How Far Have We Come? Black Teens vs Grandparents | Middle Ground

vote vote vote we've been voting for decades nothing meaningful has been accomplished how has the experience of being black in america changed i lived black history amend the fight for america is a performance documentary that examines the revolutions and counter-revolutions that have shaped america i remember when kennedy was shot i remember when martin luther king was shot we grew up with the panthers things have changed so much every day i have conversations with my children about the current events things that are going on today comparing them to years ago yes and they would but it was always a white-washed version of history like oh racism ended when the civil rights movement was i was taught the bare minimum everyone learns about martin luther king i honestly wish i learned a little bit more about slavery today i'm looking forward to being understood a lot of the experiences that i have with older black people is i'm the parent you're the child you don't have an opinion in my day we had a consensus we knew exactly what the priority was today's youth they have a lot of mixed messages so i'm looking to hear what message is it that they are trying to get across [Music] my name is beverly arrington tomorrow's my birthday i'll be 70 years old i have three children seven grandchildren and three beautiful great-grandchildren you look amazing thank you so much my name is skip townsend 57 years old born and raised right here in los angeles i'm the father of 12 children i have 15 grandchildren i have one great grandbaby i'm a advocate for peace so i'm a domestic violence counselor anger management parenting i'm cynthia singleton i'm 74 years old my main thing in retirement is i'm a coordinator for intergenerational tutoring program for lausd and i'm happy i'm i'm really fortunate i have a good life hi i'm alex alexandra i'm 17 i'm a high school student i'm biracial so it's kind of hard for me to find my part of society so i fight for literally everybody because i understand that we are extremely marginalized and we deserve better my name is devin hayden i'm 17 years old when i go to college i hope to pursue a degree in political science because i feel as though there are not enough young people or black people in government hello i'm bree i'm in school i go to fitm and i'm studying merchandising and marketing i also work at a bakery just getting me through college so yeah i'm just taking life one day at a time i'm just trying to figure out my my space in this world can i get my grandparents on the right and my team is on the left if you agree step forward if you disagree stay back my generation has had it harder than the other side my first job was at a bank they would use me as the supervisor but i was still making minimum wage and then they promoted all of these other people who were white i didn't have any of the titles and did all the work i was trusted to do the work i wasn't trusted to get paid any more money i had a job and they actually told me that i looked too militant because i had a throw and i was proud of my throat and i had an afro sticker on my car and they told me in order to continue to work here you have to get rid of the fro and get the afro sticker off of your car we had to tow the line and look the best act the best in order to have any kind of advancement whereas now i think there's things are a little looser for me i think being 14 15 years younger than youtube my challenges were different it wasn't about a job we couldn't go to the movies because the crips had started because now we can't go to the park now when i go to school there's a different element so when my mother tells me to go to the store and the store is maybe two blocks away but i know just crossing that busy street puts me in in danger it'll make me go six seven blocks the other way and my whole world was not about get a high school diploma i just want to get home every night so it's just so many things that were dangerous in my growing up in the 1980s and 90s that i think that what the children have today is a silver or maybe if he's a golden spoon bring the golden spoon in here yeah i completely agree with everything i said and we could even say that we've had a golden spoon in our mouth you guys aren't wrong with that i mean you guys definitely like paved the way for us so we're just following your footsteps almost i do think that our generation has a lot of pressure on our career and education and i appreciate it it is very stressful and parents want me to have a good job and go to a good school my grandparents went the same but it's because they want me to have what they didn't have i wholeheartedly agree that you guys had it way harder but you guys were lucky in the point that you knew who the racists were you knew the kkk was down the street over there you knew because they was in your face with it now in the face of technology in the new age people are way covert about it they hide it i've had somebody comment monkey under my thing and i didn't even know who it was i'm only 17 i'm not prepared to have somebody on the internet who doesn't know who i am call me derogatory slurs or you know threaten to kill me you know what it's like to experience overt racism i don't but i need you guys in situations like that because i don't know what to do i do have to say one thing that i kind of disagree with i feel as though the younger generation doesn't have as much guidance or a specific goal that you guys had you guys had people like malcolm x you guys have people like fred hampton you've had people like that who do we have obama maybe we don't really have those leaders to to guide us in a certain direction i disagree i think you are the leaders people are going to tell you that you have to aspire to be somewhere but martin luther king jr and malcolm x both died before they were 40. they were the leaders when they were your age so you guys are the leaders and who you hang around see i hung around big monster tiny killer little shooter baby one punch you guys are not hanging around them you're hanging around people who are inspired and motivated to do the same things you're doing so the leaders are here i don't think you recognize them because they're right next to you protests should be peaceful absolutely not i've seen in the 1992 riots and also in the recent uprisings that a lot of opportunists were there and it was the opportunity to tear up our own communities the emotions the the drive the passion creates something that turns violent it turns ugly and the rest of the world is able to see that there's a lack of control let's work on finding a solution rather than just destroying the community i think one of the greatest examples is the bus boycott the world runs on economics it's all about the money hurt them in the wallet you can march to your blue in the face but unless they're gonna lose money then it doesn't affect them as much as the bottom line does that these people are gonna actually stop buying our products affect the money and i think you'll get a much longer reaching effect and you seem so peaceful [Laughter] i think when we were going through the black lives matter protest this past year you know the peaceful protests were never seen you know we would see a 10 second clip of it and like oh there was a peaceful protest an hour ago although i don't agree with violence i don't want anyone to get killed or hurt i do think that it brings a little bit more awareness to what we're fighting for i agree to an extent i am a product of the watts riots we lived at 115th and central our friends were all in those riots they'd knock on the door and tell my mother hey miss addy keep the kids inside things are getting bad out here i don't agree with everything that happened in the watts riots because there was a lot of destruction but the watts riots are still referenced today my father always said the squeaky wheel gets the oil but i don't want anybody to be hurt i don't want to see a repeat of what we saw at the capitol none of us want to see any kind of nonsense like that we want to have a message with what you're doing yeah to some extent i completely agree but at the same time i'm a wholehearted believer in civil disobedience for example the founding fathers though i am very critical of them they used violent tactics to get from britain to be independents this is just property damage i don't really necessarily care if a building gets burned down if a cop car gets burned down because how many people have been killed by the hands of the police and nothing has happened the whole reason why people protest is because they're upset about something black people have every single right to be upset and i don't think that we would have got the killers of george floyd convicted had we been out there just holding the sign please convict no we need to apply pressure to the government because if they think that we're not going to step up and take action and hold them accountable they're not going to do anything okay i might interject a thought since i'm the senior here believe this if you believe nothing else what you do now will follow you for the rest of your life this world is digitized and you don't want to get in this man's system because this brother can testify once he gets you in that system he will keep his foot on your neck and you will never ever hardly get free say you do something by you get arrested how's that arrest record going to affect you for the rest of your life i want people to think of long range i think the black lives matter what made me overjoyed and i had tears because they got it these kids finally got it vote vote vote protest yes but where's the power i definitely think that you should be voting but we have to recognize how undemocratic our system is we've been voting for decades nothing meaningful has been accomplished there are still disparities when it comes to education there are still disparities when it comes to police brutality there are still disparities when it comes to drug charges these are all problems and we've been voting and it hasn't been working okay i hear you and i understand you but you have to work within the system you live in the system you live in is voting and as you can see biden and harris are in office voting put them there think about what you're doing who it's affecting and in the long range it's not just that one day is what's the far-reaching effect of this what's the misconception people might have about you as a grandmother i think most people think that i'm mean i know some of the girls where i work but say she's mean but boy she'll get you out of trouble with the union i'm very straightforward and i'm very blunt i've always been because i grew up in a family that was very structured it was a very religious family and my parents believed in corporal punishment and i'm glad because it's helped me a great deal in my adult life i think it was a good thing hard when you're young you don't understand it but in the long run i think it's a good thing i have dated people of another race i couldn't get past a couple of dates because we went to alvarez street and lo and behold we ran into all these brothers and i just felt so uncomfortable it's not the same for you as it does for us a long time ago these were in the 60s i just couldn't continue and when i told him i felt bad because he said you're a racist you won't date me because of my skin color and i thought about it and i said yeah that's deep i've always felt bad about that but i just couldn't do it um i mean i'm in a relationship right now with a white person if you like you like like that that's it shouldn't be can i ask you something yeah of course when you go out and you see brothers african-american men do they look at you different because you're with a white guy a thousand percent like i told them people are going to look at us and they're not looking at you they're looking at me because i'm with you it doesn't make me uncomfortable but i do see people staring i think even though i'm not against interracial dating i think that if the child is black that they should never lose that black culture and try to assimilate another culture i have a problem and an issue with that so i'm obviously a product of interracial relationship my mom is filipino my dad is black watching my parents try to understand each other and then me being a biracial person like it's really hard to bridge that gap because my mom is an immigrant from the philippines she doesn't know what the black experience is i see the disparity and understanding and in the same sense that my dad doesn't really understand what i go through and i'm in a relationship with a black person right now and it's so much simpler to explain like this is my experience as a black woman this is what you will have to deal with police brutality if my child is dark skinned but until this point i've never encountered anyone that is willing to sit down with me and be like okay your experience is valid we're gonna get through it together because they completely shut down when they realize you have baggage in eighth grade i gave a speech to about five thousand people i was for the promotion from eighth grade to ninth grade and they were always telling me oh i'm so articulate and i don't like that very much because i'm like well what does that mean you know sometimes i act white when someone says you act white that's not a thing that doesn't exist it's more like a colloquial term that people use to refer to one power when people refer to me as like oh yeah you talk whites you sound white you dress white they're referring to a higher status than than my color my skin color ain't nobody gonna take me seriously if i spoke like this if i went to a a meeting and i spoke with like the little twang in your voice they gonna think oh you one of them you wanted them ghetto ones you you'd allow angry black women so i have to present myself in a way that is consumable and acceptable to the people that i am presenting myself with do you think that you being makes us anything to do with that oh yeah asian people have this positive stereotype that they're the model model minority myth like you're the smart you're the good minority and if people see me as that asian self and i distance myself from the blackness which i've had to do before in order to give myself good opportunities it's unfair it doesn't apply to me my mother used to always tell me that i act black i had a hard time trying to get to the other side of that and i don't think i ever reached it i don't think i ever acted white maybe i should have said agree i do act professional in certain settings like i work in customer service i have to raise my voice three octaves for people to think that i'm being respectful and maybe people think i'm white over the phone maybe my name and my voice correlates i could be white but i never try to be white um i think that i've heard the term you're one of those educated black women i love being professional i love my education to shine love it can move in the other direction if made to do so i can go south real quick okay i think that people mis mistake being articulate and educated for trying to be white but i think our generation that was the norm you strived every day to be intelligent correct i'm gonna be blunt you don't go out ashy put that vaseline on your legs on your elbows don't go out with rollers in your hair are you crazy we were taught you have to be better you have to look better you have to act better you have to dress better you represent a whole group of people and i think that ideology may be lost a little now when you go out but we were trained to act the best we could act not to use ebonics you know we had to to survive i don't look at it as a negative thing james bond once said that whiteness is a metaphor for power black people are trying to get educated trying to seek intelligence and knowledge to gain power in one way or another whether it be economic power whether it be culturally we want to be recognized as human beings yes all right i will say the most impactful event for me was being incarcerated in l.a county jail in 1998. i was wrongfully accused and treated unfairly in particular because my father passed away while i was about to start a trial for two life sentences and the reward that i got from my father passing away is i was put in a hole the system didn't know what to do with me so they put me in isolation it was done to protect the other inmates because i might have been volatile and going through something would exploded and that's definitely unfair i think that the system needs to integrate some healthier procedures i have trauma um i would just say have a lot of trauma with the cops my dad always had run-ins i was always in the car from a young age and i just get immense anxiety like passing a cop car seeing a cop when i first started driving my parents hadn't even put like my registration everything like right above my head so i didn't have to reach so i wouldn't get shot when i get pulled over i facetime my father i have video like it's stressful to be afraid of a cop on a daily basis but that's what i got to go through i watch black people die on tv like it's a show for everyone to see i watched george floyd die in front of the entire world in my phone that looked like my father to me when i saw brianna taylor i thought of my sister when i saw mod aubry i saw my older brothers it takes a toll on you to see that and to constantly understand that this is your reality this could potentially be me i've been assaulted and experienced microaggressions and have been harassed before and you know nobody really wants to talk about it because what do you say to like a 12 year old girl who's just been you know sexualized it's a painful conversation that a lot of people are not ready to have so acknowledging everything you guys said i want to talk about ptsd but not post traumatic stress disorder i want to talk about what you just said which is present it's happening right now i'm consistently it's reoccurring trauma i feel like i'm in a domestic violence relationship with law enforcement with society with the government and at any moment my life and my children's life are in danger and you guys as well so it's not post-traumatic it's present it's right now um that's one of the blessings of growing old you get control of your emotions more so i don't think i'm as stressed as a lot of people over the things that are happening they affect me but i know that i can't control it so what is that going to cost me in the long run if i lose myself and my health and everybody doesn't have that luxury to be able to do that and i understand that and because i think two things happened to me when i was very a younger woman in my 20 in my 30s 40s my son was shot and killed on the street and drive-by shooting and two years later my husband committed suicide so you get so you realize you can't control everything but you can control how you react to it and you've got to get yourself under control or um you will lose yourself so i guess in a way i have tpa what do you call it ptsd ptsd yeah so i seem very composed i seem very cool it's because you have to be to survive you have to it's all about surviving generational trauma is real that's it post slavery trauma went into my grandparents who taught my mother and my mother taught me it's really important to know that it has been passed on my mother beat me because her mother beat her yes her mother beat her because her mother beat her yes because they did not want the masters on the plantations to beat their children so they said no no begging please no i'm gonna teach them and they get a whip and go beat their own kids so that someone else wouldn't and this is passed down this is handed down to me even where you know i said i have 12 children well seven of the oldest ones they too got beatens where the last five they got talking to they got time out so we go sit on the porch it's a different concept and it is definitely handed down yeah so it goes back all the way to slavery i would take it back to that's crazy pre-slavery adding on to what you say that's kind of why a lot of stress-induced illnesses it runs in black families is because we're constantly under this pressure and stress mental health isn't something that black people can afford to deal with because you have a whole bunch of other issues to deal with in a day-to-day life you can't afford to go see a therapist because you got to get them bills paid right and i just want to say that we were told you will deal with things that you've never dealt with before so you're going to have to you know find your way and just dealt with it maybe very privately or go to church and listen to the sermons you know and let the pastor tell us you know what's all this stuff that's going on yes a lot of people went to church and dealt with stuff other people went outside the liquor store so mad dog 2020 cisco saint ives old english became the healing they dealt with it through alcohol or substance abuse living in the united states is a privilege [Applause] i mean yes there's million flaws in our system but i do have all these resources and programs some kids don't even get to read have a book have a pencil so i'm just unlucky to be here that's all yeah i have been fortunate enough i've traveled all over the world vietnam singapore japan china italy rome france and there's no place like the united states because we have a middle class almost everywhere in the world it's rich or poor there's no section 8 there's no wick there's no afdc you dis on your ass i've been to other countries as well and it really matters what you value like when i go to places like the philippines yes they're poor over there but their family bonds are like this they are happy who do you see who's working a nine-to-five job behind a desk happy with what they live with people in the suburbs doing the same thing every day for 40 years just having kids staying home going to work and i feel like the perception that you guys carry isn't as a result of the indoctrination of the american dream you're taught that you're going to get a white pick a fence with a nice house in the suburbs and that's why so many people come here is because we sell america like this is a utopia a great place but then you come here and then you see immigrants suffering so they come here expecting better only to have a different set of struggles i understand how you feel but it's one thing to say it than to live it and even yourself like when you go to the philippines i've been the philippines they were exploited from the military base that was there i mean they live in deplorable conditions universal health care yeah that's all good too but look at some of the other conditions they live in we take for a lot for granted i just still say it's it's not as easy as it looks um do you think that america has been good or do you think black people have been privileged in america for me it's a compare and contrast this is good about this country this is bad about america this is bad about this country this is good about america and for me i i feel you know i like it here you know so i want to answer your question that's what's good about traveling black people are prejudice against all over the world it's not just in america because the ruling class has made you think that blonde hair blue eyes and light skin is better true so in brazil if you're light skinned you're better in africa women are dying of cancer to bleach their skin white so don't think it's just america that suppresses the black man i'd be hard put for me to leave the united states and be able to survive at the level i live here very good point uh you know michael that this side of the room the um bad hips the bullet wounds and all that starting to set in for this side just let you know all right black people are resilient wow softball question i am a strong black woman and i would not be here today if i wasn't i am a strong black woman as well because i am willing to take on anything that affects my family affects the things that i believe in i'm a strong black man and i know that because of all the obstacles and challenges that i had to face not only with society but i had to face the challenges within my own community i'm resilient because i have the power to harm or to heal and at this time i choose to heal i'm resilient power to you my great-grandmother was a slave so it taught my grandfather how to be resilient how my mom and me so we've been taught since we were born like how to be resilient it's a powerful trait to have i'll say that's true every obstacle all the turmoil we've had to overcome it's amazing that we're all sitting here right now us as a people are one of the most resilient people that have walked this earth we've been beaten down we've been assaulted we've been tore down in ways i don't even think humanity could even comprehend and yet we still get up every single time i'm still gonna sit here for hours and listen to you guys tell your story so that my son or daughter won't have to go through that again i want it to end here we all deserve better well i want to say that i apologize to you guys because i was expecting uh i was expecting y'all to be sagging i was expecting you to be combing your hair you're hitting on your phone and stuff so i apologize because i had a misconception but i had no idea who you were going to be and you guys really are the leaders so i'm i'm honored and humbled to be in your present today thank you guys for being here because you put something in me [Music] so you

Channel: Jubilee

Views: 804,789

Rating: 4.9067845 out of 5

Keywords: jubilee, jubilee media, jubilee project, middle ground, spectrum, odd man out, versus 1, embrace empathy, live deeper, love language, blind devotion, netflix amend, being black in america, black lives matter, civil rights movement, black grandparents vs black teens

Id: XUqVabC6YvA

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021