September 1, 2022 • 51 mins
Tracy T. Rowe, Cara Pressley, and the Red Table Talk community are unpacking the Red Table Talk episode that dove into the minds of those who hate. From a former neo-Nazi leader being welcomed to the table, to Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Dr. Jillian Peterson sharing just how deep hate runs, Let’s Red Table That needed two episodes to examine these stories and share new ones. Ernest Crim III, author of Black History Saved My Life, joins our virtual red table to describe the hate crime he and his wife experienced and why he wouldn’t sit down with his harasser today. Dr. Susan M. Glisson has worked in racial reconciliation for decades, and she reveals the shocking moment she learned the truth of her family history and how she chose to react in this episode of Let’s Red Table That.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all. Hey, what's up? And welcome the Les Red
Table that I'm Tracy t Brow and I'm Cara Pressley.
How are you feeling a day? Tracy? Do you know
how I'm feeling? Cara, I'm feeling every day amazing. And
I know you're feeling successful. Of course I had a
feeling you might be feeling every day amazing, just the thought.
But yeah, yeah, I'm definitely feeling successful. Glad to be
(00:22):
back today. Oh my goodness, yes, today's episode. Okay, mm
hmm listen, heavy heavy. We have great guests though, we do,
Oh my gosh, amazing. They're doing some phenomenal work. But
when I say heavy and deep, okay, heavy and deep
was this episode? So how did you feel about that episode?
(00:44):
Before we even talk to the guests, Oh my gosh,
so much to unpack for me. Ka, it was really
about fear, trauma, and pain. I think all three of
those things dry life. Hey, Because we don't know how
to process pain, fear, and trauma. It's easier, I think
(01:10):
for us to to shift it into hate. All right,
just let it kind of summer if you will. I
feel like they're limiting beliefs. Are would hinder us. People
just know what they know and how they grew up.
They don't want to hear any other perspective or even
want to consider the impacts on others. So I think
that's the biggest part of it. We definitely saw it
(01:32):
in this episode. I am glad that they got to
get someone who was reformed to come to the table.
I can't say that's how person would always be welcome
at the table, right. You know what? I would like
to allow myself the luxury of believing that I have
evolved enough, despite the fact that I gave full side
eye and hell to the no faces during the episode.
(01:56):
You are a gam two point oh for real? Go
and let y'all know that now Heysey's faces straight gam
this whole episode. Let me say this, it's difficult and
as heavy and deep as this episode was, it was
also relevant and necessary. We need to talk more about this,
especially now that there is so much happening in our
(02:18):
country and there's so much going on with regard to
race relations, education awareness. We need to have these kind
of conversations with groups of people that we can trust
and groups of people that we can learn from, and
then we can unlearn with Hello. Yeah, that's a key one.
I like that you've gotten to hear how we feel.
(02:38):
But now don't you think it's time to hear what
your Red Table Talk community has to say? Tracy, Yes,
I do. We asked our community, how do you keep
your personal biases in check? And here are some of
your answers. Kin start us off with our good old
memphisis to friends friends. Jent Tom says, I up to
(03:00):
tell myself there are different strokes for different folks, and
everything ain't for everybody. Man. That's the way to think
about it. That is a real good, happy neutral You
just say, sure, what works for you. If you're a
consenting adult, go forward, not to stamp out. It's a
process that begins with awareness and recognition. I'm a work
(03:22):
in progress, Betty Rufel mayor, thank you for that. That's good.
That's also wise. Those are sage words. I'm work in progress.
Give yourself some brevity, Zola right More Walker says, I
remind myself of the beauty of diversity. I'm glad she's
able to find beauty and diversity. Yeah, I love that
she gets it and Brown Betty. Betty said, we're all
(03:49):
biased and sometimes that's okay. I'm allowed to help a
single mom over a married one because I identify with
single motherhood. I just asked myself why I feel like
I feel If the reason is me projecting some trauma,
I turned my attention to the trauma, literally, just mirroring
what I said. Right, It's about you identifying what is
(04:10):
going on with yourself. Why do I feel that way?
You have to tap in. If you don't tap in,
then you're only gonna be concerned with what's on the outside,
and you need to tap out. If you don't tap in,
tap out, tap tap in. I'd like to play the
Sweetie song. Let's go to this break. We're going to
take a quick break, but when we get back, we'll
(04:31):
be joined by two guests from our Red Table Talk community.
I love that we have guests on our fantastic podcast. Cara.
Dr Susan Glistens the president and founder of the Glistened Group,
(04:51):
a racial reconciliation and community building program based in Mississippi,
a state notorious for racial violence. Here, Susan used as
an approach she calls the Welcome Table to facilitate community
driven dialogue and informed action in the communities that welcome her.
Her work fights for empathy, healing, and equity as the
(05:11):
remedy to white supremacy. Thank you for joining us um
Let's Red Table that Dr Susan so happy to be here,
Such an honor, happy to be with all of you. Yes,
I'm calling you my sister from a different mr. You
know that I love it. I love it and it's
an honor right right. Ernest Crumb the Third is a
self proclaimed black history advocate joining us from Chicago. Have
(05:35):
great Pizza right. He works as a high school history
teacher and an online educator for all. Ernest is at
the Virtual Red Table to tell us about his book
Black History Saved My Life, which he wrote in after
he and his wife experienced the hate crime that went viral.
He shares this story to teach the important role black
(05:55):
history plays and culture today, and he continues to use
his platform to teach true black history on social media.
I love that we know you've guessed it on Gammies
podcast positively gam a little while back, and we're happy
and glad and appreciate you for joining us as well
on less Red Table that the Red Table Talk family
is amazing, So thank you for coming to join us.
(06:17):
Thanks for having me, Thank you, Welcome, Welcome. This is
the part of the show where we reveal which moments
made us pause, I mean, rewind, turn heads and say,
let me listen to that again. Waiting, wait, wait what?
Wait what? Right? So, Susan and Ernest, let's kick it off.
(06:41):
Were there any moments that made you say wait what?
During the episode? You know? For me and I took notes.
I took copious notes actually on the educator by trading
no surprise there, Mr Academia, So I have the mirror
what I expect from my students, and I did a lot,
And I think the main thing that stood out to
(07:02):
me was when they started talking about what drives white
males to engage in this type of racist violence. There's
kind of this white male entitlement to what I've owed
in this world. I expect to have a girlfriend and
be wealthy and be respected or have resources, and so
when I don't get those things, my anger and rage
(07:24):
is very intense. There's always been something that I've wondered.
And again, being from Chicago, we often hear the tropes
about black men in the city with gang violence, so
there's a stark difference between the gang violence we see
that often doesn't make its way into the school building,
versus when white males engage in violence, it often does
in public spaces. And again that is a wait wait wait,
(07:51):
wait what right? Right? And when they said that, I
believe it was Dr Jill. Dr Jillian. She said that
the self hate that they have for themselves or the
depression that they're dealing with, flips to what's wrong with
them as opposed to them doing some type of internal reflection.
And it really made me think about going back to
even what Jeff was talking about, how in a lot
(08:13):
of these spaces they take advantage of those who are
most vulnerable. And I really connected with the part where
he said they were recruiting in Detroit, they were recruiting
in places that were economically impoverished, because that's the same
thing gangs do in the black community. Some mirror mentality,
is it not? Yeah, that's totally Await what Let me
(08:35):
say this because a couple of times already I've made
the Gammy face. So I want you to know throughout
the episode, let me acknowledge Gammy, you know I love you? Okay,
I made Gammy facial expressions throughout the entire episode, Gammy
and I were mirrors on the facial specially with the
side I turned up lift. It was if words could speak,
(08:56):
the words would say wrong. The whole episode was yeah,
gah Man Willow were on the same page. Now, Carrol,
which one were you? I work to understand. I'm trying
to understand others, even the main guest who had twenty
seven years of hate right but now he is just reformed.
(09:19):
In my mind, I want to understand that at the
same time as you say, let that go like that. See,
look at you. You You don't want to forget a man
at all. What I'm saying not that I don't forgive. Okay,
you can forgive and leave folks along. Okay, you can
forgive and disassociate. Right now, I'm making a little bit
of a stink face. What about you two? Dr Susan Ernest,
(09:42):
how do you rank his deservedness of forgiveness. That's a
tough one because I noted that he said he didn't
feel like he had the right to ask for forgiveness,
and I really appreciated that because I'm not sure that
he does. Apologies to the extent that they are effective,
are usually effective between the person who was the perpetrator
and the person who was a victim. But he not
only hurt individual people, his program of hate hurt a
(10:05):
lot of us out in the world. How do you
repair that. I appreciated his courage for coming to the table.
We can't get going to try to change anything if
we can't come to the table. But yeah, the wait,
what how does it? Why does it take you that long?
Why does it take you? Why you're not You're clearly
not a dumb person. Right. You can read, you can
watch TV, you can hear what people have to say.
It shouldn't take you that long to recognize humanity in
(10:27):
another person. Right. My other question is, like when he
was in his household and decided to change his life around,
did your wife, children just forgive you family members? Did
they just go along with your change? Did that really
happen like that they just accepted your change because you
preached this for a long time. Yeah, I had the
same sentiment because I dealt with the hate crime face
(10:50):
to face, me and my wife. So I think when
people talk about forgiveness in this situation, it's more so
I don't owe you like me tell you I forgive
you even if I did, but I think oftentimes you
make it a public spectacle. Forgiveness for me is that's
something that you have to deal yourself because you hurt yourself.
(11:10):
It's spewing out hatred means that you hate something about
yourself to be able to consciously do that as an
adult too. So for me, if you really want to
be forgiven and I'm not him, I can't say for sure.
He seems to be doing great work, and the fact
that he made an organization and he's working that's great,
and he has to continue to do that, and it
has to also translate to economic resources, has to translate
(11:32):
to policy because just like you an't say when I
saw twenty seven years, I'm like, bro like, I've been
actively engaging in learning black history since I was in college,
and I still have a long way to go, and
I still have to make sure I am not digesting
these racial tropes and stereotypes that we're all fan. So
he has a long way to go, and I hope
(11:55):
that he's aware of that. But I do commend him
for taking that step. But it would have been very
difficult for me to sit there and not be a
little confrontational about some of the things he did. Do
you think that he deserved to see at the table
with all due respect? I think based on the conversation, yes,
I think that since it was facilitated by black women,
(12:15):
who we know the history in this country and for
them to extend that honor, he should have been honored,
and I think he deserved it. And to me, he
came across humble, but again, just knowing what he did
and just the experience I've had, it would have been
very difficult. But I think it's important to hear that
perspective because we have to understand that whether we ignore
these people or not, they're here. I just don't believe
(12:36):
I'm the person to facilitate that. So I commend people
like Dia Darryll Davis. But and I will also say
this about him. I believe that when you have people
who are that extreme, and I could be wrong, but
I'm just going based on how I feel right now,
I think that it's easier to have them switched their
mindset than someone who unconsciously spews racism and lives in
(12:58):
this implicit mind's world. If you understand what I'm saying,
that is all right now, Ernest that's a wait what
We could have a whole conversation about that, and I'm
here for it. I want to hear all about that.
I really do, because I love a good verbal volly.
I gotta get Dr Susan in On here because I
want to hear from your perspective. It's a wonderful dynamic
that we have to have a gift of having a
(13:19):
black man and a white woman on is our guest
today to talk about this, right because you're both soldiers
on the same field. Tracy, I appreciate that so much,
and I think Ernest has said it so much better
than I. But when I encounter situations like this where
there's an opportunity to engage with someone who has harmed others,
my first question is who are the folks that he's
(13:40):
harmed and what are their thoughts about this? That needs
to guide what we do right Working in the Philadelphia
sipping the show The County, the missisp be burning case,
I needed to know what the black community in the
show The County thought about in York there and if
their suggestion to me was we're not ready or they're
not ready, we need to take time, then time we take.
(14:00):
So the fact that Dia connected with him and in
some ways kind of vouched for him was moving for me.
I wanted to know what her thoughts were about having
him at the table and reaching across to him. You
bring up a really interesting point, and I don't know
that it was really addressed in the episode. If it was,
feel free to correct me. None of the victims directly
(14:22):
were ever given a voice. We didn't hear that in
the episode. And it's interesting that you bring up the
point that if the victim isn't ready, then it's not time.
And in DEA's case, even though she was vicariously because
so many of us didn't directly feel it, but as
a result of his efforts and his organizing and his
(14:44):
almost three decades worth of hate, it's a rippled and snowballs, right.
So we are victims directly and indirectly, but we didn't
have that true representation of someone who said that like you,
Earnest I Direc actually felt the impact and the ill
effects and the negativity and the direct hate from him,
(15:06):
and so it's just interesting to me. It's why it's
so important that Ernest is here to share his story
but also to Earnest's point earlier. There's plenty of work
for folks to do until the person who has been
harmed might be ready. They may never be ready, And
that doesn't mean that you get to sit around and
not do anything right. You have to do the inner work.
You have to excavate, you have to do some archaeology
(15:27):
on your attitudes, and then, you know what, you gotta
make some amends. You gotta try to do some things
the policies, the practices of the procedures. You got to
reach back to some other white folks and bring them
along with you too. You don't get to just sit
and wait while someone is having to do the hard
work of repairing themselves when they've been harmed. Yeah, that's
good because so often times the burden is kind of
(15:50):
unspokenly put on the oppressed. Right, thank you, that's what
I did to you. You know what you did make
me feel better about what I did. You know exact
actually what you've done, And if you don't, I need
you to stop and think about it. I said this
when we were preparing for this show. Like when they
ended segregation, who went in and told all the employers
(16:10):
how to actually treat the employees, nobody like y'all made
it up and and more so acted like nothing really happened.
So that cognitive dissidence is a problem for me. Living
in the Capital and Confederacy, a lot of things are
just you don't speak on them. You just don't go
on that street, you just don't turn that way. There's
so much social conditioning that has happened with the we
(16:34):
can't go on certain streets and we can't say certain things,
and we were finally giving a voice. It's just I
don't know whether I need to get up and cheer
or take my headset off and weak that it was
even said, how would you feel sitting at the table
with Jeff I that's hard to say that. I think
(16:56):
the difficulty bigger than just sitting at the table with
him is we're saying that he talked to one person
of color and his entire outlook was forever changed. Is
that the goal of the protesting and everything we want,
because then when someone changes, I hear us even in
this conversation saying, oh no, I doubt it a little
bit understood though, because you do twenty seven years of
(17:18):
a thing. I mean, you're right with your hand for
twenty seven years and then you gotta go to what
your left hand the next day, like, is that just
is just automatically changed like that, so you don't revert
back at all, You are just completely And I mean,
if that is the beauty of change, then we would
like to all have that same grace. Right you would
be able to sit at the table with him, or
you wouldn't. I feel like I'd be able to sit
(17:39):
at the table with him and listen. But I feel
like there would be a little doubt there as far
as are you even being genuine? Is this a true
change you're having? I think I would question it. Mm
hmm okay, So let me tell you like you earnest,
I had wait what? Wait what? Wait what? It was
like a wait what remix in this episode for me,
one of the wait what mom? This was dea story
(18:01):
of a man who enjoyed seeing fear in the eyes
of a person he meet because he had been fearful
his entire life. Then he said, I saw something that
I've never seen before, And he said, I loved it,
and I'm going what was it? He said? Fear? Oh,
he said, you know, for me, somebody who was afraid
my entire life. Now somebody else was afraid, ernest you
(18:23):
go ahead because you touched on it, and just go
and elaborate for us. Yeah, So that revelation by Dea,
I think that what we have to realize, and I
think somebody touched on this on the episode as well,
is that all of this is deeply rooted in fear
and hate is just another way that that comes out
of us when we go back through history and we
(18:44):
think about the system that's being created. The fear is
that black people are going to take something from white people.
Fear is that indigenous people were going to take something.
The fear coming from maybe living in an environment where
there were a lack of resources during the MIDI period
in eury Board during the plague, and you come over
here and you see what you think is all of
(19:04):
this opportunity. The fear might be that it's going to
go away, and we don't often realize how that can
be talked to people implicitly and care. You brought up
a great point because you're saying, like when segregation comes down,
and I've always had this thought. We've never we've never
had a mass movement where we said, Okay, we need
to flip all the education we need to make sure
(19:26):
we're teaching this instead. It's two thousand and twenty two
and we're talking about teaching about black history and how
we need to in some ways rephrase it as in
voluntary working or whatever. They were talking about Texas black people.
Did you. I just can't even. I can't even if
that's a whole another episode, and I hate to even
(19:48):
I really personally, And this might be a way what
I don't necessarily like using white privilege because I don't
think it's a privilege to be able to benefit from genocide, slavery.
I think that there's white access as a result of
these things, something that whites can benefit from and again
benefits and quote would be that when you deal with
(20:09):
your hate, like oftentimes you're nurtured in it. Like people
might not want to be punitive with you, they might
want to coddle you. But if I have something hate
because of the environment I grow up being and not
realizing the hands that put my hood together with redlining,
I have police everywhere and watching everything. I do. So
want fear and hate to be nurtured. But we never
get that opportunity to figure out why we even have
(20:31):
that feeling, and then a lot of white folks who
have that feeling of they don't understand why they have that.
It's not natural to feel that way, but it's been
nurtured in some way to maintain this hierarchy. And I
believe that once we get to the core of that,
and that also goes again to another weight, what moment
of the exposure to other people at a young age,
it takes away that feeling, that anxiety that you have initially,
(20:53):
so it doesn't have to come later in your life.
But I think there's a larger there's a larger point
about the intentionality of the socialization process us. Right. There's
a really great book that's called The Epistemology of Ignorance,
and it is about how white folks are specifically socialized
to have that whiteness and the benefits of power that
come with it be rendered invisible so that you don't
(21:15):
question it, so that you don't question it, and that
black folks and people of color are socialized in the
exact opposite way. To know that in is a society,
this hierarchical society, you are in a particular position and
you're supposed to stay there. You're not supposed to step
outside of it, right. I've always said that they've been
conditioned to ignore that. It's not that you don't see
(21:35):
it because there's a great phrase, I'll believe it when
I see it, But the opposite is actually true, I'll
see it when I believe it, which goes back though,
card to what you were saying about their certain streets
you couldn't turn on. There's certain things you couldn't say.
It literally is a it's a mind f right, my
first inklings of some type of race situation, right, Bless
(21:58):
my heart. My grandma was driving and she would always
blink her lights. We lived in the county outside of
the city. But I'm like, why are you blinking your
lights at them? And she was like, just to let
them know that the cops are up there, because nobody
has time to be pulled over. Yeah, that still happens.
Now it's translated into something different for no Okay, it
was just me trying to understand and my mind, I'm like, wow,
(22:20):
that's so nice. She is warning this person. Not it's
nice now not thinking about the true implications of what
that could be, but the origins of it. You're saying
came from be careful because you need to be on
your piece and ques because you're potentially coming into contact
with someone that is representing the law. Sadly Dad has
circled back around to be true. But what it was
(22:44):
now it was literally, it's your speeding and I see
you speeding. Dr Susan. We talked about dea story of
a man who enjoyed seeing fear in the eyes of
another person that he beat, and that it was because
he had seen fear in his entire life. I love
(23:06):
the Willow's response. I hate to say this, I really
hate to say this. Some people feel powerless just like
he did, and don't do that. So her idea was,
even if the person was fearful and he wanted to
have someone else demonstrate the fear that he had. To
Willow's point that just because you had that experience and
(23:30):
you were traumatized by it, doesn't mean that you get
a pass. Like other people have had traumatic upbringings and
they didn't turn to violence. So what's giving you the
creative license and authority to do that? And not everyone
has the freedom to respond? Dr Susan, what's your take
on all of that. Ernest has nailed and Willow nailed it.
We are socialized differently. And one of the advantages that
(23:53):
comes from this skin disease I have that's called whiteness,
is that I have the ability to expect not to
have any reaction when I transgress. It's more likely that
I am not going to be held accountable. Not that
there aren't white folks in prison, right there are, but
for more often than not, disproportionately, folks who look like
(24:13):
me are able to transgress and get away with it.
And how we have that expectation that we will right,
there is an expectation. Absolutely, We've absolutely been socialized to believe.
It's why for so many white folks, they didn't understand
why black folks might be worried about police officers coming
into their community on mass right, because they have not
(24:34):
experienced it. Just do what they're asking, We are okay,
delay it. So it's a socialist in process that has
to be that has to be excavated, and one of
the main beautiful tools that does it is actually learning
black history. What Ernest is doing is so powerful. There's
work being done in the field of psychology. It's called
the Marley hypothesis, and it absolutely says that when white
(24:57):
folks learn accurate history, that's much harder for them to
deny that racism exists. And it's like a dog. You
would think that would be the case, but they're actually
showing that if we teach accurate history, then there can
be a change. And that's why so many folks are
attacking critical race theory because they know there's power in
the truth. We are just learning every day, okay, and
(25:22):
this episode put some faces and stories to the heavy
topics of racism and hate crimes that we hear about
and sometimes just often don't see again. Even as I
unlearn some of the things that I've gone through, just
to not minimize others, I'm realizing it is happening to
a lot of people everywhere. Just because one of my
(25:45):
police interactions to date didn't end up with me getting
hurt or you know who knows if I was profiled,
but I got to walk away, that doesn't mean that
there are not other people who have truly gone through
some significant situations and it all for some attention. Earnest.
Let's jump into your situation. I really want to hear
about this because you and your wife were at a
(26:06):
community event a few years ago where a white woman
harassed and spelled derogatory names of you. What you talk
all about in your book, of course, and make sure
I'll get that, but could you please share that story
with us and why this was really the catalyst for
you to take your work a step further past that classroom? Definitely.
So I guess I should preface this by saying that
I started teaching because I knew the important role Black
(26:29):
history played in my life, in our life, and just
like Dr Gleason said, I just knew that when I
figured out where I came from and I understood how
rough our ancestors had it, but they still persevered. They
gave me a lot of pride in college, and it
helped me to understand why my neighborhood was the way
it was, and it helped me to understand that it
wasn't my own doing. So I had the capacity to
(26:51):
fight through these things. And one of my favorite quotes
from my mentor, Dr Philippe Matthews is nothing's wrong with you.
Something happened to you in Black history did that for me.
So when I graduated and started teaching, this event happened
in July thirty twenty sixteen, So I have been teaching
for about six years at that point. I say that
because I want people to understand that I was already
in this type of word. I was teaching, I was
(27:12):
doing mentoring. I would go to protests, but I was
always in the back, and for me, it was just
I teaching the class I mentored. But when I closed
that door my business, I got a private Facebook page,
Instagram private. I don't do anything like that. But ten
was a year, it was a summer, it was a
rise of Trump. You also had Phorlando cast Stile. You
also had Outside Sterling. I think we were a year
(27:33):
removed from Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and his Beyonce Diamond
Reynolds pulled over by Minnesota police for a broken tail.
Like Reynolds streamed what happened next live on Facebook the
death of Oton Sterling, shot while being pinned down on
the ground. The family says Sandra Bland would not have
committed suicide because she had too much to live for,
(27:55):
and placed the blame for what happened to her on
what they called quote over zealous trooper who were stepped
his authority. So I had all of that on my mind.
When me and my wife went to this event, it
was a way for us to decompress because it had
been a wild summer. We had just gone to Jamaica,
and Jamaican's were asking us, like, what's going on in America?
Y'all safe? That's what we do the question. That's the
(28:18):
hardest part about leaving the country. I promise you, yes,
someone's gonna ask. They are I wondering what's going on
on that side of town. So we went to this
event and it was a majority black event southside of Chicago,
South Shore Culture of sent there with my wife. It's
about black. Towards the end of the event, we decided
to go play a game called cornhole because we noticed
that there was an open station to play this game.
(28:38):
We walk over there. There's one being bag though for
that station, so that's a problem. We looked to our
left and we noticed there's a group of four people
to black and too white. They had about fifteen being bags.
We thought, just rough estimate, Okay, maybe they'll offer us
some bags. Music is loud. I don't really want to
go up to them. They're playing, but maybe they'll see
us looking. Somebody throws a bag really far nobody to
(29:00):
grab it, so we're just kind of waiting, you know,
Me and my wife are like, well, maybe we can
at least have two. She grabs the bag and immediately
a white lady in that group like power walked towards
us like we just stole her purse or something and
started screaming like you could have waited for us to finish.
We weren't done yet, and I'm thinking, like, y'all got
(29:21):
somebody you have bags over there, And so because she
came at us so aggressively, I just was like, no,
you're not getting it back now. If it was respectful,
it could have been different. It's just not it's not
in me. She kept yelling, she called my wife a hole,
and that's when they kind of escalated from that point.
(29:43):
So her two black friends almost start to come towards
us to protect her, and then she begins to say,
we're acting like a bunch of in words, what happened
to me? Hold on you? And that's when something just
went off in my mind. What I was like, I
(30:04):
can't believe this is really just happen right example jail,
because it's how many things go through our mind, because
like we just talked about you don't have the ability
to react you want, but you had the wherewithal though
you know I need to record this, yes, yes, so
the benefit of me, and I say benefit loosely, but
being able to deal with that as a professional who
(30:26):
was educated in black history, had a wife, had a family,
I wasn't the same person I was ten twenty years
pick ten years ago, where I would have just been
straight to fighting. So in my mind, I'm thinking, I
don't even like using that word anymore at that point
in my life. So when you say this, I know
it's not a reflection of me, it's a reflection of you.
I'm still shocked, it still hurts. You can hear it
in my voice, but consciously it's like, I need to
(30:47):
at least document this because it's social justice. At this point,
it's not a crime. You can say that word. Unfortunately,
it escalates as I take it out. I tell you,
because first I took out my phone and said, okay,
say it again so I can get all the camera.
Now I'm recording, right right, I said, go stop now,
(31:08):
I'm ready with you because I'm thinking World Star, I'm
thinking Facebook, and she slaps it. I picked it up,
and she's so frustrated at that point she just goes off.
It's like no, no, no, no, no no, and then
just going like a machine gun, and she takes a
step in the opposite direction, then turns towards us while
her friends are right there in the middle, and spits
(31:29):
on me, my wife, primarily my wife, and that's when
the phone dropped, and the rest is history. As we say,
here's what I want to know. Okay, the friends, because
she was playing cornball, corn hole, corn she was playing.
But what I want to make sure I got that's clear,
(31:49):
is she was playing and she had black friends were
playing with her, right, Yes she did, Yes she did.
And that's always the thing that people don't understand. Not
is that but they were actively protecting her. I don't
think they realized what they were doing, because again, okay,
I saw that, earnest. I saw that in the video,
and I was like, now, wait a minute. You can
(32:10):
say you don't see color. Okay, that's all finding good.
And I grew up in an environment that was fully diverse.
I'm grateful for that. However, calm, come on, now, you
cannot stand and it's not even a matter of race.
At that point, it's right and wrong, and their friend
was wrong. It's two left feet. I saw them literally
square up beside her like we're pillars for her in
(32:32):
the video at that point, how did you feel? I
felt betrayed. And I say this because my knowledge of history,
my experience. I was not shocked. Okay, backtrack. I was
shocked that it happened in that manner, but I cannot
be shocked if a white person is racist when this
society wants them to be. But I was shocked at
(32:54):
that the two black friends did nothing, and in fact,
a lot of my aggression and frustration went towards the
guy that was there, because I wasn't going to unless
I felt like my safety was at risk. I wasn't
going to striker. I was thinking I was gonna be
fighting him, and he never once looked at me as
a man the eye, and that did something to me,
(33:15):
and I think that hurt more than anything. And in
her white friend, I think this is like a parallel
to like just what happens with race issues in our country.
The white friend was in the back the whole time.
She was just like, well that sucks. And the two
black friends immediately came up like, oh wait, no, it's
not that big of a deal. This doesn't bother us.
And and I had I just had a revelation as
(33:37):
you were asking me this question that I never had before.
I've been speaking about this for five and a half years.
The proximity to blackness that she had. We also have
to understand that although segregation was enforced after slavery so
called ends, black folks and white folks have always been
close and proximity throughout our history, and some of the
casest people to white people in this country where those
(33:58):
who were enslaved. That's right, yes, yes, uncle nearest, the
whiskey like you know when I hear about right, I like,
uncle near, Hello, they're in Tennessee. Hello. I love mind.
(34:20):
When I first started drinking it recently with the key
in my mind, I was like, I'm waiting on this segway,
I'm waiting on the parallel this come on, let me here.
And I was just like this man stole this and
grew a whole generation of Jack Daniel. I just couldn't
I love Jack. I'm saying so, like again, how things
(34:40):
are just stolen from us, even the security and safety
from person to person, how it goes to others. Okay,
so now that's a whole another episode as well, because
that happens repeatedly in history. Has how manny, it's currently happens.
Name a restaurant that you know of that is in
(35:01):
your town. Okay, So since Carl's talking about food and liquor,
we're gonna give her deep dish pizza in Chicago. Right,
We're gonna give her pond raised catfish in Mississippi. Hello,
We're gonna give her some fantastic ribs in Memphis. And
know that every one of those foods categories literally had
some black folk who had the recipes and or managed hello,
(35:27):
managed the kitchen, and the recipes were literally lifted from them,
taken from them, or gifted to them, as some of
the stories go, and national brands have been created as
results of them, or just how anything has been flipped
to their benefit and or entertainment. Like my grandmother used
to tell me about how after she picked tobacco, she
(35:50):
said that they used the watermelon rhyns to get the
tobacco off their hands, so instead they were mocked for
constantly having watermelon and the wife folks not understand and
why they're just thinking, looking at me eating on that watermelon,
you won't let us wash our hands. I don't know
if you're paying attention, you know what I mean. So
small stories like that. I think about how we were
mocked when we actually were out here surviving and just
(36:11):
trying to live our best lives even with all these stories,
and how things continue to come to light, and how
you continue to grow and earnest. You have grown a
brand and shared awareness through all everything you've gone through.
Do you think your harasser could change? Do you think
that woman has the ability to or do you even
(36:31):
want to sit down and talk to her about how
she's been since the event? If she had an energy
to change, could she change? Yeah? I think that she does.
I think that she actually does have the capacity to change.
I think most people do. There are some who are
so far completely gone you go to the extreme levels
of shooting. I don't have any sympathy for that in
this situation. I do. I think it would happen on
(36:53):
her own time. I don't think any of the pressure
from going viral or anything I said publicly would convince her.
I think it could happen later in life. Who's to
say it hasn't happened already. Who knows. She doesn't want
to what Dr Susan said, excavation, She has to excavate
some of that stuff. She's gotta unearthen in herself and unlearned.
Do you think that any of the criminal repercussions that
(37:18):
she suffered may have made her take a step back
and say wait a minute. And I know that I'm
asking you to speak on her behalf, but I'm just
from your perspective, do you think that may have had
anything to do with what could have been potential atonement,
if ever there would be. I think in her situation
that it could potentially speed up the atonement, only because
(37:40):
I know when I posted it, there were people posting
pictures of her saying some of the same type of
language to people. And she was in high school, so
she she had a history of it, and she was
never punished. Why stop exactly? So for me, Dr Kenny,
I believe said this, it's about who shows up. I'm
sorry it was Dia. Who shows up when you're most
(38:00):
vulnerable and broken matters. So I'm hoping maybe somebody showed
up for her in that situation and showed her the
air in her ways. But and again for some folks
the punishment makes them go harder in that direction. It
really depends on the person. I can't really say, like
you said, but I will say again that I think
that it's a possibility, but I would not actually want
to sit down with her, just because I feel like
(38:22):
for me, a moment sitting down with her is a
moment I could have been sitting down with one of
our kids was harmed by somebody like her, and it's
a way anything. Okay, So that's interesting to me because
Dia had the grace that she extended to Jeff, and
that is literally what shifted the course and trajectory of
his life. So you would not be in a position
(38:46):
to offer or extend your harasser that same grace. Never
say never, But July two thousand and twenty two, I
just there's so much that I want to do and
have to do in this life with this issue, and
only get one of these, I just don't see the point. Again,
Like after this, I started my colleague and I shout
(39:07):
out to Rodney Coldeney. We started the Black Student Union
at our school. After I deal with the situation and
to hear what our kids dealt with and they never
had an advocate, They didn't get a chance to record it.
It happened to them at work in the drive through.
Nobody cared or they did it in class. So for me,
it's like, unless you talk about you got a fortune
that you're gonna give up and I can help you
(39:28):
redistribute that. I can help you have some conversations for
that benefit. If we're just talking to talk, no, it's
a waste of time. But if you if we're talking
because you have some access that you want to have
your own personal reparations fund, then yeah, let's do it.
I feel like with Dear too, cheat was intentional about
healing pieces of herself, understanding pieces of what she felt,
(39:50):
trying to get that out. So I feel like when
she came to him it was a little bit more
directed and honestly, whether he chose to change or not,
she was doing a work in her movement of work.
She's a journalist. Most journalists we were passionate about what
they're what they're talking, you know, what their person. She
wanted to share with him how she felt. This is
(40:13):
how it was truly impacted. Whereas even in this conversation
we're talking about all the things that we I'm not
gonna say hid but knew we couldn't speak about, maybe
not talk directly about it. And I feel like I
want to tell you we got we need to just
go ahead and talk about that. Let's just talk about
that for a quick second. You've said it a couple
of times that I want to be able to understand more.
(40:33):
I want to learn more about what you're saying about
the things that we couldn't say in the places that
we couldn't go. Will you share with us an example
of your experience and that I worked for the government
for twenty years and I have constantly been underneath white
woman after white woman who has minimized what I've said,
minimized what I've done at the same time until it
(40:56):
was time to take on the workload for them. Now
of a sudden, I'm overly accomplished and successful and amazing.
And you know so after being in that professional space
and then growing up through school different sports. I did gymnastic,
I was a bigger girl on the team, so never
quite fitting into their cookie cutter mold, not having another
black girl to turn and talk to, like, are you
seeing this? You know what I mean, so just having
(41:18):
someone substantiate my feelings, acknowledging they were valid, and not
that I didn't feel myself worth. But as you're growing
up a preteen even young adult in this professional setting,
we're looking for someone to affirm what's going on. Anybody
see this? So I found that comfort and my other
girlfriends and other corporate positions. Let me tell you what happened,
and this is why I started taking notes. This is
(41:39):
that's probably why my note taking a successful. It's significant,
It's intense, you know what I mean. As you were
growing up, it was a learned behavior where you ever
told like don't go down this don't go down this
street because it isn't safe, or it's not my side
of town, it's not my place to be, or just
you go through one experience and you never go that
way again, whether it's being about the police or I
(42:01):
got to fight down that street. So some things I
think are just not spoken. If I only ones who
ever experienced that, I mean, have you always been this outspoken?
This is a learned behavior for me? Are you asking me? Yeah?
And not even outspoken. I've always been me, But to
come fully into who Karral Pressley is I feel myself
ever evolving, Especially when I became the career cheerleader. That
(42:23):
was because I had nobody cheering me on and I
had to reaffirm who I was and what I was doing. Yeah,
I get that, but yeah, would to answer your question
for me? Yeah, I have always been this outspoken. People
like my family will say, yeah, that's Tracy, and people
in elementary school would even tell you that. And I
(42:44):
literally grew up from K through college all white. I
went to a predominantly white school. All my whole community
was like white, and then we were the other and
it was like two percent was black, where we were
happy to see the other blacks. It was like, hey,
it was just this unspoken thing where when you thought
you're the same skin, major can and that's not true
(43:06):
now and so right, and so for me, I have
always been outspoken, But part of that was because I
was empowered and affirmed and knew that I had a solid,
firm undergirding with my mother and that she was going
(43:28):
to back up whatever I said, and that she knew
I was gonna say something that came from a place
of logic, right, I wasn't going to challenge some authority
in a disrespectful and appropriate way. But I was going
to be able to stand on my own. I have
had to confront racism, but in the North, my experience,
it was very much more covert than it is here
(43:50):
in the South. Dr Susan, you have been fighting this
good fight in the South consistently, and I want to
know from you. Jeff said that part of what led
him down his path of hate was his fascination with
his grandfather, who fought in Hitler's army. I'm trying to
figure out what led you down that path in the
(44:11):
first place. So for me, my grandfather fought in Hitler's
army in World War Two. Now, my family was not
for this stuff. They are actually against it and tried
desperately for years to get me out. But it was
that fascination with his history, my grandfather and my great
uncle's fought That was the opening to the Rabbit Horse.
(44:33):
And you discovered, Susan, that your family has a similar
background being on the wrong side of history. Your great grade,
give or take a great grandfather, was a slave owner
and an ancestor fought for the Confederacy, not uncommon here
in Mississippi and Tennessee and Georgia or Georgia right, name
(44:55):
is pick a state, any state. But your reaction to
learning that history has been completely from from Jeff's because
I was prepared. So before I learned those histories, I
learned a question what I was seeing? Right? We talk
about my mama. Right. A great author was once asked
how did you get to be from where you were
to where you came up to where you are now?
And he said, I walked up my mama's backbone. Right.
(45:16):
I wish I wrote that line. I walked up my
mama's backbone. My father died when I was four. My
older brothers were gone than Marine Corps. And she she
had been treated badly by her father and had told
her year to be seen and not heard, and that
didn't hit her right, right, So she always said that
my children are going to be able to say whatever
they want to say, regardless of whether I like it
or not. And believe me, we tested that theory. And
(45:38):
so when I was a ten years old in n
there was one TV in the house and it was
in my mama's bedroom and Roots came on, and so
my mother made me sit down and watch Roots with
her just working class white woman in Evans, George, outside
of Augusta, whose father, my grandfather, was named for the
(46:00):
presidents of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis m M. My mother
sat me down and we watched Roots, and I was
horrified at how the black folks on the screen were
being treated. And more than that, I was deeply embarrassed
that the people who were doing it to them look
like me. So I was primed, right, it's horrible, as
you you feel ashamed. I was primed as I grew
(46:21):
older to then learn that I had folks who fought
on the Confederacy. That's what I learned first, right, But
I told myself this little comfort. I said, they joined
the Confederacy. There was a horrible decision, but data didn't
know slaves, right, like I can still be like kind
of okay, that they didn't own human beings. I comforted
myself with that lie. I didn't know yet it was
(46:42):
a lie I should have suspected. I'm a historian, But
it wasn't until December, when I was out West doing
research in the LDS Library that I found Robert mccaslan,
who was four great back on my father's side, who
had been born and raised in uh Northern Ireland county
that was predominantly Catholic, who would have been treated badly
(47:05):
by the British, so that he would have known what
it felt like to be discriminated against. But came to
this country in the late seventeen hundreds, and what do
you do to get ahead in this country? If you
look like me? You go into that industry, right, you
go into forced labor camps. And so he became an
overseer first, and then he owned human beings. And so
(47:26):
I found his will where he names the people that
he owned. I found where he'd split the forced labor
camp up between his children, and then Patrick, his clearly
favorite child, who got more folks passed along to him
than the others. On the eve of the Civil War
in eighteen sixty, he took what were three human beings
and grew his ownership to seventeen human beings, including a
(47:47):
two year old child. And I sat in that library,
oblivious to everybody else, and just wept because the facade
that I had comforted myself with, I couldn't comfort myself
with that anymore. My family was working class. The reason
we were working class, I didn't realize was because our
wealth wasn't owning other human beings. And it's devastating, and
(48:10):
all you can do is face it, acknowledge it, and
then do what you can to repair be a part
of the solution. To Ernest's point about what he ever
sit down with that woman, it is not his job
to do that, right that there's a beautiful social justice
ecosystem that my friend deep I are created. There are
different roles in the movement, and it's good to be
clear about what your role is. And Ernest is clear,
(48:32):
and he is awesome at what he does, and he
needs to keep doing that. Somebody like me who wants
to try to get more white folks to come to
the table, I'd be happy to sit down with her
and see where she is and and invite her into
a conversation. The first thing I do is it just
tell me your story, right, talk to your people, because
I've always said, like white people got to help white people.
(48:52):
It's I can't help. I don't even know what you're
going through. So I'm so glad that you said that,
because it's not a conversation of me telling them how
I feel. It's when I leave and y'all are backed
by yourselves. Dr Susan, the hurt that you must have
felt because you would tried to give yourself a pass
and singing Roots and feeling guilt and shame. I remember
(49:16):
watching Roots, I remember being angry. I remember going to
school the next day after the first airing and the
white students coming up to me apologizing. I just want
to say the for the folks who were afraid of
critical race theory, who want to try to protect their
children from that feeling, you need to be celebrating that
your children see abuse and enslavement on the TV screen
(49:40):
and they feel bad about it, because that tells you
that your child has a moral compass. Celebrate that, yes,
and how we should not be like that. When I
was growing up, I so despised Roots. Now, mind you,
I was born at eighty two. I am forty successful
years old. I despised Roots because I was tired of
the slaves story. Again. Here I am strong, ten years old, man,
(50:01):
successful in my life, completely integrated, walking to the Applebee's man,
living my best life. Segregation where Whitewater fountain Ware. So
I was so completely separated, I didn't know how close
it truly was We had so much to recap in
this Red Table Talk conversation that we need two episodes
to discuss it all. So you'll have to wait until
(50:22):
next week to hear the rest of our conversation. We
got into it in part one of our conversation with
Ernest and Susan. But next week, oh my, you cannot
miss part two, right, You'll hear about the shocking message
Earnest received from a student in this class who proudly
waved a Confederate flag. And then Susan shares for the
first time about a successful two year reconciliation project that
(50:46):
she champions, and we'll talk about the trauma of gun violence.
It's a lot, but these episodes are so important and
we're grateful Earnest and Susan could join us for these
tough conversations. That's right, So come back next week to
hear the rest. Big thank you to our executive producers
Jana Pinkett Smith, Ellen Rackittin and Faulon Jethro. And thank
(51:08):
you to our producer Kyla Knehru and our associate producer
Yolanda Chow. And finally, thank you to our sound engineers
Calvin Bayliss and Devin, Donnahey,
Hey, y'all. Hey, what's up? And welcome the Les Red
Table that I'm Tracy t Brow and I'm Cara Pressley.
How are you feeling a day? Tracy? Do you know
how I'm feeling? Cara, I'm feeling every day amazing. And
I know you're feeling successful. Of course I had a
feeling you might be feeling every day amazing, just the thought.
But yeah, yeah, I'm definitely feeling successful. Glad to be
(00:22):
back today. Oh my goodness, yes, today's episode. Okay, mm
hmm listen, heavy heavy. We have great guests though, we do,
Oh my gosh, amazing. They're doing some phenomenal work. But
when I say heavy and deep, okay, heavy and deep
was this episode? So how did you feel about that episode?
(00:44):
Before we even talk to the guests, Oh my gosh,
so much to unpack for me. Ka, it was really
about fear, trauma, and pain. I think all three of
those things dry life. Hey, Because we don't know how
to process pain, fear, and trauma. It's easier, I think
(01:10):
for us to to shift it into hate. All right,
just let it kind of summer if you will. I
feel like they're limiting beliefs. Are would hinder us. People
just know what they know and how they grew up.
They don't want to hear any other perspective or even
want to consider the impacts on others. So I think
that's the biggest part of it. We definitely saw it
(01:32):
in this episode. I am glad that they got to
get someone who was reformed to come to the table.
I can't say that's how person would always be welcome
at the table, right. You know what? I would like
to allow myself the luxury of believing that I have
evolved enough, despite the fact that I gave full side
eye and hell to the no faces during the episode.
(01:56):
You are a gam two point oh for real? Go
and let y'all know that now Heysey's faces straight gam
this whole episode. Let me say this, it's difficult and
as heavy and deep as this episode was, it was
also relevant and necessary. We need to talk more about this,
especially now that there is so much happening in our
(02:18):
country and there's so much going on with regard to
race relations, education awareness. We need to have these kind
of conversations with groups of people that we can trust
and groups of people that we can learn from, and
then we can unlearn with Hello. Yeah, that's a key one.
I like that you've gotten to hear how we feel.
(02:38):
But now don't you think it's time to hear what
your Red Table Talk community has to say? Tracy, Yes,
I do. We asked our community, how do you keep
your personal biases in check? And here are some of
your answers. Kin start us off with our good old
memphisis to friends friends. Jent Tom says, I up to
(03:00):
tell myself there are different strokes for different folks, and
everything ain't for everybody. Man. That's the way to think
about it. That is a real good, happy neutral You
just say, sure, what works for you. If you're a
consenting adult, go forward, not to stamp out. It's a
process that begins with awareness and recognition. I'm a work
(03:22):
in progress, Betty Rufel mayor, thank you for that. That's good.
That's also wise. Those are sage words. I'm work in progress.
Give yourself some brevity, Zola right More Walker says, I
remind myself of the beauty of diversity. I'm glad she's
able to find beauty and diversity. Yeah, I love that
she gets it and Brown Betty. Betty said, we're all
(03:49):
biased and sometimes that's okay. I'm allowed to help a
single mom over a married one because I identify with
single motherhood. I just asked myself why I feel like
I feel If the reason is me projecting some trauma,
I turned my attention to the trauma, literally, just mirroring
what I said. Right, It's about you identifying what is
(04:10):
going on with yourself. Why do I feel that way?
You have to tap in. If you don't tap in,
then you're only gonna be concerned with what's on the outside,
and you need to tap out. If you don't tap in,
tap out, tap tap in. I'd like to play the
Sweetie song. Let's go to this break. We're going to
take a quick break, but when we get back, we'll
(04:31):
be joined by two guests from our Red Table Talk community.
I love that we have guests on our fantastic podcast. Cara.
Dr Susan Glistens the president and founder of the Glistened Group,
(04:51):
a racial reconciliation and community building program based in Mississippi,
a state notorious for racial violence. Here, Susan used as
an approach she calls the Welcome Table to facilitate community
driven dialogue and informed action in the communities that welcome her.
Her work fights for empathy, healing, and equity as the
(05:11):
remedy to white supremacy. Thank you for joining us um
Let's Red Table that Dr Susan so happy to be here,
Such an honor, happy to be with all of you. Yes,
I'm calling you my sister from a different mr. You
know that I love it. I love it and it's
an honor right right. Ernest Crumb the Third is a
self proclaimed black history advocate joining us from Chicago. Have
(05:35):
great Pizza right. He works as a high school history
teacher and an online educator for all. Ernest is at
the Virtual Red Table to tell us about his book
Black History Saved My Life, which he wrote in after
he and his wife experienced the hate crime that went viral.
He shares this story to teach the important role black
(05:55):
history plays and culture today, and he continues to use
his platform to teach true black history on social media.
I love that we know you've guessed it on Gammies
podcast positively gam a little while back, and we're happy
and glad and appreciate you for joining us as well
on less Red Table that the Red Table Talk family
is amazing, So thank you for coming to join us.
(06:17):
Thanks for having me, Thank you, Welcome, Welcome. This is
the part of the show where we reveal which moments
made us pause, I mean, rewind, turn heads and say,
let me listen to that again. Waiting, wait, wait what?
Wait what? Right? So, Susan and Ernest, let's kick it off.
(06:41):
Were there any moments that made you say wait what?
During the episode? You know? For me and I took notes.
I took copious notes actually on the educator by trading
no surprise there, Mr Academia, So I have the mirror
what I expect from my students, and I did a lot,
And I think the main thing that stood out to
(07:02):
me was when they started talking about what drives white
males to engage in this type of racist violence. There's
kind of this white male entitlement to what I've owed
in this world. I expect to have a girlfriend and
be wealthy and be respected or have resources, and so
when I don't get those things, my anger and rage
(07:24):
is very intense. There's always been something that I've wondered.
And again, being from Chicago, we often hear the tropes
about black men in the city with gang violence, so
there's a stark difference between the gang violence we see
that often doesn't make its way into the school building,
versus when white males engage in violence, it often does
in public spaces. And again that is a wait wait wait,
(07:51):
wait what right? Right? And when they said that, I
believe it was Dr Jill. Dr Jillian. She said that
the self hate that they have for themselves or the
depression that they're dealing with, flips to what's wrong with
them as opposed to them doing some type of internal reflection.
And it really made me think about going back to
even what Jeff was talking about, how in a lot
(08:13):
of these spaces they take advantage of those who are
most vulnerable. And I really connected with the part where
he said they were recruiting in Detroit, they were recruiting
in places that were economically impoverished, because that's the same
thing gangs do in the black community. Some mirror mentality,
is it not? Yeah, that's totally Await what Let me
(08:35):
say this because a couple of times already I've made
the Gammy face. So I want you to know throughout
the episode, let me acknowledge Gammy, you know I love you? Okay,
I made Gammy facial expressions throughout the entire episode, Gammy
and I were mirrors on the facial specially with the
side I turned up lift. It was if words could speak,
(08:56):
the words would say wrong. The whole episode was yeah,
gah Man Willow were on the same page. Now, Carrol,
which one were you? I work to understand. I'm trying
to understand others, even the main guest who had twenty
seven years of hate right but now he is just reformed.
(09:19):
In my mind, I want to understand that at the
same time as you say, let that go like that. See,
look at you. You You don't want to forget a man
at all. What I'm saying not that I don't forgive. Okay,
you can forgive and leave folks along. Okay, you can
forgive and disassociate. Right now, I'm making a little bit
of a stink face. What about you two? Dr Susan Ernest,
(09:42):
how do you rank his deservedness of forgiveness. That's a
tough one because I noted that he said he didn't
feel like he had the right to ask for forgiveness,
and I really appreciated that because I'm not sure that
he does. Apologies to the extent that they are effective,
are usually effective between the person who was the perpetrator
and the person who was a victim. But he not
only hurt individual people, his program of hate hurt a
(10:05):
lot of us out in the world. How do you
repair that. I appreciated his courage for coming to the table.
We can't get going to try to change anything if
we can't come to the table. But yeah, the wait,
what how does it? Why does it take you that long?
Why does it take you? Why you're not You're clearly
not a dumb person. Right. You can read, you can
watch TV, you can hear what people have to say.
It shouldn't take you that long to recognize humanity in
(10:27):
another person. Right. My other question is, like when he
was in his household and decided to change his life around,
did your wife, children just forgive you family members? Did
they just go along with your change? Did that really
happen like that they just accepted your change because you
preached this for a long time. Yeah, I had the
same sentiment because I dealt with the hate crime face
(10:50):
to face, me and my wife. So I think when
people talk about forgiveness in this situation, it's more so
I don't owe you like me tell you I forgive
you even if I did, but I think oftentimes you
make it a public spectacle. Forgiveness for me is that's
something that you have to deal yourself because you hurt yourself.
(11:10):
It's spewing out hatred means that you hate something about
yourself to be able to consciously do that as an
adult too. So for me, if you really want to
be forgiven and I'm not him, I can't say for sure.
He seems to be doing great work, and the fact
that he made an organization and he's working that's great,
and he has to continue to do that, and it
has to also translate to economic resources, has to translate
(11:32):
to policy because just like you an't say when I
saw twenty seven years, I'm like, bro like, I've been
actively engaging in learning black history since I was in college,
and I still have a long way to go, and
I still have to make sure I am not digesting
these racial tropes and stereotypes that we're all fan. So
he has a long way to go, and I hope
(11:55):
that he's aware of that. But I do commend him
for taking that step. But it would have been very
difficult for me to sit there and not be a
little confrontational about some of the things he did. Do
you think that he deserved to see at the table
with all due respect? I think based on the conversation, yes,
I think that since it was facilitated by black women,
(12:15):
who we know the history in this country and for
them to extend that honor, he should have been honored,
and I think he deserved it. And to me, he
came across humble, but again, just knowing what he did
and just the experience I've had, it would have been
very difficult. But I think it's important to hear that
perspective because we have to understand that whether we ignore
these people or not, they're here. I just don't believe
(12:36):
I'm the person to facilitate that. So I commend people
like Dia Darryll Davis. But and I will also say
this about him. I believe that when you have people
who are that extreme, and I could be wrong, but
I'm just going based on how I feel right now,
I think that it's easier to have them switched their
mindset than someone who unconsciously spews racism and lives in
(12:58):
this implicit mind's world. If you understand what I'm saying,
that is all right now, Ernest that's a wait what
We could have a whole conversation about that, and I'm
here for it. I want to hear all about that.
I really do, because I love a good verbal volly.
I gotta get Dr Susan in On here because I
want to hear from your perspective. It's a wonderful dynamic
that we have to have a gift of having a
(13:19):
black man and a white woman on is our guest
today to talk about this, right because you're both soldiers
on the same field. Tracy, I appreciate that so much,
and I think Ernest has said it so much better
than I. But when I encounter situations like this where
there's an opportunity to engage with someone who has harmed others,
my first question is who are the folks that he's
(13:40):
harmed and what are their thoughts about this? That needs
to guide what we do right Working in the Philadelphia
sipping the show The County, the missisp be burning case,
I needed to know what the black community in the
show The County thought about in York there and if
their suggestion to me was we're not ready or they're
not ready, we need to take time, then time we take.
(14:00):
So the fact that Dia connected with him and in
some ways kind of vouched for him was moving for me.
I wanted to know what her thoughts were about having
him at the table and reaching across to him. You
bring up a really interesting point, and I don't know
that it was really addressed in the episode. If it was,
feel free to correct me. None of the victims directly
(14:22):
were ever given a voice. We didn't hear that in
the episode. And it's interesting that you bring up the
point that if the victim isn't ready, then it's not time.
And in DEA's case, even though she was vicariously because
so many of us didn't directly feel it, but as
a result of his efforts and his organizing and his
(14:44):
almost three decades worth of hate, it's a rippled and snowballs, right.
So we are victims directly and indirectly, but we didn't
have that true representation of someone who said that like you,
Earnest I Direc actually felt the impact and the ill
effects and the negativity and the direct hate from him,
(15:06):
and so it's just interesting to me. It's why it's
so important that Ernest is here to share his story
but also to Earnest's point earlier. There's plenty of work
for folks to do until the person who has been
harmed might be ready. They may never be ready, And
that doesn't mean that you get to sit around and
not do anything right. You have to do the inner work.
You have to excavate, you have to do some archaeology
(15:27):
on your attitudes, and then, you know what, you gotta
make some amends. You gotta try to do some things
the policies, the practices of the procedures. You got to
reach back to some other white folks and bring them
along with you too. You don't get to just sit
and wait while someone is having to do the hard
work of repairing themselves when they've been harmed. Yeah, that's
good because so often times the burden is kind of
(15:50):
unspokenly put on the oppressed. Right, thank you, that's what
I did to you. You know what you did make
me feel better about what I did. You know exact
actually what you've done, And if you don't, I need
you to stop and think about it. I said this
when we were preparing for this show. Like when they
ended segregation, who went in and told all the employers
(16:10):
how to actually treat the employees, nobody like y'all made
it up and and more so acted like nothing really happened.
So that cognitive dissidence is a problem for me. Living
in the Capital and Confederacy, a lot of things are
just you don't speak on them. You just don't go
on that street, you just don't turn that way. There's
so much social conditioning that has happened with the we
(16:34):
can't go on certain streets and we can't say certain things,
and we were finally giving a voice. It's just I
don't know whether I need to get up and cheer
or take my headset off and weak that it was
even said, how would you feel sitting at the table
with Jeff I that's hard to say that. I think
(16:56):
the difficulty bigger than just sitting at the table with
him is we're saying that he talked to one person
of color and his entire outlook was forever changed. Is
that the goal of the protesting and everything we want,
because then when someone changes, I hear us even in
this conversation saying, oh no, I doubt it a little
bit understood though, because you do twenty seven years of
(17:18):
a thing. I mean, you're right with your hand for
twenty seven years and then you gotta go to what
your left hand the next day, like, is that just
is just automatically changed like that, so you don't revert
back at all, You are just completely And I mean,
if that is the beauty of change, then we would
like to all have that same grace. Right you would
be able to sit at the table with him, or
you wouldn't. I feel like I'd be able to sit
(17:39):
at the table with him and listen. But I feel
like there would be a little doubt there as far
as are you even being genuine? Is this a true
change you're having? I think I would question it. Mm
hmm okay, So let me tell you like you earnest,
I had wait what? Wait what? Wait what? It was
like a wait what remix in this episode for me,
one of the wait what mom? This was dea story
(18:01):
of a man who enjoyed seeing fear in the eyes
of a person he meet because he had been fearful
his entire life. Then he said, I saw something that
I've never seen before, And he said, I loved it,
and I'm going what was it? He said? Fear? Oh,
he said, you know, for me, somebody who was afraid
my entire life. Now somebody else was afraid, ernest you
(18:23):
go ahead because you touched on it, and just go
and elaborate for us. Yeah, So that revelation by Dea,
I think that what we have to realize, and I
think somebody touched on this on the episode as well,
is that all of this is deeply rooted in fear
and hate is just another way that that comes out
of us when we go back through history and we
(18:44):
think about the system that's being created. The fear is
that black people are going to take something from white people.
Fear is that indigenous people were going to take something.
The fear coming from maybe living in an environment where
there were a lack of resources during the MIDI period
in eury Board during the plague, and you come over
here and you see what you think is all of
(19:04):
this opportunity. The fear might be that it's going to
go away, and we don't often realize how that can
be talked to people implicitly and care. You brought up
a great point because you're saying, like when segregation comes down,
and I've always had this thought. We've never we've never
had a mass movement where we said, Okay, we need
to flip all the education we need to make sure
(19:26):
we're teaching this instead. It's two thousand and twenty two
and we're talking about teaching about black history and how
we need to in some ways rephrase it as in
voluntary working or whatever. They were talking about Texas black people.
Did you. I just can't even. I can't even if
that's a whole another episode, and I hate to even
(19:48):
I really personally, And this might be a way what
I don't necessarily like using white privilege because I don't
think it's a privilege to be able to benefit from genocide, slavery.
I think that there's white access as a result of
these things, something that whites can benefit from and again
benefits and quote would be that when you deal with
(20:09):
your hate, like oftentimes you're nurtured in it. Like people
might not want to be punitive with you, they might
want to coddle you. But if I have something hate
because of the environment I grow up being and not
realizing the hands that put my hood together with redlining,
I have police everywhere and watching everything. I do. So
want fear and hate to be nurtured. But we never
get that opportunity to figure out why we even have
(20:31):
that feeling, and then a lot of white folks who
have that feeling of they don't understand why they have that.
It's not natural to feel that way, but it's been
nurtured in some way to maintain this hierarchy. And I
believe that once we get to the core of that,
and that also goes again to another weight, what moment
of the exposure to other people at a young age,
it takes away that feeling, that anxiety that you have initially,
(20:53):
so it doesn't have to come later in your life.
But I think there's a larger there's a larger point
about the intentionality of the socialization process us. Right. There's
a really great book that's called The Epistemology of Ignorance,
and it is about how white folks are specifically socialized
to have that whiteness and the benefits of power that
come with it be rendered invisible so that you don't
(21:15):
question it, so that you don't question it, and that
black folks and people of color are socialized in the
exact opposite way. To know that in is a society,
this hierarchical society, you are in a particular position and
you're supposed to stay there. You're not supposed to step
outside of it, right. I've always said that they've been
conditioned to ignore that. It's not that you don't see
(21:35):
it because there's a great phrase, I'll believe it when
I see it, But the opposite is actually true, I'll
see it when I believe it, which goes back though,
card to what you were saying about their certain streets
you couldn't turn on. There's certain things you couldn't say.
It literally is a it's a mind f right, my
first inklings of some type of race situation, right, Bless
(21:58):
my heart. My grandma was driving and she would always
blink her lights. We lived in the county outside of
the city. But I'm like, why are you blinking your
lights at them? And she was like, just to let
them know that the cops are up there, because nobody
has time to be pulled over. Yeah, that still happens.
Now it's translated into something different for no Okay, it
was just me trying to understand and my mind, I'm like, wow,
(22:20):
that's so nice. She is warning this person. Not it's
nice now not thinking about the true implications of what
that could be, but the origins of it. You're saying
came from be careful because you need to be on
your piece and ques because you're potentially coming into contact
with someone that is representing the law. Sadly Dad has
circled back around to be true. But what it was
(22:44):
now it was literally, it's your speeding and I see
you speeding. Dr Susan. We talked about dea story of
a man who enjoyed seeing fear in the eyes of
another person that he beat, and that it was because
he had seen fear in his entire life. I love
(23:06):
the Willow's response. I hate to say this, I really
hate to say this. Some people feel powerless just like
he did, and don't do that. So her idea was,
even if the person was fearful and he wanted to
have someone else demonstrate the fear that he had. To
Willow's point that just because you had that experience and
(23:30):
you were traumatized by it, doesn't mean that you get
a pass. Like other people have had traumatic upbringings and
they didn't turn to violence. So what's giving you the
creative license and authority to do that? And not everyone
has the freedom to respond? Dr Susan, what's your take
on all of that. Ernest has nailed and Willow nailed it.
We are socialized differently. And one of the advantages that
(23:53):
comes from this skin disease I have that's called whiteness,
is that I have the ability to expect not to
have any reaction when I transgress. It's more likely that
I am not going to be held accountable. Not that
there aren't white folks in prison, right there are, but
for more often than not, disproportionately, folks who look like
(24:13):
me are able to transgress and get away with it.
And how we have that expectation that we will right,
there is an expectation. Absolutely, We've absolutely been socialized to believe.
It's why for so many white folks, they didn't understand
why black folks might be worried about police officers coming
into their community on mass right, because they have not
(24:34):
experienced it. Just do what they're asking, We are okay,
delay it. So it's a socialist in process that has
to be that has to be excavated, and one of
the main beautiful tools that does it is actually learning
black history. What Ernest is doing is so powerful. There's
work being done in the field of psychology. It's called
the Marley hypothesis, and it absolutely says that when white
(24:57):
folks learn accurate history, that's much harder for them to
deny that racism exists. And it's like a dog. You
would think that would be the case, but they're actually
showing that if we teach accurate history, then there can
be a change. And that's why so many folks are
attacking critical race theory because they know there's power in
the truth. We are just learning every day, okay, and
(25:22):
this episode put some faces and stories to the heavy
topics of racism and hate crimes that we hear about
and sometimes just often don't see again. Even as I
unlearn some of the things that I've gone through, just
to not minimize others, I'm realizing it is happening to
a lot of people everywhere. Just because one of my
(25:45):
police interactions to date didn't end up with me getting
hurt or you know who knows if I was profiled,
but I got to walk away, that doesn't mean that
there are not other people who have truly gone through
some significant situations and it all for some attention. Earnest.
Let's jump into your situation. I really want to hear
about this because you and your wife were at a
(26:06):
community event a few years ago where a white woman
harassed and spelled derogatory names of you. What you talk
all about in your book, of course, and make sure
I'll get that, but could you please share that story
with us and why this was really the catalyst for
you to take your work a step further past that classroom? Definitely.
So I guess I should preface this by saying that
I started teaching because I knew the important role Black
(26:29):
history played in my life, in our life, and just
like Dr Gleason said, I just knew that when I
figured out where I came from and I understood how
rough our ancestors had it, but they still persevered. They
gave me a lot of pride in college, and it
helped me to understand why my neighborhood was the way
it was, and it helped me to understand that it
wasn't my own doing. So I had the capacity to
(26:51):
fight through these things. And one of my favorite quotes
from my mentor, Dr Philippe Matthews is nothing's wrong with you.
Something happened to you in Black history did that for me.
So when I graduated and started teaching, this event happened
in July thirty twenty sixteen, So I have been teaching
for about six years at that point. I say that
because I want people to understand that I was already
in this type of word. I was teaching, I was
(27:12):
doing mentoring. I would go to protests, but I was
always in the back, and for me, it was just
I teaching the class I mentored. But when I closed
that door my business, I got a private Facebook page,
Instagram private. I don't do anything like that. But ten
was a year, it was a summer, it was a
rise of Trump. You also had Phorlando cast Stile. You
also had Outside Sterling. I think we were a year
(27:33):
removed from Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and his Beyonce Diamond
Reynolds pulled over by Minnesota police for a broken tail.
Like Reynolds streamed what happened next live on Facebook the
death of Oton Sterling, shot while being pinned down on
the ground. The family says Sandra Bland would not have
committed suicide because she had too much to live for,
(27:55):
and placed the blame for what happened to her on
what they called quote over zealous trooper who were stepped
his authority. So I had all of that on my mind.
When me and my wife went to this event, it
was a way for us to decompress because it had
been a wild summer. We had just gone to Jamaica,
and Jamaican's were asking us, like, what's going on in America?
Y'all safe? That's what we do the question. That's the
(28:18):
hardest part about leaving the country. I promise you, yes,
someone's gonna ask. They are I wondering what's going on
on that side of town. So we went to this
event and it was a majority black event southside of Chicago,
South Shore Culture of sent there with my wife. It's
about black. Towards the end of the event, we decided
to go play a game called cornhole because we noticed
that there was an open station to play this game.
(28:38):
We walk over there. There's one being bag though for
that station, so that's a problem. We looked to our
left and we noticed there's a group of four people
to black and too white. They had about fifteen being bags.
We thought, just rough estimate, Okay, maybe they'll offer us
some bags. Music is loud. I don't really want to
go up to them. They're playing, but maybe they'll see
us looking. Somebody throws a bag really far nobody to
(29:00):
grab it, so we're just kind of waiting, you know,
Me and my wife are like, well, maybe we can
at least have two. She grabs the bag and immediately
a white lady in that group like power walked towards
us like we just stole her purse or something and
started screaming like you could have waited for us to finish.
We weren't done yet, and I'm thinking, like, y'all got
(29:21):
somebody you have bags over there, And so because she
came at us so aggressively, I just was like, no,
you're not getting it back now. If it was respectful,
it could have been different. It's just not it's not
in me. She kept yelling, she called my wife a hole,
and that's when they kind of escalated from that point.
(29:43):
So her two black friends almost start to come towards
us to protect her, and then she begins to say,
we're acting like a bunch of in words, what happened
to me? Hold on you? And that's when something just
went off in my mind. What I was like, I
(30:04):
can't believe this is really just happen right example jail,
because it's how many things go through our mind, because
like we just talked about you don't have the ability
to react you want, but you had the wherewithal though
you know I need to record this, yes, yes, so
the benefit of me, and I say benefit loosely, but
being able to deal with that as a professional who
(30:26):
was educated in black history, had a wife, had a family,
I wasn't the same person I was ten twenty years
pick ten years ago, where I would have just been
straight to fighting. So in my mind, I'm thinking, I
don't even like using that word anymore at that point
in my life. So when you say this, I know
it's not a reflection of me, it's a reflection of you.
I'm still shocked, it still hurts. You can hear it
in my voice, but consciously it's like, I need to
(30:47):
at least document this because it's social justice. At this point,
it's not a crime. You can say that word. Unfortunately,
it escalates as I take it out. I tell you,
because first I took out my phone and said, okay,
say it again so I can get all the camera.
Now I'm recording, right right, I said, go stop now,
(31:08):
I'm ready with you because I'm thinking World Star, I'm
thinking Facebook, and she slaps it. I picked it up,
and she's so frustrated at that point she just goes off.
It's like no, no, no, no, no no, and then
just going like a machine gun, and she takes a
step in the opposite direction, then turns towards us while
her friends are right there in the middle, and spits
(31:29):
on me, my wife, primarily my wife, and that's when
the phone dropped, and the rest is history. As we say,
here's what I want to know. Okay, the friends, because
she was playing cornball, corn hole, corn she was playing.
But what I want to make sure I got that's clear,
(31:49):
is she was playing and she had black friends were
playing with her, right, Yes she did, Yes she did.
And that's always the thing that people don't understand. Not
is that but they were actively protecting her. I don't
think they realized what they were doing, because again, okay,
I saw that, earnest. I saw that in the video,
and I was like, now, wait a minute. You can
(32:10):
say you don't see color. Okay, that's all finding good.
And I grew up in an environment that was fully diverse.
I'm grateful for that. However, calm, come on, now, you
cannot stand and it's not even a matter of race.
At that point, it's right and wrong, and their friend
was wrong. It's two left feet. I saw them literally
square up beside her like we're pillars for her in
(32:32):
the video at that point, how did you feel? I
felt betrayed. And I say this because my knowledge of history,
my experience. I was not shocked. Okay, backtrack. I was
shocked that it happened in that manner, but I cannot
be shocked if a white person is racist when this
society wants them to be. But I was shocked at
(32:54):
that the two black friends did nothing, and in fact,
a lot of my aggression and frustration went towards the
guy that was there, because I wasn't going to unless
I felt like my safety was at risk. I wasn't
going to striker. I was thinking I was gonna be
fighting him, and he never once looked at me as
a man the eye, and that did something to me,
(33:15):
and I think that hurt more than anything. And in
her white friend, I think this is like a parallel
to like just what happens with race issues in our country.
The white friend was in the back the whole time.
She was just like, well that sucks. And the two
black friends immediately came up like, oh wait, no, it's
not that big of a deal. This doesn't bother us.
And and I had I just had a revelation as
(33:37):
you were asking me this question that I never had before.
I've been speaking about this for five and a half years.
The proximity to blackness that she had. We also have
to understand that although segregation was enforced after slavery so
called ends, black folks and white folks have always been
close and proximity throughout our history, and some of the
casest people to white people in this country where those
(33:58):
who were enslaved. That's right, yes, yes, uncle nearest, the
whiskey like you know when I hear about right, I like,
uncle near, Hello, they're in Tennessee. Hello. I love mind.
(34:20):
When I first started drinking it recently with the key
in my mind, I was like, I'm waiting on this segway,
I'm waiting on the parallel this come on, let me here.
And I was just like this man stole this and
grew a whole generation of Jack Daniel. I just couldn't
I love Jack. I'm saying so, like again, how things
(34:40):
are just stolen from us, even the security and safety
from person to person, how it goes to others. Okay,
so now that's a whole another episode as well, because
that happens repeatedly in history. Has how manny, it's currently happens.
Name a restaurant that you know of that is in
(35:01):
your town. Okay, So since Carl's talking about food and liquor,
we're gonna give her deep dish pizza in Chicago. Right,
We're gonna give her pond raised catfish in Mississippi. Hello,
We're gonna give her some fantastic ribs in Memphis. And
know that every one of those foods categories literally had
some black folk who had the recipes and or managed hello,
(35:27):
managed the kitchen, and the recipes were literally lifted from them,
taken from them, or gifted to them, as some of
the stories go, and national brands have been created as
results of them, or just how anything has been flipped
to their benefit and or entertainment. Like my grandmother used
to tell me about how after she picked tobacco, she
(35:50):
said that they used the watermelon rhyns to get the
tobacco off their hands, so instead they were mocked for
constantly having watermelon and the wife folks not understand and
why they're just thinking, looking at me eating on that watermelon,
you won't let us wash our hands. I don't know
if you're paying attention, you know what I mean. So
small stories like that. I think about how we were
mocked when we actually were out here surviving and just
(36:11):
trying to live our best lives even with all these stories,
and how things continue to come to light, and how
you continue to grow and earnest. You have grown a
brand and shared awareness through all everything you've gone through.
Do you think your harasser could change? Do you think
that woman has the ability to or do you even
(36:31):
want to sit down and talk to her about how
she's been since the event? If she had an energy
to change, could she change? Yeah? I think that she does.
I think that she actually does have the capacity to change.
I think most people do. There are some who are
so far completely gone you go to the extreme levels
of shooting. I don't have any sympathy for that in
this situation. I do. I think it would happen on
(36:53):
her own time. I don't think any of the pressure
from going viral or anything I said publicly would convince her.
I think it could happen later in life. Who's to
say it hasn't happened already. Who knows. She doesn't want
to what Dr Susan said, excavation, She has to excavate
some of that stuff. She's gotta unearthen in herself and unlearned.
Do you think that any of the criminal repercussions that
(37:18):
she suffered may have made her take a step back
and say wait a minute. And I know that I'm
asking you to speak on her behalf, but I'm just
from your perspective, do you think that may have had
anything to do with what could have been potential atonement,
if ever there would be. I think in her situation
that it could potentially speed up the atonement, only because
(37:40):
I know when I posted it, there were people posting
pictures of her saying some of the same type of
language to people. And she was in high school, so
she she had a history of it, and she was
never punished. Why stop exactly? So for me, Dr Kenny,
I believe said this, it's about who shows up. I'm
sorry it was Dia. Who shows up when you're most
(38:00):
vulnerable and broken matters. So I'm hoping maybe somebody showed
up for her in that situation and showed her the
air in her ways. But and again for some folks
the punishment makes them go harder in that direction. It
really depends on the person. I can't really say, like
you said, but I will say again that I think
that it's a possibility, but I would not actually want
to sit down with her, just because I feel like
(38:22):
for me, a moment sitting down with her is a
moment I could have been sitting down with one of
our kids was harmed by somebody like her, and it's
a way anything. Okay, So that's interesting to me because
Dia had the grace that she extended to Jeff, and
that is literally what shifted the course and trajectory of
his life. So you would not be in a position
(38:46):
to offer or extend your harasser that same grace. Never
say never, But July two thousand and twenty two, I
just there's so much that I want to do and
have to do in this life with this issue, and
only get one of these, I just don't see the point. Again,
Like after this, I started my colleague and I shout
(39:07):
out to Rodney Coldeney. We started the Black Student Union
at our school. After I deal with the situation and
to hear what our kids dealt with and they never
had an advocate, They didn't get a chance to record it.
It happened to them at work in the drive through.
Nobody cared or they did it in class. So for me,
it's like, unless you talk about you got a fortune
that you're gonna give up and I can help you
(39:28):
redistribute that. I can help you have some conversations for
that benefit. If we're just talking to talk, no, it's
a waste of time. But if you if we're talking
because you have some access that you want to have
your own personal reparations fund, then yeah, let's do it.
I feel like with Dear too, cheat was intentional about
healing pieces of herself, understanding pieces of what she felt,
(39:50):
trying to get that out. So I feel like when
she came to him it was a little bit more
directed and honestly, whether he chose to change or not,
she was doing a work in her movement of work.
She's a journalist. Most journalists we were passionate about what
they're what they're talking, you know, what their person. She
wanted to share with him how she felt. This is
(40:13):
how it was truly impacted. Whereas even in this conversation
we're talking about all the things that we I'm not
gonna say hid but knew we couldn't speak about, maybe
not talk directly about it. And I feel like I
want to tell you we got we need to just
go ahead and talk about that. Let's just talk about
that for a quick second. You've said it a couple
of times that I want to be able to understand more.
(40:33):
I want to learn more about what you're saying about
the things that we couldn't say in the places that
we couldn't go. Will you share with us an example
of your experience and that I worked for the government
for twenty years and I have constantly been underneath white
woman after white woman who has minimized what I've said,
minimized what I've done at the same time until it
(40:56):
was time to take on the workload for them. Now
of a sudden, I'm overly accomplished and successful and amazing.
And you know so after being in that professional space
and then growing up through school different sports. I did gymnastic,
I was a bigger girl on the team, so never
quite fitting into their cookie cutter mold, not having another
black girl to turn and talk to, like, are you
seeing this? You know what I mean, so just having
(41:18):
someone substantiate my feelings, acknowledging they were valid, and not
that I didn't feel myself worth. But as you're growing
up a preteen even young adult in this professional setting,
we're looking for someone to affirm what's going on. Anybody
see this? So I found that comfort and my other
girlfriends and other corporate positions. Let me tell you what happened,
and this is why I started taking notes. This is
(41:39):
that's probably why my note taking a successful. It's significant,
It's intense, you know what I mean. As you were
growing up, it was a learned behavior where you ever
told like don't go down this don't go down this
street because it isn't safe, or it's not my side
of town, it's not my place to be, or just
you go through one experience and you never go that
way again, whether it's being about the police or I
(42:01):
got to fight down that street. So some things I
think are just not spoken. If I only ones who
ever experienced that, I mean, have you always been this outspoken?
This is a learned behavior for me? Are you asking me? Yeah?
And not even outspoken. I've always been me, But to
come fully into who Karral Pressley is I feel myself
ever evolving, Especially when I became the career cheerleader. That
(42:23):
was because I had nobody cheering me on and I
had to reaffirm who I was and what I was doing. Yeah,
I get that, but yeah, would to answer your question
for me? Yeah, I have always been this outspoken. People
like my family will say, yeah, that's Tracy, and people
in elementary school would even tell you that. And I
(42:44):
literally grew up from K through college all white. I
went to a predominantly white school. All my whole community
was like white, and then we were the other and
it was like two percent was black, where we were
happy to see the other blacks. It was like, hey,
it was just this unspoken thing where when you thought
you're the same skin, major can and that's not true
(43:06):
now and so right, and so for me, I have
always been outspoken, But part of that was because I
was empowered and affirmed and knew that I had a solid,
firm undergirding with my mother and that she was going
(43:28):
to back up whatever I said, and that she knew
I was gonna say something that came from a place
of logic, right, I wasn't going to challenge some authority
in a disrespectful and appropriate way. But I was going
to be able to stand on my own. I have
had to confront racism, but in the North, my experience,
it was very much more covert than it is here
(43:50):
in the South. Dr Susan, you have been fighting this
good fight in the South consistently, and I want to
know from you. Jeff said that part of what led
him down his path of hate was his fascination with
his grandfather, who fought in Hitler's army. I'm trying to
figure out what led you down that path in the
(44:11):
first place. So for me, my grandfather fought in Hitler's
army in World War Two. Now, my family was not
for this stuff. They are actually against it and tried
desperately for years to get me out. But it was
that fascination with his history, my grandfather and my great
uncle's fought That was the opening to the Rabbit Horse.
(44:33):
And you discovered, Susan, that your family has a similar
background being on the wrong side of history. Your great grade,
give or take a great grandfather, was a slave owner
and an ancestor fought for the Confederacy, not uncommon here
in Mississippi and Tennessee and Georgia or Georgia right, name
(44:55):
is pick a state, any state. But your reaction to
learning that history has been completely from from Jeff's because
I was prepared. So before I learned those histories, I
learned a question what I was seeing? Right? We talk
about my mama. Right. A great author was once asked
how did you get to be from where you were
to where you came up to where you are now?
And he said, I walked up my mama's backbone. Right.
(45:16):
I wish I wrote that line. I walked up my
mama's backbone. My father died when I was four. My
older brothers were gone than Marine Corps. And she she
had been treated badly by her father and had told
her year to be seen and not heard, and that
didn't hit her right, right, So she always said that
my children are going to be able to say whatever
they want to say, regardless of whether I like it
or not. And believe me, we tested that theory. And
(45:38):
so when I was a ten years old in n
there was one TV in the house and it was
in my mama's bedroom and Roots came on, and so
my mother made me sit down and watch Roots with
her just working class white woman in Evans, George, outside
of Augusta, whose father, my grandfather, was named for the
(46:00):
presidents of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis m M. My mother
sat me down and we watched Roots, and I was
horrified at how the black folks on the screen were
being treated. And more than that, I was deeply embarrassed
that the people who were doing it to them look
like me. So I was primed, right, it's horrible, as
you you feel ashamed. I was primed as I grew
(46:21):
older to then learn that I had folks who fought
on the Confederacy. That's what I learned first, right, But
I told myself this little comfort. I said, they joined
the Confederacy. There was a horrible decision, but data didn't
know slaves, right, like I can still be like kind
of okay, that they didn't own human beings. I comforted
myself with that lie. I didn't know yet it was
(46:42):
a lie I should have suspected. I'm a historian, But
it wasn't until December, when I was out West doing
research in the LDS Library that I found Robert mccaslan,
who was four great back on my father's side, who
had been born and raised in uh Northern Ireland county
that was predominantly Catholic, who would have been treated badly
(47:05):
by the British, so that he would have known what
it felt like to be discriminated against. But came to
this country in the late seventeen hundreds, and what do
you do to get ahead in this country? If you
look like me? You go into that industry, right, you
go into forced labor camps. And so he became an
overseer first, and then he owned human beings. And so
(47:26):
I found his will where he names the people that
he owned. I found where he'd split the forced labor
camp up between his children, and then Patrick, his clearly
favorite child, who got more folks passed along to him
than the others. On the eve of the Civil War
in eighteen sixty, he took what were three human beings
and grew his ownership to seventeen human beings, including a
(47:47):
two year old child. And I sat in that library,
oblivious to everybody else, and just wept because the facade
that I had comforted myself with, I couldn't comfort myself
with that anymore. My family was working class. The reason
we were working class, I didn't realize was because our
wealth wasn't owning other human beings. And it's devastating, and
(48:10):
all you can do is face it, acknowledge it, and
then do what you can to repair be a part
of the solution. To Ernest's point about what he ever
sit down with that woman, it is not his job
to do that, right that there's a beautiful social justice
ecosystem that my friend deep I are created. There are
different roles in the movement, and it's good to be
clear about what your role is. And Ernest is clear,
(48:32):
and he is awesome at what he does, and he
needs to keep doing that. Somebody like me who wants
to try to get more white folks to come to
the table, I'd be happy to sit down with her
and see where she is and and invite her into
a conversation. The first thing I do is it just
tell me your story, right, talk to your people, because
I've always said, like white people got to help white people.
(48:52):
It's I can't help. I don't even know what you're
going through. So I'm so glad that you said that,
because it's not a conversation of me telling them how
I feel. It's when I leave and y'all are backed
by yourselves. Dr Susan, the hurt that you must have
felt because you would tried to give yourself a pass
and singing Roots and feeling guilt and shame. I remember
(49:16):
watching Roots, I remember being angry. I remember going to
school the next day after the first airing and the
white students coming up to me apologizing. I just want
to say the for the folks who were afraid of
critical race theory, who want to try to protect their
children from that feeling, you need to be celebrating that
your children see abuse and enslavement on the TV screen
(49:40):
and they feel bad about it, because that tells you
that your child has a moral compass. Celebrate that, yes,
and how we should not be like that. When I
was growing up, I so despised Roots. Now, mind you,
I was born at eighty two. I am forty successful
years old. I despised Roots because I was tired of
the slaves story. Again. Here I am strong, ten years old, man,
(50:01):
successful in my life, completely integrated, walking to the Applebee's man,
living my best life. Segregation where Whitewater fountain Ware. So
I was so completely separated, I didn't know how close
it truly was We had so much to recap in
this Red Table Talk conversation that we need two episodes
to discuss it all. So you'll have to wait until
(50:22):
next week to hear the rest of our conversation. We
got into it in part one of our conversation with
Ernest and Susan. But next week, oh my, you cannot
miss part two, right, You'll hear about the shocking message
Earnest received from a student in this class who proudly
waved a Confederate flag. And then Susan shares for the
first time about a successful two year reconciliation project that
(50:46):
she champions, and we'll talk about the trauma of gun violence.
It's a lot, but these episodes are so important and
we're grateful Earnest and Susan could join us for these
tough conversations. That's right, So come back next week to
hear the rest. Big thank you to our executive producers
Jana Pinkett Smith, Ellen Rackittin and Faulon Jethro. And thank
(51:08):
you to our producer Kyla Knehru and our associate producer
Yolanda Chow. And finally, thank you to our sound engineers
Calvin Bayliss and Devin, Donnahey,
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