Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we take a look at the recent redistricting boom that has followed the US Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Calais decision and consider whether the racial frame that this has been presented in is the best frame to view it in for those who oppose it.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like a podcast. I'm James Keats, and joining me today is a man who knows the importance of dealing with the man in the mirror.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Tunde.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Ogunlana Tunde. You ready to show us today who's bad?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Man, you can't throw that much Michael Jackson out and not expect me to react. But I gotta have a chance.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Yes. No, I'm gonna stay disciplined and we'll just have a show. I mean, you just.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: I'm trying to get you to react.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: No, you can't.
You just screwed me up. Yeah.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Thank you. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. We're recording on May 26, 2026. And Tunde, back in April, the U.S. supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had out of six congressional districts, two had been drawn majority black. And the Supreme Court struck it down finding that despite Louisiana's population being 30% black, factoring in race to create that a second, you know, there was one. And creating a second black majority district was unconstitutional. Now, the real fallout from the decision is that it reinterprets a part of the civil rights era Voting Rights act and to not require states to draw their congressional districts in a way that doesn't dilute the voting bloc of minorities, at least as long as it's done for partisan reasons and not for explicitly racist reasons. Now, since the decision, many states, particularly in the south, have rushed to do their own redistricting in ways that does dilute the voting power of blacks and other minority candidates and in the context of making districts more partisan towards Republican. But so soon, I want to take a big view here. What stands out to you about the Louisiana v. Calais decision and all this redistricting that we're happening that's happened since, which does seem to be in effect really muting the voting power of blacks and minorities around the country.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: I would say a lot stands out to me, which is why we're having a show. But I'll give you the succinct two things that stand out. One is that, honestly, man, that there's no finish line in a democracy.
And what I mean by that is this is an interesting experience for me to live through. I'm 48.
I was born in 1978, so post the civil rights era. So I grew up in the backdrop of this idea that that stuff was over and that, you know, equality and all these kind of. Everybody was getting along and I was naive in projecting out.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: I'm sorry, you said before.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: You thought we were all on the same page with this kind of stuff.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's where I'm getting at is. And yes, exactly. So that's what I was just about to get to is I was naive in projecting to the rest of my fellow countrymen in America that 90% of us all felt the same way. And so that's what stands out to me. And part of your wind up here, which is it's kind of like the Dobbs decision with abortion.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: When they kicked it back to the states, certain states immediately, like Texas and Oklahoma began to have very draconian laws regarding abortion. And that was for some people, predictable. And I think that. And that's for some people why they felt that issue.
The federal government, through the ruling in 1973 in Roe vs Wade, had given federal protection to women who wanted that right of choice. Here is the same thing which is once this Voting Rights act of 1965 had enough holes in it via the Supreme Court, through years of hard work for people who didn't like the 1965 legislation, we, like you just said, we immediately like immediately saw states rush back to redistrict and make their constituents experience, I guess, less representative. So that's one thing that stands out. And the second thing that stands out, James, and I'll try and get through this really quickly, is, you know, I've lived overseas. I spent almost five years of my life living in Australia, another first world country. And in looking at other countries I've visited, the reason I mentioned Australia is because I actually lived there. So it's not like I was visiting for two weeks and having lived there for that long. I had seen them go through several elections, both prime minister elections and the local municipalities.
And the contrast, I would say, from another first world country and the experience I have here is the hostility of which American citizens look at voting, look at including allowing everyone to be included. I mean, this idea that, you know, we're trying to shove 330 million people to vote on one single day and that mail in votes are considered now to be by some people to be, to be unpure and they're hostile towards that. When I lived in Australia, for example, in the 90s, they would. I remember there was a $45 fine for people who did not vote.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: So adjusted for inflation, maybe that would be equivalent to $253 a day. So imagine that it was 180 in terms of the.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Like, they wanted people to vote, whereas here we don't want.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Here it's not. There's always this thing about we got to keep certain people out all the time. And so to me, that's what stands out, is just another, I got to live through this. Right. That's kind of like.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: It's a. It's a good point. And just to see kind of that. That opposite perspective of, hey, our objective is to make it so that everybody votes versus our objective is to control the vote in a way that creates an outcome that we want. And that, to me, is really the big thing here.
I saw a lot of the immediate reactions and the callback to the Jim Crow era, which I don't think that stuff is out of line. But to me, what really stands out here is how the partisanship and the racial element are blurred together here in the sense that I don't get the sense that these redistricting efforts are primarily about, hey, let's make it so black people can't vote. It really does appear to me that it's like, hey, black people are a reliable constituency of the Democratic Party, so we're gonna try to mute that as much as possible and either stick them all into one district. So if it's so many of them that we can't dilute them all, we'll put them all in one so that way that they won't affect anything else, you know, like. Like what they would do in Louisiana or. And so forth. Or we're going to. To, like in Tennessee, for example, we're going to divvy up Memphis so that we can kind of make it so they don't get anything, you know, like, they won't be a majority in any congressional district. And while, yes, the. The. On the kind of looking at the American experience, our first reaction is like, oh, yeah, that's about race. But it actually, it really does seem about partisanship, you know, in a way where it's like, well, yeah, if this group of people votes 90% and we can see who they are and see, like, we. They all live in the same area. You know, we're like 90% for one side and we're not that side.
This is an effective group of people to go after from a. From A partisanship standpoint. And so I'm not saying that is that should matter necessarily and whether or not it's something you should support or not. But the blur between is this really happening? Because people are like, yeah, we're going to make it so black people can't vote.
Which some stuff does happen like that, you know, like I do see, I've seen rules and I've seen, you know, like voting, voter suppression stuff that, that does operate like that. But this actually seems like, hey, no, no, no, forget whether or not, because you have 30% of the population in Louisiana, whether or not you should get then a third of the representations or you should be able to, based on how things are set up to be able to vote in 30% of the representatives for Congress.
We're just saying, hey, we want to mute the idea of anybody in this party. Cuz what it reminds me of, I say, and I'll kick it back to you, what this reminds me of actually is the efforts that go against college students to try to make it harder for them to vote. And it's like, well, yeah, that's another constituency that tends to lean one way. And so it's like, is that because that's not because of a race issue? That's like, oh, because these people say, seemingly would make Republicans harder, harder for them to win elections, let's try to mute their voice as well. And so I don't know, it's hard for me to look at this purely from a racial standpoint. Even though muscle memory from living in the United States and learning about the history of the United States makes it feel like this is a racial issue directly, 100%.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I think you're finding an interesting seam in the American culture. And there's a tension there, which is that.
And this is a very hard conversation for us to have as a culture and a nation because our country is founded on things like white supremacy. A lot of people can get mad when they hear someone like me say
[00:09:29] Speaker A: that, but it's the tension the country's founded on the tension between white supremacy and equality.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's what I'm getting at, which is you have cultural realities like Manifest Destiny, where people felt that God gave their group actually this country, to go behave certain ways, right?
Move all the savages off the land, bring these Africans in to work the land, all that kind of stuff.
But then the reality, like you said, the Bill of Rights has embedded in it, we the people, the people are created equally and all that. So there are these tensions that are constant within the American story and the American struggle. And I think the racial tension is one of them because part of the tension, which is less discussed about than the racial stuff, is the tension between
[00:10:16] Speaker A: labor and I mean, interestingly also with that is that I also feel like because of the history of the nation and the cultural kind of legacy that's there, blacks actually there is a built in kind of structural setup to fight something like this.
And I want to get into this later. So there's a group of organizations and people that are ready to spring up right now to say, hey, this is, you know, black people aren't going to have representation now, so we're ready to fight it. We're going to file these lawsuits. Like it's already kind of set up and ready. There's an engine there that just needs to get turned back on and people need to get invested back in. But it was, you look at the civil rights era and that was a lot of black leaders and also whites that were with them, but black leaders that were leading the United States to become the nation. It said it was, you know, like they were leading the charge, you know, in saying, hey, this is what we say we're about. Well, we're going to help us get there, so to speak. And so the racial element may help mobilize, so to speak, the fight against this. Even whether I'm saying whether for me, I'm like, I don't know if this is actually racial in the same way that Jim Crow was racial or the same way that slavery was racial.
It seems like the racial piece, or at least there's something going on here with the racial piece being almost like you said, the, the thing that the pivot point here. But what's actually the objective here, which actually is going on is something else, you know, and it relates more to partisanship, which also there's a legacy, at least. George Washington talked about the negatives and the concerns of partisanship all the way back at the beginning. And that's been a tug also because partisanship, and we've done this in other shows, I'm not going to go down our greatest hits with that. But partisanship does have people put the interests of some other organization ahead of the interests of the nation at large.
By and large, it leads to that kind of thought. But I want to keep us moving. But you had something else.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Well, yeah, yeah. So because you said something very important, I think you're onto something. When you talk about going back to Jim Crow or even slavery, all of it was Designed to fracture, I guess, the equivalent of the working class.
So if you look, and we don't have time for me to explain all of this, but for the audience, look up the name Nathaniel Bacon. He was a gentleman from 1676. He led a rebellion in the Virginia colony and giving people homework.
Yeah, yeah, it's great. Go look it up. It's very interesting right around.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Because prior to 1676, there was all indentured servants and mixed in with some slaves were all multiracial Africans, British poor people, former convicts, things like that.
And what happened is Mr. Bacon led a rebell the elites, because the working conditions and all that were so poor. So long story short, it was a Virginia colony. The British Crown figured out that, hey, what we got to do is actually we're going to give the poor whites now. We'll give them some of the Native American lands and we'll make sure that only the Africans now work in the fields. And we'll give the poor whites the ability to be slave patrollers so they can oversee the slaves and we'll give them a little bit of this land. And that's something that created what W.B. du Bois reference as the psychological wage of whiteness in our culture, the psychic wage. And I think that's the root of it, James, is that unfortunately, there was a cultural alliance developed between certain groups in this country, the elite, and a certain group, not all, but a certain kind of slice of the poor white community.
And basically it was an exchange, which is if the elites are allowed to do whatever they want, some of those people in that community for that psychic wage, all they like for them, they just don't want to be black. So as long as they're considered in their culture to be above a black person, it doesn't matter how bad their living condition is. And I think when you understand that psychic wage concept, that helps us better understand in the modern moment why people seem to vote against their own interests so many times in terms of the working class in this country.
And so that's.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the word. Not necessarily. Looking now at the voting of the people right now, because we're looking at how the legislatures themselves are drawing these things up. And I mean, I touched on it before. I'm going to actually just kind of move into the next part of this. I want to discuss the racial element more explicitly here. And because like I said, the thing that when I was first reading about all this, that I was having a hard time squaring was, is race driving this or is Partisanship driving this, and is this being driven by a desire to, hey, we got to get those black people and we got to make sure that they don't have a voice, or is this saying, hey, we want to make it so that the Democratic Party has less districts they can win if black people are voting 90% Democratic?
And we've seen a lot of people talk about this subject saying, oh, well, this means that if black people want this to stop, then that means black people need to vote Republican and Democrat and that way that the party's can compete, you know. And so that's. That's been one proposed solution. Now that I think that has a lot of. That misses a lot of the big picture of what's happening. But when you look at. And I'm gonna. I'll get, I'll get your thought here, and I have some, some thoughts that I want to add.
Does the. Does it really even matter? You know, like if I, if I. Am I being too academic here, being too nuanced here, trying to really parse it out of. Okay, well, is this about race or is this about something else?
Do you think this even matters?
Or is this just a nail and we need to hit it with a hammer?
[00:16:01] Speaker B: So hold on for the audience. My friend over here who is an intellectual property attorney with a computer engineering degree is asking me if he's being too academic.
So let me just.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: And I'm asking a wealth manager.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: No, no, don't put it on me.
You get all that smart accolades here.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: I'm stupid.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: So. No, so. So I think you're on to something, James. This is, this is hard in American culture because like you said, our emotional muscle memory does feel like this is. All right, we recognize this, the Southern states, like, we're saying Jim Crow era stuff, all that. Right. But I think that's why I brought up the Bacon's Rebellion from 1676. Not to be on a big tangent, but just to say that those kind of realities also have to be acknowledged in our discussions about this. Not between you and I, but I mean greater as a culture. Because I agree with you, James. This is about fracturing the working class. This is about not allowing people who would do things like raise taxes on billionaires, which in this, in today's world would be the Democratic party, right? Maybe 100 years ago it was a different group, but that's today. That's. That's from keeping them to get enough power in Congress and in the government and in state legislatures to do things like that.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: So you're saying this is partisan in order to keep the people who have shown that they'll allow the billionaires to do what they want. Right now, that's the Republican Party. This is part you're saying that you see that as a driver, is that, hey, this is about the haves making sure that no mom Donnie comes around and starts poking at them and talking about trying to redistribute stuff.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: That's correct. And this is why to me, the psychic wage culture is so important. Because by saying, by focusing on the fact that they're disenfranchising black voters, I believe that unintentionally, people who do not want to see that happen, they are already telegraphing to enough people in the majority group in this country who are conditioned to believe if something's happening to black people, it doesn't matter or it's not going to affect them. Right. And so, and so it's a man in the tailpipe.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Basically, the people who are going to complain the loudest are actually going to turn off some of the people that they would conceivably need as an ally to try to reverse something like this.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Remember, like any, like any organization or group. Right. You're only as strong as your weakest link.
So if you make the greater culture and the majority group think that the black people are just this problem that are, you know, uneducated, illiterate, that always, you know, just somewhere they got to be figured out in this country, they're never going to look up and say, okay, well, why is it that all of us are getting our Medicaid cut and soon to have be Medicare? Why is it that we're going to spend 1.5 trillion on the next budget, which we've been told on defense when most Americans said that they don't want to fight all these wars, all these things that don't seem to get solved for the American people, they tend to never get solved. But people get really jacked up when they see a black guy kneeling an NFL game.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: So it's this. It's this inability to focus on the real issues and to be constantly distracted by these shiny objects of which race is a great way to give a distraction to the public in America.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: That's interesting you say that because I think it matters not. Because again, like, you wouldn't have to do a lot to convince me that people will do something that's racist, you know, in America. Like, that's kind of. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, you know, like. And I'm sure That there are people who are racist that are a part of doing this, you know, but how you fight it, you really, it's good. It's difficult to fight against something if you don't understand kind of the levers that, why they're pulling, the levers they're pulling because there may be a way to, you know, it's kind of like the judo thing. You use somebody's momentum against them, you use what they're trying to do. If you understand that, then you can flip that on them and then end up coming out ahead. And so my concern is that if what's happening and why it's happening is misidentified, that the approach to fighting it might be one that doesn't deliver results in the same way. You pointed out, like, if you make this issue about race, then some people who have been conditioned to think that discrimination is everywhere or that black people don't get discriminated against anymore because Obama and anything like that, you might turn them off.
The issue of representation is one that. And representation across the board is one that we should fight about. But the question is how, how do we fight about that? Is this going to be an issue where we need to try to get more legislation to say that, hey, you got to treat black people a certain way because of this historical background, which is actually what's being under out or undercut right now, or is there something else we can do?
You know, and so that's why I look at like what happens with the college students, what happens with the mail in stuff. If it was once it was determined that more of the mail in votes tended to be Democratic votes, then all of a sudden it was like, oh, well, the Republican Party doesn't want to do mail in votes anymore. We got to cut off the mail in votes.
So, okay, just clearly the Republican Party is looking for any angle where there are votes that tend to be more Democratic than Republican to mitigate that, to either lessen their people's ability to vote or to mitigate the power of those votes. And so, and this seems to be part of that effort. So if that's the case, then yes, we could fight it the traditional way, the way that was fought in the 50s and the 60s, but there may be other levers that we can pull, you know, like just, just for example. And I mean, and I, I don't know that this is the right way to do it, but I also want to sit around and study this kind of stuff. I'm not in a think tank or anything like that, but proportional representation, like now, the reason why we use congressional districts that are based on geography, using congressional districts based on geography gives a lot of power to the land and less power to the people, because it really matters where you are, more so than who you are, more so than you're a human being. It matters where you're located. So if all your people are concentrated in an area of the state, then if it's based on geography, then you can be, your power can be mitigated pretty easily by divvying up that power, either splitting it up or concentrating in one place. And so you might have 30% of a population, but if they're on 5% of the land, it becomes much easier to write you out. If it's going to be based on land, it's not constitutional. That says that the way that congressional districts are divvied up has to be based on land. That's based on a law from the 1960s. So maybe the approach, if the goal here is saying, hey, we want to use the idea of people's disbursement over land to cut out people's representation, then maybe an approach, maybe this could go alongside the efforts to push this from a racial angle to say, hey, let's get rid of the land calculation. Like, if you're a state and you have X number of people, we're going to overturn this law from the 60s and we're going to have it so that the states do, however many votes get cast in that state, you know, if they're good, vote for Republicans, if it's 30% Republicans and 30% Democrat. And then, you know something, some other parties, that's how we're going to attribute their representation in Congress for the next two years. And that's how many, you know, countries around the, around the world, that more parliamentary style system.
But the proportional representation type voting, that puts the onus like you can't write people out then so to speak, it's just like, all right, if you're a person, then your percentage of your vote is going to count no matter what. So how you attack this, I think, I think there should be some thought as opposed to just reflex. The reflex is great. I'm happy that people who have the muscle memory are jumping right to it. But I also think there should be some thinking also on, hey, what may be the most effective ways to make it so, generally speaking, we just have greater representation of all people. You know, what, what else is limiting this, you know, and what is allowing this type of stuff to happen.
So I do want it to. I did want to look at one other piece of this, and that is actually, it looks more at, you know, going the other way. You know, like you saw, the NAACP recently is calling on young black athletes and saying, hey, because of what these southern states are doing to minimize the voting power of black folks, let's. You guys should avoid going in playing football. Going. Playing sports for these big southern schools that tend to derive a lot of income from the sports that, you know, the football programs or whatever. They derive a lot of money from that TV money, money in stadiums and saying, let's not go make them rich, young athlete. Go somewhere else where the state is not actively trying to undermine the constitutional rights and the voting power of people that look like you. So what did you think about kind of that approach by the NAACP as far as to try to motivate or bring young athletes into this fight and saying, hey, let's try to go after them, Go after people that are doing this where they'll feel it in their pockets.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: I support it. I think you made the comment earlier that there's kind of. Culturally, there's some muscle memory in the black American community through these organizations like naac.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: And this is the kind of. This is reminiscent of that. Yeah.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Or Urban League or some of these others. And, yeah, it's just. It's interesting, man, because it's a reminder of so many things I would say. This one is the idea that sports in America have always been traditionally the place where this type of cultural stuff plays out. So historically, we did a show years ago about baseball and the beginning of segregation in baseball, actually, in the 1800s.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, no.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Well, yeah. And then. And then, of course, we know the famous name Jackie Robinson was the beginning of the desegregation of that. And.
And it's interesting, too, that the one I wrote down here that came to my mind first was Jack Johnson, who was one of the first racially polarizing sports figures in the 19 teens because he was the first black heavyweight boxing champion. And again, same thing. They tried to keep him out of fighting until he was able to successfully play a psychological game on the current. Who at the time was the current heavyweight champ and baited the guy into fighting him. And then Jack Johnson cleaned his clock. And it was such a controversial thing that a white. A black man actually beat up a white man on camera that his final knockout, they actually did not show. Yeah, they cut. They cut the film.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Well, because, remember, at that time, part of white supremacy was that white People were better in athletics and sports. Part of white. Like people don't remember that. That part that was. Used to be part of white supremacy as well.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And then you had Jesse owens at the 1936 Olympics. You know, like, you're saying a lot of examples where sports broke a lot of cultural kind of molds, you know, I'd say in the late 19th and through the 20th century. And, you know, we could even go to our lifetime. James, when you and I were kids in the 80s, early 90s, you know, there was a kind of culture where it was seen that black guys weren't smart enough to be quarterbacks. You know, and before that, maybe it was point guards and basketball. So, you know, this is. Sports has always been in America, this kind of testing ground.
We could even say with Kaepernick taking a knee and how that was received. I was thinking about the 1960s. People like Muhammad Ali, Lu Alcindor, you know, changed his name to Kareem Abdul Jabbar because. And same with Cassius Clay becoming Muhammad Ali because of their exposure to the Nation of Islam. So there's always been this kind of swirling between what's going on in the culture and then it playing out in sports in the United States. And so with this one, I'd say, yeah, it makes sense.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: It's a tool that NAAC do, so to speak, from a historical standpoint.
I think now I'm uncomfortable by this just in the sense that this is adults asking the kids to make the sacrifice. I get it. And I think it's a good idea, you know, in this, in the way of, hey, you know, like part of the reason SC schools, SEC schools, which is the Southeastern Conference and other schools in the south, didn't desegregate for a really long time, you know, more or less. And they. Part of the reason they ended up desegregating those schools, like actually not just one person with federal troops bringing them in, is because schools like USC and Ohio State and Michigan, not, not in the south, were getting black players and beating them in football. So the, the, the, the thought process, I think is good. But, you know, to me, I also, I look at this and I'm saying, well, if we're going to ask black athletes to say, hey, let's, let's. Let's try to be strategic as far as this and, you know, punish schools in states where they are hostile to vote, the voting, you know, of black people or just in general.
Let's ask everybody who believes that voting is important and voting should be Something that everybody has some as a right to do and have their vote count and have their vote matter from a representation standpoint. You know, like I look at, if you look at the entertainment industry, one of the most influential figures as far as trying to bring walls down there was Frank Sinatra. You know, he's like, hey, I'm not coming here and performing if, if Sammy Davis Jr. Can't have a room and then do his thing as well. And so on one hand we're saying, hey, we're just going to ask the black athletes to do this. Not any athlete who believes in these United States of America constitutional principles. Let's ask everybody who believes in these principles, like, hey, let's do this. Let's not just ask the one. Because a lot of times, yes, and we've seen where black athletes or black activists can make a big difference, but we've also seen where white activists or, you know, whatever, entertainers, whatever, can also make a big difference too when they share those values. So on one, you know, I'm looking at, okay, well, let's. I'm a little uncomfortable with these adults telling these 18 year olds that, hey, you need to be the tip of the spear here.
You know, now again, everybody should make sacrifices for the greater good. So I don't have. I understand that, but that makes me a little uncomfortable. I can live with that. But then also it's like, well, let's not narrow our focus. Also, like, why are we letting everybody else off the hook who may share these values? Because again, this is about values.
I think in a bigger fight, more than just race. Race is an element here, but it's not the only element.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you hit it on the head, man. That, that goes to what I was saying before that, you know, we will.
It'll be to our detriment to focus this as a black voting rights issue as only. Yes. And even though the optics appear that way, and that's what I mean. And maybe this is a way to kind of put a bow on what I was saying earlier about kind of the elites and the oligarchy, that kind of aristocratic class that wants to keep the bottom, you know, let's say the working class fractured.
It's in their interest that everyone thinks this is about race because then the black Americans will get defensive and feel like everyone's beating them up. The white American, Some of white Americans will just look the other way as soon as they hear that it's something about blacks.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not my fight, you know,
[00:31:03] Speaker B: and then exactly that attitude. And then a lot of the immigrants who benefit every time black Americans do stand up and fight for their own rights, because they really are civil rights. Right. There's the rights of civilians, everybody. So that means all these immigrants that came here post 1965 benefited, you know, from Asia and from the South America and all that stuff, and from Africa. Right. And black Caribbeans. And everybody benefited from coming here after black Americans did all that heavy lifting and got lynched and got beaten and put. Got the water hoses and dogs put on them. And so this is an example, again, to your point, James, that the NAACP is recognizing that Americans out there are being disenfranchised of their constitutional rights.
And they're, you know, like has been historically. It's the black Americans doing the first shot across the bow to say, no, this isn't right. I think you're absolutely right that blacks shouldn't be fighting this alone. It'll be great if the NAACP welcomed in some star white athlete who's getting a football scholarship somewhere or a basketball scholarship or baseball and say, hey, we're asking you not to go to the SEC schools as well. And it'd be great if that kid responded positively. So I do think that, again, we're only as strong as our weakest link as a nation. And if we're a nation that's based on the Constitution and not a race, then we should be all protecting each other as relates to these constitutional norms and rights that we have. And so I think this will. That's why I said, James, for me.
Yeah, well, I just want to finish this and then I'll hand it back. I know we're going to finish is.
That's why I say it's exhausting a little bit sometimes. I used to say this as a joke. It's exhausting being black in this country. But I'll broaden that right now. It's exhausting being aware of these things in this country because you're looking at other people who would benefit from them being enfranchised, and they don't. The psychic wage is really in the way of progress in this country. And so, you know, I mean, staring
[00:32:58] Speaker A: at it, you know, to your point, you say you're only as strong as your weakest link. And for people who value the Constitution and equality and freedom and all that, the weakest link are the people that are hooked on the psychic wage.
So they keep, you know, they keep getting pulled and distracted and looking at other stuff so that they can prop up, you know, this other Group. The billionaire class of people. Yeah, like. But nonetheless, that's the weakest link. And so they. We either have to outvote them or to show some of them that, hey, you know, the game you're playing is a game that you make everybody lose, you know, so to speak. Except, you know, the top one, you know, for 0001.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Maybe they'll figure it out when we have a $3 trillion defense budget and it's too late.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: They've decided that their psychological interests, you know, psychic wage. Their psychological interest is more important than their constitutional interests or their financial.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's true.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: That's kind of what it represents.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: So I should buy Lockheed Martin is what you're saying.
There's all that's going to happen. The war budget's going to get bigger. Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: And then the domestic budget's gonna get small.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: So. But I, I think we can wrap this from here. But I definitely do think that. I'm not saying that the idea of understanding that this is an attack that is directed and, and you're really. Who's taking the brunt of this is black Americans. And so black Americans can use some of the, the, the tactics that they've known to have worked over time. And so to use that. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, saying that. It's also good, though, to really see a broader picture here that may be one plan of approach, one plan of attack. But there are other things happening here that may provide grounds to attack the general effort of making less or providing less representation of people. How can we provide more representation for everyone? You know, how can we do that? There's a lot of different ways to do it. One, there's a racial element, but there's other elements as well. And let's not jump right to the one and only lock in on this one and not be able to see kind of other tools that we may have to and other allies that we may be able to bring in to try to fight this on a larger scale. Because the people who are trying to narrow representation, believe me, they're not just taking limited pathways. They're. They're pushing every angle they can. So if you're gonna push back against them, you probably need to do the same. So. But yeah, but we appreciate for joining us on this episode called like I See It. Subscribe to a podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Skis.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: I'm Tudormana.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
