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 have a conversation today about whiteness and understand how whiteness is at the

heart of the failures of the flood warning system that ended up costing so many lives in Kerr County,

Texas over the past week. But before we do that, I have to lay a foundation. So this podcast

might actually end up being two different episodes, but we're basically going to be talking today

about the ways in which racism and identities

rooted in whiteness contribute to an approach to economics and governing that basically says

there's no reason for us to invest in any of the structures that society needs because we as

white people have decided that fiscal conservatism is more important

than any sort of approach to helping and governing people across broad swaths of society.

And while it might seem like a stretch to talk about the way in which racism is at the heart

of fiscal conservatism, which is part of the reason that so many people died due to the lack

of mourning systems in Kerr County.

But if you give me a minute, I'm going to bring all of this together and we're going to start by understanding whiteness. One of the things that's going to be really important for us to

understand when we are analyzing anything about current events is the history that underlines those

events. My audience on Sirius XM knows that I am a huge fan of this principle known as

Sankofa. Sancofa is a symbol out of the Adinkra symbol system, which is a part of one of many

symbol systems throughout the continent of Africa. We often think about symbol systems as sort

of being limited to the hieroglyphs in Eastern Africa. But baby, just let me tell you, many, many, many, many, many indigenous African communities

had symbolic systems in addition to their oral history.

We often learn about the African continent as one or the other.

Either you were an oral people or you had a written expression, and there are many communities

...