captioned live! we took one hour to read four paragraphs together. excerpt from: Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Thabiti Lewis. I don’t usually save my lives because (1) that requires editing and I am already drowning in administrative work and (2) I enjoy existing in temporal space for only a moment in time, rather than being replayable and rewatchable and forwardable all the time. it’s a weird thing to watch happen to your personhood. but this one i found to be really lovely and helpful, so here it is. i hope you enjoyyy.
video transcript below:
toni cade bambara: we are at war (00:00)
Alrighty. So I didn't really like, I didn't really like nonfiction until I got to graduate school— specifically because I did not find it worth it. I was only given nonfiction— and I want to know if this is just me here; I mean, if you're watching the replay, just tell me in the comments when I answer, when I ask a question that you might like to answer, but specifically for you all with me live: how many people here were only given nonfiction as homework growing up? Like you were in school, you were in history class, you were reading scientific factoids and having to regurgitate them. You were given non-fiction in autobiographies or biographies and English courses in high school. And was it fun? Like, were you only given— was non-fiction only given to you as homework? That's what I'm asking. Is that the case? Yes, question mark.
Is that the case? Yeah, only a couple of fiction books. I really only had nonfiction as homework and that sucked. Like I didn't really care. I didn't give a fuck about nonfiction because it wasn't fun. It wasn't engaging. There was no fun story there. There wasn't like, I didn't like, it just felt like brute force learning. It felt like someone was prying opened my mind and cramming it full of crack— whoops.
cramming it full of FACTS that I didn't necessarily want to know or care about. Why am I reading about dinosaurs? Because my teacher told me to. Oh, what a great way to foster a loving long-term relationship with reading, right? So I didn't really like nonfiction until, as in like, I enjoy it. I read it for fun. I didn't like nonfiction until graduate school because graduate school, I began grad school at 22, which is young now that I think about it in post.
I began graduate school and really began to understand the human tapestry. The fact that when I am reading someone's story, a community's stories, when I'm learning about something that feels like it's just a seed of knowledge, it's actually embedded into this long tapestry that connects us all. When I began to understand humanity itself, the Anthropocene (as in the human sovereign world) as a story in and of itself, that's when I really began to fuck with it. That's when I really began to fuck with nonfiction. So—
Toni Cade Bambara. I know that we just said that we didn't know her, which breaks my heart because Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison are peers. For the amount of people, who in this, who here knows Toni Morrison? Can you give me a like, give me like, say yes in the chat so that I can get a good semblance of what's going on? Do we know Toni Morrison? Yes. Nothing but yes. Nice stream with likes, yeah. We know who Toni Morrison is. Oh, absolutely. Maybe one no. Love Toni Morrison. Who is Toni Morrison?
for the people that are saying no. And thank you for saying no, because I don't want to assume that everybody knows if someone doesn't. Who is Toni Morrison? Who's Toni Morrison? Let me know. Who was she? What she write? What she do? Why are we interested in her? What's going on? She's a writer. Give me more than that. Is every writer someone that goes down in history? No. So like, why do we know about her? Even though she's like long dead, not long dead and gone, she died in 2019. She's an author.
She's an author, she's an activist, a Black woman. Come on, keep going. Keep going. Oh, someone's reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison in class. Why was The Bluest Eye groundbreaking? Why was The Bluest Eye one of her favorited, most famous novels? What's going on about The Bluest Eye?
We've heard of it. Why? “I don't write for white people.” That was rather groundbreaking. I mean, it's groundbreaking now, but especially at the time that she said it, right? This is like the 1980s or 90s. She's being asked in interviews, like, why don't you write for white people? And she's like, why would you even fucking ask me that? Do you know how, do you hear how you sound? “You can’t know how profoundly racist that question is.” That's what she said. “I don't think you have a grasp of just how profoundly racist that question is.” That is some groundbreaking shit, right? It's centered around the Black perspective, she wrote of the Black experience, not the Black experience as if there's like a, like a one canon Black experience, a very particular kind of Black experience where Black people were feeling the weight of slavery and the decisions that they came to because of it in terms of hating themselves, never being able to find themselves beautiful. That's what The Bluest Eye is about, right? Or in Sula, Black experiences that are about engaging with womanhood and the ways that you can put womanhood on and off like a costume, what is expected of what good and bad or deviant women are. Lots of magical realism in that book. Beloved by Toni Morrison, in which we're dealing with infanticide because you're working under slavery. That's a very particular kind of Black. There's not one broad stroke Black experience. She's working about very particular things, right?
I'm waiting for someone to name the biggest accolade of her early career. Toni Morrison started out as an editor and then was able to get the Nobel Prize. She was the first Black woman to get the Nobel Prize for her work in The Bluest Eye, which was her debut novel. Okay, so Toni Morrison, giant. So the fact that we don't know, that we don't know about Toni Cade Bambara breaks my heart.
Because Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison were peers. Or even if they weren't, depending on how you define peership, right? Whatever. But they were friends. They ran together. They knew each other. They were probably getting a lunch. Toni Morrison was Toni Cade Bambara's editor.
Toni Morrison was Toni Cade Bambara's editor. So it makes me so sad that we don't know about her. This woman is one of my favorites in terms of my academic pantheon. She's someone I return to all the time. When I'm fed up with y'all, when I'm fed up with being on the internet and going around in the same circles and feeling like I'm throwing my brain at a brick wall, right, Toni Cade Bambara, someone who constantly talks me off the ledge, reminds me about the beauty and the brilliance in writing and in writing for the general public and in writing small experiences, especially about the Black experience. Toni Cade Bambara is an activist as in like an on the ground community organizer. She's a multi-talented filmmaker and she died of colon cancer in 1995 in December. She was raised in New York. Yes, the Salt Eaters. Come on. Exactly.
She was incredible and she was an incredible ethnographer. She's an incredible cultural ethnographer, which is very important to me as someone who wants to write about an experience of people without just kind of copying someone's life and pasting it on the page. She calls that being an emotional gangster. Like going around with your pen in your back pocket, writing down the life experiences of your loved ones and your family members so that they can see themselves on your book pages. She's like, absolutely not. That is so, that like, she calls it like, you're a literary thug, just like plucking people from their real lives and pasting them unceremoniously onto a paper. She was able to write short form and long form stories, short stories and novels that were so close to Black experience, just regular everyday Black experience that it would lift off the page. You could feel it on your skin or you could taste it in your mouth. Beautiful stories, a wealth of stories. One of my favorite ones is a tender man out of The Seabirds Are Still Alive, which is also a really great short story about the post Vietnam. I just like, she's fucking amazing, right? She's a canon Black feminist, Toni Cade Bambara. And in fact, everybody go ahead and type this out in the chat, ready? Toni Cade Bambara. I'm certain that we can spell it from here. Everybody type it out in the chat. Yes, this is the woman who wrote Gorilla, My Love. Exactly, exactly Rodney, Toni Cade Bambara. Write it out so that when you walk away from this live and there's no longer, you know, a pretty face and shiny jewelry, um, coming at you to make sure I can garner your attention, you remember it. Good. Okay. Toni Cade Bambara. Yes. B-A-M B-A-R-A Bambara not O-A. Bombara. Good. Good, good, good. Okay.
I fucking love this lady. And when I say she was an on the ground organizer, she was an on the ground organizer. And she was an organizer until the day she died. She really engaged with struggle, not just in a literary way, not that I think that engaging with liberatory practice in a literary format is like lesser than or bad. It's just that she's rare in that she was a writer kind of out of her back pocket.
The first thing that she describes herself is not a writer or a teacher. It's a mother and a student and a community member and a neighbor. She was a writer for her neighborhood. You know, when she told people she was a writer, they'd be like, can you help me write this thing? Yeah, of course. You want me to write that thing? Yeah, of course. She was very embedded in her community. Writing was something that she did to like keep track of herself. And in fact, there's this particular passage that I want to read from an interview that she did with Claudia Tate in 1983. So now I'm going to begin reading and analyzing texts. When people pop in this chat and say, what are we doing? I don't know what's going on. Please don't expect me to stop. Help your comrades. Make sure that they know what's going on. Tell them who Toni Cade Bambara is, who is a what? Now that we've talked about her. Yes. Come on, Critical Grace Theory! Up on your jazz. Yes. Who's Toni Cade Bambara? Now that we've gotten a tasting, repeat back to me what you have learned to make sure that you can help your comrades. And I wanna know more than just like one word descriptors. Let me know.
What time period was she from? What was she involved with? About the time period that we know about, what would she have been involved with if I tell you she was a community organizer? Tell me, come on. She's a community organizer, mother, writer, give me more than that, come on.
This woman lived until 1995, okay? She was a particularly active writer in the 70s.
Her early literary, yeah, the Black Panther era. What else was going on during the Black, what were the Black Panthers existing of and responding to, like what was going on? What was she a writer in context of, right? Few— food, mutual aid, keep going. Who was Toni Cade Bambara? What did she do? She was a friend of Toni Morrison. She was an on the ground communicator, organizer, civil rights activist during the civil rights movement, right?
Black oppression is as long as colonization. We gotta be more specific than that. Writer of everyday Black experiences. That's a very good picture. Thank you. Thank you. What else?
She was more than a teacher, but a mentor and friend to students and members of the community. Okay? Active in the 1970s.
So when, can someone name one thing that she's written? A beautiful ethnographer. Thank you, Rain. A cultural ethnographer, a studying ethnographer. Okay. So when you describe Toni Cade Bambara, I'm gonna need more than just writer. I'm gonna need more than just author. That doesn't enough. That doesn't do enough. Right? And don't just tell me she coined the term— that's very good, Jenna. Don't tell me she coined the term emotional gangster. Tell people what that means because people will know what that means.
She wrote Gorilla My Love, she wrote The Salt Eaters. Beautiful, beautiful. She was a trained mime?? why did I not know that? She was also a filmmaker because she found writing to be really isolating and solitary and that really drove her nuts and I'm coming to the same point, because the amount of time that I spent alone writing at a screen or alone writing in my notebooks. Alrighty, so when people come in this chat and ask what are we doing? What's going on? Who are we talking about?
Tell them and tell them in earnest. You need to be able to remember these things when you walk away from these place, okay? I'm gonna read a bit from an interview conducted by Claudia Tate. This is in 1983, okay? So at this point, Bambara has already released lots of seminal texts of hers. She's released, let's see, The Black Woman, which is 1970. That's a...
feminist anthology that was just like fucking groundbreaking at the point in time, fucking groundbreaking. By this interview, she has also released a Gorilla, My Love, which is a collection of short stories, all assembling around the Black experience and particularly around the experiences of children. I love it when children are protagonists. I love that shit. She's gotten her master's degree. She's teaching at City College, okay. And I believe she has also published…
Yes, she's published The Seabirds Are Still Alive, which is another collection of short stories. Lots, many of them focus on Vietnam as a war specifically or the effects of Vietnam and the characters that continue on their lives. And she was invited to Vietnam as a guest of the Women's Union in 1975. So when we say that she was in community, when she was organizing and engaged in international feminist struggle and struggles for liberation, we mean that shit, okay? She's able to write about these things because she's living these things. And she's able to write about it at a respectful distance. You know, that doesn't copy paste people onto the page. That's that emotional gangster thing. That's where we are. It's 1983. We're sitting down with Toni Cade Bambara. Veritable legend by the time we're sitting down with her. Okay? The question is— I'm gonna stop after every paragraph. Okay? So we can discuss it.
The question is: what determines your responsibility to yourself and your audience?
And Bambara says,
I start with the recognition that we are at war.
I actually want everybody to type out that sentence right now because that's a maxim that I repeat in my mind all the time. I start with the recognition that we are at war. Type it out. I start with the recognition that we are at war.
what determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience? I start with the recognition that we are at war. This is 1983, okay? So we're not at active war. There's not boots on the ground in the United States. There's not boots on the ground in the United States and everywhere else, although they constantly engage in proxy wars and wars by economics. We are at war as in, actually, I don't wanna give you the answer. What could that mean? This is 1983 in the United States. So there's not an “active” war going on. So what could she mean by that?
I start with the recognition that we are at war when asked what determines your responsibility to yourself and your audience. What could that mean? Reagan, that's a good answer. Good answer, good answer. What else? What could that mean? Violent force submission, word, war on drugs. Yes, we, we as in Black people, that's a very good point. We is not everybody. Not everybody's at war in this country, right? So war on drugs, the killings of Black political leaders, Reagan and his fuck shit, word, okay. War and the sense of struggle for the people, word. War against our communities, yes, yes. The AIDS crisis, yes. Yes, honey. 1983, had the AIDS crisis really hitched off by then? Maybe I'm wrong. I have to look at that. War on mental slavery, the counter-revolution, three trade, yeah, mass deaths. When did the AIDS crisis start? Why don't I know this off the top of my head?
Although she would have known about it, even if it was, let's see, late 1970s, early 1980s, word, yes, AIDS epidemic. So officially this, you know, the CDC started at 1981. So yeah, AIDS crisis in Reagan, early 80s, word, word. And she was very involved in the LGBT community, especially with like the amount of Black feminists that were lesbians themselves or Bendy in general. War against Cold War, political, yeah, yes, word. Good. “I start with the recognition that we are at war.” There were many right answers and there are many right answers to this. I would argue today we are still at war, but I'm going to keep going. Okay.
I start with the recognition that we are at war and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp on which economic, political, social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It's not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomever's benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth. What is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family, and the human family is to try to tell the truth. And that ain't easy.
There are so few truth speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of Western civilization has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that the truth works, that it releases the spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that creates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility for naive idealism that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.
That's paragraph one. This is 1983, I'm gonna stop there. Because there are so many bits that I wanna get into. The recognition that we are at war, we define who we is, right? Okay? And that war is not just a debate. War is not a debate between the economic, political, social arrangement that has hegemony, that rules over the world.
It's not just a battle over turf and who has the right to use whoever resources for whose benefit, right? It's not just rhetorical. It's not just political. It's not just any of things. The war is also being fought over the condition of truth itself. So what does that tell us? In addition to the proxy wars, the economic wars, the political wars, the wars waged by policymaking and intentional negligence such as the AIDS disease, such as poverty existing in the first place?
We also know that COINTELPRO is going on at this point in time. Now the public don't know that necessarily for sure, but the people that are living it can absolutely tell you that it was going on right then before the CIA unclassified those documents. They fucking know. The war is also on, boom, it's your girl now propaganda. The war is also being brought over. What is the truth about human nature and about human potential? We already talked about what book this is. Answer your comrades, don't leave them hanging.
The war is also being thought about the truth, right? What truth is human nature about the human potential?
My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family, and the human family is to try to tell the truth. And that is not easy, that ain't easy. There are so few true speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of Western civilization has claimed the allegiance of so many, as in this purported truth. These things that we have been told are true, that are actually directly harmful to us. There's a war there in that too.
There is a war going on in just trying to realize what is true for us, we who are not benefiting from the wars that happen above our heads. Where are the casualties? Where are the bodies being dropped on the in-between? I can't pin anything in the chat because it's not gonna stay longer than one minute. So I'm gonna stop and answer this question one more time, exactly one more time, okay? And then everybody's going to remember it so that we can answer our comrades so that I don't have to stop.
conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, okay? All right?
Coolio, answer your comrades. Put it in the chat, write it out for yourself so that you can remember it well, because I'm not gonna stop again.
We have rarely been encouraged and equipped— this is just the first paragraph, okay?
We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate that the fact that the truth works. Now there's multiple definitions of work here, right? The truth works as in it's effective, but that the truth works as in it is a laboring. The truth is actively laboring, that it releases the spirit, and that's a capital S, that it releases the spirit, and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, this is United States specific, that for example, equates criticism with assault. Now I just said in an essay that I just published and also in a video that should be circulating right now… hopefully. Thank you for all your likes to help me circulate those videos because TikTok hates bitch ever since I started political education, okay? I just said in a video that I really love critique and that I feel trapped in an academic zoo because the critique that I get online is abysmal. It is poorly thought out. And there are lots of interviews in here where Bambara is given the opportunity to critique her peers to think about what they do well, what they do poorly, what they could have done better. And her critique is well-rooted. It is well-researched. It is rooted in the times, the circumstance, the necessities of the texts. It's rooted in who those authors are and what they try to represent or the boundaries that were put in place for them writing at all. Critique is a loving process. And it's one that requires a lot of research on your side to know who you're critiquing in the first place. So the fact that I get critiques over and over again that are… lackluster.
fucking lackluster, that are baseless, that have nothing to, that very clearly show that you have never engaged with my work, that you saw half of one video and wanted to sound smart. It's exhausting for me because it means that I can't get better. Grace just put it in the chat, iron sharpens iron. I can't be sharpened if you're made of fucking plastic. Like get yourself some better critique. Get the bones, the brass, the teeth to be able to chew on me well so that I can get better. Cause I'm exhausted.
Alrighty.
We live in a world that for example, equates criticism with assault. That equates social responsibility with naive idealism. That it is naively idealistic to believe that you are responsible to the people around you.
that defines unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism, that you are literally some sort of deranged for wanting to read. You know, the most annoying question I get all the time, why do you read so much? Why do you write so much? I'm going to gag myself with a spoon. When I'm on my phone in public, no one asks me why I'm on my phone. What, God forbid I pull out a book in public. I just, my God,
Answer your comrades.
I do not think so that's the first paragraph. That's how much we got from just one paragraph and we got one, two, three, four well-bodied paragraphs in this one question, what determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience? So our first questions, our first set of answers are, I have to tell the truth. And people don't like telling the truth in this society. And it's hard to tell the truth in this society because what is true is constantly morphing for the good of the empire in charge and not good for the people who are living in these purported truths. Are we tracking?
Does this make sense?
We Gucci thus far?
Like the live or say yes. it’s 260 people in here. So if someone has a question, ask me, cause I'll do my best to answer it. Yes?
Following?
Beautiful. Alrighty.
Are we ready?
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation. But I do think it has its potency. This is paragraph two. That's a topic sentence. I mean, I'm gonna say topic sentence loosely because this is just her orating. This is what Toni Cade Bambara sounds like when she's orating. These are recorded interviews. I aspire.
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has its potency. What does potency mean? That's a great question, baby, with a little face.
What does potency mean?
Power, keep going. Power, strength, keep going, keep going. What context do we usually use potency in? Intensity, good, power, strength, intensity. Strong effect. Potency means it packs a punch. That's a very good way to say it, Eddie. Yes, concentration, it means highly effective. Good, relevance, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, medicine. So if I were to say, yeah, good, good. Concentrate it. We say things like, ooh, that lemon is potent in this smoothie. You know what I'm saying?
It's usually, it's not just power. It's not just effectiveness. It's effectiveness in a cocktail of other things. Make sense? Does that make sense? So I think literature is the prime. I don't think it's the primary instrument, meaning first, but I do think it has its potency, as in the cocktail of instruments that we have towards liberation. That one do be back in a punch. She should be, oh, there she is. Damn. There that is literacy. Yes.
Okay.
So I work to tell the truth about people's lives. I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our communities, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block who have been waiting in the wings. Characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp flashy or hustler slick or because they didn't fit into previously acceptable modes or stock types.
I want to lift up some usable truths. I want to lift up some usable truths, like the fact that the simple act of cornrowing one's hair is radical in a society that defines beauty as blonde tresses blowing in the wind, that staying centered in the best of one's own cultural tradition is hip, is sane, is perfectly fine despite all the claims to universality through Anglo-Saxonizing and other madnesses.
Okay, hold on.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. That's paragraph two. And again, we got a lot to unpack. Remember the question that Bambara is answering is what determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience? She already said, what? What was the topic sentence? What was the first sentence of that first? I made you write it down. What was the first sentence of that first paragraph? What was it? Somebody tell me. Someone better tell me. Y'all wrote it down.
Come on. I start with the recognition that we are at war. Yes. I start with the recognition that we are at war. It's something I repeat in my head. I remember, you know how, I don't know if y'all grew up religious, right? I grew up, I was raised by my mama, so I was raised in the Christian church.
and they encourage us to memorize scripture word for word, bar for bar and memorize it. And when I realized that you don't only have to do that with religious texts, that you can memorize anything that you find helpful, that's when I memorized beat for beat, bar for bar. I walk around and I think about it. I look at homeless people in New York sleeping face to pavement and I think about it. I look at who the most internally displaced people in the world being children in Sudan right now and I think about it.
Everywhere I start with the fact I start with the recognition that we are at war. In the little ways and in big ways in the ways that I see it every day that I'm prone to ignore everywhere I start with the recognition that we are at war. and then the second thing is literacy packs a punch. I work to tell the truth about people's lives, right? That first that first paragraph talks about truth-telling and the necessity of it and how not easy it is—
Not just because the war is violent, not just because the war is political, not just because the war is over turf and land and labor, all things are true. The war is literally over What is the truth itself? So then we see that in the second paragraph. I work to tell the truth about people's lives. I work to tell the truth about people's struggles, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring center stage all those characters, not just ordinary folks on the blog, right? Not just the people that have clean archetypes.
but the ones that are waiting in the wings. She says something beautiful here. I wanna lift up some usable truths. What could she mean? What could she mean by usable truths?
What could she mean by usable truth? What does that mean?
What is a truth that might be usable to people that are constantly under war?
Stuff you can put into practice, word. Truth that frees the mind, word. Truths that will benefit you, yeah. Something you can actionable, something that you can apply to your life, forms of resistance. Right, the truth of our agency. Ooh, truth that, yeah. Truth that is powerful, that leads to our agency. Truth from history. Ooh, reminds me of COVID precautions that masking is knowledge and action, period. Yes, yes.
I wish I had a mask in reaching distance, but I do be staying masked. Yeah, yes, truth that's in community. I love it. Usable truths, truth of everyone's divinity, truth of our value. I love those two answers in particular because she's talking about upholding and uplifting stories that aren't marketable, right? These character archetypes that we have, that we see over and over again, especially in, right? We're in 1983. This woman has been writing for the last decade and she's from New York. She was raised in New York, okay? So the acceptable modes of the stock types that she's talking about are real, like she says, hustler slick, real gangster, real pimp flashy. And she's like, you know, and some of us are children. Some of us are singers. Some of us are the organizer's wife. Some of us are Vietnam vets. Some of us are, there are so many kinds, traditions, lenses, manipulations, tastes, flavors of blackness that I want to write about.
Usable truths like the simple act of cornrowing one's hair is radical in a society that defines beauty as blonde tresses blowing in the wind. Simple like staying some centered and the best of one's own cultural tradition is hip. Are you ready for this? Is sane. A self-defined version of sane is perfectly defined despite all the claims to universality through Anglo-Saxonizing and other madnesses. Stunning, fucking stunning. It is perfectly fine despite all claims to universality through Anglo-Saxonizing and other madnesses.
I love this lady. You see why I returned to her? You see how worn, you see this? Worn, okay? Marked the fuck up.
I love this lady. Thank you, God. Can I repeat the last line? For sure. She says, like the simple, it's kind of a long sentence. Like the simple act of cornrowing one's hair is radical in a society that defines beauty as blonde tresses blowing in the wind, but staying centered in the best of one's own cultural tradition is hip is saying is perfectly fine despite all claims to universality through anglo-saxonizing and other masses (anglo-saxonizing being a verb).
Are we tracking?
Yes? Tell me you actually like the look. We got it? Is it making sense?
Mm-hmm. Tell your comrades the book title.
Coolio, I'm gonna keep going. Anglosaxonizing, rank colonization, force assimilation. Right, right, right.
Alrighty, I'm gonna head on to paragraph three.
Tell your comrades the title of this book. People have been asking. It would be dishonest then, this is paragraph three, to what determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience. We're at war. We need to be truth-telling. Truth-telling can be radical. Okay? It would be then, ready?
It would be then dishonest though, to end my comments there.
First and foremost, first and foremost, I write for myself.
Writing has been for a long time, my major tool for self-instruction and self-development. I try to stay honest through pencil and paper. I run off at the mouth a lot. I have a penchant for flamboyant performance. I exaggerate to the point of hysteria. I cannot always be trusted with my mouth open, but when I sit down with notebooks, I am absolutely serious about what I see, sense, know.
I write for the same reasons I keep track of my dreams, for the same reason I meditate and practice being still, to stay in touch with me and not let too much slip by me. We're about building a nation— that inner nation needs building too. I would be writing whether there were a publishing industry or not, whether there were presses or not, whether there were markets or not.
That's paragraph three. So we talked about what determines your responsibility to yourself and your audience. I start with the recognition that we are at war. The truth is hard to tell. The human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain't easy. Right? Second paragraph. While I don't think literary is the primary instrument for social transformation, it packs a punch. You do have some potency. I want to lift up usable truths, right? That staying hip to your own tradition is perfectly fine and perfectly sane in a world that wants you to Anglo-Saxonize, to whitenize yourself. Remember, this is 1983. The Negro is not yet in vogue. Bethann Hardingson is one of the first Black supermodels walking the runways. Okay? This is not a time in which white girls are getting box braids and crying about how it's perfectly fine. This is a time in which what is beautiful...
is still uniquely and exclusively white. So then here three, it's dishonest to end her comments there about what she, her responsibilities to herself and her audience. She says, it is dishonest to end my comments there. First and foremost, I write for myself. First and foremost, I write for myself. It's been a long time tool of self instruction, of self development. I would add self-discipline in there for me personally.
She stays honest through pencil and paper. And this, this in particular, it's something I relate with a lot. She says, I've a penchant for flamboyant performance. I exaggerate to the point of hysteria. I can't always be trusted with my mouth open. I just be talking. Sometimes I talk myself off a cliff. However, but and, when I sit down with my notebooks, I am absolutely serious about what I see, sense, and know. When I sit down with my notebooks, I am absolutely serious in what I see, what I sense and what I know.
I write for the same reasons I keep track of my dreams, for the same reasons I meditate and practice being still to stay in touch with myself, to not let too much slip by me. And then here's another maxim. Here's another maxim. I want you to write it down because this is one I repeat to myself too. We're about building a nation, semi-colon the inner nation needs building to. We are about building a nation. The inner nation needs building to.
We are about building a nation. The inner nation needs building too.
The People's Oracle, Dayna Lynn Nuckles has lately been saying, uh, revolution starts in the body. I think that's another way to say that. We are about building a nation the inner nation needs building to. Remember that she said this in response to the question.
What was that question? What determines your responsibility to yourself and your audience? What determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience? Inter-nation building. I have a responsibility to my audience to build my inter-nation because we, we who are at war, we, we are about building a nation. So the inner-nation needs to be building too. That's a great question.
What's the inner nation? What could she be talking about? What's going on there? What are our ideas? What is the inner nation?
self, inner sovereignty, the body, right? Our mind, the inner you, the reclamation of the self. Revolution happens in the body, knowledge, compass, and self understanding. Inner nation is in self and calmness, your inner community, your agency, your self authority, the temple of the Holy spiritual as in you. I like this, many right answers.
The ego, the integrated mind, soul, body, being, being embodied, your inner child, your inner pantheon of people, your spirit, your close community, the process of learning, relearning, unlearning, individuality and community. I always say that I'm an amalgamation of people that built me. Yeah. Yes. The collective self. That's a very good way to put it, Mina. The collective self. Okay. There are many right answers. And we're not going to state all those right answers here. And I suspect, what Toni Cade Bambara's inner nation is. It's different than mine, it's different than yours. But it's a beautiful question to consider, isn't it? Has anyone considered what their inner nation is before that in these terms? What your inner nation is? Because that inner nation implies a lot. It implies lands, governance, systems, ideology, shared culture. Do you feel like you have a shared culture in and of yourself? Is that something you ever considered before this?
Right? Not a nation, but a world. I agree. I don't really fuck with the nation state, but word. If we're trying to build a nation, as in build a word, world. Yeah. The expansive fullness of you, the collective self is a really great way to put that. Right? Never thought about that term until today. What I call my garden space. Exactly, Lynn. Someone's been reading. Wow. I'm flattered. That is exactly what I call my garden space. Exactly. Beautiful. She ends this out by saying, I would write whether there's a publishing industry or not,
whether there are presses or not, whether there are markets or not. So this is a very interesting turn, right? Because she's been asked, right? What is your responsibility to your audience? What determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience? And she's kind of answered with, my responsibilities to myself exist regardless of whether there even is an audience. I myself am my own audience.
Are we tracking?
(1) We are at war.
(2) The truth is difficult, but we got to tell it anyway.
(3) So we want to tell simple and usable truths. Fuck Anglo-Saxonizing yourself. And,
(4) you need to build your inner nation.
If we're in the business of nation building in the first place, the inner nation needs working well. We tracking? Yes, say yes or like the like. That's where paragraph three. We got technically one mega paragraph, but I'm gonna split it up into two, cause it's long.
I began writing, this is paragraph four, all right? I began writing in a serious way, though I can't recall a time when I wasn't jotting down stuff and trying to dramatize lessons learned when I got into teaching. I began writing in a serious way when I got into teaching. It was a way to keep track of myself, to monitor myself. I am a very seductive teacher, persuasive, infectious, overwhelming, irresistible.
I worked very hard in the classroom to teach students to critique me constantly to protect themselves from my nonsense. But let's face it, the teacher-student relationship we've been trained in is very colonial in nature. It's fraught with dangers, the power given to teachers over students' minds, students' spirits, students' bodies, students' development. My God, to rise above that, to insist of myself and of them that we refashion that relationship along progressive lines demanded a great deal of courage, imagination, energy, and will. Writing was a way to hear myself, to check myself. Writing was and is an act of discovery. I'm gonna stop there. This is technically one paragraph. We're going to, we're going to put it into, okay.
First of all, I relate to this paragraph a lot, a latte, because I am, there's a reason that I write about like the hegemony of beauty, the hierarchies of beauty in the society, how we're more likely to find beautiful people more trustworthy, more benevolent, more worthwhile. I am not naturally a good or benevolent person because you like my face and voice. I've written about it. I screamed from the rooftop about every other TikTok business quarter, and even still.
I watch how effective, yes, exactly Simone, capital B Beautiful, someone been here. Exactly, Amy, thank you, thank God that my lessons are sticking. Because honestly, I feel like I'm throwing my brain at a brick wall and watching it splatter and nothing changes because the amount, still, that people are like, man, I just, I only watch your videos because you're gorgeous. I mean, thanks. But it scares me how easy it is to change the minds of the populace because I appear on camera.
I said this in a different line, but I'm like, there's a reason I don't want to become a video essayist. It's because I'm very compelling on camera. It's because it's very easy to get you all to agree with whatever I say and whatever I feel because you're watching me say and feel it. There is something that reading does, which it creates like a distance between you and me when you're not listening to my Taurus velvety tones into like a high quality microphone. Okay. When you're not seeing my very pretty face and voice and be so wrapped up in what I'm saying. I am a prolific orator. I started public speaking when I was 14, okay? I'm not new to this. I'm very good at what I do. I'm very aware that I'm very good at what I do and that it's very easy to convince you all, a mass of people who have given me a lot of undue authority, quite frankly, to believe what I tell you to believe. You don't even check my sources. You take my word for it. That is a ludicrous amount of responsibility that I really did not do a lot to receive. I did not earn this. I was an overnight sensation on TikTok. My first video ever went viral and I've been viral since. And lots of people co-signing me by ways of follows and shares of likes. Lots of people saying, Hey, I too find this legitimate gave me a lot of undue authority that I did not do a lot of work to receive quite frankly. Now, adrienne marie brown said trust the people and the people become trustworthy. My God is that never more— There is no truer case than for me because I was ready to scam y'all.
I wanted to get on TikTok and become a skincare influencer and cash in on these good genetics and get a nice paycheck, a payout every time I promoted a product that I was gonna use in my personal life anyways. I was so well set up to make a lot of money and to keep it moving. I didn't wanna come into political education. I didn't wake up one day and want to do this. Okay?? I was ready to scam you bitches. Easily, and you would've given me your money easily. Like there would have been no cognitive. None of it.
Honestly, I thought about like, oh, I could do political education while also doing my skincare and makeup at the same time, and I could have. Most people would not have found anything wrong with that. Oh my gosh, yes, I'm gonna buy the oil cleanser that ismatu recommended while talking about how terrible fast fashion is. Are you fucking serious? It would have been so easy. But I did not, because you all expected me to be benevolent, because you all expected me to treat you kindly and give you my best. And because at the time I came on TikTok, maybe like six, seven weeks after being here, Roe versus Wade got overturned and I watched a lot of panic and no sources and I was like, okay, I can give a source. Like that's not hard. Uh, fucking apparently it is a little hard because most people that are thought leaders in our current television scape— this is television, you’re watching TV right now— social media has entirely replaced television as we've previously known it. This is the thing that is easy. It's the thing that gets in everybody's hands and it's the thing that is most affordable. You only need wifi.
Television is designed to make you feel things. And I am very good and imbuing my face and my body and my vocal performance, my performance on camera with emotion. I know that because I go viral every time I express extreme emotion, happiness, sadness, anger, despondency, encouragement, anytime, anytime that I am at an emotional level six or above, I'm ranking over 500,000 views. You all are easy to exploit, quite frankly. And it's not your fault. It's not your fault. This...
Medium, this medium makes it so that you are wrapped up in the emotions of whoever's on screen, that you take their word for it, that you consider them the protagonist. We see this watching Insecure right now. Don't bully me because I haven't seen all of Insecure yet. I'm taking my time on that one. But we constantly root for the protagonist, Issa, even when she's wrong, just for the fact that she's the main character and the cameras on her the most. It should be a little alarming, how quickly people were able to see me as a kind, trustworthy character when I did little to nothing to earn that, honestly. So the reason I started writing was to root myself in things that I found to be usable truths. The reason that I take reading seriously is to make sure that I am not asking hundreds of thousands of people to take my word for it. We should want better than that.
We— Freddie!! it's so good to see you— We should want better for that, okay? We should want more. It is absolutely ludicrous that we have thought leaders that can walk around and not read a book for years and still be very effective. Absurd. Our standards are low.
The reason I began writing in a serious way was when I got into teaching. I feel that in my bones. Toni Cade Bambara said this before I was alive. This is an interview from 1983, okay? It was a way to keep track of myself, to monitor myself. This is her speaking about herself and I'm about to put it in my voice and you see how well it applies to me. I am a very seductive teacher, persuasive, infectious, overwhelming, irresistible. I worked hard in the classroom to teach students to critique me constantly, to protect themselves from my nonsense. And let's face it, the teacher-student relationship we've been trained in is very colonial in nature. You are trained to take my word for it. It is fraught with dangers. The power is given to teachers over students' minds, spirits, students' development, my God, to rise above that, to insist of myself.
And of them, that we refashion this relationship along progressive lines demanded a great deal of courage, imagination, energy, and will. Writing was a way to hear myself and to check myself. Writing was and is an act of discovery. That's paragraph four. I'm gonna stop right here.
How many people have read or listened to The Case Against Sponsorships? That's an essay I wrote and it's actually one of the most important essays I've ever written. Information Anarchy, The Case Against Sponsorships. How many people actually went and listened to it? Because it's, I understand that it's one of my more academic essays. I don't care. It's one of the most important essays I've ever written. The process of writing it radicalized me because even while I was writing it, I was like, am I sureeeee that I want to publicly never commit to taking sponsorships? Because that means that I am giving up whatever livelihood I could possibly hope to have in a traditional sense from being on social media. That's a big commitment. And to call out the fact that advertising is just straight up brainwashing and that I, in selling my word, am selling you all down the river, that I'm now positioned, even though I did nothing to earn that— that I am now positioned as a thought leader, as someone trustworthy, as someone that you all come to for sources of information, usable truths that might affect us in this world. For me to sell my opinion, for me to sell my word is to sell you all. I would be selling you all.
That is not the mentality that I came into, uh, influencerdom with. First of all, I didn't mean to be an influencer with first place. Secondly, I was very ready to sell you. I was very ready to sell you when I came into this space. It was because I saw how much agency I had over shaping collective knowledge, shaping culture. Right? My first big engagement, like really, really big engagement with the, with the social internet came after six weeks of being online maximum. And it was when I was talking about Malcolm X and I found out,
in the process of researching and reading his biography like three times in two weeks and like just falling into an entire rabbit hole on him and his life and his history that he was engaged in queer sex work. And I, a queer sex worker, was quarantining from monkey pox at that time. And I got on the internet and yelled about this man, the things he made me feel, the misogyny he went through, the fact that he has a history of literally battering women.
The long form video on Malcolm X's chapter in queer sex work was delayed because I needed to meet people that knew him in real life before I would feel comfortable changing cultural knowledge like that. But let me tell you what, I was very new to the internet. I had been here for maybe five, six weeks. Did I know I was important? Did I know I was capable of changing collective culture? No. Why would I think that? I don't think that way about, I did not grow up on the social internet. I didn't grow up with social media. Watching someone random state their opinions is just… a random person stating their opinions. It doesn't matter how much, how many likes it has, that is a random person stating their opinion to me. So to find out that everybody else thinks I am important enough to get mad, to get angry, to have minds changed, I did not realize that I was capable of changing the minds and hearts of the masses. In fact, that's something I really didn't internalize until like a year after doing this. And by then we were in real deep. I feel these words a lot. I have way too much authority in this space of teacher. Way too much. It is absurd, in fact.
You should critique me constantly. And the reason that I get so upset about lackluster critique is because you're selling us both short. I'm not gonna get better if people don't have the teeth necessary to call me out on some bullshit, to ask me to do better. To say, read that one again, I don't think you got it right. To say, I don't think you know enough to be able to speak on this well.
To rise above that. Are we tracking thus far?
Toni Cade Bambara is answering the question, what determines your responsibility to yourself and your audience? And one of the responsibilities that she states is, I have a responsibility to read and write to make sure that I can root myself in usable truths because let my mouth get going, I'm not trustworthy. She says, I cannot always be trusted with my mouth open. I exaggerate to the point of hysteria. I've got a penchant for flamboyant performance. Let me tell you, I know how to put on a show.
I need to put pen to paper to make sure that what I know is true. Because when I sit down with notebooks, that's what she says, right? Paragraph three, when I sit down with the notebooks, I am absolutely serious about what I see, sense and know. And I'm the same way. I may speak too fast. I might put a foot in my mouth. I might imply something I shouldn't with my mouth. I might exaggerate to the point of hysteria with my mouth. Once pens to paper, once it is ink to paper, that's it. That is that. That's the territory of, I said what I fucking said.
That's why I write essays to give myself space between you and me so that you without my pretty face and my beautiful speaking voice and my flamboyant nature and my persuasive, infectious, overwhelming, irresistible way of taking up space on your phone screen, you have the words on a page so that you can consider the way that my claims fit in your mouth. That is your responsibility to yourself. And that's the benefit of reading versus listening or watching. Not that you can't learn via watching, not that you can't learn via audio. I love those versions of reading, and they do different things. If you want to consider someone critically, read it and look at their sources. Critically, take their voice out of it, take their face out of it, take the emotion that they are trying to take you on out of it. Look at the words on a page. Allow yourself to be so bored that you start thinking about your own thoughts.
Allow yourself to read it out loud in your mouth so you can see how it feels.
Tracking? The amount of people that called me a written word supremacist, that is trash critique. Trash. It's god awful. Do better. Are we tracking?
There are critiques to be had, but that truly is just, that's fucking trash. I don't learn anything from that. Foolish, right? Coolio, thank you. Alrighty, this is the final paragraph, ready? Let's do a quick recap. What are we reading? Tell me the title of this book. Title of the book, someone tell me. Ideally multiple someones. What's the title of this book? What are we reading?
Come on.
Come on. Nope. That's an interview from 1983, but that's not the title of the book. No, no. There we go. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. I'm certain that you meant Cade, the city of flights, but that's what it is. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Toni Cade, something is not good enough. Nope, I want everybody to write that down. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. I stopped this live twice to tell you that title. I told you to remember it and you didn't. No apologies necessary. I told you all to remember it and you didn't. That's important. That's very fucking important. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. It's a collection of interviews that has been put together, edited by Tabitha Lewis. Sorry, Thabiti. Thabiti Lewis.
Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. The reason I'm not emphasizing the editor of this is because it's a collection of [interviews]. The person that edited it is not necessarily the author. Does that make sense? Usually I am big on you need to remember title and author, but the person that edited it did it in community with a lot of Black women. You know what I'm saying? So for this purposes, conversation with Toni Cade Bambara, good. And when asked by Claudia Tate in an interview in 1983,
what determines your responsibility to yourself and to your audience, what are some of the things that she said?
What are some of the things that she said? Tell me. There was a couple that I asked you to just remember verbatim, as in word for word.
Answer your comrades questions. I start with the recognition that we are at war. Beautiful. I write to keep track of myself. Stunning. Tell the truth, right? Yes. Tell usable truths. Yes. What else? That there's an inner nation. Ooh, yes. Her responsibility towards herself. We're about building a nation. The inner nation needs building too.
that literature is a potent tool, that literature is maybe not the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has its potency. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
What else did she say? The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. It's something she did say, not in this particular interview, but that is a very famous quote that is attributed to her. She said that, yes. The stealing of other people's stories, right? Usable truths does not mean copy pasting people in your real life onto the page. That's emotional ganster. What kind of thuggery is that? That's what she says, beautiful.
What does she say about students and student teachers? Yes, Anglo-Saxonization, as in, it is radical in a society that defines beauty as blonde tresses blowing in the wind. That stays centered, if you stay centered, in the best of your own cultural tradition, that's sane, that's hip, that's perfectly fine, despite the claims to Anglo-Saxonize.
Always question your teacher. What the hell? Why am I being asked to verify my human is during a literal lie? What the hell? Wild. Don't take her word for granted. I worked very hard in the classroom to teach students to critique me constantly, to protect themselves from my nonsense. The power given over teachers’ minds— or sorry, the power given to teachers over students' minds, students' spirits, students' development, my God. It's important to question teachers. It requires a great deal of courage, imagination, and will, beautiful. This was a great recap. Everybody give yourself a round of applause. That was stunning. Good job. Way to remember things. I want you to remember these things once I am no longer singing and dancing and tap dancing on your screen to get you to pay attention to me, okay? When there is no one in shiny dangly earrings with cute eye make up singing and dancing at you to get you to learn something, I want you to remember these things.
Coolio, are we tracking?
Those of us that have been hearing, those of us that have been hearing, any questions thus far? Can I finish this out? We're tracking. Say yes or like the live. It's 300 people in here. I'ma wait. How many say yes? Round table yeses. That was four paragraphs. Well, yeah, three and a half. Three and a half paragraphs. This last paragraph is long, so I split it into two, but it's one paragraph. This is four paragraphs to answer one question well. You see what long form thought gets you? We've been here for a while.
You see what you get when you pay attention to one thing for a long time? You learn so much. Imagine me trying to do this amount of rigor to learn this much in, uh, in a three minute video. And about 60% of people only watch 12 seconds of a three minute video and they move the fuck on. You see how much I don't like short form content?
beautiful. Alrighty, it sounds like we're good.
Are we ready?
Mm.
I frequently discovered, this is that last paragraph, this is paragraph four, this, the back half. I frequently discovered that I was a dangerous, that I was dangerous. Sorry, I'm going to start that over. I frequently discovered that I was dangerous. It's virtually unfit to move the students and myself into certain waters. I would have to go into the classroom and beat them up for not taking me to the wall.
for succumbing to mere charm and flash when they should have been challenging me, kicking my ass. I will be eternally grateful to all those students at City College and Livingston Rutgers, remember she from New York, for caring, for the caring and the courageous way they helped me develop as a teacher, a person, a writer, and a mother too. Fortunately for all concerned, my daughter, a 99 year old wise woman who travels under the guise of a young thumb sucking kid, knows when to walk away from me, when to close her ears, turning my rantings into a joke, call me on a contradiction. But even after she's grown, and even if I never teach again, I will still use writing as a way to stay on center, for I will still be somebody's neighbor, somebody's friend, and I'll still be a member of our community under siege or in power. I'll still need to have the discipline writing affords demands.
I don't wish to be useless or dangerous, so I will write. And too, hell, I'm a writer. I am compelled to write.
I love this lady. I miss her and I never met her. I miss her and she died before I was born. I miss her.
I don't wish to be useless or dangerous, so I'll write. That's a maxim I memorized from this one too. I do not wish to be useless or dangerous, so I will write. If you resonate with that one, write that down. I understand that's not everybody. I understand that's not everybody, but that's me. So I'm going to write it down. I can put that in the chat, right? Comment, yeah. I'm going to put that in the chat. I don't wish to be useless or dangerous.
So I’ll write.
God Almighty.
I love this lady.
What does this last paragraph say?
What does this last paragraph say? What, like, what's the, if we could chalk it down to like a pithy thesis, something that'll fit in the comment section of a live, what is this back half to this last paragraph? What does it say?
She learned so much from her students critiquing her. Yeah. She said, I want to be held accountable. Yeah. She said, writing is where she goes to be honest. Yes. She said, check your teachers. She said, we need to have a purpose. She said, Ooh, putting the revolution, legacy of revolution on paper. I don't know if that's what this says, but I don't think that that's something she would disagree with. Writing cuts the nonsense. Dreamy babe, I think that that's absolutely something that she said here. Right?
Right. I'll still need to have the discipline writing affords and demands, right? Even after she is grown, she here being her child, her daughter. Even after she's grown, even if I never teach again, I will still use writing as a way to stay on center for I'll still be someone's neighbor. Ooh, wait, let's zoom in here. I need writing to stay on center, not just for teaching purposes, I might never teach again—not just to parent well, my kid's going to be grown one day. And she says nothing about the big heady ideas of revolution and world making here in this place. She says, I need to stay on, on center because I'll still be somebody's neighbor. I'm a still be somebody's friend. I'll still be a member of our community under siege or in power. Remember we are at war and either that war is going to continue to go on and impress us or that war is going to— we'll win, and we'll be in power.
Under truth or in power or sorry-- under siege (but under truth is accurate as well) under siege or in power, i'll still need to have the discipline writing affords and demands. I don't wish to be useless; I don't want to be dangerous; so I will write. to hell, I'm a writer. I am compelled to write. I have that one circled: I am compelled to write. I know you can't see this backwards but my God. my God I love this lady.
When I am fed up with being on the internet, when I am fed up with the fact that I woke up one day and was a public educator, despite the fact that I never wanted this for myself, no one, wait, I just, I don't know many people that like desire to teach. This profession gripped me by the back of my neck and dragged me in kicking and screaming. I did not necessarily want to be in this space, here I am. But when I am fed the fuck up, I open this book like a holy text.
and I memorize things that I'm gonna need to take within me. And to hell, I'm a writer. I am compelled to write.
Thank you God.
I'm so happy that I know that Toni, Toni Cade Bambara exists. And I'm happy that you all know that Toni Cade Bambara exists as well. There are many incredible… incredible… I don't even want to say incredible because that implies like a, I can't believe it and I can. I can believe it. Most of the, the transcendent timeless genius that touches me throughout eons and decades— it’s from the hands and hearts of Black women.
So I can believe it. I find it in fact, very credible. But I'm saying that there's more than just Toni Morrison in terms of the pantheon of Black women, artists, writers, scholars, activists, historians, there's more than just Toni Morrison. And she was friends with a lot of them. Toni Morrison did not ask to be the Beyoncé of her generation. And it's something that we call the Beyoncé effect, but it happened way before her, where if there's greatness in blackness, the white academy, chooses exactly one to exalt above everybody else. And that's never how that happened. They were always in community with one another. And the fact that they were in community with one another made each other better. They knew each other. They did brunch together. They were in collectives with one another.
And in community with herself too. Word, Jaclyn, that's very good.
All right, that's all I got. Thank you so much for coming, this is fun. Happy to have recorded this on a separate medium because live keeps playing with me. So, oh yeah, that's an hour, an hour 10. I'm gonna wrap this shit up. I do need to shower and get myself ready for bed. But thank you for being here. This is very fun. Thank you for all of your engagement. It's fun to learn in community.
Live is one of the only places that I can come and like learn in real time. I really fucking appreciate it. I'll give you a second to answer each other's questions because we got people asking what book it is. And if you've been here, especially for the full hour, I want you to see how much I get the exact same question. And this is just from 300 people. Not that there's anything wrong with asking questions. Absolutely ask your questions. But I cannot possibly be expected to answer the same question 15 times in an hour.
Hard no. Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping your comrades. I need you to imagine this then on a scale of like a video of 300,000, the amount of times I get the exact same question. God Almighty, if I get one more comment saying, you supposed to, there are accounts pretending to be you. Actually, I like, I literally can't look at the comments anymore. I don't, I'm tired. I encourage you, as usual, to do your own research and to make sure that you are able to support yourself in continuing the work. There's a Discord that's linked on my substack. And the sub stack is always linked in bio, literally always. It baffles me that I still get this question. “[I’m] a veteran?" Oh God. It's only been two years. Not I look like what I've been through. That's terrible.
Alright.
This is very fun. And also thank you for all of your likes and your engagement because the algorithm hates a bitch. Since I started TikTok, no, not since I started TikTok. Cause when I wanted to be a skincare influencer, views came easy. It was not difficult. Specifically when I started political education, that's when they were like, *buzzer sound* wrong answer. So I appreciate this. A recording of the live, should I choose to post it, will be on Patreon. I often don't post the lives because it's fun for me to exist in temporary space. I don't always wanna be replayable. Sometimes I just wanna do things once and just have it be like, if you were there, you were there. Most of the time I don't save my lives because if you were there, you were there. And now it's special. Isn't that fun?
Has anyone been here for other lives? Isn't that fun? And that it encouraged you to actually like write shit down? Cause if I record it and I'd be like, oh yeah, all the notes are recording. Are you gonna write it down? No. Are you gonna go tap dance to make sure that you can remember this? Yeah, makes it special. I feel like it's okay to exist in internet space for a little while and then leave. I think that that's fine. Yeah, like.
You pay attention in a special way. If you don't write it down, if you do not write this information down, poof! There it goes. And I, I like that. I like that a lot. Alrighty, that's all I got for tonight. Thank you so much. besitos, have a good evening. I may or may not post this. We'll fucking see. Goodbye.
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toni cade bambara: i start with the recognition that we are at war