4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2020
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Hey, it's Elise Hugh with TED Talks Daily. |
0:05.9 | Today on the podcast, a spoken word performance from Mark Bamuthi Joseph. |
0:10.5 | You'll hear it as it played out on stage at TED 2019. |
0:14.2 | Mark's poetry performance is beautifully infused with jazz. |
0:17.9 | And it's a powerful story about being a black father having to teach his son about the |
0:22.7 | challenge of just existing while black. He lays out the pain and limitations of how in so many |
0:28.8 | spaces in America, the only thing that speaks is his skin. Uh, me and the boy wear the same shoe size he wants a pair of Air Jordan fours for |
0:43.3 | for Christmas I buy them and then I steal him from his closet like a twisted Grinch |
0:50.9 | themed episode of Blackish. |
0:56.6 | The kicks are totems to my youth. |
1:00.2 | I wear them like Mercury on my black man's feet. |
1:04.4 | I can't get those young freedom days back fast enough. |
1:09.7 | Last time I was really fast, I was 16 outrunning a doorman on the Upper East Side. |
1:11.8 | He caught me vandalizing his building. |
1:19.7 | Not even on some artsy stuff, just stupid. Of all the genders, boys are the stupidest. |
1:30.1 | 16 was a series of barely getting away and never telling my parents. I assume that my son is stewarding this tradition well. |
1:34.9 | 16 was the low-end theory in Marvin Gaye on repeat. |
1:39.3 | 16 is younger than Trayvon and older than Emmett Till. |
1:45.0 | At the DMV, my boy's in line to officially enter his prime suspect years. |
1:51.2 | Young, brown, and behind the wheel are moving semaphores signaling the threat of communities from below. |
2:00.9 | On top of the food chain, humans have no natural predator, but America plays out something genetically embedded and instinctual in its appetite for the black body. |
2:07.5 | America guns down black bodies and then walks around them, bored, like laconic lions next to half-eaten gazelles, bloody lips, America and the black body on some Nat Geo shit. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of TED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.