Latest / The Most Important Question / Facts Are Non-Negotiable, Framing Is A Choice

Transcript

Facts Are Non-Negotiable, Framing Is A Choice · The Most Important Question

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] I got a lot of books on my shelves whose title seem to answer their own question.
• 0:10
  "The State Must Provide," "Man's Search for Meaning," "There is no Place for Us," "The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace," "Everything is Tuberculosis," "The Lessons of History," "Of the Sum of Us," "How Will You Measure Your Life?"
• 0:24
  "How the Word is Passed," and of course, "The Price of Exclusion." What is the price of exclusion?
• 0:30
  Well, if your family paid the price, if your people were ever left out of a textbook, you don't need this new book to tell you. And even if it never happened to you, the title can feel like plenty.
• 0:40
  Exclusion was expensive. Got it. But while it seems like reasons to leave those books on the shelves, you get the idea, you are very wrong. The title is just the verdict. The book is the evidence.
• 0:55
  It is the names, the dates, the receipts, and in this case, one family story that somebody dug up before it disappeared. My guest has a name for that work. It is ancestral intelligence.
• 1:07
  Her book belongs alongside "The Warmth of Other Suns" and "How the Word is Passed" by Clint Smith, who has also been on this show. So here's the question: What can I do about a history I think I already know?
• 1:20
  Every week, I ask someone working on the front lines of the future the most important question in the world: What can I do? I found out why they do the work, what you and I can do to support it.
• 1:30
  My name, of course, is Quinn Emmett. I'm your host, and my guest today is Nicole Carr. What a conversation. Nicole is an Emmy-winning investigative journalist and a journalism professor at Morehouse College.
• 1:41
  Her book, "The Price of Exclusion," follows her great-grandfather, Dr. Lawrence St. Clair Ferguson, Fergie, if you know, a Jamaican World War I veteran and Howard-trained physician her family barely spoke of.
• 1:54
  Nicole and I went a lot of places in this conversation.
• 1:57
  Her great-grandfather, ancestral intelligence, and why books like these have to be read and have to be handed on, whether you lived the story or your family lived the story or not.
• 2:08
  Your first job is simple, which is to read it, and then it is to pass it on. It is to continue to do the work, to do your part to answer the question, what can I do? Let's go.
• 2:17
  [upbeat music] Nicole, welcome to the show. I mean, we've been chatting, but welcome for real this time. Thank you, Quinn. You're very welcome. You're very welcome. We've both got our very exciting trees going on.
• 2:34
  You've got a great shirt. I don't have avocado stains on mine today, so everything is a win. Nicole, I'd like to start with two questions, and I, and I think I hinted at this a little bit.
• 2:45
  It sounds like they're the same question. Mm. They're not, and that's on me, but I'm gonna give it a shot here. So the first one is, why do you have to do this work? So you've done a bunch of different stuff.
• 2:58
  You said you were never gonna write a book, right? Maybe you'll never write another one. Why do you have to do th- [chuckles] why do you have to do this work? And then, same sentence, but why do you have to do this work?
• 3:11
  So why did you have to write this book, if that makes sense? And you can answer them however you want. Yeah. I, I had to write the book because I was called to write the book. Hmm.
• 3:23
  So I actually did not have a choice in it. Y- I went looking for... We're gonna talk a lot about spirit and, uh, my favorite kind of AI, which is ancestral intelligence. Sure.
• 3:40
  And I got that from the actor Tim Reid, who I used to watch on "Sister, Sister" all the time. But he's got this cool shirt that references ancestral intelligence. I
• 3:52
  was called to it because I was looking for a way to survive, you know? So someone had to survive because I'm here. Mm-hmm. I'm, I'm the proof that
• 4:06
  humanity, we are the proof that humanity has survived difficult things, what looks like life-ending things, what looks like end of humanity things. And so I wanted to know why. So going to, or how.
• 4:24
  Yeah. So going to look for those answers, you get called to it because, you know, one clue leads to another. And the second question was why this work now or- Mm-hmm...
• 4:38
  so- It's like, why, why do you have to do this work? So you, again, like, you, you did TV and, and you've done so much. Why do you have to do this work now? Like, where does it go from here with it?
• 4:50
  Oh, I have to do this work because I don't believe any of our work is necessarily for the living. Hmm. Give me more. Okay.
• 4:59
  I, I've come to the conclusion just in my own life and, you know, 20 years in newsrooms and- Mm-hmm... various modes, and I, I'm here to leave the record. Mm-hmm.
• 5:14
  And so I'd better be sure that I get it right. Mm-hmm.
• 5:20
  But I'm here to show proof of how, how we did overcome and, and because there are those who came before us, they've done the same thing, but it has to be extracted in a way, and that's how I, I know how to extract information.
• 5:37
  I know how to dig. I know how to, you know, hit a dead end or hit the wall and figure out not just A through D, but the rest of the alphabet. Like, there's something that comes after that.
• 5:51
  How do you get to the next thing? And so those are the skills that we, we have, you know, a lot of us in, in journalism and especially in investigative journalism. It's just the dig, right? And so I had an opportunity to
• 6:10
  To dig and to figure out why history is relevant to today. We, we can't move through life without understanding how we come to be. Yeah.
• 6:23
  And so if there's something that we're struggling with, the answer to that or the approach to it is not to magically come up with some solution sans any context for how we got here. Like- Mm...
• 6:36
  that would be like getting lost on the road trip and forgetting that I, you know, exited from 285. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But, like, if I wanna get back to where I'm going or figure out what went wrong- Yeah...
• 6:49
  I might know where I came from. Sure. It's fine to be lost and to explore, but you gotta know how you got there, right?
• 6:54
  Exactly, 'cause now I know not to take that route anymore, or I know that, you know, east and westbound have different sorts of exits. I may not be able to come off the same one that I, you know- Sure...
• 7:08
  that I left the highway on. And so I just... So that's, that's the why and that's the how and that's why it must be. [laughs] I think it's amazing.
• 7:20
  I was so honored, like I am today, and lucky to have a few months ago on Clint Smith on the show, um, to talk about the young reader edition of How The Word Is Passed, which is a book that, again, I'm, I'm in Williamsburg, but I, I, you know, look like I do.
• 7:38
  I am who I am and, and this is a complicated, it's a special, complicated place in a lot of ways. Got the College of William & Mary 400 feet down the road, 400 years old.
• 7:47
  Clint had even just written a story, because it's the 250th, in The Atlantic about Williamsburg, so the timing of the whole thing just lined up. But
• 7:55
  the way he, like you said, digs, saying, like, if we don't not just tell the story, but understand, like, why and how and who told the stories and what, what a fact is and how we build on that for the people now, but like you said, for the future.
• 8:14
  Not, not as much for the living, but for the living to come and, and your kids who are far enough, you know, apart that they will experience some things differently, but, but even beyond that, right? I really love that.
• 8:25
  The point is, I really love that perspective and, and I love that question of not just, like, it's always been who gets to tell the story, right? And, and that's so important, but also, like,
• 8:36
  let's always make sure we do kinda do, like, one step forward, one step back and go, "Can we try to understand why the story and how and, and what the, what the pieces are?" You're on this journey.
• 8:48
  You've been doing TV for, like, two decades, and I'm gonna say some words I, I, I don't love saying, but let's cut to 2020 for a moment. Super fun for everyone.
• 8:58
  You're, like so many reporters, like, shooting shit in your garage with a bunch of kids running around. [laughs] Everything was great. You hear about this plaque in a hospital, and it, it says, I believe it's in the...
• 9:11
  I believe the words were, and apologies, I don't have your physical book to, like, wave around at people here, but I do have, the PDF is marked up to hell over here on my other screen.
• 9:19
  You got a, there's a, there's a family photo of a plaque in a, a hospital lobby that says a- about a gentleman that was respected and honored. So again, going back to find out how, how you got here, who, who's Fergie?
• 9:31
  Oh. Fergie is my ancestor and the ancestral guide, the narrative throughline for The Price of Exclusion. And so that plaque, I'd actually
• 9:47
  received that photo in 2018 when the only grandfather I knew from my paternal side, when he died, and some members of the Ferguson family come to the funeral.
• 10:00
  And we have a cousin who's, who's asking, you know, "Did you know there's a plaque in the Port Antonio Hospital," [laughs] you know, "that is honoring your great-grandfather?" And I'm like, "No, I, I didn't."
• 10:14
  And she sent it to me. So just really quickly if I can, you know, kinda tick through family issues. So I, my maiden name is Ferguson.
• 10:28
  I, my father is the youngest of Fergie, Dr. Ferguson's grandchildren. My gr- his son was my grandmother's first husband,
• 10:40
  and so there was a very abusive relationship that leads to my grandmother leaving Jamaica, where they were from, leaving her children, who were all born in the US, but leaving them with her family in Jamaica, and then she goes off and finds the grandfather that I know my whole life, right?
• 11:02
  So once he dies, this side of the family who, a few people who had stayed in close contact come to the funeral, and they're telling me about this ancestor, and my cousins. You know, "Did you all know this?"
• 11:16
  I'm like, "No." Been to Jamaica, spent a summer there. Didn't... We knew he was a physician, but we didn't know much about the name we carried.
• 11:26
  All we knew is when we would visit our grandparents in the DC area, my grandmother would always say, "You know, your great-grandfather went to Howard." And that's, that's it. We didn't even know his name. It's just Dr.
• 11:37
  Ferguson. So that plaque picture is sitting in my email. But fast-forward to 2020, you know, I'm four months po- postpartum with our youngest. Our two little ones are in kindergarten, third grade, and virtual school.
• 11:53
  We're running live TV out of the garage.
• 11:56
  I'm running six to eight-minute packages on the 11:00 news every day telling you how to get tested, where, you know, how to get around, what not to do, what's the lockdown, what, you know, what's the latest political
• 12:11
  whatever. And I was just exhausted one night early in the pandemic, and I'm like, "How the hell did they get through this 100 years ago?" So then I start thinking about him. I'm like, "Wait a minute. What? Dr.
• 12:24
  Pond, wasn't, wasn't he around during this time? Wasn't he practicing, whatever?" So that's, well, and that, 'cause you're right, it was 100 years ago that like, holy shit. Yes. Yes.
• 12:34
  And we know that there's a lot of missing documentation from that time- Mm-hmm... because people had done what I think we've, we're trying to do right now, but we can't do, which is think out of our heads.
• 12:48
  But we know right now, we're sitting here and COVID cases are rising. I, I know I've been traveling a lot and it's- Mm-hmm... like, yeah, people are definitely dying. Plague, as you mentioned, is going on.
• 13:00
  The flu, Russia, right. Like we cannot escape the issue of public health- Mm-hmm... and our responsibility to each other- Mm-hmm... to keep each other safe. Oh, and the measles. Don't forget about the measles.
• 13:15
  Oh- Don't forget about the measles. And I, I know, I yell at my kids every day. Don't worry. I'm definitely, uh, it's all the things, but I'm like, "Hey, he survived this. A lot of people died. He survived this, but how?
• 13:31
  And wasn't he..." I went looking for him. Mm-hmm. And it just so happened, I mean, you're in Virginia, and I'm thinking of, I got so
• 13:44
  much out of the, the way of life between DC, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, when I went looking for this stuff. But anyway, I go to Howard University. I pull that plaque out because it has initials on it.
• 13:56
  It doesn't even have his full name. And I was like, "Let me see if I can find him in the Howard archives."
• 14:03
  And the Mellon Foundation had just given Howard's Moorland-Spingarn Library a ton of funding to digitize new assets, and there he was that night in his medical school yearbook, a 1925 yearbook.
• 14:19
  But he lands here in 1919 after being in the Great War for the British, you know, during that time. So I, I find out through his medical school profile that he had been in the war.
• 14:35
  When he had come here, his age was off, but I reconciled that in birth records. And he, he gave me so many clues to start digging deeper, and it takes off from there.
• 14:49
  And I get, you know, a ton of Caribbean history to weave through this.
• 14:55
  It's very much a, a story of migration, immigration, public health, anti-Blackness around the globe, how these things intersect and bring us to today and the attitudes we have today.
• 15:09
  And I just went down the rabbit hole with him and I said, "Okay." I was talking to my agent one day and she was like, "You should write a book." I was like, "Sure. Yeah."
• 15:20
  And it couldn't just be about him, but he could be our guide. Mm-hmm. And he could give me permission to tell all these histories that weave in and out of his time and my time, and yeah. So that's how we get here.
• 15:38
  Doing this kind of thing, and you know, I,
• 15:41
  I talk with Clint about it too, and, you know, you just think about it all the time, like you, you find this person, whether they're your history or not, but especially if you're yours, a- and it's like a sliding doors thing where you're like, "Oh, I gotta go down this rabbit hole."
• 15:55
  You know, even, uh, no matter, even if it just ends up being late night notes, right? Or, or whatever. Oh, yeah. But he turned out to be
• 16:03
  like, you know, this like Forrest Gump type person who, you know, like you said, went to Howard and trained, but like can't get an internship because the, the, what we...
• 16:14
  Coming back over and over, I mean, the story of America, right, is these, the, the federal thumb on the scale of what it can do to burgeoning systems or existing ones, like you talk about we're seeing now obviously, but what that meant back then.
• 16:29
  Yeah.
• 16:29
  You had, you had this quote, and I'm gonna mangle it basically without cutting forward too much, but essentially like the thresholds they set for these medical schools that were a couple decades out of flavor at best, right?
• 16:43
  To go like, of course they weren't gonna have that endowment. Like that number's not arbitrary, right? So
• 16:51
  let's, I wanna, can we talk about that period of history a little bit because it is so important forever, and for now obviously, to not let this system become what it can.
• 17:02
  And all, again, we can talk about all the doctors estimated lost over time because of it, all that kind of stuff. So talk to me about that for a moment. Yeah. So it's really important for us to examine the role of
• 17:17
  nonprofit work and philanthropy in kind of breaking this pipeline of physicians that we have in bringing us to the point where we are today.
• 17:32
  Really what I find with the American Medical Association and then Carnegie is that they're effectively playing a role that the federal government is very much playing today, okay, when we come to the demise of the medical schools.
• 17:50
  Just really quickly for people to get kind of a CliffsNotes version of this. So, you know, upon emancipation, our, our nation is faced with how to integrate the American Negro into
• 18:09
  freedom, and we don't get there, right? So let's go back to Howard University.
• 18:16
  As it's founded by an ex-Union general, General Howard, who appears in the, the book, President Lincoln also charges General Howard with the task of running the Freedmen's Bureau.
• 18:31
  And so we're talking education, banking, housing, healthcare, the hospitals. Like, how are we, again, going to integrate the American Negro into free society? And we know the Bureau lasts a split second.
• 18:46
  The federal government pulls out of its support for ensuring our livelihoods post-enslavement really quickly, and, and we go this Reconstruction Era.
• 18:59
  We're literally trying to reconstruct life and, and get us to a, a point where we're... Really, what we're hoping for is full citizenship, right? Of, of fair shot at playing a role in this democracy.
• 19:14
  So the education piece is so important because our historically Black colleges and universities, this is how they come to, to form out of the ashes of the Civil War.
• 19:27
  And on the medical school front, very early on, we're talking the 1880s, America's first four-year medical school is established at a Black university.
• 19:40
  It's Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Shaw is founded by the Baptists, and there's also an ex-Union chaplain who dips into his war savings and his wife's, his very wealthy abolitionist family, his wife's abolitionist family, pouring into building this school to educate Black people in matters of domestic matters and religion.
• 20:07
  And- Can we, can we pause for a second on, on... 'Cause you, you made a point there, and this was, struck me so much in the book about it being the first four-year school. Yeah. Because lot of...
• 20:19
  First of, this is not what, like, the other medical schools were going, and William & Mary's one of the oldest, but they didn't have a medical school, so mostly Harvard. They were doing- Yeah...
• 20:25
  I think it was, like, two or three years. But then what was the pushback about a four-year school? Well, the four-year school is meant to challenge Black people's merit and intelligence.
• 20:38
  It's a if you are going to begin to put a white coat on a Negro, he or she ought go to school longer to prove their intelligence as that of the white man.
• 20:49
  From the liberal, progressive, goodwill Baptist end, the trustees are thinking, "This is a good approach because this is how we can convince the public to support this thing." Like- Mm-hmm...
• 21:03
  you, you want them to become a part of this professional class, and, you know, we're not gonna hand them any favors. Like, this- Mm-hmm... has gotta be rigorous if we're going to start doing this.
• 21:14
  And at this point, you have over a dozen Black medical schools. Howard and Meharry are the ones that we know- Mm-hmm... um, because they're the ones that remain [laughs] after this- Right...
• 21:25
  breakdown we're about to, to talk about. And Shaw is producing... It's so important to note that it's not the size of Howard, and Meharry is not the size that it is today. Shaw is a major player in medical education.
• 21:42
  The second proposal the Baptists had was for a law school, but that was considered super radical. Mm-hmm. You wanna train the Negro to defend themselves in the court of law? Mm-hmm.
• 21:52
  Like, to participate in democracy like that? Mm-hmm. No. But he ought be trained in matters of health because he or she should be able to take care of his people.
• 22:05
  And when we get to the evaluation that shuts them down, the thinking is, there ought to be some Black medics so that they take care of Black people so that they can not spread disease to white people.
• 22:19
  But also, health is a function of labor. Mm-hmm.
• 22:24
  So it makes perfect sense that there is an appetite in our post-enslavement society for at least a fraction of some trained Negro doctors to touch their own people, to keep them healthy, to keep them laboring. Mm-hmm.
• 22:42
  Mm-hmm. And so, uh, what happens in the early 20th century, and, and let's back it up. This Leonard Medical School at Shaw produces not only more than 400 Black physicians in the Southeast, and they generally stay
• 22:59
  in the South between... Well, we can throw DC in there, but really between North Carolina and Florida. Mm-hmm. They're really populating the, the Negro hospitals at, at this point.
• 23:14
  The problem with educating us in this way is that we don't stick to the thing that we're trained for, meaning you're not just a doctor, but now you've gone off and you've become this political force. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 23:28
  Because education opens the door to the beginnings of sustained wealth, and, and being financially secure, you know, lends you some other freedoms. I don't have to work for you. I've got my own practice.
• 23:46
  Then people trust me, and so then they trust me with other decisions. So the doctors you read about, the Black physicians you read about, including my great-grandfather, commonly they sit on school boards.
• 23:59
  They open banks. They open insurance companies. There's a Black physician here in Georgia who owns the printing press to America's first sustained Black daily newspaper, The Atlanta Daily World. It's not the first one.
• 24:16
  We, we know we have Wilmington before that, and, and The Wilmington Daily Record is the first building burned down in the insurrection in 1898 because of a multiracial, you know, government.
• 24:30
  And so I say all that because- This relates to today. Mm-hmm. If you're going to kill a political force, you gotta kill the education. Mm-hmm. And so it becomes very apparent that
• 24:47
  w- with the Negro going outside of teaching and preaching and farming, s-
• 24:54
  now we're dealing with a part of society, we're building them up to take part in this democracy in a way that the letter of the law does not intend them to. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Certainly the spirit of it, yeah. Yes.
• 25:07
  This, the- Yeah... spirit of it, the spirit by which who authored the, the law and the ways of the land did not consider us the full citizen to participate in this democracy, and so education becomes a thing.
• 25:22
  There are a lot of people who have fashioned the Flexner Report, which is commissioned by the American Medical Association and Carnegie to improve medical schools, to shut down the ones that aren't, are.
• 25:34
  There are a lot of people who say, "Well, w- why is that a problem?"
• 25:37
  Well, my question is why does it shut down all of the only institutions, all but two of the institutions, that would train Black people in this profession?
• 25:46
  There's nothing wrong with improving the condition of medical education- Mm-hmm... but what constitutes an improvement? Mm.
• 25:55
  And in this country, the improvement was to shut down most of our educational institutions, the ones... Now, sure, you've got one here or there at, at a Johns Hopkins, at a, a Penn, a Yale, a Harvard.
• 26:10
  That's one in a million, a drop in the bucket if you were to see a Black face there. Mm-hmm.
• 26:16
  We're, we're still, to this day, largely educated, are doctors, lawyers, judges, engineers, largely educated at historically Black colleges and universities. And so we, we can relate this to the anti-DEI movement
• 26:31
  later on, but- Sure... it's, it's certainly a way to, to attack the education of Black people in America in a way that seems almost goodwill and, and not harmful. Like- Right... who wouldn't want the best schools, right?
• 26:48
  Okay, well, what's your criteria, and would it be possible for Black people to meet that criterion- Sure... at that point in history just a few decades post-enslavement? And the answer is no. And that has
• 27:04
  obviously persisted because people have, have, have designed and, and kept up these systems that, that make it persist on purpose. And I, I keep coming back to, you know, Dr.
• 27:15
  Arwel Bush at Johns Hopkins, gentleman who does heart transplants, talking about why young Black heart transplant men die at higher rates.
• 27:23
  And, you know, had Lauren Underwood a few years ago about her omnibus and, and we talk about a lot of it is trust and access, right?
• 27:33
  Y- you have this great quote about you can't accolade your way out of this, which is essentially, like, we gave them the ac- we gave them the access to
• 27:43
  be educated, to take care of your people, and get these accolades, and then, like you said, all of a sudden can participate in all these other parts of society that m- the law and the institutions did not prepare for as we ran away from reconstruction as fast as we could, and now your accolades mean nothing.
• 28:01
  There are no places to get internships. There are no places to train. Like you said, there's two schools left. Where do we go from there?
• 28:09
  Again, knowing where we, we are now, the things we didn't learn from 1918 in, in general, right? What did we learn? What has been, what was given or earned or achieved that then was taken away?
• 28:21
  Sort of what were the biggest moves along the way there that you traced during your book? Yeah.
• 28:27
  I, I maintain, and I said this a couple of months ago on, on News Hour, with Jeff Bennett, 'cause he was like, "Well, what is the price of exclusion?"
• 28:37
  I maintain that until you address the education and the training, and the access to education, then you cannot address social determinants, and education is a part of that. Sure.
• 28:52
  You can't address policy because you've effectively cut out the policy makers. Mm-hmm. You know, education is not just for us to train for the one thing, which is the point I'm making about the characters in the book.
• 29:05
  100%. With it, they, they move mountains and society in other ways, but you have to get the education. That is the first w- anything that's been made
• 29:21
  illegal in this country for a group of people must be powerful. If you can be killed for learning to read and write, or for teaching a group of people to read and write, then reading and writing must be really important.
• 29:39
  In this country more than any other, any rule exists for a reason. It, it is because, like you said, something ki- came too far and, and we needed to, to act. Well, if my mind can't be in bondage- Mm-hmm...
• 29:55
  I can't be in bondage. Sure. So that's the point, and I think this is why people hate it or love it. A lot more people, I think, love it than hate it. Percival Everts James, I don't know if you've...
• 30:08
  Have you had a chance to read James? It's- Oh my God, it's so good. I did the, I actually did the audiobook- Yeah... which I don't remember who the gentleman is that read it, but it's...
• 30:17
  Oh my God, that book is fantastic. Right. So we interviewed Percival. He came back to Morehouse College, and I was able to moderate a panel with him. Oh, that's awesome. Oh my goodness.
• 30:28
  But look, the point about James, you know,
• 30:32
  having this access, not only reading these classics and speaking different languages and all, it takes him out of this world, and then allows him to resist the world that is being handed to him.
• 30:47
  It is absolut- the whole point of it all is that- You may say James is a slave. You may enslave him. His mind is free, and it's vast,
• 31:03
  and it is a book that brings him to that vast world that allows him to think of possibilities, and then allows him to see himself moving differently in this world.
• 31:15
  And that's, you know, one example with your great-grandfather, right? He literally left. He went to Edinburgh- Well, yeah... right? Because- He went to Scotland... and, and that's not, obviously not an option
• 31:25
  for everyone by any stretch, but, but to say like, "I will n- I will not be, be... I, I have something to offer here. I have the accolades. I have the curiosity. I have the drive to do this," right? Mm-hmm.
• 31:37
  And then taking him to run a hospital for 30 years or whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah. So he uses...
• 31:44
  I think what's really important with his story is that when he's coming into America at the tail end of pandemic to go into pre-medical studies, when- First pandemic, just to be clear. Yeah, yeah. Great. Yeah.
• 32:00
  Come on now. Let's be specific. Jesus. But he lands in DC during Red Summer, like the very- It's crazy...
• 32:07
  you know, Black servicemen and women who had obviously fought for America while he was fighting for the Crown, were coming back to a country where, and we're just fixing the language around this, where there are race massacres.
• 32:21
  They're not just riots. Mm-hmm. They may begin as these riots. They end in these massacres, and they're being lynched, and they've served this country, and they've done, you know... I'm sorry.
• 32:34
  I, I'm gonna say this, and I, I really do not care who doesn't believe this, but there, there cannot be a more patriotic people, Black Americans.
• 32:49
  When a country shows you over and over and over that it will extract your
• 32:57
  labor, it will kill for your labor, it will build economy off your labor, it will send you to fight for said nation where you don't hold the same rights that you go to another country and fight for other people to have.
• 33:12
  Mm-hmm. But we send you to fight,
• 33:14
  and then you come back, and we're gonna cut a group of you out of benefits that would allow you to have a, a dwelling, a home for your family, to be employed in a certain way, to live anywhere you want to live, to move freely.
• 33:30
  When we will show you that over and over and over, and then get to your descendants and say, "Well, what the hell are you all complaining about?"
• 33:40
  To represent it, my son and I were watching the other night the incredible Netflix documentary Court of Gold, I think it was, about the...
• 33:47
  It's about the men's basketball team in the last Olympics, and Steph Curry hitting that shot, and all these things. And
• 33:54
  it's hard, it's hard to argue with that, with, with, with, like you said, the ancestral intelligence that's been passed down to, to continue to, like you said, not just exist, but to try to improve it for more people beyond your own circle.
• 34:10
  People have designed systems against it, and then to represent it. But here's the key to that, right? Like, we gotta be in the books and the archives and all the things to find it. Sure.
• 34:21
  'Cause there's just no, there's no point of reference without books, which again, people work so hard to get rid of something- Mm-hmm... for the masses to, to...
• 34:34
  We're in Banned Book Week as we talk, like, and people say, "Well, a book can't be banned 'cause you can still access it." Well, it's just like food insecurity and kids who go to school.
• 34:45
  Sometimes your best meal is at school, right? No. Like, I need school- They make you pay for it. Right. Right. Sometimes the, the window, the key to the, the opening the book is the school library.
• 35:01
  It's the, you know, I may not have the opportunity or the resources or the people in my life to take me to the store where we were just joking we spent all our, our money. Mm-hmm. A real, you know, thing.
• 35:15
  I may not have that, and so the library where you're saying this thing can't exist may be my only point of access.
• 35:22
  And so my whole point is the, the book, the research, the primary sources are all living in places that are under attack as we speak.
• 35:32
  And so we can't even get to that mode of thinking that we were just talking about if we can't access the truth of it all. Tell me about when you were first able in your research
• 35:47
  to access the history of George Simkins and Hubert Eaton, and how they turned the system on its head to use the federal checkbook- Mm-hmm... to enable more access. Can, can you tell us a little bit about that?
• 36:04
  'Cause I did not know this is how this went down. It's pretty incredible. It's incredible, and it's incredible these two landmark cases come out of the same state. Mm-hmm.
• 36:16
  And you know, I'm from North Carolina and have worked in Wilmington, lived in Winston-Salem, worked in Winston-Salem, lived in Greensboro, in Fayetteville. Mm-hmm.
• 36:27
  Like, all these places where these people and their people intersected, I... This is where we're from.
• 36:34
  So when we get to the civil rights portion of the book, because I try to go in some kind of chronological order to- It's amazing... the previous- Yeah... past, present. Yeah. And Dr.
• 36:47
  Hubert Eaton was the son of a physician who had gone to Leonard Medical School. In fact, his name Hubert comes from his father's favorite professor at Leonard Medical School. Love it.
• 37:01
  And Hubert Eaton went to, his father practiced in Winston-Salem, and he went to Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, so a HBCU in Charlotte.
• 37:11
  When it came time for him to train to be a physician, there was not a medical school for Black people in North Carolina. And this is why we have to be careful about the way we retell history. I had a very kind librarian
• 37:29
  while I was researching the paper say, "You know, I, I think the state of North Carolina even paid for Dr. Eaton to go to medical school, like, 'cause he has an incredible story."
• 37:41
  And I'm like, "Yeah, they paid, Quinn, but Dr. Eaton had to sue the state under the separate but equal clause," 'cause he said, "You don't have any resource for me in my home state, so you..."
• 37:55
  He challenged them under the letter of the law to send me to the equal, you know, schoolhouse. That's how he gets to Michigan and becomes the only Black med school graduate in the class of '49.
• 38:11
  Keep that in mind, because Dr. Eaton only has the ability to do this because he comes from some money. Mm-hmm.
• 38:21
  So you see where his father's career as a physician and all that affords them the ability to challenge the system. Mm-hmm. That in and of itself is that political force that I'm talking about. Sure. Yeah, of course.
• 38:33
  He comes back, he marries the daughter of another physician who went to Howard Med. He goes into practice in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his father-in-law. And before he takes on the segregated hospital system, Dr.
• 38:48
  Eaton has, he has moved to sue the, the YMCA because they can't golf and play tennis at the segregated Y in New Hanover County.
• 38:59
  That's actually how he comes to train Althea Gibson, uh, in his backyard 'cause he builds a tennis court back there.
• 39:05
  So he takes on New Hanover County schools to desegregate them so his children can attend the schools, but then he takes on the hospitals.
• 39:13
  I mean, the Black hospital in Wilmington was in shambles, where he was practicing the, the surgeries. And they go into this federal discrimination case, and the NAACP LDF is, it's, it's Eaton versus James Walker Boreal
• 39:30
  Hospital. And this morphs into a 10-year case, and the key to desegregating the hospital is not the doctor's claims of discrimination. Because the hospital was able to come up
• 39:48
  with all of these reasons why, yeah, you're in this other facility, but you don't meet this qualification that the other doctors at the white hospital are grandfathered into.
• 40:00
  You don't meet these qualifications to come practice here. Like, it would just be making a new rule to say, "You're, you're not being discriminated against in..."
• 40:09
  Well, the LDF is working with the help of, of, the Adam Clayton Powell. They're working to say, "Fine, you don't have to let Black people in, but
• 40:22
  if you do not uphold separate and equal or this discriminatory stuff, we're withholding federal dollars from you. Like, you can do whatever you want, you just won't get this money." Mm-hmm. And after the, the,
• 40:37
  the, the war, the Hill-Burton Act is, is providing all this money to rebuild these hospitals. So if you're getting that money, you can't discriminate.
• 40:46
  And so you get this case in Greensboro that complements Eaton's case, Simpkins versus Moses Cone, and they are proving in all these ways that you're getting this money, you're still discriminating.
• 40:59
  But here's what turns everything on its head, and it takes 10 years to do this. It's not proving the case of discrimination against the doctors. They keep hitting a brick wall with that.
• 41:10
  But it is Black patients who say, "When you exclude my doctor from the facility, you have now given, you've basically written my, my death certificate." Mm.
• 41:23
  "Because I need what's in that hospital, and I can't get in there because my doctor can't practice there, and this is the, the only physician that is going to treat me in this way." Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
• 41:34
  "Now you're killing people for no reason." Mm-hmm. And so that's, like, kind of the short of it. It's all this strategy to see, how do we pressure them with the federal dollars?
• 41:45
  Which is happening in the reverse right now. Right, right. But how do we pressure them with the federal dollars, and how do we prove harm on scale beyond a single discrimination claim? Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm.
• 41:59
  Have some kind of fight to stay in something like that for a decade. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, but it's really saying, okay, if, if, if all parties are gonna be deprived of this access, and- Mm-hmm...
• 42:12
  and there's, there's a domino effect to it, how can we measure that enough to, again, say, "Okay, if you're saying this is the current law and we're gonna apply to it, maybe we will
• 42:24
  once in a while have these, these wins that, that, that can open that up a little bit again." Not forever- Yes... not conclusively, obviously, here we are, but- Sure, sure.
• 42:34
  And I think the, the important thing to remember about all of this is, 'cause I just finished addressing a group of physicians about equity here at the medical school in Atlanta, Morehouse School of Medicine, and this was sponsored by the AMA.
• 42:49
  And the AMA, during COVID, did apologize for the role it played in shutting down the medical schools, the Black medical schools, recognizing that that's where, why we are where we are, not only with the physician population, but with the distrust issue that we're so desperately trying to resolve As we talk about public health
• 43:12
  i- in this environment. The, the physicians last week were like, "Well, you know, what is it that we do? What can we do?" Like,
• 43:25
  and I think this idea that one must fight because to whom much is given, much is required, is really tough when you're worn out. And that's, that's any of us.
• 43:42
  But w- what we have to understand, and what I've, what I think about with the Dr. Eatons of the world, or Simpkins, and in, in some cases, like with my great-grandfather, is that if not you, then who?
• 43:56
  If not now, then when?
• 44:00
  And so if I'm gonna think about my purpose in life being beyond my own comforts, 'cause Eaton could've just taken on the Y and the schools or whatever and been like, "Yo, my kids are in s- in the good schools, and they got what they need, and I'm playing tennis every weekend, and I make a lot of money."
• 44:20
  They had a second home in Jamaica. He, he wasn't... You know, all of this fight gets him, and I don't believe I included this in the book, but it also gets him audited by the IRS. He, he gets attacked in a lot of ways.
• 44:36
  His wife dies in their vacation home, essentially on a girls' trip with... You know, there's all this strain and this stress because you're in this forever fight.
• 44:46
  And I think that when we are privileged to have the resources we need to fight, then we're required to fight. And that looks different for everyone. Like, this conversation to me is,
• 45:01
  it's lending itself to a fight, keeping a conversation going, platforming a conversation, writing the narrative, writing the history, preserving the history. Like,
• 45:15
  I'm called to this 'cause this is what I can do with who I am and what I have. You know? But man, you give me some kinda
• 45:26
  almost unlimited financial resources, like nothing's really gonna kill me, my food is always gonna be on the table, in a nice home, and there's a second home, and there are cars, and there...
• 45:38
  I can come and go as I please. Like, I might need to do something with that privilege. And, and that's what is required of us in, in during our time here. And so, yeah, I think about that a lot.
• 45:54
  And I'll just add in really quickly, Dr. Eaton's daughter just wrote me a very nice handwritten note. Yeah, I had to have the family's permission to republish some of the archives. It's in a restricted archive.
• 46:09
  She said, "I just wanted to let you know we don't give this permission to writers, scholars that often" but that I'd done a good job with it. And, and for that I'm, I'm satisfied. While it is true that
• 46:25
  there's a lot of wasted energy, and there's a lot true that there are some very measurable ways,
• 46:31
  a variety of them, that you can show up to any of these civil rights, which is a very broad umbrella, to kids' cancer, malaria.
• 46:40
  We're far enough along to know what works and what doesn't, what is a distraction on purpose, what's disinformation, what's not. But the question of who is required
• 46:50
  to, to carry the, to fire and to do the fight, knowing that the same people have always had to, is a really important...
• 46:58
  For who is it enough at this point, with everything that has been done and been done to so many people, and the same people, for them to be able to just be a doctor, to serve their people, where everyone else has to,
• 47:13
  like myself, ha- have to fill in those gaps and, and take over in ways that only serve those purposes, right? Most people conduct politics as a hobby because they're not scared. Oh, yeah. I mean-
• 47:31
  Where everyone else,
• 47:34
  it is for power to, to survive, if not to improve their own lives or their families, or like you said, to, to improve on and to add to the ancestral intelligence of how did they survive, how did we get here, how do we keep going?
• 47:48
  It seems like we can't get anywhere with a reparations conversation, because we, we get back to this idea of like, "Well, I didn't do this thing." Like, we're here, we're h- we're here now.
• 48:02
  But in the same breath, we recognize that people, other people who did not do this thing or were not in this kind of bondage have lives that are directly impacted by those things. Yeah.
• 48:18
  So if you, if we understand that people benefit from things that happened when they weren't alive, and that other people struggle because of things that happened when they were not alive,
• 48:30
  then let's cancel that argument out, to say that- Mm-hmm... because we're here in this time, we bear no responsibility to repair the damage.
• 48:43
  I don't know that that is my problem to solve as a Black person. I'm in a constant state of resolving and thinking about the thing because I am. Mm-hmm.
• 48:57
  And whether you're doing this consciously or not, there's a way that you operate.
• 49:01
  There is a talk that every Black parent's gotta have with their kids if you're gonna want them to come back home, or have a shot at coming back home. Mm-hmm.
• 49:11
  Um, I just, I was in a conversation with one of my children's... teachers, and this is for my most mild-mannered middle child who, um,
• 49:27
  like, prays for you before she leaves in the morning. Like, "Mommy, you said you had a stomach ache. Let me pray for you." And I had a teacher call in the middle of, of the day and say she was being combative.
• 49:39
  I was like, "R- really? How so?" Of all the kids you could've called about, like of your three kids. Right.
• 49:45
  Yeah, but like, I know this child, and I know people say this about their children, but I'm real- we're really shocked. We're on the three-way call, like mom, dad, teacher. Like, it was important enough for you to call.
• 49:56
  And it was really the teacher's frustration, and he's like, "Well, when I turned around, she said it wasn't so-and-so who was talking, and I know who's talking." I said, "Oh, so she took up for someone in the space.
• 50:09
  Is that what you're calling combative?" And we just went through this back and forth, 'cause I need to understand what you're saying.
• 50:15
  My point in telling the story is that, like, I had to check that language because that's some loaded language for a Black child in your classroom. Mm-hmm. Who's... And that's actually not what you're describing.
• 50:29
  So these are the things, and he, he reneges on this, and has since said, "You know what? She's actually not a problem." Actually just got off the phone with him before I did this interview.
• 50:42
  But why were you so quick to assign this personality trait to my child when you cannot provide the evidence of that? And it's just, that's not true.
• 50:55
  There are a lot of things I could s- I could see happening, and we can talk about. Not true. What I'm saying is a lot of this stuff is not, it, it is the brunt for Black people to bear because we exist.
• 51:08
  It is not on me to solve because I've given you, and those who have come before me have given the nation the ways in which this thing can be resolved, but we keep choosing as a nation to operate in a very particular way.
• 51:24
  Mm-hmm. And need to also remind ourselves, since we just celebrated her birthday, that America is a baby. Mm-hmm. These are actually baby problems. We're not a longstanding civilization over here, right?
• 51:41
  This, like, we just got started, and we refuse to put the baby in the corner and say, "Hey, this ain't how we're gonna act. We don't tolerate this." We actually,
• 51:57
  I reckon we've set ourselves back certainly more than 50 years where we're going with policies for public health- Mm-hmm... women's health, access to the ballot box, our safety, accountability for a federal government.
• 52:15
  I mean, we're cl- we're, we're setting ourselves back, right back to these times. And I don't know how long it's gonna take to repair that, but damn, you're, you're only 250. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 52:32
  If we can't, if we can't address this now when you're a baby, what's gonna happen when you get to middle school? Right. Right. No, and, and, and it, it, it's, there's a, there's a meme. A meme. I'm 1,000 years old.
• 52:48
  There's a GIF, JIF, I don't know what the hell it is. It's somebody, it's a funny tweet. I don't fucking know. I'll send it to you.
• 52:55
  Somebody's just like, "Oh, that, that's not what America does," or whatever, and, and then they open a history book and they're like, "Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait." But
• 53:04
  so again, and I, and I say this with a s- very visceral self-awareness of, of their, of their privilege, but my kids started watching, my 13-year-old found Key & Peele, right? Perfect.
• 53:18
  And he found Obama's Anger Translator, of course. And you can't understand that without
• 53:31
  the story you just told of your child being called combative, and why Obama always said,
• 53:38
  you know, for all his, you know, the wonderful things he did in his faults, like why he was like, "I can't, I can't be the angry Black man. I, that is like the, I cannot do that."
• 53:48
  And th- that skit doesn't exist without that and without that whole history, and you don't get this phone call, and like you said, without this loaded language of combative.
• 53:56
  And we don't have, you know, Georgia who only flipped blue, purplish because of, you know, decades of, of, of Black women fighting for it, but still not have taken the Medicaid money without that history.
• 54:09
  And again, again, this comes back to the, how the word is passed and the price of exclusion. Like we know the price for, we see it. Yeah. Yeah.
• 54:16
  And, and to that, that point, like that's absolutely why Obama needed Biden in his- Sure. Sure... in the form he was in. If he was ever doing. Right. And yet and still, like some of the most racist, horrific...
• 54:33
  I mean, we don't even know the extent to which that family was threatened, and this- I can't even imagine. No, but we, we fast-forward in the past 10 years. I,
• 54:49
  it's, it's almost un... It, it, it's troubling how much America allowed for the
• 55:03
  vile nature of the person holding the highest office in the land, for the, the, the language that's used, the decorum, the, the racism, the policies. Like I remember saying 10 years ago-
• 55:19
  Like, this whole thing about the press and y'all watch. I, I, I, about a year, maybe a little less than a year before Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested,
• 55:30
  I had written a Substack newsletter about how the Black press was criminalized under Hu- Hoover's FBI, and predicted that a journalist was going to be arrested that year.
• 55:44
  Like, we were right back on track, but you need that context to show you, like, how and why governments go after journalists in this way,
• 55:55
  and what is going to happen to us if we keep excusing these things in the press pool. And we did it for a decade, and sure enough, you, you've got the reporters' homes being raided. It came for everybody.
• 56:08
  It started with the hurling the insults at Hispanic, Asian, and Black reporters. The, in the very beginning.
• 56:17
  Jim Acosta, Yamiche Alcindor, April Ryan, Weijia Jiang, who then ends up sitting next to the president and it, you know, as head of White House Correspondent. But anyway, if we had nipped that crap in the bud
• 56:31
  a decade ago, you don't get to raids and banning press and really what we're, we've almost arrived to state-run media. Yeah.
• 56:45
  You don't get to clear the airwaves so the, the ownership of these companies. What happened? My God, look at what happened to 60 Minutes. Quint tells
• 56:57
  this story often, but in his book about what has been done on purpose, again, to the, the African American community. Oh, yeah. Which, like you said, to use the same example, is a baby. It's basically brand new. Right.
• 57:11
  And we're already trying, and I say we because this is what people voted for. Mm-hmm. It is being stripped away and stripped away so that we can't tell that story because,
• 57:24
  and again, and you know, my old history professor will, will kill me for this one, but- Mm-hmm...
• 57:28
  the quote in one of the Federalist Papers about like, men are not angels, basically, and that's why we need these, these, these guidelines, our rules, our systems. Because we're very aware, 'cause
• 57:43
  whatever your beliefs, the original sin, like we're very aware if you, if the revolution is well read, what we're capable of. We're- Yes, and it- The price of explosion is like, it's very easy to calculate here.
• 57:55
  Like, it's not, it's not difficult to do if you start doing any of it, and they don't want you to. No, it- They want you to have the education and the access. Forget we don't want
• 58:07
  Serena Williams to have good care when she's giving birth, right?
• 58:10
  And, and, and bleeding out, and, and I know Beyoncé had, had, had similar and, and that's, you know, why, part of the reason why Representative Underwood is so focused on the Momnibus.
• 58:20
  I believe one of her friends was a nurse. Mm.
• 58:24
  Before we get to that, it is, it is we don't want the access to have, for someone to have the education to be able to rock the boat, to be able to become a part of society and own a home that gives them the power to do more.
• 58:37
  We have to keep cutting it back, and it's the same thing as the attack on the African American system, so that is part, I mean...
• 58:44
  I'm such admirer of your work and, you know, you've worked in, with ProPublica, which is one of my favorites and, and all this, but i- it is why I, I,
• 58:55
  I was very interested in this book and, and talking to you is because the, the answer is both self-evident but also constantly requires explanation. Constantly.
• 59:07
  And I am glad you mentioned ProPublica because while the book starts out with me working in local television here and covering the summer of 2020 and the racial reckoning and COVID and all this stuff,
• 59:24
  while I'm writing it, I transition to ProPublica, and I almost thought I was writing the wrong book because I was covering school board uprisings and the forces behind one.
• 59:36
  But then I quickly realized, as I'm writing on this, you know, at night, on the weekend, whenever I get a chance, that I'm actually covering the same thing. Yes, that I was putting narrative.
• 59:48
  I, I tell people the school board, it was not your normal education beat. I think a lot of education reporters struggled with covering the uprisings, one, because it had a white woman face to it,
• 1:00:04
  and historically that's just, that's safe, that's non-threatening. They're just concerned parents. Never mind that none of the concerned parents look like anyone else. Like, that was my first clue.
• 1:00:16
  Like, we didn't get the memo to turn up at the school board meeting. Where, where, where was this memo? C- well, 'cause it wasn't written. Right. Yeah. No one sent that for us. That's, that's not our fight. And so
• 1:00:31
  the whole point of the school board coverage was to show the forces that finance and shape the thing, and I remember saying in late 2021, early 2022, that they're coming for higher ed and the federal government, and I remember people being like, "That, what?"
• 1:00:49
  I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no. This, the school board," and I wrote a piece for the Atlanta Journal Constitution about this at the conclusion of my years of reporting on it.
• 1:00:59
  The school board was the testing ground for the fall of democracy.
• 1:01:02
  This is why I will always maintain if you want to shape an electorate which then shapes the nation, then you absolutely have to go where we are indoctrinated, and that doesn't have to have a negative connotation.
• 1:01:16
  We're indoctrinated into values. The place that you go is to the one system that most of us will pass through in our lifetime, and that's the public school system.
• 1:01:28
  Ironically, in Georgia, the idea of public schooling is, is started by Black people. It's by Haitians who were fighting here in Savannah to-
• 1:01:39
  The whole concept of public schooling is, is bred out of reconstructing a nation post-enslavement. That's where you go to reach young minds.
• 1:01:51
  And so the distraction was, 'cause how many school board uprisings are you hearing about now? Used to hear them every day. No.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah, the job has been done, and y'all certainly did in, in, in Virginia, in northern Virginia.
• 1:02:07
  It's been, the, the thing has been accomplished because it was never about said bathroom, whatever particular book or, or, or the COVID or what. It, it wasn't about the thing at the moment.
• 1:02:20
  It was about the appetite to other something or some people in order to steer the education in a particular way, therefore steer the indoctrination.
• 1:02:32
  We ought to be indoctrinated into values of humanity, that, you know, Quinn, if you're not okay, you and the family aren't okay, we're not okay next door, right?
• 1:02:43
  Because to love thy neighbor makes sure that I'm knocking on that door and I'm like, "Okay, brother, what can we do?" Well, this is- To contribute... and, and I'm not sure your, your particular
• 1:02:58
  faith or what have you, but I was a, long ago, religious studies major. Mm-hmm. I'm like a monster atheist, right? But I really believed in, this is answers a lot of the questions of how we got here, right?
• 1:03:10
  Whether it's war, whatever it might be. Anywhere in the world, here we are.
• 1:03:14
  But of my biggest criticisms of, of most at least US-based organized religion, not to say everyone, but a lot of them, it is this idea, and you came back to love thy neighbor. Like, th- that is, it is a verb.
• 1:03:25
  It is, you have to do the works part of faith and works. And if you're not doing it, and I, you know, I,
• 1:03:32
  we launched this whole thing which pissed a lot of people off, which I was so excited about, and we call it Actually Pro-Life.
• 1:03:38
  And the idea is, is very measurable, and it's like, if you haven't showed me something you have measurably done to improve the health or lifespan of a child or someone who has fewer resources than you- Yeah...
• 1:03:52
  then that's not what it is. Like, if you're not, like you said, if you're not knocking on the door, then, then you can't, you're just saying it out loud. It is a, it's a hobby, right? It's a, it's a hobby.
• 1:04:01
  And if you can stand to see your neighbor kidnapped- Sure... in a force in which people do not have to identify themselves or a reason or where you're taking me. Mm-hmm.
• 1:04:14
  We keep talking, my biggest media criticism around coverage of immigration enforcement is that you're talking about people being deported when deportation is an actual legal process, and that's not what we're seeing.
• 1:04:27
  That's not what we're doing. That's not what we're doing here. We're not doing it. We're not doing it. I, so I am a scholar of the historic Black press because, again, narrative- Sure...
• 1:04:39
  plays in, in history, and I always say America doesn't have a full accounting of herself without the pages of the historic Black press. Sure. Freedom's Journal, the bicentennial is next year.
• 1:04:50
  Freedom's Journal is actually launched to argue for Black people in America to have access to the ballot box and full citizenship. That is the whole point of America's first Black newspaper, 1827.
• 1:05:03
  And that we pledge ourselves to no party, but no longer can others speak for us. We're not gonna do a partisan thing, but we're gonna do a human rights thing.
• 1:05:12
  And when the Fugitive Slave Act passes, I happen to have this 'cause I'm writing a paper for a conference next week. Mm-hmm. Mary Ann Shadd, who turns into Carrie- Mm-hmm... is from an, a, a Black, Northern Black family.
• 1:05:25
  They're free. They run a stop on the Underground Railroad, and when the Fugitive Slave Act passes, she's like, "Hey, this place ain't gonna work for us."
• 1:05:33
  And she goes to Canada, and she's the first Black woman in North America to publish a newspaper. Her whole basis of this is a plea for immigration,
• 1:05:43
  a plea for, "Black people, you must move to freedom in a different way 'cause I don't think this place is gonna work for us." We have been debating based on the Fugitive Slave Act, right? Right.
• 1:05:56
  Based on masked men, deputized people do, do not have to identify themselves, determining that you are out of pocket for moving freely, and we're gonna capture you, and you're gonna be enslaved in these ways.
• 1:06:11
  If that is not what we're watching, and we're sending minors, children who don't know anything to court to plea their case for where they're going to s- forth with their lives without any parents.
• 1:06:25
  We're a cruel, we are a cruel, cruel nation.
• 1:06:32
  We are, we are very aware of what we're capable of, and, and if we're willing to read the books and, and to, and to let those books be published, and then let those people be educated so they can publish.
• 1:06:42
  The whole thing, we, we can keep going down it all. We are, again, have to keep going back to Clint's work, but I keep reading it but a lot- Oh, no, do not Clint...
• 1:06:52
  and I'm also, I, I'm also, I really love, you know, most people, my, both my grandfathers fought in World War II and, and all this, so I think about it all the time, but, but Clint's work, he wrote that incredible piece in The Atlantic, and then it was part of the book about, I'm forgetting what the word is for the little things that are stuck in the pavement in Berlin.
• 1:07:11
  All those places outside the homes of the people who watch them go by. I'm totally forgetting what the word is and how they stick up a little. And again, being above a candy shop at Colonial Williamsburg.
• 1:07:21
  These quote unquote "deportations," these don't happen without the people going, "Ugh, it's such a shame, but, you know, what am I supposed to do?" What am I supposed to do? Or I don't want a target on my back. Right.
• 1:07:32
  Right. I don't want any trouble coming my way. Right. And so this, this whole idea around individualism and that turning our head to atrocity will somehow save us- Mm-hmm... is, is only It's wholly untrue.
• 1:07:48
  You're just allowing fascism- Mm-hmm... authoritarianism to rise. You're- You're just giving everything a break... acting. Yeah. You're aiding and abetting.
• 1:07:57
  And so then we get back to this conversation about our comfort and, and also when we say, "To whom much is given, much is required," a lot of people think about money, and it's like, but like what if, you know, my riches are in the fact that, you know, my kids are safe every night, and there's a roof over their head, and that, that is an insane privilege.
• 1:08:21
  Insane. My kids have it every day. They have no idea. And, and we yell at them all of the time, and we try to do everything we can to indoctrinate them, like you said. Doesn't have to be a bad word. Yeah.
• 1:08:30
  But they will never know the difference. Like, you know, it can only go so far, and we can only make them and encourage them and teach them to do so much. They won't know that fear.
• 1:08:40
  They won't know the fear, and I think, Quinn, I'm gonna say something that just sounds awful, but it's, it's true. It's we don't have enough people in our current state of living who are willing to die
• 1:08:58
  for something, and I think y- yeah, I don't wanna have to face death to stand up for life. But what if that is the cost?
• 1:09:16
  And I think about, you know, movements only move with young people. Mm-hmm. We don't have a civil rights movement without the students
• 1:09:28
  at these historically Black colleges and universities, and again, that's another reason that education is so dangerous because if your mind is opened up...
• 1:09:39
  Like, I've maintained that the point of, of college, it's, it's not to score a particular score on a test or to say that I, you know, I took XYZ so now I am proficient in these things.
• 1:09:53
  To go to school and, and you determine what the education is, trade school, community college, traveling for a year, whatever. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 1:10:03
  To take yourself to school is to widen your ability to think and to empathize with other people and then to use that empathy and turn it into a solution so s- one might live better than they do now, and that's why liberal arts and humanities are under attack.
• 1:10:23
  Of course. I think of a quote during the AIDS massacre. He said, "Go out and make some fucking history." The point was like you're gonna rally in the morning, and you're gonna be dead by tonight.
• 1:10:40
  It's, you shouldn't have to be the ones, but like what, what, what is there to lose?
• 1:10:45
  Like you said, that's, it's those young people that are tortured and, and are required, but that doesn't excuse everyone else from not participating in whatever is the most measurable way to those people, not to myself.
• 1:11:01
  My kids are gonna be fine. We're dealing with this all...
• 1:11:05
  And literally I've been yelling at our school board for, for months 'cause they're doing some like very, very light re-segregation, and people are calling them on it left and right, and they're just plowing right through.
• 1:11:17
  And again, like I don't give a shit where my kids go. The school system's fine. It's good. They're gonna be fine.
• 1:11:23
  It doesn't fucking matter, but it's all these kids that, I mean, I'm sure you know all about this, like every meeting is scheduled for when people can't come. Sure. Access. That's it. It's access. That's it. And access.
• 1:11:38
  So- Yeah... if I have this fake job, like why shouldn't I fucking go? That is the point. If I, if I'm given that opportunity, that's it.
• 1:11:46
  If I can sit around and read your book and Clint's book and all this, but, and, and, you know, then, then I should be able to bring it. Go, guys. I mean, we literally had
• 1:11:55
  the, their, their meeting where they actually do have public forums is in, uh, a school that was specifically built to be the segregated high school. Yeah. That's where we're having those conversations.
• 1:12:09
  I'm like, how are you unaware of the subtext of what we're doing here? Like are you fucking kidding me? Mm-hmm. It's just... But, but it'll just continue, you know?
• 1:12:19
  And I'll tell you, the people who are attacking education and the way that it's financed and what the federal government will finance based on what you come out of school making or whatever, they're not not sending their kids to college.
• 1:12:34
  They're not, and, uh, that, that's, so that tells you everything that you need to know. And let me tell you, humanity doesn't involve like a focus on capitalism. It just doesn't.
• 1:12:48
  So if you're saying my degree, like I came out of a historically Black college in, or university in North Carolina, Winston-Salem State, math communications major with the Syracuse for broadcast journalism, and my first job on television in Hubert Eaton's Wilmington, North Carolina, paid me $18,500 a year.
• 1:13:11
  But you know what I did for $18,000 a year? I learned how to not only bear witness- Mm-hmm...
• 1:13:20
  but document what I'm bearing witness to for an audience, and then I do it a little better in the next place, in the next place. And I would say my, my start in the world with $18,500
• 1:13:36
  didn't make m- my degrees of no value. It didn't make my college experience of no value. It put me in the mindset to set out in the world along with-
• 1:13:49
  Other aspects of my rearing, my childhood, to do what I consider an important body of work. Okay? So it's not based on what I've made and, or... Like,
• 1:14:04
  the only reason we care about money is 'cause we need it to survive in this kind of society. Like, that's the only reason.
• 1:14:14
  Like, I just wanna be comfortable, and I want my kids to be comfortable and to have access to the things that they need and some of what they want, right? Like, the joys of, of life.
• 1:14:26
  But other than that, if you're asking me about a dollar, the dollar means nothing to me.
• 1:14:31
  But my mind, my ability to be an empath, my ability to sit still and feel something outside of the chaos that's around me, those are the things that I value in life, and that can't be bought. And
• 1:14:49
  I think right now, and I, I don't wanna butcher the quote, but Toni Morrison, whose book is being banned in our school district as we speak,
• 1:15:00
  speaks of these times of chaos as a time for the artist to, to create art, for the writers to write, for us to engage in the conversations and then do something with what we know and find out something we don't know.
• 1:15:16
  And so we're just in a time, and it feels, you know, it feels like it's going to get... Like it's warring each other. So much chaos, but I gotta stay focused to do the work. And so we gotta keep working. And
• 1:15:32
  I wanna say two things.
• 1:15:33
  You brought up Clint a lot, and I have to say how The Word Is Passed is absolutely stylistically what helped guide me through writing The Price of Exclusion because, well, it's what I know how to do, field reporting in the archives and the investigation, but you have to go touch and feel the thing.
• 1:15:51
  You do. Yeah. That's what he does so beautifully. Oh my God. Yeah. And talk to the people and, and I thought there was something so striking about stepping into these very important places like
• 1:16:02
  America's first public hospital for Black people and see who sits in there today and what they grapple with today on the grounds of this place that is, was actually never meant to really care for us.
• 1:16:19
  Like, how does that translate a century, a century and a half later? You gotta go touch it and see what people know and what they don't know, and why, and why is that.
• 1:16:30
  And so it, it really was a, a book, a spiritual book guide to this, to this work. And then the, the places, like I, I love my T-shirt. It comes from Village Books in, in Atlanta.
• 1:16:46
  And, and we need places to gather and to think and to get offline. I've been talking a lot about this on the book tour. This is, what, what can we do?
• 1:16:57
  We can stop arguing with people online and stop arguing with accounts that are made to concoct more chaos because it's leading to idle minds. Well, and that's the hobbyism, right? It feels like an outlet.
• 1:17:12
  It feels like you're doing something.
• 1:17:14
  And even those of us who are trying to do those things or, or have to can get caught up in it, 'cause again, these are the systems that are completely designed to entrap and to keep you there and to, to use any available energy or bandwidth that you might have as a hardworking author and m- mom of three- [laughs]...
• 1:17:31
  crazy, wonderful children. They're like, "We're gonna suck that out of you, and then that's all you got." And you're right. You're like- That's all you got... "That is all I've fucking got." Yeah. I don't have it.
• 1:17:38
  Mm-hmm. But I love the... Obviously, I love the Toni Morrison quote. I love how evergreen it is forever, and that, of course, it's being banned now, and it's still applicable, and it's always been applicable. So
• 1:17:51
  on, on that note of, of evergreen stories and art, so my wife co-wrote the Wicked movies, and... I know, I know. You had this, you just said this- Work, huh? Yeah... point about...
• 1:18:04
  You just, but you just said this thing about Atlanta, about being in this place that was actually never meant to care for us. And these movies came out, and so many people...
• 1:18:17
  First of all, they tried to make them for 20 years. They were... It turns out the book came out. They tried to make the movie first, and then Stephen Schwartz said, "Let me try to make it a musical."
• 1:18:27
  This is whatever, 25 years. Musical happens forever. Bunch of different people try to make the movies. They make them, they come out, and everyone goes, "Wow, they are v- very relevant for now."
• 1:18:36
  And you go, "Well, yeah, because they always are," because you have to make art during the time, and because the story's been told and also, like, it's been coming out.
• 1:18:46
  And then I'm not sure it, you know, if, if you saw them or enjoyed them or know the story at all or any of that. I did. Yeah, and I, I bawled. Oh yeah, me too. I saw it 40 times and still bawled every time.
• 1:18:55
  But- Mm-hmm... again, I'm, I'm coming back. I promise there's an end to this.
• 1:18:59
  Elphaba had a new song in the second movie, and she's standing on the yellow brick road while everybody else is trying to leave, 'cause they're like, "We're fucked." The animals are like, "We're out. This isn't it."
• 1:19:12
  And she has this quote, fucking can't remember it, but she talks about, "Why do I love this place that never, like, wanted me here?" basically. Like, S- Stephen wrote that song like a year and a half ago, you know,
• 1:19:29
  i- into a story that is very old because the whole story is very old, and the animals being, you know, condemned for these things and driven out, and Elphaba being treated because of, of course she who she is.
• 1:19:40
  But it's this idea that, again, going back to, to, to Toni Morrison's book, like this, you have to tell these stories. We have to tell these stories.
• 1:19:47
  You have to go down the rabbit hole when you discover Fergie, when someone says "Hey, did you ever know about this guy?" And you're like, "No."
• 1:19:57
  It's a, it's this tale as old as time, and that's tragic and terrible, but you have to keep telling it, and you had to do all your news to get you to that point to do it, to add, hopefully, to the ancestral intelligence, right, for, for the next folks.
• 1:20:10
  Yeah. [laughs] Look, you've got me thinking about the next one. Actually, I need to- What's the next one? Well, I've got a w- I've, I've got an idea that centers around the monuments we build. Hmm.
• 1:20:28
  Because what you can see, you can believe. And what you can't see, you can easily erase. And that's not a new... Like, that's not prolific, a new thing. Clint touches on these themes, and I certainly...
• 1:20:45
  What struck me in researching the book is how... Have you ever read a set of facts that can also be a complete lie? Sure. Right. So it's what you don't say.
• 1:21:02
  It's not that- Mm-hmm So a lot of the- By omission. It's... Yeah. It's the omission that, that changes the entire framing.
• 1:21:11
  And so I teach a social justice journalism course, and they gave me, at Morehouse, just the, the blank page to create it, and I sat with it and I said, "How am I... What is social justice journalism?"
• 1:21:24
  Well, social justice applies to every facet of life: healthcare, education, access to you name it, the things that we need to be here- Hmm... to live in society that we all ought to have access to.
• 1:21:38
  But I was sitting in this room one night before I started on the syllabus, and I said, "I've got it."
• 1:21:43
  And I say this all the time, it's on my website, I say it at conferences, that facts are non-negotiable, but framing is a choice. Always. Yeah.
• 1:21:53
  And frame of those facts is how we choose to reckon with said thing, and it can change our trajectory just like this. Sure. And that's, that's that framing of the state of North Carolina paying for Dr.
• 1:22:09
  Eaton to go to medical school. Totally true. It's totally true. But why? Why do... We're not getting into the hows and the whys enough, and those are the most...
• 1:22:23
  You know, we used to be taught in J school, you know, I've been in the game for 20 years or whatever, 25 years now. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
• 1:22:30
  It's just like, you know, you're just straight with the, the facts, and if you get any deeper than that, you're getting into, like, specialty reporting. That's investigative. That's long form.
• 1:22:39
  When we really should've been taught the how and the why is, like, it's not an option. Hmm.
• 1:22:47
  It's not an option, that you must, to complete the story, you must get to some sort of how and why, and you must allow those things to evolve, and with it evolving, your understanding does as much. And so I, I just...
• 1:23:03
  There were a lot of places that I'd, I touched and I, I, you know, I felt along the way, and I'm like, "This is not true, but it ain't true." It's like- Of course. But this is the whole thing.
• 1:23:16
  You can talk about, you know, Clint's new book's on World War II, right?
• 1:23:19
  And again, like every white guy of a certain generation just sits on TNT and watches amazing movies about Saving Private Ryan or, or Band of Brothers. They're wonderful. Are they exclusive? 100%.
• 1:23:31
  But as that generation dies out, right, and again, my grandparents were, were, were part of it, uh, uh,
• 1:23:39
  we v- very dangerously start to lose touch with the why and the how of how many people participated in that, whether they were drafted to or they volunteered or whatever it might be, or they were forced to or they were put in a, you know, a, a fucking camp just 'cause their dad was half Japanese.
• 1:23:54
  Yes. But you can't just tell the story of Omaha Beach. You can't just tell E Company and, and all these different things, right, even Schindler's List,
• 1:24:09
  without telling the story of the fact that there was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. Mm-hmm. You gotta do... If you don't tell that, you don't get the context of, "Wait, why did we stay out of this for so long?"
• 1:24:22
  You know? Well- And, and that is, you have to have all of those foundation pieces to understand how we got to that place, right? Yes. Why were people on that beach?
• 1:24:34
  And I, I tell people all the time, if you wanna study the Holocaust, your first stop in the archives ought be, once again, the pages of the historic Black Press. Oh, of course.
• 1:24:43
  Before The Washington Post and The New York Times really get into calling a thing a thing, you had a lot of Black soldiers who were, of course, drafted, but they were also dispatching for the
• 1:24:57
  A&P, for the Negro Press, the wire service. And they were able to recognize Jim Crow on steroids and the inhumanity of the thing in a way...
• 1:25:12
  It's, it's written in a way, and it's written early on, that we don't see in mainstream press because, because the oppressed can recognize the oppressed in a cu- particular way.
• 1:25:25
  I think that's really instructive when we're talking about narrative and, like, what, when do we come to calling what we call the atrocity? Like, what does it take for us to finally say, "That's it"?
• 1:25:38
  What does it take for us to finally say where America is right now, and where she won't be? Well, we're inching toward the midterms. I mean,
• 1:25:51
  right now that- Have you, have you read a really beautiful, beautiful book from last year by- One day everyone will have always been against this It's on my TBR because the title a lo- yeah.
• 1:26:06
  And I think it's- It's everything you think it's gonna be and, and more. It's, it... What you're saying is, when do we get to the point where we say what something is?
• 1:26:15
  Because this is what we do, because we've recognized it, because it is not that different. The technology to spread the disinformation around it is- Right... different, but it's just more powerful.
• 1:26:26
  Like, the, the methods are really the same- Yeah... and what is being done is the same. I, I, it, it is a perfectly tragic book. It's very real, so I hesitate to say, like, you'll love it, but- Right, right...
• 1:26:37
  I think you will appreciate it certainly intellectually and, and morally. Yeah. Because that's what we do. Again, one day we'll have every- everyone will have been against this, you know? Yeah. I mean,
• 1:26:52
  I was listening to one of these crazy interviews where, so it was a man on the street kind of podcasting deal, something that came across my feed, and I was listening to a, a woman say, you know,
• 1:27:08
  that Black people needed to get over this kind of thing because, you know, there was,
• 1:27:13
  there was enslavement, but then, you know, King, this is what she said, King fought so this, this other s- so that you would have a shot, and you've got that shot, and I don't know what you're complaining about.
• 1:27:26
  And then she went on to describe enslavement as a way that actually provided people with skillsets they needed to move on in life.
• 1:27:35
  And I couldn't help but think about the Florida curricula a couple of years ago that went out that, like, these are the ways that an ens- Oh, I remember this. Yeah. You remember this? Yeah.
• 1:27:46
  And they used an example of an enslaved man, and I could not verify, I don't know where they got this from.
• 1:27:54
  They said, "Oh, well, he was a," I forgot the trade, "and because he had done that while he was enslaved, he was able to do X, Y, Z." He got, he got some skill. Yeah, I fully remember this. He had some skill. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:28:04
  But you know what's so crazy about this? Like, do we believe with our full brains that people survived the Middle Passage, were brought here and had no humanity, no skillset?
• 1:28:18
  You literally sold enslaved people based on climates, on air. There's a reason the Gullah Geechee people are from where they're from. Oh, yeah. They could, they could work in the swamp. This was not a broad stroke. Yeah.
• 1:28:29
  Right. They could do these things. It is if to say that we civilized the people when we put them in bondage, and they became people with skills because of our bondage.
• 1:28:41
  And in that bondage, we fed you, and we housed you, and we provided medical care, and then it just leads to the great... We talk about the big lie.
• 1:28:52
  The biggest lie in history is not the election lie, but it's right up there with it. The biggest lie is a white savior lie through enslavement, through colonization.
• 1:29:05
  And again, it's what, like, the colonization, again, I'm, I, I literally... Jamestown's down the road, you know? Yeah.
• 1:29:12
  And it is a, it is a, a beautiful place filled with history, and amazing people work there who are committed to telling more and more of the story of
• 1:29:20
  those guys, mostly third sons, were, like, here for two reasons, basically, because they heard there was gold, there was not- Uh-huh...
• 1:29:27
  and to spread, you know, the religion, the, the good word through horrific practices, and they were like, "You're welcome." Which is, again, what we did.
• 1:29:37
  You go through the Crusades and all these things, and it's, it's not complicated. It's a, it's a, it's a tale as old as time. But, but like you said, it's- Even this idea of, of healing, of providing
• 1:29:50
  medical care, it, it wasn't just white physicians who were going to plantations.
• 1:29:58
  They were transporting enslaved people between plantations to take care of one another, which tells you, right, that somebody came over here with a way of being. Sure.
• 1:30:10
  With a way of heal- that, that this idea of care and healing does not begin with the science that we say lived here with these people.
• 1:30:21
  Well, no, I mean, you spent a while talking about, about smallpox and inoculation and the gene- I mean, the whole thing in your book. Yes, right. Yes. Yes. The enslaved man, formerly enslaved man in Boston.
• 1:30:33
  Oh, one, one, oh, I'm totally for- One Onismus? I'm not sure how to pronounce that. I'm sorry. But yeah. Oh, Onismus. Uh-huh. Yes, Onismus.
• 1:30:41
  And, and they were like, "Hmm, no, since he, he came up with it, that's, that can't be right, and I'm not tou- I'm not touching that skin."
• 1:30:49
  Th- that's, and that's it, and he, he's literally, and his enslaver, Cotton Mather, is so enthralled with it. He's just like, well, thank God for Cotton Mather's diary, right?
• 1:31:02
  And, and the preservation of that because that is telling us a story that we otherwise would not, we wouldn't believe it. Sure.
• 1:31:11
  And I, I found, I always say, like, Benjamin Franklin and his bros were running, like, the Fox News of the 1700s. Do these- Mm-hmm.
• 1:31:19
  And then he turns around and ends up saying, "You know, I wish I had inoculated my child." 'Cause he fucking died. He dies. Yeah.
• 1:31:26
  He dies, but then you fast-forward, you go back to, and I didn't get into this as much as I should have. I've been talking about it on the book tour. But you've got W.E.B.
• 1:31:37
  Du Bois here as a professor at Atlanta University, and his child is, is dying of a preventable disease, and he maintains that
• 1:31:48
  if th- their Black doctor had been able to enter the closest hospital with that child, that the boy would have survived. That is why you find letters from Du Bois to the president of Shaw University
• 1:32:00
  As it, it pertains to Leonard Medical School, he's very interested in the plight of the Negro doctor and making sure we don't break the pipeline that, that becomes broken. Mm-hmm. 'Cause he's experienced this himself.
• 1:32:14
  And I'll tell you right now, there's a public hospital that sat on the campus of Spelman College, right connected to Atlanta University.
• 1:32:23
  Trained Black nurses, a college for Black women, trained Black nurses, did not allow Black doctors to practice there. Because the leadership of the college was, was, it's, it's not Black-led.
• 1:32:35
  It's still this progressive thought where they were like, "You know what? We're gonna go this far, but not this far." Right. So I think when we reckon with those things, we, we can attack the issues before us today.
• 1:32:51
  It, it, a narrative is so powerful. I'll, I'll say this. Narrative is so powerful. I was almost intimidated to speak before those physicians because I thought I'd be bringing them something they already knew.
• 1:33:03
  Like, what, who am I to be the keynote to your brilliance? Sure. But what I understood is we use different parts of our brains. And the things that you can do, I know I can't do. I'm not meant to do.
• 1:33:19
  But there are some things I do that bring clarity to the things you do because of narrative. Of course. Because I can tell you the story, right?
• 1:33:28
  And I can put a face and some history and some things together in a way that is easy to understand. So many of them did not know about Shaw University, did not know about Leonard Medical School, had not thought about
• 1:33:44
  the data and social determinants and academic speak that we write in the journals translating into narrative in this way. But they could recognize their patients and their plight in the story. Yeah, sure.
• 1:33:58
  They're gonna crush flashcards all day. That might not be your business. The how and the why, someone's gotta tell them that story, right? Yeah. And so you- But that's where I-... and I'll go dig.
• 1:34:10
  But that's what I, so my very brief version of that, you know.
• 1:34:14
  So, so I, I've done w- you know, one million different things and worked on the Obama campaigns and for newspapers and, and phil- philanthropic stuff, all this shit. And, and how did I get to this?
• 1:34:27
  The, the very brief version is in, in 2000, in 2008, I had a cousin get diagnosed with cancer. And this is before all this. This is like, you know, again, Obama, I was working for ESPN, like, who, who god knows.
• 1:34:41
  And love her very much. We have the same birthday. And she got sick, and I thought, "What, what, how the fuck do I have-- What do I do? Like, what do I do?" N- not a doctor.
• 1:34:53
  Not a re- like, you can go back and check all my AP biology tests. It's not great. Lot of red pen. But I found, I don't, n- n- so many people had found it before me. Someone recommended. I did, can't take credit for it.
• 1:35:07
  Someone sent me this group called Team in Training, and they are the fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. And the whole thing is you sign up for a race,
• 1:35:21
  whatever, and then you train with a team of people who are comprised of survivors, family members, current patients sometimes, depending on what they're going through.
• 1:35:34
  And the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, along the time of your training, however many weeks or months it is, they set up these talks, keynotes, conversations, Q&As with doctors and researchers and all these people who are like, "You've agreed to run this race and raise some money.
• 1:35:48
  Here is exactly how I'm gonna put the $10,000 you raised to use." Because I was good at flashcards, and I can do that. And that was so compelling to me in the moment and so revelatory.
• 1:36:03
  But even so more now, I finally wrote this whole essay about, like, why we made Nap. And I was like, "Oh, shit." It was 'cause I was like, "Oh, I can run. Like, I, I can sweat, and then I give them the money.
• 1:36:16
  This is g- I don't have to be a fucking doctor," you know? And a few years later, or the next year, a, a very good friend got cancer. He ended up passing away very quickly. But immediately I was like, "Where's the play?
• 1:36:27
  Who can I raise the money for, for this specific?" And there was a whole thing. There is always something- Yes... you can do. Even if, again, you are not scared enough, it doesn't have to just be the Instagram thing.
• 1:36:38
  It doesn't have to just be reading the books. Of course, the education's important. The revolution will be what's read. Mm-hmm. But it is vitally important to look a- look around and go, "What can I offer to this?"
• 1:36:51
  To someone who says, "This is what we need." Exactly. Right? It's gotta start with that. But then you go, "What can, what can I offer?" And, and you, it might not be something that ever occurred to you before. Right.
• 1:37:02
  But I guarantee you there's a way to do it. And like you said, it's easy to have that fraud instinct of like, "Holy shit, a bunch of more house physicians." Like, what can I bring to the table here? Right.
• 1:37:11
  They don't know shit, right? I mean, we have traveled all over the country, and we're at this premier institution, and the AMA is like, "Come, come to-" Sure, sure. Yeah.
• 1:37:19
  Like, this is a little different than the book tour. And- Yeah... this is your thing. And history narrative, it, it'll, it'll get you every time. It can at least put you in the right framework to launch
• 1:37:37
  the attack, meaning for solutions. Sure. To attack the, the issue and say, "Okay, this, this is the starting point because we know this." You know, when we're talking about public health, social determinants do matter.
• 1:37:53
  There are people, including those who govern us in this moment, who are making policies who say, "Where you live does not determine your outcome."
• 1:38:03
  Like, you better be able to dig yourself out of something if you want it And that's crazy when you're dismantling all of the arms charged with investigating the slop that's dumped in your backyard.
• 1:38:18
  We have a place of the co- part of the country that we affectionately call Cancer Alley. So like- Cancer Alley... don't come to me, tell me it doesn't fucking matter where you live.
• 1:38:27
  That's what, and, and- We'll normalize anything. We'll normalize anything. We'll normalize not feeding kids. I, I don't put the lunch account on automatic refill 'cause I may not pay from the same card or whatever. Yeah.
• 1:38:42
  We just fill it up when it comes. It's incredible to see the language in the reminder that there's no money on the account. And I've even called up to schools, and not naming schools, whatever.
• 1:38:57
  I'm saying I've called up and said, "Can I put... Thanks for the reminder. Can we put money on someone else's account?" "We don't have a mechanism for that." What? Like...
• 1:39:13
  Oh, I guess that's evil socialism. Yeah. What, what is the opposite of that? What? But we can send unlimited letters that sound like we're, you know- You figured out that formula...
• 1:39:29
  we are credit, you know, collectors. Mm-hmm. Like we're creditors to say, "Hey, if, if you don't do this, kid's gonna get a cheese sandwich," and then you got somebody allergic to dairy.
• 1:39:44
  But if you're gonna eat, that's what you're gonna eat 'cause nobody has money on your accounts for some overpriced, I don't wanna call it slop, but a lot of it is.
• 1:39:54
  And so y- yeah, like we're just not good to each other, and if, if we're, if we're just better to each other on a basic level, like policy doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be human.
• 1:40:14
  I always struggle with how to phrase this, but the good news about fighting for really basic shit for some of us for the first time, for many people forever, is it doesn't have to be complicated.
• 1:40:29
  We can, I don't care what you wear, how you look, whatever your freak flag is beyond that, but like if we can agree on these basic things and then, like you said, go knock on your neighbor's door,
• 1:40:40
  doesn't have to be complicated. And who knows what we're capable of if we do do the basics, right? And it's equitable. The basics are equitable. If, if everybody can access the thing they need to live.
• 1:40:59
  Yeah.
• 1:40:59
  We were out in LA for a long time and, and you know, they have all these uncapped oil wells, and they've got oil production still going in the middle of these cities, and we know what it does to kids who can't sleep.
• 1:41:09
  We know it does like w- Forget the fact that, again, no life is worth more than another, and it doesn't matter if they end up going on to cure fucking whatever. Like who knows?
• 1:41:22
  We're, we're sitting here playing with one hand tied behind our back on purpose, you know? But we have to put the people in power, like you said, looking at school boards. Oh, God.
• 1:41:32
  All those places, and working our way up and, and, you know, Virginia, we- we've, we've done a pretty good job of, of trying to right the ship here at the state level. Like you can do that.
• 1:41:42
  You can help give people health coverage that you'll probably never need, and I hope Georgia does it at some point, but it, the work is required. It's gonna require everyone.
• 1:41:49
  'Cause if, if we're not dead, we're living, and since we're living, we might as well do something with the life. Am I... What else am I gonna do here? I have kept you all day. Clearly beg to keep going. You are so kind.
• 1:42:04
  You are so kind. I'm sorry if you had literally anything else to do today. Little papers to write, some midterms to grade. Fine. You can blame it on me. I'll take the hit. Any day. Any day. People should go get the book.
• 1:42:18
  I don't have it. Maybe it will- Photoshop. There, there it is. See? No, hold on. Down, down a little bit. Other way, other way, other way, other way. But you're covering up your name.
• 1:42:29
  The Price of Eclu- Exclusion by Nicole Carr. She's just so lovely and patient and kind and thoughtful, and it's a beautiful story.
• 1:42:39
  Man, until you start asking questions, you know, about the why and the how, you never know you got a Fergie out there or turns out you've been doing news all this time to prepare yourself to tell that story.
• 1:42:49
  So that's it. You can check us out at our new site and new URL at themostimportantquestion.show. That's themostimportantquestion.show. You can check out our very quickly growing YouTube at Important Not Important.
• 1:43:04
  Please subscribe and like and all that stuff. And of course, you can follow us on the socials at importantnotimportant on Instagram and TikTok. You can buy our merch at shop.importantnotimportant.com.
• 1:43:15
  We've got great stuff. And of course, almost everything we make is free to you, not to us, so you can support that by joining the membership and get some bonus episodes too at importantmembership.com. Thanks.