Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 581 | What DO White Americans Owe Black People? | Guest: Professor Jason D. Hill

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Today we're talking to Professor Jason D. Hill, who teaches philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. He recently wrote a new book, "What Do White Americans Owe Black People?" in which he examines the historically strained relationship between the two groups of people. We discuss several myths perpetuated by the progressive Left, like systemic racism, the idea that reparations are needed for reconciliation, and the idea that racism is infused into every part of American society. We also talk about some of the shortcomings of the Republican Party in reaching out to black voters, and Professor Hill explains what he'd like to see the GOP do differently to help the black community realize that they indeed do have many conservative values. Lastly, we talk about a much more realistic way to approach difficult conversations about race — one in which no one needs to apologize for their skin color and everyone is treated with respect. --- Today's Sponsors: My Patriot Supply has helped millions of families get prepared & stay safe when times are tough. Their Emergency Food Kits give you breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, & snacks — with MANY different sizes of kits to choose from. Go to MyPatriotSupply.com & get prepared. Reliefband is the #1 FDA-cleared anti-nausea wristband that has been clinically proven to quickly relieve & effectively prevent nausea & vomiting associated with motion sickness, anxiety, migraines, hangovers, morning sickness, chemotherapy & so much more. Go to Reliefband.com & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save 20% plus get free shipping. A'del Natural Cosmetics handcrafts & artisan makes their cosmetics in small batches without the use of parabens, synthetic fragrances or preservatives, petrol products or anything else on an ingredient list that's too difficult to pronounce. Visit AdelNaturalCosmetics.com & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save 25% off your order. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers American Meat delivered right to your front door. Go to good ranchers.com slash alley. Good ranches.com slash alley. Okay, guys, we've got a treat for you today. I am talking to Professor Jason D. Hill. of DePaul University. We are talking about his new book. What do white Americans, oh, black people.

He's got a very heterodox view on this. And I'm super excited for you to hear this conversation. We're going to talk about this idea of reparations, of racial reconciliation. And what he thinks about this as an independent conservative who kind of bucked against the mainstream narrative about race and racism in the United States. Very enlightening conversation. I know you're going to love it. So without further ado, here is Professor Hill.

Professor Hill, thank you so much for joining us. For anyone who may not be familiar, can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? I am a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, and I specialize in political philosophy and ethics. And I've been there for 22 years. I was born and raised in Jamaica. I came to America when I was around 20 and became a citizen maybe 25 years. ago and I've written a number of books. My most recent book is, What the White Americans, Old Black People, Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Dopression. And in my work, I'm seeking

to defend American exceptionalism, the American dream, and to show why America is a really unprecedented phenomenon in world civilization and in the world today. Yes, you've written several books and the title that you just listed really particularly caught my eye. What white people or what do white Americans, oh, black people? That's a question that I think a lot of people on either side of the aisle have been asking, particularly over the past almost a year and a half at this point since the George Floyd incident. We've been wondering, okay, what is it? Like, how can we reconcile? How can we satisfy both sides so that we can come together and kind of move past this racially divisive moment that we seem to be in? So can you flush that out a little bit?

Why did you write this book and how did you come to the conclusions that you did? Well, I really started to write the book because in my previous book, we have overcome an immigrants letter to the American people, which was really dedicated to the American people and a love letter to American people. I had grown a little bit tired of what I call the America phobia that I thought was suffusing our culture, hatred of America because it's a good country. And I saw the reparations movement, that is the idea that whites, all blacks reparations because of either the residual effects of slavery because of something called systemic racism, which I don't think exists anymore, or because of ancestral guilt, I thought was quite divisive in and of itself that reparations had been already paid in the form of affirmative action in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which in itself brought blacks full legal standing before the law. and ended, really terminated and ended, formal state oppression for black. So legal oppression ended it with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1972 Employment Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And I think we have become a culture of entitlement where an occult, a cult of victimology

has really descended on this culture. And I don't think that races can reconcile. individuals as individuals can seek reconciliation among themselves. I don't believe in the idea of racial reconciliation because that's a sort of a collectivist viewpoint. I believe that individuals acting on at the auspices of the grace of God will reconcile among themselves. So I decided to write this book because I thought it was a reparations was really, really highly divisive. The idea that it could bring the races together was ridiculous, that it would further just divide. the races and to try to induce guilt into white people into thinking that because their ancestors

might have owned slaves, which again is another fallacy, the majority of white Americans living today, according to my research, indicate that their ancestors came after the Civil War. So even if one were entitled, one were sort of tempted to go with the ancestral argument, which is a form of collectivism, it just wouldn't even work. So I wanted to sort of put an end to this notion that I wanted to take the reparations argument seriously and to look at them and then to debunk them and to show that reparations have already been made and continue to be made towards blacks in this country. So the argument is that I hear from people kind of on the other side of this that, okay, yes, the policies that you listed, the programs were put in place that you talked about

in the 1960s and the early 1970s. That's true. But there have been other forms of oppression. And basically that's the whole premise of the 1619 project, that basically oppression and forms of slavery have never really gone away. They've just kind of changed forms over the last several hundred years. And today it manifests itself in mass incarceration that started with the war on drugs. And some people would argue that, well, the 1960s and the 1970s really weren't that long ago. So people alive today are still being impacted by the systemic racism that instillum. institutional racism that existed in those decades. And that is the cause of the disparities that we see between black Americans and white Americans.

So maybe that's what they would say to kind of push back on what you're talking about, that even if systemic racism or institutionalized racism doesn't exist today, the effects are still being felt. And that actually is, you know, the reason for some of the poor outcomes and the trials that Black America is going through today. Well, I think it's undeniable that there's still racism in America. I mean, there's still psychotic idiots, which is what racism really is. I mean, racism is a form of psychosis where you look at someone's morphological characteristics and you make a judgment based on skin pigmentation or racial ascriptive identity.

But the fact that it suffuses our institutions, that our institutions are by mandate, by decree, racist seems to be empirically false. or universities or corporate systems are inundated with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, where there has been and continues to be a concerted effort to include minorities, especially blacks, in leadership positions, in recruitment positions. I speak as a professor of 25 years in the classroom, and I can tell you that there is no liberal, or let's strike the word liberal, there is no progressive, in a good sense of progressive, meaning forward-looking university that has not taken as its goal the business of recruiting blacks into the universities. The whole establishment of black studies, queer studies, women's studies, Chicano studies, you name it, any kind of program that emerged in Sixers was a form of bringing into the domain and bringing those who existed on the periphery or in the margins of society within the full pantheon of the human community.

I think what we really need to talk about is the pathological features that exist within the black community that no one wants to talk about. For example, 74% of African-American children in this country are born out of wedlock. Now, that's on the surface doesn't really seem to be alarming. But of the 74%, almost all of them, about 72, are born into dire poverty. So that's a problem when you have single mothers largely raising children without fathers, when children don't have a father figure, when there's already a crisis in masculinity in this country, when men are demonized and stigmatized,

and when the state has taken itself to be the surrogate husband and dissentivized black fathers from taking care of their children, and the state itself since the 1960s has taken itself as being the surrogate husband of black women, That's a problem we have to address. Mass incarceration occurs because blacks constitute something like 12 to 13% of the population, but commit more than 70% of the crimes in this country. The carjackings, the murders, the rapes, most of those, you cannot fudge the facts. These are just embarrassing facts.

I say this is a black immigrant sitting here, but the statistics are there. It's not white people who are going into black communities and killing black people. The black on black crime is horrific. The murder rates, the intracial and the interracial murder rates are disproportionately high. So we have a higher percentage of blacks in prison because a higher percentage of blacks commit crimes in this country than do whites. Those are the facts. So we have to look at the systemic problems that exist within the black communities that are generationally replicated. Because since the latter part of the civil rights movement, I argue in my book,

book, the state has usurped its role as being the protector of individual rights and has gone much farther in, or further, I should say, in taking the role of being the surrogate, assuming a managerial class that lords it over of previously disenfranchised people, expropriated their agency, told them you can't take care of yourself, we will give you welfare benefits, we will take care of you, and have really paralyzed and crippled the agencies of individuals who during, and I'm during Jim Crowe and during the height of segregation, lived often in thriving communities at thriving schools. So I'm not advocating going back to that year. I'm just saying it's sort of ironic that the statistics show that the literacy rates, the 22% of blacks,

the out-of-bred birth rate was 22% prior to, in that era, in 1962. So these are systemic problems and systematic problems, both, that exist within the black community, that we cannot just simply point to any disparities or asymmetries between the race and just cause it and link them to racism. We have to look deeper at other causal factors, I think. Hey, this is Steve Deast. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and religious. rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are

or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you podcast. I hope you'll join us. And some of those systematic issues that you're talking about, what's interesting, and you talked about the growth of the administration state and the state becoming the surrogate, and that's absolutely true. And even though I do think that this is a bipartisan issue, what's interesting to me is that I believe it's about 95% of black Americans vote for the Democrat Party. And every election cycle, you hear the Democrat politicians vying for their vote, blame the problems.

in the black community on, you know, Republicans, white people, Christians, conservatives, whatever it is. But black Democrats or Democrats in general have been representing and running communities with a high concentration of black Americans for decades, for decades and decades. And so a lot of the problems that we are seeing and that are always blamed on, you know, white Republicans, I'm not really sure how they're attributed to white Republicans when a lot of these communities have not elected any form of Republican in decades. And so why do you think that is? Why do you think there is kind of the cycle of the of Democrats voting for, or for many black Americans voting for the same politicians that are overseeing so many of the problems that

are likely causing a lot of the disparities in a lot of what ails these black communities? Well, one is I think many of them, many blacks are socially concerned. and Christians. And so the irony here is you would think that they would vote on the other side. A lot of them are caught up in a sort of like many Americans are caught up in this entitlement mentality. I've lived in this country for 36 years. And I am absolutely shocked at the extent to which this entitlement mentality, which seems so un-American, has spread like fungi across this. That's the way he pronounced it, fungus, you know what I mean, of fungus across this country. But more importantly, I think that in one respect, the Republican Party has never really offered a viable alternative.

That is, it has never really properly reached out to the black community and said, your values are our values. That is, you believe, can you take care of yourself? Are you responsible for the pro-creative choices that you make, the reproductive choices that you make? Are they yours? Do you believe in lower taxes for small businesses so that those small businesses can then hire you? Do you believe that the income that you earn that you send your child to, you should not be taxed on that income and you should have school choice, vouchers that you should be able to send your children's charter schools? If the Republicans were to lay out a comprehensive and intelligible, in layman's term, philosophic and political worldview, a lot of black Americans, I think, would reconsider how they vote.

But I'm blaming the other side here because I think that they turn up it, like Hillary Clinton, who turns up with her fried chicken wings when she was running for the Senate in 19th, right, do you know what she did. I think the Republicans do a similar thing. They sort of make sort of half-hearted gestures. But there needs to be a consistent policy of saying, look, your values are American values. And they're actually aspirational values that you have that are middle class values. and you don't want to bloated totalitarian large government taking over your life

because then your sovereignty and your autonomy and your capacity to build a better life of your children are no longer yours. In other words, the kind of respect and just, I'm not saying the Republican Party is disrespectful to blacks, but a show of continued protracted respect by laying out the values that are universal values that all of us hold really. who are responsible for our lives, who are responsible for the children that we bring into the world,

they're not anybody else's responsibility, and the government can properly affect policies that will enhance our economic well-being. If it's laid out that way, consistently, I think we'll see a different kind of outcome. Yes, I do also lay a lot of blame at Republicans' feet to simply, you know, they talk about the fact that most black Americans,

vote Democrats and how to vote Democrat and that's a problem, but they don't actually pose any solutions or, as you said, offer a viable or an attractive, rather alternative to voting Democrat. I also think a lot of it is media distortion, that there is a conflation in the media of opposing the organization of Black Lives Matter or supporting good police officers or being opposed to critical race theory and intersectionality with racism, especially now, that we're told by people like Ibra Mexicendi that you can't be not racist. You only can be anti-racist or racist. And anti-racist means disagreeing with everything that Ibramax-Kindi says.

And so now the conversation about race has become very convoluted to where anything that the right opposes in the culture wars that has to do with race is perceived as racism or hatred of black Americans, which it's not. And so I think that the right is also fighting a little bit of an information and propaganda. a battle to say it's just kind of hard to cut through the noise and say, you know what, it's not racist to not support Black Lives Matter, the organization, or it's not racist to be against critical race theory and intersectionality. It's not racist to, you know, support good police officers, whatever it is. It can be really hard to be on the defense and kind of explain from a conservative perspective. Yeah, I disagree with a lot of these things, but I want Black Americans as all Americans to really succeed.

And it seems like sometimes that kind of falls on deaf ears or it's hard to just cut through the noise, quite honestly. I agree with you. I think that I was speaking as an independent conservative here, I think that the cutting through that noise is very difficult. But I also think that conservatives have got to sort of admit a couple of things that, yes, America had an ugly racist past towards blacks. It has changed.

Yes, sir, continue. It used to be stupid racists in this country, but the majority of Americans are not bigoted racist who want to destroy the lives of black people. And then to spell out why critical race theory, why the diversity, equity and inclusion movement, why even the reparations movement is really, really harmful. Again, using language that is really, really honest, that is just really, really transparent, and to show that it would really, really harm the interests of black people. But I don't think conservatives know how to fight the cultural wars.

I don't think conservatives. I mean, I find myself even being canceled by conservatives sometimes because they say, can you just tone it on a little bit? And I'm like, well, I'm toning it down. The far left, people like Ocasio-Cortez and the squad are ratching it up, right? And preaching hatred of America, hatred of capitalism, hatred of individualism, attacking Christianity, attacking all religions, really, but really the Judea Christian foundations of this country. And so I have no business toning anything down.

If anything, we need to be not increasing the noise volume, but increasing the qualitative nature of our message and being unapologetic. See, I think too often conservatives are, they're just very quiet and they fight the wrong types of battles. So in the division of labor, I think the battle has to be fought on multiple levels. It just can't be fought politically. Conservatives have to make inroads into Hollywood, have to make inroads into comedy, have to make inroads into art. Just like the left knows how to fight the battle on multiple fronts, on Netflix, in Congress, in the Senate, in all spheres of life. I think conservatives concentrate too much on the political realm and not. on the multiple spheres in which people actually live their lives.

I certainly think that's true of elected Republicans especially. I think elected Republicans, Republicans in Congress do, for the most part, a really bad job of understanding what their constituents really care about, understanding on a cultural level, what we're after, what we're pushing against, and they just don't know how to represent that. whereas as you said, the politicians on the left are almost only fighting a culture war constantly. And so I do see that. I also see, though, I mean, I do see conservatives who are not in the political realm,

but are, you know, whether they're podcasters or whether they're parents, whether they're school board members, they are starting to manifest what you just suggested, realizing that, okay, we've got to provide entertainment. We've got to be running for office. That's a political realm thing, but we've got to be changing the minds of our friends and families. As you said, it's a multi-front effort. I do see conservatives starting to wake up and realizing the dire consequences of some of this. I mean, there's a lot of different things like gender ideology that I think are damaging, but also this critical race ideology. I think a lot of parents, even apolitical parents are waking up like in Virginia to, okay, this is a problem, whether your child is white or black. This is going to hold children back. It's going to pit them against each other. This is not a recipe for success in the United States. So I do think that there are some people that are waking up to that and doing exactly what you're suggesting.

I think so. And I would like to see more grassroots work between or among the races, you know, between black, like white white middle class moms reaching out to, this is done on the level of in the church, but reaching out to work. let's say working class moms and saying, look, I know you think, and you have every reason to believe that there still exists racism in America. But let's have a conversation about what critical race theory is really, really about. And is that the world that you really want your child to grow up in a world that he believes or she believes that systemic racism suffuses every single institution? that race is still a determinant of destiny and fate. Do you really think that your race, your child's race,

is going to determine his fate or his destiny and have these conversations. So there needs to be more grassroots conversations. I don't believe in anything like a racial reckoning. I think that's a ridiculous idea or some kind of, like I said, races don't reconcile. It's individuals reconcile. So I think that's one battle that could be fought

if on the grassroots level, individual organizations could get together that comprise different racial groups and have these honest conversations, you know, yes, I know that your race has, your sense of dignity has been eviscerated by racism from time to time, but that's not the majority of Americans. And have, because people want to be heard, right? And the only platform that a lot of black people feel that will give them some sort of visibility is the nefarious movement of Black Lives Matter, which is a Marxist American hating institution that wants to destroy the economy and tear down banks

and it was in its charter when I read it years ago before they took it down. And to have these really, really honest and sometimes painful but non-condescending conversations and that's the way that I don't like to use the word healing, but that's the way that an intelligent conversation is going to happen where people feel visible and feel heard and feel,

less alienated from their fellow compatriot. You know, it's not something condescending where white people are going to be speaking down to blacks or speaking for blacks, but speaking in conversation with them because they're having these conversations with the critical race theorists and the Abram candidates of the world who are really poising the minds of their children. You know, one thing, and maybe you can help us work through this, because the majority of people who listen to this podcast are suburban women Christians. And I would say that that is the next frontier for the social justice, racial justice ideologues.

Actually, they're already really conquering this frontier through really a lot of white guilt. And using some of the rhetoric that you just talked about having honest conversations, building bridges, but really the conversations that are being had in like white Christian, suburban social justice world are not two-way conversations. There are conversations with a lot of stipulations and a lot of rules that are placed only on white people. That, I mean, I'm not just thinking about, you know, some abstract idea. I'm actually thinking about a specific group that a lot of Christians have been a part of

that say that, okay, white people, when you're talking to black people, you're not allowed to argue with them. You're not allowed to push back on them. You're not allowed to say your own experience with any kind of discrimination. if they want to cuss at you, if they want to yell at you, then you just have to let them do that. That is what, that's how we're going to accomplish reconciliation. And you also have to admit that you are inherently racist, whether or not you believe that you're racist. You have to divest of your whiteness and your white privilege.

I think that's also where the conversation stops for a lot of white women who don't like racism and don't find themselves racist. Of course, they don't want to be called a bigot. But when the conversation involves only being demeaned and condemned for something that they don't feel like, they're guilty for, well, a lot of people are going to run for the hills and there will be no individual reconciliation there. So I don't know. Can you just help us like work through that? How do we navigate that as people who want relationships with people who feel like they're victims of racism? But, you know, the conversations like that are so one-sided, they really just don't seem to work. Well, as someone who's written about white privilege and how complicated that

whole phenomenon is like somebody living in Appalach or without any teeth, no health care, and running water. I don't see how that person is enjoying white privilege. I would say to white suburban moms who are middle class is that, you know, you approach a black person, first of all, unapologetically. Your whole demeanor is like, I don't see you as a problem and I don't see myself as a problem. You don't exist as a problem for me and I and I don't exist as a problem. I can't apologize for who I am in the world, but I want us to have an honest conversation and I want to hear experience. And like any debate, you set the ground rule to respect. That is, we're going to, there'll be mutual and reciprocal show of respect and civility.

And reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements. And that is you take your own agency as a white person very, very seriously. You don't approach it apologetically. You don't apologize. What are you supposed to do with your whiteness? I mean, if you're dressed in blackface, you're going to be canceled, right? Sort of annihilating your existence. You can't do it.

You're white. And that's just a basic fundamental. part of your existence and you approach that in a very unapologetic way that you're not here to apologize for being white you're not here to apologize for your even your whiteness but you're here to really understand you're both there to understand the experiences of each other and to hear the stories of each other and to find in that hearing moment solutions that will work for both both parties And I think if we come without a sort of prefab agenda of converting each other to the author's perspective, but it's it's it's it's whites have got to divest themselves of this apologetic

notion because the other side blacks are going to be like in the other group, you know, be like see you as prey and and seize upon your guilt and without without any forethought of malice, see that as a sort of weakness and conversations have to operate from a source of strength. So again, I always go back to honesty, you know, admitting, no, yes, there has been an ugly past in this country. There still continues to be racism. But don't ever admit that because you are white, you have to be a walking practitioner of racism like Ibrahim Kendi wants you to admit. So be looking to your heart and be honest and admit that, you know, you intend to you want to do good, that we're all agents of good in some way in the world. And the more

honest one can be with another person. I think the more meaningful the conversation can be. But starting a conversation, I have to say, with apologizing for being white, with admitting that because you're white, you're a systemic walking practitioner of racism is a recipe for failure because what you've done is you've made blacks into victims and stand. them within primature of innocence and you've put them beyond the pale of criticism, you've put them beyond the pale of questioning. And you have to make it clear that in the conversation there's going to be mutual addressing of stories that you're listening respectfully, but you're also going to ask critical questions and critical questions are going to be asked of you.

I would love it, I love when people approach me that way because it means that they take me as an equal, that they show me respect, that they're not being condescending. And everyone wants that show of respect and that show that I'm being treated as an equal in this, in this kind of situation. It's difficult is after, say, you know, a news story comes out that involves, say, a white police officer and a black person, an unarmed black person where there was the story of the Border Patrol agent that, you know, know, he was on his horse and the story came out that he was whipping migrants, but he wasn't actually, you know, the context was also published that that's not what was happening. And yet, I think what we are very often told is that in order to be loving as a white person, we kind of have to affirm whatever narrative, whatever the popular mainstream narrative is after a new story

involving a negative interaction between a white person and a black person. And in order to, like to bring up facts, I hear the facts, you know, actually about police brutality in the United States, or here's what really happened in that story, or here are some statistics that refute the narrative that is being perpetrated. If you do that, you're accused of being what is like the worst thing ever in Christian social justice world, and that is unempathetic. You're called unloving. Of course, you're called racist and white supremacists and all these things. So how do we balance, like speaking the truth, I think correcting false narratives is a very loving thing, no matter what it's about in the same way that when you turn the lights on for someone in any way,

you know, they don't like it. They're frustrated because they were sleeping, but it's actually the loving thing to do. You don't want someone to sleep the day away. It's been hard when people have told me hard truth that I didn't want to know or have been corrected in some way, but it always ultimately ends up being good. But when it comes to racial narratives in the United States that are not necessarily based on fact, I think most people are really scared to bring up facts that refute what Black Lives Matter says or any mainstream narrative about it. How do we balance that? How do we balance like the

truth in love, listening to someone's experience with empathy, but also, you know, not affirming things that simply aren't true, you know, about something like systemic racism? It's never going to be easy. And there's there will be pain and there will be probably some sort degree of anger. So there's no easy answer. But I think that the way that one presents oneself is very important. That is, if you present yourself as we're all children of God, And I'm approaching you not as a white woman or a white man or a white person speaking to a black person, but I'm approaching you as your brother in Christ or your brother in God. And that's the way I see you fundamentally.

And you really mean that and you look that person in the eye. And people can spot a fake. And so you're approaching this from a humanistic, Christian, religious, godlike perspective. that is, I feel as much the suffering in my own being when I see someone being shot by police, regardless of statistics, whether that person is white, black, Mexican, I feel in my body the same kind of pain that you feel. And you really mean it because if you are truly a child of God, you will feel when an earthquake hits Haiti and 10,000 people die

or a tsunami hits Indonesia and thousands. If you truly are a child of God, you feel that suffering, you feel the loss of life. And if you approach people, I find in that way that, yes, I'm a white person and you're a black person, and I can never inhabit your experiences and you can never inhabit mine. But there's a deeper humanity that we share. We are children of God and we are brothers and sisters in God. And I'm approaching you not as primarily a white person. I'm approaching you as your brother or your sister in God.

that is a profound paradigm shifter. I mean, you have got to that person's heart. You have broken through a lot of barriers. You have depoliticized the conversation and shifted it into a deeper, deeper, deeper realm. And as someone, I must tell you, who was raised Catholic, became an intransgent atheist for 20 years, and then had a conversion experience and I'm a firm believer now and have a very strong relationship to God. and can't imagine not having God in my life. I find that when I approach people in that way,

when I say, look, I respect your position. I disagree with it, but I'm here to have understanding and I approach you not as an antagonist, but as your brother in Christ. You know, it's, you see the change in the person's demeanor because you see the armor getting off because you're not there to have a fight. you're there to see you come with a spirit of empathy and understanding.

And I think that is both an underestimated and underpursued strategy that has not been undertaken. And that's why I said it's outside of the show that racist can't reconcile because race is collective, I can't do that. That takes individuals relating to individuals, one person to another person, saying that on a grassroots level, And if a village of whole nation of whites were to do that to blacks or to comport themselves that way to blacks, we could have a sole revolution in this country. We really could. You know, I think a lot of people want that. They certainly, we certainly don't enjoy the racial tension and the racially divisive rhetoric that we see. And just the tension, I think, that a lot of people feel surrounding these conversations.

conversations. I love what you said about starting from a place of humanity that is not political. Yes, I think it's important to talk about facts. I think it's important to counter false arguments, bad arguments, false narratives and things like that. But starting with humanity and our connection as human beings, it changes the game. So thank you so much for sharing all of that. I could ask you a thousand more questions. But can you tell everyone where they can follow you, how they can support you, where they can buy your book? You can buy my book on Amazon because you get a fantastic discount there. So the book is What to White Americans, Oh, Black People, Racial Justice and Age of Post-Depression on Amazon, and check out my other books there.

And you can follow me at Twitter at Jason D. Hill 6. And on Facebook at Dr. Jason D. Hill 1913. Yes, on Facebook. I'm always looking for my increase. In fact, in my book, I also thank my Facebook community. because they're so loving and supportive of my work. Oh, good. Well, I'm so glad to hear that. I know that you'll get a lot of kind messages from my audience is just what they do.

And I encourage people to encourage you and reach out to you and just tell them, tell you what they think about the interview. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I feel so blessed to have met you and to have been on your show. Thank you. Hey, this is Steve Deist.

If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV. or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.