welcome to a very very very special segment of truth today i'm gloria your host and i'm really excited i have three people on the set who are very very very dear to me and they're very special because they're all social workers like me but they the title of the show is today tomorrow and always because they all represent a very special time in life for me with their friendships and their contributions to my life and we're going to have a beautiful discussion so i want you guys to all welcome to my show first dr robert walker who you've seen many times and that when he travels through the bay area one day he'll move back hint hint he stops by to do the show my next guest is tracy jones who this is her first time on the show but i've been trying to get her here for five years and she finally made it today and then my next guest is so dr walker welcome to the south you very much it's a pleasure to be here and it's always a pleasure to be back in california and america from florida well i think i was talking to hold the show when i was here before i talked about ebony zhang's and i did i define dev you become what the label says you are and that explains a lot of dysfunctional behavior but i've gone beyond that now they haven't even now i'm using the term creo creole ism creole centric i'm trying to speak to the future not the past and the max we've been trying to develop black pride in going back to africa and all that stuff but we've been here five hundred years in a western hemisphere and i'm pretty sure in another five hundred years we will have mixed and blended to the point where the idea of blackness in a literal sense will not be relevant to culture will probably still be connected to africa in some ways i was telling dean here earlier that the music probably will always define us but in terms of who we are you mayfield and the impressions of the people get ready we need to get ready for that and stop being hung up on the past and i want to end that little discourse by saying about twenty years ago maybe thirty years ago i wrote an article for the black social workers and i pointed out that this relationship between creole and black americans had a low boiling point and fact that it was simmering but it had a lot to do with conflict in the neighborhood and i want out and did a lot of seminars and workshops and i was bringing people into the discussion and i was surprised at how many people will punish not because they were black but because they were like and when you start talking about this it's not real or reasonable when we first started talking about there's always the real dark skinned people with nappy hair broad nose that lips just suffered mightily but over the years i've discovered we all suffered mightily and as like the tutsis in the hutus in wanda they live side by side for a long time and then they fought like hell so we need to start to start reading out who we are who are becoming and we need to stop some of this conflict that's around she thinks she's cute because she has a you know was that the conversation is so rich it's so rich because i will say that the piece of the past that i'm most concerned with is the fact that the language doesn't we don't use words like human beings that left africa went through that enslavement process because i think to just refer to the experience as slavery just to extend refer to the human beings slaves is the kind of label e that that's where the damage originally starts well maybe mine i start there but that's where the biggest her is in this nation with regard to that so i i would not correct you because you're my professor but i let you know that i always suggest to people that they refrain that and that they actually say human beings who either experienced this process suffered and slave and process survived the insulating a process because to separate the human being from the process is one thing one one place we need to be and then to honor the process for what it was and not damage the people further because they experienced the process so i would say the path that bears like bring in today and that bears working through while we're on this road but but i i i that's what i feel like maybe that's why i talk so much well i would i will i would accept your correction about the terminology you know the whole word slave comes from the slavic people who are also in slavery but it really not represent who we were in fact harriet tubman said when she was running on the well road she could have freed more heavily on and on they were slayers exact what i'm saying is they didn't think of you'll know that's my bringing like a teacher is always going to be a teacher no matter what that's a but i think having you as a teacher and other people who profit me to think past what where they knew i had been trained to think to go past and to open my brain up to see what would come out is where how where i how i got there and why i stay perpetual just keep or even until we could get here so  international level they're starting to people are starting to say that beauty is best defined through this biracial sort of look i can't remember what research i see and if you look at a lot of t v commercials now it seems to seems to be they're trying to market i think it's all about money and it's all about well you know this is less this this might not a fan this group that you know who do this is to see that energy and i think you know bob when the d decide like for me they couldn't tell who i was you know i just kind of maybe they could tell a lot of i carry myself and thought i think yeah i think we're kind of within a certain direction like that but part of the question for me is have can you move forward when you don't really have it together from your consciousness that you're trying to develop from the type who saw i think i feel like we might move in that direction so fast that  connection with africa and everything that has been so so i look upon it as something less than one and i get afraid that we we don't value mirror up your numbers ill part in africa i think i felt when we were up and by you know that even though there's a great deal of mixing in brazil and so forth but there was a lot of african nitty and the culture in other words when i went to a condom blaise celebration a big when i divided by color that was a lot of white people are now doing this african dance so that the culture of africa and appreciation of africa still exist even among the creole people that's what i meant by they they change physically and culturally they licks but the african component when you're in cuba and resilin even at a small dose and but in ecuador the african cultural part stays with the people and that's helpful to me because you know because even in america we say and so entrenched in american culture and not this in american culture in many different places and even for a variety of reasons like you know i had a conversation with someone we were talking about and some parts of china and vietnam know all over africa there are some sections of africa i've never been there but i've studied africa death some parts where they were very dark but they're not all very dark and i'm talking about indigenous african people so i think the geneticists say necessarily destroy your romantic image of times but i don't i think that's part of the process as it is when we learn about england and we learn about all the great people ben franklin and thomas jefferson you learn about all these people  halves of the us and i think that mind frame of limiting them even only a few people only see people in that way and people are way more than that your way more than your color and i think when you've got other countries like brazil where see the blending and i make sure it makes you wonder but i mean they they i think they have their own class issues that are very different from what we as black americans experience in the united states  that i don't think they've had that experience with the like say the civil rights movement per se of those things have on a level that they've had here in the united states i don't that's not there i think and brazil where everything is very class of we're here we're very integrated i would say not in quotes by you know black americans going to school where and college we have careers where embers a little it's hard for black brazil's brazilians to be and higher education you know not there's many of us and higher education now but we have we've afforded that ability to be there came from california and while your grandparents came from texas ok i'm mixed i'm mexican i'm black and ok so did you find in your own like say being born here  and so as the bulk of your family in california as well ok so did you find that a lot of that color division in even then because you're younger than us in your family say in the people in your age group like we had it really bad back you know fifty sixty even it was really really bad if you look like me or if you look like bob  you've got hail from both sides all the time no matter what my daddy was the mailman or the milkman or net you know her if economists saying all right i'm just curious at it for you b and younger was the hybrid to penetrate africa so let's be clear now that was a time in our history where clearly there were three groups europeans africans and a mixed in between and the makes people in between both in africa here brazil  wales were given and in between status so that they did better than the africans over time this was a pattern that continued but that is changed point now is that does it doesn't work that way anymore so i just want to be clear that th is a history of light skinned mixed looking people having slight privilege when it comes to being acceptable to white people but that was quite a while ago now to his we're still living with the residuals of that but it's very subtle th research that actually shows that not only do think people black people think light skinned people are more attractive but attractive people are thought to be more intelligent and more competent and the fact is the data supports that it's not just perception that there's a look at oprah later show on something about black women a black man of light skin color came on that show and said his father who was also african american would not have dark skinned person and i'm from position because they steal the son grew up and took his father's place and said he was going to prove his father on and he hired some dark people to put up front and sure enough they did still say this proves my point when you don't find many people looking like him because that's our history having said that we are finished with our history and moving forward and we have to accept the fact that probably the last black people among us now than before probably the majority  light skinned probably the majority of us don't have a real kinky hair anymore and if we do we can do something about it so we're moving in that direction and we need to start talking about who we are like real people yeah yeah i agree with just living in the bay area being born a racist san francisco and spent i spent my summers growing back and forth between texas and louisiana summers and texas here all year round every neighborhood that i lived in growing up in san francisco and in texas when i spent my summers there the neighborhoods are either no longer black and san francisco in particular is no longer a black neighborhood black people are scattered everywhere and in beaumont texas where the neighborhood itself is still primarily black however the people who are buying the houses in there today are the enemy they're not black people selling black people houses to black people they're black people that sell houses to be enemies because they're pulling their moneys and they're fine him and then like the black people who moved all over in beaumont their movie to those other what we call more fluid neighborhoods the ones who can't and the ones who don't are staying there but those houses are just big old the the older people die off leave the house nobody goes back and they just goes to the city so the something in the way that we're operating that's probably promoting all of this change and shift that we're doing that's bigger than the first because we are unconscious to who we are our history and our present secondly more we're doing to eliminate those kinds of strongholds or stability that we've had because we're so unconscious of who we are and what we are what we is not a good thing whatever but on so that comes to mind but that the other piece it comes to my mind is that we do talk about this issue alive and i do a group with parents who have children who are depressed so the kids the kids who are depressed me and i think every now and then the parents meet with me but you know for for some of the african american girls you know they do some of the darkness going worlds are coming you know it's not that uncommon where i get parents who report that you know a part of my child's depression is about her skin color and i worry about this popular culture you know bt hip hop in turn on the videos and they're not even some of them that were like here i run merchants i do this i do that but but you aren't you aren't you are not it people want money they want to fast they want that life and this life isn't this is a hard sell i mean we need to be more conscious of this and make sure we include diverse callers not just our girls because when i worked in santa clara county the only people i saw in psychiatric consultation were light skin because they were having tremendous problems both like you said catching it from all sides  thank you everybody for tuning it and i will see you next time