Remembering Ferguson with DeRay Mckesson

and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.

Four years ago, a string of killings of unarmed African Americans by police gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and an explosion of related organizing.

Among the figures to emerge from these movements was a school administrator, always clad in a trademark blue vest, DeRay McKesson.

He came to Washington this week to speak at the Atlantic Festival, and we sat down with him to ask: What does organizing mean to him?

And what would it mean to succeed?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Atlantic.

Before we dive into the conversation, a heads up, we taped this interview with Doreen McKesson backstage at the Atlantic Festival, our showcase of thinkers and leaders, which has taken over several blocks of downtown Washington, D.C.

this week.

We're not in the studio, and you're likely to hear that on the track.

McKesson has just written a memoir called On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope.

After our conversation, we'll share a few more moments from the festival.

Now, on to the interview.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

With me, I am delighted to say, is The Atlantic's inestimable senior editor, Jillian White.

Hello, Jillian.

Thank you so much for joining us.

With us also as our guest this week on Radio Atlantic is DeRay McKesson.

DeRay,

a well-known activist, host of Pod Save the People, and his book, On the Other Side of Freedom, is now out in bookstores.

DeRay, a lot of this book, I was expecting a memoir, And there's a little bit of memoir in there.

But a lot of this book is about your organizing philosophy.

What you've learned about activism, how it works, organizing communities.

Where did you learn that?

Yeah, I think...

You know, I think that we all learn so many things in so many places.

And one of the most foundational experiences I've ever had was teaching.

I taught sixth grade math.

Sixth grade is magical and beautiful and great.

And,

you know, as a teacher, especially as a math teacher, I had to figure out how to break down these really complicated things into bite-sized pieces that they didn't know that we were going to put together again one day.

So I remember teaching that when two things touch, it means multiplication.

Like I taught that far before I taught equations, but I knew that like once they got that, we got to equations, like it would all click.

And like that lesson of like.

taking the complicated thing down and like putting it into bite-sized pieces and then helping people put it back together like huge as an organizer I think the second is like you know I what the best teachers do is walk into classrooms knowing that the gift already existed before I got there so what I'm trying to do do is help kids access the gift long after I'm gone.

Like you don't need me to learn math.

I'm here as a facilitator.

What the worst teachers do is say that the gift only exists in my presence.

So when I think about organizing, like when I'm meeting people, it's like

my challenge is how do I find the gift and how do I help you find the gift?

Like that is my work because if I can help you do that, then like you can access this, you can access that long after I'm gone.

Those are really helpful.

I think my work inside of school systems, I was a chief human capital in the school system in Baltimore.

I worked in a couple school systems, is that that made me obsessed with like systems.

So, like, when I think about most of the work that I do now is like not program-based, not because I don't believe in programs.

I did program, you know, I opened up an after-school program in Baltimore,

trained and supported a third of all the new teachers in the city, worked at the largest community center, Hall of Children Don't believe in programs.

But when I think about like the biggest lever, it like always leads back to like structures to me, and that's where I like double down.

Yeah,

the um, you have this quote in the book that is, uh, has already been been spreading like a meme.

It's been on, I think, like school marquees

at different high schools around the nation.

The phrase is, or the quote is: hope is the belief that tomorrow's can be better than our today's.

Hope is not magic.

Hope is work.

Much of the first part of the book is about hope, which is a kind of what I think goes an Obamian

message.

And it led me to the question:

Obama obama himself was also a community organizer and

how do you think that the philosophy or approach that you bring to activism differs from his what do you think overlaps

i think that we both have like a a deep belief belief in systems and structures like i

I think about that.

I think too, and this is not necessarily a critique of Obama as much as it's like a critique of the way we think about what it means to lead, is that when I think about what it means to lead, it's like

so much of it is about helping people both believe in and see themselves in a world that they have not yet experienced and i think about like what it means to like push and challenge white people sometimes is that like it is going to be uncomfortable you're not going to like it sometimes but like part of my work is to like push you there because i know it's the right place to be uh and i think that you know if there's any critique of the obama white house

when he was president, especially during the protests, it was like, will you talk about race in really clear terms and like name white supremacy and name these things, even if it's uncomfortable, even though people be upset, even though the poll number, like, but this is actually what it means to lead, right?

That like you push people in the direction you know they are supposed to go.

So I think that was hard.

And the third thing I'll say is that like we were always interested in

like the big risks, you know, and like would the DLJ condition funding for police departments?

Like would they and I and I do think that the administration was more open to that at the end.

And then they were doing a good setup for Hillary and then Hillary didn't win and that was you know here insert doomsday.

So.

So, one of the things I want to talk about, and you talk about this in the book a little bit, and I think this goes into when you talk about building a structure and building a system and kind of doing the hard work and making something that's going to last long after you leave.

In the book, you mentioned the fact that you guys were in Ferguson for 400 days.

And I think I forget that sometimes, because in news, we think about things in terms of kind of like, when is this going to be the biggest news?

When is this?

Is this going to be the time list?

But you kind of built a system with others that went on for more than a year, where protests were going for more than a year.

So I was wondering if you could just talk through how you think about creating a system like that, how you think about creating and facilitating a movement like that, where you are trying to help empower people on the ground to do something for over a year.

Yeah, do you think, I think that if there's any frustration I have with people who write about the protests is that they don't adequately name that Ferguson was a phenomenon, that there was something just different and special, something that none of us like just intentionally made.

You know, an organization didn't come down and say, oh, 400 days, you know, like it emerged and like we should name it as that and like appreciate it as that.

So when I think about like what it means to have been there, is like the first thing I ever did was make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you know, like that was it.

And like most organizing starts off like pretty small, pretty basic.

You didn't see that, like we planned all these things that didn't work, but and they were fine.

Like you didn't see those.

You only remember the things that were like big and that worked.

That's when I, my advice to people are like sort of how we did it.

I think that really like

the thing that we did that was so special is like we walked into the risk that we walked out every night with like this notion that like we don't know everything, but we know my brown should be alive.

And if we go home, people act like this didn't happen.

And so we were like, we're going to be out here.

We're going to be out here anyway.

We might as well figure out what to shut down or like how to bring a crisis.

And people ask me like, why do we shut down things?

And it's like, we're shutting down things to have other people experience a fraction of what we experience in our homes, right?

Like when you are killing people in our communities, there's a disruption that we see every single day when we wake up.

So we want you to be annoyed when you like can't get to the mall.

We want you to be frustrated that you are like late to go pick somebody up because that frustration is just like a micro cause on what people feel when they're like losing their loved ones in senseless ways.

And like, that's real.

And when people ask, like, why do we focus on black people?

It's like, you know, because the outcomes are so bad that if you fix it for black people, you fix it for everybody else necessarily, right?

And those are the things that I'm mindful of of like this idea, how do you sustain it, you know?

But I do think the first wave of the work was like awareness, right?

We're trying to get people to just believe there's a problem.

The second wave of the work is like translating that awareness into solutions.

You talk in the book about the decision to go to Ferguson, the decision to be in

St.

Louis,

and just saying, I've got the time available.

I can just go down there.

And then you talk about what was happening on the ground when you got there and

how this movement started to take shape.

But I'm curious about the

that car ride.

I'm curious about what you were thinking when you were on your way to Ferguson.

What did you think was going to happen?

And how did you begin?

What was the first thing that happened when you got to the city?

What did you do?

Yeah, I don't even know if I just had time.

I had a job.

I was in charge of, I was a senior director of Human Capital in Minneapolis.

I was in charge of all hiring for all positions at the district level or in the district, not just at the district level.

But I did have like a purpose, right?

It was like this, like, you know, I don't know everything, but they killed a kid and like, that just can't be right.

And it was like, I'll get another job.

Like, if I get fired or like whatever, I don't have the money to like survive, but like, I have free, you know, like, like, I'll figure that out.

That, like, there are moments in life where like we have to, we have to make a choice about who we are in the world.

And that was my moment.

But where were you going?

Like, where were you driving to when you got to Ferguson?

Where did you park?

And how did, what did you think was going to happen next?

So, Brittany, so a friend, I said I was going to go, and a a friend of a friend got in touch with Brittany Packnet, who is very close to now.

And she found somewhere for me to sleep.

And like that was the beginning.

But so when I first got to town, it was raining that night.

And it was a pretty simple night.

And the second night

was wild.

It was the first night of the curfew.

But the first night I got, I like went to

the guy, the QT hadn't been burned or closed.

You know, QT is still around.

And I went to the QT, met up with Brittany and some other people there.

And like, that was the beginning.

You know, that was like my very first thing.

And

yeah, the drive was like, I think I was just focused.

It was like,

at that point, I'd worked with kids for so long that I remember this idea of like, what does it mean to live our commitment to kids?

And like, it can't, my commitment to kids can't just be like a philosophical thing, you know, that one that I can like give a dope talk about.

It was like they killed a kid.

And as much talking as I do about like, I stand up for kids and daily, they killed this teenager.

And then the least I can do on a weekend where I'm not doing anything is like, just go staying with other people, you know?

And like that was, that was like so basic to me.

Like that wasn't a hard, I didn't enjoy a nine-hour drive alone.

And like it was a lot of Spotify and like a lot of, you know, random calling people being like, hey, you just talked to me.

But it was the right thing, you know, and I felt confident in that.

So one of the things you talked about on stage just before this at Atlantic Fest was, so the response to a lot of this has been training.

We're going to train police officers.

We're going to train employees.

We're training, training, training, training, training.

And that is going to help change things.

It's going to help police be less violent towards

minority communities.

It's going to help Starbucks employees not be racist towards two black men who are in a Starbucks just trying to start a business meeting.

And I thought your comments there were really, really interesting.

And I was just wondering if you could reprise that for us.

Yeah, I'm pro-training.

Train everybody, train the police, train the teachers, train the public, train everybody.

I don't want training to be a cop-out.

And oh, no pun intended.

I just said that.

Pun intended.

It's one of those patches.

I just had that happen.

That was natural, everybody.

So when I think about the training stuff, it's like, I don't know what a training module looks like not to kill a 10-year-old, right?

Like, I don't know how many hours of training you go to not to put a bullet through like a seven-year-old's heart.

Like, that to me is not a training issue.

That's like something else.

So that's sort of how I feel about that.

And the unconscious bias stuff, it's like some of the

sure,

but some of the stuff is conscious.

And we shouldn't just like wipe it away being like, cause you're afraid to say that that was racist.

Right.

And I worry about that.

Or even like community, you know, I didn't say this out there, but community policing.

It's like, I'm pro, you know, if we got to have the police, I guess community policing as an idea makes sense.

But like community policing is predicated on this notion that if the police are in communities or no communities or blah, blah, blah, they'll be like more just, right?

And it's like, you shouldn't have to know my name not to shoot me, right?

You shouldn't have to like hi-fi my kid on the bus to treat him like a real person.

Right.

Like you shouldn't have to like go to my sister's cookout to like think that she is worthy of being alive.

Right.

You don't know all the white people and y'all are treating them fine.

Right.

Like, so I worry about the way that we use community policing that actually is like doing a whole lot of other work and like isn't just about what people think it's about.

Why did you decide on policing as being sort of the point of leverage, as the point, one of the focal points of your activism?

There are a lot of

places where you could have focused your work.

You could have focused on prosecutors and prosecutorial discretion and the incentives that that introduces into the criminal justice system.

You could have focused on housing and

the effects of segregation, evictions, the types of things that Matthew Desmond has written about,

notably in evicted.

But you chose policing.

And what did you see in that as

why was that the focal point of your activism?

Yeah, I think about

it was the entry point in this way because of the death of Mike Brown.

I continued in this work because I quickly remembered and realized that the issues with the police are like the bedrock issues of like so much of black resistance.

You know, you think about

you think about Rodney King.

You think about like this long legacy of like something happened with the police that like created the crisis.

You think about Memphis with King, you think about like all these things.

It was like the police are actually like a, they're either the in the foreground or the background of like all of the things.

And it's like, if we can figure that out, we can actually figure out a lot.

So that's sort of why I stayed.

I think that the other reason I stayed in this, in this sort of particular issue is because I now understand that the system is just rigged, right?

So when I think about like some of the laws, it's like, you know, what does it mean that there's a law in California that says that any investigation of an officer that lasts more than a year can never result in discipline regardless of the outcome?

It's like, that's just the game and like the more that i can be a part of like

pulling back

the shit like the curtain so that people see that stuff like that to me is like

like i think i can do that i want to do it i like think i can help people understand things that are like seemingly complex and be like, no, you can be, you can be an expert on bail.

This is not like some rocket science thing, right?

And the criminal justice system is like made up by like the most basic people.

Like it's not, it's insidious in its design, but it's not too hard for you to like figure out.

And I want to do that work.

I think we can win too.

And you talk a lot about the need for accountability, right?

And I think that was one of the reasons that you were getting at why you chose kind of policing and criminal justice and just the lack of accountability that there is there because the power structure is so crazily skewed.

And also people tend to not know a lot about how anything works until they are kind of thrust into it.

then they're already at a disadvantage, right?

So I was wondering how you think about kind of introducing the concept of accountability and how you think that accountability can be kind of put more in the forefront and actually hold people to those standards.

You know, we think about the difference between justice and accountability, that accountability is what happens after the trauma.

Justice is the fact that there should be no trauma in the first place.

So the core of our work is always focused on justice, right?

How do we make sure that we create a system that's just in the absence of justice?

We like fight for accountability.

And the police have, there's like neither, you know, like, well, we're not going to either in the policing world.

Is that,

you know,

it is,

there's no other public service role where like people almost know there won't be anything that happens.

Like, it just won't.

It's like 97% of officers are never charged.

99 are never convicted.

So like.

the worst thing that might happen to an officer is like they get fired but because there's police police departments don't work together there'll probably be a police officer somewhere else right like imagine if you go into work every day and you like imagine being a bank teller and you know that you can just steal money from the register And like, the worst thing they're going to do is like send you to another training, being like, don't steal money from the register.

And you're like,

well, I'll go sit through another training.

You know, like, what is stopping you from sitting through another training?

Or you get fired from the bank and then you just go down the street to a new bank and they're like, don't steal money from the register.

Like,

you're going to, you just like steal the money from the, you know what I mean?

Like, that's like what is happening.

And it makes sense that, like, you're not going to stop stealing money until like there's actually a consequence for you.

And the consequence can't be sit through another eight hours of training.

Yeah.

Thinking about policing, the Washington Post, our friends at the Washington Post have been doing tremendous work over the past few months in reporting on unsolved homicides in different cities.

And

that work, much of it follows from a book that was reported by Julio V.

Ghettoside in the homicide department in the LAPD

over the past decade.

In some ways, Giuliovi's book, Ghetto Side, is like a decades later reapproach of some of the same questions that David Simon was asking in Homicide, Life on the Street, the book that gave rise to the wire.

But Juliovie makes a pretty sharp argument, and I'm curious how it strikes you in the book.

In the book, she argues that

not solving homicides is one of the worst things that police departments do, and not structuring themselves to be committed to actually clearing, figuring out who has killed the most vulnerable men, the most vulnerable people in a community,

who are black men and women, statistically, in many communities.

That not taking that crime with the seriousness that it deserves has all of these attendant effects.

It means that

the communities learn the lesson from the police that their lives are not worthy of that seriousness and they, as a consequence, don't want to work with any of the police.

One of the police officers quoted in Leovi's book talks about just not believing in even the whole notion of preventative policing, saying that the role of the police should be to solve these crimes and to solve homicides most of all, and that his work points him towards visiting with families, sitting down in people's homes and helping them process their trauma, and that that's a very different role for an officer to play.

How does that argument strike you?

Do you think that a differently imagined police system might be more structured towards solving homicide?

You know, for 2,000 years, we literally slit people's wrists and called it healthcare.

That we like drain people's blood and we're like, hope the impurities are coming out.

And like, actually, we were just killing people.

And, you know, during that same period of time, it was like while we were bloodletting and like draining people's blood, we were like, oh, their blood pressure went down.

It's like, no, no, they just like don't have any more blood.

And it took so long for people to think about like, we just need a different solution.

This is actually is not a solution.

If the goal is to save people's lives, this is not doing it.

If the goal is to like, I don't know, kill people and call it something else, like we're actually doing that really well.

So when I think about this question of like, what are we doing with police departments?

It's like the clearance rate is fascinating that like, even if you believe capitalism is like the answer, this is just a bad return on investment.

That like, what does it mean where you pump in like half a billion dollars, like in Baltimore, eighth largest police department in the country, clearance rate is almost nothing.

Like officers are the highest paid people in the city, more overtime, more money than any other public servant in the city, more money than the mayor, than the, than the school superintendent, or line police officers.

Safety is at an all-time low.

You know, like, this just isn't, it's not, it's not even like Durate hates the police.

It's like, this just isn't right.

This is like the bloodletting.

We're like slitting people's wrists and being like, why aren't they surviving?

It's like, because this just isn't the solution.

But do you think that putting more resources towards homicide solving, towards actually going out and doing the work of clearing these homicides, rather than the work of preventative policing, which can manifest in things like stop and frisk.

You know, I think that the police have enough resources.

And the data proves, not even like my feelings, that like more is just more sometimes, more is not better, right?

Is that what we can, you think about the crimes of poverty, it's like we can actually fix poverty, right?

That's like a, that is like a legitimate solution.

So if it is like theft and those sort of things, like we can, we can create the conditions where people don't need to steal.

So there will be like some people who just steal because they're like fascinated with stealing.

And like that is a extreme minority of the people committing that.

Crimes of drugs, we can actually like help people get addiction treatment.

Like those things we can do, right?

I'm interested, like what we, what I don't know how to fix is like the people embezzling money and money laundering.

Those are the people.

That's not a crime.

Like you just did that because that's what you wanted to do.

Right.

And, you know, what would it look like if we invested so much of this money in the, and I don't even want to call it prevention, but just like actually like giving people the resources that they need to do well.

I think the police are already heavily staffed.

I think that like that, that works.

I don't think more will help us.

There will need to be a mechanism in society that like

finds the people who commits those sort of wrong.

Like I think that that is like a real thing, but I think that they have the resources.

Now the question is, can we do the larger, well, will we do the larger work in society?

So you think about Trump just gave $700 billion to the military.

It would take $125 billion to take every single person out of poverty, right?

Like it's not, it's not that there's no money and no resources.

It's that the will isn't there.

And the police are really interesting because they sort of play all all sides they do the like we are not your social worker we're not your parent we're not your whatever cool and at the same time they're like please fund the football league and it's like but i thought you weren't my social worker my coach i thought you like just policed and it's like you are like conveniently sort of making every argument with your like split second decisions and then you're like i'm always busy but then you're like well i need to go and you're like what's going on right so i'm not i'm not sold on that i do wish there were more people willing to publicly just say this isn't working that we need a different solution so the clearance rate thing is interesting, good data.

I think if the outcome is like more funding to police departments, it's like the wrong, like the data doesn't suggest that that's like a good solution.

Or even shifted funding within police departments.

Yeah, because I think that's part of Jilliovi's argument is that

all the resources within the department, you can keep the resources stable, but shift way more of them towards solving homicide, the most serious crime ostensibly that the police department can take on, and away from the kind of foot patrol preventative preventative work that can actually

increase tensions between the police and the community rather than resolve them.

Yeah, I think

I'm interested in how we prevent all of those things from happening so we don't have to do any more like redoubling of resources more than I'm interested in like that.

And I do think that like increasing the clearance rates is like a good thing.

That will not be the solve though.

That like some of the relationships are broken so badly that people just sort of feel like you're doing the bare minimum.

you're finally doing the bare minimum of your job and you don't get like an award for that.

They're like, you get paid to find the people that kill people.

This isn't like a hobby.

This isn't like a, you know, like, yes, you did it.

Thank you for finally doing your job, you know?

I'm interested in this idea of kind of where we would be able to put resources versus policing and poverty alleviation.

I mean, a dream of poverty eradication is one of them.

I'm wondering if there are other areas that you've kind of isolated as things that if we invested a whole ton of resources in this thing, then we wouldn't even need to worry about policing.

Do you think about the recent study that just came out about pre-K and DC?

About how pre-K and DC, you know, people thought that the benefits would be solely educational and like they are educational, but it also led to the highest maternal employment rate in this city in decades.

And you're like, that makes sense, right?

So like, what does it mean when we make those kind of investments, knowing that they actually are wealth investments too, that women, mothers can actually participate in the

workforce in ways that they historically were not able to do right that matters so i'm interested in that i'm interested in like housing programs and like educational access to higher education like those you know you think about the community college of baltimore city i just know baltimore well it's like a one percent graduation rate you're like why would you go

like

1% is like what is happening you know what I mean like so how do we strengthen those institutions that could be real levers for people you know i think if i'm obsessed if i wasn't doing mass incarceration the police and racial wealth gap i'm obsessed with a lot lot of things led.

I'm obsessed with it.

I'm obsessed with adult literacy.

Is that like we, there's no scaled adult literacy program.

So if you're a 20-year-old that can't read, where do you go?

You pray.

That's a bad solution.

I was going to say, one of the things that it makes me think of a lot is the conversation we're having around mental health and the complete lack of care and facilities and programming to treat people with mental health illnesses and then how ill-equipped police departments have said that they are to deal with people with mental health issues and where that has consistently led.

And I wonder if we were able to direct a huge amount of resources into caring for people with mental health issues, where that would leave us in terms of policing.

Do you know where the biggest mental health facility in the country is?

Chicago.

Where?

Cook County.

Yes.

Cook County Jail.

The three biggest mental health facilities in the country are prison and jails, which is nice.

Radio Atlantic Triviality.

Yes, yes.

There's this passage I wanted to read a little bit of from the book.

Conflict exists in community, and not all conflict is the same.

It has dimensions, nuance.

If we are to live in community with each other, we must acknowledge this reality.

Skip ahead a little bit.

The choice to live among others requires the presence of a mechanism for responding to conflict to instances when norms and values are broken or alleged to have been broken.

But the choice to live in community also means that the community must dictate those norms and values for itself and must be able to manage the set of interventions used when conflict inevitably arises.

I read this passage in part.

This interested me because it was at the one time a statement about why the impulse to dedicate a law enforcement mechanism was constructed in American neighborhoods and in neighborhoods around the world.

But there's also a meta-level to this too when I read it.

Activism itself and organizing involves inherent conflict among organizers and that goes back, it is impossible to read back generations of activism in America and elsewhere and not read about some of the tensions within the movements that existed at those times and I'm curious how you as someone who has had to navigate those tensions as an activist

how do you grapple with them and what have you learned about conflict that exists in the community of organizers that you're a part of yeah i wrote that passage because i was interested in like you know we did we created the first ever public database of use of force policies policies and use of force policies are the rules by which police can kill or harm people in communities and it was actually just like really hard to find them and we're like you know if the police have the power to shoot you in the head you should at least know like the circumstances where that like that seems like a basic thing right and it was this idea that like we know conflict is going to exist we know there'll be consequences and people and communities should at the very least be a part of making the consequences and know them right like that was a When I think about the movement space, you know, it's hard when you think about the civil rights movement is that they, the movement was built out of institutions and out of institutions, so schools, churches, like those sort of things.

And those places inherently have mechanisms to deal with conflict.

Like there's like a, there's like a pastor, there's like a whatever.

Um, the movement today was born out of, you know, we were in the street.

And that is just like a different, it's a different way of being together.

Uh, so I, in hindsight, I wish that we had been more intentional about

like just developing a mechanism to deal with conflict.

I think there's some conflicts inside around like, what's the best pathway to change, right?

Is it like burn it all down or is it sort of a work within?

People offer that dichotomy.

And that's a constant tension.

That's been true for a long time, too.

Programs or structures, you know, some people feel like

opening up a homeless shelter is actually the most impactful thing.

Some people feel like working on homeless policy is the most important thing, right?

Like, so those tensions,

there's always a battle of like who is seen and who isn't, like, whose stories do we lift and who don't, you know, whose stories don't we tell, who is accessed and who doesn't.

So I'm mindful about those.

Those are not public tensions, but they're present.

But given the fact that one of the pieces of the environment that has changed is social media, is the very public space in which you all are organizing and

speaking.

If protest is the act of speaking truth in public, as you say, much of that is happening on these platforms.

Do you think that there are mechanisms that the movement, that activists are evolving now

to navigate that conflict when it arises?

In the larger space, I don't know.

I don't know.

Like,

you know, it's this reattention between people.

Some people are like, I wish that the conflicts were more public so that we can understand them.

That's a lot of professors feel like that.

A lot of people who don't know internal movement politics.

Some people feel like if they were public, people would lose faith in the movement space.

So they want it to be private.

I don't know.

As somebody who's like the brunt of some of the things that aren't true, it's like I'm pretty publicly quiet because I just like, don't, it's just like, I don't.

Sometimes it's like, who wants to be be trapped in like some 12-hour conversation about some random thing, which is like what the internet does to you sometimes.

So I don't know.

That's honest.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, DeRay, on the other side of freedom, congratulations on finishing, publishing the book.

Well, thanks.

Good to be here.

And thank you all.

And thank you for joining us.

Jillian, thanks as always.

Thanks for having me.

Of course.

Chill, chill, chillian.

All right, when we're back in a minute, we'll have something special.

Festival keepers, the moments from the Atlantic Festival that we won't soon forget.

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So, this week, instead of Keepers, we're going to share a few moments from the Atlantic Festival that stood out to us.

Some of them you might already have heard on the news, others might have just been memorable for us.

But these are moments that we wanted to keep.

First, here's Hillary Clinton discussing Russian meddling with Jeffrey Goldberg.

It is the first time, as I say in the afterword, that we have been attacked by a foreign power and have done nothing.

I mean, it would be like, I can't even imagine.

I mean, it's a horrible example, but after 9-11, George W.

Bush said, well, you know, I don't have time to meet.

I don't have time to this.

It was terrible.

We feel sorry about it.

We'll rebuild New York and the Pentagon, but we're not going to worry about it.

Well, at a certain point, that's what this is turning into.

The evidence continues to accumulate.

People in Congress have tried on a bipartisan basis to deal with it, to get more help out there to states and counties because we have such a decentralized election system.

But unfortunately, we're not doing enough, and I can only hope and pray that we don't see a repeat of what happened in the midterm elections.

Here's Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, the Judiciary Committee member who forced the quickly concluded FBI investigation.

I was very troubled by the tone of

the remarks.

The initial

defense that

Judge Kavanaugh gave was something like I told my wife, I hoped that I would sound that indignant if

I felt that I was unjustly

maligned.

But then it went on and the interaction with the members was sharp and partisan and that concerns me.

And I

tell myself, you give a little leeway because of what he's been through.

But on the other hand, we can't have this on the court.

We simply can't.

And

talk of impeachment or stacking the court.

It's just, it's going the wrong direction.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Everything he said was factual.

He's frustrated his nominee has been treated so badly.

Factual is a personal, degrading attack on someone who is a private citizen.

You know, here's what's personally degrading.

This is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill.

See, this is not the first time this has happened.

That's actually a reference to something somebody said.

In James Carville.

I don't like what the president said last night.

I'm the first person to say, I want to hear from Dr.

Ford.

I thought she was handled respectfully.

I thought Kavanaugh was treated like crap.

Yeah, well boo yourself.

California Senator Kamala Harris.

Last night the president of the United States

at a rally

urging a crowd to laugh at her.

Yeah.

I can't think of anything more not, inappropriate is not, it doesn't, it's not descriptive enough.

It's mean.

It's mean.

And it is completely without any level of empathy

about what her experience was.

He clearly watched her testimony.

So what was the purpose of saying that and doing that?

Did it need to be done?

Of course not.

But beyond that it didn't need to be done, doing it was for what purpose?

The director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Aijin Pooh.

We need to have a collective truth-telling and a real honest conversation about what is happening in our country, the severe and toxic power imbalance that leaves women so vulnerable to sexual violence and harassment.

And

I also think that longer term, we need to talk about masculinity.

that there needs to be a vision for masculinity and strength inside of masculinity that doesn't come at the expense of women.

This is not a partisan issue.

This is not,

this is not, this is actually a question of what kind of world we want to bring our children and our grandchildren into, and also now about the sanctity of our democratic institutions.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

My thanks to our guest, Dere McKesson, for sitting in with us in the midst of a hectic festival schedule.

Thanks as well to my inestimable co-host, Jillian White.

Thanks as always to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the immortal rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic as interpreted by John Batiste.

What is your keeper?

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

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Most importantly, thank you for listening.

There may always be much in the world to fight against, but may you never lose sight of what and whom you're fighting for.

We'll see you next week.