#RolandMartinUnfiltered - SCOTUS Landmark Affirmative Action Ruling, IM Christine Farris, NY Mayor Checks White Woman

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

6.29.2023 #RolandMartinUnfiltered: SCOTUS Landmark Affirmative Action Ruling, IM Christine Farris, NY Mayor Checks White Woman  It's been a historic day at the Supreme Court; we have an expert panel joining us to unpack the Supreme Court's landmark decision against affirmative action means for the future of education and racial equity in America. Today we lost another legend in the civil rights movement. We're saddened to report that Dr. Christine Farris, the last living sibling of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has passed away. We'll look back at her incredible life and the legacy she leaves behind. And New York Mayor Eric Adams is making headlines tonight after a video of him shutting down a white woman at a town hall went viral. We'll look at the video and explain why some criticize the new mayor for his comments. Download the Black Star Network app at http://www.blackstarnetwork.com! We're on iOS, AppleTV, Android, AndroidTV, Roku, FireTV, XBox and SamsungTV. The #BlackStarNetwork is a news reporting platform covered under Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. in slams a decision. Vice President Kamala Harris, she was here speaking at the Global Economic Black Forum. We'll have her comments as well. Plus, we have a number of black legal scholars also giving their thoughts on today's decision. We'll also talk about the back and forth between Clarence Thomas and Judge Katonji Brown Jackson. They went at each other in their various opinions. And also, why isn't the Supreme Court ruling affirmative action unconstitutional in colleges, but they're allowing the military academies to still use it? If it's constitutional for them,

why not the rest of the country? We'll unpack all of that right here on Will and Martin Unfiltered on the Black Star Network. It's time to bring the funk, let's go. He's got whatever the piss he's on it. Whatever it is, he's got the scoop, the fact, the fine. And when it breaks, he's right on time. And it's rolling.

Best belief he's knowing. Putting it down from sports to news to politics With entertainment just for kicks He's rolling, yeah It's Uncle Roro, y'all Yeah, yeah It's rolling, Martin, yeah Yeah, yeah Rolling with rolling now

Yeah, yeah He's funky, he's fresh, he's real the best You know he's rollin' Martel Martel All right, folks. All right, folks. Today's Supreme Court decision dealing with affirmative action in colleges. We expected today's decision, but still, the 6-3 decision, the conservatives on the Supreme Court rule that in two cases involving Harvard as well as University of North Carolina, striking down the use of race in college admissions.

This was Christmas Day, if you will, for Clarence Thomas. He's been waiting for this moment. And, man, the opinions between him and Judge Katonji Brown Jackson were absolutely on fire. Joining us right now, Dr. Walter Kimbrough. He's a member of the President's Advisory Board on HBCUs. He's a past president at Flanders Smith College and Dillard University. Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawless Committee for Civil Rights Under Law out of D.C. We also have Dr. Jeremy Leavitt, distinguished professor of international law,

Florida A&M University College of Law, and Tiffany Brewster, Tiffany Brewer, assistant professor of law at Howard University. I want to start with you, Damon. Walk us through this decision. It was one, again, that we have long been expecting. We knew how this conservative Supreme Court was going to rule. What is the what did they actually say with regards to Harvard, University of North Carolina, and what's going to be the impact on other institutions all across the country? Well, Roland, look, first, this court has struck down the admissions policies at both of the schools,

but it did so in a very strange way. It obviously did not fully affirm precedent, but it also did not outright overrule all precedent. It actually underruled the precedent. It basically took the law and put it in a knot, in some kind of pretzel, and said, here, figure this out, y'all. Essentially this court has essentially said, look, we're going to apply Grutter as if it's still good law, but these policies didn't adhere to Grutter.

Now, if the UNC policy and the Harvard policy did not adhere to Grutter, then the question remains, what really does? So it's really intellectually dishonest, which is one of the worst things you could ever say about a Supreme Court decision. It doesn't make a lot of sense in law, in fact, or in history. And this is where I'm confused, because there was a very strange footnote in this decision. They said the United States, as in Amicus Corrie, contends in race-based admissions programs further compelling interests in our nation's military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below address the propriety of race-based admission systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present. Okay, now I'm confused. So how can you make a constitutional decision but say there's a compelling interest for diversity in our military academies,

but for the rest of the colleges and universities, we're good? I'm confused. That's what I mean by intellectually dishonest, Roland. I mean, it may be. This is not an actual ruling on the military academies, but it may be okay to keep our nation safe because it's important. But it's not okay, at least at UNC and Harvard, to promote's first public school, university, created to educate the children of slave owners that were black folks suffering from Jim Crow and continue, even until recently had a Confederate monument on campus. So it's good enough potentially for military, but not for black and brown folks here. Intellectually dishonest.

I mean, I will say this, though, Roland. Chief Justice Roberts did say that nothing in the opinion prevents universities from asking students about their experiences with respect to race and essentially racism. And so here's the other side of that. There's nothing that stops black and brown students from talking about who you are. So our message to students is flood the market. Tell them exactly who you are all over your essay, all over your application. Let them know who you are. Because the truth is, as much as this court may want it to be the case, nothing can really stop the fact that we are a race-conscious society. And we also are going

to have a race-conscious future no matter what this court decides. Now, Ed Blum, a white man who's been against affirmative action for a very long time, he challenged, of course, California state, he led this lawsuit. And so you have these Asian American students who contend that they should, that they were being discriminated against by Harvard, and more of them should have been admitted to heart based upon merit. But here's the problem, Damon. Their problem ain't affirmative action. Their problem is white folks in legacy. And the Supreme Court said nothing about that. Nothing about that at all. Now, look, you know, legacy admissions are kind of like the grandfather

clause in voting rights in the days of Jim Crow. If your grandfather could vote, then you can vote, too. This is just like saying, well, if your grandparents could attend UNC or attend the UNC or Harvard, then you can, too. That's essentially what it is. There's some structural racism in that very structure to leave that in place. Now, we don't like legacy

admissions to begin with, but if all you're left with is something like that without real consideration of race, then you're talking about a whole new type of civil rights violation, a violation against black and brown people whose grandparents and great-great-grandparents were not able to attend these schools, not because they didn't want to, not even because they couldn't afford it, but because they were not allowed to. They were not welcome in these institutions. That is structural racism at its worst. Indeed. Damian Hewitt, Law School, I appreciate it. Thank you so very much. Tiffany, I want to go to you. Again, I want to stay on that particular point. And again,

I'm looking at all of these white conservatives, Tiffany, and they are all they are ecstatic with today's decision. And I keep responding to them, to the Ben Shapiro, to the Eric Erickson's, the Charlie Kirk's, to all of them, to the David French's of the world. Why is it y'all are so silent on legacy. Clarence Thomas, in his opinion, he's talking about merit and merit, and merit is the most important thing. We know for a fact that 45% of the students at Harvard are in because of legacy or they're athletes. This ain't about merit. And I dare say, Tiffany, these Asian-American students who now think that they're going to now have an explosion of admissions at Harvard and Yale and all the Ivy League schools because of their SAT scores. Now, they're still going to be impacted by legacy. Yeah. Well, I agree with Damon wholeheartedly when he started the conversation by saying that the decision is intellectually not honest. But we were not surprised by this because the court, you know, over a decade ago was hinting in their decisions that they

see that, you know, we're really a racially blind society. So we saw this coming. But certainly ignoring legacy admissions and particularly the high rate of legacy admissions at some institutions historically, some of the best institutions historically, completely ignores the very argument that the conservatives were seeking to make. And we are not a race-neutral society. We probably never will be because we still have not truly acknowledged and have a debate right now the impact of slavery that we still feel and how it impacts educational systems as well and opportunities for students to even matriculate. You know, we see even in the amicus briefs, even large sectors of corporate society who are our employers,

who are the ones that are receiving these students who also agree that diversity is important even in the workplace as well. So this decision really cut against even the economic interests of the very economy that it certainly wants to prop up as well. And we are not going to be better off. I agree with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said that this has a devastating impact that cannot be overstated. So ignoring the impact of legacy admissions is absolutely intellectually

dishonest. And it's why the American people are starting to distrust the Supreme Court as an institution as we speak. Jeremy, when we look at this case again, you look at these arguments that were being made by these Asian-American students. One, some of them are laughable. One of these students went on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News a couple of weeks ago and talked about how he applied to Stanford and all of these other schools in California, and he couldn't get in because of affirmative action. Well, we knew that was a lie because they banned affirmative action

in California schools a long time ago. So what ended up happening here was, and let me know if I'm making this way too simple, you got a group of Asian American students and their parents who were pissed off that their kids were not getting into Harvard, Yale, and Ivy League schools. You got a group of Asian-American students and their parents who were pissed off that their kids were not getting into Harvard, Yale and Ivy League schools. So they decided to sue.

So now what they've done is upend the entire system because a few of them didn't get in and they're blaming it on affirmative action when the very system is what kept them out. Legacy is still in place. The Supreme Court didn't address that. Supreme Court didn't address gender. We know white women have benefited from affirmative action more than anybody else. And so I'm sitting here going, what did you accomplish except screw it up for a lot of other people? Yeah, I mean, I can't disagree with that.

There's so much to unpack here. First of all, the Asian students that filed the claim assumed that they were qualified on all other criteria. So test scores are one criteria, race is one criteria, but often they don't have the same level of public service, attachment and engagement with the community, and other things that universities look at. So it can be a myriad of things. The assumption here is if you score high, you're being admitted. And that's not always the case. We know that to be true. I've been the dean of a law school. That's not necessarily the case. But this case is dangerous because essentially what it does is it eliminates the compelling government interest

and narrowly tailored test of scrutiny. So it really does override the Grutter case to eliminate the use of race, even as a compelling factor in college admissions. And I think you're right to point out here, well, why in the military? Well, I think that's clear. They need brown and black bodies in the military. So they're willing to give an exception for that. So we're available to go to war for America, but not attend its public universities based on our race. We're available to be recruited as five-star athletes to Division I and II schools as black athletes, but race is not a factor. What if we take race out of the factor for the recruitment of college athletes? Because there has to be a nexus between race and athleticism. If that

weren't the case, we wouldn't be filling up the benches of football teams and basketball teams across the country. So race is convenient for them. For me, this is another episode of what I call the kind of lawfare that the Supreme Court has made against African Americans. We can look at the Dred Scott decision in 1857, where they said that black people weren't citizens of the country and had no rights for which the white man was bound to respect. We can go to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that essentially overrode the 14th Amendment in 1868, right, that essentially said that we're going to make it equal, but we're going to make it separate. That is the order of the day until 1954. And between 1954 and the mid-1970s, we fought to desegregate. So there really hasn't been time for us to have the equality of affirmative action that so much of us think is relevant

and proper given the history of discrimination. Here's the thing that is interesting to me also here, Dr. Walter Kimbrough, that as I look at this and look at this ruling and then look at this whole reaction, and that is, again, so you have the Harvard case, University of North Carolina, and the Supreme Court now wants to put the onus on the students, what you can bring up and what you can speak to. What was also fascinating, again, is to hear all these people keep yelling, merit, merit, merit. And they keep thinking that everything is based upon, well, I had high grades in high school and my test scores.

I think about Abigail Fisher, the white girl out of Texas, when she sued the University of Texas because she contended, oh, I didn't get into the University of Texas because affirmative action. Well, what happened during depositions? They discovered that there were a lot of white students who had lower scores than she did, but got admitted. And so what always happens here is whether it's Abigail Fisher, these Asian-American students, it becomes, oh, I didn't get in, so it must be the black and brown people. More of them were getting in when it was like, no, a bunch of white students got in over you. That's literally what we keep seeing in these cases.

No, absolutely. It's the same, you know, the black guy did it. I'm thinking about what Jeremy was talking about. You know, my mom went to the University of California at Berkeley, and I remember reading one of their magazines a few years ago. And one of the concerns that people had is that if they strictly admitted students based on those qualitative scores, the University of California, Berkeley would be heavily Asian. And so people are uncomfortable with that. And so they really have been depressing even that level of enrollment.

And no one's complaining about that. And so how do they depress it with the legacies and all these other things? Like Jeremy said, the athletes. I mean, if we're just going to use admission criteria, let's use it for the athlete. Let them meet the same level of admission requirement. But we look at athletics as a special quality that they're bringing to the institution and people get excited about that. So black and brown students have always been the easy target to say, well, it must be their fault when actually is not their fault. And when you, like you said earlier, when you start looking at legacies, the major donors, those are the people that are impacted. And some of these institutions don't

want to look like, you know, Berkeley doesn't want to be 70% Asian. And so they are depressing those numbers. And you can't blame the Black folks there because there's still three to five percent of the population. So you could take all the black folks out. That doesn't change it. And that's a deeper conversation that people have to have. Folks, hold tight one second. I got to go to break. We come back. We have more conversation about today's decision. We'll hear from President Joe Biden, hear from Vice President Kamala Harris. All of that as we continue our discussion about this Supreme Court decision, banning the use of race in college admissions today

and announcing a six to three decision. We'll discuss more right here on Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Blackstar Network. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution.

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Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

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Hatred on the streets, a horrific scene, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence. You will not replace us. White people are losing their damn minds. There's an angry pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol. We're about to see the rise of what I call white minority resistance. We have seen white folks in this country who simply cannot tolerate black folks voting. I think what we're seeing is the inevitable result of violent denial. This is part of American history. Every time that people of color have made progress, whether real or symbolic, there has been

what Carol Anderson at every university calls white rage as a backlash. This is the rise of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys. America, there's going to be more of this. Here's all the Proud Boys, guys. This country is getting increasingly racist in its behaviors and its attitudes because of the fear of white people. The fear that they're taking our jobs, they're taking our resources, they're taking our women. This is white people.

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Weekdays at 3, only on the Black Star Network. Hi, everybody. I'm Kim Coles. Hey, I'm Donnie Simpson. Yo, it's your man, Deion Cole, from Black-ish, and you're watching... Roland Martin Unfiltered. All right, folks, we're back on Roland Martin Unfiltered. It was immediate reaction across the political spectrum today when the Supreme Court decision came down.

Here is what President Joe Biden had to say about today's ruling. 45 years, 445 years, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that college has freedom to decide how, how to build diverse student bodies and meet the responsibility of opening doors of opportunity for every single American. In case after case, including recently, just as a few years ago in 2016, the court has affirmed and reaffirmed this view that colleges could use race not as a determinant factor for admission, but as one of the factors among many in deciding who to admit from a qualified, already qualified pool of applicants. Today, the court once again walked away from decades of precedent and make as a dissent has made clear. The dissent states today's decision, quote, rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. End of quote. I agree with that statement from the dissent.

The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court's decision. Because affirmative action is so misunderstood, I want to be clear, make sure everybody's clear about what the law has been and what it has not been until today. Many people wrongly believe that affirmative action allows unqualified students, unqualified students to be admitted ahead of qualified students. This is not, this is not how college admissions work. Rather, colleges set out standards for admission and every student, every student has to meet those standards. Then and only then, after first meeting the qualifications required by the school, do colleges look at other factors in addition to their grades, such as race. The way it works in practice is this.

Colleges first establish a qualified pool of candidates based on meeting a certain grade, test scores, and other criteria. Then and only then, then and only then, it is from this pool of applicants, all of whom have already met the school standards that the class has chosen after weighing a wide range of factors, among them being race. You know, I've always believed that one of the greatest strengths of Americans, you're tired of hearing me say it, is our diversity, but I believe that. If you have any doubt about this, just look at the United States military, the finest fighting force in

the history of the world. It's been a model of diversity and has not only made our nation better, stronger, but safer. I believe the same is true for our schools. I've always believed that the promise of America is big enough for everyone to succeed and that every generation of Americans, we have benefited by opening the doors of opportunity just a little bit wider to include those who have been left behind. I believe our colleges are stronger when they're racially diverse. Our nation is stronger because we use, because we are tapping into the full range of talent in this nation. I also believe that while talent, creativity, and hard work are everywhere across this country, not equal opportunity, it is not everywhere across this country.

We cannot let this decision be the last word. One emphasis, we cannot let this decision be the last word. While the court can render a decision, it cannot change what America stands for. America is an idea, an idea unique in the world, an idea of hope and opportunity, possibilities, of giving everyone a fair shot, of leaving no one behind. We've never fully lived up to it, but we've never walked away from it either. We will not walk away from it now. We should never allow the country to walk away from the dream upon which it was founded. That opportunity is for everyone, not just a few. We need a new path forward,

a path consistent with a law that protects diversity and expands opportunity. So today I want to offer some guidance to our nation's colleges as they review their admission systems after today's decision. Guidance that is consistent with today's decision. They should not abandon, let me say this again, they should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America. What I propose for consideration is a new standard. Where college is taken into account, the adversity a student has overcome when selecting among qualified applicants. Let's be clear. Under this new standard, just as was true under the earlier

standard, students first have to be qualified applicants. They need the GPA and test scores to meet the school's standards. Once that test is met, then adversity should be considered, including students' lack of financial means, because we know too few students of low-income families, whether in big cities or rural communities, are getting an opportunity to go to college. When a poor kid, maybe the first in the family to go to college. When the poor kid, when a poor kid, maybe the first in the family to go to college, gets the same grades and test scores as a wealthy kid, his whole family's gone to the most elite colleges in the country, and his path has been a lot easier. Well, the kid who faced tougher

challenges has demonstrated more grit, more determination, and that should be a factor that colleges should take into account admissions. And many still do. It also means examining where a student grew up and went to high school. It means understanding the particular hardships that each individual student has faced in life, including racial discrimination that individuals have faced in their own lives. The court says, quote, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an application's discussion of how race has affected his or her life, but be it through discrimination or inspiration or otherwise,

end of quote. Because the truth is, we all know it, discrimination still exists in America. Discrimination still exists in America. Discrimination still exists in America. Today's decision does not change that. It's a simple fact. If a student has overcome, had to overcome adversity on their path to education, college should recognize and value that. Our nation's colleges and universities should be engines of expanding opportunity through upward mobility. But today, too often, that's not the case. Statistics, one statistic,

students from the top 1% of family incomes in America are 77 times more likely to get into elite college than one from the bottom 20% of family incomes in America are 77 times more likely to get into elite college than one from the bottom 20 percent of family income. Seventy-seven percent of great opportunity. Today, for too many schools, the only people who benefit from the system are the wealthy and the well-connected. The odds have been stacked against working people for much too long. We need a higher education system that works for everyone from Appalachia to Atlanta and to far beyond. We can and must do better,

and we will. Today, I'm directing the Department of Education to analyze what practices help build a more inclusive and diverse student body, and what practices hold that back. Practices like legacy admissions and other systems expand privilege instead of opportunity. Colleges and universities should continue their commitment to support, retain, and graduate diverse students and classes. You know, companies, companies who are already realizing the value of diversity should not use this decision as an excuse to turn away from diversity either.

We can't go backwards. You know, I know today's court decision is a severe disappointment to so many people, including me. But we cannot let the decision be a permanent setback for the country. We need to keep an open door of opportunities. We need to remember that diversity is our strength. We have to find a way forward. We need to remember that the promise of America is big enough for everyone to succeed. That's the work of my administration, and I'm always going to fight for that.

Folks, joining me now is Dr. Greg Carr, Department of African American Studies at Howard University. Glad to have you here, Dr. Carr. You're coming to us live from Atlanta. You heard what President Biden had to say. And next, after the next break, we're going to play what Vice President Kamala Harris had to say here in New Orleans. And he talked about this guidance given. The fact of the matter, we know is this, even with all of its problems, the reality is the use of affirmative action, not only in college admissions, has been one of the most successful ways in which to bring people of color, black folks and others, into this system and take advantage of economic opportunities, educational opportunities.

I talked about this in my book, White Fear, how the browning of America is making white folks lose their minds. They have been going after this because they knew what was coming down the line. They knew America was going to become a day one day where white folks were not in the majority. And what you have here are people who are so angry for even a sliver of an advancement by black folks and others that they want to say, oh, no, let's be race neutral, except in the things that still benefit them

when they know it's not race neutral. Absolutely. Well, race neutrality, as we know, doesn't exist, certainly in the American New Universe. When we say race neutral or colorblind, what you mean is preserving whiteness. Today, the Supreme Court of the United States continued to be very consistent since the federal Constitution was passed and ratified in 1787. Today, the Supreme Court of the United States reaffirmed that standing for whiteness is

a central element of U.S. constitutional law. That's it, full stop. My concern is how we read that. We know that white women have been primary beneficiaries of affirmative action. We know that most of us are not going to Harvard or Yale. I mean, Harvard and Yale go to hell, as far as I'm concerned. I never aspired to go there.

When they tried to get me to apply when I was at Tennessee State, I had no interest. What we're really talking about is a system in place in this country where the elite—and by the elite, I mean the financially elite, the economic elite, like Ed Blum, who basically made up a Trojan horse in the form of Asian-Americans, because the Asian-American undergraduates at Harvard stood with the non-white students, quite frankly, most of them anyway, and used it as a point of entry to try to reinforce in this radically unequal country protections for the very elite. Ketanji Brown Jackson in Orals—and by the way, congratulations, of course, to KPJ, because

she, unlike Alito and Thomas, has morals and recused herself from the Harvard case, but did write in dissent for the North Carolina case. During the orals, she asked, so if a student applies, I'm sure y'all probably have talked about this, but if a student applies and writes in her or his admissions statement the impact of being a fifth-generation person applying to the University of North Carolina. In other words, writes about legacy.

Is that allowed? The lawyer said yes. And then she said, but if another student writes and talks about being the first in her generation to be able to apply because of segregation, can she write back? And the answer was, almost sounded like Tim Scott talking. So what we're really talking about is protections for whiteness. And the deeper question, as far as I'm concerned, as black people are concerned, is why do we mistake the advancement of a handful of folk into the economic elite as a proxy for the advancement of all of us?

As you say, I'm in Atlanta right now. The future of higher education seems to me should look a lot closer to Georgia State University, over 30,000 students, about 40 percent black, about maybe 27, just shy of 28 percent white, double digits in Asian and Latino, black president, and access to resources. The whole idea is we have to expand the concept of higher education. Walter, you're talking about your mom with Cal Berkeley, once they got that referendum in and put that race cannot be included as a factor in policymaking in the state of California, the law school at Berkeley, Boat Hall, cratered in terms of the number of black people. Now, my question is, why in the hell are you aspiring to that as your standard and model for excellence in the first place? This is the point. I don't, I'm not celebrating today, but I'm damn sure not nearly as worried about this

as a lot of people who simply haven't thought through the impact of stigmatized Blackness and aspiring to proximity to these elite spaces as some kind of proxy for advancement for the race. This is the deeper question that this case invites us to have to have conversation in in the Black. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated.

I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner.

It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug thing. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette.

MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Community. Well, Tiffany, I think that when as how I saw this here, I mean, let's just and again, I'm not sitting here attacking the students or the parents. But I look at I go back to these are these exclusive schools in New York City when the mayor, the previous mayor, tried to make changes to them. And there was a lot of Asian-American parents who were like, how dare you? Because they're children. So what did you have? You had this insistence on high grades and high scores in the hiring of tutors and all those different things. In fact, I'm going to read what former First Lady Michelle Obama had to say about that

because she addressed that very issue. And so what you have here, so to Greg's point, why are these students so insistent? Because they understand that the elite schools, every single one of those Supreme Court justices, where do they go? Where do the folks in Washington, D.C. look to hire, all those same Supreme Court justices, where do they go? Where do the folks in Washington, D.C. look to hire, all those same Supreme Court justices, hire clerks? For all of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and how wonderful she was and how liberal she was, how many black clerks does she have? Are they choosing clerks from HBCU law schools? No, they're not. And so really what we're talking about, the reason

there is this fight, and I see you over there laughing, Jeremy, the reason you have this fight over here, because the reality is this nation, Republicans and Democrats, they believe in the elite institutions. This is what this system is all about. And that's what these folks are. That's why when you like it pisses me off when I see these videos and people go, oh my God, so and so, the black kid got into Harvard. And I'm going, okay, that's great. And again, for me, I don't, you know, like I get it, but I'm not tripping

because I'm going, wait a minute, so I should be excited because the black kid got to Harvard but not be excited, the black kid got to Howard? That literally is what we talk about, what is being created. Tiffany, go ahead. Well, I think we should be excited about both, Roland, really, because it comes down to also autonomy of how you... Oh, let me be real clear. I'm excited at Harvard. Tiffany, I'm excited when they get into Harvard, when they get into Howard, when they get this, when they get to Kennedy King College, the city college in Chicago.

See, I'm excited about all of them. But what I what I don't like is when we as black folks, when we say, oh, getting into Harvard is bigger than getting into Harvard. That plays into white validation. Absolutely. And we have to reject that. And we have to have enough pride in the messaging that we have about the value of historically black colleges in particular, and even look historically at how they were founded and how our ancestors did so much with so little. And are we even fulfilling that responsibility and legacy? But, you know, we cannot equate the access to elite institutions as validation of our ability to succeed. So I don't want this decision to be, you know, certainly interpreted that we can't aspire to these elite institutions or that now everyone has to go to HBCU. But what if everyone did go to an HBCU? You talked about the athletes earlier. What if the athletes,

you know, who perpetuate some of these institutions that do not consider race, what if they went to HBCUs? I wonder financially if some of those institutions would truly survive. So I do think it is important for us to really peel down and understand, even in how we move forward from this decision, as Dr. Carr alluded, it's not just a doomsday, but it is a challenge for us and our community to think about our messaging. You know, I went to a predominantly white institution. My husband went to Morehouse.

And as we talk more and more, I'm like, I should have gone. You know, but you talked about why, but you know, I was listening gone, you know. But you talked about why. But, you know, I was listening to I knew I wanted to go to law school. So I'm listening to and looking at all the Supreme Court justices that went to certain institutions. These are messages that do get filtered down to our young people. But we have to reverse that. And I do think decisions like this today make it even clearer for us who are leaders in empowering and educating Black minds, whether at an HBCU or in our own homes and families, to really look historically at what we have been able to achieve as Black people in this society and to look at the institutions that will further

that as well. And one thing we haven't, you know, really talked about, we talked about how white women have been the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action. But when we really look at the impact of this decision moving forward also on black women, who when we look at an intersectional analysis of how Black women have been faring, you know, in the profession of law, you know, in other professions, I think this type of decision can have devastating impacts on Black women's advancement as well in a very disproportionate way than it would clearly have on white women. And, you know, I thought the decision was also very interesting in the court really completely rejected all of the justifications that both schools had with respect to what the benefits are and the goals that they have in serving diversity as an interest. And the court essentially said that none of them really fit into the strict scrutiny analysis and they couldn't

even measure them. So it's like they are just rejecting altogether the value of diversity. And to reject that means you are rejecting that there is a disparate impact that history has had on underrepresented people. And who's impacted the most by disregarding that is black people in the United States, because we have a unique history of the impact of slavery and the continued impact of systemic discrimination. And this is another furtherance of systemic discrimination in our society, unfortunately. Hold on one second. Going to a quick break, two minutes. I'll be right back and we'll continue the conversation. We'll hear from Vice President Kamala Harris. We'll also read for you the statement from Michelle Obama. And also, I'm going to play for you. 2004, I specifically questioned President George W. Bush about affirmative action and about legacy.

Wait till I play that for you. You're watching Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Black Star Network. Download the Black Star Network app, Apple Phone, Android phone, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, Samsung Smart TV. Also support us by joining our Bring the Funk fan club. Your dollars make it possible for us to cover the stories that we do every single day. Trust me, this conversation that we're having right here with black education and legal minds ain't happening in the mainstream media. It ain't happening in the black owned media. It is't happening in the black-owned media. It is only happening right here. So please support us with check and money orders.

PO Box 57196, Washington, D.C., 20037-0196. Cash App, Dollar Sign, RM Unfiltered, PayPal, R. Martin Unfiltered, Venmo is RM Unfiltered, ZL, Roland at RolandSMartin.com, Roland at RolandMartinUnfiltered.com. We'll be right back. My early days in the road, I learned, well, first of all, as a musician, I studied not only piano, but I was also drummer and percussion. I was all city percussion as well. So I was one of the best in the city on percussion. There you go. Also studied trumpet, cello, violin, and bass, and any other instrument I could get my hand on. And with that study, I learned again what was for me. I learned what it meant to do, what the instruments in the orchestra meant to do what the instruments

in the orchestra meant to each other in the relationships. So that prepared me to be a leader. That prepared me to lead orchestras and to conduct orchestras. That prepared me to know, to be a leader of men, they have to respect you and know that you know them. You have to be the teacher of the music. You have to know the music better than any.

There you go. Right, so you can't walk in unprepared. Up next on The Frequency with me, Dee Barnes. She's known as the Angela Davis of hip hop. Monet Smith, better known as Medusa the Gangsta Goddess, the undisputed queen of West Coast underground hip-hop. Pop locking is really what indoctrinated me in hip-hop. I don't even think I realized it was hip-hop at that time.

Right. It was a happening. It was a moment of release. We're going to be getting into her career, knowing her whole story, and breaking down all the elements of hip-hop. This week, on The Frequency, only on the Black Star Network.

I'm Faraj Muhammad, live from L.A. And this is The Culture. The Culture is a two-way conversation. You and me, we talk about the stories, politics, the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. So join our community every day at 3 p.m. Eastern

and let your voice be heard. Hey, we're all in this together. So let's talk about it and see what kind of trouble we can get into. It's The Culture. Weekdays at 3, only on the Black Star Network. Hello, I'm Marissa Mitchell, a news anchor at Fox 5 DC. Hey, what's up? It's Sammy Roman, and you are watching Roland Martin Unfiltered. Folks, I'm here in New Orleans for SF Festival 2023,

and that was a Global Black Economic Forum sponsored by Essence Ventures. Vice President Kamala Harris was speaking. Before she made her remarks, she did address this Supreme Court decision. I prepared to have a very long conversation with you about many other matters. And then the highest court in our land just made a decision today on affirmative action. And I feel compelled to speak about it. And I'm sure that I share the sentiment and the feeling of everyone in this room in terms of the deep disappointment.

I encourage everyone, by the way, to read the dissenting opinion of Justice Gitanji Brown Jackson. I encourage you to read it because she is a beautiful writer who is compelled by logic and a knowledge of history and a clarity of thinking about where we have been in as a country and where we have the potential to go. And what she so rightly has articulated, as I take away from her writing and the way I feel about it, is the disappointment is because this is now a moment where the court has not fully understand the importance of equal opportunity for the people of our country. And it is in so very many ways a denial of opportunity. And it is a complete misnomer to suggest this is about colorblind, when in fact it is about being blind to history, being blind to data, being blind to empirical evidence about disparities, being blind to the strength that diversity brings to classrooms, to boardrooms.

So I did, Tishana, I thank you for giving me this moment to just speak on that. And I think that there is no question. We have so much work to do. And the president spoke so eloquently earlier today about this. Our administration will use all the tools in our power to continue to applaud policies that understand the importance and the significance and the strength also made is the point of encouraging our educational institutions to now be very careful about how they will prioritize the importance of diversity, including looking at students' backgrounds in terms of access to financial strength and benefits, where they went to high school, where they grew up. And also the president, I thought, was very clear about saying to corporate America that we would expect that this decision will not in any way cloud their judgment about the importance of diversity in the workplace. One of the things I want to talk about.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back.

In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corps vet. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Look, we've got someone from Florida A&M University, Howard University, two folks from Howard University, and of course, former president of two HBCUs. I've been seeing a lot of folk talk, Jeremy, about, oh, my goodness, this is now going to be a boon for HBCUs.

When you hear that, your thoughts? I'm not so sure. I think it's possible that those students that would otherwise, you know, get rejected if race is not a factor could decide to attend HBCUs. But that might be some false logic. The math doesn't really equal that in my mind. You know, I think the case sends a strong message that we can build predominantly white universities with our labor under an edict of the Supreme Court as enslaved people, but we can't attend them. And so we're at, I think, a critical juncture, but not a critical juncture in the way people might think. You know, we're past the time where we've got to start thinking out of the box. For example, why don't we have HBCUs in the northern part of the country? Why don't we have

private HBCUs in the northern part of the country? Are we thinking out of the box about the kind of educational institutions we need to create? How do we reinforce existing HBCUs and make sure that they're on target fiscally and having the right academic programs to educate our people? Listen, I didn't want to attend Harvard. I wanted to know what Harvard's daddy thought. So I went to Cambridge in England, and I learned a whole lot about Harvard and Yale in doing that, right? So the idea is that teaching at an HBCU, for me, is enriching, because I have a multitude of diversity. We often don't think of HBCUs as diverse, but they are probably the most diverse institutions in America. We have whites and Latinos and every other group there, as the panelists know. And so I wouldn't get too caught up in some of the rhetoric about that.

What I would do, though, is say that we have to start thinking strategically about a court that has made lawfare against us for 400 years, a court that has systematically discriminated against us, a court that has not given us any breathing room in affirmative action to rebuild and repair the damage that has been done. And so we can't count on the court, and we really can't count on governmental institutions. This has been in the making for a while. If we go back to the prior decision in the Fisher case, and look at the dicta of Justice Scalia. Justice Scalia made it very clear, right, almost as a pretext to this case that maybe blacks are too inferior to attend elite white universities. Maybe they should go attend HBCUs.

So the logic of this has been a part of the thinking in this system for a long time. We've just arrived now at a critical juncture where we were always supposed to be, right? I think there's been a myth of white education and what going to predominantly white institutions does for African Americans. And in fact, we destroy a lot of our young people in these institutions, quite frankly. So I think we have to start thinking out of the box so that we can conceive of a new paradox and education for ourselves and quit always reacting to what white black people and conscious white people, is to understand the assault that is taking place. So, for instance, Byron Donalds, Congressman from Florida, he wrote some little silly tweet that literally made no sense.

Some other people talked about how, oh, this is now an attack on woke. And I need people to understand that this Supreme Court decision, first of all, was tailor made in terms of how Ed Bloom filed it for the conservative Federalist Society Supreme Court justices. They thought that independent state legislature theory was going to fly. They got three votes, didn't get five, but they got three. You look at CRT. What I keep saying is they're going after any diverse initiative in corporate America.

You already see how they attack Bud Light and Target when it came to transgender and it came to LGBT. So what people need to under what black folks need to understand is that the assault that they are waging, this battle, this war is not limited to education. They have seen how effective it has been, and they want to slow it down and get rid of it to make it more harder for the next 50 years, and we should be much more fortified for the battle at hand. No, I mean, I definitely agree. I think this is a larger attack on pretty much everything black. And they're looking to do that.

I wrote an op-ed for the AJC a few months ago when they were doing some of those kinds of things led by the Lieutenant Governor. And basically I just said, he just didn't like anything black. And so we're seeing a lot of that. You know, I'm thinking about what Jeremy is mentioning in terms of, you know, what this means for HBCUs. I mean, I think there's going to be a range of people.

I think that you will see some more interest from some folks because they're going to realize, first of all, what they did was get all the diversity offices. So if you get to one of these campuses, you're not going to have any support. And now a lot of students who are making decisions will realize that there will be fewer Black students in years to come. I'm in an interesting position because I have a rising senior who is now going through that process. And so now she has to factor in different places to say, what is it going to look like in a year? Because the number of students that they have now won't be the same. And so I think that there has been this overall attack and people are saying, what's going to be next? But I mean, I keep thinking about this in the broader higher ed concept and particularly with HBCUs. Since I knew Brother Carr would be on here, I had to

pull out a little history because I think he's going to appreciate this. And this is a Howard reference as well. 95 years ago, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson did a report for the YMCA and he talked about, and this is where we are right now. He writes, he says, Negroes must do a contradictory thing. They must work with all their might against segregation and at the same time strengthen their so-called segregated institutions as if they expected them to last forever. They must insist that the doors of Harvard and Yale be kept open to Negroes, and at the same time build up Howard and Lincoln as if there were no Harvard or Yale. And I think that's sort of where we are. That's what we saw today, is that there are going to be people fighting because I think we need those opportunities as well. And we can't let this be the first salvo in attacks on everything black, which people are doing.

But at the same time, we've got to figure out how do we even strengthen our institutions? And as Brother Carr said, how do we have deeper conversations in our communities about strengthening our institutions and what we do? I think that is very important. And that is a critical point there, Greg. I think back to Gerald Horne's book on Claude Bournette and the Associated Negro Press and what he's called the Jim Crow paradox, that at every moment when we are knocking down the walls of Jim Crow, we're putting a nail in the coffin of black institutions. And we've seen that when it came to black economics, black on media and as a result.

But one of the things that I have been trying to also remind people when we talk about when I see other people commenting about, oh, well, this could mean for HBCUs. Well, just look at the last five years, especially after the death of George Floyd in 2020. The last five years, we've seen a tremendous increase of students applying at HBCUs. Well, here's one of the issues. If you don't have the infrastructure, you've got to be able to keep up. And so we see at Texas Southern University,

Howard, Tennessee State, multiple Florida A&M having to put students in hotel rooms. And so there's somebody tweeting me back. They said, yeah, but if they get more students, they need more money. I'm like, no, no, no. I said, you need the infrastructure now. You can't wait till they show up and then go, oh, here's the influx of money.

And I said, no, you have to be prepared for that. And so to Walter's point, this has to be a conversation of how are we building up institutions because the numbers are the numbers. 237,000 students go to HBCUs. There are 1.6 million black students who go to PWIs. If 10% of all black students at PWIs decide tomorrow to go to HBCUs, they literally cannot handle that infrastructure. And so we have to understand infrastructure and capacity if we're talking about, people love to say, man, use our own, build our own. Yeah, but if you don't understand

what building means, that's just a whole bunch of words thrown together. Sure. Roland, I have to echo Brother Levitt. Prof, you're right. The HPC classification is a strict one based on history and experience, as we know. But I would count Medgar Evers in Brooklyn. I would count

Chicago State in Chicago. You say Kennedy King. There are a number of schools. Community College is Philadelphia. All those things, all those are spaces where our people can get a quality education now we also have to factor in the fact that higher education has been completely disrupted so you know with the emergence of online learning

and then COVID disrupting things the price point is way too damn high I would be caught dead in Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard and you know I hope you appreciate that especially since you're a fan of you where my old professor from Ohio State, Ler work Pernell spent many years after he left Ohio State. So I know you appreciate that, but I give a damn about Cesar Rhodes and his mama.

But the point is this. The point I'm about to make is this. We, and this is why the Black Star Network is so important, we're not going to have this conversation anywhere else, but we need to have this conversation. When you read Clarence Thomas' concurrence, where he says that Gratz was not decided correctly, that Fisher was not decided correctly, and if you remember the oral arguments where Scalia was raising that very point you raised, Roland, and then died before he could write, died in the lodge where one of his billionaire friends had put him up for the night. The arguments they're making are arguments we need an answer for.

Let me just be very clear about this. We're talking about strict scrutiny. We're talking about whether a policy achieves a compelling state interest and whether it's narrowly tailored. When you reclass Thomas's concurrence, we don't have an answer for that. When he says, what is a compelling state interest? Because when I'm looking at this from a class perspective, is it really benefiting black people when you get black elites

at Harvard and it ain't the black masses? Is that a compelling state interest? And when you start talking about being narrowly tailored, what are you using as a proxy for diversity beyond just demographics? I hear the vice president talking about data, but what does the data tell us about class? Why am I raising this? Not

because I'm supporting Clarence Thomas. What I'm saying is we haven't had a conversation about this, quite frankly. And when you read that concurrence, and he's saying all this stuff about how I can't measure the progress. When we start talking about diversity, you understand

that the 14th Amendment, as Tony Brown Jackson continues to remind people, did not preclude race-based remedies. And the only time we started talking about affirmative action as being about diversity was after Bakke. And we use this as if we're reading the Bible. But in fact, going back to what you raised, President Kimbrough, Brother Walter, when Monica Johnson said that, we were trapped behind the hedge of apartheid. There was no class differentiation that could prevent the black elite from escaping.

But because of those victories from Brown after, the black elite started getting the hell away from the black masses. You know who else never hired a clerk from an HBCU? Thurgood Marshall. The point is that if the benefit for affirmative action was just going to benefit the black elite, well, then, damn it, I don't care. I'm saying that and we use HBCUs as the kind of proxy for black higher education and exclude all the community colleges where our people are, which include California, which include Mississippi, Hines Community College, which include, as you say, Kennedy King and all these other people in the federal colleges of Chicago, then what we are saying is that our value, our valuation of what it means to be black and move together in this country, really what we're talking is we just want to develop the black bourgeoisie and use us as some kind of proxy for advancement of the race.

And I'm telling you right now, at a time when the white bourgeoisie is turning away from higher education and it is being disrupted, we're going to be left holding the bag in a conversation that if we don't have it now, and I say we don't have it now, what I'm saying is when you read this 237 pages, what you're going to discover is nothing in it that's going to address these issues that we are raising that we don't have answers for, that this white mass, this majority is being able to use to reinforce whiteness. And our response is, but let us in. That's not enough, man. I do want to throw this out. And look, I got the four of here, and I was in a group chat, and we were talking about this here. So, all right. I think we're already seeing this. So, let's say you do see this

explosion on HBCU campuses. Well, aren't we also going to see that even the HBCUs are going to become more selective as to who they're letting in. And so what then happens to those black students who are not, frankly, the upper echelon of black students? I mean, we're going to have to grapple with how are we educating folk who are not the best of the best, not in the top 10 percent, not the talented 10th. How do we deal with, again, the individuals who, you know, they. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, It's really, really, really bad. Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug

thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Weren't 3.8, 3.9,

4.5.0 or whatever, but there have been people who have gone on and gone on to do great things because they simply got a shot. Just would love to hear your perspective. Let me, and I want to hear first from the former president of two HBCUs first, because that could be a, because we're actually even seeing that right now, Walter.

Yeah, you know, I think there's always been a range of institutions. So HBCUs aren't a monolith. You know, I was president of two institutions. Dillard would be a part of that group that we call the Black Ivy League. And that's with the Howard and Hampton and Morehouses film. Philander Smith was not that. And it really served the sort of low income folks from from Arkansas that were really sharp. But Philander Smith was a place that produced Joycelyn Elders and James Cone, father of Black liberation theology, his brother Cecil Wayne Cone, and Robert Williams, a father of Black psychology. So there's always been a place. So I agree with you. I don't think everyone, and just based on my experience, I don't think

everyone will rush toward that. The challenge, I think, for some to rush toward that is that when you get these outside pressures saying where you're not doing a good job because your students don't graduate at a certain level, and those graduation rates a lot of times are determined by socioeconomic status. So you have a lot of Pell Grant eligible students, your graduation rate is lower. That's just part of it. But it doesn't mean that those places in these small towns aren't doing a good job. So I think there's always going to be a place. There will always be HBCUs that say, we are not trying to chase the status. But there will be some that have that kind of cachet that people look at. And I think that's fine. There's going to be a range. But there's always going to be a place for a Howard. And there's going to always

be a place for students at Edelph and Lander Smith that that's HBCU very different but still plays an important role and I think that to brother Carr's point we can't just be places where we're viewed as you know a place where the black bourgeoisie goes we have to deal with the predominantly black institutions like he mentions the Chicago states the community college in Alabama now those kinds of all of that I think is part of it as well. So that's the way I would, I think there's going to always be that range. And I just, based on my experience, I don't think everybody is going to try to rush toward that kind of, say, how do we get better? A lot of people are just trying to get students right now to keep the doors open. So they're just looking for the students.

And if this helps drive some of those students there, those students, and actually those students will have a better experience than going to some no-name regional institution that didn't want them anyway. I mean, that's just a fact. That's right. You know, Tiffany, one of the things that I always say when we have these conversations and people are talking about, you know, all these, you know, these elite schools, I mean, look, and I've had this conversation with black folks who've gone to PWIs and black folks who've gone to HBCUs. I didn't go to HBCU. I graduated from Texas A&M University.

Folks say, well, man, well, A&M for journalism, it wasn't Columbia. It wasn't Syracuse. It wasn't Medill at Northwestern. It wasn't all the It wasn't Syracuse. It wasn't Medill at Northwestern. It wasn't all the rest of these schools. You know what? It's a whole bunch of folk, white, black and otherwise, who went to all of the schools, who spent a whole bunch of money, who not in three Hall of Fames. Yeah. So I make the point is it's not fully a function of where you went to school. I get that whole deal. It's the work you do after you get that sheet of paper.

Exactly. And it's also about who will hire you to get not only that first opportunity, but retain you and promote you. And many of those employers were part of the amicus briefs that were saying that diversity is something that they want in the workplace. It is a part of the productivity that they believe that can happen in the world. So it is apps and in their, their industry. So it's absolutely not just where you went to school. But, you know, Georgetown keeps stats and they say that nearly a third of Black and Hispanic students with high school GPAs of 3.5 or better are actually at community colleges. So I think that the conversation of moving forward also has to be around strengthening the institutions where black students end up even outside of hbcus hbcus cannot as we pointed out handle from an interest infrastructure perspective every student that may want to uh apply after george george floyd

howard in particular the law school in particular, was inundated. And every year, you know, from an admissions perspective, the ratio of who we can admit is very low compared to the applications. But we have to be at the table also, Roland. I mean, when in essence, even when the court is evaluating, you know, what factors really meet the test of strict scrutiny or not, you know, there's an underlying assumption of what is qualified. The students and parents that brought these lawsuits have their own definition based on what we've always said in the educational institution is qualified. But we have to get to the table that is defining even in higher education what means qualified. Is it GPA? Do we need to consider GPA? How much do we need to consider standardized tests? Do those tests need to be changed? Are we in positions of power to move the needle on what qualified even means? Jeremy, your final thoughts.

Let me say this. This is a problem created by white people and white institutions. And if they want to solve it, they have the power to solve it. The movement toward test-optional institutions, Harvard has the capacity not to have certain entrance examinations. They have the power to make the changes. We've seen a movement afoot, whether it's to SAT, whether it's to LSAT, whether it's institutions seeking to waive's the LSAT, whether it's institutions seeking to waive the GRE, they have the capacity to fix the program if they want diverse institutions. What we have to ask ourselves, I think, is the real question is, do they really want diverse institutions? And I'll tell you why I ask that. If you've read this case, you'll know that

the justices asked the lawyers for Harvard and North Carolina several questions that they didn't have responses to that any person on this panel could have answered in a more eloquent way. That, for me, raised a red flag. I'm going to be quite honest with you. It's almost as if they threw questions that they didn't need to throw. And when you're trained as a lawyer, you know how to do that. So something else is moving here that just doesn't sit right with me. And I will say this. I do think HBCUs have the capacity to take many more students. There's an infrastructural problem, of course.

And that's what happens when you have state legislatures that underfund universities like FAMU and others. So my major point here is that we shouldn't get too much in a titsy over this decision. I'm more concerned about the greater effects of this and contracting and disadvantaged business enterprises and how this precedent can be used in the corporate sector to disenfranchise Black people and how this really, in my view, is the cherry on top of the rollback in the post-George Floyd era. I think we've reached it there. We've got to be realistic about it. We've got to put on some new boxing gloves and get to work. Walter, final thoughts. Well, you know, like I said, I've been

really trying to spend time going through it, and we'll see how this impacts HBCUs. I think one of the broader things we're going to have to look at, just in terms of capacity, is that how does this trying to spend time going through it, and we'll see how this impacts HBCUs. I think one of the broader things we're going to have to look at just in terms of capacity is that how does this impact our students who want to go to graduate and professional school? Because we don't have as many of those options in terms of, I mean, medical schools have a limited number of spots. Law schools have a limited number of spots. I mean, even, you know, even at a Howard, I mean, they can't take many more students in terms of what they have with their ability. So you have all these other law schools. And so now we've got to put more.

My wife and I were talking about this earlier. She works for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and they have this Marshall Motley Scholars Program. And so now the pipeline programs become much more important now because we have to make sure that these students can get over all these other additional hurdles that are being created for them. So we've got some work to do. We can't just sort of say, oh, well, that's the way it is. We've got to figure out how because we still need our students to be able to access those places after they leave our institution. So that's part of the work that will happen. All right. Tiffany, Jeremy, Walter, I appreciate y'all being on the show.

Damon as well. Greg, you hold tight. You're going to be there with our panel. We're going to continue this conversation when we come back. I'm going to play for y'all. 2004, August 2004, UNI Journalists of Color Convention, President George W. Bush spoke. His focus was not on what made news that day. When my question to him about affirmative action and race and legacy did make news, we're going to show you what this discussion we're having right now. I raised it to him 19 years ago. You're watching Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Black Star Network. My early days in the road, I've learned, well, first of all, as a musician.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened

when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I studied not only piano, but I was also drummer and percussion. I was all city percussion as well, so I was one of the best in the city on percussion.

There you go. Also studied trumpet, cello, violin, and bass, and any other instrument I could get my hand on. Mm-hmm. And with that study, I learned, again, what was for me. I learned what it meant to do what the instruments in the orchestra meant to each other in the relationships. Right. So that prepared me to be a leader. what the instruments in the orchestra meant to each other in the relationships.

So that prepared me to be a leader. That prepared me to lead orchestras and to conduct orchestras. That prepared me to know, to be a leader of men, they have to respect you and know that you know them. You have to be the teacher of the music. You have to know the music better than any. There you go.

Right, so you can't walk in unprepared. Up next on The Frequency with me, Dee Barnes. She's known as the Angela Davis of hip hop. Monet Smith, better known as Medusa the the gangster goddess, the undisputed queen of West Coast underground hip hop. Pop locking is really what indoctrinated me in hip hop. I don't think, I don't even think I realized it was hip hop at that time. Right.

You know, it was a, it was a happening. It was a moment of release. We're gonna be getting into her career, knowing her whole story, and breaking down all the elements of hip hop. This week on The Frequency, only on the Black Star Network. Next on The Black Table,

with me, Greg Carr. Succession. We're hearing that word pop up a lot these days as our country continues to fracture and divide. But did you know that that idea, essentially a breaking up of the USA, has been part of the public debate since long before and long after the Civil War, right up to today? On our next show, you'll meet Richard Crichton, the author of this book, who says breaking up this great experiment called America might not be such a bad thing.

That's on the next Black Table, right here on the Black Star Network. Hello, I'm Jameah Pugh. I am from Coatesville, Pennsylvania, just an hour right outside of Philadelphia. My name is Jasmine Pugh. I'm also from Coatesville, Pennsylvania. You are watching Roland Martin Unfiltered.

Stay right here. Folks, August 2004, President George W. Bush speaks at the UNT Journalists of Color Convention. It no longer exists, but it was a combination of all four minority journalism organizations, Native American journalists, Asian American journalists, Hispanic journalists, National Association of Black Journalists. At the time, I had just taken over as executive editor of the Chicago Defender, and I was asked to represent NABJ on that particular panel. Each one of us was supposed to get one question. And, well, I didn't want just one question. And so using my Texas connection to President George W. Bush, I asked him if he would take two questions.

He thought it was going to be two questions just for me. No, I wanted two questions for the entire panel. What you're about to see is the results of the second question that I asked President George W. Bush. He came there. I think he was speaking about something dealing with the war or whatever. And what typically happens is Associated Press, they write the story up. They already have the day of the copy of his speech. So as soon as he gets finished, they press the button. It goes out across the wire.

Well, the question that you're about to see actually made news. The New York Times, other newspapers the next day wrote about this. And so this really became the second story. And at the time, the Supreme Court was looking at the affirmative action case out of the University of Michigan. That was the pretext of the question that I asked him 19 years ago. Watch this. You said, quote, quotas. You said, quote, quotas are an unfair system for all, unquote, with regards to your opposition to affirmative action. No, no, no. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. With regard to my opposition to quota systems.

To quotas, okay. But I've never heard you speak against legacy. Now, the president of Texas A&M, Robert Gates, said that he would not use race in admissions, and then he later said he would not use legacy. If you say it's a matter of merit and not race. Shouldn't colleges also get rid of legacy? Because that's not based upon merit. That's based upon if my daddy or my granddaddy went to my college. Yeah, I thought you were referring to my legacy.

That's why I allowed you to go ahead and bring it out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in my case, I had to knock on a lot of doors to follow the old man's footsteps. No, look, if what you're saying is, is there going to be special treatment for people, if we're going to have a special exception for certain people in a system that's supposed to be fair, I agree. I don't think there ought to be. So the colleges should get rid of legacy.

Well, I think so, yeah. I think it ought to be based upon merit. And I think it also be based upon. And I think colleges need to work hard for diversity. Don't make don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong. You said against affirmative actions, what you said, you put words in my mouth. What I am for is I just read the speech, Mr. President. What speech in terms of when you came out against the Michigan affirmative action policy. No, I said I was against quotas. So you support affirmative action, but not quotas? I support colleges affirmatively taking action to get more minorities in their school. That's a long headline, Mr. President. I support diversity.

I don't support quotas. I think quotas are wrong. I think quotas are wrong for people. And so do a lot of people. But just to be clear, you believe that colleges should not use legacy. I think colleges ought to use merit in order for people to get in, and I think they ought to use a merit system like the one I put out. Thank you very much.

Thank you all. Thanks for having me. Folks, that story went crazy. Let me tell you what happened. The New York Times had a story the next day. White parents at Harvard and Yale were blowing the phones up, demanding to know if they were going to be changing their policies to get rid of legacy. We know they didn't. We got our panel here. Let me bring in Dr. Greg Carr,

Department of African American Studies at Howard University, Recy Colbert, host of the Recy Colbert Show, Sirius XM Radio, Lawn Victoria Burke, NNPA, Black Press of America. Greg, I can tell you got a kick out of that question. That was the great answer, man. You're peeling it down. He laughed because he knows that he can say that, and it don't

matter because they're going to keep it. You nailed it. This is exactly what Contagion Brown Jackson is writing about in her dissent. at and it don't matter because they're going to keep it. You nailed it. This is exactly what Katanya Brown Jackson is writing about in her dissent. This is what Sonia Sotomayor is writing about in her 69 page dissent. Hers was the longest

of the 237 pages. You're not getting rid of the true affirmative action in this country is whiteness. Let me be very clear about that. And I just want to mention one other thing. And you nailed him on that. And he knows they're not getting rid of it. Here's the thing, Roland, and you brought it up, brother. You put this thing exactly where it needs to be.

Exactly where it needs to be before the break. At Howard Law School, a lot of our students who come to Howard Law School, students in my classes, went to historically white schools as undergrads. They went to the Berkeleys. They went to the Harvards. And they come to Howard Law School to get that thing that they didn't get in undergraduate.

Now, what Walter said is very important in terms of these graduate professional schools because I have a lot of friends who are parts of faculties and other places at these white, at these black schools. And we only have three black medical schools, Meharry, Morrill School of Medicine, and Howard. I mean, you could count some others that have them in the North. But the problem is this. You got a lot of non-black students at those schools because they know those schools are cheaper, they're equal, if not better, Trump prepared you, and you got black students who

can't get in those schools because folk been discovered out of their quality. We don't have enough schools. But what you put right in the square, I think really is what we have to deal with this. After Bakke, when affirmative action moved from, because of statutory interpretation, moved interpretation of the 14th Amendment and Civil Rights Act 1964,

moved from redressing past problems to diversity, our focus became diversity. And what you might see is an uptick, and I'm already seeing it at Howard, as they begin to want students with the astronomical GPAs and the ability to pay, you're beginning to see students at HBCUs who are only there because they've discovered that there's an equal network or better network. If you want to go to Wall Street, you don't go to Stanford undergrad. You go to Howard undergrad, and they got Wall Street. They filthy on Wall Street with that same network.

But here's the problem. Those students bring some of the same attitudes toward the working class and the laboring class that they would bring if they were at Stanford or Harvard. You put it where it needs to be, Roland. When we start, we have to address this question of class in the black community. Because for a lot of black folk, they would love it if HBCUs became DEIUs and they don't want to get rid of legacy either because they're four or five generations in. And just like George W. Bush giggled because

he knew you had trapped him, there are black people who would say, hey, I don't want them Negroes who I'm scared of when I walk down the street at my HBCU. I'd rather have the third or fourth generation student who was aspiring to go to the University of Chicago, but now because of his decision, will look twice at Spelman. I don't want those students at Howard because, quite frankly, I don't need that petty bourgeois static. But guess what?

Their number's getting higher and higher and higher. And I don't know what they do for the race except use it to their individual advantage. The thing that I cracked up on there with that one, Recy, was one, he wasn't expecting that question. Two, he openly admitted when he said, yeah, all the doors I had to knock on to follow my dad's footsteps. George W. Bush is an absolute byproduct of white privilege, of legacy. That's how he got into Yale. That's how he got into Harvard. He didn't even come close to having the grades. And what ends up happening parlays that and to become an owner of the texas rangers baseball being in the all business becoming

governor of texas and becoming president of the united states right and and so what you have here again you have these these asian american students and these asian parents and they are so hell bent on harvard yale columbia cornell brown all the i don't even know what the hell all of i can't even name all of them and so hell bent on that that they felt that oh no no no it's merit to every single one of them asian american parents amer America ain't never been about merit. That's the BS they always say. It has always been about the hookup, privilege, who you know, and it has been about whiteness. And the Supreme Court in his decision today did nothing to strike down the very thing that discriminated against them, which was legacy. Period. But I mean, that's the whole point, right, is this whole notion that the system is going to

somehow be more fair when it's going to just further advantage those who are already given every single leg up in our society. I mean, in addition to white supremacy being the biggest crock of shit, meritocracy is the biggest crock of shit. It has nothing to do with merit, with you getting this astronomical GPA. It's whether or not your school can throw the letters AP in front of a class title, and now you get an extra grade point GPA. I did have that. You know, I benefited from that, too, myself. But I'm just saying there are ways to game the system.

And the way that the white people have set this up, this set this up, is that they're always going to win. And so no, I'm sorry, Asian people, you are not any more welcome. You're not going to have any more additional ability to get into these institutions because they don't want your Asian ass there either. Just like

they don't want our black asses there, they don't want y'all there either. We're already underrepresented in these institutions, supposedly, with affirmative action. And so, you know, but I think somebody had mentioned they have the opportunity to use personal impact and personal stories and things of that nature to find a way to get around the whole notion that it's strictly by the GPA, by the SAT score or whatever scores, and they're going to continue to game the system. It's the same way that Republicans cheat. When they run out of the majority votes, they gerrymander until the votes don't even matter. They steal, they lie, they cheat. That is the American way, not meritocracy. That's never going to change as long as whiteness is still a concept that people exalt in this country. That's never going to change as long as whiteness is still a concept that people exalt in this country. That's not going to change for anybody. Black people, we're going to always

find a way to get along and do what we got to do. This doesn't change that in the sense that we're going to make a way out of no way. But the other people who have been benefiting by the blood, sweat and tears of black people and the activism for black people and off the backs of our systemic discrimination, they're going to get a wake-up call with this ruling. Let's be real clear here, Lauren. What's going to happen here? I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company

dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1,

Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice

to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this

quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things.

Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. What kind of student body do they want?

You don't look a lot of schools right now are not even requiring the SAT and ACT. That's right. I think it all back to your book, White Fear. At the end of the day, Roland, the demographics are changing. Frankly, we're winning. Black people are winning. You know, the Barack Obama era, I think, is what touched this moment off. Even though Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum lost, they came very close to winning. The sort of subset within a subset that's obsessed about these types of things, who gets into Harvard, who doesn't, et cetera and so on. They are panicking in the background.

They don't want to admit that people like Abigail Fisher are too stupid to get into school. They will never admit that. It really doesn't matter. To Recy's point, we make no way, we make a way out of no way, whether it's James Meredith, Arthurine Lucy, or Vivian Malone, we will make it. We will always make it. It really doesn't matter what the rules are. If you give us a playing field and you give us what the game is, we will win, and particularly when it does not involve any sort of subjective judgment. The thing about school and admissions, of course this thing is subjective. Of course, for 360 years, it's always played against us, whether it was massive resistance or it being illegal for black people to learn how to read or whatever it's been. We've overcome it and we'll overcome it again. And it doesn't matter that John Roberts thinks that race doesn't play a factor in American life and Clarence Thomas is a

fool. It really doesn't matter. In the end, we'll make it. You know, to your point, Roland, you made a point about how there's so many successful people out there who have not gone to these Ivy League schools and make it anyway, because, of course, success is not just built on some degree that you have from an Ivy League school. We see so many people like Malcolm X or somebody like that, that they're making it because of determination and grit and intelligence and hard work, and it has nothing to do with any—but if you're on the Supreme Court, so many of these people are baked into this notion, particularly in the Supreme Court, that you have to go to a certain school to make it.

I mean, lawyers are particularly geared for thinking that way. So this isn't really a surprise, but it really doesn't bother me. There's a little piece of me, actually, that's kind of oddly glad that it happened, because now we don't have to hear about this constant, ridiculous idea that we're not qualified somehow because we got into a school. I mean, affirmative action, you might get into the school, but affirmative action is not going to take your test. It's not going to pass the bar for you. It's not going to get your A's and B's that you have to get when you get into the school. And there's that sort of idea in everybody's head that just getting in, of course, is the entire trick, which typically it is. Absolutely. All right, folks, hold tight one second. I got to go to break. We come back.

I want to read what Michelle Obama posted on social media. But what's really key is, I think, the last part where she actually gave a call to action to her followers. That's next on Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Black Star Network. Hey, folks, the

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Donald Rush, Gerald Gilmore, Gregory Kelly, Richard McGregory, Tommy Williams, Charles Slocum, Ronald. Thank you. And Antoine Brand, Tiffany Tolder. Thanks for contributing during our show. Anybody who gives, we'll get a personal shout out as we're live. Folks, I'll be back in a moment hatred on the streets a horrific scene a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence white people are losing their damn mind there's an angryTrump mob storm to the U.S. Capitol. We're about to see the rise of what I call white minority resistance.

We have seen white folks in this country who simply cannot tolerate black folks voting. I think what we're seeing is the inevitable result of violent denial. This is part of American history. Every time that people of color have made progress, whether real or symbolic, there has been what Carol Anderson at Emory University calls white rage as a backlash. This is the rise of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys. America, there's going to be more of this. Here's all the Proud Boys, guys. This country is getting increasingly racist in its behaviors and its attitudes because of the fear of white people. The fear that they're taking our jobs, they're taking our resources, they're taking our women. This is white fear. On a next A Balanced Life with me, Dr. Jackie,

a relationship that we have to have. We're often afraid of it and don't like to talk about it. That's right. We're talking about our relationship with money. And here's the thing. Our relationship with money oftentimes determines whether we have it or not. The truth is you cannot change what you will not acknowledge. Balancing your relationship with your pocketbook.

That's next on A Balanced Life with me, Dr. Jackie, here at Blackstar Network. Hi, my name is Brady Riggs. I'm from Houston, Texas. My name is Sharon Williams. I'm from Dallas, Texas. Right now, I'm rolling with Roland Martin. Unfiltered, uncut, unplugged, and undamned believable. You hear me? A lot of folks have been commenting today regarding the Supreme Court decision striking down the use of race in college admissions.

One of the statements that I thought was quite interesting came from former First Lady Michelle Obama. This is what she wrote. Back in college, I was one of the few black students on my campus, and I was proud of getting into such a respected school. I knew I worked hard for it, but still I sometimes wondered if people thought I got there because of affirmative action. It was a shadow that students like me couldn't shake, whether those doubts came from the outside or inside our own minds. But the fact is this, I belonged. And semester after semester, decade after decade, for more than a half a century, countless students like me showed they belonged too.

It wasn't just the kids of color who benefited either. Every student who heard a perspective they might not have encountered, who had an assumption challenge, who had their minds and their hearts open, gained a lot as well. It wasn't perfect, but there's no doubt that it has helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb. Of course, students on my campus and countless others across the country were and continue to be granted special consideration for admissions. Some have parents who graduated from the same school. Others have families who can afford coaches to help them run faster or hit a ball harder. Others go to high schools with lavish resources for tutors and extensive standardized test prep that help them score higher on college entrance exams.

We don't usually question if those students belong, so often we just accept that money and power and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level. So today, my heart breaks for any young person out there who's wondering what their future holds and what kinds of chances will be open to them. And while I know the strength and grit that lies inside kids who've always had to sweat a little more to climb the same

ladders, I hope and I pray that the rest of us are willing to sweat a little too. Today is a reminder that we've got to do the work not just to enact policies that reflect our values of equity and fairness, but to truly make those values real in all of our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. If you're interested in supporting organizations who have long been advocating for this cause, check out UNCF, Hispanic Scholarship Fund, APIA Scholars, American Indian College Fund, the Dream U.S. Thurgood Marshall College Fund. That to me, Recy, I think is important in that what the first lady is saying, we can sit here and yell, holler and scream, but we've got to have take action.

And so for her to wreck to millions of followers to recommend those institutions, I think is an appropriate response because the work still has to get done and the folks still got to get educated. Absolutely. Like I said, black folks is going to find a way to make a way out of no way. But I also want to say, and I say this not in response to

First Lady Michelle Obama because I have the utmost respect for her, but respectfully, let's also normalize not giving a fuck how white people think we got our asses in a room, whether that's a school, a boardroom, or any situation, because they ain't thinking two times about what we think about how they got there. So, you know, this whole notion of, you know, our affirmative action was a dark cloud over black students. Who gives a damn? At the end of the day, did you get an advantage or not? If you did, then that's all that matters. And that's something that white people have figured out.

And they do it shamelessly. They take advantage of every single leg up they have, and they turn around and say that they got that advantage because they're the best. They're the best because they're rich. They're the best because they're white. It's not about a test score with them, and it's not about a GPA. It's I'm white. I won. So by default, I deserved it. And I want us to normalize that attitude within our community, whatever we can do to get ahead. And I'm not saying step all over people, but if we're in the room, then we belong. And that's all that has to be proven to anybody. So, yes, let's do this call to action, but we also need to change. And we've talked about this throughout the show, the mentality that goes into wanting acceptance, wanting to prove that we deserve and that we belong.

We don't have to prove shit to anybody just like the same people we so-called trying to prove ourselves to don't feel like they have to prove anything to us. See, that was the thing for me. That was a thing for me, Greg. You know, Clarence Thomas, that was always his deal. Part of this thing is that, you know, his hatred affirmative action, because he felt like what the white kids

were saying about me when I was at Yale, that cheapened my degree. Yeah, but you rode that damn elitist-ass degree to the Supreme Court. So stop fronting. And the thing for me is I'm like Reesey Gregg. I didn't give a damn what no white kid at Texas A&M thought. Here's the crazy part.

I've said stuff. I got white folks, white folks who was they were trying to call me a a affirmative action baby when I was at CNN. And you know what? I wasn't about to sit here and go, how dare you call me the affirmative action baby. I've done this, this, this. All I simply did was what Della Reese said in the Harlem Nights. Kiss my entire ass. Period.

That's right. Well, I mean, you know, although I must say something Professor Levitt said before he logged off about this, the impact of this, something that I their cue in terms of affirmative action from these types of decisions. So now everybody who's brushing up their resume, who's going in for an entry-level position or internship, needs to be very nervous now about these places that now are going to take this and say, oh, that's the signal? That's why Biden said, don't you corporations do this, because he absolutely knows they're going to do it. But this not giving a damn is really central. Clarence Thomas is a deeply traumatized man his blackness is

drawn from what he thinks white people think about blackness. The way he talks color his hair, the approach and it's, you know, that's why we talk with Corey Robin who wrote the book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas on a black table. He is a black nationalist but his blackness is a figure of the white imagination. He thinks he's helping black people. Absolutely. And that's basically just showed who he wrote into the

Supreme Court. But anyway, it's a good article in the recent issue of New York Magazine about those two clients of Jane Thomas. But recently, when you talk about not giving a damn, that's critical. And that was a lovingly kind of corrective to the First Lady because a generation before Michelle Obama went to Princeton after they became co-ed, Sonia Sotomayor graduated from Princeton, class of 76. One of the first places she came after she was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court

was Howard Law School. And I sat in an auditorium with those law students and listened to her say that she wanted to do something about the class elitism on the Supreme Court. Because everybody's either Harvard or Yale. They're either Catholic or Jewish. They went to these exclusive schools.

And she wants to diversify the clerks. The first question that she was asked that day was by a young man that said, I want to be a clerk. So what do I need to do? And she gave an excellent answer about being able to read and write beautifully and love it in law and all that. She still ain't hired no HBCU clerks, to my knowledge. Guess who ain't hired no HBCU clerks in her first term either? Katonji Brown Jackson

or Harvard. My point is this. Michelle Obama wanted something coming out of the South Side of Chicago and she got it, to Reese's point at Princeton. She got access to the privilege, the very privilege that she balanced in that message by saying, here are all the institutional supports for places where people don't have the privilege that you should support. But I'm going to end with this. There's a certain gaslighting among the black elite who appoint themselves as a whole lot for the race. Because the last I checked, Rowan, your Black-owned, Black-operated,

Black-as-hell content network has yet to have the sit-down with either the former First Lady or the former President of the United States, who are so rah-rah about race. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Except when it comes to sharing some of that Netflix money or something. I mean, see, I'm always a little

wary of them Negroes that get in the room and don't bring nobody else with them. I mean, see, I'm always a little wary of them Negroes that get in the room and don't bring nobody else with them. I'm going to stop right there. Well, look, you're absolutely right. I attended the Global Black Economic Forum that Essence Ventures put on today and was here, it was in the Four Seasons Hotel, and the ambassador of the united

nations spoke uh again vice president spoke i think it's taking place tomorrow uh and um and there were first of all it wasn't it was it wasn't i don't even know if there was registration it may have been it may have been a cost associated with it and uh and i was sitting there and i was you know i was looking around the room and there were people in the room who I knew, I've talked to over the years and folk who were working in corporate America and the conversation was in black economic form. And even when the vice president was speaking, I was remarking to the guy sitting next to me, they were talking about, oh, economic opportunities in Africa and whatever. And I turned to him, I said, 95% of the black

owned businesses in America do less than $5 million in revenue. 95%. If you look at the Executive Leadership Council, the black corporate group, their own internal study shows how many of those black folks are booted out of corporate America before they reach 60. Boot it out. It sort of hit the glass ceiling. And so to the point that, Greg, that you were making and just sort of just how I absolutely feel,

my whole deal is if you become one of those elite blacks and you're operating in rarefied air, the question is, how are you connecting with those of us not at 30,000 feet? How are you saying I'm going to bring people along with me? I say this all the time. If you're if you're in the company, I just don't want to see the black people who you have in executive positions. I want to know who get the contracts, who's getting the money, who's getting the catering contracts, who's get the transportation contracts, who's get. See, that's the whole deal. At some point, if we're going to be sitting here talking about, Lauren, how do we move in privileged circles? How do we operate in elite institutions? Who's benefiting

from us attending a Harvard or Yale? Are the individuals benefiting or we're benefiting as a collective? Are people truly maximizing the opportunities to open up new opportunities? I say this all the time to the black people

who work at these ad agencies. What are you actually doing for black-owned media? Or are you just simply there to check boxes? And so that's what this whole thing boils down to. And so, yeah, Greg, we didn't get an interview with the president when his book came out. We didn't get one with the First Lady when her book came out. Even in the last year of the White House, the First Lady told me specifically, out of her own mouth, two consecutive years,

that she was going to do a sit-down interview with me before they got to the White House, and it never happened. So I don't know why, but my whole deal is I tried. I was available. They never called. Ain't like folk didn't have my number. So that to me, Lauren, we as African-Americans, and I'm going to bring it up to King here. Clarence Jones said in his book, King met with him,

and Clarence was like, yo, I'm good. I'm making money as a corporate attorney. I'm all right. King gave a speech the next day, and Clarence Jones said King was basically talking to him saying, just because you're doing well in your field don't mean that you can't help the rest of our people. That really has to be our state of mind. And so that's how we must approach, I think, this and also other issues. Lauren, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, that's deep. I mean, there's so much to say there. I just know in my experience

in all the places that I've worked, whether it's ABC or USA Today or whatever, it wasn't the boule crowd that was helpful to me. It was typically people who were blue collar, who had to work their way up, that went to some community college and then transferred after two years into another school and had the life experience that sort of taught them that I've got to help other people. Now, sometimes it's somebody in the boule crowd. Sometimes it is somebody from Harvard. You just never know in life. But what I find is that's generally not the case. But I mean, us working as a collective has always been a huge challenge.

It's something that we need to deal with. You know, to get back to a few things about this Michelle Obama statement that you put up before, I mean, you know, as I think everybody on the panel knows, she went to Princeton, which is like probably less than 5% black, to echo Recy's sentiments once again. I mean, this idea that you're going to make me feel inferior, you're going to make me feel like I shouldn't be in the room, or I'm going to be thinking about what other people, I really could not give an F. I really could not. Half the time, we're the

smartest person in the room in a place like Harvard and Princeton, because we got to be perfect to get in there. They get in on legacy. They get in on athletics. They get in on some nonsense. They're a donor, whatever, Trump's freaking son-in-law, whatever. So the 5% of black kids you see walking around on a Harvard-Princeton college campus. They're like the cream of the crop in the entire country. They're the ones that get all the scholarships. They're the ones that busted their ass, got the perfect freaking SAT score. And then you're going to make me feel like I shouldn't be here. You've got to be out of your mind. So what Recy said earlier is the perfect thing. And, you know, Clarence Thomas, the idea, the absurdity of Clarence Thomas lecturing people on anything.

But, you know, he's it's at the end of the day, it's Stockholm syndrome and insecurity. He wants so badly to be liked by white people. He wants that so badly. And you can never get it. It's the Adolf Caesar speech and a soldier story at the end of the day. They still hate you no matter what you do. You've got to do your thing. And Clarence Thomas is just a sad example of what happens when you grow up in a society, in a situation, in a specific place that doesn't like you and you know that. And you don't figure out that, you know, your confidence and your self-ability to come through that has got to ignore your environment around you.

I think it's sad in a way. I think, you know, I think it's difficult. You know, I sometimes think about Clarence Thomas and I feel sorry for him that he doesn't have the self-awareness about who he is as an individual. And he lets society make him feel inferior. And you see it in his statement today. Shout out to KBG, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for lighting his ass up hot on everything that he said. So there you go. Got to go to a break.

We come back. I want to talk about that because, folks, if y'all have actually read any of this, it was like, it was like, look, Judge Katanja Brown Jackson, she basically wrote this mother. That's pretty much what, and Clarence Thomas was hot. Clarence Thomas was mad at this sister because she went at his throat. We'll discuss that next right here on Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Blackstar Network. Next on the Black Table with me, Greg Carr, the enigma of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. What really makes him tick and what forces shaped his view of the world, the country and Black America?

The answer, I'm pretty sure, will shock you. And he says, you know, people think that I'm anachronistic. I am. I want to go backwards in time in order to move us forward into the future. He's very upfront about this. We'll talk to Corey Robin, the man who wrote the book that reveals it all. That's next on The Black Table, only on the Black Star Network. On the next Get Wealthy with me, Deborah Owens, America's Wealth Coach,

I'm sure you've heard that saying that the only thing guaranteed is death and taxes. The truth is that the wealthy get wealthier by understanding tax strategy. And that's exactly the conversation that we're going to have on the next Get Wealthy, where you're going to learn wealth hacks that help you turn your wages into wealth. Taxes is one of the largest expenses you ever have. You really gotta know how to manage that thing and get that under control so that you can do well. That's right here on Get Wealthy, only on Black Star Network.

Up next on The Frequency with me, Dee Barnes. She's known as the Angela Davis of hip hop. Monet Smith, better known as Medusa the Gangsta Goddess, the undisputed queen of West Coast underground hip hop. Pop locking is really what indoctrinated me in hip hop. I don't think it's, I don't even think I realized it was hip hop at that time. Right.

You know, it was a, it was a happening. It was a moment of release. We're going to be getting into her career, knowing her whole story, and breaking down all the elements of hip-hop. This week on The Frequency, only on the Black Star Network. Whoo! Whoo!

Hi. I am Tommy Davidson. I play Oscar on Proud Family, Louder and Prouder. I don't say, I don't play Sammy, but I could. Or I don't play Obama, but I could. I don't do Stallone, but I could do all that. And I am here with Roland Martin on Unfiltered. Man, let me tell y'all something. A lot of times when you're reading these Supreme Court decisions, your eyes just sort of gloss over. But man, rarely do we get to see

these justices duke it out. Judge Katandri Brown Jackson, she wrote this here, and it may not be if we have the full control room, but she said, the majority and concurring opinions rehearse this court's idealistic vision of racial equality from Brown forward with appropriate lament for past indiscretions. But the race linked gaps that the law aided by this court previously founded and fostered, which indisputably define our present reality, are strangely absent and do not seem to matter. With let them eat cake obliviousness today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces colorblindness for all by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country's actual past and present experiences, the court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America's real world problems.

No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways. And today's ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority's perspective is that it proceeds, parentheses, ostrich-like, from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain.

If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more. Y'all, she was in the pocket today. Can you say Clarence Thomas was a little hot? Let me just read for you. Let me just read for you what John Roberts was so mad. Clarence couldn't fight his own fight, so John Roberts had to come defend him. He writes, that is a remarkable view of the judicial role, remarkably wrong, lost in the false pretense of judicial humility at the dissent

espouses is a claim to power so radical, so destructive that it required a second founding to undo. Justice Harlan knew better. One of the dissent's decrees, in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior dominant ruling class of citizens. There's no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. That was the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. John Roberts literally used the Plessy dissent to try to slap down this black woman on the Supreme Court. That's right. Really? Really, y'all? Now, let me find.

So I got to read to y'all how clueless Clarence Thomas is. So check this out. He goes, yet Justice Jackson would replace the second founder's vision with an organizing principle based on race. In fact, on her view, almost all of life's outcomes may be so unhesitatingly ascribed to race. This is so, she writes, because of statistical disparities among different racial groups. Even if some whites have a lower household net worth than some blacks, what matters to Justice Jackson is that the average white household

has more wealth than the average black household. By a long shot. Okay, that wasn't his opinion. This, he writes, y'all, this is what Clarence Thomas said. This lore is not and has never been true. Even in the segregated South where I grew up,

individuals were not the sum of their skin color. Boy, bye. Then as now, not all disparities are based on race not all people are racist and not all differences between individuals are ascribable to race put simply the fate of abstract categories of wealth statistics is not the same as the fate of a given set of flesh and blood human beings

he's quoting Thomas Sowell is not the same as the fate of a given set of flesh and blood human beings. He's quoting Thomas Sowell. Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. No, she didn't. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans. Lord, while I'm looking for this, Greg, help me out here.

Yes, sir. What page? Did you see the page number on the PDF? What page? I don't have the page number up. No. Okay, not a problem. What I'm looking for right now with Brown Jackson is when she made, y'all, she said. Put the 103.

Put the 103, I think. I'm just going to paraphrase it, Greg. When she said, this boy's arguments are so stupid, I don't even have enough time to blow them out the water. Yes.

She literally said his straw man arguments. Yes. I think you probably look at, I'm sure you are, in footnote 103 of her concurrence, I'm sorry, her dissent, she

destroys him. This is very important. And again, listen, y'all, Black Star Network, nowhere else, I just want to just pause here and make this observation roll. I know some of y'all think Rachel Maddow is brilliant. Maybe she is,

maybe she isn't. I'm not sure. But what in the history of black news media, where have you seen a host read from Supreme Court opinion and dismantle it in black media? This ain't the hee-hee-ha-ha reality

television. This is a different thing going on right now. And I also want to thank you, Roland, by the way, because not only were we able to interview Corey Robin for the Black Table, we interviewed Professor Kernel Roosevelt at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book on that second reconstruction. Only on the Black Star Network are you going to get behind

the noise to deal with what Katonji Brown Jackson is dealing with. In footnote 103, what she says is Clarence Thomas made up an opinion in my name and then attacked it. So she says Justice Thomas' prolonged attack, ante at pages 49 to 55, responds to a dissent I did not write in order to assail an admissions program that is not the one UNC is prepping. She called that MF is chasing a pink elephant. She said, what is a pink elephant? A pink elephant argument

is when you say, don't think of a pink elephant. And all you can think of is pink elephants. She says Clarence Thomason made up a concept of erasing his mind that he's obsessed with that doesn't exist in reality and then he tried to make me up to attack me, and then she dismantles him. Chris Thomas is sick.

And Katonji Brown Jackson was on him like Omar was on everybody in the wire. She brought the pump shotgun for his ass. I think that's probably what you, I think maybe that footnote you're looking for. Footnote 103 is on page 25. Oh, no, no, no. Right. I love this here.

Recy. She says Justice Thomas ignites too many to well, Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list or fully extinguish here. The takeaway is that those the takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race, quote, a classic pink elephant paradox, refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room, the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great nation's full potential. Worse still, by insisting that obvious truths be ignored, that they prevent our problem-solving institutions from directly addressing the real import and impact of social racism and government-imposed racism, anti-at-55 Thomas J. concurring, thereby deterring our collective progression toward becoming a society where race no longer matters.

I mean, she was like, boy, you just offering straw man arguments that don't amount to nothing. And I just don't even have enough time to extinguish them here. I mean, it's like, you know, we all get into these arguments on social media with somebody who just don't know what the fuck they talking about. And it's just like, we aren't even in the same realm of the conversation. You are on some whole other shit that I don't even have time to properly respond to. But I just have to

say, I would be remiss if I didn't say this. Fuck the founding fathers. This whole notion that like, oh, we're going to get the founding fathers. They own slaves. Fuck them. Fuck them and their stupid ass vision. This was not a race blind country. This was not

equality for all country unless you buy into their notion that enslaved people are not in fact human beings. So I just it's absurd and it's gaslighting how these white supremacist justice, including Justice Thomas, try to sit up there and act like they are showing deference to the notion of colorblindness by invoking people that fucking did not see black people as human beings, let alone women as human beings. That's a whole nother story, too. So I just think that we're having a discussion on the terms and with notions

that were bullshit from the very beginning and to carry them forward is just delusional, but it's intentional. It's working as designed. It's going to have the impact that they wanted to have. The only thing is there's going to be collateral damage with people that they typically wouldn't want to do harm to, which is not black people. It's the non-white or non-white and non-black people and the women who are white who have benefited greatly from the strides and from the kinds of protections that affirmative action has put in place. But let's all be clear. Black people still had to work 10 times as hard. I remember when I was applying for jobs, moving to the DMV, I took my race off of applications and I immediately started getting more, you know, more calls back because I bought into the notion of diversity and equity. I'm black. That's going to help me. Shit. It sure the fuck didn't. As soon as they didn't know if I was a

black girl, I got all the damn calls. And so we know as black people in this country, when we're going for a job, when we fill out those applications, if you check black, you definitely not getting ahead. Despite what these white propagandists and racists have been trying to tell us and shove down our throat about how diversity and inclusion is disproportionately impacting us. It hasn't. So go to hell. You know, Lauren, she nails it. And look, we know it. What's that fool Vivek, whatever he was running for Republican. He didn't run for president. He did some videos at the time. But oh, there's no systemic racism. I'm like, fool, shut up. Reeson made the point there. Yeah, you take, look, colorblind studies

have been done. Exact same resume, white-sounding name, black-sounding name. The white person got 50% more callbacks than the black person. So let's sit here and not sit here and play this silly little game. We know what these cats are doing. This is where we got to learn to call it what it is. And I got to go ahead here and go there. Anybody who's watching me right now and anybody who's listening to me right now, if you chose to vote

for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, you can kiss my black ass. Because all of those folks who got caught up in Bernie, Bernie didn't get the nomination, I didn't vote for Hillary. Guess what? That's how we got today's decision. How about that? Hillary beats, if Hillary beats, and let me be perfectly clear,

Hillary wasn't no perfect candidate, ain't no perfect candidate, but I know she damn well was better and smarter than Trump. I know damn well she would have never appointed a Neil Gorsuch, a Brett Kavanaugh, an Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. And so, again, all y'all folk who commenting today on this decision, and if you kept your sorry ass at home, and if you didn't register, and if you did vote, and you voted for Trump over Hillary, kiss my ass. You sound like the dude, Latino dude, who used to clean, he used to do some yard stuff or whatever. I can't remember what he did.

It clicked some inside. I don't know. My wife hired him. I don't know. And so, oh, he was a big ass Trumper. Oh, man, he loved him some Donald Trump. Until Donald Trump started deporting that ass. And when Donald Trump started going off on them damn immigrants and building the wall,

oh, it's amazing how his tone changed on his Facebook page. And guess what? That's why we use hashtag, we tried to tell you. So, again, if you're one of of those folks who complaining after the fact, just like all the white women were whining outside the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision, shut your ass up because today is what happens when you do not vote. That's real. Lauren, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I do think about Robbie Mook today. I think about Robbie Mook a lot today because it is the moment created by Hillary Clinton losing.

You know, the irony of this whole Clarence Thomas, Katonji Brown, Jackson boxing match that we saw that she really won in the first round, is that you have Clarence Thomas arguing that somehow, you know, race shouldn't matter, and of course, so sort of disregarding history, disregarding everything that has to do with black history. He just has this sort of contempt. It's kind of strange. It always sort of rears its head at these moments. And it's really strange. And the fact that he was so motivated by what she said, it's just an ultimate example of a hit dog hollering. But the ultimate irony of it is that the reason that he is on the U.S. Supreme Court is the very thing that he is arguing against. He, in fact, is a quota. He's

not even affirmative action. Anybody who believes that he's qualified to be there is joking. I mean, this man never speaks. He never says anything. And then all of a sudden he does say something that motivates him is something like this, usually race. And it's a shame. You know, I just cannot wait until he's gone. I cannot wait until he's off the court. He's exactly what a lot of these sort of racist right-wing Republicans love. They always find some black clown to sort of do their bidding, and they have found it in him. And he's dangerous. He's just dangerously stupid. And the reason that he was angry today is that he got smoked, and he got smoked red hot. And it's good to see because, you know, Sotomayor is the other big player in this game.

Sotomayor really brings it. I don't think Kagan brings it as hard. And by the way, Kagan's the other one that's never had a black law clerk in history. We should check that. But at any rate, Katonji is really, I know a lot, we heard a lot of stuff about Katonji. Remember when she got nominated, she might be too conservative. She might be corporate. She went to Harvard, this and that.

Well, she's showing up big time in these opinions because I can't wait to read the rest of it. But what I've already read already shows me that this was a great pick. This is a great moment for President Biden. Indeed, indeed. Folks, I got to do a quick break. When we come back, we do have to pay homage to Christine Farris, the last sibling of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She passed away today at the age of 95. We'll tell her story next. Roland Martin, unfiltered on the Black Star Network.

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Venmo is RM Unfiltered. Zelle is Roland at RolandSMartin.com. On the next Get Wealthy with me, Deborah Owens, America's Wealth Coach, I'm sure you've heard that saying that the only thing guaranteed is death and taxes. The truth is that the wealthy get wealthier by understanding tax strategy. And that's exactly the conversation that we're going to have on the next Get Wealthy, where you're going to learn wealth hacks that help you turn your wages into wealth. Taxes is one of the largest expenses you've ever had. You've really got to know how to manage that thing

and get that under control so that you can do well. That's right here on Get Wealthy, only on Blackstar Network. What's up, everybody? It's your girl Latasha from the A. And you're watching Roland Martin Unfiltered. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Folks, Dr. Christine Farris passed away today at the age of 95. She was the last living sibling of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She was more than just his sister.

She was the first child of Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Spelman College and later master's degrees in social foundations of education and special education from Columbia University. She was a founding board member of the King Center, founded by Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, in 1968. That same year, they began a memorial library documenting Dr. King's journey in the civil rights movement. She was one of the longest-serving tenured professors at Spelman College, teaching at the all-women's institution for more than five decades.

She was also one of the longest-serving members of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her grandfather, father, and brother served as pastors the family's gonna hold a news conference tomorrow at the King Center at 11 a.m. Eastern Ferris spoke at the dedication in 2011 of the MLK monument in Washington DC. I stand here today as the person who knew Martin Luther King Jr. longer than anyone now alive. I was there in our home the day that he was born on January 15, 1929. He was my little brother, and I watched him grow and develop into a man who was destined for a very special kind of greatness. It's been quite a journey from that cold January day more than 82 years ago on down to today when I first laid my eyes on my baby brother. Now I'm standing here alongside an African American president at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall. During my life, I've witnessed a baby become a great hero to humanity who provides hope and inspiration

for freedom-loving people everywhere. So I just want to say to all the young people coming up, great dreams can come true, and America is a place where you can make it happen. And I know that our president will agree with me on this. It years ago. The dream of justice, equality, and brotherhood he shared with us on that sweltering August afternoon. It's really the heart and soul of the American dream. It's what this country must always be about so we can light the way forward to a new era of peace and prosperity for all people in all nations. And I remember another lovely afternoon in 1983 when another president of the United States signed into law a bill to name my brother's birthday a federal holiday.

That, too, was a day of hope and healing. I don't think my brother's legacy could get much larger, but I was wrong because here I am overjoyed and humbled to see this great day when my brother Martin takes his symbolic place on the National Mall near America's greatest presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt. This is just overwhelming.

My brother was never one to seek great honors. In fact, he was self-effacing, and he was amazed and humbled to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace back in 1964. I want to thank the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity for having the vision, commitment, and determination to conceive this project and to see it through by honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with such a wonderful statue on the National Mall. You have ensured that his legacy will provide a source of inspiration for people from all over the world for generations to come. My brother was an alpha himself and he was deeply proud of his fraternity brothers when they carried to the aid of our nonviolent freedom struggle again and again

with urgently needed contributions and volunteer support. And now, against all odds, you have built this beautiful monument which brings honor to our country and hope to coming generations. And in closing, I want to thank each of you for joining us today. Your presence is also an affirmation of my brother's legacy and the great blessings of diversity in America. Let this wonderful day mark another step toward the fulfillment of the dream and let all hearts be joined together as we move forward into the future, united and determined to create the beloved community in America and throughout the world. I thank you. One of the things that often happens, Lauren, when you are the sister or the brother of a prominent person, people only equate you as this. But so many people, women who've gone through Spelman, have talked about the importance of Christine Farris on their education.

No, absolutely. And I think I met her at the groundbreaking, not that ceremony, but the one before. I guess it must have been before 2006. Really nice lady. Very nice lady. And I was really sad to see that bulletin with everything else that was going on. I was really sad to see that. I tell you what, Reesey, I think she probably gave dorothy hype a run for her money with them church hats every time i saw every time i saw her she always every time i saw she was always dressed to the nines always just absolutely stunning um and i love that you

mentioned that because you know black women are so multifaceted. We could be powerful and dynamic and look damn good in the process. So I'm glad that you are paying homage to her and her invaluable contributions beyond just simply. And I don't say simply in a pejorative way, but beyond just being the sibling of the great late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Great. I mean, I'm almost overcome, Roland. Again, this is the importance of this network. This is the importance of this show. And this is the importance of you as a journalist who has got both feet planted firmly in our community. When the president of the United States spoke at Ebenezer recently and Sister

Bernice King was there and talking and then Professor Ferris came in, in her wheelchair, which she only used in the last couple of years. You know, it's like time stops. These last couple of days I've been in Atlanta, spent part of yesterday and today at the King Center. And of course the news came today. And just sitting there with the women and men who are the park rangers for the National Park Service, who take care of the original—well, not the original, A.D. Williams, her grandfather, built that church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, starting in 1914.

There was a young sister today who works there, and she was talking about how Professor Ferris was celebrating her birthday in that church, even as she continued to be a member of the huge new sanctuary across the street, Ebenezer, where, of course, Reverend Warnock is the pastor, our friend, brother. She said that, you know, students from the Atlanta University Center would perform at the legacy church, Ebenezer. And to a person, the sisters who run the bookstore next to the King home, the brothers who work outside and maintain the King campus, the King Center campus, they talked about Christine Ferris. You know, this sister who spent, as you say, five decades on the campus of Spelman College,

listening to students at Spelman, listening, knowing that she took that job in 1958 to teach freshman reading and expanded that literacy quest over decades, not just Spelman students, but to many others. Condolences to her children, to her nie niece and nephews. Condolences to everyone whose lives that she touched. Her husband, Isaac Ferris, and of course Roland, you know better than I do, because again, you've been over here many times.

Auburn Avenue, Isaac Ferris, her husband who worked for the Atlanta Daily World. When you see Christine Ferris, you don't just see an individual. You see institutions and the power of institutions to shape lives and to continue to shape lives. If she were white, this would be all over all of the press everywhere. But because she is black, it falls to the Black Star Network to do what you do every time one of our giants makes transition, which is to pause, to keep passing of a giant. So I wish I could be there tomorrow for the family press conference.

But in a way, it doesn't matter because her legacy lives in us. Thank you for doing this brother, as always. Christine King-Ferris passed away at the age of 95. And so we certainly honor her. Lauren, Reesey, Greg, I appreciate it. I want to thank our president and legal panel that was on with us as well. Great conversation. And again, a conversation you're not going to get anywhere else. If you want to understand why black-owned media matters, and let me be real clear here, kill the music. What I'm trying to get you to understand is this is not just about, again,

entertainment and sports and things along those lines. We have to have news and information in our community. We must be enlightened and educated about what is going on. That's why we do what we do. And so it trips me out when I see these fools, man, you're always begging for money. But it's amazing. They don't say nothing when NPR does it. They don't say nothing when PBS does it. Yet here we are trying to walk in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells Barnett and John H. Johnson and Robert Abbott and Charlotte Bass and all of the historic folks who have been in the black press operating in the 21st century.

What we do on this show, folks, nobody else is doing. I'm telling you this. Byron Allen has two hours of news a day on his network, The Griot. Two. We got five. My show is two hours a day. for Roger Muhammad is two hours a day. Then we have a weekly show. So whether it's Deborah Owens, Jackie Hood Martin, whether it's Greg Carr, whether it's Stephanie Humphrey, whether it's Dee Barnes. Y'all, that's five hours of black owned news and information every single day. That's why Black Star Network matters. So first and foremost, we got literally, we're almost at 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube. We need you downloading our app. We own it. We control it. And that's critically important. So please do so. Download the Black Star Network app, Apple phone, Android phone, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, Samsung Smart TV.

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bucks. Uh, thank you for being black media. Uh, and so, uh, Gregory just sent 50, Chris Young just sent 25. Y'all I'm only going to do this for 60 more seconds. We're way over time. We normally don't go that long. Chris Young just sent $25 for RMU 2023. And so you're seeing Saltay Dean just sent. And so you're now understanding Vincent Williams. I appreciate that $4. And so, folks, all of this matters. We are doing the work, and so that's what's important. And so we appreciate it. Louise sent $20. Y'all, I'm only doing this for 30 more seconds, and then I got to go. I got to get out of here. Charles Berry sent $100. Thanks a bunch. Y'all can give when the show is over. I saw y'all giving on YouTube. I saw folks giving $20 and $50 and $40.

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I'll see you tomorrow. From New Orleans, I'm Roland Martin. Holla! Folks, Black Star Network is here. Hold no punches! I'm real revolutionary right now. Black power. Support this man, Black Media.

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