Change is An Inside Job

season five, which is pretty incredible. Five years ago in twenty nineteen, which pause for shock for that shit, because I posted a meme in my Instagram stories I think like a week or so ago where it was. Can you believe that twenty nineteen was five years ago? It's hard to think back that far because so much has happened. It's like, what you know, Your head just starts spinning

trying to get back. And literally the other day I went into my phone and put in twenty nineteen because I literally had no real recollection of that year, like it was wild, and so I had to put the date in the year in and then begin to go through photos and I'm just like, I look, here's my thing to you all. Do this. If you have not done this, if you don't do this on your phones. Do it put in like January twenty nineteen, and then just let or twenty nineteen and just go through the year.

I look like a different person, like one hundred percent and the stress, the pandemic, I just look like a different person. And so I say that to say that when Andrew, my producer, who has been with me since

the beginning of WOKAF and so we're counting. So if folks are like, wait a minute, I've been listening since the beginning beginning, We're really looking at twenty nineteen as wokf's independence year, which is when I left Sirius XM and went to an independent company, went to DCP Entertainment, and the show went through a couple of iterations after leaving Sirius. And so for me, five years ago is a wild time because it was a time that I decided to really bet on myself and to bet on you.

All the listeners. Some have come and go, and there are new and old and like ride dies from you know, from the beginning, and people that have just heard about

me recently and are signing up. And I just want to say, particularly to all of those that went on this ride with me that signed up for Patreon that are still on Patreon, which I can't express to you all enough what your support financial support has meant for my ability to continue doing this show in an independent fashion, and even though it's been through so many bumps and I'm going to go through you know them, and I mean, we've been through so many bumps on this show, but

the country, my god, you know, we've been up and down Everest, I don't even know how many fucking times over the last five years. And so I just want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Just incredibly, I'm so indebted and in so much gratitude for the love and support that you all continue to show me and have allowed me to actualize my dreams

in a lot of ways. I just want to start off by saying, too, just like a little quick background, particularly for those that are new to wokay app, is that back way back when you know, I launched this show as a response to Donald Trump being elected president in twenty sixteen and just being completely and totally fucking flabbergasted that this country that I had decided to like dedicate my brain power and work and energy and passion to making better, whether that be as a school teacher,

as a fellow on a congressional fellow on Capitol Hill, as a federal lobbyist, set a series of organizations and cities to working, you know, and launching initiatives to better the lives of LGBTQ plus people, particularly those that are black and live at the intersection of multiple identities. I

believed in the promise of this country. I believed in the responsibility of each generation to do its part to make way right for the generation to come behind it and pick up the baton, and that we would get better right with more knowledge, more access, more technology, each and every year, each and every decade. And then Trump happens, and you know, I will say, folks that since then, since then, and we're talking now, it's like it's so

hard to kind of go through the years. But Donald Trump was inaugurated seven years ago, and since then it is like a portal of hate has opened up in this country and is just eating it from the inside out.

And what began my career as this hopeful, ambitious young person that saw how government and policies were able to bring my family from Jamaica to the United States to build a life and a way that I could then exist right and be first generation American born here because of policies that allowed for immigration right and the ability to start over and build a life right. And my family has always had such a strong sense of pride

for this country. And I think that that's what makes me so angry about the anti immigrant, hateful, white supremacist rhetoric that we hear in this country, which is that you will meet no person of greater pride than an immigrant who has come to this country and built a life. You will meet no one more dedicated to this country than an immigrant that comes here. And that's just facts.

Because up until right the last seven years, America, while imperfect, has been that country where you can start anew and build something for you, yourself, your family, build a community. That has always been the promise of America in its hopefulness. And so and I'm getting like choked up talking about it, because what's happened over the last seven years has been a robbing, a ransacking of that hopefulness and that idealism that everyone should have. Right. You think about things that

were impossible until they were done. That's the story of America. We have so many faults, so don't get me wrong, right and I could, I could list them right as well as you. But I want to speak about for a moment, like the hopefulness and the idealism that is actually what has made America great and a standout from

other nations. What is heartbreaking is that over the last five years of me being on air and independent with WOKF, I have seen a horrific devolving of America and my own hopefulness, my own desire to participate in this American project, in this democratic project, because until seven years ago when Donald Trump became President of the United States, there was a belief that even though we have horrific gun violence, even though black people are killed by police on a

regular basis, even though there are hate crimes and hatefulness, that there was still opportunity and still more people that believed that we could be better tomorrow than we were today, and that we all, with our varied talents, ethnicities, culture races, that we add something, We add value, not by virtue of what we produce, but by who we are. But now as I look back and I hold up just unlike Wikipedia, let me see all of the things that happened in twenty nineteen, y'all so much that it is

genuinely like so hard to think back pre pandemic. But I want to give you some highlights. Well, five years ago, we weren't in two wars. Five years ago, a million

plus Americans hadn't died from a global health pandemic. But we had a number of Democrats announcing that they were going to be running for president, which all of whom I had forgotten about, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Mary Ann Williamson, Elizabeth Warren, Like, I kind of forgot that so many people had announced to take on Trump, and that, you know, the Supreme Court had allowed Donald Trump to roll back progress inside of the military with limiting the participation of

patriotic trans people who wanted to serve their country, and this president was like No, I forgot that Roger Stone had been charged with seven counts of obstruction of justice and witness tampering, but he would later be pardoned right

by Donald Trump. I forgot that there had been so many shootings when you pull up Wikipedia and you look and you put in a year, and they listed out month by month, and kind of pull out, you know, important dates where things had happened, so many shootings, pretty incredible. Democrats took back the House to stop Trump. Bill Barr lied to the American public about the contents of the

Mull Report. The list kind of goes on and on and on, and it's just we've lived so many lives since then, and that's kind of what has stood out to me the most is that I feel like I have a lived so many lives over the last five years. Our certainty about things that we could expect, our stability have all been uprooted, and there's this sense of feeling untethered right like you're just in this consistent state of unraveling.

And to one extent, I find the unraveling cathartic because I think that America has spoon fed us a consistent diet of lies about who America is, what our shared values are, the idea of our exceptionalism, this badge of honor that we would wear around the world as we are the hardest working people that never take vacations, while the rest of the world looks at us and it's just like, huh, but your quality of life is shit

and you were all dying much younger. The pandemic in a lot of ways helped lift the veil around the grind of capitalism and the fact that sure, you could put in fifty sixty seventy eighty hours a week, but if you drop dead, they will clean out your cubicle, your office, your locker in within a day and slide somebody else into your slot, pay them half of what you are being paid, and start the process all over again.

We started to real lies during the course of the pandemic, how important precious and short our time on this planet is, and how do we really want to be living our lives, and do we really want to be living our lives in a way where we're spending our days, hours off of our lives, commuting, putting our lives on hold, so that we could put the value in the importance of insert said company, said organization. First, well, they pay my bills, okay, But can you also be a full human being? Right?

People loved to talk about work life balance, but what folks realize for those that were privileged enough to be able to do their jobs from home was that going into the office was a lie for corporate real estate and for your bosses to be your overlords because there was a lack of trust. But yet they want to say that we're a family. Keep that familial language out your mouth. This is a job. My family doesn't hold

evaluations and then fire me. Right. My family doesn't put my worth right in connection to what I produce for them. So this idea that your workplace is your family is a lie. It is it's a lie to get you to go above and beyond but only be paid what is on the ground. So why am I going above that? So people started to think differently and move differently, and we like to joke and I have about generation ze. Oh they don't want to work as hard and blah blah, yeah,

because actually no, they want to work smarter. They want work to actually work for them and their lives and not the other way around, because they've seen their parents and their grandparents burn the fuck out. What would have made a difference if not just following along and climbing up the ladder right, hoping to be recognized and to be seen and to someday be paid your worth. But you just go along for the get along. That's what the prior generations did. And this one whose life was

abruptly halted by a global health pandemic. They have a different understanding of how precious life and time is and how everything can be gone in an instant. We can learn from them instead of thinking that we know everything, We can learn from how gen Z looks at work and thinks to themselves, Yeah, this is just not my vibe. You know everything can stop tomorrow because it has, so how do I want to live this one precious life?

These are some of the questions that we have been asking ourselves, folks over these last five years, over the last five seasons of WOKF, where we've tried to bring in experts and academics and authors to work through these conversations with us, to maybe offer us a different perspective, a different vantage point, to help open up and expand

our minds and our hearts a bit more. But when we really take a minute, take a pause, to sit back and look at all we've made it through to this point, My God, do we owe ourselves more than a round of applause, more than a pat on the back. We need to sit in deep gratitude for how much we have been through and we are still here. There are so many that are not. We have definitely been going through really dark times. But I still when I can see sunshine and blue skies and hear the birds,

that's when my possibility and hopefulness grows. And some days I got it, some days I don't. Some days you got it, some days you don't. But we hope right that there are people around us who do have it when we don't, who can carry the hopefulness when we are feeling hopeless, that we can be in community and be balancing each other out as we move through these really difficult times. America has change so much, and not for the better in a lot of ways. You know,

we've made way for a return to unabashed racism. We've moved back to a place where white supremacy is celebrated and not marginalized. It's hard, I tell you this often it is hard to get on this microphone some days. The last five years have been really difficult, very challenging to keep going and feeling like there is any impact

to be had. So I just deeply appreciate those of you who send messages and tweet and post and you know, share bits and pieces of the show, because I will tell you that I've had a lot of dark days, a lot of days when I want to just pull the plug and I say, what does it all mean? Does it even matter? And then on those very low days,

someone comments, share is a thought, thanks me. And I have always said that if I can only reach one person, but that one person then sees things differently and then starts having different conversations with the people around them, and then those people start to see things differently, and so on and so forth, and then we become this ripple effect. Because what I do know is that change is an

inside job. So if we can change and shift the way that we think and expand and the way that we love, and we begin that work on ourselves, that light shines out and it opens other people's eyes, It pulls the veil off, and it gives other people that you may not even know, permission to do something differently, to speak up, to take on varied responsibility to make

this world better. So, on this five year anniversary and the kickoff of season five of Woke AFFI Daily on iHeart, I just want to thank each and every single one of you for your hopefulness, for your persistence, for your valor, for your love and support of independent media and voices like mine and a show like this. I would not have made it through the last five years without you all,

so thank you. That is it for me today. Dear friends on Woke af AS always, power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.