Latest / Color Commentary / Ep 27 | Don't Tell Me What Young People Can't Do
Transcript
- Charles Cole: Welcome to Color Commentary, a podcast where the stories shaping our world are told in black and white first, and then we dig into their deeper meaning in full color. Each week, I'll be bringing you the news like this. First, we'll start with what I like to call the black and white section, a clear, straight-shooting rundown of the facts and the traditions of the greats like Ed Bradley, Walter Cronkite, and the classic voices of journalism. Then we'll shift into the color commentary section, where I have my own personal opinions and insights. Sometimes it'll just be me, Sometimes we'll have guests. We gonna figure that out together. We gonna build the exact show that we want. And I do that with your feedback as we shape this journey. So leave your feedback, leave your comments, like this stuff, share it, do all the things for me, okay? I really appreciate it. Now let's get into it. Today, I'm really excited about this topic. I'm doing this later. I was a little under the weather, need to get this out. But I was thinking about some of the young people that I work with. And we have this cohort. of this national cohorts. The like second time we've done it, still getting the kinks out. And these young people are brilliant. They're like, you know, some of them, a few might be in high school, but most of them are in college or just finished college. And I have them doing a really big project around agency. And it's really them finding their research question of something they want to actually fix, learning how to do the research around it so they can have some critical thinking skills, but not just, you know, then having some other Like we're breaking it all the way down to what they can do to have impact. And I love doing it because it's a big, heady topic and it's difficult for them. ⁓ But it's also about them believing in themselves. And so I wanted to do this episode today with them in my mind. All right? So don't tell me what young people can't do and I don't want them to put a ceiling on themselves. you know, there's people that's not so young. That's not for the youth. This is for you as well. My philosophy on a lot of this stuff is if you can help the smallest of us, those that are most in need, that helps everybody, right? So if we're talking about young people, and in this case, it's still developing, maybe they're more vulnerable and haven't dove into the world yet and don't know what they can do or change and have an impact on, We want them to see that they can, but also if you 60 years old, you can do stuff too. Everybody can do something. Agency truly does start where you are. So while this topic of today is don't tell me what young people can't do, it's really a Trojan horse for don't tell me what you can't do. Because I want you to think about two names when we start talking about what young people can and can't do and that's. These names, I don't know if they've ever been said together, but one is Nasir Jones and the other is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Better known as Mary Shelley. Let me give you the facts first. Nas is my favorite rapper and Nasir Jones was born September 14th, 1973 and grew up in Queens Bridge Project Houses. the largest public housing project in America in Queens, New York. His father was a jazz musician, Oludara, and he dropped out of school in the eighth grade. At 17 years old, delivered his guest verse on main sources live at the barbecue in 1991, and he was hottest fucking fish grease. and our representative, Faith Newman, heard it. She found him and she signed him to Columbia Records. And she later recalled, I lost it. You don't ever have to let me sign anything else while I'm here, but you gotta let me sign this kid, okay? So between the ages of 18 and 19, assembled a team. Let's call it the dream team of producers. Primo, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Lars Professor, Elias. Again, this is the... black and white section, but Illmatic is my favorite album of all time. So I'm going to enjoy talking about this. But he got these dream producers together and they spent more than two years crafting what would become Illmatic. He was a perfectionist who kept going over budget. At one point, his A &R walked out of the studio in frustration and found a yellow legal pad with his lyrics on it. She said, I just started reading it and I was like, oh my, okay. Nas. is a supreme talent. I've heard 50 Cent refer to him as the uno, as the one, the special one. Even they've been friends, they didn't have beef, they friends again, but he always maintained he was just more talented than us. And Illmatic was released on April 19th, 1994, when Nas was only 20 years old. It is widely regarded as the greatest hip hop album ever made. The source gave it a rare five Mike Raiden, Rolling Stone ranked it number 44 on his list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. Il Maddic is 10 tracks, 40 minutes. It is, and he so famously wrote this as a young man staring from his project window who never finished high school about a world that he saw. ⁓ just from his crib. Now that's what I'm really familiar with. I still wanted to script it out because I didn't want to miss anything, but I could talk about Nas all day. I really, really can. ⁓ Now this next person I'm a fan of, but I didn't know as well. And so the research on this was even more fascinating ⁓ when I started to do it. So Mary Shelley was born on August 30th. in 97, but that's 1797. She was born in London. She was the daughter of two of the most influential thinkers of the era, which were philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died 11 days after giving birth to her. In the summer of 1816, when she was 18 years old, Mary traveled to Lake Geneva with her lover, Percy. Shelley and their infant. The weather that year was catastrophically cold. I just like how they talked back then. I just want to put some sauce on it. Go with me, it's fine. The result of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, it blanketed the atmosphere. It caused crop failure around the world. So she was trapped inside this via with Lord Byron and a small group of writers. ⁓ Lord Byron issued a challenge. Each of them would write a ghost story. So for days, Mary had nothing. Then one sleepless night, she had this vision. Because everything was dramatic as hell when you retell these stories with biographers. But here's her vision. And I quote, I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life. And she began writing immediately. I don't know what else Lord Byron had and might have given them to help with this, but I digress. But between the ages of 18 and 19, she wrote Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Fun fact, people always leave the second part of the title off of Frankenstein, but that is the full title, okay? The Modern Prometheus. It was a story of a scientist who creates life. and abandon his creation and what that rejection does to a man who only wanted to be loved, but also didn't ask to be here. It was very deep stuff for an 18 year old to be writing and possessing. Frankenstein was published in January, 1818 when she was 20 years old anonymously because the world assumed her husband had written it. It was the first work of science fiction. It invented a genre. It is... since been adapted more than 190 times for stage and screen. It is still in print. It's still being taught. It's still being made into films ⁓ like, I thought it is when I was watching Frankenstein, that Guillermo del Toro had did, but I had always, I've always respected the monsters, right? Like, so that's Frankenstein, Dracula, people like that. and just their staying power. for like how long they have. And then you realize Mary Shelley started writing this at 18 years old and it was out by the time she was 20. Not only was it out by the time she was 20, she lost her child, her premature infant died. And then she was unmarried with this dead baby. She got disowned by her family and was pregnant again. That's who wrote Frankenstein, this young girl. Now I could have used a few other people. I almost used Stevie Wonder, but I wanted to, Stevie Wonder would have been great. Cause he's awesome. He's one of my favorite musicians as well. is my favorite rapper. know, Stevie Wonder is like my favorite musician. the, so I wanted to, but in picking Nas and Mary Shelley, felt like two different sides of a coin, and then B, I was around, so to speak. ⁓ when Illmatic came out. Like I was still very young and everything like that, but I was around, you know? So that's the news. Now let's talk about it. You are listening to Color Commentary with Dr. Cole. When I put these names together, I need you to understand that these people are not the same. And I wanted to basically give this two worlds, two different times, two different sexes, different races, different financial statuses, different realities. Like I wanted to show this juxtaposition, but the thing that they had that combines them is their youth and how they saw the world and were able to articulate that and fought through whatever they need to fight through to make these masterpieces that are still highly, highly regarded. Like I needed you to really understand that. to me, Oh, Maddick is the greatest hip hop album ever made. And then Mary Shelley is like the first science fiction novel that was written. And both of these were executed on by people who weren't even 21 yet. And again, I'm thinking about the young people in my national cohort that I'm asking some tough questions to and giving them things that it's not gonna be handed to them. It's not just simple for them to decipher, but I believe in them and I need them to believe in their self because here's the thing about believing in other people. I learned this early on. You can't want it for somebody else. You can't. Your mama can love you to death. Your daddy can love you to death. Your sibling can love you to death. Your spouse, your children, you can love people to death, but they got to want that thing for them. If they're going to have agency, they got to have the agency of it. It's just really, really important. One of the number one findings when I did my dissertation actually around why black boys highly impacted by the crack epidemic were able to go on to become doctors and lawyers and all that stuff. One of the biggest findings was they had a high value of education on their own. Their parents might have had it and their parents fought for it in front of them, but at some point it transferred to them and they made it happen. So it's just important to note. And on that note, that's in that vein, Nas dropped out of school very young, very young. He didn't have like a diploma. He didn't have these grades or whatever. But he's one of the most prolific writers of a generation. Like, Illmatic is really one of the most prolific critiques and observations of ghetto life during that time from his perspective as such a young, unfiltered, but like, pure brain. And it is like, he was written off by this education system that I write and talk about so much. and to come back and be one of the most literate people with that level of precision in an album with like stanza and bars and limited space, it's lot, yo. It's truly a lot. Whereas let's get to Mary Shelley, right? Like in the same vein, here's some things, know, cause Nas got songs like One Love, where for those that may not know One Love is a conversation between him and his man that's in jail. It's a letter and, ⁓ but Nas experienced a lot of loss. I experienced a lot of loss as a teenager. A lot of my friends died, man, and were killed. They didn't die because they were sick. They were murdered. So Nas had that in common. You know who else did? Mary Shelley was dealing with some incredible heavy stuff. Incredible. When she wrote Frankenstein, she was grieving her baby. Like this is a time, right, where childbirth is very, very dangerous and babies tend to not survive, which is part of the reason why if you had a farm or something like that, even before the United States was around, you would have a lot of kids because some of them were gonna die and you needed the labor, right? So this young girl just lost her baby. And she was pregnant again. So she's thinking about all that stuff. She's grieving this baby that's passed on and she's worried for this new baby. If it's gonna be the same thing. She was living in a foreign country without her family support because remember they were super prestigious, right? Like her mother had passed away. Her dad had a name. Like she was one of them. He was one of them. And you can't be having no bastards. You can't be out here. dilly dallying and being unmarried but hella pregnant. So she got that weight on her at 18. She didn't just write a book, she invented a genre. You understand? Like even in that, like think about the concepts, both in Illmatic and again, I'll name some, because I know everybody here watching hasn't listened to Illmatic. You should. ⁓ But this young girl in Frankenstein is talking about God and creation and responsibility and abandonment and what it means to bring something into the world and then refuse to claim it. Like she's talking and asking questions that the philosophers and scientists. of the day, like we're struggling with then and they're still struggling with now. But she took this shit on. And then you talk about Nas and what he was writing about. And he's writing about these complex socioeconomic dynamics in a unfiltered way. he's, he has not been like, he hasn't had a college pour into him or he wasn't the, like I said, like this top student, like he is just giving you his experiences of like, yo, and this is what poverty does. And this is why we do this. This plus this equals this. Like these are very profound works that's coming from a very, you can't even call it innocent place because both of them had their innocence taken from them. So it was really interesting. And here's the thing, they wasn't just welcome with open arms. The world didn't believe either of them at first. It just not, it didn't take them seriously. The publishing world assumed that Her guy, Percy Shelley had written Frankenstein. Mary's name wasn't even on the first edition. And then Illmatic only sold 330,000 copies in his first year. And now 330,000 physical is actually really good. But back in these days when it was only physical, right? Like there was a different bar, right? It was gold or bust. You needed to get the gold in the first year to be deemed successful, so to speak, right? it would eventually get multiple times platinum. The Source Magazine gave it five mics, but the mainstream didn't catch up to it for years. genius don't always announce itself with a parade, man. Sometimes it leaves a legal pad in the studio or a manuscript in the via, and it just waits for the world to understand what it's looking at. And here's the thing. you can only imagine the level of frustration that they both might've been dealing with, you know? And some people might try to poke holes in this and say, well, you being nostalgic. And I'm not being nostalgic. I'm not saying that the past was better. I'm not saying that the, like, I'm not romanticizing any of this stuff. I'm just giving you facts in two different, like 200 year part shit. You know what I'm saying? What I am saying is that the capacity of young people to produce profound world art and work is documented across centuries and across cultures. And yet every generation and every system and every institution finds new ways to tell young people to wait or to be patient and to earn it first, to prove themselves before they get the resources or that platform or a trust or whatever. Whatever. And I work with young people every day. some of that work I've watched 16 year olds dive into original research and find out shit like what we're working on right now in Oakland where it's like, yo, like there's this huge gap between what students are believing their academic performance is and what the data actually says. They didn't need a PhD to do that. They just needed a question and a methodology and somebody that trusted them, you know, enough to let them look and who sat there with them when they had questions. That's all I did. And those same kids now, those same 17 year olds are, that are upset with their, their, their, their, you know, the system is saying, why do I have an A in English, but I'm three grade levels behind and I don't know that. Like this is what I think about, I'm thinking of them as I was reflecting and going back through Illmatic just for this and I listen to Illmatic all the time still, right? And he's doing the same thing. He didn't have to be a scientist to be able to tell you or report back what he saw in his community. And Mary Shelley, know, hers came to her in a nightmare. But then she had the... She wrote that shit out. She did it and she built this super complex story that's still being studied today. So the question is never whether young people are capable. Like history has answered that. And history has answered it even when you think that they're not smart because they don't have the grades or they ain't got the scores or whatever. That's why I showed you Nas first. So drop out, Eminem drop out. Give him a pen and a legal pad. Eminem's shit is so wild, he writes his shit in circles. That's not the question about their capacity and if they can do it, if they're capable. The question is whether the adults around them, those teachers, those parents, institutions, funders, policymakers, community, elders, the church, whatever, are they willing to build environments where the capacity has room to breathe? Nas needed Lars Professor to believe in him at 15, man. Mary Shelley, she needed Lord Byron to issue that challenge that took her seriously as a writer. And neither one of them was created in a vacuum. Like someone had to say, belong in this room, your voice counts, let's see what you've got. And if my young people are listening that I work with, let me say to you, you belong in this room, your voice counts. Let me see what you've got. Go do the research, go read it. Read it in a way that interests you. You ain't gotta be point dexter in it, but like if there's a problem that you're seeing and is bothering you and it's in your spirit and your soul, you only gonna be this age once. You only gonna have this type of freedom once. Embrace it, make mistakes, break shit, and move forward. This is what you gotta do because the system is telling young people that they aren't ready in the same system that would have never signed NOS or never published Mary Shelley, who might I remind you? We still read today. Nah, man, no. It's a system that's optimized for the familiar, the credential, the proven. And will both these artists prove, even though they separated by what, 177 years and by an ocean and by every possible dimension of difference? What it proves is that the most important work sometimes comes from exactly the person that that system would have overlooked. I'm just inspired by these two people, So you can't, don't tell me what young people can't do, man. I got the receipts. I've done some incredible shit in my own life. When I was in high school and I knew I needed to go to college because I went to all these elementary schools and I was really poor and my parents was used to, at this point they clean, but come from this dope fiend family and like most of the men in my family in and out of jail, you know, been to jail, and out of jail. No, no, there was nobody in that house that knew anything about this thing that we call, you know, about college or higher education or any of that stuff. Like it was, no, nobody was there. It wasn't a thing. And so. Look, man, I know our podcast, we explore things, right? And I tend to talk about education, but I like talking about movies and things like that. Right now, one of the things I'm always gonna talk about is the will, that will to survive, that will to thrive. I told myself as a kid, I remember being at that shelter in San Francisco. And this shelter, were all, everybody was in like the same space and it was bunk beds. All your shit goes in some bins underneath the bunk bed. And there was some things that I would like hold on to. You know what I'm saying? Like, cause it should have get stolen. There's a lot of drug addicts in this shelter. And I remember staring there and all this cacophony of smells and shit. And these moans that you hear from people. Some people was trying to kick drugs and it was just a lot, you know? I mean, look, it was my normal, right? Like everybody got their own normal. I lived in four shelters, it was my normal. But I remember being like, I'm not doing this when I get older. I'm gonna be great at something. and it shaped my identity. So I had to learn how to build and create and teach myself things. And then when the internet like kind of got prolific and it was just everywhere, like I just became a better student and a hungry one. And I had to lean on like my instincts. I used to trust those instincts so much more than I trust them now. And I'm not saying that with pride. I'm actually saying that a little bit of shame. Charles should be a little, young Charlesie should be a little annoyed with Dr. Cole at times, cause he's playing it a little safer than what we normally do. But you know, I got staff now and I've got kids and you think about that stuff. But then. I'm working with my national programs director and we're talking about it he's, you know, it's his program now because I'm trying to run a company and build out the agent against the two. But, you know, he was talking to me about how they were taking in some of the stuff and how some some were taken to it. But a lot of them were struggling with it. And again, I'm happy for the struggle. I want them to struggle. I think that we have to build that out. But then I just started I allow myself to just fantasize about being at age again and just the world being in front of me. and my need and desire to do something about it or to put something out in the world. And these young people should be being fearless right now. and You can just tell, you can start to see the moments where somebody's so full of life and then they go through this system with these inadequate schools or bad teachers here and there and they start to crush their spirit. They start to crush that ambition. They start to crush that light in their eye. And now, hold these young people on this side and not think about older people. Think about yourself and think about how life has humbled you and like how life has at times crushed you or pushed you or just made it feel untenable or made you feel like you couldn't create something or do something or you know. And then you start to listen to that shit. And then you start to tell yourself that you can't or that it's a them thing or the system or this. And again, we ain't never letting the system off the hook. They always gonna get smoked, but who is the they? See, that's the trick that the system plays is that there's no person. It's always somebody else. And even when you're inside of that system, you still refer to the system as if you don't work in this. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just... Don't tell me what can't be done. Don't tell me what your admiration and wonder of the world can't help you produce. And don't tell me that you're too young because you just don't have the life experience yet. It's gonna come regardless whether you want it or not. Don't tell me that when I can show you Nasir Jones and Mary Shelley. When I can show you some of the most mature, prolific, profound. various forms of literature between these two. Do you understand that Nas wrote New York State of Mind with a teen behind his age? Like, do you understand that Mary Shelley? decided to question creation and who and the monster and this, that, and the third, and wrote two titular characters, right? Like two characters in Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Frankenstein's creature. to where they're symbiotic. There's the creator and the created. And there is the feelings of like, when you read Frankenstein, she writes it in a way where you are both Dr. Frankenstein and the creature. You are both wanting to create something and build something in the world. like, you understand that struggle and you kind of admire. Dr. Frankenstein early because of how he's like kind of ridiculed and has to almost become this mad scientist because the world is just not ready for what he's talking about. And maybe they shouldn't be, right? Like you shouldn't play with certain things, but then something is created. now she's making, now she's talking to everybody that's like, okay, if God created us and we had asked to be created, but I'm in pain and misery. How do I? How do I navigate that? Like these are some huge questions for a young girl who just lost a baby to be asking. That's all I'm saying. I didn't have a Lord Byron or a large professor or Q-tip to kind of be there, right? I kind of had to be in my head with this stuff a lot, which is why the former podcast is working for me, because I'm used to talking to myself. I did it a long time. It's just that the internal monologues are just now going on this camera and out there to you. But I will just say this, my next step in my action item. for anybody that's here listening, right? Who can you go inspire and push them to tap into who they are and dig into that? We ain't expecting them to be as prolific as Nas and Mary Shelley on the first go round. That's why it's only two of them in the world that ever existed. But who knows? That's one, I'm not done yet. The second one is for you. I don't care if you are 98 or 18. Are you letting the voices in your head or in this world stop you? from creating something beautiful, creating something new? You afraid to fail? You afraid to be wrong? Look around you, it's a ton of shit that's wrong. The winners in life lose more than they lose constantly. We just stopped tallying the losses. You just need one good win. That's all science is. Science is just having a question, right? Not even science. Let's go back to research, because I have some young people that I work with that I want to hear this. So let me put it in their context, because I love them. It starts with a question. How do I fix X? Well then first you gotta go find out what exactly what is X and why is X that way? This is the phase that we call in our work, the awareness phase. Are you aware, right? So you have to become aware. Like why is this an issue? How does this plague people? What is going on? But then I want those people to then start thinking about how are people navigating this now and how would they need to navigate for this thing to be better? Let's say we're talking about something going on in a community. Maybe it's a poverty stricken community and you're talking about that. How are these people living today? This is Nas looking out the window, right? This is Mary Shelley looking at thinking about London and thinking about her parents and thinking about like the high society that she lives in, how can you know how controlled she is. And that even when she does do something incredible, they automatically get a credit to her dude. How does she navigate that? And how does she want to be navigating? That's the navigation stage. But then comes the duty. Now that you've answered some questions. Now that you've got some more insight, now that you can articulate this problem, now that you've identified ways that people navigate and the ways that we'd like for them to navigate, now that you've seen the holes in the system, now you got a duty to share it. You got a duty to publish it. You got a duty to go on social media and talk about it. You have a duty to share that art with the world, to spit that verse on live at the barbecue and kill it. or to write the book and put it out. They had a duty to put that out. So what's your awareness and your navigation and your duty? Thank you for listening to Color Commentary. We love to hear from you. So drop us an email at colorcommentarypod at gmail.com. if you like to, if you're liking what you hear, please subscribe to the show, leave us a five star rating, share it on social media and join us every Thursday for more Color Commentary with Dr. Cole. Peace.