity if you're going to leave us behind. We can't leave you behind and you can't leave us behind. That's what Malcolm's saying to Kwame Nkrumah, to all those folks because they have their bigger geopolitical interests. But Malcolm is saying Black folks' lives here really matter and you need to be supporting us internationally in front of the United Nations. So when we think about King, king is doing major diplomacy too. He visits Ghana in 1957. He spends a month in India in 1959.
Speaker 3:King, over the course of the 60s, becomes increasingly radical, increasingly revolutionary, especially after Malcolm X's death, but even before that. When we read the speech of the March on Washington and listen to it, king is talking about reparations. August 28, 1963, he says we come here to cash a check that has been stamped, insufficient funds, but we refuse to believe that the Bank of American Justice is bankrupt. So when we think about King, he says in that speech we're going to have to struggle together and go to jail together because he realized the United States is a sick, what the Panthers call decadent, racist society. You know, you only have to go to jail in an unjust society. Dostoevsky says you can measure a society by who's in its prisons, right, who's in its prisons. And in this country, 2.3 million people in prison, overwhelmingly Black people. By percentage, because we should only be 12% of the folks in prison, we're about 40%. It's a crazy number. And those cats are innocent because the system has done this to them. So when we think about King, between 63 and 65, before Malcolm X's assassination on February 21st 1965, king becomes increasingly militant, increasingly radical, but he really doesn't break out until Malcolm is assassinated and Malcolm and him meet March 26, 1964. But Malcolm tells a journalist that him and King have the same goals human dignity.
Speaker 3:In 1964. Malcolm listens to an entire speech by Dr King December 17, 1964 in Harlem, after King's comeback, returns from winning the Nobel Peace Prize in Scandinavia, and he speaks admiringly of King. A few days later Malcolm visits Selma, alabama, right before his assassination, and he's trying to visit Dr King but Dr King's in prison and he meets up with Coretta Scott King Dr King's not just wife but political partner and he says that he's there to support Dr King. He believes in voting rights, which we see from the ballot or the bullet speech. Malcolm always still retains the right of self-defense and self-determination. That's why he says the ballot or the bullet. He says and he doesn't believe in democratic institutions. He believes in Black people's ability at the grassroots to utilize the vote to transform corrupt and racist and white supremacist democratic institutions. So there's all this stuff that's happening where you see the convergence.
Speaker 3:But one of the things and I'll give it over to you, langston is that after Malcolm's assassination, february 21st 1965, the person he's got the biggest impact on is Dr King. Dr King can't play it both ways anymore. There's no more good cop, bad cop. Dr King becomes both. He becomes both. He's marching arm in arm with Black power activists which they won't tell you. He's really friends with Stokely Carmichael and I document it in the book Mississippi, meredith March.
Speaker 3:And then, when he comes out against the war in Vietnam, 1967, he doesn't just come out against the war in Vietnam, he says the United States is the biggest purveyor, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and that we have to guard against the triple evils facing humanity materialism, racism, militarism. We're still facing those triple evils now. And Dr King says that the halls of the US Congress are running wild with racism. He speaks in September of 1967 and says the biggest problem with urban rebellions and violence going on is not black people, it's white racism, that white racism is the number one problem before the Kerner Commission. And he says that white people keep preaching peace but they're the ones who unleash the chaos that's upon all of us. This is Dr King. This is Dr King.
Speaker 3:So Dr King is taking no prisoners, taking no shorts and that's why when we celebrate Dr King, we stop in 1965, nationally, at the Selma speech, selma to Montgomery speech, the Montgomery speech in March 25th 1965. So that's after Bloody Sunday, when they finally complete the march from March 21st to March 25th. There's 30,000 people there and he's saying how long, not long. And we stop him there because we know Dr King becomes a pillar of fire, a man on fireael, black power radicals, of course, of white supremacy. He also becomes the person who is talking about black is beautiful, alongside of Malcolm X. He's talking about black pride.
Speaker 3:King has a speech in 67 where he says the racism is so deep they say a white lie is a good lie and everything black in the dictionary is bad. And King is saying this this is Dr King. People don't get. They're giving you the okey-doke, like Malcolm said. You've been tricked, you've been bamboozled, you've been led astray. About Dr King, not just our own community, but about Dr King.
Speaker 3:There's a reason why Dr King's assassinated. He's not assassinated because white folks love him and they're going to give him a hug. They can't wait to make him president of the United States. No, he's assassinated because he's a revolutionary. He's not bringing a knife, or we've been hoodwinked as well. He's not bringing a knife or a gun or curse words, but the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, everybody's saying he's bringing violence to Washington DC because of a poor people's campaign. It's Dr King who starts the first Occupy movement. Not to occupy Wall Street, katz. Dr King said we're going to occupy Washington DC with black, with white, with Mexican-Americans, native Americans. I'll close with this.
Speaker 3:Dr King goes to Marks, mississippi, in early 1968, one of the poorest zip codes in the United States. Bunch of black folks, black kids, boys, girls who don't have shoes, who don't have blankets, parents who are eating onions for lunch and dinner. This is real talk. Dr King is in tears and he's seen poor people in Mississippi, delta. He says and we have the footage. He says, and this is what Malcolm had said.
Speaker 3:He said the way you're all living it's a crime in this rich nation. Malcolm had accused white America of a series of crimes against black people and by 68, martin Luther King Jr is saying he's saying this poverty, this segregation, right here in Mississippi, the richest nation in the world, is a crime. Not only that, malcolm had always talked about racial slavery. Dr King is talking about racial slavery, reparations, the Homestead Act and says the white folks got free land, european immigrants, black people couldn't get access to the Homestead Act and now they're telling you to pull yourselves up by the bootstrap. King says we're going to start the Poor People's Campaign from Marks, mississippi. He's in tears. He's talking about this the next few weeks until he's assassinated. And he's saying that we're going to Washington to get our check. That's.
Speaker 5:Dr, King.
Speaker 3:So Dr King is a revolutionary. We talk about 2020, these protests, covid, racial disparities, the deep seated racism that continues to mess with our mental health, our access to capital to be entrepreneurs, just our lives because of the criminal justice system, poor education. We don't have access to clean water, we're more exposed to asbestos and lead Our kids suffer from asthma. We live in food deserts. Dr King and Malcolm were talking about this, so they realized we needed radical Black dignity and radical Black citizenship simultaneously. So the idea of saying you have to be Team Malcolm during this revolutionary time or Team Malcolm Martin, it's nonsense and again, it is the okey-doke, so you don't get the best of both of these iconic revolutionary figures.
Langston Clark:Yeah, that's good. And now a message from our sponsor. The Heman Sweat Center for Black Males honors the contributions of Heman Sweat, the first African American admitted to the University of Texas at Austin, through innovative programs to support the social, professional, academic and spiritual developments of Black males at UT Austin and the surrounding community surrounding community.
Langston Clark:I have the privilege of living in the present and I'm spoiled in a way. I'm spoiled because I went to UT Austin for graduate school and was loved and nurtured and had Black male mentors and Black female mentors in a way that most graduate students or undergraduate students don't get at a PWI. And the same thing happened when I got my master's from Ohio State. And, of course, I went to HBCU for undergrad, north Carolina A&T. So I've been protected all the way through. But I had some experiences, like in elementary school, where I was the only black kid in school, and so I think part of me is like I don't know how I feel about integration, but I've been integrated my whole life right, and I've definitely reaped some benefits from having proximity to the wealth and the social capital that comes with white folk. So that's one thing I'm wrestling with. The other thing I'm wrestling with is we see now George Floyd gets murdered, breonna Taylor's murdered the murder in.
Langston Clark:Atlanta, all of these things happening and everybody's on the bandwagon. Everybody's like Black Lives Matter. It's Black Lives Matter on the streets in Austin. You know Target is making Juneteenth a holiday.
Speaker 3:And we made Juneteenth a holiday. But now other people corporate America, because black folks in Galveston, texas started that holiday and it used to be Jubilee from June 19th 1865. Then we started annual 1866, june 19th. We used to call them annual Jubilees in Galveston. In Houston, black communities bought five acres of land just to have parades and festivals in Houston. Land has since been stolen from us, but we did the holiday and we made Texas recognize it in 1980. 47 states have since recognized it, not as Emancipation Park, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So we did this, just like I was at Prairie View A&M building and, like Walter Rodney said, grounding with my sisters and brothers and Prairie View. All over Texas we have freedom towns, we have these black towns in Oklahoma and other places, but Texas is really number one and so we did that. So Target and everybody doing we have to understand that's black genius and black magic. That's making Juneteenth I just wrote a piece for CNN make Juneteenth a national holiday. But we did that and the people who did it. Great books for brothers to check out the Half has Never Been Told by Ed Baptist did it. Great books for brothers to check out the Half has Never Been Told by Ed Baptist. Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, ebony and Ivy by Craig Wilder. When we look at racial slavery and what happened, these are folks who are being completely decimated and murdered in really despicable and heinous ways. But we did that, so it's important to give us credit for that.
Langston Clark:So I guess the point I'm making is these movements that we started, these holidays that we started, I'm concerned that they're just going to get co-opted, and I'm not trying to blame us for this that we will be made to settle for the recognition, not get the equitable distribution or redistribution of the resources that we need in many times.
Speaker 3:No, no not this time. We've got plans already the Black Lives Matter movement, movement for Black Lives. That policy agenda is where you start. It includes reparations, but it's even bigger than reparations. We're already battling and doing the policy battles right here in Austin to defund the police and transform what we think about as public safety nationwide. Yeah, we'll take some corporate money, but we're saying that the corporate money should go to things like Heman Sweat Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, places that are Black-led and are actually impacting Black people's lives. So I say not this time, and I think that onus is on us.
Speaker 3:I've said this on national television. I'm writing in Black communities all over that we have a generational opportunity to transform American democracy, to have Black dignity and citizenship institutionalized with guarantees and outcomes that are guaranteed for success, that are representative of our portion, of the demographics, of who we are right and in terms of racial integration, brother, here's what I'm saying. It should be our choice. Everything should be racially integrated and if you want to just say, hey, I like to live in like a predominantly Black neighborhood in Houston, then do it. But it shouldn't be that your red line, your kids and you don't have access to wealth credit that zoning policies are so racist that the auto zone is in the Black community and the white suburbs are safe.
Speaker 3:We've got to have racial integration. We have to have integration of resources and when there's suffering, the suffering is shared so our people don't go to jail overwhelmingly, die overwhelmingly Our Black women, whether they're making $50,000 or $5 or $500,000, worse healthcare outcomes, including giving birth to babies. This is a travesty and a state of emergency and a catastrophe. So we've got to push for racial integration. We have to push for racial. There's no such thing as separate but equal in the United States. It's segregation and unequal. And then, within that integrated sphere, if we decide, hey, here's how we want to interface with that. That's different. That's different. But it can't be that there's places in the United States where you're unsafe, where you have no political rights, where your wealth has been stolen from you and you're criminalized and punished and incarcerated. We've got to put a line in the sand there, even as I'm completely pro-Black institutions, independent institutions, parallel institutions whether it's Martin Delaney or Amy Jacques Garvey or so many Black feminists and Black nationalists have been moving towards for so many decades and centuries.
Langston Clark:And one last question before we go to the audience. We have different age ranges of folks here. We cater mostly to an African-American audience, but we have, you know, allies and learners here. But this question is for families, black families in particular, and I'm sure others could benefit. How do you take a book like the ones that you've written and have a conversation about these things with your family? If the children are like first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, how do parents transmit this information?
Speaker 3:There's some good books. I would say that Ibram Kendi. He's got a young adult book called Stamped for the Beginners which is illustrated with Jason Reynolds, and that's called Stamped for Beginners and that's a takeoff of a big national book award winning book he wrote called Stamped from the Beginning, and Ibram is a friend, one of my former mentees, and he was just really blown up bestsellers. There's going to be good books for children. There's even a baby book how to have an Anti-Racist Baby that he has a little baby board book. So I would say there's some good. Even President Obama has a book that I read to my daughter that looks at race and stuff. That can be a good conversation starter right there as they get older.
Speaker 3:We have to share the story with them, the story of not just Black liberation in America but the whole thing, including our resistance to racial slavery, while even being under bondage. And you know slave resistance, slave rebellions, the brilliant Black women and men, both then and now, who continue to resist, because Breonna Taylor and George Floyd are no different from the ancestors we had in the 19th century. We had all this genius and neither is Jay-Z and Beyonce and Michelle and Barack Obama. They're getting some more education and more access. But even at the end of racial slavery, people don't understand. It was about 500,000 people who were free. Black people were free About 270,000 in the South, about 236,000 in the North and so we've had this struggle for a long time and, like I said, it's a struggle for Black dignity and citizenship because the Voting Rights Act didn't give it to us.
Speaker 3:One of the things that we can't lie to our kids is that the civil rights movement had a happy ending. It did not. It did not, and this is why 2020 is erupting, why 1992 happened. People forget Overtown Rebellion in Miami in 1980. So these things continue to happen and we didn't win. We're still struggling, but we have to understand it's not the triumph, it's the struggle, and teach our kids that and really teach our kids to love themselves and to love our history. Connect that history to not just America and the West, but to Africa. We have a long prehistory before this country and to love our history, connect that history to not just America and the West, but to Africa. We have a long prehistory before this country and we're connected to Haiti and Jamaica, the Caribbean, latin America, south America. We are everywhere, we are everything, and our culture dominates the world. It's just that all the wealth we've built has accrued to other people because of white supremacy, because of a racist system of capitalism, because of racial violence and terror that has systematically been deployed against Black communities.
Langston Clark:Thank you. So we're going to have Chris Cutt-Calvin sort of filter the questions in from the audience.
Speaker 4:What a great conversation. Thank you both. I want to go over to Daniel Thomas first. He had a question early on in the conversation that I want him to be to ask you guys live, and then we'll go to our question and answer series and kind of just run down the list. There's about five questions there. If anybody has any questions you can put them there and we'll kind of just go through them and you guys can kind of just knock them out Kind of quick fire style. Daniel.
Speaker 5:Hey, dr Joseph, thank you for the talk. So the question that I wrote and Langston and I talked about this A few times was Recognition without redistribution. So you see, on Instagram Everybody's getting excited that you know. Streets are being painted and statues are being torn down, but in those same streets when the paint is being put down, it says Black Lives Matter. It's completely gentrified, like in East Austin. The same place where the paint is being put down, it says Black Lives Matter. It's completely gentrified, like in East Austin. The same place where the statues are being taken down, nobody really knows the historical significance or the true history of those figures being taken down. So there's a lot of things going on with recognition, not so much with redistribution. So I'm just curious if you had any thoughts about how people could mobilize to focus more on redistribution, not just superficial recognition.
Speaker 3:It's. You know, daniel, I think that's a great question. It's a great point. One of the things I would say is that I think it's happening, and here's what I mean. I think what's the interesting thing about 2020 and you've seen a bunch of white allies on the street who are trying to join a movement of anti-racism that Black people have been in for 400 years, and certainly one of the latest iterations is the Black Lives Matter movement of 2013,. 14, 15. That has continued. So I think the strategy that's being deployed right now and it's one I approve of is an all of the above.
Speaker 3:People are trying to eradicate systemic, institutional, structural racism and defeat white supremacy from stem to root. Some of that has to do with Confederate monuments and flags, and it's important to get rid of them. Some of that has to do with faith-based institutions and having faith-based institutions invest, but also look at themselves from top to bottom. Some of that has to do with corporate America, higher education. People are looking at the theater, sports, culture, finances in terms of the whole financial system here, venture capital, silicon Valley, austin, silicon Valley getting Juneteenth as recognition, but the redistribution piece is major and again we have a reparations movement. That's serious. I mean.
Speaker 3:The case for reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates was just the tip of the iceberg. It's the National Coalition for Blacks of Reparation and COBRA, which has been around for decades. It's Callie House who tried to get a pension movement for African Americans. It's 40 Acres and the Mule Port Royal Experiment, south Carolina, and what we're seeing now. Sandy Darity, the esteemed Black economist from Duke, has a new co-written book on reparations. We look at HR, that bill 47, the Conyers bill about a reparations investigation committee. Bob Johnson, the co-founder of BET, along with his ex-wife, has called for $14 trillion in reparations. So Cory Booker, the senator, when he was a nominee for president, candidate for president, was saying he supported reparations. So we have to set up and we have it on the ground, talking about reparations and how that would look locally, statewide and nationally.
Speaker 3:Reparations is a big game changer because we need that wealth, transfer of wealth that was stolen out of the black community for multiple, many infinite generations up into the present and that was stolen both through racial slavery but a century of solid segregation and lynching and the super exploitation of black labor and black folks not having access to the New Deal or the GI Bill or World War II and 30-year low-interest mortgage loans that set up white middle-class wealth Homes that were $50,000 became $350,000 over a generation and that's been passed on. So we have a lot, a lot of claims to reparations and we have great, great plans about reparations that would provide very, very specific investments, including investments that can transform gentrification, where we can have transformed segregated communities that have investment. We have pushback against the undervaluing of Black neighborhoods and businesses, which is how gentrification happens. Our neighborhoods are undervalued. With the newest book I've looked at and I can give people the price of your by Alan I'm losing his name by $180 billion.
Speaker 3:So we are doing that and I think we should continue. So the big. So we are doing that and I think we should continue. So the big. I think you need the Juneteenth recognition and, at the same time, the redistribution. So it's really an all of the above strategy. Certainly, there's low hanging fruit reason why we lack access to citizenship, the reason why we are dehumanized, is because there is a whole superstructure of both institutions and a culture that justifies anti-Black racism and everybody imbibes it. Black people even imbibe it, but so do Latinx, native American, queer, trans. Everybody imbibes anti-Black racism. Because we live and breathe this society. It's important for us to understand that we can push back and say we're going to be anti-racist, we're going to be for racial justice, we're going to be for deep empathy for Black people, but the redistributive part of this is a game changer. It's usually important. Everyone here should be for reparations and not just for Black Americans all black people in the United States and globally.
Speaker 4:Thank you, want to go to Usame? You had a question that you asked in the chat box.
Speaker 2:While you were talking about the three evils that Dr King talked about militarization, racism and capitalism, slash materialism. I was thinking about the ongoing police brutality, and could we see what the police has been doing as almost the epitome, or at least the confluence, of these three aspects that Dr King so profoundly spoke about?
Speaker 3:Yes, you know. Yes, and even more, because what you see, even like the Ava DuVernay, the brilliant documentary the 13th, we were all bamboozled with the 13th Amendment. It said it was ending racial slavery except people in prison. And in the next 155 years they put us all in prison, including immediately after and before that amendment was even ratified. We are convicted, we are criminalized, we are incarcerated, we are punished. When you look at American history now, the only reason we didn't have two million people in prison at the end of the 19th century, and most of them being black, was we simply didn't have the technology to make it happen of punishment. It was easy enough and you get. The great book is Khalil Muhammad's the Condemnation of Blackness, which looks at how European and white progressives were saying, how the European immigrants could eventually be assimilated, but the black people couldn't. And the black people were criminalized. People said they were genetically dumb and predisposed to crime, especially the violent rape of white women. This is insanity, but this is America right. So the criminalization of Black people starts as soon as racial slavery ends. It was there during the antebellum period, but you also didn't need to expand it as much because you had this system of racial slavery right, so that criminalization. You know the new Jim Crow talks about the drug war and felony conviction as a new Jim Crow. But that racial caste system is even bigger than just the criminal justice system.
Speaker 3:The brilliance of Black Lives Matter and Martin King knew this and so did Malcolm was that America's criminal justice system is a gateway to panoramic, kaleidoscopic systems of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. That's why we're being murdered. We're being murdered in Arkansas in the back of police cars where people say we committed suicide with a gunshot to the head. This is ridiculous and that's why Malcolm said we needed justice by any means necessary. Because he was saying the people in charge of the country and the people who are connected to these institutions are immoral. Charge of the country and the people who are connected to these institutions are immoral, unethical, morally reprehensible people. That's what he was saying and he was right. He was right, okay. So he was saying black lives don't matter. We need to transform this country and this world by any means necessary.
Speaker 3:He comes to see, because King understood this. You aren't going to win in a knife fight or a gunfight. You are outnumbered, you are outmanned. You actually had to organize such resistance that it couldn't be ignored. And that's what we're seeing on the streets of the United States right now 2,000 cities, including cities that aren't predominantly African-American people, coming out in the streets for Black Lives Matter. So the people are way ahead of the politicians. The people are way ahead of these systems of punishment, these systems of white supremacy and dehumanization that we find ourselves locked into. So that criminal justice system is very, very powerful, but it's one piece that's part of the super exploitation of Black people.
Speaker 3:Ruthie Gilmore's book Golden Gulag is great on this point too and for convict lease system. Douglas Blackman Slavery by Another Name and Sarah Haley's no Mercy here About Black Women, convict Lease System. And Talitha LaFleur's Chained in Silence all about the convict lease system. Very important to get you know. Another important book to get is the Stephen Hahn book A Nation Under Our Feet that looks at Black radical self-determination after the Civil War. And of course, ta-nehisi Coates has the three-volume graphic novel of the Black Panther called A Nation Under Our Feet, which is inspired by the Stephen Hahn Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Speaker 4:Dr Joseph, as I was scrolling through the text I saw Caleb Davis's question. I wonder it's just so on point what does the shield or the sword, or both, look like in the 21st century? What are some common and uncommon examples, both locally, domestically and internationally?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that the way they look is what you've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement locally, and you know Austin Justice Coalition, the work we're trying to do at Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, what Heman Sweat does, what it looks like, is this Protests, demonstrations that are nonviolent, that can have civil disobedience, but they're going to be attached, and that's for citizenship. They're going to be attached to Malcolm's bold and robust structural critique of racism, white supremacy, uncompromising love for black people but unapologetic insistence on black liberation. So you combine both, because what you say is that, look, we are facing an existential crisis and the crisis is white supremacy. That's the crisis. The crisis is anti-black racism and it's's institutional, it's structural, it's systemic and it's global in scope. So this is local, regional, national and global, and the way in which the resistance looks is what we've seen.
Speaker 3:We've seen Black Lives Matter not only protest in the streets but call for comprehensive policy transformations. We have thousands of racist policies to obliterate and erase from the books, and that's not enough. Then we have to have thousands of racial justice policies and that's going to connect to gender, connect to LGBTQ, connect to immigrants. It's got to be intersectional, but it's got to be Black-led, because the movement for racial justice will never be achieved unless we achieve Black equality. It's never going to be achieved right, because anti-Black racism is the organizing principle and everybody in between, their status in society is connected to how close they are to us politically and physically, or how far they are to us politically, physically, geographically. That's a great answer.
Speaker 4:With everything that's going on on our college campuses, I wanted to pull this question from Mr Neil Tanner, Using the wisdom of both Malcolm and Martin. What advice would you provide towards college students, athletes, musicians, slash entertainers to make the most of the current cultural shift in America and abroad?
Speaker 3:And I would conclude that other question by saying in terms of how does it look nationally and globally? We're seeing all these coalitions happening globally, in France and Europe, but Africa sympathy marches just everywhere, right, and so the face of it has to look that. You look and you attack and you try to look for racist ideas and racist policies, obliterate them and institutionalize anti-racist and racial justice policies wherever you're at. That might look different in London because you have a different population. It might look different in Paris, it might look different in parts of the Middle East or Africa, but the same organizing principle of being anti-racist is very important In terms of students and I can send you guys some anti-racist resources that we have. We put together an anti-racist resource guide at the center. A couple of things I mean. You guys can educate yourselves, you can agitate People are already doing it at UT and, I'm sure, at UTSA, making demands for more Black students, more Black faculty, more funding for Black male students who are really, and Black female students but really underrepresented just on campus, on campuses. We are losing ground there. We can ask for more and demand more money for community engagement as well, more money for research and creating scholars like Dr Clark and Dr Sutton. So there's a lot that you can do on campus In terms of athletes, athletes and entrepreneurs and folks who are sort of influencers. You know, read and use your platform for justice.
Speaker 3:The thing I'll say, and I'll close with this, what converges Malcolm and Martin is that, one, they both have personal sincerity. Two, political integrity. And three, unapologetic love for Black people, all Black people. Black people who are poor, black people who are considered ugly, black people who are considered marginal, black people who are considered repulsive, who are considered marginal Black people who are considered repulsive Black people who are not considered human beings. Malcolm X spent 76 months in prison between 1946 and 52 and never forgot that and always tried to organize people who are in prison, people who are the least of these. Martin Luther King Jr would go to the Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black belt. He slept on the floor of shotgun shacks. He embraced the least of these as well, and that's what all of us should be doing.
Speaker 3:We have to think about the black community like we do our own family and have deep, deep empathy, even when we make mistakes, especially when we make mistakes because we don't get a chance to have second chances and third chances and 50 chances, like our white counterparts. And we can see that with the way this country treated the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and 90s and eviscerated and destroyed and humiliated and incarcerated so many hundreds of thousands of innocent people are in prison right now for selling weed and selling crack. And now weed is legalized. And when white folks got the opioid addiction, we medicalized it, gave them help, gave them hugs, gave them money, refused to arrest them.
Speaker 3:This is a sick society, like Dr King said, and it's our job to try to make this the beloved community. But before we can make it a beloved community, we can say this is a sick society infected with the disease, not just racism, but the virus of white supremacy that George Floyd could not outrun Breonna Taylor, george Floyd, ahmaud, arbery, outran, covid-19, only to run into the bigger. The deadliest pandemic in the history of Western civilization is white supremacy.
Langston Clark:And that was a good ending right there. Thank you, Dr Joseph, for coming. We appreciate you spending this time with us. Thank you, Thank you all, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining this month's episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite. In the next episode, we will feature Dr Maurice J Hobson, author of the Legend of the Black Mecca. Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta. Ut Austin's LBJ School for Public Affairs. The center's mission is to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race, democracy and public policy impact the lives of global citizens.