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  • GutTheEmpire [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I'm an Indian from a reservation in Oklahoma who wants to start a Marxist YT channel, and had two main questions for our supple voiced podcaster.

    1. How would an Indigenous person even begin to tackle the ignorance around decolonization, when the ed. system produces people that will go on Twitter and call me a savage or deliberately ask other whites what 'reserves' are, instead of someone who lives on one, just to be spiteful? Americans have voluntarily clinged to an 18th century belief used to justify their settler colonialism without the need for a "Red Scare" towards Indigenous people, maybe my question is how would you get subjects of an Empire to face its historical sins, in a way that humanizes the victims and recontextualizes the stories they've grown up with as facts?

    2. When you're writing a video script, besides having a weekly upload schedule, what keeps you from dropping it and doing something else when you hit a creative roadblock?

    • Secondthought_JT [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Hey, that's awesome! Decolonization is one of those topics that tends to elicit a knee-jerk response from the average American. It's frustrating and I'm not sure what the correct answer is there. I think a big part of the problem is that the listener feels personally attacked or guilty, like they did something wrong and don't want to be made out to be the villain. I think taking a patient approach with them (as frustrating as that may be) could help ease them into it. American propaganda is a hell of a drug, and it's going to take a lot of work to deprogram your viewers. You'll never win everyone over, but that's just part of having a political YouTube channel. As for your second question, I've been doing YouTube a long time now, so I've got a pretty solid workflow and rarely have to deviate these days. That being said, there have been times where I just wasn't vibing with the topic I chose for the week and I had to make the decision to put it on the back burner and attempt something else. There's nothing wrong with changing topics every once in a while. Always better to work on something you're interested in than forcing yourself to work on a topic just because you picked it.