0093 | Octobber 14, 2019
1619:
Music, Blackface, and Performing Freedom
The hosts discuss the history of “performing blackness” in music, as well as other forms of media. What does it mean to “co-opt” another culture’s music? What’s fair and what’s foul in artistic expression?
| C.T. WEBB: 00:00 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning or good evening and welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age and I’m speaking to you from partially cloudy Southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:28 | Hi, Steven G. Fullwood, and I’m the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivist Project and I am coming to you from Harlem. And it is nice and in the 70s here and it’s pretty lovely. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:40 | And I’m Seph Rodney. I am a senior editor at the Hyperallergic blog and a recent author of a book titled ‘The Personalization of The Museum’ Visit which is all about museum visiting and how it’s changed. And I am coming down to you from the boogie down Bronx. |
| S. BOND: 00:59 | Hi. I am Sara Bond and I am coming to you from rainy Iowa City now where we are hanging out with all the political candidates until February. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 01:11 | Yes. Thank goodness. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:14 | So we are continuing our conversation about the 1619 Project and in particular– oh, this is to remind our listeners – thank you very much Dr. Rodney – that we practice a form of what I like to call– we like to call intellectual intimacy which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. And after that inelegant introduction, we’re going to continue our conversation about the 1619 Project and in particular, we decided to let the conversation continue on cultural appropriation and music and maybe it will wander from there. But everyone kind of felt they had some areas that they hadn’t gotten to in the last podcast that they wanted to. So I’m just going to step back and then as much as possible let’s just let the conversation go. So there were some other examples you guys had that you wanted to bring up. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:02 | And so I think we ended on Joni Mitchell, right [laughter]? |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:04 | Yes. Yes. Your uplifting story about Joni Mitchell. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:07 | I keep thinking of Janet Jackson’s song ‘Got Til It’s Gone’ and Q-Tip going, “Joni Mitchell never lied.” That was one of the things that sort of cycles in that song. But I was thinking about blackface and I was thinking about how is music appropriation a form of blackface? And so that’s a question I wanted to ask you guys. Again I have some thoughts about it but I put that out there in the middle of the oracle. What do you guys got? |
| S. RODNEY: 02:41 | Well– |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:41 | I think it can be. My little thing is yes, I definitely think it can be. But Seph please go ahead [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY: 02:47 | Yeah. I suppose – sort of be cliche about it – the proof is in the pudding, right? I think we have to think through individual examples. I wrote a piece on Miley Cyrus for Hyperallergic a couple of years ago because at some point she showed her ass and oh, the music video she did with Robin Thicke– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:05 | MTV music awards. |
| S. RODNEY: 03:07 | –where she almost literally showed her ass. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:11 | No, she showed it [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY: 03:11 | And the way that she was behaving– no, I think actually what precipitated the brouhaha was that she, at some point, kind of disavowed her hip hop affiliations. She basically said, “I am tired of this. Guys always talking about girls on my cock and big cars and blah, blah, blah.” And she said, “I’m just going to return to this other sound and I’m going to turn my back on that.” And I think relatively soon after that she got married. People were up in arms like, “Oh, now that you made some money off of us and you can go back to being this pure lily-white woman who is ashamed of the kind of gangster or overly commodified associations that you used to lug through your music.” And I wrote a piece basically making the argument that Miley Cyrus is not the person to look at to gauge our sort of sense of the limits or appropriateness of appropriation. She’s not the one. I think that intellectually, emotionally, at the time, she was a bit of child. She was a child. She was just trying things on and seeing if they fit and seeing if they could make her money and then trying something else on. Like outfits for an evening out. I think that people forget that this is very much the American story. That we appropriate– I’m kind of muddying the waters here but I’m hoping that we can clear them eventually, but I’m reminded that this is something that is a very American story – to appropriate a persona. To take a persona that is not the “authentic” you however that– |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:07 | I think it’s a cultural story. |
| S. RODNEY: 05:07 | –complicated [crosstalk]. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:08 | I don’t think it’s just American but– |
| S. RODNEY: 05:10 | Fair enough. But it’s sort of weaponized in America, right? It comes to its grandest fruition in America. We do adopt personas, we adopt lifestyles, we adopt ways of seeing the world, we adopt belief systems and we act them out on a stage. So I guess I’m saying all that to say I’m confused [laughter]. |
| S. BOND: 05:42 | Yeah. Right. Can I ask a question here? |
| S. RODNEY: 05:45 | Sure. |
| S. BOND: 05:45 | Because I’ve been struggling with something that is similar is that a few weeks ago or maybe it was now months ago an article came out on digital blackface and the use of memes. And essentially the idea was that the most popular memes are usually of black housewives; Real Housewives of Atlanta, often NeNe Leakes; and a lot of black women. And white people really like to use black memes in order to express outrage, in order to express hyperbolic emotion. And this article called it out to say essentially white people are using digital blackface in order to express emotions they’re too afraid to express without the use of black people. And I just wondered what you guys thought about that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 06:39 | Oh, definitely. I didn’t read that article but I’m so excited by it. I have to find it because I’m a meme person and I think archives should be collecting them because they are really of the moment and they pop up almost instantaneously after some nation-wide issue comes out. And I’ve noticed that there are different kinds of memes. And one of those memes that you just described is blackface. I didn’t call it blackface but I remember thinking, “Well, who put this out? And who put it together?” Who put it together? Who puts this out? And how does it live on the cultural imagination on the internet? So I don’t take a blackface to mean a black purpose or a black person behind it like a black thing. And the memes are really good to look as a way to look at what’s kind of always been there but now this is just the new form it’s taking. |
| C.T. WEBB: 07:32 | So if you want to say that ” “– so I’m always saying “black” “white” when we have these conversations and I’m just going to stop doing it because it’s irritating [laughter]. So if the point of the article is that the germ of what is typically signified as an authentic experience in American culture is black, okay. If the point of the article is to say that we are reduplicating blackface oppressive structures in the 21st century because of that use I would say absolutely not and that is a stretch. And again makes the move that I described earlier, “This is not the problem.” Sharing black memes is not the problem. This is not why we still have an over-representation of black men in American prisons, this is not why we have so much poverty in black communities. I mean these are structural problems that are not going to be addressed by calling out memes because that’s not the source of the problem. |
| S. BOND: 08:42 | Right. But, Travis, can I ask you something? |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:45 | Yes, please. |
| S. BOND: 08:46 | Yeah. I just wanted to ask, when we make black people absorb feelings and ideas and hyperbole like anger and we re-associate anger with black people through memes isn’t that also reinforcing negative stereotypes that also do feed in then into the idea of the angry black woman or the angry black man? I mean aren’t we reinforcing stereotypes because white people have a fear of being perceived in this way and so we allow black people through memes to take on that persona for us? I mean isn’t that part and parcel– can we really separate it the way that you’re saying? |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:26 | Yeah. So I think that’s a fair question. I mean there’s a lot to unpack there and I’ll try and just pick two so Seph can jump in. One, I don’t think– you use the word make black people. I don’t like we can circumscribe ” – I’m sorry – black reactions to anything. I think that autonomy is something that visits all of us rarely and that includes white and black people. But it does visit all of us at times and so I would probably take issue with the idea of making. And two, I would also question that there isn’t a deep pleasure and desire in the unrestricted expression of emotion and that it is not necessarily a cross that we are making black people bear. It’s actually something we feel restricted by white waspy culture. And so it’s not oppressing. It’s an attempt to liberate and the only way that we’ve been able to do that in the 21st century is that blackness has become the signification of liberation in all of its handicapped forms. So that’s my response. |
| S. RODNEY: 10:41 | And I want to say– I want to ask the question, and this I’m posing to all of you – but Sara you may want to jump on this first, is what does it look like if – I’m going to use the quotes here because I feel like they’re necessary – “white culture” isn’t affected by, doesn’t take anything from “black culture”? What would our society look like if that were the case? Because– |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:12 | Boring [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY: 11:13 | Right. Not only boring– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 11:14 | No. No. No. No. |
| S. RODNEY: 11:16 | Not only boring– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 11:17 | Not fair. Not fair. Go ahead. |
| S. RODNEY: 11:18 | Not only boring but just– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 11:19 | That’s feeding into some things. |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:21 | No. No. No, I was joking. I was joking [crosstalk]. |
| S. RODNEY: 11:24 | But antiseptic or more to the point segregated. Because can you imagine going into town– “you go into town” and you go to Bob’s Burger’s or you go to the opera or you go to the dance recital and then you literally go to the other side of the tracks to experience “real culture”? The joint and the cipher that’s happening down– |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:54 | That’s Memphis. What you’re describing is Memphis. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 11:56 | Right. But this is my point. And I’m not saying we just throw out the whole idea of cultural appropriation being way too complicated to place on our backs and carry. But the alternative, the other side of that continuum which is a siloing of cultures, we don’t want that either because that’s segregation. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:20 | It can never happen though. Once you put something out there it’s in the world. It’s in the world. It’s how we’re dealing with it, how we think about it, how it’s used in the capitalist culture. And I want to say this too about this notion of white culture being boring or whatever. Of course, Travis, I know you’re joking, but immediately I thought about what I would’ve done my Ph.D. on had I had time or another body or in another dimension and it would’ve been on folks like Bukowski or The Beats and to really kind of dip into– and also the women who were Beats – which you never hear about, or even the black beats – which you never hear about. You hear about the core folks and what drove them. What was this idea of free? What were they rebelling against, and that’s sort of thing? No one’s going to– I’m never giving up anything that people associate with white culture that I like. Sorry. No, I’m interested. And so there’s no essentialization of either for me but there are things that are important to point out when it comes to cultural production and who benefits and I go back to that. But– |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:25 | Can I piggyback on both those things to ask Sara a question about– in fairness, structurally, intellectually, how do we parse the argument of digital blackface from the argument that “western civilization” which is, of course, a stupid reification and not real, right? I mean we can have a whole podcast [crosstalk]– |
| S. RODNEY: 13:48 | We all know that. Whooop [laughter]! |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:50 | But let’s– |
| S. RODNEY: 13:52 | Lawd [laughter]! |
| S. BOND: 13:52 | Agreed. |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:53 | Let’s just set that to the side. How do we parse those two arguments from people saying that science is because of white culture, science is because of the west, democracy is because of the– I mean, of course, these are– I mean I don’t think any of us – other than if we were just trying to be patient with someone – we certainly wouldn’t entertain these arguments seriously amongst ourselves. We might entertain them in a larger context because you need to but can you parse those two arguments? They seem to be coming from a similar point of view about authenticity and culture. |
| S. BOND: 14:28 | I agree but all the things that you mentioned for western civilization were both positive, right? Democracy. A lot of the things that get attributed to western civilization are very good things. And what I’m saying that digital blackface often does is allow for negative emotions – emotions that we’re penalized for, particularly women – like anger, like negativity and emotions that get out of hand. I think that we’re seeing a lot of digital blackface saying the things that we want to say. And so I totally agree with your analysis that it’s because of wasp culture that we’re told that we have to be kind of quieter and so we feel as though this is a way to express ourselves. But I think that oftentimes when we talk about western civilization we’re attributing positive things. And when we use digital blackface we’re taking emotions that are not always held in high regard in society and then applying it to black people to express for us. And it’s a mask. It’s a theatrical mask that we’re putting on and that’s, I think, why they’re calling it digital blackface. And this is something that goes way back in time. The use of masks in order to express cultural attributes that are stereotyped and attached to certain ethnicities. |
| C.T. WEBB: 15:53 | Sure. So I want to let Seph or Steven respond also. I’m with you on that. The only thing that I’m not entirely convinced by is that I feel like amongst intellectuals there’s a kind of echo chamber about what is regarded as negative in the culture at large. I am not at all convinced that people outside of the academy or outside of people that read The New York Times regularly or read books regularly that they would identify the strong expression of emotion as a negative. I have lots of people that I interact with on a regular basis that would not necessarily describe the sort of umbrella that you’re using of negative emotional expressions as a negative and is actually just a mode of expression and something that they might egg on or something that they might– and I would say is probably somewhat reflected in our politics right now. That there is clearly– I think we’re both sort of on the same page around what we see as the downfalls of this overly restrained emotional expression in public. But I don’t know that the rest of the culture at large is there with that negative ascription. I could be wrong about that. I’m not saying that I have some special pulse but, yeah, I am skeptical of that. I don’t know that they’re as anxious as we are about it. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:25 | So something that Sara said that brought me to a James Baldwin quote. I believe it’s from ‘Here Be Dragons’ and it’s an essay about masculinity and the ideal manhood. And in the piece, he says, “Being a faggot allows a traditionally masculine man”– this is not verbatim. “Calling someone a faggot allows that man to act out a fantasy on another man’s body without taking any responsibility for it.” And I think about that emotional disconnectedness or the dissonance that we’re talking about with using digital blackface as a way of connoting some kind of response to something. And I was trying to figure out if I’d ever seen a meme that contradicted– not contradicted the whole thing but just do I ever see that? So white women are allegedly frail, right? So they’re frail and they’re always falling apart and they can’t handle anything. White men don’t have big dicks. So I was thinking about these memes, right, and I was like, “Well, they’re all pretty fucked up,” for the most part. |
| C.T. WEBB: 18:30 | All of them. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:31 | Well, I won’t go [inaudible] because I’ve seen some memes that were really funny like one about Jussie Smollet [laughter] where it’s like– |
| S. RODNEY: 18:41 | God! We’re already laughing. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:44 | –and it’s funny I’m trying to grab the text together in my head but it was something to the effect of ‘America’s winning so well that a black man has to go to get an African to oppress him’ which is so entangled and weird and funny. And pulling it apart is ridiculously useful to kind of think about his case, right? So memes can be really, really instructive. It’s just what are they instructing and what are they just basically parodying in terms of what people think they believe about other people. Morrison wrote a book called ‘Paradise’ and the first line of it is called ‘They shoot the white girl first, with the rest of them they can take their time’. And what she’s trying to do– in subsequent interviews and other things she said, “I want to show that it didn’t matter what race meant in this novel.” |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:34 | You’ve mentioned this before. I love this quotation [crosstalk]– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:36 | Right. And I think it was really important to think about when we– she says, “Race is the least reliable piece of information you have about someone,” because– |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:45 | Absolutely. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:46 | And so you go to that thing and you go to that person then you have to be in Sara’s face or in Travis’ face or Seph’s face or Steven’s face and what are you left with? If you shed yourself or if you’re honest and you’re vulnerable and you just listen and be open and porous with your feelings. That’s a different kind of relationship than just going, “Travis is this, Sara’s this, and Seph is this.” |
| S. RODNEY: 20:12 | And I want to add onto that this idea that part of the positive register of human feeling is we’re aided to get there by black music, right? Because as Wesley Mars in his essay in the 1619 Project that, ‘Through music, music no one “composed” – because the slave people were denied literacy – music borne of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope’ and I’m thinking that that is exactly why you can see in some, again with the quotes, “white musicians” you can hear that. You can hear the feeling, you can hear the play, you can hear the exhaustion, you can hear the hope, you can hear it in Kenny Loggins. I would argue you can hear the hope in Michael McDonald, you can hear it in Melissa Etheridge, you can sometimes hear it in Joss Stone, you can definitely hear it in Sam Smith when he sings ‘Stay with me because you’re all I need’. You can even hear it in Jamie Lidell. There are ways in which the vernacular – which is I think a way to talk about this without using the quotes. The vernacular of music– |
| C.T. WEBB: 21:36 | That’s great. Thank you. |
| S. RODNEY: 21:36 | –taps into the exhaustion and that hope and that unrestrained joy. That is being moved by the spirit and that’s something that I think black people have brought to the table and made available for all of us to take part in and ennobled it. That’s the thing, right? Wesley Mars even points this out in his piece talking about R&B how R&B sort of raised the whole game up from this place of sort of degradation because it made black people stars, it made them shine, it gave them the wardrobe and the backing vocalists and the production values. But aside from that what I think black music has done, what the vernacular has done is it’s brought us to the place where we can say it’s okay to make music from a place of exhaustion, of hope, or muddied emotions, of noise. |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:38 | It’s a very punk sensibility actually. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:41 | Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So that kind of soul, that spirit is precisely what we celebrate when we talk about black music. Ooph! |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:53 | Yeah. I love that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 22:55 | A few thoughts back I was thinking that what’s dangerous about saying that white people have no emotions [laughter] or have not made any emotional– I’m sorry. You can’t tear me away from Ricky Lee Jones. You will never tear me from Tom Waits. |
| S. RODNEY: 23:09 | Amen. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:09 | There are things you will not do. And I don’t think that they’re aping black music. |
| S. RODNEY: 23:12 | Amen. Amen. I don’t think this– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:15 | That’s up for– |
| S. RODNEY: 23:15 | Go ahead. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:16 | All I’m saying is that’s up for argument, for discussion. But no. No, there’s just something there. |
| C.T. WEBB: 23:24 | To soften, I mean I think Sara asks pointed questions about how they’re used in contemporary culture and I think they’re fair questions and skepticisms. But I do think that if you were to do a larger reading of the United States that the way– I mean earliest recorded usage of white people that I’m aware of is Thomas Middleton in 1604 or something like that. So the invention of the white race or that there was a white race goes back to the 17th century. But there is a way in which it was perfected in the United States and what “whiteness” meant in its associations with liberty and freedom and all the rest of that. But that isn’t the case anymore, right? |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:12 | I mean the most aspirational aspects of what whiteness ever meant have been superseded by blackness, right? I mean our significations of liberation and freedom are brought to us by the most recent iteration of that struggle which is the black struggle in this country in particular over the most oppressive, sophisticated legalized racial system ever or system of prejudice probably in the history of the world. I mean I know the Egyptians were really good at it and I’m sure Sara could school us on the Romans and the Greeks but we were really good at it and that was overcome by a segment of the population. And I think white America – again, I’m using air quotes – doesn’t know what to do with that. We don’t get to look back at Jefferson and Washington in uncomplicated ways anymore but we do get to look at King, we do get to look at Malcolm X. I’m not saying these people are unalloyed but I’m saying that they certainly strike a chord with us in a way that those other figures don’t. And I don’t think the culture– we just don’t know what to do with it. It fucks us up. Where do our stories go from here? |
| S. RODNEY: 25:39 | I’m recalling a podcast I heard a bit of. Back in the day– and this is five years ago is back in the day in this instance. When I try to be a bit more ecumenical about my news reading I would check out the right-wing blogs and sites like Laura Ingraham and Steve Levin and– what’s his name? Is it Beck? |
| C.T. WEBB: 26:15 | Oh, Glenn Beck. |
| S. RODNEY: 26:16 | Glenn Beck. Thank you. And I was listening to a bit of his podcast – I think it was a podcast from his site – and he was waxing on about George Washington and in a very– I don’t want to mock him in this instance even though he’s worthy of being mocked. In a very emotional and kind of porous way he was talking about George Washington crossing, I think it was the Delaware River during one campaign. He talked about– again, he was clearly moved by the story as he’s telling it. He’s talked about George Washington crossed the river as he was leading this troop of men and he didn’t have assurances that once he got to the other side he would have the supplies he needed, he would be able to take care of his me, basically be able to keep the men under his charge alive. Something like that. And he said, “He crossed the river and he didn’t know. He didn’t know.” And he was waxing on about this. And I thought, “Wow! This is what it looks like when you have a myth that is super dear to you. Super, super dear to you and you hold on to that motherfucker tight.” So you– |
| S. BOND: 27:441 | Right. And I think it’s important to point out that the Delaware River was frozen at the time and that actually the very famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware is a mythical, aesthetic recreation of something that never happened and yet Glenn Beck loves to refer to this painting and yet that painting is an ideal myth that lives in his mind and not a reality.1 So I think that’s a metaphor for right now [laughter]. But sadly for a lot of how history is remembered through omission and then through aggrandizement that we graft onto Washington. And that is to say white people graft onto Washington the hopes and dreams of the year 1776 but it’s a bunch of white people in a boat that never really happened the way it is depicted. But it’s a romance of history that Glenn Beck loves as a pseudo-historian. |
| C.T. WEBB: 28:51 | Yeah. I think the omission and aggrandizement is a very elegant summary of how those myths and how history is written. I think that’s exactly right. I mean that is exactly what happens. That’s how those things move. So we’re not able to see you so I can’t tell if you are wanting to pop in with something. Anything that you want to say? I mean we’re coming pretty close to time. We’ve got a few minutes left but– |
| S. BOND: 29:17 | Right. I just wanted to kind of say that I do think that cultural appropriation ideas have gone really far. At least in Iowa City we had a dumpling place that opened up by a white woman which everybody in Iowa City got up in arms about because the recipes had been taken, allegedly from– had been culturally appropriated and this was very similar to the tortilla recipe cultural appropriation story that came out I think a couple of years ago now of women in Oregon I believe who went and got tortilla recipes from grandmothers in Mexico. So I do that cultural appropriation is very difficult to grapple with in music and in food and it’s something that is pointed out particularly by the 1619 Project that a big point of this is just to reference back where the information came from. And so when we think of pecan pies or pecan pies if you would like to say it incorrectly [laughter] then I think that part of it is just knowing context and depths. Yeah. I think food, which we will probably get to next time, food is very close to music. and that it’s hard to give verbal or written footnotes but that at least recipes can allow us to have a little bit more context and attribution than music can because audio is just a very different medium than writing is. |
| S. RODNEY: 31:07 | Agreed. I think that we can also make a way for ourselves even in audio genres to tell stories, to tell the story of the thing. When you have the opportunity to make the YouTube video, when you get interviewed for such and such an outlet or a magazine tell the story. Tell the story of where this came from. Don’t say that it’s just grew out of your own head or it came to you– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 31:35 | [crosstalk] |
| S. RODNEY: 31:36 | –in a dream. Exactly. Exactly. |
| C.T. WEBB: 31:40 | Yeah. Steven, do you have anything to close us out with or–? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 31:41 | [laughter] Oh, yes, another Joni Mitchell update. |
| S. RODNEY: 31:46 | Oh, Lord! |
| S. FULLWOOD: 31:46 | So here’s yet another one. |
| S. RODNEY: 31:48 | Here we go. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 31:48 | So she’s quoted in CNN – this is February 11th, 2015 – and what she says is, “The Canadian wisp of a singer feels she shares an affinity with black men.” “When I see a black man sitting I have a tendency to go– you know. I nod like I’m a brother,” she told New York Magazine. “I really feel an affinity because I’ve experienced being a black guy on several occasions.” Mm-hmm [laughter]. Here’s the last two lines of the article. She claimed it started with comments by her dentist. Oh, medical stuff. We got medical stuff coming up here folks. One day he said, “You’ve got the worst bite I’ve ever seen. You have teeth like a negro male.” I have dropped the piece of paper – you cannot see it. I have dropped the mic. I’m all done. There you have it. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:41 | Oh, my God! |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:41 | The things that we learn. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:43 | So Steven, can you just, at the end of every podcast, come up with inappropriate Joni Mitchell anecdote [laughter] because [crosstalk] |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:52 | Oh, wow! [crosstalk] are there so many? |
| S. BOND: 32:54 | Agreed. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:55 | I can totally– |
| S. RODNEY: 32:56 | Oh, my God! |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:58 | I just [crosstalk] and fun. |
| C.T. WEBB: 33:00 | It is. It is. You guys are going to have to show me how to nod next time I see you [laughter]. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:06 | You watch movies. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:08 | It’s a little bit like this [laughter]. |
| C.T. WEBB: 33:12 | [music] So okay. As always, thanks very much for the conversation and I’ll speak to you guys soon. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:17 | All right. Take care. |
| C.T. WEBB: 33:18 | Take care. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:18 | Bye-bye. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:19 | Thank you. |
References
First referenced at 17:25
James Baldwin
“James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America’s foremost writers. His essays, such as “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America.” Amazon
First referenced at 18:44
Toni Morrison
“Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.” Amazon