Conversation Series 133 – William Spivey

Greetings, everyone! I’m thrilled to introduce the next guest on The Contraband Wagon who will be joining me for a 2-hour conversation on race, William Spivey (our hundred-and-thirty-third Conversation Series event).

William is a writer on Medium (https://williamspivey.medium.com/) and Substack (https://substack.com/@williamspivey1) who I was connected to via our mutual writer and editor colleague Walter Rhein (https://walterrhein.substack.com/). After reading some of William’s race-centric pieces, I knew I wanted to have him on the show!

During our prelivestream Zoom call, I got to learn that William grew up in Minneapolis, MN and went to a recently desegregated school. Despite being on the cutting edge of desegregation in MN, he was largely unaware of that reality and of his blackness. It wasn’t until he attended HBCU Fisk University that he gained a higher level of awareness of his racial classification. But even then race was not central to his college experience or his life. It wasn’t until after college and particularly in the last fifteen years that William made a concerted effort to educate himself. He has been deeply investigating white supremacy and its relationship to his country and his life ever since.

Presently, William has a dedication to expose the history of creating slaves via rape as a vehicle for economic mobility for almost a century beginning in the late 1780s. This is a history that has been sanitized across the nation as “natural reproduction” or “natural increase.” We’ll also discuss the racial discrimination facilitated by the United States government in the administration of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) loans that represent examples of systemic racism responsible for past and present racial wealth gaps. We will also discuss organizing and creating space for race education at a time when our government is actively opposed to such teachings. And as always, we will talk about William’s evolution of race consciousness.

Join us for this wide ranging and illuminating discussion. Bring your comments and questions to the chat. I hope to see you there!