Mina, Unfiltered
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Mina, Unfiltered
Apr 29, 2026
Welcome to Mina, Unfiltered
Welcome to Mina, Unfiltered
00:00
05:26
Transcript
0:01
One evening, about an hour before sunset, my sister and I were driving home from our cousin's wedding in Memphis when we got a flat on the side of the interstate.
0:09
We pulled off on the nearest exit, put our hazard lights on, and waited for our parents to come help 'cause they weren't too far.
0:16
And less than five minutes later, a huge pickup truck with a "Don't Tread On Me" front plate stopped right behind us, and out stepped this, like, hardy, young white man in his dusty working boots and a shirt with the Blue Lives Matter, Police Lives Matter flag inside a Punisher logo.
0:36
And if you've spent any time on the internet, you know exactly who you think he is. So right away, he saw our situation and he immediately got to work changing my sister's tire to the spare.
0:49
He refused payment, and he pointed us in the right direction.
0:52
And so afterwards, my sister offered him a handshake as a thank you, and he hesitated and stared at her hand for just a little bit too long before giving her a brief shake and saying, "Hurry on now.
1:03
You girls don't wanna be around here when it gets dark." And then he just drove away. And I still think about that moment because he was, in the same, like, five minutes,
1:14
super helpful and a quiet warning, a person and a signal, both things at the same time, and there wasn't really a resolution. So the thing is, the algorithm doesn't know what to do with that.
1:28
It needs him to be a character, either a villain or a redemption arc or, you know, a caricature. It needs the story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has to end somewhere clean, but it didn't.
1:42
It just ended with us back on the road and me and my sister sitting with something that we couldn't quite name and looking at each other skeptically on the way back. I'm Mina.
1:52
I'm a Black woman from Tennessee, which means I live inside contradictions like this one on a regular basis.
1:58
I'm a writer, a policy researcher, a BTS ARMY, and someone who is deeply just unconvinced that any algorithm has ever accurately described a real human being, including me. And
2:13
I think when I recorded my About This Channel video, the original one, I don't think I really got to the meat of what I'm trying to do here, which is why I'm sharing this story with y'all.
2:24
I started this channel because the personal and the structural aren't separate. Your individual struggle to belong and to feel like you have a place in a community, a self that isn't performed for someone else,
2:37
um, that struggle, it's not, like, a personal failing. It's a response to intentional systems designed to make certain people feel like they don't belong. And I think that we have to
2:49
understand both of those things at once if we're gonna build a anything real, a real community. I think we're at a place now where there's a lot of pessimistic nihilism.
3:00
I describe myself as an optimistic nihilist, so I'm trying to get everybody else, uh, on that jam with me.
3:06
But the truth is, like, in practice, not all beliefs are equally valid, and we still have to build community with the people who hold the harmful ones. Um, some things cause real harm,
3:21
and I've been the recipient of that harm, and it has to be named and it has to be rectified, and there have to be solutions. I don't know what they are, but they have, we have to have them.
3:31
At the same time, we have to find a way to live alongside and sometimes work with the people who currently believe those things because it's not like we can just banish people to, you know, the other end of the Earth [laughs] for not agreeing with us, right?
3:45
So it's really messy and complicated, and that's kind of the point of being alive, I think. Um, I do wanna say that Mina Unfiltered is not a safe space in the sense of no hard questions.
3:59
It's not a passivity incubator that lets you just, like, gloss over the real harm that I talked about with, like, "You just need more empathy and to be more positive and to accept."
4:08
Like, there has to be real atonement and real change. And I'm not gonna pretend like I have it figured out because I don't.
4:15
I'm right in the thick of it, which is literally why I started this channel [laughs] because I don't know what to do, and I wanna talk to other people who maybe have...
4:23
might have an idea of something that we could try out. Mina Unfiltered is,
4:29
you know, my way of doing the kind of hard, messy, uncomfortable work of thinking seriously about what it actually takes to build communities where everyone has a role to play and where everyone has somewhere to belong,
4:45
even if you don't really like them, 'cause there are plenty of people that I don't really like that I also think they should... you know, they deserve the same shot at having a good life as I do.
4:56
So that's kind of a bit more in depth about where this channel is headed, my reasoning for this channel, what I hope to get from y'all, what I hope to share with y'all, and I really, really, really hope you stick around.
5:10
Ciao. [upbeat music]
Mina, Unfiltered
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