Look at that. 5:00 Eastern time on the East Coast and this is Lemon Live at 5. I'm Don Lemon. Thank you so much for joining us. Make sure you hit the like and the thumbs up. It does affect the algorithm. More people become aware of our channel and our conversation. That's really important to us. Also, become a member of the show as well. So, that was my old-school anchorman. Look, this is going to sound a little bit interesting, maybe throw you off a little bit, because look, I know that people like to say, 'Oh, why are you guys talking about race so much? Everything is about race in this country.' But pretty much everything is about race in this country. Now, I want you to take a look at this that's happening at the White House.
Look at this video and tell me if you think that a black president would get away with this. Because there, you know, people worried about, oh, is a black man going to be president? It's going to be like it's going to be the hood. And this is some ghetto hood. And it's not even — I can't even say that it's ghetto fabulous because there's nothing fabulous about it. It looks like a roller coaster. You guys know what this is in front. And can you imagine if Barack Obama had desecrated the White House like this? They would be going crazy. I mean, remember when he said, 'I would like some Dijon mustard.' And they were like, 'Oh my gosh, he's so haughty.' But basically, they were saying he was uppity. And then you have this at the White House. I mean, everything is about race. You just don't want to talk about it. Like Jennifer says, white people just don't want to talk about it. Everything is — can you imagine? Look at this. It looks like they're getting ready. Do you remember when the carnival would come to town when you were a kid and you'd hear them banging the tracks together and you'd go on the ride and your mom and your parents would be sitting there going, 'You couldn't pay me to get on that.' Because they take it up, they assemble it and disassemble it every other week, however long the carnival is in town, and they're on to the next town. That's what the carnival is in town. Look at that. Outrageous. Outrageous.
Now look at this. This is what someone did, a rendering of it, but they think it's going to look like — [sighs] — and they had the nerve, I'm serious, to talk about it because they never said anything about Biden and how he was going to decorate the Oval Office. And I remember Obama decorated, and Michael — I think it was Michael Smith — Michael did — Michael Smith did it. It was beautiful, beautifully done, very tasteful. But look, can you imagine? Look at this. This is some ghetto, y'all. And I mean hood. I mean, trailer. Oh, yeah. I said it. [laughter] For real. For real. I'm not saying just because of the UFC, that's not what I'm saying. Anything about the UFC, you can do with that your own self. This could be a fair, a carnival, whatever. And remember Barack Obama used to invite black artists to the White House. I mean, John Legend, they were like, 'Oh, the rappers are in the White House desecrating the — oh my god.' So everything really is about, you know what. And let's just show you this. So let me see, let's see Barack Obama's Oval Office. Let's see. Let's see.
This was Biden's, but similar.
Oh, let's see Biden's. Let's see Biden's. I'll see Biden's. Look at — okay. Very tasteful. Got the gold curtains. That's fine. And that was the — look at this under Trump. [snorts and laughter] Come on, y'all. Look at Biden. Very clean. The taste. Look at this tacky. Look at this. You may as well on that. You may as well have put some plastic on those couches. So, I'm just saying there's a difference. There is a difference. I can't imagine a black president getting away with this. I can't imagine it at all.
And so I want to talk about the subject of race because I came on today, I said, you know what, I'm going to let my guest do all the talking, and I was going to give you an update on what's happening in South Carolina, which is huge, which I'm going to discuss with my guest, and also what happened in Alabama is huge, and the redrawing of these districts and what the Supreme Court has done, basically gutting the Voting Rights Act. So let's bring in — without further ado, we're going to bring him in a little bit later. We're going to bring him in early if he's ready to go. And that's Mr. Eddie Glaude Jr. He's a St. James S. McDonald Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University. Let me just give you his resume. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Begin Again and Democracy and Black. His new book, which is fantastic — he's like, 'Oh, stop. Oh, shucks.' — it's called America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. It shows us how we have become trapped in cycles of chaos, violence, and erasure over the country's refusal to face its double consciousness around race and freedom. And welcome, Eddie Glaude Jr. I'm so happy that you're here finally on The Don Lemon Show, and I'm also happy to have gotten an early edition. And I don't know if I sent you the note, but I loved how you started the book, and I love that you say all the words that people are afraid to say and everything that people are afraid to say when you said the first thing after you talked about the music. And then who would you give the quote from? You said, 'My beginning is...' — can't think of it now.
That's from T.S. Eliot, yeah.
T.S. Eliot. And I was like, wow. And then you did music as well. But let's talk about — you said, 'I do not love America.' That's basically how you started the book.
Yeah. Yeah. First of all, it's just wonderful to see you. It's finally great to be on your show. You've been doing such amazing work on so many different levels. And it's just wonderful to see how free you are, Don. It's just wonderful. Yeah, but —
I can say all the words that you said in that book, that you wrote in that book. I can actually say them on my show now.
I think part of what I was trying to say in that first sentence, or what I was actually being explicit about, was, you know, I have a very unsettling relationship, a very vexed relationship with the country as an abstraction, right? 'I do not love America and never have, especially now.' That's what I wrote. And part of that has to do with the fact that I've had to survive the country, right? I'm from Mississippi, man. And I remember as a kid, my dad was the second African-American hired at the post office in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and he moved us from one side of Moss Point to the other side. And I was outside playing with my Tonka truck. I write about this in the book. I was playing with my Tonka truck and the neighbor's dad called me the n-word, you know, just yelled out, 'Stop playing with that,' and I grabbed my Tonka truck and went inside. And so the world announced what it thought of me, and he wasn't alone in that belief. And then I had to go inside and my parents had to do the work of keeping that belief from taking root in my spirit. So America as an abstraction has never been something to which I've been attached. I've been instead attached to the people on the ground, to those folk who poured into me everything so that I wouldn't believe what the country was saying about me. And I think this demand for gratitude, this demand for loyalty from us, actually proceeds from a willful ignorance about what the country has done and continues to do. I mean, hey, we're in the era of Trump and the latest backlash to us. And so I needed to say something that many of us feel. I needed to write something that many of us hold. I wanted to say it to give permission to us to say it out loud.
I think you remember during the 2008 — it was the Obama election — the first lady said, 'This is the first time that I've been proud of my country.' And I understood what she was saying. She wasn't saying that she was never proud of America. She was saying she was talking about something that America did that made her proud in the moment, but she got so much backlash for that. And I'm glad that you said this, because who cares in this moment that we're living in now? Were you nervous about writing those words at all? Were you, I should say, hesitant about writing those words?
When it first came — when I first typed them, when it came off my pen, Don, I got up and started pacing because it wasn't just my pen, you know. I'm getting chills as I think about it. I wrote the book in nine months. It was like the beginning of a possession, like something was coming through. And I said, you know, I'll be damned. The risks are what they are. What we have to do in this moment is that we can't dance. We can't beat around the bush. Because whenever the fever dream spikes, Don, whenever the fever dream spikes — which is another way of saying whenever the country, whenever, as we would say back home, whenever our white folks lose their mind — our task is to get our babies to the other side, right? We got to make sure they survive it. And the way I can do that as a writer and as an intellectual is to be as boldly honest as I could possibly be on the page. And that means being vulnerable and taking risks. And so there was some nervousness — I canceled an overseas trip because I didn't think I would be able to get back into the country for writing it, you know. So I understood what I was doing.
Look, I think what you said — your pen, it wasn't just you because we all feel that way. I have a similar story that I write about in my book where I talk about the American flag and how I feel the American flag has been co-opted by the right and the far right and they feel like they own that American flag. But I happen to — you know, I grew up in a place, at a Catholic school in Louisiana, and we prayed every day and we did the national anthem, we did our Pledge of Allegiance every day. And you know, I'll explain what I mean by this in a moment, but whenever I hear the national anthem, especially if I hear Whitney Houston sing it, it gives me chills. I tear up and I want to cry. And one, for the emotion of it; two, not for the fake performative patriotism, but for what that flag really means and what that national anthem really means. It doesn't mean that you must stand up. It means that you have the option not to stand up. It means that you can criticize and protest in your country. It means that you can write, 'I do not love America and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground, in the life lived in a particular place and time, and in memories that make up residence in the heart.' So the next sentence is what got me, because we all feel this: 'I suspect love of country is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are, things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be.' So I think every black person — pretty much most black people, you know, unless you're — we won't name names, maybe a little bit later — have that tug-of-war about, do I love the country, do I not? I agree with you. I'm not necessarily in love with America right now, but I do love the idea of America, about trying to create a more perfect union. But so far that has not come to fruition.
Yeah. So, you know, I think sometimes even the more perfect union talk can get us in trouble. It affirms the inherent goodness of the country, that no matter our sins, we are always on the road to a more perfect union. It works almost — you know, I grew up Catholic too, in the Josephite tradition — it works almost like a confessional. That's all we need to say: 'We're a more perfect union.' And then it absolves us of our sins. We can have another moral holiday because we're guaranteed the arc of the country is always towards perfection, as it were. But I think for me, whenever I hear a certain kind — being from the South and being from particularly Mississippi where I'm from — a certain kind of American patriotism sounds to me like a rebel yell. It indexes a set of positions and views that causes me to be on alert, right? Because there always comes a suspicion of me, of us, seems to always come in tow, that somehow we're not quite a part of the country that they imagine. And this goes to the heart of a major claim of the book. Don, I want to say that America is haunted by its own divided consciousness, its double consciousness, its divided soul. W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 wrote The Souls of Black Folk. There was a wonderful documentary about him on PBS in the American Masters series just last week. And Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk makes this claim that black people suffer from a kind of double consciousness, that we see ourselves through the eyes of those who despise us, and then that impacts our self-understanding. That notion we come to believe what the world says about us, right? But I think the double consciousness that Du Bois describes there is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation, that America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can't hold those two things together without contradiction.
And it deposits a kind of madness, Don, at the heart of the country, because in those moments when the nation tries to imagine itself as this idea, this creedal idea, it's then kind of, shall we say, yoked to this idea that the country only belongs to a certain group and the rest of us should play minor bit parts, to be grateful to be here, as if someone has possession of freedom. A certain group possesses freedom for themselves and then they can give and take it away. They can give it to us and take it away. That we are, instead of being full-fledged citizens, owners of this extraordinary experiment, we are instead objects of charity. You know, Frederick Douglass said in 1877, 'Don't give me alms, I want justice.' Right? And so I think part of this uneasy relation has everything to do with this divided soul of the nation. At once it imagines itself as a creed, as an idea, and then at the same time, right, it is a blood-and-soil nation. We hear that echo in the voices, in the words of J.D. Vance right now. And it's not just because of MAGA; that has its roots in the very founding of the country itself.
All right, let's go there. [laughter] Why do you think white people, especially white men, are so obsessed with black people — white people in general — are so obsessed with black people and discriminating against black people and what black people are doing and trying to police black people and telling them what to do? I'll tell you there's a story — I'll tell the story after this, but answer that and then I'll tell you my story.
Well, you know, first of all, let me just say we're talking at a certain level of generality, Don. Now, I love this wonderful formulation by James Baldwin, and I'm paraphrasing him from The Evidence of Things Not Seen. He says, 'I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white, and then there are white people.' It's an important distinction. So we're talking about a certain unselfing that's rooted in an ideology that presumes or assumes that certain people, because of the color of their skin, ought to be valued more than others. And that hierarchy is essential to their self-standing. And at a certain level of generality — now, this is really important to answer your question — that hierarchy is predicated upon us being at the bottom of the well. That's how a certain notion of white identity acquires meaning. We're not them. We're not those who were held in bondage. We're not those folk. And so it's almost like, you know, money being tethered to gold. Without gold, money is just paper with ink on it at a certain point. Without us at the bottom, whiteness doesn't have its meaning. So there's always this ongoing reproduction of the hierarchy that requires of us to be fixed in our place. And the moment we kind of move outside of that fixity, all hell breaks loose because we interrupt the orbit around the sun, because we're the anchor of it all. Now we can get into other kinds of psychological accounts, but I think the hierarchy of racial meanings requires of us that we remain fixed at the bottom, and we have to be reminded of it. As I put in the book — and excuse the language here, I have to say it — this idea of true Americans even today demands, it absolutely needs its niggers. It requires it. Whether it's us, whether it's Muslims, whether it's trans, it needs the other, right? In order to solidify its sense of self, if that makes sense.
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Someone said, you know, 'Do away with the sponsor.' I'm like, no, no, no, no. [laughter] The reason that we're — what I want people to know, Eddie, is the reason that we're able to talk like this and you can say those words is because we're not on corporate media and we don't have the big sponsorship. So, you know what I'm saying? Because those folks are like, 'Oh my gosh, brand safety. I can't do it.' And they don't like to sponsor us. So let me — I love what you were saying. So let me tell you my story that just happened. Was it yesterday or the day before? I forget. I think it was Sunday. And it's more about entitlement. But I find that there's a certain kind of person who is always entitled in this way. So I went to my local breakfast place to get breakfast, and we parked, and I do all the time, and there's a certain way that you park because it's sort of, you know, you do the — like on the diagonal. You know what I mean? Like kitty-corner, they say, you park there. And there was this SUV that was parked taking up at least three, maybe four parking spaces, parked the other way. And so I went in and I said, 'Excuse me, does anyone own the black SUV outside?' And the guy said, 'Yeah, that was me.' I said, 'Sir, you may not realize it, but you're taking up like three or four parking places.' And he just looked at me. He said, 'And?' And I said, 'Well, there's a lot of people out there who are trying to get into the driveway and park, and you're taking —' He goes, 'I'll take the ticket.' And I said, 'You're not going to move your car?' And he said, 'No, I'll take the ticket because my car doesn't fit that way.' And I said, 'Okay, number one, you don't want to admit that you're wrong. And number two, you should have realized that before you parked there, that your car was too big. Perhaps you should have parked somewhere else rather than taking up parking spaces where your car did not fit.' And I find, as I said, always a certain kind of person, usually a white man, who does something like that. And I was just stunned. People were looking at me and I said, I can't believe it. I left and I said, 'I have to leave here or I'm going to say something to this guy because — [laughter] — and let him know in front of his kids what a piece of he is, right?' And that is entitlement. But I could never, ever get away with that. And if I had cussed that man out, I would end up in Page Six as someone who attacked someone. Do you know what I'm saying? Or the cops would have come. The cops would have come and I would have been the aggressor. Do you know what I'm saying? We could never get away with that, Eddie Glaude.
No, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, we have to know our place in so many ways. And in this moment of MAGAism and the like, it is clear to me that people are trying to remind us of our place. They're trying to reassert it. And if we're angry, if we show any kind of passion or emotion, right, it triggers fears, it triggers a sense of warning, because these people, in the imagination of the country — us, you and me, right — we always present the potential danger because we embody the contradiction of the nation. What do I mean by that? In the early July, in the July days of 1834, there's an extraordinary riot. Black folks show up at July 4th celebrations, Don, and our very mere presence would call forth violence. They would attack us physically if we showed up because our bodies actually represented the contradiction. It exposed the lie that was being celebrated. It's almost like John Adams saying to King George, 'We will not be your negroes' — at the very moment that he's giving expression to a notion of freedom. It's based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom. So you have to erase us. We got to be banished from view. Because if we're in view, you're going to have to redact. You're going to have to tell a different kind of story. You're going to have to account for our presence in the place. And so I think these moments of entitlement, these moments of rank selfishness, is part of the toxic brew that I think is eating out the lining of the country's belly. It's not just simply hatred that has us by the throat. It's the toxic combination — to mix my metaphors — of hatred, greed, and selfishness, and how that gets run through the history of racial meanings in the country. But I'm proud of your restraint, my man.
I was just like, I got to get out of here. I mean, and every single time — I had never seen a black man act like that.
And when we do, we're in cuffs.
And there, in front of his kids and all the people waiting, and it was raining, and there were like little old ladies trying to get their cars in, and he's just like, 'No, I'll take the ticket.' And I was like, 'Man, you —' and then I, you know, I know. Anyway.
Bad home training, man. Bad home training.
It's bad home training, but it's also entitlement. And other things. Now listen, you also talk about this, and I could — I mean, just getting past — I got past the prologue in the beginning, but you also talk about people saying — because they say it to me — 'Why are you always talking about race? What about racism? You're so privileged.' They tell you, you're a Princeton professor. They tell me, 'Oh, you're a CNN anchor. You're on the TV, or you know, you're rich.' Whatever it is that they say. So then why do you keep talking about racism in America? None of that — whatever they're mentioning, the title, the position, or the money or whatever — none of that makes you immune to racism in America. And as a matter of fact, it could make you a target, even a bigger target of it, or at least a more public target of it.
We become the exceptional example, the exceptional negro. Yeah. To disprove the reality of racism. And you know, look, not everything — I have this sentence in the book: not everything in the U.S. is about race, but everything is, you know.
Can you please explain that? Because I said that when I came — I don't know if you heard me when I started streaming — I said, I know people think it's not, but everything is about race. And I pointed out the monstrosity of erecting a UFC wrestling ring on the lawn of the White House. And imagine if Barack Obama had done that, right? He could never get away with that. But anyway, so how is everything about it and not about it? Because I agree with you.
I use this example in the book. Imagine the parchment upon which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was written. And imagine the inkwell that was used spilling all over the documents, right? And so this is slavery. This is the transatlantic slave trade. This is the economy that brought the modern world into existence. But imagine all of that black ink falling, covering, like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — is it the Gulf of America? I don't know, right — all over the paper. And the only way you can see the documents is that you have to hold it up to the light and see how you got to see through the stain in order to see the words. So what I'm saying in that moment is that race stains the American project. We can still read the principles. We can still read the ideals, right? But because of the reality of slavery, how it corrupted the soul of the nation from its beginnings, it impacts the economy. It impacts the social and cultural and political reality of the country at every turn. And so it even, shall we say, informs the very sense of entitlement that we just talked about, where black folk don't even have to be present, right, for it to work. And so part of what I'm trying to get at with that moment is to say, look, it's not just because I'm obsessing over the issue, right? It goes to the heart of what now forms the experiment. And the thing is, this is the key. This is the key, Don. When we're talking about race, I'm not talking about black folk. I'm talking about the very way in which the white American as a concept distorts and disfigures democratic principles. It's not about us. It has never been about us. It's about the way you conceive of you, which requires a certain understanding of me. So the stain, the black ink, isn't us. Of course it's about slavery, but it's about those who believe that they're superior because of the color of their skin.
Can I talk to you about some things that are in the news right now? Let's talk about Alabama courts rejecting Alabama's House map, calling it unfair to black voters. I mean, finally. But however, we all knew that they were trying to get rid of the only Democratic district there, and to get rid of black political power is what I believe is happening. But what do you say? It happened, it was Alabama, and then there was South Carolina blocking Trump's effort to gain more House seats. South Carolina was about that, and then you had Alabama as well. Similar story on the same tree but different branches. Republicans are saying none of this is racist and this is creating equity in the states and in voting districts.
They're lying, you know, just telling bold-faced lies. [laughter] And I think we need to call it for what it is. I mean, we're in the midst of a second redemption. And you know, when we think about redemption in the context of the collapse of radical reconstruction, this is when southern Democrats, by way of coups — literal coups and violence — took over the southern states, and it had everything to do with disenfranchising black voters. It had everything to do with the violence that came with that disenfranchisement. Just remember Robert Smalls of South Carolina, who was a Civil War hero who also served in Congress, documented that over 53,000 black people were killed between the end of reconstruction and the end of the 19th century. So this is part of this period, because remember now, radical reconstruction is 1866 to 1876. Then we get this period that leads up to Jim Crow, and that's not undone until 1954, barely then. We're not a genuine multiracial democracy until 1965. And then that's undone or assaulted 15 years later with the election of Ronald Reagan and, of course, the ascendance of John Roberts and the Shelby case in 2013. So there's been this all-out assault on black voting power. So I think we need to understand what they're doing for what it is. This is a second redemption, a second lost cause. But I also understand why they're being hesitant, because they're going to unleash the beast. The black — I mean, I was just in Mississippi for the Mississippi protest last Wednesday. Don, Mississippi is damn near 40% black, and they weren't there engaged in a kind of nostalgic longing for the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. They were doing math. If we turn out with this level of numbers, if we increase voter registration by this number, if we understand that the turnout has to increase by each county — out of 82 counties in Mississippi, 52 counties showed up to that protest on a Wednesday, on a rainy Wednesday in midweek. So I think what Republicans in the South are realizing is that they are radicalizing a constituency that will impact how they exercise power in the South. Also, you want to give a shout out to Deuel Ross and the LDF, who made the argument around Alabama. They've been in court ever since the Shelby decision, the Democracy Docket with Marc Elias, the Marc Elias group. They're fighting in the courts. But I also need to say this. The courts have played a central role in the consolidation of the idea of the white republic. And we tend to read the court through the Warren Court. We always want to read the court in light of those from Brown v. Board and all of the decisions that followed from that. The court hasn't played that role historically. Historically, it has secured power — white power. And Dred Scott is just an exaggerated example of the court's typical orientation.
So I want to play this, and I'm not — I want to set you up. Just give me a couple extra minutes because I know you have to leave in a bit.
What we know with clarity and certainty is a black person — yes, look at me, I'm still black — who ideologically is aligned with their state or their district can win anywhere. Final point is simply this. You can have a concern about having minority populations — and I don't mean blacks at this time, I mean Democrats in South Carolina — go without representation based on a congressional map. But the one thing you cannot argue is that people of color can't win who are ideologically aligned with the state. And I got to say this with great certainty. South Carolina will elect people who don't look like the majority population because we've already done so. But we also elect people who feel like, walk like, and talk like, philosophically, who we are as South Carolinians — consistently conservative.
Bless his heart. [laughter] I'll let you go. No, I mean, I'm going to lose every sponsor I have. No, I just — I mean, just bless his heart. Eddie — what, how does that happen to someone?
Well, look, I think, you know, let me just say this. I'm not one — I don't throw away people. You know, that's not my place. I think everyone is a cracked vessel. I am. And we're all in need of grace and forgiveness at some point in our lives. So I don't —
I don't want to throw him away, and I'm not questioning his blackness. I question his politics.
And I question the communities out of which — I mean, the way in which he's understanding the needs of the community out of which we both come. I think it's very clear to me that how he's describing the ideological orientation of South Carolina, that that orientation is not such that it would benefit the majority of Black South Carolinians, whether it's about...
That it would just — that it would represent the majority of Black South Carolinians and representation, right?
If that was the case, we would have seen more — he wouldn't be such a unicorn, right? Because I mean, just the evidence suggests, right, that he's not, right, because he's so singular, right? And so I think it's so important for us to understand the bad faith of his claim. That's not to say that Black folk are by definition Democratic. Most Black folk in the South, if you control for race, according to one Pew Research data point, if you control for race, Don, Black folk are as conservative as Mormon conservatives.
There you go. Especially in the South, as you said, because you're Mississippi, I'm Louisiana.
I get it. And look, I had to come out — I had to leave Louisiana to come out, you know, and then once I was like, you know, Don Lemon, then I went back. But in order to become Don Lemon, I had to leave. I had to leave the South.
But that doesn't — but that conservatism doesn't evidence itself ideologically in a way that is in alignment with policies that are punitive to working people. Even conservative Black folk are just simply saying, 'People should be able to live their lives, should be able to flourish.'
So I think it's really important for us to say that, you know, he's just engaged in bad faith. I'm trying to be nice. Can't you tell?
I know. But who's responding? No, no, no. I'm just joking around. No, don't even worry about that. This is why we're here and I'm in this space. I'm just joking. But I have one more for you. Okay.
All right. Here it is. I'm seeing a lot of talk from my colleagues on the left, too, as we shift toward this reinvigorated talk about Jim Crow and the past of this country. And as someone who is a direct descendant of a slave, as someone whose great-great-grandfather was born on a plantation, I can assure you slavery is over. Jim Crow is dead. When I go anywhere, I don't see any white-only signs. I don't. I promise you. I am a Black man that represents a white-majority district in Texas. The great-great-grandson of a man born on the plantation stands before you today as a proud conservative Republican from Texas, as a believer and follower in Christ, and as a believer in what this country can be if we allow equality for not just Muslim Americans, not just Buddhist Americans, but also Christian Americans like yourself. God bless you, young man. You give me a...
Oh, bless his heart. You know, one of the things — I'm going to say this. I know I shouldn't say it, but I have to say it.
Yeah. Say it. Just say it.
You wrote the book on race.
Yeah. White folk ain't the only reason why we're not free.
So, you know, I mean, I just, you know, look, we're a complicated community. And part of the things that — part of one of the things we have to say is that Black folk are just as complicated as any other group of folk. We have people who are staunch conservative. We have folk who are knuckleheads. We have folk who are pious, folk who are loving, folk who are mean-spirited, folk who are cruel, people capable of evil, people capable of decency. We are as complicated as any human beings on the planet. So I don't want to pull his Black card. What I do want to say is this.
The fact that you have achieved what you have achieved in Texas ought not lead you to conclude or to lie about the reality of the country as such. Right? I mean, you can be conservative and hold your conservative views, but you don't have to lie about the reality of race in the country or the reality of racism in the country, right? You don't have to lie about what they're doing. And so it just — it irks me when folk engage in bad faith, when they think that by aligning themselves with this position, they're going to in some way benefit. You know who did that? The leaders of Mount Bayou in Mississippi, Don.
The only Black town in Mississippi, the leaders of Mount Bayou said as they were disenfranchising Black folk with the collapse of Reconstruction in Mississippi, they said, 'Just leave us alone and we'll sign off on what you're doing.' Now look at Mount Bayou today. You're going to sell your soul for a mess of pottage. That's James Weldon Johnson, right? And it's a mess of pottage. Trust me, you don't have to lie. I'm not asking you to turn your back on what you believe in your heart. You could be conservative, but you don't have to lie to be conservative. That's the key.
Mr. Glaude, do you have just a couple more minutes?
I just — I've got to get... Okay, so let me get this. I want to talk to you about the slush fund, but first I got to get a word in from our sponsors.
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You know, and the other piece on the so-called non-weaponization fund, look, this is part of a settlement. You know, the president could have just continued his lawsuit and said, 'Hey, I'm going to sue you for whatever it was, $3 billion,' and probably won and kept the money himself. Instead, he set up this fund to make reparations, if you will, to those who were also wronged by the Biden White House and the IRS and the DOJ.
Reparations.
Andy Claw Jr., he said it when this happened. I was on the show and I said, 'Is this reparations for white people or MAGA reparations?' And look, it happened on a Monday. By Tuesday, they were giving reparations, you know, that settlement or whatever, which was not a real settlement because he was suing himself. And then the reparations thing happened on a Tuesday. When for how many centuries we've been trying to get reparations for Black people and nothing has happened?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, bless his heart, too. Bless the folk. I just think it was really important for us to understand the irony. So much of what we're experiencing is an inversion of the arguments that were used in the context of the civil rights movement and the like. He's using the language of reparations, Don, because they believe that reverse discrimination, right, is actually more prevalent than the discrimination against Black and brown folk. This is why, you know, the civil rights division of the DOJ is doing what it's doing. So they're...
