The Truth About Pan Africanism and Black Nationalism

A Harlem childhood can hold two truths at once: the sting of violence and the spark of genius. With Agyei Tyehimba, we trace how Sugar Hill bookstores, elders, and family stories forged a mind hungry for history—and how that hunger turned into real wins, from campus reforms to community institutions. IJ walks us through the leap from reading to organizing: photocopied flyers, door-knocking, and a relentless year-long push that forced a university to restore and respect African American Studies. Along the way, safety upgrades and transit changes followed—proof that when Black students lead, entire campuses benefit.

We then zoom out to the global map. Agyei Tyehimba defines Pan-Africanism as a clear, uncompromising stance: anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and committed to uniting African-descended people across borders to build political power, economic independence, and cultural confidence. He lifts up the line from Henry Sylvester Williams and C. L. R. James to Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Kwame Nkrumah, making the case for a living strategy—trade, security, education, and banking that serve our communities. Black nationalism complements that vision at home: community control, cooperative economics, independent schools, and the disciplined self-defense that has protected leaders and neighborhoods for generations.

Threaded through all of it is a methodology: verify before you act, think critically, and let love anchor your politics. IJ calls ideology a raft—something to cross with, not a weight to carry forever. Race-first does not mean race-only; smart coalitions are vital when authoritarian currents rise. If you’ve been searching for a conversation that blends story, scholarship, and strategy—and that treats freedom as a practice, not a slogan—you’ll feel at home here.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find these conversations. Your support helps grow a community that studies, builds, and acts together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:10

What's going on, everybody out there? It's Ron Brown, MMT, the People's Fitness Professional, aka Soul, Brother Number One, Reporting for Duty. Peace to everybody out there. My mic is a little off right now. It's all good. Sometimes this happens, technical difficulties. But anyway, thank y'all for coming out this evening. I really appreciate you. Um, brother, how do you pronounce your name? That was the thing I was gonna ask you before we got on.

SPEAKER_02: 0:37

It's IJ. IJ Taeimba.

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

IJ Taeimba. Brother IJ Taeimba in the building with us this evening. Brothers from Harlem, New York. Am I correct? Yes, sir. Brothers from Harlem, New York. Now, uh, before we go into today's discussion about Pan-Africanism and black nationalism, um, I want to go into your history. Let's go let's break that down. Where were you born and raised?

SPEAKER_02: 1:07

Born and raised in Harlem, New York. Uh, people would refer to it as Hamilton Heights. We back in the day, we just call it Sugar Hill. I'm very I'm very close to City College. I'm very close to 145th. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23

All right, so growing up on Sugar Hill, man, uh that's a that's a whole other conversation. You know what I mean? But let's let's go a little bit into it. Like I grew up in Harlem myself. Peace, peace, peace, peace, y'all. Thank you. Thank you for everyone viewing, coming out this evening. I really appreciate y'all. Uh oh, before we go into this whole discussion, let's throw on the commercial. One second.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47

Peace, family, and welcome to NYP Talk Show. This is more than a podcast, it's a conscious platform rooted in truth and culture. From Pan-African teachings, hip hop culture, current events, health, wellness, occult, and much more. Our mission is to reclaim our narrative and uplift the African diaspora with real stories and real conversations. Support us through Super Chats, during live shows, donations on Cash App, GoFundMe, Patreon, or Bud Sprout, and by repping our official merch. Available on our website and right here on YouTube's merch shelf. Every dollar, every super chat, every hoodie builds the movement. This is NYP Talk Show.

SPEAKER_01: 2:31

All right, we're back, we're back. So what I wanted to mention was um, you know, being that like I'm from Harlem myself. If you grew up in Harlem, you grew up with pan-African or black nationalists uh not only teaching, but images in the schools, all around you. Um it's it's Harlem's tradition, right? So you growing up, of course, you saw all this, right? And how did it shape your your uh perception now as a grown man?

SPEAKER_02: 3:06

That is that's a weighty question, but that's a very important first question, to be honest with you. I think that grounds the whole interview. Uh so I was born in '68. So that means that I was a child in the 70s and a teen and then a young adult in the 80s. So that's what I mostly remember and know. So Harlem was interesting at that time. It was a kind of a is a famous novel, and it starts off, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And that's Harlem. Harlem had incredible ugliness, dope fiends, violence, get your chain snatched on the train, all types of craziness going on, and yet it had great beauty. The problem is the ugliness was all pervasive. I said in a documentary about um AZ Alpha Rich Porter that my mother and father had to send me all the way to 77th Street to go to school. We had to go all the way to 67th Street to buy food. But if I wanted guns, drugs, I could go right around the corner. So it's funny, you could you could be in a place that has great beauty, but because the ugliness is everywhere you turn, the beauty is in spots. If you don't have an appetite for that beauty, or no one points you in the direction of the beauty, you may live in a beautiful place and never see the beauty. So we got Africans, new Africans in Harlem that never been to the Schoenberg Library. You see, if I'm trying to make my point, uh never never been to the Audubon Theater. Uh, never been, you know, so this is what I'm trying to say. Never seen African dance. So we went to African dance class. So so I just want to make that, and that's not to bang on our people, but that's to say that's that's the per paradox that it was to grow up in Harlem. You could be around all the ugliness, and you could slide off into those nooks and crannies of beauty. And a lot of that had to do with what your parents exposed you to, and a lot of that had to do with your own hunger. What was you hungering for? You know, you tend to find what you're looking for. So when I was coming up, that's what it was. I was fortunate enough that my father was conscious, and my mother coming up from the south from uh Montgomery, Alabama, had a mother who was involved with the Montgomery Improvement Association, so, and whose church pastor was Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the best friend of Martin Luther King.

unknown: 5:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 5:56

My dad is coming from that urban, played in the Ruckers, Harlem swag, and he got to hear Malcolm speak personally on 116th, 125th. So I had the blend of that kind of that civil rights sensibility with more of that hardcore black nationalist Pan-Africanist sensibility. So for me, yeah, I went to 125th brother. I walked all in blocks, I talked to the book vendors, I bought vote, saved up my little money, uh, bought books and had long discussions with the book vendors who tended to be brothers that were what? Formerly in the Republic of New Africa, were in the Nation of Islam, Revolutionary Action Movement. So I'm getting a political education there. I'm going to uh Liberation Bookstore. I'm meeting Una Mozak, the proprietor, who's a stone, who was, rest in power, a Stone Cold Revolutionary sister who took me in like her low, her little grandson, and gave me books and talked with me and gave me the history. Her father was a steamship captain for Garvey's Black Star Steamship line. So it so I was fortunate in that way, my beginnings and the fact that I was kind of given, I was, my mind was sensitized to be on that frequency to have, to look for that, to want and to love and to look for that type of consciousness. And so I many times found my, I found things. So like First World Alliance, it's probably in middle school when I started going to First World Alliance. That was on um sometimes at City College, but mostly on 145th and convent, this little Lutheran church, paid like a dollar or two, and you got to hear John Harry Clark, MS Wilson, Maremba Ani, all the heavy, the heavyweights in um nationalism and plan-African thought. So in that, in that respect, I was blessed. Uh, not so much because of myself, but because of the people around me that kind of made my mind sensitive to wanting to know about blackness and wanting to stand up. And so therefore, I found these different little places, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 8:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 8:05

Did I answer your question?

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So now um what school did you go to? High school, starting high school.

SPEAKER_02: 8:13

Went to Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx.

SPEAKER_01: 8:16

Okay, okay. Did you play any sports in there?

SPEAKER_02: 8:19

I played football.

SPEAKER_01: 8:21

Right, that's the football.

SPEAKER_02: 8:22

As a captain, a co-captain. I tried track, but track um beat me down, man. I I know I have a new appreciation for track. I thought track was a sizzy thing, but a brother challenged me on the football team that ran track too. And I did it, and I just I come out from those work, those practices, brother. I would go to my house, I'd wake up the next morning with all my clothes on, like exhausted. So my mother was like, You can't do that. Sorry. It's getting away your work, you can't do that sport. So I stayed with the football. Um, I was also on a student council with Cardinal Hayes, too. So I had kind of a leadership experience there as well, in terms of that answer. And sports is leadership too, you know? So yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 9:07

For sure, for sure. So now growing up in Harlem, you saw all this, you saw the you saw the good, you saw the bad. These things shaped you. You go to Cardinal Hayes, and then so going into college, um, um, um, so what did you major in at college?

SPEAKER_02: 9:22

I majored in sociology. Uh, I had a uh a minor in African American studies.

unknown: 9:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 9:29

And um, if if if I had the right advisors, I might have had a dual major in uh if I knew better, I would have had a dual major in uh sociology and uh psychology. I took so many psychology classes. One person's like, man, if you took about four more classes, you'd have another degree in it. But so that's the importance of having the proper, hey Ishmael Bay, peace to God. Uh that's the importance of having proper advisement.

SPEAKER_01: 9:55

Okay, okay. Ish and Abdul, then Ish, uh my brother, he says you're a living legend. That's peace, man.

SPEAKER_02: 10:04

Oh man, Ishmael, man. To hear Brother Ishmael tell it, uh you know, I I I love my brother Ishmael. I think he's I and I and I appreciate his his love and how he shows love. Me and brother go all the way back to Syracuse.

SPEAKER_01: 10:21

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02: 10:22

So I know Brother Ishmael. What? Ishmael uh our daughters went to the same uh all black daycare in Syracuse? What was that? Uh that'd have been we had to we're going back to the 80s.

SPEAKER_01: 10:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: 10:35

Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_01: 10:36

So you went to Syracuse?

SPEAKER_02: 10:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, sir.

SPEAKER_01: 10:41

Okay, okay. So, so uh you go to school you go to school. So, what do you do with your degree and things like that? What was your journey as a professional?

SPEAKER_02: 11:26

Well, the thing is, what's important for people to understand about me is the things that made me who I am are the that that Harlem experience that I already talked about briefly. But also when I went to Syracuse, now remember, all this time I'm an autodidact. All this time I'm kind of self-taught. I'm reading this stuff, I'm reading, reading on my own, right? There's no black studies in high school. So I'm just reading. But once I get to Syracuse, now I'm able to take all that consciousness and now I become an activist. It's a whole nother level. It's one thing to read and know. It's another thing to challenge sites of oppression, to organize people, to do rallies, knock on doors, make phone calls. You know, there wasn't no social media. So I couldn't just put up a post like everybody meet up at the student center. Back then, you took a piece of paper, you wrote meet in the student center at 12 noon, and you Xeroxed it a thousand times, and you gave it to people, and they passed them out on the campus. You know, so so it's that part is very important that I can't skip. What shaped me was that early consciousness and that very strong activist experience. My queen teases me, says, Man, you always talk about Syracuse. That's a and I think it's because that was so foundational to who I am and how I see the world. Because why? If I'm the president of the black student union, which I was, that means I'm bringing in people to speak. That means I'm picking them up at the airport, I'm bringing them back to the hotel, I'm taking them to the venue, I'm taking them out to dinner along with my board. That means I'm kicking it with Khaled Muhammad, Kwame Toure, Nikki Giovanni, Susan Taylor, uh Sister Soldier, Ross Baraka. Right? Okay, so uh Joe, uh um uh Naeem Akbar. So I'm getting I'm getting some real, I'm plugging into some power right there, you know. And some of those people became my my lifelong jugnage, like uh Dr. Khalil, Minister Farrakhan, um got close in the beginning. So that's important to say, that part. So I guess the way I would use, I say I use my my training in college, I guess, is um sociology teaches you to understand social trends, why groups behave the way they behave? What forces lead a group to cower under oppression? What forces lead a group to resist their oppression? Why do oppressed people behave the way they do? What are the effects of oppression, white supremacy, on black people? Why do we act? Why do we think the way we think? Why do we say we want this, but we're not moving in accordance with what we say? We want, well, we're not, we're not like some type of uh uh uh biological misfits. Their sociology explains all of that, right? You get rewards, you get punished. A lot of black people want to do a whole lot of stuff, but they know, they see what happened to Mega Evers, and they heard about what happened to Fred Hampton and Brother Malcolm and Dr. King and Khalid Muhammad, uh uh though he was not ruled a homicide, that is very suspicious. So, black people, a lot of black people want to do stuff, but they're scared out their wits. They don't want to die, they don't want to go to jail, they don't want to be a political prisoner for 40, 50 years in the white man's dungeon. So we learn to what? Accommodate. You know, it's like if a person kidnaps you and they doing whatever they want to you, uh, what do you do? You want to live. So you start trying to be nice, you start saying the things they like to hear, you do little things because at this point you're like, well, I don't think I'm ever gonna get out of here, but I want to live, I want to survive. So sociology teacher taught me that our people, if if we knew better, if we knew what they had done to us and were doing, how they are responsible for our miseducation, our malnutrition, our preventable diseases we're dying from every day, our willingness to support white businesses and white people and believe white authorities, and when a black man or woman says it, we don't believe it. That is attributed to that sociology, all the stuff that was done to us, and those are the effects. Because if people don't understand that, brother Ron, they think we're retarded and we're not in the way that we used to use it. We are retarded in the literal way. We've been slowed down. Right? So there's a there's an answer for well, why are kids our why are kids not performing as well? Oh, there's a there's an answer for that. That's what uh Naeem Akbar talks about, Joan's Kenjufu. People that studied this all their lives, they say, well, they were taught that math is beyond our comprehension. Oh no, you can't do no math. Why? Well, math is the source of business acumen. You ain't got math, how much how good a business person you're gonna be? Right? But then if you know the history, the people who first discovered mathematical principles and applied them in any significant way, because you can't make uh a pyramid of Giza or Grand Lodge of Luxor without geometry and trigonometry, right? So this whole thing of Pythagorean theorem, that's a lie. Pythagoras, we know, studied in in what what the white man calls Egypt, which we know is Kemet. We know this now, right? So a lot of these people that we we given praise and honor to got it from our ancestors, and the greatest lie ever told was that we are nothing, have nothing, have done nothing, and can be nothing. That's the greatest lie, and it's the most powerful lie. It got people who whose ancestors people came to learn from. People studied, white, ancient white historians wrote so loftily Herodotus, Ibn Kalduh Calhoun, the Arabic historian, that we are the most handsomest of men and women, the most tallest, the most statuesque, the most knowledgeable. And then you see this, and you say, wait a minute, there's a disconnect. Because we we see the person now who's a crackhead, a drug addict, in and out of jail, robbing and raping, and we don't know what that man you looking at now that's broken down and destitute, no teeth, no clothes, begging for money. Back in the day, he was the man. But something happened to that man and got him the way he was, and that's our story. And so people like me and you, I believe, are trying to remind people the story, man. Don't judge us by the end, the outcome of what you see now, man. We went through a process, right? And we and just as we went through a process to go from here, to go up to here to down here, we can go to a process to go from here and go up here. So that's really what it's about. So I used my information to teach. I became a classroom teacher. And um, we started a school back in 2000, 2000, called Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy, the acronym being Kappa, no affiliation to the fraternity. Um I've done that for a while, and then uh I guess you could say I've also used it to actually organize people. So I've had, as a teacher, I was still involved with community activism and organizing. Still going to uh um what was Brother Altamatic's organization? United African Movement on 126th Street, across from the mosque, Nation of Islam Mosque number seven. Go there for all the meetings, um, very much involved in the community, very much involved in many protests.

SPEAKER_01: 19:47

Um pardon me, I'm gonna cut your wisdom. Now, you said it started in Syracuse, right? Your activism. Now, how long were you in Syracuse? And can you give me some examples of what you started off with and your journey after?

SPEAKER_02: 20:05

So I I was at Syracuse from 86 to 1990, and um and then I lived in Syracuse for about five years and worked there. Um worked close with the Nation of Islam there, um and did a few things in the community there. And then in 1995, I still went off to grad school, but Did I answer your question? I think I answered your question, right? You said, where did how long was I there? What was the other part?

SPEAKER_01: 20:40

Yeah, and and what did you start off with for like your activism?

SPEAKER_02: 20:46

Oh man, well, when I I gotta tell people this, man, because I need them to feel it. Imagine if you spent all your early childhood years hearing from your father about Nat Turner and Malcolm X is the journey, truth. And then you're reading on your own about Malcolm and activism. And then you go to a place where first day there, you go there, and there's a bunch of black students and all black walking down the main street chanting and doing a protest. I felt like somebody dropped me in heaven. That's how I felt, man. I was like, this is um, no way, this is unbelievable. I called home, I was like, dad, they doing A, B, and C, da da da da da. So I joined the Student African American Society, and I started out the way we did back then. Passed out flyers, went to every meeting, asked some questions, soaked up a lot, did a lot of reading, watched all the videos they showed, and we had different activities, and we were heavy in the community. So we did, we gave out food in the community. We did all types of stuff. All types of hardcore, and this is very important. I say this, right? Hardcore organizing. Meaning you had to get up early and you went, you did, you went to the, you're going to this part of Syracuse, you're going to that part of Syracuse. Um, so I became familiar with the brothers that were slinging and all that. And the work, the working class, the people going to church, the barber went to the barbershops. I was a student, but I wasn't one of these students who they're afraid to go in a community, you know. I don't go in a community. I just stay on campus. You know, so that was important. And our I think um we did a quite a, we got a we did a lot of things, man, activist-wise, but the thing that we would be known for most and probably that had the most important um impact was the campaign to resurrect our African-American Studies Department. Also, I want to say we went to the high schools, Nottingham, I forget some of the Corcoran, I forget some of the other ones, and we and we took black students from them high schools and brought them right up to the campus so they could benefit from all those nice facilities that some of their taxpaying dollars, the parents' taxpaying dollars were paying for, if we can be real about it. And so we we um almost like uh a baby student African American Society for the for the youngins. And we brought them to our meetings and we taught them too. So we went to the community, did good work, but the the African American Studies campaign was the big deal. That was a year-long campaign. Our parents' generation fought. And know in the 60s, our people were fighting for black studies on these college campuses. And they won it. But now by the time my generation comes, which is their children's generation in the 80s, we're looking at these black studies departments like, yo, what's going on? The ceiling's falling in, stuff is messed up, is disorganized, we don't have enough professors, we don't have enough classes. This is ridiculous, right? And meanwhile, we see people going to these Greek history classes and all these white history classes, we're like, nah, no, no, no, no. That's not gonna happen like that, right? So we began a campaign and we were militant and we were very non-compromising. I have to say that. So we held people hostage in buildings, administrators where they could not leave. We disrupted traffic in the streets, we uh disrupted their meetings, their um the the white uh so-called American history classes, we disrupted them so that they had to end their classes. They couldn't keep teaching. We disrupted some of the chancellors' meetings, um, took over their meetings. We would get up on the stead, we would come come through, snatch the mic on the chancellor and say, This is an SAS meeting. What you gonna do about our African-American Studies Department? There might be a thousand people there, business owners and stuff. So finally, the university capitulated and uh met and signed off on our 13 demands. And so if people go to the campus now, um, they're gonna, and I'm sure I'm sure the people there now have complaints about it, but if people who came up in the 60s and the 80s go back to the university, they're gonna see a fully refurbished African-American Studies Department with an elevator and, you know, professors, it's a whole different thing. Uh uh MLK library that has won awards since then. When we were there, it was completely disheveled. So I think that's probably the main thing people remember us for. But I want to be clear, we fought for a lot of things. There's a blue light system on that campus. If a young lady's walking on campus late at night, some creep is following her, there's these poles all throughout the campus. She can hit the button, it'll sound off an alarm, it'll go straight to the school safety, they know exactly where she is. It's a blue light, this world, so it's a deterrent. We help fight for that. We help make sure that the buses on the weekends didn't stop at 1 a.m. We made sure they ran longer, and we made sure that they stopped where if the if this if a young lady or a guy lived off campus, and off campus had to be more, a little bit more rural looking. And at nighttime, brother, it's dark. So we made sure that the sister didn't have to wait all the way to the bus stop. If she lived right here, she could say, I want to get off right here, and the bus driver had to stop and let off. And that's what we did. So, you know, you know, people tend to make it seem like all we do impacts only black folk. But you know the history, the civil rights movement benefits everybody in this country, not just black people. And I want to be clear about that. That was the same with us at Syracuse.

SPEAKER_01: 26:41

Okay, okay. Now, uh the brother uh Ishmael Bay said, what valuable knowledge did you obtain from Ivy League Cornell University?

SPEAKER_02: 26:50

Oh man. See, okay, so um I I eventually went to uh became enrolled as a grad student, a master's student in uh the Africana Studies Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. And that that was pivotal, pivotal, pivotal in my life because now I got to be around what we would call today some master teachers. But I always had some master teachers, but now this is a this African Studies and Research Center was special, man. The brother who's who was the founding director, Dr. James Turner, rest in power to him, uh has has produced his as a master teacher. He learned from Dr. John Hood Clark. That was his teacher. Let me start there. But he, all the people that came through this man, and his humility and his grace and elegance and his uh uncompromising nationalist Pan-African position. Kimberly Crenshaw, Scott Brown of UCLA, uh uh Rosa Clementates, there's um Jonathan, Jonathan Fenderson, um, there's just so um sister's name, Leslie Alexander. There's so many people that came through him that have gone on to be great warriors for our people, uncompromising warriors for our people. So he gets utmost respect uh from me and from a whole lot of people. Um he actually convened the sixth uh Pan African Congress in Tanzania because he was so a person that you not many people could say they hated. You know how they say, I don't like this person. He was one of them people that they picked him to do it because they knew that there's a lot of Pan-Africans and nationalists button heads, just like what happens today, if we're honest. But they knew that if they picked him, nobody would have a problem. But he had a way of you know helping people understand, yo, it's not no arrogance here, no ego. This is about being free. That's our whole goal. He kept you on that. So I got for the first time the best resources for my study. I got a guy, and like myself, he was a student activist in college fighting for his Black Studies Department. So it was a lot of synergy. And a man, it was just some beautiful professors there. Um, Brother Ishmael. The knowledge I got was of my writing ability, which was probably good, became went through the roof. Got fine-tuned my ability to research things, my ability to see something, hear something, I jump on something just because I heard it. Don't believe something just because somebody heard it, don't disagree because just because somebody said it. To know the art and science of critical thinking. How do you logically interrogate a person, not emotionally? How do you say, well, that premise, this is your premise. But how you supported that premise is completely faulty. Therefore, your premise is faulty, right? And that's important when it comes to writing journalism, activism, finding out we're mad at this store isn't hiring black people. So we ready to go against the store. These white people doing this. Is anybody gonna do the research to find out if in fact it is a white-owned store?

SPEAKER_03: 30:22

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 30:24

Okay, is anybody gonna do the actual research to find out if what you think is correct is correct? Or do we just do these, we just assume this, right? So, uh, brother Ishmael, uh, uh to your question, critical thinking ability went through the roof, relatively speaking, writing ability went through the roof, and really understanding the and how do I say this? The anatomy of oppression. What does oppression look like? What are its components? How do what how do they move against us publicly and privately? Right? What have our people done in the past to resist uh our different forms of oppression? And also it deepened my analysis, brother Ron, because before that it was all race, it was race, race, black, black. And um, the professors there, um, shout out to Sister I see, Indri Issi Lamumba. She married the cousin of Patrice Lumumba. She was a brilliant, brilliant African, and she was a master educator. She was so, this is what I'm saying about Africa, brother. This is a grad program in the Ivy League. They are very uh selective, very um, could be very condescending. And yet, I didn't have any babysitter for my little three-year-old baby girl Nubia. And she said, bring her right in here. So my I was able to bring my three-year-old daughter in my graduate school class at an Ivy League, which would have never happened anywhere else. Ever. They just said, brother, that's on you. You knew you was coming here, you worked that out. But it was family. So, Brother Ish, it also showed me what love looks like in a political way. You know, not romantic love, but more like, what do we, how do we, how do what does it look like when we say we love each other and we're trying to help each other grow? We make concessions, we we stretch for each other, we accommodate for each other. And so um, those are some of the things. And then, of course, I got in touch with a lot of, I continue to get in touch with a lot of stone cold revolutionaries. So I just, I mean, I don't know, I've just been blessed like that. I just able to get in these certain with certain people, and then they put me in certain places. And so, yeah, I hope I answered uh your and brother Ishri's question.

SPEAKER_01: 32:45

I think so. That was that was thorough. Now I want to go into um what is Pan-Africanism?

SPEAKER_02: 32:51

If you had to give it a definition, you get into nitty-gritty. So Pan-Africanism is an ideology. Let's start with that. It's uh an ideology is a framework, it's supposed to be a framework of ideas to help people understand something and help people grapple with something. So whether it's Christianity, it's religious ideology or whatever, it's supposed to be a general framework to help you understand something and engage something. Sometimes to challenge something and sometimes to promote something. Pan-Africanism is a global political ideology and cultural ideology for black people. So that word, that prefix pan, which I believe is Greek, which means all, right? So when you see pan in front of anything, it means all. So that's the diaspora. That this is an ideology that's saying we recognize ourselves as being one people. We don't care if you were born in Uruguay, Nicaragua, uh, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, United States. If you're African descendant, you're African descended. We are one people. Like you took a bunch of graham crackers and you crushed them up and you sprigged it all over the world, map. That's what happened to us. You sprig it all over the world, map. And sometimes we forget, we get caught up in our particular dish that we eat, our particular dialect, and some of our customs that we forget. Yeah, you Jamaican, I got you. I got you. And I'm so-called African-American, and you, I got you. But guess what? We all descend from this place. Now, there's controversy over that, which, you know, this that's another show, I think. But that's what Pan-Africanism is saying, that we recognize all of our people around the world. We're trying to liberate and unify Africa, continental, the continent of Africa, and we are also fighting against. You can't say we're Pan-African if you're not fighting against colonialism. Pan-Africanism is anti-imperialist. A lot of people sneak around here saying they're pan-African and they're not uh going against uh colonialism on the continent or in other territories of African-descended people. It is distinctly anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist. And it wants to set up a situation which all Africans around the world are empowered economically, culturally, um, politically. Uh, one of the great, and I should say, Trinidadans took the lead in Pan-Africanism. If we go away back, C. LR James and uh George Padmore and Henry Sylvester Williams, these are all people from Trinidad. So shout out to Trinidad that are considered the ideological pioneers and foundation of Pan-Africanism. But since there, we have people like uh the Honorable Marcus Garvey, uh Brother Malcolm, and uh uh right here in Harlem, rest in power, they renamed the street after him. Brother Alambe Braff, right? That we that that championed the call for Pan-African unity and did a lot to help advance our people. So let me break it down this way. We got a huge continent of Africa, it has more mineral resources than anywhere on this planet. 65% of its land, and that's a lot of land, it's farmable, fertile land, right? But we're disconnected from Africa. And yet we begging white folk for jobs and services and all this stuff, and we got a big brother, we got a parent that is filthy rich across the waters, but we got no relationship with them. What happens when someone is astute enough to say, yo, let us reconnect with our people in Africa, man? We can give, we can lend something to them that they need, and they can lend something to us that we need, and we could all be stronger. What happens when I get in touch with my long-lost dad, who's filthy rich, who's been disconnected from me? All types of possibilities emerge, don't they? So that's what Pan-Africanism envisions. We're gonna liberate Africa as a continent, and we're gonna uh participate in the liberation of African people all over the world, and we're gonna empower African people all over the world, and we're gonna uh also it's important to understand the principle of self-determination that these um these people in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica and all these different places here in the United States will either have a land or territory that they run separate and distinct, or will exist in the places where they are right now, but will operate, almost have their own um uh economy, their own defense, their own policing, their own banking, if you feel what I'm saying. So that's kind of what we're talking about. Um I think I'll cover that. So, yes, and and it's very important that we emphasize this idea. It's a lot of consciousness raising involved in Pan-Africanism, getting people here to see you. I know, I know you don't speak an African language, and I know you're not um, you don't have a uh a direct line to Africa, possibly, but we're an African descended people. Uh most is most of the scientists uh would agree that that humanity began in Africa and that people kind of emerged from Africa to other places, right? So that's kind of what it's about, Pan-Africanism. Oh, and let me just just very quickly, while I'm on the full screen, let me say some of the key pioneers. Harry Sylvester Williams, who actually came up with the term Pan-Africanism, who's a Trinidadian, W.B. Du Bois, who organized uh most of the Pan-African conferences, uh Congresses that we had. Uh we have um Marcus Garvey. We have uh Kwame and Kruma, who's very important. Why? Because Marcus Garvey is saying all this, but he's in Jamaica and Harlem. Some of the pioneers are saying all this, but they're in Trinidad. But Kwame and Kuma was the first continental African to say, yes, I too, right here in Africa, support this Pan-African ideal. And so he was actually trying to formulate a United States of Africa. And of course, you know he's the first prime minister of Ghana. So uh he named his um his airline, I think his name Black Star. Great, great respect for Pan-Africanism. And when W.B. Du Bois divorced himself from the Communist Party, and when he divorced himself from the United States and he left the United States, where does he go? Ghana. Because it was Pan Africanism. And what does he come? And what does he come to say? And right, the brother that he'd been banging on, talking about, and Garvey was talking about him too, let's be clear, to be fair. They was having a battle. What did he come to say? He was remote. Right. After all those years. Because remember, the boys lived to be damn near 100 years old. So he had a long time to reflect. He said Garvey was right. The whole time. So it's a beautiful story, man. When people think of it, Julius and the Airway promoted African socialism, Amakal Cabral. So it was a lot of people who were pioneers. Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Right? There's a whole lot of people that supported. Do you hear me?

SPEAKER_01: 41:05

Yes, sir. Yeah, part pardon me. Uh something happened with my internet.

SPEAKER_02: 41:10

It's all right, brother. We still rocking and rolling. Yo, you you just kept the ball rolling.

SPEAKER_01: 41:14

That was that. Yeah, man. That's how we gotta do it. That's that's just up, man. You know, it's snowing and all of that. Anyway, um, so how do you feel, this brother uh Garvey, Garveyism 3977? How do you feel about Harry S. Williams, uh, Pat Moore, and uh CLR James and Nakuma married outside of the race?

SPEAKER_02: 41:38

Thank you for that question. I tend not to um impose myself into people's marriages and their sexualities. That's that's people's personal choices. I what whatever I believe I believe about it actually doesn't matter, technically. So I kind of stay away from that. If that's what people decide to do, that's on them. That's not something I would do. That's not something I support. Um, and personally, I'm not talking about them. But personally, for me, the way I look at it is I'm in a position to trust you more if you're telling me that you're fighting for black people and fighting against white supremacy and you're a black man and you're married to a black woman. That's me. That's my politic. But that doesn't mean because it's my politic, that I'm going to expect that of everybody else. People are different, man. People move differently. I every day I live, I see I say more and more, man, people are different out here, bro. I see stuff all the time, and I say, I don't, hey, I don't support that, but hey.

SPEAKER_01: 42:43

Yeah, yeah, you know the avenue of the internet, people are changing. Yeah, because you know, the algorithms are pretty much uh manipulating the population at this point. So that's we're gonna see a lot of crazy, crazy things up ahead. So, you know, the worse this uh internet thing gets. But anyway, um, so now um as far as black nationalism, I don't know if you went in depth on that explanation yet.

SPEAKER_02: 43:12

Yes, sir. So black nationalism is another political ideology. Remember, a framework of ideas. I keep saying this because a lot of us are getting really caught up, and we're becoming slaves to ideology, and that's not what our ideology is supposed to do. It's a framework.

SPEAKER_01: 43:29

Listen, hold on.

SPEAKER_02: 43:30

It means that it means that this is the general idea, right? These are the general practices, and then you have room to study what others did, and you have room to be critical of what they did, you have room to build on what they did, you have room to see a slightly different vision or to enlarge in the vision that they had. Not to be stuck, right? Um, so case in point, uh, we're dealing with a Trump situation, we're dealing with imperialism on the highest level. Um, we're dealing with straight up repression, we're heading in a clearly fascist direction. If anyone knows fascism and its elements, we're heading there. That's a fact. Uh beating up on the media, getting people fired, trying to get media people suspended, trying to trying to enlarge and enlarge in the scope of the executive branch. No, every branch has equal powers. Now he's trying to enlarge it. He's he's firing people who disagree with him and hiring people who agree with him but aren't credible, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, right? Okay, so in that type of situation, Pan-Africanists and nationalists who are intelligent and wise should be saying, oh man, we gotta get our numbers up. We gotta, we gotta have allies. We gotta build. We gotta build across across this idea of you gotta be blacker than black. We gotta we gotta build people who's fighting against capitalism, people who's fighting against, you know, they're trying to destroy women's reproductive rights. There's so many issues, right? But if you're stuck to that, I'll say, oh no, I'm black. I don't brush my teeth because two-paced is white, I don't wash up because soap is white, no. Family, no, no, no, no. It's a framework. So that means if anything changes, you're supposed to be able, you're a martial artist, right? Okay, so if the dude is fighting you straight up hand in hand, you fight him a certain way. That dude pulls out that machete, right? It changes it a little, right? Yeah, the dude pulls out a gun, you're not gonna stay stuck in your cottage doing you, you're gonna move and react to what's coming at you. It's the same thing politically. So let me just say that. Having said that, nationalism, similar to Pan-Africanism, is a kind of political, cultural, economic, political ideology for black people. And it's a lot more domestic. So, whereas Pan-Africanism is looking at the continent of Africa and all over the world, African descended people, nationalism is domestic. So, for instance, in the United States, nationalists in the United States are looking at police brutality in our cities. They're looking at these low-performing schools, and kids graduating and can't do the math, the reading, the writing that they were supposed to have been educated to do and start out with a disadvantage.

unknown: 46:24

Right?

SPEAKER_02: 46:25

They're looking at the abduction of black women who are still not being found. They're looking at the mass uh incarceration, disproportionate incarceration of black people and trying to find out. They're looking at political prisoners who've been languishing in the dungeons of American prisons for 30 and 40 and 50 years. Uh, our good brother H.R. Brown, I forget his Muslim name, became a distinguished imam. He had a growth come protruding out of his jaw that looked like a oh man, like a small bowling ball. This man is suffering. He's no threat to nobody, and they would not let him out, family. See, so nationalists are fighting those domestic issues. That's not to say that nationalists don't can't be nationalists and pan-Africanists. We call them, like me, a pan-African nationalist.

SPEAKER_03: 47:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 47:23

That blend the two, right? But it's it's very important that that people understand the net the Pan-Africans gotta understand, yes, we're African, yes, we're fighting for all African-descended people. But you know what? We got some serious issues right here, too. All of our energy can't go to Pan-African. We got issues right here. Some of us got issues right in our cities. Like black water coming out the water faucet. And that means ridiculous. You know, people can't get work, people getting laid off for unethical reasons. So we're struggling on two fronts, domestically and globally. And I think one of our challenges, brother Ron, is to find a balance in between how the issues we raise and the actions and activities we engage to make sure that, yeah, we're fighting for what's going on in Africa and our people around the world. It's like this. I can't be going out, I'm gonna clothe, I'm gonna clothe everybody, I'm gonna go to Brooklyn. I'm gonna clothe everybody, all the black people in Brooklyn. Right? And meanwhile, the people in Harlem are butt-necked.

SPEAKER_01: 48:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 48:31

Like, come on, like, think about that.

SPEAKER_01: 48:33

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 48:34

And there's people that do that. They have they all we're so far over there that right in their immediate territory, it is terrible. So it has to be a balance. And I think that's um that's kind of one of the things. So back to nationalism, um, it has certain key ideas. Community control. Um, so that is, we have our own institutions. Uh, we have our own uh uh credit lending associations, schools, um, our own defense units, we might call community policing. Um we're gonna have um a cooperatively owned business. So we all have businesses, but we're trying not to be like other people where one person or family runs it and they have complete say. But where we have an enterprise where other people in the community can actually buy in and we can own it together, and we can buy products cheaper because we buy in bulk, and now we can make them uh more affordable for community members. Like this is perfect for supermarkets and and laundry mats and stuff like that. Uh self-defense is an important part of uh of nationalism, very important part. From this, we get people like the, even though they were in the civil rights movement, people like the Deacons for Defense and Justice come out of that. That, you know, we're former military people and we're gonna take our military skills and protect our leaders or community members. The Black Panther Party kind of comes out of that. Republican of New Africa, the revolutionary action movement come out of that. Um, and to a slightly different degree because they're not as overtly political, the nation of Islam kind of comes out of that. They got that through the Islam. And for people who think they soft when they're just talking, go look up what happened when the police got a made a false call to 911, ran up in the mosque in the 70s and did it again in the 80s. Find out what happened to them.

SPEAKER_03: 50:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 50:33

And I'm not even gonna go further with the story. And you know, they're not just talking that now. We're talking about getting disarming people and throwing them out the mosque, like for real, for real. So it's that part of it, it's about economic independence, it's about cultural affirmation. Right? So a lot of people, myself included, following in pseudo brother Malcolm, uh, as we our consciousness increased, some of us, not all of us, decided I don't want my European name anymore. I don't want to be known as Quentin anymore. I don't want to be known as Joe or Paul or whatever it is anymore. I want to disavow that connection and I want to go and get an African name. I may never know where I come from, though today I think we can find out, right, with AfricanAncestry.com. So that's a I can't wait to do that to find out actually where I do come from. But I didn't wait, brother. In 1991, I knew my daughter was being born, I changed my name. I didn't want her to come to this world uh with no white name. I just didn't. And I didn't want, I didn't want to continue carrying a white name. So I changed my name. So you find that I'm in the 60s and 70s in the Black Power Movement, which is definitely a nationalist movement and Pan-Africanist movement, a lot of people changed their names. So Don L. Lee went from Don L. Lee to Hakeem Itabuti, and Leroy Jones went from Leroy Jones to Mary Baraka, right? And so on and so forth. Um, some of the early pioneers would be Martin Delaney, uh Marcus Garvey, Elijah Mohammed. Let's not forget a brother, we always forget his name. Umble Prophet Jouali is in that, is in that category. More of the religious form of nationalism. Elijah Muhammad, brother Malcolm, Stokely Carmichael who became Kwame Tori, changed his name. Amiri Baraka. Uh, let's not forget Morana Karenga, who started the Us organization and Kwanzaa and the Kawa Eida theory.

SPEAKER_01: 52:40

So yeah, so can't forget Allah. Can't forget Allah, uh Clarence Smith, Father Smith.

SPEAKER_02: 52:46

Oh, brother, thank you. Father Allah for sure, Clarence13X got all the youth, got all the scoop the youth up with those teachers, man, and man, we wouldn't have hip hop music if it wasn't for the God body. You can almost believe that, at least not at the high lyrical level. You think of your most lyrical uh uh hip-hop artists, uh I guarantee you, at least two-thirds of them are gonna have affiliation with with uh 5% nation. So, yeah, that's absolutely right and exact. Yep. I think the brothers frozen. Um so you're gonna see nationalists are gonna be dealing with stuff like even independent political parties, uh, uh building institutions. So Harlem Liberation School is a nationalist Pan-Africanist project, right? Our organization said we're tired of hearing black people believing things that are untrue and that are negatively impacting them, and we're tired of them not knowing the basics they need to know about our struggles, our social political movements, our important people in our history. So we start an organization to teach black political education. That's an independent institution. We're not getting money from the federal government, we're not going to white communities and begging them for money. We're not, we're doing it ourselves, right? Uh so all of that is in line with that nationalist sort of um position.

SPEAKER_01: 54:13

Indeed, indeed. So you explain black uh uh I'm sorry, you explain Pan-Africanism and black nationalism as frameworks. So all the other teachings and school of schools of thought ideologies are also frameworks, hence the reason why you were saying, you know, uh, you know, basically you can't get stuck in your own way. You know, you want to kind of like um uh uh uh uh unify with others for us to build in the community and do greater things.

SPEAKER_02: 54:48

Well, what I'm trying to, what I'm really trying to communicate to people is I use this Buddhist analogy. If you're on a desert island and you ran out of all your fruit, fish ain't there, no vegetation, you know, you don't want to starve to death. You look across the way, you see another island, and you see, wow, they got vegetation over there. Man, if I can get over there, so you get the tree, you make logs, you get the seaweed, you make a makeshake raft, you sail over to this island, mad fruit, mad vegetation. That raft was what you used as a vehicle to get you to another place. But how foolish now would it be to take the raft, tie it on your back, and walk all the way around that island for the rest of your days there with the raft on your back. What once liberated you is now burdening you. So all it's saying is if you're nationalist, you can stay nationalist, pan-Africanist, whatever. But remember, you're not the only person on this planet, family. There's other people that are black, African descendant, and they believe other things. And just because they believe different from you doesn't mean you discard them. It doesn't mean they're worthless. You might learn something from them. You don't have to agree on everything. What we need to agree on is who our enemies are, and and that we need to fight them, resist them, and build things for ourselves. So my concern is I'm getting older, I'm looking at the different people on the social media and and all this, I'm like, man, yeah, race first, but it doesn't mean race only, if that makes sense. Yes, you take care of yours first, but understand ultimately the world we envision is gonna be a world everybody lives in. So actually, you kind of want everybody to be alright. Because if everybody's alright, nobody's starving, nobody's getting uh assaulted, uh, people able to run, go run, do whatever they want, then the world will be in a better place. So, no, am I out here advocating for white folk? Not necessarily. I'm advocating for black people, but here's how it works with injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, is what Dr. King said. He's right. So if they're doing something to women and they're they are um oppressive to women, and they're doing something to gay people, and they're doing something to uh um obese people, body shaming, they're doing something to all these different people, and nobody says anything because they're like, Well, that's not me. What you're allowing to happen is a fascist state, and it's gonna get to a point where you will be oppressed if nobody stops and no, we we fighting all these things. I'm not saying we need to join everyone's fight, but we can't allow our ideologies to blind us to the world, and we can't allow ideology to distort what we see. We have to see the world clearly as it is. I got these these reading glasses. Imagine if these joints was black. What am I gonna see? Everything I'm seeing is is distorted. This has to be clear so that I can see what's really going on, who's really, who's really my opponent. You know, they were I'm not gonna get into this because it brings up bad feelings. But um blacks and Latinos in Harlem died, were killed by a man who was mentally ill. Because that man who was mentally ill was part of a protest movement, and he was taught, led to believe that the people that owned this store were white and were oppressing uh, you know, the workers and were doing this and that. And he went in one day and fired in or threw bombs and fired in this store and killed blacks and Latinos who was just there working, good brother. They're not into the political thing, no, they're just working. Come to find out, that place was owned by a black church. Mmm. Because somebody didn't do their due diligence and find out the actual facts. That's what ideology can really mislead people, man. So I'm a nationalist and pan-Africanist, but listen, I read all types of books by all types of people. I'm not gonna ghetto eyes my mind. My mind is infinite like the universe. And I want I want it to be fully stocked. My arsenal, I want it to be fully stocked. You know, I don't want, I don't want to limit what I know based on some racial thing that somebody else made up. All knowledge out there is available to me and you. All knowledge is available to me and you. And so that's my thing is that we be very careful that in our efforts to help our people, we're not becoming oppressive and being harsh with our people and losing empathy. And you don't know this, and you don't. Well, wait a minute. If we have knowledge itself, we know our people are 5, 10, 85%. We know that that most of our people are deaf, dumb, and blind, poison animal eaters, hard to lead in the right direction, easy to lead the wrong direction. We know that. We're taught that. So that's telling you 85% means most of our people. So that means, yeah, sometimes you get mad at our people, you think they're backwards, reactionary. But remember, have grace, because you know how they got where they are. They were miseducated through a variety of means. So you gotta remember that. And sometimes ideology, brother Ron, we can get so it's sometimes it's a thin line between loving your people hard and starting to. Hate your people. And that we got to be careful of. We got to always love our people. It's like your drunk uncle at the family, the holiday dinner. He gets drunk. We know he does that every year. We know he does. So we do we put things in place to save him from himself. But we don't talk bad about him and disrespect him behind his back. We try to help him. Right? And that sometimes we lose that piece. And that's the piece that will save us. The love. The ideology has to come from love. It can't come from people that get off on hurting people or people that get off on just bossing people around. That's not what this movement is about. This is a love project. This is we love our people. That's why we sacrifice. We study, we fight, we train, we build organizations. Not to hurt nobody because we love ours. But if you come over here on something else, then you're going to get another thing. Right? But I'm saying before we go there, this is for love. We love it on our people. And that's what gets missed sometimes.

unknown: 1:01:40

Indeed, indeed.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:41

On that note, brother, thank you for coming out this evening. I really appreciate you. Great breakdown uh the framework is what I got from this for the most part, is in terms of Pan-Africanism, black nationalism. And you broke down the framework. I really appreciate you and uh your build and all you all that you've done for the community. Hope to have you up again. Do you want to let people know where you are on social media? Give them your emails, your you know, whatever contacts you want to give them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:13

Oh, yes, sir. They can find me. If they type in my name, as you see there, they'll come up with a bunch of stuff. Uh, you could also look at me, uh, find me on wokusu.com. That's w u C U S U. Wake up, cleanup, stand up. And if you type in wokusu.com, you'll find me. You come to my website. I do, I'm an empowerment coach. I help people to be better, do better, and think better, finish things, uh, be more punctual, get over their distractions and fears. And um, I also have written quite a few books. All of that you'll find if you go to uh uh if you type in my name in Linktree, you'll come up to everything. So it's very easy to find me. My name, as you see on the screen, or type in wakusu w cusu.com. Oh, and also have Harlem Liberation School YouTube channel and Wokusu Empowerment Channel, which is a self-empowerment channel.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:19

Thank you for coming out this evening. I really appreciate you, brother. Thanks to all the viewers. Really appreciate you. We will see you tomorrow, 7 o'clock, a conversation with a santeria and 8 o'clock, building with uh Crip Jesus, and we are out of here. Peace.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:37

Peace family, and welcome to NYP Talk Show. This is more than a podcast, it's a conscious platform rooted in truth and culture. From Pan-African teachings, hip-hop culture, current events, health, wellness, occult, and much more. Our mission is to reclaim our narrative and uplift the African diaspora with real stories and real conversations. Support us through Super Chats, during live shows, donations on Cash App, GoFundMe, Patreon, or Bud Sprout. And by repping our official merch. Available on our website and right here on YouTube's merch shelf. Every dollar, every super chat, every hoodie builds the movement. This is NYP.