In this candid and thought-provoking episode of From Chains to Links, hosts Ifeoma Ike and Kelly Burton explore the interconnected themes of rest, reset, and the evolving fight for equity in a multicultural democracy. Through heartfelt reflections, sharp humor, and powerful insights, they tackle everything from the historical contributions of Black communities to modern movements for justice to the importance of prioritizing rest as a revolutionary act. With discussions on building intentional communities and reimagining the path to liberation, this episode inspires listeners to embrace rest, reclaim their power, and reimagine the future.

Thick Thighs Save Lives and Other Ways We Get Free in 2025

Hi, Ife.

Kelly, how are you?

I’m amazing. How are you? Welcome to 2025.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Did you think you made it?

I did. I didn’t know how I was going to feel but I’m here. That’s a real way to enter. Sometimes, we get that mistletoe seal, “Happy New Year.” Things are supposed to be automatically great. I feel like even towards the end of 2024, I was like, “I know what time it is. I’m clear.”

I feel like a lot of us flipped into that mood like, “Let’s go. Let’s do this.”

The Assignment For 2025: Focus On What Matters

I want to ask you what the assignment is. That’s what was going through my head at the end of 2024. If somebody was like, “Kelly, what’s the assignment?”

The assignment is to keep your head down and stay focused. There are going to be so many distractions that are coming left and right. At the end of the day, we have to do what is necessary to advance the cause. What does that look like for you? What does it look like to advance the cause through this period in history?

In another space that I’m in, we wrapped up what we annually do with Black Policy Lab. Theme was the reset because it was a feeling of A) Reminders, and B) An invitation to reimagine. The only difference between rest and reset is one letter so also having moments of pause to process. For people like us who are almost always clear as to what the assignment is when it comes to contracts, roles in our family, and saying, “I do certain things well,” we often go into rote memory every new year.

We like to think we’re creating a new vision board but many of us are doing the same thing. It was like, “No. How do we look at community differently?” Part of the assignment is not being delusional about what is happening but also resetting and maybe even reprioritizing what is in front of you that you can control and what does that look like? It’s similar to keeping your head down and focusing on the focus. If that wasn’t the priority before, it should be the priority now.

What does it look like to care for each other better? What does it look like check in on your strong friends and the ones that are struggling. I am getting more into being a little bit more strict about my calendar so that I can find the pockets of rest. How do I announce that to people so I can set better boundaries and expectations? I feel like we’re going to get back into the unexpected things that are going to pop up. I feel like the thing I can control is my calendar and schedule.

Rest Vs. Reset: Finding Intentional Moments For Reflection

Can you say a little bit more about the distinction between rest and reset and how it’s one letter? What does that look like for you?

I haven’t come up with anything clever. I could make up a word for the E because that’s the vowel that’s in between the two. I haven’t come up with the two but as we’re thinking about dreaming and visioning, one of the things that I’ve thought about for the longest is how wild it is. The term dream is so weird as a Black person. There’s this concept of the American dream. A) It’s a fantasy. B) You’re supposed to wake up from a dream. What happens when you wake up?

There’s this other part around dreaming that is a point of privilege because it assumes you can sleep, you have rest, and you have time to rest. In many ways, I do think that the space in between you’re at now and where you’re trying to get to does have a lot to do with that space of dream, vision, and rest. I believe that things get deposited when you dream. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of us, statistically, don’t get enough time to rest.

It doesn’t mean we’re not productive but it does mean that we may not be some of the versions of ourselves that we’re supposed to be because we never got the rest to get deposited into. If there was a leap between rest and reset at this moment, it feels like how you create more intentional points of rest so that the resetting can reveal more of what your assignment either is at this time or the things that you have never been able to do. You didn’t get rest because you weren’t busy with too many things. That’s what’s coming up for me.

I love that. It’s interesting when you said the part about dreaming, sleeping, and waking up. You have to wake up from a dream. We’re in this moment that is anti-woke. It’s as if people do not want to be awakened. There’s this James Baldwin quote and I’m going to mess it up real bad but it’s along the lines of, “If you want to piss somebody off, wake them up.”

We got a lot of pissed-off people because we have shaken them awake to say, “This is the reality of what people in this country are facing. Deal with it.” They’re like, “Nope, I want to go back to sleep, what we had, and where we were. I want to go back to the power apparatus and the state of supremacy that was in place.” It’s our work to continue to be like, “Nah, you don’t wake up today.”

America, we’re going to wake up today.

It’s a wake-up call.

It’s about the meme where they have a whole bunch of Black women sitting on the top of a building and watching the fire. Let me tell you something about Black people. For every beautiful art piece that maybe should have one interpretation, it’s going to have 55. I’ve seen beautiful expository prose about, “My people are in those buildings. I can’t watch the buildings burn.” A lot of people can never be happy about it. That was the original intent but people were like, “It’s not Nanny’s fault that she knows about this thing. It’s the policy’s.” I get it. It’s not even in us to leave people behind. If people don’t understand how a day in a life without a Black person cares, it’s hilarity.

The Struggle For Respect: Black Liberation And Democracy

People don’t realize how your freedom has been made available on the backs of Black people in this country. 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery but the 14th Amendment created a path to citizenship, not just for Black people but for all non-White people. There are all sorts of movements for liberation that are built on those amendments that were established for us. We’ve seen it with the civil rights movement and the Immigration Act.

If your folks got here in the last years, that is because of our movement. Everybody gets here and gets brand new because they have arrived in a situation in a state of a set of conditions that it took a whole lot of bloodshed to create. Folks don’t have any respect for it but you’re going to respect it if it’s gone. If you have to put yourself on the line to restore it, then you’re going to know for sure. We’re in this state and a lot of us are hoping and praying it doesn’t get to but at the end of the day, it’s going to be what it’s going to be.

I go back to the episode with Bakari when he talked about how it’s always been necessary for Black blood to flow in these streets for this democracy to advance. It’s time for other people to put some skin in the game who are not Black people. We have over-indexed in the making of this democracy. We have had to earn our citizenship in ways it has been handed to other folks so people feel entitled to certain things that we have had to earn. No one has done more than Black folks in establishing our position in this society. Other folks are going to have to do their part. Get a formation. Let’s go.

This is what we say for the rest of the reset. The reset I recognize as necessary for all communities but the reset is also only as effective as your ability to connect to and access but also internalize truth. When you said people don’t have respect for us, break it down. “I don’t care if you like me.” I know that’s tough for people to reflect on this MLK season. We don’t give a fuck if you don’t care. I know that’s hard. 

People think Brown v. Board of Education was about, “the Negro children want to play with me?” If you had given the resources that were dictated by law to the babies that were being taught by people that love them when we had the highest number of Black teachers, many of them who didn’t go through the certification system that you all got but somehow the babies became doctors and the earliest forms of what is still the leading contributor of professionals in this society are HBCUs, which are underfunded but taught by people that love them.

You all would get what you think you want, which is segregation. That’s hard for people to hear. Segregation wasn’t quite the problem for even some Black folks. What was the problem was second-class citizenry and money and resources flowed with whiteness. Integration was necessary for us to guess what we were already deserving of inherently should have as human beings. Human beings did not ask for integration as a necessity for our comfort because it is not comfortable.

We did not ask it because we needed anything from you all as it relates to “merit.” Believe it or not, all of our ancestors, regardless of what condition they were in, believed in their genius and passed that genius on to their children but the confusion that we have every MLK season in addition to the perversion of his quote is that we spend our time trying to “race bait.” “Newsflash, Black people didn’t even create Black people.”

That part.

The concept of Black people didn’t exist until White people needed Black people to exist to create the standard of Whiteness. This is legal. I’m not making this up. There are many White scholars who are saying the same thing. We did not create this. I feel like people have all this information and they want us to be the inheritors of the burden but also the educators of the truth. The reality is we’re exhausted. When I think of that image of women watching the burning, that’s what’s burning for me. I don’t have it in me to educate you on things that AI bots can say better than me. It’s there. The question is, do you want to accept it?

Finding New Pathways To Liberation

On that note, it’s going to be a great January and an amazing 2025. The issues that we care about are going to resonate and we’re going to continue to find our people and tribe. In this country, democracy has advanced because of folks of all backgrounds. This is going to be an opportunity for us to find connections that we otherwise would not be looking for. I got an invitation, a virtual intro to connect with someone. I looked at their background and I’m like, “Why would they connect me to this person?” I say, “Lord, I’m going to go into this year being open-minded.”

You gave it to the Lord.

The Holy Ghost and I are in a conversation constantly. They say to pray without ceasing. I have a new interpretation of that prayer. It’s me and the Holy Ghost. When little kids were small and they had an imaginary friend, they’d be like, “Why Bobby?” “Who is Bobby talking to?” “That’s me, 46 talking to the Holy Ghost.” looked at this person’s background and I was like, “What is the connection here?” When I look at all the lifestyle pics that I see and there’s some light, I don’t get it but I’m like, “I am going to stay open to connections around humanity and places where I otherwise would not have expected it to show up.” This is going to create an opportunity for new unexpected pathways to liberation. Let’s go.

I’m going to lean into giving myself enough time to trust my instinct. Here’s the thing. Statistics show that there are still many folks who stay within their stratified demographic and have never encountered a Black person. A significant number of them have never encountered somebody outside of their community and this includes immigrant communities. I wonder why they never ventured out of their space. The largest or biggest glaring message that comes to my head is, “They get everything so they have everything they need. A being and B being in community.” I’m going to be in the community.

Some of us are trifling in the community. As an equity expert, we are allowed to be trifling. True equity is met not when we are all in boardrooms. True equity is met when we can all be C plus and B taken care of. That is true equity. I don’t want to make sure that people who are fuck shit can still be fuck shit because it’s your right. That is what we should be able to have the complexity of who we are exists but there is a piece that’s missing as to why are our spaces never allowed to by ourselves.

There is Jason Williams. I think that’s his name. Otherwise, known as the fine blue-eyed green-eyed. He was at an event that I was at. It was some weird CEO event. I love it when people use their privilege. For all you pretty people, please use your pretty privilege for liberation. Rule number one, it’s time for you to use your titties, lashes, waves, and thighs for liberation.

When I created this pretty boy better than AIs, the road to integration was segregation. White ladies were like, “Tell us more.” I’m in the back screaming with the kids. They melted into his little eyes. he told them, “Don’t you want me to be safe? Don’t you want me to be in a space where I’m at my most healthiest first and then we can come back to integration?” I was eating that little marshmallow up and was like, “That is what we need. We need Treaties for justice and tap this liberation.”

We need to use our shit for us because the reality is what is crazy about what Bakari mentioned about the blood in the street. We also have to respect the past but also recognize that sometimes we jump into quickly to try to fix shit. That’s not a problem that we created. It’s because we know we have the answers and we have often been the ones that have been trusted at the height of conflict to fix it.

But what AMREF is not good at is after they have killed our babies, shut down our businesses, foreclosed our homes, and a number of us have died during pandemics, they are not good at the slight little rebound where 10,000 people die versus 50,000 people or 2 kids make it to medical school instead of 1. Once you get them, they get that little bit of progress. They’re like, “Take it back. They get into uppity. Don’t say Black no more. We’re post-racial. You all are good.”

That to me is cool. Have that sentiment but are we comfortable going back to our communities and being like, “It’s just us. Let’s rock it out.” Sometimes we don’t admit how much we are connected to White gays, White audiences, White acceptance, White participation, and at times White investment. We do suffer a bit in investment when we choose ourselves.

We don’t sometimes talk about how we need to redefine value so that we’re still seeing value in ourselves. We may not be the biggest publication but we may be the most supported publication and more importantly, the healthiest publication by resetting within our community. That doesn’t mean that we hate other communities but other communities do this on a day-to-day basis and nobody calls it out.

Revolutionary Leadership: Fighting For Change Today

What is Dr. King thinking? What would be his takeaway and offering?

I think about the two spectrums of life longevity. I don’t know what an evolved King had he reached his Nelson Mandela years. I imagine that a lot. I like the route of a revolutionary but what was similar between all of them, King, X, Fred Hampton, who barely even was in his twenties, is that all of them had some type of death, a 30-year death, either after 30 plus years they were gone or in the case of Mandela, chained for 30 years, which in itself is hard to grapple with.

I want to say that King would honestly not be famous in our realm if he were still here because we don’t honor living revolutionaries unless they die a certain type of death. I do think that in this modern digital TikTok era, I am curious as to whether current generations would be able to coexist with the complexities of someone who dared to build multicultural. My curiosity is whether or not King would have still subscribed to a multicultural way of building.

As social scientists, when you continue to see the repetition of an attempt at a thing and it’s not becoming successful, he is a reverend so he has to continue to have faith and hope for the things unseen. I do think that there are some suggestions that before he transitioned, there was the pragmatism and reality that America was going to hell in a handbasket. There was a shift in how he was looking at what we get to do on this earth.

I can’t answer that question. I do think that there’s a part that feels like King would want his people to do exactly what you said and believe that you’re going to live abundantly. Believe in your people and that we can have a joyous year where we fight the right fights, whether they’re popular or not. That’s what I believe would be happening. I do think we need to think about what it means for us to fight outside of traditional political structures and what it means for us to fight and build homes that may not necessarily result in a transactional gain. What do you think?

To this piece about a multicultural democracy, before the election, I would have believed there to be a difficult but more direct path. On the other side of the election, I’m not so sure. It revealed complexities that I did not know existed that would take a tremendous amount of unpacking, rebuilding, and restoration of trust and establishment of trust. I had a couple of insights that came out of it but maybe we’ll tackle that on the next one. Thanks, everybody, for joining us for another episode. I’m curious what you all think. We’re excited about this conversation and going to continue it on social media. We’ll see you in the next episode.

Thank you.

 

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