Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff the only podcast that I am currently recording while sleep deprived because I fell into a really deep research hall instead of sleeping. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is Joel Monique, who is a filmmaker and iHeart, executive producer and a writer. How are you?
I'm so good, Margaret. You know, sometimes we listen to be very frank and not too excited. I don't like when people are too happy. It makes me feel suspected, like what's going on that you have so much joy in your life?
Yeah, like hippies, they're always pretending to be.
Happy for sure. What was it? Called it toxic happiness with an aggressive happiness for You're like, this is it's too much. But I've been doing a lot of different stuff and trying new things and things. I was like, oh, I'm gonna do this for a really long time. For example, go on a vacation. I keep saying I'm going to go on vacation, and then either I work through it or it's a work trip, neither of which counts as a vacation. So I've actually told people you can't contact
me through these days. I'm taking off, I have plans, I've booked things. It's happening. I am leaving my state. I'm only going to the next one, but it's still happening. I'm very excited about it. And I'm gonna see making the Stallion while I'm there, so you know, it's just a sea of winds.
There's this HP Lovecraft movie that's terrible. I'lled dig on and I don't actually sually watch horror movies, but I watched this a long time ago. The scene that I remember, besides the scenes that I couldn't watch because I'm squeamish, was the very beginning. They're on this boat and he's just like working on his laptop the whole time they're on this like boat out off the coast of Spain or something, and finally his wife is like fuck you
and throws his laptop into the ocean. And I think about that scene because about once a month I think to myself, what if I threw my laptop into the ocean, wouldn't that be great? And then I remember how much I enjoy eating food and how much I enjoy expressing ideas and having other people interact with this.
Yeah, yeah, you'd be upset without the word. I just think, what if I could work and it didn't have to be a grind?
Yeah?
What if you could work and people were like, that's good enough for today, and you're like, I also feel satisfied with the amount of work done today out of return for more work tomorrow, Like I'm gonna be alive tomorrow. It's just weird to me that we're just like just keep going, like, but I'm done, I'm done, I'm done for the day. I'm tired. Yeah, I feel you also would completely just be Sometimes I'm like, I do I need this laptop? So I throw it away? Do I violently destroy it?
Or just put it in a.
Drawer and close it and pretend like it's not there anymore?
All the different ways we dream about destroying our phones and laptops.
For sure.
Well, you may be a producer, but you're not our producer, because our producer is Sophie. Hi.
Hi, that's a good that's not Sophie.
See, that's that's that's the joke is because actually we have another producer who's just usually not on Mike, named Scharen, but today Charene is our producer.
Here, no, h charene, I am here. Thank you for having me.
I'm always looking for opportunities to hang with Scheren And then you were like, Sharen can come hang out with us, and I was like, this is the greatest day.
Way about you though, Oh my god, it was so cool at the moment.
Correct very loved this is great.
So okay, other people involved in making this. Our audio engineer is Danel. Everyone has to say hi to Daniel Hi Danel.
Hy Danel Hi Danel.
We love Our theme music was written forced by un woman. So the last time we had you on, I think was an episode about the Black Panthers Breakfast program, the Mutual Aid program.
Yes, do you know what they're Okay? I asked my father. I was like, hey, will you tell me about that time that you got food from the Black Panthers And he was like, absolutely I would, And then I never thought about it again. I need to sit him down and actually get recorded, because yeah, he's got like all of these different stories and stuff. I can maybe ask my uncle too. But that was a great episode. I
really like learning about that program. That program actually led me to the documentary The Dear Mama Tupac documentary have you seen and.
I haven't seen it yet. I want to do a specific I like have a book about the Shakur family specifically. And I'm like waiting to yes, yes, Yeah.
It's fabulous and one of the and I've watched a ton of dots about like the Black Panthers and stuff, but one of the best about the women behind the Black Panther movement, about the actual organization that went into the breakfast program and how it was useful, why it pissed people off. Fabulous, so good, great footage.
That's that's awesome. And and the thing I love about that story. The thing that really stuck with me when people tell me this story when I was like a young radical or whatever, people be like, look, the black they're scared people because they walked around with guns, but they scared people especially because they fed people, you know. And this idea that the mutual aid program is like,
really what scared the FBI? And we talked about that third episode, and today we're going to talk about even more mutual aid that scared the ever loving shit out
of a bunch of racists. Oh okay, And the reason I am sleep deprived is this wasn't originally my plan when I set out to write a script this week, because last week on this show, I covered a bunch of factory takeovers in Argentina about how workers took over their workplaces and turned them into worker cooperatives in two thousand and one to two thousand and three or so, and a bunch of these are still around, and it was fun and had me on this like worker co
op kick, and I was like, I might talk about worker co ops more this week. And in that episode last week, I made the claim that the history of the cooperative movement in the US owes an awful lot to Black America in a way that is not acknowledged much right, partly because like the overall okay, the reputation of co ops. When I think about like co ops, I tend to think of gentrifying forces of white people.
Yes, sure, I also view that they are large, beautiful grocery stories with great produce where they stop you right at the front. They're like, do you have a membership? And if not, do you have cash for that membership? Otherwise get out and you're just like, oh, okay, won't even look at your space.
Sorry, Yeah, and so I was like, Okay, I want to if I made that claim flippantly, I want to talk about it. And so I was like, Okay, when I do this piece on worker cooperatives, I'll talk a little bit about how I was influenced by the black cooperative, by black cooperative economic thought. And then I started reading all the books about black economic cooperative thought.
Mm hmmm.
So black cooperative economics is not the side story to this week. It is the story.
It is the story as it should be. Probably we're about yes, it really is.
Not only that, but like there's more Like I stopped because I ran out of like one time in the week because I'm sleep deprived, but two like it ran out of episode time. You know, Wow, we're not even going to run up to the modern day. The history of early Black American cooperative economics is just too good not to deep dive. It is even more fundamental to understanding how kind of everything in America works than I
would have imagined. And the origin the origin to that is basically black mutual aid and black rebellion and black cooperation. Because as far as I can tell, every honest story about America starts in one or both of the following two places. Okay, either violent colonial expansion in the genocide of indigenous peoples, sure, yeah, or the unique racialized chattel slavery system that was the backbone of the New World and especially the US is a.
Seem like important pillais to get started and building a class of people who leave everyone else literally in their dust. Yeah, I could see it. I could see.
Yeah, they would come.
Back to this.
It really does. Like any anything you talk about is that happens in the US is going to be influenced by both of these things. We all live in the shadow of these things. And I'm going to argue, because I like metaphor and take metaphor very seriously, that we live on land that is haunted. For some of us, it is haunted by what our ancestors did. For others, is haunted by what happened to our ancestors. For an awful lot of people, it's both. But this show's middle
name is formally and Charine. Just make sure to make it from now on, the show's formal name just stick this in the middle of the show title is the coolest things that have ever happened have happened in the shadow of or in reaction to the worst atrocities the world's ever seen.
Wait what we're ting? Can they get that down?
Yeah? Yeah, the coolest things that have ever happened have happened in the shadow of, or in reaction to, the worst atrocities that the world's ever seen. It's a mouthful, but I think it's worth it.
But accurate. Okay, I'm gonna listen more, and then I have potentially some theories.
Wow, no, no, give me your theories.
Okay, So before we started recording, I woulday, but I've been reading a ton of fantasy books, a lot a lot of fantasy that and Japanese death poetry heavily in my rotation lately, and the idea of atrocities being not necessary but entirely unavoidable. Yeah, right, has been lingering over a lot of that work. I think a lot of the fantasy I'm reading lately almost always has some kind of centered shenocide, wore atomic bomb, more atomic esque weapon,
the big one. It's I think haunting us. I think we're very conscious, like subconsciously aware of the fact that we are constantly dealing with these atrocities, and yet it's weird how in our daytime. We do not at all make space to pause and think or react or address any of the issues. Yeah, totally sort of haunted by the fact that it's coming at me and like it's
just pouring out of our art. It's just constantly pouring out of art of being like, do you know that we were just killing each other out like a very large level, very quickly. Yeah, do you see it is? It's not registering. It's pretty people are telling you. Does it register now? Maybe it's packaged in a very entertaining story. Do you see it now? No, it's been it's.
Creeping me out a little bit.
I'll be honest.
No, But see that makes sense and it actually ties into something that I like. Folks will be surprised to
know that. Another Cool Zone media host, Robert Evans, keeps the opposite schedule that I do, and so when I was awake at five in the morning to keep writing a script, Robert Evans was also awake, but for the opposite reason, and we were like texting each other and one of the things that comes up is about we were just talking about how emotion comes through art and sometimes how we kind of need art both the creation of it and the experience of it almost to like
let ourselves feel certain emotions. Yeah, you know, and it I don't know whether it's because like otherwise we're afraid that we'll be consumed by them or let mean, honestly, okay, this is completely off the capital we're talking about, but like I feel, as I get older, i'd like have my emotional reactions are dulled. They're still there, but they're like the sharp edges have been like worn down by time. Oh for sure, So art becomes even more important to me as they get older.
Is that why dads can only cry when they watch movies, watch very emotional movies, because they're like because I talked to my father and father like figures men of fatherly ages. And a lot of times, you know, when I talk about taking action, they are so like you could if you want to do if they're like, it's really honorable that you want to be organizing her out in the street. But that's not a thing that works. I've said it
fail so many times. It's just it's almost cute, you know, because it's sometimes cantatizing where you're like celeeral, but yeah, they're just they're complete. Do I think worn down by existing. Maybe yeah, are is important. I'm excited to learn about commerce. Don't mean to derailis. But no, no, I really got me thinking. And I've also been reading so much poetry lately that I was immediately like LinkedIn. I was like, yes, I too, take poetry seriously.
No, no, I I this is the other stuff that I'm like. I think people they only know me through my podcast are like, ah, Margaret who only reads history books, which is true because I spend all my time reading history books. But like art and all this stuff, is I like anything to talk about it too, but to
talk about history and sociology books. I've talked a lot on the show about the nineteenth century labor movement, especially how either how annoying and racist the white unions were or how cool the internationalist, anti racist like integrated unions were. I haven't actually talked yet as much as I'd like to about the specific black unions that also existed. But all the good stuff that comes from the crucible of the labor movement came either through immigrant workers or black workers.
And we've talked a bunch about a bunch of different strikes, about how the most important strike in US history. The most successful labor action in all of US history was when the black people in the South won the Civil War by conducting the largest general strike in US history, crippling the Confederate economy.
And I don't know, you think about what you're talking about. That's crazy.
Oh god, no, no, no, okay, so, oh my god. So there's this sociologist who I'm about to talk about, a bunch named W. E. B. Dubois and not yeah, not pronounced Dubois, Dubois, which I kept wanting to say constantly, but it's Dubois. And he wrote this theory. But it wasn't a theory he like, I mean, he backed it up with facts. I guess it's like a theory in like a science way, not in a like random conjecture way. Right where he lays out that enslaved people in the
US South performed a massive general strike. They withheld their labor during the Civil War in a way that crippled the Confederate economy and in many ways won the war and the transfer also because a ton of people fled at great risk to get across the lines and then they didn't just like I mean, I'm sure some of them did. I wouldn't blame him, but they didn't just like keep going. They stuck around, and they said, well, how can we help, how can we help the war effort?
And there was this like labor army of formally enslaved, self emancipated people and it actually, like I talked about it long enough ago that I'm afraid I'll get the details wrong. Okay, but this is what I knew about du boys is that he was the guy who wrote that thing about the general strike and like changed my conception of the US Civil War. But it turns out he wrote a lot of stuff. I mean, I knew he wrote a lot of stuff, right, Yeah, I didn't know what it was. So du Bois spent his incredibly
long and influential career throwing proverbial dynamond I guess. Okay, So, like part of the reason I think that we don't hear about him much, right is because by the time, at least of like my white education, there is only two black people in history, and there's the good one, Martin Luther King and then the bad one Malcolm X.
For sure. The way uh it was, I went to an all white elementary school, and so yeah, that was definitely the the messaging across the board there.
Yeah, and so we didn't hear about him as much or any of the like really influential thinkers that came before the nineteen sixties.
Wait was to be Okay, did Paris had a World's Fair at some point? I think he was at.
It and he didn't put it past him. It would that sounds like something he would do.
Okay, if it's this incredible book that is so highlights all this detailed information that he brought there about like what the African American was doing like at that time, and there's like all these beautiful photographs, so folks like dressed to the nines, and then there's like talk of their business and stuff, and just that heat had sort of like was recording and preserving our history as it was happening in a way that wouldn't be bias leader, which I think is kind.
Of that sounds like this guy, yeah, because that's what he He's a sociologist and he was really fucking good one. And another thing that he talked about a lot that we take for granted today, but was a revolutionary idea at the time. Even my white education talked about how the failure of reconstruction right like after the Civil War was one how the failure of it was because of racist white people, right, it was because of Jim Crow Laws and the KKK and like not like black people
are lazy until the boys proved it. The general hypothesis with black people are lazy and that's why reconstruction failed, which makes me very annoyed.
This is Tony Morrison has a quote I will pair of phrase about sort of being for still waste time explaining racism away to be like, hey, that's just racism, Yeah, not talking in fact, you're just talking to me racism and how to take my time to explain why it's racist to you instead of doing the work that I should actually be doing. One exhausting situation. Our poor guy to bois, he was really suffering.
That's what he did over the course of his Like this guy lives to be ninety five and he keeps working his entire life, right, he saw a lot, sir, And like I think about I don't remember this guy's name. A long time ago, my ex boyfriend was telling me this story about like, yeah, there was this scientist and he had to spend his entire career measuring skulls because he was the guy who proved that black people's brains aren't smaller, and like, imagine, I mean, I guess that's
an important thing to do with your life. Imagine having to do that with your fucking life.
I have to put so many numbers down on paper that you finally see was just right in front of your face, that that's it's trying, it's trying existing in space. Sometimes, Yeah, that's crazy.
So Dubois said a lot of stuff, some of which was mind blowing at the time, it seems obvious in retrospect, and some of which isn't talked about now, like this general strike theory of the US Civil War, and people have pushed back on that a little bit, like it wasn't the only thing that once the Civil War. There was this whole war part of it too, you know, and like, but it was a really important part that
is still left out of that conversation. He was also the first person writing about black cooperative economics, at least that I've found, and in nineteen oh seven he edited a book called Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans, which had an excellent and evocative subtitle report of a social study made by Atlanta University under the patronage of Carnegie Institution of Washington, d C. Together with the proceedings of the twelfth Conference of the Study of the Negro Problems held
at Lanta University on Tuesday, May the twenty eighth. Nineteen oh seven. Wow, I know, just really draws you in.
Rules, right out the tongue.
Yeah, okay. Two epiphanies while reading this one. People knew how to subtitle books back in the day. Just really just lays it out, just real explicit.
No talk about what's in here. We're not trying to build mystery. This is the text, Please find us.
Yeah. Two. My second epiphany was that I have become someone who reads books with subtitles like this and finds them riveting and loses sleep because I read more of the nineteen oh seven book that's incredibly hard to parse than the twenty fourteen book that explains it all very rationally and in a way that's easier to understand.
Because you're an academic and you're like, this is the first source, this is this is the good stuff right here. I never knew anyone else's opinions or thoughts.
No, I'm in art schools, I can't be an academic. And then I'm like, no, I participate in the academic study of these books. And yeah, exactly. The nineteen oh seven book has a lot more of the like really interesting details, and a lot less of the here's how to explain it to someone one hundred and fifteen years from now.
Right.
The more readable book I just want to shout out is called Collective Courage. It's by Jessica Gordon Nemhard and it's from one hundred years later, in twenty fourteen.
That's the one I'll be reading.
Yeah, but before we talk about the history itself, I want to talk about these products and services that supported our podcast and we're back. Hey, I also want to talk about the historian. I want to talk about W. E. B. Du Bois, or as his friends called him, because he insisted doctor du Bois.
List. See, he said, I have the education. I'm not dealing with these white people.
Yeah, no, totally, Like.
This is exhausting, y'all see me, you know what's up? Please call me the proper way. I respect the hell out of it.
Even his best friend had to call him doctor du Bois. However, his best friend was white. So it's like, according to one article I read.
Okay, this is so he said, I can't be best friends with you if you show me proper respect and deference at all times so I'm not caught out tripping again. Seems reasonable that a pro like, we're gonna risk friendship in this era.
And if you're gonna be a guy who's like even my best friends to call me doctor du bois, and you're gonna be five foot five and carry a cane even when you don't need it, and wear like dressed to the nines at all times, you are either an asshole or one of the coolest and weirdest, most interesting intellectuals of your time.
It's really a fifty to fifty split here because I'm keeping read flags. But also, like, you know what, Yeah, the truth is always a little murkier. You really want to put him in a category. I'm sure he was a complicated human being. Yeah, but there's definitely a lot of those areaser just like we what now. But yeah, you know, okay, guy had personality you would not soon forget him.
No, I find him charming. I haven't read as much about his personal life, you know, is that some people have pointed out that he wasn't necessarily the best husband or father, but that is outside the scope of this podcast, and I don't know enough to really talk about it. Yeah, but besides all these things, the thing you need to know about doctor du Boys is that he was the first black graduate with a PhD from Harvard. He had the club.
I assure you the pleasure was Harvard when somebody was asking him about what was her time at Harvard, Like, I'm sure the pleasure was Harvard. I'm a fact that, but I'm pretty sure that's that care that rules.
Okay, which is awesome because later in his life he's going to reference Oscar Wilde, and Oscar Wilde was exactly the kind of guy who would say that kind of thing, right for sure, Like I've I found at least one thing that referred to him as a dandy, and I really like putting him in the Oscar wild category. In a lot of ways, that makes sense.
That makes sense, spiffy fits wellgroom mushed ash, you can see it.
Yeah, and like real fucking good takes on politics.
Actually, yes, Harvard, Goozett confirms, Okay, that's a factual quote from Hell.
Yeah. So the second thing you need to know about doctor Dubois is that he was born in eighteen sixty eight, which is famously only three years after the first Juneteenth, the day when the amani Emancipation Proclamation finally hit Texas.
Okay, not to safie too much, but I recently found out my great great great possibly a fourth grade in there. Grandfather at the initial one in Austin. We own a store called the Lions Convenience Store, part of the founding, like Black families of Austin. I was very excited about it. I no idea where the first two teenth That's amazing. I've been learning a lot about this space and time.
It's an interesting period for black people that I think we're sort of only just now uncovering as a consciously like the in a more zeitgeist way.
That makes sense to me. I think that there's a lot of like it's been really interesting to me to learn that we know more about things that happened a long time ago now than we did like closer to those events.
Yes, one hundred percent.
That is wild to me. So he was born only three years after the end of legal chattel slavery in the US and I'm adding all those qualifiers because there is still legal slavery in the US. It is in prison systems, and there's still chattel slavery in the US. It happens to undocumented people. But the end of legal chattel slavery in the US is a big fucking deal, one of the biggest deals in the history of the world. Honestly, he lived for ninety five years and he died in
nineteen sixty three. He literally died the day before the March on Washington from the nineteen sixties civil rights era.
Okay, wait to mark history with just your entrance and exits.
A it's a reminder that the space between these two events is one guy. There's one guy between those events.
Yeah. Wow, he wasn't there for either of them, Right, you just missed. Yeah, that's intense. Yeah. Time is much shorter than we think it is. Sure.
Yeah, so Dubois before he was doctor du Bois, when he was just Web, he probably didn't go by w He probably did. He's the kind of kid who would have gone by Web. Someone knows more about this than me. There's hundreds of books written about this man. I read some of his writing and some writing about him. He was born in Massachusetts in a black community that he described as a fairly idyllic setting, like local white churches helped pay for his college, and he says he didn't
experience a ton of racism as a kid. Then he went to an HBCU, a historically black college in Tennessee. That place is called Fisk. You will be surprised to know that between his idyllic black community in Massachusetts and Tennessee in whatever, he suddenly had to experience an awful lot of racism culture shock.
When you cast the Mason Dixon HiT's different for sure.
Yeah. He went on to become the first black person in history to get PhD from Harvard, like I was saying, and then he just went on to write some of the most influential shit about race the world has ever seen. In nineteen oh three, he published his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk. By nineteen thirty five, he wrote Black Reconstruction, which is when he laid out about how Reconstruction was a failure of wasn't a failure by black people?
You know?
Yeah, And the classic black civil rights dichotomy that I grew up learning about, of course, is Martin Luther King the Reformer, and Malcolm X the radical right. Yeah, this sells MLKA short. He was way fucking cooler than my white liberal education taught me.
Oh for sure. For sure. I think when I'm okay, it's like the one of the most waking organizers, like guy on the ground who understood what it meant not just to be the face, but to structure the the way movements were captured. Right, like when I just recently learned that he chose pretty women to be arrested with and Georgia, who was like, listen, if they're arresting gorgeous young women, people are gonna be upset about it.
Me.
Yeah, black, I don't really care about me. They'll care these women are geting arrested, and they could be like, show we're knowing. Also what we know about the man is a full human being. But I also think it's just like that kind of thinking is a is necessary in order to make movements h gain traction with folks who might otherwise just you know, chill in the middle,
be comfortable and that. Yeah, yeah, a brilliant thinker, not just the guy who was like, we no fighting back, which I think is often how he gets painted.
No, totally, and it's he's easier to misrepresent and recuperate into capitalism and like whiteness than the man than Malcolm X, who was just it's very hard to do that to Malcolm X.
Right, yeah, well, because you get to whatever you see Malcomax being Oh, that guy took no shit, like he would not food anybody in this room. He would be like pretender, fake, get out of my face, like no, there's no uh, it's not a guy who was interested in being a politician necessarily.
Yeah, and clear. I wouldn't fuck with either of them by selling them on the street.
I'm okay, we'll just take you by surprise exactly, sweet face like pastorly voice where you're like, oh okay, like this guy's chill, and then he starts speaking to you like I'm dumb, I'm stupid, and why did I think I could take this man is brilliant, Like oh.
God, yeah, no, totally. So at the turn of the century, you had a different dichotomy of black intellectuals that was being presented to everyone. Right, you had Booker T. Washington, who is more moderate. His position gets called accommodationism and basically Booker T. Washington, this sells him a little bit short, and I'll talk about in a second. Booker T. Washington said folks should compromise on their rights in order to
get the bare minimum ount of white society. Basically, doctor du Bois comes on the scene and he's like, we are intellectually the equal of whites, and we demand a quality now. But it's not just like du Bois radical, Washington boring compromiser. It was actually about also how they positions themselves are on class. Washington was like, we want to focus on our working class power. I'm paraphrasing here,
I'm a little bit putting words in their mouths. We're going to focus on working class power by educating ourselves as laborers and will become the economic equals of white people by like doing manual labor and stuff, and then we'll be in a better place to fight for our rights. And a lot of people don't like this because it's like, well, that's the work we're already expected to do within white society. Anyway, du Bois came in and he believed in what was
called a classical education. He's a Harvard man. He wants to focus on intellectual quality. He claimed that a quote talented tenth, a sort of intellectual class of elites that made up about ten percent of the black population, aha, would lead the black people to equality. And it is not surprising that he ends up pretty Marxist, right.
Yeah, yeah, the talented tenth is the belief there within is still held strongly amongst certain African Americans, and in concerning in what I find to be somewhat concerning ways.
Yeah, and du bois So the boys didn't coin it. It was actually coined by a white northern liberals who used it to diswade their plans.
Yeah.
Right, They were like, oh, we're going to establish black colleges in the South and make a make a talented tenth. You could probably guess by the way in our tones. I have no interest in offering strategic advice. This is not a plan that specifically appeals to me.
Yeah. I think any plaster, any plan for improvement that requires selecting tempercent of people to move on while everybody else sort of waits for them to open the door, is immediately suspect, like, wait, what's happening here? Who's doing the choosing? Would define talent? Talent in what way like it just it's all it's yeah, not great.
Well what's interesting. Du Bois is such an interesting thinker. He develops as he gets older and I'm cutting ahead to further my script, he changes his position this and he stops being like by the end of his life, he's not like, oh, we need the smart ten percent. He kind of is like, we need the moral ten percent. Oh, and we also need people to like integrate our struggle into broader struggle of other marginalized people, and like there's actually he's hard to pin down in some ways.
We change so much over the course of our extremely long lives.
I know, right, like what like I don't think the same shit when I was twenty No.
Thank god he experienced so much.
So this more radical thinker actually still had more in common with MLK than Malcolm X, at least tactically. Du Bois in the early twentieth century. He was not super stoked on Black Insurrection. He was like, I get it, I'm not anti. I understand why people do it. Like he's not mad at Nat Turner, for example, like the most famous slaver vault person during this period. And we'll probably still you know, all that stuff comes from the right place and maintains our dignity. Right, It's better than
just sucking it up. But it is politically misguided because with the white power structure is more powerful than us, is his argument. But the opposite position, the accommodationist position, destroys our dignity and undermines us as people. He presents this idea so he believes in this third tradition, a
nonviolent defiance, which he connects to Frederick Douglas's legacy. And what's interesting about this from my point of view, all of these people are so you know, like when you simplify him to be like oh Berker T. Washington's like boring liberal, yeah, or like Frederick Douglass totally nonviolent. Like first of all, I mean, like the Civil War wasn't a non violent protest. His like sons were fighting in that. You know, he was a little bit old by that point.
I'm sure he would have been. Frederick Douglass was no pacifist. I like this quote by him because it, well, whatever he says, if the Southern outrages on the colored race continue, the negro will become a chemist. Anarchists have not the opoly. I'm bomb making and the Negro will learn.
A check and innate. Just don't push us too far. I really appreciate with people just kind of laying on the line just to be like, you know, what actually
we do, But I think that's also it's irritating. And again I would say with my my education in Black American history begins in college because I was want to start hanging out more black kids my age, and I I'm sort of it's somewhat perplexing, but also you understand the intentionality of it the older I get of just how things we think are understood and buried are constantly rebrought up as being like factual, like the idea that oh, black folks just lack education, and if it's just education,
then that would be what would give them a head, or oh they're lazy, if they would just work harder, then that's how. It's just like, it's wild to me that people can still be distracted from the fact that these are systems in place that are concrete and and and they're here, and we have to fix it. We have to do I mean, we have to tear down and rebuild the system. But there's that I don't know, it's just crazy. Yeah, that's crazy.
No, And you know you're right about how like, yeah, watching these things, like of course everyone understands systemic racism, and then we've like slipped at remembering systemic racism, you know. Yeah, So Dubois was into a sort of less violent defiance. To quote author David Haikwan Kim, Dubois's third way of political self assertion quote inherits the moral and spiritual legacy of black insurrectionism without advocating violent mayhem or caste submission.
And so basically it's like, well, we're going to stand up, but we're just not necessarily going to do it in these like kind of one off ways. But he gets really interesting but all this shit I okay, well so hear me out, Okay, okay, So tactically and strategically he's sounding a little bit more Martin Luther King. Right, non violence is not the same as submission. It's the op is a form of rebellion.
Yeah.
But the other thing about du Bois is that he also presaged black nationalism in some ways, according to at least you know, some of the authors I was reading. Frederick Douglass was about black folks integrating into white society. The boys insisted that black people should embrace their African heritage even while living in the US.
Yes, everyone else is allowed to, might we also enjoy?
And he gets more radical as he gets older. Later in his life he talked about how this negative view he had of the insurrectionist like when he was writing in his youth, he wrote about black insurrectionists being like, look, I got where they're coming from, but it wasn't the right plan. And the white insurrectionists, like the labor movement and the anarchists and stuff like that, he writes about them and he's like, I don't know, it's just weird
flash in the pan stuff. It doesn't matter. Right Later he writes explicitly about how this was his Harvard education, talking this is what they taught him to believe about these movements, and he started seeing labor uprisings as part of a lineage of struggle, not as just like sporadic uprisings into chaos.
Ah.
He started adding class more actively to his critique, and he started seeing all of these struggles as connected. And he didn't drop race. This is his primary thing for understandable reasons, but he became more of a like racism deeply informs capitalism, and the two are intertwined, which is to say, I really like this guy's thinking.
Yeah, well, and you've paid a picture of an evolution, right. I mean, if you grew up in a sheltered, comfortable town where everybody looks like you and your happy in life is good, like, that's how you perceive the whole world because you were young, know nothing else. And then you get to college and you learn a little bit more, and then it sounds like what should be obvious, And maybe the main lesson and takeaway for folks is I've
start speaking to more organizers. Is something I've certainly been checked on a lot, which is like, you come from a class that has a lot of privilege that you've not acknowledged yet. And if you do not acknowledge your class privilege, and then if you do not engage people outside of your class, you are not actively doing the work. You're missing such a large picture of what's actually going on. And it just sounds like he got out in the
world and was like, oh, there's a lot totally. The workers are angry for a reason.
Yeah, not random, no, absolutely, but you know what's a good steam valve for class aggression is ads and stuff that goodbye, and that way you don't feel as bad about capitalism because you can participate in it through here's the ad break.
Did do? Did it do?
And we're back.
Hey.
So he actually helped form the NAACP in nineteen oh nine, and then he edited its paper for twenty five years, which was called The Crisis, which is a fucking sick name for a newspaper.
It really is gets attention getting.
Yeah, and I'm not going to get into like there's a lot of other folks, like Marcus Garvey comes on the scene shortly after this and is pretty critical of Dubois. They have a lot of conflict and you know, and they're both involved in the Pan Africanist movement, which is a movement to unite Africa and also often African people in the diaspora into one identity and or nation to
unite against colonization. But like there's a lot of like splits within that, and like Dubois, understandably, people were critical of some of the things that he said. Into sure, but you know, whatever I did all this cool shit. His actual political beliefs were pretty consistent throughout his life, He started off even before he figured out all this other shit, believing in economic cooperation, like it's not even the it's not even like nineteen hundred yet before he
starts writing about economic cooperation. He also believed consistently throughout his life that black people should demand their rights directly and immediately, and he was basically a democratic socialist for most of his career. How he actually carried himself politically varied. Basically, he did whatever he thought was pragmatic at any given point.
He would sometimes vote Republican, sometimes Democrats, sometimes third party, sometimes refuse to vote, depending on the candidates at the time, and basically like what they specifically offered to the black community, which I don't make sense.
Whatever, it's a logical way to vote and move through life to Yeah, no party loyalties, I'm aboutfit.
He would join and leave the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. He would pick fights and men ties between the NAACP and the Communist Party, like all the time. He started off against US involvement in World War One. This is a common sort of anti imperialist position. Then he ended up in favor of World War One. Then
he regretted being in favor of World War One. He was opposed to US involvement in World War Two, especially in the Pacific Theater, because he figured that the US would probably use that opportunity to just do more imperialism, which which yeah, you know, that makes sense. There's very few wars that the US is a government was involved with which I'm like, we were solidly on the right side, and World War two is one of those. But I
still completely understand the critique of the Pacific theater. We'll just expand US interests.
I mean, listen, you two things can be true. We could join Lee and fight Nazis and also ravage countries that were like, its completely unnecessary. We take advantage wherever we go, so you know, yeah, man, yeah.
I know.
So compromising in ways that seemed pragmatic and then regretting it was a hallmark of his life, it seems. And I'm making that because it happened at least twice. Okay, there was the World War one one and then in nineteen twenty eight, one of du Bois's mentees was a fellow black Harvard Man named Augustus Granville Dill, and he was caught by the vice squad doing homosexuality in a
public bathroom. Du Boys fired him from the crisis Boys now and Augustus retired from writing, and then spent the rest of his life like as a piano player and teacher. Du Bois regretted this for the rest of his life, as you shared it in his autobiography, he wrote, quote, I had before that time no conception of homosexuality. I had never understood the tragedy of an Oscar Wild. I dismissed my coworker forthwith and spent heavy days regretting my act.
Amazing of you two, say so, sir, I mean, I think a lot of people would just take it to their grave, you know. I know, it's wonderful for him to have said it out loud, because it is really tragic.
That's the thing I find really compelling is this sort of intellectual honesty where it seems like he's like not specifically committed to an ideology, he's like committed to trying to do right, and sometimes he slips up really dramatically and is inconsistent, and he feels really human.
I mean, and that's a rarity, I think, especially for people who are lifted onto such pedestals and the work is very good. People are like hero, I'm like well human being.
Yeah, totally, totally. As he aged, he became more and more radical During the Cold War. He remained critical of the USSR for its despotism, but overall he backed them against US imperialism, and the US didn't like him for this. He's absolutely caught up in the Red scare time and time again, even though he kept like being like, I'm I'm not with the communists, but he would like as the US government like goes after him more and more,
He's just hanging out with his communist friends. He's like, fuck the US government.
He's like, I'm not one of them, but I like it better over here.
Yeah, And he deepened his analysis of how all sorts of marginalized people need to work together. He shifted his belief about an educated vanguard leading the way to a sort of moral guidance where being a good person and specifically selfless was far more important than specifically their education. The US revoked his passport for him being a commi, and when he was like in his fucking in his eighties, they were like, oh, no, you're a sketchy commi.
Uncle Sam's never not petty.
I know it took a nineteen fifty eight Supreme Court decision to get him his passport back.
Y'all were extra petty. Wow. Usually this is running around with some paperwork, a little extra long line. Yeah, Supreme Court. God damn.
So he moved to Ghana nineteen sixty one, at age ninety three.
I love the man, he says, and peace out. No one talked to me ever again.
Sucking done. Yeah, and before he moves to Ghana, as final fuck you to the US government, he formally enrolls and gets his membership card in the Communist Party the USA. Slow clap, slow, and most analysis I've seen isn't because like suddenly, at ninety three, he suddenly becomes a committed Communist Party communist.
He's been doing it the whole time.
It's a fuck you, it's a fuck you the Red Scare, it's a fuck you the US government.
That is amazing. I really I enjoy that. Yeah, yeah, you help this man prisoner. I mean, like, the United States is large, but there's the reason he should be confined to its borders. That's crazy. Yeah.
He died in Ghana two years later, not suspiciously. I mean he was fucking ninety five and he died the day before the march on Washington.
Wow.
And the Communist Party in the US, honestly, being pretty clever, they started a youth organization called the du Boys Club, which was a reference to the patriotic boys clubs of America.
That's amazing settiness all around. Live.
You know that, I did laugh really hard, And.
So yeah do boys one of America's most important public intellectuals. And why do I want to talk about him? I did all this research talking about him because because of a paragraph he wrote in the introduction of his book about economic cooperation, the nineteen oh seven book. And I'm going to quote this paragraph, quote the conference. The conference that produced this report regards the economic development of the
Negro Americans at present as in a critical state. The crisis arises not so much because of the idleness or even a lack of skill, as by reason of the fact they unwittingly stand hesitating at the crossroads. One way leads to the old trodden ways of grasping fierce individualistic competition, where the shrewd, cunning, skilled and rich among them will prey upon the ignorance and simplicity of the mass of the race and get wealth at the expense of the
general well being. The other way leading to cooperation and capital and labor, the massing of small savings, the wide distribution of capital, and a more general equality of wealth and comfort. The latter path of cooperative effort has already been entered by many. We find a wide development of industrial and sick relief, many building and loan associations, some cooperation of artisans, and considerable cooperation in retail trade.
He was ready. He was like, I have a plan, Please follow it. It sounds like a dream. I mean, nobody took note. No one was like, wow, maybe that could.
Thing that would work for us, That would have been a better plan overall. And that's like even like he's always waffling on like party politics or whatever. I mean, these are white parties. The Communist Party of US was like actually fairly black during this time period because they're the only political party in the US that was like consistently good about race issues during that time the whole
like nineteen twenties nineteen forties era. They were like anyway, whatever, that's besides the point, because I'm like people probably know this about me. I'm like not a big fan of the USSR, but I'm also not a big fan of the US government or whatever. But it's like, why does he need specific party politics and ideological lines. He laid out exactly what he's hoping will happen. Yeah, and it comes from the black experience in America, not European ideology.
Yeah. Yeah, it's again and incredible to me. Uh, the absolute choke whole power has to be like, oh no, we have we have the solutions. We're pretty clear on what would work and be most beneficial for most people. That's not a mystery. We don't need to solve it. We have the answers. We're just refuse to do it. You're just not going to even try it. No, Yeah, heaven't forbid. They see it works, long, don't do it. It's just crazy.
Well, and we're going to get to that and probably on Wednesday's episode where they do. They prove a lot of this stuff works, and then of course reaction comes and why supremacy comes and shuts a lot of it down. But so basically, he lays out a challenge to all of us because he saw how black Americans were absolutely the leaders in the realm of economic cooperation in the US.
And it's possible that no group in history has ever pulled itself up economically from worse conditions against such fierce odds as Black America did after the Civil War. When I think about an America without Jim Crow and the KKK, like it would just be fucking unrecognizable today. Oh for sure, there's a reason that white people end up like literally bombing a place called Black Wall Street. Yeah, because Black Americans organized and fought in a thousand ways, and one
of those ways was economically. Author Jessica Gordon Nemhard lays out a bunch of shit about how black cooperativism worked in the US that had it existed since the beginning, like actually goes back before the beginning of the US, That women have consistently taken the leading role in most of its organizations. Wow, oh yeah, it's the numbers aren't
even close. We're gonna talk about it next episode. That many of the organizations were specifically cross class in a way that greatly strengthened them, and that basically all of them throughout time have been opposed, often violently and destructively, by white supremacy, and yet to spite that they've done so much, and so were we talking a little about what they did.
Women are so great, y'all.
I love women, I know they Yeah, like the black women organizing in this era just held down entire economies of Yeah, Like it's just fucking incredible. The history of black economic cooperation in resistance to racism and slavery in the US is older than the US itself. I think I've brought it up before on the show because it like blew my mind when I first found this out. You know, like when you think of insurance companies, you
largely think of like evil capitalist things, right, Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you know they have radical roots.
Insurance has radical roots. You know what it would because insurance here to ensure that you are taking care of in difficult times and someone exactly I can make coin off of that. Wherefore, I know, human being suck.
I know, insurance companies have their roots in mutual aid. In some ways, you could say mutual aid has its roots. Mutual aid is like a recognizable name. Practice kind of has its roots in old insurance companies. They like not companies, insurance associations.
Wow.
Dubois traces the history of this legacy of cooperation back to Africa itself. He argues that despite the claims of the anthropology at the time enslave people. This is another one of those things that I think is common knowledge now, but like wasn't then. Basically at the time, people were like, oh, no, black people as soon as they got to America, they don't remember Africa. There's no connection to any cultural or
religious traditions. That's you know, total blank slate. Instead, du Bois argues that people brought an awful lot over with them, since they were people who had memories.
Full, full lives, remember their stories. Yeah, I've been watching and learning a lot about Black culinary.
Traditions that have been oh cool.
From West Africa to here. They're interesting maps where they lay out, you know, soil conditions in different parts of West Africa, and they're like you'll see here they were growing rice, and then the rice were growing the same way here, and then in the architecture of a lot
of southern buildings. You can see similar designs in like ancient African architecture, specifically West African architecture, where like the way the they're low and flat so that wind can blow across the top and keep the lower parts cooler, things features like that, and so it's yeah, it's everywhere, and it's again, it's wild to think how intensely woven
enslaved people were to everyday culture and society. People were like, they're not doing anything here, just like you couldn't get dressed, you couldn't feed yourself, you couldn't like farmer lands like literally over here doing everything entertaining your damn children, like making sure they don't get killed, like so much. And then to like the willful arrogance to be like what they've had no effect, yes, is not totally.
And also that those people are lazy, You mean, the people who've built your house and feed you and take care of your children and brush your hair.
Literally in the fields while you're chilling on the porch, like god it's hot. These lazy assholes making sure my life runs well. Y'all were crazy, ah, so much.
Yeah, And so once people got here, got here, and so once people were stolen and fucking trafficked, a ton of people started organizing help one another out in all kinds of different ways. Enslaved people on a plantation might collectively tend a small garden plot for themselves. They organized to buy one another freedom. Maroon communities start popping up everywhere. This is like one of my favorite things to cover. I will always when I find out about new Maroon community.
It's an easy roon communities are there are these? They're gorilla societies, uh like gorilla with EU or u E, populated mostly by self freed black people and Indigenous people with the occasional poor white family. And these Maroon communities, many of which lasted for generations, would have totally different social orders in the societies around them. And a lot of these societies were very cooperative. Also, they sometimes go raid slave society and that's cool too, Margaret.
Okay, oh my god, huh. I literally touched the hem of this in my research. I was telling Margaret before that I've been doing a lot of research on who do practicing enslaved folk like pre Civil War, and what I learned is like, typically a lot of these wait, what was the word users.
It was not in my maroon towny, Maroon societies.
Societies, maroone societies, so.
Apparently communities or colonies or yeah. Yeah.
I read about a couple of them and they were saying that they would specifically choose like difficult territory to it was like deep deep deep with the swamp on the islands that you have to like swim or like you have a boat to get to. And I was like, this is so cool. It's legit. How I script Okay, I can't even talk about it, but I'm so excited when you do an episode on them, will you please invite me because I am so curious to learn more.
I think it's the coolest thing to just be like part of the reason because you know, when you think about when I think about my black friends who have a firm grip on the history of our people in this country, there are folks who grew up like in deeply embedded black cultures, right so like yes, church, but also school, like they had black teachers growing up, which a lot of black kids, Like I had my black
teacher until my third year of college. Yeah, like I just were like outside of my imediate family and then we go visit, extended family just wasn't there. And so I say all that just to say, like, it's it's interesting to think that a lot of the reasons this information isn't getting passed over to like white kids, Like a lot of that information is like this is for
don't know, this is for us, we're over here. It's like the first time I saw Daughters of the Dust, which is essentially about a maroon community society of people like living out there. I uh, I think the beautiful. I'm really excited to learn more about them. I've got really guests.
Sorry, I didn't know that they were so prevalent. Like I first heard of this one called the Great and the Great Dismal Swamp in northeast North Carolina, and frankly, I first heard about it because like white radicals love when there's like white people in the story. Of course, like we talk a lot about John Brown and shit
like that. Yeah, and the Great Dismal Swamp. There's like this version of the story that there was like also poor white people living there, and that's probably true, but if so, it's like way less important than people talk about.
But the thing so then you're like, oh, there was this one maroon society or you hear about these ones in other countries or things like that, and slowly you're like these were fucking everywhere, Like this is like not you couldn't have a slave society without it being interspersed with pockets of freedom. Yeah, no matter how hard they tried, and they literally invented policing in order to try and stop this kind of thing.
You sure did.
But the other thing that gets kind of played up, and a lot of the versions of this is like and then they would go raid slave Society and bring into clare war on slave Society and like that's like kinda true, but also a lot of the Maroon communities were like, don't go fucking rating. Well, like fucking they'll come shut us down.
Like no, right, first of all, like let's be smart about it. Okay, we got to protect everybody here, Like for sure, let's get some people out, but like also the ones who handle your shu, because again, there are so many people here already. The deeper tectae. Yeah, I imagine it would be a highly selective, highly organized operations and not just pitchforks. You know.
Yeah, the rating was like pretty but a lot of the actual organizations of them were somewhat informal. But then again, we did an episode about I don't remember what the main topic was, it was probably it was about Brazil and there was this like king, a black king, living in the mountains of in a maroon community in Brazil with like an army, a palace, and it was like it was kind of wild. So there's that one and then another for anyone who's listening is like, I want
to already hear episodes. We did an episode about Fort Negro in Florida, which was not part of the US at the time, which was a very militant run society that started from black British soldiers. Okay, so much listening to do market Yeah, no, I'm like, I'll probably have you on for Great Dismal Swamp. I've been planning to
do that one for a while. So in addition to these maroon communities, you also have entire secret societies that formed about which we know very little because they're secret societies. But we know a little bit about them, partly because there's that not actually secret societies. The Masons, the Freemasons, they get tied into this story too in a positive way.
The conspiracy theorists are going to be clocking a lot of things. I know.
Well conspiracy theorists. Black Freemasons in the US are older than the US. On March sixth, seventeen seventy five, a year before the US fifteen Free Black Men were initiated into Freemasonry, soon forming the African Lodge number four fifty nine. Then they formed a national Grand Lodge of three other lodges. Wow, one of the biggest, the two biggest centers of the cooperative organ that we're going to be talking about. One of them is the secret societies and the other is churches.
Dubois rites, Oh, this ties into what you were actually talking about. He's going to use outdated terminology for this, Dubois writes. It was not, at first, by any means, a Christian church, but rather an adaptation of those Heathen rights which we roughly designate by the term obi worship of Voodooism. Association and missionary effort soon gave these rights a veneer of Christianity, and gradually, after two centuries, the church became Christian with a Calvinistic creed and with many
of the old customs still clinging to the services. It is this historic fact that the Negro Church of today bases itself on one of the few surviving social institutions of the African fatherland that accounts for its extraordinary growth and vitality.
Yes, yes, I mean, if you think of all the things that sertifically think of coming out of a church, and then you distill it down to the who do is, which is essentially a practice of non faith based rituals that are meant to invoke either healing or inspiration or protection. These were These were again women again, the protectors, again the organizers and based of the community. These were people often bringing children into the world is duels or you know, midwives.
And it's yeah, it's fascinating to consider. I had I had the link of as Christianity was forced on enslaged people, the rituals and traditions of the Christian Church were intermingled with who do but linking that then to organize movements. I hadn't had that chain link yet.
No, And it's he makes it like it's one of the main things that du Bois ends up writing about in this piece is about partly because there's more information
about how the church groups did it right. Yeah, but it's like like syncretic Christianity is something that is really interesting as relates to I've studied more about a colonization like Ireland, right, you know, you have the Irish Catholics that are a syncretic faith that is still believes in fairy wells up until like the eighteen hundreds, which is like fourteen hundred years after they all supposedly became Christians.
You know. And this isn't to say that the Black churches today are not fully Christian, just that syncretism and the transition of religion is like a more complicated and interesting process than people give it credit for. Absolutely, the church became one of the centers of black cooperative life and through that one of the centers of revolt and also building cooperative economies, which are not wholly separate things. Several of the most ambitious slaver vaults in the US
grew out of Black churches. Take for example, Denmark Vesse. Denmark Vessey was a black man who bought his way out of slavery in South Carolina. He literally won a lottery and was like, sweet by me, that's what I want.
Holy Molly, that it would be the luckiest day.
Oh my god, wow, I know.
And also how chet it's like watching kids try to get into schools by winning a lottery. You're like, this probably shouldn't be how that words sign?
Oh yeah, God, so he's free and he starts an African Methodist Episcopal congregation in South Carolina and immediately starts illegally teaching in slave kids how to read, which is a fucking cool thing to do.
It's fucking awesome.
Then he wasn't able. He's a carpenter, and he makes enough money that he should be able to buy his wife and children their freedom. Their owner won't sell bitch, Okay, So he did what any reasonable person would do and tried to overthrow the slave empire of the United States of America.
What other options have you left me? I tried you pay Dan, you said no, So.
I know I have to fight you. I genuinely like I would watch this movie like that is a perfectly natural and worthy conclusion to reach. Yes, he planned for a revolt on the Steel Day, and this is okay. So it's like been proven and Corty did this. But there's like, like, if you read the Wikipedia about this, for example, it's all written in the like was accused of not like totally absolutely did, But I think all
this is cool as shit. So I'm just gonna say did, because he like you do the crime you do the time you can brag about it, whether he did it or not. You know what, I like this rule. Okay, Yeah, I have a friend I probably brought this up before. I have a friend who was like convicted of all of the property destruction out of protest in Pittsburgh. Like they were like, you smashed every window that was broken,
which was like physically impossible for him to have done. Sure, and then he like went to prison about it for a while. And now I'm like, yeah, you could tell people you broke every window.
He they absolutely could. Absolutely, I did it.
Yeah the time it was me, I teleport.
I'm amazing for having done it. Yeah, exactly, You're welcome. Wow.
So he planned a revolt for b Steel Day July fourteenth, eighteen twenty two. Thousands of people enslaved and free alike, almost all but not exclusively black, were in on this plan. Wow. Two fucking people out of those thousands snitched them out?
Now? Was it? Bring them forward? Got to take this beating because what.
Yeah, everyone gets rounded up. Thirty five people, including VESSI, are hanged. Of course, the four white conspirators were off let off waylighter. They weren't the snitches.
I know for sure.
They were let off way lighter. I mean just literally because they're white, right, and they get a few months in prison each, I think they're in court, they're able to be like, oh, I was totally doing it for money, you know.
And so therefore it's it's a job. Yeah, you could understand money. What else could I do? What? Oh? God, capitalism you wild? Wow? This whole system trash wow.
Yeah. But I will say one, Okay, clearly, this uprising did not destroy the slave Empire of the United States, but his kids lived became free because they survived long enough to see the end of legal chattel slavery in the United States. And this these insurrections, you throw enough sparks and eventually fire catches, and that's what ended slavery. So that's one way the church was involved, is that he was you know, he ran a church.
Uh.
Nat Turner probably the most famous rebel in Southern history. And I'm not going to talk about him because I'm planning to do the whole thing about him. He was a preacher also, but because the church was where people would meet and try and overthrow the slave empire, it was under constant scrutiny from the evil Empire. The enforcers of that evil empire, and still people organized despite all
of that. And we'll talk about what they organized on Wednesday. Yeah, but first we could talk about the stuff that you do. And I mean producing is literally a form of organization, but you know it's not the only thing you do.
Yeah, uh, it's not what even Yeah, I think mostly right now, I've been working with a friend to get her film production company up. She has this radical idea of how to make filmmaking a mentally healthy and safe space to work, which it is currently not. It is both our passion. She comes from a poor background. I come from a middle class background, but we neither of
us have money to start this career. Took a long time, you know, And so we're working on like how do you create ethical hours and still make your day and get your shots? How do you film difficult scenes in a way that both protects the performers but also everyone
working around that scene. And it's been a great honor, and so where our film is, we're applying to festivals right now, and it's something I hope to be doing more of and bringing more of that into some of my other spaces, like my program at here at iHeart Next up where we train and develop folks who've never made podcasts before but have interesting stories to tell.
You know.
I think it's sort of the form of organizing I found I can take on right now. Is helping people who want to have careers and the arts find ways to do it in a way that's financially reasonable. Money is keeping people out of the arts. It's really bothering me. So this is my one little way in. But yeah, yeah, I guess that's kind of what I do outside of work. But again, always it's just more work.
But I mean that stuff matters, And like the idea of like, you know, we complain a lot about how tech culture wants to like work everyone to death, right, you know. Tech culture is like, oh, if you don't work eighty hours a week for my tech startup, you don't care about it, yea, And like where did they
get that idea from? Well, nonprofits and the arts are the two places where that has been the norm forever, where everyone working on a project is expected like, well, since you care about it, you're going to work yourself to death over it.
You know, it's so unnecessary. You can make beautiful, impactful art without having to feel like shit without missing out on important life events, without stressing yourself into like an unrecognizable shape. Yeah. So yeah, more of that if you can find spaces to do it within your own life. I say, tecklate, it's been rather rewarding.
Hell yeah. My plug this week is that today if you're listening on the day that drops, which is June tenth, twenty twenty four, the kickstarter for my book, The Sapling Cage, my debut novel. I've written a ton of novellas and short story collections and all kinds of other books, but I've never written a novel that well, okay, I ghost wrote some romance novels, but I'm not allowed to say that I did that. Well, I'm not allowed to tell
you what they are. My debut novel, The Sapling Cage, is being kickstarted as of today, and you can find it on Kickstarter and you can pre order it there, and I'm really excited about it. I'm trying to make this the biggest book debut of my career, and you all can help buy backing it. And I'm going to read a blurb for my own book. I didn't write this blurb. Another author, Nissi Shall wrote this blurb, simple, strange,
and elegantly effective. The Sapling Cage begins Margaret Kiljoy's anarchist fantasy series with an engrossing story of the struggles between tax collecting knights, barfly thieves, and apprentice witches still too raw to use the magic they can barely see out of the corners of their eyes. There are goodies and baddies of all genders. There's bullying monsters and healing rainbows
and rotten scheming nobles. This book was so gripping that, though I tried my best to slow down as the end came rushing nearer and nearer, I just couldn't do it. Now that I've reached the last page, the only thing keeping me from crying about it is the knowledge that there's more of Killjoy's glorious epic to come.
I'm soul. That's a really good one.
Ah, thanks Margaret.
Wow, Okay, got some chills and very excited. That's gonna be fun.
Thanks, and you all can hear more about the story of this podcast, well, not the story about the podcast. Whatever, come back. We're gonna have another episode of this on Wednesday. Talk to you then, Hi, Margaret, here just with one more plug. If you're listening to this episode on the day it came out, on June tenth, twenty twenty four, then this will be timely. And if you're listening some
other time you can still hear it. It'll still sadly be timely, because tomorrow is June eleventh, and I'm going to read a statement about what that means. June eleventh is the International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and long term anarchist prisoners. This day seeks to strengthen the connections between those behind the prison walls and those of us on the outside through benefit events, actions, and spreading the names and stories of our friends locked away since
twenty eleven. This day intends to address the specific issues facing long term prisoners and strives to build a network of solidarity that has built on memory, action, and remaining unyielding in the face of repression. To learn more about the history of June eleventh, the prisoners we support, or to get some ideas for organizing a June eleventh event where you live, visit June one one dot org.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media. Visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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