Honoring The History & Legacy of Black Veterans| Beyond the Scenes

In honor of Memorial Day, we observe the contributions of Black service members like The Harlem Hellfighters and the Tuskegee Airmen. In this episode, host Roy Wood Jr. chats with the cofounder of the Black Veterans Project, Richard Brookshire and the author of Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, Matthew F. Delmont. They discuss the racism and segregation Black soldiers have had to face in the military, how Black Veterans were excluded from GI Bill benefits, and how the GI Bill Restoration Act would be a step toward repairing the damage done to Black Veterans and their families. Original Air Date: November 8, 2022.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Comedy Central. Hey, it's Roy. Quick note
about today's episode of Beyond the Scenes. The subject of
suicide and suicide attempts are discussed briefly, So if you
want a tiptoe away from this episode, you can, and
if you want to stay, let's get started. Hey, welcome

(00:25):
to Beyond the Scenes, the podcast that goes a little
deeper into segments and topics that originally aired on The
Daily Show. But here's what this podcast like. This podcast
is like when you were a kid and the bell
rang for recess And now you're in the courtyard drinking
your juice box and you're playing four square with your
friend Aaron, who you're convinced is gonna be your most
goodest best friend for the rest of your life. Then
he moved away and he never told you goodbye. Still

(00:50):
think about you, man, if you're out there, just there's
no love. I'm sorry. What were we talking about? Yeah,
I'm Roy Wood Jr. And in honor of Veterans Day,
we're talking about a CPE time segment that honored the
contributions of the black soldier rode the clip in World
War One. The three hundred and sixty ninth Infantry Regiment

(01:11):
fought so fiercely that the Germans called them the Harlem
hell Fighters. And when a German says you know how
to whoop ass, that means something. The Great War also
provided many black fighters with their first chance to travel abroad,
and once in France, our brothers in arms found something

(01:32):
they had never seen before, respectful white people. It was
so enjoyable in Europe that a lot of black soldiers
didn't come back, which I understand. I went to Belgium
for two days, ended up staying the whole summer with
Helga and she knew how to iron that Belgian waffle.
Oh my waffles. I was there for three months, and

(01:55):
then my wife found out. I'm sorry, baby, Please please
let me go home. Today I'm joined by the co
founder of the Black Veterans Project and former infantry, combat
medic and US Army veteran Richard Brookshire. Richard, how you doing.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
I'm doing good. I really have it to be here. Excited.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, good to have you here. I'll tell you my
Veterans Day story about the parade in high school where
I stepped in a horse turret. But first let's welcome
my second guests. They're a professor of history at Dartmouth
College and author of the new book Half American, The
epic story of African Americans fighting World War Two at
home and abroad. Matthew F. Delmont, Matthew, thank you for

(02:38):
joining us.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
It's good to be here, right, Oh well, a pleasure
to have you all. And let's get into this discussion.
You know, the contributions of veterans, I think are often
minimized and remixed in our society, and done so even
more for black veterans. Matthew, I like to start with you.
Your book is titled half American. Talk to us a

(03:01):
little bit about how you settled on the title of
that book and what the experience was like for black
service members in the military during that time, where you know,
the racism and segregation was just as entrenched within our
armed forces as it was in just general American society.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
So the title of the book, calf American comes from
a letter that a man named James Thompson wrote in
December nineteen forty one, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Thompson writes a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, which was
the largest and most influential black newspaper at the time.
What Thompson asks is, should I sacrifice my life to
live half American? Is the America I know worth defending?
What he's saying is he is a Black American. You

(03:39):
think about what it means for him and other Black
Americans to get drafted into a military that is entirely
racially segrogated.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
The Army is serogated.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
It only particularly allows Black Americans to serve in supply
and logistical roles, by and large, are not allowed to
participate in combat. In the Navy, black Americans are all
allowed to volunteer and be drafted into the messment branch,
where they essentially will wait on and serve white officers,
and at the start of the war, black Americans aren't
all out in the Marine Corps at all. This is
an affront to the patriotism and service of Black Americans

(04:05):
that they want to be able to do everything they
can to help protect their country, to serve the United
States at this time of war, but the military doesn't
do what they can to acknowledge their service and to
take advantage of the skills that Black Americans can bring
to the military.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Effort.

Speaker 4 (04:19):
Once those black troops get drafted into the military, what
they find is that conditions on those bases are just
as bad, if not worse, than they aren't surrounding towns
and cities in the country. Their stories abound of black
troops being sent to these army camps in the South,
and they're fearing for their lives. They get attacked by townspeople,
they get verbally abused and physically harassed by white officers.

(04:39):
They're called racial epithets every day. Things get so bad
that they're actually anxious and excited about the prospect of
being able to deploy to battlefronts in Europe with the
Pacific because they think it's going to be safer there
than it is in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
And they didn't start letting black troops in until after
the war start. You know how races you've got to
be to pas No, you can't for America. We'll do
it first, Uh all right, we getting I asked, well,
come on over here, black folks. All right, we won't
go and let you in just a little. I'm not
sure if that was the exact memo or how it
was discussed, but it's definitely an interesting dichotomy in the

(05:12):
sense that you want to have pride for something that
is also you want to have pride in a place
that is also you know, mistreating you Richard as a
veteran when you enlisted, how much was the thought of
the inequities that still trouble America? How much did that

(05:33):
play a role in you choosing to enlist or even
being hesitant to enlist initially?

Speaker 5 (05:38):
Yeah, I mean I think like the first thing I
can think of is I joined shortly after Obama was elected,
and so it was like this momentum, like we have
a black you know, commander in chief, the first black president.
So maybe there was something, Naiva say. I was also young,
and young people tend to join. You're talking about even
in World War Two, the predominant, like the majority of
folks that were joining or were like nineteen and twenty
and twenty one, These your young people, right, So I

(06:01):
think I was naive around the inequities, and my story
kind of bears out kind of all of the lessons
learned over the last decade since I went to Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
And talking with other black soldiers. Was there any sense
of community or is it kind of every man for
himself when you're dealing with inequities within the armed services.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
I think it depends on where you end up getting stationed.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
When I was in training, I think that you know,
we kind of congregated based off of race. I just
naturally folks kind of gravitated to the folks that they
were kind.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Of wanting to be around.

Speaker 5 (06:34):
And then I ended up being stationed at a small
base in Germany, a former Nazi base actually in bomb Holder, Germany,
where it was predominantly white. I had only a few
black soldiers that I could even befriend, let alone kind
of build community with. And that was actually probably the
beginning of the awakening, right because I was kind of
thrust from going up. I was a student at Morehouse

(06:54):
about a year and a half before, and then suddenly
I dropped out of Morehouse and found myself at the
middle of Bombholder, Germany around a bunch of Midwestern white boys,
and it was just it was different. I remember that
first like six months, that first six months going into
the going into work, and like the kinds of conversations
that these folks were like engaging in, like you know,

(07:15):
they was just kind of skewing the things that they
were hearing all Fox News. It was happening back in
twenty and ten, right right right after Obama had got
elected and.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
All those things. So it was discouraging.

Speaker 5 (07:25):
I remember coming to work and kind of like just
was it was always kind of an awakening every single
day with how ignorant folks could be, how prejudicial folks
would be, how sexist and homophobic folk could be, let alone,
how racist folks could be. So after about about six months,
I just I stopped engaging in the dialogue because it
was exhausting and I had to prepare to go to war,

(07:47):
right and with these same people, right, So I felt
like I was just kind of a losing battle to
try to feel like I could change their minds or
all they needed was one more conversation for me, or
one more one more book to read, or one more
book recommendation to you know, edify themselves. And you know,
these folks aren't really interested in learning.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
How do you have like in upon and listening, How
do you possess a sense of pride in something that
is not fixed within that organization? Like if we just
go with the Harlem Hill Fighters, right, all right, Harlemhill
Fighters they go over to France during World War One,
they whoop a lot of ass, they get a lot
of metals, and then they come home and they can't

(08:27):
even be in their own parade for the home coming
to even celebrate that you made it back safely to America.
And then you look at groups like the Tuskegee Airmen
who had a lot of their accomplishments overlooked. And it
was a long time before we really in my opinion,
properly gay those brothers. They're flowers. So how much did
you identify with the black person's relationship with the military

(08:50):
of the past and reconcile that with the present? And
you know, why are these black service members? Why are
they so important to military history.

Speaker 4 (08:57):
I think what's powerful about black military service is that
Black Americans have always been fighting two wars at the
same time. They've been fighting for equality within the military,
but they've also been trying to fight to make America
actually up to its ideals. I think that's true in
World War One with the hom heel fighters, It's true
in World War Two with Tuski Airmen and all the
more than million black Americans who served, And it's true
after the military becomes deserogated. That even once military deserogates

(09:21):
in nineteen forty eight and you see some improvements, the
kind of military that Richer was a part of still
has racial discrimination as a key part of it. It
is still facing a lot of the challenges with regards
to racism that are fully meshed in the culture of
the military. And so I think is powerful about the
fact that Black Americans have continued to serve the country
is that they're truly demanding the country be a better

(09:43):
version of itself. They are trying to articulate and trying
to bring in into being a better version of the
United States.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
And rich the same question to you, how did knowing
those stories of the journey of black people through the military,
you know, how much did you feel a connection to that?

Speaker 2 (10:01):
You know, early on, I.

Speaker 5 (10:04):
Think that it really actually happened after I'd gotten out.
I came I came back, finished my last three years
in the military. While I was kind of matriculating the
beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement was kind of
proliferating in the country. I was kind of struggling to
reconcile my service. I wasn't connected to a lot of
vets right, like even fewer vets that serve now that

(10:26):
they did back then. So there wasn't a lot of
community to discourse with or engage with. And it's really
what was the impetus to my project was the desire
to kind of better understand the inequities that were that.
So I'll start with uh, you know, Unfortunately, I had
a suicide attempt about a year after getting out of
the military. Like I said, I was really really struggling

(10:48):
to reconcile my service and you know PTSD that I'd
had and just didn't feel like I was getting the
support that I needed. And when I was in the
psych world, we could didn't have TVs, we didn't have
any you know, anything to engage. So I had people
for bringing me books and I read a book called
When Affirmative Action Was White, a book by Irakats Nelson,
a professor out of Columbia, and there are two chapters

(11:10):
in it that focused on the GI Bill And essentially
this is wide social welfare program right after World War
Two that enabled many people to gain access to zero
VA back home asso, the ability by a home for
the first time, to ability go to school, and it
was the first time that I really like sat with the
history that black folk were mostly locked out of that.
So shortly after getting out the Psyche ward, I went

(11:31):
to an event because I was unemployed and the event
was for unemployed vets, and it just struck me that
the majority of that room was black, and so for me,
it was like, Yo, there's this history that I just
engaged with. That's very clear. I'm in the midst of
this Black Lives Matter movement, the ascension of Trump is happening,
trying to figure out how I can be of utility
and reconcile my service. And then I'm seeing, like, you know,

(11:51):
get to googling for a couple of weeks, trying to
do research and seeing that there's really no this history
isn't connected to the present day, and how can we
be having a racial justice conversation as a country and
it seems not to be happening in this institution which
historically has always had a race problem.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
And then kind of talking about some of my experiences.

Speaker 5 (12:10):
As well, I was beginning to connect the dots in
like this invisible kind of issue of race still permeating
in the military, and wanting to do a project that
would really kind of tie the historical threat for people
and make things plain and simple.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
And so that's what we've really been trying to do
for the last five years.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Let's talk a little bit about that for a second,
because your time in the army, you know, after that,
you wrote a New York Times article a couple of
years ago entitled Serving in the Army as a queer
black Man opened my eyes to racism in America. Now,
within your time enlisted, were you openly queer and if not,

(12:48):
what type of layers did that add to being within
the military.

Speaker 5 (12:53):
I came out when I was sixteen, and I think
part of even my experiences at Morehouse is trying to
reconcile what that meant, right to be a young black
man and to be gay. So I came in with
a good sense of myself and I think that's partly
why I survived the military and then but I had
I came in at the height of donational hotel. I
couldn't be out, you know, in the military, and that

(13:13):
was something that I was aware of going into it.
But it took about two years between training and that
first year being at my duty station getting ready for war,
and you know, ultimately, you know, you know, only hide
so much, right, And so I was facing a lot
of sexual harassment a lot of folks. It kind of
rumors were floating in the way and way in which

(13:34):
people were engaging with me. And on top of I
think like some racist based actions and like just some
some things that a lot of black folks face when
they're like, you know, significantly diminished or like, uh, they're not,
We're not We're not mentored.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
In the same ways. We're kind of set up for
failure in a lot of ways.

Speaker 5 (13:49):
So I definitely think like me being gay played a
role up until that point. But right before I went
a deployment, I was like, yo, I might go to
Afghanistan and die. So I'm not about to go there
without folks, you know, the people that I'm working with
directly knowing that you know, I'm gay and I'm not
something that I'm ashamed of. So I came out to
my to my direct unit, the folks that I was

(14:10):
working with, specifically the physicians because I was a combat
medic and my other medics, and they were largely supportive, right,
but I was also it just it just so happened
that a policy had passed where they do Na's hotel
was still in place, but it was under review and
so they weren't kicking anybody actively out right, And it's
just that that window of time, and then the policy

(14:31):
actually changed on my birthday in Afghanistan, about nine months
into my deployment.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Did you here's here's a here's a here's a personal question,
but I feel compelled to ask it. By dealing with
discrimination from sexual orientation and then dealing with discrimination well
sexual orientation rumors and then dealing with racial discrimination, you

(14:57):
would combat medic. Did you regret signing up for the
one mos that requires you to maybe help somebody that
might have been talking shit to you the day before
on base.

Speaker 5 (15:12):
I never resented being a combat metic because I think
I got.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
To if you never had a moment where you're like,
these are the people I got to save if they
get shot.

Speaker 5 (15:22):
No, I mean, I would say one of the most
racist people that I engaged with was actually a physician
that was in charge of all of us.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Right, So you know.

Speaker 5 (15:35):
I remember Martin Luther King day and I'm a morehouse man.
Sometimes Martin Luther King's on TV. I want to give
him a shout out. And it was playing in our
age station, and he was like, turn that troublemaker off,
and he literally like what he said.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Right, and he said that it was like something out
of a movie. I was like, what is happening?

Speaker 5 (15:52):
Because he started talking about how Martin Luther came down
there and he was older, older gentleman, he came down
to keep us from Alabama and said it came down
and made all this trouble and my mammy got all
worked up. And he was talking. He basically had he
had a mammy. I never met someone who had one,
but he had.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (16:11):
It was just like something like that, right, But here's
somebody in charge of like the career trajectory of these soldiers,
let alone the kinds of engagements that we might have
with the soldiers of color, queer folks, whatever, local Afghan
populations and what have you. So, yeah, that opened my eyes,
but I never regretted being a combat medic. At the

(16:32):
end of the day, helping people is helping people.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
So you ain't you ain't never seen somebody that was
on the battlefield messed up and then you just walk
up to.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Never had the opportunity.

Speaker 5 (16:45):
Nah, nah, let me just stop right there.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Matthew before we go to the break. You know, everybody
talks about the struggles of the black man. But if
the black man got it bad on the Monday and
the Tuesday, then the black and get it bad all week.
Who were some of the other unsung black military heroes
in the military during that time, particularly black women. Let's
take a moment to educate people on you know, just

(17:14):
not only what was necessarily going on on the front
lines with black men, but also with black women in
any and all support capacities, if not combat.

Speaker 4 (17:21):
So within the military, there were thousands of black women
that participated in the Women's Army Corps. The largest group
was a group called the six hundred and eighty eighth
Central Postal Director of Itttalian that was under the command
of Major Charity Adams. And this group's job, once I
got sent to England in nineteen forty four, was to
distribute mail throughout the European theater, which is actually a
really difficult thing to do because you had troops moving
all the time.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
These tudents were moving.

Speaker 4 (17:42):
Back and forth across across France and Germany as the
as ors progressing, and he had a lot of guys
with common names, so they were trying to determine which
Bob Jones was receiving this mail or which Tom Johnson
was receiving this mail. But they developed these systems to
get mailed distributed throughout the European theater and ended up
moving about sixty five thousand pieces of male per day
throughout the European theater. It was really important for true morale.

(18:04):
Both black and white soldiers talked about the importance of
receiving male from home in terms of morale, But those
black women had to face the kind of racism and
sexism they would have been countered in the United States
as well, and so in terms of where they could
stay when they were in England, they had to fight
to get access to hotels, get fight to get access
to the Red Cross aid stations, and so every step
for them was a battle within the military. But they

(18:24):
performed extremely important role in industry being the male throughout
the European theater. On the home front, there are more
than a million Black Americans participated in defense industries, and
six hundred thousand of them were black women. And for them,
the war industry has really opened up important job opportunities
that just weren't there before the war. By and large,
black women had opportunities outside the home only either in

(18:45):
agricultural work or being domestic servants for white families. And
so a lot of these black women war workers. Essentially,
they were like black Rosie derivats. They said, the war
is what got them out of white people's kitchens. And
so those again were month by month, week by week
battles to get access these really well paid and important
war jobs. So black women's work was crucial to winning
the war.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Well, after the break, I want to talk a little
bit about you know, we've talked a little bit about
what the military was like, and we've gone a little
bit of what it was like specifically for you, But
I want to talk about what the military is doing
right now to try and in some of this discrimination,
and what other veterans are dealing with once they're on
the other side of their military service. This is beyond

(19:25):
the scenes. We'll be right back. Beyond the scenes. We
are back. We are talking about what it means to
be black in the military, black man in the military,
black and quer LGBTQIA plus in the military, what it
means to be a black woman in the military, and

(19:46):
we were talking, you know, during the break there, Richard,
just a little bit. Also not only how black women
were dealing with so many issues in trying to help
the military during that time, but it seems that a
lot of the issues that affected men also intersected with
them as well.

Speaker 5 (20:03):
Absolutely, one of the things that a lot of people
don't know or that black women under the policies that
don't ask, don't tell, were disproportionately affected. There's a new
study that is getting ready to be published that shows
that women broadly or in the last five years have
been up to four to five times more likely to
get a dishonorable discharge or other than honorable discharge, meaning
they're getting into the military and leaving without access to

(20:26):
their benefits. There's still a wide variety of issue around
sexual assault in the military, and the military hasn't done
a good job of really forthrightly addressing that issue. And
so you have all not only just discrimination kind of
rearing its ugly head, but all these other issues and
ways in which black women can and are marginalized that
are often invisible to folks.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yeah, then let's stay right there in that pocket, Matthew,
because I've always joke, isn't the right world. But I've
always said on stage that you know something going wrong
in the military because they got their own court and
they own jail. What of the job, you know, got
their own jail. In line, damn is everybody breaking the rules?

(21:07):
So how does the legacy of racism and white supremacy,
how does that still haunt our military today?

Speaker 4 (21:14):
Well, I think there's a through line in terms of
how criminal justice works in the military, how it's worked historically,
and how it works in the present.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
In the World War two time period.

Speaker 4 (21:22):
To pick up on what Richard was just saying, one
of the ways that black Americans were treated unfairly was
what they called blue discharges. These were written on blue paper,
but they essentially kicked people out of the military without
having to go through the court martial process for black
troops who they considered to be troublemakers. And so the
two primary populations that received these blue discharges were gay
and lesbian troops at the time because that wasn't allowed

(21:42):
during World War Two, and then black troops. Anyone who
organized or pushed back against the kind of racist treatment
they're receiving on base would received one of these discharges,
and that was a lesson honorable discharge, which meant that
they had no access to the benefits that they had
earned and worked for during the war. Fast forward into
the present and a lot of those same issues remain
with regards to how military justices carried out along lines

(22:02):
of race. I think this is where you see as
much as the military has progressed, and I think there
have been significant aspects of progress from the World War
two area to the present, it's still in sitution that
has a lot of the existing racial prejudices of the
nation that in many ways it can't not have those
when you're bringing together this wide cross section of demographics, race, gender,

(22:23):
sexuality from all across the country. If you get people
in power who have pre existing racial biases, that's going
to lead to disparate and unequal treatment for people of
color in particular once they're in the military, and you
see it reflected in the kind of legal punishments and
court martials and other less and hounimble discharges that the
black troops continue to get today.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
We were talking at work about the NFL and black coaches,
right and how that's a problem in terms of having
more black coaches means that there has to be changes
at the top higher than the level of coach. So
that's GM, team president, owner or league officials. Right, So
when you talk about eliminating racism, that's structural and institutional.

(23:05):
How much of this falls on people, Let's just say
at the Pentagon level to stop with, Like if you
look at like, say January six right, January sixth, I
think it was like over twenty people that were active military,
not like for military.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah yeah, not like.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
You got radicalized later after you let no, you was
just at base yesterday. I'd be right back, Lieutenant got
to run down to DC for some of the January's,
I'd be right back. Yet, Like, how do you adjudicate that,
how do you punish that? How do you regulate that
when it's so ingrained, when you have monuments named after
all of these Confederate generals? Like how do you stay

(23:44):
And I hear you breathing already, Like how do you
change any of this culture? Where the solution even begin?

Speaker 2 (23:53):
It's complex?

Speaker 5 (23:54):
Right, I think that we're the focus of the project
that I've been tearing out of the course of the
last few years has been is looking at the history first,
and so you know, kind of focus almost exclusively on
veteran affairs issues like these, the harms that have been
done when it comes to the military itself, like race
is a factor from recruitment to retirement, and there are

(24:15):
multi faceted prongs when you have conversations about how to
address those things. Right, So let's just take recruitment for instance,
we know, based off of the geospatial map study that
was done on the city of San Diego, the majority
of recruitment that was happening in black neighborhoods were for
service oriented roles, right in low skill, low age really roles,
and they were recruiting officers from white, affluent neighborhoods.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Right.

Speaker 5 (24:39):
So we haven't been able to strapolate that study outward
to see what's happening in other cities, but we can
kind of take that as a model.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right.

Speaker 5 (24:47):
We know that just within the military itself has a
broken equal unemployment opportunity system, right, the ways in which
folks can make complaint plaints and adjudicate complaints without fear
of retribution. The statistics show that folks don't try that process.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Trust.

Speaker 5 (25:01):
Folks don't trust that system, right, So you're getting funneled
into the military, oftentimes with only access to kind of
service oriented roles. You have the academies. Really that these
military academies, which more of the top brass, end up
kind of being funneled through. You have a race issue
really with recruitment and the ways in which they target

(25:22):
black populations to attend those schools.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
So that ends up having impact thirty.

Speaker 5 (25:26):
Or forty years down the line when these people become
the heads and leaders of the military, and then you
have a white nationalist problem in the country. You know,
the Pentagon doesn't want to be forthright and honest about
right and the ways in which they tackle it because
there is a very uncomfortable discourse around what does that mean?
Around politics? Because what I found and the ways in
which people were being radicalized. And I tell this this

(25:48):
story because it's an important one. Like I served on
a former Nazi based in Germany. Right, it was not
uncommon to see people walking around with mind Coft and
reading it like for leisure.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
Right, just white like sports illustrated.

Speaker 5 (26:03):
Yeah, yes, yes, And and there were folks that were
just in you know, and they would say, oh, I'm.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Just interested because not like a book on tape nothing
like a kindle.

Speaker 5 (26:13):
I mean, for all I know they have they had
all those things. But yeah, bringing it to work and
reading it, it was it was normal.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Right.

Speaker 5 (26:18):
Fast forward four years, I'm getting out, I'm going to work.
One day, shortly after getting out the military, I pull
pull up on a paper and I realized there was
a gentleman who we'd gone to basic training at the
same place at the same time. I never I don't
believe I've met this person, but we ended up being
stationed at bomb Holder, which is a very small base
in Germany at the same time, in the same unit,
deploying to Afghanistan at the same time, getting out of

(26:40):
the military at the same time. You know, fast forward
three years. He becomes a white nationalist, comes to New
York to murder a black person, just a random black person. Radicalized, right,
And to me, that's when everything started to I started
to connect the dots more that, like, you know, the
radicalization that's happening.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
In the military.

Speaker 5 (26:55):
Conspiracy theories were rampant in the military. Like I literally
would be talking to commanders and they'd be talking about like, oh,
FEMA camps are real, and like you know, and these
are people that are entrusted with thousands of you know,
the leadership of thousands.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Of people, potentially hundreds of people.

Speaker 5 (27:11):
So you know, it's just, yeah, a radicalization in the
in the in the in the in the army is
really I think the big issue. But I look at
like something someone like Bishop Garrison. He got appointed last year, uh,
an appointment the first of its kind to report directly
to the Secretary of Defense, and he lasted less than
a year in that position, a black man who was

(27:32):
appointed to oversee uh, you know, uh, the issues around race,
the issues around diversity and inclusion, and within a year
he's being kind of pushed out it. You know, I
you know, it's there's no easy solution, but there has
to be a willingness to have the conversation.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
And that's that's.

Speaker 5 (27:49):
Something that's continuously pushed off because race still plays a
major role, right, a major role for folks, and and
they want to they want to keep that racial hierarchy,
and there are folks in the military that that abide by.

Speaker 4 (27:59):
There's deep historical roots for this as well. So there
were countless stories of black troops during World War Two
who saw white troops run up the Confederate flag either
alongside or instead of the star stripes. Once they took
over these towns in France, and you just have to
stop and imagine, like, what.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
Did that feel like?

Speaker 4 (28:14):
That's what that look like to these black troops to
see their fellow soldiers or their white countrymen praised the
Confederate flag and they absolutely knew what they were doing, right,
both sides did that. Everyone understood that was a signal
for slavery and for a racial hierarchy that could be
traced back to the Jim Crow South. Part of what
was important about the military finally desegregated in nineteen forty
eight is they recognized that racism and sererogation made the

(28:36):
military a less effective fighting force. That during the war,
surrogation was stupid. It made no sense strategically right, you
were doing everything in duplicated. It was justly complicated. They
were segregating blood from white and black blood donors, even
though there's.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
No scientific basis to do that.

Speaker 4 (28:52):
It's not because of political correctness or anything else that
led them to desegrogated. It was due to intense political
pressure from black activist but also to the fact that
military leaders finally identified that we can take better advantage
of the man power of the country if we actually
are integrated. That they were turning away black Americans with PhDs,
with language skills, with degrees from Harvard because they didn't

(29:15):
want to have black Americans serving in certain units. And
so I think to Richard's point, there's been a lot
of backtracking in the last couple of decades that one
thing that comes out of Vietnam is you have once
the military becomes an all volunteer force, you start to
see vastly more numbers of Black Americans and Latin X
Americans participating in the military. You see many more minorities
in the military in the past three decades, but you

(29:36):
also see the development of a very intense and increasingly
public white nationalists strain in the military, and it's hard
for the military to have both those things coexist. You
can't ask people of color to serve disproportionately to the
percentage of the population while also still cultivating and not
doing anything to counteract an intense white nationalist thread in
the military. Think, if there's any hope for where the

(29:58):
military might go in the future, it's trying to recognize
that it's really mission critical for the military to be
a space where racism isn't part of the day to
day culture that you want this to be a space
we're all Americans who choose to serve can do so proudly.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
I want to say one more thing. Racism is a spectrum.

Speaker 5 (30:14):
Right, you have white nationalists, but you also have the
everyday person who might have racial biases. But the way
that they move, the way that they engage compounds over
time and affects a black person's career, potentially in the military.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Right, So when we.

Speaker 5 (30:27):
Have these conversations about racism, it's often like it kind
of very easily goes to the white nationalists conversation when
like the everyday racial bias and the attempts to try
to intervene in that with education are being intervened, right
or not being taken seriously. And I think what happened
at West Point last year was a perfect example. When

(30:48):
there was a class being stood up to essentially kind
of engage with the concepts of seeing critical race theory.
It ended up on the Congressional floor, right with like
members decrying that like, how dare we try to see
to teach the former leaders of our military about the
history of racist country and the systemic ways in which
it shows up. And so anyway, I just wanted to
put that in a conversation about racism being a spectrum.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
On the other side of your military career when you retire,
and we've kind of raised the surface a little bit,
but let's stick in on this. What are some of
the inequities and the types of benefits black veterans have
received throughout history. My uncle is an army veteran and
God bless him, this man and spent about the last
five six years trying to prove that he has what

(31:32):
they don't think he has. And he keeps getting sent
to every single VA doctor that ain't got an appointment,
and it ain't get well. You had to get a
second opin, got to do this paper. It's just a
long ass dance. And not only what are the inequities
that black veterans have received throughout history, but what impact
has that had on veterans' access to housing and education

(31:53):
and healthcare and just just general economic opportunities.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
Historically it's had a huge impact. So the GI Bill
was perhaps the most important piece of legislation in our
nation's history. It's what enabled a whole generation of white
veterans to come back and enter the middle class, to
be able to raise themselves up and raise their families
up because it provided access to low interest via backed
home mortgages, provide access to college tuition benefits, loans, be
able to start businesses, and range of healthcare benefits and

(32:20):
other benefits as well. But the way that legislation was written,
it was largely authored by Southern Democratic politicians who are surrogationists,
and so they made sure that legislation was distributed not
at the federal level, but at the state and the
local level, which meant that these local VA officials could discriminate,
discriminate once black veterans came into these local offices, and
so we have countless stories from nineteen forty six forty

(32:41):
seven of black veterans going to their local branches and
just getting the run around, either being denied outright or
being steered into vocational programs. And what they're trying to
do is go to a four year college. They're being
told that they can't use benefits for certain reasons, and
in terms of mortgages, probably the largest portion of the
benefits all across the country, black veterans find it impossible
to get mortgages to live in the majority of neighborhoods.

(33:04):
It's true in New York and New Jersey, it's true
in California. That has a dire long term impact in
terms of the racial wealth gap. There's a group at
Brandei's University called the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity
that's been running some studies to try to calculate what
the long term impact of this is. And what they
found is that black veterans benefits from the GI Bill.
For World War Two vets was only worth about forty
percent of what white veterans got, and over a lifetime

(33:26):
that was about one hundred thousand dollars per veteran. Now
you can imagine what that means in terms what black
veterans from World War Two could pass on to their families.
When you look at what should be very upsetting numbers
in terms of the racial wealth gap in the country,
a huge part of that can be traced back to
the GI Bill. And so historically this is really a
fulcrum point in terms of how the country either could
have moved closer to racial equity in terms of wealth

(33:48):
the way their policy was written.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
We moved in the other directions.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
So the GI Bill opened up gaps between veterans that
shouldn't have been their base on their service.

Speaker 5 (33:55):
Yeah, and to piggyback off that, I think Matthew and
I had a discussion last week. He had mentioned that,
and I never really thought about it, but it makes
perfect sense because a lot of folks assumed that Okay,
well they weren't able to go to white schools with
the GI bill, but there was an infrastructure at HPCs
to absorb the number of black vets that were returning.
And so what you had was not only this stripping
of generational wealth that could be passed down through home loans,

(34:17):
but also the disappearance of a professional class that could
have arised from you know, access to college education in maths.
So really for the first time, and I think that
has a direct correlation to the industrialization, what we see
in inner cities throughout the fifties and sixties and seventies,
and urban plight. It has a direct correlation because that

(34:38):
generational wealth compounded, the ability to be able to educate.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yourself out of circumstance compounded.

Speaker 5 (34:44):
And then I like to start around Vietnam, like you know,
go from World War two to Vietnam, the nation's first
fully integrated war, and Black vets were disproportionately being kicked
out of the military continuously, over one hundred thousand of
them kicked out without access to the benefits.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
We've been talking.

Speaker 5 (35:01):
Predominantly about the GI Bill, right, which is a huge
social welfare program, very important, but disability compensation is another
avenue of income in the thousands of dollars potentially a
month that folks are not getting access to.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
And we were able to prove that there.

Speaker 5 (35:15):
Was a statistically significant disparity with respect to the denial
rates that black vets were facing, and one of which
were that over the our five year period from twenty
fifteen to twenty twenty, black veterans were almost thirty percent
less likely to get disability for something like PTSD. And
that's just in the most recent conflict, right, So we're
going to the same wars and dealing with like all

(35:36):
the things that you just said, discrimination and lack of
access to genuine opportunity, and that has a psychological effect
as well.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
But these things aren't being taken serious when you go
to the VA to.

Speaker 5 (35:46):
Talk about like I have PTSD, and it might look
different from a white VET, or maybe it does look
the same as a white FET. But I'm still being
denied this disability compensation. And so the case that's getting
prepared now is actually a gentleman who served Vietnam by
the name of Conly Monk, who I think is one
of the most important black vets in modern American history.

(36:06):
He served two tours of Vietnam, got kicked out his
last month in his second tour. He went from the
age of nineteen to twenty one, serving two tours in
the Vietnam. Like I said, he was from New Haven,
and a white superior called him the end word. He
got in a physical altercation. Forty years later, he still
doesn't have access to his benefits. Five years ago, in
twenty fifteen, he was six years ago, he was able

(36:28):
to win a landmark case with YEAH that gave anyone
who had been discharged a dishonorable discharge or other denominal discharge,
who had post traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury
access to their benefits. What that means in real time
is that they compensated him for three years of the
back pay that they owed him, but they still owe
him from all the pay that he didn't get all

(36:49):
the way from nineteen seventy one, right, So now he
is levying a suit against the VA, and his brother
is suing on behalf of their deceased father who was
a World War Two vetter and didn't get access to
the GI bill. Because another thing that we don't talk
about is service is also intergenerational, So you have the
same families often being stripped of access to these benefits

(37:11):
and then it being compounded over time.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
And so, yeah, Richard, you were fortunate in the sense
that your mother took you in after your suicide attempt
and was there to be an integral part in your
growth and helping you out of the PTSD and helping
you out of the depression and helping you back into
the world of employment. There are a lot of veterans

(37:36):
that do not have that type of care and concern
within their family tree. How has the VA failed Black
veterans in the scope of just mental health? Like, at
any point before your suicide attempt, did you ever feel like, well,
maybe I should just go to the VA, and then
a voice in your hair going, nah, they ain't gonna

(37:57):
be able to do shit. Was there ever hesitant? See
did you go to the VA. Did you seek out
mental health services before the suicide attempt? Or was the
attempt the first fissure you know in your stability at that.

Speaker 5 (38:09):
Time, I did. I didn't know that I had PTSD,
but I went to the VA. I sat down with
a psychologist there and was basically told that I had
something called adjustment disorder, which I don't know what that is,
but talked to people since they were like, well, that's
a form of PTSD, but a lot of that's a
term that they basically used to say, oh, well, we
can't really help, you don't have a lot of resources

(38:29):
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
I just felt sidelined.

Speaker 5 (38:31):
It took so much courage to try to go and
actually have the conversation, because you know, people are proud.
I'm a proud person, and I didn't want to admit
that I had something wrong, especially being a combat medic,
because I got to see folks who were really messed up, right,
So in my mind, I'm like, well, I'm not a
mess up as them, so I'm gonna be okay, I'm
gonna go figure it out. But I went and was
dismissed and then found myself even in what led to

(38:54):
my suicide attempt was then they started. They gave me
an antidepressant, which in the law tim I found out
I was bipolar, but they gave me an anti depression
that made it ten times worse and that which led
to my attempt. So it was just like mismanagement kind
of all around because the things that I was expressing
and trying to make plane wasn't being taken seriously.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
I was just you know, so so yeah.

Speaker 5 (39:16):
And I think by way of how the VA has failed,
I mean, I think it has not wanted to address
the fact that it has a race issue. There was
a survey of VIA employees about two or three years ago,
and of them it something of words of seventy percent
said that they dealt with racism or they saw discrimination
on their in their everyday jobs. Right of the of
the employees that were actually surveyed. What does that mean

(39:38):
for the black vets that have to actually go and
get get and get service there. And a story that
actually happened recently this last year. There was an older
black veteran that went to the VA was basically seeking
help for PTSD and they'd forgotten about him.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
He was there for hours.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
He ended up killing himself inside the VA, right, And
so these are just kind of added total conversations about
just systemic failures because you know, our pain isn't seen
as the same or what our experiences aren't as validated.
There's not enough cultural competency within the VA, and I
don't know there are efforts to try to change that,
but there are actors, just like there are actors that

(40:15):
are entrenched in within the Department of Defense that just
don't see race as an issue or purposely just want
to continue to have the disparities continue to ravage. And
if we hadn't done the study with YM put pressure on,
I don't know if they would have even said, hey,
we should address the fact that there's a thirty percent
disparity with PTSD.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
I don't know, Matthew, what role does the American public
play and contributing positively into the lives of veterans, because
because like we we know we are in America, right,
you know, we celebrate the veteran and we love that veteran.
And then you go to the football game, everybody give
it up for the veteran. Look at that veteran over

(40:54):
there sitting there, and join the game and we clap
for that veteran. We pride ourselves on honoring folks who
risk their lives on the battlefield. But throughout history, and
we know what's going on in the present day, but
throughout history, what has been the experience of black veterans
returning home?

Speaker 4 (41:11):
The experience of Black World or Two veterans returning home
was that they were openly disrespected in the communities they
came back to. They were on the wrong side of
the GI Bill policy. By and large, they were openly
harassed by a lot of white communities. Their stories of
black veterans as soon as they got back on ships
being directed white veterans this way, Negro veterans that way,
and oftentimes they didn't use the polite term there.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
There's hearing racial obtects as soon as they get off.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
As soon as they get off a boat, they're being
directed to not march their troops through white towns. They
have to take a circuit as path it only goes
through black towns. And there's at least a dozen black
Order Two veterans who were murdered some wires still wearing
their military uniforms because too many white citizens thought that
these black veterans were going to be leaders in civilrice
moment after the war, and black veterans were.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
They were.

Speaker 4 (41:56):
They came back and they demanded equal rights, They demanded
the kind of freedom inmocracy their for abroad. But the
kind of treatment these black veterans received was horrific and
it was not fitting out their service. I think, thinking
of the present, what does it mean for the American
public to actually support veterans and troops is to think
about what it means to support individual veterans and troops
that I think too often you find yourself at supporting event.
Everyone will clap for the veterans when they stand up,

(42:17):
which is great in theory. But then when push comes
to shove and money's to being allocated to the VA,
your money's to be allocated to support the actual lives
of veterans, to make sure that they have the resources
they need to re enter American side and to be
able to thrive professionally. That's where we need the American
public to stand up. It's not enough to say that
one supports the troops or one supports veterans. At a

(42:40):
supporting event, you're kind of generically supporting the category. Then
what you need to do is support the actual living
people in your communities who served this country.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
After the break, I want to talk solutions and Richard,
I want to dig a little bit more into your
program and what you were doing to help the veteran
as my uncle calls it, veterans think that's how black
people say, vet vetch vet trends. This is beyond the scenes.
We'll be right back on. I want to end with

(43:11):
a couple questions about what we can do. You know,
with regards to solutions and Richard, you have spent a
lot of time sitting and building out this project that
you've talked about a couple You've already mentioned it a
couple times, but let's really pull back the layers on it.
You know, it's called the Black Veterans Project. With everything
you've laid out today in terms of the systemic issues

(43:32):
within it for enlisted officers and the issues that retired
officers deal with, are you optimistic about seeing progress around
the issues of racial equity within the military, because you
know you'll start a project, I'm going to solve the problem,
and then you look at the problem you'd be like,
whoah shit.

Speaker 5 (43:52):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean I wouldn't be doing this if
I didn't feel like we could have an impact.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
I think, I look at what we've done over the
last four years.

Speaker 5 (44:01):
It really started with the idea that you know, when
I was googling black vet, nothing really showed up except
a few miscellaneous organizations, of whom we've begun to collaborate with.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Some of them.

Speaker 5 (44:10):
A lot of older black vet Black Vets have been
organizing forever. Right, there are black vet organizations as old
as out of World War One.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Right.

Speaker 5 (44:19):
I got to go to an old American legion that's
a historically black American legion, and they were founded by
returning black gis who didn't have anywhere else to go,
and they formed community and they ended up doing amazing things.
But my generation is what understands the Internet, right, and
so when I started the project, I realized that like
their history just wasn't being told and there wasn't enough coverage.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
So I think, you know, we've been part and parcel
to the proliferation of a lot.

Speaker 5 (44:44):
Of storytelling around, specifically with the press, like working with
the press and edifying journalists and making sure that folks
are talking about this in the digital sphere around like
just historical contributions, but also like the inequities, just making
sure that the inequities aren't lost. It's very easy to
put up a photo of the Tuskegee Airmen and say, oh,
that's enough, But then you're not talking about how some

(45:05):
of those men were obstructed from the GI build and
the compelling generational impact, right. So I just wanted to
kind of force a more rounded conversation and then you
know what we've been able to glean by way of
data and then kind of connecting researchers and folks that
are really interested in reparations for black vets, because.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
That's really at the heart of the work that we've
been doing is that I.

Speaker 5 (45:26):
Believe and we believe that veterans are the best position
to push forward. Black vets are the best position to
push forward a conversation about reparations in this country, especially
because we don't have to go all the way back
to slavery. We can talk about something that was done
in the last one hundred years, let alone the last
fifty to sixty years that has been affecting black black veterans.
But also when we talk about black vets, we're also

(45:47):
talking about black families the black community, right, They're not
mutually exclusive.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
So yeah, So then to that point, Matthew, can we
can we legislated? Is there anything being done on a
policy level to combat racism within the ranks of the military,
because I always feel like the military, like you have
the federal government. In my opinion, you have the federal
government and then you had the military, and like, the
military is always treated as this weird annexed fifty first state,

(46:18):
if you will, that has their own jail, their own court,
their own funding, their own little network of hospitals and everything.
How can DC better legislate stuff, you know, even beyond reparations.
Is that even happening right now?

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yeah? Let me answered in two ways.

Speaker 4 (46:33):
So on the military side, absolutely, I mean, theoretically, the
military is a taxpayer funded institution and it should be
accountable to the kind of treatment that Americans who serve
their country are receiving. I think the question of when
the military observes racism happening, whether it's those explicit asks
of racism or it's the kind of day to day
perpetuation of racism that harms black trips and people of

(46:57):
color in the military and prevents them from having long
sustained beneficial careers. Those are things that the military can
hold troops to account for. That's going to take work,
it's going to take action, it's going to take leadership.
But the military is nothing if it's not a structured organization.
It's a hierarchical organization. So if military leaders say this
is going to happen, and they hold their supportinents to account,

(47:18):
that is something that can change if the American public
demands it.

Speaker 3 (47:21):
The change and the other piece.

Speaker 4 (47:22):
Picking up what Richard was saying about policy legislation, there
was a legislation that was introduced last year called the
GI Bill Restoration Act that would go a long way
towards addressing the wrong of the GI Bill and the
racial discrimination that happened there. It was introduced on Veterans'
Day twenty twenty one, just last year, by Seth Moulton
and James Clayburn and the House representatives, and by Raphael Warnock.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
In the Senate.

Speaker 4 (47:43):
What that legislation would do is it would provide those
Gibul benefits to the descendants of Black World or two
veterans who had been denied those benefits, so would enabled
them to be able to use it for home loans
or for college tuition. That's a small piece of a
much larger conversation about reparations. But reparations is about repairs
both the financial aspect and trying to make right the
kind of benefits that these black veterans should have received.

(48:05):
But also it's about acknowledging that this was wrong. This
was something that black veterans had earned through their service
in World War Two that had been denied to them,
and so just the possibility of passing legislation beyond the
very important financial aspect would do justice to the service
of these black veterans and help to repair that wrong.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
I want to end optimistically, what can we the regular
people of the world do to properly honor and support
veterans other than letting them board first on the airplane
and giving them fifty five cent coffee at fast food establishments,
because we all know that's what fixes all of these issues,

(48:45):
being able to get on the plane first. What else
can we do, Richard, I'll start with you.

Speaker 5 (48:53):
There are abundance of policies that have been pushed forward
to try to address the issue of race in the military,
But how can the American public I think one, it's
edifying themselves on the necessity of ensuring that a piece
of legislation like the Giblo Restoration Act can actually do
some level of repair. They have intent to try to
break that bill up, to try to pass components of

(49:14):
it next year, specifically the housing provision in the one
hundred and eighteenth Congress, which would give quite literally potentially
millions of African Americans access to zero VA back home loans.
But we already know that there is still a rampant
discrimination with respect to black folks access to home loans.
Right we need let alone home appraisals and all these
other things. So what is the private sector doing also

(49:35):
to just ensure that the landscape is set so that
this reparations can potentially be instituted in a way that
can actually have an impact. Because as it stands now,
we might pass this bill by the grace of God,
and the impact that it could have had is undermined
by the lack of public awareness and also a lack
of real due diligence with respect to how we actually

(49:59):
get this bet to fit in the hands of the
families that have been affected. Because it's also an invisible wound. Right,
And I'll say this as the last part. It's like
one in engaging with a lot of journals specifically around
World War Two in the harms of the and access
to the GI Bill, is that a lot of families
don't even know that this happened to them, right, or
I can't even fully articulate it. And you have a
whole generation that very close to not being with us anymore. Right,

(50:22):
But their families certainly bear the scars economically, at least
of in access to the GI Bill. So I think
the biggest thing that the American public can do is
educate themselves, engage with the history by half American read
read a book.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Honestly, I think that.

Speaker 5 (50:41):
That is like the best way so that we're not
engaging ignorant based discourse.

Speaker 4 (50:46):
Matthew, how do we support I'm a historian, so I'll
say the same thing I say to my students that
the stories we tell about the past matter. And so
I think a first starting point is really reckoning, honestly
with the history of our country, particularly when it comes
to military that black Americans people of color have served
this country.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
Throughout our nation's history.

Speaker 4 (51:01):
They've been deeply, deeply patriotic, but that service hasn't always
been repaid, and so I think a starting point is
recognizing that veterans have been treated unequally throughout American history,
and particularly with the story about World War Two. I
think in the present, I think it's important to talk
about veterans as actual living people. I think we're at
a point right now in our country where the military
is drawn from about one percent of the entire yeo's population.

(51:21):
So you have the one percent who serves in the
ninety nine percent of everyone else, and we've fallen into
this trap where veterans are treated as heroes as a
sort of generic category, but then too often ignored as individuals,
particularly for black veterans and veterans of color. That is
a disservice to veterans and also to the larger American public.
I think as citizens who are not in the military
are not veterans, we have to treat veterans as sort

(51:44):
of actual living and breathing people who deserve the benefits
that they earned and deserve to be welcome back into
American communities and given all the support they need to
find careers professional pathways that do justice to the important
work they did within the military.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well, I can't thank you all enough for this wonderful,
wonderful conversation. I appreciate you all for going beyond the
scenes with me today. That's all the time we have.
Thank you to our guests Richard and Matthew, and be
sure to check out Matthew's new book, Half American, the
epic story of African Americans fighting World War Two at
home and abroad. Thank you both, Thanks Lit, Thank you

(52:24):
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Speaker 2 (52:45):
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Speaker 3 (52:56):
This has been a Comedy Central podcast e