Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay, thank you so much. Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day and when I go live with my YouTube audience. I want to talk today about the ways in which black women in particular and black men and

women together collectively can predict the future, or at least we predict the future when it comes

to what is happening in our society as it pertains to broader issues. We are often what is called

the canaries in a coal mine. Now, this is a phrase that we use so often that I don't know that

everybody actually understands where the phrase comes from. So I want to just sort of take a second

to just remind us of the importance of this particular terminology, canaries in the coal mine.

And one of the reasons this is important is because when we're thinking about the way in which

black people show up, it is often in the form of exploitation,

right, when it comes to our relationship to broader society. And according to a really fascinating

article in the, in Review.gale, it's called the historic roots of the canaries in the coal mine.

What happens with this particular bird? You guys have seen canaries before. They're pretty little yellow, bright feathered birds and they're canaries. You've seen a lot of them. People have them as pets,

and they weren't always considered a part of the household pet pantheon. In the 19th century,

we're talking 1800s America, canaries, these beautiful birds, pretty little birds,

they were also used as these really important risk predictors

in coal mines or any sort of mine where men, usually men, were digging in the earth to extract

minerals. And this was because canaries in particular are very sensitive to carbon monoxide. Now,

carbon monoxide is a substance that would basically wipe out entire mining communities because

it is a substance that you can't really smell, you can't really see it, and when you encounter

it is toxic and it would lead to mining incidents in the aftermath of industrialization.

So coal mines, when they were not just getting their supplies together in terms of what the men

would need to actually dig in the ground.

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