Episode 156 - Marc Lamont Hill

Summary

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Grits and Eggs Podcast

Host: Deante’ Kyle
Episode 156: Marc Lamont Hill
Date: June 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Grits and Eggs dives deep into the intersection of Black identity, intellectualism, media representation, and the demands of authenticity in public life. Deante’ Kyle sits down with scholar, media personality, and podcast co-host Dr. Marc Lamont Hill for a wide-ranging, candid conversation that blends raw personal storytelling, Black cultural commentary, and reflections on living with purpose. Together, they deconstruct corporate media, the power of radical imagination, the pitfalls of respectability, and the responsibilities of community.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Parenthood, Generational Gaps, and Black Fatherhood

Timestamps: [04:10] – [09:50]

• Both Deante’ and Marc share humorous and heartfelt stories about parenting children of varying ages, parsing the differences between raising young kids versus young adults.
• Marc reflects on how relationships with children transform over time, especially with adult daughters:

  “There’s a way that I want to do more... but I have to remind myself she's an adult. I can’t call your job. You gotta call your job.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [07:27]

• They discuss activities, the identity struggles of teenagers, and the importance of becoming parents who raise children they’d want as friends.
• Deante’:

  “I tell my sons: I want to raise you into the type of man that I would want to be friends with.” [09:04]

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2. Media, Authenticity, and the Limits of Corporate Spaces

Timestamps: [10:46] – [24:16]

• Deante’ recalls first seeing Marc during the infamous Don Imus “nappy headed hoes” controversy, leading into a critique of cable news as a space that eschews nuance for drama and binary debate.
• Marc describes his experience on Fox News and CNN, likening it to being cast as the “wrestling heel” or intellectual underdog.

  “Cable news is designed like pro wrestling. There’s a good guy and there’s a bad guy and you rocking with one or the other.”

• He discusses the inevitability of being fired for being truthful in media:

  “If you tell the truth in corporate media, you gonna get fired. If you get a retirement watch at corporate media, you probably sold out.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [14:41]

• Candid reflection on how financial and family responsibility complicate the choice to take risks:

  “When it’s time to take a courageous position, there’s always a thing at stake that's personal and immediate.” [37:25]

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3. The Joy and Power of Black Intellectualism—Unchecked

Timestamps: [21:24] – [30:35]

• Marc details the liberation he feels podcasting, specifically with the Joe Budden Podcast, compared to rigid cable TV:

  “Cable media, you’re on for three…six minutes. Now we on for four hours… At some point you gotta be yourself.”

• Deante’ and Marc discuss the importance of a visible spectrum of Black intelligence (from book smarts to street smarts) and humor, breaking the myth that ‘acting smart’ is ‘acting white.’
• They shout out Mona and the rest of the JBP team for their blend of intellect and authenticity.

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4. Identity, Performance, and the Trap of Political Archetypes

Timestamps: [30:58] – [46:43]

• Deante’ and Marc joke about the path to right-wing influence for Black personalities—how easy it is to grift as a performative conservative versus speaking truth to power on the left.
• They roast the “low bar” for right-wing Black punditry:

  “Look at the kind of degrees…on the right look at their Blacks…they went to barber college!” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [45:02]

• Emphasis on the exhaustion and misery that comes from inauthenticity:

  “Y’all look miserable. You came in today, bright-eyed…they came in looking like they in the Sunken Place.” – Deante’ Kyle [46:59]

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5. Philly Roots, MOVE, and the Radical Black Tradition

Timestamps: [49:21] – [54:34]

• Marc recounts living in Philadelphia during the MOVE bombing and the shifting community perception of radical Black groups over time.
• Discussion of how media narratives stoke fear and misrepresent Black movements, and how the personal becomes political.
• Marc’s educational philosophy shaped by the chasm between “at risk” school labels and the creative, capable Black children he knew.

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6. Deconstructing Education and Defining Black Possibility

Timestamps: [54:34] – [61:09]

• Marc describes how his academic journey was about bridging practice and theory, centering Black experience and imagination.
• The problem with deficit-based labels in education:

  "The same kid that's singing solos in the church choir or getting his purple belt comes to school and he's just ‘at risk’…there was such a gap between who I knew Black people to be and who school knew them to be." [56:39]

• Both discuss rejecting imposed realities and imagining Black freedom outside of American or white constructs.

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7. Radical Imagination, Community, and the Path to Liberation

Timestamps: [61:09] – [70:27]

• They expound on the ancestral act of imagining a future for Black people during enslavement—planting “trees whose shade you may never sit in.”
• Marc invokes Paulo Freire and the need to redefine the “freedom dream”:

  “To the oppressed, to be is to be like the oppressor—our very model of existence… has to change.” [63:13]

• Discussion of world-making vs. nation-building (name-dropping Adam Getachew’s “Worldmaking After Empire”) and the collective sacrifices liberation demands.

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8. Materialism, Individualism, and Collective Ethics

Timestamps: [67:44] – [73:33]

• Deante’ and Marc get real on the seductions of material success, the logic of American individualism, and how true freedom may require giving up privileges, even for those committed to justice.
• Deante’:

  “I would give it all up for a community. Because I don’t need it if I have a community.” [67:58]

• They illustrate the differences between poverty in community-oriented cultures and in America’s hyper-individualistic context.

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9. The Ecology of Black Religion, Knowledge & Culture

Timestamps: [73:33] – [77:41]

• Marc discusses his upbringing in the Ansaar community (Nubian Islamic Hebrews/Dr. York), and how a search for knowledge led him through various Black religions and schools of thought.
• Both reflect on the vital survival and liberation role of Black religious traditions and how texts were (and are) reinterpreted to fit Black realities.
• Shoutout to foundational Black radical texts:

  “Everybody should read Pedagogy of the Oppressed [Paulo Freire]... David Walker’s Appeal..." [76:13]

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10. Tolerance, Brotherhood & Learning Across Black Ideologies

Timestamps: [77:41] – [84:36]

• Love for the variety of Black religious and ideological organizations—5 Percenters, Hebrew Israelites, Nation of Islam, Rastas—emphasizing internal debate without denigration.
• Marc:

  “We may just have a brotherly disagreement…Even if I don’t agree with them, look at how they organize…there’s a value to that.” [83:19]

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11. Imagination, Black Art & the Future

Timestamps: [84:36] – [87:37]

• Provocative question: "What does our art look like free? What is Black music, Black art, Black life not in response to oppression?"
• Celebrating Native Tongues, gospel music, Black sci-fi (Octavia Butler), Deante’ and Marc emphasize the power of the Black imagination to create new existences.

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12. Collectivism vs. The Myth of Self-Made Success

Timestamps: [88:24] – [92:09]

• Deante’ and Marc contrast European individualism (“I think, therefore I am”) with African/Umbuntu principles (“I am because we are”), tying it to child-rearing, education, and social progress.
• Marc:

  “We are each other's harvest, we are each other's business, we are each other's magnitude and bond.” – Quoting Gwendolyn Brooks [89:35]

• They critique the American “self-made” myth and the way it blocks necessary collaboration and shared well-being.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Parenting:

  “I get every nickel I can out of that spot. He be whooping my ass.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [04:52]

• On Authenticity in Media:

  “If you get a retirement watch at corporate media, you probably sold out.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [14:41] “I wouldn’t trade [podcasting] for anything…if CNN called me… I wouldn’t go nowhere near cable news…that’s not who I want to be talking to.” [34:31]

• On Black Radical Tradition:

  “The idea that the mayor—a Black mayor, by the way—dropped a bomb on a residential house in the middle of a major city is insane.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [50:30]

• On Black Possibility and Freedom:

  “Black people need to be told…you can imagine a reality for yourself, bro.” – Deante’ Kyle [62:04] “To the oppressed, to be is to be like…and to be like is to be like the oppressor.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [63:13]

• On Community and Self-Made Myth:

  “Nobody’s self-made… the great myth of America is that you did the shit by yourself.” – Dr. Marc Lamont Hill [90:09]

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Select Extended Exchanges

• Parenting as Friendship Goals
  Deante’: “I want to raise you to be the type of man I’d want to be friends with.” [09:04]
  Marc: “You pay now, you pay later.” [09:48]

• On Corporate Media Realities
  Marc: “At Fox…they wanted me to be El Conquistador… just got his ass beat by every Republican… but then I started winning.” [15:23–16:56]
  Deante’: “So you was on some ‘03 Detroit Pistons shit.” [16:56]

• Materialism and Liberation
  Deante’: “The system, it incentivizes and rewards individuality. And I would give it all up for a community. Because I don’t need it if I have a community.” [67:58]

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Final Reflections

This episode is a masterclass in Black thought, self-interrogation, and the quest for liberation. Deante’ and Marc Lamont Hill build a powerful rapport, moving between laughs and lessons, with a relentless commitment to truth-telling and bringing everyday Black experiences into the light. The episode dares listeners to imagine new realities, value community over performance, and embrace the complexity of the Black journey—past, present, and future.

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Further Reading / References Mentioned

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
• David Walker’s Appeal
• Worldmaking After Empire – Adom Getachew

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For more, follow Dr. Marc Lamont Hill and Grits and Eggs on Patreon!

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Transcript

[Deontay Kyle]

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[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services for MyPay and Chime Card provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime prime only. No minimum balance required. Checking account ranking based on a J.D. power survey published October 20, 2025. For for information on APY rates, MyPay, Spot Me and travel perks, go to Chime.com disclosures this episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer.

[Deontay Kyle]

Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yayo woke up in the morning and to God be the glory Thankful for another day to tell my story Put my opinions in the universe and let them orbit I'm from the dirty soul with a dirty mouth My knee or a bit miss things things on me like a Norbit had to refuse them cause my bitch no rest Fusion she gorgeous as I doubt my sons up and kiss my daughter forehead Tell them we gonna get this money to my pockets morbid Remember living in apartments now we playing mortgage. How's life?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's. It's okay, you know, like everybody else. Yeah, world is crazy man. I got a four year old, so. Oh, that. Yeah, exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

God damn.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That should be whooping my ass.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, that's a four year old. That's the only one.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

No, I got a 26 year old. A 22 year old.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, you. You started getting fresh game. Yeah, you had a reset on you.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

There you go.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Hey man. Hey man. My power to you brother. Old brother, you understand?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He got me picked up at 5.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I'm gonna get there 4, 59 and 59 seconds.

[Deontay Kyle]

Hey, listen, as long as you get there before 5.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, but not A minute before. Yeah, If I get there 4:30, I'mma wait.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, thank you.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I get every nickel I can out of that spot. He be whooping my ass.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, know that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I ain't getting there, man. If I wait in the car.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I got 14, 12 and eight boys. Girls. Two boys. The oldest is. Two is. And the baby is a girl. That's why I was just on the phone with. That's now I gotta check in with her. Like, she my damn mama. She got that. She got all my, like, extroverted qualities. She real like, hey, what you doing? And why? Oh, shit. Yeah, it's. You know, and then I think the thing more than anything is like, activities too, you know, that's that they got boxing three times a week. And she got karate and gymnastics.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's what I'm starting to get in the mix. Cause I forgot all that stuff, you know, he do swimming. I got him in karate. We do like karate like three days a week. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Gymnastics, you know, soccer. During different seasons, start hooping. And he's my first boy. So I'm like, I got a list of shit we need. Okay.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

So yeah, he gotta do everything.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He gotta do everything.

[Deontay Kyle]

I got a 17 year old son, bro just turned 17. He see my face on the Internet more now. I'm just the ATM to him now.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Before then, he never asked me like, yo, yo, Pop, can we get this? And that's like, hey, I want this, I need that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It went from can I have to,

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

yo, here's the link. Get that for, bro.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yo, my 14 year old, he just send links. Yeah. You know what he sent me the other day? He sent me some Balenciaga sneakers. I said, nigga, not in this lifetime. Are you crazy? Yeah, I got your mind. And I told him. I was like. I was like, what do you do? How soon they forget? I told you, like that designer, that shit you gotta buy with your own money, right? I'm not even buying myself no Balencia. So you know you ain't getting them. You gotta go back down to the A6, my brother. Yeah, you heard me. Like, what are we doing? Balencia, like, you a rapper, like, to go to math.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah, right? To go to math class in Balenciaga.

[Deontay Kyle]

To go to algebra and Balencia. Never, never. I can't see it. Yeah, yeah, can't do that. You are you. How. How is that, though? Like, to raise children into adulthood?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's great. In a certain way. Are we on air yet?

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, we rolling.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

We rolling. Okay. Give you the right answer for sure. I'll text you some other shit. No, it's great, man. It's a beautiful thing to watch. It takes an adjustment, the kind of conversations you can have and kind of, particularly with grown daughters. My daughter just graduated college last week.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So I also have to like, remind myself that she is an adult. So there's a way that I want to do more. Like, I gotta pop my job. Let me call. No, I can't call you grown ass woman.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, Job.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know what I mean? I can't call your job. You gotta call your job.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

But it's great to raise people who you actually like. And I actually like my kids.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So that's the dopest part. I call him just to talk. Like, what you doing? Let me tell you about my. And I can tell about my day and talk shit.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's kind of a beautiful thing.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, that's cool.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And then to go back to contrast that to this four year old who's great, but he's four.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And that whoops your ass.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And you don't get better. I mean, you can become a better parent, but you don't get like physically better at it. It's like sports. Yeah. You know, like when you come back from retirement. Yeah, yeah. You know, parenting at 47. So like my back don't care about how much energy I got and how excited I am. My back is like, nigga, what are you doing? You know, all of it. He is a ball of it. He go. He's like a tornado. He loves it. But that's what I found, like activities like karate lately has been. He loves it and I think he might be good at it. Some other shit he did, he wasn't so good. I was like, this ain't for you. This ain't your ministry.

[Deontay Kyle]

And you gotta be.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

This ain't gonna be for you. But karate, he's got it down. He's very physical. But like, he goes to a karate school with run by black men. So it's also great. I love to see him just being led by black men, being around black men, see them in positions of authority. So it's like. It's like all the things. And I get a break. Yeah. Yeah. They're back.

[Deontay Kyle]

Like, thank God, you need that. My philosophy with my kids, I tell my sons, more importantly than anything, is that when I'm chastising you. And I'm like, constantly. And you think I'm nitpicking. It's really not that. It's like, I'm not your friend. I want to raise you and to be the type of man that I would want to be friends with.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes, yes.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because one day, you know, I would desire to just be able to call you and talk shit.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? But if you're not the type of man I would want to be friends with, not only is it a failure on me as a parent, but it's like, man, now we got to re navigate. Like, I'm gonna have to come and clean up a lot of messes in your adulthood.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You do.

[Deontay Kyle]

I don't wanna do that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. You pay now, you pay later.

[Deontay Kyle]

Real? Sure. Extra real. My first introduction to you was cnn. Don Iman's nappy headed hoes debate with Patrisse o'. Neill.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, that was Fox News.

[Deontay Kyle]

Fox News.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Okay. Yeah. That was handed in combs. Rest in peace, Patrice.

[Deontay Kyle]

Rest in peace, Patrice. And I was like, I don't know whose side to take this moment. Cause I love Patrize.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Me too.

[Deontay Kyle]

But he's making. I was like, this guy's making some valid points though.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? And I'm always. Cause I always been on some. You know, I'm raised up by people that just love blackness, love themselves, and taught me to love myself and our people. So it's like, I don't know if I could just chalk this up to comedy. That was a crazy take. This guy's making some good points. You know what I mean? But it's also like, okay, I just like, that's where I started trying to figure out how to see things from two different opposing views, which is the

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

opposite of cable news. Cable news is not designed for you to have nuance, to think about an issue in a multitude of ways. It's designed like pro wrestling. There's a good guy and there's a bad guy and you rocking with one or the other. And I hated that. The Patrice o' Neal thing's funny. I always get tweets and messages from people telling me he like whooped my ass in that debate. I never went back and watched it. Partly. Cause I'm afraid, like, if I watch it, maybe he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And I don't care. I don't. I try not to think about them as competitive things, especially with my brothers. But I do remember that interview well. And I was really sad when he passed away. Cause I really liked him and I really regret it. Something I said in an interview about him. It wasn't crazy, but I accused him of soft shoeing.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And Hannity and Combs didn't get what that meant.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, he did, though. Oh, he got a little.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He was.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, that's. That's what turned him up. Like. Oh, you gonna say the soft shoeing.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. And I wasn't even tv. Right. And I was. I was new to TV and I didn't know him. I mean, I knew who he was, but I didn't understand what he was trying to say. I still think he was wrong, if I remember his argument correctly.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. But I think his angle was wrong because it's putting. And this is something that I've been discussing a lot lately is you putting the role, the title, the adjective, the profession before the black. It can get murky because if you a comedian before you black, then comedy ultimately will dictate how you approach your blackness. Yeah. You let a certain shit slide that shouldn't slide.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? We seen that. We was just discussing that roasting. Like, I don't. You know, I get it. I get it if you feel like this is comedy and this is what it is, but I ain't shit funny about that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right, right. And I just want us to not find it funny.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That would deal with most of this shit. I'm not against free speech. And that was what I was trying to say to them back in the day was like, you can say what you want. You have a constitutional right to call somebody a nappy headed hoe. I just want us to be so outraged by that shit that he can't stay in business. That part he shouldn't be allowed. He shouldn't be excluded from the free marketplace. It should just be so bad for business to call black women nappy headed hoes that you don't do it. It should be so bad for business that you don't make fun of trans people or poor people or whatever the thing is.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. You know, because there is some lines everybody else knows not to cross too, with certain groups of people. So it's like, I want to be included in that. Don't cross that line with me, bro.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes. I want fucking with us to be bad for business. That's all I'm saying.

[Deontay Kyle]

That part, that's real. I think so. Some newfound relevance that you found in being a part of podcasting now. But I also just understand that, like when I saw you in corporate News, I would stop. You know, I always made. Like that was always the thing. Like, I want to appreciate that say, you know what I mean? But how is that, like, when you are one of the few black people in a space like that, especially in corporate media and especially with all the red tape around what you can and can't say. And to your point about the wrestling having to play a role, how do you mitigate that influence? Like, how did you deal with. This is my opinion, but maybe this is not the opinion I'm allowed to say. Did you ever. Were you pushing that line?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I never, I was aware of what was popular to say. I just never let that dictate what I was gonna say. I went on TV every day when I was at CNN and FOX with the assumption that it could be my last day at work. You know, W.E.B. du Bois used to wear a three piece suit, black three piece. So Cornell west wears one now and he talks about that as being like his funeral suit. Like, if I die, like I'm prepared to die.

[Deontay Kyle]

Except for the worst. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, but not just the worst, because worst almost frames it as that's the wrong outcome or undesirable outcome. The inevitable.

[Deontay Kyle]

Gotcha.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

We all gonna die.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. If you tell the truth in corporate media, you gonna get fired. Yeah. If you get a retirement watch at corporate media, you probably sold out.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You probably did something wrong. If they thank you for 50 years of service on TV, you probably fucked up. You know what I mean? So for me, it's not even the worst is gonna happen. It's the inevitable is going to happen.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And so if you keep going out there and doing that with that mindset, you'll be okay. So, you know, at Fox, it was a little bit different because they brought me out there to be not just wrestling because we can't think. Like we all wrestling fans growing up.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, of course.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. We all about the same age, I think. So. It wasn't like WrestleMania wrestling. It wasn't Andre the Giant versus Hulk Hogan. No. This was like Ultimate Warrior versus Pedro Morales. This was like the Saturday wrestling where your favorite wrestler came out and whooped somebody ass who you never saw before. They wanted me to be El Conquistador.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That just got his ass beat by every Republican. They didn't know who I was. I was just a black dude and I happened to have a PhD. So for them that made it even better because I could just be a regular Republican and just whoop this guy who calls himself Doctor, which I even don't do, but, like, that's what they were on. So when I would go out there, I was supposed to be the underdog. And then I started winning. And Bill O'Reilly got a kick out of that. That was almost like his kink. He liked getting his ass whooped by black people. But he also had a. Bill O'Reilly's a phenomenally talented host, smart guy, and probably not that different politically. You'd be shocked to know maybe than us in this room on a lot of shit. So Bill liked it, but the rest of them hated that shit. And at one moment, Roger Ailes just fired me. He said I was a bad guest. They came up with other reasons, but you know, that my politics were radical is what they said. They brought in Mumia, they brought in Assata, they brought in Khalid Muhammad. They brought in all these names to say he's not one of us. But the truth was, as I was told, I was just winning too many matches. The Washington generals can't just come out East Baying motherfuckers. You gotta lose. And they weren't.

[Deontay Kyle]

He was on some like, 03 Detroit Pistons.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly, exactly. And that's what made CNN so much better in terms of a space where I could talk. But cnn, the fault lines are different. I remember going into the 2016 election, I was Green Party, been a Green Party member now quarter of a century. But when they started talking about the election, I was like, well, they were like, well, of course you're voting for Hillary. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, we have to have critiques of the Democratic Party.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Take Hillary off the table. Cause I don't want that to be a distraction because it wasn't just about the presidential race. I just had critiques of Democrats. I said, I'm a Green Party member. They didn't punish. I mean, they didn't say anything to any. I didn't call into an office for that. I just stopped being on air. Because the silent rule is you gotta be one or the other.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And you can't be part of any other conversation. I remember one time I did a debate with somebody, a black preacher, the black preacher from Cleveland. Nice guy. I just can't Darryl something. We were debating Palestine before it was okay to debate Palestine. And they made it a pre tape, which I'd never done a pre tape on CNN before. And, you know, they do pre tapes. Nice guy. He knows a lot of things, I'm sure, just not this, you know, I beat him like a rented mule. And it Never made it to air or they cut out significant parts of it. They stopped bringing me on to talk about Palestine. It's one of the things you can't do.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So I had to learn to answer your question. Like I had to learn what the fault lines were. I had to learn what the rules were. But my solution wasn't to follow those rules. It was to just keep going till they told me I couldn't come back no more.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And that's what they did.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Because there's a. And you know, just on a personal level, how do you find stability and security in that? Especially with this is yet I sell

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

drugs to the community.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, all right. Well, all right. Say less ain't going nowhere. Doctor, crack dealer. Doctor. Get your hand to beat you right now. Oh, you smart, huh? Hit this. That's so funny.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I mean, what I've learned that at my most visible and my most successful, I was making a lot more money than I am now. So I had to learn to scale back. But also I have firm bases. Tv, media, all this stuff is bonus. I'm a professor. I'm a scholar by training. That's my job. I'm a full time professor. That ain't going nowhere. I'm 10 years.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I can't get rid of me if you wanted to.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And so the rest of it is just, you know, again, I treat it like it's going to be here until it's not.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right. Does it have an effect on. What's the initial effect with a new class is like Dr. Martin Lamont Hill, but also Martin Hill, the personality that used to be.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I hate that, you know. Now I teach at City University of New York Graduate center. So I teach only PhD students. So that helps a lot. Yeah. But I've been in places where I taught undergrad and grad and there are people who would sign up for my class thinking that they were going to get the mark that they see in a pulpit or the mark they see on now jbp. Or the mark that they, you know what I mean, see on tv. Yeah. And it was like, I'm not here to entertain you. I'm not here to put on a show for 16 weeks. When they saw that syllabus though, that stopped all that. Cause I put a book a week on.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So if you here for 16 weeks, you read 16 books. They're not small books, they're not pamphlets, you know what I mean? And you're gonna have to write a lot. And once you see that syllabus they like, eh, maybe I'll just.

[Deontay Kyle]

I gotta lock the fuck up.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I just follow him on Patreon. I'm never gonna that.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I need to lock in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause this is the thing, boy. If you get into crunch time with book one and you know another one coming. That's rough. Yes, that is rough.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah. That's facts. You get through page 492 on Monday and you gotta start the next one that night.

[Deontay Kyle]

You gotta start it that night ain't no break.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. And I know when people didn't read.

[Deontay Kyle]

Do you in your experience with not only corporate media but like becoming more cultural personality now, how freeing is that? Because I think we've been able to see a lot more of your humor and the Dart Lamont Hill and these things like that. Which is cool because I think intelligent people also need to be humanized in that aspect that everything ain't like every time I talk, nigga, I'm not talking about, you know, the pitfalls of capitalism and you know, the intersectionality of that. It's like, yo, I'm usually not, I'm. I have, I'm a person.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? And I think that when you work corporate media, of course there's like these boxes that you get put in, then you get the PhD and then you're professor. So everybody think it's just all books all the time. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's. There's something fun about being able to just be me. I've had very few media spaces where I could just be me. They were short lived when I had them. When Black Black News Channel launched at an 8pm show. That was great. I got to run the gamut. That might be the only time the griot. Same thing. But those are kind of only spaces where I was able to really do like both. So when Joe Budden podcast came, that gave me an opportunity to not just show these other sides, but to do it in long form. Cause cable media, you're on for three minutes, five minutes, six minutes. Now we on for four hours, three, four hours. So you get to really. You can't perform that long.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

At some point you gotta be yourself. I mean you're performing but like if they see you four times a week, 16 hours a week.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, man. The performance go out the window.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You gotta be you.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, you gotta be.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

They know who you are and what you're not.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And so I like, there's a sense of relaxation that I get. I love talking about all the Things that I care about. Yeah. I think sometimes people forget that I'm a professor now. It's almost the other extreme.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know what I mean? Why the fuck you talking about that? And I'm like, well, that's what I do. I actually know a lot about this.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know, it's actually my feel.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Actually in my bag right now.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That happens sometime now, to the other extreme, but I love it. I love being able to show that. I think it's important for people to see black people in these spaces. Black people performing different tasks, black people thinking out loud. Black people demonstrating the life of the mind and how it can play out in all these different spaces and places.

[Deontay Kyle]

And a spectrum of intelligence as well. Because, you know, the thing. I think oftentimes we like to donate intelligence to, you know, just the books or just the. You know. You know, we do this in our community with these extremes. Book smarts or street smarts, but there's also spatial intelligences. There's a multitude of forms of intelligence. And the thing about the show is, like, as funny as Mona is, she's just as smart.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Mona's super smart.

[Deontay Kyle]

She's bright, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

If y' all don't know Mona, don't call me white girl. She is. She's smart and she's informed.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's the other thing.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's the informed.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You can have a great mind and not know shit.

[Deontay Kyle]

True.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, and she's one of those people who knows a lot and has a good mind. And so I always enjoy building with her. Everybody up there. I enjoy building with absolutely. Everybody up there knows a lot about something. Yeah. And when we connect, you know, like, it's like some Voltron shit. Like, we were able to really do a lot. I love it.

[Deontay Kyle]

I think it's one of my. It's my favorite thing because it's like, we need to. You know, there's this. The. What it does in real time is tear down the mentality of acting white because you could be yourself in those spaces and. But I can't play with your mind. I know you. I know you probably one of the smartest people in every room you walk in. But in this room, not only are you just as smart, but you still get to kick it and be a nigga on some nigga shit. Some.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Sometimes, like is my favorite.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know, that's my favorite. That was my favorite part about, like. Sorry to bother you. I say that, like, all the time. Like, because it's like, what you don't understand is, like, in the micro, these are how, like these conversations get built around a multitude of people from a spectrum of intelligence and from the, from the dumbest to the brightest. And the. The information is transferred to raise everybody at once. Like, sometimes I need to take a perspective from somebody that don't know as much about this as me just to see how they feel about it from there, just from a raw perspective.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And experience matters. So there are people who are. May not have read all the studies on an issue, but they've experienced the thing in a certain way. Absolutely. And that experience matters. How you make sense of or how you navigate something matters. And it informs the theory and it creates more. Helps you create more theory. So I don't want to be like, oh, I've read every book on poor people, so I'm going to tell poor people how they should feel about this new policy. That's silly.

[Deontay Kyle]

If you haven't experienced poverty.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

The book really actually will do you some injustice because the experience is. That's the best teacher. That's the one.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Well, it's a great teacher. But then at the same time, just because you are really, really poor doesn't mean you have all the answers to fixing public policy. Right. Doesn't have you too close to it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, and so.

[Deontay Kyle]

And then also it'll get personalized where it's like, well, this is the best solution for me in my situation, but not poverty overall.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's right.

[Deontay Kyle]

That makes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. So. So you always want to balance that. And historically, I think we've, we've created these kind of intellectual divisions of labor where we don't think black people have the ability to theorize and to think and to come up with big ideas. The best we'll do is listen to the story and then we'll let some. So it's like white people bring theory, black people bring experience. So when you think about, like, who writes the history books, who writes the philosophy, but we'll read some slave narratives, but then someone else will tell us how to make sense of them. And part of what we have to do is say black people can theorize and philosophize too, number one. But also we have to find deeper meaning in the experience. Black people, ancient storytelling, we're offering stories, but we're also offering theory, we're offering philosophy. When all those things, your grandmama and your great grandma, all them stories, all them expressions, all, all, all the Bible pull outs and all, all that stuff has deeper meaning, they're not just they're not just these phrases that we use to distract us from the world. They helped us make sense of the world.

[Deontay Kyle]

Hell yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, all that shit matters.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. My personal experience, even through deconstructing religion, was utilizing some religious text to make sense of that I was going through.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? Like, like there's. And I think that that's the part where shit get lost is like deconstructing me. Something doesn't mean throwing it away. It's like literally deconstructing. Like, take it apart.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? And like, so you figure out what's going on with you. I'm going to say this just to be quite honest. I do take credit for you getting a job at the jpp.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, wow.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm going to tell you why I got to hear this.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I would tell you thank you, though.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. For sure. You're welcome. You know what I mean? I'm doing what I can. I was like, yo, we. As we was coming up, you know, it was. It was Joe ish. It was the original crew before you and Mona came on.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And so we hitting the streets with like this raw, intelligent, street political. And so I was like, you know, it's the biggest podcast out. And then I'm blazing right now. And then when they got you, I was like, man, they got him out there so he could compete with me.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Man. That's probably true. Yeah. Cause you was killing it.

[Deontay Kyle]

You see what I'm saying?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He was killing it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Is. Is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes.

[Deontay Kyle]

Type shit I said. But in that moment, it was like. It was. It's nothing else like that on the market.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

And so I'm on niggas heels. I know I am.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I was watching all the clips when they hired you.

[Deontay Kyle]

I was like trying to neutralize. Went got the nigga with the PhD on me, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Man, this PhD don't mean nothing, man. They give him out all the time. But now I put the PhD from what I hear.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yo, but honorary motherfuck.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Whatever it is, you know. But I think it's dope. I think it actually expanded the space even more because people like you made it cool to be not just smart, but to have a progressive politics, to have a progressive gender politics without even though they use this word way too much, without pandering, without being disingenuous and without like not being a nigga.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You're quite niggers.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Yeah, I love it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, I love it. And that's the idea. You can do those things. And I think that makes a window into a better politics, whatever that looks like for people, more accessible.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Cause basically, it's like before people thought, in order to be progressive, I gotta be that dude over there. Whoever that dude is, it wasn't who they thought.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Now they see you and they go,

[Deontay Kyle]

I could be him. Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Like, I want to be him.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And it's like, I don't have to choose between being. Having a humane vision of the world and being myself or being cool or being whatever. So when I watched you, I was excited performance.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's the point.

[Deontay Kyle]

That is. I think the thing is, when I looked at this is what actually started me making content. I'm driving trucks and it's like full time. These are also conversations I'm having. Anyway. I exhaust the minds of the people that was in my life.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

They would, please get this camera in the mic.

[Deontay Kyle]

Please find somebody else to talk. My wife would be like, bro, this is over my head, bro. She said, you can't wake me up. And like, yo, you know what I just realized? She's like, I don't want to know. Please make content, please. And then. But what it was is like, oh, okay. This is what it means to be a liberal. This is what it means to be a Democrat. This is a progressive. This is the male feminist. It's like, y' all have these archetypes of how y' all doing things. And it's like, you know, even down to the way a nigga dress, sometimes it's like, oh, okay, so, you know, blue hair barista, Democrat. You know what I mean? Like, you got the Nazi cut with the suit, Richard Spencer style, Republican. It's like, oh, y' all have created, like, cookie cutter ways of, like, identity and, like, just identifying with politics. Like, I don't have to show up any certain way to support trans women. I show up just like this. And I'm not backing down from that shit. And I'm not also lying. I'm dead ass. And I was like, oh, y' all playing? And I was like, I'm a truck driver.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I work.

[Deontay Kyle]

Like, I'mma just show up how I am. Cause, like, I don't got time to play with these niggas and this game that they doing. And I know that because I was, like, able to do and cut through with that. That is going to give the next person permission to just be themselves and have this. Because when you are performing, hey, man, nobody want to go to a show that lasts all day.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You ain't lying.

[Deontay Kyle]

You See what I'm saying? You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

So when you get exhausted with the performance, people gonna find out who you really are and then, you know, you crash and burn or you just find a new grift, but.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Which is what some people do.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's what they do. But I think for like, you know, I'm informed by people like you. But also I always take notes from things like this. Like, man, he on the fucking corporate news saying this shit. So when I don't see him no more, it's like, I know why I don't see this nigga no more. You know what I mean? But it's like. But it was also good to see you on the jbp because it's like that's needed in those spaces too. Because with.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I love talking to them. Not just my brothers and sister who were up on the couches with, but their audience. But the audience. I wasn't talking to black men before. You know, the people who watch Fox News a little bit, you know that demographic. The people watch CNN a little bit. When I was on VH1, I was doing some other, you know, it was a different kind of show. But here the brothers who I'm in barbershops with, who I would be on basketball courts with if I could still run, you know what I mean? The people who I see around the way, like, those are people who watch this. And now I have access to them, they have access to me. We're in conversation with each other. That's such a blessing, man. I wouldn't trade that for anything. I always tell people, if CNN called me right now and said, come back, you know, we'll match your salary, we'll do it. I wouldn't go nowhere near cable news. Not just cause it's dying, but because that's not who I want to be talking to.

[Deontay Kyle]

Exactly.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I didn't know that. Conversely, if you'd asked me five, I left CNN in 2018. Now, shit, if you asked me 10 years ago, would you want to leave this to do a podcast? I would have been like, fuck no. Great. Cause I couldn't see it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right now I see it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Yeah. There's also this segmented way of presenting black entertainment as it literally needs to be entertaining in the sense that weed out the intelligence. You know what I mean? Dumb it down, make it accessible to the. The least red person. And almost like we don't even want well read people to be watching this. This ain't for them.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's what CNN is for. And when you do it like that, then you, you diverge people from, like, actually having a, A conversation that they're both mutually involved in.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? So, like, even with the pod, it's like, well, I don't, I'm not signing to this company or that company. I'm just keep it independent. Because I don't need you to ever suggest to me that there's something to change.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because there ain't.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because I'm being myself. I have, like, literally the best job in the world you do. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

No one's ever going to call you in an office and say, a little less on this or a little more. Oh, bro, that's happened to me in a couple jobs I had.

[Deontay Kyle]

And, you know, and that's a tough conversation for you because now you have to deal with, like, man, like, your own individualism and, like, your morals, and it's like, fuck, like, how do I toe the line? And, you know, you know, to the point of the beginning of the show, you know, you have adult children, so at some point, these were teenagers. And they have needs. They need stability.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. I had to pay that college tuition.

[Deontay Kyle]

See what I'm saying?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And that was my biggest fear, you know, was like, you know, I got fired from CNN when my daughter was a freshman in high school, I believe, and she was at a school with a tuition, independent school. So it was like I got figured this shit out. Yeah. And then when I got back on track, some people in my ear like, yo, nigga, I know how you feel about whatever the thing might be, Palestine billionaires, whatever. But you got, you got people who need you and who are dependent on you. My father, I had to pay, you know, for his nursing home as he was dying, you know, you know, my mother went blind suddenly, and I gotta pay for her. You know, there are all these things happening and people who need me. And at some point, their vulnerability in a very human and immediate way, has to be weighed against the needs of people who are sort of abstract in some way.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, like, I care about guys. I also care about my mom.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And you gotta make those choices. Yeah. Or at least you think you do. Yeah. Um, and so it was always a

[Deontay Kyle]

challenge, an individual priority, you know, often is gonna take the front seat to things because it's like, man, this is, this is, this is a real live experience. And, like, I am personally affected by this. I, I, you know, objectively, I can be. I can. What's going on In Gaza is disgusting and it does affect me emotionally, but this is my fucking mother.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. The problem is, and I agree with that, and the challenge is when it's time to take a courageous position, there's always a thing at stake that's personal and immediate.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And there's always a reason not to do it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Like as a professor, there are people who used to say. They say it like this too. They start whispering, I support you on Palestine, but I'm not tenured. As soon as I get tenure, I'll start saying something this. Then they get tenure. Yes, but I need to be promoted to full professor.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's always gonna be a good, oh,

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I need an endowed chair. Oh, I need this grant money. Oh, I wanna be dean. Cause then I could change things from the inside. And before you know it, they've had a 30 year career. They've got all the accoutrement of the academy and they ain't said a word, said nothing. So there's always a reason to be cowardly.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be tactical and strategic. Yeah, but we have to balance those two things.

[Deontay Kyle]

The cowardice is incentivized too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes.

[Deontay Kyle]

Like man, if you not saying anything is a lot more beneficial. Yeah. It's not a big scheme of things, it's a reason.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Van Jones, I won't say no disrespect. I mean some disrespect. Van Jones is still on cnn. He's talented. Is he more talented than the people who left? Maybe, maybe not. But I think taking the positions he's taken toward Donald Trump, toward the Israeli apartheid state, that's why he's still there.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's why we not absolutely. You know, there's a reason if our open enemies hate us and love you. That's, that's the telling piece here.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. You know, you know, I think about this all the time and this is just like the abstract way that I view things is that this is an example, but it's also very relevant. Like Stephen A. Smith signs this great deal with espn.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Unprecedented deal. And then you wonder why the start talking like that. Like it's hey man, how you gonna keep the job? Yeah, hey, this is a, this is a monumental deal. Guess what? You finna make some monumental sacrifices too? You know, cuz that whole IQ thing was cr.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, that was, what was the IQ

[Deontay Kyle]

thing Donald Trump was talking about? You know, Stephen a been like, he

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

been calling people low IQ and he called Donald he called Stephen a low iq.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Well, how did Stephen A respond? I just.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, he, he, he. He's still on board.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, wow.

[Deontay Kyle]

And you would think that Steven, this is absolutely despicable. You got me up.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right, right, right, right, right.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's what I want. That's what I want. He can't do that on Stephen A. Is. You know what I mean? It's like the thing is, is. And you know, we all have our personal stake in the game, and it's like, shit, nigga, you know what I want to say versus what I know is gonna happen if I do.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So I've known Steven a long time. My take on him, a little different. Not totally different, but a little different. I think he believes what he says. I think that he's just actually conservative. Yeah. I think that on sports media, one that's good for business.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Most of ESPN don't really want radicals and progressives.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

They want people who will be lean toward the NASCAR crowd as well.

[Deontay Kyle]

For sure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And so I think he's always been that. Not red hat conservative, but like kind of regular Sunday black church conservative.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, for sure. You know, and with age, man, that thing just starts to just start.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yo, I had to check myself a couple family members to ask me for money. Like, how hard are you working?

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Are you willing to delay your gratification? You know? You know what I'm saying?

[Deontay Kyle]

You need to stop getting Starbucks.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, exactly, right, Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yo, Boomer Cake. But like, don't get me started with that. Not 500, right?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, dead ass.

[Deontay Kyle]

I got 50 for you before 500. What's he doing? Where's your bootstraps, yo?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Where's your bootstraps? So I think Stephen A.

[Deontay Kyle]

Is

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

being genuine and sincere. I just think now that the deal

[Deontay Kyle]

is signed, yeah, for sure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

There's a lot more. He's a lot more comfortable. And they're a lot more comfortable allowing him to do that.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's a tenure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes, yes, that's exactly right. And because his views align more with some of those bosses than ours do, the Runway's over. Believe me, if his beliefs were to dismantle capitalism and to free Mumia Abu Jamal and to liberate the land of Palestine, they wouldn't be like, oh, we're

[Deontay Kyle]

gonna be on FS1, man. Shit, if that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

If that.

[Deontay Kyle]

I think we on ESPNU right? At 1:30 in the morning. 15, 1:30 to 1:45. Stephen A. Smith, right? Nigga don't even have time to articulate a thought exactly it's two commercials.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, man. It's a nasty game out here.

[Deontay Kyle]

It is, man. And I think the thing is, is that the more you know, the other mature like you. You. There is some maturation that comes with how you perceive the world of understanding why people make the compromises, sacrifices they make. Because it's like, here's the thing.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm not angry N. I get it. Oh, yeah, it makes sense.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

I got three kids, nigga. You know, the thing is, it's like it would make sense to sign to a bigger corporate media deal and just. You know what I mean? Just skate.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

But with your talent, if you decided tomorrow that you wanted to be a right wing, I mean, hardcore, my nigga, do you know how much. Do you know how much money we would have?

[Deontay Kyle]

My nigga, I'm busting down with you.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, you got to. I'll be your co host. We started out together.

[Deontay Kyle]

They gonna say, God damn, them got ungodly money. They got Mark and Deontay.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

They got basically on the money.

[Deontay Kyle]

Like, God, no, but listen, what you don't understand is I'm gonna be on some rapper. I'm gonna be sitting on the money. The right wing niggas podcast. Oh, my God, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

What? The line is shorter over there.

[Deontay Kyle]

The background. You know how I got all that art in my background? It's just gonna be red pills everywhere. American flags.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep. But they lining shorter.

[Deontay Kyle]

Listen, bro, it's. It's the. The entry. Yeah, the entry. Like, it's. It's kind of low key, entry level.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Look at the. Look at. Go turn on. I give it.

[Deontay Kyle]

This is not difficult to do.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

No, look at any of these mainstream. Look at, like, Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow has a PhD in political science from, like Oxford or Cambridge. One of them, too.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Sean Hannity has a high school diploma. Like, you don't have to be as talented on that side. I'm not saying. Yes, there's plenty of very smart right wingers, but if you can get that side of the aisle riled up, they don't care so much about being informed. And if you black, I mean, look at the black leftists. Look at the kind of degrees. My sister Brianna Joy Gray went to Harvard. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

See what I'm saying?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You, you, you know what I'm saying? Have major degrees. Amanda Seals has a master's degree from Columbia University. Motherfuckers got major degrees. Angela Rye has a law degree. You know what I'm saying? Like, then you look on the right and look at Their blacks.

[Deontay Kyle]

Hey, they went like barber college, man, with the barber school.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Fucking ICDC and shit. It's like. But the line is so short, they don't care. You just gotta say the thing that they once said.

[Deontay Kyle]

Barber school. Cnn. You sitting at home all day

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

and that. What you doing?

[Deontay Kyle]

Don't school. Right wing, right. Pick up that red hat and pick up some wings on the way.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You gonna fly.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Fact.

[Deontay Kyle]

I mean, the thing is, it's like. Oh, man. Like the. The. The just. The. Just the access point to that is. Is just so simple to the point where people don't understand how infuriating it is to be intelligent right now. It's infuriating. It's like y' all niggas don't believe the shit y' all saying. Y' all just. It's like a gig.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Yeah. That's what it is. It's a performance gig.

[Deontay Kyle]

It fucking sucks. But it's like, I. I'm not above understanding it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Cause it's tempting. You see, you see the. Like you said, you see the play. You see the logic, and it's. It's tempting to believe that the world is as simple as they need it to be for their points to make sense.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, oh, the jobs are leaving because of those Mexicans. You know, all of our values are gone.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because you don't even have to explain yourself.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know, it's just easy.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's so stupid. Oh, my God.

[Deontay Kyle]

And that is the. That is a reflection of how dumb it is. How easy it is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Is. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

And

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I'm.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm. I. I get a extreme amount of gratification from doing it the way that I do it. And I also am. I'm looking at you. Y' all look miserable.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You look. You came in today. I mean, bright eye, you know, I'm happy. 47 year old back, but. Yes, bright eyes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right, Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

You look.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You look good.

[Deontay Kyle]

You look happy.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I'm saying? You're going through the emotions of the regular human every day. That we are going to deal with some form of grief or stress or whatever. But, like, you ain't looking like you in the Sunken Place. These rough. They deny, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

They definitely.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Them got hit him with the mib. Yeah. Bing don't remember nothing. Yo, this is a little principal

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

turn

[Deontay Kyle]

these us into the man. This Stephen A. Still start talking online like LeBron James and then be like and. And. And shout out to Donald Trump. Oh, we got him.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He's back. He's back there, right?

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? But, you know, I'm not, You know, even. Even the thing is, is like, to be that dumb, in a. In a sense requires some level of intelligence to know what you're getting yourself into.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what it is?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Most of them, for most of this exception. Just like the Jesse Lee Petersons of the world.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, that right there, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, he's special. He's special.

[Deontay Kyle]

They walked him in off the street, yo, for real. But that was somewhere on the corner, just saying dumb. They was like, yeah, come on. He'll do.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Come on.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, boy, do we have a topic. The Age of Lucky Day. Listen, here's my thing. DC Young Fly is. Is not the person that is just tries to be overtly intelligent, even though, you know, he's a smart young man. And then he get on there and just make a fool out of him. And this dude, he don't care. He just babbling, dog. Yeah. And it's like I was. Oh, I was so happy to see DC handle him the way. Because you don't even deserve. You don't deserve to sit down with, like, a PhD like you. Yo, get clowned. Yeah, this is what you need. You need to get clowned, and it still won't change you. You know what I mean? I'm interested in this. I was thinking about this. The same. Are you from Philly? Yeah, born and raised. Same year you was born is like the infamous standoff between the police and the move group.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, the first one.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So there's 78, and then there's 84. 85. Excuse me, 80.

[Deontay Kyle]

The bombing.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

The bombing, right.

[Deontay Kyle]

How. How much noise was the MOVE group making in Philly, though?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So the Powhatan Village group, which was the one in the 70s, they were gaining traction. People knew who they were. Obviously, that's before my time, but by the 80s, people knew who they were. My cousin, she's really like my aunt, but, you know, cause of age differences. But she lived on Osage Avenue where the bombing happened. She was very familiar with them. The family was very familiar with them. John Africa's movement had been growing. You know, part of it was that the media was creating a scare campaign. So every time you turn on the tv, you heard about the MOVE organization. Every time you watched Open the daily newspaper, you heard about the MOVE organization. It was always in a negative light. So I grew up scared of move. When I would watch the TV images, I literally. I remember my first nightmare as A kid was move.

[Deontay Kyle]

Really?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Mm. It was. And then over time, we learn the truth. The community, the grassroots always knew the truth. But those of us regular, you know, people just living our lives, we didn't know. We thought, oh, those are the crazy people. Those was bad people. Then you get to know Pam Africa, you get to know Ramona Africa, you get to know, you know, you know, Mike Africa and so forth. And you understand what they were trying to do and what. Who they were trying to be. And whether you agree with their philosophy or not is irrelevant. The idea that the mayor, a black mayor, by the way, dropped a bomb on a residential house in the middle of a major city is insane.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's insane. Crazy. And burnt up a block like this place, like tens of families.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? In the middle of a major American city, the second bomb dropped, and it just so happened to always be on drop on black people, Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep.

[Deontay Kyle]

But I mean. And the second bomb dropped on this land is what I mean.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I.

[Deontay Kyle]

When I. When I watched let the fire. 2014 was a crazy year for me because I'm at the peak of my deconstruction. But I'm also not trying to. I'm not just trying to go into another ideology. So I'm just taking things.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

What ideology were you in?

[Deontay Kyle]

So, because I was raised Christian, I was. You were, like, deep in the gravitated well, because I come up in the street, I reject everything, and then it's like, well, I want to change my life. What will my grandma do? I'm going to get baptized. I give my life to Jesus, and then I keep it pushing. But after the high of redemption wears off, it's like, shit, man. Like, I don't really fuck with this like that. I still got some of the same questions.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I got questions, right?

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Before I got in that water.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

I thought those questions was going to go away. Obviously, it's not the devil, nigga. It's something wrong here.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And so it took me a few years to just get comfortable with just being like, I'm not a Christian. And then as you seek alternative ideologies or just, you know, just new information and things that, like, was shunned, like, you know, before. It's like, any information outside of that Bible is the devil.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

So then once I got willing to accept new information, I stumbled upon the Let the Fire Burn documentary. And, like, I'm in tears, nigga, because it's like, oh, yo, there was women and children in there. Now these. The American morality is always no Women and children.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

But because it's black women and children, that morality goes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Because they're not humans.

[Deontay Kyle]

They're not human. And this is when I started realizing, like, oh, this is what they trying to keep me from.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's exactly right. That's what they want to keep you from. Because it doesn't fit into the American narrative of blamelessness, of innocence. You know, this idea of American innocence is central to American empire. You know, we have the moral high ground. We don't make mistakes. And when we. On the rare occasion that we do, we correct them. Yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

And we. And we. And. Come on, guys, look at them. Look at how they living.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

These people are fucking savages.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

Now, what you're not gonna say is, like, they was breaking up urban and the urban environment to make a natural environment there. And it was feeding themselves. And they were comfortable with rejecting vanity because I don't have to be dressed up to the nines to earn and deserve respect.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And we know the fucking law.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

So you can't just take me to court. Cause I'm gonna walk circles around you. Yeah. It was a powerful movement that they was making.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Absolutely. And which is why they had to shut it down.

[Deontay Kyle]

Which is why I had to shut it down. And I want to think about this in comparison to you growing up in Philadelphia and then having a PhD in urban education. Does growing up in an environment like that lend to you wanting to pursue that?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

No, it's a good question. I wanted to pursue a PhD. Because I wanted to understand the world differently. But it was always in the kind of Africana tradition which sort of instructed that the. The knowledge had to be useful for something.

[Deontay Kyle]

Gotcha.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, like it wasn't enough to just get the degree. I need to be able to think about how to fix some things, how to leave the world better than I found it. And so, you know, I started a doctoral program thinking about education in a very particular way. And then I moved to a different doctoral program and said, you know, I want to think about this as an. I'm an anthropologist by training. So I said, I want to think about this sort of anthropologically. I don't think about culture, I don't think about systems. I want to think about practices. I wanna think about how people navigate the world and make sense of the world, but how it connects to education. So all that's happening, and as I'm going through the program, I'm thinking about the people I grew up with. I'm thinking about the people Who I knew and their relationship to education specifically. I think about the kids that could work in the corner store, count change without a register. Think about the drug dealers I knew that could. They weren't walking around calculators, but when they got to school, suddenly they weren't strong math students. I think about the kids who would. I mean, you got kids too, right? You said 17. Yeah. I mean, think about all the texting they do. Yeah. I mean, the number of text messages that kids send just in a week is far more than the amount of writing we used to do on a day to day basis. Who were we writing to when we were teenagers? We weren't writing. Yeah. You know what I mean? We just weren't writing. So when we say these kids have a literacy issue or these kids are struggling readers or struggling writers, sometimes, it's not that they're struggling readers, struggling writers. It's that the way that they engage text is different than how school expects you to.

[Deontay Kyle]

Thanks.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And so if. And then there's just the labels in general, you know. At risk. What does that mean? Right. We're all at risk.

[Deontay Kyle]

At risk of.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. At risk of what?

[Deontay Kyle]

And that's the thing. If you just leave it at that. At risk and you don't ask of what.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

Then you can put. You could just push them to the side.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly. To be human is to be at risk. Right?

[Deontay Kyle]

Sure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. This is the truth.

[Deontay Kyle]

To be in love is to be at risk.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Everything is at risk.

[Deontay Kyle]

Everything is at risk.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

But we frame those kids in that way and that sets parameters of how we could understand them, how we can see who they are. So the same kid that's singing solos in the church choir or getting his purple belt in karate or, you know, whatever, Whatever the talent might be that same kid who I knew around the way who was funny and charming, he could fight, he could whatever. The thing was, that kid comes to school and he's just at risk. She's just a behavior problem. She's just a struggling reader. Right. And so there was such a gap between who I knew black people to be and who I knew black children to be and who school knew them to be. That I said, something's wrong here.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, for sure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And it ain't the kids. So I wanted to study systems to try to make sense of the how and the why we got to this place that there's such a big gap, because the gap forecloses on possibilities. The way you approach somebody that's at risk is different than the way you approach somebody who's at Promise, right? The way you approach somebody, you know, I'll tell you one quick story. I remember being a teacher.

[Deontay Kyle]

And

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I remember as a high school teacher my first year, like, I would go into the teacher's lounge and then the teacher's lounge. That's where you vent. That's when you talk about shit, you know? And it'd be like, oh, Jamal, man, fuck Jamal. You know what I mean? Jamal whooped my ass first period. And then otherwise, oh, yeah, I got Jamal third, man. You know, he. You know, and we all telling stories about how fucked up Jamal is, you know, Then some teacher been the 30. I taught Jamal's mom. She wasn't shit, right? And suddenly all these conversations are happening about Jamal. And then there's this teacher who likes Jamal and see some talent or who hasn't met Jamal yet, right? But before you even meet Jamal, the story of Jamal has been told. And so do I approach Jamal as somebody who can learn, or do I approach Jamal as somebody. Look, just keep your. Stay in the seat. Don't get up. Don't fight.

[Deontay Kyle]

You approach him as a problem.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly. And so if you approach him as a problem, then you.

[Deontay Kyle]

He's a problem.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He's a problem. And so school and the world has scripts for black people, black boys, black girls, about who we and what we are. And it's always framing us as Message boy is in question from 1903. Right. And so was a black folk. How does it feel to be a problem? Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

God damn.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

If we begin as a problem, and the framework is that we're a problem, and politically we're framed as a problem, what do we do with these people? How do we fix these people?

[Deontay Kyle]

It's always something they're trying to solve.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

There's something. Right. We're the thing that is to be solved.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Or mastered or controlled or dominated. Yeah. And so if that's the framework, then we're always going to be behind the eight ball. So for me, you know, the life of the mind, the reason I pursue academic ideas, the way I reason I pursue anything like this is specifically, to use your word, deconstruct the systems themselves and the narratives themselves and the frameworks themselves. Not to deconstruct black children.

[Deontay Kyle]

No.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Not to deconstruct black people, but to say, what is it about the world that we begin from this place? And what would the world look like if the world could be otherwise? So I'm always trying to imagine the world that is not yet. You know, I'm an abolitionist. I'M trying to imagine what does a world without prisons look like? What does a world look like where we don't ask who did it and why, but instead who was harmed and how do we make them whole? Right. If we change the framework and the approach, everything opens up.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep. Everything opens up.

[Deontay Kyle]

When we doing our shows, the show that I'm running now, I formulated like a lecture slash comedy slash. Cause I formulated like a comedy set.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

But it's because I have like this idea of, like, accept America as a corporation and then resign from it. And what I tell people is that you have never imagined a reality for yourself.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

There's no black reality in your mind.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

No.

[Deontay Kyle]

The black reality that you exist in is in the minds of white people.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep. Yep.

[Deontay Kyle]

And you accept it. So you try to navigate it instead of trying to imagine a reality for yourself. And because that is like a leap of freedom, like you.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It is.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? That is an act of rebellion and revolutionary and all these different things is just to say, you know what? I don't accept your reality.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep. And to be able to, ma. But first you have to know that you're in someone else's reality.

[Deontay Kyle]

Which is why I tell. I go, I take you down this pathway of corporation. You in a corporate. Hey, nigga, you work for a corporation.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

By accepting their reality, you work for them and resign.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep, that's it.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's it.

[Deontay Kyle]

And.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And.

[Deontay Kyle]

And I think. And it's heavy because I know when I'm pondering on this shit, I'm like, man, I wonder if this is gonna be received well. But also, I don't give a fuck, because n. I'm receiving it. Like, if this is the thing that came to me to say, if this was been put on my mind.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Then that. Then that's the thing I gotta go with. And it's been received so well. But it's also like, black people need to be told in some instance, like, you can imagine a reality for yourself, bro.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes, yes. You, you, you.

[Deontay Kyle]

And you have all of the. You have all of the skills, you have all of the will, and you have all of the faculties to create that for you. And it's not out of reach.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

No, it's not out of reach.

[Deontay Kyle]

Out of reach.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's not out of reach at all. But you, again, that's where the radical imagination comes. You have to be able to imagine worlds that are not yet futures that are not yet selves that are not yet that.

[Deontay Kyle]

And to your point, though, that is what our ancestors were doing as they were enslaved.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm not gonna die. Cause I need to live to be able to. Just to show you, like, n you ain't gonna kill me. Because one day there's gonna be a child that's not gonna be born in these chains.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And that's why I'm staying alive. Cause I could keep running away until you kill me, or I could stay here and I just. I'mma deal with this brutality, but I'm a deal with it with my great grandchild in mind, that they won't be born into these chains. And it's reality.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Now we got a little chain. We got chains around our mind, but those is. We could break those too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Absolutely.

[Deontay Kyle]

And we in the process of doing it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Absolutely. I think figuring out what freedom looks like, having a template for freedom and a model of freedom is important. Because if there's a book by Paulo Freire, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And in this book, Paulo Freire, you know, says, and everybody should read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's a dense read, but it's an important read. He says to the oppressed, to be is to be like. And to be like is to be like the oppressor. So our very model of existence, the only way we know how to be human is, Is to be like them. And so our vision of free. Think about Bill Cosby. I mean, that's the great example, right? The great and the worst example.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

When people were talking about Bill Cosby, the people who were defending Bill Cosby were often saying, why aren't they going after. Name somebody Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, whatever. But those people weren't calling for Harvey Weinstein to be treated like Bill Cosby. They were calling for Bill Cosby to be treated like Harvey Weinstein. Because their vision, again, the vision of freedom and humanity and liberation, was to be as unchecked, as unaccountable as heterosexual, cisgendered white men. Powerful, rich white men. Because in this.

[Deontay Kyle]

Let me get away with brutality.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right? Because to be is to be like. And to be like is to be like our oppressor. So the freedom dream has to change, you know, and until the freedom dream changes, then we're gonna stay locked in this space.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Because we're still playing by their rules.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right. I tell people all the time, like, I've said this on a podcast numerous amount of time, bro. Like, if you. What you doing is like, you're not trying to get off A plantation. What you're doing is trying to maneuver your way to the whip, right? So you could swing that bitch. But that ain't your whip, right? Why you want that? Like you see what it done to you, right? Why would you. Why would you even want that? What you should want is for the people who hold the whip and the mind that made the whip to die.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes. Right. That's a different freedom dream. There's a.

[Deontay Kyle]

Not only kill the person swinging it, but kill the mind that made the whip.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. Why do we need a whip? Yeah, Right. Those start to be the questions. And then everything changes. Because now the relations of power change, relations of oppression change such that there aren't any. That's what you want. So, you know, when I think about the liberation struggles of the 50s and the 60s and the 70s on the continent of Africa and around the world, there were some people who wanted to. Who wanted to nation build. But to build a nation was to have a ruling class, a dominated class, a dominating class, and a dominated class. We were replicating the conditions of capitalism. We were going to replicate the colonial condition. Right. There's a book called. It's by Adam Katachu and it's called World Making After Empire. And what she's saying is for people like Kwame Nkrumah, the idea wasn't to nation build, it was to world make. It was to say that we don't have to build nations that are replicated after our oppressors and our open enemies, but instead we can create worlds that are not yet. We can create worlds that are organized around different things. So not. There's not always somebody who's dominated and someone. Right. We don't always need winners and losers.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right? Right. Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. We don't always need oppressors and oppressed. We don't have that. Doesn't have to be our future. But then we have to start thinking about something and we're gonna start sacrificing some things. True that. Because if you are of the ruling class, you got to give some of that shit back.

[Deontay Kyle]

Bingo.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, everybody want to go to heaven. Don't nobody want to die.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

At some point, you gotta be willing to let this stuff go.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, and that's me too.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And I think that niggas think they're like. Like, you'll forget that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Cause when I'm telling people this and I'm on stage, I'm like, hey, hey, hey, me too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

I need to imagine a better reality as well. I'm not just speaking to you. I'm speaking to myself as well. Yeah. You know what I mean? If this idea of, like, materialism. Like, I'm just as materialistic as y' all niggas, too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And he's up, y'.

[Deontay Kyle]

All.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

He is, yo up. I'm trying to tell you, when we change all this shit, when the revolution come, this nigga's giving up a lot of shit.

[Deontay Kyle]

Giving it up.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Giving it up. Oh, it's gonna go.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, it's gone. And the thing is. Is like, I ain't trippin', right? Cause I would. Cause the thing is. Is like the. The system, it incentivizes and rewards individuality.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes.

[Deontay Kyle]

And I would give it all up for a community. Because I don't need it if I have a community.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's right.

[Deontay Kyle]

If we listen. I tell people all the time, poverty and poverty in Jamaica and poverty in America is two different things. Because in Jamaica, everybody in your neighborhood don't have shoes. So you not having shoes don't matter in America, if I don't got shoes, a nigga will drive past me in a bent. Yeah, that'll fuck you up.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You see what I'm saying? And that's. And Jamaicans. I'm not talking. I'm just. Just an example. But you know what I'm saying? Just anything where it's like, if we're all experiencing poverty, then we ain't poor, right? Well, I mean, we are, but, like, just.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I understand what you're saying.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's the mentality of, like, how people in Appalachia live. Like, we don't need the government. Cause we have each other. And we all ain't got shit, but we got everything.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right?

[Deontay Kyle]

You see what I'm saying?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Thinking collectively is the key.

[Deontay Kyle]

Thinking collectively. Like, I don't. Yeah, but like, what. Like, if. If. If. If. If I build a. If I build a community where everything is in walking distance, then you can have a Rolls Royce. I don't need it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's not necessary. And from an anthropological standpoint, knowing, like, even knowing how you came to be, like, how you grew up in a cult and shit like that, or was been deemed as a cult now, is that. How do things go from empowering the collective? And then when it starts empowering the collective, it goes to empowering the individual is cause to be is what you. It's the. It takes the same path. Even if it starts empowering people.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

Why does it funnel down is because the mentality, even the ideology, is still rooted in this structure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

It hasn't rooted in a structure outside. And what it does is recreate powerful ideologies from the past. Yeah, but. But it puts them here. Yep. And that shit can't exist here.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

At the end of the day, as long as there's capitalism, we're going to see wide amounts of human suffering, wide amounts of human inequality, wide amounts of environmental destruction, wide amounts of racism. All these things are rooted in the existence of a class defending state. Yes. And so our very ideologies are rooted in that. It permeates every aspect of our being and we have to be willing to dismantle that.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely. Like at the cost of a multitude of children being enslaved to a mine in the Congo. I don't need an EV there.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, right.

[Deontay Kyle]

Like if that's the cost.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know, you either find an.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You.

[Deontay Kyle]

You either find an alternative source to human suffering or you don't get the final product.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Just is what it is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And that's okay.

[Deontay Kyle]

And that's okay because what that does is put the brain to work and recreate what the possibilities are. You're gonna find an alternative. We always do.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? But like the thing is, is like once it became okay to have human suffering as an alternative, then the creativity gets killed. I'll just get someone else to do it, no matter what they have to go through.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And then if I'm not directly affected or you know, I could just put it in the back of my mind like, yeah, I got the Apple phone and woo, woo, woo. And I just put that in the back of my mind that I don't have to think about the manufacturing process.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You don't think about any of it. It's not our problem. It's not our business, and it's not our problem.

[Deontay Kyle]

Bingo.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And we have to return to the idea that it is our business and it is our problem. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

This is a beautiful conversation, but we like. I'm just getting to know who you are. I don't know who you are, but I'm learning who you are more. We spare past. You said he was in a cult.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah, I. Where are you from?

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm from Atlanta.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Okay. So how old are you?

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm 30, 37.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, you're a little too young for these guys. That's why I'm asking.

[Deontay Kyle]

Okay.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Because there was a big presence. So there's an organization that was called Ansar, Pure Sufi that became the Ansar law community. They were here in New York in Bushwick for a long. On Bushwick Avenue. For a long time. They were also in Philadelphia, where I grew up. They were in other places. They were a Muslim organization. They initially. They. They later transitioned into Nubian, Islamic, Hebrews.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, I know what you're talking about.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Dr. York. They hold the tabernacle. Yeah, I know you're talking about. So they were in Atlanta.

[Deontay Kyle]

They were, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

In fact, we had a store. I ran the store on MLK in West End.

[Deontay Kyle]

Okay.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And then another store on mlk, but out of West End. And then I also worked in Edgewood. What was Edge. Edgewood. Edgewood, yeah. Edgewood Avenue. Five little five points.

[Deontay Kyle]

All those.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, I used to. I used to vent in front of Linux train. I used to sleep in front of Linux train station.

[Deontay Kyle]

Okay.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And I. I had started reading the books and being involved when I was in my teens and kind of rocked out through to. Through the time. I went to Morehouse and then dropped out, and it was still there. Okay. Yeah. And it was an organization I was a part of, and it was part of my journey toward knowledge itself. Yeah, gotcha. You know, I did a lot of reading. I came up on 5% lessons. I came up with supreme wisdom. I came up on, you know, I was trying to read and consume every bit of information I could find because I was trying to. I was trying to make sense of the world, and I was trying to imagine different worlds and different possibilities.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I was trying to figure out how we could get free.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Trying to figure out who I was.

[Deontay Kyle]

Okay.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And it was beautiful. And also problematic and dangerous. Like all organizations, like, everything. Yeah. You know.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. That's like, you know, this is a culture. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's culture. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

But it's like, you know, I mean, negative connotation.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I think most religions are cults.

[Deontay Kyle]

No, no, they are definition that makes it a religion. Is this the just popularity.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. You got good publicism. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Crazy. I think Jesus got that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yo. You got that.

[Deontay Kyle]

That good. Have you ever talked to. I know it's like, random, but it's. It is extremely accessible for you. Have you ever talked to, like, 21 Savage about this? Because he grew up in the same.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, he. So he was. He was a kid on. On we called the land when I was there. I didn't know him, obviously. I. I believe I knew his mother. I believe I knew his mother at the time. I see the photos. Like, she looks familiar to me. Not to, like, know her, to, like, have, like, deep conversations, because men and women didn't even engage like that. And I was very young. I was still a teenager.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

But. But no, I have to answer your question. No, I haven't, but I'd like to. Yeah. There's some other people who were very famous in the music industry who were in there, you know, who I knew, spent time with, you know, I don't. Those who talk about it. I let them talk about it. Right. But we talk about it. We talk about the experiences. And I learned so much. You know, I don't look at. I don't think about any experience that I've had in my journeys around knowledge of self, religion, faith, politics. All of them I've learned a lot from.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

None of them have been without significant lessons. And I try to just take them and build on them as I move through the world now.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Because it becomes a part of the. You know, it's like another patch on that quilt. Like, this is like, this is my shit.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? It's what I went through. It's like, there's no shame to be had around it, because ultimately you have no control over the big outcome of these things. But you take away from what you like. I tell people, like, I still will reference the Bible, you know what I mean? I took away a lot of wisdom and knowledge from that shit. She taught me a lot about myself.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. She got black people through a whole lot.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Bingo.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know?

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? My grandma and the suffering of her health, it was the thing that got her through that. I can't discredit that. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Gospel music got us through. Spirituals got us through. Scriptures got us through.

[Deontay Kyle]

I mean, the church was a meeting place, bro.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes. And it was also a radical political organizing space.

[Deontay Kyle]

It was.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I mean, early Sunday school literature was as radical as anything the Panthers put up.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, when you think about David Walker's appeal, if y' all ever read David Walker's Appeal, y' all should read David Walker's Appeal, A preamble together with four articles to the colored citizens of the world, but particularly, most expressly, the United States. That's the name of the book.

[Deontay Kyle]

One second, Tristan. All these books that he's mentioning, please, like, make sure that you keeping track of it and put in the description

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

as you read David Walker's Appeal. One is, there's references to Christianity in it, and it was a text that kind of emerged right around the time that Turner's Rebellion. And there's a relationship between those two things. But Negroes couldn't read that book. Because it was an insurrectionist text. So it was on Sunday, the only time they would let Negroes gather and have a book, I. E. The Bible, that we'd slide in the other text. So the scriptures themselves were sites of possibility for emancipation, but we had to read them differently. We had a different, as they say, hermeneutic. Right. We read the text differently. So when we read Exodus, we weren't thinking about the children of Israel back in the day. We were thinking we were the children of Israel. We became the people in the wilderness. And so that became our vision of freedom. We had to read it differently.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

We had to engage Paul differently. We had to engage Jesus love ethic differently. Not in the sense that we were alien, but in the sense of we had to apply it to our own circumstances, as the Nation of Islam did. Yeah, yeah. They looked at those texts and said, that's us. We are them. Yeah, yeah. That's how we get free.

[Deontay Kyle]

And also, you know, not for nothing, the same thing the rosters did, too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

They found a way that, like. And that. That's the. You know, that's the genius of that scripture that people can find a way to apply it to them.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Now, right now we bring things to text.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And then we take things from text. And so for black folk, I don't judge people for their faith traditions. That's not who I am. That's not the space I was in. Maybe when I was 18, you know, debating people in underground Atlanta, I might have been like, is you on that?

[Deontay Kyle]

Shit can get wicked. Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Did it. We used to literally scrap. I remember. Yeah, yeah. But.

[Deontay Kyle]

Nah, tell us. Let us know, please.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I want to know. But we used to, like, come to physical blows with 5 percenters over lessons. You know, we used to come to blows with Christians over scripture. We would be fighting over. I mean, physically fighting over this. I'm not on that. Cause I have a different philosophy around this shit.

[Deontay Kyle]

Same. But I knew I wasn't willing to judge people on that when the most radical anti Christian would be like, yeah, nigga, anthropology. Jesus. Like, whoa, brother. Right?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Hey, yeah, I ain't on that time.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, relax.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right, right.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's a little. You're going too far.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You're going too far. You're missing the point.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because the thing is, is that, you know, think about this. I think about the story of him. And then think about chattel slavery. Exactly. Think about what they did to a runaway. You know, a lot of Jesus.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, a whole lot of.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know, a lot of them. And also Too. Like, stop talking about my granny savior like that, my nigga. Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know what I mean?

[Deontay Kyle]

That's because if my granny heard you

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

say that, oh, she'd be on your ass.

[Deontay Kyle]

Put the oxygen tank down and whoop your ass.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. Whatever. With the tank on me. Right. That's what blow this whole up. Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know, walk bar in this with the oxygen thing. You better relax.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Stop talking about Jesus like that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean? But, like. But it makes sense. And it's like I knew, like, oh, there's something wrong with that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's not. That's not the way to approach this. That's not help. You don't like to demean.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

In that sense, you know, the only time that I will ever. And you know, I've since matured past this, too. But even then, like, evangelizing, like bridges, you know, chill. Don't approach me with that, do you? But when you realize, like, there's a level of evangelicalism that everybody takes the approach they have to take their message to the street. You know what I mean? When you ride down Camp Creek and you see the brothers out there with the newspaper and the fruit and everything like that, that's their form of being evangelical. And it's like, you know, they might not press it on you, but.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And that's all I ask. That's all I ask. I remember when I used to sell. Cause I used to sell on Camp Creek, too. I remember I used to be all over Atlanta, man.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, bro. You name some spots.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. And these were before they got changed.

[Deontay Kyle]

You see what I'm saying?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

When you show everybody, it's like, yo, first of all, West End epicenter of culture. My. You gonna be out there with the rosters. Yeah, The Muslims, everybody. The. The gospel cues. Yeah, not the gospel. Israelites, Hebrew Israelites. And those niggas. Oh.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Shout out to the Universal Church of Practical Knowledge. Shout out to my brother. Shout out to Tazari. I love the brothers.

[Deontay Kyle]

Dog face right here. Listen, bro, I'm walking down. I come in. I was walking up past Queen City. I was going to Oakland City train station, leaving my auntie house. And this nigga said what this nigga said to me. Look at this motherfucking mulatto. I was like, hey, my nigga, what you trying to do? I don't know. Nah, we ain't going like, this is Oakland City. We can get it in.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

He's like, I'm making a point, brother. And if you would just listen right, and let Me enlighten y'. All.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You backing down, though?

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Cause they will fuck you up.

[Deontay Kyle]

They will.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

They roll deep, too.

[Deontay Kyle]

They roll deep.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I got some family that's.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yo, the beautiful thing about this podcast is that we do attract all of them. And even if they know we don't align with their ideology, they don't reject ours because we not rejecting theirs. I'll make a little fun of you.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, I disagree with them ideologically on some key points. I'm actually, at some point gonna write a book about them that's actually on my very short list of future projects, is to do something on maybe the icu. International Church is universal practice. You know what I'm saying? They used to be called something else. I remember back when they were called the Church of Israel or the Israeli Church. But again, these are people trying to make sense of the world, approaching text, interpreting text, being rigorous and thoughtful about how they engage it. Even if I don't arrive at the same interpretation, the same conclusion, we all try and get free. And I'd rather bring people into the conversation. Now I'm gonna have to say to them, hey, now, I see my brothers in Africa is different than you do. I don't have the kind of ontological criticism of white people that you do. I don't see white people as inherently evil. As an ontological thing. Like, I don't think you come out. Cause I see race as a social construct.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

For sure. Whiteness I got some issues with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Okay. But just being born white is whatever, you know?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Like, it's a.

[Deontay Kyle]

And it really is just melanin deficiency. Like, you want to be scientific about it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because when they say certain, it's like you're making a good point. You know what I'm saying? Because. And because I'm not. I'm not closed off to education. Right. And I. I don't. I don't marry anything. Like, the thing that I'm most married to is liberation. That's it. Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And. And so I'm always trying to figure out how we can do that, because even though I may not agree with what they're doing. Isupk. Whoever's doing on this particular point, we may just have a brotherly disagreement. I still, like, look at them schools they doing. Look at that Passover they just did in Houston.

[Deontay Kyle]

Look at how they organize.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Look at how they organize. Look at the commitment to coming out and proselytizing, evangelizing, whatever you call it. Right. We used to call it Teblican. Right. But whatever you call it, going out there and doing this thing, that's a discipline that we can learn now. They didn't invent it. We've been doing it for a long time. But they're carrying the traditional. What can we get from that?

[Deontay Kyle]

And it's ultimately the most consistent.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yes.

[Deontay Kyle]

You see them. And the thing is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. You know, and they gonna read. They gonna read.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Your ideology might bring one or two out to the block every now and then.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

Them is out there 10 deep every day.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Every day. Yes. Minimum. And. And there's a value to that, to seeing that. So I. I never want to throw that away. Even if I don't agree with them on a number of issues.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I'm willing to. I'm willing to learn.

[Deontay Kyle]

And I think that that's a very important. It's just a very important position for black people to take as a whole. Because what we have to realize is that every. All of our ideologies are in response to oppression and white supremacy.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, but that's part of the problem. That's part of the problem. What does our music look like? What does our art look like? I don't wanna say all of our stuff is out of oppression, but I will say. Cause I don't think that's true. But so much of it is consumed with speaking back to oppression, responding to our situation. What does our art look like? Free. What does our world look like? Free.

[Deontay Kyle]

And also, why can't you enjoy woke rap?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. My thing just is make it good.

[Deontay Kyle]

And it is make it good.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Like gospel music. Like, some of that shit is bad.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, it's just bad. And I got the hits, but there's some shit that's like, whoa.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

But I think the thing is, like, ultimately, what the issue that most niggas have with backpack rap is. It doesn't address their oppression.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Right. It. But maybe.

[Deontay Kyle]

I mean, yeah, this is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

This is. This is where sometimes I don't want to tie artists to a kind of immediacy around responding to things.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So, I mean, think about. I'll just give you one example. Think about the Native Tongues movement, right? In hip hop. Some of that shit wasn't political. Most of it wasn't political in the way that, like, Public Enemy was in the way that Paris was in the way that Sister Soldier was in the way, you know, and shit. Some of the gangster rap wasn't explicitly political, but there's a way that fuck the police it's still a politics.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. Very much so, in fact.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

There's a way that the aesthetic shift that we see with leaders of the new schools or what Tribe Called Quest, invites some things that we couldn't consider before. Because now we're in conversation with history. Just think about how Q Tip or Ali Shahid, but particularly Q Tip in this example, are sampling now, who are we in conversation with in history?

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That takes our mind in different places. If we can think outside of the traditional frameworks of music, that gets us somewhere different.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know what I mean? So sometimes it's not the immediate. Here's a solution to our political problem, which is important. But sometimes just being able to imagine, I mean, reading Octavia Butler, just the idea of black futurity, the idea that black folk will exist in a future, that there is a world that includes black people at a time where we're told that black people don't have a future, or where we aren't necessarily convinced that there is a future.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right, right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That alone might give us the mental fortitude and the creative imagination to solve the problem of today. Because I know, like you said earlier, that somebody's grandmama or great, Great Grandmama imagined a world that included us, even if they didn't live to see it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That kind of creative imagination. Yes. Might not be wrapped up in a political line, but it might be wrapped up in a gospel song.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So if I don't know that my pain can be healed, but then I hear that there's a balm in Gilead.

[Deontay Kyle]

Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Or if I don't know how to deal with the dislocation of being an African in America, and I'm reading the Psalms and I'm like, well, how do I sing the Lord's song in a strange land? And then black folks say, well, I sing because I'm happy.

[Deontay Kyle]

Cause I'm free.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Free. Yep. And I know he watches me, man. Look, bro, I'm telling you, that shit is when I tell people that you need to plant a tree that you might not be able to enjoy the shade of. That is the whole concept of that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's what it's about, man. That's the beauty. But that's only if you get out of the European mindset.

[Deontay Kyle]

Hell yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You get out of the. What we call the Cartesian logic of I think cockatoo. Ergo, assume I think, therefore I am, which is about the individual.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And you embrace the Ubuntu principle. Yeah, I am. Because we are.

[Deontay Kyle]

Hey, bingo.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

There you go. It's a whole different framework.

[Deontay Kyle]

It is. And it's. And then, you know, then. Okay, this is so crazy. I didn't realize now that you said it. I didn't realize, like, that's how I'm raising my children, with the umbuntu mentality is that when you fuck up, everybody's in trouble because now y' all will hold each other accountable. But not only that, when you good, y' all all good, everybody good.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And that's the important part. Otherwise it's just collective punishment.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right. But otherwise you just do some Israel shit. But yeah, but no, we all benefit. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

How do I do that? Like, oh, like if there's a gross. If there's a gross. Like, oh, you just like ignoring these rules. Like you just being rebellious. And then I'd be like, all right. Everybody giving their phones. Sometimes it's like just to feel that, oh, not only, like, have I become responsible for his actions, but now you understand that your actions affect other people.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly. Gwendolyn Brooks, in her poem to Langston Hughes said, what? We are each other's harvest, we are each other's business. We are each other's magnitude and bond.

[Deontay Kyle]

Bingo.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's.

[Deontay Kyle]

And that, that as. As. As abstract as a concept that is going to be to some people. That is the simplicity that I live with. Right.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Because they're interconnected. Because even in this world where you think you doing it by yourself, you're not. The great myth of America is that you did the shit by yourself. The self made. Ain't nobody self made.

[Deontay Kyle]

Self made what?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Running backs don't run through lines, they run through holes.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You just go out there, you quarterback, and then a whole defensive line. No O line.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Exactly.

[Deontay Kyle]

You get whacked all day, every day, and you're never gonna gain a yard.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

But America teaches you to only think about Barry Sanders in the end zone.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yes.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

And not think about who got him there, which is space that's open.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's why I hate an MVP award.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, I get it. I get it.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. Because like, you're the best because of this team.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

Like, yeah. You know, you do a seven game series seven times, there's gonna be a different MVP of every series.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Because whoever skill set rose the highest to the occasion due to the actions of the collective.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Right.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's just what it is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's right.

[Deontay Kyle]

And you know, I think it's. I think we are bombarded with trauma, especially with these phones that there's no time to stop and think about each other. Yeah. There's no time to stop and think. This could just be a bot. There's no time to stop and think like, well, what can I receive from this ideology even if I don't agree with it? It's like you should be learning something from everything, even if it's learning what you don't want to be.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know what I mean?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

And I think that some people self made. The self made shit has always bothered me. Even in the street. When I was in the street, nigga be like, oh, I'm 100. And it's like, well, you A to somebody, right? So you ain't 100. Right?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Everybody's a to somebody.

[Deontay Kyle]

Everybody. And so you flaw. And it's like just that mentality though, that you like, are convincing yourself it's delusion.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's delusion. But we're encouraged to have that delusion because the world stays as it is if we stay as individuals. Yeah. It only changes when we have a collective ideology, a collective effort, a collective vision, a collective mission, collective goal, you know, that's the only way we change. Yeah. So they want us to be individuals.

[Deontay Kyle]

Even this mentality now, like, if you think about these data centers. And the thing is, if they talk about the environmental impact of the data center, right. The reason why they're willing to continue to build them is because they're. It's not my problem.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

It's not my problem.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'mma die. And then y' all will be left with the earth. That is a result of my actions now. I don't give a fuck. It's not my problem.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I only need this shit for 30, 40 more years. That's what you say.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm gone.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah. That's all they thinking.

[Deontay Kyle]

By the time we, you know, whatever. You know what I mean? It's like. And even more than that, like how sick individuality is. Is like, nigga, you got kids.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, sick.

[Deontay Kyle]

You don't even care about the world you leaving for them. Sick. And me. I have ever. I have. Listen, since I had my first child, I've been thinking about my grandchild. Mm.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

I'm 21 when I had my first child and I'm thinking about my grandchild, which is putting all my effort into this child to be the best person of theyself so they could be a great parent to the child that's to come. And these niggas is like, yo, I don't give a fuck. That forest.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, right.

[Deontay Kyle]

You know What I see when I see that forest, a couple billion dollars in my bank account.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep. That's how they think. That's how they think. And that's the European mentality. That's a colonial mentality.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's like, literally ravage. Ravage everything.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

The world is to be dominated. The Earth. The environment is to be dominated. The Earth is to be controlled. Everything is to be monetized and controlled and exploited.

[Deontay Kyle]

And this is how niggas become Hebrew Israelites.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I see it.

[Deontay Kyle]

And the white man read devil, sodomite, you know? And I'd be like, nah, let that cook for us.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Just listen, he's saying something. Yeah, but I think you mean Edomite.

[Deontay Kyle]

Edomite.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

My bad, my bad.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

All right. I'm trying to save you.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, my bad, my bad. Shout out to, you know, Happy Primark.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, that was gonna go different on the clip. Yeah, yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Eat a mic, eat a mic. Eat a mic. Yeah. You know, I don't study day tech, so. I don't.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Sorry. I appreciate you as a cult vet. That shit. It's muscle memory.

[Deontay Kyle]

That shit came back.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You mean the Edomites, my brother. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, yeah. Sodomite. Sodomy. Okay, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Okay.

[Deontay Kyle]

Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, yeah. But, like, I used to. Cause, like, you know how when you. Okay. So big cat, 5%. 5 percenter. He know that. So, like, when we first, like, became friends.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You a pop center.

[Deontay Kyle]

I pressed 5 cent.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yep.

[Deontay Kyle]

He was really on that. And I, like, I remember one day I was like, today's degree.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Today's the day's degree. Wow, brother.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, you put me on the spot.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Today's degree, it's knowledge. God, brother.

[Deontay Kyle]

No, that's not.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Not.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's not the degree.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You say days degree.

[Deontay Kyle]

Days math. Yeah, that made math. But the degree is something else. You know, the degree is why did. Why did the devil. You know what I'm saying? Stuff like that.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, you do it like that. Okay.

[Deontay Kyle]

I do it like.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know what I'm saying?

[Deontay Kyle]

That's how I was talking.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

We came up with the same thing. Interchangeable, but. Okay.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, that's how I was taught. Oh, yeah. Charlamagne mentioned. He mentioned 5%. I was like, what's today's mathematics? The math and the degree, I mean, they are the same. But how I was taught it was. You say. You say the mathematics, and then you break down today's degree.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Who was the original man?

[Deontay Kyle]

The original man is. Original man is the colored man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

The original man is the Asiatic black man. The Maker, the owner, the cream of the planet under the father of civilization, the God of the universe. Come on, man. It is.

[Deontay Kyle]

Come on, man. It is about the real 5%.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Might be 4.

[Deontay Kyle]

No, that's crazy.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

4% is crazy.

[Deontay Kyle]

4% is crazy. Nah, you keep you sharp, B. Nah, nah, nah. But, you know, like I was taught, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I didn't know they had. How big was. So you came up.

[Deontay Kyle]

No.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

So look, you came from Atlanta.

[Deontay Kyle]

I got that from when I stayed

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

in New York for a little bit. Ah, okay. I was about to say.

[Deontay Kyle]

So when I. When I used to walk to the store, I used to walk wherever I was going. The brothers, I said, yo, what's today's degree? What's the mathematics? You know, you God, right? I'm like, what is he talking about?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

And they give you what? They'll give you this piece of paper.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

When you come back here, I'm test you on what this is. You better know what it is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Or we go whoop you.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I say the consequences are not known information. Yeah. They're a very unorthodox approach.

[Deontay Kyle]

We go whoop your ass. You don't know what this is.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's. That's how.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's how I learned, like, knowledge. Knowledgeable gang banger. Yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

And then I. Then I. I'm sorry. No, you good. Go ahead. Then I, you know, I stopped doing the lesson. Then I came, I was introduced to it, and I was like, man, you know what? I used to do this when I was a kid. Let me come back through again.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I was at a school. The reason I was at a school in Newark. I was principal for a day at Weequake. In Newark. In Newark. And the principal's a 5 percenter.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, word?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. The principal. Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's ill as fuck.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Great brother, man. Great brother. He actually invited me out to family day out in the park. And. Yeah, man, when you walk in, it's like, positive energy always creates elevation, you know what I'm saying? On the door.

[Deontay Kyle]

That shit is powerful too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

You know, he's teaching the standards and the curriculum and all the things that the state wants them to know, but he's also weaving in information that the kids need to know to give them knowledge of self.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah. And if you think about this from a different perspective, these posters that you will find in school and in the workplace, that would be like, perseverance, teamwork. You ingest that shit so much that after a while, you start looking at it from a different lens. Like, I do need a little perseverance. Right now, nigga.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

You hear me? And, like. But I mentioned that. I mentioned that to him.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I'm sorry we got all distracted.

[Deontay Kyle]

No, it's cool. I was driving trucks. Yeah. It's like, he kept telling me, like, every day, and I was. I was making an effort. And then I had told him one day, I was like, stop asking me this. I don't care about the mathematics right now. I got most. I got some most shit on my going on. This is becoming a responsibility, right?

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, becoming a responsibility. Everything I call you.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, man, I don't know. And it's like, I don't. I don't. I'm not gonna avoid my nigga.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

I forgot to tell you, like, no more mathematics, baby. I can't. I can't do mathematics right now, baby. I'm on this truck. I've been on the road for three weeks. Yeah. I ain't see my kids that. I just want to keep. I just want to keep them sharp, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

That's. Keep mine sharp.

[Deontay Kyle]

That's how you do it.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Keep your mind sharp, man.

[Deontay Kyle]

I know. We are closing it on time, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, man, I gotta go pick up my.

[Deontay Kyle]

I got.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I gotta pick up my kid from school. I was saying earlier, I don't know if it was on air, but I was like, man, I gotta get him at 5 and eat with my ass, man. So I don't get that minute earlier. Yeah, I never late, but I don't get there a minute earlier, man. I get my. My full. My full payment in.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, for sure.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah.

[Deontay Kyle]

Every minute.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Every. Every minute.

[Deontay Kyle]

I need it all, but, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Great, man. I love building with y', all, man. This is dope.

[Deontay Kyle]

Hell, yeah.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

When I'm in Atlanta, I'm gonna come through again.

[Deontay Kyle]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah, man.

[Deontay Kyle]

You're always welcome, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I appreciate that, man. I love.

[Deontay Kyle]

I appreciate you genuinely coming. Pulling up on.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Of course, of course. Of course.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, man. This is. This is a doc, man.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Y' all could just call me. Y' all could just call me Mark. I don't use the doctor, man.

[Deontay Kyle]

It's doc, man. Ladies and gentlemen, thank.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Follow me on Patreon, by the way. Follow me on Patreon.

[Deontay Kyle]

Yeah, go to Patreon, brother. Go to Patreon. Come to our Patreon, too.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Oh, yeah. I subscribe to Y'.

[Deontay Kyle]

All.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

$8. $8. I subscribe.

[Deontay Kyle]

Oh, appreciate it, man. Dope. I'm your host, Deontay Kyle, who's in front of the camera. Front of the camera. Big ass cupcat, man. Yeah, we'll see y' all next week.

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

I just want to rap.

[Deontay Kyle]

I just want to rap, man. Yeah,

[Dr. Marc Lamont Hill]

Yeah. They say without the proper labor Faith don't stand a chance I put my faith in faith and stand on fertile land I planted seeds that'll indeed turn into trees before rest in peace teas get printed of me.