Welcome to another episode of Civic Cipher. I'm host Ramsay's job.
They called me q Ward and that just so happens to be my first initial in my last name. I don't want to confuse some about it. What's up, Joah, everything man? What's going on? Ah Man? I promised land this.
Indeed, so welcome to Black History Month. Are this is our first Black History Month as a show, indeed, and we're going to talk about it. The thing is, I want to talk about some of the things that aren't as widely known because you know, every year we hear about, you know, doctor King, and we hear about, you know, George Washington Carver making peanut butter, and you know, black people invented stoplights and cotton gins and all this sort
of stuff. But there are some things that are part of the black African American call it legacy that aren't as well known. But you know, people should know about them, and people should be educated. You know. What happens is a lot of times folks will kind of throw their hands up when it comes to black folks. You know, black folks are you know, they need to pull themselves up, They need to figure out their own problems in their
community and so forth. And I get it. And if you don't, if you don't have any deeper knowledge, that sounds sensible. It sounds like, yeah, of course that makes sense. But if you understand that, you know that those those still waters run deep, and you know how deep it gets, then perhaps you might find yourself being a bit more understanding, empathetic and passionate, supportive, et cetera. And so in that spirit, I would like to, you know, talk about some Black history.
So I need to suggest to everyone that you know, just like any anyone's history, any group of people, it's not all pretty. Some of it is. It may be difficult to revisit on today's show, one person in particular, if we have enough time, we'll get to him. But you know, some of the his legacy as far as African Americans are concerned, is particularly troubling. But again I think that it helps to as matter of fact, you know what, we can talk about him now, you know,
so we'll start there. One of the things that's happening in the world is that you know, everyone's getting vaccinated for COVID nineteen. I just got my second vaccine, so I am living the COVID free lifestyle. I'm mask off COVID proofs as as future would suggest a mask off out here. Uh No, I'm just joking. I still wear my mask. But you know a lot of black folks have been particularly concerned about getting that vaccine because of a deep seated mistrust of the medical community and the
government by black folks. And you know, I do want to talk about the Tuskegee experiments because you know, we spent some time talking about that, and we said that we peel back a few more layers when we had the time. But I mentioned in that episode that it actually goes back further than that. It goes back to the beginning of black people in this country being used as human guinea pigs. And so, you know, once upon a time, as we all know, you used to be
able to buy people in this country. You could own them and they were your property.
Could did you buy a specific group of people? Could you pick from any variety of people?
Was it just no? You could actually you could pick from any variety of people, provided that they were black African people. Okay, yeah, so you know, Henry Ford, you can get any color as long as it's black. So I think he got that from from slavery perhaps so. Anyway, so today we're going to talk about or first rather, we're going to talk about someone named James Marion Sims, doctor James Marion Sims. So he's credited as the father, the father of modern gynecology. He developed tools and surgical
techniques related to women's reproductive health. In eighteen seventy six he was named president of the American Medical Association, and in eighteen eighty he became president of the American Gynecological Gynecological Society. Make sure I get that right, an organization that he helped find found, so, you know, a man who certainly provided a basis for you know, research in
women's studies. I think I have some some notes highlighted where it suggests that once upon a time it was not really ah in good taste to deal with women's reproductive organs. It just was something that the medical community didn't really take seriously, didn't really look into women's reproductive health. And this guy kind of champion that, you know, he just he peeped the weakness in the rap game and sold it, you know, or in the vagina game in
this instance. So he the reason he was able to get so much off in terms of research and so much experimenting and studies and reports and things like that. Written is because his research was conducted on the bodies of enslaved Black Africans and he used them as medical test subjects. And one thing that I have noted that is still being brought up to this days, he experimented on them without anesthesia. There's a there's a passage I want to read in just a second, but that's something
that still perpetuates this day. I remember reading something maybe a week ago, two weeks ago, something like that pertaining to this deep seated mistrust that black folks have with the medical community. And there was a doctor who was not black, but this doctor's you know, he was under the assumption that black people experienced pain at a lower rate than white folks. And I wish I had earmarked it, you know, but this, you know, and he was he
was well meaning, and he was educated. Of course, so this guy's not out there doing the same things he once did. But you know that it just goes to show you how powerful myths can be, and how powerful prejudice it and racism can be. You know, even if you're not trying to cause harm to folks. You know, if you take these certain things to be true and you don't know any better and you don't have that perspective, then you perpetuate that those racist beliefs, even if you
don't actively engage in hating people. Like if I don't believe that dogs feel pain, and I kick dogs, you know, or whatever it is I do to dogs and I don't think that they feel pain, you know, then you get you get what I'm saying there. But once you recognize, okay, these dogs feel pain, it might change the way you behave So of a terrible example, who wants to kick dogs? But you know, I use dogs because oftentimes on this show, we have to compare ourselves to dogs, because.
Unfavorably at that.
But a lot of times white folks will make a big deal if something bad has happened into an.
We compare unfavorably to dogs, right sadly.
So, yes, this is one story about black history in this country. A lot of the medical research that you get the benefit of having and the experience and so forth, the medicine that you enjoy, that research, a good amount of it was conducted on enslaved black folks. You know, this is before animal testing and before all the other sort of stuff.
You know.
So this is and this is around the time when you see medicine go from just kind of being something that you have to study for a year or two and then you can become a doctor to something where you have to like really really study and really know
what the human body is capable of. Is because during slavery, you know, so much research was done, and in the early nineteen hundreds there were things like the Teskegee experiments, things like that that we know about, and many more things that my assumption is that we don't know about, we'll never know about, that were conducted on actual living human beings. And as history has taught us, at least in this country but largely around the world, the most
disposable human beings often are melanated. And so this guy is just one of the people who is as I stated, he celebrated as the father of you know, gynecology and or modern gynecology. Like he invented a bunch of tools that help you to get in there and you know, get busy. In fact, I want to read one of these passages here. He started off with no specific gynecological training. Examining and treating female organs was widely considered offensive and unsavory.
As I mentioned, his entry in treating women changed when he was asked to help a patient who had fallen off a horse and was suffering from pelvic and back pain. To treat this woman's injury, Sims realized he needed to look directly into her vagina. He positioned her on all fours, leaning forward, and then used his fingers to help him see inside. This discovery helped him developed a precursor to
the modern speculum. And then another example. This is in the public domain too, by the way, so you can look this up yourself. Brace yourself, all right. We know three of the names of the female fistula patients from Sims's own records, Lucy, Anarka, and Betsy. The first one he operated on was eighteen year old Lucy. These were slaves who eighteen year old Lucy, who had given birth a few months prior and hadn't been able to control
her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were commonly naked and asked to perch on their knees and bend forward into their elbows, so their heads rested on their hands. Lucy endured an hour long surgery, screaming and crying out in pain as nearly a dozen other doctors watched. As Sims later wrote, Lucy's agony was extreme. She became extremely ill due to its controversial use of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, which led to
her which led her to contract blood poisoning. I thought she was going to die. It took Lucy two to three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation. Again, slave, no choice in the matter and no anesthesia.
The pain and screaming, I mean the screaming. Yeah, an agony didn't give them the impression that maybe she felt pain.
Funny how it works, right, Wow? You know, we understand that there is a long history of people telling themselves a separate story that is not based on the reality of the world or the reality that they even see. It could happen right in front of them, but if they choose not to acknowledge it or see it, then it may as will not be true. So you know, this is how it goes. Fortunately, we have a show called Civic Cipher and we're able to talk about that,
so I'll continue for a long time. Sin's fistular surgeries were not successful. After thirty operations on one woman, a seventeen year old enslaved woman named Anarka who was sorry, who had a very traumatic labor and delivery, he finally quote perfected his method after four years of experimentation. Afterwards, he began to practice on white women using anesthesia, which
was new to the medical field at the time. And then I'll spare the rest of this, but he goes on to discuss how he experimented on enslaved children and so forth. So happy Black history monk.
Happy. Interesting word choice.
Well, you know, it's I think it's important that we discussed these things that we know about them. And you know, there's good things and there's troubling things, and all of it is history. All of it is there for public consumption, and we need to know where we come from so that history doesn't repeat itself, and it gives us an idea of what to push for as we move forward. And so, you know, these stories certainly help frame where we are, how we were treated, and give us a
baseline to demand what we deserve. Some folks make casts for reparation. So you know, you got to and you got to bear in mind that there's more than just the impact that that might have on one or two or three people. You know, there are generational psychological traumas that are perpetuated for those who have read the Willie Lynch Letter, regardless of whether or not you believe it to be a first person account of what took place
or a work of fiction. The the logic and the the reasoning is sound, and so those are the things that you know, these things can can bring to life. And so yeah, black history. Speaking of Black history, I do want to take a moment before we move on to give a shout out to somebody very very important to me who has I believe made Black history. It might be a you know, just a footnote or a small, little, you know, paragraph in Black history, but I'll take it.
A very very very dear friend of mine recently was named the official DJ for the Phoenix Suns, and I wanted to take a moment to shout him out on the radio because that's a tremendous accomplishment. It's a Black accomplishment, and it's one more feather in our cap.
So congratulations to Q Ward, that's pretty dope. Congrats to that fella as well. No, man, seriously, pretty cool. Yeah, that's that's big.
So next time you guys go to a Sun's game, you'll hear Q on the turntables doing this thing. So shout us automatic and automatic as well. All right, So moving on some more black history for you. You know, as I mentioned that we when we were initially talking about the vaccine rollout, we didn't get a chance to go into too much detail about the Tuskegee experiments, and so I wanted to take some time today to explain exactly what the Tuskegee experiments were, So allow me to read this.
The Tuskegee Experiment began in nineteen thirty two at a time when there was no known treatment for syphlis, a content ages venarial disease. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, six hundred African American men in Macon County, Alabama were enrolled in the project, which aimed to study the full progression of the disease. Participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the US Public Health Service were running the study.
That US stands for United States.
It was a government back study. Bill Clinton had to apologize for this many years later, of course, but yeah, nineteen thirty two, they recruited six hundred African American folks to study the effects of syphilis. The quick and dirty version of this is that these people were poor, limited means black, the most disposable in society. These people were deliberately intentionally infected with CISS and then given the treatment.
And this is something that needs to be said, because this is the most important component of this equation is that they did not know that they were deliberately infected with syphilis, and one told them that was what was going to happen, is you know whatever, And this is why the government ultimately wasn't in.
The pamphlet that they received when they signed up.
So what originally what they were getting treated for was what they referred to as bad blood, right, and bad blood, you know, was just a catch all term, you know, anything that you know whatever. So if you got bad blood or you think you have bad blood, you know, come on down, we'll fix you up, and you know, you can be a part of a medical study. And then what they were doing was infecting them with syphilis so that they could treat the syphilis.
Right, so.
You can imagine how that sort of scarring on the But once this came out, once everyone knew about this, then everything started looking suspect.
You know, the distrust is earned.
Oh yeah, absolutely, it's not like you know.
Random paranoia.
Oh and then here's the crazy part. We're talking about history. But you know, as I mentioned, there is still a sizable disconnect between the medical community. Of course, we know that there's a disconnect between the government and black people,
but the medical community and black people. As I mentioned, there are doctors that are alive right now, practicing medicine right now who have some idea that Black people are fundamentally different in the way that we experience pain and the way that we respond to treatment, and the way that we articulate our pain.
You know.
You know, if I say my leg hurts, you know that it's not taking it seriously as often as someone who is white. You know, this happens a lot with women. This is why more women died during childbirth and so forth. You know, and these are all very googleable, and as you know, Google does not cost money, so you know, obviously I can't talk about everything on the show. But just because this is black history doesn't mean that it's
not taking place today. And just because this has happened in the past doesn't mean it is not still happening today. And so, as you said, Q, the distrust is very much earned. Now. Our challenges black people is to learn how to trust, learn how to love, you know, and so forth. Which is why it was so big on getting that COVID.
Vaccine nineteen thirties people. Because I think people hear about the Tuskegee experiments and their mind is very long time ago. My grandmother was almost an adult when this happened. My grandmother is still alive, Like, I don't want this to feel like it's five generations ago.
Yeah. Well, the last person who was the last participant of the Tuskegee experiments passed away in two thousand and four. Now bear in mind that syphilis that was deliberately injected into these human beings wiped most of them out, and then a lot of them died from other things, you know, related to the disease. But yeah, so okay, let me read on. So what does this say. The Associated Press broke the story in July nineteen seventy two, forcing the
study to finally shut down. That means that the Tuskegee experiments went from nineteen thirty two to nineteen seventy two.
So my mom was almost thirty when the experiment stopped. I just want to keep keep your guy, keep giving you guys some perspective on how recent this was. My mother, not grandmother, So your mother twenty eight years old when the Tuskegee experiments were finally shut down.
So you can imagine this was like like incredible, Like this was like huge news, especially in the black community. So that distrust in the seventies when this came out. You know this, in the thirties, when they first started doing the experience, no one knew what was happening. In the seventies when everyone found out, which is again very relatively speaking, that's modern history. There's people who were alive that remember seeing that, Oh my god, they did what,
you know. And there's some people who are as educated as we are that know how deep these roots go. And so their distrust is valid, you know, or valid is perhaps not the right word, but it's earned. Earned is a better word. Right now, Again, we can't distrust everything, you.
Know, but which is a kind of disturbing and growing problem. We've went. We've gone from I don't really know to okay, no facts are real. Yeah, and okay I won't I won't. Yeah, we can't.
We can't go from one extreme.
Yeah, I know what, you won't derailist. But there's a lot of people that look like us, that come from where we come from, that are kind of preying on that distrust exactly and using it as a catchall for don't believe anything, nothing's real, everything is against you. Yeah, and that's a tough place to operate from as well. Just just operating in full out bad faith is.
Just not good.
So let's see, one hundred and twenty eight participants died from syphilis, forty spouses had been diagnosed with it, and the disease had been passed to nineteen children at birth. People are still alive, some of them. As a result of the Tuskege experiment, many African Americans developed lingering, deep mistrust to public health officials and vaccines. During his apology, oh yeah, oh yeah, Bill Clinton, when he was president, he had to come and apologize.
He didn't have to, Well, I want to make sure we say that.
That's fair, that's fair, But he did, and that is an acknowledgment.
Yeah, he needed to, but didn't have to.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that no one's ever going to apologize that's fair. But you know, he comes in, he apologized for it. And what that does is it makes people like us me and u Q who say these things out loud look less crazy and less angry and less radical to folks that aren't as studied. Usually they're white folks that feel like we should be very
happy with what we've been given and our station in life. Yeah, and these are the sorts of people that would say to us, well, you weren't in the Tuskegee experiment, so what is the problem with that?
You know?
And and you know the e everything is wrong and the world only looks the way that it looks to them, you know, and if we don't see it their way, then we're somehow wrong. And so by Clinton apologizing for this, it allows us to live in a world where okay, we both have to agree on the facts. We both have to agree that this happened, and we have to deal with the implications of that, because if the government
never even acknowledged it, much less apologize for it. Then we again, we sound like crazy people to those people. We sound like enemies to those people somehow, just by stating that the truth that the uh, you know, the first doctor we talked about, all his records are in the public domain. Now this guy's all that stuff, though.
And it's important to point out as ignorant as some of these things may sound to us. We talked about on one of our shows, there's a it's either a burning or a hanging photograph, and their families present at this picnic, it's important to point out by the very nature of those people being there with their kids in essence having a good time, some of them sincerely didn't
think anything was wrong with what they were doing. And as heinous as it is, it's different than now where people are fully aware that it's not okay, you know what I mean. So it's as heinous and file as some of these things sound, especially the things you were saying with regard to the experiments on the young ladies. As he perfected his methods, there may have been people himself included, who seriously thought, even with the pain and
agony and screaming and discomfort. That was very, very clear that black people did feel pain less. And there were a generation or generations plural of people who felt we were scientifically inferior and may have used, you know, what they thought was clear science and their religion, and they're just teaching from their parents, like we believe in Santa Claus, once upon a time, until we grow up and learn better.
A lot of those things were taught and people believed them because that's what you believe, you know, the same with the religion that you practiced. It was taught to you. You weren't born with the consciousness to know about God and the role that he played in your life and how you viewed your religion, be a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic, whatever the case. So a lot of these things were in doctrine to people from childhood at a time where
everyone felt that way. Just like thirty years ago, the way that people spoke about our brothers in the LGBTQ community was a lot different than it is today. And I'm not talking one hundred years ago. I'm talking about when I was a teenager, yea twenty years ago, thirty years ago, ten years ago. Views are continually changing, people becoming more informed, more educated. I don't like to use the word tolerant, like I'll tolerate you if you're different
from me. Just sounds awful, But that's the kind of word that they use. People are becoming more accepting, I think is a better word, tolerant of people who practice a different religion, a different lifestyle, come from a different background, and look different than we do. I think it's important that as a whole we evolve. And I think that's why this is kind of me speaking to some things
that I've said on the show prior. Why I get so upset at people who still choose hate and divisiveness and you know, racism, because those things aren't charged to ignorance anymore. You don't not know better anymore. You're just
choosing that. And that's why I'm so you know, I say on the show all the time, Rams is the heart and the consciousness of the show, because sometimes I'm mad, and it's just because you know, people choosing evil over good, to put it simple, kind of digs at me, man, because once upon a time, even though it was terrible, people really didn't know any better, right, and those doctors were developed to maintain a superiority in a supremacy. So
even the roots of that doctrine were bad. But the children of those people were taught something that they thought was fact. And now we know better, and we're still teaching that same stuff and not we but people are still teaching those same things, and you know that's disturbing. That's what upsets me the most.
You want to hear something funny that once upon a time I was lived in some apartments and I was I used to get baby sat by this lady named Betty, Betty van Winkle. She's passed away now. Now Betty was a million years old when I met her. I was probably like ten something like that, and I have two little sisters and a little brother. At the time, my youngest sister was still baby mode, you know, probably in
diaper still. And I remember Betty telling me something like, you know, well, black people they do have a you know, there is an older that black people have. Ooh, you know, so you just have to make sure that you scrub extra hard, you know, and you wear perfume and lotion and everything. So we Betty, Now, Betty, now I was a kid, you know, and no one. I had never heard this before. So Bettie telling me this was like, oh my god, I older, you know, a slight older,
there's whatever. However she said it, I'm like, huh, you know, well now I'm very aware, you know, because you know, around ten is when you start partner. You start understanding like, okay, there's there's girls. There's even if I'm not in the girls all the way, because I didn't get into girls until I was middle school, you know what I mean. But I don't want to get teased, right, so, you know, little kids are mean. So it gave me a little bit of a complex. You know, to this day, I
have much cologne. I have like seventeen deodorants. You know. My bathroom is a mess, a clean mess, but you know, got a lot of variety in there. But yeah, so Betty told me this, and I assumed that it was.
True because she.
Loved us. I do believe that she did. You know, she learned something from somebody who lived in the eighteen hundreds, you know, when she was a little girl, because her parents had based on her age alone, you know. And I knew Betty in the nineties, and Betty was I don't know, seventy when I met her or something like that. So the thing is, it wasn't until I was twenty four, twenty three. I'm thirty eight now, So what until I was, you know, early to mid twenties when I recognized that
Africans taught Europeans how to bathe. You know, you remember there was a lot of plagues and stuff, and those things were being you know, perpetuated throughout Europe, and you know, the hygiene practices of northern Africans became particularly useful to those Europeans in preventing the spread of all the different plagues that was claiming the lives of them and their
loved ones and their family right. And so the teachings of these Africans, it's funny when you when you see that, it's like, wait a minute, hold on, this is the opposite of what I was told, you know, And and flip this. Once upon a time in this country, you know,
everyone bathed. I might have been like once a week, and I all use the same bathwater, you know, and all this and and you have to bear in mind that a lot of these ideas, in my assumption, my estimation, come from well, if you have people who are poor, who have two pairs of clothes, their Sunday best and their work clothes, you know, and they might not even have shoes. You know, you can't even consider them poor because their property. Dogs and cats aren't poor or rich
their property right, so these people are not. They're not subject to those considerations. So you have slaves that you know that rarely, if ever, get de bathed. They're always around each other, and they're in squalor. It's their life, you know, they live next to the hogs and the hogkins. If there's a reputation that develops that, you know, they
don't smell that great. You know, by the time it gets to you know, a ten year old ramses being passed from generation and generation that black people have a slight over to them. By the time it gets to me, it's gone through. You know, we've kind of evolved past that, but the rumor stays, and that's the power of a rumor. Again. So just a quick story that I'm glad I got to share. You know, I've got a few of those,
But table's day for that one. All right, Black history, moving on, Uh, you know, the youngest person ever executed in the United States of America was black.
I did not know that. But nothing about that fact surprises me.
When you hear a cool story, shoot, it's not cool. George Steney Junior h he was sentenced to death at fourteen years old. They electrocuted him and they put the little thing on his head and shocked him. There's actually a photograph of him that exists, if you wanted to look it up.
Definitely, don't want to look it up.
It's not it's not He's not dead, you know. In the picture. It's just he's crying, you know, and he's got the thing on his head. They snapped a photograph of him, and but it's you know, you know, there's there's this been this call, you know, say their name, say his name, say her name, you know, in recent years and months, and I think that it's important for allies. We've been through enough trauma, so we don't have to
continue to stare at these you know. But I think that seeing the face of a child weeping, especially after you hear this story, well make it real for some folks who might again just be casual listeners of the show, or they're just happened to catch us on a Saturday or Sunday, whenever you're listening. You know, my words will only go so far. But for you to make this,
you know, really commit to this. You know, if you're trying to be a better person, trying to be a better brother or sister to your African American brothers and sisters, you know this is one way to do it. Look in the face of this child as he weeps in the final moments of his life. He was a real person. He was born, he had a heartbeat, He was endowed with consciousness, He had a future, He had dreams and goals,
things that scared him. Probably had a favorite food. He made people laugh, he cried everything.
Just like you and me.
And they executed him. They snuffed his life out at fourteen years old. During his trial, even on the day of his execution, he always carried a Bible in his hand, claiming to be innocent. For what that's worth, he was accused of killing two white girls, eleven year old Betty and Mary, aged seven. The bodies were found near the house where the teenager resided with his parents. At that time. All members of the jury were white. Of course, The trial lasted only two hours, and the sentence.
Wait, a double murdered trial lasted two hours.
Yeah, I want me read it again. That's what it said. Yeah, but you know why though, right, I think you know what, But this is really what's gone fry your brain.
Oh.
The trial lasted only two hours. The sentence was dictated ten minutes later. It was quick to extinguish his life.
They'd already made their minds up when they saw who the charges were brought against. They'd already made their mind up. Yeah, he did it, and we're going to punish him the worst way we know how.
All right, so.
We know he did it, even though there might not be any evidence, we know he did it.
Oh, this this gets way worse. George Stenny Jr. Again, I want you to remember that. By the way, if you're just tuning in the civic sich ferromy host Rams' joh.
And this is Quentin, but they call me q Ward.
Yes, indeed, And we are celebrating black history, some parts you may not know about. Right now, we're talking about George Stenny Junior, the youngest human being to be executed in the United States. The boy's parents were threatened and prevented from being present in the courtroom and subsequently expelled from that city. Before the execution, George spent eighty one days in prison without being able to see his parents. He was held in solitary eighty miles from the city.
He was heard alone, without the presence of his parents or a lawyer. In other words, they found two dead people. They found someone who lived close enough that was black. Have you ever heard the expression, man, I was just black and nearby, as he's literally a victim of that. For those of you who've never heard that expression, that's a common expression for black folks to just be black and nearby, And it means exactly what you think it means.
It's just like I just got hemmed up on some nonsense. I have none to do with it. I was just the closest, easiest target for the people who were looking for a close, easy target, and I was black enough to fit that description. So here we are.
The fit the description part is important, right, because we weren't just looking for any target.
And that's part of you know, we talk about how somehow our skin makes us appear criminal to police and to you know, a lot of folks. This is kind of you know, what he was up against he was black and nearby, all right, And again, I want to reiterate, he never got a chance to talk to a lawyer, never got a chance to talk to his parents. Their kid went out to play.
One day and then they convicted and sentenced in less than three hours.
So he was electrocuted with five three and eighty volts in his head. Seventy years later, his innocence was finally proven to a judge in South Carolina. The boy was innocent. Someone set him up, set it up to blame him for the crime. And you can read all the rest of that if you want. He again George Stinny Junior s T I N N E Y on Wikipedia.
Yeah, I'm gonna look that up because I love to to learn about how his I was proven.
You're gonna you're gonna see his face. But yeah, that was actually something that the government acknowledged. And uh, you know that's obviously that comes from a dark time in the country. But you know it's not so dark because Trayvon was twenty twelve, you know, George Floyd was was a twenty twenty. Brehanna Taylor was twenty twenty. Yeah, I forget the kid's name, but he lived in Colorado and he had I think he had like autism or something. He was walking home. He had a hoodie on or baby,
I forget his name. He deserves for me to say his name. But that's the one that troubles me the most. That he was I think he was walking home.
I want to say, an artistic kid as well.
Right, he used to work with the cats, I want to say. And he would like play his trumpet at or was it a trumpet? I'm not sure. In any event, I I'm looking for him, I can't find him.
Oh, here he goes right here.
Elijah McClean. He deserved for me to say his name, Elijah McLain. That's the one that really bothered me because as he was dying, as as the police snuffed his life out, he was still trying to say positive things to them. If you ever read the transcripts, it'll break your heart. He was trying to say, I love you, Why are you doing this to me? I'm sorry? What
did I do wrong? You know, and you know that type of mind, it's very difficult to grasp traumatic things in the way that you know, you and I can can process them. And so he really didn't know what was happening to him and couldn't understand it, and then he was not alive anymore. And to my understanding, no one has been held accountable for that. So shout out to Colorado for that one. All right, some more black history.
Okay, trying to be trying to be you know, as talk to me. We're fathers, man, and it's not that, not that, not that being fathers makes us more susceptible to those feelings because I always, uh, you know, you hear about something being done wrong to a woman and you're hear somebody say I got daughters, because if that gives them the more ground to feel. But our fears are different.
Yeah, I don't think we're more empathetic, especially with regards to the example that I use, because we all have mothers, nothing else, so we can all relate to the idea of love from and to a woman. But our fears are different when when you're a parent and when you're a father to a black boy. And these stories are not history, they're today, right. We learn about slavery in school as part of our very very dark, difficult.
And traumatic past.
It's history.
Things we're talking about right now. They aren't history. They're still normal today. They're not one off, They're not these rare things that happen every now and then. And you know how you know proud I am, and you know if you follow me on social media, you'll see my kids, you know, and the comments that I get about my kid they always make me feel incredible. I just wonder, at what point, for my son specifically, people see him different than beautiful and oh my god, he's so cute.
Is it when I get his first haircut?
Is it when.
When somebody braids his first corn row? Like?
What at what point does he go from?
When does he go from oh my god to oh my god? And I'd be naive to think it's not going to happen to him. He is beautiful, that is my baby boy. But I'm my mom's baby boy. And I'm forty years old, thank God, still here. But have I had moments where I didn't think I'd come out the other side of it okay, and I would get home and be able to tell this story. Yes, a couple times in the last two hundred days, one time
in the last thirty days. I don't know. It's becoming more and more difficult to not be affected by Even when we talk to each other about show topics, we're searching for the light you want to come on one day and just talk and laugh and smile. But I often find myself feeling guilty for being the person that's shining the flashlight on the stuff that we shine it into because people would argue they're fatigue with hearing it. I know what you mean. I'm so sorry, y'all, and
we have to do it. It's very, very difficult to abuse someone. I won't even say a child, but say you're abusing someone their whole life, and you tell them to stop complaining about it, stop bring why do you keep bringing it up? Because you keep doing it. And there are people that are exhausted that hearing us talk about the way the world is viewed through our eyes. They're tired of feeling guilty about it, and they're tired
of hearing us talk about it. And last week when Camille went on Bill Maher show on HBO, talked about how privileged he is, so there's no white privilege and systemic racism doesn't exist. And you know, Bill Maher, someone who I viewed as an ally for a decade, easy sat and agreed with him because they're both just tired of race being interjected into anything. As if we're the ones doing it, you don't say, hey, look at me
different because I'm please. And they know so many black people that are tired of being felt sorry for and
are tired of hearing about it. Okay, So the black people that you know feel that way, and you know that for sure you're speaking for all of them, or are you speaking to the one who like Camille, who like Jason Woodlock, who like Candice Owens, want to be comfortable around the colleagues that help them put money in their bank accounts, and they want to show gratitude for the positions that they've in, the places that they've ascended
to in their lives. These are educated, accomplished, successful black people.
I want to say something while we're on that topic. For those examples that you name, there are so many more accomplished, wealthy, successful, whatever black people who acknowledge the reality of the situation, and they are very much the exception. They you know, they managed to navigate these waters a little differently and things worked out a little bit better
for them. But it's it was a fluke or whatever, you know, I I rams this recognized that for me to even be on the radio, like it's just an alignment of the moon and the stars and the planets. This was never a realistic thing for me in my lifetime to be able to use radio in a city as big as you know, the one that I'm from, which is Phoenix, and make a living off of it.
Right.
It's just it's so I thought that I was going to just get a job the same as anyone else. And so you know, there are many more people who will acknowledge that, you know, so I just I think it's there are some people who are going to go against the grain, of course, and some people just prefer to be antagonist. But you know, for the most part, everyone kind of agrees that you get a tougher go. If you're a woman and you get a tougher go. If you're gay, you get a tougher go. If you're
black or brown, you get a tougher go. If you are handicapped, if you get a tougher go. If you're Muslim, you get a tougher go. If you're you know, any of these sorts of things.
Try being all of the above.
There you go, so I know some gay black women.
Who imagine gay black Muslim woman.
Oh yeah, no, those are the people that honestly, those are the people that really get out there and make the world change.
Superhero.
Yeah exactly. But yeah, so again I want to make sure that I, oh another thing while run the subject. I'm not prepared to talk about this at length, but I do want to mention Emmitt Till briefly. A lot of folks might know the story of Emmitt Till, but it's not too dissimilar from George Stanny Junior. And in brief, you know, he was he was a little bit lighter
skinned black child. He was fourteen. He went from Chicago down to I can't remember what state it was, but some midwestern southern state and whistled like kind of like a what's that whistle you do? Fox?
Whistle?
Fox whistled at a white woman as she was leaving a grocery store. And so he did the little whistle and then he says bye baby to the to the lady, and then you know, lady keeps walking or whatever, and then some folks came snatched him out of his bed.
Beat him up.
I think there's that's they dragged him behind a car, dumped his body in the river, anchored his body to something, and threw him in the river. I'm not mistaken. And the reason we know his name is because his mom, as g as she was, had an open casket funeral for him, and then so everyone, all the press was
able to come and take pictures of his body. His body was all beat up and bruised, and it had been in water and so forth, and so it was just it was very scary to see a human being in that shape, and it kind of painted the picture of what he had gone through in his last moments of his life by going by baby to a white woman. And then, of course, you know the woman in the court, you know when they found the guys that did it,
who never went to jail for that. But the woman lied in her testimony, and she admitted that she lied in her testimony on her deathbed. So she lived with that liar whole life, and then she died, I want to say, in the eighties.
And it happened in Mississippi, Mississippi.
That's where he went. Yeah, but yeah, so another story. But the reason I wanted to bring up em Mattila is because he's a little bit lighter skinned, and you know the amount of melanin. You know, there is a correlation overall. But blackness is kind of like the scarlet letter. It just applies to everyone with you know, any detectable African roots, and somehow it's counted against us in our time in this country when it comes to a lot of things, including life and death. But I do want
to get some more stuff out of the way. I'm gonna have to get through these a little bit quicker. So Memorial Day, I'm gonna talk about that. One. Memorial Day was started by African Americans honoring fallen Union soldiers. It's a little tidbit a lot of folks don't know about. So there's that one.
I'll shout out to all of our unions. You know this, the magical marketing of capitalism has made people view unions right, the organization of labor for the labors, to protect the laborers, to do what's best by the laborers, as the bad guys. Yeah, even laborers view it that. Oh man, sorry, well.
You know, I think you said it before. The greatest trick the devil ever.
Pooled, convincing the world he didn't exist, and I.
Think that that's a great stand in for capitalism, you know. But another thing I wanted to get off was that the Statue of Liberty was originally created and gifted to the United States to celebrate the freed slaves, not immigrants. I think that's very important. Wow, have you been to the Statue of Liberty? Q? I have.
Fortunately, I used to go every week for a couple of months as you and I were traveling the world on cruise ships. One of mine and route from Bermuda to New York docked at the Statue of Liberty every trip.
Nice I went to the Statue of Liberty too, and all the history there, all the little signs that you can read and everything, all the people that give you the walking tours and all that stuff they talk about, all the immigrants that passed through there, talk about everything, you know, except the Statue of Liberty was originally created and originally gifted to the United States to celebrate and to commemorate the freeing of the slaves, the emancimate Emancipation Proclamation.
And you know, this erasure, this whitewashing of history is something that is not lost on me. And because I have a platform and I'm able to share these things, you know, I think that I should share it, you know, and it should not be lost on you, you know, listening to my voice, because this is who we are, and that's just as much Black history as doctor King.
You know that the intention behind that woman standing with that torch, holding that book, you know, is two commemorate the freeing of slavery, to suggest that America had made a transition from the old version of herself to the modern version of herself. And the fact that that was co opted to suggest that every other immigrant was now welcome in America, it flies in the face of that. And I think that we need to know that, we
need to understand that the intent behind it. We also need to know that that's another thing that was taken away from us. You know, we're here now, we lived here, we lived here for hundreds of years, and that we're Americans. Our children have been born, their children have been born. So everybody here now is Americans. Right, this is at the end of slavery. Everyone here is Americans. There's no
direct connection with Africas. Now we can go back to our ancestry, and we didn't know our own African names we can speak the language. All this stuff was stripped from us and we had no connection. You know. So we're Americans now, for better or worse, and there's this gift given to us by France that is then taken from us as well, and so there's not even a thing to look to that says, Okay, well this is to commemorate that. I think we're gonna have to do
a part two. We definitely need to talk about them.
We can do three or four parts.
We got enough a month, Yeah, that's true, but we definitely need to talk about the panthers. I want to make sure we talk about the black panthers in the free breakfast program. And we need to talk about crack, how crack cocaine made its way into poor black neighborhoods.
If only they had treated it like a pandemic like they're doing this opioid crisis. A lot of less incarcerated and dead brothers and sisters.
Yes, indeed, but you know, when we get into that, we'll understand why that never happened that way. But again,
there's a lot of black history here. And another thing that we're going to do at some point this month is I want to make sure that we have a guest up to talk about some of the bills that are on the books, at least in Phoenix where a good amount of folks listen to the show, so that we can discuss some of the things that people are trying to do and take away from Phoenicians in response to Joe Biden getting elected president and Trump not getting his second term.
Dealing with some of that stuff in Georgia as well, Yeah.
There's basically more attempts to disenfranchise.
Voters so make it more and more difficult and in some cases impossible for us to show up and vote. Right right there, we exercise are right.
So that's what we're here for. So we'll definitely have some guests up be able to talk about all that and more. But I think that's going to do it for us on this episode of Civic Cipher. Once again, thank you for tuning in. I'm your host, ramses Jah. They call me q Ward And if you had any questions any topics for the show, you can hit us
on our website civiccipher dot com. Please consider following our social media that's also at Civic Cipher and don't forget you can download this episode and all previous episodes on your favorite podcasting platform or at Civiccipher dot com. And please, please please consider becoming a Patreon. It really helps the show and it helps us grow right