Our Body Politic

Gen Z In The Midterms: 25-Year-Old Congressional Candidate Maxwell Frost and HBCUs Voter Base

Episode Summary

This week, we’re spotlighting a powerful voting bloc: Generation Z. First, Farai interviews Maxwell Alejandro Frost, Democratic nominee for Florida’s 10th Congressional District, about how his Afro-Cuban identity and work as an organizer and musician help shape his political platform and views. Then Farai is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of MSNBC’s “Into America” Trymaine Lee who shares what he’s learned about the political interests of young Black voters attending historically Black colleges and universities in his new series, “The Power of the Black Vote.”

Episode Transcription

Farai Chideya:

Hi folks. We are so glad you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We'd also love you to join in financially supporting the show. If you're able, you can find out more at ourbodypolitic.com/donate. We're here for you with you and because of you. Thank you.

Farai Chideya:

This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. This week we're continuing our focus on the midterms. The oldest members of Generation Z are roughly 25, and they've already been courted as a powerful voting group. Now their generation is turning out candidates for Congress. Fun fact, while you can vote 18, you must be 25 to serve in the US House. At exactly 25 years of age, Maxwell Alejandro Frost is the Democratic nominee for Florida's 10th congressional district. Hailing for Orlando, this Afro Cuban organizer has worked on protecting abortion rights, ending gun violence, and giving formerly incarcerated people access to the vote.

Farai Chideya:

And if he's elected in November, he could make history as one of the first members of Gen Z to serve in Congress. We spoke to Maxwell about what he envisions for the future of US politics, plus how his personal experience helped crystallize that vision. Hi Maxwell.

Maxwell Frost:

Hey. How are you doing? Thank you so much for having me.

Farai Chideya:

I am grateful to be here with you. So you're 25 years old, You quit your job, you drive Uber to support yourself, and you are the Democratic nominee for Florida's 10th congressional district. But walk us up to here. What was little Alejandro doing? Is this where you grew up and how did you decide to do this?

Maxwell Frost:

Yeah. I got involved in politics 10 years ago. Central Florida's where I was born and raised. My family's from here. This is my home. I went to an arts high school, middle school. I always joke around that it was a little like high school musical, but not exactly. But either way, I played the jazz drums. I was a drum major and did a lot of jazz band at the school. Before every concert, my best friends and I would go across the street to this restaurant, load up on a ton of junk food. And I remember the night specifically, we were there eating before a show, then there was a silence that fell across the entire restaurant. We looked around and we looked at each other and we looked up at the television screens and saw that somebody walked into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut at murdered 20 children, six teachers.

Maxwell Frost:

And seeing that had a profound impact on me. I went to the show, I couldn't play right that night. I kept thinking about it and sometimes in life you just feel like something in your gut that you need to do something. Well, I felt like I needed to go to Washington DC for the memorial that was going on. So I went to that memorial and that vigil and that's where I had my call to action. It was the night of the vigil and I was sitting across from a guy named Matthew Soto. Now Matthew's sister, her name was Vicky Soto. She was a teacher at Sandy Hook, that when she heard the gunshots, she hid her children in the closet and hid them around the classroom to save their lives and she was killed.

Maxwell Frost:

And I remember sitting across from Matthew, hearing him talk about his sister, cry about his sister. I'll tell you, seeing a 16 year old with a demeanor of a 60 year old change my life forever. I went straight to my hotel room. I remember I even called my mother because she's a public school educator of 30 years. And I made the commitment that for the rest of my life I would fight for a world where no one has the feel the way I saw Matthew feel that night.

Farai Chideya:

When you talked to your friends and said, I want to do something about this. How did your friends react?

Maxwell Frost:

They were always very involved in a lot of the work I did. I remember when I decided to run for student government president, my campaign was my best friends and my friends have always been such a big part of my life. Not to get too deep, but I was adopted at birth. So I've never really known blood. And what that means for me is I just value my friendships that much more, my friends or my family.

Farai Chideya:

It sounds like you have a lot of family of love. You have the family that adopted you, you have your friends. What does family mean to you?

Maxwell Frost:

Yeah. Well, for me, my family's very much been a chosen family. My biological mother had many hardships just being a woman of color born into a zip code that had been forgotten about. She had already multiple children. I would've had many siblings. And I feel so lucky to be adopted by a mother who's been a special education teacher for 30 years, this is her last year, she's retiring. A father who's a full-time musician who's always instilled music in me and really through art, taught me how to be vulnerable than what it means to open yourself up and be vulnerable to art and music.

Farai Chideya:

You talking about music makes me think about the family of Nelba Marquez Greene, whose daughter Anna Grace was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting and she and her husband have opened a magnet school for music and arts in their daughter's name. And they have a son who's now a young man who survived the attack at Sandy Hook. Music does such incredible things. What does music mean to you?

Maxwell Frost:

Music and art means everything. There's that quote from Dead Poets and I always talk about it on the stump and on the campaigns. Politics and medicine and law are all about sustaining life, but culture, love, family, music, dance, these are things that make life worth it. And for me, politics ought to be about ensuring that we can make life worth it and make that worth accessible for everybody.

Farai Chideya:

Well, let's dig into some of the things that you care about as a candidate. Your political platform includes requiring background checks for all gun sales, funding community, violence intervention programs, dismantling the NRA and developing a task force with 25% BIPOC and youth members. How did you develop that and what are you doing to try to make it a reality?

Maxwell Frost:

Yeah, many of the things my platform are not things I made up. And these are things that communities and folks have been fighting for, honestly, generations. We have some very creative ideas on there. We have some new things and then we have things that are not so new and that we've just been asking for. When it comes down to ending gun violence, the interesting thing is we're usually pigeon and hold into a very specific conversation that revolves around the regulation of guns. And we do need to regulate guns, we need a background track because I do believe in an assault weapons ban and banning high capacity magazines.

Maxwell Frost:

We also have to look at the root causes of gun violence. And when we look at the statistics, what we see is that, the top reason why people will commit gun violence, it's because they're crimes of condition. And what I mean by that is people are in a specific condition and they feel like they can use the weapon to get ahead or provide for their family or solve an issue. In a question also in any gun violence has to be how do we create a world where people do not feel the need to use a gun to solve their problems in the first place? And that's when we talk about a lot of these other issues. When we talk about healthcare and getting healthcare to every single person in this country, when we talk about making sure that people have a dignified wage. When we talk about ensuring people can organize in a workplace and have the benefits they deserve and the resources they need to live their best life. When people have a better world, they're less likely to use the gun to solve their problem.

Maxwell Frost:

So when we take a step back and we view issues holistically and not in these pigeonhole that really the opposition want us to think in, because if the thinking of the issue is siloed, that means the organizing will also be siloed. But to end gun violence, we have to work to end poverty and to end gun violence, we have to work to ensure everyone has the opportunity or the resources that tap into the American opportunity.

Farai Chideya:

Another thing that I think relates to gun violence in all violence is mental health and wellness. According to any number of studies like the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey, that's annual, Americans are stressed out, some people are really in a deep mental health crisis. Do you see this in your generation, in your community? And how would you as a politician if you get the chance to be a Congress person, deal with the mental health crisis?

Maxwell Frost:

Yeah. I mean we need to destigmatize mental health. And a huge way we can do that is ensuring that everyone has healthcare and that within that healthcare is also mental healthcare. The fact that wraparound and full service is not provided to people on Medicare, Medicaid shows that it's not prioritized by our government and further stigmatize the issue to our young people. So it's important. People should view going to the therapist or going to get checked out just as we view going to get your normal checkup for your physical health. Your mental health is important. And when we talk about ending gun violence, it's incredibly important as well. It is one of many factors that impact violence in our country. And the interesting thing is a lot of times people will blame folks with mental health conditions, which I'd argue almost everyone in the country has mental health problems.

Maxwell Frost:

People will argue that, that is the end all be all with gun violence. And statistics actually show us that people with serious mental health problems are actually more likely to be the people shot with a gun, not the ones to shoot someone with a gun. So when we look at the nuance, we recognize that it's not about the demonization of a specific group of people who might be dealing with something or dealing with problems, but ensuring that there's access to everyone to take care of themselves and take care of them mental a health as well.

Farai Chideya:

Let's switch to another topic that's definitely big in the news, which is migrants and specifically migrants being flown around by branches of the US government. So on September 14th, Florida governor, Ron DeSantis facilitated two flights reportedly originating in San Antonio, Texas to send a group of about 50 migrants to Martha's Vineyard. And here's Governor DeSantis defending the decision.

Speaker 3:

Everyone wants to come to Florida. So we've worked on innovative ways to be able to protect the state of Florida from the impact of Biden's border policies.

Farai Chideya:

Now, Florida's DeSantis, Texas governor, Greg Abbott and other officials have already been sending buses of migrants to sanctuary cities like New York or to DC including specifically the DC residents of the Vice President Kamala Harris. So Max, well, what is your take on what Florida governor, DeSantis is doing and the optics of this and the real life drama behind this?

Maxwell Frost:

Well, I mean it's disgusting. This is essentially human trafficking. Human trafficking to score political points because our governor here, Ron DeSantis, is more interested in running for president than running our state. That's why he scapegoats the most vulnerable communities for every issue under the sun, every issue that he's failed to bring real change on. Affordable housing, ensuring people have healthcare, ending gun violence. Our governor is a bully. He's not a statesman, he's not somebody who's working for the people and coercing busloads of immigrants and migrants who are just looking for better life, tricking them into signing documents to consenting to just being sent wherever, being promised jobs when none of that actually happened just to score political points. I mean, these are humans, these are people, these are our family. You might not know them. But we're all part of this grand mosaic of humanity.

Maxwell Frost:

And what the governor is showing us is really the true intentions and true cruelty of this new right MAGA movement that is very fascist in its foundation and does not value human life. And it's important that we take him at his word. I think that a lot of folks see something like this and they think about how worse it will be in the future. We have two governors here, the Governor Texas, Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis who are in a race to the bottom. And we should be calling that out and that's what we're doing here in Florida. Like Maya Angelou said, "When people show you who they are, believe them." He's showing us who he is and let's take him out his word.

Farai Chideya:

That was Maxwell Alejandro Frost, Democratic nominee for Florida's 10th congressional district will continue our conversation with the congressional hopeful when we return, that's on Our Body Politic.

Farai Chideya:

Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just joining us, we're speaking with Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the Gen Z Democratic nominee for Florida's temp congressional district about how his work as an organizer and also musician helps shape his views today on the need for diversity in Congress.

Farai Chideya:

I want to get a little bit into your family history and how immigration is viewed differently for different people. You have spoken very lovingly about your mother and grandmother having immigrated from Cuba "in the early 1960s with only a suitcase and no money." Part of my background is that I've covered voters including different immigrant population of voters for many years. And there's many different communities where the older immigrants are totally anti-communist, anti-socialist. This could be Vietnamese Americans in the San Jose area, it could be Cubans in Miami, just not every single person. And then the younger generations feel differently. How do you view who gets accepted here when they're a migrant or immigrant versus who doesn't? And also the generational issues that sometimes go with this?

Maxwell Frost:

Yeah, this is a great question. I think the generational piece is incredibly important. And I'll talk about Cubans for a sec. There is a deep rooted history of Cuban going from Cuba to Miami and being entrenched in a Republican radio machine and Republican rhetoric that has used their fear of what they just escaped to demonize specific people or specific party, mainly Democrats. Folks assume that all immigrants come into this country are all liberal and Democrats and you just pointed out. That's not the case. A lot of folks are very conservative and a lot of that has to do with fear of what they've left in a hunger for the freedom that this country provides.

Maxwell Frost:

Well, the problem is that the Republican right, and specifically this far right movement has in some sense successfully gotten this monopoly on freedom and this monopoly on patriotism and it's a fuss. They talk about the freedom from, freedom from this, freedom from that. But what we're talking about is true freedom is what you have the freedom to do. Whether you have the freedom to live your life free of gun violence, the freedom to have healthcare or not choose between if you're going to pay for rent or pay for a doctor's visit, and really talking about those human issues on a day to day basis is how we're going to help demystify the things we're fighting for to people.

Maxwell Frost:

It's important for us to have those conversations and not just yell at people and not just dismiss people, but really say, "I understand. I get it and it makes sense that you feel that way. Let's talk about it." And having those conversations as an organizer in my life has been about the battle of hearts and minds and that doesn't stop with immigrants.

Farai Chideya:

Florida is really a laboratory for the different types of Latino identity and the political spectrum, age, national origin, everything. So how do you market yourself as a candidate to people of different origins, including the many origins within the Latino umbrella?

Maxwell Frost:

Well, I mean there's so many different ways of thinking and people from different parts of the world. I mean, when we talk about Latinos in different parts of the country, we think about Latinos in Nevada that overwhelmingly voted for Bernie Sanders. But Cubans in Miami might think a little different. And I think a lot of that has to do with the history of where you're coming from and the community that you live in. The way we spoke with Latinos in this race was very simple. We spoke to them about the issues they care about and we spoke in their language. We launched one of their very first Spanglish bilingual ads that we put on TV. That really spoke to, it was me talking in Spanish and English, Spanglish, which is a growing language, especially for younger Hispanics and Latinos. But not just talking about immigration, talking about every issue.

Maxwell Frost:

Criticism I have for my own party is oftentimes when we talk with Latinos, what are we talking about? Immigration. When we talk about Black folks, what are we talking about? Criminal justice reform. And I think obviously these two things are extremely important. My family came here from Cuba. However, Latinos care about having a decent wage too. They care about being represented in their workplace too. They care about having affordable housing too. They care about having healthcare as well. So for me, it's really talking about this broader agenda that's really centers around love and centers around humanity. And that's something that no matter where you're from, you can get behind and you can understand. And I think that values driven conversation is the key.

Farai Chideya:

Now, you won a 10 way primary including against a former member of Congress and a state senator. And this is a seat formerly held by representative Val Demings, a seasoned politician. So what do you say to the people who are just like, "Well, that Maxwell, he seems really nice but he's way too young to take this job."

Maxwell Frost:

We need a Congress that looks like the country. We need diversity in opinion. We need diversity in race, but we also need diversity in age. I think it's important to have different people at the table who have upbringing through different parts of our history. I believe we need older folks in Congress, but it's skewed that way, way too much right now. A third of this country is millennials and Gen Z, yet we barely make up government. So we need that diversity. I've been doing this work for the past decade, working at huge organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and March for Our Lives, where I ran a multimillion dollar budget and worked across the country on federal legislation and state legislation to end gun violence.

Maxwell Frost:

The last thing I'll say is I know I don't fit the typical caricature for what a candidate is, but I truly believe we need more working class people in office who understand the urgency of these issues. And if you don't want to take it from me, take it from people who currently do the job. I was the only person in that primary to be endorsed by current members of Congress. I was endorsed by two congressional caucuses that represent over half of House Democrats in three US senators. So these are people who have been there for a long time, who looked at the field, who have seen my record and who are saying, "Send us Maxwell Frost. He needs to be up here. We need that diversity and he's ready for the job."

Farai Chideya:

So let's end on joy. We ask people, we interview very often about what brings you joy. So you went to an arts magnet school from what I understand, and had a band or were in a band say, Good to KC, which played for President Barack Obama's second inauguration. So not bad for an early music career. What brings you joy these days?

Maxwell Frost:

What brings me joy is complete fulfillment of what makes life worth it. And for me, those things are culture, it is music, it is food. It's the thing that really binds us together. And I think there's so much value in really being enthralled with that. I was asked, I think in an interview, "What's the first thing you're going to do when you get to DC besides your job?" And I said, The first thing I'm going to do is do some block walks and figure out where the good food is. And I want to tour every music venue. I want to know which music venues have the good sound and which one smell like cigarettes and which one... I want to know everything about the community that I'll be in because community at the end of the day is really all we have the front lines of our culture happening in the community.

Maxwell Frost:

So it brings me joy is just being a part of community. And for me that's usually around the arts, whether it's playing the drums or putting together my music festival. I actually own a very small music festival here in Orlando with my best friend called Mad Soul. And it's a nonprofit music festival. We donate 100% of our proceeds to mutual aid here. And it's small, it's a 500 person festival. It's not anything huge, but it's our way of giving back and our way of doing something. And I always talk about the fact that a lot of times people look at the festival and think, "You're raising money for a cause," and we are. But the festival is a cause in of itself. The event is because we're hoping to give a platform to local musicians and also open up an audience that being inspired.

Farai Chideya:

All right. Well Maxwell, thanks for spending some time with us.

Maxwell Frost:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Farai Chideya:

And we've been speaking with Maxwell Alejandro Frost, Democratic nominee for Florida's 10th congressional district. And now to continue our conversation on young people in politics, Trymaine Lee is the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of MSNBC's Into America. His show hit the road to hear young Black voters point of view on what issues matter most to them. The new series is called The Power of the Black Vote. This fall, he and his show are traveling across the US to visit students at historically Black colleges and universities including the likes of Texas Southern University, North Carolina Central University, and Florida A&M University. I caught up with him about what he's learned so far. Welcome Trymaine.

Trymaine Lee:

Thank you Farai. It's always good to join you.

Farai Chideya:

So how did you come up with this idea of touring the HBCU circuit and plugging into what people actually thought about this country of ours?

Trymaine Lee:

So for a long time we have been batting around this idea of taking Into America, literally like Into America. The pandemic messed us all up so we couldn't really get out there and engage the way we really wanted to. But the idea of talking with young people in particular about the issues that matter most to them and how they're thinking about policy and politics and politicians, the issues that actually matter to them and what they're talking about with their parents, their friends and families. And where better to do that than on campuses of historically Black colleges and universities with their rich history and all this Black excellence and just these bright, brilliant minds of theirs.

Farai Chideya:

I am not without hope that young Black people can make a difference and always will because there's a level of passion and focus and also just frankly, reality checking. One of the things we found was that we have this survey partner, the wonderful gen forward survey out of the University of Chicago and just found how much that student debt was robbing people of the chance to start families buy homes. And the idea is that in America, that being a college graduate gives you a certain set of gifts and tools that you use to navigate the world. But what if you've got a ball in chain instead of a toolkit? So we've listened to some of the conversations you've had Dexter from Texas Southern University, Jordan of FMU. What did these conversations reveal?

Trymaine Lee:

Speaking to the student loan issue in particular, as Black people, especially it's like education is the way and we know that the way our system is structured for Black people at least is not just education, but we realize that uneducated White people live in healthier, safer environments than Black people with some education and some degree of money. That's not the way wealth works. Wealth isn't generated by your education, it's what you are able to inherit and the homes in real estate. And that was probably one of the more disheartening parts, two sides of the coin when it comes to the student debt issue it's like, we did everything and you told me this was the key, but then you set it up to where I can't afford it, where I'm arriving on campus with so much less wealth than my peers. And even though when we graduate, Black folks end up with seven or $8,000 more in debt within just four years.

Trymaine Lee:

That number triples. But that range of students that you mentioned from the environment Jordan in Florida A&M University using ingenuity and their smarts to try to figure out some way to save us all. There are students who realize that their communities are impacted first. Black communities, indigenous communities are on the front lines, but that something has to be done now. Texas Southern University grappling with their state, being on the front line of this fight over history and banning of books and that they're really working through this really nuanced, complicated idea of what it means to be an American. And the value of having your stories not just told but centered, it was a lot.

Farai Chideya:

Let's go deeper into that because that episode touches on how Texas schools in general are navigating the law. Texas has had a long outsized stake in how national textbooks get propagated and how basically education policy ripples. What did you talk about in your episode?

Trymaine Lee:

Yeah, so we talked about some of the history behind this and you think about the real fight over history because we know the power of understanding the truth began after the Civil War daughter of the Confederacy and other groups taking over local school boards to make sure they had control of the textbooks so they can control what students are learning. But what it means to feel seen and do you go to schools where your very presence is seen as hostile? And we sent it on a little bit of South Lake. Our colleagues did this great podcast and documenting over this one town wrestling over this very thing. This was also White and White violence. It was a White community, 2% Black, where some parents after this viral video went everywhere where a bunch of students were seen using the N word. So this community says, "No, we have to do something to educate our children cause this is wrong." And then they implement this program and then there's this backlash.

Trymaine Lee:

So they're fighting with each other about what they want their children to learn. Because not necessarily that they're worried about what Black students are learning in the majority Black school, it's what "woke education" and what enlightenment are these White children getting? How they see themselves. So we're into this law is like you can have any teaching that makes people feel bad about themselves. They're not talking about these Black students, they're talking about these White students. So a lot of the conversation was around that and how these Black young people realized that these laws aren't about them at all. It's about the White power structure.

Farai Chideya:

Well, here's a clip from your town hall discussion at TSU with some of the students and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicole Hannah Jones.

Trymaine Lee:

The same people who are writing these laws are the same ones approving funding for publicly funded institutions like this one here. Do you think in the midst of this broader political fight over CRT in '60, '19 that the mission of a school like this could be undermined?

Speaker 5:

I was in an African American studies class before these laws were made and I was able to learn about my identity and to truthfully stand on what is being Black in America and with these laws being put in place, what does that look like for our future? And I think that it's really leaning more so towards fear of our generation learning true history and becoming the change makers that we want to see in the world. And I don't think they want to see that.

Speaker 6:

What we are seeing is part of a very long pattern of turning school boards and public schools into the central battlefield or the culture wars. Nine of 10 American children attends a public school. It's our most democratic of institutions. So the way to stoke fear during periods of polarization has always been to go through the schools. As a parent, all someone has to say is someone is harming your child or making your child feel bad. And then all logic and rationality goes out of the window and people will support really regressive policy if you talk about as being harmful to their children. This is what we saw during school segregation.

Speaker 6:

And I would argue that the people who have been taking over school boards, they have inherited the legacy. They are working within the legacy of segregationist who stoked racial fears, who stoked fears of marginalized people in order to gain power and to control what students were learning, what students could be in the classroom with your kids. And that's what we're seeing right now.

Farai Chideya:

And that first student voice we heard was Dexter Maryland at TSU, Student Government Association President and Dexter was raising concerns about how HBCUs and universities can address these book bands and curriculum changes. What are being called anti CRT laws really don't have to do with critical race theory but with a reckoning about what America is, what America was. And how does that factor into the series that you decided to do?

Trymaine Lee:

We talk about this idea of the truth about America, there's this mythological America we've been taught through patriotism and false patriotism and we understand that as Black people, we pushed America to be the democracy it is. Because they were lying from the very beginning about respecting mankind, inequality we're lying because they were buying and selling and trafficking and raping people.

Trymaine Lee:

But I think beyond the truth about America is the truth about who we are and our humanity and our contributions. And some of the students spoke so eloquently about feeling that they weren't being seen and the truth was being erased. And in that void of the truth about who we are and how we exist and all things, America and White supremacy and can project onto us the deficits. It always, if there's something deficient with us, the mythology around this hyper sexualized masculine beast, all the things that they can project on us so that we continue to be oppressed and dehumanize. And these students are wrestling with that and sang it quite plainly when I went to school, they didn't see me. And it's still 22 years old, 23 years old, still grappling with what it means to not be seen.

Trymaine Lee:

So as we bear the weight of all the systems, then you're also bearing the weight of still feeling that people see you as less than what you are. And I think it plugs into the broader tour one because we want to remind people, as my mother raised me, I am somebody. So talking to these young people, you are somebody and what you think about policy matters. What you think about the political parties matters. What you think about these issues and the history and the present, it actually matters. So I think starting at TSU with that conversation in a town hall format, I think really set us off on the right path to have these conversations on all the other campuses that we've been going to.

Farai Chideya:

That was Trymaine Lee Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of MSNBC's Into America with insights from his new series, the Power of the Black Vote. Coming up next, we continue our conversation with Trymaine Lee on young Black voters and the 2022 midterm elections. You are listening to Our Body Politic.

Farai Chideya:

Welcome back to Our Body Politic. We are talking to Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, mainly host of MSNBC's Into America about the Black vote, specifically the young Black vote ahead of the 2022 midterms and he's got a special series. Let's continue the conversation. So what does it mean to you to be a journalist who visits physical places? We've had a lot of dissociation from our physical spaces because of the pandemic. And I think it hurt us. We had to do it to save our lives, but we've also been missing that presence. Why did you decide to do these travels and what are you getting from being there and having these town halls?

Trymaine Lee:

I am very much a believer in the transference of energy and power in things and spaces. In my library here, they are old books. And I love the idea that this first edition was on some college campus in the sixties. You're looking and you're finding and you're holding something and to be in some of these spaces. We're at the COFO Center in Jackson, Mississippi, which Bob Moses and David Dennis and all these organizers on the campus of Jackson State University. And we sat in a room where Dr. King and other organizers and there are pictures of them organizing and building in that very space. And we're standing there and the walls just have all this energy, the good and the bad.

Trymaine Lee:

You think about Jackson State University, a master that took place there where students were shot and killed. But to walk in the literal footsteps of giants and luminaries and thinkers and people that pushed America and pushed the culture and our society forward, means everything. And it was important that we are there touching hands, looking at each other. Sharing moments with each other at Florida A&M University, going out on a boat to this buoy that they set up to gauge the water quality, to understand how it affects the oyster population. And to be there and see them dragging the oysters up and we crack them open and we're eating fresh oysters and talking about the oyster as the bee of sea life, as the oyster goes, so goes sea life. To be there, it's different. You can't do that through Zoom. I think half the battle sometimes and letting people know that you care is I am here and present with you. I'm going to travel here with you. I'm going to spend my time and air and energy with you. It makes a lot of difference.

Farai Chideya:

Yeah. This is not apropo of colleges but of oysters. I remember doing one of my very early TV pieces in the nineties about the oyster community on Staten Island. So there used to be a huge Black oyster community. They were actually driven off mainly by pollution and destruction of the oyster beds, which then led to a wide variety of other things like the hyper segregation of Staten Island, which I always thought was like, "Okay. It was always super White." It's like, "Well, now maybe not always."

Farai Chideya:

So what I love is that you pull up these threads of history, whether you're talking about art and the schaumberg, whether you're talking about HBCUs, where are we in terms of history and making sense of it legally with things like anti-CRT laws, which are not really about critical race theory? But these are affecting HBCUs, elementary schools, many different types of places. And how did that factor into what you chose to do with this series?

Trymaine Lee:

First of all, I love the illusion of thread and threads of history. And because with my work I tend to look at it like a big quilt and my career. And I'm trying to stitch it all together. Different colors, different shapes, different fabric, just movement. Sometimes there are halts and there's all this pacing and you can look up and I'm still stitching it away. So I'm always very intentional about trying to thread it all together because it's not some distant thing that happened because you think about what a hundred years was, that's yesterday. It's about 1965, 64 DEO Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, that's literally yesterday. They were just filling pools with concrete because our bodies touch that water.

Trymaine Lee:

But I think in terms of where we are, we're at a place where we often find ourself in this country where the default position for America is a White supremacist suppressive like default position. Once there is progress, there is always a pushback because to have a fully realized Black population, a fully realized American population dislodges people from where they see themselves fitting in the hierarchy, which is usually on top. Usually meaning always on top.

Trymaine Lee:

So I think what we're seeing in this pushback is the spread of that so called "wokeness" which is so ridiculous and CRT, it becomes a catchall phrase, they're scared of the enlightenment of people and the truth. Some of these people I think they've been born and bred off of this stuff. So I think some of them really believe it. We cannot forget this isn't all just about political power, it's also about social power and maintaining access to resources and the best of what America is.

Farai Chideya:

You're listening to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. This week we're discussing the role HBCUs play in the Black vote ahead of the 2022 midterms with Trymaine Lee, host of MSNBCs Into America. I'm someone who went to public schools in Baltimore and then I went to Harvard and have had the mix of different levels of privilege and access with all of that. But so often what I get frustrated by is this idea that somehow everything is now... All of the advantages are rolling downhill. So anyone who was born in a working class Black community automatically gets a pass. And it's like that's just not how it works. It's not how systems of influence work. But I do worry that the sales job, that is done around what America is, what meritocracy is. And at this point I'm like, I don't even know how we even approach this from a logical standpoint. Logic doesn't seem to have much to do with it.

Trymaine Lee:

No, there is no logic because we're operating in the real world, the fantasy world. Another world that we made up, we fall into the Black hole. We're in this kind of another region. When you think about the old fights around affirmative action and you look around, "Where's all this affirmative action happening? Where are all the Black people in?" I thought affirmative action was getting in all these unqualified Black people. I'm looking around, that's me and two other people here in this company. And even in 2022 look around and we're like, "Where are all these unqualified hires?"

Farai Chideya:

Yeah. There's the tsunami of people who have been given a pass.

Trymaine Lee:

Where are all these silver spoons I would imagine be clanking over right now. I don't see any. I see some plastic spoons. No, but it is amazing because again, logic does not matter because even we're talking about what elite is and we're having all these conversations and what that means and where we are, it's all foolishness. And I think that's the problem because a lot of these conversations are happening in this fantasy world where if you go to mainstream media, go to mainstream corporate America. This CRT and all, it's not happening. It's not happening. So there we go. I'm not to try to-

Farai Chideya:

And I do think that what you say about elite is so important because it's like there's a whole movement of people who were steered to go to the traditionally elite White universities and now that they have kids of college age, their kids are like, "I'm going to an HBCU," and it's a really interesting turn about. So let's talk a little bit about how this affects life chances. So Black students and families are just way more in debt than their White counterparts. So you interviewed some students currently in college and also alumni who are saddled with student debt. So let's take a listen to how one family is dealing with intergenerational debt.

Trymaine Lee:

Camry is sitting in her well worn 2010 Honda Accord, logged in to start a shift for the food delivery app, DoorDash. Camry is 25 years old, a few years out of college and she actually has a full-time job at the Durham Police Department.

Speaker 7:

I do this job on the side to help pay bills.

Trymaine Lee:

Some of those bills that are looming for Camry starting next year are student loans.

Speaker 7:

I think I have to pay back 35,000 total.

Trymaine Lee:

Camry isn't alone. Student debt has become a crisis that has exploded in recent years. Today the total student loan debt in this country is more than $1.7 trillion. And over the past three decades, the average amount of debt owed by student borrowers has tripled. But Black student borrowers like Camry have been hit especially hard. And even though she's in debt, Camry doesn't regret getting her degree in criminal justice at North Carolina Central University, one of the states storied HBCUs.

Speaker 7:

After taking a forensics course, my senior year of high school, it was automatic, like I knew I wanted to try to be a crime scene investigator or work with evidence or work in forensics and you need school to do that.

Trymaine Lee:

But this student debt crisis is not just hitting Black graduates hard, it's impacting their families too.

Speaker 7:

All I remember really is just someone telling me what to do to get certain loans, but I had to learn along the way.

Trymaine Lee:

Dina Fincher, Camry's mother still remembers those early conversations and at first Camry took the loans out herself, but then something unexpected happened.

Speaker 8:

Each year they said that the tuition was going up.

Trymaine Lee:

And Camry couldn't qualify for any more federal loans. So Dina had to step in.

Speaker 8:

So I ended up having to get about five parent student loans to help her out.

Trymaine Lee:

Parent plus loans have become increasingly common in recent years and often come with even higher interest rates than normal student loans.

Speaker 8:

With my daughter, it was a little over $23,000. With my own school it was about 35, 36,000.

Trymaine Lee:

A third of Black parents with loans for their children's education still have student loans themselves compared to 13% of White parents. In all, Dina owes nearly $60,000. Dina is 52 years old. Now divorced and works as an administrative assistant at a law firm. And like her daughter, she picks up extra work whenever it's available.

Farai Chideya:

So we wanted to really play out a bit of your, I would say investigation there of the impact of student debt. Where do we go from here?

Trymaine Lee:

As Black people, we've inherited a lot from the generations before us. Fortitude, strength, this dual vision of being Black and American and navigating all these spaces. But what we haven't inherited at all is wealth. The wealth that had been denied us for centuries of building this country brick by brick. And when you think about the debt, that is another thing that we actually inherit. Where those that came before us were struggling to make it and even in their attempts to help us settle themselves with more debt. But we know that once Black people get into the middle class, your children are more likely to fall back because of stuff like this where you just can't afford it triples, there's nowhere to turn. You get frustrated, think how many people left school early because they couldn't afford it. I thought it was really important to show the generational nature of this debt, student loan debt in particular and how it not only saddles the youngest of the educated generation, but also their parents.

Farai Chideya:

I am a second generation college grad and I wish that my parents had gained the advantage they should have from their educations, but for many different reasons, including race, class, colonialism they didn't. But certainly I did not emerge into adulthood with any familial wealth. And essentially one of my hard conversations with my White friends is like, "You understand meritocracy is a thing for you and not a thing for me." I come from brilliant people who've been cheated like a million times. Right now I think that a lot of White kids are worried about meritocracy in a way that maybe their parents are very uncomfortable with.

Trymaine Lee:

Especially if you had this notion, whether you were conscious or not, that your Whiteness is going to get you all the way. We'll in a place like a Mississippi, and this is an extreme example, the poorest state in the country and the refusal to expand healthcare because those lazy Negros who don't want to, if they can benefit it from it, sorry, and that people have actually bought into that across the board. That same White supremacy is harming you in a way that I think they're just now starting to realize, "Wait a second, what did we signed up for? What is this?"

Farai Chideya:

What you're talking about is deeply embedded in the award-winning book Dying of Whiteness, which we've had the author on here. But there's a way in which American meritocracy has been a fiction for a lot of different types of people. And one of the things that I really admire about HBCUs is that they don't rely on American meritocracy. They have their own systems of merit and meritocracy and just like, "We're just going to do excellent things and we don't need to be approved of by the universe. We're just going to be excellent."

Trymaine Lee:

What's amazing, and I've heard this said a number of times and I love it because I'm trying to find another space that operates like this where you may fail but it will never be because of your Blackness. You know what I'm saying? It might be because you didn't work hard enough, you study habits, you might not have mastered the skills that you need to do A, B, C, or D. All those things could be true, but it won't be because you're Black. Where else does that happen in America?

Farai Chideya:

How do we look at these younger people who are at HBCUs and what they have to tell us about our future?

Trymaine Lee:

I think on one hand, when you think about the next generation, and we say this as a cliche almost, but it's true that they will lead us. They are the ones picking up the mantle and they're the ones that are going to carry us forward and push us forward. At the same time, we know that a lot of young people are arriving at this place now where they're like, "Does this even matter?" There's a two party system and if you are young and Black, you're saying, "One is openly housed towards us, the other is always doing little bait and switch. If we get here, maybe it'll right the ship and that doesn't happen." So I think they're getting frustrated and fed up and they're understanding the system in a way where it's not just drinking a Kool-Aid and your people died for this, which they have. So we built this system, we should be part of it.

Farai Chideya:

But just because your grandmother risked her life doesn't mean that you have the same bargain with the same party or the same system.

Trymaine Lee:

All of that. So I spoke to some young people on a campus, Jackson State University, they're part of a group who are trying to make sure they organize and get voters registered on campus. And I said, "Well, how do you convince your peers who aren't as connected as you, how do you get them to understand the system and engage with the system?" They said, "A lot of voter education and political education," because people just don't know how the dots are connected. And once they understand it's about more than just the presidency, electing Joe Biden is not going to change your life in any substantive ways. But if you understand what the attorney general does, you understand what the mayor does. You understand the limitations and the great power that some positions have. That's when they said it clicks. So some of this dissatisfaction is that a lot of our young people, they've been at the whim of the system, they don't understand how the machine works.

Farai Chideya:

What I'm seeing too is a lot of younger Black people being like, "We've had a Black mayor for 30 years of some sort and things still are not great." And that's when you start looking at structural things like restorative economics, gerrymandering. You have to look not just at who is sitting in a seat, but what does that seat confer?

Trymaine Lee:

And with the people in that seat, not to make the leap to all skin folk and kin folk, but just because there's a Black man or Black woman in office, that does not mean you don't hold them accountable. So when you are a strong block, if that brother or sister is not serving you, then you remove him or her. And that's the problem is that the system, as we know is rigged and is broken, but we also haven't shown up, we haven't maximized it yet. Show up and saying, "Here we are, these millions and millions of Black voters and we will weaponize this."

Farai Chideya:

And I do think that we're at a point where we have to pay attention. It's a very awkward point for American society, global society but your work really inspires me to look at all the different ways that people are making way. So thank you.

Trymaine Lee:

Again, always coming from you that is high, high praise. Obviously, I've respected you and your work for so long, so hearing that from you, I know I'm doing something right. So thank you.

Farai Chideya:

Trymaine, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.

Trymaine Lee:

Thank you Farai. I appreciate it.

Farai Chideya:

That was Trymaine Lee Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of MSNBC's Into America, discussing their series, the Power of the Black Vote. We're partnering with URL Media to report on your questions ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, which take place on November 8th. Midterms tend to get less turnout than presidential years, but the politicians running for Congress, senate, governor, and local office have a massive influence over our lives. So we are gathering questions from you so that we can answer them with reporters from the URL Media family.

Farai Chideya:

What do you want to know about how politics are impacting your life and or community right now? You can respond to us on Instagram or Twitter @ourbodypolitic to find our submission form and leave your question there. You can also call us at (929)353-7006. That's (929)353-7006. 

 

Farai Chideya:

Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts. 

Farai Chideya:

Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. Nina Spensley is also executive producer. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister and Traci Caldwell are our booking producers. Anoa Changa, Emily J. Daly and Steve Lack are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.

Farai Chideya:

Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Mike Goehler, Carter Martin, and Archie Moore.

Farai Chideya:

This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.