Iyanla Vanzant on why the Black people don’t want to address our issues: ‘For us, it’s cultural’
Iyanla Vanzant is back with another season of Iyanla: Fix My Life with a new set of families who are suffering through unfinished business.
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Iyanla Vanzant is back with another season of Iyanla: Fix My Life with a new set of families who are suffering through unfinished business. This season, we get a blast from the past, the Mitchell family is back, as well as a new set of faces who Vanzant tries to guide and encourage into a new way of life.
During an interview with theGrio, Vanzant touched on why, when it comes to family business and issues for African Americans, we just don’t address it.
“For us, it’s cultural,” says Vanzant. You’ve got to understand— I mean and while we don’t like to talk about it, it’s cultural.”
”So even in our DNA and our cellular ancestral memory, prior to slavery we didn’t cross villages very much. So what was going on in your village, stayed in your village. What was going on in my village, stayed in my village. And how that manifested in the 19th century was what goes on in the house stays in the house.”
READ MORE: Here’s why Iyanla Vanzant won’t fix R. Kelly: “It would have been brutal”
Although Vanzant believes we are making efforts to change that, it is still a matter of who’s teaching it and where it’s being taught to have these conversations.
“I wonder when are we going to get a chance to say,’ Jussie, come here. Let me have a conversation with you,” she continues.
“If given the opportunity to have that talk with Jussie Smollett, Vanzant revealed that she wouldn’t tell him anything at all. Instead, she would just listen and tell the actor, “I don’t know what happened, but this is what it looks like. So what do you want to say to me?”
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“We’ve only heard part of the conversation,” adds Vanzant about the Smollett scandal. “One of the things that I want to do is be a place for people to come to have a conversation that’s longer than three minutes. Where do we as people of color go to have a conversation of our side of the story? Of our lessons and if our challenges?”
The OWN host wants to be that space, but the challenge is people won’t come to talk. No one wants to tell their “business.”
Watch Iyanla Fix My Life on Saturdays at 9/8c on OWN
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