This episode features Jermar Perry, one of Campfire’s Fellows. Jermar Perry provides his answer to the Season 31 question, "How can we unlearn the false narratives we're taught?". A Fellow’s Campfire can best be described as TED without the data, The Moth but interactive, and a sermon but without the religion. You can learn more about Jermar Perry on the Campfire website, https://cmpfr.com/events/jermar-perry/.
The Campfire Fellows go through rigorous training and coaching provided by Campfire Faculty so they can share their wisdom through story for you. Our Fellows are the people next to you at stoplights or walking by on the street. These Fellows apply or are nominated by people like you, who know interesting and introspective people with some wisdom to share. The Fellows go through a unique process with our team to discover a wealth of wisdom inside themselves and then are trained on how to share the origin stories of their wisdom.
This episode was originally performed in February 2020, produced by Jeff Allen, and recorded live at High Low.
Please be advised, some adult language is used during this episode.
This episode features Jermar Perry, one of Campfire’s Fellows. Jermar Perry provides his answer to the Season 31 question, "How can we unlearn the false narratives we're taught?". A Fellow’s Campfire can best be described as TED without the data, The Moth but interactive, and a sermon but without the religion. You can learn more about Jermar Perry on the Campfire website, https://cmpfr.com/events/jermar-perry/.
The Campfire Fellows go through rigorous training and coaching provided by Campfire Faculty so they can share their wisdom through story for you. Our Fellows are the people next to you at stoplights or walking by on the street. These Fellows apply or are nominated by people like you, who know interesting and introspective people with some wisdom to share. The Fellows go through a unique process with our team to discover a wealth of wisdom inside themselves and then are trained on how to share the origin stories of their wisdom.
This episode was originally performed in February 2020, produced by Jeff Allen, and recorded live at High Low.
Please be advised, some adult language is used during this episode.
Hello again, Internet. I'm Steven Harowitz, and I'll be your host for this episode of Campfire at Home. Almost every month, we gather at the Campfire to hear stories about life and how we live it from the everyday voices that live around us. Campfire at Home is how we bring that live storytelling experience to you wherever you are. In this episode, you have the distinct honor of hearing stories from our Season 11 fellow Jermar Perry. Jermar Perry was born and raised in the city of Philadelphia until he moved to St. Louis about four years ago, a year after his then fiancee and now wife moved here. After receiving his bachelor's degree in journalism from Temple University, Jermar decided that the field wasn't quite for him and started working in children's services. Once he moved to St. Louis, Jermar was accepted to St. Louis University and received his MSW in clinical social work in May of 2019. After performing in the Men's Story Project the past two years, Jermar realized he had a passion for this, which he credits to being born into a family of storytellers. Something to know about this episode is that the stories we hear from Fellows can be pretty different from our other storytellers. The Fellows program teaches interactive long-form storytelling and that can be pretty tricky when trying to translate it to a podcast. So we think we've done a pretty good job, but it is going to be a little bit different. Also, the Fellow's stories try to answer our Season question, which they help us formulate and then we put out to our audiences to vote. The last thing I'll say is that these podcast episodes are ad-free, and that's really only possible because of the folks who take our storytelling classes and because of the organizations we have the honor of working with. Now to the stories. Let's head to the Campfire to listen to Jermar's story and answer to how can we unlearn the false narratives we're taught.
Jermar Perry:How's everyone doing tonight? Can we get a thumbs up, thumbs down, no thumbs, thumbs to the side? It looks like I see mostly thumbs up. Okay. Now I generally generally hate cold weather. If it was up to me, I would never leave the house during this time of year when it was like snowing earlier and it's just cold. I hate it. But I love, love, love February. Anybody know what February is? Wow. When I rehearsed this, I expected like one person to get it right. But damn, this crowd is woke. Okay. All right. Now I see what I'm working with. Okay. Exactly right. February is Black History Month. I love, love, love Black History Month. Give it up for Black History Month one time. And I'll be doing that a lot tonight because not often I'm standing in front of a crowd and I can have people clap for what I want them to clap for. So I'm going to take that full opportunity tonight. So I love Black History Month, love being black. That wasn't always the case because being black is what I was teased the most about growing up. And if you can't tell what my secret is right now, I am very black. Also didn't expect that joke to work as well as as it did, so it's going to be a fun night. So yes, I'm very black. And when you're very something people always let you know what you're very is, like you don't know that you're fucking very black. Um, and it wasn't like from like, you know, outside of my culture, it was within my culture. It was within my neighborhood, within my family. And you know, they always let me know how black I was, and they still do to this day. So now that you know what I was teased about, just shout out some of the things you were teased about. Being short, fat, slow. Okay. So that leads us to tonight's question for Campfire, which is how do we unlearn the false narratives that we were taught? And those were all things that you were talking about yourselves. So, and that led me to look up what a false narrative was, which is kind of funny because apparently I'm the one who came up with this question and I still needed to look it up. So I thought to myself, false narratives, what is a false narrative? How do we define a false narrative? So I did what we do when we want to look for definitions of stuff. We don't go to dictionaries anymore. I went to Google, and I Googled false narratives. And what came up was a lot of words, words, words, words. And those words weren't necessarily how I would talk to a great crowd like yourselves. Um, those words didn't make sense to me. So I came up with one word and it was the perfect word and it was the most beautiful word. That sounds like kind of like Trump, but it's always good to get a good digging on Trump when you have a microphone in front of you. Um, so yeah, this is words, words, words, words, words. So I said,"Damn, this isn't how I talk. This isn't how I speak." So I came up with this one word, and, like I said, it was a beautiful word and that word was'bullshit.' False narratives tonight will be bullshit. And we'll replace false narratives with the word bullshit. And you all just told me some of the bullshit that you all heard about yourselves, that people put on you at some point in time. So right now we all have a Ninja Turtle-looking mask in front of us, and I love 80's and 90's references apparently because tonight will be littered with those. But it is not a Ninja Turtle mask, and we'll explain what this mask is at some point. And some of you have already done what I'm about to ask you to do, which is to hold up this mask to your face, and I'll do everything that you guys do and we'll do this together as one. And it may seem a little silly and ridiculous, but it'll make sense eventually, hopefully, maybe or maybe not. Um, so what if we removed all of those things people said about us, all of those things people tease us about? What if we removed all of them? And this is challenge by choice. If you don't choose to do anything we ask you to do tonight, it's totally fine. But what if we just sort of didn't have these things that, these stigmas? What would that feel like? So I just want to take a second to sort of breathe, and at the count of three we could all take one collective breath in. So one, two, and breath in and breathe out. Now if you all could just pan the room and see what it would look like if we were all the same race, the same height, the same complexion, the same everything, what would that feel like? Creepy, right? Yeah. Boring. So tonight the goal for us to do is to embrace the bullshit and the bullshit people said about us. And now I want you all to do something even more interesting with these face masks. And we all have markers, right? Okay. If you don't and you can see someone. We all have face masks. If you don't, someone is passing them out. I'll just give everyone a second to collect their selves. We're a patient group. Like I said, this is all family tonight, and I'll just run down what we're going to do. So what we're going to do with this face mask is we're going to give ourselves tattoos. We're gonna tattoo our face. And the first thing when the tattoo our faces with is the things that people said about us, those things that people tease us about, some of those things, the bullshit. So on my face mask, I'm a terrible artist by the way, and I'll just talk us through this. I used to work with kindergartners and first grade, and I'm from Philadelphia, so I can't say kindergarten properly. I say Kenny Gardner, so you can laugh at me. It's okay. I got thick skin. Um, so yeah. Um, so you could draw that thing. You could write that thing. So I'll do this with you. So across the top of my forehead, my tattoo would say"black," and if you're creative and you're like a Mozart type and you want to like do whatever to this mask as the night goes on when you feel inspired, this is your mask. This is your thing. Hopefully you all take this home and do something fun and wild and weird with it. Well, not too weird, but it's a judgment free zone tonight. This is like the, this is like the, uh, Planet Fitness of Campfire talks. So, okay. Now we're going to get into a little bit of a history lesson. Anyone ever watched the show Drunk History? Well, I'm not drunk yet, but there's a bar here and it's time, so I'm going to give you a bit of a drunk history lesson of why you all have masks made out of brown paper bags. So if you all could just picture African drums and if some of my people are less coordinated rhythmically,your drums, your drums in your head, we're not going to judge you. Um, so whatever those drums sound like in your head, and we're going to take it back to Africa, the West Coast of Africa to be exact and picture these drums. Picture the beautiful coast of West Africa. Picture the ocean. Picture beautiful people being beautiful people. And then one day those people get captured. I'm not a historian, so if anyone corrects me about any of this stuff afterwards I'm going to plead the fifth. So these people take these other people and they ship them to the West or, I'm sorry, to the Americas. Now, once they hop off the ship, everyone looks like me. And then atrocious things happen to these people. And one of the most atrocious things that happened is some of the women get raped by these owners, causing some of these quote unquote"slaves" to be lighter skinned. And some of those lighter-skinned slaves who are related to the people who own them literally work in the house in some instances, and some of the slaves who are darker work in the fields. And this causes a bit of friction as we could imagine. And that friction goes on and that friction goes on until a paper, brown paper bag is enacted, a test. So if you were darker than a brown paper bag, you weren't allowed in certain spaces like fraternities, nightclubs, and even churches, believe it or not. And this goes on and on and on until I was born. And this just shows that the bullshit was kind of bred within my culture before I was even born. Now when I was a kid, I was a pretty jovial kid. And one of the things I loved, loved, loved was wrestling. Any wrestling fans out here by chance? Oh wow. Okay. I was surprised by that. Okay. So I love, love, love wrestling, and this is like the era of like Hulk Hogan and like Ultimate Warrior, Andre the Giant, like all that good stuff. So I love wrestling, was a big wrestling fan, and I'd wrestle anybody, my grandpop, my uncle. This is like figure four leg locks, off the top of the, like, you know, bed type stuff and you know, all of that stuff. So I would go around the corner from my grandmama's house, and I would wrestle my cousins and you know, some of the neighborhood kids, some of my classmates, and we'd create these championship belts out of cardboard and wrestle on these urine-stained mattresses, which probably is not really sanitary, but we were kids. We didn't know any better, and it was hella fun. Um, and yeah, I loved wrestling to the point where I won some tickets to go to this wrestling match. Now I was super excited. Me and my uncle go to this wrestling match. And you know, I actually called the radio station and won these wrestling tickets, and, at like nine years old, this is how big I was into wrestling, and I was so close that I could almost touch some of these wrestlers, right? Now this one wrestler was the black wrestler. He was the black wrestler of the era, maybe the second black wrestler of the era, and his name was Koko B. Ware. Now Koko B. Ware had like the colorful hair. He's supposed to be like a bird. He had a pet parakeet named Corky. We'll call him Corky. It wasn't the parakeet's name, but it did have a name. And Koko B. Ware passes by me to the point where I could almost touch him. And as he passes by me, he gets pelted with all of these racial slurs by grown adult men, and at that age to kind of let me know the bullshit existed and what bullshit was. Koko B. Ware didn't deserve any of that. Koko B. Ware wanted to do his bird dance, jump off the top rope, and play with Corky, who would also wrestle people and win matches somehow, but it was the 80's. A lot of cocaine involved I'm sure and all that stuff. This is like the era of Howard the Duck. And that let me know the bullshit was real. Now one of the other things I loved when I was growing up was hip hop. I was a big, big hip hop fan, and I'll date myself through the night because, you know, I'm getting old now. It's you do when you get old. You reminisce. And I love like Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One. This whole era of 80's, late 80's, early 90's rap music that was like really, really good and stuff I still love today. U m, my mom on the other hand didn't love t hat I was listening to this stuff. S o I remember when I came home a nd like N.W.A. tape, N.W.A.'s tape when I first bought it and she was like,"What the hell is this? It's like,'Fuck the police. Why the hell are you listening to t his stuff? Y ou're like 10 years old." But I knew, I guess I was really woke a t 10 years old. I don't know. U m, so she made me sell it to like a cousin. Now, my mom would do on Saturday mornings. Di d e veryone else have Saturday mornings where t hey cleaned the house, listened to li ke A nita Baker and stuff like that? Black folks know what was talking about. I don't know what y'all did in white families, but I' m s u re y' all d id so mething. I just don't know what it was be cause that wasn't my family experience. My family experience was listen to Anita Baker and we cleaned. Ri ght, right. You better be spotless. But my mom would push on like more of the R&B music at the time. Right. So this is like the DeBarge family, wh o w e all thought were Mexicans but they were really like biracial. It's ju st l ike Tina Marie, who we all thought was a light-skinned black woman, but she really was a white woman. And we found out both of these things like three years ago an d t his is like Al B. Sure. And if you're young you probably have no fucking idea who an y o f t hese people are. And if you're young and white, you definitely pr obably don't have any idea who these people are. But be ar w ith me, it a ll ma kes s ense at the end. So I was tending to gravitate towards these groups, and my mom was pushing th is o n me like,"Oh listen to this, you know, soft R&B music," um, w hich wa s f ine. Th at w as great. But that wasn't where my soul was at the time. My soul was into hip hop. Um, a nd then there's other people who yo u d o know, like Prince. Everybody knows Prince, right? Everybody knows Michael Jackson, right? Yeah. So I loved, loved, loved Michael Jackson when I was a kid to the point where I had the doll with the red leather jacket and the zipper and the glittery socks and all of that stuff. I wish I still had that do ll t oday. I don't. But I loved Michael Jackson to t he point where my family wo uld h a ve t hese family gatherings and they do something called the Soul Train line based off the Soul Train. Now, and I'll just bring you into the culture if yo u n o t f amiliar with any of th is s tuff. So like I said, we're all family here tonight. So in my family we would have like the Soul Train line, which is b ased off the show Soul Train and people would gather around and you danced on this line. Now when I was this age, my family wo uld h y pe m e up to d o all these Michael Jackson da nces t o the point where I thought I was Michael Jackson. I thought I was gonna be like making money as like a Michael Jackson in terpreter. But like, I was like, th at d idn't work out for me. And this is l ike moonwalk Michael Jackson, like spin move Michael Jackson, and this is like split Michael Jackson. And if I attempted to do any of that stuff right now, I would not be going to work tomorrow. So I'll spare you, and I'll spare me. But I love this era, love Michael Jackson. And we later found out that Michael Jackson one day would turn white. Right. At the time who knew that this beautiful black man would turn into a white woman? I didn't do it, but who did do it was Joe Jackson. So Michael Jackson would inherit all of this bullshit from his father. So his father told him to hate his nose, to hate his complexion, to h ate himself as he was making the family millions of dollars, billions of dollars probably. So that was bullshit that Michael Jackson had to go through that, and a lot of us had to go through it in some way, even if it wasn't our nose or our skin or whatever it was. So during this era, Michael Jackson would catch on fire. People are cruel for laughing at this, but he'd catch on fire during this Pepsi commercial. And the reason why he caught on fire was because of this h airstyle called the Jheri Curl. And just a round of applause. Who doesn't know what the Jheri Curl is? Okay. We have some people, ok ay. Like I said, we're all family here tonight. This is all one group big hug. So the Jheri Curl, yes Jheri Curl. You had to have a very moist Jheri c url, right? Your shit couldn't be dry. If y o u h a d a d ry Jh eri C url, you would not like living right. Ri ght. Curly fries. So Jheri Curl. Lo ok, there was a t hing called Jheri Curl juice or activator juice, so you spray it. You spray your shit down, and it h a d t o be like glistening and glossy and all this other ty pe o f s tuff. Right, right. You ha d t o have it moist. So that's where I'm about to go. Thank you. This is a great crowd man. Y'all are on it. I'm im pressed. So there was this movie called Coming to America, which ev eryone h a s p robably heard of the do ughnut p art too. So, so th ere's l ike the scene in the movie wh ere l ike this family sits down. They own a Jheri Curl company basically, and they're like really wealthy back in the 80's, and they sit down on this couch and they get up and the couch has the Jheri Curl juice from where they just sat. This was my house, my grandmom's house. Yes. Everybody in my fucking family had a Jheri Curl at one point. Everybody, mom, grandmom, aunts, name it. If they didn't have the Jheri Curl, they had the S curl, which was like the cousin of the Jheri Curl or the brother. I don't know. It w as in th e f amily, and a lot of R&B singers that my m o m p ushed upon me that didn't look shit like me also had these, these sort of, u h, h airstyles or variations of them. So one day I asked my mom, and I was a quasi-adult a t this point, I was like,"Mom, why don't you we ar y o ur h a ir natural?". She ki nd o f s coffed at me. And then one day somebody told me why do I wear my hair like this? Cause m y hair is cut like this every two to three weeks. It's a big thing within me n o f m y culture, go to the ba rber s h op a nd get hair cuts and cut their hair down. And it's because it's socially acceptable to people throughout history to be cleaner cut and to look like this as opposed to have my hair in lo cks o r wild like it once was. And it was kind of bullshit, to go back to the theme of the night, that my family had to have all of these crazy, terrible hairstyles that really damaged the hair an d them i n some ways and didn't represent who they were. So right now I want ev eryone t o pi ck u p t hose masks. We haven't forgot about them and to represent what some of those things we re i n your family. Was it culturally? Was it the nose, like in some cultures? In some cultures, it m a y be t he eyes, and you ca n r epresent some of that, and just take a chance to be creative. So above my"black," I'm going to give my person a red Jheri Curl ca use I have a red marker. Okay. So one of the things that would happen would it b e the name calling would s tart. Now, up until this point, I was a pretty jovial kid an d I still was. But when you are the darkest person in your black neighborhood, you are everything black. Your last name is p retty much Black. In m y household I thought my name was Blackie, wh ich i s f unny, right? Ca use m y mom was also very dark, but this is how deep th e s tuff goes. So one of the first nicknames I was given was by my aunt's husband, who set up like this boxing match, like some real toxic masculinity bullshit. Um, a nd he had me fight like a cousin of his. I don't know if you gr ew u p in a community like me, you always have fake cousins whose not your cousin. He's n ot ev en r elated to the person who introduces you. So we get gloves and we box. And ne edless t o say, this guy was like later on, like a real professional boxer, so it didn't go well for the kid. But I get this nickname. So you just can't have a boxing match between two kids when you're a grown man. Right? You have to ha ve t o have like a ring side. You have to give pe ople n icknames. You go t t o l ike short the door. You go t t o g o through the whole thing. So my nickname was 40th Street Black,and at the time I really didn't know who 40th Street bBack was. I wo uld l ater find out the 40th Street Black was a f ighter from th is o ld bl axploitation m ovie with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. So I was thinking,"40th Street Black, I li ve o n 19th Street. Why am I?" So I didn't get it. Now another movie would c ome out and I would get the nickname an d t his movie would change the course of black people, specifically dark-skinned people for eternity. And this movie was Boyz n the Hood. Yes. And there was one scene in this movie. This was a coming of age movie about a group of young black me n t h at g rew up in South Central Los Angeles, and one has a father named Furious Styles, which is a great name and it ha s n othing to do with the story I'm about to tell. Now Furious Styles wa s r aising the one guy who was the main character Tre out to be this li ke r eally righteous upstanding guy who unlike the other young Ne groes w ho don't have a father figure, and one dies at the end and they yell out Ri cky a nd he dies. Real sad, still traumatic to this day. Now the on e s c ene i n t his movie is Tre gets called up to t each the class ca use h e's clowning an d t e acher's l ike,"Well, Tre, you co uld t each the class yourself." So she gives him a ruler an d T re commences to s peak on Africa, and one kid who is his friend or was his friend bl urts o ut this legendary line that would change the course of dark humanity forever. An d t hat line was, anybody kn ow w hat that line was?"I ain't no African booty scratcher." And at the time in my neighborhood, I was the closest thing to l ooking African. So I was the African booty scratcher after that, and the self-hate, wh ich i s r eal, but it's al so f ucking ridiculous, right? Like who thinks of that? African booty scratcher, who puts those three words together, right? It's kind of funny thinking back on it now, and those lines would sort of stick with me. So we were all given like funny nicknames, right? They came along with the teasing. So right now we'll do another drawing on the mask, and I'm going to give myself some tears and I'm going to give myself a picture of Africa and a bo oty a nd a scratcher and you ca n a ll take th is time to d o this to o. Alright, now I got to the age of about 19 where I would reach an d m e et e very righteous black man's kryptonite. Anyone know what that is? Any guesses? Javier does now, so he can't participate. Let's take a guess. I can't even see wh o's o ut here. This is a dark crowd. Just take one guess. Yeah. What's every righteous black ma n's kryptonite?
Audience Member:Police.
Jermar Perry:God damn, that's a great answer. That's a better answer than I'm about to give right now. But no, the righteous black man's kryptonite is white women. That's right. I met a group of young white gals. I was living my 19-year-old glory, and this is like the era where I like flunked out of college. I had to move back home, and my mother would like leave not so subtle hints to like not live in her house anymore. So this is like Army pamphlets under the pillow, a lot of passive aggressive stuff to get out. So, alright. I'm like,"Yeah, okay, screw this. I'm moving." So I move, and, and it's like, you know, about three white girls and they have an apartment and we're all about the same age and we're doing what 19-year-olds do and everything was swell. Right? But then there are certain things that came up within this relationship. And my girlfriend, you know, we call them partners nowadays, at the time, was from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Yes. And this isn't the fun-loving Office, Scranton, Pennsylvania. This is good old racist Pennsylvania. And there'd be certain instances where I couldn't do basic things in my home even though my parents didn't live close. We were in Philadelphia, and one of those things was I couldn't answer the phone because her parents didn't know that she was dating a black man, and that was fine with me because I'm 19 years old and I'm doing my thing. I'm not at home, right? But then there would be other things that would come up and some of those other things would be like, you know, I would come home after a long day of working, and I worked in like a chic coffee shop near the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. And you know, it was really hard, depressing, you know, work. And I'd have at least a hundred dollars every night. And this was the era of people caught cabs still, so I'm dating myself again. You know, people had phones in their houses at one point and cabs. They'd call cabs. So I would stand out and try to catch a cab with all this money in my pocket and these cabs would drive right up to me and they'd drive right off, or they stopped right in front of me, pick a couple up, and drive right off, or they stopped just beyond me to pick a couple up and drive right off. And needless to say, I would come home and I'd be pretty fucking angry. And my partner at the time just didn't deliver the vitriol that I needed for the anger that I had for society at the time, at 19 years old. She understood, but I needed somebody to understand. And now I have a lovely wife, who's in the front row. Give it up for my wife, and if my wife does nothing else, she understands. So she understands to the point where she'll come home after a day of dealing with racism and sexism and whatever else the world comes at her and she'll scream at the top of her lungs about all this shit to the point where our neighbors probably think we're having like this crazy fight, but it's just my wife. She's pretty passionate about all this stuff. And I'll listen and I'll understand and I needed that understanding at that time. I didn't get it. Now shout out to all the interracial couples. Give it up. If you love somebody from outside of your race, then give it up. Clap it up please. It's beautiful thing. It's t he melting pot of America and what it should be, u m, but it just didn't w ork for me in that instance. A nd I'm sure it works for others. And I would go on and I would go on and I would really g row to be stuck in the bullshit of self hate throughout my teens and early twenties. And then the reason why we gave it up f or my wife i s b ecause she was a part of the reason to get me out of the bullshit, along with reading books by Malcolm X and just really embracing my blackness and my culture to the point where now I feel like I have the Leroy, Bruce L eroy g rill g love. If anyone has ever seen the movie The Last Dragon, a nd if you haven't I'll explain it to you. I'll give you the Cliff Notes like I've done all night. And The Last Dragon is a movie. It i nvolved a lot of Jheri curls. I watched i t recently, and I didn't know t here were a lot of Jheri curls c ause I had to watch it for research data as I spoke about this tonight and for my own personal pleasure. Now Bruce Leroy was this character, and he goes through the m ovie trying to get his glow. Now he's also based on the character Bruce Lee. So he's like the black Bruce Leroy. He's like the b lack B ruce Lee of the 80's, and, long story short, the last scene he gets his glow a nd his glow is orange. And Bruce Leroy fights the bad guy whose name is Shogun. He had this line,"Kiss my converse." I thought it was Sho'nuff, but actually it was Shogun. I looked it up recently. Yeah, we were all wrong for those years. I thought it was Sho'nuff too, but it was Shogun. I did my research, so I got my g low. So if you had a glow, and I understand some people a re still working through the bullshit, what would your glow be? What color would it be? Yeah, so you might not have that color marker in your hand right now, but just give yourself a glow around your face. What is your Bruce Leroy glow? And I'll give myself a glow. My aura would be red, and you can't say red. It gotta be red. So now I've kind of reached a point in my life where I'm sort of content. I've got out of the bullshit that I was stuck in throughout life, and now I spend some of my time or most of my time helping other people get out of the bullshit. Um, so one of the things that I do is I run a healing and writing circle for men of color. I facilitate that with another person, and give it up for the brothers who came up to support me tonight. Appreciate y'all. Love y'all. I run programming all across the city for young men of color and also have a podcast for black men mental health. And I do a whole lot of stuff, most of it for way too cheap. But anyway, that's another story for another day. But there is no liber-, there is no cost on liberation someone told me. So we receive these blessings in a lot of ways and they bless others hopefully and help others and we received the help too in a lot of ways. So one of the other things that I do is I run groups and I work with a lot of high school students. Now before I moved here I thought colorism was kind of dead until I moved to St. Louis. Right. I was coming here with regency bias from the East Coast, and what made it most real was working with the youth. Now, if you haven't met any inner city, young black folks in St. Louis, which I'm not mad if you haven't. Like I said, we're all family here, is that they have this thing called joning. And if you've worked with inner city black youth, then you know what joning is or you grew up in the city. Now where I was from in my age group, it was called busing or if you're older than me, it was called playing the dozens. And back in Philly right now it's called bidding. So pretty much, and if you're from the Italian culture, it's called breaking balls. I know that cause I grew up with a lot of Italian people, but joning is this thing of people go back and forth and they joke on each other, right? They joke and they joke and they joke and they joke and they joke and they joke and they joke, and usually it's really fucking terrible and not funny. But when you're an educator you got to listen to all of this shit and try to squash it and so on and so forth. So one of the things that keeps coming up during the jones that I hear across the city is largely based on colorism."You're so dark, you're too light, you're this, you're that." And I give these kids such wonderful, beautiful speeches about where all these things come from, and I give these passionate, impassioned history lessons and, you know, and why that's wrong and why that's self hate and to love yourself. And these kids don't give a fuck. They don't care, right? Everybody stopped for two seconds. They were right back at it. But it's also interesting because you know, I'm not. You know, when you work with kids, I'm not beyond being spared for joning with the kids. These kids are good on me. And the first thing they always say is how dark I am. And it's really interesting because some of these kids could be my daughters and sons. They look just like me. It was like, I'm really confused and baffled by this because we are the same complexion. And I went through this yesterday, literally yesterday I talked to a girl, you know. It was like we had like a whole black history thing. So I'm in like Western, like I'm in like African garb, and she thought it was like the funniest thing ever. She was like,"You like, you're from Nigeria." So I'm like,"Why is that a bad thing? You know?" And then this girl is darker than me. So you know, she tells me her parents are half-white, which would it be a lie. She's not adopted. That's a common thing also amongst the kids where I work with, y ou know. Everybody's half white or half native American, y ou know. They don't say Native American, they say I ndian or whatever they are. But nobody's proud to be who they are. And these kids are largely stuck in the bullshit. And when I bring up these questions, they really don't have an answer about why they aren't proud to be themselves. And it really baffles me and I don't really know how to answer these questions or to help these kids get out of the bullshit cause it took me s o l ong t o g et o ut o f t he bullshit. So I get it and I fully understand.[Baby coos.] Right, Autumn. You agree. So y eah, that's my job and that's what I try to do. I try to help other people get out of the bullshit and try not to have those false narratives. So I had to unlearn the false narratives that I was taught by learning to love the things about myself that society said I shouldn't. And if everyone could just look at their mask and just glance at their m ask for a few seconds and just glance at those beautiful flaws, those beautiful f laws that created you, those beautiful flaws that are you, those beautiful things that created you, the person who you are today. And some people in the audience might still be going through their set of issues. Now I understand e very d ay is a daily struggle and a daily fight. But just breathe i n. Let's just take one breath in a nd one breath out. How's that feel? How's it feel to embrace the things that society said you shouldn't love about yourselves? And if I had one message to give to everyone, it would be to love yourselves. Love yourselves if you're short. Love yourselves if you're dark. Love yourself if people think you're overweight and you don't fit a certain criteria. Love yourself, whatever that is. Love your flaws. Love who you were created to be. That's my time. My name is Jermar Perry, a nd thank you all.
Steven Harowitz:And that is a wrap. You can make sure to hear the other episodes from past Seasons by subscribing to Campfire at Home wherever you get your podcasts, and if that place lets you leave a review, please do. It helps others find the podcast, and it shows support to the storytellers. If you're in the St. Louis area, we'd love to have you come out to an event or a class when we can have those in person again. You can find all those details at cmpr.com. That's C M P F R.com. And luckily for those of you that don't live in St. Louis, everything we do has moved online, so you can actually take our Intro to Storytelling class no matter where you are, St. Louis or otherwise. To find details about that, you can visit our website at cmpfr.com. That's C M P F R.com. As always, a big thank you to the Campfire team, our photographer Jenn Korman, our videographer and podcast producer Jeff Allen, the home for our classes when we are together in person TechArtista, and same for the home for this event, the High Low, and, speaking of which, tonight's stories were recorded live at the High Low in St. Louis, Missouri. Thanks for listening to Campfire at Home. I've been your host Steven Harowitz. Until next time.