Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson - Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He also wrote "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America." He joins Kate and Oliver this week to share what he teaches in his courses, the history of systemic racism in America, slavery, how literature and statistics were used to push narratives, where we go from here and much more.  Executive Producers: Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, and Sim SarnaProduced by Allison BresnickEditor: Josh WindischMusic by Mark HudsonThis show is brought to you by Cloud10 and powered by Simplecast.This episode is sponsored by Helix and Four Sigmatic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. September is a great time to travel, especially because it's my birthday in September, especially internationally. Because in the past, we've stayed in some pretty awesome Airbnbs in Europe. Did we've one in France, we've one in Greece,

we've actually won in Italy a couple of years ago. Anyway, it just made our trip feel extra special. So if you're heading out this month, consider hosting your home on Airbnb with the co-host feature you can hire someone local to help manage everything. Find a co-host at Airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, it's your favorite jersey girl, Gia Judice. Welcome to Casual Chaos, where I share my story.

This week, I'm sitting down with Vanderpump Rural Star, Sheena Shea. I don't really talk to either of them, if I'm being honest. There will be an occasional text, one way or the other, from me to Ariana. Maybe a happy birthday from Ariana to me. I think the last time I talked to Tom, it was like, congrats on America's Got Talent. This is a combo you don't want to miss. Listen to Casual Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It may look different, but Native Culture is alive.

My name is Nicole Garcia, and on Burn Sage, Burn Bridges, we aim to explore that culture. Somewhere along the way, it turned into this full-fledged award-winning comic shop. That's Dr. Lee Francis IV, who opened the first Native comic bookshop. Explore his story along with many other Native stories on the show, Burn Sage, Burn Bridges. Listen to Burn Sage Burn Bridges on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kate Hudson. And my name is Oliver Hudson. We wanted to do something that highlighted our relationship.

And what it's like to be siblings. We are a sibling rivalry. No, no. Sibling revelry. Don't do that with your mouth. Sibling revelry. That's good. I was really excited about this because I just want to talk to a professor.

You know, I want to talk to like a historian, someone who lives and breathes and understands and studies this, teaches it in school. And I really was just excited to be a student. Yeah, so we did. We got to. We talked with Dr. Khalil Mohammed. He's a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He's an author. He wrote the condemnation of blackness, race crime, and the making of modern urban America. You know, it was, we went to school. You know, I went to school. I went from Boulder, two years in Boulder to Harvard. Yeah, I think I even say that in the episode, that's a far cry from Harvard. I didn't even go to college.

But you know what? Look, we're learning as we go. Honestly, this was one of those moments where when we were done with this, I kind of got off of the call. And I was like, you know, why have I never learned this? Yeah. It does make you kind of realize there's just a lot that we don't know. There's a lot that we're not taught in school.

And I just really appreciated him taking the time to, discuss matters of race in America and... Well, we talked about systemic racism, really, you know, not just the buzzword of systemic. He really sort of broke down what that means of what systemic racism in America means, you know, slavery, how and when policing began, and how literature and statistics were used to sort of push this narrative. It was a lesson.

It was a lesson where we got to sort of be one-on-one with a harbors. professor and pick his brain. And it made me just want to read more. It also, it also made me want to go to Harvard. So I don't want to go to Harvard. I just want to take his class on a Zoom class. Just us. Just me and that. That's it. Anyway, here is Dr. Khalil Mohammed. You're a professor at Harvard. Yep. is history, race, policy? Policy, yes, yeah.

Well, I'm excited to be a student for a couple hours or an hour and a half. I know. This is the first time we get to, we're going to Harvard. I know, I'm so excited. I went to Boulder for two years, and it was two years for a reason. I had to get the hell out of there.

Let's just say Oliver was a far cry away from going to Harvard. Well, I just didn't apply myself. Where did you grow up, Cleo? I grew up on the south side of Chicago. You did? I actually grew up in the neighborhood that Obama started his political career

and still owns a home. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's called High Park. High Park, that's right. And when, at what point in your young life, I'm assuming, did you sort of feel that this was going to be your path, you know what I mean? Education, you know, when did you feel,

did you know that at an early age? No, I actually thought I was going to be a business person and make a lot of money. I, you know, I came of age in the 80s when greed was good, right? That was, that was kind of the ethos of the time. And for being a post-civil rights baby, the way that my parents understood racial progress in part was like being successful going into the corporate sector. I did that. Turned out. It was like, oh, not quite for me. And then I pivoted and decided to go to get a history degree. What was you remember the moment? I mean, was there a moment we were like, wow, wait a minute, this isn't really what I want to do. This isn't for me. Do you remember that pivot? Long story short, Rodney King was beaten nearly the death by the California Highway Patrol,

my junior year. Officers were subsequently acquitted. Next year was the uprising in LA. And all of that was like a Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner moment for me as a then 18, 19 year old. And I had a lot of questions, didn't quite understand. Nothing in high school had prepared me to understand race and racism, certainly not in the present. And also being a kid of Chicago, nothing about the way that the nation had explained Bull Connor and German Shepherds and Southern racist made sense in L.A. And so that's what led me to begin to think more deeply. Like, maybe a career in business isn't going to answer this for me, maybe something else. What were those questions, though, that you were asking after the L.A. riots, you know,

when you were sort of, when you were making your pivot, I mean, what were those questions? Well, how could this happen? How could, how could, uh, the, beating a Rodney King caught on videotape and in the acquittal of all the officers. I mean, it just didn't make any sense at all. And more particularly because as an African-American student at an Ivy League, I was at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, we as black students were also being questioned by a conservative presence on campus that saw us as having been beneficiaries of unfair affirmative action policy,

some of us were taunted, engaging in various on-campus activities. So I was also living with a certain kind of anti-black hostility on campus that then coupled with Rodney King, having grown up in what, by all accounts, was a somewhat idyllic, middle-class, integrated community on the South Side of Chicago in High Park, where President Obama has spent a good chunk of his adult time. So from childhood to college to these national events unfolding, I was totally confused and unprepared. How did the college deal with the Rodney King situation? Was there active conversation going on campus during that time? No. The students who were outraged by the verdict got together and did an act of civil disobedience

by essentially taking to Market Street, which is one of the main thoroughfares in Philadelphia and marching to City Hall, had nothing to do with the university. And in fact, the university had no role either negative or positives, totally neutral in our decision to protest. Where the university got involved

was because some of the energy that was expressed in the larger climate of concern about police violence was also playing out in a kind of culture war on campus, as I already mentioned, about affirmative action and many, many other things, that's where the university ended up having a problem. It had a problem of both trying to balance free speech rights for its white students who wanted to describe Martin Luther King as a communist

and Malcolm X as a hatemonger, which was what one columnist did in the student newspaper. He did it pretty regularly. And at the same time, recognized that black students who were only 5% of the population were not feeling welcomed at the University of Pennsylvania at that moment. And so that tension between those two competing principles and norms was never entirely resolved, even by the time when I left. But what about growing up, you know, did your parents, you know, where were they at as far as the education of race as a young boy? You know, did they sit you down and say, look, this is our world right now. This is going to be your world.

Yeah. So did I have the talk? Did you have the talk? I certainly had the sex talk. I remember my dad had experience. I still haven't had that with my kids yet, and they're 13. I don't know how to approach it. My dad is very deliberate.

He's a very smart guy, spent his whole career as a photojournalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for photography covering Ethiopian famine in 1985. But I don't really remember a race talk. I certainly won't remember a conversation about be careful around the police, keep your hands, at, you know, 10 and 2, don't make any sudden moves. I don't think I had that talk. My mother, interestingly, who was, you know, in many ways, first generation middle class, she went to college, ended up with a master's degree, and then later a doctorate of education. Very unusual on my mother's side of the family.

She had the kind of attitude like racism is not the problem. Ignorance is the problem. So I remember as a teenager constantly saying, that's racist. thought something was racist. And I remember her saying, well, how do you know that's just not ignorance? So I think she was trying to sort of figure out how to balance, like, not being angry about racism and in sort of enjoying being first generation middle class. She was also a school teacher, worked in a overwhelmingly black school system. So I don't really remember a race talk, to be frank. Yeah. We're in that space right now. What is

ignorance and what is racism? You know, ignorance by definition is without knowledge. know, it's okay in, it's okay to say that you're ignorant. I think that there's a negative connotation to that word for some reason, right? Right. But we can be ignorant as long as we want to sort of understand where that ignorance is coming from and try to flip it. Right. But so how do you differentiate sort of ignorance and racism now, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, in part, that's, that's the, it was my own ignorance that made me feel vulnerable in college led me to get a PhD in history. Right. It's a choice to see education as an important ingredient to doing what people call today anti-racist work, whether it's anti-racist organizing, anti-racist teaching, anti-racist scholarship, you name it.

And so part of it is that I now have a clearer sense that Americans, including myself, were systematically miseducated about the history of race and racism in the United States. Most of us were taught that racism was really the purview of individual bigots, of individual bad people who do bad things, and that we can see them, we can touch them, we can smell them. They're obvious to all of us. This is kind of like the Bull Connor and Mark Furman version of what a racist is in America. Now I know better. A lot of people are learning now for the first time. It certainly wasn't taught in school and still isn't taught in school. that racism by large is a system, a system designed to categorize people as people who are doers and workers, people who don't have the same rights and privileges. Certainly in this country, going back to slavery, people defined literally as property, as commodities, as assets that could be insured, that could be traded, that could be invested, that could be leveraged for buying other things. I mean, just incredible. And so nobody learned any of that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when I was coming of age.

And it's still not widely taught. Why do you think it's not widely taught? You know, it's such a huge part of our history. Yeah. Well, I think that knowledge is power. Knowledge is politics. The story we tell about who we are as a nation is part of the myth making that makes society's work.

Every society has a kind of origin story of myth. Our particular myth has never had room to take full stock of how the basic wealth creation in this country was born of land theft from indigenous people and labor exploitation from people of African descent. And Americans have been very prickly about coming to terms with that because they see it as a zero-sum story. If we tell more about slavery and racism and what happened to the native populations, we'll be telling less about how great we are. And that's cost us in many ways, but it's most especially cost people of African descent. It's cost, you know, in different chapters, people of Mexican ancestry. And it certainly cost the indigenous populations of this country. Yeah.

It's like the more you, the more we learn about, like I remember when I first read the people's history, you know. And that's impressive. Yeah. Well, I mean, we went to such a progressive school. And so it was, you know, the cool thing if you read it from, you know, front to back. But, you know, you start reading it, and I remember we used to argue in a senior year and school, like everybody used to argue about why we're not taught these things. And you realize that it does, it sort of breaks down all these things that are celebrated and have been celebrated for so long are just destroyed immediately when you start to recognize what they're really founded upon. I was watching an interview that you did, and this, I think it was Bill, Bill Moyers.

And he was talking about history as interpretation. What is truth and what isn't? How do we know what, which interpretation of history is the correct interpretation? Right. I wanted to see if you could speak to that a little bit. Yeah, well, so it's a really great point, this question about interpretation of the past. So one easy way that I try to describe how history is nothing more than a disciplined interpretation of a collection of facts about the past because it's hard to recreate all the conditions of the past.

And the further we get away from it, the harder it is to see everything unfold as it did. But if you could understand that, then you certainly can relate it to the fact that we could all read today's newspaper, right? journalists generally, particularly mainstream journalists, are bound by the professional standards of journalism to get the facts right. The opinion writers interpret, the reading public interprets, but the facts are supposed to be accurate. And yet, and still, we could read the same newspaper and come away with a completely opposite view of what the hell is going on at any given moment. So imagine when you're looking back 300 years that in many ways, it was never easy in the president to figure out what the hell just happened or how to make sense of it.

And it doesn't necessarily, the facts don't get any clearer. What gets clear is that you have a sense of hindsight. So what you have is like, oh, like people thought that was going to happen and it didn't turn out to be that way. Or people assume that this kind of president was going to lead in this way. And it turned out they didn't. So history gives us perspective and hindsight, but we still debate over the facts. we still debate over how much weight to give to the facts. And in that sense, it is like a lawyer's debate between two advocates fighting over how to best interpret what's happened.

So then how do you pick out, how do you discover the truth? And this is a question that I wrestle with even today because I watch all news just to see the different angles, to see where everyone's coming from. Yeah. How do we interpret the truth, even today, you know? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, probably the best standard would be the preponderance of evidence standard in a civil trial as opposed to a criminal case where, you know, it's beyond reasonable doubt. So if you think about the preponderance of evidence standard, historians rely upon the cross-examination of different kinds of evidence. archival evidence is what we describe as the papers, the private thoughts, the letters. You know, places where people tend to be more honest because they're not subject to public scrutiny. All of us say things that we know the public is listening that is slightly more beneficial to our personal reputation than we might say if we know no one is listening.

So historians apply the same standards to different kinds of evidence. And you try to come away with enough cross-examination of different kinds of. of evidence that you say, we have a pretty good sense of what Alexander Hamilton intended, or what Thomas Jefferson intended. Some things are also easy to document. It is easy to know what the founding father's generation thought about people of African descent. Because they said a lot of things publicly. You don't actually have to dig beneath the surface and intuit their real hearts and minds. White supremacy as an idea in the United States of America, as a colonial idea, as a founding idea, as an antebellum idea, was a robust defense of the fundamental

idea that there were hierarchies, different kinds of races with a certain northern European type at the top, and then southern and eastern Europeans closer to the middle, and then people of Asian ancestry, and then people of African ancestry at the bottom. I mean, that's the way things were until the kind of the middle of the 20th century. So you don't need to be a detective to figure out what people were thinking about races for most of American history. So when you think of the Constitution, like how does that sit with you? Just generally, just that document. Yeah. So the Constitution is a brilliant document predicated on a universal idea that didn't apply to everybody. Right. And so what's brilliant about it is, as Frederick Douglass, the most famous 19th century abolitionist said, is that,

in the words themselves captures the idea of a society that I want to live in. But we don't live in that society because at the end of the day, the founders adopted a language in a set of ideas that privileged them as property men of elite standing because what they were really pissed off about was the way that their peers in Great Britain were mistreating them, treating them like slaves, taking advantage of them, not allowing them. the political rights and liberties that they felt they were endowed with. And so the language they captured was brilliant, but it was always self-serving. It was self-interested. And of course, there was a degree. There were anti-slavery believers, and there were pure-hearted, what we call progressives today, who were among the founding generation. But they were not the dominant voice. But these are some brilliant men. How are they not understanding, or if they are, they're just sweeping under the rug. They're hypocrisy. Yeah, well, you know. Like, you know, like, you know,

You know what I mean? It's hard to get into their heads, but... A lot of them understood the contradiction, but it's the same contradiction that many of us live with, right? So if I'm a liberal New Yorker and I moved to Brooklyn in Bed-Stuy that used to be working class in black and reflected years of systemic neglect, and now I feel good about living in this community because it's safer, there's cool black people, Issa Raig, you know, is running around. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, where am I going to send my kid to school? And I'm like, oh, I'm not going to send my kid to school because there's all those black people that go there. I want a special school just for my kid. So I just give that example because we live with contradiction. All of us make choices that don't match our principles or at least the self that we want people to know about us.

That's deep, man. Because it's hard to root that shit out. That's deep. When you're teaching, you know, when you're starting a class, where do you even begin? Oh, man. Well, it's been really easy lately. Well, yeah. What courses do you teach?

Yeah, so I teach, so at the Kennedy School, I teach a course called Race, Inequality, and American Democracy. And I start with, believe it or not, Bree Newsom, who took down the Confederate flag on the steps of the Columbia, South Carolina. courthouse back in 2015, just after the Emanuel Nine were killed in South Carolina, in Charleston. I also connect her to Frederick Douglass, who gave a stirring speech on July 4th. What is your Fourth of July to the slave, which is a piercing Jeremiahic critique of the founding contradictions of American society? He gave that speech in 1852 in Rochester. I then connect him to Donald Trump, who has articulated all of these robust ideas about making America great, which are in total contradiction to what Frederick Douglass thought 150 years ago.

But here's the little fun part. Donald Trump was praising Frederick Douglass as a great American when he visited the new Smithsonian African-American Museum. So like, it doesn't make any sense, right? Yeah. And then the final person I open with is Jeremiah Wright. Now, you may not remember who Jeremiah. right is, but he was Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years who, he and Michelle, who Fox News turned into a caricature as a reverse racist, a black man who hated white people. But what I show

them is if you listen to the actual speech that got him in so much, quote, unquote, trouble with, you know, not God bless America, goddamn America, all of his facts were absolutely correct. The critique he made of American society was absolutely correct. But the politics of his critique were out of fashion at the time that Barack Obama was running for office. So when you put all that back together, a black woman activist taking on the Confederate flag, a president who has accelerated white nationalists and white supremacist neo-Nazism in the United States, and a black pastor who was trying to speak truth to power, certainly inspired Michelle and Barack, who they subsequently had to quote unquote distance themselves

from. And then Frederick Douglass, one of the most eloquent truth-tellers in all of American history. So, you know, it blows people's heads away because, like, all these things are collapsing on each other, and we're talking about 150 years of history. Sounds like a really amazing class. Do you find that your students are expressive in the class and incredibly engaged, or do you find there's, like, trepidation in how to communicate some of these subjects? Yeah, yeah. So first of all, Some people might assume that I have mostly black students. That's not possible where I teach because we only have like 4% black population in a school in various programs of the school.

And they're about 800 students who attend the Kennedy School. They're all graduate students. And so my classes are about 80% white or Asian. And I have a small number of Latinx students and black students. They make up about 20%. So the students, the white students, many of them are self-select. students who are interested in this stuff. Some of them don't know a whole lot.

Some of them have learned a few things. And so it's a mix. But they warm up. And to be honest, we think probably the biggest takeaway from who my students are and what they represent. First of all,

they're going to be legislators. They're going to run things. They're going to be, you know, change agents because that's what the school produces. But also, they are the kind of people who will admit that, hey, man, I got the best education in this country office. I went to private school.

Here I am at Harvard. of them went to Harvard undergrad and they're like, I feel like a freaking idiot in this class because no one ever taught me this stuff. I mean, I watched a piece where you were talking about really starting at a kindergarten level, like how do we start to implement some of these studies immediately into the classroom? You know, I think it's vital that these things are. Well, it's creating different adults and you actually said that, you know, different adults. And I mean, it's an interesting topic right now because there is an education process that has to happen that I'm dealing with with my kids.

And, you know, I personally, you know, am trying to educate myself as much as possible, number one. And then I'm trying to figure out how to communicate some of these things to my children who really, they understand. what's going on but they don't really understand because they're look at it at some points and they're like well why is this happening i don't feel this way right this isn't the way that i feel but at the same time it's important to understand your history absolutely and i think sometimes maybe the white people are wrestling with do we feel like we're tainting our kids or we let them just be these free-spirited children yeah yeah so what you're describing is that if i didn't have the talk as an African American student or a young person that our parents didn't do, which is not, I mean,

I would say a lot of black kids do have the talk. But if I didn't have it, think of the millions of white kids who didn't have it when I was coming of age and don't have it now. And so the problem in part is that it's not that not talking about race to your child or taking some colorblind approach, which is akin to saying, we don't teach our kids to see color, don't notice color, we all treat everybody the same. The problem is that they're learning both because of the society we live is profoundly unequal and that you can make assessments about who's doing well and who's not by simply opening your eyes and watching who are the essential workers and who are not, what kinds of stereotypes exist about people. And in this day and age for kids,

Like the idea that any parent of like an eight-year-old thinks their kids not seeing what's happening in the world is totally absurd. So social psychologists call this the problem of racial socialization, that basically white kids are being racially socialized. They are learning about race, but they're learning about it in ways that actually reproduce the worst racist cultural stereotypes about non-white people, because that's how the world is currently organized. So what I say is like if you think that your kid is less likely to end up with a child as a teenager or to contract a sexually transmitted disease or to have really retrograde toxic masculinist thoughts about women and girls, then the best way to do that is to not say anything about gender or to talk about the way that we treat people or non-gender conforming folks. No, of course not. Absinence only is a terrible idea as a form of education, and it's been proven. So we know that if we want our kids to protect their bodies and we want them to protect other people's bodies and to respect difference in terms of gender and sexuality, then we have to actually teach them. And it's not a one-off lesson. It's not a woman's history lesson. It is a lesson baked into both what we do as parents, but it's also baked into what we expect to happen in school. And so we need to do the same thing when it comes to understanding race and racism in other forms of social difference because we know that the consequences are lethal.

They cost us. They cost individual lives. They hold up all kinds of inequalities and forms of discrimination that most people say, well, I didn't sign up for that. But in a way, you're part of it if you're teaching your child to, you know, or protecting their innocence is the better way to put it. Mm-hmm. helix helix helix helix helix helix i always want to do jingles when i when i start the ad i was i wish there was like a jingle i can sing or make up like helix sleep your best night or helix put your head on the pillow no helix your back will never hurt something like that that's free helix that's free that's free

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full discount applied at checkout can't really beat that i actually have a question this may be a controversial question i'm not even sure but i sort of used my own experience as a child whose dad left him right my our father left and was not around his father left him and you know it continued on in sort of the Hudson male, you know, to the patriarchy leaving their kids, right? I wanted to break the cycle in a sense. I just, I felt it. I never wanted to be that person as a young man. So should one have any compassion for a child, a newborn of racism? Meaning, did they have a chance to think for themselves? They were born into a family. family of racists, so to speak, and this is all that they knew. You know, how do we break those

patterns? How do we break those cycles? Is it their fault necessarily when you have no choice? There is no free thinking. This is who you're going to be. This is who my parents are, so I don't have much of a choice. Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of compassion for children who grow up in, you know, staunch racist households. There's no question about that. That's why schools are places that build our sense of civic well-being, places that promote democracy. I mean, school is not just some career builder so that you can get a job one day, as people often think about it. The whole point of school was to socialize a sense of collective responsibility. How do you learn the social contract that we're all supposed to live by?

You learn it in school. It's a pledge of allegiance, right? I think what's really interesting about what's happening right now is the sort of unveiling of how corrupt our institutions are, how messed up from the school system, the bureaucracy, and they're antiquated, the curriculums, what children are learning and the money going into the school systems. And then you have police, which, you know, we'll get into that institution. Then you have the government and the corruption inside of the government. And, you know, I've never spoken of these things because it's something that is polarizing. And sometimes I like to just be Switzerland. But the reality is, is that right now what's amazing about this flare up in history that we're living in now is this, to me, is that it's like sort of the veil being lifted. It's like, oh, now we can really talk about how corrupt these, you know, that these institutions have to change for.

this to change. We need to talk about race now, not colorblindness. Like there is a real, it's like it is about race. Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, sorry I didn't. Well, no, you, you actually, your riff there is really important because part of what you're describing is a lot of American share a mistrust of our public agencies. Now, they mistrust them for different reasons. So if I'm a southerner and I believe the government is evil, then I may mistrust it because I think the government's doing bad things. If I'm a northern liberal, I may mistrust government because the local schools aren't working or they're wasting money or I feel like they should be doing more. So there's a lot of mistrust. And the thing that I would say that is not so obvious is that we've had about four decades of various leaders in our country at all levels, federal, state, local.

kind of breaking government on purpose. And why would we have political leaders break government on purpose? Because if you have a sense that government's working against your interests, bingo, like, let's get rid of it. If you have a sense that you want to keep more of your money because the people who benefit from government

are, as Mitt Romney once said, takers instead of makers, then the hell with government. Why should we need it? Or if you're a working-class African-American and government looks like the way the police treats you, then you don't want government in your life either because it's abusive. So there's a lot of ways in which government not only hasn't been working, but it's also been kind of deliberately sabotaged.

That's partly a consequence of Reagan Revolution. Partly, I mean, he named it. He said, you know, evil is government itself. But Trump shows us, for example, that across agencies, like, you don't want the EPA to work, hire a fossil fuel person to run the EPA. You don't want the State Department to work. Don't replace diplomats. Just stop hiring people. So we're seeing in this moment a very extreme, deliberate effort to make a lot of government fail so that it fuels, yet again, the private sector has the

answer. I'm a businessman. I can run America. Business people are wonderful. So it's complicated, but that is not something that most Americans think about, which is the deliberate sabotaging of our public sector. So when you say Switzerland, the reason why those countries, Scandinavian countries work is because the citizens of the country know that the public sector has to represent our collective interests. It has to do well because if it does well, we all benefit. But aren't we dealing, though, with, you know, I had this conversation with a friend yesterday, you know, how it's like policy and money, right? These are the two things that are needed. Okay. Policy. Everyone is so worried about their constituents. It's the people, the people have to speak. And you're seeing that now, especially on the Republican side, I'm sure there's a lot of minds that are thinking, that are feeling one thing but doing another. They have to appease. their constituents. If the people speak, then politicians and that whole process has to shift or am I not right when it comes to it? You know, I mean, everyone's answering to the people.

You answer to the people, these lawmakers. It's all about their districts. That's it. Whether they believe, whatever, what's in their heart, you know, seems to be put aside a little bit. Their integrity is compromised because they just want to be fucking reelected for the most part. Yeah. So what you're pointing out is a chicken and egg problem, right? So here I am sort of pinning the problem on the political elites and their ambivalence on one end and direct angst directed towards the system. But you're right. I mean, we have also, as citizens, been demanding, like, I don't want to pay any more taxes. I don't want to pay for a new Hudson Tunnel project to collect New Jersey to Manhattan so that Amtrak can run better because Amtrak has already bloated

the hell with the post office because, you know, who needs it anyway? So like, you're right. And the way that that we try to understand that political scientists do this more than historians is that they look at like what messages are people getting? Like how are people coming to see taxes as some kind of inherent bad when taxes is really the only means to fund our collective goods? It's the only means to get a road repaired, unless you're going to privatize the road and tell some billionaire, you can make money off the charging a toll on the road. So the degree to which people have the responsibility of demanding more of their politicians is the work that's right in front of it.

It's why people are calling for a Green New Deal, who are on the left or who are progressive, because they're like, look, Earth is about to explode and triple up into a dried-up raisin because of greenhouse emissions. And so how do we fix that? Well, we have to build an infrastructure to roll back the impact of carbon emissions and to sustain a future so that our grandchildren will have Earth. That's not going to happen because Michael Bloomberg writes a big check. He can certainly contribute to the cause, but we have to agree that we care enough about this collectively in order for that to happen. And doesn't that translate to what's happening now as far as race?

I mean, people have to get hip to what it is to understand his. a little bit more to go a little bit deeper instead of just being reactionary to some of these things that are happening. I mean, does this moment feel different to you than in your lifetime anyway? And how do we continue this shift? Absolutely. So I've been asked this question. So yes, this moment feels different in my lifetime, I've never seen anything like this. At every level that I could measure, what I'm watching on television, what I'm reading in the newspaper, the conversations I've had with my own daughter, who has been to protest last six, seven days in the a row, the teach-ins that I'm doing as a historian, the conversations I'm getting at every

level of civil society from folks in the Hollywood community who I've gotten to know in various things that I've done over the years to people who are part of very elite think tanks in this country. They're all asking the same question, how do we move forward? How do we deal with this moment? You ask the question, how do we take that momentum and sustain it? And to be frank, I think that mostly the longer people stay in the streets, the more momentum will be sustained. It's kind of as simple as that. As soon as people move into discussions behind closed doors, as soon as people hand off all of their power back to elected officials, the less likely we are to see the kind of transformation that is required at this moment. I want to add one quick

thing, though, on the climate change issue, you compared it to race in your original response. You're exactly right. Because if we think about the absurdity of not only a set of politicians, but also their constituents saying climate change is a hoax, that scientists are in some kind of liberal media conspiracy to convince us to do these things. I mean, we elected a president who pulled out of an international climate change agreement. I mean, this is not like just partisan malarkey, as Joe Biden might say. This is, Stakes could not be higher. So how do you explain people who really believe that climate change is a hoax? Well, part of it is that they have religious beliefs that trump science. They are trusting of authoritarian figures who tell them what to believe. Race is an equivalent problem. People's beliefs about race are trumping the evidence of racism,

trumping the evidence of systemic white supremacy. And so it's hard to change people's beliefs once they reach a certain age because just like learning a foreign language or learning how to play an instrument, man, it gets really tough after a certain point. So you have to invest at a younger age in order to educate people.

We need kids to be more respectful of science, obviously, and we need kids to learn a more truthful history about what happened in this country and in other parts of the world. I mean, I know this is what everybody's talking about, and it's simple, and you see it on social media. But, I mean, the simple question, what is systemic racism? Oh, man, it's a question. Yeah.

Well, systemic is becoming this buzzword. It's a buzzword. People are just using it now without understanding the meaning, the definition of it. Yeah, then you have, you know, you have like the slides and people slide over, and there's a couple statistics that talk about systemic racism and what it is. informative. And I think it's, I think a lot of people have done their own looking deeper into it. But while we have you here, I mean, what is systemic racism? Yes, yes, let's do it. All right. So exhibit A, slavery, right. Doesn't take much to convince someone like, oh, yes, slavery was a system. It was the dominant economic engine of the colonies until the revolutionary period. And then it

became a major appendage to an increasing industrial economy that emerges in the north. So if you have a hard time thinking of slavery as systemic racism, then everything else I'm going to say from now on is going to be even tougher. Okay, that's Exhibit A. Exhibit B would be most people would say, okay, a system in the South that emerges that basically says that most black people, men will work as sharecroppers and they will be cheap. it systematically by white landowners because if they try to negotiate fair terms, they might be lynched or hauled away by the local sheriff. And women will work in white people's homes taking care of their babies as domestics. And the children and the spouses of those farm workers

will not be able to go to school, will not be able to move freely through southern society because the dictates of segregation say that that's an affront to white people. So that's systemic racism, right? Not an abstraction. So then we get to this 1960s and the present, right? Now things start to get a little squishy for people because they're like, well, the civil rights movement solved this, so we don't have systemic racism anymore. All those laws fixed it. But actually, no, we'd have to go to the north to see a better example of what systemic racism looks like. So a lot of people know now that this thing called redlining is part of why African Americans have, don't have the same wealth as whites, that on average, the average black family has about $17,000. The average white family has about $170,000. Why? Because most white people's assets are bound up in their house. Why don't black people, why aren't more black people homeowners? Why don't they have more assets tied up in real estate? Because Private lenders in the early 20th century made buyers and homeowners sign restrictive covenants that said you cannot sell this house to a black person. Why would they do that? Well, one, they were practicing another form of segregation like their southern counterparts, but also because the real estate market believed that black people were an inherent risk to property values. Not because black people did anything, but because the idea of white supremacy meant that the more social

intimacy between blacks and whites, the less desirable was the community. So that moved from the private market to the federal government. By the 1930s, the federal government sanctioned redlining by building into its underwriting policies when it gave money to builders or gave reduced interest rates to homeowners, said, you can have this money, you can have a piece of the American dream as long as black people don't live in that neighborhood, as long as you don't sell the black people. And so the term redlining captures how the federal government and private lenders and banks participated in keeping black people out of white communities for most of the 20th century. Long Island in New York just did a major investigation about six months ago,

and real estate brokers are still steering black people into black neighborhoods and white people into white ones. So that's probably the most obvious of our more recent time understanding of what's systemic racism we could talk about. And was the reason that that happened where, you know, you cannot sort of integrate or commingle because you're not going to, you're not going to be able to borrow, right? is the reason that that happened because black people were considered criminals was there a criminality attached to black people then which obviously you go back in history again to catch up to the reasons why this was happening in the first place in the 30s right right so we so yeah so yeah this is complicated right you're asking me i mean we're getting into the weeds here a little bit and so you know if it gets too much pull me out but um blackness like the very symbol of blackness

was both a form of attraction. It made America unique. It shaped our culture. The obvious way to understand that is the most popular form of entertainment that America produced, the first form of entertainment, not before we get, not to jazz or blues,

it was Blackface. Blackface, by the 1830s, was a overwhelmingly white performance tradition that literally captivated the hearts and minds of urban European-descended immigrants and Americans. So we moved from Blackface in the 1830s to the first major motion picture, D.W. Griffith's film

is about white people in Blackface telling the story about race and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. Then we moved to the first talking picture, which is about Al Jolson performing in Blackface and the jazz singer. I mean, you can't separate American popular culture with a fascination about black people. So what Martin Luther King said in 1967 in his last book was that America has always had a love-hate relationship with black people.

This form of love-hate meant at the same time that white people found their groove. They got their swag on the international stage. They then were captivated by jazz. They were engaging in trying to be like black people. This wasn't just some new thing that happened more recently. This was going way, way back. also meant that what happened on the stage was not supposed to happen in the home, was not supposed to happen in the school, was not supposed to happen in the neighborhood,

was not supposed to happen at work, because those two things were considered separate things. You couldn't actually, you could perform like a black person, you could make fun of a black person, you could try to be a cool white guy by being like a black person, but you could not have actual equality with a black person. You couldn't have a black neighbor. You couldn't go to a black doctor. You couldn't accept black blood when the person who invented blood transfusions, Charles Drew, was able to save tens of thousands of people during World War II because of the prospect of

Negro blood getting in white veins. So I can't tell you exactly the psychosis behind all of that. That means it's really, in some ways, it's unexplainable. But it is why black people were subjected to these systemic forms of discrimination to keep them out because the fascination was one thing, the equality was something else. How do you explain white people going to watch black people play on football fields? A hundred thousand people gathered and one of them takes a knee and all of a sudden, you know, a good chunk of the fans say, that guy is an ingrate. He doesn't deserve to be in this country. If he doesn't like America like it is, why does he get the hell out? Like, it doesn't make any sense.

It's so crazy. Oh, God. Going back to slavery, Khalil, what was the justification for slavery? Oh, man, this is an easy one. Slavery was always about making money. So, you know, you're the first colonists. The new world, quote unquote, that Columbus discovered, quote, unquote, was always about profiteering. Nobody came.

not going to cross the Atlantic to set up some idyllic utopia that everyone would chill the hell out and have a good time, right? That wasn't the point. The point was to explore for wealth creation, for natural resources. And so Columbus came for gold, et cetera. We all know that story. Long before we get to 1619, for example, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch had been looking in the United, in North America and South America for various profitable. arrangements. And what they settled on by and large was sugar. Sugar brought Europeans into the new world like gangbusters. And so they took the land, they harnessed the productive capacity

of indigenous populations from Brazil all the way up, you know, of something like 11 to 12 million people who supposedly came to the new world. The vast majority of them, 10 million or so went to Brazil, the 600,000, if I have my latest estimates, right, came to North America. It was always about the money. It was always about the money. Never anything else. So that's slavery. They settled on a system of chattel slavery in the United States, what would become the United States, because that was the best way to ensure that everyone would know that the poor white people weren't the slaves because there were a lot of them. And if they were treated like slaves, they might just kill all the colonial elite.

I mean, you know, because these folks were far away from home. But if you could turn an identifiable group of people by virtue of skin color and by virtue of being from a part of the world that is west and central Africa where their language, they didn't have shared language. If I was an Irish immigrant or an Irish indentured service, I could speak English. I could know that you were plotting against me,

that you were planning to cheat me. But if I'm speaking Igbu or Yoraba, and I don't understand what the hell's going on, I'm a whole lot easier for you to exploit. So you're still the Africans, you bring them here, and then you say, oh, you know what, if we define this system as they're not as sophisticated as us, their brains are smaller, they were meant to do this kind of work. Look at their skin color. Their skin color protects them from the heat.

We're not supposed to be bent over in fields and rice patties doing this kind of work or tobacco farming or eventually doing cotton. This was what God intended for them to do. Those ideas eventually were the justification for the wealth creation and the labor theft and the enslavement of people. Racism came first. Slavery came first. Then all of the ideas and the justifications and the mythologies came later. Where was the humanity in all of this? Were there, who were the first activists, you know, were there people back then who were like, this shit is not right? I mean, what are we doing? These are human beings. Was there any humanity? Absolutely. Yes, Oliver, there were a ton of anti-slavery, mostly Christian evangelists, people who knew that the Bible didn't

sanction slavery, even though there are references to slavery in the Old Testament. And there's a lot of authoritarian children obey your parents or, you know, you'll lose your arm. I mean, you know, Nobody actually followed that, right? But they did follow slaves, obey your masters. So on one hand, there were Christians who recognized that the story of Exodus was the story of God's vengeance directed towards those who would enslave the Hebrews. By the same token, the financial incentives, right? We talked about contradictions already. We're like, hey, you know what?

You know, God didn't really mean for me not to live long and prosper. And the way you live long and prosper in this arrangement is you buy you some slaves and you keep it moving. And so while you're right, there were plenty of anti-slavery activists and believers that weren't enough of them. And the way that we know that there were a few of them was because by the time the nation is founded, a lot of the northern colonies that had lower economic incentives to continue slavery, the soil wasn't as profitable for big plantation, the economy was beginning to, industrialized by the turn of the 19th century by the 1800s. And so they said, you know what?

Slavery always felt kind of icky in the first place. This doesn't really feel right. And so, you know what? And we're not making that much money from it. So it's a win, win, win. Most of the northern colonies got rid of slavery during the revolutionary period through gradual abolition laws. They weren't all saints.

And even the ones who articulated anti-slavery beliefs still decided because of financial decision that, you know, they were going to get out of the game. And the way we can know that their own contradictions continued is because unlike most Americans who think slavery lived on in the 1800s up to the Civil War was a southern problem. Nearly all of the capital in the United States ran through slave plantations into the 1900s, into the 1800s, in the industrial sector. The, as I already said, slaves were capital that could be traded, not just traded in the United States but traded in London. We didn't get to a cotton revolution just because there was a lot of cotton plantations. We got to a cotton revolution because in the New England towns of

Massachusetts and Rhode Island and elsewhere, there were tons of mills. And those mills were spinning the raw cotton coming off of a slave plantation and people were getting rich. The world was being clothed in cotton and people were getting rich from it. So even when slavery began to disappear in the north, the financial aspects and reached of slavery never stopped until the end of the Civil War. And so that's where the idea of sort of reparations come in, because essentially we were built on the backs of slaves, America, it seems. I mean, that's it.

Yeah, that's it. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's pretty straightforward. Yeah. Yeah. So when we talk about reparations, how does that look, you know, how does that, how does that, how could something like that be implemented, you know, and. explain that. Yeah. So first of all, reparations is a process and an outcome. So the process is the part that we've never done, which is just to come to terms of what happened. So you actually

have to do the truth and reconciliation part of reparations as a part of the process of arriving at what the recompense is going to be. The reconciliation comes first, then the recompense. Now, there's two things. One, people do believe that cash payout is an appropriate recompense because in a world shaped by money, that is a meaningful punishment and a meaningful form of compensation for people who have actually been victimized. Victims of the Holocaust had been paid reparations and continue to be paid reparations by the country of Germany. Japanese attorneys were paid. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was $20,000 were paid to the survivors of the Japanese internment.

There are a few other examples where a state or a government paid recompense precisely because that is the recognizable legal format of paying someone who has been harmed. Americans like to think of this. They're uncomfortable with that, one, because they're like, well, when does it in? How much money is it? Is it $10 trillion?

And the estimates are pretty much that high, but we're probably going to spend $10 trillion in stimulus money by the time the coronavirus is over. And guess what? We're going to be okay, right? So today tells you something about money. The second thing is people confuse a payout for policy. And a lot of conservatives will say, since the great society with the war on poverty, Americans have spent all this money trying to help black people.

They already got their reparations. Well, I can see why people might think that. But a policy solution that is primarily universal where you're targeting poor, people, rather than black people, because that's what Medicaid did, that's what new housing policies did. Head Start wasn't just for black kids only. It was for a whole lot of low-income white kids all over the country. The vast recipients of great society, big government money going back to the 60s, were actually low-income white people. So you can't call great society programs, reparations for black people, even though it is true that African Americans have

benefited from those programs. So we haven't done reparations. And so I resist people saying, well, we just need new policies. The best way I could put it is, if we started a green new deal, you would actually start with, as a policy matter, both a check. We'd have to agree on what that is. And you would say, we're going to put as many of the people at the most vulnerable and the people have been most victimized by history at the starting line for these infrastructure jobs so that we can rebuild this country. Yeah.

And how do you find those people, though? What's the system in finding the people who have been subjected, you know, the most to it? Yeah, well, that's not hard. I mean, there are like 35 million African Americans who are people whose roots go back to slay. and some of whom their roots don't go back to slavery, but they've been here three or four generations.

They've dealt with the same matrix of white supremacist policies, et cetera. They're, you know, we all check the box on the census. African American, you start with that. Like, the notion that we ought to spend a lot of time scientifically, surgically, surgically identifying the most deserving population makes about as much sense as it made to a white southerner to pick apart whether the very light-skinned person in front of the people person in front of them is one-eighth black or full-black. Like, they didn't give a shit.

They just said, you know, we think you're black. Get to the back of the bus or get off the side of the street or call me mister, you name it. So it's a bit of an ironic thing that a system that basically said the one-drop rule means any identifiable form of blackness you have makes you a second-class citizen. Now on the back end of the reparations debate would suggest that we need to be really very specific of the deserving black people because we don't want to make sure that there are any cheaters in the mix.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. 1636. Uh-oh. I was reading the timeline and it talks about the night watch. Yes. That in 1636, Boston created the night watch

which led to the first police force in America. Yeah. So the Boston Nightwatch was kind of like very low, level enforcement. The basic idea was, let's make sure some food doesn't set anything on fire and wipe us all out. I mean, that's, that's it. So that's the, that's the origin story of a kind of vigilant, even they even call, the Romans called them vigils, because in Roman time, those same people, their job was to keep an eye on things when everyone else was sleeping,

because lest, again, someone decide that they wanted to burn down the chapel or the mill and ruin everyone's lives. Most of what we would consider policing function in a place like New England, where, you know, population of black people and indigenous populations were still small relative to the European colonists, once they rooted out all the people they didn't want in their community, were religious beliefs. You know, they treated people as heritage. Um, they focused on a lot of, um, morally contemptible behavior. So the policing was neighbor to neighbor, uh, minister to parishioner. Uh, it wasn't so much, uh, a, a uniformed group of people who were like, you just broke the law, you're going in. And I read a bunch about some,

I've put some interviews, you know, talking about the north, talking about the south, you know, that, that, that, that loophole, that loophole. Yeah, you know, all right. Let's just Let's talk about that just for a little bit. You know, I want to get into that. So, to be fair to Kate, so the 1636 Boston Night Watch is happening at the same time as various parts of the country are starting to figure out, like, how do we keep black people from getting together so that they don't plot insurrection or rebel? Now, because things are much more fluid in the early 1600s, it takes a while for places like Virginia and South Carolina to pass what become known as Negro acts or slave codes. And the first of them really kick off around 1660, 1670. But in a nutshell, these slave codes have said that any black person is presumptively a slave, and all slaves need to be checked for their paper.

to make sure they have a right to pass, because any slave that is found without permission on any road is either suspected of insurrection, rebellion, running away, and can be subject to corporal punishment on the scene. And there was a lot of intermixture between white indentures and black folks. The slave codes, they begin around the 1670s, whether it's a northern colony or a southern colony, are really like, we need to separate out poor whites,

and enslaved people, because if they get together, we won't win. I mean, like, we won't win. So the slave codes begin to penalize intermixture. They begin to decide, they decide, for example, that any child born to a black woman is a slave. That was the first time in the world that had ever happened because the status of the child usually followed the status of a father in other societies. And that was obvious because that meant that white men as slave owners could rape their property and the child would then add to their assets would become a slave as opposed to a free person. And so those black codes essentially said that three or more black people gathered was a threat. And they put in place a force of people, men of both landless

and landowning status, that is, you know, elite men and working class white men. They had to serve in some cases up to a year. They were duty bound. If they didn't perform the duty, they could be arrested. And they had the full power of colonial government and later the anti-bellum states to dispense corporal punishment against any African-American on site,

including killing them. And that's pretty much the infrastructure of southern law enforcement for 100, I'm sorry, sorry, for 250 years until we get to the end of the Civil War. So you asked about the sleuth, the loophole. So the 13th Amendment is the amendment that abolishes slavery, right? This is this is transformative. This is a big deal. This is the moment we've all been waiting

for, right? Except in an amendment that's really pretty short, it says that slavery nor indentured servitude shall exist in the United States except as punishment for a crime. And you're like, whoa, wait a minute. It actually says slavery should, shall not exist except for punishment for a crime. So wait, we can have slaves as long as they're criminals. And that's exactly what happens. It's in the earliest days after the civil wars over, the South has lost. It's not clear how they're going to be brought back into the government. So they go about their business. They're like, you know, those wars over, we'll also be it. We'll just, you know, get our lives back together. So they pass a bunch of crime bills in every southern

Confederate state. And these crime bills basically say everything black people would want to do, as free people is now a crime. The only thing black people get to do that we think is okay is work for us. If they don't want to work for us, they're vagrant. That's a criminal offense. If they challenge our authority, raise their voice at us, that's assault. That's criminal offense. If they try to go vote for political representation, it's not technically an offense, but we'll intimidate them. And then if they get pissed off about it, that's assault. We'll put them back in jail. And so you have this incredible moment where basically things look a whole light like they had just looked in the midst of the Civil War before the Civil War, and black people who had been free are now being sold at sheriff's auction back to their former plantation masters, not as slaves, but as criminals to work off their fines. It's incredible. And a lot of that gets overturned because we have a radical Congress, these quote unquote radical Republicans, they see this for what it is. They pass the 14th Amendment, gives everybody equal protection under the law, due process under the law,

birthright citizenship. I mean, it's the most important legislation in the Constitution that some people call the second founding is the fundamental basis for all the freedoms that Americans and newcomers to this country take for granted. Women's rights, LGBTQ rights, marriage equality, immigrant rights, so on and so forth.

All happened because these radical Republicans say, we have to pass a constitutional amendment to keep these former Confederates in check. And so the point is, though, the criminality becomes the most elastic, useful way to put black people back in their place, to make sure they don't have the full access of their freedom. And it lasts for 100 years. Right. That's what I was about to say. And then, but that's it. The die has been cast.

Now, because of that, the black people have been sort of labeled just criminals in general. And am I wrong in thinking that that has just carried on? That is just carried on through time. I'm just trying to get to the point. As I sit and I listen, as I'm listening to this, I'm just shocked that I am a 41-year-old woman who has never learned this. I grew up going, granted, I didn't go to college. But with private education.

By the way, at a super liberal arts school as well. Never. I only until now, I mean, I, you know, it's not something that I ever sought to understand either. Yeah, no. I mean, you're, you're having that moment that my students have. Yeah. They're like, this is jacked up. They feel, they're like, they're angry about it because they're like something, something's not right here. So. Because you know the basics. You see the movies, you know, and you read certain books that are beautiful and become very popular. But you don't really understand that. ins and ounce of what really happened.

I think, though, too, is what I was trying to sort of get at with just, it's understanding the whole picture. There's a lot of people who, when I post certain things, you know, you read the comments, right? And yes, there's a lot of just straight up racism. Then there's some ignorance. And then there's people who are just reacting without understanding. And that is the frustrating part for me right now.

And I'm a newbie, right? I've been inspired by this like I never have before. And now I feel like I want to at least on the small platform that I have to just at least get people to just think before they react. There's a lot of reaction. And when you really understand the truth of the criminal justice system and where it all came from, understanding the patterns that have existed throughout black history and it's like how how was how was there even a how was there a chance how did anyone have a chance when it was this oppressed for this long and now it has become part of the fabric of America it is now the DNA which needs to somehow be

stripped out and it feels like a big undertaking but there is a shift I think you know know. I mean, that's my interpretation. We need Tiano Reeves and Lawrence Fishburn to come up with a that we can all take so we can see the Matrix. We're all going to go into the Matrix.

Right. I have Allison. We have on this dock and she's pointing me into this direction of this question. So by the 1890s as a way to suppress black, freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data

as objective, colorblind, and... Incontrovertible. Incontrovertible, right. That's from my book, yeah. That's from your book. The condemnation of... How did they do this? Oh, man.

So this is fascinating. So it was never fashionable to claim to be a racist. This is counterintuitive, all right? So every generation of white Americans consider themselves to be better than the one that came before. So by the time we get to the end of the 19th century, right around the end of

slavery, that generation of white leaders, these were people that I write about who were Harvard professors, they were northern politicians, they were people like Jane Adams, who was a famous social worker. They basically said, like, we're better than our forebears. And a lot of the shit that we've inherited around race and racism is not our fault. It's our job to do better, right? So their sense of what had come before them kind of let them off the hook for owning the ways that society had already set up forms of privilege. And so what they said is like, because we're not responsible for what's happened before, we can be more objective because we know that that we're not as bad as they were.

And in a nutshell, they thought of themselves as post-racial. I mean, again, I know it sounds crazy, but they had these civil rights laws. Now they're like black people can kind of do their own thing. So even though we know sharecropping was a shitty deal for black people

in second-class citizenship, they were a little more ambivalent about it. Just like we've known for a long time that mass incarceration and the crime bill of the 1990s built the biggest prison system in the world, but a lot of people were like, it's full of criminals. Why should I feel bad about this gigantic criminal justice system?

So when you go back 100 years to the 1890s, for the first time, northerners and Southerners, liberals and conservatives, are all kind of like, well, the crime statistics tell us that black people commit more crimes than white people. And if the crime statistics are just as bad in Chicago as they are in Birmingham, then it can't be about Southerners, it's got to be about them. And that becomes the most dominant argument in favor of segregation that links that moment 100 years ago to our time today.

The crime statistics show that black people have a crime problem, that's why we put all the police in their community. The crime statistics show that black boys, you know, are dangerous, so why should I send my kid to school? with a bunch of black kids so they can get beat up. The crime statistics emerge in 1890 for the first time as a way of talking about black people as inferior and as dangerous without appearing

to be racist. I'm not a racist. They have a crime problem. So while it seems like we think of those people as racist because that was a long time ago, and of course they were more racist than us, they didn't think of themselves as racist because they were looking back at slavery. They were saying, well, those were the real racist,

we're not. So it's like the pattern just keeps repeating itself. Well, why were those statistics there in the census, right? Why did those statistics exist? Are we going back to that 13th Amendment loophole? I mean, is that when this sort of started? Yeah, yeah, it's good question because it's important. Why 1890?

Like, where did that come from? So 1890 is really the first census after the end of slavery to be kind of an authoritative report card on black people. Why? Because the 1870 and 1880 census, as you could imagine, the South was devastated. I mean, it literally needed to be rebuilt. So the census was not that reliable. Secondarily, because this question about who black people really were, what they were capable of, Southerners had said, oh, they're going to turn into primitive cannibals and destroy society. Northern abolitionists said, no, they're just like us. They're just black. So this was a debate. And the Civil War didn't solve.

didn't answer the debate. So what you had is, like, people like, oh, well, let's see what they're made of. So by 1890, you had the first generation of African Americans who had never been born as slaves. If I'm born in 1865, by 1890, I'm 25 years old. And demographers, believe it or not, looked at that birth cohort, that generation and said, well, let's see how they're doing because they weren't slaves and we passed all these civil rights laws. So if they had their freedom and they weren't enslaved and if they are doing well, great, we'll give them credit. If they're in prison, well, then it turns out Southerners were right after all. Now, that's why the 1890 census was so important. And the evidence was that black people were then 12% of

the population, but they were 30% of the nation's prison population. They were almost three times overrepresented, which by the way is about the same today. Black people are still about 13% of population. They're about 38% of the prison population. So the same disparity in that day and age became proof that, oh, black people are free and look what they do with their freedom. They turn to crime. Now, quick point, there was no asterisk on the data. The data was never about all those southern racist sheriffs, those plantation owners who cheated black people out of their money and told them, you don't raise your voice at me, and I'm going to call the cops. It was not about black people trying to vote when it was illegal for them to vote.

So all of the racism that used the criminal justice system to try to re-enslave black people was what drove the crime statistics. But most white Americans did not have enough patience to figure all of that out. And when black people complained about it, they were like, eh, nah, I'm good. I'm okay. Yeah. You live in your neighborhood. I'll live in mine. And if you try to move in my neighborhood, the cops are going to come get you. I know how things went down. Mm-hmm. Yep. It's crazy shit. Crazy, crazy, crazy shit. Man. What about white people? Oh, go ahead, Kay. I was just say racial scapegoating in the 20s and 30s. And, you know,

how does this tie into police brutality? Yeah. So again, most of us today, my students, the general public, think about racism in the past as a southern problem. They just think like, oh, you know, I get it, right? It was really bad. Now it's better. But when you look at the great migration period, which is the time when African Americans began to leave the South, they were running away from lynch mob, they were running away from sharecropping, they were coming to big cities. They came to Chicago. They went to L.A. after World War II. They were in New York by the turn of the 20th century there. And all these new cities, cities. And they're really tiny population. They're only about 5% of the population by the 1910s. But their presence elicits or draws out the same kind of resentment. Like remember, blackface minstrelsy starts in those big cities. It's one thing to make fun of black people with burnt cork on your face. It's another thing to have them as your next door neighbor. So when black people show up in these communities, white people start to use the law the same way the southerners use the lynch mob. They're not happy. And they turn against their black neighbors in their neighborhoods,

at the workplace, and the police abet a lot of this. Even so much as white people begin to know, for example, that you can cork your face, commit a crime, and the police will just be looking for a black person. There's a report published in 1941 that shows instance after instance after instance of white men corking their face to appear like black people so that they could escape scrutiny. I mean, it's astounding. Like there's nothing new under the sun. Right. Right. How, how, how, how important is, how important are white, are white people in sort of being a part of the solution here, however long it's going to take, right? How, how important are white people in this whole thing? It's the whole show, my friend. That's it. It's the whole show. Yeah, that's it. Because, Because the truth is that black folks, not everybody, but, you know, black folks have been fighting this battle since the beginning.

I mean, Crispus Addicts proved his patriotism as the first person to lose his life in the Revolutionary War. Black folks have fought in every war in this country, and by the time of Vietnam, we're at the front lines and disproportionate numbers. You know, there's no aspect of trying to prove one's worthiness for full participation. in American life that you can't point to black people trying to do, including resistance to racism, including, you know, so much of what I'm sharing with you is not because I lived back then. It's because black people who were Harvard educated or who like Ida B. Wells, who was like one of the first black women freedom fighters,

had a printing press in 1884, a black woman with a printing press pointing out racism. It also got burned down when she defended her friends who had been lynched by a local white mob in Memphis. So we can know how black people were fighting against these things because they left a record of their efforts. But it's never been enough. And as long as the majority of white Americans, whether they self-describe as liberals or as conservative, stand on the sidelines and convince themselves that black people must be doing something to deserve all of this, then this stuff is going to continue. And it starts locally?

I mean, as far as voting, local politics, mayors, DAs, assistant DAs, you know, I mean, there's a, I mean, you never want to ask what can I do. And I understand that because I asked that question. One of my friends, you know, my friend Don, I texted him. And I'm like, I just, when this happened. And I said, look, I love to have a conversation. I don't know where my mind's at right now. And he says, before we have this conversation, read this. And he sent me this article that Benjamin O'Kiefer. road. And it really resonated with me. And in it, you know, it was this idea that it's not up to black people to educate white people. You have to sort of ask these questions for yourself and do the research and, you know, want to learn, you know, which I have been doing. But at the same time, I texted my friend back and I said, look, you did teach me something. And I said, I don't expect you to read me all the books, but you pointed me to where the library was you know and um so you know you hesitate in asking the question what's it going to take you know as far as white people go what is it going to take to keep pushing this forward aside from

taking this taking into the streets which i agree with that keeps it that keeps it present you know but what what can white people do on the day to day well they they can see the victims of police violence the victims of housing discrimination as their own flesh and blood. I mean, you know, if you felt like this were happening to someone who you cared about because you had empathy for them, because you identify with them, white people are perfectly capable of showing outrage at the things that happened to other white people. So, for example, we know, I mean, this is not meant to be controversial, but we know the

Sandy Hook shooting of all of those children who were killed by a young man who was mentally disturbed, you know, not only made the president cry, but I'll admit when I heard the news that day I cried because I have small children. I mean, it's just devastating. The shooting at Parkland, which then led to a group of young student activists who helped to spur some more legislative activity, but still not enough. So there's some people. Some people, people call this an empathy gap. I mean, there's a way in which white people don't think about black suffering as something that is meaningful to them. And again, I've, you know, I've tried to suggest that there's some psychological wiring. I mean, you know, when your entire society has been

built to say that white lives actually matter and everything else is optional, then that's the message that people have, even in 2020. So how do you unravel that? I've suggested that you have to do it with very small children. They have to be built differently because it's hard for adults to see things differently because they've been seeing them the same way the whole time. It's not impossible, but not only does it take a lot of re-education for the adult, but they got to own it. You've got to own it. You have to actually push back against your instincts because at some point your stomach for fighting racism will give out. Your appetite for being treated like a pariah when you're around your white peers and counterparts and you're the only one sticking up

for what you're seeing and saying like look this is not okay like yeah you you end up the crazy totally oh i've been i have been that guy so many times and and i think this goes to the psychology uh of just wanting to be liked just generally we were talking to this girl kate shots i don't know if you heard our talk with her and she was good but she used this great thing that i loved where there's like calling out and calling in, you know, and you call someone in. Right. And I really loved that. Yeah, that was good.

And I am really loving this time of people wanting to learn, all people wanting to learn more about our history and how it has brought us to where we are today. But that's what I'm, my hope is that as we keep the momentum and everybody starts really, holding themselves accountable to how they're going to be a part of change that we continue to call each other in, you know, instead of calling everybody out. I think that's the right formulation. I mean, look, I'm a professional educator. And so I can't do my job if it's about calling people out and embarrassing them about what they don't know. My job is to meet people where they are to help them find a path that they can own the journey that they need to take and then meet them on the other side if they choose to

stay on that journey. That's the only way this works. And I would say to Oliver, like, you know, the experiences you've described, I think for the most part, I think a lot of the action is really in all white spaces. So the offense won't be directed towards an African American listener who was like, hey, you didn't say that right. It really, the empowerment should come in how, white people socialize each other to understand how racism works because there just ain't enough black people to spread around you know and more Latin X I mean you know in I mean white people are still 65 percent of the American population so even if you you know you'd get at best one one person of color for every two that's right three yeah two white people that's the ratio um so a lot of the

action really is about how white people own their ignorance, own the problem, educate, and then organize themselves to change this country for the better. Well, this has been, this has been so my God, awesome. You're the best. I know. I've learned so much. It's just, it's, this has been a really great hour and a half. I mean, for real. I actually have one more quick question. Just, Real quick, just about the silver lining of this administration, if there even is one. It has sort of, it's almost like smoking out the cockroaches in a way. This has, this has made people feel, this administration has made people feel, racist people feel more comfortable in coming out.

We get to see the real sort of festering of this country, the people in it. I think a lot of the times these people are silently feeling this way, and now, you know, their voices are louder, and we get to understand how deep this problem really is, and now it's out, we can start, you know, the process of making it better. Is there any silver lining there in that this administration has brought up a lot of shit, and people are in the streets right now really vying for change? Yeah, I mean, short answer is absolutely. And no one that I know would have wished

that any of this would have happened since 2016 or certainly since the start of 2017. Even the pandemic, right? No one is really responsible for the way that this pandemic has taken so many lives, both here and other parts of the world. But this administration is responsible for not addressing

the underlying structural disadvantages that black and brown people as quote-unquote essential workers have borne the greatest burden, not having masks, not having the kind of equipment that they need to keep our utilities and grocery stores and health care facilities going. And so you put that in place with what happened with Armad Arbery or with George Floyd

or with Brianna Taylor or... Crazy Lady in Central Park, who might as well had called, this black man is about to rape me. And now it's just too much. It's too much. And a lot of people on the sidelines have said, you know what? This is it. This is the final straw for me.

And if that's what it took, then it's time to make a lot of good come from it. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Hey, I had a great time. And I really appreciate you guys asking such great questions. So look forward to. getting together. Thank you.

Yeah, hopefully one day. Thank you. Sibling Revellerie is executive produced by Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, and Sim Sarno. Supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Editor is Josh Windish. Music by Mark Hudson,

aka Uncle Mark. Hey, it's your favorite Jersey girl. Gia Judice. Welcome to Casual Chaos, where I share my story. This week, I'm sitting down with Vanderpump Roll Star, Sheena Shea. I don't really talk to either of them, if I'm being honest. There will be an occasional text, one way or the other, from me to Ariana, maybe a happy birthday from Ariana to me. I think the last time I talked to Tom, it was like, congrats on America's Got Talent. This is a combo you don't want to miss. Listen to Casual Chaos on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It may look different, but Native Culture is alive. My name is Nicole Garcia, and on Burn Sage, Burn Bridges, we aim to explore that culture. Somewhere along the way, it turned into this full-fledged award-winning comic shop. That's Dr. Lee Francis IV, who opened the first Native comic bookshop. Explore his story along with many other Native stories on the show, Burn Sage Burn Bridges. Listen to Burn Sage Burn Bridges on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The internet is something we make, not just something that happens to us. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the Tech and Culture Podcasts or No Girls on the Internet.

In our new season, I'm talking to people like Anil Dash, an OG entrepreneur and writer who refuses to be cynical about the Internet. I love tech. You know, I've been a nerd my whole life, but it does have to be for something. Like, it's not just for its own sake. It's an inspiring story that focuses on people as the core. or building blocks of the internet. Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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