Awakened in America
Awakened in America
S2 Ep #2: Folklore & Race
Host Z & Host Jess discuss the intersectionality of folklore and race with Dr. Pat Turner of UCLA, author of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture" and "Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters."
You're listening to awakened in America, two minds on a journey to create dialogue about diversity, inclusion and optimism.
Speaker 2:Hey listeners, how is everybody doing? We are really excited to be back with our second episode of 2021. That feels good to say it's been kind of a long week over here. I don't know about the rest of you, but I am kind of dealing with some repatriation of sorts. Kind of like getting back to a little bit of normalcy. My kids kind of went back to preschool for a few mornings a week. It was my daughter's fourth birthday, just a lot of things that were really normal pre COVID, that all of a sudden I'm kind of reacclimating and kind of throw me for a bit of a loop. So apologies if I'm sounding a little bit tired and trying to get it together here for everybody. But having said all of that, I'm super excited to have with us today, Dr. Pat Turner. And I thought it was especially fitting that all of us are women and it's the beginning of women's history month. That's very exciting as well. And, um, as a girl, mom, and I'm a boy mom too, but as a girl, mom, definitely, you know, along with other social issues, really want to make sure that that that occasion is elevated. So D do you want to say hi to everybody before we introduced Dr. Pat, hello awakens, thank you for joining us and hope you enjoy this episode. So Dr. Chats, we have here with us today, her name is Patricia Turner. We kind of just made up that name, Dr. Pat, and the last 10 minutes. And she's being a really good support and letting us go with that. So she is a senior professor. She's actually been a professor since 1985, and she's been teaching in world arts and cultures slash dance. And African-American studies at UCLA here in LA area where we are, and her research focuses on racial dynamics as they surface and folklore in popular culture, she's published four books. And the one we're going to reference probably today, later in the episode is called. I heard it through the grapevine rumors and African-American culture, and then her most recent manuscript, which is race rumor and conspiracy theories. Sorry, if he, um, what's the full title of that Dr. Turner? Well, you know, with the editors now, so the title admitted it, which doesn't mean that that's the title that will be on the book. The authors in your audience will know that, but the working title is trash talk, colon anti-Obama lore and race in the 21st century. She's also served as a consulting scholar on several documentaries, including Marlon Riggs, Emmy award winning, ethnic notions. And I know she's actually done a lot more than that, but this is the very modest file that she supplied us with. And she's also held dual appointments as vice provost of undergraduate education and the senior Dean of the UCLA college before she stepped down last. So, hello, Pat, great to have you with us. I want to say hi to our listeners real quickly. Hi,
Speaker 3:It's great to be with you.
Speaker 2:So what we're going to be talking about today is something that I actually feel really privileged to be able to have, um, a conversation about with somebody so knowledgeable and, um, well-studied on, uh, something that DNI do our best to tackle in our conversations and in our episodes, this is very nuanced, you know, huge issue that, that America's day thing. I know other parts of the world as well, but that will be racism and, you know, racism in America and Z. And I, although we feel very passionate about it and you know, I, myself from a student of racism and, and how it's affecting things by no means, are we any sort of expert? And I always try to caveat that because I think a lot of the time I find myself kind of like making some sort of statement and I'm like, you know, I don't really think I'm qualified to say that, but today we have with this, somebody who is extremely qualified. So I feel really, you know, I'm grateful to be able to have this conversation with you. And I hope my listeners and everybody that follows us. Um, hopefully you are going to get the same sort of experience from, from hearing somebody that's so knowledgeable on the topic. Like I said, so without further ado, our first question that we have for you, we know that you study folklore and that, you know, to me, it seems like a pretty specialized topic. Could you kind of tell our listeners what your definition of folklore is to start with problems?
Speaker 3:Every folklorist will define folklore a little bit differently, but I think of it as the material of every day life. It may help if I sort of tell you the moment at which I knew that I was a folklorist, I was in graduate school and I knew that I wanted to specialize in African American materials. And I wanted to make that the core of, of my scholarly inquiry, but I didn't know if I wanted, I had been an undergraduate major in political science. I didn't know if I wanted to do history. I didn't know if I wanted to do literature. Um, you know, I didn't know what lens I wanted to use. And a professor of mine suggested that I take a folklore class. I fell in love with it right away. And I remember that the professor that, um, on a particular day, this, the subject matter of the lecture was Proverbs. And I remember leaning back in my chair in the lecture hall and saying, this is it because Proverbs for the literature of my household, my parents didn't read Ralph Ellison. They didn't, you know, they didn't listen to black opera singers. They only bought it any magazine on special occasions. You know, there had to be somebody really good on the cover before they were going to spend money on that. But folklore represented a way into the live it's of people like my family and the members of our church, because they'll have a literature and had a mode of communication in terms of Proverbs and the sermons I'm in the church on Sunday, the, the lyrics of the spirituals, the red parte, my father would engage in with his buddies, um, you know, with beer on Sunday afternoon and that kind of thing. And folklore gave me a way of privileging that, and really focusing all of my academic energy, uh, in that direction.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's great. So it was sort of a natural gravitation that you have there. That's really cool. So as it relates to African-American history, I guess when in your own personal history, did those worlds kind of come together and you study them side by side, or they're two separate entities, right? You studied folklore and also African-American studies.
Speaker 3:I always approached, you know, when I was, you mentioned that I had my first faculty appointment in 1985. So I was educated at a period, which in which people didn't study African-American studies, it was very, very new field and only a few places had focus on it. And certainly no place had, you know, a whole graduate curriculum at the time that I would have been going to graduate school. So many of the faculty members in African-American studies of my generation were trained in something else and had identified, you know, their, their, their focus had been, uh, the experience of African-Americans. So my early colleagues were people who had English PhDs. Yeah. So I, I came to it from the point of view of, as I say, from, from the point of view of folklore and in my, my first faculty appointments, the advertisements for the jobs were basically, you know, looking, looking for someone and, uh, with, with a PhD in areas that have required them to explore the African or African-American experience, you know, folklore was one of the categories and that's, you know, that was my entree point.
Speaker 2:Again, going back to things that, to me seemed very specialized and I'm genuinely very interested in how you landed on a book about quilting and its place in American history. I know that's another one of your four books that you have published currently. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 3:Sure. And I think you mentioned before that this is a women's history month African-American women's stories are even harder to an earth, then the story's writ large. And one of the things that folklore is, you know, in, in, in terms of trying to figure out these stories, one of the things that I found challenging in my early years as a scholar was folklore respondents, speak to the source, right? We want to interview the people themselves about their lives, but black women. And I, I like to resist these generalizations when I can, but it's a reasonable general generalization to make that, um, women, I would have been interviewing in the 1970s and eighties who grew up at the beginning of the 20th century were unaccustomed to having anyone really interested in their lives. So you would try to interview them about what their households were like, what their education was like, any of those kinds of things. And you'd get one word answers. And why do you care about, you know, they flip the script on you. Why do you care? Nobody, nobody cares. What kinds of vegetables I grew, nobody cares that you know about this. And it was a very frustrating experience until I was working with colleagues at the Smithsonian institution on a Folklife festival. And they had asked me to be a part of a team that was going to interview African-American quilters from the South. Who'd been selected to participate in this festival in Washington, DC. And they brought their quilts with them. And with the quilt as the topic of the discussion, they were far more animated. So you can get them to talk about their childhood by asking them, how did you learn to quilt? Your mother, teach her to grab what was that realized, you know, what was the furniture like? You could get to all of the other things about their lives, about their marriages by making the quilt for subject of the conversation rather than the woman itself. And it was a far more revealing thing to me than what I had done up until that point for sort of getting at that generation of women. And then I realized that the perception of black women was quilting was, you know, my first experience of it, it was women from the South who, you know, hadn't had much education, lower socioeconomic status, all of that. There's a tendency to frame the black experience sometimes that way. And to say that that's the whole of the black experience. And I quickly, you know, I knew this already, but Colts were another way of saying that's not true. So my book on quilting taught, you know, I've got, um, explorations of art, quilters of male quilters. I'm a black quilter who learned to quilt in Alaska, which is where she grew up, urban quilters and quilters with PhDs. The common denominator is that they're African-American, but they represent the range of African-American demography. And the common denominator with them is an artistic impulse to create something functional or beautiful with fabric. That is fascinating. I wasn't expecting all of those connections. So thank you for making those for me
Speaker 4:Because my grandmother and some of my great aunts are quilters. And, um, I know from watching my grandmother actually do the quilting and stitching like, you know, each square that, and actually own her own grandmother's sewing machine that she had, uh, rebuilt. And we actually have our house today. To me, it was a way to pass on our history because unfortunately, I feel like much of the oration has been lost, like as generations move forward, that's not a primary way of disseminating knowledge like it used to be. So did you find that like the quilters, were they using that to pass on history?
Speaker 3:So there's a lot that's been written about that. And you know, there's not a great paper trail on, on many aspects of, of, of particularly 19th century and early 20th century African-American experience. So there are some people who would, who make the case. And I don't think the evidence is there, that there was a lot of messaging in the quilts themselves. And I don't find a lot I'm in this sort of group of scholars who don't find a lot to substantiate that the quilts themselves, particularly in the era of, uh, you know, again, in the 19th century and early 20th century contained hidden messages, but your grandmother's experience with, um, your great grandmother and other women in the family, the time that they spent with each other, working on the quilts with they were working on the quilts in common. That was certainly the time that they use to share family histories with each other. It's in those common functions of life that the younger generation binds out what their grandmother was like, or, um, what the wedding of an aunt was like, what the work conditions were like for the generation before, what their access to education was, you know, and the, and the ritual of giving a quilt. One of the most moving sets of stories I collected during the quilting time was of, um, lots of people who were the generation in their families to go to college in say the 1940s, fifties, and sixties, and their mother, their grandmother, their aunt made a quilt for them to take, to put on their dorm bed at college and the selection of the fabric, you know, what colors they chose, you know, what, what they opted to give was a great significance. And I heard a range of stories from the recipients of those quilts, some of which was, you know, they, they treasured it right away and they were very proud of it. And others, these were often the more traumatic stories where people who said, I didn't want to put it on my bed. I wanted a bedspread on my bed. I didn't realize then what, uh, that this gift represented. You know, I thought it was putting something country and homemade and, you know, I wanted a bedspread, like I thought other people had in college, on my dad, and now I would give anything to go back or, you know, they all these stories about retrieval and finding, you know, finding, finding the quilts and so forth came up. So, so, so certainly quilts had a historical dimension to them often, not in the actual making of the design of the quilt itself. Thank you for explaining that. That definitely makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I now have a better understanding of the way that folklore African African-American studies and quilting all kind of come together. So related, we read that your research focuses on racial dynamics as they surface in folklore in popular culture. So now we have a better understanding of what you mean by that. So tying it back to the, we're curious what your feedback would be on how you think it affects the racial tension in this country and kind of what we're going through right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think I started out wanting to reveal and, and a lot of my work is focused on revealing more about everyday life in black culture, but African-Americans have had to grapple with the way white Americans treat us and deal with us and sort of structural racism and so forth. And that often gets manifest actually in white folklore in the kinds of slurs that become associated with blacks, with the stereotypes that will frame the black experience, the same tools of folklore that I can use to celebrate a beautiful quilt that a woman has made, or a man is made every day. White life can be populated by negative stereotypes about blacks stories that, that they tell, um, most recently, obviously the kinds of conspiracy theories, the kinds of rumors, you know, my, my recent work on Obama is really all a largely white folk lore about black people. And there you see enormous evidence of the, of the racial tensions from the moment that he emerged prominently in the sort of mindset of people who were hardcore political junkies, which most people would traced to 2004 when he gave the nominating speech for John Kerry at the democratic national convention, the rumors and the innuendo about him started within the weeks following that
Speaker 2:[inaudible] yeah, I think I actually read something that you published that was talking about, you know, it was a combination of factors, but the fact that he kind of little known before the election kind of set off this huge media frenzy of conspiracy theories and things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think it's the work I did in, I heard it through the grapevine focused on rumors and legends within the black community that were ways in which again, lots of scholars at that juncture had written books and articles, particularly contemporary legends as though there weren't, they didn't exist in the black community. And so I can remember taking coursework and so forth and reading books that said, you know, this is a white phenomenon and so forth. And I knew from my own experience that that wasn't the case. So, you know, my, like I said, my book, I heard it through the grapevine and then whispers on the color line. You know, my focus there was on beliefs that reflected the way in which some African Americans. And again, you've got to watch that tendency to generalize made sense of the world around them and made sense of the messages they were receiving from, from white society and the way that the way they interpreted the order of who has power and who doesn't have power and how much power people have, and, and the extent of that power. So, you know, that, that was the first two, the first, the first, the first couple of efforts there. And then with the later work with Obama, it's completely, you know, it's almost completely flipped, right? Because these are the things that are circulating in near exclusively white communities around, around why he was, why it was inappropriate for him to be president, uh, why it was offensive for him to be president, why it was un-American for him to be president, you know, with a series of beliefs from the fact that he wouldn't wear a flag pin or salute the flag or sing the national Anthem, or was Muslim by birth was born in Kenya or Indonesia
Speaker 2:Intended to inflicting Bola on American soldiers so that they would kill off other white Americans, you know, was conspired with the Italian leadership in 2016 to manipulate American voting machines in 2020. So that Joe Biden would be elected presidents. You know, it goes, it goes from flag pins, you know, to Q Anon. So, yeah, that is quite a timeline as he and I were talking about this, we actually, I came across like a Venn diagram of all the different Obama conspiracy theories. So the only two, I feel like I was really privy to being a Caucasian are, um, that he is not born in the United States. He's not an American citizen and that he's a radical Muslim. Those were the two that I remember being like, okay, I have no idea who's circulating this and where it's coming from, but when you lay it out like that, it does make sense. It was, you know, presumably, you know, coming from a place of fear or unfamiliarity or, or, um, that sort of thing. And, um, some white American households, I guess. And that's kind of what started the avalanche. How about UV? Were there anything you remember when Obama was kind of new on the scene?
Speaker 4:Basically, it was just, I just, I just remember, especially once he was elected president that I just couldn't turn on like certain news stations without a hearing, you know, constant negativity, you know, to the extent that when I was working as a nurse, you know, some patients that were from other countries would actually say to me like, wow, you know, I can't believe, like they're saying that about the president on the television. And I said, yes, you know, it's, it is very unfortunate. Um, so they, they actually thought that, I guess the America that, you know, everyone once believed in like, Oh, it's such a, you know, such a great country to hear them talk about a black president that way who was newly elected, hadn't even had a chance to prove himself. That was just being denigrated like daily. It was just, I think it was unbelievable to many people in the world, you know, not just African-Americans
Speaker 2:Z. Do you remember, I'm curious to know if you remember when he was being considered a possible candidate for president that sort of 2006 to 2008 period, maybe even 2005. Do you remember members of the black community who didn't want him to run? Because they were afraid he'd be assassinated?
Speaker 4:Honestly, I don't remember that particularly when he was running, but I do remember that once he was elected. Yeah. That was like, and you know, it's really weird because I, I think I may have heard it like a couple of times from like random people, not even like my close friends or anything, but then like then when I went to so close friend, they would like say the same thing. And I'm like, yeah, you think that too? And then like random African-Americans that I ran into thought that, and then my close circle of people also started to believe the same thing was like, well, it happened to Dr. King for those who don't agree with what I'm about to do, it happened to Malcolm X. But I'm just saying that, you know, typically when prominent black leaders have risen up, things just happen to happen to them is not like it's a conspiracy theory. It's more like this is what actually happened. And so our belief is that, why can't it happen again?
Speaker 3:I think it's interesting though, you know, in terms of this topic of, of sort of race in the 21st century and where we are in DeVry thing, he talks about it in promised land in his biography. And Michelle talks about it and becoming that they really struggled with potential black voters on this issue. And they had to say things like Michelle would say to political consultants did and, and, and, and to other people, Oh, we'll look, you know, he could just, he could get shot cricket, crossing the street, you know, he could, you know, if he's a black man, he could get killed anytime. So, you know, let him run for PR you know, it's, it's not any more likely or less likely because he's running for president. And when I was writing that part of my book, I said, how do I, this, that this is something, no white candidate, no white candidates partner has to assuage people, Oh, look, he could get killed anytime. You know, he's, he's a young white person in America, or she's a young white person in America, you know, that they're subject to random violence at any given moment. So why not let them run for presents like a whole level of an issue that is absent. I think from the considerations of, you know, people rooted in a journey of, uh, other candidates for president
Speaker 4:Kamala Harris, similarly with, you know, I believe I heard some rumors about that as well, and that she may have even had for a vice-president that her, her security detail may have started sooner as opposed to other vice-presidents.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It did throw a bomb. It did for her too. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I, in my, you know, and all my whiteness took issue with our Kamala Harris was that, um, I read, you know, things saying Indian, she can't face she's Indian because Indian people are like, you're not Indian, you know, you're, you're black. And then she can't say she's black. And they're like, no, you're Indian. I mean, what a world we in. I, yeah,
Speaker 2:That was something that struck me about, about the most recent election was just, it was just, I guess, a disarming tactic, you know, for people that weren't comfortable. And that was the response just to kind of turn it on its head and start discussions. And, um, I guess it was effective in that regard because it got to me, so kind of along similar lines, we're talking about things I've heard through the grapevine things of these heard being in two different races. So what do you think had accounts for the fact that some Caucasians and probably, you know, even some of the people you worked with, aren't aware of the same conspiracy theories that circulate among people of color. I know you've kind of already mentioned this, but in like a, in a sentence, how do you feel like that happens
Speaker 3:Part of what you were saying before, about how few of the ones from the Venn diagram you knew part of why you didn't know them. Isn't just, it isn't just that you're white, it's the, it's the networks that you're in, right? It's the, it's where you touch the kind of materials that, that I was looking at our own are only going to be privy to people who are in those conversations, right. Who were on those websites in the first place. Although, I mean, one of the most fertile grounds for me for finding material is in the comments section after one of the Obamas has been on television or interviewed somewhere. So we're given a speech or something like that. So if you go to Michelle Obama's speech at the democratic national convention, both of her last speeches, and you go to a YouTube posting of that, and then you click newest comments. First on YouTube, you will inevitably get the anti Michelle lore, which accuses her, of being, um, a man, you know, she's trans she's transgender, and they will refer to her as Michael. And they'll talk about evidence in, yeah, she was born Michael Robinson. They'll, they'll talk about evidence of male anatomy and so forth, but you've gotta be somebody who, and I don't recommend this. You've gotta be somebody who, who, um, who, who, who knows how to scroll those comments and knows, you know, and knows what to look for. One of the things that I, um, have found with, um, many aspects of, of doing folklore research in many folklorist have this experience as well. It's fairly common to us. So we're all we're explaining and we're doing interviews and we're doing this kind of thing often. We'll say, you know, I've never heard of that until I did that interview with you. Or I read that book and now I see it every week. I wasn't privy to this before, but now, now it's so common. Even, even quilts people said, I never thought I'd even seen a quilt until I heard of your book. And now I realize how many people I know have them and how many gifts there are of the minute, you know? Um, you know, it's just another whole, uh, exposure level.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm actually one of those people. Now I'm thinking about quilts that were made for my myself, but I was a baby and all that stuff. Very cool. Um, so I have one last question for you, and then I'm going to hand it over to Z these days, like you said, you know, conspiracy theories, I guess social media is taking over in a lot of ways. The relationship between social media and conspiracy theories is something I came across, you know, when I was preparing for this and I read an article that president Obama, I think he published late last year in the Atlantic. And he says, he thinks they're the single biggest threat to democracy as it relates to social media and conspiracy theories. How do you, how do you view that? Do you agree?
Speaker 3:I know no one of the things that social media and the internet, the coincidence factor of that is kind of an interesting one. You know, I wrote two books about this before anybody ever had a Twitter account. So these things have existed, have existed and have affected how people behave, how people vote, you know, the, the discord, the, the racial discord of the 1960s and 1970s. And, um, you know, what were called riots, then we're all fueled by rumors and conspiracy theories. Nobody had a Twitter account, right? So the, these things have always existed. I will say that it's remarkably expedited in our world today because of the ease with which people can promote and disseminate them, the anonymity that you can get. So people can put something in a post after, you know, Michelle Obama speech at the, at the democratic national convention, and they can have a quirky handle and they can get away with it in a way that if they had to encourage other people to agree with them, they would have to out themselves, if they were doing it, you know, in church, on a bus in the workplace, they'd have to say me with my name, who, you know, I believe Michelle Obama was born in a man. I believe, you know, all of these, these things and risk risk, the, um, refugee, you know, possible reputational harm. You don't have to do that with social. You don't necessarily have to do that with social media and so forth. Although it's remarkable to me, how many people just do insane things with their own names and, and with their own identities. And, um, you know, it comes back to haunt them. You are right on, well, thank you so much. I'm going to, I'm going to hand it over to Z for now.
Speaker 4:So Dr. Pet in your book, I heard it through the grapevine. You told the story of how back in 1985 six-ish you were teaching at a university of Massachusetts, and there was a conspiracy that came up related to church's chicken. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and why that made such an impact on you that you said, you know what, I need to do more with this, and I need to do research behind that and look into other conspiracies.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I was, you know, right out of graduate school at the time. Um, as I said in the conversation earlier, I had rumors and legends had been a component of what I had studied. And I'd read, you know, the books in the articles. I we'd had a guest lecture who had come from Scandinavia and taught a whole course on, on, on legends for us and in graduate school. And they were more so than, I think other scholars folklorist have been traditionally very attuned to the black experience in America, uh, because it's long been recognized by white folklorist that this was a way that the black experience could be, could be rendered. Anyway, when my student told the story about church's fried chicken being owned by the KU Klux Klan, and that the chicken contained something in it, sterilized black men, and that this was a mode of genocide. It hit all of the markers of rumors and legends that I had studied, but I knew no folklorist was looking at it. And part of what you want to do when you're a young scholar is carve out your turf, right? You need to carve out what, what you, you know, that originality, that creative thing that nobody else is talking. So I went back to this and I said, I better make sure nobody's done it. And we're a very collegial group. But back in those days, you either had to pick up the phone and call somebody. But more likely what I did was write letters. I wrote letters to like the six or seven leading edge and scholars and said, is anybody working on church's chicken? And nobody was, and everybody said, Hey, if this is great, don't have to attack. And so I, um, and then as I was finishing that one, the, um, beliefs about the Atlanta child killer came up and then that we were on the, the early days of, of AIDS, uh, the early days of crack. Um, and how crack cocaine, um, was decimating urban areas and explanations for that were coming up. I found a lot, lots of, um, information as well. So that's really how I got started.
Speaker 4:Wow. And you know, that they really speaks to, like you said, that, that, that time period as well, that it seems like, and I don't know if this is true, but conspiracies seem to float around each other in a specific time period. So like you had several in that time period, and now I feel like there'll be several in this time period. So maybe each time period has its own legends and rumors and things like that. Do you find that it's really a weight? Is it some of it's rooted in truth? I'm sure. But is it also a way to try and understand maybe the culture at that particular moment?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. And there are a wide range of things that fall into this category. So, you know, you can take something like church's fried chicken being owned by the KU Klux Klan and containing a magic ingredient that sterilizes black male leaders. And I can, you know, I can have scientists, you know, critique the chicken and make sure there's nothing in there. I can trace the ownership of church's chicken. You know, I can do all of the things that discredit that as a truth, but part of what's going on there, I would argue
Speaker 4:Is
Speaker 3:Fast-food pride. Chicken company has had rumors or legends associated with it. And ambivalence about fast food and an ambivalence about fried food and particularly chicken. You know, a colleague of mine wrote a book about, about effect, the affection we have for home cooked chicken. There's a, a truth that's underlying that people are like, it's not the best thing for me to be spending my money on NAS produce fried food. And it's not the KU Klux Klan that's benefiting from it, but it's not a black person either. I mean, when you get to the corporate hierarchy of church's chicken, you know, it's, it's white basis better there. So switched hands so many times, I'm not even current on who owns it. I could have told you back in the day, but, but that's part of what's going on. There is that it's a way in which people are saying, you know, it's probably not a good idea for me to eat this in terms of the, something like the proliferation of crack cocaine in urban areas. That is a really, really dense, you know, that's a really dense, uh, topic and what happens in San Francisco versus what happens in New York and Detroit and Philadelphia with how the drugs got. There are, you know, it's not necessarily the same story over and over again. In, in, in all of those situations, there's not a lot of evidence to suggest a premeditated plot, which is what some people imagine a conference room with, you know, white power brokers sitting around the table and a Blackboard going, let's do genocide by bringing drugs from South America. And we'll have a network that rebukes it. Like, like there's not a lot of evidence that, that happened. There's evidence that controlling the spread of drugs in black areas was never a priority. It was never, um, it's where law enforcement dollars were going to be wisely invested where treatment programs are. We're, we're, we're, we're, we're going to surface. And there's one of the ways in which I collected that more often from people who would go well. Yeah, I know it's not true. I'm dealing with 13 and 14 year olds who I don't want to pick up the crack pipe the first time. So if I tell them just don't do drugs or, you know, it's not good for you that doesn't work. If I tell them the man wants you to do it, if I tell you you're fulfilling, Oh, white Clark, you know, white people want to keep you down. Some of them will pick up that pipe the first time. Some of them that will be that's a, that's a politically acceptable appear, respected space. They can be in to say, I'm not going to fulfill the white man's fantasy of, of black subjugation. Um, that that's in a more effective story to tell in that situation than you could overdose. And, you know, all of the, all of the, what we would consider, what some people would consider, the more legitimate reasons, you know, not to, not to, uh, not to experiment in, in drugs.
Speaker 4:That's interesting that you say that. Um, because when I first thought of folklore myself, I thought of the storytelling component of my, I think my grandmother said that like her grandparents, when they spoke to her, they, they never really gave you a direct answer, that there were a lot of like metaphors and insinuations, or they tell you a story. And then you had to gleam the information from the story and kind of try and figure it out. And then subsequently like that my grandmother would do the same thing to like my mother's generation and her siblings. And, you know, instead of saying like, don't have sex with before marriage or something, they come up with some type of story on chastity or, you know, just something, but it was never like direct information. So I feel like that's probably probably goes way back in the way that generations used to tell stories that almost like the Bible, like, you know, you can read the Bible one time 20 times and you will get something different each time. So I wonder if you find that too, um, with the folklore. So my, my next question was as the member of the association of African and African American folklorist and as a professor, do you feel as if there is an equal representation of folklore by African-Americans presented in education?
Speaker 3:No. Um, and I think this is, this is something we've long struggled with. Folklore is one of those fields. Unfortunately, I think, you know, everybody is privileges their own, their, their, their own heart, right? So everybody believes, you know, in, in, in what they, what they study folklore tends to be one of those fields that you don't get to until you get to college. And then not even all colleges and universities have offerings. So we don't ever encounter anyone in my field who says, you know, very few, I think the other people I know who said, I always knew I wanted to be a folklorist their fathers or mothers were professors of folklore, because nobody hears about this in high school. I'm reading a book now by a black biologist and his mother was a high school biology teacher. So he, you know, he was a to biology, you know, from high school, you know, people go into biology, you know, from, from high school folklore, you sort of have to find it in college. And then it's in the, you know, some places it's in the humanities someplace, it's in social sciences, lots of African-American first-generation students are encouraged to do more professionally oriented kinds of degrees that will make them engineers or lawyers or doctors, you know, folk people, you know, what do you mean? You go out, you go around the country interviewing quilters. You can make a living doing that during the black person who's gone through. They're like, wait a minute. You know, we don't want you, you're not going to be like, dependent upon us for money or anything party, you know, you need to, you know, and it's hard to explain to people that yes, actually you can make a living doing it. So we struggle to attract more young African-Americans incoming president of the American folklore society is a black woman. And, um, I think that, that, it's very important. It's very important part, uh, thing to her to, to see what we can do to just try to make some more inroads there.
Speaker 4:That's awesome because these days there's so much that, I mean, kids can be literally anything. I mean, you know, the sky really is the limit and there are many more professions. I feel like then there were previously, you know, based on evil, evolving, you know, with different careers and professions, it's just more that we know now. So kids can do more. And at an earlier age, exposing them to different things also can encourage and inspire them. But, um, after 40 years, I want to mention something referencing statutes, because that was something that came up after George Floyd's murder and the protests around statues and, um, history and whether or not it was, you know, device of having historical statues up of people who actually did not contribute in a positive way to American history. Um, so my question is after 40 years, um, a bust of a Confederate general and first grand wizard of the KU Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford, Forrest, which was seated at the Tennessee state Capitol was finally removed in July of 2020 after protests and petitions. Do you feel that this movement is permanent or are we just experiencing the aftermath of George Floyd's murder and what do you feel needs to be done to make lasting changes in the way history is portrayed?
Speaker 3:I don't know if either of you are gardeners and I have to make sure I, I hate that the name of this plant, it has an, has an, a nationality associated with it, but do you know what Japanese not wheat is? It's an invasive plant. People planted it in lots of places a long time ago. And if you don't have a regimen for keeping it back, it will take over your garden. It will take over your guard. You know, you'll think you have the Japanese not weed under control. And then it just takes over. And I, I think racism is like that. People will think that, you know, it's been very cyclical. People thought people thought at the end of the civil war, we've got black. You know, there were blacks in Congress at the end of the civil war and black colleges developed, and people said, we are on the road to racial parody. They were saying that in the late 1860s in the early 1870s until radical reconstruction came along and Jim Crow comes along and everything gets shoved, it gets shoved back. They said it again at the end of world war II, look at these black soldiers that come back. We can't possibly oppress people who have defended America. So loyally, you know, they we've got, you know, and again, white supremacy surfaces that gets, that gets pushed back. End of world war two, all of the civil rights activities of the 1950 sixties and seventies are the, okay, this is the moment, you know, we're going to, they kept updating the look of aunt Jemima, you know, and saying, Oh no, we can't have a mammy on the cover. We'll make her look like a black home economist. You know, you know, this, this kind of thing. So all of these things happen, but then it's, it just keeps and you know, it comes back the forces that want it to come back are strong and resilient. And we got it again in the nineties, we just had the anniversary of the Rodney King trial. And that was another moment after that, that people said, okay, you know, we have to change the curriculums in schools. And, you know, we have to make places in board rooms. You know, when the election of Obama people started using the term pop, that's supposed to be a post-racial moment, surely things were going to change. And now, you know, it's the aftermath of, of George Floyd. So the forces that want to mitigate racism have to be as strong and as organized and as persistent as the forces that don't, you know, you just, you can't like ignore your garden. You just have to stay on it. And it's not easy work. It's very hard. There's a fatigue that comes to many people from always having to be the warrior for always having to be on it. You know, I, I had a black colleague at Berkeley who, a black female colleague who said when she first came to the Berkeley faculty, they're like, Oh, this is good. You know, we've got this black woman, we're gonna put her on the hiring committee and we're going to put her on the admissions committee and we're going to, you know, do all of this work with, you know, she's, she's so great that she's coming. And she said, is there a committee where the faculty get to contribute to the look of the campus and the architecture and the landscaping? And they said, yeah. And she said, could I be on that one place? I can't even a time when I'm just, I need a space where I can do something that, you know, I do this work of race in my scholarship and in my classroom, could I just be on the committee that decides, you know, where the next parking lots are going to go and you know what we're going to do with the garden, just please,
Speaker 4:You know, that's really profound. That's a great analogy. And you're absolutely right. I think, um, some of the earlier discussions that Jess and I had when we initially launched the podcast, um, were actually about that very thing was the momentum behind the George Floyd murder and COVID, and you know, is, you know, like that trifecta seemed to be like a time when things could really change. But that momentum, we kept saying like, you know, is this meant going to always be there because if it isn't there, then are we going to go back to the norm? You know, uh, the status quo where even my husband and I sometimes discuss that, you know, these businesses that are, you know, fortune 500 companies that are like, Oh, you know, we stand for DEI. And so now we have these boards and, you know, we, we have guests come in and they talk about race inequality and this, that, and the other, but then, you know, add any black board members or you add one as what, a token or you'll have interns. So like we had a recent, our first episode for this season, um, it's called a new Walker from, um, she went to Spelman and she's an author now also. And she was just saying that, you know, like we still need historically black universities because like, all of this has happened, but there's this like, but at the end of it in the butt, is, are we going to have the momentum to keep going to keep having these conversations? Are you going to just hire, you know, black interns from historically black universities, but then you don't actually hire them on to work. And then once you hire them on, are you gonna just keep them at that level? Or are you actually going to promote them up the chain, just like you would, if they were white, like, are you going to do these things? Are you just saying that you're going to do these things and holding, holding them accountable, holding companies accountable, and Justin and I have also discussed that really a large part of it is, is allyship. It's not a battle that African-Americans can fight solo. It's going to have to be like a United front and it's going to have to be, you know, people of color. And it's going to be people that are not of color saying that enough is enough. And that's enough is enough with the statues. Enough is enough with the microaggressions. Uh, enough is enough with, you know, saying that there equality, but then not having fair representation. So, you know, how do you feel as far as like race inequality? Like how, I don't think it's fair to ask you, how do we change the narrative? Cause that's like a huge question. I think that you gave a great example of how we have to be as strong as those who are pushing the race card constantly. Is there a way, is there a way outside of black lives matters? You know, is there a way that we can create that Creek? We can create that on a community level.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Even just normalizing the conversation. Yeah. I think what you said about allyship is important again, in my manuscript on Obama, you know that at the end you have to sort of, you have the obligatory, what, what can we do about this chapter? You know, how do we stop this in the future and all of that. And one of the things that I talk about there is there's, there's a real interesting moment in the whole birther, um, Muslim debate about Obama. When John McCain in 2008 was approached by a white woman, volunteer for him, who said she didn't want to vote for Obama because Richie mended a Muslim and became, took the microphone from her and said, well, no, actually he's not, you know, he's, he's, that's not true, but I don't want to run against him because of his politics and did this whole thing. And there's a similar moment in the Trump campaign in 2016, where somebody yells out, Obama's a Muslim and Trump gets him to repeat it. And he eggs the crowd on. And I make the point in my book that McCain did not get elected and Trump did. And that it wasn't, but it's not enough that became, it's not enough that McCain, um, took the microphone away. Um, that's great. They kept mentioning it with his funeral and everything, but what if both political parties said they would be responsible for debunking the rumors of the other one? So what if the democratic party, because now, you know, it's effected it. What if the democratic party said, we will take the stand, we will be the ones to say, no, you shouldn't vote for him because of these principles, because we see these platforms differently and, and vice versa. So that it's not, it's not the pro Obama people or Obama himself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that, um, one of the first things I read actually during the beginning of COVID and, you know, kind of like the height of George flight and everything, I think it was Don on the podcast. And I know I've referenced it before, but he says something about don't ever ask a black person to explain to you, you know, why there's racism in the country or, um, how do we fix it? Because you're putting the burden back on them. And I had like an aha moment. Like, I've definitely done that to my frenzy here. And I, I hopefully we don't make that mistake again. But, um, you know, I think that was really important for me in terms of understanding the delicate nature of a conversation, you know, but also it was like, uh, okay, I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, you know? And, um, Robin de Angelo, you know, the other person that I reference a lot talks about that too, you know, white people Caucasians kind of need to be up for that. And as students of anything, you know, you're, we're learning as we go, but the accountability piece is important. I think in the allyship, you know, like you said,
Speaker 3:Any closing thoughts, Dr. Pat? No. I think what you're attempting to do with the podcast is admirable. I think this is the part of the solution, actually conversations like this and persistence, and then the application, what people have
Speaker 2:Learned that, so that your audience, you know, what they hear from you and, and, and, and putting that to work. I think that, um, you know, that's, that's a part of how we move forward. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. We had Dr. Patricia Turner on here, go check out her book. Um, once it's published about the rumors and conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, and hopefully we'll be speaking with her again soon. And I think actually we're going to call the flood and you kind of named it in the very beginning of Laura and Rachel in the 21st century. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have you on, and thank you listeners again for listening to this.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to awakened in America. If you enjoyed today's podcast, be sure to subscribe and leave a review. You can also find us on Instagram at awakened in America. That's awakened underscore in underscore America and remember be mindful, be grateful. And most of all be you.