The Daily Signal - #375: Reaching Minority Students

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

In our abbreviated episode today due to the snowstorm that hit the Washington, D.C., area, we feature an interview with C.J. Sailor of the Gloucester Institute, a nonprofit that works to engage minority students on campus.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, January 15th. I'm Daniel Davis. Today we are snowed in at the Daily Signal, which means we're a bit lower staff than normal. But as always, the podcast continues. It'll just be a little shorter today. And today we bring you a conversation that Jenny Montabano and I had with C.J. Sailor of the Gloucester Institute. That's a conservative nonprofit group that works to engage minority students on campus. And I'll just say at the outset, his work really is fascinating. Here's the chat we had with CJ. Well, here with us to discuss what it takes to reach young people as conservatives is C.J. Sailor.

He's the program director with the Gloucester Institute, an organization that trains young conservative leaders. CJ, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So Cignell. Yeah, CJ, you know, reaching the next generation is so critical to determine the future of our country. You're someone who's in the thick of that, reaching out to young people on college campuses and elsewhere. First off, just tell us what kind of work do you and your colleagues do to reach young people and what kind of exchanges do you have with them?

Sure. Well, thanks, Daniel, for your question. The Gloucester Institute was founded in 2005 by Kay Coles James and her husband Charles James with the single mission of finding and training and nurturing the next generation of minority leaders. We found that there has been a stronghold on policies. that are set to improve minority communities. And liberals, quite frankly, have sort of put up a barrier for allowing minorities to understand what it means

to embrace conservative values. And so one of the things that's important to our founder that we provide a platform for these students to come in the safe environment to discuss issues that allow them to use critical thinking to come to a solution on what's the best idea? Is it better to be self-sufficient or is it better to rely on big government? Is it better to embrace a failing school system or is it better to embrace choice in education?

Is it better to support economic development, economic improvement in a free society, or is it better to be drowned out by socialism? So we're fortunate with the work that we're doing. We own a property in Gloucester, Virginia. We encourage and invite everyone to come visit us at some point. It's a national historic landmark. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would visit there quite frequently. The United Negro College Fund was found it there.

And on this property is where we bring our students to train. And they've received a lot of backlash because of what they're doing, what they're coming to learn, doesn't fall in line with a lot of their friends and folks in their constituency. Well, CJ, you are doing some wonderful work. But have there been obstacles that you've encountered with your work? And if so, how have you, you know, encountered those and move past them? Sure, yes. Lots of obstacles.

You know, there's a situation I'm reminded of about a year ago. I was recruiting on a college campus in Virginia. And I received a call from a professor one day. And the professor said to me that we don't want you to come back to our campus and to pass out recruit. flyers because your organization is teaching African Americans how to be black conservatives. And we don't want your sort of rhetoric on our campus. And I had to give this professor a history lesson in who President Abraham Lincoln is and

what that means for African Americans. And also what the Republican Party means, which is actually in history will tell you that African Americans, the Republican Party was home for African Americans. and it's sort of a lineage of coming home to a party in which we first started, where we got our roots. So a lot of the backlash comes from individuals that want to continue to hold down a certain segment of our population and not allow them to explore and to find policies to actually work. As I said earlier, if you were going to stay in a failing school system, why stay in a failing school system when there are opportunities for you to explore the options and choice and charter schools.

And there are numbers out there to show that there is a significant increase in graduation rates for students, African American students that attend charter schools. So we're on the front line of the battlefield to ensure that our students get exposure to conservative values. That's so great. You know, you talk about being shut off campus. And, you know, so often the problem. is not that we disagree, it's that we're not even having a conversation. We're not even able to have that civil discussion. What ways have you found useful to engage people who may not at first

want to even have a discussion? Is there any way to reach those folks? Because we see more and more on college campuses that sometimes there's a lot of big protests and backlashes when conservatives come to campus. How do you break through that? Yeah, a great question. One of the things is you know, to meet people where they are. Especially in a minority community, there is observation to be had when approaching this particular group with a different set of values and views

that they may not have ever been exposed to. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and I can tell you that when I graduated high school and went to Morehouse College and was talking to my classmates about self-sufficiency and about a free society, talking to them about economic independence and pro-life issues, protecting life. They looked at me like I was crazy and said,

where in the world does a African-American young man from Detroit think like that? And it was disheartened to hear that because African-Americans are not a monolith, and we have different set of views, we have different values. But I think the opportunity is shut out for a lot of students, that want to be exposed to these new ideas. There's a Pew Research poll out that said 31% of African-American millennials actually feel that the Democratic Party does not care about their issues. And that's telling, because when you look at where our country is headed in,

I mean, right now there's a major win, I think, in terms of our president being able to bring the unemployment rate down for African-Americans, and one of the first, lowest numbers in a while. And these things get shut out by media. Media doesn't report it, but thank God for the Daily Signal and the Heritage Foundation who really gives us the platform to get these messages out. So we're not in this fight alone. We have great support from the Heritage Foundation.

We're appreciative of that support with resources to be able to combat all of the negativity and the shutting down of. of having the conversation on campuses, but we must continue to fight and must continue to meet students where they are and to listen more so than to go in, sort of ramming down their throats

that, well, our values went out every day. I think, well, let's have the conversation. Let's compare and contrast, and we'll see that conservative values went out at the end of the day in the battle of ideas. You sort of touched on this already, but it's so important to engage all communities, including the youth, but also minority communities.

And so for our listeners who are listening right now, do you have any more suggestions for how we can engage different communities, including minority communities, and open up those lines of communication? Yeah, yeah, great question. You know, go, go to those communities. Go to an African-American restaurant and try the food. Have a conversation. You know, go to an African-American church. Go to these communities and have the conversation and start there. start with understanding what their plight is.

And we do that. The Gloucester Institute, we pride ourselves on going to college campuses, meeting students where they are presenting our programs, providing a different path that actually ends in results. Our founder, K. Coast James, coined a phrase called, solutionist. We want them to be solutionist in the fact that when you think about issues and you think about what are the ills in society,

that are plaguing communities, well, what's the solution to the problem? We can talk about it and complain about it, but what's the solution and what are the policies that are working that's winning in our communities? So, you know, for our listeners and for folks that want to engage in this fight of opening our party up and having a bigger tent and exposing students to new ideas, is to support the Heritage Foundation for resources to help us to get the platform so that we can to get our message out through the Daily Signals is doing an amazing job. But we encourage all our listeners to continue to support the Heritage Foundation as we continue

to grow our relationship with Heritage's Foundation to impact these communities of color. There's demographics tell us that by 2050 America is going to be led by minority communities. That is a huge fact for us to fathom and that do we want these communities leading us to a socialist society or do we want a thriving, vibrant, upward mobility, society that embraces freedom, that embraces self-reliance? Yeah, that's so good. You know, one of the most encouraging experiences I had in college was I went to, I had to go to different churches for different, for a class assignment. And I went to Chicago's Austin neighborhood, went to an African-American church, predominantly African-American church, and meeting the people having lunch. So cool to build a connection with folks that you might think on the outside,

extremely different, but there's so much there that is common. And it's amazing how you talk about building a connection as fellow Americans. Like, that is the first step. And it's easier to do than one might think. So really appreciate your message. And thanks for coming on, CJ. All right. Thank you.

Thank you, guys. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, and please give us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow, hopefully with less snow. You've been listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis, sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visit DailySignal. signal.com.

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