 How y'all doing? What's up, Highline? All right, so I got the pleasure to introduce three of my closest friends. Actually, they like probably more brothers to me. I just read a little bit of their bios. So they are smart and got extensive bios. So I'm just gonna get a little bit. So Dr. Jared Ball is a father and a husband. After that, he is a professor of communication studies in the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. And his career rate of the multimedia website, I mixed what I like, and I'm sure he's gonna talk a little bit about that. Dr. Mark Bolden is an African sovereignty psychologist. He holds a doctorate in counseling psychology with a concentration in Afrocentric psychology. And Dr. Burrows, last but not least, is an independent researcher and writer based in Newark, New Jersey. He has taught at Howard University and Morgan State University. And he's also an outstanding journalist and author. And he'll talk about some of his works. So please give a warm Highline welcome to Drs. Ball, Bolden, and Burrows. You can hear me better this way? All right, good morning. What we're gonna do today is kind of a mishmash of comic book geekiness, non-Western thought, and film criticism. Now, before we start, how many people are excited about Black Panther and his amazing friends on Friday? I wore this shirt just for you. This is only the third time I've worn this shirt. I bought this shirt back when nobody knew about the Black Panther outside of comic book geeks, right? People go to comic book stores and buy comic books. That's when I bought this shirt. And I knew one day I was gonna wear this shirt and it was gonna matter, and today is that day. Now, I've been invited here because I wrote this book, Marvel's Black Panther, a comic book biography from Stan Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates. See, I'm hardcore. I couldn't even watch AMC's comic book men for years because they were cutting way too close, but I started watching it and now I'm like, I'm like the missing Black cast member of that reality show. My book is about the history of the character in the comics. And we thought that we would combine the comic book discussion with the film discussion. And I mean, this presentation, as you would probably know, is evolving because I mean, after Friday, we'll have to revise what we're gonna do today. So this is just a beginning discussion about that. So my book talks about the history of the character in the comics. He was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the co-creators along with Steve Dicto of basically the entire Marvel Universe, but I don't have to tell you that. And I talk about how the character comes out at an interesting period. Fantastic 452, yes, I know it by heart, comes out in between the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and the emergence of the Black Panther Party. The emergence of the Black Panther Party surprised Marvel because all of a sudden they had this character called the Black Panther that you can tell they based the idea off of what was going on in the news with the African liberation movement and people like Patrice Namumba and Kwame Nakruna. So you can tell they developed that idea, but now they were dealing with the Black Panther Party, which had a whole different agenda than maybe the Cold War liberals of Stan and Jack. So I document how the character goes back and forth depending on who's writing the character and the white writers and the black writers I compare. And it turns out that what people didn't know which is why I wrote the book was that frankly the movie character you've now seen or about to have seen in three movies in three as many years really is the creation of the black writers of Christopher Priest, who's run, this shirt represents, and Reginald Hudwin. And I talk about how it was the black writers who took the character and made him in terms of the tradition of African sovereignty and African defense and made him basically a cool character. A character that Marvel was subconsciously or not looking for a way to rival DC Comics' Batman. Because with Black Panther you have Batman, but as a king, as a leader of a country. So I go back and forth through the various writers and I talk about how the character gets powered and depowered. Now, the important thing about my book in terms of these films is the fact that it was the black writers who when finally given a chance to write Black Panther was able to make him a non-western, mysterious, powerful character. And the emphasis is on power because many of the white writers depower T'Challa while many of the black writers empower T'Challa. And so the important thing about these movies is the fact that it was Marvel being very intelligent looking at what their black writers had done with the character said, this is the character we need for Captain America's Civil War. And as a result of that being a success, Marvel was not dumb. They figured out that if it works here, they can work into no movie. And thanks to Sony and Marvel making the deal to bring Spider-Man into the film universe, they moved Black Panther coincidentally to February. Coincidentally. It's not like Corporate America doesn't study people. It's not like there were people who are experts on black people and know how black people and brown people will respond to stimuli. Had nothing to do with that. It was completely accidental. So we have a situation where a character that my own family, I wrote the book and I was trying to spend my own family in Christmas, what was going on? You know, and they were like, what are you talking about? A king? What are you talking about? And the commercial comes on. Now this is back in December. Now we're in this situation where all of a sudden everybody's now a comic book geek and not only are they a comic book geek but now they're Wakandan. This has been a very strange time for me. I'm walking around and everybody's looking like a geek. Everybody walks around with a t-shirt, okay? And I think that's cute that you wanna be a geek. It's cute. Us hardcore geeks have been with this character for a long time. Now, Dr. Bolden's and Ball, they think they're geeks and I humor them and you know. But they have an analysis about the character in the movies that I want you to pay attention to and then we're gonna combine all of this together because what we are clear about is that fantasy can be a form of social protest but fantasy can also be a form for mental conquest. And we need to have a critical analysis of this character who was not created by black people and by the way, not created by Africans either, check that. All right? We've gotta have a critical analysis of how American popular culture works and how Disney works because as we know, and some of you might remember this, Disney has a whole channel devoted to female empowerment called Disney Channel. That's what that channel's about. And some of you might know, although you might be too old to watch the Disney Channel, that the Disney Channel's top rated show, they just canceled but it dealt with a black family who were part of the CIA. Show's called Casey Undercover. So you have a channel devoted to innocuous content for young girls but the black show has to be about the CIA and protecting American interests. This is the Disney Channel. This is the Disney philosophy. So even though I know where the white character in the Black Panther movie comes from and I know the purpose the black writer created him for and this purpose he's used to legitimize the CIA's involvement in the third world. And from that point, I wanna move on to Drs. Barlin-Bowlin because they have a presentation for you where we're gonna discuss a lot of this. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. First, I wanna thank Dr. Bryce and the good folks here at Highline for having us back. Or for me and Dr. Bowlin, it's our return trip and we finally did, as was mentioned, get our third colleague back and have what we've affectionately called the Killer Bee's Squad. Bald, Bowlin boroughs. Okay, all right. So again, I'm Jared Ball and from my contribution to this collective, a lot of the focus of my own work is brought to this and which is sort of a combination of my academic training in Africana and then media studies with the sort of unofficial training from political education and what is loosely referred to as the black radical tradition. And before I get even more started here, I do wanna first invite everybody to, how does this advance? Uh-huh, ding. I do wanna invite everybody to, we're gonna come back to some of this here. I'm gonna just wanna start at the end, I guess. Sorry about this. There we go. Did I just kill the thing? Oh, yeah, but I gotta get it to show again, right? From current slide. Anyway, I wanted to start with a quick shout out to our collective website known as imixwhatilike.org and invite you all to not only check out all of the content, but in particular, the first episode we did, and I don't wanna go too far again, but the first episode we did of academics and cars. So if some of you are familiar with, like the Jerry Seinfeld comedians and cars having coffee and stuff like that and people doing freestyle rhymes and cars, what we've just done in academics and cars version. And the first episode starts with us literally leaving the theater after first seeing this film and having our first conversation about it. So I wanna invite you all to check it out and much more of the work that we all do in our extended networks do, which I think you'll enjoy. So that said, I just wanna, I'm gonna put a quick timer on here because I'm not gonna take more than 10 minutes here to lay out my initial thoughts and then we're gonna come back, as was said, for a more collective presentation and conversation. But I think it's always important to always start with the fact that media are best understood as ideological weaponry in service of a particular political function. And if you ever take your time, if you haven't already, to endeavor a study into the origins of this country's academic approach to the study of communication, it's all very clear in the documentation what was the purpose. The purpose was initially create new citizens out of European immigrants and train existing non-white people to be non-white and to always know their place as non-white and subservient and to teach wasps basically that they are superior. And that general function has pretty much preceded unended up until today. And in terms of, particularly as we talked about the internet and digital technology, much like all media technology, we should always remember, particularly in the context of this country, their military origins. So whether it's radio, certainly the internet and even television had a very military component to it in terms of its delivery of messages, its purpose as a commercial product and deploying the very techniques developed to propagandize people in other countries to do the same work here for those internally held, some of us describe it as colonies or subjects as opposed to citizens in a democracy. And that there has always been a parallel even in terms of definition and function between propaganda, public relations and psychological warfare. So there should be an evolving recognition, particularly as we move into 21st century, further into 21st century, of the military function of everything in our media environment from trying to convince us to buy a certain shoe or car, to go to a certain film or to have a certain political worldview. There has been a particular understanding for those interested in the study of propaganda. And if you really just think about it, Demos is the organization I think and Oxfam reported recently that 1% of the world's population is worth more than the rest of the world combined. I just start with that broad description because if you want to maintain that level of inequality, particularly if you are in the 1% or the 1 1⁄ of 1% that really own everything. The number one mechanism or method for maintaining that inequality is to convince people that it's either natural, normal of their own fault or that those who are in that 1% are there because they've worked hard and deserve it. So there has been an immeasurable effort deployed historically to manage people's perception of the world using propaganda, using popular culture in particular as a mechanism to manage the social inequalities that continue to worsen. So when historically, when black people rebel, there are more black people put on TV and in film. And if you look now, and I haven't done this, anybody maybe can, I'm happy to discuss this with anybody, I have an unfinished project where I've just been starting to look at the change in the token Negro over the last 30 to 40 years. And the token Negro is becoming more of a token Asian or a token Indian or token LGBTQ. And the purpose is the same. Any group that might potentially be threatening must be brought in through tokenism. And so now that black people have theoretically had their problem solved after Obama in particular, right, everything's good, right? More or less, right? There needs to be a new tokenism encouraged so that other aggrieved communities feel less threatened and less distanced by this. But it is something that we always have to be careful of that is, as Harold Cruz once asked, what happens when an oppressed community is brought into the cultural store of their oppressor? There is similarly, I wanna make a couple, I'll just put out a point here about, there's a similar confusion around the concept of entertainment. More so in this country, I think, than anywhere else in the world, and which is logical because nowhere else in the world have we seen the sophisticated development of a propaganda system like we have in this country. We are the most highly propagandized population in the world. You have at no point in human history if you had a greater concentration of control over popular culture in the hands of a few than we do today. And people have been talking for decades about how what will allow the United States to exist as an empire longer than previous empires of the past is because this country's control over popular culture and digital technologies in this country and around the world. Convincing people that things are better than they actually are, despite people's lived experience. If you can actually go outside and be beaten and shot and live in poverty, but then somehow be convinced after two hours in a film that there's a greater horizon, things are all good. So when I look at how many black people in particular are excited to come out of a black panther film, I feel like doing the Malcolm X routine when he was catching people coming out of church. All day in the preacher's seat and you still come out here. This is what's still going on. Don't get too excited about what you saw on screen or heard in the pulpit because then you still gotta come out here. Anyway, as to the film itself, I think it's always important, not only in particular to look at the relationship of film to propaganda. And it has long been understood that film in particular is dangerous because starting with the captive audience and for those of us who are over probably, I guess the age of 40 at this point, we have seen the shift and those older than that have even seen the shifts beyond that where you could have at one point gone to a movie theater and for 10 cents seen newsreels and movies all day and all afternoon then it gets more expensive. When my generation came in, at least when you went to the theater, you had a chance to talk to someone you were with before the films and the preview started but now that's even gone and your generation has propagandized from the moment you walk into the building. Captive audience, sit down. Now they have commercials and not just previews for films but commercials and games to play. You can't even sit and talk to anybody anymore while you're waiting for the film. You've been, the captive audience experience is meant to begin from the moment you walk into the time you leave then it gets darker, the huge screen, the dolby surround sound and you are completely locked in a sensory environment and bombarded with images that are then dismissed or weakened by this concept that is propagated that it's just entertainment. And we're told the first criticism I get when I offer my thoughts the first thing people say to me is man it's just a movie, it's just a song, it's just a book, it's just entertainment and we don't recognize intentionally by design that there has been a lot of effort put into denying the role of entertainment in constructing a consciousness for us. So as I often say to my students borrowing from a professor I once had that I disagreed with all the way through except for this, remember Professor Richardson at Frostboro, we disagreed about everything but he said one thing that I always appreciated he said you have to interrogate your preferences. I soften that to mean you have to ask yourself why do I like what I like and how do I know what I know and you have to be more critical of it when you like it. So if you liked Black Panther given the context of what this country is doing given the context of political and social and material inequality given the context of white supremacist images and anti-blackness in this country you have to ask yourself if I am delivered something from the mainstream institutions that I like I should be suspicious. What is it doing that I like? What did I like in that film? Because those who create the media that targets us they have conducted those studies. As Dr. Burrow said what will people like? Well black people, brown people want some more images black women want some more black women let's throw some black women in there let's let them even take a wig off and make it seem like it's some advance in terms of African beauty. Let's throw some things at them and this has historically been written about this isn't just Dr. Ball coming up with this if you go back and look at the history of the Kerner Commission we just had the 50th anniversary of. It said basically you wanna help make black people feel less likely to rebel put them more on TV hire a few more black journalists so my generation grew up with some more black journalists and we had what's happening in Sanford and Sun and good times, right? Follow the trend written, directed, produced by whites mostly men with money for a black audience to be less likely to see the contradictions and to rebel and then here we are in 2018 with a film produced largely written by or initially developed by certainly distributed by and benefited mostly in terms of the money generated white male dominated companies with conglomerate connections to international business and relationships all around the world that have none of our interests at heart. Please. No! It's like. Sidious this can be, right? When the black man of the movie came out when the first things I heard was okay Disney's making all of this money should we demand that Disney give us some of this money? Right, black people and black people were asking this. Disney understanding human psychology the way they do two weeks later that they were gonna open STEM centers and major American cities. Now they're opening STEM centers because they're talking about the Afrofuturist vision of the movie and they found with their very quick analytics that Shuri was one of the most popular characters that people were talking about coming out of the movie. So they said, okay, let's set up something where we can claim that we are training the next generation of black and brown children to be like Shuri. Now, the fact that they did this only two weeks after the movie came out means that they understood our mentality and understood what we would ask for and what would put Pavlov to shame they gave us something before we barely asked for it. This is the power of the Disney Corporation and this is how oppressed people are studied to the point where one of our problems politically in 2018 is that there are no more new situations for them to study in terms of how we respond to something. They know every single response we're gonna make to every single action. So we can't produce something new that frightens them so we can get concessions or revolution because there is now nothing new to produce because they have figured out every single response we're ever going to make. Okay, thank you. So just a few more points from me, at least at this initial point that I just wanted to make very quickly. So just again, we'll come back to this but try to be careful with this concept of entertainment. It has been developed over a long time to confuse people into thinking to lull us into his false sense of security. And then as I wanted to also quickly point out here there's a great deal of under discussed literature on the relationship between intelligence agencies like the CIA and managing our public sphere. So this isn't again about being a conspiratorial test. Yep. Okay. Or like Ishmael Reed said about conspiracies. If you wanna call me a conspiracy theorist you just have to acknowledge yourself as a cointment. Thank you. So in a great book that I like to quote from all the time by Frances Stoner Saunders, she talks about what, not just the intelligence agencies of this country but working with their colleagues in England and the West did over the last 50, 60 years which was to create, well this was actually longer than, well over a 50, 60 year period starting in the early 21st century to fight against the growing tendency particularly among oppressed people towards communism to use public sphere and entertainment to convince people that communism and socialism were bad and that capitalism was good and American democracy could only function under a capitalist economy. So what they said was, and I'll paraphrase this quote that she said, she said we didn't, she spoke to one of the, Jay Epstein was his name, and a guy who was actually considered to be part of the liberal left and a publisher of so-called progressives. But as he said himself, he was part of the left wing of the anti-communist block and he was one of the people positioned at high levels of publication not to tell people you must write what I tell you to write to be published but simply to set up, as they said, a facetious set of criteria that would, by definition, determine the kinds of people that would apply or be accepted or fit within the mission that they wanted. So when you look at popular culture today and when you look at popular punditry in academia or anything today, especially when you like it, start to ask yourself, again, why do I like what I'm hearing or reading or seeing but also how is it that these are the people that got placed there and not someone else? And this isn't just a question of talent because obviously there are plenty of talented people that we all know in various fields that are not super famous. This is a question of who fits the criteria that has been established by those in power who want certain forms of discussion more popular than others? And in my last piece that Dr. Burrow sort of touched on here, first of all, you should all get this book. Just, I wouldn't have time to really get into it but it's a fascinating critique of how Disney comic books teach people from a very young age, things like imperialism is good, white people are better than black people, women are bad, or at least inferior, or at least only useful when connected to a male, that kind of thing, and so on and so forth. And that there's a lot more going on in comics and in particular because comics have a way of reaching young minds, particularly when depicted as animals and not human beings, messages are much more easily distilled, but the real point about the film that I wanted to make, I thought we had it right there, the point that Dr. Burrow's pointed out about the STEM programs and nonprofit solutions to intentional economic and social problems. If you, Dr. Burrow's mentioned that there was some attempt at the early development of the character, the Black Panther character in the Marvel comic, to have him be a non-radical, non-black liberation figure. Patrice Lumumba on the left here, the only democratically elected leader of the Congo, who was that spoken of figure that T'Challa was initially meant to represent the opposite of. The reason that we put this in here is because in 1960, Lumumba goes with the same kind of sash that you see T'Challa wear in the film to the UN to give a speech about what his newly free and independent country, the Congo, was going to do. And in that speech, he tells the West, your days of imperial power are over, colonialism is over, our resources are gonna be used for us and for other Africans oppressed and you all are gonna have to go. Immediately from, literally before his speech was over, Western powers were conspiring to assassinate him I think within 365 days of that address, he was assassinated and replaced by a CIA preferred leader in the Congo. Here, we have T'Challa at the end of Black Panther come and give a very similar speech, wearing again I think not coincidentally a similar style sash, he comes to the UN to tell the new world that he is entering at least, that they are there, that they have the technology and that they're going to give it over to everybody. And then he gives that knowing and smiling nod to the white CIA agent in the back of the room. That to me was the sort of the final straw, the most obvious point that the film was making politically to I think propagandize us with what this film is intending to do, that is to create a new pan-Africanism that isn't really pan-African, to create a radical or to create a pan-Africanism that isn't really radical, that isn't the form that existed in real life, to take us away from not only that politics that informed LaMumba, but informed the Black Panther Party which has most popularly delivered upon us the symbol that this film is looking to reclaim, and leaves us with the idea as the film says at the very end that a spaceship will come down into the hood and deliver you a non-profit art center, and that will be the end of your oppression. The very last thing I'll say about that is we do have to understand that this was the very Nixonian plan in the 1970s to replace Black liberation with non-profits. I mean, this was exactly what was done on purpose which is why so much of our so-called activist world is a non-profit society, and why coincidentally, I would argue, so little has changed materially. All right, I will stop there. Dr. Bolden will take it from over. Oh, look to align yourselves with those in power who are creating this problem, and then look for solutions to your problems that those in power want you to find. So if I could just interrupt again. Because, again, I love everything about the movie but the politics. The problem is the movie's about the politics. You have a movie about an African country in which no black person says the word Africa with the exception of the narrator in the very beginning, the guy who gets killed. He's the only black person who says the word Africa in the movie. Africa is mentioned by the white characters. We have a film in which Wakanda's only talk about Wakanda and the world. They never talk about Africa. And that's purposely done because if they talked about Africa, then they would have come and ground with Killmonger, and then they would have worked out something. Like if T'Challa had made that speech to the African Union, that would have been a completely different movie. Had T'Challa and Killmonger said, oh look, what if I give you control over Africa and you can build up Africa and you can have a real African Union, there'd have been no battle. And Killmonger would not have been the quote unquote bad guy he is in the movie. But there had to be a battle because there had to be a victory because there had to be an accommodation to the world. And now on Friday, we're gonna see where all the white characters, two-third of the movie goes, but we don't know what to do. And so they're gonna go to Africa. The whole last third of this movie's in Wakanda. You're gonna see all the Black Panther characters again on Friday. It's the last third of the movie, and you're gonna see them because the white characters need help. The help, great. Go ahead. Briefly they need the help. Right? Okay. All right, thank you very much, Dr. Ball. Okay, so how much time we got left before we get into full-blown Q and A? Okay, perfect. Okay, so let's just make sense of how Disney is the center of propaganda. 1950s, they used to have a show that came on weekly on regular TV. Regular TV is like non-cable based or non-boot leg. So on regular TV, Disney introduced uranium to the American public and said this is going to be a new source of energy. Now most folks recognize uranium sits in this place now as one of the main metals used in nuclear warfare, right? So why would Disney be promoting a metal that would be associated with the end of the world? Their job was to make it kind and gentle, real palatable, right? Now we also know Disney for another thing, I think Dr. Burroughs echoes this point wonderfully, Disney is here to steal all the stories in the world. And so Africa having one of the longest histories in the world, they got a lot of stories. So if Disney can break into Africa and get those stories, then you will have some of the oldest stories out, right? But they already did this in Asia, stealing the white lion straight out of Kimber. I'm sorry, Kimber the white lion. Predates Disney's Lion King, right? So Disney stole this just flat out. And then of course the song, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, straight out of South African vocalist group. So let me try to summarize some of this stuff quickly, okay? T'Challa is a sovereign king. His responsibilities are to maintain the power of the state and then maintain the power in royal blood, right? But T'Challa's problems is he's gonna get introduced to somebody who's also of royal blood who wants to change the nature of that state. So his challenge then becomes what is the successful transition of power? And if you think about the US and the own inaugurations in the US, one thing you'll hear every president say is that we have a successive transition of power that is uninterrupted. So now the CIA's assassination of Lumumba was effectively disrupting the state power and then putting in their own preferred person becomes the CIA disruption of the transition of power. And then I'll talk a little bit about the burial rights and the work that I actually do with my clients. So let's keep rolling here, we got that. Now Killmonger is like every young person that I work with as a clinician, Killmonger's the favorite character. And it's real curious because he represents the quintessential Pan-African activist rage from the US going into his own bloodlines in Wakanda, right? So Killmonger represents reparations and repatriation. Reparations in the sense where he's looking at the objects that have been stolen by the British and plunder of the US, plunder of the African continental artifacts. He's looking at really like Benin. Let me just show you a picture of these artifacts he's looking at real quickly. And as he's looking at this, he's saying to the woman that is curating the museum, I'm just here to take my stuff back because this is all stolen wealth. Now, when folks are watching this movie in Benin and this scene comes up, folks are like, oh yeah, that's a problem. They immediately start thinking about Killmonger as the one who's going to repatriate and return all of the museum's stolen artifacts back into the continent, right? So you can catch that pretty quickly as he says that. Next thing we got Killmonger doing is this classic reversal of the scene from the original roots, right? The original roots, Toby is getting, or Kuntukinte is getting whipped on a post and being told to say his name Toby and he refuses, gets whipped multiple times, finally says Toby. Killmonger reverses that trend, goes to the continent and makes the continental Africans and Wakanda say his African name. Now, as he does that, he's literally reclaiming African heritage. So now you have this issue of repatriation. And what is it like for African Americans that want to go home to African repatriate? Well, some of the black panthers have already done this. Daruba Ben-Wahad would say that the political prisoners who are still in prison today in the US confines should be released with dual citizenship to an African country. All countries reclaim their political prisoners. Africa as a continent should be reclaiming its own sons and daughters. And Killmonger represents that tradition. Now, these are just some of the folks obviously up left. We got Asada Shakur, who's in exile in Cuba now. In the middle, we got Daruba Ben-Wahad, who I just mentioned. Anyone know who's on the far right or have heard of him, Geronimo Pratt. Geronimo Pratt was one of these folks who, like a Killmonger, would have been trained by the US military and then brought his services back to work for black folks in multiple organizations. The difference with Geronimo is he came from black community organizations that sent him into the military to go get military skills and then bring them home. And was so bad that when they would have shootouts with the cops, let me not say it like that. The panthers wouldn't have shootouts. When the cops would shoot into the Panther headquarters, Geronimo had the officers' sandbags so that the cops couldn't actually penetrate the defenses of the Panthers' office front headquarters. And literally had to shoot to a standstill. No Panthers murdered in those raids. Now, there is a Garvey quote that kind of captures what Wakanda is. And Garvey isn't really thought of as a comic book geek, but he is this strong African sovereignty nationalist. Some would say he's not Pan-Africanist, but we won't go into those arguments. But his idea is that one day there will be an empire on which the sun shall shine ceaselessly as it shines on the empire of the North today. Do y'all remember in the movie when Kilmonger says literally the same thing? We're going to have the sun never set on the Wakandan empire, right? Y'all know where that comes from? One of the British administrators who was credited with naming Nigeria Lady Lugard said the same thing about the British empire. They have so many colonies in the North and South that they always have sunshine. So when it's winter in the North, South is producing crops. Winter in the South, North is producing crops. The sun never sets because the colonies are always working for the British empire. Kilmonger's job and goal is to reverse all of that. Garvey's presaging all of this, right? He asks, where was the Black man's government, his king and kingdom? Where was his president, country, men of big affairs? If I couldn't find them, then I would go there and make them. This is in 1910, Garvey's talking about this stuff, right? And then you even think about when Njaka says in the movie, right, towards the end, you want to die in Wakanda? And he's like, no, bury me with my ancestors at the bottom of the ocean. Choosing the path of African American liberation struggle, recognizing enslavement over the sovereignty of his blood country, it's a real strange turn. Now, give me 50 more minutes and minus five, and then we'll talk a little bit about the women warriors, right, because the real heroes of the film are the way that we see African women portrayed that we haven't seen in portrayed, or maybe we have, right? So, everybody recognizes Denai Gurida, brilliant role as a coyee in the film. There is an actual group that this military force of women would represent, and everybody was excited about seeing dark-skinned women with short hair on film for the first time in warrior traditions. And I was like, this isn't the first time we've seen it. Grace Jones, foremother of Afrofuturism, is playing these roles way before. Differences in Conan's version, she was formerly enslaved, and Conan frees her. Conan, the white destroyer, when he was next to Wilt Chamberlain, the black guy, who chose not to free her. Real interesting themes, right? And how the women warriors change over time. So, where have we seen them before? We've seen these women warriors in Nubia, where you have a trilogy of Kandakas in a dynastic line, Amani Shaquetteau, Amani Dhanas, Amani Tare, we're all there fighting Alexander, keeping him out of ancient Nubia. All women leaders who were first on the battlefield to fight. We've seen this before, right? And then if we talk about Afrofuturism, anybody familiar with the music of a man known as Sun Ra? Sun Ra would be one of these forebringers of Afrofuturism. Of course, we got Grace Jones there. We talked a little bit about Shuri. Now, in my own clinical work, and I'll try to start to wrap up on this, right? In my own clinical work, I work with the boy on the right, and we see what kind of effects that Wakanda may have on black children on the left, right? My boy on the right that I work with has an older brother who's six. He's four now. His father died before he was born. His older brother says, I wanna be an astronaut. The idea of being an astronaut is so he can fly into the sky. And talk to his father. So now I get to use Black Panther to actually recreate ancestral connections from fathers to sons. Because the issue of black boys losing their fathers through internist violence is well represented in the movie. The difference is the black boys I work with have no technology to go back and actually talk with deceased fathers. But this is all they want, right? So now you may hear six year olds thinking suicidal thoughts, not because they wanna die, but they wanna reconnect with their fathers. And the work that I get to do now uses Black Panther to say, well what if we could recreate a scene where you get to talk with your father? And the honored place to be as a therapist is having actually worked with his father before he was killed. So I get to sit in an office on a couch and say your father sat right in that very seat. So let's imagine his presence here, right? And so much of what you see in the Black Panther is about the preservation of traditions over modernity. And then what does the future look like over modernity? But the one technology that remains true in the Black Panther is how do you make ancestral connections inseparable, inseparable, unbroken? How do you fortify those connections? So we know in the continent, if folks are putting on masks, some of these masks would actually represent ancestral figures, right? So we actually have masks in the office and we will put these masks on the children and let them imagine themselves in these roles, right? So in this mask itself, you could probably see in the middle a little bit there is a leopard symbol. So they get to be the black leopard. We don't actually play Black Panther, but we get to play those things out pretty specifically, right? Okay. So let me move forward just a little bit and talk one more thing about women warriors and the city of Benin itself. Anybody heard of a country called Benin? You've heard of this, right? There's an ancient Dahomey that isn't really all that ancient. And there was a military force called the Ahosi where 30% of the military force for Dahomey was made of women warriors. Now, Benin should be like the prototype city for Wakanda because they had a wall that was like 9,000 miles long, longer than the Great Wall of China. They had all of the kinds of technology that we imagine a city like Wakanda to have and then they also had the Benin bronzes that you see in the middle, right? And there was a technology that existed there that Europeans when they found folks were like we never realized Africans had iron smelting in this kind of technology and art. So now the things that we wanna say about this 1800 civilization that was really given birth in like 800 AD and through its height in 1400, it starts to fade by the time we get to the 1800s, right? That's where the Brits come in and just see the rest of it and literally burn things to the ground. What we could say about this place is that it was more advanced than Europe during Europe's own Middle Kingdom period, right? So we've seen Wakanda's in history before but so burnt down you wouldn't recognize any of this stuff. Love to just talk briefly. I mentioned Sun Ra before. This is him on the left in the middle and to his left is a woman named Janu Emoja. Now you got a line of fashion that comes out of Wakanda that has probably kicked up African textiles like 10-fold. We can actually see that as one of the places where African textiles or African industry has grown since the movie. But you've had these amazing designers who've been doing this kind of stuff for a long time. The Mali African wears one, Janu Emoja's another. And then the last piece that I'll say is everybody saw the scene where Njaka comes in and burns down the heart flower. Y'all know why he did that? Let me just ask y'all a question real quick. Why would he burn down the flowers? He doesn't want them anymore for anybody else, right? He wants to be the last Black Panther and if the flowers are what give the power then he wants the power to remain with him. Now we've seen this before where folks will burn records so that there is no more memory being kept of a society. Where have we seen that? We've seen that Library of Alexandria. We've seen that where Hypatia might have been the last African librarian of the Library of Alexandria. We've seen that in Brazil where the majority of Africans who were enslaved were taken into out of Central African Congo. Portuguese burnt the records of enslavement so there'd be no one there to record it, right? But now the other thing that Killmonger does that's real specific to an African American tradition of using arson is he burns down the crops of Wakanda and in burning down the crops, it's almost like he's on a plantation destroying the ability of the plantocracy to continue their slavery over people. So he reverses it. I'm gonna burn down the heart-shaped flower and make sure that nobody else continues this legacy, right? Now, Dr. Burroughs kicked off where this film is going to go toward infinity. So what we have at the end of the Black Panther movie is a CIA operative destroying the one liberation theorist-minded person and his ability to spread his idea of retribution. We've already said reparations, we said repatriation, the third R would be retribution. What does Njaka wanna do? Take the Wakandan technology and go across the world and reestablish sovereignty for African people the two billion worldwide, right? But he can't because he's killed by who? Everett Ross, the CIA agent, right? So even in the movie you see the historic role played by the CIA playing itself out with destroying any African liberation attempts, okay? So I will stop here and then we can open up for Q&A. Thank you all very much. Okay, fam, we're gonna be starting the Q&A in about five minutes. We do ask that if you do have a question to please utilize the microphones, keeping in mind that we do have our accessibility live captioning that's happening so please use the microphones. There's one over here and then there's another one to my left. So we'll be starting in about five minutes. Thank you. Hey, welcome back, fam. We're gonna go ahead and remain, we're gonna continue on with our Q&A till 12.30 and so if y'all have any questions, walk on up or we'll take a mic for ya. I'm gonna start because I've had this question. So Infinity War, Avengers Infinity War is happening this Friday. It's coming out and one of the things that I have been worried about since I saw Black Panther is how are, how are they going to, this is going to affect Wakanda big time, right? And so how do you feel like this is really going to affect in terms of, now I'm talking like movies wise, but in terms of how it's really going to affect the storyline of the Black Panther, considering that there is so, now I feel like the white folks are coming into Wakanda, what does this mean for Africa? And are they, do you think that Africa's gonna play a bigger role in the storyline to come, not just Wakanda? Well, I mean, I'll give you the geek answer on this. Marvel has had a plan from day one from the success of Iron Man One where you see Nick Fury at the end of it talking about the Avengers. This has all been a big experiment for them. Now, they have a chart in which they've already plotted the next like seven or eight movies. So what I like to say, and I have no evidence about this is that I like to say that when you look at the Black Panther film and you look at how it ends, it's very clear why Ava DuVernay was not allowed to do this film. Ava DuVernay, who did A Wrinkle in Time, was in deep talks with Marvel about doing Black Panther but she wanted, as she said publicly, she wanted to do a film about Africa, having him be in an African environment. And Marvel was like, no, you don't understand, see, we have a plan, we have a map. And the map has to lead to Thanos coming. So she didn't get to do the film, Ryan Cooper got to do the film. And Ryan Cooper said, you know, the film is to him a combination of Godfather and James Bond, right? So that's the film that he wrote that we see. But it's very clear no matter what he got to do in the beginning of the film, in the middle of the film, the film ends with them opening up. Why? Because they open up in time for Thanos to come and the white heroes, which will include Thor, the Guardians of the Galaxy, will need the help of the Africans. So the last third of the film is in Wakanda because they need help. And what do they also need? They need an army. So when you look at the trailers, when you look at the pictures, you see most of the cast of the Avengers movies in front and the Black Panther. And who you see in the back? Thousands of Wakandans, they're fodder. They're currently fodder, that's gonna happen when this war happens. They're using Wakanda as their post to make their last stand. And so they're gonna sacrifice the lives of these Africans to maintain the entire country. So in other words, as I like to joke about it, but it's not really a joke, they've made the entire country of Wakanda into a magic negro. Magic Negro is a film term about the black character in a film that only exists to help the white characters and then they die or move away or whatever. That looks like for right now what Wakanda is going to be. This is the role that they set up for Wakanda with the connection with the CIA and opening up all the technology and everything to the West. They've set this up so that this collective adventure is going to happen, but it's going to happen with the Avengers in front and Wakandans in back, as you see in the trailer. It's right in the trailer. So that's what I see, without having seen the movie, that's what I see right now. Any other questions? I was curious about your thoughts on, I'm not sure if you've been to the EMP that's now called the Mopop. They had a Star Trek exhibit with a lot of interviews and now they have a Marvel one that just opened a couple of weeks ago that I have not yet gone to, but I got four free passes if you want to come. Because I'd love to talk to you guys about it while we're there, but I'm thinking about how they portray Star Trek in a lot of films as being like really groundbreaking because of the types of diversity, cultural diversity the characters portray and the themes of unity and whatever and how progressive they are and thinking about how Black Panther does that and at the same time that it's actually, the protagonist is an apologist and is what I'm thinking now is like he's Thanksgivinging the situation is like the white people needed help and then the Native Americans came and gave them food and saved the day and that's how we celebrate Thanksgiving and that's not maybe accurate, right, of how that relationship goes down and thinking of Black Panther being Thanksgiving again. It's interesting you bring up Star Trek because we have to talk about the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, right? And Star Wars, the individual fighting against the state is correct. And Star Trek is much as we may go up Star Trek, Star Trek is about the system being correct and the individuals being flawed. So we have to ask when we look at popular culture movies, is the rebel correct or is the rebel incorrect? And Black Panther, you have a film that arguably has no villain in it if we have an argument over what is the future of an African nation in the world. So the so-called villain is giving an analysis of sovereignty and self-defense that the African state is rejecting. So you have an African state, Wakanda, reject the idea of Pan-Africanism in a movie that celebrates the beauty of Africa, a fantasy film which what reinforces the idea that the state is always correct. You even see this in other films in which white people try to grapple against their own colonialism. For instance, there's a film I just saw the other day called Valerian in the City of a Thousand Worlds. Anybody seen that film? That's a very interesting film. That's a French comic book film and French people made this film. In fact, they want to make the sequel. They love these characters so much. But that film is about how France raped one third of Africa and how they have to grapple with their legacy as colonial people. That film is about whether or not the indigenous people who they raped deserve to survive. And they show the colonialism as embodied in this one Maverick general who committed this genocide. See, it's never the problem of the system. It's the problem of a Maverick person. But the Maverick person represents the ideology of the system. But you can't have movies, fantasy movies in which white people indict themselves as a collective for their own colonialism so they blame it on the crazy general. And it's a film that is about the two white heroes when it really should be about the indigenous people. The indigenous people in the film have a more interesting story than the heroes. But the heroes have to be white because the society has to be white because if the society is not white then we have to deal with an analysis of what happens to other people who are not white. And that analysis can only be a plot device and not a focus. So when we deal with popular culture we deal with what is being reinforced, what values are being reinforced in the society. We talk about Star Trek was being reinforced is that NATO and the United Nations and any government structure is correct. And people have to assimilate because the Federation is about assimilation as much as the Borg is if you know Star Trek you know what I'm talking about. The Federation does it politely and the Borg does it with force. But we know there's no difference between the two. In the reality the Federation would control the Borg and send the Borg out to forceively colonize. So when we talk about Black Panther we talk about a country who's escaped colonialism and whose answer to escaping colonialism is to not help any other African. And that's what makes Kilmonger such an interesting doing. Anybody wanna add to that? Any other questions? Well gentlemen thank you so much for being here. I'm the chair of the board here at Highline and I'm always excited about the kind of program we bring for this week. So thank you. I'd love to hear your thoughts about vibranium and what that represents in the modern era. One of my friends who I have dialogue about when we break down movies said it was code for melanin but would love to hear your thought about vibranium in its role because it was woven into Wakandan life even the clothing. And then also if you have time talking about the genius of the black mind and how that was revealed not only through Shuri but when the general was steering the ship she had no steering mechanism and no wheel. She was using her mind and she was in a meditative pose. So if you could speak on either of those or both. Sure. So the direct connection would be uranium was already introduced by Disney to say that we're gonna go in and extract all the mineral wealth of every place that we can find uranium. Vibranium is introduced in the same way that now you see cobalt or coltan being taken from the Congo, right? So this is a mineral that is in electric cars, computers, laptops, iPhones, phones in general and there's about $24 trillion worth of coltan and Congo. So now relate that to vibranium and say well what actually would make the society rich and it is the nationalization of the main mineral, right? So then if we related it to the Congo then the Congo should just say all right all mining and extraction companies, multi-national corporations have to go because we're nationalizing all of the mineral wealth and then whoever said that would be killed but they already did that with Lumumba, right? So we see parallels of the kinds of minerals that are actually being extracted from countries within Africa and then we see other groups if they're not extracting them they're getting 99 year land leases to go in and figure out what do you have there? Similarly as you mentioned it might be melanin, right? Because melanin is now understood to be a battery or an energy source. So people are studying melanin to see what kind of superconductor powers that it has. How long will it last? How do you actually create melanin? What are the uses of it as a battery? And they're figuring out that not only is melanin part of the neurodevelopmental system within humans but you can find aspects of melanin and then create the chemical formula for melanin to create a synthetic version. But melanin as a superconductor would have those same kind of properties. Heighten the ability to store energy and in the deep ancient Egyptian and Comedic traditions this would be Akhenaten trying to figure out how do you create a disk to harness the power of the sun? And that disk would be used to power the society. In this case it's weaponized and militarized and turned into an actual suit where you can absorb all energy of aggression and then disperse it back to the person. So vibranium is almost like it's a mind reading, thought reading energy that if you come with aggression and attack it will store that energy and then kick it back on you. The piece about the remote control driving and using the mind as a power would just be to say do we have any aspects of that within African tradition? And there are numerous African traditional healers who would say that they could actually heal people who aren't local to them, meaning they're not in front of them. So they might put somebody in a place 90 miles away and the healer's job would be to figure out what ailment they're actually enduring and then what's needed to heal that person. The person who comes to mind most with that is a woman named Mam Fattusek who's part of the in-depth tradition out of Senegal amongst the label of Wall-off Peoples. And she's, there's a documentary where she's alleged to have been able to levitate people. She can put people into possession by determining what spirit, rhythm that your body possesses and having the drummers play that spirit rhythm so that your spirit possesses you and makes you do things that are mythological in nature. And that tradition's still there, the in-depth folks are still there, the in-depth cats are still in Rufisk in Senegal and still carrying on a tradition, her daughters carry on that tradition. The interesting there though is it's women who control that remote technology just like in the movie. So there's something about the tech and women's power of connectivity that the movie catches well in terms of what technology looks like. And then the other piece I would mention is like Wangari Matai's impact on technological developments in reforesting and reforestation efforts in Kenya would be the same kind of thing with being the keeper of the tradition of Earth's technology and being able to use that technology to transform the planet, the environment and then the individuals themselves. And I just wanted to say very quickly because my book is about the writers of the comic, the invention of the sister and of the female army are all from the black writers. Those characters didn't exist before black people started writing Black Panther. But for me, where the film captures the issue for me is that it's the issue of the social relationship that remains unchanged. So the African genius, the technology is irrelevant. Absent of revolutionary change of the relationship with in this case European or colonial powers. Because in the example you bring in whose service is her African genius put? When I hear the examples that Dr. Bolden brings up, my initial reaction honestly is after, well I should say my initial reaction is appreciation and amazement. Quickly followed by frustration which is what I see when I see Wakanda. Well if you have all these traditions and all these powers and all these abilities, at what point are they gonna be organized, massified if I can just make that word and apply to the rest of us? I feel very Killmonger. My reaction is, even as a radical Pan-African, is where are all of these traditions and histories being applied to help not only the African collective on the continent, but those of us left out here in the diaspora? And so when I'm looking at vibranium, they have all this vibranium, but it's useless to anybody outside of Wakanda and then only by the film's end delivered over to the same imperial forces that have created these problems in the first place by this speech that I was trying to highlight very quickly that he gives at the end in nodding agreement with the CIA agent. So my point is it doesn't, whether it's vibranium in the film or coltan in real life or whether it's some Afrofuturism depicted on film or the real life Afrofuturism that exists in these traditions, until this relationship is dealt with, it's all irrelevant. I think it's all totally useless. I don't care about pockets of individuals or small communities being able to defend themselves while the rest of us suffer. And to the extent that none of our ability to, even the benefits we have as black Americans here in the seat of empire here, to the extent that we can't help anybody else or even ourselves for that matter, it's useless to me, totally irrelevant. So that's what I think the film shows. You can have all this vibranium. You can have all this tradition and genius and brilliance, but if you don't have a revolutionary relationship with the rest of the world or Huey Newton's inter-communal, revolutionary inter-communal relationship with the rest of the world, useless. Oh, are you? Okay. I can't remember what you guys were talking about when this question popped in my mind, so I'm sorry, but... So you talked in the beginning about how a lot of technology has military origins and things that we consider commonplace now, like TV and internet, started in the military. And I have conversations with a lot of my peers who are getting their DNA done, their DNA results. And I know that there's a lot of information out there about how racist scientific research is and all of that, but I was wondering about your perspective as far as propaganda, public relations and psychological warfare and how you think that common people now having access to their DNA results is gonna impact that. I would just say one thing is that a lot of folks that I talked to, it's almost like we have to have a debrief about their DNA results. We gotta sit down and have something to eat or something to drink together because people, there's just a lot of emotions and a lot of other things, other than just, oh, this is gonna be fun and I'm gonna see where my heritage is and so. I think that's a great question. And in the very short time, I'll give the best answer I can give. I did the DNA, I did ancestry DNA. I did that. And I only after that learned that there was a pre-existing black woman run, black version, whose name I can't remember, specifically for African-Americans. But my first thought when I got the results was this is fascinating, it's very interesting to see all the details and all this. Then immediately my wife was like, what were they gonna do with your DNA? And cause I was like, let's do, let's give our, I was all in a very serious contradiction with what I think I understand about the world. I was like, let's do it, let's get the daughters, our daughters, let's see where everything is. My wife was like, absolutely not. First of all, you were foolish. And I'm definitely not gonna allow you to extend your foolery to our children just so you can get a picture and an idea. She was like, I know where I'll tell them where they're from. Like that, if it's not even real, it don't matter. Like they need to have a positive constructed myth of their own, she took my own argument against me, but I'm big on positive constructed myths. But in the absence of real data. But she, so I think that that's a very, so it's a real concern. We should be very careful about what we give, why we're giving our DNA over to whom and what's gonna be done given the context of hostility that exists. And then finally, I do agree that there should be a debrief in a conversation because on the other end of it is, I think there's a lot of, I'll just summarize this way, the politics and confusion around how different people's identities are being used. In other words, is the wonderful diversity that we might all point to being used to create the fantasy of a rainbow coalition in the world or is it being used as I was talking a moment ago to radically reunite everybody? In other words, if one part of my, so I come from everywhere, so if I said, but if one part of my background is doing better because of the institutionalized global structures that provide for them versus this other group, Africans of course, that don't get that, then we need to have a whole new, I don't wanna just know that I have European ancestry in this end, I wanna know why my black ancestry isn't the same well off as my white ancestry. So those kinds, and I see, but I see the commercial, everybody's like, oh, I'm from everywhere. And Henry Louis Gates with this whole thing, I'm more European than black as the dean of black studies. Okay, anyway, so I agree that's a very important. If I think about that question, at one point during apartheid in South Africa, the government, the apartheid government was looking for ethnic specific biological warfare. And part of what the DNA produces is strings of genes that represent different trajectories of health and disease. So if you can target what specific genes are afflicted with specific diseases, you can then start to look at targeted health inputs, medicines, what have you. But you could also do the inverse. So you could look at which groups suffer specific kinds of diseases and expose them to more of those biological agents. And so we talked a lot about the theater of communications as the latest theater of war. In addition to that would be not just the brain mind, but like the neurological substrates of the brain. And how do you get neurotoxins to target those neuro substrates specifically? And what do they look like per the environment that you're in? So in the world of African traditional spirituality, voodoo has this place as something that's seen negatively in non-hation sensitive eyes. But neurologically voodoo is a medical science. And so the ability to create people who are zombified actually occurs through neurotoxins that are local to the puffer fish. And so extracted from a military perspective, they're now recognizing, okay, we can create zombie-like conditions by injecting people with this venom from the puffer fish. And how did they get that? By studying African medical science in voodoo. And then how does that work? Oh well, if I need a neurotoxin, I just go looking for the puffer fish if I'm in Haiti. And then I can figure out what that fish is, what those fish are, or what those fauna and flora are in whatever environment I'm in through studying the indigenous healers from that group and then saying, this is how they use it for health. This is how they use it for harm. But the military has one agenda, maintain the political aims of the country you're serving. So it's never gonna be used for help if it's not serving that country. We like questions. We're not very adverse to questions. You may have ideas that you wanna ask. We'll be nice. Yes, please. I think we technically are out of time. But if y'all have other questions, I don't have no way to be. So feel free. And they rolled with me, so they stuck. So exactly. That's the most important question. Any other questions? But either way, thank y'all. Criticism? Yeah. Things that you wanted more of. Hello. So you were mentioning about essentially how the dominant culture is like, however many steps ahead of us in terms of what we think, how we're gonna react to a lot of things. What would you suggest as for myself, as a person of color, specifically a black woman, where I could focus my studies and education in terms of kind of getting ahead of them? Like, you know what I mean? Like getting to where that I can put my focus into my community and what would that look like in terms of not adhering to what they want me to do, if that makes any sense. If you want to go on the election, be time. That sounds good. But also vaccinate from whatever's coming. Right, kind of like, kind of get, beat them at their own game. And like, so I was thinking about there being a therapist and you know, you mentioned that you were a therapist. So is that a good route to take in terms of continuing to educate black and brown children to kind of get ahead of the game in terms of what their future's gonna look like? It's a really good question. You could take a therapeutic route to do prevention work. Right? So we know so much of the prevention work starts before conception. So the idea would be who is being, who's being planned to bring into this planet? And then the question is, what planet should they be brought into? Traditionally, African women have had to respond to that question in the most obscene of ways where if you think about a mother who's enslaved saying I was raped and I was raped to produce an enslaved child. The father of the child is going to enslave the child. He raped me so he could produce an enslaved child. In that kind of obscene environment, the options become even more obscene. Should I kill my own child? So that they don't have to endure the father who raped the mother and live in this world where their destiny is to be of service to rapists and then produce more enslaved children. Right? Okay. How do you get ahead of people that think that way? You'd have to tune them off completely. So that would look like studying an indigenous language where rape of women is in part and parcel of the culture. So you would say, how do I prevent the rape of women so that children will be born enslaved? And you would start immediately in that space of saying, how do we prevent rape? That would be prevention work. So the work that I do, I literally have to work with the boys to say, your tendencies are to become rapists. Cause you're thinking power over women entitles you to control dominion over women. But if we want to carry on a tradition that you're a part of that is parenting, then we've got to look at how many mothers you've had who have successfully managed motherhood to get to you. And why would you be the one person who would break a line of unbroken motherhood? All right, okay. That would be one way to approach it. Second piece would be like, I'm gonna study this language so I can learn that there are languages that exist that don't have histories of rape as part and parcel of their existence. I feel like when we try to separate ourselves in that sense, like, you know, have our own language for say like, we're shut down or it's like, like there's always a way for them to stop us. And it gets frustrating cause it's like, okay, we can, you know, try to isolate ourselves but kind of like reclaim ourselves. But it's like they have a plan in play that shuts that down. And I mean, I get what you're saying, like we have like kind of getting to the root of it. I don't know. Okay. I mean, I'm only gonna add that, I mean, the only reason, like I'm not saying you're doing this but I sometimes hear this tendency and I know I'm criticized for this all the time that we give too much credit to those in power. I think it's important to study power and understand how things work so we can understand how just groups of regular human beings have organized themselves to create an environment that impacts us this way. But they're not undefeatable. They're not mystical or special. And I think they've even encouraged use of this Illuminati phrase so that we don't see them as just normal human beings who have organized themselves. That's all they've done. So whatever you do, I would just, I think I understand what Dr. Bolden is encouraging which isn't a full isolationism. It's, as I interpret what he's saying, it's an investigation of indigenous and all the cultural worldview so that your worldview is not solely comprised by an enemy and that you can then, as I would interpret it, say, then we can then develop ways to not only, as Schomburg told John Henry Clark, study European history to learn why they wrote you out of world history but then to develop our own organized political movements that have future development plans and methods of protecting themselves. So kind of like don't focus on like instant gratification, rather organize and put a plan into play that's going to unfold itself throughout time. Yeah, I mean, there is not gonna be any instant gratification, revolution in the process. Yeah, and I think that's what a lot of people focus on. Yeah, no, yeah, and that's what, that's encouraged by our social media moment also where if we can't post and tweet about it now then it's irrelevant. And that's, we have to, and that's what I really, and I'll use this in my concluding comment. What I really think has to happen is offline political organization starting in small groups of people who are knowing each other in each other's face, building and learning each other and growing together, political education, study all the radical traditions of whatever community you are connected to or are comfortable with. All communities have these radical traditions, tap into them, study them, organize around them and then look to expand from there. That's the only way I can see this getting better and then whatever work you do can be on some level insurrectionist, whether you're a therapist or a gas station attendant or a professor or whatever. You can find ways to use that to develop other forms of consciousness in organization. And I just wanna geek that answer up. So like in terms of images for instance, you know what people are only now just learning about for instance is that there is a whole national network of independent black comic book creators who have local conventions. I just did the one in my hometown of Newark, New Jersey. And there's a national convention every May in Philadelphia. Now it's been announced about a week or week and a half ago that there's gonna be a Wakanda Con in Chicago in which a whole bunch of Afrofuturists and other people are gonna come there. There will be toys and games and things that are there that you will have never seen before. And if you're gonna counteract hegemony, which is what I think you're really trying to deal with, is that you have to surround yourself with those toys and games and books and surround the people you are surrounded with that you love and who love you with those things. I know these two men, these two men are fathers. And they have surrounded their children with things that are African. Or things in terms of your dual culture, the dual culture of African and Panama in your case. And one of the proudest moments I know, I'm gonna tell some probably Dr. Ball from Dr. Ball's life, one of the proudest moments I know he had was when he raised girls who kind of barely knew who Beyonce was. Now imagine how much control you have over you with your children, read and see and hear and what they understand about the world where they only have just marginally heard about some woman named Beyonce. And I do take pride in that. By the way, I also wanna just say very quickly, like just one last piece, please do go to ImixwhatIlike.org. I mean, and follow us at Imix What I Like, subscribe. I mean, it's under sort of my name, but it's our work and a lot of other people's work and a lot of interviews and multimedia production that will help, I think, expand anyone's political education and the ranges of debate that we have are very different than you see elsewhere. So I do wanna encourage that you and others check that out as well. Thank you guys.