July 5, 2025 • 34 mins
MSNBC’s The Weekend anchor Jonathan Capehart details his new book Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home. The New Yorker’s John Seabrook examines his new book The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We are on vacation, but that doesn't
mean we don't have a great show for you Today.
The New Yorker's own John Cebrook stops by to talk
about his new book, The Spinach King, The Rise and
Fall of an American Dynasty. But first we have MSNBC's
(00:25):
The Weekend anchor Jonathan k Part to talk about his
new book, Yet Here I Am Lessons from a Black
Man Search for Home. Welcome to Vast Politics, Jonathan cape.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Part, Hey, Molly, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I'm so excited to have you.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm sorry, I'm a little horse.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Let's start with this book. I want to know sort
of how you decided to write this, what the way was,
And I want to know for my own ratification, how
scary it is to write about ourselves.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know, during the Trump years, the first years in
twenty seventeen, as a way of escaping sort of the
mayhem of the first Trump years, I decided, you know what,
all these stories that I've had in my head about
my summers as a kid at my grandparents A's in
North Carolina. I need to write these down. They're very
vivid memories, very formative in terms of how I see
(01:19):
the world, how I see the country, how I view race,
and so I just wrote them down. They became the
shorthand was the down South chapter, all about going Jehovah's
witnessing with my grandmother and the people and who we
talked to and relatives, and I sent it around to friends.
I sent it around to three specific people, April, Ryan,
(01:41):
Tammeron Hall, and Joy Read, and I asked, what do
you think of this? Each one individually said this is incredible.
Keep going, And so I kept going. I didn't have
a publisher or anything. I just wrote and would send
them and other people like, yeah, here's another story, here's
some more pages, and they just encourage me to keep going.
(02:02):
And so when I got the book contract years later,
I had two particular books in mind that formed how
I would go about writing this very personal book. The
first one was by Katherine Graham, her By Autobiography, personal history.
If anyone listening hasn't read it, you should pick it
(02:23):
up because it is raw, honest. Katherine Graham was the
most powerful woman in journalism in her time, and one
of the most powerful women in the country, and yet
in her book she talks about her fraught relationship with
her mother, She talks about her own insecurities being publisher
of The Washington Post. It was really when I read
(02:45):
it in the late nineties early two thousands, it was
incredibly refreshing to read something so powerful and honest from
someone so important. And then fast forward twenty years to
Charles Blow's memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones and
again raw, honest, candid, introspective, and it was wonderful to
(03:07):
read because it put into perspective and context the passion
that fueled Charles's columns in the New York Times. And
so I thought, if I were to ever get a
book contract, that's the way I will write my book.
I will be raw, I will be honest about my
successes but also my failures, absolutely honest about my failures
(03:29):
and shortcomings. And when I got the contract, that's exactly
what I did. Oh and our mutual friend Richie Jackson,
when I really started writing, gave me the best piece
of advice because he had just finished writing Gay Like Me,
and he said, Jonathan, put yourself on every page, be
sure to do that. That's what I did, so, with
(03:50):
Katherine Graham on one side, Charles Blow on the other side,
and Richie Jackson sitting on my head, I went about
putting myself on every page so that when people read
the book, yet here I am, they will understand that
perhaps maybe the image they have of me all buttoned
up and looking rather nice and everything. You know. My
(04:14):
hope is that they will see that that's just their
image of me. It's not fully who I am.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
We both have written these very personal memoirs, and I
feel like one of the things that is sort of
the hallmark of the Trump administration is that they kind
of go after you for anything they can. I mean,
we've seen that. I think of like Eugene, they were,
you know, trolling him for just any number of things
(04:41):
one of the things. And they've certainly told me endlessly.
And I was always very careful about my public information
because of my mother. She had a stalker, and so
we were always very careful because we always knew that
guy was coming for us. But I just wonder, here
we are writing these very personal thinkes I am having
the same experience in some ways for me, is very scary.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I did not grow up in the way that you did,
and so for you, safety and security is ever present.
You know that wasn't my upbringing. So as you know
I'm writing this, I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking
about who am I going to help by being this honest?
And by that I mean, yes, I'm an outgay black man,
(05:26):
But there are pieces of my story and experience that
are universal. And my hope is when people read this
that they will see parts of themselves, pieces of themselves,
or if they don't, an experience that I've got that
I've written about that maybe they're going through now or
they went through and it gets them to think about
(05:48):
it in a different way. That has been my goal
the other goal. One goal is here, get to know
me better, and the other goal is, Hey, through these
experiences I you will take to heart some of the
lessons that are you know, sprinkled throughout the book.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It's funny because it's like the experience of being able
to be who you are in the world is pretty
new phenomenon. I mean, one hundred years ago, it wasn't that.
Why for example, I talk about being sober all the
time because I want to destigmatize alcoholism. I want to say,
you don't have to be ashamed. You can get sober,
(06:25):
you can go to AI, nobody's judging you, and you
can have this amazing life. So I do wonder how
important it is for us just by the sheer facts
of being an out gay man, being someone who's an
alcoholic who got sober when they were teenager, Like, how
important that just that is in the world.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It's very important. I'll speak for myself, you know, I've
always wanted to be a journalist. Becoming an opinion writer.
An opinion columnist was not, you know, in the life plan.
But when I realized that this platform that I'd been given,
when my editor said, hey, you should write columns, and
I started, you know, putting more and more of myself
(07:07):
in the columns, is when I started hearing from people.
When I started hearing you know, hey, I never thought
of it that way, especially on matters of race. When
I started realizing that my audience was you know, heavily
African American, but it was also non people of color,
and for many of them, I was their gateway. I
(07:29):
was there entree to understanding stuff that was happening. So
when Trayvon Martin was killed, and I wrote the column
that talked about the talk and the rules that I
was told, you know, don't run in public, definitely, don't
run with anything in your hands in public. All the
things that I do, the number of people I heard
(07:51):
from who said I never knew this. I had one
colleague at MSNBC come up to me in the weeks
after tears in her eye and he said, she said,
I never knew that those conversations were happening. She said
her son's best friend was black, and that he was
(08:11):
over their house all the time. She knew his parents
and everything, but she never knew that when he left
their home, the conversations that were happening. And so once
you understand that, the responsibility that comes with that. I
looked at that as Okay, I see people are looking
(08:33):
to me to guide them, and it's not my responsibility personally,
but professionally sure. And the more I hear from people
who say, you know, you helped me, the more you realize, Wow,
with this platform comes responsibility and so how am I
going to use that? And so I've been using it,
(08:54):
putting it in service of helping move the dialogue, help
people I don't know, get beyond their pretty conceived notions
or their hard fast beliefs because they trust me. That's
the hope I.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Have found for me.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
That it's been a very destabilizing time in American life.
You know, we have gone from backlash to backlash to backlash.
Have you found it destabilizing?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Destabilizing in the sense that the world as we knew
it has been completely.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Upended again and again and again.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Right, and so the shock and trauma of twenty seventeen
now looks quaint compared to what we're going through. And
so you know, with his reelection, I knew right away
that I needed to protect my own inner piece, my
own sanity, And so you know, I don't. I mean,
(09:54):
I pay attention to the news and watch the news,
but I make sure that I have breaks, and I'm
make sure that by protecting my inner piece, I don't
burn myself out. Because of what I was saying before,
there are lots of people who are looking to me,
looking to you, looking to many of our colleagues to
(10:14):
help guide them through this really tough time.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah, I think that's right. When you're talking about this,
I think so much about how we have I mean,
there's so much disruption, such short intervals. And I think
a lot about this interview I did with this tech
billionaire who I was interviewing, and I was like mad
(10:39):
at him because I think he's a bad guy pretending
to be a good guy. He was saying that the
level of disruption that has happened because of I mean,
I didn't grow up with the phone. We didn't have
phone that they're just this with, Like the world that
I grew.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Up in is gone. You know.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
I come from nineteen nineties magazine like everything that I
was taught to believe. I mean, it's so funny for
me to go back to writing a book because I
come from writing books, so that you know, I've seen
the magazine rule just appended in every different way. But
books are, in its own way, the same terrible business
(11:19):
that they've always been.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I will, I will take your word for it, because
this is my first book, and it has been an
interesting process. Writing the book is actually what was fun.
You know. I look at writing as you know, putting
together a jigsaw puzzle. Writing the column is a five
hundred piece puzzle. Writing this book was a ten thousand
(11:43):
piece puzzle of blue sky, green trees and sand and
trying to figure that out was fun. But then afterwards,
no one told me that I had to read more
than one you know, edited draft of the book. By
the time I read the fourth you know, final pass through,
I was like, God, damn it, I'm bored. So it's
(12:05):
going to read this book and then have to do that.
It's the whole build up to lunch, and then there's
the lunch. I mean, you've been through this, not.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
For ten years, not for a long time, so I
mean it's a little bit different than it used to be,
and the fact that everything has changed, the fact that
the entire world has changed. But I do think when
you have to read, when you're reading the book again
and again, what I find for me that's hard is
and why I'm not a good editor of my own work,
which is actually something that's important and it's good to
(12:36):
be good at, is because when I read things too
many times, I sort of fall in love with the
worst parts of it. You know, I love very flowery writing.
I'm obsessed with pros. I've gotten worse about that in
my older age, so especially in the world of AI,
I just am so delighted when things are beautiful and
feel like Diddy and that even if they don't move
(12:59):
this story along, I don't give a fuck, which you know,
it's not actually what anyone wants. I wonder if we
could talk for a minute about kind of staying sane
in a crazy world. And during the election, I was
on television at the very I was on for the
coveted three am to six Am spot. When I went
(13:22):
to go sit down at the desk, I saw Rachel
Matta and I sat to her like, oh my god,
how the fuck are we going to survive this? And
she said, You're going to get up tomorrow morning. You're
going to go on Morning Joe, and you're going to
help these people because you know this idea that we're
going to get up there and just tell people the
news and help them get through it. Is that what
(13:45):
drives you? And how do you do it?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
As you were asking that question, I was pulling out
my book because I know I have the perfect answer.
You know, during Trump one, I was just trying to
cope with the torrent of news. I was reading David
Blight's Mammoth biography of Frederick Douglas, and in the introduction
there was this paragraph that was so sweeping in its
(14:10):
scope that it gave me perspective, the perspective I needed
to give me hope. I want to read it if
you don't mind. This is from David Blite. He's writing
about Frederick Douglas. He writes, the orator and writer lived
to see an interpret black emancipation, to work actively for
women's rights long before they were achieved, to realize the
civil rights triumphs and tragedies of reconstruction, and to witness
(14:34):
and contribute to America's economic and international expansion in the
Gilded Age. He lived to the age of lynching and
Jim Crow laws, when America collapsed into retreat from the
very victories and revolutions in race relations he helped to win,
and I go on to write. What gave me hope,
in Blite's words, was the sweep of Douglas's life. A
(14:55):
man who was born a slave and escaped, who was
a celebrated orator against the sin of slavery and saw
the end of that evil institution. Douglas played a part
in the nation reaching toward its founding ideals during Reconstruction,
and then the great man lived long enough to see
all the gains he fought for the reverse by Congress,
the courts, and the President during the terror of the
(15:16):
Jim Crow era. My story is proof that Douglas's fight
was not lost, that as bad as things are, they
won't stay that way. I am a descendant of slaves
whose parents were born and raised in the segregated Jim
Crow South. My cousins and I are the first generation
in our family who didn't have to pick cotton. My
story is the story of an only child, mama's boy,
(15:38):
who had dreams of being a journalist and no roadmap
for how to achieve them. I'm a black man who
writes for the Washington Post, anchors a show on MSNBC,
and serves as a political analyst on PBS News Hour.
And I'm an out gay man who was able to
marry the man I love and have the ceremony officiated
by the Attorney General of the United States, who made
a key determination that made it possible. Think about that
(16:02):
the sweep of Douglas's life. What that showed me was
history happens in a cycle. We go in a cycle.
History is not linear. It whins, and for every step forward,
there might be three steps back. And so for me
to read those words about Frederick Douglas in that year
twenty seventeen, how could I not look at that and think, Wow,
(16:26):
I should remain hopeful. It put for me everything into perspective.
You know what I like in it too, what I
tell people, think of it as being on a really bad,
turbulent flight. It's uncomfortable, you hate it, You palms are sweaty,
your heart's racing. You think you're gonna die, but you don't.
(16:46):
You literally get through it. It is my hope that
as bad as these times are, as turbulent as these
times are, that we will get through it on the
other side. But no one should fool themselves into thinking
that it's not going to be rough. You know, it's
sort of like the pilot has already come on and said,
flight attendants and beverage service get back in your seats.
(17:10):
We're going to go. We're going through some rough air,
and the pilot doesn't tell you how long it's going
to last.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Jonathan Gabar, Thanks Molly.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
John Seabrook is a contributor to the New Yorker and
the author of The Spinach King, The Rise and Fall
of an American Dynasty. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
John Seabrook, thank you Molly for having me on your show.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
We both have memoirs that are about to come out
and ergo, we must talk to each other.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
It is the law.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
And also we must talk about your book, which comes out.
We have the exact same pub date. This it's kismett.
You write for The New Yorker. I write for Baddy Fair.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
It's all the Conday thing.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yes, we both worked for the Conde Nast Empire. The
book is called The Spinach King. It's funny because when
we were talking about it, I said, what's your book called?
And you said The Spanish King? And I thought, oh,
it doesn't make any sense. The Spinach King, the Rise
and Fall of an American Dynasty. It's funny because it's
like my family writers, but also a lot of like
(18:24):
herring merchants and people who didn't accumulate any wealth. Explain
to us sort of your family story and how you
got here.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
So yeah, the book is about my family who emigrated
to America in eighteen fifty nine. My great great grandfather
was that man. He was just a working class English guy.
The Industrial Revolution kind of forced out. He arrived in
New York in eighteen fifty nine with his two children
and his wife, and he ended up down in the
(18:55):
very southern part of New Jersey on a small farm.
He didn't live that much longer, but his son, whose
name is Arthur, with my great grandfather. He was apprenticed
to a local farmer and learned the kind of high
end vegetable growing business, which there used to be a
lot of farms around New York that grew vegetables. People
(19:16):
needed them. As the city developed, they got pushed further out,
and by that time they were sort of you know,
out in Connecticut or New Jersey, but they supplied the
cities with you know, high end produce, kind of a
farm to table operation. Really, he had a small farm,
and my grandfather was born on that farm in eighteen
(19:37):
eighty one, and so he kind of came of age
in the Gilded Age, and his heroes were robber barons,
you know, who did everything they could to make money
and disregarded the law at almost every turn they could
get away with. And he formed his idea of who
he wanted to be during that era and from those men.
(19:58):
And even though he was just a picky, you little
farmer down in South Jersey. You know, he had these
big ambitions and what he was going to do was
industrialize the vegetable growing and packaging business, you know, because
that was what he started with. Henry Ford was kind
of his role model. So he wanted to create a
factory that would produce vegetables on a very large scale,
(20:22):
and he managed to do that and eventually created a
frozen vegetable factory called Sebra Farms, which some of your
listeners actually may know. It was quite a popular brand
in the fifties and you can still find the frozen
Queen spinach in some places, even though my family doesn't
make anymore. So he became this kind of late Robber
(20:44):
Baron style industrialist, and because it was an agricultural business,
it required thousands of workers, and over the twentieth century,
those workers were harder and harder to find because it
was farm work, so he had to look further and
further afield. So waves and waves of immigrants came down
(21:05):
to South Jersey and lived in a town that he built.
It was like a pullman town. It was actually called Seabrook,
and he owned all the housing.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
So like Elon Musk.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
If you wanted to make America great again and say
this is the America that we're thinking of, you couldn't
do better than look at Seabrook Farms as a model
for what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
It was.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
It was run entirely by white Protestant men. Women had
no role in upper management, people of color were not
treated the same way as white people. There was corruption throughout,
and yet it was all sort of represented as this
kind of bootstrapping American dream, rags to riches kind of
(21:50):
story that became a big part of the brand, and
the brand story really became kind of who we all were.
You know, I was born in nineteen fifty nine, so
the business was kind of declining by that point. But
the brand and the story of how the Seabrooks became
who they were was all sort of manipulated for commercial reasons.
(22:12):
And I think if the family, if I said, one
reason why it all fell apart is that the family
and the brand became so confused that people didn't know
what whether their value was as a family member or
as kind of like a brand member. And it led
to enormous conflict between my father and his father and
(22:34):
Eventually it was a succession battle that brought the company
down and my father was disowned and we moved away
to another place. So it's the story of all of that.
And I would say, my just to one the thing
that I mean, many families maybe have a narrative somewhat
like that. But it's interesting in this case because my
father and my grandfather were born forty years apart. My
(22:58):
grandfather was sort of, you know, born in the age
of the Robber Bearents. My father came of age in
the New Deal era, and so his attitude toward workers'
rights and unionization and women in the workplace were formed
during the sort of birth of the liberal tradition that
(23:19):
we kind of grew up with, whereas my grandfather came
out of this kind of make America Great McKinley tradition.
So in their conflict, you see a conflict that our
country has faced and continues to face, between a kind
of liberal tradition and an illiberal tradition, if you want
to call it, that represented by my father and my grandfather.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah, so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So there's a generational divide here.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
There's a generational divide that's that also kind of frames
a national divide in how we think of our country,
how we go about creating corporations, and what we think
of capitalism and how free a hand capitalists should have.
And you know, I think the tech burrows of today
(24:07):
were very much like a hand like my grandfather had
in you know, nineteen twenty to do what he wanted.
And maybe they're going.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
To get it.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
But you know, it's interesting to see how that played
out and how corruption and lies and secrets and tests
of loyalty until no one could really be loyal enough
to my grandfather. How all that played out, and think
about how other autocracies, authoritarian regimes have played out and
(24:40):
find the common ground there. That's one way to read it,
you know, as a kind of a parable of an
autocracy and what brings them down.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
When you're in this sort of famelial struggle when it
comes to familial wealth, is there a lot of bad
blood still in the family? And also where does this
book fall in that.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
When I started researching the book, I mean, so I
grew up with you know, the brand story basically, and
my image of my grandfather was a positive one, and
it really wasn't until I started researching the book that
I discovered all this sort of horrifying stuff that my
family had done to preserve their power, particularly during the
(25:27):
thirties when there was a massive strike at Seabrook Farms
that led by African American workers, which was extraordinarily courageous
at the time, and it was crushed with violence vigilantes.
Even the KKK, the New Jersey KKK, which was actually
kind of prevalent in those days, were brought in to
(25:50):
put down this strike. You know, my image of my
family changed as I, you know, discovered more and more
of this stuff. And by the way, I I wouldn't
have probably known this stuff, except that all these regional
newspapers that used to exist that no longer exists ended
up getting digitized and put on newspapers dot Com so
(26:11):
you could search them, so I could find these kind
of daily stories of what happened, and you know, on
a particular day in nineteen thirty four that I never
would have known anyway. So then I had all this
information and it was like, Okay, I'm writing kind of
an expost say of my family. Now I'm investigating my family.
(26:32):
I'm taking my journalistic skills which I learned, you know,
apart from my family working for The New Yorker, and
now I'm actually bringing them to bear my family, and
that actually was a very difficult thing to deal with.
I mean, I think one of the unique things maybe
about this book is you don't really read like insider
(26:54):
expos days of wealthy families written by one of the
family members who are willing to tell the truth and
who have decided to tell the truth and are willing
to risk alienating family members because the truth is more important.
And in this case, because all these workers whose stories
(27:14):
weren't really being told truly, who had contributed their lives
to Seabrooke Farms and were treated badly by my grandfather
and my uncles and maybe my father too, I felt
I was kind of doing it for them, partly too,
to sort of you know, there's a a social justice
piece of this because of the nature of my family's
(27:36):
agricultural work and the things they had done. So I
did have a decision to make, you know, should I
should I tell? Should I if this really is going
to damage my family? Should I do this? I don't know.
In the end, maybe I didn't really have a choice.
I had to do it, you know, I had to do.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
It right because the truth is what matters. Right.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
I mean, that's you know, speaking to someone who in
this book writes about my own family. I mean, doesn't
it feel like there's just no other choices, Like why
even bother going on if we're not going to tell
the truth.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And I think it helps us understand our families better.
And in your case, your mother and your relationship with
your mother. In my case, it was my father, although
my mother is also in the book, But I had
a difficult relationship with my father. And part of the
reason I realized that was so was because he had
a very difficult relationship with his father that I didn't
(28:29):
really know the details of until I started researching this book.
And then when I discovered all this shit that he
had to deal with and what he put up with
from his father and who'd really tried to destroy him,
I felt like, oh, now I get it. This is
why you had such difficulty as a father because you
didn't have a role model for a father, and under
(28:51):
in that context, you actually did really well. This was
after he was gone, so it was it was, you know,
sort of all reconcili after he was dead, But it
actually meant a lot to me to come to that
place through that work.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Yeah, I think that the big question is why it
is sort of why write about your family and why
and sort of what the lessons are there in the end,
you know, we cannot be held responsible for the crimes
of our parents, but we certainly can learn from them.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
The thing about this story is that there were thousands
and thousands of immigrants whose life stories are immeshed with
my story, with my family story, beginning with early twentieth
century with Italian immigrants. And during the Second World War,
two thousand Japanese internees came from the concentration camps to
(29:48):
Seabrook farms and reinvented their lives there and many of
them remained. And then after the war, hundreds of Estonian
displaced persons came from the DP camps in Eastern Europe
and they were sponsored my by grandfather, who who you know,
was always looking for labor that he could control. But
(30:10):
they see my grandfather as their savior, right wows as
the person who like the American that reaffirmed their belief
in America, particularly for the Japanese Americans after you know,
the people that they thought were their protectors had actually
rounded them up and thrown them into these camps. But
of course with my grandfather, it was like an ideal
(30:32):
employment situation. I think he got these people they had
to stay, and there was no place for them to
go anyway, And then they lived in houses that he
rented to them. He was getting tenants who could easily
be evicted if they didn't work or they didn't pay
their rent or and their rents were taken out of
(30:52):
their salaries. So and the housing was completely segregated by color.
It was a bizarre situation that still resonates today and
in those families and their children. You know, I'm going
to present the book down there at the big reunion
of the Japanese Americans who their descendants who came this summer.
(31:13):
You know, I'm not really sure how it's going to
go down because it's it's really challenging a lot of
assumptions they made about my family as this kind of
the good Americans. So it's not just me, you know,
it's their stories too that intersect with my story. But
I feel like the narrative has to be corrected. We
can't live with the because the people who control the
(31:36):
past control the present, right, And if we know this
from our current day, and if the people, if the
past is portrayed as this kind of wonderful, utopian, nostalgic,
you know, crime free, stress free, you know, gender not
free world, then that is going to be the world
(32:01):
that politicians try to create for us today. But it's
a lie. And in my case, certainly in our case,
it's a lie. And I think in the MAGA case
it's also a lie, but I know that it's a
lie in my case.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
What is so meaningful about this story is that we
can see how important it is to the MAGA to control,
to try and control them, right, Like they're banning books.
Our literacy rate is what, like before than thirty percent
of Americans can't read at a fourth grade level. So
(32:36):
these are people can't even read these books, but they're
banning them. And there's a reason for that, and that's
because they know that history is i mean, the whole
endless discourse on the books about American history. That is
because they know this is such a central data.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Absolutely, you know, and when he talks about like making
America great again, like what is this place where it
was great?
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Always?
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Very sort of fuzzy and vague, and because it's fuzzy
and vague, you think, oh, well, maybe that was kind
of nice. But when you see an actual example of that,
which is what Seabrook Farms was, and you know how
it began, how it was sustained, and how it ended,
it's very educational. This is one possible outcome of where
(33:21):
we're going. If we don't change directions, and it ends
very badly. It ends very badly. If they don't ban
this book, maybe somebody will. We'll get that out of it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, so important and interesting in the question of whether
or not you can ever kind of go back to
your family's history and what that looks like. Thank you,
Thank you, John.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
I haven't read your book yet, Molly, but I'm super
excited to read your book.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and to hear the best minds
and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you
enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and
keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We are on vacation, but that doesn't
mean we don't have a great show for you Today.
The New Yorker's own John Cebrook stops by to talk
about his new book, The Spinach King, The Rise and
Fall of an American Dynasty. But first we have MSNBC's
(00:25):
The Weekend anchor Jonathan k Part to talk about his
new book, Yet Here I Am Lessons from a Black
Man Search for Home. Welcome to Vast Politics, Jonathan cape.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Part, Hey, Molly, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I'm so excited to have you.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm sorry, I'm a little horse.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Let's start with this book. I want to know sort
of how you decided to write this, what the way was,
And I want to know for my own ratification, how
scary it is to write about ourselves.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know, during the Trump years, the first years in
twenty seventeen, as a way of escaping sort of the
mayhem of the first Trump years, I decided, you know what,
all these stories that I've had in my head about
my summers as a kid at my grandparents A's in
North Carolina. I need to write these down. They're very
vivid memories, very formative in terms of how I see
(01:19):
the world, how I see the country, how I view race,
and so I just wrote them down. They became the
shorthand was the down South chapter, all about going Jehovah's
witnessing with my grandmother and the people and who we
talked to and relatives, and I sent it around to friends.
I sent it around to three specific people, April, Ryan,
(01:41):
Tammeron Hall, and Joy Read, and I asked, what do
you think of this? Each one individually said this is incredible.
Keep going, And so I kept going. I didn't have
a publisher or anything. I just wrote and would send
them and other people like, yeah, here's another story, here's
some more pages, and they just encourage me to keep going.
(02:02):
And so when I got the book contract years later,
I had two particular books in mind that formed how
I would go about writing this very personal book. The
first one was by Katherine Graham, her By Autobiography, personal history.
If anyone listening hasn't read it, you should pick it
(02:23):
up because it is raw, honest. Katherine Graham was the
most powerful woman in journalism in her time, and one
of the most powerful women in the country, and yet
in her book she talks about her fraught relationship with
her mother, She talks about her own insecurities being publisher
of The Washington Post. It was really when I read
(02:45):
it in the late nineties early two thousands, it was
incredibly refreshing to read something so powerful and honest from
someone so important. And then fast forward twenty years to
Charles Blow's memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones and
again raw, honest, candid, introspective, and it was wonderful to
(03:07):
read because it put into perspective and context the passion
that fueled Charles's columns in the New York Times. And
so I thought, if I were to ever get a
book contract, that's the way I will write my book.
I will be raw, I will be honest about my
successes but also my failures, absolutely honest about my failures
(03:29):
and shortcomings. And when I got the contract, that's exactly
what I did. Oh and our mutual friend Richie Jackson,
when I really started writing, gave me the best piece
of advice because he had just finished writing Gay Like Me,
and he said, Jonathan, put yourself on every page, be
sure to do that. That's what I did, so, with
(03:50):
Katherine Graham on one side, Charles Blow on the other side,
and Richie Jackson sitting on my head, I went about
putting myself on every page so that when people read
the book, yet here I am, they will understand that
perhaps maybe the image they have of me all buttoned
up and looking rather nice and everything. You know. My
(04:14):
hope is that they will see that that's just their
image of me. It's not fully who I am.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
We both have written these very personal memoirs, and I
feel like one of the things that is sort of
the hallmark of the Trump administration is that they kind
of go after you for anything they can. I mean,
we've seen that. I think of like Eugene, they were,
you know, trolling him for just any number of things
(04:41):
one of the things. And they've certainly told me endlessly.
And I was always very careful about my public information
because of my mother. She had a stalker, and so
we were always very careful because we always knew that
guy was coming for us. But I just wonder, here
we are writing these very personal thinkes I am having
the same experience in some ways for me, is very scary.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I did not grow up in the way that you did,
and so for you, safety and security is ever present.
You know that wasn't my upbringing. So as you know
I'm writing this, I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking
about who am I going to help by being this honest?
And by that I mean, yes, I'm an outgay black man,
(05:26):
But there are pieces of my story and experience that
are universal. And my hope is when people read this
that they will see parts of themselves, pieces of themselves,
or if they don't, an experience that I've got that
I've written about that maybe they're going through now or
they went through and it gets them to think about
(05:48):
it in a different way. That has been my goal
the other goal. One goal is here, get to know
me better, and the other goal is, Hey, through these
experiences I you will take to heart some of the
lessons that are you know, sprinkled throughout the book.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It's funny because it's like the experience of being able
to be who you are in the world is pretty
new phenomenon. I mean, one hundred years ago, it wasn't that.
Why for example, I talk about being sober all the
time because I want to destigmatize alcoholism. I want to say,
you don't have to be ashamed. You can get sober,
(06:25):
you can go to AI, nobody's judging you, and you
can have this amazing life. So I do wonder how
important it is for us just by the sheer facts
of being an out gay man, being someone who's an
alcoholic who got sober when they were teenager, Like, how
important that just that is in the world.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It's very important. I'll speak for myself, you know, I've
always wanted to be a journalist. Becoming an opinion writer.
An opinion columnist was not, you know, in the life plan.
But when I realized that this platform that I'd been given,
when my editor said, hey, you should write columns, and
I started, you know, putting more and more of myself
(07:07):
in the columns, is when I started hearing from people.
When I started hearing you know, hey, I never thought
of it that way, especially on matters of race. When
I started realizing that my audience was you know, heavily
African American, but it was also non people of color,
and for many of them, I was their gateway. I
(07:29):
was there entree to understanding stuff that was happening. So
when Trayvon Martin was killed, and I wrote the column
that talked about the talk and the rules that I
was told, you know, don't run in public, definitely, don't
run with anything in your hands in public. All the
things that I do, the number of people I heard
(07:51):
from who said I never knew this. I had one
colleague at MSNBC come up to me in the weeks
after tears in her eye and he said, she said,
I never knew that those conversations were happening. She said
her son's best friend was black, and that he was
(08:11):
over their house all the time. She knew his parents
and everything, but she never knew that when he left
their home, the conversations that were happening. And so once
you understand that, the responsibility that comes with that. I
looked at that as Okay, I see people are looking
(08:33):
to me to guide them, and it's not my responsibility personally,
but professionally sure. And the more I hear from people
who say, you know, you helped me, the more you realize, Wow,
with this platform comes responsibility and so how am I
going to use that? And so I've been using it,
(08:54):
putting it in service of helping move the dialogue, help
people I don't know, get beyond their pretty conceived notions
or their hard fast beliefs because they trust me. That's
the hope I.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Have found for me.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
That it's been a very destabilizing time in American life.
You know, we have gone from backlash to backlash to backlash.
Have you found it destabilizing?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Destabilizing in the sense that the world as we knew
it has been completely.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Upended again and again and again.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Right, and so the shock and trauma of twenty seventeen
now looks quaint compared to what we're going through. And
so you know, with his reelection, I knew right away
that I needed to protect my own inner piece, my
own sanity, And so you know, I don't. I mean,
(09:54):
I pay attention to the news and watch the news,
but I make sure that I have breaks, and I'm
make sure that by protecting my inner piece, I don't
burn myself out. Because of what I was saying before,
there are lots of people who are looking to me,
looking to you, looking to many of our colleagues to
(10:14):
help guide them through this really tough time.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah, I think that's right. When you're talking about this,
I think so much about how we have I mean,
there's so much disruption, such short intervals. And I think
a lot about this interview I did with this tech
billionaire who I was interviewing, and I was like mad
(10:39):
at him because I think he's a bad guy pretending
to be a good guy. He was saying that the
level of disruption that has happened because of I mean,
I didn't grow up with the phone. We didn't have
phone that they're just this with, Like the world that
I grew.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Up in is gone. You know.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
I come from nineteen nineties magazine like everything that I
was taught to believe. I mean, it's so funny for
me to go back to writing a book because I
come from writing books, so that you know, I've seen
the magazine rule just appended in every different way. But
books are, in its own way, the same terrible business
(11:19):
that they've always been.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I will, I will take your word for it, because
this is my first book, and it has been an
interesting process. Writing the book is actually what was fun.
You know. I look at writing as you know, putting
together a jigsaw puzzle. Writing the column is a five
hundred piece puzzle. Writing this book was a ten thousand
(11:43):
piece puzzle of blue sky, green trees and sand and
trying to figure that out was fun. But then afterwards,
no one told me that I had to read more
than one you know, edited draft of the book. By
the time I read the fourth you know, final pass through,
I was like, God, damn it, I'm bored. So it's
(12:05):
going to read this book and then have to do that.
It's the whole build up to lunch, and then there's
the lunch. I mean, you've been through this, not.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
For ten years, not for a long time, so I
mean it's a little bit different than it used to be,
and the fact that everything has changed, the fact that
the entire world has changed. But I do think when
you have to read, when you're reading the book again
and again, what I find for me that's hard is
and why I'm not a good editor of my own work,
which is actually something that's important and it's good to
(12:36):
be good at, is because when I read things too
many times, I sort of fall in love with the
worst parts of it. You know, I love very flowery writing.
I'm obsessed with pros. I've gotten worse about that in
my older age, so especially in the world of AI,
I just am so delighted when things are beautiful and
feel like Diddy and that even if they don't move
(12:59):
this story along, I don't give a fuck, which you know,
it's not actually what anyone wants. I wonder if we
could talk for a minute about kind of staying sane
in a crazy world. And during the election, I was
on television at the very I was on for the
coveted three am to six Am spot. When I went
(13:22):
to go sit down at the desk, I saw Rachel
Matta and I sat to her like, oh my god,
how the fuck are we going to survive this? And
she said, You're going to get up tomorrow morning. You're
going to go on Morning Joe, and you're going to
help these people because you know this idea that we're
going to get up there and just tell people the
news and help them get through it. Is that what
(13:45):
drives you? And how do you do it?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
As you were asking that question, I was pulling out
my book because I know I have the perfect answer.
You know, during Trump one, I was just trying to
cope with the torrent of news. I was reading David
Blight's Mammoth biography of Frederick Douglas, and in the introduction
there was this paragraph that was so sweeping in its
(14:10):
scope that it gave me perspective, the perspective I needed
to give me hope. I want to read it if
you don't mind. This is from David Blite. He's writing
about Frederick Douglas. He writes, the orator and writer lived
to see an interpret black emancipation, to work actively for
women's rights long before they were achieved, to realize the
civil rights triumphs and tragedies of reconstruction, and to witness
(14:34):
and contribute to America's economic and international expansion in the
Gilded Age. He lived to the age of lynching and
Jim Crow laws, when America collapsed into retreat from the
very victories and revolutions in race relations he helped to win,
and I go on to write. What gave me hope,
in Blite's words, was the sweep of Douglas's life. A
(14:55):
man who was born a slave and escaped, who was
a celebrated orator against the sin of slavery and saw
the end of that evil institution. Douglas played a part
in the nation reaching toward its founding ideals during Reconstruction,
and then the great man lived long enough to see
all the gains he fought for the reverse by Congress,
the courts, and the President during the terror of the
(15:16):
Jim Crow era. My story is proof that Douglas's fight
was not lost, that as bad as things are, they
won't stay that way. I am a descendant of slaves
whose parents were born and raised in the segregated Jim
Crow South. My cousins and I are the first generation
in our family who didn't have to pick cotton. My
story is the story of an only child, mama's boy,
(15:38):
who had dreams of being a journalist and no roadmap
for how to achieve them. I'm a black man who
writes for the Washington Post, anchors a show on MSNBC,
and serves as a political analyst on PBS News Hour.
And I'm an out gay man who was able to
marry the man I love and have the ceremony officiated
by the Attorney General of the United States, who made
a key determination that made it possible. Think about that
(16:02):
the sweep of Douglas's life. What that showed me was
history happens in a cycle. We go in a cycle.
History is not linear. It whins, and for every step forward,
there might be three steps back. And so for me
to read those words about Frederick Douglas in that year
twenty seventeen, how could I not look at that and think, Wow,
(16:26):
I should remain hopeful. It put for me everything into perspective.
You know what I like in it too, what I
tell people, think of it as being on a really bad,
turbulent flight. It's uncomfortable, you hate it, You palms are sweaty,
your heart's racing. You think you're gonna die, but you don't.
(16:46):
You literally get through it. It is my hope that
as bad as these times are, as turbulent as these
times are, that we will get through it on the
other side. But no one should fool themselves into thinking
that it's not going to be rough. You know, it's
sort of like the pilot has already come on and said,
flight attendants and beverage service get back in your seats.
(17:10):
We're going to go. We're going through some rough air,
and the pilot doesn't tell you how long it's going
to last.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Jonathan Gabar, Thanks Molly.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
John Seabrook is a contributor to the New Yorker and
the author of The Spinach King, The Rise and Fall
of an American Dynasty. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
John Seabrook, thank you Molly for having me on your show.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
We both have memoirs that are about to come out
and ergo, we must talk to each other.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
It is the law.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
And also we must talk about your book, which comes out.
We have the exact same pub date. This it's kismett.
You write for The New Yorker. I write for Baddy Fair.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
It's all the Conday thing.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yes, we both worked for the Conde Nast Empire. The
book is called The Spinach King. It's funny because when
we were talking about it, I said, what's your book called?
And you said The Spanish King? And I thought, oh,
it doesn't make any sense. The Spinach King, the Rise
and Fall of an American Dynasty. It's funny because it's
like my family writers, but also a lot of like
(18:24):
herring merchants and people who didn't accumulate any wealth. Explain
to us sort of your family story and how you
got here.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
So yeah, the book is about my family who emigrated
to America in eighteen fifty nine. My great great grandfather
was that man. He was just a working class English guy.
The Industrial Revolution kind of forced out. He arrived in
New York in eighteen fifty nine with his two children
and his wife, and he ended up down in the
(18:55):
very southern part of New Jersey on a small farm.
He didn't live that much longer, but his son, whose
name is Arthur, with my great grandfather. He was apprenticed
to a local farmer and learned the kind of high
end vegetable growing business, which there used to be a
lot of farms around New York that grew vegetables. People
(19:16):
needed them. As the city developed, they got pushed further out,
and by that time they were sort of you know,
out in Connecticut or New Jersey, but they supplied the
cities with you know, high end produce, kind of a
farm to table operation. Really, he had a small farm,
and my grandfather was born on that farm in eighteen
(19:37):
eighty one, and so he kind of came of age
in the Gilded Age, and his heroes were robber barons,
you know, who did everything they could to make money
and disregarded the law at almost every turn they could
get away with. And he formed his idea of who
he wanted to be during that era and from those men.
(19:58):
And even though he was just a picky, you little
farmer down in South Jersey. You know, he had these
big ambitions and what he was going to do was
industrialize the vegetable growing and packaging business, you know, because
that was what he started with. Henry Ford was kind
of his role model. So he wanted to create a
factory that would produce vegetables on a very large scale,
(20:22):
and he managed to do that and eventually created a
frozen vegetable factory called Sebra Farms, which some of your
listeners actually may know. It was quite a popular brand
in the fifties and you can still find the frozen
Queen spinach in some places, even though my family doesn't
make anymore. So he became this kind of late Robber
(20:44):
Baron style industrialist, and because it was an agricultural business,
it required thousands of workers, and over the twentieth century,
those workers were harder and harder to find because it
was farm work, so he had to look further and
further afield. So waves and waves of immigrants came down
(21:05):
to South Jersey and lived in a town that he built.
It was like a pullman town. It was actually called Seabrook,
and he owned all the housing.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
So like Elon Musk.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
If you wanted to make America great again and say
this is the America that we're thinking of, you couldn't
do better than look at Seabrook Farms as a model
for what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
It was.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
It was run entirely by white Protestant men. Women had
no role in upper management, people of color were not
treated the same way as white people. There was corruption throughout,
and yet it was all sort of represented as this
kind of bootstrapping American dream, rags to riches kind of
(21:50):
story that became a big part of the brand, and
the brand story really became kind of who we all were.
You know, I was born in nineteen fifty nine, so
the business was kind of declining by that point. But
the brand and the story of how the Seabrooks became
who they were was all sort of manipulated for commercial reasons.
(22:12):
And I think if the family, if I said, one
reason why it all fell apart is that the family
and the brand became so confused that people didn't know
what whether their value was as a family member or
as kind of like a brand member. And it led
to enormous conflict between my father and his father and
(22:34):
Eventually it was a succession battle that brought the company
down and my father was disowned and we moved away
to another place. So it's the story of all of that.
And I would say, my just to one the thing
that I mean, many families maybe have a narrative somewhat
like that. But it's interesting in this case because my
father and my grandfather were born forty years apart. My
(22:58):
grandfather was sort of, you know, born in the age
of the Robber Bearents. My father came of age in
the New Deal era, and so his attitude toward workers'
rights and unionization and women in the workplace were formed
during the sort of birth of the liberal tradition that
(23:19):
we kind of grew up with, whereas my grandfather came
out of this kind of make America Great McKinley tradition.
So in their conflict, you see a conflict that our
country has faced and continues to face, between a kind
of liberal tradition and an illiberal tradition, if you want
to call it, that represented by my father and my grandfather.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah, so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So there's a generational divide here.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
There's a generational divide that's that also kind of frames
a national divide in how we think of our country,
how we go about creating corporations, and what we think
of capitalism and how free a hand capitalists should have.
And you know, I think the tech burrows of today
(24:07):
were very much like a hand like my grandfather had
in you know, nineteen twenty to do what he wanted.
And maybe they're going.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
To get it.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
But you know, it's interesting to see how that played
out and how corruption and lies and secrets and tests
of loyalty until no one could really be loyal enough
to my grandfather. How all that played out, and think
about how other autocracies, authoritarian regimes have played out and
(24:40):
find the common ground there. That's one way to read it,
you know, as a kind of a parable of an
autocracy and what brings them down.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
When you're in this sort of famelial struggle when it
comes to familial wealth, is there a lot of bad
blood still in the family? And also where does this
book fall in that.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
When I started researching the book, I mean, so I
grew up with you know, the brand story basically, and
my image of my grandfather was a positive one, and
it really wasn't until I started researching the book that
I discovered all this sort of horrifying stuff that my
family had done to preserve their power, particularly during the
(25:27):
thirties when there was a massive strike at Seabrook Farms
that led by African American workers, which was extraordinarily courageous
at the time, and it was crushed with violence vigilantes.
Even the KKK, the New Jersey KKK, which was actually
kind of prevalent in those days, were brought in to
(25:50):
put down this strike. You know, my image of my
family changed as I, you know, discovered more and more
of this stuff. And by the way, I I wouldn't
have probably known this stuff, except that all these regional
newspapers that used to exist that no longer exists ended
up getting digitized and put on newspapers dot Com so
(26:11):
you could search them, so I could find these kind
of daily stories of what happened, and you know, on
a particular day in nineteen thirty four that I never
would have known anyway. So then I had all this
information and it was like, Okay, I'm writing kind of
an expost say of my family. Now I'm investigating my family.
(26:32):
I'm taking my journalistic skills which I learned, you know,
apart from my family working for The New Yorker, and
now I'm actually bringing them to bear my family, and
that actually was a very difficult thing to deal with.
I mean, I think one of the unique things maybe
about this book is you don't really read like insider
(26:54):
expos days of wealthy families written by one of the
family members who are willing to tell the truth and
who have decided to tell the truth and are willing
to risk alienating family members because the truth is more important.
And in this case, because all these workers whose stories
(27:14):
weren't really being told truly, who had contributed their lives
to Seabrooke Farms and were treated badly by my grandfather
and my uncles and maybe my father too, I felt
I was kind of doing it for them, partly too,
to sort of you know, there's a a social justice
piece of this because of the nature of my family's
(27:36):
agricultural work and the things they had done. So I
did have a decision to make, you know, should I
should I tell? Should I if this really is going
to damage my family? Should I do this? I don't know.
In the end, maybe I didn't really have a choice.
I had to do it, you know, I had to do.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
It right because the truth is what matters. Right.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
I mean, that's you know, speaking to someone who in
this book writes about my own family. I mean, doesn't
it feel like there's just no other choices, Like why
even bother going on if we're not going to tell
the truth.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And I think it helps us understand our families better.
And in your case, your mother and your relationship with
your mother. In my case, it was my father, although
my mother is also in the book, But I had
a difficult relationship with my father. And part of the
reason I realized that was so was because he had
a very difficult relationship with his father that I didn't
(28:29):
really know the details of until I started researching this book.
And then when I discovered all this shit that he
had to deal with and what he put up with
from his father and who'd really tried to destroy him,
I felt like, oh, now I get it. This is
why you had such difficulty as a father because you
didn't have a role model for a father, and under
(28:51):
in that context, you actually did really well. This was
after he was gone, so it was it was, you know,
sort of all reconcili after he was dead, But it
actually meant a lot to me to come to that
place through that work.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Yeah, I think that the big question is why it
is sort of why write about your family and why
and sort of what the lessons are there in the end,
you know, we cannot be held responsible for the crimes
of our parents, but we certainly can learn from them.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
The thing about this story is that there were thousands
and thousands of immigrants whose life stories are immeshed with
my story, with my family story, beginning with early twentieth
century with Italian immigrants. And during the Second World War,
two thousand Japanese internees came from the concentration camps to
(29:48):
Seabrook farms and reinvented their lives there and many of
them remained. And then after the war, hundreds of Estonian
displaced persons came from the DP camps in Eastern Europe
and they were sponsored my by grandfather, who who you know,
was always looking for labor that he could control. But
(30:10):
they see my grandfather as their savior, right wows as
the person who like the American that reaffirmed their belief
in America, particularly for the Japanese Americans after you know,
the people that they thought were their protectors had actually
rounded them up and thrown them into these camps. But
of course with my grandfather, it was like an ideal
(30:32):
employment situation. I think he got these people they had
to stay, and there was no place for them to
go anyway, And then they lived in houses that he
rented to them. He was getting tenants who could easily
be evicted if they didn't work or they didn't pay
their rent or and their rents were taken out of
(30:52):
their salaries. So and the housing was completely segregated by color.
It was a bizarre situation that still resonates today and
in those families and their children. You know, I'm going
to present the book down there at the big reunion
of the Japanese Americans who their descendants who came this summer.
(31:13):
You know, I'm not really sure how it's going to
go down because it's it's really challenging a lot of
assumptions they made about my family as this kind of
the good Americans. So it's not just me, you know,
it's their stories too that intersect with my story. But
I feel like the narrative has to be corrected. We
can't live with the because the people who control the
(31:36):
past control the present, right, And if we know this
from our current day, and if the people, if the
past is portrayed as this kind of wonderful, utopian, nostalgic,
you know, crime free, stress free, you know, gender not
free world, then that is going to be the world
(32:01):
that politicians try to create for us today. But it's
a lie. And in my case, certainly in our case,
it's a lie. And I think in the MAGA case
it's also a lie, but I know that it's a
lie in my case.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
What is so meaningful about this story is that we
can see how important it is to the MAGA to control,
to try and control them, right, Like they're banning books.
Our literacy rate is what, like before than thirty percent
of Americans can't read at a fourth grade level. So
(32:36):
these are people can't even read these books, but they're
banning them. And there's a reason for that, and that's
because they know that history is i mean, the whole
endless discourse on the books about American history. That is
because they know this is such a central data.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Absolutely, you know, and when he talks about like making
America great again, like what is this place where it
was great?
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Always?
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Very sort of fuzzy and vague, and because it's fuzzy
and vague, you think, oh, well, maybe that was kind
of nice. But when you see an actual example of that,
which is what Seabrook Farms was, and you know how
it began, how it was sustained, and how it ended,
it's very educational. This is one possible outcome of where
(33:21):
we're going. If we don't change directions, and it ends
very badly. It ends very badly. If they don't ban
this book, maybe somebody will. We'll get that out of it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, so important and interesting in the question of whether
or not you can ever kind of go back to
your family's history and what that looks like. Thank you,
Thank you, John.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
I haven't read your book yet, Molly, but I'm super
excited to read your book.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and to hear the best minds
and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you
enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and
keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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