All Thought Is Black Thought Lionel Poorly

G challenges O to think less about the political theory of organizing for a moment and think more about the personal events in his life that brought him to identify with other oppressed people and organize to fight back against that oppression. G & O share stories from their experiences that helped radicalize them and the love and joy they experience in struggle.

The brothers review the film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe, written by Ruben Santiago-Hudson based on August Wilson's 1982 play, starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final (and arguably greatest) screen performance before his unfortunate death at the age of 43. The brothers meditate on August Wilson's body of work, which chronicles stories from working-class Black people and which the brothers definitely plan to come back to in future podcast episodes. They try to address the question Wilson once asked to one of his elders: How did you live to be 70 as a Black man in America? The brothers also relate some stories passed down from their own family histories, stories that some of the people in Wilson's stories might relate to, and consider how the isolation of young Black people from their elders is one way the antiblack structure works to sap the capacity of Black resistance.

Today, for Father's Day, the brothers ask, how is Black fatherhood possible in an antiblack world? In other words, how do new and evolving forms of antiblackness and capitalist oppression change and strain the relationships between Black fathers and their children? And how, in this changing but still deadly context, can new forms of masculinity emerge? This review of the 2016 movie Fences, starring and directed by Denzel Washington, examines the web of relationships around Troy, a former Negro League baseball player in Black Pittsburgh of the 1950s. G & O talk about the relationships between Black parents and Black children. The brothers also explore the film's treatment of other themes, including the emotional labor of Black women, Black intergenerational trauma, and Black men's friendships. O reflects on a time he performed in a scene from this play.

How do we survive capitalism while organizing its end? Thinking about violent events like the Flint water crisis, the police murder of Breonna Taylor, or the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 have many Black radical activists asking: As we organize to bring down the oppressive capitalistic structure, are we preparing ways to amass the resources and capacities we as Black people will need to survive this genocidal structure in the meantime? In this episode, G & O begin to think through these sets of questions. The brothers recorded this episode shortly after the 2020 election was called. The celebrations of November, which would soon be followed with the horrors of January, led the brothers to reflect on that moment, even before white supremacist terrorists tried to violently overturn the election and murder government officials. What the brothers saw, and still see even after the January 6 attacks on the capitol, is a moment way bigger than the election. In this moment there is an opening, a need for big ideas in critical Black thought, including Black self-sufficiency and self-defense, Black conversations about the role of government, surviving within capitalism while working to destroy it, and the importance of radical leadership from the Black  poor and working class.

The brothers talk about homelessness and the looming lapse of the federal eviction moratorium. G talks about his experience being homeless with a family to take care of. The brothers originally recorded this episode before the Biden administration signed off on the one-time distribution of $1400 relief checks and extended the eviction moratorium by a few months. Most of it still applies because both of those acts of governmental largesse were temporary and did not come anywhere near solving the problem. And now, with a federal judge recently ruling the eviction moratorium unconstitutional, the problem is again being kicked down the road. But the fundamental problem is,  and has been, capitalism -- a genocidal system generated out of structural antiblackness and anti-Indigeneity. The brothers discuss alternatives to that genocidal system we live under.

Inspired by Karen Hunter and Greg Carr's YouTube conversations about jailbreaking knowledge from the academy, the brothers reflect on aspects of the academy that they can do without -- including classism and antiblackness. They think through how Black people might keep the irreplaceable functions of the academy (the production, conservation, and distribution of knowledge) while discarding the other bits. They discuss the kinds of knowledge Black people need in order to get free.