Photo credit: It's Going Down

This week Neal and Ryan talk about their respective journeys as Indiana youngsters learning about racial justice, white supremacy, and activism, through hip-hop, hardcore and punk, skinhead culture, and lots o' book-learnin'. They discuss the idea that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity," as espoused by the late author and historian Noel Ignatiev, who passed away earlier this month, and the band named after his ideas, Racetraitor. 

The Atlantic reported on the Circle City's history with school desegregation, explaining that "a decision more than four decades old continues to haunt Indianapolis's education system while almost everything else in the government is unified" in Racial Bias and the Crumbling of a City.

It's hard emotional work to have frank discussions about white supremacy, but, as Neal says in this episode:

"once you feel your feels, come to the understanding that as the beneficiary of institutionalized racism, of redlining, of mass incarceration of black bodies, of the the corporate labor system that grew out of the cotton fields and became Amazon...grapple with that and think about how you're complicit and then what you can do to overturn it."

Read about Leonard Peltier HERE. 

Read about Mumia Abu-Jamal HERE. 

Hoosier Illusion is on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Neal Taflinger is on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Ryan J. Downey is on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Hoosier Illusion is part of the PopCurse podcast network.

Talk therapy and antidepressants have worked wonders for our us, who between them boast a variety of diagnoses like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, codependency, depression, and general anxiety. In this episode we retrace our respective journeys into talk therapy as adults. As Neal puts it:

"Talking is something that I've always been super comfortable with. I've always been a, I guess, a good extemporaneous speaker like something I know about. I'll go and I will wear you out talking about it. And I love arguing it's part of my personality, I guess. So what I couldn't do is articulate how I felt about things. It was all intellect and even a couple times that I'd started doing talk therapy, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists would even tell me like, okay, you're intellectualizing this, you're not actually in touch with how you feel. This is just all like, conceptual to you. And that was a way of protecting myself."

Listen to the full episode below or wherever it is you get your 'casts. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review.

In typical Hoosier Illusion fashion, this episode's title contains multiple related references, calling back to the name of a split Ryan's band Burn It Down released with Chicago's Racetraitor. The title itself was pulled from a lyric in the song, "Every Man's Got A Devil," which was itself a reference to one of Ryan's favorite movies, "The Crow."

Want to talk about your own experiences with tak therapy? Hit us up on Twitter or email us at hoosierillusion@gmail.com.

( 📷: Bob Peele)

Hoosier Illusion's maiden voyage, "What Is You?," is built on a piece Neal wrote, titled "I Was In A Band," about anxiety, alienation and his relationship with the hardcore punk scene which make is the most appropriate jumping off point for this podcast.