Tell em to tell you dot com the podcast about pop culture black history and spirituality It's about to be a great part Go on take it away. Tell em to tell you Hey, y'all. Hey, it's your girl tip. Thank you for joining me for another edition of tell em to tell you the podcast where I give you my musings About black history black culture in black spirituality today.
I want to talk about the CDC and its recent guidelines for US public schools I want to talk about these schools in general and then I want to follow up with billionaires in space So let's just try it in. Okay, so the CDC has issued new guidelines Starting us public schools and what they've said is Teachers and students who have been vaccinated will not have to wear their masks inside now It's amazing to me that they say this at the same time that we see this tremendous uptick in the number of delta variant cases in the US The delta variant being the more transmissible more contagious if you will iteration of COVID so far Almost 100% of all us cases newly reported us cases are of the delta variant kind Listen, let me tell you something we growing up used to think the CDC was about science It wasn't a by part. I mean it was a bipartisan organization We didn't worry about whether a government a Republican or a Democrat was in office the CDC kind of based its guidelines on science, right? But there was something about Trump's presidency That revealed a whole lot of stuff to us in these guidelines being issued by the CDC reveals to me number one Either these people are not familiar what really happens in US public schools and two that they might not be concerned about the science so much They're concerned about science's impact on capitalism.
All right, let me say this I live in a red state so I can only speak for what it's like here in Georgia There will be teachers who pretend to be vaccinated who will not be vaccinated There are teachers who are already itching not to wear masks in schools Those teachers will still not wear masks in schools and they will not be honest about whether or not they've been vaccinated At the same time the CDC is issuing these guidelines It's amazing to me that they're ignoring the fact that children under the age of 15 still haven't been cleared to receive vaccines And so maybe you should issue the guidelines that said in high schools Students and teachers who have been vaccinated don't need their masks But what about our babies? I have a nephew who's going to be starting for the first time ever yay Evan kindergarten Not only is Evan too young to receive any type of vaccination. He has underlying health conditions Now we're going to be sending him into a school He's fine and he alone will be responsible for making sure that he's healthy at five At five I'm praying that my nephew has the judgment and the guidance from us Necessary to keep on a mask all day even if his classmates and teachers don't Even if his classmates and teachers try to convince him that he doesn't really have to Why would the CDC do this job? I am so confused about this So confused why this vaccination isn't working like every other vaccination in terms of you got attorney your immunization records even register for school in a lot of these places But what you're doing is promoting an environment where our most susceptible individuals in this country are youngest who are not Listen 99.9% of all the deaths From covid right now among the non vaccinated and you're telling me in a school where some of these students can't get vaccinated because of their age They don't have to wear masks like please somebody help me understand this and as an educator myself who is vaccinated I still don't want to catch it.
The vaccination does not prevent you from getting covid Let me say that again because some of y'all may not know that the vaccination does not prevent you from getting covid And I'm seeing all these get together these gatherings where people don't have on masks and I'm like What is going on? I think the CDC is very irresponsible right now very irresponsible and I want to I want to end up with this point because you know This is about black folk for me. I am so tired of Unlearned black people telling other black folks not to get vaccinated Like if you know if you want to do it for me in my house thing, that's fine You can choose not to but don't be out here trying to convince other black people not to Especially if you don't have a background in science or medicine Because I'm gonna assume you'll know what the hell you're talking about if you wanted to give medical advice you really should Go to medical school. I'm just gonna leave that there.
Don't put our people in jeopardy And if you're on, you know, you don't know whether or not you should be vaccinated Just I mean look at the smart black people around you. What are they doing? Anyway, what are the medical doctors in our communities doing? Don't listen to a certified nursing assistant either.
I'm just saying Y'all can say what you want to say what I'm saying is there's a level of commitment that is required to receive an advanced degree like a medical degree These people have put in the work and the time and the effort Well, I wouldn't listen to their expertise over someone who's sitting at Google telling you what the research is I'm just saying stop listening to any and everybody about stuff. That's important Speaking of schools, let me also say this and you may have heard me say before that We'll probably witness the death of us public education in our lifetimes. We'll definitely witness it if we don't get on our stuff Y'all so I wanted to in case you haven't heard the Sullivan County Board of Education in Tennessee It's a case. We really need to be paying attention to it was a teacher a white teacher who was fired for teaching Tomahissi Coates and other issues about white privilege.
Okay. He was fired by the school board and when It was appealed. This the director of education the chair. Well, they call it.
It basically. He's the chair of the school board Dr. David Cox Tried to say that they don't care about anti-racist education happening in their schools But it has to be balanced balanced with what if you don't want anti-racist will you balance the anti-racist education with racist education balance with what? Certain things don't deserve to have a balance.
That's like creationism versus evolution those things don't deserve to be in balance They're not the same one Is a mythology and y'all can get mad or not But it is one is mythology and the other one is based on science. They're not equivalent So you're saying this man deserves to be fired from his teaching job for having an anti-racist curriculum or lessons Because it should be balanced See that's what I want to be a reporter because I would make you tell on just a balance for what was the opposite of anti-racist education? Why do we want it? See that would be my question somebody would have to sell me that But for the rest of us I want us to be paying attention to what's happening.
So the critical race theory discussion It's a distraction from what's really going on Which is the censorship of curricula and lessons in US public schools There are certain things that powers would be don't want you to learn they don't want their students to learn They don't want your students to learn because when you learn certain things, you know how to address the systems a little bit differently And that's what I think they're most afraid of now If you just Google I'm not going to post any hot links because I don't want to send traffic to their websites They make ad money But if you just Google some of these anti-critical race theory websites, they have whole game plans for taking over the school boards Here's why it's dangerous. We can see it happen in Sullivan County only one school board member voted to say that teachers job Only one the school board is Responsible for hiring and firing in your district now you may have thought that was the individual principles purview It's not the principles make a recommendation but the school boards have ultimate authority and so if a school board is controlled by people who don't like your kids They can stack schools with teachers who don't like your kids if the school board is against Anti-racism they can stack schools with teachers who will not touch anti-racist lessons or curricula You see how that works? And if you go to some of these websites where people are very vocal about being anti-critical race theory and for them It's just a blanket term. They're using for anything.
They don't like they're not really anti-critical race theory They're anti anything they don't like and they're grouping it under one word So it makes it easier for them to perpetuate the propaganda against it Okay, so don't be distracted by conversations on critical race theory make people tell you what they mean and watch their argument fall apart Because really what they mean is don't teach them anything. I don't want them to know Again, they are deliberately stacking school boards now. So how do we resist that? We resist that by running for school board We resist it by having people on the school board who look and think and are for us Here in the state of Georgia only requirements for running for a school board is having a high school diploma and the average school board does not look like the Population of students in that district because usually these are people who don't have to work who have money because it's expensive to run for office right and they can do what they want to do in terms of Delivering a certain kind of education to a certain kind of student largely because many of us ignore the school board as a legitimate political organization We're not paying attention to it for years before I became a professional educator I am panting that would be the the product of ballot I skipped.
I don't know these people I might have seen two or three signs, but I don't know their political status Right school boards are some of the most powerful people in a district and nobody pays attention because many of us don't understand what they do So let me let me give you some some stuff here one like I told you they have the ability to hire and fire Okay, so what happened in Sullivan County Tennessee could very easily happen in your district if the if the school board is stacked in such a way Okay, the second thing is that the school board tends to interpret curricula So the state has a set of standards that says this is what your students should be learning at this particular grade level The superintendent in the school board are responsible for interpreting that what it looks like on the ground again We have begun to believe that principals have this authority because historically they may have had it especially in segregated schools They don't have it contemporarily not for real technically it has to go through the school board the school board helps set the budget So what people are paid how much funding goes to what school those kinds of little things they have some will grown there that we haven't been paying attention to Here's what's important when we talk about the school to prison pipeline school boards also get to vote on disciplinary policies And we already know our children are predominantly disproportionately affected by zero tolerance policies that are usually approved where at the school board level And so please use this as a wake up call the Sullivan County case for you to start paying more attention to us public school boards and what we can do to have more seats on them Get together there are plenty I promise you probably depending on where you live but if you anywhere in the south there are plenty of retired black teachers Churches need to get together and support a candidate the Panhell organization needs to get together and support a candidate Masonic log just need to get together support candidates We need people on these school boards if we want to have the kind of control of our students education that we need to have We cannot trust this system to do right by our students if we're not making the system do right by our students Okay, that's all I really wanted to say about that because also again the school board and it's my asking stuff If we want to protect our babies y'all we have got to assert ourselves into these spaces Now let's go to the other thing I wanted to talk about and this is billionaires in space foolishness that's going on Whether it's like a competition who's gonna be the first billionaire to make these space travels and what's gonna happen to get there every You know I must must cuz I'm not he's doing this for our grandchildren children What listen y'all I just wanted to say a few things on that number one I want to point us back to traditional African worldview this idea that there can be people among us that rich while other people are as hungry as Some people are means that there's a supernatural imbalance. It's not normal It is not normal to have a world where there's someone like Bezos who can afford listening out. I have said this before I'm gonna keep saying it There are reports that this man has so much money that he could end world wide hunger and homelessness and still be a billionaire But you run into space Like there's something unnatural about that. I want you to sit with that and just think about it not just in the United States I can end worldwide hunger everywhere and instead of doing that I want to run to space There is something unholy and unnatural about that because then you're not who listen.
I tell on themselves You doing this for whose grandchildren? Certainly not the one who's looking at a fiction Certainly not the man in the soup kitchen line. You're not doing it for your grandchildren Whose grandchildren are you speaking of humanity is not your concern? You are There is a gentleman on Instagram and TikTok whose tag name is modern warrior.
I love following him But he usually greets most white people with hey, colonizer I love it go look for him in Solarius, but there is something there when we talk about these billionaires in space there's something there y'all that Rather than limiting the problems on the planet we have You're running to move to another when you've not even figured out how to have good harmonic relationship with the one where we are You want to move to the next thing not giving real thought as to what happens when you move there in terms of what you do to it That you've already done to this one I think it's appropriate to still cause some people colonizer because that's how they operate right? I move to a place I consume all its natural resources and I move to the next place Right my homeland I've depleted everything so I need to go find another homeland and deplete everything that I need to go find another homeland and deplete everything there's an mentality there that's not Normal it's not natural it can't be sustained and that's what I mean about billionaire status But that's not natural the ability to hoard that much. It's not natural I you can't come into me otherwise and there's a problem with any system that supports it So I was happy that by the issue those executive order like what was it like 72 orders this week now? They don't have teeth in them So I'm hoping it's not symbolic But we have got to get a real handle on this or we won't have a world and you best believe y'all have watched that cosmic Slop episode based on Derrick Bell's story You best believe if them folk them colonizers go to space they ain't taking your black tail We better get it together right here if you don't have a garden and I don't care where you live When I was in an apartment I had containers on my patio So you can have a garden right outside your door if you have to throw some tomatoes in a pot throw some squash in a pot throw some peas in a pot Do things to build a relationship with the land With animals the other things animals so during the pandemic a lot of people were working from home and Adopted pets bought pets so on and so forth and now that capitalism has us returning to the office despite COVID still being real Shelters are in reporting increased numbers of surrenders What kind of relationship to animals do we really have when they're only there for our companionship when we need it?
And then they're not anymore We have a whole lot of getting right to do a whole lot of getting right to do But I have faith that we can do it. So if you have been paying attention to Instagram my Instagram page we went live Friday We're gonna start reading channel at travase things fall apart because I think given the things we've discussed today I believe it's important that we really read that text if you've already read it Let's reread it together If you've not read it now is a wonderful time to read it together We're gonna have our first meeting on Friday if you're not already a member of my email list Make sure you join that email email list later today I'm gonna be sitting out the zoom link for that book club if you gave me your email address in a DM You will also get that email today with the zoom link So if you don't get it by Tuesday, let me know because it may be an issue with my email center But I am doing that today. So make sure you do that now Let's end off on celebrating one of our magical little sisters Missalia avant garde who won the script spelling bee? Yay I'm so happy for her and for her little girls who get to see her right this basketball phenomenon Who is also an intellectual genius showing us what it looks like to live in balance?
We do it all y'all And quiet is this cat that's what they're scared of but we do it all and so I just want to applaud her say congratulations Congratulations, congratulations, and thank you for setting the model Some of us are learning about the case in 1908 where another black girl won but the rules were changed to keep from awarding her So go do some research on that I'll put a link in the show notes about that but I wanted to end off with it was celebrating our little sister And I hope you all have a beautiful beautiful rest of the day tell them to tell you