Host: Jon Goode
Jon: [00:00:01] Welcome to All Together Now Fridays with The Moth. I'm your host for this week, Jon Goode. You may have seen me hosting the Atlanta Moth StorySLAMs or hosting a Mainstage around the country somewhere or exchanging coins for cash at the Kroger Coin Star. However, you know me, or if we are meeting for the first time, it's wonderful to be sharing this time and space with you.
Today, our story is from screenwriter, director and hip-hop lyricist extraordinaire, the one and only, Boots Riley. I actually ran into Boots during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park, which we were calling Troy Davis Park at the time. I was a huge fan and hesitant to introduce myself, because nothing is worse than finding out people you are a fan of suck.
To my great delight, Boots did not suck. He was a joy to share a conversation with, and I'm so glad that you too will now be in some way in conversation with him also via his story. Boots told this story at a Mainstage in San Francisco where the theme of the night was Going for Broke.
Just a quick note before we hear Boots’ story. For those of you who might be sensitive, this story does include discussions of gun ownership and some mentions of violence. Here’s Boots Riley, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Boots: [00:01:37] So, I have a band called The Coup. [audience holler and applause] We've been around for 20-something years through a lot of technology and gentrification type changes. The technology change is one that has really changed our music a lot. These days, you can have a studio on your laptop and just be recording anywhere in your car, in the alley, wherever. But back in, when we started out in the early 1990s, you had to actually go to a studio and do it analog. These studios cost a lot of money. So, we didn't have a lot of money. We always did the midnight-to-eight shift, because nobody wanted that time and that was the cheapest time.
We liked it. I liked it, because we'd come out, it'd be morning time, everybody just be waking up and we'd have a new song. Our studio was actually right in this neighborhood in the Tenderloin, and we lived in Oakland. And so, every morning we'd drive across the bridge back home.
One morning, we're driving back across the bridge. Pam the Funkstress, The Coup’s DJ, was driving, and I was sitting in the back with some other folks that had been in the studio and we realized we left our keyboard player at the studio. [audience laughter] And so, we needed to turn around. The only place to turn around on the Bay Bridge was Treasure Island. At this time, Treasure Island wasn’t full of condos like it is right now, it was a naval base.
So, we got off on Treasure Island, made that turn and started heading back up the hill towards the bridge, when all of a sudden, we hear woo-woo. It was the military police stopping us. The cops stopped us and asked us all for our IDs. There were a bunch of us in the car, and we all gave them our IDs. They asked Pam for the registration. I say from the back, "Registration’s in the glove compartment." So, somebody opens the glove compartment, and a waterfall of bullets comes down. Let me explain how those bullets got there. [audience laughter]
So, this was Oakland in the early 1990s, the Bay Area in the early 1990s. Although Oakland was and is kind of known for this media-created image of mass Black-on-Black violence, what we know from CDC statistics, is that actually there was less Black-on-Black murder in the early 1990s than there was in the 1950s and 1960s. And so, although many people, when they thought of Oakland, were scared of Black people, basically. That wasn’t what I was afraid of. What I was afraid of were white supremacists.
Let me explain further this situation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, white supremacist organizations made outward claims that they were going to take back the Bay Area. There was a lynching in the late 1980s at the Lafayette BART station. There was an Aryan Woodstock in the early 1990s in Napa. There were neo-Nazi rallies in Union Square. This was a time when people like Tom Metzger were in national news, and David Duke could get elected to office. And places like Ocean Beach were not safe for people of color, because you’d get stabbed by racist skinheads.
So, when the white supremacist organizations like Aryan Nation started putting out lists of rappers they thought should be killed, that they weren’t going to kill but thought should end up dead. First, when they started putting up these lists, there were rappers like Ice Cube and Chuck D, people known for their social justice lyrics. And The Coup, you could say we were about social justice. We were a radical communist group, who we still are. We were a radical communist band with album titles like Kill My Landlord and Genocide & Juice. [audience laughter]
White supremacists didn’t like us. We ended up on one of those lists. It’s not a good feeling to know that there are crazy people looking at a list of people that should be killed, and you are one of them. So, we bought guns. We also didn’t want to get messed with by the police, so we did it all the way legal. We registered them, we went to the shooting range to make sure we knew what we were doing with them and we transported them legally when we needed to transport them. With that meant, carrying it in a lockbox, while it was unloaded, in the trunk of your car.
What I didn’t realize this morning before I told somebody to open the glove compartment, was that we had recently been to the shooting range, and there was a box of bullets that were open and they came running down like a waterfall. They seemed to be going in slow motion. The cop pulls out his gun, and has it two inches from Pam’s head and says, "Put your hands up! Everybody puts your hands up,” which we do. And with the gun two inches from her head, Pam is crying. The cop radios in for backup. And in what seems like seconds, four or five jeeps full of MPs come and they jump out of the cars saying, "Hut! Hut! Hut! Hut!" forming a semicircle, holding big machine guns.
So, we’re sitting there with our hands up. These MPs become the chorus, the answer to the cop’s call. So, whatever he says, they repeat once or twice. So, when he says, "Who has the gun?" They say, "Who has the gun? Who has the gun?" [audience chuckle] And I realize that my next words could decide whether we live or die, but I know I have to answer something. So, I think very carefully about the words I will use and which order I will say them in, as I say, "In the trunk, in a locked box, unloaded, there exists a gun. [audience laughter] It is registered to my name." And so, they say, "Get out of the car! Keep your hands up!" It’s hard to get out of a car with your [audience laughter] hands up. But believe me, since I know the stakes, my hands stay up and I figure out how to get out of the car.
I’m standing outside of the car, shaking, with what seems like dozens of machine guns pointed at me and dozens of MPs looking for whatever action they are going to see today. The initial cop opens up the trunk. He sees the lockbox. He says, "Where’s the key?"
I show him the other key. He opens up the lockbox. I still got my hands up. He sees there a gun and a clip, which the clip is with the bullets I kept in. And I say, with my voice shaking but just trying to get the words out, "You see, it’s unloaded. It’s totally legal."
And he says, "How do I know that this gun is unloaded?" And I say, "Well, you see the clip right there, you see it’s unloaded." He says, "How do I know there’s not one in the chamber?" And I say, "Well, you could pick it up, and open it and look in the chamber." He says, "I’m not touching your weapon.” I don’t know where he’s going with this. [audience chuckle] He says, “Pick up the gun and show me." I stand there. And he says, "Pick up the gun." And then, his chorus of MPs say, "Pick up the gun. Pick up the gun." He says again, "Pick up the gun." And they say, "Pick up the gun. Pick up the gun." Pam yells, "Don’t pick up the gun!" [audience laughter]
I say, "I’m not picking up the gun." And then, he says again, "Pick up the gun. Pick up the gun." I notice that one of the MPs has tears coming out of his eyes while he’s yelling for me to pick up the gun. And then, that makes tears come out of my eyes, because this is it. After a couple more times of him saying, "Pick up the gun," I say, "Just take me to jail. Just take me to jail. I’m not touching the gun. I’m not touching the gun. Take me to jail." I see a look. Maybe it’s defeat or something, maybe it’s just contempt in his eyes as he says, "Get in the car."
So, I get back in the car. He goes over and conferences with the other MPs. He comes back, hands us our licenses and says, "Look, you all have traffic warrants, so we could be taking you to jail. But as a courtesy, we’re going to let you go, because this has just been a misunderstanding, a bad situation here." So, I don’t really want to argue, because I just want to get out of there. But after the guns are not pointed at us anymore and we’re about to take off, I ask him, "Why did you stop us?"
And he says something about, "Well, we don’t know if you’re terrorists. You could be terrorists. We don’t know what’s going on, so we have to stop and check." And I said, "Well, if we were some good old boys in a 4x4 pickup truck with a gun mounted on the back of our windshield, I don’t think you would have stopped us." He’s like, "Well, I don’t know about that." We take off, pull up towards the hill and leave there with our lives. And every day or so I have to cross that bridge, and I see the sign that says Treasure Island Exit. And it reminds me of the time that me doing everything I was supposed to could have got me killed. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Jon: [00:14:54] That was Boots Riley. Boots Riley is an activist and the co-founder of the critically acclaimed and overtly political hip-hop group from his story, The Coup. Boots is also the writer and director of the award-winning movie, Sorry to Bother You.
When I heard Boots’ story, I was reminded of an experience I once had in college. I found myself a 19-year-old African-American man with a 19-year-old white roommate at a 90-year-old predominantly white college. Compared to the Wakanda my life had been up to that moment, it was certainly different, certainly different. My roommate Shane and I, we got along very, very well, however. And one weekend, I asked if he’d like to come to a party with me. It would be what was known at the school as a Black party, because Black people would be partying. And without hesitation, he said yes.
So, we went to the party. I introduced him to people. It was a warm environment. I mean that literally, it was hot in there, the walls were sweating and we both, we had a ball, man. We danced the night away. We left exhausted and began walking back to our dorm room. Shane was about 15 yards ahead of me. I was walking slowly with my head down. My feet hurt. I mean, house music will do that to you. Then I heard a voice say, "Hey, I need to see your ID." It was a campus security guard. It was not uncommon as an African-American student to be stopped at all types of hours and asked to produce your papers. It was so common I thought nothing of it.
I reached to retrieve my ID. And just then, Shane came walking back with his ID in his hand and he said, "Here’s my ID." And the security guard said, "I don’t need to see your ID." And Shane replied, "We’re both walking down this sidewalk. So, either you need to see both of our IDs or you don’t need to see anyone’s ID." I eased my ID back into my pocket. The security guard looked at us both and simply walked away. In these turbulent times, people wonder what allyship looks like. I tell them, you’ll know it when you feel it, when you hear it and when you see it. For me that night, it looked like Shane.
To make big changes in our society or governments, we have to start by changing individuals. It’s important to practice stepping outside of ourselves and seeing the world from someone else’s point of view. In some cases, you’ll never be able to understand the way someone else walks through the world, but it is important to try.
Here are some prompts to get you started. Can you think of a time when authorities failed you? Maybe it was a teacher, a doctor or a boss who didn’t listen. How did it feel when someone who was meant to help you, didn’t? As you heard in Boots’ story, the assumptions we make about others can have truly dangerous consequences. What assumptions have you made about others that were proven false? What were the consequences? What false assumptions have been made about you? How did it make you feel?
That’s it for this week. Hope you’re staying safe inside and healthy. Now that you have watched all of Netflix and listened to all of Spotify, why not share a story from your life with friends? Stories are what turn friends into family. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
Julia: [00:18:48] Jon Goode is an Emmy-nominated writer, raised in Richmond, Virginia, and currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. Jon is the regular host of The Moth’s Atlanta StorySLAM, and has a number one best-selling collection of poems and short stories entitled Conduit that you can find on amazon.com.
Jon: [00:19:07] Podcast production by Julia Purcell, with help from my sister, Tiffany Goode. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.