Incandescent Rage

left with a bunch of what ifs. But if you are watching the infrastructure bill fight play out right now, you are not feeling hopeful. You are actually probably feeling aggravated, anxiety induced, rage filled at the fact that you have two supposed Democrats who are willing to extinguish our democracy

for their own ends. So again, when we direct all of our hope, right when we direct all of our hope on oh, I don't know, two fucking people, or the hope that they're going to be more Francises in the world or more Fiona Hills in the world, and we realize that they are not, that that this country is actually made up of a bunch of cinemas and mansions,

people that don't really give a fuck. They only care about their own town, their own life, their own family, and be damned everyone else you even had This week Joe Biden mentioning there are two people that are holding up my agenda, but doesn't have the balls to say

who the fuck those two people are being? Is how we all know who they are that doesn't have the balls to take it to them to the fucking street and say, you know what, here's the thing, American people, I am doing everything within my goddamn power in order to try and make sure that another six hundred and fifty thousand Americans don't die from COVID, and I'm sorry we are now at over seven hundred thousand that I'm trying to do my best to make sure that more

people don't lose their jobs, that you have clean drinking water, that we can build up infrastructure to fight our twenty first century climate change problem, right the crises that we are in. And I could do all of these things, you see, because I have great policy ideas and I have good people working with me. But I have two people that refuse. And so, dear fellow American, do you know what I need? I need you to pick up the fucking phone. I need you to inundate their offices.

I need you to do sit ins, I need you to do march is. I need you to make calls, and I need you to defund these two fucking senators because they are the ones that are standing between you and your livelihood, between you and our democracy. Because let me tell you something, we are running out of time for Joe Biden to play the fucking comforter in chief. And I am frankly don't need a comforter anymore. I will say it again. I need a fucking commander. I

need a warrior. I need somebody that knows that we don't have any time left and need to leave everything on the fucking floor. Right, But Joe Biden still believes that he's operating with twentieth century senators. He still believes that Mitch McConnell gon spit in his face but then want to grab a scotch with him later and that will hash it out as the way we do in the deliberative body. Dear Joe Biden, the Senate is dead.

Collaboration is dead, right. I don't know what else it is that Mitch McConnell literally has to say other than what he already said, which is that his one job, his job is not to make sure that the American people are okay. His job is not to make sure that America stays competitive on the global stage. No, his one job is to make sure that you are a one term president. Ding ding ding. Where the fuck did we hear that before? So here's the thing. We keep

betting on everyone's better angels. And the question that I am offering is what if they have none? Right? I know that I say this often, but I gotta tell you this week not making me feel great, kind of making me feel like. You know, we are already living in nineteen eighty four and big Brother is everywhere. All I can say is, you know, at least China is transparent about their shit. And by transparent, I mean that they are all about social control right and beating back

any type of resistance. In America, we say that you're We're all about freedom, except we've sold your data to the highest bidder. We're all about freedom, except we're using your information against you for capitalistic gains. And then we won't regulate shit, because then that would be taking money out of our own coffers. I don't think Wu Tang knew how prolific they were when they said that cash rules everything around me. But dear fucking god, they really were.

Coming up next is my conversation with the brilliant writer from The New Yorker and the voice one of the voices behind the new book Black Lives Matter is Gilanni Cobb. So stay tuned for that conversation, folks. I am very excited to have our second you, Gilani Cobb, are our second in studio guest um for wok app Daily. I'm really excited to beat me up the MSNBC host Yasmin Masougi and beat you out. So I mean something like the silver medalist. You are a silver but still on

the podium. Yeah, but you know they always say like the bronze medalist is happier than the civil the silver medal because the silver is the runner up. Bronze medalist is happy to be getting a medal, but the silver medalist is like, what could I have done? And so it's the situation where I was like, I lost by a fraction of a second. Could I have gotten you here? If I had enticed you with the fact that you

would have been the first sure you have come quicker. Absolutely, Okay, all right, definitely that was my That was my I'm just saying, standing here with the silver medal, with the silver medal, but you're still on woke app so that in and of itself is winning and makes you a champion. Gilanni Cobb, you are a staff writer with The New Yorker. You have put together edited one of the most dance books I think that cover black life in America, The

Matter of black Lives. You put this together. He I don't even know how you were working in the midst of twenty twenty. Me. I needed to be partly catatonic for half of it, and then, you know, then started to kind of get the win back in my sales.

But I want to talk to you about did you think the weeks the months following the murder of George Floyd that we had reached some type of reckoning because we were all collectively indoors, right, we were all on our devices, staring at the TV, just waiting for whatever bit of news about the future of our lives, of our planet as it was being enveloped in this virus, and then recognizing the multiple pandemics that we are actually living in Did you think that it was going to

be a reckoning or was it just going to be one of the many? So I was at a disadvantage in understanding the significance of George Floyd. And the reason I was at a disadvantage was the fact that I had written about when I was in my twenties, I had written about Amadudiallo and Abner Louima, you know, who were respectively shot and sexually abused by in my PD offices, and the kind of tortured path it took to get any semblance of justice those situations. Of course, it was

you're Rodney King. Before that I wasn't really writing. But in my thirties, you know, I had written about all of these instances of police excessive use of force. In my forties, had written about, you know, all these concerns. And here I was as a fifty one year old person, and I had seen overwhelmingly the same outcome of the administration or the bureaucracy circling ranks and finding a way to exonerate the person who had committed and agree just wrong.

And so I thought, when I looked at the video, I said, this is horrific. Is in humane, is disgusting. They'll find a way to get to get this guy off. And what I underestimated was, well, I undersubmitated two things. The first was the impact of everyone at home. There was nothing to distract your people didn't have to go to work, you know, and so they could just stew in these visuals and what the inhumanity of it meant. And the second thing was the excruciating length of that video,

which I still never watched. I attempted to watch it when we did a documentary on policing, and you know, as part of the documentary, I sat down and said I should watch this video, and you know, I got to like maybe the four minute mark, and I was like, I need to stop this. But for people who sat there and watched and like, do how long it takes anything? For eight minutes and forty six seconds, you know, that

is commitment. And this person kneeled a minute after minute after minute after minute in service of the cause of extinguishing George Floyd's like And I think that people weren't prepared to see that kind of casual sadism on display because it's different. I mean, it's all tortuous and disgusting. But it's different with a bullet, right, because there's a there, there is a distance right that is between it, and

it's generally generally quicker. Right, this was right, and he could say, oh, I feared from her, I feared from my life. Right is the common refrain because it's so quick, and you know, cops have to act so quickly under pressure, is what they tell us time and time again. But this wasn't that. And I think that I foolishly believed that this was going to be a reckoning moment because I said, there's no way that you watch this for

that long. And but but at the same time, I did also say, well, they're going to hang this on this one bad apple, which is what they say every single time on woke AF. I say, yeah, it's a bad apple from a poisonous orchard that had spanned the length of this country. What are we what are you talking about? But as long as we can convince people that if we get rid of this one, there are so many good ones, right, which is which is what

happened in the Derek Chauvin trial. You know, I covered the trial and when you saw the police chief Madaria Rodondo come out and denounce Chauvin's actions. You saw the various members of the police department come out, you saw police voices from across the country denouncing what he had done.

And I said, you know, we're being good copped, you know, because in order to highlight the idea that the police are fundamentally good and benign, we need to distinguish ourselves from this person, to say he's not one of us, he's not like us. But the problem is that he had been on the Minneapolis Police Force for I think it was nineteen years, that he had been in a supervisory capacity, that he had been training younger officers in the ways of the department, and he had been promoted.

And so by what metric was this man not one of you? And so of course he was one of them. He represented them in their values and as demonstrated by their continued employment of him and their promotions of him. And so it was really a kind of illusion that thought we were being sold. And the point of it was so that we could get back to the business as usual set of presumptions that if there is this person, especially if it's a person of color, who dies in

the course of an interact, with the police. They had it coming. This your book, The Matter of Black Lives, with this deep anthology, all of these stories, this analysis, How how or do you hold on to any semblance that America isn't destined for just implosion more of the same. Yeah, because I will tell you that one of the things that gets me every time that I read you know, your writing, uh and others, Charles Blow other other folks.

I'm like, it just never gets any better, right, And so how you know, how do you hang on to any like that that we're not just going to implode, that we're just not headed towards destruction. It's interesting, Um, you know, in this collection, we have this really dazzling array of people, you know, thinking about these questions and how they pertain um and not necessarily you know, expressly

or explicitly. Sometimes it's as a subtext, you know. But we have you know, Tony Morrison's writing in here, Hilton Owl's, Zadie Smith, Henry Lewis Gates during Saint Felix, my current colleague at The New Yorker, Khalif Asana, you know, a whole I hate when I started mentioning people because then you leave people out the people starting upset about it, But there's really so much, such a breath of work in there that I really think it's a kind of

profound set of meditations about individuals, about events, about places, about people, and so on. And maybe the net effect of that is to have a broader perspective on whether or not there's hope, whether or not there's the possibility of change. You know, as I wrote in the introduction,

I said that the anthology is not about race. It's about the people who are most commonly tasked with confronting it, you know, because race affects the entire society, but it is typically black people who expect it to confront and wrestle with, you know, this demon and try to drag it out of the public square. And so that's what we were trying to get at, you know, to your specific question about about implosion, I actually don't view it

that way. I think that there is change, but it's just that that change is fragile, is contested that you have to protect it, you have to hold onto it. But you know, when we start looking at our political representation, even as the people are trying to throw impediments, you know,

between us and the ballot box. Now, you know, in some ways, we're looking at this from a different vantage point because you know, we have a congressional Black caucus, we have black elected officials and cities across the country on the municipal level. You know, on the state level, that black people have a level of political power an authority which is far and away different from what we looked at in nineteen sixty five, which is to say that what John Lewis was getting hit over the head

for worked. You know, it wasn't a cure. It was a treatment, but it was a treatment that had results, and so I think that we have to have an assessment.

The other thing that I think it's important is that you know, when I have this conversation, which I have quite frequently with my students, I always direct them at to the last message that w Eb Dwo Boys released the world, or rather the message that was released upon his death, and as background, the Boys, when he was twenty five years old, said that he would devote his life to slaying white supremacy, that he would fight against white supremacy on behalf of black people. That was what

he wanted to dedicate his life too. He was twenty five years old. He did that until he was ninety five years old. He was still fighting when he died. Seven decades of his life, seven decades he pursued this mission. And when he died, he left a message saying for people coming after him to not despair because our struggles along and because the roads are difficult, you know, but always humanity reaches a higher level, he said. And so I don't have the vantage point of seventy years of struggle.

So I don't really have the right to be pessimistic day that I see it now making me feel like I don't have the right to be that. I based my lave this journey. Um. Now the last question, the last question for you. Um. You know, the past eighteen months have been one of the most trying times in

our country, on our planet, and in our world. And I'm curious, you know, on woke AF I talk a lot, obviously about politics, and talk a lot about race and identity, UM, but I'm also moving into a place of talking about what it means to live whole and to live full and to center joy, especially in the face of persistent despair. So how do you keep yourself centered in some type of joy. How do you keep your light about you in the face of darkness? You know, it's funny because

I mean very small thing things, you know. So if I think about what made me really happy today, I woke up at four fifty nine this morning, and I got up and before I did anything, you know, started anything, I just sat down in the dark quiet, and that was it. You know, that was the thing that made

me happiest in that day. And then, you know, I think that for me looking at the younger people who were coming up now and coming into their own and even you know, the children that were coming included mind, you know that that, you know, those are things that make me happy. I went out and bought myself a new suit last week, which is you know, I love clothes, and one point, buying a new suit would have really like been a thing like, oh wow, this suit, we

haven't gonna wear it, and it's and so forth. And it was okay. I mean I liked it. I mean I still like suits. But you know, the thing that really made me happy is thinking about playing a role in the development of these younger people who are coming after me. I love that. Joanni Cobb, thank you so much. For making time, folks. The book is the matter of black lives. I implore you all to pick it up because we're going to be going through it on the show.

Thank you, Thank you so much. That's it for Today's Woke, a f daily podcast. To hear more from today's show, including my full interview with Jilanni Cobb, support me on Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash Woke a power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.