Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I'm Chuck Perkins, reading what I learned versus what I knew out of my new book. Beautiful and ugly too.
[00:00:08] Be careful when courting the past.
[00:00:11] History can look you in the eye and with a straight face tell a bold face lie.
[00:00:17] Working class black people made me.
[00:00:20] I witness the daily calculations, not the grotesque caricatures of blackness from Universal pictures.
[00:00:28] My kingmakers had depth.
[00:00:31] I watched them claw their way through the crucible of captivity, outgunned and outmanned, traveling an impossible road from no education and illiteracy to inadequate education.
[00:00:43] There was still too much talent in the room possessed by black men and women.
[00:00:48] Even in the tormented souls who had been ground to shells, vestiges of wisdom were visible.
[00:00:54] Before attending school and without ever being told, I knew Mali, Ghana and Songhai existed.
[00:01:02] The world could not make sense without their ingenuity. Timbuktu had to exist. And of course, the Dogon understood string theory. Thousands of years before Columbus, I knew that black people were inventors.
[00:01:17] I felt it in my gut.
[00:01:19] My grandpa could fix whatever was broken.
[00:01:22] Fighting on the African coast, on slave ships in the Caribbean and on the mainland, black people bled for their own freedom.
[00:01:31] No one had to tell me this before the movie Glory. I knew the Nubian saved America from itself.
[00:01:38] Ask Lincoln if I'm lying. I knew something of that fortitude by the way I was protected.
[00:01:44] My feisty, snuff dipping great grandmother was one generation removed from slavery, was nobody's chump.
[00:01:51] There were rebellions and rumors of rebellion. By day, the persecuted could feign acceptance and by night burn down the house.
[00:02:01] If you saw Happy Darky, you were supposed to.
[00:02:05] But did you miss the blood in their eyes?
[00:02:07] In a whirlwind of an insult, a smile is always a chagrin.
[00:02:13] Uncle James had been sent to prison. He used the same hands that held the gun in the robbery to create African art.
[00:02:21] Angola was the penitentiary named after the country, a ubiquitous insult to the diaspora. It used to be a plantation, and it still is.
[00:02:31] Every mention of its name guided my uncle's chisel. His wood carvings were black. The subjects had broad features. They held court on the walls in my house.
[00:02:41] I woke up to that stoic gaze every morning. An African aesthetic was elevated in my home. When I crawled into the world, I already knew black was beautiful. And then I went to school gazing at chalkboards for 17 years, from kindergarten to college, turning page after page, learning only about the brilliance of white men. They had a monopoly on inventive genius.
[00:03:09] The Sons of Ham could only claim slavery.
[00:03:12] Whatever steps taken towards civilization, we can think white people and white Jesus is a false equivalence education synonymous with whiteness. But this is what I learned. Forget about them backward Negroes, speak the King's English. Learn about Aristotle. Get some whiteness in your life. Since I didn't want to be white, the pursuit of scholarship became an act of self betrayal. So I rolled a J and let my pants sag. What I learned about black people from living with black people made me proud. What I learned about black people in school brought me shame.
[00:03:48] All these years on planet Earth and the folk who look like me ain't do nothing but pick cotton with all black classmates and mostly black teachers.
[00:04:01] That's what school taught me.
