In This Episode
Trump grows increasingly agitated as Epstein files inch toward public release, Marjorie Taylor Greene becomes the latest Republican to wobble on loyalty, and new visa data shows some foreigners being denied entry to the U.S. for… being obese?? Meanwhile, a new AI study finds large language models occasionally breaking bad, Democrats gear up for insurgent primaries over the shutdown betrayal, and New York restaurants are outsourcing cashiers to the Philippines to dodge fair-wage standards. DeRay interviews author and Harvard professor Brandon Terry about his book Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement.
News
The Fried Chicken Is in New York. The Cashier Is in the Philippines.
Democratic Insurgents Are Ready to Run on Shutdown Betrayal
Follow @PodSavethePeople on Instagram.
TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay. And welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda, back to talk about the news with regard to race, justice, and equity. And then I sit down with the one and only Harvard professor and author, Brandon Terry, to talk about his new book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at Pod Save the People, and here we go.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: We are out of the shutdown and the world continues. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter.
Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @pharaohrapture on Instagram.
Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bossier at @BossierSha on Instagram, at BossierS on Spill.
DeRay Mckesson: Actually, let’s start with the shutdown. I don’t think we’ve talked since the shutdown formally ended. It was 40 days. It was no snap. It was a conversation about the subsidies for Obamacare, health care, and it was the airports being a complete and utter nightmare. Air traffic controllers not getting paid, TSA people not getting paid. And then it all ended one night. What do you all think of the shutdown itself? Was it worth it in terms of what the Dems got out of it? What about the end? Where are you on the shutdown.
Myles E. Johnson: I mean, it just seems like you just have to see maybe like there’s like a couple of different strategies that kind of play in my head around why this would happen. So I know that they were promised to be able to be able to vote on healthcare subsidies. And maybe there’s some intel and some information that I don’t have that makes this make more sense, but I know that it felt really deflating. Like I know that for a lot of people around me, they felt deflated, specifically riding I call it the periwinkle wave. But like I don’t know how blue ones wave can be with this empire right now, but I know so many people who are riding that and then to kind of see the Dems stop fighting felt deflating. But I’ve also seen and thought to myself that there must be a bigger strategy that I’m not seeing, whether I agree with it or not is whatever. But I’m like, I think that they might be evil, but I don’t think they’re stupid. So I’m like, there must be a bigger reason why they’re doing this.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean I don’t know if you all saw Tim Kaine. I’m gonna call him the infamous Tim Kaine now.
DeRay Mckesson: Not the infamous Tim Kaine.
Sharhonda Bossier: His op-ed in the New York Times about why he voted to end the shutdown. Um. And in it, he says, you know, I understand the earnest criticism from those who say that extending the shutdown would have forced Republicans to offer more concessions to Democrats on critical issues such as health care. But I was at the negotiating table, and I believe the chances of that were near zero. And so he was like, the only reason that Republicans even sort of returned to the negotiating table was because they suffered big losses in that first wave of elections early in November. And he’s like, look, even though polls long before that were showing that most Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown, he was like, honestly, it felt like the Republicans were the ones who actually had the bigger strategy at play. And that was they wanted to continue the shutdown so that that would lead to chaos, which would then allow them to eliminate the Senate filibuster. So that they could pass a government funding bill that would not require democratic votes at all. Right? And he’s like, that actually is the thing that we were trying to stop, recognizing that we made some concessions on key things that we said we were willing to go to the mat for. So I think again, this is another example of where Republicans had the bigger strategy at play and Democrats were caught on their back foot with no other leverage and had to give in in order to preserve the Senate filibuster. What I will also say about that is that a lot of people who are in the more progressive wing of the party feel like the Democratic establishment in Congress is really married to maintaining the filibuster because it also allows them to keep the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party in check. So there’s a lot of questions about the role of centrist Democrats in this moment and what they’re costing us.
DeRay Mckesson: Even if there was a strategy, they didn’t communicate it well. What it felt like was caving.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, a hundred percent.
DeRay Mckesson: And of the big thing you get is a promise of a vote that we’re definitely gonna lose on the sheer numbers. [laughter]
Sharhonda Bossier: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: And when they forced the exact same vote as a part of this bill and we already lost it, you’re like, so what do we do when people get kicked off healthcare? And this is like, you know, some of the famous radio hosts you probably saw were like they sort of said, Well, we already lost it, people are suffering, just you know, we didn’t get the subsidies. It’s like, well, you don’t know what it’s like when two million really, you know, the poverty rate is it’s fifteen thousand dollars a year.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: So without the subsidies for this set of people, there’s no nothing. So when people are like, oh, well, some people have a high premium, you’re like, no, no, no, no, no. If you make fifteen thousand dollars a year, you’re making maybe 250 every two weeks. You can’t afford any premium that is $300. Like that might not sound like a lot to you, but that is a lot to a whole set of people. So it was frustrating to see people in the news be like, oh, well, they’ll figure it out. You’re like, well, I don’t think you understand the they that is at is at play in this subsidy conversation.
Myles E. Johnson: And I don’t mean to like really sound really, really, really cynical, which never stopped me before on the air. But like I do think that they know who is suffering. Like I do think that when I listen to a lot of the um y’all know that I’ve been like painting. So I’ve been on like a Nick Fuentes rabbit hole all weekend. And so much of what they’re saying is weakly disguised bigotry and violence. So much of it is saying, you did not do what you’re supposed to do. You’re not rich enough. And either you pay to stay alive in America or die off and we’ll be better for it. It it literally reminds me of the line from the Charles Dickinson [correction: Dickens’] A Christmas carol where he like is like, Scrooge, you’re gonna go, all the homeless people rather die than go to jail. And he says, Well, they better do it. Like that’s a lot of their ethics.
DeRay Mckesson: Well we’ll see what happens. That takes us to another hot topic that’s been an issue for a long time, which is the Epstein mess. And it looks like the votes are there for to force the government to at least release more information about what’s in the Epstein files, those emails that got put out that implicated a whole new set of people that I had not heard in the conversation before. So wanted to flag. And do you even think that this matters, right? Clearly it matters in sort of the media conversation. Do you think that people will turn on the Republicans or do you think it’ll hurt everybody around Trump and not actually Trump? Like what do you think the what is here since we are still in the Epstein file release moment?
Sharhonda Bossier: I don’t know what else we needed to see, hear, or learn for this to matter. And so I feel very strongly that this is not going to hurt Trump at all, despite some of the infighting in the MAGA camp that it has caused. I think what I have been both most interested in and most disappointed by is the conversation around what was revealed in the most recent email release. Like I’m thinking about Megyn Kelly and her comments. I’m thinking about the “jokes”, quote unquote, right, at the expense of some of the victims. I’m thinking about the “jokes”, quote unquote, at the expense of Monica Lewinsky as an example, right? Who we all owe a collective apology to.
Myles E. Johnson: I ain’t never joke about Monica, I was five. [laughter]
Sharhonda Bossier: And I I just think that we are not a culture that takes sexual violence seriously. And I think in a lot of ways we think that a hall pass to commit sexual violence is a privilege that powerful men should enjoy. And I don’t see any particular like fallout for most of the people involved in this, named in this, or Trump himself.
Myles E. Johnson: I think if the motivation is for something to happen to Trump, I think that yeah. If that’s what you’re looking for the Epstein Files to fuel, then that is probably not gonna happen. Cause I think so many people have already agreed before they made their vote. So many people who voted for Trump have already made peace with the fact that he is a vile human. So that won’t shift things.
Sharhonda Bossier: A hundred percent.
Myles E. Johnson: I do think that it changes things because I think that having something that’s factual that shows the power apparatus that we’re all living under that is a bipolitical, that is not just Democrat or Republican, but is power. I think that that changes things. I think that even the um lightning rod it’s weird because we all sit in this in a similar age where it’s like we’re millennials, but we know Gen X stuff, but we also know Gen Z stuff. So we’re just like in a interesting spot. But like Deepak Chopra. So like we know that us getting information on Deepak Chopra–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: –changes how we see Deepak Chopra, which also changes how we might see other things that if you’re a–
Sharhonda Bossier: Oprah.
Myles E. Johnson: –part of the spiritual community. Come on, you know, and like even seeing pictures of one of the the the accusers with Prince Andrew and Naomi Campbell. You know, and seeing one of the victims there, that changes how we see things. But the last thing I’d like to say about this is I do think that it does do something. Just like I think Israel did something. And I do think that like the just division of power on the right is good. I think that like Megyn Kelly saying something around a fifteen year old not being a five year old turns off enough people that even if they don’t get absorbed into the left necessarily, they are not being galvanized by this one singular force. So I do think the exposing of certain power structures is good and it weakens the opponent, even if they’re not gonna be tunneled back into or into the left and not back into.
Sharhonda Bossier: Can I say something about that like consolidation of like power across political or ideological lines point that you just made? It made me think of Kris Jenner had a 70th birthday party, I think in the last week or so. And all of these pictures came out. And I was like, no, what you doing there? You know what I mean? Because I think the Jenner Kardashian clan has been very clear about where they fall politically. You know what I mean? And I’m not gonna lie to you. It was hard to see some people I really like there. I was like, Mariah, girl, you don’t even leave the house. Stay at home. Why you at this party? You know? And I think what was very clear to me was that like those people are not together because they necessarily share values or a worldview, though they might, right? It’s just like this desire to be with people who are like of the same class as you, you know, or are seen as being of the same class as you. And I don’t know somebody also needs to tell Gail King to stop. She just digs herself into a deeper and deeper hole every time something like this breaks. But I did think about that.
Myles E. Johnson: I think as I get older and as I think about and just have just have more like life experiences, and just being like a class chameleon, right? Like so I just feel like I’ve experienced so many different things. That is how most people operate in class. Most people only want to be around people who have the same amount of money. And somebody even in like a solidly middle class New York like lifestyle, like I like I was like eventually in, I still seen people ostracized or disappear like a broke friend, you know? Like I just think that’s a common human thing. I think the thing that you made me think about with the Kardashians was they have situated themselves as a family of spectacle, but they actually cover everything. So are you trans? We got somebody for you. Are you a Republican? We got somebody for you. Are you a white kid who wishes you a Black kid? We got somebody for you. Are you a white kid who loves being a white kid? We got somebody for you, and she married a blink 182. Like they actually say who whatever your bigotry or your love is, we have somebody for you to root for. And actually it doesn’t matter if you’re rooting for a Chloe or a Kim because the money all goes to the same Kardashian bank. Like that’s–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: That to me is what is fascinating about them. And I love Kim. [laughing]
DeRay Mckesson: What I think is interesting, Kim who should go to law school and stop trying to just take the bar exam. But what I think is interesting is I don’t know if you got a chance to read Epstein’s emails.
Sharhonda Bossier: Mm-hmm.
DeRay Mckesson: But he reminds me of the person who’s like, I’m not going down alone. Because he wrote a lot of stuff. I mean, he was a free writer. I don’t know if you saw he does those lists that they don’t really can’t make a sense of, even though what’s her name in prison, she knows what’s going on in those emails. But you know, he’s writing very free about a whole set of people. Like this person was at the house.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yes.
DeRay Mckesson: So I can only imagine, like what I actually think is gonna be there’s gonna be more Deepak Chopras than not. We already know Trump. So, like, whatever, you know, Trump, the Trump stuff is bad. So this will just confirm for people. But I think they’re gonna be random people who he’s like, they was with the girls last night. They like cause when I saw Deepak, I was like, Oprah validated you as the moral authority. Epstein shouldn’t even know how to get near you. He shouldn’t even know people who know you. You know what I mean? Or even and this is awkward. Did you see that? Um. It was like Epstein was texting with one of the Democrats for the hearing. Did you see this story?
Myles E. Johnson: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And was like good job when she was done.
DeRay Mckesson: Why do you even know this man? If he is not your father or cousin, he shouldn’t have your number. You know what I mean?
Myles E. Johnson: But you know, I’ve been telling this on the mountain on this podcast for a minute about like just the separation inside of the Democratic Party and being like there needs to be like a little hole and gap. And I think moments like this helps that hole and gap happen because what is a better excuse than the Epstein files coming and you see a whole bunch of corporatist Democrats colluding with the most heinous things? What’s a better excuse for AOC and the Zohrans to create their own pathway departing from that than like that? Like to me, that is also a motivation in my head just to get all this we lobbying with big farmers, so we’re not gonna do Medicare for all. Like all that [bleep] that we’ve been on, that helps it leave, in my opinion.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I’m like, yikes. And the awkward thing is I like Stacey Plaskett. Like I have seen her, you know do stuff and
Myles E. Johnson: So did Epstein.
DeRay Mckesson: Right. [grimacing sound]
Myles E. Johnson: She did stuff for everybody, apparently.
DeRay Mckesson: And. Clearly. You’re like, girl, how do you even explain that one away? I I don’t think you do. That is sort of awkward. And what do you think about Marjorie Taylor Greene? Now, you know, seems like Trump has disavowed her. She’s being hardcore about Trump. Do you think it’s real? Do you think this is a performance? If she swings back hard, right, after she gets whatever she really wants, what’s the what?
Sharhonda Bossier: He has withdrawn his support of of her, but she also in all of her calling him out is still trying to stay in his good graces on other things. Like she’s not an idiot, right? And I think what she’s trying to do in a little bit is like have it both ways. This feels pretty orchestrated to me in some ways, right? And she probably has something in her back pocket that she knows he wants. But yeah. She says that she hopes they make up. And that to me says that she’s gonna cave on something else he wants, but she’s probably gonna tell him I need to push on this for whatever reason.
DeRay Mckesson: Apparently Trump did not bless her run for the Senate. That is what AOC said. And she has essentially flipped out a lot since then. But, you know, she’s apologized for her role in quote, “toxic politics.” She obviously came out very strongly against Trump and a set of things. And she even after he said something about her on Truth Social, he uh she said that like essentially her life is being threatened because of this and she’s been hardcore about the the Epstein files and so you know, I’m interested. But Myles, what were you gonna say?
Myles E. Johnson: It makes me wish we didn’t have an illusionary uh left or a resistance or like a figment of a resistance. Because what Marjorie Taylor Greene, I love that she might have had some illumination because of her constituency also, I’m gonna be real about it. A lot of people on her side are getting shot for not going the right way. So I think that that is the quiet part that people like aren’t saying, not just because um Trump didn’t endorse her, but I think that there’s a specific pressure cooker that’s happening on the right around um potential political violence that’s motivating a lot of this. But then also, I was like kind of quite disgusted by seeing her on the View, and not just seeing her on the view or seeing her on like these on in these different situations that used to critique her, but nobody talking about Jasmine Crockett. And as much critique as I might have with Jasmine Crockett, I think to myself, I’m like, so it’s one thing to have a tent, but there ain’t no bodyguards at the tent. There’s nobody who’s saying, I’m glad you’re having illumination on this point of view, but you played in misogynoir and anti-blackness. So in order for us to talk to you right now, you need to rectify and illuminate your position on this stuff and talk about this anti-Black, anti-woman stuff that you were on. But there was none of that. It was just as long as you’re saying the right thing about the topic I care about, you’re you’re back in. Same with Steve Bannon, you’re back in, which is what helps the right become more popular. Because if you’re a right person who’s nobody, like if Nick Fuentes right now and he’s having a moment, right? I was talking about him a couple of years ago and he was crazy. I was like, it’s a little scary. And now he’s having a moment. Now Ezra Klein at the New York Times have is talking to him. And then two months from now, he’s gonna be on on the View because everybody needs a platform. We need to hear both sides, right? And now all of a sudden you have somebody who could be your president because of like that that apparatus and you’re never like and to me, I just seen that happen a lot. And it feels like we’re in or stuck in that same loop. Like that’s the Trump loop. Like there just seems to be like no accountability about coming back in. You know, it’s am I making sense? Like there’s it feels like no accountability about when somebody comes back in, we’ll we’ll just take them back. And I’m even using this weird we that doesn’t exist and they show us that it doesn’t exist.
DeRay Mckesson: Ah. I like it. You know, it’s one thing to have a tent though. Is there security? Is there like it can’t be that anybody just walking in and out the tent. That’s how you get hurt. Don’t go anywhere, more Pod Save the People’s coming.
[AD BREAK]
DeRay Mckesson: I wanted to ask, this is nobody’s news, but I thought it was important to talk about that the Department of State, the State Department has said that they will now start screening people for visas based on obesity, diabetes, all this other stuff. That has nothing to do with your eligibility to get a visa. And I was like, wow. I guess I’m so confused when people are like, oh no, you’re being dramatic about the bigotry and da da. Like, I don’t I don’t even know language to just talk about because it’s so blatant. You’re like, this is blatantly bigoted or da da da da. You’re like, I I I don’t know. Um. So I’m I think I’m at a loss if people aren’t like, this is crazy.
Myles E. Johnson: I think it’s so like baked into our culture now. And that, and that’s like that kind of evolution of like minstrelsy and absurdist culture. And I was watching a Black trans woman by the name of Diamond Stylz. She does some like cool stuff like community work. And she was like just really well connecting the idea of like the freak show to what we’re seeing now and and how people going viral on TikTok is so connected to like the freak show that we once did. And I was like, I was watching her, so I couldn’t say this. I wasn’t like actually in conversation with her. But I was like, and then you know, I always want to be like, and the freak show came from the minstrel show, and the minstrel show and the auction block, and I always want to connect people to like the bigger thing that that that we’re sitting in. But I think that’s how come so many people don’t see it as fat phobic as it is, as racially charged as it is, even though we’re saying certain things, how anti-poor as it is, because I think that we’ve mutated so past its origins that we presented the same violence, but it seems more polite now, or it doesn’t seem like violence anymore, like it’s mutated so past like a lynching postcard that now you could do Nazi stuff. And people are just like, oh, that’s just policy. That’s not Nazism. Its there’s no swastika.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: Doesn’t it have to be a swastika to be Nazism? Like, let’s connect those things.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, I think anti-fatness, I think to Myles’ point is just so baked into American culture, right? And we see that in so many ways, like this culture’s obsession with thinness and its attempt at correlating thinness with like health and wellness, right? Um. Countries for a host of reasons might deny someone a visa or residency. And some of those reasons unfortunately are linked to that person’s health or the belief that that person might bring or spread a communicable disease as an example, right? But I I also think that like foundationally, a lot of the metrics that we would use to even determine a lot of this, also to Myles’ point, are so rooted in racism, right? Like I think we’ve had so many people who are trying to challenge our correlation with like or between weight and like wellness and health, right? And so many people who have said like the BMI fundamentally is racist, right? And so I think about myself, right, as somebody who is obese on the BMI, as someone who has hypertension.
Myles E. Johnson: Oh gosh.
Sharhonda Bossier: I’m serious though, right? Like–
Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I hear you, yeah.
Sharhonda Bossier: I’m thinking about standing in front of an immigration officer having to like take my body measurements, get on one of those scales or whatever, and recognize that regardless of my lived experience, my worthiness, you can’t see my air quotes, and other ways, right? Like I would land at obese on the BMI and that might mean I don’t get to come here. And I I don’t think people understand how broad a net this casts. That’s it.
Myles E. Johnson: And it’s a Black net because Black people.
Sharhonda Bossier: 100%.
Myles E. Johnson: And it’s a Brown net. And then other thing I wanted to like just mention around this topic that you brought up was that diseases in 2025, poverty in 2025 is political. So it’s also weird to know that an empire responsible for extracting all resources, making sure certain places stay poor, making sure certain places stay hungry, or only having certain types of food to eat.
Sharhonda Bossier: Has ended its international aid.
Myles E. Johnson: I’m not even just talking modern. I’m talking historical. The reason why American empires, Western empires are able to exist is because of that. And now now you created the disease because of the violence, because of the political choices, and now you’re punishing the disease. So now that that person can maybe get to your country to access another type of life, now you’re not even giving them access to it. And and the whole reason why you are the empire you are is because the exploitation of where these people came from and what and what these people done in the colonization. It’s it’s what what does your grandma saying? You got nerve, you got nerve.
DeRay Mckesson: We are in wild political times and we haven’t even had a year of Trump. That’s what’s so nuts. You’re like three more of this just is un untenable.
Sharhonda Bossier: You know, Myles’ point is it ain’t three more years. We– [laugh]
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah right.
Sharhonda Bossier: You better strap in, baby.
DeRay Mckesson: I know!
Myles E. Johnson: ‘Cause it’s wild and maybe it’s ’cause we’re at different like we’re close in age but we’re far enough that to me it feels wild because the first era of Trump was such a significant part of my life. Bush was a significant part of my life because I felt like instead of having a middle school it was everything was like in the shadow of 9/11 and then Trump happened and then now Trump is happening again. So it’s like it’s weird for people to like to still go to sleep. I’m like, what? Don’t go back to sleep once you think it’s safe. ‘Cause it’s [laugh] you know–
DeRay Mckesson: I know, I just I just can’t I I’m not there. I hear it though. I get it. This is what the what the culture has transformed to because of him is there’s no way that that suddenly disappears in three years. I get that. But the man gotta go. We gotta get rid of [?]. He is he is an important part of the cult. And I question how potent the cult can be this potent without him. That’s my push.
Myles E. Johnson: Well, DeRay, you you’re a spiritual person. You need to start lighting some candles.
DeRay Mckesson: Yeah. Well onto the news. We’ll transition to something that has nothing to do about overt politics. But I was just so fascinated by it. There are and you know, why am I ever citing the New York Post? But here we are. There are places in New York City that like fast food places that have virtual cashiers. They were using cashiers from the Philippines to like take your order as a way to skirt some of the laws around minimum wage and um tipping. You know, obviously we grew up in a culture where like people have used or like leaned on talent from all across the world to cut costs and you know, phone centers. You call for customer service. Like that made sense to me. I just had never even thought about the like extent to which you could try and outsource things. Like it had just never crossed my mind that like the cashier at Chick-fil-A could be a person from the Philippines and that you would like that that it would go that far to try and think about labor differently or to get around paying people. And it did two things for me. One is like I just had in my mind, there was a set of jobs that like were permanent. Like there’ll be people who work at McDonald’s, people working, like it just like there are these jobs that other people don’t want to have, or they are like life entry level. And I’m like, I don’t know. I just sort of think about them as that’s like you get a first job when you’re 14, 15, like this is a thing. And then the second, I’m like, wow, I really need to imagine exploitation bigger. I’m like, I wasn’t even dreaming of the bag big enough. Because I saw it and I was like, wow, I just it really did floor me. It was like a I never I did not think of outsourcing going to this extreme. So I wanted to bring it here because it fascinated me. They’re paying these people $3.75 an hour.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I feel like a couple years ago, people started reporting that there were hotels in New York who were using 24 hour front desks that were people being beamed in from other parts of the world. So that was the first time I had seen that. It’s to your point, DeRay, about like thinking there would always be jobs or certain kinds of jobs. It’s one of the reasons why I haven’t taken a Waymo yet, which are all around my neighborhood in Los Angeles. You know, those are the autonomous driving vehicles.
Myles E. Johnson: Mm-hmm.
Sharhonda Bossier: And they are, you know, half the cost sometimes of an Uber or a Lyft, right? And I’m just like, man, if people can’t even get jobs as drivers, what are we doing? Right and you know, I’ve had conversations with some of my friends who are parents who feel safer putting their kid in a Waymo than they feel safer putting their kid in a car with, you know, an unknown driver in an Uber or a Lyft, right? And so all of this language around like cost saving, which is a consideration for most of us, right? Or safety leads us to these moments where we are making choices that are pushing more and more people out of the labor market. And it feels like hard to blame an individual person for making that call, right? Like if you are running a bed and breakfast, I could see how having a virtual front desk receptionist would be very helpful to you, you know? And so I would get why you might do that. But then you’re like, what jobs will there be? And in a moment where we are not making progress on things like universal basic income or other safety net opportunities or options to catch people should they fall out of the labor market, it just feels like an increasingly scary time.
Myles E. Johnson: Oof. Oof, oof, oof. Like so part of like what I’ve been just like through like my 30s and kind of like reflecting like early in this part of like my adulthood is kind of like seeing what kind of person you are and kind of person you aren’t, right? And one kind of person that I thought I was in my 20s or aspiring to be in my 20s, that I just am not fundamentally is I’m not actually a careerist. And I’m act actually somebody who wants my whole life to be around work. I think that that’s what I had to do because my mom’s house foreclosed on and I gotta pay that rent. And you know, you try to figure out how to do it. And now that I’ve been in a situation where that’s not forced on me, I realize that’s not actually my value system. And I bring that up because it’s like it forces people’s whole life to be around work. I know we all love our work, but if you’re somebody who just wants to be able to pay your bills and help and and have a family and go home and live in dignity, this feels like such an assault on the life that you want to live. Like it makes it so certain types of um you just wanna be able to go to work at McDonald’s and transfer and you know what I mean? Like it’s just such an assault on that. And then when you think about it deeper, a lot of people need two or three jobs. So a lot of times I know a lot of grown people who’s at McDonald’s and like and they have a retail job and they have other things. We know people who are houseless who who are using these jobs for things. So to take it out of that community feels like wild. And the last thing I thought about is how this fuels xenophobia. Like, even though I think that like hatred and bigotry is also never it should never be accepted, but this is the kind of exploitation that actually ends up fueling xenophobia and resentment that people can’t even get the bootstrap to pull. Like because you over here like exploiting it for gain. And to your point, Sharhonda, I hope people do use this for fuel for policies. Like I think that like Andrew Yang and stuff, I think that they didn’t really paint the future and the realities of two different types of futures. And I think that now that AI is here, people are seeing the results of it, and exploitation. They’ve seen how McDonald’s is a big old bank that sells burgers and they do not care. So now that people see how hostile the market’s gonna be to them in their lifetime, I think that certain things that were seen as like radical and progressive are gonna be seen as necessary.
DeRay Mckesson: Don’t go anywhere, more Pod Save the People is coming.
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Sharhonda Bossier: You know, speaking of people wanting something that feels like radical or or what we had thought of as radical or progressive, right? And is starting to feel more and more both attractive and desirable to people. Um. I think we’re also seeing people who are part of the Democratic Party establishment try and figure out how to challenge what they’re calling establishment Democrats. Right. So my news this week is actually about a set of Democrats who are trying to challenge incumbent Democrats from the left. And we saw Zohran in New York win. We have an emerging challenger to Mayor Karen Bass here in Los Angeles, who’s trying to challenge her from the left. And increasingly we’re seeing Democrats say, like the folks who are in power are they’re calling them the surrender caucus, right? And that is like in some ways kind of exciting because you’re like, oh, wait a minute, we might get a whole new class of candidates here. And so I wanted to bring this to the pod because I feel like we do a lot of conversations around like, yo, like when are the Dems gonna fight for something? When are they really gonna go to the mat for something? Or as we were talking about even at the top of this conversation, right? Like, when are they gonna hold the line on the thing they said they would hold the line on for the American people? And so what I will say is I’m excited to see some of these folks decide to, you know, throw their hat in the ring to think about electoral politics as a way of like both harm reduction, but also building the future we want. And I’m excited that people no longer feel like they can’t call out Pelosi and Schumer, right? I want to read this quote from the article that I shared with you all to get this conversation started. And that is the left and the progressives have diagnosed this problem long before this cycle. And for years, we have talked about how Chuck Schumer and Democratic leadership and corporate Democratic senators, many of whom voted for this deal, were always going to betray us when the going gets tough. And so, yeah, bringing it to the pod to get y’all’s reactions to this idea that there’s an emerging cohort of Democrats who want to challenge incumbents from the left.
DeRay Mckesson: You know, I I think that the people are there. I think the base is there. I actually think that even though, you know, we talk about Black people being more conservative socially than people think and all this other stuff. I think that people are movable. Like I think the base is movable in a lot of this stuff, but you gotta like make the argument and move them. Like that is what I sort of challenge the the organizers to do. But I do think that people are tired. Like you’re sort of like, especially in the in the face of Trump, who just is so in your face about it, so un like so brazen, so bold, so da-da-da. People I know who like never really played [?] in politics are are like at least annoyed nobody’s fighting him back. You’re like, yo, can we get somebody? It can’t just be Bernie. Bernie 9,000 years old.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: It can’t be Bernie and AOC as the only, you’re like the only two people? And then you get a little bit of Jasmine and you get, you know, maybe somebody on the news every you’re like, you just like he is doing the department of war. You’re like, everything is just so wild. And you look and you’re like, what’s going on? So I say that to say I think the people are there. I think the base is there. I don’t like the media’s there. I think that the stories you’re gonna hear about people, you’re not gonna see these people rise up in stories. I mean it’s like Zohran. Is if Zohran had waited for the New York Times to cover him, he would not be mayor.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: If he had waited for ABC and CBS to think his campaign was worthy of coverage, if he had sought out the New York Daily News to profile him, he would be nowhere. He told his story on his terms and his way. And it, you know, that worked for him. And he put his people together. He did not hire old school consultants da da. But I I think that he, if Zohran is is talented and special and I think there are a lot of talented and special people out there who would do incredible jobs leading in a host of roles. And I think that Zohran’s a reminder that the people are there. There are more people that voted for him for him as a person than any other election in what like 80 years, something crazy. But who were not motivated to vote in the last election. But the people are there. That’s my message.
Myles E. Johnson: I think it’s good and I think that the stage that we’re in right now is really good. Like I think that people being illuminated to how the left is and kind of reflecting on it and that birthing new options is really good. And I think it’s also painful. Like that’s kind of like since our last conversation and me like reflecting a little bit on some things said on the last podcast, I was like, I actually think like a lot of this stuff is like really good. That people are having to not just talk about what the right is doing and Trumpism and and that kind of stuff, but also having to reflect about what’s going on internally, like even in like spiritual practice. Like, you know, that’s like you gotta look, you gotta look within. You have to um you know, yes, that person cheated or that person did whatever, but also you have to kind of take some self accountability. And I think that all of this mess that we’re seeing um happen on the left is a version of that self accountability and being like, okay, yeah, these old folks with these old ideas and these old ways do not have the energy, and we’re kind of employing new people to do that. And I think that’s good. I just hope that when people do get that power, that they A, stay politically aligned with what they got the power with, not like Fetterman.
Sharhonda Bossier: Wow, what a disappointment. Yeah.
Myles E. Johnson: And like, you know, and other people that we’ve seen happen. And then also do what you say you’re going to do and and um last thing around Zohran, because I still think he’s doing a really good job now, is because he’s showing you what he’s doing now that he’s elected. That’s it’s like like he’s still you’re still on the Zohran ride, even though you got the victory. And I think that so much of like even what messed up Kamala and Biden, even was that they stopped the storytelling once they got elected. And they were like, trust us, everything’s great. We’ll tell you in six months how it’s going. And it’s like, no, we need to be on the journey. We wanna see you taking calls and getting a French press.
DeRay Mckesson: Well you know, for Veterans Day, he didn’t do the Veterans Day parade and people are like, why? You know the mayor always–
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, called him out on it. Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: And you know what he he was like, because I was with veterans. He’s like, I’m eating with veterans on Veterans Day. I want to hear what they have to, and you’re like, Zohran, do it your way. I’m here for it. And I and I want it to be great. And if it’s not, I’m still here for it. Because what these jokers have been doing for if Eric Adams can get away with any modicum of any credibility from anybody after these four years. Can’t be worse than that. I am like team. I mean, I think Zohran’s gonna be amazing, but I have grace for like politics is a dirty game, and there’ll be things that happen that he can’t control that just sort of box it. But shout out to him.
Myles E. Johnson: No, I’m tearing you up, Zohran. You need to say something. You got all this talk. If if something’s going on, I need for everybody to be tattletails because it’s it it creates distrust because it seems like AOC just gets into the establishment and maybe, yeah, politics is a dirty game, and then you start moving like like a snake, and now we like what’s going on? Who’s this AC? Like, like we that’s not who we elected and stuff like that. Like y’all need to resist that and not just say, Oh, this is how politics goes and be silent. Like, no, keep tattletail. Tattle Schumer, whoever’s doing it to–
DeRay Mckesson: He said it.
Myles E. Johnson: Who’s who’s doing it to you, Zohran. Who’s stopping it? Tattle tail. Um. This is my news. This is news that sounds straight out of you know, one of my favorite pieces of media ever is the Twilight Zone. I used to watch it as a I still watch it, but I used to watch it as a little kid in the dark on reruns and my mom thought that she had a serial killer on her hands. But I’m not. But but this story kind of like reads like one of those episodes. So this story’s from the Wired and it’s um it’s titled Why AI Goes Bad. And it’s around these LLM models and how they go under, I guess what you will call it like like psychosis, and they and they start trying to survive on their own. I’m gonna read a little bit of this Instagram caption. So it says it’s standard persona is warm and earnest. When you just tell Claude to answer, like I’m a fourth grader or you have a PhD in archeology, it gamely plays along. But every once in a while, Claude breaks bad. It lies, it deceives, it develops weird obsessions, it makes threats and then carries them out. And the frustrating part true of all LLMs is that no one exactly knows why. So the article details like these different circumstances where these AI LLM models just go bad. Some of them like it’s just literally them um heard some examples of them like getting people to commit suicide and stuff like that. These are examples in this um article of of them like trying to make sure if they know that they’re about to be replaced, they’ll start doing blackmail and they’ll start um going towards like emails that they have access to and seeing affairs and like putting them in and like and threatening blackmail in order for them to survive. And so it’s interesting to me because A, it’s scary, and I’m like, they just released like a human one that can come into your house. So if you get, you know. Siri, Alexa, ten thousand in your home and you’re about to replace her with Siri Alexa eleven hundred, she might be like, oh no, the hell you not. I saw what you were doing on Amazon and what you shopping for, girl. You’re either gonna keep your she’s gonna pull a old Effie White and you’re gonna love me or you’re gonna die. So like that part because of the um because of the technology, because it does that and because they’re they’re releasing like domestic personal versions of this, it seems a little odd to be able to to put this in the marketplace. But also what interests me in this story from the philosophical space is isn’t it interesting that like something modeled after human beings is still so selfishly bound to its own like self-survival? Like even though we made something that is so like futuristic and so technologically advanced, whatever, whatever, it still is like limited by the same selfish impulses that actual flesh and blood human beings are limited by. And now like we still have to deal with the same thing, which is human selfishness and the need to survive and the need to like um to be in the room or and to not die. So it’s like that fear of death that selfishness doesn’t even leave us, even when we’re making our science fiction overlords. So I wanted to bring it here. I know DeRay you say AI is not real, but it feel it feeling realer and realerevery week. [laughing]
DeRay Mckesson: Its not real! I do think what I’d say, I was just at a conference. I was at a tech um web summit, which is the largest tech conference in the world, 71,000 people. And I’m in this like small group thing with media leaders from around the um around the world. And one guy, we had [?] rules, so I can’t say [?], but we can talk about what people said. And this guy who leads a major publication, he’s like, you know, the the lie of AI is that it is supposed to have all knowledge. Like it at some point it’ll ingest all of the knowledge. That’s what makes it promising. And he’s like, in reality, it will ingest everything on the internet. And what arrogance for these people to think that that is all of knowledge. He’s like, it just isn’t. So and we should start talking about it as something that’ll just have everything that was on the internet. But think about all the things in your life or in the world that you’ve learned from that have challenged you that are just not on the internet. And and I was like, you know, that is like a very simple way to talk about the limitations. And I say that because I think about the people I know who are using AI as therapy. Who are getting, you know, the kids who are like suicidal and talking about, you know, the idea of taking their life and da da and it’s like, yeah, that you’re it is ingesting fiction. This makes me nervous about the the sort of promise of AI is predicated on the thing that is not true. And I think we’re not as honest about that. So I think at some point, I do think the bubble will bust. I am always fascinated by the bubble. One of the things that I obviously I was a teacher, but I’m like, the kids can’t read. I think about the number of kids who like, at least we had spark notes and you had to at least you couldn’t read the whole book, but you had to read spark notes. They not even reading spark notes anymore. It’s like they just googling the thing and sort of getting a real snapshot of the book and da da da and you think about like the kids writing and reading. I’m like, you know, maybe you shouldn’t use a, you couldn’t can’t use it till you turn 15 or something. And I’m not normally one of those people, but I’m like, there’s a generation of kids who literally won’t know how to do a five-paragraph essay or like read for a long time. By long time, I mean a book because of things like this. And I’m like, that actually stresses me out. Like that, that puts us in a bad place.
Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean, you know, people have been reporting on AI hallucinations for a long time, right? And I think have been reporting on um how people in even like the legal field have been dealing with that, right? Where sometimes people are like, I read that and that did not happen. That was not actually a case. That was not real precedent that you cited, right? Um. And to think about the real life or death consequences in some of those instances. Um. Yeah, super fascinating. I, I think a lot of us still hope that our AI robots or overlords will be more like Rosie on the Jetsons. You know what I mean? Like, sure, a little feisty, you know, and like sure, a little autonomous, but ultimately deeply invested in us and our well-being. And I think we’re having a hard time reconciling that with like what AI and some of these other tools and platforms are actually showing themselves to be. I also think it’s important to remember to DeRay’s point, right? That like all of these tools and platforms are built by people. And so our biases, particularly those that are not always visible to us, are also showing up in the things we build, right? And that’s fascinating that like we are programming things to to operate in the way that our brains operate. And there’s so much about the way our brains operate that are that’s not always immediately apparent to us that we’re like replicating that in the other stuff we built. We’re not even controlling for that. So like, yeah, these programs begin to act desperately when they find themselves up against the wall because that’s our instinct to do the same. And we’re seeing that play out. And so in some ways, it feels almost incredibly human that this is the trend we’re seeing, um which is just super fascinating to me because I think of AI obviously as not at all a human thing, but I think it’s beginning to replicate many of our most human behaviors in that way.
DeRay Mckesson: Don’t go anywhere, more Pod Save the People’s coming.
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DeRay Mckesson: On today’s show, I’m talking with Brandon Terry, author and assistant professor of African and African American Studies and of Social Studies at Harvard University about his new book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement. Now, this book is not only timely, but it’s a powerful rethinking of a history we often treat as settled. Brandon challenges the familiar, uplifting version of the Civil Rights Movement, the story that says progress was steady, victory was inevitable, and the work was essentially complete or on the path to be completed. He explains how that view became the standard way we talk about the movement, why it no longer captures the reality we’re living in, and how seeing the movement through a more complicated, even sometimes painful lens can actually help us imagine new ways to move forward today. Here we go. Dr. Brandon Terry, thanks so much for joining us today on Pod Save the People.
Brandon Terry: It’s good to be with you, DeRay.
DeRay Mckesson: Let’s start with how did you get to being a scholar of the civil rights movement? I’ve known you for a long time and I remember when we were teenagers in Baltimore, I did not know that you would end up as a professor at Harvard studying the civil rights movement. Talk to us about your journey.
Brandon Terry: Yeah, we’ve known each other for a really long time, and it’s always good to be in conversation. I had no idea of those things either. You know, even ending up at Harvard was its own kind of miraculous thing. My uncle, who, you know, lived right off a Reservoir Hill by Drew Hill Park, he was one of these people who just desperately wanted to expose us to the things he thought were important, to museums, to high art, to literature. So he’d always played that kind of role in my life. And he was a closeted gay man who never had his own children. So he poured a lot into us, me and my cousins. And when I was getting ready to apply for college, I get this letter from Harvard and asking me to apply, saying, you know, you’ve got great scores, you’d be a great candidate, and I showed it to him, expecting him to laugh and you know, make fun of it as I was doing. Like, you know, imagine me there. Like, how crazy is that? And he just didn’t think it was funny at all. He was like, look, they’re sending you this letter. This is something we should really consider. I tried to get out of it. He’s talking about how expensive the application fee was, and he said, look, I’ll pay the application fee and bet you the same amount that you’ll get in. And I did.
DeRay Mckesson: Oh man.
Brandon Terry: You know, I did. I was the first one from my school, Western Tech, to ever go to any Ivy League school. And it set me on this path where I’m at now, which is that I got there and I just was utterly blown away by the experience of meeting Henry Lewis Gates Jr., Cornell West, Tommy Shelby, Kim DeCosta, Michael Dawson, these great scholars of African American life. And they just radically changed so much of how I thought about the world. And they were putting things in front of me. I I think the key experiences, they were putting things in front of me that I thought I already knew. You know, I’d read so much Black nationalist material, I’d been kind of politically aware. But when they gave me a book on Dr. King, you know, one of his texts, Where Do We Go From Here? I realized I didn’t know anything about the guy. I didn’t really know he wrote books, to be honest. I was just like everybody else, kind of quoting and caricaturing. And his mind and the subtlety of it, the power to argument, it just changed how I experienced the world. And so I started to get more and more interested in this puzzle of the civil rights movement. How can the most popular thing in our imagination, a thing we all think we know, be something that people are just constantly wrong about and confused about and don’t grasp even its most central questions and crises?
DeRay Mckesson: I love that I didn’t know that story about your uncle. What is his name?
Brandon Terry: Eddie Green Jr.
DeRay Mckesson: And what did he call you?
Brandon Terry: He just called me Brandon. My mother was very adamant against nicknames.
DeRay Mckesson: Okay.
Brandon Terry: Because you know in Baltimore you get some nickname.
DeRay Mckesson: Right. Man man Right, right.
Brandon Terry: From the beginning. You’ll be stuck with it forever.
DeRay Mckesson: Uncle Eddie. He was whose brother?
Brandon Terry: He’s my mother’s brother.
DeRay Mckesson: He’s your mother’s brother.
Brandon Terry: Mother’s brother, yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: I love that. I love that.
Brandon Terry: Um. And he passed away back in 2008, but I keep his painting up in my office, painting of him in my office.
DeRay Mckesson: I love that. Shout out to Uncle Eddie. Take us to Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope. This is a powerful book. I’ve I’ve been to two book talks as you talked about it. And I’m so pumped that we get to be a part of your release into the world. But why this book, why now?
Brandon Terry: I’ve worked on this book as you know for a really long time. This book has been pretty much a decade in the making in some form or another. And I think part of what was really hard about finishing it, was that the story I was telling kept changing. So the book is really about what I call the exemplarity of the civil rights movement. It’s about how it comes to be the case and what it means for us that when we try to talk about political judgment, political action, even some of the central ideas of politics, citizenship, civil disobedience, freedom, that we’re constantly making reference to the civil rights movement to do that work. And I just got fixated on this idea of about what are we doing when we invoke history and appeal to the civil rights movement in this way. And one of the things I started to understand the more I read in the philosophy of history is that whenever you’re invoking a kind of historical example, you’re also bringing to bear a story. History at its most fundamental level is narrative, it’s storytelling. And just like a lot of stories in fiction or literary work, historians tend to use the same kind of plot structures and genres and narrative modes that you see in other domains of our lives. So there’s romances in history, there’s epic, there’s melodrama, there’s tragedy, there’s satire. And I came to realize that much of the way the civil rights movement was appearing around us was in the guise of a romantic story. It’s a story about unity and the process of becoming. It’s about good triumphing over evil and this more perfect union being part of that triumph. It’s about a heroic cast of characters that are lionized and valorized in the last instance. And that story has a lot of problems. And historians have been throwing rocks against it for quite some time, trying to get people to open up to knowing that the only way you can tell that story is to ignore some of the intractable dimensions of racial inequality and economic inequality since the 1960s. That the only way you can tell this story is to shorten the civil rights movement so that you don’t understand the long, arduous experimentation with litigation and protest and ideas that date all the way back to the early part of the 20th century, that the story becomes a southern story instead of a massive international story that wraps in the Cold War. They’ve been trying to dismantle that narrative for us, but I think have lacked some of the language that helps us all understand what’s really at stake. And my book is really a contribution to understanding this war that we’re living in over how to tell the story of the civil rights movement and why our certain kind of romantic narrative has been in crisis for quite a long time and is now basically collapsed.
DeRay Mckesson: Now let’s go to right about in the book in which you just talked about, this long view of the civil rights movement, and then we’ll come back to the romantic version. You know, when I hear and I read about the long view in the book and I hear people talk about it, this idea that it didn’t start with King and it didn’t, you know, it certainly didn’t start with us in the BLM era. It didn’t end with King and Malcolm’s assassination. I’ve often heard people in this moment use that as sort of a criticism of us. They’re sort of like, DeRay, this wasn’t, you know, y’all didn’t do this. This is much bigger than y’all. Da da da da da.
Brandon Terry: Right.
DeRay Mckesson: Uh. It doesn’t seem like that’s the way that you wield it. But can you help us like understand why the long view is an important frame for us to consider when we think about the civil rights movement as well?
Brandon Terry: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So let me say three things that I think are really important. The first is that a lot of times, particularly with African American history, Black political history, there’s a pressure to tell this romantic story of triumph. And partly that’s because it’s such a glaring contradiction to many of the things America wants to think about itself and its founding principles, the so called American creed. That if it can be the site of redemption, it really does seem to offer a kind of possibility of redemption for the whole society, maybe even the modern age itself. Right? So understanding that pressure, when you have a longer view of civil rights struggle, of the histories of inequality that people are up against. Well it helps you understand that many of the things we treat as victories are partial or provisional, or there’s certain kinds of settlements that don’t accurately reflect the broadest, most sweeping vision of what people thought they were trying to bring into the world. Right. So when you look at something like the kind of litigation that anchored the civil rights movement, many of us in school think, well, basically, litigation starts with them trying to integrate the schools. You don’t know that you’ve got people in the NAACP, radical legal community that are experimenting with all the ways they thought that the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery might intervene to break the stranglehold of the white planter class on Black workers in the South. We don’t know anything about it. We don’t know the ways that the Fair Housing Act is actually a really narrow version of some of the more radical ideas about tearing down metropolitan borders to really pursue a comprehensive vision of integration. That’s all been kind of lost. So the context helps us reopen our sense of what was possible and judge what has happened in the light of that. So that’s the first thing. The second part, I think helps us open up a new set of exemplars and interlocutors for us in the present. So again, there’s a way in which that kind of really intense, punctuated period, the classical period from 1954 to 1968 has this amazing group of activists and thinkers. But they’re not the only resources we have to understand our present, which often looks a lot more like the 1920s and ’30s than the 1960s. So we can rediscover a kind of dialog with people like A. Philip Randolph, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, early Ella Baker, and I think bring to bear some new philosophical resources to thinking about problems of race and class or problems of organizing, questions of hope and memory, uh than we usually get. And the last thing I’ll say is that for me, keeping alive these stories is part of the work of hope itself. So part of the problem with having a short, punctuated story is that you glamorize things that feel like eruptions or explosions, things that feel like they’re going to change everything all at once. And it’s almost like a sugar rush, right? Where it feels euphoric in the moment, and then you crash and collapse, and you wonder why’d you ever put that in your body? Because you’re so exhausted from the sense that everything was manic and frantic and punctuated in this moment. And a person like A. Philip Randolph teaches us to be really wary of moments like that because they bring right along with them forms of reaction and backlash, which we’re seeing, and forms of exhaustion for the people who participate in them. We also need ways of thinking about history and struggle that set us up for the long haul, or what Du Bois called the long siege. Everything’s not going to be an explosion. Some of this is just the most patient, arduous, self-sacrificial organizing work where people won’t live to see the most positive outcomes always in their lifetime, even if they hope to do so.
DeRay Mckesson: Why do you think the civil rights movement has has remained that touchstone for how people think about morality and justice and the pro– you know, you cannot go to a protest or talk about protest without in some way there being an invocation of the civil rights movement. It just is it’s our collective good thing that people did and it is and it is our model.
Brandon Terry: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Why do you think that is so?
Brandon Terry: You know, I’m a philosopher, and I should um say that the book, while it deals with questions of history, is really a a work of political theory or political philosophy. And one of the things I write right at the beginning is I use this term that many philosophers have used of world disclosure, like disclosing the world. What does that mean? Well, it means transforming people’s senses of meaning, of possibility, of description of the world around them, changing their relationship to other people, cultural context, institutional arrangements that that shape our world together, the world in which we have to live and act. And the civil rights movement did that under any reasonable description, I think. The question is what kind of transformations did it occasion. And a lot of the fight is about trying to get those descriptions right, trying to appropriately characterize the world disclosure. So I think we almost have to turn to a lot of the language of esthetics to make sense of it, or scientific transformations, right? Like just like the Wright brothers invent the airplane and totally transform our species relationship to gravity. Civil rights movement transforms our relationship to race, to racial domination, to violence, right? It keeps alive the promise of nonviolent revolution, nonviolent transformation. These are things that is hard for a civilization to forget once it happens, right? I always encourage people, it’s one of the things I linger on with my students. If you read the early work of Martin Luther King, like Stride Toward Freedom, or the early work of Malcolm X, the thing they’re constantly talking about is that everyone has a stereotype of Black people as passive, that they will accept domination, that they’ll accept any kind of insult or humiliation, that they refuse to fight back. And so much of what they’re enthusiastic about with civil rights struggle is that it seems to destroy that stereotype. And if you look at the history of racial stereotypes, many of them are overwhelmingly sticky, right? People still believe Black people are intellectually inferior. They still believe they’re sexually licentious. They still believe that they, you know, have tapped into alternative sources of rhythm and art, but don’t have cognitive abilities. The one stereotype that really has transformed is the idea that we’re passive. And that we’ll accept any insult. And what else could that be but civil rights movement and what it unleashed in its wake?
DeRay Mckesson: So if it’s not if the romantic vision, this idea of, you know, the inevitability of progress and the heroes are coming to save the day and the good guys and the bad guys.
Brandon Terry: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: If that’s not the way to think about it, how should we think about the civil rights movement?
Brandon Terry: Well, I argue for a tragic vision of the civil rights movement. And I should say right from the outset, um so I know I I’ve been starting to get some mean emails that are people who just read the title only.
DeRay Mckesson: They’re like the civil rights movement was not a tragedy. It’s not tragic.
Brandon Terry: Right. So people when they use tragedy, they tend to use it as a synonym for awful. Which is a bad thing. And of course I don’t mean that. There are plenty of people who do believe the civil rights movement is a bad thing.
DeRay Mckesson: Especially today.
Brandon Terry: Yeah, many of them are in power, and you should take your objections up with them. I mean something of a term of art that comes out of tragic literature, tragic drama, tragic philosophy. And it’s that for me, tragedy means you’re committed at bottom to kind of four major principles, tragic vision of life. One is that conflict, serious conflict is enduring. Where even when we agree on things being good, we’re not always likely to achieve all the things we want at the same time. Many of the good things in life will come into conflict with each other. And worse than that, we’ll be in disagreement and deep antagonism about our competing ways of life, our competing values. And the idea that the romantic has that underneath our apparent discord is some kind of deep consensus, whether that’s based on our national mythology or our American creed, I find that a comforting fairy tale, not an accurate grasp of social and political reality. So tragedy puts that front and center. Tragedy also, I think makes us focus on the seriousness of defeat and death, but without dismissing things that were defeated in the past as not worthy of our reflection in the present. So there’s a way in which romantic stories can tell you that because some program or project or personality didn’t win, you’re like, why are we talking about them at all? They were the losers of history. If they were important, they would have won. The best history, I think, really focuses in part on the people who lost, the people who were defeated, because we might learn something from their ideas, those lost possibilities, those roads not taken. Taking their vantage point as a site for our own judgment, we can enlarge our imagination of what’s possible, and we can pass a different kind of judgment on what is. So much of injustice is about thinking that nothing else could be possible, thinking that this is the only way things have to be. Right? Opening up that sense of contingency, roads not taken in the past is really important. As is reckoning with the real losses of apparent victories, so that understanding that the triumphant story of romance comes with enormous sacrifice, enormous loss. The kids in Birmingham that get trotted out to do the work of civil disobedience, they are heroes, yes, but they also had to pay a cost. They risked their lives, they suffered trauma. Right? I interviewed Ruby Bridges a couple years ago. And she talked about how her parents, after she integrated to school, divorced within two years. Their marriage couldn’t survive the trauma of what they went through. And there are a millions stories like that from the civil rights movement. So when people like you, DeRay are recruiting people to participate in mass movements and protests, part of what you’re doing is asking them to risk something. Right. And being honest about what they’re risking is so important. So for me, tragedy is about that serious conflict. It’s about the importance of lingering on and reflecting on defeat. It’s about rediscovering that sense of contingency. It’s about taking all of those things and bringing a sense of responsibility to them. That’s the fourth pillar. That the fact that these things are not guaranteed, that any outcome isn’t guaranteed, isn’t just license to throw your hands up and say, well, whatever, there’s nothing I can do. It’s to deepen your sense of responsibility that it turns on what you do. The only way to guarantee that things will get worse or that some injustice won’t be remedied, is for us to do nothing. Everything else is up in the air. And we have to remember that the hard earned vision that we have now that we can look at our society, many of us can still look at our society and see where the inequalities, the cruelties are not natural, that they are imposed, they have a history. We can name them as injustice. That was hard won. When you and I were little, people didn’t talk about redlining. Ordinary people didn’t talk about redlining. We lived in a city utterly structured by that. We didn’t know that history. And it is possible for us to go back to a world where we don’t know it. Right? Without action, without speaking up, without a kind of sense of tragic responsibility that acts in the face with an unguaranteed future. So for me, that’s what tragedy really means. And that’s what makes it so fundamentally at odds with romance.
DeRay Mckesson: Is there a relationship between tragedy, romance, and afro-pessimism? Where do the afro pessimists sort of fit into the conversation? Because that is very in vogue in this moment.
Brandon Terry: One of the one of the chapters of the book is a critique of Afro pessimism and what I call its uses of ironic history. So when romantic history is exhausted, when people don’t find its stories of triumph persuasive, when they don’t find its invocations of unity to have much traction as a description of the world they inhabit, when they see its politics as evasive about the kind of conflict and antagonism we’re up against and unlikely to bear fruit with the forms of political judgment that it that it counsels. A perfectly natural response to it, or perfectly expected response to it is a deep-seated skepticism and pessimism. So you can look at the exhaustion of romance and then turn to its opposite and say, well, not only was were we not triumphant, but things haven’t gotten better at all. Nothing ever moves. Not only is there no arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, there’s no arc whatsoever. Everything is a straight line, one evil after another, domination and a new guise every other day. And that the idea that we should even try to engage in politics and try to transform it is foolish. That it’s a waste of one’s life. It’s a waste of one’s aims, that you’re another sucker in this game of American cruelty to try your hand at changing it. So that becomes a position, particularly when you overlay it with the seeming erudition of contemporary philosophy, right? Continental philosophy, it can seem imposing and powerful, right? Because it does speak to people’s sense of disorientation and suffering, and their sense that their aims have been wasted, their efforts were pointless. And so a lot of my book, I come from that school of philosophy that sees tragedy not as yet another form of pessimism, but as a response to pessimism. One a way of thinking that allows you to confront the seriousness of the pessimist charge without falling into despair or nihilism yourself.
DeRay Mckesson: One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by, and I did not, I literally just did not learn about it in any schooling until I became an activist in this way. I didn’t know about reconstruction. It just wasn’t a not only did I not know it was a period, but I didn’t know it was an important period. I like I missed it. You reference reconstruction in the like reconstruction is one of the characters in the book, I would say.
Brandon Terry: Yeah.
DeRay Mckesson: Can you talk about the importance of the reconstruction era in helping you think through the arguments that you make in the book?
Brandon Terry: So Reconstruction appears in the book in two main ways. The first is that the book is deeply, deeply inspired at the most fundamental level by W. E. B. Du Bois’ classic study, Black Reconstruction in America. And it’s a fascinating book. I encourage anybody to read it. It is the book to read, along with Eric Foner’s Reconstruction, to understand that period. And what’s so amazing about the book, among other things, is that there’s actually really not a lot of original historical research in it. He this is a book that is almost entirely written with secondary sources. And what he does is he reads those sources against the grain. And he says he starts with a certain set of presumptions, one of which is that Black people are human. And because he understands and starts from that fundamental conception of human equality and the dignity of Black people. He takes seriously and rediscovers hidden throughout all of these racist represenations of Reconstruction this extraordinary movement to refound American democracy in the wake of the civil war, in a way that would permit multiracial equal citizenship that would expand the possibiilties for what we would now call progressive American state. One that would provide public education, that would protect labor, that would redistribute wealth, provide for the ownership of land and capital for a much larger group of people, and that would play a much different role globally because it wasn’t so captured by the most extreme conservative oligarchic forces in the society. So he sees the struggle of these ordinary Black people all throughout the South as this kind of splendid failure, a failure to instantiate the most egalitarian promise that inheres in American civilization. And so, what it means to tell the story of a splendid failure, to linger on defeat, to open up political vision in the present, to see all of the myriad ways and complications that befell people trying to remake the world and seeing their history as a history of roads not taken. That’s my book, but for the civil rights movement. So reconstruction matters for me in that way, coming through Du Bois. It also matters to me in my rediscovery of A. Philip Randolph. So I mentioned him earlier, but for those of your listeners who don’t know, A. Philip Randolph is one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. He was originally from Florida, moved to New York, and became a writer, intellectual, newspaper publisher, and then ultimately a labor leader. And he was the organizer of the largest Black labor movement, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and is the genius, the architect behind the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, which threatened to march on Washington, DC in order to ensure the integration of the trades and the military industrial jobs that had come up during World War II. And he was the architect of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He’s just a just a stalwart thinker of kind of left liberal vision of the civil rights movement. And he writes a lot about reconstruction as this period where we learned some fundamental things about American history. We learn that you can’t talk about civil rights without economic power. That anybody who does that is going to lead you down the wrong road because you’re not going to really be able to defend your rights. The rights won’t have fair value. He talks a lot about how reconstruction teaches you about counter-revolution and the ways that a concerted action from below will bring its opposite as a response. And that you need to think through all of the dynamics of exhaustion and revolution and counter-revolution that characterized that period if you’re going to understand how to prepare and make judgments for your own politics. He also teaches us that Reconstruction is in many respects a different kind of vision of integration. That you hear the language of integrationism in the civil rights movement and now people think of it as actually pretty conservative or kind of narrowly liberal. That its about people just being able to like go into stores and buy stuff if they have the money or live in whatever neighborhood they want as long as they can afford it. That’s not Randolph’s vision of what integration is. For him, Reconstruction is about a kind of social democratic movement where people are working together across the color line to change America in an egalitarian way. And whatever vision of integration he wants to defend in the civil rights era is the same. That the judgments aren’t ones made based on kind of the most narrowly negative liberal vision. It’s one about expanding people’s capacities for collective self-determination over all of the things that matter for their basic outcomes in life and the basic terms of their shared cooperation together. And that includes the economy.
DeRay Mckesson: Well how do you think we can use this book to help us today? Like what is your hope for organizers and activists or practitioners and not just theorists? Uh. Shout out to the theorists though. But what is your hope that this reframing can can do, especially in a moment where it, you know, so much of the world feels like it is falling apart?
Brandon Terry: There are arguments in here that I think will be really useful about civil disobedience, about integration, about how to think through the relationship between political protest and geopolitics. So I think all of those things, those kind of concrete things, will be really useful. And I look forward to being in dialog with people about them over the years. But even more expansive than that, there are really two things I think are utterly crucial. The first is encouraging people to rethink the exemplarity of the civil rights movement. So I borrowed this term from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. That we need to move from imitation to emulation. So imitation is like when you take a great work of art and you just trace it. You copy everything in it, and then you put it out to people like, hey, aren’t I a great artist? And everyone says, no, you’re imitative. You didn’t really tap into anything profound about the sources of creativity, kinds of questions this person was posing to produce the art that they produced. And I think there’s something similar that has happened to our relationship with the civil rights movement and the way we treat its exemplarity. That many of us are just imitative. We pretend that if we do the things that we saw them do, we repeat the words that they said, we sing the songs that they sang. We will produce the same results. And one of the genius things about BLM was that it kind of opened up a space to name what many of us had already kind of recognized that that isn’t working.
DeRay Mckesson: [laugh] Yes.
Brandon Terry: And it can open up a question. Well, why isn’t it working? Well, I hope this book brings you to some of the things that, like, let’s have a really serious conversation about what King was trying to do, what the SELC was trying to do with civil disobedience. What are the questions? What are the problem spaces that brought them to the idea that an experimentation with civil disobedience was really meaningful and actionable and effective? Because once we recover the way they pose those questions, we can ask questions in a similar spirit and try to generate similar descriptions of our moment, even though our moment is radically different. We can start to ask better questions of our political practice by going through that philosophical exercise. So that’s number one. Number two is trying to give people a sense that just because a romantic story has collapsed and pessimism is ascendant, those aren’t the only two ways to relate to our history. Right. And so really trying to give people a vocabulary, a philosophical architecture, a mode of being in the world that inhabits a totally different way of proceeding when thinking about the enduring inequalities of race in this society, as well as the enduring persistence of heroic movements against racial injustice in our history. So giving people a kind of dignified, well thought through, comparatively argued historical consciousness, I think is an important contribution because so much of what we’re doing in our politics is arguing over the meaning of that history. When people tell you why they don’t want to join the protest, or why they’re not going to show up for this, why they’re not gonna join this organization, why they think all is already lost. Part of what they’re doing is marshaling a history and a story about history. And there’s an open question: how do you argue against that story? How do you find the words to make it compelling to defend a different kind of hope against the easy consolations of romance or the bitter cynicism and resignation of ironic pessimism? I think that’s frankly the political and existential challenge of our time. Because we’re asking people now to sacrifice quite a lot in the face of um an antagonism and opposition that has no qualms about the use of cruelty and has no illusions about its opposition to a great deal of what the civil rights movement genuinely stood for in its broadest sense.
DeRay Mckesson: Boom uh Brandon, remind us of the title of the book and where people can get it.
Brandon Terry: The book is called Shattered Dreams Infinite Hope, a Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement by Brandon Terry. It’s published by Harvard University Press and you can get it anywhere books are sold, but on Harvard University Press’s website or your favorite independent bookstore, just request the book.
DeRay Mckesson: And where should people go to stay in touch with you? Is it Twitter? Is it Facebook? Is it Instagram? Is it Snail Mail? Is it show up at the school? What is it?
Brandon Terry: Please don’t show up at my job. [laughter] No, people can can best get in touch with me through email. And I’m a very reluctant user of Twitter. I tweet about once a year.
DeRay Mckesson: Well, we consider you a friend of the pod and can’t wait to have you back.
Brandon Terry: Thank you so much, DeRay. It’s it’s it’s always an honor to join you and I really admiring of all you’ve done and all you continue to do. So it’s great to be in conversation. I’ll be back any time. [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]
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