Keynote Address by Yohance Lacour

Highlights from the keynote:
 

• “The core issue is that the 13th amendment did not abolish the culture of slavery. Culture is communication. It didn't abolish the language of slavery. When General Lee surrendered it wasn't because they had a change of heart. It was because they were outmanned and outgunned and they and they walked away from that … they didn't change their minds and they didn't change their language. So their journalists and their storytellers continued to tell stories in the same vein.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “And if you deny the lingering effects of slavery, you have either been irreversibly brainwashed, you are evil in nature, or just willfully ignorant. I mean food recipes, folklore, governmental structures have survived since slavery and been strengthened. How could the spirit of it not. I dare, I challenge anyone who acts as if slavery is a thing of the past to tell me when the spirit was crushed. When were the ideas and the thoughts and the languages of slavery's biggest supporters, when was that abolished? In the same way that that language was used to justify this type of treatment then of slave patrols and of slave owners, it's being done today to justify over-policing and mass incarceration.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “[W]hen you push these narratives and tell these communities, you tell young Black boys, that they’re savages and super predators, they internalize it. And then when you tell our communities that's who our boys are, our communities internalize it. And our communities, it gets to overpowering their lived reality. They get to the messaging. They experience the messaging more than they do their own realities. Especially when you’re scrolling all day. You actually… People are taking in these images and these depictions and it gets so overpowering what they know happens when they walk outside their own house.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “[H]ow do you feel if every time you open the paper, when you see your face or a face that looks like yours, it’s going to jail, it's getting killed, it's scaring everybody? So now you walk around the street and you either keep your hands in your pocket and try to make sure that everybody know you're not him. And you walk with your eyebrows up and a smile cuz you want everybody feel safe and you constantly trying to figure out how to make people feel better about you. Or, you’re like, you know what, yeah, I'm on that. I'm on that. That's what makes me most angry about the subhuman, three-fifths, super-predator, Black savage narrative is when I see it internalized.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “[N]ow you got little Black boys who embrace the term savage, who rap it. And these are huge media corporations pushing it. So media ain't just journalism. Media is storytelling. Why is that? Why “Empire City” ain't a movie? Why sis’ work on LA gangs and police – why that ain't a movie? Why we ain't telling them stories?” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “We still complicit. We have still turned a blind eye to the fact that public education is predicated on property tax. We've turned a blind eye to the fact that there are food deserts in the same communities that public education is predicated on property tax. ... We might vote against it and talk against it in rooms like this amongst each other, but it's happening over there and for the most part we try to move away from that. And we try to put as much distance between ourselves and them as possible.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “Journalism has to be a tool. You got to decide. Are you a journalist first? or a freedom fighter? Journalism is a tool for freedom fighters. Otherwise freedom fighting is just something you can step in as a journalist and step out.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “The media, for people who come from the places we trying to fight for, has always just been an extension of the police. We got to show them we not, right, or we got to find the police who can admit and acknowledge that they not doing it right and there are some serious problems. And we got to link up. We need people. She was revolutionary. She was radical. You don't hear police talking like that. That's what we got to encourage. And this ain't just for journalists and storytellers. Whatever you do. Again, culture is communication. If you communicate through whatever you do.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “We can't be storytellers just for the sake of being storytellers, just for the sake of the pursuit of truth, right? We got to pursue truth to an end. Because … a lot of people … will promote voting and tell Black folks to vote but solely because your ancestors died for the right to. As if people marched and died just to stand in line at polls. They died to get their hands on some weapons. They died to get the right to vote so they could weaponize those ballots and stamp out white supremacy in the quest for a true democracy. We got to pick a side and we got to let people know what side we pick. We got to organize.” – Yohance Lacour
   
• “[U]ltimately the picture that the media has painted of us is about as dangerous and harmful as the treatment we've suffered from the hands of police. So we lump ‘em up. But I weaponized … my network. I weaponized my relationship. Y'all ain't done this work and not met people closer to it that you can weaponize them. … [T]hat's what I suggest we do.” – Yohance Lacour