Seize The Time featuring Elaine Brown

In this episode, former Black Panther leader, Elaine Brown gives an analysis on the state of Black America, reflects on her time in the Black Panther Party and the urgency for self-determination.

Seize the Time inaugurates a series of conversations yet to be discovered—each one a reminder to the fact that true revolutionaries do not rest, particularly when the Revolution itself remains unfinished and very much alive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:47

Hello and welcome to the Elaine Brown Podcast. I am your moderator, Africa Wusada, and I am going to guide you through a listening journey within this podcast. If you don't know who Elaine Brown is, you should. But if you don't know who Elaine Brown is, she is the former leader of the Black Panther Party. She is a singer and songwriter and activist, the author of A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little Bee, as well as a developer of affordable housing. So I welcome you all to join in to this listening experience. Elaine, starting right off, I have two questions. My first question to you is the song Seize the Time, which we just heard the first verse of what was the mindset when creating that song? And why is this podcast called Still a Revolutionary?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Well, uh, thank you very much for asking that question because even though that recording was done a long time ago, 1969, um I think I was pregnant when I had made that recording. Pretty sure I was. Um it's relevant then and maybe more relevant today. That first verse talking about uh if you say the sun belongs to you, well, I don't see you uh, I see that it's been snatched from you, meaning uh your whole uh existence as black people, uh, you're not living uh the life that you should be living. You're not living as free people. So uh I haven't seen you do anything. It's time, don't you know that it's time to seize the time? And when you look at that cover with that big AK on the cover, then you know that what I mean, because I say, and you know what I mean by seize the time. Now it's relevant today, obviously, uh, or should be obvious, because where are we today? We black people, and that's who I'm speaking about, as well as other people that fall into a certain uh class category with us, but the convergence of race and class in America is so unique that black people uh arise as a unique experience uh in this country, and therefore, this being the richest country and the most militarily powerful in the world, uh, we are living in what we used to call the belly of the beast. So we are the we are living at the bottom of life. We we have the highest incarceration rate, the highest poverty rate, the highest homelessness rate, the uh highest cancer death rate of black women dying of uh breast cancer, cervical cancer, black men, highest rate of death of by prostate cancer, highest infant mortality, maternal mortality rates, and so forth. Dr. King said at one time in uh his great speech, Where Do We Go From Here? Uh he said when he looks out, even though we had achieved the 1964 Civil Rights Act and gotten this 1965 Voting Rights Act, um, when he said, I look out at America and what we have is half of what is good and double of what is bad, I would say that in 2026, we have the same situation. We are still living at the bottom of life in America. So if we don't intend to get back to the freedom agenda, to the freedom struggle, then we will fade away into oblivion, except for those few that have uh been able to, thanks to the blood of our people mostly, uh, find their way into some amount of comfort uh and have forgotten about freedom. Yeah, that's what I have to say about why you want to do that. And this program, I wanted to call it still a revolutionary. I want this to be out here because I'm still committed to the struggle for our freedom. Now, some people, I had a woman actually have the nerve enough to say to me, a black woman at that. I she said, Well, aren't you, don't you think you're an anachronism? And I thought, well, I don't know how a human being could be an anachronism, but meaning that this is some old stuff, these some old school 1960s, 1970s, this stuff is not relevant today. And well, it wouldn't be relevant if we were free. Now, for those Negroes that think we're free or that really don't care, um that's one thing. But I take the position that the objective conditions that we look at that I just delineated are such that we cannot act like we are a free and independent people. We don't even, we barely can say we have a black community anymore, much less that we are any kind of a nation. Where is the black community? We've been identified and dispersed and uh and and uh to the hinterlands, under the bridges, in the here, there, and everywhere, and we're still living at the bottom of life. We still uh don't have a wealth, for example. Um people say, well, you got all these uh billionaires, which we don't have all these maximum, maybe 15 billionaires. What does that have to do with the number of black people in America who can barely uh make ends meet? And uh but more importantly, what makes us think that any minute now, if I can just get a better job, don't go back to prison, don't get fired, get an education, some kind of way, if I really, really work hard enough, I too can be Oprah. Isn't that what Nas said? You could be Oprah too.

SPEAKER_03 6:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

But uh first of all, I don't know why you want to be Oprah, but um uh the point is you will not be Oprah because that is already written into the structure of America from the beginning, that this is a a construct that has no place for equality, egalitarianism, equity, any of that. This is a country that was designed from the beginning to make sure that the rich get richer, that greed and and violence are the are the clarion cause of the day. That is the foundation, the ideological foundation. And then, of course, you want to use Christianity or what have you as a um as a uh guide with uh white Jesus, and uh that's your guide, but that's one thing. The point is this country is founded and is embedded in its structure of that the greedy win, the violent win, the rough, the ruthless win, and the rest will have to f fall in line.

SPEAKER_05 7:33

So I hear you. And so I guess how do we really define freedom? Because I think you just touched on the point that for many people, especially black people, freedom is not being in jail, freedom is paying your bills, freedom is, you know, being able to say, I'm not going to work today, I'm gonna take a PTO day off. And and then how does that define the status of black America right now?

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Yeah, well, you know, the Black Panther Party, we had a um 10-point platforming program, and our first point, which was an articulation of the manifestations of our oppression. So we would say we need how we want housing, uh, we want to end to police brutality, that kind of thing. So we had 10 points, or really nine, that articulated um what were the manifestations? How do we know that we were an oppressed people? You know, we know that because you look at the numbers of people that get killed by the police, who gets killed and who doesn't, who goes to prison and who doesn't. We in the state of California, we are five percent, five percent of the total population of the state, and we represent around 40% of the prison population. Now, either we think that um, either we think that we we have uh there's something wrong, there's a criminal gene, and there are people who have actually said that, that there's a criminal gene among blacks, which is so stupid that we can dissect it if we want to, but the point is it's stupid. Uh so either we think there is a criminal gene, that we are born as criminals, or some of us are, um, or we realize that there's not something wrong with us, uh, but something wrong with the scheme of things, as Shakespeare said, not in ourselves, but in our stars. In other words, in in the construct of where we find ourselves. So when people think because they can pay a bill, in and of itself, that's hysterical. Um, because you're still paying bills. Rich people don't pay bills, they're the ones that bill you, okay? That's kind of stupid. Uh, and that's where we've gone. We have a slave mindset because we've never had our own uh anything. Uh, when we were enslaved for 250 years in America, we were not only a free laborer, we were not only um denigrated and and and and treated uh like animals because uh with the excuse that we were black and therefore not really human, and that comes out in a lot of different ways, but we were stripped of every vestige of anybody's uh humanity, so that uh not only did we not have control over our own bodies and our own lives in any minor way, uh, in terms of uh just making a minimal decision to be in love with somebody, to not work and for free and so forth and so on. Um we were stripped of our everything that other people and nations around the world still have, no matter even if they are poor. Uh we didn't have land. Where was our land? This land belonged to the Native people, and after the Europeans killed them, they stole the land. But we've never had land here in America. We had a moment of 40 acres uh that came and went in matter of months, but barring that moment, we have no land as a people that we can say this is where black people live. We don't have that. We don't have a we don't where is our anthem? We know that we have uh uh the black national anthem, as we like to call it, uh, but we don't have a country, uh a sovereignty and a people that says this is our thing. But those are just parts of it. We don't have our own money, we can't say there's black money in America. We don't have our own uh banks, we don't own any single thing in America, but we were stripped of even our names and our memories and our history and our culture, uh every single vestige of who we were, and we were not we were not given anything to replace it except for that we were this inferior people, not white people. You know, Thomas Jefferson said that the black, in notes on the state of Virginia, the black, he said, I advance is that the black is inferior to the white in the endowment, meaning the the very found the makeup, the genetic makeup of both mind and body. It's Thomas Jefferson. These people love Thomas Jefferson, so we know that in America we don't have any place other than as an inferior people. Now, somebody could call you a nigga, but you might own everything, so then it wouldn't matter, but we don't own anything either. What do we own? Oprah doesn't even own the own channel, you know what I mean? We don't own anything, we don't control anything currently. So we said in the Black Panther Party in our first point, we want freedom, power to determine the destinies of our black community. Now, the saddest part about that statement is we can barely find the black community anymore. Where is it? I'm trying to resurrect some sense of that in West Oakland right now, but barring these little pockets that we've created where we've done something, we don't have uh a sense of or have a location where we can say, well, we said this was the hood, but we don't even have the hood anymore. And the few places I remember when the big fire in in LA when everybody was crying about Malibu or wherever they were crying about, the people in Al Tadena, which is a black alternative to Pasadena, these were middle class, well, really working class black people. They can't, they don't have the insurance to crawl back into their homes anymore. They thought they had a nice little neighborhood, wasn't like the rest, wasn't crime filled, and all the things that we think of when we think of the hood and burnt down, they ain't got no money to come back, and nobody's worried about it. And that's just a minor example of where we are as a people. No, we are not free because we don't determine anything that goes on in our lives. You know, lastly, when when black people say, well, you know, people say, your phone's going out, your phone's breaking up. I love when people say that to me. I said, This is not my phone, this is a piece of plastic I had to buy, and in order for me to use it, I have to connect myself to some white man's company that's got satellites all over the world. I have no idea where these satellites are, but even if I did, I have no control of them. And if I don't pay the bill, I won't even have a connection to them. So if their satellite gets swept away by rain or wind or something, I don't have Wi-Fi. That's I have nothing to do with any of that because I'm not in control of anything that affects my life, my life. I'm not in control of the most fundamental systems of telecommunications right now, no technology, uh, all of the uh the fundamental industries, you know, the trains, the planes, the boats. We lucky we can get a ticket on a plane. I know when I go to take a ride in a plane, I notice there'll be three black people and 150 white people. We're not even able to buy a ticket to go anywhere. We're not in the hotels that we fought to be to integrate. So we have to assess our situation, but we have to see it through the eyes of our people and not through individual uh people who have, quote, made it or whatever, and then we see ourselves and say, Well, I can make it too, you know. And then we look at where have we made it, which is something that we can talk about in terms of who has made it and what do they do with it.

SPEAKER_05 16:02

Well, yeah, and that's my next question because how how do we pull people out of this superficial superficial comfort that they're in? And and then they look to these people, these wealthy people, these leaders, uh, as the answer, but they're not on the same page. We we there's all these different narratives around what the solution is or what we ought to be doing. So, according to you, like how who should we be listening to? Who what should we be doing? Because I think there's so many voices out there that it's kind of become convoluted.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Well, I don't know of any voice out there that's talking about black people right now, other than a few little people that pretend they're some kind of a revolutionary, or and they all seem to whine their way back to pretending they have some link to the Black Panther Party. You see fake Negroes and um in Philadelphia, you got another little group coming up in Tacoma, Washington, of all places, uh, and a whole bunch of people around the around the country. Every once in a while you get uh remember in Atlanta, they had some little, they were actors and they put on uh had fake guns and they walked through the streets and and and they had on Panther-like uh regalia and said they were gonna start something. So, but as for those that are the popular people, uh that is to say, the people that have the microphone that have the power of the uh of the airwaves, which are controlled not by black people. So, what does that tell you about them? Uh, but uh I don't see there is no the answer. The first thing is that we have to figure out, which is why I'm I'm trying to uh use this podcast format uh in these uh in this last part of my life to remind our people that we need to uh stand up, as Dr. King said, straighten our backs and stop acting like some slaves and accepting uh the position of being impoverished and care about each other. But the first thing is to have a the kind of black consciousness, not about, you know, like okay, well, I'm black and you know, I'm proud of whatever it is, but where I where what affects my people affects me, whatever I have. I'm I don't want uh, I want for my people for myself what I want for my people, or vice versa. I'm not gonna be Rihanna out here with some diamond uh crusted sunglasses on, and uh and my folks are living like shit in the community, or or like Beyoncé and uh Jay-Z doing an ad for Cartier for some jewelry that would probably buy houses for a whole community of people uh there in uh in uh Louisville or Louisville, Kentucky, where you are, Africa. Or I'm not gonna be out here uh making all this money and doing nothing. Oprah, what does she do? She had that Angel Network, which wasn't really anything but asking other people to contribute. But her history uh is a history of being America's mammy. Um so we have all these people that have made it, but they've made it from the blood of our people, especially the people who are in elective office. And right now we have a congressional black caucus and the United States Congress, which is bigger than any number of black elected officials we've ever had. Why? Because Fannie Lou Hayman lost her eye to put to get the vote. All kinds of people and Edmund Pettis Bridge and Bloody Sunday, people fought from 1865 to 1965 just to fight to get the vote for black people, to say to it that we weren't denied the right to vote, though it matters very little since we make up a very small percentage of America and it's basically mob rule by racists right now. We in that state, we have mob rule, call it democracy, but it's mob rule by racists. If white people vote in a block, which they do, and black people vote in a block, which we halfway do, we're gonna lose all the time if there's a conflict of interest, and there is a conflict of interest. So when we get to these people that have, quote, made it, then we have to look to them. Where are these leaders? You got a Negro named Hakeem Jeffries, walking around the name Hakeem, no less. Here he is, the so-called leader of the Democratic Party caucus or something in the United States Congress. What have these people done with all this shit that that uh Trump has done for the last year? Trump is busy every day doing some of the most racist and insane shit you have ever seen. Now, that doesn't mean that he's unique in that, because he can't beat Thomas Jefferson because he was a slave holder. Can't beat George Washington, a slaveholder, biggest slaveholders of their time when this country was formed, which they will be celebrating the formation this year in July. And we like to celebrate uh the 4th of July, which I want to just throw up every time I see some black person waving a flag. But the point is, Hakeem Jeffrey, sitting there as a so-called leader, he says nothing about, oh, let's just go to Venezuela and arrest the head of that country. What ain't no Venezuelan call me nigga? That's what we used to say before. What is wrong with you that you couldn't say, wait a minute? No, the only complaint they had was you know, you never consulted Congress. And since then they haven't said a mumbling word. That man is sitting in jail in New York. How are you gonna go into a country, supposedly a sovereign country, and just arrest, quote unquote, the head of the country? And that's okay. You're gonna invade Iran and kill the leader. Well, you created that whole uh Iranian um moolah uh uh uh enclave that's been running Iran since they ousted the Shah. You did that, America. Ronald Reagan did that. We forgot about Iran Contra. You sold guns to those people. The Shah was in America being protected by Carter. That's why I say that Trump is really not much worse than the rest. He's just crude and probably crazy. I mean, really, like, okay, I project the brain on Alzheimer's. But the real crazy person is not the crazy person, it's the one that endorses and follows him and doesn't do anything. The congressional black caucus should all lay put their heads down in shame for the failure to say anything meaningful or do anything at all about the current status of things of our people. That is just shameful. And I like to talk about that later on. But I want to talk also about the rest of these Negroes that have money because they could be doing something. I look at a guy like Jay-Z, and you know, I like to say, as little Kim said, take the big guy down and the rest will follow. So I'm going to say about Jay-Z. I'm not even gonna comment on the absolute ignorance and stupidity and backstabbing, boot licking. Uh, let's put, can we have something about these rappers, these coon rappers like Snoop Dogg talking about Snoop Dogg? I love Donald Trump. Who says that? You're supposed to be coming out of Long Beach Crips, please. Stop yourself, Snoop Dogg, and what's the little boy's name that got he's not even a he's not even a rapper. What is he? Some kind of half-stepping fake uh a brother from the hood. Uh, what is his name with that coon show on TV called uh uh Nick Cannon Cannon with his 15 children? Does he have any black women in his life? But anyway, Nick Cannon with his coon show. I fucks with Trump. What are you saying? You don't even talk like that. Who cares? Trump don't care, that's for sure. Although Trump had a whole bunch of people around him for Black History Month. These are the Negroes that literally follow him. You know, I've been calling them uh they they're following him there. They're magas, but they're black. Oh, I call Negroes, right? So I call them Nagas. Naga equals a Negro MAGA. Yeah, you got Tim Scott, you got people like Shermichael. People walk around the name of Shermichael something. How about this guy, Mel Melik something? Not even Malik, but Melik. All these elected officials, but the entertainers that got millions of dollars, billionaires that could be building something. If you don't want anybody asking you to pick up the gun like we did in the Black Panther Party, I'd be asking that, but that's just me.

SPEAKER_05 25:20

But our people are so bought into capitalism and having extreme wealth, and and as you said, having diamonds, like we're so married to that that it's hard to get them away from it. And so in our conversation, something that you've always said to me is that you know, you have to be willing to die. And so my fear for us is that I don't know who those people are anymore that are that are willing to die. People, there are men out here that's willing to die with shoes, but not willing to die with their children, you know, or if someone abuses their family, they're not willing to die, but they're willing to die over some money, or they're willing to die over, you know, a cult.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

So, like they're willing to do that because let me tell you something. Today, you know, a friend of mine who was being a Black Panther Party in Pittsburgh said to me, he said, the common thing among the brothers in the hood today is tell on three and you'll go free. So I don't think they're willing to die for what you say. I don't think they're willing to die for anything because right now we got all these fake uh violence prevention programs that involve a lot of the different black men uh in uh in the so-called hood, whatever whatever's left of it. It's supposed to be gang prevention and all this kind of thing. But what do they do? They're really just a snitch program. And they're not even getting a diamond for that. You know, they're getting uh they're somewhere between a diamond and government cheese, you know. They they have nothing at all that they gain for that. I don't see anything. Uh I don't think that's the only criterion. I don't even think you have to sacrifice much when you got the money like uh like uh Oprah or uh uh Jay-Z or whoever these other entertainers are, and that's what we are, uh Michael Jordan and uh you know Steph Carey and what have you. When you got their kind of money, you don't have to die for this shit, but you could at least put a few dollars together, build something in the community, identify it as black. These people won't even say the word black anymore. They're not even black anymore, even though the only way that they came into existence was because of the support. You know, the NBA, I I don't know what I think the I think the NFL National Football League has more blacks than the NBA percentage-wise, but both of them have majority black players, right? And we don't even own one team. Now, I understand that Michael Jordan may still have a piece of the Charlotte Hornets, but that's the best we can do. And I don't even know what the Charlotte Hornets do. I don't know if it's a football player. I've imagined it's a basketball team since he was a basketball player. But he's lost millions of dollars in gambling or playing golf. Really? You didn't have anything else to do, you couldn't think of anything. Now he put up a clinic or something in North Carolina or what have you, things like this, little stuff like this. In general, there's no advocacy for our people, and they could use their platform, this massive platform that Oprah has to say something for black people and to do something. You don't have to become a revolutionary, but at least say acknowledge that we that we are in a state of oppression in this country, and that this is unacceptable, and that we need to rise up. And we celebrate Dr. King, and we celebrate. Sometimes we celebrate Malcolm X, sometimes we celebrate the Black Panthers and Huey P. Newton, don't actually know what these people did or didn't do. And people look at me and think, well, you know, I'm this old revolutionary or this old broad still talking this stuff, but I'm still going, I'm still going to do it because you ain't doing a goddamn thing. And uh, as I like to say, as you well know, Africa, you know, uh Lord, you should have killed me a long time ago because I remain a bad bitch. And so I'm looking at you, and yes, I can criticize you because you're not doing anything for your people. We have these academics, these are bootlegging ass, white loving Henry Lewis Gates, for example, sitting up there at Harvard talking about the Africana chair of Africana Studies, whatever he's now calling it. There's a man who did a film, a documentary some years ago called The Two Nations of Black America, as if we have one nation, but we don't. So, and what did he mean? He tells us, he says, Look, these boys in the hood playing off of the film name, these boys in the hood are like Martians to me. This is Henry Lewis Gates. They're like Martians to me, and he has the support of these ignorant other academics like William Julius Wilson, who gave us enough fodder for Bill Clinton to create the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. But Henry Lewis Gates says, My home now is Harvard Yard. I don't have anything to do with these people in the food. Some people get up this morning and worry about black people. I'm not one of them.

SPEAKER_06 30:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Of course, we remember, fast forward after that documentary, this Negro got locked out of his own house, tried to get in, and he got arrested.

SPEAKER_06 30:56

You sure did.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

And when, but wait, when he got arrested, he wasn't even outraged by it. You know, he's married, he was married to a uh coal miner's daughter from West Virginia, white girl, a ticket taker at the train station. Here he is, professor at Harvard, but anyway, he has he talks to Obama, and they, the two of them, the president of the United States, a professor at Harvard, sit down and have a beer with this low-level uh racist whiteboard to see if they can work things out. Wow. Come to some consensus. And they filmed it. So that was Obama's response to a racist act which had its own nuances to it, since it was Henry Lewis Gates that got locked out of his own house.

SPEAKER_05 31:52

But that's happened a lot around the country where people try to have these sit-down conversations with the police. And for whatever reason, there are people who believe that somehow we can compel our oppressors to have empathy for us or to understand or to do better. And so, given that that that's not reality, like what do you propose? Should how do we advance the agenda to free black people when we know that we can't appeal to our oppressor through, you know, philosophy or sympathy or empathy?

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Well, there's the morality of America, it doesn't lend itself to that. And uh the Negro that's looking for the constitution or some moral ground uh is looking in the wrong direction. Uh, there's not going to be any uh empathy, but you are right in that the uh uh around the country, these little groups formed, NAACP, what have they ever done for black people? Don't know. Uh their legal defense fund handled the uh Brown v. Board of Education case. But as we know, uh from the uh Supreme Court, uh the Supreme Court judgment in Brown v. Board of Education from 1954 to today, schools in America remain segregated and disparate in terms of funding based on a black school versus white schools. So the sadness of the fight and the struggle to enforce Brown uh is that is still not enforced. But that's you know a separate question. So for us to think that um, you know, the devil's gonna change, or that you're gonna go to this man and expect that he there's gonna be some concern about uh about black people uh and that we should be doing something like stopping uh uh stop uh uh uh police brutality, anti-police terror bullshit. I can tell you what changed a lot of things here in Oakland when Huey P. Newton got into a confrontation with two pigs or two white cops here in Oakland, and the majority of the Oakland Plea is still white. That was in 1967. This is 2026. Uh well, one cop got killed and the other one got wounded. Huey went on trial, which you know, which gave birth to the Free Huey movement, which uh caused the Black Panther Party to go from being a small group in Oakland to a national organization with international connections and and coalitions. Now, Huey P. Newton said for every act of aggression, for every act that they commit against us, we must deliver a consequence. Now, until we prepare to do that, now everybody's not gonna do that. We saw ourselves as the vanguard party. Now, what did that mean? Coming out of a Leninist ideal or idea, this was the organization that was supposed to organize the people to get ready for making fundamental change. And so we did all the things that we did, in addition to carrying the gun and advancing the concept of self-defense. We sit and cry and go to these funerals and talk about, and then we want to compare so-called community violence with state violence. It's not the same, you see, because state violence is sanctioned by the state. Right here in D in uh in Alameda County, you can find a DA up until recently with a woman named Pamela Price was elected and then immediately recalled. You couldn't find a DA in all these years that ever would prosecute a cop for killing a black person, mostly young black men. Matter of fact, I can't name any cases of killing white men, but anyway, uh the point is we have to understand what we're up against. So, unless we're ready, I'm not asking everybody, I'm advocating, but I'm not as I'm not asking people to do what they're not gonna do.

SPEAKER_06 36:08

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

So we can get past a certain number of people, but right now we're afraid to lose our little job and you're gonna lose it anyway. And anyway, why are you committed to some of this shit? Excuse my language. These people got to crying in DC because they lost their income out of the uh working for the government, collecting taxes from us. I don't care that that's what you were doing now. You're mad because you're in the line to get some free cheese. You see, so um we have to make a decision. Are we with us? Are we creating any, are we getting back? And so I'm looking to somebody young. I don't even want to talk to anybody over 30 at this point.

unknown 36:45

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

They might not even want to talk to anybody over 20. Because we have to find some new blood where somebody got the heart, the courage, the concern, the consciousness to say our people have got to organize and get back to the freedom train. We got to organize. Now, we're not only up against all the guns in the world. Now, these people can fire rockets for thousands of miles and stuff like this. We can't, our little bit of guns that we got in the community is a joke. That's what makes me uh laugh about people saying, Oh, there's so many guns in the community. Where did they come from? We don't make any guns. We certainly didn't make an Uzi. That came out of Israel. Now, you know, they don't even use an Uzi no more. So you you know that's is a that's an old gun for the Israelis. How did the Israelis make gun get into the hood? I don't know. And you don't think it's some white police that brought it into you? This is kind of dumb shit that goes on. But the point is, this in addition to capitalism, which affects not just black people, but certainly native people, certainly native people, indigenous people, Latinos, people of color, and even poor whites living in the hollows of Kentucky, living in the coal mining areas of West Virginia, that don't have any more than black people have, but they imagine that they're superior and that's some kind of way they can take their white trailer sales down to the bank and get a dollar, which is just a joke on them. But we have to recognize there's another part of this formula that is not looked at, and that is the question of white supremacy. Because in America, everything is black people and white people. All the people that are not black and white, that are not black, that are not black, are trying to be white. They'd be putting down other mixed. When they ask this, when the census rolls around, they want to call themselves, well, I'm really mixed, I really not black. Yeah, I have Indian in me, and I have a little bit of Puerto Rican and something else, you know, and Chinese and Filipino, you know, yeah. Everybody tries to squeeze up in the category of white because everybody understands that to be black in America, even black Nigerians will come into America and don't want to be black, right? People come from Ghana, people come from Nigeria in droves to try to study here and get a job here, all of that. They come into America, they come into America and they don't even want to be black. They denounce us and they get hired. Yeah, they're hired by some of the biggest banks, the biggest um investment firms. It's all kinds of Nigerians working in the tech business. Yeah, but but when it comes to a black from America, everybody understands. Everybody, including us, we have bought into white supremacy. Yeah, more importantly, we bought into black inferiority.

SPEAKER_05 39:51

Yeah, nobody wants to be a nigga.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

We have bought into black inferiority, and what is wrong with that is the file. What happened is this when this country began to evolve and began to institutionalize the enslavement of the African, and that's what it was. It was not the enslavement of any other, you know, people say, Oh, the Irish indentured service, sit down. Or they were blacks and owned slaves, be quiet. I'm not speaking of some oddball moment. Masses of blacks in America are here because we were captured very often with this major assistance of other Africans, put on the ships, and brought here and sold on the open market. And it comes, you know, we had a long history, which we can talk about at another time in another podcast. I do want to talk about it. But suffice to say that we're gonna peg it at 1619. I don't want to argue about somebody, well, blacks were here before that. Not interested. Right now, we can peg the enslavement of African people that evolved into the institution of slavery that built America. We can peg that entrance that in that that entrance at around 1619, coming in on a ship called the White Horse of all the things. Now, which by the way, the English had stolen those slaves from a Portuguese slave ship, which is just what more sin can you commit, crime can you commit? Now we didn't stole the slave, but anyway, after you'd have killed the Pohatan Confederacy, all 30 tribes of Pocahontas' people, including her daddy, Chief Pohatan. After you've done that in 1690, going forward to the seven, whatever, 1607 forward, blah, blah, blah. You grab up the land, kill all the people, and put us. Then you start to develop an ideology because remember, these are some rogue white people. These some of them they captured somebody, but in the end of the day, most of the whites that came from Europe were what we would call European trash. These people, they they they would say they can go because we don't care about them. And so it's like Australia being just founded by white prisoners, right? So, or grounded in white imprisonment. But anyway, um, so these people come here and they find that they can be supreme here if they just can get into the system. And they get the king, King James, the author of the Bible, is giving them uh land. He's giving them land that doesn't even belong to him, but he's giving it to them. So they're growing, developing the land, they're expanding and all this. Tobacco is growing, and they're making money, then ultimately they they find cotton, the growth of cotton. And as Karl Marx said, but for cotton, there would have been no industrial revolution, and but for slaves, there would have been no cotton production, period. Now, so during this time of the first hundred and so years of our enslavement, there was nothing but conversation about the inferiority, the bestiality, how we were we were meant to be in this and we were meant to work for them. And culminating, in as I said before, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, who tried to make this a scientific statement as if he was some type of genius or scientist or had some information, he goes through a whole litany in notes on the state of Virginia, who becomes the third president of the United States, and who's uh the so-called author of the Declaration of Independence, and we look to the Constitution as if that has something to do with us, ain't nothing to do with you. That so-called three fifths clause is ridiculous for you to think it has something to do with valuing any black person. It doesn't. What does it say? We're gonna count these Negroes as three fifths of a man for the purposes of uh of the electoral election electoral college. Now, Thomas Jefferson is important to Get this in notes on the state of Virginia says, Look, uh, I don't know why the black is inferior to the white. I don't know whether this came as a result of time or just circumstance, but this is what I will say. I just start out by saying, look at that color, look at their color, that immovable veil of black, it's disagreeable. It's Thomas Jefferson. He said, their hair is not long and flowing like our hair, and they tend to be lazy and don't have an odor, and they don't love their women, they lust like the orangutan, they lust after their women. He even says that, and they have no musical art in them. He says, I advance it, therefore, that the black is inferior to the white in the endowments, meaning the genetic makeup of both body and mind. These people can't be equal to us. Yes, I can say all men are created equal. I don't mean them. Later on goes on to say, but we do see evidence that with one pass of white blood, which he should know since he had all those children with his rape with his rape victim, Sally Hemings, one pass of white blood, he says, shows an improvement in the black.

SPEAKER_06 45:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 45:30

Know that they are inherently inferior and they cannot be considered equal. And then going forward to Lincoln, these are the big people. We ain't talking about the people day-to-day life. Lincoln says, Look, I like any man believe in the supremacy of the white man. This ain't got nothing to do with that. These I can't have this expansion of slavery. That's what this is about. When he develops proclamation, uh, emancipation proclamation. So what we have to understand is that written into the code of the constitution and all other legal alleged, you know, all this structure and institution. But the economic institution is capitalism, where greed and whoever whosoever can capture something and kill the other one to make more money, that's who's going to succeed. The rest of you, too bad, you'll work for me. I might let you have a few dollars. So, but that comes with the rise of industrialization. But before that, the 250 years that we that we struggled in the fields of America as slaves, uh, we we raised America up from a piece of garbage, a colony of white uh Europeans, English, into this powerful country because of cotton. In the end of the day, part of the fabric of America is that white people are superior to black people. And worse than that, most white people believe that, and worse than that, most black people believe it. So part of what I'm trying to do is to get us to the place where we can get back to our agenda because we value ourselves, and we see not just black as beautiful, but I want to say this uh before we have to end this. You know, Huey Newton was asked on a TV program with other people, other black men, two other black men, can't remember their name, don't want to. Uh there was a guy named Jimmy the Greek, and he used to be uh the person people looked to for betting, and he would say, you know, like why a horse is gonna win or whatever. So he said the reason that black men always won these races in the Olympics and all these things is because we had this genetic superiority in terms of our legs, in other words, the implication being we were some kind of animals, right? And uh that's why everybody got mad. So everybody got mad because they felt that Jimmy the Greek was insulting black people. Well, you know what you do to somebody like Jimmy the Greek if you felt he was insulting black people, just slap that bitch, okay? That's what I do. I'm very good at that, as you thought. So I don't know why you should have been what you want him to like you. Like you're mad because he said, Oh, you said that? Here's what I'm gonna tell you. I'm not gonna argue with you about something like that. But I wouldn't care if he didn't matter. If he matters, then I'm worried. If he's drunk, I worry. If he's some average uh white boy on the street, unless you're in my way or you're getting ready to kill me or something, I don't even care what you say because you ain't got nothing to do with what I do. But the point is, they said Jimmy the Greek said this. So the black men that were on this panel with Huey, they were like, Well, this is a falsehood. They had some kind of scientific discussion about the legs of black men and all kinds of dumb shit. And Huey said, Well, I agree with Jimmy the Greek that we are superior athletically, but I think he didn't go far enough. I would advance it, Huey says, that the black has evolved to be a superior people. No other people could be stripped of so much of their humanity and fight back and survive, and not only that created everything that's worth anything in America. To the food, to every single cultural aspect they copy that we do. You want to say, I was just reading about a documentary coming out about Big Mama Thornton, who would put out the song uh Hound Dog before Elvis Presley. Not worthy of too much conversation. It's not the conversation. The point is everything Elvis Presley steals right out the mouth of black people. He don't even bother, okay? So they've been stealing our everything, and we've been giving it to them because we don't know how to fight back when we're not organized. So the purpose of the Black Panther Party was to be a vanguard of a revolutionary struggle because it would require fundamental change, revolutionary change in order for us to be free. You can't fix the education system and think everything else is okay. You can't bring black men out of prison and think everything's gonna be all right. You can't say we all got a job and think everything's okay. I don't want a job, I want to work for UPS. I don't want to deliver uh food to your door through a DoorDash.

SPEAKER_06 50:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:44

I want to own DoorDash with you, not alone, not where I give you two dollars and I make a hundred.

unknown 50:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:53

Do I give you? No. So my point is I'm still a revolutionary because we have got to understand who we are as a people. I'm not excluding other people and their oppression, because one of the things I learned who I am is every man's death diminishes me. So I'm concerned with the lives of everyone. I understand that we are not the only oppressed people in the world, people all over the world living like dogs, mostly because of the same enemy, which is the United States government, and really the corporate, corporate managers and owners of the government. You know, we got to look at one last little quick thing on this. You go into a target, like people talk about they're gonna boycott target, whatever. You go into a target or a safe way store, whatever store, and they got an armed guard in there, especially now. You're gonna kill me because I stole a piece of chicken for real. So whose police are you? Right, you the target police? So the government is not there for you and me. Yeah, the government will, these people will you walk out the store with something and they tell you to stop, and you don't stop, you're gonna get shot. Stealing some candy, stealing some, you know, some food. It's unbelievable that we don't even get it. We don't have a police force. We should have community control, but we don't even have that. So the police are the biggest manifestations of government to keep us in line. You better not step out of line and do anything. At some point, though, I'm hoping, and I believe, as my friend Jamil Alameen said to me, used to be called H. Rap Brown, I would like to talk about that another day. Snake and all of the things that we went through.

SPEAKER_03 52:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:53

H. Rat Brown, Jameel Alamine, that by then Jamil Alamine said to me, I believe that it's only inevitable that the pendulum will swing our way again. And you will be ready. And you will not have to worry, you will understand what just happened because the forces will change. And you know that one little thing can happen sometimes, and the entire country will shift its emphasis on this or that, because the media and what have you, a news story will come out, and everything will suddenly be different, and people will be looking for something. So I'm hoping that people who will listen to this podcast, especially young blacks, will say, Look, what am I doing today to advance the freedom of my people?

SPEAKER_06 53:42

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 53:43

That was powerful. Thank you so much, Elaine. Um, I mean, that actually was my last question. Like, what can someone do? And we definitely can delve into it in the in our next episode. Um, but I do have one final thing. Um, we talked about um building power, and one of the things that you have done in an amazing way is developed a 100% affordable housing complex in Oakland. Um, and and I also note that because you had mentioned also like just working, us working for the system. I've always had a job that I where I worked for someone white. The only time I've ever worked for a black person ever in my life was in Oakland, California, where that was my actual employer. Um, so it's something to be said about Oakland. Um, but you are the developer of a 100% affordable housing complex, $80 million budget to build it. Prior to that, you had never been in that industry at all. Um, but when we're talking about building power and ownership, uh you've done something that, again, not being Beyoncé or Jay-Z, not being Oprah Winfrey and having all of this money disposable at your fingertips. One, if you can answer quickly, how were you able to do that? And then what is what is the purpose and the goal of having that space and sustaining that space for our people?

SPEAKER_00 55:25

Well, there's no quick answer on how. I'm doing a documentary on it, so we'll have to wait for all of that. Uh, but here's the point um the land was there, the city owned it. I had a challenge by one of the elected officials, was asked me if I could do anything about reducing recidivism. And I said, Well, of course, the only thing you have to do is either get a job for these brothers coming out to joint, or you're gonna have to build, they're gonna have to have their own business because they're denied uh housing, they're denied jobs, uh, they're denied everything, and you expect them not to go back to prison. Well, I'm going back to what I know, because most people are in prison for economic crimes, even though they may be connected to um to some sort of quote-unquote violence, like armed robbery, what have you. So I attempted to develop some type of a place for businesses, found the land. It was city-owned, blighted, just like so many other cities have a lot of land and that is owned by the city, not developed. And I learned a lot about what I had to do. And I fought like a dog to get that land and to get the money to build housing because that was the requirement. In order for me to hold on to the land, I had to build affordable housing. But I built affordable housing that's very low for very low-income people, uh, what is called extremely low income. Uh, people, nobody in my building, on average, everybody's paying between four and five hundred dollars a month. We put a bed in every single, we have 79 units. We put a bed in every bedroom with a mattress and all that. Put a dining table in every dining room, glass top, beautiful. We put a couch in every living room that opened out to a bed. We put dishes in the in the in the kitchen and towels in the bathroom. We provide free Wi-Fi, free electricity. We got 20,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof. The point of the building was to provide a place for our people and other poor people, but it's mostly black, mostly black single mothers, mostly black single mothers and their children to provide a place because we first of all just need housing. Over 7,000 people applied for those 79 units of house. Wow. And we only had enough for that. It was very solemnic, very sad, but we had to make decisions. We did a lot of randomization uh by based on a greater need and what have you. I'm hoping this will be a model for other people around the country. I want some Negroes in uh in Kentucky and in Philadelphia and in Chicago and Houston and what have you, to say, wait a minute, yeah, if that bitch can do it, I can do. That's right. That's what I want you to say. But if you ain't you won't sit around and wonder about, well, did she have a white man with her? Did the white man do it? Well, hell, just if you want to know, I'm gonna put a documentary together, but I'm telling you, it starts with identifying quickly. This is on a more practical level now, just for housing. Identifying city-owned, government-owned property that's not being used, and then trying to get a hold of that property for free or for a dollar, like I did, but then you got to build something. I had to find that money. But guess what? These people give this money away to each other all day long, and there's all kinds of affordable housing money. It's hard to get. You don't want to do the little bit of sacrifice, which ain't gonna be of your life, but it may be of your time. You don't get to go to the club, you know, you don't get to go on vacation, have time off, all the bullshit people do. You have to put in work 24 hours a day because this is about you and your folk. But it's it is doable. So the goal is this is a model. This ain't the end of nothing. It's 79 units of housing. But we are building out our five businesses. We have a community market, a restaurant, a fitness center, an urban farm, and a tech center.

unknown 59:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 59:27

And we'll be building the we're building out the market now, and it's going to be cooperatively owned by formerly incarcerated others who are what I call socioeconomically marginalized. Folks in our building can just come on downstairs with their uh government cards and buy food at a low cost, and so forth and so on. So I want to create a model for how can we do it? This ain't complicated. If you want to do it, you will, but if you want to play the game and be master's slave for the rest of your stupid life, then go right ahead. I don't want to talk to you. I told you I'm not really interested in people much over uh much under uh other than people under 30 years old, because they at least have the ability to not be stuck in to imagine, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:12

Yeah. Wow. This has been wonderful, Elaine, and and I salute you for all that you sacrifice, uh, all that you continue to do at 83 years old. Um listen, guys, please tune in for our next episode. Um, you can find us on Instagram, on YouTube, on all the places that you watch um podcasts at Still a Revolutionary. Um and until next time, all power to the people. That's right. To the people. That's right.