39 | Made You Look | For Real, For Real
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We're about to get into another episode of Black History For Real. For Real, for real. Where we chronicle the stories of movers and shakers from Black history all around the world. The stories will inspire you, educate you, and more often than not, leaving you shaking your damn head.

I'm Francesca Ramsey. And I'm Conscious Lee. Francesca, I'm going to keep it real with you. Okay. That sounds like every other episode of this podcast, but please hit me. No, I try. I try. But I've always had weary feelings about old Halloween and it being right around the corner and I'm a little creeped out and I got some things I want to get out of my chest. Okay. Wow. All right. Tell us how you really feel. Halloween is a holiday that's for children. So I'm not sure what you're creeped out about.

see, you know, usually when we start talking about Halloween in a Western way, we start thinking about them spirits and whether we're talking about the spirits from a Western context or a non-Western context, I don't like to play around. Yeah. But not all spirits are bad. Not, not everyone's spirits. You think that's, that's, that's, that's good that we talk about for Halloween specifically, because I don't, I don't remember Jesus being evoked for Halloween. No, no, no. I'm not, I mean,

I mean, it just doesn't mean only in the context of Halloween because our ancestors could be considered spirits as well. I mean, we did just do an entire arc on Afro-Latinos. And, you know, lots of Afro-Latinos are turning back to the religions of their ancestors. Oh, like what you mean? Give me some examples. Like Santeria or Regala de Ocha or even voodoo.

Okay. Okay. You might got me now. You might got me because I know I ain't got nothing against voodoo and I'm very well aware of how much it is pathologized within the Western society. So I wasn't thinking that deep, I guess. So maybe I thought I was going to get deep, but you might have beat me to the depths.

Okay, the tables have turned. The turbos have tabled. Yeah, see, I was thinking of spirits like, you know, the Ouija board type shit. You know, voodoo gets a bad rap usually. People who don't really know about the religion hear the word voodoo and they start shivering in their boots. They start clutching pearls and getting tighty whities and panties out in a bunch. You know what I'm saying? There are a lot of whack ass assumptions when it comes to that old voodoo, hoodoo.

There are a lot of different connotations when you use the word voodoo, but in reality, voodoo connects all the way back to the African continent. But the religion, as we know it today in the US, has its origins in Louisiana by way of Haiti. It was brought to the US by enslaved black people from the island.

The slaves were not allowed to practice voodoo. They had Catholicism forced upon them. So they did something pretty ingenious. They would substitute the Catholic saint for their voodoo spirit force, their loa or their orisha. I know Beyonce had everybody thinking about orishas when she had the lemonade going on with the bat and the yellow stuff and the water and, you know what I'm saying, I guess the orisha goddess. Yeah.

- Yeah, I mean, it's just also a really good example of how anything that is associated with black people gets demonized and misinterpreted to be evil when we don't actually think about, well, how is it that Christianity and Catholicism were pushed onto enslaved people and people were not able to actually practice their original religions?

I'm just very impressed by the ingenuity of Black people throughout history, always finding a way to get around the rules in order to be who they really are. Yeah, yeah. I think that the way we were able to infuse a lot of spirituality into Western ideas of religion, to me, it shows not only our survivability, but I think that our resiliency and ingenuity and how we're able to just...

Keep on keeping on, even when everything around us is trying to stop it. Absolutely. As usual, making a way out of no way. And honestly, the people who practice voodoo might be a little bit more

a little less egocentric when it comes to religion because they're not out here proselytizing or trying to force people to convert. - And one of the core tenets of the faith is God ain't sitting around paying attention to every little single thing humans do. I feel that, but just 'cause God ain't all in our business don't mean spirits and the ancestors ain't paying attention. You're being watched. God is watching you. The ancestors is watching you. Always keep that in mind.

Part of voodoo, though, is communing with the spirits, with music, with dance and ritualistic change. I got some thoughts about why voodoo gets such a bad rap in the U.S., but I want to hear from you first. Let me hear your analysis.

I mean, like I said before, the fact that it's associated with Black people, I would say is first and foremost why it has been seen as primitive or scary or otherworldly, like you're communicating with dead people or evil spirits. I would also say like film and TV. So often when you see voodoo referenced...

It's some scary figure with a voodoo doll sticking pins into it and somebody on the other side of the country or the other side of the world is jerking around. And it's shown as a way to manipulate and harm others rather than an actual cultural and religious practice. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we might have our Afro-Latina family to thank for the research of voodoo, but we got other things to thank them for too. Some of them things just left your boyfriend a little, not only humble, but it's very thought provoking. Yeah.

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She talking about voodoo got me feeling like I did after the episodes on Afro Latinos. Learned about Pele, learned about Celia Cruz, learned about Gwen Ifill.

It really showed me that I have a lot more things in terms of the textures of Blackness that I can explore and get to understand more different ways of how Black folks are positioned throughout the diaspora or throughout the world. With that being said, I think when it comes to Black history for real, we can talk about how we get a little humbled every episode. There's always something that I didn't realize I didn't know. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know.

Me, humbled. Okay, that is something that is new for me. But maybe you do have a point. Look, I'm not against admitting a little humility when required. Yeah, I'm for them like we got a whole thing that could be introduced, you know? Okay, I'm not really sure where you are going with this, but let's hear it. It's time to get into a little segment. I'm going to call this segment, I've Been Humbled. Yeah, I've Been Humbled.

Okay, you, exactly, you, you have been humbled, conscious. Myself, on the other hand, I'm not so sure. Now, go vote now, Frankie. Don't act brand new. You ain't gonna act like there ain't nothing that surprised you or caught you off guard. Like, oh, I didn't realize that. You keep telling me I'm the only one. No, okay, I think it's the phrasing that's, you said humbled, okay? Nothing about learning something new, okay? But since you're going to insist, I,

I was really surprised about Celia Cruz beefing with the government. Like, I didn't realize that she was essentially, you know, like, persona non grata for a minute. And, like, Castro wasn't messing with her. Like, that was really news to me. I didn't realize...

that Fidel Castro was super duper complex as much as he was. I had to go back and revisit it. What I'll say is that Celia Cruz having to fight for her own ownership in terms of her performance to make sure it didn't become like property of the state. I get how that could have been very strenuous for her to navigate. If you haven't checked out those episodes, definitely go check out that episode.

Yeah, I mean, her resilience and standing up for herself and the ownership of her music, especially in the face of a dictator, was really scary and took extreme guts. And even just knowing that her music was banned was...

for most of her life was really like something that I just did not see coming in her story at all. What about you? What are some things that you learned and I guess were humbled by as surprising new information for you? The whole story of Pele?

Felt this whole story. I heard about him growing up. And even though I'm from Texas, I feel like, you know, being in my little small town, it was more like football and basketball. So really getting to see how much of an impact that he had on the sport at such a young age and just seeing how he was an international icon that had to go through so many trials, tribulations. And I feel like he was one of those people that got put into a hard rock and a hard spot.

He was obviously black, but he wasn't able to explicitly talk about being black. So he had to do it in different ways. And for me, it really intrigued me. It really caught me off guard and really made me think about how a lot of black figures are like damn near always already the black elephant walking in the room. We can talk about it, but we can't acknowledge it. We can admit it, but we can't point at it. You know what I'm saying? It was very mind blowing.

I like to be very mindful of not coming off like my people call in Texas, the gringos, but I want to just acknowledge, you feel me, from a very linguistic, phonetic standpoint that I try my best in trying to speak the Spanish. You know, I'm a Texan. I'm a proud Texan. I love being from Texas. And I thought me being in closer proximity to Spanish speaking populations, that the vernacular would just be a little better. But I felt like I should have maybe took those high school Spanish classes a little bit more.

But she was doing her thing, though. I feel like it was sometimes I was like, oh, shit, okay. Thank you for saying that because I similarly felt challenged about the Spanish portions. And I will say I also felt embarrassed because I am a Floridian and I grew up around a lot of Spanish-speaking people. I did take Spanish in.

in high school, but I'm embarrassed to admit I cheated in Spanish. I think back to the hoops that I jumped through in order to cheat in Spanish, and I should have been putting that time into just learning the language.

Because now I really regret that I don't speak Spanish and I'm so jealous of my friends that are fluent. But it's something that I really want to work on. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something that we definitely could work on in trying to bridge the divide. We know these days, especially on social media, man, the division be going in between folks not understanding the difference between race, ethnicity, and nationality.

So they be just literally lost in the sauce, thinking, thinking deeply about shallow shit, drowning in their own understanding. We know that this divide happened with the same thing with like, you know, Cardi B, her being Afro-Latina or her having statements in the past where she's talked about being black, but not being black, but being black. I feel like it just starts to add a whole bunch of noise and sounds and dialogue, creating a whole bunch of confusion, man.

Yeah, it's really frustrating that this continues to be a constant conversation around Cardi. I really just wish that we could just dance it out like the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz. But sometimes this same confusion happens around members of the Black community that are a little bit lighter complected as well. If you red boat, if you light skin, there's always this conversation of, are you Black enough? Yeah.

On my mama, you know, I'm a little exhausted, but I think there is always a conversation that I'm willing to have because there's so many people that become displaced and or feel like they have no place, you know, in the community based off of how we talk about it.

Yeah. And like you said, it often comes back to this idea of ethnicity and race. And, you know, I don't even think we've really talked about the one drop rule on this show. But the idea that anybody gets to determine how black somebody is, is, you know, upholding white supremacy. It's just a tool to divide us when in reality, it's

You're still going to be seen as black. You're not going to be able to worm your way out of your black identity just because in certain spaces people are trying to police how black you actually are.

And the authenticity test has always been whack. And ethnicity and race, they whooping people ass. With a belt, with a switch that you had to go pull from the tree yourself. But for real, they're just not the same. So as a reminder, race is a social construct based on outward physical appearances versus ethnicity, which is cultural. And it's why people can be both Black and Latino. It's not either or. It's a yes and.

It's a yes and. And white supremacy wants us to believe that being black is always limited. That's why I try to correct people instead of saying black or black and. There's a huge erasure that happens within the black community, specifically when it comes to Afro-Latina family members. And I think that it gets wrapped up into like American exceptionalism. We know that technically, you know, Spanish, Portuguese, English,

All these are European colonial languages that we speak via colonialism. And I think that sometimes in America, we get we get we get lost in the source of coloniality and we start being like our colonial language is better than yours. And as a result, I think it kind of pushes that erasure. But I also recognize, too, that anti-blackness is so pervasive that even within the Latino community, there is sometimes a a a.

a hesitation to acknowledge how there are Afro-Latinos in that community. So it sounds to me like there's a anti-Black erasure that happens both inside the Black community and outside the Black community where those Black intersectional folks, those Afro-Latinos, you know what I'm saying, get the short end of the stick.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I feel like there's that recurring joke on social media of like, I'm not black, I'm Dominican. I'm not black, I'm Dominican. It's like, sorry to tell you, the hair has got a little kink in there, the nose, the skin, like you, you want to us. Yeah.

I know black. I know black. I know black. I know black. Let's unpackage, you know what I'm saying, the words of Malcolm X. Who taught you to hate this idea of being black? I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It is anti-blackness in one way or another. I will argue in some instances, if anti-blackness and colonialism ain't brothers and sisters, they're like first cousins. You know what I'm saying? It's all connected, all interconnected. And we see

Our sister Celia Cruz, you feel me? She had to do a lot of tying things together and battling through anti-Blackness and colonialism. We know the queen of salsa. She experienced it not only firsthand, but in many instances she was able to prevail.

As somebody that studied a lot about Pan-Africanism and as somebody that's learned a lot about politics through the American lens, she was beefing with Fidel Castro. She was really big beefing with Fidel Castro. And the Cuban president has had a very checkered past, you know what I'm saying? To say the least. I'm sure we got some thoughts. You got some thoughts?

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I'm Erlon Woods. I'm Nigel Poore. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia. When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California. And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast.

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All right, Conscious, you just brought it up. And I know that you have been dying to talk about Fidel Castro. You named the segment earlier, I've Been Humbled. How about we consider Maybe I Was Wrong as the title of this next segment. And I will say that that could be for you and I, the proverbial I. It could be both of us. It could be the listeners.

So let's jump into a little history real quick. When Fidel was coming up, Cuba was run by this authoritarian dictator named Fulgencio Batista. Dude was obsessed with gaining approval from the upper classes. He consolidated power, shut down the free press, and even became cool with the American mobsters in Havana.

Yeah. Yeah. And after a while, the Cuban people was suffering, big suffering. And when Batista grabbed power, America just looked the other way. It didn't matter how he treated people as long as he wasn't communist. This is back when it was the Cold War.

This is the political fight between Western ideology and communism. You know, the Red Scare, McCarthyism, that whole thing was at its peak. Fidel wasn't cool with all that. And America was cool that Fidel wasn't cool with all that. I'll say that history lesson. Go follow me somewhere else for that. But listen, man, this is around the time when Fidel Castro started not to like the United States because that was turning a blind eye to the suffering of his people as long as it wasn't communism. He built units like guerrilla rebels to be able to go against Batista.

By the end of 1958, Batista fled Cuba. Fidel rode triumphantly into Havana, and he was a hero to some people. But over in America, if you ask more than one person about Fidel Castro, you'll get more than one reaction. It's hard to argue that part of the reason that the U.S. didn't like him is because he was a communist and allied with the former Soviet Union, the country that we, of course, now call Russia. Russia. Russia.

See, United States wasn't cool about being friendly with no communists, especially having the communists within the Western hemisphere they already thought they cornered the market on. And it's why they helped Batista stay in power so damn long. And the thing about Fidel, the thing about Fidel is when we talk about him in the West,

We usually run into this power bias thing that strips the autonomy of Cuban government away from Cubans, and we only view it through the friendly, allied eye of America. When we are more likely to believe people in power over those without as much, it's

It's a power bias. And we see this in the news all the time. Whenever the police kill someone, too many reporters take the cop's word as gospel. You also see this in news headlines when there's like passive headlines or, you know, there was an officer involved shooting. It automatically favors the person in power, which again is an example of that power bias.

Yeah. On my daddy and my mama in the United States, the power of bias shows up at every instance when we talk about history, especially when we think about who gets to make the history and how that history is capitulated, you know? So given that, what exactly are your thoughts on why we have such a negative view of Fidel in the United States?

I think that American imperialism is all about who's going to play friendly with America. And the fact that the Bay of Pigs, you know what I'm saying, during Kennedy's time with us trying to invade and get it and Fidel Castro not conforming to the power, I think that has a lot to do with how we view him out West because he wasn't friendly to America.

American diplomacy and spreading of democracy within the island. And, you know, we were really trying to make sure that no communism, no Soviet Union influence was that close to America because we believe it to be spies. But I think the hypocrisy of democracy of it comes is that view that we have like

80 to 100 different American bases all surrounding the Soviet Union. And we see it as being cool, but we saw the potentiality of influence. For one base. Being able to, like literally a sign of war. And I think that we all just inherited this perspective.

Yeah, I think it's also an instance of multiple things can be true. Like, I don't think we need to whitewash who Fidel Castro was, but I think in the United States... He was a dick-sized guy.

acknowledgement of how we've gone into other countries and fucked shit up. Like, you know, excuse my French, but like, we just, there's always like this, this idea of like, we've always been the good guys. We're always just and right. And I would say, you know, like,

Even in most recent years, I feel like a lot of people are having their eyes opened to the way that the United States has meddled in other people's politics and also turned a blind eye when it's convenient to them while simultaneously...

being like the hall monitor of the whole world. Like we're so quick to be like, you guys are doing the right thing while we're, you know, not treating our own citizens fairly back home. So again, I think when it comes to Fidel Castro, I think it's just really difficult for people to acknowledge that like the perception that we have of him is not completely well-rounded because it doesn't actually acknowledge that

Like who the United States has always been. And, you know, if we're going to keep it real, continues to be. Well, not only continue to be, it's really like the American government and the entity of America believes that it should only have, it should be the only quote unquote major European influence within, you know what I'm saying, the Western industry. So when you said, excuse my French accent,

It really made me think about how literally through the entire of the West Indies or the Caribbean, whether we're talking about, hey, there was control by the French. We're talking about Cuba. There was control by Spanish. So, you know, I'm saying it's like that there is an allegiance that the American government believed for the constituents of these islands and countries to pledge allegiance to America. And if you didn't.

If you ain't kissed the ring, you got to see the guillotine. And for me, it's like making sure, like you said, we're not trying to sanitize or romanticize Fidel Castro at all. But it is worthwhile acknowledging that Batista was spilling blood of Cuban peoples.

And America was turning the eye. But when Fidel Castro came in, it was Cubans. All of a sudden, we started becoming Cuban humanitarians. It's like, no, you don't care. You're using the suffering of Cuban people to push your political agenda. I think that's bad. We can be critical of that without trying to justify the suffering and obliteration of Cuban people. That's what I think. Yeah, absolutely. And again, multiple things can be true.

Two different people got two different responses. Former U.S. diplomat Wayne Smith thinks that Fidel will be remembered because he stood up to the United States and survived. Yeah, he did survive a whole bunch of assassination tips, but we still do have other people like the Cuban-American professor Marifeli Perez-Stable, who cannot ignore the thousands...

thousands of executions that took place under Fidel's regime or the 40 to 45,000 people held as political prisoners. So we don't have time to get into the fullness of his legacy, but do you think we are wrong in America with how we view Castro?

I think so. I think that if we have so much capacity to be able to view the good and bad when it comes to analyzing the regime of America, no matter whose presidency we were under, I think that we should have that same decorum and tenacity when it comes to being able to view the full legacy of Fidel Castro and not just him being an arch enemy of Western powers, i.e. America.

I think there is a multiplicity of things of who he was. And it's like without trying to paint him as just great savior revolutionary, being able to view the good and the bad that he did. Because I feel like every president that was running America under during Fidel's regime, if he was doing an impact calculus, I must say that there's probably more blood being spilled with furthering empire building in America than whatever Fidel Castro was trying to do in Cuba.

And if we say that bloodshed matter, if we say that terrorism matter, if we say that corruption matter, then don't just try to always point that finger at foreign entities.

With the splinters, and we got full-blown logs here in America. That's what I would say when it comes to Castro. It becomes a good versus bad paradigm with the expense of America always being seen as good, with whoever running Chuba always being seen as bad. And to me, I ain't with it. You know who probably would have had some thoughts about this man if she still was living? Who would that be? Gwen Ifill.

The icon. The truth teller. You know what I'm saying? I ain't even going to lie. I had no idea who she was recently because I ain't know her name. But once I started seeing her face and we was doing an episode, I'm like, oh, man.

This is what we're talking about. It made me think intersectionally about that Afro-Indigenous erasure of women. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I knew who she was, but I did not know that she was Afro-Latina. But I mean, just hearing her story was really incredible. And again, goes back to the thing that we were saying about race and ethnicity tripping folks up.

It seems like that part of her story is not widely discussed. And my thinking is, how many people did not actually understand that she was or know that she was Afro-Latina? She was a Panamanian and Barbadian, I think is what it was. It got me thinking about that Panama Canal. I'll say that for another episode as well. But it's like, hey, America gonna throw its weight around. And that's the reason why I think conversations about Afro-Latina specifically is a very intriguing conversation because you get to

get into the intersections of how wherever they from was corrupt or had its infrastructure being exploited, but also how American government would have its hand up in it. But sis, Gwen Ifill, she broke all kinds of barriers. As an Afro-Latina woman, she hosted Meet the Press, PBS NewsHour. She moderated vice presidential debates and held powerful people accountable at a time where most folks couldn't as a Black woman.

I think the way that she viewed journalism really goes hand in hand with the power stuff that we were talking about, except she did nearly everything she could to not engage in that type of bias. And I'm somebody who has had the privilege of getting to work in news media and also in late night. And so I've kind of like done a little bit of work that dabbles in journalism. I'm

not a journalist, but when I look at the news, sometimes I do see, I mean, if I'm being honest,

most of the time I see a bias towards the powerful and also biases when it comes to racial dynamics. I mean, let's talk about the current election and the way that our news media is talking about Donald Trump versus the way that they're talking about Kamala Harris. They're holding her to a very different standard while he gets to be outwardly hostile at times to journalists and other political figures and saying incendiary things.

and making fun of people. And oftentimes the news media, it kind of handles him with kid gloves, if not feeling as if they are afraid of him, like that they are placating him in order to avoid, you know, experiencing his wrath. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that when it comes to how we talk about Kamala Harris versus how we talk about, you know, Donald Trump, there's night and day differences. And I think this conversation about even though she is like black Jamaican, you know what I'm saying? Not Afro-Latina. I think that, you know, the way that Gwen Ifill had to deal with backlash for trying to talk truth to power sometimes reminds me in different ways when Kamala Harris tries to do it.

It's not only closely tied to like objectivity in journalism, but about being real and being able to account for that embedded bias. You know what I'm saying? That's what I think sometimes is missing from mainstream TV and why so many of us influencers on social media is like, because we are being very real and accounting for our life experiences and perspectives and how it might influence our journalism. Whereas a lot of them old school journalists, excluding Gwen, they tried to really play the objectivity in a way that just came off as disingenuous.

you know, being impartial and whatnot. But how Gwen said it, I don't believe in objectivity. I believe in fairness. Everybody brings their own life bias to what they do. People don't ask white males whether they can be objective covering white males, but they ask black females where they can be subjective covering black females. And with that being said, to the people in the back, to the people on this side and the people on this side, if you have

Self-devout white supremacists that believe in the pride and supremacy of white people voting for a man because they believe he aligns with their white supremacist values. You're insulting the intelligence of black people if you automatically assume y'all ain't voting for her because she's black. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Anytime I hear someone use identity politics, I mean, it's not even a dog whistle at this point. It's a foghorn. Because like, yes, identity is part of your daily experience. And it's not unreasonable that people are going to gravitate towards folks who have shared experiences that they do. But let's be real. If every single Black person votes for Kamala Harris, it's not going to make her win the election. She still needs to get votes. Right?

from white people, from Latinos, from indigenous people. She still needs to get votes from a whole host of people that don't look like her. And to your point, there are full-blown white supremacists endorsing Donald Trump. So, I mean, they're saying full stop, we're voting for him because he's a white man and that's who we believe should be in the White House.

On the topic of objectivity and this idea about truth and justice...

The reality is a lot of journalists, it seems, are struggling with that objectivity. I mean, there's so many things where it just seems like everything you read is an opinion piece. And I would also add that I've been really frustrated and worried with the level of media literacy these days. I mean, it just seems like people are really struggling to identify what's actually...

Yeah.

And people really struggling to decipher what's what. And I am frustrated, you know, duly that journalists in many ways seem to be making it harder and harder because people are failing to be objective and just report on the facts. And I realize our biases are going to be inherent whenever we talk about issues that are important to us. But news media has to be held to a higher standard in that respect. Yeah.

Yeah. And a lot of the news media start to show they in here and biases, especially when it comes to racial pathology. When you believe that you have to be very concerned and skeptical when it comes to black people covering black people, because we're going to be biased, recognizing that the default, the national norm.

It's white people covering white people. You know what I'm saying? So for me, it shows how that, when I talk about racial literacy, the ability for people to read in white situations pertaining to race, that there's always some deficit they start black people at, especially when it comes to just how we view our eyes. Not only do we accuse journalists

of inherently not being able to be objective, therefore they're bad journalists. Literally everyday Black folks, if we see a Black person murdered with our own eyes, they'll double check us and say, "Hey man, your eyes is biased. You didn't see what you think you seen. Wait till we have an investigation." It made me really think like, I'm glad we talked about Gwen Ifill. And I'm just really just, I would love if she was around during this whole cycle. And in fact, I would love if she was able to be a moderator

for a VP Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debate.

Do you think Gwen would try to handle him? Do you think Gwen would go for Trump trying to handle her? Hell no. No, no, no. I mean, and it would also, to your point about, you know, Gwen being able to handle him, I think that it would probably really ruffle him because I think he's very intimidated by Black people, but by Black women especially. You know, it's got the double whammy of the racism and the misogyny. And I think he really struggles. I mean, think

about it, I forget what year it was, but when Megyn Kelly was the moderator, a white conservative woman, Donald Trump was losing his mind over her being, he remembered, he's like, oh, you must have blood coming out of your eyes or your whatever. I mean, he

could not even help himself with a journalist who has a long history of being supportive of him just because she was attempting, and I'm not going to give her any cookies because it's still Mike and Kelly, but she was attempting to be objective during the debate and give everybody the same amount of time and

and hold them to the same standard. And he really struggled with it. So I can only imagine that it would be a challenge for Gwen Ifill. - Either way, it definitely got me feeling excited about who we gonna talk about next, what next topic is gonna humble me, and you know, who gonna give me an ability to be thought-provoking about, you know what I'm saying, some black history for real.

Absolutely conscious. I totally feel you. We will do what we can to hold it down for Gwen, for all of you on the history front. Thank you so much for tuning in to this bonus episode of Black History For Real. Yeah, for real. Because, you know, we like to add an extra layer and flavor of rudeness on this. You feel me? See y'all next time. Black is beautiful.

If you like Black History for Real, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

Black History for Real is a production of Wondery. This episode was written by Morgan Givens. Sound design by Lucas Segal. The theme song is by Terrace Martin. Lindsay Gomez is our development producer. The coordinating producer is Taylor Sniffin. Sophia Martins is our managing producer. Our associate producer is Sonya May. Matt Gant and Morgan Givens are the senior producers. The executive producers for Wondery are Marshall Louis, Aaron O'Flaherty, and Candace Monique Azrin.

Juan hacía los quehaceres escuchando merengue. ¡Epa!

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