The Audacity of Being Black

so much wrong that continues to happen. And I'm like, do we talk about the news of the day, which is the fact that listening let me just say this, listening to the McDaniel's trial, the trial of the three murderers that killed Ahmad Aubrey because he had the audacity to jog while black in his own nigh Hoodum, listening to that trial, which I cannot stomach, and I think that my tolerance for white fuckery and rage has reached

a all time high. Like I just don't. I no longer have what used to be like an iron stomach to be able to listen to the to the defense talk about how these white men were well within their right to have a citizen's arrest, even though Georgia wiped that rule right, that law off the books because it was inherently racist right, and it was installed like a century ago. It's hard for me to listen to the

justification of murder of black people anymore. I know the story, I know the song, the I feared from my life, the um they were doing something and saying, oh, we were protecting our property. It's always the same fucking story. So it's like, if you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times, and there's really no need to continue to relive these stories with each and every single murder.

So I haven't wanted to dive into that. And there are other people who know that you can listen to, like our friend Mark Thompson who's been covering the trial on his show Make It Plain. So there are plenty of people that can walk you through the intricacies of that. I am just not going to be one of them

because I care too much about my mental health. But there's another story that has really taken hold over me, and it's kind of how I feel, and I know that many of you feel this way as well, because you're messaging me and dming me about how to deal with this sense of despair. Michelle Goldberg, who has joined Woke af a couple of times over the years. Is a writer for The New York Times, and this week she wrote a piece called the Problem of Political Despair.

And before I delve into the piece, you know, I want to share with you my own feelings over the past couple of weeks. Right, Usually, I get super excited for the holidays. You know, I'm not one of those people that decorates everything, you know, but I love spending time with my family. I love taking a break. But over the past couple of years, I feel like it's like there's a dread that kind of follows along with

the holidays. And so before I delve into the political despair, I kind of want to talk about like this holiday feeling and get a sense like if other people feel this way. I kind of miss And let me preface this by saying that I'm not a cheap person, right, but I miss the holidays really being about spending time with family and friends that you don't get to readily see. I miss the idea of, you know, it being about the time and the quality of that time and the

games and the cooking together as opposed to the overconsumption. Right, So, for the past couple of days, I've been kind of deciding do I really want to do a show on like capitalism and Black Friday every year? Right? You see the videos. Media loves it. They love to show, you know, middle income or lower income people with these mad dashes into the store to get the latest gadget right that they can only afford frankly when the prices are slash.

But we know that capitalism is about breeding this feeling that you need material goods in order to feel good about yourself, that in order to stay in competition with your family and friends, like, you just have to accumulate

more stuff. And you know, the fact is that we know that that companies inflate prices right so that they can then cut them in a way that makes us think, oh my god, I'm getting these things for seventy percent off, when in fact they're still recouping a huge, huge, fucking profit.

And these are the same companies that have poor labor practices, that don't pay their people, that have folks coming in now on Thanksgiving Day, right, like you can barely finish a turkey before folks are either called into work if they work in retail, or your family is like, well, we got to you know, finish this all up so that we can go accumulate more shit, right, and then show you how much we love you by giving you a bunch of shit that is only going to add

to the clutter and take up space in your homes. Right, this is how I feel these days. And I know that I sound like a grinch, but the reality is is that I feel like capitalism. The desire to accumulate more stuff, the goal of keeping up with your neighbors so that you have the latest iPhone, you have the latest pair of sneakers, you have the latest whatever, really has us devoid of what the holidays actually were about. Now, let's be clear that Thanksgiving, much like the celebration of

Columbus Day, is a fucked up holiday. Right. We have tried to move it just to being you know, the holiday that is about gratitude, the holiday that is about really giving thanks But you know, when we understand the origins, right, as we've been talking about America's origin story, we know that this right Thanksgiving is based on the massacre of indigenous people and the colonization thereof by a bunch of white religious zealots who decided to leave their homeland so

that they can pursue their religious fanaticism right unencumbered by taxes. That that's just such like the story in a nutshell. And then they come across the Wampanogue tribe who greets them, who then they rape and pillage and colonize, and then so begins their story of despair. Right, So that's this

in a fucking nutshell. And I got to tell you that whenever I see still in the twenty first century, still in twenty twenty one, when I see young elementary school kids coming home, you know, off of the bus with the Pilgrim hats on and still like doing this performative racism, I'm disgusted, right, And I'm like, oh, see, if I had kids, they would need to be homeschooled because I cannot believe that we're still doing this bullshit about the Pilgrims and the Indians and like, oh the

coming together and the sharing of food involved, blah, and you know, totally whitewashing over the reality of what has happened, right, and where those Native American and Indigenous populations are today, that they are on small plots of land referred to as the reservations, where they have they are over indexed in alcoholism, drug abuse, joblessness, depression, anxiety, all of these things that come from this thanksgiving right, that come from

the treatment of indigenous people in this country and why slavery was born because you couldn't enslave a group of people that knew the land better than you did, so best to just massacred them and put them on a small plot of land and then ship in actual human beings that you refer to as chattel in order to build up the economy so that you could continue your religious fanaticism right unencumbered. So that's the story of America

in a fucking nutshell. And so when I come to this holiday season and begin to take stock, you know, as we only have a couple of more weeks left of the year, and you know, everyone is frantically moving because you want to end the year, you know, as well and as thoughtful as you started it. I was just in a conversation with one of my cousins and she's like, oh, you're looking forward to the holidays, and I'm like, not really, I'm kind of looking forward to

them being done. I'm and it's not because I don't want to spend time with my family because I do and I spend you know, plenty of time with them throughout the year. But it's the over like consumption, consumer driven, capitalistic nature of Thanksgiving and the speed through you know, Hanukkah and Christmas and you know, and then the rush

to the new year. It's disgusting because we don't actually I mean, you would think, right, And a lot of people said this that last year, and I'll speak for myself. Last year, I think that more people, and you tell me in the comments section, I think that more people took stock of what the holidays meant because it was the first time in many of our lives right where we were not able at all to join with family because of the coronavirus. We all needed to stay within

our pods. And even though that was recommended by the CDC and recommended you know by many health officials and scientists and doctors, many people did gather and then they had these mini COVID you know, cluster events right where where a lot of people ended up getting sick. But it was really a time to take stock for me and many people into what really matters, like do you

need the pile up of presence underneath the tree. Do you need to you know, exit out of Thanksgiving dinner so that you can get you know, a new microwave. And again, I don't say that to shame people who this is their opportunity to shop during the year because the prices, you know, meet what they are able to bring home. So I'm not shaming them, but I'm shaming business,

big business. I'm shaming capitalism and how it has deteriorated, like our sense of connectedness, right, our sense of joy from just being able to be in each other's presence and break bread and share a meal, right and actually really truly think about what you are grateful for, right to have this moment, have this time in our very fast paced lives, even though we may not be back up to full speed in a lot of senses, which I will talk about what's transpiring in Europe and why

we need to really pay attention to how we are still being mindful living in a global health pandemic. But you know this coincides this feeling, this desire to kind of just for me anyway to speed through the holiday, is that I just don't want to see the commercials.

I don't want to be concerned with what amount of stuff I need to buy people that are able to buy all of this shit for themselves, right, Like I struggle every year to think about, like, what is the gift that isn't about you know, just adding to the stuff, right, that is thoughtful, that is you know, one that is indicative of the relationship that I have with the person that I'm gifting, and is indicative of the thoughtfulness that I want to have and the space I want to

hold for that person in my life. And you feel this force, right Like if you were to say like, no, no, no, we don't need to exchange gifts, then you seem like the cheap bastard, right that doesn't want to you know, buy presence for people. And that's not what I'm saying. It's just, you know, the desire to consume so much, to buy so much, to fill this void that we

all feel. In many ways, I realize that it cannot be filled with things, right, and that if we were to just take a at back and reimagine what we want this season to be, that it isn't just the season of giving and the season of rapping and the season of you know, going into increased debt because you want to be able to tell people what you bought for them, or you want to be able to show

it off. For the fucking Graham, that we could just have a season of honesty, one that isn't about how much we can get how much we can give, but like about how grateful we really are. And I know that that sounds corny, but it's where I am. It's where I've been really for the last couple of years.

But the pandemic put things into perspective. Right, to be appreciative for health, to be appreciative for the health and wellness of your family and friends, the ability to having create pods, right, Like I a couple of pods of people, and I'm still really active in those pods, even though you can see more people now now that I'm vaccinated, now that I've had the booster shot, and feel a

lot more comfortable doing so. But just you know, taking a step back and thinking about when we were at the height of the pandemic, why you surrounded yourself with the people that you did. Right, The sense of calm, and again I don't mean to minimize, right, the trauma, the exhaustion, the fear that we were all living in and many of us you know, still are, but it's shifting into being fearful right and grief written about other

things that are transpiring in our society. But for those of us that had the privilege to slow down, for those of us that had the privilege and the ability to work remote and still do right, I just I don't want to lose sight of what I was truly grateful for and happy about and had deep gratitude about during the height of the pandemic. And I feel like in this rush to go back to normal, it is the rush to purchase all of the things that we didn't purchase, right, to go to all of the places

that we didn't go to in twenty twenty. And it's like the makeup that we're trying to do in this year is not really about, oh, how do I want to show the people who I miss so dearly how much I love and appreciate them? Right, It's like how hard can I flex on the Graham, you know? And how hard can I, you know, go and recoup all of the things that I weren't that I wasn't able

to purchase and spend. It just makes me feel gross and you know, in my family, as we're like you know, looking ahead, Christmas comes and then it's Black Friday, then it's you know, all of these things, we've put like limits on what we are spending, like here's a budget, or we just want stocking stuffers because in my family they're funny and you know, and we get more joy out of unpacking our stockings than we do with like

the gift that we're getting. And maybe it's because we don't have a ton of little kids in our family, and so people have moved to believe that Christmas is really for them or the holidays in that sense, and

gift giving is really for them. But I just want, as we embark on the second holiday season in a pandemic, at a time when there is such despair, that we stop and pause and really think about how we want to show up right, like how we want to be in community and what that looks like and how that feels.

And it isn't about how much stuff we have and how many packages we can get or you know, our table scape for the holiday, but about like who is actually around that table and who isn't right because again, we're embarking on a holiday season the second one of which is in a pandemic where over seven hundred thousand people have lost their lives. And so there are a lot of missing people that are going to be you know, not at this holiday season. And so what does that mean?

And are we pausing to have like a collective moment of grief around that and honoring that loss in the rush to get back to normal? There is nothing normal about what we've been through and what we continue to go through as a country and as a world. And so can we use you know, this week, this time of you know, Thanksgiving to really think about what we

are grateful for. So on our Thanksgiving wok a f I am going to go through, like what I have learned over the past year, the things that I truly am grateful for, and I encourage all of you to do the same, to use this week and the rest of the year as an opportunity to take stock in the obstacles that you overcame, the opportunities that you created

for yourself, and what you're most looking forward to. If we are not grounding ourselves in thinking about how we are bettering not only ourselves, but our family, our friends, our communities, then I I feel like we are going to get lost in the despair of the moment, into this dystopia that doesn't seem to have an expiration date, which brings me to this piece that Michelle Goldberg wrote, which is called The Problem of Political Despair in the

New York Times, and it starts out like this. On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state's elections, then pause to let my techiocardic heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of

full body horror. If this were simply my problem, i'd write about it in a journal instead of The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party. It's predictable that with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, phrenetic political engagement. But there's a withdrawal happening now from news conception, activism, and in some places voting that seems

less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from COVID, but I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve. I want to pause there because this is the kind of space that I have

found myself in. And as I was reading Michelle's opinion piece, it struck me that it isn't just an exhaustion that I am feeling and that we are all feeling from the Donald Trump and Trumpism hangover, because a hangover would mean, to be honest, that you had overconsumed the night before.

And here are the lingering effects. Except the consumption of Trumpism is continuing, right, And what we thought was going to stop with an election and a new administration and a new Congress has only continued to barrol out of control.

And I say this daily on woke af and if you follow me on Instagram, you see the more uplifting posts that I post in the morning, my rise and sparkles as a way to kind of set the tone for the day, right, And what I realized in the point that she makes is that we're not feeling a sense of relief in that, you know, okay, we can rest assured that the country is back in the hands of grown ups, of patriots, of people that actually believe in the constitution and the rule of law, and that

they're busy at work patching back together our frayed society. But the more that we look around, the more that we read, and the more that we watch, we realize that all that was all that transpired on election Day right in twenty twenty, was that America hit pause on authoritarianism.

When we talk about this all the time, but it's this feeling that I think as a way to move through the Trump administration and get through the day after day of COVID right and the masks rules, and then the six feet of distance, and then quarantine, and then the shutdowns, and then the doubling back to shutdowns, and then the phased reopenings, and then the insurrection and all of these things, right like, when you take them one after the other after the other, you're like, fuck, I

cannot believe that we have made it this far through this nightmare. But at the same time, there is this collective shutdown that is happening. I talk about my mother a lot. My mother is a rabid MSNBC watcher, reads all of the blogs, watches every show, or she did rather until this last election. After the election, the television and my parents home never goes on the news unless it is the local news, to see what is happening

in their town, what is happening around the corner. If it's even on in the background, you can sense the energy shift in the house. My mother gets a bit

more anxious. I too, if I'm there, start to get like a bit more prickly, not really knowing where any of it is coming from, until we realize, oh shit, the TV is on and has been on for the past hour, and we're just hearing the same news matriculate in in the back of our heads, like even subconsciously, our body is getting tighter, our you know, our lines in our face are getting deeper, and this grip, right,

this body grip is taking over. And the moment that we turn it off, recognize where how the energy is shifted and what started it, we start to evenly come back down. Well, when Michelle offers in her peace that there is this sense of avoidance and not just relief, well she's one hundred percent. Right, I am in the news like she is on a regular day, and I

avoid it. Right. I gather as much as I can as quickly as I can, orienting myself around which stories I think are the most important, right, and they'll do the least harm as a way to then analyze them and share them here. But in doing so, over the past several years, pieces of myself have been broken apart. Because it's really hard, especially if you're a person who wants to be of service, right, who has dedicated their

life to public service. It's hard to be in this state of being where you're not sure if you're having any impact whatsoever, because the problems that we are facing just seems so goddamn big and overwhelming, right, Like, there was a funny meme, this like series of jokes that I saw the other day on Instagram that was just like, my god, do we have to talk about colonialism and

white supremacy on every fucking occasion? Like can I just have the salt past to me at dinner without talking about how like it's tied to British realism of India and this? Then the other thing, it's like, can we just go see a fucking movie without then having to dive into the inequality that you know, people of color lack representations still, right, Like, can we just take anything in without having to recognize like the injustice and embody it.

It becomes fucking exhausting because there's nowhere to look and feel like, oh yeah, well, at least in this space, everything is okay. So there is this active avoidance that is happening right now. The point that Michelle make in our New York time piece is well, there's a serious problem.

What happens if we all decide to actively avoid reality and I mean the news, right, Like, I don't mean to go and create our own reality, you know, like Republicans have, But I mean to actively disengage from the news of the day, from the current political and social climate. That avoidance has a price, right, because the fact is that if we aren't paying attention, if we aren't finding or creating tactics to allow ourselves to pay attention enough,

then what happens? Right then we decide that you know, voting doesn't matter, We decide that we don't really trust these agencies anyway, what difference does anything make? And we begin right to really distance ourselves from participating actively in society, in our government. But at the same time, right, does that continued active engagement in marinating and misery, what is

it really doing? Is it helping to reshape or reimagine who we can be when the people that are in power and have the ability to make real, real, thoughtful

change decide that they're not going to do that. You know, I was reading most recently about the scale back, right, the scaling back of the infrastructure bill, and how all of these historic things, historic investments in childcare and elderly care, and investment in workers, how it all got scaled back, right, because what the media wanted to focus on was the number attached to the bill as opposed to the policies that were in there that are desperately needed by Americans,

and that need was exacerbated by the pandemic, and so instead of focusing on what Democrats are actually providing, we just wanted to focus on the cost. Right. Meanwhile, it's your fucking money. So do you want your money to actually better your life or do you not? Right, Like, that's the thing. Do you want your tax dollars to go into paying off CEOs and shareholders? Writing giving them breaks or do you want to see real life investment into your day to day lives. I mean, these are

the choices, but that's not the way that it's presented. Nonetheless, you know, this avoidance that is happening is also coming out of self preservation. There is only so much that we can all take in and weather. Like I said from the jump, I'm not following the McDaniels trial, not in any like deep investigative way that I did with Chauvin, right, because I just I can't listen to the justification of

murdering unarmed black people. I just can't. This country has a pattern and a history of cruelty and violence and terrorism done at the hands of enraged white men. And what are they enraged by, Oh, because they're taking our place, or they shouldn't be on our streets, or blah blah blah blah blah, until of course you recognize that our economy doesn't work without those that are the foundation for

this capitalistic pyramid, which are people of color. Right. I say that all because it's important for us to take these breaks. And while Michelle makes a point about avoidance, but we avoid things that we can't readily handle, and we need to understand that avoidance for avoidance sake is not helpful, but avoidance as a way to bolster up our self care, to build our collective armor, is necessary so that we can get the work done. So she

goes on in her peace to say this. One redeeming feature of Trump's presidency in retrospect was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. COVID two once seemed like something we'd be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trump is m like the virus would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election,

the inauguration, and the availability of shots. Now we're past all of that, an American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date. You see, we were in many ways suspending reality right because we kept saying,

if we just do this, things will get better. If we just wear masks, if we just social distance, we'll be able to figure out how to live with COVID being is how Republicans and anti vaxers were not interested in it ever, leaving right because it could have but we were not interested as a collective right, like, we can't move forward when twenty five percent of the population is like no, fuck fuck, you know, fuck safety and health and wellbeing. We want the virus to stay. It's

to stay. But we kind of talked ourselves through the steps that we could take because what I have come to understand, and what my therapist actually alerted to me this week, is that our sense of safety right has been completely and totally wiped away and diminished the reality that like you can walk outside, you can touch somebody's hand or hug them, or they could cough or sneeze and droplets enter into the air, and now you're infected

and you're infecting everybody else around us. Again, the reality of that is still settling in with us. The safety that we all thought that we had from you know, global health pandemics, we don't because now that this has happened, we recognize that anything can fucking happen. And it's the same that is true with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of Trumpism and white supremacy. If Donald Trump be elected and our society can be pushed to

the brank of democracy's breaking point, then anything is possible. Right, And when you start to really think about that that like this could possibly not be as bad as it could get, that things could in fact get worse, your desire to tap in to all of this fades, right, because again, self preservation is going to take control, because I don't want my mind to go to the darkest fucking place that it can. My god, what could be

worse than Donald Trump? Well, we're seeing that. Maybe it'll be Writtenhouse for presidents soon, right, maybe it'll be Paul

Gosser for president. Right, And dissantists and all of these people who have literally right are perpetuating violence, are celebrating it, who have either actively killed their constituencies and actively chosen violence as a way to deal with their political opponents, as opposed to, you know, the old school way of debate, that we are a society that is completely and totally fucking unhinged, right, waiting for the other shoe to drop

and not knowing where that's going to come from. And so as an act of preservation of quality of life and our mental health and wellness, we are avoiding to a certain extent what is transpiring in front of us because it's too fucking much. It's too goddamn much. We expected life to get better, you know. I am reminded of the it gets Better campaign that was targeted towards LGBTQ youth in their early two thousands, when there was a rash of suicides because of bullying right in schools

of Q youth. And so we created guidelines and campaigns in order to bring awareness right, and the idea was just hold on because it's going to get better. But look at where the fuck we are now, right? You and an entire administration come in that wiped out any advancements that we had made into creating safe, right and connected schools for all kids. Instead, we've put a target on their backs. We told them that it gets better, but actively over the last several years, things have gotten

progressively worse. So how do you choose to engage at a time when nothing seems to be going right or actually better? Yet everything is going to the right even though we supposedly won. If this is what winning looks like, I hate to think about what the next loss will bring because I don't feel like a winner at all? Do you? So she goes on to say this, what's terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose.

Jerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House. North Carolina, a state Joe Biden lost by one point three percentage points, just passed a redistricting map that would create ten Republican seats, three Democratic ones, and one competitive one. Democrats would have to win North Carolina by eleven point four points just to win half of its congressional seats.

That's according to five thirty eight. She goes on to say, Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local effects who protected the integrity of the twenty twenty election, replacing them with appartics. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the twenty twenty four election outright, since they don't control the current administration. But but they can throw it into the sort of chaos

that will cause widespread civil unrest. So, folks, when you have this reality to look forward to, right when this right, the fact that we are watching Republicans systematically destroy voting rights put into place those sycophants who are not going to hold the line for our democracy right, that are instead going to thwart your voice right and your vote in a decision to have minority rule, And then you couple that with the recent you know, verdicts in the

Written House case, and as we're watching to see after the jury deliberates in the McDaniel's case, if there will actually be justice, and my whole thing is that even if there is justice right in that case, it doesn't signal that our justice system is fucking working. So when you take all of these things into account, who the fuck doesn't want to bury their head someplace else? Who the fuck doesn't want to not think about what is coming down the pike because what is sitting in front

of us is just so overwhelming. You know, I looked all the way to the end of this piece for some you know, leaving the reader with something hopeful. And it's the same way that I feel at the end of every woke a f show. How can I leave people, leave you all with something that is hopeful when everything

around us points to the contrary. And this is why, you know, yesterday I posted one of my quotes from a group called Spirit Daughter, and it said something to the extent that gratitude is fucking magic, right, because having a practice of daily gratitude where I stop, you know, in the morning, in the evening, and it parts during the day to think about and just quietly give thanks for various moments, people, the breath that's in my body, the ability to go walking, the ability to stretch my

body and add more breath and space to it. That I find little and big things each day to be grateful for. Because if I were to take in every single bad message right, if I were to look at every single DM where somebody is sending me yet another story that is awful, I wouldn't want to get out of bed in the morning. And so I don't want

our reaction to our current dystopia to be avoidance. For avoidance sake, I want us to develop other tactics that allow us to be able to consume the bad, but be able to let it go and at the same time recognize and hold the good. It doesn't have to be an either or proposition. Either I marinate in misery or in my act of avoidance, I pretend everything is okay. It is possible to hold both, to recognize that things are indeed really bad, and then have such gratitud to

daily for the things that aren't right. Understand what you can control, right and let go of the things that you cannot. We are not going to end white supremacy, not in our lifetime. All we're going to do is be able to chip away at it so that, as Clint Smith said to me in an interview that will air later this week, that the next generation doesn't have to chip as hard. They'll still have chipping to do, but we will have removed a layer, making their work easier.

And that's a hard pill to swallow, because we all want to see the fruits of our labor. We all want to believe that we're doing this not only for ourselves right so that we can live freer, but for other people. But in recognize saying that we may never see that, and we need to let go of the expectation around it. But that doesn't mean that we stop

doing the work. It just means that, at this time of great despair and struggle and grief and trauma, that we need to put our energies into creating strategies and tactics that allow us not only to survive, not just keep our head above water, right, but allow us to thrive. Because if you can thrive in the moments of great despair right. And again that doesn't mean about how much

stuff you can buy or sell or whatever. No, it means how whole you can live, right, how connected you can be to yourself right and to your community, to your family, to your friends. If you can thrive in these moments of despair, then just imagine what you can do when the world is a little bit more settled,

a little bit less anxious. And so I offer, as we prepare to enter into the holiday dash and prepare to once again gather with family and friends, for us to talk out loud with each other about what each of us is doing to thrive, not just to survive, what each of us are grateful for, and how we show up and show gratitude so that we can share not just in our collective grief and in our trauma, but in our desire right to create positive energy, to

put something positive out into the world, and to actually thrive. So that is my hope as we enter into this holiday season. That is it for me today, dear friends, on this Woke Wednesday, as always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.