In Black America; In The Spirit with Susan L. Taylor

Thank You All. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. Wherever I go in America, and I travel a lot, wherever I go, in any urban areas that happen just today across the street, there are our brothers, black men sitting,

holding court. Not because black men are lazy, not because they are as media would portray them, but because in the nation that brothers, black men and black women helped to build, brothers can't find work. They've never been able to find enough work that would pay them a fair family wage so that they could take proper care of their families, which is why black women have the longest history of work of any women in America other than Native American women. At the turn of the century, a full 90% of black children were born into two-parent households. In 1970, 75% of black children were born into two-parent households. There's a wall on black America, and the cannons are pointed at our children and at our men. So we have to get smart. You see, coming together as black men and women, it's one of the most politically important things that we must do.

We have to build strong black families. We have to make commitments to each other. We have to find our divine right-mates, and we have a long history of loving and supporting each other. If you know your history, you know that. And what we need to do is stop pointing the finger at each other, black men and black women. And we're going to do anything like link fingers and point them at the system that is determined that we need to thrive or exist. Susan L. Taylor, Editor-in-Chief of Essence Magazine and Vice President of Essence Communications Incorporated, has been called the single most powerful black woman in journalism today. Her monthly editorial column in The Spirit has become a powerful inspiration to millions of black men and women, encouraging them to do more and be more for the empowerment of black people worldwide. Much of Ms. Taylor's life exemplifies the kinds of triumph and struggles Essence readers know intimately. In much demand as a speaker, Susan Taylor recently traveled to Houston, Texas just four days before her wedding to speak at a black women's conference at the Shrine of the Black Madonna. I'm Karen Monsho.

Welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, Essence Editor-in-Chief, Susan L. Taylor in Black America. So the continuing pain in black America is really dependent on our inertia. The continuing pain in black America is dependent on our standing still. It's dependent on our not being disciplined and not being organized. It's dependent on our not being serious about our lives. I think at every turn, we have to ask ourselves, who am I, and what is the challenge at hand? What's the mission?

I'm always reminded of what W.E.B. Du Bois hoped for us, that group who he called the talented 10th. And a lot of people thought that that was the elitist kind of notion that he had that there would be this small group, this 10% of black America who would be educated, who would be committed, who would work entirely to put the underpinning of love and security beneath the rest. And so often, people get frustrated and say, man, the work is awesome. It's too hard. We can't do it. You see, if you don't know your history, then you think that the hardest work is still in front of us. If you know your history, you know that we have overcome greater obstacles than any crack, than any heroin, than marijuana, than unemployment, than all the ills that are really eroding the system. We have overcome something even greater than that we have. That's our rich and glorious history, and that's what we have to remind ourselves of every single day.

If we're talking about an agenda for black women and men for the new age, I'll tell you what I'm telling myself, and that is to take my own good advice. That good advice reaches an estimated four million men and women who are faithful readers of Essence magazine. Before the first issue of Essence hit the stands in May 1970, Susan Taylor had been hard at work, perfecting her craft as an actress with the renowned Negro Ensemble company. In 1969, the birth of her daughter, Shana, and the breakup of her marriage prompted her to reassess her options and channel her energies into a field that would allow her to spend more time at home. She created her own company, Nikwai Cosmetics, walked into the offices of the Infant Essence magazine and convinced the editors to give her a job. Her self-confidence paid off, and she started writing freelance articles. One year later, she was named the magazine's Beauty Editor, and a year after that, her position was expanded to include both fashion and beauty. Since becoming editor-in-chief in 1981, Susan Taylor has been responsible for guiding the magazine through a period of phenomenal growth.

She was also host and executive producer of Essence the TV Show, the country's first nationally syndicated black-oriented magazine show. The TV show ran for four seasons and over 60 markets around the world. Susan Taylor is of the firm belief that the time for black folks to rise is now. She says the time for black people to get serious is here, moving forward into the new age, Essence editor-in-chief, Susan L. Taylor. Education, information, we hear it all the time, it's what we say to our children, stay in school, study hard, become an independent, self-determining person. Do we have everything we need to be independent and self-determining? I'll tell you what I appreciate about this life is that it's never too late. No matter how old you are, it is never too late. Why are we here? We're here to self-actualize. Each of us is really a divine original. We're here to do something so unique and so special. And our challenge is to find out what that is. Not to compare ourselves with each other.

Not to see ourselves as better than or less than anybody else, and we do that also often. You know what we do, we see somebody in a magazine or on television, and we think we want to be that person. In fact, one of our greatest thinkers, Dr. Francis Wellesing. I don't know if you're familiar with her work, Dr. Francis Wellesing, who was just too forward for Howard University, they had to get rid of Francis Wellesing. My sister speaks truth. She said that black folks, we take our models for being from television. And we compare ourselves to the people on Dynasty and all those fancy programs. And when we don't see ourselves measuring up, our lifestyle seems so very different from there as we think something is wrong with us. You know, black folks watch what, 30% more television than anybody else in America. Don't even own 0.02% of the stations. Don't even control that much of the programming. But we watch 30% more of television than any other group. That was a joy. You know, for me, Bishop O'Moo coming here today and seeing our young children outside,

playing and doing constructive things and hearing in the church, putting together the programs for this evening. They weren't home in front of the television set, being programmed to hate themselves. To disrespect themselves, to not know their own beauty and their own power. What do you need to be a self-empowered person? What do you need to do to be the best person you can be? What is your mission? You know, I think the most important time that each of us must take is what I call quiet time. That quiet time. That time that we just press away from the world, the time when we turn off the television, turn off the radio, unplug the telephone, get still, and when you have small children it's hard. You know, mine is 19 now. But I know when my pumpkin was little, I used to have to lock myself in the bathroom for five minutes just to come back to being human.

What we do is we bring the office home. You know, we bring the problem home and we put them on our children in a way that really kind of, I think, wounds their spirit. Quiet time is the most important time that each of us must take. We must carve out that 45 minutes, half an hour, 15 if you can't manage anything greater. Now I should know that by now. I've been writing about it for almost 19 years, even when I was the beauty editor in 1970, before I became the fashion and beauty editor, before I became the editor in chief, I still used to try to write these little spiritual messages. And I have to do that for 19 years, I'm still not taking my quiet time every single day. Like I know I need to, you know, quiet time. It's the time when you ask yourselves those critical questions. Do I like my life? We're not here just to suffer. We're going to suffer. That's part of the human experience is how we grow. In fact, if not for my pain, I should have been where I'd be, you know, where I grew up in Harlem on a hundred and sixteen street in Park Avenue.

It's not for my pain, it's not for my fingers to smoking robbers and miracles, you know. Just thinking that everything was all right. But it was waking up with a six week old daughter, a marriage that had fallen apart, not knowing how I was going to make it through the night. You know, I remember getting up day after day, looking over, I lived on the 20th floor there, then looking over, wondering if I should jump off the terrace. That's how depressed I was. That's how depressed I was, you know. But every time I thought about doing something radical, every time I wanted to take those covers and pull them all over my head and say, I just can't do it. I can't make it. That baby, that genre would cry. Ah, milk. You know, and I had to get up, had to put one foot in front of the other, had to keep on going. So it's those challenges that help you to build muscle. Do you know who you'd be without your challenges? You'd be weak. If black folks are strong, we're strong because of struggle. It's struggle makes you strong.

And life, we're going to know pain and joy, we're going to know laughter and tears, we're going to know all the good things that life has to offer and we're going to suffer too. Our challenges to take quiet times so that we can listen to that still, small voice that's within, that's always whispering the truth because you see, we're more than what meets the eye. We're human and divine. We are human and divine. We're in order to give birth, in order to give voice, in order to give life and light to that divinity. We have to close out the cacophony of the world. We have to retreat. We have to go within. You can't hear it when you're running your mouth. You can't hear the still voice within. You can't hear your divinity. You're not in touch with it when the telephone, you know, when you're on the phone or when the television is blasting. You know, we come home from work, not even business with the television, but we turned it on anyway. Can't deal with like being in this house in silence, that's scary. Take that time to go within.

That's where you ask yourself, do I like my relationship? Am I in a relationship that is pulling me down rather than uplifting me? Am I in a marriage that needs either to end or to be renewed, you know? Do I have friends? Do I have people in my life who are negative? Who are pulling me down who are pointing out all the things that I can't do? Who are pointing out all my flaws? Do I have people who are encouraging me and coaxing me to reach for deeper levels of myself? And am I eating to live rather than to just, you know, stuff my face or put it in my mouth because it tastes good because I saw it on television or because somebody put it before me for it. Food will poison you. One of the problems we have as a people is that we eat the wrong food and we're the first generation of African-American people who are able to choose our great-grandmother's couldn't choose our great-great-grandfather's couldn't choose we can choose we can choose to go to school we can choose to be disciplined we can choose to eat healthily quiet time

taking that quiet time and getting in tune with you and your divinity and what you need to be doing for you so that you can really be strong for your people. The best thing that we can do for African-American people is to take care of ourselves because you see when you're taking care of yourself, when you're filling your own cup, then you're prepared to give. If you have a half empty cup, you know, you always hear people say black women are evil don't you have that all the time? You black women are so evil, we're not evil, we're tired, you see? Women are tired, black women have a history of tired in our bones, we're not just tired from our tired, we're tired from our mother's tired, tired from our grandmother's tired and our great-grandmother's tired from Sejona truth's tired, you know, think about the historical black woman and the kind of work that they did, you know, our sisters men they washed, cooked, cleaned, and ironed for their families, took care of their children,

their husbands, their parents, their husbands' parents, they went across town, washed, cooked, cleaned, and ironed for white America, took care of the children, the parents, and the parents' parents, and then came back to the black community and baked up the sweet potato pies to uplift the church to build black institutions, colleges and whatnot. This is all in the same day, you know? Black women deserve a rest and a celebration, it's all right to say I cannot help you with that project, I cannot do another thing, you have to know your capacity for giving, you have to make sure that you take care of yourself, that you make you your number one priority, your health, your mental, your physical and your spiritual well-being must be your number one priority or you're not going to be of service to anyone else, you know, it's going to take some time for us to really get used to that. And black women, especially aren't raised to take care of self, we're raised to take

care of everybody else, you know, I listen when older black women talk to me, I love to just suck in and you know, drink up their wisdom, and I'll tell you something that so many elderly black women have said to me, they said, girl, we're so proud of you young women, you know, run a magazine and ministering as you're doing and running choirs and doing all those wonderful things, you know, I never, I had ideas, had me an idea for a little newspaper, thought I was going to start a little grocery store, thought I was going to start my own little business over here, over there, go to school, but you know, I never got around to do it, because I just was so busy taking care of everybody else. And these women invariably say to me, even though they were glad that they did their giving, they didn't know when they had given beyond that capacity for giving, they didn't know when it was time to stop giving to other people and give to self, or give to self first, get full, and then nobody will call us evil, because you see, when you're giving, you don't have it within you to give, then you have tight jaw as giving, that's why people

call black women evil, you know, because we're doing it, don't want to do it tired, you know, but we're going to do it anyway, because we don't know how to say no. Here's what I've begun to do, tell you what, I'll call you tomorrow, or the day after and let you know whether I can do it, take it home and think about it, rather than just bury my meal, do it, fine, I'll do it, then you feel bad if you go back on your word and you torture it inside, you know, just get in the habit of not responding immediately. Let me see if I can work that out, and I'll get back to you tomorrow, or next week take the time that you need, quiet time will teach you that, teach you all that, give you the strength that you need to learn how to say no sometimes, quiet time. I just came back from Zimbabwe, my second trip to the motherland, and every time I go to the motherland, I come back infused with our power and our beauty. When I was in Senegal, some 10 or 11 years ago, I'll never forget what a teacher at the island, an island that's called Gorey, or off the coast of Senegal, where they had the

slave castles, where our ancestors were kept in chains, waiting for those slave ships to come back from the Americas. I'll never forget what he said, you know, at that point I hadn't really read that much about slavery, didn't really make that connection that those were really my great, great, great, great grandparents, you know. He said, oh, black American, you don't know who you are, you don't know who you are in his, you know, French accent, he said, when Africa was being raped, they didn't just take anybody, they took the strongest of the strong, they took the mightiest of the mighty, so they took strong, young men and young women who could bear babies, he said, this was business, he said, I want you to hold these shackles in your hands that held your ancestors, he said, I want to show you a trunk, a trunk that was probably maybe a little larger than this podium, he said, you know, what they did to your people who tried to escape, he said, they would stuff five and six of you in a trunk without food, without

water in your own waste for a week, he said, they would position that trunk so that the other slaves could hear the moans and the groans, and the message to them was don't try escaping, he said, and if your people survive that, they never tried it again or they died, you know, he said, it wounded the spirit to be just enclosed for that kind of time if those people let me survive, and he said, I want you to look out to that door that the African school, the door of no return, I'll never forget that moment, and I looked at that cold, dark Atlantic Ocean, and I remembered what Amiri Baraka said, Amiri Baraka says that at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, there's a railroad track of bones, of bones that leave from the West African coast through the Caribbean, South America, the Caribbean and the Americas, he said that the sharks would just follow the slave ships because they

knew they would be fed, have you ever seen the diagram of the bottom of a slave ship? If you haven't, you must, you must, our ancestors didn't have any more rule than you have sitting in your chairs, and you know how long that middle passage that crossing took, it took three months, three months, we can't even be uncomfortable for three minutes, find it problematic to stay with that information that we need to study for three hours. You see, if you know your history, you know the hardest part has been done. Three months, W.E.B. DeBoys, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, documented that as many as 60 million black bodies are on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 60 million brothers and sisters who stopped their breath in their own chests because they rather died than being slaved, 60 million brothers and sisters who were thrown overboard because they might have been infected with the disease and the slavers didn't want

to infect the human cargo, and we know how many brothers and sisters have died early deaths in this America, they're dying as we speak. The sisters and brothers who've been lynched, who've been shot up and hoes down and bitten up by dogs burned out of their houses, shot their own selves up with drugs, so who are we? We're the black survivors, we are the strongest of the strong, we are the mightiest of the mighty. That's the power that you have to wake up with every single day before you lift your head from your pillow, you have to affirm who you are, you have to know who you are. There's nothing out here that's greater than what you have inside. Our story of survival is the greatest story of the triumph of the spirit in the history of the world. It is. It's your story. You have to celebrate it and hold on to it every single day. There is no challenge that's greater than you. There is no problem that you will ever have that's greater than you.

There is nothing outside of you that's greater than you. The answer is to everything you can ever confront in your entire life, lie within, within the spirit, within the spirit. The only time spirit fails us is when we fail to tap into it. I said, I write about it, talk about it, and I forget, confound it going around in circles, biting my nails to the quick over some problem. All right. We'll back and read my own editorial. Didn't I say, yes, that's what I should do, okay? Invariably, spirit gives you the answer. Spirit will always be there for you if you don't forget to tap into it. We have to remember who we are. As you brush your teeth, you say, I love you. Love you. You're going to make today a wonderful day. Not going to let anybody or anything take me off course. If you live your house with that kind of mindset that somebody can cut you off in the car, you know, a bus can come and splatter your clothes. Which mud? It's not going to matter because that's not important. That's not important. We have to get our priorities right.

And the truth is people bring their problems to relationships and to work. So if there's somebody in your office or wherever you work, it's acting crazy, let them be crazy. Just get out of the way. And don't take it personally because we're all working on our own statue. You know, we're all working on getting ourselves whole. And some people are really far away from that further away than others. I think the most profound thing I know is that each of us can only interact at our level of development and understanding. And for you to want me to be who you want me to be is a kid taking your head and knocking it against that post, it won't happen. I can only be who I am, either accept me or leave me alone, one or the other. And you know what's true? The very things that I've usually pointed out as flaws in other people are the things that need fixing in me. The very things I especially criticize my daughter for, yeah, that's what I wish I would do better. That's what I wish I would be about. Take a look at ourselves, work on ourselves and leave other people alone, try to give

them support. In fact, if there's something that you can share with somebody that's going to help them to be a better person, then tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, rather than talking about them behind their back, rather than you and I going into a corner tearing him or her down, why don't we talk to that person and say, hey, this is my observation, take him to leave it, I think it's so and so and so, and move on. The time to rise is now, this is our time, it is. And you see, black America, our sisters and brothers who were in pain, that group of black Americans who really are disenfranchised are counting on you and me, making the right moment to moment decisions. This is bigger than our individual lives. We're talking about the survival of a people here. Now we know that the greater the blessings we have, the greater the responsibility, and we are each other's keepers, we know that, our ancestors knew it. We have to have faith in ourselves and believe in ourselves, even when we can't see the light, just like our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers did. As Dr. King tried to tell us so often, you know, just so this is your America, you were

here even before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, you were here. Black folks were here, even before the Declaration of Independence was signed, we were here, working in America. We were here before Betsy Rousseau, the first flag. We were here. We were here before Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner. We were here in America, black men and black women working side by side. In fact, in the Caribbean, we made sugar queen and the South we made cotton cane. It's our efforts that created the wealth that is America. If you think about that stock market that crashed a couple of years ago in October on the 17th, how do you think the stock market was starting? Built on slavery, started in the early 1800s in England. Don't you know what you can create with an inexhaustible supply of free labor over hundreds of years? What can you create? America. That's what you can create. So America owns you.

Great debt. America owns you something so large and so powerful, but nobody's going to give it to you. Nobody's going to come and say here it is, here's what we owe you, nobody's making reparations. We are that talented, our challenge is to believe in ourselves and to every day reaffirm our power. To remember that God is not in the church or in crystals or crosses or artifacts. God is within us. We are God. We're human and divine. Our challenge is to lift as we climb and to never ever ever look down on another human being only when we're reaching down to pick them up. That's the only time we need to look down on anybody. I challenge you just as I challenge myself to take bold, purposeful steps, to think before you act, to remember that black America is counting on you, making the right moment to moment decisions.

I challenge you to challenge yourselves to dig your heels in deeper, to spread your wings to be patient and to carve out that time for quiet time and study every single day. We must do that. There's a war on our people and we're going to win the war. In order to win the war, we have to be warriens, we have to be strong, we have to be prepared for the fight. I want to leave you with the last stanza. We should say it together of the Black National Anthem. It's my mantra. Shadow beneath my hand. Can we say it together? May we forever stand true to our God, true to our native land. There's an ancient Egyptian formula that I love and use. It's abracadabra. You know what it means? It means hurl your thunderbolt, even until death. Abracadabra. Never give up. Never stop trying. Never stop believing. Never stop getting up. Never stop putting one foot in front of the other. Abracadabra. Keep on keeping on.

And as James Baldwin, our great writer and thinker and humanitarian and visionary for Black people whose prolific life is a real example, I think, a living example because his work is alive and it's right in the bookstore here. It was wonderful to see the whole series of James Baldwin's books. What he tried to say to us again and again is, Black folks, your crimes are already bought and paid for. All you have to do is wear them. All you have to do is wear them. I want to thank you, my brothers and sisters, for inviting me. In the spirit, essence editor-in-chief Susan L. Taylor, whose mission she says is to provide Black people with positive images to help them move forward. If you have a question or a comment, please write us. The views and comments expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until next time, for In Black America's technical producer Cliff Hargrove, I'm Karen Monsho.

Please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America cassettes. Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building V, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's In Black America cassettes. Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building V, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. This is Karen Monsho.

Join me this week on In Black America with my guest, Susan L. Taylor, editor-in-chief of Essence Magazine. There's a wall on Black America and the cannons are pointed at our children and at our man. So we have to get smart. Cassette's this week on In Black America.