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Episode #2209
Jeff Johnson: New Voice of Urban Consciousness
Brown: He’s been called the vice of a new generation who tackles hard-hitting topics in his provocative documentary series on BET, the Jeff Johnson Chronicles. Meet Jeff Johnson and hear his message and views next on Black Issue Forum.
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Brown: Hello, everyone and welcome to Black Issues Forum. I’m Natalie Bullock Brown. It seems every generation sits in judgment of the generations that follow. Since slavery African Americans have fought hard and with dignity for freedom, equal treatment and entitlement to Civil Rights. But it often seems older generations feel that young African Americans through their language, their dress and choice of music exhibit a clear lack of regard for the hard won entitlements many of us now enjoy. In return younger generations argue that they are misunderstood. Well, this afternoon we think today’s guest can help bridge the gap between generations with his provocative brand of thought and activism. Jeff Johnson is an acclaimed political expert and has been dubbed the voice of urban consciousness. He has served as the vice-president of Russell Simmons Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and is the former national director of the NAACP Youth and College Division. In February of 2005 Johnson produced and hosted a series of mini-documentaries on BET called the Jeff Johnson Chronicles which explored provocative topics through candid interviews in neighborhood settings with everyone from the most profound scholars in academia to those degreed in street smarts. Johnson has tackled issues on black youth and obesity, incarceration, fascination with material wealth and more. And now I would like to welcome Jeff Johnson to the program. Thanks so much for being here.
Johnson: My pleasure. My pleasure.
Brown: Let’s first start off and just talk about the origins of the Jeff Johnson Chronicles and why it was important to you to do the show.
Johnson: To go back a little bit, I mean I never wanted to be on TV. Was not a plan for me. Wasn’t a journalism major, wasn’t in broadcasting—none of that. I was an activist, an organizer and I thought at least a mediocre one. And had run into some folks from BET on the circuit here and there and sat on panels with people. And one day ran across Steven Hill who is senior vice-president of programming at BET—or executive vice-president of programming at BET now. And he just asked me do you want to be on TV? And I said I don’t know. What are you talking about? And we talked about a couple of things and ultimately the goal was me coming on and providing commentary on Rap City once a week. And that commentary led to me covering the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for BET on the entertainment side versus on the news side. And so bringing interviews with congressional members and party leaders to 106 and Park and Rap City audience in a way that the network hadn’t done before. And so that I think was the catalyst for saying, “Well, this guy really can bring some kind of consciousness in an entertaining way to this demographic.” And we talked about—Todd [ph] had a conversation with Steven again, you know, what do you want to do? I said, “I want to host the black politically incorrect show,” and he was like, “No,” he said, “What else do you want to do?” I said, “I want to tell stories.” And so he said, “Great, send me a list of the issues that you want to cover and we will choose some of them. We’ll find some documentary, and a documentary production team,” since that wasn’t something that BET really had in-house. And then he Chronicles were born.
Brown: Tell me, let’s go again back to your commentary on Rap City. Tell me what sort of things you were talking about. I mean, Rap City is a show—well, why don’t you describe it and then tell me how you fit into that.
Johnson: Well, Rap City when it was created was really the quintessential hip hop show. You know, Yo MTV rap existed at the time but Rap City came with, these are videos that you are not going to see anywhere else. You know, grass roots kind of underground hip hop stuff and not really that anymore. But that’s what it started out as. So it is the place where you go when you want to see hip hop videos. But the demographic is a younger demographic teenagers for the most part. But because it has been such a part of the hip hop community you still have 20-somethings and 30-somethings that will watch Rap City. So it is a broad demographic. And so the issues range from everything from voting and why it’s important to education to savings and investment, to black and brown relations to the necessity for young people being involved in leadership. I mean, I don’t think there is anything that we don’t tackle and I have been thankful to the network for never censoring me. So I can pretty much say what I want to.
Brown:That’s a privilege.
Johnson: That’s a great privilege.
Brown: Yes, it is. It really is. Tell me about the interactive, I guess, element of what you do. Because I know online you have an opportunity of you provide an opportunity for people to kind of sound off and what they think about the things you have talked about.
Johnson: Sure. I mean, it has been an amazing relationship and because it has given me a sense not only from a demo but from geographic aspects. I mean, I have got—I have more young people that write me from Toronto than I do from Ohio. And so again, you see these pockets of young people that are seriously concerned about what’s going on in their community. What they are angry about, what they are frustrated about, what they like, where their needs are. The largest number of emails that I received was when I started the Rap City Book of the Month piece and young people saying, “Please, send me book lists. I want to know what I should be reading.” And I was surprised. But what it speaks to is that these young people have a thirst for knowledge and information that they are not being given. And in some way, shape or form we need to understand that providing them with news and public affairs doesn’t mean we have to dumb it down in order to be engaging and cool.
Brown: Let’s go right to some of the topics that you deal with but before we do that I want to ask you, I mean, you said you were surprised by the fact that so many young people wrote in wanting a book list. Do you think that older generations of African Americans think that the younger generations and teenagers really in this day and age really aren’t interested in learning, have a completely negative view of where kids are coming from?
Johnson: I don’t think most older people know young people, at all. And I think it’s because in many cases they are either afraid or they are disinterested. And then what has happened, what has exacerbated this generation gap is technology. And so we have got cell phones, we got two way pagers, we got email. You know, we got computers that will fit in your pocket but we don’t talk. And so not only with the breakdown in families especially in urban communities and poor communities but with the increase in technology that has us communicating in a different way with technologies that in many cases elders are afraid of themselves, you now have even less communication. And so young people are not being engaged by stories of elders who have experienced a different time and place that they would be able to understand and respect their elders and thus be a little bit more open to elders who really are interested in many cases in understanding young people. And that is not new. I mean, that has always been the case. But the technology divide has exacerbated that.
Brown: And you think hip hop has and I want to lead into one of the topics that I know you discuss which is going from—has our country or our community gone from let freedom ring to bling bling? So what would you say about that?
Johnson: I mean, hip hop is the expression of young people. Now what makes it different is that never has an expression of young people been so controlled by corporate interstates. So there is a hip hop industry and then there is a hip hop community. And in many cases, if we’re honest, the people that market, promote and create hip hop hate hip hop. Because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t put out some of the stuff that they put out and label it as hip hop. So we really got to deal with that. There are young people in communities all over the country that are of different races and economic status that love the elements of hip hop which are dejaying, b-boying or break dancing, graffiti artistry, emceeing and knowledge that has nothing to do with oftentimes what we see on MTV, BET and on the radio. And so one, elders don’t understand the distinction and so they only view hip hop as what they see on television or what they see on the radio and don’t understand that there is a large group of young people who don’t subscribe to this form of hip hop. Secondly, hip hop has been one of the only things that these young people have been able to use to be able to communicate with each other in a way that is free. They don’t have the access to other institutions, they haven’t necessarily created their own institutions and then what is most important is that elder generations post-civil rights failed to create institutions primarily for African American young people that instilled the necessity of leadership in them so they would understand and have a level of reverence for what these elders were able to provide as it related to access to public accommodations. But if you don’t teach them, how do you expect them to know?
Brown: Right. Well, how do you—what would your prescription be for bridging that gap?
Johnson: Talk! I mean, rocket science it is not. If you want to build a relationship—if I want to build a relationship with you I don’t walk by you everyday and not speak. If I want to build a relationship with you I don’t ignore the concerns that you have. If I want to build a relationship with you I don’t act as if the things that you are concerned with are unimportant because I may not understand them. But in many cases that is what is happening in local communities. We have elders that walk by young people and that ignore young people. And in some cases, in good cause because now you have allowed a generation to exist that don’t care about old people, they are not concerned with elders and will knock them out. And so some of the fear is legitimate. But we got to understand that these young people didn’t create that themselves. They were allowed to exist in a place of neglect that did not say even if I am not your parent I am responsible for raising you. Even if I didn’t birth you the community has a responsibility to disciple you. And we don’t see that happening in our communities. I grew up at a time even at 33 when if I was walking down the street and I did something crazy I had to look around first to see who was around. Because even if my parents were at work there might be somebody who may have known somebody that knew my parents. And by the time I got home they was on the beat-Jeff-down line so that I had a spanking coming before I even got to the house. And we don’t see that happening anymore. And when you don’t provide law and order for young people vis-à-vis discipline, then the police are going to provide it, the courts are going to provide it, institutions that have no real interest in the development of our young people are going to provide it and that’s the kind of thing that we are seeing in absence of communities loving young people, they are forced to be disciplined by institutions that don’t love them.
Brown: Talk about education because I know one of the things that you feel is that education is completely—education system has failed young people in general because it is not set up to teach rather it is set up to allow children to hit benchmarks I guess. Talk a little bit about what you see the problem being and what we can do to change that.
Johnson: I mean, the bankruptcy of public education is something that you could do an hour show on by itself. And so it is unbelievably complex issue that I don’t think we should try to overly-simplify. That is rocket science. Because what we are talking about is decades of neglect of a system that is now so convoluted that it is difficult to even try to figure out where to start. I mean, because we are dealing with in many cases the unconstitutional funding of public education in many states. Where not only are we not funding it properly but we are putting other priorities above funding education which leads to improperly being able to pay teachers and provide benefits for teachers which lead the best teachers to go to school systems that aren’t in urban communities or rural communities for that matter. That puts us in a place where we don’t have proper resources for students where they are using second edition books when there is a tenth edition out. Where you don’t have computers and technology available but they got new computers at the jail at the youth detention facility. Where even from a structural standpoint you don’t have schools that are conducive to learning because the heat doesn’t work in the winter and the air conditioning doesn’t work in the summer and they are asbestos infected and you know, bricks are falling down around them and the windows don’t open. But, again, at the jail, at the youth detention facility there is new paint with new bars and new computers and new facilities. What is the message that we are sending? Then when we start dealing with curriculum, what are we teaching? And what are we setting the standard for? In many urban schools 65% is seen as acceptable and so now young people are shooting for 66% where you have people that if they graduate with a 70 you got families throwing parties. As if that is legitimate, when we come from communities that said excellence is not an option but it is a mandate and so we now have through no child left behind schools saying passing a basic skills test that is not going to prepare you for the rigorous curriculum of most colleges and universities is now acceptable. So now even if I am graduating, I am graduating passing a basic skills test that is not preparing me to be able to compete at the Dukes of the world or the UNC-Chapel Hills of the world. Or in many cases even some of those “lesser universities” and I don’t know if they are lesser but they just aren’t setting a high expectation themselves. Then if that wasn’t enough you are now saying you got to be certified to move on from the fourth grade from the eight grade from the twelfth grade. But half of the teachers aren’t certified because we now aren’t pushing education as a priority even within institutions if higher education to ensure that we have adequate pools of legitimate teachers who are not dedicated to a paycheck but are dedicated to preparing another generation of young people to be able to go into the workplace and compete on a level that is so often in America we are not able to compete on anymore. So all of those things.
Brown: Yeah, and I see it is complicated.
Johnson: It has to be dealt with systematically at that level and I don’t mean to go on but if we talk about some of the potential solutions that have even been thrown out there, the charter school movement was supposed to be a movement that said, “Let’s begin to try to identify non-traditional models that can be inserted into public education to provide reform on a system that needs to be reformed.” But now we view charter schools and public schools as competing interests because people have been able to see how economically lucrative charter schools are. And, again, the development of young people has been lost and people’s ability to be able to gain access to a capitalist venture that makes them money.
Brown: Earlier you mentioned that we come from a community that at one time said education is not an option, it is a mandate. Talk about what changed in our community, if anything, after Civil Rights occurred. After integration occurred and how that impacts us now.
Johnson: Well, I mean, we came out of one room school house, especially in the South, out of one room schoolhouses that transferred into under-funded neglected public black schools that educated people well. And so while we fought for separate—we fought for a long time for separate and equal. We said, “Give us our own schoolhouses where you give us the resources to be able to properly educate our kids and when we saw that those resources weren’t going to be provided we realized that Brown v. Board of Education was the next option and separate and unequal was not going to be tolerated. And we wanted to be able to gain access to integrated schools because we felt like now if we have these resources we are going to be provided with a more quality education. But what we didn’t take into consideration was if these white folks who in many cases don’t want us in these schools in the first place, why are they going to educate our young people with the things that they need to be whole people? And some of your viewers are going to say he is playing the race card. I am not saying that because I think that there are some great teachers of all races that love young people and love education. But from an institutional standpoint we did better educationally under segregation because there were people that were dedicated to preparing black students to be able to compete not only academically but be able to socially deal with the systematic and institutional racism that they were going to face in a country that still is dealing with systematic and institutional racism.
Brown: So let me just clarify, what you are saying is that not that segregation was something that was necessarily good but what it did do for us was that it allowed us to--
Johnson: Segregation was great for us.
Brown: It was great for us in the sense that it allowed us to take care of each other and we were in a position where we had to take care of each other.
Johnson: But see, allowed I think is the wrong word. We recognized that we had to. Nobody allows you to take care of yourself. You take care of yourself or you don’t. And so we were forced through segregation to understand the necessity of self-preservation and self-sustaining infrastructure in institution. Integration put us in a place where we had the misnomer that now public accommodations were going to take care of us in a way that we used to take care of ourselves.
Brown: Why do we think that?
Johnson: Because we crazy. I mean, clearly. Most other races, even as they integrated into the broader American culture have never let go of the institutions that still provided cultural or ethnic specific empowerment. We are the only ones that have done that. And we did that because I think we got to a place where we felt like now we are finally accepted. After all of this time of fighting and all of this time of struggle, now we are finally accepted when who cares if we were accepted or not? At the end of the day I don’t care what other people think about me. I understand that we have to provide institutions that we control so that in lieu of any kind of institutional racism or discrimination that the paramount responsibility for taking care of my community is on me. We gave that away.
Brown: So how do we get that back?
Johnson: You know, that is a process that is going to take much more time because now we have young people that have never known what it looked like before. They don’t know what it looks like to go into a black community that has more black businesses than it does other kind of businesses where the dollars turn over in that community more than they do lead that community. And, again, why is that important? It’s not important because we say black businesses are better or less than white businesses or Korean businesses. It’s about where does that money ultimately go at the end of the day? And at the end of the day if the businesses are controlled by people who don’t live in that community then that means those dollars leave that community and so many of our communities are in need of economic development that will be able to take place if we actually, economically invested in the community with people that could create viable and responsible businesses that reinvest in that community instead of send it to another community. That is one piece. The second piece is how do we begin to turn the tide or at least combat the breakdown in families? Because now I question if many of us even live in communities anymore. I don’t know who lives next door to me. I don’t know who lives across the street from me. I don’t know who lives two doors down. And how do you create community in a place where I don’t know anybody that lives around me? Because if I don’t know you I don’t trust you. And if I don’t trust you that is not community. That is just a place where all of us live. How can we begin to engender and encourage real community where I walk across the street to introduce myself to you when you move into the neighborhood, where I am not automatically skeptical of you because I Have never seen you before because you look differently than me. Where I feel like I have a responsibility to you because you live where I live. And hopefully you will be the kind of person that looks out for me when I am not there. How do we begin to have responsibility for the schools that are there in our community even if we don’t have young people that are ours in them? Where I understand that if a school is in my community I am ultimately responsible for all the young people that are there? And so I am not fighting raising taxes because I don’t have a kid in the school, when I understand that the better that school is the more it helps the property value of where I live. The more those kids are supported the better it is for the broader neighborhood. So now I am not getting stingy with my taxes because I don’t have kids there. I recognize the more that school is empowered, the better it ultimately is for the community. There is some institutions that have to be in place that encourage this kind of process. There is some education that has to take place to educate people eon why having a renaissance in a sense is necessary. There are leaders that have to be able to lead these individual movements because it’s a chess game, it’s not checkers. And hopefully, five to ten years from now we begin to see us turning the tide because we are not going to turn the tide in a year on things that have taken decades for us to get this bad.
Brown: Absolutely. Well, I understand that you have an organization called Truth is Power. Tell us about that and how you think that might help in all that you have just discussed.
Johnson: Truth is Power is a company. And I have so many people say, well, what is your organization? This is a for-profit company. I’m very serious. I have non-profit organizations that I work with and I support. But what I began to see as an activist is this model that people that were concerned with activism dedicated themselves to a vow of poverty and I am not willing to make that vow. I have family to take care of and I think that ultimately we have to be concerned about how do we build economic infrastructure to be able to fund for ourselves the things that we believe in? And you don’t do that when you are only existing within a non-profits paradigm. And so this for-profit company is divided into two divisions. We have a strategy group that does governmental relations work and so we focus primarily on economic development so how do we work with companies that are interested in urban development, going in and buying houses but making sure that the people that live in those communities have access to low interest loans so that they can stay in that community even as it’s redeveloped. Kind of reverse gentrification, if you will. And that is the niche that we are focusing on from a governmental relations side. On the other side we have a leadership group that focuses on leadership development and training for everything from corporations to non-profit organizations to churches and does curriculum development for those organizations that are interested in doing leadership development.
Brown: Well, it definitely is apparent to me that whatever you do, Jeff Johnson, we are going to be hearing from you in the future, now and later. Thank you so much for being here today. I would like to of course, thank Jeff Johnson for joining us and if you would like to learn more about Black Issue Forum or obtain a transcript of today’s edition or if you want to learn more about our guest, please visit us online at unctv.org/bif. When you visit be sure to give us your comments and program suggestions and you can also call us on the BIFline at 919-549-7167. For Black Issues Forum, I am Natalie Bullock-Brown reminding you to be encouraged no matter what. Have a good one.
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