In this episode Erik Fleming interviews two Harvard professors: Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished, on criminal justice, rule of law, and the legal work needed to make democracy more inclusive; and Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge, author of Laboring in the Shadows, on the vital but often overlooked role of Black youth workers, community-based education, and the resilience and joy that sustain Black communities.
The discussion explores the unfinished project of American democracy, inequities in the criminal system, the power of community youth work, education reform, and why hope and collective action remain essential.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 Welcome. I'm Erik Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.
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00:01:15 --> 00:01:20 The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.
00:02:00 --> 00:02:06 Hello, and welcome to another moment with Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.
00:02:06 --> 00:02:13 And so today I have two Harvard professors.
00:02:14 --> 00:02:17 Yeah, we got two Harvard professors on the podcast.
00:02:18 --> 00:02:26 Alexandra Natapoff, who is a professor at the law school, and she has co-authored
00:02:26 --> 00:02:29 a book called America Unfinished.
00:02:30 --> 00:02:40 And then Bianca, Dr. Bianca Baldrige, who is a Harvard education professor.
00:02:41 --> 00:02:47 She's at the Graduate School of Education. And she has written a book called
00:02:47 --> 00:02:49 Laboring in the Shadows,
00:02:49 --> 00:02:59 but her primary labor in the shadows is about black youth workers, people who help.
00:03:01 --> 00:03:08 Black children, you know, like in after school, preschool, those folks,
00:03:08 --> 00:03:14 she's been a crusader for youth workers in and out of the classroom.
00:03:15 --> 00:03:22 So that's what our discussion is going to be about. So it is cool that we've
00:03:22 --> 00:03:27 gotten to the point now where we're getting Harvard professors.
00:03:27 --> 00:03:35 They're not the first ones, but, you know, it's a sign of where we've come as
00:03:35 --> 00:03:42 a show, that we are getting people like that to come on.
00:03:42 --> 00:03:47 You know, every week I try to have the best possible guests,
00:03:48 --> 00:03:53 you know, as far as expertise and as far as stature.
00:03:53 --> 00:03:57 Every now and then you'll get somebody that you may have read about in the newspaper
00:03:57 --> 00:04:01 or saw on the internet or saw on TV.
00:04:02 --> 00:04:07 But, you know, I'm trying to get the best. And I always say that my guests are
00:04:08 --> 00:04:09 more intelligent than I am.
00:04:10 --> 00:04:14 And that's not self-deprecation. That's just facts. You know,
00:04:14 --> 00:04:18 I'm not the smartest guy on the planet, nor have I ever claimed to be.
00:04:18 --> 00:04:20 At one time I thought I was the baddest dude on the planet.
00:04:21 --> 00:04:24 And then I got reminded that I wasn't. You know.
00:04:27 --> 00:04:32 But I just want you all as listeners to, instead of,
00:04:33 --> 00:04:40 dealing with the hype and the little 15-second sound bites and all that stuff,
00:04:40 --> 00:04:43 I want you to get the meat of it.
00:04:44 --> 00:04:50 You know we might crack a joke or two but I'm not gonna win you over with buffoonery.
00:04:52 --> 00:04:56 Although I think humor is very, very important in this time,
00:04:56 --> 00:05:03 you know, my style is I ask questions, I get people that can give you answers.
00:05:04 --> 00:05:11 And I hope that you are receiving this well.
00:05:12 --> 00:05:17 And if you are, then please go to www.momenterik.com,
00:05:19 --> 00:05:26 and show your support either by giving this podcast five stars,
00:05:27 --> 00:05:29 making a one-time donation, or subscribing.
00:05:30 --> 00:05:34 Write a review. Whatever you want to do, please go to the website,
00:05:35 --> 00:05:41 check it out, and just let the people that are,
00:05:42 --> 00:05:47 the other people that are supporting the podcast that you are listening to. How about that?
00:05:49 --> 00:05:55 I just thank you all for listening, as always, But, yeah, it'd be nice to see
00:05:55 --> 00:05:58 a little more support, only because,
00:05:59 --> 00:06:04 we're within the 90-day window now with the elections, and we got to keep things going.
00:06:05 --> 00:06:11 We got to be encouraged, right? So, anyway, enough of that. Let's get on with the show.
00:06:11 --> 00:06:15 And as always, we kick it off with a moment of news with Grace G.
00:06:22 --> 00:06:27 Thanks, Erik. Three suspects have been arrested in separate incidents for sending
00:06:27 --> 00:06:32 death threats to witnesses following the disappearance and death of Nolan Wells in Mississippi.
00:06:33 --> 00:06:37 U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell was released from a Kentucky rehabilitation facility
00:06:37 --> 00:06:39 to finish his recovery at home.
00:06:39 --> 00:06:44 Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Party nomination in the Michigan U.S.
00:06:44 --> 00:06:49 Senate primary, and he will face Republican former Congressman Mike Rogers in November.
00:06:49 --> 00:06:55 State Representative Justin Pearson won the Tennessee 9th Congressional District's Democratic primary.
00:06:55 --> 00:07:00 Donovan McKinney, a state representative, ousted U.S. Congressman Sri Tanidar
00:07:00 --> 00:07:04 in Michigan's 13th Congressional District Democratic primary.
00:07:04 --> 00:07:08 The Department of Justice dropped vandalism charges against former Olympian
00:07:08 --> 00:07:13 Davey Hearn after concluding that a flawed installation caused the Lincoln Memorial
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 Reflecting Pool liner to peel.
00:07:16 --> 00:07:20 Congressman Wesley Bell successfully defended his U.S. House Senate seat against
00:07:20 --> 00:07:25 a Democratic primary challenge from former Congresswoman Cori Bush in Missouri's
00:07:25 --> 00:07:26 1st Congressional District.
00:07:27 --> 00:07:31 The U.S. Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as the CDC director,
00:07:31 --> 00:07:35 making her the first African-American woman to hold the post.
00:07:35 --> 00:07:39 Reverend Adam Hamilton won Kansas' Democratic Senate primary,
00:07:40 --> 00:07:44 setting him up to face off in November against incumbent Senator Roger Marshall.
00:07:45 --> 00:07:50 Senator Rand Paul referred Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Department of Justice after
00:07:50 --> 00:07:55 a Senate committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.
00:07:55 --> 00:08:00 A Spokane resident was arrested on arson charges for allegedly starting one
00:08:00 --> 00:08:05 of three Washington fires that forced mass evacuations and destroyed hundreds of buildings.
00:08:06 --> 00:08:10 A federal judge granted the Justice Department's request to dismiss convictions
00:08:10 --> 00:08:15 against members of the Oath Keepers involved in the January 6th Capitol attack.
00:08:16 --> 00:08:21 And, the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak in U.S. history has claimed its first
00:08:21 --> 00:08:23 two fatalities in Michigan.
00:08:23 --> 00:08:26 I am Grace G., and this has been a Moment of News.
00:08:34 --> 00:08:37 All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news.
00:08:37 --> 00:08:42 Now it's time for my guest, Alexandra Natapoff.
00:08:43 --> 00:08:50 Alexandra Natapoff is an award-winning criminal justice scholar and a Lee S.
00:08:50 --> 00:08:54 Krendler professor of law at Harvard Law School.
00:08:54 --> 00:08:58 She writes about criminal courts, public defense, plea bargaining,
00:08:58 --> 00:09:03 wrongful convictions, and race and inequality in the criminal system.
00:09:04 --> 00:09:08 She previously served as a federal public defender in Baltimore, Maryland.
00:09:08 --> 00:09:14 She is also the co-author of this book called America Unfinished.
00:09:15 --> 00:09:22 And so we'll be talking in a little bit about her work as a public defender
00:09:22 --> 00:09:24 and how that has shaped her career.
00:09:25 --> 00:09:28 And we're going to be talking about America Unfinished. So, ladies and gentlemen,
00:09:29 --> 00:09:35 it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest of this podcast, Alexandra Natapoff.
00:09:46 --> 00:09:53 All right. Alexandra Natapoff. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you.
00:09:54 --> 00:09:57 Well, I'm really, really honored to have you on.
00:09:57 --> 00:10:01 And I won't say it's a series, but you wrote this.
00:10:02 --> 00:10:08 You and Guy Charles wrote this incredible book. Well, let's not say right.
00:10:09 --> 00:10:15 You compiled like these essays, right? Yeah. And we give you author's credit
00:10:15 --> 00:10:20 because you were the one that came with the idea. But you compiled these essays
00:10:20 --> 00:10:23 into this book called America Unfinished.
00:10:24 --> 00:10:32 And so you and some other people will be on the show to talk about their parts in the book and all that.
00:10:32 --> 00:10:35 But I'm really, really glad to have you because you were the,
00:10:37 --> 00:10:41 I don't know, conspirator, the visionary. I don't know what term you want to
00:10:41 --> 00:10:45 use, but they come up with this concept to do this.
00:10:47 --> 00:10:51 I like conspirator. Can I have that one? Yes, ma'am. You sure can.
00:10:52 --> 00:10:57 So we're going to get into that a little bit. But I want to do my normal icebreaker,
00:10:57 --> 00:10:59 which is to throw a quote at you first.
00:11:00 --> 00:11:05 And I want you to respond to the quote. And the quote is, The world will little
00:11:05 --> 00:11:11 note no long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
00:11:11 --> 00:11:17 It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
00:11:17 --> 00:11:22 they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
00:11:23 --> 00:11:29 Well, thank you for that particular quote. It's actually the quote from which we stole the book title.
00:11:30 --> 00:11:35 The book is called America Unfinished because we thought it captured precisely
00:11:35 --> 00:11:41 that spirit, which is that our democracy, that our legal system, they're not finished.
00:11:41 --> 00:11:44 We don't inherit them complete from the previous generation,
00:11:44 --> 00:11:48 and we don't hand them down complete to the next generation.
00:11:48 --> 00:11:50 We are always working on them.
00:11:51 --> 00:11:55 And the quote, of course, is from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and he gave it,
00:11:56 --> 00:12:02 in the middle of the Civil War to honor the unfinished work of building,
00:12:02 --> 00:12:08 as he put it, a government of the people by the people for the people.
00:12:08 --> 00:12:13 And of course, that was one of the most fraught, important, violent moments
00:12:13 --> 00:12:22 in our 250-year history of working out what do we mean by the people who is going to be included.
00:12:23 --> 00:12:25 In that idea, in that ideal.
00:12:25 --> 00:12:31 So we took the term unfinished from Lincoln, from the Gettysburg Address,
00:12:31 --> 00:12:34 because we wanted to honor that spirit.
00:12:34 --> 00:12:38 Now, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,
00:12:38 --> 00:12:46 it's a time to think about not only this moment in history that we are currently
00:12:46 --> 00:12:49 facing, again, a very fraught,
00:12:49 --> 00:12:55 a very contested moment of great change, but also to look back over our history
00:12:55 --> 00:12:57 and see the arc of all the things we have built?
00:12:59 --> 00:13:06 And this book is about the legal infrastructure of that experiment, of that journey. Okay.
00:13:07 --> 00:13:11 So now the next icebreaker is what we call 20 questions.
00:13:11 --> 00:13:18 So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20. Okay.
00:13:19 --> 00:13:20 Oh, just 14.
00:13:22 --> 00:13:26 Okay. What does the idea of a better
00:13:26 --> 00:13:30 world mean to you? and what would be different in that better world.
00:13:31 --> 00:13:34 Do you mind my asking why that's 14? Just random.
00:13:35 --> 00:13:40 Oh, okay. Just random. I like to know what kind of questions I'm answering.
00:13:42 --> 00:13:48 So I'm going to answer from the perspective of my legal and scholarly expertise
00:13:48 --> 00:13:52 and the subject that I wrote about for the book.
00:13:52 --> 00:13:57 So Professor Charles, as you noted, he and I conceived of and pulled together
00:13:57 --> 00:14:04 and edited this book, 62 essays by 62 different Harvard law professors. That's what the book is.
00:14:05 --> 00:14:09 But we each also contributed an essay, and I contributed an essay about our
00:14:09 --> 00:14:14 criminal system because that is the space in which I have been working for 20
00:14:14 --> 00:14:17 years, and the essay that I wrote.
00:14:17 --> 00:14:22 And before I became a law professor, I was a federal public defender in Baltimore.
00:14:23 --> 00:14:28 And so I sometimes joke, but it's not really a joke, that everything interesting
00:14:28 --> 00:14:31 that I know and learned, I learned in Baltimore.
00:14:31 --> 00:14:35 About our criminal system, but also about our democracy, about the inequality
00:14:35 --> 00:14:38 in our democracy, about the racism in our democracy.
00:14:39 --> 00:14:47 And to me, all those things have dramatically come to a head and can be seen in our criminal system.
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 And so that's why I've focused on the criminal system, not because it's the
00:14:50 --> 00:14:56 only space in which to focus, but because it's so representative and so destructive
00:14:56 --> 00:14:59 and so dehumanizing and so inegalitarian.
00:15:00 --> 00:15:06 And so for me, a better world is where our laws, our democracy,
00:15:06 --> 00:15:11 our citizenship, our ability to be part of this community.
00:15:12 --> 00:15:17 Could meaningfully be deployed to make our criminal system in particular and
00:15:17 --> 00:15:24 our democracy more generally a more inclusive, egalitarian, humane space that
00:15:24 --> 00:15:27 we could be more proud of.
00:15:27 --> 00:15:34 And being a public defender is in many ways a depressing endeavor.
00:15:34 --> 00:15:38 You're really in the belly of the beast. People's lives are being crushed.
00:15:38 --> 00:15:41 Their families are being crushed. Their neighborhoods in Baltimore being crushed
00:15:41 --> 00:15:44 by the criminal system. And yet at the same time.
00:15:45 --> 00:15:51 It is a space in which people and legislators and lawyers and activists and
00:15:51 --> 00:15:56 community members can deploy the tools of democracy, of legislation,
00:15:56 --> 00:15:59 of law to meaningfully push back.
00:15:59 --> 00:16:06 And so at the same time as I saw great injustice and great sadness in my clients'
00:16:06 --> 00:16:13 lives and in their cases, I also saw the possibilities of pushing back through law.
00:16:13 --> 00:16:15 And it was the inspiration for becoming a law professor.
00:16:16 --> 00:16:21 And so I write in the book about how our criminal system actually works pretty
00:16:21 --> 00:16:29 well for the wealthy, for the well-resourced, for people who are valued by the criminal system.
00:16:30 --> 00:16:34 It's not true for most Americans. Most ordinary Americans are not valued by our criminal system.
00:16:35 --> 00:16:40 But a better world would be one in which our legal infrastructure,
00:16:40 --> 00:16:46 our criminal system, accorded everyone the same dignity, respect,
00:16:46 --> 00:16:52 importance, and therefore protections of rule of law and the principles of rule of law.
00:16:53 --> 00:16:55 We're a long way off from that better world, I think.
00:16:56 --> 00:16:58 But to me, that's always a fight worth having.
00:16:59 --> 00:17:06 Yeah, and I'm going to get back to that particular contribution you made about,
00:17:07 --> 00:17:12 the rule of law, because I really want you to dive into that a little bit.
00:17:15 --> 00:17:20 Before I get into that, I want to ask this question. Oh, I know what I wanted to say before.
00:17:20 --> 00:17:24 So my uncle was an attorney in Baltimore. I don't know if you knew him or not.
00:17:24 --> 00:17:29 His name was Fred Charleston, but he was an attorney in Baltimore for a number
00:17:29 --> 00:17:30 of years before he passed away.
00:17:31 --> 00:17:34 Why is Harvard important as an American institution?
00:17:36 --> 00:17:37 That's a great question.
00:17:39 --> 00:17:43 It's important for all kinds of reasons, both wonderful and problematic.
00:17:44 --> 00:17:48 So let's start with the problematic. It's an institution of great wealth, power, influence.
00:17:49 --> 00:17:56 It has been part of and produced the knowledge and the personnel for many of
00:17:56 --> 00:17:59 the inequalities that we were just talking about.
00:18:01 --> 00:18:05 It has not in its history always been a redistributive, an egalitarian,
00:18:05 --> 00:18:07 a redistributive institution.
00:18:08 --> 00:18:13 At the same time, it's an institution of extraordinary knowledge.
00:18:15 --> 00:18:23 And influence. it has brought so many people into the ability to speak.
00:18:24 --> 00:18:28 To speak about, of course, I teach at the law school, so I'm partial to law.
00:18:29 --> 00:18:37 But Harvard, as one of the preeminent universities in the United States, if not in the world,
00:18:37 --> 00:18:48 is the quintessential home of the power of knowledge and the ability to bring people into that space.
00:18:48 --> 00:18:52 So I teach law students, but for example, just a few weeks ago,
00:18:52 --> 00:18:57 I also taught a class at the undergraduate level for veterans,
00:18:57 --> 00:18:59 for veterans who are thinking of coming back to college.
00:18:59 --> 00:19:05 And Harvard is also a place that invites people into this extraordinary world of knowledge and power.
00:19:06 --> 00:19:11 And so the double-edged sword is that it's an elite, powerful institution and.
00:19:13 --> 00:19:18 And therefore doubles down in some ways in that kind of hierarchy,
00:19:19 --> 00:19:22 which is by its very nature exclusionary.
00:19:23 --> 00:19:29 And yet at the same time, because it does open its doors, because it does welcome
00:19:29 --> 00:19:33 more people in, because it does make more things possible, it is also redistributive.
00:19:33 --> 00:19:37 It also shares knowledge. It shares opportunity.
00:19:37 --> 00:19:43 It shares possibility. And so we're always walking that edge between what is
00:19:43 --> 00:19:49 inspiring about Harvard and what, frankly, I think, and my co-editor,
00:19:49 --> 00:19:52 Professor Charles, it's one of the reasons we pulled this book together.
00:19:53 --> 00:19:57 We thought as professors at Harvard, we have not only this incredible opportunity,
00:19:58 --> 00:20:04 but frankly, also an obligation to share that that is what makes Harvard great, that we are able not only,
00:20:05 --> 00:20:09 to create knowledge, but also to share it. And so that's really the spirit of this book.
00:20:10 --> 00:20:16 Yeah, because that was my next question. Why did America Unfinished need to be written?
00:20:17 --> 00:20:23 Well, it started about six or eight months ago.
00:20:24 --> 00:20:27 We were grappling. So Professor Charles and I have been colleagues for a long
00:20:27 --> 00:20:30 time, and we've been in this conversation for a long time.
00:20:31 --> 00:20:35 What does it mean to be a legal scholar, to have been an attorney and now be
00:20:35 --> 00:20:38 a legal scholar, to have the opportunity and the privilege of being at Harvard
00:20:38 --> 00:20:43 Law School where you can create knowledge and bring people together in a way
00:20:43 --> 00:20:46 that can be influential or powerful?
00:20:46 --> 00:20:50 What is our responsibility at this moment when so much of the American legal
00:20:50 --> 00:20:53 governance infrastructure,
00:20:53 --> 00:21:00 is contested and some of it is on fire and some of the legal profession is on
00:21:00 --> 00:21:03 fire and parts of Washington, D.C. are on fire?
00:21:05 --> 00:21:11 What's our responsibility? And the answer is we're supposed to do what we do, but better.
00:21:12 --> 00:21:15 We're supposed to do our scholarship and we're supposed to do it better.
00:21:15 --> 00:21:18 We're supposed to share it more. We're supposed to step up more.
00:21:18 --> 00:21:20 We're supposed to do it with more people.
00:21:20 --> 00:21:25 And so it was that spirit that caused us to reach out to our entire faculty.
00:21:25 --> 00:21:32 And we said, we think this is a moment when we should be valuing our academic
00:21:32 --> 00:21:36 freedom and celebrating it by using it.
00:21:36 --> 00:21:39 We should recognize that it's a privilege. And so we should not just talk about
00:21:39 --> 00:21:42 having it. We should exercise it in this way.
00:21:42 --> 00:21:45 And it was really actually very inspiring.
00:21:45 --> 00:21:49 So many of our colleagues stepped up right away and said, absolutely,
00:21:50 --> 00:21:54 we think that we should be sharing our work at this moment. Does it mean that
00:21:54 --> 00:21:55 people have the answer? Of course not.
00:21:56 --> 00:22:00 But it means that we can share knowledge. And frankly, our colleagues,
00:22:00 --> 00:22:05 you know, some of our colleagues have been working in their spaces for decades.
00:22:05 --> 00:22:11 They're the national experts. Some of them are the world experts in the things that they do.
00:22:12 --> 00:22:14 And our thought was, everyone should have access to that.
00:22:15 --> 00:22:21 And so we pulled together the book as a response to this moment in American
00:22:21 --> 00:22:27 law and governance, but also, of course, in honor of the fact that it's our 250th anniversary of,
00:22:28 --> 00:22:35 which should be a time for reflection, for rethinking our old ways, good ways.
00:22:36 --> 00:22:40 Should we change our habits? We often update ourselves on our birthday.
00:22:40 --> 00:22:43 Okay, what's working? What's not working?
00:22:43 --> 00:22:48 What do we need to do differently? So we really try to embrace the moment in
00:22:48 --> 00:22:55 a way that might be helpful to and engaging for as many people as possible.
00:22:56 --> 00:23:00 So I got a personal question. How come the preamble to the U.S.
00:23:00 --> 00:23:01 Constitution didn't make the cut?
00:23:03 --> 00:23:05 You got the declaration in there. You got the Gettysburg address.
00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 How come the good old preamble didn't make it?
00:23:09 --> 00:23:12 Well, one of it was we did this very fast and had page limits.
00:23:12 --> 00:23:17 So we had to argue to get more space in the first place.
00:23:18 --> 00:23:24 You might expect, actually, from Harvard law professors that we would only have put the law in,
00:23:25 --> 00:23:29 that the Constitution, and there are, of course, many essays about the Supreme
00:23:29 --> 00:23:35 Court, about constitutional law in all kinds of spaces, but we wanted to be,
00:23:36 --> 00:23:38 more encompassing than that.
00:23:39 --> 00:23:42 Because there's a lot of law you could put in, and there's a lot of law that
00:23:42 --> 00:23:45 we have in the essays, but we thought that the—well, so first of all,
00:23:46 --> 00:23:49 the 250th, it's the birthday of the Declaration.
00:23:50 --> 00:23:54 But also we thought that the Gettysburg Address captured something about the project that the.
00:23:55 --> 00:24:03 The legalism of the Constitution was part of, but might not fully convey.
00:24:03 --> 00:24:07 And the spirit of the book is in part to notice, yes, of course,
00:24:07 --> 00:24:12 law is central, but law is always working with all our other institutions,
00:24:12 --> 00:24:15 law, politics, education, culture,
00:24:16 --> 00:24:20 the economy, all pieces of our democracy.
00:24:20 --> 00:24:24 And so you're absolutely right. We could have put the preamble in,
00:24:24 --> 00:24:28 but actually we were trying to be more capacious, as it were,
00:24:28 --> 00:24:31 more imaginative and include things that,
00:24:31 --> 00:24:37 maybe wouldn't be quite so entirely straightforward. Yeah.
00:24:39 --> 00:24:46 You know, that was my guide. And whenever people talk to me about legislative work,
00:24:47 --> 00:24:52 I think the preamble, first of all, you take an oath to uphold the Constitution
00:24:52 --> 00:24:54 when you go in these positions.
00:24:54 --> 00:25:00 But I think that preamble is the best guide because, first of all,
00:25:00 --> 00:25:02 you're establishing what the target is.
00:25:03 --> 00:25:07 You're trying to establish a more perfect union. And you make a commitment to
00:25:07 --> 00:25:10 defend the nation, you make a commitment to provide for the general welfare,
00:25:10 --> 00:25:13 and you make a commitment to protect individual liberty.
00:25:13 --> 00:25:17 As a legislator, That's your job, right? So.
00:25:19 --> 00:25:26 That's why I value that paragraph so much. It was like John Meecham was talking about the sentence –,
00:25:28 --> 00:25:30 In the Declaration of Independence was the most important sentence.
00:25:30 --> 00:25:34 I would argue that the preamble is the most important paragraph.
00:25:35 --> 00:25:40 And so, you know, I just, like I said, that's personal for me. But we'll move on.
00:25:41 --> 00:25:45 Well, we'll include it in volume two. How about that? Thank you.
00:25:45 --> 00:25:47 Thank you so much. I like to hear that. Of course. All right.
00:25:49 --> 00:25:52 And Annette Gordon-Reed asked the question, so I'm going to ask it to you.
00:25:52 --> 00:25:55 Are we a democratic nation or a heritage nation?
00:25:56 --> 00:26:00 Yeah. If I could just celebrate that particular essay that you're drawing from
00:26:01 --> 00:26:04 for one moment. As I said, there are 62 essays in this book.
00:26:05 --> 00:26:11 From 62 different Harvard Law professors. And Professor Gordon Reed wrote one
00:26:11 --> 00:26:14 of the first essays in the book.
00:26:14 --> 00:26:19 It's called Making Americans a History. And of course, we're very fortunate
00:26:19 --> 00:26:25 to have Professor Gordon Reed. She's one of America's most preeminent historians.
00:26:25 --> 00:26:32 And she takes us all the way back to the founding, to the roots of the argument.
00:26:32 --> 00:26:35 It's a fascinating essay for
00:26:35 --> 00:26:39 your listeners. I hope people will take a look, especially at this one.
00:26:40 --> 00:26:46 And she takes us back as a historian to 250 years of fighting over this question.
00:26:46 --> 00:26:50 Who gets to be American? What do we mean when we say.
00:26:52 --> 00:26:58 That we are American? And she shows us how this has been a tension from the
00:26:58 --> 00:27:04 very beginning between the idea of tribe, if you will, blood, legacy,
00:27:05 --> 00:27:10 what you might think of as the old school model, right? That's how monarchs become monarchs.
00:27:10 --> 00:27:18 That's how nobility becomes nobility versus the idealism of what America could become.
00:27:18 --> 00:27:22 And of course, the idealism was not realized at the founding.
00:27:22 --> 00:27:27 It took many years for the notion of we, the people, to expand,
00:27:27 --> 00:27:31 to include, to actually include all of the people.
00:27:31 --> 00:27:35 And we could have an argument about how well it's even done,
00:27:35 --> 00:27:39 that there are essays about, have we done it yet? Are we there yet? Is everyone included?
00:27:41 --> 00:27:46 But Professor Gordon Reed shows us that this has always been a fight.
00:27:46 --> 00:27:52 And we're seeing it now in the fight over immigration, in the violent over-enforcement,
00:27:53 --> 00:27:58 of immigration across the country that has so shocked so much of America.
00:27:59 --> 00:28:03 And I think part of the shocking quality is not just the violence,
00:28:03 --> 00:28:08 although the violence is shocking, and it's not just the illegality,
00:28:08 --> 00:28:12 although so much of it is illegal. Well, it's the ethos.
00:28:13 --> 00:28:21 It's the idea that we're going to be so cramped, so exclusionary,
00:28:21 --> 00:28:25 so narrow in our notion of who counts as American.
00:28:25 --> 00:28:30 And I think part of the outrage and the shock shows that actually a lot of Americans.
00:28:33 --> 00:28:37 We don't think that. We think that we are inclusive. We think that we are one people under law.
00:28:37 --> 00:28:43 We don't think you have to be born in any particular place or speak any particular
00:28:43 --> 00:28:49 language or come from any particular ethnicity. We don't agree with that.
00:28:49 --> 00:28:55 So Professor Gordon Reed, I think, writes this beautiful historical essay explaining
00:28:55 --> 00:29:00 the arc of that argument that, frankly, we are, you know, we're having today every day.
00:29:01 --> 00:29:07 Do you feel that the current administration has damaged the concept of the rule of law?
00:29:07 --> 00:29:09 So thank you for asking me that
00:29:09 --> 00:29:14 question, because it is what I write about in the essay for this book.
00:29:16 --> 00:29:21 So let's take a step back. In the criminal system, which is my area of expertise,
00:29:22 --> 00:29:27 rule of law has always been shaky for ordinary Americans.
00:29:27 --> 00:29:32 So when I was a public defender in Baltimore, as I have done my work and scholarship
00:29:32 --> 00:29:37 about the criminal system over and over again, we see how the criminal system abandons rule of law,
00:29:38 --> 00:29:43 for ordinary people, for the vulnerable, for people who don't have the resources,
00:29:43 --> 00:29:46 the money, or the social capital to fight back.
00:29:47 --> 00:29:51 And so I think one of the things that's happening in our political discourse
00:29:51 --> 00:29:55 right now, in our legal discourse, is a kind of a romanticization
00:29:56 --> 00:30:01 of the American legal system as if somehow it was all working perfectly until
00:30:01 --> 00:30:04 this moment, and then the Trump administration broke it.
00:30:04 --> 00:30:11 And at least in the criminal system, I think there's a very clear story to be
00:30:11 --> 00:30:13 told about how that isn't the case.
00:30:13 --> 00:30:19 What is the case, actually, is that our system has been vulnerable to exploitation
00:30:19 --> 00:30:25 and abuse for a long time, and the administration is taking advantage of tools
00:30:25 --> 00:30:28 that were forged long ago.
00:30:28 --> 00:30:34 So, as I, you know, explain in the essay, we now live in a world where pardons,
00:30:34 --> 00:30:41 can be courted and purchased for millions of dollars, the presidential pardon power, where...
00:30:43 --> 00:30:47 Where federal prosecutions are openly political,
00:30:49 --> 00:30:53 embrace the idea of political reward and retribution.
00:30:53 --> 00:30:59 Now, in the world of criminal law and criminal scholarship, we all look at each
00:30:59 --> 00:31:03 other and we point out, you know, it's always been kind of political.
00:31:04 --> 00:31:08 There's always been a political strand,
00:31:09 --> 00:31:13 a political valence to the way we have formed our criminal system And many of
00:31:13 --> 00:31:21 us, including myself, have argued against what's unfair about this for a long time.
00:31:21 --> 00:31:29 But the openness, the sort of crass embrace of the idea that it's now okay,
00:31:29 --> 00:31:31 that it's okay to do this,
00:31:32 --> 00:31:40 that I think is an extreme version of what our criminal system has been that we haven't seen before.
00:31:40 --> 00:31:47 The idea that an administration would openly embrace, as if it were okay,
00:31:47 --> 00:31:53 the politicization of the coercive power of the state.
00:31:53 --> 00:31:58 And to their credit, we have seen federal prosecutors across the country quit
00:31:59 --> 00:32:01 because they said, this is not the job I signed up for.
00:32:02 --> 00:32:06 And just to be clear, I was a federal public defender. My entire job was to
00:32:06 --> 00:32:10 fight with federal prosecutors. I was on the other side of the V.
00:32:10 --> 00:32:14 It was the United States versus my client. And I,
00:32:16 --> 00:32:24 And I have been heartened by the wave of federal prosecutorial pushback against
00:32:24 --> 00:32:28 this open erosion of rule of law.
00:32:28 --> 00:32:30 Did I think they were doing a perfect job before? No.
00:32:31 --> 00:32:38 Have I written critically about the politicization and the racialization of
00:32:38 --> 00:32:39 the criminal system? Yes.
00:32:39 --> 00:32:42 Do I think this is extreme? Absolutely.
00:32:45 --> 00:32:49 Yeah. You ended your essay in the book with this statement, rule of law in the
00:32:49 --> 00:32:53 criminal system has always been elusive for the powerless.
00:32:54 --> 00:32:58 Now the rest of us are learning what that feels like. So my question to you
00:32:58 --> 00:33:01 is, how do we end the elusiveness?
00:33:03 --> 00:33:09 You asked me a few questions ago what I thought would be a better world.
00:33:10 --> 00:33:16 And this is the answer to that question. If rule of law were truly – let's back
00:33:16 --> 00:33:19 up for a second because rule of law is one of those lawyerly professorial terms
00:33:20 --> 00:33:23 that I think bears unpacking.
00:33:23 --> 00:33:27 A label. What do we mean when we say something like that? We say it in law school all the time.
00:33:27 --> 00:33:32 What we mean is we have decided, indeed, the Declaration of Independence and
00:33:32 --> 00:33:34 the preamble to the Constitution,
00:33:35 --> 00:33:40 through those documents, through those commitments, we decided to run our country
00:33:40 --> 00:33:44 based on law and not on brute power.
00:33:45 --> 00:33:51 The old school sentence that captures this in many Supreme Court cases.
00:33:52 --> 00:33:58 And the Massachusetts Constitution, in fact, is the idea that we are a government of laws and not of men.
00:33:59 --> 00:34:06 And the idea is, at the end of the day, we agree to do it by law and not the
00:34:06 --> 00:34:07 most powerful person in the room.
00:34:07 --> 00:34:10 The person with the biggest stick doesn't get to decide. The person with the
00:34:10 --> 00:34:14 most money doesn't get to decide. The king doesn't get to decide. It's not the pope.
00:34:15 --> 00:34:21 End of the day, we're going to do it through law. And that puts a certain kind of constraint on power.
00:34:22 --> 00:34:27 Law enhances power, of course, but it is also a pushback, a constraint against power.
00:34:28 --> 00:34:31 And so rule of law is the promise that at the end of the day,
00:34:31 --> 00:34:36 we're going to do it by law and not just by power.
00:34:36 --> 00:34:41 And we're going to live with the outcome, even if we don't like it.
00:34:42 --> 00:34:45 And we can all think of outcomes that we don't like, but notice the radical
00:34:45 --> 00:34:49 nature of the idea that the most powerful person in the room with the biggest
00:34:49 --> 00:34:55 stick and the most money and the most troops and access to the most violence,
00:34:55 --> 00:34:57 would say, okay, that's the answer.
00:34:58 --> 00:35:03 The law, the legal system has provided an answer and I don't like it and I'm
00:35:03 --> 00:35:05 going to live with it anyway.
00:35:07 --> 00:35:11 There's something really profound about that move. Of course,
00:35:11 --> 00:35:15 a lot of people are comparing this era to Bush v.
00:35:15 --> 00:35:23 Gore, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave the election to
00:35:23 --> 00:35:28 President Bush and meant defeat for the candidate,
00:35:29 --> 00:35:30 Vice President Al Gore.
00:35:31 --> 00:35:35 And many people have pointed out Al Gore did not deny the outcome.
00:35:36 --> 00:35:39 He didn't say, this is unfair. We should get rid of the Supreme Court.
00:35:39 --> 00:35:47 He said, oh, that's the law. The Supreme Court has made a decision and I am going to abide by it.
00:35:47 --> 00:35:51 Even though, as powerful people go, he had a lot of, you know,
00:35:52 --> 00:35:56 he had a lot of ammunition at his disposal and he didn't use it.
00:35:57 --> 00:35:59 That's what rule of law is. Yes.
00:36:01 --> 00:36:06 And so let me take us back to Baltimore, which is my clients understood that
00:36:06 --> 00:36:11 law was not going to protect them if a Baltimore police officer decided that they didn't want to.
00:36:12 --> 00:36:16 And my clients understood that the law was not going to protect them if they
00:36:16 --> 00:36:20 lived in a neighborhood where the city council or some powerful developer or
00:36:20 --> 00:36:25 some other person with money or influence decided that they wanted that neighborhood
00:36:25 --> 00:36:26 to be one way and not another.
00:36:26 --> 00:36:31 They understood that the law was not going to be for them, which is a way of
00:36:31 --> 00:36:34 saying that rule of law had abandoned them.
00:36:35 --> 00:36:39 Whereas in wealthy communities,
00:36:40 --> 00:36:44 it used to be in federal court that many of those defendants,
00:36:44 --> 00:36:49 hedge fund managers and people on Wall Street and high-profile defendants,
00:36:51 --> 00:36:55 they might have been guilty as sin, but they knew the law would work for them.
00:36:56 --> 00:36:59 They were going to get to invoke the Fourth Amendment. They were going to get
00:37:00 --> 00:37:05 to argue about what the rules meant. They were going to get to use the law. The law was for them.
00:37:06 --> 00:37:11 So to me, a better world is one in which everyone who is hauled before the state,
00:37:12 --> 00:37:17 or has a conflict in their life would know that this edifice,
00:37:17 --> 00:37:22 this infrastructure of law that we have built over 250 years is for them.
00:37:22 --> 00:37:26 Does it mean we will get the answer we want? No, it does not.
00:37:26 --> 00:37:29 But it means we're all playing by the same set of rules. And today,
00:37:30 --> 00:37:35 I think it's shockingly and abundantly obvious that the American people,
00:37:36 --> 00:37:40 we do not all get to play by the same set of rules. Yeah.
00:37:42 --> 00:37:47 Should the Supreme Court be restrained, reformed, or remain status quo?
00:37:48 --> 00:37:54 Great, hot topic question. And I'm going to direct your listeners back,
00:37:55 --> 00:38:02 to the collection because we have two extraordinary essays in hot disagreement
00:38:02 --> 00:38:04 with each other in the collection.
00:38:04 --> 00:38:07 There's a lot of disagreement in this collection. And if you go through.
00:38:08 --> 00:38:14 Perhaps it's not surprising that 62 Harvard law professors cannot agree on what
00:38:14 --> 00:38:17 the problems are, what we should do, or even what the question is.
00:38:17 --> 00:38:21 And this, of course, is one of the great questions of the moment.
00:38:22 --> 00:38:27 So the two essays, and I'll just flag them for your readers if they decide to take a look.
00:38:27 --> 00:38:31 In this section on the Supreme Court, there's a dozen sections on all different
00:38:31 --> 00:38:34 kinds of subjects in the book. I put this one on the Supreme Court.
00:38:35 --> 00:38:40 There's an essay by two luminous constitutional law scholars.
00:38:40 --> 00:38:43 They are national experts in this space.
00:38:43 --> 00:38:48 And their essay is called Declaring Independence from Judicial Supremacy.
00:38:49 --> 00:38:53 And they argue essentially that the authority of the Supreme Court should be dismantled,
00:38:54 --> 00:39:01 that democracy should not be in the hands of five unelected Harvard and Yale
00:39:01 --> 00:39:06 graduates insulated from the political process, and,
00:39:06 --> 00:39:11 that judicial supremacy is being abused and it should be ended,
00:39:11 --> 00:39:14 which is essentially an argument for restructuring the Supreme Court.
00:39:15 --> 00:39:23 And then the very next essay, also by a luminous constitutional law scholar of national repute.
00:39:24 --> 00:39:30 Argues in an essay called A Court of Two Crises, he argues that even with the
00:39:30 --> 00:39:36 challenges and the politicization that we are seeing at the Supreme Court, and even though.
00:39:37 --> 00:39:42 So many people have lost faith in that institution, that it is still one of
00:39:42 --> 00:39:47 our most important bulwarks for protecting rule of law.
00:39:47 --> 00:39:53 And he goes through a list of, we're well aware of the ways in which the Supreme
00:39:53 --> 00:39:56 Court has helped and supported the Trump administration.
00:39:57 --> 00:40:00 And he goes through and points out examples that we might not have noticed where
00:40:00 --> 00:40:05 the court either did not rule in favor of the Trump administration,
00:40:05 --> 00:40:10 or as he points out, sometimes more importantly, protected the lower courts.
00:40:10 --> 00:40:13 When the lower courts ruled against the administration, or when the circuit
00:40:13 --> 00:40:17 courts ruled against the administration, they let those decisions stand,
00:40:17 --> 00:40:20 which is a big part of what the Supreme Court does. They interfere, they don't interfere.
00:40:21 --> 00:40:24 And he argues that if we do what the previous essay said we should do,
00:40:25 --> 00:40:30 which is mess with the court, that we will destabilize rule of law.
00:40:30 --> 00:40:34 And when we break that institution, there will be nothing standing between the
00:40:34 --> 00:40:41 politicized branches, particularly the executive and full-on lawless authority.
00:40:41 --> 00:40:45 And so whatever you think of the answer, these two essays, I think,
00:40:45 --> 00:40:51 really illuminate what the key questions are. I learned an enormous amount from
00:40:51 --> 00:40:52 this collection, by the way.
00:40:52 --> 00:40:57 And I like to think of myself as a pretty well-read person. I pay attention.
00:40:58 --> 00:41:04 But I learned so much from my colleagues and it really deepened my understanding
00:41:04 --> 00:41:10 of what the issues on the table currently are, especially in this space. Yeah.
00:41:12 --> 00:41:16 What do you want readers of America Unfinished to take away from it?
00:41:18 --> 00:41:19 Great question.
00:41:21 --> 00:41:25 There's stuff we can do, and there's changes we can make, and we've been making
00:41:25 --> 00:41:31 changes for 250 years, and there's no reason to stop now, and it's not magic.
00:41:32 --> 00:41:35 The law is not magic. We teach this to our students.
00:41:35 --> 00:41:39 Is it complicated? Yes. Is it difficult? Yes. Can everybody wield it? No.
00:41:40 --> 00:41:45 Is it magic? No. There's no ghost in the machine. It's just laws passed by legislatures,
00:41:46 --> 00:41:49 enforced by courts, and argued about by lawyers, and.
00:41:50 --> 00:41:56 All of which is based on our national understanding of how our democracy is supposed to work.
00:41:56 --> 00:42:01 And so my hope from these 62 different essays, each one holds up a piece of
00:42:01 --> 00:42:02 this problem to the light.
00:42:02 --> 00:42:05 What about the Supreme Court? What about Congress?
00:42:06 --> 00:42:11 What about climate change? What about AI? What about war?
00:42:12 --> 00:42:19 And these essays show, maybe a way to say it is they show how law matters and
00:42:19 --> 00:42:24 also how it can be changed, that we are not written in stone,
00:42:24 --> 00:42:26 we are not written in granite.
00:42:26 --> 00:42:35 And as I flagged a little bit earlier, there's something daunting often and
00:42:35 --> 00:42:38 sometimes scary about these questions that so much is at stake,
00:42:38 --> 00:42:39 so many lives are at stake.
00:42:39 --> 00:42:43 But at the same time, I hope that people will walk away realizing,
00:42:44 --> 00:42:48 this is not, it's not impossible, it's just hard.
00:42:48 --> 00:42:54 But you know what? 250 years ago, breaking from Britain was,
00:42:54 --> 00:42:56 you know, was no small feat.
00:42:56 --> 00:42:59 It was hard. We've been doing hard stuff the whole time.
00:43:00 --> 00:43:04 The Gettysburg Address, when Lincoln said, it is for us, the living,
00:43:04 --> 00:43:07 to continue this unfinished work.
00:43:07 --> 00:43:10 What could be harder than ending slavery?
00:43:11 --> 00:43:16 And we did that. So I have to say that I, and I'm a little bit of a half-full
00:43:16 --> 00:43:23 person, you can tell from the way I talk. I wouldn't keep doing this if I wasn't
00:43:23 --> 00:43:25 hopeful that law could matter.
00:43:25 --> 00:43:31 And I hope that when people read these essays, the ones that resonate with them,
00:43:31 --> 00:43:34 the ones that they're worried about, the ones they're interested in,
00:43:34 --> 00:43:37 they'll walk away thinking, you know, there are things to be done.
00:43:38 --> 00:43:41 Things in my local community, things with my local legislature.
00:43:42 --> 00:43:46 I would consider this a wild success if someone decided to run for office who
00:43:47 --> 00:43:51 maybe hadn't, you know, thought that there was a way to intervene before,
00:43:51 --> 00:43:54 or if students just read it.
00:43:55 --> 00:43:58 It's well-designed as a curriculum because there's so many different pieces
00:43:58 --> 00:44:05 of the puzzle that it addresses that students are inspired to become engaged.
00:44:06 --> 00:44:09 I'm not saying that they should go to law school, but they might realize,
00:44:09 --> 00:44:10 you know, I could do that.
00:44:11 --> 00:44:15 This is not magic. this is just thinking. This is just work.
00:44:15 --> 00:44:21 So I hope that the book is engaging and inspiring to people who are concerned
00:44:21 --> 00:44:25 about all the working parts of our democracy right now. Yeah.
00:44:26 --> 00:44:30 All right. Finish this sentence. I have hope because.
00:44:32 --> 00:44:39 I have hope because people. I had hope because people, when I was in the Baltimore
00:44:39 --> 00:44:45 City Detention center lock up with my clients, they would run out of attorney
00:44:45 --> 00:44:47 meeting spaces because it was such a terrible,
00:44:49 --> 00:44:50 infested, awful facility.
00:44:50 --> 00:44:53 Nobody should have had to have been there for a minute.
00:44:55 --> 00:44:58 So sometimes I'd meet with my clients in a broom closet because that was the
00:44:58 --> 00:45:00 only place we could have a private conversation.
00:45:01 --> 00:45:08 And nobody wants to meet your public defender. Just like you never want to meet your oncologist.
00:45:08 --> 00:45:13 It means that you're in the worst moment, one of the worst moments of your life.
00:45:14 --> 00:45:22 And so many times my clients were thoughtful, hardworking, responsible people
00:45:22 --> 00:45:25 who were in terrible places in their lives.
00:45:25 --> 00:45:29 And we would talk about this terrible moment for them, for their families, for their children.
00:45:34 --> 00:45:39 And we would work together on their case. So that's the worst case scenario.
00:45:39 --> 00:45:42 It's one of the worst things that can happen to a person charged with a federal
00:45:42 --> 00:45:46 crime. You're in a broom closet with your federal public defender in Baltimore
00:45:46 --> 00:45:48 trying to figure out what to do next.
00:45:48 --> 00:45:50 And yet they stood up.
00:45:51 --> 00:45:53 They were thoughtful. They were responsible.
00:45:55 --> 00:46:01 And that has given me hope for 20 years that if they can be intelligent and
00:46:01 --> 00:46:05 thoughtful and rational and try to do the right thing, they say,
00:46:05 --> 00:46:10 I have made a mistake or I am in this terrible fix. What can you do for my family?
00:46:10 --> 00:46:11 How can you help my family weather this? Or,
00:46:14 --> 00:46:18 how can you help me? And my colleagues in the Federal Public Defender's Office
00:46:18 --> 00:46:24 who took on terrible, impossible cases And yet they fought to the very end,
00:46:24 --> 00:46:26 every paper clip, every piece of paper,
00:46:27 --> 00:46:34 because people, because of the commitment that we see all the time in ordinary
00:46:34 --> 00:46:38 people, even under the most terrible circumstances, to stand up and try to do
00:46:38 --> 00:46:41 the right thing for themselves, for their families,
00:46:41 --> 00:46:44 for others, through the law, through their community.
00:46:46 --> 00:46:52 I think many of us were very moved and inspired and given hope by Minneapolis,
00:46:53 --> 00:46:57 when the people of Minneapolis, ordinary people,
00:46:58 --> 00:47:02 these were not fancy people with a lot of money and big sticks and fancy degrees.
00:47:02 --> 00:47:06 They looked around and they said, this is wrong. And they got in their minivans
00:47:06 --> 00:47:10 and they took their neighbor's children to school.
00:47:11 --> 00:47:17 How could you not be hopeful when people do that under terrible circumstances.
00:47:17 --> 00:47:23 So that's what makes me hopeful. All right. So Alexandra in the top off,
00:47:24 --> 00:47:31 Thank you for doing this. How can people reach you, and how can people get the book?
00:47:33 --> 00:47:37 So, Harvard Law School, the website is public.
00:47:38 --> 00:47:42 There's only one Natapoff there, so if you Google my name, N-A-T-A-P-O-F-F,
00:47:43 --> 00:47:46 and my email is public. It's just on the website.
00:47:46 --> 00:47:52 There's also a page on the Harvard Law School website that is dedicated to this
00:47:52 --> 00:47:55 book, America Unfinished, with,
00:47:56 --> 00:47:59 not just information about the book, but videos from different contributors
00:47:59 --> 00:48:04 talking about their essays with free materials, other ways to delve into it.
00:48:04 --> 00:48:07 I think it's a really wonderful page that the school put together.
00:48:07 --> 00:48:12 The book itself is published by MIT Press. You can get it in any,
00:48:12 --> 00:48:19 you know, whatever independent bookstore you like to go to or any online outlet that you prefer to use.
00:48:20 --> 00:48:25 The one thing I would love to flag, last thing for your listeners, is that we are,
00:48:25 --> 00:48:33 really thrilled that MIT Press has agreed that in 2027, this book will become
00:48:33 --> 00:48:38 open access, which means it'll be free for anybody who wants to read it.
00:48:38 --> 00:48:43 And we're really grateful to MIT Press for being willing to do this.
00:48:43 --> 00:48:47 They're the ones who are giving up the revenue. To the extent that there are
00:48:47 --> 00:48:51 any royalties, we're donating them to our local public library.
00:48:52 --> 00:48:56 So we're not receiving the money, but MIT Press is footing the bill for putting
00:48:56 --> 00:48:59 the book together. But they were willing to make this open access because it's
00:48:59 --> 00:49:01 so consistent with the spirit of the book.
00:49:01 --> 00:49:04 Everyone needs to be part of this conversation.
00:49:04 --> 00:49:05 These essays are short.
00:49:06 --> 00:49:09 They're four or five pages. Anyone can read them.
00:49:10 --> 00:49:14 There are no footnotes. We worked really hard to edit them to make them accessible.
00:49:15 --> 00:49:19 You don't have to be a lawyer, you don't have to be a law professor to read
00:49:19 --> 00:49:24 these essays. And we really wanted to make sure that this conversation was available
00:49:24 --> 00:49:26 and accessible to everyone.
00:49:26 --> 00:49:33 And so because MIT Press has so generously been willing to make this book open
00:49:33 --> 00:49:40 access in 2027, it means if you don't have 20-odd bucks right now, and so many Americans.
00:49:42 --> 00:49:47 Don't have any extras lying around right now, it will be available.
00:49:47 --> 00:49:51 No one will be cut out of the conversation that this book is trying to be part
00:49:51 --> 00:49:54 of just because you don't have, you know, 20 bucks at the moment.
00:49:54 --> 00:49:57 So we're really grateful for that piece of the puzzle. Yeah.
00:49:58 --> 00:50:07 Yeah, that's a pretty cool, noble gesture, you know, because like you said, it's not a hard read.
00:50:08 --> 00:50:12 You know, it's very easy because, like you said, the essays are no more than
00:50:12 --> 00:50:19 four or five pages and all that, but you can feel the depth of knowledge that
00:50:19 --> 00:50:22 each one of these contributors puts into the essay.
00:50:23 --> 00:50:29 And you understand why those people were asked to write their essays.
00:50:29 --> 00:50:36 So, again, I just want to thank you for doing that, you collaborating with Mr.
00:50:36 --> 00:50:40 Charles to do that, and for coming on the podcast.
00:50:40 --> 00:50:46 I think it's important for my listeners to be exposed to people.
00:50:47 --> 00:50:51 And I always tell folks that, you know, my guests are way smarter than I am.
00:50:51 --> 00:50:56 And so it's just always a privilege for me to bring those people onto the show. But.
00:50:58 --> 00:51:02 This is a seminal work that you've put together.
00:51:02 --> 00:51:08 And I'm really, really glad to hear that it'll be available to everyone because
00:51:08 --> 00:51:11 everyone needs to read it. And I think it's an appropriate...
00:51:13 --> 00:51:17 Reflection. I think you had made a statement earlier that every birthday we
00:51:17 --> 00:51:19 need to have a reflection about ourselves.
00:51:19 --> 00:51:23 And I think this book is a perfect reflection of where we are as Americans.
00:51:23 --> 00:51:28 So thank you again for doing the book and for being on the show.
00:51:29 --> 00:51:30 Well, thank you so much for having
00:51:30 --> 00:51:33 me. All right, guys. And we're going to catch y'all on the other side.
00:51:53 --> 00:52:00 All right, we are back. So now it is time for my next guest, Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge.
00:52:02 --> 00:52:07 Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge is an associate professor of education with expertise
00:52:07 --> 00:52:12 in community-based education and critical youth work practice at the Harvard
00:52:12 --> 00:52:14 Graduate School of Education.
00:52:14 --> 00:52:20 As a sociologist of education, Baldridge's research explores the social political
00:52:20 --> 00:52:22 context, community-based youth work,
00:52:23 --> 00:52:28 and critically examines the confluence of race, class, and gender and the impact
00:52:28 --> 00:52:34 on educational reforms that shape community-based spaces engaging Black and Latin youth.
00:52:35 --> 00:52:41 In addition, she explores the organizational and pedagogical practices employed
00:52:41 --> 00:52:46 by youth work professionals amid educational reforms and restructuring.
00:52:46 --> 00:52:51 Baldridge's first book, Reclaiming Community, Race, and the Uncertain Future
00:52:51 --> 00:52:57 of Youth Work, examines how racialized market-based reforms undermine the efforts,
00:52:57 --> 00:53:03 of Black community-based organizations to support comprehensive youth development opportunities.
00:53:04 --> 00:53:06 Her book received the 2019 Critics'
00:53:06 --> 00:53:10 Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association.
00:53:11 --> 00:53:17 With the support of the National Academy of Education's Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship program,
00:53:17 --> 00:53:24 Baldridge investigated how racial disparity discourse influences community-based
00:53:24 --> 00:53:30 spaces that engage Black youth in predominantly white cities that espouse a
00:53:30 --> 00:53:32 liberal and progressive ethos.
00:53:33 --> 00:53:38 Her second book, Laboring in the Shadows, Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work,
00:53:38 --> 00:53:42 examines the pivotal role of black youth workers in the lives of young people,
00:53:43 --> 00:53:48 and the challenges they face in an unstable and often underappreciated position.
00:53:49 --> 00:53:55 Current research examines broader issues of equity facing the out-of-school
00:53:55 --> 00:53:57 time sector nationally,
00:53:58 --> 00:54:04 to precarity of the youth work profession and how Black youth workers navigate anti-Blackness,
00:54:05 --> 00:54:10 and how Black community-based youth organizations respond to city change and
00:54:10 --> 00:54:15 displacement fueled by gentrification and educational restructuring.
00:54:17 --> 00:54:21 Baldridge's research appears in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal,
00:54:22 --> 00:54:29 Review of Research and Education, Teacher's College Record, Educational Researcher,
00:54:29 --> 00:54:32 and Race, Ethnicity, and Education.
00:54:33 --> 00:54:38 Baldridge's experiences as a youth work professional in U.S. cities and abroad
00:54:38 --> 00:54:40 also profoundly inform her research.
00:54:41 --> 00:54:48 With a deep commitment to engage research and disrupting oppressive youth development spaces,
00:54:49 --> 00:54:55 Baldridge works with several out-of-school time networks and facilitates communities of practice,
00:54:56 --> 00:55:00 with organizational leaders and youth development professionals nationwide why
00:55:00 --> 00:55:04 to sustain justice-oriented and humanizing youth,
00:55:05 --> 00:55:06 work practices.
00:55:07 --> 00:55:12 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest,
00:55:12 --> 00:55:16 on this podcast, Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge.
00:55:28 --> 00:55:32 All right, Dr. Bianca Baldridge, how are you doing?
00:55:33 --> 00:55:36 I'm doing well. I'm doing really well.
00:55:38 --> 00:55:45 Well, I'm really glad to have you on the podcast because I came across your
00:55:45 --> 00:55:51 profile in LinkedIn and I said, oh, yeah, I got to get this sister on the show.
00:55:52 --> 00:55:55 I got to at least pick her brain a little bit, especially with education.
00:55:55 --> 00:56:00 Thanks for having me. Yes, ma'am. So, so you understand there's three people
00:56:00 --> 00:56:03 that I admire the most in the world.
00:56:03 --> 00:56:06 There are social workers, veterans, and educators.
00:56:07 --> 00:56:13 And so I think, you know, my social worker friends say that social workers run the world.
00:56:14 --> 00:56:22 I get that. But, you know, I think those three professions are vital for society.
00:56:22 --> 00:56:26 I think there are other professions have their place. But I think if we're going
00:56:26 --> 00:56:30 to make it, it's going to be the social workers, the educators,
00:56:30 --> 00:56:32 and then the veterans to protect us from everybody else.
00:56:36 --> 00:56:40 So let's go ahead and get this thing started. I do a couple of icebreakers.
00:56:40 --> 00:56:44 And so the first icebreaker is a quote that I want you to respond to.
00:56:45 --> 00:56:51 And the quote is, the freedom to study how a society built on both slavery and
00:56:51 --> 00:56:58 equality moved, however unevenly, toward broader rights is not a luxury.
00:56:58 --> 00:57:02 It is part of what makes the United States worth celebrating.
00:57:02 --> 00:57:08 Attempts to ban or sanitize honest teaching about slavery, reconstruction and
00:57:08 --> 00:57:12 civil rights do not defend American exceptionalism.
00:57:12 --> 00:57:15 They undermine it. Mm-hmm.
00:57:16 --> 00:57:21 Yeah. My response to that, actually, it reminds me of James Baldwin's quote
00:57:21 --> 00:57:26 about to be educated, right, in a society is to be able to question, right, America.
00:57:27 --> 00:57:32 And so, yeah, for me, it's all about, and especially working with young people.
00:57:33 --> 00:57:36 Young people live in the same world that we live in, so they have an understanding,
00:57:37 --> 00:57:41 of societal harms. They may not have the language that adults might use,
00:57:41 --> 00:57:45 but they understand what's going on. And so I'm always, you know,
00:57:45 --> 00:57:48 you've got to be able to live in truth.
00:57:48 --> 00:57:51 And I think young people understand that. Yeah.
00:57:51 --> 00:57:56 Okay. All right. So now the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.
00:57:57 --> 00:58:03 Okay. So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20. 13. All right.
00:58:04 --> 00:58:09 Do you think there is such a thing as unbiased news or media and why?
00:58:10 --> 00:58:16 Unbiased news. I don't think many things are unbiased or objective, right?
00:58:16 --> 00:58:21 I think how we raise questions, how we analyze things, how we make sense of
00:58:21 --> 00:58:26 things are often filtered through how we understand ourselves and how we think about the world.
00:58:27 --> 00:58:35 But do I think that you can do a job of presenting, right, information without opinion? Sure.
00:58:35 --> 00:58:38 I think there's ways to do that, right? Journalists get trained in that.
00:58:38 --> 00:58:43 As a researcher, right, I'm trained to sort of take data, to sort of think about
00:58:43 --> 00:58:47 it in ways that are true to what the data is telling me. But that is still all
00:58:47 --> 00:58:50 very much filtered through who I am.
00:58:50 --> 00:58:54 So I guess it's a yes and no. I understand.
00:58:55 --> 00:59:00 Where on your journey of life did you decide to be an educator?
00:59:02 --> 00:59:08 So this might be embarrassing, but I remember being in the first grade and lining
00:59:08 --> 00:59:11 up my stuffed animals, pretending to teach them.
00:59:13 --> 00:59:19 I knew that I always wanted to do something with education. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles.
00:59:19 --> 00:59:25 I had amazing Black teachers, Black women teachers, and I admired them.
00:59:25 --> 00:59:29 And so I wanted to mimic them, like mimic what I saw. I loved learning.
00:59:29 --> 00:59:32 And so I knew that I always wanted to do something in education.
00:59:32 --> 00:59:38 So probably first grade, probably first grade. And then that shifted a bit as
00:59:38 --> 00:59:43 I went into middle school and high school and understood that I loved teaching.
00:59:43 --> 00:59:47 I loved working with young people, but it didn't necessarily need to be in school,
00:59:47 --> 00:59:50 right? And I started doing work and teaching and facilitating and work with
00:59:50 --> 00:59:53 young people outside of school context. So...
00:59:55 --> 00:59:58 That's great. That's where it all began. Thanks to Ms. Walford.
00:59:59 --> 01:00:05 Yeah, that's awesome. You know, because like I tell people, my journey in politics
01:00:05 --> 01:00:11 started with my parents bought me a set of world book encyclopedias at three.
01:00:14 --> 01:00:19 And I found this page. It was a two page spread of pictures.
01:00:19 --> 01:00:22 And I said, I want to be one of these pictures up here. And that was the spread
01:00:22 --> 01:00:24 for President of the United States.
01:00:25 --> 01:00:28 And then, of course, you flipped the pages and it went into detail about what
01:00:28 --> 01:00:32 the office is and all that. But it was like you had me sold on the portraits.
01:00:32 --> 01:00:34 I wanted one of those portraits. Right.
01:00:34 --> 01:00:40 So, of course, I didn't get to be president, but it started me on my journey
01:00:40 --> 01:00:46 in politics. So now I just I you know, I always believe in a superhero origin story.
01:00:47 --> 01:00:52 And so I just what was your moment. Right. And when you decided to do what you
01:00:52 --> 01:00:56 do. So that's cool that you had the little animals lined up and stuff.
01:00:58 --> 01:01:01 I love that. I love that. And you mentioned encyclopedias. Like,
01:01:01 --> 01:01:05 I remember encyclopedia salesmen, like, coming to the door. I'm old enough to know that.
01:01:07 --> 01:01:08 When they would sell it from door to door.
01:01:10 --> 01:01:14 I remember my parents getting them. Yeah, yeah. The kids don't understand that.
01:01:14 --> 01:01:19 They don't get it. As a matter of fact, the guy who was really,
01:01:19 --> 01:01:21 I think, the last Democratic governor for the state of Mississippi,
01:01:21 --> 01:01:26 Ronnie Musgrove, when he was a young man trying to make a little extra money,
01:01:26 --> 01:01:29 that's what he was doing, selling encyclopedias.
01:01:30 --> 01:01:34 You know, our children can't even imagine that. It's like, you mean the app
01:01:34 --> 01:01:39 that I could put on the phone? People were actually selling these books. Yes, yes, they were.
01:01:40 --> 01:01:43 Our parents were buying them. That's right. All right.
01:01:43 --> 01:01:48 In the introduction to the book, Laboring in the Shadows, you said youth workers,
01:01:48 --> 01:01:52 the volunteer part-time and full-time staff in these programs,
01:01:52 --> 01:01:55 are essential to American social,
01:01:55 --> 01:01:59 political, economic, and educational life. Why do you believe that?
01:02:00 --> 01:02:05 Oh, I believe that for many reasons that actually you mentioned in your introduction
01:02:05 --> 01:02:10 and thinking about social workers, and I think you mentioned veterans and educators.
01:02:10 --> 01:02:16 There are groups of workers in our society that literally help society function.
01:02:16 --> 01:02:20 And I believe that youth workers are one of them, though they're often invisible,
01:02:21 --> 01:02:24 and not always mentioned alongside classroom teachers.
01:02:24 --> 01:02:29 So youth workers, again, are the professionals who work in nonprofit youth-serving organizations,
01:02:30 --> 01:02:34 community-based serving organizations, those that might be identified as after-school
01:02:34 --> 01:02:38 programs, whether they are run by school districts or independent programs,
01:02:39 --> 01:02:41 independent organizations across the country.
01:02:42 --> 01:02:45 And so when you think about young people spending time in school,
01:02:46 --> 01:02:49 they only spend about 18% of time in school.
01:02:49 --> 01:02:52 Some of my colleagues, fellow sociologists, have studied this, right?
01:02:52 --> 01:02:57 Which means that 18% of their time is spent in school, they spend about 41%
01:02:57 --> 01:03:01 of time sleeping, which means their waking hours is another 40%.
01:03:01 --> 01:03:05 And so during that time, they are doing things like leisure activities,
01:03:05 --> 01:03:08 being at home, chores, and extracurricular activities.
01:03:08 --> 01:03:12 So spending time outside of school, engaging with their peers,
01:03:12 --> 01:03:15 or some kind of other forms of activities.
01:03:17 --> 01:03:21 During non-school hours, right, which means that parents are allowed to work,
01:03:21 --> 01:03:25 right? So when parents are allowed to work beyond the school hours,
01:03:25 --> 01:03:30 that is serving our economy, right? They can be into the workforce.
01:03:30 --> 01:03:35 Youth workers also support our school systems. Many community-based youth-serving
01:03:35 --> 01:03:39 organizations, or how I talk about them in my work, community-based educational
01:03:39 --> 01:03:42 spaces, they are often making up for what schools lack.
01:03:43 --> 01:03:46 What they can't provide, or what they refuse to provide, right?
01:03:47 --> 01:03:50 And so you have youth workers who are in many ways filling in the gap and meeting
01:03:50 --> 01:03:54 young people, not as part of their family, not as part of their school,
01:03:54 --> 01:03:58 but there are these other group of people that are supporting the social,
01:03:58 --> 01:04:01 political, educational development of young people.
01:04:02 --> 01:04:08 And so I don't think this is too much to say, but I do think that on some level
01:04:08 --> 01:04:13 society would collapse, right, if you didn't have spaces where young people could go after school.
01:04:14 --> 01:04:18 And those places that they're going after school, they are staffed by youth
01:04:18 --> 01:04:23 workers, by people who love young folks who are working to ensure that they're
01:04:23 --> 01:04:26 okay, that they are safe.
01:04:27 --> 01:04:31 And then also thinking about the number of resources that might be provided
01:04:31 --> 01:04:36 to young people. So many youth serving organizations are serving meals,
01:04:36 --> 01:04:40 providing young people with snacks after school, and they may not I've eaten that day, right?
01:04:40 --> 01:04:46 So it's essential labor that I argue is often in the shadows,
01:04:46 --> 01:04:48 right? Hence the title of the book, Laboring in the Shadows,
01:04:49 --> 01:04:51 that these organizations, these.
01:04:52 --> 01:05:00 Programs that support young people and their families are kind of everywhere, right, in many ways.
01:05:00 --> 01:05:03 So you think about our national youth-serving organizations,
01:05:03 --> 01:05:07 the Boys and Girls Club, the Y, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, like those are national
01:05:07 --> 01:05:11 programs. But there are so many independent grassroots programs that are not
01:05:11 --> 01:05:12 tethered to national networks.
01:05:13 --> 01:05:17 But then you also have work that's taking place in faith-based communities,
01:05:17 --> 01:05:23 right, or in parks, museums, libraries, right? So youth workers are really everywhere.
01:05:23 --> 01:05:25 Right. They're they're doing this labor.
01:05:25 --> 01:05:29 And I would suggest that they're often hidden in plain sight.
01:05:29 --> 01:05:32 Right. We interact with them, but we may not know that that's what they're doing.
01:05:32 --> 01:05:38 Yeah yeah but i don't think that's an extreme statement as far as to say that
01:05:38 --> 01:05:41 the society would collapse because all throughout history,
01:05:42 --> 01:05:46 there's always been programs to try to keep us out of trouble right you boy scouts,
01:05:47 --> 01:05:53 yeah right the little league baseball you know the the police action athletic
01:05:53 --> 01:05:58 league all these things were set up you mentioned boys and girls clubs those were all things to try to,
01:05:59 --> 01:06:03 keep us from getting into trouble and doing anything, you know,
01:06:03 --> 01:06:08 that little kids or teenagers or especially middle school kids.
01:06:09 --> 01:06:12 I didn't realize how bad middle school kids were until I got older.
01:06:13 --> 01:06:17 It was like, you know, I was like, was I that bad at 12 and 13?
01:06:17 --> 01:06:20 Because it was like, we didn't have middle school in Chicago.
01:06:20 --> 01:06:24 It was like you went from kindergarten to eighth grade. So maybe that minimize
01:06:24 --> 01:06:29 the damage we could do. I don't know, because we were like upperclassmen in that school.
01:06:30 --> 01:06:35 It's a special time. It is a special time of development, for sure. For sure.
01:06:35 --> 01:06:39 I spent some time working in nonprofits with middle school students,
01:06:39 --> 01:06:42 sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders.
01:06:42 --> 01:06:45 And they're cool in the sense that they will tell you the truth,
01:06:45 --> 01:06:46 right? Like they have no filter.
01:06:47 --> 01:06:50 But which is part of the reason why I think youth work is really important is
01:06:50 --> 01:06:54 because what's happening at that age, right, they're beginning to question,
01:06:54 --> 01:06:57 right, question their parents, which is why they talk back a lot, right?
01:06:57 --> 01:07:00 They're awkward, right? So they're coming into their bodies.
01:07:00 --> 01:07:05 They're trying to recognize and name like the many different kinds of emotions that they're feeling.
01:07:05 --> 01:07:08 And there's often not a space for that in traditional schools.
01:07:09 --> 01:07:13 And so when I think about the nonprofit sector and youth workers who are able
01:07:13 --> 01:07:17 to think about like, all right, middle school kid, like you're going through
01:07:17 --> 01:07:18 this, you're going through that, you're weren't this.
01:07:19 --> 01:07:21 Let's kind of think about all that together.
01:07:22 --> 01:07:25 And so I find that the youth workers who engage that population,
01:07:26 --> 01:07:29 they had their work cut out for them, but they also tend to enjoy it because
01:07:30 --> 01:07:33 you're meeting multiple needs of young people.
01:07:33 --> 01:07:39 And it feels like they all converge at the middle school level, for sure.
01:07:42 --> 01:07:47 Let's get off the horror of the middle school kids. Let's explain deficit framing
01:07:47 --> 01:07:50 versus strength-based approach.
01:07:51 --> 01:07:56 Yeah. So actually, in thinking about what you just mentioned around how and
01:07:56 --> 01:08:00 why these programs exist, right, we kind of have to think about the ways that
01:08:00 --> 01:08:03 young people, right, the category of a young person of youth,
01:08:03 --> 01:08:05 the way that they are framed in our society.
01:08:06 --> 01:08:10 And when we think about teenagers, we think about preteens, there's all these
01:08:10 --> 01:08:15 narratives around like how quote unquote bad they might be or like troublemakers.
01:08:15 --> 01:08:19 I remember growing up and my mother had a refrigerator magnet that said,
01:08:19 --> 01:08:21 you don't scare me. I have teenagers.
01:08:22 --> 01:08:26 So it's always like, you know, young people are sort of meant to be kind of
01:08:26 --> 01:08:29 controlled. Right. We're supposed to follow directions and all of that.
01:08:29 --> 01:08:33 And so at the time of even just the emergence of after-school programs when
01:08:34 --> 01:08:38 women, right, had to go into the workforce, children run unsupervised.
01:08:38 --> 01:08:43 So there's always been this language around, we got to keep kids occupied.
01:08:43 --> 01:08:46 We got to keep them occupied and off the streets. Otherwise,
01:08:46 --> 01:08:48 they're going to get into vagrancy.
01:08:48 --> 01:08:52 And so let's put some structure to this out-of-school time. Yeah.
01:08:53 --> 01:08:57 So a lot of that has sort of carried into programming today.
01:08:58 --> 01:09:01 And I've argued throughout my career in the ways that it's been classed,
01:09:01 --> 01:09:03 but then also racialized.
01:09:04 --> 01:09:07 So you get this framing, particularly around young people of color,
01:09:08 --> 01:09:12 primarily Black and Latinx young people, young people living in poverty,
01:09:13 --> 01:09:15 that if they're not occupied,
01:09:15 --> 01:09:20 they're going to roam around the streets and they're going to terrorize the neighborhood.
01:09:20 --> 01:09:27 And so it becomes this, so then community organizations then become these spaces
01:09:27 --> 01:09:30 of containment for black and brown kids.
01:09:31 --> 01:09:35 And I've spent a lot of my career kind of rejecting that because that gets into
01:09:35 --> 01:09:41 these ideas of what they're perceived to be lacking or deficit, right?
01:09:41 --> 01:09:48 And so in youth programming, you get frames that, oh, these kids are at risk.
01:09:48 --> 01:09:50 They're broken. They need to be fixed.
01:09:51 --> 01:09:57 And I think on the surface, that language doesn't appear to be kind of this negative framing.
01:09:58 --> 01:10:01 But when you think about it, it's like, well, at risk of what?
01:10:01 --> 01:10:06 It often puts the blame on individuals and on culture and not in what's lacking
01:10:06 --> 01:10:10 in institutions and what's on sort of structural problems that sort of create
01:10:10 --> 01:10:15 the conditions that young people and, you know, individuals are trying to navigate.
01:10:16 --> 01:10:19 And so that deficit framing throughout my career, I've really sort of pushed
01:10:19 --> 01:10:22 back on it as it pertains to Black education and Black youth.
01:10:23 --> 01:10:27 Because a lack of or something that's different is not deficient.
01:10:28 --> 01:10:34 And that those, the language around youth work that is deficit-oriented positions
01:10:34 --> 01:10:38 these organizations as their saviors, as something to be fixed.
01:10:39 --> 01:10:44 And also that kind of, I think, takes away from their humanity, right?
01:10:44 --> 01:10:47 And it becomes that these organizations are only set up for,
01:10:47 --> 01:10:52 you know, kids of color, right, Black kids or poor kids, when all young people,
01:10:52 --> 01:10:54 right, deserve opportunities to be engaged after school.
01:10:55 --> 01:11:00 The strengths-based approach, on the other hand, is really not looking at what's lacking.
01:11:02 --> 01:11:02 But.
01:11:04 --> 01:11:08 What is already held, right, by young people? What are their talents? What are their gifts?
01:11:10 --> 01:11:13 What has their family and their communities poured into them?
01:11:14 --> 01:11:18 And that the different approach to that is thinking about organizations who
01:11:18 --> 01:11:22 can look at a young person and say, I see you, I see you're already brilliant.
01:11:22 --> 01:11:25 I see you're already whole. I'm just here to help.
01:11:26 --> 01:11:30 I'm here to enhance what you already have. I'm here to maybe expose you to the
01:11:30 --> 01:11:32 things that you want to learn about.
01:11:32 --> 01:11:37 Or things that you may not have access to, but there's nothing wrong with you as a person.
01:11:37 --> 01:11:40 I think much too often, particularly in the education system,
01:11:41 --> 01:11:43 we look at young people as problems.
01:11:44 --> 01:11:49 And in the youth workspace, particularly Black and Latinx young people,
01:11:49 --> 01:11:55 they're looked as problems. And I don't see young people as problems, right?
01:11:55 --> 01:11:59 You know, I see them as joy. I see them as brilliance. I see them as needing
01:11:59 --> 01:12:01 opportunities, you know, needing to be heard.
01:12:02 --> 01:12:05 And so I think that approach, you know, coming from a strength-based approach
01:12:05 --> 01:12:08 is much, much better than a deficit approach.
01:12:08 --> 01:12:13 And again, I can't emphasize enough how sort of the field of youth work has
01:12:13 --> 01:12:17 come a long way in acknowledging this, right?
01:12:17 --> 01:12:21 And it's taken not only my work, but like lots of people before me who have
01:12:21 --> 01:12:24 said, like, we have to frame this work in different ways, right?
01:12:24 --> 01:12:27 Again, we're not fixing anybody. We're not saving anybody.
01:12:27 --> 01:12:30 We are responding to structural conditions, right?
01:12:31 --> 01:12:36 These programs exist because of failures in society, not because anything is
01:12:36 --> 01:12:40 inherently wrong or deficient about young people or their families or communities.
01:12:41 --> 01:12:45 You recently said Black communities have always found ways to educate,
01:12:45 --> 01:12:48 nurture, and prepare Black youth for the world.
01:12:49 --> 01:12:52 Give an example of this resilience. Yeah.
01:12:53 --> 01:12:57 I love that question. And I'll say that
01:12:57 --> 01:13:00 to give a little context to my answer, what I try to do in my book,
01:13:00 --> 01:13:04 Laboring in the Shadows, is connect contemporary Black youth workers who are
01:13:05 --> 01:13:09 engaging in organizations with young people today to a longer history,
01:13:10 --> 01:13:11 of communal care.
01:13:11 --> 01:13:14 And resistance and survival within Black communities.
01:13:14 --> 01:13:19 And so I often point to the example of the Black Panther Party, right?
01:13:19 --> 01:13:24 And their labor and their education work with young people. So programs like
01:13:24 --> 01:13:29 the Free Breakfast Program, thinking about their community and survival conferences,
01:13:30 --> 01:13:34 The ways in which they would emphasize critical consciousness and social awareness
01:13:34 --> 01:13:36 for young people, right?
01:13:36 --> 01:13:40 That kind of political education work even precedes them, right?
01:13:40 --> 01:13:46 Like we've always found ways to nurture, protect, and educate young people.
01:13:46 --> 01:13:49 I think even before then, I talk about in the book,
01:13:50 --> 01:13:56 Mary McLeod Bethune and the work of the Youth Administration and the work that
01:13:56 --> 01:14:00 she did for Black youth in finding employment opportunities and opportunities
01:14:00 --> 01:14:02 for civic engagement, right?
01:14:02 --> 01:14:07 So there's always been the work, right, of whether it's informal,
01:14:07 --> 01:14:13 whether it's, you know, grandparents at the kitchen table, whether it's a formal organization.
01:14:14 --> 01:14:18 Like the National Youth Administration led by Mary McLeod Bethune,
01:14:18 --> 01:14:20 or whether it's the Black Panther Party, right?
01:14:20 --> 01:14:27 There's always been an effort to not only educate young people,
01:14:27 --> 01:14:31 so in terms of what's happening in schools, but also in prepare them for the
01:14:31 --> 01:14:35 world that they were going to inhabit and how the world was going to see them.
01:14:35 --> 01:14:40 And it's often, as Black people, less than human or as a problem.
01:14:40 --> 01:14:45 Right. So how to navigate like white supremacist institutions. Right.
01:14:45 --> 01:14:48 How to sort of carry yourself in the world.
01:14:49 --> 01:14:54 All of that is a part of the education. Right. So education is not just schooling.
01:14:54 --> 01:14:57 Right. It's also how to show up in the world, how to navigate the world.
01:14:58 --> 01:15:02 But that's just always been essential to black communities. Right.
01:15:02 --> 01:15:04 I think about growing up in South L.A., right.
01:15:05 --> 01:15:10 You know, I got talked to by my parents, by my uncles, by my aunts,
01:15:10 --> 01:15:14 cousins about, you know, how the world was going to perceive me. Right.
01:15:14 --> 01:15:18 That was an education that I took with me into the classroom when I went to
01:15:18 --> 01:15:20 college, went to UC Berkeley.
01:15:21 --> 01:15:25 Right. As you know how to prepare for that. Right. As a black student and being
01:15:25 --> 01:15:28 one of few black students on campus in a predominantly white institution.
01:15:28 --> 01:15:33 How was I going to understand who I was right as a black woman in that space?
01:15:33 --> 01:15:37 So that kind of education is not only essential to Black youth work,
01:15:37 --> 01:15:42 but it's always been a part of Black educational practice. Yeah.
01:15:43 --> 01:15:45 And that's, you know, and that's something that.
01:15:46 --> 01:15:53 I guess I try to wrap my mind around a lot of times UCL, Berkeley,
01:15:53 --> 01:15:59 you know, Northwestern schools, even Harvard, you know.
01:16:00 --> 01:16:05 I remember going to visit my friend who went to Northwestern.
01:16:07 --> 01:16:13 And I remember seeing they used to, I guess they had the dorms where the cafeterias were in the dorm.
01:16:14 --> 01:16:20 Dorm and so all the all the black students that lived in that dorm sat at that one table,
01:16:21 --> 01:16:26 and I and I have to and I have to remind myself that I was spoiled I went to
01:16:26 --> 01:16:30 Jackson State okay so when I when I listen to you and my friends and other folks
01:16:30 --> 01:16:34 talk about your experiences at these colleges it's like,
01:16:34 --> 01:16:37 oh yeah that's right it wasn't that many of them around there,
01:16:38 --> 01:16:39 you know It was like they all hung out together.
01:16:40 --> 01:16:43 It was just weird to see all the AK sitting next to the Delta,
01:16:43 --> 01:16:45 sitting next to the Sigma Gamma
01:16:45 --> 01:16:48 Rho, and then the Q. And they were all sitting at the same lunch table.
01:16:49 --> 01:16:54 And I was just like, wow, that's, yeah. So I have to keep, when you said what
01:16:54 --> 01:16:57 you said, that's what triggered that about Berkeley. It was like,
01:16:57 --> 01:17:00 yeah, I guess there wasn't a whole lot of black kids when she was there at Berkeley.
01:17:02 --> 01:17:07 Yeah. Okay. Robin D.G. Kelly said, the catalyst for political engagement has
01:17:07 --> 01:17:12 never been misery, poverty, and oppression, but the promise of constructing a new world.
01:17:12 --> 01:17:14 Do you agree with that statement and why?
01:17:15 --> 01:17:23 Oh, absolutely. I absolutely adore the work of Robin D.G. Kelly and was so thrilled
01:17:23 --> 01:17:25 that he was able to blurb the book.
01:17:26 --> 01:17:29 And his notions of freedom dreaming.
01:17:32 --> 01:17:36 Is so important to me in many ways. So being trained as a sociologist,
01:17:37 --> 01:17:41 I can talk all day about social conditions and structures and systems of inequality.
01:17:42 --> 01:17:43 And I do that. I can do that well.
01:17:44 --> 01:17:48 I love doing that. I love to be able to point out the ways in which structural
01:17:48 --> 01:17:53 oppression sort of shapes our lived experiences. I love doing that.
01:17:53 --> 01:17:59 But also recognizing that there has to be room for not only what I want to tear
01:17:59 --> 01:18:03 down, but also what I want to build, what I want to create, what I want to imagine,
01:18:03 --> 01:18:05 right? What the vision is.
01:18:05 --> 01:18:10 And so the importance of activists, right? I mean, this is, you know,
01:18:10 --> 01:18:15 drawing on Kelly's work and thinking about the systems we might be tearing down,
01:18:15 --> 01:18:16 but what's going to be in its place?
01:18:17 --> 01:18:21 What is, what questions do we have, right? What is our imagination?
01:18:21 --> 01:18:23 What is it that we want to see?
01:18:23 --> 01:18:27 And what I think is so powerful about youth work, particularly in Black space,
01:18:27 --> 01:18:30 and I should have said this at the beginning, but I've been a youth worker since
01:18:30 --> 01:18:35 I was 15, right? So I have always worked alongside young people.
01:18:35 --> 01:18:40 And it did that all the way through, you know, my graduate program.
01:18:40 --> 01:18:44 And there are ways, as a professor now, there's ways that I engage young people,
01:18:44 --> 01:18:46 youth workers, and program leaders around the country.
01:18:47 --> 01:18:52 But that process of being able to imagine a future, to be able to dream,
01:18:52 --> 01:18:57 to be able to create and build is so essential, I think, in life affirming for young people.
01:18:58 --> 01:19:01 And to be able to have the space, to create space, to create opportunities for
01:19:01 --> 01:19:06 young people to dream and to imagine beyond what they think is possible is really
01:19:06 --> 01:19:10 crucial, right? It's really, really crucial to building the world that we want to see.
01:19:11 --> 01:19:16 And so whether it's the idea of freedom dreaming, whether it's sort of sparking
01:19:16 --> 01:19:19 creativity or thinking about not only what you're going to tear down,
01:19:19 --> 01:19:22 but what you're going to build, that process is really important.
01:19:23 --> 01:19:26 And I also think it makes room for critical hope.
01:19:27 --> 01:19:32 So as I was writing the book, well, doing the research for the book was collected,
01:19:33 --> 01:19:38 really at various periods of crises and struggle, right?
01:19:38 --> 01:19:43 So one of the case studies in the book is a city, a Midwestern city,
01:19:43 --> 01:19:48 where 75% of Black youth live below the poverty line,
01:19:49 --> 01:19:53 where there was police violence against young Black people, where there was
01:19:53 --> 01:19:58 violence on the part of white teachers in attacking Black students.
01:19:59 --> 01:20:02 And then another period, so 2020, right?
01:20:03 --> 01:20:07 So on the onset of COVID, as well as what Robin D.G. Kelly calls Black Spring.
01:20:07 --> 01:20:13 So the uprisings against police brutality and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
01:20:13 --> 01:20:19 I think about Ezekiel Ford, you know, 20 make eight, right? And the list goes on and on and on.
01:20:19 --> 01:20:23 All this was happening while I was interviewing people.
01:20:24 --> 01:20:29 And while they're witnessing sort of the loop of Black death in the media over
01:20:29 --> 01:20:32 and over and over again, they were also out protesting.
01:20:33 --> 01:20:37 They were, you know, in Zoom school.
01:20:38 --> 01:20:44 They were, you know, surviving and trying to sort of sustain their life,
01:20:44 --> 01:20:48 but also still hopeful for change.
01:20:48 --> 01:20:52 And I use the word critical hope, and I'm borrowing from various scholars,
01:20:52 --> 01:20:56 including Jeff Duncan Andrade, who talks about critical hope in the sense that
01:20:56 --> 01:21:02 it's not a dismissal or not that you don't acknowledge systemic oppression or
01:21:02 --> 01:21:03 white supremacist forces.
01:21:03 --> 01:21:08 But it's recognizing, right, that that change can happen, right,
01:21:08 --> 01:21:13 or that we can sort of push back, right, on inequality so that it's a critical hope.
01:21:13 --> 01:21:18 And I think that process is just extremely important, right,
01:21:18 --> 01:21:21 to have this both and, to have this awareness of the systems and forces,
01:21:22 --> 01:21:24 that sort of shape our lives and that can constrain our lives,
01:21:24 --> 01:21:30 but also to remain visionary, right, as our ancestors did,
01:21:30 --> 01:21:33 right? As our ancestors did.
01:21:35 --> 01:21:41 The fighting and the survival, all of that, but wishing for a better tomorrow,
01:21:41 --> 01:21:43 for those who came behind them.
01:21:44 --> 01:21:50 That's why I do what I do, is I want to make this better for those who are behind me.
01:21:50 --> 01:21:55 And to do that, I can't lose that critical hope. I can't lose that sense of
01:21:55 --> 01:22:01 imagination or that visioning and the ability to dream of something different. Yeah.
01:22:02 --> 01:22:07 How can the American education system be reconstituted to fulfill the promise
01:22:07 --> 01:22:09 of constructing a new world?
01:22:10 --> 01:22:16 Oh, you know, that's a good question. And I think it's partly part of the reason
01:22:16 --> 01:22:19 why I work outside of the school system in many ways.
01:22:19 --> 01:22:23 And let me let me break that down a little bit. Right. Because I do think that
01:22:23 --> 01:22:26 when we think about schooling.
01:22:26 --> 01:22:30 Right. In American society and the exclusion of black folks. Right.
01:22:31 --> 01:22:34 The degradation and exclusion of native folks and indigenous folks. Right.
01:22:35 --> 01:22:39 We have to sort of think about the education system in that way and the ways
01:22:39 --> 01:22:42 that it wasn't designed right for us. And so because of that,
01:22:42 --> 01:22:49 there are mechanisms and processes within school systems that continually fail. Right. Our kids.
01:22:50 --> 01:22:52 And in many ways, I think that's by design.
01:22:53 --> 01:22:59 That said, right, there are schools and school systems and educators who are
01:22:59 --> 01:23:04 brilliant and sort of, you know, working and supporting young people.
01:23:04 --> 01:23:09 As a sociologist of education that studies outside of school,
01:23:09 --> 01:23:13 that studies community organizations that in many ways are a complement or a supplement to school,
01:23:14 --> 01:23:20 what I would envision, right, to really kind of make this better.
01:23:22 --> 01:23:25 Is to think about what's happening in the out-of-school sector,
01:23:25 --> 01:23:30 what's happening in youth workspaces, to bring that in connection and in partnership
01:23:30 --> 01:23:31 to what's happening in schools.
01:23:31 --> 01:23:37 And that's not to say that what's happening in community-based educational spaces
01:23:37 --> 01:23:42 needs to fold into what's happening in schools, but to recognize them both, right, as,
01:23:43 --> 01:23:48 separate entities, but entities that could come together to support the optimal
01:23:48 --> 01:23:50 development of young people.
01:23:51 --> 01:23:54 And I say this for a couple of reasons, just to kind of give you some concrete examples.
01:23:55 --> 01:23:58 In many schools of education, there are teacher education programs, right?
01:23:59 --> 01:24:03 When I was on the faculty at UW-Madison, I had a colleague who sent her pre-service
01:24:03 --> 01:24:07 teachers not into the classroom first for their training.
01:24:07 --> 01:24:11 She sent them to community-based youth-serving organizations to work alongside
01:24:11 --> 01:24:15 youth workers to learn how to connect with young people, right?
01:24:16 --> 01:24:20 So in schools, there are often constraints and constraints and,
01:24:20 --> 01:24:23 you know, teachers having to teach the test and all these things and their jobs
01:24:23 --> 01:24:25 are extremely difficult.
01:24:25 --> 01:24:29 But oftentimes there's not a sort of time or the ways in which sometimes teachers
01:24:29 --> 01:24:33 are sort of put in this position of authority and having all the power.
01:24:34 --> 01:24:37 Whereas in youth work, not all the time, but for the most part,
01:24:38 --> 01:24:41 youth workers are able to connect with young people without some of the barriers
01:24:41 --> 01:24:42 that teachers face. right?
01:24:43 --> 01:24:47 And so it's not lost on me that many schools of education are looking to community-based
01:24:47 --> 01:24:51 youth-serving organizations and youth workers for how to connect with young
01:24:51 --> 01:24:55 people, how to think about whole child development, right?
01:24:55 --> 01:25:00 That academics are important, but also social, emotional support is also important.
01:25:00 --> 01:25:04 So when I think about how we might transform the education system,
01:25:04 --> 01:25:06 I think we have to learn from...
01:25:07 --> 01:25:13 All educators, right? Young people have many educators in their lives.
01:25:13 --> 01:25:16 That includes their families. That includes youth workers.
01:25:17 --> 01:25:18 That includes classroom teachers.
01:25:19 --> 01:25:23 That there are multiple spaces of learning. That's not just the school walls,
01:25:23 --> 01:25:26 right? It's what's happening in parks. What's happening on their blocks,
01:25:26 --> 01:25:28 right? What's happening in their faith-based communities.
01:25:29 --> 01:25:33 All that is important. So I really think it's important in particular for youth
01:25:33 --> 01:25:38 workers, program leaders to be in conversation, right, with classroom teachers
01:25:38 --> 01:25:40 and school administrators.
01:25:40 --> 01:25:45 I'll give you one more example. So at the beginning of COVID,
01:25:46 --> 01:25:50 I had one Twitter rant, one Twitter rant back then.
01:25:50 --> 01:25:55 And there were all these conversations about what was going to happen in the
01:25:55 --> 01:26:00 fall, right? Because the onset of the pandemic came in March.
01:26:00 --> 01:26:03 And so there was all this panic about what was going to happen with schools.
01:26:04 --> 01:26:08 So there were these panels and all these conversations and school principals
01:26:08 --> 01:26:11 and teachers and all these people. And I'm like, this is great,
01:26:11 --> 01:26:13 but you're not doing this alone.
01:26:13 --> 01:26:16 Young people have community organizations they go to after school.
01:26:17 --> 01:26:23 Do you know where your kids are going after school? Right? So what's happening in those spaces?
01:26:24 --> 01:26:27 What can we learn? How can we partner?
01:26:28 --> 01:26:32 And as we saw, there were libraries that were opening their spaces to provide
01:26:33 --> 01:26:35 internet services, right, to young people.
01:26:35 --> 01:26:39 You have folks who were, you know, pivoting and working in parks, right?
01:26:40 --> 01:26:43 You know, I think about San Francisco that, you know, created these learning
01:26:43 --> 01:26:47 hubs to support the kids of essential workers, right?
01:26:47 --> 01:26:51 So you had parks and recreation coming together with libraries,
01:26:51 --> 01:26:54 coming together with nonprofit youth-serving organizations to make sure that
01:26:54 --> 01:26:56 young people could learn, right?
01:26:57 --> 01:27:01 So it's just, youth workers have always been there.
01:27:02 --> 01:27:07 They're also exemplary at care work, and in particular, care in crises.
01:27:08 --> 01:27:11 And so I think we have to learn from each other.
01:27:12 --> 01:27:17 We have to be able to pull like what's wonderful and beautiful about schools
01:27:17 --> 01:27:20 and what's wonderful and beautiful about community organizations and be able to talk to each other.
01:27:21 --> 01:27:26 But that also requires, right, school systems and classroom educators to see
01:27:26 --> 01:27:34 youth workers as educators, right, as pedagogues, even if they don't have the same kind of degrees or,
01:27:34 --> 01:27:37 training in the way that they think is needed, right?
01:27:38 --> 01:27:41 So I just think that's really important for us to just really think about young
01:27:41 --> 01:27:46 people's broader ecosystem of learning, that it's not just schools.
01:27:46 --> 01:27:48 It's never been just schools.
01:27:49 --> 01:27:55 It's never been just that, right? So we have to really learn from young people's
01:27:55 --> 01:28:00 broader ecosystem of development and the people, the educators who are in that ecosystem.
01:28:01 --> 01:28:04 So, I forgot to ask you the Harvard question. I'll get back to that.
01:28:04 --> 01:28:10 But since you're on this flow, in the context of changing the American educational
01:28:10 --> 01:28:15 system, was the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education a good thing or a bad thing?
01:28:16 --> 01:28:22 Dismantling? You mean under this current administration? Yes, ma'am. Yeah, I mean.
01:28:25 --> 01:28:29 I mean, there's so much to say.
01:28:30 --> 01:28:34 One, I think it's a bad thing, right? I think there's a lot of infrastructure
01:28:35 --> 01:28:38 that has been established that has been undone.
01:28:38 --> 01:28:46 I often think about protections for students and for teachers that are completely undermined now.
01:28:46 --> 01:28:52 That is a disservice and heartbreaking in many ways. I mean,
01:28:52 --> 01:28:54 I think there's just so much to rebuild.
01:28:54 --> 01:28:58 And this is not to say, right, because, you know, as a sociologist of education,
01:28:58 --> 01:29:03 I have lots of critiques, right, of the way, you know, the federal government,
01:29:03 --> 01:29:07 you know, treats education and the way that things are set up.
01:29:07 --> 01:29:09 I have lots of criticisms for sure.
01:29:10 --> 01:29:14 But also I think about the infrastructural support, like for one,
01:29:14 --> 01:29:20 in thinking about students with disabilities and the protections, right?
01:29:21 --> 01:29:27 Like how all those things get undermined, it's just a really dangerous position.
01:29:28 --> 01:29:31 That we're in. So no, it's not a good thing at all.
01:29:32 --> 01:29:39 Yeah, because based on that answer, you're more about the foundations of what
01:29:39 --> 01:29:44 was good and build on that instead of just scrapping the whole project and starting from scratch.
01:29:45 --> 01:29:50 And I mean, you'll get arguments from either way, but I respect what you're
01:29:50 --> 01:29:53 saying as far as it's not a good thing.
01:29:53 --> 01:29:58 I agree. It's not a good thing. But, you know, because you're a visionary person,
01:29:59 --> 01:30:05 I was I wanted to pick your brain on that, which leads me back to the Harvard question.
01:30:05 --> 01:30:12 So why is Harvard an important American institution, especially as it pertains to your profession?
01:30:15 --> 01:30:18 Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think...
01:30:19 --> 01:30:23 So I've been at Harvard for, I think I just finished my fourth year there.
01:30:23 --> 01:30:28 As I mentioned, I was on the faculty at UW-Madison before that for a while, for several years.
01:30:29 --> 01:30:34 I don't, let me answer this in a couple of ways, maybe without losing my job.
01:30:34 --> 01:30:43 But I think that sort of universities in general, right? Like they are important
01:30:43 --> 01:30:45 in terms of the knowledge that gets produced.
01:30:45 --> 01:30:49 And I think that's absolutely important and critical. I know I've been working
01:30:49 --> 01:30:53 in universities for a very, very long time for that reason, right?
01:30:53 --> 01:30:55 The knowledge production, the learning and all of that.
01:30:56 --> 01:31:01 I mean, I think that Harvard as being considered one of the best institutions
01:31:01 --> 01:31:05 in the country and in the world, that's not lost on me.
01:31:07 --> 01:31:11 And I will also say I think there are many universities throughout the country,
01:31:12 --> 01:31:15 where there are brilliant minds, brilliant thinkers, brilliant scholars who
01:31:15 --> 01:31:21 are pushing for new knowledge that help us as a society,
01:31:22 --> 01:31:28 not only solve complex problems in ways that are creative.
01:31:28 --> 01:31:34 And so I think all universities can, not all universities, but many universities can get that.
01:31:35 --> 01:31:39 That credit. What I do think is special about Harvard, and I'll just kind of
01:31:39 --> 01:31:46 brag on where I'm situated, which is the School of Education, is that you do get.
01:31:48 --> 01:31:56 Various approaches to solving complex educational problems, which are deep social
01:31:56 --> 01:31:57 and political problems as well.
01:31:58 --> 01:32:02 And this is something that I often say to my students, right?
01:32:02 --> 01:32:04 And it's, you know, going back to your question about the Department of Education,
01:32:05 --> 01:32:11 we have created a mess, like complicated, complex, interconnected,
01:32:12 --> 01:32:16 systemic problems as it relates to education in America.
01:32:17 --> 01:32:21 And so I don't believe in like one thing, like a silver bullet,
01:32:21 --> 01:32:26 like one solution fixing multiple complex social problems, right?
01:32:27 --> 01:32:32 And so what I appreciate about Harvard and particularly the Graduate School
01:32:32 --> 01:32:36 of Education is that I have colleagues who are working in many different dimensions of education.
01:32:36 --> 01:32:40 So whether it's policy, whether it's thinking about storytelling and the power
01:32:40 --> 01:32:45 of storytelling to create change, Or, you know, there's so many different avenues
01:32:45 --> 01:32:49 and ways in which people are tackling, right, educational and social problems.
01:32:50 --> 01:32:53 So that's important to me. And I think whether it's a Harvard question or a
01:32:53 --> 01:32:59 university question, I think it's in general the ways that scholarship can influence social change.
01:33:00 --> 01:33:05 And then being in an education school and being a sociologist that is,
01:33:06 --> 01:33:09 I always say that I, you know, have a foot in the community.
01:33:10 --> 01:33:14 And that's exactly where I want to be. Like, I never want to abandon what got
01:33:14 --> 01:33:20 me to where I am. And for me, that's community, that's young people, that's youth workers.
01:33:20 --> 01:33:26 And so I appreciate universities that honor and celebrate community engagement
01:33:27 --> 01:33:32 and that are also honest, right, about the harm that they've caused as universities, right?
01:33:32 --> 01:33:37 So I think about Harvard's Legacy of Slavery Project and other kinds of projects
01:33:37 --> 01:33:41 where you have to be sort of accountable, right, to the harm that you've caused in the past.
01:33:41 --> 01:33:44 Whether you were there to create it or not, right, as a part of an institution
01:33:44 --> 01:33:47 that has this legacy, it's important to address that.
01:33:48 --> 01:33:54 So I appreciate that as well. But I would say my overall answer is universities
01:33:54 --> 01:33:59 in general, including Harvard, bring together really, really brilliant minds that,
01:34:00 --> 01:34:06 hopefully understand that not one idea, not one theory, not one method is going
01:34:06 --> 01:34:10 to solve the complexity of the problems that we have in this country. Yeah.
01:34:11 --> 01:34:16 So I want to be cognizant of your time. I've got two questions left.
01:34:17 --> 01:34:19 So if you want to, well, okay.
01:34:19 --> 01:34:22 How does police violence impact education?
01:34:23 --> 01:34:30 Oh, yeah. Anyways, so I don't think you can talk about education without talking
01:34:30 --> 01:34:35 about other social issues and forces and systems. So I don't think you can talk
01:34:35 --> 01:34:38 about schools without talking about policing in this country.
01:34:39 --> 01:34:42 You know, I have many colleagues who sort of study the parallels,
01:34:42 --> 01:34:47 right, between the prison system and the education system or the carceral logics
01:34:47 --> 01:34:48 that, right, exist within schools.
01:34:49 --> 01:34:55 And so while this is not like my research area, I'm very much have always been concerned.
01:34:55 --> 01:34:59 It can sort of point to the ways in which carceral logics enter classrooms,
01:34:59 --> 01:35:06 enter sort of the ways in which young people can and can't move within schools, right?
01:35:07 --> 01:35:11 The ways in which they are surveilled, the ways in which they are physically attacked, right?
01:35:11 --> 01:35:15 The ways in which they are silenced and often pleased for the ways that they
01:35:15 --> 01:35:17 show up, their physical appearance to what they say.
01:35:18 --> 01:35:22 All of that, right, is deeply connected for sure.
01:35:23 --> 01:35:27 Some of my favorite scholars who sort of talk about the carcerality and the
01:35:27 --> 01:35:31 connections between education and schooling, I think about Damien Sojourner.
01:35:32 --> 01:35:35 His book, First Strike, is incredible.
01:35:36 --> 01:35:39 And that way I think about David Stovall, he mentioned Chicago.
01:35:40 --> 01:35:43 He's one of my favorites. And sort of just thinking about the relationship,
01:35:43 --> 01:35:49 right, between sort of the prison industrial complex and education.
01:35:49 --> 01:35:53 So there's absolutely lots of parallels. When I was at UW-Madison,
01:35:53 --> 01:35:55 I taught a course on youth education and society.
01:35:55 --> 01:36:00 We had an entire section on carceral logics and thinking about what many scholars
01:36:00 --> 01:36:04 have termed not the school-to-prison pipeline, per se, but a nexus,
01:36:04 --> 01:36:09 right, in the ways in which it's deeply embedded, right?
01:36:09 --> 01:36:15 Yeah, I think about David Turner at UCLA, who has done incredible work with
01:36:15 --> 01:36:20 organizing Black and brown young men in their fight against police violence,
01:36:20 --> 01:36:24 right, in schools and within communities in South Central Los Angeles.
01:36:24 --> 01:36:28 So there's just tons of brilliant work out there on this topic,
01:36:28 --> 01:36:31 but the connections are real for sure.
01:36:32 --> 01:36:39 And again, always deeply concerned about the carceral logics that sort of seep
01:36:39 --> 01:36:44 into education in ways that we may not even fully recognize.
01:36:46 --> 01:36:50 And that sometimes has shown up in youth work as well in terms of policing the
01:36:50 --> 01:36:54 bodies of young people, policing the sexuality of young people,
01:36:54 --> 01:36:57 particularly Black women and girls.
01:36:57 --> 01:37:03 And so, you know, I really always encourage anybody who works with young people,
01:37:03 --> 01:37:07 whether you're in schools and out of schools, I always ask them to sort of question
01:37:07 --> 01:37:10 like why they ask young people to do certain things and where it comes from.
01:37:11 --> 01:37:15 Right when we when we are struggling for for power and authority over young
01:37:15 --> 01:37:20 people right like that logic of like i need to have this power i need to have
01:37:20 --> 01:37:23 like this kind of authority over young people and their bodies and what they
01:37:23 --> 01:37:25 say and what they do for me is very carceral.
01:37:27 --> 01:37:32 And i don't know that we always think about it in that in that way and you know
01:37:32 --> 01:37:35 i mean i mentioned this earlier i mean i think that there are ideas we have
01:37:35 --> 01:37:40 about young people as a just category right as a population, for sure.
01:37:41 --> 01:37:46 And then when you add in race and class and gender, right, there's more that gets added into that.
01:37:46 --> 01:37:51 And so I think we really have to sometimes pause, right, and for sure absolutely sort of reflect,
01:37:52 --> 01:37:57 like deep critical reflection on why we do the things we do,
01:37:57 --> 01:38:03 you know, why our schools look particular ways, like why we are in such a quest
01:38:03 --> 01:38:06 for power and authority, right, over young people as though they can't make
01:38:06 --> 01:38:08 decisions for themselves, you know, yeah.
01:38:09 --> 01:38:14 Yeah. And part of it is just exterior, too, because if you go to Jackson,
01:38:14 --> 01:38:18 Mississippi, I don't know if you've ever been, but there's two high schools. I haven't.
01:38:18 --> 01:38:26 So one high school is built like right literally across the street from a cemetery.
01:38:28 --> 01:38:35 And, and one, they put like a barbed wire fence around the school.
01:38:37 --> 01:38:40 And I was just like, you know, I couldn't do nothing about the,
01:38:40 --> 01:38:43 the, the high school that was across from the cemetery.
01:38:43 --> 01:38:48 Cause that was historical from black folks settling in, in, in everything was
01:38:48 --> 01:38:52 in one spot because the elementary school is right next to high school. Right.
01:38:52 --> 01:38:56 But at the at the at the other high school they have the barbed wire fence,
01:38:57 --> 01:39:00 we were challenging the superintendent who was a black man it's like why would
01:39:00 --> 01:39:02 you do that well we got to protect the students,
01:39:02 --> 01:39:07 so don't you have like magnanometers in the school don't you have like police
01:39:07 --> 01:39:11 officers well you know you don't want to trespass it it's like it's a school,
01:39:12 --> 01:39:16 it's a school it's like my old high school in chicago doesn't have a barbed
01:39:16 --> 01:39:20 wire fence it's got a fence but it's not barbed wire You know what I'm saying?
01:39:20 --> 01:39:23 A barbed wire fence sends a message.
01:39:23 --> 01:39:24 Anyway. Absolutely.
01:39:25 --> 01:39:30 I mean, a big message, right? And then I don't know if you've seen some of the
01:39:30 --> 01:39:34 schools that will have making sure that students stay in a particular color
01:39:35 --> 01:39:38 in the hallway, right? So they're literally tracking students.
01:39:38 --> 01:39:39 I'm like, we're talking about prison.
01:39:41 --> 01:39:47 Like, what's happening? Towing the line. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that's crazy.
01:39:47 --> 01:39:51 All right. Let's get off of that. How is joy a form of resistance?
01:39:53 --> 01:40:01 I love this question. You know, I think, you know, joy for me is not just sort of an emotion, right?
01:40:01 --> 01:40:05 Or, you know, it is an emotion, but it's not just that. And I think there are
01:40:05 --> 01:40:09 times when, you know, taglines like joy and resistance, like it feels like it's,
01:40:10 --> 01:40:11 just something that people say.
01:40:11 --> 01:40:14 But I really think it's deeper than that, particularly when you're thinking
01:40:14 --> 01:40:17 about Black life, Black survival.
01:40:17 --> 01:40:21 And I think about Black Joy as a.
01:40:23 --> 01:40:28 Sort of as a part of this idea of both and, right? That Black folks are fighting,
01:40:28 --> 01:40:31 we're working, we're surviving, we're thriving, like all those things.
01:40:32 --> 01:40:37 And right through injustice, through white supremacy, through deep anti-Blackness,
01:40:37 --> 01:40:39 there is community, right?
01:40:40 --> 01:40:44 There is creativity, there's art, there's culture, right? Like all of these
01:40:44 --> 01:40:52 things get produced that bring joy in the midst of struggle and pain, right? And suffering.
01:40:52 --> 01:40:57 And that's, I'm always like, ah, wouldn't want to be anything other than Black, right?
01:40:59 --> 01:41:03 You know, the idea of making a way out of no way or, you know,
01:41:03 --> 01:41:07 sort of, you know, laughing to keep from crying, like those kinds of things,
01:41:07 --> 01:41:08 like not that you shouldn't cry, right?
01:41:08 --> 01:41:13 Like, you know, but like holding all those things together at once is deeply,
01:41:14 --> 01:41:19 it's just always been important to the work that we do in the world.
01:41:19 --> 01:41:20 And so when I think about,
01:41:22 --> 01:41:26 activism within Black communities, when I think about education in Black communities,
01:41:26 --> 01:41:29 when I think about political organizing in Black communities,
01:41:29 --> 01:41:33 there's always a form of joy present, right?
01:41:34 --> 01:41:38 And I think that it's sustaining, right? It's like through the struggle,
01:41:38 --> 01:41:43 through the pain, all of that, we're going to create, we're going to laugh,
01:41:43 --> 01:41:48 we're going to build. And it doesn't mean that the suffering isn't happening, right?
01:41:48 --> 01:41:54 As we're working against that, but it also means that joy is present too.
01:41:54 --> 01:41:56 And in my book, I found that,
01:41:58 --> 01:42:00 the interviews that I did, youth workers were.
01:42:03 --> 01:42:07 Though they were alongside young people protesting the murder of George Floyd.
01:42:09 --> 01:42:13 In those conversations and helping young people process and literally try to
01:42:13 --> 01:42:18 make sense of everything that they were experiencing, there might be music involved.
01:42:19 --> 01:42:25 There might be food involved. There might be other forms of connection and joy
01:42:25 --> 01:42:30 and laughter and fellowship that is sustaining, right?
01:42:30 --> 01:42:34 And that is allowing young people and youth workers to get through the day,
01:42:34 --> 01:42:37 right? To get through the week, to get through the month, right?
01:42:38 --> 01:42:41 That's just so important. So I see it as a life force.
01:42:41 --> 01:42:46 I see it as sustaining. I see it as respite, right? From the every day of every day.
01:42:47 --> 01:42:52 You know, and the sort of desire to keep going, right?
01:42:53 --> 01:42:59 That there's joy present, right? Amid the pain and suffering that might have been, you know.
01:43:01 --> 01:43:04 I'm thinking about like Frankie Beverly and Maze, like the joy and pain,
01:43:04 --> 01:43:09 right? Like sunshine and rain, right? Like it just, it really goes together
01:43:09 --> 01:43:13 in many ways. And I, and, you know, even as a Black academic.
01:43:15 --> 01:43:20 Like, the joy sort of also keeps me from going into the depths of despair.
01:43:21 --> 01:43:28 And I find that it can be really easy to do that, like, given all that we're faced with.
01:43:29 --> 01:43:32 Yeah, it prevents me from going to the depths of despair as well.
01:43:32 --> 01:43:33 So, yeah, I'll just end there.
01:43:34 --> 01:43:40 Okay. All right. So finish this sentence. I have hope because...
01:43:43 --> 01:43:48 Because my elders had hope for me. Okay. All right.
01:43:48 --> 01:43:54 So, Bianca, Dr. Bianca Baldridge, how can people reach out to you?
01:43:54 --> 01:43:58 How can people get this book, Laboring in the Shadows, or any other book that you have written? Yeah.
01:44:00 --> 01:44:04 How can they do that? Yeah, so I have two books. My first book, Reclaiming Community.
01:44:04 --> 01:44:09 My second book is Laboring in the Shadows. You can get that anywhere you buy books online.
01:44:09 --> 01:44:13 So they're both from Stanford University Press. So you go to Stanford University
01:44:13 --> 01:44:17 Press, you can go to Bookshop and support your favorite local bookstore,
01:44:18 --> 01:44:20 Amazon, Barnes & Noble online as well.
01:44:20 --> 01:44:27 To stay in touch with me, I'm Bianca Jontae, B-I-A-N-C-A-J-O-N-T-A-E on all social media.
01:44:28 --> 01:44:36 Well, Dr. Bianca Jontae Baldridge, thank you for doing this. Thank you for the work that you're doing.
01:44:36 --> 01:44:42 I was teasing you about the obsession with youth workers, but it's really cool
01:44:42 --> 01:44:49 that there's somebody that really has a passion for people to have a passion, right?
01:44:50 --> 01:44:57 And I really commend you for being that scholarly voice for those folks doing that kind of work.
01:44:57 --> 01:45:03 And I just really am humbled that you took the time out in the middle of your
01:45:03 --> 01:45:07 conference to do this podcast. I greatly appreciate it. So thank you so much.
01:45:08 --> 01:45:13 Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Decoteau Irby speaks so highly of you.
01:45:13 --> 01:45:17 So he was on your podcast maybe last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
01:45:17 --> 01:45:22 Yeah, so, and he's a, now, do you have a hidden talent like Decoteau and you're
01:45:22 --> 01:45:24 a musician or anything like that or?
01:45:25 --> 01:45:27 I'm, you know, I can make playlists.
01:45:28 --> 01:45:33 I had a, I had a, I had a very short stint DJing, but I absolutely love,
01:45:34 --> 01:45:35 love music. So I collect vinyl.
01:45:36 --> 01:45:43 Yeah, jazz, funk, soul. That's kind of what I love. But I don't have any talent like Dakota.
01:45:44 --> 01:45:47 I got you. Well, I don't know now if you were DJing now. I don't know this.
01:45:47 --> 01:45:50 DJing now is not the same as DJing when I was in high school.
01:45:51 --> 01:45:55 Right. Short stint. Short stint. Very short. I see. Well, look,
01:45:55 --> 01:45:57 again, thank you for doing this.
01:45:58 --> 01:46:01 The rule is you have an open invitation. So if you write another book,
01:46:02 --> 01:46:05 you know, whatever, anything that you want to get off your chest,
01:46:06 --> 01:46:08 once you've been on the show, you have an open invitation to come back.
01:46:08 --> 01:46:15 So I would be honored if you accepted that opportunity and came back on.
01:46:15 --> 01:46:18 So just let me know and we'll make that happen.
01:46:18 --> 01:46:21 Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Erik. All right,
01:46:21 --> 01:46:23 guys, we're going to catch out on the other side.
01:46:35 --> 01:46:43 All right, and we are back. And so I want to thank Alexandra Natapoff and Dr.
01:46:43 --> 01:46:46 Bianca J. Baldridge for coming on the podcast.
01:46:47 --> 01:46:49 Incredible interviews.
01:46:50 --> 01:46:54 Enjoyed the conversations. Very, very,
01:46:56 --> 01:47:04 relaxed. I mean, you know, I try to tell people that I'm not in this gotcha game. you.
01:47:06 --> 01:47:11 You know, I invite people on to give their opinions.
01:47:12 --> 01:47:17 And, you know, it seems like the majority, overwhelming majority of people that
01:47:17 --> 01:47:22 come on, we at least are within the same political tribe.
01:47:23 --> 01:47:28 But it's not because I exclude other people. It's just the way it works.
01:47:28 --> 01:47:33 And I've had folks on the other side come on, too. And I hope they can tell
01:47:33 --> 01:47:36 you that it was a very relaxed environment.
01:47:37 --> 01:47:46 They came on and, you know, wasn't, you know, I wanted somebody to beat up on or somebody to fuss at.
01:47:47 --> 01:47:52 I just want to hear your viewpoint. And the main thing I used to tell them sometimes
01:47:52 --> 01:48:00 it's like, you know, you have this audience that maybe you won't normally reach.
01:48:01 --> 01:48:04 Try to convince them your point of view.
01:48:05 --> 01:48:09 And it seems like that strategy has worked out pretty good. But these two interviews
01:48:09 --> 01:48:10 are very, very relaxing.
01:48:12 --> 01:48:18 You know, and it's just the way my schedule is now to get people to come on,
01:48:18 --> 01:48:19 I'm extremely grateful.
01:48:19 --> 01:48:24 You know, there's a lot of stuff going on, especially in the summer,
01:48:24 --> 01:48:27 and now school is coming back in.
01:48:27 --> 01:48:32 So, you know, for people who actually teach for a living.
01:48:32 --> 01:48:36 This is a real hectic time because they're trying to get their classes situated,
01:48:37 --> 01:48:44 kind of get a feel for how their students are and, you know, go from there.
01:48:44 --> 01:48:51 So for Professor Natapoff and Professor Baldridge, again, thank you.
01:48:51 --> 01:48:57 Thank you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Enjoy the conversations.
01:48:59 --> 01:49:00 Really, really did. Anyway.
01:49:05 --> 01:49:10 I want to quickly touch on something that really kind of falls in where my mindset,
01:49:11 --> 01:49:19 is this week and then get into what I want to say about a thought that I had.
01:49:20 --> 01:49:26 So, allegedly, Mitch McConnell is, as you heard in the news report,
01:49:27 --> 01:49:36 has been moved from this rehab center he was at to now he's supposed to rehab at home.
01:49:37 --> 01:49:44 And according to the statement that allegedly he said that he should be rejoining
01:49:44 --> 01:49:49 the Senate shortly. Well, here's the thing about that.
01:49:50 --> 01:49:55 The election to replace him is going to take place in November.
01:49:56 --> 01:50:02 And then, you know, unless he wants to make some grand farewell or something,
01:50:03 --> 01:50:10 you know, in December, is he really coming back before January?
01:50:12 --> 01:50:15 So there's a lot of people on my side of the fence.
01:50:16 --> 01:50:21 I think he's dead already. And for whatever reason, they're just kind of prolonging
01:50:21 --> 01:50:23 it so the governor won't.
01:50:24 --> 01:50:27 But they've gone past the deadline for him to appoint somebody.
01:50:27 --> 01:50:29 So now, you know, they just.
01:50:31 --> 01:50:35 If they do decide they're going to announce to the world that he has passed
01:50:35 --> 01:50:39 away, then it'll be some kind of special election.
01:50:39 --> 01:50:43 You know at this particular point if you have a special election I mean by the
01:50:43 --> 01:50:48 time you count the votes with that one you know campaign count the votes,
01:50:49 --> 01:50:54 and then if it's a runoff you know the person that replaces them will literally
01:50:54 --> 01:50:59 be a senator for like 30 days or less so you know.
01:51:01 --> 01:51:07 I like the way Governor Andy Beshear has handled it. Some people are like saying,
01:51:07 --> 01:51:08 well, he needs a man, doesn't it?
01:51:09 --> 01:51:14 Andy Beshear said, look, I would think that since I'm the governor of the state,
01:51:14 --> 01:51:20 the least that Senator McConnell could do is that if he's talking to everybody
01:51:20 --> 01:51:22 else, it'd be sure nice if he talked to me.
01:51:24 --> 01:51:30 And, you know, I would go even further and say maybe he needs to let the president
01:51:30 --> 01:51:31 know that he's allowed to.
01:51:33 --> 01:51:38 So, you know, but then Governor Beshear turned around and said,
01:51:39 --> 01:51:44 you know, I mean, if he doesn't and he stays away from the Capitol,
01:51:44 --> 01:51:50 then that helps my folks in Washington and helps the Democrats.
01:51:51 --> 01:51:58 Because, you know, we only need a couple of senators to go our way that's Republican
01:51:58 --> 01:52:04 instead of, you know, instead of four, we only need three.
01:52:05 --> 01:52:08 So if he doesn't want to call me, fine.
01:52:09 --> 01:52:14 But I would think since I'm the governor and he's the U.S. senator and it's
01:52:14 --> 01:52:21 his health that is denying this representation in the Senate,
01:52:22 --> 01:52:25 at least he would have given me an update and let me know.
01:52:25 --> 01:52:28 So I think Brazier handled it the way he needed to handle it.
01:52:29 --> 01:52:32 Some people are saying, well, he needs to force his hand. Not really.
01:52:35 --> 01:52:41 It's like, look at the time. But that gets into my bigger point, which is.
01:52:43 --> 01:52:48 You know, it's been almost 35 years since a young man put a question into the
01:52:48 --> 01:52:51 cultural lexicon. Can we all get along?
01:52:52 --> 01:53:00 And just this incident alone with Mitch McConnell answers the question in a negative way. No.
01:53:01 --> 01:53:09 I think a lot of us have tried to get along. You know, my political career was
01:53:09 --> 01:53:15 during, you know, within 10 years of that question.
01:53:16 --> 01:53:24 And I know that as fiercely as I fought for our people, especially in Mississippi,
01:53:25 --> 01:53:26 I did try to get along with people.
01:53:27 --> 01:53:32 You know, I've gotten along with my opponent. I've been along with,
01:53:32 --> 01:53:37 you know, my people on the other side of the political fence.
01:53:38 --> 01:53:44 I tried, you know, and I didn't want to grow up to be this old,
01:53:44 --> 01:53:46 bitter man, you know, like in the,
01:53:46 --> 01:53:50 I always refer to the Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino, right?
01:53:51 --> 01:53:54 But it's a trope that a lot of people have played in Hollywood.
01:53:54 --> 01:53:58 And heck, there was actually a movie called 12 Angry Men, right?
01:54:00 --> 01:54:05 So, you know, I'm not, I don't want to be that dude. I don't want to be that
01:54:05 --> 01:54:10 guy that looks outside and tells folks to get away from me and all that,
01:54:10 --> 01:54:14 you know, get off my yard. I'm trying to be that guy.
01:54:16 --> 01:54:24 But the way the politics is going, you know, and just the style, it's hard.
01:54:25 --> 01:54:32 It's hard to get along with people who are unreasonable in their thought.
01:54:33 --> 01:54:35 And I was just sitting thinking, you know.
01:54:37 --> 01:54:41 They let that man go, the Olympian, they let him go.
01:54:41 --> 01:54:47 Because even Jeanine Pirro couldn't make up any evidence to convict that man
01:54:47 --> 01:54:52 to deface in the refluxing pool, right? Donald Trump's angry about that, so what?
01:54:52 --> 01:54:59 You know, you were using her to cover up your mistake, which was hiring your
01:54:59 --> 01:55:05 pool guy to handle a project that monumental and that you hate,
01:55:06 --> 01:55:11 President Obama so much that you didn't pay attention to the details,
01:55:12 --> 01:55:17 that you couldn't put paint on the surface that was put in there, right?
01:55:17 --> 01:55:22 You couldn't just put any old paint on there because it was designed not to do that.
01:55:23 --> 01:55:28 And they had to put that surface in in such a way where you would still have
01:55:28 --> 01:55:29 the reflecting effect on it.
01:55:31 --> 01:55:38 You just wanted to give a friend of yours a hookup, and it was an embarrassing moment for you.
01:55:39 --> 01:55:45 And you asked Janine Pirro to sacrifice her reputation, even more than it already
01:55:45 --> 01:55:49 is, to find a scapegoat for your mistake.
01:55:51 --> 01:55:59 That's why we can't get along, right? When you have a group of people who have
01:55:59 --> 01:56:03 no sense of accountability, no sense of guilt even,
01:56:04 --> 01:56:13 who creates these illogical conspiracies and theories and thoughts and puts
01:56:13 --> 01:56:15 them out there as if they were facts,
01:56:16 --> 01:56:22 and warped the minds of people who I thought were independent of thought,
01:56:22 --> 01:56:25 who were mature mentally.
01:56:27 --> 01:56:34 You create this environment of not being able to get along. You can't.
01:56:35 --> 01:56:40 Because sometimes you have to have contrition. Sometimes you have to realize,
01:56:41 --> 01:56:45 I probably shouldn't have said that the way that I did. Right? Right?
01:56:47 --> 01:56:49 You know, and there's just some people you're not going to jive with.
01:56:49 --> 01:56:52 That's part of the human experience.
01:56:53 --> 01:56:59 But collectively as a society, we should get along. We should tolerate each other.
01:57:00 --> 01:57:05 But if your political strategy is to divide and conquer all the time,
01:57:06 --> 01:57:08 then you're creating an environment where we can't get along.
01:57:09 --> 01:57:15 Because if we got along, you wouldn't have a political foothold.
01:57:16 --> 01:57:17 And it's terrible.
01:57:18 --> 01:57:26 It's a terrible way to build an organization based off of chaos and confusion, right?
01:57:27 --> 01:57:32 And the crazy thing is they all profess to be Christian and the Bible tells
01:57:32 --> 01:57:36 us that God is not a God of chaos and confusion.
01:57:37 --> 01:57:43 That domain belongs to the devil, Satan. That's his realm.
01:57:44 --> 01:57:50 But you say that you're a Christian, but the only way that you can maintain
01:57:50 --> 01:57:58 political power is to adopt an anti-Christian philosophy of chaos and confusion.
01:57:59 --> 01:58:00 That's crazy.
01:58:01 --> 01:58:07 And the scariest thing of all is that there are human beings out there who can't,
01:58:08 --> 01:58:12 differentiate that. They can't see what I'm saying.
01:58:13 --> 01:58:19 You know, the president of the United States says, oh, this guy is a communist.
01:58:20 --> 01:58:22 Like, he's the authority on communism.
01:58:23 --> 01:58:27 And there are people out there who say, oh, yeah, yeah, he got to be a communist
01:58:27 --> 01:58:29 because the president said so. What?
01:58:30 --> 01:58:33 No, he would be a communist if evidence said so.
01:58:34 --> 01:58:38 Right? And there's this guy out here now who I've tried to get on the podcast
01:58:38 --> 01:58:43 who's really, really lighting up all these conservative shows. Thank you.
01:58:45 --> 01:58:50 Basically reminding people, look, y'all talking about socialism is bad.
01:58:51 --> 01:58:56 He literally did an interview from a man-made lake to prove his point.
01:58:56 --> 01:59:00 He said it was the government that built this lake that I'm riding this boat on.
01:59:01 --> 01:59:08 And y'all are saying that socialism is bad. Well, it was government workers that built this lake.
01:59:09 --> 01:59:12 It was the government that approved this lake to be built. It was government
01:59:12 --> 01:59:16 engineers that figured out how we could make this work.
01:59:17 --> 01:59:20 It wasn't private business, it was the government.
01:59:21 --> 01:59:26 So if you've got a problem with socialism, then I don't expect you to be on this lake, right?
01:59:28 --> 01:59:34 So, you know, he's doing his best going on these conservative shows trying to educate these people.
01:59:34 --> 01:59:40 It's like, don't get caught up in that rhetoric, right? The Hoover Dam is socialism,
01:59:41 --> 01:59:44 if you want to be ideologically pure.
01:59:45 --> 01:59:48 The WPA, that's all that was, you know.
01:59:49 --> 01:59:54 We were trying to get America out of the Great Depression.
01:59:54 --> 02:00:00 And so the government created jobs, literally created jobs.
02:00:01 --> 02:00:06 Now, we've gotten back to a point where we have some government jobs,
02:00:07 --> 02:00:12 and Elon Musk tried to take all of them away, but we have government jobs.
02:00:12 --> 02:00:16 But now we expect you all in the private sector to handle, you know,
02:00:16 --> 02:00:23 now that the depression's been over for almost 100 years, we kind of expected y'all to,
02:00:24 --> 02:00:28 keep the ball rolling and create these jobs, keep the economy going.
02:00:28 --> 02:00:33 That's what y'all want, even to the point where the government is deregulated too far.
02:00:34 --> 02:00:38 But every now and then, government has to step in and say, hey,
02:00:38 --> 02:00:44 look, we got to balance this thing out. We can't have all these people unemployed. We can't.
02:00:45 --> 02:00:48 The economy is a standstill. We got to do stuff.
02:00:49 --> 02:00:54 World wars were big business for the government because it was like,
02:00:54 --> 02:00:59 okay, got to make tanks, got to make planes, got to make bombs, whatever.
02:01:00 --> 02:01:02 Right? But we're trying to stay out of world wars.
02:01:06 --> 02:01:11 So, but when we were doing that, that was socialism to a degree.
02:01:14 --> 02:01:20 So, you know, but because people are not educated the way that they should be,
02:01:22 --> 02:01:28 either by choice or by deficiency in the system, we've created this culture
02:01:28 --> 02:01:31 where it's cool not to get along.
02:01:32 --> 02:01:38 And it's been simmering throughout time, but it's not what we're supposed to be about.
02:01:39 --> 02:01:42 Right? I heard somebody say, and I think I may have mentioned it before,
02:01:42 --> 02:01:53 somebody said that the Confederates lost the Civil War, but they won the Social War, right?
02:01:54 --> 02:02:00 And my position on that thought is I haven't surrendered yet.
02:02:01 --> 02:02:08 And there's millions of us who have not surrendered yet. So they ain't won.
02:02:08 --> 02:02:11 You can still fight them. They ain't won.
02:02:12 --> 02:02:16 They may have the upper hand, but they haven't won.
02:02:17 --> 02:02:23 And so I even challenge somebody to say, well, if you're saying that my position,
02:02:24 --> 02:02:29 is the dawn of communism, then I can make the argument that your position is
02:02:29 --> 02:02:31 the continuation of the Confederacy.
02:02:32 --> 02:02:38 In the concept of American history, which one was worse? because when we had
02:02:38 --> 02:02:40 to fight communism, we had to leave.
02:02:41 --> 02:02:46 We had to fight the Confederacy. It was in our own backyard. So which one is worse?
02:02:46 --> 02:02:51 Which one is more of a threat, the Confederacy or communism?
02:02:52 --> 02:02:57 And if we really want to be honest, it was the communists that lined up with
02:02:57 --> 02:03:06 the North in their sense of theory and thought to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War.
02:03:08 --> 02:03:12 Granted, it hasn't been fully thought out and all that stuff,
02:03:12 --> 02:03:14 but you get what I'm saying.
02:03:15 --> 02:03:20 That concept of people caring for each other, caring for their fellow man,
02:03:21 --> 02:03:25 won the day in the Civil War, eventually.
02:03:26 --> 02:03:31 But ever since then, it's been a battle on the social front.
02:03:31 --> 02:03:42 So, I just want to encourage people to focus in on whatever spiritual philosophy
02:03:42 --> 02:03:46 you buy into, you believe in.
02:03:46 --> 02:03:52 Understand that that, especially in the Abrahamic religions,
02:03:53 --> 02:03:56 that tolerance is the key to everything.
02:03:57 --> 02:04:02 You tolerate those who have not achieved that spiritual awakening,
02:04:03 --> 02:04:06 and you embrace the people who have,
02:04:07 --> 02:04:15 and you keep being an example so that those folks that have not received it will, right?
02:04:16 --> 02:04:24 That's why we have people going to synagogues and mosques and churches once a week.
02:04:25 --> 02:04:30 We're supposed to be getting encouragement for us to evangelize to others.
02:04:31 --> 02:04:33 We're supposed to be the examples.
02:04:34 --> 02:04:41 But if you're going to a church that says Jesus is Lord, and then when you step
02:04:41 --> 02:04:46 out of the church, you're doing the devil's work, That's not helping us get along.
02:04:47 --> 02:04:53 That's all I'm saying. Do some self-reflection. And on November the 3rd,
02:04:54 --> 02:05:00 2026, once you have done your self-reflection, vote accordingly.
02:05:01 --> 02:05:04 All right, that's all I got. Thank you all for listening. Till next time.