Episode 18: “We are the Evidence” MLK, Inauguration Day and The Road Ahead, with The Group Chat
Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
[Sigh]. I am sitting here trying to figure out how to begin this episode. When our podcast first started, I would script these intros out very meticulously. And as time has marched on, I realized that it’s critically important to let myself be and feel and speak from the heart. I’m also thinking about the fact that so often when I’m in therapy sessions, shout out to my therapist, she’s incredible and very much my home girl. But often when I’m in these sessions, she asks me to locate where I’m feeling my feeling. ‘Cause I have a tendency, surprise, surprise, to intellectualize everything. That is never just about feeling it, but it’s always about what the feeling means. Where did it come from? What lesson am I supposed to learn? So to get out of my mind and into my body, which I invite you to do with me: The feeling I’m feeling is sadness. There’s some anger and rage and frustration and a lot of fear mixed up in it too, if I’m honest. And it’s just manifesting in a set of hot tears coming from my eyes. But really the place where I feel it is in my chest.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Every breath feels heavy. I feel like I’m gasping for something that should already belong to me. For something that I should have just because I’m human. And for something that keeps feeling further and further out of reach because somebody else feels like I’m not human. [Sigh] Yesterday was the day that a lot of our lives changed for at least the next four years, for, I hope, just the next four years. It was King day. It was also the day that I woke up and realized that my friend, your friend, our friend Cecile Richards, had become one of the ancestors. For those of you who have been here the entire three seasons, Cecile was our very first guest in October 2020, ahead of that consequential election. And here’s some of the love and brilliance she shared with us then.
CECILE RICHARDS :
Women have been doing the work forever to make change. Things will not change unless we use this newfound power to drive our own reckoning with government. Because the issues that we are dealing with are structural and they are systemic. We have to have aspirations that put our issues collectively at the top of the agenda, not at the bottom of the agenda.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Fast forward to last November, Cecile’s life looked very different than the one she was living when she spoke to us in 2020. A very aggressive forum of brain cancer had tried to take her out and here she was still working, still creating, still innovating, still telling abortion stories, still supporting women and non-binary folks all across this country, and still taking the time to come and talk to us at Undistracted. Cecile, you were and will always be a very, very special legacy, not just in the Undistracted family, but for a country that needed and still needs courageous, thoughtful, unapologetic voices and spirits like yours. I’m hoping that you are resting well, that you’re up there playing cards with your mama and probably giving us a few extra angels of protection as we enter this next era. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your love, and thank you for your unrelenting belief in justice.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
I don’t know y’all waking up to that news. Um, set what was already going to be a difficult day into a tailspin for a minute. And I felt like I gathered myself and was better. And I did all the things I said I was going to do. I didn’t watch the inauguration. I didn’t read things that would trigger me. I focused on my family. I focused on what I had to say. And I focused most importantly, on where Dr. King might lead me, lead us in this time. And then I saw a video of one tech billionaire doing what to me and most people and apparent experts on fascism, World War II and Nazi Germany, what appeared to all of us to be a Nazi salute.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
And then I read the list of executive orders that were taken up just yesterday to turn back the hands of time and supposedly make America great again. And suddenly all of my protection, all of my boundaries came crashing down and I was distraught. And I think it’s okay to just let myself feel that. Knowing that today I woke up feeling a little better, a little more healed, a little more ready. [Sigh] A little more clear. After prayer and a good night’s sleep and tucking my little one into bed. I got the chance to start a new day. And hopefully I’ll get the chance again tomorrow when I’ll be a little stronger and a little more ready and a little more clear.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
But what I know for sure, and I shared this morning on social, for as long as I’ll still be there, what I know for sure is that I have work I was purposed to do. Work that was created specifically for me. And in my mind, that’s because of the fact that there is a creator. But even if that’s not your belief system, there is work for you to do shaped by your lived experience, your identity, your knowledge, your passions, your talents, and where all of those things intersect. There is an opportunity and a privilege and frankly, a duty for you to do your work. To be very clear, you have to do your work and not leave it to anybody else. You have to do your work and not swerve into a lane that’s not yours. And you have to do your work because sitting out right now is just not gonna be the solution. So let’s feel our feels and let’s do our work.
On today’s show, we are navigating a day filled with very sharp contrast. Martin Luther King Day and the inauguration of a president whose policies are the antithesis of everything King taught us. To help me unpack this is back to the group chat with the incredible Dr. Brittney Cooper and Dr. David J Johns.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
The whole reason that he ran for president is ’cause he got mad that there was a meritocracy that put Obama in the office. What he wants to do is establish a world that is the opposite of meritocracy.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
I want us to lean into those moments to challenge these ideas that, that are designed to divide us and to have it so that we don’t need Masters or overseers because we’re doing the Slave Masters work for them.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
But first we’re gonna take a quick break.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
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BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
So happy belated birthday Dr. King. You all know Dr. Martin Luther King Day is a holiday that, for many, signifies how one man’s dream paved the way for people of all races, not just Black or white to envision and participate in a world of racial harmony. That’s what they say anyway, but let’s keep it real. The progress that we associate with Dr. King’s legacy was not done by one man. It was the collective work of countless activists, educators, students, everyday people, uh, his wife and children too, who fought in the name of justice and equity. Hell, even the effort to establish MLK Day as a Federal holiday faced so much resistance. Y’all, it wasn’t even officially observed until 1986. And let’s not act like this world of racial harmony was something that people were excited about. MLK was assassinated and he died mostly hated by white America.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
So now, this year, as we honor Dr. King, we’re also witnessing the inauguration of a president whose rise is steeped in rhetoric, policies, mindsets, and behaviors that are the direct antithesis of Dr. King’s…everything. The irony is so funny that it’s actually heartbreaking. So where does this leave us as a nation? Have we really grown that little? What does it mean for that guy to be sworn in on a day meant to celebrate one of the greatest symbols of justice? And most importantly, how can we draw from the wisdom of Dr. King and other figures of our past to help us make sense of what lies ahead? To help me unpack these questions, I am hyped to be back with the group chat: Dr. Brittney Cooper, professor of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, and Dr. David Johns, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition. Coop, David, welcome back. I’m so excited to have you back on Undistracted ’cause y’all were the only people I can think to talk to right now.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Hey friends. [Laughs]
DAVID J. JOHNS:
Hey friends.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Oh, we need to talk about, we need to talk about a whole lot of things. Um, but we are recording this on Tuesday, the day after Martin Luther King Day. ‘Cause that’s all yesterday was for me.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Correct. Correct.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
It was Monday. It was Martin Luther King Monday. It was find some Inspiration Monday. It was be a mom Monday. It was be a friend Monday. It was be a daughter Monday. It was being a citizen Monday. And that’s about it. Um [Laughs]. So Coop, how, how, how was yesterday for you? What did you
BRITTNEY COOPER:
You know, it was a, a restful Monday. I watched some Netflix. I did a bit of crocheting and I did a little bit of writing on my, you know, new work or whatever. So.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Okay. Okay. How about you DJJ.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
I also rested. And I prepared for travel. I’m excited to be participating in Creating Change, which is produced by the national LGBTQ Task Force as one of the largest, uh, convenings of folks who are politicized. And so I’m really excited about that and all the events that NBJC are gonna be be producing there. So I packed and did some final prep, and then I reflected on, uh, some of Dr. King’s teachings.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Yeah.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Yeah.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
I revisited a sermon that his son gave me in 2015 when I was feeling some of the feelings that have resurfaced.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mmm.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
That I vomited up to use Uncle Jimmy’s term. Uh, the sermon is, but if not, he preached at, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 67.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Yeah.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
And then I was thankful that on his actual birthday, uh, January 15th, I was at the National Action Network Breakfast where Martin Luther King III reminded us that the last sermon his father wrote, but was unable to preach was, um, America May Go To Hell.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mmm.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
Um, so I did a lot of reflecting on what it means for us to be living in, I imagine a part of Dr. King Junior’s nightmare and the work required for us to hold the dream.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
So it sounds like between the three of us, there was a mix of rest and work, um, which sounds pretty typical both for this crew, for Black people in America, for people who care about justice. You know, we did some toddler oriented MLK time in the morning. We watched Gracie’s Corner, uh, MLK holiday song and read our MLK Golden Book. We also read our Kamala Harris Golden book. ’cause we have both.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Yes.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Let’s be clear.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Yes, we love it.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
We also have the Beyoncé Golden book, which will be coming out very soon.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
[Laughter]
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
[Laughter] And then I, I watched, um, I Am Not Your Negro, because I felt like, to your point, David, some of Uncle Jimmy’s wisdom from being in that time and of that time, um, and that unique position he held both being in this space, but also external to this space as a dedicated artist and not necessarily, um, an activist first was, was just instructive for me.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Um, I spent some time editing a piece that I had been writing in the days before that ended up being published on The Cut yesterday. Um, and shout out to our friend Lindsay Peoples over there. We we love the Cut.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
That’s right.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
We love Lindsay. Yes and Catherine and the whole team over there.. And lemme I’m gonna be honest, I cried yesterday.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Yeah.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Like, I, I did not, I was, I did, I set up everything to not feel heavy, but I still felt heavy. Um, I did all the things I could do to keep my eyes off of the monstrosities of yesterday, but they still came to me. Right. Um, in particular in the form of two things. One, Elon Musk, and we all know what he did.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Mmm.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
And two, the link to the WhiteHouse.Gov page that shows every single executive order that was put through yesterday, mostly to rescind previous work and executive orders from the Biden Harris administration. And even before.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
And I bring that up in particular, beyond my personal rage, there’s a personal connection that all of us have to a lot of this work. Right. Our scholarship has informed this work. Our activism has informed this work. When Trump 1.0 came in office, all of the work that I had been spending doing for over a year as a part of Obama’s policing task force, literally was deleted and unfunded by Trump. Biden tried to bring it back, now it’s gone again. And David, on the list of those executive orders is the ending of an office, a team, a critical set of work that you helped build under Obama, which was Excellence in Education and Employment for African Americans. I mean, that was, you were literally the executive director of that. And knowing that the Biden Harris administration had brought that work back after Trump, I know was critically important to our community, but also to you. So like, I just wanna acknowledge that this is, we always say the personal is political, but like, this is real, real personal. This was our actual work.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
Yeah. Friend, I don’t know that I have the words to describe all of what I am feeling in this moment. And I continue to struggle with holding space for folks for who civic participation is performative.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
And optional.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
At, at best. Yeah. Right.and who don’t appreciate that there are people who dedicate their time, talent, and treasures to public service in pursuit of this country living up to its foundation principles and to honor all of the ways in which our ancestors sacrificed to build this ship for free.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Yeah.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
And there was a part of me that was, you know, going through the list and processing, like, you know, some of it’s nonsensical and I’m, I’m trying to remain grounded in lessons from Hitler and what, what, what he was able to do in his first 100 days, which was to stoke a lot of chaos and fear that encouraged people to, to capitulate. So he didn’t actually have to have power.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mm-hmm.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
You know, so as I’m reading through parts of it and I’m thinking to myself, okay, so you sir, say that there are only two genders that doesn’t make the fact that there are more than two genders not a reality. Right? Like the, some of this is maybe on the surface, laughable in, in some ways debatable. A lot of this is consequential,But when I got to an office that I hold memories of deep in my soul, and I, I I I thought about it, had a conversation with Monique Toussaint, who, who took a chance on me when I was, I was Executive Director to transition from a space that she was already in, um. In the White House and the Department of Education and, overnight to have, um, all of our work, um, rendered invisible and not important, um, has a rage in me that I don’t know how to describe in spite of the fact that I have an intimate relationship with words.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mm. That is, um, deeply honest and vulnerable. And I want you to both know that we appreciate you for sharing that and also that we are here as you continue to process it. So much of what you said is resonant, but in particular, you know, you referenced this moment and I think that there were some things that he said in his inauguration speech that were beyond policy intention, but were actually statements of belief. Right? And they were clear signals about the orientation that he and his ilk expect all of us to have. If we’re going to call ourselves Americans. Two of those things in particular stick out to me. One, you’ve already mentioned, David, that there will only be two genders, male and female. And two, that we’re going to build a society that is quote, colorblind and merit-based.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
So what I heard was, we are going back to being a white, heterosexual, patriarchal nation, get in line or get run over. And I wanna be clear that he can say everything he wants. That doesn’t actually mean that our aspiration should be a colorblind society. Just because he’s rendered our work invisible does not mean that it doesn’t exist. That it’s not important that it didn’t happen. Um, and that it’s not still real, but Coop, like, what is our work ahead of us? Are we just gritting our teeth trying to survive? Are we taking a four year long vacation somewhere internationally?
BRITTNEY COOPER:
[Laughs]
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Are we pushing back on every little thing that comes out? Are we educating people so that they understand that’s not a life philosophy that we have to prescribe to? Is it all of the above? Like…
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Well first of all, let me be very blunt in saying that the idea, so, that there are two genders bullshit. Also, the idea that America’s a meritocracy when Donald Trump is the fucking president is a white boy’s wet dream.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Hello!?!
BRITTNEY COOPER:
That’s all that…
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Let’s also be really clear. If you really believed in a meritocracy, you’d be fine competing with the entire diverse country.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Listen. The whole reason that he ran for President is ’cause he got mad that there was a meritocracy that put Obama in the office.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Period.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
What he wants to do is establish a world that is the opposite of meritocracy. He wants to establish a world in which white boys get positions simply because they’re white boys and they believe in reinforcing their position through brute force. He wants to install a world where women are supposed to go back home, um, and fuck on demand, and then have babies at will with no support, with no parental support. They don’t want them in the workplace, they don’t want them to have money, they don’t want them to have power. His presidency is a reaction to the #MeToo movement and the attempt to hold people accountable.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Uh-huh.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
To try to grapple with the, his own sorted histories of sexual violence that the court has proclaimed that he has. At the same time, when Barack Obama became President, it is like Donald Trump thought to himself that this country has gone down. Because any world in which a Black man can be president is a world that has no merit at all based on his white supremacist understanding.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mmm. There it is.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
And it is, that’s psychic break that has driven the whole of politics for the last decade. Even for white men who know that this is an irrational way to think, emotionally they need it to be true. They want a world in which white possibility is secure. And what they are threatened by is the idea that if this were a true meritocracy, then their mediocrity will be exposed over and over and over again. So one of the things that, that I have known Black folks to do is we believe deeply in some of these ideas, right?
BRITTNEY COOPER:
We believe in meritocracy, which is why we’re always like, just give us our shot. We will strive for excellence. That we are people who celebrate Black excellence, right?
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mm-hmm
BRITTNEY COOPER:
We are people who say you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. So meritocracy is actually a core value that we hold. And one of the reasons that we are so hurt is because we have watched the, the woman who was the most meritorious in this race, not win!
DAVID J. JOHNS:
[Whitles] Say that!
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Precisely because she actually was qualified, because she was excellent.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
That’s right.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Because she could have done all of this better. Right. We watched it happen with Hillary Clinton. We are living in a country that says it wants meritocracy, but backlashes when that meritocracy shows up in the bodies of folks who are not male, who are not white, who have not had power before.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
That’s right.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
And we have one exception, and that exception was Barack Obama. And look at the price that we have paid because that brother was able to get over the line.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
[Sigh] Yeah.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
And so if you ask me what the times require. What I would say is that there are gonna be many decimations in this administration. And so we don’t have to react to the first one. I think that we get to be still, I think we get to breathe. I think we get to treat it the way that my grandmother used to tell me to react to a storm. “Baby, get somewhere and sit down, the Lord is at work”
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mhmm.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
“Turn off all these lights, unplug all of this stuff, and just sit here and let the Lord be at work.”
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mm-hmm.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Now we can’t stay in that posture forever, but what if we just gave ourselves one moment to stay in the posture of recognizing the magnitude of all of the stuff that we’re having to witness. And then from that position, thinking about what is the best direction for us to go? I wanna acknowledge for people that we have been surviving this dude for a decade.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Yeah.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
He literally 10 years ago this year, came down that escalator and became a terror. And I’m a scholar of the 19th century and early 20th century, and I’m still stunned. So imagine that we live in this world where white men are doing all of this because they think they’re losing power. And yet, to your point, within being in office in less than 24 hours, he was able to wipe out decades of work. Right? And so this assertion of white male power is not just to remind us that they have all of this privilege that we say they have had. It is also this attempt to reclaim not just for these old white folks, but also for young white people. What they are trying to do is create a taste in the mouths for young white people. That this is what it means to be white. This is how the world should feel to you. You should have people to dominate. Because here’s the thing, a world where white people and white men specifically don’t have Black and brown folks and women to dominate, is a world where whiteness has no meaning for them. Because that is what whiteness means for them. Whiteness is tethered to domination. And so they have an existential crisis at the point that they can’t reach for and be intimate with some idea of domination.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mhmm.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
And it is our ability to have clarity about what the psychic hold is in the life of whiteness for them, them allows us to figure out how to fight. Because here’s the thing, baby, you can’t reason your way out of thinking that’s like that. There is no moral persuasion that does that. Our job is not to try to convince them at this moment to be better humans. Our job is to figure out how to survive.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
There’s only one example in the hist—modern history of African American folk where we dealt with massive government abandonment and we figured out how to build a civil society to survive it. And that was the era of Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell. And these were the Black women who organized after reconstruction had ended. And they said, we will build schools, we will build hospitals, we will build nursing homes. We will build a civil society to catch the least of these. So what we do in this moment is we don’t spend our time trying to only convince white folks that there is a better humanity to which they can aspire. We also figure out what Packnett said, which is, what is your work? And then you do that work. Yeah. We just do our work and we build the world. And we remember that we are not the first Black folks to have it all and have it snatched away.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
This is exactly right. I am, I am so grateful for the lessons of history in this moment. Right. I am not grateful that our ancestors had to survive them, but I am grateful that they dropped the breadcrumbs along the way. And part of the reason why it has been so intentionally pursued that those breadcrumbs are kicked and erased and thrown in the ocean in the form of, in making teaching that history illegal, is because they know that that’s the path. They know that that’s the blueprint and it would be much better for them should we choose to not build those worlds. I’m also thinking about the fact that it is not just his courts. It’s not just Congress. It’s not just his cabinet that are helping him do these things, and destroy what we have built.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
It is also the oligarchy, specifically these tech bros who lined up and sat in their seats. Elon and Bezos and Mark and all of their cronies, they all sat, sat next to each other in the front row in the seats that they had paid very much for. The TikTok CEO was right up there too. Right? And they decided that as you try to build your world, we’re going to make sure that we remove from you tools that you use for world building over the last decade. Right. I’m of the belief that Elon bought Twitter to destroy Twitter because he knew that the Arab Spring and the Ferguson uprising and Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter understood how to use that tool for our collective power. Right. And that I, I’m clear that like the 15 hours that TikTok went dark, were all about positioning Trump as a hero and positioning TikTok to be able to be used for state media. Because now we see there are certain words that you type in if you’re in America and no results pop up if you type in, you know, Elon Nazi salute. Right. Like nothing comes up all of a sudden. Wow. So we’re watching this happen on all fronts. I’m over here trying to make sure that my first newsletter gets out by the end of the week. You can subscribe at abrittanypacknett.com because I’m like, if our ability to reach and teach and learn relies on… relies exclusively on sites that we know are hostile to us than we’ve already lost. Right. So like we, we gotta, we gotta get our ducks in a row here.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
But I’m also thinking about some other things. So he declared a state of emergency at the border. He closed the app that allows asylum seekers to schedule appointments with border patrol agents. He’s attempting to redefine birthright citizenship, which we’ve discussed a little bit before, because I think especially for African American people who are descendants of enslaved people, we think that has nothing to do with us. And we forget that birthright citizenship came out of the fight for emancipation, which is to say that enslaved Africans who were forced to breed, had to raise children that were not seen as citizens. And so part of the fight for our dignity and humanity to be recognized in this country was to create the amendment that says birthright citizenship exists, including for those people that you just wanted to cast off as labor. So I don’t feel all that secure in my citizenship just because I can go back four or five generations in Mississippi and Alabama.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
He’s pardoned nearly all of the convicted January 6th rioters. The guy who wore the horns has been quoted, I listened to NPR this morning, has been quoted as saying now that he can, he’s gonna go back out and buy some guns. So I’m feeling real safe about that. He’s walked back protections for transgender people who are being held in federal prison. He signed us out of the Paris Climate Accords and walked back a bunch of climate change provisions. He’s excited to quote “drill, baby drill” and has declared an energy emergency. He’s rolled back DEI in the government entirely. So I think really my question is what are you all doing to stay up to date and aware without burning yourself out. Coop, how you’re managing, staying woke, but also keeping your peace.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
You know what? I’m taking a lot of naps and I am not actually trying to stay woke.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Come on Naps.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Yeah.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
I stay woke, but I take naps.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Yeah. I take naps. And you know what? Because I don’t actually know. One of the things that I think the TikTok ban slash faux-ban or whatever it is, and all of this, all of these media folks lining up behind him should have taught us, is that having more information is not the same thing as having more knowledge.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM AND DAVID J. JOHNS:
Mmm!
BRITTNEY COOPER:
We are in an information rich society. And yet somehow people still came to the conclusion as you began this segment by saying that, that it couldn’t get worse. That things were already bad, that fascism was already here. And that kind of thinking is a consequence of folks having too much information. And not enough of the kind of frameworks to help them to actually process things.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Yeah, that’s good.
And nothing makes me more apoplectic than people who are like, oh no, it ain’t no different now. It’s always been bad. Ain’t no difference between these two candidates. Ain’t no difference between, you know, we just all out here on a plantation. Nothing makes me angrier than folks who are, who play around with history. ‘Cause I’m like, no, no, no. My life is not the same as my great-grandmother’s life who was born in 1903 and who I had the pleasure to know and spend time with as a child. My life is not the same as my grandmother’s life who was born in 1927. The history is not the same. And our ability to be more precise about what we know becomes really important. One of the problems that I think we have in this moment is that everyone thinks it is their responsibility to keep abreast of everything. And we literally have not thought about knowledge in that way before because it is not a sustainable model for how to do it.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Wow.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
That is why, you know, up until the democratization of the internet, we believed at some level in experts. That’s why Dr. David is an expert in education. You’re an expert in education and policing.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mhmm.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Right. I’m an expert in history and Black women studies. Right. Our Sunday school teachers were our local experts in the Bible. The mechanic was an expert in cars. Right. People had their lanes and we came to respect them. And we didn’t think that just because we could Google, WebMD, that we knew more than the Doctor.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
[Laughs]
BRITTNEY COOPER:
And so what I want us to do is relieve ourselves of the burden and the arrogance of thinking that we have to know everything, keep up with everything. This is going to be a moment that is gonna require us to, to reimagine our relationship to these platforms in multiple ways.Reimagine our relationship to the amount of labor that we have been requiring each other to do. Because it was always unsustainable, which is why all of us are always feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. So your refrain today, pick your lane, stick to it. Do your work. It is the message.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
We’ve been referencing the ancestors, we’ve been referencing Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King. We’ve been referencing, you know, Anna Julia Cooper and, and and Ida B. Wells and the King children and so many others. Let’s get specific. When you think of the books, the songs, the films, the quotations that have become mantras, that have become meditations, what are you carrying forward? It could be from Dr. King or from anybody. I shared with you all that I had written that article for The Cut and one of the quotes that I picked “These are revolutionary times. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism. Eternal opposition in a sometimes hostile world.”
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
That one stuck with me yesterday in part because of the acknowledgement that the world is hostile and the fact that that doesn’t negate our eternal responsibility. I’m also, as I prepare for this moment, reading Jesus and John Wayne, because I feel a particular calling to the ways in which white supremacy and evangelicalism have been slowly but intentionally pervading, liberatory, radical Black religious spaces. So those are, those are two of the things I’m using and taking with me forward. David, how about you?
DAVID J. JOHNS:
Yeah, I, uh, wanna name for folks who, uh, won’t see it. I am crying. Um, I’m allowing myself to cry as I used to tell my, my elementary school students, real men wear pink. They teach kindergarten and elementary school and they also cry. And I reached for two things. One is, I referenced this at the top of our conversation, but as Dr. King’s, “But If Not” sermon delivered November 5th, 1967. I encourage you to allow him to preach it to you. He tells a story of Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, three young brothers who would not bow at the knee, would not capitulate to the demand a fascist. And what Dr. King says is, now I want you to notice first here, that these young men practice civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a refusal to abide by an order of the government or of the state, or even of the court that you’re conscience tells you is unjust. Civil disobedience is based on a commitment to conscience. So I, I want to encourage folks to trust the sacral thing that says, that don’t make no god damn sense. That is not what gets us closer to freedom. That is not what our ancestors sacrificed for.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
The very last thing that Dr. King does, and he was 38 when he delivered this. And what he talks about is, he says that “You have to do right for the sake of doing so.” So he says that “If you were doing right to avoid pain and to achieve happiness and pleasure then you aren’t doing right. Ultimately you must do right because that’s the right thing to do. And you got to say, ‘but if not.’ You must love ultimately because it’s because it is lovely to love. You must be just because it is right to be just. You must be honest because it is right to be honest. This is what the text is saying more than anything. And finally, you must do this because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. And I say to you this morning that if you have never found something so dear, so precious to you that you will die for it, then you are not fit to live. You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause, and you refuse to do it because you’re afraid. You refuse to do it because you wanna live longer because you’re afraid that you’ll lose your job or you’re afraid that you’ll be criticized or that you’ll lose your popularity. You’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot you or bomb your house. And so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation in your breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.” The last thing he writes in this moment for me is this: “You die when you refuse to stand up for right. You die when you refuse to stand up for truth. You die when you refuse to stand up for justice. We will only get through this together. When they come for us, they come in mobs, they try and outnumber us. And so if we link arms and aims and overcome some of these socially engineered divisions to stand closer together, we will, we will survive this.”
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Hmm. Take us home Coop.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Um, yesterday, one of the things I did was to do some writing because I wanted to think with an essay of June Jordan’s. That’s a favorite. It’s an essay called “Where’s the Love” that she wrote in 1978.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mm-hmm.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
And it is chock full of bars, but I’ll just give you this one. She says “The overwhelming reality of power and government and tradition is evil, is diseased, is illegitimate and deserves nothing from us. No loyalty, no accommodation, no patience, no understanding except a clear minded resolve to utterly change this total situation and thereby to change our own destiny.”
BRITTNEY COOPER:
June Jordan ask us to be resolved, to look at power, to see it clearly, to not negotiate with it, capitulate to it, to not, you know, slow walk it to not, you know, try to embody it, to not metabolize it, but rather to see it clearly.And then to decide in ourselves, in whatever ways we can, that we will change it. It might be slow change, it might take us a long time. It might be change that we don’t get to see in our lifetime. But when we become resolved, as Dr. David just told us about what the stakes are and who we are and what we are willing to risk
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
Mm-hmm.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Then we can change everything then. So it is as it is in heaven, it will be on earth. We are the embodiment of the change. It starts within us. And once our minds are made up, it’s just a matter of time before we can make what is our internal and our collective reality the reality for everybody. And we have to believe that. We have to believe it. We have to have faith in it. We have to remember that faith is the substance of things hoped for. It is the evidence of things not seen. And we are the evidence. We are the evidence that new possibilities and new futures are possible. We are the evidence that how they seek to kill us, it did not win. We are the evidence of that. Our children are the evidence of that. Our movements are the evidence of that. Our communities are the evidence of that. Every time we show up and we love each other. Well that is the evidence of a different set of possibilities.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
Amen.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
We are the evidence. Amen. Amen we could just end podcast right there. Somebody passed the collection plate. Uh, the doors of the church are open. I see y’all in the vestibule, for the let out.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
[Laughs]
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
We are the evidence. I think that is the perfect way to close this conversation of the group chat. Um, I’m always so grateful to both of you for your wisdom. Um, I know that our community gets so much outta these conversations, but I have to say, so do I. So, thanks for taking the time, friends, love you guys much.
DAVID J. JOHNS:
Love you.
BRITTNEY COOPER:
Much love, B.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
There is a negro spiritual called Good News. And it’s talking all about how when we pass on to eternal life, we have a robe waiting in that kingdom ready to be loved on by our savior. A lot of times when I am trying everything to not slip into the clutches of despair, I ask myself, what is the good news? Well, here’s some good news. Did we know the playbook? They already wrote the plan. It’s a whole lot of pages. But, um, it’s there to read. We can prepare ourselves, not just because we know what they’re gonna be up to, but because we have the blueprints of our elders, our ancestors, and so many people who can inspire us toward change. We know that the point of fascism is to overwhelm and to keep us distracted, which is why we can be intentionally and unapologetically Undistracted. That is precisely the calling of this time. Do your work, do your work, do your work. And in the end, with the blueprints of our ancestors and arm in arm together, we gonna make it. That’s good news.
BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM:
That is it for today, but never for tomorrow. Undistracted is a production of The Meteor and our friends at Wonder Media Network. Our producers are Vanessa Handy, Brittany Martinez and Alyia Yates. Our editors are Grace Lynch and Maddy Foley. Thanks also to Natalia Ramirez and Sarah Culley. Our executive producers at The Meteor are Cindi Leive and myself and our executive producer at Wonder Media Network is Jenny Kaplan. You can follow me at @ MsPackyetti on all social media and our incredible team @theMeteor, subscribe to Undistracted. And y’all don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any place you get your favorite podcast. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being, and thanks for doing. I’m Brittany Packnett Cunningham. Let’s go get free.