In This Episode
The U.S. threatens new sanctions on the International Criminal Court—so long as it agrees not to prosecute Donald Trump—while American service members quietly worry they’ll be left holding the legal bag for overseas military strikes. Plus, a reminder of what accountability and care can look like, as the Redd Family Collection of Black Art anchors community, history, and cultural power at the Tubman African American Museum. DeRay interviews author and historian Bench Ansfield about their book Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City.
News
US threatens new ICC sanctions unless court pledges not to prosecute Trump
U.S. military members fear personal legal blowback tied to boat strikes : NPR
Redd Family Collection of Black Art | Tubman African American Museum
Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
DeRay Mckesson: [AD BREAK] Hey, this is DeRay, and welcome to Pod Save the People. On this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda, back to talk about the news with regard to race, justice, and equity. And then I sit down with the incredible historian, Bench Ansfield, to talk about their new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City. The book revisits the wave of fires that tore through the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s and challenges a story that many people were told. Here’s the thing, I wasn’t told any story. I read this book and was like, this is wild. I had no clue, literally no clue it happened. Didn’t know anything about who they blamed it on, what was true, not true. I think this will blow your mind. It blew my mind. Read the book, listen to the interview. Here we go. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: This is our last episode of 2025. It’s been a long year. I’m excited for 2026. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson on Instagram at @SunPulpit. I promise y’all I’m not changing it again. That’s it, Sun Pulpit, that’s it. I’m done.
Sharhonda Bossier: We went from moon to sun. My name is Sharhonda Bossier. You can find me on LinkedIn at @BossierSha on Instagram and at @BossierS on spill.
DeRay Mckesson: Before we talk about politics, let’s talk about MTV.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: RIP.
DeRay Mckesson: I can’t believe MTV is actually ending. I when I saw that, I was like, oh, that’s like a weird Onion article. And then I was like, wow, I never thought there’d be an end to MTV, the pioneers of that type of journalism and music videos. And I’m I was shocked, actually, that it is that it’s over.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, MTV breaking news with Kurt Loder, you know what I mean? You were like just you were used to that kind of beaming in as you were watching music videos when they did the like spin off channels and you could get your like VH1 Soul because it’s all the same company, you know, um that felt good. And then I think maybe just over the last decade, they struggled to kind of capture the cultural zeitgeist, right? Like they struggled to meet young people where they were. And they weren’t keeping those of us who were part of the MTV generation checked in. I remember people going on Total Request Live and like how big a deal that was. You couldn’t wait to see your favorite people on that. There’s some iconic footage from the late ’90s, early aughts from like just people doing wild stuff at the MTV awards. For some people, it was like the first time they saw like two girls kiss each other was when Britney and Madonna kissed on stage. Like there was just like a whole host of things that happened. That like if you weren’t there, it’s hard to explain how much of a cultural powerhouse MTV was. So a little sad to see it go, but I, in some ways, think they were victims of their own strategic missteps. Um. And like even as music videos have come back, I’m thinking about like even you know 10 or 15 years ago when Gaga was investing a ton in music videos or Beyonce investing a ton in music videos, there was really no place for them to go and nowhere for MTV to play them in their schedule. So, you know, people don’t wanna watch ridiculousness or reruns of the Hills over and over. [laugh]
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah.
Sharhonda Bossier: Um. But still, sad to see it sunset.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I think I think it was pretty obvious MTV was going downward even in my youth because of um MTV relinquishing so much to the reality television pipeline. MTV and VH1, so many Viacom um uh ran companies were relinquishing it to um reality television. And to me, that is like the canary in the coal mine. Even if it looks successful at that moment and people are, it’s popular at that moment. And it–
DeRay Mckesson: Myles, are you a hater of it road rules and real world? They were the pioneers, young c’mon Myles.
Sharhonda Bossier: But that’s different than what they became the Hills. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: I’m younger than that. So Real World. Not my–
DeRay Mckesson: Hater hater.
Myles E. Johnson: Not even being shady, but like Real World and Road Rules were came out in the ’90s. And those were two individual reality television programs that were–
DeRay Mckesson: Pioneers.
Myles E. Johnson: –surrounded that by sure, but also surrounded by other types of programming.
Sharhonda Bossier: Correct yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: By the time I was 10, which was 2000.
DeRay Mckesson: You’re so shady.
Myles E. Johnson: It was, it was [indistinct banter]–
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh my God.
Myles E. Johnson: By the time I was um nine, ten in the early 2000s, there was um it was a tall like where you took Laguna Beach to the hills, um Jersey Shore.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: There was um the dating games, so there was a lot of these dating games that were answers to–
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –more adult dating games. Tequila, tequila, tequila.
Sharhonda Bossier: Tila tequila.
Myles E. Johnson: Tila Tequila, so there’s a lot more to–
DeRay Mckesson: Oh, I missed all of those.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, see so–
Sharhonda Bossier: –Deeply problematic bisexual representations. [laughing]
Myles E. Johnson: No deeply. So like, once you get to like that trash TV early 2000s, mid 2000s MTV, you can see that we’re going down where you could see that the and the really the last vestige of relevance is a that MTV Music Awards and stars like you just named Beyonce and Lady Gaga, who were still of that Michael Jackson, um Prince era of creating art pieces through their music videos and making it relevant because where else would you go? Um. But I wrote for MTV in my career. I’m glad to say it. And last thing I want to say that’s kind of connecting this, speaking of dead like brands that are to me, were just a pinnacle of places I wanted to see myself as a kid, that Rolling Stone article about Taylor Swift and how um it’s coming out that that whole article around Taylor Swift being um basically saying that all the Nazi-ism accusations that Taylor Swift was receiving were all bots. So now it’s being revealed that that was a publicity ran article, but then the also the publicity company is also an AI company. So now she fed this problem to AI and it created an answer and Rolling Stone published it in order to turn the wave of what how she was being critiqued around. And again, when I did MTV, just being real, that was, I have no problem with the artists who I talked about, but that was a PR article. Like I was, commissioned to not to just do a publicity article for MTV. And I was thinking, well, damn, I’m such a interesting smart writer. And there’s so many other interesting smart writers to kind of defang me and just write a PR article, shows you where MTV is going and it’s not the cutting edge. And same with the Rolling Stone article. It’s like, this could have actually been such a more interesting moment if we, I guess we weren’t in this place in media where you can’t really take those kinds of risks because the artist is also the company controlling the the the publicity so.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, actually one more shout out to uh an MTV institution. Um. Diary, remember like you think you know, but you have no idea. This is the diary of–
Myles E. Johnson: No idea.
Sharhonda Bossier: I loved those, yes.
DeRay Mckesson: Wow. That’s–
Myles E. Johnson: I think [?]–
DeRay Mckesson: I was heartbroken when I found out MTV Cribs was a scam. That really did mess me up. They were lying.
Sharhonda Bossier: Look at Myles. Myles is like now, you know [laughing].
Myles E. Johnson: So you were–
DeRay Mckesson: Myles, how was I supposed to know?
Myles E. Johnson: So you thought somebody was sitting down and sleeping in a fish tank every night?
DeRay Mckesson: Shut up, shut up. I was young!
Myles E. Johnson: Like Missy Elliott. What about Pimp my ride? Did you [?] Pimp my ride?
DeRay Mckesson: I was young! Pimp my ride, also a scam? I you know, I was young.
Sharhonda Bossier: Also a scam.
Myles E. Johnson: Did you think but did you know it was a scam?
DeRay Mckesson: No, I was like, wow, this is what rich people this is the life of the rich and famous and then which was also another good show that my great grandmother watched. Lifestyles–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: –of the rich and famous, not on MTV.
Sharhonda Bossier: With Robin Leach.
DeRay Mckesson: With Robin Leach. Oh wow. Myles, do you remember that? That’s too. Do you remember lifestyles of the rich and famous?
Myles E. Johnson: No I don’t remember that, but I am a pop culture archivist, so I have seen it.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay okay.
Myles E. Johnson: And experienced it.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay, okay, okay. Okay. My favorite pop culture throwback reference was when you did um oh my god what’s her name miss she’s the Jamaican that wasn’t Jamaican. Um.
Sharhonda Bossier: Miss Cleo? Miss Cleo.
Myles E. Johnson: Miss Cleo.
DeRay Mckesson: Miss Cleo.
Sharhonda Bossier: Miss Cleo.
DeRay Mckesson: That was great. That’s one of my favorite episodes of your cultural, you wrapped it all together in a way I was like, okay, you did that. I’m a 10 out of 10 no notes. So um, rest in peace MTV. Um. I also want to talk about you all must have seen by now that Jasmine Crockett is running for US Senate in the great state of Texas. There’s been a lot of controversy about it. There have been people who have been super pumped and super proud of her. There have been people who have said that the Republicans have seeded this campaign, that they seeded the polls, that they really went under the run. There have been criticism about her position or what people believe to be her position on Israel or lack thereof, excuse me, or Palestine. I’d love to know what you all think about Jasmine running.
Sharhonda Bossier: So when I first saw the announcement, my first thought, and maybe I shouldn’t admit this on the podcast, was like, oh, she looks good. And that matters so much for women, particularly Black women in the public eye. Like she looked great. I wasn’t quite sure how the leveraging of Trump talking about her would play with people because I think there was a lot of, oh, I am those people’s worst fears, which I think is like fine, but I feel like the base is really hungry for someone who will fight for something, not just be the anti-Trump. And I haven’t quite yet gotten a sense of what her vision is. As anticipated, as predicted, as we all probably could have likely, I don’t know, written ourselves if someone had pushed us to. We’ve seen a lot of anti-Blackness, a lot of sexism, a lot of misogynoir where those two things intersect in response to her campaign. Really not rooted in or focused on the issues, right? A lot of it has been about how people perceive her, how people perceive where she is rough around the edges, etc, etc. I do think that what’s interesting is seeing some of the press and media coverage saying, you know, she says I a lot, she talks about herself a lot. And maybe that’s actually what this political moment requires, right?This political moment might actually be a moment in which someone who centers the people too much and what they are talking about is not electable, particularly to statewide office. In some ways, you need someone to be in love with the candidate almost to a point of some of their positions not mattering, right? I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. She did say something really smart, I thought, around the chances she has as a Democrat running for statewide office in Texas, right? She’s like, everybody is telling us like, it’s impossible, blah, blah blah, but like we can shift that. And so I thought it was smart for her to name that early.
Myles E. Johnson: I think so many things fascinate me about Jasmine Crockett that did not fascinate me before she ran for Senate, if I’m being honest, because I think a lot of different questions show up now that she’s vying for even more power and because she’s operating in a way. So here’s the thing. I think that Black people, so I’m big into interior design, I promise this is gonna make sense. So I’m big into interior design in different people’s houses. And what I’ll notice is that when Black people do interior design for the houses, they have more portraits of other Black people, their families, of pop culture, and of themselves. It’s almost like the uh Black people we reinforce our images and our pop culture images more. And I think that Jasmine does that too. And I that sometimes that can be misconstrued as a type of narcissism. But if you have a culture trying to disappear you, you gotta put yourself on your phone screen. If you have a culture that’s trying to dissapear you or trying to um shame you, you gotta have the extra long nails that say resist and say, oh, I’m gonna do both at the same time and I know law. Like that is a part of us creating visibility out of the invisibility we’ve been handled. And I think doing that in ways that are like ghetto fabulous are is a part of our cultural tradition. So again, I think I think that’s one thing. The other thing is me kind of reading these articles around Republicans seducing Jasmine with these polls and and and kind of, reading more about how that’s the thing that both Democrats and Republicans do. It’s starting to make so much more sense. How come, like again, you know, Vice President Harris it felt so uneven. I’m like, well, when I log on, it feels like she’s gonna win. But when I’m in the streets, or when I’m talking to different people in different areas, that does not feel that it does not feel like that. And it’s interesting to see the Republican Party kind of seduce who they think will be the person who will be easily beat and thinking through those things. Like last thing I’ll say is even things with like Gavin Newsom coming out and saying that like, oh, he’s the front runner and stuff like that. I sit with a lot of doubt with that. I sit with a lot of doubt because there is, I just sit with lot of doubts with that, like I find it hard to believe and I find it hard to not be conspiratorial when we’re just seeing these numbers and so much of, of course, my lived experience, but what I’m seeing culturally and just and honestly, just the gut that you cultivate after talking about culture for a minute and being like, I don’t, this this doesn’t feel right. It feels like either people are being tricked or we’re trying to be tricked into thinking these people are the front runners or these are the people that people like and it’s actually not that. And we’re just gonna get embarrassed when we’ve run these candidates who don’t actually have this support. And um.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Jasmine’s going to be an interesting science project of that too, of seeing how much of this is real. Is is there more people coming out, like what what actually happens?
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I’m you know, I’m interested in this. I do think you’re right, Myles. I think a lot of people, one of the takeaways, mine as well from Kamala was just the difference between what was happening online and what was happening in in person conversations. It was like night and day, two different races, two different countries, two different conversations. Like that was very interesting. Also, you know I had never thought about Jasmine and Israel before. And the fact that there is so much lack of clarity by her answer means that she has to just clear something up. Like the fact that both sides are having clips that sound sort of something. I think that the lesson for me from Kamala was if you don’t take this seriously, it will bite you in the behind on the left. Like you got to take it. Kamala didn’t take it seriously. She thought she could, President Biden her way–
Sharhonda Bossier: Side step it.
DeRay Mckesson: –out of it.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And she couldn’t. So I was actually surprised that Jasmine is even in a even in a moment where people legitimately can say they don’t know what she believes. Like that is sort of a, I was like, oh, that was a that was sort of a weird not lesson learned from the last moment. I also was surprised by her launch video. I was, I too, Sharhonda, was sort of like, I thought a lesson learned from Kamala was like, just being against Trump, not a motivator for people. That was a, that was a non.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: You know, Zohran, I think is the great lesson of like be against that man, but be for a lot of other things. And you know I went to McDonald’s today, y’all. I just want to say this. Do you know how much a large fry at McDonald’s, do you know how much a large fry at McDonald’s is?
Sharhonda Bossier: $4.
DeRay Mckesson: Just a large fry. $4 and 19 cents.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: That is, do you remember–
Myles E. Johnson: A Palestinian baby is how much a fry at McDonald’s cost.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay okay thank you.
Myles E. Johnson: Okay. No Zionists.
DeRay Mckesson: Do you remember $4 used to be a whole meal. Anyway.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: But I so I was surprised that she um that she went with it now with that said, she is the left has very few clear communicators. She is one of them. The left has very few people I think who people have seen be willing to fight and push back visibly and da da da like she is one of them I think that that means something. But I also was sort of I don’t her she I saw a news clip where um they were like, you know, how are you gonna how are you gonna convert the Trump voters? And she was like, I think I can win without them. And I was like I don’t know if that’s true in Texas. Like I think you might need to get some of them, but I don’t know Myles, what you got?
Myles E. Johnson: So I, maybe surprisingly, but I’ve been disagreeing with people who think that Jasmine’s instincts right now are not on. Because everybody’s left in every state is different. And I know a lot of people in Texas, my aunt lives in Dallas, she maybe I shouldn’t say she works for Planned Parenthood in Dallas. So maybe I should be quiet. She has a leadership position there. But um but uh but but um I see so many people come out of Texas. And and not unlike Georgia, there is a different practicality that comes out of the left um inside of these southern states because they are so intimate towards what’s going on. It’s not theoretical. It’s not Cuomo versus Zohran, which is still these kind of like liberal left choices even though one is corporatist and and and maybe not so left and one is seen as like more socialist it’s like literally a Ku Klux Klan member or Jasmine and I think that her just saying I’m anti this MAGA movement actually will does work well in Texas, will motivate people–
DeRay Mckesson: You know I don’t know. I think that’s not I think that she’s running against the guy on the left. It’d be different if there was no other candidate running in this race. She is not running against a Klan member.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, she’s gotta win this primary. Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: She’s not running against a Klan member on the in the left, I don’t think I hear you though. I get it.
Myles E. Johnson: No, I’m not saying she’s running against a Klan member on the left. I know uh uh the the–
DeRay Mckesson: James.
Myles E. Johnson: The hairless white boy who she’s running against. Like I get that, but I’m saying once that primary’s done, who she’ll be running against is somebody who most left Black Texans do not want. And I think that her galvanizing Texans in this way of saying I’m anti that is enough. I think that I truly think that a lot of people specifically when I think about Georgia and Texas and how they speak about things, they’re like, no, we want these we want these people out and we want to know somebody who’s gonna be oppositional towards them. And it feels different than them–
DeRay Mckesson: This is not what you said about Kamala, this is literally the anti-comment you said when you, you, you made a whole thing about like just being–
Myles E. Johnson: Because Kamala is run because Kamala is running for the was running for the president of the United States, which means you have to have a nuanced and various and and and and more diverse way of how you attack it. Texas is, do you want guns? And you want somebody who’s going to um whose going to help Donald Trump, or do you not? Same with Zohran. That’s every place, every position should have a different campaign. So I don’t know why we would compare what Jasmine’s doing for Texas to what Kamala was trying to do for the whole United States.
DeRay Mckesson: We just disagree on this. I think it is a consistent argument to say that just running against Trump is not enough to win and I don’t think that’s place-based but we disagree so like that’s cool. I do think the internet is like a third place though and I think that Jasmine is, I don’t think this strategy is winning on the internet and now whether that translates into real life or not you know we’ll see um but I do worry about and I was in a room with the James with James and I was surprised at how well it works in the room. I’ve never seen Jasmine talk in a room. So I’m, you know, like that matters. I’m interested to see what that feels like. I saw the James guy and I was like, oh, this is, this works. This like Christian sort of thing. Sort of interesting.
Myles E. Johnson: I do think if I were to tell like signal any type of advice to Jasmine, um in this moment, is for her to do interviews where she’s able to, I guess, sure, address the like those more leftist global concerns, but have a better answer. But I also think Jasmine can really do some good work with, so like, on the left, there’s really no spaces to talk philosophically or spiritually or talk about like your narrative and your storytelling. Like a lot of times, like uh, on the right, you’ll go in there and you’ll be somewhere for four hours and you will definitely talk politics, but you’ll talk about your ideas on philosophy and your ideas on gender and your ideas on um spirituality and of course these all these things are like fascist and conservative ideas, but there is still those conversations. And I think that like, in order for people to feel Jasmine, like why maybe we just don’t have those type of interviewers, but like there are videos of Jasmine code switching and having a different voice. And I think that that is an opening for such a vulnerable conversation of how did you find your voice and stuff like that. And I think I wish I saw more of that with her so people can feel connected cause now she does she does feel like a mascot though. Like she does feel flat.
DeRay Mckesson: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was gonna say that. They I think this has definitely flattened her and she has become one dimensional and she is not. She is much fuller than that. And you’re right, where do you go? It’s like the breakfast club. There are not a lot of places that I think their campaigns would send them. It is one of the things, especially because I you know because of the New York of it, Zohran is still doing Instagram like things with these people with like 5,000, 10,000 hits.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: I just saw. He did a thing with this there’s like a kid who has a podcast, like a he might, this boy must be in first grade, maybe second grade. He interviewed Zohran and he’s like, what’s it like? What are you gonna do when you’re mayor? Like, and I’m like, Zohran, you are nailing this strategy of like staying with the people and being like a full person. And um I had been very impressed by that.
Myles E. Johnson: I said that when he won. I said that when he won I said don’t log off. And I guess I intuitively knew because they were actually so smart. I was like, that is just the beginning. What y’all like he’s going to make sure that you never feel like, oh, we got him in the seat and got him elected and he disappeared. You’re going to feel involved with it. That’s why I was saying the thing about the ta– be joking about the tattle tale because he has that kind of communication. You have to um you have to cultivate that and continue to be cultivated. That is that is what killed Kamala too, is that she kind of just disappeared. Once she did all the–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –things where she should have took us on that journey and and and and and got us used to her.
DeRay Mckesson: She did, yeah, he is a model.
Myles E. Johnson: Have y’all heard of the diaper diplomacy?
Sharhonda Bossier: Diaper diplomacy?
DeRay Mckesson: Oh, I didn’t see that. Yeah, what I will say about Jasmine Crockett, in the interest of being fair, is I just looked up and she is beating Talarico in the latest poll. I think it is it’s like 51- 40 something but she is she’s up. And um that is good for Jasmine.
Myles E. Johnson: The other reason why I think what she did was smart is even when I see Diaper Diplomacy, and you know I love um woke Katy Perry, you know, I love Taylor Lorenz down, but I saw Taylor Lorenz critique Jasmine Crockett for using AI, and I see so many people critiquing Jasmine Crockett for using AI and using this kind of like viral AI slop, diaper diplomacy esthetic to get some of her get some of her messaging out. But I think that is what a huge group of her supporters and that Democratic base is. The Democratic base isn’t the far left. It’s not anarchists. It’s not it’s not Black feminists. It’s those kind of neoliberal, the View watching, I hate Trumpers and they watch stuff like that and they want and they feel activated and that is enough for them, you know, and I think, that’s how come it’s smart too because she’s kind of going over a group of people of leftists who you probably won’t be able to satisfy and stuff. And she’s kind of doing to me what what to your point Kamala Harris couldn’t do because she was running for a different position where I’m like, oh, you could actually do that with from what I’ve what have I seen from the culture of Texas. You can actually get away with running like that. And I think her choices are showing that they’re not dumb choices for where she’s at and the people she’s serving. Um.
DeRay Mckesson: And in some ways, your critique could be level to Kamala that like, you know, if it wasn’t a campaign that felt so run by consultants and trying to get this group of people that frankly probably would have supported her anyway, she could have actually done some really interesting things that would have that would’ve opened up, or she could’ve not done things like [?] says. She could’ve shied away from some things that were just gonna lose her some people.Um to is a TSU poll Crockett polls highest with Black women, 92%. Black men, 84%, and Latino women, 49%. And lowest among white women, 45%, Latino men, 33%, and white men, 32%. It’s 51% to 43% her and Talarico.
Myles E. Johnson: Chelsea Handler needs to do her a big one. Like those, I can’t stand it though, the white, whatever it is, that white mom, the White Y moms, like those.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Like a lot of the–
DeRay Mckesson: Oh yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –people need, a lot the white women, people in the zeitgeist need to do their big one and help her. But I think that she, what’s interesting is a lot of times the things that smartly and cleverly Jasmine is using are things that are already seen as Black and dumb. So I think that people see what she’s doing and thinking that she’s dumb, but then the results are showing that no, she actually just knows who she’s talking to. And she’s really not talking to the smartest leftists on the internet. She’s talking to a working 49-year-old who is tired of this Trump nonsense and wants to and to alleviate that pain. [music break]
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: Let’s jump into the news. My news is about the ICC, the International Criminal Court. And I was going through the news this week and I definitely missed this. If not for the pod, I would not have known that president Donald Trump wants to make sure that the ICC amends its founding documents so that they will never investigate Donald Trump now or when he leaves office or his top officials. They also want to make sure that the ICC drops investigations of Israeli leaders over Gaza and they want the International Criminal Court to formally end any probes of US troops in Afghanistan. Now uh the ICC, you know, already doesn’t have full jurisdiction over things related to the United States. And you might famously know that the International Criminal Court did issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, for the former Israeli defense chief, and um a Hamas leader. So that has been a thing. And um, you know, it is, I saw this and I was just really surprised by it actually. There are 125 member states in the ICC. Um. And it excludes the major powers, like China, Russia, and the United States, but has wide jurisdiction to all of our citizens in general. So they’re worried about what happens when Trump leaves the White House. And I bring it here because it’s just a reminder that they know what they’re doing. They know they’re breaking all types of laws, norms. Like they know this is a war crime. Like there’s not a moment where you’re like, oh no, they think they’re doing the right thing. Da da. It’s not, that’s not this. They know they are wrong. And they are all freaking out to make sure that when Trump dies or leaves or whatever, that they all don’t get hauled into any version of an accountability mechanism that we have. And I just, I don’t know if I have anything deeper to say here besides um, again, it showed me that they know what they’re doing and that that structurally they’re trying to make sure that nobody is held accountable here or elsewhere. Yeah, so I brought it just so um I didn’t know if y’all had seen this.
Sharhonda Bossier: I had not seen it. I think it’s also a strategy that they’ve deployed domestically though. I think that’s why they have so many cases pending in front of the Supreme Court because they know that what they are doing is not allowable. And so they’re like just like if you change, change the rule so that what we want to do is legal and allowable, I find though their fear of the international criminal court, quite frankly, to be a little funny. I don’t have another word for it because I think the ICC has really demonstrated that if you are a leader of one of the sort of powerful countries in the world, rarely do we come after you and rarely do you actually experience any real consequence. I think the sort of most highly visible set of like international trials or tribunals were, you know, happened in the wake of World War II, um the Nuremberg trials, like some of the folks who were architects and um orchestrators of the Holocaust. But even a lot of people who were lower rank and participated in that got resettled in the US, you know? So like there’s just like, there’s, in some ways I’m like, you were never going to be who the ICC targeted. You are not a Black or Brown person leading a quote unquote “third world.” You know, regime or country where they are gonna call your regime a military junta. You know what I mean? Like that you’re not who they’re targeting. So I’m just, I’m not quite clear what they’re fearful of to be honest with you, but maybe that’s my naivete. Somebody listening will know better.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, and maybe, yeah, I think I’m on the same side as you, Sharhonda, on this, is that, to me, when I read it, it felt like a um, so things can feel really big to us because we’re on the receiving ends of it because we are in this society that they are manipulating, but I kind of just feel like it was just their retirement plan, like it’s just like crossing their T’s, like, it’s like, just like somebody might do like insurance or do something with housing or making sure you have a different types of like uh money coming in once you retire. It kind of felt like they were just making sure, well, let’s make sure that this doesn’t become an inconvenience and let’s just use our power to ensure that this won’t get out of control. But I don’t know if I’m buying that this was as big of a move for them as it is for us viewing it and making it news is I guess what I’m trying to say.
DeRay Mckesson: Hmm. That’s interesting. I do think like trying to stop the investigations of the other people seems like a big deal too, like you can’t investigate the war crimes that the US troops did in Afghanistan, you can’t investigate the Israeli people for what they’ve done in Gaza. So maybe they are just using Trump as a front, like so that becomes the news. But really, what they really want is to make sure that none of the other sergeants and generals, who I’m sure raped and pillaged all these people and killed all these people, that nobody will ever hold them accountable but–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Another thing to add to the list to watch.
Sharhonda Bossier: Well, in that same vein of like what’s allowed under the law, what’s extra judicial killings and murder, um et cetera, we’ve talked on the pod a couple of times about the US blowing up ships and boats in the Caribbean. And to date, the US has blown up more than 20 boats or ships and has killed more than 80 people in those strikes. The Trump administration’s official position is that they are preventing drug smugglers from making it to the US. This is sort of a preemptive strike. And you know legal experts, including former military lawyers, are saying that y’all are killing civilians who’ve not been accused of anything, who are not you know facing trial, who’ve not been convicted of anything. Right? And this is unlawful and it amounts to murder. And so increasingly some U.S. Service members who have been part of these strikes are reaching out seeking legal advice of their own to figure out if they could face personal legal consequences for their actions, right? I also think that this speaks to people understanding that this administration is out for itself, right, and that if this administration needs to sacrifice anyone so that the international community feels like it’s gotten its justice. It’s likely going to be a rank and file member of the military. And so I just find this moment really interesting where people are like, I understand that I have sworn a duty to uphold the constitution and to serve the president of the United States as my commander in chief. And I think that what’s happening here might be wrong. If I’ve participated, what are the likely personal legal consequences for me? And I wanted to bring it to the pod for that reason. I think it also kind of builds on some of the themes that DeRay’s news this week raises for us.
DeRay Mckesson: All the I hope the International Criminal Court is reading this news too, get these people, you know get round all of them up. I don’t know, you know, Trump, I think is hoodwinking, you know he don’t care about these people. He don’t even know who he pardoning and his whoever is doing the pardons over there certainly is not checking for the these people who, when anybody sane takes over the DOJ again, all these people are going to get in trouble. You know, hopefully that day comes. But I don’t I am surprised at the not riders for Trump who are continuing to support this stuff. I don’t know. Like the I think about all the the um the beard ban, I think like firing all the Black people, kicking the trans people out, changing the books, like, you know, people with medical conditions that are completely fine to be in the military, getting all them out. You know, it seems like the OG military people have to be like, this don’t make no sense. You know like the Joint Chiefs fire those people. Um. What Hegseth is doing over at the FBI, getting rid of everybody. You’re like the intelligence community, you guys even are conservative, but this feels like even a stretch. But anyway, I just think about the people blowing up the boats is a small group of people in this administration who should be held criminally liable when this is over.
Myles E. Johnson: You’re making me question if I understood the article correctly, because I felt like I was also reading about people kind of having maybe like even like moral dilemmas.
Sharhonda Bossier: Oh for sure.
Myles E. Johnson: Around those actions.
Sharhonda Bossier: For sure.
Myles E. Johnson: So what kind of like makes me a little sick around the military and the idea of the military and I know that it’s like normal in our society and I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna, but like, it’s just the fact that we outsource our moral evaluations to somebody else to like, it still feels weird. Like even the idea of the, I guess I’m going back to like the National Guard in my like imagination, the fact that like actually there is not a whole group of um people who said, oh, I’m not I’m not doing this. I’m quitting this. I I don’t wanna do this. Like that that actually like scares me a little bit. And again, it might be because I’ve been reading Culting of America, which everybody should read, but it like it really puts fear in me that you have to ask somebody else, what is the moral around killing somebody? Like another human being? Like that should be clear. The fact that you need somebody else to be in between that, that just feels odd to me. It just feels weird. And I know we’re in a place where violence and protection are intertwined and we feel like we need that, but even that feels weird, like that no, you did a wrong thing. And hopefully that wrong thing is an illegal thing and justice should happen because you did that. Yeah, you should have said you should’ve quit.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I think this raises the question, like, does the state have a right to kill? And if so, under what circumstances, right? And I think increasingly many of us are coming to the belief that the state doesn’t have a right to kill, right? To take life.
Myles E. Johnson: I guess what frustrates me about America is that was already established by your own in a nation under God. We are a Christian nation. Everybody need the Bible, right? So we already established that is wrong. We already established, that that is not how we should do those things, because of y’all’s own doing. So now we’re here now that we’re here, it’s like now we have to pretend and see what the legal loophole, like no, that’s wrong, and you know that is wrong.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: It feels weird. It feels feels strange.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
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Myles E. Johnson: So I’m bringing good news. I’m bringing good, good, good, news. So I uh I was, A, this is coming from a non-profit by the name of Rainbow Serpent. They are specific when it comes to Black LGBT issues and art and culture, and they have a lot of cool programming and exhibits that they do. And one thing that I found is this documentary that’s available on YouTube for free called Miracles, the Red Family Art Collection. And it’s about this family who, hear this, it was the first Black art gallery in Macon, Georgia. I’m gonna read a little bit from Tubmanmuseum.com about this family. In 1990, Mel and Vernon Redd opened Miracles Fine Art Gallery in Macon, the city’s first fine art gallery dedicated to Black art. For six years, it served as a cultural hub, showcasing Black artists and fostering appreciation for their work in the middle of Georgia. In 1996, health challenges forced the gallery to close, and for over two decades, the collection remained in storage. Now and along the way to revival, this exhibition brings these treasured works back into the public eye, reaffirming the family’s enduring commitment to preserving Black cultural heritage. It goes on to say more than just an art exhibition, Miracles is a testament to survival, resilience, and revival. So A, the documentary is so good because it not only talks to the founders, but also talks to their children and who are grown, who are also in the arts. And also to me because y’all know, I’m like, I kind of just completed my first year in Ohio. And I think one of the bigger reasons why I wanted to leave Brooklyn and why I wanted to leave New York, at least for a moment, was because of it feeling like the things that were happening there were isolated there, and it feels like the actual risk that is of the moment wasn’t happening. And I feel like this is such a good example of what the actual risk looks like, which is going into making Georgia and creating an art cultural hub of Black art that centers Black art and Black culture and is a meeting place for Black minds. Um, that is what the risk actually looks like because that’s where the change is really needed. There’s not really don’t don’t don’t, don’t don’t don’t get me, but but I don’t think if California or um specifically like LA or if New York or DC never had another Black thing again, a Black excellent thing again. I think that they will still have an abundance of things. Whereas I think there are so many places bereft of that, who do not have any of that. And I think these people were such a good example of how it does not take um all the millions of dollars. They were still working their regular jobs. They had children. The children have beautiful pictures of themselves against this Black art with these Black artists that and it’s not to mention the um some of the art they have, so I’m talking like Ernie Barnes. Um. Jacob Lawrence, they just have some like uh beautiful sculptural pieces. I believe they even have like either some portraits or some sculptures of Augusta Savage, um a sculptor I talked about before, Black woman sculptor that I talked about before on this podcast. But they have so much stuff that that just infused that community with culture and with purpose and with possibility. And again, it was a way to keep money inside of the Black community. So you have artists who able to show show their work there and get it bought. But then you also have Black people who are able to, hey, I have you know, that kind of $5,000, $10,000 to $15,000 that kind of the meat of the real art community. We kind of hear about the $300 million purchases, but that kind like person who can afford that $10 thousand painting or that $15 thousand painting, that is who we need to be able to get to put more money to Black artists. And the fact that there was a hub to do that kind of economic exchange was really inspiring and made me feel like, oh wow, this affirms the possibilities that I’m seeing in my mind of like, okay, these things can’t just exist in these coastal elite spaces. They have to um exist in places that don’t have any that people have forgotten about or people have said are useless or it can’t be um or it can’t be changed. And not to wrap this up with Jasmine Crockett once again, but I think to me what they did culturally and artistically is what a Jasmine Crockett would have to do politically is saying, oh, Texas is red, forget about Texas. That has not been a good strategy. So I think even when it comes to culture and art and getting people in a society to think more cutting edge and to update their beliefs and stuff, you have to go to these places that are seen as conservative and a lost cause and update those places with art and with cultural hubs. And I think this was such a cool blueprint. And again, the documentary is free on YouTube, you can watch it, support it. It looks like a really cool nonprofit. I did my Googles to make sure there wasn’t no embezzlement or anything chile. No, no, no money laundering. So I can so I can I can endorse it and say it looks really cool. And um I think it’ll be something really beautiful to watch while you’re enjoying your your your Christmas or your Kwanzaa or your Hanukkah.
Sharhonda Bossier: I appreciated seeing the photos and videos of the family actually, and I felt like the matriarchs were wearing dresses that I could almost feel against my face. I don’t know how else to explain it, right? Like like I could feel walking behind my grandmother, right. I could smell walking behind Auntie Dawn. Like I just, I like, I just there’s something about seeing Black people who look like regular Black people moving and living and breathing and building this thing that um felt so comforting to me. So you know, I’m grateful that this has become one of your segments on the podcast. Um. Because again, it just opens up portals to new worlds for me, but also familiar ones.
DeRay Mckesson: You know, we’ve talked a lot, and we as a society, not even the podcast have talked about a lot about the end of third spaces, that there are just aren’t places, you know, it’s like people talk about the bowling alley a lot, but I think about, there are these really cool third spaces that still exist that people don’t go to as we plan, we’re planning at Campaign Zero for Black History Month, and we’re looking at like, archives that exist, museums that are around, art spaces that are round that that like people just haven’t been to in a while or haven’t thought of, or that we went to on field trips when we were little kids, but they’re like actually cooler now. We actually can appreciate the art because we’re a little bit older. You know and this just reminded me of like um that I that I think we might have been having an incomplete conversation when we talk about the lack of third spaces, that there actually are these really interesting spaces that are doing really cool things, that you can meet interesting people who are values aligned almost by virtue of the space itself. And I want us to pay attention to that. And even to me calls me to think about in my organizing, how can we partner with some of these places? Because, you know, so many places you just need to get in one time. Like and if you get people there, they’ll be like, oh, this is cool. But they just might not–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: –go on their own the first time, right? So how can we actually invite people into spaces or use them to throw events or talks that are a little off the beaten path. So that is my push.
Myles E. Johnson: What you just said just had really um just got me thinking about different things as far as just how we all can be of service to that. Like since being in Ohio and being in different like organizations and being able to use like digital consulting and just other things that I’ve learned being in New York and just having the career that I’ve had so far of like, oh, here’s a way to cut through the noise, you know because there’s so many places that to your point are these amazing places, but maybe don’t know how to update how they’re reaching people and letting people know about them. So in this kind of viral internet community, they kind of get suppressed, or they don’t really cut through in helping people cut through. So I think we all have anybody listening to this, everybody in society, I think, we all have um different resources we can lend in order to make sure these places stay um in our like collective consciousness so we can continue to support them.
DeRay Mckesson: As we close, would love to know what you guys are looking forward to in 2026. Is anything on your mind as we, as we think about the end of 2025 and the beginning soon of 2026?
Sharhonda Bossier: I’m looking forward to fully leaning into my role as the resident auntie on the podcast. Um. It’s been really fun to spend time with you guys in this way and to stretch myself and be pushed in my my own thinking. I’m also looking forward to hopefully more time in community. Um. I think one of the things that I’m taking away from our conversations is the need to continue to build relationships outside of my existing friend circle to open up my home to more conversations and more people about what’s happening in real life because I do think all of us are hungry for that um and I have the space and the capacity and the resources to do it. And so um looking forward to sharing updates on how that stuff goes um in my new real life.
Myles E. Johnson: Right. Okay, let me know, because I want to come to Cali and um and have a salon at Sharhonda’s house. That sounds like a Sharhonda salon. Yeah.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
Myles E. Johnson: I want, I wanna be involved in that. I think I’m most excited when, as, as it pertains to like the, I guess the podcast for 2026 is, I’m continuing to kind of just challenge myself to look for even more things and publications and ideas and cultural hubs and these different um like like kind of Black cultural artifacts to present as possibility models. Specifically, now when people feel, because of the political moment, feel like more in like dire restraints. I love being able to supply, like, no, we were we were this is what this is what some Black people were doing during the crack era. This is what some Black people were doing during this era. Or this is what some Black people, again, to DeRay’s point early, are doing right now and that we just don’t know. So that exploration has made me feel really, really, really um useful. And to Sharhonda’s point, I’ve gotten um some opportunities to like collaborate with different institutions where I live and to do different work. So just taking the artistic, cultural obsessions of mine and giving it to these different places in the Midwest that um I see there’s not a whole bunch of that. So that’s what I look forward in 2026.
DeRay Mckesson: I am really just trying to get through next Friday, everybody, and um [laughter] to get some time to, I feel like I’m so busy that I don’t, I have not had a chance to like dream dream in a while. So I’m hope that is sort of what I, what I what I want to do in the transition to 2026 is like dream, dream again. And I’m proud of the we did some really cool things in 2025 that I’m like, oh my God, I didn’t think we could pull this off. We pulled it off and I’m looking forward to time to dream, dream. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: On today’s show, I’m talking with historian Bench Ansfield about their new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson, and the remaking of the American City. The book revisits the wave of fires that tore through the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s and challenges the story many of us were told about who was responsible. I learned a ton in this book. I didn’t know any of this stuff before I read this book, I think you will be as fascinated by it as I was. Here we go. Bench, it is amazing to meet you. And this was such a beautiful book. And I feel like I know a lot around race and justice and, I knew none of this. I have so many questions, and it is an honor to have you on the podcast.
Bench Ansfield: Thank you so much, DeRay, it’s it’s an honor to be here, I’m excited to get into it with you.
DeRay Mckesson: Well, let’s start with how did you, before we get to fire, did you how did you even learn about this topic? Did you always know you were gonna write a book like this? Like, I don’t know. Tell me how you got here.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah, no, I was first kind of put on to this history by a neighbor of mine in Philly. I moved to Philly right after graduating college. I also thought I knew a thing or two, but my neighbor uh uh basically was like, look like this thing happened. Landlords in mass burned down their buildings in the Bronx and what kind of occasion, the conversation was that we were talking about the move bombing in Philly in 1985. And she was like, well, this wasn’t just here. This was also, you know, happening in the Bronx. And I remember just being like, what? You know, like, and I didn’t really start looking into it for a number of years, the question just kind of like, lodged itself in the back of my mind. But then eventually, it kind of got too, too, too heavy to, you know, became too much of a burning question and I started to follow the money and see what I could find and I was just totally astonished at what I came upon that, yes indeed, this was a this was a mass massive widespread phenomenon not only in the Bronx, in cities across the country, including in Philly. It took me, you know, 10 years to collect the research that eventually became–
DeRay Mckesson: Whoa.
Bench Ansfield: –this book. And a lot of the reason for that, you know the length of that gestation period is that the only people who really had remembered this were the people who lived through this history, right? Historians were getting it wrong, politicians, pundits were getting it wrong. So it took a long time to kind of piece together what what actually was really happening.
DeRay Mckesson: So let’s zoom out. So I’m I I start reading it and I’m like, up to 20% of the Bronx was burned. That is, it just blew my mind. So can you, just for people who have not had the pleasure of reading the book yet, tell us the top line of the scope of arson and then why it matters.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah. So in the Bronx, roughly 100,000 units of housing were lost over the course of about a decade, which is equivalent to like a city like New Haven, Connecticut burning down in its entirety twice, right? And actually, this wasn’t all just landlord arson. There were different sources of the fires. And also some of this was just landlords abandoning their buildings. But the most destructive fires were set by landlords. And in general, landlords’ disinvestment from their buildings was kind of the catalytic factor, the precipitating factor that set, you know, these buildings on their road to ruin. And, you know, the story is about bad landlords, of course, but even more so, it’s a story about insurance and the kind of inner workings of insurance in our cities and in our lives. And I should I should stop here and just, like acknowledge that, you know, for folks listening to this. Just the mention of the I word, it can can can get people to freeze up, right? Nobody wants to talk about insurance. Like it’s the most stressful–
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah.
Bench Ansfield: –soul sucking thing. You literally buy insurance so that you don’t have to think about it. Like that’s, that’s the business model. But the more I read about it, the more, I started to see that, you know, it’s it’s everywhere. It’s this kind of hidden infrastructure of finance that shapes all sorts of, you know, shapes our lives, shapes our landscapes in all these different ways. And that’s really what ended up, you know, pulling me in is like insurance pretends that it’s really boring, but actually, it is like a, it offers this this window into into how capitalism works, right? It not just how capitalism works, but actually how, how capitalism like the emotional logic of capitalism in a given moment, right? It’s like a mood ring for capitalism. It shows it all on the surface, right? Like the fear, the greed, the anxieties, it’s all there turning those emotions into dollars and cents.
DeRay Mckesson: So, you know, it’s funny, I’m reading the book and my first aha is like, I can’t believe they burned down so much of the Bronx. This is wild and I can’t believe this happened not just in the Bronx, but in other cities that there was an incentive to do this. So that’s my first, I’m like I had no clue. So I’m in between meetings the other day and I’m telling people, I’m like, did you know they burned da da da? And then I keep reading and I’m like I had this moment where I’m like, I actually didn’t remember a world before insurance. Like I didn’t even think about a world before fire insurance or homeowners insurance. Like I sort of have always thought about them as like, they just have always been around. And then I read this and I’m like, oh no, they have not always been around.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And that it is a racialized coming of insurance. Can you tell us like, what was the, can you help the listeners understand like, what the what was the incentive for landlords to burn so much of the property? And then again, like so many beautiful moments in the book and then public housing like remains unscathed is not burned down, is is resistant to this, can you help us understand the incentive structure for landlords in the Bronx to commit so much arson?
Bench Ansfield: Yeah, so this is really this really, you know, blew my mind that I had to train myself in how the industry works in order to piece this together, because it has a lot to do with how insurance redlining has shaped our cities are the metropolitan regions since the 1940s. And, you know, redlining is is in 2025, like a lot of most people hopefully are at least familiar with the term most of my students who come into my classrooms, even as as freshmen, they will have some familiarity with redlining. But when people talk about redlining, usually they’re talking about mortgage redlining like that’s the kind of hidden assumption there. Insurance redlining was actually a different animal, right. And it played a role in how mortgage red lining worked, except like we know nothing about it, right? And this is again, part of like oh, you know, not overlooking insurance overall, you know, and not not kind of subjecting it to our analytic gaze the same way that we do other aspects of our economies. So insurance redlining began actually later than mortgage redlining, it began in the late 1940s. And it continued for the next two decades, really until the 1960s, when the uprisings of that decade basically accelerated it so much that the insurance market in American cities just kind of dried up almost entirely, right, insurers were in what I what I call a racialized panic right. The dollar losses from the uprisings of the 1960s weren’t actually that high compared to like a natural disaster for instance, but insurers were just totally convinced that unremitting Black revolt would continue to shape American cities forever, essentially. So they just fled. And President Lyndon Johnson at the time in 1967, basically realized that they had a major insurance crisis on their hands, right? Because even like government agencies were losing their own insurance, right in Philadelphia, where I’m where I am speaking from, the school district, the the housing authority, they themselves had their insurance get canceled. So LBJ convenes a commission to study this, and it’s actually kind of an offshoot of the much more famous Kerner Commission. And what that commission ends up doing is they propose something called the FAIR Plan, which stands for Fair Access to Insurance Requirements. And this was a kind of public private insurance program that was designed to be an anti-redlining measure. It was designed to be a racial justice remedy, right? A way to correct for the redlining that had deprived Black and Brown neighborhoods of insurance for these previous decades. But what the fair plans introduced was actually still pretty crappy insurance. So beginning in 1968, states across the country introduced these fair plans. And this was what I what you can kind of roughly think of as as subprime insurance. It was so expensive, and it delivered really shoddy protection. And this sort of fair plan expansion occurred alongside ongoing redlining by banks and mortgage lenders. It occurred alongside all of the cutbacks and the austerity and the disinvestment that happened in American cities in the 1970s. And what that meant is that landlords were in a position where when they kind of measured the potential profits they could make through renting their buildings and getting equity in their buildings and eventually selling their buildings, versus the amount of money they could make just by burning their buildings and collecting those fair plan insurance claims, a good portion of them opted to burn their buildings, right? They were making an economic decision. They were heinous decisions, but they were making economic decisions. They were acting in accordance with these market principles. And that’s that’s kind of what drove this in the Bronx and across American cities.
DeRay Mckesson: So again, I’m reading and I’m like, I knew the Kerner Commission. And the report was progressive in some ways, even today, it was wildly progressive then. And today you read it, and you’re like, you know, the government wouldn’t even say those things today.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And then you talk about Hughes, who leads the commission that creates the fair act. And you’re, like, well, this was not very progressive. And such a good example of how people do these big structural things that sort of go without anybody paying attention to and it reshapes whole community’s lives. It really did just blow my mind. You know, I don’t want to give away some of your coolest stories. So I’ll just ask you. There were stories that stuck with me, but you know, I don’t wanna give them all away. Is there like a story of a landlord that like still sticks with you from the book?
Bench Ansfield: Hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: Because one of the things I thought you did that was so well that I didn’t even think about was sort of this argument about why the Bronx, why it was easy to do there. And this confluence of like the just racist redlining and all that stuff, but just racism in and of itself that people didn’t think of landlords, like they weren’t the suspects, you know? Like when you got all these Black and Brown people, people just assume that the arsonists are like bad Black kids, or–
Bench Ansfield: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: –bad Latino kids.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And it was the landlords!
Bench Ansfield: Yeah, yeah, yes, totally. So that was kind of like the the big myth that this project is trying to debunk, right, is that the fires of the 1970s were just, you know, quote, “people burning down their own neighborhoods,” right? Which is actually a narrative residue from those rebellions of the 1960s and into the early ’70s, right. And there’s a real tendency in popular memory, and even in the in what historians, write to allow for the kind of intense brightness and radiance of the 1960s uprisings, right? Which are so powerful, right, such a powerful force in American history, you know, through today, that kind of intense brightness works to obscure the more destructive wave of landlord arson into the 1970s, right. And it’s not just a matter of historical memory. During the 1970s, it was actually common among policymakers, especially policymakers in the the Nixon orbit, right. Now it’s Nixon is president, he takes over from LBJ to blame the rising fire rate on vandalism, on they’re often kind of using these terms of riots and pyromania and vandalism. And this is a move that Daniel Patrick Moynihan makes famous in this memo that he writes to to Richard Nixon in 1970 called the benign uh neglect memo. And that tenancy to blame tenants, to blame residents for the torching of their own neighborhoods could take, you know, all sorts of different valences. Some of these were sexualized, criminologists believed that homosexuality was an indicator of pyromania. There’s all these different ways where, you know fire really lends itself to this sort of scapegoating, right? And to come back to your initial question, landlords were were wise to this. So I actually begin the book with a landlord who wears blackface before going, dresses himself in blackface before going to torch one of his buildings, which was you know kind of exactly, you know this isn’t that’s not actually a move that most landlords even had to do. They actually found more cunning ways to kind of redirect blame onto their tenants, but it’s really emblematic of what landlords in general are trying to do, which is, you know, to to kind of invert the causality, right, to redirect blame on to the people who are victimized by this process, right. And so the kind of master myth that the book is trying to take on is that this is just tenants burning down their buildings. And that tendency to just blame tenants is evident even today in all sorts of different ways, right? Landlords can in all different spheres blame their tenants for processes that they themselves set in motion, right? And it’s tenants who, in the end, really take on most of the risk and the pain from that sort of discursive and narrative move.
DeRay Mckesson: That was a story that I was gonna, I was like, I love that he gets pulled over for a tail light.
Bench Ansfield: Mm-hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: And they thought he was Black. I’m like, I love it. See, this is what you get for being shady, you know, and being in blackface.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah, exactly. Again, it’s like, he’s wearing blackface. But the the kind of, you know, lesson to pull from that is that actually, what most landlords were doing is they were they didn’t need blackface, they used financial masquerade, right? They found other ways, I call it briefcase minstrelsy, they found other ways to kind of shrug off any culpability and to push it onto to the residents of these neighborhoods. And actually, the biggest way to do that was simply by hiring what they called torches to do the burning for them. Torches were usually young men or boys who lived in the targeted areas, right? Sometimes in the building itself. Sometimes these were like, you know, like 13 year olds. They were to get paid like sometimes as little as like 10 or 20 bucks to burn down a building. And because of the way that arson laws worked in the 1970s, it was exceedingly difficult to incriminate anybody but the person who literally struck the match. And so landlords could really insulate themselves from prosecution simply by commissioning somebody else to light the fires for them.
DeRay Mckesson: Can you help us understand the toll on communities? So, you know, I first am shocked by the fact this is happening, then I’m shocked because who knew insurance was, I mean, I knew the history of insurance as a concept was racist.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: But I’m like, I didn’t even know fire insurance was a thing. There wasn’t a world before fire insurance. But can you talk about the impact on on the Bronx or on families and communities? And as you started to talk at the very beginning of our conversation about the people who know this story the best are the people who experienced it.
Bench Ansfield: Yeah, of course. So it’s it’s kind of like impossible to overstate just how much these blazes this this firestorm terrorized the communities in the path of the blazes, right? The fires actually moved in somewhat predictable patterns. And this is especially true in the Bronx, where they spread gradually northward from the southern reaches of the borough. And in a way they were you could actually watch them engulf block after block. And because these patterns were so discernible, even to the naked eye, right? Fires produce smoke. Like, right, they’re not. This isn’t a hidden violence. You could see them coming. Sometimes years ahead of time, you can watch them from miles away from the mid Bronx, from what was, you know, previously parts of the North Bronx getting kind of eaten up by this wave of of arson. And so tenants watching this had to be really vigilant. Like they had to cultivate what I think of as this bruising vigilance just in order to stay alive. And the kind of the most damning detail or kind of, the most tragic detail, the one that I couldn’t shake when I first started encountering it in the archive. And I can’t tell you how many times it came up was parents putting their children to bed wearing shoes or wearing street clothes, right, like ready to jump up and escape their apartment as fast as possible. Families would keep suitcases packed by the door. Just trying to imagine that sort of vigilance and maintaining it for years, right? That that’s what it took to stay alive is I mean, it’s just it actually breaks you when you really take take in that detail. And most did stay alive. So considering that in the Bronx, there were 30 fires every night, on average.
DeRay Mckesson: That is–
Bench Ansfield: It’s crazy.
DeRay Mckesson: Wild.
Bench Ansfield: Right? It’s totally it’s totally. It’s, it it’s beyond comprehension. And yet there are there were fewer deaths than, you know, then those numbers would suggest. And part of that is that landlords typically weren’t actually trying to kill anybody, right? They were trying to make money. And they and actually, if anybody died, it increased the amount of scrutiny that the fire would attract, right, so they, they found ways to tip off tenants, they would slide notes under under tenants doors in the middle of the night, they, you know, the super would would kind of spread it, you know, spread news, like a rumor, and this was life saving gossip, that actually, you know, what is is, is one of the reasons, one of the ways that like people kept each other safe, right. And just to before I forget this other point that you made earlier, the only safe place to be was public housing. So this is this was like the little this is like the data point that convinced me that this history had you know, this project had legs, right? The fact that public housing, which is usually vilified in this era, right? We think of the 1970s is kind of the the beginning of the end for public housing. By this point, it’s deemed a failure and the federal government turns against it. It refuses to build more public housing, it begins to tear down public housing and that process of gradually deconstructing this huge housing initiative that had since the 1930s created these hundreds of thousands of units across the country. That whole narrative of public housing being a failure is totally contradicted by this finding that actually the only safe place to be in the 1970s Bronx was a housing project owned by the state, right? That is so against the kind of common assumptions of how dangerous, supposedly dangerous public housing was in these years that it really forces us to rethink you know what model of housing is actually most effective, right? What would it really mean to take seriously this finding that public housing was immune to these profit-incentivized fires? And I think it really should change the calculus of where public housing belongs in our present cities.
DeRay Mckesson: Can you help us understand how did the fires stop? So the Bronx is not burning today, and but what is it a structural thing or what should we be paying attention today given the scam that you exposed around insurance that I like didn’t even know about?
Bench Ansfield: Yeah, so, you know, Bronxites figured out before before anyone that these fires were being lit for profit. I tell the story in the book, one one Bronx tenant whose name was Genevieve Brooks, and she lived in the Crotona Park section of the Bronx and by the mid-1960s started to watch white flight just ravage the neighborhood. She started a tenant union to try to save her building, but realized that was kind of thinking too small. So then she tried to organize a block association, still like wasn’t wasn’t thinking big enough. So she resolved to start a neighborhood wide organization specifically for youth. She called it Seabury Daycare. And this daycare center effectively became the kind of unlikely vanguard in this fight against arson. So she and the children in her care you know, they had they had their ears to the ground. They noticed in the very early 1970s that there seemed to be a pattern to these fires. They seemed suspicious in some way. And so in 1973, she and you know the kids in her care started to to keep data on on these fires, where they were happening, when they were happening. And they were able to map this pattern. She brought her findings to the fire department in in her neighborhood. And she was effectively gaslit. She was told, you know, oh, you’re seeing things these fires were lit are being lit by junkies, they’re being lit by vandals, like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. But she was undeterred, she kept organizing, she eventually starts another group called mid Bronx desperadoes. That was a community development corporation, and keeps pressuring the city to take action. And there were dozens of other organizations just like that happening in in the Bronx alone. If you look nationally, they’re the by the late 1970s, the federal government begins creating basically an anti arson like yellow pages, they like list out every anti arson organization across the country. And that yellow pages booklet is 160 pages long, there are so many organizations that are just proliferating across the country. Whereas before 1970 say there probably wasn’t a single anti-arson organization, right? Why would why would you need an anti arson organization before the arson wave? Ultimately, the book makes the argument that this sort of this sort of grassroots organizing, though it was like the the catalyst for these various processes for stamping out the fires, grassroots organizing couldn’t take the profit out of arson on their own, right? They actually needed state intervention in order to do that. They needed to pressure their policymakers in order to, you know, to act effectively, because the arson wave wouldn’t subside until until there was no profit to be made, right. And so policymakers by the late 1970s did get on board. They passed various reforms. They started actually creating municipal anti-arson strike forces. They created various pieces of legislation like tax lien legislation, which basically enabled the state to collect back taxes from insurance payouts before the landlords could actually collect that money. And because so many landlord torched buildings were in tax arrears, it actually made it harder for landlords to then turn a profit. So there were all these different mechanisms that came together. They also they also shamed insurance, the insurance industry itself, right, which actually played a huge role, you know, insurance, it turns out is pretty vulnerable to bad optics. So once insurers realized that they had a PR crisis on their hands, they actually got on board, they actually started really paying attention to which of these fires seemed to be suspicious. And and you know refusing to issue payments on those fires right away. Right? They began actually really investigating and really sending out adjusters to to look into these fires. And all of these various factors together by the early 1980s meant that the arson wave had effectively ended.
DeRay Mckesson: Boom. Now we are coming up on time. I again, I cannot tell people to read this book more. I’m a huge fan and people need to read the book. Where do people go to stay in touch with you? Is it like Instagram? Is it Twitter? Is it the website? Is it where do people whenever you whatever you do next, they need to know about it. How do people stay in touch with you?
Bench Ansfield: Thank you that’s so kind for you to say. Yeah, my I’m on Twitter most like most prominently. I’m also on Instagram. I also like so I am a professor at Temple and my website is freely available. I really encourage folks to get in touch. I’ve actually had really incredible letters received really incredible letters from folks who who survived these fires who I hadn’t previously met. Buildings that I write about actually got in touch. So I really I actually really read the letters that come in and I usually respond. So, I’d love to hear from you.
DeRay Mckesson: What’s your Twitter? Can you tell them?
Bench Ansfield: It’s at @BenchAnsfield.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay, boom. Well, this again was an honor. I’m happy that we got to do a teaser for the book. But people buy the book, read the book. The book, if you can imagine is even cooler than this interview, because the book is that good. Um. We consider you a friend of the pod and can’t wait to have you back.
Bench Ansfield: Thank you so much.
DeRay Mckesson: Well, that’s it. Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week. And don’t forget to follow us at Pod Save the People and Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. And if you enjoyed this episode of Pod Save the People, consider dropping us a review on your favorite podcast app, and we will see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by AJ Moultrié and mixed by Charlotte Landes, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Myles E. Johnson and Sharhonda Bossier. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.
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