Tell them to tell you. .com. The podcast about part culture, Black History and spirituality. It's about to be a great part.
Doctor Tim, go and take it away. Tell them to tell you. Hey y'all, hey, it's your girl, Tipp. Thank you for joining me for another edition of Tell them Tipp told you.
The podcast where I give you all my be using about Black culture, Black History, Black spirituality. So today I want to talk about Juneteenth, you know, that's coming up. And I also want to talk about what's going on with critical race theory and education, what I think we should be doing. And then finally, I want to finish up with some, just a brief discussion about Black capitalism.
You ready? Let's just jump right in. So on the 19th, many of us, hopefully all of us, will be celebrating Juneteenth. It's growing in popularity.
I'm happy to see that. If you go on my Facebook or my Instagram pages and you scroll through my videos, you'll probably see a couple from the last few years describing what Juneteenth is. But for those who are relatively new, you know, it's a celebration of liberation. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1862.
It became effective January 1, 1863, but the news didn't reach Galveston, Texas until 1865. And so June 19, 1865 is when we celebrate, is when liberation reached Texas. All right. So as a result of that, we celebrate Juneteenth on June 19.
A couple of things I want to point out to you. If this will be your first celebration, it's typically celebrated with red foods and drinks. So if you're going to celebrate, I'm going to tell you, go ahead and go to the grocery store now. Go ahead and get your red stuff.
You know, we grill meats. And so you got the barbecue sauce that's red. If you watch the documentary, High on the Hall, you heard them talk about using beet juice, because that's the traditional form, using beet juice to dye your cakes. I like doing tea cakes because they're also tied to liberation.
And it's a traditional food for Juneteenth. So tea cakes, red stuff, even red drink. And if you know anything about Hibiscus, we drink that everywhere in the diaspora. So I know the Kroger here in Georgia carries dried hibiscus.
You can use that. Some people call it Jamaica. You can dry that. I boil it down.
I like to put ginger and a little lime in it when it's boiling. Mix it with a little sugar syrup. And it makes a wonderful, refreshing drink. So it's just a hibiscus.
It's red. The red velvet cake, watermelon. A lot of black people amassed a lot of wealth behind watermelon, which is why a negative stereotype was developed to keep us away from the wealth that came from watermelons. But it's just watermelon.
So did I do it all? Grill meats, tea cakes, red velvet cake, and some kind of red drink. Now, you know, Kool-Aid. I'm telling you the traditional form would have been something like Hibiscus.
But you know, I'll get you some Kool-Aid, some red pop, whatever you like. And celebrate Juneteenth. It really is a day for us to remember what we're supposed to get as a human. Right?
Freedom is a human entitlement. It's not something special that should be. Only granted to certain people. It's a human entitlement.
So let's celebrate it. Celebrate our efforts to get it. Let's not confuse the day with the so-called Emancipation Proclamation, which really didn't do nothing. African people self-regulated.
I'm sorry. Self-liberated through self-regulation. But you know, never forget that, all right? So if you're interested in celebrating Juneteenth, go ahead and start gathering your materials.
I'll probably send out a reminder email to my email list serve. If you're not on it, please get on it. You can get on it. If you're on Instagram by clicking the link in my bio, my Instagram account is TiffanyDPhD.
Or, you know, make sure you're on the email list for the website, which is www.telemptulge.com. I'll probably send out a recipe or two, some kind of prep materials and some reading resources to learn more about Juneteenth. Matter of fact, if you're on the email list, an email is going out today with some reading resources. So that's there.
But I just wanted us to be ready. You know, as the old people say, stay ready. You don't have to get ready. Go ahead and prepare for Juneteenth.
And let me say this about Juneteenth before we move on. What's interesting to me is that most enslaved Africans were freed before June 19th. However, black folk in the United States celebrate on June 19th. You know what that means to me?
That's somewhere deep within our spirits. We understand that none of us are free and to all of us are free. And I think that's a beautiful sentiment and a wonderful reminder, right, of what liberation truly is. This is Pride Month.
And, you know, in our communities, we got a lot of hang ups about sexuality. I don't think there are our indigenous hang ups. That's a whole other story. I think that's a colonized enslaved after effect, right?
And we can have that discussion later. But please understand that you cannot want liberation for black people if you don't want gay, that people to be free. All right. It ain't about some of us.
It's about all of us. I just wanted to put that there. So happy Juneteenth coming. Let's talk about this critical race theory thing.
I'm not going to stay long on today's podcast because I really want you to be one. Prep and for Juneteenth and two, thinking about this conversation. So critical race theory is being attacked by conservative groups. If you just Google it, you'll find all kind of crazy stuff.
But what came across my desk this week was like an informational booklet that they're disseminating. Right-wing conservative groups are disseminating. And it presents critical race theory as this very divisive thing that's being taught in US public schools. So I just want those, I'm not speaking to people who think like that.
I'm not defending that truth because anyway, I just want those of you who are curious about critical race theory to be informed and to know what you should be doing. So here's the thing. Critical race theory is old. It's about, it's with 80s.
It's an old critical race theory is not new. That alone should tell you that these people are not really concerned about critical race theory so much as they're trying to censor information. It's from the 80s. It's not being taught.
If you think it's being taught in your school system, all you have to do is go to your state board of education website, look up the standards that are being taught and review the standards. I can promise you as a teacher educator, you ain't going to find it. Especially in the state of Georgia. It's not there.
It's not there. Okay. I'm getting off on the tangent. Critical race theory was born from critical legal studies which looked and examined the laws and proposed that all laws in the United States are built primarily to protect white male moneyed people.
All right. And that they have been since the founding of this country. That's the study that critical legal studies generated, right? Was this framework of examining laws because if they're built to protect this particular population, then they have to have a component of race built into them.
Okay. Derek Bell introduces critical race theory as an extension of critical legal studies. Again, it had a legal framework. So it's a way of looking at systems around you and identifying through critical reflection, power distribution.
Okay. Now, because we live in the United States, a lot of just by virtue of how the country was founded, power distribution plays into it. You cannot be stealing land from one people and slaving another people and think that the laws have nothing to do with race and ethnicity. Right.
You just can't do it. You can't examine history. Devoid of race because different kinds of people contribute to history. All right.
So when they talk about teaching history without teaching race, it's impossible. If you just think about how would you teach the period of enslavement without race? How would you teach Japanese internment without race? How do you teach the Jewish Holocaust without race and ethnicity?
You can't. So I want I want us to be lesser focused on the buzz word that they're giving it, which is critical race theory, which has nothing to do with what they're really doing. What they're doing is censoring information and it's an element of authoritarianism. That's where our focus needs to be.
You don't get to tell us what happened. And that's what they're trying to do is to prevent you from seeing the patterns of their own behavior. Because if you see the patterns of their behavior through a critical examination of the history, then you can predict their moves, their strategies become apparent, and you know how to respond to it. I think many of us laugh about the uneducated Trump voter, right?
There's a reason why they're attacking truth in schools right now. Because if you know the truth, it is harder for you to be manipulated. They're trying to censor information. That's what this is.
And the pamphlet that I saw had these synonyms, right? They had a list of quote unquote synonyms, other words associated with critical race theory. Now here's where it gets dangerous, right? So these politicians are putting in the law critical race theory, which you know, I'm kind of okay with that because what they themselves don't know is we're not teaching that anyway.
So you put it in there that I can't teach it. That's fine. I ain't no lawyer. I don't teach in law school.
Do you understand what I'm saying? So let them use that term. But what's dangerous is in these pamphlets where they're unpacking it even deeper is they're associating it with terms that have nothing to do with, they actually on the list that I saw and I'm not going to give the website because I don't want you to click it and give them clicks on the website. But I'll probably put some screenshots on my social media.
They had social emotional learning. Now let me say something about social emotional learning. From the name you can tell it has really nothing to do with race, not even power that much. It has to do with student agency, student well-being, the ability to self-regulate.
You remember what I said earlier about self-regulation and self-liberation, right? But it has that built into it. Not only that, social emotional learning has been linked to an 11% increase in academic achievement among students. They are beginning to associate, we call it SEL, SEL with critical race theory.
Now if they're able to do that and the law says you can't teach critical race theory, then these wonderful strategies, this tool of social emotional learning could be stripped from restorative justice which seeks to disrupt the school to prison pipeline through introducing a new way of dealing with schools and discipline issues. They're linking that to critical race theory. Multilingualism was on the list, y'all. Multicultural education was on the list.
Cultural response of teaching is on the list. And if you work in education, you're recognizing some of these terms and it should worry you. Because these are best practices in education. This is what we know works for students and they're linking it to something that they can't even define.
And they're not even trying to describe these interviews. You should be clear by now that they don't know what critical race theory is. All they keep saying is divisive and it teaches you to hate white people which is a total misunderstanding and misrepresentation of critical race theory. Right?
They also understand, I don't even know if there's a misunderstanding so much as they're presenting it as something being taught in schools. When any educator, if they're a law school, unless they work in a law school, they'll tell you we don't teach that. Okay, so here's what I wanted to say. I mean, was it Texas I saw?
They even talk about making teachers wear body cams and then the teacher will get fined like 10,000 hours if they get caught. I mean, what the hell y'all? And it's so subjective because they're not defining it based on the research around critical race theory. It's so subjective that if they wanted to get rid of a teacher for teaching the truth about history, they could.
Right? That's the danger in this is the censoring of information. Now, let me say this master teacher is going to teach period. You never got to worry about Tiffany Denise Poe not doing what she's supposed to do in a classroom.
Let that be said right now. How's an ever? Let me also say this. If you don't understand by now that we need our own educational institutions, please the pamphlet that I'm telling you that I read this week, it had a whole section on how to take over your school board.
Now, because of that, I'm going to be doing a webinar. I haven't decided when or where yet, but I'm going to be doing a webinar on the same information how to take over your school board, why you need to control your school board and what the school board does because some of you hear me saying they're trying to take over the school boards and you don't really understand how powerful that is. So I want to unpack that for you. But let it be known that the school board is the primary body that's responsible for interpreting curriculum.
They also set the job descriptions for teachers and other staff in place. They have the authority to hire and fire. They control the budget. They control the textbooks.
And so forth. So your school board is extremely important. They also set the disciplinary policies for our school. Extremely important.
And yes, we need to control them. If you look at your local school board, I'm willing to bet that maybe one or two of them are educators, career educators. Everybody else is kind of like a good old boy and businessman. And I'm specifically using the male gender right now.
All right. So just to be very cognizant of we need to be watching school boards and paying attention to those elections. All right. I'm going to be unpacking that later.
But we need our own institutions because when you start examining these things and you look at this anti intellectualism that is flowing right now, it should be apparent that we got to have our own spaces. We have to have our own spaces. If you are not informed enough to provide supplemental education for your students, you need to find it somewhere. Like I'm not asking your kids out of public schools right now.
But I am saying if you're going to leave them in public schools, you have to make sure that there is a way for them to get with. They're not going to get there because they're not going to get it. I'm also going to say this. Oh, baby, I'm going to say this.
All your skin folk ain't your kinfolk. I know you've heard Zora Noherson's quote by now, but let me say it to you this way. There are going to be black people offering you tutoring and supplemental education who don't know shit about their history. And all they're going to be doing is regurgitating what already happens in US public schools.
That's not the kind of supplemental education I'm talking about. Those are not the alternative institutions I'm talking about. I'm talking about an alternative and or supplemental institution that can provide information to your family and your community about who we really are, our potential and the system. Okay.
All right. I don't want to preach right there. Listen, this is something near and dear my heart. I'm not trying to get all the way on the soapbox, but we can't talk about Jun TV, y'all, about efforts to get free unless somebody else defined freedom for you.
That shouldn't happen. We can't talk about that in the same context. You cannot say you want to replicate Tulsa and I'm going to next and somebody else teach. That's why half of y'all are just learning about 1921 and Tulsa.
That's why half of that population is just not learning that Tulsa wasn't the only black wall street in this country. And some of y'all, even fewer, are just learning that they destroyed all of them. It's because they censor the information you're taught. Look at the, I'm telling y'all go to the standards for your state.
If you don't believe that, meet greasy. Go to the standards for your state. Look in the standards for history, social studies, so on and so forth and see what they're teaching your kids. It's no wonder they don't know anything about their culture.
It's not in the standards. And let me say this as a teacher, educator, because it's not in the standards. A lot of the teachers don't even know what's missing, missing to fix it. That's why another teacher who taught them.
I'm getting off that soap box. I want to go to Tulsa. I know this is about to lead me to a whole other soap box, but I believe it's all related, so follow me. Ever since the watchman episode, Tulsa, it's beginning to enter international consciousness in a way that it never has before.
So more and more people are learning about this horrific massacre that occurred in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So you have a black man who basically creates a neighborhood, a community of black businesses. Not everybody was wealthy, y'all. It was a normal black city.
But that area of town was relatively selfish because there were so many black businesses. And long story short, what happens is white go get jealous. They have this massacre. They burn down a lot of the homes, businesses, massacre the people.
It's horrific. They're investigating right now a supposed mass grade that they've located. It's an awful thing. Those of you who have, this is the hundredth year.
Those of you who have the opportunity to go to Tulsa, please pour some water out for the souls, please. Don't forget the spiritual component of these things. Those people are, anyway, this is not that. If you go and you know what you're doing, pour some lubation.
If you don't know how to do that, say a prayer for those who lost their lives there. Who lost their dreams there? Right? Do that.
Now, I'm hearing a lot of black capitalists. Let me be clear before I start this. I am not criticizing people who want wealth. I want wealth.
I believe in black luxury. I like nice things. But I have a problem with black capitalists who are limited in their thinking because they are black capitalists. Okay?
Let me just start with that. I have a problem with all these black Wall Street movements that are happening, right? Because they seem to be devoid of context. Here's what I mean.
In most of the conversations, if not all of the conversations I've heard about black Wall Street streets because I said they were in other areas, right? I'm in Albany, Georgia. We have one. Harlem.
Okay. Rosewood. There were black Wall Street. You cannot study the economics of the area, economics of that legacy without discussing the rest of the history.
And that tends to be what's happening right now. There are so many people, small business grants, black Wall Street, starting banks, black Wall Street, financial literacy classes, black Wall Street. I'm not criticizing those movements. What I am criticizing is that they're not connected to institution building beyond financial institution building.
That is dangerous. I'm also bothered by the history being used to support black financial independence without looking at the other parts of what we should be learning from Tulsa. Here's what I mean. What do y'all know about the education system in Tulsa before it was destroyed?
We talk about the money. Okay. But what were the religious organizations like? What were the fraternal organizations like?
We don't know anything about the culture beyond economics of it. Money will not save you. Tulsa is the example that teaches us money cannot save us. So these black capitalists who listen to things about critical race theory, you know, this critical race theory argument right now, they listen to stories about police brutality and their answer is we got to make more money.
And then they point to Tulsa. Do you understand the cognitive dissonance that is happening when you point to Tulsa as an example of what we need to be doing? What happened in Tulsa? Money alone cannot save us.
Tulsa is evidence you separating into your own area in the city is not going to save you. Look at Tulsa. Now I'm not saying I know what is going to save us, but I'm saying Tulsa is evidence that money alone can't do it. That segregation alone can't do it.
It has to be systematic. You all if you listen to the package you've heard me say that before you can't take one cog in the wheel and expect the wheel to still go. So if we've been attacked through systematic oppression, I respond to it has to be systematic. It can't be only economic is all I'm saying.
If you're going to use Tulsa as a beacon of hope, use it all and understand the whole story. Yes, Black Wall Street was there, but what else was there? What are the families? It's almost like we talk about these people like their nameless and faceless who are the families?
The descendants of some of those people still live. What were the people like? What was the city like beyond business? And if we're going to examine Tulsa, remember I think the example of black capitalism ain't going to save you because if you know the story what happens after the massacre, not many of us have gone beyond the massacre.
What happens after the massacre? We're beginning to now because there was a hearing last week. You know one of the last survivors testified before Congress in order to try to get reparations, reparations never paid to those people. If your house burns down and your bank book is destroyed, you try to go to the bank to get your money, you can't.
Not if the bank chooses to be immoral and dishonest, which most of them did. You don't get your money back. What if the D.T.M. was in the house?
You might get your man taken. This is what happened after and it says something about some of us got to be in law to learn how to fight these things. Okay? This is what I mean.
What are the after effects of the massacre? Did we have places to go? How did we support migration? How did we maintain culture when it moved?
There are other aspects of Tulsa that we need to be paying attention to and they can be very informative, especially when we stop privilege. I don't want to say it like that. Tulsa is a very important thing to study. Don't misunderstand my next point.
Tulsa is not alone. When we study things in isolation, when we pay attention and celebrate and honor things in isolation, we might not know the whole story. We need to be asking ourselves. How is Tulsa related to Rosewood, related to Harlem, related to Overtown?
Do you understand what I'm saying? How are these things related? What happened in each of them? In some of these places, Overtown, it wasn't necessarily a violent.
I was going to say that wrong. It is violent, but it was a physical violence. It was about taking land. It was about allowing an interstate to come through the middle of the community.
It was about separating families with cement. But we need to understand how that is related to a bloody massacre. Because all of it seeks to do the same thing, disrupt the culture and destroy the community. Now that we have that understanding, we can see systematically how we've been oppressed.
If we can see systematically, then we are better in a position to confront that system. That's all I'm saying. So honor Tulsa. This is the 100th year.
Honor it. But don't honor it in isolation. Don't ever forget the people. I think I'm done with my rant this morning.
Today was a little harsh, but I can mean to be harsh. I'm saying all of this in love. I think it's to the point now where we no longer can procrastinate about things. If you don't feel it, I've been talking to some of my friends who are spiritually attuned.
All of us feel this shift happening. I think all of us feel it. Some of us just have better language for it. But you probably feel it.
That's on the precipice of something. Something is happening. And I'm going to remind you again what I said earlier to all people say. Stay ready.
You don't have to get ready. Listen, we got to get our house in order. We need to be in order. When whatever happens happens.
We don't have to be prepared. We don't have to be anxious about it. And the way you avoid being anxious as you ground yourself in the present moment, you look at what you have control over today. And what we all have control over right now is learning.
We can learn these things. Retop to somebody who knows something more than you do. And here's a piece of advice. Don't hit Google.
Hit Google Scholar. All right. All right. I'll talk more about that later.
Maybe I'll send that out in the next newsletter about Google versus Google Scholar. Really though, if you want to quote, quote, research a historical event, you can go to Google to get some cursory information, some foundational introductory type stuff. Don't always trust it. But then go to Google Scholar and get the real deal.
All right. I think that's all I really want to say today. Just reminders that CDHW is available. Click the link in my bio.
You can get to that. I do still have room for some life coaching clients. If you're interested in that, go to the website www.talentatouch.com. Hit me up there.
If you're on Instagram, you can book a clarity call to see if we would be a good fit through the link in my bio. Get your red stuff, but you don't see just be good to each other and for each other. I always hate for you. Love y'all.
Make it a good one.