Trump rewrites history on White House website, study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, or related to donors/staff, and the rise of Black educators on TikTok. Pod Save The People is back with the Blackest Book Club reading list in collaboration with Reconstruction and Campaign Zero. DeRay interviews author Aaron Robertson about his new book titled The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America.

News

The Rewriting of a Pioneering Female Astronomer’s Legacy Shows How Far Trump’s DEI Purge Will Go

Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff

HillmanTok: The rise of Black educators on TikTok

Trump pauses 25% tariffs on Canadian goods after deal will Trudeau

Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.

TRANSCRIPT

[AD BREAK]

De’Ara Balenger: Hey, family. De’Ara Balenger here. So after four incredible years, I’ve made the hard decision to step back from Pod Save the People. This show has been such an important part of my life, so meaningful. And while change is never easy, I know it’s time to step into a new chapter. The conversations we’ve had, the stories we’ve uplifted, the impact we’ve made. I carry all of it with me. Being part of this team that is so deeply committed to truth, justice and change has really been an extraordinary honor. And in the words of Bell Hooks, one of the best guides to how to be self loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. Right now for me, that means taking a little more time to love on myself, my family, to reflect and to step back and really be grateful about everything this space has given me. I may be stepping away from the mic, but I’ll always be rooting for the work that happens here. This isn’t goodbye. It’s just a shift. A transition. Thank you to my incredible co-hosts, our listeners, and everyone behind the scenes who has made this journey so special. I am forever grateful. I love you all. [music break]

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay. Welcome to Pod Save the People and this is our first episode of Black History Month. It is me, Kaya, and Myles, talking about the news that you didn’t hear with regard to race, justice, inequity from the past week. And we are happy to announce the third annual Return of the Blackest Book Club. If you don’t know, every year, Pod Save the People collaborates with Reconstruction and Campaign zero to curate a brand new reading list just for you. And through our partnership, the Blackest Book club provides a platform for community members to connect, to converse, and critically engage with literature as an act of resistance and solidarity. Check out our Blackest Book Club reading list at Recon.today/Blackest-Book-Club. Let’s go. [music break] Happy, Happy Black History Month 2025. This is DeRay at @Deray on Twitter. 

Kaya Henderson: This is Kaya Henderson at @kayashines on Instagram. Happy Black History Year 2025, friends. 

Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson @pharaohrapture on Instagram. Happy Black History yeah eternity. Black History eternity. [cheers]

DeRay Mckesson: Well, there is a lot going on. And let’s start with the most recent joy, because this year has been so much so far that we haven’t had a lot of joy. But the Grammys was so Black, so beautiful, from Doechii to Kendrick, to Beyoncé to Victoria Monet, Keke, everybody just looked so good and was so cool. What were your favorite moments? I will say that um Blue, I feel like we saw Blue grow up at the Grammys. I’m like, I remember you first seeing her and now she’s asking Beyoncé, can I come up on stage with you? And just ah it’s just so cool. And then Beyonce had the nerve to do two interviews afterwards. I said, you know, 2025 is really just opening up, so I’ll stop there. But what stood out to y’all? 

Kaya Henderson: Listen, I’m going to tell the whole truth and tell you that I was so excited when she won um Country Album of the Year. And literally my partner was like, I was like, if she wins, I am going to jump up and down so high. And he was like, don’t worry, she’s not going to win. And when she won, I tell you that I literally was up in the air and I tired my old self out so that I couldn’t even finish watching the Grammys. I fell asleep, but I watched enough of it to see [laughin] because that’s what happens when you’re old. Um. But I watched enough of it to see, Doechii, oh my gosh. I thought her comments were amazing. Um. Kendrick I mean, if there is not a song of the year, if They Not Like Us is not the song of the year, I don’t know what is. Um. I thought that the best new artist category was really, really tight. I don’t know, Chappell Roan or I don’t really know Sabrina Carpenter. But um but just the whole lineup of people that they had um was, it seemed wildly competitive. Um. It was just yeah, it was Grammys so Black and I’m here for it all. Um. I even thought that there was so much grace and camaraderie in how people sort of how Taylor Swift handled Sabrina Carpenter winning that category, how excited Taylor seemed for Beyoncé when she won. Um. I just thought the whole thing was delightful. And usually I’m mad when I watch the Grammys, but um this one I was very happy about. 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I’m not a I’m not a Grammy’s girl. [laugh] I’ve never been a Grammys girl. I haven’t been a Grammys girl. It’s so funny because uh, obviously, like the New York Times piece is associated with the Grammys, but the whole piece is about me not caring about the Grammys and thinking and me trying to get other people to cheer up and be like, she was just [?] on stage in front of Middle America like she won. Fuck the gold statue. Um. Uh. You know, there was there were some, like, cabaret vibes with the Grammys for me, the Cabaret, the film um starring Liza Minnelli, where the cabaret is kind of this like analogy for uh the you see the cabaret deteriorating as you see Nazi Germany um happening in Berlin. So it was it’s a little strange always to see these uh these uh shows in this political context and then also to see so many um hyper political identities like Chappell Roan and Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar and not hear a whole lot of political speech. This is just has been such an interesting moment. And not to say there was nul of any political speech, but you know, when you think about Greenwich Village or, you know, folk singers and rappers in the history of being a musician and an artist specifically in America, where blues and folk and hip hop has always had a political slant, it felt oddly um vanilla and and and just not not as sharp. So that that was the strangeness for for me. But I always feel, you know, if you’re a Black person, and you care about Grammy, and you got that Grammy, get that Grammy. And I’m happy and I’m happy for you because we deserve to um pursue excellence in whatever is the symbolism of the attaining of that excellence is it’s good to me. 

DeRay Mckesson: I was surprised to see Diana Ross out there uh giving Kendrick the award, I was like come on Diana. 

Kaya Henderson: Oh yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: And they really– 

Myles E. Johnson: Why are you surprised?

DeRay Mckesson: I don’t know Di–

Myles E. Johnson: She’s been on tour. That’s what you, you don’t know. 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh I did not know.

Myles E. Johnson: She’s been on tour. Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: Really? 

Myles E. Johnson: I saw her two times. Yeah, that you shouldn’t you you shouldn’t be surprised. Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle have been out here working and Anita did too right before she cursed out Babyface, remember? She yeah there was there was an auntie revival. 

DeRay Mckesson: I didn’t know about it.

Myles E. Johnson: They’ve been on it. 

Kaya Henderson: Oh yes.

DeRay Mckesson: I’ll say because if I was a writer I would write this essay but I am not writing right now so I’m going to say it on the pod is you know, I’m always struck at how many industries, people, things were fundamentally changed because of the protests and they don’t acknowledge the protests. So, you know, if you saw when the Recording Academy um president got up there and did that speech ushering in the weekend, you know, he talked about the what is it, it is 13,000 voting members. They made that commitment about adding 3000 women uh Grammy voters since 2019. Afterwards, you know, they talk about the racial demographics, a 90% growth in the percentage of Black or um African-American voting members, hundred percent growth in the percentage of Asian or Pacific Islander. None of this happens without the protests it doesn’t like it just is not a thing. And this is not just the recording academy. There are a million places like this, but this conversation about race and who chooses the Grammy voter. It is like it doesn’t happen without the protests. And I just want to acknowledge the activists and the people who put their bodies on the line to force these conversations about race that change industries, even when those industries don’t acknowledge that that is what caused it. So I just wanted to say that. Um. And now we have the sobering news of what is happening in the world. So uh DOGE, I think that’s how you say it, right? DOGE that’s the non-agency agency. Um. You know.

Kaya Henderson: Yes

DeRay Mckesson: I don’t know if you all saw, but it looks like DOGE, which is run by Elon Musk now has access to the Treasury’s systems payment systems, forced somebody out. I don’t think we’ve talked since the FAA challenges where Elon forced somebody the head of the FAA out. There was obviously that plane crash with the helicopter in DC. That was tragic. There have been some other issues bubbling up with planes. I was just in DC and I took a train. I normally take the 45 minute flight, but this time I was like uh I don’t know. Um. And I bring it up because it looks like every day, you know, more is happening in this administration than people thought was going to happen. So I just wanted to see what’s on your mind, because I will say I am a little nervous. I’m hoping that the party has some sort of response. Shout out to Pete Buttigieg and AOC and Representative Jasmine, who seem to be the only voices just saying something. But I look up and Mitch McConnell is annoyed and I’m sitting up here like Mitch you were a part of it. I don’t know. You gave him the Supreme Court. I don’t know how you’re on the Sunday afternoon show up here mad about what Trump’s doing, I don’t get it. And the tariffs. How could I forget to bring up the tariffs? So I just wanted to open it up because it would we’d be remiss to not talk about this. I don’t even know what one thing to focus on. Is it the tariffs? Is it the FAA? Is it the Pete guy being confirmed and the other guy might run the CIA and Mitch McConnell? There just seems to be so much going on. And he’s only been president for not even 30 days. So, you know, we have to talk about it because it is top of mind. But what is on your mind with regard to the presidency? 

Myles E. Johnson: I think with how everything’s been going on, my mental health strategy with it has been let the news come, see what sticks. Because even with the whole government shutting down thing, that was something that of course, if if there were going to be so many Black people who didn’t get food stamps or didn’t get these other things, that is a huge emergency. But it ended up not like it didn’t happen within 24 hours. It kind of that part of it corrected itself. And that would have been kind of alarming people getting people’s, you know, nervous system deregulated. You know, I learned that on TikTok. Um and and stuff with for for no reason. So that’s been my strategy but what I’ve been seeing. And it’s and it’s scary to to talk about but um what I’ve been seeing is white power finding its, you know, expressing itself and reorganizing itself and figuring out ways to um legally reorganize everything that has been organized since the civil rights movement. You know, and again, my big thing with this is less that they’re doing it. I mean, obviously that they’re doing it is a huge deal. But the fact that there are people who are willing to do this with Trump and then also there are people who are supporting him. And I think that is the big thing. Each election we learn is who our actual neighbors are and not just who we imagine our neighbors to be. Sometimes and and and that’s what’s the most um chilling about all of this, is that there’s so many people who are happy with, happy in cheering on these results. And this is going to animate the next conservative wave so in four years when J.D. Vance run runs or whatever, conservative um new icon or new prophet they crown runs, they’re going to run on, you see what Trump did? I’m going to do this now to this whatever the new group of people is. And I’m more concerned about the momentum. 

Kaya Henderson: So I’m struck by how quickly folks are moving for sure. I am clear that this is about deregulating our nervous systems and overwhelming us and distracting us and all of those things. And like you, Myles, um I just refuse to be all in a tizzy. Right. I know so many people whose anxiety is high and they don’t know what to do with themselves. And I my mental health coping strategy has been what can I control? And I can’t control a lot of the things that are going on. But I can control a set of things that are really important to me, including what happens to young people in this particular moment. And um my thing is, you know, um I was talking to a friend who said, do you think that after Joe Biden won, the Republicans were sitting around and holding space for each other and making sure that they were feeling good, or were they or were they doing something else? And I was like hmm they were plotting and planning and getting themselves ready for the next election. And so I have taken that to mean, what am I doing to ensure that I am being a warrior for children right now? That I’m protecting children and I’m looking for the loopholes that people are not paying attention to, to to do what I need to do um because I won’t sit here on my hands and do nothing, um but I will do stuff that I think is really important and that I have some control over. And all of that being said, I think the thing that is most shocking to me in all of this is how much power Elon Musk is wielding for somebody who was not elected, for somebody who has not been confirmed by the Senate or the House, for somebody who literally who is an immigrant, um we don’t know his status and who because he’s the richest man in the world, basically purchased um Mr. Trump’s loyalty through his election um donations, his campaign donations, and now has access to our our Social Security numbers our our all kinds of information about us and has the ability to single handedly stop making governmental payments, stop providing food to people around the world like and every single person who has tried to stand up basically for the republic and say, this is not how we do things, has been removed or sidelined. And the thing that is shocking to me is there seems to be no recourse. Um. There seems to be absolutely no recourse. And I think maybe if anybody with malintent thought that it was this easy to hijack the American government, [laughing] they’d a not waited this long. They would have done it before now. But I am stunned at how easy it is to hijack the American government. I am stunned, frankly. 

Myles E. Johnson: The glue is the normalcy and the pageantry it’s like this invisible agreement that that white power has had made. And we’re like, oh this is how it’s done? And what we’ve got to do is go to court and [?] this in and do this and we’ll get it. And then, you know, the invisible part is, no, we don’t want to do that no more now. Now we want something new. 

Kaya Henderson: And by the time you get to court, this thing will be over and done with. Right? Like 19 attorney generals–

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah that’s part of the strategy. 

Kaya Henderson: –are suing and da da da da da and all of that jazz. And while that is winding its way through the normal processes. These people are on go time. 

DeRay Mckesson: And I think about the FBI agents, you know, all those law and order guys who, you know, Trump supporters, and he’s marching y’all out the building. He is firing all the FBI agents. You’re like and when I saw the FBI union put out a statement, I was like, you know, this is rich because all of a sudden workers rights and all this stuff matters and he is screwing you guys over. But this is like how bullies work, right? Is that bullies sort of force you to this position where you got to do something. And I think that Trump is calling people’s bluff. All these people had all these big speeches. And I’m looking at the it really is AOC, Jasmine Crockett and Pete, who I’m watching say coherent things to push back. Otherwise, it doesn’t look like much of a fight. And as much as I’m annoyed by people who didn’t vote, seeing the former head of the DNC say that Biden should have stayed in. Not helpful. It just like it like in this mom–, you have too much structural power. You should be rol– helping us think of something like that’s not the how you should be using your platform. That is actually really disappointing. 

Kaya Henderson: Maybe the other surprising thing is that the Democratic Party does not have a thing to say, doesn’t have a position to to advance, doesn’t have a direction. It it seems to just be sitting around watching it all happen. 

Myles E. Johnson: Also, the Democratic Party has been disavowed of power. You know, like I think that’s a part of it, too. There is nobody on the Democratic Party who is um I mean, obviously, if you’re a senator, that is power. But I’m talking about the kind of cultural power that they have. There is nobody there. And um that what really actually has to happen, which is wild is while something is getting burned down that you want to save, somebody has to be um starting something from scratch. And I feel like there’s just nobody there starting doing the brick by brick stuff because right now you still need people who are all about kind of building an apparatus for the Democratic Party and for really for people from the left that doesn’t exist yet. And part of me, start, ones, wonders is that because in order for the Democratic Party to really be strong again, it does have to um at least collaborate. 

Kaya Henderson: Die. 

Myles E. Johnson: With people who are on the left. 

Kaya Henderson: Die and start all over again. 

Myles E. Johnson: But also collaborate with people on the left. Like sometimes like I keep on revisiting  um Vice President Harris’s speeches around having the most lethal government and and bringing out Liz Cheney and stuff like that. How the strategy was to become like more of a Republican than we saw. 

Kaya Henderson: Or centrist yeah.

Kaya Henderson: And I think that’s just because they’d rather be more Republican often than talk to people who might say Free Palestine or have complicated um academic views around gender or any of these other things that maybe feel alienating to the Trump or to Trump voters. They’re trying to like, get those people back. So it’s kind of–. 

Kaya Henderson: Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: Leaving them without power, in my view. But I want talk about tariffs. So I read that he’s taking away income tax. Right. And then this tariff move is what is going that that’s going to replace the income tax that’s being taken away. That that’s the that’s the full strategy. What I’m afraid of is that people who know anything about the economy, know about stocks, know about all those different things, are going to say this is foolish. This is not what’s this is not what should happen. But what I’m afraid of is that for four years, it might–

Kaya Henderson: Old. 

Myles E. Johnson: Even itself out. 

Kaya Henderson: Enough. 

Myles E. Johnson: Like I feel like it might be one of those Covid Trump check moments where why did you even need a Trump check? Because he was incompetent. But at the end of the day, I feel like people are going to feel the no tax burden in whatever and then maybe even because they have this no tax burden they’re willing to pay 20% more on eggs and stuff like that. And that is kind of my fear with this whole tariff thing, is that it it’s destroying something that we need. But the first waves of the death might feel good to some people or like a relief to some people. 

DeRay Mckesson: My hypothesis around this falling apart is I think that Trump and Elon are operating two different agendas. Is that I actually think that Trump is sort of like haphazard and and sort of whatever we lived through that first go around. I think it’s about his ego. I think that, you know, he’s trying to figure out what he can get and those two things. I think that Elon is running like a total destruction campaign. That, you know I, somebody said it very brilliantly, like don’t call this a coup, that a coup is trying to replace the people. What Elon’s doing is trying to destroy the thing. It’s like no more USAID, no more Medicaid. Like, it is not about replacing the people who run it. It is actually about destroying the things so that it doesn’t exist anymore. Whereas I don’t know if I would have said that was Trump’s goal. I mean, it might be now. And I think that clearly Elon has power and influence and is being unchecked. So I think you’re right about like there’s a world where people would be like yeah–

Kaya Henderson: Only until they fall out.

DeRay Mckesson: –I’m saving more money from income tax. Da da da. But I think that what we what will happen quickly, I think it’ll happen quicker than Trump would have allowed it to happen only because Trump does get he gets it. You make people unhappy and it sort of doesn’t work. Elon doesn’t care, is I think that when the social services crumble really quickly, like when Medicaid, when the or like. I don’t know if you saw one of the rural government sites is shut down. You know when they did the DEI thing they took all the websites offline. So they’re these sites that service rural communities that are just like down and I think that people are I think they’ll be a pain point that hits sooner than later because of Elon’s actions. 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah it just seems like they’re so forgiving to Trump and into Elon. And I think the it seems like the sentiment and when I watch other not just podcasters, but when I talk to people in you know, where I’m where I’m at, you’ll know where I’m at. [laugh] And, you know, and nobody knows what my political leanings are. I listen to them. They have so much um grace and they’re like, oh they’re redoing something. It’s going to be down for seven days or it’s gonna be down for a couple of hours. Or it’s going to be down for whatever. So there’s that grace component too. And then to the Elon point, again, I isn’t he modeling so well what Jeff Bezos can do? And what Mark Zuckerberg can do? Even when I was watching Mark go on the Rogan show and when I was thinking about Jeff Bezos not taking any political leanings um for Washington Post, which he now owns, I’m like, oh Elon is modeling to uh to American citizens who who are billionaires and who have oligarch ambitions of how they how it could be done. He’s almost like path making for them and they’re keeping off because they know good and well that they might have to run on a Republican ticket. That is my that now I just put my tinfoil hat on with that one. [laughter] But but but um but I think it was just worth saying that that’s that’s what I think about with Elon. I’m like, if you have somebody and same thing with Trump. Trump is so horrendous that J.D. Vance is or Mike Johnson is going to feel like a relief. 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah and I actually don’t. Myles, I actually I agree with what you said and actually think there’s something underlying it. I do think people are like very oddly sympathetic and sort of whatever, but I think that is a sympathy to the story, not the policy. And that’s where we are losing because I think that people like I think that the right has seeded and granted, they have the media ecosystem to do it. So it’s not even like slick storytelling. It is Fox. And, you know, I think about the buyouts, a great example. There are 8000 articles where the headline is Trump offers a Buyout. Now, two days later, people are like, that’s not a buyout. It’s a scam. Da da. But one whole day of coverage is buyout coverage, and they have mastered that or even the um $50 Million in Condoms to Gaza. It’s a day of news. 

Kaya Henderson: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: Repeating that as fact. There are ten minutes later, being like that’s not true. And I actually think that that is what they have gotten good at. But when you tell people, they’re like, well, why’d they lie about that? You know, people do want to be lied to and they want to be scammed. They don’t think all that stuff I actually believe I actually think if we had good storytelling, we’d be a little more even. 

Kaya Henderson: But the media’s culpability in that is real here, right? Because they so it the truth doesn’t matter anymore. They just don’t want to be left behind on a story that’s carrying the day and that’s doing such a disservice to regular Americans. But I think that the reason why people have grace is because people do want a reformed government. People do want some of the things that Mr. Trump has promised. And so they are willing to they know that, you know, you’ve got to break it before you can fix it. And I don’t think that people deeply understand that, like this isn’t a matter of it’s just a little broken and then we’re going to fix it, that like, these things are being disabled in ways that, you know, we might never be able to recover. And in the same way that you now see all over social media, all of these people who didn’t know that, you know, Obamacare equaled the Affordable Care Act and now they’re like, wait a minute, why is he talking about cutting it? I need my Affordable Care Act. And they didn’t realize that it was Obamacare. I think that people are going to wake up far too late to really deeply understand the consequences of what’s going on. I think that that is what this administration is counting on, actually, that like they can do everything that they have done and will continue to do and people will wake up too late. 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah. 

Kaya Henderson: And the real question is who will be left? I mean, I think when the government totally fails, it moves to privatization. Right? Because the only people who will be able to carry on the functions that the government used to do are the big companies that like there’s a reason why these oligarchs are all lined up because they stand to win significantly, significantly uh big business pieces of business. They can, you know, take over the whole government. And I don’t think that like I just people are not read. This is not this is not even you don’t have to go to Nazi Germany. You can look at the the you can look at what happened during reconstruction. You can look at what happened in the ’30s after the Great Depression to see how this has played out. And I I I you know, this is why you need the you need the populice to not be well-educated because when we don’t know our history, when we’re not well-educated, when we don’t know how economics works, when we don’t know how our own financial systems work, when we don’t know how our own government works, this is what happens. You allow this madness and people will wake up in four years and be like, what in the world? 

Myles E. Johnson: And I love how you framed that because that’s such a because I’ll often get annoyed when I mean, I always get annoyed when Trump is talking and and and he’s in the news, but I just really get annoyed with like the political conversation because it becomes about Trump. Right. And in order for him to take power and do what he’s doing. This is a long plan. You know, he’s the person putting it out, but he’s it’s just eight years of him. But it’s really been a long, steady plan of white power and white supremacy. And now we’re seeing and now we’re just living the the plan. But that this this this this pushback has happened really since white flight like it’s just it’s just been it’s been in the forecast. 

DeRay Mckesson: I know we have to talk about. I know we have to go to the Blackest book club. But you know some people have asked me about white supremacy and I’m like, just look at the qualifications of this cabinet. If you have never, ever thought about the absence of merit or you can’t even pretend that these people are qualified. Like, this is a this is a joke. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come. 

[AD BREAK]

Kaya Henderson: Well, family, you know what’s going on. Reconstruction, Campaign Zero and Pod Save the People are thrilled to launch the third edition of The Blackest Book Club. This year’s theme, Imagine A Brighter Future, calls us to harness the power of literature as a revolutionary act, to dream boldly, to resist injustice, and to craft a new world rooted in equity, hope and joy. In a time of immense political and societal changes. We turn to books as tools for liberation and imagination. Through reading, we find not only answers, but also the courage and creativity to design better lives for ourselves, our communities, and future generations. To deepen this shared journey, we’re asking you to reflect on the books that have shaped your vision of justice, of resilience and possibility. 

Myles E. Johnson: This year, in addition to naming the books, we invite you to share the [?]. The personal connections, lessons, or moments of clarity that make these books essential. Feel free to dream as big as you reflect. Consider books from any genre, whether fiction, nonfiction, poetry or beyond, that have inspired you to imagine new possibilities and reimagine what a just and joyful future could look like. 

DeRay Mckesson: That’s right. So go check out our Blackest Book Club reading list at recon.today/Blackest-Book-Club. At the link you can download the list and make a purchase in support of the cause. We’ve designed a limited time Blackest book club apparel collection featuring a range of designs and colors just for you. Stay tuned this month as we grab a book from the list each week and spend time digesting it together. 

Kaya Henderson: So my news this week um comes right off of all of this new administration I don’t know activity. I will say, um I think one of the most notable things that the administration has done is attack um diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government, not just across the government, but also um we’ve seen businesses back off of their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments. Um. And I we’re also seeing people attack the businesses who are standing tall um on their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. And while we’re having this big conversation about whether or not people are qualified because of their diversity, I thought that this new study that just came out from the National Bureau of Economic Research was quite interesting. And um this study found that 43% of white students admitted to Harvard University were either recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the deans interest list, which means they are applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard. Let me say that again, 43% of the admissions to Harvard are basically special cases. 

Myles E. Johnson: Nepo babies.

Kaya Henderson: Which means which means [laugh] yes nepo babies or um horses that we want to run in our athletic programs or uh people who whatever, whose parents work there or whatever, whatever. 43%. How many Black and Latino students? Less than 16% each. So this whole thing about affirmative action and, you know, minority students taking white students slots is trash because white students aren’t even earning their own slots. In fact, the study found that roughly 75% of the white students admitted from those four categories would have been rejected if they were not nepo babies, would have been rejected. Um. 70% of all of the legacy applicants are white, compared with 40% of all of the applicants who do not fall under those categories. So basically, regular white students have a 40% admission rate to Harvard. But legacy students, white legacy students have a 70% chance of being admitted to Harvard. And you want to talk to me about who’s qualified and who’s not qualified because of their diversity, equity and inclusion. One quote from this study said, and I quote, “Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students. With the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.” And so when we think about, you know, our most prestigious university in the United States, they perhaps are the largest purveyor of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, but not in the way that people thought. They are diversity, equity and inclusion programs for white students who have some connection to the university. And I brought this to the podcast because I think it is wildly ironic. We watched our president say that the reason why we had a um a plane crash last week in Washington was because of DEI hires. And he says it’s common sense. Um. Common sense ain’t so common, sir. Um. The biggest beneficiaries of DEI initiatives are white women. The biggest beneficiaries of admissions preferences are white people. And so masquerading your power moves under the guise of diversity hires are unqualified. Um. I think there is lots and lots of evidence to the contrary. And evidence doesn’t matter to this group of people who don’t feel like truth or expertise or data really matters. But um for all y’all folks who think you’re hot because you went to Harvard, I think in the same way that um minorities have had to question the same way that you’ve questioned whether or not minorities belong there and earned their spot there. I think we need to ask that question a little more broad. 

DeRay Mckesson: The only thing I have to add is um this is a question for either of you. Do you know how large the Harvard Endowment is? It’s the largest academic endowment in the world. Do either of you know how large it is? 

Myles E. Johnson: Not a clue. 

DeRay Mckesson: It is–

Myles E. Johnson: Couldn’t even give you a almost.

DeRay Mckesson: $53 billion. And I bring that up because I’ve heard some people who work at elite places defend legacy admissions as a fundraising thing that like we have to continue to prioritize the parents of a set of people who donate disproportionately the school because it’s the only way to keep the school running that like, you know, you need this money to run every year and that just doesn’t hold for a place like Harvard University. You have enough money that you could not admit any of these kids for the next 100 years and you will be perfectly fine. You will produce another group of alumn who can fund the place, who will do cool things. And but the idea that you needed to keep the place afloat is literally not is not a thing. That’s not the answer. So the question becomes, what is the answer? Especially when it is such a big proportion of the incoming kids. It’d be different if this was 5% [?] you’d be like, okay, that’s like. But you’re like it’s half the kids um is really noticeable. And I just highlight again that it is not an issue of fundraising. 

Myles E. Johnson: Hmm. So do you know that Harvard is the first American corporation? 

DeRay Mckesson: I do. 

Myles E. Johnson: So. So, like, when it comes to like and there’s been so much talk about Target this week in the Twitter streets. 

Kaya Henderson: Oh my gosh. 

Myles E. Johnson: And like and just in social media, I should say, there’s been so much talk about Target and as a corporation and just blah, blah, blah. But um to me, reminding myself that Harvard is the first American corporation. So it is a corporation that was meant to consolidate white power. And how did you get into this corporation if you were not white and um and wanted to have that shine of excellence? You dedicated yourself to white standards of excellence and exceptionalism, and you uh sworn via your commitment to it, via your assimilation to put your Black Brown woman exceptionalism in service of white male power. That is how that is the function of Harvard to me in 1636. And what I see is evolution and transformations of those that function and and people trying to push what that function is. But then you also see in 2025 that there is a reset button. There is a factory setting button and and so again. 

Kaya Henderson: Back to the original settings.

Myles E. Johnson: It’s one of those situations where I can’t say that something new is happening. It’s that we’re there’s something very old is revealing itself and showing that, no, we hadn’t gone anywhere and we will morph and be whatever you diverse thing you need us to be in order to get more money. But once that thing is not profitable anymore, and once the political structure has swung right, we do not care anymore. Because they started rolling things back before he got elected, you know? Um. So to me, I think those when I read those percentages, it just seemed like, oh the the the function of Harvard still is still there because those 43% of those people, those legacy people, those are the people who are consolidating their power, exchanging it and making sure that it go to their children, whether they’re smart or not. 

DeRay Mckesson: Boom. Um. While we’re recording, I just wanted to note that Republican Congressman Andy Biggs has introduced a bill to abolish OSHA. The entire text of the bill reads, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 is repealed. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is abolished. That’s the whole bill. 

Kaya Henderson: Just those two sentences. [laugh]

DeRay Mckesson: Again, you have to ask again yourself. 

Kaya Henderson: Again. Giving busin–

DeRay Mckesson: Why are they trying to end all regulation of businesses all I mean, the consequences of this will be dire. 

Myles E. Johnson: And it’s it’s just proof that if you are not personally wealthy, it is your fault. And they are showing that we want to eliminate the people we don’t want any more people being able to suck at the tit of American wealth anymore. We do not want any more parasites and poor people are parasites to them and sick people are parasites. It’s that it’s it’s that Aryan blood shit. 

Kaya Henderson: Culling of the herd. [music break[

DeRay Mckesson: Don’t go anywhere. More Pod Save the People is coming. 

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: I’ll go to my news, so my news, this is why the second Trump administration is so, so different. So this story, as you know, there was this uh executive order by DEI. They took everything off the websites. They took the word trans out of everything. They took some whole sites down so they could delete any mention of um diversity and inclusion. They put people on leave. We talked about that before they took off and mentions of HIV like a whole host of things they’ve done. But I bring this one because I was like, this is just such an odd rewriting of history, and it reminds me of how powerful the storytelling feature is and how the erasure of history is a part of the plan and process. That you actually can’t do what Trump and Elon are trying to do if you do not control information. It’s why Elon bought Twitter and why he tweets a lot of things. It’s why Trump, you know, like, you know, you remember when Trump got banned, it was a break. We sort of got when Trump was banned off it, it actually mattered. It was not insignificant that he was relegated to Truth Social because none of us were on Truth Social. But when Trump gets unbanned, the storytelling function isn’t is a legitimate function in the regime. But this is about Vera Rubin. So during Trump’s first presidential run, he signed an act that named a federally funded observatory after an astronomer named Vera Rubin. Now she’s a big deal because she has some of the landmark research on dark matter, and she’s an outspoken advocate for women in science. After Trump gets elected, they start editing what the observatory’s website says about her. So it used to say, quote, “Vera herself, obviously an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” that gone. It said she advocated for women in science, that sentence, gone. There’s another paragraph that said Vera Rubin, whose career began in 1960, has faced a lot of barriers simply because she was a woman. That disappeared, came back that they literally there’s another sentence that was on her bio, science is still a male dominated field but Rubin Observatory is working to increase participation from women, and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Rubin Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science and take steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with less privilege. As of last week, that entire paragraph is gone. I say that because this active rewriting of history is a part of the plan, and it’s why the work around the Blackest Book Club or the way people just talk about the past and catalog and download things actually really matters. I think the next phase of organizing will have to be offline only so that we can make sure that people actually get the information because the internet is being controlled in a way that I think none of us anticipated to be this quick. And I knew it was coming, but I didn’t anticipate it to happen like this. But the rewriting on the government websites is really wild to see that you’re editing her bio like this, is just nuts. So I wanted to bring it here because I was even surprised by this. 

Kaya Henderson: I think it is it’s both shocking um and it is comprehensive. It tells you that these people are not leaving a stone unturned. There’s no detail too small. Who’s Vera Rubin? Where’s her observatory? Like how many I’ve been on this earth for 54 years and never heard of her until you brought her up. Right. And it was important enough to make sure that every single iota of, you know, contrary thinking is purged. And I think that, um you know, we watch these people building the roles of what they learned from the first Trump administration um that they are that they didn’t get right the first time was they didn’t have enough loyalists who were willing to do all of this work. And now they have stacked their folders and they have people whose literal entire jobs are to go through. This is I mean, we’re not even three weeks in and we’ve changed government websites that ostensibly don’t have much to do with anything. And I think that that is an indication of how comprehensive this administration is. I don’t I think that, again, like, I think people are deeply underestimating how much damage is being done in a short amount of time. And um and this is just an example of that. 

Myles E. Johnson: A few things come into my mind with this, A, how how important symbolism is. So much of this stuff, like I’m sure a lot of the things that Trump wants to push through are going to be fought maybe don’t happen, maybe actually harm harm people. So these are the things that can happen that are purely symbolic, but also um assuage the people who who want to see those who want to see those things. Again, the most disturbing part about this to me is the women who like this. It’s the it’s the people who voted for him who are with him. Same thing with the the Ice deportationa, same thing with um Black people. It’s it’s it’s it’s less to me about what they’re going to do. But the reason why they’re able to do it is because there’s enough women who are on who who have successfully been brainwashed by like patriarchal power that that they want to erase their history or they want to minimize the reasons why this person was able to exist. Like that’s really disturbing to me. There’s enough Black people who also don’t want to be specialized or don’t want um there to be any talk about um about history anymore. There just seems to be a lot of people who don’t want to hear that history was bad. And again, with this conversation too, and I didn’t mention it with the DEI um article either. I am starting to question the articles, though. I just question the narratives in the DEI narratives. And, you know, these conversations are still about a privileged class. And usually specifically when we talk about DEI people and people who will benefit from DEI. If we’re just talking about Black people. Those are usually those jobs are affecting people who are just not the economic make up of most Black people. So I wonder if us kind of, not us literally on this podcast, but us as like a collective we. Um. Us focusing on these stories that hurt us emotionally and they offend us emotionally because we go to our Rosa Parks place in our hearts and we’re like, you’re not going to erase us. But it doesn’t touch anybody because most Black people don’t aren’t in a position to even enter the buildings where DEI would affect their employment. Like that is what kind of concerns me sometimes about these conversations too. And then because this is so disgusting and misogynistic, we still we talk about it and we want to critique it, but it just seems not to be touching people it like uh culturally, unless you already were on that side, of course. So my news is about TikTok, which I’m not on. So we’re going for a ride. [laughing] So um TikTok is a video, a video space I’m sure that you know about. But it’s a it’s a video sharing app. And in resistance there was a few creators and educators. These are people these are oh just  well degreed pedicured academically people, academic people, a lot of them, I should say, um who decided to come together and make their own coursework that is going to be um done via TikTok. And they called it HillmanTok, which is based off of the um imaginary college that was in a different world, the Black sitcom. And these courses are from everything from things that are about like relaxing and self-help and self guru stuff, but then also academic stuff. So telling people things about uh resistance and organization and history and and stuff like that. So there’s a really wide breadth of things that are happening on TikTok. HillmanTok is just a collective of educators who are coming together and and and really letting their expertise be for free. And I thought this was such an interesting and liberatory idea of how can we use digital space in order to do um any type of educational or radical work? Of course, TikTok is owned by uh was it Bytedance? We know Meta we know Meta products own everything, but I thought it was such a good platform or a good blueprint, rather, for how digital space could be used in the future. Because I see you see it on YouTube how the video essay and the video critique has just grown a lot of legs. There are people who are really thirsting for that kind of knowledge spec– um and I and specifically young people and uh when I think about apps like Spill and other opportunities that I saw with Black people trying to get into the social media space, I think sometimes I’ll note that people kind of go the cart, the culture and entertainment way with Black people. And I think there’s a more of a thirst, but people don’t know how to address the education gap or address the hard news gap in Black culture. And I thought this was such a good blueprint of how to do it. And I think the next step is how do we get this great infrastructure on something that we also can control and not make it a Meta product where Mark don’t like it, it’s coming down or it’s being suppressed, or a Elon product um and Elon don’t like it, it is coming in down and, you know, definitely not a Bytedance product where China could just be like we tariffing everybody so nobody getting educated on TikTok because your president getting on nerves. So how to how to how to how do we you know but I thought the idea was so good. I thought the um I mean, when we talk about joy, just the reactions I saw, if you go on HillmanTok on any other social media platform that isn’t TikTok, you’ll see so many great reactions from um Black folks. And, you know, I always look for the Black folks with the 50 followers and the 150 followers to really see what’s hitting. And the people are really, really excited about it. And I love that. And I love the idea that there are Black families who can be educated with them and they can watch TikTok reels and be educated about Black history. And, and yeah, I think this type of stuff starts in the home and we can’t rely specifically in this age on public schools to always teach your your your child Black history. And there you know I did not learn about Malcolm X at my school, I did not learn about Angela Davis or Assata Shakur or the Black Panther Party um in in in my public school, those were things that my mom introduced me to and educated me on. And I think that as Black people, we should always keep that spirit of self education with us because we’re always will be limited uh when it comes to education, when even when we’re not underneath a fascist regime. We were always kind of fighting for our education to be more robust. And I think this was such a cool, inventive way of how to do that. So I wanted to bring this all to you all. I really was um excited to bring this to Auntie Kaya because she is, you know, a high priestess of Black education. 

DeRay Mckesson: Yes high priestess. 

Myles E. Johnson: So I wanted to see does she crown it, does she frown it? 

Kaya Henderson: I’ll be that. I’ll be that. Um. I was super excited to see HillmanTok University um as somebody who shares this belief that we have to teach ourselves. We can’t rely on, you know, the traditional public school system or whatever um to teach Black children their history and their cultural identity and to build strong Black children. Um. I thought this was awesome. I mean, I have spent the last four years building a company that does that. And um and there are lots of people just like us, folks who are doing that because of them. You know, we can and all of the Black history um and Black book um Instagram sites and whatnot that are using social media to make Black history free. And I think um, you know, we really saw a flurry of this after the whole anti AP African-American history brouhaha with the state of Florida. We’ve seen churches that have gone back to I mean, this is not new for us. Historically, Black communities have always um relied on our own social and cultural institutions to teach from Sunday school to, you know, mutual aid societies to fraternities and sororities to civic clubs. We talked to um literary societies, right. Salons that were carried out. Where we have made sure that I mean, this is our historical tradition. We are teachers. We have always been teachers all the way back to the griots in in on the continent. Right. Like we are teachers. And it was beautiful to see us using this um medium to broadcast and communicate. And what I know for sure as a student of history is whenever we start poppin, people come for us whenever we start really teaching ourselves. I mean, welcome to the Black Panthers who, you know, people know their militarism, but most people don’t know that they set up feeding programs and schools and pre-kindergartens because their priority was around strengthening the Black community through education and collective action. And so I think what what I know for sure is there are lots of people who are accessing HillmanTok. People and their families are doing this together, People who never thought that they could go to college or afford college are all over the place talking about I feel like it’s my first semester at an HBCU and like, there is nothing you you can’t tell me. There’s study after study after study that shows that when we see ourselves in the thing that we are learning, academic progress soars, confidence soars, leadership soars. And so what I want to be very clear about is HillmanTok is has a target on its back that these people don’t want us teaching each other these things. And so my guess is that in short order and I’ve heard first of all, I heard that a white woman has applied for a trademark for the title HillmanTok. What? What? Uh. But this is what happens the moment we do stuff, people flock to it um and try to own it, try to dismantle it, try to wield it against us. And so um I am I hope that the professors are making sure that they have some legal advice to protect their content. Um. And I do like you, Myles, worry about who can just flip the switch and shut this whole thing down because that is a real threat. 

DeRay Mckesson: I’ll say, the only thing I will say is um it’s a reminder that people both want to organize and want to be organized, that people were like hungry to sign up. It was like a it didn’t it didn’t take 50 websites and info. Like it was like people were like, I am ready. I got something to say I need to learn. Like there was a there’s like a real hunger. And, you know, as a person who organizes every day, one of the hardest things is reminding people that they can start where they are, that people think they got to go to 18 seminars and you’re like, no, no, no, no, no. We got to we’re going to do this wherever we are. And we come, like you said Kaya, from a tradition of this type of organizing in church basements, on porches, like people sharing information is actually key to how we got out of the institution of slavery in any way. And literacy was it was impossible to do without literacy. So it’s cool to watch. And, you know, I saw too the thing about the white woman trying to trademark it. I also saw a different um line of conversation about trying to formalize it too soon, you know, like trying to make it a structure and da da da and it’s like sometimes you do, you know, and this is a hard thing that we all learn in organizing is that you got to let things breathe a little bit. Like you can create the container, you can create the space, but sometimes you can let it breathe so you can figure out what the thing is. And you don’t always know what the thing is when you’re making up new things. Um, like I said in another conversation on this episode, because I do think the future of organizing is not going to be online and just because the what we can believe and not believe has become a little too blurred. Or I think that I the people who become influencers will be like it used to be a very, very small group of people. I think this age of like everybody sort of being a thing I think is not going to last. And I was talking to somebody about the Democratic influencers because they were like, you know, the Dems chose the wrong people, I know this is veering a little bit. But I will say that actually I don’t know who I think is [?] like who do I think is influencing people’s actual behavior, political behavior. I don’t know who’s on that. There are a lot of personalities that I think are sort of around in the space. I don’t know who I’m seeing that I’m like, people are making decisions based off what you said. I don’t know. Like, I mean, definitely products, but otherwise I’m, I don’t know. 

Myles E. Johnson: People who are on the left and this is just my like analysis of it. They don’t want the people on the right are still into persona right. And a lot of and and and and want uh and want a person and want this type of and want an influencer and want a president and want these type of icons. The thirst that I’m feeling on the left, even if it hasn’t been articulated, is that they want a policy like they want something that puts lightning in their body the same way Barack Obama did, but like the policy that does that. So they’re trying to like find that core. So there’s not trying to remodel the Democratic Party after like influencer stuff is just so it was just so weird to me where I’m like, don’t get influencers get regular every day people and like, don’t try to get somebody to influence somebody to vote. Get people to talk and use maybe a platform to facilitate that, ask a influencer to hold that conversation or maybe even moderate it or whatever. But like there’s not any of those people who people want to see talking to other people. People want to feel empowered via the influencer, not feel not like an ambassador. But the last thing that I wanted to say as far as the the topic that Auntie Kaya um made me think of too, is I’ve been just rethinking my like relationship with social media because social media could be such a site of, you know, if you don’t, if you’re not critical of it, you’ll just end up just kind of producing consumerism and and and body politics and all these different things that just, I don’t know, just seem like they’re just flat. And I what this TikTok, this HillmanTok moment reminded me of is that you can choose for your social media page to be a site of education. So then they have to not be a site of um of joy or excite of your excellence. But we can choose that personally too. And uh there’s just been things I’ve been thinking about and I’ve been working on that of how can I make uh my digital presence a site of of education. And we all can do that. We all can post something. And even if it gets, you know, five, I think the like thing is really fucking with us, so it’s really not about it going viral. It’s about maybe five out of those one people seeing that thing and um or one out of those five people seeing something and maybe changing the way they think or knowing a new fact. And I think we have to be okay with that. And not just about the numbers game when it comes to social. 

Kaya Henderson: Well said. 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come. 

Kaya Henderson: [AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: To kick off this year’s Blackest book club programming. I sat down with Aaron Robertson to talk about his new book, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America. Aaron Robinson [correction: Robertson] weaves together historical research, [?] reporting, cultural critique and a little bit of memoir to consider the search for an ever evolving Black utopia. I learned a ton in this book. It was interesting. There was a whole sort of religious movement that I did not know anything about until I read this book. And it was really, really beautiful. I hope that you enjoy our conversation. Here we go. Aaron Robertson, thanks so much for joining us today on Pod Save the People. 

Aaron Robertson: It’s great to be here. 

DeRay Mckesson: Now we have already had a conversation in person about your new book, still new, right? we can call it new and the Black Utopians. But before we talk about the book, let’s talk about your journey as a writer and as someone who wanted to talk about this specific topic. Did you always know you were going to write about this city, this image? These organizers? Tell us your story. 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. I did not know where the story was was going to take me. So, you know, I’m from Detroit. Was born and raised there, and for a long time I had been interested in writing about or thinking about Afrofuturism and the ways that Black people have attempted to make their communities really beautiful and kind of livable spaces. But the journey to writing about, you know, the Black counterculture during the the 1960s and 70s was not not obvious to me. I grew up in Detroit, but my grandfather was from this town west of Nashville called Promised Land. And when I learned about Promised Land’s history like it was this all Black town founded in 1870. So right after the, you know, Civil War, I realized that there was this beautiful tradition of all Black freedom colonies throughout the United States. And so I wanted to write something that encompassed this history that kind of started like in the mid-19th century, that showed the ways that Black Americans had been creating communities of, you know, refuge and dignity for themselves. And I also wanted to bring that into the 1960s, this period of social tumult and social change, especially in a place like Detroit. 

DeRay Mckesson: You know, I have only been to Detroit once. And this made me want to go see the Shrine of the Black Madonna and [?] I was like [?] to go see it. Take us to we’re going sort of jump around here but take us to the shrine. And I want to I want to work backwards from that. 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. The Shrine of the Black Madonna is a church that started in Detroit in the 1950s. It was founded by this radical preacher named Albert Cleage Jr. And Cleage was born to a sort of well-to-do Black family in Detroit, like in the 1910s. And he was involved in the civil rights movement in the ’50s. But he is best known as a Black nationalist, actually. So, you know, in the early 1960s, he began to really split from the ideologies of the mainstream, you know, civil rights groups. And he was interested in starting a church that was not a kind of Sunday’s only institution where a congregation would gather, would worship, you know, Christ then would go home after that. He wanted to create an environment where Black people were involved in self-determination projects, so he wanted to establish Black political institutions, Black economic institutions. And that was really the foundation of this church that he he founded. The shrine is sometimes seen as kind of the great embodiment of what is known as Black liberation theology, which in short is this idea that God is a god of the oppressed. And in the case of Albert Cleage Jr and his church, God was someone who you know sympathized with the plight of Black people. The the kind of motto of his church and of the movement that he started, which he called Black Christian nationalism, was that nothing is more sacred than the liberation of Black people. And this was the mantra that for, you know, decades after the church was founded, would guide all of their kind of radical experiments in communal living. 

DeRay Mckesson: So I learned a lot in the book. One was about the the stories of the people and the way that they thought about the relationship between art and religion. But also I was surprised at how little I knew about the shrine itself. Like I, I think I had seen a picture before, and then when I was reading, I was like, oh  no, I had heard about this. But I and I don’t know if I asked you this at the book talk, but why do you think this has been a seemingly under written about story in the in the larger landscape of Black art or a protest? You know, like I think about the stories that you elevate that center this so deeply in the liberation tradition, not simply about like Black liberation theology, but sort of the protest movement, the civil rights movement, and Black [?] like that whole moment. This is this is in conversation with that, it seems. And yet it wasn’t until I read your book that I was like, oh this is like a thing thing. This isn’t just like a cool piece of art in a church. 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. I think there are a lot of reasons that the Shrine of the Black Madonna is not well known today. In part, it has a lot to do with the sort of radical theological beliefs of the pastor of Reverend Cleage Jr. In the 1960s, he was probably best known for writing a book called The Black Messiah, which came out in 1968. And it was a book that was trying to kind of diagnose the state of the Black Revolution at that time in the U.S. So he was writing about, you know, the perceived conflicts and, you know, tensions between people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. But he was also saying that the kind of, you know, revolutionary figure of Jesus Christ was himself a Black man. And he was not talking about it symbolically, like his view was that, you know, the Christ who who lived on Earth was a revolutionary like Black nationalist, essentially, who was going against the white oppressor Rome. So you can imagine that at that time that was not a very popular belief. And, you know, Cleage was seen as a kind of leader of a new religious movement. And in the 1960s and, you know, early ’70s, if if you were a revolutionary who was saying, I have this sort of prophetic way of thinking about social transformation in this country. And there’s a relatively small group of people who will embrace these views and try to change the world. You might have been dismissed as a kind of cult. So in some instances, you know, Cleage and the Black Christian Nationalists were conflated with groups like the People’s Temple and, you know Jim Jones. Right? So these these these sort of like radical fringe activist groups, but also, you know, Cleage was very much involved with other groups in Detroit like the Nation of Islam. Like he was inspired by a lot of what Elijah Muhammad was doing in terms of, you know, purchasing land. Right. Purchasing farmland for Black Americans, establishing Black owned businesses, etc.. And so sometimes Cleage and the Black Christian nationalists were actually mistaken for being a part of the Nation of Islam. And like even though Cleage was well known in the late 1960s, in the early ’70s, he he actually stepped out of the public eye really to focus on, you know, building up his church. So all of these are reasons why I think the church isn’t as well-known today as a movement like, you know, the Nation of Islam or even, you know, the Black Panthers. There was just less visibility. And I think to a certain extent, the social movement was interested in not being not being too exposed, you know, in the public eye. 

DeRay Mckesson: Got it. And one of the things that I also appreciated about the way you wrote the book is that instead of just dropping us in a point in time of like the church existing and the art being there, you sort of lead us to how it happened. So the history of it is is such an important part of the book. And that was the part I was like, oh I didn’t I you know I learned all about I had from birth to I’m like, oh here we go. Right. Can you talk about why that was important to you because you could have made a different choice. You could have said, the shrine is here, the church is here, and sort of talk about the ramifications of that. That is a that would have that is another way you could have done this. That is not what you chose. We sort of get the before we get the, the what happened then we get the after. Can you talk about the historical part of this and why that was important to you? 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. You know, I didn’t want to write a book that was just about the countercultural moment in the 1960s. I was interested in, you know, in kind of showing the ways that Black utopian traditions have really deep historical roots. So, you know the the kind of impulse to create spaces of safety and security and economic prosperity that didn’t just start, you know, during the period of urban rebellions or the Vietnam War. I wanted to go back to the foundation of these all Black towns to sort of show the ways that that there were many different shapes, I think Black utopian communities have taken. So it was important for me to write a book that was not only about the the, you know, literal spaces that Black communities had created, but also to show the ways that, you know, for black utopian dreamers, there was so much that they were thinking about in terms of, you know, the creation of art. Right. I wanted to get into the the really kind of emotional and psychological like feeling of being involved with social movements. I think that for a lot of Black utopian dreamers, we tend to come up against this conflict, you know, which is do we stay like where we are and try to change the communities that are right in front of us, or do we leave and do we go somewhere else because the conditions around us are, you know, untenable. And so the book is sort of full of stories of of the people who stayed, you know, who stayed within the bounds of the United States to try to enact, you know, social change. But there are also stories of people who said, okay, I don’t see anything for me here, like in the United States. I can’t imagine this place, you know, being much better. So I have no choice but to leave. And that was especially true in the in the story of an artist named Glanton Dowdell. He was this this Black nationalist who was best known for painting the the mural of the Black Madonna and Child at the Shrine in Detroit. 

DeRay Mckesson: It’s almost like I set you up for the next question. But you beat me to it. But before I ask about Glanton, I want to zoom out and I want you to define Black utopia for us. I think that when a lot of people, a lot of people’s relationship with the term utopia is sort of it’s like fanciful in some ways, like it’ll never come to be. It’s sort of like, you know, like I think about the first dystopia I ever read was the Giver. And then the utopia was sort of the world that had never become a thing. And and I do think that’s what people think of when they hear the word, how do you use it when you think both about the title but also in the language you just used about Black utopia? What does that mean to you? 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. So one of the gifts and challenges of writing about Utopia as an idea is that no one completely agrees on its parameters really. You know, I think that usually Utopia does have that connotation as something that is, you know, fanciful or kind of limited to the imagination. But I wanted to explore, I think, and reclaim a different meaning of the word. In this case, Black utopianism, as I see it, describes some of the many ways that that Black people have attempted to creatively resist the sort of political, social, you know and economic restrictions that have historically been imposed on them. And that encompasses a wide range of of methods, right? So there there is actual, you know, placemaking. Right. So. Reclaiming land, you know, for example, and using that to establish communities or, you know, farms kind of urban gardens, Right. Stuff like that. But there is also the the ways in which Black people have needed to create, you know, art or sort of social relations, right. In which they can feel dignified. I think that utopianism is really at root about how people relate to one another. Right. So. It’s why the book is about about, you know, social movements, because we can talk about these like grand plans to change the world. But it really starts so often with changing one’s own family, one’s own city, like one’s own neighborhood. And so that’s why I wanted to focus so closely on the Black Christian nationalism movement. I was interested in the ways like hope is actually sustained on a day to day basis. You know, I think when I was growing up and sort of thinking about social change, the kind of visionaries that I would speak to would say, well, I just had to find a way to hold on to hope. And it sounded really good, but I didn’t actually know what that meant. How difficult was it like, what was the emotional toll of movement work, especially in the case of people who were doing this kind of work for decades? It’s not easy. And so I think it was important for me to write about not only the beautiful experiments that that Black people have engaged in, but also moments of, you know, failure, moments of kind of compromise and splits within Black social movements, because that to me was just as interesting and as compelling as the stories of of the successes, you know, of these movements. 

DeRay Mckesson: Let’s zoom back into Glanton. So if Cleage is, you know, one of the central characters and we you know, we learn about his daddy and the whole, you know, we we learn so much. Then Glanton is the other central character and we also learn again, I knew nothing about him as an artist, but I appreciated that I did not meet him at the point of the art itself. I met him so much earlier than that. Can you talk about why his life story, not just the the image he produced was important to you to include in the text? 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. So if Reverend Cleage was this very programmatic, you know, like Black social visionary, by that I mean, he had a really clear sense of the kind of long term plan that he wanted for his movement. He, you know, wrote a couple of books about exactly what kinds of changes he wanted to see for Black people in the world. Then the story of Glanton Dowdell, who was the artist, right, who was so associated with the Shrine of the Black Madonna. You know, his life was really an example of improvisation, right? As a way of surviving and thriving. He was born in this this really poor neighborhood of Detroit called Black Bottom, which was on the city’s east side. It was where a lot of poor Blacks and a lot of poor, you know, immigrants largely from from Eastern Europe, moved in the early 20th century. He grew up in conditions of poverty. And, you know, he went to prison for his involvement in a murder when he was a young man. And so he lived this tumultuous life, but he was also a beautiful visual artist. And that was a skill that he had refined during his years in prison. And to me, the story of this this sort of like, you know, mischievous, troublemaking artist who then when he’s out of prison, right, he gets involved with all of these movements in Detroit. He he helps establish the Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party. He’s involved with this Marxist Leninist group called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Right. Like he is as steeped in American social movements as you know anyone else. But then in 1969, he feels that, you know, the the FBI is really, you know, circling in on him. He thinks that his time in the U.S. is up. And so with the help of these young like leftist Swedish activists, he actually self-exiles to Sweden where he lives for the rest of his life, you know, until he dies in 2000. And that story of fugitivity, right. Of of of trying to create a better world when there are so many obstacles that sort of suddenly present themselves was very interesting to me. How do you adjust on a dime, right? Especially when when the main arena of your work is no longer the country, you know where you were born. What does it mean to strive for a better world when you are so far from the world that you thought like you would always be a part of? So his story for me was was really fertile. 

DeRay Mckesson: Um again, I learned so much. I was like, I didn’t even know this man existed. And then I was like, he did a lot. He had a, it is also that, you know, there’s a moment in the Black freedom struggle where a lot of people left. You know, you think about like, you know, Baldwin goes and comes back and [?]. You know, like a whole set of people who were instrumental to the moment are like, yeah, America is not doing it. 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: And sometimes that perspective is helpful. And, you know, some people never return. Like our dear sister in Cuba, so. 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: But take us to the today part of the book. So I think about Beulah land, which is more today than, you know, the story of the creation of the Shrine. Where does Black Utopia sit both in the way you chose to end the book and in the way that you think about the today work? 

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. So the book kind of builds up to the creation or establishment of this land in the South that the Black Christian Nationalists purchased. So in the mid 1990s, the shrine you know members had had saved enough money over the course of, you know, fundraising for for decades. They had saved enough money to buy about 4000 acres of land in South Carolina in Abbeville County, which they called Beulah land. And the idea had been to acquire land in the south so that they could grow crops to then send to to Black neighborhoods throughout the like mostly urban north. And the project had had been in motion for, you know, 20 plus years. When they actually bought the land. It turned out to be this old cattle ranch that was not really conducive for growing crops. But I wanted to to show the ways that these utopian dreams manifested, you know, on Earth, like for many of the Black Christian nationalists, Beulah Land was really the most tangible manifestation of this utopian dream. Right? This this farm, even though it didn’t completely do what they had wanted it to do, had a name, you know, going back to the 1970s or I mean, even the late 1960s. So this was an example of Black people saying, okay, we have this goal, we’re going to name it. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. We don’t even know where in the U.S. this farm is going to be. But we will orient ourselves towards attaining this goal. And that, I think, is is really indicative of, you know, what what some people call pre figurative, you know, politics, like which is this idea that you have to act like in a way, right. That that shows that you kind of already have what you’re striving for or like what you’re striving for is here. You just have to sort of build up to it. And so that was really the the point of Beaulah Land. And there are so many other, you know, predominantly Black and Brown led intentional communities that exist throughout the country now, from Vermont to North Carolina to, you know, you name it, there are these these pockets of of Black and Brown led spaces that are, you know, emphasizing the importance of land reclamation and having a more sustainable relationship like with the Earth and also with one another. I think that one of the short, one of the parts about the shrine that I think current day activists would would probably struggle with is that even though it was revolutionary in many ways, it was still a sort of patriarchal led Christian church. Right? I mean, the Christian church like obviously was not going to speak to everyone’s needs. And as a part of that, there was there was not really space intentionally carved out for people who were part of the, you know, LGBTQ plus community. But a lot of the Black intentional communities today are led by by women, by people who identify as queer or, you know, gender nonconforming. And that was a part of the book that I at least wanted to gesture to at the end. But there’s so much space for someone to write a whole lot more about about that. 

DeRay Mckesson: Do you know what? Do you have any, do you have a second book in you? Do you know what you want to do next? 

Aaron Robertson: And I–

DeRay Mckesson: As somebody who wrote a book, I know how hard it is to write one. So I even get to know when people ask about the next one I’m like, this one almost took me out. But–

Aaron Robertson: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: I wanted to ask you. 

Aaron Robertson: I do the in fact, the Black utopians was not supposed to be my first book. I was was doing research for a novel, actually, when I learned about the Shrine of the Black Madonna. It’s kind of a book about revolutionary Black Catholics in Detroit. So it’s it’s it’s in the same period and it’s dealing with, you know, similar issues. But I do hope to go back to it soon. 

DeRay Mckesson: [?]. Well, let everybody know where they can get the book and where they can follow you, is it Twitter, is it instagram, is it Facebook is it they need to show up at the house. What is the? What is the way? 

Aaron Robertson: You can get the book online you know, anywhere I mean Amazon, Bookshop.org, or most most bookstores near you. I don’t have a Twitter or Instagram, but if you find me on LinkedIn, hey, give me a follow. 

DeRay Mckesson: LinkedIn how old are you? [?] LinkedIn. Why are you like boycotting social media? Is this a thing? 

Aaron Robertson: I was I was on it and for so long and it just was not doing anything for me, really. I was so addicted that I had to I had to hop off. 

DeRay Mckesson: Okay. LinkedIn. So find him y’all on LinkedIn for the updates. Or if you see him walking in the street in a city near you. Everybody get the Black Utopians. And Aaron, thanks so much for joining us today on Pod Save the People. 

Aaron Robertson: Thank you DeRay. 

DeRay Mckesson: Well, that’s it, thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week. Don’t forget to follow us at 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’ll see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media, it’s produced by AJ Moultrié, and mixed by Vasilis Fotopoulos. Executive produced by me and special thanks to our weekly contributors Kaya Henderson, De’Ara Balenger and Myles E. Johnson. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.