This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Welcome back to part two of You Can't SAY THAT.

[0:04] Tonya Pinkins: I'm Tonya Pinkins, and I'm speaking with playwright, television writer, Keith Josef Adkins.

[0:18] Tonya Pinkins: So let's talk about your playwriting.

[0:20] Keith Josef Adkins: Okay.

[0:21] Keith Josef Adkins: The plays that I'm, I mean, I've seen probably three or four of your plays, and I almost got to be in one, but, um, you know, Central Park.

[0:30] Keith Josef Adkins: You've got a play about the creation of Central Park.

[0:33] Tonya Pinkins: Would you want to tell us about it?

[0:34] Keith Josef Adkins: Yeah, um, that play, The People Before the Park, um, which is, um, supposed to have a production in the fall.

[0:43] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, haven't heard from the theater yet.

[0:45] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, but, um, it's a play that was inspired by, um, Seneca Village, which was a, um, black, um, community, um, 19th century black community in the central, what we now know as Central Park, um, around 81st, 86th Street, sort of Central Park West, going in, going east to maybe what now will be considered Sixth Avenue, right?

[1:11] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and it was a black community, um, that was, um, sort of governed by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church as well as the African Union Church.

[1:22] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and so many of the sort of residents were members of those two churches, right?

[1:28] Keith Josef Adkins: And then even prior to Seneca Village, which I believe was sort of founded in 1825, I believe, 1825 or 1826, there was another, um, community called York Hill, um, which was about like a block or two northeast of where we now, where we can, what they considered Seneca Village.

[1:49] Keith Josef Adkins: It was another community, um, there that was, um, predominantly African Union, right?

[1:56] Keith Josef Adkins: And so, um, and that community was around since the late 1700s, as far as documentation.

[2:02] Keith Josef Adkins: And the reason why we know that was because there was a, uh, a fugitive enslaved black man who fled to Canada.

[2:10] Keith Josef Adkins: And once he got to Canada, like I think in the early 1800s, late 1700s, he wrote that he had for a while sort of hid in York Hill, which in the, which we now know is the Central Park area.

[2:23] Keith Josef Adkins: So I just believe that the York, once York Hill was sort of dismantled because the city decided to put the water tower in that area and just sort of disperse those people.

[2:33] Keith Josef Adkins: They just went a little west and purchased land from some white people who they already knew.

[2:38] Keith Josef Adkins: So it wasn't like suddenly people came out of nowhere and created Seneca Village.

[2:41] Keith Josef Adkins: They were already in that area.

[2:44] Keith Josef Adkins: And so I was just very, very, like I am always very interested in sort of unpacking and looking at the black experience historically and future-wise, but, um, in this case historically, and how people navigate and sort of like the, um, the audacity of black people, the intelligence, the strategic moves of black people.

[3:02] Keith Josef Adkins: And so with Seneca Village, you had this community that came together who wanted to stay together to keep themselves sort of isolated from downtown Manhattan, which was basically the Wild West, um, where they would walk the streets downtown Manhattan, five corners, excuse me, five points, and other places like that, and can be murdered in a moment just for being black.

[3:21] Keith Josef Adkins: So being uptown was safer.

[3:24] Keith Josef Adkins: There was a safe haven, it was swampy, it was wooded for the most part, very, very rocky.

[3:29] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, wasn't easy to sort of, um, till the land there, but at least it was theirs.

[3:35] Keith Josef Adkins: And they were also property owners, partly because, um, in order to vote, um, in the city of New York, I mean in the state of New York, you had to have property.

[3:46] Keith Josef Adkins: So many, um, black people were being impacted by white policy and being powerless in those policies, they decided like let's even take a stronger step forward and, you know, make sure we're voting on behalf of ourselves, so we need to own some land.

[4:04] Keith Josef Adkins: And so many of the owners of the properties in Seneca Village, and even, you know, earlier with York Hill, but now just with Seneca Village, were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, some of whom didn't even live in Seneca Village, they just owned the property there so they could vote.

[4:22] Tonya Pinkins: Mmm, gosh, that's a piece of history that I did not know.

[4:24] Tonya Pinkins: Now you brought up two things.

[4:26] Tonya Pinkins: It took me on two tangents.

[4:27] Tonya Pinkins: I gotta hold both of them.

[4:29] Tonya Pinkins: The first one I want to hit is that, um, did you ever see that show, The Nick?

[4:36] Keith Josef Adkins: I have not seen The Nick yet.

[4:37] Keith Josef Adkins: No, it's on my list of many of the, it was interesting because one of the things I appreciated about The Nick was it seemed to depict the violence that happened against, uh, black Americans in New York in a way that I felt was authentic and was showing that this was not okay.

[5:00] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[5:01] Tonya Pinkins: And I, I'm gonna contest that with that.

[5:03] Tonya Pinkins: I watched the first episode of, of, uh, The Watchmen, and I felt that that one when I turned in and I saw that violence, I felt like they were not commenting, they were just showing it as if this was okay and this was fine, and that was so different than the way it was framed inside The Nick, even though in both instances no words were spoken.

[5:24] Keith Josef Adkins: Right.

[5:24] Keith Josef Adkins: There was a sense in The Nick that you knew, like this is not cool.

[5:28] Tonya Pinkins: Right, right.

[5:29] Tonya Pinkins: Um, yeah, you also have a history in, um, finding people's African heritage.

[5:40] Keith Josef Adkins: Yeah, we, uh, yes.

[5:42] Keith Josef Adkins: Uh, yeah, Africa, yes, African heritage.

[5:45] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, more specifically, their black American and African and/or African American, um, ancestry or genealogy.

[5:53] Tonya Pinkins: How do you do that?

[5:53] Tonya Pinkins: Because I've done ancestry.com, I've done the, uh, national, what is it, National Geographic, the Human Genome Project.

[6:01] Keith Josef Adkins: Okay, right.

[6:02] Keith Josef Adkins: And that stuff doesn't seem very accurate at all.

[6:04] Keith Josef Adkins: It's like sort of isolating you by a community, and, and we know that two Yorubas have more diverse DNA than any two people anywhere on the planet who leave the continent.

[6:15] Tonya Pinkins: So tell me more deeply about this tracking people's ancestry.

[6:20] Keith Josef Adkins: Yeah, I mean, for me, like, I mean, what I do, um, is I build, I build family genealogies and family trees.

[6:27] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, I'm not, um, in the business of DNA testing or anything like that, so I can't help anyone find out any specific ethnic group they come from within Africa at all, like any kind of scientific thing.

[6:40] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, but I am, I am able to, um, build trees for, I've had at least 50 clients, 50 black families that I've built trees and built genealogies for over the last decade.

[6:53] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and you know, and so for me, you know, um, you know, so the origin story of all that is my grandfather was, my maternal grandfather told me his family genealogy when I was a kid, and I had no idea he kept telling me this person, their name and their mother and their father, and I was like the only one of the grandkids who was sort of spouting what he had told me, and I felt a little bit like a nerd.

[7:14] Keith Josef Adkins: I don't know what, why he had told me, whatever.

[7:16] Keith Josef Adkins: And as an adult, I was like, wow, I want to know more about what he, what he sort of instilled in me.

[7:20] Keith Josef Adkins: And then I just started doing research.

[7:22] Keith Josef Adkins: I went to the Mormon genealogical library, discovered they had all this documentation because the Mormons believe, I think they want to gather as many ancestors or many people as possible in the hereafter.

[7:34] Keith Josef Adkins: There's some, there's some kind of religious sort of, um, mission around their genealogy.

[7:38] Keith Josef Adkins: It's not just they're just looking for their family.

[7:40] Keith Josef Adkins: It's like some kind of heavenly, to be with the Heavenly Father, the more people you can gather in your family, like the better, or something like that.

[7:47] Keith Josef Adkins: I could be, um, sort of not languaging that correctly, but I know there is a religious sort of element to their genealogy, but their libraries are packed with information.

[7:56] Keith Josef Adkins: And so I was able to find my grandfather's family as well as my grandmother's family, and because of that, I just expanded all four grandparents, and I found documentations and wedding certificates and death certificates and births and migratory information and, um, lynching information.

[8:13] Keith Josef Adkins: It was just packed with information, right?

[8:15] Keith Josef Adkins: And so I did that for myself, and then I started doing it for others.

[8:19] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and then I did so many families that I began to have a sense of if you said a last name, I could tell you what part of the country that black family came from.

[8:30] Keith Josef Adkins: And, and so sometimes people will tell me stuff about themselves, and they'll, and I'll ask them their last name, and they'll tell me some narrative that isn't true because I'm like, that's not true because those people only lived on that side of the river, you know.

[8:42] Keith Josef Adkins: So I'm, so black people gotta be careful when they talk to me about, you know, being part Cherokee and stuff like that.

[8:47] Keith Josef Adkins: I'm like, oh, okay, well, that you ain't really part of Cherokee because those people weren't Cherokee.

[8:51] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, but, um, but even with the Cherokee part, like what's really fascinating that many black people, most of the clients that I had initially, like maybe the first 15, all wanted me to find their Cherokee ancestor, all of them.

[9:06] Keith Josef Adkins: And it was always a woman, it was never a man, and she was always, her hair was always so long, she tripped over it.

[9:13] Keith Josef Adkins: You know, it was the same story.

[9:15] Keith Josef Adkins: I was like, wow, are you always related to each other?

[9:17] Keith Josef Adkins: What's going on here?

[9:18] Keith Josef Adkins: And so, um, but what I did discover was there is some truth in our sort of sort of Native American ancestry because of the Southeast had a sizable population of, uh, what they call mixed race Cherokee or mixed race Indians by the mid-700, the mid-1700s or the mid-18th century.

[9:37] Keith Josef Adkins: And so if you, and so if you had someone like that in your ancestry, say like a fourth-grade grandmother, and she ends up having 150 to 200 great-grandchildren, and those 250 great-grandchildren also have grandchildren, all those people can claim that same ancestor and say, Oh, yes, I'm part Cherokee.

[9:58] Keith Josef Adkins: So there is some, there is some truth to it.

[10:01] Keith Josef Adkins: You know, it's just I think people are kind of lost in the narrative of it all.

[10:04] Keith Josef Adkins: Narrative, narrative of it all.

[10:06] Keith Josef Adkins: But my bigger point is, um, I just became very, very fascinated in helping black people, black families sort of find out more about their American experience.

[10:16] Keith Josef Adkins: Because I think it was often sort of, you know, um, uh, erased and or not considered urgent or important.

[10:24] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, we were taught things that were not about ourselves or misinformation about ourselves.

[10:28] Keith Josef Adkins: We were not taught the micro specificity of who we were and our grandparents and great-grandparents' journeys.

[10:35] Keith Josef Adkins: So I, so for me, it's like really a very revolutionary act to find, um, and build trees for black families.

[10:43] Tonya Pinkins: And how many, how many, uh, grandchildren did your grandfather have?

[10:48] Keith Josef Adkins: My grandfather had 11 grandchildren.

[10:51] Tonya Pinkins: Why did he tell you?

[10:54] Keith Josef Adkins: I don't know.

[10:56] Tonya Pinkins: Of course you know.

[10:58] Keith Josef Adkins: Why do you think?

[11:00] Keith Josef Adkins: Well, I mean, I don't know, because I mean, one thing, I was um my when my mother went to work, when my parents went to work, my grandmother, my mother dropped me off of my grandparents um before before I started school.

[11:12] Keith Josef Adkins: So I would I was dropped off there and I was around them.

[11:16] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and then she would pick me up at three o'clock and take me back home.

[11:19] Keith Josef Adkins: But I spent the day with them, and I think perhaps because I was around them so much, and perhaps I there, you know, I sort of uh expressed some eagerness and was a curiosity about many things.

[11:32] Keith Josef Adkins: Um my grandfather probably said, Well, here's the one that's gonna, I'm gonna store the history within this kid.

[11:38] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, he was midwife and you to be the next Grio, right?

[11:42] Keith Josef Adkins: Yeah, yeah.

[11:43] Keith Josef Adkins: No, it's true.

[11:44] Keith Josef Adkins: It's true.

[11:45] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, so yeah, so yeah, but I'm I'm thankful, I'm thankful that he did that and very grateful um because I didn't know that as an adult it would turn into such a significant part of my life.

[11:57] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and even you know, in a way, inform my interest in the future, you know, in Afrofuturism and sci-fi, you know, sort of understanding the past helps me, not helps me, but I think it triggers an urgency about rebuilding a future.

[12:14] Keith Josef Adkins: Um and sort of reimagining the future because I saw what the past looked like in both its ugliness and its beauty.

[12:22] Keith Josef Adkins: And so, like, can I craft something like that for the future?

[12:25] Keith Josef Adkins: You know?

[12:26] Keith Josef Adkins: So, so yeah, it's been it's been a very significant part of my life, and I'm very grateful for it, you know.

[12:31] Tonya Pinkins: Mm-hmm.

[12:32] Tonya Pinkins: Now, you also have uh a show.

[12:35] Tonya Pinkins: I mean, I saw uh the first episode of it of a kind of sci-fi horror piece, The Abandon.

[12:42] Tonya Pinkins: You know, that's my my favorite world of sci-fi horror.

[12:45] Tonya Pinkins: So The Abandon.

[12:46] Tonya Pinkins: Is there gonna be more of The Abandon?

[12:47] Tonya Pinkins: And I know you were even having some readings for another sci-fi piece.

[12:51] Tonya Pinkins: I wasn't sure if that was uh an extension of The Abandon or what.

[12:55] Keith Josef Adkins: Right.

[12:55] Keith Josef Adkins: So yeah, The Abandon, um I created a few years back um with the intention of it being a full series, like a you know, a six-episode series, um, like 20 minutes each web series.

[13:09] Keith Josef Adkins: And um, you know, got all the funny I could for that first episode.

[13:12] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, very much inspired by um The Descent, which was um a sort of sci-fi horror film um from back, I think like 2008, I believe, about a group of...

[13:12] Tonya Pinkins: Is that the women down in the cave?

[13:25] Keith Josef Adkins: Yes.

[13:25] Keith Josef Adkins: Okay, right, yes.

[13:27] Keith Josef Adkins: You're like, is that a movie?

[13:29] Keith Josef Adkins: Because when I saw that, I was I didn't even finish it the first time.

[13:31] Keith Josef Adkins: I was like, look, just these women fighting with each other.

[13:33] Tonya Pinkins: That's a horror enough.

[13:35] Keith Josef Adkins: Exactly, right?

[13:36] Keith Josef Adkins: It's so it's such a smart film because it's like you you place people together who have already have tension, you put them in a secluded, isolated environment, which is for them caves underground, and then you sort of introduce like this other sort of entity that they have to fight, and then it that triggers their sort of you know, survival instincts, then therefore that triggers their animosity, you know.

[13:59] Keith Josef Adkins: So it's a great, great, sort of very simple um uh way of telling story about character in sort of in close relationships, which is what I wanted to do for um The Abandon with black men.

[14:11] Keith Josef Adkins: I wanted black men to go on a hiking trip and find themselves in the middle of something, you know, in the case of The Abandon, and there's like you know, a possible alien invasion, um, alien occupation of the world, and they just happened to be camping while it happened while it happens, and it exposes their conflicts and sort of interpersonal sort of demons and whatnot.

[14:30] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, but yeah, so that so the mission of that was to have um six episodes.

[14:34] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and then after the first episode launch, which was very, very successful, like it was just it just went crazy.

[14:41] Keith Josef Adkins: I was like, wow, this is like people really wanted to see like black folk in a sci-fi world, even though when I initially pitched it to um an executive, like an industry executive from some major company, Tonya.

[14:55] Keith Josef Adkins: It was interesting.

[14:56] Keith Josef Adkins: They told me that um, oh well, that's very interesting, but they're the black people don't watch sci-fi.

[15:04] Keith Josef Adkins: There's no audience for it.

[15:05] Tonya Pinkins: I was like, huh.

[15:07] Keith Josef Adkins: So that made me go out and do it myself.

[15:08] Keith Josef Adkins: I was like, you know what?

[15:09] Keith Josef Adkins: I'm gonna do it myself.

[15:10] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, but what happened was, and it happens often, I believe.

[15:14] Keith Josef Adkins: I learned such a big lesson in this is that I had several people come to me wanting to support the project um financially.

[15:22] Keith Josef Adkins: Um and so they dangled money in my face anywhere, it was anywhere from 50,000 to a million dollars angled in front of me as far as like we can make this happen, right?

[15:32] Keith Josef Adkins: People were coming from out of Facebook, like Facebook messaging me from Hollywood, you know, all that was going on.

[15:38] Keith Josef Adkins: And I got so amped.

[15:39] Keith Josef Adkins: I was like, oh my god, this is about to blow up, oh my god, you know, and so I I wrote all the other episodes and I was so excited, and then eat one by one, each one of those sort of um danglings just sort of went away.

[15:52] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, you know, money didn't come through, they they were now not interested, they moved on to something else.

[15:57] Keith Josef Adkins: So now I'm left with nothing.

[15:58] Keith Josef Adkins: I'm left with a year and a half later waiting for monies to happen with you know the the urgency behind it was gone.

[16:06] Keith Josef Adkins: So then I wrote a feature version of it, which I think you may be talking about um feature film version of The Abandon.

[16:14] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and um I'm still trying to kind of get that made.

[16:17] Keith Josef Adkins: It's definitely a sample that's being used often.

[16:20] Keith Josef Adkins: I have a couple people looking at it now.

[16:22] Keith Josef Adkins: I have another film though that is a horror film.

[16:25] Keith Josef Adkins: Um that another writer, uh Devin Hawk and I um co-created and wrote.

[16:30] Keith Josef Adkins: And we are actually that is going to be produced.

[16:32] Keith Josef Adkins: We're just on the phone with the producers um yesterday about COVID-19.

[16:37] Keith Josef Adkins: We call it the COVID-19 proofing the script.

[16:41] Tonya Pinkins: Um what does that mean?

[16:43] Keith Josef Adkins: Means basically like looking at scenes and taking out all the crowd scenes, um, and sort of downsizing characters so that way you have less characters, less actors sort of to be responsible for the you know, responsible for their health.

[16:59] Keith Josef Adkins: Um and like making sure, like, you know, like there's enough outdoor shots and trying to keep anything that's inside a space, like can you do it outside the space, you know, things like that.

[17:10] Keith Josef Adkins: So um, but yeah, so that that that film um which is called um uh The Nightman uh is uh it's coming to uh production soon.

[17:23] Keith Josef Adkins: I hope.

[17:23] Tonya Pinkins: I don't awesome.

[17:25] Keith Josef Adkins: We'll see.

[17:26] Keith Josef Adkins: I just made my first uh feature film in the fall.

[17:30] Tonya Pinkins: Oh nice.

[17:31] Keith Josef Adkins: Which is a socio-political horror film, and we're in post now, and uh hopefully it'll find a home because content is king at the moment.

[17:38] Keith Josef Adkins: They won't exactly people who have things somebody was just saying to me yesterday that it's really a good time for people who have things in post production because companies are buying, they they need content.

[17:38] Tonya Pinkins: They need content.

[17:56] Keith Josef Adkins: You know, I think I even heard that there are people are going some of the companies and networks are going back into the vault of things that they said no to.

[18:03] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I'm sure that's happening.

[18:05] Keith Josef Adkins: And pulling that back out.

[18:06] Tonya Pinkins: Yep.

[18:07] Keith Josef Adkins: Yeah, I'm sure we're gonna see a lot of stuff that got shelved, a lot of pilots that got shelved.

[18:11] Keith Josef Adkins: We're gonna see a lot of content that got shelved.

[18:13] Keith Josef Adkins: I'm sure there's millions of things because people are consuming content so rapidly during this time, and this is gonna go on for at least another six months.

[18:21] Tonya Pinkins: Yep.

[18:22] Tonya Pinkins: Uh yeah, I agree with you.

[18:24] Tonya Pinkins: I agree with you, definitely.

[18:26] Tonya Pinkins: You're a very seemed like to be a very spiritual person to me.

[18:30] Tonya Pinkins: Can you tell me something that seemed like a bad thing at the time, but it set you up for something good later?

[18:41] Keith Josef Adkins: Hmm.

[18:43] Keith Josef Adkins: That's very that's a very wonderful question.

[18:47] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, you know, I think I think about this often.

[18:50] Keith Josef Adkins: I think about I'm from Ohio, I'm from Southern Ohio, Cincinnati specifically.

[18:55] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and Cincinnati was and still is, for the most part, it's improving, but a very ultra-conservative, um, very sort of strongly Christian in on sort of in a right wing kind of way.

[19:10] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, extremely racist, um, which sometimes comes out of the conservatism, um, and a very absolute world where things are black and white.

[19:22] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and I and I grew up in that environment where there was a certain expectation of me because I was just part of the app, I was just part of the culture of Southern Ohio, right?

[19:35] Keith Josef Adkins: And my mother was a maverick and progressive, and so was my dad.

[19:41] Keith Josef Adkins: But my dad was much more traditional in sort of the way he behaved and sort of like his interests, but he also was a maverick in progressive thinking.

[19:49] Keith Josef Adkins: And so they both kind of showed me that there was a world outside of Cincinnati where I could sort of define myself.

[19:58] Keith Josef Adkins: I didn't need to sort of rely on the definitions of an absolute world.

[20:19] Keith Josef Adkins: I felt like I was walking around with definitions that other people had sort of imposed on me, and I couldn't find myself.

[20:34] Keith Josef Adkins: And got into the world, I really devoted and decided to commit my life when I was relatively young, like in my early 20s, mid-20s, that my life was going to be dedicated to self-definition.

[20:46] Keith Josef Adkins: And so that required a lot of unpacking of other people's expectations, a lot of other people's insecurities and fears and all of that.

[20:55] Keith Josef Adkins: And that that's a lifetime of work to unpack, you know, just not your sort of immediate experience of growing up in a certain place, but even the generational expectation and traumas that are imposed upon you as a black person, as an American, as a human.

[21:10] Keith Josef Adkins: And so I think I'm very intentional about always being aware that I have the license to unpack and find myself.

[21:20] Keith Josef Adkins: And so I'm never I've never like, I feel like, you know, every six months, I'm like, oh my God, I feel like a brand new person, you know, because I'm constantly, you know, finding myself, you know.

[21:31] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, and I think maybe that, you know, is translatable.

[21:35] Keith Josef Adkins: That's being translated as a spiritual sort of journey. And I think it is, you know, I feel like I, you know, I'm always in conversation with the universe, with God all the time. And I thank it for showing me that self-definition was going to be my salvation, you know? So, with your ongoing self-defining becoming, what are you saying yes to and what are you saying no to? And how do you find the way to say no?

[22:12] Keith Josef Adkins: Yes, yes, God. You know what's interesting, Tonya? Like, initially, when the stay-at-home order happened and the pandemic sort of really showed its face, right? And everybody was just like, "Oh my God," there were deaths and all that, like I really didn't have any, I didn't, I was speechless. I didn't know what to say. And I was also in the middle of curating some plays for the Apollo Theater and sort of, you know, the New Black Fest was coming up, and I had all these very specific things and ideas about what I wanted to do, sort of politically and artistically. And then this happened and it just silenced me. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I don't even know what to do." Like, what do you say to this?

You know, let me take some time to just be still and just figure out where I am and what is happening to all of us. And out of that came a disinterest in anything that wasn't speaking on the behalf of Black well-being. Not interested. No, no interest for it. I don't want to just have people inviting me to sort of participate in play readings, virtual play readings. And I was like, "Well, if the play that is happening has something to do with our wellness and what's happening right now in our current situation, cool. But if it's not, I don't want anything to do with it." That's just where I am right now. So even I told my managers, it got to the point I told my manager, "Hey, I don't want to have any more conversations with producers or any production companies if the content they're interested in has nothing to do, if it has nothing to do with Black folks or marginalized experience or the current state of the world."

Like, and that's where I am now. I think I've always kind of been that way, but I think this, you know, speaking back to what you were saying about what triggered you from one thing to the other, this pandemic has definitely triggered a part of me that has always wanted to stand strong in a certain sort of POV, you know, and now I'm just like, "Nope, if it ain't got nothing to do with that, I don't want to be, I don't want to have anything to do with it." I'm not interested.

[24:22] Keith Josef Adkins: And you say that you are busier than you've ever been.

[24:26] Keith Josef Adkins: Yes. It's crazy. Yes. So yeah, that's where I am. That's where I am. And now, you know, even now I, you know, things are coming to me. Like, you know, I think taking this time and just being still, even though it's difficult because, you know, like you said, like the COVID-19, the pandemic thing, this could be going another six months and beyond. And so I'm aware of that, but now I feel a little bit more empowered by just being still and looking at the world and looking a little ahead in the future, which is what I always do. Like I just say, "Okay, what's gonna happen in two months?" Right? And so I'm much more able, I'm much more inspired and focused to create work, to participate in conversations about work, you know, and be very specific about how to curate and engineer things that I think are important to who we are right now.

And because, you know, like you and I were just saying earlier, you more than I was in the beginning, like this has really exposed a lot about this pandemic has really exposed a lot about the vulnerability of the Black community in this country, and just historically so. And so, what can we do as thinkers, as artists, as human beings to rectify that vulnerability? And that's not to say that we're not empowered people or extremely intelligent, because that's a given, right? That's one of the reasons why they try to keep us vulnerable. But you know, I think that even more so for me, I want to be much more active and much more deliberate about sort of finding ways to minimize the vulnerability, you know. And that's where I am.

[26:20] Keith Josef Adkins: I feel like Ava, Lena, Issa are really, you know, making this space and bringing and midwifing other artists through. Do you see that that will continue, you know, post-COVID, that they will continue to have these platforms to keep bringing new voices into the television film world?

[26:45] Keith Josef Adkins: Yes, I do believe so. I think Ava in particular is interesting because she does seem to be very invested, even though she says she never thought she would sort of be a political filmmaker, but she seems very much invested in those type of stories and sort of exposing those truths. And I think for me, she is someone that is a beacon as far as like wanting to continue to tell those kind of urgent stories and being sort of committed to that kind of urgency. I think Lena and Issa are continuing to create opportunities which allow for other artists to find their urgency and sort of, you know, be committed to urgency. So all of them are equally sort of important for different reasons, you know. But I definitely feel like, you know, it's undeniable that our story and experiences in this country are integral to changing the way this country is looked at and how it sort of navigates.

It's I think it's always been us, like you said, it's always been us. You know, as far as the democracy is concerned. Like, and I think that even if there is any lull that somehow the white institution decides, "Oh, we want to tell Black stories because we understand what's going on too," which that is also going on. You and I are aware of that, right? I think the, like you were saying earlier, like the gorilla sort of movement that is necessary right now because we don't know what's gonna happen to the smaller sort of institutions and entities, it's very important that we get on the ground and just unapologetically in your face tell good quality stories about who we are, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Because I think it's just what we need, you know. And thankfully we have Ava, Issa, and Lena and others who are sort of, Charles King, Macro, yeah. Right, exactly. But we also can't wait for all that.

[28:52] Keith Josef Adkins: You know, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I have one last question for you in our COVID-19 edition. What are you consuming? Uh movie, book, television film that is, you know, what do you, what do you, what are you nourishing yourself on right now?

[29:13] Keith Josef Adkins: I'm consuming television. You know, tell us what, let's see. I've watched Little Fires Everywhere, which I thought was really interesting storytelling and interesting sort of racial gender conversation. I watched the Malcolm X documentary, which broke my heart and blew my mind.

[29:42] Tonya Pinkins: What's that on?

[29:44] Keith Josef Adkins: That's Netflix.

[29:45] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, you're talking about the, are you talking about the Miles Davis?

[29:50] Keith Josef Adkins: No, Malcolm X.

[29:52] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, okay. I don't even know that one.

[29:53] Keith Josef Adkins: Okay, yeah, the Malcolm X doc. Um, okay, and what else have I? Um, what's your reading?

[30:01] Keith Josef Adkins: You know, I just finished reading in Jameson's, you know, sci-fi writer's newest novel, which is set in New York. Um, what's it called? The City We Became.

[30:15] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[30:17] Keith Josef Adkins: Um, which is really, really good. Um, very inclusive, like inclusive world. Like everybody is represented. It's really kind of wonderful. Um, and yeah, I think, I mean, that's pretty much it. You know, honestly, like I said, like, you know, there's been a lot of time where I'm just sort of still and just sort of chilling. I'm, you know, experimenting with a lot of vegan cuisine and I'm trying to master the, you know, oatmeal, almond butter cooking with no flour, you know. Really trying to nourish my spirit, you know, my body, keep myself healthy and, you know, so that's always helpful.

[31:58] Tonya Pinkins: Well, it was really great getting to talk to you, Keith.

[32:01] Keith Josef Adkins: You too.

[32:03] Tonya Pinkins: And you sound like you're just blooming, blooming.

[32:07] Keith Josef Adkins: Oh, I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

[32:11] Tonya Pinkins: Thank you so much. When we, when I, I'm gonna wrap out and we need to stay on the phone for a moment because they have to upload the recording. Okay, because that's the way Zencaster works. So I'm gonna just do a close. Okay, and then we're gonna just wait until Alan tells us that we're done. Thank you so much, Keith, for speaking with me today. This would be a COVID edition of You Can't SAY THAT. My name is Tonya Pinkins, and come back and listen to more intimate conversations with smart people about the world that we live in.