GRAND FRESH

RACIAL HAAABBBITS! How do white people learn to be white people? How does this affect us as people of color? This week we talk about racial profiling and more as tools of whiteness to make POC constantly on the edge of not belonging. The kicker is, most white people don't actively realize they're doing this. Whiteness for them, as a way of negating Blackness, becomes a habit. Habit is something that makes the world invisible, we don't think about the things we do when something becomes habitualized. We don't see our habits, but we see through our habits. We look at all the oodles of ways that racism becomes habitualized and how to change habits when it comes to race!  ENJOY and check out our live show in Brussels on Feb 29th

This message is brought to you by the realest! Viewer Discretion is advised.  Brussels as the new European capital for modern art? Fake news? Well regardless, do we even go to museums and galleries? This week we talk about Black/POC life in terms of city/rural divide. Is the city the only place we can go? We talk about the narratives we chase of having to live in cities to live a livable life and forget our sistren we leave in the country. It's a bit of a brain drain of rural life to seek community in the cities. Maybaby goes full country bumpkin and advocates for a life in nature, something we are continuously deprived of in cities!   Then we get on THIRD SPACES. Third spaces are outside of domestic and work life. Where do we go? How do we feel inside these third spaces? Can we feel comfortable in third spaces (museums for instance) that aren't owned by us? We flow question on question and have some illuminating finds on our lil convo. And never forget to moisturize in these cold months!!!

WE'RE OUT WITH EPISODE 4 FEATURING A VERY SPECIAL GUEST: ERIC CYUZUZO Eric is a Rwandese-Belgian, Brussels extraordinaire who is a jack of all trades. Currently working in a cultural institution and a past working in fashion, we talk about the qualms of why he became disenchanted with the fashion industry (spoiler: exploitation) and his journey in the cultural field. Even more we get on Noname's latest statement that she's quitting music because she doesn't want to perform anymore for white people. 

Welcome to the last installment of MIND YOUR BUSINESS. This week we're coming at you with a conversation on COMMUNITY. What is a community? How is it different from a scene or a society? A scene is common identities, a community involves kinship. We talk about how community is a gamble, a necessary part of feeling recognized as a person, but also risks erasing our individuality. We see communities both as toxic and the place where we search for care.   For many of us, community is the place where we have revelation, take political resistance, and learn how to heal from our interactions with the rest of the world. Still, particular communities are what are causing us injuries as QTPOC, both internally and externally. We get introspective of being there for our own communities and needing to step up!   We also get up on the distinction between local communities and online communities, how they relate to each other, and how we should be engaging in both. We globalizing community so we can act locally and in concert! But speaking of community, we catch up a bit on Burna Boy and our talk in Rotterdam (unfortunately unrelated…). ENJOY Y'ALL.

For this weeks episode, and the 2nd installment of MIND YOUR BUSINESS, we tackle the topic of toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is the phenomenon where men suppress their emotions and use violence as an indicator of power.  Repression of feminine perceived acts always comes back in terms of violence to the individual in question or to those who present in femininely perceived ways. How does the intersection of Blackness and gender lead to a double consciousness? As people who are reared with expectations to take up masculinity, what are the intersections between being an oppressor and being oppressed by the same system. EVEN MORE, we talk about the importance of vulnerability and the non-affordance of vulnerability to Black women in many social settings! Vulnerability is coming together, understanding what is happening to you, and being recognized for the words presented, which, is healing. TTYL XOXO

Welcome to SZN II! Part of a three episode mini series, MIND YOUR BUSINESS will be looking at some precarious connections between mental health and race. We look into mental health through the foundations of *gasp and silence*, psychoanalysis. Taken from our dear Carribean French thinkers (eyes sway to Cesaire and Fanon), we look at how being racialized effects mental well being. We look at projection and repression, of what it means for the psyche to experience racism and how it comes back in ways that we wouldn't think of. We go full on, A+, front of class student and talk about the Lafargue Clinic, the first affordable psychiatrist for Black people in the United States. The clinic took the social effect of racism as the cause for a series of mental illness for the patients, and above all listened to their narratives! We dig this all back up to think about how important mental health is in relation to social environment, since racialization leaves no one untouched. Freud would be turning in his grave right now y'all! 

Wassup everyone, for this episode we about to get in things! In this episode we talk about meeting Kimerblie Krenshaw (our Ohio QUEEN) in the Black Archives in Amsterdam. Then we jump into an intersectional research of the infamous Gaslighting. Gaslighting is a form of mental domination where someone makes you distrust your own thoughts or experiences, and tries to make you concede to their perceptions. "You haven't been well lately" "you're paranoid" "you're overreacting" become common weapons gaslighters use to make you question yourself. We ask how can gaslighting be used collectively, both in a raced and gendered way to erase the real experiences of marginalized identities. Google scholar could not hold a flame to this episode y'all!

  Hey Angels, we’re back with EP. #6. On this month’s agenda we get on the topic of Pan-Africanism inspired from our recent trip to Senegal and The Gambia. We give a lil tour of the amazing and awe-inspiring time we had there, and how it enticed us to think in terms of similarities instead of differences when thinking of African diaspora+Africans across the continent. How do we address humanism that isn’t complacent? How can we recognize our place, with given privileges, and be conducive to a Pan-African struggle? We tackle this and more (with tons of banter) to vouch for a more critical global solidarity movement y’all!! ENJOY

  Disclaimer: Jbaby outdid Whitney's voice on this episode, listener discretion is advised.   Welcome to the house of reparations. This episode is sadly only an hour long conversation of a 500 year dialogue so we keepin it (semi)concise and pumped this time. Restitution, emotional, and monetary compensations based around the Africa Museum and the colonial countries will be the topic of debate and demand. Case in point, we look into current reparation movements, i.e. the Nama and Herero people, and ask how can we give reparations without neocolonial states upholding what reparations are meant to displace. We touch on this and the peculiar Black Civilization Museum which has recently opened in Dakar.   ALSO heyyyyy! We're looking for a new concept for the final segment. DM/PM/send a carrier pigeon and let us know your ideas for the next episode! XOXO - GF Sweets   Side Note: This was recorded before we went to Senegal and The Gambia, saw the Black Civilization Museum, did all that ish and lived our life. AND our GF producer, Kaat, didn't pull up with us so we didn't record an episode there, sorry for playin y'all!

WELCOMMMEEE BACK YA'LL, it has been the longest hiatus but we've reTURNed with new vigor and tea. For this episode we are blessed to have Jesse Stanier as our special guest! She is an outstanding PHD student from London who works on the phenomenology of aging and is giving us peak conversations on allyship. This week we get on the topics of speaking "for, about, to, and with". We also get on with how to procure a call-in with your fellow allys that, lets be real, are doing THE most. Somehow and finally we arrive to the enthralling conclusion of Jbaby's problematic fav: ms.Azealia herself! "GRAND FRESH changed my life" - Audre Lorde

Whats good evvveeerrrrrrryyyone! This week we got our special guest Kim on deck whose doing research on coloniality and the body, so she came thru to enlighten us (hold the modernity reference). This week we talk about postcolonialism vs decolonialism, anti-blackness in the term POC, Donald Glover and the body, and finish off with some slam poetry ofc. To say the least Kim gets us HEAVY. We would like to thank our babies JB (James Baldwin) and Frantz Fanon for sponsoring this weeks content.

Heyyyy y’alll we’re posted with PODCAST #2. We get up on some important questions: FIRST, whats up Ms.Lauryn? A look into one of her most introspective interviews leaves us a second or two of thoughts of our yeaaaarrrning for a good comeback! We get a little more into our astrology and deliver a Doo Wop so harmonized Destiny Child watched US from Beychella. CATCH US ON IG: GRANDFRESH DISCLAIMER: During 8:00, I Jbaby, get too overzealous about my description on Reiki, without giving a full account of it. I was speaking more on the appropriation that the US and the UK has ushered on the art: it was developed in 1922 by Japanese Buddhist Mikao Usui, and has spread worldwide since. For a more in depth description of Reiki, refer to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReikiALSO, sorrryyy y’all we reference Kanye BEFORE his gruesome commentary on black slavery, looking back now we would not have chosen him as a refer. People like that do NOT deserve clout.

Podcast #1 y'alllll! In our first recorded date over a microphone, we dig into the real ish we POC should be focused on especially in Europe: get some vitamin D. We hit up on black 'DIY' culture and get neck deep on existential thot by living through a fire. BASED IN BXL WELKOM TO GF.