On the podcast: Spare a dollar for Fannie Lou Hamer? George Jackson?

Three truths from the Grown Black Girls conversation on the debt we owe history  

Honoring history means more than sporting that graphic tee. image credit: pexels.com/@connorscottmcmanus/

In the wake of Black August and Labor Day, Lighthouse founder Natalie A. Collier and Lighthouse Vice President of Research Dr. Charity Clay recently discussed what we owe to the freedom fighters of history. Do we owe it to them to fight the same fights? Do we owe it them to live their wildest dreams? Do we owe them a check? Consider these three truths excepted from their conversation.

1. Recognize that times have changed 

Natalie: What do we owe the people who came before us? And how do we keep ourselves from mythologizing the people who came before us, keeping them human? Which I think I think is a part of the beauty of people who have fought before us is their humanity. What do we owe George Jackson? 

Charity:  We can't continue the struggle they lived in their time because our conditions are different. Sometimes we take the idea of taking up the mantle without recognition that the struggle they had in their time in a lot of ways is fundamentally different in its operation now or should be. 

Right, because what we do sometimes is we try to use the same tactics that they used, forgetting that when systems of oppression, specifically whiteness, adjust those same exact tactics are not as useful or impactful and can sometimes be weaponized against us. 

So I think sometimes in our attempt to continue the struggle in the ways that we understand our predecessors to do, we lose ourselves in the context that we also inherited, but we live in a time that's never been lived in before.

Skip to 24:45 to hear the beginning of this conversation. 

2. Yank them from the realm of mythology (Hey you, take off those clothes!) 

Natalie: I think it was 8th grade was the year that the um Spike Lee's Malcolm X came out. And all all the guys ... everybody was wearing X stuff, you know, X merchandise X on their t-shirts and their hats or whatever. I distinctly remember the principal of our school, who happened to be my uncle, walking up to people wearing  X paraphernalia and asking like give me three facts about this person. Tell me who Malcolm X was. What did he do? Whatever. And if you couldn't, he would make you take your baseball cap off, take your shirt off, and turn it inside out and put it on. Like, you don't get to walk around wearing this and don't have an understanding of who this person is.

Skip to 37:08 to hear Charity talk about what happened in her classrooms when students sported Black Panther or that time one of her favorite students showed up in a hoodie featuring the War Report by Capone-N-Noreaga.

3. Keep community with today’s freedom fighters

Charity: “Those who are political prisoners and speak when once they once they're released speak about how people still poured into them while they were incarcerated. Those are some of the surprising things that always warm my heart. It was like, ‘yeah, I was isolated, but there were people who were trying every way they could to make sure I felt like somebody somewhere still cared about me.’ 

That's what we should inherit. We should inherit that, right? We don't got to inherit slogans. We don't got to inherit hairstyles and rhetoric. If we can inherit that that that privilege to say you always will know that somebody cares about you.” 

Skip to 43:23 to hear Charity describe how we can all better support political prisoners today.

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