Downward Spiral of Despair

so just outdone. I'm outdone with Republicans fuckery. I just I think about, well, what are the things that I want to remember and cover for the week, And I feel absolutely crazy, Like I feel like my head is on some type of swivel because I can't remember from what happened on Monday, because so much crap happens during the week. It's like one big avalanche. But I'm going to try and summarize just some of the things that

have happened. But I tell you that the guests that I have for today's show is perfect because the title of doctor Treva Lindsay's book is exactly how I feel on any given fucking day, which is America, Goddamn violence,

Black women and the Struggle for Justice. And you know, we will talk about the reasoning behind her title, which is if you're familiar with Nina Simone, Nina Simone's song Mississippi Goddamn was about the violence that black people the black community were facing in Mississippi, and doctor Lindsay will go into detail about the history behind that song and why she wanted to attribute a part of her title

to Nina Simone. But Folks, when I take a look at this week, when I think about more leaks of Kevin McCarthy showing momentarily that he actually recognized how grave of a moment in American history the insurrection was, but only to make an about face, get on a plane, fly down so that he can perfectly position his lips

on Donald Trump's ass. It's so disheartening. But what I think that I'm finding about these moments and why I get stuck sometime in this downward spiral of despair that then I have to force myself to climb out of, is because I believe that this current iteration of the Republican Party, imagine if you actually had a fearless and fierce Democratic party, So imagine them to be an entirely different party altogether, one that wasn't afraid, one that was

filled with warriors that were about this battle. Republicans and the fucking cartoons that they put out as their representatives are literal gifts on a silver platter, But it's only a gift to people that are willing to go toe to toe with their bullshit and fuckery, like State Senator McMorrow did in Michigan when she's like, no, I'm not going to cower from the Republicans attacks and the audacity and the despicable nature of them referring to her as

a groomer and as a pedophile, which is their new fucking insult of choice, right to paint us all as these pedophiles. Meanwhile, we can go through a list of their sexual abusers and deviance and terribleness that they embrace. Right, But what Senator McMorrow did in her fierce fucking pushback was that she didn't run scared. She met toe to toe, showed integrity, showed grace, but above all else, showed passion, showed anger. Right, because I asked myself every single day,

where the fuck is the fire? Where is the energy from Democrats? At the audacity of Republicans to try and destroy not even try, they are actively destroying our democracy without any real fucking opposition. Michael Harriet, writer for The Grio and a former guest on Woke app tweeted and said, you have Republicans literally offering the most terrible policies right and trying to rewrite school curriculum, trying to erase gay people, black people, women right from curriculum, and Democrats want to

run on quote unquote kitchen table issues. If there's no more of a kitchen table issue than your child's education, I don't know what is, but as sure as fuck know that backing off from culture wars does not serve

Democrats at all. Just look at Virginia and Governor Glen Youngan, right, there was no pushback to his parental control right, which in my piece for The Daily Beast that I wrote this week on the case that is in Washington State with regard to prayer in schools, there was no pushback too, yunkin, That's how he won. Democrats were like, well, crt isn't being taught, It's something that we only teach in blah

blah blah blah blah blah blah. As opposed to going toe to toe with the junkins of the world and saying, what scares you about Tony Morrison, Why don't you believe that our children should learn and be able to contextualize inside of a classroom the layered experience and history of America.

What is so scary about that if marginalized communities were forced to face white domestic terrorism on a regular basis, your ancestors, no less, Why can't children learn about that and learn from the mistakes that we've made in the past and be able to contextualize the progress that we've had and still that there is more room to grow.

Of course, unless you don't believe that the progress that has been made is good, and so then then you are put on the defense to talk about why you think that LGBTQ folks should be a push back into the closet, to talk about why you believe that women have no business in the workplace, to talk about why black people shouldn't be able to vote, Because then, right you would find democrats creating the parameters for the game instead of running after fucking Lucy with the football, And

then you would see the media then respond and actually ask the kind of fucking questions that they should be asking. But instead we have a Republican white supremacist cult that

is rewriting all of the rules. I mean, I said this this week on Democracy Ish, my other podcast with my friend Jaha Ali, where we had on the author of Jesus and John Wayne talking about white Evangelical Christians and how they have remade Jesus into their warrior Christ, their muscle bound, tanned warrior Christ and why this party that was supposed to be about family values fell for a deity that has been three times married and grabs

about brags about grabbing women by the pussy. Right. So the Republican Party in its current incarnation is a fucking gift. But it is only a gift if you have a backbone in a spine, which we know the Democratic Party doesn't have. My whole thing is that, folks, we got three hundred federal judges that Trump appointed right in four fucking years. Why is that? Because Democrats have no spine

and they didn't fight against Mitch McConnell. They didn't take him on because they thought that, oh, well, maybe if we don't fight him, he'll be our friend. Right. You still got fucking Joe Biden on a regular basis referring to these obstruction as motherfucker says his friends, right, because they have not or they refuse to identify who the

villains are. Republicans have no fucking problem doing that. And so yeah, at the end of each week I find myself in a place of utter despair where I want to say, on a regular basis, America got damned, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And So coming up next, friends, my conversation with a Triva Lindsay, feminist historian and author of America Goddamn Violence, Black Women and the Struggle for Justice. I hope that you enjoy the conversation.

Please do let me know in the comments section what you think, folks. I am super excited to welcome to the show for the very first time doctor Treva Lindsay, who is an feminist historian and author of the book America, Goddamn Violence, Black Women and the Struggle for Justice. First of all, Bravo, because the title is does not love that Nina Simone song that just still till this day penetrate. So I want to start out with that question first,

Doctor Lindsay, which is why that title? Yeah, you know, and and what what was what was the spirit behind that that selection? Well, first and foremost, thank you for having me here. I'm so excited to be in conversation with you and to be in conversation with your audience, especially about this book. So I love Nina Simone, right, So that's first and foremost. I just love me and Simone. Whatever I can incorporate her in some way into a title,

a concept, I'm there for it. But this had such a particular meaning, so one I wanted to ground this in me because this book is both a history and also a collection of personal accounts of my experiences with violence that really help the reader the audience to understand the stakes of addressing the pervasiveness of violence against black women and girls and my families from North Carolina. So

there's that Nina Simone connection that comes in there. But Missus Sippi Got Damn is a song that Nina writes in response to the assassination of Mega Evers and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in nineteen sixty three that killed four little girls. It's how they're often remembered by history. But their names were Addie, Carol, Cynthia,

and Denise. And I was really interested in the idea that we don't actually say their names, we refer to them as the four little girls, and we don't know a lot about them before that moment of the spectacular encounter of white domestic terrorism. We don't know who they are. We don't know that they were brownies, and they love to play the clarinet and music. And that was Na

Simone's first protest song. And I know, we tend to think about Nina Simone, who has always being politically active with her music and engaged in that way, but she was always against kind of anthem music up until that point because she was like, how do you fit all that black people endure into three and a half minutes?

How would one begin to do that? But these two incidents propelled her to figure out a way to do that, and so she writes this song that is both indicting of the ongoing struggles of African Americans and people of African descent in the United States by pointing out different states and homes in or Mississippi, but she's talking about

everywhere that it is everywhere. And so my riff on this was saying in twenty twenty two, we're still saying America, God damn, the levels of violence, the level of harm, the level of dispossession, exploitation and marginalization that you're still conscripting Black men, women and girls to endure is unfathomable, and so I wanted to return to a song that

conveyed that urgency. Who was also written with that same spirit of telling the truth about America and also telling the truth about the resistance that black people were mounting against it. You know, doctor Linda, you make so many good points, and a couple of that I want to circle back to, so first being the reality that just hit me one. I didn't know of the four little black girls names, not off of the top of my head.

And what kind of erasure does that signify? Because you know, when I think about the people's names and why the hashtags with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement are so important, and why the say her Name movement has been so important, it has been because of this erasure of black people and violent, the violence that has consistently and has been unrelenting we visited upon our community since

the beginning of time. And so when you say those names and we think about that, as you said, spectacular moment of white domestic violence, of white terrorism, what is it you think that we could have done, even if even you know, with our hindsight being twenty twenty, but even contextualizing that spectacular moment with let's say the shooting at Mother Emmanuel in South Carolina, but you know a handful of years ago, and the idea that we talk

about the nine parishioners that were murdered, but we don't say their names, right. I mean, I'm I'm certain their community says their names. I'm saying that their church still lifts up their names. We know the name of the shooter right, right, right, and so's so that so I'm like, what is it about us in our society that allows us to elevate those that do us harm and then at the same time forget or erase those that have been harmed? Yes, and it's it's it's a couple of

things that I think are happening there. So my insistence on saying their names and getting their names right is also about accessing these stories from a life affirming point of view. What happened to them was death dealing. What happened to them is how we come to know them. But that's not how their communities knew them. Their communities knew them as people. These girls who were moving through the neighborhood and part of this community that we're there

on an early Sunday morning. There's the fifth girl who survives the bombing, who we're still living right, Sarah, who's

the sister of Addie. All of that is why I want to say their names, because then that compels me, and I'm hoping folks who care and compelling folks to care to actually learn about their lives prior to that moment, what life was snuffed out in terms of doing that, But even when we get to moments where we are saying names, but not necessarily the names of those victimized, terrorrized, assailed, or harm oftentimes we're trying to name, and I understand

we're trying to name the horror. We're trying to make sure that there is a record and a documentation of the ways that white supremacy operates, of the ways that patriarchy operates. I understand that impulse. I also want to ensure while we're holding that, while we're naming, that, while we're rendering that ever legible, that we don't then participate in the erasure of the life that these individuals live.

What happens before the injury, what happens before the killing who or worse, what happens is we do name certain people, but then we use it implicitly that criminalizes. So we often say the Rodney King trial. Rodney King wasn't on trial.

And if we ask people who the four officers were, we don't know, don't know, right, we say the Trayvon Martin Kays will say the Mike Brown case, And implicitly it does a recriminalization of individuals who are being who have been victimized, who have been killed and or harmed, And we don't offer to do that in trials. Usually a trial is named after, right, the person who is

accused of having done harror. But when it comes to black people, so often because I think our attempts to navigate, to name, to categorize, and to identify this relentless harm, that oftentimes we still imbibe the same logics, and we imbibe the same rhetoric and then spewed that back out as we attempt to remember, as we attempt to recollect,

as we attempt to mobilize. Oh my goodness, you know, when I think about how many black women, right, and this is the point of your of your personal stories. But when I think about how many Black women whose lives have been stolen from them, right and by and I don't just mean via murder, I mean via rape, via emotional abuse. I mean just the violence that is

that is put upon Black women. And then yet to your books point and to your point, and yet we still find ourselves as the ones that are on the front lines for justice, experiencing experiencing the abuse not only from you know, outward white society, right, but then also the erasure that we have experienced throughout history of being on the front lines of civil rights movements and yet told to be in the back right, being the one that is the front in the pew and literally making

the church run. But you're not the pastor at the front, right, And so what is it about you think the spirit that is that is a part of that is innate in Black women. And I hate this trope, but that does give us the strength to both be able to experience violence in all of its forms, but then still find ourselves in these leadership positions to quote unquote do the work. Oh. I mean that's a heavy one, Danielle, right, and as a heavy one because I think we again internalize,

and imbibe in specializing in the holy impossible right. It's the moniker from Nanny Helen Burroughs of what black women do. Because there's a way that we know that the stakes are so high. We know that the systems that we're warring against, our systems that kill, rape, harm, demean and devalue us. So we have a stake in continuing to be on the front line. This is why you'll never hear me say no one cares about black girls and women. We care about black girls and women, and we are

certainly not no one. Come on, and because we have that care practice, because we love with abundance, because we know that our love, because our love sits at the foot of all of these warring systems of oppression. It sits at the foot of how white supremacy operates, how patriarchy operates for many of us, how transphobia and queer phobia operate, how ableism operates, how imperialism and colonialism operate.

That it demands for us to survive and thrive and love on each other in accountable and just ways, to be on the front line because we know we are the front line being attacked, and we're being attacked from all directions, and so that demands that we be vulnerable with one another. We talk about our stories, even when

we're demonized for doing so. We can see that currently happening, and it happens quite often when Black women do come forward about particular forms of violence at their current especially if it's intercommunal and interpersonal. And so I recognize that as a strength. But the strength for me comes from the willingness to have a full recognition, a particular kind of multiple consciousness about how we want to imagine, we want to be in the world, how we imagine ourselves

in the world. We are practicing a particular kind of freedom as we move through this world. That it's telling us that we are not worthy, we are not valuable, that our communities aren't valuable to people we love are valuable, that we're disposable, and our living, breathing existence is a refutation of that politic of disposability. And I think that propels us to keep showing up in spite of so many factors warning against us, including those sometimes we're fighting alongside.

You know, one of the things that I notice, and I want to ask if you notice this too, You know, we've been living inside of this global health pandemic now

going on two years plus. And I have noticed that through this time, at least in my in the feeds of social media that I follow, that black women in particular have and black women and let me say this, black women that have the privilege and the ability to, let's say, having worked from home, you know, having been remote, but reassess their lives in a certain way where our health and wellness and our own self care seems to have seems to have reached a new stage where we

are really putting that that as a part of our liberation right now, you know, by virtue of your work, Audrew Lord and others way before us had talked about self care as a revolutionary had talked about you know that that that that our liberation is not just about how much we produce right and our production, but it is about our ability to sees our ease back right

that has was stolen from our ancestors. And so have you not, like, in what ways do you have you seen black women in this modern time as we are moving through so many varied heavy moments, our shift, our shift in self and I know I'm making an overgeneralization. But I'm talking about what I have seen by virtue of people that I'm following. But it's been like the poets and the artists and all these things, and it's

been deeply about self care. Have you noticed this similar, Yes, I have, and I noticed it one and this is what this book has allowed me to see. It's interesting when your book, in the work that you're doing, teaches you and put you in conversation with other people you're continuing to learn from. Is that I made a different

intentional commitment to rest and care. I had you to write a book like this, right to sit with these stories, to sit death, to sit with rape, to sit with my own experiences with violence, to sit with stories from my community, and the care became as important as any other practice that allows you to write a book. So there was a care practice, and ethics practice, and editing practice or writing practice, but the only one that had to be intacted every step was the care and what

I was doing. And I noticed during a pandemic, which in many ways became a great magnifier of all of the disparities that we see. So who's going to be disparately impacted by COVID, Who's going to be disparately impacted by what is the impending housing crisis, Who's going to be deeply impacted by food, insecurity, water, all of the issues.

And we knew from the beginning. The very first article I wrote during the pandemic was about the disparate effect COVID was about to have on Black women and girls. And this was April of twenty twenty. That was so foreseeable. And so to see Black women and tweens and teens via TikTok and other mechanisms prioritize care, care networks, care

of self, thinking about places like the NAP Ministry. I'm thinking about outlets of things, of thinking about the Black health and wellness in the work of someone like a Stephanie Evans who kind of collects this longer history. Think about black women practicing yoga, These amazing images of Rosa Parks practicing yoga amidst organizing and being this radical force

that she was. And I see so many people seeing the death, the grief and not having our typical ways of and being able to engage one another, that the ability to create care practices was a tool of survival. It's a tool of resistance against an additional death dealing force that is now disparately impacting us. And so I've been very heartened to see a number of Black women prioritizing that and cutting across kind of class that is lined to articulate what it means to rest, to care,

to create moments of breath for one another. And that to me, as I think about the things if we move to endemic from pandemic, that I hope we're bringing with us into that stage, that this is not simply reactionary to this global phenomenon that is COVID nineteen that has been so ravenous to our communities, but that we take that tool as it has manifested in this moment and recognize it as an ancestral inheritance and move it

into our features. You know. One of the things too, And in thinking about how you wrote America, Goddamn, it's like, how do you how how did you go about doctor Lindsay being able to tell stories about violence while recognizing that that is really the lens that White America sees us through right like they It is trauma porn for

Black mothers that have lost daughters and sons to police violence. Right, it is normal for them to see our tears and and you know, and not even and have I guess momentary fits of empathy that but are that are very fleeting. So what does it mean for you to write a book that contextualizes through you know, personal accounts violence and and and and the struggle for justice but understanding that like, we are so layered and have experienced so and have

experienced so much and are so much. But then at the same time, society kind of just I don't know, I'm trying to think of the word that I'm looking for distills us into these one dimensional beings of trauma. So it's like, how do you both like tell the story of that but then also know that that's all

we've ever been distilled into, Right? And I write through a little bit of that tension for me, particularly in the chapter where I speak about intro communal violence, about my concern that what I'm writing here could be weaponized in particular ways or contribute to the illogical but ever present criminalizing and pathologizing of black people, which is never my intention, And that where do you use I think

it is so accurate of trauma porn. Let's just keep talking about the death feeling without talking about the systems. And so for me, the stories in the way that I attempted to write this are brought to life through the structures and systems that I'm identify. That the systems and the structures are what are so disgusting and deplorable. That is the inhumanity. Right. I don't ever concede that white supremacy dehumanizes Black people and that we are rehumanizing ourselves.

It is whiteness that has to prove itself as person or human because the track record of inhumanity that has been constructed over hundreds of years, of colonial violence, of white supremacist violence, of patriarchal violence, of capitalists exploitative violence, of current imperial violence, tells a very real story about who needs to reckon with what the human even means. And so those systems and structures, for me, are what

is at the core of the book. That's the goddamn when I bring in the stories, which is why I use first names to identify the people who are a sale, who are killed, who are raped, who are sexually assaulted, to create a sense of intimacy, right, run short on the building of empathy, because I don't believe that whiteness actually is constructed around or grounded in empathy, And there's

so many examples of that. The most recent study is that when folks found out that COVID was disparately impacting communities of color, largely black and indigenous, open it back up right, and that we saw empathy around COVID significantly decreased once studies came out, once there was more publicity around the fact that black and Indigenous in particular communities

were being disparately impacted. So empathy isn't the thing I was working for in the book, right I'm writing for I'm writing from and with an among black women and

girls and gender expansive people. I am hoping they see themselves in this, and I'm hoping that a broader audience who was engaging this is thinking about how terrorizing, how awful, how just gut wrenching, soul crushing, life evacuating these systems are and feel indicted, and feel uncomfortable, and feel even a little bit of the goddamn that black people have been feeling for hundreds of years, and that as a condition of the inhumanity of whiteness, as construct right as

whiteness as it exists, as it shores itself up through being able to pathologize and criminalize. And so the structures and systems are on trial here, not the people. Do you think then that movement movement politics is getting our focus wrong? Then, because the point, at least what I have perceived to be the point of Black Lives Matter, have been to actually do just that right, identify to the world that black lives matter. Do you think that, then?

May be we we are which But what I just took away from you is you're saying we're already human. I don't have to prove my humanness. I'm not rehumanizing myself, and that we need to show how inhumane the systems and the structures have been putting, putting whiteness as a construct then on the defense to defend itself. It's cruelty, it's in humanity, it's violence, as opposed to us trying to prove our innocence. Because I even I'm listening to you and my synapses are going because I'm like, so,

wait a minute, we have respectability. Respectability politics was born out of our desire to show up as best as we could because if they see us right as clean, articulate, you know, dignified in all these things, that maybe they won't hang us from the neighboring tree, right and so have is there is this an opportunity, this, this calamity, this time that we're living in, does to present an opportunity for us to reimagine the presentation of how we

get to justice. That it isn't about elevating our humanity, as if we're the ones that should be doing that work, but instead to show the inhumanity of the systems at play. Yes, and I think it's interesting because we have you know, Black Lives Matters hashtag, a global network, you have racial justice movements, movement, all of which have my deep and profound respect right for what it brought to the fore.

And that notion of mattering, I understand on the most gut level why that is like the impulsive reaction, we matter, we matter, we matter, and we have to say that to ourselves sometimes because it's very easy to imbibe and internalize the same white supremacist logics, patriarchal logics, transphobic logics that circulate. We're growing up in that society too. So the divesting from that is part of the work that we're doing. So that mattering in that declaration and that

assertion is one part in one's strategy. I am interested as your noting here and moving us and thinking about the long legacy of people who have moved us, to think about these structures, to think about these systems, to call that out. It's why we're having discussions about abolition in the ways that we are right now. That would not have even happened ten years ago. Five years ago,

we weren't having public debates. And I'm just saying debate, not that we've all become abolitionists, but to say that people are studying, reading, debating, and when we get to the debate what you just mentioned here envisioning something else that is part of what abolition calls you to do. That is the tradition of black Fami's abolition, imagining worlds

in which white in humanity is indicted. Not that we're constantly proving to people who are doing the cruelty, to the systems that are doing the cruelty, that we deserve not to be treated truly right, it's e eradication of cruelty that's at the core of the kind of work that we're doing and on the ground, that is what

so many dynamic organizers are doing. That's what I see in Dream Defenders, That's what I saw on a scot As Daughters and Black Youth Project and the Black Translives Matter kind of all of these movements, the Marsha P.

Johnson Institute. There's so many ways that I'm seeing that work manifested before we've named it, because the work comes first, and then it's like, it's this right, It's like a person is shot and killed, and in response to seeing that person's life stuff, now we want to affirm that they mattered, They matter to their community, they matter to their loved ones, they matter because now we won't get whatever gifts they were bringing into the world that we

may have needed, that we all may have needed at some point right to move forward into the world that we're seeking to create. That's where that mattering comes in. And when I think about Black Lives Matter, I am relating that as a concept of identifying something life affirming

about this spectacular moment. So I only know Ayanna Stanley Jones or Brianna Taylor, or Deborah Danner or Tunisia Anderson because they were killed, but the people who live with that every day, those individuals mattered to them in substantive and real ways. And so when we say that as a collective, I think part of that impulse is also about affirming those connections and those intimacies and never letting us forget that they matter to someone, and that mattering

is why we must continue to fight. So I see it rallying, and then we move in ways that are indicting of white supremacy. Let me tell you something, doctor Trevia lindsay you are welcome back on wikashone any goddamn time. I would like to, because I have to tell you that this is one of the most i opening conversations I've had in quite some time, just in the way of thinking, just in the way of thinking about how

we are presenting the fight for justice. And I I had a Naha moment with you just now where I'm like, no, it is it isn't just about presenting the fact that our lives and our communities matter. It is about, like just your final point, the indictment of white supremacy. It is that it is. It is about that, and that to me is that the next iteration the shift that I want to see on a on a national level,

on a on a mainstream media level, um type of space. So, friends, the book is America, Goddamn Black Women and the Struggle for Justice, Doctor Tree, the lindsay, please do come back to Woke a f and drop some gems again. Absolutely, thank you so much for having me friends. Like I say at the end of each week, as we head into the weekend, please do something each and every day that is bringing you joy. I don't care what it is, so long as it doesn't cause you harm or people

around you harm. But grab some joy, some sunshine, some air. Take those quality deep deep breaths. We will continue to fight and get through this together, and we can only do it if we are strong and well. Remember that disease comes from dis ease, so we need to embrace our ease in the midst of this tempest. That is it for me today, dear friends, on Woke f as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.