What A Day - Still Marching After All These Years

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Trump’s former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis published a scathing indictment of his presidency, and he’s been backed up by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. Lawmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus are preparing a piece of police legislation that will aim to end racial profiling and qualified immunity.We speak with Dr. Keisha Blain, a professor of African American History at University of Pittsburgh, about how what’s happening now is an extension of the work civil rights leaders began long ago.And in headlines: Trump signs executive order to weaken environmental protections, Zoom makes users pay for end-to-end encryption, and loud blonde man Jake Paul charged with looting.

It's Friday, June 5th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What A Day, wrapping up another two-year-long week here in America. Honestly, time has just lost all meaning. On top of everything else, we should also abolish clocks. Yeah. On today's show, a conversation with Dr. Keisha Blaine about the history of protests and police, then some headlines. But first, the latest.

It was just amazing. Everywhere you go and see people, how they cling to him. They wanted to be around him. You know, George, he was like a general. Every day he walks outside, it'd be a line of people, like just like when we came in, wanting to greet him and wanted to have fun with him. That was Philonise Floyd speaking yesterday at the first of many memorials set to take place to honor his brother. And there was additional news that came out of that day of remembrance. Al Sharpton and the Floyd family announced that they will hold a march on Washington in August on the 57th anniversary of the original march on Washington.

It will be led by families of black people killed by the police. Gideon, we have a lot to cover in a short amount of time. So what else is happening? Yeah, so a few developments on legal proceedings or lack thereof pertaining to some high profile and horrific ongoing cases. In Georgia, a judge ruled yesterday that there was probable cause to try the three white men on murder charges for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. The special agent in charge from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation also said at the hearing that Travis McMichael, who killed Arbery, called him the N-word after he fatally shot him. That is according to what the man who filmed the video told investigators.

Then attorneys for McMichael denied it and said that Brian, the man who filmed it, was lying to get leniency. And yesterday, a prosecutor in Omaha, Nebraska, said that he was going to petition for a grand jury to review the case of James Scurlock, a 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a white bar owner this past week. The initial determination was that the owner acted in self-defense as a group of protesters and the owner were involved in a physical altercation. And lastly, in Louisville, no officers have been

charged yet in the killing of Breonna Taylor in March. The FBI opened an investigation just over a week ago. Today would have been Taylor's 27th birthday. We are going to continue following these stories as we find out more, as well as the ongoing protests for racial justice. Yeah. And speaking of protests, President Trump is continuing to draw criticism for his militaristic reaction to them, and specifically the violence against peaceful protesters in the nation's capital just this week. That's right. Yeah. And on Wednesday, General James Mattis, who was Trump's former defense secretary, wrote a scathing statement about his former boss in which he said, quote, Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people, does not even pretend to try. And yesterday, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that Mattis's words were, quote, necessary and overdue.

She also said she is struggling with whether to vote for Trump in November. I mean, imagine still struggling to figure that out. I just don't get it. But I don't know. Yeah, she can talk to us more. Trump responded by saying he would be campaigning against her and would support anyone. He said, quote, if you have a pulse, I'm with you. The president is finally being open about his basement level political standards.

All of his standards are low. They're so, so low. We've talked yesterday, though, about some of the responses we've seen on a policy level to protests over the last week. But Akilah, take us through some more that have developed in the last 24 hours. Yeah, so we have some more good news as a result of the ongoing protests. In New York, the NYPD comptroller has proposed a $1.1 billion with a B dollar cut to the police budget to be invested into the community. Now, the NYPD's annual budget would still be nearly $12 billion, which is still way too much, but a billion dollars would absolutely do some good. On the other coast, the curfews in LA and the

endless Amber Alerts that announced them several times each day, different times every time, they're over for now. This comes after public pressure on Mayor Garcetti and after the ACLU and Black Lives Matter LA sued the city, saying they were infringing on First Amendment rights of protesters. And it is good to see. Okay, and we finally heard from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi yesterday on federal action. What did she have to say? Okay, so Pelosi said that Democrats will release policing legislation drafted by members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Monday. It's unclear what kind of legislation could pass in the Dem-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate, but here's hoping.

Pelosi said the bill would aim to end racial profiling, end excessive use of force, and end qualified immunity. If you're unfamiliar, qualified immunity makes it harder for victims of violence and their families to sue police. We're going to be talking a lot more about that next week. So that's a quick update on the latest, but today we wanted to take a moment to step away from all the news alerts and look back at history, specifically the history of racist policing in America and how these past couple of weeks of protests fit into it. Yeah, and we're going to start with the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. Of course, we could

go back to the country's founding, but we are not the 1619 podcast, which you should definitely be listening to. It is excellent. For today, we're going to keep things a little bit more recent. And to do that, we're going to bring in Dr. Keisha Blain, a professor of African American history at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Blain, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So we really want to get into history, obviously. And this week, a lot of people are revisiting the history of the civil rights movement. But what do you hope we are better able to understand about that history and how it relates to what's actually happening right now? in this moment to recognize that the problem of police violence in the United States is one that civil rights activists were very vocal about. And I think many people imagine that it's a fairly new topic that we're discussing. And that's not true. For example, in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave, of course, the very famous I Have a Dream speech

at the March on Washington. I think many people don't realize that one of the parts of his speech was to point out the problem of police violence and brutality. He went as far as to say that we could never be, and I'm quoting from him, we could never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. So I emphasize that because I think to understand the connections really help us recognize that what's happening in this moment isn't divorced from the civil rights movement, but I would argue it's actually part of the civil rights movement. Absolutely. Wow. people have focused on this week when media is so often zeroing in on acts like looting as opposed to what protesters are actually seeking justice for. What do you make of the fact that sometimes in the conversation, people try to ascribe what is acceptable protest?

I think the unfortunate reality is that there's never really been any acceptable form of protest in the United States. And what do I mean by that? The irony is that the very same people today who are talking about look to King, look to the vision of nonviolent activism, pacifism, this is very important. Absolutely. These are crucial ideals. But what's interesting is that these people also don't tell you that King encountered resistance, violence and downright disdain because he was a part of a movement that pushed for civil rights using the kinds of methods that now we're saying are great methods. So why was King attacked, for example? Why were Black activists brutally attacked simply for walking? They were just walking. They were walking from Selma, right? They were walking to Montgomery, singing songs, holding hands, and still encountering resistance and actual violence. So now we say, well, that was acceptable. Well, acceptable then? No, certainly not.

And acceptable to who, you know? Like, I don't think that people ever evaluate that, like, these were people fighting for their rights who then were brutalized for it. You know, despite all of the huge gains, at least that we can point to in legislation from the civil rights movement, you know, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the full promise of, you know, racial and economic equality is still completely left undone. For example, the economic divide between Black and white Americans is as wide as it was in 1968. In some places, it is wider. Can you talk about what happened in the years after the, you know, I guess what people see as the beginning and end of the civil rights movement and how that progress just stalled out?

And if that is the right way to see it? Well, I think what we have to always remember, and we see this even in the contemporary moment, every time there is something that we can classify as a gain, there is backlash, always. So even in the case of the Brown Supreme Court decision in 1954, well, guess what happens? We celebrate this moment. This is wonderful. We have finally desegregated public schools. We begin to move toward a place where we can have full integration in public spaces. But what do people do? The same people who resisted it before 1954 continue to resist it after 1954, but only this time they have to resist it with a lot more rigor and passion because now it's harder to get around it because now we actually have a Supreme Court

decision to enforce it. And so whenever there's a gain, there's backlash. And the danger with a gain, with a political gain, is that the same way you can gain it, you can lose it. And we see today, even when you talk about the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, if we're not careful, and we've already seen the steps toward this, those very rights will be lost. They're eroding as we speak. And so we have to always remember that when we gain rights, the key is to actually hold on to them and never lose them, to fight to make sure we never lose them. Absolutely. In terms of the historical perspective, is this a moment in which the police, years, and it depends on when someone was born. just a terrible case from 1999. I think certainly many of my students would not be familiar with the case, depending on when they were born. But I vividly remember that moment as someone just

even being in Brooklyn at the time and feeling similarly that, well, maybe this is the turning point, that here we have this Black immigrant just gunned down by the police senselessly. And even before Amadou Diallo, there was the Abna Louima case, just a list of Michael Stewart. It was exhausting, all these names. But the Amadou Diallo case was a moment where I remember, and I was very young, but I remember thinking, wow, something's happening here. People are mobilizing here. This is national. This is even global. Perhaps this is the last time we'll see this taking place

because we are going to change. And then here we are in 2020. Years have passed. A lot has changed, but what hasn't changed is the fundamental problem of American policing and the ways that the Black people are continually being targeted and losing their lives. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Geez. I mean, yeah, for me, I'm like, Mike Brown was such a pivotal moment. And I think that, you know, that was recent memory. One last kind of big picture question. You know, I want to take a moment to talk about the role of Black women in the movement, first of all, and human rights. Can you talk about their leadership past and present?

Yes. One of the things that I think many people forget and lose sight of is that women have always, always been crucial to Black political activism in the U.S. and certainly globally. So even thinking about the context of the civil rights movement, we do credit a lot Rosa Parks. We talk about her courage, but we don't always talk about Joanne Robinson, who is actually someone who played a key role with the Women's Political Council in actually organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Generally, we talk about the Montgomery bus boycott, we focus on King. Now, in a similar kind of way, even today, I noticed even in the past five years or so, we all know that three Black women founded Black Lives Matter as a movement in 2014. But how many times have we seen the movement represented, so to speak, in mass media and the voices that tend to be prioritized are men. So what we notice when we compare past and present is that there is still this sort of

expectation that the leader who emerges has to be this male figure. And what we know is reality tells us, history tells us, and just the facts of the current moment is that women are in fact leaders, organizers. What has changed perhaps is a matter of whether people acknowledge publicly the role of women leaders. But even today, as we're talking about the 2020 uprisings, we see women leading. I just saw a recent video, for example, with Tamika Mallory speaking powerfully in Atlanta. That's just one brief example where we see women leaders emerging within various contexts to talk about police violence and to get people to reorient their minds and to focus on the larger issue at hand, which is structural racism. Yeah. Wow. Dr. Blaine, thank you so much again for being

on the show and just for sharing your work and teaching us a little bit today. Thank you for It's Thursday, WOD Squad, and something that's got our temperatures a little up or down or, you know, whichever direction is the worst, is New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. Brees did an interview with Yahoo this week, which like, okay. And he picked one of the worst moments ever to say that if any of his black teammates wanted to kneel for the national anthem, when the NFL starts back up, he would not support them.

Breeze has since apologized for his comments and did the heroic work of posting a stock photo of a black person and a white person holding hands on Instagram. Cool. Kitty breeze messed up. We all know this. How would you like to see other pro athletes and celebrities use their platforms the right way? I feel like it's just like, if you have something to add to the discourse, add it. But if you know that you're like stepping in shit which this is clearly stepping in shit just run it by like at least one person before posting like if you if you feel that you have to post it or tell somebody in a yahoo interview um but you know i mean i think the other way to do it is to do the like kanye west thing where so far at least he has not said anything.

I'm patiently awaiting him saying the wrong thing, but has like contributed lots and lots of money to the families of Floyd and Taylor. So that's one way to do it. But yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that that's right. Like Kanye would probably say something terrible. So like just shut up and give your money, you know? Yes. But when we look at like athletes though, what do you think that they should be doing during all this? You know, I mean, that's right. Let's start with doing.

We'll talk about saying later. I think that these athletes should, you know, for one, be listening a lot. Drew Brees is a quarterback in a very black city, New Orleans. And why do we have to hear from him at all? Like, who's asking his opinion on how black people live their lives on his team or elsewhere? Like, why is he an authority on anything? So like one, if you're an interviewer, stop asking irrelevant people shit about this. Second, like if you have a lot of money and you're just sitting on it right now and you're not even

working, you could be donating to charities. Even if you don't want to, you know, say anything in particular about these cases, there are plenty of charities doing good work that you would really have to be an asshole to assume they're not, you know, like if you don't, if you just want to sit and count your dollars and say black people be quiet, then like, don't do a fucking interview. I agree. Yeah. And it was like Malcolm Jenkins, who responded to Breeze immediately after that like helped kick off him realizing that he had fucked up so bad. And he was like being like, dude, what is going on here?

Yeah, why not text one other person before you start answering? Also, like LeBron dragged him. So I'm like, man, I guess he was he got tired of just sitting at home and he's like, I need to lose every weekend. Now I'm going to lose this weekend again. Well, whatever. You know what? Somehow, someway, we made it to the end of what feels like the longest week in recent history. Thank you so much for checking in on us.

Check in on your friends and family. Make sure that they are not perpetuating systemic racism. And we will catch you on the other side of the weekend. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. The pandemic might not be the first thing on everyone's minds right now, but around the world, the number of COVID-19 cases continue to rise. Brazil's death toll is now the third highest in the world, right behind the United States and the UK. Iran is experiencing a second wave of infections, with the number of daily cases rising to 3,000.

Here in the U.S., the White House is now requiring states to report the demographic data of citizens getting tested for the virus. That is intended to give the government a clearer picture of who is most affected by the pandemic. As we've seen and read, there have been gaping racial disparities in the spread and the treatment of COVID-19, with Black Americans dying at disproportionate rates. Always. Trump signed an executive order yesterday to weaken important environmental protections for federal infrastructure projects. That means the government could potentially approve projects like mines, pipelines, and highways without agencies stepping in if the project is harmful to the environment. So trees, better see your ass at the marches. Trump cited the current economic crisis as the reason why he wants to bypass environmental laws to build pipelines faster.

In addition to hurting the earth, research and history have taught us that communities of color and indigenous people are disproportionately affected by pollution and ecological hazards. Trump's order is currently being reviewed by the White House and could be finalized within weeks in case you didn't know where their priorities are. Many are expecting legal challenges to come. Mr. President, thank you for keeping your eyes on the ball. The latest white person to face consequences for his actions is Jake Paul. The social media personality and always yelling blonde man was charged with criminal trespassing following the release of videos that showed him in a mall that was being looted. The Scottsdale Fashion Square, where Paul

disappointed us all by standing by as his friend defaced a defenseless PF Chang's wasn't the site of any organized protests. Peaceful protests were happening elsewhere that night in nearby Arizona cities. Paul has said he was trying to document people's anger, but it seems more likely that he was trying to cash in on a movement for his own clout. He makes millions on YouTube views, and it's been shown time and time again that on that platform, very bad politics can equal very high view counts. Yeah, good job, YouTube. All right. Well, the video conferencing app Zoom, an app some of us use every day to look at our chins while our co-workers do presentations, has announced a controversial new policy. The company, which has gotten serious criticism for failing to protect user privacy, confirmed this week that it will only provide end-to-end

encryption to users that pay for its service. That means law enforcement could access the conversations you have on free Zoom. Before you move your company's all-hands meetings to burner phones, it's worth noting that a lot of video conferencing services don't provide end-to-end encryption, including Google Meet. So this isn't entirely unusual. And Zoom says they will only share information with FBI and police in extreme cases like child abuse. Up to you whether you choose to believe them. But I, for one, will now be adopting a set of codes and ciphers for when I want to make controversial statements on Zoom like the president is very bad. Two blinks means I'm hungry.

And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, insult the president to us on a secure phone line and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading

and not just bad Instagram apologies from quarterbacks like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes.

I'm Gideon Resnick. And have a good two-year weekend. We need it. What a Day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.