Tiffany Dena Loftin, the National Director of the NAACP Youth & College Division, stopped by The Karen Hunter Show, where the ladies discussed the genius of organizing.
During the interview, Loftin detailed the origins of her activism and how to ensure that our efforts are tangible and not just symbolic.
“So how do we come together? You know, every day I’m challenged with the work that you guys are doing, the work that you have always done, the work that you are going to continue to do.” Prof. Hunter asked her.
“This notion that somehow because of melanin or lack of melanin, a person is better or worse or more, more intelligent, less intelligent, more worthy, not worthy. How do we get together? “
Loftin replied: “Proximity is important in this work. Relationships, not networking, but relationships are important in this work. And I look at organizing power on a scale — I’ve been trained to look at it on a scale,” she explained. “There were things that we do that are like self-help and community service work.”
“So my brother, Trae Tha Truth, who is a rapper in Houston, Texas, who’s traveling around right now… Who’s the baddest brother ever, he is finding ways to take people who are homeless, who have skills and plumbing, and pay them to fix the plumbing in somebody’s house,” She continued, “He is donating water and food. He is finding clothes and toys. He’s doing all these things for the community and recruiting people to buy trucks and moving. He’s doing that. That’s self-help, right. It’s people in the community helping other people. He worked with Beyonce to do some cool stuff.
“So, that’s the self-help work. It’s a spectrum. then there’s the education work. And the education work is like, for example, what I had to do in Ohio for the training for the pregnant white woman who thinks she’s a Black mother. And so I do these trainings to educate folks and expose them to how policy impacts communities and then give them language so that they know how to talk about it. And then I tell them what they can’t say, like here’s language that you can’t use. So that’s the education piece.”
Watch the interview below.
