INTERVIEW: Resmaa Menakem, Vincent Ventresca, & Charles Little II on Creating The 'IMen' Series, Racialized Trauma, Henrietta Lacks + More

Charlamagne Tha God (0:03)

It's The Breakfast Club. You gon finish or y'all done?

Yep, it's the World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club. DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, Charlamagne Tha God, Lauren LaRosa is here as well, and we got some special guests in the building. Resmaa Menakem, you know, always a regular here. Always a pleasure to see you.

Resmaa Menakem (0:21)

You seem like a good brother.

Charlamagne Tha God (0:22)

And Charles Little II and Vincent Ventresca.

Vincent Ventresca (0:25)

That's me. Good morning, man. Good morning. How are y'all?

Resmaa Menakem (0:29)

We're doing good, brother. We're doing good. We're happy to be here with you. And anytime I get a chance to be around you, man, it's good for me.

Charlamagne Tha God (0:35)

We're talking about a couple of things, right?

Resmaa Menakem (0:36)

Yeah.

Charlamagne Tha God (0:36)

We're talking about the I'm in TV series.

Resmaa Menakem (0:39)

Yeah, man.

We started this. We started, me and Vince started, me, Vince and Andre Hardy actually started writing this about three years ago. Vince used to be on the original I'm in TV show but on the sci-fi channel. And so we became friends and he said, do you want to write something with me? And I was like, no, I'm done writing right now. And then we started talking and then I was able to add some of the pieces of our history and our culture into it. And so we started writing it.

Vincent Ventresca (1:10)

Man, it was crazy.

We were thinking about doing this other thing and we were on their way to talk to somebody about that. And I was like, hey, man, I was on this old show, The Invisible Man. He goes, I know you were. And then he was like, I love that show. And I said, what if we took that show and played with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, like through the lens of that? And then Resmaa was like, okay, go on. And then Resmaa said, well, how about this? Tell me what you said.

Resmaa Menakem (1:33)

So then I said, you know, what if we didn't use the old techniques? What if we actually used the cells that actually transformed them of Henrietta Lacks?

Vincent Ventresca (1:42)

Henrietta Lacks.

Resmaa Menakem (1:44)

And then use that. And then part of the whole thing is that black people reclaiming those pieces and they shouldn't have been in his body in the first damn place. So, you know, so we wrote a whole, so we've actually written the whole first season. And what you guys saw was the pilot and the trailer, right? And so what we're doing now is, so I've mortgaged my house to do it.

Vincent Ventresca (2:10)

I didn't know that, by the way. That was new information.

Charlamagne Tha God (2:13)

Yeah.

Resmaa Menakem (2:14)

And, but, and then we had my boy Charles come in, who's an Emmy Award-winning editor, and he saved our bacon.

Charlamagne Tha God (2:24)

I want to ask you something, right? The Henrietta Lacks part of it. Her story is one of the most disturbing examples of medical exploitation in American history, right? Why was it important to connect that history to this fictional world?

Resmaa Menakem (2:38)

So, I believe that fiction and sci-fi and stuff like that offers more room for us than just doing something like a documentary or something like that. We can do more with it, and it goes into people without us finger-waving, right? Before they know it, they're getting something, right? That kind of disturbs them, and that's what we want to do. That's what all of our writing was, right? All of our writing for all of these three years was not about storytelling, but story withholding. What do I mean by that? We withhold pieces, and with the mind normally, I'm a social worker, what the mind normally does is fills in the gaps, and then you start to want more to it. So it was important for me, it's important for me in any of our writing, you know me, man, in any of our writing, if we're talking about black people, it is important that we hold fidelity to that. It is not a throwaway thing. So when you're talking about black people's history, what culture was happening to black people, you have to hold it in a way that allows for even the next generation to feel like it's important, right? So that's why it was important to, so there's three main things that contributed to this. So it was the idea of Raph Ellis' Invisible Man, it was the idea of Henrietta Lacks, and then also the movie, and you guys know this, The Spook Who Sat By The Door.