you can read part one “i said yes. and i would do it again.” over at faafo.app.
before the recording even dropped, the platform asked me point blank: is this AI? i clicked yes. this is the unfiltered version of why — and why the loudest voices against AI are often the same people who have never contributed a single thing to the internet, visit zoos on the weekend, and pay ancestry.com to access records that should be free to Black families.
i have been in tech since before most people knew what a podcast was. i have earned this. a cornerstone conversation for anyone who has ever side-eyed someone for using the tools in front of them to get free...
liberation moves through whatever infrastructure exists
my response to all of this is not to boycott the technology out of fear. my response is to use it aggressively and intentionally.
i use AI to buy back the most valuable asset in the modern world: time. time to teach. time to create.
time to show other people — specifically Black people, specifically women — that financial freedom and mental liberation are the same project. the underground railroad did not end. it evolved. liberation has always moved through whatever infrastructure existed in its era. right now that infrastructure includes AI. i am not going to apologize for getting on the train.
that framing connects directly to a much larger conversation that Van Jones ignited when he publicly stated that AI is the closest thing to reparations that Black people are going to get. the statement is explosive. and the response to it is worth sitting with.
a panel on the Dr. Boyce Watkins Black Excellence Channel — featuring Tiara Williams, Yolanda Spivey, Mary Dean, and Micah — pushed back hard. Yolanda Spivey drew the distinction clearly: AI is a ubiquitous technology. everyone with an internet connection will use it. reparations, by definition, are an owed debt designed to repair specific historical harm — intentional disenfranchisement, stolen wages, stolen land, and systematic exclusion from wealth-building engines like the GI Bill. you cannot settle that ledger with a free app from the iOS store.
the panel went deeper, into the 1866 Indian treaties — legal mandates that required the five civilized tribes to provide formerly enslaved Black people with 160 acres of land, $150 in cash, and tax-exempt status. this was not a metaphor. it was a legal order for wealth transfer. and it was dismantled through what the panel called administrative weaponization. between 1938 and 1941, the federal government used the quantum blood law to demand fractional proof of Native American ancestry — a document trail that was impossible to produce from a population that had been legally classified as property and specifically denied birth records for generations.
they weaponized genealogy to block access to what was legally owed.
which is exactly why bloodline.faafo.app exists.
the mirror
the panel is right that AI is not reparations. Van Jones is right that it is a radical equalizer for anyone willing to use it. both things are true. the contradiction lives in the gap between them.
Yolanda Spivey also points to something that needs to be said plainly: AI companies are actively scraping Black culture — the slang, the syntax, the tone, the flavor — to make their models sound more authentic and human. that cultural data trains the neural network. the people generating that culture are signing away their rights to it in terms and conditions nobody reads. Mary Dean, the lawyer on the panel, flagged this directly: by clicking agree, users are handing tech giants a perpetual license to their own intellectual property and commercial image.
it is digital strip mining. a corporation clear-cuts an ancient forest, builds a subdivision on top of it, and names every street after the trees they destroyed.
i know this. i have known it since the first time i hit publish in 2006. my content has been searchable, scrapable, and freely available the entire time. i made peace with that the moment i chose to show up publicly. what i refuse to do is sit out the next era while everyone else argues about the ethics.
AI is not a neutral tool. it is a mirror. it reflects our existing societal debts, our ingrained biases, our history of extraction, and our urgent desires for freedom. it magnifies whatever human nature is already there.
the question is: what are you going to do while you are standing in front of it?
the work
bloodline.faafo.app is an audio documentary and a work of art. it maps my family tree across 500 years, produced and researched from Bahia, Brazil. i used AI to help organize historical data. i used synthetic voiceover narration. i disclosed it when asked. i would do it again.
this is not performance. this is not apology. this is what it looks like to use every available tool to document your own existence in a world that has spent centuries trying to make you undocumentable.
sources:
- The Architect of Digital Freedom
- The Thirsty Hypocrisy — r/aiwars on Reddit
- Van Jones: AI Is the Closest Thing to Reparations That Black People Are Going to Get
- i said yes. and i would do it again. — faafo: Sisi (in Brasil)
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