Love, Power, and Liberation: Angela Davis, Lama Rod Owens, and Prentis Hemphill in Conversation

[@eastbaymeditation]

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[@jraaccounts]

would it be possible to add subtitles/ closed-captioning to the video? that would make it much more accessible. thank you!

[@eastbaymeditation]

@ thank you so much for the feedback! Absolutely 💯

[@megeasling8080]

Keep the joy!

[@sarwangparikh8730]

🎉 🔥 👏🏽

[@nenabee2830]

who was the artist at the start and what was the song?

[@siriuslyspeaking9720]

One speaker mentioned her work in DEI efforts, but what is more representative of DEI than the concept of mixed income housing? The word community is applied today to nearly any association a number of people may have, but living side by side, with people different than yourself, is the real test of a sense of community. What percentage of - lets say Black people, really would want to live in a community, that was not predominately Black? That would be an interesting poll to take. If we are not willing to ask these kind of questions, are we really trying to bring about meaningful change? The policy of mixed income housing was instituted with the hope that it would, be a solution to the problem of wide disparities among groups. The policy is decades old now, and so who has even asked, how this policy has fared? Nicole Hannah Jones has even said that gentrification in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, for Black people. She has also said Black children would benefit from having White children, in their classrooms. She said all this, around the same time as her work on the 1619 Project. Everyone knowns about the 1619 Project, and have talked about it, so why not these surely other controversial statements? Is it because they don't fit the woke narrative, that is promoted as being the thoughts and feeling of all, or most Black people? Meditation is the focus of this group, but mediation is going to be required to solve the problem of the divides, that exist within humanity. Mediation requires honesty and a sense of fairness, but also reasonableness. My problem with wokeness, especially Black people's practice of it, is that those of us who do subscribe to it, paint the picture that all of Black people's problems, are the result of racism, in all its forms. We surely contribute significantly to our problems. Jessie Jackson, in his younger days, said to us "what does it matter, that the doors of opportunity are opened to you, if you are too drunk to stagger through them"? Minister Farrakhan, has scolded Black people, on our negative self-defeating/destructive behavior, since he has been around. Many of our historical leaders have appealed to us, to take control of our own lives, yet the woke narrative peached by many, sees any condemnation, of anything some of us may do, by any Black person, as blaming the victim. They claim today that Black on Black crime is not a thing today, when many of them said nothing of the sort about the campaign Hip-Hop had against violence, and songs like 'We're Headed For Self Destruction', that were both created in the 80's. In retrospect, it is not surprising the campaign failed. This disregard for the value of our lives has been around, for a very long time, among a very significant number of us. If our lives matter so little to us, who else is going to value them more? What has been the reaction to woke rhetoric regarding policing and incarceration, by those of a criminal and violent mindset, to calls to defund and abolish police and prisons? They have ratcheted up their criminal and violent behavior, in the wake of less officers on police forces. Yet the woke don't even call for the organizing of the Black community to police itself. The first level of policing is the values people have and the standards they set for the communities they live in. This is a fundamental pillar of community - a group of people of common values. Culture is tied to the values a people have. Differences of values result in subcultures. The only concept the Left seems to have of culture is the physical/material aspects of culture or the tramping of it that can be perceived by the senses. We seldom think of culture on the values level, and when we do, it is more in the area of values that produce anti-social/negative behavior. This is how we get the glamorization of drug use or deadly and debilitating drugs, and terms like OG and ride -n- die, that have become normalized by a significant part of the general society. These kind of terms are used by sports announcers and can be seen in commercials. With all the talk about mental health and trauma, and the like, we act as if, this kind of message constantly given to the public, has no impact on some people, especially children, youth, and adolescents, let alone acknowledge the contradiction of this with the idea that trauma can be triggered, since many of us consume so much negative/violent entertainment. Black politicians don't agree with a lot of woke rhetoric, but instead of denouncing it, they just ignore it - distance themselves from it, as if that is enough, and now they act as if they are shocked at the outcome of the election. The whole time Black people have been rhetorically complimenting ourselves on being conscious, down-for-the-cause, right-on, keeping it real, and now woke, a significant number of us have been undermining all the efforts of those, who have been working for us. If not the religious and the spiritualists among humanity, who will promote the need for humanity to give itself a peace-dividend? Is not the best way to defund anything, and free up funding for direct life-affirming needs, is to make it largely not needed? Why would anyone think the representatives, of the people would be more likely to see the value, in this, given their history, than would the people, who would benefit the most from it? Why does the Left, especially us Blacks, not expect anything from we the people? This stance is contradictor to the proclamations, that our lives matter - period!- that we are a spiritual people, creative, resilient, so even go so far to say magical. Why then do so many of us expect so little, to nothing, from so many of us? It is a devaluing of ourselves, to do this. We have called out ourselves for being anti-Black in the past, but now is the most critical time, for us to truly value our lives, and first affirm our own lives, with our individual actions, we do the opposite. We are surely somebody, as Jackson often shouted decades ago, but only when we show it. Too often we go to extremes, in showing who we are, even when this is done, in what some think is being positive. Self-affirmation for some clouds their understanding of appropriateness, and its relation to the common spaces. The woke talk all the time about safe spaces, and rightfully so, but seem to ignore the need to emphasize the importance of respect of the common space. Narcissism may be a problem, we have yet to realize or appreciate, It may be a subconscious overreaction, to affirm our worthiness. No amount of personal success, seems to be enough, to dispel an eternal doubt, that may be present, in one's mind. It is a more life affirming/less self-destructive respond to the imbalance/disparities that exist, between Black people and other races/ethnic groups. Any honest attempt to deal with racism, in all its forms, must begin from the point of acceptance, that a White child upon seeing the disparities that exist, between the races, is likely to, at least subconsciously perceive, that they are superior, and thus develop a sense of it and privilege. The reverse of course, would be true for non- White people, especially Black people. Again, if we are not willing to begin from this hypothesis, I don't thing we can solve these problems, that only seem to be becoming more insurmountable. To talk of the abolishment of police and prisons, in the context of the real world - communities so many Black people live in, is to triple down on unreasonableness. The majority of Black people don't support the call for this, as a poll has likely proven. A big part of the problem is that, we the majority, remain silent and let the woke among us speak publicly, as if it represents all or most of us. If younger generation believe in abolition, then they will soon enough be able to prove it. Younger generations, as they always do, have different ideas about life, than previous ones, and so those who see themselves as woke and speaking as if they reflect the will of us, may soon be cast aside as irrelevant, as us boomers, at least feel, we have been. The generational divide in this climate of intellectual dishonesty can only get worse, as well as the male female divide. Black people have been splintering before our eyes, since the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the Right will make mince meat of us, going forward in this state. We see what has become of the separate efforts for reparations. How can it even be considered to be a transfer of wealth, given the vast majority of wealth, is in the hands of a very few people? That point alone shows how those speaking, as if they represent us, are doing a terrible job of leading. There exist no governance structure among us, to regulate our interactions, mediate difference, and serve as a vehicle, to reach collective agreements among us. This is us - who we are - the state of our being, that we have yet to acknowledge, if in fact, it can be acknowledged. That is the catch-22. The question of where does the Democrat Party and the nation go, pales greatly in comparison, to the question, where do we go from here, as a people. What I see here is more of the same ole same ole. Talk of revolutions is folly as they only bring back around what previously existed - the need for weapons to insure the changes remain in place. Nor is any kind of reset enough. When was any previous sate adequate? The answer lies in our evolution. More specifically we must catch up with our evolution of intelligence, in our emotional, moral, and spiritual evolution. At present, we are like children with powerful tools and dangerous weapons in our hands.