Freedom Now - Saturday, June 13, 2026

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1. as dark and incisive new comedy, The People of Pompeii, set in the aftermath of the 2025
2. Palisades fire.
3. Theatricum is located in Topanga Canyon, just off the 101 freeway, in the shade of the California
4. Live Oaks.
5. Explore and picnic in the gardens before the show.
6. Further information available at www.theatricum.com and at kpfg.org.
7. You're listening to KPFK 90.7 FM, Los Angeles.
8. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.
9. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment
10. And it seems that I can hear God saying to America
11. You are too arrogant
12. And if you don't change your ways
13. I will rise up and break the backbone of your power
14. O-Tip, which in the language of ancient Egypt means we come with justice in peace.
15. Welcome to Freedom Now, a Saturday Pan-Africanist and internationalist world affairs program.
16. Freedom Now is committed to the principle of the rights of all peoples and nations to self-determination.
17. We thank you deeply for your contribution to KPFK, which permits programs like Freedom Now to stay on the air.
18. in this era of corporate acquisition and co-optation of all dissident media.
19. We provide the microphone, challenging their corporate and racist point of view.
20. So stay tuned for Agenda here at Freedom Now.
21. Fellas, I'm ready to get up and do my thing.
22. I want to get into it, man, you know.
23. peace hoteps and wisdom to all of our faithful and devoted listeners out there in the radio verse
24. this is brother brandon sancara and i want to start things off by thanking all of you loyal
25. listeners yet again for joining us this weekend you keep us on our mission and allow us to bring
26. you our agenda for today, Saturday, June 13th, 2026. Our theme today is Black Women's Struggles,
27. and we will be diving deep from medicine to music and charging those revolutionary batteries for yet
28. another Saturday. We begin with our dear ancestor and Freedom Now founder, Babadidon Kamati,
29. bringing us the African Drumbeat Historical Calendar for the week, reminding us that every
30. Every day is a day in African history.
31. Then we get right into things as our very own treasure trove of wisdom, author, historian
32. and professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston and Freedom Now
33. co-producer Dr. Gerald Horne is joined on the line by Wendy Klein, Dima G. Selle Chair
34. in the History of Medicine at Purdue University in Indiana and author of the book Expose the
35. Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam And in the second half of our program Dr Horn will be joined on the line by Raelynn Rabaka professor of African African and Caribbean Studies at the Ethnic Studies Department at University of Colorado at Boulder as well as author of the book Black Feminist
36. Funk, Funk Women and Black Musical Feminism.
37. Now I'm going to be on the ones and twos as we pour this knowledge, making sure your mental
38. cup runneth over with revolutionary wisdom, right here to quench your mental thirst on
39. Freedom Now, KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, and kpfk.org streaming live on the web. To make sure
40. we stay on a smooth ride with that cultural vibe you know and love, we will be enjoying a musical
41. bottom featuring Jodeci, Alice Coltrane, Esperanza Spaulding, V-Red, Regina Carter, and Brandi Younger.
42. Now people get ready for this train to come in, taking you one step closer to mental liberation,
43. and stay tuned for that beat of the historical drum,
44. followed by an interview with Dr. Gerald Horne and Professor Wendy Klein.
45. All our studies, history is best qualified to reward all research.
46. and when you see that you got problems all you have to do is examine the historic method
47. used all over the world by others who had problems similar to yours
48. and once you see how they got theirs straight then you know how you can get yours straight
49. Ho-Tep, this is Dinan Kamathi with Freedom Now's African Drumbeat Historical Calendar.
50. This calendar gives life to our revolutionary sheroes and heroes
51. and struggles against slavery, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, and racism.
52. As the United States and NATO's assault against humanity continues,
53. We use these historical lessons to remind us that the people's power is greater than Western military technology.
54. June 16, 1680, Nandi was a Zulu mother warrior of the great African leader Shaka Zulu.
55. She fought European slave traders and helped organize an all-female militia, which has numerous successes against the British.
56. She trained Shaka Zulu.
57. June 16th, 1976.
58. June 16th is celebrated as Youth Day in South Africa,
59. a commemoration of the over 10,000 students
60. who rose up against the racist South African regime's
61. Africana Medium Degree Program,
62. which forced all African schools in South Africa
63. to learn the Dutch language Africana.
64. The Black Consciousness Movement,
65. the Pan-African Congress,
66. and the African National Congress
67. had a history of doing underground political organizing in Soweto.
68. Targeted by the students for destructions were beer halls and liquor stores,
69. which many African students believe were used by the European government to control African people.
70. Over 600 students were killed.
71. June 18, 1858, Lakshmi Bai was born.
72. She's a national heroine of India,
73. a rebel military leader of India's war of independence against British colonialism.
74. She died at the age of 30 on the battlefield of Gwalior.
75. She was a wrestler boxer and athlete as well as a revolutionary organizer Her women brigade was called the Amazon of Jahanzi She specialized in giving training to women as troopers and gunners in their Liberation Army
76. June 16, 1862, legal slavery was abolished in the United States.
77. June 18, 1953, Egypt, Kemet, becomes republic under leadership of its first president,
78. Mohammed Naguib, who was born in the Sudan.
79. President Naguib and Kabul Abdu Nasir were the primary leaders of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952,
80. which was led by the Free Officers Movement founded in 1949.
81. The Free Officers Movement was a group of young officers, all under 35,
82. from peasant and working class backgrounds, that were fiercely anti-British colonialists and led Egypt to independence.
83. independence. June 18, 1954, the CIA invades and overthrows the democratically elected government
84. of President Jacob Arbenz Guzman. President Arbenz put forth new policies, such as giving
85. unused lands by private corporations to the landless peasants, United States multinational
86. corporations, in particular United Fruit Company, which is today Chiquita Brands International,
87. Lobbied to overthrow this democratically elected government.
88. Following the coup d'etat, the Guatemalan Civil War begins.
89. This involves a massacre of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Mayan Indians, characterized as genocide.
90. This war prompts a mass migration of Guatemalans to the United States.
91. June 19, 1865, Africans in Texas are notified of Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued in 1863.
92. Juneteenth marks the event.
93. June 19, 1960, Emma Tayaka was born.
94. A Chicana labor activist and a member of the Texas Communist Party,
95. She led the Pecan-Sheller Strike in 1933 in San Antonio, Texas, to oppose wage cuts of the already super low wages of 5 cents per day.
96. Over 2,000 Pecan workers ran on strike at over 130 plants.
97. Strikers were tear gassed, beaten, and jailed before victory was won.
98. June 19, 1937.
99. Trinidad in the Caribbean.
100. The British colonial police are defeated in their efforts to beat back oil worker strikers under the leadership of union organizer Uriah Butler.
101. Uriah Butler stated that unemployment and low wages in Trinidad were the work of the evil white men who controlled the colony and above all else, the evil oil magnates.
102. This strike ushered in a new radical political leadership that led Trinidad to independence.
103. June 19, 1965, Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella was arrested and deposed after leading Algeria to independence and a rapid nationalization of Algeria's land and industries.
104. June 19, 1968, the Solidarity Day March of Poor People in the U.S.
105. This mass march establishes the Squatter Settlement named Resurrection City,
106. which has represented Native Americans, Chicanos, and poor whites together with Africans.
107. This campaign brought to the front door of the White House the massive poverty in the United States.
108. June 20, 1920, Eduardo Mudalani was born.
109. He served as the president of Frelimo, the front for the liberation of Mozambique.
110. Frelimo led a guerrilla war against Portuguese colonialism For Limo led the reconstruction of a socialist Mozambique In 1969 he was assassinated by a bomb planted in a book
111. sent to him by the Portuguese secret police, Pied.
112. This has been the African Drumbeat Historical Calendar here at Freedom Now.
113. This afternoon's program can be re-heard for the next 60 days
114. at kpfk.org, audio archives, scroll to Freedom Now.
115. please join us in the chant of unity wherever you are in the chant of unity by repeating after me
116. a mandala away to three times which means the power belongs to we the people
117. Thank you.
118. For KPFK Los Angeles, this is Gerald Horne, and with me on the line is Wendy Klein,
119. Dimas Silly Chair in the History of Medicine at Purdue University in Indiana,
120. and author of the book Exposed, The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam.
121. Thank you for joining us on Freedom Now, KPFK Los Angeles, Wendy Klein.
122. Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
123. And we're delighted to have you. So why did you produce this book?
124. That is a wonderful and very important question. I'm someone, I've written several books on women's reproductive health.
125. And my second book focused on the women's health movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
126. and I have a chapter on how doctors should teach the pelvic exam
127. and a controversy that erupts around that process.
128. Much later, an editor at Polity Press approached me
129. and asked if I'd like to expand that into an entire book.
130. And I thought, actually, I really would.
131. Because in the meantime, all of these examples of sexual abuse
132. in the hands of what I call white coat predators,
133. particular doctors who've taken advantage of their situation to sexually molest women while giving a pelvic exam,
134. made me realize that this was a really important story that had not been told
135. and that we needed to have a conversation about why these things occur in this supposed safety of the medical examining room
136. and what doctors and lay readers should understand about why that process is able to happen even in today's climate.
137. So what role do enslaved women play in your story?
138. Great question. And in fact, so in my book, I cover sort of roughly a 200 year period, right?
139. We've had this procedure and we've had these tools that were developed nearly 200 years ago that have changed very little.
140. Surprisingly, the speculum that gets used today essentially was created by a doctor in
141. the 19th century who practiced on the enslaved, who developed the speculum. So the tools haven't
142. changed very much, but the context has. And what's important to understand, and again,
143. I think I feel passionately when I speak to doctors, to gynecologists about this, is to
144. appreciate the importance of understanding this history, where this procedure was first developed,
145. in order to understand its potential for abuse today.
146. So the important thing to understand about the enslaved part of this story
147. is that the procedure was developed at a time when women,
148. and particularly women of color, had limited rights.
149. Obviously, enslaved women had essentially no rights, right?
150. They're seen as inferior.
151. They're not viewed as actual human beings.
152. They're property.
153. And as a result, they were subjected in this case to medical experimentation, essentially.
154. And a particular doctor, Dr. James Marion Sims, who practiced on the enslaved in order to kind of perfect gynecological procedures and surgeries.
155. So to understand that it was essentially on the backs, on the bodies of enslaved women, that we have some of our understanding of what the female body looks like inside emerged from those bodies.
156. Could you elaborate on that latter point? That is to say, is it still fair to suggest that slavery haunts, if you like, the practice of OBGYN?
157. Yeah, I would say that. And I don't say it to attack OBGYN as a practice. I think if you understand 19th century medical history, a lot of the assumptions in terms of especially women's health were based on 19th century beliefs about women's bodies.
158. And race, of course, is also central to that.
159. Let me just quickly make one obvious point.
160. The purpose of the pelvic exam and why it develops was revolutionary in the 19th century,
161. because if you think about female and male reproductive parts, women's are interior and until then had not been able to be seen.
162. And so this notion that you could develop a tool in which you could peer into the female body and see for the first time the cervix and try to understand her reproductive parts was, as I said, revolutionary.
163. It hadn't been done before. But the problem was, what do we know about 19th century society?
164. uh think about the victorian area concerns about female purity this notion that men were peering
165. into women's vaginas obviously was problematic right james marion sims is quoted in his memoir
166. he writes if there was anything i hated it was investigating the organs of the pelvis
167. he's essentially saying i'm not some kind of creep um so i can't look at women white women's bodies
168. right? Because that would be very immoral. The assumption was that at the time was that
169. enslaved women were by their nature of their race, not pure. That was limited to white women's
170. bodies. And therefore it was more appropriate to peer into a black body, a black female body than
171. a white So it was actually really essential that the first kind of examples come from the enslaved It a way of justifying it before they can kind of streamline it and standardize it as to something that
172. you know, all women should have, essentially.
173. Now, you mentioned Jane Marion Sims.
174. My understanding is that until recently,
175. there were statues constructed in honor in many cities,
176. including New York, if I'm not mistaken.
177. yeah what influences would you draw if any about the fact that he was still being honored until
178. recently well again and i'm glad you brought it up because i was actually meaning to as well
179. that's how we know that that we need to there's there's still reckoning that has to happen around
180. the history of gynecology and the fact that activists took a stand on this and demanded that
181. that the statue come down is an indicator of that.
182. This was, I believe it's 2018,
183. but it was the same time that the debate about statues in general,
184. Civil War, Southern statues,
185. whether or not we should be removing them.
186. So it's part of that whole movement,
187. but here it's particularly interesting for me as a medical historian
188. because it's a recognition that while he may have made valuable contributions to our understanding about gynecology,
189. enslaved women paid a price for that, and there need to be conversations around it.
190. That particular statue was very close to where his New York office was,
191. and it's a reminder of the importance that the people we should be talking about
192. are the enslaved women themselves, and three in particular, who we only know as Lucy, Betsy, and
193. Anarcha, to recognize what they went through as a result of his studies.
194. Now, who was Robert Dickinson, and what role does he play in your story?
195. Okay, so yeah, and again, I've tried to tell the story across roughly 200 years, so if we move
196. into the 20th century, Robert Dickinson was the president of the American Gynecological Society.
197. And he, so he lived a long age, but he was interested in female sexuality, roughly from
198. 1900 to 1940, 1950.
199. And people saw him because he took a stand on birth control
200. and being supportive of women using birth control
201. and that female sexuality was...
202. Sorry, let me just explain.
203. There's this shift from the Victorian notion of purity
204. to by the turn of the century and into the early 20th century,
205. this idea that women did have sexual feelings and that was perfectly appropriate,
206. that they were entitled to having feelings of sexual desire.
207. And Dickinson was really seen as one of these champions of that causes.
208. So many women saw him as kind of a hero within the movement.
209. When I dug into his records at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University,
210. I found direct evidence that among his patients,
211. he was also sexually abusing them.
212. And, you know, it made me sick to my stomach
213. to realize this, but it was further indication
214. that if we look back we can kind of trace sadly an ancestry of what I am calling white co who feel a sense of entitlement that embedded in the history of gynecology that they can touch and explore in ways that isn always in the best interest of their patients
215. It's for their own either pleasure or their own research interests, but it's not, again, it's abuse and we need to call it abuse.
216. So he plays an important part in that story as well.
217. You mentioned this phrase, white coat predators, and that leads me to this question.
218. What has been the role of activism, particularly by women, in helping to change the practice of OBGYN?
219. And has it led directly to more women practitioners of this particular field of medicine?
220. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mentioned at the beginning of our interview that I had written this earlier book on the history of the women's health movement. And that book is entirely about how the women's health movement in the late 60s, 1970s and 80s really took a stand and demanded some change.
221. When I lecture on this in the classroom, most of my Purdue students, when I say, how many doctors do you think were female in 1970?
222. And they're like, I know, I don't know, 60 percent. No. Do you know the answer?
223. Oh, me?
224. It's, yeah.
225. No, tell me.
226. It's 93 percent.
227. okay they're primarily white males and they are um essentially controlling the norms of of what
228. women can do and understand about their bodies and so the women's health movement comes forward
229. in and you know it's connected to the larger feminist movement but this group is really
230. demanding um that we need to consider why is it that we have uh white men who don't have um who
231. don't possess a female body telling us what we experience, how we should experience it,
232. whether we can have birth control, whether the pain we're feeling is real pain or imagined pain.
233. What can we do about this? And so they create these support groups to talk about it,
234. to research themselves. A group creates the book, Our Bodies, Ourselves with that in mind.
235. And it really galvanizes a widespread movement of women realizing for the first time really as a
236. as a larger cohort, that they are entitled to information about their body.
237. And perhaps they need to challenge this idea that there are quotas on the number of women who can become doctors.
238. So part of the movement is also to demand the end to these quotas so that you can have more women in medical school that can become gynecologists.
239. And so that's when we start to see the tide turn and a recognition that the women had a right to information about their own bodies,
240. but that women as a group are also entitled and have the brains and the ability to become doctors and to study their bodies as well.
241. So they're really key to this story. None of this would have happened without their role in it.
242. So what is a pap smear and what role does it play in your book?
243. So, yeah, I wanted to make it clear that, again, I'm not trashing gynecology as a field.
244. and the procedures that have developed have saved countless lives.
245. The suggestion isn we throw gynecology out the window It how do we decipher how do we entangle disentangle excuse me the threads of abuse from the valuable procedures that were developed
246. And of course, the pap smear is short for the doctor that created the procedure,
247. George Papinakoulou from Greece, who recognized that he came up with a procedure
248. essentially to detect early signs of, well, to detect cervical cancer.
249. And that's what in turn generates this idea of the routine gynecological exam.
250. That, you know, women every so often, it's changed as to how often,
251. but for years and years it was annually women 18 and over should see a gynecologist
252. and have a routine pap smear to check for any indications of cancer.
253. So that's basically what it is.
254. But it involves, of course, something that's very private.
255. And for many women, especially if you're 18 years old and you're going for the first time, this idea that frequently a male is going to penetrate you right now.
256. They've got a white coat.
257. They're supposedly wearing a glove.
258. It is not a sexual procedure.
259. But the difficulty is because we don't talk about it.
260. it becomes easier to kind of blur the boundaries between what is a medical procedure and what is a sexual procedure and what is a potentially abusive sexual procedure.
261. Right. And so it becomes really essential to have conversations about the appropriate way of doing a pap smear, of doing a pelvic exam,
262. of having a conversation so that the patient is aware of exactly why they're having it.
263. You wouldn't believe the studies that show the percentage of women who don't even know why they're having the procedure or what it consists of.
264. So having that conversation, having a chaperone in the room, particularly if it's requested, and discussing it, making sure the patient feels comfortable with the procedure.
265. Because what happens as a result of it being so avoided, you know, ask anybody if they've had an exam and they probably went.
266. It's not comfortable, leads people to avoid it.
267. And as a result, it leads to greater incidence of cervical cancer, greater incidences of
268. pregnancy because people avoid seeing a doctor, which used to be a requirement before getting
269. a prescription for the birth control pill.
270. So these conversations become really essential, right?
271. And so that we, so that people feel comfortable seeing a provider and don't turn it and recognize
272. that it's possible to have it without extreme pain or the potential for abuse.
273. Now, excuse me if your book doesn't cover this, but if I'm not mistaken, you talk about Henrietta
274. Lacks. Is that accurate? I briefly, yes, I do. I mean, she, because she, she is one of the examples.
275. I really just give her as a brief example of the fact that she did not receive the proper
276. treatment because she was black, that if she had been a white woman, particularly a middle-class
277. woman, her life might have been saved because she might have had one of these routine pap smears
278. that were unfortunately more likely to be conducted for white women than for black for reasons of
279. racism. And for understandable reasons that many black women would avoid seeing a white male doctor
280. because of racism and the potential for abuse.
281. So had she been seen, she might not have lost her life to cancer.
282. and yeah, so that's her role in my book.
283. Now, if I'm not mistaken,
284. she had an afterlife, so to speak, in the sense...
285. Yeah, with the HeLa cells.
286. Yeah, tell us about that.
287. Well, it was when she developed...
288. I don't want to...
289. It's been a while since I've read that story,
290. so I don't want to say anything inaccurate,
291. but her body produced these cells that were...
292. They call them immortal cells because they grew in a petri dish extremely rapidly.
293. And so researchers recognize their value and then use them for all kinds of research.
294. And now we heal cells are in all kinds of vaccines.
295. They have been used to save lives, but it was done without her consent and obviously without her knowledge.
296. So that's a fascinating story in and of itself.
297. And actually, let me just say one more word about that issue of consent.
298. It was done without her consent.
299. I just want to emphasize that, that these enslaved women were unable to give consent because they weren't, they didn't have the freedom to do so.
300. But also what I discovered, much to my horror, is I found 19th century gynecological textbooks, which essentially say, if you need to, you know, if you need to do a vaginal exam,
301. and this is particularly for pregnant women,
302. and they resist, proceed anyway.
303. Consent is not necessary.
304. This is written in medical books.
305. So think about medical students studying that,
306. and they're getting the message
307. that they do not need that consent.
308. That it's their right as a doctor to physically examine,
309. penetrate with a finger a woman's vagina,
310. regardless of whether they have that person's consent.
311. You can just think about how,
312. if we don't kind of have a reckoning of that,
313. that that was in textbooks,
314. we're never gonna reach a point
315. where we can all acknowledge 100%
316. that we need to be very careful
317. about how this exam is done
318. and the conversations that need to take place.
319. Well, I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave it there.
320. Wendy Klein, author of the book,
321. exposed the hidden history of the pelvic exam.
322. But thank you for joining us on Freedom Now, KPFK, Los Angeles.
323. Thank you again for having me.
324. This is Sister Flora, and you're listening to Freedom Now at KPFK 90.7 FM in occupied
325. Mexico, including Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara, 93.7 FM in San Diego, and streaming
326. live on the web at kpfk.org.
327. Today's program, as well as 10 prior editions, can be re-heard at kpfk.org slash audio archive,
328. and scroll down to Freedom Now.
329. For a truly alternative international perspective on world affairs, check out RTTV Russia, CCTV
330. TV China, and online at Presna, Latina, Cuba, Telesor, Venezuela.
331. News 24, South Africa, and Press TV, Iran.
332. We will now continue with historian professor Dr. Gerald Horn.
333. For KPFK Los Angeles this is Gerald Horn and with me on the line is Raylan Rabaka a professor of African African American and Caribbean studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the book Black Feminist Funk Funk Women and Black Musical Feminism
334. Thank you for joining us on Freedom Now, KPFK Los Angeles, Professor Rabaka.
335. Thank you so much for having me, Professor Horn.
336. Thank you. So why did you produce this book?
337. You know, I wanted to fill a void in funk music studies.
338. There's a tendency whenever we say funk to start and stop often with the great trinity, the great male trinity of funk.
339. Of course, I'm speaking of James Brown, Sly Stone and George Clinton with Parliament Funkadelic.
340. And there has been a paucity of work on funk women.
341. And in fact, there's never been a book-length work on women's contributions to the origins and the evolution of funk music, the way that women engage funk aesthetics, funk culture.
342. So beyond the music, I argue that funk is a movement that took place roughly between about 1965 and the end of the 1970s in 1979.
343. Now, what do you mean by black feminist folk?
344. Huh, a tricky question
345. I simply mean I'm developing a concept of black musical feminism
346. Where if you look at chapter one of the book
347. That chapter is on the black women's liberation movement
348. And I argue that during the black women's liberation movement
349. There was this thing called black political feminism
350. And so I'm really sort of trying to press the envelope to let folks know that there were many different forms of black feminism in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.
351. And so when you think about somebody, let's say, like an Angela Davis or the Combahee River Collective, you know, those are expressions or forms, if you will, of black political feminism.
352. However, I argued that there was a parallel form of black feminism taking place in music. Certainly once you get to Aretha Franklin's 1967 classic called Respect, you could go from there to Nina Simone's work in the late 1960s.
353. And then by the early 1970s, you have this explosion where soul music begins to morph into funk.
354. And so you have these iconic female funksters, if you will.
355. And so I'm developing a concept of black musical feminism.
356. And you can clearly see it's not just funk. It also goes back to soul.
357. We could even take it back to Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.
358. But in the 1960s, late 60s, late 70s, you have this thing called, you know, sort of black musical feminism that's really situated around soul and funk.
359. And so I had previously done a book called The Black Black Women's Liberation Music, where I really sort of engage a lot of those major soul sisters.
360. Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner and Etta James.
361. And so this is, in some ways, a sequel to the work that I did on Soul Sisters, where I'm really sort of turning very, very squarely onto women's contributions to funk music and the funk movement.
362. Now, speaking of which, who was LaBelle? What role do they play in your story?
363. Well LaBelle LaBelle is the most iconic funk group And so they grew out of as you well know
364. Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
365. And they got tired of the constraints of the girl group aesthetic of the 1960s,
366. which some people thought, you know, flew in the face of the emerging feminism that was taking place, you know, from the mid 1960s forward.
367. And so they became very exasperated, very frustrated with the fact that they were, you know, they grew into grown women and they were still expected to behave, if you will, like teenage girls and to sort of doll themselves up in what looked to be like prom dresses.
368. There was also like a pushback against a Eurocentric aesthetic of that, you know, again, straightened hair, cardigan sweaters, gloves and a very sort of, you know, they felt constraining conception of not simply womanhood, but African-American womanhood in particular.
369. And so LaBelle exploded all of that by really sort of taking on a more direct ownership of black women's sort of desires, their sexual fantasy and everything.
370. Obviously, they had afros. They didn't wear, you know, traditional conservative looking clothes for, you know, women in the music industry.
371. And they had these iconic space suits. So this is where you sort of have some early Afrofuturism taking place in black feminist funk during this this period.
372. And, you know, Professor Horn, let's be really clear there. Their hit record is about a sex worker.
373. You know, you know, their their hit record. We've all heard it. Their hit record is about a sex worker.
374. And so you can clearly see then that LaBelle was troping on or nodding to the fact that what I'm calling black feminist funk took place during the height of what was called the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
375. Now, you made reference to Patti LaBelle.
376. Yes.
377. From which the group takes its name.
378. Anything to add about Nona Hendrix?
379. Absolutely.
380. This was the foundational songwriter of LaBelle
381. Nona Hendricks was
382. I think today we would probably call her bi or queer
383. And so there was a queering, if you will
384. That went on in a black feminist funk
385. So again, we're talking about black women
386. Being able to own their sexual desires
387. And as we're going to see once we move forward
388. This becomes like a subtext
389. within the work of Black Feminist Funk, that in America at that time, there didn't seem to be
390. very many avenues for women in general and Black women in particular to express their sexual
391. desires and to articulate what sexual pleasure might be for them. And as you know, Professor
392. horn in the late 1960s coming into the early 1970s, there was a huge discourse within many
393. feminist circles surrounding what was called the big O. And by the big O, someone like a
394. Nona Hendricks meant, you know, the female orgasm. You know, a lot of men were completely oblivious
395. to the fact you know what I mean And so you have this explosion to where what I calling black feminist funk not only served as a soundtrack
396. to the black women's liberation movement
397. that took place between 1967 and 1979,
398. but it was also one of the major soundtracks
399. of the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
400. There were a lot of people, not just black women,
401. who were able to sort of get in touch
402. with their own sexual identities, their own sexuality by listening to the music, not simply
403. of black feminist funksters, but Afro disco divas like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Linda Clippard,
404. Diana Ross. I could just go on and on and on. And so there's a real interesting way
405. that black women's sexuality, instead of being seen as something provincial,
406. It was seen as incredibly universal, that it allowed a lot of different folk to get in touch with their sexuality, their sexual identities and their sexual expressions.
407. So who is Chaka Khan? What role does she play in your story?
408. Wow. Chaka Khan. Chaka Khan, as you know, got that name, that powerful name when she was a member of the Black Panther Party in Chicago in the late 1960s.
409. And she befriended Fred Hampton, who was the leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago in the late 1960s.
410. And there was a kind of radicalism that Chaka Khan brought to the music.
411. She is the most commercially successful funk diva, funk woman.
412. She received Grammys.
413. She obviously went on to have this incredible career, but she started her career with a band called Rufus.
414. And it was an interracial.
415. So it was a it was a mixed band of all men, by the way.
416. And she added this sort of vocal dynamism to the mix.
417. And there's an interesting story that I recount in the book
418. That Ike Turner came to Chicago, closed his eyes
419. And thought he was hearing Tina Turner sing over funk beats
420. And funk grooves and everything like that
421. And so he initially asked her to join
422. And be a background singer for Tina Turner
423. He wanted her to be an Ike Ed
424. Chaka Khan, of course, reading the tea leaves
425. you know declined and went on to have her own illustrious career instead of getting stuck under
426. Ike Turner which as we know Tina Turner liberated herself from that situation a little bit later and
427. so there's a sense in which Chaka Khan brings elements of Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin,
428. Tina Turner into the mix and synthesizes them into the funk aesthetic that allows her to sort
429. of get in touch, if you will, with some of the funk sensibilities of women sort of expressing
430. themselves more fully and more freedom. And so here, Professor Horne, I really want to underscore
431. that, as you know, the funk aesthetic is about freedom. The funk movement was about freedom.
432. And when we say freedom, because it's taking place during the Black Power movement,
433. freedom isn't simply social, political, cultural. It's also spiritual and sexual.
434. And Chaka Khan helped people sort of tune into some of that element. I would also be remiss
435. if I didn't talk about Chaka Khan's sense of fashion, that she was, I characterize her as
436. Afro-Bohemian, and that to a certain extent, what we're calling the
437. funk movement was really the African-American avant-garde movement of the late 1960s and the
438. 1970s. And so this is where you can see the black aesthetic of the black arts movement also comes
439. into play. I mean, that was very emblematic, if you will, of the African-American avant-garde.
440. And so this is where we get figures, as you know, like Emilia Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Tony Morrison,
441. Alice Walker, Maya Angelou. I could just go on and on and on. Ishmael Reed, Haki Marabuti,
442. and so on and so forth. And so there's a kind of avant-garde-ism that's taking place where Black
443. folk are experimenting and exploring during the Black Power movement. And it plays itself out on
444. many, many different levels. But the main goal for all of this is freedom. And yes, human freedom
445. in a general sense, but specifically black freedom. And then when you transpose that and
446. bring that to the black women's liberation movement, what we're talking about black women's
447. freedom, right? On a lot of different levels. And so it's a multi-level form of freedom.
448. And literally I've written a book about the soundtrack, right? To black women's liberation,
449. that this notion of freedom, they want musical freedom. They don't want to just sit up here and
450. be little pop divas. I mean, many of them rejected a lot of the Motown divas aesthetic where Barry
451. Gordy really sent, you know, sent a lot of them to this sort of glitz and glam school.
452. They pushed back against that. They're wearing denim. They're wearing spacesuits. They're where
453. Chaka Khan is wearing not very much at all. She was very famous for showing her midriff
454. and everything and her little belly button at the time. And she had this lion's mane of hair.
455. So it wasn't simply that Chaka Khan was vocally dynamic. In terms of her larger aesthetic, she's wearing headdresses, she's wearing Egyptian clothing, a lot of things from South Asia, from North Africa.
456. Like she's very bohemian, if you will. And so funk being incredibly emblematic of that, you know, that sort of avant-garde element. If you want me to give you sort of a masculine measure of that, of course, we go directly to Parliament Funkadelic, George Clinton's P-Funk empire. I mean, who can deny how avant-garde P-Funk, you know, Parliament Funkadelic was in the 1970s.
457. Now, what about Betty Davis?
458. And was there any influence on her from Miles Davis?
459. You know, I I I reversed that in the book.
460. So, yes, Betty Davis was influenced by Miles Davis.
461. But the inverse is also true.
462. True. OK, it was Betty Davis, I point out in the book that introduced Miles Davis to both Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, who were friends of hers.
463. It was Betty Davis who introduced Miles to the music, the funk music.
464. So not just the R&B, but the funk music of James Brown.
465. And so it was Betty Davis who was so influential, although they were only married for about a year.
466. and it was a very turbulent marriage, Miles Davis was so influenced by Betty Davis,
467. he put out a record in 1970 called B.I.T.C.H's Brew. I have to spell it out in case my mother
468. listens to this And so it called B Brew And that literally was his wedding present to Betty Davis who was about 20 years younger than him
469. So, you know, Miles Davis was still, you know, wearing these three piece suits and these incredible suits.
470. And again, Miles Davis was incredibly dapper. I mean, he got GQ Best Dressed Man of the Year, I think, 10 years in a row.
471. But Betty Davis got him out of those suits. He became just a younger, the feel more vibrant Miles Davis. And he began to experiment with his music, adding electronics. And so this is where you get people like Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea and Dave Holland and George Benson joining Miles Davis's group, which was a rotating cast of characters.
472. And it was Betty Davis who felt really suffocated after a while by Miles Davis. As you know, Betty Davis was a model and a dancer and somebody that was a promoter. So she would have these incredible sort of dance parties in clubs in New York.
473. and Miles Davis.
474. She took Miles Davis to
475. these sort of dance parties and he
476. said that he could feel
477. the bass in his chest
478. when he went to these spaces.
479. This was the age of rock.
480. He was particularly interested
481. in black rockers like
482. Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone.
483. And again, Betty Davis
484. turned him on to all of those.
485. And so in some senses, Betty Davis
486. actually changed the face not simply of
487. funk, but of jazz.
488. Right. And so she's kind of like a specter in the background that most people don't really talk about or they don't give her the credit that she deserves.
489. And in my book, she's in the foreground. And I talk about the way that her first album features musicians from Sly and the Family Stone, Santana's group, The Grateful Dead.
490. So she was able to get all of these Bay Area, you know, after her and Miles go through their breakup and their divorce, she moves to the Bay Area.
491. And so she's hanging out, absorbing all of this Bay Area rock and funk and soul.
492. And she mixes all of that into this incredible form of black musical feminism and black feminist funk.
493. But she does it with the blues aesthetic.
494. Her vocals are very guttural, very growly. In fact, most people said she looked sweet and petite, but she sounded like a lioness roaring. You know, if you listen to Betty Davis, even more than that, Betty Davis's work flew in the face of the politics of respectability.
495. There were a lot of sort of the quote unquote old guard of the civil rights movement that were incredibly displeased and frustrated, upset by Betty Davis's music where she talked about, quote unquote, tricking.
496. She talked about sleeping with multiple men and picking them up and using her good looks to get what she wanted.
497. And at the time, you know, in the mid 1970s, well, that was like shocking to a lot of people, so much so that many white feminists and the women of the NAACP ended up boycotting Betty Davis's music and her concerts.
498. And you know it ended up with her a lot of her records were taken off of radio
499. rotations and everything like that and
500. Her work is just so incredibly groundbreaking and so I mean I argue that she literally is the culmination of Black feminist funk because her work does grapple openly with race with gender with class
501. and with sexuality. Are there any contemporary examples of Black feminist funk?
502. I really appreciate this question. Ironically, it was two men who carried sort of Black feminist
503. funk into the 1980s. And that would be, of course, Rick Jane with the Mary Jane Girls and Prince
504. with first Vanity Six and then Apollonia Six. And those groups, as you know, are known for being
505. very sultry, being very sassy, sort of owning their sexuality in some very unique ways. I mean,
506. As you know, with Prince's groups, Vanity Six and Apollonia Six, they wore lingerie and negligee.
507. So the first time I ever saw a woman, you know, in lingerie was with Vanity Six, who, you know, her hit record was Nasty Girl.
508. I mean, you can see from the title of it. I mean, it was just a very fascinating thing.
509. So that's the 1980s. By the time we get to the 1990s, of course, we have to go to Michelle Indigiocello.
510. Michelle Indigocello as you know
511. Bass player and comparable songwriter
512. Vocalist
513. But again carrying that funk vibe
514. That black feminist funk vibe
515. Into the 1990s
516. And she's considered if you will
517. The mother of the neo soul movement
518. So even before D'Angelo
519. Even before Maxwell
520. There is Michelle Indigocello
521. And then of course the queen
522. Of hip hop soul
523. Mary J. Blige
524. I mean we already know Mary J. Blige
525. saying not only she covered not only Chaka Khan, but the Mary Jane girls, if you will.
526. And then we can fast forward to one of my own high school sweethearts, Erykah Badu,
527. who definitely sounds like Chaka Khan with hip hop sensibilities.
528. Right. She sounds like a cross between Billie Holiday, one of Chaka Khan's major influences and Chaka Khan herself.
529. So Erykah Badu being a synthesis, we could go to somebody like India Irie, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Jamila Woods, coming on down to our day, to so many folks like Summer Walker, you know, Coco Jones.
530. I could do this all day, but I know we don't have all day.
531. Finally, Raylan, Rebecca, author of the book Black Feminist Funk, what's next on your agenda?
532. You know, I have been quietly writing what will likely be the first critical and scholarly work on Kendrick Lamar.
533. Like myself, Mr. Lamar is very close with his moms.
534. He has a conflicted relationship with his pops and everything.
535. And Kendrick Lamar allows us to not only explore a history, culture, race, class, sexuality, but also spirituality in the, let's say, 2010s and in the 2020s.
536. And as you can see, Kendrick Lamar just became the most Grammy Award winning hip hop rap artist in the history of the Grammys.
537. I don't need to point out that Kendrick Lamar has a Pulitzer Prize.
538. And so there's a sense in which in my classrooms I have been using Kendrick Lamar's work as almost like a contemporary James Baldwin.
539. So if James Baldwin was a rapper he might sound he might rhyme like he might be touching on some of the topics that Kendrick Lamar is touching on The fact that Mr Lamar also grapples with mental health You know
540. he says that he's a Reagan. He's a Reagan baby, a Reagan era baby, because he was born June 17th,
541. 1987. So he's born during the crack era where there's a lot of gang banging going on. But,
542. You know, like me, his mom kept him up in the church. So he's trying to like, how do you navigate, you know, like myself growing up in the projects, but also knowing that, you know, I was scared of my mother, my grandmother, that I was up the gangbangers and the dope dealers and the pimps and the hustlers.
543. Right. And so there's a sense in which Kendrick Lamar's work allows us to really sort of explore big African-American, black American historical moments such as Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, the Black Lives Matter movement, Colin Kaepernick's NFL protests.
544. I mean, there's so many things that are unique about the first 25 years of the 21st century.
545. And to a certain extent in my new book on Kendrick Lamar, I'm arguing that he helps us sort of he provides a soundtrack to black life in the first quarter of the 21st century.
546. Well, Raylan Robaca, I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there.
547. But thank you for joining us on Freedom Now, KPFK, Los Angeles.
548. Thank you so much for having me. Take care. Peace.
549. In closing, we'd like to thank our guests, starting with Professor Wendy Klein from Purdue University in Indiana
550. and author of the book Exposed, The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam.
551. We also thank Professor Raelynn Rabaka of the University of Colorado at Boulder
552. and author of the book Black Feminist Funk, Funk Women and Black Musical Feminism.
553. Shout out to Dr. Gerald Horn for doing what he does best
554. and guiding this train of mental liberation towards pan-African enlightenment
555. for yet another Saturday.
556. Word to producer Sister Tej.
557. shout out to our spiritual backbone freedom now founder and ancestor baba didan kamadi bringing
558. us the african drumbeat historical calendar for the week abundant thanks to our marvelous engineer
559. and last but certainly not least thanks to all of our loyal listeners and supporters
560. it takes a village to build a revolution and freedom now is a village to be reckoned with
561. this has been brother brandon sankara and you can join us on facebook at freedom now gerald horn
562. You can email the program at freedomnow at kpfk.org.
563. But that's not all.
564. Go to the audio archives on kpfk.org, scroll down to Freedom Now, and you'll be able to hear this program as well as 60 days worth of prior programming here at KPFK 90.7 FM.
565. With that, we send you off.
566. And until next Saturday here at Freedom Now, we stand running our marathon ready for revolution.
567. Take it from me
568. Someday we'll all be free
569. Music