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Recorded at	March 16, 2018
Event	TEDxNashville
Duration (min:sec)	18:00
Video Type	TEDx Talk
Words per minute	185.8 fast
Readability (FK)	67.92 very easy
Speaker	David Ikard
Description	African American and Diaspora Studies scholar


1	00:14	I am the proud father of two beautiful children,
2	00:19	Elijah, 15, and Octavia, 12.
3	00:24	When Elijah was in the fourth grade,
4	00:27	he came to me,
5	00:29	came home from school bubbling over with excitement
6	00:32	about what he had learned that day about African-American history.
7	00:37	Now, I'm an African-American and cultural studies professor,
8	00:41	and so, as you can imagine,
9	00:43	African-American culture is kind of serious around my home.
10	00:46	So I was very proud that my son was excited about what he had learned
11	00:50	that day in school.
12	00:52	So I said, "What did you learn?"
13	00:54	He said, "I learned about Rosa Parks."
14	00:57	I said, "OK, what did you learn about Rosa Parks?"
15	01:00	He said, "I learned that Rosa Parks was this frail, old black woman
16	01:06	in the 1950s
17	01:08	in Montgomery, Alabama.
18	01:10	And she sat down on this bus,
19	01:13	and she had tired feet,
20	01:15	and when the bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white patron,
21	01:20	she refused because she had tired feet.
22	01:22	It had been a long day,
23	01:24	and she was tired of oppression,
24	01:25	and she didn't give up her seat.
25	01:27	And she marched with Martin Luther King,
26	01:29	and she believed in nonviolence."
27	01:31	And I guess he must have looked at my face
28	01:35	and saw that I was a little less than impressed
29	01:39	by his
30	01:41	... um ...
31	01:42	history lesson.
32	01:44	And so he stopped, and he was like, "Dad, what's wrong? What did I get wrong?"
33	01:48	I said, "Son, you didn't get anything wrong,
34	01:50	but I think your teacher got a whole lot of things wrong."
35	01:53	(Laughter)
36	01:54	He said, "Well, what do you mean?"
37	01:56	I said, "Rosa Parks was not tired.
38	02:00	She was not old.
39	02:03	And she certainly didn't have tired feet."
40	02:06	He said, "What?"
41	02:07	I said, "Yes!
42	02:08	Rosa Parks was only 42 years old" --
43	02:12	Yeah, you're shocked, right? Never heard that.
44	02:14	"Rosa Parks was only 42 years old,
45	02:16	she had only worked six hours that day, and she was a seamstress
46	02:21	and her feet were just fine.
47	02:23	(Laughter)
48	02:24	The only thing that she was tired of
49	02:27	was she was tired of inequality.
50	02:30	She was tired of oppression."
51	02:32	And my son said,
52	02:33	"Well, why would my teacher tell me this thing?
53	02:37	This is confusing for me."
54	02:39	Because he loved his teacher, and she was a good teacher,
55	02:42	a young-ish, 20-something white woman,
56	02:45	really, really smart, pushed him, so I liked her as well.
57	02:49	But he was confused. "Why would she tell me this?" he said.
58	02:52	He said, "Dad, tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more about Rosa Parks."
59	02:56	And I said, "Son, I'll do you one better."
60	02:58	He was like, "What?"
61	03:00	I said, "I'm going to buy her autobiography,
62	03:02	and I'm going to let you read it yourself."
63	03:04	(Laughter)
64	03:07	So as you can imagine,
65	03:10	Elijah wasn't too excited about this new, lengthy homework assignment
66	03:15	that his dad had just given him, but he took it in stride.
67	03:19	And he came back after he had read it,
68	03:23	and he was excited about what he had learned.
69	03:27	He said, "Dad, not only was Rosa Parks not initially into nonviolence,
70	03:34	but Rosa Parks's grandfather, who basically raised her
71	03:38	and was light enough to pass as white,
72	03:40	used to walk around town with his gun in his holster,
73	03:45	and people knew if you messed with Mr. Parks's children or grandchildren,
74	03:50	he would put a cap in your proverbial bottom."
75	03:54	(Laughter)
76	03:55	Right?
77	03:57	He was not someone to mess with.
78	03:59	And he said, "I also learned that Rosa Parks married a man in Raymond
79	04:05	who was a lot like her grandfather."
80	04:09	He would organize.
81	04:11	He was a civil rights activist.
82	04:13	He would organize events
83	04:17	and sometimes the events would be at Rosa Parks's home.
84	04:22	And one time Rosa Parks remarked
85	04:24	that there were so many guns on the table,
86	04:26	because they were prepared for somebody to come busting into the door
87	04:29	that they were prepared for whatever was going to go down,
88	04:32	that Rosa Parks said, "There were so many guns on the table
89	04:35	that I forgot to even offer them coffee or food."
90	04:38	This is who Rosa Parks was.
91	04:41	And in fact, Rosa Parks, when she was sitting on that bus that day,
92	04:46	waiting for those police officers to arrive
93	04:48	and not knowing what was going to happen to her,
94	04:51	she was not thinking about Martin Luther King,
95	04:53	who she barely knew.
96	04:55	She was not thinking about nonviolence or Gandhi.
97	04:58	She was thinking about her grandfather,
98	05:00	a gun-toting, take-no-mess grandfather.
99	05:04	That's who Rosa Parks was thinking about.
100	05:07	My son was mesmerized by Rosa Parks,
101	05:11	and I was proud of him to see this excitement.
102	05:15	But then I still had a problem.
103	05:17	Because I still had to go his school
104	05:19	and address the issue with his teacher,
105	05:21	because I didn't want her to continue to teach the kids
106	05:25	obviously false history.
107	05:27	So I'm agonizing over this,
108	05:29	primarily because I understand, as an African-American man,
109	05:32	that whenever you talk to whites about racism
110	05:35	or anything that's racially sensitive,
111	05:37	there's usually going to be a challenge.
112	05:39	This is what white sociologist Robin DiAngelo calls "white fragility."
113	05:45	She argues that, in fact,
114	05:47	because whites have so little experience being challenged
115	05:51	about their white privilege
116	05:52	that whenever even the most minute challenge is brought before them,
117	05:56	they usually cry,
118	05:58	get angry
119	05:59	or run.
120	06:00	(Laughter)
121	06:01	And I have experienced them all.
122	06:04	And so, when I was contemplating confronting his teacher,
123	06:10	I wasn't happy about it,
124	06:11	but I was like, this is a necessary evil
125	06:13	of being a black parent trying to raise self-actualized black children.
126	06:18	So I called Elijah to me and said,
127	06:19	"Elijah, I'm going to set up an appointment with your teacher
128	06:24	and try and correct this
129	06:26	and maybe your principal.
130	06:27	What do you think?"
131	06:28	And Elijah said,
132	06:29	"Dad, I have a better idea."
133	06:33	And I said, "Really? What's your idea?"
134	06:34	He said, "We have a public speaking assignment,
135	06:39	and why don't I use that public speaking assignment
136	06:42	to talk about debunking the myths of Rosa Parks?"
137	06:46	And I was like,
138	06:48	"Well, that is a good idea."
139	06:51	So Elijah goes to school,
140	06:55	he does his presentation,
141	06:56	he comes back home,
142	06:58	and I could see something positive happened.
143	07:00	I said, "Well, what happened, son?"
144	07:03	He said, "Well, later on in that day,
145	07:05	the teacher pulled me aside,
146	07:07	and she apologized to me for giving that misinformation."
147	07:12	And then something else miraculous happened the next day.
148	07:16	She actually taught a new lesson on Rosa Parks,
149	07:20	filling in the gaps that she had left and correcting the mistakes that she made.
150	07:24	And I was so, so proud of my son.
151	07:29	But then I thought about it.
152	07:33	And I got angry.
153	07:35	And I got real angry.
154	07:38	Why? Why would I get angry?
155	07:40	Because my nine-year-old son had to educate his teacher
156	07:45	about his history,
157	07:47	had to educate his teacher about his own humanity.
158	07:50	He's nine years old.
159	07:52	He should be thinking about basketball or soccer
160	07:56	or the latest movie.
161	07:58	He should not be thinking about having to take the responsibility
162	08:02	of educating his teacher,
163	08:05	his students,
164	08:08	about himself, about his history.
165	08:10	That was a burden that I carried.
166	08:12	That was a burden that my parents carried
167	08:14	and generations before them carried.
168	08:16	And now I was seeing my son take on that burden, too.
169	08:21	You see, that's why Rosa Parks wrote her autobiography.
170	08:26	Because during her lifetime,
171	08:28	if you can imagine,
172	08:29	you do this amazing thing,
173	08:34	you're alive and you're talking about your civil rights activism,
174	08:38	and a story emerges
175	08:40	in which somebody is telling the world
176	08:43	that you were old and you had tired feet
177	08:45	and you just were an accidental activist,
178	08:48	not that you had been activist by then for 20 years,
179	08:52	not that the boycott had been planned for months,
180	08:55	not that you were not even the first or the second or even the third woman
181	09:00	to be arrested for doing that.
182	09:03	You become an accidental activist, even in her own lifetime.
183	09:08	So she wrote that autobiography to correct the record,
184	09:11	because what she wanted to remind people of
185	09:15	was that this
186	09:17	is what it was like
187	09:19	in the 1950s
188	09:23	trying to be black in America
189	09:25	and fight for your rights.
190	09:28	During the year, a little over a year, that the boycott lasted,
191	09:33	there were over four church bombings.
192	09:35	Martin Luther King's house was bombed twice.
193	09:39	Other civil rights leaders' houses were bombed in Birmingham.
194	09:43	Rosa Parks's husband slept at night with a shotgun,
195	09:48	because they would get constant death threats.
196	09:51	In fact, Rosa Parks's mother lived with them,
197	09:53	and sometimes she would stay on the phone for hours
198	09:56	so that nobody would call in with death threats,
199	09:59	because it was constant and persistent.
200	10:01	In fact, there was so much tension,
201	10:04	there was so much pressure, there was so much terrorism,
202	10:06	that Rosa Parks and her husband, they lost their jobs,
203	10:09	and they became unemployable
204	10:11	and eventually had to leave and move out of the South.
205	10:17	This is a civil rights reality
206	10:20	that Rosa Parks wanted to make sure that people understood.
207	10:25	So you say, "Well, David, what does that have to do with me?
208	10:31	I'm a well-meaning person.
209	10:33	I didn't own slaves.
210	10:35	I'm not trying to whitewash history.
211	10:36	I'm a good guy. I'm a good person."
212	10:40	Let me tell you what it has to do with you,
213	10:42	and I'll tell it to you by telling you a story
214	10:44	about a professor of mine, a white professor,
215	10:48	when I was in graduate school, who was a brilliant, brilliant individual.
216	10:52	We'll call him "Fred."
217	10:55	And Fred was writing this history of the civil rights movement,
218	10:59	but he was writing specifically about a moment
219	11:02	that happened to him in North Carolina
220	11:04	when this white man shot this black man in cold blood in a wide-open space
221	11:08	and was never convicted.
222	11:10	And so it was this great book,
223	11:12	and he called together a couple of his professor friends
224	11:16	and he called me to read a draft of it before the final submission.
225	11:20	And I was flattered that he called me;
226	11:22	I was only a graduate student then.
227	11:24	I was kind of feeling myself a little bit. I was like, "OK, yeah."
228	11:28	I'm sitting around amongst intellectuals,
229	11:31	and I read the draft of the book.
230	11:35	And there was a moment in the book
231	11:37	that struck me as being deeply problematic,
232	11:40	and so I said,
233	11:41	"Fred," as we were sitting around talking about this draft,
234	11:45	I said, "Fred, I've got a real problem with this moment that you talk
235	11:49	about your maid in your book."
236	11:52	And I could see Fred get a little "tight," as we say.
237	11:59	He said, "What do you mean? That's a great story.
238	12:03	It happened just like I said."
239	12:05	I said, "Mmm ... can I give you another scenario?"
240	12:08	Now, what's the story?
241	12:10	It was 1968.
242	12:12	Martin Luther King had just been assassinated.
243	12:16	His maid, "domestic" -- we'll call her "Mabel,"
244	12:20	was in the kitchen.
245	12:22	Little Fred is eight years old.
246	12:24	Little Fred comes into the kitchen,
247	12:26	and Mabel, who he has only seen as smiling and helpful and happy,
248	12:33	is bent over the sink,
249	12:35	and she's crying,
250	12:37	and she's sobbing
251	12:40	inconsolably.
252	12:42	And little Fred comes over to her and says, "Mabel, what is wrong?"
253	12:47	Mabel turns, and she says,
254	12:50	"They killed him! They killed our leader. They killed Martin Luther King.
255	12:54	He's dead! They are monsters."
256	12:59	And little Fred says,
257	13:00	"It'll be OK, Mabel. It'll be OK. It'll be OK."
258	13:04	And she looked at him, and she says, "No, it's not going to be OK.
259	13:07	Did you not hear what I just said?
260	13:09	They killed Martin Luther King."
261	13:13	And Fred,
262	13:15	son of a preacher,
263	13:17	looks up at Mabel, and he says,
264	13:20	"But Mabel, didn't Jesus die on the cross for our sins?
265	13:25	Wasn't that a good outcome?
266	13:27	Maybe this will be a good outcome.
267	13:30	Maybe the death of Martin Luther King will lead to a good outcome."
268	13:36	And as Fred tells the story,
269	13:38	he says that Mabel put her hand over her mouth,
270	13:43	she reached down and she gave little Fred a hug,
271	13:47	and then she reached into the icebox,
272	13:49	and took out a couple Pepsis,
273	13:51	gave him some Pepsis
274	13:53	and sent him on his way to play with his siblings.
275	13:56	And he said,
276	13:58	"This was proof that even in the most harrowing times of race struggle
277	14:04	that two people could come together across racial lines
278	14:07	and find human commonality
279	14:09	along the lines of love and affection."
280	14:12	And I said, "Fred, that is some BS."
281	14:16	(Laughter)
282	14:18	(Applause)
283	14:20	Fred was like,
284	14:23	"But I don't understand, David. That's the story."
285	14:26	I said, "Fred, let me ask you a question."
286	14:29	I said, "You were in North Carolina in 1968.
287	14:35	If Mabel would've went to her community -- you were eight years old --
288	14:39	what do you think the eight-year-old African-American children
289	14:42	were calling her?
290	14:43	Do you think they called her by her first name?"
291	14:45	No, they called her "Miss Mabel,"
292	14:47	or they called her "Miss Johnson," or they called her "Auntie Johnson."
293	14:50	They would have never dared call her by her first name,
294	14:53	because that would have been the height of disrespect.
295	14:55	And yet, you were calling her by her first name
296	14:58	every single day that she worked,
297	14:59	and you never thought about it."
298	15:01	I said, "Let me ask you another question: Was Mabel married?
299	15:05	Did she have children?
300	15:06	What church did she go to?
301	15:08	What was her favorite dessert?"
302	15:12	Fred could not answer any of those questions.
303	15:17	I said, "Fred, this story is not about Mabel.
304	15:20	This story is about you."
305	15:22	I said, "This story made you feel good,
306	15:25	but this story is not about Mabel.
307	15:28	The reality is,
308	15:29	what probably happened was, Mabel was crying,
309	15:32	which was not something she customarily did,
310	15:34	so she was letting her guard down.
311	15:36	And you came into the kitchen,
312	15:38	and you caught her at a weak moment where she was letting her guard down.
313	15:42	And see, because you thought of yourself as just like one of her children,
314	15:45	you didn't recognize that you were in fact the child of her employer.
315	15:50	And she'd found herself yelling at you.
316	15:53	And then she caught herself,
317	15:54	realizing that, 'If I'm yelling at him
318	15:57	and he goes back and he tells his dad or he tells mom,
319	15:59	I could lose my job.'
320	16:02	And so she tempered herself, and she ended up --
321	16:05	even though she needed consoling -- she ended up consoling you
322	16:09	and sending you on your way,
323	16:11	perhaps so she could finish mourning in peace."
324	16:16	And Fred was stunned.
325	16:17	And he realized that he had actually misread that moment.
326	16:22	And see, this is what they did to Rosa Parks.
327	16:25	Because it's a lot easier to digest an old grandmother with tired feet
328	16:31	who doesn't stand up because she wants to fight for inequality,
329	16:34	but because her feet and her back are tired,
330	16:36	and she's worked all day.
331	16:39	See, old grandmothers are not scary.
332	16:42	But young, radical black women
333	16:44	who don't take any stuff from anybody
334	16:46	are very scary,
335	16:47	who stand up to power
336	16:49	and are willing to die for that --
337	16:51	those are not the kind of people
338	16:54	that make us comfortable.
339	16:59	So you say,
340	17:01	"What do you want me to do, David?
341	17:03	I don't know what to do."
342	17:07	Well, what I would say to you is,
343	17:09	there was a time in which,
344	17:11	if you were Jewish, you were not white,
345	17:13	if you were Italian, you were not white,
346	17:16	if you were Irish, you were not white
347	17:17	in this country.
348	17:19	It took a while before the Irish, the Jews and the Italians became white.
349	17:24	Right?
350	17:26	There was a time in which you were "othered,"
351	17:28	when you were the people on the outside.
352	17:33	Toni Morrison said,
353	17:35	"If, in order for you to be tall, I have to be on my knees,
354	17:38	you have a serious problem."
355	17:40	She says, "White America has a serious, serious problem."
356	17:44	To be honest, I don't know if race relations will improve in America.
357	17:50	But I know that if they will improve,
358	17:51	we have to take these challenges on head on.
359	17:56	The future of my children depends on it.
360	17:58	The future of my children's children depends on it.
361	18:01	And, whether you know it or not,
362	18:03	the future of your children and your children's children
363	18:07	depends on it, too.
364	18:09	Thank you.
365	18:10	(Applause)

David Ikard: The real story of Rosa Parks -- and why we need to confront myths about Black history