These 'Witches' Are Empowering the Next Generation

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2017

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2016, the campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” highlighted an important cultural shift. It represented the idea that the country needed to return to its “traditions” in order to be prosperous as it was once before. This “return to values” is particularly targeted at groups like Brujas, a radical youth collective in New York City that is rejecting these traditional ideas of America through art, politics, and skateboarding. Brujas, which means witches in Spanish, represents a new generation of revolutionaries that are unafraid to blur the lines between culture and activism. They are all for disrupting the patriarchy, trans-liberation, prison abolition and are doing it through the world of skateboarding, politics, and art, and they are doing so unapologetically. Sophia Paliza-Carre takes us inside this new youth group formed in a skatepark in the Bronx and primarily made up of women of color to learn about their ideas on politics, activism, and what it means to be carefree young activists in 2017. Episode Contributors: Kai Wright Sophia Paliza Carre Karen Frillmann The United States of Anxiety is hosted by Kai Wright and produced by WNYC Studios. Listen to more shows from WNYC Studios: http://wny.cc/yzc4304odXp WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics, Radiolab, Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin and many more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue
0:18.0	and achieve your own dreams. than Democrats and Republicans. Whatever Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
0:34.4	represented politically, for a lot of people, they were stand-ins, for intensely
0:39.5	personal feelings about gender. For all the advancement women have made, gender inequity remains
0:49.8	a stark and seemingly unmovable reality. Economically women still earn just 83 cents
0:56.7	on the dollar compared to men. Socially it remains perfectly appropriate to excuse
1:01.2	sexual assault by blaming the woman attacked.
1:04.2	So in recent elections, mainstream Democrats have tried to harness the frustration that millions
1:10.1	of Americans feel with these persisting dynamics. At one point in 2012 it almost
1:15.4	defined the race. From what I understand from doctors that's really rare if it's a
1:19.7	legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. And of course, of course it was profound in 2016.
1:25.0	And of course it was profound in 2016.
1:28.0	She was warned.
1:30.0	She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.
1:36.0	Millions of women and men alike have stood up and said this stuff is no longer acceptable,
1:42.0	that times have changed for the better.
1:44.8	And to a lot of people, Donald Trump is a pretty clear rejoinder.
1:49.6	The idea that a man who bragged about sexual assault and who was actually filmed while
1:54.8	harassing a woman on her job that he could be elected president it just feels
1:59.2	like a tremendous reversal of progress.
2:01.6	I just start kissing them.
2:03.7	It's like a magnet.
	...

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