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Kim: What does your clothing line mean to you?
Senay: Madow Futur, to me, is our voice. It's our voice as Black people - as oppressed people in general. But specifically as Black people. And it is a proclamation that Black youth are the future. What happens in the world is dependent on our people and what we do. The arts are a way to galvanize and catch people's attention. It's a way to seduce people into positive ideologies. Madow Futur is a wearable proclamation that the future is Black - something that we can make beautiful. I also grew up watching a lot of science fiction. Futuristic things are really important to me. I try to incorporate into all my work. I'm a bonafide Afro-futurist.
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 Lacey: Tell me your story of courage. What happened?
Kim: I spent some time in jail for assault. I was terrified. And I'm tough - but there were some women in there who made me feel like prey. When the correctional officer first brought me to my cell, I almost had a panic attack because of how small it was. I told her I couldn't go in. She just laughed at me. She said I had no choice. And when she closed the door shut behind me, I'll never forget that sound. It was the ultimate feeling of being trapped with no escape. It was concrete in every sense of the world. And you just retreat within yourself - you make every effort to flee the reality. Part 4 of 4 | See Previous Post In the United States, Africans aren't Black.
Black Americans and Africans are two distinctly different groups. It's difficult for people to understand this because of our shared complexion and origin, but Black Americans are their own people. Black Americans have an experience in the United States that is specific to the transatlantic slave trade, not their origin in Africa. But African immigrants and first generation Africans have an identity outside of US slavery - especially because they have the privilege of knowing what country in Africa that they originated from. Kim: What is the trap?
JR: A place in the 'hood that if you stay there too long you get trapped there. The people and circumstances bring you down.  Ira Glass: Nikole Hannah Jones is an investigative reporter, these days at The New York Times. We've had her here on This American Life before too. But her first big reporting job was back in 2003. She was reporting on the schools in Durham, North Carolina. And like most places, there were good schools and there were bad schools. And at the time, it was the heyday of No Child Left Behind. Durham was working really hard to improve the bad schools.
Nikole Hannah Jones: And I would go to schools, and they would just always be trying these new things that actually sounded like they might work. They would do things like, "We'll put a great magnet program here. Or we are going to really focus on literacy. We're going to start an early college high school, which kids would earn college credit in high school. We're going to improve teacher quality. We're going to replace the principal. More testing."They're always talking really about the same things. I mean, you could take these conversations and go from district to district to district, and you will always hear the same things.  Addiction is an interesting phenomenon to look at, because it reveals stark differences in the way a society treats its vulnerable, depending on what type of class or race they belong to.
We can say that someone with any kind of addiction is vulnerable in a way, due to the nature of addiction. Addiction is commonly understood as some sort of unproductive – or even counterproductive – behavior that an individual is unable to stop engaging in with their own will power. So addicts are vulnerable: they can’t stop what they are doing, so society has to come up with a way of helping them – or punishing them, depending on your stance. But addictive behaviors crop up in many different ways, and they turn up across race and class lines. It is not surprising then when we start to see that not all addictions are treated the same. What should we do with addicts? How do we treat addiction? Do we help people? Do we punish them? These are interesting questions, but for now, we are going to focus on the way that this society treats different kinds of addicts differently.  In a community, or even a society, there is a way in which everyone fits in. What do you do to contribute? What do you get for your contribution? Who are you? How do you relate to others? In the end, you have to take up space as a unique individual. This is your identity.
Many times, an identity is socially constructed and given to an individual. In a healthy society, this can be consensual. Society asks of you a contribution based on an honest evaluation of who you are. In an unhealthy society such as this one, it is forced. To those benefiting from force and domination, identity seems as a default position. The privileged find themselves buoyant in their own societies and see themselves reflected back when they look into society. So they say to themselves, "yes this is me, and this is how the world should be," usually without thinking much.  Normally it seems we'd want to share artifacts from other cultures. Other geographically distinct peoples have had centuries and even millenia to develop aesthetics, culinary arts, technologies, musical styles, and cultural practices that any other given culture would never dream of creating. That is the beauty of culture: its creations are born from vast chains of organic historical flows of events, and any given culture is impossible to fake or synthesize. It bears its own character. To truly understand a culture and create authentic works within is to be part of it.
But to take and enjoy a cultural artifact from another culture, and derive wealth from that culture, while actively seeking to exploit and oppress members of that culture and deny those members their deserved wealth is a form of stealing, or appropriation. And this is the thorny problem underneath our diverse, multicultural society. Alix Spiegel: There's a man named Bob Rosenthal. He's a research psychologist. And early in his career, he did this thing. He went into his lab late at night and hung signs on all of the rat cages. And some of the signs said that the rat in the cage was incredibly smart. And some of the signs said that the rat in the cage was incredibly dumb, even though neither of those things was true.
Bob Rosenthal: They were very average rats that you would buy from a research institute that sells rats for a living. Alix Spiegel: So then Bob brings this group of experimenters into his lab, and he says, for the next week, some of you are going to get these incredibly smart rats. And some of you are going to get these incredibly stupid rats. And your job is to run your rat through a maze and record how well it does. Privilege is what’s assumed by those who are in power. It’s like water for fish. It’s the things you don’t actually think about because that’s just the way things are. And in every society, it’s different. It will look different in Guatemala than it will in the United States or Korea.
But in European influenced societies, the mass migration of Europeans to the world, five centuries ago, created a particular version of that - and a version that we still live with today. |