 everyone so happy to be here, so happy to be here. And we're gonna continue the conversation from last time about indifference of the Black family structure, the importance of self-care. And but we're gonna focus more on what we deserve. We meaning what Black people deserve. And I really enjoyed the article from the author, Tana Hesse Colt, that he wrote for the Atlantic, The Case for Reparation. And The Case for Reparation, 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, six years of separate but equal, 35 years of racist housing policy, until we reckon with our compounding moral debt, America would never be whole, never be whole. And so I'm gonna start with you, Andre. Just for our viewers to just, we're dealing with a lot of the young people now who are just hearing about reparations. So for our sister power viewers, what are reparations? Reparations is any kind of system that is designed to cure an injustice. Lots of people have gotten in reparations for very bad things that have happened to them in the past. There was a sister who petitioned the legislature of Massachusetts and received reparations back in the late 1700s. And certainly we know about the Japanese-Americans who received reparations for being interned in concentration camps during World War II. Germany has paid billions of dollars in reparation to Israel for the genocide that was committed during Hitler days before World War II. Representative John Conyers introduced a bill, bill 40 in the United States legislature every year for the last 40 years. John Conyers has passed away now, but the Black Caucus has picked up and carried the ball with regard to the reparations bill and it looks like in the wake of the George Floyd murder and the atrocities, we might get some traction with the reparations bill. Although the reparations bill is talking about a study, a study of the area, a study of the arenas in which discrimination has been systematically applied. Tony Hussie coats a article in the Atlantic. I really enjoyed that too because he really approached it in a systematic manner. He talked about the FAA, he talked about the New Deal that excluded farm workers and domestic people back in the 30s from the protections of the New Deal in terms of social security and Medicare and things of that nature. And that was a compromise that was made with the South will have a New Deal, but will exclude farm workers and domestics. And those just happened to be the jobs that most African-Americans were working in those days. But even with the New Deal in terms of the soldiers coming back from World War II, the VA benefits, the VA benefits were doled out to the state. And so each soldier had to deal with their county administration in order to get their educational benefits and things of that nature approved and passed. And there were many, many obstacles in doing that in the South. Thank you, thank you for that. Well, Reggie, I'm gonna come to you. Why should I pay for reparations? People are saying my family didn't own any slaves. What does this have to do with me? Well, it has everything to do with each individual would be crazy enough to make such a statement because there's still beneficiaries of the acts that happened to 300 years ago. They're direct descendants of those who wholeheartedly benefited for the forced slavery and the forced labor upon people who look like us. And there's no such thing as reparations without restoration. So the whole premise for reparations is the fact that you restore people to at least a reasonable portion of where they were or should have or could have been. But even as my dear brother Andre has just said, even with all of the bills that have been passed, we still, it's like the Native Americans said, we still have been sold a bill of goods and they spoke with a forked tongue because even with everything that happened, there still was redlining. And I was just so happy. I don't know if you all read the story that I saw it originally on CNN then New York Post had it of a family in New York that had actually lost all of their land, their shorefront property. And this family just got $75 million to judgment just came down for them to be able to restore their property that these people have built all these big resorts and everything on. But all of their property has been restored to them worth $75 million. So it has everything to do with the fact that you can't negate the fact that that leg up from two, 300 years ago is still even more substantial amount because when it was worth maybe just the equivalent of like $5,000 way back then, maybe 200 years ago, you put it in today's inflation rate, those, the whole premise is now worth $5 trillion. So that's the whole purpose of not being able to ever say, I didn't have anything to do with it, I could just still benefit from it. Absolutely, that's correct. The American economy was built on the backs of enslaved people. Yes, we built this. We built this country. I'm gonna switch to Sequoia and just switch gears a little bit Sequoia regarding fear control-based correlations between span your ground, voter suppression and violation of our first 14th and 15th amendments. Please elaborate. Yeah, kind of even ties in with the reparations in terms of how we're all connected, all these things are connected. There's a legacy of systemic racism and violence against black bodies. And it's all based in fear and control surveillance. What are we up to? What are we doing? Why aren't you here? Why aren't you there? You know, when we were once property, right? Because it's all about property and property rights and protecting property. And that's what the policing is all about, right? They used to police our bodies on slave patrolling, right? And then it went to, they had from like going into protecting unions, right? And then it's all still about property. So we have reconstruction and we're free, right? You had the 13th to 15th amendment. We're free, you have the right to vote, right? We're supposed to have these citizens and protection under the law and all these things, but there's resentment, right? So all of these black codes started to be initiated. To continue to surveil, to control, resentment, fear that we're going to mess up their property because we're no longer property, but they want to still keep us enslaved in a way. So then you have ways of like vagrancy laws and things that, oh, okay, now you're going back to jail. Now you're a felon who can just franchise you. So it goes on and on and on. And you leave to today, you have a similar concept with these stops and frisk, no warrant breaking into people's homes and killing them and such. So there's this legacy of wanting to surveil and control our bodies based out of fear. These are people who have these hateful notions do not want us to progress. It's white rage. And it's always when we're progressing and trying to move forward. And it ties into the voting, the voting suppression. If we are made a felon, Dursing's amendment has that little, little clause in it, right? You're free unless you commit a crime. So if you commit a crime, then you can go back into being enslaved in some kind of form or another. And like today they have like these for-profit prisons. So there's just a way, it's perpetual way of continuing on to keep us under their boots and under their knees, so to speak. So the legacy is that we have to be on our voters' rights. We have to know what's going on, know the laws, know what's going on in terms of surveilling and policing our bodies and making sure we know our rights from our First Amendment right to protest, to our right to vote, our equal protection under the law on the 14th. And yeah, that's that connection. Thank you. Andres, where does Hawaii fall on these points that Sequoia is talking about our First, 14th and 15th Amendment? Boy, Hawaii is an interesting place. Well, stuff certainly does happen because of the numbers of African-Americans. There aren't as many incidents of violence and things of that nature. It used to be that the police were a lot more prone to beat people up than shoot them. Although I had a case in which a Filipino young man was asphyxiated by three cops sitting on him, that was the Aaron Torres case. So basically I would say that, you know, the United States is part of indigenous Hawaii. Hawaii has the history of being an independent brown nation and a lot of African-American sailors who were indeed slaves before the Civil War jumped, shipped and stayed in Hawaii. So Hawaii was a place where slaves were free, like when slaves escaped to Canada and things of that nature. However, in the 1890s when Hawaii was overthrown by racist planters who basically took over, well, they created the newspapers and you read some of those stories that were written in the cartoons about Hawaiian royalty because they were brown, they were denigrated as incapable of governing themselves and they had to be controlled by the white folk. So Hawaii has a long history of a plantation mentality and in that plantation mentality, there is a color bar kind of a range that is expected in terms of who's to be on top and who's to be management and who is to be taking orders. And we're still fighting a lot of that. The fact though that Hawaiians are brown in and of itself has been somewhat of a bar against a real color cast system but there is a plantation mentality in Hawaii that manifests itself through most of the systems. I mean, certainly if you look at the banking systems, there aren't too many black folks involved in banking in Hawaii. There's certainly a lot of real estate folks involved in real estate and some even doing well like Artie Wilson and a few others. I think Hawaii best for African-Americans who kind of have their own business and a certain amount of independence but at the same time, I think that people come to Hawaii or the kind of people who like to travel and check out the world and don't necessarily take somebody else's word for it. They want to check out the facts for themselves but there is a civil rights battle going on in Hawaii. One of the things that disturbed me recently was listening to the 911 tape on the Lindani Miani emergency call. And at the beginning of the tape, the lady who made the call was relatively calm and she said his name and said that he was from South Africa. So I mean, there are two things there. I mean, he identified himself with his name that he was from South Africa and she wasn't that alarmed. As the call went on, I heard the dispatchers say, is he white? Is he white? Is he black? Is he Asian? And she repeated that many times whereas the lady had already given the man's name and said he was from South Africa. Now, most intelligent people realize that most South Africans are indeed people of color, various colors, but most of them are Africans. Yeah, thank you, Andrea, on that. I wanted to get to Sequoia, not just Sequoia, I wanted to ask you, Reggie, silence is violent. And Nelson Mandela said fools multiply when wise men are silent. Yes, yes. If you had to give one bit of advice to up and coming young people, what would that be? Raise hell and take no prisoners. And I say that emphatically because of the fact that you just hit the nail on the head. Remaining silent has cost us already over 400 years. And knowing that our prisoners will never be our savers, we have to like never before lift our voices and become outraged, not enraged, but outraged and just say, no, we just not going to take it anymore because being silent is the same thing that caused all the problems even over in Hawaii. I mean, it just amazes me that everywhere, the Caucasian race has gone, it was that sense of superiority and entitlement. And so for the young people now, I'm saying, you know what, I salute you, trying to be peaceful all the time, trying to just get along, going along to get along, that never works. And like Malcolm says, by any means necessary, like never before because of the fact that the Caucasian races are becoming a minority in a few years from now, not too distant future, it's just more outlandish now than it ever has been before, in the history of years gone by. So I would just tell them, fight like hell and take no prisoners. I like that, fight like hell and take no prisoners. That's it. Legacy of past is evident in today's stand your ground and voter suppression field, advancing through mostly Republican controlled state legislation, your thoughts. Yeah, that's, you know, that's tied in with the new, you can run over protesters with your car in the exempt from murder. So what is that? That's fear of us speaking our truth to power. They're very draconian, it's all overreaching. I find that, you know, you can just run someone over just based on like stand your ground, right? Zimmerman got away with killing Trayvon based on feeling like his life was threatened, right? So if someone feels that their life is threatened and they're in a car, they can just go up and kill you and you can walk away, you know? So it's, and then the person that you kill or injure would be the one that goes to jail is fined at least $3,000 or make it in a felony, you can get six years. So then going back to the voter suppression, then if you're a felon, you're in jail, you're enslaved, you are disenfranchised, you cannot vote, hence white supremacy again as another, you know, leg up. So it's just crazy that all those people of color who have used stand your ground in the past, wasn't Marissa Alexander, was an example, right? It was a domestic violence issue and she had to go to jail. I mean, it was overturned eventually, but basically every case, maybe Andre can speak to this more when if there's a person of color who uses stand your ground, they go to jail. Yeah, you know, and then, you know, Andre, you can elaborate on that and then we'll come back, Sequoia, talk about, you know, we'll discuss the five Ds of by standing. But I wanted to ask Andre about going back to reparations. What are we talking about this now? We're talking about it now because we've been talking about it forever because, you know, black folks have never stopped talking about reparation, you know, it kind of rises and falls with the tide in terms of what's politically possible and expedient. But, you know, after the Civil War, people were promised 40 acres in a mule. 40 acres in a mule. Got the 40 acres in a mule and then Johnston, who was president after Lincoln was assassinated, reversed the order and then a lot of people's property got taken. But some people did manage to acquire some property, even though it was never given and allocated and things of that nature. My people were enslaved in Texas, at least my father's people, and were churned out with absolutely nothing. That's why we didn't take the name Rogers of the jerk who enslaved us and took the name Wooten, somebody who did us a service. But by 1900, my great grandparents had acquired 500 acres of Texas. So the four boys got 125 acres each. And we've been passing that down, you know, for the last 100 years or so. I have 125 acres in Texas that my grandpa left me of my father's. And so I know the impact that the land brings. That's what sends us to college, basically. Property is power. We still have the land. My grandpa left that farm free and clear. And I'll dig into the details, but if you have land, people will ask you to rent it. If you're not using it, I mean the land should be producing something and it does. And that's why reparations gets into the issue of interest. Like if you have $1,000 in the bank, it used to be that you could get some interest. If you have a court case and you have a judgment, the state of Hawaii demands 10% annually interest. So interest compounds. I mean, if you're studying any banking, you know, with the compounding interest is liable to double that sum every seven years, depending upon what that is. And so that's the wealth that slavery created. The excess wealth that slavery created funded Harvard and Yale. Yes, yes. Brown University, they were slavers. That's where the excess money comes. Couple of years ago, a brother got fired from breaking a stained glass window at Yale University because the window showed black people picking cotton in slavery. So basically, when you look at these ivory power schools, they're slavery money there. And when you look at the techniques, the business techniques that they teach in these business schools, that's where they commodified human being. And that's where they bought and sell people certainly before the Civil War. And a lot of them still do it after the Civil War where the human cost matters not to them as long as they're making money. If other people are bleeding, that's not really their problem. A lot of this goes back to the poverty of Europe really, because think about it, where's the great gold mine in Europe? Where is it? Think about it. But you can think of great gold mines in Africa. You can think of great gold mines in the United States. They're great gold mines in Russia. But the Europeans became pirates and thieves because they did not have the resources and that white supremacy is about claiming the property that the natural resources that the other people of the world controlled because they live there and those things are in those lands. And so people all around the world are rising up now and demanding their rightful share of their property. But the other thing I do wanna say is the techniques that won the civil rights movement are ineffective in this economic battle. We need smart people to organize and try to take advantage of the levers of economic power that there are. Like even in Honolulu, I mean the city's talking about building some affordable housing along the rail line. I would like to see a group of African-Americans get together and try to create some housing. You create some jobs and attack this homeless problem here. Yeah, thank you on that, Andre. And we're gonna have to do a part two, three and four on the reparations. But very quickly, I'm gonna want Sequoia and then Reggie to close. We were gonna talk about the five Ds or Bystand Direct Distract, Delegate, Delay and Document. But Sequoia, is there anything we're leaving out here that needs to be addressed? And one minute with you, Sequoia, and then Reggie, you can close us out. Well, just overall, just to bring it all together is that all of these indignities that we've been suffering for over 400 years is from breaking down our family structure, right? We must strengthen ourselves. We must release that mentality of having to put the onus on us to fight, fight, fight all the time. When this is a white supremacy problem, it's not our problem. Self-care is important. Now, when you witness things as a bystander, you wanna be direct, check out the situation. Is it going to be harmful to yourself or others? Once you get that, assess that, start distracting. Jedi Mind Trick, bringing others around to engage the victim, ignore the perpetrator, don't engage them, right? Other things to delegate. Get third parties, the people witnesses around you to help to keep it engaged, ignore the perpetrator. And then those are some, those who might be afraid, you wanna maybe delay. You can't be in the moment, but maybe you go back and you check in on the victim after the fact. Walk with that person to take them to their destination. And then have, and they'll always be out there documenting and make sure in the safe place to document. Go to SPLcenter.org, they have a whole listing of what you can do as a bystander. Thank you. Thank you, Sir Reggie. In two minutes to left, give us the words of wisdom. My words today are just based on everything. Okay, Sikora, you're a right spot on with everything you said in those four D's. But we have reached the point in time that we have to just understand that the reality of this whole situation regarding slavery all the way up to today, white entitlement, my grandmother and grandfather, just like I'm Andre was saying, they acquired a lot of land in the Carolinas and my family has so much land. And we were always taught land is powered because they can't grow no more land. And unfortunately through generations being passed down to some of these grand children who had no better sense, they got rid of all this land. I'd never understand how you're gonna get rid of your land and then have to live in an apartment that cost you more than what the home that you already owned on the land, that was your family land. So my words of empowerment today are just, unity is not only the key, but I keep saying to all of the younger men, constantly every day, trying to reach out to young brothers and sisters and letting them know we're gonna need each other. So we have to first start cleaning our own house within. Now I'm not one of those who will let people tell me all lives matter when we talk about black lives matter. And I don't let people come up and counter that by saying, well, we have to stop killing each other first. Yes, all of that is a byproduct of slavery. Keep in mind, we were the ones who, when the father was in the house, just to get welfare benefits, the father had to be put out of the house. We were the ones who were told that, like I said, a man, you know, we were just three fifths. So when all of that comes to grip, like Malcolm said 50 years ago now, we just have to be at a point now that all hands on deck and it's time for us to stand without any fear, trepidation or hesitation and never retreat and take no damn prisoners. All right. By black and boycott, everybody. That's right. All right, everyone, but thank you for your wisdom, Sequoia. Thank you, Andre. Thank you, Reggie. I'm Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, Aloha. Aloha, everyone.