On this episode we talk to Humanature founder Michael O’Bryan about the origin of the term zombi and some of the myths that still persist about slavery and Blackness in America.
Listen to “The White Meat Podcast” on Spreaker.Here’s the transcript:
David Dylan Thomas: Welcome everybody to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and I am the writer and director of a movie called White Meat, which is about what happens when a bunch of enslaved folks who are buried beneath Washington Square Park come back from the dead as zombies, but seem to only have a taste for white people.
So, I am here with one of the people who has been very helpful in helping launch this his name is Mike O’Bryan. Mike introduce yourself to the good people of the White Meat Podcast.
Mike O’Bryan: Hi, everybody. I’m Mike O’Bryan. What do I, I, I’m a, I’m an artist first and foremost. I’m a creative first and foremost.
And then actually I’m a human first and foremost.
David Dylan Thomas: There you go.
Mike O’Bryan: Than an artist. And I am at Drexel University. I started a lab there focuses on the future of work, wealth, and asset building for historically excluded populations. And then I-
David Dylan Thomas: Means brown people, y’all.
Mike O’Bryan: Black and brown, you know, all the folks, you know, what’s interesting about that, those originally I named it or we framed it that way because of the very litigious nature of America.
But I really got into and am interested in the ways in which rural and or poor white people have experienced historical exclusion that has not been organized for them in that fashion.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh totally.
Mike O’Bryan: And, you know, it’s the point of manipulation,
David Dylan Thomas: I mean, to put too fine a point on, you can tell me if I’m wrong here, like when you want to know who’s excluded, look at who’s doing fentanyl, right?
Like, when I think about the huge Like when people talk about like oxy and fentanyl and some of the populations that are getting devastated is very often these rural communities.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, that’s a good it’s an interesting and good point and I want to be clear to your audience I wasn’t laughing at the use of fentanyl.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, no, no, no, no, no,
Mike O’Bryan: But I never, that’s an interesting lens that I’d never thought about I’d say I think it’s worth exploring right because I think you’re I think there’s something there, right? And the way that people are treated when they suffer from addiction, I also think starts to tell you a bit more about who might be dealing with forms of historical exclusion as well.
So yeah, no, I, I dig. And the other part of my life, I started a kind of a consulting firm called Humanature some time ago now, almost six and a half years ago.
David Dylan Thomas: Congratulations.
Mike O’Bryan: Thank you. Yeah. We’re still going and growing and it’s a fun time. Our mission is to put humanity at the heart of every organization.
We believe that’s a change management process. A lot of change.
David Dylan Thomas: Imagine that.
Mike O’Bryan: Imagine that change.
David Dylan Thomas: Do you think, do you think that corporations think they get that for free? Do you think a lot of corporations don’t even think that’s something they need to do? Because like, of course humanity is at the center of my organization.
We’re all humans here. Do you think people, do you think people are under that illusion or?
Mike O’Bryan: Yes and no. Right? Like I think some people are. I think some people are not.
David Dylan Thomas: Okay.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah. I think some people also. believe they are doing that work, but no, they have farther to go. Or further to go. One of the two.
I think there are people who have no idea what I mean when I say that. I’m reading a really interesting book called I think it’s called, let me get the title. Sorry. I know I’m like taking up time, but it’s a fascinating book. It’s kind of, it’s, it’s one of those books, like I’ve been waiting, but I gotta stop saying, like, I’m trying to grow up, Dave.
It’s one of those books I was searching for, hoping somebody wrote and then found out someone did. And was like, you’re kidding me. Yeah. It’s called Accounting for Slavery: Masters in Management. It’s by a woman named Caitlin Rosenthal, who used to work for McKinsey.
And the reason I bring that up is because essentially what the book is laying out as a premise with very, very detailed research behind it is that the, the framing and understanding of the management sciences as we know it, comes from enslavement that would make sense industry around it. Right, this idea of like putting people into spreadsheets. Yeah understanding what age productivity what detracts from it who doesn’t like it was meticulously studied and what she puts forward is that these documents and these records exist with meticulous detail and in volume, but no one had done the like deeper business analysis around it. And so she went into that world and you know, I’m only on chapter two cause I can only take parts of it at a time, but it’s what I was, that’s what I was looking for because when I look at the manner in which the modern firm or company is told to exist, I mean, it really is, I’ll explain it like this because.
I think examples or metaphors are simpler.
We exist in a world that acts as if there’s something that I call magic threshold theory, that you can cross thresholds and divorce yourself from context. You can divorce yourself from experiences and impact. So we start this very young with children, right?
When you go to school, your job is to learn. I don’t care what happened before, but you get in that door and your job is to learn. But what if I hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours? What if the amount of violence in my neighborhood is so high, unfortunately, that I couldn’t sleep. What if I had to make sure my younger siblings ate that morning and so I barely got to eat and I got to make sure they’re getting to where they got to go and I got to go to where I got to go.
So by the time I get to school, I’ve actually done a significant amount of work to just be a nine or 10 year old. There was no divorcing myself from those, those, those, experiences that context or that impact. But we, we say those things and try to encourage people to believe that. And then it just metastasizes and matures and grows with us as we get older.
So when I go to work, there’s this expectation that if my parent is dying, if I’m intergenerational caregiving, if fill in the blank, right. If I’m dealing with COVID, if I have a kid who’s struggling in school, like that, none of that is supposed to impact me because I’m supposed to show up as this autonomous agent and there’s a show on Apple TV that speaks to this brilliantly
David Dylan Thomas: Are you talking about Severance?
Mike O’Bryan: Is that it? I can’t remember the name of the show.
David Dylan Thomas: It’s with Adam Scott and like you go into the building and once you’re in the building,
Mike O’Bryan: Right, they take, they wipe.
David Dylan Thomas Everybody please watch Severance. Oh my God. It’s so good.
Mike O’Bryan: And when I saw it, I was like, Oh shit, that’s it. That’s exactly how we believe this shit can work for people. And it’s just not a truth.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because, like, to me, that speaks to two things. One, it speaks to, like, doctrinal thinking, where you, like, want one thing you can focus on so that you don’t have to think about context, right?
So we see this in extreme religious belief. We see it in adherence to capitalism, or really any doctrine. It’s sort of like, this is the one thing that matters. I don’t have to think about anything else. And life becomes much simpler. But it also is making this assumption that things aren’t interconnected, right?
Right. That. Fundamentally, there’s no expectation that I should make room for your grief at work, because we’re at work. And that’s the magic word I can say, We’re at work. Or, it’s just business. That’s the magic words I can say to justify any behavior. Because once I say it’s just business, literally just, right, I’ve already created a liminal line there, business.
Everything else gets to go away. And it makes perfect sense that we’d be tying this back to slavery, because like, when I see sketchy business practices today, they always bend towards slavery. I have a friend who just got a promotion. Actually, in the movie, we see this play out, where someone gets a promotion, but they don’t get more pay.
So they have to do more work for the same pay, right? And they’re supposed to be happy because they got a promotion. And that is the “How much can I extract from you while giving you the least amount possible?” And the ultimate version of that is slavery. I’m going to take everything from you and profit off it and give you the least.
I will make sure maybe you have water, but everything else is going to be, what can I get from you?
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah. And I think it’s hard for us to reckon with that, right, because of the larger narratives and stories we tell ourselves about who we are as a country, as a group of people, as groups of people, as sectors, et cetera.
And one of the things that’s really difficult about being human is that your mental models of the world, the way you have come to know, both yourself and others and groups in the world, the way you’ve learned to manage expectations of others in yourself and how people respond to you versus others and how they respond to others versus you, et cetera.
The, the thing the brain doesn’t want to do is shift mental models and worldviews because actually you’re, you, you, when you get into that world, you are, fundamentally, breaking molds and frameworks by which your brain is operating to survive.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Problem solve. And so the body and brain will double down on things that could, can be proven to be untrue.
And we’re watching this play out.
David Dylan Thomas: I was about to say, this feels very current.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. We’re watching this play out. And, and so that’s, that’s hard because again, physiologically we are driven to not, this is going to sound bizarre to some people. We’re, we’re physically, physiologically kind of driven to not change even though we are a highly adaptive species.
I mean, it’s just interesting conundrum of our existence. And so intentionality and focus are huge benefits and assets to the brain and directing neuronal energy for lack of a better term and power and focus, excuse me, and power, through focus, right? What you give attention to actually gets stronger networking physiologically between you know areas of the brain that are going to facilitate activities, etc.
And by attention, that’s time. That’s energy. It’s quality of experience, right? And so I, I always just suggest people think about that because hap, haphazard usage of time, energy, quality, et cetera, content that you’re putting into time. Haphazard use is still use. Whether you mean to or not, you know what I mean?
It’s an interesting thing. It’s like, can we make people hyper aware of their constant ability to learn? Like we think of learning as happening in concentrated moments that are identified, right?
David Dylan Thomas: It’s like, oh, you have this period of your life and that’s learning and learning, learning, learning. All right.
Now you’re now it’s time to, to be productive and go to work. No more learning. No more learning. I need you productive now.
Mike O’Bryan: Well, and now what’s interesting is like, so a lot of my work or a lot of our firm’s work is helping companies build cultures of learning, right? Because. There’s no way to be an enterprise now and not learn.
Half your workforce needs to be upskilled. I don’t know, half in air quotes, right? But a large chunk of the workforce is needing readily, quickly to be upskilled and reskilled. And automation and AI are taking aspects of work. Well, let me rephrase that. It’s actually, I’m gonna use the term terraforming, wait a minute.
But it really is changing the landscape, if you will, The topography in air quotes, right? Of how work operationalizes itself.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: So it doesn’t matter anymore if you didn’t have a tech role. Most roles are now tech enabled in some form, matter, or fashion. We don’t have that takes a entire reorientation to not just the nature of work, but like, what does it mean to be a thinking sentient being that can learn, but now has to learn intentionally and fast and apply quickly.
David Dylan Thomas: But I think it’s interesting though, because I feel like some of that is human driven, right? That, that, that speed, that rapidity, the necessity of always be learning. is something that humans invented, right? There’s no, like, natural storm that is arising that is forcing AI upon us, that is forcing new modes of communication upon us.
There are choices, and more importantly, investments being made that are saying, no, you have to learn this now, because we just sunk 50 billion dollars into it, you damn well better get good at it, right? So, it’s, it’s, all of which to say I feel, I feel this yearning as we talk about this for a moment of agreement and consent around how fast we want to do this.
Because I think it’s easy for us to pretend, again, going back to the threshold, oh Progress is necessary. At this speed, at the greatest speed possible. Right? Progress is necessary. And it’s like, I didn’t, I didn’t agree to that. Did you, did you agree to that? I guess I gotta do it.
Mike O’Bryan: Well, you know, my favorite worlds that I see in movies and television or read about in books are often hundreds to thousands of years into the future, but people don’t really have jobs and learning is the pursuit.
Right? And, and no one’s fighting over food. Because there’s such abundance of space to grow food and no one’s fighting over water. ’cause it’s just naturally here. It’s how are we stewarding it and tending it. Yeah. Et cetera. And, and how are we making space to actually obtain more water?
Yeah. Fresh water, et cetera. Right. Whether that’s through you know, human made, manipulated context. Or we find more. Right. And so. So I, I look at that as the other end of that extreme that you just made, right? And so, right, to be human is to be a learning entity, right? Children are learning well before they’re in any formalized grade school.
If anyone raises them or spends time around them, you see it. They learn things that you don’t even know they were learning until they spit that thing back at you. You’re like, wait, don’t say that. Don’t do that. Right. My favorite is when kids present context. Like, right, I got two god kids and I just, I love seeing them put two and two together and get to four.
Particularly when they put two and two together, but you and I know that that’s not two plus two, it’s two times two times three. But they’re just using what they got and they’re like, ah, close, but here’s this other piece. And they’re like, oh, right. But that, that is to me, one of the most, instructional as we’re moving forward in space and time and figuring out this human endeavor in the context of this wild globalized world of ours, the earliest stages of life I think give us the cues for what it means to then have a developmental framework on the whole lifespan because the brain’s learning, growing and changing across the whole lifespan.
It’s just that certain periods are more acute than others. Right. And so. We gotta figure that part out, but we’re always learning.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And I don’t know about you, I enjoy learning. I like it.
Mike O’Bryan: I do too. But we gotta make learning cool, I mean, you know, so, personal story. I could read going into kindergarten.
And, didn’t, I, so, no context though, right? Because, like, I didn’t, I wasn’t around other kindergartners, right? I wasn’t, even in pre K, I could read. But I didn’t, I didn’t pick up that other kids couldn’t read. Because we weren’t really reading in pre K.
This is a wild story. My mom and my pre K teacher told me, we ran into her when I was like 15, I read she was reading this book to us about Fuzzy, it was a Sesame Street book and she kept fumbling over words and I like, I don’t have, I have no memory of this, but I got up and was like, I know that word and I read it and I was like, actually, I know the, I can read this whole thing.
I read it at her, but that started this chain reaction. She ended up finding out she had dyslexia and went back to college and got her doctorate. So she has this wild story in me there, but I think about that in context of like, How was I learning and didn’t realize I was learning, right? So even by going back to kindergarten.
So that was a year later, I’m in kindergarten. And, you know, they’re teaching us letters and stuff. And I’m like, M and blah blah blah. And they’re like, what? And then so, they were reading to us. And I was like, cool, cool, whatever. And then later on, the teacher just kind of pulled me to the side and said, Michael, can you read?
I was like, yeah. And so she pulled out books and we read them together. But then what started happening was that I would get put in a corner for a reading time while everybody else was coloring. So then I was like, Oh, I can’t read at all, actually, I don’t know what I’m doing. And so what was interesting, I mean, like, literally, bro, it would be like CJ and Ron, and I’d be like, blue balls and hats, right?
Like, it was just makeup things that were clearly not on the page. I’m like, I don’t know what we did. I remember they talked to my mom, and my mother and I talked. And one of the things that I appreciate about my mom is that she realized, like, I made learning with him fun. We would listen to records. We’d go to the library, take out records, listen to records, kids records, R& B records that are from, you know, earlier ages.
I love music. I love to dance. We’d get books together. We’d read them. We’d go. You know, my mother and I would act them out. Like, it was so much fun, but then when I got to school, I was just like, well, what is this? And if I had been introduced to reading that way, right. If I’d have been introduced to learning that way, I’d have been like, yeah, learning is stupid.
I don’t want to do that. I want to have fun. You know what I’m saying? But I don’t, I, this is why I love art and media. I think art is developmentally appropriate play across all ages in the developmental lifespan. You just get a little more complex to match the complexity of where the brain is and, you know, what it can do at that time.
But it’s still fun in its play, and design works the same way to me.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah, totally. One of the one of the greatest contributions you made to White Meat is very early on I got I got the brothers together And I said, Brothers, I’m writing the screenplay. Here’s what it’s about. And I was like, okay, what books should I read? What movies should I watch? What music should I listen to? And you brought up this book called The Half Has Never Been Told and it changed my life. It didn’t just change the movie. It changed my life. So I’m gonna thank you for that. But there’s one passage I want to read that’s going to kind of kick off the next phase of our conversation here.
So this is from chapter five called Tongues that covers 1819 to 1824. And for context, The Half Has Never Been Told is basically the economic story of slavery, right? And you come away with this very real sense of you do not get America without slavery. It just doesn’t happen. It is financially unfeasible.
So so I’m going to read you this passage here. Before the Haitian Revolution, Africans toiling in the sugar fields of St. Domingue spread the story of the zombi, spelled Z O M B I. The zombi. This was a living dead person who had been captured by white wizards. Intellect and personality fled home, but the ghost, spirit, and body remained in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerer planters.
So you get this impression, right? That’s a long way from, Oh, the earth passed through a comet and now people are rising from the dead and eating people, right? That’s a, 20th century re reboot of, of the zombie myth. The original zombie was a slave, was an enslaved person who was going to have to work even after death.
And so there’s a lot in there around Haiti and how many of the Africans stolen from Africa ended up there and in the Caribbean, and a minority of them ended up in the States. There’s a story in there around African religion. There’s, so I want to get into some of the things, and some of the, maybe recap some of the discussions we’ve had about rethinking, really just extending what we were saying before about work, rethinking how we view slavery.
And how we kind of underestimate its impact today. So let’s start with like the movement of religion from West Africa to the Americas and in particularly the Caribbean and Haiti. And really the question is like, well, what did that movement look like? And how is it kind of, how did it shape our survival as Africans being stolen from her home and being forced into this horrible condition?
Mike O’Bryan: Wow. That’s like a 10 part podcast series. Yeah. But we’re we’ll touch on elements of it for you know, just for context for the listeners, I’m, I’m not an expert in this. But I’ve read a bunch, right?
And I, I love history and I, and so I’ve learned some things and I’m happy to share them, but, you know, also invite your listeners to get in touch with you about this too..
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah, totally. They have totally. If you’ve got stories, things to add. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Please do. ’cause like with, again, without being too spoily.
These stories are kind of critical to some of the plot points of white meat. And as I said, when I was writing it, I was very conscious of some of this history I was learning.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. So what I’ve learned thus far, I’m still learning, like I mentioned, is that the, the, particularly around religion, it really depends on where those Africans landed and who stole them and their own culture practices and their own approach to enslavement.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: And, and let’s name it and dehumanization. Right. So you have, I would argue that America or the enslaved black people. And in fact, I like to use the term the prisoners of war.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. This is, this is one of the, the, the angles I wanted to get into is you’re the first person I heard really frame it that way.
And it was kind of a revelation to me. Tell me why you frame it that way.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, when you, when you leave your home and go to someone else’s home and say, this shit is mine now and you fucking people are mine now, that’s war. You bring guns and for whatever reason that, and I, I’m not gonna, I don’t know why the story gets told.
I don’t, let me, let me rephrase that. I believe I know why. Stories are framed the way they are historically. Right. Right. Right. But I can’t, I didn’t talk to the original framers. Sure, sure. You know.
David Dylan Thomas: They were not available for comment
Mike O’Bryan:. Yep, yep. But it’s, it’s why they can say that all men are created equal and then do the things that they did.
I think the answer lies somewhere in that mix of things, right? So the American experiment has its own version of how it, how it grew its enslaved population, these, these prisoners of war. But going back to the 1400s, you know, you have the, the, the first attacks from Europe in mass happening on the continent and they’re attacks. They were acts of war.
David Dylan Thomas: I mean there were forts like you go to some of these places in Ghana. You go to some of these places in the and you see they were building forts and not only were they forts there were cannons aimed at the other Europeans who were trying to attack So it was wars within wars.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, and I think the other thing there…
Africa is a continent that is humongous, right? And so the way it’s socialized to us in school here and blah, blah, blah, it’s like, it’s almost like Africa is a country, right? And many of us have talked about this, right? But when you really start to take into consideration, just how vast that continent actually is, how many people, how many cultures, how many practices, how many identities are present.
And, and I think it’s also important that people recognize that there were also Arab invasions of Africa, right? And the Arab invasions, northern Africa fell to Arab invasions somewhere in the late 700s. I want to say like 765 quote unquote AD. I haven’t looked at that information in a while. It might be 735, but it’s somewhere in there, right that Northern Africa finally fell to invasion. These folks have been fighting off invaders for a while, right? And I think that’s important for all of us to sit in, right? That like people knew. We forget the spice trades, etc. Mansa Musa, like people, we, not that the spice trades and Mansa Musa are the same thing.
I want to be clear. I’m just like naming things. So there’s a comma in there for those that didn’t, you know, pick up on it. I’m just being a jerk now. But there are all these things happening. And so there’s this belief, this larger mythos, and that’s why I recommended the book to you. That’s why I use terms like prisoners of war.
The hyper intentionality of conquest was through the roof. I wanna be fair to all humans, Africans were fighting their own wars, too, right? Like, this isn’t, it, isn’t that like violence isn’t a part of the human experience?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And, and, and I think that, that, that, if you look at, ’cause I’ve watched these sort of like four hour videos.
Just like, here’s Africa, here’s all the shit that was going on over like the back in like, you know. A thousand, you know, see, like all these like these huge long swaths of history. And it’s basically people fighting, fucking, and trading, and you go to any part of the YouTube videos where like, here’s all the stuff, the long, long history of Europe and like everywhere you go on the planet, people are fighting, fucking, and trading.
And the difference is today when we go back and in Europe, we call it the 30 Years War and the like, and it was like, it’s about religion and Catholics and Protestants. It’s But then you’ve got Tsutsi’s and whatever. And like, they’re, they’re primitive things. It’s like not the same thing at all. It’s like, no, but the exact same thing, people disagreeing about religion.
Using it as an excuse to try to get lands and like, whatever. And it’s just like the, the difference I think is in the framing of it, to your point, anywhere else, we would have called that prisoners of war. Anywhere else. That would have been like hardcore Geneva Convention. Like, I don’t see anywhere in the Geneva Convention where you can, like, take people as prisoners and then be like yeah, your kids are gonna be our prisoners, too.
Like, that was some new shit.
Mike O’Bryan: Well, you know what else happens in that context, too, is that going back to framing, right? In war, and, and I’ll, I’ll link it to eugenics in America. We sometimes like to play dumb here. So actually, before you get into it, I’ll go to eugenics. Okay. There are terms we don’t use regularly anymore that used to be regularly used and had definitions and codifications and testing and la la la.
Feebleminded is one of them.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah, yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Right? So eugenics was built to help us better understand who deserved what, and how it should be meted out, and who could rise to what level. So eugenics and racism, though kind of independently developing, I mean they come from a root source in my opinion of dehumanization, but there is a little bit of independent development. While racism focused on clearly race, eugenics could focus on other things within the same racial identity of the dominant power.
So, there was, there was a lot of research being done around poor rural whites in the eugenics movement, right? So eugenics and racism actually kind of meet up at a point and are like the wonder twins, like, yeah, right.
David Dylan Thomas: “Form of…a system of government!”
Mike O’Bryan: By our powers combined, I am Captain Hate You. Right. It’s just like, wow, that’s what happened.
But the reason I bring that up is because American society understood, I’m gonna use a term here and I’m going to just be move fast and be blanketed, we had to classify these people because they’re dead weight So we have to be clear about what what we should do with this dead weight We got a limit how much they could procreate because procreation Things like pauperism, being poor was hereditary, being a vagabond, feebleminded and dumb.
I mean all these terms that like we just don’t use fully anymore. MR being another one, right? We just, but you tested at MR. Right? Like IQ test here was created for that purposes. Or let me rephrase it. It was refined and crafted from its original state as the Binet IQ test. Here, a guy, Lewis Terman, took it and recreated it.
And then he was tenured at Stanford. So it became known as the Stanford Binet IQ test. And literally, Lewis Terman is both the father of the gifted child movement and the father of tracking, essentially, in schools for those who test at MR and who are not, who are the feeble minded going back to the language they would use.
I mean, people should be able to book The Measurements of Intelligence. I mean, it is rough, but it’s clear. It’s so clear. That’s the thing I love about eugenics. These people were so verbose and all of academia was involved and all the bigs were involved. I mean, this was not, eugenics has so much reading and writing, because people were verbose.
David Dylan Thomas: Well, you find out about these captains of industry, and all these people who had these like, you know, Kellogg. And all this was just sort of like, oh, and they were eugenicists. And it’s sort of like, yeah, yeah, that sounds right.
Mike O’Bryan: There’s a little footnote in the bottom.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, that sounds about right. Or like this, the person who come up with like, you know, the measurements for How women’s clothes have a completely different measurement system.
Oh, and by the way, they were eugenicists. I’m like, yeah, okay. Yep. That tracks. It’s all, I’m not surprised.
Mike O’Bryan: So here we go for the folks listening. Right. I’m going to map this back. So if eugenics in the early 1900s, you know, 1910s, 19, 1920s, it’s helping us understand dead weight from a public policy and capitalist perspective, and this is post slavery.
Would you take the dumb and feeble minded as prisoners of war? During enslavement?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: No! You kill those off. It’s dead weight. You take the talent. You take the talent.
David Dylan Thomas: I was yesterday I went to the the, lest, lest we forget slavery museum in Germantown. And they have a map there.
It’s a very rare map. And it’s of West Africa. And instead of countries, it has like these zones. And the zones are basically like a shopping guide. This is where the people who are good at textiles live.
Mike O’Bryan: Yes.
David Dylan Thomas: This is where the people who are really strong live.
Mike O’Bryan: Yes. The rice crops.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
These are the people Because they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Oh my god. Right? And it’s like this, this is what they saw when they looked at Africa, right? Not a bunch of feeble minded, not a bunch of like weak. It’s like, no, they saw skill that they could take.
Mike O’Bryan: And manipulate. And use to grow a country.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Right, and expand an empire, a budding empire, right? And so, and America was not alone, I want to be clear on that. Oh, sure, yeah. But. America has its own version of these things, right? So I, I, I, that I hope people heard that loop, right? And so we’re taught the black people were dumb and stupid and monkeys and loincloth from running around and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I always challenge people and go, show me where was the enslaved finishing school that equipped us with all of these skills to do the variety of things here, like, come on, let’s keep it a bean and let’s keep it a bug, right? That doesn’t mean that people weren’t teaching skills here, you know, enslaved folks teaching the next generation because they were forced to clearly, but this idea that’s here, these dumb, I don’t know what thing it will come.
Oh, hammer. Oh my God. Hammer. Oh, it’s like, what, what is, these are lies. These are fabrications, right? Told to manipulate people psychologically told to manipulate on both sides, right? Told to manipulate and both sides being racial identities, right? And then we can bring class into that, but told to manipulate to manipulate and construct mental models of the world, the past, what you should expect from it now.
What does justice then look like? This totally impacted by all of this framing. And for me, this is the pursuit of my life, right? I, I am focused on dehumanization because that’s the core here. If we can get poor rural white people to recognize how they’ve been dehumanized by some of their own folks, right?
There’s this lie about like, this is how I talk about Texas. The right will say things that essentially equate to one day you’re going to be rich too. Don’t you want them to not take your money? Vote for us and we’re going to protect your future monies for you. Not realizing that the data are very clear.
You’re probably never getting it. I hate to say probably because I try to leave space for anyone to like, I broke out of a class situation, right? Like, but I didn’t realize how rare that was. Right. When I look at the data now, I’m like, Oh my God.
David Dylan Thomas: You didn’t break through because the system was working right.
Mike O’Bryan: In fact, I broke through because the eugenics infrastructure that exists, allows me to break. I tested too high. I benefited from being, I wasn’t gifted child programs. So imagine at 26. To grow up as poor as I did. And you know, you’ve heard my story and just for your listeners, like I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut.
It’s kind of like if anyone from Philly is listening, it’s like taking Strawberry Mansion or Fairhill, Hartranft and shoving it inside a Lower Marion, right? Or, or like taking Camden and shoving it inside of like the richest parts of Cherry Hill. So that’s where I come from. My mother survived foster care and she’s given me the permission to use her story in my work.
But my mother survived foster care and was trafficked as a teenager. My mother has a wild story. I grew up her child, right? Her youngest, but still she was 26 when she had me 25, 26. She had my oldest brothers much earlier than me. She was a teenager still. And so I come from a world that statistically, if people had not at very crucial moments in my development stepped in to support me and my mother and my journey, I don’t know.
I do know where I would be. I know a couple of places I could be. One of them is dead. Right. One of them is in jail. Right. And I’ve seen it and I, and I saw things happen to, for me and to me that did not get extended to other people who look like me doing the same exact thing. Like the idea of putting me in alternatives.
I’m in so much school, my sophomore and junior year, I don’t know how I graduated on time. I don’t know. But I, I, you know, like my PSATs, my SATs, I rock those, right? Like there are these things, these signs, these early markers from the vestiges of eugenics, including the gifted child movement that schools still use to track and think about and frame potential.
And so I benefited from it. It’s why I also feel on the other side, like I don’t even have a, I don’t have a, I feel like I don’t have a right to be an ass. I don’t have a right to not give, I hate saying give back, but to, to, to contribute to the world that I would love to see and contribute back to spaces and places that are meant to support, not just folks like me, but all humans moving towards their healthiest and best.
Right. So I just, I name all that because these, it’s hard for people to see how history is currently playing itself out.
David Dylan Thomas: Right. Right. And it’s, it’s funny, because that story reminds me so much, and if you feel this doesn’t apply, like, please push back, but it, but it, it reminds me so much of the, the the exceptional negro trope, right?
And it’s, and it’s a way of saying, it’s a way of, of assuaging white guilt over having it so easy. And when I say so easy, I mean, nobody has it easy, but people definitely have it easier. And seeing people suffer and saying, well, they’re only suffering because eugenically they’re inferior. And, not only that, if they do happen to have these qualities, which we are going to scientifically prove are indicators, well, the exceptional ones can rise to our station.
Our station is the normal station, right? It’s the superior station and we will allow a few of you in every year to prove that this is a fair, cause that’s the word that always comes up. Fair. This is a fair system. And if any of you can prove that you’re as cool as we are, of course you can come sit here.
Of course you can get on the Supreme Court. Oh, did I say that out loud? So, so, and not to put too fine a point on it, of course, Of course you can be overseers, right? That’s a whole other level, right? If you could have seen Mike’s eyes just now, he’s like, oh shit, here we go. But yes, like, but, but, but that’s why I say like, you didn’t succeed because the system wasn’t working.
Right. Right? Like, like, the, the, the, that your success became, and I, and I, and I copped the same thing. I went to Friend’s School in Baltimore. I was like one of like maybe four black kids in my class. I’d have a class of like 70 or 80. And we were the exceptional negroes. Like, I’m, I’ll say it out loud. And I’m, I was, I’m happy about it.
I’m happy about it now. I have a much better life because of that. But I don’t, it doesn’t make me think that the system is just, it doesn’t make me think the system is fair. It makes me think that I got the golden ticket of the five golden tickets that the system handed out.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah. You know just building on that.
One of them, one of the most difficult things for me to do, and I hope your listeners understand, I’m not tooting my own horn here.
David Dylan Thomas: And I should clarify, we’re both, both Black. I realized every time I do this, I’m like, I’m on a podcast. They were Black, right? Yeah. We’re both Black.
Mike O’Bryan: We are blackity, black, black, black.
One of the hardest comments for me to compliment. See, I can’t, I’m, I’m, I still can’t even, people call me brilliant. Right. And someone called me out on not accepting that in a public space. It was really, it was like a year ago. They were like, you need to work on that. And I was like, what do you mean?
They were like, brother, if you’re brilliant, you’re brilliant. Why can’t you own that? You need to work on that. Doesn’t make you better than anybody that doesn’t. And I had to really go interrogate that. And I realized that a lot of it has to do with what I started naming some years back as intellectual privilege, right?
What is smart? It’s freaking relative. You put a car in front of me. I’m an idiot. You know what I’m saying? You put a rocket ship in front of me, I’m an idiot. You put certain kinds of math in front of me, I’m an idiot.
David Dylan Thomas: You asked me to fold a fitted sheet, I’m running.
Mike O’Bryan: Right, you know what I’m saying?
So smart is already contextual. And what it is, is that I am overly literate in a world that likes in terms of like reading literacy, likes to put a lot of things into that kind of framing and likes to use that kind of codification of a system to translate ideas. I also benefit from being very visual and very artistic.And I think that’s what throws people.
My first leaning to the world is actually through music, sound pictures, language for storytelling purposes, that kind of stuff. And I’m very curious. And. I don’t know why the cookie crumbled this way. I do have this intellectual side and capacity that does fit the mold of what people are looking for here in, in terms of the Western world.
And so in many ways it has been a protective factor, but in a way that’s totally ostracizing too, right? Because there’s this insidious thing. prisoners of war, right? You start to make breaks in culture and making sure you’re breaking and severing certain kinds of ties. The higher I go in my career, I forced myself to stay on the ground a bit.
So it’s kind of programs I’ll keep and people look at me, but why do you still have that program? Because I never want to be too far from me, from where I come from. Doesn’t mean I don’t do my job to keep unlearning the vestiges of what being a descendant of prisoners of war has done to us.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
What would be an example of a program you keep for that purpose?
Mike O’Bryan: Oh, so I have a media fellowship program at the lab. So I have a lab at Drexel called the Wealth and Work, excuse me, allergies are tearing my life up. Asthmatic. The Wealth and Work Futures Lab. We have a media fellowship program that focuses on training 18 to 26 year olds in varying forms of media, mainly photography and film based work with some copywriting, um, skill development as well and, and like social media content management kinds of things.
And we teach them some basic research skills and some basic design skills, and we explore topics around grief and wealth building and what does that mean to people, etc. I’m trying to bring economics and the science of our humanity closer together.
David Dylan Thomas: Sure.
Mike O’Bryan: But we, we work with all kinds of young people.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm hmm.
Mike O’Bryan: I’ve been in prison, have been impacted by gun violence, I’ve graduated college, I’ve done some college, and some of those are not exclusive, right? We love to say, again, I went to prison, couldn’t have done some college, right? And that’s not a truth. So, that’s one example of keeping myself close to where I come from and those things, those communities shape me.
I learned how to learn from the community that I come from and the people that loved me there. And even the people that didn’t know how to love me there, you know, cause it’s, it’s hard when I say like this, right? In second grade, didn’t matter that I could read, grade levels above, yada, yada. Like no one really was paying attention.
Like I was still in the same classroom by third grade. They were sending me to fifth grade classrooms and I would bounce back and forth. It felt like having no home to an extent. Right. And all of a sudden though, at that point, like the friendships started to shift and I started losing friends and I was confused cause I was like, we’re all just tight.
But that differential treatment to them read a certain way. And then now mind you, I’m like nine, you know, eight or nine, some of that. And I’m in classes with, this was eight. I’m in classes where I go 11 year olds, right?
10 year olds. I’m in third grade. They don’t want me at their table. So all of a sudden I started feeling very alone very fast and went from having friends to feeling like I had enemies on both sides of me, you know, and like those, those, the school was doing what they thought was best for me.
But again, I would argue these things have their roots in breaking social capital and breaking ties and bonds. Because there’s two things that could have happened. I could have easily been like, fuck everybody. You don’t want to, you just fucking hate. I’m better than this. I’m better than you. And what a path I could have gone down with that shit.
Right. I mean, don’t get me wrong. The path I ended up taking for myself, still had his own ups and downs, but like, it’s very easy to start to exceptionalize, to exceptionalize very early a person in this, in this kind of caste system and mark them for something different, push them along that pathway. And then you end up, I mean, the world operates out of a talented 10th framework anyway.
We won’t name it.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm-Hmm. .
Mike O’Bryan: Right. But we some, we, some of us get elected or chosen or dubbed to speak on the behalf of the rest.
David Dylan Thomas: What is, what is the Talented 10th framework?
Mike O’Bryan: Oh, so it’s a, it’s a framework that essentially says. That roughly 10 percent of black people are going to speak. There’s an ed deeply educated, deeply talented, 10 percent of black folks that are going to have to speak for the rest.
David Dylan Thomas: Wait, did, did we come up with that?
Mike O’Bryan: Du Bois,
David Dylan Thomas: Du Bois, really?
Mike O’Bryan: This is a, okay, now you’re gonna get me in trouble. Let me make sure I’m not. But this is a Du Bois concept. The talented 10th. It’s actually a book by Du Bois, right? It now okay according to this it was created by white northern philanthropist. But it’s primarily associated with WB Du Bois You know, I don’t Again, I’ve not studied it deeply. Yeah, I taught it quickly in a class and was like Whoa, that does sound like how the world kind of works, right? Like there’s a group of I’ll just name elite Blacks right who are shaping and, and representing the rest of the Blacks, right? Someone else listening probably has a lot more nuance around this than we do. But when I, just the high level version and concept of that I, I, it plays out, right? We don’t name it as such. It’s kind of like white supremacy.
We don’t name it. But it’s, or we weren’t naming it for a long time. But it was still happening, right?
David Dylan Thomas: I was gonna say, yeah. But I think that, I mean, but all of it goes back to this thing we were saying before about like spreadsheets and how we look at human capital, even that phrase human capital, it’s like let’s reduce it to money, let’s reduce it to value, right?
And so even the project of saying you, you can read, the other people in your class cannot, so let us, so the thing we want to optimize for now is your education. The thing that’s most important for you right now is that you optimize your learning. You could just as easily say or arbitrarily say well the most important thing for you now is to make friends. So we’re just leave where you are.
I mean you already know how to read, you’re not gonna not learn you’re not gonna unlearn it. So fuck it let’s leave you where you are So you make friends because that’s what we think is the most important thing, right? Right. So what we think is the most important thing is gonna have a lot to do with how we react, or if we react, to you being able to learn.
Because we could just easily have been like, thrown a party and say, Yay, you can read! Alright, go play.
Mike O’Bryan: So this is where it goes back to like, why my whole positionality of human nature is around like, Everyone’s a designer. These are design challenges. What problem, challenge, or opportunity are we framing in this moment?
Because everything else that comes after that, It’s influenced by that, right? And so the imagination will rise or fall to the level in context of the framing, which by default includes our beliefs about groups of people, individuals, what is or isn’t important, what should be centralized, et cetera.
David Dylan Thomas: So, I kind of want to follow up on this thread around religion. So, how is that making its way across the sea and how is it kind of manifesting once you get to places like Haiti?
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, so, there’s a comment I made earlier about the way religion progressed, the traditional African religions, or I think the term being used now is ATRs, African traditional religions.
The way they progressed in the diaspora has a lot to do with, again, the, the conquering people and what, again, their own cultures, plus their practice of enslavement of these prisoners of war. So it’s why in America, you actually don’t, for a very long time, you don’t have easily identified diasporic religions.
In fact, in America, you’re forbidden from drumming, right? And some of the early, some of the earliest examples of why have to do with the nature of our culture drums to, to, to an outsider just sounds like drumming and music. Once you’re involved and you know more, the drums are not just sacred, but they’re talking.
So folks to drum patterns and be communicating over long distances. And so are these stories of rebellion and resistance that America has done a very decent job of squashing out, excuse me, which leads to very false beliefs of our ancestors who were prisoners of war as being docile or just accepting it and rolling over.
I invite people to read on the Stono rebellions. Oh man. Like it, but it was a concentrated effort to not share those stories and to keep those narratives suppressed because they didn’t want other Black people getting ideas.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: They didn’t want to encourage this contagion of energy.
But yeah, there are stories about, you know, drums being used and, you know, people waking up. Owners waking up to 150 people, 90 people. And they’re like, what? Right. So they, they learned very fast. The drumming was, ah, you ain’t doing that. Chop your hands off. Keep doing that.
David Dylan Thomas: Well, yeah. And, and, I mean, going back to this sort of the, the war metaphor, it is like taking away the enemy’s ability to communicate. That’s one of the first things you do.
Mike O’Bryan: Absolutely. And so as I began to understand that more, those things became what’s the word outlawed, if you will. And so, but I love us. We’ll beat on anything.We’ll figure it out. Yeah. You know, and Africa, and again I know Africa is a continent, but what I have observed by looking, I’m really into like music, and, you know the, the, the ethnographic study of it, right? Amongst groups of people. Number of cultures in Africa that drum using the water? Funky.
David Dylan Thomas: How do you even do that?
Mike O’Bryan: Well, if you hit water, it makes a sound. And depending on how you’re hitting it and what kind of force you get boom. Right, you get a noise. And there’s a dope video, I should find it and send it to you, of these three women beating on the river and it’s funky, it’s good, it’s amazing. But like, that’s who we are.
Right, the drum itself is a tool. Right, you can put a drum in front of a person in front of two different people, you’re going to get a very different experience out of it. When you put me in front of a piano, when you put Robert Glasper in front of a piano, you’re going to get two very different sounds out of it.
I’m going to play you something a little cute. Gotta practice a little bit to make it cute, you know? And not that Robert’s not practicing, but he’s already mastered. I mean, I’m sure he still practices for his own. I’m sure if you talk to Robert Glasper, he’s like, Oh, there’s a little thing I want to keep working on.
And to me, he’s already perfected it. He’s perfect. There’s nothing wrong. But he’ll, you know, I love artists in their own relationship to their, to their shit.. It’s a beautiful thing. Anyway, the, so, so the drum is not where it’s at. It’s in us. Right. The drum is sacred though, but it’s still a tool. And so in America, right, you have the, you have the removal of drums and you have the stripping of religion.
You go to Cuba, a number of Black enslaved folks came and they didn’t strip them that hard. Although they did some stripping, right? So there’s I’ll just name some things. There’s Santeria, right? It’s like the worship of the saints. What that really is is Black people hiding their religion inside of Catholicism to fool the masters.
And it worked. It worked!
David Dylan Thomas: Explain it, because I found this absolutely fascinating. See, it’s sort of like, I have this Orisha. Am I saying that right?
Mike O’Bryan: Yep.
David Dylan Thomas: An Orisha that is sort of like, close enough to what a saint is, that I can say, oh, I am praising Saint Teresa, but you know, and I know, and everybody knows, what I really mean is this particular Orisha.
And so I get to, is that kind of how it works?
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, yeah, and they built the rituals around them and etc. So, in the master space, just looks like yeah, what a story of resistance. That’s what I mean by like Black people. We weren’t just like whoa Whoa was me I’m here now let me just take my new lot make a new idea. We are we are clever
David Dylan Thomas: and there’s and there’s such a like I mean, you know it is it’s like What we get in media, especially if you look at like Birth of a Nation.
Oh my god, you get That you get either the good Negro who is sort of like, not only like resigned to their fate, but happy about it, and thankful, and then anybody else is a criminal.
Mike O’Bryan: Right.
David Dylan Thomas: Right. When what’s really goin’, and what’s not even pictured at all, is Star Wars, right? The rebellion, right? If you watch Star Wars, that is the story of a rebellion and the heroes are rebellious and they’re smart.
And they’re like, go for it against incredible odds. And they’re courageous. Ain’t none of them like, Oh, I guess the Empire’s here. I guess it’s the Emperor. What are you going to do? Let’s just sit back. No. We don’t even get that. It’s like, no, we’re going to kick ass. I’m going to learn the force. You’re going to like steal some shit.
We’re going to fuck some shit up. I still remember, um, Ta-Nehisi Coates was telling a story and he was like, yeah, the way we look at slavery now is, you know, it’s like the Lord of the, it’s like the Lord of the Rings. If it was told by the Orcs.
Mike O’Bryan: Right. I love that. And that’s true. So like, I got to stop saying like.
David Dylan Thomas: Say it all you want, man. You live, you embrace your like, you live your life. Thank you. I’m not going to like shame anybody.
Mike O’Bryan: I appreciate it. So one of the things that I think is really important for people to know and understand is that, and we’re going to, we’ll come back to religion, but I want to, I want to again, go back to like the way in which America.
I want to go back to the way in which American culture allowed or disallowed Black culture, African cultures to thrive here. So, it was considered psychosis to desire freedom. Run away from bondage. I believe it was Drapetomania was what it was called. Drapetomania.
Yeah, I mean like, so I love Toni Morrison, I really do. I, I, I, I love a lot of writers and I, I am not even, I feel the same way with any other form of art and in that, like, I don’t, I try not to go, there’s a best. I think there’s a category of people that can equally, you know, like who’s the best male singer. If you said Luther Vandross, I totally agree with you and that’s my leaning But if you said Stevie Wonder, I’d agree with you.
If you said young Michael Jackson, I’d agree If you said Marvin Gaye, who I adore, I’d agree. You know what I mean? If you said Bilal, I’d agree with you. So I think about that like it’s a level like the best level like yeah. However, I do have some of my favorites Tony Morrison’s in me and people might argue with me about this.
That’s fine. I think she might be the most prolific writer of the last century of any race, gender, or color. Now, I think for Black people, what, what she did is still being unpacked. I think for years to come, we will still be learning from it. Her ability to name things and challenge people on it outside of the writing.
Just her interviews. Major, profound, huge. But I bring it up because you know, I love a good Toni Morrison quote. And my colleague Austin, you know, I was looking for one for a presentation we were gonna do, and he said, you know, I love this one. The definitions are for the definers, not for the defined. And I said, woo.
Ooh, I never heard that one. But that’s it. That’s, look, mother Toni is teaching, teaching the people . She is teaching the people, so, oh man. Definitions are for the definers, not for the defined.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh my God. Because they’re a tool. Yeah, totally.
Mike O’Bryan: And, and there’s, there’s some implications there, right? Like, I like to think of like, you know, the, the silent, invisible semicolon.
Cause like, what does that imply then? That to make definitions work for the defined, we have to break the mental models that exist, that even created the definitions to begin with. And so I bring that up because again, going back to the ways in which, because religion is a part of culture. It is a very 21st, 20th century thing to get into the idea of, I don’t want to be clear here because it could be misinterpreted as the full separation of church and state is like something I’m against.
That’s not true at all. In fact, for our country, I think we need more of it, right?
But when you look at Africa go back, let’s go back to Western Africa. Let’s go back to the time of Mansa Musa, who if I’m not mistaken was Muslim.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, explain to the folks who Mansa Musa is, because not enough people know this story.
Mike O’Bryan: So Mansa Musa is the richest king on record to have lived. Some would say arguably, but there’s, I’ve seen more research articles that start pointing at like, you know, the amounts of gold put, put, put him at the top of the list. So much gold that when he made, so he was a Muslim cause he made the pilgrimage.
So sometimes I second guess myself. I’m like, I haven’t read this in a while. Is it right? So on his journey to Mecca from Ghana, he’s clearing the continent, you know, east to west here, or west to east, to get to Mecca. He’s giving out so much gold along the way, he’s disrupting economies. He disrupted the economy of Egypt, I think for a hundred years, because he gave out that much gold.
Do we not think that information didn’t get to Europe? Clearly the Arabs got it. Right then. The idea that no Europeans were around, like, that’s not real. The Crusades, you get what I mean? So people knew what was up.
David Dylan Thomas: People underestimate how much travel actually happened back then. It was harder, but it happened more.
Like, there’s a, The Dawn of Everything they talk about this. It’s like people think that now everybody’s moving all over the earth and stuff. It’s like, yeah, but per capita per person, people traveled much further back than they do now. Most people today never leave their town, never leave their home.
Never leave. Never go much further people back then. Much more like I was saying, fighting fucking trading because they were moving around, they weren’t doing that all in their own towns. They were moving. They were going like, so yeah, China knew about Africa. Europe knew about India. Like everybody was in on this shit.
Mike O’Bryan: So Mansa Musa as a Muslim was not persecuting non practicing Muslims.
David Dylan Thomas: He was getting them gold.
Mike O’Bryan: Do you know what I mean? Like he was even in his own kingdom. He didn’t force people to transfer over to Islam. They can practice whatever they want. Right. So that’s what, so going back to like, why, what I, so in contemporary world, we divorce religion from culture.
It’s one of the hardest things. I think. For people who don’t understand the ties between culture, religion, and ethnicity, like Judaism doesn’t make full sense to a lot of people. They can’t understand that. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You inherited a collection of books called a Bible. Torah for a Jew is not the Bible.
It is something very different. It is history. It’s philosophy. It’s myth. It is It’s, it’s all these things. And it’s them, yeah, it is who they are. It is the God of their forefathers, not the gods, not, or not the God of, you know, that guy, that guy, and that guy, these are their progenitors. These are, it is them.
It is hard for many of us to, to make sense of that because we did not grow up in a world where we saw that happen. And we don’t understand what it’s like to not Excuse me. We don’t understand what it’s like to be able to see whatever image of God you have in your image. I’ve read things that say like, that is some of the highest form forms of deep dark magic is to remove the imagery of the divine in your own image from a group of people, because what it does is it pushes further and further away your ability to obtain a version, if you will, of deification or your version of the best self that is in the image and likeness of whatever God or deity that you are, you know, ascribing to seeing.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And it’s, there’s like a double crime there. One is like, to your point about Judaism, it’s like, not only is there that, but there’s also the freedom to engage with that as you will, right?
Because lots of different Jews will have lots of different sort of relationships to that and access to that. Whereas if you were a prisoner of war, you were given one truth and you either stick to that truth or it’s the rod, it’s the whip. So you don’t, a) you don’t get to have a relationship with the divine.
You don’t even get to pick what kind of relationship you want to have with the divine, right? It’s like, oh no, you were cut completely. And you were forced into this view of the world that’s not even your own.
Mike O’Bryan: So yes, and, right? Like, I think that’s the goal of the other party. I think the, the journey of so Santeria is Yoruba culture and practice, religious practice, just hit it, like.
They tried that and these people said, yeah, got you, bro. Fuck you. Got you. Yeah. Right. And even in America, right. You have who do practices that are essentially practices from a little further South than Ghana, right. The Bantu Congo people. And while there’s a stripping away, there’s still this cultural knowledge and practice and belief that is getting handed down from generation to generation.
That’s root work, right? Now, Katori Hall as a playwright is one of my favorites because she plays around with root work in her work and her plays and it’s deep tied to identities and blackness and cultural and religious and spiritual practice and expression that does come from our folks, excuse me, because they’re, you know, Western Africa, you know, it’s a large, long stretch of land from which they were grabbing people, you know, and bringing them across the country.
I mean, excuse me, across this entire Western hemisphere.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Right. So you do find that even with the pursuit of squashing stuff out, it doesn’t fully happen. Yeah, yeah. Which is a beautiful story of resistance, beautiful story of hanging on to culture, and, and doing your damnedest and your best to hold on to identity.
Right? And I think that is remarkable. In that it gives me courage when I need it, right? When I think about the working conditions and the living conditions by which people were forced to be this resilient.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Shows me I can do it too. This is going to look different because it’s 2024 now.
And it’s not 1675. It’s not 1722 or 1885. It’s none of those things but it is those things.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, I very much want to like do a glossary here and have you break down some of these terms, but we don’t have time for that. We may do like a whole other podcast, but I think the salient point here is that what I’m hearing is that that journey of African religions and traditions and culture was as much about preserving identity. And holding on to dignity and identity under, under terrible conditions. So so that, that’s, that’s great. And, and, and the one, the one last point I kind of want to, I want to play with here a little bit is you can see that as not just this, you know, one chess move of the white man tries to keep us down and we have this one chess move back.
There’s this back and forth because then you still have in Haiti for, or Santo Domingue at the time. this attempt to use religion, even though it isn’t strictly speaking a Christian religion, to continue that subjugation. So the idea of the zombie, like that was something plantation owners tried to latch onto to say, even if you try to run away, even if you die, I still own you.
Like it was an, it was an attempt to squash hope, even using a religion that wasn’t their own.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Well, that’s what that’s that is the tactic. Yeah, right what Let me make sure I get this right Jupiter, it’s also Zeus. These are all tactics. That’s not like That’s why I go to prisoners of war.
Yeah, and somebody you subjugate as quick as possible. As fast as possible. To get that culture control.
David Dylan Thomas: Well, and unpack that for those people who don’t know. Like, what does that mean? Jupiter and Zeus is the same thing.
Mike O’Bryan: Oh, so, this is the Romans. Right? Conquering Greece. Just a plant a God on top of them.
Same thing.
David Dylan Thomas: This is so funny. This, this pisses my son off. Like, back, back. He’s been studying history, like basically his whole life. But there came a point where he was learning about like the Greek gods and all that stuff. And anytime someone bring up the Roman God, he’s like, that’s just, he would get so pissed off.
It’s like, no, call it by its real name. Like don’t deadname Zeus, you know?
Mike O’Bryan: But that’s exactly it. That’s what I mean by like that kind of tactic is old. These are old, old tactics in war, right? You obliterate culture. You subjugate it. You keep parts of it. You break other parts. You know, it’s interesting to me, no matter what, and this might, you know, I might get in trouble for this one.
No matter what was done to us, you can’t take music from us.
David Dylan Thomas: Not for lack of trying, but no, you can’t.
Mike O’Bryan: So much so that they built. They just built an entire industry around us, bro.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Top to bottom. Yeah. Top to bottom. Built an entire industry off of the sounds we were making and what we were doing.
Couldn’t keep up.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, but that’s that’s the thing that like. Our revenge for lack of a better word is that hip hop is the number one form of music on the planet. People weren’t even asking for that shit I can go to anywhere on this Earth and I can find their version of hip hop
Mike O’Bryan: You know what else for me is like take every, take the, take the international slash American greats.
Elvis, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. all failed R& B blues artists.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, hell yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Literally, like literally, right. I took a history of rock and roll class and I took it as like almost a joke because I was very curious. It was in college. I was very curious as to how much of the black experience would or would not be there.
There was not a class where I wasn’t just chuckling in the back. Cause the absolute erasure of black people, minus like Chuck Berry, was just hilarious. No Little Richard really, maybe a little mention here and there. Right. And what I, what I mean by they could not keep up is that it’s not that they don’t, it’s not that non black people didn’t have talent.
The problem was that the sounds that people were gravitating to were culturally ours. We were doing this before it was industrialized. And they become an observer. Excuse me, they would come and observe and listen and then people, you know, they’re like I’m going-
Excuse me People would come and observe and listen people that also made the music the Black folks would go to the big city to try to because they understood like There’s a thing happening here with these sounds we make and I think that is it’s wild because it was just a part of who we were and we were doing it and refining it.
There was a point where they didn’t care that much.
There’s a point where they didn’t care that much. And then you can see as it got more industrialized, they started to care a lot more.
What I love about Motown, good, bad, better, or worse, Motown took a thing that Black people were doing, polished it up a little bit, made it a little palatable and said, we’re going to double down right here, baby. And they did. I mean, excuse me. I recently I was at a restaurant last week. And a song came on, and it was Motown from the beginning, the snap. They’re calling it the snap, the pocket, the vibe. I was like, this is Motown. I’ve never heard this song. And it was good. The guy was singing his face off. But I was like, dang, that kind of sounds like Marvin, but it’s not Marvin.
Kind of sounds like Smokey, but it’s not Smokey. Like, who is this? So I look it up. Shazam, it says Eddie Holland. I’m like, what? How have I never heard of Eddie Holland? Who’s Holland? Eddie Holland? That’s crazy. 1962? Why have I never Holland, Dozier, Holland. I never thought about. Now, great. Like, arguably, most prolific writing team of the 20th century.
Arguably, right? There’s a couple others, right? But it never dawned on me that one of them actually sang for themselves. Sure, yeah. And then when I look it up, it’s like, yeah, this is Eddie Holland of Holland Dozier Holland. And for those that don’t know, just go Google Holland Dozier Holland.
I’m not going to say anything else. And I sat back and I said, wow, an architect. And I heard like I heard it I was like wow that’s that’s crazy that in 1962, I mean this guy’s was burning through these records And I was like, wow if that’s 62, what the hell were you doing in 58? Right? You know what I mean?
You think about James Brown. I get he’s got complicated, complicated man. And, you know, in many ways we would have canceled him today. And in fairness, because there are elements of what he was doing as a human being that were completely atrocious. And I’m not making any excuses for that. And, but, like, when I think, not but.
Because, yeah, we’re not going to excuse bad behavior. You know what I’m saying? And harmful behavior. And. And in the context of his talent at that time and what he was doing in the time period, how polished it was. That polish didn’t happen because a record was put in their face or like a microphone was put down it’s let me record you.
Oh, let me get polished now Eddie Holland was like, let me figure out how to write songs and get polished now because it’s 1961 or 62 you’re putting a Microphone in my face. Those sounds are ours and we were able to master them to the point to do what we did That’s like, yeah, that’s what I love Motown.
They figured out a way now some people would say got really hyper commercial, etc, but
Prolific, I’d argue Gambo and Huff, same thing. Prolific. Our sound. There’s a move in the modern world called Black American music. So if you go back to the earliest times of these folks making sounds and music, You know, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, et cetera, their earliest records, they’re cutting jazz standards, they’re cutting blues standards, they’re cutting pop standards, they’re cutting gospel standards.
I mean, it’s an array of sounds. And they finally land on the thing that’s gonna like make the money. But they were singing all of those things because all of it was a part of the black music expression. We didn’t have these strict categories. Industry did that. It’s a market.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: And so people are pushing back on that now, going like, Yeah, no, no, no.
These are all part of the black expression of music. We call it Black American music. Robert Glasper, Black Radio, is a good example of this, right? People are like, oh, he’s a jazz artist. And he’s like, sure. I do more than that. I also played in church. I play R& B, blah, blah, blah. You know, he’s on Maxwell’s, you know, what I call his comeback album back in like 2007 2008.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm hmm.
Mike O’Bryan: Right? He’s, he’s played with Bilal, been Bilal’s music director his whole career, you know, at one point and but he is a jazz artist too, right? He’s all of those things. Aretha Franklin could sing whatever you put in her damn face literally. Scat her face around, you know. Sarah Vaughan, same thing.
She wasn’t just a jazz singer. You know, so these, these, this is how in America, you know, we kept our culture. Yeah. It just got industrialized a bit. And I think over time what we’re wrestling with, particularly in the modern day is like, how do you keep the benefits of it being industrialized, but pull it back to identity to empower and to encourage and to embrace more people and invite them into what is their identity and legacy.
Right. And that’s, that’s hard, but people are doing it. That’s why we’re cultural institutions. We got to keep up. They’re dying. They’re closing. I’m on a whole other tangent here,
David Dylan Thomas: But I think but I think it comes back around to because I think the answer to that question lives somewhere in that notion of the humanity being at the center of your corporation, because that industrialization, as it stands now, is designed to strip out all that humanity to strip out all the things that make it something you can keep as part of your culture and to to, to industrialize it to the point where it all looks the same.
And I think that I don’t, I don’t think we get there. I don’t think we get to the answer to that question without a rethink and a recentering that does put humanity. I wouldn’t even say corporations just. Human behavior, human life. Cause it’s just not right now. Like most of human life right now, humanity is not at the center of it.
And you have to work to put it at the center. It’s not something that, it’s one of those things, so you have humanity centered, I have this like interdependence kick where I think about, humanity is a thing that exists. We don’t have to get to it. It exists, right? We have to stop fighting it and I think of that assuming about interdependence interdependence exists.
I don’t have to make it exist I just have to pull away all the shit that’s keeping it buried. So I feel like that’s a that we have this similar project and I think that answer to like how do you get the benefits of this industrialization and still have that identity I think it is leaning into the humanity leaning into the interdependence and stop fighting it fighting it.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and also the context matters. Yeah, you know like I Love this story about Marvin Gaye and what’s going on?
David Dylan Thomas: What’s that story?
Mike O’Bryan: Oh my gosh. Oh, Marvin. Tell the short version Yeah, for the second time Motown was not crazy about what’s going on. The song and the record the album, as it was coming out.
And they were like, Marv, we’re not putting this shit out. And Marv was like, well okay, I’m not doing shit then. I will just keep making this music until you And they, it basically got to the standstill and eventually, you know, leadership was like, alright, we’re gonna put this fucking record out, and when it fails, you’re gonna get in there and record what we want you to record.
They put out What’s Going On and The world happened the way it did, right? Yeah. Yeah. But here’s a black man and his identity understanding his prowess and being like absolutely not.
Music as a part of the human experience Going back thousands and thousands of years has always been about something larger than just one person in one moment. Liturgies were sung prayers were sung.
David Dylan Thomas: Mm hmm
Mike O’Bryan: Jews sing Torah, right? And they’re not the only group, right? Prayers in Islam are sung, right?
Like this, the world we live in has, has, has kind of taken music. It’s this industrialization of it and it’s become a commodity. It’s a, it’s a thing. It’s a type of stuff where before it was something else. And, and I think what you find with people, is that, they, they are making out of themselves. And I think that’s what you have with that story and that experience.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Right? And I think it’s a, I love him for it.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Mike O’Bryan: Right? Music might not change the world literally, but there’s a reason why Marvin Gaye liked Mahalia Jackson singing before he talked. There’s a reason, right?
It’s powerful. It opened up pathways of emotionality in people to something different on the inside. And she’s singing with the power of 30 million ancestors behind her, essentially, right? I remember being a kid hearing Mahalia Jackson, and the first time I heard Move on Up a Little Higher I was like, whoo!
What was that? Who is that?
David Dylan Thomas: So I, and, and I think it’s, it’s not a coincidence that a lot of great Black artists, a lot of artists in general, but a lot of great black artists, like, had their start in the church. Cause that’s the place where, I was having this conversation with one of the other podcast guests, Rashid Zakat, about, like, how Black people can be someone else in church.
They can’t be in daily life. And even on the plantation, there were people that they could be on Sunday that they couldn’t be the rest of the time. So I think there is. I think, I think all these things we’re talking about are connections to our ancestors that are connections to our identity. And like, how do you preserve that?
Whether it’s in this big sort of capitalist empire or is it like literally as a prisoner of war? Either way, like it’s about preserving that identity and that humanity.
Mike O’Bryan: Yeah. I mean, Black Christianity looks very different than its white counterparts. So much of what’s there is African culture in practice.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Awesome. I, please let us have you back to go deeper on Yoruba and Hoodoo and root work and all these other, like, I really, really wanna unpack that stuff. But I’m really, really happy with the conversation we did have.
Mike O’Bryan: It’s good. I’ll do, do some reading and talk to people. We’ll do, we’ll come back and have good dig,
David Dylan Thomas: because, because I, I, I definitely wanna dig into that stuff, but Mike, thank you so much.
Where can people find you and your work?
Mike O’Bryan: So you can find human nature online at www dot human nature with one N. So that’s H U M a N a T U R E dot works. W O R K S. And there are users and info at humanature.works. Well, you can email us there too, but on the website, you can also get in touch with us. I’m also on social media, Instagram.
Twitter or X at Mike OB imagines with an S at the end. So Mike OB imagines. Yeah. There we go.
David Dylan Thomas: And you can learn more about White Meat at WhiteMeatMovie.com or ask us questions at info@WhiteMeatMovie. com. So for the White Meat podcast, this is David Dylan Thomas and we will see you next time.
See ya.
