Bakari Sellers: We Are in a Dark Moment

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Speaker 11 Hello, welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's Tuesday, April 30th.

Speaker 11 I'm with my pal, Bakari Sellers, CNN political analyst, attorney, host of the Bakari Sellers podcast, his latest book. I got it right here, The Moment.

Speaker 11 Thoughts on the race reckoning that wasn't, how we can all move forward now. It was published last week.
It's why are you looking so handsome on that cover, Bakari? Look at that, YouTube viewers.

Speaker 11 That's a GQ. That is a GQ pose right there.
Man, I got to tell you, when I wrote a book, nobody even floated the idea that they put my face on the cover.

Speaker 11 So I'm not going to take that the wrong way, but you're looking good. I also, congratulations, are due.
You're back home in Columbia, the USC Gamecock women's basketball team.

Speaker 11 They just beat LSU a couple times. You know, we just couldn't make it happen this year, but I made a little money on you in the final.
So I was happy for Dawn.

Speaker 11 Yeah, no, I mean, I don't want to say a couple times. I think we've beaten you guys the last 13, 14 times.
But yeah,

Speaker 11 who's counting?

Speaker 11 Who's counting? But yeah, no, it was a, I was actually in Greenville when we had the kind of the rumble in Greenville. It was an intense battle.
Actually, went down.

Speaker 11 Slajay's brother jumps out of the stands. He threw me all off.
And he jumped out the stands and then he grabbed Camilla and he saw Camilla was 6'7 and he re he made some business decisions.

Speaker 11 He reached all life at that point.

Speaker 11 Well, congrats to those guys. It's so fun this year.
It was so fun.

Speaker 11 Anyway, before we get down to business, I got one clip from your book tour that we got to listen to, and then I got one little bit of news item. Then we'll get down to the topic of the book.

Speaker 11 But on this book tour, I gotta tell you, my feelings were hurt. I was listening to the breakfast club, and let's just listen to what you had to say on the breakfast club.

Speaker 11 I think that he appreciates the white gays, and I think that he's made himself

Speaker 11 appreciating the white LGBTQ community.

Speaker 11 G-A-Z-E.

Speaker 11 Gays.

Speaker 11 Did it sound like it's a gay? Well, what's wrong with the gays? Gays. G-A-Z-E.

Speaker 11 Oh, my God.

Speaker 11 Oh, well, what you got against me, Vakari? What's the problem? You're going on the breakfast club? You know, I took a shit. Yeah, no.

Speaker 11 I mean, Tim, that was my first interview, and it all spiraled downhill quickly.

Speaker 11 The whole tour was almost canceled. But I've learned that you have to now spell for Charlemagne and DJ Envy.
So when you go on the breakfast club, make sure you spell the words, okay?

Speaker 11 I will make sure.

Speaker 11 You're talking about Stephen A. Smith there, and we don't need to get into where you were going, but I enjoyed that moment.
People should listen to your whole interview with Charlemagne.

Speaker 11 I think it brings a different kind of juice than I'm going to have to the table here. But before we get to the book, you're a lawyer.
You're an attorney. I'm not an attorney.

Speaker 11 I am curious your thoughts on where we are in the Bragg case, in the case up in New York. Trump's been violating his gag order.

Speaker 11 You know, I feel like he's not getting punished enough for this gag order violation.

Speaker 11 I'd like to see a little bit more aggro treatment of him, but maybe this is just my outsider, you know, reality TV, you know, kind of experience watching Boston legal type experience.

Speaker 11 I'm wondering what your courtroom experience says about how you deal with somebody like this. So you're not wrong in your, in your analysis and your thought and your gut.

Speaker 11 And I think where you're going is that Trump's not being treated like every other defendant. And I can tell you that I've had people that have stood in front of a judge, had outbursts.

Speaker 11 I'm not talking about the guy who I pled guilty to a PWID marijuana who actually had on a marijuana shirt or those type of things.

Speaker 11 I'm talking about those people who make those outbursts, who still go on social media and talk about the judge who violate those orders.

Speaker 11 The problem, though, with punishing Trump is that it borders along the lines of impracticability. Like putting Trump in the jail downstairs, what does that do?

Speaker 11 If he violates it worse, bad enough that you have to put him at Rikers, how does that look? What does that mean? The Secret Service, I mean, do you? You're getting excited now, Picard.

Speaker 11 You're getting excited. Oh, my God.

Speaker 11 My imagination is running wild over there. He's tingling, guys.
He's tingling.

Speaker 11 No, you know. The white gays are getting excited now.

Speaker 11 I'm not sure how you actually get him to a point where that punishment fits. I do think there are other things, fines, et cetera, to get there.
But I think this judge is doing a very, very good job.

Speaker 11 He's very forceful with both sides. And look, I am somebody who echoed a sentiment from the beginning of this trial that this was the weakest of the cases.

Speaker 11 I still believe it's the weakest of the cases. I think that George is probably the strongest, although we won't get there for two years.

Speaker 11 I think classified documents and the insurrection are decent cases as well. But I do, after listening to the prosecution's case, I do look at it in a different light now.

Speaker 11 I don't, I think it's still the weakest case of the four, but I don't think it's a weak case, if that makes sense. I think that the violations committed by Trump were egregious.

Speaker 11 I think the evidence they have to prove that. And my concern was whether or not this case was stale because of the age on it, et cetera.
And it's proven to be something that is ripened for the moment.

Speaker 11 So he'll be a felon by the time November comes around. You think so? Yeah.
You think they're going to convict him? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the evidence is overwhelming.

Speaker 11 By the way, let me just say this. For the first time,

Speaker 11 Donald Trump has a good lawyer. Like most of the cases that Donald Trump has gone through, this process, the civil trial, you know, all of those things, just terrible, terrible.

Speaker 11 The New York State Attorney General trial, terrible, terrible lawyering on the part of his team, but he actually has a really good criminal defense lawyer. The problem problem is you can only...

Speaker 11 Blanche you're talking about? Yep. Yeah, Blanche.
You can only work with as much as you have, but he ain't got a whole lot to work with. One more thing on the legal side.

Speaker 11 So a lot of panic, a lot of rending of garments here in our pro-democracy coalition over the Supreme Court hearing last week on

Speaker 11 whether Trump is immune, whether presidents are immune from various of these crimes. I noticed you said that the January 6th and the documents case were just decent.

Speaker 11 What did you think about the kind of immunity arguments and the state of play on that case? I think that the justices, save for

Speaker 11 Gorsuch,

Speaker 11 Kavanaugh, and Thomas, and Alito, a certain extent Alito, I think they are going to find that he does not have immunity.

Speaker 11 The problem is that they're going to delay these trials and send it back down to the D.C. circuit, and that's going to be the problem that we find, or the 10th Circuit.

Speaker 11 And that's going to be the problem that we have here. They're going to slow this down, And that means that these trials will not be had until after November.

Speaker 11 And so at the end of the day, Trump gets what Trump wants. The weakest case going first.
That's the only one out there. He's able to beat it up pretty good.

Speaker 11 Most legal commentators are beating it up pretty good. The cases with strength being pushed back to after the election.

Speaker 11 And if he's president of the United States again, God forbid, that makes it even more difficult to bring him to trial. And he's gambling on himself like he always does.
He's rolling the dice.

Speaker 11 If he loses, then there is a high probability Donald Trump will go to to jail in the next 18 months. All right.
Your lips to God's ears. Okay, let's get back to the subject at hand here.

Speaker 11 The subtitle of the book is not exactly subtle. We have that in common.
My face wasn't on the book cover, but my subtitle, The Republican Road to Hell, was also not subtle.

Speaker 11 But it's also a lot of words, and they just wrapped it around. A lot of words,

Speaker 11 both of them.

Speaker 11 Thoughts on the race reckoning that wasn't. Why do you assess that it wasn't? Because I don't know.

Speaker 11 I could take the counter case that we have had a racial reckoning and certain certain types of progress. So, why do you assess that the reckoning didn't happen?

Speaker 11 I think 2020, 2021, there was a belief that we were on the brink of some third reconstruction. And I was a proponent of that, a believer in that.

Speaker 11 I think that we had a very hot summer with the deaths of Ahmad, Brianna, and George. We forget that all three of them were murdered within, and you see the videos within a matter of moments, right?

Speaker 11 And so, between that and COVID, you had an entire globe that was coming out for for things like social justice. And you can't discount the fact that we were in COVID.

Speaker 11 I think COVID played a huge role in George Floyd and the reaction thereof because we were stuck in our homes, you couldn't go anywhere, and you were forced to look at this video of this black man being murdered over and over and over and over again.

Speaker 11 And so your eyes were compelled like a laser on those images.

Speaker 11 And you saw, I mean, black, white, Democrat, Republican, you know, Yankees from the North and those of us from the South all marching in the streets together.

Speaker 11 I mean, it was fascinating all over the world. And I just thought, you know,

Speaker 11 that we were on the brink of having this reckoning around the issue of race, having these robust conversations about not necessarily somebody calling you nigger.

Speaker 11 I don't care about that, but these underlying systems that are still in place today. And I do agree with you.
And I don't think that we are saying anything different.

Speaker 11 I think we've made a lot of progress in this country. I mean, I acknowledge that.
My dad is somebody who disagrees, and he disagrees on objective measurements.

Speaker 11 Well, just for context for people who don't, you've been on the Borg Podcast before and talked to Charlie about your family story.

Speaker 11 But for those that missed it, just give us some context about who your dad is before you explain. Yeah, my dad was one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Speaker 11 Uniquely enough, one of the stories about my dad that not many people know, but I'll share it with you. He doesn't find it funny, but I find it hilarious.
I always say that

Speaker 11 King didn't get everything right because King performed my dad's first wedding in the basement of Evernese Baptist Church, and it lasted about six months.

Speaker 11 Dang, I think about those pictures that now you can't put on the mantle.

Speaker 11 You can't put them up anymore. You can't put them up anymore.

Speaker 11 That hurts. My dad was an organizer.
He actually led the search mission in Philadelphia, Mississippi for Goodman, Schroerner, and Cheney.

Speaker 11 And probably most famously or infamously, I guess, he was incarcerated and the only person incarcerated for the events of the Orangework Massacre, which was February 8th, 1968.

Speaker 11 State troopers fired shots into groups of students, students, and three were killed, Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond, and Delano Middleton, and 28 were wounded. My dad was shot as well.

Speaker 11 The officers were tried. They were all found not guilty.
They tried my dad. He was looking at a maximum of 75 years in prison.

Speaker 11 They ended up backdating his indictment and saying they lost all the evidence, but they did charge him, try him, and convict him of rioting.

Speaker 11 He became the first and only one man to riot in the history of this country. You know, my dad went to jail not once, but twice.

Speaker 11 He went to prison for that, for rioting, and he also went to prison for refusing to go to Vietnam.

Speaker 11 And I grew up, you know, I tell people I'm a product of the proverb it takes a village to raise a child.

Speaker 11 It's just my village is probably doper than most because my village was like Kathleen Cleaver and Julian Bond and Marian Berry and Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I'm a contemporary and I know little Jesse and I know Bernice King and I know all of Malcolm's kids. And it's kind of like we're in this little

Speaker 11 soil rights nexus of children of the movement. And it's just the fascinating badge of honor that we wear.
How can that guy think we haven't made progress? But yeah, help me understand.

Speaker 11 Well, and exactly. So my dad in the book, I actually drop a quote from a conversation we're having.
And it stems from a picture. And, you know, my dad is somebody who has all of these pictures up.

Speaker 11 And the picture of my dad is my dad. It's John Lewis.
It's Stokely Carmichael. It's Willie Ricks.
It's Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. All right.

Speaker 11 And the picture is unique because it's in front of Rikers.

Speaker 11 And Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte had just bonded these young civil rights activists out because they were protesting apartheid at the South African embassy.

Speaker 11 And so you have this picture, and it's this cross-section of black intelligentsia, pop culture, wealth, and black grassroots activism.

Speaker 11 And me and my dad from that picture, begin to have this conversation and kick out the book. And my dad is like, you know, it takes a collective effort.

Speaker 11 It takes a cross-section of individuals if you're going to make progress. And then he goes off on his tangent about Kanye West.

Speaker 11 And I'm like, dad, Kanye West haven't been the same since college dropout. He's like, Kanye West can do more.
I'm like, dad, Kanye has been lost for a long time.

Speaker 11 Find somebody else to put your hopes on.

Speaker 11 That ship has selled. Yes.
And so, but he says he believes that we're back in 1954,

Speaker 11 which is pre-Brown v. Board of Education.
And on metrics, he's not necessarily totally wrong. I mean, black home ownership in this country is the same as it's been in the 1960s, right?

Speaker 11 That's a remarkable statistic when you think about it. Home ownership is the key determining factor of wealth.

Speaker 11 And we're at the same rate of home ownership as we were in like 1967, 68, pre-Served Housing Act.

Speaker 11 And so, but I push back on him and disagree and say that I cannot ascribe to that notion that we have not made progress during that point. I had more in line with your thoughts because

Speaker 11 I know Jimmy Lee Jackson, I know Megger Evers, I know Emmett Till, I know Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond and Delano Middleton. I know all these people who laid on jailhouse floors, who were shot.

Speaker 11 And if we say that we have not made progress, then I question whether or not we're saying their lives were in vain and their struggles were in vain. And I refuse to do that.

Speaker 11 And also, for me, it's also acknowledging my dad's struggle as well and the things my dad went through and letting him know that

Speaker 11 his life and his sacrifices have meaning and have value. But it brings up a larger point that...

Speaker 11 You know, a lot of times when we're having these discussions around where we are as a country, people like to say, well, why are you talking about stuff in the past?

Speaker 11 And I'm like, well, my mom and dad are still alive. Like, my dad was shot

Speaker 11 I gotta tell you I mean we know each other a bit like but not so well I know your family I haven't been invited to the barbecue or anything you can't dance you can't you can't dance can you cook I mean what do you bring into the barbecue if I invite you I season my food I season my food all right I'm in Louisiana now we got Tony's on there so I could do okay but trust me I for whatever reason you know just because it's not my experience I guess that's the reason even though we're the same age i kind of assumed your dad was dead yeah i know it's like right you know until you start doing these interviews i started reading your interviews because it's just like you think about Stokely Carmichael and like that just feels like the past, you know, and it's just not.

Speaker 11 It's not. And my mom, my mom was a part of the desegregating class of her high school, right? Wow.
She was born in 1951. It's wild to think about.

Speaker 11 By the way, next time you do your book, you have to do Washington Journal. Like you have to do C-SPAN and take live callers.
It's a thing, right? It's a whole thing.

Speaker 11 You know, we haven't been a full democracy that long. Like

Speaker 11 we just got the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964-65.

Speaker 11 We had a country where people weren't able to drink from the same water fountains, go to the same libraries, go to the same schools, have the right to vote until 64, 65.

Speaker 11 And so you're talking about less than 60 years in which you've had a

Speaker 11 full democracy and people who were fully able to participate in that democracy. And when you think about how young that is, it kind of reframes the discussion.

Speaker 11 And the reason that I say we missed that moment is because we had an opportunity to talk about the progress that was made and we had an opportunity to analyze where we have to go.

Speaker 11 And instead, we just got these like $1,600 or $1,800 checks with Trump's name on them. And then Joe didn't put his name on his checks.
And then everybody turned the page and moved on. Yeah.

Speaker 11 The actual policing side of it, though, I pulled this up because I was.

Speaker 11 I was listening to you talk about this and I was like, is this really right? You know, I was trying to match my feelings about how things have changed to the reality.

Speaker 11 There have been a couple hundred policing bills in states you know that made very reforms obviously certain states blue states purple states more than more than red states awareness is up correct i've got some cop friends you know who who kind of complain about this actually but and that's good that they're complaining about this right where they feel like they have to be much more cautious about like using force you know that they've got eyes on them i've a couple of cops have said that have like expressed that to me that's anecdotal but you kind of sense that that's a common you know feeling the george floyd policing act didn't pass what would have counted for you?

Speaker 11 What would have made you feel like, yeah, the moment was met? So let's back up and let's look at it all together and some of the things we just talked about.

Speaker 11 One of the things that drives me nuts is the fact that I think that the change that we have in this country usually comes with a steep price for many black folk, right?

Speaker 11 Like you don't get the 64-65 Voting Rights Act without the Evan Pettis Bridge. You don't get the Fair Housing Act without the assassination of King.

Speaker 11 You don't get the Confederate flag taken down in South Carolina without nine people dying in a church, contrary to whatever Nikki Haley may tell you.

Speaker 11 We're not even having this robust criminal justice conversation on a large level without George Floyd dying the way he died, right? And so the price is really high. I've been in rooms.
I actually,

Speaker 11 this is a funny room. You'll laugh at this.
But in this room, I had the family of George Floyd, the family of Eric Gardner, the mother of Eric Gardner.

Speaker 11 I had, oh man, it was like five or six families of individuals who were killed by law enforcement. And we had Tim Scott in the room.
We were in his office at his table.

Speaker 11 And I wanted him, them to have an opportunity to meet with Tim to talk about criminal justice reform and where we were. And guess who stopped in? Guess who came to the meeting?

Speaker 11 Guess who peeked their head in? Jared Kushner. Lindsey Graham.
Oh, your boy.

Speaker 11 My guy. My guy.
Our guy. Lindsey peeked his head in, and Lindsey said, Lindsey wanted to hear from them and said that they were empowering, you know, Tim Scott to get this done.

Speaker 11 listen to the stories and the pain of these families and then nothing happened.

Speaker 11 And so when you think about the things that that haven't happened, you're talking about just on criminal justice reform, the fact that there's no national database for bad actors, right?

Speaker 11 So if you get fired from, you know, the Arlington Police Department, you can just go down to Richmond and get hired, right? There's no database. There are no psychological evaluations required.

Speaker 11 There's no ban on chokeholds. There's no ban on no-knock warrants.
I mean, you're from the South.

Speaker 11 Imagine what's going to happen in Louisiana if somebody serves a no-knock warrant in Baton Rouge or one of the parishes at 2 a.m. Tell me what's going to happen.

Speaker 11 Everybody in there is going to die die because they're going to shoot back. The police are going to shoot.
Everybody's going to shoot. Innocent people are going to die.
It happens more often.

Speaker 11 No shortage of guns. No shortage of guns.

Speaker 11 So there are just some things that we could have done to meet that moment. And you're right.
I mean, you have to give Minneapolis, for example, has done great work.

Speaker 11 The state of Minnesota has done great work, although it's not being realized per se.

Speaker 11 And some of the actions, I represent a family out there now, Ricky Cobb, who was gunned down by Minnesota State Police.

Speaker 11 But there are some things that could have been done to meet that moment, particularly on a national level while while we had that momentum.

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Speaker 11 On the kind of other side of the coin, the more kind of awareness, representation, DEI.

Speaker 11 Again, I feel like there's been some change, at least in my circles, you know, among the white moms.

Speaker 11 You've seen some change, but it's also resulted in a backlash, which maybe speaks more to your father's point of view. I want to play a little clip.
from Tucker Carlson last week.

Speaker 13 In 1994, the operating assumption of virtually everyone in the United United States was the main lesson of the civil rights movement, of the letter from the Birmingham Jail and the Edmund Penns Bridge and all the different sacred moments that we grew up hearing about, the main lesson of those moments was it is immoral, in fact, unacceptable, to attack people on the basis of their race.

Speaker 13 So then if you fast forwarded 30 years to find the same country engaged in a public hate frenzy against people because of their race, you would find that bewildering.

Speaker 11 How did this happen?

Speaker 13 Of course, there would be the discrimination, the institutional racism of hurting people on the basis of their race in hiring, in admissions to schools, in federal contracting, in promotions.

Speaker 13 There would be all of that. But there would also be the public manifestation of it, of saying out loud, we just don't like you.
You're not as good.

Speaker 13 You are morally defective because of your skin color. You say this about white people, people who founded the United States.

Speaker 11 You'd be shocked by that. People who founded the United States, Picari.

Speaker 11 Look, there have always been these guys, right? But this is something, no? Yeah, this is something. I actually talk about it in the book.

Speaker 11 I have a whole chapter dedicated to Tucker and people like Tucker and Clay Travis and Ben Shapiro, et cetera. Some of your old road dogs.
You've come a long way.

Speaker 11 I don't know if any of those guys were my old road dogs.

Speaker 11 I had some bad dogs, but I don't know if any of them. Clay Travis made me.
Clay Travis, but he was, but he moved the other way. All right.
He moved.

Speaker 11 We've been moving opposite directions down the trail. Yeah, I don't know what happened to Clay.
Clay's actually, actually very smart. I was going to say, I can't say the same thing for Tucker.

Speaker 11 I don't think Tucker is very well read. And one of the reasons you know that is because

Speaker 11 he mentioned The Letter to the Birmingham Jail. And the letter to the Birmingham Jail wasn't about any of that stuff.

Speaker 11 The letter to the Birmingham Jail was actually written to black folk, in particular, black ministers who didn't like Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 11 I would challenge Tucker to actually go read the letter to the Birmingham from the Birmingham Jail. That's first.

Speaker 11 Second, I define white supremacy in this book, and that statement and clip embodies it because

Speaker 11 white supremacy is when equality feels like oppression.

Speaker 11 And,

Speaker 11 you know, for my children, all I want is equality. I want them to be able to have the same opportunities.
I don't want them to have more opportunities.

Speaker 11 I just want them to be able to get on the same dance floor as their counterpart, regardless of who they love, what they look like, or who they pray to, right? That's freedom in my mind.

Speaker 11 That's equality. And for a large swath of, maybe not large, but for a swath of white male conservatives, particularly white male evangelicals, there is a fear that that equality is oppressive to them.

Speaker 11 And that is what is echoed in that sentiment from Tucker. And one of the initial things that bothered me about

Speaker 11 Tucker was when he delved into the great replacement theory. Do you remember that segment that he did on that? Yeah, of course, yeah, of course.

Speaker 11 And it wasn't the fact that he did it, but it was the fact that he did it and had a prime time news slot. And then there were ads.
They were making millions of dollars before and after.

Speaker 11 He did an openly racist segment, right? On an openly racist sociological theory. I forget, you might remember, was that before or after the Buffalo shooting? After the Tops shooting.

Speaker 11 It was after, right?

Speaker 11 Because we were having this conversation about

Speaker 11 how racist, a little crazy motherfucker was.

Speaker 11 He was just, he was nuts.

Speaker 11 You know, his manifesto, and remember he had on the barrels of his gun, I believe, and we were having those conversations.

Speaker 11 It's the New Zealand shooter, the same manifesto. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, you know, Tucker went into this great replacement theory.
And where I got to in the book is that racism is a commodity now.

Speaker 11 You know, we're old enough. We're not that old, but we're old enough to remember when like races like hit in the corner.
Right. Right.

Speaker 11 They might talk to each other, but they really didn't come outside. And now they have their own shows.
Yeah, this is kind of my point.

Speaker 11 So I wrote about this a little bit in my book about that WorldNet Daily. You remember that WorldNet Daily? Yeah, I do remember that.
Joe Farah. Okay.
Yeah. So these guys were openly racist.

Speaker 11 And they had a decent readership on their site, of course, because there's always going to be a market for open racism.

Speaker 11 But like that guy occasionally would get invited on Fox, you know, but he wasn't the keynote speaker at stuff. You know what I mean? Like he was around.

Speaker 11 It wasn't like he was shunned in Republican circles, but it was always a little bit like, eh, I don't know. You know what I mean?

Speaker 11 Like, none of the candidates I worked for would have had him be the opening speaker at their thing. They would have had somebody who did a little bit more proper dog whistling.

Speaker 11 You know, we would have had Rush or something. You know what I mean? And like, that is a category difference, though, right? Like, it just is.

Speaker 11 Like, going from having to be a little bit shameful, a little bit in a corner, to being like, no, on X, I'm just going to read this exactly.

Speaker 11 The tweet that accompanied that clip: there is systemic racism in the United States against whites everyone knows it nobody says it how come question mark 75 000 likes like that's kkk shit just right out in the open yeah and and it's valuable because that that's my other thing it's not anything that's ostracized or set aside it's right out in the open but also He's getting paid by Elon Musk to do this.

Speaker 11 He was getting paid by Fox News to do the same thing. It wasn't until the emails got exposed and everything else that they let him go.

Speaker 11 But there is an inherent value, and you see that in people like, what's the guy who's not that smart? Oh, man, the young one. He runs like

Speaker 11 Michael Noel. No, no, no.

Speaker 11 Keep going. Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 11 Charlie Kirk. Yeah.
He's talking about airplanes. He's scared of going on an airplane to the black pilot now.
Plane to the black pilot. Yeah.
Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 11 Oh, this man, this man called Gentanji Brown Jackson like a DI appointee. Yeah.
And I'm like, dude, you dropped out of community college. Like,

Speaker 11 like the audacity, the audacity of of some of these conversations to be had and so you know they they get paid again i call them grifters but i don't i don't really know if they're grifting i mean every year they come around and what is it tpusa makes a killing they have these donors that give money to them to go out and and rile up young voters i don't i don't know it but it is a problem it is a stain that is some of the racism institutionalized that we talk about that's kind of out in the open that you can see and touch and the question is how do we unravel that that's a good line and that is how these guys feel.

Speaker 11 Quality feels like oppression. That's a good line.
I'm going to steal that from you. Please do.

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Speaker 11 I want to kind of put these terrible people just aside for a second and talk about like what is attracting people.

Speaker 11 You know, I do a Snapchat show, thanks to our buddy Hamby for like teens and I have a lot of people. Hamby's getting you paid by Snapchat and he hasn't called me yet.
Barely, barely, barely. Trust me.

Speaker 11 It's more work than it's worth. Let's be honest.

Speaker 11 I like doing it. I like doing it because it's teenagers and it's early 20s guys that lead it.

Speaker 11 And coming to my thing, it's mostly like white guys, young white guys who like, and I'm glad you're talking.

Speaker 11 You are a good messenger, correct? I'm protecting them from like the Jordan Peterson pipeline or the Tucker Carlson pipeline. You know what I mean? They might be turned off by some of your

Speaker 11 Andrew Tate pipeline. Yeah.
And so anyway, but what I hear from them, they're good-natured ones that I worry might be on the line of tipping down the pipeline, falling down the wrong path.

Speaker 11 And their complaints are like,

Speaker 11 some of this stuff is crazy.

Speaker 11 There are classrooms out there where they're like, we're going to separate you by race. It feels like it's the 1960s again.
And like, I'm not going to get a job.

Speaker 11 You know, someone's going to get a better job than me because they need to fill some quota. Again, some of this stuff is

Speaker 11 maybe overwrought. And, you know, you want to play your tiniest violin for them.
But like, Should there be some consciousness of that? Are you worried about that?

Speaker 11 There's been some DEI folks, Robin, D'Angelo.

Speaker 11 Some of the shit's a little overkill you know some of the little overkill i don't disagree with that i mean some of that you look at it you're like damn that's not helping the cause right now especially since there is a microscope on it right but like why are you eliminating why are you eliminating a scholarship for black students to do right what does that do for anybody that just that's what happened after the supreme court ruling is what you're saying the scoot yeah and the crazy part about it is you know I still know people and I go to these graduations in South Carolina and everything where you have first generation college students, like black folk, first generation college students.

Speaker 11 Their daddy and uncles and everybody didn't go to the same school.

Speaker 11 You know, we got legacy admissions and all of those things, but that doesn't help assuage the fears of the young men you're talking about.

Speaker 11 You know, me talking about the fact that if you really want to be honest with you, white women benefited from affirmative action more than any other segment of the population, it wasn't black folk, but it was white women.

Speaker 11 That doesn't assuage that either. What I would tell them, though, is say, look.
For a long period of time in this country, we had an unequal playing field.

Speaker 11 And the playing field now is not going to benefit one person over another. It's going to be equal.
That may mean that you have to work harder.

Speaker 11 And that may mean mediocrity from you may not be acceptable. For a long period of time, one of the most successful people in the entire country was a mediocre white man, right?

Speaker 11 Because you could just navigate through life. Especially a rich one.
Let's just be like upper, yeah,

Speaker 11 a mediocre white man in rural Iowa, probably not doing that great. You're correct.
And I'm glad you checked me on that because you sound a lot like Reverend Dr.

Speaker 11 William Barber, who are interviewed for this book and will articulate that we need to start looking at the similarities between that voter, that person that you're talking about, that the middle class rural farmer in Appalachia and also the working class individual black person in Jackson and start talking about the similarities they have with each other.

Speaker 11 I want to talk about the outreach in that kind of world to working class black folks. William Barber is great, by the way.
He is so thoughtful on this stuff.

Speaker 11 I'm very lucky to have a chance to talk to him a couple months ago. But there's some worry about this, right?

Speaker 11 There's some worry that that same guy that I'm talking about, that's a white guy, there's a black guy that's kind of a version of that, that also feels like they're not getting spoken to by the Democratic Party.

Speaker 11 They don't like the DEI stuff. They don't love all the

Speaker 11 some of the cultural stuff. They feel like maybe they're getting left behind.
What they bring to the table isn't valued.

Speaker 11 I think there's a big worry that RFK might have an appeal to that kind of, we're painting with a broad brush, but like that there's some sub-segment sub-segment of that demo that RFK might appeal to.

Speaker 11 They might stay home. What do you think? Are the Democrats kind of failing that demo at all? Or what would you think that the party could do better? I have a whole chapter about it.

Speaker 11 I mean, for a long period of time, you know, in my first book, My Vanishing Country, I kind of give the flowers to black women and them being the kind of the backbone of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 11 But in this book, I kind of raise the blinking lights and say that there's a demographic, which is the second largest demographic for Democrats, which is black male voters that we haven't paid attention to.

Speaker 11 And you're starting to see slippage.

Speaker 11 You know, the best example I can give you is I was asked, what would I like to hear from Joe Biden when he goes to Morehouse this weekend or next weekend for graduation?

Speaker 11 And I was like, you know, number one, the world seems like it's on fire. Talk about globally what peace looks like.

Speaker 11 Number two, talk about reproductive rights and the role that men can play in ensuring that we help.

Speaker 11 secure reproductive rights for our sisters, our daughters, our loved ones, our wives, whatever it may be.

Speaker 11 And number three, I said, you know, have a robust agenda that includes things like voting rights. But if you go up there and talk about criminal justice reform for 25 minutes, I personally will riot.

Speaker 11 There are young black men that have concerns besides jail.

Speaker 11 Exactly, right?

Speaker 11 So, oh, you guys all know somebody who's been in jail. Let me fix that problem for you.
Like, no.

Speaker 11 So, you know, for me, it's a very interesting time because we have to do a better job of listening to these voters. And we simply have not done that.
And you are seeing a slippage.

Speaker 11 Now, I analyze this race differently from most.

Speaker 11 And you probably, some people have stolen it from me, but I would argue that this race is not between joe biden and donald trump i think it's between joe biden donald trump and the couch because i think there'd be more black male voters that stay home than vote for trump west or rfk and part of the thing is rfk is decently transparent because black voters will be like man he sounds great damn he sounds good but what what he been doing for us the last 10 years And the answer is that his resume is a little thin when you start looking at what he's been doing for these communities that he's he has a bit of a Bernie Sanders problem in terms of resume connectivity and history with the community.

Speaker 11 Now your vision may sound good, but you don't have the connective tissue. I was in one of these kind of off-the-record things with some Democratic politicians.

Speaker 11 So I guess I shouldn't reveal who it was, but I was like, okay,

Speaker 11 sorry, that's halfway out of my mouth. I'm trying to figure out how do I phrase this question.
This isn't that big of a secret, but I just don't want to get me any trouble.

Speaker 11 There was a black commentator that was speaking to Democratic politicians, and his advice to them, I'm interested in your take on this, was stop talking about people of color when you're talking about black men.

Speaker 11 He's like, sometimes black men want to hear about the problems facing black men. I don't know.
I just thought that was an interesting take.

Speaker 11 And I was just wondering if that was something that resonated. That's a true sentiment.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 I mean, if you, and also, I mean, a lot of my good white progressives and good white liberals, they like to do like a rising tides lift all boats thing, right? And these race-neutral policies.

Speaker 11 And no, we want to hear race-specific policies that are going to fix race-specific problems. And that's right.

Speaker 11 I mean, listen to black men and talk to black men the same way you listen to black women and talk to them.

Speaker 11 Democrats are kind of silly in our messaging because we are also the same party that goes out and is like Latinx.

Speaker 11 And Hispanics, they don't even call themselves Latinx, right? Come on. And we talk about Hispanic voters in Florida and I'm like, it's like 27,000 subsects of Hispanic voters.

Speaker 11 Like, why are we lumping them all in?

Speaker 11 Why are we having this global conversation instead of going to these communities and talking to these communities and listening to these individual communities about their needs and addressing them appropriately?

Speaker 11 We have a messaging issue. One group on that that I was interested in your take on as I was thumbed thumbing through your book last night.
It's a quick read right now.

Speaker 11 It's a good read, but it's a quick one. So, folks, you can go and get there, don't get intimidated.

Speaker 11 You talk about a lot of folks in the book, a lot of older black folks, really, but yourself included, who are like religious Christian black folks.

Speaker 11 I want to separate you from it a little bit because you've gone a little bit. You're a little bit urban.
You're a little bit of a globalist.

Speaker 11 You might live in Columbia now, but like folks that have kind of traditional values, Christian values, sometimes I feel like the Democrats forget about that group and like that they're not, you know, you do have Raphael Warnock, right?

Speaker 11 But like when you're on TV, when you're like, you're going to MSNBC and CNN or on any of these places, surrogates, like that's a big demographic of the party and it feels like they get forgotten about like religious.

Speaker 11 We have to fight that battle, right? Because there are a lot of GOP voters who believe that GOP stands for God's only party. There is a way to message to black voters and you saw that in Georgia.

Speaker 11 a lot, which changed the dynamic in Georgia and made it a purple state over time where you're messaging to those black traditional Christian voters.

Speaker 11 Raphael Warnock is probably the better person to talk to along those lines, as you pointed out. But that is a segment, and it is an interesting way to.

Speaker 11 And I was speaking to Terrence Woodbury, who's at HIT Strategy, who does a lot of this focus grouping. Yeah, I've been wanting to have him on.
Yeah, you got to have him on.

Speaker 11 I mean, he'll bring his PowerPoint. I mean,

Speaker 11 it's fascinating. He's really, really good.
But he talks about how you message to black male voters and you use those talking points, like around the issue of abortion.

Speaker 11 It's God granted everybody free will.

Speaker 11 And so, why does Glenn McConnell or Donald Trump get to take away that free will from, you know, your wife, your daughter, when it comes to her reproductive rights?

Speaker 11 Or, you know, you are the head of household, these traditional kind of Christian values.

Speaker 11 So if you're the head of household, why is somebody else making these decisions instead of you and your wife and your doctor for you?

Speaker 11 And so when you message around those times, just around the issue of reproductive rights, you bring in these group of kind of disenchanted black male voters and you message along the same lines lines that you're talking about.

Speaker 11 It's a fascinating theory, one that I never really even thought about. We're running out of time.
Two more heavy things for you, then I'll get you out of the row. Quick and heavy.
How about that?

Speaker 11 Can you do quick and heavy? I can do quick and heavy. I want people to hear about, in case they don't buy your book, they should buy the book.

Speaker 11 In case they don't, the story about the woman, the Gullah Geechee. I had heard about this.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 11 It's like one of those things that exists in your periphery, but I just didn't know a lot about it. So maybe just give a quick version of that story.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 Josephine Wright was amazing, and and I learned about her story on X.

Speaker 11 X has gone to hell in a handbasket since Elon bought it, but I was, you know, I follow all my local reporters, and please, local reporters do the best work.

Speaker 11 Posting Courier is running an article, and these developers from Savannah wanted 20 feet of her land. All right, and she was like, No.

Speaker 11 And like many individuals along the coastline, she's had that land since the Civil War, like right out since Reconstruction, like 150 years in her family. And they sued her.

Speaker 11 She's 90 years old, like paid taxes, done everything. They sued her for this land, for this development.

Speaker 11 And there are other folks in that like community, the Golgichi, that kind of live out in that same area, basically. Yeah.
And a lot of times they don't. I mean, you'll be surprised

Speaker 11 the number of individuals who lose their land simply because of tax issues or it's referred to as heirs property issues. It's very complicated legal issues.

Speaker 11 You got to go through and make sure it was passed down from one generation to another. And these big companies, because the land is pristine, it's right along the water.

Speaker 11 These large large development companies they literally prey on these individuals who may not have had it passed down appropriately whatever and go in and swoop in so anyway i go down to represent this young this young lady i call her young she was 90 some years old we take this picture together she's 4'10 i'm 6'5 and a half we're barely in the frame together and we get hope from snoop dog and kyri irvin and all these people and um she died recently and after her death we settled the case but her family will get to keep the land in perpetuity i love that people should read more about that it's a fascinating community

Speaker 11 I just didn't know a lot about. All right, last one.

Speaker 11 You've got a chapter. It's called Dear Stokely.
Stokely is the name of your son. It's obviously named after your dad's friend, civil rights advocate, Stokely Carmichael.

Speaker 11 So, my question for you is: I have a black daughter. This is to your black son purposefully, but I've got you on the podcast.
You know, you have all this lived experience.

Speaker 11 You got decades of lived experience. What advice would you have for her that maybe I might miss based on my suburban Denver crunchy, crunchy experience?

Speaker 11 That's a good question. I mean, you're going to do something that can fill any void, which is you're going to love her and feel that void of love that she may not otherwise get.
So I'm not concerned.

Speaker 11 I think the only thing that I would recommend, and I don't get parenting advice, but it's just to allow her to appreciate the contours of her lips and the way that her cheeks are shaped and the way that her hair feels.

Speaker 11 And when she sees other images that look like her, allow her the opportunity and the space to feel the beauty of those things.

Speaker 11 You know, the Kenneth Clark doll experiment is something that I think about all the time. I would ask you to go Google it, but

Speaker 11 it was one of the kind of expert opinions given in Brown v. The Board of Education.

Speaker 11 And you had all of these black kids and they were asked to choose the dolls that they identified with or found to be the most beautiful.

Speaker 11 And all the dolls these black kids found to be the most beautiful were white dolls. And they deemed the black black dolls to be ugly.

Speaker 11 And it was this kind of really reckoning with yourself about, are we giving young black children the space to understand their beauty? And that's all I would ask you to do.

Speaker 11 You should give parenting advice. That is great.
Maybe that's the second, maybe that's the next line for you after that. Lawyer, lawyer, commentator, author, parenting advice columnist.
I don't know.

Speaker 11 That's so good. Bakari Sellers, man, let's do this again soon.
It's so good to hear from you. Congratulations to the Gamecocks and Don Staley.
Go out and buy his book.

Speaker 11 We're going to run the streets at the conventions. I look forward to drinking beer with you and you and Peter.
Let's get the group back together. All right, I'll see you out there.

Speaker 11 The book is the moment. Thoughts on the race reckoning that wasn't how we can all move forward now.
Go out and get it. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 11 We'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark podcast. Peace.

Speaker 11 Brown skin girl

Speaker 11 on the other side of the room.

Speaker 11 Brown skin girl staring

Speaker 11 with the brown eyes.

Speaker 11 Ooh, baby,

Speaker 11 don't you know you're a cutie pride

Speaker 11 Princess Little Wendy with a polka dot dress on

Speaker 11 Oobin

Speaker 11 lady whose name I don't know

Speaker 11 Let me tell you, darling, ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh, ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh,

Speaker 11 ooh.

Speaker 11 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture Eastas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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