Donny Jackson | Using Your Art to Create Empathy

Srini Rao: Donny, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.


Donny Jackson: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. It


Srini Rao: is my pleasure to have you here. As I was saying before we hit record I found out about your work through Cher Hale, who is literally the only publicist that we have never once said no to.

She has A remarkable track record with us. Anytime my friends ask who should I hire as a book publicist, she's the person that I say they should go to. An absolute pleasure to get in here. Before we get into your work, I want to start asking you what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping the choices that you've made throughout your life and career?


Donny Jackson: My dad was a postal worker for 35 years after the air force and my mom was a nurse's aide. Working class Family in Pittsburgh. And in terms of how it shaped my upbringing lots of ways. Some of them invisible that I couldn't even tell you, I'm sure, but the ones that I'm super aware of have to do with work ethic for one my parents worked very hard and encouraged encouraged me to work hard and to be consistent and reliable.

Thank you. And also I guess an offshoot of that was the notion of integrity and being honorable and being, being true to your word. And and some of that certainly got reflected in the workplace, but they also wanted it to be reflected in how I treated other people, how I showed up in, in the world as a.

As a young black kid in a world that wasn't necessarily built for a young black kid. Those are some of the ways that I think what my parents did for living and how they invested themselves in. work and honor and integrity. I think those are things that informed who I am.

Yeah. With your


Srini Rao: dad as a postal worker and your mother doing what she did these seem like very consistent, predictable career paths that. Have a very linear arc. And of course, just from knowing what I do about you, I know yours hasn't been that. What did they teach you about making your way in the world?

What did they teach you about careers? What advice did they give you? And when you present a path like this to them, what do they say to it? That's interesting because they didn't present a path to me. What they did was nurture me being, like, A bright, shy kid. And so they certainly encouraged reading and they were very supportive of my academic success.


Donny Jackson: And there was, because there was no kind of pathway beyond working class life they really couldn't envision what. What I would be I think part of it was just a great reservoir of hope that it would be something beyond what they were doing. And so it was just a constant diet of being boosted up.

So basically whatever you're doing, keep doing that and keep bringing A's home. And why is there a B and I bet you can do better. That kind of thing. Sounds a lot like an Indian family. Yeah. And but I guess what, what is implied in that is we know you can as opposed to something lofty and unreachable.

The unspoken assumption is that we know you can. And only in hindsight do, did I realize that was the thing that, that level of confidence in, in, in my ability to do things was a lifeblood. And. Definitely inform my willingness to take risks and try things that nobody else in my family had the opportunity to do or the interest in doing.

So I think their support allowed me. to be risky in a family where people did take stable jobs because risk wasn't a way to put food on the table. Yeah. So in addition to that one of the things I thought was interesting that you said was you said for them, they didn't put a patent for in front of you because path in front of you, because of the fact that They can't couldn't see beyond the working class life that they had.


Srini Rao: So as a young boy with them as your parents, how did you find the vision for what your life could be? When that's what they could see, but obviously you saw something else


Donny Jackson: and I can't take credit for being this amazing visionary, honestly part of it is just tumbling through it, but what they did do is encourage education.

And I lived and I basically lived in the hood in Pittsburgh and a neighborhood called Homewood that I cherish to this day. But. The schools in Homewood at the time were, the public schools were not the best, and so they sent me to Catholic school, which was the equivalent of a prep school, even though we were Baptist and certainly didn't practice Catholicism, but those were the best schools in the city, basically, in terms of preparing someone for a life and education.

And so what they were, I think, prescient about Was being able to place me in a very educationally rich environment so that whatever seed I had could could flourish. So I think I thank them constantly for having the foresight to do something like that. And they didn't know how it's going to turn out.

And of course, neither did I. And as as I. Just propelled through that system. You know what? What that does is it provides options. It provides opportunities for one to risk to try new things to fail and to learn from those failures. And so Being in an academically rich environment allowed me to grow to find my best smart self, if you will, and through that, I discovered things that I wouldn't have Ordinarily discovered.

Nobody in my family before me had graduated from college, for example. And so that was a path that seemed organic seemed natural based on my, my my academic success in high school. So the goal was, okay, I guess you go to college now and didn't know what to major in, didn't know what that was going to mean at the end of it.

But in 11th grade, I took a psychology course because I was trying to avoid a hard science class, and that was an elective that I could take. And up to that point, I thought I was going to write for a living. I started writing when I was eight and thought that was going to be who I was.

But I didn't have any idea how to make a living at writing, except I had heard of journalism. That didn't seem to be quite it. But then the psychology class kind of exploded my thinking about. What I could do because it tapped into what I as a shy bookish kid was already doing, which was paying attention to people, trying to figure out how they tick.

And for me, I was writing and trying to be creative in my exploration of that. But this was a whole discipline that was about trying to understand people. And it was this Eureka moment. Hey, I'm going to do that. And so I majored in psychology and off I went to, to undergrad having no idea what that adventure was going to be, but it was the beginning of of a grand adventure as it turned out.

So


Srini Rao: I think that what's fascinating to me is you have a contrast of two environments, right? And you mentioned you grew up in the hood, but then you went to what were the best public schools or the best schools in Pittsburgh at the time. And I have so many questions about this around race, around community, but let's start with the environment piece because I wonder when you have an environment like the one that you grew up in and then you go to school in an environment that's completely different.

How is it that you managed not to succumb to the environment that you're in at home or in your neighborhood? And also this is a question I asked one of our former guests who had happened to be a white guy who grew up in South central LA, like in an all black neighborhood. When we look at this stuff and I was asking him because, and I'm very curious for you because as a black person, your perspective, I think would be interesting because he was a white guy.

Give me his perspective. But when I look at neighborhoods like that, like my perception of neighborhoods like that is, I probably guarantee you completely inaccurate because my entire perception of it is based on having seen John Singleton movies like boys in the hood. So When you look at how media portrays environments like that, what do you think that we misunderstand and why is it that we get somebody like you who comes out of a neighborhood like that and accomplishes what you have and transcends the environment and then on the flip side.

You get people like the characters in boys, the people who end up in prison.


Donny Jackson: It's, I think it's easy to cherry pick the high profile things. And if you have a media culture that if it bleeds, it leads, et cetera. It's going to pick, it's often going to pick the high.

Profile, but low incident events because those are more sensations and sensational. Those are more interesting to get people to watch your program. And so what it does miss it does miss the things that are mundane, but beautiful at the same time loving families and intact households and a camaraderie between.

between people of the same cohort. So that's not interesting for the news because the news traffics in exceptions. And so I think one of the things that we have to keep track of is the media is going to show you the things that differ from the mundane, because that's what makes sense for ratings.

I think we should absolutely worry if what the news is doing is showing us. just good things, because that means that's the exception to the horrible things that are happening. In the news. So I think that's one of the things that the narrative about urban life misses because of how we're built to learn things in terms of our media culture.

Yeah.


Srini Rao: Now as far as transcending the environment why is it that what is it that happens to somebody who doesn't end up in your situation and life goes into disarray for them?


Donny Jackson: And there's a a novelist from novelist and writer from Pittsburgh from Homewood.

In fact, John Edgar Weidman who grew up in the same neighborhood that I did and has a brother and. His he ended up as a writer, his brother ended up going to prison for life. And so under the same household, in the same neighborhood, and so it's it's ineffable what can happen in a family because of how people are put together and how, the environment reacts to how people are put together.

So it's hard, it's sometimes hard to say. Again, that's the same household and two different outcomes from siblings who it's not like they were 20 years apart and generationally different. And so that's a fascinating study sadly. For me, but it happens all the time.

And I can certainly name people who grew up in the same neighborhood. That I did and that I don't consider myself smarter than they were, and their lives didn't turn out the way mine did. What, one of the things that I had that that was the bedrock for me was again my parents commitment to nurturing this shy bookish kid and blocking for me and getting stuff out of my way.

And growing up bilingual, bicultural in that sense. Yes, I had to negotiate what was true about my neighborhood and still where we're a necktie in. In school for 12 years. And so that, that level of agility and versatility was a survival tool and it had served me well, didn't know.

And again, I can't I don't want to place myself as this person who was so aware of how nimble I was becoming, it just happened I grew up and survived it all. And so I can't take full credit for all the good things that were propping me up. But but I think I've tried to be to my other point about how I grew up honorable to what my parents fed me.

So I tried not to waste those things and tried to take some of the risks that they couldn't. We've had as you might imagine a lot of conversations about race this year. And so given where you grew up, I couldn't help but ask you about it because you mentioned that you grew up in a world.


Srini Rao: That was not really suited or not designed for a young black boy to thrive. So what were race relations like at the time when you're growing up? And what did your parents teach you about race? Yeah,


Donny Jackson: that's it's such a, it's, I'm fascinated by it still as I look back because I grew up in a time when.

Things were in transition going from from colored to Negro to black to Afro American that was an interesting trajectory and watching that happen as the neighborhood was also. In transition and becoming more black whereas before it was it was pretty diverse and I would say lean more toward predominantly white watching that happen.

Being someone who grew in his ethnic identity at the same time, the neighborhood was growing and its identity was just a fascinating parallel as I look back on it and what my parents Often talked about in those early discussions about race, we didn't have the talk that black parents have to have, I think, with their Children now about the danger of being black with law enforcement.

It was more about being respectful and being making sure that you were a good example of what black people could be because people's perception was so skewed in the opposite direction. The goal was for me to make sure that I wasn't feeding into those stereotypes. So be be polite be respectful.

Be honorable and have integrity, et cetera. Because the prevailing narrative. because people didn't spend a lot of time really interacting with each other was stereotypical. Yeah.


Srini Rao: Yeah. It's funny because Isabel Wilkerson wrote this brilliant book called cast, which I had alluded to in the previous conversation with Laura Robbins, who's a writer for Huffington post, who was here and had a fascinating conversation with her about this around stereotypes and where they come from.

Stereotypes are fascinating to me because the funny thing is in a lot of ways they get shaped by our experiences. So we make broad generalizations based on individual experiences. So we turn individual experience into universal truth when it comes to stereotypes.

And I, even as an Indian person I know that there are things that people have as stereotypes about us, but what I wonder about your relationship, what do you remember as one of your first experiences with racism, and I appreciate the question because it is it is important to map out what's the constellation of racism in any given person's life because it, it will differ from time to time.


Donny Jackson: And. And yeah I, I like talking about it just because it has been such a journey one, one of the, one of the earliest recollections had to do again with the academic environment that I was in and. I wrote an essay as a part of a class assignment and I was like in the second grade and and they asked us to write some stuff and I used the word ritual in in my essay and the teacher thought I had copied it from somewhere.

She thought somebody else had done the work for me because there's no way that I should know that word. As a. as a second grader. And her countenance about it was, at least my interpretation about it was, you little black boy couldn't possibly know that word yet. And use it correctly in a sentence.

And and so it became this inflamed thing where my parents had to. Come to the school and basically explain to them look, this is a kid who's been reading since he was three, he reads the dictionary for fun. Yes, he knows that word. He uses it regularly. And in addition to a whole bunch of other words that are certainly beyond what you would expect a second grader to use.

And and he is if not equal to perhaps superior to some of the other kids in this class. And we insist that you recognize that and not accuse him of of malfeasance. And and. At the time there was no discussion. She didn't say you little black boy, this or that, but in the aftermath and the postmortem of it, my, my parents talked about it as a racial incident.

And I hadn't made that connection at all, honestly. And I was one of maybe two black kids in the class of maybe a dozen. And so that was the first time I had to think about people's perceptions of me. Including this element in a way that wasn't positive, that somehow detracted from who I was.

And so it was a very complicated moment, but I do consider that kind of my first recollection of the awareness of race as a as a negatively valence thing.

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com Slash creative and get 40 off your first subscription. Again, that's mind lift, M Y N D L I F T. com slash creative for 40 off your first subscription. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Finding Forrester with Sean Connery. Sure. But the very, that almost exact scene plays out for the young kid.

He ends up writing something cause they, he's this incredibly talented basketball player and he goes to some fancy prep school in New York and he ends up writing something that's so brilliant that the teacher actually questions whether it's his. And then finally at the end, Sean Connery comes in and reads it.

And he says I had to come and read this for my friend, Jamal, because he wasn't allowed to read it, but this is, these are his words, not mine and that just reminds me


Donny Jackson: of that. Yeah. And I've said there's been many incidences that, that resemble that one where you know the unfortunate.

compliment of somebody being surprised at how well you did something. And I resent that level of surprise and it went through this, I've been through this in every iteration of my academic life for sure. And and in some cases in my personal life where people are talking about how articulate I am.

And as if that's a surprise and obviously you, Chris Rock has joked about it with talking about Colin Powell in terms of what were you expecting? Yeah. It's like when my parents somebody tells my parents, Oh, it's your English is so good.


Srini Rao: It's we've been here for 25 years. Of course. And it's funny you mentioned this because I, my dad is a professor, a college professor. And then You know, you're an academic, so you know how the system goes of like tenure and then promotion after promotion. And I've had to literally rewrite rebuttal letters for him because he's been denied promotions that were like completely not factual.

I looked at them and he's yeah, none of this is true. And I was like then why is this happening? You've been at the university for 25 years. And it was shocking to me that in an environment like a university. He's, he actually said he's in all honesty, he said it's partially racism.

And I could not believe that after this long and he's been there for almost 20, almost 30 years at this moment. So what I wondered now is having grown up the way you did in the neighborhood that you did around the time that you did. When you look at where we're at now, and part of the reason I wanted to talk about this in particular is because as I was reading the poems, I noticed that a lot of your poems centered around specific events, which we'll talk a bit about.

But when you see where we're at now and you see where how you grew up, like. How do you feel? Hopefully with the election of Biden we're gonna get out of this mess. But I did see somebody say it was actually a woman on Trevor. No, I think she was a sociologist of some sort of black woman.

And he was talking to her about some of this. And two party systems. She said, You still have to remember 70 million people voted for Trump. And many of them she said, it doesn't change the fact that we live in a divisive society just because we have a new president.


Donny Jackson: It's chilling. The number of people who, who voted for him and the fact that we're verging on 2021 and that's still a thing.

It's stunning. And as much as there is to celebrate there's. At least 70 million other things to be fearful of, and even though I'm I I've been fortunate and I've worked hard. And so I've I've managed to get some of the prizes I have doctor in front of my name.

If I really want to insist on that I have a couple of Emmy awards. So that's the biggest prize you can get in the profession that, that I'm in and and I'm still alive. And But even though those things are true, nobody pulling me over at a stop light is going to see any of those things.

They're just going to see a black dude in a car. And so I have to go through all of the algebra of what can this turn out to be. because I don't have time to list my, my, my CV for this cop. And and I have no idea what all of his history has led to in terms of how he perceives me as. A 200 pound muscular black guy in a car.

And so that's a different narrative, especially when you look at the, what can be perceived as a dysmorphia in terms of law enforcement often misperceiving. What a 12 year old looks like in a Tamir rice or Mike Brown who looks like a monster or Terrence Crutcher, who was perceived from a helicopter as being dangerous I have to be concerned about what the lens is that I'm being perceived by even in 2020, even after 70 plus million people vote for the guy that I wanted them to vote for.

But then there's and again, if you look at the 70 million people that represents the people who voted, that doesn't represent the people who are related to them or live next door to them who didn't vote, who still believe the same thing. So it's at least 70 million people. And so Having to negotiate that every day.

And I wrote an essay about this. So I posted on the Facebook several years ago called what I want white people to know about me. And so one of the, one of the things that I talked about in the essay was you have very little idea of the weight that. I carry into a situation and I'm one of the lucky ones, I'm privileged in comparison.

And so if I have to worry about these things and I have a certain amount of privilege that can protect me if I insist on people calling me doctors, things change fairly quickly in, in those situations where it's like, Oh, okay. So this is not quite what I thought it was going to be but not everybody has that, that, that weapon if you will to wield in a situation that is electrified by, by, by race.


Srini Rao: It's funny, I'm sure you've probably seen it, Dave Chappelle, in one of his stand up comedy bits, tells this story about how... He and a friend were walking around and they were both stoned and they walked up to the police officer to he's we're gonna ask for a cop for directions because he talks about how black people are afraid of the police and he was a black man would never talk to a policeman while he's high.

That would be a waste of weed,


Donny Jackson: which I remember hearing that bit and he


Srini Rao: tells a story about it. His white friend goes to the cop and he's yeah, he's Hey, we're stoned in the office. Calm down. He's eighth street is that way and just let them go. But the funny thing is This isn't just an American thing.

Like I you triggered a memory for me that my dad told me about. So my dad was a PhD student on Australia growing up. And at that time in the late seventies, Australia was very open to immigration and a lot of Indians ended up going there. And he had a another postdoctoral candidate who was in his lab with him, who was a black person.

And he told me, he said, when we would go to look at apartments, people wouldn't rent to the guy simply because he was black. And my dad finally got to the point where he had to literally call in advance. And say, listen, I have a friend who's looking for an apartment. I'm going to bring him there to look at it, but we don't want to waste the gas driving there.

If you're not going to rent to him, he's black. You should know that. But I could know and to me, I was like, wow, this actually is not just an American thing, but it's a worldwide thing. And that, that to me is shocking that it's still there. So I guess this is a really weird question probably, but what do you think are the roots of this?

Why is it that Why is racism prevalent, particularly in America? Like, why is it that somebody would be racist against a black person? Do you think media plays a role in creating that? What even causes that? What are the roots of this? The broadest simplest explanation is that this is the legacy of slavery and the fact that We started off, we black people in America started off on unequal footing being seen as chattel and even post slavery have not been able to shed the history of that.


Donny Jackson: And so part of what happens I think is when you have a whole group of people that were basically labor, literally slave labor. Immediately, there's a distinction between haves and have nots. We are better, white people are able to say in that situation, because if you look at it, they are.

Not necessarily whatever your cosmology is in the eyes of a higher power, but in in, in the practical everyday sense of it we're better than you. And so even though the law changed about what we say about that there's still the stain of that from the perceptual sense, but there's also an internalized stain that, that happens.

And so tribalism I think is a consequence of that where people you stick with who's, who looks like you and who's comfortable. With you et cetera. And so you don't get a chance to develop a sense of empathy if you don't interact with people. It's harder, let's say and so empathy is, I think at the core it's the soul of how we treat another person.

If I know how my behavior affects you, I govern my behavior accordingly. But if I've practiced not thinking about your perception because I'm in this tribe and you're in that tribe, then I don't get a chance to do that. I don't get a chance to practice that level of empathy. It's much harder to oppress a person whose feelings you've taken into account.

And so I think in answer to your question. The long answer to your question is that this this history of being separate, and in some cases equal, but in a lot of cases, not really the whole separate but equal thing just wasn't really true. There's just been a lot of practice in not interacting with each other.

And and some things have some things change that when when you're forced to be together on a job in some ways in some ways unions help that in terms of the bigger enemy was the guys with the money. And so collective bargaining. We were all in this together.

And so in some ways that helped in some ways, even though the military was was segregated, but at some point when people are shooting at you we're more like them, we're different because they're shooting at us, and so there was a certain bonding that, that happened there, but outside of those very incendiary conditions.

We're not often forced to live with each other and interact with each other. And so that lack of empathy and internalize stains on both sides of the racial fence, I think continue to prevail. Yeah. It's


Srini Rao: funny because when you were saying all that, I couldn't help but think of the movie, remember the Titans, but you're talking about separate, but equal.

And it's interesting because in Isabel Wilkerson's book, she says like they created all these policies. I think either FDR, I don't remember which president was, But it was for homeownership and she said, what people don't actually acknowledge in history is almost all of the policies that were designed to move society forward and make life better for Americans actually excluded black people.

And I never knew that and you look at it and you're like, wait a minute, that is, that literally is the definition of structural


Donny Jackson: racism. Yeah. And redlining and and then those little subtle things that happen when you try to rent an apartment, even if it's legal to do those things become part of the disease of living a racialized life and it takes a toll and we're in a place now where let's just say post George Floyd, where there have been a number of incidences for decades prior to that, but I think the the influence of COVID and then us being cooped up made that a different flashpoint than Mike Brown or Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin.

Even though those certainly were flashpoints, but it didn't become as global as George Floyd was. But I think that was under the blanket of COVID as a, as an additional frustration that, that burst. Burst that bubble. And so now there's there's a great deal more discussion about it.

There there, there are diversity trainings and unconscious bias trainings and white fragility as a bestseller et cetera. But then you're still looking at that 70 million people who, who voted for the other guy who's in office still. And so as a.

As a black person in America one still has to be just really sanguine about it and it's just oh yeah, sure better for sure, better, but not great and not as good as it should be on the eve of 2021. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit what I wonder is how in the world somebody who gets a doctorate in clinical psychology ends up becoming a spoken word poet and an Emmy award winning television producer.


Srini Rao: Those things don't seem to those are not two combos or three combos you'd ever imagined going together.


Donny Jackson: Thank No, it's, it I'm happy to talk about it because I want people to, to use my life as an example of, you don't have to have it all figured out. And there are paths that you can make for yourself that, that weren't there before.

And and you don't have to feel stuck my favorite thing is when I hear a 25 year old saying, Oh it's too late for me. I can't make it in the industry. I'm like just shut up. You know what I mean? You're 25. The world is your oyster. Stop tripping, but I like using my life as an example because it is weird.

It's a strange combo the unicorn of it all. But the truth is I consider myself a writer more than I consider myself any other thing. I alluded to started writing poetry when I was eight years old and fell in love with what language could do.

What I could do with language, not just as a reader, but also as someone who could manipulate language and break the code of what it could do. And so that's really the foundation of who I am. And it just so happens that I couldn't figure out how to make a living as a poet, that was never even a thing to, to consider, but it is the thread that, that runs through my life being able to.

Be a storyteller with words. So while I'm a professor at a university and running a mental health center and having a private practice, I'm still writing all the time and feeling frustrated that this isn't what I'm doing for a living. And at some point I thought, yeah, and I'm well trained as a shrink and a professor and that's going fine, but it's not fulfilling.

It's not it's not doing it for me. And here's where we circle back to my parents giving me the freedom to try new stuff. And having a doctorate is a great plan B, frankly. And so it was easier to basically say, look, if this doesn't work out, moving to Hollywood and trying to be a writer.

If it doesn't work out, you can come back and be a professor. Open your private practice back up again. No harm, no foul. And but making the decision to leave still is the best decision I've ever made betting on myself basically to, to try something. Different to try something that wasn't preordained by how I grew up or how I was educated.

And so I I moved to LA and didn't have a job. Didn't didn't know anybody in the business. Knew one person, a guy a good friend of mine from high school he wasn't like a studio head. So That wasn't really helpful in, in the creative hookup and I figured it out but figured it out makes it makes me sound like I'm smart in that way.

No, I figured it out. That is no, just stick to it. Just keep at it. And the adage of the harder you work, the luckier you get is what happened, honestly. And and so I ended up. Tripping into reality TV at its, it's at its inception because somebody took a chance on me and and it flourished from there the poetry thing continued just because I'll write.

All of my life regardless of whether I get paid to do it and and started to perform a little bit more and become comfortable just doing the performance piece of it and and so now all of those things are still alive and well. I do want to ask you one question around the mental health piece, because I think that I'd.


Srini Rao: It seems like, mental health and race have a very sort of interesting coexistence. And I know this through my own personal experience because the sort of, I, I don't know what it is for black people, but I'm curious, particularly as a therapist who is black or a psychologist is black.

The narrative that I grew up with, particularly around mental health and getting help for it. Was that therapy is for crazy people. And if you saw one, God forbid that you talk about it so much so that there was a time and my sister is a doctor and for some reason she couldn't refill my prescription for my antidepressants.

This is when I was taking them. And my mom and I asked my mom, I was like can you call a friend? A thousand fucking doctors, like everybody we know. And she actually refused. And I said, why? She said, because I don't want them to know that you're taking antidepressants. Wow. Yeah, and that so I wonder when you look at mental health, particularly in the context of race,


Donny Jackson: what have you seen?

Part of it is that same stigma. Part of it is that if you're getting mental health treatment, there's something broken about you in a way that It's shameful as opposed to getting dialysis, which isn't shameful or mending a a broken ankle.

That's, there's no shame in that, but having a broken brain, having broken biochemistry that, that seems like it's endemic to you as a human being. And there's something corrupt about that. And so that has pervaded. The community such that there's it's gotten better there, there are certainly people who, who talk about therapy and the benefits of it.

And there are very prominent people who happen to be black and are supportive, but the prevailing narrative is still, there's something wrong with you and it's going to take a while, I think before people realize that. It is a helpful and not a shameful thing to do.

That's that's a path that's not going to be a quick fix. And the media psychologist who. Who kind of traffic in those kind of quick fixes that, that doesn't really help. I think the the overriding narrative is still, no there's something wrong with you and how you were raised or how you negotiate the world or or whatever.

But it is It's not, it's still not okay. So we still have a lot of work to do. And and I think that's we just we just have to continue to do the work. We have to continue to tell each other, to to tell our to tell our peers, to tell ourselves that we wouldn't have this, we don't have this same level of shame for a sinus infection but when it's your, what's your, when it's your brain, your feelings, your thoughts, that seems like something that you could fix on your own.

To some people and and with a group of people who have had reason to to be wary of science whether it be the Tuskegee experiments or Henrietta Lacks or whatever there's it's in some ways understandable, but it's also unfortunate because, but because there is value in this thing beyond the fear of it. Yeah. I think that it's funny cause you're a spoken word poet and we were spending a lot of time talking about race. And part of the reason for that is because as I was reading your poems, I realized like this plays a huge role in your art.


Srini Rao: Or as an artist, as a creative, when you think about the choices you make, both from the poems that you just composed, but also the projects that you choose to get involved from a television standpoint. What is it that determines your choices? What when you're conveying messages, like what is important to you to get across when you make things?

Cause I, I think about my work here and I think to me, like what I want is to give a home to people who feel like they don't have one. Particularly as creatives, like that is because I've always felt that, even in my own culture, I've jokingly said, I was like the people I feel least comfortable around are Indians, like my own, because I feel that often this is the place where I'm going to be judged.

I was working on this piece about the woes of being an immigrant in the arts and as it is it's discouraged, but then until you become like Mindy Minhaj, people are like, Oh, you're just some schmuck who's wasting your education.


Donny Jackson: Yeah. It's a burden sadly.

And I think my, my goal, look, I can't pretend that I've chosen every project because of some lofty philosophy. Sometimes I need to keep the lights on and that's just the truth of it. I'm at a point in my career now where I have more choices and I can.

I can turn down some things that, that don't seem to fit what I'm, when I'm trying to accomplish in the world as a creative. And and I have a lot more freedom in, in what I write of course. And I'll talk a little bit about that. But in, in what I try to align myself with in, in, in television work is.

Is a type of storytelling that allows people to have conversations about what's what's true in the world, even if that's not necessarily the easiest conversation toe to have. And so that's it. That's been fortunate. I've been able to do that for the last several years. And it's what I tell the people who help find gigs for me or people for me to meet with the hope of having a gig.

Is that this is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for things that have meaning in. In a way beyond just following people around who are dating or or in the soap opera of it and I'm not trying to malign those things. Those are entertaining things and


Srini Rao: don't worry.

I've been, I've unfortunately been not just I wouldn't say a victim of it, but I've been on one of those things. So that's my latest claim to


Donny Jackson: fame now. So you get it. And look people are entertained by it and in some ways I think there are some shows that do harm, but most of them don't.

Some, I think most of them are innocuous but it's also not necessarily a thing that I want to do. And so I make very intentional decisions around what I want to work on and and I'm willing to sacrifice some stability in order to do that.

But as a writer, I have a lot more control. The book and album, Boy, a collection of poems that both of which are out now, those are culled from lots of work, but the fillet of it really is around social justice things, not just domestically, but globally about it, just how we treat each other and how that isn't always the the greatest outcome for some groups over others.

So looking at the othering of what human beings can do to each other is part of the soul of the book and the album. And that, that was important to me, not because I have the answers, but completely opposite of that, because I don't. And I think if I. If I'm a town crier enough about certain things, whether it be race or gender or class, let's say that maybe somebody else is stimulated by how I've talked about it and maybe they will have an answer or wait, or they can be in a conversation with somebody that can have an answer at the very least what I'm after to, to go back to something I mentioned before, what I'm after is increasing empathy.

Okay. And so if I can write something in such a way, whether it be from the point of view of Khalif Browder, who was in jail for three years but not really convicted of anything or a trans woman who is reflecting on all the. Other trans women who have been murdered in America if I can put those things out there, maybe somebody will think about these issues in a way that they hadn't before, and maybe they can be part of a solution that, that I haven't conceived of.


Srini Rao: Wow. As always, Cher has knocked it out of the park and sent us yet another amazing guest. I want to finish with my final question, which I'm very curious to see how you're gonna answer this, but what do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?


Donny Jackson: I think what makes someone unmistakable is when they embrace what is unique about them.

It's easy to figure out how you're part of a tribe how you want to be part of a tribe. You want to be considered one of the group one of the in crowd, the cool kids in the cafeteria, whatever it happens to be. But I think what makes someone unmistakable and being unmistakable is about someone else's perception of you largely.

And so I think once you embrace what is. unique about you, then it's hard for people to mistake you for someone else. And they have to acknowledge, whether they like it or not, they have to acknowledge your distinction in the world. But it's going to be harder for them to acknowledge your distinction.

If you don't I acknowledge my distinction as this. Bizarre unicorn doctor, poet, TV producer it's weird, but I'm, I celebrate that and I celebrate that not for the narcissism of it, of which there has to be some for sure, but I celebrate that for the beacon it can be for other people to embrace their unicorn, embrace their weird, embrace their unmistakable.


Srini Rao: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and sharing your insights and wisdom with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you your work, the book and everything else that you're up to?


Donny Jackson: Oh, thanks for asking about that. Donnyjacksonpoetry. com is a place to go.

And that'll lead you to the book. There's an album version of the book boy poems. And you can find that on all the streamers Spotify and Apple music, iTunes Amazon. And so I I invite people to to read the book or listen to the album or do both at the same time, because that's one way of experiencing the.

So yeah I'm not hard to find in that regard. Follow me on Instagram not because you'll learn a lot about me particularly, but I try to feature other people regularly on, on my Instagram. Just Dr. Donnie doctors spelled out Dr. Donnie on Instagram. Yeah, so I hope people will we'll check it out and let me know what they, they think share it with people that you think are like minded that might get something from it.

Amazing. And


Srini Rao: for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.