S2 Ep1060: Ta-Nehisi Coates: A Natural Human Reaction

Transcript

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Speaker 4 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
A little change from Bill Crystal Mondays today. You can get your crystal fix in written form.

Speaker 4 His newsletter is out this morning arguing that we're not alarmed enough about what Trump is doing in LA. But instead, we got a special guest today, author and journalist.

Speaker 4 His Between the World and Me will be released in paperback next week in observation of the 10th anniversary of its publication. It's Tanahasi Coates.
How you doing, man?

Speaker 5 I'm good. I'm good.
A little sick, but I'm okay. I'll be all right.

Speaker 4 What a strange world it is for you to be the stand-in for Bill Crystal.

Speaker 5 You know? Yeah, we're practically indistinguishable.

Speaker 4 Who the hell knows how the world will turn?

Speaker 4 But I want to get into the book stuff and some other bigger picture stuff. But obviously, we had some news over the weekend.

Speaker 4 I want to pick your brain about with the National Guard being deployed to Los Angeles in reaction to the anti-ICE protests. I guess just open-ended first.

Speaker 4 I want to hear what you make of what we're seeing out there.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think it's tough because I think there are people

Speaker 5 who probably

Speaker 5 try to be strategic and understand politics who probably don't love this and don't love the visuals that they're seeing.

Speaker 5 And I think it is certainly true that Trump wants to, you know, bait a confrontation. You know, he certainly did that in

Speaker 5 2020 with George Floyd and everything. And so it's pretty clear that, you know, he's trying to create a spectacle that helps him.
And I know that there probably is, again,

Speaker 5 a tendency or maybe a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss what looks like

Speaker 5 the disorder of protests, to deal with the very, you know,

Speaker 5 real thing of having to convince people of your position and not feeling like these visuals are the best. The problem is,

Speaker 5 I think there are a number of us who have been watching

Speaker 5 ineffective and probably maybe more importantly than ineffective, feeble resistance and

Speaker 5 down to outright cowardice. And so it's like when people come into your community and

Speaker 5 they're snatching folks out of graduations or they're snatching folks when they're going to

Speaker 5 report and follow the letter of the law.

Speaker 5 When you have a situation in which people are being taken out of this country and thrown in the gulags, and folks are laughing about it and laughing about defying judges and some of our politicians say, well, we shouldn't talk about this.

Speaker 5 You know what I mean? Or some people who, you know, I guess our political opponents say, well, well, you shouldn't focus on this. That the guy who is actually his center to, you know, Van Holland, who

Speaker 5 represents him, should not advocate for him. People feel the very human need to do something.

Speaker 5 You know, you can't just come into people's community and inflict violence and expect that there will be no reaction. These are human beings.
You know,

Speaker 5 these are human beings. And so these, these questions, you know, that necessarily arise, and I, and I understand them, you know, of strategy and tactics, et cetera.

Speaker 5 It's very hard to ask people to not be human beings, you know, to not have human reactions, you know?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 On the kind of instigation side of it, you know, it's funny,

Speaker 4 of all places, the Wall Street Journal editorial board this morning wrote this sentence, which is, I think, half insightful about the situation.

Speaker 4 They wrote, it's fanciful to think that raiding restaurants to snatch bus boys or home depots to grab stock clerks won't inspire a backlash. The correct part was the second half of the sentence.

Speaker 4 They're correct that that would inspire a backlash. I think maybe their incorrect part was that there are people around Trump that desire for that not to be the case.

Speaker 4 I think that's actually the point of what they're doing. And

Speaker 4 if even the folks sitting over there at News Corp, you know, can see that this is a natural human reaction. Like, I hear you.
It is hard to begrudge that reaction.

Speaker 4 Like, on the other hand, you know, like burning up Waymos and waving Mexican flags, like, I don't understand what, really, what that is achieving either. Right.

Speaker 4 And so like, it's, it's tough to kind of navigate how to balance those

Speaker 4 questions.

Speaker 5 I don't know that it's strategic, though. You know what I mean? Like, I don't, I don't, I don't know that it is, you know, the fact that some group of people sat back and said,

Speaker 5 this is going to get us, you know, to this place. Yeah.
You know, in this period, we're going to do this. We're going to do that.

Speaker 5 One of the things, people don't talk about this enough with the civil rights movement, right?

Speaker 5 Like, they look at the nonviolence and they look at what appears to be the discipline of it and the suits and the, you know, the hats. And, you know, say, well, why can't we do that?

Speaker 5 But if you read the history, first of all, what they were doing was tremendously inhuman in the sense of they were training themselves to not defend themselves.

Speaker 5 This is not, again, a very, very natural human reaction. You know, somebody hits you, you try to stop them from hitting you.
That's a pretty, you know, natural thing.

Speaker 5 And so they were disciplining disciplining themselves to, A, not do that. And then they were constantly dealing with people

Speaker 5 who, you know what I mean, didn't feel like that was how they wanted to live, that somehow that assaulted their dignity, that, you know, that assaulted, you know, the sanctity, you know, of their body.

Speaker 5 This was a constant.

Speaker 5 constant, constant, constant tension, you know, right up to the point where Martin Luther King gets killed, right? And we end up with riots.

Speaker 5 And is it the case that you could make, you know, maybe more political political progress if folks dressed in suits and all you know waved american flags and carried copies of the cross i mean possibly possibly you know what i mean i will say that not necessarily i don't know that that would work given where we are right now but i understand the argument for it but i just i just think like we have to build into our politics

Speaker 5 a tolerance for the idea that people will have human reactions. And then we have to calculate accordingly.
You know what I mean? That doesn't mean that folks don't know, try to strategize.

Speaker 5 But kind of looking at these people and saying, why don't you do X, Y, and Z?

Speaker 5 Because this always happens. You know what I mean? It always happens.
I think it would happen with any community. Yeah.
You know?

Speaker 4 Well, I guess, I mean, obviously there's some limits to any parallel, particularly civil rights parallel, but

Speaker 4 maybe

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 missing ingredient here is to your point about kind of the limp resistance coming from the more, whatever you want to call it, establishment, normal sect.

Speaker 4 Like if that is missing, then like the void, that there's a void that is filled. You know what I mean? Like you needed, again,

Speaker 4 this is really reductive, but you needed Malcolm and

Speaker 4 Martin. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 I know what you mean.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And I think what that means is when you have this kind of limp resistance, it's like the established tech channels completely lose legitimacy.
So what am I left with? You know,

Speaker 5 what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just let these people just come in here and do this to my community and not do anything? And I don't think that's a position anybody would want to be in.

Speaker 4 What is your sense of alarm just as far as, you know, and I think it seems like things died down a little bit overnight, but

Speaker 4 just how quick to the trigger these guys were in the Trump administration with a National Guard deployment.

Speaker 4 You know, they put out a press release, 500 Marines from the 2nd Battalion in 29 Palms, California are prepared to deploy.

Speaker 4 It does feel like they want to do that.

Speaker 5 Oh, they definitely do. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't surprised.

Speaker 5 Again, if you go back and look at, you know, 2020, maybe they were a little slower in 2020, you know, because they had this visual of George Floyd to contend with.

Speaker 5 But, I mean, they were sending people with masks and

Speaker 5 with the badges covered up, you know. And this was not ICE.
This was not, you know, a matter of people who weren't citizens. This was, you know, deployed in general against, you know, citizens.
And so

Speaker 5 I'm not surprised by that. You know, they want to portray an image of

Speaker 5 this country kind of being at war. And Trump is the, you know, the defender of order while he loots the country, by the way.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, to me, the difference between 2020 is it's obviously not Trump because his impulse is the same, but it's like instead of having Mark Esper or whatever in charge of the military, you know, some guy who's not perfect, has got his own flaws, but like, you know, doesn't want to be, you know, doesn't want his kids to see him as the guy in the history book that sent the military in after, you know, Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets, he's got a weekend talk show host running the military now.

Speaker 4 And so I got, to me, I think that is what makes that's what makes my concern level higher now than about the potential for state violence than maybe looking back.

Speaker 4 I don't know if you feel the same way.

Speaker 5 I think you're right. I totally agree.
I thought this when Trump won, though, I mean, it's just like, it's

Speaker 5 anything could happen. Never.
Anything could happen.

Speaker 4 One more thing on the Trump or on this part of it. So this is happening now in LA with the specter of we're, you know, coming up this weekend.
We've got our birthday parade.

Speaker 4 The birthday boy gets a tank parade through the city in dc so you spent some time there uh went to howard i don't know if you have any thoughts on that visual um the inverse visual i guess from the the waymo's on fire it's bad

Speaker 5 it's it's bad you know i i do think it's one

Speaker 5 i do think it's one of these things that

Speaker 5 we have to reckon with which is someday

Speaker 5 Trump will not be president. But I think

Speaker 5 yeah, I am sure that. I'm not sure that, you know, how that's going to happen,

Speaker 4 but at some point it will.

Speaker 5 You know what I mean? I don't know.

Speaker 4 The AI is happening really fast. Is it possible they could like put like what

Speaker 4 Futurama? They could put his brain in a thing like Richard Nixon and make him permanent president.

Speaker 5 Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so.
But barring some, you know, grand AI, you know, innovation, I think what is happening is like there's significant damage being done to like

Speaker 5 expectations, norms, legitimacy, et cetera. I actually think that damage started when people,

Speaker 5 well, when we as a country began to believe our own hype, which is to say, if we say the Senate is the greatest deliberative body in the world, then it must be. And we don't have to do anything

Speaker 5 to kind of make that true, you know, make that the case, you know, when folks really began to believe that this wasn't a country, you know, run by fallible human beings, that there were ghosts in the machines that could guide it.

Speaker 5 And thus, the institutions did not have to be protected.

Speaker 5 There didn't have to be an amount of caretaking

Speaker 5 done there. That really left it vulnerable.
And what is happening now

Speaker 5 is the next guy, whoever that is, after Trump,

Speaker 5 can say, I want a military parade too.

Speaker 5 I can loot the country too. I can have my own crypto coins and crypto business too, because that's what it is now.
And so I think,

Speaker 5 as frightening as Trump is and as frightening as he is right now, I mean, I think he probably will go down,

Speaker 5 certainly it's the case so far, as the most impactful president of my lifetime. And that is

Speaker 4 scary. Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's an interesting question, right? Like this,

Speaker 4 how much of this is irreparable? I think that's another thing that kind of goes back to stuff that you've written about in the past. I mean, we've had...

Speaker 4 dark times that then you know things got a little better and then backslid and i you know we could go through all the historical examples of that but you know there's certain things that

Speaker 4 something changes, the country makes a choice, it goes down a path, and like the other path then becomes closed, right?

Speaker 4 There's certain things that are not fixable. Like there, you know, Trump won't always be president.

Speaker 4 You know, maybe we can, the next president can come in and put in some reforms to prevent future presidents from having crypto griffs like we did after Watergate or whatever.

Speaker 4 But Tim, how does that happen though?

Speaker 5 Like, how does that, like, how do those reforms happen given what the Senate is, given what the political parties are like? Like, how does that even happen?

Speaker 4 I'm going to answer the question with a question, which is, I don't know, what do you think? I don't know. It's hard.
It's hard.

Speaker 4 I guess that's my, that was the point of bringing it up is that I just, it's hard to see along some of these vectors things getting better, at least in the short to medium term, you know, because of putting them back in again.

Speaker 4 Right? I do think it was potentially reparable, at least some of the damage from the first term, but now

Speaker 4 it is hard to like kind of envision a way, you know, back to a politics that looks more like what it was like before. And but then I guess there's a question of like, is that, do you want that? Right.

Speaker 4 Like maybe something else emerges out of it. I don't know.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I will hope something else emerges out of it because I don't, I don't think, again, I don't think Trump just magically appears.

Speaker 5 You know, I think there were currents and I think there were things that were already happening that, you know, made him possible.

Speaker 5 You know, and so that probably has to be, you know, dealt with to begin with.

Speaker 5 I also think,

Speaker 5 you know, and I don't know where you are where you are in this, because I know you're, you know,

Speaker 5 maybe even at this very moment, going through your own political evolution,

Speaker 5 as all good citizens and thinking people should be, by the way.

Speaker 4 Yeah. You know, nothing wrong with changing your mind, man.
That's what I always say to you.

Speaker 4 People never change their mind that I'm much more suspect of.

Speaker 4 I always said to people, I was like, if the stupidest game show host in the country got like a a racist buffoon who has no redeemable qualities, gets made the president, and your reaction to that was, you know, my views on everything, the nature of the country, pretty much the same

Speaker 4 or unchanged. Then I was like, then we had a different view of the country.
You know what I mean? So anyway.

Speaker 5 And so I just say that to say that I do think people have to have some positive vision of the state.

Speaker 5 Like that has to happen. Like at some point, people will have to feel like the state itself, the government, not America as an abstract concept, but the government is itself good for something.

Speaker 5 And it would be helpful if that something was not just violence. So for instance, if it was not just the cops or the military, like there has to be some positive articulation.
of the state.

Speaker 5 And I think that that is important because when you are asking people to go out to vote for something, when you're asking people to go out and support something, or you know, when you're in a situation like we are right now where where something is being taken apart, you know, like I've heard a number of people say, look, most Americans don't care about what happens to USAID.

Speaker 5 Like, most people don't care about this. Well, that's our failing that they don't care, right? Like, that's not just

Speaker 5 a fait accompli.

Speaker 5 You know, the fact of the matter is, you know, there have been certain political decisions to talk about the state in a certain way, to talk about the government in a certain way, to portray it in a certain way that has made it easier

Speaker 5 to believe that

Speaker 5 taking it apart can somehow be a good thing or a positive thing. What I'm trying to say is, there are narratives that happen before this

Speaker 5 great action happens that we all deplore.

Speaker 4 And so I think

Speaker 5 if we are trying to get either back to something or probably in my preference, forward to something, there has to be some sort of positive articulation of what you're defending.

Speaker 5 Because if your position is just, I am just slightly less skeptical at the state than this guy, I don't think that that works, you know.

Speaker 4 And I guess this gets to a conundrum that the Democrats have, in particular in the Trump era, which is

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 at some level, a positive articulation of the state is a defense of the status quo, right?

Speaker 4 It doesn't have to be a full-throated defense of it, but it has to be a defense of like what is good about America, right?

Speaker 4 Whether it be the institutions or, you know, liberal democracy or pluralism, right? Like it has to be the rule of law, right?

Speaker 4 Like, okay, this, these are things that America has done that is good, but Democrats find themselves being defenders of a status quo that people don't like.

Speaker 4 And that takes us back to the first thing you mentioned, which is you end up kind of having a limp pushback.

Speaker 4 So how do you, how would you navigate that if you, if you, if somebody called you and said that they want to be the standard bearer of this and they want you to help them find some words for it, like, what would you, what would you even say?

Speaker 5 So I will, let me just say up front that I'm somewhat in tension with the advice I'm about to give, right? And this is why I'm not in electoral politics.

Speaker 5 There is a long history of African-American leaders both asserting,

Speaker 5 I can't believe I'm going to say this,

Speaker 5 both asserting the greatness of America. and like the flaws at the same time.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 So when Martin Luther King goes to, you know, the martial arts, he says, you know, I just, I'm just, you know, you you know, the check has come back. You said X, Y, and Z is true.

Speaker 5 I think that's great. I think those things you're standing for are great.
You're not doing them.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know what I mean? And so it doubles this kind of a defense

Speaker 5 of the country. You know what I mean? Or as a statement, you know, a positive affirmation of the idea of what it should be.

Speaker 5 And then at the same time, a real articulation of what is actually happening. If you've sent me grimacing at that idea a little bit,

Speaker 5 it's probably because

Speaker 5 as I have myself changed over the past five to 10 years, particularly, my politics are probably becoming a little bit more international.

Speaker 5 And so I am not always just concerned about making sure this country is just in terms of its treatment of its citizens, but that it really is a just actor on the world stage.

Speaker 5 Maybe you're getting this from me, but I feel that oftentimes we are not.

Speaker 4 And maybe, I don't know. I mean, maybe there is somewhat of an answer in that to like this, you know, political conundrum that the Democrats have themselves in.
Like maybe there is a way to

Speaker 4 talk about

Speaker 4 the flaws and the mistakes and the things that we need to change while like uplifting

Speaker 4 maybe not the state, but the people, the nature of the American people, you know, the nature of the American people and the experiment. Or maybe that's

Speaker 4 bullshit.

Speaker 5 I think that's how we get here, though. I think that's exactly how we get here.
Because, like,

Speaker 5 I don't want to

Speaker 5 personalize this, but

Speaker 5 the thing I think about all the time, like, I think about, I wrote a piece on Barack Obama at the end of his presidency, right?

Speaker 5 And he granted, he's very kind and granted me, you know, a lot of time to interview and talk with him.

Speaker 5 And I wrote this, so it's not like I'm breaking any news, but the thing I remember him saying most out of that interview, out of, you know, everything he said and all the articulate things he said was,

Speaker 5 you know, Trump can't win.

Speaker 5 And he can't win because there just isn't a history in this country of,

Speaker 5 I guess, what he actually said was

Speaker 5 normally, with a couple of exceptions, the American people respond to people with a positive vision.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And not a negative vision. And he was, you know, that wasn't a line.
You know what I mean? Like, he really did at that point in time believe that. He may not now, but he really did believe that.
And

Speaker 5 i think about that a lot because i think it is a manifestation of

Speaker 5 like how some of this

Speaker 5 conversation about the experiment and about the people deludes us allows us to ignore the fact that we are still human beings and we are still subject to you know, all of, you know, the flaws and all of the impulses and all of the darkness and all of the things that are in the soul of human beings.

Speaker 5 And so it is certainly possible to build, you know, as Trump has proven, a political movement off of the darkest part to us, you know, and that is unfortunate, you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 But I think if we can face that, you know, like my worry is that we feel that there is something in us, in our bones, that makes us invulnerable to this sort of rhetoric.

Speaker 5 And I think we would, you know, do well to dispense with that.

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Speaker 4 Let's talk about that. It's a little bit kind of what I want to get into in the book too in a minute, but like

Speaker 4 what does facing that look like? It's interesting you say that about President Obama, because I agree with you. I think that he believed that.

Speaker 4 Like, I think that he believed that of all the flaws of the American people, like that, you know, that the American spirit was stronger and that there was something about the country's

Speaker 4 aspirations that made them reject the most dark elements of

Speaker 4 Trumpism. And there are a lot of us, you know, that woke up a couple months ago and were like, fuck.

Speaker 4 like we had this realization right that was like we went from thinking we made a mistake Hillary actually got more votes we weren't prepared you know we didn't do the right things we didn't make the right arguments we didn't have the right standard bearer and like it was excusable and it's fixable to thinking oh no like right we actually this is yeah this is bad like things are the country is bad maybe like at its core like so when you say okay to make things better you have to face that like what does that look like?

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 there's a part of you that says, well, maybe I should just relent into despair then and just say, fuck this, and kind of become like them, right?

Speaker 4 I don't know, become a mirror image of them is maybe the right, I think that's a rational reaction. So I don't know.
How do you process that challenge? Because you've been processing it long before.

Speaker 4 I reread the book last night and you were talking about all this stuff 10 years ago.

Speaker 5 I mean, but that's the political tradition, right? Like, I mean, like, I say this all the time, but

Speaker 5 African Americans in this country as a community have been enslaved in this country longer than they have been free.

Speaker 5 So what that means is that, or, you know, on these shores, I guess, you know, if you predated before the country,

Speaker 5 but what that means is that

Speaker 5 to the extent that, you know, people cared about human rights or anything like that, like the idea that people's children shouldn't be sold off because of the color of their skin, that people shouldn't be worked to death because of the color of their skin, that women should be subject to industrialized rape and sexual assault.

Speaker 5 I mean, for the most part, we were just kind of like, eh,

Speaker 5 you know, I don't love it, but you know what I mean? Like, you know, many, obviously, so many of our founding fathers was, you know, like, they owed their existence to that.

Speaker 5 And it took a war that killed 20% of the military-age white male population in the South to get rid of it. I mean, that's a high price.
Yeah. That's a really, really high price.

Speaker 5 And so, what that means is not that, you know, America is, you know, as a state or as a country is somehow worse than all other countries or states in the world.

Speaker 5 What it means is that we have just as much capacity

Speaker 5 for looking away from evil as everybody else. And yet, if you look at the political tradition that comes out of that, it's not really a despairing tradition.

Speaker 5 These are people who are, you know, are kind of facing the worst of it, you know, in terms of, you know, America.

Speaker 5 And I think for, you know, complicated reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, the answer rarely is this thing is totally and completely corrupt. We need to abandon it.
Sometimes that's the answer.

Speaker 5 And some of that, you know,

Speaker 5 I very much identify with. But certainly the mainstream position of the politics

Speaker 5 is not that. You know what I mean? And so I think on one level,

Speaker 5 The black tradition really does grapple with

Speaker 5 the dark heart of humanity that is here and is very much present

Speaker 5 in America and has always been present, while at the same time trying to

Speaker 5 advance it.

Speaker 5 And again, I don't think that's because there's anything boned deep about black people in this country. It's just the nature of our experience here and what we've had to.

Speaker 5 Despair isn't really an option. You know what I mean? Because it's like, despair is like,

Speaker 5 They sold my son, you know, from Virginia down to Mississippi. And so am I going to completely abandon all efforts to find him? That's what despair is.
So, I can't betray him by doing that, right?

Speaker 5 Like, we have people at stake. You know what I mean? It's very intimate with us.
And so, to despair is to like, you know, abandon people, you know, which I think is a bit much for us.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And this is the thing that kind of pisses me off sometimes when thinking about the conversation around Trump voters, thinking about how to process all this is like there's a lot of this excuse making, right?

Speaker 4 It's like there's a lot of economic pain, there's resentment, like the factory towns got hollowed out. And, you know, the Apple, you know, there was fentanyl.
And

Speaker 4 there's some truth to all that. But like, you hear all that and you think, well,

Speaker 4 okay, but,

Speaker 4 you know, I mean, black folks went through way worse than all this

Speaker 4 in the last generations.

Speaker 4 One of the things I was reading from you recently, I forget which article it was in, was where you were like, if anybody should be angered about the devastation wrecked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it's the African Americans.

Speaker 4 The housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap, right? And you didn't see this radicalization, right? Like at a community level, right?

Speaker 4 Individual level, but like at a community level, you didn't see this. Okay, what we really need to do is put in charge our most comically evil, you know, standard error and punish the perpetrators.

Speaker 4 But that

Speaker 4 has been what you've seen from, you know, a lot of folks on the MAGA side. And I just don't, like, okay, so what is the lesson there?

Speaker 4 Sometimes it takes takes you to a bad place when you think about that the lesson is that they were successful in putting Donald Trump in.

Speaker 5 I think it is hard to accept that culture is an extremely important part of politics.

Speaker 5 That there's not going to be a politics that doesn't have a cultural component to it. You know, that there just isn't.

Speaker 5 You know, I was talking to somebody a couple of months ago, you know, who I, you know, actually was, you know, I think, you know, further to the left, and they were making the point, you know, and I think, you know, it's an astute political point

Speaker 5 that, hey, you know, I don't, you know, I won't go out and talk about, you know, say, you know, trans rights or immigrant rights, you know, to this person over here.

Speaker 5 I will focus on the things that we have in common economically, you know what I mean, and try to build the coalition there.

Speaker 5 It's not that I'm, you know, anti-trans or anti-right, you know, immigrant, but you know, I'm trying to build a coalition. And coalitions have to be built on the things that are shared.

Speaker 5 And I said, yeah, that makes sense. But what happens

Speaker 5 when your opposition starts attacking people,

Speaker 5 right? Like that, that

Speaker 5 really is, you know, I get it. Hey, you don't want to highlight it and talk about it.
You know, I understand that.

Speaker 5 You know, I mean, that's not the, you know, the point of, you know, how you get elected. But when people decide that they want to talk about it,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 4 what do you do then?

Speaker 5 You know, and

Speaker 5 I probably am one

Speaker 5 that feels that it's immoral

Speaker 5 to

Speaker 5 see bullying and to look away from it.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 not to mention, you know, as some people are now pitching, jump in on it. And it's tough, man.
Like, like

Speaker 5 to accept that

Speaker 5 a group of people or that someone would turn over the entire state

Speaker 5 because somewhere

Speaker 5 in the country, there's a high school track athlete who is transitioning and maybe won first place. Like that, that would be enough.

Speaker 5 I mean, that's scary.

Speaker 5 Like, that's really scary, you know?

Speaker 4 I also struggle with the premise of the argument because, like, the economics of the Trump voter is better than most people throughout the world. You know, like, the French haven't turned to a Trump.

Speaker 4 Like, we did better than the European country. You know, it doesn't work for me as a unifying theory that it's just the economics.
Like, the cultural part, the cultural battle,

Speaker 4 like, may is is a much clearer to me like rationale for him

Speaker 5 let me also just advance that a little bit too i mean there are people i think um whose politics i probably you know share in terms of what they want to see uh in terms of what the the social safety net should be in this country but when you look to europe where the social safety net is a lot stronger and you talk to black people over there and you talk to Arabs, you know, Arab people over there,

Speaker 5 they do not feel that the social safety net has been necessarily been an anti-racist endeavor. In other words, it has not expunged, you know, those feelings.

Speaker 5 It really hasn't, which is to say that, you know, you can deal with all of that economic stuff in the way that a lot of people suggest, you know, they should be dealt with.

Speaker 4 And yet,

Speaker 4 you know, not a ton of liberalization in Qatar and the UAE, where there's like a lot of economic prosperity that's passed along.

Speaker 5 That's true. I mean, that is exactly right.
That is exactly right.

Speaker 5 I mean, in our own country, post-war period, I mean, you have this, this boom, and, you know, in terms of, you know, like, we see that as the golden age.

Speaker 5 I don't think anybody would describe, you know, post-war America, you know, as a particularly tolerant, you know, not racist, you know, place.

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Speaker 4 I want to get into a couple more of the elements from your book we've been touched on, but first there's this other book out there that has people kind of a flame, Abundance.

Speaker 4 I'm sure you've been here in the chatter about this.

Speaker 4 Ezra wrote this.

Speaker 4 Ezra wrote this yesterday about the theory of power. And I was like, man, I have to get Tanasi's reaction to this because

Speaker 4 I don't really know where you'll take it.

Speaker 4 But he wrote this, because I guess to set this up, some on the left have been criticizing him, saying that the book does not have a clear view of power and that the right way for the left to gain power is to create enemies, particularly in the billionaires and the corporate leaders.

Speaker 4 And this was his pushback to that. My view of power is more classically liberal.
In his book, Liberalism, The Life of an Idea, Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly. Human power was implacable.

Speaker 4 It could never be relied on to behave well.

Speaker 4 Whether political, economic, or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.

Speaker 4 To take this view means power will be ill-used by your friends as well as your enemies, by your opponents as well as by your neighbors. From this perspective, there are no safe reservoirs of power.

Speaker 4 Corporations sometimes serve the national interest, sometimes betray it. The same is true of governments, unions, churches, etc.

Speaker 4 What do you make of that? It seems right to me.

Speaker 4 I mean, I quote. There are some people that are very mad about that.
No, I see that. There's some that are like, no,

Speaker 4 that's not accurate, actually.

Speaker 4 And it's a false equivalence between, you know, these groups.

Speaker 5 I haven't read the column, so maybe it's like something

Speaker 5 that I'm missing. You know what I mean? Let me just say that.

Speaker 4 But,

Speaker 5 and while I follow the debate, I haven't had the chance to read Ezra's book.

Speaker 5 You know, I actually am still a little confused, you know, in terms of what the lines of the debate actually ought to be, to be frank with you.

Speaker 4 Well, here's why I asked you about it. I sorry to put you on the spot.
I asked you about it because I saw the Ezra tweet when I was reading an Atlantic article you wrote about Tony Jute.

Speaker 5 Yeah, Tony Jutton.

Speaker 4 There was a bit in that where you were talking about power. And

Speaker 4 you were writing about how there is this view that there's this arc of, you know, moral arc of history that was bending towards justice, the Obama view.

Speaker 4 And Jute was basically saying, no, that like, no, people do not pay the price for their

Speaker 4 ills and that the only way to make things better is to gain power. And so anyway, that's why

Speaker 4 I was curious kind of whether you had thought through

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 kind of question about the right way, you know, the right way to view gaining power.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I love that quote. That's actually from his book, Post-War.
And one of the things that

Speaker 5 that book is very, very clear-eyed about is

Speaker 5 the means by which, you know, what we call, you know, Europe today was, you know, established.

Speaker 5 Our rosy-eyed view of how the west greeted the survivors of the holocaust and dealt with the implications of the holocaust and the implications of world war ii and what he's talking about at that point is you know actually ethnic cleansing and how like there's some you know journalists who believing in you know the divine justice of the world believes that people will pay you know for that and

Speaker 5 tony is just like no there's no evidence that anybody ever paid you know sometimes the bad guys just get away with it

Speaker 5 i read that so I think Between the World and Me was published in 15, because we're 10 years, so it would have been published in 15, but really between the world and me comes out a case for reparations.

Speaker 5 And so I read that in 13, you know, before I went into the case for reparations, actually. And

Speaker 5 one of the things that conditioned me for was like just a view of the world and a view of history.

Speaker 5 You know, because I do think, you know, certainly within the African-American tradition, and I think this is because of, you know, perhaps our relationship with Christianity and the force with which, you know, Christianity has

Speaker 5 exerted itself in our politics and among our greatest leaders, in fact, that there is some sort of, at the end of the day,

Speaker 5 this will work out.

Speaker 5 The arc of the University Zolamba bends towards justice. And

Speaker 5 I guess Tony was probably one of the first people I read that was like,

Speaker 5 no, the arc is bent. People have to bend it.
It does not bend. There's no gravity.
There's no anything.

Speaker 5 And, you know, in fact, to the contrary, if anything, you know, the inertia is on the side of evil, not good.

Speaker 5 You know? And so that was

Speaker 5 just a revelatory moment. You know, and I'm probably all of

Speaker 5 my writing proceeds from that.

Speaker 4 Let's take it to the between the world and me then. You just earlier that I think you said something like in the five, 10 years since your views on it have evolved in some ways.
So,

Speaker 4 and how so?

Speaker 5 Well, I mean, I mean, a big one is, you know, and I've talked about this quite a bit, it's probably case for reparation. So I should explain the relationship between those two things.

Speaker 5 Okay. I was at the Atlantic

Speaker 5 for 10 years and somewhere around 2012, 2013, you know, I was, I mean, the grades, that job was so cool, man.

Speaker 5 And the coolest thing was like, I, you know, I was, I was a blogging and I would write like maybe twice a year or once a year, like these big pieces for the magazine.

Speaker 5 And what that meant was I just had so much time to read. You know what I mean? I just had just tons of time to just read and absorb.

Speaker 5 And because of what the blogosphere was then, I would often write about what I was reading. And then I would have this feedback, you know, with the people that were commenting.

Speaker 5 And they would say, well, you should read this, you should check out that. And I would go check out that.

Speaker 5 And I was, and so I was like in this, you know, I think this, just this hyper period of growth.

Speaker 5 And I don't know that I knew it then, but much of my political journey at that point was really just to answer the question of why was it that in every single socioeconomic indicator

Speaker 5 you looked at black people were typically you know somewhere at the bottom and i only say you know somewhere you know to include indigenous americans in in that you know calculus you know why was that so consistent and at the time you still hear this sometimes but less so now you know there was there was a huge argument for culture etc which never passed my smell test yeah right baggy jeans yes yes yes baggy jeans pull up your pants right

Speaker 4 yeah pull up your pants and that'll solve it that's enough you know um i mean you should pull up your pants, but I don't think that's why.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I was at World Pride this past weekend.

Speaker 4 People seemed to be doing well economically and had their pants down.

Speaker 5 It was fine. It was fine, as it turns out.
I feel like I started to get answers to that question, you know, and that really led me to a case for reparations.

Speaker 5 And the real breakthrough for me was that I was able to articulate it for my editors in such a way that they understood it.

Speaker 5 And not just understood it, got excited about it and backed it and did everything. And so that was a remarkable, you know, thing for me.

Speaker 5 And Between the World and Me came out of a need to express emotionally, which really an empirical case in case for reparations.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 5 those two things happened. And two really big things came out of that.
The first was that

Speaker 5 I don't even feel comfortable articulating this, but a level of fame accrued to me that I did not expect. It was not George Collooney fame, but it was Make Tanahaski an uncomfortable fame,

Speaker 5 which maybe doesn't take much.

Speaker 4 Yeah, people are looking at you at the airport.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And you're just trying to get it.
Yeah, like yesterday. Like yes, I just got off a plane from Denver yesterday.
And you would think I'd be happy about this.

Speaker 5 I mean, I guess I should be, but the stewardess is like,

Speaker 5 man, you know, I knew I recognized you. And then I saw your name.
And I love seeing you on Democracy Now, and I love your books. Thank you, da-da-da-da-da.

Speaker 5 And while I appreciate her, I really, really do. There's a part of me that just kind of wants to put on sunglasses and go like this, right? And go on.

Speaker 5 You know, not that she did anything wrong, but I'm saying that I was uncomfortable with the amount of that. And what it did was it meant that

Speaker 5 a number of critiques, you know, began to come in, you know, which is fair and what should happen.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 part of that is linked to, you know, the second thing, which is that one of those critiques was the case for reparations and how I wrote about Israeli reparations and that.

Speaker 5 And it was said to me in a way

Speaker 5 that forced me to take it seriously.

Speaker 5 And I spent some time taking it seriously. And,

Speaker 5 you know, my book that just came out, the message that came out of that, in some ways is an attempt to reconcile myself to Palestinians, to the impact of my work on that community, to Israel, to Zionism.

Speaker 5 But I have to tell you, it is

Speaker 5 also

Speaker 5 one of those moments where I guess I realized,

Speaker 5 even I, like how naive I was about the country I lived in.

Speaker 5 you know, and what it had its fingerprints on and what we did. And so that goes beyond Israel.
Like then you start looking at everything.

Speaker 5 Kim Burns has this documentary, which he put out years ago on the Vietnam War, but I just happened to watch it, you know, recently.

Speaker 5 And you see things, it's a great documentary, but you see things like that. And you say, well, okay, if this was true of us in this moment,

Speaker 5 what is our basic nature then? Like, what else have we done? What else have I missed? What else am I not seeing? You know, and so that's kind of the path I've been on.

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Speaker 4 I don't know where you're going to take that. And And I think that the personal reflection is important.
Obviously, something I've been going through. I'm curious about the external, though.

Speaker 4 You know, like this whole sort of world

Speaker 4 evolves, not out of your book alone, per se, but kind of out of a lot of things that are happening around that time, particularly kind of with Black Lives Matter and racial justice.

Speaker 4 And when I was rereading the book last night, one thing that struck me is like a couple of times you write critically about accepting the invention of racecraft in the book and like you write about this sort of and there's this tension right between making racial identity and like the racial prioritization like a prime focus versus like rejecting the false construct a bit and i you know again it was 10 years ago so i didn't really rereading it now that struck me because like a lot of the folks you know, in the ensuing decade have leaned in way more to like the kind of racial hierarchy argument side of this, which obviously is there in your work as well.

Speaker 4 And so I don't know. I just, I'm wondering, did you watch all of that with any,

Speaker 4 did it evolve your view at all? Or did you think that was cool or interesting? I don't know. Like, what did you make of kind of all of the conversation that around that in the ensuing decade?

Speaker 5 So that's a great question. And I'll say two things.
The first thing is, there's a very subtle shift that's being made.

Speaker 5 And it's present between the world and I really had to do it when I was doing case for reparations because the argument in case for reparations is not that black people should get reparations, it is that

Speaker 5 victims of enslavement, Jim Crow should get reparations. There's a very subtle difference there.
The point is not the color of your skin. The point is, I can prove that somebody injured you.

Speaker 4 And you should be paid for that.

Speaker 5 Just like if you're walking down the street and the cops jump on you and beat the hell out of you, and you sue the city. The city should, you know what I mean, repair you.

Speaker 5 You know, it is connected deeply to the injury, not to, you know,

Speaker 5 your skin color. And that's a subtle thing, you know what I mean? And so what you're talking about, that is present in Between the World and Me also.

Speaker 5 And it's, you know, it's present whenever I, I think the line in Between the World and Me is race is the child of racism, not the father. In other words, it's the racism that's real.
It's a thing.

Speaker 5 Somebody wants to do something to you. They call you the thing.
and then you become the thing in their eyes. You know, now you have a decision about whether you accept that or not.

Speaker 5 You know what I'm saying? And so it was always important to me not to accept it.

Speaker 5 I think the problem comes in in the second part. So that's a very nuanced thing to have to go through and complicate to go through.
I think

Speaker 5 during that same period,

Speaker 5 some of us decided that social media was an effective place to convey nuanced ideas. I think that was a mistake.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 5 I actually think that was the mistake.

Speaker 4 In what way?

Speaker 5 When I write,

Speaker 5 I am ridiculously careful.

Speaker 5 I don't just throw things out. I don't just lob things because I recognize that many of the things that I am saying are things that people are not really going to want to hear.

Speaker 5 Even people who are sympathetic to me. You know, like there's a part of them that's like, really, Tanahasa, you're going to make me, you know, question this again.

Speaker 5 And so it's really, really important that I be as thorough as I possibly can. I'd be as nuanced as I possibly can.
And I'd be as direct and articulate as I possibly can.

Speaker 5 You know, there's a phrase in that book, The People Who Think Themselves White, that I actually adopted from James Baldwin that I repeat over and over again.

Speaker 5 And I'm not being sarcastic when I say that. I am saying that this is an invention,

Speaker 5 that we really aren't different. Like there really is no bone.
There's nothing bone deep in that. There's nothing.
There's nothing. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 There is a fiction and a narrative and things that have come out of that that have made us different, but it's not a a real thing.

Speaker 5 It took forever for me to figure out how to say that in a way that I felt true to me. You know what I mean? Like it took multiple drafts and going and looking over sentences again and again.

Speaker 5 And somebody who

Speaker 5 is trying to take that level of care, because I believe that's the level of care that we have to take, you know, if we want people to take our ideas seriously,

Speaker 5 that person probably should not have the ability to immediately try to articulate that, press a button and send it out to a million people.

Speaker 5 Like, those two things are intentional with each other. I would argue they're actually contrary to each other.
You know, and so I know that there are,

Speaker 5 well, I'll just speak for me. It just, it takes so much work and so much effort to say the thing in a way that is true to what I actually feel and I'm seeing.
And I am not capable

Speaker 5 of doing that in a tweet, you know, Instagram, blue sky, whatever. It's just not the medium is not suited for that.

Speaker 5 And so what happens is then there are either people who, fair-mindedly, you know what I mean, don't get the nuance of what you're saying. And so that becomes a problem.

Speaker 5 And there are other people who are completely unfair, you know what I mean, and are not legitimate. And then they use this butchered version of you, you know what I mean? And that becomes who you are.

Speaker 5 I think when you're coming with narratives and ideas and themes and theories that are outside of what people are used to and what the mainstream is, You got to be patient.

Speaker 5 You got to be patient with yourself and you got to be patient with them.

Speaker 5 That doesn't mean that you got to be less radical or not aggressive or not say what you think, but you need to make damn sure that you're saying what you think in the best way you possibly can.

Speaker 4 It's interesting to put social media on that because, like, and there's there clearly has been a backlash.

Speaker 4 I don't, you know, I don't like what you ascribe it to and like what, you know, how much of it was already there versus how much is a backlash, right?

Speaker 4 But at some level, you know, the Trump movement and other, you know, this sort of rise of like more explicitly racist young folks like the Groipers and stuff like this.

Speaker 4 It's not as if those people did not exist in 1996. They just weren't talking about it in quite as an upfront way, right? So there's some backlash that...
And so to point that social media is the...

Speaker 4 Is that what you're saying? That you think that just the nature of the discourse, the social media was the driver of that? Do you think?

Speaker 4 Or was there going to be a necessary backlash no matter what anytime?

Speaker 5 There's going to be a backlash, though. I mean, there's never been a moment.

Speaker 5 Look, when obama got we should have known i mean look you know like there've never been moment of racial progress in this country where there wouldn't there was no backlash so that was going to happen i guess the thing i'm more referring to is probably

Speaker 5 some of the writers and maybe even activists who are of accord with me and you know in terms of my politics in terms of where i would like to see the world

Speaker 5 who I think maybe articulated themselves too much over social media. Like it became their main way.

Speaker 5 And actually what they were saying was quite complicated and important and significant, you know, but I don't know that a tweet is the best way to do it.

Speaker 4 I guess one more thought about that,

Speaker 4 you know, kind of evolution over the last 10 years, because I look at it and I want you to go ahead and tell me that this is moderate Tim being misguided about the nature of these things.

Speaker 4 Please feel free to say that. But I look back at the 10 years and look, my daughter's like, I have an adopted daughter.
And like, one of the coolest things about it. How old is she telling the oldest?

Speaker 4 She's seven. She's seven.

Speaker 5 Congratulations. Yeah, she's made it seven years.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it is. She's amazing.
And we have made it seven years.

Speaker 4 And here's the cool thing about it is that she grew up in this moment is that, you know, my parents, you know, and my husband's parents, who are from the suburbs and from rural America, respectively, and have, you know, like a combined eight black people in the counties where they lived, right?

Speaker 4 Growing up, like they

Speaker 4 now,

Speaker 4 I think in a large part to the change that we've seen over the last 10 years, can go buy her kids' books that have, little black girls as the main character and, you know, dolls.

Speaker 4 And like it's easy, it's easy for them, right? Like rather than having to go out and do it.

Speaker 4 And they kind of get why it's important in a way that they, I don't think maybe would have 20 years ago, right?

Speaker 4 Like, so there's been progress in this kind of area of recognition and platforming or whatever, identity that has been positive.

Speaker 4 And then there's been this other element that's like, well, you know, we're going to have at schools now, we're going to re-separate people and have groups of black kids and white kids in different classes or we're gonna have these things where we rank you know the intersectionality and the different levels of oppression if you're this and that group combined versus that and that group combined and to me it kind of like feels like there was some really positive elements and then that there were there were some elements that like lended itself to a more potent backlash and i don't know if you look at that at the period and feel that at all or or think i'm totally off base about it it?

Speaker 5 No, I don't think you're totally off base. I think all movements have their excesses, and I think all movements have their fools

Speaker 5 who are part of those movements.

Speaker 5 And sometimes those fools, you know, have power, and sometimes those excessive people have power and they do things that are not smart and are not in service of the ideals that they claim to be serving.

Speaker 5 I think that the difference is

Speaker 5 so I'm of two minds about this.

Speaker 5 You know, on the one hand, I feel like, again, like what I was saying before, is that when you are the person that's seeking to revolutionize something, when you are telling a group of people, you want to go in front of a group of people and say, everything

Speaker 5 you have, all of your material progress in the world and all your mother's material progress, grandmother, that all generations, is rooted in the destruction of somebody else's stuff and the theft of that.

Speaker 5 You have to understand that's going to be hard for people to take.

Speaker 5 so yeah that's true you know what i mean and so um what that means is again i really you know i have to stress this it doesn't mean that you don't say it though right but you just have to remember how difficult that would be for you to hear you know what i mean and then you have to a say it in the most truthful way you can you know what i mean um and

Speaker 5 Readly enough, I believe this, you know, even though I write hard and write aggressive, you actually have to say it in the most compassionate way you can say it too.

Speaker 5 Now, compassion to me means something different probably than it does to a lot of other people. For some people, compassion means you talk soft to people and you rub their back.

Speaker 5 And for me, it means that you address them like adults. You address them respectfully, but you're very direct with them about what is what.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think

Speaker 5 all political movements don't exist under that burden, though.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Certainly MAGA doesn't. You know what I mean? Like they can say excesses are the point for them.
You know what I mean? Like, like, you know, going over the light, that's the whole point.

Speaker 5 I mean, you know, to do that. Yet for us and for people, you know, who really seek this kind of, you know, bone-deep change in the country, that's not, that's just not a luxury we have.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, that's not a luxury that we have had. And so are there people out there, you know what I mean, who

Speaker 5 said and did certain things, you know what I mean, and articulated themselves in certain ways.

Speaker 5 And if there's a level of vagary that's coming into my language right now, it's because I was never able to measure like what was what and how much, you know, was, you know, like what portion of this was actually true.

Speaker 5 In other words, what portion of this was real and what portion of it was being gemmed up.

Speaker 5 You know, I'm not saying no portion of it was real, but I it was always sure because I'll be honest, like a lot of the people who I was hearing that from were not people who I would say, um,

Speaker 4 you have a lot of respect for their point of view.

Speaker 5 Yes, yes, yes, yes. I would not consider them, you know what I mean.
Um, now, some things I did, I was like, this is truly some dumb shit. Like, this is, you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 And I would, you know, have no problem with that. But no, I don't think you're wrong, man.

Speaker 5 I don't think that is incorrect. I think,

Speaker 5 I mean, here's, okay, so here's an example I think. Let me make this, maybe I can make this a little bit more tangible, right?

Speaker 5 Folks are really upset about defunding the police, right? Like that was, and that became a political flashpoint. Like it became a thing that people said, this person wants to defund the police.

Speaker 5 How many

Speaker 5 actual people running for office in Congress and Senate would have said, I want to defund the police.

Speaker 5 I don't think many said it. You know what I mean? It was an activist crime.

Speaker 4 Some mayors and prosecutors.

Speaker 5 Some mayors and prosecutors. Did they use that language? I mean, you could tell me they did.
I mean, I'm just curious. Did they say, I'm running on defunding the police?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I guess I'd have to go back to the archives. I mean, like, there were some functionally, you know, that they were with that crowd, you know, I guess.
With that.

Speaker 5 With that crowd. See, that's what I mean, though, right? Like, like, I could be with that crowd.

Speaker 5 Like, Like, oh, yeah, I sympathize with what you're saying, but maybe I'm gonna say it differently. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 Like, but see, actually, even I'm not, you know, trying to go squish you on this. In fact, I think, like, what you're saying makes the point, right?

Speaker 5 Like, you have to worry about what crowd you're with. Yeah.
But your opposition really doesn't.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know what I mean? They can walk around with open races. Who cares? You know what I mean? Like, it really, it really doesn't matter.

Speaker 5 And so that's like, there's a weight you labor under to be on point, correct, you know what I mean? At all times.

Speaker 5 I feel like as a writer, this serves me because it actually forces me to reinterrogate everything I write. It forces me out of certain mediums.

Speaker 5 You know, again, there's certain places I just don't go to talk and I just don't, because they don't serve that. And so it really concentrates me.
But I do understand that, you know,

Speaker 5 I don't know. I guess I go back to where we started at the beginning here.
You know, people are human. Yeah.

Speaker 5 People are human, you know, and sometimes they're unwise in how they, you know, articulate things and think about things and say things.

Speaker 5 And they say things that, you know, maybe get them an applause and not necessarily are about the work that they claim to be.

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Speaker 4 Two other little items from the book. When I read it last night, I was like, I thought about it differently than I would have in 2015.
Dr.

Speaker 4 Mabel Jones, my favorite character, God love her, lost her son, LSU, grabbed. Shout that out.
She's unbelievable.

Speaker 4 You said when you're talking to her, compared America to Rome. Glory days long ago passed and those were sullied and we can't get the message.
We don't understand that we're embracing our deaths.

Speaker 4 This was you to your son later in the book. You wrote, I do not believe that we can stop them being the kind of American power structure because they just will ultimately stop themselves.

Speaker 4 Both of those things seem a lot more acute than maybe they did in 2015. Jesus.

Speaker 4 Was that not compassionate? Was that not in your spirit of compassionate writing?

Speaker 5 No, it was in my spirit of compassionate writing. Because I think like your compassion begins with honesty.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, I think actually people can feel that. I I think people can feel when you're trying to hurt them and when you're, you know, trying to be, you know, straight with them.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, again, you know, I think what echoed in the back of that writing was, you know, I said earlier that like I started with case for reparations.

Speaker 5 I had done at that point, I did so much research for that work that what became clear was that

Speaker 5 the standard, you know, sort of liberal articulation of this of America as a fundamentally good country, fundamentally in its bones good, that just made some mistakes, some significant ones, but some mistakes

Speaker 5 was false. Was false.
Those things that are dismissed as mistakes are actually core to what the country is. And if you take them out, you actually don't have a country.

Speaker 5 And so that can't help but reformulate, you know, how you feel. And so that I can be completely, you know, maybe a little clearer about what I mean when I say that.

Speaker 5 I think, you know, when I was writing Case for Reparations,

Speaker 5 I was writing to a reader who probably believed

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 slavery was a thing that happened in this country alongside

Speaker 5 everything else. In other words, if slavery didn't happen, you could still have an America.

Speaker 5 And what became clear is fundamentally that is not true. Like, like fundamentally.
You know what I mean? Like you look at your institutions that date back from their period.

Speaker 5 It was tough in 1850 to assemble a large amount of money and not have

Speaker 5 your fingerprints somewhere on slavery. It was that big of a thing.
You know what I mean? And then that followed through into

Speaker 5 the, and this was the heart of the essay, you know, the GI bill and

Speaker 5 all of the reforms then, which were only possible by excluding African Americans. They wouldn't have passed.
You just wouldn't have had them. Right.
You know, and so.

Speaker 5 When you start accepting that about the country, you say, oh, oh, this is who, you know, if you just think about it as a person, and now you're getting getting an accurate biography of who that person is,

Speaker 4 and you say, oh,

Speaker 5 so where is that person probably going in 10 years?

Speaker 5 You know, and so, like, for that book, it just, it fundamentally caused me to fundamentally reassess what was possible, what was likely possible. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 In terms of what the country could do. That was before Trump, too.

Speaker 4 I wrote that before. You're right.
That's what I'm saying. It's just, it's so stark now, right? This, like, the element of stopping themselves.

Speaker 5 It probably felt a little overwrought honestly in 2015 the idea you know what i mean that's what everybody told me that's what everybody told me that was the critique of it they were like this dude is hopeless he's over 200 this feels kind of like modest now

Speaker 4 this is like a median bulb article

Speaker 5 no no man that was people were like no that's this dude's gone way too far what is wrong with him Two things real quick.

Speaker 4 Our culture editor, Sonny Bunch, demanded that I ask you if the black Superman movie is dead. I know nothing about this world.

Speaker 4 I guess you have a whole other life where you do comic books and movies and stuff. And this is not my world.
I don't care about what happens in magical creatures, but other people do.

Speaker 4 So I have to ask. You should care.
You should.

Speaker 5 I guess that the answer I can give is that

Speaker 5 it's still in development. Other people have said that.
So with more power than me. So I don't think I'm going beyond what's been publicly said.

Speaker 4 I don't even know what the weight of that question is, to be honest. Literally, I was like,

Speaker 4 I was like, is there anything I should ask him? So he's like, you have to ask him what the Black Superman movie. So anyway, I'm for a Black Superman.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 We saw a lot of backlash to that lesbian kiss and Buzz Lightyear, though, and the Black Little Mermaid. So you never know what the ramifications of that might be.

Speaker 4 So the book is framed, right, as to your son, right? Samori. It's written to him.
Was it advice to your son, would you say, or more of a explanation for your son of your perspective?

Speaker 4 Rereading it, you're like, obviously, your backstory could not be more different than mine. And your experience could not be more different than mine.

Speaker 4 So, I found myself throughout thinking about it as a father, is being like, there's just a lot of like history and

Speaker 4 life experience that I just do not bring to this job that you did, right?

Speaker 4 And so, I guess my question for you is: if you have any advice for me or for my child, no, you know what, I think, oh, I think you're both right and you're wrong.

Speaker 5 You're right, and if it's the point of, you know, obviously, just on its face, you know, our backgrounds are very different. Having said that, I do believe

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 anybody who's had to live a significant portion of their life or their entire life outside of what the dominant culture and politics articulates itself as the ideal, as the archetype, probably has some level of insight into that culture that people who have not don't.

Speaker 5 You know? And so that was all between the world and me was, right? Like, it was like, okay, there's this umbrella of humanity and human rights.

Speaker 5 I am from a group of people that, for their history, have in general been outside of that. What are my insights on that?

Speaker 4 Well, you can give me advice without. You don't have to attack me.
No, I'm not. I'm not, though.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, I know you're not.

Speaker 4 You don't have to be like, yeah, bro, you're right. You don't know anything.
I appreciate that. I know some things.
I didn't think I knew nothing.

Speaker 4 No, no, but what I'm saying is, you know, maybe there's some,

Speaker 4 there's also some part part that's black, that's dark to me, right? That I just, that is just not

Speaker 4 in my field of vision, and I'm learning about it.

Speaker 5 You probably know more than you think. You know what I mean? That's the first thing I would say.

Speaker 5 And then, like, you have to remember, like, like, most of my insights actually come from taking a much harder, more skeptical look at a story that I already knew. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 Or thought I knew. You know, it did not come, for instance, I'm going to go spend some time on, you know, some reservations.

Speaker 5 And, you know, that would have been a worthwhile endeavor, but it did not come from that.

Speaker 5 You know, I mean, it actually came from, you know, it was a deeply internal mission that allowed me to externalize. Man, I guess

Speaker 5 why am I resisting this question?

Speaker 5 I don't enjoy

Speaker 5 the idea that people write books that other people perceive as insightful.

Speaker 5 Like, you just wrote the book. Like, you just wrote a book and you were insightful in that moment.
You know, it doesn't mean that you're insightful about life.

Speaker 5 And not only that,

Speaker 4 that's fair. I hear that.
Not only that.

Speaker 5 Not only that, there are people who can't write books or don't write books or have it yet,

Speaker 5 who have their own stories and their own experiences. And then there's insight that is drawn from that too.
And that's equal. You know what I mean? And sometimes more.

Speaker 5 And just because you wrote the book doesn't mean that you have it more. Like,

Speaker 5 I began my professional career as a journalist. And part of being a journalist is you sit down and you listen to people and you make yourself stupid.

Speaker 5 You know, and oftentimes they have insights into life

Speaker 5 that, you know, just would never occur to you. And so I really do go back to what I was saying.
I'm just saying, I think,

Speaker 5 like,

Speaker 4 how

Speaker 5 do you have a conversation with your daughter explaining how different the world is that she's growing up in in terms of how it looks at LGBT people and how it looked at you?

Speaker 5 Like, I imagine that's going to be a little abstract to her.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know? And yet there are, there are, I imagine there are also lessons and experiences, you know, from that, from having lived through that, that are probably also important.

Speaker 5 Does that make sense? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Sure.

Speaker 5 All right. I don't want to assume too much.

Speaker 4 No, no, no. I'm not.
I was the one.

Speaker 4 It's all good. I hear that, man.
It's,

Speaker 4 we're all on a journey and just trying to navigate through it, you know? And

Speaker 4 I feel lucky that I have been able to, I go through different kinds of things and experiences that opened my perspective onto different, you know, items that maybe I wouldn't have, right?

Speaker 4 Had I just been straight or had I just had like a family that's mono-racial, whatever. But, like, with that comes like

Speaker 4 challenges and awakenings and all that. And so, anyway, oh, I do have one piece of advice.

Speaker 5 This is my only piece of advice. Yeah, okay, great.

Speaker 4 Perfect. We can leave it on that.

Speaker 5 If you have the ability and the power at any point to live for some period of time outside the country, and

Speaker 5 with that, to raise a kid who is not monolingual and maybe already on that.

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 5 That's a great thing.

Speaker 4 It's a great thing.

Speaker 5 The best thing I ever did for my kid. Best thing.

Speaker 4 Best thing. Outside the country.
Okay. That is good advice.
And who knows? I might be thrust out of the country from time to time now. So that might make it easy on me.
Man, I really appreciate you.

Speaker 4 This is so fun. It's good to meet you.
And let's do it again sometime. All right.

Speaker 5 All right. Thanks, brother.

Speaker 4 All right. Thanks so much to Tanahasi Coates.
I really appreciate him coming on the pod. I want to have a bonus segment for you guys.

Speaker 4 On Friday, we did a live show and fundraiser, Frendree, in support of Immigrant Defenders, which is the legal effort helping the Venezuelans that have been disappeared to that hellhole in El Salvador.

Speaker 4 And we had a little bit of fun.

Speaker 4 If you want to go watch the whole show, which included some pretty raunchy gay jokes, some annoyingly funny material from Sarah, who I think was just adamant that she was going to outshine me and Lovett, who think we're the jokesters.

Speaker 4 So, if you want to go see all that, the comedy, go to the YouTube page and you can check it all out there. But for podcast listeners, I wanted to share with you the serious parts of the show.

Speaker 4 I interviewed Lindsay Tozlowski, who's the lawyer representing Andree and a handful of other

Speaker 4 Venezuelans. And boy, she's just amazing.
And we appreciate her work so much. It was great to finally meet her in person.
We've been DMing for a while now. So I've got that segment.

Speaker 4 And then at the very end of the show, I took off my jokester hat and gave a rant about why this specific case has upset me so much and why we want to do everything that we can to continue to draw attention to it in the hopes that we can eventually prevent these.

Speaker 4 these men from being disappeared for no reason except the cruelty of the folks in this White House. So I hope you enjoy both of those segments as much as possible.
If I make you cry, sorry. And

Speaker 4 we will see you all back here tomorrow with our usual Bill Crystal Monday, but on Tuesday. So stick around and we'll see you all back here soon.

Speaker 4 The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 4 Introduce yourself. Tell everybody who we're talking to.

Speaker 19 Hi, everybody. I'm Lindsay Toslowski.
I'm the president and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 4 It's so great to see you in person, finally, after all of our Twitter DMs. It's unfortunate we had to use Elon's platform to talk, but you know, it's nice that he brought us together.

Speaker 19 I'm glad he brought us together.

Speaker 4 I'm just so appreciative of all the work that you're doing, and I'm so grateful that we were able to support your guys' work with this event tonight.

Speaker 4 I should say I got a text from Congressman Richie Torres's folks. They donated $1,000 to your group as well since he couldn't be here tonight.
So we're doing the best we can. But I thought that,

Speaker 19 why don't you start by just telling us about andri and how you got to know him and how you got to represent him sure um so andri is an asylum seeker from venezuela he came to the u.s last year when he was in venezuela as a gay man he faced incredible discrimination he also was politically persecuted he was physically hurt he was followed home by police officers so he made the incredibly difficult decision to come to the u.s But he had a really rich life there.

Speaker 19 He's been in a theater troupe since he was seven years old. He

Speaker 19 actually worked on the Miss Venezuela pageant. He was in pageants himself as a contestant.

Speaker 4 Now is that common in Venezuela for Trendo Ara men to be working on the Miss Venezuela pageant?

Speaker 19 You know, I don't think that's been a cover I've seen before.

Speaker 19 Not common. He also worked professionally as a makeup artist.
He, you know, had this really rich life. He's close to his mom.
So for him to flee and come to the United States, things were really bad.

Speaker 19 And it was really difficult for him to live authentically there. So he came to the U.S.
and he did everything that we were asking people to do. He made an appointment.

Speaker 19 He waited in Tijuana for that appointment. He got into the U.S.
He was kept in an ice prison in San Diego from the moment he arrived here. He's never stepped free in the United States at all.

Speaker 19 During that time, he passed his credible fear interview, which means he was on his way to getting asylum. We started representing him in December of last year.

Speaker 19 We were in the process of waiting for a court hearing for him, and he was disappeared by the Trump administration on March 15th.

Speaker 4 And so, since you had started, you had been talking to him at that time. I mean, did you kind of expect that? Or what was the situation between kind of December and March?

Speaker 19 Yeah, so we were getting ready to move forward with his asylum case. We had a hearing on March 13th.

Speaker 19 He was really suffering in an ICE detention center, which is one of the reasons that we worry so much about what it's like for him now in a torture prison in El Salvador.

Speaker 4 Suffering how?

Speaker 19 Suffering. He was sexually harassed.

Speaker 19 He had actually made complaints in, this is a detention center in San Diego.

Speaker 19 But he also was doing other things while he was there, including at one point he gave us a, it was sort of like a business plan, a 19-page business plan that he had created for a nonprofit that he wanted to start and it was to help kids who were homeless and to help you know other gay kids and he was planning to do that once he got out and he wanted to know if we could show it to the judge to show that he had good intentions here in the US

Speaker 4 now you do a lot of these cases

Speaker 4 bring them fucking back yeah it's ridiculous

Speaker 4 you know the Andre case has just taken up so much of it's good, it's gotten attention, taken so much of my brain power. But I know you represent other folks as well.

Speaker 4 Are there any other stories you want to tell us about the people that you represent that are in El Salvador?

Speaker 19 So we represent eight other men who are also at the same Secot prison in El Salvador that Andri is.

Speaker 19 One of them is Arturo Suarez. He's a professional singer.
He actually had a baby born since he's been there, who he's never met. Another is Miguel Rojas Mendoza.

Speaker 19 He was picked up in Louisiana while working as a horse trainer and rancher.

Speaker 19 He actually had TPS, so he had protected status here in the United States. He has two children, and his children's names were the tattoos that he had that likely landed him there.

Speaker 19 And there are so many other stories, so many other Andres that could be part of the more than 235 men who were sent on those U.S. government planes to El Salvador.

Speaker 4 How do you not become just consumed by rage, murderous rage? That's a personal question. I'm looking for advice.

Speaker 19 You know, I think that every single day that I'm here, I feel like I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think all of the other...

Speaker 19 And I...

Speaker 19 And I think all of the other, we have a huge team that's working on Andri's case, other immigrant defenders, other colleagues. We have a case that is actually the JGG versus Trump case.

Speaker 19 It's happening here right now. We got a positive decision this week.
So we are keeping hope alive.

Speaker 19 I believe, I know in my heart that we will get him back and we're not going to stop fighting until we do.

Speaker 19 And so I think, you know, to answer your question about rage, we're channeling our rage for good at this moment because what the hell else are we going to do?

Speaker 4 I'm just going to play that back to myself from time to time to try to use your wisdom to help me out. Okay, we had a a little news today with the Kilmar Brego-Garcia case.

Speaker 4 I guess kind of. I mean, it's good, but also, fuck these people.

Speaker 4 Just from the legal perspective, what does that development say to you about all these other cases?

Speaker 19 So the news that we got in Kilmar's case is that he's on his way back to the United States.

Speaker 19 What that says to me is they need to stop lying, that it's impossible. And if they can bring him back, they can bring Andre back.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And this is the thing about all these cases.

Speaker 4 Like, the reason why they're bringing Kilmar back is because they want to make it about the details of Kilmar's life, which I don't know about one way or the other, but like, that's the fucking point here, right?

Speaker 4 Like, you can't kidnap 250 people, send them to a foreign gulag, and then just be like, well, whatever, we'll see what happens. Some of them are bad guys, some of them, right?

Speaker 4 Like, that is the issue here. And so, how do you think about like framing that for people so we don't get bogged down in the details of individual cases?

Speaker 19 Right. In many ways, what happened, I mean, there's lots of legal things I could tell you about the Alien Enemies Act and all these things, and I won't.

Speaker 4 Thank you. You're welcome.

Speaker 19 But what I can say is that his case is fundamentally about due process. And due process is most important when the government is accusing you of a crime or alleging you are a gang member.

Speaker 19 The only thing that stands between any of us ending up in a prison in El Salvador, just like Andri, is the fact that we have due process, we have constitutional rights.

Speaker 19 When those are trampled, when you are, like Andri, whisked away without getting to speak to your lawyer, without knowing where you are going, without being given an opportunity to refute what the government is saying about you, your day in court.

Speaker 19 This is what happens. And if it can happen to him, it could happen to any one of us.
And that's why this case is not just about Andri. It's not just about the 240 men.

Speaker 19 It's about the future of our democracy and whether or not we're going to fight for it.

Speaker 4 All right, last thing. What can, obviously folks here care about this.
They showed up tonight. We really appreciate all of you.
What else can people do?

Speaker 19 Well, we're so grateful for this.

Speaker 19 You know, donating to organizations like Immigrant Defenders Law Center and our partner organizations is so important because it helps us to do this work.

Speaker 19 All of our work is done for free for the clients. And so being here is really important.

Speaker 19 But we're asking people to continue to shine a light on this case, continue to lift up his story, lift up the stories of all these men.

Speaker 19 You can go to freeandri.org and you will see toolkits so you can reach out to your elected representatives. But really, the U.S.

Speaker 19 government here, the Trump administration, they are trying to erase his existence. And so what we need people to do is keep his story alive.
Don't let them erase him.

Speaker 19 And most importantly, talk to your family and friends, those that live in Republican districts.

Speaker 19 Make sure that they are going to town halls, that they are asking the questions about when Andre is coming back and when he's going going to get his day in court.

Speaker 19 That is the best thing that people can do.

Speaker 4 I admire you so much. Thank you so much for everything you're doing.
That's Lindsay. Appreciate her.
Thank you, everybody. Yeah, stand off.

Speaker 4 I'm about to be sad for a little bit, so I'm sorry that I have to end you on something sad. But the reason why we're doing this is because of Andre.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I think there are two reasons why this has affected me so much.

Speaker 4 One is because, kind of, what Lovett was saying, I came out of this tradition of being pro-life and being pro-freedom and thinking that that was

Speaker 4 what was animating my political work. And Jeb used to say something about how we wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to live a life of purpose and meaning.

Speaker 4 And I believed that and thought it wasn't BS.

Speaker 4 And so the idea that we are doing that, that Republicans, that Donald Trump, that our country is taking away somebody's life, their purpose, and their meaning,

Speaker 4 really pisses me off. And so that's one reason.

Speaker 4 And the other reason is just because,

Speaker 4 I guess just because both me and Andrea are gay, I guess, I can just imagine it. And I just want, I'm sorry to do this, but I just want everybody to imagine this with me for a second.

Speaker 4 He flees Venezuela. He flees communism.
He takes a horrible journey across Central America, through Mexico, goes through unimaginable shit, has to deal with cartels,

Speaker 4 has to find food and shelter just to get to America because

Speaker 4 he thinks here he can live a life of purpose and meaning. He thinks he can be free.
And he gets to the border and he does what he's supposed to do.

Speaker 4 He signs up for the stupid CBP1 app and explains why he had to flee a communist country. And then we let him in.
And he sits in a cell. And he's sexually harassed in the cell.

Speaker 4 And he is abused and attacked. And he is hoping that it's worth it.
Because at the end, there's this thing, there's this freedom in this country that he can get.

Speaker 4 And instead of that, one day he's in the cell, and people come in there and they shackle him. And they shackle his legs and his hands, and they take him with other Venezuelans to a plane.

Speaker 4 And he's thinking, this is horrible, but

Speaker 4 at least I'm going home to Venezuela, right? At least I get to see my mother and my best friend. And instead of sending him to Venezuela, we send him to a fucking hell in El Salvador.

Speaker 4 And he gets off the plane and they beat him up and they shave his head and he screams out for his freedom. And he says, I'm gay, I'm not a gangbanger.

Speaker 4 I want just, you have the wrong person, and there's nothing you can do. And they put him in a fucking hole.
And he's living a nightmare that like you can't imagine.

Speaker 4 Like it is just an unimaginable nightmare. And the reason that he's living it is our country, is that we did it to him, like the U.S.
did it to him.

Speaker 4 And so it's up to us to get him the fuck out of this nightmare.

Speaker 4 Well, you better listen, my sisters and brothers,

Speaker 4 because if you do, you can hear

Speaker 4 their voices still calling across the years.

Speaker 4 And they're all crying across the ocean.

Speaker 4 And they're crying across the land.

Speaker 4 And they will to we all come to understand.

Speaker 4 None of us are free.

Speaker 4 None of us are free. One of us are changed.
None of us are free.

Speaker 4 And there are people still in darkness.

Speaker 4 And they just can't see the light.

Speaker 4 If you don't say it's wrong, then that says it's right.

Speaker 4 We got to try to feel for each other.

Speaker 4 Let our brothers know that we care.

Speaker 4 Got to get the message sended out loud and clear.

Speaker 4 None of us are free. One of us are changed.
None of us are free.

Speaker 4 It's a single truth we all need

Speaker 4 just to hear and to see.

Speaker 4 Oh Lord, none of us are free.

Speaker 4 Now I swear, your salvation

Speaker 4 isn't too hard to find.

Speaker 4 None of us can find it on our own.

Speaker 4 We've got to join together

Speaker 4 in spirit, heart, and mind.

Speaker 4 So that every soul who's suffering will know that we're not alone.

Speaker 4 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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S2 Ep1060: Ta-Nehisi Coates: A Natural Human Reaction

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