Truth Be Told

The days are shorter and colder, and like you, we’re looking for inspiration to sustain us through winter. For our last episode of the season we talk with two authors who are passing on the wisdom of the great icons Bruce Lee and Frida Kahlo to teach us what we’re capable of. Arianna Davis is the author of “What Would Frida Do? A Guide to Living Boldly,” the digital director of Oprah Magazine and a self-proclaimed Friducha. Images of Frida Kahlo have been heavily commercialized, but Davis believes there is much to learn from her that can inspire us in 2020.

“The book is not meant to be a blueprint of how to live your life,” Davis says. “There’s definitely a lot of decisions that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with, but I think we can read about her story, the decisions she made, the way she lived her life so fiercely for inspiration on how we can also live our own lives boldly and fiercely.”

Kahlo is considered to be one of Mexico’s greatest artists. She contracted polio at the age of 6, which caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. As a result, she wore long skirts her entire life. In high school, she suffered a trolley accident that fractured her spine and pelvis. She was hospitalized for weeks and had to wear a full-body cast for months. Later, she would not be able to bear children with her husband and painter, Diego Rivera. She and Diego had a tumultuous marriage that, coupled with ongoing physical ailments, caused her depression. One week after her 47th birthday, Frida died of a pulmonary embolism.

Davis was hesitant in writing a book about such a big icon. “Even though I am Latina, I’m Puerto Rican and Black — I’m not Mexican. And so I had that moment of asking myself, ‘Are you really the right person to tell the story? Should this be a Mexican writer that writes it instead, especially after all the ‘American Dirt’ drama?’ ”

But for Davis, Frida is a shared icon for all Latinx people, and so she made sure to do as much research when writing the book, including traveling to Mexico City where Frida was born and raised.

“I’m Black and Puerto Rican and growing up as a Latina, I think Frida is one of those icons, one of those faces that you just know of. She overcame so many obstacles while being proudly feminist, being proudly Mexican, being proudly queer. And this was all in the 1920s and ’30s. So for me, seeing the Frida movie and learning more about her story really sparked this fascination that kind of eventually became an obsession.”

The biggest lesson Davis has walked away with is one of Frida’s famous phrases, “Viva la Vida,” which means live your life or long live life. Davis feels Frida knew the end was near after Frida’s leg was amputated. Then Frida painted watermelons with a message — Viva la Vida. Davis gets goosebumps every time she remembers this phrase.

“The fact that she had every obstacle you could possibly think of in the end, she still had this positive outlook of you need to live your life and live it to the fullest,” says Davis.

This week, our souls needed to be reminded of what idealism feels like and what hope sounds like. So, we brought in some of the most dynamic voices of our time and asked one simple question: “What’s the world you’re fighting for?”

Here are some of their answers:

“I’m fighting for a world where people of color don’t need to work twice as hard to be seen as less than equal. I’m fighting for a world where we all have a future that’ll not be filled with floods, hurricanes and fires. I’m fighting for a world where we can heal from white supremacy and colonialism.” — Althea Mitchell, member of The Radical Monarchs

“So a world that I’m fighting for is for a world that has systemic and interpersonal solidarity in action. Growing up in San Diego, California I didn’t see myself reflected in the curriculum. In middle school moving to Ohio, I didn’t see myself reflected in the curriculum. Moving to Indianapolis, when I first taught, I didn’t see myself in the curriculum. And then when I moved to Boston to go to grad school at Harvard, that’s the first time I saw myself in the curriculum taking an ethnic studies graduate course taught by Dr. Christina Villarreal. She exposed me to cross coalitional movements. So today I’m fighting for our voice being unapologetically in the curriculum, being present. And I want to make sure that we’re not omitted from the conversation, because when we’re omitted from the conversation, we are still fighting the same battles of lack of representation, of lack of resource s or a lack of radical imagination as templates for us to see ourselves as the leaders we were born to be.” — Tony DelaRosa, Filipinx activist, poet and manager of teacher leadership development of Teach For America in Miami

“The world I see right now is a world full of hope, it’s people becoming more and more active, posting more and more on social media, regarding activism and how people can get involved and educate themselves on issues that they’re connected to, that they’re inspired by, that they are interested in. The world I’m fighting for is a world where urban oil drilling is read about in books and they think it was ridiculous that it went on for so long. It’s a world where nobody is being denied the right to breathe clean air, that everybody has access to this basic human right and everybody has access to safe drinking water.” — Nalleli Cobo, environmental justice activist

“The world that I’m fighting for is one that advocates for the rights, resources and livelihood of the people in our community who’ve been historically and constantly marginalized. I’m fighting for a world that prioritizes unity and empathy and making sure that our communities place importance on uplifting, liberating one another.” — Ruby Ibarra, M.C., poet, director and scientist

In this episode, host Tonya Mosley hangs out with two Wise Ones, Alex Aiono, a musician, podcast host and YouTube star, and Jelani Anglin, founder of Good Call NYC.

Anglin grew up in New York and experienced a run-in with the law as a teenager. “That’s a story that many young Black males have had,” says Anglin. “And if they don’t,

Black women are, by and large, on the front lines of the political fight for democracy. Last year, we saw a record number of Black women serving in Congress and a record number of Black women serving at the state level in politics. There’s data that shows Black, brown and Indigenous women are in the trenches  — as political activists, volunteers and everyday people — mobilizing Americans to get out and vote.

This week, Tonya Mosley talks with award-winning journalist and friend, Farai Chideya, who knows both personally and professionally why Black women show up each and every time. Chideya has a new radio show called “Our Body Politic” which unapologetically centers reporting on not just how women of color experience the major political events of today, but how they’re impacting those very issues.

Chideya calls women of color a “superdemographic.” What she means by that is, all women of color are people who can tip elections. “And as different as we are, we are all people who tend to get undervalued by the political system,” Chideya says. “Not hired as strategists, not given the advertising contracts to reach out to voters.” Because women of color are poorly marketed to and a misunderstood group compared to their political power, Chideya does not refer to the group as a “demographic” but rather a “superdemographic.”

Women of color are the secret sauce. We are the roux in the American gumbo. We are not just the parsley on the side of the plate. We are the base of the plate and we need to be understood as such. And, I would argue, Black women over the age of 70 are the secret, secret sauce.

Chideya believes that America is poorer intellectually and sociopolitically because the voices of Black and people of color have been excluded and censored. “We have to recognize that the act of truth-telling is an act of everyone bringing their gifts to the table and then fighting about how we write the first draft of history,” Chideya says. “It can’t be told by any one group or any one person.”

Still, Chideya and Mosley recognize that there needs to be a fight for a shared truth in order for a society and democracy to be preserved. Chideya created the term “psychic privacy fence,” which refers to people only being surrounded by others that are like them. “How you live is not the only way to live,” Chideya says. “And if you don’t understand how other people live, you’re never gonna understand America.”

Chideya’s time as a journalist and political analyst made her aware that America was, in what she calls, a culture war. “People’s decision-making was not based on logic — it was based on cultural affiliations. I like to think of elections as this great pageant of national belonging. And in a country this divided, people choose what kind of political affiliation they belong to,” Chideya says. “They will follow that sense of belonging off the cliff of logic.” As a journalist, Chideya believes it’s important to understand this part of the story,

On Aug. 28, 2020, the world heard the news that actor Chadwick Boseman had died at the age of 43 of colon cancer. Boseman was known for his role as King T’Challa in Marvel’s “Black Panther.” He also portrayed iconic Black figures such as James Brown, Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson. Boseman’s death came as a shock because he did not publicly disclose his stage 3 diagnosis and four-year fight. His death not only raised awareness of colon cancer, but also the health care disparities Black people face.

Colon cancer is curable if caught early. It most commonly affects people who are 50 and older, but in 2018, the American Cancer Society (ACA) changed its guidelines to advise people to start regularly screening at 45 because of the steady rise in the number of young people diagnosed. Yet, Boseman died of colon cancer at the age of 43, before the recommended screening age.

Black Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival rate from colorectal cancer of any racial group in the U.S. There are a lot of reasons for it, but one of the most important ones is late diagnosis. By the time we get to a doctor, it’s too late.

Our Wise Ones this week are two guys literally working to save our lives. Dr. Italo Brown is an emergency medicine physician and clinical instructor at Stanford University Hospital. He’s been on the front lines treating people with COVID-19 over these last few months. Jahmil Lacey the founder of TRAPMedicine, a nonprofit that focuses on using barbershops to help address the health inequities of Black men and boys. He’s currently in medical school, and he joined to talk to us as he just got out of class.

You had this cultural icon in our community, as a result of his roles in a number of films, but also like he’s one of us. He went to a Historically Black College/university (HBCU), Howard University. He navigated his way through Hollywood. He took on roles that really depicted us in a very positive light. And when I found out that one, he was diagnosed when it was already stage 3 cancer means he had been impacted by this for a while before he found out and he decided to just live. — Jahmil Lacey

Dr. Brown says the very act of having to advocate for yourself to get an earlier screening is an example of systemic racism. You can walk into a provider’s office and say, “I think I need to get a colonoscopy,” says Dr. Brown, “and they say, you don’t need a colonoscopy because they don’t understand the way that it decimates the people in our community. They don’t understand that fear plays a factor and how much it actually took for ...

Walter Thompson-Hernández has reported and hosted videos from nearly every continent and throughout the United States, covering Japan’s Chicano subculture, the Compton Cowboys’ legacy and the disruption of cosplay stereotypes. His latest project is a first-person audio anthology called “California Love.”

“White folks have had the freedom to move to Los Angeles and tell our stories freely. This show is entirely different,” Thompson-Hernández said in an Instagram post. “I wanted to create something for people who look and sound like me. And a show about L.A. from someone born and raised in Southeast L.A. in a one-room hospital on Florence Boulevard in front of a Tacos Mexico.”

Thompson-Hernández has told stories since he was 11 years old, as a graffiti artist, then as an academic scholar. He earned his master’s degree in Latin American studies from Stanford University and was enrolled in the UCLA Chicano studies Ph.D. program for one year before leaving to write for the New York Times. Prior to graduate school, he played professional basketball throughout Latin America for the Mexican Olympic team. He said all of these experiences have shaped him as a storyteller and his use of various mediums to tell honest stories about Black and brown people.

"I am not thinking about white people when I make stories to be quite honest. It's been a process. When I am creating something I am thinking about my mom, my cousins…If it doesn't resonate with them, I didn't win." –@WTHDZ #deartbt

— #DearTBT (@TruthBeToldKQED) August 20, 2020

Truth Be Told host Tonya Mosley asked him about working in audio for the first time, dream collaborations and how 2020 has been for him.

You can watch the conversation on our Instagram TV here and follow our live-tweeting of the conversation here.

Episode transcript can be found here.

Thank you to the KPCC, LAist and “California Love” team for this collaboration. Specifically, Kristen Hayford, Jennifer Su, Veronica Lopez, Megan Tan and Kyana Moghadam.

Have you listened to “California Love” yet? It’s a love letter to the city of Los Angeles, Thompson-Hernández’s community, and the people that are touchstones to his life. It is also a podcast about a side of America that usually doesn’t make it to mainstream media. “If you’re from L.A. you hear all these tropes about the city and that’s not what I know.” — Walter Thompson-Hernández.

The first and final season of the podcast is out now and you can find an overview of each episode below. In case you need some direction on where to start,

Earlier this week, we woke up to another morning of tragic news: Jacob Blake was shot and tasered several times by police on Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, leaving him in serious condition as of Tuesday. He was trying to break up a dispute. His father reported that his son is now paralyzed from the waist down but doctors do not know if it is permanent.

It’s been nearly three months since the deaths of George Floyd and Tony McDade; five months since the death of Breonna Taylor and six months since the death of Ahmaud Arbery. It’s disheartening that our conversations about racism and trauma continue to be relevant every single day. We know there are lifelong impacts to this trauma. And we continue to turn to the power of healing together.

This week we have asked Wise One, Resmaa Menakem, for help. He’s a healer, trauma specialist and author of the book “My Grandmother’s Hands.” In conversation, Menakem asked Tonya: “Have you noticed that since George Floyd got killed, all of the practices that used to give you relief, no longer do?” He continued, “That’s because we’re trying to do individual things to deal with communal grief.” The same could be said this week, and every time a Black person and their families’ lives are forever changed as a result of racism.

Trauma is a response to anything that’s overwhelming that happens too much, too fast, too soon or too long, Menakem says, coupled with a lack of protection or support. It lives in the body stored as sensation: pain or tension — or lack of sensation, like numbness.

Menakem says these lifelong effects also impact our psyche, our bodies and our DNA. How well do you listen to your body? How do we tune in to the alarm bells our bodies are ringing? Wise One Menakem helps people listen and act on the messages our bodies are giving us. And during the course of our conversation, we got into another related subject — inherited trauma.

Our question this week comes from Nia Ita Thomas. Thomas identifies as a proud Afro-latina/Afro-indigina woman by way of the Dominican Republic. She is a New York City-based educator, storyteller and mental health advocate. Thomas is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, the daughter of immigrants and grew up with a parent who was emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive. When Thomas read the book “The Body Keeps the Score,” she connected her clumsiness to trauma and said she had no idea she was disassociating from her body.

I’ve always been known as that kid that was clumsy, and I never thought to connect it to my trauma or to the ways that I was actually disassociating from my body. And so that’s a way that definitely shows up. I’m not the most graceful person. I’m dropping things a lot. I’m not the most observant person. I’m book smart,

There is no right way to parent during a pandemic, and everyone is doing their best.

On this week’s episode, we hear from parents in the thick of raising children during the coronavirus pandemic. We got a lot of questions from listeners, so we gathered them and enlisted two Wise Ones to help us work through them. Host Tonya Mosley is joined by Nancy Redd, author of several women’s health books and “Bedtime Bonnet.” And she’s the mother of two children — August, who is 9 years old, and Little Nancy who is 6. New York Times opinion writer and prolific tweeter Wajahat Ali is our second Wise One. Ali is a father of three little ones – 4-year-old Nusayba, 6-year-old Ibrahim and 8-month-old Khadija.

Redd had home-schooled her children before the pandemic, so this quarantine has been a return to their previous routine. As of this January, Ali’s 4-year-old daughter Nusayba was declared cancer-free after being diagnosed in 2019 with stage four cancer and receiving a liver transplant. And the two of them have figured out a way to not lose their minds while being a parent, a full-time writer and a healthy human during a pandemic. Mosley and the Wise Ones began the conversation with a check-in and stressed that the key is to not be too hard on yourself.

Wajahat Ali: It is a struggle for working parents. At first, people were saying, “Oh, isn’t it fantastic?” And now it’s like, “Yo, we are drowning.”

Nancy Redd: For individuals who are used to the work-life balance, where your child was away from you; you were away from home and you all come home together … To be honest with you, I have no idea how you can make this transition so swiftly and quickly. Of course, there is going to be some growing pains.

Both parents admit to the humbling lessons quarantine has taught them, such as valuing being in together as a family. But Redd and Ali say their experiences, although unique to their family and environment, are not that different from our listeners who wrote in with questions.

Question:

“Dear Truth be Told, my name is Giselle and I live in the Inland Empire in California. I have a 5 year old who just started kindergarten and an almost 3 year old. How do we address the question of “how long will this last?” Our 5 year old only experienced less than a school year [before COVID] and with school starting back up again, she’s confused why she won’t have a “first day of school” and asked when she will be able to do that again.”

Wajahat Ali: Yeah, my son also had a year of school before coronavirus and he had his routine. But what we told him and we told Nusaybah is: We’re in a global pandemic, there’s something called a virus. People are sick. People are dying. And so for our health right now, we have to stay away from some folks. We have to social distance so we can see our friends on Zoom and we might have to do something called distance learning on the internet. But, you know, this will eventually pass. It might take some time. It might be a year.” And so me and my wife, we have not coddled them when it comes to the reality of the pandemic.

Nancy Redd: Well, I don’t like to be wrong, so when I’m asked a question that I don’t have an answer to, I am never afraid to say, “I don’t know” because it makes them believe me more when I say “I know.” So what I like to do, especially with my littlest one, is to diffuse the situation and their anxiety. But whatever the question is, if it’s like, “How long would this last?” To afford a medium of autonomy in the relationship, I usually throw it back to them — “I don’t know. How long do you think? What do you think needs to happen before we can all get back to the way things were? What can we do to move things forward?” Keeping their little minds busy with active questions gives them less time to dwell on the p...

How do we fight an enemy like COVID-19 without the power of physical connection — the very force that has bolstered us through tough times in the past? That is the question we are unpacking in this week’s episode, prompted by our very own host, Tonya Mosley.

“Colonialism always works by separating and displacing people of color. My hometown of Detroit is the American manifestation of this — economic divestment over decades has left it vulnerable and bare, bore the brunt of something like a pandemic. When I was a kid, I’d tell anybody who asked me that I was going to move far away and explore the world. And I did. … But now, as I watch how COVID-19 has ravaged places like Detroit — I am aware that I am also vulnerable because I am isolated from my people — and the very superpowers of connection and community that allowed our ancestors to survive past atrocities.”

Tonya talks with two hometown friends, Sarah Davis and Kelly Anglin-Poindexter. Anglin-Poindexter now lives in Houston, Texas, and Davis lives in Austin, Texas. They got on a three-way call to talk about the heartache they feel being so far away while many of their Detroit neighbors, schoolmates and church friends are dying of COVID-19.

Tonya: Do you guys miss home? Do you miss Detroit?

Sarah: I’m just missing the Detroit that we knew when we were growing up. I absolutely miss my family and I do get extremely nostalgic when I go back home. But it’s not for Detroit today. It’s like for the Detroit that we knew and what Detroit could possibly be. I do see little sparks of potential. So, when I see that, I’m like, wow, that’s like what Detroit could be maybe in another 10 years. So if you can miss something that’s in the future, that’s how I feel.

Tonya: That’s kind of profound — miss what Detroit is soon to become. But I do feel really emotional about what’s happening with COVID-19 and just the amount of people who are dying from it, the amount of people who are sick, the six degrees of separation.

Kelly: I had a really good friend who was in the hospital and on a ventilator for 45 days. And it was like every single day, I was either trying to reach out to her, her mom or husband, to find out what was going on. And I didn’t realize how much stress that was causing me. And it was interesting that her mom called me one day and she just she started praying with me. Now, this is her daughter. And I was like, ‘I’ve got to put it together. I can’t allow this anxiety to take over me. I have to be able to take care of my family, take care of my kids.’

Tonya: Yeah, I feel a tremendous amount of fear and also guilt. And I’m trying not to cry about it. My dream had always been like, I’ll go away and establish myself and then come back to Detroit. And that just didn’t happen. I just went away and I never came back. And a big part of that is because of opportunities in other places. So it’s a twofold thing for me — feeling guilt for not being a part of the solution in Detroit. And all of it is exacerbated by this COVID-19 crisis that we’re dealing with.

Our Wise One shares similar feelings. Sarah M. Broom is a writer and author of an award-winning book called “The Yellow House: A Memoir” about her childhood home in New Orleans East, Louisiana. The neighborhood was promising at the height of the space race as it became home to a major NASA plant.

Broom says a prized childhood memory of hers is remembering how her mother would fix the house up and make it smell good. “She still is this immense sort of sensual person, very interested in how things look and how food is presented. And also this incredible cook.

This week, Tonya Mosley is joined by “Call Your Girlfriend” podcast hosts Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman to answer a round of listener questions. Sow and Friedman met in Washington D.C. in 2008 at a “Gossip Girl” viewing party. After that, they became long-distance best friends, started a podcast together and wrote a soon to be released co-memoir called “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close.” Their book details the ups and downs of their decade-long, long-distance, interracial friendship: from falling in friend-love, to developing a business partnership, to entering couples therapy to save their friendship when it reached a breaking point. By the end of the book, they build an argument for friendship as a bond worth protecting just as fiercely as romantic love.

“We saw a gap in the literature that exists about really staying in a long-term friendship, not just through things that are joyful and exciting and life-giving, but also things that are really challenging. And just from our own experience and our own friendship, that was something that we have at various points really wanted to read. And so it’s sort of that conventional story of writing the book that you once needed.” – Ann Friedman

“What we were really looking for was a joint telling of one friendship. And we were really trying to come to a singular narrative about our own story, and also find some common vocabulary and really a new way to talk about a friendship. The words ‘best friend,’ ‘B.F.F.’, and ‘bestie’ are all great but there is something just about them that is so reductive to be a really enriching experience that two adults can have in friendship.” – Aminatou Sow

Sow and Friedman define “Big Friendship” as a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations and emotional shifts. They brought their personal experience, research and reflections to a round of listener questions.

Sow suggests first, take a deep breath. “I recognize the contours of this question so much and I have struggled in my own relationships.” She recommends some introspective questioning. “Are you saying it because you’re annoyed by it, or are you saying it because it actually is having repercussions on your friend?” After self-reflecting, if you are going to engage in a conversation, Sow advises finding a way into the conversation that does not center yourself.

Some suggested language: “Hey, tell me about your relationship. Are you happy?” instead of “Hey, I think your partner is a loser,” which is very subjective.

“This question is how a lot of people end up with those commemorative friendships,” Friedman says. Commemorative friendships is one of the three categories they learned about when doing research on adult friendships. Friendships can fall under these categories: active, passive, and commemorative.

“Active friendships are fully happening right now,” Friedman says. “You are in communication with each other regularly, you are up to date on the struggles and joys of that person’s life and you are connected. Passive friendships are ones where you still feel a great fondness and maybe a good bond, but you aren’t really keeping up. And finally, commemorative friendships are friendships that you’ve both moved on from and you don’t expect to ever come back to.”

Friedman says “I think there is a reason why it’s hard to evaluate a relationship with a lot of historical weight,

We yearn for glimmers of joy as we dismantle racist systems and consume traumatic news updates, all while sheltering at home in a pandemic. So, we’re revisiting our very first episode, Holding on to Joy, with an updated conversation between host Tonya Mosley and her grandmother, this week’s Wise One, Ernestine Mosley.

Our question-asker is Dr. Seema Yasmin, who is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, poet, medical doctor and author. She asked:

“How can I feel joy when the world is burning?”

This episode was recorded before COVID-19, so Tonya was able to travel to her hometown of Detroit. There, she talked to her grandmother and New York Times bestselling author, adrienne maree brown. Tonya asked her grandmother how she continues to find joy. Her response: “There is a difference between joy and happiness,” said Ernestine Mosley. “I am happy right now. I am just happy to see you. That’s different from joy. The joy is in your heart and it stays with you.”

For Ernestine Mosley, she gets joy out of helping people and getting involved in change-making. “When I can talk to someone and lift their spirits, or do something for them to help them in spite of everything in the world, it is still beautiful. We have a beautiful world here and we have to change it.”

The self-identified pleasure goddess, adrienne maree brown, also distinguishes joy from happiness. “Joy is not extraneous. .. something you have to earn, or off to the side.” For brown, joy is a freedom journey that allows for pleasure. So much so, that she wrote a book about how to make social justice the most pleasurable human experience, called “Pleasure Activism”. She references Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power” which emphasizes that in order to keep your eye on the prize, you need to experience your full erotic self. How do you do that?

Brown suggests starting with getting to know yourself — learning what your calling is and what work you are supposed to be doing. Next, practice “attention liberation” which is taking your attention away from what you cannot change and focus on the helpers. Then, do an inventory of your life. Specifically, identify the spaces you feel in absolute alignment with yourself and out of alignment (i.e. “I say I care about food justice but I buy McDonald’s every time I’m at the airport” says brown.) Finally, brown emphasizes, “Joy is a practice.”

While our world is undergoing a transformation that some may even dub an apocalypse, brown reminds us communities that have survived genocide do so through laughter, intimacy and connection.

“Laughter is important. Joy is important. It’s not a guilty pleasure, it is a strategic move towards the future we all need to create. One in which our children are laughing, our children are free. They can go wherever they need to go. There are no borders holding them. That is what I am living and loving for.”

Brown leaves us with a powerful quote from Bobby Sands, an Irish nationalist who led a hunger strike in prison in 1981:

“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

Tonya checked in with her grandmother recently to talk about joy in this moment. Ernestine lives in Detroit, one of the places hardest hit by COVID-19. And for the first few weeks of the protests,