In This Episode
Trump orders US bombing of Iran nuclear sites, ICE impersonations surge amid immigration crackdowns, young men emerge as a swing vote to watch, and Tyler Perry hit with a $260 million sexual-assault and harassment lawsuit. DeRay interviews Deborah N. Archer about her new book Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality.
News
Trump Claims Success After Bombing Key Iran Nuclear Sites
Why Young Men Voters May Be More Likely To Swing Back
ICE officer impersonations spike in wake of immigration crackdown
What to Know About Tyler Perry’s $260 Million Lawsuit
Follow @PodSaveThePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay and welcome to Pod Save the People on this episode. It’s me, Myles and Sharhonda back to cover this last wild week. Lord, there’s a lot going on. And you know, this episode we didn’t always see eye to eye. So I’m excited for you to hear us talk about the news. Then I sat down with the acclaimed scholar and the chair of the ACLU national board, the one and only Deborah Archer, to talk about her new book, dividing lines, how transportation infrastructure reinforces racial inequality. I learned a ton. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at @PodSavethePeople to stay updated with all things Pod Save the People. Here we go. [music break] Well, it seems like every week gets a little wilder than the last week. And here we are at war. We are back. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles at @PharaohRapture on Instagram and @MoonPulpit on Twitter.
Sharhonda Bossier: And I’m Sharhonda Bossier. You can find me on LinkedIn, at BossierS on Spill, and once again, at bossiershay on Instagram. And shout out to Myles for bullying me into getting back on Instagram.
Myles E. Johnson: Bullying works.
Sharhonda Bossier: Uh. Also make sure that you are following me, actually not the imposter account, somebody’s been impersonating me on Instagram they have like 6,200 followers and have been doing it for almost three years, it seems, which I just found out this week so.
Myles E. Johnson: I’m sorry, Sharhonda. I needed to get–
Sharhonda Bossier: Listen.
Myles E. Johnson: I needed it. I needed the money. [laughter]
DeRay Mckesson: Y’all are funny. Oh, Sharhonda, I’m gonna reach out to somebody on Instagram and try and get that taken down. I didn’t know they had like real followers for pretending to be you.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I’ve tried to report it and Instagram has been like, this account doesn’t violate our community standards. So um I would appreciate the help if any of you listening work at Instagram, help a girl up.
Myles E. Johnson: Okay.
DeRay Mckesson: That’s [?].
Sharhonda Bossier: So last week when we were talking about the political assassinations in Minnesota, we talked about Melissa Hortman. I said that my understanding at the time was that she was no longer in the state legislature. That was actually not correct. She was no longer the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. So she was still in the legislature. She just was not in that same leadership position because of the result of an election that resulted in a tie between the two parties. So I wanted to issue that correction since that came up and was discussed in the comments during last week’s episode.
DeRay Mckesson: Well um, you know, the only real news to talk about before we talk about our individual news is that Trump has taken us into war with Iran. It happened very quickly. We all saw it play out online because he he posted it on Truth Social last night. And I just wanted to get your takes on what what what do you think is happening? What’s going on? Yeah. Where are you with Iran?
Myles E. Johnson: I’m traveling right now, so I want to just I’m learning about this with all of you all, and um literally when Sharhonda put the news in was the first time that I heard of it, just because I just have been so unplugged. Um of course, my first response is, I hope that nobody tries to attempt to make this seem like something that was going to happen exclusively by Trump. I think we’ve done a lot of things so far that are special and unique and only Trump would do. There has been no democratic leadership that has shown or or no leadership in general across parties that have shown a different destiny. And this is the destiny that everybody said was going to happen, um period, because that’s what America is going to do and that’s the relationship we have with Israel. And that has been Netanyahu’s plan. So I hope that people take this as a moment to be anti-war, to really review what has happened and say how did we get here and not try to play partisan politics because there was no leadership that expressed any type of loyalty to peace, and and and I hope that that is not misconstrued because Trump happened to be the person to press that button because it looked like every piece of leadership we had was going to press the button um when Netanyahu decided to do it.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I also am traveling. I’m on a girl’s trip in Santa Fe and um was in Meow Wolf, which is like an immersive art experience. And as we were like pulling out our phones to like you know try and figure out the next part of this puzzle, like all of the news alerts came through, right? And I was like, you know what? We’re trying to figure out where this family went as they have been experimenting with inter like, you know, dimensional travel. I want to be in whatever dimension they are in that is not this one. [laugh] Uh. And I think part of my reaction was, I think to Myles’s point, this has seemed unfortunately for all intents and purposes almost an inevitability regardless of who was in power because I think we sort of knew this is what Netanyahu wanted to do. And we knew that the way that the US has chosen to show up as an ally to Israel was likely gonna draw us into this broader war. I think what has been interesting is like, you know, on the right, Republicans who are like, we, you, know, this man campaigned on not dragging us into another forever war, and this very clearly is going to be another forever war if and when Iran retaliates. Um. I think it’s also been interesting to hear Democrats say things like, uh, you know, Congress is the only, you know body that has the ability to declare war. This is unconstitutional, et cetera, et cetera. And that seems a little bit ahistorical because for a long time, U.S. presidents have authorized these kinds of airstrikes and other military actions unilaterally, right, including democratic presidents. Um. And then I think lastly, you know hearing the response from other countries in the region um and saying like, y’all, we need to deescalate this. We need to descalate this, we need to de-escalate this. And you know knowing that some of the folks who want to have an opportunity and a rationale and a justification to attack U.S. um military operations, bases, interests, et cetera, in the region are likely going to leverage this. I think it’s just a really scary time. And I think we’re just seeing like a dialing up of um just so much, I don’t know, like violence is, violence feels like too puny a word to describe what’s happening. Um. But I think, it’s really terrifying. And, I think what I am observing is you know Trump got out-Trumped by Netanyahu in this moment. Um, and yeah, and still, I don’t know if anyone else had been in power, the U S would have made a different decision. So I’m, I’m wrestling with that right now on Sunday morning.
DeRay Mckesson: I think I didn’t anticipate us to be at odds on this one, but I disagree with both of you pretty strongly actually. I think that this idea that like both sides are the same is dangerous rhetoric. I think that that only inflames the political sphere and I think that it is not true. I think that you know Obama entered the Iran nuclear agreement specifically to avoid this. Trump’s cover for this is actually about nuclear weapons, which Biden also continued the Iran Nuclear Deal. Kamala was clear that she would also continue the Iran nuclear deal. Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, which is sort of how we got into this mess here. Now, that is not to say that any of them were critical of Israel, because like they were not and that is just and Israel has nuclear weapons, which–
Sharhonda Bossier: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: The United States is pretending to ignore.
Sharhonda Bossier: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: And if the world acknowledged Israel’s nuclear weapons then we would not be able to send Israel aid. So, everybody participated in that, and that is unreal. You’re like, what does Israel have on everybody? You’re like, who are they blackmailing you know like? What is going on?
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: So I do think that is true across the um across the parties. But, you know, and to this idea that democratic presidents have unilaterally entered war and not in our lifetime. I think the Iraq war is a great example is that, you know, there was vigorous debate about the Iraq War that was in response to or like the idea was that it was in response to a terrorist attack, which was a lie. But still, Congress, and famously Barbara Lee, right, was the lone person in Congress who decided to vote against it. But the idea that in the absence of an attack on Americans, that the president just like launches missiles into another country is new. So, yeah, I worry about this idea that both sides are the same. I think that’s not true. I think that I cannot imagine Kamala would have done this preemptively and I cannot image that the landscape that we’re in would have just glossed over it. Like Trump is like, they’re not, Trump’s not even giving a briefing till Tuesday. I could, like that is, that would not have happened under any other presidency. So I’ll be interested to see how this plays out. I’ll be interested to see what Obama says or Clinton or Hillary or the other people who were leading, but the idea that American troops will die soon because of this, which had nothing to do with America, frankly, besides this Netanyahu running game on America.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, but DeRay, what do you how then does like Obama’s authorizing of drone strikes in other countries, right, where he was killing foreign nationals, and I think in one instance, authorized the killing of a U.S. citizen, right? Like how does that square with this? Right. I think my point was that like presidents have sidestepped Congress, even in not authorizing war, in authorizing military action and in authorizing the use of military force. And so this does not seem like too far a departure from that, is probably a better articulation of my point.
DeRay Mckesson: That’s fair. I need to learn more. Like national security is not my, I don’t know about the drone strike. I mean, I remember it happening, but I don’t know the details. I just think that is materially different than using the cover of nuclear weapons and bombing a nuclear stronghold under that pretense when there was a deal in place to avoid this. Like that was a that was the like we had two presidencies that explicitly tried to undo this or like tried to avoid this specific moment and Trump not only backs out of the agreement, and here we are, right? And even Trump’s own advisors who are shady people, they were even like, mmm I don’t know if Iran actually has been working on nuclear weapons, right, because of the deal that was brokered for the past administration. So it just feels, that feels different to me. And I really cannot imagine Kamala or Biden or Obama doing this in this way. I just, I think this is apples and oranges. I do not think that they are the same in this way.
Sharhonda Bossier: I think that has more to do with the changing nature of war than it has to do with people’s actual values and positionality around which body has the authority to, to make what calls, but I hear you.
Myles E. Johnson: I do agree that if anybody else was in the presidency, it would have happened differently. That is the whole thing I’ve been complaining about is it um it will have been a polite entrance into war. Um. But so my thing is like, yeah, it is apples and oranges. My thing is that all the fruit is rotten. So I’m saying no matter how we got there, we would have ended up in a place um similar to this, even if it went through certain types of bureaucracies. But what I wanted to um, what I was thinking about that kind of is about this, but a little bit separate. Was there was so much conversation on the internet and between my friends and different social circles I was in that really believed that the things that were happening in Palestine, that the things that were happening in the Middle East had nothing to do with what was happening to Black people, Black Americans, and we know that Black Americans and poor Black folks over-represent in the military. So that’s how come we have to care about Palestine. That’s why we have to have leaders who are able to say what is right and what’s wrong, even if they want to win something. That’s why we need those type of um forces because now that we are in this moment that we’re either going to tiptoe and ballet into slowly over years or do it instantly and with brute force like Trump is doing, we’re going to end up here and no matter what, it was going to be poor Black people’s blood who is going to pay for this war, and that’s how come here I’m saying it, I’m not saying it for the living room. That’s why I want any Black person hearing my voice to think about divesting from anything to do with this government, because specifically when it comes to this military, because it is going be your body, your life that’s going to be put on the line and they do not care. You are just another chess piece and this is proof of it. And I’m and not that I’m glad, of course, that we are in any type of war, but I’m glad that it’s happening in a way that I see people being illuminated by oh this feels just like Iraq because of course, Obama didn’t start Iraq or the war in Iraq, but he sustained it. There are so many people who sustained the violence and kept it going and performed one thing and let us stay there for a long time. And last thing I’ll say about this that has to do with this war, but really about the Trump era in general, it will be interesting to see what policies that the Democrats or liberals, when gained control, will allow to sustain, because that is oftentimes the game plan. Trump does it, and then it gets sustained, and you give us some bullshit about, well, it takes 20 years. No, it doesn’t.
DeRay Mckesson: Remember, Obama is who withdrew us from Iraq. So to suggest that he, anything that he did not, I think is just not true framing. He is who took us out of Iraq. I think that, again, Obama negotiated, and I hate that I’m the Obama defender of this one, but Obama negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. I don’t know what to say. And I do think it is sort of like, I don’t know who gets served well by this idea that everybody would have been like Donald Trump eventually. I think, that is just, not true.
Myles E. Johnson: I think Black people having their own sovereign ideas around politics that are not attached to electoral politics is who wins. I think the more Black people who engage with electoral politics and engage with global politics, not from a framework of nationalism or imperialism, but the framework from what’s best for me and my community and not how I can give my body to some white man in power or some white or some Black woman who’s serving a white power ideal and power, I think that’s who wins, as long as we are thinking what is good for Black people first and not what’s good for this um uh disastrous project, I think that’s who could win.
DeRay Mckesson: I agree with that. But I want us all to be careful about this idea that like everything would have been like Donald in the end. I think that’s just not true framing. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: One of my news is immigration, which I we probably would disagree about this too. Let me start by saying, you know I’ve seen and um I can’t even remember his name, but one of Obama’s advisors, oh Axelrod, who I know and I was a fellow at the Institute on Politics that Axelrod ran. And I like him generally. I saw his tweet where he was like, we deported more people than Trump. And you’re like, well, what a, what a bad. This is why people hate the party. Now I’m with you on my, I’m like, well, no, this is, this is rough. Um. But I want to talk about immigration because one of the things that I keep seeing is both that sentiment and just from a numbers perspective, I am like reminded that it’s not like Trump’s ICE round one was like a better ICE than ICE has normally been. What Trump had that no other president had in American history was COVID. So a lot of things changed during. Like there are some things around Trump’s numbers that just looked better because nobody was flying to the country, nobody was traveling in the country, nobody I mean, just was a it was a very different time. So even when people talk about crime spiking during COVID, crime, all crime did not spike, subsets of crime did spike, but there were historic drops in crime as well, which had not necessarily lasted, but COVID was just such a weird moment in society. So I worry that people talk about Trump’s first term ICE numbers as if Trump was like pro-immigrant in some way, And it was like, no, COVID was so crazy that the whole apparatus was just doing something different. So I say that as like an entry into my news is that ICE, as you know, officers are wearing face masks. So all across the country, ICE officers are covering their face. And what people thought was going to happen was that people would start impersonating officers because you could just put on a face mask, get a gun. And because ICE officers are not legally required to wear uniforms that say that they are ICE, anybody, a group of people could just show up and you probably have seen the pictures of ICE agents who look like they are like just random people in the neighborhood, um just showing up, which is a problem. So the news is finally reporting that there is a spike in people impersonating ICE officers. That is dangerous. They’re robbing people. You can only imagine how that goes. So I just want to bring that here because that is one of the things that people don’t talk about or don’t think about. And that is wild to me. But the other thing that I wanted to say that I don’t know if either of you knew, is that ICE is the only federal law enforcement agency that can do what’s called direct hire. So they can actually bypass the competitive hiring process if they say that there is a need for officers and they can essentially just hire people. So one of the things that the Trump administration is doing is that they are just direct hiring a ton of people. So you probably see this online where people are like they’re militia members or private agents and da da da what they’re doing is just going through the direct hire process. And because the other agencies don’t have direct hire, they have to go through like a real hiring process. But direct hiring means that they can just fudge it a little bit. And, you know, I’m happy that people are seeing the horrors of ICE and like what it is looking like in communities. I also just want to say just as a point of, you now, I feel like I became the Obama Defender in this episode. But when people talk about the numbers, um the material difference between the Obama deportations and the Trump deportations is that with, under Obama, the hierarchy of people that they were focused on were convicted felons. You couldn’t even be just convicted of one misdemeanor. You had to be convicted of multiple misdemeanors. And then they actually over-indexed on people at the border. So they turned away a ton of people at the border from entering the United States. They were not doing what is happening now. So Trump, there’s actually like a grid that, there’s a memo that the Obama administration put out that shows like tier one, tier two, tier three, but it was almost exclusively convicted, people convicted of felonies, people convicted of multiple misdemeanors, um and then people at the border who did not have sort of licenses, er paperwork and stuff like that. Um. So under Obama, for instance, like you couldn’t be deported for a traffic violation. Like that wasn’t a like yes, you are not here sort of legally, but a traffic violation doesn’t da da. And I won’t spare about um about docking all those things that was a pathway to immigration and incomplete and insufficient, but something. And then you get Trump, there are no priorities. You’re like, Trump is just going straight into the straight into people’s graduations and da da da. And as you’ve seen, the numbers are showing that the majority of people that Trump is detaining are not convicted of anything. Did not have due process. They are not even, they’re being arrested at the immigration hearings. You’re like, well, this is sort of a crazy world. So I just, again, I want us to be careful about this idea that like, everybody was the same. Deportations were deportation. And it’s like, no, they were materially different. And this moment is materially different and I don’t want that to get lost. And as you can imagine, the Obama administration, the data suggests that they did not use this direct hire process. Like Trump is using it as you could imagine. So I’ll stop there, um but I did want to bring this up.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, you know, I spend a lot of time in multiracial spaces, multiracial coalitions. And what I will say is that I hear you on the distinctions that you’re trying to draw. I’ll say that the anxieties that communities experienced um didn’t feel different from the folks that I know who were trying to think about pathways to citizenship. I don’t disagree with you. I’m saying practice and impact are different.
DeRay Mckesson: I don’t know. They not the people I’m talking to. So maybe we just talking to different people.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah um and to your point about like the shortcomings around um some of what you know previous administrations have tried to do around immigration reform, a lot of the folks that I’ve talked to are actually really disappointed because Republicans for a long time had been the party of immigration reform, actually. They had been folks who were saying like there is a business case for us to figure out a shorter and shorter pathway to long-term either like residency or citizenship for people. And so the folks that I know who are organizing in red states and purple states right are like the Republicans have backed away from that issue at the state level and at the federal level, and that has been really hard for them. And so if you’re watching in places like Texas and Tennessee where even undocumented students have been able to take advantage of in-state tuition, right? Tennessee was able to hold the line on that. Texas rolled it back. Like the folks who were in the sort of immigration reform space are um feeling like they are losing even their most reliable allies who in many instances actually had been Republicans. So I just, you know, I think it’s I think the picture around immigration and immigration reform in this country actually is not as neat as Democrat and Republican. Um. So that is that. On the pretending to be or impersonating you know ICE officials, I think a lot in the direct hiring process in particular, I think a lot about the stories my grandparents told me about sheriff’s departments in the South in the 1930s and ’40s um and how anytime people got really anxious or nervous around what Black people were doing. The most racist people in town would raise their hands and then end up deputized, right? And so this to me feels very much akin to that. And I think there are historical parallels and historical lessons that we can learn that might be applicable to this um moment about like how we show up um and how we think about standing in solidarity with and protecting our friends and neighbors who might be targeted. Cause I think what we are seeing right now also is just large scale racial profiling. Um, and so it’s like, do you look like you might be undocumented? Right. And we also know, like, as we’ve talked about before, you know, especially I live in Los Angeles, there are large numbers of like undocumented Asian immigrants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they don’t seem to feel as communities anyway, don’t seem to like they’re under the same pressure, under the same level of scrutiny. And so, um, you know, this is not as we all know, right? This is theater. This is about trying to live into a set of, uh, campaign promises that Trump made. So that his base feels like he’s held the line on something that’s important to them. Um. But yeah, I think it’s a, yeah, um our immigration system is broken and I just wish that we had some vision around how to do that that was not um so reliant on armed law enforcement and that wasn’t so relient on trying to fix it on the backs of our young people and denying them pathways to opportunity.
Myles E. Johnson: The first thing when thinking about these ICE raids, um the first thing that comes to me is a rearticulation of what’s happening, because I think in the reartriculation of what’s happening then lies um what needs to happen. So the rearticulation is there is an imperialist, white nationalist uh uh system or group that has called themselves ICE that are the leading of usually the pathways in order to empower people to be able to terrorize, um to be able to terrorize communities. So the systems you used to have to go through in order to be um an ICE agent are being deleted. So, all you really need is the willingness in order to proliferate white nationalism imperialist terror. So now that we know that that is what’s happening, and now that we know that anybody from uh the good old boys or whatever white nationalist group you can think of to Dr. Phil is going to be a part of it, then I hope that immigrant communities who are brown and immigrant communities that are Black, look at the Black Panthers, look at Lincoln Heights today, and say to themselves, so what do we do in order to arm ourselves, in order, to protect ourselves, now that we know that there is an organized effort to annihilate the people who are next to me, who may have nothing to do with me, even though, you know. Where I live in Ohio, a huge Haitian community, they’re all panicked. They’re all being um terrorized. But what I’ve been witnessing is people saying, we already know the government is a failure. We’ve already felt the government as a failure, we feel it every single time we are on our roads. And we have those pothills, we see it every single time that somebody asks us to be their president and we see nothing change economically and materially in our lives. And we still see people die in front of our in our neighborhoods. So we already know that that is a failure. So what are we going to do now that there’s a new failure being sprung? How are you going to respond to that? But I think as long as we’re kind of like being almost um maybe entertained, shocked by the fact that there are white nationalists in a white nationalist nation willing to do white nationalist shit. That’s always been the case, you know, and maybe that’s because I live next to um, you know Stone Mountain in Georgia. I saw Ku Klux Klan rallies. The Confederate flag was flying during middle school for me. That was our national, that was our state flag when I was living in Georgia, I had white kids come and tell me, call us all types of niggers. I have not in any part of my life um uh agreed with the idea that we are living in this progressive um in this like kind of like progressive liberal notion and I think right now people are gonna have to uh catch up to the fact that there’s more than a policy change that needs to happen. I’m trying not to be [laughing] I’m trying not to be super provocative around being armed or violent or organizing in order to arm yourself, but look at the history books, look at The Black Panther Party. That is what’s necessary. Anything else is a slow descent into fascism and a slow as descent into authoritarianism in your life. That is the only answer to what you see happening to me, in my opinion today.
Sharhonda Bossier: DeRay finna fire both of us after this week. Okay. [indistinct banter]
DeRay Mckesson: I will say, it’s like, I’m happy to hear the arguments because I’m like, oh, we got a lot of work to do. That’s what I feel [?] so I’m here like, I need to go reorganize better.
Sharhonda Bossier: I’m on your side.
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, there and you might be absolutely right. It’s like I think, and I think everybody, Sharhonda, you, me, I think that we all arrive at the politics and the mental states that best equip us for the lives that we’re leading. I never was, like, I don’t know anybody. I’m not in neighborhoods where, you know, me visit Lincoln Heights. I’m trying not to say where I live now or whatever, but I live in another hood. I’ve only lived in Black hoods. So this is the politic that has helped me survive and be able to talk to you at 34. So I would love to be illuminated and enlightened to another way of doing some things, but I’ve never seen it work. I’ve ever seen it happen. And um the one time I try to get some things going or, you know, me, other people, then the hospital almost kills you. Then the food stamps take six months to come. Then the welfare gets taken away. So it’s like, no, [bleep] that I don’t want to participate in that anymore. I want something alternative that exists no matter if the party’s blue or red.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, this is where I’m like the right won the messaging is that like what Trump is doing really well is that when you ban all the black countries from coming in, they don’t get logged as deportations, but it’s brilliant. It’s like a beautiful, that is a, it’s like reverse deportation that won’t show up in the numbers, but you just don’t let anybody from the countries come. You’re like that is that is like a really fascinating way to do something that is just not the same as what other people have done. You know and I think about this idea that people experience immigration [?]. I’m like I know people who we’re able to go to college, we’re able to stay, or we are able to benefit from things because of the Obama work. That was just, that is just true. And the last thing I’ll say on this, that is actually true of all of the work, not just it’s healthcare, it’s um, you know, food stamps we might actually might survive because of a weird rule is that I do think the, my critique of the organizing left is that, I think organizing is always twofold. It is like, say the big idea and then convince people of the big idea. Like it is always both of those things. And I think in the last 12 years, I’ve seen organizers nail saying the big idea and not necessarily convincing people of the big idea. Like they sort of like let go of that work being their work. And I do think that we gotta, we have to do that better. I don’t think that is a, forget the party. I think that you ask people like, what is the fix for healthcare? It’s like, I think nobody knows. I don’t think the left has a answer for like, what is the fix? It’s, like, do people really know what single payer is? Do people know what universal, like it is sort of a mess, you know? I think that the question of how we do it is actually, that is the question. Like that is the, you know like food stamps, for instance, we did it five different ways before we landed on what we do today. And there were legit, you now, the first version of food stamps is we were mailing surplus food to communities and giving it to people. That was a way to deal with the surplus, but Miles would get 10 pounds of apples and Sharhonda would get ten pounds of melons. And you’re like, well, yeah I need food, but like, that wasn’t that wasn’t the best way to do it. But it was actually direct assistance to communities. So the how is actually not like sort of a frou frou thing. The how is, how matters a ton. And I think that I’m, my critique is of the organizing left is I think we have to equip people on like the what and the how that makes sense for them. Because, you know, free healthcare for all could mean a doctor’s visit a year, that you could operationalize it that way, or it can mean a doctors visit every time you get sick. Those are two very different ways to build a healthcare system you know what I mean. Anyway, blah, blah blah blah, Sharhonda lead us.
Sharhonda Bossier: The last thing I’ll say on that is that I feel like this is, DeRay, what I was saying about you last week, which is like, it’s a thing that people don’t know about you. And that is your brain comes alive in thinking about how to operationalize solutions to these challenges. Right? Like, I think people think of you as just an organizer, but you have a very bureaucratic brain. Um. And I don’t know, I just I think it’s the thing that, people might not have a ton of visibility and insight into how your brain works. So wanted to mirror that back to you. My news this week is about a survey or a poll conducted by UGUB and the Young Men’s Research Institute. It’s a survey of 1,000 young men, age 18 to 29, not just voters. Um. And there are a couple of like really interesting data points that I wanted to bring to the pod for discussion, uh that I think tell us a little bit about the state of um just sort of manhood in this country right now and perceptions of it. And then also because we are always talking about the Democratic Party. And I think a lot of people, particularly in sort of more mainstream media um have talked about young men moving away from the Democratic party as um sort of a permanent shift. Um. I think this this poll gives us some insight into where and how some of these young men, many again, who are not voters, are persuadable and movable on issues that we care about. So a few data points that I wanted to highlight to talk through. Um. One is this shift with a majority of young men in this age group saying that there is not any career that they admire, um which is really fascinating to me, uh with young Black men in particular saying that entrepreneurship is the most admired career for them if they were to choose one um and that the least appealing career for men across the board it was public service. Uh. So I think there’s something telling in there. Um. Across the board, also for most men, the most important aspect of being a man was providing for your family. And that spiked among Black men. But the sort of least important aspect of being man was helping people who needed. Again, I think an interesting data point there. There are, trends, you know, we’ve been having this conversation about trends towards secularization in the US kind of more broadly. Um. But about 50% of the young men surveyed said that religion remains an important part of their life, with that being much higher among young Black men. I think an interesting thing for Democrats and the party to think about is that none of the people we are talking about as leading contenders for the next presidential election have significant name recognition among any of the men in this cohort, right? So we have talked a lot about Pete Buttigieg and Wes Moore and others, right. And these young men are like, we don’t know them. And so I think that that is important. And I think the Democrats have a lot of work to do if they are thinking about, you know, who they’re gonna bet on this next election. And then the last thing that I wanna highlight is um sort of stuff around um how young men think about the lives they want to live in terms of like partnership and home ownership, etc. Right. Um. So, you know, most of these young men have been or responded that they have been in at least one significant relationship in their lives. So this is not a group of like, quote unquote, “incels”, which I think is also a conversation that has really been taking root here. Uh. But that also these are young men who say that they really desire a spouse, a family and to own a home, so still have very traditional notions around the lives they want to build and feel most frustrated that those things feel out of reach for them and that is across lines of race. So I wanted to bring that here because I think we’re hearing a lot of narratives take root around this cohort of young people. And I think that what I am seeing in this data is people are looking for connection, they’re looking for meaning, they’re looking for fulfillment through their careers. And they’re looking for pathways to build a stable home life and family. And so um I think actually looking at this data gives me a little bit of hope about how we can engage young men and the issues that we need to speak to and thinking about how to best engage them. So wanted to bring that here for discussion.
Myles E. Johnson: I found that this article really, really, really interesting. The first thing I wanted to um like kind of say that I feel like fits right here is that the YouTuber FDSignifier, um maybe a day ago, no, actually a day ago, to when we’re recording this, which is on Sunday, posted a video and he talks about um the Obama years and Black people. And I think that that was really enriching. I don’t agree with everything FDSignifier says, um but I think that was really enriching and complicated. And and here is one of the things that I disagree with what he said in another video, not this video, but another video is around Black men in college is um and really Black men and um [sigh] I guess this like world like the thing that really struck me Sharhonda was when you said um there’s not any career like that that they want and I resonated with that so deeply and when I was reading some of those New York Times article that the New York Times articles about college I thought I was like well how do you have a population of men, right, specifically when we’re talking about Black men, who, less than 100 years ago, being lynched, being totally being totally told you’re not allowed in this society. And then doesn’t it seem kind of natural that there will be a large population or group from this population who does not find it easy to mutate their personalities to fit inside of the thing that tried to annihilate them or tried to assimilate. And I think that a lot of I when I see these answers, I see a failure to create a sovereign Black community within America. I see the failure of there not being these Maroon spaces or that Maroon politic. Forget having the space, but about having the Maroon politic of saying, no matter where you’re at, no matter what you go do for work, you still have this community and this place to go down to in that community, even though there’s I know everybody got an LLC and everybody’s talking about communal spaces. A lot of that is fantasy. We are not in a nation that is uh where their soil is fertile for community. We’re just not. And we can have that fantasy and we could talk about it and we can aim towards it, but it’s not true. And we see it when, to me, when we look at certain statistics specifically around Black um men and we see that their rejection to certain things makes a lot of sense. And the reason why I kind of connect it with me is because I’m somebody who did not, was not inspired in high school. I’m somebody who did not I didn’t have the upperly mobile trajectory, you know what I mean, of of of education. And I was totally um outcasted by this society and this media and this culture that I just thought was so alien and stupid and white. And I didn’t want to participate in it. And to be honest with you, there have been times in my life, thank God for writing and creativity and other things, but there’s times in my that I’m like, yes, I would rather sell drugs or try to be an entrepreneur or do survival sex work, then participate in something that feels like a violence to me being in the room. And I know if I feel like that as somebody who can code switch with the best of them, who is wearing a white collar shirt as we speak, I know, if I feel like that, there’s other Black men who feel like that and I think that we have to just address our failures in that way. And that’s what this article pushed me to even further think about. And I think F.D. Signifier and so many other um, you know, I’m all about the Black YouTube and Instagrammer girls and stuff. I think there’s so many people attempting to um remedy that, explain that, and also um help us get visions of what that looks like in ways that maybe are unique from what we tried before.
DeRay Mckesson: Also, before I respond to this, I would ask that for next week, if you can come with a list of YouTubers or videos we should watch, those of us who the YouTube space is so foreign to me that I don’t even know where I would start. I don’t know. So I’ve never heard of FD Signifier. I know you really like Taylor Lorenz, who we actually should just get on the podcast.
Myles E. Johnson: She’s on YouTube, but she’s like a reverse YouTuber, right? Like she already has, she’s kind of in that Don Lemon, Joy Reid, even though she’s her own independent thing, but she’s already had the clout. So I would, yes, I will definitely do that, but I want some people who generated from YouTube and sustained from YouTube and didn’t come from Washington Post or, you know. [?]
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, because I’m like.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: You say these names, I’m like, if I type in, I would go to YouTube and be like political video about now or something like I don’t even know what I would type to find the people you talk about. So there are two things that I think are really important that that you sort of talked around. The first is um I think that we in the public conversation mistake name recognition for trust.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And this poll does a really good job of being like, Elon has high name recognition. Blah blah blah.
Sharhonda Bossier: But no trust.
DeRay Mckesson: But almost more than half the people who know Elon’s name don’t actually trust him.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: So when I see all these articles around like, the left doesn’t have the people and the right has like the big podcasters and da da da, you know who does have more than 50% trust among this age group is Mr. Beast.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: The Rock. You know, like it is, so they do trust some people.
Sharhonda Bossier: LeBron James.
DeRay Mckesson: LeBron James, they do not trust the people that, sort of, the media suggests are, like, owning the Manosphere and da da. They listen to them.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: They know who they are, but, like Andrew Tate, all those guys are like, you know, more than 50 percent, um, like not trusted. So, I think that’s interesting. The second thing is that I was heartened, um, to see that people, like one is our families and da da da da.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Like it, this idea that that young men have, sort, of, like opted out of community or society is, it doesn’t seem to be true in the data. I do think, to both of what you have said, I think that they are opting out of a type of way of being in society that’s like, you get a job, you work it for 30 years, and–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Like I think nobody’s interested in that. I think that you know how people date and fall in love, I think all those things are interesting and different. We have a lot of work to do with feminism. You know the men–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: –are a little, you know still very transphobic and homophobic, which was um I thought we had worked on that just a tad. It seems like we have not with you know of all the kids, I’m like, the 18 to 21 year olds, it was okay to be gay in high school. I’m, like, it was not for me when I was, you know.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: When I was, they’re wearing finger nail polish. And I’m that would have been, I’d have had to go to a different school if I wore finger nail polish, it’s crazy.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: So, it does make me hopeful in a way, um but I think that the space is wide open. I think, that everybody’s hungry for leadership was another thing that I saw in this.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: There wasn’t anybody that people are like, looking to, and Sharhonda, you pointed to this, but we over-index on Bernie, Gavin, and AOC as like voices.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: That people listen to. This cohort barely knows who they are.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yup.
DeRay Mckesson: And you know if they know who they, barely trust them. I mean, barely in the like 5% range. It’s not even.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: You know this is a negligible input, Myles?
Myles E. Johnson: I want to offer an idea too when it comes to when I was reading this data, and I think it also makes me think about Elon and like just like the conversation I’ve been having with or just just yeah with like specifically young people, young dudes, young straight dudes. I don’t know specifically when it come to conservatism and like the wave of conservatism that I’ve seen. I don’t know how much trust is valuable. And I’m not saying it’s not valuable, but I feel like a lot of people put your willingness to comply over if I trust you.
DeRay Mckesson: Can you say it differently?
Myles E. Johnson: I wonder, because I know language is a place of struggle, I know media literacy and illiteracy is a problem in this country, I wonder if we have ideas around what trust means that means one thing, but doesn’t really matter when it comes to who you pick to be your leader. I think that what people look for, specifically when you start talking about the right and men, I think people look for people who are um who are willing to comply or obey the kind of um in some ways, like the fascist rule, or or or when it comes to even Bernie, there was people there was some people didn’t like Hillary for some some some really astute reasons, but there were some people who did not like Hillary because they didn’t because she wouldn’t um comply to their particular leftist ideas and won’t and won’t bend to it. I think they’re looking for people who will bend to their will, less people who they trust. So, I think that if you were a Democrat who wanted to um uh win the presidency, I don’t know how much people need to trust you. I don’t trust Gavin Newsom. I don’t think anybody’s going to trust Gavin Newsom because he reminds you of American psycho. I think thats his benefit. I think that what people want to witness is that Gavin Newsome is going to do what I told him to do because when I vote for you, I’m telling you what to do in certain circumstances and I expect for you to behave and perform how I voted for you to do.
DeRay Mckesson: That makes total sense. If you had to, if you wrote the poll question, how would you, this doesn’t have to be perfect, but I’m interested in this. How would you ask it outside of the trust frame? Would you say something like, you know um, of the people listed, who do I think is most likely going to do what they say? Or who do you think is gonna do what I want? Like, is that what you would ask? Is that versus like of the the people, who do trust the most?
Myles E. Johnson: Absolutely. I would ask.
DeRay Mckesson: Interesting.
Myles E. Johnson: I was like, who would do what I want them to say? I would even ask um, like like like, what what does trust mean to you? Give them multiple choices of what trust even means before you ask them a question about trust. Make sure we’re working with the same definition. Ask them, does uh do you need to trust somebody in order to be led by them? I think these are all questions that really see what’s really going on with the psyche and what you need to produce in order get those people to vote.
DeRay Mckesson: Don’t go anywhere. More Pod Save the People is coming.
[AD BREAK]
Myles E. Johnson: So my news today is Tyler Perry. Um. So here it is, y’all. And I think that this, all this conversation–
DeRay Mckesson: Okay.
Myles E. Johnson: I think because this conversation in all ways is really talking about one thing, and what I really do think is that um Black people, Black culture, has really fed into this kind of like neoliberal project, both in media, and I think that in a lot of ways we’re witnessing that neoliberal projects crumble. And I think that a lot Black people have emotional relationships with the people who are the tycoons. Of of of of that of that project and also the projects and the music and the films and all the delicious stuff because it’s magical but This Tyler Perry story, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, Tyler Perry was sued by um a young actor named Derek who accused him of what it reads as um some some flirtatious text, um sexual coercion, and some dialog that nobody, I don’t care if you work at Arby’s and I don’t if you work in the biggest bank in the world, can’t nobody’s boss text you the things that Tyler Perry was texting this man. Um, but I guess what I really want my news to be about, rather than just the scandal, is the very clear matrix of power and influence and persuasion that Tyler Perry employed in order to control this scandal. So I was watching Taraji P. Henson speak, um Sherri Shepard speak, because they’re in his latest movie, Straw. And they talk about Tyler Perry and how great he is and how many millionaires he’s made and how great he is. And I thought, they’re laying it on kind of thick. It felt like something was coming for Tyler Perry and then lo and behold, this case drops. And then when we look at this case and him talking to this very attractive white boy and giving him money, not because he’s good at his job, but because Tyler Perry wants to lay down with him. That is the same thing that Christian Keyes, never names Tyler Perry, just says it’s a very distinct Black billionaire who everybody loves who makes movies. We only got one of them, but who also might be a little fruity, but he never names Tyler Perry. But that’s the same thing that Christian Keyes accuses of Tyler Perry doing. And then when we look at our own satire, our own kind of left-of-center satire with its failures, I’m talking about Boondocks. So when we looked at the episode of Boondocks critiquing Tyler Perry, they describe the exact thing that he’s accused of. And my thing is when I look at these Shade Room comments, when I looked at The Hollywood Unlocked comments, I see bots. And I also see a lot of Black people who are so attached to Black excellence, even if it’s not happening via their lives, that they will not look at things that are very clear and very obvious. That a Black drag queen with church trauma who got beat up and who got sexually abused can do the same thing to somebody else. It is simple math. He’s never been to therapy. Like, allegedly, allegedly allegedly, he did it to me, allegedly in my opinion, it’s obvious. And what gets me scared is if Black people are so fascinated and so attached to the people who um have power and who have fame and who are um symbols of this kind of Black excellence that we adore, that we’re never actually able to critique power and create something that, again, the word sovereign comes to mind, and also has some type of moral compass upwards. If at any moment we say, well, we already did enough. We gave them enough. Predators are not chess pieces. That is not how we do things. That is now how we should do things, so just because they got Harvey, we don’t now we give them Bill, or, oh, they got whoever, um uh Johnny Depp, so we need to get Diddy. That’s not how this works. If there’s anybody who is going to prey on Black folks who are poor and vulnerable with money, with fame, and with the promise to take them out of poverty, if that person is willing to do whatever they have to do. I don’t care if you are raping people. I don’t care if you are sending them text messages that let them know that your financial destiny lies in if you will lay down with me or flirt with me back. That is financial exploitation, and if you’re talking about the poorest population in this nation being uh producing those people and for it to be weaponized for people inside of our race, outside of our race, that is something to critique and to disembowel. That is something to say, I don’t care how many times I watched uh Madea’s Family Reunion. And I love that Cicely Tyson. And I love that Maya Angelou. And every single time I’m on land, I say this land. And I will continue to watch Madea, but I’m able to say both things at one time. We just have to be okay with Black people going through a lot, just being less than 100 years out of segregation and going into this white media apparatus that birthed minstrelsy and us having huge failures. And one of the huge failures that we created, a minstrel drag queen who finds it okay to sexually and financially exploit other people allegedly because they have church trauma allegedly. And I think that is the thing that people don’t want to talk about. I think that people know that this happened and they don’t wanna talk about it. Now tell me how you disagree y’all.
DeRay Mckesson: Here’s what I will say um, you know, for all the listeners, we don’t talk about the news until we get to the podcast. So I never really know what people are gonna say. So I’m processing in real time. I was surprised at the comments online that were so ardently pro Tyler. Like I was sort of like surprised by them. And I talked to somebody about it last night. And they were like, well, the $200 million lawsuit is silly. And like, they were, like, the number makes it not serious. And I’m sort of like, well I, you know, I am a manager of people, and I’ve been a manager of people since my early 20s. I couldn’t imagine as the manager sending texts like that. As an employee, I couldn’t imagine receiving texts like that. So like, just independent of like Tyler the person, independent of race, independent of his job, just like the manager employee relationship, I just couldn’t imagine sending or receiving those. I’ve had to discipline people who have sent less texts than that.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And still, you’re like, well, that just is inappropriate. And given the level of power you hold, you just can’t be in the role. You know, like, I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you not to be able to eat dinner, but you just can’t be in this role in that way. So I was actually surprised to see people just sort of like blindly defend Tyler. Like not interrogate, not sort of say, hold these two things true that are like, hey, you know, great films, interesting films, and like not a great manager, or like inappropriate manager, or sexually harassing people manager. So you’re right, the tour, that sort of defense of Tyler, I do think it’s a precarious situation. What does it mean when there are so many Black actors who are like, Tyler is the only person who ever paid me a real wage and the loyalty that that engenders both amongst those actors and all of the people who like those actors, like that is something, and I always say about Tyler, for TeRay’s birthday, when she was, I don’t know, 16, 17, we went to go see Tyler Perry in a high school auditorium. And it was like the second coming of, I mean, it was the most live play I’d ever seen in my life. I think it was the first play I’d seen live. So I’ll be interested to see how this plays out, but I was surprised at people’s sort of wholesale defense of Tyler. Um. Yeah, that was surprising to me.
Myles E. Johnson: So um what your response made me think of is how, obviously, not surprised I am because I saw the Bill Cosby stuff and I saw the um R. Kelly stuff and how people reacted, but I also saw the Jussie Smollett stuff. And I also saw people know that Jussie Smollet, no, come on, I saw people know what Jussie Smollett did, saw the evidence, saw all the documentaries, saw what was going on. And instead of saying, I’m not a carceral logic person, so I know that this person did this because I’m not going to reject my own logic to my own intuition in order to sustain your fantasy and sustain your lie. But I will say I’ve made mistakes and I stand beside you as you made your mistake and I say that there is no Black person for a nonviolent crime who should be put in prison. But we didn’t see that though. We saw a whole bunch of people gaslighting a whole bunch of other people. So we have even the most progressive and the most intellectual of people playing that gaslighting game. Then of course the people who got two jobs and who are um doing DoorDash on the side, who love Tyler Perry, are gonna play that game too. Who’s setting the standard?
DeRay Mckesson: Who’s setting the standard? That’s a good one.
Sharhonda Bossier: The only thing I would add is I think, you know, to DeRay’s point about this being like, unfortunately, a pretty common experience in workplaces is I think we um explain away when this happens in so many other workplaces, particularly if this happens and it like results in like a marriage or whatever. And you’re like, wait a minute, hold on a second. You were her direct manager and now you’re her husband. Hmm. You know, and I think that for a long time, people were like, well, it’s OK if everyone involved is like consenting. And we and I actually don’t believe that. I think when there’s a power imbalance like that, that you should not pursue a romantic relationship with someone. And the last thing I’ll say is you know our public conversations around consent are really new. And um I think there are also people in the same way that we saw with Cassie, et cetera, right where they’re like, if you were going to be this proximate to a rich, powerful man, you should expect that this is the cost of being that proxmit to them. And we also haven’t uprooted that thinking that is like deeply, deeply seated in so many of us so yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: This week, I sat down with scholar and president of the ACLU board, Deborah Archer, to talk about her new book, Dividing Lines, How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. Her book is the essential account of how transportation infrastructure from highways, roads, sidewalks, y’all, sidewalks, and busses became a means of protecting segregation and inequality after the fall of Jim Crow. Let me tell you, I thought I understood this. I thought, I understood people talking about transportation, infrastructure and racism. I did not understand it until I talked to Deborah Archer. You have to listen to this. You have to go buy the book. Here we go. The one and only Deborah Archer. It is honor to have you here on the podcast.
Deborah Archer: Thank you so much for inviting me to join you.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, our work has intersected a lot, both from your role as the board chair of the ACLU, but also because of your scholarship on housing ordinances, which our team at Campaign Zero came across. And then your newest book, Dividing Lines, literally blew my mind. So let’s just start with how you got to civil rights. Did you always know you wanted to do civil rights law? Did you want to be a professor? Like, what was your, how’d you get here?
Deborah Archer: I think my parents would tell you that I’ve always wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. They tell me that as early as they can remember, I talked about doing the work that I’m doing now. I think that I got into civil rights because I wanted to fight for families like mine and people like me and our ability to live without discrimination, our ability to live with dignity and respect. I come from a background I think most people wouldn’t think. My parents are Jamaican immigrants, I’m the first generation American citizen in my family, the first person in my family to graduate from college. And I grew up in Connecticut, one of the richest states in the country, but deep poverty, deep inequality, deep segregation. And my parents often had to struggle to provide for us to navigate around the discrimination they faced because they were immigrants, because they spoke with an accent, because they’re Black. Because they didn’t have financial resources. And it really did motivate me to do the kind of work that I’m really blessed to be able to do today.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, you know, I have seen a lot of stories about the racist history of the highways, or I’ve seen people talk about that, but what you do in the book is you zoom us beyond highways, not just highways. So there’s a lot to talk about highways here, but I had no clue about sidewalks. I didn’t know people were putting barricades up on the streets. I’m like, what is going on? This is so wild.
Deborah Archer: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: Before we jump into those details, how did you get to transportation? Like, did you? You know, you’ve written about a lot of things in civil rights. Did you know that you were gonna focus on transportation? Did you stumble across the transportation history? How’d you get here?
Deborah Archer: Yeah, I didn’t know that I would end up here. I’ve been a civil rights and racial justice attorney for almost 30 years. And during most of that time, I did not think about transportation justice as a civil right issue, although I really should have. As you mentioned, a lot of my work is at the intersection of race and place and exploring the inequality there. And I found that we aren’t really having full and robust discussions about what brings us to inequality when we look at place and space and housing. But the way that I got to transportation was that I was invited by a community group in New York to work with them to defend and represent a Black community that was anticipating a infrastructure project. And they wanted to make sure that racial justice and racial equality was centered in the conversation. This community had been harmed decades before when a highway was built right through the community. And now they had you know spent decades rebuilding their lives in the shadow of that highway and didn’t want the new infrastructure project to repeat those sins of the past. And through the work with that community and the organizers there, I came to learn how widespread the story was, that basically every state in the country. You can find a community of color that was destroyed or siloed or blocked off, isolated by an infrastructure project. And I just began to dig and dig, spending more time with communities to hear their stories and to really try to understand the ongoing impact.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, there were so many things I didn’t know, first of which was the history of the Birmingham bombings you focus on a period of time where there were 50 bombings. And I had no clue that they were in response to the racial zoning laws. Can you talk to us about, can you talk us about that history and why it was important that you foregrounded that in the book?
Deborah Archer: When I started to do the research for this um book, I also knew general history in the way that you say that you’ve known. We know all of the awful things that have happened and been done to Black people in Black communities in order to hold on to and protect white supremacy. But I also didn’t realize that so many of those things were directly tied to advances in housing and migration of Black folks out of Black communities post Jim Crow. So in Birmingham, Alabama as Black people started to feel the weight of the civil rights movement and feel empowered and were able financially to move into areas that were formerly zoned for whites only because Birmingham used racial zoning laws, which literally said on this side of the street, white people can live and on the other side of the street is where Black people can live. But Black people were starting to move and violate those invisible lines that were created by laws. And the attorney who represented a lot of those families saw that his family was terrorized, his house was bombed, churches were bombed. And Birmingham, Alabama came to be known as Bombingham because of all that was going on. And Birmingham is a really powerful example. After the racial zoning laws were struck down. Birmingham built I-59 and I-65 to maintain the racial segregation. In some places, the highway follows the exact lines that the racial zoning laws used to follow. But Birmingham isn’t alone. We can talk about Atlanta that also built um, you know, you said literal walls blocked off a street. Atlanta had what was called the Atlanta Berlin Wall, and that was built in 1962. After a Black surgeon bought a house in a white neighborhood, and white folks in the neighboring community wanted to protect their community from more Black folks coming in, and they built a barricade in the middle of the road. And that barricade stood there for about 72 days before it was taken down, but it really kind of opened up the opportunity to continue to do that and similar things all throughout Atlanta.
DeRay Mckesson: You know, it really struck me about the way you set up the conversation with the highways is that precisely what you said, I knew that it had happened. I didn’t know that it was a way to circumvent other things being deemed unconstitutional or like other ways of doing zoning. I just, I had no clue. Before we talk about the barricades and the streets and the sidewalk, which I thought was just wild, I was actually like really, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but you actually were able to find that they wrote about the explicit intent around the highways. This wasn’t even like, you know, you’re not like guessing about their intent. They wrote it. So that was one I wanted to talk to you about. The second is that I hadn’t even considered until I read the book about what happens when you use eminent domain and don’t either don’t pay Black people for their homes or you pay people dramatically under market value as a way to continue to screw them. And then the third thing that you made me think about. I was like, I never even thought about, like, the creation of the suburbs. I’m like, oh, I guess I guess you’re right. If you make the highways and you disconnect communities, then you make another community and all the white people move to that. I was like this is how you make the suburbs.
Deborah Archer: That’s right. That’s right. So there’s so much that you said that I wanted to I want to follow up on. One, the connection to between Jim Crow falling and highways being built because I don’t think that people really understand that connection. And one of the kind of the nefarious genius in using highways and infrastructure as a barrier is that it could withstand evolutions in civil rights laws. As we anticipated the fall of segregation, a highway would stand. So as judicial decisions um in the 1950s and 1960s made it more difficult for government to isolate Black communities using zoning laws and other regulations, we saw urban planners turn to highways. And it really kicked into high gear when the court signaled the fall of segregation in Brown versus Board of Education. Which I’m sure everyone knows was decided in 1954. And in the wake of Brown, government officials proclaimed and demonstrated through real extreme um measure that they were gonna protect segregation with everything that they had. And so two years after that decision, we found Congress had hearings on the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and then passed that act. And so they switched from redlining and racial zoning laws to the highways. And after that happened, government officials didn’t hide their re-segregationist attempts. They were pretty explicit saying, we’re gonna build a highway here because that’s where the racial zoning laws had the dividing line. In Atlanta, the mayor saying, I have to build a Highway I-20 right here on this route because I promised the white community that I would give something to them to protect them. And so they didn’t hide it. And so I was able to find many examples where communities were explicit about needing the highways or roads built in a certain way to protect them from Black people, but also government officials being very explicit to say that they were doing this to protect white people from Black migration.
DeRay Mckesson: The suburbs existed when I was a kid. They just were there. And then I was reading this and I was like, oh, I guess they weren’t always just there.
Deborah Archer: No. And so, you know, to build the highways, they used eminent domain. To build major roadways, they also have used eminate domain. And that’s a tool that you use to take private property for public purpose. Theoretically, you’re supposed to give the owner just compensation, but the compensation was never just. And, so, for a variety of reasons, Black people did not get the full value of their homes, or they got nothing for their homes. And then they were forced to find new housing in already deeply segregated and overcrowded communities because of racial segregation. So although the highways helped connect these newly emerging suburbs to the city so folks could have work in the city, go home to the suburbs, those suburbs were not open to Black people. They were racially restricted covenants, were attached to that housing. There was just rampant housing segregation and discrimination. In the book, I tell the story of a family in Ohio who lost their home to a highway. And every weekend the family would go to look for new housing and the son would say that he could see the look on his father’s face, the look of disappointment every time they went up to a house and when the owner realized that they were Black, um told his father to go away, that they weren’t going to rent to them or sell to them. And so it helped solidify racially segregated suburbs and inner city neighborhoods that grew increasingly segregated, concentrating economic inequality and really overcrowding and taxing of um the infrastructure there.
DeRay Mckesson: Let’s go to page 79. I’m gonna ask you to read the bottom of 79. Instead of paraphrasing it, cause you just wrote it so great that I was like, people should just hear what you wrote. That’s why you wrote a book. And I’ll tell you, as somebody who wrote a book, I always was annoyed that I would be interviewed and the people didn’t read the book. I’m like, this is why I wrote it.
Deborah Archer: I appreciate that.
DeRay Mckesson: The bottom of 79, that starts with the subtle. I’ll leave it to you.
Deborah Archer: The subtle and not so subtle uses of street planning techniques included dead-ending streets, converting roads to one-way streets that repeatedly led drivers away from white communities, turning through streets into cul-de-sacs, changing the names of the streets as they passed from white to Black communities, and refraining from paving streets as they approached racial boundaries. Sometimes municipalities used subtle tactics to limit Black access. At other times, localities made no attempt to disguise the segregationist intent behind nominally race-neutral practices.
DeRay Mckesson: Deborah, it blew, literally blew my mind. I was like, the highways I had heard about, you built it out and I understood the whole sh’bang by the time I finished reading. Street planning? I was a zero. I had never heard of that before. How did you, how, how? Tell us like, or what? Oh, I don’t even know what to ask you.
Deborah Archer: It is mind blowing. It makes you see the built environment in an entirely different way. So it was not just about using the highways to lock in communities, to segregate communities. It was really a belt and suspenders kind of approach. It was that you could not live near us, and we wanted to make sure that it was as difficult as possible for you to get from your house to my house, and we want to make that we don’t have to suffer any shame by being perceived to live in the same neighborhood or community as you are. And Atlanta, which at the time called themselves the city too busy to hate, really was an example of using everything. They layered everything. And as a result, it’s hard to get around Atlanta. So Atlanta changed street names. If you look at Atlanta now, look at a map, as some streets move from across Ponce de Leon. It’s one name before Ponce de Leon then a different name afterwards. And that was because Ponce de Leon was a dividing line between Black and white communities. Atlanta has so many one-way streets that just keep leading you away from the Black community and you cannot easily move from the Black community to the white community. Because of all the one way streets just keep taking you around and around in a circle. And I talk about Memphis, which also used that as well. We they had a case that I studied in law school called Memphis versus Green. So I was aware of this example where they blocked off a road, right at the point where the road led from the Black community to the white community. They just built a barrier. They said it was to keep out undesirable influences. But it really was to make sure that Black people couldn’t come through their community, couldn’t drive through their community, couldn’t walk through their community. And it really not only makes it difficult for you to navigate, to makes it hard for you to live your life, to get to where you have to go, to get to the doctor, to the dentist, to buy groceries. It stamps the Black community with stigma, making it seem as if you’re so awful that you we can’t even have you be close to us. We can’t even let you get anywhere near our homes and our community. And so it was a lot, it is a lot to process, especially the way that all of this is layered on top of each other, and the really powerful symbolic messages that these kinds of efforts sends to you.
DeRay Mckesson: So you already talked about the Atlanta’s Berlin Wall and how it was up, it wasn’t up forever. It got taken down, it got burned, all those things. But after I read that part, I had to Google because I was like, I’ve never heard of this. So I’m Googling, like, who is this mayor? And I look up the mayor and he’s one of the good guys. And I’m like, well, goodness, if the good guy, you know at first I’m, like this is Bull Connor’s cousin and he just hated Black people. I’m like he won against the segregationists. He was the good guy who still put up a wall because the Black man bought land. That is, you know, if the good guys are doing this, we’re down bad.
Deborah Archer: And good guys are still doing it today, right? It is their choices that we have to make when we’re building infrastructure projects. And the choices are always done in a way where Black communities are forced to bear the brunt of the and the inconvenience of the infrastructure and other communities get to enjoy the benefits. It’s a lot of pressure from powerful, influential, suburban, wealthy communities on our elected officials to do what protects their community at the expense of other communities. So this is not a story about um just good guys versus bad guys. I think that’s, unfortunately, so often how we think about racism, that we’re looking for um to identify the bad actor. We’re looking to identify the Bull Connors or looking to identify, you know, the racist. But racism isn’t all about the Bull Connors. It wasn’t then. It isn’t today. It operates in various ways. And taking a look at the highways and our transportation infrastructure writ large in the way that I did, I think really helps illuminate the power and creativity and adaptation of racism.
DeRay Mckesson: I received that push, yes. I did Google him, because I was like.
Deborah Archer: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: I’ve never heard of this before!
Deborah Archer: It is fascinating, his backstory, and that he was someone who was seen as the more progressive of the choices for mayor in that the election just preceding it.
DeRay Mckesson: Can you also talk about the sidewalks? This was another part that um you know you you throw a nod to it in the introduction. So I’m like, okay, let’s see what’s going on with the sidewalks. And then I get to the sidewalks in the second half of the book and I’m just, again, blown away. Just, you know I’ve never heard of this. What I know in policing is that there are some places where it is legal to ride bikes on the sidewalk and I know I know that from my work as an activist, but I had never imagined that it would be illegal for Black people to walk on sidewalks until I read your book.
Deborah Archer: Yeah. So I think sidewalks are really a secondary concern for a lot of people. When I talked about transportation infrastructure, said I was doing this book about transportation and infrastructure, no one ever really thinks about walking and pedestrian infrastructure is part of that story. Um. But really to this day, there is a legacy of Jim Crow that is felt in neighborhoods across the country because they lack pedestrian infrastructure. After city planners destroyed Black communities with highways and the roadways that we’ve talked about, they largely ignored not only public transportation but the needs of pedestrians. And so we didn’t think about how are these residents gonna navigate the areas around the highways and the overpasses and the access roads without a comprehensive system of well-maintained sidewalks. And so you’ll see Black communities that don’t have a well- maintained sidewalks, the sidewalks lack connectivity or they’re impossible to walk on. And rather than address this inequality and face the problem head on, we do what we have done in so many other ways. Many local governments then responded to their own underinvestment in sidewalks with over-enforcement and over-policing of pedestrian traffic rules. So we have neighborhoods bisected by these highways and roadways. Black residents don’t have many ways to move around safely. Residents then can face the threat of systems that target, harass, and arrest them as they try to navigate their own community because they’re walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk, because we have laws that say you can’t walk in the street, but we have sidewalks that aren’t walkable. And I know people know the very, well-known example and tragic example of Michael Brown in Ferguson who was killed when he was stopped for walking in the street in a community that um activists had long said didn’t have walkable sidewalks and activists for a long time, they were fighting for better pedestrian infrastructure for people to more safely navigate their community. And of course, there’s always a historical story. And I try to tell the historical aspect of this as well, because sidewalks have always been contested public spaces that were shared by necessity. And as a result, it created daily opportunities to reinforce racial hierarchy and insult and subjugate Black people. So I learned that there was an official term to what I had been doing and experiencing for decades. And it is called giving whites the wall or the white man’s right of way. And that’s Black people stepping out of the way to make sure that white people could walk on the inside of the sidewalk, farther from the road and safer for them. And that was called the white men’s right-of-way. It’s something that I experienced walking every day in Greenwich Village, but I was interested to learn this history, this connection to Jim Crow.
DeRay Mckesson: Now, I have to imagine that most of the listeners, including like me, this will be a new way of thinking about transportation for them. Do you have any advice, or like, how do you want, how should people in communities start to think, or questions that people should ask, or is there somewhere people should go? Like, to think about how to make the transportation infrastructure more equitable. One of the things that you do, both throughout, but at the end as well, is the limitations of the legal process, that people have tried to use the courts to enforce a whole host of things and, you know, largely cities have been creative about how to screw Black people over. So trying to think about um, is there any advice to people on the front end that they could do to be more involved?
Deborah Archer: Yeah. So just to pick up first on your point about the law, we have lots of civil rights laws that are powerful in many ways and have really beautiful language. But they’re limited in transportation infrastructure because they apply after decisions have been made and kind of momentum is behind the decision. They focus on intent and ignore systemic inequality. And as we were discussing, that’s not necessarily how racism reveals itself in transportation infrastructure, and they put the burden on the plaintiff and give real undue deference to public officials, basically accepting any excuse that they give for why the only possible route for this road is through a Black community. And so I think the book is trying to call on us to think differently and explore the trade-offs that policymakers have to um engage in and not make the same trade-offs always, trade-offs at the expense of Black communities. I think it, going forward, requires a shift in national transportation policy. This includes reimagining how we use transportation and infrastructure to serve and support communities of color. And whether you call it community equity focused or anti-racist design, equitable design or something else. It’s about not looking at our current situation as a neutral baseline. It’s abut connecting seemingly isolated incidents and projects to common policies and approaches and recognizing that those approaches keep leading us to inequitable discriminatory or oppressive outcomes. And I think we have to find a way to get involved from the beginning. I often hear from communities who want assistance and I do work with a lot of communities around the country um who are fighting these kinds of projects, but they come to me five, six, seven years after the initial announcement or initial citing decision. And that really is too late in a process to affect meaningful change because of the limits of our civil rights laws. Communities need to be involved, engaged from the beginning. And some of the onus in that is on communities to when you hear talk of an infrastructure project, a road, a highway, sidewalks, public transportation decisions to get involved immediately, to seek support, seek resources that will enable you to fight for what your community needs and what your community deserves. But the onus is also on those who are engaged in making these infrastructure decisions to find ways to put racial equity at the center of all of their decisions and to have really meaningful community participation in decision-making, not just hear their voices after you’ve decided what you want to do, but empower the community, give them the tools that they need, the opportunities and resources to be meaningfully engaged in the discussion and to be meaningfully engaged in the decision-making.
DeRay Mckesson: One of the other things that stuck out to me was how permanent the changes become. So when you write about New York City and you write Lincoln Center, disrupting a community of color, I never knew that until this book, you know? And there’s something that happens where the, what happens when you put this infrastructure over a whole neighborhood, it’s like, we never know. How would I know?
Deborah Archer: Because these stories aren’t being told, Lincoln Center and the story of Lincoln Center and really everything in the book about infrastructure is part of the legacy, I think, of Robert Moses, who was responsible for building a lot of the infrastructure in parks and cultural institutions in New York and had this philosophy that these infrastructures should go right through Black communities that and other communities of color that he felt were blighted and were a drain on the larger community, and then spread that philosophy, spread his gospel around the country. And so we see that again and again. And I think it’s unfortunate that we don’t tell the full history of how these beautiful, amazing institutions were built. Lincoln Center is such an amazing community institution, but we should know that it damaged and destroyed Black and Brown communities. And transportation is really a paradox. We often think of roads and highways and public transit only as symbols of progress and connection, but I try to tell the story about how these same systems have been used as tools of exclusion and displacement, especially in Black communities. And I think it’s important because if you don’t understand the truth and full scope of how we got to where we were. We can never actually craft policies and solutions and approaches that are gonna get to the heart of the problem. You know, if you want to get at policies, solutions, and approaches that are going to get to the hard of the problem, it has to be based on a foundation of truth and understanding of what brought us to where we are today. And so we have to tell these stories. It’s one of the reasons that the attempts to silence discussions around race and inequality. One of the reasons the attempts to end discussions of Black history, to tell only the positive stories of America, why it’s so harmful, because it not only deprives us of knowing those stories and knowing the struggle and understanding how the people before us fought to get us to where we are, but also deprives us of understanding the facts of how we got to where are so that we know how we need to craft our struggles moving forward.
DeRay Mckesson: Where do people go to stay up to date on what you’re doing or thinking or putting out in the world? Is there a Facebook? Are you on TikTok? Is it Instagram? What you got?
Deborah Archer: Yeah, not on TikTok yet, but I am on Instagram, and I am on Twitter and Bluesky at DeborahNArcher. And I would love for people to check out those pages and come see me give some talks and learn more about the book and my research.
DeRay Mckesson: And one of the last questions I wanna ask you is that this is a trying time politically for a lot of people and people’s hope is being challenged in moments like this. What advice do you give people whose hope is challenged in moment like this?
Deborah Archer: I wish I could say that it was um easy to wake up every day and choose hope, the times are really challenging, but I still do because I don’t think we have any choice. We have to wake up every day, and choose to continue this fight because if we don’t continue to push forward, we’re going to be pushed back, and we can’t afford to do that. In this work around transportation infrastructure. It gives me hope that there are people who have lived in these communities for decades and they have never given up hope. And they are fighting every day with love and determination and creativity. And if they can get up every day under the shadows of the highway, knowing the ways in which our country has worked so hard to keep them locked out and left behind. If they can get up each day and fight then I really don’t think any of us has any choice but to join that fight. And then finally, every day I wake up and I really feel blessed to have the opportunity to do this work, to have the opportunity to lead and to really be reaping the benefits of those who fought and led and just survived before us so that we could be in this space and enjoy the amazing lives and opportunities that we have. And it is a blessing to be alive in this moment. To do this work when there is such important and vital work to do. And I know that you know that because you’re getting up every day and you’re doing the work. And it really is an honor to be doing the work alongside you and so many others. [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 Moultrié and mixed by Charlotte Landes, executive produced by me and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Myles E. Johnson and Sharhonda Bossier. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
