Tillamtiptoldyou.com The podcast about pop culture, black history and spirituality. It's about to be a great vibe. Doctor Till, gone and take it away. Tillamtiptoldyou.
Hey y'all, hey, it's your girl, Tip. Thank you for joining me for another edition of Tillamtiptoldyou. The podcast where I share with you all my musings about black history, black culture, and black spirituality. This is gonna be a relatively short episode because you know what?
I got one topic for today. Dear Tyrese, during Black History Month, come on, bruh. Let's just jump right in. So if you have not seen it, Tyrese went on a Twitter rampage or a Twitter rant the other day.
And I just want to talk about it in the context of, this is Black History Month. Dude, what are you doing? So let me start with, what is Black History Month? Now, we all know by now, hopefully we all know by now, that Black History Month was started by a Dr.
Carter G. Woodson in 1926 as Negro History Week. And it really was designed to be a week where we celebrated all that we knew about black history and culture. It has morphed into an international project that are Black History Month throughout the world, most popularly here in the United States during the month of February.
Now, don't let anybody start that conspiracy theory foolishness. It is intentionally during February by Dr. Carter G. Woodson's design.
But Carter G. Woodson famously argued that if a race had no history, it's still in danger of being exterminated. And as an educator, I can tell you that y'all, we are in trouble. We are in trouble.
The other day, I actually taught on the Tuesday, that was the first, right, February 1st, and actually taught class on that day. In that particular day, instead of calling role as normal, I asked every student to give me at least one black history fact that they knew. I'm gonna tell y'all it was crickets. And for those brave enough to speak up, their understandings of even the things they knew, lacked nuance, were not informed and very superficial.
So for example, one student told me that Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. And when I asked for details about what that dream was, they couldn't tell me any. When I asked for where that speech was made, they really couldn't say.
And as a reminder, I teach college students. And so some of us are worried about what's going to happen as a result of these anti-DI laws, banning books and so on and so forth. I'm here to tell you that if we are just now thinking about that, we're a little late. So we got some fixing to do.
This podcast isn't about that. But I just want to tell you where my headspace was when I read the two weeks by Chariis, excuse me, by Chariis, God forbid him by Dr. Chariisis. I want to say something.
Now again, Winston said that if a race had no history, it stood in danger of being exterminated. In education in particular, we talk a lot about if a children's socialization is controlled by others, those children no longer belong to the community from which they come, right? There's an African proverb that says, when you walk in the footsteps of your father, you learn to walk like him. But what happens when there are no footsteps for you to follow?
Then you may be walking like, whomever is shaping your path. And that's the danger that I think we see happening with Chariis. And so I want to read you some of his quotes. And then I want to tell you what I think is happening.
So it all started, and again, this is during Black History Month, right? It all started when Brother Chariis said, sometimes, I'm quoting from his Twitter, sometimes I wish I was born in Latino. All right, that in and of itself is not a big problem. There are Afro-Latino people, right?
But then he goes on to say, I mean, the Latin community is grounded in family, loyal entrepreneurs, business man and women, literally represent the dreams, the grind, the hustle, doing whatever it takes to stick together against our odds. Now I wish you could see my face I'm making right now. I'm just gonna continue reading from another one of his tweets. And then I'll get into it.
Okay, so quote, I've learned, and I'm reading all the errors. So if you notice some errors in that last tweet, those are his errors, not mine. Let me continue the quote. I've learned a lot about the Muslim community throughout all my travels in the Middle East.
They have a father structure where they honor their fathers. The Middle East, the thinking and the mentality is that they would much rather have a son over a daughter because they know that there is nothing like the leadership of a father and a man being the head of the household. That's the end of the quote that I'm gonna share. Listen, Brother Tyree.
So let me, I had to look up his age because I was like, I really believe he's too young to be talking like this, right? That he should know better. And sure enough, when I looked up his age, he is 45 years old, he was born in whites, California. So he grew up around Black folk, y'all.
Here in the United States. Now here's the thing, your reality, and this is a lesson for all of us. Our reality is partially dictated by the people we spend the most amount of time with. So for example, if you're around educators, you tend to think like an educator, you're exposed to our language or jargon, so on and so forth, you're familiar with the policies that shape US public schools.
If you hang around with doctors, and I'm sure there are some things that you know that the average lay person would not know because it comes up in your conversation. It comes up in your observations. You see these things, you experience these things. So I'm surprised that someone born in whites, California, would think that Latin people somehow have a privilege on hustling, right?
I'm just pulling one thing out of his tweet, but that you would put that on, Latinx people, not saying that they don't have it, but then you say it in a comparative way, as if we don't. Brother Tyree's, what black folk were you around and whites? They didn't know how to hustle. What black folk have you but around period?
They don't know how to hustle. I mean, that's part of the reality of being a marginalized population in a capitalist society. You have to know how to make ends meet. I'm not sure where, now I wanna also add these two things, and I'm gonna get all the way into this.
Tyree's has been married twice, right? In both of the relationships, he has been very vocal about the problems in them. So he was married to Norma Mitchell from 2007 to 2009, and again to Samantha Lee from 2017 to 2020. And as far as I know, he's not married now.
Listen, let me go back to the first book. I mean, the Latin community is grounded in family, loyal. Brother Tyree's, you only married to Norma for two years. Did you privilege family then?
Were you loyal to her or Samantha? You were only married two for three years? I'm not saying that he wasn't, because I don't know. My mother always says, you don't know somebody's marriage unless you got a key to the front door.
So I'm not pretending to know if there were any infidelity or anything like that, but I'm saying I feel empathy for Tyree's. Who are you around? Let me go back to the quote. Latin community is grounded in family, loyal entrepreneurs, businessmen and women.
What, you don't know, Tyree, you and Black Hollywood, you don't know Black business owners? No stylists work with you? We know producers have worked with you. Black producers have worked with you.
They're not businessmen, they're not business women. Are all your tax people not Black? Maybe they're not, I don't know. But it just surprises me that someone could be in a community that has these Black representations of these various life forms that he's celebrating in another culture and not seeing them.
Now I'm not even getting into the fact that he obviously doesn't know there's a difference between race and ethnicity, that one can be Black and Latinx. He didn't go to school, so I'm not excusing that. That's a whole nother problem. But what I'm saying is he's acting as if the Black community does not have these things, as if he's not a Black father.
So if you're saying that you like Islamic or Muslim culture because the father is privileged, what have you done to be privileged in the lives of your children? Or in the lives of community children? I don't have children, but I try to live in such a way that they learn to respect Black women, right? And I'm never gonna criticize Black folk for one or two knuckleheads in the community.
What do you mean you wish you were born something else? It's really sad to me that he has no examples around him that demonstrate all of these things he's listing out of characteristics of, as characteristics of Latinx culture. I also the characteristics that have sustained Black folk as long as we've been in the belly of the beast, right? We could not, the civil rights movement could not have been what it was except that Black entrepreneurs, Black homeowners put their property on the line to make bail for people, that Black homeowners created safe spaces or activists to sleep when they were in other cities.
I mean, I don't understand how you can talk about loyalty, knowing that everything that was done to separate Black families during the period of childhood slavery in this country, that one of the first things Liberated Africans did was take out newspaper ads to help find family. Like that was the first big literacy thing that we did in the States was create these ads to try to find one another. We wrote letters to try to locate children and spouses and other family members that were lost through the trade. Does he not know, he may not know that.
And that goes back to Woodson's point, that if we don't know who we are, we can cease to exist. One of the most troubling things that I hear some young people say is, I don't wanna watch another slave movie. I'm tired of that trauma. I'm tired of learning the same stuff.
Baby, but you don't know the stuff. You're saying you're tired of it, but there's nothing to evidence you've ever been exposed to it. Now I would be tired. I am tired of the way King has reduced two or three lines of one speech, right?
And not the brilliant fiery rhetoric that he was really known for. I'm tired that you think Mama Rosa was just tired. Okay, I'm tired that you know Fannie Lou Hamer, but don't know any details of her life. And I've discussed it that Tariis does not think black folk are entrepreneurs, loyal, and value all members of the family to include fathers.
That is an indictment on all of us. That what we must do is to call in everybody, right? I was angry initially when I read the tweets. Cause I'm like, brother, during black history month, then you all say this stuff.
One, you say it's a foolishness, but number two, you gonna say this foolishness during black history month? Come on, man. But then the teacher probably activated, right? And I'm like, he doesn't know.
He doesn't know. Maybe he does not know who we are. And that's an indictment on the public school system. It's an indictment on pop culture.
It's an indictment on the black folk in his circles. He deserves our empathy and our calling in that we do not accept such a pathological narrative from him or anyone else, right? That it is our responsibility to expose all of the community, to the brilliance, to the light, to the resilience, to the strength, to the innovation and creativity, to the hustle of black folk. We all deserve to know to celebrate those things.
We all deserve to know that they are ours. See what happens if we no longer teach our children that this is who we are, then they can become like Tyrese and think that these characteristics are rightfully somebody else's, because they don't know themselves and when you don't know yourself, somebody else can tell you who you are. Now I'm not just talking about Tyrese anymore, y'all. If you have not taken the time to know yourself, the media can tell you you're not light enough to be beautiful.
If you don't know yourself, the overly zealous Christian nationalist can tell you that you don't have a relationship with God and you might believe it because you don't know yourself. So I'm gonna close out. I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this. I just want you to reflect on what it is you do in your day to day life to help evidence to the rest of the community, who we are and who we have the potential to be.
I'm gonna read you John Henrik Clark's famous quote about history. Y'all know, if you don't know, he's one of my favorite scholars, like Mama Zora, W.E.B., John Henrik Clark, A.C.H.H.A., you know my type four, M.Wally Bushu, that's my type five, right? Let me just read you one of my favorite quotes about John Henrik Clark on Black History. He says, history is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day.
It is a compass they use to find themselves on a map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be. That's all I really wanna talk about today. I hope y'all have a beautiful, beautiful rest of your day.
Tell them to talk to you.