Look at you. You've been really inspired to participate in more local politics. You're killing it. What has your council person done for you? Don't listen to her. Look how far you've come. This anti l g B t Q bill was stopped with your help. That's not even mentioning the federal government. Cheto in chief and his cronies don't give a damn about you. Neither that the other so called leaders of the free world. That's why your community is still struggling. Never forget you were dragged to this brutal land against your will. Your ancestors didn't fight so hard for nothing. There a reason you're alive today. You may be tired, but you've made Hella gains. You're on the come up. You're making oppressive systems crumble. Sy No, no, no, no, no, no no, she's wrong. Those systems are alive and well, and the antis are still building them up. Same problems, different day. Your votes matter, your voice matters. All this hard work and dedication you're putting in it is really helping to improve our government and our society. There's no way you'll make rule change working within these old, stale systems. It's a trout there's no out for you in this broken system. Freedom is a facade here. You're stuck in a vicious cycle of oppression. Being a good democrat and gonna help you. You've got to break the machine. I'm bridget Todd and you're listening to solution sessions, changing the world one conversation at a time. Acro Punk is a safe place, a blank space to freak out in, to construct a new reality, to live our lives as we see fit while making sense of the world around us. Here at afro Punk, we have the conversations that matter to us, and these are our solutions. In our previous episode, we drove into some of the ways that voting and running for office could move the needle, but justifiably not me when thinks that method works fast enough, if at all, especially in a world where we're all trying to figure out exactly what reality is. In French philosopher John Beaudriard wrote Simulacra and Simulation, arguing that media and symbols could create an alternate but fake, shared reality. In this world, language becomes a tool for manipulation on a mass scale. It tells us that useless products are actually valuable and that we should buy by by our way into a new reality, and it renders the people who make these goods faceless and insignificant. And language, but amplified by those with the biggest megaphones, can have insidious effects. Don't be so don't be so overly dramatic about it, chuck what you're saying. It's a falsehood, and they're giving. Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point alternative alternative facts. Four of the five facts, he uttered, of the five facts, we're just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods, alternative facts. This phrase couldn't be a better example of Boadyard was warning us against that language can be perverted, corrupted, used to build walls and fence off reality. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. I have no choice, you know that gene fire. Yes, we now live in a world of alternative facts. But the president who denies things that we all saw happen with our own eyes, and when that happens, we have to question everything. The first time I voted, it was the Bush Gore election of two thousands, and a bunch of us had this kind of party and I are maybe they announced that al Gore was the next president state is and we all started celebrating. This was in the dorms at Georgia State. And then we turned around and then they Bush was up there as the president United States. That's Franklin, James Fisher. Franklin is in a punk band called Algiers. He can pinpoint the very moment the veil of our democracy was lifted, the moment he became disenchanted electoral politics, sitting in his dorm room at Georgia State, watching George Bush the elected in November two thousand, Florida goes for al Loring. Now, folks, the employers, you changed the CBS news estivates when all the votes were in and count the Sunshine state like plenty of sunshine for al Gore. Our correspondent Corey Oliver asked him about it at the Atlanta Solution Sessions. That was the very first piece in a long you know from from then for me in my active political engagement from then up until now of a very clear and explanatory sort of picture of why I no longer place any faith whatsoever in the American electoral process. And you you trace that too when the American public, after on what we're presented as very clearly two false pretenses for two wars, they decided to legitimately elect George Blush for his second term. And then you get this supposed post racial society with Obama. I mean it leads all the way up into when in the primaries for this past election, when Trump won, and I was telling all of my friends who were supposed to Democrats or socialists or whatever else. Your your alarm bill should be ringing right now. If I had to describe Frank's take on politics and one word, it would be skeptical. He's skeptical of the two party system, skeptical that either political party has the best interests of marginalized people at heart, and skeptical of their ability to have an actual impact, including former President Obama. He questioned the narrative that eight years under Obama created a meaningful political change. I liked Obama because he was a brother that gave a lot of racist, olden white men, you know, hard palpitations because you had you had a brother in the White House, and he was smooth, but he was still the president of the United States. Did I ever think for a second he was really gonna precipitate change? You know, he fought for a couple of things that everywhere else in the so called developed world are foregone conclusions. Healthcare. He proposed accessible healthcare for the general population. And somehow that's you know, that's the biggest controversy that you could unite in American political discourse. It just it speaks to the absurdity of the climate here. I remember when Obama was elected, everyone saying, Martin King's dream is to Phil you know, we are finally arrived. Do you think that Obama's election for Phil King's dream anyway? No, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I think because at the very end of his life, MLK was turning towards very more fundamentally social issues. He was organizing the March against Poverty on Washington and at that point they were like, well you gotta go. You know what I'm saying. I think he was realizing that what he had done, and he did a hell of a lot. I would never undermine what he did, but I think he got to the point where he was starting to realize that what he'd done and started was starting to reach it. In his conclusion, he couldn't really go any further, and he started to realize that what he what he was really addressing and attacking was a systemic issue, and as a systemic issue because it was an offshoot of capitalist school problems. We'll be back with more solution sessions after this quick break. I think it's a pretty common sentiment among a lot of black folks that we were supposed to be very very excited about the election of Barack Obama was exciting, but then maybe looking at actual progress and feeling a little bit empty. Yeah, I think that Obama's election was a huge opportunity for us not to be disappointed like we often and might I say usually are when it comes to politicians. I don't know if I'm going too far there, but yeah, there was that feeling of being disappointed afterward for a lot of people because there are high expectations of what he would do for black people, specifically while he was in office, and those expectations were not met. To say the least, that's true, but don't you still get a pang of excitement or pride when you see a black grandma with a Barack Obama T shirt or toebag. I do love those airbrush T shirts. Of course, there's like a huge wall and somewhere in South Carolina, like Columbia or something with like his painting on it, and every time I go by and I'm like, I feel good, Like it feels good, and I think that that's a good thing for black people to have. But that doesn't mean that we can't also be critical of the things that he actually did. I think that he even said that, you know, I can't just cater to black people, And that's actually exactly what you talked to see Sheila Nutly about. Yeah, so I asked her about that whole sentiment of Obama not living up to expectations, and she had a lot to say about it. I think I think it's important to question the extent to which the Obama administration was responsive to black people's needs. And that's in part because if any other time in American history, when would the opportunity be for black people to have the influence that they did at the highest office in the land by way of the presidency, than with what we witnessed with the election of President Obama as the nation's first black president. That's Sheila Untally, a professor at the University of Connecticut and author of the book Trust in Black America, Raised Discrimination and Politics and I'm your co host Eves Jeff Cooke. When I asked Professor Nuntally about the post Obama era sentiment that the president didn't live up to expectations or do enough for black people, she recognized that just being a Black Democrat in office isn't good enough. We need substantive representation, she said, not just descriptive representation by way of Barack Obama being black. We still have to be critical of black politicians work, and we have to keep asking questions now that they have a seat at the table, what are they bringing to it? How are they improving Black lives? But for people like Franklin, who put little to no stock in American democracy, the ineffectiveness of black politicians isn't the only problem with the system. Of course, politicians can be our saviors. The real issue is the American political system was built to see US fail, and these politicians are attempting to patch and rig a machine whose goal has always been to oppress US. America's history is one full of racial terrorism and black murder that was mandated by the government time and again. The government has proven that black lives are not a priority, and it feels like a ceaseless battle. So it is a matter of acknowledgement of this history, but also what that means for the attitudes and feelings of people who have been disparaged over time, and that this is something that should not be left out textbooks or should not be something that people learn in higher education, but that it is American history that if we were to know, we can try to make sure that it does not happen again. From slavery to the Plessy Versus Ferguson decision that upheld racial segregation laws to Jim Crow, it's easy to trace the history of the institutional restrictions placed on black people. Take the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, where the U. S Public Health Service study poor black men who had syphilis for decades but never told them they had infection or gave them the known treatment. It's set the stage and not only said for Black Americans to feel skeptical towards society and government at all levels. Men who were poor and African American, without resources and with few alternatives, they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service. They were betrayed. Medical people are supposed to help when we need care, but even once a cure was discovered, they were denied help and they were lied to by their government. The line of thought for political skeptics is pretty simple. Actually, the government consistently proves it doesn't care about black people. So some black folks what no part in politics? What kind of emotional toll would you say that years of systemic mistreatment by the government has taken on the black community in America. The toll has been distrust in the political system, and as a distrust that is longstanding, such that we have seen Black Americans be um one of the most distrusting racial and ethnic groups UM over time, right um. And that that distrust is such that it could affect whether or not Black people decide that they've become politically active in certain ways. And that distrust lives on because the government continues to sponsor discrimination based on skin color. Professor nut Only and I spoke about the low black voter turnout in the presidential election and what royal distrust and the candidates and the political system may have played in that. But the election showed just how far America is wanting to go to further its legacy of prejudice and persecution of the marginalized. Just look at how the Russian government exploited the racial fissures in American public opinion. As Professor Nuntily put it, part of that influence that we are continuing to uncover is the use of social media to the price us or in some way create an environment of skepticism among voter And so for example, in the USA Today report of both thirty five over thirty Facebook ads that it is believed the Russian government um purchased and played on Facebook related to race and polices. And we also found that more than sift reference race. See it's another example of the simulation Internet ads. Sensationalized media coverage and childlike rhetoric became the tools for mass manipulation, convincing Americans that a reality TV star was the most valuable candidate and the government capitalized on America's tensions over race to control the elections outcome it manufactured in America that needed to be made great again via racist, sexist, xenophobic caricature and uncovering evidence of Russian meddling. We expos is the workings of the machine. But even though we've exposed these machinations, the machine is still grinding along. No collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, absolutely no collusion. So you have to wonder, why should black people believe in the system still going this far to cast out the people already on the margins. What could a few politicians and votes do to throw a wrench in such an unwieldy yet powerful machine. Yes, the political machine is pretty powerful and fucked, but how do we deal with that? What's the skeptic to do? I wanted to know more about a skeptic like Frank's take, because he's not alone in the way he questions our political views and leaders. Musicians have a long history of standing up against the status quo, and plenty of black artists have moved beyond their music to challenge social and political norms. Whether we've agreed with them or not. James Brown endorsed Richard Nixon and looked up to segregationist strom Thurman. Fayla Cooty inspired people to fight oppressive governments, as Zalia Banks defended forty five, though she or denounced him, and Kanye West wants to be loved for speaking up about black issues. Has said that he loves Donald Trump and admires the way he defies expectations and the outspoken Miss Nina Simone Well, she once said in an interview, there's no civil rights movement. Everybody's gone. When it comes to political skepticism. In the music world, Frank's and good company, so I asked him about it. What we are interested in as a band is starting a conversation with people. Um, if people want to join the conversation as school, and if they want to argue what we're proposing in conversation, that's cool too. But we're not writing prescriptions for anyone. We're not a political party. We don't have any delusions of being activists. Even Frank had what he calls a normal upbringing and education. He says he spent twelve years being taught things in school, only to spend the rest of his life deconstructing them. What was your education like when you were young. I mean, it's like everyone else know, you pledge a lead us to the flag. You you completely bypass the the genocide of the indigenous people. Uh. You learned that the the presidents were all great men. You barely learned about women at all. When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books, but Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the let's said the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America, And of course I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those the only books there were. The most concise way I can put it is that everything that is fed to you is through this lens of American exceptionalism, which is that everything that happened to America is not through the exploitation of free or cheap labor or you know, people who have been subjugated to a vicious system of capitalism and imperialism. Uh. But that America got to be how it was because it was ordained by And it doesn't take you very long, particularly if you happen to be a minority, to realize that that's not true. Was there a moment for you were that crystallized, or was there a time where you thought, Wow, I've been fed a lie. We're being fed a lie. You start to put the pieces together, pieces of the puzzle together, because no system is omnipotente or you know, infallible, no matter how much they may try to make themselves seem that way. And I think that's one of the good things about cultures because it exposes sort of those cracks in the foundation, that of of falsehood that you know that the state kind of tries to represent itself as such. At Solution sessions in Atlanta, Frank was especially critical of the state party politics and the efficacy of electoral politics to create social change for black volks. Malcolm X has a speech called the Ballad or the Bullet from nineteen sixty four, and he talks about all the stuff very thoroughly and much more eloquently than I ever would be able to. Hey, he carry up pussy putting. That's the government. Any claim to pick, that's designs to delay or deprived you will need right now of getting full rights. That's the government that's responsible. And anytime you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship, while the civil rights of a people. Then you are wasting your time pulling to that government expecting redress instaid. You have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of tennocide and all of the other plans that he is guilty after day, Now that we have Donald Trump, it's very easy, I think for people to forget that. Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, you know, Sandra Bland, You get the idea. I could go through the whole litany. All of these happened, All of these things happened. His atrocity has happened while the most powerful, presumably powerful man in the country, in the land, in the world was a black man. And if people tell you that, if you just get out and vote, then you can change things. And not only did these things seem to continue, but they seem to accelerate on Obama's watch. Something doesn't add up in that equation. He's right, Obama's administration didn't wave a magic wand and get rid of all discriminatory crime. Even though the murder rate declined most of the years Obama was in the White House, there were many mass shootings mainly committed at the hands of white man. I might add, the worst grade school shooting in US history, at least twenty seven dead, twenty children, seven adults, including the principle, and the gunmen killed himself. White supremacists were ignited by the fact that a black man was president, and social justice activists pushed back against them, all to the delight of the media thirsty for sensational stories. The expectation of Obama being a savior for black people collided with the reality of Obama's moderate tendencies and legacy. An example I continue to think of is that on his first day, I remember posting this on Facebook. His first day, he signed executive order to close once on them obey when this first term, and yet we've seen more renditions, We've seen more clamping non in civil liberties, we've seen more on things like that have concerning reason, in comparing Obama MLK as some do, it's almost as if we bought into the simulated version of who MLKA was. In reality, he was a radical enemy of the state. But as we talked about on the episode on activism, the version of m okay that many Americans do afy today is very different from who he actually was, what he actually did, and what he actually stood for, much like the false nostalgia that make America great again. In parts, we reimagined the world where our leaders solved all our problems and we're safe and perfect. And when you think about our political landscape, it's no wonder why it can sometimes feel like we're living in an alternate reality, one where everything is a copy of a copy, a knockoff of something that was never real to begin with. You can see it in our president, whose lives about verifiable facts become their own fake reality, and Frank even sees it in the ways that we try to resist and how I can become a hollow and impotent scream into the wind. The thing about fakes is, no matter how good they are, you could always see the flaws, the little cracks in the facade that show the whole thing is just a knockoff. A theme that came up time and time again in my conversation Sprank. Were those times when the crack show and we're given an opportunity to stop the machine and see reality for what it really is. It can be something as commonplace as Instagram or in the wake of resistance to Trump. The way we behave at political demonstrations, it's easy to confuse noise for real progress whatever. I'm on a political demonstration in the United States and people are chanting, show me what democracy looks like. Democracy looks like, and then they do that for about two hours, and then they go to brunch. That's not what democracy looks like. Democracy is ugly and like the democracy is hard one and endangerous. Here more solution sessions after this break. Well, many of us, myself very much included, remember Obama's legacy as one of progressive change. Frank doesn't agree. For frank Obama's legacy is one that easily tricks us into thinking things were rosier than they were, the way you might remember things from your youth as happier than they felt and you were actually experiencing them. But Obama's legacy is also a reminder that being a Democrat or a member of any party you align yourself with does not inherently make a politician the best one for your interests. Supporting a party based on a constructed and well marketed platform is just giving into that simulation. In fact, Franklin says, no political parties ideology reflects his The only thing that feels at all politically representative are those who questioned the two party system entirely. There is not a reposition of a representational party in American politics that does that, which is why the Democrats are not a viable option for anything that has any substance in my life or in you know, my my peers and contemporaries ideas. And if you look throughout history at the people who did force these aforementioned changes through activism, through organization, those people did question. Even while Frank is clearly critical of establishment party politics, that didn't stop him from voting in the last election, something he says he does not out of expectation for social change, but out of a testament to the hard one right to vote that our ancestors died for. He also thinks there's hope that voting in local community elections could actually make reel change. For as pessimistic as he sometimes sounds, maybe being critical about the world around you, it's actually a certain kind of optimism, striving to see the world clearly and wondering how it luck, if it were better. If you want to put a label on how we think with regards to American politics, it's optimistic. It's seeking to look beyond the system as it exists in you know, the duplicity's forms through which it represents itself or tries to represent itself to people, and looking for another way, which is not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of hope and imagination and a little bit of common sense. So you call it commonsense if you want, you know, how to think it's that complicate. There's the time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, but you can't take part, you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, by all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stuck, and you've got doing the take that the people running to the people owned. But unless you're free, the machine won't be prevented from it at all. So, even if you believe that voting is basically futile or the two party system is wasting everyone's time in America, it doesn't mean that you have to check out completely. You can still engage in building a better country and a better world. Franklin suggests reading and having real conversations to reveal false realities that incite true progress. And that's a good start. But once you've exposed the machine and disassembled its cogs, what's next? Where do we go from there? Matthew Kinkaid of Overcoming Racism spoke about this at Solution Sessions in Atlanta. We have to build our own institutions. It's just the reality of this. If you look at the Black Power movement or any sort of movements of solidarity, the reason why these leaders are the first ones to get killed is because all of our power are collective spending power, are collective intellectual power. We can think that when we start to build our own institutions. And so if we're expecting the government to make a change, the reality is you're right, it's against us. So we have to start building institutions. And one of the reasons why it's tough, that's so many people teaching our kids don't come from our communities because the civilized movement isn't done. We have to prepare our kids to continue that battle in that journey is to teach our kids to start building their own institutions. If you're black in America, you live in a country where you've never been valued. Black people were in chains when the Declaration of Independence proclaimed all men were created equal, and we're still the targets of state sanctioned murder, while white people tell us that racism no longer exists. Because this trauma envelops her history, our very existence the United States is one of conflict. We've always had to resist. So it's our right to be disenchanted. It's okay to distrust people who have never earned our trust. It's logical to denounce and defy institutions that were built on our backs and simultaneously broke them. But we have to pave a way forward. If we're going to lift the veil, then we have to know what's beyond it. What's the solution. Bridget read everything you can. What's the solution? Bridget started ie u? What's the solution? Bridget make your own lanes? What's the solution? Bridget break the machine. Next week, we get into the work we can do outside of politics. To do that, we talked to Black Lives Matter co founder Patrise Colors about what sparked her advocacy and got her fired up. You know, that's what I think about every single day when I wake up. Am I changing the material conditions from black people? Am I making more space and room so that we could be free and we could be freer. And that's the work for all of us to be doing. Whether you're black, white, not the next Asian and digeness, we should be thinking about how we change the material conditions for those most marginalized. Ye Afro Punk Solution Sessions is a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works. Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Jeff Coke. Executive co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper, and Kuan latif Hill. Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and Kathleen Quillian is audio engineer. Many many thanks to Casey Pegram and Any Reese for their production and editorial oversight, and many thanks to our on the ground Atlantic crew, Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver and Noel Brown. The Underside of Power is performed by Algiers. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Apropunk

Look at you. You've been really inspired to participate in more local politics. You're killing it. What has your council person done for you? Don't listen to her. Look how far you've come. This anti l g B t Q bill was stopped with your help. That's not even mentioning the federal government. Cheto in chief and his cronies don't give a damn about you. Neither that the other so called leaders of the free world. That's why your community is still struggling. Never forget you were dragged to this brutal land against your will. Your ancestors didn't fight so hard for nothing. There a reason you're alive today. You may be tired, but you've made Hella gains. You're on the come up. You're making oppressive systems crumble. Sy No, no, no, no, no, no no, she's wrong. Those systems are alive and well, and the antis are still building them up. Same problems, different day. Your votes matter, your voice matters. All this hard work and dedication you're putting in it is really helping to improve our government and our society. There's no way you'll make rule change working within these old, stale systems. It's a trout there's no out for you in this broken system. Freedom is a facade here. You're stuck in a vicious cycle of oppression. Being a good democrat and gonna help you. You've got to break the machine. I'm bridget Todd and you're listening to solution sessions, changing the world one conversation at a time. Acro Punk is a safe place, a blank space to freak out in, to construct a new reality, to live our lives as we see fit while making sense of the world around us. Here at afro Punk, we have the conversations that matter to us, and these are our solutions. In our previous episode, we drove into some of the ways that voting and running for office could move the needle, but justifiably not me when thinks that method works fast enough, if at all, especially in a world where we're all trying to figure out exactly what reality is. In French philosopher John Beaudriard wrote Simulacra and Simulation, arguing that media and symbols could create an alternate but fake, shared reality. In this world, language becomes a tool for manipulation on a mass scale. It tells us that useless products are actually valuable and that we should buy by by our way into a new reality, and it renders the people who make these goods faceless and insignificant. And language, but amplified by those with the biggest megaphones, can have insidious effects. Don't be so don't be so overly dramatic about it, chuck what you're saying. It's a falsehood, and they're giving. Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point alternative alternative facts. Four of the five facts, he uttered, of the five facts, we're just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods, alternative facts. This phrase couldn't be a better example of Boadyard was warning us against that language can be perverted, corrupted, used to build walls and fence off reality. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. I have no choice, you know that gene fire. Yes, we now live in a world of alternative facts. But the president who denies things that we all saw happen with our own eyes, and when that happens, we have to question everything. The first time I voted, it was the Bush Gore election of two thousands, and a bunch of us had this kind of party and I are maybe they announced that al Gore was the next president state is and we all started celebrating. This was in the dorms at Georgia State. And then we turned around and then they Bush was up there as the president United States. That's Franklin, James Fisher. Franklin is in a punk band called Algiers. He can pinpoint the very moment the veil of our democracy was lifted, the moment he became disenchanted electoral politics, sitting in his dorm room at Georgia State, watching George Bush the elected in November two thousand, Florida goes for al Loring. Now, folks, the employers, you changed the CBS news estivates when all the votes were in and count the Sunshine state like plenty of sunshine for al Gore. Our correspondent Corey Oliver asked him about it at the Atlanta Solution Sessions. That was the very first piece in a long you know from from then for me in my active political engagement from then up until now of a very clear and explanatory sort of picture of why I no longer place any faith whatsoever in the American electoral process. And you you trace that too when the American public, after on what we're presented as very clearly two false pretenses for two wars, they decided to legitimately elect George Blush for his second term. And then you get this supposed post racial society with Obama. I mean it leads all the way up into when in the primaries for this past election, when Trump won, and I was telling all of my friends who were supposed to Democrats or socialists or whatever else. Your your alarm bill should be ringing right now. If I had to describe Frank's take on politics and one word, it would be skeptical. He's skeptical of the two party system, skeptical that either political party has the best interests of marginalized people at heart, and skeptical of their ability to have an actual impact, including former President Obama. He questioned the narrative that eight years under Obama created a meaningful political change. I liked Obama because he was a brother that gave a lot of racist, olden white men, you know, hard palpitations because you had you had a brother in the White House, and he was smooth, but he was still the president of the United States. Did I ever think for a second he was really gonna precipitate change? You know, he fought for a couple of things that everywhere else in the so called developed world are foregone conclusions. Healthcare. He proposed accessible healthcare for the general population. And somehow that's you know, that's the biggest controversy that you could unite in American political discourse. It just it speaks to the absurdity of the climate here. I remember when Obama was elected, everyone saying, Martin King's dream is to Phil you know, we are finally arrived. Do you think that Obama's election for Phil King's dream anyway? No, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I think because at the very end of his life, MLK was turning towards very more fundamentally social issues. He was organizing the March against Poverty on Washington and at that point they were like, well you gotta go. You know what I'm saying. I think he was realizing that what he had done, and he did a hell of a lot. I would never undermine what he did, but I think he got to the point where he was starting to realize that what he'd done and started was starting to reach it. In his conclusion, he couldn't really go any further, and he started to realize that what he what he was really addressing and attacking was a systemic issue, and as a systemic issue because it was an offshoot of capitalist school problems. We'll be back with more solution sessions after this quick break. I think it's a pretty common sentiment among a lot of black folks that we were supposed to be very very excited about the election of Barack Obama was exciting, but then maybe looking at actual progress and feeling a little bit empty. Yeah, I think that Obama's election was a huge opportunity for us not to be disappointed like we often and might I say usually are when it comes to politicians. I don't know if I'm going too far there, but yeah, there was that feeling of being disappointed afterward for a lot of people because there are high expectations of what he would do for black people, specifically while he was in office, and those expectations were not met. To say the least, that's true, but don't you still get a pang of excitement or pride when you see a black grandma with a Barack Obama T shirt or toebag. I do love those airbrush T shirts. Of course, there's like a huge wall and somewhere in South Carolina, like Columbia or something with like his painting on it, and every time I go by and I'm like, I feel good, Like it feels good, and I think that that's a good thing for black people to have. But that doesn't mean that we can't also be critical of the things that he actually did. I think that he even said that, you know, I can't just cater to black people, And that's actually exactly what you talked to see Sheila Nutly about. Yeah, so I asked her about that whole sentiment of Obama not living up to expectations, and she had a lot to say about it. I think I think it's important to question the extent to which the Obama administration was responsive to black people's needs. And that's in part because if any other time in American history, when would the opportunity be for black people to have the influence that they did at the highest office in the land by way of the presidency, than with what we witnessed with the election of President Obama as the nation's first black president. That's Sheila Untally, a professor at the University of Connecticut and author of the book Trust in Black America, Raised Discrimination and Politics and I'm your co host Eves Jeff Cooke. When I asked Professor Nuntally about the post Obama era sentiment that the president didn't live up to expectations or do enough for black people, she recognized that just being a Black Democrat in office isn't good enough. We need substantive representation, she said, not just descriptive representation by way of Barack Obama being black. We still have to be critical of black politicians work, and we have to keep asking questions now that they have a seat at the table, what are they bringing to it? How are they improving Black lives? But for people like Franklin, who put little to no stock in American democracy, the ineffectiveness of black politicians isn't the only problem with the system. Of course, politicians can be our saviors. The real issue is the American political system was built to see US fail, and these politicians are attempting to patch and rig a machine whose goal has always been to oppress US. America's history is one full of racial terrorism and black murder that was mandated by the government time and again. The government has proven that black lives are not a priority, and it feels like a ceaseless battle. So it is a matter of acknowledgement of this history, but also what that means for the attitudes and feelings of people who have been disparaged over time, and that this is something that should not be left out textbooks or should not be something that people learn in higher education, but that it is American history that if we were to know, we can try to make sure that it does not happen again. From slavery to the Plessy Versus Ferguson decision that upheld racial segregation laws to Jim Crow, it's easy to trace the history of the institutional restrictions placed on black people. Take the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, where the U. S Public Health Service study poor black men who had syphilis for decades but never told them they had infection or gave them the known treatment. It's set the stage and not only said for Black Americans to feel skeptical towards society and government at all levels. Men who were poor and African American, without resources and with few alternatives, they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service. They were betrayed. Medical people are supposed to help when we need care, but even once a cure was discovered, they were denied help and they were lied to by their government. The line of thought for political skeptics is pretty simple. Actually, the government consistently proves it doesn't care about black people. So some black folks what no part in politics? What kind of emotional toll would you say that years of systemic mistreatment by the government has taken on the black community in America. The toll has been distrust in the political system, and as a distrust that is longstanding, such that we have seen Black Americans be um one of the most distrusting racial and ethnic groups UM over time, right um. And that that distrust is such that it could affect whether or not Black people decide that they've become politically active in certain ways. And that distrust lives on because the government continues to sponsor discrimination based on skin color. Professor nut Only and I spoke about the low black voter turnout in the presidential election and what royal distrust and the candidates and the political system may have played in that. But the election showed just how far America is wanting to go to further its legacy of prejudice and persecution of the marginalized. Just look at how the Russian government exploited the racial fissures in American public opinion. As Professor Nuntily put it, part of that influence that we are continuing to uncover is the use of social media to the price us or in some way create an environment of skepticism among voter And so for example, in the USA Today report of both thirty five over thirty Facebook ads that it is believed the Russian government um purchased and played on Facebook related to race and polices. And we also found that more than sift reference race. See it's another example of the simulation Internet ads. Sensationalized media coverage and childlike rhetoric became the tools for mass manipulation, convincing Americans that a reality TV star was the most valuable candidate and the government capitalized on America's tensions over race to control the elections outcome it manufactured in America that needed to be made great again via racist, sexist, xenophobic caricature and uncovering evidence of Russian meddling. We expos is the workings of the machine. But even though we've exposed these machinations, the machine is still grinding along. No collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, absolutely no collusion. So you have to wonder, why should black people believe in the system still going this far to cast out the people already on the margins. What could a few politicians and votes do to throw a wrench in such an unwieldy yet powerful machine. Yes, the political machine is pretty powerful and fucked, but how do we deal with that? What's the skeptic to do? I wanted to know more about a skeptic like Frank's take, because he's not alone in the way he questions our political views and leaders. Musicians have a long history of standing up against the status quo, and plenty of black artists have moved beyond their music to challenge social and political norms. Whether we've agreed with them or not. James Brown endorsed Richard Nixon and looked up to segregationist strom Thurman. Fayla Cooty inspired people to fight oppressive governments, as Zalia Banks defended forty five, though she or denounced him, and Kanye West wants to be loved for speaking up about black issues. Has said that he loves Donald Trump and admires the way he defies expectations and the outspoken Miss Nina Simone Well, she once said in an interview, there's no civil rights movement. Everybody's gone. When it comes to political skepticism. In the music world, Frank's and good company, so I asked him about it. What we are interested in as a band is starting a conversation with people. Um, if people want to join the conversation as school, and if they want to argue what we're proposing in conversation, that's cool too. But we're not writing prescriptions for anyone. We're not a political party. We don't have any delusions of being activists. Even Frank had what he calls a normal upbringing and education. He says he spent twelve years being taught things in school, only to spend the rest of his life deconstructing them. What was your education like when you were young. I mean, it's like everyone else know, you pledge a lead us to the flag. You you completely bypass the the genocide of the indigenous people. Uh. You learned that the the presidents were all great men. You barely learned about women at all. When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books, but Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the let's said the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America, And of course I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those the only books there were. The most concise way I can put it is that everything that is fed to you is through this lens of American exceptionalism, which is that everything that happened to America is not through the exploitation of free or cheap labor or you know, people who have been subjugated to a vicious system of capitalism and imperialism. Uh. But that America got to be how it was because it was ordained by And it doesn't take you very long, particularly if you happen to be a minority, to realize that that's not true. Was there a moment for you were that crystallized, or was there a time where you thought, Wow, I've been fed a lie. We're being fed a lie. You start to put the pieces together, pieces of the puzzle together, because no system is omnipotente or you know, infallible, no matter how much they may try to make themselves seem that way. And I think that's one of the good things about cultures because it exposes sort of those cracks in the foundation, that of of falsehood that you know that the state kind of tries to represent itself as such. At Solution sessions in Atlanta, Frank was especially critical of the state party politics and the efficacy of electoral politics to create social change for black volks. Malcolm X has a speech called the Ballad or the Bullet from nineteen sixty four, and he talks about all the stuff very thoroughly and much more eloquently than I ever would be able to. Hey, he carry up pussy putting. That's the government. Any claim to pick, that's designs to delay or deprived you will need right now of getting full rights. That's the government that's responsible. And anytime you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship, while the civil rights of a people. Then you are wasting your time pulling to that government expecting redress instaid. You have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of tennocide and all of the other plans that he is guilty after day, Now that we have Donald Trump, it's very easy, I think for people to forget that. Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, you know, Sandra Bland, You get the idea. I could go through the whole litany. All of these happened, All of these things happened. His atrocity has happened while the most powerful, presumably powerful man in the country, in the land, in the world was a black man. And if people tell you that, if you just get out and vote, then you can change things. And not only did these things seem to continue, but they seem to accelerate on Obama's watch. Something doesn't add up in that equation. He's right, Obama's administration didn't wave a magic wand and get rid of all discriminatory crime. Even though the murder rate declined most of the years Obama was in the White House, there were many mass shootings mainly committed at the hands of white man. I might add, the worst grade school shooting in US history, at least twenty seven dead, twenty children, seven adults, including the principle, and the gunmen killed himself. White supremacists were ignited by the fact that a black man was president, and social justice activists pushed back against them, all to the delight of the media thirsty for sensational stories. The expectation of Obama being a savior for black people collided with the reality of Obama's moderate tendencies and legacy. An example I continue to think of is that on his first day, I remember posting this on Facebook. His first day, he signed executive order to close once on them obey when this first term, and yet we've seen more renditions, We've seen more clamping non in civil liberties, we've seen more on things like that have concerning reason, in comparing Obama MLK as some do, it's almost as if we bought into the simulated version of who MLKA was. In reality, he was a radical enemy of the state. But as we talked about on the episode on activism, the version of m okay that many Americans do afy today is very different from who he actually was, what he actually did, and what he actually stood for, much like the false nostalgia that make America great again. In parts, we reimagined the world where our leaders solved all our problems and we're safe and perfect. And when you think about our political landscape, it's no wonder why it can sometimes feel like we're living in an alternate reality, one where everything is a copy of a copy, a knockoff of something that was never real to begin with. You can see it in our president, whose lives about verifiable facts become their own fake reality, and Frank even sees it in the ways that we try to resist and how I can become a hollow and impotent scream into the wind. The thing about fakes is, no matter how good they are, you could always see the flaws, the little cracks in the facade that show the whole thing is just a knockoff. A theme that came up time and time again in my conversation Sprank. Were those times when the crack show and we're given an opportunity to stop the machine and see reality for what it really is. It can be something as commonplace as Instagram or in the wake of resistance to Trump. The way we behave at political demonstrations, it's easy to confuse noise for real progress whatever. I'm on a political demonstration in the United States and people are chanting, show me what democracy looks like. Democracy looks like, and then they do that for about two hours, and then they go to brunch. That's not what democracy looks like. Democracy is ugly and like the democracy is hard one and endangerous. Here more solution sessions after this break. Well, many of us, myself very much included, remember Obama's legacy as one of progressive change. Frank doesn't agree. For frank Obama's legacy is one that easily tricks us into thinking things were rosier than they were, the way you might remember things from your youth as happier than they felt and you were actually experiencing them. But Obama's legacy is also a reminder that being a Democrat or a member of any party you align yourself with does not inherently make a politician the best one for your interests. Supporting a party based on a constructed and well marketed platform is just giving into that simulation. In fact, Franklin says, no political parties ideology reflects his The only thing that feels at all politically representative are those who questioned the two party system entirely. There is not a reposition of a representational party in American politics that does that, which is why the Democrats are not a viable option for anything that has any substance in my life or in you know, my my peers and contemporaries ideas. And if you look throughout history at the people who did force these aforementioned changes through activism, through organization, those people did question. Even while Frank is clearly critical of establishment party politics, that didn't stop him from voting in the last election, something he says he does not out of expectation for social change, but out of a testament to the hard one right to vote that our ancestors died for. He also thinks there's hope that voting in local community elections could actually make reel change. For as pessimistic as he sometimes sounds, maybe being critical about the world around you, it's actually a certain kind of optimism, striving to see the world clearly and wondering how it luck, if it were better. If you want to put a label on how we think with regards to American politics, it's optimistic. It's seeking to look beyond the system as it exists in you know, the duplicity's forms through which it represents itself or tries to represent itself to people, and looking for another way, which is not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of hope and imagination and a little bit of common sense. So you call it commonsense if you want, you know, how to think it's that complicate. There's the time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, but you can't take part, you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, by all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stuck, and you've got doing the take that the people running to the people owned. But unless you're free, the machine won't be prevented from it at all. So, even if you believe that voting is basically futile or the two party system is wasting everyone's time in America, it doesn't mean that you have to check out completely. You can still engage in building a better country and a better world. Franklin suggests reading and having real conversations to reveal false realities that incite true progress. And that's a good start. But once you've exposed the machine and disassembled its cogs, what's next? Where do we go from there? Matthew Kinkaid of Overcoming Racism spoke about this at Solution Sessions in Atlanta. We have to build our own institutions. It's just the reality of this. If you look at the Black Power movement or any sort of movements of solidarity, the reason why these leaders are the first ones to get killed is because all of our power are collective spending power, are collective intellectual power. We can think that when we start to build our own institutions. And so if we're expecting the government to make a change, the reality is you're right, it's against us. So we have to start building institutions. And one of the reasons why it's tough, that's so many people teaching our kids don't come from our communities because the civilized movement isn't done. We have to prepare our kids to continue that battle in that journey is to teach our kids to start building their own institutions. If you're black in America, you live in a country where you've never been valued. Black people were in chains when the Declaration of Independence proclaimed all men were created equal, and we're still the targets of state sanctioned murder, while white people tell us that racism no longer exists. Because this trauma envelops her history, our very existence the United States is one of conflict. We've always had to resist. So it's our right to be disenchanted. It's okay to distrust people who have never earned our trust. It's logical to denounce and defy institutions that were built on our backs and simultaneously broke them. But we have to pave a way forward. If we're going to lift the veil, then we have to know what's beyond it. What's the solution. Bridget read everything you can. What's the solution? Bridget started ie u? What's the solution? Bridget make your own lanes? What's the solution? Bridget break the machine. Next week, we get into the work we can do outside of politics. To do that, we talked to Black Lives Matter co founder Patrise Colors about what sparked her advocacy and got her fired up. You know, that's what I think about every single day when I wake up. Am I changing the material conditions from black people? Am I making more space and room so that we could be free and we could be freer. And that's the work for all of us to be doing. Whether you're black, white, not the next Asian and digeness, we should be thinking about how we change the material conditions for those most marginalized. Ye Afro Punk Solution Sessions is a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works. Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Jeff Coke. Executive co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper, and Kuan latif Hill. Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and Kathleen Quillian is audio engineer. Many many thanks to Casey Pegram and Any Reese for their production and editorial oversight, and many thanks to our on the ground Atlantic crew, Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver and Noel Brown. The Underside of Power is performed by Algiers. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Apropunk