The People Detective with Nicholas Baham

[00:00:10] Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome one and all. Welcome back to 12th Street Talk Back where transparency is our love language. I am your host, Victoria J. Welcome to another awesome and beautiful day that God has decided to bless us in. Welcome to Season 7 of 12th Street Talk Back.

[00:00:34] We've got a beautiful, beautiful guest in the house for you guys today. But first, before we jump into that, let's jump into this. You guys know what we do. Let's give God a little praise today. Let Him know that we love Him and we thank Him for His grace and mercy.

[00:00:52] Heavenly Father, we just thank you today for your grace, for your mercy. We thank you today for the fellowship. We thank you today for breathing your breath into our bodies, Heavenly Father.

[00:01:04] We thank you on this day, Father God, that you are always making a way, that you clothe us in your righteousness, that you cover us under your all-amighty shadow.

[00:01:15] We just bless your name on this day. Those that have ears to hear, let them hear today. Those that have open hearts, let them open up their heart. In Jesus' name we pray, amen and amen.

[00:01:30] So listen guys, I got some goodies, goody, goody, goodies for you. Welcome to Season 7. We have in the house today on Freedom Friday, our first Freedom Friday back as we kick off Season 7.

[00:01:44] We have Dr. Nicholas Bayham in the house today. Dr. Nicholas Bayham is a professor of ethnic studies at California State University, East Bay, and he teaches courses in Black Studies and Genders and Sexualities in Communities of Color.

[00:02:07] Guys, we are going to have an awesome, awesome chat today. I'm excited about this one as well as Nicholas Bayham. Let me tell you a little about him as the author.

[00:02:21] As an author, he has introduced to us the mysteries of detective and fiction combined together.

[00:02:30] His passion for writing has allowed him to impact people in meaningful ways. He believes that written word can be a powerful tool for change and activism.

[00:02:42] Welcome, welcome, welcome guys to the show. Nicholas Bayham. Welcome to the show, Nicholas. How are you today?

[00:02:52] I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for having me, Victoria. It's a real pleasure.

[00:02:57] It is. It is. It is. I was excited about this one. We're going to jump right in. We got a lot to discuss today. First of all, congratulations on your book. This is not your first book.

[00:03:12] Introduce your book. Introduce your book to the people before I get into your business.

[00:03:17] So thank you for the opportunity to do that and introduce this to your audience.

[00:03:21] So I'm an academic. I've been a professor for 24 years at Cal State East Bay, and I decided that what I wanted to do was I wanted to communicate in a different way about a lot of the issues that I teach in the classroom and that are part of my community.

[00:03:40] It's specifically in the East Bay, California, which encompasses places like Oakland, where I live right now.

[00:03:47] And the novel is a detective mystery thriller. It's called The People's Detective.

[00:03:57] It's set in contemporary Oakland. This first novel, The People's Detective, first in the series.

[00:04:04] I'm working on the second book right now. Actually, I'm more than halfway through the second book.

[00:04:10] This first book takes part right before the pandemic, and it deals with an issue that I felt is highly underreported in this area and nationally.

[00:04:24] And that's the issue of missing, disappeared and trafficked black girls and young women and other women of color.

[00:04:37] This is an epidemic in this area. You know, we're in the Bay Area about the second or third biggest hotspot for this kind of activity.

[00:04:48] And many people may not know it, but sex trafficking is only second in illegal enterprises behind drug trafficking.

[00:04:57] We're talking about something that's like a $36 billion industry, something where they've reported that we have a lot of data from 2023 that suggests that there were over 36 million reports in 2023 of people who were missing and potentially trafficked.

[00:05:20] So that's the central focus of the book.

[00:05:49] As the person.

[00:05:50] As the person.

[00:05:50] We know that you're a professor.

[00:05:52] We know that you're an author.

[00:05:54] We know that you have love for your home, Oakland.

[00:05:57] Tell us something else that you may have not talked about on someone else's show.

[00:06:02] Something that'll give my audience a peek into who you are.

[00:06:06] Okay, that's a good one.

[00:06:08] So I am a, let's start with this, because I think that this is pretty defining for me.

[00:06:14] I am a native San Franciscan, actually.

[00:06:18] And, but my father had businesses in Oakland because things being what they are, at the time there was a stronger black business community when he was starting his business.

[00:06:31] It wasn't always the case.

[00:06:32] Used to be more black folks actually in San Francisco than there are in Oakland.

[00:06:36] But San Francisco very early on began this practice of black urban removal.

[00:06:44] And so, you know, San Francisco has something that I call the phenomena of black culture without black people.

[00:06:51] So, the ribs aren't as good and the jazz isn't as good and the song isn't as good because we're not there.

[00:06:58] Okay.

[00:06:58] Right, right.

[00:06:59] But they're trying to maintain, you know, that whole thing.

[00:07:03] So, I kind of fell in love with this region because it meant being around my father.

[00:07:09] As far as writing is concerned, what I don't discuss with a lot of people is that I've been trying to do this since I was about 15 years old.

[00:07:18] I wrote a novel when I was that age.

[00:07:22] I had a very close friend who was published with the same firm company that I am, Bootstrap Publications.

[00:07:30] He goes by the name of Damien Hunter.

[00:07:34] And he and I would, we were early writing partners, still are.

[00:07:38] I mean, we're like brothers hand in glove.

[00:07:42] And so, I've been trying to do this for quite some time.

[00:07:45] And it's been in a variety of different iterations.

[00:07:48] It's always been in my heart and kind of a bucket list thing for me that I've decided that, you know, now is the time to do it.

[00:08:00] And to really commit to doing it.

[00:08:03] So, that's something that a lot of people don't know about me.

[00:08:06] And then I think the rest of it is that I've realized in writing a novel that there is, and I think the same thing applies for academic work.

[00:08:14] It turns out that there winds up being a lot of you in what you write.

[00:08:20] And if people know you, they know how to spot those elements, right?

[00:08:27] Right.

[00:08:27] So, there are people that I have loved and I love who are in my family, who show up in parts of my characters.

[00:08:36] There are things that people know that I care very passionately about that show up in the book.

[00:08:42] There are things that, there are interactions that I've had, real interactions that I've had with people.

[00:08:47] Conversations that make their way into the novel as well.

[00:08:53] And when you're done with it, as an author, you know, you read it back.

[00:08:58] And I know this sounds silly, but I've cried reading my own work.

[00:09:03] Oh, no.

[00:09:04] Because there's so much of me in it, right?

[00:09:07] Right.

[00:09:07] Yeah.

[00:09:09] Yeah.

[00:09:09] I'll tell you what, what struck me is when I got into the particulars of your book is, you have a little section there where you tell people, listen to this music.

[00:09:26] After you read a chapter or before you read a chapter was one of them so that you will know what mind frame I was in as I was writing that.

[00:09:35] You have a pretty interesting Spotify list.

[00:09:38] Yeah, I know, right?

[00:09:40] You know, a part of me, I was overworking my brain saying I should incorporate some of that music into this segment.

[00:09:47] But I thought that was interesting because as a creator myself and I have written novels as well.

[00:09:55] I haven't published any.

[00:09:56] I'm slacking on that.

[00:09:57] Oh, because it's one.

[00:09:59] Yeah.

[00:09:59] I know.

[00:10:00] My mind churns with stuff.

[00:10:03] And I thought that was pretty interesting because a lot of people can't multitask.

[00:10:06] Some people like quiet, quiet when they're in deep thought.

[00:10:10] I thought that was pretty interesting.

[00:10:11] The music, your music playlist as I went into the chapters.

[00:10:17] But I'm getting ahead of myself.

[00:10:20] We know that you're a professor.

[00:10:21] We did talk about something that I want to tap into just a small part of it.

[00:10:26] You told me before we started that you had met Vice President Kamala Harris.

[00:10:32] Yes.

[00:10:33] And I think I would agree that I'm a little bit somber about that situation as a professor, as an author, or as a community activist.

[00:10:46] What's your thought today on our nation, on our country?

[00:10:51] It's been hurting since Tuesday night in ways that I didn't anticipate because I thought that she would win.

[00:11:03] Yeah.

[00:11:04] And this wasn't because of the polls, but this was because of where we are and what we know about the first four years, which were an absolute disaster.

[00:11:16] You know, I mean, I just I think any rational person says to themselves, do you want to go through another four years where you're waking up literally every day to something that makes absolutely no sense?

[00:11:30] Right.

[00:11:31] Like you get the news that he found out that Obama created a pandemic handbook.

[00:11:38] Right.

[00:11:38] And put it in the trash immediately, because why not?

[00:11:41] You know, you can't learn it.

[00:11:43] You could obviously he can't learn anything from a black man.

[00:11:46] Right.

[00:11:46] Right.

[00:11:47] So and then lo and behold, there's a pandemic a few years after that.

[00:11:52] And a pandemic handbook has been thrown in the trash.

[00:11:55] Not going to use it.

[00:11:56] And even more, let's make it all about him, because that's what it's all about.

[00:12:02] Right.

[00:12:02] All about him and how it reflects on him.

[00:12:05] Who wants to go through that every single day?

[00:12:08] You know, where just, you know, where cruelty is the point on a daily basis.

[00:12:13] And where we're in, we've got this cabal of, you know, right wing hate groups and corporate fat cats and people who call themselves Christians, but are actually the biggest hypocrites in the country.

[00:12:33] Because what they really worship is whiteness and not Christian, not Christianity.

[00:12:39] And by the way, Jesus wasn't white.

[00:12:41] And Jesus didn't exist in a time in which there was even a concept of whiteness.

[00:12:47] So I thought we've got a great shot of winning.

[00:12:50] The other reason why I thought we had a great shot of winning is because I started to see when she was, when she received the nomination.

[00:13:02] I started to see what I saw when I met her.

[00:13:04] So I met her when she was the district attorney in San Francisco.

[00:13:09] We were, I had a family company, Bayham and Associates Educational Consultant.

[00:13:17] And we put on this program for high school students where they had, we put them in front of the tech sector, executives in the tech sector.

[00:13:30] And they had an opportunity to interview, prepare resumes, interview.

[00:13:35] And it was not just one day.

[00:13:36] There was a period of preparation.

[00:13:38] So we had all these different exercises that their teachers had and they were to work through it.

[00:13:44] There were special groups of kids who signed up for it.

[00:13:47] You know, they volunteered for it.

[00:13:49] And she came and she spoke.

[00:13:51] Now, keep in mind, we asked San Francisco city government.

[00:13:54] We reached out to everyone.

[00:13:55] We said, who would be willing to come and speak to these young people?

[00:13:59] And no one responded except Kamala Harris.

[00:14:03] Wow.

[00:14:03] So she came.

[00:14:05] She gave a rousing address to the students.

[00:14:09] She identified with them.

[00:14:11] You know, this was she was alternately at times the young woman who had worked at a McDonald's and whose mother had struggled to purchase her own home.

[00:14:22] And then someone who had this political future that we all knew was there.

[00:14:28] But I was also struck.

[00:14:30] So I was struck by her humanity.

[00:14:32] Right.

[00:14:33] I was also struck by something that you didn't see on television.

[00:14:37] It didn't translate.

[00:14:38] And that was her charisma.

[00:14:40] I was struck by the fact that she absolutely owned the room, owned the space, all of it.

[00:14:50] She was very much the boss.

[00:14:54] And that never showed up for me on television until she received that nomination.

[00:15:00] And then that was the first time where I said, that's the person that I met.

[00:15:04] Because all of a sudden, that charismatic energy that that sort of I'm in control of this.

[00:15:12] You know, when she would say things like, I've prosecuted people like him.

[00:15:16] I know who he is.

[00:15:18] That was who I met.

[00:15:20] And I and I think the Democrats have to be compassionate.

[00:15:25] You know, Dr. King has a quote along these lines.

[00:15:28] You have to be both compassionate.

[00:15:30] And you have to have some force and some power.

[00:15:35] You know, to have one without the other is dangerous.

[00:15:39] That's right.

[00:15:40] So the heart and the and the commitment and the will to make things happen is very important.

[00:15:48] I voted for her because I that's what I saw.

[00:15:51] I saw the potential for a new era.

[00:15:54] And I also voted for her because black women have been the foundation for American democracy for quite some time.

[00:16:04] 90 percent of black women voted to uphold our representative democracy and to vote against someone who would dismantle it and who had clearly demonstrably threatened it.

[00:16:18] This was not theoretical anymore.

[00:16:21] This was not theoretical anymore.

[00:16:21] After January 6th, there's no theory.

[00:16:24] This is who this person is.

[00:16:27] Right.

[00:16:28] Without apology.

[00:16:29] Right.

[00:16:30] Right.

[00:16:31] And so you have 90 percent of black women upholding that.

[00:16:35] But that had been the case in every election cycle.

[00:16:37] I think really what if we go back in American history, all the way back to the founding of feminism in this country, which starts with black women, because that's the first feminism in this country.

[00:16:50] The sojourner truths of the world.

[00:16:54] You can see that there is that there's a direct line through the histories of black women in really upholding the promises of this country that have never been fulfilled.

[00:17:09] And so that was part of what I was connecting with as well.

[00:17:14] Helping.

[00:17:15] Yeah, I wanted a new era.

[00:17:17] You know, I think it's time it's time that this country have a woman leader, but you also have to have the right woman leader.

[00:17:25] It doesn't really matter what the what your gender is.

[00:17:28] You have to be the right person.

[00:17:32] And I want I think the right person is a black woman.

[00:17:36] And we're just talking about identity.

[00:17:38] Everybody says, well, you shouldn't vote on identity.

[00:17:41] But the truth is, is that we just voted on identity.

[00:17:44] We voted on white male identity.

[00:17:45] So I don't want to hear that identity is not relevant in politics or the Democrats made a mistake in in investing in identity politics.

[00:17:55] Republicans are invested in white masculine identity politics, period.

[00:18:00] That's an identity.

[00:18:01] It's not a standard.

[00:18:03] It's an identity, just like any other identity.

[00:18:06] And it's manufactured as well.

[00:18:09] OK.

[00:18:11] But as long as we're going to be honest about that, I definitely wanted to see a black woman elevated.

[00:18:21] Look, we have a black woman on the Supreme Court and we have a Latina on the court as well.

[00:18:28] These are two of of our of our four justices who are holding down any sense of sort of appropriateness with respect to adhering to the Constitution.

[00:18:45] They're not legislating from the bench.

[00:18:48] They're actually reading through the Constitution.

[00:18:51] And that was the kind of thing that I wanted in the White House.

[00:18:56] I think Joe Biden gave us a nice little spell of normalcy.

[00:19:02] Of course, there are certainly things that are not normal.

[00:19:05] War in Gaza, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:19:07] That's not normal.

[00:19:09] And I'm not suggesting that's normal at all.

[00:19:12] Right.

[00:19:12] Right.

[00:19:13] But he gave us a spell of normalcy outside of Jan 6 is what I'm saying.

[00:19:19] That's what I was saying to you before we came on not to turn this into that.

[00:19:26] But we had a sense of calm.

[00:19:29] Yes.

[00:19:29] We had gone through the storm and I try.

[00:19:32] I relate everything biblically.

[00:19:34] It's kind of like when Jesus was asleep on that boat and everybody else was panicking.

[00:19:39] We came out of that and we had a calmness just for a spell.

[00:19:45] And even though things were going on, we don't know whether it was mentally, physically, health-wise with Biden

[00:19:51] and what the reasons were for Harris coming on the scene when she did.

[00:19:56] I felt a sense of excitement and also a sense of rejuvenation like we did when we had the Obama era.

[00:20:05] For me, it was about having a good person.

[00:20:12] Yeah.

[00:20:13] Someone with a heart for the people because we're all going to make mistakes.

[00:20:18] We're all fallible.

[00:20:20] But just to have that peace that our nation needs, I think that's what we need.

[00:20:26] We need to heal some more.

[00:20:28] So if we could have had eight years of healing after what we came out of that four years when January 6 happened,

[00:20:36] I think we could handle a little bit of anything going forward.

[00:20:41] But we still need that peace.

[00:20:42] We didn't need to jump back into the frying pan, if you will, as my mother would say.

[00:20:47] And here we go.

[00:20:48] And the thing is, is that I think there's one thing that we can definitively say here today as we record this podcast.

[00:20:59] Those people who made that decision, a number of them will regret it very quickly.

[00:21:05] Very quickly.

[00:21:06] Very quickly.

[00:21:06] And I think before we get to midterms in 2026 and certainly before we get to 2028, there will be a number of people who just, you know, and I'm talking about the people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump.

[00:21:19] You know, they went with, you know, what the person whose signs they saw the most of, right?

[00:21:29] Popular choice in their area, right?

[00:21:31] They're not really ideal logs, but, oh, hey, I'll just go with the flow on this, right?

[00:21:36] They're going to regret that decision.

[00:21:38] And the people who didn't vote, because there's 20 million Americans who didn't vote either.

[00:21:43] And they're as much to blame for what happened here as those who voted to put a convicted criminal into the White House.

[00:21:53] By the way, isn't it surprising that we don't have a constitutional amendment that bars you from becoming president of the United States if you've been convicted?

[00:22:03] And yet in many states, people who are convicted can't even vote.

[00:22:07] What you said.

[00:22:09] What you said.

[00:22:11] What you said.

[00:22:13] Well, let's talk about a little bit more about you, Professor, because it is about you, Doctor.

[00:22:18] Let's talk about what inspired you to write The People's Detective.

[00:22:25] I know we spoke about it a little bit.

[00:22:27] We talked about the self-sex trafficking.

[00:22:30] You mentioned in there police brutality.

[00:22:32] You mentioned the drugs.

[00:22:34] You mentioned how we got here and the soul of the story being in Oakland.

[00:22:39] Tell us a little bit about how you got inspired to write The People's Detective.

[00:22:45] Okay.

[00:22:46] So I had wanted to experiment with genre writing as a way to deal with some of the topics I teach.

[00:22:54] One of the first courses that I got at East Bay was a course called Black Sexualities.

[00:23:01] And in order to teach healthy sexuality and how people in our communities are building towards healthy sexualities and healthy body awareness and acceptance,

[00:23:17] you do have to deal with the histories of degradation that we have been through, which includes slavery and Jim Crow and obviously things like lynching and rape, all of which are acts of violence perpetuated against, in many cases, our sexual bodies.

[00:23:35] So sex trafficking was always going to be a natural first topic for any first genre novel that I wrote because it is slavery.

[00:23:51] So it is in fact the same thing.

[00:23:55] It is enslavement.

[00:23:56] The other thing is that I, a number of years ago, this was during the first Trump administration.

[00:24:01] I don't think I'm going to repeat this for this upcoming one.

[00:24:05] It was just too stressful.

[00:24:06] I had a podcast and I did about 150 plus episodes of a podcast called Along the Line for the Media Freedom Foundation.

[00:24:17] We were doing critical media literacy.

[00:24:19] That is, you know, helping people really ferret out what what really is fake news and what what comes with some actual facts.

[00:24:31] Right.

[00:24:32] OK, so I decided that I was going to do a series of investigative pieces about labor exploitation.

[00:24:41] And I went down a deep, dark hole around that led me to sex trafficking.

[00:24:50] And I realized along the way that black women are overrepresented as victims in sex trafficking.

[00:25:00] In some cases, we're talking about up to 40 percent of people who are missing and disappeared are black women.

[00:25:09] For example, out here in the Bay Area, 2023, I think we reported about 1500 people who are missing and anywhere from four to 500 of those were black women.

[00:25:25] The other overrepresented group that no one talks about also are American Indian women who are highly overrepresented in these spaces.

[00:25:35] It was such a deep, dark well that at one point in time I got into I'm not sure how I did this and I had trouble getting back into it.

[00:25:45] But I got into police records in Washington, D.C., which provided statements of missing and disappeared black women, black and let's.

[00:26:00] And they give bios that, you know, they give the age, most of the age, like between 12 and 14.

[00:26:06] There are young women in those descriptions who are on the spectrum in some cases.

[00:26:14] They're definitely on the margins in terms of of class.

[00:26:20] They're leading very dangerous spaces.

[00:26:24] Let's just put it that way.

[00:26:25] OK, they are they are by definition at risk individuals.

[00:26:32] And, you know, when you as you start to go through that as a black person.

[00:26:38] For us, I mean, the absolute red line for us is slavery.

[00:26:44] It's the it's the fear.

[00:26:46] I realized when I was going through it that I do have a primal fear of returning to slavery.

[00:26:53] And I don't know if anybody else would ever articulate or say that.

[00:26:58] But but I have a primal fear of that.

[00:27:00] And I have a primal fear of living in a society where people look at me and fantasize about me being enslaved.

[00:27:07] Yeah.

[00:27:08] And I think you're the only one.

[00:27:10] Yeah.

[00:27:11] And it's scary.

[00:27:13] I mean, that's what I see when I like when I saw Jan six, I saw a lynch mob.

[00:27:19] Right.

[00:27:20] That's what I saw.

[00:27:21] That's lynch mob behavior.

[00:27:22] And when I see, you know, proud boys marching down the streets with the lanterns and the this and the that.

[00:27:30] I see people who want an order going back to slavery.

[00:27:36] And I don't think that we've really ever gotten past slavery.

[00:27:40] So sex trafficking for me is a continued face of it.

[00:27:46] Child labor exploitation, which brings us all of the things we need for our electric cars and our laptops

[00:27:52] and our cell phones is slavery outside of this country.

[00:27:56] We spoke about that.

[00:27:59] Previously, I told you that I was going to do a piece about sex trafficking.

[00:28:04] And when I went down that rabbit hole.

[00:28:07] It was a lot of information.

[00:28:09] It's not just the black and brown communities, but as well as the professionals in the black and brown communities.

[00:28:18] You could be a doctor.

[00:28:19] You could be a lawyer.

[00:28:20] You could be all these things as professionals.

[00:28:24] But let's just say you take the wrong loan from the wrong person and they're in the sex trafficking business.

[00:28:32] They can pretty much prostitute you out your services or whatever it takes.

[00:28:38] It was a rabbit hole.

[00:28:40] The numbers, the percentages that I came up against.

[00:28:43] I told you I had a whole notebook.

[00:28:45] It would take me probably a whole week or more just to get the information out there.

[00:28:52] As well as we talked about they could be right in your neighborhood, living right next door to you.

[00:28:58] That's right.

[00:28:59] And we don't even know it.

[00:29:01] So I thought it was kind of interesting that you put it this way in the book and how you introduced it with a detective and Aurora.

[00:29:10] Let's talk about that a little bit.

[00:29:12] How did you come up with the character?

[00:29:15] So there are two characters who really are the people's detective.

[00:29:22] One of them is a character by the name of Aurora Jenkins, who is a reporter for one of the historical black newspapers here in Oakland, the Oakland Post.

[00:29:34] It's her investigative reporting that provides some of the information about who's actually responsible.

[00:29:43] And I don't think this is really the core of the book.

[00:29:47] You sort of get a sense of who's responsible very early on.

[00:29:52] But there are more layers to it that really are deeper in the book.

[00:29:56] So in order for a crime like that to happen and then to continue to happen, very powerful people have to be involved in it.

[00:30:06] And I'll just leave it there.

[00:30:07] And then the other person who is a part of what we can properly call and who is properly called the people's detective is a character by the name of Sonny Trueheart.

[00:30:20] And Sonny's deal is that he's a former cop who became a whistleblower against the corruption in the Oakland Police Department.

[00:30:32] Now, the Oakland Police Department is historically corrupt and has even participated in its own incidents of sex trafficking.

[00:30:44] Very recently, for your for your listeners, they can Google the name of Celeste Boat, who was a young woman prostituted by the Oakland Police Department, by certain officers in the Oakland Police Department.

[00:30:59] Underage, by the way.

[00:31:01] Wow.

[00:31:02] Yeah.

[00:31:03] So their corruption is kind of legendary.

[00:31:08] I mean, in California, next to the Los Angeles Police Department, there probably isn't a police department that's more corrupt.

[00:31:17] San Francisco has also dealt with dramatic corruption, too.

[00:31:21] And we all, of course, all know about the murder of Oscar Grant at Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California.

[00:31:29] So, again, another dark mark in the history of policing in this area.

[00:31:37] So it's both of these characters, the reporter and the detective, the one-time police detective, who then becomes a private detective.

[00:31:50] And the person who brings them together is another woman.

[00:31:54] And she, her name is Nzinga, named after the great African queen.

[00:32:00] And Nzinga is a Bahamian civil and human rights activist who wants the story to come out and who understands how this trade plays out internationally.

[00:32:13] Now, the importance of having a woman break the story is that even if I have a male lead character, there has to be woman's agency in dealing with women-centered issues.

[00:32:30] I did not want to write a novel that was about a heroic male figure rescuing women.

[00:32:40] That's a little off for me.

[00:32:42] And I don't like stuff like this.

[00:32:44] I love the balance.

[00:32:45] Yeah, you have to have that.

[00:32:49] I love that.

[00:32:49] The other thing about Aurora is that she is, she's based, her character is based on my grandmother.

[00:32:59] She's based on my mother, who was the person who brought our family on my mother's side to California.

[00:33:06] She raised all six of her younger siblings in Beaumont and Galveston, Texas, after their mother and father died, and then moved everybody out to California after seeing an article and a picture about San Francisco in a magazine.

[00:33:26] She was also one of the first black nurses at San Francisco General Hospital.

[00:33:32] She had to fight white nurses, by the way, while she was doing her work.

[00:33:35] Physical fight.

[00:33:38] She taught me a lot about masculinity.

[00:33:42] And one of the things that I teach in some of my classes is this concept of female masculinity.

[00:33:48] And so the book opens with Aurora in what you might typically think of as a kind of a masculine setting.

[00:33:56] The chapter is called The End of Misogynoir, or The Specific Hatred of Black Women.

[00:34:01] And she is, she's in a fight for her life.

[00:34:06] That's how the book opens.

[00:34:08] But, you know, it was who really showed me those things when I was young.

[00:34:15] It was my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was probably one of the more masculine people that I knew outside of my dad and my grandfathers.

[00:34:26] It's interesting that you say that because I think that women, we get a bad rep for that masculine side of us.

[00:34:34] And it's not that we want to be here.

[00:34:37] I'm constantly telling my other half, I don't want to take the lead.

[00:34:41] I don't want to walk in front of you, but I don't want to walk behind you either.

[00:34:44] I want to walk beside you.

[00:34:46] But when we begin to choose our mates or our partners or even friends and family, there's certain things that we go through in life that put us in tough positions where we have to, as you would say, man up.

[00:35:00] And we're in a fight for our life like Aurora.

[00:35:03] We've got to raise the kids as a single mom or single dad, whatever the case may be.

[00:35:09] So it's not that you want to be in this position.

[00:35:13] Sometimes in life, it deals you those cards where you find yourself there.

[00:35:18] Just like your book with the sex trafficking.

[00:35:21] I'm sure nobody wanted to be snatched up and be put, taken out of their home and put into a situation that they don't know when or if they're going to get out.

[00:35:34] I like the fact when you opened, you can get the feel of how you opened with the first chapter.

[00:35:41] You can get the feel.

[00:35:43] It almost felt like I was there.

[00:35:45] You know, the smell, the taste, the thing.

[00:35:48] And I'm a reader anyway.

[00:35:49] But I just like how you brought that all together and with the music.

[00:35:55] And with the music as you get the feel.

[00:35:57] Yeah.

[00:35:58] Let me, let me, you mentioned that earlier.

[00:36:00] Let me discuss that with you for a second here.

[00:36:03] First of all, just one last thing on the opening of the book.

[00:36:06] A number of years ago, there was a young woman named Nia Wilson who died on a BART train.

[00:36:14] BART is our train that connects some of the different regions in the Bay Area, San Francisco to Oakland to Richmond and also goes down to the South Bay as close as you can get to San Jose.

[00:36:29] Okay.

[00:36:29] Nia Wilson was murdered on a BART train.

[00:36:34] And that first chapter is also about me rescuing black women's agency and removing black women from a state of victimhood on that train.

[00:36:47] You know, I think it's important sometimes to symbolically take a thing back.

[00:36:51] One of the things that we always used to do when someone was lynched, and people forget about this, but what we used to do when someone was lynched is after we would take the body off the tree, we would send a group of the community to that area and we would uproot the tree.

[00:37:07] Because the tree cannot exist anymore.

[00:37:09] If the tree exists, it's always a memory every time we pass it of the person who was lynched on that tree.

[00:37:17] We cannot allow that to stand as an element that terrorizes us in our communities.

[00:37:22] So I wanted to, and that's something that I think, you know, Oaklanders in particular might catch.

[00:37:30] Some Oaklanders would definitely catch.

[00:37:33] There's a reference to her without naming her where Aurora is fighting.

[00:37:37] You might remember that she's fighting and she's remembering someone who lost their life on that train.

[00:37:42] And this is my way of symbolically recapturing that person's life, spirit, and their agency.

[00:37:51] As for the music, the music is sort of a tribute to my father.

[00:37:57] My father was a classically trained clarinetist who could also play jazz.

[00:38:02] I'm also a guitar player, by the way, a blues guitar player.

[00:38:06] So he gave that to me and he taught me how to listen.

[00:38:09] And one of the things that I did in writing the book is on that playlist where you have particular songs for particular chapters,

[00:38:18] I was listening to those songs while I was writing.

[00:38:23] So I listen and write.

[00:38:25] And that's how I get in it.

[00:38:27] And I did this for two reasons.

[00:38:29] One, because my father taught me how to listen.

[00:38:33] And he made listening an integral part of my life.

[00:38:37] So we would sit down long hours into the night and he would just keep playing something over and over on a record player.

[00:38:45] And yes, I'm old enough to have had vinyl records.

[00:38:49] Okay.

[00:38:50] Hey, look, let me move out the way.

[00:38:52] My record player is right here.

[00:38:54] There you go.

[00:38:55] There you go.

[00:38:55] Got a Motown record on there right there.

[00:38:57] I love the vinyl.

[00:38:59] The other reason why I do this is because I had the pleasure.

[00:39:04] It was a life-changing event.

[00:39:06] I had the pleasure when I was in college.

[00:39:10] I went to college in Chicago, University of Chicago, which was great because I just would hang out in the blues clubs at night all the time.

[00:39:18] And as you know, Chicago is basically Mississippi North, okay, is what Chicago is in the black communities.

[00:39:25] I had the pleasure of meeting James Baldwin the year before he died.

[00:39:31] And one of the things that, and I now teach a class on James Baldwin at East Bay.

[00:39:36] One of the things that Baldwin said in his letters is that he wanted to write the way that Aretha Franklin sang.

[00:39:48] And that he liked having music while he was writing.

[00:39:53] And look, I'm no Baldwin, okay?

[00:39:56] But he changed my life.

[00:39:58] Just that one meeting, I mean, he was so inspirational.

[00:40:02] He was, people called him a prince.

[00:40:04] He really was that.

[00:40:06] Just, he had such a positive, beautiful, moral aura around him, right?

[00:40:13] I wanted to do something that honored Baldwin and the way that Baldwin's writing has always impacted me.

[00:40:21] So those are the two things.

[00:40:24] So when people listen to the playlist, you are listening to what I was listening to when I was writing what you're reading.

[00:40:31] I thought that was interesting.

[00:40:33] You know, I hopped on Spotify and listened.

[00:40:36] Thank you.

[00:40:37] I appreciate that.

[00:40:37] I did, and I did follow your podcast.

[00:40:41] I think you should keep at that.

[00:40:43] I think it all ties in together.

[00:40:46] I stopped by your website.

[00:40:48] You guys go check out his website.

[00:40:50] I have it pinned at the bottom of the screen, scrolling across.

[00:40:53] I love the fact that how you brought in a little bit of Oakland.

[00:40:59] I appreciate it.

[00:41:00] And it all ties in together.

[00:41:01] Let's talk about Coltrane for a little bit.

[00:41:04] Yeah.

[00:41:06] I picked up on that too.

[00:41:08] All right.

[00:41:09] So that's my first, my first academic book was, it's called The Coltrane Church, Apostles of Sound, Agents of Social Justice.

[00:41:21] And it is about a, so I was raised, you have a church audience.

[00:41:26] And so it's really important that we talk about this.

[00:41:29] I was raised in the Pentecostal church in San Francisco at, my mother was a Pentecostal.

[00:41:38] And my father was a Catholic, but my mother was Pentecostal.

[00:41:43] So we went with my mother's decision for church.

[00:41:46] My dad was actually, by the time I was born, he was basically not involved with the Catholic church at all.

[00:41:55] So there was a church that wasn't too far from us that my dad knew about, and he used to talk about, called the Coltrane Church.

[00:42:04] And we used to see them sometimes when I would go to, he'd take me to the airport, and they had an airport ministry.

[00:42:11] And I used to have a classical guitar teacher who lived above where they, where they had their services on Divisadero Street in San Francisco.

[00:42:22] And I was always kind of interested in this, but I had never attended the services.

[00:42:28] So the premise is that there were two people, one of whom was Pentecostal, Tronzo King, and Marina King, his wife, his young wife, who decided that they would go to a jazz club to listen to John Coltrane.

[00:42:46] And they were just very young lovers.

[00:42:48] They went, you know, for cocktails and good food and all that.

[00:42:52] They show up, and they felt, and as soon as Coltrane walked on the bandstand, they both thought that they had witnessed the Holy Ghost walking out on that bandstand.

[00:43:02] And they thought that the Holy Ghost was communicating through Coltrane, and then they had Coltrane pointing his horn at that, you know, the soprano.

[00:43:12] And they didn't know what to do with this initially, but they felt like Coltrane was trying to give them a message.

[00:43:18] And the truth was is that Coltrane was trying to give everybody a message.

[00:43:21] On his Love Supreme album, in the liner notes, he talks about, by the grace of God, overcoming heroin addiction and being given a higher purpose for his music.

[00:43:33] And so the Love Supreme album is a four-part suite that is about praise and worship for God.

[00:43:42] And keep in mind that Coltrane was raised in a black Christian context, but his first wife was Muslim.

[00:43:50] His first wife, by the way, whom he talked to even after they divorced, he talked to her every night.

[00:43:57] That's very odd.

[00:43:59] Most people don't do that.

[00:44:00] And then his second wife, who was a Hindu.

[00:44:04] So he definitely had kind of an all-religious experience, universality of religious truth, you know, looking for things, core beliefs like love.

[00:44:13] So my book is about these people who have formed this church and maintained it over 50 years and counting because it's still going on.

[00:44:25] And built not only a kind of an alternative Christian spiritual belief, because Coltrane is a saint for them, because his music has changed hearts and minds and moved them towards God.

[00:44:41] But also they've advocated for black communities in San Francisco.

[00:44:48] So they have a political function, a cultural function, and a spiritual religious function.

[00:44:53] And the book provides a history of that against a backdrop of the histories of San Francisco from really the early 1960s to the present.

[00:45:09] I took a sneak peek at that one, too.

[00:45:12] That's why I mentioned it.

[00:45:13] You guys can find these books over on Amazon.

[00:45:18] With the people's detective, what do you want your readers to get out of this book?

[00:45:25] What is the main focal point for you?

[00:45:28] Yeah.

[00:45:29] So what I want is I want for you'll notice at the end of the book, there is there there is an appendix that provides names of organizations that fight sex trafficking and that also help victims.

[00:45:44] And you'll also notice that on the companion podcast that we put together, the 10 episode podcast.

[00:45:51] There are two sex trafficking, anti-sex trafficking activists who are interviewed on that companion podcast.

[00:45:59] What I want people to do is I want people to get active and to start at least contribute to organizations that are fighting sex trafficking.

[00:46:09] So there's one person I interviewed.

[00:46:12] I'm going to give you three organizations right now on this broadcast, but there's more in the book.

[00:46:18] There's the soap project.

[00:46:21] And Teresa Montano, who's a part of that, is on the podcast.

[00:46:26] What they do is they literally put soap into hotels and motels where the activity is often happening.

[00:46:36] And when you take off the wrapper of the soap, you have information about trafficking, resources you can find, et cetera.

[00:46:46] So that may be your only moment alone as a trafficked person.

[00:46:50] When you go into the bathroom and then you're going to wash your hands, you're going to take the wrapper off the soap.

[00:46:56] And there's the information for you for help to get out of your situation.

[00:47:02] That's one.

[00:47:03] I thought that was brilliant.

[00:47:05] Yeah, isn't that like the most brilliant thing in the world?

[00:47:09] And the thing is, Teresa was trafficked and she was trafficked in a very unique way.

[00:47:13] She tells her story in my companion podcast.

[00:47:16] And she may be somebody that you want to have as well on your podcast.

[00:47:22] She was trafficked, but she was trafficked in a way that doesn't technically fall under the definition of trafficking.

[00:47:30] Because when we think trafficking, we think moving from state to state.

[00:47:33] That happens.

[00:47:34] Okay, and I talk about that in the book.

[00:47:36] That definitely happens.

[00:47:37] And it's also international.

[00:47:40] Teresa stayed at home.

[00:47:42] She lived at home with her parents.

[00:47:45] Her trafficker called her out at night.

[00:47:49] She had to sneak out of the house at night, get in the car with her trafficker, who then took her to the client and drove her back home.

[00:47:56] Now, you may ask, why would she do that?

[00:47:58] She did that because her trafficker set her up in kind of a blackmail situation.

[00:48:05] This is another way that people get trafficked.

[00:48:08] And there are multiple ways that people can grab you.

[00:48:12] Somebody took her home.

[00:48:14] Some boy that she wanted to hang out with took her home, but on the way made a stop at his apartment.

[00:48:20] She goes in the apartment.

[00:48:22] She gets drugged.

[00:48:24] She's raped.

[00:48:25] It's filmed.

[00:48:26] And then he threatens to expose her family to the film and destroy her family's reputation and her reputation.

[00:48:37] Right?

[00:48:38] And she does this.

[00:48:39] And then when she tries to get out of it, they get violent.

[00:48:42] I mean, at one point she talks about they killed her dog just to show her how violent they could get.

[00:48:49] Right?

[00:48:50] The other organization is the other two are more Oakland based.

[00:48:55] There's one here in Oakland called Missy.

[00:48:58] That's M-I-S-S-S.

[00:49:00] There's three S's.

[00:49:02] E-Y.

[00:49:03] I want people to consider contributing to Missy.

[00:49:07] And then there's another one called Love Never Fails that largely operates here in Oakland.

[00:49:13] There are more that operate here in Oakland.

[00:49:15] And now black churches are getting involved.

[00:49:18] So if your black church is getting involved in anti-sex trafficking or information, get involved.

[00:49:25] If there's a public ministry at your church.

[00:49:27] I'm involved with the public ministry at Allen Temple in Oakland.

[00:49:33] So my wife is a baptized member of Allen Temple.

[00:49:37] And I also have an affiliation still with the Coltrane Church where I do some lay ministry for them.

[00:49:45] Get involved with your church.

[00:49:47] If your public ministry is not involved in sex trafficking, get involved in sex trafficking.

[00:49:53] And then stay tuned for the next thing that I'm going to do.

[00:49:56] The next People's Detective book is called Sanctuary.

[00:50:00] And it's going to be about the crisis of the unhoused.

[00:50:05] So after that one's done, I'm going to be asking people to get involved in issues around unhousing.

[00:50:12] Well, you kind of just went into my next question.

[00:50:14] Because I was going to ask you, how did you develop the character of Sunny and Aurora?

[00:50:20] And if you were going to, I guess, if you would, do a series of the Sunny Mysteries.

[00:50:29] So tell me.

[00:50:30] Yeah, I'm doing that now.

[00:50:31] There's a series.

[00:50:32] This is going to be a series.

[00:50:33] I don't know how many books it's going to be.

[00:50:36] We have a contract with Bootstrap Publications for four of them.

[00:50:40] But I think if they're successful, we will certainly expand that.

[00:50:45] At least that's what I'm hoping.

[00:50:49] They're going to tackle issues in this city.

[00:50:53] I'm putting Oakland on the map.

[00:50:55] Because there's not enough detective fiction set in Oakland.

[00:51:03] There's a lot in L.A., San Francisco, New York, Chicago, all that kind of stuff.

[00:51:08] I'm putting Oakland on the map.

[00:51:10] It belongs.

[00:51:11] This is a very, very special, special place.

[00:51:15] It's overlooked.

[00:51:16] I hear that.

[00:51:18] It's like a lot of places in this country that are overlooked because its history is profoundly black at points.

[00:51:28] Let's just be frank about that.

[00:51:29] Okay?

[00:51:30] And yet, that's also its beauty.

[00:51:34] Because some wonderful things happened here.

[00:51:36] I mean, if you think about it, you don't have school lunches for kids without what the Black Panther Party in Oakland did to provide school lunches for kids.

[00:51:48] Yeah.

[00:51:49] So we have done some things here.

[00:51:53] But we're much maligned, right?

[00:51:55] Crime, all that kind of stuff.

[00:51:56] And that's overblown.

[00:51:58] That's the third book.

[00:51:59] So the second book will be about the crisis of the unhoused.

[00:52:04] And really, the villains of that are really kind of the corporate developers.

[00:52:09] So this one really gets kind of deep into the history of development and underdevelopment in the city of Oakland.

[00:52:17] The third book will deal with the whole manufacturing of a crime wave, post-COVID, COVID and post-COVID crime wave.

[00:52:31] And in the third book, leading into the fourth book, Aurora may run for Mara Volkman.

[00:52:42] And I may centrally deal with women's, Black women's leadership.

[00:52:49] I like this already.

[00:52:51] I do, I do, I do.

[00:52:52] I can't wait to sit down and have my long weekend to finish up what you sent me over.

[00:52:59] Because like I said, guys, this is a page turner.

[00:53:02] And I like how you deal with different issues that affect us daily, that is still affecting us now.

[00:53:10] The sex trafficking, drugs.

[00:53:14] What was the other one?

[00:53:15] I had a police brutality.

[00:53:17] Things happen in our community.

[00:53:18] I want to go back, though, because you did touch on something that I think that we all need.

[00:53:22] Your love for Oakland.

[00:53:24] And in the beginning, I read that you said it was as if you would say your love song to Oakland.

[00:53:32] I think that us in our Black communities, as well as what I'm doing here in North Carolina, I'm in the South.

[00:53:39] I think that if we rallied around each other more in our Black and brown communities of what an individual is trying to do.

[00:53:48] We can do a lot of stuff in-house as opposed as stretching out our hand and other areas where we might get that no.

[00:53:58] If we form a community around the stuff that we're doing, your novels and being in the community and all the other wonderful things that you have going on.

[00:54:07] I said the same thing here in North Carolina.

[00:54:10] We've got to start watching our own six, if you will.

[00:54:15] Absolutely.

[00:54:16] You know?

[00:54:17] So I think that's a wonderful thing, bringing attention to your in-house, which is Oakland.

[00:54:22] My in-house here is North Carolina.

[00:54:25] But I want to tap into the storytelling part of it a little bit more.

[00:54:29] How did you come up with the character, Sonny?

[00:54:32] I know, but my audience doesn't really know how you came up with him as the detective behind the People's Detective.

[00:54:41] So he is almost everybody that I write about in this book, because I believe that you should write about things that you know.

[00:54:50] Almost everybody that I'm writing about are people that I know or kind of an amalgam of people that I know.

[00:54:57] And for Sonny, his story is it's a story of redemption of a Black man who's lost someone tragically that he loved.

[00:55:10] And I think we've all had that experience.

[00:55:13] And who wanted to do some good as a police officer because he comes from a lineage of men, his father and his grandfather, who did kind of unofficial work as private investigators.

[00:55:27] His father was officially a private investigator, but his grandfather used to do investigative work in Louisiana.

[00:55:36] So kind of unofficially.

[00:55:38] And so he wants to make a contribution to his society.

[00:55:42] But like so many other things, where he chooses to make that contribution turns out to be a very corrupt space.

[00:55:50] And that's in the space of the Oakland Police Department.

[00:55:53] There are a couple of flashbacks in the book to his old Oakland Police Department days and how corrupt it really is.

[00:56:02] There's something in the book of my father, who I lost when I was 26 years old.

[00:56:09] He was 56.

[00:56:10] I was 26.

[00:56:13] And his own story of disappointment.

[00:56:17] There's also something in here of my father-in-law, my wife's father, who just died very recently.

[00:56:25] He was a Vietnam veteran.

[00:56:31] He worked for the DEA after Vietnam.

[00:56:34] So he went from the war in Vietnam to the war on drugs.

[00:56:38] And I had a couple of conversations with him about both of those experiences.

[00:56:42] Not many, because they were pretty scarring experiences.

[00:56:46] And I couldn't help but think that for men like him or men like my father, some of whom, like, I know my father died angry about things that didn't happen for him that he knew he was qualified for.

[00:57:03] Right?

[00:57:03] I mean, kind of like what you saw on Tuesday, where it's like, I can't be qualified enough.

[00:57:10] Right?

[00:57:10] I'm still not going to be, I'm still not, because I'm black, I'm not going to be qualified over somebody who's a convicted criminal who didn't run a campaign at all.

[00:57:24] You know, all kinds of things like that.

[00:57:26] Right?

[00:57:27] Just awful stuff.

[00:57:28] I'm still apparently not as qualified as they are.

[00:57:32] And so I wanted to write a story that redeemed those folks.

[00:57:37] Where they had a chance for redemption and a chance for a repairing of the heart.

[00:57:45] Where you could maybe negotiate the anger.

[00:57:48] There's a lot of rage inside of Sonny.

[00:57:51] And it comes out at various points in the book.

[00:57:54] And that's the rage that my father had.

[00:57:57] I'm very familiar with how angry he was.

[00:58:01] I'm very familiar with how angry my father-in-law was.

[00:58:06] And I'm also very familiar with the alcoholism that he lived with post-Vietnam for the entirety of his life.

[00:58:13] He was an alcoholic while he worked for the DEA.

[00:58:16] He was a functional alcoholic.

[00:58:18] And so I wanted to write a redemption story for them.

[00:58:21] In the second book, that redemption story goes even further because I provide a chance for Sonny to find love again.

[00:58:31] And to be whole.

[00:58:33] And not to live with ghosts of someone he loved in the past.

[00:58:40] When you meet him in The People's Detective, his father, his mother, the woman that he fell in love with.

[00:58:46] There is no one in his life.

[00:58:50] All the love in his life is gone.

[00:58:52] He has nothing.

[00:58:53] And so the first minute that you meet him, he is an alcoholic.

[00:58:59] He is talking about trying to kill himself with alcohol.

[00:59:05] But by the time you see him in the second book, he's still battling his demons.

[00:59:10] But I want him to come closer and closer to finding a way to repairing his heart.

[00:59:17] So that's who Sonny is.

[00:59:19] And I think a lot of us as black men live with this.

[00:59:22] And we don't talk about it.

[00:59:23] I know that churches provide spaces for us to talk about it and to be whole again.

[00:59:29] But I think the anger and confusion that you see with a lot of brothers, some of that is that we're hurt.

[00:59:36] And we don't talk about the fact that we're hurt.

[00:59:39] It doesn't mean that we're just because we talk about the fact that we're hurt, though, that doesn't mean we're not strong.

[00:59:45] We think that it does.

[00:59:46] You know, Sonny is still very strong in certain ways.

[00:59:51] But he's also hurt.

[00:59:53] And the rage in the violence that he's prone to is a sign of his pain.

[01:00:01] As you were saying that, my face went blank because I think it happens in our black and brown communities more often than not.

[01:00:13] And because we were raised that the man are the stronger vessel.

[01:00:17] They can you guys can handle anything.

[01:00:19] You're our Superman and we're your kryptonite.

[01:00:22] I also think that it also happens with women as well.

[01:00:27] You know, we do feel like we're not good enough.

[01:00:29] Most of my audience know that I am a recovering alcoholic.

[01:00:33] And everything that you just talked about from the story's character, we actually go through real life.

[01:00:40] Losing people and needing that person that was your cheerleader, if you will.

[01:00:48] And turning to something for comfort.

[01:00:53] Yes.

[01:00:53] But also being functional with that to look at me to know I was just having that laugh with my bestie yesterday.

[01:01:00] She said, I never knew when you had been drinking.

[01:01:04] I never saw that side of you.

[01:01:06] And I said, because it was functional.

[01:01:08] Yeah.

[01:01:08] So everything that you said about this character, I love the fact that we can relate to it as people in our everyday life.

[01:01:19] I think we go through enough of, if you will, staying away from behind the curtain.

[01:01:26] But when we start to go behind the curtain, we start to see different layers being pulled back.

[01:01:31] So I think this will be a great read for my audience.

[01:01:33] You guys have to tap into this book with Dr. Nicholas Bam and going over to Amazon and pick up his book.

[01:01:41] I do want you to leave us with some food for thought.

[01:01:44] We got into so much and there's so much, so much more I want to get into with you.

[01:01:49] I would love it if you would come back.

[01:01:51] I will.

[01:01:52] We could just chop it up about life in general.

[01:01:56] I mean, you have a broad perspective on a lot of things that, you know, I'm just picking up gems from you today.

[01:02:02] I'll bits and pieces of what we've already discussed.

[01:02:06] What food for thought could you leave us, if you will?

[01:02:10] Something, I know that you're passionate about the election.

[01:02:17] For me, I'm trying to get past the anger before I really speak on it because we can say things that we can't take back.

[01:02:30] And I woke up in a rage and I said, let me just ponder on it for a minute.

[01:02:36] And when the time is right and the emotions are settled, maybe it'll make more sense coming out of my mouth.

[01:02:42] Because the Bible does say we are snared by the words of our mouth.

[01:02:46] I want to want it to make sense.

[01:02:49] What's your food for thought on your book on life as we know it?

[01:02:55] Because you do.

[01:02:56] You are a professor.

[01:02:57] You have your hat and hands and many, many things.

[01:03:00] Well, just, you know, for food for thought, and I'll make it relevant to what we experienced on Tuesday.

[01:03:08] We're in a long game.

[01:03:11] You're a part of a very long continuum since dating back to 1619.

[01:03:20] And understand that while it really hurts, our ancestors went through things that hurt even more, right?

[01:03:32] And still found a way to experience some aspect of their lives, some aspects of their lives with affirmation and positivity.

[01:03:45] We were here before any of this nonsense.

[01:03:48] And we will be here after all of this nonsense.

[01:03:52] This is a long game.

[01:03:54] And part of what I do as a professor is in Black history and Black studies, I try to connect people up to that continuum.

[01:04:04] You're part of a continuum.

[01:04:07] What we do here today, Victoria, what you do with this podcast is part of a continuum of what Black women have done since 1619.

[01:04:17] And so we're hurt today.

[01:04:20] But I think Kamala Harris was right about that in her concession speech.

[01:04:24] We get back to work tomorrow.

[01:04:26] Yeah.

[01:04:27] In whatever capacity we can.

[01:04:29] Because the long game continues.

[01:04:32] And as long as there's progress for us in the long game, then we're headed in the right direction.

[01:04:41] Yeah.

[01:04:42] I think at the end of the day, be heartened.

[01:04:45] And don't allow yourself to think that everything is just around these people in this particular moment.

[01:04:54] We've got a much longer history that we're a part of, that we've been fighting back from.

[01:04:58] And we're going to continue to fight.

[01:05:00] And I do think that we are continuing to win.

[01:05:05] Yeah.

[01:05:07] Small steps, baby steps.

[01:05:08] Small steps.

[01:05:09] I mean, it's unfortunate that in our Black and brown communities, we do have to take small steps to get to a victory.

[01:05:18] Yeah.

[01:05:20] Until we don't.

[01:05:21] I mean, listen, we are going to have to take small steps until we don't.

[01:05:26] And there will be a time when we don't.

[01:05:29] We are going to break free.

[01:05:31] Okay?

[01:05:32] I don't know when that's going to be.

[01:05:34] But we are going to break free.

[01:05:35] You just have to keep working towards that moment of breaking free.

[01:05:37] And you have to believe in what the 90% of Black women who voted in this past election believed in.

[01:05:45] If you want some hope, ask them why they haven't given up.

[01:05:49] And then connect with that.

[01:05:52] And do the same.

[01:05:54] I like that.

[01:05:56] I like that.

[01:05:57] It just gave me a whole flood of flash of my great-grand, my grand, my mom.

[01:06:02] We all have a stage in our life.

[01:06:05] And I have two daughters that are 24 and 27.

[01:06:09] We're all going to come a point in our life that we're going to be fighting for something.

[01:06:13] Or we're going to be paving the way for something or someone.

[01:06:19] So I like that.

[01:06:21] That put me in deep thoughts.

[01:06:23] Is there any events that's coming up for you?

[01:06:26] Any book signings?

[01:06:27] Any other podcasts?

[01:06:31] Anything that you want to let our audience know about?

[01:06:34] As well as where they can find your book.

[01:06:36] Not just on Amazon.

[01:06:37] Is it anywhere else that they can find it?

[01:06:40] Go ahead.

[01:06:40] The floor is yours.

[01:06:41] Yeah, if you don't want to shop and put money in Jeff Bezos' pocket, which I completely understand.

[01:06:47] I don't think it's going to help.

[01:06:49] You can go to bookshop.org, which uses independent booksellers and thrift books.

[01:06:56] Also, if you don't have any issue with Barnes & Noble, although they're also a larger corporate entity, you can go to Barnes & Noble.

[01:07:02] If it's not at your local bookstore, your independent bookstore, you can go to your local independent bookstore and have them order.

[01:07:10] They'll likely order it for you through bookshop.org, which many of them participate in because that's that independent bookseller network.

[01:07:19] As for other things, I am starting a podcast tour.

[01:07:25] I don't have the schedule in front of me, but I can get it to you so that you can put it on your website.

[01:07:32] There is one that I will be appearing on soon that if you don't mind me grabbing my calendar, I'm sorry.

[01:07:40] Oh, that's fine.

[01:07:41] And I have a portion on my website, and this is for you and as well as any of my guests.

[01:07:47] There's a portion on my website for guests that you guys can go in.

[01:07:50] And if you've been on the show, you can put anything in that area that says guests if you have a calendar or a schedule or portions of your book or quotes or things like that.

[01:08:04] So I want to put that out there for you guys.

[01:08:07] But you're doing a podcast tour.

[01:08:09] So you have to come back around to this one.

[01:08:12] There is so much that we did not talk about.

[01:08:16] Yeah, I will be there for you whenever you need it.

[01:08:19] I've got the – on the 21st, I'm going to be on the Keep Hope Alive podcast.

[01:08:26] That's going to happen.

[01:08:27] And then there's a podcast that I'm doing that I'm looking for the information on.

[01:08:33] There's about 30 million people who pay attention to this.

[01:08:38] It's the Little Give Love podcast.

[01:08:44] This is a podcast.

[01:08:45] Have you heard of this?

[01:08:46] Mm-hmm.

[01:08:47] Yeah, so I'm going to be on with them.

[01:08:50] I don't have the date marked down, but I think we're going to do this in about a week, actually.

[01:08:58] Yeah, I'm going to be –

[01:08:59] I've seen that somewhere recently.

[01:09:00] I'm doing this tomorrow.

[01:09:01] I'm on the Little Give TV show tomorrow at –

[01:09:08] Oh, I'll tune in.

[01:09:09] Yeah, 12 Pacific.

[01:09:12] I have to tune in.

[01:09:13] I've just seen that somewhere.

[01:09:15] I don't know if somebody sent me something or I've seen it somewhere, but I did see that somewhere.

[01:09:19] Well, Dr. Nicholas Brennan, it was a pleasure to have you on my show.

[01:09:26] Thank you, Fred.

[01:09:26] We did not tap into half of what I have researched on you.

[01:09:33] I am a researcher.

[01:09:35] And my eyes were open, and I said, that is someone that I have got to have on my side over here on 12th Street Talkback.

[01:09:44] I can learn a lot.

[01:09:45] So, guys, tune in.

[01:09:48] Go to his website.

[01:09:49] It's at the bottom of the screen.

[01:09:51] It's scrolling across the ticker.

[01:09:53] As well as go over to Amazon, if you will, or some of the sites that he told you about.

[01:10:03] Order his book.

[01:10:04] It is a page-turner.

[01:10:07] Go back and order some of his previous books.

[01:10:10] I'm sure they're just as good as The People's Detective is.

[01:10:16] I can't wait to get in my comfy pajamas this weekend and finish it up.

[01:10:21] Thank you.

[01:10:21] I am a bookie.

[01:10:23] Thank you so much for coming on to the show, Doctor.

[01:10:27] I appreciate you.

[01:10:28] And I'm going to be reaching out to you.

[01:10:30] I am going to be reaching out to you.

[01:10:31] Please.

[01:10:32] For those of you that tap into the show and you want to support him, I will have all his information in the link below that you can go.

[01:10:44] And even if you want to have him on your show, if you're someone in the podcast world or radio world and you want to have Nicholas on your show,

[01:10:54] all that information be in the description as well as his website and his email.

[01:10:59] Thank you so much for a wonderful conversation today.

[01:11:02] Thank you for having me.

[01:11:03] This was beautiful.

[01:11:03] You're a friend of 12 Streets Outback.

[01:11:07] And guys, get ready because he's going to be back again.

[01:11:09] I'm sure of it.

[01:11:12] You guys, if you can't do anything else for yourself today, do me one favor.

[01:11:18] Give someone else a kind word, a thought, a beautiful thought.

[01:11:23] That'll help someone out as well.

[01:11:26] You never know who you're going to be helping in these days to come as we go through this next four years of uncertainty.

[01:11:37] If you don't have God in your life today, check us out Monday, Wednesday and Fridays.

[01:11:43] We do a reading of the word.

[01:11:45] If you will.

[01:11:46] We study together.

[01:11:49] We study together.

[01:11:51] Then we fellowship together and we break down the word of God.

[01:11:55] And sometimes we just read to have something to meditate on.

[01:11:59] Enjoy your weekend.

[01:12:00] And this weekend, don't forget, if you haven't already subscribed to the show, hit that thumbs up button.

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[01:12:26] So if you don't have access to Wi-Fi, you can pick up your phone and simply listen to 12th Street Talkback that away.

[01:12:34] Shouts out to my studio, Unfiltered Studio Network.

[01:12:39] Thank you guys for always supporting the show.

[01:12:43] Thank you guys for keeping 12th Street Talkback on GoodPods' top 100 charts.

[01:12:50] I think we landed at number three and that was great for us being that.

[01:12:56] We've been missing in action for about a month.

[01:12:58] So thank you, thank you, thank you.

[01:12:59] Thank you for the followers.

[01:13:01] Don't forget.

[01:13:03] Share, share, share.

[01:13:04] Share this episode.

[01:13:06] Share this conversation.

[01:13:08] Let's support our men and women in our community.

[01:13:12] Peace and blessings to you all.

[01:13:14] Until next time.