TillI'm Tiltoldyou.com, the podcast about pop culture, black history, and spirituality. It's about to be a great part. Doctor Tilt, go and take it away. Till I'm Tiltoldyou.
Hey y'all, hey, it's your girl Tilt. Thank you for joining me for another edition of Till I'm Tiltold You, the podcast where I share all my musings about black history, black culture, and black spirituality. So I want to talk about the celebration ball today. I want to talk about accountability.
And then I want to tell you about a blessing in something you should all be thankful for before we go. Alright, let's just jump right in. So I am going to start with the not so good news and then we'll move into the good news. And then I'm going to give you a charge.
Alright, so you know, COVID is not going. It's amazing to me that people talk about post-COVID, post-COVID, post-COVID way. You know, we are now looking at the Omocron variant that was first discovered in Southern Africa. Not that it came from there, but that it was first discovered there.
And it's showing itself to be very infectious. I saw a physician the other day say it's as infectious as the measles, which is pretty darn contagious. So we need to be careful. We need to be masking up.
We need to be washing our hands. We need to be social distancing. And we need to be really realistic. I know a lot of us are fatigued by the mask wearing, but we can't stop, y'all.
We can't stop. And even if you feel safe enough to go without your mask, please protect the people around you by wearing a mask. Now, this is really a test in safety and empathy and compassion. So let's do that.
Okay. I want to be safe. I want to be careful. I don't want to get on that soapbox, but I will slightly, not all the way, just a little bit.
Listen y'all, we cannot convince other people that our lives matter if we don't take them seriously ourselves. Okay. That's all I'm going to drive right there. I just want to have us all be mindful of what's going on.
We are still in a global pandemic. And let me also say I don't think the pandemic would be as bad right now if we weren't playing politics. All right. I'm old enough to remember when C++ became a requirement and it was not a partisan issue.
It was a health issue and nobody had a huge problem with it. Even when they said no more smoking in public places, it was a little pushback, but not much. It was for public safety and nobody had a problem with it. But I'm really to be certain that either one of those things would pass now, right?
It would be something framed on human rights. So we need to be careful. We also need to be careful with the Supreme Court case, which is a blow against Roe v. Wade, California right after that used that same case to say that citizens could sue gun manufacturers in a type of gun control attempt, Governor Newsom did in California.
But Governor DeSantis implored it. What I'm saying now that families can sue teachers for, I believe it's set up to $10,000 if they're teaching quote unquote critical race theory. All right. So we're in some dangerous waters right now.
I think we just need to be very, very informed about what's going on. I think we need to hold our politicians accountable if we saw what Manchin did with the BBB playing. That you can one person can strike down legislation that his state overwhelmingly supports by a 43 point margin I read. His state overwhelmingly supports the spending bill and he won't vote for it because he's in the pockets of corporate interest.
Yeah, we, we, we, oh, I don't like to talk about the founding quote unquote founding fathers a lot because I think they were hypocritical assholes. But I will say that in our founding documents, it says that at the point the government stops being for the people we need a new form of government. And I'm just going to put that there. I think what I as black folk particularly, I think what our game needs to be is on some of the wrong stuff and creating mutual aid societies within our communities and being relatively self-sufficient.
Now that's not to say we ignore the structural things that are happening around us. We continue to vote. We continue to be politically engaged. We continue to run for office so that we can change this beast.
But we can't ever ignore that the beast is still a beast. All right. Okay. So the other things that I wanted to talk about was the prosecutor in the Ethan Crumbly case.
Remember this is the, was he 14 or 15 year old white boy who shot up a Michigan school. She's receiving some pushback in the case because she charged the parents. Now I want you to go back and listen to that episode. I think there was a couple episodes ago where I talked about some white parents being willing to sacrifice their children for certain things.
I just want you to pay attention to what's happening in this case. There is no white supremacy has no accountability. It does not believe in accountability. It believes in shaming, distancing and scapegoating.
And we see here this, now she's a white woman. The prosecutor is being scapegoated for being too harsh while the parents seemingly people don't want them to have any accountability for giving their child access to a gun, refusing to remove him from school, even when things were going on and teachers reported potential violence. So on and so forth, like, I don't even want to say nothing else about that. No accountability, just like in the Kim Potter case.
So Kim Potter, if you remember, is the Minnesota officer who claimed she was tasing Dante, right? She thought she was tasing Dante right during the traffic stop when she was actually shooting him. If you saw her testimony this week, she was on the stand giving us all kind of want to be never failed to years. And it again failed to me for this white supremacy has no accountability.
It doesn't believe that it should be found guilty of anything, especially anything violent against people of color. And we really, y'all need to stop being surprised. I don't know. Those are the things in the news I wanted to cover, but I do want to end I don't want the news to be too heavy on us.
So I did want to say something about the celebration ball this past Saturday in Atlanta. If you don't know anything about the celebration ball, it is considered the Black College football championship. It is the game between the me act and the swag. And it's been doing on since 2015, but I think this year kind of reinvigorated that ball game.
We had South Carolina State play Jackson State University. They Molly Wautum. I think JSU and what the Sanders has been able to do at Jackson State has really invigorated HBCU athletics. I call it the Sanders effect, right?
They're selling out tickets like never before, getting media like never before. And it's not just Jackson State. It's spilling over onto the other HBCUs because all of the things that people want to say about Sanders, I think he's been intentional about broadening the scope to include our HBCUs when he's having conversations about his team. Let me say this.
I'm a little troubled, not a little. I'm a lot troubled by how some black folk are talking about him. Now he's made a couple of, I think he's made a couple of missteps, but by and large, you can tell his heart isn't the right place, his money isn't the right place, his talent isn't the right place. I think he's doing the right thing by his players in this school.
But some of, I'm seeing people rejoicing in his loss. Like, you want him to be humble. Now I'm going to go back and talk about something I've talked about before on Instagram and the podcast. Stop telling other black people to be humble humility or to be humble means you have a low valuation for yourself.
I ain't never asking nobody black to do that. This meant, listen, when you played in the league, we called him Prone Time. Why are you surprised that he's a little braggadocious? There's nothing wrong with that.
It's part of athletics, part of black sports culture. While all of a sudden, some of y'all are just some haters. Why are you not a problem with this man? No he does not know all of the politics.
See, this is what people don't get. Let me say this as an HBCU professor who graduated from an HBCU and attended another book. Listen, there are a whole lot of politics in our schools. A whole lot of politics in and around HBCUs for all sorts of reasons, right?
Some good, some not so good. And if you're coming from outside of our institutions into our institutions, you're going to make missteps simply because the culture is strikingly different. So if you went to a PWI, I don't expect them to know all the politics of black college sports. I expect them to make some mistakes, but I always try to judge people based on what I think their intention is and their effect.
And if we are looking at his effects, the standards effects on black college sports as well as I think his intention, I think we're good and we need to stop. Get off the bat, all right? Speaking of which, we got to give him his props because he recruited. Now the article first probe, I mean the news first probe, they were calling him the number one recruit in the United States.
ESPN now has enlisted as the number two recruit in the US and that's a little funky to me. But anyway, Travis Hunter from Collin Teoh High School in Swaney, Georgia. That's here in Georgia. I'm in the Peach State, y'all know that.
Listen, they burning standards, jerseys in Tallahasic, baby. I went to a fan view. So I spent a lot of time in Tallio. And one thing I can say is Florida State tends to be extremely loyal to their players and their graduates.
I am a little tickle that they're burning standards jerseys because Travis Hunter chose Jackson State over a number of PWIs including Florida State. It goes back to this accountability thing for me, right? White folk. I live, like I said, I live in Georgia.
So S-E-C is like a mini-god here. You created this environment where players become celebrities and millions of dollars are thrown behind these teams. And now you're a little shook because if Travis Hunter predicts and I think Deon Sanders' intent is, you will see waves of Black students choosing HBCUs. And I love it.
I love it. I love it. I love it. Y'all.
And the fact that, look at some of the comments on these Travis Hunter articles. It is crazy. Y'all remember that book, $40 million slaves? It is crazy that now that Black players are beginning to take ownership of their bodies, we see the nastiness truly come out.
You see that these people never valued our players as people, but as instruments of entertainment and labor. So I'm tickled by Travis Hunter's decision to go to HBCU. I'm even more proud of his statements on why he chose to come to an HBCU. And I just want our institutions to be ready for the influx of students.
Because, like I said, there's a lot of internal politics at some of these schools. And I want to give this caveat. But I just remember that all HBCUs, ideologically HBCUs, I really want, I'm not going to go deeper into that, but missions matter, faculty matter, administration matters, and all of us should be centered on the goodness of our students. Alright?
So, yeah. So looking into what the business coaches say evergreen stuff, the stuff that don't change, but it does have to do with this accountability and the Travis Hunter move a bit. Let me tell you something. I woke up the other day.
And as I sometimes do, starting on the social media, I like to look at reels and TikToks of, you know, get ready with me, type TikToks, mini vlogs of people's lives, them cleaning and organizing their house. I like that kind of stuff, right? Which is a little trailer into how the YouTube channel is going to adjust a little bit. Because for those of us that like vlogs and that kind of thing, there's not really, there aren't really mini videos for my age demographic.
Okay. So that's just a teaser of things to come. But I like looking at these things. And sometimes, and I've said this before, sometimes when we're looking at these things that become easy to fall into comparison, we start to feel bad or guilty or frustrated that our life doesn't look like someone else's.
And I woke up the other morning and I heard God clearly say, be that person. So I want to pass that on to you. So let me tell you what I mean by be that person. If there's a person you desire to be, do what that person would do.
So if you desire to be a person who jogs in the morning, get up out the bed, put on some tennis, if you physically, put on some tennis shoes and go, even if it's not a job today, do the C25K, you know, there are plenty of C25K apps on your smartphones, couch to 5K. Do a training program virtually and walk, jog a little, walk a little, jog until you are the person that jogs every morning. If you want to be the person who makes the ice coffee in a pristine kitchen, make you some ice coffee in the morning, boo, boo. If you want to be the person that prays and meditates daily, start a prayer and meditation practice.
If you want to be a business owner, Google what is required in your state, Secretary of State's website, and find out what it takes to establish an LLC or an S-corp or whatever else. Talk to a tax attorney, find out what tax systems you need to set in place for your business. I will caution against this just because I think a lot of people get caught up in it. Don't look for your logo first.
Don't do that first. Do a name first. Decide what you're going to, what your business is going to be first. Set up the legalities of it and then you can move into the other part.
Because what I don't want you to do is for it to become just a visual business without the business. I don't tell you this as a mistake I have made where you got the social media thing popping. You got a couple of contracts, but there's nothing behind it to ensure sustainability. A lot of y'all know me through the tele-tipped soldier brand and I appreciate you.
I'm glad you're here. But I'm an educational consultant who made a whole lot more money at the beginning of my career than I do now because I did not and do not. This is one of my goals for 2022. I do not have systems set in place for that side of my business because all of my passion really is in a bridge between what tele-tipped soldier is and the Polk educational consulting.
I have not done a good job of marketing that bridge. That's going to improve. But tele-tipped soldier was a more organic growth. It came more out of just Tiffy being tip and being vocal about things I thought about.
If you remember back, I think I talked about it in the very first episode of the podcast. Very first. That was a couple of years ago, three or four years ago now. Anyway, I was about to make an excuse.
First because I talk about how it was a group of friends who came together. We decided to start a podcast and I kept bugging. We recorded but it never was released to the public. I was like, I don't want to sit on this idea.
Let me just want to do it myself. That's where the podcast came from and it's been an organic growth with tele-tipped soldier since then. Now, I want to be intentional. I'm going to be very intentional about being a business woman.
I mean, business woman. I think black women do business differently. The descent of the market women. So let me say this.
This is a plug for both the businesses, my life coaching and the air consulting. Everything I do is culturally centered. I am clear and specific. Everything I do and intentional is culturally specific.
How I run my businesses has to be in order to be fulfilling to me. See, when we define success for ourselves, I think too often we forget the fulfilling part. In order for my businesses to be fulfilling to me, they must be culturally centered. Which means this is what I've discovered about myself lately.
I don't mind paying for coaching. I don't mind paying good money for coaching. But at what point I identify the coaching is not aligned with my cultural ideology. I got to leave it alone.
So for those of you who are interested in business, I really encourage you to think about what is going to fulfill you. One of the dangers with entrepreneurialism on social media, at least to me, is that a lot of people are just regurgitating their coach. So they want to be a business coach. They hire a business coach.
And then their package simply offers a condensed version of what their coach taught them. And I'm saying this as someone who has consumed a couple of different coaches' packages. They all say the same thing. A lot of them, let me not say it.
A lot of them are saying the same things. And I will also say this. You know, a lot of these coaches got in on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, when they started to blow up. Whenever you come into something early, you have advantages that everybody doesn't necessarily have.
And I think in their coaching, they forget to mention that. That some of their reach comes from how long they've been on. And so they're telling you these different strategies to use that have worked with them over the time. But they're missing that variable.
And they're not explaining that variable. It's easy for a funnel to work a certain kind of way if you got 5 to 10,000 email subscribers. The other thing I'm saying, the growth to get to that is not as short as some of them would have us believe. And some of us are looking at their social media numbers, thinking that all of those are paying clients and some of them aren't.
I'm not even talking about bots. I'm talking about just nosy people, competitors who are trying to look at their marketing strategies and watch their posts and hashtags to see what they're doing. I don't know where this came from. I just felt the need to cover it.
Let me get back to my main point, which is, is there somebody want to be a better you and upgraded you? I leveled up you. I want you to sit quietly. And maybe this will be one of the Gwendolyn Brooks meditation is going up this week, probably today, and an Audrey Lord, I'm sorry, not Audrey Lord, Lord Jesus.
Bell Hook's meditation is coming up soon because of our transition. I'm going there in just a minute. Maybe a meditation needs to be, well, let's just do it now, right? Close your eyes for a second.
Unless you're driving, if you drive, keep your eyes open on the road. But when you get to a place where you can close your eyes. So I won't do the meditation now because I want you to be distracted. But when you get to a place, I want you to close your eyes.
I want you to imagine the life of the person you dream of me. Imagine their life. What does that look like? What do they eat?
What kind of music do they like? What do they vacation? And then I want you to put all of those things on your to-do list. Now, some of them have to be delayed necessarily, right?
All my to-do list is going to the mouth. I can't really afford that right now, but it's in my plan. I have a savings account called vacation. It's in my plan to do that because the Tiffany I want to be does that.
You know, there's some other things that the Tiffany I want to be does that are plans for Tiffany to do it. And I'm not talking about goals. Goals are important, but I'm talking about when you move the goal to a plan and you actually have steps and strategies to obtain the goal. I want you to be in the planning process.
So set your goals first, but don't just leave them. That's what happens to a lot of us. We set our goals. We drop them.
I want you to set your goals, sit with them, make sure they're really your goals, but then I want you to have a plan and I want you to be working the plan. So again, if you want to go to the Maldives, if that's on your bucket list, do some comparison shopping now, find a travel agent or a trip, just get the estimated cost right now. You don't have to make a commitment and begin putting your money aside. If you want to have this website with all the bells and whistles for your business, start researching website developers.
Both beyond fiber, the person you want to be on go through fiber, they're a business person. So there, there, there, get some testimonials. If you have, if you see some websites you like, hit the person up and say, would you mind telling me usually at the bottom, it might even say Webmaster so and so or site built by so and so. Do you got, but listen, let me say this, when you are out here comparison shopping for things like that, ask for a portfolio and for testimonials and do your due diligence and do some research.
You can't build me a logo if I can tell your logo was made in Canva. I can do that myself. Don't try to sell me, that you're going to build me a website. If I can tell us a week site, I can do that myself.
It's all I'm saying to y'all. Just do your due diligence. But begin to put your ducks in a row and work the duck. Okay.
Where did that come from? Y'all getting all the energy and foolishness from me today. Okay. I said that, that, that, okay.
We have the transition of Bell Hooks that happened. And if you follow me on Instagram, you know that it was a Robin Boylorn, Robin Boylorn, who's at University of Alabama? I did her digital storytelling workshop. This is how I made her acquaintance.
I'm good people, beautiful writer. The first time I heard this concept was on a blog of hers. And she talked about how so many of our Black women theorists, Black women in the Academy died early. And it's been on my mind since I read that blog post.
If I can find the link, I'll share the link in the show notes. There was a tweet that went around the other day that listed the death ages, the ages of death of like, I do lower, Barbara Christian. Now Bell Hooks was 69. Octavia Butler died early.
I'm Gloria Anseladoula. These women of color, these powerful theorists whose work is life affirming and can pull us to our highest potential. They leave us early. And I think a lot of it is because they put so much of themselves in the work because of their love for us.
It puts me in a tailspin because I'm already feeling some kind of way. I just want us to move beyond self-care being a trend and be intentional about fighting like hell to be here. We can't change the world. We can't model for other young children.
We can't mentor and be mentee if we're not here. So let me tell you that not so pretty. Some of you saw my TikTok or my Instagram reel about getting my mammogram last week. What I didn't tell y'all is it cut me.
When we're big breasts, we get irritated under our broad line anyway underneath our breasts. And if they're too rough during the mammogram, it can cut you, lead to microtators. I'm in pain right now. Still, that was a week ago.
I might have to go to the doctor this week because it's not healed up. That kind of, but that self-care I had to have the mammogram done. It wasn't comfortable. It is scary.
I'm not a two-time cancer survivor. My mother had breast cancer and had a mastectomy. I am not, mammograms are difficult for me emotionally and physically, but that self-care. I hate, I have PCOS, which causes insulin resistance.
So I have to check my glucose levels. I hate that. I hate how it makes me feel. My goal is to get all, is to control the PCOS this year with diet exercise.
But, and I mean diet as in how I eat, not how much I eat. I'm not that diet culture. We're gonna talk about that one day. But I just want to get off my meds.
That is my objective. I'm fine now. That's one of the best. It's gonna be off to me.
It's, but we have to move into, I do what it talks about, you know, taking care of myself is an act of political warfare. Some of us have to see it like that. I enjoy self-care that feels good. I enjoy self-care that makes me feel, I mean, is relaxing and inspirational and motivational and spiritual.
But sometimes the shit hurts. Therapy, don't tell you all about therapy. I do not talk about this last week on the podcast. That's hard work.
Self-care is hard work. But I can't look at the transitions of these powerful women and not be moved towards a greater emphasis on my own care. I just can't. Now, if I want to have a measure of the impact that they did, and speaking of Bell Hooks and a measure of impact, let me tell you something about Bell Hooks, I didn't always agree with her.
Writings are ideas. I didn't always agree. One of the things I will respect, and I think we saw this with her transition because you didn't really see a lot of criticisms. And there are things we could criticize about her ideas and positioning.
But one of the things we cannot say is that she did not love our people. Bell Hooks center her MO. Her way of moving through the world was love. That's why so many of us remember her finally.
And are a little anxious about the size of the shoes she leaves behind. But I want to encourage, particularly if there are any black women academics listening now. When I use the word academics, I don't necessarily mean employed by the academy. I mean scholars.
You can be a business owner that sells T-shirts and P.A. Scholar. So I just want to say that. We got work to do.
So many of our giants have left. I'm going to put this on me. I don't like putting on other people. Some of us are running from my work because we've depended on other people to do that work.
Stop. We need your work. Nobody else can do it. Nobody else can be an Octavia Butler.
But no one else is going to be a you either. Do what you got to do. Do what you got to do. I have taken enough of your time today.
I want to wish you a very happy holiday season. Listen. On the website, there's a link that says Quanza for 2022 strategic planning. This is a seven day course.
We'll meet everyday live for an hour at least to talk about the principal of the day and how we can use it to plan strategically our holistic success for 2022. This course is perfect for anybody who's interested in establishing their own business, going back to school and getting a degree, making fundamental lifestyle changes, improving the nature of their relationship with their boom, you know, whatever. If you got some new things, you try to get Poppet in 2022, enrolling the course.