Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - Martin Luther King Jr., the Revolutionary With Dr. Peniel Joseph

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Van and Rachel welcome scholar and author Dr. Peniel Joseph to discuss Dr. King’s evolution and the watering down of his legacy (6:21). Plus, Ed Reed goes off on Bethune-Cookman and HBCUs (40:48), and the LAPD faces scrutiny for the death of an unarmed Black man (1:04:14). Hosts: Van Lathan Jr. and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Peniel E. Joseph Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, yo, yo, thought warriors. What is up? Hary Lerner is on. It is I, Van Lathen, Jr. And it's me, Rachel and Lindsay. No pleasantries. That's right, because the cowboy game comes on tonight. Plus, I don't want to take time away from Professor Joseph.

Oh, don't make you feel bad. You guys, you guys, we, we have, Rachel is great. I'm great, not really, but things are okay. Look, here's the deal. We have, we have Poneil Joseph. it's Dr. King's birthday today. You're going to hear a lot of lies about who Dr. King is. And we wanted to make sure that on this podcast, we gave you guys the truth.

Maybe some things you hadn't heard about Dr. Martin Luther King, not those things. Okay. I know what you guys are thinking. I know what you guys want. You want some, you want shade room civil rights activists. That's what you guys want. You guys, that's what you guys want. That's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about who the man was politically. what his actual beliefs were? Was Dr. King a communist? Yes or no? How did his leftist sort of view of society play into some of the things that we got? Maybe the poor people's campaign. What was his relationship with Dr. King?

The writer of the sword and the shield, the world's foremost scholar on the black power era, civil rights era, Ponell Joseph joins us today on how I learned to talk about Dr. King. He went to Rachel's school. Rachel was very proud of that. I'm very, very proud of it. It shows you great things.

What is our motto? What starts here, changes the world. Is that the motto of Texas? It is. I thought the motto of Texas was interception. He's at the 40. He's at the 50. He's at the 10 to 5.

Touchdown, Oklahoma State. That's what I thought the motto of Texas. Okay, first off, none of that applies. I thought the motto of Texas was off sides again. These guys just can't get out of their way. None of the supplies. The U.S. is having a real problem. I'm sure we're going to have a lot of Longhorns.

listening to this episode. So please don't disrespect. Was touchdown TCU. You. Wow. Wow. Um,

before we get it. Look, before we get into it, it's important that you guys know today that, uh, the version of Dr. King that you get is just a lie. It's just facts.

They've taken this guy who was one of the deepest, most complex, sociopolitical thinkers in the history of this country, an activist, sometimes a radical, a disruptionist, all of this and turned them into this middle of the road, a force for the establishment of the status quo. Yeah. Or the maintaining of the status quo. Rachel, you know this.

You know this. They're romanticism. him and almost said if you want to be a good black this is and you want to make change this is the way that you need to do it by taking away so many of the things that he stood for and believed in and watering them down and it's important it's important that we discuss this important that we discuss

what the America let's be honest media machine can do to one of the most important Americans in the history of the girl one of the most important citizens of this world ever, you know? And you know what's interesting? We talk about how we got a very watered down version of him when we were in school, but this next generation might not have a version of him at all. Yeah, talk about it.

Before we get into Pineal, because there's a whole bunch of things that Donnie put in a document here, but we just did the interview with Pineal, and there's no reason for us to go back through all of this stuff, Donnie. But thank you. God damn, Penil Joseph to come on the podcast. Okay. There's no reason you got a whole, you got five pages of stuff here.

And we got Penil Joseph. We're just going to talk to him about it. Okay, Donnie. That's the way you do that. Okay? Thank you. I do want to talk about the sculpture, though. Yeah, yeah, whatever.

I do want to talk about the sculpture. Big old dick. Do you didn't see the sculpture, Rachel? What sculpture? Rachel, how do you miss stuff like this? Wait, what sculpture? Are you, you're watching Bachelor and Paradise reruns over and over. how do you miss stuff like this?

There was a sculpture, a sculpture to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. And Coretta Scott King was put up in Boston. I did. I saw it. A sculpture of Dr. Kean's

big, righteous penis up in Boston. It's just funny because, you know, Seneca Scott, who is Correa Scott King's cousin, says the mainstream media was reported on it

like it was all beautiful because they were told they had to say that. But when it came out, a little boy pointed out, that's a penis. And everyone was like, yo,

that's a big old dong, man. If you had showed that statue to anyone in the hood, they'd have been like, no, absolutely not. You know, it's just,

it's weird that they commemorate Dr. King in Boston, what Boston's been through, and it's just a big black dick. You know what I mean? It looks, so if you haven't seen it,

it looks like, that's what it's holding. It's, and I don't care which angle you get, and I don't mean to be critical of somebody's work, but this ain't it. Well, if you look at it from a different angle and you look at the picture, you understand. I'm looking at it from several angles.

I know. I get it. But if you look at it from a different angle and you look at the picture of him holding her, you see what the inspiration was. But it's tough. Are you going to go to Boston and take a picture in front of it? Why not?

Dr. King probably looking down on that smiling. Like, yeah, nigger. Oh my gosh, I just saw it a different way. I don't know. Dr. King probably looking down at it. Yeah, they know. They know. All right, guys, before we go too far off the rails here,

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Okay, guys, got a big treat now. Huge treat. It is Dr. King Day. Celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hopefully you've heard of him. Hopefully, you know, you learned about him at some point in school. But I think that there's more learning that should be done about Dr. King. What I mean when I say that is that I think that we're getting a watered down milk toast bullshit version of Dr. King that suits narratives here in this country.

One guy who I know will give us the real, one of the smartest men I've ever had the pleasure of knowing or reading is Dr. Penile E. Joseph, scholar teacher, public voice on race issues, especially the history of the black power movement. So many amazing books. I've talked to you guys about him on this podcast before. He holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. That's right. Hook him war.

It's racist. Joseph also serves as vice president of the board of directors at the Banyard Rustin School of Social Justice. Got it. LGBTQIA safe space community activist center and educational enclave. I keep telling you guys about this book. The Sword and the Shield, I read all of this stuff. The Sword and the Shield, the Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Right now he has out.

That one's out too, but he has a new one out. The Third Reconstruction America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the 21st Century. Penel E. Joseph joins us today on higher learning. My brother, thank you for checking it. Oh, thank you, Brother Van. Thank you for all your support through the years. And you're one of the blurbers of the third reconstruction. So, Rachel, I'm a big fan.

So, yes. I blur. So, like, it's so nice to meet you. It's so nice to meet you. And I, I'm a fan as well. And I was introduced to you by Van. I have to say that I'll give him credit. But what I will not give him credit for is the fact that he tried to hate on us before this

started. It was going to take away the fact that we were going to acknowledge that we both bleed burn orange, that we both come from University of Texas. Austin. He's a hater. He's got a hater in our midst. He did. What I was saying is I wanted you guys to get all the introductions out of the way so that we can focus on what we're here to talk about, which is Dr. King. But Rachel, if you want to put

Texas ahead of Dr. King, which is what Greg Abbott probably wants to do. Go ahead and do it. We're going to get into this because we want to have a discussion because the sword and the shield paints an interesting picture of these two really incredible men. at very pivotal points in their lives. And it was a look into Dr. King's life that I hadn't really gotten in a lot of the other things that I've read about him

or things that I've seen about him. So the first thing I want to ask you, Ponell, is what do you feel like the biggest lie that America at large tells about Martin Luther King Jr. is? That he was not a confrontational revolutionary. I think that's the biggest lie because I think he's a passionate figure, even as he's a compassionate figure, but he's a confrontational revolutionary.

And in the sword and the shield, man, I even, I criticize Malcolm X for not understanding that about Dr. King. And I, and I criticize both of them for their misunderstandings of each other, which by the end of their lives, they come closer to understanding dignity and citizenship. But I would say that even Malcolm got nonviolence as practiced by King wrong. Gosh, I have so many questions. I was going to ask something different.

But now I want to say something to what you just said. Do you think that the reason that Malcolm X had thought the wrong way about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is because there was some societal pressure to it or even, you know, the people that he surrounded himself with had him thinking in that way to where he had this jaded view of Dr. King. Well, I'd say it's one word and it's really what the ecosystem we're part of. It's media. Media. Media couch Dr. King is the. American Gandhi. He rolled with it, just like all of us would roll with it if we became this

popular big brand. He rolled with it because he had his own objectives, but it's media. Media places King in one box and media places Malcolm in another box. And both of them believe what media says about the other until they get near the end of their lives. How would you describe? Because a lot of people talk about what King believed politically. Obviously, He got a lot of things done using political structures here in America. A lot of legislation, tangible change in the lives of black people came from the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked very closely with LBJ and had ambitions to work very closely with the president that preceded LBJ, John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, not J.F.K. Jr.

What do you think or what could you tell people about King's political beliefs, in and of themselves. How did he view the world politically? I think politically he evolves. Some people try to say that King was always a radical, King was always a revolutionary. You know, I disagree and I show that in the book. Even though privately he's reading about Marx

and he's reading about black revolutionary figures, publicly he's a reformer, right? So for me, I don't think you show who you are until you walk the talk. And I think he evolves over time. He thinks initially he can get freedom for us through reform. Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing. Over time, he comes to see, especially after Malcolm's death in the Watts uprisings in 1965, he goes to Chicago,

tries to desegregate Chicago. That doesn't work. And then he marches with Stokely Carmichael in Mississippi and basically does a big, you know, repudiation of LBJ by saying April 4th, 1967, America is the greatest purveyor violence in the world and militarism, materialism, racism, or the triple evils facing humanity. He says it's going to be a bitter but beautiful struggle, but because he loves America, he's willing to criticize America, right? And so he becomes a revolutionary in part because of Malcolm X's example. So I think King goes from being a reformer to being a political radical by around 66 marching arm in arm with Stokely Carmichael. By 67, he lets it all hang out. And it's important for our listeners to know within one year of his up to then

most revolutionary speech, he's assassinated. The sword in the shield, you chose to write about Dr. King and Malcolm X together to show, to kind of dispute this, what we've been told. You know, I remember growing up, it was always kind of Malcolm X, what we were taught, when little we were taught about Black history in school, Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King. You know, if you want to things done. You need to be more like Dr. King, but you wrote this book, two of them together, showing that they had more in common. Can you speak towards the end of their Dr. King's life? Can you speak to what it is that they shared in common when their, when their values, beliefs, started to align more with one another and what that was? You know, they're both revolutionary

humanist, Rachel. They both believe in the black freedom struggle and liberation and freedom for all people, but they went about it in different ways. Malcolm believed in black radical dignity, and King believed in black radical citizenship. And I'm going to break down what that means. So for black radical dignity, we're all born with human dignity, Malcolm argued, and I believe. For Malcolm, we didn't need external validation of that dignity, which is citizenship. So Malcolm questioned why we would need to go Little Rock Central High School and be attacked by mobs of white people and have our little black girls in 1957 go to those schools under military escort. Malcolm questioned that because he said, if we valued our own human dignity, we need to have

our own schools, our own businesses, our own neighborhoods, our own communities. Yeah, Malcolm wasn't a separatist. He told James Baldwin, he told anybody he would debated if white people weren't racial terrorist and trying to stop black people from attending schools, he'd have no problem with racial integration. He says the very fact that they're committing these acts of terror shows us something about them in this society rather than us. King thought differently. He believed in what I call radical black citizenship. And what that meant was not just voting rights and civil rights. He talked about a guaranteed living wage, housing, decent housing for all of us, no more violence or segregation. And over time, they come to believe you need both. By the ballot or the bullet in

1964, Malcolm comes on board radical black citizenship. And by the time King is talking about black is beautiful and it's so beautiful to be black in 1967, he comes aboard radical black black dignity. And really, by the time he's marching with Stokely Carmichael, King becomes, I call King a black power activist, even though he's a black power activist who's against the use of violence. He's against the use of violence. And he's trying to convince Stokely that it can be even more confrontational to be nonviolent. That's why Stokely was going to join the poor people's campaign. He's meeting with Stokely at different churches and different places to join the poor people's campaign because King organizes the first Occupy movement, which is the Occupy Washington, D.C.

movement in 1968. They called it Resurrection City. Jesse Jackson took over. Other people took over because he's assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, helping those sanitation workers. Kings leftist views. How much did they influence the way that he got things done in America? How much did they influence his unpopularity in America? Because America has done a remarkable about face on Martin Luther King Jr.

That began really around 20 or 20. years after his death or maybe even a little bit before then. Actually, let me bifurcate those questions. So I'm going to ask one and then I'm going to come to the other one. Let's use the C word here. You hear that Martin Luther King Jr. was extreme leftist. He was a communist. He had communist people who were a part of his base, his power base, his inner circle,

Is that true? Is that a fact? Stanley Leveson, who is really one of his main advisors, was a former member of the CPUSA. That's a fact. Leveson wasn't a communist by the time he was advising King. I'd say King is a radical, social democratic activist along the lines of those folks in Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, who wants capitalism, democracy, but a safety net for all people. So I'd say that if we look at King's politics, he's not a communist.

he's a social Democrat. On the back of that, he was deeply unpopular a lot of the time that he was alive. Yes. By mainstream white conservatives didn't really like Dr. King very much. A lot of people,

North and South, didn't like Dr. King that much. A lot of black people didn't like Dr. King that much. Well, the majority of us did, man. Right. But there is a plurality of black people. You're correct.

There's a good, no, 30%, 35% where like this, this brother's been taking it too far, right? Yeah. There's this weird about face. He becomes deified. Yeah. To not just the right, but far right conservatives.

So the point to where you hear guys like Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson quoting Martin Luther King Jr. At what point does that happen in American history and why? Well, you know, then he's very, he's very, deeply unpopular by 1967, 68, because he comes out against the Vietnam War when the Vietnam War is still popular.

In 15 years, from 68 to 83, he gets a federal holiday. How did that happen? That's all owed to Coretta Scott King, grassroots activists, certainly Stevie Wonder and other people get credit, but it's really Coretta Scott King who organized

a campaign to get not her husband a holiday, but she wanted a holiday for the entire movement. What all, what everybody went through. And that means that's Angela Davis, the Black Panthers. It was really a united front. Now, since 1983, this is 40 years ago, since Reagan signed it into a holiday, the right wing has appropriated King because he gives them cover, right? Back in the day, I remember when I was growing up, Public Enemy had a song by the time I get to Arizona, which was about Arizona being one of the few states. Yeah. That wouldn't do the King holiday. And Chuck D was saying he was

going to kill the governor of Arizona in the song if the governor didn't sign this at a holiday. I mean, this is wild times, right? When I, when I was in college. So when we think about Dr. King in the last 40 years, I think that he's become commodified to the point where you see some of his speeches on Apple TV commercials, different big businesses, and so the right wing appropriates him. And the one thing, Rachel, band, the quote they love. is the content of our character quote from August 28, 1963.

And he said he hopes to live in a world where his four little children are judged, not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. And that's all they needed to hear because they go into their whole colorblind racism rant. And he wasn't saying we weren't supposed to see each other's color. He was saying we weren't supposed to have negative attributes. If you were, if you're Middle Eastern, if you're Irish, if you're black, Latino, the whole deal, it's all good. We just weren't supposed to ascribe negative and say, oh, I know what stereotype you fit

into. That's it, but they've turned it into something else. So the quote that love from King is the content of our character. Shelby Steele, again, when I was in high school, came to a bestselling book, the content of our character in 1987. And that was an anti-affirmative action thing. And you had all the conservatives saying, this is great. This is what Dr. King, content of our character, right?

And so that's what they've done. That's been the hustle over last 40 years. And unfortunately, for some of us, that's worked, right? That's worked. But I think a lot of us now push back and say, hey, here's the real true Dr. King. Who's a revolutionary? Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up.

I was going to ask you about that because they love, you're so right. They love to quote that quote without realizing. It's like you don't have to understand much about Dr. King to really. realize that's exactly not what he was talking about. He loved being black. So why would he be colorblind in any way? And I want to piggyback on that to say, for those who are listening to this podcast who maybe throw up a quote every Martin Luther King day, work for a company who does that because on social media, if you don't do it these days, you know, you're condemned almost. There's a lot of pressure to do it without any context behind it. What would be the book

from Dr. King you would tell them to read and what would be the speech you would tell them to listen to, to get, if you could pick one of each. Yeah, you know, I think the book would be where do we go from here, chaos or community? If you need something shorter, it would be letter from Birmingham jail.

And the speech would be a time to break the silence. That's a speech written with the help of Vincent Harding, who's the late great black theologian, from Atlanta and who started the Institute of the Black World, the great Vincent Harding. He's got a great brilliant book called There Is a River and Hope in History. He was one of Dr. King's biggest confidants, him and his wife. I think Letter from Birmingham jail is great because in that King criticizes white moderates. And Letter from Birmingham jail is also great because King gets flak for plagiarizing and all this stuff. He wrote letter from Birmingham jail.

And you can see how brilliant he is. He wrote that on small pieces of paper. They put it all together, but nobody ghost wrote that. Nobody did anything with that. That's all him. And you can see how brilliant he is. And he says that the white moderate is the biggest threat to all of us, more so than the white citizens council, more so than the clan. This is King talking, not me. He says the white moderate, because the white moderate is interested in a negative piece, which is calm without justice rather than a positive piece, right, which is justice and no, no racism and no oppression. So that's an extraordinary letter.

I read that every year, and I read it more than that, but I've taught that. And my students are amazed because I forced students to read it out loud. That's what we do. We each take paragraphs. So we're not just internalized. I hope to internalize it, but we're externalizing. And they're like, wow, some have said, hey, he's a better writer than I thought. This black dude is smart.

I'm like, I'm positive. I'm positive. So, yeah. Got two more questions for you. But the first one is, LBJ and King, what an interesting relationship. You have two guys.

LBJ thought King was his best pal. He's like, I gave him all this stuff. And then he kicks me in my ass over the war. But I think that the relationship between LBJ and Q. King actually kind of sets up the current relationship that black people have with the Democratic Party. And it's very emblematic of some of the issues of trust and some of the issues of advancement or the lack of advancement that we might have with the Democratic Party.

Question here. What do you think Dr. King, knowing what you know about him, ask you to get into your head right now. would think of black people's relationship with the current Democratic Party, given that he politically aligned himself with LBJ to get things done, but then was also hypercritical of LBJ when it was time to be over issues that he thought he deserved to criticize him over. We have sometimes a problem in our community now criticizing the Democrats, even when they are deservate of criticism.

What do you think? Well, I think that's an interesting analogy, King and LBJ and black people in a Democratic Party that I hadn't thought of before. So I think that's great. Oh, wait. You didn't think of it. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a very interesting analogy. You know, I think that Dr. King would want us to mobilize under the banner of the Democratic Party and be very, very critical of the Democratic Party at the same time. So I think that he always was able for us to do two things at once. Black people don't get enough respect from the Democratic Party. They don't get enough power from the Democratic Party because the United States has become a one-party state in terms of pro-democracy. Only one major party is for democracy. Black people are sort of in a bind, right? And data-wise, black women and men, but black women and men suffer differently because we're different people. And so there are more black women who vote than black men. there are more black men who are incarcerated than black women, even as black women's rates of

incarceration are growing fast. When we think about the Democratic Party, Democratic candidates should look very, very black because so many black women and then black men vote for them at extraordinary rates, at the most rates of any human beings on the planet. So from that perspective, since we overrepresent, you should have multiple black people. people who are Democratic candidates for governor, for senator, for Congress, much more so than just being 12% of the population, because we vote in presidential elections at more than 90% clip. In certain elections, like special elections in Alabama, a few years ago, black women were voting 95% for the Democratic candidate, right? We voted around 86% for Stacey Abrams.

We voted around 90% for Biden. So I think King would want us to be strategic. I think he would want us to be strategic in that relationship. King certainly was critical of Johnson, but his strategy wasn't to try to cultivate Nixon or Wallace, right? So that's the thing. There you know. No, like we've got to be strategic, right? So we have to push the Democratic Party.

And hopefully we get the Democratic Party a kind of capture towards social justice in the same. way that those who are anti-democratic forces have a capture of the Republican Party. Because then that Democratic Party would speak truth to power about mass incarceration, about poverty, homelessness, mental illness, about sexism, reproductive rights. They would be clear and morally profound, just like Dr. King. And they would be for, Dr. King is for redistributive justice. He felt we had to take wealth from the top to give people a safety net at the bottom. And he wasn't saying he wanted a communist country.

He wanted redistributive justice. It still was going to be capitalism, but a different kind of system where everyone had a safety there. Because Dr. King said in 67, we could afford it and we could still afford it. Donald Trump did a 10-year tax plan that cost $4.7 trillion over the next 10 years in 2017, $4.7 trillion. And when Biden tried to pass a billback better plan that would, be 3.5 trillion over 10 years, he couldn't get that. You see what I'm saying? So when we say redistributive justice, that's what we mean. The 4.7 trillion that Trump passed is 99% for the rich

and wealthy. That's what it was. 4.7 trillion that we have to pay for for the next 10 years so that billionaires can get even more money, right? Talk your shit, Poneil. I didn't hear you. What you said? I said, talk your shit. He was saying some real good stuff. He was saying you over here messing up with Dr. shit. Okay, last thing I want to say to you. 60 years ago, Dr. King wrote about, as you mentioned,

the white moderate. And here we are today. The white moderate is still an issue to still a quote, a stumbling block in the stride to freedom, among other things, but definitely that. So the question is, where do we go from here? What would Dr. King say about where we go from here, where we are in 2023? And then also I'm wondering, how do you think he would feel about the way that his legacy is being used today?

Well, the latter, he would be pushing back against Orwellian use of his legacy, right? King is this revolution social justice movement who's being used against Black Lives Matter and other revolutionary social justice movements. So it's ridiculous. And he would push back against that. King's the person who said, a riot is the language of the unheard. He'd be in solidarity with those in Baltimore, Ferguson, everywhere that people are being oppressed. The young black man just was murdered in Los Angeles. So many different things are happening. He'd be right there. King went to jail many, many times alongside of people like Soklee Carmichael. So he would be incarcerated. He'd be in jail. When we think about the white moderates, this is really important, though.

Way before we had buzzwords like allyship, we had the white moderate and white liberals. And King really calls them out. And I think everyone should read a letter from Birmingham jail because you could see King getting his radical thrust. He's not a full revolutionary yet, but he's calling out white moderates and saying, look, you're the biggest danger to black citizenship and dignity because you refuse. to take a side. The same people who criticized segregation also criticized those who did peaceful demonstrations against segregation. Same thing with BLM. You criticize and you say, hey, you're against police murder of black people like George Floyd. Okay, when we do a protest, you say you're against

the protest and demonstration too. Or when you want policy like the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, you say it's anti-cop and anti-police. I think King would say, and this is what he for And certain people, like you have people like Rabbi Heschel and other people who did choose the side, he forced white moderates to choose the side, either be in solidarity with the black struggle for citizenship and dignity, which is really a struggle for human rights and dignity for all people. Or we know that you're part of that other side and these adversaries, even though you may not wave the Confederate flag, you may not have a white sheet, but there is no room for moderation in a struggle for justice. that is as morally and politically clear as the black struggle for citizenship and dignity. And he said that in 63, and certainly that struggle is even more clear, I would argue now and today, in terms of we know, and this is where King, he turns this quote by the abolitionist, Theodore Parker, into the better quote, about the arc of the moral universe being long,

but bending towards justice. But King knew that to bend it towards justice, you had to have a multiracial coalition. You have to have solidarity beyond allyship. And remember, letter from Birmingham J.L. He's criticizing white clergy leaders. It's a big, whatever we want to call it, to those clerk, against those clergy leaders, right? It's a big, we can say snub and be nice and polite, or you can say something different. It's a big against those folks. It really is. But he never uses a curse word. He's never angry. But you can see the righteous indignation. And And throughout letter from Birmingham jail, you can see King is angry and there's pockets of rage in that letter, which is great. And again, I understand why he's angry.

He's writing it from jail. From jail? He's been arrested. He's angry. So this is what we're going to do because we have more stuff to talk to Pineal about. I want to bring Pineal back in February, which is Negro history time. It started out as Negro history week, man. True.

You're right. Negro history, 1926, Carter G. Woodson. So I want to bring Penil back because I want to talk to about, to two things, to Penil about two things. One, I want to talk about ban and wrestling. Okay. Yeah. All right.

And two, I want to talk about the erasure of black women in the black power movement and in the civil rights movement at large. Yeah. Okay. About some black women, the Ella Baker's of the. the world, we talk about other people that you should know that were fundamental in these movements. I could talk about more things about Dr. King. I could talk about it. I could talk about who Dr. King dated when he was in the seminary. I could talk about the records,

but I'm going to leave that alone. Read the book. You got to read the sword to shit. Can I give a shout out to the sword and the shield is going to be a TV series. Oh my gosh, congratulations. Talk to us, Paneo. Yeah, yeah. So that's going to be on Disney Plus as MLKX. And they've already cast and started filming. I'm in the writer's room.

And Kelvin Harris Jr., Harrison Jr. is playing Dr. King. And Aaron Pierre is playing Malcolm X. So that's been the deadline, the whole thing. So it's called MLKX. And it's going to be season four of the Genius series. So when is that coming?

When, like, when can we look at that? It's probably coming either this fall or early next spring, because they're filming in Atlanta now. Yeah, they're literally, so it's there. And if you guys don't know Kelvin Harrison, Jr., he is from Waves. He is for. Brilliant. Serino.

Yes, he is from the, what's the movie he did with Tracy? What is it called? The high note, Kelvin Harrison, Jr., he's great actor. It's going to be great. Also, you guys can listen to Pineal, Race and Democracy. That's the name of the podcast. because you guys, you got

everything that he has, I just grabbed it all. Like, I actually, I reached out to him. I can't remember why. Oh, oh, it was a project where I was doing, still I am doing. And I wanted to talk to him about it. I reached out to him. And this brother has been a fantastic source of information

and just is the foremost voice on a really transformative time in American history. And you guys, it's just important to understand, in my opinion, the fact that so many of the struggles that these men and women, women and men, were talking about discussing and litigating in the 60s, it's like a mirror to the things that we're talking about now.

We're talking about economic justice. We're talking about voting rights. We're talking about police reform and brutality. Absolutely. And it's the same thing. And it's both illuminating but also maddening that we're still discussing these things. We're talking about this in 1860s and 1870s too, which is why I did the third reconstruction. I mean, it's crazy.

Talk about the third reconstruction real quick, Peneo. You know, it's 160 year time loop. You know, in terms of the third reconstruction, it just looks at three periods of American reconstruction, 1865 to 1898, 1954 to 1968 is the second. And in 2008 to the present as the third. And really, I argue that we've been involved in a narrative war between reconstructionists who are supporters of multiracial democracy versus redemptionists to our supporters of the lost cause, racism, the hate, the violence, all of that. And the lost cause is really white supremacy is part of it, but it's bigger than that because the lost cause allows us to justify white supremacy, elect white supremacist presidents, have a white supremacist Christianity and really all feel good about massacres in Tulsa. in Arkansas and Chicago and Atlanta like that. That's how big white supremac.

And that's why we built Confederate monuments to white supremacy. So the loss cause is huge. And we're battling against that. And speaking of black women, Nicole Hannah-Jones, 1619 project, it's been the big arrow in the heart of the lost cause. And that's why you got over 30 states doing the anti-CRT legislation. So the loss cause is a big deal. We'll talk about it next month, definitely.

We will talk about, hey, you guys, don't tell you, Don't tell me I've never turned you on to the geniuses. This is where you get them here. High Learn. Penil Joseph, thank you so much for stopping by to talk to us a little bit about Dr. King. We will have you back in three weeks to kind of formulate what we should be getting. I'm going to have a whole series.

What we should be studying Black History Month with Penil Joe, Penil Joseph. That's what we're going to do. Thank you for joining us today on highland. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Rachel. I loved it. Enjoy it. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis,

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Services not available in all areas. It's Pinell not the man. He's fantastic. I gotta say it's one of the best things that you've done is introduce me to him. Trimbing glasses. Dr. Joseph and his work. And I've learned so much. And I'm just scratching the surface.

But I think that's incredible that that's about to be a TV series. It is. And on Disney. Look, Pineal over there getting that money. That's what I'm talking about. Disney money. Pinell over there getting that money. Publications from Pineal Joseph.

Wait until the midnight hour, a narrative history of black power. Read that. Dark Days, Bright Nights, from Black Power to Barack Obama. Stokely, a Life, read that. Sword and the Shield, the Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X

and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Read that. The Third Reconstruction, America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the 21st Century. That one just came out, read that. The Black Power Movement,

rethinking civil rights, Black Power era, haven't gotten to that one yet. Neighborhood Rebels, Black Power at the local level. he was the editor of that joint. I have not read that one either. Those are the books by Pinald Joseph.

I would suggest that you get as many as you can. Stokely is fantastic. Wait until the midnight hour is fantastic as well. I wish. Sword the Shield is one of the best books I ever read. I wish you would have asked him that question that you asked Soledadab. if you had to get if you had to get rid of one which one because I'm very curious as to what his response

Here's the thing about that question is that I've been roundly criticized for it Yeah you sold out I was like that's a terrible question That's why I want to hear what he would have said to that It's okay he's coming back you can ask you can save it for black history Ma'all right uh let's talk about Negroes of today Ed Reed is one if you guys don't know who Ed it is. He is simply one of the greatest football players who ever lived. He is,

I like to go to people's legacy panels. You ever, you ever go to Wikipedia and then you go to people's little panel where it has all of their accomplishments? Sure. Okay. I call that the legacy panel. I've said that before. Ed Reed, Super Bowl champion, NFL defensive player of the year. Five time, first team all pro. If you don't know, that means five times he was the very best player at his position in the league. Three times second team all-pro. That means for eight years, he was either the best or the second best guy at his position. Three-time interceptions leader, all-decade team. One hundredth anniversary all-time team.

He was voted one of the 100 greatest players in the history of the NFL. Super Bowl champion. Co-big East defensive player of the year, BCS national champion. Ed Reed is just one of the best ever. He is a Louisiana boy from down there in St. Rose, Louisiana, went to Destrohan, then went to Miami. He is in a college football Hall of Fame. He is a pro football Hall of Fame. I am giving you all of those accolades of Ed Reed right now

because I'm going to be very hard on Ed Reed in this segment. He is deserving of every single centella of praise that you can give someone for what they've accomplished athletically. And he's a good guy. He's a good guy. Ed Reed is also now the head coach. of Bethune Cookman. It's not on the swag.

It's not super official yet, but he is the head coach of Bethune Cookman. He is acting in that capacity right now. This comes on the hills, of course, of Dion Sanders being the head coach at Jackson State and Eddie George being the head coach at Tennessee State. Also, we have to mention Hugh Jackson, who was also cut his teeth in the NFL as an NFL

as an NFL coach is coaching at grammar. So what we're seeing is guys who've achieved a lot in football. High level football. NFL head coaches. A Heisman trophy winner and that's a collegial award, but then all pro in the NFL

in Eddie George. Two all-time greats in Ed Reed and Dion Sanders coming back and coaching at HBCU schools. You feel like that's a good thing for the HBCU schools. Do you not, Rachel? I think it's a great thing.

Anything that brings attention to an HBCU is a great thing. And I think it opens the doors for other people to follow in their footsteps. Eddie George, Dion Sanders, Ed Reed. But not if they do this, which is what you're being critical over. Yeah. Depends on what kind of attention you bring. Ed Reed just fucking destroyed Bethune Cookman in a couple of rants on his Twitter.

Just got to be honest with you. Just destroyed. Like he was disposed to his Twitter earlier in the week. He is, I'm assuming, just getting to the school and getting his feet wet and understanding the way things work at the school and some of the challenges he might face as the head coach there. He had two separate wrens. We're going to give you the first one right now, Donnie. Prime was not wrong about what he was saying. All y'all out there with y'all opinions full of crap, don't know shit.

But needless to say, I just pulled up to work. We're going to try to help y'all too, man. man, because I know a lot of HBCs need help. I'm just here to help here first. I see it on too clearly. All our HBCs need help. HBCUs need help. And they need help because of the people who's running it.

Broken mentality's out here. I'm going to leave y'all with that, man. I got to get in the office. Okay. That had people upset enough. Even with the gospel music playing in the background? Even with the gospel music playing in the background. that's what people do sometimes.

Sometimes I had a friend named Tremaine back in the day and you always knew Tremaine was really mad when you heard Did I ever tell you this? You knew Tremaine was really mad in this car when you heard Yolanda Adams open my heart. Tremaine was a straight thug, right? You know what I'm saying? But like, when Tremaine pulled up,

if Yolanda Adams opened my heart was playing, you knew it was going to go bad. Ebony knows this. One time Ebony kicked Tremaine out of the house for whatever reason she didn't like him and when he was leaving it was the funniest thing in the world because open my heart was blasting

out of his car he didn't change his your lawyer to Adam's song right so when you're that matter and that's maybe that's what Ed was trying to do so it was wrongly criticized for this we'll talk about the criticisms of that later he then came back with a different

much more aggressive live stream, tweet, whatever you want to call it. And Donnie's got to sound. Was this, wait, wait. When he came back, is this because he was reading

the responses from people on the first one? Part of it, yes. Absolutely, for sure. Okay. Yeah. Been mutton and showing shit. I chose not to. But now I'm out here walking

with the football team picking up trash. But I'm mutting us. Man, get out of here, man. I should leave. I'm not even under contract doing this. I'm mutting us. Man, get out of here, man.

They mutton me. These motherfuckers ain't even clean my goddamn office when I got here. I'm mutting y'all. Get your ass, man. Come on, man. Come on, man. All this shit here was trash in front me. Who you think got this shit cleared out?

That building right there got trash in it. It's fucking trash. What are you talking about? I need no goddamn donuts to come out, help out, because people just want money. That's why I don't have That's why I don't fuck with social network Okay, we should say that since then

Ed Reed has offered an apology. He has said in regards to my social media And comments about the university staff And other institutions I would sincerely Apotlite to sincerely apologize To all BCU staff students And alumni for my lack of professionalism

My language and tone Were unacceptable as a father, coach, and leader My passion for our culture, betterment, and bringing our foundation up Got the best of me and I fell victim while engaging with antagonists on social media as well. I'm fully aware of the hardworking folks at our school who are also fighting to make things better and more financially sound. I'm encouraged for my communication with my AD, Reggie Theis, and our administration.

And I understand it's a work in progress. My passion is about getting and doing better. And that goes for me too. Rachel, your thoughts. Well, I'm going to flip it on you because you went to. to an HBCU. We've had this discussion, not this particular discussion,

but talking about Dion and him going to Jackson State and then leaving and the backlash with that and then how particularly the black community and those who went to HBCUs responded. As a person, I mean, discussed my school, you'd see.

I didn't go to an HBCU. I'm wondering for you how this feels to the way you talk about Ed Reed and how much he still means to the game of football, to so many, to, he went to Miami. He went to Miami, right? Yeah, he went to Miami.

Yeah. To fellow hurricanes, to those from Louisiana, his hometown. Then to be, have these disparaging remarks against the HBCU against us. I'm asking you, how does that make you feel? He went to an HBCU. So the first thing I thought was that they should fire him. It's the first thing that I thought. The first thing that I thought was that.

he can't possibly be allowed to coach Paton Cooleman. I've thought about that, and obviously I feel like that's a bridge too far. But let me tell you something that I think people are not understanding when it comes to guys like Eddie George and Dionne Sanders and Ed Reed. These guys weren't good football players. They were great, best of the best, incredible once-in-a-generation football players. Yeah. Dionne Sanders and Ed Reed had better NFL careers than Eddie George did,

even though Eddie George was a fantastic NFL player, but he George is a husband trophy winner. So, he's been a man whenever he's picked up a football, whenever he's had a football in the sense he's been a man. Okay. That separates him from, that separates them from understanding some realities about what goes on into HBCU.

See, they've never had to deal with that. from the moment they ran on a track, intercepted a football, or ran somebody over, they were given the best of the best stuff. They were flown around places by people who knew that they would be able to make a lot of money off them. They were given every single chance to be successful,

whether those chances meant that people looked the other way from certain things. Ed Reed is talking about picking up trash. Well, Ed Reed was so good that if he dropped some trash, somebody else would probably pick it up. And that same thing goes for Dionne Sanders and that same thing goes for Eddie George. It does not mean that those men did not make incredible sacrifices and haven't really comported themselves in really honorable ways to get to where they've gotten.

All of those guys are great citizens. They are. But what I'm saying is that there's a privilege that's involved and how great they were that's not allowing them sometimes. and I'm not painting all of them with this brush. I'll use Ed Reed right here. That's not allowing him to see how much of an asshole he comes off as when he looks at the school like this.

Where Ed Reed is, where Dion Sanders was, where Hugh Jackson is, and where Eddie George is, you're at the places that have been, left behind. See, they didn't leave you behind. They didn't leave you behind because you could run fashion than a lot of the guys at these places. You could jump higher. You could do things they couldn't. So they didn't leave you behind. They talented tipped your ass to Miami, Florida State, and Ohio State. They gave you everything. And what these schools are asking you to do is to give a

little back. So to get on your high horse before you've even got comfortable at that place and talk about years and years and years of underfunding. Years and years and years of those schools doing the best they can to turn out minds with so much less than other schools have is deeply, deeply disrespected. respectful and offensive to me. No fucking right. No right.

And let me tell you something else. It's ungrateful. And it's ungrateful on the part of Ed Reed. Ed Reed was the assistant defensive backs coach at Buffalo. Wasn't retained when Buffalo changed coaches. He was the chief of staff for Miami football. It's an advisory role under Manny Diaz and then under Mario Cristob. He left, I'm assuming to take this job.

Okay. Ed Reed, in no way, is qualified to be the head coach of a college football team. He's not. Ed Reed, for what you would call most people's qualifications to coach a college football team. Ed Reed doesn't have it. Correct. He doesn't have years and years and years of being a defensive coordinator or an offensive coordinator. He doesn't have years and years and years of being an assistant.

And if it was up to the people where he cut his teeth, if it was up to him, I don't see him as a defensive coordinator at Miami. I don't see him as a defensive coordinator or even a defensive backs coach in Baltimore. When Ed Reed wanted to be a coach, do you know who would give him the opportunity to coach? Same thing with Dionne Sanders. To be a head coach, it was a black school. because black schools did for Ed Reed and Dionne Sanders the same thing that they do for black students all the time, which is in part to give black students opportunities they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. See, you have the more houses and you have the spellments and you have the howlers.

But then at Southern, there are a whole bunch of kids that I know that went to Southern. they were able to get a college experience that turned them into thriving professionals that they wouldn't have been able to get at a different place because they wouldn't have been able to get in, they wouldn't have been able to afford to go. So the HBCU serves a segment of black people that need the HBCU in a lot of cases. Yeah. Okay.

And the way those kids are being given a chance, it's the same way that Ed Reed and Dionne Sanders are being given a chance. They're being given a chance that they wouldn't or, let me say this, that they weren't otherwise given. Go to Bethune Cookman, pick up the fucking trash, or leave. Go to Bethune Cookman, build something at Bethune Cookman, change the priority level at Bethune Cookman, put in the work or leave. The fact that you would go there and before you've ever done anything significant, Ed Reed is oh and oh at Bethune Cookman. The first thing out of your mouth is these niggas ain't got their shit together.

Fuck you, dog. Like, seriously. Like, go there and be a part of building Bethune Cookman. And for everybody else that says, hey, he's calling out problems. He's calling out problems. Where was the call to action? Where was, so where was the call to action from Ed Reed in his rants about Bethune? Cookman to change something.

Where was the go fund me? Where was the, hey, help me with this. Where was the call? It was a bunch of bitching and moaning and complaining about shit that we already know. If we've been here, Donnie went to Howard. Howard got a fucking $500 million endowment or some crazy shit. He still had roaches and shit in the dorm. We understand either roll up your sleeves and help out and be a part of the solution

or go someplace where they will tolerate your ass. Go someplace where they'll let you in the back door to write chalk on the board. Not where you'll be the fucking head coach like the places that you came from. I'm sorry. I'm glad that he apologized. I hope that Ed Reed has all the success in the world at Bethune Cookman, but I'm sick of that shit. Do you? I do.

See, that's what I was going to say. It doesn't seem like you're, and everything you're saying is very true, by the way. It doesn't seem like you think he should be the head coach. And here's my question, or maybe just a thought. I don't understand how, if I'm a player, right? Because you're a leader as a coach, right?

It's not just about a title. It's not about having this team with these players and all of that. It's about being a leader and leading these young men on and off the field. And if that's your immediate response, whenever he faces adversity, because let's be honest, even if he was at a D1 school, you're going to have issues. Is this how you face it? issues when they come to you? Is this how you handle them? You go to social media and you let

everybody in on your business. I think that's what was so upsetting to me as well. I can't say it's personal in the sense of having gone to HBCU and I can't speak to that experience. But it's one of those things. Remember out when we're talking about black movies and it's like should we talk, should we say a movie's not good even if we know it's not good because we want to, you know, lift up black creators and we want people to support the artistry and the art. And so we feel a need to protect that. Well, that's kind of how I feel in this situation with an HBCU. Why are you letting everybody in on our business? Why are their business, I should say, because I didn't go, but why are you letting everybody in on their business? Why are you talking about all the things that

are wrong rather than focusing on some of the positive of the fact that you're now going to lead it? How are, as you said, call to action? How are you going to lead? How are you going to push through? are you going to make this team better, this program better? What was it that he said about Dion? What did he say Dion wasn't wrong? Okay, well, let's talk about some of the things that Dion did in a positive way to uplift HBCUs. What was Dion right about in lifting up Jackson State and all the attention that he brought

about with that? It's just, I was shocked by it. And I don't know. I disagree with you. I don't know if he can lead Bethune Cookman in the way that he should now that he has voiced these feelings in such a public and demeaning way. I don't know. It's not off to a great start.

The start is terrible. I would agree with that. What I don't want to do is be the person that see somebody stub their toe and then cuts their foot off. But it's more than a step toe. I disagree. I think what, like, what, I don't want to see somebody stub their toe and then cut their foot off.

What I want, what I want, read to understand and the guys that, like, maybe don't understand some of the cultural things because we're going to see the influx of these people. This is why Eddie Robinson Jr. was saying that Dion wasn't swag. We're going to see more guys come to get these head coaching opportunities. One reason, Rachel, is because it's a way to cut corners. It's a way to get a head coaching job that you might have not gotten before. Stepping stone. Using HBC uses that.

Right. So we're going to see these guys come into these cultural rates. They have to be able to culturally appreciate. what goes on at the schools and what the schools do, and they have to understand that. That's not Miami. And so what I'm saying is, did he fly off the handle and jump out and like jump off the roof

into something that was stupid, disrespectful, and bad? Sure. But what my hope is, is that Ed Reed in time understands the task that he has at hand, which is building Bethune Cookman into a competitive team, a great team in the swag, And changing some of the expectations around with Bill Cookman, right? Bridget Diaz, who's an NBA grade is the AD there.

So I think that I don't want him as well. I don't want him to deny. I don't want to deny him the opportunity to be positive because it is a big deal to have him there. But I want to make sure that guys like that understand that with the extra added attention that they bring to those schools, like comes a responsibility to comport yourself in a way

that is constructive. Like don't nobody need you going down there talking all of that dumb shit when Bethune Cookman has been an org has been a school that has served black people for years. How old is Bethune Cookman, Donnie?

Donnie, how old is Bethune Cookman? Look that up for me. Like Bethune Cookman's been serving black people for so years. How dare you come down there and talk shit on them before you've even done anything. And if he wasn't Ed Reed,

that person who said this would probably be fired. Because let's be honest. I don't know that they would be fired. Okay. Well, according to you, and it sounds like in his second rant, it sounds like, 1904,

but then Cookman was founded. All right. 1904. Wait, did I do that math right? No, it's over 100 years. Oh, God. Jesus Christ.

Whoa. Almost 100 years. Whoa. Well. Maybe you should have gone to an HBC where they teach you basic math. 119 years. Yes. But I literally saw the four and the three in my mind.

I said 100 years. No, but what was I saying? The reason I said he, if he wasn't who he was, he would have been fired. And that reason I think that he would have been fired is because in his second rant, he does allude. You said it, but he ludes to the fact that he hasn't even signed a contract yet. It's not official. So I think that they would just be like, let's just cut it off before we even get started. Why are we even going to deal with this?

But I think because he's Ed Reed, they're giving him a little bit more because of what a name and the status and his legacy, as you spoke on, brings to a school like this. I just, it would be hard for me. If I was in a position of power, it would be hard for me as an administrator when you shit on the administration as well to keep you to want to give you. you a contract and put you on the payroll because you shit on everybody. You got to think about... That'd be tough. But you got to think about the student athletes

and what he could potentially do. I get it. I'm saying, we're making excuses because of who he is. That's my point. It doesn't matter. But to me, I'm not making excuses. If he wasn't him, they wouldn't give the person the contract. But if he wasn't him, he wouldn't be there in the first place.

So if he wasn't him, they wouldn't take some high school coach from somewhere who had never coached the game before and made them the head coach. Obviously, what their, what their thing, is that Ed Reed is overall that he's good for Bethel Cook. Number one, I'm just not the kind of guy to be like, I thought, like I said, I thought they got to let Ed Reed go. But then I'm thinking, no, I think as critical as I am, there has to be some way that things like this happen and that we're the better for them and that we just don't kick

everybody. Look, we know what you like, Rachel, kick him in enough, Lindsay. I say, let him. The daughter ought to judge. No, I only say let him go because he hasn't even started. So it's like just before we even get into it, let's just cut it. Let's try this again. Let's try this again.

That's what I say to that. Don't you give you that title. Rachel, kick him in a nuts, Lindsay. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and make it a mess. You don't need Weather Tech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips.

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Try Activia today. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. All right, the LAPD is under fire right now for the death of a black man who was repeatedly shocked with a taser. This young man's name was... Kenan Anderson, 31-year-old Washington school teacher visiting Los Angeles,

died earlier this month, hours after police officers repeatedly shocked him with the taser. This guy happens to be the cousin of Patrice Cullors, who is one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, somebody that we've talked about, great deal here on the podcast, and everybody's talked about for all kinds of reasons, both controversial and awesome. Okay. the video itself is pretty disturbing to watch.

What you see is right there, a pretty popular intersection. I think it's the corner of Lincoln and Venice. Kenan Anderson appears to, in the aftermath of some sort of car accident, they say that he was driving erratically, he hit someone. Another Uber driver later claims that he tried to steal their car,

whatever. But when we see Keenan for the first time, it's clear that he is going through something. He's going through something. He's acting very erratically. He's saying that he did a stunt earlier. He's saying that people are trying to kill him. He won't calm down.

They have a very difficult chance. He's not presenting any danger to the police officers, at least not in my estimation. But he is certainly going through something. He negotiates back and forth with an officer about what he's going to do, like sit down, sit down, to lock your hands, it goes back and forth. Keenan takes off.

He runs into traffic. Once again, this is somebody who is in crisis, right? This is somebody who has something going on with him. The officer chases on the motorcycle. It's a motorcycle cop. The officer chases him on the motorcycle. And then when they get out in the middle of the street, by this time there are a bunch of different officers.

They tase Keenan seem like five, six times. many more times than that to get him down, they tase him. He is transported to the hospital where he dies hours later. Rachel, did you see the video? I only watched the video to a certain point. I only watched where he was flagging the officer down, and I watched the officer, you know, tell him to come to him. And, you know, like you could see him talking.

As you said, you could clearly tell he was not okay. And I saw him running away from the officer, and then I shut it off. I don't want to see anything else. I don't want to see it. We should say that this is the third man that the LAPD has, have killed this year. Oscar Sanchez was killed earlier this year, and a guy named Takar Smith was killed. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic that was in the kitchen of his estranged wife.

He came into the kitchen after she called them. When the wife called the police, attempted to alert them to the fact that her husband was, in fact, schizophrenic. And try to let them know that before they went in. He had a knife in his hand. They tased him. If you watch the video, he was turned away. He still had the knife and they killed him. So I watched both of these videos.

I watched Patrice talk about the loss of her cousin, who was a schoolteacher in D.C. worked with teenage kids in D.C. And when I watched the entire thing, we should say that the LAPD in the aftermath of this has just been horrific. They've been terrible. They have leaked to the press. Preliminary toxicology reports indicate that he had some drugs in the system,

which, to be honest with you, has very little to do with how all of this went down. And the reason why I'll tell you that is because until we get the official word from the corner and that complete autopsy is done, we won't really know what the reason that he was in crisis was, right? He died four hours later, even if this stuff was in his system, and I'm talking about cocaine and weed, even if this stuff was in this system, what I've read on this says that you typically don't die of a cocaine-related situation four hours after it happens. it's just them attempting to put out information or to disseminate information about what he had in the system is no different than the police officer lady saying she smell weed in the car where Flando Castile was killed or the of course ridiculous discussion over whether or not it was Fentina or Derek Chauvin's knee that killed George Floyd. having said all of that, I'm interested in what you saw and took from

the video that you watched around the death of Kenan Allen and the police stop in it of itself. What did you see when you watched the part of the video that you watched? Well, the part of the video that I watched, the police, it shows the police approaching him as he's in the street and he moves on to the sidewalk. And he has, and they're like, put your hands up,

put your hands up, put your hands up. He's putting his hands up. He's moving around. He's not staying still. Then he says, I don't want to be, and I'm paraphrasing, but he didn't want to be in the dark. He wanted people to see where he was. Yeah. Yeah.

He said, I want people to see me. And the officer's like, okay, that's fine. And he's telling him to come here. He's clearly frantic. He's trying to communicate that he is either lost his car, his keys. I can't remember which one he's saying, but he's trying to communicate that he needs help. He's saying he needs help. And, but he is.

It is erratic behavior, but he's clearly in distress. Like, that was so obvious to me. He seemed so desperate for help. And the part of the video I watched couldn't have been longer than a minute. And he's scared, but he's in distress. And let's be honest, the number of times we've talked about these issues on this podcast in light of our current society and culture, it is a scary time and it always has been to be black.

but it doesn't matter who you are. I see the police. I get nervous. You see the police coming. You know you need help. Of course, he was scared. That's why he didn't want to be in the dark and he wanted to be where people can see him.

But he's moving. The officer's communicating. He's communicating. It's as if the officer is talking over him and not listening to him. It's like the officer never says like, how can I help you? What do you need?

It's talking at him. And I'm not saying in an aggressive way, but he's not listening. And you eventually see him run off. And that's where I stop it. And then I see the officer, it looks like he's mad to be on a motorcycle, move towards him.

And I don't watch any more of that. So what I saw was someone who was desperate, who was lost in whatever sense of the word, in someone who was in distress, and was asking for help, and was never in the second, in the minutes that I was, watch that, given that type of help. He was talked at.

It's so funny. I asked you that question because I wrote something down. When he runs off, the cop says, let's go get him. And I have something with a big circle around it in my notes. And it says, let's help him. That was never said.

That's it. There isn't, there is, it's called the MAU. It's a mental evaluation unit that the LAPD has. In the case of Tricar Smith or Keenan Anderson, these units weren't utilized. Nothing has changed. Police killed more than 1,000 Americans in 2022. I urge everyone right now to read an op-ed in USA Today by Finesse Marina Rivera,

in which the ways that traffic stop lends itself to the lethality of police interactions is discussed. The thousand deaths in 2022 are more than any point in the past decade. The police are killing three people a day. nothing that happened in the aftermath of George Floyd's death changed anything. I'll say again, this is the facts. Nothing changed. Nothing. There was no legislation at a high level, qualified immunity endured, and police got more deadly. nothing changed.

It was all for nothing. Nothing. You might have got some organizations that got some funding. You might have gotten, I don't know, a couple of people get national platforms that might have not had them and maybe down the road that'll do some good. Maybe some of the people whose profiles were elevated will enact some sort of change.

But in terms of, are you, safer as an American from the police now than you were when the entire world watched the police execute a man of putting a knee in his neck. The answer is objectively no. Facts. Objectively no. The greatest victory for the right in the past couple of years was the perversion of defund. because that was able to be sort of spun as we want less police

and not what it really meant was that we want more safety. Right. If you have people that are, that their goal and job is to go out and help people, then that's what they do. People that are looking for order, well, they want to get people into custody, detain them or kill them.

people that are looking to help, they help. In two cases, Kenan Anderson and to Carr Smith needed help. They needed help. The police that we have right now are not qualified to do this. What they're taught is to arrest and kill bad guys and make money for their municipalities by giving out tickets. They're taught to arrest, kill, and extract money from citizens.

It's just about how long you guys want to do this. And it's about how you want to be distracted by slogans or by political disagreements that you might have. It's just, I mean, I'm not even mad anymore. I want to bring Valerie Castile on this podcast, the mother of Philando Castile, they reached out to me. And to talk about the fact that the man who killed Philando Castile, Steele is now a teacher in Minnesota. Do you know what Philando Castile did? He was a teacher that worked with kids.

He worked with children in the school. That guy who killed him illegally, when Philando Castile was reaching for his ID as a legal gun owner now is living out the life of the black man that he killed. Do you care? Like, seriously. And I'm not asking, do you care as like, do you care about the life? Do you care about the system?

The officers in this situation, they didn't know what to do. That's not what they do. They didn't know what to do. There is more than enough money and more than enough resources to have people respond to these types of situations who are trained to de-escalate them

and preserve human life. The reason why that's not happening is because we don't care enough. That's a fact. The defund was a bad, and they should have came up with something else. Maybe. I don't know. These guys are dead. They're dead because soldiers went out to deal with a mental health crisis. The police are soldiers. They're foot soldiers of American order and the status quo. And they will be that until there's

impetus for them to protect and serve and to preserve and value human life. Killed the guy. So we're going to keep watching the Kenyon Anderson situation. at this point, there's going to be more information that comes off. Tachar Smith, to Carr Smith's family is looking at all of their legal means, as is Oscar Sanchez's family as well. It's January.

Three dudes dead, LAPD. When you talk, focusing on Los Angeles, particularly, because you're talking about three that are dead in Los Angeles. And you talk about, Our responsibility, and you're absolutely right. It is our responsibility.

When you look at Karen Bass, who is newly elected as the mayor, and she demanded the immediate suspension of the police officers involved, do you not also look at her and say, is that where you're going to stop? Is that the only thing? And I'm not putting blame on her. I'm just saying it's also the duty to recognize, sorry the gardeners are here, so he's going to keep barking.

But isn't it also the duty for the politician who's representing the city as a black woman, I might add, to also recognize that the immediate suspension is not going to be enough in this instance. What can she do? She could say what you said. Okay. She could talk. I mean, this is the person who has a platform who surely recognizes that three individuals are dead at the hands of the police department in her city, who can recognize is that this is a power. pattern two weeks into Los Angeles, coupled with how many deaths were in 2022 at the hands of police.

So she could say something. I'm not saying that she can make an immediate change, but something could be said. Because meanwhile, what is the LAP doing? What is it that they're announcing instead that they're banning the thin blue line flag? So this is what Karen Bass said. This is the statement that she issued. I want to know if this is good enough for you. I have grave concerns about the deeply disturbing tapes that were released today.

My heart goes out to the families and loved ones who are mourning the loss of Takar Smith, Kenyon, Anderson, and Oscar Sanchez. Full investigations are underway, and I place that the city's investigations into these deaths will be transparent and will reflect the values of Los Angeles. I will ensure that the city's investigations will drive only towards truth and accountability. Furthermore, the officers must be placed on immediately leave. No matter what these investigations determine, however, the need for the need for the need for, for urgent change is clear. We must reduce the use of force overall, and I have absolutely no tolerance for excessive force.

We must also lead our city forward. Finally, on the mental health crisis that has been allowed to grow, fester, and cause so much harm to Angelinos, their families, and communities. Especially as a former healthcare professional, I'm deeply troubled that mental health experts were not called in,

even when there was a documented history of past mental health crisis, in the case of Tkar-Smith, and in the case of Kenyon Anderson. I just add that. She didn't say that. I'm just saying that that's true in both cases. When there is no immediate risk to others,

law enforcement must not be the first responder when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis. I believe officers and Angelinos agree on this. Tragically, this is a national crisis. And in reviewing a sample of incidents in which people died during encounters with police as part of my legislation work in Congress, my office found that a third or more of the people involved were experiencing a month.

mental health crisis. That's fucking insane right there. It is. Okay. It is time that proven reforms are universally implemented and accelerated within LAPD. Los Angeles must lead nationally on mental health and use of force reform. I appreciate Chiefs Moore decision. Chief Morris, it's Michael Moore, Chief Police here, Chief Moore's decision to release the footage today. Policy allows for up to 45 days before footage of use of force incidents is released. But I believe the Los Angeles Police Department must be as transparent as possible as expeditious, oh, T.I. As expeditiously as possible. Once again, my heart breaks for the families and loved ones who are experiencing such a tragic loss. Rachel, your thoughts? I, I, that's more than I saw from

her statement. So I think that that's absolutely great. The only thing that I would add is I'm working with the LAPD, I'm working with the chief to figure out how we can make sure that in a situation like this, because this won't be the last one, sadly, how we can make sure that the units that we do have are utilized in this type of situation. I would love to know that, you know, we talked about call to action earlier in this podcast. I would love to know that everything that you're saying is true,

and it's great. And thank you for using your platform for that. So now how do you, your office and the LAPD work together to actually make sure that this is implemented? So there are eight cops They were involved in this The original bike cop I think his name is listed

In the video that I watched Because I watched the video that was released by the LAPD Donnie do we have the names of the police officers That are that are involved in this Like it's difficult to find Hold on for a second I think it's on LAPD.org Right now

I'm on LAPD online.org right now and there is there's information about this but the officer's not named. Perhaps that's some sort of policy on January 3rd, 2023 at around 3.30.8 p.m.

A West Traffic Motor officer was flagged down. It says an officer, an officer, an officer, one officer, one officer, one officer, one officer. It doesn't say their names. Perhaps they're somewhere else. Anyway, we'll move on. We'll continue to watch that story. story.

Condolences to the families. You guys, once again, it's time to revive the argument and the discussion about how we imagine safety to exist in our communities. It depends on whether or not you want soldiers or advocates for your safety. And I'm not just talking about in a case where somebody is having an episode. I'm talking about do the police care if you live through a police action? do the police care to not whatever man right no you're right um okay O'Dell Beckham Jr. is on here couldn't give a fuck less yeah can we don't need to

just hope it works out for I don't know I saw it I'm just I don't have the bandwidth right now to be upset about that I don't know what happened if it was fair or unfair you got to where was going, things were very good. Sorry. I just don't, I just don't, I just don't. I don't care. So you're fine. You're not.

All right. Van's very serious question of the week. That's the end of the podcast. Guys, look, we gave you, we came in on MLK Day. We gave you the pod. It's just not all roses today.

They lied about Dr. King. Ed Reed is going nuts. And then fucking, we're still in a, same fucking spot after all of this shit that's happened. I wish I had, I wish I had like, should I do something funny? What can I do that's funny? No, it's not funny.

That's what we do with black people. No, you don't do. No, you don't. That's what we do with black people. It's a theme. We literally talks about this with Penil. All 60 years later, we're still in the same spot with all this stuff. Donnie, you know what we can do?

No. After Van's very serious question, take them out when I'm a nigger. I was about to say you can give us a new song, but we already got that one in the backpack. Yeah, take us out. I got so many new songs. I have this weird, yo,

this thing's been happening to me recently. It's like just before I wake up, like between sleep and awake, I have this weird burst of creativity where all of these crazy ideas coming to my head and I have to write them down right when I wake up all the way. To remember them because there's such a great. ideas. There's something weird that's happening.

I'm having weird dreams. It's crazy. Our advanced very serious question is this. Asteroids are coming to Earth. I'm going to destroy the planet. Many asteroids, okay. But we're going to be okay because you're going to be able to, Rachel Lindsay, they've entrusted you to take care of things.

So you're going to be able to bring your family to this place. They've got to figure it out. And they're also going to allow you to pick the people that you're going to bring. Rachel, we're not talking about your family. you can pick wherever you want. I know some people that probably won't make it. Did you get this idea in that weird moment?

I want you to listen. You can pick a scientist and engineer, a botanist, and a survivalist, whatever, you have to do research about them. But to entertain everyone, you have to bring one celebrity. So you're going to have a scientist, an engineer, a botanist,

and a survivalist, even though they got you all set up, right? to kind of get on the other side of the asteroid. Your family's going to be there, but you have to bring, this is, after the asteroid hits, you have to bring one celebrity to entertain everyone,

the whole colony of people that you're going to have. Let's say they have to, let's say it's 100,000 people or 200,000 people, a million people that you're, you have to pick one celebrity to entertain everybody, who would it be? That's really tough. It would have to be a comedian.

Okay. Right? I would think. But remember now, it could be a comedian or it could be somebody that could do a lot of things. Like, oh, God. I don't like this. Donnie, who would you choose? I'm going to go with Jamie Fox.

Jamie Fox is the answer. Yeah. Well, that's actually really good. Jamie. I was thinking comedian. I was like, okay, who's a comedian, an actor? Annie can sing, and he can play. He's the only answer.

That is so true. Jamie Fox is the answer. If that was a puzzle, you figured it out. Jamie Fox, if you can only bring one comedian to entertain, one celebrity to entertain everybody, everyone, after the asteroid hits, Jamie Fox, Jamie Fox, because Jamie, it could be, it varies. if Sammy Davis Jr. was alive back in the day I picked Sammy. Because Sammy could tell jokes.

Sammy could sing. Sammy could dance. Yeah. I don't need the dancing. So I'm good with Jamie. You're good with Jamie? Okay, if it had to be a woman, who would you choose? Who's the most entertaining woman in the world?

It might be Beyonce. It would be Beyonce. Is there a female Jamie Fox? I was thinking that, which is why I paused. Like a lady that does it all? Sure, of course, right? Yeah, but I can't think. Can you think?

You got Jennifer Lopez. No. Beyonce. Of course, obviously you choose Beyonce, but, you know, it's like there's got to be somebody, right? I was thinking Janelle Monet, but.

Danielle Monet. Yeah, but she doesn't have the comedy. She's not bringing comedy. to the aspect, at least not that we know of this yet, but I think like overall talent varying things, she's the first one that's coming to my mind.

Hmm. Who would you pick? Who would you pick? If it was a woman? Yeah. Rihanna. Just because it's like, you know,

she also going to hang and smoke weed with you. But see, I was thinking the hang thing and you said her, but it's like, but that's not what, that's not what we were given here. No, obviously. that's who you want to hang with. That's a tough question, but you're right. It is Jamie Fox.

Hey, at least I was on track with the comedian. Kiki Palmer, way, whoa. Oh, that's a good one. Whoa, it's got to be Kiki. It's got to be Kiki. See how, see how misogyny gets in your brain? No one even thought about it.

It's got to be Kiki. Kiki got it all. Kiki got the same shit. It's the same shit. That's a good one. Donnie. Donnie, you are on it. Donnie, you're on top of it.

with that fucking part of you What the fuck? He gave himself props. Did you hear that? He said, he said, I'm on top of it. Yeah. All right.

See, you can't even. All right, guys. Take your thing caps off. Do not stop learning. I am Van Lathan Jr. I'm Rachel and Lindsay. Hi, guys.