Join Erik Fleming in this episode filled with insightful conversations on crucial topics shaping our world today. First, delve into a discussion with Dr. Marlene L. Daut, a renowned historian, as she explores the Haitian Revolution's significant impact on global history, particularly its connection to African American identity and struggles. Understand the persistent stereotypes and historical setbacks Haiti endures and the revolutionaries' unwavering fight for freedom.
Next, explore the intriguing world of linguistics and arts with Samuel Jay Keyser, an acclaimed theoretical linguist. Discover how repetition influences our perception and enjoyment of art forms like music, poetry, and painting, and its application in politics. Keyser's insights offer a deeper understanding of how repetition can shape public perception and resonate in political discourse.
The episode also addresses current political maneuvers in Texas, highlighting how redistricting efforts might alter the power dynamics in congressional representations. Listen in as Erik Fleming passionately discusses the challenges faced by young Black politicians in navigating a political landscape fraught with obstacles, urging resilience and strategic action.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 Welcome. I'm Erik Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 I want to personally thank you for listening to the podcast.
00:00:09 --> 00:00:12 If you like what you're hearing, then I need you to do a few things.
00:00:13 --> 00:00:19 First, I need subscribers. I'm on Patreon at patreon.com slash amomentwitherikfleming.
00:00:19 --> 00:00:24 Your subscription allows an independent podcaster like me the freedom to speak
00:00:24 --> 00:00:27 truth to power, and to expand and improve the show.
00:00:28 --> 00:00:32 Second, leave a five-star review for the podcast on the streaming service you
00:00:32 --> 00:00:35 listen to it. That will help the podcast tremendously.
00:00:36 --> 00:00:41 Third, go to the website, momenteric.com. There you can subscribe to the podcast,
00:00:42 --> 00:00:47 leave reviews and comments, listen to past episodes, and even learn a little bit about your host.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:51 Lastly, don't keep this a secret like it's your own personal guilty pleasure.
00:00:52 --> 00:00:57 Tell someone else about the podcast. Encourage others to listen to the podcast
00:00:57 --> 00:01:02 and share the podcast on your social media platforms, because it is time to
00:01:02 --> 00:01:04 make this moment a movement.
00:01:04 --> 00:01:10 Thanks in advance for supporting the podcast of our time. I hope you enjoy this episode as well.
00:01:12 --> 00:01:17 The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.
00:01:21 --> 00:01:56 Music.
00:01:57 --> 00:02:02 Hello, and welcome to Another Moment with Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.
00:02:03 --> 00:02:08 And we're getting into season 12 now. This is going to be the second episode.
00:02:11 --> 00:02:16 And I've got two guests on who are two individuals who are definitely smarter
00:02:16 --> 00:02:18 than me, but most of my guests are smarter than me.
00:02:20 --> 00:02:23 I hope that y'all get something out of the conversations.
00:02:24 --> 00:02:31 One is going to be talking about Haiti and, you know,
00:02:31 --> 00:02:38 the relevance of its history to where we are now and why we kind of have perceptions
00:02:38 --> 00:02:41 about people from that country.
00:02:41 --> 00:02:48 Right. And then we've got another guest who has written a book about repetition
00:02:48 --> 00:02:52 and the subtle power of it. right?
00:02:52 --> 00:02:57 And of course, you know, we dive into how it plays in the politics,
00:02:57 --> 00:03:04 but the book is geared more toward the art, but, you know, there's some relevance to the discussion.
00:03:04 --> 00:03:08 So I hope y'all listen to that and y'all get some joy out of that.
00:03:09 --> 00:03:16 Still trying to get 20 subscribers on patreon.com slash a moment with Erik Fleming.
00:03:17 --> 00:03:22 And, you know, we're still going to be pushing that go, you know, throughout the year.
00:03:23 --> 00:03:27 And I'm not saying that it's going to be easy, but I just believe it's going
00:03:27 --> 00:03:31 to happen because I know that you are going to do it and you're going to tell
00:03:31 --> 00:03:32 a friend and you're going to,
00:03:32 --> 00:03:36 and that friend's going to tell a friend and it's just going to happen.
00:03:37 --> 00:03:44 And I appreciate those of you who have been sending feedback in and not just
00:03:44 --> 00:03:48 supporting me, but supporting the guests even that have come on the show,
00:03:48 --> 00:03:51 because that means that people are listening.
00:03:52 --> 00:03:58 And so I greatly appreciate that and encourage you to go to the website,
00:03:58 --> 00:04:05 momenteric.com, to, you know, you can leave those comments on the website.
00:04:06 --> 00:04:13 Don't send me marketing and spam and all that stuff because that's going to
00:04:13 --> 00:04:15 get deleted out. That's not going to make it to the website.
00:04:15 --> 00:04:22 But, you know, sincere reviews, comments, you know, did you like a particular
00:04:22 --> 00:04:24 guest that you like to show?
00:04:24 --> 00:04:27 All that kind of stuff. Again, momenteric.com.
00:04:28 --> 00:04:33 And you go ahead and leave those there. Five-star rating, the whole nine yards.
00:04:33 --> 00:04:39 You can go to that website and, you know, check out other guests that I've had on, other episodes.
00:04:39 --> 00:04:48 Yeah, so do that. Support the podcast, patreon.com slash a momenterikfleming. It's only a dollar.
00:04:48 --> 00:04:51 Subscribe for the whole year. Oh, well, a dollar a month.
00:04:52 --> 00:04:55 So I guess that'll be $12 for the whole year.
00:04:57 --> 00:05:02 And momenterik.com is the website where you can link on to do a subscription.
00:05:02 --> 00:05:07 But you can also, you know, learn a little bit about me, a little bit about
00:05:07 --> 00:05:10 the podcast and all those things.
00:05:10 --> 00:05:15 All right. So I've done all that housekeeping and I've got some comments because,
00:05:16 --> 00:05:20 like I said, this whole thing started with me being frustrated about things.
00:05:20 --> 00:05:25 And so something happened, a couple of things happened over the last week that
00:05:25 --> 00:05:28 more than frustrated me.
00:05:28 --> 00:05:32 It pissed me off, actually. And so, I'll talk about that.
00:05:33 --> 00:05:37 But let's go ahead and kick this thing off. And as always, we kick it off with
00:05:37 --> 00:05:40 a moment of news with Grace G.
00:05:42 --> 00:05:47 Music.
00:05:47 --> 00:05:52 Thanks, Erik. A shooter killed four people, including a police officer and then
00:05:52 --> 00:05:56 himself, inside a Manhattan skyscraper, with a note found later blaming the
00:05:56 --> 00:05:58 NFL for his brain disease.
00:05:58 --> 00:06:03 The U.S. Central Bank held interest rates steady, and Federal Reserve Chairman
00:06:03 --> 00:06:08 Jerome Powell indicated that rate cuts are unlikely soon due to inflation concerns.
00:06:09 --> 00:06:13 Kamala Harris announced she will not run for California governor next year,
00:06:13 --> 00:06:17 but hinted at a possible presidential bid in 2028.
00:06:17 --> 00:06:20 North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced his U.S.
00:06:20 --> 00:06:26 Senate campaign, aiming to flip a Republican-held seat after Senator Tom Tillis' retirement.
00:06:27 --> 00:06:31 A Republican-led congressional committee denied immunity to Ghislaine Maxwell,
00:06:32 --> 00:06:36 Jeffrey Epstein's associate, who has been subpoenaed to testify privately from prison.
00:06:37 --> 00:06:41 The U.S. Senate narrowly confirmed Emil Bove, President Trump's former personal
00:06:41 --> 00:06:46 lawyer, to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge on the 3rd U.S.
00:06:46 --> 00:06:47 Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:06:48 --> 00:06:52 Canada plans to recognize the state of Palestine at the United Nations in September,
00:06:52 --> 00:06:55 following similar announcements from France and Britain.
00:06:56 --> 00:07:00 The Trump administration issued new guidance stating that federal employees
00:07:00 --> 00:07:04 can discuss and promote their religious beliefs at work if it is not harassing.
00:07:05 --> 00:07:10 A powerful magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula caused
00:07:10 --> 00:07:15 damage and generated a tsunami, which triggered warnings and evacuations across the Pacific.
00:07:16 --> 00:07:21 Nurses in Nigerian public hospitals held a seven-day warning strike Demanding better pay,
00:07:22 --> 00:07:28 working conditions, and increased recruitment And around 154 federal employees,
00:07:29 --> 00:07:34 or 6.7% of the civilian workforce Have accepted buyouts this year as part of
00:07:34 --> 00:07:38 the Trump administration's effort To reduce the size of the federal workforce
00:07:38 --> 00:07:42 I am Grace G., and this has been a Moment of News.
00:07:44 --> 00:07:50 Music.
00:07:50 --> 00:07:53 All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news.
00:07:53 --> 00:07:58 And now it is time for my guest, Dr. Marlene L. Daut.
00:07:59 --> 00:08:06 Marlene L. Daut is professor of French African-American studies and history at Yale University.
00:08:06 --> 00:08:13 She is the author of Barondon Vastay and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism,
00:08:14 --> 00:08:19 Tropics of Haiti, Race, and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in
00:08:19 --> 00:08:22 the Atlantic World, 1789 to 1865,
00:08:23 --> 00:08:27 Awakening the Ashes, An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution,
00:08:28 --> 00:08:33 and The First and Last King of Haiti, The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.
00:08:33 --> 00:08:42 She is also co-editor with Gregory Perrault and Marion Rohrleitner of the volume
00:08:42 --> 00:08:45 Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, an anthology,
00:08:46 --> 00:08:49 and with Kama L.
00:08:50 --> 00:08:53 Glover, A History of Haitian Literature.
00:08:53 --> 00:09:01 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest on this podcast, Dr.
00:09:01 --> 00:09:03 Marlene L. Daut.
00:09:05 --> 00:09:15 Music.
00:09:14 --> 00:09:20 All right. Dr. Marlene Daut. How are you doing, ma'am? You doing good?
00:09:20 --> 00:09:26 I'm doing well. Thank you. Well, it is always an honor to have people smarter than me on the show.
00:09:27 --> 00:09:34 So I thank you for accepting the invitation. And I want to kind of get into it.
00:09:34 --> 00:09:38 So what I do is I start off my interviews with icebreakers.
00:09:38 --> 00:09:42 So the first icebreaker is always a quote.
00:09:43 --> 00:09:49 So this is the quote I want you to respond to. I'm worried that most people who only know U.S.
00:09:50 --> 00:09:54 History or have spent all their time in the comfort of living in the United
00:09:54 --> 00:09:58 States really don't understand the kind of danger they can be in.
00:09:58 --> 00:10:03 They are more interested in their own personal security, their own personal wealth.
00:10:03 --> 00:10:09 The entire history that I'm studying shows things can be extremely fragile,
00:10:09 --> 00:10:14 and all it takes is people not standing up for what's right.
00:10:14 --> 00:10:16 What does that quote mean to you?
00:10:16 --> 00:10:22 Well, you know, I think we're kind of those of us living in the United States
00:10:22 --> 00:10:26 right now, but in many places in the world are essentially seeing what happens
00:10:26 --> 00:10:28 when people don't stand up for what's right,
00:10:28 --> 00:10:32 when they are more concerned with the fact that they have a job and they have
00:10:32 --> 00:10:35 a home where they're not an immigrant,
00:10:35 --> 00:10:38 that they're not in danger of being deported.
00:10:38 --> 00:10:43 But when we see injustice happening to people, you know, we have all of our
00:10:43 --> 00:10:47 great leaders in the civil rights movement explain to us, you know,
00:10:48 --> 00:10:50 injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
00:10:50 --> 00:10:57 And so that's what it means to me is that just because maybe a lot of people
00:10:57 --> 00:10:58 don't really think about Haitians,
00:10:59 --> 00:11:06 maybe it's an abstract place to them that what is happening to Haiti and Haitians can happen anywhere.
00:11:06 --> 00:11:11 When you look at the long history of the world, which is much older than all
00:11:11 --> 00:11:13 of us by thousands of years,
00:11:13 --> 00:11:21 we have seen every type of civilization crumble and no civilization has been immune to it so far.
00:11:21 --> 00:11:23 And none of us can foretell the future.
00:11:24 --> 00:11:30 So all we can do is take care in the moment and make sure that we are constantly
00:11:30 --> 00:11:31 fighting for justice. Yeah.
00:11:32 --> 00:11:36 All right. So then the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.
00:11:36 --> 00:11:40 So I need you to give me a number between one and 20.
00:11:41 --> 00:11:44 Okay, let's say four. Okay.
00:11:45 --> 00:11:49 How should we balance individual freedoms with the common good?
00:11:50 --> 00:11:55 I think that first, it helps to define what is freedom.
00:11:55 --> 00:11:59 And actually, the time period that I'm studying, the Haitian Revolution.
00:11:59 --> 00:12:06 The aftermath of Haitian independence post-1804, and Haitians defined freedom
00:12:06 --> 00:12:10 as freedom from slavery, personal freedom,
00:12:10 --> 00:12:16 and independence was defined as freedom and liberty from a colonial ruling power,
00:12:16 --> 00:12:20 essentially sovereignty, that they could decide their own government.
00:12:20 --> 00:12:26 And I think that a lot of people actually confuse those things or conflate those
00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 things, freedom from slavery and independence.
00:12:29 --> 00:12:33 And I think partially one of the reasons that happens is because,
00:12:33 --> 00:12:37 you know, a lot of the circles that I run in and that many of us on the U.S.
00:12:37 --> 00:12:40 Side are familiar with are the arguments of, you know, kind of U.S.
00:12:41 --> 00:12:45 Political theorists who really don't make the distinction when they talk about
00:12:45 --> 00:12:47 the ideals of liberty of the founders.
00:12:47 --> 00:12:55 They fail to distinguish that actually, for most people, personal liberty meant not being enslaved.
00:12:55 --> 00:13:00 And independence meant not being beholden to Great Britain, meant creating your
00:13:00 --> 00:13:01 own government, being sovereign.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:07 And I think that confusion persists today when I see people talk about how the
00:13:07 --> 00:13:13 country was founded on ideals of freedom, failing to distinguish freedom for whom and from what.
00:13:13 --> 00:13:18 And I think if we got back closer to the arguments and understandings that people
00:13:18 --> 00:13:21 had in the 18th century when these things were being hotly debated.
00:13:21 --> 00:13:26 In large part because of the Haitian Revolution, we would have a greater understanding
00:13:26 --> 00:13:29 of why, for many people in the United States.
00:13:29 --> 00:13:35 That democracy doesn't feel as liberating as it does for those at the top.
00:13:35 --> 00:13:37 I think of the Langston Hughes poem, right?
00:13:37 --> 00:13:40 Why, oh, why does democracy mean everybody but me? Mm-hmm.
00:13:41 --> 00:13:44 Wow, that's pretty heavy. Look, so how did,
00:13:45 --> 00:13:51 talk to the listeners about how you came from being a little old Haitian American
00:13:51 --> 00:13:57 girl in California to a distinguished professor at Yale University dropping dimes like that.
00:13:58 --> 00:14:04 Well, you know, one of my favorite Haitian authors is a historian anthropologist,
00:14:04 --> 00:14:08 a late historian anthropologist named Michel Votrouille, and he wrote a very
00:14:08 --> 00:14:10 formative book called Silencing the Past,
00:14:10 --> 00:14:13 Power and the Production of History, which was published in 1995.
00:14:14 --> 00:14:18 And in it, he talked about, or rather his family members have said as well,
00:14:19 --> 00:14:22 that history sits at the dinner table in a Haitian family.
00:14:22 --> 00:14:27 And so I was constantly hearing about Haitian politics, but I didn't actually
00:14:27 --> 00:14:31 know that much about Haiti's history, other than I knew the names Toussaint
00:14:31 --> 00:14:34 L'ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti's founder.
00:14:34 --> 00:14:41 But I wanted to delve more deeply into the deep history of, essentially,
00:14:41 --> 00:14:43 I say the land where my mother was born.
00:14:43 --> 00:14:45 It was a way to get close to my mother.
00:14:46 --> 00:14:51 My grandmother had dementia for most of my life growing up. So she had all the
00:14:51 --> 00:14:53 stories and she couldn't tell them to me.
00:14:54 --> 00:15:00 And so I had to go and find them. And I found myself being very envious of other
00:15:00 --> 00:15:01 Haitian Americans who would say,
00:15:01 --> 00:15:05 my grandmother told me this, My grandfather told me that, that I didn't have
00:15:05 --> 00:15:09 that because my grandfather was not with us and my grandmother was not in the
00:15:09 --> 00:15:11 place to tell me those stories.
00:15:11 --> 00:15:16 And it's interesting because when I was in graduate school and I decided,
00:15:16 --> 00:15:19 oh, I want to study the Haitian Revolution, so many people said,
00:15:20 --> 00:15:22 oh, no, don't do that. Nobody knows where Haiti is.
00:15:23 --> 00:15:26 It's not mainstream enough. You'll never get a job.
00:15:26 --> 00:15:30 But the thing is, is that when I went to graduate school, I wanted to be a novelist.
00:15:30 --> 00:15:34 I went to graduate school because we were in a deep recession and I thought
00:15:34 --> 00:15:37 I better do something with my time. What am I going to do?
00:15:37 --> 00:15:40 And I fell in love with also teaching.
00:15:41 --> 00:15:46 And so that's the reason I became an academic. And I found that people who are
00:15:46 --> 00:15:51 trying to warn you from doing something, most of the time, they don't have ill intentions.
00:15:51 --> 00:15:54 I truly think that. They just looked at the past and thought,
00:15:55 --> 00:15:58 if she does this, you know, she's going to be one of those unemployed academics.
00:15:59 --> 00:16:01 And I think I just thought, well, that would be okay, because then I'll just
00:16:01 --> 00:16:05 write my novel. You know, I was still young in my 20s. I'll just write a novel
00:16:05 --> 00:16:06 if that doesn't work out.
00:16:07 --> 00:16:12 And in the end, I found that actually when I started to explain the story of
00:16:12 --> 00:16:18 Haiti's journey from being a slave colony, the most torturous slave colony in the world,
00:16:18 --> 00:16:22 to being an independent state that is the first to permanently abolish slavery
00:16:22 --> 00:16:26 anywhere in the world, their ears perked up. Everyone was listening.
00:16:26 --> 00:16:31 And I talked about how everywhere in the United States in the late 18th and
00:16:31 --> 00:16:33 early 19th centuries, people knew about Haiti.
00:16:34 --> 00:16:38 All of these enslaved people and free people of color in the United States were
00:16:38 --> 00:16:44 inspired by Haiti with the abolitionist movement. White enslavers were terrified.
00:16:44 --> 00:16:47 Thomas Jefferson was terrified. And so I thought,
00:16:47 --> 00:16:53 you can't tell me this event is not important and not mainstream if it caused
00:16:53 --> 00:16:57 people around the world to react, some negatively, some positively,
00:16:58 --> 00:17:02 to create laws specifically to contain the Haitian Revolution.
00:17:02 --> 00:17:07 When Great Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, it was not out of the
00:17:07 --> 00:17:08 kindness of their heart.
00:17:08 --> 00:17:13 On the floors of Parliament, they're talking about how many Africans had recently
00:17:13 --> 00:17:17 been transported to the colony of Saint-Domingue, what Haiti was called,
00:17:17 --> 00:17:21 and how that contributed to the Haitian Revolution and Haitian independence.
00:17:21 --> 00:17:26 They wanted to stop the importation, forced importation of Africans from the
00:17:26 --> 00:17:29 continent because they believed they were the more rebellious.
00:17:29 --> 00:17:35 They were soon proven wrong that that was perhaps a factor, but not the only
00:17:35 --> 00:17:40 factor, not even the greatest factor, but that's what they believed and it caused them to react.
00:17:41 --> 00:17:46 And so I'm happy to say, and I think those who warned me against studying Haiti
00:17:46 --> 00:17:50 are also happy to say that they were wrong. Yeah.
00:17:51 --> 00:17:56 Well, you have devoted your academic life to the study of Haitian history,
00:17:56 --> 00:18:02 and you kind of touched on a little bit, but go deeper into why Haitian history
00:18:02 --> 00:18:05 is significant to African Americans.
00:18:06 --> 00:18:09 Yes. I mean, the significance to me, you know,
00:18:09 --> 00:18:12 one of the reasons I wanted to study the Haitian Revolution as well is because
00:18:12 --> 00:18:16 the first books that I was reading that had to do with Haiti and the United
00:18:16 --> 00:18:22 States talked about how afraid everyone in the United States was of the Haitian Revolution.
00:18:22 --> 00:18:28 And in fact, when I started to delve more deeply into Frederick Douglass's engagement
00:18:28 --> 00:18:32 with Haiti, with Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper,
00:18:32 --> 00:18:35 with their engagement with Haiti, with Toussaint L'ouverture,
00:18:35 --> 00:18:37 with the King of Haiti, who, of course, I study,
00:18:38 --> 00:18:40 I started to get a different picture.
00:18:41 --> 00:18:44 Was everyone afraid of the Haitian Revolution?
00:18:44 --> 00:18:49 Because Gabriel Prosser wasn't afraid of the Haitian Revolution when he started
00:18:49 --> 00:18:50 his revolt and rebellion.
00:18:50 --> 00:18:53 Nat Turner wasn't afraid of the Haitian Revolution.
00:18:53 --> 00:18:57 John Brown, a white abolitionist, was not afraid of the Haitian Revolution.
00:18:57 --> 00:19:02 And these are individuals, anti-slavery activists and abolitionists,
00:19:02 --> 00:19:08 who have known interest in the Haitian Revolution and took inspiration from it.
00:19:08 --> 00:19:13 And when I started to see this reflected in the literature as well,
00:19:13 --> 00:19:17 that there were just references all throughout early African-American literature.
00:19:17 --> 00:19:22 The first African-American short story from 1828 is called Teresa,
00:19:22 --> 00:19:25 a Haitian tale. It's about the Haitian Revolution.
00:19:25 --> 00:19:31 The second known African-American short story from 1837 by a man from New Orleans,
00:19:32 --> 00:19:35 a free man of color named Victor Césure, is called The Mulatto,
00:19:35 --> 00:19:37 Le Mulat, because he wrote it in French.
00:19:37 --> 00:19:42 And it's about a slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, today Haiti.
00:19:42 --> 00:19:52 So I knew that it was much deeper than the fear narrative that was really rampant in U.S.
00:19:52 --> 00:19:57 History. That was the framing, was everyone was afraid. And yes,
00:19:57 --> 00:20:00 they reacted, but they reacted negatively. And
00:20:00 --> 00:20:06 And I wanted to show that it wasn't the case that when we talk about everyone.
00:20:07 --> 00:20:12 Usually people are meaning in historical circles, white everyone's.
00:20:12 --> 00:20:19 And if we put Black Americans back into the frame, we see it is hardly the case
00:20:19 --> 00:20:22 at all, and not even all white Americans.
00:20:22 --> 00:20:28 The most famous speech about Toussaint L'ouverture was from 1861 by a white
00:20:28 --> 00:20:31 abolitionist named Wendell Phillips. William Lloyd Garrison,
00:20:31 --> 00:20:35 a white abolitionist who started The Liberator, he was interested in Haiti.
00:20:35 --> 00:20:39 They talked about it all the time in the pages of the journal.
00:20:39 --> 00:20:44 And so we have to have a fuller sense of history and look for things that don't
00:20:44 --> 00:20:48 just confirm what we already believe, but actually look for the stories we're
00:20:48 --> 00:20:51 not paying attention to because they have,
00:20:51 --> 00:20:54 in many ways, been deliberately silenced. Yeah.
00:20:55 --> 00:21:02 I'm dating myself because there used to be a series of Black historical comic books.
00:21:02 --> 00:21:09 So the first time I ever heard of Toussaint L'ouverture was in this comic book.
00:21:09 --> 00:21:15 It was a whole depiction about how he led the slaves to revolt against the French.
00:21:16 --> 00:21:21 And I'm like going, there is no way I would have learned that in school.
00:21:21 --> 00:21:25 I mean, never even thought about teaching that.
00:21:25 --> 00:21:30 And so, you know, so that always has always been in the back of my mind.
00:21:30 --> 00:21:34 I just remember that comic book issue because it's like he's in full battle,
00:21:34 --> 00:21:38 you know, back then with the hat and overcoat and all that stuff.
00:21:38 --> 00:21:42 And he's standing with one foot on the heel, you know, you know,
00:21:42 --> 00:21:44 got the hand in the breast, all that kind of stuff.
00:21:44 --> 00:21:47 And it's like on this comic book cover and I was like,
00:21:48 --> 00:21:52 why aren't we talking about this guy? Even the people like, you know,
00:21:52 --> 00:21:57 Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, uh, and Nkrumah, all them guys,
00:21:57 --> 00:22:00 I never heard them say the man's name.
00:22:00 --> 00:22:03 Now it's, it's definitely hard to, if you're not fluent in French,
00:22:03 --> 00:22:07 it's really hard to say, but I mean, they didn't even, well,
00:22:07 --> 00:22:12 Malcolm alluded to it a little bit abstractly, but nobody really talked about this guy.
00:22:12 --> 00:22:15 And so this kind of leads into my next question.
00:22:15 --> 00:22:18 Cause you've mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was one of those,
00:22:18 --> 00:22:23 white folks that was afraid and he was the president of the United States at the time and so.
00:22:24 --> 00:22:28 He refused to recognize Haiti as
00:22:28 --> 00:22:31 a sovereign nation so how did
00:22:31 --> 00:22:36 that how did how did that contribute how did how much of a setback was that
00:22:36 --> 00:22:41 to Haitians that the United States wasn't the most powerful nation in the world
00:22:41 --> 00:22:46 at that time but they were they were they were they were the they I guess.
00:22:46 --> 00:22:48 They were the new kids on the block. Yeah.
00:22:48 --> 00:22:54 And they were this epitome of fighting for freedom and they were still in the midst of it.
00:22:54 --> 00:22:59 And the freedom in the context that you explained that they did not want to be part of an empire.
00:22:59 --> 00:23:05 How much was a setback for the Haitians not to be recognized by the United States
00:23:05 --> 00:23:06 or basically any other nation?
00:23:07 --> 00:23:10 You know, it's interesting. It depends on how you look at it, right?
00:23:11 --> 00:23:15 So it's not just that Thomas Jefferson and didn't recognize Haiti.
00:23:15 --> 00:23:16 He actually tried to punish Haiti.
00:23:16 --> 00:23:19 In 1806, he issued a trade embargo.
00:23:20 --> 00:23:24 And this trade embargo, actually, it was a huge setback because the United States
00:23:24 --> 00:23:28 was, along with Great Britain, one of Haiti's greatest trading partners.
00:23:28 --> 00:23:35 And they would get in exchange for coffee because that's the biggest crop of independent Haiti.
00:23:35 --> 00:23:39 The biggest crop of colonial Saint-Domingue under French rule was sugar.
00:23:39 --> 00:23:44 But many of the sugar plantations burned. So coffee is kind of their thing.
00:23:45 --> 00:23:51 And this embargo actually leads to shortages of flour, of things they need for
00:23:51 --> 00:23:53 hospitals. And so people die.
00:23:53 --> 00:24:00 So this was a legitimate setback. The question of the United States not recognizing Haitian independence.
00:24:01 --> 00:24:07 Haitian newspaper journalists would talk about how they can call us whatever
00:24:07 --> 00:24:13 they want, they can persist in their fiction that we are still Saint-Domingue and not Haiti,
00:24:13 --> 00:24:16 but it will be a mere fable.
00:24:17 --> 00:24:22 And in fact, when 1810 rolls around and the trade embargo is supposed to expire.
00:24:23 --> 00:24:28 Congress just lets it expire and trade resumes between the United States and Haiti.
00:24:29 --> 00:24:33 It never stopped between Haiti and Great Britain. And so we see that those Haitian
00:24:33 --> 00:24:38 journalists actually had a very astute argument that you can say whatever you
00:24:38 --> 00:24:42 want, but your merchants come to our shores, goods travel back and forth.
00:24:43 --> 00:24:47 And in fact, Haiti in the 1810s was quite prosperous.
00:24:47 --> 00:24:51 Now, this doesn't mean that they didn't want official recognition.
00:24:51 --> 00:24:56 In fact, Haiti's rulers, principally Henri Christophe, who became the king of Haiti,
00:24:57 --> 00:25:01 he tried to dangle before the governments of the United States and Great Britain
00:25:01 --> 00:25:06 in the latter part of the 1810s, the idea that they would get a kind of most
00:25:06 --> 00:25:10 favored nation status in trade if they became the first to recognize Haitian independence.
00:25:11 --> 00:25:17 Unfortunately, what happens instead is that France's obstinance intervenes because
00:25:17 --> 00:25:19 this is Haiti's greatest setback.
00:25:19 --> 00:25:25 It would be France not recognizing Haitian independence would be as if when
00:25:25 --> 00:25:30 the American Revolution ended, Great Britain for decades said,
00:25:30 --> 00:25:31 you're still our colony.
00:25:31 --> 00:25:35 We're not going to recognize your independence. And we're going to threaten
00:25:35 --> 00:25:41 all the nations that are around you with sanctions and problems and war if they
00:25:41 --> 00:25:46 recognize your independence, because France and Great Britain are constantly at war.
00:25:46 --> 00:25:49 And many of those battles are happening in the Caribbean. They're attacking
00:25:49 --> 00:25:52 each other's ships, sinking boats, sinking.
00:25:52 --> 00:25:56 So Great Britain has a vested interest in Haitian sovereignty,
00:25:56 --> 00:26:02 but not in recognizing Haitian independence because they fear repercussions from France.
00:26:02 --> 00:26:06 And so unfortunately, what happens is by the time France does agree to recognize
00:26:06 --> 00:26:14 Haitian independence in 1825, they do so only by exacting the price of 150 million
00:26:14 --> 00:26:16 francs from the Haitian government.
00:26:16 --> 00:26:19 They say, yeah, okay, we'll recognize you after all this time.
00:26:20 --> 00:26:21 Essentially because we have no choice.
00:26:22 --> 00:26:25 We see that you would rather go to war than become a colony again,
00:26:25 --> 00:26:26 but you're going to have to pay us.
00:26:26 --> 00:26:30 And unfortunately, again, one of Haiti's rulers, A man named Jean-Claude Boyer
00:26:30 --> 00:26:35 agrees to this, and it essentially destroys all that prosperity that had been
00:26:35 --> 00:26:39 created through the lucrative trade with the United States and Great Britain,
00:26:39 --> 00:26:41 because not only do they have to pay that amount,
00:26:41 --> 00:26:44 now they have to give France most favored nation status.
00:26:45 --> 00:26:49 And Great Britain says, oh, well, no, that doesn't work for us.
00:26:49 --> 00:26:53 And so they lose out on huge amounts of trade. Hmm.
00:26:53 --> 00:27:01 Well, again, dating myself. Many people in my generation remember Haitians as
00:27:01 --> 00:27:04 the refugees that were turned back during the AIDS epidemic.
00:27:04 --> 00:27:10 Then, of course, during the 2024 presidential election, Haitian immigrants in
00:27:10 --> 00:27:14 Springfield, Ohio, were scapegoated as eating dogs and cats.
00:27:14 --> 00:27:21 Why do you think Haitian people are treated, stereotyped in such a dehumanizing way?
00:27:22 --> 00:27:25 You know, it started during the Revolutionary Era.
00:27:26 --> 00:27:33 Thomas Jefferson, in a 1799 letter, he refers to the revolutionaries as cannibals
00:27:33 --> 00:27:34 of the terrible republic.
00:27:34 --> 00:27:39 And of course, he's referring to the French Republic, but in the Caribbean,
00:27:39 --> 00:27:45 that they are cannibals. And this was very common to speak of the Haitian revolutionaries
00:27:45 --> 00:27:49 as out for blood, white blood, drinking blood.
00:27:50 --> 00:27:54 Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti's founder, the most famous image of him depicts
00:27:54 --> 00:27:57 him holding up a white woman's head.
00:27:57 --> 00:28:04 The phrase he most became associated with in the context of Haitian revolutionary
00:28:04 --> 00:28:08 history in the early 19th century was coupé tête boulecaille,
00:28:08 --> 00:28:11 which in Haitian, Kaleo, means cut off heads, burn down houses.
00:28:11 --> 00:28:14 So he would give all of these speeches.
00:28:14 --> 00:28:18 His most famous speech to me is the one he gave in April 1804,
00:28:18 --> 00:28:21 where he says, I have avenged America.
00:28:21 --> 00:28:26 And yet, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in certain circles today.
00:28:27 --> 00:28:30 Dessalines is a tiger out for
00:28:30 --> 00:28:34 human blood. That was literally one of the tropes they used in the era.
00:28:34 --> 00:28:41 And there is a through line from that kind of effort to dehumanize the revolutionaries,
00:28:41 --> 00:28:45 the freedom fighters, by calling them insurrectionists, brigands,
00:28:46 --> 00:28:48 rebels, and terrorists in their own era.
00:28:49 --> 00:28:54 That all contributed to the sense that they were not out for freedom,
00:28:54 --> 00:28:59 that they did not bring war in the name of liberty like the American revolutionaries,
00:28:59 --> 00:29:04 right but that instead they just wanted to kill white people you know and when
00:29:04 --> 00:29:08 i teach this history to my students i say what makes more sense that they wanted
00:29:08 --> 00:29:11 to be free from slavery or that they just wanted to kill white people because
00:29:11 --> 00:29:14 if they just wanted to kill white people they could have done it all along.
00:29:15 --> 00:29:22 For 300 years, when the Spanish were there first, they didn't only just wantonly kill white people.
00:29:22 --> 00:29:24 And even during the revolution, they didn't do that.
00:29:25 --> 00:29:29 Toussaint L'ouverture was known for saving the family that had enslaved him previously.
00:29:30 --> 00:29:34 People felt things just as they do now, even for people who had harmed them.
00:29:34 --> 00:29:38 And I think this is something that's really hard for a lot of people to understand.
00:29:38 --> 00:29:42 They want it to be a black and a white issue, and the Haitian revolution was anything but.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:48 And I think that that mentality persists to this day, that when Haitian immigrants
00:29:48 --> 00:29:52 are framed as wanting to come to the United States so they can eat people's
00:29:52 --> 00:29:55 pets and commit crimes, what makes more sense?
00:29:55 --> 00:29:58 That they want to come here because they want to benefit from all this,
00:29:58 --> 00:30:02 quote unquote, liberty and equality that the United States keeps touting around the world like an ad.
00:30:03 --> 00:30:07 That they want to benefit from all of this, that they want safety and security
00:30:07 --> 00:30:10 for their children, that they can go to free public schools,
00:30:10 --> 00:30:12 which does not exist in Haiti. it's pay to play.
00:30:12 --> 00:30:15 If you don't have money, you can't go to school. What makes more sense?
00:30:15 --> 00:30:18 That Haitians want that or that they just want to come here and eat people's
00:30:18 --> 00:30:21 pets and commit crimes and robberies?
00:30:21 --> 00:30:27 And I think that when you see the truth juxtaposed with the lies,
00:30:27 --> 00:30:31 the slanders, the libel, I say Haiti is the most slandered nation on earth.
00:30:31 --> 00:30:35 People will say anything and can get people to believe anything.
00:30:35 --> 00:30:41 As you mentioned, the AIDS crisis, that just randomly plucking Haiti out as
00:30:41 --> 00:30:43 one of the quote-unquote four H's.
00:30:43 --> 00:30:46 And the medical doctor, the late medical doctor, Paul Farmer,
00:30:46 --> 00:30:50 in his book, AIDS and Accusations, shows that Haiti actually had the lowest
00:30:50 --> 00:30:53 HIV rates at that time of any Caribbean nation.
00:30:53 --> 00:31:00 And so, again, you can just say anything about Haiti and people will believe it.
00:31:00 --> 00:31:05 And that is that form of what Michel-Wolf Tuyot called Haitian exceptionalism.
00:31:05 --> 00:31:08 I find that that is what persists today. Hmm.
00:31:11 --> 00:31:16 1799. That's a long time to carry a stereotype. It really is.
00:31:16 --> 00:31:23 So how has the history of Haiti led to the current unrest that is happening now in the country?
00:31:24 --> 00:31:29 I mean, in certain ways, we can see that it begins with Haitian independence
00:31:29 --> 00:31:34 and what you mentioned, nations around the world not recognizing Haitian independence
00:31:34 --> 00:31:36 because this puts pressure on the governments.
00:31:37 --> 00:31:40 France, during this time, it's not like they just sit back and say,
00:31:40 --> 00:31:41 we're not going to recognize you.
00:31:42 --> 00:31:45 No, France is repeatedly, throughout the first two decades of Haitian independence,
00:31:46 --> 00:31:50 trying to restore Saint-Domingue, in quotation marks, which means to bring back
00:31:50 --> 00:31:54 slavery and French rule. And as I mentioned, only when they couldn't do that
00:31:54 --> 00:31:56 did they decide, we'll get this money.
00:31:56 --> 00:32:00 And then a new form of war begins, an economic war.
00:32:01 --> 00:32:05 Haiti's president enacts these kind of draconian laws called the World Codes,
00:32:05 --> 00:32:09 which essentially reclassifies all Haitian citizens as laborers,
00:32:09 --> 00:32:12 says, we have to pay this money so you're going to have to go back to the fields.
00:32:12 --> 00:32:16 If you're not elite or in the military or you don't know somebody,
00:32:16 --> 00:32:17 you're going back to the fields.
00:32:17 --> 00:32:21 And, of course, this creates unrest. And that president, Jean-Pierre Bouillet,
00:32:21 --> 00:32:24 is overthrown in a coup d'état in 1843.
00:32:24 --> 00:32:30 And this occasions a series of coup d'états, overthrown governments,
00:32:30 --> 00:32:32 eventually an assassination.
00:32:32 --> 00:32:36 And the United States is going to use this turbulent history,
00:32:36 --> 00:32:39 even though the United States is also, during this entire time period,
00:32:39 --> 00:32:40 has a turbulent history.
00:32:41 --> 00:32:45 And so does France, as it keeps bouncing back and forth between Republican monarchies
00:32:45 --> 00:32:50 of various forms. So this is Haiti's instability during this time is hardly
00:32:50 --> 00:32:54 an outlier, but Haitian exceptionalist arguments can make it seem like it was.
00:32:54 --> 00:33:00 And so the United States, by the time 1915 rolls around, uses this history of
00:33:00 --> 00:33:02 instability to say we're going to occupy.
00:33:02 --> 00:33:08 And they occupy Haiti for 19 long years. They get they install a puppet president.
00:33:09 --> 00:33:12 A situation that persists to this day. They control elections.
00:33:12 --> 00:33:15 They train a brutal police force.
00:33:15 --> 00:33:22 Haiti had never had a kind of state-run police force whose job was essentially
00:33:22 --> 00:33:25 to police and harm the Haitian people.
00:33:25 --> 00:33:30 And in fact, James Weldon Johnson, the great African-American writer from the
00:33:30 --> 00:33:35 early 20th century, wrote repeated articles in The Nation, the magazine that
00:33:35 --> 00:33:39 still exist to this day to criticize what the United States was doing.
00:33:39 --> 00:33:45 W.E.B. Du Bois wrote repeated articles saying, why are white Marines in Haiti
00:33:45 --> 00:33:51 harming peaceful Haitian citizens who have never damaged any Haitian, any U.S.
00:33:51 --> 00:33:56 Property, who have never done one thing to the United States? What are we doing there?
00:33:56 --> 00:34:02 And unfortunately, that history of intervention is considered a watershed moment
00:34:02 --> 00:34:08 in Haitian history, because when the United States leaves, they don't leave.
00:34:08 --> 00:34:14 They stick around politically. And by the time we get to the election that brought
00:34:14 --> 00:34:19 François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, to power, we see that the United States
00:34:19 --> 00:34:23 had a hand in essentially disqualifying all of his adversaries,
00:34:23 --> 00:34:27 disregarding the actual election results and putting him in power.
00:34:27 --> 00:34:32 And he stays in power as president for four years and then declares himself president for life.
00:34:32 --> 00:34:36 And when he dies, his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier,
00:34:36 --> 00:34:38 known as Baby Doc, takes the reins.
00:34:38 --> 00:34:44 And even though he rules until 1986, when he's overthrown in what's called déchoukage,
00:34:44 --> 00:34:49 which means uprooting in Haitian Creole, it's not going to lead to less chaos.
00:34:49 --> 00:34:53 It's not going to lead to less brutality because the United States is going
00:34:53 --> 00:34:57 to step in once more and say, oh, here's another reason for occupation,
00:34:57 --> 00:34:59 followed by UN occupation.
00:34:59 --> 00:35:02 And that's the history of Haiti in the 20th century.
00:35:02 --> 00:35:07 I could go on and it's just the same thing over and over, rinse, repeat.
00:35:07 --> 00:35:11 The government says this person's corrupt. They are gone.
00:35:12 --> 00:35:17 Occupation, natural disaster, occupation. It's a repeating history at this point. Yeah.
00:35:18 --> 00:35:25 So I guess to sum it up, international intervention is the historical seed that
00:35:25 --> 00:35:30 leads to where we're at now with the political instability and stuff.
00:35:31 --> 00:35:36 Go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to say, I think that instead of being able
00:35:36 --> 00:35:41 to figure it out, like the other nations that were figuring it out with their instability.
00:35:42 --> 00:35:47 Haiti was always kind of tampered with, and the path was pushed in a certain
00:35:47 --> 00:35:52 direction, instead of saying, let them figure it out, like the rest of the world
00:35:52 --> 00:35:55 at that time was trying to figure it out. Yeah.
00:35:56 --> 00:36:02 All right. So let me try to get these few questions in. Haiti shares Hispaniola
00:36:02 --> 00:36:04 with the Dominican Republic.
00:36:05 --> 00:36:09 Recently, tensions have risen between the two countries to the extent that Haitian
00:36:09 --> 00:36:14 descendants, who are citizens of the Dominican Republic, had their voting rights taken away.
00:36:14 --> 00:36:18 Was there a period in time where those two nations had better relations?
00:36:18 --> 00:36:23 And what do you think it would take for those neighbors to achieve better relations in the future?
00:36:23 --> 00:36:28 You know what is very interesting? the time period that those two nations,
00:36:29 --> 00:36:34 which Haiti was a nation, but the Dominican Republic was a colony still,
00:36:34 --> 00:36:36 or what's now the Dominican Republic.
00:36:36 --> 00:36:43 During Jean-Pierre Boyer's reign from 1822 to 1844, the year after he was out
00:36:43 --> 00:36:47 of power, the whole island was Haiti, was the Republic of Haiti.
00:36:47 --> 00:36:54 And historians like Anne Eller, for example, talk about this as reunification and
00:36:54 --> 00:36:56 And that this reunification had
00:36:56 --> 00:37:00 broad support. But there was one group of people who didn't support it.
00:37:00 --> 00:37:04 And in her book, We Dream Together, she details how Dominican elites,
00:37:04 --> 00:37:08 white Dominican elites who, you know, sort of painted themselves as Spanish,
00:37:08 --> 00:37:12 that they are real Spaniards, they never wanted to be a part of this.
00:37:12 --> 00:37:15 And so when Boyer was out of power, they seized on the opportunity to rebel.
00:37:15 --> 00:37:22 And unfortunately, those elites shaped the history to the extent that in Dominican
00:37:22 --> 00:37:26 history to this day, that period of reunification is called colonization.
00:37:26 --> 00:37:31 And Dominicans celebrate their Independence Day in 1844 as independence from
00:37:31 --> 00:37:37 Haiti, even though those Dominican elites invited Spain to recolonize them, which they did.
00:37:37 --> 00:37:41 So they had actually several periods of independence, quote unquote.
00:37:41 --> 00:37:48 And the stereotypes that Dominican historians and Dominican elite of the 19th
00:37:48 --> 00:37:52 century created about Haiti and Haitians were kind of of a piece with what the
00:37:52 --> 00:37:52 United States was doing.
00:37:53 --> 00:37:56 Oh, they're cannibals, they're criminals. And this came to a head,
00:37:57 --> 00:38:03 actually, in 1937 under Dominican dictator Raphael Trujillo when he ordered
00:38:03 --> 00:38:08 a genocide of Haitians living along the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic
00:38:08 --> 00:38:10 in what's known as the Massacre River.
00:38:10 --> 00:38:13 And ever since that time,
00:38:13 --> 00:38:19 there has been, of course, deep animosity and a lot of attempts to kind of reshape
00:38:19 --> 00:38:25 the history to paint Haitians as the aggressors and therefore deserving of any
00:38:25 --> 00:38:28 punishment, including stripping them of citizenship and voting rights.
00:38:28 --> 00:38:34 Yeah. And I think it's ironic that that very river you talk about is kind of like.
00:38:35 --> 00:38:40 A swap meet or a discount mall now for Dominicans because they'll go over there
00:38:40 --> 00:38:42 and they'll buy stuff from the Haitians on the river and, you know,
00:38:43 --> 00:38:47 get it cheaper than what they would get, I guess, in their main cities.
00:38:48 --> 00:38:55 Yeah. History is amazing. I love it. So you were inspired by Haitian literature
00:38:55 --> 00:38:57 to become an authority on Haitian history.
00:38:58 --> 00:39:02 Do you hope that your books inspire future generations? And what do you want
00:39:02 --> 00:39:04 people to take away from your works?
00:39:05 --> 00:39:10 Oh, my goodness. Yes. I, you know, was I was inspired by people's writings,
00:39:10 --> 00:39:15 like the shovel of as I mentioned, silencing the past and Julius Scott's The
00:39:15 --> 00:39:21 Common Wind that I was so inspired by other people's writing that that's what
00:39:21 --> 00:39:25 I wanted to do, because I saw how, you know, The Common Wind,
00:39:25 --> 00:39:28 which is was Julius Scott's dissertation,
00:39:29 --> 00:39:31 was never published until I think it was 2020.
00:39:32 --> 00:39:36 And as a book by Verso Press, so it's now available.
00:39:36 --> 00:39:40 And the common wind, of course, refers to the British poet William Wordsworth's
00:39:40 --> 00:39:42 famous poem about Toussaint L'ouverture,
00:39:42 --> 00:39:45 in which he says there's not a breathing of the common wind that will forget
00:39:45 --> 00:39:48 thee, because, of course, the French are going to kill, essentially,
00:39:49 --> 00:39:52 Toussaint L'ouverture by deporting him, arresting him, and leading him to die in a French prison.
00:39:53 --> 00:39:58 And when I saw the effect that that work had not just on me,
00:39:59 --> 00:40:01 but on essentially all my colleagues.
00:40:01 --> 00:40:05 Vincent Brown, the author of Tacky's Revolt, talks about it as a mixed tape.
00:40:06 --> 00:40:08 We passed it around, the dissertation, since it wasn't a book.
00:40:09 --> 00:40:11 Everyone wanted to read it. You had to get your hands on this dissertation.
00:40:12 --> 00:40:16 When I see the power of these words written so long ago in the 1970s,
00:40:16 --> 00:40:20 and there we were in the early 2000s all reading it, and it was just as relevant.
00:40:20 --> 00:40:23 It wasn't obsolete. It was as if he had written it yesterday.
00:40:23 --> 00:40:29 I knew that if I could make something that even 10 people would read and it
00:40:29 --> 00:40:32 would change their mind about Haiti and Haitians, that that would be of value.
00:40:33 --> 00:40:37 And, you know, my last, my latest two books, Awakening the Ashes,
00:40:37 --> 00:40:40 which is an intellectual history of Haiti and the first and last King of Haiti,
00:40:40 --> 00:40:46 I think are where I sort of honed most deeply my craft in trying to tell the
00:40:46 --> 00:40:51 story of the Haitian revolution and Haitian independence and its aftermath in
00:40:51 --> 00:40:57 a way that hopefully broader audiences can understand that the Haitian Revolution,
00:40:57 --> 00:40:58 I always say, is for everyone.
00:40:58 --> 00:41:03 It involves the story of how everyone got free because it changed the world.
00:41:03 --> 00:41:07 It embarrassed the United States. It embarrassed France and Napoleon.
00:41:07 --> 00:41:11 That's why they didn't put it in their history books. That's why I never learned
00:41:11 --> 00:41:15 about it in any school history book, because this is embarrassing.
00:41:15 --> 00:41:20 If your argument is that the U.S. founders couldn't abolish slavery because
00:41:20 --> 00:41:24 nobody thought of it at the time, and it was not the way of the world.
00:41:24 --> 00:41:25 The Haitian Revolution shows you.
00:41:26 --> 00:41:30 Many people thought about it. The history of slave revolts and rebellions preceding
00:41:30 --> 00:41:34 the Haitian Revolution, which is what I talk about in Awakening the Ashes also,
00:41:34 --> 00:41:36 shows you many people thought about it.
00:41:37 --> 00:41:39 It's that everyone problem again. Who is everyone?
00:41:40 --> 00:41:45 And in fact, what I show in Awakening the Ashes is enslaved people in the Americas
00:41:45 --> 00:41:47 vastly outnumbered the enslavers.
00:41:48 --> 00:41:52 So it's safe to say that popular opinion of the time was that slavery was wrong
00:41:52 --> 00:41:56 when we look at the vast number of slave revolts and rebellions,
00:41:56 --> 00:41:59 not just in the Caribbean, but in North and South America, all over.
00:41:59 --> 00:42:03 And so with the first and last king of Haiti, the takeaway was,
00:42:03 --> 00:42:07 here is what Black sovereignty was striving to be.
00:42:08 --> 00:42:13 He was trying to create a free Black sovereign nation, imagined as a kingdom,
00:42:13 --> 00:42:17 because that was the most popular form of governance and common form of governance
00:42:17 --> 00:42:20 at the time, in which Black people would determine their own futures.
00:42:20 --> 00:42:23 You know, I mentioned that France kept trying to invade.
00:42:24 --> 00:42:28 Do you know what King Henry did when they did, he'd had the last straw in 1816.
00:42:28 --> 00:42:32 He said, I'm going to issue a trade embargo against France. We're just banning all their goods.
00:42:32 --> 00:42:37 This was not a person who was afraid of, well, what would that look like? What will France do?
00:42:37 --> 00:42:40 He said, the more who come, the more we will kill.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:45 If they must come, let them come. He didn't say, we're going to go over there and do anything to them.
00:42:46 --> 00:42:49 If they must come, then let them come. But we're ready to fight them.
00:42:49 --> 00:42:56 And he created a massive citadel that could house 30 soldiers in order to prove to France.
00:42:57 --> 00:43:01 And you might say that the French were convinced that they couldn't come and
00:43:01 --> 00:43:05 retake it because they never brought their troops onto the shores.
00:43:05 --> 00:43:10 They did all kinds of other things to test the waters, but they didn't do that.
00:43:10 --> 00:43:14 They didn't dare do it again because they knew that they had opposition. Yeah.
00:43:15 --> 00:43:21 So being the brilliant person that you are, you already answered the last question.
00:43:21 --> 00:43:28 So how can people get a copy of those books, Awakening the Ashes and the First and Last King of Haiti?
00:43:29 --> 00:43:34 And how can people reach out to you other than signing up for your class at Yale?
00:43:34 --> 00:43:37 How can people get in touch with you?
00:43:38 --> 00:43:42 Yeah, well, you know, I always say my books are available every place that books
00:43:42 --> 00:43:46 are sold, you know, online and in lots of Barnes and Nobles and all those things.
00:43:46 --> 00:43:51 I always say, check out bookshop.org. I know people have a reticence to use
00:43:51 --> 00:43:56 sites that they're familiar with, but bookshop.org supports independent bookstores.
00:43:56 --> 00:44:00 So even though you're buying something from a company, they give a huge amount
00:44:00 --> 00:44:02 of their profits to independent bookstores.
00:44:02 --> 00:44:05 And you'll see the independent bookstores that they partner with.
00:44:05 --> 00:44:09 You can look for one in your area if you want to make sure the funds go to that particular bookstore.
00:44:10 --> 00:44:15 And as far as keeping up with me, if you visit my website, kingofhaiti.com, I have a blog.
00:44:15 --> 00:44:20 I'm trying not to be on social media as much because algorithms and all kinds of things.
00:44:20 --> 00:44:25 But I am on LinkedIn and Instagram as well. But my website, kingofhaiti.com,
00:44:25 --> 00:44:28 or my name, MarleneDaut.com.
00:44:28 --> 00:44:30 Both of them point to the same place. I have a blog.
00:44:30 --> 00:44:34 And I also, for any teachers out there, have a tab called Teaching Resources.
00:44:35 --> 00:44:38 I've created a lot of materials because I decided at some point,
00:44:39 --> 00:44:43 like Toni Morrison told us, if we don't see what we want created out there in
00:44:43 --> 00:44:44 the world, we can go and create it.
00:44:44 --> 00:44:50 And so I have videos there for young kids up to high school and college kids,
00:44:50 --> 00:44:53 lesson plans, essays, essays for teachers.
00:44:53 --> 00:44:57 I want people to teach, Association Revolution, if they're afraid they don't
00:44:57 --> 00:44:58 know how, I want to help them.
00:44:59 --> 00:45:03 So please check it out. All right. Well, Dr. Marlene Daut, I...
00:45:04 --> 00:45:08 I greatly appreciate you taking the time. And more importantly,
00:45:08 --> 00:45:10 I greatly appreciate you being a historian.
00:45:10 --> 00:45:15 I have an incredible affinity for teachers and especially historians,
00:45:15 --> 00:45:22 because I just feel that if you don't understand what happened before,
00:45:22 --> 00:45:25 you're going to make the same mistakes.
00:45:26 --> 00:45:31 And you can learn from your past instead of just repeating it, right?
00:45:31 --> 00:45:38 And so I just appreciate the work that you've done, and especially dealing with
00:45:38 --> 00:45:42 a country that even Black folks don't really understand.
00:45:42 --> 00:45:48 And they really should understand the history of Haiti, because just as much
00:45:48 --> 00:45:50 as there's pride in the continent of Africa,
00:45:50 --> 00:45:56 there is an incredible thing right here in the Americas, a nation that showed
00:45:56 --> 00:46:00 that Black people can govern themselves if they're allowed to.
00:46:01 --> 00:46:03 And so anyway I don't want to get
00:46:03 --> 00:46:06 off on the soapbox But I just want to thank you
00:46:06 --> 00:46:09 For dedicating your life to that
00:46:09 --> 00:46:12 work And again I thank you for coming on the podcast Well thank
00:46:12 --> 00:46:17 you so much for having me It means so much to me When people want to talk about
00:46:17 --> 00:46:22 this history And spread the message Again that right here You know our neighbor
00:46:22 --> 00:46:28 It matters what happens in Haiti And Haitian history matters too Alright guys
00:46:28 --> 00:46:30 We're going to catch y'all on the other side.
00:46:31 --> 00:46:49 Music.
00:46:46 --> 00:46:46 We'll be right back.
00:46:49 --> 00:46:56 All right. And we are back. And so now it is time for my next guest, Samuel Jay
00:46:56 --> 00:47:00 Keyser. Samuel Jay Keyser is a theoretical linguist.
00:47:01 --> 00:47:07 He is the Peter de Flores Emeritus Professor, an emeritus member of the Linguistics
00:47:07 --> 00:47:13 and Philosophy Faculty, and former Associate Provost at MIT.
00:47:13 --> 00:47:20 He has authored numerous books and scientific publications and is the editor-in-chief
00:47:20 --> 00:47:22 of the Journal Linguistic Inquiry.
00:47:23 --> 00:47:27 He is also a jazz trombone player, and he lives in the Boston area.
00:47:28 --> 00:47:36 His new book is Play It Again, Sam, Repetition in the Arts, which is published by MIT Press.
00:47:36 --> 00:47:41 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest
00:47:41 --> 00:47:45 on this podcast, Samuel Jay Keyser.
00:47:46 --> 00:47:56 Music.
00:47:56 --> 00:48:00 All right. Samuel Jay Keyser. How are you doing, sir? Are you doing good?
00:48:01 --> 00:48:05 Pretty well. Thank you for asking. Well, I'm glad to have you on,
00:48:05 --> 00:48:11 and we're going to talk about your book a little bit called Play It Again, Sam.
00:48:12 --> 00:48:19 And I know this is a book that talks about repetition, and we'll get into all
00:48:19 --> 00:48:25 that and the science of it a little bit. But this is a political show.
00:48:26 --> 00:48:29 So I'm going to I'm going to get you into a political conversation,
00:48:29 --> 00:48:34 not too deep, but I think I think you'll understand where I'm going with it
00:48:34 --> 00:48:39 once we get there. But but I'm just glad to have you on. And it's really an honor.
00:48:39 --> 00:48:45 So what I do is on the beginning of my podcast, my interviews,
00:48:45 --> 00:48:47 I do a couple of icebreakers.
00:48:48 --> 00:48:52 So the first icebreaker is I want you to respond to a quote.
00:48:52 --> 00:48:59 And this quote is, we must resist the temptation to regard global perception
00:48:59 --> 00:49:02 as no more than careless perception.
00:49:02 --> 00:49:04 What does that quote mean to you?
00:49:05 --> 00:49:10 Well, I mean, I think that quote is right on. What it means is what you see is not what's there.
00:49:11 --> 00:49:16 We are creatures that have been shaped by evolution.
00:49:17 --> 00:49:20 To survive in this particular environment.
00:49:21 --> 00:49:28 But the best example that I know of that what is really out there and what you
00:49:28 --> 00:49:32 perceive that is really out there are two different things.
00:49:32 --> 00:49:36 For example, when you're looking
00:49:36 --> 00:49:43 up at the night sky, you see tiny little pinpricks of light called stars.
00:49:43 --> 00:49:48 That's not what the sky looks like. And if you're, you can tell what the sky
00:49:48 --> 00:49:53 looks like by looking at the so-called radio sky,
00:49:53 --> 00:49:59 pictures taken of the sky by interferometers that have sensors that are,
00:49:59 --> 00:50:02 you know, in some cases, a mile long.
00:50:02 --> 00:50:06 The point is that our eyes are an inch wide.
00:50:06 --> 00:50:11 If they were much wider and the rest of our body were in proportion with it,
00:50:11 --> 00:50:16 we wouldn't be able to live on this Earth because of the conditions of the Earth.
00:50:16 --> 00:50:19 But if our eyes were 100 yards wide,
00:50:20 --> 00:50:27 we'd be able to look at the sky and see the fantastic array of electromagnetic
00:50:27 --> 00:50:31 phenomena that's there.
00:50:32 --> 00:50:40 So every night when I look up at the stars, I remind myself that I'm not seeing what's there.
00:50:41 --> 00:50:45 And that's what that core is about. It's quite right.
00:50:46 --> 00:50:50 Yes, sir. All right. So my next icebreaker is called 20 questions.
00:50:51 --> 00:50:56 So what I need you to do is give me a number between 1 and 20.
00:50:57 --> 00:51:00 Say it out loud? Yes, say the number out loud.
00:51:00 --> 00:51:06 Okay. I'll choose 7. Okay. Born on the seventh month of the seventh day.
00:51:07 --> 00:51:11 Okay. All right. Well, happy belated birthday. Thank you. Yes, sir.
00:51:12 --> 00:51:17 What do you consider the best way to stay informed? about politics,
00:51:17 --> 00:51:19 current events, health, etc.
00:51:19 --> 00:51:24 Well, I think there are a lot of good ways. One thing, don't read American papers
00:51:24 --> 00:51:27 because they really are biased.
00:51:28 --> 00:51:32 I remember a quote several years ago.
00:51:34 --> 00:51:40 Mike Wallace was interviewing the editor of Croft in Russia,
00:51:40 --> 00:51:48 and Wallace said to him, what's it like being the editor of a paper that's beholden to the government?
00:51:48 --> 00:51:52 And he said, well, it's just like editing the New York Times,
00:51:52 --> 00:51:55 only they don't realize it.
00:51:57 --> 00:52:02 And so I think that one of the best ways to stay informed is to read newspapers
00:52:02 --> 00:52:04 from outside the country.
00:52:05 --> 00:52:11 And another way to stay informed is, of course, to read the opposition,
00:52:11 --> 00:52:13 to see where the opposition is coming.
00:52:13 --> 00:52:18 You don't want to read things that coincide with your own beliefs because all
00:52:18 --> 00:52:19 you're hearing are echoes.
00:52:20 --> 00:52:24 And that's another way. And I think there are many other ways.
00:52:24 --> 00:52:30 If you have people that you trust, you talk to them, and so on and so forth.
00:52:30 --> 00:52:36 There are, I think on the internet, there must be, oh, you know,
00:52:36 --> 00:52:43 a thousand different ways to stay well-informed if you know the right places to go to. Yes, sir.
00:52:44 --> 00:52:51 All right. Right. So your book explores the way repetition works in what they
00:52:51 --> 00:52:56 call the sister arts of poetry, music and painting. Right.
00:52:56 --> 00:53:03 And you are a linguist by training, but you're also a musician.
00:53:03 --> 00:53:05 You played a trombone. Is that right?
00:53:06 --> 00:53:13 That's right. So how did you first become interested in this topic dealing with
00:53:13 --> 00:53:14 being specific about repetition?
00:53:15 --> 00:53:21 And poetry and music I get as far as the repetition goes, right?
00:53:21 --> 00:53:25 And you explain it very well in the book, but naturally, you know,
00:53:25 --> 00:53:30 people kind of get it when you say there's repetition in poetry and music.
00:53:30 --> 00:53:33 But can you explain what the
00:53:33 --> 00:53:39 how repetition works in a painting so first explain how you got interested in
00:53:39 --> 00:53:44 doing a book about repetition and then a repetition in arts and then explain
00:53:44 --> 00:53:51 how repetition works in something visual like a painting okay well i think i
00:53:51 --> 00:53:52 to answer your question,
00:53:53 --> 00:54:01 I'd have to say that in my mind, this book is the second book in a duo.
00:54:02 --> 00:54:07 The first one is a book I wrote in 2020 called The Mental Life of Modernism.
00:54:07 --> 00:54:16 And just to cut to the chase, what I argued in that book was that at the turn
00:54:16 --> 00:54:21 of the 20th century, a remarkable thing happened in poetry, painting, and music.
00:54:22 --> 00:54:29 Namely, they cease to be, they abandon typical formats for making art.
00:54:29 --> 00:54:33 In the case of poetry, meter and rhyme were given up.
00:54:34 --> 00:54:39 In the case of music, tonality was given up, that is to say the kind of music
00:54:39 --> 00:54:41 that is centered around the.
00:54:42 --> 00:54:47 Tone, a particular tone, and a scale associated with that tone,
00:54:47 --> 00:54:51 and chords associated with the scale associated with the note, that sort of thing.
00:54:51 --> 00:54:55 That kind of thing is hardwired, sort of built into us. We sort of naturally
00:54:55 --> 00:54:57 listen to that kind of music.
00:54:57 --> 00:55:03 And it was replaced by atonal music, which was music built on an arbitrary 12-tone set.
00:55:04 --> 00:55:07 And the rules were, pick 12 tones, any 12
00:55:07 --> 00:55:10 notes you want and make music
00:55:10 --> 00:55:13 out of that but here's a constraint you can't repeat
00:55:13 --> 00:55:16 any of the notes until you've used them all
00:55:16 --> 00:55:21 up so there was kind of built into this a kind of an anti repetitive notion
00:55:21 --> 00:55:29 and with respect to painting well most painting before the 20th century was
00:55:29 --> 00:55:34 really aimed at representations of the natural world.
00:55:35 --> 00:55:41 I mean, to caricature, it was photography before photography.
00:55:41 --> 00:55:46 But, of course, that's much too simplified, but it's an easy way to get at what I'm saying.
00:55:46 --> 00:55:53 So what happened was that these three art forms abandoned all of these predilections,
00:55:53 --> 00:55:59 all of these art forms that appeal to natural predilections of the brain,
00:56:00 --> 00:56:07 forced art to find new ways of thinking about making art.
00:56:08 --> 00:56:16 And the point of the first book was that particular forcing of people to think
00:56:16 --> 00:56:18 differently was not new.
00:56:18 --> 00:56:20 In fact, it had happened...
00:56:22 --> 00:56:31 Oh, let's see, about 300 years earlier, in three to 400 years earlier, with Isaac Newton.
00:56:32 --> 00:56:35 When Isaac Newton came up with the notion of gravity,
00:56:35 --> 00:56:43 that was earth-shaking, because basically what it said was that any theory about
00:56:43 --> 00:56:49 the world could no longer be seen as a mechanical theory in the sense that the
00:56:49 --> 00:56:53 universe was really like some incredibly mechanical device.
00:56:54 --> 00:57:00 Why? Well, in a mechanical device, every part of the mechanism has to touch
00:57:00 --> 00:57:02 some other part of the mechanism.
00:57:03 --> 00:57:11 And what Isaac Newton showed was that it's possible for two objects to influence
00:57:11 --> 00:57:15 one another, even when they're billions of miles apart and not touching.
00:57:15 --> 00:57:20 I mean, that was really news, but it worked.
00:57:20 --> 00:57:23 It explained too much to be sort of hoo-hoo.
00:57:24 --> 00:57:26 You had to accept it if you were a scientist.
00:57:26 --> 00:57:31 But if you accepted that, you were forced to think about the world in a different way.
00:57:32 --> 00:57:38 The world was no longer made up of theories based on common sense perceptions of the world.
00:57:39 --> 00:57:42 Remember now, this is what your first quote was about.
00:57:42 --> 00:57:49 The world was not the way you thought it was, but rather what science was now
00:57:49 --> 00:57:52 about was about theories of what the world was like.
00:57:52 --> 00:57:54 And that's exactly what happened to the arts.
00:57:55 --> 00:57:59 And so my view is that the shift that
00:57:59 --> 00:58:05 took place in the 20th century that we call modernism was simply this shift
00:58:05 --> 00:58:11 away from what the brain did naturally to ways of the brain having to construct
00:58:11 --> 00:58:18 habits of mind to account for a world that we know is not like what we perceive it to be.
00:58:18 --> 00:58:20 Now, in the course of that.
00:58:22 --> 00:58:27 I had a footnote about repetition, and I had talked about repetition when I
00:58:27 --> 00:58:30 talked about music in that particular volume.
00:58:30 --> 00:58:39 And I said something about repetition, what it might do, but I just sort of was really commenting.
00:58:40 --> 00:58:44 It was not a very deep comment. It was just noting that there is such a thing
00:58:44 --> 00:58:48 as repetition, and one ought to think about what it means at some point,
00:58:48 --> 00:58:49 but I couldn't in this book.
00:58:50 --> 00:58:58 And then after I finished the book, I started doing sort of collateral reading.
00:58:58 --> 00:59:07 And I came upon a comment by Leonard Bernstein, whom I have great,
00:59:07 --> 00:59:12 great admiration for as a musician and as a conductor and a composer.
00:59:13 --> 00:59:20 And he had said, The reason why so little progress had been made in musical
00:59:20 --> 00:59:26 theory is because theoreticians paid no attention to repetition.
00:59:27 --> 00:59:30 And that got my attention. I said, well, you know, that's right.
00:59:30 --> 00:59:34 I wasn't paying that much attention to repetition. Maybe I ought to think about it.
00:59:35 --> 00:59:40 And then this was the other shoe drop in.
00:59:41 --> 00:59:46 Friend of mine called my attention to an experiment that had been performed
00:59:46 --> 00:59:52 by a woman named Elizabeth Helmer Margulis, who was a musicologist at Princeton.
00:59:53 --> 00:59:58 And this experiment was a very simple experiment, but it was really telling.
00:59:58 --> 01:00:02 And here's the experiment. I'll tell it to you because it's not complicated at all.
01:00:03 --> 01:00:11 She took music by two masters of atonal music, Luciano Barrio and Elliot Carter.
01:00:11 --> 01:00:15 And she deliberately doctored the music.
01:00:15 --> 01:00:24 And the way she doctored it was just using a computer's brute force copy and paste functions.
01:00:24 --> 01:00:30 She copied a bit of the music and inserted it again later on in the same piece.
01:00:31 --> 01:00:39 And she did it when the two pieces were next to one another and when they were farther apart.
01:00:39 --> 01:00:44 So think of it like this. Let's call the piece that she copied segment one.
01:00:45 --> 01:00:52 So let's say the music can be divided into five segments, one, two, three, four, five.
01:00:52 --> 01:00:56 The first doctored segment, which she called immediate repetition,
01:00:57 --> 01:01:00 came out one, one, two, three, four, five.
01:01:01 --> 01:01:06 The second doctored version came out one, two, three, one, four, five.
01:01:07 --> 01:01:11 So now she had four pieces of music, the originals and doctored versions,
01:01:11 --> 01:01:15 which by brute force only, no artistic considerations at all,
01:01:15 --> 01:01:19 just plain brute force copy and paste.
01:01:19 --> 01:01:22 She played it to two different audiences.
01:01:22 --> 01:01:29 One was an audience of ordinary listeners, students who liked music but had no special training.
01:01:29 --> 01:01:35 And she asked them which of the versions they liked best. And they replied they
01:01:35 --> 01:01:37 liked the doctored versions best.
01:01:38 --> 01:01:43 And she took the same experiment to a conference where the attendees were all
01:01:43 --> 01:01:46 PhDs in music, music theorists.
01:01:46 --> 01:01:50 She did the same thing, and she got the same result.
01:01:50 --> 01:01:56 So what she concluded, and the conclusion that she came to seemed to me to be unavoidable.
01:01:57 --> 01:02:04 Namely the mere addition of repetition itself without any artistic goals or
01:02:04 --> 01:02:10 plan or format at all, the mere existence of repetition enhanced the pleasure
01:02:10 --> 01:02:12 of a particular work of art.
01:02:12 --> 01:02:17 So given that, I thought, ah, I think I got it now.
01:02:17 --> 01:02:22 So then what I did was I went back and looked at the three art forms that I
01:02:22 --> 01:02:28 know best, poetry, painting, and music, known as it happens as the sister arts.
01:02:28 --> 01:02:32 And I examined how repetition worked in all three of them.
01:02:32 --> 01:02:35 And I found that was my book
01:02:35 --> 01:02:38 and what my book is really about was how that
01:02:38 --> 01:02:43 worked yeah so you
01:02:43 --> 01:02:51 said that when she did the experiment that both the ordinary music listener
01:02:51 --> 01:02:57 and the actual music theorist theorist liked the doctored version better the
01:02:57 --> 01:03:02 one that that like you said through brute force put repetition in the piece.
01:03:02 --> 01:03:09 Why do you think that repetition pleases us? Why do you think we react to it like that?
01:03:09 --> 01:03:14 Well, can I begin by saying that's a great question? Okay.
01:03:15 --> 01:03:22 And now I'm going to try to give you an answer. It turns out that there is a certain phenomenon.
01:03:22 --> 01:03:26 Well, let me put it differently. Let me start over here.
01:03:26 --> 01:03:31 In order to tell that something is a repetition, You have to ask yourself,
01:03:32 --> 01:03:35 what does it mean to be able to say that A is a repetition of B?
01:03:36 --> 01:03:41 Well, it turns out that you have to have the ability to do two things.
01:03:42 --> 01:03:45 One is to tell when they're the same, when they're identical.
01:03:46 --> 01:03:49 And the other is to tell when they're different.
01:03:49 --> 01:03:54 And these kinds of detectors, it turns out, are hardwired in the grain.
01:03:55 --> 01:04:01 Psychologists have shown and neuroscientists call these things pomps.
01:04:01 --> 01:04:06 And these pomps are hardwired into the brain. The human being has this ability.
01:04:06 --> 01:04:12 It's something that we can do naturally. Like, for example, we can walk naturally.
01:04:12 --> 01:04:17 We can see the world in colors naturally, in 3D naturally. There are things
01:04:17 --> 01:04:19 that we just do very well.
01:04:19 --> 01:04:24 One of the things that we do naturally is to tell when something is the same
01:04:24 --> 01:04:25 or when it's slightly different.
01:04:26 --> 01:04:33 Fact, there's a game that children and adults like to play called Spot the Difference.
01:04:33 --> 01:04:38 And when you were a kid, you probably played this. You were given two pictures.
01:04:38 --> 01:04:42 One of them would be the so-called the original.
01:04:42 --> 01:04:48 It would have maybe a house and a park, a tree, a moon, maybe stars,
01:04:48 --> 01:04:51 maybe a bench, maybe two people walking.
01:04:52 --> 01:04:57 The second picture would be just like the first picture, but you have to find out what's different.
01:04:58 --> 01:05:01 And it could be that the second picture is just like the first,
01:05:01 --> 01:05:03 except only one person is walking.
01:05:04 --> 01:05:12 Or the second picture might differ from the first, except that the moon was orange instead of red.
01:05:12 --> 01:05:15 And of course, the more complicated you make these pictures,
01:05:16 --> 01:05:22 the harder it is to find the difference. And when you find it, you get a kick.
01:05:22 --> 01:05:24 And that turns out to be pleasurable.
01:05:25 --> 01:05:29 Why should that be so? Well, here's a possible story.
01:05:29 --> 01:05:34 And remember now, this is speculation because I'm very, very dubious myself
01:05:34 --> 01:05:37 of just those stories about why
01:05:37 --> 01:05:43 evolution puts things into our brains in a particular way. But in 1968.
01:05:45 --> 01:05:52 A social psychologist by the name of Robert Zients discovered a phenomenon which
01:05:52 --> 01:05:55 he called mere exposure.
01:05:55 --> 01:06:01 And what he showed was this, that if you take a subject, for example, an infant,
01:06:02 --> 01:06:09 and you expose that subject to the same image over and over and over again,
01:06:10 --> 01:06:15 the subject will develop an affectionate bond with the image.
01:06:16 --> 01:06:19 That's a fact. That's what he was able to show.
01:06:19 --> 01:06:25 Now comes evolutionary storytellers. And here's a possible and not unreasonable
01:06:25 --> 01:06:26 story that I've heard told.
01:06:27 --> 01:06:30 The goal of evolution is not to create a loving couple.
01:06:31 --> 01:06:38 It doesn't want to make a mother and a child in a beautiful relationship.
01:06:38 --> 01:06:39 That's something we do.
01:06:40 --> 01:06:45 But what nature wants to do is make sure that the gene pool is contributed to.
01:06:45 --> 01:06:51 It wants the best possible set of genes to be passed on, according to Darwin.
01:06:52 --> 01:07:00 All right. So, you can see why this particular phenomenon would be hardwired
01:07:00 --> 01:07:06 into the brain, because it would make an infant, it would bond an infant to a mother.
01:07:07 --> 01:07:13 And what better bond is there to give the infant the best possible chance of
01:07:13 --> 01:07:18 survival in the early months and years of its life than to be bonded to the
01:07:18 --> 01:07:24 creature who is going to do everything she possibly can to make sure that that infant survives?
01:07:25 --> 01:07:32 That's reasonable, might even be true. But the point is, that particular circuitry is there.
01:07:33 --> 01:07:39 And my claim, and this is the buffo ending, my claim—.
01:07:42 --> 01:07:47 Is that artists have co-opted that hardwired,
01:07:47 --> 01:07:54 built-in propensity to extract pleasure from repetition into their art forms
01:07:54 --> 01:07:59 to make sure that their art has an element of pleasure in it.
01:07:59 --> 01:08:03 And they've done that in those three art forms, and I suspect many others.
01:08:04 --> 01:08:08 I'm now reading, trying to educate myself in the field that I knew nothing about
01:08:08 --> 01:08:10 at the time, but I'll bet you it's there too.
01:08:11 --> 01:08:13 I just got to figure it out. It's architecture.
01:08:14 --> 01:08:20 Why buildings look the way they do. Anyway, you got that? That's the story. Yes.
01:08:20 --> 01:08:25 So let's dive into this a little more because since it's a political show,
01:08:26 --> 01:08:33 I want you to take that same theory about repetition and explain how is it used
01:08:33 --> 01:08:34 to good effect in politics.
01:08:34 --> 01:08:39 And you introduced the term to me in the book called structural priming.
01:08:39 --> 01:08:42 So kind of talk a little bit about that.
01:08:42 --> 01:08:49 How does repetition or how can repetition be of good use in politics based on
01:08:49 --> 01:08:54 what you were able to study and a little bit about structural priming?
01:08:54 --> 01:08:59 Because the example you used in the book was Churchill's speech.
01:09:00 --> 01:09:02 Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
01:09:02 --> 01:09:08 Well, first of all, remember, Churchill's speech is, he used a rhetorical advice.
01:09:08 --> 01:09:10 We shall fight on the landing grounds.
01:09:10 --> 01:09:12 We shall fight on the beaches.
01:09:12 --> 01:09:17 We shall fight in the streets. We shall fight in the alleys, whatever.
01:09:17 --> 01:09:26 That repetition automatically makes the speech attractive because you've heard
01:09:26 --> 01:09:29 that before, and you've heard that before, and you've heard that before.
01:09:29 --> 01:09:33 So that's what I was talking about in the book. Now, you are,
01:09:33 --> 01:09:34 because it's a political show,
01:09:35 --> 01:09:43 you're really asking me to sort of think off the top of my head about how repetition
01:09:43 --> 01:09:45 might be used politically.
01:09:45 --> 01:09:50 And because I'm a nice guy, I'm going to try to accommodate you instead of saying
01:09:50 --> 01:09:53 to you simply, hey, I don't know anything about that.
01:09:53 --> 01:09:56 But let me show you an example.
01:09:56 --> 01:10:00 Why do companies like coca-cola
01:10:00 --> 01:10:03 and pepsicola and fedex invest a
01:10:03 --> 01:10:06 lot of money in just putting their name on the
01:10:06 --> 01:10:09 ad because if you see the
01:10:09 --> 01:10:16 name over and over and over again then you develop an affection for it and the
01:10:16 --> 01:10:22 again the the just so evolutionary storytellers would say well what's that is
01:10:22 --> 01:10:28 doing is that's showing the subject that to see the name is a safe environment,
01:10:29 --> 01:10:31 because you're seeing it, nothing happens to you.
01:10:32 --> 01:10:34 And so when you see it again, you welcome it.
01:10:35 --> 01:10:37 Well, what does that sound like? Well, it sounds like a big lie.
01:10:38 --> 01:10:45 I mean, people have often noticed that you say a lie enough times and people begin to believe it.
01:10:46 --> 01:10:51 Well, I think that there is a very strong possibility that to a large extent
01:10:51 --> 01:10:55 we're hardwired to believe things that we hear over and over and over again
01:10:55 --> 01:10:58 that don't cause us any harm unless we think about it.
01:11:00 --> 01:11:05 Yeah. And that's, that's good because I, you know, when I was thinking about
01:11:05 --> 01:11:11 your, your, when you were explaining the bond between a mother and a child,
01:11:11 --> 01:11:14 it's, it's like the, the,
01:11:14 --> 01:11:19 and, and in the branding, like for, for products, it's, it's a trust thing.
01:11:19 --> 01:11:22 Not only is it does it it gives
01:11:22 --> 01:11:25 us pleasure to trust in something if if
01:11:25 --> 01:11:29 if i constantly you know and i've run follows
01:11:29 --> 01:11:33 before so if i constantly throw my name out there whether it's on billboards
01:11:33 --> 01:11:41 or tv ads or radio spot whatever right the yard signs the repetition of my name
01:11:41 --> 01:11:45 is supposed to give you a pleasure and supposed to give you a trust it's like
01:11:45 --> 01:11:47 that's the person i need to vote for?
01:11:47 --> 01:11:53 Am I getting the gist of what you're saying without being too simplistic about it? Yeah.
01:11:55 --> 01:12:00 You're sort of using the hardwired propensities of the brain for a result.
01:12:00 --> 01:12:04 The fact of the matter is we all ought to simply think about things.
01:12:05 --> 01:12:10 We ought not to let the automatic mechanisms of our brain take over.
01:12:10 --> 01:12:16 But any particular proposition, we ought to think about, and whether it's true or not to think about.
01:12:16 --> 01:12:21 Unfortunately, that's hard to do. It takes work.
01:12:22 --> 01:12:26 And people aren't inclined to think so much as they are to react.
01:12:27 --> 01:12:33 And that's just who we are as a species. It'll probably kill us.
01:12:35 --> 01:12:42 Well, I'm not trying to get into any Armageddon thoughts, but I do understand the concern.
01:12:44 --> 01:12:52 Take a look at these recent results on Chatbot, where people use Chatbot to write essays.
01:12:53 --> 01:12:53 Yeah.
01:12:54 --> 01:13:00 And they developed, I think, the format for the experiments.
01:13:00 --> 01:13:06 I haven't read this stuff carefully, and I urge you and your audience to fact-check
01:13:06 --> 01:13:11 me on this, because I may be getting it all wrong, and that's why you've got to think.
01:13:11 --> 01:13:20 But I read a recent story about some research that was done in a nearby institution.
01:13:21 --> 01:13:23 Reputable institution, and
01:13:23 --> 01:13:27 what they did was they had a group of people write a paper using chatbots.
01:13:27 --> 01:13:30 And then they had a group of people write a paper using
01:13:30 --> 01:13:33 only chatbot for references and then they had
01:13:33 --> 01:13:38 a group of people write a paper and they were not allowed to use any artificial
01:13:38 --> 01:13:44 means at all and not surprisingly the people who used chatbot for the paper
01:13:44 --> 01:13:49 and references couldn't remember a damn thing they'd written a week later and
01:13:49 --> 01:13:52 the the ones who used the references were a little
01:13:52 --> 01:13:55 better but the ones who had thought about it
01:13:55 --> 01:13:58 themselves remembered a great deal and
01:13:58 --> 01:14:02 so the the use of these robotic devices
01:14:02 --> 01:14:05 in order to as a kind of
01:14:05 --> 01:14:08 a crush or an aid you
01:14:08 --> 01:14:14 might say as an aid can do you real damage because it can simply appeal to the
01:14:14 --> 01:14:18 passive side of your brain which says oh it's so much easier to let somebody
01:14:18 --> 01:14:24 else do it or something else do it and that's the And I'm afraid that there's
01:14:24 --> 01:14:25 no substitute for thinking,
01:14:25 --> 01:14:29 and that our ability to think is an incredible,
01:14:30 --> 01:14:32 incredible gift of nature.
01:14:33 --> 01:14:36 Why we don't take advantage of it more, I don't know.
01:14:37 --> 01:14:40 Into that as as we say in the southern
01:14:40 --> 01:14:42 church and i've used it many times on the
01:14:42 --> 01:14:47 podcast it's like those are the kind of points you need to say a little louder
01:14:47 --> 01:14:54 so the folks in the in the back can hear it i don't know you know there comes
01:14:54 --> 01:15:01 a time when oh well i think to myself i'm i mean you know I'm in the end game,
01:15:02 --> 01:15:05 Eric I mean, there comes a time when,
01:15:06 --> 01:15:12 you no longer want to yell so the people in the back can hear because you don't
01:15:12 --> 01:15:16 have a breath I got you Alright,
01:15:16 --> 01:15:22 so last question Do you have any concerns in this political climate about the arts?
01:15:24 --> 01:15:32 Well, it's a very good question, Erik And I think the knee-jerk reaction is, oh, yeah,
01:15:32 --> 01:15:40 I do, because of the notion of repression, of the notion of enrols on free speech, and all of that.
01:15:40 --> 01:15:48 But I'll tell you something. I visited a country, Cuba, and saw the art scene
01:15:48 --> 01:15:54 in Cuba, which had developed during a period, a similar period, of social control.
01:15:54 --> 01:16:01 And the art was fantastic. I mean, it was so inventive, creative,
01:16:01 --> 01:16:06 alive, active, engaging, whatever you can think of.
01:16:06 --> 01:16:12 I think that there's something about the human spirit that is just like the
01:16:12 --> 01:16:16 blade of grass that grows up in the middle of concrete.
01:16:17 --> 01:16:23 So I think the arts will always survive because as long as there are human beings,
01:16:24 --> 01:16:30 because the ability of the drain to create is its greatest property.
01:16:31 --> 01:16:37 And you can decide not to choose it, not to use it, which is what so many people do.
01:16:38 --> 01:16:40 But there will always be people that will use it.
01:16:41 --> 01:16:44 And if they use it, there's no way to stop it. Some stop them.
01:16:45 --> 01:16:50 Yeah, when you said to use that blade of grass through concrete,
01:16:50 --> 01:16:56 I was immediately, the song by Aretha Franklin, There's a Rose in Spanish Harlem, right?
01:16:57 --> 01:17:02 And yeah, and I think that's a great, great analogy.
01:17:03 --> 01:17:10 So if people, before you say the next thing, let's just say Aretha Franklin was one of the greatest.
01:17:10 --> 01:17:16 I mean, she was just an amazing singer and influenced so many singers after her.
01:17:16 --> 01:17:19 But she was just extraordinary.
01:17:20 --> 01:17:25 I'm sorry to interrupt no that's okay that's okay you know praising the queen is always good,
01:17:26 --> 01:17:30 Where can people get this book, Jay? Play it again, Sam, the repetition in the
01:17:30 --> 01:17:32 arts. They have to find out.
01:17:39 --> 01:17:42 Well, let's see. Where do you usually get books?
01:17:42 --> 01:17:48 I guess two places come to mind, a bookstore or a library.
01:17:49 --> 01:17:53 Okay. And I think the cheapest way to do it is to get your library to buy it.
01:17:54 --> 01:17:56 Okay. And so that's what you can do.
01:17:57 --> 01:18:02 It's available, I'm sure you can find it online, Amazon or something like that.
01:18:02 --> 01:18:04 But it was published by MIT Press.
01:18:05 --> 01:18:11 And so if you have this, you know, just a modicum of skill, you can just put
01:18:11 --> 01:18:16 in my name and the title of the book, Play It Again, Sam, and you'll find some
01:18:16 --> 01:18:17 place where you can buy it.
01:18:18 --> 01:18:24 Yes, sir. And if people want to reach out to you, how can people get in touch with you?
01:18:24 --> 01:18:29 Well, I'm on Facebook. I don't know. I guess you can do it that way.
01:18:29 --> 01:18:34 I'm in LinkedIn, and you can do it that way, and that's pretty good. Yeah.
01:18:36 --> 01:18:38 Okay. All right. Well— I don't have a webpage.
01:18:40 --> 01:18:46 I made one, but it seemed it was just too much to keep it up. I understand.
01:18:46 --> 01:18:51 Well, Samuel Jay Keyser, I greatly appreciate you coming on, sir.
01:18:51 --> 01:18:58 And I encourage people to get the book. I told him it was taking me back to
01:18:58 --> 01:19:03 school, but it's detailed and it flows.
01:19:03 --> 01:19:07 There's a flow to it where you can pick up where it's coming from.
01:19:07 --> 01:19:12 So I encourage people to get it. And I thank you again for taking the time to
01:19:12 --> 01:19:18 come on the podcast. I appreciate it. The gratitude is,
01:19:18 --> 01:19:23 the other way. Thank you for giving me some time to talk to you and to your
01:19:23 --> 01:19:26 audience. You're doing me a big favor. Thank you so much, Eric.
01:19:27 --> 01:19:30 Yes, sir. All right, guys, we're going to catch y'all on the other side.
01:19:31 --> 01:19:42 Music.
01:19:41 --> 01:19:45 All right, and we are back. So I want to thank Dr.
01:19:45 --> 01:19:53 Marlene L. Daut and Samuel Jay Keyser for coming on to the podcast.
01:19:54 --> 01:20:00 Please get their books and, you know, just let me know again.
01:20:00 --> 01:20:02 Let me know what you think about everything.
01:20:02 --> 01:20:10 It's really, really cool to just talk to people that are smart and,
01:20:10 --> 01:20:17 you know, you know, seen some things and appreciate the history of things, right?
01:20:18 --> 01:20:25 And, you know, there's wisdom in conversation. There's wisdom in collaboration.
01:20:26 --> 01:20:30 And there's wisdom in compromise, right? And so,
01:20:31 --> 01:20:37 you know, I just really appreciate the opportunity to talk to intelligent people,
01:20:37 --> 01:20:41 and I really appreciate having this platform to do that.
01:20:43 --> 01:20:49 And I also appreciate this platform as, and you've heard me say it many,
01:20:49 --> 01:20:55 many times, as a form of therapy, as a form of catharsis, as a form of release,
01:20:55 --> 01:21:00 right, to deal with what we're dealing with in this world. So,
01:21:00 --> 01:21:01 again, thanks to my guests.
01:21:02 --> 01:21:05 Really appreciate y'all coming on. And thank you.
01:21:06 --> 01:21:10 Let me just get into it, right? So there was two African-American men.
01:21:11 --> 01:21:21 One, I have talked about his mistreatment before, but now it's just continuing on.
01:21:21 --> 01:21:26 And then a new brother who is emerging on the political scene.
01:21:27 --> 01:21:36 And they're dealing with these people who are really not intelligent people. They're crafty.
01:21:37 --> 01:21:44 They're devious. My favorite word is invidious, right? But they're not intelligent people.
01:21:45 --> 01:21:48 They're very base in what they do.
01:21:49 --> 01:21:54 And it's very easy to say, oh, well, you know, you're being partisan and all that stuff.
01:21:54 --> 01:21:57 And it is true because it's partisan.
01:21:58 --> 01:22:03 And I say this, and I have to throw this disclaimer out every time because I
01:22:03 --> 01:22:05 grew up around Republicans.
01:22:05 --> 01:22:13 I know Republicans. I've had beers with them. I've smoked cigars with them. I've partied with them.
01:22:14 --> 01:22:20 I've worked with them. I've lived my life around people. And then this crap happened.
01:22:21 --> 01:22:27 And I say that it evolved and took a whole new life.
01:22:29 --> 01:22:37 And my explanation of it is the last gasp, the last breath of white supremacy in this nation.
01:22:37 --> 01:22:42 And they're going out with a fight. They are not laying down and surrendering.
01:22:42 --> 01:22:44 They're trying to do some damage.
01:22:46 --> 01:22:51 These people, you know, right now have taken over the Republican Party.
01:22:52 --> 01:22:58 And to the degree that it's like, you know, there are folks that try to be smart,
01:22:59 --> 01:23:05 Alec, and say that, well, you know, it's the Republicans that freed the slaves and da-da-da-da-da.
01:23:06 --> 01:23:12 And I said, yeah, this party is not that Republican Party.
01:23:12 --> 01:23:18 As a matter of fact, this Republican Party is, this current one is more like
01:23:18 --> 01:23:24 the Democrats back during slavery or the Democrats during Jim Crow,
01:23:24 --> 01:23:25 especially in the South.
01:23:25 --> 01:23:31 That's what this Republican Party is. And if people get offended by that, so be it.
01:23:31 --> 01:23:38 As a black man who understands his history and who has experienced certain things in life,
01:23:38 --> 01:23:44 especially in the political world, I can stand 10 toes down and say that this
01:23:44 --> 01:23:51 Republican Party now is or would be comfortable having a Bull Connor or George
01:23:51 --> 01:23:53 Wallace or Strom Thurmond.
01:23:53 --> 01:23:57 And as a matter of fact, Strom switched over to the Republican Party, right?
01:23:57 --> 01:24:00 Those guys would feel right at home right now.
01:24:01 --> 01:24:04 And some of their crazy cousins. That's where we are.
01:24:05 --> 01:24:10 Now, history is history. Yes, the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln,
01:24:10 --> 01:24:16 party of Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, all those guys, right?
01:24:17 --> 01:24:22 But the Republican Party now is more like Stephen Douglass, right?
01:24:23 --> 01:24:27 That's where we are. And that's the way they're acting, especially toward people
01:24:27 --> 01:24:31 that look and sound like me, right?
01:24:32 --> 01:24:40 And it's one thing to go after me, you know, I've seen a few sunrises and sunsets, right?
01:24:40 --> 01:24:44 But these young brothers you're going after, now they can hold their own,
01:24:44 --> 01:24:51 but it still pisses me off that they have to experience what they experience.
01:24:52 --> 01:24:55 Take, for example, Isaiah Martin. He's 27 years old.
01:24:56 --> 01:25:01 He's a young man in Texas, wants to run, I think, for the 18th congressional district in Texas.
01:25:01 --> 01:25:07 I don't know who's in that seat now, but I didn't bother to do Ballotpedia or Google it.
01:25:07 --> 01:25:11 But I just know that he's running for office. So he came.
01:25:12 --> 01:25:20 To the state capitol in Austin, I think, because they are having hearings throughout the state.
01:25:20 --> 01:25:23 And if you're not familiar with what I'm going to talk about.
01:25:23 --> 01:25:29 So Donald Trump, the president, reached out to the governor of Texas,
01:25:29 --> 01:25:34 Greg Abbott, who, let me just say this, right?
01:25:34 --> 01:25:41 It's news. It's not nice. It's not kind to talk about people who suffer a handicap, right?
01:25:42 --> 01:25:46 But if there's going to be an exception in this world, it is Greg Abbott.
01:25:47 --> 01:25:51 I forget how he got his injury and why he's in a wheelchair and all that.
01:25:51 --> 01:25:57 But, you know, when you're as evil as he is, you shouldn't be offended that
01:25:57 --> 01:25:59 somebody calls you Hot Wheels or anything else.
01:26:00 --> 01:26:04 Y'all want to rally around him. That's fine. That just shows that y'all just as evil as he is.
01:26:05 --> 01:26:10 Because all the stuff he's doing, I mean, people have died because of him.
01:26:10 --> 01:26:11 People have frozen to death.
01:26:12 --> 01:26:17 People are being washed away through floods because of him.
01:26:17 --> 01:26:21 He is a harbinger of tragedy and pain.
01:26:23 --> 01:26:30 And his partner in crime, Ken Paxton, I think he's got some kind of disability too. I don't know.
01:26:31 --> 01:26:33 But both of them are very, very evil people.
01:26:34 --> 01:26:39 And I don't throw that word around lightly. I know a lot of people were sensitive
01:26:39 --> 01:26:45 about that or the fascist word or the Nazi word. I'm like, bruh, it is what it is.
01:26:45 --> 01:26:49 Even Paxton's wife of umpteen years finally said enough's enough.
01:26:50 --> 01:26:50 You know what I'm saying?
01:26:51 --> 01:26:58 At least she stuck it out for 30-something, you know? I'm just saying, I don't...
01:26:59 --> 01:27:03 Care for these people, right? And they're all in the mix.
01:27:03 --> 01:27:09 So President Trump reaches out to Governor Abbott and says, I want to keep this
01:27:09 --> 01:27:15 majority in the House because the way it's going right now, we're going to lose it.
01:27:15 --> 01:27:19 So the only way we can do it is we got to alter the numbers.
01:27:21 --> 01:27:28 So I need y'all, since there's some concerns that were brought up by the previous
01:27:28 --> 01:27:33 Justice Department about how you redrew the lines, this would be a good time to go ahead and.
01:27:36 --> 01:27:41 Redistrict the district, but make it so that we get more seats.
01:27:42 --> 01:27:49 Now, when the census came out in 2020, 2021, Texas was supposed to get four
01:27:49 --> 01:27:56 new congressional districts, but the growth came in the Latino community primarily.
01:27:57 --> 01:28:04 So there was supposed to be, based on the census data, the potential for three
01:28:04 --> 01:28:08 new districts that would be represented by somebody from the Latino community.
01:28:08 --> 01:28:13 And then one probably to be majority black, right?
01:28:14 --> 01:28:23 So when the legislature in Texas redistricted, somehow, someway,
01:28:23 --> 01:28:25 they got more white districts out of that.
01:28:26 --> 01:28:32 And somebody broke it down as like they created 23 districts that eventually
01:28:32 --> 01:28:37 supported President Trump in the election, right?
01:28:37 --> 01:28:43 So now the plan, the map that they've revealed is that they want to create,
01:28:44 --> 01:28:46 increase that and make it 30.
01:28:47 --> 01:28:52 So basically, by the way the districts have been drawn and all that stuff,
01:28:52 --> 01:28:54 it'll be a net gain of five.
01:28:55 --> 01:28:59 And I know the numbers would say seven based on what I just gave you,
01:28:59 --> 01:29:03 but as far as actual districts, the way that they want to draw them, it'd be five.
01:29:04 --> 01:29:08 New districts with a couple of districts that may have supported Trump, but,
01:29:09 --> 01:29:15 swung for a Democrat, right? So, you know, first of all,
01:29:15 --> 01:29:20 who was the president of the United States to tell a state to redraw their map
01:29:20 --> 01:29:25 and, you know, so we could get more people? Because it was that easy.
01:29:25 --> 01:29:29 Barack Obama could have done that in 2010, you know?
01:29:30 --> 01:29:33 I mean, he was trying to get the Affordable Care Act passed,
01:29:33 --> 01:29:36 and he was trying to get a budget still done.
01:29:37 --> 01:29:41 So it was like, it had been advantageous of him to say, hey,
01:29:42 --> 01:29:47 New York, California, wherever that the Democrats don't have independent redistricting,
01:29:48 --> 01:29:54 why don't y'all go in and redraw the lines so we make sure that we can keep the majority?
01:29:55 --> 01:30:00 That's not the president of the United States' job. That's, you know,
01:30:00 --> 01:30:04 It's a violation of, I believe, the 10th Amendment.
01:30:06 --> 01:30:14 So that. But then you got a Governor Abbott and a Ken Paxton who say, oh, yeah, we'll do that.
01:30:15 --> 01:30:20 That's why I can say evil, right? Because there's nothing good out of that.
01:30:21 --> 01:30:24 You can't win it on the merits. You can't win it on the policy.
01:30:24 --> 01:30:29 So you can't win it on what you've been doing these first years,
01:30:29 --> 01:30:32 you know, of the second Trump administration.
01:30:33 --> 01:30:36 So you got to cheat because that's all you're doing. You're cheating.
01:30:37 --> 01:30:39 You're trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.
01:30:40 --> 01:30:44 You're only supposed to redraw the lines after the census. Now,
01:30:44 --> 01:30:47 if the court tells you to redraw the lines, that's one thing.
01:30:48 --> 01:30:53 But the president of the United States, and then he drew the map for you, right?
01:30:53 --> 01:30:57 Somebody in Washington, D.C. drew the map for the Texas Congressional District.
01:30:58 --> 01:31:03 Cool with it. I'm just saying, if you live in Texas and you hear this,
01:31:04 --> 01:31:08 you might want to reconsider your leadership, especially on the Republican side.
01:31:09 --> 01:31:14 Just a thought. Anyway, there's his brother, Isaiah Martin, and he,
01:31:14 --> 01:31:19 like other citizens, decided that he was going to show up at this hearing.
01:31:19 --> 01:31:22 Now, when they were doing the hearing, they didn't have the map,
01:31:22 --> 01:31:25 or if they had it, they weren't letting the people see it.
01:31:25 --> 01:31:28 They were just telling folks, this is what we're going to do.
01:31:28 --> 01:31:30 And it's been covered by the national media.
01:31:30 --> 01:31:34 So it's like people have a gist to what they're trying to do.
01:31:34 --> 01:31:37 Especially the president came out and said, yeah, we're going to get five more
01:31:37 --> 01:31:41 districts in Texas. Really? You are, Mr. President? How's that going to happen?
01:31:41 --> 01:31:44 Oh, they're just going to call a special session and redraw the line.
01:31:45 --> 01:31:49 So needless to say, people are upset in Texas.
01:31:49 --> 01:31:54 And so Isaiah Martin, who wants to be a member of Congress, decided to speak.
01:31:55 --> 01:32:00 The people at the hearing didn't like what he was saying. or I guess he went
01:32:00 --> 01:32:04 over his time because they only gave people like two minutes to speak.
01:32:05 --> 01:32:12 So they physically arrested him for going over his time, not squirted him out
01:32:12 --> 01:32:13 of the room or got him out of the chair.
01:32:14 --> 01:32:20 They arrested the man, put handcuffs on him because he went over two minutes and he was like.
01:32:22 --> 01:32:29 Say, he came back the next day because magically the charges got dropped.
01:32:30 --> 01:32:34 He came back the next day and gave him peace of his mind, which he should have, right?
01:32:35 --> 01:32:38 He arrested a man because he went over the two-minute limit,
01:32:38 --> 01:32:40 plus he didn't like what he was saying to you.
01:32:41 --> 01:32:45 Then, the other gentleman, he's 29.
01:32:46 --> 01:32:52 He's one of the two Justins from Tennessee, and this is Justin Jones,
01:32:52 --> 01:32:59 you remember him and the other member who were kicked out of the Tennessee legislature
01:32:59 --> 01:33:03 for speaking out gun control.
01:33:04 --> 01:33:08 This was right after the school shooting in Nashville, where a friend of the
01:33:08 --> 01:33:10 governor's got killed, right?
01:33:12 --> 01:33:18 And the Speaker of the House, I think his name is Sexton or whatever, they kicked him out.
01:33:18 --> 01:33:23 They voted him out of the session. But the rules in Tennessee favored the two
01:33:23 --> 01:33:27 Justins, and they got back in, right?
01:33:28 --> 01:33:33 And so now they can't do that anymore in Tennessee.
01:33:34 --> 01:33:38 They're trying to figure out a way to fix that, but they can't do that anymore.
01:33:38 --> 01:33:43 But anyway, Justin Jones, who represents Nashville, the capital city,
01:33:43 --> 01:33:50 he's one of the representatives there, He found out about a state event sponsored
01:33:50 --> 01:33:53 by the Department of Transportation in Tennessee.
01:33:53 --> 01:33:58 Now, you know, it was some private, some lobbyists behind it.
01:33:58 --> 01:34:01 You know, a lot of things happen like that.
01:34:02 --> 01:34:05 State government of the state will say this is our event, but,
01:34:05 --> 01:34:08 you know, it's sponsored by such and such.
01:34:08 --> 01:34:13 And, you know, that happens. But if you're having the event in the district,
01:34:14 --> 01:34:14 you're going to have a lot of time.
01:34:15 --> 01:34:24 Jones, regardless of what political affiliation he is, he should have the right to refusal, right?
01:34:24 --> 01:34:28 So we were having a big thing and I got, you know, like in Clinton,
01:34:29 --> 01:34:33 for example, we were having a big thing in Clinton and, you know,
01:34:34 --> 01:34:36 so like ribbon cuttings.
01:34:36 --> 01:34:42 So everybody in Clinton, when I was, you know, in the state legislature,
01:34:42 --> 01:34:44 everybody in Clinton was a Republican And as far as municipal,
01:34:45 --> 01:34:49 the mayor, the at-large council people, and the councilman, the regular council,
01:34:49 --> 01:34:50 they were all Republican.
01:34:51 --> 01:34:56 And so they would have like events, ribbon cuttings and all that stuff.
01:34:57 --> 01:35:01 So they would invite me to come because I was one of the representatives of Clinton.
01:35:01 --> 01:35:04 As a matter of fact, Clinton had a distinction because of redistricting.
01:35:05 --> 01:35:09 They had six of us that got a part of Clinton, right?
01:35:10 --> 01:35:16 But only two of us actually lived in the city. So it was me and his other representative, Philip Gunn.
01:35:16 --> 01:35:20 And Philip later became the Speaker of the House after I was no longer there.
01:35:21 --> 01:35:28 And I was, I guess, the senior member of the two because I was already in the
01:35:28 --> 01:35:29 legislature when the field came in.
01:35:31 --> 01:35:34 And so when they would have these ribbon cuttings, I would come,
01:35:35 --> 01:35:37 and then Philip wouldn't be there.
01:35:38 --> 01:35:44 And it got to a point where they were saying, A, you know, tell Phillip that
01:35:44 --> 01:35:47 he needs to start showing up to these events just like you are, right?
01:35:47 --> 01:35:50 And I was like, okay, you know.
01:35:50 --> 01:35:55 But Phillip made that decision that he was not going to those events,
01:35:55 --> 01:35:58 whether he had a conflict at work or whatever was going on.
01:35:59 --> 01:36:03 He had the right to refusal because he was invited because it was happening
01:36:03 --> 01:36:06 in his district, right, in his city.
01:36:07 --> 01:36:13 Jones, his district incorporates the airport in Nashville.
01:36:13 --> 01:36:17 So the Department of Transportation was having an event. It was sponsored by
01:36:17 --> 01:36:19 some business people, I guess, or whatever.
01:36:20 --> 01:36:26 And so Justin is like, okay, well, we got this event in my district.
01:36:27 --> 01:36:31 I'm going. So it's like they say, well, he wasn't on the list.
01:36:32 --> 01:36:37 It's like, well, if it's a state event, you know, I just want to come and see
01:36:37 --> 01:36:39 what's happening. Yeah.
01:36:40 --> 01:36:44 Now, in Mississippi, people played a partisan game just like anywhere else.
01:36:44 --> 01:36:49 And, you know, I assume other states do the same thing, played a partisan game.
01:36:49 --> 01:36:50 I'm sure here in Georgia and all this stuff.
01:36:51 --> 01:36:55 But usually, well, at least in my time.
01:36:55 --> 01:36:58 Now, remember, I haven't been an elected official in almost 20 years.
01:36:58 --> 01:37:03 So, in my day, you could crash an event, right?
01:37:03 --> 01:37:07 You could show up and say, well, we didn't expect him to be here,
01:37:07 --> 01:37:13 but since he's here, you know, we kind of like are in his district.
01:37:15 --> 01:37:20 Okay, we'll allow that to happen. But now I guess it's different because it's
01:37:20 --> 01:37:25 like they showed a woman who was a state senator.
01:37:26 --> 01:37:32 She was not on the list. Well, because she was Republican, they let her in.
01:37:32 --> 01:37:38 And then she later told somebody that was covering what was happening with Representative Jones.
01:37:38 --> 01:37:41 She said, oh, well, I'm representing Lieutenant Governor.
01:37:43 --> 01:37:47 If that was the case, then you would have been on the list, right?
01:37:48 --> 01:37:51 Because it would have said, okay, Senator so-and-so is going to represent the
01:37:51 --> 01:37:53 lieutenant governor, let her in.
01:37:54 --> 01:37:58 She had to stop, and they had to make a few things, and then they let her through.
01:37:58 --> 01:38:05 Meanwhile, Representative Jones is being stopped by white men in suits and police officers.
01:38:05 --> 01:38:12 And the nicest people of all of them were the police officer because the state
01:38:12 --> 01:38:15 troopers realized, yeah, these folks vote on our budget.
01:38:15 --> 01:38:19 And I don't want that man giving a speech about why we shouldn't get our money.
01:38:21 --> 01:38:25 I don't want to be the guy responsible for that legislator getting the Black
01:38:25 --> 01:38:27 Caucus to vote against our budget. Right.
01:38:28 --> 01:38:32 Because even though the Black Caucus is not the majority in that in that building,
01:38:32 --> 01:38:37 And when you start seeing all those votes going against your particular agency, you got questions.
01:38:38 --> 01:38:42 You got some issues that you need to address. I've seen it happen.
01:38:43 --> 01:38:46 We did it. Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.
01:38:47 --> 01:38:50 It's a particular representative that was not happy with what was going on there.
01:38:50 --> 01:38:54 And he informed us of what was the problem, primarily dealing with black folks
01:38:54 --> 01:38:55 being hired as game wardens.
01:38:56 --> 01:39:00 So once he hipped us up to what was going on, we was like, all right,
01:39:00 --> 01:39:03 brother, we're going to be in solidarity with you. So when the first time their
01:39:03 --> 01:39:06 budget came up, about 40 of us.
01:39:06 --> 01:39:11 So now you're seeing 40 no votes popping up on an appropriations bill. What?
01:39:12 --> 01:39:15 Now we got to ask some questions. Why are all these people voting against our budget?
01:39:16 --> 01:39:23 What's happening? Because if you start with 40, you make him pick about 20, 22 others.
01:39:23 --> 01:39:25 And then you don't have a budget.
01:39:26 --> 01:39:32 Nonetheless. So the trooper was the nicest one of the white folks to Representative Jones.
01:39:32 --> 01:39:35 But these other folks were coming out here and they were, one of them,
01:39:36 --> 01:39:38 I guess, was just going to try to manhandle them.
01:39:38 --> 01:39:43 And the trooper even kind of said, yeah, that's Representative Jones.
01:39:44 --> 01:39:47 And that's all he said. He didn't say anything else. He said,
01:39:47 --> 01:39:48 that's Representative Jones.
01:39:49 --> 01:39:54 Meaning, if you physically do something to it, I'm going to have to arrest you. Right? Right.
01:39:55 --> 01:39:58 Regardless of what's going on here about whether you should be at this meeting
01:39:58 --> 01:40:02 or not, if you assault a state representative of my presence,
01:40:02 --> 01:40:06 I might have to put the handcuffs on you and I'll deal with my commander or
01:40:06 --> 01:40:09 whatever at that point afterwards.
01:40:09 --> 01:40:13 Because you're not an elected official. You're just some dude,
01:40:13 --> 01:40:17 I guess, that was part of the party. You know, but he caught the hint right
01:40:17 --> 01:40:22 away and he stopped physically touching Representative Jones at that point.
01:40:22 --> 01:40:25 But they were trying to they were telling this man that he couldn't come to this meeting.
01:40:26 --> 01:40:30 And then, of course, he went to the sister and the sister said,
01:40:30 --> 01:40:31 you know, Department of Transportation.
01:40:32 --> 01:40:35 Also, the Department of Transportation is sponsoring this. And I,
01:40:35 --> 01:40:37 as a state representative, can't come in my district.
01:40:39 --> 01:40:45 Deal was Elon Musk wants to build a tunnel under the airport,
01:40:45 --> 01:40:49 kind of like the experiment he's doing in Los Angeles. He wanted to do the same thing.
01:40:50 --> 01:40:56 And I guess the folks in Tennessee like, oh yeah, you could do it under our
01:40:56 --> 01:40:57 airport here in Nashville.
01:40:57 --> 01:41:03 So you know there's been some envelopes passed. There's been some hands shook.
01:41:03 --> 01:41:07 There's been some wink, winks, nod, nods. You know something's going on.
01:41:07 --> 01:41:10 Because that's how these people operate. They're very transactional people.
01:41:11 --> 01:41:16 Right? And so, they're talking about building this tunnel.
01:41:16 --> 01:41:22 But you don't want the representative of that district to be in on the meeting,
01:41:22 --> 01:41:24 even if he's not in favor of them.
01:41:25 --> 01:41:30 Right? I mean, we had a situation with the Port of Gulfport.
01:41:31 --> 01:41:35 When we were trying to decide how that money was going to be spent, right?
01:41:36 --> 01:41:39 The Democrats, Republicans, the chair of the committee was a Democrat.
01:41:40 --> 01:41:43 He wanted to know what y'all were trying to do. And, you know,
01:41:43 --> 01:41:48 you got George Bush sending the Secretary of Hud saying, well,
01:41:48 --> 01:41:49 we want to build some condos or whatever.
01:41:50 --> 01:41:53 And we're like, don't we need to fix the port first?
01:41:54 --> 01:41:58 I mean, we were having these discussions and we were not excluded from it.
01:41:59 --> 01:42:03 You know, the port wasn't in my district, but I was on the committee,
01:42:03 --> 01:42:06 so we went down to the port.
01:42:07 --> 01:42:09 They didn't tell us, y'all can't come in.
01:42:10 --> 01:42:14 When they were having the meetings trying to sell us on building the condos,
01:42:14 --> 01:42:16 it wasn't just Republicans only.
01:42:17 --> 01:42:19 They had to let us in, right?
01:42:20 --> 01:42:25 So whether you agree with the person or not, whether you are the same political,
01:42:26 --> 01:42:29 you can't build nothing in that man's district without his say-so,
01:42:29 --> 01:42:32 his sign-off, his input.
01:42:32 --> 01:42:40 That's just damn disrespectful. Because I'm sure, as God made the grass green,
01:42:40 --> 01:42:46 that wherever Sexton represents, I forget where he, I had that knowledge before.
01:42:46 --> 01:42:51 I know it's not Nashville. But wherever he is, if the shoe was on the other
01:42:51 --> 01:42:55 foot, and Representative Jones and the Democrats were in charge,
01:42:55 --> 01:42:59 and they decided they're going to build something in his district,
01:42:59 --> 01:43:01 he'd be all up in the meet.
01:43:01 --> 01:43:07 He wouldn't give a damn if you had the SWAT team from the state troopers of Tennessee in his way.
01:43:07 --> 01:43:13 He was getting in that meet because this is my district and you can't tell me
01:43:13 --> 01:43:17 where I can and can't go in my district. He would have acted a plumb fool.
01:43:17 --> 01:43:23 But he thinks that since he's in charge and the black folks aren't,
01:43:23 --> 01:43:26 that he can treat, and especially a black person he really hates,
01:43:27 --> 01:43:29 he can treat him any kind of way.
01:43:30 --> 01:43:36 Tell you is that's a bad strategy. From this point forward, I just want y'all
01:43:36 --> 01:43:38 to understand that's a dumb idea.
01:43:39 --> 01:43:44 These folks, people thought that I was a little bit aggressive.
01:43:46 --> 01:43:51 These young folks in politics now don't give a damn, right?
01:43:52 --> 01:43:59 They don't have a concept of power as like, I don't have the numbers to do and I need to strategize.
01:44:00 --> 01:44:06 These folks right now, they're learning from the elders about restraint, right?
01:44:06 --> 01:44:10 Okay, you can't punch that guy. You can't beat them up.
01:44:11 --> 01:44:17 You can't cuss them out all the way. You got to show some restraint, right?
01:44:17 --> 01:44:21 And they're teaching them the tactics, but their mindset is,
01:44:21 --> 01:44:24 I'm about to tear this crap up.
01:44:25 --> 01:44:28 I'm about to blow this MF down.
01:44:29 --> 01:44:34 If we can't have access to it, then it doesn't need to exist. That's their mindset.
01:44:35 --> 01:44:39 If you're not going to let me have a say-so about the district that I want to
01:44:39 --> 01:44:42 run in, if you're not going to let me have a say-so about a project you're building
01:44:42 --> 01:44:45 in my district, then we'll shut it all down.
01:44:46 --> 01:44:50 And I'm not going to discourage them from doing it. Because I think that's the right attitude.
01:44:51 --> 01:44:59 Because the way that politics is now, you can't have intellectual discussions with these people.
01:44:59 --> 01:45:04 You can't have respectful discussions with these people because they don't have
01:45:04 --> 01:45:07 any respect for us. So, you know,
01:45:08 --> 01:45:13 is I can show you better than I can tell you. What I would advise the Republicans to do,
01:45:14 --> 01:45:20 is let Donald Trump be Donald Trump and the rest of y'all stop impersonating
01:45:20 --> 01:45:25 him because whatever Teflon he got going on, you ain't got it.
01:45:25 --> 01:45:32 Whatever aura he has where he doesn't go to jail or he doesn't get in trouble, you ain't got that.
01:45:33 --> 01:45:38 And if you keep messing with these black folks, especially these black men who
01:45:38 --> 01:45:43 are wired to say, hell no, you're going to find out.
01:45:43 --> 01:45:47 You're going to find out really, really quick, and it's not going to be pretty.
01:45:48 --> 01:45:53 And I'll be in the bleachers along with other folks of my generation,
01:45:53 --> 01:45:55 like, go get them, young buck, sick them.
01:45:56 --> 01:46:02 Because disrespect wasn't tolerated with us. And who do you think raised these
01:46:02 --> 01:46:06 young men, my generation, or the generation right after us.
01:46:07 --> 01:46:13 We didn't raise our children to capitulate to white folks, to white supremacy, to evil.
01:46:14 --> 01:46:17 We didn't teach them that. We taught them to be men and women,
01:46:17 --> 01:46:20 to stand up for what they believe in, to fight for what they believe in.
01:46:21 --> 01:46:28 We just was hoping that they would be in a more receptive society and they didn't
01:46:28 --> 01:46:30 have to utilize those skill sets.
01:46:30 --> 01:46:36 And if they did with the technology, they could find some creative ways to get around it.
01:46:38 --> 01:46:42 Sometimes history will dictate that the old is new again.
01:46:43 --> 01:46:47 And if people are going to be disrespectful for you and your positions,
01:46:47 --> 01:46:56 they want to shut your voices down, they want to deny you access to stuff, tear it up. Tear it up.
01:46:56 --> 01:47:01 Once they get tired of you tearing it up, then maybe they want to sit down and talk.
01:47:01 --> 01:47:04 But the only way you can stop evil is to resist it.
01:47:05 --> 01:47:08 Now, Dr. King says the best resistance is love.
01:47:09 --> 01:47:15 No argument about that. The best way to end darkness is light. No argument about that.
01:47:15 --> 01:47:21 But you got to light a match in order to get light, right?
01:47:21 --> 01:47:26 You got to generate some feelings, some passion to love.
01:47:27 --> 01:47:31 And anger, from what my parents taught me, is an expression of love.
01:47:31 --> 01:47:35 Because if they didn't care, they wouldn't say anything.
01:47:35 --> 01:47:37 So it's all right to get angry.
01:47:38 --> 01:47:42 It's all right to push those buttons. It's all right to challenge things to
01:47:42 --> 01:47:43 people that are disrespectful.
01:47:44 --> 01:47:48 If you want to win the battle, if you want to stay in charge,
01:47:49 --> 01:47:51 you need to be respectful.
01:47:51 --> 01:47:57 Use your power respectfully because if you don't, it'll be taken away from you.
01:47:57 --> 01:47:58 Period, end of discussion.
01:47:59 --> 01:48:04 I'm not advocating a particular way to do it. I'm just telling you that's how it's going.
01:48:05 --> 01:48:08 And if you keep messing with these young black men, you're going to find out.
01:48:09 --> 01:48:15 I just know that when I was their age, disrespect was not an option.
01:48:16 --> 01:48:20 So I can only imagine how they feel, right?
01:48:20 --> 01:48:25 The only difference between me being 29 and them being 29, 27,
01:48:25 --> 01:48:30 there wasn't any internet, wasn't camera phones, right?
01:48:31 --> 01:48:34 So they're trying to be restrained because of that.
01:48:35 --> 01:48:41 Outside of that, and I don't want them to accept that.
01:48:42 --> 01:48:46 I want them to continue to be men. I want these sisters to be out here.
01:48:46 --> 01:48:52 Don't let these folks try to put y'all in the place in their mind.
01:48:53 --> 01:48:56 Don't let them do it. Stand up for what you believe in.
01:48:57 --> 01:49:01 Stand where you're supposed to stand. Sit where you're supposed to sit.
01:49:01 --> 01:49:02 Speak where you're supposed to speak.
01:49:03 --> 01:49:08 And don't let anybody, anybody deny you that opportunity.
01:49:09 --> 01:49:15 All right. Glad I got that off my chest. Thank you all for listening. Until next time.
01:49:16 --> 01:50:03 Music.