Coleman Hughes | The Deal w/ Nissim Black

[Music] hey coleman thank you so much for coming on the show such an honor to have you here on the deal man i really appreciate it it's my pleasure no pleasure's all mine pleasure's all mine so let's let's get into this really really quickly um i i have to ask you about this video because the video is fire the video is fire right um blasphemy i mean like i i i mean quite honestly i got i got a whole lot a lot of questions i got to ask you off camera about this video anyway but first off i want to ask you like what inspired you to do this i mean there's obvious things that you talk about that inspired you to do it but there could have been many other platforms as you're familiar with but what made you want to do it in the music video well i it was 2019 when i first started the song and i had just testified before congress and i was feeling the heat of a lot of people that didn't like my opinion in the room online and i was uh there was a kind of resentment of feeling like people were not taking uh my opinion in good faith or or seriously and engaging with it and there was a kind of frustration that i just felt i had to channel and uh that that that was really the the feeling that sparked the song so i made that beat and then it just the lyrics just kind of came this kind of flows i know all about inspiration you know it's very interesting they say artists usually when they're going through something uh makes the best music would you would you agree that you know that had it not happened you don't think you would have been able to pull off a record like this i think you you often have to have strong emotions about something where the where those emotions come from is less important but yeah i mean it has to be a strong emotion that is the genesis of a moving piece of artwork right right so you are let me get this straight you are black and you're also white you're mixed is that is that what you i think i caught that line inside the inside the song right yeah that's a lot that's more of a metaphorical line in the song i mean okay ethnically i i would you would one would probably call me half black half ethnically puerto rican my mom was puerto rican my dad okay he's black okay okay got it so here's some of them on my puerto rican side i'm also racially mixed like my grandma is like white puerto rican my other grandma was black puerto rican so even that is like you know i i do think at the end of the day almost every black person in america has some quote unquote white in them genetically for sure that's sure and a lot of white people don't know they have uh black in them so it's kind of not metaphorical no it's true i mean even if you look at the african-american population or how many people have native american in them also too everybody's like it's always been a thing for me anybody that's that's black by the definition of meaning that descendant of you know um slave slavery in america and i'm gonna say most of the people that came over even a lot of them even um are not 100 african jeans you understand what i mean it's not so this whole you know extra super pro black black everything you're talking about the color of your skin but ethnically a lot of people have a lot of other other uh you know ethnic groups you know mixed into the to the gene pool for sure right for sure so i want to ask you about this record so you said a few things i want to quote a couple of these lines that you that you had so you said look at my attitude after they called me a tom and a ray called me a [ __ ] it's a 10. you say well you said something else it's a 10 but um i keep it clean um i mean explain some of these bars to me i'm saying don't tell me who the fan losing a few of my friends yeah i've been booted from public events and it was almost and it was over something i said like talk to me about some of these things i'm just excited to hear about it i had officer tatum earlier on on the show and we discussed a few of these things but i'm really like interested to pick your brain on this side well yeah so the choice for me as a public figure as a writer has been to think for myself and to think what i actually think and risk being called names by people being called uncle tom being called a [ __ ] sometimes right and the choices between that and just shutting up thinking what i'm supposed to think not really thinking for myself and basically people pleasing catering to the people that that wield those kind of epithets as a way of policing the boundaries of thought so i've always chosen the first route and that's basically what that's about it's like i'm not going to stop thinking for myself because someone is calling me a name i mean that i think unfortunately those kind of slurs do work on a lot of people that don't want to that limit themselves and what they'll think so so as to never cross boundaries that will get them called names by other black people but i don't think that's that's just not the the way to be an autonomous uh self-driven individual right right of course it's not a i mean there's a few different things you know i've struggled with a lot of these things i myself i grew up in the hood i was very very um familiar with what that relationship was like specifically you know dealing with a few of the things you you know you were talking about in this record and things that just been going on specifically the relationship between the police and me being a black man you know what i'm saying in the hood growing up and and i always tell people like i was way more worried about the other guys i was beefing with then i was with the police you know i just didn't grow up with a crazy fear my fear of the police is i didn't want to go to jail but i didn't grow up ever thinking like you know i'm saying the police are going to shoot me i know some people could argue that we're living in different times but i think we're just living you know what i'm saying with different uh different people on the news to be honest i think i think you know it's been very very hard um to be able to have these tough conversations because there's so much noise in you being a public for being a person that's a writer you understand um the power of you know uh putting articles out and different things like that how strong do you think that the influence has been from the media in terms of uh being able to sway people in the black community on this issue in particular that's a great question and i i think the media the one of the primary powers the media has probably the most important power is not necessarily how they tell you something it's what they show and what they don't show so and i'm talking about national news i'm talking about cnn msnbc fox um the national news which is now what everyone watches it used to be people were more into local news but more and more it's become national and what happens is every day in this country like a billion different things happen crazy things happen in different towns and cities all across america and the national news picks and choose chooses you know two or three to report and the primary power they have to shape our picture of what's going on in our country is to choose certain things and to not choose others so for example um obviously the killing of george floyd was a huge story as it should have been but three years before that tony timpa who was a white man in dallas that was killed in in a very similar way to george floyd on camera a knee on the back of his neck for 13 minutes and the cops making jokes as they kill them right that just wasn't a big news story so basically what happens is you show all the examples of things happen to black people you show none of the examples of them having to white peop happening to white people and then people form the impression that oh this kind of thing only ever happens to black people because of what are being shown and what they're not being shown and that's the primary power to shape shape the narrative and it's i don't even think a lot of people in the news are doing that consciously or they they know what they're doing right right um that that has a real power to skew people's perceptions about what's right that's a great answer great answer i you know what i you know i myself you know it's very hard for me because when i'm having these conversations even with people that i grew up with or different things like that like the truth is is that nobody ever really thought it out you understand what i'm saying nobody ever really thought about it themselves you know i mean i remember being a kid and there would be this group of five percenter guys you know what i'm saying i think they were they you know obviously meant well so they would take us out of the class and they will pump us basically with their ideologies of how important it was as a black man to know that your god and whatever the case is but it was like you know all these things happening to people you know whether it's from the media whether it's from you know these type of groups or whether it's from what's happening entertainment in our culture it's really programming a person to think and and not to think about things their actual life experiences in other words like you know i was put on the spot after the george floyd thing and somebody was just like you know what's it like being black growing up you know in your neighborhood like you know you know did you experience racism what was that like how did that feel and i'm gonna be you know i have to be honest with people like i didn't but but it had had had it not been framed to me that way you understand what i mean i would have never i would have just been like yeah it's hard out here uh you know what i'm saying people are racist and all that because that's what i've been fed you understand what i mean but when i think about myself how many times did i actually experience those things i grew up in seattle seattle happens to be very very liberal very very politically correct there could be a lot of systemic things that are wrong but to say that i actually was experiencing racism or the police did this and whatever yeah the times i got jacked up by the police it's like you know i was doing something i shouldn't have been doing i looked like i wasn't doing something i should have been doing so uh i guess my question is to you are you thinking are you seeing the same thing you know for yourself also today a lot of people's opinions they don't even own those opinions they're not really theirs they really belong to what they've been taught from other people so what you're talking about has a name uh it's been given a name by by certain thinkers called the optimism gap which is you ask someone the same question in two different ways and they will give you two different answers so right if you ask someone how much racism there is in in the us they will tell you a lot there's a whole lot of racism how much crime is there in the us there's a lot you know whatever it is if you ask them how much racism is there in your neighborhood how much crime is there in your specific on your block the more concrete you make it so that they're actually thinking about their day-to-day experience the more people will say well actually it's not as bad it's not as bad right right so you know like if you ask everyone has have people been making economic progress the past 50 years you've got a lot of people saying no we're just as poor as we ever were you ask people are you doing better than your parents most people will say well actually yeah i am doing better than my parents so the more concrete you make it the more you get people to actually think about their own lives rather than these big narratives about the country that are influenced by the media the more optimistic people are about the future and about how much progress has been made wow that's crazy it's funny because you know not to get in i don't care if you're four or not i have to make that disclaimer just because i know that the you know whatever algorithms and whoever is watching or whatever not saying pro not saying against but the vaccine was a major issue this this past year right so i seen a video somebody has hit me of someone going around on college campuses and they were asking all these girls how do you feel about you know my body my choice everybody obviously agreed they agreed that it's okay to you know abort their child and and whatever else because it's their body their choice right so um and asked several different girls and finally they they after they were done asking you know certain amount of girls she went back and asked all these same girls how do you feel about a vaccine mandate with you oh no i'm definitely four and i'm definitely for it i'm definitely fourth 100 percent you know for and and then the question is well what does that do with my body my choice and everybody stumped oh i didn't i didn't think about that you know almost i almost didn't think about it so it seems like even in the midst of all of this sometimes you know it's just like you know i mean i found that to be very very hilarious but i think it's sometimes it's just one of those things where um you know i think people need to spend a little bit more time alone away from the rest of the world like and and and for me that's how i'm able to formulate my opinions i take time i go spend like you know an hour every day just talking to god trying to formulate what my life is and and what i'm supposed to be doing and why why was put here you know do you have any practices or anything like that that help you to stay focused on what you're pat because you could be indoctrinated also too on the right also too right where the person's right or they're left on the political spectrum you can hold and own opinions that don't really belong to you but as an individual so my question is for you how do you keep your opinions your own that's a really good question um well i try to always i mean meditation helps i'm a big meditator and um i guess the the way that helps is to make me a little bit better at not trusting my first reaction to everything so if i read something and i feel in my body i just i think it's [ __ ] i don't always trust that i think okay wait a minute i'm i'm being too reactive to this this is the kind of thing that's going to lead me to just confirm what i already believe so let me actually give this a chance let me give let me really uh right this is so much of a chance as i can and see see if there's anything uh to be gleaned here because i know that so i'm i'm doing that a lot when i'm reading things that i don't like i try to expose myself to things that i i wouldn't normally expose myself to and i think that helps me not get too deep down any rabbit holes that are misleading or or wrong and i try to also really detach my own i try as much as i can to detach my ego and identity from what i believe right because the moment i say it's a core part of my identity that i believe x y and z that's the moment that i'm gonna start believing things that aren't true because i'm trying to protect my identity right so i try to remain as flexible as possible as open to new facts and new information and new paradigms um not wedded to any one particular ideology because i think pretty much every ideology gets something right and something wrong right and um so and i'm hardly perfect but i try my best right right right right so let's let's get back to the music a little bit since uh we're playing a similar arena there so i want to know what what drove you to start producing and to start writing uh writing songs well i've been i've been obsessed with music since i was like 12 years old it's my first passion really and it's um you know like why does why does anyone get into music it's like you know it's the most beautiful thing in the world and it's it's sort of self-explanatory at that level but getting into hip-hop i didn't really get too deep into producing and writing bars and that kind of thing until i was 18. and it was partly around the time my mom was sick and eventually passed away and i was really using hip hop to cope with that loss a lot uh how old were you how were you when you lost your mother 18. oh wow wow i was 19 when i lost my mother well it's crazy hard to hear that yeah but i think you know we were talking earlier about how powerful emotions are usually the genesis of art and so that was a huge formative powerful experience for me that was the genesis of my interest in in like really writing full songs and um so i dealt with a lot of the emotions through that and ever since then i've been i've been producing and and rapping and trying to sing a little bit sometimes you know right right right yeah once you start one thing you know it leads to another you know um so like music is obviously the most powerful thing so usually there is always some type of influence that that sparks that who you who would you say with your musical influences and particularly in your type of position and holding the views that you do and even me i would say even becoming more of a religious person um over the years right so my musical influences um versus versus the fact that i probably disagree with them and and a political standpoint but disagree with them as an individual but like they're still dope you know what i mean so like i want to know if like you have to deal with that dichotomy also yeah sure i mean i've always found i can listen to music by people that disagree with my politics um a lot you know like i i can actually listen to music by people who i think have really wrong and kind of hateful views and if it's good music it's still it still touches me the humanity of it can still touch me a hundred percent um i mean as far as influences i have so many but you know as far as rappers go to narrow it down i mean i love tyler the creator earl sweatshirt i love uh kanye eminem mf doom kendrick lamar childish gambino chancellor earlier chance the rapper you like rappers you're like real rappers it's what you just j electronica right yeah i mean that's a good place to start right right now so you mean to the into the guys who i mean i would say kanye is both from both you know kanye would throw bars also too but he's just such a creative but also tyler the creator just very very creative out there type of type of guys that would just do things that you would never think on a record right um here's my question right now in terms of guys that are out that are positive i don't know if you're very familiar with this work one of the guys i think that operate in that space and i think this is a problem that's happened with hip-hop and it's sort of some of the problems that we're happening we're having also in um a lot of these social issues that have now become political there's a guy by the name of nf you familiar with nf okay so enough is from detroit uh i encourage you to look him up um in terms of content-wise he's clean meaning that he um he doesn't curse um he's he's almost like a clone of eminem i was saying a little bit his style's very similar he's also you know young white kid from detroit uh but i think he a guy like him is he's super talented i think he's talented than uh you know a good majority of these guys that are out right now that's my honest opinion and i feel like even me being able to ask you that you not know who he is although he has millions and millions of followers and and and broke hashem he's he's had platinum records but i feel like a guy like him in the way that the industry is gone he'll never get recognition because of the color of his skin is that ironic it's interesting yeah you know like obviously eminem was a huge deal as the really like the first white rapper where every great black rapper after him or many of them at least were influenced by him and respected him on irritable terms with the greatest black rappers so he really did he broke the it sounds crazy to say but he kind of broke the color barrier right for white rappers and there have been others in the in the meantime that i've really gotten a lot of respect in the world like mac miller um right but yeah i mean it's an interesting thing i don't know going forward the more and more race conscious that we get in the culture and the more and more anti-whiteness is sort of viewed as cool in the culture will will white rappers and i mean like if you're a young white rapper now i think it's in some ways it's easier to come up because you've had eminem and and those kind of people before you but in some ways it's harder to come up because if you say one wrong thing you make one misstep people are more going to be waiting to jump on you now than i think they were 10 years ago right right right and it's one of those things also too where i think in this particular case is sometimes that you'll never get that credit for really being that good because uh you know it's just been so such a grab on like you know this is our culture this is us this is that you know what i mean so almost feels like a person will never even get a chance it's been bothering me a little bit i just kind of i kind of want to know what you thought about it you know so you were a guest on the on the bill mayor show and you were there to debate the police brutality and you even testified in front of uh you know congress and everything to voice your opinion on slavery and reparations so take me through that experience really i really want to know like what that was like what's it like to be a guest on the on the bill mayor like tell me what that tell me what that was like well they put me up in a really really nice hotel like way too nice they treat all their guests the same and they have people on there that are like a-list celebrities so they treat everyone like an a-list celebrity pretty much by default which was really cool besides that there's actually nothing to say because it was it was during the height of covet restrictions in in la and wow la was extremely extremely conservative and they're co not conservative politically but like risk-averse in their covert policy so we i couldn't hang out with bill we couldn't have a get-together we couldn't have a party we couldn't talk i couldn't talk to anyone it was mass the whole time so it's just like straight to business straight to the show straight back home there's really nothing um i can say about it but it was i mean it was an honor to be on that show i really like bill's show i think he um he's one of the few voices on the left that really said is not afraid to disagree with the trend and you know says exactly what he feels and i think that's really important and that's why he's so recognized as far as congress that was kind of a circus that was much more it was way more disorganized than i thought it was and if you've seen the video of these testimonies it doesn't really capture the degree of chaos that was actually in the room like it felt like it could almost turn into a riot at any moment and like no one wanted to do like there wasn't that much security it was kind of disorganized it was like a lot of government functions it's kind of like half baked and like not that tightly organized it's kind of kind of a show right so do you feel like your voice was heard that's my question like you imagine with the circus is already one thing but then it's almost something like sometimes like you feel like you're talking to you know what's your thought are you going there trying to convince anybody are you are you only saying like listen if i make a few good points as long as this is filmed then i'm going to capture people out there but i'm not even thinking about you know trying to change anybody's mind up there yeah i was trying to communicate as succinctly as possible what i actually believed and i was trying to persuade people um and it's such a hard format because you know they they say they give you five minutes and like an idiot i actually took that seriously so i made sure i could say everything in five minutes and if you know for you know like five minutes you can't even say enough that would go into one op-ed right a short op-ed that that would take like 10 minutes to read so it's very difficult to communicate anything subtle right everyone else on the on the panel went like 10 15 minutes and i was like jesus i feel like an idiot i could have taken my time a little bit more um but at the end of the day i went up there i said what i thought and uh let the chips fall where they may right so the biggest thing as long as you feel you feel like you were successful in it i mean i just i would never know my biggest issue has been always with you know especially these things that got more poli political i would say um is that you know we have i i call them ride factors what i mean by ride factors like there are things that i'm real willing to ride or die for right um political opinions have never really been something i could ride or die for even though over this last year makes a person really feel like they have to but so there's a few different ride factors right ride for me means that ride or die things right so for political opinions i couldn't feel like i could ride or die for it although i could see how you know over this last two years or whatever as things have gotten crazy why people definitely feel the way that they feel but god is my thing like that you know so like if if i'm going to um you know have to ride about or die about an opinion it's going to be because it's my god opinion you know you understand what i'm saying like for my faith for me as my thing to where that's one thing that we're we're not gonna touch you know and i and i grew up like i said in in you know in seattle washington and it was a very politically correct place and i didn't really know that you know here we are in 2022 that a lot of the view views that i had when i was working for the ywca which was all about empowering women and fighting systemic racism that when i'm arguing with people you know at all these workshops and different things like that i didn't know that my my social views would later on become political views you understand what i mean so there's a few different things that i can ride or die for do you ever get to a point where you feel like it's just not worth it you know what i'm saying it's only politics this is a very small thing i don't know how religious you are not religious you are whatever what other thing could be taking you um into much more of a space of saying that this means more important to me than than politics right now but hopefully my question was a question yeah um i guess politics is important to me the culture of the country is important to me the direction of the culture is important to me so and and i do i feel like if i say it's it's not worth it to weigh in on something where i think weighing in is is useful right it's kind of like uh it leads to a vacuum that just other people step in and push their point of view right and it's like it's a little bit like the argument for why america should you know intervene in foreign affairs sometimes it's like we pull our troops out of there russia's going to put their troops in there china is going to take over right if we stop influencing it's just someone worse is gonna come in right so it's not that we wanna be doing that it's that someone's gonna do it so it might as well be us and i think a lot of times when i'm weighing in on political issues it's you know everyone's going to be weighing in and i know my perspective is it's it's often not going to be the dominant perspective and so i feel like i don't say something i'm letting i'm just letting other people dominate the narrative more and so i want to do my part right but um but yeah i mean at the end of the day you have to pick your biggest battles definitely right and so not everything is is a ride or die issue for me um not everything is an issue that i'm gonna stake my whole reputation on right yeah you have to sort of yeah you have to you have to pick your battles you have to pick your battles okay so my last but not least question i would say also to on this is sort of sticky so my understanding is i ask you a man of faith but you you consider yourself an atheist right i've been a jew i've been a muslim been a christian i've done my my fair share of whatever were there at any point that you were ever a person of faith or anything like that or you know how did it come come to be about that you would become an atheist uh no there was no point at which i believed in a literal god no i've done i've done meditation retreats i've done psychedelics i've felt i felt what you'd probably call spiritual experiences radical connectedness to all people and uh radical empathy for all beings and and i've had those kind of experiences i've also had you know strange experiences while meditating where my entire body felt like it almost like i had taken some drug and it was it was like tingling and shining head to toe i've had strange things happen and i so i tend to believe that people have um experienced the strange things they say they experience whether it's a spiritual experience a religious experience and so forth but i've never believed in a literal god that can hear my prayers or that um is is running things um from heaven uh so i never had that belief to begin with and i never uh became persuaded with with any particular religion so i've never i've never developed that belief really so it's like in the house you were raised that way like your family was that way or it was like i want to know how neither of my parents believed in god so they didn't raise us to believe um god and and i never went into any particular belief system on my own right so has there ever been a moment it's not my last question has it ever been a moment where you hoped that god exists um it's a good question thank you [Laughter] so at least one you have to think about so you know i don't i think it's it's hard for me to even [Music] really entertain seriously the idea that there is a god up there um to even hope for it i i'm not sure i can bring myself to hope for it sincerely right um on the other hand i think a lot of the attitude in life that would come with a belief in god i think is positive you know like this idea of being radically grateful for everything that you're given all of your talents all of your um like the idea of really meditating on your blessings in life i think is it's like the healthiest thing an individual can do is to look at everything that's gone well in their life and dwell on it and not really take credit for it understand that you've been given gifts right and to walk through life humbly as a result of that i think is is the like having that kind of attitude if when that comes from religion or belief in god i think it's a really beautiful thing um so i can't say that i've ever hoped that god is real you know call me back on my deathbed i might have a very different attitude i definitely thought that uh some of the attitudes that can come with a belief in god are deeply healthy deeply healthy amazing amazing okay listen man i i want to tell you man i'm definitely a uh a a big fan of everything i've been exposed to obviously i'm on god's team but other than that i i definitely want to tell you no doubt about it that uh you know just the the courage the amount of courage that it takes um to stand up and to fight even after losing friends and being ridiculed and and fighting for something that you believe i think that we all share that that is that it's it's a uh it's a it's something that definitely during these times we don't see a lot so that's why you know people such as yourself anytime it happens it's like it's so celebrated you know um from people who who want to have that courage but they don't necessarily have it so i want to wish you you know a blessing you should only go from strength to strength and you should have only success in every single thing you do i thank you so much for coming on the show it's my pleasure awesome thank you [Music] you