The Covenant with Black America Part 2

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Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to Malik's Bookshelf, bringing a world together with books, culture and community. Hi, my name is Malik, your host of Malik's bookshef Woo. We had an eventful week, an All Star week and community events that were hit, home, run, electric and amazing. Well, the Covenant with Black America twenty years later was very informative and quite enlightening, and I'm going to feature in some of the conversations that took place.

Tavis Smiley has.

Updated this new book with new essays contributing Covenant. Yes, we're at the event and they spoke and I was able to record some of their words as Tavis Smiley was the keynote speaker.

So I want to feature some of that.

Most enlightening conversation and talk that took place. So I want to definite make that my main subject for this particular episode. I want to also feature at a later time the Jay Ellis event that we hosted that had over four hundred attendees, and it also had a mini Insecure.

Reunion that took place.

I'm going to probably address that next week, but this particular episode this week, The Covenant with Black America Twenty years Later by Tavis Smiley and contributing Covenant authors. We had a community event this week and the title of the event was called The Covenant with Black America Twenty years Later, and the keynote speaker and contributing.

Author and editor is Tavis Smiley.

So this event had Covenant contributors and their names are Connell West, Melina Abdullah, Connie Rights, Mark Willie Thomas, Elisa o'doona, and Tyrone Howard.

All of them.

Spoke just a little about the essays that they contributed to in this new book, because it's been revamped and the essays been updated, and it's called The Covenant with Black America twenty years Later by Tavis Smiley. I was able to record some of the words of the Covenant contributors at the event, so I'm going to feature that on this episode.

I'm gonna start with Tavis Smiley.

This book has done a lot of work over the last twenty years.

So here we are now twenty years later with this new edition of the text.

And so we have.

Reached into the best of Black America to get a variety of persons, thought leaders, opinion makers, influences to write.

New essays for this edition twenty years later.

We are fortunate that a number of these contributors in the book, for those who already had it. A matter of fact, turn if you got a book, we gotta make my Bible studies being the church. This Bible study you got if if you got your Bible, if you've got your book, I'm sorry, I hold your book up.

Let me see this. Get that shot, Get that shot.

Pren you that shot, Get that shot, get that photo. Hold you from something high everybody where your book sitting, hold.

Yours in there, and way you just do care. So we are fortunate. And it didn't really I didn't plan it this way.

I just reached out to some of the best and most brilliant people that I know, asking them twenty years later if they were to consider writing a new essay for this text on these particular companies.

Tyrone Howard, can we.

Show some serious and not give me some serious love attention effects for brother Tamas.

Right out of time like gim like, what are we to give host the flowerpots? Were not to give the flowers the brothers, There's not happening with our use your vision and your commitment, your position and my mind, your love for us, and so I just hope we love on you the way you love on us. And so I just want to say thank you for the vision, thank you for allowing me to be a part of this. As you all know, for those who know me, for those who don't, our education.

Have been my passion for a long time.

And essentially what I've tried to capture in this particular essay is that education has always been a harveuser of basic human rights in this country.

When you want to look at whenever Americans.

Tried to show how it feels about black costs, all you have to do is look at at schools, and so the goal will be showed me the schools public education that are done right, and then you can start to tell me about how this country is serious levet doing right by black folks. And so what I raised are some real compelling questions that we must think about moving forward when it comes to public education.

One is this.

Racial recording that we have seeing a massive and unprecedented racial transformation in our schools in this country, and black folks are becoming less and less and less the flavor of the month, despite the fact that black folks have always been the ones at the forefront of ensuring that

And so I want to.

Make sure that we don't lose the ways in which black folks have been at the forefront of creating the public schools that have the highest of quality.

Second thing I'll talk about.

Real quick is I want us to find a way to begin to be really unapologetic about the end of the criminalization of black children in schools, in anything primalization, because there's too much data that still shows the ways in which black bodies are scrutinized, black bodies are surveilled, black bodies are policed all in public schools.

You look at the data on.

Who's most likely to be expelled, it's black children. You look at the data, who's most likely to be suspended, it's black children. You look at who has the highest suspension rates of babies in pre school is black children. I'll say that again, suspension of babies in pre school is black children. So until we begin to have these serious conversation about ending the criminalization and the policing of black children, we're not going to be serious about that.

So the Covenant talks about how we have to.

Get serious about making sure public education is right, that we lift up the important role that racism has played and continues to play in public education, and how we create up more bright, better affirming, and loving public education systems.

Melina Abdullah, Hey everybody, Tabis, thank you for including me, and thank you for look, I'm gonna just expose who I am.

I like to follow through.

On things that I'm also a hell of a procrastinator, But you can't procrastinate with Tabas tennys Is.

Like you said at five o'clock, it's seven o'clock, right, And so thank you for me.

I'm patient looking me and thank you for including me in the book, and so many things that have been really really important, not just for me, but for this movement and many of you have heard on streets that Black Lives Matter is a thing of the past.

Right what lives matter moments is over? Say she looks, they're liars. They're liars. We were getting.

It's not over.

It is not over when mainstream media, when corporations, when white supremacy turns it ten.

It's because we're affected.

And so we have to remember that we are lions who tell our own stories. And I'm so so grateful to Brother Tabs for giving us a platform to tell.

Our own story. But this is not a drill. Every single Saturday on kb LA, we're.

Always including an uplifting movement and everything that he does. So he asked me to write an essay on community policing, which I absolutely do not believe in. And the reason I don't believe in community policing is because I know that police don't create safer communities resources too. And so the essay that I wrote comes in the name of Wakisha Wilson, And so if you could say her name with me, I'd appreciate it. Wakisha Wilson, say your name, Say your name.

Wakisha Wilson was a thirty.

Six year old black mother who was taken to Metro Detention Center.

Here in Los Angeles for a very very.

Reminder crime or so called crime for basically telling somebody off. And her family didn't have a lot of extra money. Her mother's an in home care worker, and so like many of our folks, they made the decision that she would stay in until Monday, when she could go in front of a.

Judge and then be released on a walk. She didn't live that long.

She was killed inside LAPD Metro Detention Center and the tape that surveiled her cell was deleted. There were twenty two minutes of missing video. Here's what's worse is that they never even bothered to tell her family. So her mother frantically searched for her for four days before she

The premise of the essay is when we fled our.

Communities resources with things like housing with things like quality education.

With healthcare, with livable wage jobs, with all the.

Things that our communities want, neat and deserve.

Then we can remove police who cause harm from our communities and instead have communities of care. So community policing is different for me than.

It is for many others who.

Advocate having cops with guns and badges in their neighborhood.

That's never made me feel safer. I don't think it's made most black people feel safe.

What makes us feel safer is resources, and so I encourage it to enter the essay for us to consider abolition, which means tearing down systems of harm and building systems of care that really nurture black people.

When black people get free, everybody else off.

So I'm grateful to be able in Connie Rice, of.

Course of nature.

You know, you galvanize, you organize, you mobilize. I've never seen anybody, and I've been all around the country. No one uses the media more strategically to fight some good fight.

I'm telling you a good fight, I'm telling everybody knows about. It's wonderful to be here with you.

I did.

You can skip my essay. All I did was I'm in I'm in uh Taviss, like, can't you make it broader? Cause I said, no, No, we got one thing to do this year. We we we cannot let a white.

Nationalists supremacist get in the White House.

That's all.

That's how I got. If you want me to write something, that's all. I feel like frightening you're gonna have to do so anything. You forbting me. I'm surprised you inviting me back. I don't expect any that find My message was.

Justice is a relay. My my grandmother told me. She said, because I started to complaining about Raven. Okay, she said, you don't have the right to complain. You have learned the right to complain.

M until you've had to sit in your kitchen.

In Birmingham, Alabama, with the lights out and a long gun over your knee, waiting for the klan. Mm I wanna hear you can play about anything. All you have to do is walk through the doors we died to open.

So justice is a relay. You take that Batona, don't drop it like my guard folks did in Paris.

I don't know.

That's not the women's teams dat I can remember crack swimming and.

Drop your not drop the batonas I'm like.

My grandmother said that justice is not a sprint, it is a relay, and generation to generation you hand out the town on and you run like the wind. And so now on our watch, this is our watch, it's our watch. Our folks had a my grandparents and my great grandparents. I'm the great granddaughter of slaves and slave owners. Just great, not great, gready, just great. It's been four

But you know, it just hadn't been that long. When's the person.

Who's the child of slaves, the last child of slaves to die?

Do you know?

When he died two years ago? Two years ago, died in Washington, DC, and they documented that.

His father was born into slavery.

So it has not been that long. But we have come a long way, with much much further to go. This is our watch. It's never been easier to fight this fight. Many some of us face dead, but not many.

All our great grandparents face dead trying to vindicate African American rights and so my little essay, I'm sorry to have.

Us say, you know, it came in. I said, this is all I'm gonna do.

Yeah, I said, I love I love folks expressing their opinions.

We are one job because it's bad. Somebody said, why do you do a why do you.

Support the constitution and enshrined your inferior already as a woman and as an African American?

Why do you fight?

I said, because without that document we probably do.

Be pub pickn.

Cotton freed slaves and escaped slaves, freed themselves and made Lincoln realize that he had end slavery.

We gave him that idea, our ancestors gave him that because.

He needed to free us in the rebellion States to win the war.

It was out of any altruism. I don't know whether you believe. You know, he wanted to deport us after we were free.

So let's understand we were freed by all white supremacist but we don't know. Let the second one get in, all, okay, So I my little lessay is you vote for whoever is and get to two hundred and seventy, two hundred and seventy if we can count electoral College one of the artifacts of slavery.

It locked in the power of the Southern States. We still have it.

It's still tilted toward the anti African American liberation forces. The electoral college is one thing, the filibusters Another's a whole drop down many of the things we have to do to fix this democracy.

But we got to have a democracy to fix. Okay, so that you know I'm all for it. Listen, It's not gonna be my candidate.

You know, folks I want probably can't get elected in my lifetime, but we better go.

We've got a much of it.

Harris has put us back on the board and back on the court, and.

She's making three three point shots and we need to get behind here. I don't care if you'd agree with everything about her. That's how we get the democracy. So that's what my essay is about. In Tavis, thank you for inviting me back. I'll probably be dead at the time.

You can do it in another twenty years, Alissa o'donah.

Sometimes you wake.

Up in the morning and you're wondering, are we making a difference, How do we sustain ourselves in the work. How do you not get burned out when you see so many of our brothers and sisters, aunties and mamas out on the street.

And I remember my uncle Ray.

Who growing up in this community with experienced homelessness after World War Two, and I remember my mom. We would always go to a local barbershop or a bar to look for him. And at that point our community was able to sustain enough or we had some resource.

Not all doctor Villa.

We need more always, but at least there was a sense of community where we could look after each other. And back then, we didn't know something of being uncowled or the term of homelessness. We just knew this was our loved one and the community helped us take care of him because he didn't want to come inside. So fast forwarding to that where we have four out of ten people experiencing homelessness across this country are our brothers and sisters.

When we look at the state of.

California, every counting, I literally the data, we are disproportionate compared to our census count in the homelessness population. Only Native Americans come after us. So this is a real crisis. And Tatus and Supervisor, I'm really thankful because we don't talk about.

It as a national issue.

We talk about it when it's on our doorstep. We're wondering what do we do about it. But when you look around the room, and if we ever had time, maybe there were days of dial up to understand how many people where homelessness has been a part of their own story. Maybe they live in the car, maybe they live with a friend. At some point you understand the structural It's not a personal responsibility issue. And so I'm so glad that we're able to take it tonight to a national level.

So thank you, Mark Ridley Thomas.

I'm simply in the context of the state of Felipe, although it should be appreciated that this state has the largest proportion of homeless people across people within any state in the United States. It is a crisis across the nation,

Rough edge, the hard edge of poverty. It is called homelessness.

And I know if I want to survey the room, somebody here would raise their hand and say either they know someone who has been or is homeless, the homeless, who has experienced homelessness with themselves.

This is what I want to leave you with. And I'll step aside.

Cornell west yea.

Who is holding up the bludstay Ganna.

To support this book. Just movement. We know the Black street of movement.

Has always been the eleven in the American Democratic lowest tide of Drew.

Tellen and Justin c and Brother Tamas. I want to begin by saluting you, my bride.

You have been.

We have been blessed to be brothers now for over thirty five yeah.

Old of the countrict and the world, trying to be true to Frederick Douglas and I to.

Be Wales, Martin King and Patty Nohema and so many others. I wanted a little to court mark really common and I think I heard the game, and I give it as the biggest love up before.

We can buy stuff from the part of it.

Both dynamic duo.

When it comes to forces of good in the.

Plos and July, oh Lord have pursed. And then my running made my.

Dear sister my day. I'm doing together, but the.

Others in solidarity with the president Brown family.

So the kind of running it's hard to find out, sharper, legal and social kind of drink into our struggle and it goes on and on and on and so many others there. I don't want to take your time.

I want the book signing to be in but.

Heat in mind that twenty.

Years later we're still on fighter.

Twenty years later, we still as committed, as dedicated and as do.

People.

But you ain't on the chocolate side of town and before working people around the world. And yes we're toys bears, Yes we're relay brunners.

Yes we loved witers, Yes your freedom.

Fighters, yes with toy spreaders.

Yes what woulded he is?

That's part of the part of who we are as a black people at our best, a great Black people at our best.

That's what the Covenant is about.

Twenty years ago with Brolla, I can't Third World Press.

Twenty years later, we still swing.

In brother Town.

Yeah, were.

Thanks for listening to Malik's bookshelf with topics on the shelf are books, culture, and communities. Be sure to subscribe and leave me a review. Check out my Instagram at bleak Books. See you next time.