God-level knowledge darts, according to Desus and Mero, are “advice you could base a religion on.” The book, part memoir, part comedic parable, serves as a life guide of lessons the duo learned on Bronx streets since they met in summer school in the 1990s.

Their conversation was indeed a lightning round of spinning darts. Their banter about the Bronx, graffiti, bodegas, and beyond was deftly facilitated by Monk-Payton, who asked them to dive deep into their personal stories and describe how the Bronx had shaped them.  

“Every day is a mix of hilariousness and overwhelming tragedy,” Desus said of his younger days in the borough. “You could be having the time of your life, and your good friend is dead. Or you’re chilling with your boys, and next thing you know, you get beat up by the cops. It happens that fast. I remember the last time I got arrested, I was literally just walking with my boys.

“The next thing I know, I’m in bookings. It happens in the blink of an eye, and you have to roll with the punches,” Desus told viewers of the virtual event, part of an ongoing partnership between Fordham University and the Bronx is Reading.

In their book, the two were not afraid to address sensitive issues like therapy and masculinity.

“Men should just cry it out sometimes or go to therapy if you can,” said Mero. He described how difficult it can be for men from Caribbean backgrounds to get the help and support they need. “If you go to a barbershop and you’re like, yo I’m going to go see my therapist, 10 mother-f-ers are like yo, you’re going to wha?!… There’s something wrong with you if you go to therapy.” 

In terms of combating the cultural stigma, Mero said, “Sometimes there are ebbs and flows in life. You want to speak to someone who is not going to judge you, someone you can speak frankly to, someone who will give you strategies to cope with whatever you are going through in life. My dad cried all the time. That’s why I never thought crying meant you were soft. If you keep that bottled up inside, you become a human black Air Force One.”

Beyond the difficulties of the Bronx— poverty, policing, and policies— that blighted their experiences, both Desus and Mero expressed overwhelming gratitude to the borough that made them. 

“Shout out to everyone in the Bronx. When people see [us], they thank us for representing the Bronx,” said Desus.

As one of the largest institutions in the Bronx, Fordham did not escape their discussion. Both Desus and Mero grew up within walking distance from the University.

 “As a kid, I always thought that [Fordham] was the Bronx zoo. I didn’t realize it was in the opposite direction. It had that big gate–and I was like, where are the animals at, what’s going on?” said Desus. 

Pugsley’s Pizza and Jubilee—Fordham’s annual alumni reunion event—also received a shout-out from Mero, whose wife is an alumna. 

“I used to live around the corner from Fordham, growing up and seeing this gate and wondering what’s that–it’s so mysterious… and then being a grown man and getting access to this for the first time because my wife is an alumna… And thinking, wow, this is a really nice campus…omg…Shout out to Pugsley’s I enjoyed some pizza over there… and jubilee…” He added emphatically, “Go, Rams!”

Bodegas: ‘Lifeblood of the City’

The bodega, central to NYC and the Bronx, plays a big role in Desus and Mero’s story. 

“The bodega is the lifeblood of the city,” said Desus.” It’s also where you establish a relationship with Papi, and Papi watches you grow up. He’ll let you get food for free because you left your wallet, and he knows you always come in here, and he’s like you got it next time. Or you can be like, ‘yo Papi, can you hold these house keys for me? I’m going to work, my sister will pick them up,’ and he’s like, ‘yo, no problem.’ If we don’t have bodegas, how would we survive? That’s why we are the Bodegas Boys. They hold us down, so we hold them down.” 

There were many questions about God-Level Knowledge Darts’ visual elements from readers in the event chatbox. The inside covers and chapter headings are filled with graffiti. All of the parts written by Mero are done in block letters, a nod to his love for graffiti. 

“I love graffiti so much because it’s just a dope way to express yourself. For kids in the hood, it’s like—I was here. I’m here, I matter, I exist. That’s what it was for me as a 13-, 14-year-old kid. Going up and down Tremont Avenue writing my name was like, I’m Mero, I was here. I matter in the giant world that we live in.” 

One of the biggest hopes for the book was for it to serve as classroom reading.

“We hope that in 30 years, students have a class based on this book, and students hate us for it,” Desus said, laughing.

For more jokes on cultural politics, favorite memories of the Bronx, and their illustrious career interviewing guests from Nas to the Obamas, listen to the conversation on crowdcast. 

At a Nov. 11 virtual event sponsored by Fordham and The Bronx Is Reading, which puts on the annual Bronx Book Festival, Rankine spoke about her new book Just Us: An American Conversation with Laurie Lambert, Ph.D., Fordham associate professor of African and African American Studies. 

Through Just Us, Rankine narrates her personal experiences related to race and racism with white friends and acquaintances—and, in some cases, their own rebuttal to her stories.

“The book’s intention was to slow down these interactions so that we could live in them and see that we are just in fact interacting with another person, and that there are ways to maneuver these moments and to take them apart—to stand up for ourselves, to understand the dynamic as a repeating dynamic for many Black people, white people, Latinx people, and Asian people,” said Rankine, a Jamaica native who grew up in the Bronx. 

Rankine has authored several books, plays, and anthologies, including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the 2016 Rebekah Johnson National Prize for Poetry. Her other awards and honors include the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She currently serves as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a professor at Yale University. 

A Portal to Reflect on Your Own Life

At the evening event, Rankine said she wants her readers to use her as a portal to reflect on their own experiences and assess them, rather than simply live them. Reading Rankine’s stories can also serve as a restorative experience for some readers, particularly Black women, said Lambert. 

“As a reader, I felt like I was being guided through these situations by a narrator I could trust—a narrator who understood a lot of my experiences as a Black person,” Lambert said to Rankine.

Naming ‘Whiteness’

The acknowledgement of a person’s “whiteness” can be perceived as threatening because it sounds similar to white nationalism and the violence associated with it, said Rankine. But “whiteness” is a necessary term when talking about race. 

“The kind of clever thing that was done by white culture is the naming of white people as people. They are allowed to hide behind the generality of that statement. They are people and we are African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Latinx Americans, Native Americans,” Rankine said. “That’s how white people have negotiated their lives: We are just neutral people living our lives, and you all are people of color.” 

This centralization of whiteness still stands in many places today, Rankine said. She cited the example of students and other people telling her they have received recruitment calls from white people who say they have perfect jobs for them, but they’re being “forced” to hire Black people to diversify their departments. This strategy to create equity is being falsely framed as something that takes something away from white people, said Rankine, who spoke at Fordham in 2016. 

‘It Gives Me Hope’

Rankine acknowledged that it’s hard to confront covert racism. She’s had to train herself not to let things go—to stop saying she’s tired, that it will stop the conversation, that somebody else in the room should say something instead of her. It’s essential, she said, to hold people accountable because they make critical decisions with long-term effects on places like juries, boardrooms, tenure committees, and dissertation evaluation committees. 

“We have been socialized so much towards silence and stability and not speaking up. And that’s what’s so amazing about the young people now—this new generation of high school students and college students,” Rankine said. “They are speaking up before things even get said. It gives me hope.”

Listen to the full conversation here. 

Oluo aimed to provoke and address difficult questions as she discussed the topic of her first book, So You Want to Talk About Race (Seal Press, January 2018), with Ashley C. Ford, the moderator of the event and author of the upcoming memoir Somebody’s Daughter.

In Keating Hall’s auditorium, the pair candidly described their experiences growing up as black women in America. Ford said she went to a high school in Indiana where 80% of the students were black, yet most of her teachers were white. 

This paved the way for Oluo to share the way she navigates the education system as a mother. 

“What I try to get teachers to understand is that when you think you are not talking about race, you’re talking about race. Often teachers don’t realize when they are teaching white history, white language, white science 90% of the time.” 

Oluo encouraged parents to show up and speak up on behalf of their children. When pressed by an audience member on what teachers can do to help students from low-income or minority backgrounds, Oluo said the best thing is to try to find resources for their parents. Doing things like translating the paperwork that gets sent home can make a big difference. 

Under Ford’s guidance, the evening’s tone varied from serious to light. When Ford asked whether social media is a good place for tough conversations, Oluo said with a laugh, “You should stop fighting with your family members on Facebook.” After a pause, she added, “Don’t get me wrong, social media is horrific, but I wouldn’t exist without social media. It is the biggest tool for marginalized voices to be heard.”

The audience leaned in when Oluo talked about the many different kinds of people who were impacted by her book. She described a black woman she met at a book signing in the Bay Area.

“She was dressed in a suit, she had obviously just come from work. She said, ‘I never knew that the things that happened to me were something that could be written in a book. I’m 56 and I’m now just figuring things out. I’m going to give this book to my daughter who is 32 so she doesn’t have to wait as long as I did.’”

Ford, who was named to Forbes magazine’s list of 30 Under 30 in Media in 2017, confessed that she was obsessed with Oluo’s YouTube channel Lessons in Shades, where Oluo talks about difficult topics while applying make-up. “There’s something about this reveling in this creative process, especially for a black woman,” Ford said. “It’s a little more serious than people take it at first. I have been watching you do your face and your eyes. It’s very beautiful and empowering.”

Oluo smiled and said, “I do it because it’s creative and it’s a celebration of myself.”

This event was sponsored by Fordham’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.