This week, we’re offering another political remix of some of our most enlightening political conversations to provide context ahead of the 2022 Midterms. We bring back Farai’s interview with Tara Setmayer CNN political commentator and contributor to ABC News on why she chose to break her loyalty with the Republican party. Then, Farai speaks to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton about the fight for D.C. Statehood and Yamiche Alcindor, anchor and moderator of Washington Week on PBS and Washington Correspondent for NBC News on lessons from covering the Trump era. And on the weekly segment Sippin’ the Political Tea, Farai is joined by Errin Haines, founder and editor-at-large for The 19th and April Ryan, political analyst and The Grio’s White House correspondent to process the guilty verdict for former officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, police reform, and the early days of the Biden-Harris administration.
Farai Chideya:
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Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. In advance of the 2022 midterm elections, this week we're looking back at some of our best political segments, giving context to this critical moment in history. The upcoming election marks two years of President Biden's administration. While women of color made historic strides like gaining a seat on the Supreme Court with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the fight against racism, xenophobia and discrimination continues across the country on and off Capitol Hill.
Farai Chideya:
And it should go without saying that people of all races and genders like our listeners have a choice about how to engage in these battles. Today, we revisit conversations from around the 100-day mark of the Biden Harris administration. As President Biden took office, the nation had been roiled by the January 6th insurrection and the false allegations that victory had been stolen from former President Donald Trump. This even fueled divisions within the GOP, which continue to play out in midterm races like the Maryland Gubernatorial Race and the Georgia Race for Senate.
Farai Chideya:
Let's revisit my conversation with someone fighting far right extremism and misinformation from within the conservative ranks. Tara Setmayer is senior advisor for the Lincoln Project and a resident scholar at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. She's a former CNN political commentator and GOP Communications Director on Capitol Hill. After publicly leaving the Republican party, when former President Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, she was part of over a hundred conservative party members who signed the call for American Renewal Letter in 2021. It's a manifesto demanding that the Republican Party loosen its ties with Trump. She continues to criticize the former president and Trumpism as the co-host of The Breakdown, a biweekly show on the Lincoln Project TV YouTube channel. I asked her about where she sees the future of the GOP in this interview from 2021. Tara, welcome to Our Body Politic.
Tara Setmayer:
Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya:
As part of my upbringing, I was raised in a Black but very cross ideology family where my family has Black Catholic veterans and a lot of social conservatives, some of whom vote predominantly for the Democratic party and some of whom vote predominantly for the Republican party, but I'm going to be real with you. In recent years, some of the most conservative members of my family have really struggled with how to exercise their vote given the choices that they had. How do you see the current split in the GOP playing out and how does it relate to you as an individual and maybe your family as well as just as overall politics?
Tara Setmayer:
Well, thank you so much for having this conversation because I know that there are so many people who struggle with this. The last five or six years have been really challenging for those of us who have spent most of our professional lives in the Republican space. I was actively involved in college Republicans when I was at GW, George Washington University and as a young conservative in the nineties, that was a really exciting time for us. You had the Republicans taking over Congress for the first time in 40 years, the contract with America, you had very big personalities like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and John Boehner and some of these names now people shutter because they're like they're horrible people, but for us as young conservatives coming out of the Reagan era at the time, it was all very exciting. That's where I came up.
Tara Setmayer:
I've always been more about the ideology versus the party loyalty. My mom was a single parent, had me at 21. She taught me to be an independent thinker from the time I was a kid. So fast forward to the Trump era, which followed the Tea Party era, which is where I started to see some of what we ended up seeing in the Trump era percolating. And it was really very easy for me to reject Donald Trump, reject the ilk that he was spewing and I firmly believed that he was so against traditional Republican orthodoxy that there was no way that Republican leadership would put up with it.
Tara Setmayer:
And when I saw that people began to fall in line and become blatant hypocrites, like certain things that were basic Republican foundations that they excoriated President Obama for eight years, all of that went right out the window when they saw political power and their grasp through Donald Trump, such a despicable human being on every level. As I saw more and more people who I respected, who I thought were ideological stalwarts sell their souls, it became more and more untenable for me to stay in the Republican party.
Farai Chideya:
So what were some of the personal consequences of starting to question the direction of the GOP and where politics was headed?
Tara Setmayer:
I did lose a lot of friends, political colleagues, people I'd worked with. I spent seven years in Capitol Hill as a senior staffer, I was a communications director and it was the greatest seven years of my life. I loved it and I saw so many of those folks, elected members of Congress who I admired and respected, just fall align, including the one I worked for. It was very disappointing, but it was very difficult to navigate with some of the friends who I was very close with losing them. To this day, one of my closest friends, she was like a sister to me, we don't speak anymore because she's a journalist and she's a journalist for the wrong people on the other side and helped to push some of these narratives that have been so damaging to our country, like the big lie.
Farai Chideya:
The big lie meaning specifically that the 2020 presidential election was stolen?
Tara Setmayer:
That's right. That and how there was really no collusion with Russia and how that was all just some hoax in the deep state. All of the things that you see on right wing talk radio and media, she was pushing and so that was one of the hardest relationships to lose. It felt like brother on brother, like the Civil War. I was a general in the Union and she's a general in the Confederacy.
Farai Chideya:
You talk about this as a civil war within essentially conservative Americans or Republican Americans. You can define for me how you see it, but what are the sides that divide you from your former friend or your perhaps future friend?
Tara Setmayer:
At first, it felt like it was just a civil war within the party. Like I said, I was involved in the Republican party for 27 years. There were a lot of people who did not agree with Donald Trump that knew he was crazy and incompetent and lazy, but they just thought, well, we'll be able to control him because some adults will be in the room in the beginning because, oh, because of Hillary, we can't have Hillary. I think that they underestimated the damage that he could do and they underestimated the depths of his depravity. That began to create some fishers within the party where people had to make decisions here, but now they're fully ensconced, right? Power is very intoxicating. For me, it wasn't worth it. I was never supporting him. I didn't care what the situation was because in my opinion, none of this was worth it, none of it, not the Supreme Court justices, not the tax cuts. None of it was worth the assault on democracy that we ended up seeing and the assault in our institutions.
Tara Setmayer:
I gave a little bit of a pass to some folks who still thought that they could just cast aside Donald Trump's character flaws because they wanted to get some things done and here was our chance. We had control of Congress, we had the White House, but Charlottesville happened in 2017 and I said, that's it. I mean the list was long already by the time Charlottesville happened, but him playing footsy with white supremacists and these neo-Nazis, I said, that's it. The grace that I gave Trump supporters at this point is over. And the grace that I gave any of my friends who went into the administration is over. I'm going to call them out on this, specifically my friends who were black Republicans because I'm like, now you guys are literally just engaging in cognitive dissonance in a way that is really hard to explain a way.
Farai Chideya:
Let's talk about January 6th. When you talk about people who've been also walking the road of being in politics or engaged with politics in some ways and who didn't really see Charlottesville as a wake up. Has January 6th been a wake up or not really?
Tara Setmayer:
Not really, which was also shocking to me. It was amazing to watch people who we thought were reasonable. Your neighbors, your coworkers, your family members start to spew some really anti-democratic sentiments. And I started to ask myself, was that there all the time? Do these people always feel this way? Was I just naive about how much this was still in our culture? The friends of mine, who we are still of like mind, we often talk about this and it seems as though there was this very ugly underbelly that ran through, not just the Republican party because a lot of these Trumpers are not necessarily Republicans. It's a different type of ideology here, but there's this through line I think within the country based on race and xenophobia and fear of the other, that I was definitely naive to.
Tara Setmayer:
Some of the tactics of the Republican party from all the way back to the southern strategy, Nixon's election and his campaign, some of the law and order terminology, I used to look at that and say, well, it was pure politics, it was numbers. That's why they did it. It wasn't necessarily about race. I disagree with that now. This level of authoritarianism that has been creeping into our democracy under Trump, that's how democracies die. It's clear that we have to remind Americans why democracy is important and why we need it.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, I mean, let me jump in because the natural transition is to talk about the letter, A Call for American Renewal, which you signed onto and a lot of prominent Republicans, conservatives, former Republicans signed onto. How realistic do you think implementing these goals within the traditional party politics framework is? And if this does end up being a call for a breakaway party, a third party or something else, how realistic do you think that is?
Tara Setmayer:
Well, I've always wanted to run for office myself at some point, but after the election and then after January 6th, I'm not so sure that the Republican party can be redeemed in its current form, I thought it would be as a Republican. I considered myself to be a pragmatic common sense conservative. It has to be burned to the ground. It's just the way our system is set up. It's so difficult. It's such a herculean task to start a new party. That's why we've only had two parties for the last 160 years, but that doesn't mean it's not impossible because we are watching a once great party implode. And it's time for those of us who are in positions where we do have influence, where we do have access to give the millions of Americans who feel politically homeless now, something to be a part of. I think there's an opportunity for real political change in this country that's long overdue.
Farai Chideya:
Tara, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I really appreciate it.
Tara Setmayer:
Thank you so much for having me.
Farai Chideya:
That was Tara Setmayer, Senior Advisor for the Lincoln Project. Coming up next, the fight for DC statehood with Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Plus, on Sippin' the Political, we look back to a conversation with founder and editor at large for the 19th Errin Haines and TheGrio's Washington DC Bureau Chief and Senior White House correspondent, April Ryan. That's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. We're continuing our second political remix, The Deep Context from the recent past Shaping the Future in midterm season. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton has represented the District of Columbia in the house for over 30 years. As a delicate from a district that is not a state, she isn't allowed to vote for legislation in the house, but she's fighting for that to change. Since regaining the majority in Congress in the 2020 elections, Norton's colleagues in the house have voted in favor of making DC a state two years in a row. The fight for statehood continues as advocates and residents are now waiting for a vote on the Senate floor. The outcome of the upcoming midterm elections could make all the difference. In April 2021 following the last successful house vote, I asked the congresswoman why she fights for statehood and what it would mean for the more than 670,000 residents of DC. Congresswoman Norton, welcome to Our Body Politic.
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya:
Looking over the three decades that you've been in Congress, what has changed for the better in terms of equity and what is still lagging behind? How do you measure success?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
We certainly can look at what has been accomplished for women and what has been accomplished for African Americans as leaning in toward success. We see, for example, more women in Congress today, although I must say it still lags well behind the numbers you would expect. As for African Americans, I think once we saw Black Lives Matter, we understood that Black people just would not take it anymore and they went after everything from the way African Americans are treated personally to getting statutes down that extolled the old Confederacy, so we are seeing the end of the tolerance for racism in our country.
Farai Chideya:
And yet, of course, there is a powerful resistance to that, including white nationalists who marched on the capital on January 6th. And there is the question of taxation without representation, which is the rally and cry of many people who look at the status of the citizens of Washington DC. Tell us about your relationship to the push for statehood and what it would mean for the residents of DC and for the nation at large.
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
Well, I've been in Congress for decades pushing for statehood and actually when I first came to Congress, Democrats were in power and I got an actual vote on statehood. A large number of those Democrats were southern Democrats. And so I did not, in fact, get statehood in my first term. So the first time I got in the majority again, I was able to get our DC statehood bill passed. And I'm going to say it is about a time when you consider that DC residents pay the highest federal taxes per capita in the United States, 54% of the American people support statehood for the people who live in their nation's capital.
Farai Chideya:
And so if you were to speak to a congressperson who you don't know well and make a case for DC statehood in simple terms, what would it be?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
I would tell them some of the things I think they don't know. For example, that we have a budget that is larger than that of 12 states, that we have a higher personal and gross domestic product than any state. I bet they didn't know, that we have a bond rating greater than that of 35 states. In other words, if anything, the district is overqualified for statehood.
Farai Chideya:
And what about the racial dynamics of this moment in time around the demographics of Washington? Washington used to be called Chocolate City. Some still do, but it has become increasingly mixed and there have has been a loss of working class and middle class Black home ownership as the city has gotten more expensive. What, in addition to statehood, would really help people who are working class residents of Washington?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
The demographics of Washington has changed because it's a high income city and we are losing lower income residents. That's the dynamics of the economy that are very much regretted. Housing is more scarce in the district than perhaps any place else. That's in part because the district can't build high because of the presence of the capital, the monument and the rest. So there's almost nothing it can do about that except what the city is doing and it is building more middle and lower income housing.
Farai Chideya:
It's a divided Congress and prospects for passing in the Senate seems slim. How do you read the chess board and what are your next moves?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
Oh, actually I'm encouraged by the Senate and the reason is that we now have a 50/50 Senate and we have a Democratic president. The Senate was delayed in organizing over one issue, and that was the filibuster that requires 60 votes to pass any bill. The Senate has gotten rid of filibuster for everything except legislation and it looks like that's on its last legs.
Farai Chideya:
So you see a path ahead to DC statehood through reform of the filibuster?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
Precisely. What we need to get most legislation passed is the end of the filibuster. That's not just for DC statehood, that's for virtually everything the American people need and want.
Farai Chideya:
But do you think that the Democratic party is unified behind one idea or enough of a consensus around what happens to the future of the filibuster? For example, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of your colleagues on the Hill, has not been a hundred percent behind filibuster reform from what I can tell. Am I wrong about that?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
No, he's been a hold back and he's not the only one. We know that there are Democrats still to conquer to get rid of the filibuster or even for DC statehood, but Democrats know that they can't retain power if they don't do any better than the Republicans. So if they stand behind the filibuster and don't get things passed, they will be back in the majority. So Democrats are out in front against the filibuster and that'll help the district, as well as the American people.
Farai Chideya:
So when you look at the voting rights issue and the wave of legislation, I believe last I checked, 43 states had some form of legislation introduced, doesn't mean it came close to passing, but introduced having to do with the restricting voting rights as someone who's not only a member of Congress, but also a public intellectual, a long time public figure. What are the different ways that you're trying to address this issue at hand?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
Republicans are trying to reduce voting rights because they can't get over the last election when Democrats won even in some conservative Republican states. You can't take that back and all those states are trying to change voting procedures, but those are the various states where Democrats came out. In other words, Democrats have learned there is a way to defeat Republican efforts and that's to come out. That's what happened in 2020.
Farai Chideya:
So when you look ahead, and I'll wrap up here, but are you optimistic about America becoming a healthier nation? Some people find this era of ours with the racial reckonings and the pandemic and the issue of voting rights pretty depressing, pretty stressful. How do you process this moment?
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
On the contrary, when you see how American people are engaged in a self-corrective, having given the Congress the presidency to Democrats, when you see people in the streets essentially moving the country more in our direction than any other direction, then I could not be more hopeful about the direction our country has taken.
Farai Chideya:
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, thank you for joining us.
Eleanor Holmes Norton:
My pleasure.
Farai Chideya:
That was Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, delegate for the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives. My next guest is Yamiche Alcindor, the anchor and moderator of Washington Week on PBS and Washington correspondent for NBC News. She's worked as a local and national print and television political reporter for many years and began covering the Trump administration in 2018. Here's a bit of our previous conversation. Yamiche, thanks for coming on Our Body Politic.
Yamiche Alcindor:
Thanks for having me.
Farai Chideya:
I'm just so excited to talk to you. And I want to start with a little bit of a retrospective on what we should have learned from covering the Trump era.
Yamiche Alcindor:
We should have learned that we have to be really, really careful about how we air people's misinformation and lies, and we have to put everything that we put on the news, on the radio, on TV and print in context. I remember when I was up to become a White House reporter, one of my mentors, a great woman named Athelia Knight, she was a longtime Washington Post reporter. She said the first thing I should tell you is make sure that you don't become a stenographer because it's very easy to say the president said this today, that's news. When in fact, that's not what it is. It should be the country's going through this. The president said this. Here's what that actually means. That's the way that we need to be covering politics.
Yamiche Alcindor:
What we need to also do is not lose sight of how people are impacted with politics in their daily lives and what they're talking about at their kitchen tables. And I say that to say there was this idea that Donald Trump was not known to people and that Hillary Clinton was the person because she had been First Lady and the Secretary of State, that she was the one who had the star power, but anyone in almost any single household knew that Donald Trump from the moment, at least for my generation, the moment you said Donald Trump, it meant money. It meant the Simpsons. It meant someone who had had a big reality TV show. So I think for me, we have to really-
Farai Chideya:
who showed up in all the rap lyrics?
Yamiche Alcindor:
Right, so I think we really have to understand it and really think through what we mean by star power and it not just be this Washington centered thing when we think of the clout that people have.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. And so what was it like moderating a presidential debate during one of the most important cycles in history? I mean, what was it like on that night or that day when you were preparing for that? How did you feel? What did you want to go in and do and how did you feel afterwards?
Yamiche Alcindor:
It was nerveracking. I was really, really nervous about knowing the information, about speaking clearly, about making sure that I came away with a sense that we had gotten to the issues that were really important to people and especially in my case as a child of Asian immigrants, came from a working class neighborhood in Miami, I wanted to feel like the people who I grew up with, they felt like their voices were part of the debate.
Yamiche Alcindor:
I think I came away feeling proud and I walked away feeling like we got to all the issues, including race. I think there was a real feeling that identity politics is how we got here and that people had leaned too much on race and that's how we ended up with President Trump. And I always pushed back on that. I said I always think that "identity politics" is really just about the fabric of America, how we started the country, who built the country, and that you can not talk about race enough. I think that that was something that I always felt like I wanted to make sure I did and be true to myself. I'm a civil rights journalist who really cares about race and social justice and those issues, I think, had to be part of what I wanted to do in the debate.
Farai Chideya:
I heard a lot of compliments of that debate. And also, to be honest, some regret, why has this never happened before? Why have we never had a serious discussion of race as a political driver like before? One of the things for me, as you know, I have been speaking out a bit about how I feel the narrative of race as a driver of political choice was suppressed in the 2016 election coverage, at least in the newsroom where I was. What do you think political editors and reporters need to understand now in the era of re-litigating voting rights, et cetera, what do we need to take into understanding how race is a driver of political choice and political power?
Yamiche Alcindor:
I would say the biggest lesson of 2016 and 2020 should be that white people really care about being white just as much as Black people care about being Black. Whether they're rich or poor or in different parts of the country, we found that white voters, in particular, they also are very much motivated by race, very much motivated by the privilege that they think that they have and the privilege that they do have and that has to be a part of the conversation. Race is not just a story about "people of color," but a story of those who are assigned the race of white and what that means to them every single day. That whiteness can be really important.
Yamiche Alcindor:
I remember interviewing this man in Wisconsin and wanting to ask him about why he was supporting President Trump, and I wanted to ask him about healthcare. That was my story. I was focused on that. I kept asking, "What do you think about healthcare? What do you think about healthcare?" And he kept responding, well, people think I'm racist, people think I'm racist. And finally I said, "Okay, well, why do people think you're racist?" And he went on this whole diet trap about how he didn't think that a Black girl like me should be working at the New York Times, and there are too many black people in this town, which was literally about 97% to 98% white when I was talking to him. And you know what that exchange taught me was that he was trying to tell me what was motivating him. And I wasn't listening. I was like, oh no, it's definitely the healthcare proposal. And he was like, no, it's the race.
Farai Chideya:
Yep. Yeah, no, believe me, I have learned so much about this country and learned so much as a field reporter, which I think really shapes who I am. And you've done so much field reporting, including in your family's nation of origin, Haiti. Let's go back to that. When you went to Haiti, what was it like as a Haitian American to go there and report at such a heavy time for such an incredible nation, which fought for and won its freedom?
Yamiche Alcindor:
There's that saying, I'm my ancestors' wildest dreams. The moment I touch down on Haiti as a reporter, a working journalist who had interviews with the foreign minister, I thought I am my ancestors' wildest dreams because I have family members who were jailed under the dictator in the 1980s, who could not dare have thought of being a journalist on the island nation of Haiti and then had such pride being the first Black nation, the most successful slave rebellion in 1804. But at the same time, it's a country that has just really, really had so many different struggles. And I try every time I'm in a job to really write about Haiti, keep it top of mind. My father, who still lives there, he's often reminding me, guess what? You are so much a child of Haiti and don't forget that.
Farai Chideya:
Among many things you and I bring a lived experience of what it means to have these intergenerational ties to the African diaspora. And this may not be true, but do you feel like your objectivity has ever been questioned as you report on Haiti because you have ancestry there? I mean, I think it's fascinating, and by fascinating I mean troubling that for so many Black reporters, anything related to our blackness makes people question our objectivity, but that doesn't happen for whiteness to return to these constructs.
Yamiche Alcindor:
Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I've still been a journalist who wants to get the story and wants to get the story fair. I also, I think, I'm a journalist that definitely has deep convictions about what's unconstitutional, what racism looks like and that it's bad that racism shouldn't be this thing that should be allowed to continue and grow and fester and mutate and that we should be shining a light on that. But I also think that I bring this feeling that I want to make sure that all sides, the credible sides, not scientists who say climate change isn't real, but I mean the sides of the government, the sides of different warring faction that they should be heard. But I also think that we have to be very wary of false equivalencies. And that means that if I'm going to be doing a story about civil rights and voting, I can interview Republicans who say, look, this is what we think about voter fraud, but we should also say, here's the percentage of voter fraud that actually happened, which is about zero.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I'm also fascinated by this political era seems to be one where some people feel like reporters should be a little less aggressive with the Biden Harris administration. Tell us a little bit about what your expectations are for covering the Biden Harris administration fairly and what that means to you.
Yamiche Alcindor:
For me, what it means to cover them fairly, to cover the Biden Administration fairly, is to bring up the issues that are on people's minds and to bring up questions where the administration is having challenges. So immigration is a big one. It's a colossal endeavor. The Vice President has been handed part of this to deal with the northern triangle countries. But in a lot of my questioning during the last press conference, it was about what we're seeing, these rising numbers of unaccompanied minors.
Yamiche Alcindor:
And I think there were some people who definitely took issue and felt like the media was focusing too much on something that President Biden couldn't control, but we also have to point out that he made the decision to follow US law to stop breaking US law to allow unaccompanied minors. I think that there are some who feel like that's the media beating up on Biden, but in fact, it's just asking tough questions. It's holding them accountable. It's fact checking them if they need to be fact checked. And it's asking about how they plan to deal with some of the biggest issues of our day, which includes COVID, immigration and race and a number of other topics.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Yamiche, that is great stuff to remember as we look ahead at your coverage on PBS. Thank you so much for joining us.
Yamiche Alcindor:
Thanks so much for having me.
Farai Chideya:
That was Yamiche Alcindor, Washington correspondent for NBC News and anchor and moderator of Washington Week on PBS. Coming up next, we revisit a round table discussion on Sippin' the Political Tea from the early days of the Biden Harris administration with TheGrio's Senior White House correspondent, April Ryan and Our Body Politic contributor, co-founder and editor at large for the 19th, Errin Haines. You are listening to Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. Next up, we're bringing you one of our standouts from our weekly round table Sippin' the Political Tee. In 2021, nearly a year after kneeling on George Floyd until he died, former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder. Many people saw this as a small victory during a season of uprising around police brutality. Chauvin later faced federal charges of depriving Floyd of his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable force from a law enforcement officer. He pled guilty and was sentenced to more than 20 years. He also pleaded guilty for a similar crime kneeling on the back of a 14 year old boy for at least 15 minutes, injuring him. Like George Floyd, the teen boy cried out for his mother. The week the murder verdict came out, I spoke with TheGrio's Washington DC Bureau Chief and Senior White House Correspondent, April Ryan, plus Our Body Politic contributor and co-founder and editor at large for the 19th, Errin Haines. Let's listen to that conversation. Welcome to our Body Politic, April.
April Ryan:
Hello Farai. Hello, Errin.
Errin Haines:
Hey there.
Farai Chideya:
So great to have you and Erin, what have we got on tap today?
Errin Haines:
Well, I think we have to start by talking about policing and police reform. You had the Derrick Chauvin verdict to come out in Minneapolis, and around the same time that verdict was being announced, you had 16 year old girl Ma'Khia Bryant being shot and killed by a Columbus police officer. You also had this week, the wake and the funeral for Daunte Wright. A lot of the Black lawmakers I'm talking to this week are saying that there's building momentum to do something about police reform in this moment via the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, so a lot going on in politics. I want to stay on the Chauvin trial. I know it's been top of mind for all of us this week. So let's start with Vice President Kamala Harris who addressed the nation shortly after the verdict was passed.
Kamala Harris:
Today, we feel a sigh of relief. Still, it cannot take away the pain. A measure of justice isn't the same as equal justice. This verdict brings us a step closer and the fact is we still have work to do.
Errin Haines:
April, I'm wondering how you've been processing the Chauvin trial and the verdict?
April Ryan:
How have I been processing it? It's actually different, Errin. I've watched over the years, many of these cases, particularly during the Obama administration, and I processed it by watching history being made. We have seen so many police officers have qualified immunity and they get the benefit of the doubt. And there's no accountability for the death, i.e. Freddie Gray in Baltimore. He should have never been brought into custody, but he just made eye contact with the police officer and therefore, he was considered guilty and then ensued a chase. At the end of the day, no one was held accountable for this. But now in Baltimore, they have cameras in police vehicles. They're also trying training for deescalation, that's in Baltimore. But in other places, let's go to New York, Minnesota, Charleston, okay, Walter Scott. Remember that? That case the police officer tried to obscure the scene.
April Ryan:
A lot of these officers are not held criminally liable. And then after that issue, when the Derek Chauvin verdict came in, you know who I thought about? I thought about Sabrina Fulton. I thought about Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, who said I can't breathe 11 times. It's victory, but yet heartache. Why could my son not be here? And then why could that not happen for my son, the victory? So it's a lot that goes into this. I look back at the history to today and will the momentum continue? So we have to wait and see how this plays out because you still have a Republican faction that is pro-policing and does not want to see any kind of deescalation training or tactics. It's a strange dynamic. I want to see how it plays out.
Errin Haines:
Yeah, I mean, as a journalist who's has also long covered these cases now, this is the third president to be here in the Black Lives Matter era. I am right there with you and you saw President Biden addressing this verdict as well and calling this verdict rare guilty verdict, something that doesn't happen hardly enough as Black Americans know all too well. Farai, I want to turn to you. How have you been processing the Chauvin trial in the verdict?
Farai Chideya:
Ugh, there's so many things. I don't have children myself, but of course, I have a lot of children that I love. And I've been thinking especially about all the people I know who have children, who are entering that smelly stage of adolescence and entering being seen often in ways that make no sense and are completely culturally deterministic as adults when they are still children, those 13 year olds or 12 year olds, the age of Tamir Rice, who start getting a little height on them. It's like who's a man and who's a boy is completely culturally deterministic in this society. And is often used to paint some people as having moral agency and others as being defenseless, regardless of their age and regardless of what they've done. So I've been thinking a lot about that transitional age, which is awkward for everyone, but hopefully you get through it alive, not always, not like Tamir Rice.
Farai Chideya:
And then I'm thinking a lot about, to the extent that I have a fixed ideology, it's that I'm a structuralist. I believe that structures determine outcomes. I mean, many things do, but if you have a structure that is biased, you will get biased outcomes. And so if you look at the law enforcement officer's Bill of Rights that Marilyn had and was a pioneer in the 1970s, it pretty much gave something close to blanket immunity for many aspects of policing. And now Marilyn is now leading in reforming that and saying, well, all of us should live under the same constitutional rights. And I have a lot of respect for great law enforcement officers. I've interviewed a lot of them, but the reason that there is such a pervasive history of law enforcement officers killing people and nothing happening is a structural issue. It is a legal issue. And so I'm really looking forward to seeing how the structural issues can change.
Errin Haines:
I mean, both of you make such great points. We know from the civil rights era that just because certain things are legislative, the enforcement of that legislation does not always happen and that is the thing that matters. That is the thing to potentially make a difference.
Errin Haines:
You're listening to Sippin' the Political Tea on Our Body Politic. So I want to also go to speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was at the Congressional Black Caucus Press Conference after the Derek Chauvin verdict. And she said this soon after the guilty verdict was delivered on Tuesday.
Nancy Pelosi:
Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice, for being there to call out to your mom. How heartbreaking was that? Call out for your mom, I can't breathe, but because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.
Errin Haines:
April, I want to come to you because I'm wondering what you think about what this says about how the guilty verdict in this particular case is understood by certain segments of the population.
April Ryan:
People are hurt, people are upset, people are tired. Do I believe that Nancy Pelosi meant to diminish what happened? No, but there is a sensitivity from a community that's been hit so hard by this, not just this year, last year, the last eight years, the last 20 years. This has been going on for 402 years from these slave patrols up to Jim Crow to civil rights to now. And people are finally seeing some light, not a lot of light, but some light at the end of the tunnel and they want to call a thing, a thing. He was brutally murdered because was four people were on him, one on the neck and three on the back. He was murdered. And I get the sensitivity. So I do not believe that she meant to offend anyone, but we have to realize we have to call a thing, a thing in this moment in time to keep moving towards a brighter light of justice and equality.
Errin Haines:
I want to talk about the expectation that Black journalists provide analysis on the news about police brutality while they themselves are experiencing trauma. There's not really the same expectation for white journalists to really analyze white violence. I'm thinking specifically just back to the January 6th insurrection. And Farai, I want to come to you because I'm wondering what you think accountability looks like for white journalists and predominantly white news organizations in this moment?
Farai Chideya:
First of all, nothing happens until it happens, but this will be part of what I am hoping to cover in a book that I'm working on. The mainframe of the book is not race itself, but one of the case studies is what I call the invisibilization of whiteness. Blackness and Asianness and Native American identity, et cetera, are all considered, for the purposes of journalism, deterministic categories that come with certain markers of whether it's criminality, income, whatever, but whiteness is not studied as a race. And I think one of the most revolutionary things that could come out of the past five years in politics and the current era is to realize that whiteness is a socially constructed racial identity with its own patterns and deterministic qualities, just like Blackness or Asianness. They're all social constructs. There is no biological Black race or biological white race, but there are social constructs that have meaning because we give them meaning. Most of the world that we live in every day is socially constructed.
Farai Chideya:
And so white reporters will be asked to study Blackness, like a foreign country or Latinoness, but not asked, well, what's your home country like? I mean, I'm not asking for anything different for white reporters than Black reporters. White reporters should confront that whiteness has its own qualities, whether you like them or not or whether you support all of them or not. Whiteness has qualities. And as someone, I often question why I, as a 25 year old Black woman, was meeting people from the Ku Klux Klan face-to-face, part of the reason I was is because white reporters weren't doing the work because they didn't believe it was important. They thought it was like, oh, that's something that Black people went through in the 18 hundreds. It's like, no, actually it's completely relevant. And January 6th showed us that. So we've had people leading newsrooms who fundamentally got the story wrong and are still getting paid. And I'm just going to say that right here.
April Ryan:
Ooh, okay.
Errin Haines:
This tea is hot and getting hotter and Farai, please hurry up and write that book because I have long said whiteness is also an identity. It is an identity that needs to be covered because again, that helps us understand who and where we are as a country and as a democracy. So look, I want to stay on talking about the media and how it covers the Biden Harris administration. Our friend Yamiche Alcindor was just on with you, Farai, earlier in the show, talking about her expectations about covering the Biden Harris administration. So, April, I want to come to you as somebody who has been covering multiple White Houses, what are your expectations as you cover this current administration? And is your process now any different from the way that you cover the previous administration?
April Ryan:
24 years, five presidents, sometimes you say, oh, there's not going to be anything new and different. With each president, I should have never said that. With Bill Clinton, I said, oh, there will never be any president newsier than Bill Clinton. Then comes George W. Bush. I said, oh, there will never be another president newsier than George W. Bush. Then comes the first black president. Oh, there'll never be anyone newsier than Barack Obama. Then comes Donald John Trump. Then I said, there will never be another president newsier year then Donald Trump. And here comes this transformational new administration, Biden Harris. The way they approach this, I think back to Bill Clinton, how Bill Clinton was ahead of his time when it came to issues of the Browning of America and race, Joe Biden coming into this administration. He's got a year. He's got a year before 2022, and the Republicans try to unseat many of the Democrats in the Senate and in the House. And he's got a year to make a lot of major changes. And he's on the verge of doing this.
April Ryan:
I believe he could go down as the civil rights president, as he's dealing with these colliding crises. We, in our lifetime, we've never seen anything like this. Okay. Death, destruction, pandemic, job loss, mass vaccinations to stay alive, education virtually. But we are moving and this administration sees that this is a moment that they have to lift up these babies who are in school to help them learn because we have so many children who are falling behind and then dealing with the racial reckoning, changing policing that is centuries old, changing mindsets as it relates to structure. This is an administration like none other because we have seen times like none other. So I just watch and wait. He and Kamala Harris are people who understand governance, understand humanity, understand politics, understand diplomacy, and understand the needs of the people and also the wants of the people, so we'll just see.
Errin Haines:
There are a lot of moving parts happening as this administration rounds its first a hundred days. With that, there's some criticism of the horse race type coverage, instead of focusing on some of the policy and the media coverage that focuses on how Biden is winning or losing against his Republican rivals in Congress, for example. Meanwhile, here we are talking about issues of infrastructure, gun control, climate change, withdrawing from Afghanistan and voter suppression. What gets lost when the media pays more attention to wins and losses rather than the issues? Is there a better way to do this?
Farai Chideya:
There definitely is. And I think part of the question is who are you talking to? So wins and losses matter more to the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill crowd, people who are directly influencing policy on a granular level. Most people, even those who are engaged citizens, are not looking at it from that same tactical background. And I think a lot of times, especially prominent news organizations, end up as if they're writing just for the congressional aids instead of for a broader audience, which is one reason why some people hate political news because it seems intimidating. There's too much jargon.
Farai Chideya:
So I would ask all of our colleagues to say, who are you writing for? If you're writing for an insider audience, go there. And if you're not, what are you doing to frame things? One of my biggest concerns with news coverage is the lack of context. We have to ask ourselves, how are we serving civil society and democracy with the news coverage we do? And I think that this show that we're doing here goes deep into politics, but we're also accessible. We are here for people. I know that people on Capitol Hill listen to this show, but this show is not for Capitol Hill, it's for everybody. So let's just be cognizant of who we're trying to reach.
Errin Haines:
That's exactly it. I mean, this is why you had to create Our Body Politic. This is why we created the 19th, so that we weren't doing horse race journalism, so that we were thinking about the voters, the American people who are the winners and losers. And frankly, April knows this too. This is why diversity matters. When you have journalists who are bringing not only their lived experiences to the work, but are coming into spaces with their communities in mind, with the issues that they care about, you're simply going to get a different perspective and a different kind of political journalism. And the coin of the realm, you're exactly right, cannot continue to be something that feels more insular than about who and where we are as a democracy. So with that, the political tea was hot this week again. We have to leave it here for now, but April, it was great talking to you.
April Ryan:
It's wonderful to be with these great minds who happen to be Black women. That's just awesome.
Farai Chideya:
That's right.
April Ryan:
That's awesome.
Errin Haines:
Amen. And it was nice to chat with you again, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
Oh, it is always great to talk to you Errin. And April and Erin, this has just given me so much pleasure. It's just a joy.
Farai Chideya:
That was TheGrio's Washington DC Bureau Chief Senior White House correspondent and CNN political analyst, April Ryan, plus Our Body Politic contributor, Errin Haines, founder and editor at large for the 19th.
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:
For the re-broadcast segments in this episode, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams was executive producer. Paulina Velasco was senior producer. Jen Chien was executive editor. Cedric Wilson was lead producer. Julie Zann was talent consultant. Original music by Kojin Tashiro. Additional production was by Priscilla Alabi, Mark Betancourt, Sarah McClure, and Kojin Tashiro.
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.