NC Supreme Court blocks order to throw out 60,000 ballots, Barack Obama doubles down on criminalization of Assata Shakur, and a debate on the ethics of genetically screened embryos.

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NC Supreme Court temporarily blocks court order to throw out 2024 ballots in Riggs-Griffin race

Why Assata Shakur was suddenly promoted to terrorist

Should human life be optimized?

The Rise and Fall of ‘the Resistance’

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TRANSCRIPT

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay and welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda. We’re just talking about what’s going on in the news from this past week. We have a great discussion at the beginning about this moment of protest or the lack thereof or the presence of, I learned a lot about what, what everybody’s thinking. So this, you know, I took a lot away from this one. I take a lot from all the episodes, but this one was particularly interesting to me. I hope that it is interesting to you too. And let us know, DM us, tweet us, send us an email. I’m really interested in what you think about the topics that we discuss at the beginning of the episodes, specifically today and obviously the news. Here we go. [music break] Hey y’all, we are pumped to be back. I am actually recording from Dreamville Festival in Raleigh, North Carolina. 50,000 Black and Brown people. It is really beautiful. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter. 

Myles E. Johnson: Hi, this is Myles E. Johnson, and I am @Myles.E.Johnson on Instagram. 

Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bossier and you can find me on LinkedIn. 

DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, what do people, what’s the most common mispronunciation of your last name? Is it Bossier? 

Sharhonda Bossier: No, it’s Beauxer actually, because there’s a parish in Louisiana that has the same spelling. And so most people who are familiar with that part of the state will pronounce it in that same way. 

DeRay Mckesson: Beauxer. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Beauxer. 

DeRay Mckesson: That would not have been, I’d have lost the jeopardy on that one. That would have been don’t don’t phone a friend if that was the question. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: I’d have lost that one. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: Um. Well, this was another wild week in American politics. Insert tariffs here. It seems like everything’s going to cost a lot more soon, but it seems like the MAGA people still are, you know, riding strong with Trump, which I am just, I am floored about. Um. But Myles, I’m really interested. One of the things that you teed up for us to discuss is whether there was a resistance at all before and I’ve been interested in this because people have asked me like DeRay are you protesting? Are you organizing a protest around Trump? What happened to the protesters? Da da da and for those of you listening, we earnestly do not discuss anything that we’re gonna talk about on the pod before we record so I never really know what you know, everybody’s gonna say but but Myles I’m really interested in this conversation about what happened to um Resistance 2.0, as they called it with Trump, what happened to all the protesters, what is, help us think through it? 

Myles E. Johnson: So I was on YouTube, which is um my my personal Library of Congress. And I found a YouTuber, still a journalist, but former kind of like legacy media journalist named Taylor Lorenz. And she goes through really fantastically the deterioration of the resistance and also does like this autopsy of the Resistance that happened during 2016. And it when she does this autopsy, there are so many people who were a part of that resistance, who were, uh before conservatives. There were so many people who turned conservatives. So basically she shows that a lot of the people who were leading those protests, leading those ideas were already in the Republican conservative sphere and went on and went over to the Democratic um digital space in order to make profit. And when we see such a deflation that can happen, I would say even maybe before this week, like when we’re talking about uh after the inauguration, that can also be seen as why that so many people were a part of this, quote unquote, “resistance” in order to further their own fame and stardom. I want to read a little bit of what I sent during the text because I felt like it was synthesized right, but um just the synthesization around the video. It says, the Biden administration coasted on vibes and symbolism, student loan payments resumed. Police budgets ballooned. Gaza burned and climate promises evaporated. Real movement energy like the 2020 uprisings was pacified, not empowered. The same resistance stars who once cried fascism now downplay Biden’s failures or pivot to the right-wing platforms. The algorithm stopped rewarding outrage, so they moved on. So outside of um there being so many bad actors inside of this resistance movement, um she really articulated something that I didn’t think about because I think I think of Biden in fragments, but there were a lot of things that people that that Biden failed at when it comes to more left and progressive policy. He, he, he did manage to hurt enough feelings politically to for some people to look at his presidency and say, that was not for me. That was not a good presidency for me who are on the left or who are progressive. And of course, people who um who are who are radical uh uh uh far leftist, whatever is the name for for for people who have leftist politics now. Um. There were some failures. And I think sometimes when we’re trying to, when some people were trying to defend Biden. Uh, they would ignore those parts and ignore those pieces. And then it just creates a distrust of the person you’re talking to then an illumination on Biden’s actual legacy. It just turns into, well, you lying to me too, and saying that he did this and this and this, and made my life better. And I’m telling you, this was important to me. This was important to me. And this was important to me, so anywho, she lays that out. It made it really interesting and it made me a lot more hopeful because when you know who made something, you’re not as mad the cake ain’t good. So sometimes you could just get a better baker in the kitchen, a better uh better recipes to um to happen. Then thinking this was 100% of our efforts and ended up with a second Trump presidency. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I mean I, what I find interesting about that, right, is um my first thought was less about people who were already leaning conservative and then moving uh sort of into progressive or democratic spaces as a way of like capturing the zeitgeist and like leveraging that for like celebrity access and and money. For me I, my first starting point was people who I knew um you know prior to 2016 who were um more moderate, and I had never really seen speak out on things, right? And then sort of their whole persona, professionally and publicly, became being on the vanguard of the resistance, right, and like how they were able to, like I’m always thinking about people who were in my sphere of influence, right. And how they we’re able to leverage that for speaking gigs, for you know for book deals, et cetera. And I just wonder what it means to think about having lost an opportunity to really um have have capitalized on what was starting to feel like a little bit of radicalization of people um and then having had that like commodified and having had, that been like the basis of some people’s careers, right? And I think we’re seeing the fallout of that in the second Trump term, right? Where people are losing their spots, losing their speaking gigs, losing their their jobs. And I just wonder what it means for how we think about the opportunity for a new kind of resistance in this moment, right? One that is not so married to existing power structures and existing ways of like communicating and being in community with each other. Does that make sense? 

DeRay Mckesson: It does, I do have a push. I’m interested because I read um I read Taylor’s sub stack about this and because Myles put it in and and I actually like Taylor. This is, let me start by saying, like, you know, I don’t if you don’t know her work before the, she was hounding the tech bros. She was the one reporting on them. They have hated her for a long time because she was just a truth teller. She was at the Post. She’s done a lot of things and I like Taylor and uh I was, I was struck at how I’m not sure I think her analysis applies to Black organizers. I like didn’t quite read that in there. I’m interested in, you know, and let me tell you what I what I did not see. I did not see sort of an honest reckoning with the exhaustion of those, of people who, like me, we were in the street in ’14. We were in the street in ’20. We were in the street Trump da da da. So like, I know people who this go around are just like, I literally do not have the fight, like I I gotta take a break because I have done the big lift two, three times already. So like, I’m interested in that. And if you think, I don’t know, if you think the absence of that in Taylor’s piece is okay, or I don’t know, I felt like a real absence. And, you know, I was talking to somebody else about, before Myles, you put this in, her writing, it crystallized it, but they were sort of like, well, the threat of, like, especially for people from marginalized identities, the cost of protesting is way higher today than it was ever. So I think about even in my, you know, I’m being sued by this police officer. So that is like a real nightmare for me personally. But I think about like, you know, the Trump people are disappearing people on the sidewalk going to class and like it is that the cost feels very different than it felt when the women’s march and when I was in the street and da da da da da, and I didn’t see those in her in her piece. So I that’s not to discount her piece. I actually think her piece feels very true to me for a lot of the white progressive people that I saw make these Twitter accounts and make videos and do all these speaking engagements. I don’t know if I thought it was true of the people of color organizers that I know. 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh, I think that’s such a good point, DeRay. Um. I think it is missing a race analysis. So many of my favorite YouTubers who are not Black are missing race analysis, which is how come I always get on here and say, uh can anybody who has any type of resource make YouTube platforms or help somebody make a YouTube platform and fund those things? Because that is the hole that is missing in the internet in this digital space that’s growing. So I totally agree with you there. The only um thing that I would, I don’t even know if it’s a push, but just a nuance is I totally agree with about the organizer piece, but even me and you have spoke about other organizers who sat in mansions and expel some neo–

DeRay Mckesson: Myles you kill me. 

Myles E. Johnson: –No I’m just saying. Am I lying? They expel some neo-conservative–

DeRay Mckesson: You right, you right, you right, you right.

Myles E. Johnson: –elitist views when they when they got the chance. There were so many people who saw their, they went from the streets to to to to Oprah. That was the trajectory of so many Black folks, so just because so yes, I think to your point, there is a nuance, there is an  exhaustion that’s happening around organizers. And a lot of people who pushed and and don’t and and and are exhausted today. But I think that the Black community still has to be um accountable for the bad actors inside of our community who utilized the moment of resistance. 

DeRay Mckesson: That’s fair, I’ll give you that. 

Myles E. Johnson: To further their career. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think that’s right. And I think one of the reasons why people are so tired is because instead of like building a bench or instead of saying like many of us can be the face of the resistance, people try to hold space and block other people out because there seem to be a direct financial benefit to that, right? Like if you become the go-to, then you are the person who gets all the speaking gigs, all the book deals, et cetera, right? But then that means that when it’s time for you to tap out and like, look, this is work that you have to tap in and tap out of all the time, there’s no one to take your spot, right, because you’ve essentialized yourself. And I think this is like part of like when what happens when we don’t interrogate how we are replicating the very same power structures and dynamics that we say that we are trying to resist even within our own movement, right? There is no second wave of activists to come up and be the face of the work because we didn’t invest in them. You know what I mean? 

DeRay Mckesson: I can, I can take that. Myles, Myles what gave you hope though? 

Myles E. Johnson: But what? 

DeRay Mckesson: When you said this gave you hope, where was the, what was the? That’s what I’m like, where was the hope? 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh, the hope is in, so if, I’m just using a normal number. So if 100 people tried their best and were in those books and pushed and really tried to make something happen and it didn’t work, that can kind of birth a hopelessness. If 50 of those 100 people were really like, I just want to have a talk. I just really like the panel fee. I just really trying I’m trying to get my career. It gives me hope because we actually haven’t seen what 100% of passion and commitment can do because we didn’t produce that. 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh that’s new. 

Myles E. Johnson: So that to me–

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: Where the hope is, where it’s like we still have a chance to reimagine and restart still. 

DeRay Mckesson: Now you know it’s a new day when Myles is up here giving the pep talk about the hope in the organizing community, y’all. 

Myles E. Johnson: I’ll have you know I’m a spark of a light in the room. 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m just saying I’m here for it because I would sit here like where was the hope in this one? 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda does this not, when you read this to you, what’s your takeaway? Like what’s you’re, like, we can do blah, is it Myles, is it the same one that Myles had? Is it? 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I think I’m always also trying to look for for the silver lining and I think as someone who, you know, also has been in the streets and doesn’t necessarily have a public profile around that, I think there’s an opportunity for us to talk about how we engage more people. I, um, you all know Mariame Kaba, right, and like and her work and I think one of part of like when I read her what I always think about is her push to invite people to the party over and over again, and to welcome them with that same enthusiasm, no matter at what point they accept the invite, right? A lot of us tend to be like, girl, you late, we’ve been here already, et cetera, et cetera. And I think when I listen to this, I’m thinking about all of the people we’ve trying to invite to the party who have not yet accepted our invitation, and who I think now there’s an opportunity for us to invite um and for us to have a different conversation about what participating in the resistance can look like, that’s not about building a personal brand, but that is actually about shifting power and shifting how we are in relationship and community with one another. So I’m excited about who yet hasn’t been engaged. 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh, I’m I’m just interested in how does this analysis reckon with the hands-off protests that just happened? Because, you know, there’s a reading of Taylor’s piece that makes it seem like this level of coordination and protests all across the country happening simultaneously and da-da-da would potentially not happen again. That was how I read her piece. It was sort of like a you know, those people, that wave died out. We don’t know where those people went. Da da da. The energy’s gone. And then just this weekend, we saw hands-off protests all across the country. In Baltimore, like I you know I saw them in places where I’m like, oh, I didn’t know. And it’s not a lot of Black people in them. And I’m, like, whoa, this is, you know, people are seemingly, they are back in the streets. So how do you reckon her analysis with that? 

Myles E. Johnson: The first thing was the, to me, the lack of Blackness was my analysis, that I’m–

DeRay Mckesson: Oh interesting. 

Myles E. Johnson: I’m always gonna see the when you see the absence of Black people in protests, and you know, Black people invented the resistance and the protest and and the, you know America was an apartheid country. So so um Black people invented that. So me seeing no Black people there feels interesting and odd to me. And also, I think. You know, if we’re gonna have a vibes election, I think we need to keep that on. I think that if we really try to quantify and talk about vibes, we need continue it. There is a different temperature today. I think there is a different feeling of when you left. Um. I remember people who went to go to the um to the Women’s March, for instance, and you would think they were going to um carnival. You would think, you know, it was fun. It was Mardi Gras it was put the– 

DeRay Mckesson: It was brunch and protest. Protest and brunch.

Myles E. Johnson: Pussies on the head. You know, that’s freaknik, putting pussies on the head, that’s that’s crazy. So there was a celebratory um nature of it and a joyfulness in it and also an excitement and curiosity about it because I think it just hadn’t happened. And now it feels like if we got to, if you forcing us, I’m really mad. The signs ain’t cute, as cute. The people aren’t as frisky. There’s not as many um outfits, there’s not as many viral moments like all those things kind of tell me the temperature of it. And then, you know, the last thing is I am in the Midwest. We go to Indiana. We’re in, we’re in Kentucky, we’re in Ohio, we’re in those places. And I just don’t think people understand how the Black communities in the Midwest are rotting. And how there is so much um uh lack of excitement in so many of these Black communities. And when I speak to people about politics and what’s going on, um I haven’t I have never heard Black people talk about stuff like this before, or talk about the political state of the country like this before. I never have. Black people, poor, rich, middle class, are usually always the people who can tell you about some democratic, if they know, they Democrat they know the right thing, they know about being democratic, or they’re on some, you know, severely ho-tep shit. But I’ve never seen Black people like really kind of be like, I’m throwng in the towel. These white people crazy. I’m just gonna mind my business. That’s new to me. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think the tone and the tenor of the media coverage has also shifted, right, to your point about like what has gone viral and what has not. Like I have not seen a ton of, and I’m off social, so I recognize that, right, but I even in network news coverage, right? It’s been mostly like really short articles with really short clips, like this happened this week, you know, versus like I think some of the stuff we were seeing in 2014, 2015. Uh. And then obviously again in 2016 and then in 2020 there was this sense that the the media was telling a story about a growing and rising wave of resistance, but the framing now does not feel like one that is helping people understand just how broad spread sorry how broad and like how widespread the support for resisting Trump and his policies in this moment are, right? It feels like they’re like, well, you know, this doesn’t measure up to the “exciting and fun stuff,” quote unquote, that we did, you know, five, 10 years ago. And I think watching the framing of it has been truly most interesting to me. 

Myles E. Johnson: And there’s no focused tragedy. There’s like, you know what I mean? There’s no focused tragedy. And unfortunately I do think that America and this just generation and just maybe that’s just human nature in general, there needs to be something that has happened, not a sort of something gonna happen that galvanizes people often. 

DeRay Mckesson: The layoffs aren’t tragedy, the tariffs aren’t tragedy? Like what do you mean? 

Myles E. Johnson: Listen, we’re post-1980s Black people. 

DeRay Mckesson: Not this listen. I love it.

Myles E. Johnson: I want us to sit in what, because sometimes I think that Black people, we don’t think about the version of Black that we are. We are post 1980s Black people. You can’t really threaten brokeness and poverty. And if you–

DeRay Mckesson: Oh interesting. 

Myles E. Johnson: If you wear the wrong thing, we’re gonna we’re gonna we’re going to knock you down. And we’re in 2025, and we as a people survived 1980 to 1999. That like that’s just not a thing like anymore. And unfortunately, it does take that moment in New Orleans, that moment in um and that moment, for instance, that moment in New Orleans was more thoroughly connected to Trump’s incompetence. If that happened while Trump was in office, and his incompetence, that would be something that was a lightning strike. We need a villain, we need a hero, we need a bad thing, we need a savior. So even the airplanes is too disconnected from a singular person being villain and and and trying to connect that to one singular person is too much for the it seems to be too much for the average American person’s imagination. So we need to be very direct. Osama Bin Laden put the planes through the building. That’s what Americans need. 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: What was your question for me? 

Myles E. Johnson: So I also wanted to like ask you that same question because I know one thing that stunned me when I got to New York City, and I will never claim to be the nicest person or the most agreeable person that’s not even on my set of goals, but I was stunned at the competition and the other stuff around being Black and wanting Black empowerment inside of media or representation or want to be able to talk about the countless things that people want to talk about during 2016, I was stunned at the internal fighting and bickering and um that was happening inside of the spaces that I found myself in, which was usually around other writers and other media personalities and other like inspiring people in that space. And I do want to know, do you think that maybe the things that you experience interpersonally or digitally is worth examining as a reason how come we are seeing such a disempowered Black power movement today? Do you think that connection is worth anything? 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I think that’s right. You’re right that like, and Sharhonda, you’ve been around for this and Myles, you’ve been around and you know, you’ve gotten the calls from me being like, this was crazy. The competition inside, like if I ever leave activism, it will not be because I’m tired of the police. It’ll be because I’m tired of fighting other Black people around stuff that like I shouldn’t be fighting activists about, you know. Um. Yeah, I don’t I don’t know I’m sensitive to you know one of the critiques of me is that I was like the first celebrity activist of this moment, like the activists who became sort of celebrities so people sort of attribute that, like I started it. And I’m like, nah, I don’t know if I started if, but yeah, I, I dunno what to say that’s kind. I think I’ve been shocked at the lack of results. I think I would be more sort of whatever about people’s public platforms. If I could see, I’m, like, oh, you changed that law. You like built the thing, you helped da da da. But I look and I’m like, I remember you in 2020 out being loud and you know, raising a ton of money. And I don’t really know what happened. And Myles, I did an interview um not too long ago with a friend. And one of the things he asked me, he was like, are you still an activist? And I was like I’m [indistinct], yeah, I’ve never stopped. And he was, well, I thought you’d have a TV show by now. I thought that you’d leverage that. This is what he asked me in the interview. He’s like–

Myles E. Johnson: Not about scale. 

DeRay Mckesson: I thought that you were, he said, I thought you’d leverage that to have like a show or like a network or da da da. And I like, you know I the commitment I made in 2014 is a commitment that I have still made 10 years later. And he’s like, wow, I’m like really shocked you still do this. And I, it was the first time somebody had just so plainly said to me, like, I like you. And I just assumed that this was like a stepping stone to something better. And I’m like the stepping stone is to like change the system. I’m trying to do all this stuff so I can like change, that is the goal. It is not to like have a TV show. And I was like, well, that is really, that is interesting. But people, you’re right. That is the trajectory. And I do think, I don’t know. Maybe you all know, but I’m too close to it. But people are really, I’m shocked at how little people ask for results in the activist space. Like just caring is enough. Like, or just showing them to the thing becomes enough. And I’m like, you should ask them where that 20 million dollar, like we should have to tell you like what I spent the money on to make results. I don’t know, that feels like a fair, a fair bargain to me or a fair deal, but that’s not what happens. 

Myles E. Johnson: Would you ever say anything unkind? 

DeRay Mckesson: Mm. Publicly, oh, I say a lot of unkind things. Would I say them publicly? Ah, you know, Myles, this is the honest truth, so push me. Is that one of the reasons why I don’t talk about those people or those things is that mainstream media doesn’t write about them and a lot people sort of ignore them. The moment I say something, the story becomes DeRay and so-and-so is fighting. Like they the media sort of, it becomes this thing. So I like legitimize there, I’m dealing with something right now, we’re trying to do this thing and this big group of activists have come out about this policy thing that there’s no, they are only against it because they don’t like me. The moment that I like start talking about it publicly, they get a bigger profile to fight me. Whereas if I just ignore them, I can actually get the thing done. It won’t be a thing and I’ll just move on to the next thing. And so I do feel stuck in that way. 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I do think sometimes I see even with just Black people of all types of faith, I think it’s just something in us that that Christian nice stuff sometimes really is our own venom when I see it. And I think that often we’re are afraid of chaos. We’re afraid of kind of being the person to say, oh, I’m gonna go into the darkness. I’m not gonna, when somebody else is being a chaos agent, we link arms, we’re harmonious, we shall overcome. When somebody hits us, we turn the other cheek. But I think that sometimes it’s like, no, we gotta, we see the chaos and sometimes we gotta press our own button and yeah, the publicity might look like this or the reaction might look this, but now we have people talking about Black liberation, Black organizations and Black policies and actually looking at it because I think sometimes so many people are afraid to say something about the person who, about light-skinned Malcolm X swindling money or somebody having mimosas and brunch and calling it, Black power, like, to me, those things, or somebody having $20 million and having nothing to show for it. We need to talk about that. And if we don’t talk about that, we’re letting it so Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and those generations can repeat those same sins because we’re not, we’re afraid to talk about it. That to me, there’s something so connective about us not wanting to talk about that and so many Black people dealing with poverty who don’t want to talk about money, who don’t want to talk about the father who gambled it, who don’t want talk about the Tyler Perry issues happening because we don’t want no dirt on our clothes or dirt on anybody else. And I think that those alliances have to be have to be killed or we’re gonna be killed as a Black community. That’s my opinion. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I don’t think we have a public framework for having conversations like this that are not about the person, right? But that are focused on the work and the outcome and the impact, right. So I do think that, you know, absent that you end up in a situation where you have opened the door to, I think in this particular instance, like Black people, Black queer people, Black women, Black, queer women, right, like becoming the public targets for what I think is often valid critique. But I don’t think many people have a muscle around critiquing the work and not the person, right? And I think a lot of us are reluctant to, even if we disagree with what they have done, how they have it, to be the validators for opening the door. 

DeRay Mckesson: Yes. 

Sharhonda Bossier: To things that are gonna be personally injurious to people. Do you know what I mean? None of us want to be like, I’m the person who said it was okay to, or I’m the person whose public critique was levied or leveraged in a way that allowed for other people to come and shoot personal attacks at this person, right? Like I do think that part of what is happening is the downside of us trying to adopt an ethic of care in the work, which is I don’t want to put this person on the line you know for um yeah being personally critiqued, et cetera, because people have experienced real personal harm as part of their their work, right, even if we have questions about the impact. Um. Yeah, I think it’s tough. 

DeRay Mckesson: I think that’s right, Sharhonda, about the lack of framework. Because it’s so so you say one thing about a scammer, and then it becomes DeRay said the Black leaders are scammers. And you’re like, well I didn’t, that’s not what I said.  I said that person was, Myles is not convinced. 

Myles E. Johnson: This might just be me seeing how Gen Z, Gen Alpha um and then also just YouTube as an apparatus, like if you look at just how things get seen. So it’s so and so owns, so and so destroys, so-and-so other person. And then you see Candace Owen um going after Ben Shapiro, and then them fall out and her get fired, and they all do this stuff. And then what you kind of see is everybody rolled in the dirt, but you know what you did in the dirt? You planted seeds and now you see Candace Owens with the biggest YouTube platform. And you also see Ben Shapiro with these biggest platform stuff. I’m not saying we should be as soulless as Republicans, where it’s like, listen, if you want to be in the fame game, you want be in the attention game, you have to learn how to utilize all attention to and leverage all attention to your goals, like that is a part of being in the attention economy. Um. I understand it because I’m that way too, as far as being extremely kind and precious and sentimental around Black people. But when we look at the digital sphere, it’s a cold wild west place. And if you want to play in this space and you want play with the money, I’m going to play with you. And that’s how people are winning. People are kind of winning [?] through communications, through kind of putting that you know putting that to a side or it reminds me of the Boondocks episode that shows um a pastor played by Cee Lo Green, um pretending to be upset with Ann Coulter and then behind the scenes, it turns out that Ann Coulter. 

Sharhonda Bossier: They besties. 

Myles E. Johnson: And that pastor were actually um besties and and and strategizing together of how to get him the money by strategizing that argument. And I’m not saying we need to do anything as that dubious or that thought out and strategic, but there’s something there, you know, it’s not working. It’s not like Black people have a huge great leverage on Black digital media and Black political um talk and in people’s eyes we don’t. Just a very few people have that so something new has to happen and I am a person who thinks chaos and darkness can be utilized and leveraged when you know what you’re doing and I think there’s a few people who know what they doing who could just push the button. 

DeRay Mckesson: That’s fair. And, you know, well, let me just say this in response publicly, because I this is fair is that, you know, I am persuaded I don’t know how to do it to Sharhonda’s point about the like, the lack of framework is a problem. But I think about I wish that as a as a young activist in 2014/15, I wish I had been able to read about the conflict and I wasn’t. So I was wholly unprepared for when it happened. I like didn’t you know I came in, I came into this like bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, like, we all trying to fight the man, da-da-da- da, and people started being shady. I’m like, what is going on? 

Sharhonda Bossier: What is going on? 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m calling my friends. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m trying to read things, and nobody wrote about it. You know, it just was the other people didn’t, and Sharhonda, I think to your point, there are reasons why they didn’t write about it, but Myles is making me think about like, is there a middle ground that helps us, you know, because you know this, Sharhonda. It hurts the work overall. When we’re fighting. 

Sharhonda Bossier: It does. 

DeRay Mckesson: Like we have these fights. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: That aren’t even like principaled fights. You’re not even like trying to figure out the best way to find a thing. It’s like these personal random things. [music break] Don’t go anywhere, more Pod Save the People is coming. 

[AD BREAK]

DeRay Mckesson: Well, let’s go to the news. I’m interested in um, Sharhonda, I don’t know what angle you’re gonna take on this, so I am very interested in the angle for your news. Um. So let’s go. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, so my news is about a series of articles that the New York Times is publishing that they are calling, quote unquote, “the embryo question.” And this specific installment is about polygenic trait testing. And so, you know. For those of you who have any sort of passing even familiarity with IVF or with you know the use of donors, et cetera, to conceive children, you know that there’s always sort of a baseline of like you know genetic screening. And then also, you know like if you’re choosing, for instance, a sperm donor, right, like you get a profile, you get some basic details about them and then if they carry a gene for um uh you know some sort of quote-unquote genetic abnormality that if you know, you also carry that genetic trait, they might you know you might have a child who also has that quote- unquote “genetic abnormally” you often get that information disclosed to you. Um. But what is happening now is because we are able to just get more information about embryos. And again, we’re able to do what we call like polygenic trait testing. Which means now we can screen for things like height and skin color and eye color, right? Um. People who are taking pathways to parenthood that allow them to sort of test their embryos are now starting to select for their preferences along those criteria. And the reason I wanted to bring it to the pod is I think what we are experiencing in this moment overall is a sort of new wave of a eugenics movement. And I think when people are now in a place where they can select a you know an embryo for what they think will be a quote-unquote ideal height or what they think will be a quote unquote “ideal eye color” it raises for me real ethical questions and I think you know there’s a class element here too so a lot of the people that they profile and they talk about are people who work in tech who have high paying jobs for whom a lot of this testing is covered by their employer right and so I think if you have the ability you know, because you have class privilege to then select the quote unquote “most desirable child” you can create, right? What that often means for what the sort of new um physical and racial traits that will then be associated with lower socioeconomic status and class in this country. And so for me, this is just really emblematic of where we are going and things that we had decided I thought that were beyond the pale for a long time, right, that we were trying to create this kind of more inclusive society that was like regardless of how tall you are or regardless of how dark skin you are regardless if you have autism it is our job to figure out how to create a world where you can thrive, right? And this feels like a move in that in an opposite direction and I think when you have people like Elon Musk because he’s talked about in this article, right who are championing this work. Um. It’s just I don’t know how people are not seeing the connections to this sort of current wave of a eugenics movement. And so that’s why I wanted to bring it to the pod is, you know, I’m in my early 40s and have lots of friends who are choosing this pathway to parenthood. And so these questions do come up, right? Like, what do I do? How do I think about this? If I’m a person who believes that all humans are worthy of dignity and love and respect. right, do I want to quote unquote “be responsible” for bringing another you know disabled person into the world, et cetera. And we don’t like to talk about those things because they are the ugly side of who we are. But I do think that in this moment, again, it’s really important for us to grapple with the ethical implications here. 

Myles E. Johnson: This was such a good, a really good article, but also really, really good take. Um. Your take and the article both made me think about the, do you remember the National Geographic um image that showed what humans are supposed to look like in 2050. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes, yes. 

Myles E. Johnson: And it was just like biracial girl. It reminded me of that. And so the first thing I thought to myself was who would who would know that we will all look like these biracial cyborgs, not just because um that’s where genetics was going, but that’s where genetics is going to be engineered, you know, in like these choices. But I will have to say that I’m not surprised because, and this is no, you know this is no offense because I don’t know what I’m going to be doing during the summer because my body is looking good. And I’ve been wanting to show people what is going on because Sunny can’t handle it no more. So I’ve been wanting to do it, but I always have um I always have this little this little feminist critic in the back of my head understanding that any time that I put something out that emphasizes weight loss or emphasizes um uh certain things, I’m feeding into the diet culture and the fitness culture, because I see that when a lot of people who don’t do decolonizing work decide to put images and creations out, it looks a lot like the dominant cultures. So, I used to think that we, you know, we used to think that 3 a.m., 4 a. m., we would have um, you know, gym and infomercials. And that was just how it was because the powers that be at these executive tops, that’s just what they chose for us to see is diet commercials and and and pill supplements. But when we’re left to our own devices, that’s what comes to the top too, the thinness, the workout culture. And I don’t wanna just talk about that, but it’s one thing that I think all people participate in, that it’s a healthy thing, but as soon as it goes into the media, it turns into culture and it turns to something to be oppressed by. And there’s some connectivity to, oh, when you’re left to your own devices sure. We love we love people of all skin colors and all and all nose shapes and all this other stuff. But if you could choose, choose blue and a thin nose, you know? And just with fat people. It’s like, oh, we love Lizzo. Oh my goodness, she can’t help it. Her metabolism is slow. But now that we got Ozempic, they’re like, bitch, you better go take a shot, get out of our face. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Exactly. 

Myles E. Johnson: Get out of our face. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Exactly. 

Myles E. Johnson: You have no more excuses. Get the perm. Take the shot. Change your baby’s nose. Because we don’t want to look at it. So much of people’s desire for cures for, um and I put that in air quotes, cures for disabled people and people living with sicknesses is to cure their own discomfort with people who are differently abled than them. It’s not because they actually care about public health or the advancement of public health. And I think this article and your um evaluation of the articles just terrifically sums it up. So I’m in agreement. Hopefully some of that makes sense, but um, um, I see what you’re putting down and I agree and I think people should be shamed. 

DeRay Mckesson: Sharhonda, what do you say to the people who would say like, but if you can give your kid an advantage, like are no advantages acceptable? 

Sharhonda Bossier: I hear that, right, and look, I am not a parent and I’m not a parent of a disabled child or I’m and I am a parent of a child who requires like around the clock care and caregiving, right? Like, I recognize that I’m even entering this conversation from a different place than some other people might. Um. And I think there is a difference between saying like, you know, I carry a genetic trait or disposition towards like having a child who might not survive past infancy. And so if I can screen the embryos for that, I would like to, to avoid the pain and suffering of that child and my own pain and suffering, right? I think that’s one thing. I think it’s a completely different thing to say, I want a child who is six feet tall with blue eyes and a thin nose. I just do. And I think um we have to reckon with the fact that like what traits we consider desirable are shaped not by our own sort of you know preferences or even what makes for like genetic or evolutionary viability right they are they are shaped by social structures right and they are shaped by social structures that elevate one group of people and one set of traits over another and I think if that is the case right like on a good day–

DeRay Mckesson: Preach, preach. 

Sharhonda Bossier: –I’m five three with a round face Like, I I’m the person who gets weeded out. You know what I’m saying? And like, I always think about–

DeRay Mckesson: Right, right, right. 

Sharhonda Bossier: The fact that people who are having these conversations are making these choices are not just about their own discomfort with other people but also about some internalized stuff that they have about how they look and how they show up in the world, right? And this projection of like your children as your vanity projects. Like where do we get back to this place of like, again, all human life is worthy of dignity. And I think for us, until we are there, there’s so many other entry points into deciding who is worthy of like of life and of thriving in our society and culture. And and having that be so tied to physical appearance and very racialized traits is terrifying to me. 

DeRay Mckesson: The only thing I’d add to this because you too, like Sharhonda, there’s nothing, you did that. You did that it um is, you know, I think that people are of all whatever I think about the people that I’ve worked to organize are um, are able to have these conversations. Like they, they can participate in them, they can understand it, da da da. And I do think there’s like a classist way that these conversations sort of happen that like exclude a whole set of people who actually have deep beliefs about ethics and morality. They don’t call it ethics and they don’t use the word morality, but they have strong opinions about a lot of things. And this is actually how I think when people talk about the conservatism of Black people, I actually think so much of that is like the unexplored ideas of like, people have not been put in places to have ideas deeply challenged or da-da-da, because people are like, no, this is just what they believe. And you’re like, mm, I’m going with you know, I remember having to explain to my father what consent was. It was that was not language that he used. And we had this like really hard conversation about consent. He could do it. He could rock with me to the end. It wasn’t an easy conversation to have, but he got it. But when he was growing up, consent wasn’t, that wasn’t the language that you, it was, you know, he grew up in the era of like, why would you wear a short skirt if you don’t want somebody to say something to you? Like that was, that was what he grew up in. Now did he have the capacity to understand where we are today? Absolutely, right? And I do think these questions of like, like Sharhonda, I think that your reminder that preference is shaped by dominant culture always, is something that people can people have not been invited. There are a set of people who have not been invited into that conversation or who think that that is like a conspiracy theory. And you’re like, no. And I’m interested in how we help people have these conversations in their living rooms. And I think do think that that is a part of power building. That’ll be my contribution. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. Can I say one more thing about that? I think to Myles’s point, you know using the Lizzo example, there is an expectation that once this technology becomes available to you, you will avail yourself of it. And so if I were to have a child and I were to say like, whatever my kid comes out looking like is whatever my kids comes out looking like, people would be like, well is that a responsible choice for you to make? Right? You have the ability to choose. Why wouldn’t you, you know? And like, am I then being seen as like a bad parent or like somebody who is potentially setting my kid up for more hardship than they deserve when I could just do the thing that is quote unquote “easy” and then make sure that I’m selecting a kid with the lightest possible skin, the finest possible hair, and the thinnest possible nose, right? Like I’m a descendant of Louisiana Creoles, right. It’s in my genetics somewhere, right, that like I can do all of those things. But I just, I think we just have to be just much more critical of like “scientific advancement,” quote unquote, for the sake of scientific advancement because I think it always comes at the expense of those of us who are “undesirabl”e and y’all can’t see my air quotes, but [laugh] you know. Yeah.

Myles E. Johnson: Can I say one more thing that, because DeRay got me thinking? Um. There’s actually just connectivity between the hair perm conversation and this. There’s a connectivity between the bleaching conversation and this. And um. There’s– 

Sharhonda Bossier: As I sit here with myself pressed. 

Myles E. Johnson: You know, and there’s connectivity between, you know, I always say, I call it out, but I’m like, you don’t see me over here wearing Kente cloth every single day. I’m like I’m over here negotiating what helps me move through society just like everybody else and what and also what feels good on my person. But I know that usually that feels that is informed by something. But the other part is um it makes me think of name choice. And um I was just watching um somebody, this great comedian, her name is Nicole Byer, but she was talking about how her Caribbean parents purposefully named her Nicole because they were considering her getting jobs. So even before she was born, um uh her life was already being shaped and influenced by race. And the thing that feels dystopian and the thing that I think that could be that we can create a story around or some visuals around or something around, because I think when things are in movies or films or in stories, they hit people a little bit different, is what does it look like a generation of Black people who decided to name their children Nicole and Beth who decided to optimize their looks who decided to do all those different things and what is lost. And um as I drag on DeRay about his fitness pictures, he also does a good work, but he also does really great work because how many times in our lives when we were younger, did we see a handsome, dark skinned Black man who was smiling at you?

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: So anytime he posts a picture. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: And smiles, he’s actually in um uh in combat with so many images that we see of Black men who are his skin complexion, doing violent things or doing heinous things. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: So that’s still a work. So we have to see us showing up as the Black that we were, here I get preachy, the Black that the ancestors so asked us to be if the ancestors and God made you that version of Black it’s your duty. Your responsibility to find the beauty in that and project it to the world, not to craft it for yourself or your child. I do believe that as anti–

DeRay Mckesson: Come on come on. 

Myles E. Johnson: As anti every I but do what you want. We all negotiating. I got botox before we all know what, do what you want. [laughing] On one of my best days, that’s what I believe. So I’ve been doing a lot of research because I’ve been falling back in love with writing. It has been years since I’ve been feeling like writing something. Like maybe every year I will write one or two things that I’m just not that happy with and I put it away. But I’ve falling back in love with writing, I’ve been um preparing to collect some writings to launch my sub stack. And one of the things that I, of course, wanted to write about was the cult of Black exceptionalism and the cult of Black excellence. And in that I’ve been researching different moments of high moments of Black excellence and kind of just doing my own little autopsy report on what was really going on, what maybe I missed because I was young or partying and drunk and didn’t notice. And and what can I now use my critical gaze to see things differently and maybe connect some dots. I saw in the news that the New York Times article about Black men, Black men’s attendance of college is dropping steadily, um a lot of that went viral. Torre kind of synthesized those thoughts in that that video ended up, the journalist Torre synthesized those thoughts in that video that he did ended up going viral as well. And it got me thinking about how Black men got there, how we got there. Is are there any answers? Are there any hints that we can that we can point to as moments that are of um deviation from from the norm that maybe helped Black men get to um get to this position? And that led me to this op-ed article about Assata Shakur that I had no idea about. So during President Obama’s presidency, the bounty on Assata Shakur’s head went up. She got elevated to terrorist during his presidency. And then as I read the article and the links and the news reports, it wasn’t happenstance. It wasn’t it was a it was a strategic–

Sharhonda Bossier: There was a campaign. Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: It was a strategic campaign to do this in order to navigate the geopolitical theater that he wanted to do at that time around around Cuba and y’all know I’m big on symbolism. There is something wild about probably the pinnacle of the Black excellence status symbol, which is Barack Obama, right? I’m not talking people as humans or even politicians right now, just as symbols, because we have to know that when we get into the public sphere, we also serve as a symbolic work too. So we have Barack Obama, who is the status symbol of Black excellence, then using his power that he accrued, his imperial power, to dominate the status symbol of Black power and liberation. And just for people who maybe don’t know what happened with Assata Shakur, she was accused of um shooting, being a cop killer, even though there was um the evidence was lacking. And then also this is at a time when we look at Cointel Pro and how the United States had a deliberate and organized war on the Black liberation movement. So this her, Angela Davis, there’s always been a lot of um questions and talk about talk about the legitimacy of of of that moment when it comes to what the police were telling us what’s happening with Black people. Fred Hampton just came to mind as well. And I wanted to bring this story to the podcast because the one thing I think the New York Times piece really missed from what I’ve read is that there is a cultural gap when it comes Black men in these institutions we’re requesting them assimilate into. Now, we’re asking Black men, the same Black men within 100 years, they were lynched. They were totally shunned out of it. We’re asking more Black men to feel comfortable inside of it, and when we look at Cory Booker and why he doesn’t resonate with me and I look at him and something about him just does not connect with me. When I look at Barack Obama and see that he doesn’t resonate with me too, Michelle Obama was doing a lot of that work of resonating with me, and a lot of what I the affection I was projecting onto him was really my affection for Michelle Obama and him choosing her. That was a big part of it. I think that as we think about those moments, there’s ways that Black folks can be more accountable and more complicated with how we think about our icons and not keeping them on these pedestals that don’t let us really critically analyze what they did, what they said they were going to do, what were symbolic for, and what they actually did because, you know, Barack Obama was a Trojan horse to a lot of liberatory movements. He was he was this thing that seemed to pacify us and sing Amazing Grace when we’re getting shot when I don’t know if that’s what we needed. He was the thing he was the person who said, oh, Trayvon would have looked just like me, and I don’t know if that’s what we would that we needed. I don’t know if we needed somebody who was in the imperial power, who we were sympathizing with in order to galvanize Black folks in in our movement work. And that’s complicated for me because there’s nobody who has been Black excellent pilled like me. Like as a Beyonce stan, as somebody who loves me some Oprah, as someone who only wears pretty much satin, silks and golds. Um. As somebody who does not want any type of housing or any or or a career that does that’s not impressive to people. It’s hard for me to look at somebody like a Barack Obama and gaze on him really critically. But but this moment that thing, the Assata Shakur thing was something where I was like, yeah, I can’t I can’t look over that. That was wrong. And that’s complicated. And when we talk about Black men not being in college or wanting to be assimilated into certain systems, we have to look at who were the representatives in to those systems. And was that somebody who Black men would even aspire to be when there’s somebody who betrayed their kind of, that kind of secret Black politic that we were all supposed to kind of carry in the back of our heads, you know? I think we all think in our heads that if a Black person runs for president, the first thing they’re going to try to do is give us some reparations. The first thing they’re going to try to do is tell Assata Shakur to sit down or figure out a way to make our lives better. In a lot of ways for Black people, he didn’t not do that. In a lots of ways, he was singularly responsible for the worsening of conditions for Black people, and one of those Black people being Assata Shakur. So yeah, I wanted to bring that to the podcast. What did you think? Don’t nobody hit me because I still got Barack Obama hanging up next to my Tupac picture. And Black Jesus got ties to MLK. 

Sharhonda Bossier: There was so much in this that was fascinating to me. So um one is I went to UC Santa Cruz, um uh which is where Angela Davis was able to find her academic home after she was released from prison and Ronald Reagan, who at the time was governor of California, said she would never work in the UC system again. And my campus was like, actually she will. And so she was an active professor there when I was an undergrad. Um. Took a bunch of classes with her partner and you know my first year of undergrad like in our in our classes everybody got Assata, you know what I mean like we got a copy of it. It was like our it was part of our freshman year reading and so you know we were, Santa Cruz was like we’re the radical campus Angela Davis is a professor here we’re going to read about Assata. And I I looked at this or I read this article and I was like, you know, she, in a lot of ways, Assata has become like Che Guevara to a lot of people, right? Like she’s on T-shirts, she’s on whatever, but if you ask most people, one, what does she stand for? What were her principles? What was she like going so hard about? Most people couldn’t tell you, right, because she’s been decontextualized, and I think almost intentionally. Um. And then like, what is she on the run for? I think also most people probably couldn’t tell you because again, she has been deconextualized, I think intentionally. And so, it felt almost like, to your point, like of all people, right, like why go after this person who is not really part of the public consciousness in any way that is like radicalizing people or pushing them to take up arms against the U.S. Like it just felt like a like why waste your capital in that way. The other thing that I thought about too is that you know Obama himself had come under um intense scrutiny and criticism because of his relationship with Bill Ayers who was really active in the weather underground, right? So it was like a white radical group that had actually perpetrated violence against the United States, right? And had been part of, in a lot of ways, helping um some of these Black liberation fighters who had been incarcerated escape, right? And they were part of the um the group that helped Assata get out and like leave the country, too. Right. And so it’s like, how do you also have fancy dinners with Bill Ayers, right. And then also do the work of, like, upping the bounty on Assata. Like I also just can’t understand that part either. and how he rationalized and made sense of that. Um. And I think in thinking about what it means to have, I remember when the billboards went up again about Assata in New Jersey, right? Like I remember seeing them and finding that also to be just sort of strange. And I don’t know who he was placating or who he speaking to in that moment, which is also a big question for me because like, who cares? Who’s paying attention to this? What political points are you gaining? But I also think about um you know to your point of like what we expect particularly of Black men who get into these systems of power, I just I think like to come after a Black woman, you know to bring us kind of back to an earlier conversation that we were having um just feels like why point the entire sort of power of the United States government again at a Black women who is, who has lost everything, right, she has no relationship with her children, you know, or her daughter, she has relationship with her grandchildren really, right? Um. Like what are we getting this far removed from from that? Like what does she, what space does she continue to occupy in the Black and in the sort of more general American imagination that she felt like a worthy and deserving target in this way were my questions. 

DeRay Mckesson: Back in the day before the internet, the FBI would make mailers about people on the wanted list. I have two framed, rare mailers, about Assata Shakur in my house, framed on the wall. I think about her every day when I walk down the hall. And I’m interested in this, you know, it’s funny, Myles, because as much as you’re like, don’t hit me, I am like, don’t hit me, because I really am not trying to be like necessarily a Obama defender because he was the president doesn’t doesn’t necessarily need my defense. Um. I do think of him though as a victim of his own success in so many ways that like what happens when you go from being a legislator to the president? Never having been an executive before and he some of those early decisions for sure you know until we get to obamacare they remind me of the Black people I know who go into big leadership roles in traditional white run places and they are like I’m gonna do it the way it’s been done they’re like I am now the ceo, I’m the president. They’re like, I’m not in here to break nothing. I’m not here to like upend it. It’s worked this way for 200 years. This is my, and they don’t realize until really late that this is all shoestrings holding the thing up. It is smoke and mirrors that is like the performance of amazingness. It is people screaming and yelling at each other that have made some of the decisions that you thought were made in a collaborative spirit was like brute force pushed it through, you know, like you don’t know that until you’ve actually been in the room. And what happens when you just were never in the room this way and then you were in the biggest room imaginable, like that’s actually how I think. So I could see somebody come to him being like, we got to do this da-da-da. And he’s like, okay, we got to do it. And you’re like, instead of being like, nah, I don’t think we do this. Or like, I think about the Trayvon. You know, what he said about Trayvan was so simple. And or when he had that, when the Henry Louis Gates stuff. And Lord knows, you’d have thought that he would have, he said, kill every police officer in America. And you’re like, you know I can I can only imagine what that looks like. And you know obviously, in an infinitely much smaller space, I think about when I was in Baltimore City Public Schools and I later became chief but before I was chief [?] capital. I didn’t, you couldn’t tell me that those people weren’t, every decision was like the most noble. Like people stayed up all night and the school board was like asking, really? And then I got in there and I’m like, oh, this is a game. This is like personalities and like this is actually not as principled as I thought. And I did not know that at all until I had a chance to be on the inside, which is no excuse for Obama but I do, it to me explains um a lot. And I even think about I was in a meeting with Obama where he had this um a sociologist who was essentially saying, there is no racial impact of police violence, like there’s no disproportionate impact on Black people. And we’re sitting at the table, and this guy’s from Harvard and da da da, and Obama, I could see Obama, look at him like, well, the study said, right? And we sitting here like, man, if you don’t stop talking about this study, we all about to turn this room upside down, not the study. You know, he’s like, take it, and you’re like, Obama, that’s not, you missing, this is, this room is about to get really hard if you keep doing this, like, but there’s no racial da-da-da. And it was like, yeah, I think about, he, a lot of decisions is like what happens when you never were in the room before in that way to me. 

Myles E. Johnson: Just a couple of just two things that kind of wrap up into like what y’all were talking about um and y’alls commentary made me think about, I thought about Jeremiah Wright and how there was there needs– 

Sharhonda Bossier: They threw that man to the wolves. 

Myles E. Johnson: And they needed to do something in order to distance himself from what Jeremiah Wright was saying in the pulpit about America and and politically. So I do think that this might have been one of those moments to show how far, to prove how far away he was from um Jeremiah Wright. And um and again, to your point, DeRay, like I think the reason why it’s important to talk about and why I’m glad we’re talking about it and I hope that other people bring this up and complicate their own conversations politically based off of um information like this and conversations like this, is because I think that’s how you make a better next Black president. You know, I’m still pretty pragmatic when it comes to stuff. So I still think that the empire is not gonna fall. So what is the most powerful thing we can do while the empire is intact? And I think that it helps us shape our expectations. And I thing for a lot of people who were voting, our expectations were simply just to see the symbolism and hopefully he’ll wink, wink, throw us some dollars. And now we’re seeing, we need a more organized, principled, clear case for what you’re going to do for Black people, no matter what color you are. We can’t assume anything. Um. And to your point, how power and how these different institutions do shape us and shape our choices, I think that’s something everybody can talk about, because I promise you, I would have not been talking about Katy Perry and Lizzo as much as I was talking about it, if it wasn’t for me being in certain institutions. Because you know so it’s something that we all participate in, but I think it’s something we should all talk about.

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, and listen, right next to my copy of Assata is also my copy of Becoming. 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Okay, so. [laugh] 

Myles E. Johnson: Now that’s a boring book. 

Sharhonda Bossier: So. 

Myles E. Johnson: The audible is good. 

Sharhonda Bossier: It is, yes. 

Myles E. Johnson: Her podcast is good too. But I was like. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

Myles E. Johnson: I was like Michelle, I need for you to go ahead and just um put this to a beat or something sister. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah wrap this up. Yeah, yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: It was a boring book? 

Myles E. Johnson: A boring, a boring–

Sharhonda Bossier: It was not great. 

Myles E. Johnson: A boring read. Like she’s, you know, you really need to get into the gunk. And right now it’s like, sister, we want to hear about your mess. We want to here about there was nothing that Hollywood Unlocked will pick up from that book. [indistinct]

Sharhonda Bossier: It’s a story of persuasion, right? It’s like a we, it’s like a started from humble beginnings, but then, right, like it’s a, it’s a very sort of polished. 

Myles E. Johnson: Viola Davis. Oprah Winfrey.

Sharhonda Bossier: Look at her life, mm-hmm. 

Myles E. Johnson: You know. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

Myles E. Johnson: Queen Mother’s. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah Mm-hmm. Yeah. Before we go, can I say one more thing about Black women though? Uh. One of my friends listened to my first appearance on this pod and she wants me to correct the record. So Corinne, this is for you. You did make me tamales the year that I got cut off from my Mexican–

DeRay Mckesson: Not tamales. 

Sharhonda Bossier: –Tamale connect because he voted for Trump. She is a Black woman who stood in the gap and learned to make tamales. And so we did have Christmas tamales. 

Myles E. Johnson: Corinne. 

Sharhonda Bossier: So thank you Corinne. 

Myles E. Johnson: You see how when people got the mic, they don’t remember? But she remembered it when she was putting that hot sauce on that tamale. But as soon as she get the mic, she was acting like she was just all tamale less. And she had she was tamale-full, thanks to you, Corinne. See? Thank you for correcting that. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

DeRay Mckesson: Not tamale full. Good night. [music break] Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

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DeRay Mckesson: There is a Supreme Court race in North Carolina and a Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, she won. The Republican lost by 734 votes and he raised holy hell about those 734 votes. He appealed, appealed again, and now a panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which is the intermediary court in North Caroline, they have ruled that roughly 60,000 ballots can be fast-tracked to be thrown out. And it would, by all accounts, this was a legitimate election. She fairly won. This would make the Supreme Court. It would keep it a um not, it would make it not a MAGA court if Allison Riggs is able to go through. But I thought it was interesting. You know, I will say this until we fix it, but voter ID legitimately is my, it’s my thing. It is my villain origin story. It’s the hill I will die on. It is the litmus test by which I figure out whether the left like nailed the messaging or not, because when you look at the way um the categories are rendered, there are about 5,000 people who were either overseas or in the military who voted by absentee ballot, but they forgot to put a photocopy of their photo ID or the form that is an exception form explaining why they don’t have a photocopy of it. They did not put it in the envelope. Those people have 15 business days to do so. Now, who is gonna notify those people overseas? God only knows, but you know a lot of people don’t realize that you know in some places, when you vote by absentee ballot, you have to put a photocopy of your ID. Now, how secure is that? It’s not. You can make up a, who is actually checking that to make it real? Nobody, literally not a soul. Who is going through the form to see if you have a, it’s not a thing. These are literally just mechanisms to stop people from voting. There are about 60,000 people though who have, quote, “incomplete voter registration.” So they might have like missed something on the form, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these people have um have 15 days to correct whatever the state is saying that they got wrong. Now what’s interesting about it is that um in an affidavit, the State Board of Elections has already said that most of these people, the majority of these people were definitely properly registered. So these are like all random technicalities. And the only reason why they’re able to even contest these votes is that there was a Republican consultant who did an analysis and he did an analysis that like matched people’s voter registration to their social security number, driver’s license number or absentee voter list. And he came up with this magical number around the 60,000. And because he was a Republican, the Republican Court of Appeals is actually, um is like sort of entertaining this today. And, you know, I just am fascinated by this. It is interesting that, you now, even at the state level, they are doing anything they can to like take over the court system. That is their thing. And, you know I’ll tell you that, If we lose these battles, we lose a lot. I was just before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And when I tell you this Reagan appointed judge, there were two quotes she said about my case. We might do an episode on my case because it is bigger than me. But the Fifth circuit court of appeals judge, she says on the record, he is not Martin Luther King Jr. That’s what she says about me while I’m in the courtroom. And then she says, every protest BLM led ended in violence. This is like what she is saying from the from the dais. And I’m looking at her like, you know I will probably be fine in my case, but I’m thinking about all the decisions you have made. She was appointed by Reagan. I’m like, oh, this woman, this is really, really something. But I brought it here because I’m fascinated by it. We should watch what’s happening with North Carolina and the courts, I hope, become a space of actual advocacy, like that we build institutions. Court watch is interesting. I don’t know if Court Watch nationally has the capacity to do what the moment requires around the court apparatus, though. 

Myles E. Johnson: What you were saying about voting rights really hit me because I’ve been watching television and I was reading some articles on NPR. And do you know um Elie Mystal, he’s coming he just released a book called Ten Bad Laws and I haven’t read it yet, but I really wanna read it and he’s been doing his press run and part of his press room was um NPR and the View, which are two places that I that I frequent child. And I wanted to um talk about it because he’s been talking about these laws he wants to see abolished. And I’m like, if I hope there’s a lot of Democrats looking at this stuff, because those ideas really excited me. So I know if they excite me, they excide others. But I just want to read a little piece of his interview. Um. The person asking the question says, Elie, you actually start off the book asking the question, why isn’t everyone registered to vote? Every single voter registration law you argue is anti-democratic. And I do want you to explain what you mean. And then Mystal says, every single one right. So look, voter eligibility requirements are one right, voter-eligibility requirements are things like you have to be 18, you have to live in the state that you vote in and all these kinds of rules and regulations. And I can argue that some of the eligibility requirements are bad or wrong. But again, the scoping of the book, what can we repeal? I don’t think that we can repeal voter eligibility requirements. We need to have some of them, even some of them, the ones that I wouldn’t agree with or like. Voter registration, on the other hand, is completely useless. Once we have established the rules of eligibility, everybody who is eligible should be automatically registered to vote. And that is not just me saying that, that is most of the democratic world saying that. America is unique in its double hurdles to voting. We call ourselves the greatest democracy in the world. We are not we are not in the top 10 because other countries have universal registration. Sorry for my stuttering, they wrote it how he spoke, so there’s a lot of likes and rights, and I’m like, what’s going on? But um yeah, I wanted to offer that because that’s been on my mind that he’s um had some really radical ideas about what should be shifted in America that really excited me about the ideas of that. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think.

DeRay Mckesson: And before you go, Sharhonda, I’ll say. 

Sharhonda Bossier: Oh yeah. 

DeRay Mckesson: That um that the voter ID stuff in North Carolina had been blocked before by litigation. It only recently became unblocked and got enacted at the local level. If not for the voter I.D. infrastructure, there would be no legal basis to even challenge this many votes. 

Sharhonda Bossier: I think, you know, I decided to dig a little bit. One thing I’ve been doing recently, sorry, is like watching local news coverage of nationally important stories, because I think often local news takes a very different angle on what’s happening. And sometimes I think particularly with some of the um the big affiliates, they take a, everything is sort of covered in the tone of like a good morning America story, right? And so I listened to this um and watched a couple of local news segments and a couple of additional things came out. One is that like the targeting of democratic districts, right? It probably gives the democratic candidate um an opportunity to appeal, right. Because I think she can make a case for this being very specifically about targeting people that he assumes did not vote for him versus being about election integrity, right. Um. I think the other thing is, you know, the news sort of was matter-of-factly, like, if you’re wondering if you are a person whose vote is being challenged, here’s how you can find out, right? But it puts the onus on the voter, to your point, right, and I think most people, if they voted in this race, voted in this race and, like kept it pushing. And so I think it’ll be interesting to see who takes a proactive position, like what the work, particularly in a state like North Carolina, the party has done to contact voters, right? And to say like, hey, you need to verify this. I think this is another example of like where the Democrats having abandoned building real party infrastructure in a state comes back to bite us in the ass, right. Because it’s like, the party should be out here saying like, hey, you might need to do X or Y or Z to make sure that your vote is counted. And that should not fall on the candidate and their campaign to do that. They don’t have the capacity or the resources. I also just think that when we earlier were talking about like leadership pipelines and who is ready to take on the next phase of leadership, Dems haven’t figured that out on the courts either, and Republicans have been playing the long game there, right? And so I think we have abandoned, particularly in Southern states, significant party and political leadership positions um and have just sort of said like, we’re never going win there. So like, let the Republicans have it. And this is another example where it it um it comes back to bite us in the ass. It’ll be fascinating to watch how this plays out because it’s so clearly about trying to overturn the will of the people of North Carolina that I I wonder, um and maybe they just don’t feel like they need to pretend anything else anymore, right? Uh. But it’s not just an administrative thing, which is I think how local news is covering it right now. Uh. I think we have to figure out how to name for people, this is about, again, overturning the will of the people of North Carolina. And regardless of where you stand, you know, the United States does have secure elections, despite all of our conspiracy theories a few episodes ago about the presidential election. Um. And like y’all have to understand that what these people are trying to do is to hoard power so that you never have another say in anything that is of any consequence in your life ever again. You know?

DeRay Mckesson: Boom. And you know, the the North Carolina Supreme Court is seven people. All but two of them are Republicans. So they’re trying to clear the house on this one. [music break] Well, that’s it. Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Save the People this week. Tell your friends to check it out and make sure you rate it wherever you get your podcasts. Whether it’s Apple podcasts or somewhere else. And we’ll see you next week. Pod Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by A.J. Moultrié and mixed by Evan Sutton, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Kaya Henderson, De’Ara Balenger, and Myles E. Johnson. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]