Woke AF Daily...drag them down. Robert Jones Jr. returns to Woke AF Daily for a discussion with Danielle about their complicated feelings regarding Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with Me your Girl Daniel Moody pre recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, it is a federal holiday today and wok F is off. It's Juneteenth, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about June teenth being made into a federal holiday at a time when curriculum is being banned so that you can actually learn about Juneteenth. So it's just another fucking day off that didn't begin with significance for the greater white mainstream American society, and because of Republican pushed for white comfort ahead of white accountability, folks will never know. I looked at a fucking tweet earlier that was later taken down by the George Towner, I think, which is some you know like magazine that said Happy Juneteenth, and it had two white women, two white women sitting on a blanket pouring like white girl Rose. And then they had since pulled that down. But that's what I'm talking about, when we turned something into a federal holiday that has great significance about our freedom, about justice in America, about how outrageous it was that enslaved people would be forced to continue to labor, die, be raped and brutalized in the state of Texas for two years post emancipation. That is what June teenth is. And so during this Pride month, I am so excited an honored to welcome back to for really gripping conversation my friend Robert Jones Junior, who is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Prophets, which won the twenty twenty two Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the twenty twenty two NABA Book of the Year Award for Fiction. Robert Jones Junior was formerly known on social media as Son of Baldwin, and he is just extraordinary and we get into really really great conversation. So I look forward to you all getting a taste coming up next, folks. I am so excited to welcome back to a daily after so long, so long, brilliant, brilliant writer and author and friend of mine, Robert Jones Junior. You may have known him formerly the artist known as the Son of Baldwin, who is a Brooklyn based award winning writer and is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Prophets, Robert. It is such a pleasure to have you back. I'm so excited to see your face. So first I want to ask, as we are in the midst of Pride month, as this is Juneteenth, just how how have you been feeling about Pride this year, this Pride twenty twenty three. How is it? How is it landing with you?
For me?
And someone else actually asked me this question, and I said, what I'm thinking about more than ever this Pride is those who came before me, the ancestors who through the brick and paved the path that I today can be married to my husband and at least on paper, be protected under the law that my sexuality is no longer considered a mental health issue. So I'm paying so much respect and homage to people like Marsha P. Johnson, whose park in New York I visited for the very first time yesterday, and it's it's really in a strange place in New York. It's in Dumbo, and I'm not sure why it's in Williamsburg Dumbo area and not in Manhattan someplace, but it's a really wonderful spot. And what I noticed was how open and care free that space.
It's how close it is to the water, how beautiful.
The sites are, And I was wondering what she would think of having this park named after her and now being giving the recognition that for so long she was denied even by members of the LGBTQ I A plus community. So this pride, I'm I'm really focused on thinking about the strategies that our ancestors used to fight for their liberation.
Yeah, you know, it's it's so interesting. I think that usually in times of great strife, but you, as somebody who is very studied, you know, looks to the past as a as a guide to your writing, to our future case for liberation. And I think too often that that space is denied. Right people we're seeing you know, book bands, we're seeing curriculum bands. We're seeing full erasure right of the black experience, let alone the black queer experience right and contributions to the furthering of our democracy. And so I want to ask you, as a as a writer, you know, how is the past? How should the past be serving us in this moment right at a time when so much is being banned and erased. It's almost as if a curriculum needs to be created for people to seek the tools that are being denied to them in the presence. So, you know, what does what does it look like for us to have the past be our guide to not lose hope right in the moment that we are currently in.
You know, from my own personal experience, whats the tools that schools didn't give me? My family gave me. So my grandfather was a very learned and well read man, and so he had shelves and shelves of books that he would take out, and I'm like maybe five, six, seven years old, and he would take out a book that this thick and say, you try to read this, And of course I couldn't read read it. I didn't know every single word, but the words that I did recognize pushed me to try to understand, to try to put pieces together to please my grandfather, because I realized that for him this was very important. The problem we run into now is that in many cases it's the parents who are in collusion these with these government officials and politicians and institutions who want to erase the past to pretend, in some jingoistic nationalistic fashion that everything in this country was hunky dory, that everyone is innocent, that there's nothing to be held accountable for that just by being alive, you are entitled to power and privilege and all of these other sorts of things. And I wonder if if it's not going to take some sort of some courageous educators to buck the system, older siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, to interfere so such that these children who are who are subject.
To these.
Draconian impulses from their their their caretakers and from the educational institutions, that we could tear that down, that we could subvert it in some way. I'm always looking for, like I do that to be quite honest with my own nieces and nephews, when I see that they are ignorant of something, I feel like my job is my uncle, as the uncle, whether or not their mother or father approves, is to tell them the truth, and to not just tell them the truth such that it's just my opinion, but to point to the evidence where I got the truth from that it is my job. So we Basically what I'm saying is we have to show up as family, as community, as as as soldiers as activists within our own circles, not just on the larger global scale, but also in the home such that we interfere so that these these terrible things don't continue to happen because we can't rely on government. We cannot the santis Abbot MTG, all of these wild and luna lunatic people who are dead sets on dragging us back to the dark ages at any means, at any cost, by any means necessary, And they don't listen to reason. That reason is beside the point.
Power is the.
Point, and they are willing to do anything they.
Have to do to get that power.
So we have to then, and I'm sorry to the former First Lady Michelle Obama, when when they go low, we do not go high. When they go low, we go to Hell. Yes, and we drag them there with us.
You know, because for me, Robert, like I believe that that sentiment that you just that you just said, I believe that because I'm saying, you know, what you see that this Republican white supremacist Party is doing is about not only ushering in an authoritarian regime in these United States, not only breaking down our political norms in order to make space and room for a strong man right, but what they are also doing is very much about creating a climate of ignorance and fear that has neighbor questioning neighbor. So when you go back to saying what this is about is really being of service to your community, I want to go back to that point and unpack it, because the purpose of their hate is to shrink our idea of community. They're just you know, we're hearing reports of people being shot and killed by their neighbor next door because that's the fear bubble that they are living in where I don't even I don't even know what community is because I don't even know the person down the street because I've been told through Fox and other entities to fear that person rather than speak to them. So can we talk about, you know, how our liberation is entwined with our ability to really understand and build community.
You ever hear that expression of people united can never be defeated, The opposite is also true, a people divided can always be defeated. And so they are intentionally driving neighbor against neighbor, friend against friends, ally against ally. And you know when I was, when I was still doing Son of Balden on social media, I could actually see when the disruption agents would enter a conversation and they knew exactly what to say to trigger division, where I would I would try to intervene and say, listen, people, this person is doing this on purpose because they're trying to turn us against each other. But they have they have learned, I guess, through training, just the right psychological acts to commit to trigger people such that they now cannot listen to reason and they fall into this tumble of division, division, division, division. So one of the things I wanna, I wanna that I hope that we learn is when when we see ourselves turning against another human being, when we when we're forgetting that the other person on the other side of this argument is an actual, living, breathing human being. They they already got us because they made us forget. So now I can pull my gun out on this man who who this young boy who's coming to pick up his siblings and shoot them because I'm scared, because I'm ignorant. Because the more ignorant you are, the easier you are to manipulate. And they are counting on that. So this this is not happenstance. What what de santis Abbott and others are doing in regard to defunding education and pulling certain subjects out of school. This is by design. They're hoping that they get us to the point where we are so uneducated that we believe anything that they tell us. So how do we fight that. We can only fight that with knowledge. That's the only way we can do it. And I'm not sure how that happens in the United States of America, a country that despises knowledge. So I'm looking for visionaries who can figure out ways which we can subvert this, this horrific thing that's happening in this country. And I and any student of history can see exactly where we're going.
The path off the cliff is so clear, right that it is not about for me. The education piece of this isn't about even creating a sense of clarity. It's about creating a sense of courage, right, because the people know better. Right. They may not need to have known what happened in the seventeen hundred, eighteen hundreds, nineteen hundred's to today to get us to this place, but they know, good goddamn well, what in actual what freedom actually looks like, and that this is not it. So you know, the issue that I think too that we face, aside from this behemoth of misinformation is the desire of some to remain ignorant. Right. There are statistics that have come out that have said, you know, most recently that only thirty percent of people in this country know a trans person, right, which is which is up, by the way, up from eighteen percent some ten plus years ago when I actually got involved in the LGBTQ movement, like in a real way, eighteen percent to thirty percent. But that means, Robert, that there are seventy percent of Americans who are susceptible to the lies that are being spread about this piece of the queer community because they don't know. And so in that vein, in your opinion, what does disruption look like for those of us inside the community to disrupt the narratives that are being spread, but also for those outside the thirty percent that actually do how can they influence the seventy Well.
You know, Tony Morrison once said that the reason why people engage in bigotry is because.
It feels good.
When you are, for example, some poor family living in Arkansas below the poverty level, you can't figure out how to clothe and.
Feed your children.
If somebody comes to.
You and says, if you believe in God.
And you speak out against those trans and queer people, you will be rewarded, not only not only monetarily, not only financially.
But psychologically rewarded because.
Your whiteness then has currency. Your cis genderness now has currency. And so we have to figure out a way the thirty percent and those of us in the communities to make transfer anti transness, anti queerness, racism, misogyny, all of these things have a consequence that doesn't feel good. And the only way you can strike in this country at the heart of those things is through money. How do we take these rich people's money away? Do we stop riding the MTA and make New York come to a standstill? Do we stop going to Amazon? Do we stop shopping at Walmart? And do we find other means to survive outside of that? Do we set up systems in which we can have, you know, fail face because we have to turn away from all of these companies that we've come to use and love. How do we strike at their pockets such that they recognize that spreading these things and causing these divisions is no longer profitable.
For them.
That's the only way a capitalist will understand it. They don't care about them. They have no morals, so we can't make a moral appeal to them. They throughout the laws, so we can't make legal appeals to them. They don't care. So the only thing they care about is their money, and we got to take it away from.
Them, you know. And we're seeing this right, like, we're seeing what has happened, Like let's look at Target, the Target fiasco and the Budweiser fiasco, and also Disney, Right, we're seeing what it looks like when you have some companies that actually take a public stand, and whether they're pushed to it or not, like a Disney who is just like, we're not going to have our content dictated to us by a fascist right, like, we're going to go toe to toe with you. But then you have those that capitulate to the far right, like Target did by saying that, oh, for the protection of our employees, and I use that in quotations, for the protection of our employees, we're going to pull our pride merch from our stores and so and Budweiser, you know, who saw sales fall because of their inclusivity right of queer people. And so I wonder I believe in a national boycott. I believe in grinding capitalism to a halt, because I do, like you, believe that it is the only way to get people to do the right thing is to force them because shame does not work right. You cannot because you can't shame the devil. So I'm like, what does you know? Is it coordination by word of mouth? Is it? Because we've seen it work in history with the civil rights movement, but we have not seen it. I don't think in great success in in the modern age.
That is true.
And here's the sad part. We cannot rely on social media because social.
Media is theirs.
It belongs to the one piece, and so they will see it coming and they.
Will disrupt it.
So it has to be on the ground, underground. It has to be in that way, that way shape or form. And these young the young generation in particular, I think is.
Amenable to that. They are they are seeing.
The injustices that are happening around them, and they are they are looking for ways in which to battle those injustices. And we have and that's why, you know, I guess they're trying to keep the education to a minimum is because they know that these kids are looking for ways to do that. So our responsibility, as the generations before, is to sit down with them and figure these things out, like we have to like come up with ace the Republic. What I envy about the Republicans is how strategized they are. They have a message, and they make that message as simple as possible, and they make it as appealing as possible, even to the people to.
Whom it's going to hurt.
Yep.
How can we on the.
Left start doing that so that our messages are easy to understand yep, and that they show a clear benefit for participation.
That's what we.
Need to do, and we need the most charismatic people we can find, the most intelligent people we can find, like Danielle Moody for president.
To do this.
Yeah, you know, I think that you're right, And it's so interesting. I had the good fortune of being able to speak to a group of nine through twelfth graders recently and just hear, you know, what are the issues that they're most concerned about, What are the things that they are most interested in, And it is they are very aware of the fact that older generations are afraid of their generation because of how much they know right, because they are not just waiting to be filled up right with what a boomer or whomever, gen X or whatever wants to tell them, Like they readily at their fingertips. They have access to the whole world and they know how to use it. And so I wonder, like, do you think you know we always look to the younger generations to be the ones to solve the problems that weren't created by them, And so what do you feel about Generation Z and Generation Alpha that is coming behind them, and how we should aid them? But how what they are taking on and what they are taking to task right now?
We have to tell them to first of all, if when they hear band books, that we have to teach them that that is the first through for them, that that is a book they have to read, because if they want to take it away from you, there's something in there they don't want you to know, and you have to know that information in particular, we have to first guide them in that direction. But we cannot keep relying on the young people to fix the shit that we fucked up. Yep, we have to participate and fix it and I know we're tired, and we're overworked, and we have a thousand things on our plates, but we're talking about existence here. We're talking about because you know, once democracy falls in America, that's the domino that's going to make it fall everywhere else. And we are going to be in some dark times. So it is up to the older generations of Americans, who are some of the most cynical and pessimistic people that I have ever encountered, two.
Figure this ship out and stop.
And stop relying on this younger generation to fix.
What we broke.
Yes, one of one of the things, one of the problems that I have with Biden is this idea of going across the aisle and not we We we were at a point where Democrats had power and we did not exercise it. We just squandered it. And then now the Republicans are in this position where they can, you know, sort of challenge us and present issues and obstacles when we when we have the power. What is it about Democrats? Is it that they're complicit? I wonder if I'm asking myself that question, are democrats complicit? Do they ask we want the same things that Republicans wanted at least the white elite Democrats do. They want in essence what the Republicans want. And if that's true, then I have to say we, the people who do not align with either of those parties, have to start taking back control. And we can do that on our own streets. There's a program here in New York City, in Brooklyn, in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where the community has met with the police, the NYPD, and they said, stand back, we are going to try something. We are going to police our own neighborhood as an experiment. Y'all stand over there, two blocks away, three blocks away, and when something happens in this neighborhood, crime or what have you, we are going to intervene as citizens of this neighborhood.
And what they're.
Finding is that works.
Yeah, the fatalities drop. Ye.
People begin to know their neighbors, understand that this is a community and that we're all in this together. So in that little microcosm, something is working. When the communities decides this is ours, we're going to care for it, We're going to take control of it. We're gonna love our children, We're gonna love them past these these issues. We're going to provide them with the resources they need, like cause they have childcare services and they have uh mental health therapy for these kids that they find in these situations.
We need to.
Start doing stuff like that where we cut the government out of it and we take we take control of it ourselves. That's that's where salvation rests, not in relying on the system which has a vested interest in not in showing our best interests.
Yeah, that's one hundred percent right. And Robert, you know, it's always so great to talk to you because I think that our conversations always feel very solution oriented, always feel like that the power still does remain with the people, right, and that it is it is up to us to really look at what do we value about community and how can we strengthen what it is that we value about community. How do we start with what is in front of us instead of you know, looking beyond ourselves for the solutions. And I think that that is really important. The last question that I have for you today is, you know, with regard to Juneteenth, that became a touch point. I have no idea why for the Republican Party, as I guess they're way to provide a federal holiday, but then at the same time ban curriculum and conversation about said federal holiday, but pat themselves on the back for that, but can't pass the George Floyd Policing Act, can't pass a voting rights Act, but give us holidays. What do you make of how we understand June teenth? Right now?
You know, that was a really great strategy on behalf of the GOP to advocate for Juneteenth as a holiday, because holidays sort of function as distractions now. June Teeth is a T shirt or ice cream or getting a day off of work, so we forget what it is actually about and what it actually represents. And the sadness that's attached to Juneteenth, which is these ancestors in Texas didn't even know they were from slavery, and they got the news late. And you know, I once said about Juneteenth that the irony of it is not that the news of our freedom came too late, but that it came too early because I don't think we're free. I think this is all an illusion. We have maybe some of the trappings of freedom, but we are not actually free. Me as a black queer man walking down the street. I don't feel safe ever, because if anti blackness doesn't get me, then anti queerness will. That's that's how I feel. So I can't bother with this holiday. What I want is substantive. So you have to give me the George Floyd Act. You have to give me universal health care. Like I don't care about your your your barbecue days on Juneteenth. I don't give a shit about that. I don't care about Harriet Tubman on a twenty dollar bill, which she would be rolling in her grave behind. I want my liberation, and I want it now. I'm a tax paying citizen, so I get to I have some say and where my money goes. And I don't want it to go tillions of dollars to the military fighting these unjust wars on behalf of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I want my money in my community to make sure that my kids have a great education where the foundation of that education is the truth, not patriotic bs. And I want to make sure that if I'm going to participate in the workforce, then I want to be healthy, so I don't want to have to worry about health care or how I'm going to what do I choose rent, food or health care. I don't want that choice. I want to be able to work, pay my rent, clothe my children up, pay my bills, and not worry about if I go to the hospital, I'll be stuck with an eighteen thousand dollar bill. I was diagnosed with MS in twenty nineteen. My infusion treatment costs ninety thousand.
Dollars a pop. So I get two.
Infusions a year, one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. If I wasn't able to get married and I wasn't covered under my husband's health insurance, that would be one hundred and eighty thousand dollars I could not afford. So I could not have this treatment. That's the definition of obscene.
Yep.
So I want a world in which that is unthinkable. And that starts not with the Democrats and not with the certainly not with the Republicans, and not with government.
That starts with us.
And we have to start understanding that being a citizen is not a passive act. We have to be engaged at whatever level we can be. We have to be engaged. This is this is not a game. I mean the one percent treated as a game.
But we don't.
We can't afford to treat that as a game.
We have to be engaged period period.
Robert Jones Junior, my goodness. I always always appreciate you, always appreciate your words, your work, your passion. Folks. If you have not read the profits, you absolutely should. And Robert, tell folks how they can stay connected. You put together an amazing newsletter. You point people in the direction of new books. You're doing speaking. Just tell folks how they can stay connected to you.
Yes, for my speaking engagements. You can visit my website which is son of Baldwin dot com and to keep up with my latest writings and recommendations and so forth. I have a substack newsletter at Robert Jones you your dot substack dot com.
Wonderful Robert Jones Jr. Thank you so much for making the time to join wok f As always, we appreciate you. Happy Pride, Thank you, Pride.
Danielle. I love talking to you because you are the smartest person I know.
My God, that is impossible.
Your brain, your brain. I so admire your brain.
Thank you friend, Thank you. That is it for me today, dear friends on wok AFT As always, power to the people, and to all the people power get woke and stay woke as fuck.
