What’s Up WID: The Intersections of Race, Disability and Policing Transcript

Ashley Inkumsah:
Hello everyone, and welcome or welcome back to What’s Up WID, the World Institute on Disability Podcast where we discuss what’s up and the global disability community. If you’re new here, I’m your host, Ashley Inkumsah. And today I’m so excited to be joined by Lorrell Kilpatrick, who serves on WID’s board of Directors and is an incredible disability justice activist whose work focuses on the intersections of race and disability and Black-disabled liberation. She’s currently the advocacy services coordinator at Everybody Counts, which is a center for independent living in Indiana. Lorrell, how are you doing today?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Oh, I am doing great. How are you? I’m so happy to be here.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I’m doing fabulous as well. We were talking offline about how much I’ve been so anticipating having you on the podcast. So I’m so excited for this conversation.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Oh, thank you. I appreciate the invite.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Could you tell us a little bit about your background and your activism work pertaining to the intersections of racism and ableism?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Oh, sure. Well, my gosh. I’m from northwest Indiana, which could mean anything. I originally am from a city called East Chicago, Indiana and that’s the name. We are directly east of the border of Indiana and Illinois that separates Chicago from the city that I live in. Like most neighborhoods in the Midwest, it’s a high steel and industrial production area, which means it’s a high pollution area, which means that in the area where my grandparents lived, they often had to leave their neighborhoods because of all types of outbreaks happening from these factories that surrounded their neighborhoods. And they lived in these factories. They built schools right next to these factories. One half of my grandparents lived right across the street from a very popular gas corporation’s factory, literally the gas containers were literally just across the street and that’s where they played. That’s the background of that. That’s where people worked.

So my activism was sparked because when you live in a situation like that, you got to learn how to speak quite loudly to be heard, to get any form of human rights, not to mention civil rights, not to mention gender rights, or racial rights, or anything like that. Voices had to be very loud for people to be able to live. So that’s what I saw coming up. That’s what I was raised to believe was the way that people naturally responded. I definitely recognize how not typically maybe that was for a lot of people, but it just happened to be typical in the area that I’m from.

Ashley Inkumsah:
How did you start exploring that intersection between racism and ableism in your work, professionally speaking?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
I acquired a disability when I was young enough, I guess. I was maybe 12. No, maybe 11. My mother, my stepfather, my brother and I moved from East Chicago, Indiana to a neighborhood called Ford Heights. Ford Heights, Illinois is a neighborhood in the south suburbs of Chicago. Ford Heights has not had its own police force since probably I was about 10 years old because that’s how corrupt it was and that’s how corrupt it continued to be. The county had to take over the police force when I was a very young age.

I was hit by a car. I was riding my bike home and I was hit by a car, and I was drug down a hill under the car, and was alive afterwords, lived through it, and sustained a few disabilities after that. My family always was very, very particular in letting me know that just because I had to learn how to do things a different way didn’t mean that I didn’t have to do them. I still had to do things. I still had to know that I was able to do things, and they still had the expectation of me being able to do whatever it is I needed to do to be able to go from day to day.

So it’s wonderful. I think it was a life changer when you go through a dramatic experience like that, when one day you’re one type of way and the next day, you’re not that at all. Although, I guess that’s a form of disability activism, in terms of my family preparing me for, just because you do things differently doesn’t mean there’s not going to be an expectation for you to do them. That started off quite early.

I went to, and I lived in this area, the public school system was not good. So even though we were in this area, we were poor as all heck, too. My mother threw us right into Catholic school. Catholic school in the south suburbs in mostly Black and Latin areas in the late ’80s was interesting. It was quite interesting.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I bet.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Like living in any project area, once the guns came, once kids started finding bags of guns outside their houses pretty much, literally bags of guns just sitting there, delivered by somebody, it became dangerous to, we could no longer live there. So the Catholic school system that my mother put us in, we actually lived in a church for a while. We lived in a rectory next to a church. So that meant that we had to perform labor to stay in that church. Again came the responsibility of doing stuff. When we would go to Mass and we would see people kissing all of these statues, all I could think of is, “My goodness, I’ve got to clean that later. My God. I hope people don’t realize I didn’t clean it before.”

So in terms of moving forward, going to Catholic school, I went to Catholic school from about second grade until I graduated high school. Of course, again, late ’80s, early ’90s, whole lot of racism. Whole lot of racism. My first activist action was, in high school, somebody wrote a letter to a friend using the “N” word several times. Happened to have a Black friend also and they came across the letter. She made dozens of copies of that letter and put them on everybody’s locker to show what a racist this person was. It just happened to be the time of Kwanza. My class happened to be, I think I was a sophomore at the time. We just happened to be the largest, the graduating class with the largest number of Black students. At that point, again, we were sophomores.
So you had right there, an anti-racist protest at that high school during the week of Kwanza. That was literally my first physical involvement in activism at that moment. It was very interesting. The way they hid that girl in school like she was under attack was so hilarious. I don’t think she had to go to class for a week. They hid her in a counselor’s office until we had the Kwanza ceremony and they interrupted the ceremony by bringing her there to apologize to everybody. It’s about the same. Not much has changed.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Exactly, yeah. Your activism started very, very young.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Yeah, pretty young. Pretty young, yeah.

Ashley Inkumsah:
So we know that in the United States, 50% of people killed by law enforcement are disabled and more than half of disabled African Americans have been arrested by the time that they turn 28. This is all according for The Center for American Progress. Despite this, though, when we hear news stories about Black people being victims of police violence, disability is often left out of that narrative. Why do you think that this occurs so often?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
It’s very interesting. I saw a recent Instagram post of a young man talking about when he and his friends were arrested, or at least detained. They were under the age to be actually arrested. They were detained. He called his mother. His mother asked them what they were wearing and his mother asked them, “Are they treating you like kids or are they treating you like adults?” These kids are all under the age of 15. He said, “They’re treating us like adults.” She said, “One or all of you are going to have to pee on yourselves.” He’s like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “We got on our nice clothes and our nice shoes.” She said, “You’re going to have to pee on yourselves or else they’re not going to see you as children. They are going to treat you as adults.” So he told his friends that and he said all of them peed on themselves. He said in less than an hour, they were released.

That’s a very real thing. What I said was, it wasn’t that the police felt sorry for them because they peed on themselves. It was now, when this was presented as evidence, it cannot be denied that these are children because not a whole lot of adults, en masse, pee on themselves like that. These are children. Now they are being prevented from showing them as guilty adult. Now they have to show them as children. Now they’ve just got to let them go.
So that goes towards the answer to your question. I think there’s a whole lot of leaving out disability so people don’t feel sorry for folks, quote unquote. So people can’t believe that if this person has this disability or that disability, how is the police saying they did this or that. If somebody is deaf and they don’t speak, they only speak American Sign Language and none of the police did, how come the police said they were a threat if all they were doing is speaking in the only way that they can? How can the police defend killing them?

So of course they leave disability, this is my opinion. Of course they leave disability out. That allows them to more be able to criminalize people.

Ashley Inkumsah:
The media has so much power in influencing public perception, so when you see that disability is continually being left out of the narrative, it has an influence on the public and how they perceive peoples’ victimhood and who’s worthy of victimhood and who is not because you see people, particularly with mental health related disabilities are so often portrayed as a threat. There was just Jordan Neely in New York City, who the media was describing as unhinged and erratic, and justifying him being killed. Black people are continually portrayed as threats, and then people with disabilities are also portrayed as threats, so it’s doubly oppressive.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. These things aren’t mistakes. These things are tools. I think we all use tools. I would just like to say, I don’t know if you’ve seen the “We Can’t Breathe,” the deaf and disabled margin of police brutality put out by a couple of really great folks, then with the National Council on Independent Living. It happened about six years ago, where they showed three stories of Black people with disabilities who were, I believe all murdered by the police; one in custody maybe. Yeah, one in custody and two as they interacted with the police. When these stories were put out, it was nothing about their disability. It was all about the violence that they projected. It was all about how the police were defending themselves.

But as you said, you see this more, and more, and more. This was a video that was out there six years ago. We continue to see this. We continue to see not just adults with disabilities, but children with disabilities. Children in general, number one, but also children with disabilities who are criminalized. How many videos do we have to see in school about teenagers in classrooms who aren’t even reacting violently? They’re just not doing what the teacher says and the police comes in. There was one video where police came in and tried to pull a student out of the desk, pulled the desk with the student, flipped them over on the ground. How can that be justified?
Under a system that prioritizes control and prioritizes forcing people to obey the system because of the system, it’s done quite easily and defended by people until the people become victims, and then they don’t defend it. They don’t speak against it. They’re just silent. But their defense is always very vocal.

Ashley Inkumsah:
And this has been happening for years and years.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Decades, centuries.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Exactly, centuries. It’s only recently that, with the emergence of smartphones, that people are now catching it on camera. But it was happening long before. Speaking of police violence being caught on camera, in 2020 we saw a global movement for Black lives following the murder of George Floyd. In the summer of 2020, we saw thousands of people taking to the streets to protest injustice. It’s now been three years and it seems like things have gotten quieter, although we have movements like the Stop Cop City movement currently happening in Atlanta. The media doesn’t seem to be reporting on this, these movements as much.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
We have to look at what the primary function of the media tends to be. The primary function of the media tends to be whatever the source that finances the media says it should be. Sometimes they say it should be elections. Sometimes they say it should be protests. Sometimes they say it should be a celebration of a much loved holiday by not a whole lot of people, but that doesn’t matter. Sometimes they say it should be celebrating the fact that now the banks are closed during Juneteenth, so if you got the day off work, forget you handling your business. Now you just got to stay home, I guess. All of that. The media puts out whatever those who own it says should be put out.

That’s not always a bad thing because you have media sources. You have the Chicago Defender. You have media sources that exist because some things are never put out on “popular” but what that means is nationally funded media. It’s not all media that does this, but if people are only counting on these major media sources to know what’s happening, you’re not going to know that much. You have to go outside of those sources. By outside of those sources, what that means, it would be great if you actually mean people and you communicated with people.
When those protests were happening, especially here in an area like northwest Indiana, when George Floyd was murdered, I was involved in groups that led protests that generally happen like that in Gary, in East Chicago, in Hammond, sometimes in Highland by people from Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond. But when George Floyd was murdered, you had areas like Schererville, Merrillville where people literally were stopping traffic, hitting the streets and we had never seen anything like that before. Those of us who led those types of things was like, “Oh, my gosh.”
We had conversations about it like, “Should we try to communicate with the people who are leading these?” I remember my response was, “No, not at all.” If this has happened in an arena outside of the people where it’s typically happening, it has to develop that way. We can go. When the police attack and everybody’s very surprised at it, we can help. We can try to communicate in that way, to let people know where the safe exits are from the street when the police come crashing through. Because that’s one of the things that happened, too. When people who didn’t typically protest started doing so, you all of a sudden saw a whole lot of surprise about how the police treat protesters because it wasn’t their experience.

That was the same thing that happened, that was one of the same things that happened when all of these police murders were going on when, on Twitter, we got a whole lot of advice from activists in Palestine, activists in Pakistan saying, “This is what you want to do when the police hit you with pepper spray,” or, “This is how you want to be sure you can contact each other without it being recorded.” It was amazing what was happening. It was like the whole world of protesters were supporting each other because some people, they didn’t know what to do, but they knew they couldn’t do nothing. They knew they couldn’t continue to just sit silent.
Frankly, that’s how we all started. Those of us who do physically protest, that’s how we all started. We don’t know what to do, but we know something needs to be done.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I’d never seen anything like that before the summer of 2020. I remember literally outside of my apartment, people protesting. I’d never seen that before in my life and it seemed like we were really on a precipice of something really important. But looking back at it, it’s been three years and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. A lot of the activism that we saw did feel like it was performative. We had the posting of the black squares across social media. The question was, “How does that move the needle?” People were posting all over social media, but now things are different. How do we distinguish between real boots on the ground activism versus performative activism? Because I know some people are well-meaning, a lot of people, allies are well-meaning, but they just don’t know where to begin. Do you have any advice in that regard?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
I did a training and I still do the training. For the same reason that we don’t see so many people out here on the streets, life happens. It’s time to go to work, literally meaning to pay bills. That happens. A whole lot of teachers and parents were out on the streets and then the school year started. So in the summer, in some areas, you see an increase of public activity because the people who see the effects, in terms of teachers, they’re at their second and third jobs now, not their primary job. So that means that you have a little bit more time. But when we all had to go back to work, if you notice, there’s a similarity between when these protests stopped and when people couldn’t really take off for getting COVID anymore. You could only take off for about five days as opposed to having two weeks. So there’s an overlap of all of those things.

Quite honestly, a lot of people who were in the forefront, and I work with a Black Lives Matter collective, Black Lives Matter Gary was formed before the national Black Lives Matter movement took hold, but before different groups were recognized as chapters. First it was Black Lives Matter Hammond, which started off as Black Lives Matter Northwest Indiana. Then we had an action and it was amazing and it was all of these long time community members, older community members that took a very major street where a lot of trucks go really, really fast. It’s so funny. I’m giving the directions of safety and protest and they ran past me and went right to the streets. I’m like, “Oh, okay. We in the street. Okay.” Then you have Black Lives Matter Gary, which was formed around the same time, and these neighborhoods are right next to each other and we came together.
So you had the people, and then the founders of the Black Lives Matter national group, who went forward, and what happens is what typically happens. Money happens and that’s not a bad thing. We all need to live. We all got to pay bills. That happens. But those who have money gave a whole lot of money for these things to be structured and not on the local level. There are a whole lot of activist groups who no longer even call themselves Black Lives Matter, by the way, because of this issue, because of the issues of control of the movement. It was no longer a movement by people who were in these neighborhoods, who were in these streets, led by the kids who were homeless. It was no longer that.

It became something that people had something to lose from, which may be unavoidable. I don’t know. I haven’t had that conversation. That may be unavoidable, but when money starts coming from specific entities, it changes it. Your concern becomes about the money and all, I can’t all. Most BLM groups got some form of financial support with what we’re doing. Usually what happens is, you tend to forget how much you were able to do before you got that financial support. I’m not just talking about Black Lives Matter, any group that holds the name Black Lives Matter. That’s any activist group. Once you get attention, people do want to support. The biggest form of support is either coming, physically showing up. That’s the biggest form, and then money. Money is second or third after that.

We live in a society that runs on money. So when you get used to being able to pay for stuff, that can in different times, become the priority. Like I said, you can come back from that. You can come back from that. If you’re evaluating what you’re able to do, you can come back from it. So there are still in existence all of these groups that didn’t have money, didn’t get offered no money, never got any money, but they never came out of those streets, either. They’re still doing some incredible work.

Whether or not groups still call themselves Black Lives Matter or not, they’re still doing incredible … There are so many of them who are still doing incredible work. A lot of this work is still happening. It’s just that the news broadcasters stopped coming. We may not see it every night, but a lot of this work is still happening. People are still going to city council meetings. People are still holding elected officials accountable. People are still holding school officials accountable. People are still putting together food boxes for folks. People are still raising money so people can pay their electric bills because in the summer, they turn electricity off. In the winter, they don’t, but in the summer, everybody got their stuff turned off. We’re dealing with an issue where people are losing their Medicaid left and right and don’t even know it yet, and they need assistance. You still have a large number of groups who are giving that assistance.

So the activism, the work has not stopped. The attention just may not be there. People may not be “in the streets” as much as they can because the law actually changed. The law made it okay to run somebody over when they’re not doing anything in particular. The law made it perfectly okay to do that.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely. Your activism started young. I think when we think of most of our leaders in civil rights, I think of John Lewis for example who, I think he was 18, 19 years old taking to the streets and protesting, and getting beat and brutalized-

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Arrested, all of that.

Ashley Inkumsah:
… over and over again. How do you think that young people, because I think that young people are the people who have their finger on the pulse of all of these things. How can young people mobilize to fight for Black disabled lives in 2023?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
I think that it has to be that they have to know that they are worth fighting for, that they are worth being defended. We fight for ourselves. We defend ourselves. We have to know that what we’re fighting for, for ourselves, what we’re defending ourselves against is the same thing that affects other people. So that means that there’s somebody else who’s doing it, too. So we probably want to figure out who they are and, instead of just me doing it here alone, it could be me and this other person doing it. Then you find another person, and then you find another person. That’s the benefit of social media. That’s one of the benefits of social media, anyway, is that you get to see that there are people other than you experiencing these things that you, of course, think only you experience.

Now, the other side of it, too is how social media is used to distract us from those things. I know I’m not the only one who started watching YouTube videos or started watching Instagram videos and three hours later still sitting there with my phone in my hand. It happens quick. That happens real quick. So we … I don’t know. I think we have to, those of us who are of age have to prioritize interacting with young folks. I think especially in terms of disability. That’s what we talk about all the time here at our center.

I work for an organization called or an agency called Everybody Counts, Incorporated, that are funded to run centers for independent living, Everybody Counts and Everybody Counts North. We talk about that often. We talk about how the disability rights movement, the history, the historic disability rights movement, before it became independent living, how people were so into doing what was actively needed to be done that maybe not enough time was put on organizing young people and teaching them as a culture how important it is to keep up with this work.
We see a lot of criticism of young people, a lot, but we were all young. Looking at ourselves the ages that these kids are now, I’m sure we were into some much more sillier stuff than most of these young folks are. But I think what we have to do is continue to try to reach out to young folks because these knees ain’t the same. Not too long ago, I was at a protest and I was talking to some of the young folks. I was like, “If you guys got to run and get away, I’ll try to give you time because I ain’t going to keep up, but what I can do is fall real quick and hold up the folks chasing you. I can do that.” Our roles change real quick when these knees start popping.

That’s humorous in terms of having conversations with young people and making it a priority that they see themselves as being worth fighting for. We’re not always talking about fighting, but people who are worth advocating for. So if you believe that you are worth advocating for yourself, and you know you are not a monolith, that there are other people around that are probably going through the same things, that it wouldn’t be bad to meet some other folks so that you can advocate for each other, so you can build this activism, so you can build this advocacy, so you can normalize supporting other people in what they’re going through.

That’s how community is built. That’s how movements are built. We don’t have to wait until things are the worst before we get into what’s necessary to do. We don’t have to wait at all. It’s not necessary to not do anything, no matter how small, no matter how quiet. Doing it is the primary thing.

Ashley Inkumsah:
You mentioned that, with the Disability Rights movement, that it didn’t include enough young people. Another one of the criticisms of the Disability Rights movement is, it was really white and it didn’t include enough people from intersectional identities. So why do you think that it’s so important for disability rights organizations today to take on an intersectional approach?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
If they want to survive, they have to, and really that’s it. If they want to survive, they have to. Or else these people who they’re not including are going to shut them down. You’ve only got one of two choices. If the issues that you’re saying are affecting people, then we have to know, and we know that there’s inequality. I think that’s the biggest thing. I think if you can deny inequality, any type of inequality, and the most inequality that’s usually denied is racial inequality, but even more than that is social class inequality. You can’t divide the experiences based on race, the experiences based on gender or gender identity, and the experience based on social class. You can’t deny that. You can’t separate that.

So if you admit that, that’s happening, then you know that there’s a certain group of people who are experiencing these inequalities to a larger degree. If there are people experiencing inequalities to that large of a degree, then those are the people that have to be involved. Those are some of the people that have to lead it. The video that I was talking about earlier was vocalized by Dustin Gibson and Carrie Gray, who’ve done and continue to do an amazing amount of work.

Ashley Inkumsah:
We’ve had them both on the podcast, by the way.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Awesome. Awesome, awesome. If you don’t recognize that the people who are the most brutally affected by the inequality you’re speaking against and bring that group to the leadership because they know what they’re doing. This is their daily life experience, surviving this stuff. Then I just don’t know where you see the future of your group. I don’t know if you see a future of your group. It’s difficult.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Yup. We need the leadership of the most impacted, for sure.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Oh, my gosh. It makes so much sense, but again, systemic inequality. Systemic inequality makes people, not that everybody has to be purposeful in not seeing it, but it makes people be very used to not seeing it.

I teach sociology. I’ve taught sociology for a very long time. I remember, I’m not saying that this person had the worst interaction with police that I’ve ever heard, but in terms of the students that I’ve dealt with who vocalized it, a very young white woman told an amazing horrifying story about how a whole police force joined her ex-boyfriend or refused to protect her from her ex-boyfriend, who was a police officer, as he just attacked her family, literally attacked, literally sat outside the house his whole shift. Her father called the police. The police came, talked to him, tried to get him to leave. He wouldn’t.

Now, he’s at work. He’s supposed to be somewhere, not outside her house. The police telling her father, “Well, he’s just sitting there. It’s okay. He’s not doing anything.” The father saying, “He can’t terrorize my family like this. I’m willing to defend my family. I have what I have the legal right to have,” speaking of a gun. They threatened to arrest her father right there. They were stopped by another police officer who was telling his partner, saying some very, very offensive sexist things. All these people are white. Everybody involved in this story is white. Saying some very sexist things.
The father got offended, started to get out of the car. The cops beat the hell out of him, right there in front of his family, while making full eye contact with every woman in that car, as they beat this man and arrested him for assault. The student said that she didn’t tell this story often and she said she wouldn’t talk about it again in this class because what is she supposed to do. Her parents always taught her to trust the police. So what did that mean for her and what community could they go to? What organization could they go to based on their political ideology, based on their social ideology? Who could they go to for help? Nowhere, if you’re not willing to question the thing that you’ve always been taught to believe, yet your experience is telling you otherwise. Where do you go?

That’s how racism affects everybody. That’s not a racism affecting white people thing. That’s racism doing what racism does. That’s social class inequality doing what social class inequality does. Then when we tell this story in however many different ways we tell it with people with disabilities, I’ve been to protests recently where I’ve seen police snatching people out of their chairs saying, “You want to be a protester? You can go to jail like one,” snatching them out of their chairs.
I was driving the rescue vehicle for people who tried to get away fast enough to not get arrested. You can’t justify that. You can’t justify that. When that happens to you, I can imagine it’s horrible. You don’t know what to do with that. It goes against everything you’ve been taught, all the un-truths that you’ve been taught, all the things you’ve been taught to not see. Now you suddenly see it. Where’s your community? If you’re in a particular group that isolates itself from other people because of racism, because of ableism, because of classism, because of sexism, because of nationalism. Where do you go for support?
The sad truth is, they go nowhere. They sit silent like my former student. You sit with this silently. You don’t tell anybody about it. That was a lot. You’ve got to stop me when I start talking like that.

Ashley Inkumsah:
It’s terrible.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
I’ll keep going on.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Nope. Nope. Nope. I’m loving every minute of it. I really am. I’m thinking about, WID is currently celebrating our 40th anniversary and we’re actively talking to the community, to the disability community, various disability communities because there’s not just one. There’s several. To help us to game plan our next decade and beyond. I’d love to hear from you. What do you think that we as an organization should be doing to advocate for Black disabled people over the next decade and beyond?

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Like a lot of organizations have had to do, you have to recognize that the people who experience this stuff at its most drastic, at its most threatening have to be in positions of leadership. That means that you have to take the time, meet them, teach them. As you’re teaching them, get their input on what they’re learning. Get their criticisms. Get their self-criticisms and prepare people to be leading where you want this to go. Because we’re only going to be here for a certain time. By we, I mean those of us of a certain age and all of us have stuff.
All of us have stuff. We’re talking about a disability population. The system is not geared to keep us here as long as other people. So we’ve got to start replacing ourselves real quick, replacing ourselves with people who we’re giving some type of influence and leadership to, to do what we know needs to be done. But it has to be the people who are experiencing all of these isms that we’re fighting against the most.
That doesn’t mean we ignore other people, but if we’re talking about a game plan here, if we’re talking about who we’re identifying, it’s pretty important. I think it’s pretty important. Everybody is necessary. That’s not an opposite thing. That’s right alongside it. Everybody is necessary, but we do have to know how ableism, racism, sexism in all its forms, we have to know how it’s affecting people the most in order to say that what we’re doing is for the benefit of everybody. Because if you fix the worst problem, all the other stuff is going to be at least a little bit better. It’s going to be at least a little bit better automatically.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Yes. It’s important to recognize that all of our collective oppression is wrapped up in white, able bodied supremacy. So when we tackle that, it trickles down to everybody else for sure.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
When we talk about white, we can’t think we’re only talking about “white people,” because just like Black people, just like “Latinos,” these are designations given by people who were trying to categorize folks for oppression. We have to realize that when we talk about whiteness, we’re not just talking about peoples’ skin tone. We are talking about a political ideology that we’re all taught. I don’t want to get in fight with nobody. Don’t nobody call WID talking about me now.
When we talk about that, I think it’s important to identify what we mean by white. If the only thing you mean by white is less “melinated” people, that ain’t good enough. It ain’t good enough because there are a whole lot of less “melinated” people. Oh, my gosh. I was a part of a turkey drive. Every year, we’d take turkeys to people. I cannot say enough, and I’m not saying it’s the worst oppression, but for people who the only thing they have to feel good about in terms of themselves is that they’re white, how is that not a trick on them. How is that not a trick on them? You ain’t got no water. You ain’t got no electricity. You’re not physically clean. You got addiction after addiction, but dammit, you’re white. Not good enough. That’s not good enough. Somebody tricked you into not seeing all of these other things that are going on.
That’s the only thing I say. When we add the word white into a category, we have to make sure that we are talking about all of the agents of whiteness, not just white folks. That ain’t enough. We’ve got to talk about whiteness and what whiteness means, and how we are all subjected to that. Because a lot of us grow up, shoot, we think we’d have no problems if we were white, no problems whatsoever. Do a turkey drive one year, everybody. Do a turkey drive in lower class areas of your city or your state. My gosh. But it does mean something if you have nothing and you’re taught that racism makes you better, I guess. It don’t give you a meal. It don’t give you clean water, but maybe it gives you a good feeling. A good feeling ain’t good enough to me. I don’t know.

Ashley Inkumsah:
That was so well said. That was so well said. I think yes, whiteness is…we talk so much about it being something that you can see, but it’s something that people want to possess because it equals power and positions you in a certain place in society. It’s so important to understand and to recognize that a lot of people are trying to seek that form of power, even if they are of a different hue. I’m so glad you pointed that out.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
It’s interesting. It’s interesting, I’m telling you. You can’t put me on a podcast. We’re going to be on here for hours. I’m sorry.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I love every minute of it. Trust me, this conversation has been so, so amazing, just talking about the past, the present, the future, all of it. I loved every minute of this conversation. I’d love to have you back some time in the future because this was amazing.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Oh, sure.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Thank you so much for being a guest. This was amazing. This was my favorite, I think, podcast that I’ve recorded this year for sure.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Thank you. I appreciate it. I think this is an excellent thing that WID is doing. I keep looking forward to where WID is going. I look forward to how there is a purposeful, at least attempt and actions to manifest that attempt to get so many people involved, to get more people involved, to get young people involved, to pull older people back into it. I think that’s just as important. It’s not too late to get involved in trying to make a difference where you are for people who are around you. I don’t think it’s ever too late for that. I think that doing something betters your life. It elongates it. It makes it worth it again. I’m just so, so amazed at what WID has been able to do and what we’re continuing to do. I think you are a great part of that, putting this together. This conversation has been amazing. I appreciate you leading me in a direction and not letting me go everywhere, which I tend to do all the time. So you’ve done an excellent job, too. I appreciate it.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Thank you so much. This is amazing. I look forward to keeping in touch and continuing to game plan for the future of WID with you.

Lorrell Kilpatrick:
Absolutely. Thank you so much.