Share This Podcast

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay and welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda talking about all the news with regard to race, justice and equity that you might have missed this past week. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at Pod Save The People. Here we go. [music break] Two-week extension around ICE is the top of the thing on my mind right now. Here we go. Another week. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @SunPulpit on Instagram. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bossier at @BossierSha on Instagram, at BossierS on Spill. Speaking of the two-week extension on ICE, let’s talk about the Dems and what’s happening in the Democratic Party. Lots of movement, lots of news this week, including Kamala Harris relaunching headquarters has created a lot of buzz among the pundits and the online. Let’s call them literati. Really interested to hear what you all are seeing, hearing, thinking about Kamala seemingly wading back into the electoral waters. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Wait, are you calling the literati from the Harlem Renaissance? Is that like a [?] is that where you’re getting that from?

 

Sharhonda Bossier:  I said the online literati, you know? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh that that’s so. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: You know me, I’m like, I’m like that’s good. [laughter] I wasn’t sure. I was like, wait, no, I uh, you know, I really try not to be pessimistic when somebody’s starting something. So you know we’ll see where it goes. That is not necessarily my social or political home. So we’ll see how it galvanizes anybody. I’m not putting any of my eggs in a, in a neoliberal basket. What I will say is that the ecosystem I think that there is such ignorance of what the ecosystem really needs. And I think that you see what the right ecosystem is and is and we want to mirror that, Democrats want to mirror that, and what is most needed is a bridge. And nobody’s creating that bridge because Democrats are actually scared of the belly of the left. You know, I don’t want to call it the base, but the belly, the appetite of the left. So there is none of that. Whereas on the right, you see people like Nick Fuentes being connected and bridged to people who are seen as more liberal on the right. To me, they’re all white supremacists, but that seem more liberal. But you see these bridges continuously being created with Steve Bannon being connected to Candace Owens. Like you kind of see that. Here it’s not that it is segregation. It is we do not want to hear what those Bernie people have to say, what those um radical Black people have to say. We don’t wanna hear none of that, but we will give people who are sycophants of our politicians a platform to hopefully yell people into voting. I don’t know what the plan is there. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Or walk out of dates to force them to vote, yes. [laugh]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Shame, shame is a powerful motivator. You know, part of me is like, I don’t know what people want Kamala to do. It feels like everything she does is never the right thing for people. So it’s like, if she disappears, and it’s, like, well, why give up? She has a long career left. If she runs her president again, it’s like, wait, Myles, you’re the disappeared chart for her? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: No, no, no I would just say I know what I want her to do. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh. [?] It’s like, if she runs again, people are pissed about that. If she runs for governor, people are, so I’m like, I don’t know, the part of me is like, Kamala can do no right for people. So that is, I struggle with that. What I will say is that there’s no shortage of organizing infrastructure needed on the left. So if this helps to, I mean, this is like going to be some videos and stuff, she said, but if it becomes more than that, that will be necessary. And you know, I think Myles has yelled this point for months. More than months, half a year, a year maybe, about the party leaders being afraid of the belly or the far left or whatever we call it. And ICE is actually a really interesting moment around this because, and I’m gonna talk about this later, but when you look at the polling for ICE, what you will see is that 85% of Democrats support abolishing ICE. Now, when I first saw this number, I was like, mm because the options are strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat don’t support, strongly don’t support. So when I saw it, my gut was like, oh, this is gonna be majority of people somewhat supporting that we have lumped into a big number. I looked at the data, it is 65% of Democrats strongly support the abolition of ICE. That is a moved needle. That is an incredible thing. But you see the party leadership sort of like, like afraid of where people have moved. And I think that is true on a host of issues that we could frankly be fighting much harder on because our people are already there, we don’t have to move them anymore they’re just there and our leaders for whatever whether it’s disconnect or money they just are not doing it and that is it becomes more stark to me every day. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I wonder what you would have to hear from party leadership to know that they were finally moving in the direction of the base. I listened to an interview this morning with Speaker Jeffries talking about the Dems trying to hold the line on more funding for DHS as a way of forcing Republicans’ hands on their demands related to ICE, namely body cameras, you know ICE agents having to remove their masks, etc. And he didn’t sound like he had moved anywhere near where the base is, right? And so I’m wondering, you know, do we think that this moment becomes another fracture line within the party where the base is, you know, closer to where we are on, like, let’s say Palestine, right, and where party leaders are, to your point, DeRay, for money or fear of being unseated, reluctant to move in that direction. And I’m just wondering what it sounds like to come from party leadership, right, because I think some of them would say, we don’t want to scare the moderates. We don’t want to scale the middle, even though we will achieve the same outcomes you all are hoping for. And I’m wondering if we’re asking for language and virtue signaling that actually means we won’t get what we want. Like, what does it sound like to have party leadership say the right thing on this issue right now? 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I don’t know if I think there’s much middle. I think that people sort of are picking sides. ICE is a good example to me it’s like, when you get 80% combined of the Dems saying, get rid of ICE, there’s no middle. It is just a majority, right? So when you see people not meet it, you’re like, well, what is happening? Cause you’re not messaging that the people are wrong. Like you’re not saying, oh, you believe this, but like you didn’t get it right. Like that’s not what they’re saying. They just sort of aren’t in line with it. Now what I’m sensitive to, and I probably have a particular bias around this cause I’m an organizer, is that, the Dems can continue to do it when we don’t have a sustained, organized sort of push against them, so they can release things that don’t make sense. And unless you happen to have one of the organizers on a hot topic issue who just won’t, like the Palestinian organizers just would not relent, and they sort of moved the needle. The people about AIPAC would not relent, and they just moved the needle, but outside of these sort of like very specific things, the Dems sort of do whatever, people tweet about it, and then they just move on, right? Because there is nothing sort of forcing them to do anything else. Do I think Kamala’s gonna do that? No. But when I think of what we need in the political space, that is what we need. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I think that they’re not doing it because they know what I know, which is they kind of know like this kind of eminent Afro pessimistic truth, which is that probably in 10 or 15 years, the people who are really going to be controlling them are the people on the far right. So they can’t actually make these and totally align with the belly of their base because they know that that will upset the people who they’re really gonna have to serve. Now midterms, we all know that conservatives do not come out during midterms. So I think what Democrats are seeing is that there is going to be a wave of conservatism, if we want to call it that. I’m calling it a wave of fascism. And I think them um putting their heels inside of an issue like abolition would sabotage their chances of control in the future. So Kamala could not go on stage. if she said abolition today, abolition tomorrow, when it comes to a police state or ICE, she could not then go on stage in two years and say you’re going to have the most lethal American system. She couldn’t do all these kind of neoliberal fascist dog whistles that she does in order to maintain power. And I think all of the Democratic Party knows that. So they’re kind of stuck inside of um affordability. They’re kind of stuck inside of these certain topics because if they go any more um radical or left on any of the other ones, they know that they’ll probably end up being hated by the people who they’re eventually going to try to court. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Mmm. Got it, okay, that makes sense. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I’m wondering if Texas, of all places, uh might offer us some insight and potential lessons here, right? So we’ve talked a lot about Jasmine Crockett’s run for Senate, right, and how her messaging is landing on the electorate in in that state. We’ve talked a lot about where we’ve been disappointed in some of the positions that Jasmine Crockett has taken on some of the third rail issues among the Democratic base. And now running to succeed her uh in her current house district is her pastor who is running to her left on a lot of the third rail issues. And the Justice Dems you know who have seen success in supporting AOC and others have endorsed him. And so I’m watching that race closely. I’m wondering how you all are thinking about and processing watching this Democrat who is deeply rooted in Christianity, run to the left of someone who is already seen as radical in a party that we are talking about not having the appetite for that, and what you think his chances are, number one, and then two, again, what we think the national party might be able to learn from a candidate like him. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: A, to me, it makes sense because, you know, Jesus is a far left radical, like Jesus is the most leftist, leftist you could, that has ever left us, the throwing of the tables. The even the actual spiritual ideals, that the fact that like, oh, you do not need a king or a pharaoh or whatever they had in the biblical times. You all you need is this connection to God, and that is the supreme connection that surpasses whatever laws and governments that this earth has. That’s a kind of abolition of like government. That’s a kind of anarchist idea. So it makes sense to me that we would birth people who both believed in Christianity and believed in like leftist politics. That feels really good to me. I am also astonished that Jasmine Crockett, I’ve been trying to at least, been so good on her since she’s announced her her running. I really had to shut my mouth. I tried not to throw any pessimism. When I saw that video of her defending somebody in the Epstein’s files, I’m like, have we not watched Shonda Rhimes? Did we not, like, what where is that cutthroat, West Wing energy? If somebody who is your friend is in the Eptein file and you’re trying to gain political power, throw that man under the bus. I don’t know what’s going on. Oh, my goodness. What like, fake it. Like, I was, like perplexed that she was on television defending somebody as she’s trying to run for her Senate seat. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And I also think that like the other critiques that I had before she ran for Senate and when she was kind of just in that kind of Marjorie Taylor viral clip, I really warned against just being sucked into this digital minstrelsy of being used as a way to just be seen as um a neoliberal mascot for the Democratic Party and then being flattened. And I think now you actually see, A, her kind of cultural limitations. And now, out of all people, her own pastor is able to see that and say, oh, I know where you can’t go. I know what you can’t say, I know what you can’t do, and I know what people are really thirsty for, and I’m willing to do it. That’s, to me, a fascinating revelation that I didn’t expect to see happen. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m curious, both of you, I know, I just have questions because we haven’t talked about it. Do you think she has a, I don’t know, where are you on the like, and Myles, you have had a lot of thoughts about her over the arc, which I, it’s been great to like see. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Can you also highlight my restraint? 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Have you seen my restraint? I’ve been, once you announced–

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I was like. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: You did. But I think about like you call this digital minstrelsy, like the like, you will become the trope. You sort of, you named that a long time ago. Sharhonda, do you think that sentiment has changed about her? Do you think that you know the polls still seem really close with her and Talarico? It doesn’t it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear person. And then if she does get the nomination, do you think she can win? Or how do you she’s navigated the media I’m interested, Sharhonda? What you think? Like people probably say different things around you than they say around me about her. I don’t know. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I, you know, am with Myles on the digital minstrelsy stuff, right? Like I’ve, I definitely saw some stuff come out of her office where I was like, Jasmine, people are dying. You know what I mean? Like we don’t need the rap video. Um, and then I had to check in with myself to be like, have I adopted a respectability politic, right, that is not allowing me to like hear this woman’s message because of how she’s trying to deliver it. Also, I’m like, well, who was her target demographic and is this way of communicating like hitting them? And I just need to acknowledge that like, she’s not trying to court the old respectable aunties, right, which is my demo. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Not your demo, [laughter] that is not your demo. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think that I am struggling to see a path truly towards viability for her. What I am afraid we are seeing in some of the polling data that has her neck and neck with Talarico is people not wanting to be perceived as racist, right? And it’s the same thing that we’ve talked about with Kamala, which is like, you know, if you asked the party pollsters, if you ask, you know, the other folks who were trying to run the numbers, people were saying they we’re going to show up to vote for Kamala. And like just didn’t and the numbers that you know that they said and numbers that she needed to win. And I’m deeply concerned that we might be seeing something similar with Jasmine, which is like, in this moment, no one wants to be called racist, right? In this moment no one want to say that they are undermining a Black woman if they consider themselves as part of the left. But I’m just worried what people will do once they are in those ballots, you know in those voting booths and they pull that curtain behind them. And I’m trying not to give voice to that. I’m not trying to give energy to that, I’m trying to believe that we can win. I’m try to believe, as she said, that like, the only way we do it is to do it. But two of my siblings live in Texas, right? Both of them are partnered and I talk to both of them all of the time. And she has not come up, you know, at all as somebody that they are thinking about supporting, they haven’t even expressed excitement around her candidacy and one of my siblings is raising two Black girls in Texas, right, and is constantly looking for Black women to elevate to, you know, say like that could be you one day and Jasmine isn’t making the cut. Yikes. Can’t believe I said that, but that’s yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah I was so curious, because I don’t think I have deep thoughts about this. Like, I’m sort of like soaking this in, because I only see her on Twitter and on Instagram at this point. Like, and I see, I don’t know what ideas she has. I just see her respond to things like that. That’s like the clips that go viral are her sort of in response to something. So I need to do more homework. That is on me. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Or maybe you don’t, because according to James Carville, all we need is a white candidate who will get Black people to [?] his way. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I said, you old creoles, skeletetor, cryptkeeper. Why would you and what also that reveals, too, is how we got into this neo-liberal fascist mess, right? Because James Carvel was the advisor to Bill Clinton. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. Yes.

 

Myles E. Johnson: And he was, Bill Clinton was the one who went on playing saxophone. I’m reading a Hall Arsenio. I was but a star in the sky. But also I’ve been reading this book, we’re going to actually have this author on, so I’ve been reading this book on Toni Morrison and she starts it with Toni Morrison’s failures when it came to like essay writing, which is kind of scary. And one of her failures is she really put it on for Bill Clinton in a way that was–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: She did. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Really weird and untrue. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Whoa I forgot that. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: She did. She did she’s who christened him the first Black president 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh, yikes. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: It makes sense that he would say something like that when you think about the representations that we got. And then when you think about Barack Obama and like the creation that is, and I don’t think that you get Barack Obama without the launching pad of Bill Clinton, and also the launching pad of Bill Clinton’s failures of like Monica Lewinsky and stuff, I think that he helps make the bar really low publicly that Obama’s exceptionalism was able to sit really beautifully on top of that because we did Bill Clinton. This white trash man from Arkansas was in there getting fellatio in the White House. We can’t let this exceptional Negro in the White House with a white mom? Like it kind of made the negotiation different, I think too. But uh yeah, I think, again, I think that we’re in like the aftermath of a lot of those dangerous decisions and a lot of those engineering around what America really has to do to really be a place that is sustainable, a place that is safe and a place that is equitable. 

 

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

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Sharhonda Bossier: The Grammys were this past Sunday, so we got to see who the award winners are. There was some history made this year at the Grammys with Bad Bunny winning album of the year for the first time as like an artist who had made a fully Spanish language album for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. So, you know, we watched all the looks on the red carpet. I had like a whole little thread going with my friends about what that looked like. We saw some people choose to get on stage and leverage the moment to make political commentary on the state of the country. We saw a lot of people also choose not to do that, right? We saw Trevor Noah make some jokes about things that he has admitted he might not have made if he planned to return to host the Grammys in the future, but he has announced this is his last year doing it. But I’m curious about like what’s sticking for y’all, what albums might be in heavy rotation that you’ve gone back to revisit after seeing you know who won this year. Yeah, Myles kick us off as our resident cultural critic. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: As with everything, I think that I have, you know, yin and yang. So I want to start with, like, the positivity first. I know that we are a podcast for a Black audience, obviously, or from a Black perspective, rather. But I do want to mention Lady Gaga. A, I do think Lady Gaga has I think Mayhem is a really brilliant pop album. Like y’all know that like my bread and butter, how I started writing was about music. I love music. I think sonically it is so courageous, so interesting. And then because she’s a woman who is in her late thirties now, the fact that she, to me, she is making the most bold music, not just of her career, but the most bold music when you think about other girls who are 10 years younger than her, I think it’s really, really exciting, but also because she performed and we know that she deals with this disability. If you watch her documentary, she deals with this disability that just paralyzes her whole body and puts her whole body in pain. And you actually see in her performances, both in concert and in the Grammys, her working around that disability and that disability actually generating like really interesting choices when it comes to performance, and when it come to dance, and when comes to what she does and when I think about the disability community and and and people seeing that, oh, I might have a chronic illness or chronic pain or whatever, that you can still be a person who’s a part of performance. You know, the other part is ooh, those are y’all some class traitors, y’all some class traitors. I was so excited to see, I’m a big fan of Zach Campbell, so I was watching Zach Campbell and his review and that was to me was better just because I love Zach Campbell and I think that he’s just hilarious and I’ve just been a fan for a long time. But like watching people or watching these people go on the Grammys, it feels really weird. Post Epstein, post a second Trump era. Just all the bulls**t, like, post all of that to see people still feel compelled to legitimize this force that, like we use to, like qualify ourselves. It just really feels like, oh, some people. Speaking of Roberta Flack, who was honored, she has a song called Go Down Moses, where she says, um Black people let Pharaoh go. Like, I think we need to let Pharaoh go. And I think that it’s always disappointing to see people like Kendrick Lamar. Honestly, even like Lauryn Hill, legitimize a white supremacist capitalist institution like the Grammys, specifically now, when you don’t need to. Out of all the people in the world, y’all can totally dominate culture without legitimizing these white supremist capitalist forces, but that lets me know that more than practical, it’s psychic and it’s something in your head, but just to put a bow on it. Loved Lauryn Hill’s performance. It was beautiful. The fact that they got to honor Angie Stone, D’Angelo, and Roberta Flack, I thought it was beautiful, Bilal coming out, Lalah Hathaway, just some of our best living musicians were on that stage. Raphael Saadiq and then also, you know, Kendrick Lamar with those 16 Grammys. But I don’t need Nobel Peace Prize, I don’t need the Grammys, I don’t need nobody to tell me that Kendrick Lamar is in the tradition of a Langston Hughes or the last poets. And he is one of the most amazing artists that we’ve have seen and been graced with. I don’t need a white supremacist capitalist institution to legitimize what I already know because I trust the legitimizing force are my eardrums. The legitimizing force is my brain, not not no gold award or stature. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I don’t know if you all saw that Katanji was in the audience because she was nominated for Best Audiobook Narration and Storytelling Recording for her memoir, Lovely One. She did not win. She lost to the Dalai Lama. But what is–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Not a bad person to lose to. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah you know. But there was a call from Senator Marsha Blackburn to investigate Katanji for her attendance at the Grammys because she said, and I quote, “to have justices of our nation’s highest court been present at an event at which attendees have amplified such far left rhetoric,” is what she’s flagging in a formal letter from her office to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And I’m like, oh. I just wanted to bring that here because I don’t know if you all saw that. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Good for them! Good. Good. Good and I hope you know like like I’m at the point now where I hope they keep on giving these neoliberal institutionalists hell because if you actually let far-left people inside of the media sphere if you actually platform people who are actually on the far left and who actually says some [bleep] that makes your stomach kind of turn a little bit, then they wouldn’t be able to say that about y’all. Just like we have like all this um, this huge landscape of like, well, Nick Fuentes is not like Charlie Kirk and Charlie Kirk is not like um JD Vance and we have all this stuff. Y’all totally eliminated that. So all y’all little neoliberal, please, please please squish ICE, please all of that stuff. Now that’s seen as far left. Good. Good hope you learned something. Hope its starting to click. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So I thought that was interesting. Shout out to Lauryn Hill. She was on time. It was beautiful. Bilal–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Allegedly it was pre-recorded. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Right. [laughter] Bilal was great. I thought that part was beautiful. I mean, sans, the like, why are we still participating? Oh, and Darrel Walls. If you remember the, you know the Walls? Like the Walls group, the kids that, I mean they’re adults now, but the gospel group. Darrel Walls won. Him and PJ Morton won a Grammy. And I, you, know, I’ve always loved the [?]–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Durand Bernarr. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Durand Bernarr yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And Durand, and that moment was just great for Durand and then Kehlani. Kehlani had won before him. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: The people love Kehlani. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And you know I do like that girl, Lola, Lola who sings that song, I’m like messy or whatever it is. She just, there’s so much pain and stuff going on with her. I like her. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Before we move on, can I just say one little thing about Durand Bernarr? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: So, moons ago when I was in Atlanta and I was writing for an independent magazine, I got to interview Durand Bernarr with, he was literally staying with a friend, Bosco, and he was there and I got to interview him. And he just began doing background vocals for Erykah Badu, and we had a really great interview and such a sweetheart. And I was already a fan of him because I’m an internet kid. So I was already following him when he was alcoholharmony on YouTube and all this other stuff. So if, so even then this is, I was like 19 maybe, but like even then it felt like a full circle moment because I was watching him since I was like 14 or 15. And just to see him come into his own, to see him totally just being himself and kind of preserve this funk, Afro-centric, Afrofuturistic esthetic and sensibility that we see so many people abandoning for um like more fascist esthetics, it was really beautiful to see. Like, you know, I too have a neoliberal beating heart and I’m sentimental about stuff too. So I had to put I had to turn off my radical brain and say, you better get it, sister so like I was so like [laughter]– 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And he was so happy. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: So happy. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: That run up to the stage. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: So happy. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: How can you, that’s what’s so dangerous about it, because how can you really hate something like that? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: You really going to hate something like that? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But you got to learn to. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: There you go.

 

DeRay Mckesson: If y’all could see Myles point at the camera. But you got to learn to. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But you got to learn to. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: That was great. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Well, Myles, picking up on a thing that you just said about like, you know, the composition of the media space and who is a journalist and who isn’t also happening this week, massive layoffs at the Washington Post and what the Atlantic has called the murder of the paper and what lots of other people have said is an example of a billionaire doing the bidding not just of this administration, but of the billionaire class to ensure that there are no investigative reporters, that there’re no photojournalists, that there’s no one covering what the U.S. is doing here or abroad. You know numbers I’ve seen so far say that about 300 people have been laid off at the Washington Post, that they’ve shuttered entire sections, so no more sports, they’ve you know killed their podcasts, no more book reviews. We’ve seen people who are abroad covering active armed conflict and war say like, got fired while I’m here, you know? And you know obviously I wanna talk about WAPO in specific, but I would also love to talk about what this means more generally for the state of journalism and media, particularly print media in the US. I’m also thinking about the fact that like the LA Times, right, my hometown paper was also bought recently by a billionaire who decided not to run the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala as an example, right? And people are like, Bezos, what’s going on? You’re the you’re the business guy, number one. And number two, if you were really committed to a paper, you know, living up to its slogan, which is democracy dies in the dark, even if the paper weren’t profitable, you could subsidize it, right? So we’re not buying that this is a business decision justification that we might buy if someone else were were owner of the paper. So yeah, want to talk about it. Um. And I know those of you who are connected to writers, etc, even freelance writers, right? That’s like one less place where people have an opportunity to make a living as a journalist or a writer and whatever capacity they might do that work. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: You know, when I think about The Washington Post, it just is a stark reminder that the right is playing a not even long-term media game. It’s very short-term, and they are doing it swiftly in a way that is like supposed to make you unbalanced. So it’s like CBS turned quickly. Like Bari Weiss came in there, and this was not like a six-month, 12-month shift. It was a like, two-week, I’m getting y’all out of here. We changing this up, da-da-da. And if you don’t like it, leave. And like, that happened. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yup. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: The Washington Post is like we are firing, I don’t know if you saw the way they did it, they sent all the employees an email that said, please stay home, we have something going on, but sign on to Zoom, like do not nobody–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yup. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: –come into the office, that’s how they fired everybody. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yup, yup. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And I have some friends who got laid off and they are mailing the stuff from the office. Anything on your desk, they are mailing to your house. Like, and this is clearly not about money, it’s owned by people who can afford all of these things. The Washington Post has a subscription base and you know they do well. So this has been swift, and they’re really thoughtful about it. If anything, when I think about thoughtfulness in like they are planning this out, not thoughtfulness in like morally good. I think the crisis that I’m interested in that I don’t have an answer for is that blurring the line between the journalists and the influencers, which I think will continue to create chaos as somebody who works in organizing and I sort of need people to know enough of what’s true so I can get them to do something or not. The amount of influencers who just sort of get people on a path that I can’t do anything with immediately is sort of frustrating. And that is something I’m dealing with. Like I remember, obviously I was one of the, you know, first people on Twitter to do the thing I did the way I did it. There weren’t a ton of people sort of using social media like that around organizing. But I even think about people I won’t name who like went to Minneapolis for five hours to record content, to make a whole series of video. And they’re sort of like talking about ICE in ways that you’re like, I don’t really know if that’s right. Like this is sort of weird or, but it’s happening with all the content. And you get the Don Lemons who is, you know he is a legitimate journalist who’s not on a major network anymore, but he is few and far between of the people who are on sort of Instagram, using Instagram in that way. Myles and you know, Sharhonda, y’all know YouTube. I don’t there’s probably some smart people on YouTube. I don’t know those people. I really just know Twitter and Instagram. I think the end of big media in this way will lead to a really intense blurring of the line between influencers and journalists. And I think the public will experience them as the same. And I will think we will lose in that scenario. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: What I find most sinister about this is the best way I can map this is on my own life, right? So since moving, I’ve been able to, of course, like, find even more like economic stability, but then also get a loft space and kind of do these things that are in my head because so much of the barrier to your ideas is around, A, getting in front of people to let people know that it exists and also having the capital to make it happen, right. So when I specifically think, like what’s a Black neighborhood in um in DC? Whatever, let’s say Chocolate City. Black journalists, Black women, even people, even outside of race or whatever, cause I know Washington Post was not just brimming with Black people. There actually should be so many millionaires who are excited about this because now they can fund something. There’s actually enough millionaires, there’s enough Black millionaires. There’s enough people with capital. There’s enough people with third or fourth homes that could actually fund a project, both small, medium, and big, to make this the worst decision Washington Post ever made and the right ever made. But what’s sinister about it post-Epstein is that, oh, I think there’s a reason why we do not see those things being funded because the people even who are seen on the liberal left are still colluding with the fascist right and they don’t want to amplify right politics or good journalism too, but there’s actually so much opportunity. When I see things like this happen, the shame is not that they got fired. The shame is that there are not infrastructures looking to gather them up and to make new presses that are actually competitive in the digital market. Like the spirit of Ida B. Wells is frowning. Sometimes, and this is me being like internet brain too, is like we see so many people flaunt their wealth through materialism, which is such a like psychic distortion, because we know that like when Rupert Murdoch wanted power, he created the New York Post. Like like like, when these people want power, they take over press. And it breaks my brain a little bit, the idea that people who actually could start something that is significant choose a trip to Bali or a fourth home or think so small of themselves. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I think the thing that I’m struggling with is and that I’ve seen other people talk about is like how we as consumers can also demonstrate demand for kind of what you’re talking about, Myles, right? And it’s like, you know, I give my little money to the Intercept, I gave my little money to, you now, ProPublica, whatever, right, but like everybody can’t get $7 to $19 a month from me, right. So, like, how do we? And like, I can’t read everybody’s sub stack, right? And it takes so long for reporters and news agencies to build up the kind of credibility and infrastructure to do the kind of reporting that matters to people. I don’t know that like consumer driven demand will be enough to sustain a lot of the projects that we care about, right. So like in Los Angeles, there’s this media outlet called LA Taco and literally they started as like an outlet that was reporting on the best tacos in the city, right? And so I’m like, yes, absolutely, like I’m in. And now they have become the number one outlet for reporting on ICE activity. So they do this thing every day called the Daily Briefing and they share it on their Instagram and they’re just like, here is where ICE was across you know LA and the surrounding cities. And in order for them to be able to do that, they’ve had to go to institutional funders, right? Because my little $7 a month subscription to LA Taco was not enough for them to afford to like pay their team to do these daily briefings, right. And so I’m like, well, I could you know cancel my WAPO and give that extra money to LA Taco, right. But then the work of like trying to get an organization to a place where like, if someone walked up to you and they were like, hi, I’m here from LA Taco and I wanna talk to you about what you think of the future of the Democratic party, like does that even make sense to you, right? Like the work that a news agency has to do to build a brand and credibility and presence in the space to get the kind of access, right, that then allows them to report on the things that are meaningful takes a while and like while I understand that value, and I have the extra $23, right, that I’m now gonna redirect to LA Taco, like that’s not the case for everybody. You know what I mean? And I’m wondering how we do this that’s also absent from the people who have, because the moneyed people are also gonna have a moneyed agenda. Right?

 

Myles E. Johnson: My pushback, and I wish I remembered the philosopher’s name, he’s alive, but he talks about like giving. He talks about like the virtue of giving, and he also talks about, politically, what people should be giving and what people should be doing. So my big thing about it is, and this is how come I kind of see that there’s going to be kind of like like more violence that happens, that is more obscure, because for many people what it would take to sustain a platform or to sustain um certain projects is a rounding error for them. So it doesn’t need to be about money. And it’s not until you figure out there are more important things than money. Then there’ll be a wake up call because there are gonna be people who are so desperate that they’re gonna come to your neighborhoods. Then you’re gonna have to get, you know, I was watching an interview with Trump yesterday and he talked about how that White House was so decked out and how the roof is different and it is drone resistant and and the walls are different and all this other stuff and he was being oddly vulnerable about how scared he is for his life and I think that everybody else who finds themselves above $100,000. As much as that that not is should be scared as well and it can’t all be about oh how does this money make more money? It’s how does this money create an ecosystem where I’m not a walking target where where this surveillance system doesn’t leak my information and now everybody’s celebrating my Luigi you know what I meanI like i think that is where people are gonna have to get with it it can’t always be about profit and greed it has to be about actually having a plan for an ecosystem that does not let fascism win. And that to me is like an odd thing. And the last thing I’ll say too, and this is kind of a little bit of a push for you, Sharhonda, and I’m so excited to hear about Campaign Zero and their sub-stack release, and I hope that it’s a beginning of like more of that media apparatus, is that I think that sometimes when people are in positions of power, they continue to think like consumers and not like producers. So I know for a fact that you know how to get money in ways that your average Black woman does not know how to how make money. So when’s the last time you talked to somebody who’s making 30, 40, $20,000 about how to make money? So it’s not always about, cause yeah, you’re right, how much $23 here, da da da there, if you’re just a consumer trying to change things through consumption, you’re gonna find a limit. But to me, it’s about how do I, A, maybe use my privileges to be a producer of something, and and and what experts or what connections do I have to be able to do that? And how do I release the knowledge that I have to somebody else who may never touch the rooms that I’ve touched and understand what I touch? How do I connect those class bridges in real life? But yeah, I do agree with you that if it’s just about consumption, then yeah, that’s never gonna work. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I think that’s a right and fair push. Hold me accountable to not just having an answer, but having evidence of what I’ve done to share more about what I know and bridge and provide people access. I think you know we’ve talked a lot about money, how people think about money. How people think about you know upward economic mobility and one big way that people have tried to do that, at least recently in a way that is becoming more publicly visible is through gambling or prediction markets and hoping to strike it big. We have been talking a lot about Polymarket and Kalshi, current obsessions of mine. And Polymarket recently hosted a free grocery store pop-up in New York. And when it got shared in the group chat, right, I think all of us were like, hmm, what’s the other shoe that’s about to drop here? And then the other shoe dropped a couple of days later. DeRay, tell us about what we learned about Polymarket as a result of their big charity washing attempt. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So let me be honest and say that when I first saw the news, I didn’t realize it was a pop-up. I was like, oh, they have a grocery store? Cause that’s how I first thought. So even sneakier, the pop-ups. That’s good marketing. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That confusion’s on purpose. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: That’s good marketing. They got me, they got me. Cause I saw it in passing and I was just like, oh, this is wild. Polymarket is being sued. They being sued. This was a part of the PR to get in front of the press with em being sued, so when you Google Polymarket, you’re going to see way more articles about this free grocery store pop up than you see about the fraud. But Sharhonda, I wouldn’t have even known about Kalshi, Polymarket if not for um you. But here is, I want to connect something that we’ve talked about before. This is like, will sound like a tangent, but this is, Myles, one of your ancient talking points. Ancient in a good way. You’ve been saying it for a long time. Is that one of the, I think one of the Kalshi people is a former Obama lawyer. And there was this whole critique of like, what happens when the Obama people, the people who like, you know, go work at Airbnb and Uber and places like Kalshi, you know, it leads people to say, oh, there might actually not be so much distinction between the parties that we thought there were. That like, this might be a matter of like do you think I should die today or do you think I should die in 10 years? But like, so the death is is sort of coming and when I saw that the other day and looking at some of the polymarket lawsuit stuff, I was like, oh, this is sort of interesting because you get this cast of characters who have done legitimately good stuff in the world in a different administration. They really have. And sort of the forces of capitalism or whatever sort of entice people into these positions and places where it’s like, well, we both know that this isn’t right. And the polymarket Kalshis have done that to people, and I thought that was really interesting. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: So, my post-Epstein mind is a little bit different than my pre-Epstein mind. And I think that is mainly around morals and law. What’s the wildest part of the Epstein files for me is you know I used to like joke on here about people believing like people are eating babies and stuff like that. That’s in the files. I’m like, what, now that I’m thinking in this mind, I’m, like, well, why not start bet on America? If you’re going to abuse people, if you’re going to have people in these precarious financial situations, why not America, that’s already the predator, be just just mask off and create bet on America, a betting ecosystem, and then make a free grocery store or make a place where you can get drugs or your prescription drugs and they be free or damn there near like wholesale. What is this fascination with law and order when the people who are running, not just this nation and this world, are doing the most unthinkable things? Like literally, there are things in those Epstein files that I didn’t even connect and I am an Edgar Allan Poe fan. I’m a Toni Morrison fan and I’ve never even thought of those things. I mean it like literally you can’t see me. I’m in a black room right now. Like darkness is, hello darkness, my old friend, but like I never thought, anywho, I don’t necessarily understand the position, the moral position of people not willing to just do what you know that’s gonna keep America from being in a desperate place that’s going to end up in like a lot of violence. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And did y’all see Bill Gates sort of say very publicly, he’s like, I regret everything I did. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Every time I was I was around Epstein and Melinda is– 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Not satisfied. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: She really isn’t, and I love it. Melinda’s like, shouldn’t have been there. Bad, bad, bad bad, bad, you know, cause–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Because the wives always have to go on the, I still love you tour. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: And she’s like I’m off the tour. She said, you on your own. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: On that one. I can’t explain it. Shame, shame, shame. And I love that about Melinda. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I have always said that the Democrat party for these reasons are very radioactive. Now I cannot concede, like we all know that Bill Clinton is the predator because we know Monica Lewinsky. So now that we look back on it. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: It’s very obvious that he’s a predator. And then even the other women that he was accused of sexually assaulting, you know, watching the Monica Lewinsky documentary, reading the books, I was having an era where I was like really obsessed with that era in time and OJ and stuff like that. I had no idea just how many people were accusing Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And assault outside of Monica Lewinsky. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yup. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And the fact that not only is Hillary trying to run for something or trying to be in our face on Netflix, but also you bringing Bill Clinton to Arkansas, like that is so wild. And I love that Melinda, A, got her ass out and said no. And then also is distancing from her because that really does something politically because a lot of politics is cultural and emotional. And I’ll just tie it up, the Democrats need to fight each other. The Democrats need to call each other disgusting, need to throw each other under the bridge. They need to do all of that before they even think about touching anything Trump got going on or anything the um right has going on. They need to eat each other and then see who survives that digestion and those will be powerful leaders. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Why do you think that? What, because you think it’ll like clear the riff-raff? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I don’t even just think that it will clear the riff-raff, because like Chuck Schumer’s in these files, right, with, and I’m not just naming people who are in the files, I’m naming people who are in the files and attached to very nefarious odd emails that sound like they were participating in some stuff, allegedly to me from what I saw with my eyes, to me, allegedly to me, please don’t sue. So, I think that not only may it can kind of um eliminate the riffraff, which could do something, but I don’t think that that’s all how people stay in power politically. I think it might also make people trust the people who are upset with other people, if that makes sense. If AOC is now enemy to all these other disgusting, powerful pedophiles, I then like AOC even more. If Jasmine Crockett is that instead of actually defending people. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Got it, got it.

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I think in listening to to Myles’s last point what I hear is a point that they make all the time which is like sometimes I think it’s hard to distinguish between who’s on what side of this issue and we use sort of the party binary as a way of doing that when increasingly it’s becoming clear everything from like where US citizens are detained abroad to people’s cozy relationships with Epstein that the elite are the elite and party affiliation is not the distinguishing identity factor or marker that we hope it would be. 

 

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

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Speaking of teams and their cultural and political influence, the Super Bowl is this coming Sunday as we are recording on a Friday. And it is what many people are affectionately calling Benito Bowl because people are excited to see Bad Bunny. But it is also happening against the backdrop of the NFL hiring zero Black head coaches, despite having a record number of openings for head coach positions. And despite having a majority still Black player base. And I know we joke often when we talk about sports on this podcast that we’re not sports ball people, but to the extent that sports offer a window and a mirror, honestly, onto our broader culture, it felt important to bring this to the pod to discuss what it means to have had a record number of opportunities for teams to hire Black people into the number one spot and for no team to opt to do so. DeRay, we’re gonna start with you on this one. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I always have to remember that the Rooney Rule, which is the rule that forces NFL teams to interview Black people or like people of color for coaching roles, I forgot that it comes on the heels of Johnny Cochran suing the NFL. And that matters because if you think that they just sat around and were like, you know what, let’s do what’s right, that’s a very different thing, then you’re like, oh no, they were trying to avoid a crazy lawsuit from the most famous lawyer in country at the time. Who also was Black and super cared about Black things. So he was ready to fight, you know, you get some lawyers who won’t even stand up to the NFL and Johnny Cochran’s like, I’m Johnny Cocheran and we could do this all day, yesterday, tomorrow, and in the future. And then you get the Rooney rule and you know it just hasn’t turned out to produce much. I went down a rabbit hole and also had to remind myself I forgot that the owners select the commissioner and sort of run the commission. So the owners are really, there’s no outside anything at the NFL. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Right. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So I was looking at like what solutions could there be? And there’s some interesting one. The Yale Law Review has some interesting things about the NFL that they have proposed. For instance, having an outside auditor come in and audit the hiring practices of teams so that there at least is some sort of outside validation that is not just the NFL staff coming in and saying what happened? You obviously know that nepotism is a huge part of the way that the culture of the NFL works for the staff, not for players. Insert Deion Sanders here. Um but. You know, they he worked overtime to make that happen. But for staff nepotism, you know, the nepotisim of white leaders is just incredible in the NFL and all the data has shown that there’s nothing about merit or time. Like, that’s not what’s happening here. So I thought those structural things were interesting, but I don’t know what happens when you get a class of people who also have decided who can own what team. It’s not, you know, to another point made earlier, there are a lot of rich people out here and there are people who could, there have to be Black people who could buy, who could be majority owners in teams today, but you have to get permission to buy a part of a team. You have to give permission. You know, this is not this is not a marketplace. So when they talk about a free market, like this is you know this is also the scam of capitalism. None of it is the theory, but you know, the NFL is not a free market. It’s not the person with the money who can afford it. You have be invited in to buy. And that means that it just is a closed. Sorry, again, I all you know I don’t judge people’s decisions around settlements. So when Colin sued the NFL and settled, I always wonder what would have come out if he had not, because I–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: They clearly blackballed him and you know–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: He settled. The NFL had an interest in settling, so whatever they uncover will not come out. But I’m sure that was something to read and watch and see. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: So I always skirted around talking about, like, why exactly I don’t like sports, specifically football, because, you know, kind of lying and just like saying, like, I don’t know why I just don’t like it. But I really wasn’t sure if I would be able to articulate it. And I think I’m able to articulate it now. But if I can’t, please cut it out. But I think to me, the esthetics of football is such is so obviously a relic of chattel slavery. So I’m not the first person to make that connection of seeing like, oh, Black men giving up their bodies in order for white men to gain more and more capital. And now there is a money exchange, but because of financial illiteracy, and then also because the habit of Black people or the Black cultural habit of wealth not transforming family to family, it still feels like that kind of ongoing relic. And even now, you know, as much as I love Michael Jackson, he’s one of our most seductive neoliberal minstrels. So, the fact that he started the Super Bowl halftime and now that there are more people who are legitimizing this force, making it relevant with their talent, I don’t see any use of it. I think that it’s all bad. And I think that this just feels, again, I feel like I said this before too, but this feels like a recalcification of what this was meant to be. It was not meant to be a route or a pathway to Black freedom or Black equity. It was meant to be an exploitive practice and hey, you can’t whip these men anymore. You can’t own these bucks anymore. But here’s a sport where you can do it and we will still look like sophisticated people to our ancestors across the pond and our peers over here. So here’s what this is. And I feel like that reclassification is just what we’re seeing. This is where neoliberalism is smart. Cause when you have that one or two Negroes who are able to do it, then you can’t say nothing because, oh my god, Brown Dante got it, or Johnson do-da-da got it. So I don’t want to say nothing, because a Black man getting it is so great, and we don’t wanna tear the Black man down. Now there ain’t no Black man doing it. Now can we tear it down? That’s how I genuinely like feel about this whole football situation. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, the NFL remains a really interesting cultural force for a host of reasons, right? I, last fall, took my then 14-year-old niece to her first NFL game. It was a Rams game. And neither of us know anything about football, but I’m the auntie who makes sure that the kids have all the experiences that they’re supposed to have, right. And so, like, this was an experience it felt like she needed to have. And in the interest of full transparency, I’m gonna be watching the halftime show on Sunday. You know what I mean? I’m curious to know what Bad Bunny does. I’m curious about all the conversation around having selected him as the halftime show headliner. And that means that the NFL is gonna get my you know my views and for a couple of years, I didn’t. And then honestly, I felt like I was the last person in my orbit who was like, I’m not watching the NFL because the NFL is on the wrong side of the Black issues that I care about. It felt like nobody actually was boycotting. You know what I mean? And NFL Sunday is a is an American cultural mainstay. And Super Bowl Sunday especially, you know? And it feels really difficult to opt out. And I know I’m saying that on a podcast where, you know, people are going to be like, girl, just turn off your TV. Um, but. I want to watch, like I’m not going to lie, like I want to watch, you know, like, I do, I’m curious. I want to see, I enjoy Bad Bunny. I want to sing in the living room. I want do all the things and I’m going to, so yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s kind of the neoliberal paradox we find ourselves in, right? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I know I know. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s the neoliberal paradox. So it’s like, but and, but just to kind of correct you, cause I’m, you know, I’m a geek about this. It’s not a cultural mainstay, it was created that way. It was created by because of in Living Color was succeeding. And then Michael Jackson. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: –then created it. So just like Black people created it being a mainstay, we can end it being a mainstay, but it feels like I’ve been like playing it in my head. I think we’re gonna be known as like the Marie Antoinette generation, meaning a generation of people who like wanted their conveniences and their pleasures and their bread and circuses, like the leftists would say, more than they wanted their own revolution. And we will be a generation that really regrets not doing something a little bit sooner, not logging off Spotify, Netflix a little bit sooner because we were hoping that like a kind of neoliberal Barack Obama shaped hero would kind of save us and make it so we can have our streaming services and our AI and our lives. And I think that we’re not gonna to be able to have it all. But, you know, I be watching Bad Bunny too. I’m not saying I’m better than y’all. I’m just saying, I just want us to be real about what’s going on. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Well, speaking of Black men and their treatment under oppressive systems, my news this week is about the growing gap between life without parole sentences between Black and white defendants in San Diego. I’m bringing this to the pod really for two reasons. One is I don’t think that people often understand the discretion that prosecutors have when they’re charging people and deciding to add on special circumstances or as they are called in California, right, that essentially mean that people, if they’re convicted, will be sentenced to life without parole. I’m also bringing it because I have thought about part of my job on this pod to be disabusing people of the notion that California is a liberal place and a liberal haven. And I want us to talk about what it means also when prosecutors’ offices don’t have to share data around their the plea deals they agree to, the decisions or data that are leading to these disproportionate outcomes. And when they can be tied almost directly to whoever the district attorney is. Really quickly wanna read part of this before I turn it over for discussion. Under former San Diego district attorney, Bonnie Dumanis, Black people were about five times more likely than white people to face life without parole through the special circumstances of felony murder. Under the current district attorney, Summer Stephan, he said that rose to about 23 times more likely. And so when there’s that degree of discretion at the DA level, right, when you’re seeing this level of discrepancy between who gets sentenced to life without parole, again, under the special circumstance of felony murder and who doesn’t, it feels like this is an opportunity for us to interrogate how our systems are designed, how all of these attempts at curbing what we have called implicit bias through mandatory minimums, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, might actually be having the exact opposite outcome that we had hoped for. But again, wanted to bring this to make sure that people were aware that this is like an ongoing trend in the United States, and especially that this was an ongoing trend in a place like California that people think of as a liberal bastion. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I’ll just say, you know, we have a campaign at Campaign Zero that is focused on parole, and most people are focused on probation in this space. So there’s not a lot of structural changes that are happening to parole, but the parole system in California changed dramatically in the ’70s, essentially wiping out parole for anybody who gets like a determined sentence. Like if you get sentenced to X number of years, you essentially don’t have access to parole. So if you get sentenced to a range of years or a life sentence, then you do get access to parole, but in the great state of California, the last time I looked, which was like a month ago, every single person on the California State Parole Board is either an active corrections officer or formerly one of them, 100% of the parole board. And you’re like, well, if the question is who should decide who’s ready to be someone’s neighbor, that should be a good cross section of people. It certainly shouldn’t be the corrections people, and it certainly should only be the police. But when you look at places like California with such a big, you know, they incarcerate the most people, blah, blah, blah. You look at this and you’re like, that is A, by design, but B, crazy. You’re like of course nobody ever gets out on parole when when these are the conditions. The other thing about parole that is interesting that I’ll just I you know I’ll plus one what you said about your article is that, you know, even when you get released, most people still have conditions put on them after they get released. So you could have like warrantless searches or parole officer check-ins or all these restrictions that are technically sort of after your release. Like you sort of serve time and still, and these just serve as like pathways to re-incarceration. And there are some really progressive, like San Quentin is probably one of the most progressive prisons I’ve ever been to. Like really, really ton of programming, film festival, da-da-da, and it still is prison. You’re like all these people don’t need to be here. We got to redo this system, but the parole system has had some tweaks since the ’70s, but it is untrue that everybody’s eligible for parole. There are some states that have really good eligibility criteria, really fair processes. But again, you can have all the processes in the world. And when 100% of the people are some form of law enforcement, you’re screwed on the front end. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: This made me want to revisit W. Du Bois talking about the talented 10th, because, A, I think I could always reread something and learn a little bit more about it. But I tend to like a little bit disagree with you, Sharhonda, when it comes to California, because I do think it is a neoliberal paradise. But I think one of the reasons why I like to use neoliberal now is because it gives just another hue of what we’re living in as a society. And I do think that so much of Black people succeeding inside of culture is around assimilation. That’s how come, from my memory, that’s why I want to reread it, from my memory, W. Du Bois was saying is the job of the talented tenth to succeed, assimilate, and then go back and create networks in places for Black people who cannot do that, who are maybe so tethered to their West African-ness and to things that make them not succeed in this kind of like African-European paradox that we find ourselves in in order to free them. Toni Morrison herself said, if you find yourself free, your job is to free another. So I think, to me, it makes sense. Like, it doesn’t feel like anything has gone wrong. It feels like, oh, there’s always been this kind of apparatus to punish, to disappear Black people, to disappear people who are unsuccessful at assimilating. And to me the theme that I’ve been on and on this podcast is that to me that counts as one of the failures of the Black intellectual, the Black organizer, the Black artist, like like everybody’s to me implicated in this, is the fact that, oh wow, we are still kind of doing exactly the opposite of what Audre Lorde suggested. We’re just like kind of trying to manipulate this machine and not creating like pathways out to be marooned from the machine. And I think that is probably the thing that needs to um happen most if we’re really gonna see change, as well as you know fighting for whatever policy decisions that you think would relieve the pain and the pressure of the machine in the meantime. 

 

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

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Myles E. Johnson: Just to show you that I’m right here in the neoliberal struggle with you, that I be looking at this 401k and I said, hold on, can’t can’t be too radical. You got things to do, you got things to do. No, I can get on my own nerves a little bit. So I wanted to make my news a little fluffier, a little bit lighter. And I was looking for a gift for somebody and I was trying to get them something embroidered and it dawned on me I’m like wait I wonder if there’s like any Black businesses that embroider things and I found that Black business that embroiders things. And it’s called Bougie Brown girl company and on instagram that’s @bougiebrowngirlco. And they had this post on it that was so interesting to me and connected to what we’ve been talking about because as I think about the end of respectability politics which is something that I wrote about for the New York Times around Beyonce years ago. I literally called Beyonce in the end of respectability politics if you want to read it. Not my best, but you know, I was in my 20s. But it did make me think, oh, if we’re calling for the death of respectability politics, maybe we should have a birth of dignity politics. And what, to me, a dignity politic can be that is informed by non-respectability politics is still understanding the power that we have through esthetic and through cultural production to project something that is more positive than what the master narrative would be. So we remember Nekima and how they made it look like she was crying. We see all these kind of viral AI videos on TikTok showing Black people in the most degraded way that they can find and the most stereotypical way they can find. So part of me was just like, oh my goodness, yes, nobody should have to behave like anything. Everybody should be able to express their sexuality, be able to experiment, be able to have a bad day or bad days or bad years or a bad life. But also we shouldn’t ignore how influential understanding like a dignity politic is and this company and along with this post called being bougie and Black then now and always which just talks about really deeply around Black people and our relationship with like both luxury and the bourgeois and how some of our choices when it comes to home decor and dining and style are you know, yes, it could be seen as neoliberal nonsense, but I wouldn’t just throw it in the trash like that. I will also say that being dignified, finding your own version of dignity, everybody’s can look different. I think Doechii’s looks different than mine. That looks different then everybody else’s. So I’m not saying put clothes on. I’m just saying that when you actually absorb that politic and that and that kind of idea, that you can really create esthetics and culture that transgresses. I’ll read a little bit of the post. It says history bite during the great migration 1916 to 1970 millions of Black families moved from the Jim Crow south to northern and western cities searching for safety, opportunity, and dignity. With new jobs and access to education, Black women elevated how they dressed, how they spoke, how they kept their homes and how they moved through the world. Others mocked this growth, called it bourgeois but what they were really witnessing was Black aspiration in motion. So again, because I wrestle with a lot of things that I agree with and don’t agree with at one time, I don’t know agree with all those different things that are just listed because some of them feel anti-South. They feel anti-heritage. But I also think that we can look at maybe what those Black women were trying to achieve. And now we have more scholarship. Now we’ve been through more. Now we’re in a different place. So we can still chew our own meat and spit out our own bones. And I think that I found it really productive and really interesting. Last thing I’ll say just to close it out is there’s this artist called Spilata and he just came out with a video called The Cuntiest and a song called The Cuntiest and he looks so elegant and so beautiful and I love, love, love that image creation and it made me think about um my bathroom that I renovated and when I started to decorate it one of the things that I wanted was this picture that I love of Sam Cooke and he’s in a suit and he is embracing it and he is smiling and it’s so important to me that before I walk out of my bathroom before I walk out into the world that I see an image and affirmation of Black dignity and Black elegance, because that’s important for me to to activate. And I think the more you see what the right produces, you’ll understand that, yeah, it can feel shallow and like a nothing, but obviously it’s not, or they wouldn’t be manipulating it so much. So I wanted to ask you all, what are you all doing that is finding you dignity, either in home decor choice or dining choice or a style choice, how are y’all finding your excellence and your dignity? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: This actually made me think of two things before I answer your question, Myles. One was the conversation we had around that Rolling Stone piece about Jasmine Crockett and her being her own phone wallpaper, and why we think she might be making that kind of choice, given even our conversation just a few minutes ago about, you know, how she is portrayed in the public. And I was like, oh, I could see her saying like, this is when I feel my best, when I look my best. And I want to also look at myself and this version of myself because I need to steel myself against what’s gonna come my way today. So that was actually one of my first thoughts. My second thought was actually about my grandmother who, I don’t know, I must’ve been like 10 or 11, redid the living room and her bedroom in French provincial style furniture. And I hated it, you know? I was like, this [bleep] is ugly, you know? [laughing] But I think for her that had been such an aspirational esthetic that, you know, even as a grandmother raising three kids, right, three of her grandchildren, she was like, this is it. Like, I want this. I’m going to do it. I can afford to do it. I’ve saved for it. And what that meant for like even how we enjoyed the living room or didn’t after that, you know? But then with respect to sort of what some of the choices that I’ve made. Interestingly enough, I’ve made choices to have bold colors in my home and I don’t wear bold colors in my wardrobe. But if you come to my home, like my couches are blue and orange and I have peacocks on my wallpaper and I have deep blues on my wall and I’ve deep blue velvet bar stools, you know what I mean? And for me, it’s because I want my home to be a place where like, if you kick up your feet, you feel embraced, you feel held. And you like the way that the furry pillow on the couch feels, you know? And so that’s been an evolution for me, honestly, probably in the last like four or five years. So much so that I got my couch dyed, because I had a vision for a very specific color orange that I wanted. So yeah, that’s how I’ve thought about that in my home decor choice. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m pretty easy. I’m like a hoarder from my from being raised by my great-grandmother. So I have a lot of everything. I have like enough toilet paper to last a lifetime, enough deodorant to last a lifetime. I have a ton of books on the thing. And I love the way my apartment looks, but my friends who are interior designers, they did my apartment for me. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s what I was hoping you would talk about. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: All I did was um I approved it, and they were great. And they did it for free. Like they I mean I had to buy the furniture, but they did the design. So it’s one of the reasons why I haven’t moved because it’s just such a cute apartment and I don’t know if they’ll do the next apartment for free. [laugh] So um. Love the way it looks. I wouldn’t have but in hindsight I probably would have gotten a cloth couch because my I don’t know it’s suede or leather whatever it is, not as fun to sleep on but–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: It is not. You wake up sweaty. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, it’s like a little interesting, but I would have gotten a cloth couch if I had thought about it differently, but they did everything. They chose the paint colors, everything. Shout out to them. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I love it. I was hoping that you would talk about that. Like I think that’s so cool. And because you do such work, which has you in these different environments, I think that like having like a home base that feels dignified. And like I said, you know, we know that you probably wouldn’t have done it yourself. So I love that you come home to something that is like elegant and affirming to yourself because you’ll be in the world and you don’t know what you gonna see. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: You really won’t, shout out to shout out to them, they did it. My news is about ICE, so you know I talked about the ICE polling at the beginning of the pod, but the dems released some sort of demands and they were just really weak. I was very disappointed. Our team has been working on ICE demands for a while and their demands came out in the middle of the night and I could say a lot about them, but they’re two buckets. One is like, what does it mean to have a demand for accountability from an administration that’s already said they’re not going to do it? So almost half of the demands that the Dems put out are things that would need to be enforced by somebody and the somebody would be the DOJ or the US attorneys. And they’ve already said they’re not gonna do it. So you could ban masks being worn by ICE agents, but somebody has to enforce the ban and they’re not gonna do it. So you’re like, okay, well that is, that doesn’t work. So there are a host of things like that. And then there’s a second bucket of things in the Dem demands that are already the law. Or like already in place. So one of them is uphold use of force standards. At Campaign Zero, we wrote, I worked with the Biden White House to write the updated use of force standards for the federal government. We did it in 2022. They are good. They’re not following them. What are you gonna do? Like if they, you know, we can write them better, but they already said they’re not gonna follow them. And if they don’t follow them, there’s no consequence. Unlike with local police departments, it’s a little different because we have a whole range of things that we can do for accountability. Federal government, you only got two things. It’s either the DOJ, or like it’s either a federal agency or it’s the U.S. attorneys, and Trump has absolute authority over them right now, and it just, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. So we rolled out a set of demands that you can find at 10toendICE.org, so ten one zero, T zero end ICE dot org. And I won’t go through all 10, but all 10 I think are great, but two I’m gonna talk about. The first is, instead of having to fight about the the budget, when we poll around the country, we realize that the public doesn’t have a good understanding of like 75 billion to 100 billion da da da. And ICE got so much money that you could actually cut a big chunk of money and it won’t matter. So if you go from 150 billion to 125 billion, not really, I mean, it is good, but not really a win for us because that’s still a ton of money for them to wreak havoc. So we took a different approach and we were like, we’re going to make a cap of staff. So, we’re going to say if only 5% of the arrests that happen by ICE are for people convicted of felonies. We will staff you at 5%. We’ll give you enough staff to deal with that subset of people. Cause that seems to be what people are freaked out about. If we do that, then the staffing will go from 22,000 to 1,100. We’re like cool, we’ll give your 1,100 officers. And we will fund you for 1,100 officers, which will take the ICE budget to around $300 million from, you know, I don’t know, ten billion a year. And we’re like, you know, feels like a much easier way to like fight this budget fight and a little more sane. And the second one that we have a stake in the ground around is around the scope for border patrol. Border patrol right now has the power to patrol within a hundred miles of the American border. Two out of three people in the country live within a 100 miles of the American border, 12 U.S. states are completely covered by the 100 mile rule with border control, which is crazy. It’s like not a border anymore if it’s a hundred miles away from the border. So our proposal, and other other people have proposed this before, it just hasn’t taken off, is that the border would be reduced to 10 miles. That border patrol can patrol within 10 miles of the American border, which is still pretty far. That would be like from the port in New York City to the Brooklyn Bridge, which does not feel like the border. But 10 miles is much better than 100 miles. And then we are demanding that border patrol no longer have the power to conduct warrantless searches, which they can conduct in the radius. So within a hundred miles of the American border today, they can conduct wireless search, warrantless searches. They can put up those like checkpoints where they stop people and stuff like that. So you should go check out the demands. I wanted to talk about them here. And I think one of the things I’m struck by, cause I now feel like I’ve lived through three of these national moments. It was Ferguson, it was George Floyd, now it is Minneapolis. And I’d think I thought people would have a better sense of policy demands by now, just cause we’ve done it a couple of times. And I was in a conversation with people talking about what to do, and they had hyper-local issues, which it makes them, they are the right thing. So they’re like, Minneapolis, Minnesota should have a eviction ban. Because that makes sense, because people aren’t going to work and, you know, stores are closed. And they were talking about how important it is to fund mutual aid groups and all that stuff. Also, we got to do it. Like it has to, you have to do that stuff, but they were taking about these things as leading to the end of ICE, and you’re like those are not those are good things to do and they are not structural in the sense that like, they will stop ICE from doing anything. Like they just aren’t those things. So I take all these things as a challenge. Like how do we get people to understand the big demands? Cause like the public is actually when we poll is like very with us. Our elected leaders are not, we gotta push them but they only get pushed if people demand big things. And, you know, I’d hoped that the third go around people would be better. The last thing I’ll say to you is that I’m shocked at people who are shocked at the police this time. They’re like, wow this, the police have never acted like this. I was in a conversation just like that the other day and I was like, well, I don’t know if that’s true. Or they’re like the police are just arresting people and you’re like yes, you know? So I’m not even resentful about it. I’m just surprised actually, I think, if anything else. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I, one, was glad to see this come out. I think it’s important that someone who can force a conversation, put some stakes in the ground around what they think is important and what will get us to a place of abolition. And so, you know, when I shared it, I also shared an open invitation for people to let me know what they think, right? Because I think its important to engage in conversation around these kinds of issues. I also pulled out my little like Mariame Kaba checklist for like police reforms you should always oppose versus like support. And I was like, okay, where does this fall? You know? Cause I’m like, let me see based on an organizer framework that I have come to respect and adopt and adapt for my own work in life. Um. And then I thought a lot about, you know DeRay to your point of this kind of being the third kind of national moment where you’ve led work that has been highly visible, around some of the public narrative conversation discourse and pushback around eight can’t wait, right? And I, and around the critique of that being an incrementalist approach, right, and a reformist approach when there seem to be a public appetite for abolition. And I think we’ve been talking about for the last few weeks and even earlier in this conversation about there seeming to be a ton of public support for abolition, but us not really knowing what people mean by abolition, right. So I’m wondering how you are thinking about where this ten to end ICE falls along that like reform to abolition spectrum, if you see it as both more radical and potentially more effective than previous campaigns like 8 Can’t Wait, and what you want people to really contend with as this sort of takes on, because once you release it, it takes on a public life of its own. Right?

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I think what we just got in front of the narrative on this better than we did, eight can’t wait. We sort of put the eight out and there was we hadn’t written a paragraph about anything. Our intent, the like it just was sort of out. And that was that ran away from us. I do think that these are just different than local police departments. People sort of hate the police sometimes, but they like their police department. It’s sort of a weird thing we find in the in the data. Whereas this is an agency. This is like a random agency. I think people think about it very differently. Immigration laws will still be enforced whether or not ICE exists tomorrow or not. And the reality is that ICE is catching people, catching people in air quotes, after they are getting out of local prisons and jails. So like, you know, ICE isn’t stopping crime. So there’s that. So I do think that that matters. But you know you are right, is that when we look at the data, you know if you ask people for a set of reforms they support, they sort of, they move away from abolition, right? If you say, do you support abolish? They say, yes. Then you give them some other things like body cameras. They’re like, well, I actually support that. You’re like well, this is sort of–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yikes, right. The thing that I think is, different, and we’ve tried to be transparent about this, is that we think that the north star is to zero out the ICE budget and keep it moving. ICE has just got here. So we can, we lived in a world before ICE, we’ll live in a world without ICE. And then we say, we understand that we don’t have the, all of the political power to just make that happen overnight. So in that case, here are things that we can do. And if you do the ten things that we have done, you just dramatically constrain ICE’s ability to do anything. Going from 22,000 officers, to 1,100 fundamentally changes ICE’s ability to do much. So we’ve tried to use procedural things to sort of ham it up that don’t require the DOJ or somebody to do right by people because we assume bad faith actors in the process here, which is not a strategy we took before. So like we’re also saying that any property bought by ICE since January 20th, 2025 has to be immediately sold, given to cities. And they can’t buy any more property and they can’t buy planes. Like, you know, we can stop deportations if there’s just no planes, right? Like it’s just ain’t no planes no more, right. So we’ve tried to go that route to sort of squelch ICE if we can’t get a zero budget. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: What you speaking did make me think about though, was economics and maybe think about local economics and people focusing on mutual aid and economics because food and housing and all these different things are such a big deal to people. And I think even for myself, like I’ve had so many different class experiences, really high class experiences and low ones. And what I know is I can’t think about anything that is national if I don’t do those things. So I think that even when things get more quiet, if we ever see like say like in like eight years we see another democratic leader or something like that like I think I think that I ain’t joking but like but like– 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: No, I’m laughing because eight years is an improvement from never, which is usually where you are. That’s what I’m laughin’ at yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Optimism. But I think that like, that needs to be so imperative because that is foundational to people being able to be activated around these things, specifically people who might actually absorb some more radical ideas in politics. I even think about so many people not being for the abolition of police, but not for it when it actually hits their town. I would inject that it’s not just because of safety, I would inject because they know people in their town who have jobs in the police. And they don’t want to hurt their husband, their brothers, their sibs whoever got the jobs that are with the police. So so much of support of police is because of economic devastation. The last thing that I’ll say, too, that you made me think of is, and I’m not a policymaker. I will be so upset if I hear this, though like sometimes I’m like, wait, is somebody going to take this? Or who’s all listening? But what I will say is I think because of the fear of what’s going on, because of the inadequacy of Democrats, I think once Trump is out of office or once Democrats are in control. I think that something branded like an anti-dictator bill would be really powerful. And I think a lot of things being folded into that because I think we kind of chase these little instances, but I think so many people know about martial law and s*** like that now, that something that’s an anti dictator bill would be, really, really powerful and if I see that bill come and I don’t get no type of check. [laughter] 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Not a check for a piece of legislation. You’re hilarious. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I, yes, I want to be like the Republicans. [laughter] Just no islands, just no islands. [music break]

 

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 Moultrie 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. [music break]