The Breakfast Club - INTERVIEW: Michael Harriot On America Through The Black Lens, Tim Scott, Ice Cube, Healthy Debates + More

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. own? I planted the flag. This is mine. I own this. It's surprisingly easy. 55 gallons of water,

500 pounds of concrete. Or maybe not. No country willingly gives up their territory. Oh my God. What is that? Bullets. Listen to Escape from Zaka Stan. That's Escape from Z-A-Q-A-S-T-A-N on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As a kid, I really do remember having these dreams and visions, but you just don't know what is going to come for you. Alicia shares her wisdom on growth, gratitude, and the power of love. I forgive myself. It's okay. Have grace with yourself. You're trying your best, and you're going to figure out the rhythm of this thing. Alicia Keys, like you've never heard her before.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lauren Smith, Laura Layton, and Daphne Zuniga. On July 8th, 1992, apartment buildings with pools were never quite the same as Melrose Place was introduced to the world. We are going to be reliving every hookup, every scandal, and every single wig removal together. So listen to Still the Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everyone. I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran

going on my 10th season in New York. And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stan. Anya and I met through hockey, and now we're married and moms to two awesome toddlers, ages two and four. And we're excited about our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, which talks about everything from pro hockey

to professional women's athletes to raising children and all the messiness in between. So listen to Moms Who Puck on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wake that ass up in the morning. The Breakfast Club. Morning, everybody. wake that ass up early in the morning the breakfast club morning everybody it's dj envy jess hilarious charlamagne the guy we are the breakfast club we got a special guest in the building yes indeed journalist michael harriet and author welcome brother nice to meet you how

you feeling political commentator a little bit of everything yeah a little bit of everything on there under his belt native of south carolina of course of course he's got a phenomenal book out man called uh black af history the unwitewashed story of america i started reading it over the holidays when i was on vacation and it's one of those books that i've gotten a lot through it but you keep going back because you're gonna have your highlighter yeah you know what i'm saying constantly going through it uh tell first of all tell them what the book is about the book is a look at america through black people's eyes so we've seen books about black people through black people's eyes and history books about america through white through the white lens but this is about america through black people's eyes and it's funny uh you know

because i talk to people talk i wrote the book like how we talk to each other. So, you know, we could be at a funeral and we're like, oh, God, I can't believe she wore that hat. That's right. And so, you know, it uses humor, uses the way we talk to each other and it shows and it pulls no punches and unwhitewashes the mythology that we always been taught to believe since we got into social studies class. You know, I've always followed you on social media, senior writing on the Griot. And of course you're very funny, but when you read the book, you realize,

damn, you had to go through a lot of trauma to get that sense of humor. Yeah, man. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that's how we all got our sense of humor, right? Like it's a, it's a coping mechanism in a way, man. And that's how a lot of why black people, you know, we relate to each other like that because we deal with trauma in those ways.

And it's always been like that. I mean, since like, you know, that's kind of how we created. Charlie Case was the first stand up comedian. I write about it in the book. and his creating a standup comedy was a effort to like, get close to his father, who was an albino man, an albino black man. And his, he was a mixed, he was a mixed race and his mom erased,

told him that you got to live as white. And he, his hero was his father. So that was a, a way to get close to his father because his father was a performer. And he invented stand up comedy to kind of connect himself to his community after he was removed from it. Such an interesting concept, right? Because, like, when you think about black people in America, you know, certain people, Jewish people have been able to assimilate by being able to change their last name to read the story about the albino man who was able to assimilate I'm like that's an act of survival

like why wouldn't you in that day stay in age yeah man I talk a lot about that in the book because we like when we talk about for instance slave revolts we always like to talk about like how black people grab machetes and burn down plantations but there

were other ways to survive. Like the chapter is called survival and resistance. So a lot of what we did was just for survival. Right. Like, like, for instance, slowing down your work. You might be mad at that slave owner, but you know what's going to happen if you don't work. So you might just slow down. You might just run away for a few days knowing you're gonna get caught but

like it was like what we would call it self-care now like i know i'm going to get caught but i'm going to die if i stay on this plantation one more date in a row and so that notion of survival is a lot on how we deal with trauma man like like a lot of times when I see like black people assimilating into like what we call popular culture or like that conservative mindset, I know like some of some of the time it's a way of survival. Now, other times you see people buy all into it. Like I thought Tim, I used to think Tim Scott, it was survival technique for Tim Scott. And then I realized, oh, no, he he's starting to believe in like he there was a shift because because I've talked to him before. Right. And it was it was you always got the feeling that he was a conservative, a real conservative who was in the Republican Party. But like lately, he just shift to shifted to like MAGA dude, like MAGA black dude. You said he was embarrassing himself. You said if I think you posted a clip on your Twitter said if I send you a picture of Tim Scott, that means you're embarrassing yourself.

Yeah, right. Right now. I mean, and then like I'm not one to always like perpetuate like what they call the democratic mindset so i would always point out that tim scott for instance was the first the only person for years pushing for police reform right he people try to get republicans to pass the tim scott uh the walter scott notification act for years and then something happened and then he like he they were on the doorstep of passing police reform and tim scott sabotaged it because of like the most powerful man in south carolina this sheriff called leon lott ended police reform like one powerful white dude that nobody knows in the police reform and tim scott through tim scott right and lately he's just like stopped being that old Tim Scott and become MAGA dude.

I wonder about that. Right. I agree with everything you just said. But I wonder if that is him trying to survive in a Republican Party that is clearly being taken over by MAGA. But here's the thing. That would make sense if Tim Scott was somewhere like, Tim Scott is a Senator from South Carolina. There is no way he's a country now, but he's never going to lose. If he keeps running like 98% of what one thing people don't realize, like 98% of all senators, when they leave the Senate,

they retire. Like it's almost impossible for a sitting, sitting Senator to lose. And Tim Scott is in a Republican stronghold. He's never going to be challenged. He got future aspirations. What if he has a future political aspiration? Yeah. But are there is there a political future after Donald Trump? Like none of it makes sense. Right. Because he could be Tim Scott, the same Tim Scott he was before Donald Trump and still have political aspirations. Right. Like he might even be more popular with his party if he wasn't that MAGA dude,

right? He bought into a specific kind of anti-black conservative ideology when he didn't have to. And that like, and you can see the shift, right? He's not even making sense anymore. He was a quiet conservative dude and now he is a donald trump maga muffin a acolyte of that anti-black wing of the republican party i agree with you i just it just feels like if you're a traditional conservative like he was the maga people make you look almost

like you're leaning left so i don't think he wants to look like he's leaning left in any way shape or form yeah but i don't think that's necessarily true because we you know we hear that thing about like the traditional republicans versus the mega republicans the traditional republicans and the mega republicans there's no really no difference in policy right like all the republicans are right-wing ideologues in truth. Right. The party of the Confederacy. Right.

But but that magazine like is just a little bit more anti-black, a little bit more vocally xenophobic. But it's no policy difference. Tim Scott didn't have to buy into all of that. So like Tim Scott through his granddaddy, my grandfather was an illiterate. Tim, daddy. And he wasn't My grandfather was an illiterate Tim daddy and he wasn't, it was a lie. Right. And,

and he did that to buy into that Republican, not just the Republican ideology, but that MAGA anti-black version of black people that is necessary to perpetuate the myth of the MAGA wing of the party. I want to go back for a lot of people that don't know. I'm always curious to how people got their start. Right. So what piqued your interest when it came to journalism and politics? What was the first thing that says this is something that's interesting that I want to do? Well, that was even your journey. So I'm actually an economist by training.

So I was teaching macroeconomics and working for corporations. And this is when Newsweek was owned by The Washington Post. They I used to just write these large policy things that like, say, your company was building something overseas. I'd write like what economic impact it would have on that country. And Newsweek asked me to write these articles about first. It was why everybody was buying gold. And I wrote it and it was like everybody was like, oh, you can really write. I was like, yeah, that's what I kind of do for a living. And from there, what happened is, you know, if you're the only black person in the space, you become the expert on everything black so when black stuff that started happening even though i was an economist now i taught a college course called uh race as

an economic construct so that might be why but i just became a the the default expert they come to to ask to write about black stuff gotcha you know what i love about uh you know black af you break down the history of america a high level, right? But you also do it in a very entertaining way. And it made me think of a great movie that's out right now called American Fiction. And the one problem I had with that movie was the hole that they left about the book fuck. Have you seen the movie? Yeah.

I wanted to know why people liked the book fuck. Because I felt like he was such a high level thinker and maybe he just wrote something that was more easily digestible for people and it really made me feel like that when him and eric alexander had that back and forth in the kitchen and she liked the book and she used to like all his original stuff so i wish they would have explained it in that moment why people like the book but i think your book you know it shows you can put medicine and candy in something and be successful because you debuted at what, number five on the New York Times bestsellers or something like that. Yeah. And I think you can do it right.

But I think the difference, like, you know, the book Fuck and American Fiction is a lot of times to make it in what used to like, especially five years ago, even in the publishing industry, is you had to dumb it down for the sake of white people. And I'll kind of pretend that you were kind of stupid, which is something that black people have always had to do in in throughout history. Right. Like you couldn't let that white man know you could read or you could die right like you couldn't let the people at your job know you were smarter because you would be a threat to them that's where the phrase the spook who sat by the door comes from because like affirmative action they would take really smart people and make them secretaries but they would have to sit by the door because the people in the back office were scared that they would absorb that knowledge and take their position. So that's something that we always had to do. And that's why to me,

American fiction was so interesting because it showed like this, this, we were in this moment in publishing and then we're still in it in America in general, uh, where white people were pretending to be interested in black things. It wasn't real. Right. Like take that, you know, 2020 racial reckoning, they call it. Right. Like nothing really happened. They blacked out some Instagram on some memes on Instagram and declared that black lives matter.

But like the results of that was nothing like the corporations didn't donate the money that they pledged. There was no reform. There were no bills that came out of it. But because of that thing, we talked about early survival, the people who have been maligned and taken a sideline in publishing and in TV, they had an opportunity to take advantage of that brief moment of interest and write some books.

And then so you can see, like, we have a moment in publishing where a lot of black people are getting to speak truth without doing what fuck did and kind of dumb it down for white people. But that's what I said with you. You created a book that's super smart but it's also highly entertaining i don't think it's dumbed down at all so i always wonder like when somebody is so smart how come they can't figure out a way to make it digestible for for everybody i think a lot of that stuff is ego man because a lot of smart people want to be seen as smart people and not related information that they use that's why they use like these big old words, terrible communicators. Right.

Right. And so they make, they want to either communicate to other smart people or to be seen by people who aren't as smart as them as smarter than them. Right. And that's part, part ego. But I think there is a way,

because first of all, there's a lot of smart black people who you can communicate with who also know like regular people like me and you who know how to relate information. Like I could talk to you like I'm at the barbershop and I could talk to you like I'm in an academic setting, right? And I don't have to choose between the two because if you're smart, then part of being smart is knowing how to convey information so that it's digestible to anybody. Most attorneys do that, right? They use big words and

use words that come from a thesaurus because they feel like they're going to talk over somebody and a lot of times they ain't saying shit. Yeah, yeah. And academics and scholars and, you know, and a lot of times they say shit. Yeah. Yeah. And, and academics and scholars and, you know, and a lot of times it's because the people we're talking about were picked by the white establishment as somebody who is smart.

It's about break that down. Cause you know, just, we know how media works. We know how like corporations work. Like journalism what like at best six percent black. Right. So when you're talking about the people at the top, for instance, of journalism. Those people were picked by a white establishment and kind of endowed with the credentials to speak a lot of times for black people. But does it matter if the person that's speaking cannot galvanize an audience?

Like if you if you're not able to if you get put in that position and you're not able to, you know, energize people and make people gravitate towards you doesn't even matter. But that assumes that you're there to energize and get black people to listen and not validate things for white people. I'll give you an example, right? So a couple of weeks ago there was a black reporter who went down to near where

I live in Georgia and interviewed black people about like why Biden might lose in rural Georgiaorgia oh i read that article yeah that was in the washington post i think but the interesting thing about that article was like i lived literally five minutes from the place she wasn't interviewing like regular black people right because first of all this has that specific time where she she has one of the highest voter registration and participation rates. And she was talking about first of all, she was talking to college students who weren't going to be able to like she was asking people what why they wouldn't vote for Biden.

And they were saying, well, Biden cut off my food stamps and I'm a college student. But out of that whole subset, why would you talk to somebody who didn't have the right information? Right. When it's so many people, because you depth of to perpetuate the narrative. Right. And so a lot of times you're not there to get a black audience.

You are there to validate the same opinions that white people have already held about black people. That's why we see this thing about, you know, why is the Republican Party going to be attractive to black people? Look, I can tell you never in the history of America since black people have been able to vote, have black people voted for the conservative party, whether was the democrats or the republicans at the time it's not going to happen it's never going to happen every year it's not gonna happen at the number they're saying i think right now they say it's 22 they'll never get 22 of the black i don't think so yeah it'll never it's not gonna happen and it will go up though i think it'll be a bump but here's the kids here's what you have to ask yourself. Right. So black people make up 12 percent of the voting electorate. Right. So if it goes up by five points, that's less like that's less than a half of a percentage of the total electorate.

Right. Like five points with black people is especially if you talk about black men, it's less than half a percentage. So why would you even write an article or perpetuate this narrative and have it in multiple newspapers? Like it's not just like the New York times is talking about this. It's the Washington post is the wall street journalist, the LA time talking about the same thing when it's such a small, it cannot decide an election. When the black men turning conservative cannot, cannot decide an election as close as man turning conservative cannot cannot decide an

election as close as the elections have been lately and this one i think what i've been saying this year is that you know you don't have to it's gonna be the republicans who are the criminals you know the democrats who are the cowards because they don't fight enough and the couch which is voter apathy and i think that a lot of democrats are focusing too much on what republicans are doing when they need to focus the energy on the people on the couch. Right. Right. So if the Republicans were able to get, I don't know, two percent, three percent of black voters to increase as close as the election might be. You don't think that could now because see what you're talking about, first of all, leaves out the fact that there's this thing called the electoral college. Right. So so where the Democrats win states is in in large black enclaves in large city states with large cities. Well, a two or three percent swing in even in those cities is not going to do anything. It's not going to do anything, man. Like we keep talking about the you know, about politics in such broad terms especially when you talk about the black

vote when we never focus on this fact right like most white people in america are going to vote for a man with 21 criminal charges and we're talking about what 91 criminal charges and we're talking about what black people do not what we know white people are going to do right like we know white people are going to vote for the racist xenophobic criminal scam artist ignorant dude and

we're talking about what 0.5% of the electorate is going to do is gotta be a narrative. And they get back black people back to what you asked black journalists to rubber stamp it by talking about that dumb, stupid narrative to verify that it's a thing. Why do you think that is? Right. Because, like, you know, when I get on these platforms, I've been saying the same thing, like the whole electorate is dissatisfied. Right. Like you got, you know, know yesterday I saw a poll that said Biden would lose by I think 40 points

in a general election to Trump and the polls are down for him with younger voters and independents and Latinos and Asians and black people why do you think it's just focused on black because you can't talk about like it turns white people off to even say

the words white people you can't talk about what white turns white people off to even say the words white people. You can't talk about what white people are going to do. And then again, you have to realize this goes back to the original premise of the argument is that those newsrooms are 92 to 94 percent white. Those white people, that's not a narrative. They don't even see things through that lens. Just like, for instance, the New York Times doing that thing on Travis Kelsey's haircut. Right now, we as absurd as in all the jokes were right. What it really was about is that entire chain of command was give was was filtered through a white lens. Like there couldn't have been any black person as an editor in that newsroom

who said what do you mean popular like like this haircut has been popular for a while you now that lens is it's popular now for white people i can just tell from that that like we said this morning that they don't see us right like they don't open their eyes to see that we've had fades for yeah but mike you make all skinfolk and kinfolk. Right. Every nigga don't know about that fade. Yeah, but... They should. They do. But what I'm saying is, I don't even care about

what the white people and the black people in the newsroom did, right? It is a white lens to think that something is popular now because white people see it and start doing it. Like they, they talk about critical race theory in the reverse sense that like, why do we have to look at it from a black perspective?

Cause they don't realize that they've been seeing things all of this time from a white perspective. Absolutely. I wanted to ask you something you was talking about. Um, you know, uh, when you saw my Tim Scott,

do you think black people, period, right? When it comes to Democrats or Republicans, is there ever any reason for us to be acting the way he acts over politicians? Because black Democrats, I'd be saying the way these black Democrats over act over the Democratic Party, too. It all looked the same. It's all the same energy of the I love you. Like, do you think there's any reason for black people to be acting like that over any politician regardless of party nah no there isn't because i but i think like what tim that little dance that tim scott first of all i've seen black people do that over democratic politicians now like like like i want to be clear but the thing about black or about black people in politics in general,

man, is a lot of times we don't realize like black people have been through what? Like 20 elections in the history of black. Like we were just able to vote like 20 presidential elections ago. Right? Like, like we got, we did 20 times in the history of black people.

Right. And the other thing is, though, that a lot of that criticism is premised on the fact that the black people in the Democratic Party are cool with how the Democratic Party has worked. Like we criticize it internally and amongst each other. Like we know that the white Democrats in the in the Democratic Party are racist, too. Like they less racist than the white people in the Republican Party. Right. Like we know that and we have the same criticisms. Right. But I don't think you have to shuck and jive. Like what Tim Scott is doing is shucking and jiving for Tim Scott. I agree with you, but I feel like so many black people have done that, too.

I'll give you some examples. Clinton the first black president Uncle Joe Biden god damn what have these men done for you that you call him Uncle Joe and say that he's the first black president well first of all I think there's a difference right I don't yeah I I do in this sense right even though I I kind of agree with you but calling Bill Clinton the first black president don't do nothing. Right. But think about why they used to call him that. Because he played the saxophone. And because he used to he was he was he used to smoke weed. Smoke weed. He was good with women. It wasn't even positive. Well, yeah, but I think a part of that was to like he was a southern poor dude from from Arkansas, too.

But I agree with you. Like like i don't i don't think it was good to call him the first black president but but bill clinton didn't win because black people were calling him the first black president bill clinton uh joe biden didn't win because people was calling him uncle joe tim scott is trying to help a xenophobic racist anti-black man win by dancing. But he ain't, he not going to win because Tim Scott was dancing though. But the attempt is,

and the fact that he is positioning himself because Tim Scott really is positioning himself to be the black, to be the VP, uh, pick, I think. Head of HUD. That's the best he's going to get.

But regardless of what it is, right? Like to be a bigger part of that anti-black machine, right? Like the person who said to, uh, Bill Clinton is the first black president. What important?

Didn't get a, a lollipop from the democratic party for it. They didn't get become part of the machine. Same thing with Joe Biden. It was just some dumb stuff that people were saying, you know, amongst each other in barbershops and everything. But it was Congress people who said this. Is your country falling apart?

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We still have the off-road portion to go. Listen to Escape from Zakistan. And we're losing daylight fast. That's Escape from Z-A-Q-istan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've

hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As a kid, I really do remember having these dreams and visions, but you just don't know what is going to come for you. Alicia Keys opens up about conquering doubt, learning to trust herself and leaning into her dreams. I think a lot of times we are built to

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about like an ethos. scott is a single person who is trying to use his blackness as a cudgel against black people by verifying and validating the most racist political machine in the country do you think people you think black people are politically fatigued tired of this shit tired of tired of the conversations and the talk over and over again, tired of the selling the dreams, tired of the car sales people feel. Do you think that's going to stop a lot of people from going out? I think it might.

One of the things that might is that at some point there is going to have to be a reckoning with the Democratic Party and saying you have to stop giving us lip service and start doing the stuff that you say

but one of the things that people say well we can't do it this year because what if Trump wins they do that every election every election they tell us that now the second part of that sentence is that the difference in this time is

a lot of black folks are gonna say i ain't scared he he's already been president and live through him yeah i lived through him once right so that's the danger right that's what might attract people to the council because we live through a trump presidency i agree that we're going to have to have a reckoning with the democratic party too right, right? Because ain't nothing we can do. But I think it's wrong to equate the racism of inside the Democratic Party with the points of the Republican Party is white supremacy, right? Like that's that's the goal is to keep power among white people and they weaponize it with their policies and who they attract to their coalition i agree with you i think i think that's democrat's fault though because

you know they have demonized they demonize every single republican candidate every time it's an election and now that there's an actual real threat to democracy a real demon we like please we done heard that story before right and then the the other side of that though is they might can they might be able to fight that better if they said hey you know that demon we got the answer to kill that demon that's right right but the policies that we put forth because it's not like black people have a new agenda, we've been pushing the same agenda for since like the 1979 Indiana summit. Right. We've been pushing the same agenda. Like, that's why we kind of dismiss Ice Cube. Right. Because we knew that what he was saying was nothing. Why we want a rapper going to plead our case in the white house? Like we don't even want to vote for nobody who would even talk to a rapper versus somebody who would know our agenda policy wise.

But you wouldn't want to vote for somebody who spoke to a rapper. No. What I'm saying is if you are going to make time to address black people's needs and you're going to invite someone to speak to you and see what you might be missing if you invite ice cube and say like that's the one who i need to talk to about what black people want then you probably just a performative person who just trying to get votes and pander to black people well that's why i think we got to bring the right people with them i mean i feel like that's where the entertainment and the and the

the experts go hand in hand right like if i get that invite take somebody with you who knows what they're talking about well but here's the thing right if you are an expert who could really talk to ice cube wouldn't you have told him that, hey, this agenda already exists? Like like they know about this stuff, like it was in the Tavis Smiley wrote about it. It was in the 1979 political black summit. It's the same like literally the known like, oh, I what I'll do is I'll get behind the experts who have already been pushing this agenda. Then trying to make it about not just about himself, but being mad when we didn't recognize the absolute unique genius of Ice Cube. Right. I think we're saying the same thing though it's just like yes these agendas have already been out there but i think we gotta we gotta keep them in these people's faces because these people have every reason to ignore us right right but that's what i why ice cube should be

saying i am going to get behind these smart black people right because instead of saying this is my agenda that I wrote or not even just saying that it is mine right like just like Ice Cube has a lot of capital in black America right he could be uplifting some of the people who have been who are scholars who are

the people who have been doing the work for years and years but Ice Cube said I want to be in that room and you need to talk to me, Ice Cube. And I think there's a bit of ego in that that is to the detriment of black people. Why is that? Because let's say they did invite Ice Cube there and Ice Cube said all the right things. Like, don't just perpetuate the same myth that these stupid rappers and these stupid entertainers and many of them who haven't done the work, but they have good intentions, are the representatives for black people? But what if what if Cube actually gets it done? Like Kim Kardashian gets things that people say she gets things done when it comes to prison reform, right?

I just saw something come out right right when you watch that back it's gonna be so funny people have said that right people have said donald trump listened to kim kardashian before he listened to but there's women behind kim that have actually done the work black women behind kim i can't remember the sister's name we had them up here we had them up here i'm so sorry i can't remember two black female yeah yeah yeah two lawyers and that is the point right like if ice cube can get you into the room i ain't got no problem with that right but and i ain't even got no problem with ice cube asking to be in the room okay right but when ice Cube was told, hey, you can't be in the room, he switched up and would say, well, I can go talk to Donald Trump. And then he elevated the purveyor of the white genocide, the white replacement theory. Tucker Carlson went on his show when Tucker Carlson didn't even have a toehold in media.

Ice Cube helped him get that, help him gain that audience, validated his belief by saying he can't be racist because he's sitting here talking to this dude who is pushing an agenda for black people, right? Like that is why you don't want the people who are driven by ego in the room because if they don't get in the room, right? He switched to the enemy side, really really so let me ask you a question right

so the breakfast club here has had oh hold on i gotta say their names britney k barnett and me angel cody yes he was up here yes so the breakfast club has had uh politicians up here that necessarily weren't on our side right republicans here uh so what's your thought on that because a lot of people have said why do you give those republicans the platform as if they don't already have a huge platform why do you allow them up there and have the conversation cnn msnbc fox why do you up here and have them spew things that are not necessarily best for our community so it's it's two sides of that right like i think if you're going to have those people on you have to be equipped to counter the narrative that you you know, they're going to push.

Right. Like a lot of times, again, because of ego, we think that I'm equipped, I'm smart enough to. And it ends up being that person promoting the ideology. You give me a person a platform to promote anti-black ideology or anti-black narrative. The other thing is that just like you said they got enough platforms right like i don't necessarily disagree with the intellectual curiosity or the ability to say look i am probably what a lot of people will call progressive pro-black or whatever and my my viewpoint can stand up in the face of somebody like Nikki Haley or Republican and I'm gonna show you that it can because I'm gonna have them in this space right I don't think there's anything wrong with that but I think a lot of

times when some people do it right it ends up being counter to what we counted to the point that they brought them into. Right. Like, like Ice Cube going on Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson wiped the floor with Ice Cube. He bit Ice Cube into a pretzel. They were debating.

I never watched it. I didn't watch it. They weren't debating. Right. Tucker Carlson is an experienced media person. So he knew how to get Ice Cube to say what he want. Like Ice Cube has criticisms of people like Oprah and the people at the top of the power structure. Right. But if that's the only thing you say and Tucker Carlson manages to manipulate you and saying just bad stuff about black people, you weren't equipped to do that.

And now we're supposed to still believe that that Ice cube is equipped to go into those rooms and represent us when we see what these white folks one-on-one can can twist you in their pretzel and and make you sound like and make you look like right and that's the thing right like there is kind of a divining line where you can have that robust intellectual debate with people from the other side. If you are equipped with, if you are not equipped to do it, you also have to invite people who are equipped to do it into the room. When you have them on your platform, those people like,

you know, Republicans, conservatives, which I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid to do. I think in this era, people like confrontation over conversation, because what's the point of platforming Democrats? Because when we have Democrats up here, it's the same thing just from a whole other side. It's people that say all they did was lie about this. All they did was lie about that.

You didn't challenge them enough on this. You didn't challenge them enough on that. So it's literally the same thing. If you have Democrats on, gonna have some people that are mad you have republicans on you gonna have people that are mad there's not one politician i've ever seen come on maybe like maybe one or two that actually made people be like oh what they said was actually interesting that's kind of how you know you on the right path if you in media right like if you if both sides are upset by something you did then you probably kind of were fair right like is is i call it like my dr umar thing like dr umar don't like me because i've been critical of him you have a white wife huh no oh hell no i'm sorry i love who you love but no but dr umar was because

was mad at me because i was critical of him like of how he raised money and some of the stuff he said about gay people and the reason people know that Dr. Umar is Dr. Umar is because I did journalism and actually validated his

PhD so and people got mad at you for that Dr. Umar haters was mad at me because you validated him and what i'm what i'm trying to do is be fair right and so if both sides are kind of mad at you you probably know you were doing the right thing and you were at least fair but when do you get to the point where you can have a real conversation right i remember uh floyd mayweather back in the day where you know 10 years ago he was i like donald trump right and people were canceling him and this that and the other but when do we have a point when we can have a conversation to be like all right floyd this is

your opinion why and then have a conversation because he might not know some of the things that floyd say or there might be something that you say that somebody might not know but you'll never get to that point if we can't have a conversation. And the first thing is, like he said, is confrontation. Well, I think we can have that conversation like I do it all the time. Like when I hear stuff that people who I disagree with say, the first thing I do is try to get in contact with them and see why or try to research and see why we can have that conversation. Now, the thing is, a lot of of times like because of social media because of the way the world works right like the nuances of that conversation are never going to be talked about or seen because it can't fit into a two minute and 20 second clip but we can have the

conversation and i think that's on us to do because if you have a platform like the breakfast club you can have those conversations in long form and explore those things. And you don't have to have a hot take all of the time because it's always going to be a hot take. Right. Right. And you always go to like the pushback is kind of a reflection of how popular and how impactful you are. Cause like if I did it, I'd have way less pushback sometimes than what you guys do. Cause you got a bigger platform. What them hip hop dudes talking to them politicians. But the other thing is right.

Here's the thing. If you do something and we're a platform that gets as big as yours or mine. Right. And 80% of the people like it. Well, 90% of that 80% are just going to say, yeah well 90 of that 80 are just gonna say yeah i like that and just go on those 20 that don't like it are going to scream at you on social media so the people who like it don't ever say anything they just like like it and move on like so the people who are

for lack of a better word anti you or haters are always going to be the loudest the reason i like reading not just you know your book black af but your articles is because of what you're you look at things from an objective lens i remember an article you wrote one time and it was about tim scott's police reform bill i want to say it was a george floyd police yeah i think it was the walter scott bill and if i'm not mistaken you said tim Tim Scott's bill was better. Yeah. Tim. So, so Tim Scott's Walter Scott notification act would have required every police

department in America to notify, not just when they went, because first of all, most people don't know that like no one in America in the whole world knows how many black people police kill every year. Cause there's no mechanism to report police killings right so tim scott's bill would have not just notified you uh of the federal government every time police officer killed someone but every time a police officer

fired their gun it would have the name age race of the person they were firing at all of that right and so that part of that's why i was gonna say that's wild that that that's not recorded i didn't know that yeah i thought every time a police officer shoots his firearm that just had to be documented and it had to be in some police departments it does right but then it stays in that police department they're gonna have to go to a state agency or a federal agency. So we don't know. The things that you see about the numbers of how

many people are killed by police, those are from media reports of on-duty police officers who kill someone only with their gun. Oh, wow. Like George Floyd isn't in the police killing database. Like Eric Garner is not in the police killing database.

Wow. Right. So it's only people who are shot and killed by on duty police officers. Right. So Tim Scott's bill was better. Right. But then Tim Scott sabotaged it because you want to describe qualified immunity.

Nah, because of the national chefs association, uh, head, the headed by Leon Lott, who is the most powerful man in South Carolina. And they didn't want to give up that power to the federal federal government because of this white supremacist ideology. And y'all can look it up and google it uh the constitutional sheriff's um idea that sheriffs are above the constitution like they don't they are the enforcers of the constitution are kind of above the constitution and it's a white supremacist movement that nobody writes or talks about and that's who sabotaged police reform. So I thought I thought people didn't like Tim Scott's bill because he didn't he didn't want to qualify.

He didn't want to scrap qualified immunity. Well, that was one of the that was one of the things, the differences between like the Democrats bill and Tim Scott. But that that's not what sabotaged because really qualified immunity. Isn't like isn't it really is deal breaker. And to tell you the truth, right? Like a federal police reform bill can only do so much, right?

That's the importance of knowing about politics, right? Because, because the federal, the federal government doesn't control police officers and they don't control what the laws that govern police officers, what the federal police reform bill would have been was a mechanism to control the federal funds that police departments get.

Right. Because they can't govern police departments. That is a state level bill. So we should be trying to make this movement a state level movement. And that's why knowledge of politics is important, because the federal government really can't do anything but say, hey, if y'all your police department doesn't use body cams, then you don't qualify for these federal funds that we give police departments every year. Right. And that's all the federal government can do. So why do we let these Negroes get away with saying the Biden administration? They they did ban the use of chokeholds and no knock warrants when we know that's on a federal level. Right. Because of a lack of knowledge about politics, because, again, we don't have these conversations,

these these long form, deeper conversations, because people believe what they read on social media instead of investigating it for themselves because the there's like the fbi and the secret service are the only one the only entities or agencies that can be banned from using no knock warrants and chokeholds now what we can say is if you're the police department don't ban no knock warrants and uh chokeholds then you won't get the federal funds to buy body cams or to buy police armor or stuff like that. Now, you can withhold funds, but you can't really tell police departments, hey, y'all can knock on somebody's door or go in without a no-knock warrant. We're talking to Michael Harriot, the author of Black AF History and the Unwhite Watched Story of America. Another thing I love about the book is it shows how when it comes to America, nearly everything started in South Carolina.

Yeah, that's everything. That's always been one of my premises for like years. Even before I began writing the book is that my thing is the capital of black America. If there is such a thing as black America, then its capital is in South Carolina. Forty percent of all the people who were enslaved in America came through South Carolina. And if you talk about just spending time in South Carolina in a port or something like that, it goes up to 90 percent. That's right. Right. So black America, like all of the laws, like the the law that stopped cities from being able to segregate buses didn't come from the Montgomery bus boycott. Right. That what came from a South Carolina bus protest years before the Montgomery bus boycott. As a matter of fact, when Montgomery went to federal court and took their case to the Supreme Court,

the reason it's not a Supreme Court case is because the Supreme Court said, oh, yeah, we already decided this in South Carolina. Right. So everything starts in South Carolina. All of the laws that govern the enslaved are because of a slave revolt in 1739 in South Carolina. I think most people, if they do their family history, they'll see a relative that that came from South Carolina. Their mom was from South Carolina. Their father is from if they're black. Caribbean is different. But if they're black, like my mom just showed me a picture. It was her baby picture, and she's from South Carolina. And she showed me, she was like, look, we was broken poor in South Carolina. Look at the back.

But you understand, but that's where the initial thing came from. And the other thing I talk about in the book and we don't know is that the Caribbean connection, because most of the enslaved people from South Carolina were shipped in from the Caribbean. Right. Like South Carolina was was basically first created by a group of white people who lived, who had plantations in Barbados. Right. So they brought enslaved people from the Caribbean and then started going to back to Africa, to the rice coast of Africa when they realized hey these people know how to grow rice and there's a whole chapter in the book on like how rice built America and like before South Carolina and black people in South Carolina started growing rice most people

don't know for instance like it was slaves were 80 percent black that That's, they weren't, uh, creating other slaves because they were just importing black men. But black women were the one who knew how to grow rice and knew the agricultural technology. So that's when they started trans enslaving more black women. And that's how it became about, about one to one in America. Have you been to the international African American museum? Yeah.

I was there on opening weekend. Okay absolutely yeah man i i love this book all this stuff that you're talking about is stuff that we we we got taught a little bit growing up in charleston not the way we should have like but charleston people in charleston know a lot more oh yeah than people everywhere else just because like it's something that you can't ignore in charleston stone old rebellion then martin bethy like you're gonna learn about all of that it's it's it feels like it's in the dirt there we're here in new york growing up they tell you you learn about frederick douglass you learn about rosa parks you learn about martin luther king you learn about malcolm x you learn about those people and that's it right and a lot of it is because like those

people the bad people in charleston it was passed down, not in schools, but by the people who were involved in it. That's right. I encourage anybody, if you go to Charleston, just go on a tour. Let's get one of the brothers and sisters to take you on a tour of downtown Charleston. You'll get all of that and go see that. Go to the International African-American Museum. And by Black AF History, the unwhitewashed story of America from South Carolina's own Michael Harriot. Tell them we appreciate you, Michael. We appreciate you, George. I'm on all social media as M-I-C-H-A-E-L-H-A-R-R-I-O-T.

I write weekly, well, three times a week for the Griot and have the Griot Daily Podcast where I talk about the same stuff we're talking about here. Not with guests. It's just me explaining stuff. So the Griot Daily Podcast, you can find me on social media under my name on all platforms. Michael Harry, ladies and gentlemen, it's the Breakfast Club. Good morning.

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