The Unfinished American Experiment Featuring Alexandra Natapoff and Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge

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Welcome. I'm Erik Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.

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Thanks in advance for supporting the podcast of our time. I hope you enjoy this episode as well.

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The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.

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Hello, and welcome to another moment with Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.

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And so today I have two Harvard professors.

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Yeah, we got two Harvard professors on the podcast.

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Alexandra Natapoff, who is a professor at the law school, and she has co-authored

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a book called America Unfinished.

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And then Bianca, Dr. Bianca Baldrige, who is a Harvard education professor.

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She's at the Graduate School of Education. And she has written a book called

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Laboring in the Shadows,

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but her primary labor in the shadows is about black youth workers, people who help.

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Black children, you know, like in after school, preschool, those folks,

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she's been a crusader for youth workers in and out of the classroom.

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So that's what our discussion is going to be about. So it is cool that we've

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gotten to the point now where we're getting Harvard professors.

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They're not the first ones, but, you know, it's a sign of where we've come as

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a show, that we are getting people like that to come on.

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You know, every week I try to have the best possible guests,

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you know, as far as expertise and as far as stature.

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Every now and then you'll get somebody that you may have read about in the newspaper

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or saw on the internet or saw on TV.

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But, you know, I'm trying to get the best. And I always say that my guests are

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more intelligent than I am.

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And that's not self-deprecation. That's just facts. You know,

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I'm not the smartest guy on the planet, nor have I ever claimed to be.

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At one time I thought I was the baddest dude on the planet.

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And then I got reminded that I wasn't. You know.

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But I just want you all as listeners to, instead of,

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dealing with the hype and the little 15-second sound bites and all that stuff,

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I want you to get the meat of it.

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You know we might crack a joke or two but I'm not gonna win you over with buffoonery.

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Although I think humor is very, very important in this time,

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you know, my style is I ask questions, I get people that can give you answers.

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And I hope that you are receiving this well.

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And if you are, then please go to www.momenterik.com,

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and show your support either by giving this podcast five stars,

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making a one-time donation, or subscribing.

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Write a review. Whatever you want to do, please go to the website,

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check it out, and just let the people that are,

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the other people that are supporting the podcast that you are listening to. How about that?

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I just thank you all for listening, as always, But, yeah, it'd be nice to see

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a little more support, only because,

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we're within the 90-day window now with the elections, and we got to keep things going.

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We got to be encouraged, right? So, anyway, enough of that. Let's get on with the show.

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And as always, we kick it off with a moment of news with Grace G.

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Thanks, Erik. Three suspects have been arrested in separate incidents for sending

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death threats to witnesses following the disappearance and death of Nolan Wells in Mississippi.

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U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell was released from a Kentucky rehabilitation facility

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to finish his recovery at home.

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Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Party nomination in the Michigan U.S.

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Senate primary, and he will face Republican former Congressman Mike Rogers in November.

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State Representative Justin Pearson won the Tennessee 9th Congressional District's Democratic primary.

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Donovan McKinney, a state representative, ousted U.S. Congressman Sri Tanidar

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in Michigan's 13th Congressional District Democratic primary.

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The Department of Justice dropped vandalism charges against former Olympian

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Davey Hearn after concluding that a flawed installation caused the Lincoln Memorial

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Reflecting Pool liner to peel.

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Congressman Wesley Bell successfully defended his U.S. House Senate seat against

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a Democratic primary challenge from former Congresswoman Cori Bush in Missouri's

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1st Congressional District.

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The U.S. Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as the CDC director,

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making her the first African-American woman to hold the post.

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Reverend Adam Hamilton won Kansas' Democratic Senate primary,

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setting him up to face off in November against incumbent Senator Roger Marshall.

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Senator Rand Paul referred Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Department of Justice after

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a Senate committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.

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A Spokane resident was arrested on arson charges for allegedly starting one

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of three Washington fires that forced mass evacuations and destroyed hundreds of buildings.

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A federal judge granted the Justice Department's request to dismiss convictions

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against members of the Oath Keepers involved in the January 6th Capitol attack.

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And, the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak in U.S. history has claimed its first

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two fatalities in Michigan.

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I am Grace G., and this has been a Moment of News.

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All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news.

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Now it's time for my guest, Alexandra Natapoff.

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Alexandra Natapoff is an award-winning criminal justice scholar and a Lee S.

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Krendler professor of law at Harvard Law School.

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She writes about criminal courts, public defense, plea bargaining,

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wrongful convictions, and race and inequality in the criminal system.

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She previously served as a federal public defender in Baltimore, Maryland.

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She is also the co-author of this book called America Unfinished.

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And so we'll be talking in a little bit about her work as a public defender

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and how that has shaped her career.

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And we're going to be talking about America Unfinished. So, ladies and gentlemen,

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it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest of this podcast, Alexandra Natapoff.

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All right. Alexandra Natapoff. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you.

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Well, I'm really, really honored to have you on.

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And I won't say it's a series, but you wrote this.

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You and Guy Charles wrote this incredible book. Well, let's not say right.

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You compiled like these essays, right? Yeah. And we give you author's credit

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because you were the one that came with the idea. But you compiled these essays

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into this book called America Unfinished.

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And so you and some other people will be on the show to talk about their parts in the book and all that.

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But I'm really, really glad to have you because you were the,

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I don't know, conspirator, the visionary. I don't know what term you want to

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use, but they come up with this concept to do this.

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I like conspirator. Can I have that one? Yes, ma'am. You sure can.

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So we're going to get into that a little bit. But I want to do my normal icebreaker,

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which is to throw a quote at you first.

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And I want you to respond to the quote. And the quote is, The world will little

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note no long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

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It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which

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they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

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Well, thank you for that particular quote. It's actually the quote from which we stole the book title.

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The book is called America Unfinished because we thought it captured precisely

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that spirit, which is that our democracy, that our legal system, they're not finished.

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We don't inherit them complete from the previous generation,

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and we don't hand them down complete to the next generation.

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We are always working on them.

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And the quote, of course, is from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and he gave it,

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in the middle of the Civil War to honor the unfinished work of building,

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as he put it, a government of the people by the people for the people.

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And of course, that was one of the most fraught, important, violent moments

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in our 250-year history of working out what do we mean by the people who is going to be included.

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In that idea, in that ideal.

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So we took the term unfinished from Lincoln, from the Gettysburg Address,

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because we wanted to honor that spirit.

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Now, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,

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it's a time to think about not only this moment in history that we are currently

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facing, again, a very fraught,

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a very contested moment of great change, but also to look back over our history

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and see the arc of all the things we have built?

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And this book is about the legal infrastructure of that experiment, of that journey. Okay.

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So now the next icebreaker is what we call 20 questions.

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So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20. Okay.

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Oh, just 14.

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Okay. What does the idea of a better

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world mean to you? and what would be different in that better world.

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Do you mind my asking why that's 14? Just random.

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Oh, okay. Just random. I like to know what kind of questions I'm answering.

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So I'm going to answer from the perspective of my legal and scholarly expertise

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and the subject that I wrote about for the book.

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So Professor Charles, as you noted, he and I conceived of and pulled together

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and edited this book, 62 essays by 62 different Harvard law professors. That's what the book is.

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But we each also contributed an essay, and I contributed an essay about our

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criminal system because that is the space in which I have been working for 20

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years, and the essay that I wrote.

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And before I became a law professor, I was a federal public defender in Baltimore.

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And so I sometimes joke, but it's not really a joke, that everything interesting

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that I know and learned, I learned in Baltimore.

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About our criminal system, but also about our democracy, about the inequality

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in our democracy, about the racism in our democracy.

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And to me, all those things have dramatically come to a head and can be seen in our criminal system.

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And so that's why I've focused on the criminal system, not because it's the

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only space in which to focus, but because it's so representative and so destructive

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and so dehumanizing and so inegalitarian.

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And so for me, a better world is where our laws, our democracy,

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our citizenship, our ability to be part of this community.

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Could meaningfully be deployed to make our criminal system in particular and

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our democracy more generally a more inclusive, egalitarian, humane space that

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we could be more proud of.

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And being a public defender is in many ways a depressing endeavor.

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You're really in the belly of the beast. People's lives are being crushed.

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Their families are being crushed. Their neighborhoods in Baltimore being crushed

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by the criminal system. And yet at the same time.

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It is a space in which people and legislators and lawyers and activists and

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community members can deploy the tools of democracy, of legislation,

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of law to meaningfully push back.

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And so at the same time as I saw great injustice and great sadness in my clients'

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lives and in their cases, I also saw the possibilities of pushing back through law.

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And it was the inspiration for becoming a law professor.

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And so I write in the book about how our criminal system actually works pretty

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well for the wealthy, for the well-resourced, for people who are valued by the criminal system.

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It's not true for most Americans. Most ordinary Americans are not valued by our criminal system.

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But a better world would be one in which our legal infrastructure,

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our criminal system, accorded everyone the same dignity, respect,

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importance, and therefore protections of rule of law and the principles of rule of law.

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We're a long way off from that better world, I think.

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But to me, that's always a fight worth having.

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Yeah, and I'm going to get back to that particular contribution you made about,

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the rule of law, because I really want you to dive into that a little bit.

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Before I get into that, I want to ask this question. Oh, I know what I wanted to say before.

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So my uncle was an attorney in Baltimore. I don't know if you knew him or not.

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His name was Fred Charleston, but he was an attorney in Baltimore for a number

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of years before he passed away.

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Why is Harvard important as an American institution?

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That's a great question.

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It's important for all kinds of reasons, both wonderful and problematic.

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So let's start with the problematic. It's an institution of great wealth, power, influence.

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It has been part of and produced the knowledge and the personnel for many of

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the inequalities that we were just talking about.

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It has not in its history always been a redistributive, an egalitarian,

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a redistributive institution.

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At the same time, it's an institution of extraordinary knowledge.

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And influence. it has brought so many people into the ability to speak.

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To speak about, of course, I teach at the law school, so I'm partial to law.

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But Harvard, as one of the preeminent universities in the United States, if not in the world,

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is the quintessential home of the power of knowledge and the ability to bring people into that space.

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So I teach law students, but for example, just a few weeks ago,

00:18:52.783 --> 00:18:57.143
I also taught a class at the undergraduate level for veterans,

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for veterans who are thinking of coming back to college.

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And Harvard is also a place that invites people into this extraordinary world of knowledge and power.

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And so the double-edged sword is that it's an elite, powerful institution and.

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And therefore doubles down in some ways in that kind of hierarchy,

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which is by its very nature exclusionary.

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And yet at the same time, because it does open its doors, because it does welcome

00:19:29.038 --> 00:19:33.488
more people in, because it does make more things possible, it is also redistributive.

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It also shares knowledge. It shares opportunity.

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It shares possibility. And so we're always walking that edge between what is

00:19:43.638 --> 00:19:49.270
inspiring about Harvard and what, frankly, I think, and my co-editor,

00:19:49.519 --> 00:19:52.480
Professor Charles, it's one of the reasons we pulled this book together.

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We thought as professors at Harvard, we have not only this incredible opportunity,

00:19:58.057 --> 00:20:04.848
but frankly, also an obligation to share that that is what makes Harvard great, that we are able not only,

00:20:05.428 --> 00:20:09.778
to create knowledge, but also to share it. And so that's really the spirit of this book.

00:20:10.387 --> 00:20:16.337
Yeah, because that was my next question. Why did America Unfinished need to be written?

00:20:17.875 --> 00:20:23.426
Well, it started about six or eight months ago.

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We were grappling. So Professor Charles and I have been colleagues for a long

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time, and we've been in this conversation for a long time.

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What does it mean to be a legal scholar, to have been an attorney and now be

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a legal scholar, to have the opportunity and the privilege of being at Harvard

00:20:38.998 --> 00:20:43.808
Law School where you can create knowledge and bring people together in a way

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that can be influential or powerful?

00:20:46.433 --> 00:20:50.636
What is our responsibility at this moment when so much of the American legal

00:20:50.822 --> 00:20:53.277
governance infrastructure,

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is contested and some of it is on fire and some of the legal profession is on

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fire and parts of Washington, D.C. are on fire?

00:21:05.305 --> 00:21:11.518
What's our responsibility? And the answer is we're supposed to do what we do, but better.

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We're supposed to do our scholarship and we're supposed to do it better.

00:21:15.898 --> 00:21:18.668
We're supposed to share it more. We're supposed to step up more.

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We're supposed to do it with more people.

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And so it was that spirit that caused us to reach out to our entire faculty.

00:21:25.986 --> 00:21:32.008
And we said, we think this is a moment when we should be valuing our academic

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freedom and celebrating it by using it.

00:21:36.303 --> 00:21:39.958
We should recognize that it's a privilege. And so we should not just talk about

00:21:39.958 --> 00:21:42.689
having it. We should exercise it in this way.

00:21:42.944 --> 00:21:45.604
And it was really actually very inspiring.

00:21:45.980 --> 00:21:49.428
So many of our colleagues stepped up right away and said, absolutely,

00:21:50.032 --> 00:21:54.038
we think that we should be sharing our work at this moment. Does it mean that

00:21:54.038 --> 00:21:55.471
people have the answer? Of course not.

00:21:56.269 --> 00:22:00.205
But it means that we can share knowledge. And frankly, our colleagues,

00:22:00.916 --> 00:22:05.508
you know, some of our colleagues have been working in their spaces for decades.

00:22:05.682 --> 00:22:11.667
They're the national experts. Some of them are the world experts in the things that they do.

00:22:12.044 --> 00:22:14.866
And our thought was, everyone should have access to that.

00:22:15.738 --> 00:22:21.158
And so we pulled together the book as a response to this moment in American

00:22:21.158 --> 00:22:27.516
law and governance, but also, of course, in honor of the fact that it's our 250th anniversary of,

00:22:28.416 --> 00:22:35.236
which should be a time for reflection, for rethinking our old ways, good ways.

00:22:36.743 --> 00:22:40.686
Should we change our habits? We often update ourselves on our birthday.

00:22:40.686 --> 00:22:43.356
Okay, what's working? What's not working?

00:22:43.816 --> 00:22:48.446
What do we need to do differently? So we really try to embrace the moment in

00:22:48.446 --> 00:22:55.862
a way that might be helpful to and engaging for as many people as possible.

00:22:56.905 --> 00:23:00.436
So I got a personal question. How come the preamble to the U.S.

00:23:00.436 --> 00:23:01.941
Constitution didn't make the cut?

00:23:03.036 --> 00:23:05.576
You got the declaration in there. You got the Gettysburg address.

00:23:06.208 --> 00:23:08.060
How come the good old preamble didn't make it?

00:23:09.058 --> 00:23:12.583
Well, one of it was we did this very fast and had page limits.

00:23:12.977 --> 00:23:17.371
So we had to argue to get more space in the first place.

00:23:18.543 --> 00:23:24.418
You might expect, actually, from Harvard law professors that we would only have put the law in,

00:23:25.139 --> 00:23:29.676
that the Constitution, and there are, of course, many essays about the Supreme

00:23:29.676 --> 00:23:35.773
Court, about constitutional law in all kinds of spaces, but we wanted to be,

00:23:36.785 --> 00:23:38.260
more encompassing than that.

00:23:39.276 --> 00:23:42.626
Because there's a lot of law you could put in, and there's a lot of law that

00:23:42.626 --> 00:23:45.690
we have in the essays, but we thought that the—well, so first of all,

00:23:46.044 --> 00:23:49.458
the 250th, it's the birthday of the Declaration.

00:23:50.123 --> 00:23:54.645
But also we thought that the Gettysburg Address captured something about the project that the.

00:23:55.918 --> 00:24:03.149
The legalism of the Constitution was part of, but might not fully convey.

00:24:03.619 --> 00:24:07.968
And the spirit of the book is in part to notice, yes, of course,

00:24:07.968 --> 00:24:12.528
law is central, but law is always working with all our other institutions,

00:24:12.528 --> 00:24:15.786
law, politics, education, culture,

00:24:16.548 --> 00:24:20.519
the economy, all pieces of our democracy.

00:24:20.821 --> 00:24:24.824
And so you're absolutely right. We could have put the preamble in,

00:24:24.959 --> 00:24:28.118
but actually we were trying to be more capacious, as it were,

00:24:28.118 --> 00:24:31.344
more imaginative and include things that,

00:24:31.947 --> 00:24:37.478
maybe wouldn't be quite so entirely straightforward. Yeah.

00:24:39.095 --> 00:24:46.651
You know, that was my guide. And whenever people talk to me about legislative work,

00:24:47.533 --> 00:24:52.049
I think the preamble, first of all, you take an oath to uphold the Constitution

00:24:52.287 --> 00:24:54.197
when you go in these positions.

00:24:54.900 --> 00:25:00.638
But I think that preamble is the best guide because, first of all,

00:25:00.638 --> 00:25:02.478
you're establishing what the target is.

00:25:03.118 --> 00:25:07.468
You're trying to establish a more perfect union. And you make a commitment to

00:25:07.468 --> 00:25:10.778
defend the nation, you make a commitment to provide for the general welfare,

00:25:10.778 --> 00:25:13.408
and you make a commitment to protect individual liberty.

00:25:13.903 --> 00:25:17.258
As a legislator, That's your job, right? So.

00:25:19.269 --> 00:25:26.849
That's why I value that paragraph so much. It was like John Meecham was talking about the sentence –,

00:25:28.065 --> 00:25:30.695
In the Declaration of Independence was the most important sentence.

00:25:30.695 --> 00:25:34.875
I would argue that the preamble is the most important paragraph.

00:25:35.339 --> 00:25:40.325
And so, you know, I just, like I said, that's personal for me. But we'll move on.

00:25:41.485 --> 00:25:45.055
Well, we'll include it in volume two. How about that? Thank you.

00:25:45.055 --> 00:25:47.825
Thank you so much. I like to hear that. Of course. All right.

00:25:49.003 --> 00:25:52.515
And Annette Gordon-Reed asked the question, so I'm going to ask it to you.

00:25:52.515 --> 00:25:55.319
Are we a democratic nation or a heritage nation?

00:25:56.465 --> 00:26:00.845
Yeah. If I could just celebrate that particular essay that you're drawing from

00:26:01.285 --> 00:26:04.533
for one moment. As I said, there are 62 essays in this book.

00:26:05.812 --> 00:26:11.742
From 62 different Harvard Law professors. And Professor Gordon Reed wrote one

00:26:11.742 --> 00:26:14.429
of the first essays in the book.

00:26:14.818 --> 00:26:19.452
It's called Making Americans a History. And of course, we're very fortunate

00:26:19.452 --> 00:26:25.040
to have Professor Gordon Reed. She's one of America's most preeminent historians.

00:26:25.359 --> 00:26:32.072
And she takes us all the way back to the founding, to the roots of the argument.

00:26:32.940 --> 00:26:35.282
It's a fascinating essay for

00:26:35.282 --> 00:26:39.802
your listeners. I hope people will take a look, especially at this one.

00:26:40.156 --> 00:26:46.332
And she takes us back as a historian to 250 years of fighting over this question.

00:26:46.332 --> 00:26:50.117
Who gets to be American? What do we mean when we say.

00:26:52.192 --> 00:26:58.102
That we are American? And she shows us how this has been a tension from the

00:26:58.102 --> 00:27:04.629
very beginning between the idea of tribe, if you will, blood, legacy,

00:27:05.100 --> 00:27:10.035
what you might think of as the old school model, right? That's how monarchs become monarchs.

00:27:10.151 --> 00:27:18.262
That's how nobility becomes nobility versus the idealism of what America could become.

00:27:18.262 --> 00:27:22.122
And of course, the idealism was not realized at the founding.

00:27:22.122 --> 00:27:27.972
It took many years for the notion of we, the people, to expand,

00:27:27.972 --> 00:27:31.732
to include, to actually include all of the people.

00:27:31.732 --> 00:27:35.242
And we could have an argument about how well it's even done,

00:27:35.242 --> 00:27:39.992
that there are essays about, have we done it yet? Are we there yet? Is everyone included?

00:27:41.389 --> 00:27:46.304
But Professor Gordon Reed shows us that this has always been a fight.

00:27:46.890 --> 00:27:52.769
And we're seeing it now in the fight over immigration, in the violent over-enforcement,

00:27:53.591 --> 00:27:58.767
of immigration across the country that has so shocked so much of America.

00:27:59.040 --> 00:28:03.417
And I think part of the shocking quality is not just the violence,

00:28:03.748 --> 00:28:08.160
although the violence is shocking, and it's not just the illegality,

00:28:08.317 --> 00:28:12.868
although so much of it is illegal. Well, it's the ethos.

00:28:13.350 --> 00:28:21.289
It's the idea that we're going to be so cramped, so exclusionary,

00:28:21.289 --> 00:28:25.418
so narrow in our notion of who counts as American.

00:28:25.645 --> 00:28:30.538
And I think part of the outrage and the shock shows that actually a lot of Americans.

00:28:33.249 --> 00:28:37.889
We don't think that. We think that we are inclusive. We think that we are one people under law.

00:28:37.889 --> 00:28:43.719
We don't think you have to be born in any particular place or speak any particular

00:28:43.719 --> 00:28:49.647
language or come from any particular ethnicity. We don't agree with that.

00:28:49.914 --> 00:28:55.009
So Professor Gordon Reed, I think, writes this beautiful historical essay explaining

00:28:55.009 --> 00:29:00.740
the arc of that argument that, frankly, we are, you know, we're having today every day.

00:29:01.290 --> 00:29:07.322
Do you feel that the current administration has damaged the concept of the rule of law?

00:29:07.795 --> 00:29:09.009
So thank you for asking me that

00:29:09.009 --> 00:29:14.812
question, because it is what I write about in the essay for this book.

00:29:16.543 --> 00:29:21.909
So let's take a step back. In the criminal system, which is my area of expertise,

00:29:22.478 --> 00:29:27.753
rule of law has always been shaky for ordinary Americans.

00:29:27.938 --> 00:29:32.783
So when I was a public defender in Baltimore, as I have done my work and scholarship

00:29:32.783 --> 00:29:37.871
about the criminal system over and over again, we see how the criminal system abandons rule of law,

00:29:38.376 --> 00:29:43.583
for ordinary people, for the vulnerable, for people who don't have the resources,

00:29:43.583 --> 00:29:46.879
the money, or the social capital to fight back.

00:29:47.622 --> 00:29:51.983
And so I think one of the things that's happening in our political discourse

00:29:51.983 --> 00:29:55.790
right now, in our legal discourse, is a kind of a romanticization

00:29:56.185 --> 00:30:01.383
of the American legal system as if somehow it was all working perfectly until

00:30:01.383 --> 00:30:04.173
this moment, and then the Trump administration broke it.

00:30:04.718 --> 00:30:11.573
And at least in the criminal system, I think there's a very clear story to be

00:30:11.573 --> 00:30:13.423
told about how that isn't the case.

00:30:13.943 --> 00:30:19.741
What is the case, actually, is that our system has been vulnerable to exploitation

00:30:19.991 --> 00:30:25.581
and abuse for a long time, and the administration is taking advantage of tools

00:30:25.854 --> 00:30:28.222
that were forged long ago.

00:30:28.884 --> 00:30:34.324
So, as I, you know, explain in the essay, we now live in a world where pardons,

00:30:34.876 --> 00:30:41.250
can be courted and purchased for millions of dollars, the presidential pardon power, where...

00:30:43.791 --> 00:30:47.111
Where federal prosecutions are openly political,

00:30:49.411 --> 00:30:53.064
embrace the idea of political reward and retribution.

00:30:53.435 --> 00:30:59.881
Now, in the world of criminal law and criminal scholarship, we all look at each

00:30:59.881 --> 00:31:03.007
other and we point out, you know, it's always been kind of political.

00:31:04.691 --> 00:31:08.530
There's always been a political strand,

00:31:09.051 --> 00:31:13.971
a political valence to the way we have formed our criminal system And many of

00:31:13.971 --> 00:31:21.239
us, including myself, have argued against what's unfair about this for a long time.

00:31:21.668 --> 00:31:29.521
But the openness, the sort of crass embrace of the idea that it's now okay,

00:31:29.521 --> 00:31:31.132
that it's okay to do this,

00:31:32.004 --> 00:31:40.511
that I think is an extreme version of what our criminal system has been that we haven't seen before.

00:31:40.511 --> 00:31:47.291
The idea that an administration would openly embrace, as if it were okay,

00:31:47.738 --> 00:31:53.150
the politicization of the coercive power of the state.

00:31:53.452 --> 00:31:58.764
And to their credit, we have seen federal prosecutors across the country quit

00:31:59.158 --> 00:32:01.811
because they said, this is not the job I signed up for.

00:32:02.003 --> 00:32:06.861
And just to be clear, I was a federal public defender. My entire job was to

00:32:06.861 --> 00:32:10.271
fight with federal prosecutors. I was on the other side of the V.

00:32:10.611 --> 00:32:14.971
It was the United States versus my client. And I,

00:32:16.093 --> 00:32:24.253
And I have been heartened by the wave of federal prosecutorial pushback against

00:32:24.253 --> 00:32:28.196
this open erosion of rule of law.

00:32:28.335 --> 00:32:30.653
Did I think they were doing a perfect job before? No.

00:32:31.993 --> 00:32:38.233
Have I written critically about the politicization and the racialization of

00:32:38.233 --> 00:32:39.709
the criminal system? Yes.

00:32:39.901 --> 00:32:42.484
Do I think this is extreme? Absolutely.

00:32:45.018 --> 00:32:49.573
Yeah. You ended your essay in the book with this statement, rule of law in the

00:32:49.573 --> 00:32:53.637
criminal system has always been elusive for the powerless.

00:32:54.142 --> 00:32:58.473
Now the rest of us are learning what that feels like. So my question to you

00:32:58.473 --> 00:33:01.351
is, how do we end the elusiveness?

00:33:03.486 --> 00:33:09.725
You asked me a few questions ago what I thought would be a better world.

00:33:10.422 --> 00:33:16.183
And this is the answer to that question. If rule of law were truly – let's back

00:33:16.183 --> 00:33:19.809
up for a second because rule of law is one of those lawyerly professorial terms

00:33:20.140 --> 00:33:23.023
that I think bears unpacking.

00:33:23.023 --> 00:33:27.099
A label. What do we mean when we say something like that? We say it in law school all the time.

00:33:27.521 --> 00:33:32.730
What we mean is we have decided, indeed, the Declaration of Independence and

00:33:32.910 --> 00:33:34.853
the preamble to the Constitution,

00:33:35.434 --> 00:33:40.573
through those documents, through those commitments, we decided to run our country

00:33:40.573 --> 00:33:44.816
based on law and not on brute power.

00:33:45.474 --> 00:33:51.031
The old school sentence that captures this in many Supreme Court cases.

00:33:52.733 --> 00:33:58.855
And the Massachusetts Constitution, in fact, is the idea that we are a government of laws and not of men.

00:33:59.366 --> 00:34:06.193
And the idea is, at the end of the day, we agree to do it by law and not the

00:34:06.193 --> 00:34:07.523
most powerful person in the room.

00:34:07.523 --> 00:34:10.453
The person with the biggest stick doesn't get to decide. The person with the

00:34:10.453 --> 00:34:14.734
most money doesn't get to decide. The king doesn't get to decide. It's not the pope.

00:34:15.670 --> 00:34:21.658
End of the day, we're going to do it through law. And that puts a certain kind of constraint on power.

00:34:22.396 --> 00:34:27.997
Law enhances power, of course, but it is also a pushback, a constraint against power.

00:34:28.339 --> 00:34:31.950
And so rule of law is the promise that at the end of the day,

00:34:31.950 --> 00:34:36.611
we're going to do it by law and not just by power.

00:34:36.756 --> 00:34:41.244
And we're going to live with the outcome, even if we don't like it.

00:34:42.091 --> 00:34:45.800
And we can all think of outcomes that we don't like, but notice the radical

00:34:45.800 --> 00:34:49.580
nature of the idea that the most powerful person in the room with the biggest

00:34:49.580 --> 00:34:55.154
stick and the most money and the most troops and access to the most violence,

00:34:55.960 --> 00:34:57.771
would say, okay, that's the answer.

00:34:58.398 --> 00:35:03.910
The law, the legal system has provided an answer and I don't like it and I'm

00:35:03.910 --> 00:35:05.950
going to live with it anyway.

00:35:07.110 --> 00:35:11.150
There's something really profound about that move. Of course,

00:35:11.150 --> 00:35:15.650
a lot of people are comparing this era to Bush v.

00:35:15.650 --> 00:35:23.430
Gore, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave the election to

00:35:23.430 --> 00:35:28.590
President Bush and meant defeat for the candidate,

00:35:29.310 --> 00:35:30.704
Vice President Al Gore.

00:35:31.046 --> 00:35:35.865
And many people have pointed out Al Gore did not deny the outcome.

00:35:36.149 --> 00:35:39.098
He didn't say, this is unfair. We should get rid of the Supreme Court.

00:35:39.313 --> 00:35:47.294
He said, oh, that's the law. The Supreme Court has made a decision and I am going to abide by it.

00:35:47.520 --> 00:35:51.980
Even though, as powerful people go, he had a lot of, you know,

00:35:52.514 --> 00:35:56.775
he had a lot of ammunition at his disposal and he didn't use it.

00:35:57.065 --> 00:35:59.207
That's what rule of law is. Yes.

00:36:01.077 --> 00:36:06.904
And so let me take us back to Baltimore, which is my clients understood that

00:36:06.904 --> 00:36:11.963
law was not going to protect them if a Baltimore police officer decided that they didn't want to.

00:36:12.497 --> 00:36:16.304
And my clients understood that the law was not going to protect them if they

00:36:16.304 --> 00:36:20.404
lived in a neighborhood where the city council or some powerful developer or

00:36:20.404 --> 00:36:25.624
some other person with money or influence decided that they wanted that neighborhood

00:36:25.624 --> 00:36:26.924
to be one way and not another.

00:36:26.924 --> 00:36:31.854
They understood that the law was not going to be for them, which is a way of

00:36:31.854 --> 00:36:34.247
saying that rule of law had abandoned them.

00:36:35.089 --> 00:36:39.188
Whereas in wealthy communities,

00:36:40.334 --> 00:36:44.227
it used to be in federal court that many of those defendants,

00:36:44.811 --> 00:36:49.999
hedge fund managers and people on Wall Street and high-profile defendants,

00:36:51.018 --> 00:36:55.128
they might have been guilty as sin, but they knew the law would work for them.

00:36:56.494 --> 00:36:59.922
They were going to get to invoke the Fourth Amendment. They were going to get

00:37:00.231 --> 00:37:05.673
to argue about what the rules meant. They were going to get to use the law. The law was for them.

00:37:06.063 --> 00:37:11.705
So to me, a better world is one in which everyone who is hauled before the state,

00:37:12.722 --> 00:37:17.104
or has a conflict in their life would know that this edifice,

00:37:17.104 --> 00:37:22.527
this infrastructure of law that we have built over 250 years is for them.

00:37:22.841 --> 00:37:26.209
Does it mean we will get the answer we want? No, it does not.

00:37:26.720 --> 00:37:29.860
But it means we're all playing by the same set of rules. And today,

00:37:30.618 --> 00:37:35.657
I think it's shockingly and abundantly obvious that the American people,

00:37:36.172 --> 00:37:40.724
we do not all get to play by the same set of rules. Yeah.

00:37:42.056 --> 00:37:47.125
Should the Supreme Court be restrained, reformed, or remain status quo?

00:37:48.976 --> 00:37:54.272
Great, hot topic question. And I'm going to direct your listeners back,

00:37:55.476 --> 00:38:02.596
to the collection because we have two extraordinary essays in hot disagreement

00:38:02.596 --> 00:38:04.546
with each other in the collection.

00:38:04.546 --> 00:38:07.356
There's a lot of disagreement in this collection. And if you go through.

00:38:08.947 --> 00:38:14.656
Perhaps it's not surprising that 62 Harvard law professors cannot agree on what

00:38:14.656 --> 00:38:17.690
the problems are, what we should do, or even what the question is.

00:38:17.986 --> 00:38:21.434
And this, of course, is one of the great questions of the moment.

00:38:22.014 --> 00:38:27.001
So the two essays, and I'll just flag them for your readers if they decide to take a look.

00:38:27.611 --> 00:38:31.726
In this section on the Supreme Court, there's a dozen sections on all different

00:38:31.726 --> 00:38:34.397
kinds of subjects in the book. I put this one on the Supreme Court.

00:38:35.316 --> 00:38:40.716
There's an essay by two luminous constitutional law scholars.

00:38:40.716 --> 00:38:43.209
They are national experts in this space.

00:38:43.760 --> 00:38:48.880
And their essay is called Declaring Independence from Judicial Supremacy.

00:38:49.228 --> 00:38:53.704
And they argue essentially that the authority of the Supreme Court should be dismantled,

00:38:54.279 --> 00:39:01.856
that democracy should not be in the hands of five unelected Harvard and Yale

00:39:01.856 --> 00:39:06.116
graduates insulated from the political process, and,

00:39:06.716 --> 00:39:11.265
that judicial supremacy is being abused and it should be ended,

00:39:11.996 --> 00:39:14.825
which is essentially an argument for restructuring the Supreme Court.

00:39:15.108 --> 00:39:23.555
And then the very next essay, also by a luminous constitutional law scholar of national repute.

00:39:24.312 --> 00:39:30.024
Argues in an essay called A Court of Two Crises, he argues that even with the

00:39:30.024 --> 00:39:36.346
challenges and the politicization that we are seeing at the Supreme Court, and even though.

00:39:37.431 --> 00:39:42.754
So many people have lost faith in that institution, that it is still one of

00:39:42.754 --> 00:39:47.394
our most important bulwarks for protecting rule of law.

00:39:47.394 --> 00:39:53.214
And he goes through a list of, we're well aware of the ways in which the Supreme

00:39:53.214 --> 00:39:56.899
Court has helped and supported the Trump administration.

00:39:57.184 --> 00:40:00.714
And he goes through and points out examples that we might not have noticed where

00:40:00.714 --> 00:40:05.034
the court either did not rule in favor of the Trump administration,

00:40:05.034 --> 00:40:10.044
or as he points out, sometimes more importantly, protected the lower courts.

00:40:10.044 --> 00:40:13.214
When the lower courts ruled against the administration, or when the circuit

00:40:13.214 --> 00:40:17.574
courts ruled against the administration, they let those decisions stand,

00:40:17.574 --> 00:40:20.908
which is a big part of what the Supreme Court does. They interfere, they don't interfere.

00:40:21.129 --> 00:40:24.739
And he argues that if we do what the previous essay said we should do,

00:40:25.034 --> 00:40:30.103
which is mess with the court, that we will destabilize rule of law.

00:40:30.306 --> 00:40:34.914
And when we break that institution, there will be nothing standing between the

00:40:34.914 --> 00:40:41.282
politicized branches, particularly the executive and full-on lawless authority.

00:40:41.840 --> 00:40:45.724
And so whatever you think of the answer, these two essays, I think,

00:40:45.724 --> 00:40:51.124
really illuminate what the key questions are. I learned an enormous amount from

00:40:51.124 --> 00:40:52.498
this collection, by the way.

00:40:52.880 --> 00:40:57.744
And I like to think of myself as a pretty well-read person. I pay attention.

00:40:58.644 --> 00:41:04.507
But I learned so much from my colleagues and it really deepened my understanding

00:41:04.619 --> 00:41:10.302
of what the issues on the table currently are, especially in this space. Yeah.

00:41:12.320 --> 00:41:16.923
What do you want readers of America Unfinished to take away from it?

00:41:18.984 --> 00:41:19.817
Great question.

00:41:21.000 --> 00:41:25.660
There's stuff we can do, and there's changes we can make, and we've been making

00:41:25.660 --> 00:41:31.609
changes for 250 years, and there's no reason to stop now, and it's not magic.

00:41:32.248 --> 00:41:35.156
The law is not magic. We teach this to our students.

00:41:35.940 --> 00:41:39.940
Is it complicated? Yes. Is it difficult? Yes. Can everybody wield it? No.

00:41:40.440 --> 00:41:45.842
Is it magic? No. There's no ghost in the machine. It's just laws passed by legislatures,

00:41:46.143 --> 00:41:49.460
enforced by courts, and argued about by lawyers, and.

00:41:50.438 --> 00:41:56.467
All of which is based on our national understanding of how our democracy is supposed to work.

00:41:56.837 --> 00:42:01.038
And so my hope from these 62 different essays, each one holds up a piece of

00:42:01.038 --> 00:42:02.224
this problem to the light.

00:42:02.648 --> 00:42:05.411
What about the Supreme Court? What about Congress?

00:42:06.015 --> 00:42:11.118
What about climate change? What about AI? What about war?

00:42:12.003 --> 00:42:19.768
And these essays show, maybe a way to say it is they show how law matters and

00:42:19.768 --> 00:42:24.448
also how it can be changed, that we are not written in stone,

00:42:24.448 --> 00:42:26.349
we are not written in granite.

00:42:26.830 --> 00:42:35.178
And as I flagged a little bit earlier, there's something daunting often and

00:42:35.178 --> 00:42:38.208
sometimes scary about these questions that so much is at stake,

00:42:38.208 --> 00:42:39.368
so many lives are at stake.

00:42:39.920 --> 00:42:43.646
But at the same time, I hope that people will walk away realizing,

00:42:44.338 --> 00:42:48.403
this is not, it's not impossible, it's just hard.

00:42:48.780 --> 00:42:54.058
But you know what? 250 years ago, breaking from Britain was,

00:42:54.798 --> 00:42:56.518
you know, was no small feat.

00:42:56.715 --> 00:42:59.589
It was hard. We've been doing hard stuff the whole time.

00:43:00.210 --> 00:43:04.838
The Gettysburg Address, when Lincoln said, it is for us, the living,

00:43:04.838 --> 00:43:07.014
to continue this unfinished work.

00:43:07.449 --> 00:43:10.555
What could be harder than ending slavery?

00:43:11.160 --> 00:43:16.858
And we did that. So I have to say that I, and I'm a little bit of a half-full

00:43:16.858 --> 00:43:23.118
person, you can tell from the way I talk. I wouldn't keep doing this if I wasn't

00:43:23.118 --> 00:43:25.290
hopeful that law could matter.

00:43:25.991 --> 00:43:31.838
And I hope that when people read these essays, the ones that resonate with them,

00:43:31.838 --> 00:43:34.068
the ones that they're worried about, the ones they're interested in,

00:43:34.068 --> 00:43:37.294
they'll walk away thinking, you know, there are things to be done.

00:43:38.178 --> 00:43:41.386
Things in my local community, things with my local legislature.

00:43:42.570 --> 00:43:46.910
I would consider this a wild success if someone decided to run for office who

00:43:47.270 --> 00:43:51.290
maybe hadn't, you know, thought that there was a way to intervene before,

00:43:51.970 --> 00:43:54.610
or if students just read it.

00:43:55.130 --> 00:43:58.650
It's well-designed as a curriculum because there's so many different pieces

00:43:58.650 --> 00:44:05.930
of the puzzle that it addresses that students are inspired to become engaged.

00:44:06.230 --> 00:44:09.120
I'm not saying that they should go to law school, but they might realize,

00:44:09.120 --> 00:44:10.175
you know, I could do that.

00:44:11.510 --> 00:44:15.213
This is not magic. this is just thinking. This is just work.

00:44:15.527 --> 00:44:21.540
So I hope that the book is engaging and inspiring to people who are concerned

00:44:21.540 --> 00:44:25.657
about all the working parts of our democracy right now. Yeah.

00:44:26.498 --> 00:44:30.456
All right. Finish this sentence. I have hope because.

00:44:32.698 --> 00:44:39.510
I have hope because people. I had hope because people, when I was in the Baltimore

00:44:39.510 --> 00:44:45.060
City Detention center lock up with my clients, they would run out of attorney

00:44:45.060 --> 00:44:47.576
meeting spaces because it was such a terrible,

00:44:49.170 --> 00:44:50.970
infested, awful facility.

00:44:50.970 --> 00:44:53.174
Nobody should have had to have been there for a minute.

00:44:55.241 --> 00:44:58.150
So sometimes I'd meet with my clients in a broom closet because that was the

00:44:58.150 --> 00:45:00.303
only place we could have a private conversation.

00:45:01.002 --> 00:45:08.132
And nobody wants to meet your public defender. Just like you never want to meet your oncologist.

00:45:08.486 --> 00:45:13.734
It means that you're in the worst moment, one of the worst moments of your life.

00:45:14.507 --> 00:45:22.980
And so many times my clients were thoughtful, hardworking, responsible people

00:45:22.980 --> 00:45:25.192
who were in terrible places in their lives.

00:45:25.656 --> 00:45:29.888
And we would talk about this terrible moment for them, for their families, for their children.

00:45:34.250 --> 00:45:39.525
And we would work together on their case. So that's the worst case scenario.

00:45:39.525 --> 00:45:42.815
It's one of the worst things that can happen to a person charged with a federal

00:45:42.815 --> 00:45:46.635
crime. You're in a broom closet with your federal public defender in Baltimore

00:45:46.635 --> 00:45:48.056
trying to figure out what to do next.

00:45:48.439 --> 00:45:50.355
And yet they stood up.

00:45:51.551 --> 00:45:53.628
They were thoughtful. They were responsible.

00:45:55.115 --> 00:46:01.835
And that has given me hope for 20 years that if they can be intelligent and

00:46:01.835 --> 00:46:05.475
thoughtful and rational and try to do the right thing, they say,

00:46:05.475 --> 00:46:10.003
I have made a mistake or I am in this terrible fix. What can you do for my family?

00:46:10.183 --> 00:46:11.915
How can you help my family weather this? Or,

00:46:14.035 --> 00:46:18.115
how can you help me? And my colleagues in the Federal Public Defender's Office

00:46:18.115 --> 00:46:24.785
who took on terrible, impossible cases And yet they fought to the very end,

00:46:24.785 --> 00:46:26.967
every paper clip, every piece of paper,

00:46:27.867 --> 00:46:34.105
because people, because of the commitment that we see all the time in ordinary

00:46:34.105 --> 00:46:38.665
people, even under the most terrible circumstances, to stand up and try to do

00:46:38.665 --> 00:46:41.270
the right thing for themselves, for their families,

00:46:41.607 --> 00:46:44.440
for others, through the law, through their community.

00:46:46.531 --> 00:46:52.400
I think many of us were very moved and inspired and given hope by Minneapolis,

00:46:53.045 --> 00:46:57.235
when the people of Minneapolis, ordinary people,

00:46:58.155 --> 00:47:02.323
these were not fancy people with a lot of money and big sticks and fancy degrees.

00:47:02.753 --> 00:47:06.606
They looked around and they said, this is wrong. And they got in their minivans

00:47:06.972 --> 00:47:10.878
and they took their neighbor's children to school.

00:47:11.116 --> 00:47:17.223
How could you not be hopeful when people do that under terrible circumstances.

00:47:17.368 --> 00:47:23.632
So that's what makes me hopeful. All right. So Alexandra in the top off,

00:47:24.917 --> 00:47:31.893
Thank you for doing this. How can people reach you, and how can people get the book?

00:47:33.577 --> 00:47:37.577
So, Harvard Law School, the website is public.

00:47:38.312 --> 00:47:42.740
There's only one Natapoff there, so if you Google my name, N-A-T-A-P-O-F-F,

00:47:43.285 --> 00:47:46.228
and my email is public. It's just on the website.

00:47:46.598 --> 00:47:52.997
There's also a page on the Harvard Law School website that is dedicated to this

00:47:52.997 --> 00:47:55.469
book, America Unfinished, with,

00:47:56.077 --> 00:47:59.517
not just information about the book, but videos from different contributors

00:47:59.517 --> 00:48:04.997
talking about their essays with free materials, other ways to delve into it.

00:48:04.997 --> 00:48:07.462
I think it's a really wonderful page that the school put together.

00:48:07.868 --> 00:48:12.077
The book itself is published by MIT Press. You can get it in any,

00:48:12.496 --> 00:48:19.860
you know, whatever independent bookstore you like to go to or any online outlet that you prefer to use.

00:48:20.937 --> 00:48:25.167
The one thing I would love to flag, last thing for your listeners, is that we are,

00:48:25.980 --> 00:48:33.638
really thrilled that MIT Press has agreed that in 2027, this book will become

00:48:33.968 --> 00:48:38.049
open access, which means it'll be free for anybody who wants to read it.

00:48:38.729 --> 00:48:43.017
And we're really grateful to MIT Press for being willing to do this.

00:48:43.617 --> 00:48:47.867
They're the ones who are giving up the revenue. To the extent that there are

00:48:47.867 --> 00:48:51.852
any royalties, we're donating them to our local public library.

00:48:52.143 --> 00:48:56.037
So we're not receiving the money, but MIT Press is footing the bill for putting

00:48:56.037 --> 00:48:59.667
the book together. But they were willing to make this open access because it's

00:48:59.667 --> 00:49:01.598
so consistent with the spirit of the book.

00:49:01.969 --> 00:49:04.101
Everyone needs to be part of this conversation.

00:49:04.658 --> 00:49:05.911
These essays are short.

00:49:06.522 --> 00:49:09.198
They're four or five pages. Anyone can read them.

00:49:10.359 --> 00:49:14.701
There are no footnotes. We worked really hard to edit them to make them accessible.

00:49:15.681 --> 00:49:19.181
You don't have to be a lawyer, you don't have to be a law professor to read

00:49:19.181 --> 00:49:24.721
these essays. And we really wanted to make sure that this conversation was available

00:49:24.721 --> 00:49:26.405
and accessible to everyone.

00:49:26.840 --> 00:49:33.671
And so because MIT Press has so generously been willing to make this book open

00:49:33.671 --> 00:49:40.841
access in 2027, it means if you don't have 20-odd bucks right now, and so many Americans.

00:49:42.819 --> 00:49:47.281
Don't have any extras lying around right now, it will be available.

00:49:47.281 --> 00:49:51.211
No one will be cut out of the conversation that this book is trying to be part

00:49:51.211 --> 00:49:54.621
of just because you don't have, you know, 20 bucks at the moment.

00:49:54.621 --> 00:49:57.958
So we're really grateful for that piece of the puzzle. Yeah.

00:49:58.556 --> 00:50:07.598
Yeah, that's a pretty cool, noble gesture, you know, because like you said, it's not a hard read.

00:50:08.214 --> 00:50:12.331
You know, it's very easy because, like you said, the essays are no more than

00:50:12.331 --> 00:50:19.701
four or five pages and all that, but you can feel the depth of knowledge that

00:50:19.701 --> 00:50:22.775
each one of these contributors puts into the essay.

00:50:23.524 --> 00:50:29.184
And you understand why those people were asked to write their essays.

00:50:29.933 --> 00:50:36.061
So, again, I just want to thank you for doing that, you collaborating with Mr.

00:50:36.061 --> 00:50:40.653
Charles to do that, and for coming on the podcast.

00:50:40.764 --> 00:50:46.641
I think it's important for my listeners to be exposed to people.

00:50:47.421 --> 00:50:51.256
And I always tell folks that, you know, my guests are way smarter than I am.

00:50:51.803 --> 00:50:56.807
And so it's just always a privilege for me to bring those people onto the show. But.

00:50:58.881 --> 00:51:02.029
This is a seminal work that you've put together.

00:51:02.559 --> 00:51:08.121
And I'm really, really glad to hear that it'll be available to everyone because

00:51:08.121 --> 00:51:11.484
everyone needs to read it. And I think it's an appropriate...

00:51:13.043 --> 00:51:17.103
Reflection. I think you had made a statement earlier that every birthday we

00:51:17.103 --> 00:51:19.172
need to have a reflection about ourselves.

00:51:19.555 --> 00:51:23.403
And I think this book is a perfect reflection of where we are as Americans.

00:51:23.403 --> 00:51:28.762
So thank you again for doing the book and for being on the show.

00:51:29.337 --> 00:51:30.573
Well, thank you so much for having

00:51:30.573 --> 00:51:33.184
me. All right, guys. And we're going to catch y'all on the other side.

00:51:53.059 --> 00:52:00.599
All right, we are back. So now it is time for my next guest, Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge.

00:52:02.519 --> 00:52:07.779
Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge is an associate professor of education with expertise

00:52:07.779 --> 00:52:12.679
in community-based education and critical youth work practice at the Harvard

00:52:12.679 --> 00:52:14.194
Graduate School of Education.

00:52:14.757 --> 00:52:20.049
As a sociologist of education, Baldridge's research explores the social political

00:52:20.049 --> 00:52:22.791
context, community-based youth work,

00:52:23.488 --> 00:52:28.589
and critically examines the confluence of race, class, and gender and the impact

00:52:28.589 --> 00:52:34.964
on educational reforms that shape community-based spaces engaging Black and Latin youth.

00:52:35.867 --> 00:52:41.829
In addition, she explores the organizational and pedagogical practices employed

00:52:41.829 --> 00:52:46.287
by youth work professionals amid educational reforms and restructuring.

00:52:46.929 --> 00:52:51.639
Baldridge's first book, Reclaiming Community, Race, and the Uncertain Future

00:52:51.639 --> 00:52:57.341
of Youth Work, examines how racialized market-based reforms undermine the efforts,

00:52:57.898 --> 00:53:03.506
of Black community-based organizations to support comprehensive youth development opportunities.

00:53:04.120 --> 00:53:06.739
Her book received the 2019 Critics'

00:53:06.739 --> 00:53:10.953
Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association.

00:53:11.528 --> 00:53:17.309
With the support of the National Academy of Education's Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship program,

00:53:17.958 --> 00:53:24.759
Baldridge investigated how racial disparity discourse influences community-based

00:53:24.759 --> 00:53:30.449
spaces that engage Black youth in predominantly white cities that espouse a

00:53:30.449 --> 00:53:32.525
liberal and progressive ethos.

00:53:33.186 --> 00:53:38.051
Her second book, Laboring in the Shadows, Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work,

00:53:38.684 --> 00:53:42.770
examines the pivotal role of black youth workers in the lives of young people,

00:53:43.293 --> 00:53:48.748
and the challenges they face in an unstable and often underappreciated position.

00:53:49.809 --> 00:53:55.809
Current research examines broader issues of equity facing the out-of-school

00:53:55.809 --> 00:53:57.781
time sector nationally,

00:53:58.388 --> 00:54:04.669
to precarity of the youth work profession and how Black youth workers navigate anti-Blackness,

00:54:05.271 --> 00:54:10.279
and how Black community-based youth organizations respond to city change and

00:54:10.279 --> 00:54:15.697
displacement fueled by gentrification and educational restructuring.

00:54:17.093 --> 00:54:21.876
Baldridge's research appears in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal,

00:54:22.881 --> 00:54:29.168
Review of Research and Education, Teacher's College Record, Educational Researcher,

00:54:29.777 --> 00:54:32.308
and Race, Ethnicity, and Education.

00:54:33.538 --> 00:54:38.569
Baldridge's experiences as a youth work professional in U.S. cities and abroad

00:54:38.569 --> 00:54:40.934
also profoundly inform her research.

00:54:41.777 --> 00:54:48.575
With a deep commitment to engage research and disrupting oppressive youth development spaces,

00:54:49.214 --> 00:54:55.622
Baldridge works with several out-of-school time networks and facilitates communities of practice,

00:54:56.220 --> 00:55:00.639
with organizational leaders and youth development professionals nationwide why

00:55:00.639 --> 00:55:04.309
to sustain justice-oriented and humanizing youth,

00:55:05.119 --> 00:55:06.680
work practices.

00:55:07.448 --> 00:55:12.132
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest,

00:55:12.719 --> 00:55:16.974
on this podcast, Dr. Bianca J. Baldridge.

00:55:28.465 --> 00:55:32.976
All right, Dr. Bianca Baldridge, how are you doing?

00:55:33.934 --> 00:55:36.871
I'm doing well. I'm doing really well.

00:55:38.005 --> 00:55:45.345
Well, I'm really glad to have you on the podcast because I came across your

00:55:45.345 --> 00:55:51.045
profile in LinkedIn and I said, oh, yeah, I got to get this sister on the show.

00:55:52.245 --> 00:55:55.665
I got to at least pick her brain a little bit, especially with education.

00:55:55.665 --> 00:56:00.965
Thanks for having me. Yes, ma'am. So, so you understand there's three people

00:56:00.965 --> 00:56:03.062
that I admire the most in the world.

00:56:03.670 --> 00:56:06.747
There are social workers, veterans, and educators.

00:56:07.878 --> 00:56:13.689
And so I think, you know, my social worker friends say that social workers run the world.

00:56:14.985 --> 00:56:22.375
I get that. But, you know, I think those three professions are vital for society.

00:56:22.375 --> 00:56:26.975
I think there are other professions have their place. But I think if we're going

00:56:26.975 --> 00:56:30.515
to make it, it's going to be the social workers, the educators,

00:56:30.515 --> 00:56:32.975
and then the veterans to protect us from everybody else.

00:56:36.192 --> 00:56:40.337
So let's go ahead and get this thing started. I do a couple of icebreakers.

00:56:40.715 --> 00:56:44.470
And so the first icebreaker is a quote that I want you to respond to.

00:56:45.114 --> 00:56:51.655
And the quote is, the freedom to study how a society built on both slavery and

00:56:51.655 --> 00:56:58.090
equality moved, however unevenly, toward broader rights is not a luxury.

00:56:58.801 --> 00:57:02.105
It is part of what makes the United States worth celebrating.

00:57:02.610 --> 00:57:08.295
Attempts to ban or sanitize honest teaching about slavery, reconstruction and

00:57:08.295 --> 00:57:12.385
civil rights do not defend American exceptionalism.

00:57:12.751 --> 00:57:15.040
They undermine it. Mm-hmm.

00:57:16.078 --> 00:57:21.338
Yeah. My response to that, actually, it reminds me of James Baldwin's quote

00:57:21.338 --> 00:57:26.538
about to be educated, right, in a society is to be able to question, right, America.

00:57:27.146 --> 00:57:32.504
And so, yeah, for me, it's all about, and especially working with young people.

00:57:33.453 --> 00:57:36.576
Young people live in the same world that we live in, so they have an understanding,

00:57:37.210 --> 00:57:41.269
of societal harms. They may not have the language that adults might use,

00:57:41.645 --> 00:57:45.958
but they understand what's going on. And so I'm always, you know,

00:57:45.958 --> 00:57:48.094
you've got to be able to live in truth.

00:57:48.639 --> 00:57:51.153
And I think young people understand that. Yeah.

00:57:51.910 --> 00:57:56.824
Okay. All right. So now the next icebreaker is what I call 20 questions.

00:57:57.918 --> 00:58:03.724
Okay. So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20. 13. All right.

00:58:04.766 --> 00:58:09.381
Do you think there is such a thing as unbiased news or media and why?

00:58:10.251 --> 00:58:16.098
Unbiased news. I don't think many things are unbiased or objective, right?

00:58:16.098 --> 00:58:21.318
I think how we raise questions, how we analyze things, how we make sense of

00:58:21.318 --> 00:58:26.227
things are often filtered through how we understand ourselves and how we think about the world.

00:58:27.059 --> 00:58:35.030
But do I think that you can do a job of presenting, right, information without opinion? Sure.

00:58:35.454 --> 00:58:38.638
I think there's ways to do that, right? Journalists get trained in that.

00:58:38.638 --> 00:58:43.228
As a researcher, right, I'm trained to sort of take data, to sort of think about

00:58:43.228 --> 00:58:47.608
it in ways that are true to what the data is telling me. But that is still all

00:58:47.608 --> 00:58:50.085
very much filtered through who I am.

00:58:50.544 --> 00:58:54.341
So I guess it's a yes and no. I understand.

00:58:55.438 --> 00:59:00.228
Where on your journey of life did you decide to be an educator?

00:59:02.796 --> 00:59:08.356
So this might be embarrassing, but I remember being in the first grade and lining

00:59:08.356 --> 00:59:11.485
up my stuffed animals, pretending to teach them.

00:59:13.471 --> 00:59:19.346
I knew that I always wanted to do something with education. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles.

00:59:19.706 --> 00:59:25.013
I had amazing Black teachers, Black women teachers, and I admired them.

00:59:25.240 --> 00:59:29.390
And so I wanted to mimic them, like mimic what I saw. I loved learning.

00:59:29.785 --> 00:59:32.506
And so I knew that I always wanted to do something in education.

00:59:32.506 --> 00:59:38.206
So probably first grade, probably first grade. And then that shifted a bit as

00:59:38.526 --> 00:59:43.238
I went into middle school and high school and understood that I loved teaching.

00:59:43.465 --> 00:59:47.238
I loved working with young people, but it didn't necessarily need to be in school,

00:59:47.430 --> 00:59:50.896
right? And I started doing work and teaching and facilitating and work with

00:59:50.896 --> 00:59:53.788
young people outside of school context. So...

00:59:55.583 --> 00:59:58.856
That's great. That's where it all began. Thanks to Ms. Walford.

00:59:59.100 --> 01:00:05.189
Yeah, that's awesome. You know, because like I tell people, my journey in politics

01:00:05.189 --> 01:00:11.877
started with my parents bought me a set of world book encyclopedias at three.

01:00:14.409 --> 01:00:19.150
And I found this page. It was a two page spread of pictures.

01:00:19.847 --> 01:00:22.929
And I said, I want to be one of these pictures up here. And that was the spread

01:00:22.929 --> 01:00:24.369
for President of the United States.

01:00:25.158 --> 01:00:28.429
And then, of course, you flipped the pages and it went into detail about what

01:00:28.429 --> 01:00:32.889
the office is and all that. But it was like you had me sold on the portraits.

01:00:32.889 --> 01:00:34.365
I wanted one of those portraits. Right.

01:00:34.961 --> 01:00:40.269
So, of course, I didn't get to be president, but it started me on my journey

01:00:40.269 --> 01:00:46.594
in politics. So now I just I you know, I always believe in a superhero origin story.

01:00:47.360 --> 01:00:52.149
And so I just what was your moment. Right. And when you decided to do what you

01:00:52.149 --> 01:00:56.069
do. So that's cool that you had the little animals lined up and stuff.

01:00:58.229 --> 01:01:01.749
I love that. I love that. And you mentioned encyclopedias. Like,

01:01:01.749 --> 01:01:05.829
I remember encyclopedia salesmen, like, coming to the door. I'm old enough to know that.

01:01:07.055 --> 01:01:08.609
When they would sell it from door to door.

01:01:10.049 --> 01:01:14.049
I remember my parents getting them. Yeah, yeah. The kids don't understand that.

01:01:14.909 --> 01:01:19.059
They don't get it. As a matter of fact, the guy who was really,

01:01:19.059 --> 01:01:21.899
I think, the last Democratic governor for the state of Mississippi,

01:01:21.899 --> 01:01:26.819
Ronnie Musgrove, when he was a young man trying to make a little extra money,

01:01:26.819 --> 01:01:29.186
that's what he was doing, selling encyclopedias.

01:01:30.095 --> 01:01:34.995
You know, our children can't even imagine that. It's like, you mean the app

01:01:34.995 --> 01:01:39.775
that I could put on the phone? People were actually selling these books. Yes, yes, they were.

01:01:40.475 --> 01:01:43.965
Our parents were buying them. That's right. All right.

01:01:43.965 --> 01:01:48.625
In the introduction to the book, Laboring in the Shadows, you said youth workers,

01:01:48.625 --> 01:01:52.185
the volunteer part-time and full-time staff in these programs,

01:01:52.638 --> 01:01:55.192
are essential to American social,

01:01:55.575 --> 01:01:59.627
political, economic, and educational life. Why do you believe that?

01:02:00.469 --> 01:02:05.565
Oh, I believe that for many reasons that actually you mentioned in your introduction

01:02:05.565 --> 01:02:10.023
and thinking about social workers, and I think you mentioned veterans and educators.

01:02:10.944 --> 01:02:16.238
There are groups of workers in our society that literally help society function.

01:02:16.778 --> 01:02:20.861
And I believe that youth workers are one of them, though they're often invisible,

01:02:21.388 --> 01:02:24.146
and not always mentioned alongside classroom teachers.

01:02:24.621 --> 01:02:29.576
So youth workers, again, are the professionals who work in nonprofit youth-serving organizations,

01:02:30.335 --> 01:02:34.295
community-based serving organizations, those that might be identified as after-school

01:02:34.295 --> 01:02:38.835
programs, whether they are run by school districts or independent programs,

01:02:39.287 --> 01:02:41.268
independent organizations across the country.

01:02:42.147 --> 01:02:45.519
And so when you think about young people spending time in school,

01:02:46.244 --> 01:02:49.084
they only spend about 18% of time in school.

01:02:49.351 --> 01:02:52.306
Some of my colleagues, fellow sociologists, have studied this, right?

01:02:52.753 --> 01:02:57.105
Which means that 18% of their time is spent in school, they spend about 41%

01:02:57.105 --> 01:03:01.280
of time sleeping, which means their waking hours is another 40%.

01:03:01.599 --> 01:03:05.385
And so during that time, they are doing things like leisure activities,

01:03:05.385 --> 01:03:08.600
being at home, chores, and extracurricular activities.

01:03:08.809 --> 01:03:12.075
So spending time outside of school, engaging with their peers,

01:03:12.515 --> 01:03:15.409
or some kind of other forms of activities.

01:03:17.168 --> 01:03:21.588
During non-school hours, right, which means that parents are allowed to work,

01:03:21.959 --> 01:03:25.367
right? So when parents are allowed to work beyond the school hours,

01:03:25.704 --> 01:03:30.029
that is serving our economy, right? They can be into the workforce.

01:03:30.784 --> 01:03:35.538
Youth workers also support our school systems. Many community-based youth-serving

01:03:35.538 --> 01:03:39.288
organizations, or how I talk about them in my work, community-based educational

01:03:39.288 --> 01:03:42.803
spaces, they are often making up for what schools lack.

01:03:43.621 --> 01:03:46.841
What they can't provide, or what they refuse to provide, right?

01:03:47.166 --> 01:03:50.718
And so you have youth workers who are in many ways filling in the gap and meeting

01:03:50.718 --> 01:03:54.788
young people, not as part of their family, not as part of their school,

01:03:54.788 --> 01:03:58.868
but there are these other group of people that are supporting the social,

01:03:58.868 --> 01:04:01.755
political, educational development of young people.

01:04:02.208 --> 01:04:08.648
And so I don't think this is too much to say, but I do think that on some level

01:04:08.648 --> 01:04:13.585
society would collapse, right, if you didn't have spaces where young people could go after school.

01:04:14.315 --> 01:04:18.438
And those places that they're going after school, they are staffed by youth

01:04:18.438 --> 01:04:23.648
workers, by people who love young folks who are working to ensure that they're

01:04:23.648 --> 01:04:26.524
okay, that they are safe.

01:04:27.192 --> 01:04:31.804
And then also thinking about the number of resources that might be provided

01:04:31.972 --> 01:04:36.068
to young people. So many youth serving organizations are serving meals,

01:04:36.768 --> 01:04:40.325
providing young people with snacks after school, and they may not I've eaten that day, right?

01:04:40.714 --> 01:04:46.068
So it's essential labor that I argue is often in the shadows,

01:04:46.068 --> 01:04:48.830
right? Hence the title of the book, Laboring in the Shadows,

01:04:49.236 --> 01:04:51.312
that these organizations, these.

01:04:52.538 --> 01:05:00.114
Programs that support young people and their families are kind of everywhere, right, in many ways.

01:05:00.457 --> 01:05:03.168
So you think about our national youth-serving organizations,

01:05:03.168 --> 01:05:07.738
the Boys and Girls Club, the Y, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, like those are national

01:05:07.738 --> 01:05:11.398
programs. But there are so many independent grassroots programs that are not

01:05:11.398 --> 01:05:12.903
tethered to national networks.

01:05:13.234 --> 01:05:17.320
But then you also have work that's taking place in faith-based communities,

01:05:17.611 --> 01:05:23.468
right, or in parks, museums, libraries, right? So youth workers are really everywhere.

01:05:23.468 --> 01:05:25.119
Right. They're they're doing this labor.

01:05:25.816 --> 01:05:29.438
And I would suggest that they're often hidden in plain sight.

01:05:29.438 --> 01:05:32.326
Right. We interact with them, but we may not know that that's what they're doing.

01:05:32.779 --> 01:05:38.236
Yeah yeah but i don't think that's an extreme statement as far as to say that

01:05:38.610 --> 01:05:41.721
the society would collapse because all throughout history,

01:05:42.612 --> 01:05:46.786
there's always been programs to try to keep us out of trouble right you boy scouts,

01:05:47.645 --> 01:05:53.328
yeah right the little league baseball you know the the police action athletic

01:05:53.328 --> 01:05:58.216
league all these things were set up you mentioned boys and girls clubs those were all things to try to,

01:05:59.326 --> 01:06:03.836
keep us from getting into trouble and doing anything, you know,

01:06:03.836 --> 01:06:08.189
that little kids or teenagers or especially middle school kids.

01:06:09.106 --> 01:06:12.194
I didn't realize how bad middle school kids were until I got older.

01:06:13.446 --> 01:06:17.542
It was like, you know, I was like, was I that bad at 12 and 13?

01:06:17.920 --> 01:06:20.746
Because it was like, we didn't have middle school in Chicago.

01:06:20.746 --> 01:06:24.956
It was like you went from kindergarten to eighth grade. So maybe that minimize

01:06:24.956 --> 01:06:29.786
the damage we could do. I don't know, because we were like upperclassmen in that school.

01:06:30.729 --> 01:06:35.126
It's a special time. It is a special time of development, for sure. For sure.

01:06:35.506 --> 01:06:39.876
I spent some time working in nonprofits with middle school students,

01:06:39.876 --> 01:06:42.202
sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders.

01:06:42.540 --> 01:06:45.326
And they're cool in the sense that they will tell you the truth,

01:06:45.326 --> 01:06:46.814
right? Like they have no filter.

01:06:47.410 --> 01:06:50.496
But which is part of the reason why I think youth work is really important is

01:06:50.496 --> 01:06:54.556
because what's happening at that age, right, they're beginning to question,

01:06:54.556 --> 01:06:57.157
right, question their parents, which is why they talk back a lot, right?

01:06:57.546 --> 01:07:00.166
They're awkward, right? So they're coming into their bodies.

01:07:00.166 --> 01:07:05.054
They're trying to recognize and name like the many different kinds of emotions that they're feeling.

01:07:05.513 --> 01:07:08.833
And there's often not a space for that in traditional schools.

01:07:09.158 --> 01:07:13.446
And so when I think about the nonprofit sector and youth workers who are able

01:07:13.446 --> 01:07:17.186
to think about like, all right, middle school kid, like you're going through

01:07:17.186 --> 01:07:18.991
this, you're going through that, you're weren't this.

01:07:19.361 --> 01:07:21.386
Let's kind of think about all that together.

01:07:22.126 --> 01:07:25.927
And so I find that the youth workers who engage that population,

01:07:26.234 --> 01:07:29.666
they had their work cut out for them, but they also tend to enjoy it because

01:07:30.026 --> 01:07:33.696
you're meeting multiple needs of young people.

01:07:33.696 --> 01:07:39.699
And it feels like they all converge at the middle school level, for sure.

01:07:42.428 --> 01:07:47.617
Let's get off the horror of the middle school kids. Let's explain deficit framing

01:07:47.617 --> 01:07:50.185
versus strength-based approach.

01:07:51.009 --> 01:07:56.397
Yeah. So actually, in thinking about what you just mentioned around how and

01:07:56.397 --> 01:08:00.147
why these programs exist, right, we kind of have to think about the ways that

01:08:00.147 --> 01:08:03.522
young people, right, the category of a young person of youth,

01:08:03.894 --> 01:08:05.920
the way that they are framed in our society.

01:08:06.425 --> 01:08:10.081
And when we think about teenagers, we think about preteens, there's all these

01:08:10.354 --> 01:08:15.967
narratives around like how quote unquote bad they might be or like troublemakers.

01:08:15.967 --> 01:08:19.597
I remember growing up and my mother had a refrigerator magnet that said,

01:08:19.597 --> 01:08:21.367
you don't scare me. I have teenagers.

01:08:22.627 --> 01:08:26.397
So it's always like, you know, young people are sort of meant to be kind of

01:08:26.397 --> 01:08:29.377
controlled. Right. We're supposed to follow directions and all of that.

01:08:29.870 --> 01:08:33.959
And so at the time of even just the emergence of after-school programs when

01:08:34.297 --> 01:08:38.582
women, right, had to go into the workforce, children run unsupervised.

01:08:38.896 --> 01:08:43.104
So there's always been this language around, we got to keep kids occupied.

01:08:43.842 --> 01:08:46.677
We got to keep them occupied and off the streets. Otherwise,

01:08:46.677 --> 01:08:48.312
they're going to get into vagrancy.

01:08:48.648 --> 01:08:52.213
And so let's put some structure to this out-of-school time. Yeah.

01:08:53.943 --> 01:08:57.903
So a lot of that has sort of carried into programming today.

01:08:58.283 --> 01:09:01.963
And I've argued throughout my career in the ways that it's been classed,

01:09:01.963 --> 01:09:03.463
but then also racialized.

01:09:04.269 --> 01:09:07.943
So you get this framing, particularly around young people of color,

01:09:08.323 --> 01:09:12.877
primarily Black and Latinx young people, young people living in poverty,

01:09:13.219 --> 01:09:15.023
that if they're not occupied,

01:09:15.543 --> 01:09:20.111
they're going to roam around the streets and they're going to terrorize the neighborhood.

01:09:20.848 --> 01:09:27.963
And so it becomes this, so then community organizations then become these spaces

01:09:27.963 --> 01:09:30.953
of containment for black and brown kids.

01:09:31.255 --> 01:09:35.373
And I've spent a lot of my career kind of rejecting that because that gets into

01:09:35.373 --> 01:09:41.185
these ideas of what they're perceived to be lacking or deficit, right?

01:09:41.685 --> 01:09:48.280
And so in youth programming, you get frames that, oh, these kids are at risk.

01:09:48.593 --> 01:09:50.614
They're broken. They need to be fixed.

01:09:51.014 --> 01:09:57.909
And I think on the surface, that language doesn't appear to be kind of this negative framing.

01:09:58.309 --> 01:10:01.263
But when you think about it, it's like, well, at risk of what?

01:10:01.663 --> 01:10:06.753
It often puts the blame on individuals and on culture and not in what's lacking

01:10:06.753 --> 01:10:10.463
in institutions and what's on sort of structural problems that sort of create

01:10:10.463 --> 01:10:15.564
the conditions that young people and, you know, individuals are trying to navigate.

01:10:16.104 --> 01:10:19.513
And so that deficit framing throughout my career, I've really sort of pushed

01:10:19.513 --> 01:10:22.799
back on it as it pertains to Black education and Black youth.

01:10:23.759 --> 01:10:27.597
Because a lack of or something that's different is not deficient.

01:10:28.021 --> 01:10:34.359
And that those, the language around youth work that is deficit-oriented positions

01:10:34.359 --> 01:10:38.739
these organizations as their saviors, as something to be fixed.

01:10:39.590 --> 01:10:44.599
And also that kind of, I think, takes away from their humanity, right?

01:10:44.599 --> 01:10:47.979
And it becomes that these organizations are only set up for,

01:10:47.979 --> 01:10:52.519
you know, kids of color, right, Black kids or poor kids, when all young people,

01:10:52.519 --> 01:10:54.991
right, deserve opportunities to be engaged after school.

01:10:55.624 --> 01:11:00.828
The strengths-based approach, on the other hand, is really not looking at what's lacking.

01:11:02.162 --> 01:11:02.262
But.

01:11:04.702 --> 01:11:08.745
What is already held, right, by young people? What are their talents? What are their gifts?

01:11:10.842 --> 01:11:13.661
What has their family and their communities poured into them?

01:11:14.619 --> 01:11:18.282
And that the different approach to that is thinking about organizations who

01:11:18.282 --> 01:11:22.702
can look at a young person and say, I see you, I see you're already brilliant.

01:11:22.702 --> 01:11:25.358
I see you're already whole. I'm just here to help.

01:11:26.211 --> 01:11:30.802
I'm here to enhance what you already have. I'm here to maybe expose you to the

01:11:30.802 --> 01:11:32.162
things that you want to learn about.

01:11:32.411 --> 01:11:37.200
Or things that you may not have access to, but there's nothing wrong with you as a person.

01:11:37.970 --> 01:11:40.976
I think much too often, particularly in the education system,

01:11:41.256 --> 01:11:43.479
we look at young people as problems.

01:11:44.414 --> 01:11:49.402
And in the youth workspace, particularly Black and Latinx young people,

01:11:49.402 --> 01:11:55.175
they're looked as problems. And I don't see young people as problems, right?

01:11:55.504 --> 01:11:59.862
You know, I see them as joy. I see them as brilliance. I see them as needing

01:11:59.862 --> 01:12:01.994
opportunities, you know, needing to be heard.

01:12:02.377 --> 01:12:05.792
And so I think that approach, you know, coming from a strength-based approach

01:12:05.792 --> 01:12:08.812
is much, much better than a deficit approach.

01:12:08.812 --> 01:12:13.942
And again, I can't emphasize enough how sort of the field of youth work has

01:12:13.942 --> 01:12:17.548
come a long way in acknowledging this, right?

01:12:17.925 --> 01:12:21.512
And it's taken not only my work, but like lots of people before me who have

01:12:21.512 --> 01:12:24.932
said, like, we have to frame this work in different ways, right?

01:12:24.932 --> 01:12:27.647
Again, we're not fixing anybody. We're not saving anybody.

01:12:27.967 --> 01:12:30.865
We are responding to structural conditions, right?

01:12:31.085 --> 01:12:36.202
These programs exist because of failures in society, not because anything is

01:12:36.202 --> 01:12:40.462
inherently wrong or deficient about young people or their families or communities.

01:12:41.457 --> 01:12:45.977
You recently said Black communities have always found ways to educate,

01:12:45.977 --> 01:12:48.829
nurture, and prepare Black youth for the world.

01:12:49.298 --> 01:12:52.545
Give an example of this resilience. Yeah.

01:12:53.741 --> 01:12:57.059
I love that question. And I'll say that

01:12:57.430 --> 01:13:00.797
to give a little context to my answer, what I try to do in my book,

01:13:00.797 --> 01:13:04.743
Laboring in the Shadows, is connect contemporary Black youth workers who are

01:13:05.114 --> 01:13:09.275
engaging in organizations with young people today to a longer history,

01:13:10.226 --> 01:13:11.387
of communal care.

01:13:11.387 --> 01:13:14.376
And resistance and survival within Black communities.

01:13:14.818 --> 01:13:19.483
And so I often point to the example of the Black Panther Party, right?

01:13:19.860 --> 01:13:24.437
And their labor and their education work with young people. So programs like

01:13:24.437 --> 01:13:29.077
the Free Breakfast Program, thinking about their community and survival conferences,

01:13:30.078 --> 01:13:34.728
The ways in which they would emphasize critical consciousness and social awareness

01:13:34.728 --> 01:13:36.398
for young people, right?

01:13:36.398 --> 01:13:40.798
That kind of political education work even precedes them, right?

01:13:40.798 --> 01:13:46.148
Like we've always found ways to nurture, protect, and educate young people.

01:13:46.148 --> 01:13:49.470
I think even before then, I talk about in the book,

01:13:50.017 --> 01:13:56.098
Mary McLeod Bethune and the work of the Youth Administration and the work that

01:13:56.098 --> 01:14:00.998
she did for Black youth in finding employment opportunities and opportunities

01:14:00.998 --> 01:14:02.314
for civic engagement, right?

01:14:02.564 --> 01:14:07.898
So there's always been the work, right, of whether it's informal,

01:14:07.898 --> 01:14:13.448
whether it's, you know, grandparents at the kitchen table, whether it's a formal organization.

01:14:14.220 --> 01:14:18.385
Like the National Youth Administration led by Mary McLeod Bethune,

01:14:18.675 --> 01:14:20.422
or whether it's the Black Panther Party, right?

01:14:20.661 --> 01:14:27.178
There's always been an effort to not only educate young people,

01:14:27.598 --> 01:14:31.028
so in terms of what's happening in schools, but also in prepare them for the

01:14:31.028 --> 01:14:35.228
world that they were going to inhabit and how the world was going to see them.

01:14:35.228 --> 01:14:40.396
And it's often, as Black people, less than human or as a problem.

01:14:40.814 --> 01:14:45.324
Right. So how to navigate like white supremacist institutions. Right.

01:14:45.713 --> 01:14:48.836
How to sort of carry yourself in the world.

01:14:49.498 --> 01:14:54.668
All of that is a part of the education. Right. So education is not just schooling.

01:14:54.668 --> 01:14:57.650
Right. It's also how to show up in the world, how to navigate the world.

01:14:58.060 --> 01:15:02.360
But that's just always been essential to black communities. Right.

01:15:02.620 --> 01:15:04.896
I think about growing up in South L.A., right.

01:15:05.988 --> 01:15:10.698
You know, I got talked to by my parents, by my uncles, by my aunts,

01:15:10.698 --> 01:15:14.591
cousins about, you know, how the world was going to perceive me. Right.

01:15:14.870 --> 01:15:18.708
That was an education that I took with me into the classroom when I went to

01:15:18.708 --> 01:15:20.814
college, went to UC Berkeley.

01:15:21.074 --> 01:15:25.398
Right. As you know how to prepare for that. Right. As a black student and being

01:15:25.398 --> 01:15:28.198
one of few black students on campus in a predominantly white institution.

01:15:28.424 --> 01:15:33.310
How was I going to understand who I was right as a black woman in that space?

01:15:33.625 --> 01:15:37.698
So that kind of education is not only essential to Black youth work,

01:15:37.698 --> 01:15:42.624
but it's always been a part of Black educational practice. Yeah.

01:15:43.472 --> 01:15:45.236
And that's, you know, and that's something that.

01:15:46.643 --> 01:15:53.121
I guess I try to wrap my mind around a lot of times UCL, Berkeley,

01:15:53.809 --> 01:15:59.498
you know, Northwestern schools, even Harvard, you know.

01:16:00.600 --> 01:16:05.925
I remember going to visit my friend who went to Northwestern.

01:16:07.002 --> 01:16:13.582
And I remember seeing they used to, I guess they had the dorms where the cafeterias were in the dorm.

01:16:14.314 --> 01:16:20.356
Dorm and so all the all the black students that lived in that dorm sat at that one table,

01:16:21.013 --> 01:16:26.123
and I and I have to and I have to remind myself that I was spoiled I went to

01:16:26.123 --> 01:16:30.953
Jackson State okay so when I when I listen to you and my friends and other folks

01:16:30.953 --> 01:16:34.048
talk about your experiences at these colleges it's like,

01:16:34.685 --> 01:16:37.383
oh yeah that's right it wasn't that many of them around there,

01:16:38.123 --> 01:16:39.804
you know It was like they all hung out together.

01:16:40.083 --> 01:16:43.883
It was just weird to see all the AK sitting next to the Delta,

01:16:43.883 --> 01:16:45.103
sitting next to the Sigma Gamma

01:16:45.103 --> 01:16:48.053
Rho, and then the Q. And they were all sitting at the same lunch table.

01:16:49.583 --> 01:16:54.773
And I was just like, wow, that's, yeah. So I have to keep, when you said what

01:16:54.773 --> 01:16:57.783
you said, that's what triggered that about Berkeley. It was like,

01:16:57.783 --> 01:17:00.861
yeah, I guess there wasn't a whole lot of black kids when she was there at Berkeley.

01:17:02.140 --> 01:17:07.513
Yeah. Okay. Robin D.G. Kelly said, the catalyst for political engagement has

01:17:07.513 --> 01:17:12.388
never been misery, poverty, and oppression, but the promise of constructing a new world.

01:17:12.876 --> 01:17:14.896
Do you agree with that statement and why?

01:17:15.631 --> 01:17:23.463
Oh, absolutely. I absolutely adore the work of Robin D.G. Kelly and was so thrilled

01:17:23.463 --> 01:17:25.251
that he was able to blurb the book.

01:17:26.199 --> 01:17:29.478
And his notions of freedom dreaming.

01:17:32.098 --> 01:17:36.479
Is so important to me in many ways. So being trained as a sociologist,

01:17:37.039 --> 01:17:41.756
I can talk all day about social conditions and structures and systems of inequality.

01:17:42.123 --> 01:17:43.399
And I do that. I can do that well.

01:17:44.548 --> 01:17:48.439
I love doing that. I love to be able to point out the ways in which structural

01:17:48.439 --> 01:17:53.241
oppression sort of shapes our lived experiences. I love doing that.

01:17:53.835 --> 01:17:59.149
But also recognizing that there has to be room for not only what I want to tear

01:17:59.149 --> 01:18:03.721
down, but also what I want to build, what I want to create, what I want to imagine,

01:18:03.952 --> 01:18:05.543
right? What the vision is.

01:18:05.938 --> 01:18:10.439
And so the importance of activists, right? I mean, this is, you know,

01:18:10.439 --> 01:18:15.259
drawing on Kelly's work and thinking about the systems we might be tearing down,

01:18:15.259 --> 01:18:16.759
but what's going to be in its place?

01:18:17.538 --> 01:18:21.779
What is, what questions do we have, right? What is our imagination?

01:18:21.779 --> 01:18:23.001
What is it that we want to see?

01:18:23.546 --> 01:18:27.759
And what I think is so powerful about youth work, particularly in Black space,

01:18:27.759 --> 01:18:30.629
and I should have said this at the beginning, but I've been a youth worker since

01:18:30.629 --> 01:18:35.534
I was 15, right? So I have always worked alongside young people.

01:18:35.917 --> 01:18:40.049
And it did that all the way through, you know, my graduate program.

01:18:40.049 --> 01:18:44.119
And there are ways, as a professor now, there's ways that I engage young people,

01:18:44.119 --> 01:18:46.945
youth workers, and program leaders around the country.

01:18:47.592 --> 01:18:52.659
But that process of being able to imagine a future, to be able to dream,

01:18:52.659 --> 01:18:57.913
to be able to create and build is so essential, I think, in life affirming for young people.

01:18:58.308 --> 01:19:01.769
And to be able to have the space, to create space, to create opportunities for

01:19:01.769 --> 01:19:06.829
young people to dream and to imagine beyond what they think is possible is really

01:19:06.829 --> 01:19:10.542
crucial, right? It's really, really crucial to building the world that we want to see.

01:19:11.498 --> 01:19:16.208
And so whether it's the idea of freedom dreaming, whether it's sort of sparking

01:19:16.208 --> 01:19:19.698
creativity or thinking about not only what you're going to tear down,

01:19:19.698 --> 01:19:22.785
but what you're going to build, that process is really important.

01:19:23.487 --> 01:19:26.587
And I also think it makes room for critical hope.

01:19:27.312 --> 01:19:32.620
So as I was writing the book, well, doing the research for the book was collected,

01:19:33.265 --> 01:19:38.348
really at various periods of crises and struggle, right?

01:19:38.348 --> 01:19:43.540
So one of the case studies in the book is a city, a Midwestern city,

01:19:43.882 --> 01:19:48.540
where 75% of Black youth live below the poverty line,

01:19:49.538 --> 01:19:53.878
where there was police violence against young Black people, where there was

01:19:53.878 --> 01:19:58.440
violence on the part of white teachers in attacking Black students.

01:19:59.084 --> 01:20:02.518
And then another period, so 2020, right?

01:20:03.069 --> 01:20:07.998
So on the onset of COVID, as well as what Robin D.G. Kelly calls Black Spring.

01:20:07.998 --> 01:20:13.619
So the uprisings against police brutality and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

01:20:13.950 --> 01:20:19.293
I think about Ezekiel Ford, you know, 20 make eight, right? And the list goes on and on and on.

01:20:19.629 --> 01:20:23.571
All this was happening while I was interviewing people.

01:20:24.383 --> 01:20:29.548
And while they're witnessing sort of the loop of Black death in the media over

01:20:29.548 --> 01:20:32.632
and over and over again, they were also out protesting.

01:20:33.797 --> 01:20:37.457
They were, you know, in Zoom school.

01:20:38.815 --> 01:20:44.132
They were, you know, surviving and trying to sort of sustain their life,

01:20:44.603 --> 01:20:48.200
but also still hopeful for change.

01:20:48.787 --> 01:20:52.457
And I use the word critical hope, and I'm borrowing from various scholars,

01:20:52.457 --> 01:20:56.837
including Jeff Duncan Andrade, who talks about critical hope in the sense that

01:20:56.837 --> 01:21:02.377
it's not a dismissal or not that you don't acknowledge systemic oppression or

01:21:02.377 --> 01:21:03.538
white supremacist forces.

01:21:03.957 --> 01:21:08.107
But it's recognizing, right, that that change can happen, right,

01:21:08.107 --> 01:21:13.260
or that we can sort of push back, right, on inequality so that it's a critical hope.

01:21:13.850 --> 01:21:18.317
And I think that process is just extremely important, right,

01:21:18.317 --> 01:21:21.877
to have this both and, to have this awareness of the systems and forces,

01:21:22.509 --> 01:21:24.997
that sort of shape our lives and that can constrain our lives,

01:21:24.997 --> 01:21:30.263
but also to remain visionary, right, as our ancestors did,

01:21:30.956 --> 01:21:33.337
right? As our ancestors did.

01:21:35.697 --> 01:21:41.395
The fighting and the survival, all of that, but wishing for a better tomorrow,

01:21:41.982 --> 01:21:43.102
for those who came behind them.

01:21:44.460 --> 01:21:50.362
That's why I do what I do, is I want to make this better for those who are behind me.

01:21:50.646 --> 01:21:55.957
And to do that, I can't lose that critical hope. I can't lose that sense of

01:21:55.957 --> 01:22:01.692
imagination or that visioning and the ability to dream of something different. Yeah.

01:22:02.839 --> 01:22:07.679
How can the American education system be reconstituted to fulfill the promise

01:22:07.679 --> 01:22:09.660
of constructing a new world?

01:22:10.136 --> 01:22:16.349
Oh, you know, that's a good question. And I think it's partly part of the reason

01:22:16.349 --> 01:22:19.669
why I work outside of the school system in many ways.

01:22:19.987 --> 01:22:23.219
And let me let me break that down a little bit. Right. Because I do think that

01:22:23.579 --> 01:22:26.079
when we think about schooling.

01:22:26.399 --> 01:22:30.838
Right. In American society and the exclusion of black folks. Right.

01:22:31.191 --> 01:22:34.850
The degradation and exclusion of native folks and indigenous folks. Right.

01:22:35.300 --> 01:22:39.759
We have to sort of think about the education system in that way and the ways

01:22:39.759 --> 01:22:42.859
that it wasn't designed right for us. And so because of that,

01:22:42.859 --> 01:22:49.827
there are mechanisms and processes within school systems that continually fail. Right. Our kids.

01:22:50.739 --> 01:22:52.498
And in many ways, I think that's by design.

01:22:53.550 --> 01:22:59.469
That said, right, there are schools and school systems and educators who are

01:22:59.735 --> 01:23:04.277
brilliant and sort of, you know, working and supporting young people.

01:23:04.845 --> 01:23:09.319
As a sociologist of education that studies outside of school,

01:23:09.319 --> 01:23:13.739
that studies community organizations that in many ways are a complement or a supplement to school,

01:23:14.529 --> 01:23:20.376
what I would envision, right, to really kind of make this better.

01:23:22.158 --> 01:23:25.229
Is to think about what's happening in the out-of-school sector,

01:23:25.229 --> 01:23:30.299
what's happening in youth workspaces, to bring that in connection and in partnership

01:23:30.299 --> 01:23:31.569
to what's happening in schools.

01:23:31.929 --> 01:23:37.389
And that's not to say that what's happening in community-based educational spaces

01:23:37.389 --> 01:23:42.647
needs to fold into what's happening in schools, but to recognize them both, right, as,

01:23:43.243 --> 01:23:48.749
separate entities, but entities that could come together to support the optimal

01:23:48.749 --> 01:23:50.015
development of young people.

01:23:51.028 --> 01:23:54.344
And I say this for a couple of reasons, just to kind of give you some concrete examples.

01:23:55.065 --> 01:23:58.855
In many schools of education, there are teacher education programs, right?

01:23:59.302 --> 01:24:03.578
When I was on the faculty at UW-Madison, I had a colleague who sent her pre-service

01:24:03.578 --> 01:24:07.424
teachers not into the classroom first for their training.

01:24:07.813 --> 01:24:11.138
She sent them to community-based youth-serving organizations to work alongside

01:24:11.138 --> 01:24:15.729
youth workers to learn how to connect with young people, right?

01:24:16.134 --> 01:24:20.648
So in schools, there are often constraints and constraints and,

01:24:20.648 --> 01:24:23.848
you know, teachers having to teach the test and all these things and their jobs

01:24:23.848 --> 01:24:25.265
are extremely difficult.

01:24:25.620 --> 01:24:29.468
But oftentimes there's not a sort of time or the ways in which sometimes teachers

01:24:29.468 --> 01:24:33.613
are sort of put in this position of authority and having all the power.

01:24:34.106 --> 01:24:37.801
Whereas in youth work, not all the time, but for the most part,

01:24:38.097 --> 01:24:41.438
youth workers are able to connect with young people without some of the barriers

01:24:41.438 --> 01:24:42.625
that teachers face. right?

01:24:43.113 --> 01:24:47.648
And so it's not lost on me that many schools of education are looking to community-based

01:24:47.948 --> 01:24:51.858
youth-serving organizations and youth workers for how to connect with young

01:24:51.858 --> 01:24:55.058
people, how to think about whole child development, right?

01:24:55.058 --> 01:25:00.332
That academics are important, but also social, emotional support is also important.

01:25:00.820 --> 01:25:04.518
So when I think about how we might transform the education system,

01:25:04.518 --> 01:25:06.154
I think we have to learn from...

01:25:07.304 --> 01:25:13.335
All educators, right? Young people have many educators in their lives.

01:25:13.631 --> 01:25:16.795
That includes their families. That includes youth workers.

01:25:17.091 --> 01:25:18.778
That includes classroom teachers.

01:25:19.092 --> 01:25:23.394
That there are multiple spaces of learning. That's not just the school walls,

01:25:23.394 --> 01:25:26.914
right? It's what's happening in parks. What's happening on their blocks,

01:25:26.914 --> 01:25:28.958
right? What's happening in their faith-based communities.

01:25:29.353 --> 01:25:33.344
All that is important. So I really think it's important in particular for youth

01:25:33.344 --> 01:25:38.004
workers, program leaders to be in conversation, right, with classroom teachers

01:25:38.004 --> 01:25:40.057
and school administrators.

01:25:40.803 --> 01:25:45.979
I'll give you one more example. So at the beginning of COVID,

01:25:46.327 --> 01:25:50.644
I had one Twitter rant, one Twitter rant back then.

01:25:50.644 --> 01:25:55.964
And there were all these conversations about what was going to happen in the

01:25:55.964 --> 01:26:00.132
fall, right? Because the onset of the pandemic came in March.

01:26:00.515 --> 01:26:03.892
And so there was all this panic about what was going to happen with schools.

01:26:04.316 --> 01:26:08.034
So there were these panels and all these conversations and school principals

01:26:08.034 --> 01:26:11.224
and teachers and all these people. And I'm like, this is great,

01:26:11.224 --> 01:26:13.013
but you're not doing this alone.

01:26:13.652 --> 01:26:16.938
Young people have community organizations they go to after school.

01:26:17.320 --> 01:26:23.084
Do you know where your kids are going after school? Right? So what's happening in those spaces?

01:26:24.744 --> 01:26:27.193
What can we learn? How can we partner?

01:26:28.063 --> 01:26:32.651
And as we saw, there were libraries that were opening their spaces to provide

01:26:33.001 --> 01:26:35.172
internet services, right, to young people.

01:26:35.501 --> 01:26:39.791
You have folks who were, you know, pivoting and working in parks, right?

01:26:40.186 --> 01:26:43.203
You know, I think about San Francisco that, you know, created these learning

01:26:43.203 --> 01:26:47.053
hubs to support the kids of essential workers, right?

01:26:47.053 --> 01:26:51.703
So you had parks and recreation coming together with libraries,

01:26:51.703 --> 01:26:54.883
coming together with nonprofit youth-serving organizations to make sure that

01:26:54.883 --> 01:26:56.743
young people could learn, right?

01:26:57.316 --> 01:27:01.969
So it's just, youth workers have always been there.

01:27:02.218 --> 01:27:07.635
They're also exemplary at care work, and in particular, care in crises.

01:27:08.744 --> 01:27:11.871
And so I think we have to learn from each other.

01:27:12.456 --> 01:27:17.093
We have to be able to pull like what's wonderful and beautiful about schools

01:27:17.093 --> 01:27:20.878
and what's wonderful and beautiful about community organizations and be able to talk to each other.

01:27:21.163 --> 01:27:26.753
But that also requires, right, school systems and classroom educators to see

01:27:26.753 --> 01:27:34.123
youth workers as educators, right, as pedagogues, even if they don't have the same kind of degrees or,

01:27:34.763 --> 01:27:37.715
training in the way that they think is needed, right?

01:27:38.097 --> 01:27:41.953
So I just think that's really important for us to just really think about young

01:27:41.953 --> 01:27:46.183
people's broader ecosystem of learning, that it's not just schools.

01:27:46.183 --> 01:27:48.141
It's never been just schools.

01:27:49.783 --> 01:27:55.473
It's never been just that, right? So we have to really learn from young people's

01:27:55.473 --> 01:28:00.031
broader ecosystem of development and the people, the educators who are in that ecosystem.

01:28:01.484 --> 01:28:04.543
So, I forgot to ask you the Harvard question. I'll get back to that.

01:28:04.543 --> 01:28:10.123
But since you're on this flow, in the context of changing the American educational

01:28:10.123 --> 01:28:15.621
system, was the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education a good thing or a bad thing?

01:28:16.716 --> 01:28:22.161
Dismantling? You mean under this current administration? Yes, ma'am. Yeah, I mean.

01:28:25.975 --> 01:28:29.464
I mean, there's so much to say.

01:28:30.962 --> 01:28:34.753
One, I think it's a bad thing, right? I think there's a lot of infrastructure

01:28:35.153 --> 01:28:38.283
that has been established that has been undone.

01:28:38.933 --> 01:28:46.248
I often think about protections for students and for teachers that are completely undermined now.

01:28:46.902 --> 01:28:52.705
That is a disservice and heartbreaking in many ways. I mean,

01:28:52.705 --> 01:28:54.281
I think there's just so much to rebuild.

01:28:54.708 --> 01:28:58.235
And this is not to say, right, because, you know, as a sociologist of education,

01:28:58.235 --> 01:29:03.285
I have lots of critiques, right, of the way, you know, the federal government,

01:29:03.285 --> 01:29:07.385
you know, treats education and the way that things are set up.

01:29:07.385 --> 01:29:09.782
I have lots of criticisms for sure.

01:29:10.333 --> 01:29:14.885
But also I think about the infrastructural support, like for one,

01:29:14.885 --> 01:29:20.695
in thinking about students with disabilities and the protections, right?

01:29:21.072 --> 01:29:27.695
Like how all those things get undermined, it's just a really dangerous position.

01:29:28.855 --> 01:29:31.675
That we're in. So no, it's not a good thing at all.

01:29:32.734 --> 01:29:39.175
Yeah, because based on that answer, you're more about the foundations of what

01:29:39.175 --> 01:29:44.877
was good and build on that instead of just scrapping the whole project and starting from scratch.

01:29:45.661 --> 01:29:50.475
And I mean, you'll get arguments from either way, but I respect what you're

01:29:50.475 --> 01:29:53.705
saying as far as it's not a good thing.

01:29:53.705 --> 01:29:58.877
I agree. It's not a good thing. But, you know, because you're a visionary person,

01:29:59.536 --> 01:30:05.195
I was I wanted to pick your brain on that, which leads me back to the Harvard question.

01:30:05.195 --> 01:30:12.829
So why is Harvard an important American institution, especially as it pertains to your profession?

01:30:15.255 --> 01:30:18.240
Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think...

01:30:19.593 --> 01:30:23.243
So I've been at Harvard for, I think I just finished my fourth year there.

01:30:23.243 --> 01:30:28.907
As I mentioned, I was on the faculty at UW-Madison before that for a while, for several years.

01:30:29.786 --> 01:30:34.653
I don't, let me answer this in a couple of ways, maybe without losing my job.

01:30:34.653 --> 01:30:43.193
But I think that sort of universities in general, right? Like they are important

01:30:43.193 --> 01:30:45.270
in terms of the knowledge that gets produced.

01:30:45.659 --> 01:30:49.083
And I think that's absolutely important and critical. I know I've been working

01:30:49.083 --> 01:30:53.133
in universities for a very, very long time for that reason, right?

01:30:53.133 --> 01:30:55.429
The knowledge production, the learning and all of that.

01:30:56.010 --> 01:31:01.783
I mean, I think that Harvard as being considered one of the best institutions

01:31:01.783 --> 01:31:05.230
in the country and in the world, that's not lost on me.

01:31:07.342 --> 01:31:11.608
And I will also say I think there are many universities throughout the country,

01:31:12.184 --> 01:31:15.003
where there are brilliant minds, brilliant thinkers, brilliant scholars who

01:31:15.003 --> 01:31:21.028
are pushing for new knowledge that help us as a society,

01:31:22.105 --> 01:31:28.313
not only solve complex problems in ways that are creative.

01:31:28.313 --> 01:31:34.770
And so I think all universities can, not all universities, but many universities can get that.

01:31:35.257 --> 01:31:39.673
That credit. What I do think is special about Harvard, and I'll just kind of

01:31:39.673 --> 01:31:46.079
brag on where I'm situated, which is the School of Education, is that you do get.

01:31:48.139 --> 01:31:56.419
Various approaches to solving complex educational problems, which are deep social

01:31:56.419 --> 01:31:57.658
and political problems as well.

01:31:58.401 --> 01:32:02.029
And this is something that I often say to my students, right?

01:32:02.029 --> 01:32:04.723
And it's, you know, going back to your question about the Department of Education,

01:32:05.557 --> 01:32:11.089
we have created a mess, like complicated, complex, interconnected,

01:32:12.047 --> 01:32:16.460
systemic problems as it relates to education in America.

01:32:17.307 --> 01:32:21.449
And so I don't believe in like one thing, like a silver bullet,

01:32:21.449 --> 01:32:26.878
like one solution fixing multiple complex social problems, right?

01:32:27.301 --> 01:32:32.139
And so what I appreciate about Harvard and particularly the Graduate School

01:32:32.139 --> 01:32:36.299
of Education is that I have colleagues who are working in many different dimensions of education.

01:32:36.299 --> 01:32:40.759
So whether it's policy, whether it's thinking about storytelling and the power

01:32:40.759 --> 01:32:45.159
of storytelling to create change, Or, you know, there's so many different avenues

01:32:45.159 --> 01:32:49.674
and ways in which people are tackling, right, educational and social problems.

01:32:50.015 --> 01:32:53.709
So that's important to me. And I think whether it's a Harvard question or a

01:32:53.709 --> 01:32:59.591
university question, I think it's in general the ways that scholarship can influence social change.

01:33:00.201 --> 01:33:05.379
And then being in an education school and being a sociologist that is,

01:33:06.357 --> 01:33:09.526
I always say that I, you know, have a foot in the community.

01:33:10.879 --> 01:33:14.849
And that's exactly where I want to be. Like, I never want to abandon what got

01:33:14.849 --> 01:33:20.015
me to where I am. And for me, that's community, that's young people, that's youth workers.

01:33:20.369 --> 01:33:26.998
And so I appreciate universities that honor and celebrate community engagement

01:33:27.375 --> 01:33:32.869
and that are also honest, right, about the harm that they've caused as universities, right?

01:33:32.869 --> 01:33:37.283
So I think about Harvard's Legacy of Slavery Project and other kinds of projects

01:33:37.660 --> 01:33:41.414
where you have to be sort of accountable, right, to the harm that you've caused in the past.

01:33:41.785 --> 01:33:44.819
Whether you were there to create it or not, right, as a part of an institution

01:33:44.819 --> 01:33:47.419
that has this legacy, it's important to address that.

01:33:48.175 --> 01:33:54.215
So I appreciate that as well. But I would say my overall answer is universities

01:33:54.215 --> 01:33:59.315
in general, including Harvard, bring together really, really brilliant minds that,

01:34:00.026 --> 01:34:06.475
hopefully understand that not one idea, not one theory, not one method is going

01:34:06.475 --> 01:34:10.361
to solve the complexity of the problems that we have in this country. Yeah.

01:34:11.156 --> 01:34:16.990
So I want to be cognizant of your time. I've got two questions left.

01:34:17.344 --> 01:34:19.248
So if you want to, well, okay.

01:34:19.871 --> 01:34:22.245
How does police violence impact education?

01:34:23.955 --> 01:34:30.115
Oh, yeah. Anyways, so I don't think you can talk about education without talking

01:34:30.115 --> 01:34:35.115
about other social issues and forces and systems. So I don't think you can talk

01:34:35.115 --> 01:34:38.121
about schools without talking about policing in this country.

01:34:39.236 --> 01:34:42.255
You know, I have many colleagues who sort of study the parallels,

01:34:42.255 --> 01:34:47.445
right, between the prison system and the education system or the carceral logics

01:34:47.445 --> 01:34:48.926
that, right, exist within schools.

01:34:49.274 --> 01:34:55.205
And so while this is not like my research area, I'm very much have always been concerned.

01:34:55.205 --> 01:34:59.715
It can sort of point to the ways in which carceral logics enter classrooms,

01:34:59.715 --> 01:35:06.883
enter sort of the ways in which young people can and can't move within schools, right?

01:35:07.203 --> 01:35:11.577
The ways in which they are surveilled, the ways in which they are physically attacked, right?

01:35:11.896 --> 01:35:15.435
The ways in which they are silenced and often pleased for the ways that they

01:35:15.435 --> 01:35:17.957
show up, their physical appearance to what they say.

01:35:18.787 --> 01:35:22.937
All of that, right, is deeply connected for sure.

01:35:23.279 --> 01:35:27.365
Some of my favorite scholars who sort of talk about the carcerality and the

01:35:27.365 --> 01:35:31.400
connections between education and schooling, I think about Damien Sojourner.

01:35:32.494 --> 01:35:35.704
His book, First Strike, is incredible.

01:35:36.088 --> 01:35:39.694
And that way I think about David Stovall, he mentioned Chicago.

01:35:40.134 --> 01:35:43.974
He's one of my favorites. And sort of just thinking about the relationship,

01:35:43.974 --> 01:35:49.102
right, between sort of the prison industrial complex and education.

01:35:49.869 --> 01:35:53.184
So there's absolutely lots of parallels. When I was at UW-Madison,

01:35:53.184 --> 01:35:55.014
I taught a course on youth education and society.

01:35:55.014 --> 01:36:00.744
We had an entire section on carceral logics and thinking about what many scholars

01:36:00.744 --> 01:36:04.894
have termed not the school-to-prison pipeline, per se, but a nexus,

01:36:04.894 --> 01:36:09.294
right, in the ways in which it's deeply embedded, right?

01:36:09.956 --> 01:36:15.594
Yeah, I think about David Turner at UCLA, who has done incredible work with

01:36:15.594 --> 01:36:20.564
organizing Black and brown young men in their fight against police violence,

01:36:20.564 --> 01:36:24.051
right, in schools and within communities in South Central Los Angeles.

01:36:24.702 --> 01:36:28.274
So there's just tons of brilliant work out there on this topic,

01:36:28.274 --> 01:36:31.640
but the connections are real for sure.

01:36:32.000 --> 01:36:39.124
And again, always deeply concerned about the carceral logics that sort of seep

01:36:39.124 --> 01:36:44.239
into education in ways that we may not even fully recognize.

01:36:46.060 --> 01:36:50.100
And that sometimes has shown up in youth work as well in terms of policing the

01:36:50.100 --> 01:36:54.573
bodies of young people, policing the sexuality of young people,

01:36:54.927 --> 01:36:57.193
particularly Black women and girls.

01:36:57.519 --> 01:37:03.670
And so, you know, I really always encourage anybody who works with young people,

01:37:03.670 --> 01:37:07.270
whether you're in schools and out of schools, I always ask them to sort of question

01:37:07.270 --> 01:37:10.248
like why they ask young people to do certain things and where it comes from.

01:37:11.079 --> 01:37:15.060
Right when we when we are struggling for for power and authority over young

01:37:15.060 --> 01:37:20.170
people right like that logic of like i need to have this power i need to have

01:37:20.170 --> 01:37:23.170
like this kind of authority over young people and their bodies and what they

01:37:23.170 --> 01:37:25.660
say and what they do for me is very carceral.

01:37:27.433 --> 01:37:32.290
And i don't know that we always think about it in that in that way and you know

01:37:32.290 --> 01:37:35.950
i mean i mentioned this earlier i mean i think that there are ideas we have

01:37:35.950 --> 01:37:40.939
about young people as a just category right as a population, for sure.

01:37:41.310 --> 01:37:46.050
And then when you add in race and class and gender, right, there's more that gets added into that.

01:37:46.050 --> 01:37:51.311
And so I think we really have to sometimes pause, right, and for sure absolutely sort of reflect,

01:37:52.333 --> 01:37:57.029
like deep critical reflection on why we do the things we do,

01:37:57.755 --> 01:38:03.180
you know, why our schools look particular ways, like why we are in such a quest

01:38:03.180 --> 01:38:06.310
for power and authority, right, over young people as though they can't make

01:38:06.310 --> 01:38:08.661
decisions for themselves, you know, yeah.

01:38:09.409 --> 01:38:14.170
Yeah. And part of it is just exterior, too, because if you go to Jackson,

01:38:14.170 --> 01:38:18.221
Mississippi, I don't know if you've ever been, but there's two high schools. I haven't.

01:38:18.865 --> 01:38:26.482
So one high school is built like right literally across the street from a cemetery.

01:38:28.013 --> 01:38:35.838
And, and one, they put like a barbed wire fence around the school.

01:38:37.133 --> 01:38:40.283
And I was just like, you know, I couldn't do nothing about the,

01:38:40.283 --> 01:38:43.013
the, the high school that was across from the cemetery.

01:38:43.013 --> 01:38:48.503
Cause that was historical from black folks settling in, in, in everything was

01:38:48.503 --> 01:38:52.176
in one spot because the elementary school is right next to high school. Right.

01:38:52.832 --> 01:38:56.397
But at the at the at the other high school they have the barbed wire fence,

01:38:57.058 --> 01:39:00.203
we were challenging the superintendent who was a black man it's like why would

01:39:00.203 --> 01:39:02.196
you do that well we got to protect the students,

01:39:02.846 --> 01:39:07.103
so don't you have like magnanometers in the school don't you have like police

01:39:07.103 --> 01:39:11.442
officers well you know you don't want to trespass it it's like it's a school,

01:39:12.059 --> 01:39:16.113
it's a school it's like my old high school in chicago doesn't have a barbed

01:39:16.113 --> 01:39:20.213
wire fence it's got a fence but it's not barbed wire You know what I'm saying?

01:39:20.213 --> 01:39:23.371
A barbed wire fence sends a message.

01:39:23.529 --> 01:39:24.968
Anyway. Absolutely.

01:39:25.473 --> 01:39:30.683
I mean, a big message, right? And then I don't know if you've seen some of the

01:39:30.683 --> 01:39:34.904
schools that will have making sure that students stay in a particular color

01:39:35.327 --> 01:39:38.283
in the hallway, right? So they're literally tracking students.

01:39:38.283 --> 01:39:39.913
I'm like, we're talking about prison.

01:39:41.428 --> 01:39:47.262
Like, what's happening? Towing the line. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that's crazy.

01:39:47.768 --> 01:39:51.524
All right. Let's get off of that. How is joy a form of resistance?

01:39:53.305 --> 01:40:01.863
I love this question. You know, I think, you know, joy for me is not just sort of an emotion, right?

01:40:01.863 --> 01:40:05.583
Or, you know, it is an emotion, but it's not just that. And I think there are

01:40:05.583 --> 01:40:09.961
times when, you know, taglines like joy and resistance, like it feels like it's,

01:40:10.453 --> 01:40:11.614
just something that people say.

01:40:11.980 --> 01:40:14.623
But I really think it's deeper than that, particularly when you're thinking

01:40:14.623 --> 01:40:17.305
about Black life, Black survival.

01:40:17.898 --> 01:40:21.346
And I think about Black Joy as a.

01:40:23.033 --> 01:40:28.153
Sort of as a part of this idea of both and, right? That Black folks are fighting,

01:40:28.153 --> 01:40:31.702
we're working, we're surviving, we're thriving, like all those things.

01:40:32.091 --> 01:40:37.257
And right through injustice, through white supremacy, through deep anti-Blackness,

01:40:37.971 --> 01:40:39.962
there is community, right?

01:40:40.246 --> 01:40:44.613
There is creativity, there's art, there's culture, right? Like all of these

01:40:44.613 --> 01:40:52.204
things get produced that bring joy in the midst of struggle and pain, right? And suffering.

01:40:52.825 --> 01:40:57.653
And that's, I'm always like, ah, wouldn't want to be anything other than Black, right?

01:40:59.305 --> 01:41:03.023
You know, the idea of making a way out of no way or, you know,

01:41:03.023 --> 01:41:07.073
sort of, you know, laughing to keep from crying, like those kinds of things,

01:41:07.073 --> 01:41:08.893
like not that you shouldn't cry, right?

01:41:08.893 --> 01:41:13.579
Like, you know, but like holding all those things together at once is deeply,

01:41:14.241 --> 01:41:19.000
it's just always been important to the work that we do in the world.

01:41:19.290 --> 01:41:20.668
And so when I think about,

01:41:22.016 --> 01:41:26.203
activism within Black communities, when I think about education in Black communities,

01:41:26.638 --> 01:41:29.447
when I think about political organizing in Black communities,

01:41:29.883 --> 01:41:33.749
there's always a form of joy present, right?

01:41:34.016 --> 01:41:38.536
And I think that it's sustaining, right? It's like through the struggle,

01:41:38.536 --> 01:41:43.240
through the pain, all of that, we're going to create, we're going to laugh,

01:41:43.797 --> 01:41:48.592
we're going to build. And it doesn't mean that the suffering isn't happening, right?

01:41:48.971 --> 01:41:54.186
As we're working against that, but it also means that joy is present too.

01:41:54.732 --> 01:41:56.296
And in my book, I found that,

01:41:58.536 --> 01:42:00.932
the interviews that I did, youth workers were.

01:42:03.643 --> 01:42:07.736
Though they were alongside young people protesting the murder of George Floyd.

01:42:09.576 --> 01:42:13.846
In those conversations and helping young people process and literally try to

01:42:13.846 --> 01:42:18.834
make sense of everything that they were experiencing, there might be music involved.

01:42:19.595 --> 01:42:25.696
There might be food involved. There might be other forms of connection and joy

01:42:25.696 --> 01:42:30.456
and laughter and fellowship that is sustaining, right?

01:42:30.456 --> 01:42:34.296
And that is allowing young people and youth workers to get through the day,

01:42:34.296 --> 01:42:37.213
right? To get through the week, to get through the month, right?

01:42:38.397 --> 01:42:41.654
That's just so important. So I see it as a life force.

01:42:41.915 --> 01:42:46.921
I see it as sustaining. I see it as respite, right? From the every day of every day.

01:42:47.635 --> 01:42:52.376
You know, and the sort of desire to keep going, right?

01:42:53.919 --> 01:42:59.803
That there's joy present, right? Amid the pain and suffering that might have been, you know.

01:43:01.576 --> 01:43:04.946
I'm thinking about like Frankie Beverly and Maze, like the joy and pain,

01:43:04.946 --> 01:43:09.776
right? Like sunshine and rain, right? Like it just, it really goes together

01:43:09.776 --> 01:43:13.937
in many ways. And I, and, you know, even as a Black academic.

01:43:15.723 --> 01:43:20.397
Like, the joy sort of also keeps me from going into the depths of despair.

01:43:21.943 --> 01:43:28.178
And I find that it can be really easy to do that, like, given all that we're faced with.

01:43:29.081 --> 01:43:32.353
Yeah, it prevents me from going to the depths of despair as well.

01:43:32.353 --> 01:43:33.812
So, yeah, I'll just end there.

01:43:34.743 --> 01:43:40.032
Okay. All right. So finish this sentence. I have hope because...

01:43:43.299 --> 01:43:48.306
Because my elders had hope for me. Okay. All right.

01:43:48.556 --> 01:43:54.431
So, Bianca, Dr. Bianca Baldridge, how can people reach out to you?

01:43:54.431 --> 01:43:58.599
How can people get this book, Laboring in the Shadows, or any other book that you have written? Yeah.

01:44:00.271 --> 01:44:04.441
How can they do that? Yeah, so I have two books. My first book, Reclaiming Community.

01:44:04.441 --> 01:44:09.371
My second book is Laboring in the Shadows. You can get that anywhere you buy books online.

01:44:09.371 --> 01:44:13.081
So they're both from Stanford University Press. So you go to Stanford University

01:44:13.081 --> 01:44:17.125
Press, you can go to Bookshop and support your favorite local bookstore,

01:44:18.091 --> 01:44:20.214
Amazon, Barnes & Noble online as well.

01:44:20.592 --> 01:44:27.395
To stay in touch with me, I'm Bianca Jontae, B-I-A-N-C-A-J-O-N-T-A-E on all social media.

01:44:28.220 --> 01:44:36.362
Well, Dr. Bianca Jontae Baldridge, thank you for doing this. Thank you for the work that you're doing.

01:44:36.689 --> 01:44:42.691
I was teasing you about the obsession with youth workers, but it's really cool

01:44:42.691 --> 01:44:49.439
that there's somebody that really has a passion for people to have a passion, right?

01:44:50.058 --> 01:44:57.286
And I really commend you for being that scholarly voice for those folks doing that kind of work.

01:44:57.820 --> 01:45:03.201
And I just really am humbled that you took the time out in the middle of your

01:45:03.201 --> 01:45:07.597
conference to do this podcast. I greatly appreciate it. So thank you so much.

01:45:08.328 --> 01:45:13.071
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Decoteau Irby speaks so highly of you.

01:45:13.451 --> 01:45:17.320
So he was on your podcast maybe last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

01:45:17.731 --> 01:45:22.671
Yeah, so, and he's a, now, do you have a hidden talent like Decoteau and you're

01:45:22.671 --> 01:45:24.554
a musician or anything like that or?

01:45:25.331 --> 01:45:27.200
I'm, you know, I can make playlists.

01:45:28.442 --> 01:45:33.918
I had a, I had a, I had a very short stint DJing, but I absolutely love,

01:45:34.028 --> 01:45:35.607
love music. So I collect vinyl.

01:45:36.941 --> 01:45:43.141
Yeah, jazz, funk, soul. That's kind of what I love. But I don't have any talent like Dakota.

01:45:44.301 --> 01:45:47.042
I got you. Well, I don't know now if you were DJing now. I don't know this.

01:45:47.414 --> 01:45:50.681
DJing now is not the same as DJing when I was in high school.

01:45:51.341 --> 01:45:55.841
Right. Short stint. Short stint. Very short. I see. Well, look,

01:45:55.841 --> 01:45:57.521
again, thank you for doing this.

01:45:58.201 --> 01:46:01.576
The rule is you have an open invitation. So if you write another book,

01:46:02.615 --> 01:46:05.947
you know, whatever, anything that you want to get off your chest,

01:46:06.348 --> 01:46:08.981
once you've been on the show, you have an open invitation to come back.

01:46:08.981 --> 01:46:15.501
So I would be honored if you accepted that opportunity and came back on.

01:46:15.501 --> 01:46:18.140
So just let me know and we'll make that happen.

01:46:18.616 --> 01:46:21.681
Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Erik. All right,

01:46:21.681 --> 01:46:23.649
guys, we're going to catch out on the other side.

01:46:35.646 --> 01:46:43.086
All right, and we are back. And so I want to thank Alexandra Natapoff and Dr.

01:46:43.086 --> 01:46:46.108
Bianca J. Baldridge for coming on the podcast.

01:46:47.421 --> 01:46:49.042
Incredible interviews.

01:46:50.534 --> 01:46:54.381
Enjoyed the conversations. Very, very,

01:46:56.526 --> 01:47:04.866
relaxed. I mean, you know, I try to tell people that I'm not in this gotcha game. you.

01:47:06.964 --> 01:47:11.674
You know, I invite people on to give their opinions.

01:47:12.724 --> 01:47:17.544
And, you know, it seems like the majority, overwhelming majority of people that

01:47:17.544 --> 01:47:22.580
come on, we at least are within the same political tribe.

01:47:23.419 --> 01:47:28.264
But it's not because I exclude other people. It's just the way it works.

01:47:28.264 --> 01:47:33.524
And I've had folks on the other side come on, too. And I hope they can tell

01:47:33.524 --> 01:47:36.736
you that it was a very relaxed environment.

01:47:37.598 --> 01:47:46.699
They came on and, you know, wasn't, you know, I wanted somebody to beat up on or somebody to fuss at.

01:47:47.544 --> 01:47:52.394
I just want to hear your viewpoint. And the main thing I used to tell them sometimes

01:47:52.394 --> 01:48:00.831
it's like, you know, you have this audience that maybe you won't normally reach.

01:48:01.608 --> 01:48:04.386
Try to convince them your point of view.

01:48:05.205 --> 01:48:09.584
And it seems like that strategy has worked out pretty good. But these two interviews

01:48:09.584 --> 01:48:10.848
are very, very relaxing.

01:48:12.542 --> 01:48:18.064
You know, and it's just the way my schedule is now to get people to come on,

01:48:18.064 --> 01:48:19.340
I'm extremely grateful.

01:48:19.942 --> 01:48:24.654
You know, there's a lot of stuff going on, especially in the summer,

01:48:24.654 --> 01:48:27.307
and now school is coming back in.

01:48:27.946 --> 01:48:32.167
So, you know, for people who actually teach for a living.

01:48:32.801 --> 01:48:36.846
This is a real hectic time because they're trying to get their classes situated,

01:48:37.524 --> 01:48:44.254
kind of get a feel for how their students are and, you know, go from there.

01:48:44.254 --> 01:48:51.000
So for Professor Natapoff and Professor Baldridge, again, thank you.

01:48:51.519 --> 01:48:57.282
Thank you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Enjoy the conversations.

01:48:59.156 --> 01:49:00.994
Really, really did. Anyway.

01:49:05.128 --> 01:49:10.608
I want to quickly touch on something that really kind of falls in where my mindset,

01:49:11.128 --> 01:49:19.245
is this week and then get into what I want to say about a thought that I had.

01:49:20.507 --> 01:49:26.004
So, allegedly, Mitch McConnell is, as you heard in the news report,

01:49:27.048 --> 01:49:36.723
has been moved from this rehab center he was at to now he's supposed to rehab at home.

01:49:37.995 --> 01:49:44.988
And according to the statement that allegedly he said that he should be rejoining

01:49:44.988 --> 01:49:49.235
the Senate shortly. Well, here's the thing about that.

01:49:50.489 --> 01:49:55.465
The election to replace him is going to take place in November.

01:49:56.358 --> 01:50:02.727
And then, you know, unless he wants to make some grand farewell or something,

01:50:03.557 --> 01:50:10.789
you know, in December, is he really coming back before January?

01:50:12.027 --> 01:50:15.551
So there's a lot of people on my side of the fence.

01:50:16.305 --> 01:50:21.988
I think he's dead already. And for whatever reason, they're just kind of prolonging

01:50:21.988 --> 01:50:23.614
it so the governor won't.

01:50:24.583 --> 01:50:27.238
But they've gone past the deadline for him to appoint somebody.

01:50:27.238 --> 01:50:29.628
So now, you know, they just.

01:50:31.668 --> 01:50:35.678
If they do decide they're going to announce to the world that he has passed

01:50:35.678 --> 01:50:39.053
away, then it'll be some kind of special election.

01:50:39.910 --> 01:50:43.538
You know at this particular point if you have a special election I mean by the

01:50:43.538 --> 01:50:48.469
time you count the votes with that one you know campaign count the votes,

01:50:49.412 --> 01:50:54.018
and then if it's a runoff you know the person that replaces them will literally

01:50:54.018 --> 01:50:59.053
be a senator for like 30 days or less so you know.

01:51:01.752 --> 01:51:07.032
I like the way Governor Andy Beshear has handled it. Some people are like saying,

01:51:07.032 --> 01:51:08.562
well, he needs a man, doesn't it?

01:51:09.625 --> 01:51:14.539
Andy Beshear said, look, I would think that since I'm the governor of the state,

01:51:14.881 --> 01:51:20.172
the least that Senator McConnell could do is that if he's talking to everybody

01:51:20.172 --> 01:51:22.118
else, it'd be sure nice if he talked to me.

01:51:24.440 --> 01:51:30.262
And, you know, I would go even further and say maybe he needs to let the president

01:51:30.262 --> 01:51:31.586
know that he's allowed to.

01:51:33.512 --> 01:51:38.846
So, you know, but then Governor Beshear turned around and said,

01:51:39.792 --> 01:51:44.692
you know, I mean, if he doesn't and he stays away from the Capitol,

01:51:44.692 --> 01:51:50.343
then that helps my folks in Washington and helps the Democrats.

01:51:51.105 --> 01:51:58.622
Because, you know, we only need a couple of senators to go our way that's Republican

01:51:58.622 --> 01:52:04.208
instead of, you know, instead of four, we only need three.

01:52:05.234 --> 01:52:08.901
So if he doesn't want to call me, fine.

01:52:09.665 --> 01:52:14.162
But I would think since I'm the governor and he's the U.S. senator and it's

01:52:14.162 --> 01:52:21.601
his health that is denying this representation in the Senate,

01:52:22.192 --> 01:52:25.095
at least he would have given me an update and let me know.

01:52:25.606 --> 01:52:28.189
So I think Brazier handled it the way he needed to handle it.

01:52:29.632 --> 01:52:32.472
Some people are saying, well, he needs to force his hand. Not really.

01:52:35.288 --> 01:52:41.441
It's like, look at the time. But that gets into my bigger point, which is.

01:52:43.109 --> 01:52:48.819
You know, it's been almost 35 years since a young man put a question into the

01:52:48.819 --> 01:52:51.051
cultural lexicon. Can we all get along?

01:52:52.066 --> 01:53:00.166
And just this incident alone with Mitch McConnell answers the question in a negative way. No.

01:53:01.676 --> 01:53:09.719
I think a lot of us have tried to get along. You know, my political career was

01:53:09.719 --> 01:53:15.891
during, you know, within 10 years of that question.

01:53:16.552 --> 01:53:24.637
And I know that as fiercely as I fought for our people, especially in Mississippi,

01:53:25.392 --> 01:53:26.923
I did try to get along with people.

01:53:27.806 --> 01:53:32.177
You know, I've gotten along with my opponent. I've been along with,

01:53:32.880 --> 01:53:37.145
you know, my people on the other side of the political fence.

01:53:38.126 --> 01:53:44.569
I tried, you know, and I didn't want to grow up to be this old,

01:53:44.569 --> 01:53:46.239
bitter man, you know, like in the,

01:53:46.239 --> 01:53:50.844
I always refer to the Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino, right?

01:53:51.461 --> 01:53:54.279
But it's a trope that a lot of people have played in Hollywood.

01:53:54.279 --> 01:53:58.869
And heck, there was actually a movie called 12 Angry Men, right?

01:54:00.492 --> 01:54:05.899
So, you know, I'm not, I don't want to be that dude. I don't want to be that

01:54:05.899 --> 01:54:10.879
guy that looks outside and tells folks to get away from me and all that,

01:54:10.879 --> 01:54:14.396
you know, get off my yard. I'm trying to be that guy.

01:54:16.787 --> 01:54:24.428
But the way the politics is going, you know, and just the style, it's hard.

01:54:25.375 --> 01:54:32.278
It's hard to get along with people who are unreasonable in their thought.

01:54:33.425 --> 01:54:35.492
And I was just sitting thinking, you know.

01:54:37.587 --> 01:54:41.024
They let that man go, the Olympian, they let him go.

01:54:41.910 --> 01:54:47.437
Because even Jeanine Pirro couldn't make up any evidence to convict that man

01:54:47.437 --> 01:54:52.083
to deface in the refluxing pool, right? Donald Trump's angry about that, so what?

01:54:52.842 --> 01:54:59.377
You know, you were using her to cover up your mistake, which was hiring your

01:54:59.377 --> 01:55:05.503
pool guy to handle a project that monumental and that you hate,

01:55:06.980 --> 01:55:11.677
President Obama so much that you didn't pay attention to the details,

01:55:12.597 --> 01:55:17.421
that you couldn't put paint on the surface that was put in there, right?

01:55:17.781 --> 01:55:22.508
You couldn't just put any old paint on there because it was designed not to do that.

01:55:23.412 --> 01:55:28.107
And they had to put that surface in in such a way where you would still have

01:55:28.107 --> 01:55:29.954
the reflecting effect on it.

01:55:31.982 --> 01:55:38.101
You just wanted to give a friend of yours a hookup, and it was an embarrassing moment for you.

01:55:39.073 --> 01:55:45.542
And you asked Janine Pirro to sacrifice her reputation, even more than it already

01:55:45.542 --> 01:55:49.739
is, to find a scapegoat for your mistake.

01:55:51.194 --> 01:55:59.722
That's why we can't get along, right? When you have a group of people who have

01:55:59.722 --> 01:56:03.557
no sense of accountability, no sense of guilt even,

01:56:04.490 --> 01:56:13.242
who creates these illogical conspiracies and theories and thoughts and puts

01:56:13.242 --> 01:56:15.822
them out there as if they were facts,

01:56:16.851 --> 01:56:22.054
and warped the minds of people who I thought were independent of thought,

01:56:22.274 --> 01:56:25.987
who were mature mentally.

01:56:27.584 --> 01:56:34.138
You create this environment of not being able to get along. You can't.

01:56:35.288 --> 01:56:40.515
Because sometimes you have to have contrition. Sometimes you have to realize,

01:56:41.258 --> 01:56:45.635
I probably shouldn't have said that the way that I did. Right? Right?

01:56:47.034 --> 01:56:49.407
You know, and there's just some people you're not going to jive with.

01:56:49.813 --> 01:56:52.536
That's part of the human experience.

01:56:53.408 --> 01:56:59.340
But collectively as a society, we should get along. We should tolerate each other.

01:57:00.355 --> 01:57:05.284
But if your political strategy is to divide and conquer all the time,

01:57:06.133 --> 01:57:08.658
then you're creating an environment where we can't get along.

01:57:09.473 --> 01:57:15.362
Because if we got along, you wouldn't have a political foothold.

01:57:16.336 --> 01:57:17.433
And it's terrible.

01:57:18.555 --> 01:57:26.359
It's a terrible way to build an organization based off of chaos and confusion, right?

01:57:27.166 --> 01:57:32.364
And the crazy thing is they all profess to be Christian and the Bible tells

01:57:32.364 --> 01:57:36.485
us that God is not a God of chaos and confusion.

01:57:37.581 --> 01:57:43.690
That domain belongs to the devil, Satan. That's his realm.

01:57:44.832 --> 01:57:50.784
But you say that you're a Christian, but the only way that you can maintain

01:57:50.784 --> 01:57:58.445
political power is to adopt an anti-Christian philosophy of chaos and confusion.

01:57:59.127 --> 01:58:00.253
That's crazy.

01:58:01.208 --> 01:58:07.838
And the scariest thing of all is that there are human beings out there who can't,

01:58:08.752 --> 01:58:12.717
differentiate that. They can't see what I'm saying.

01:58:13.924 --> 01:58:19.430
You know, the president of the United States says, oh, this guy is a communist.

01:58:20.403 --> 01:58:22.475
Like, he's the authority on communism.

01:58:23.615 --> 01:58:27.654
And there are people out there who say, oh, yeah, yeah, he got to be a communist

01:58:27.654 --> 01:58:29.193
because the president said so. What?

01:58:30.245 --> 01:58:33.258
No, he would be a communist if evidence said so.

01:58:34.086 --> 01:58:38.394
Right? And there's this guy out here now who I've tried to get on the podcast

01:58:38.394 --> 01:58:43.494
who's really, really lighting up all these conservative shows. Thank you.

01:58:45.172 --> 01:58:50.014
Basically reminding people, look, y'all talking about socialism is bad.

01:58:51.027 --> 01:58:56.072
He literally did an interview from a man-made lake to prove his point.

01:58:56.884 --> 01:59:00.001
He said it was the government that built this lake that I'm riding this boat on.

01:59:01.023 --> 01:59:08.070
And y'all are saying that socialism is bad. Well, it was government workers that built this lake.

01:59:09.003 --> 01:59:12.912
It was the government that approved this lake to be built. It was government

01:59:12.912 --> 01:59:16.509
engineers that figured out how we could make this work.

01:59:17.250 --> 01:59:20.757
It wasn't private business, it was the government.

01:59:21.053 --> 01:59:26.480
So if you've got a problem with socialism, then I don't expect you to be on this lake, right?

01:59:28.472 --> 01:59:34.032
So, you know, he's doing his best going on these conservative shows trying to educate these people.

01:59:34.032 --> 01:59:40.630
It's like, don't get caught up in that rhetoric, right? The Hoover Dam is socialism,

01:59:41.342 --> 01:59:44.203
if you want to be ideologically pure.

01:59:45.243 --> 01:59:48.995
The WPA, that's all that was, you know.

01:59:49.730 --> 01:59:54.200
We were trying to get America out of the Great Depression.

01:59:54.818 --> 02:00:00.322
And so the government created jobs, literally created jobs.

02:00:01.343 --> 02:00:06.840
Now, we've gotten back to a point where we have some government jobs,

02:00:07.651 --> 02:00:12.052
and Elon Musk tried to take all of them away, but we have government jobs.

02:00:12.052 --> 02:00:16.992
But now we expect you all in the private sector to handle, you know,

02:00:16.992 --> 02:00:23.589
now that the depression's been over for almost 100 years, we kind of expected y'all to,

02:00:24.605 --> 02:00:28.542
keep the ball rolling and create these jobs, keep the economy going.

02:00:28.542 --> 02:00:33.640
That's what y'all want, even to the point where the government is deregulated too far.

02:00:34.932 --> 02:00:38.702
But every now and then, government has to step in and say, hey,

02:00:38.702 --> 02:00:44.037
look, we got to balance this thing out. We can't have all these people unemployed. We can't.

02:00:45.252 --> 02:00:48.126
The economy is a standstill. We got to do stuff.

02:00:49.651 --> 02:00:54.082
World wars were big business for the government because it was like,

02:00:54.082 --> 02:00:59.049
okay, got to make tanks, got to make planes, got to make bombs, whatever.

02:01:00.220 --> 02:01:02.914
Right? But we're trying to stay out of world wars.

02:01:06.263 --> 02:01:11.625
So, but when we were doing that, that was socialism to a degree.

02:01:14.078 --> 02:01:20.883
So, you know, but because people are not educated the way that they should be,

02:01:22.834 --> 02:01:28.768
either by choice or by deficiency in the system, we've created this culture

02:01:28.768 --> 02:01:31.770
where it's cool not to get along.

02:01:32.753 --> 02:01:38.679
And it's been simmering throughout time, but it's not what we're supposed to be about.

02:01:39.453 --> 02:01:42.948
Right? I heard somebody say, and I think I may have mentioned it before,

02:01:42.948 --> 02:01:53.625
somebody said that the Confederates lost the Civil War, but they won the Social War, right?

02:01:54.778 --> 02:02:00.483
And my position on that thought is I haven't surrendered yet.

02:02:01.221 --> 02:02:08.024
And there's millions of us who have not surrendered yet. So they ain't won.

02:02:08.861 --> 02:02:11.851
You can still fight them. They ain't won.

02:02:12.976 --> 02:02:16.210
They may have the upper hand, but they haven't won.

02:02:17.507 --> 02:02:23.075
And so I even challenge somebody to say, well, if you're saying that my position,

02:02:24.023 --> 02:02:29.718
is the dawn of communism, then I can make the argument that your position is

02:02:29.718 --> 02:02:31.680
the continuation of the Confederacy.

02:02:32.751 --> 02:02:38.158
In the concept of American history, which one was worse? because when we had

02:02:38.158 --> 02:02:40.149
to fight communism, we had to leave.

02:02:41.268 --> 02:02:46.423
We had to fight the Confederacy. It was in our own backyard. So which one is worse?

02:02:46.603 --> 02:02:51.226
Which one is more of a threat, the Confederacy or communism?

02:02:52.360 --> 02:02:57.788
And if we really want to be honest, it was the communists that lined up with

02:02:57.788 --> 02:03:06.958
the North in their sense of theory and thought to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War.

02:03:08.947 --> 02:03:12.497
Granted, it hasn't been fully thought out and all that stuff,

02:03:12.497 --> 02:03:14.260
but you get what I'm saying.

02:03:15.301 --> 02:03:20.211
That concept of people caring for each other, caring for their fellow man,

02:03:21.230 --> 02:03:25.173
won the day in the Civil War, eventually.

02:03:26.486 --> 02:03:31.245
But ever since then, it's been a battle on the social front.

02:03:31.884 --> 02:03:42.847
So, I just want to encourage people to focus in on whatever spiritual philosophy

02:03:42.847 --> 02:03:46.062
you buy into, you believe in.

02:03:46.891 --> 02:03:52.066
Understand that that, especially in the Abrahamic religions,

02:03:53.127 --> 02:03:56.275
that tolerance is the key to everything.

02:03:57.151 --> 02:04:02.557
You tolerate those who have not achieved that spiritual awakening,

02:04:03.498 --> 02:04:06.134
and you embrace the people who have,

02:04:07.274 --> 02:04:15.869
and you keep being an example so that those folks that have not received it will, right?

02:04:16.298 --> 02:04:24.237
That's why we have people going to synagogues and mosques and churches once a week.

02:04:25.316 --> 02:04:30.892
We're supposed to be getting encouragement for us to evangelize to others.

02:04:31.985 --> 02:04:33.529
We're supposed to be the examples.

02:04:34.772 --> 02:04:41.497
But if you're going to a church that says Jesus is Lord, and then when you step

02:04:41.497 --> 02:04:46.830
out of the church, you're doing the devil's work, That's not helping us get along.

02:04:47.705 --> 02:04:53.404
That's all I'm saying. Do some self-reflection. And on November the 3rd,

02:04:54.254 --> 02:05:00.188
2026, once you have done your self-reflection, vote accordingly.

02:05:01.524 --> 02:05:04.657
All right, that's all I got. Thank you all for listening. Till next time.