Speaker 1: Jackson Junior Sports the Jesse Junior Show. He talked.
Speaker 2: On thought provoking Thursdays, our conversations with a Tiba have
commenced to TIBA, welcome forward to the Jesse Jackson Junior Show.
Speaker 1: He's always good to be here.
Speaker 2: So just before the break, we're having a conversation about
about the way forward, about what's next. I know that
you want, you want to get there, but I do
want to say this politically. By the time Martin Luther
King Junior starts meeting with Lyndon Johnson and thinking some
of the great thoughts about the interconnectedness of reality and red, yellow, brown,
black and white, all of us having something in common
in this inescapable bond of mutuality. He engaged in a
life of base politics Pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church Montgomery, Selma,
Atlanta based politics. First Negroes had to follow him, and
when he had a solid base of us, then he
was able to offer a national and international, a global
vision from a base of support Er Washington, when he
ran for mayor of Chicago, started with the black community
and built out to Hispanics and to whites. Jesse Jackson
didn't have a chance in nineteen eighty four, nineteen eighty eight,
if he didn't have Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and
Black churches in Chicago and black churches in New Hampshire
and South Carolina and the South to preach in. And
of course he won all of the debates that he
participated in with all the white folks who was on
the stage. Base politics. What makes Tabis Smiley a national
leader of Black people KBLA man? Tavis wakes up every
day talking to black vote and then by the time
he makes it to Washington and makes it to the
news and he's able to argue our case and earn
the respect of the broader population. He starts with the
base politics. And one of the challenges that I have
is I don't run off and leave the base man.
I am not leaving Negro people. Man. I got to
get something to eat first. So here's my theory about that.
In this hour, they shot that white woman in her
face in Minnesota, Miss good she's LGBTQ. But in Minnesota
they are locking up black and brown people. That's all
they're looking for, are black and brown people in the
middle of this election. That's all they're looking for. In
Chicago in the middle of this election. That's exactly why
they terrorized DC under the Trump administration. That is exactly
why they're in these blue cities Los Angeles because of
black mayors. We have not seen a white mayor hardly
yet except for what's happening in Minneapolis. Well, I want
to go to the rainbow politics. I want to get
to what's next. But at the end of reconstruction, brother,
we are under attack. Help me with with what's next
in that context, because that is exactly what doctor King
confronted when young people said, I get your dream, Doc,
but do you see what's happening in our streets?
Speaker 1: So I hear what you're saying.
Speaker 3: And in no way am I, you know, saying, in
any way, shape or form, let's leave each other.
Speaker 1: I'm more so.
Speaker 3: Saying how do we lock arms together and how do
we move forward together?
Speaker 1: And not just us?
Speaker 3: Because if we just keep thinking about us, we will
consistently be a minor issue in this country. We have
been trying to do that for sixty years.
Speaker 1: Since doctor King wrote where do we Go from here?
Speaker 3: It's been almost sixty years and we're still having the
same conversation, and we still don't want to hold one
another accountable.
Speaker 1: We still don't want to say, well, hey, what did
we miss in two thousand and eight we had eight years.
Speaker 3: We've seen someone now who's in the President's House, who
over the course of five years, let's just say one year,
because what we've seen right now is in this massive
shift in the last year, is someone who had the
president's House, the House, and the Senate. President Clinton at
one point had the House, the presidency, and the Senate.
President Obama for two years had the House, the presidency,
and the Senate. What we have seen people tell us
all the time what we can't do. We can't do
this because we need to work with the other side,
We need to do this and this and this. And
yet we see someone who is in this office who
has moved an agenda forward incredibly quickly.
Speaker 1: But we are always being told what we can't do.
Speaker 3: At some point unless we want the same thing to
come back or sixty years from now, your great grandchildren
having the same conversation. Some point, we have to recognize
that it's insane to keep doing the same thing over
and over again.
Speaker 1: Why are there so many you talked about before.
Speaker 3: The break that they are these machines that are now
able to cut people's grass. Doctor King, in his book
Sixty Years Ago, talks about automation, talked about how people
would be losing their jobs. Where do we put such
a lack of emphasis on education? Because part of the
issue that we have here is when we're talking about
I mentioned here are the numbers two trillion dollars Hispanic
Latino community, one point six trillion dollars African American that's
nearly four trillion dollars. But we're spenders, We're not producers.
We don't ever ask ourselves about that. And what I'm
saying here now is that not just to recognize where
do we go from here? The question is how do
we want this to look moving forward? And part of
that is, Okay, I know I'm seeing people that are
out there in the streets and people that are organizing
and people that want to march, But what are you
marching for?
Speaker 1: And what is your demand?
Speaker 3: Let me ask you this question to two point folks,
can I just let me just finish this point I
mentioned in the beginning November third, twenty twenty six. I
would love to see our radio stations like Taviss, I
would love to see our churches, our communities, our mosque,
our churches, our synagogues. I would love to see organizations
saying we're gonna march to go vote, because that's one
thing that we can affect the difference. But if we're
just saying we're just gonna go march in the streets
and we're gonna confront people and we're gonna get hurt.
I'm not saying that they're for some people, that is
what they want to do, and I'm not telling them
not to do it. But what I am saying is,
let's figure out how we're gonna get out of this together,
not just how we're gonna go vote together as black people,
how we're gonna go vote together as Americans to change
the narrative. Because we have congressional members that keep saying
they're gonna do something or they can't do anything when
they're in Congress and they're asking if they can't do it,
it has to be us.
Speaker 2: Well, let me just say this, Satima, I got your
critique of black folk, and I know we got to
come forward in just a moment because nobody will save
us for us. But us has been ingrained in me
since I was a child. That's one of my father's
all time refrains. Nobody will save us for us but us.
But the reality is, even when we turn to each
other as a community and look for solutions, everyone is
still an individual oning off of individual consumer patterns. In
the United States, doctor King says that materialism is a
problem because we focus on ourselves and what we have
and we don't see the collective. Hey, I get it,
I get it. Here's the problem, though, brother, I believe
racism is real, man, I believe I saint looking for nobody. Listen,
if you didn't open your mouth and let somebody know
you were a brother, they would ask you for your papers.
And those of you who are not paying attention to
a Teaba looks like he's Latina. A Latino? Yeah, anybody
a lot of us do are. My producer looks like
you're a Latina. I'm Jesse Jackson Jr. When we come
forward on kb Late Talk fifteen to eighty, only me
and Tavis look like we from the neighborhood. More on
we come forward on KBI.
Speaker 1: Just cut your hair.
Speaker 2: It's gonna fall out before I cut it. More we
come forward, not forget to download our podcast here at
KBLA Talk fifteen eighty we are on thought provoking Thursdays
in our regular conversations with a Tiba. A Tiba Welcome
forward to the Jesse Jackson Junior Show.
Speaker 1: Good to be here, Jesse.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you a question of tea. But immigration
officers a search assert a sweeping power to enter homes
without a judge's warrant. Memo says, how do you feel
about that?
Speaker 1: It's against the law period. I mean, what they're doing
is wrong.
Speaker 3: But again, you know, my appeal is, you know what
is the message that goes across to rural America to.
Speaker 2: Well before we get to America.
Speaker 1: But there is a reason why I asked no, no, no.
Speaker 2: No, I want to finish this one. I want to
finish this one. You go to rural America, whose homes
do you think they're going in without a warrant? Who
are they looking for? Rural America?
Speaker 1: That's where that's where my point is. See, we can't
we can't combat.
Speaker 3: What's going on right now in urban America without figuring
out how we're going to compete with rural America. And
why do I say that the same healthcare issues that
we face within our cities. They face the same issues
with income inequality, whether not there's a farmer or whatever
they do, they face.
Speaker 1: So the whole piece.
Speaker 3: Of this, and in terms of the country, is to
divide us, is to make us feel and make us
think that, oh, they're just attacking us. Well, Jesse, Jesse,
But if you take us out, if you take us out,
if you take all the immigrants out, who's going to
be left to do the jobs that the people are doing.
So the narrative, the question, the thing that that people
don't talk about is, hey, they want you to do
the jobs because somebody is.
Speaker 1: Going to have to do it.
Speaker 3: Everything won't be automated, everything won't be AI. The reason
why I mentioned what I did, and I'm glad you
talked about doctor King in terms of talking about racism
and militarism and materialism, because I believe that what he
wrote then is is more I'm not going to say
what it's more important, because I didn't live in nineteen
sixty seven, but I know that it is just as
important today as it was then. And part of the
conversation that we have today is that we have more
resources available to us, we have different ways that we
can communicate, and there are more of us now than
there were then. But again we have to figure out
a different message. I grew up, I was born to
parents who had joined the Nation of Islam. My mentality
and the way that I think about things is about
doing for self. I understood in terms of looking at
when we talk about black separatism and black nationalism. Come
on now, that was indoctrinating me at a very early age.
And I also came to understand and to see that
there are also ways, and I'll never forget. Listen to
the stokely Carmichael and perhaps one of, if not the last,
one of the last speeches that he taught, he spoke
at the Washington Convention Center, and I'm pretty certain your
dad was there, but he.
Speaker 1: Said that if you just take this one finger and
you bend it, you can break it.
Speaker 3: But if you put all five of them together, you
have strength, and then there's power and their strength and unity.
And so my message is gonna consistently be as much
as I want to see us be free, we're never
gonna be free of these shackles, and we're never going
to be free of what is going on. And if
we're always basking and faced with fear.
Speaker 1: And my thing is.
Speaker 3: That people are looking for messages of hope, and they're
looking for not just for us to keep talking about
what the issues are. They're looking about what is it
that I can do because the reality is what is
going on right now is crazy. But we're fixed to
our televisions, we're fixed to our social media, and all
we're doing is we're fixed.
Speaker 1: That's what fear is for. That's why they want fear.
Speaker 3: That's why I keep talking about hope because in twenty
sixteen and twenty twenty four, for some reason that we're
not talking about, the country voted for fear. They voted
for fear over hope. Why why did they vote for
fear over hope? I believe doctor King was assassinated because
not because of racism alone. He was assassinated because he
spoke up against militarism. He was also questioning the morality
of the materialism that was going on in this country
and saying that as an African American community, we shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Be asking for the equality that those whites had.
Speaker 3: He was saying that we should be pushing for something
better than that, something that also brought along morality. America
is facing its issues today because it has a problem
with not just corruption, but morality even within our own
communities that we don't want to speak about.
Speaker 2: I absolutely agree with that you get no pushback from me.
I appreciate you keeping hope alive, but I am not
going to ignore and I don't think we can ignore.
Nor am I suggesting that you're ignoring the fact that Ice,
by definition is going are going through communities looking for
brown people, and the Constitution of the United States has
been set aside allowing them to break in people's homes
with masks on without a warrant. That is nothing short
of terror. If that isn't the Jim Crow South, I
don't know what the Jim Crow South is. You might say,
don't call it the Jim Crow South, just call it
something that Ice is doing. Hell no, I can't say that.
Speaker 1: It's not just.
Speaker 2: Black people everywhere, Black people everywhere. What happened to Rosa Parks,
every bus rider felt that what happened to em attil
at Tiba. Every person's who has a child that they
sent South, felt that what happened to George Floyd. Every
Negro in America understood what it meant to have a
police officer's foot on your neck or your neon him.
Speaker 3: What about Nat Turner? What about Harriet Tubman? What about
Frederick Douglas? What about Like we keep talking about the
fifties and sixties as if slavery didn't happen, and what
we are seeing today is the best time for us
to be talking about the connection of capitalism to slavery,
the connection of what we're seeing. These are nothing more
of a slave catchers at some point, I do believe
in my heart that some of them. I'm not saying
all of them are going to turn that some of them.
But the question also is who has dehumanized them to
this extent the fifty thousand dollars that they got signing
bonus and then says that they have to stay there
for five years. We've seen what happened in Germany, whether
the Castapo and others, we all have seen all these
things play out before Jesse.
Speaker 1: But the question remains, where is the hope?
Speaker 3: Where is the hope amid all of this fear, because.
Speaker 1: We're not getting anywhere.
Speaker 3: Even you and I having this conversation about oh well,
we're not talking about the roadsa parks in this way.
Speaker 1: Our issue within our own community is we don't.
Speaker 3: Talk about our history enough, and we act as if
our rights began in the Civil rights movement. We have
to go back to slavery, and we have to remember
that no matter what they try to take out of
their history books, we can still talk about our own
history because we do know that he who controls the
what media controls the narrative, where we can't think the
media can't control us in our homes if we turn
the TV off TV.
Speaker 2: I gotta let, I got, I got, I gotta say
this before we head to the to the next time.
First of all, I'm grateful for your contribution and your conversation,
but in some ways, many of our rights to begin
in the civil rights movement, and they're all under attack.
Americans with Disability Act, part of the Civil Rights Act, LGBTQ.
Speaker 1: Rights, thirteen fourteen Civil Rights Act.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get the human rights.
Speaker 1: We don't get there without thirteen fourteen and fifteen.
Speaker 2: Again, those are constitutional rights, but the statutory rights from
implementation of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments are the
nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act directly attacked just last
week by Donald Trump. He says it was bad for
white folks. Then, so he's coming after the sixty four
Civil Rights Act. He says the same thing about the
Voting Rights Act, and the Court's going to have the
final say on that in short order. I'm Jesse Jackson Junior.
You're listening to conversation with a T. But we'll get
to the fifteenth Amendment next week. More than Jesse Jackson
Junior show T. But thank you for your time. I
appreciate you.
Speaker 1: By yes, all, I appreciate you.
Speaker 2: We're coming back with Johnny Mack on KBLA Talk fifteen