This week, we share a panel from the 92nd Street Y’s State of America Summit. Host Farai Chideya asks: who defines America’s Values? We discuss the power of storytelling and civil society with Bird Runningwater, CEO of Cloud Women Media, award-winning author and Harvard Professor Suketu Mehta, author Anna Malaika Tubbs, and Washington Post Contributing Columnist Danielle Allen.
Natasha Alford
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This is Our Body Politic. I'm guest host Natasha Alford, senior correspondent at The Grio, sitting in for Farai Chideya. We're sharing a special panel from the 92nd Y’s State of America Summit led by our creator and host, Farai Chideya. This year's summit dug into our nation's most pressing questions, like the future of democracy, civic engagement and journalism. And our panel explores how we define American values and how those values shape our democracy. Let's listen.
Farai Chideya [00:01:07] The phrase American values is often used across the political spectrum. But how can we, as a nation of 300 plus million people, define just one set of values? And who gets to do the defining? We're here to discuss how American values are defined, how they shape our democracy, and how they're weaponised in the world of politics. I'm joined by four exciting speakers who all create important work from different perspectives in America. First up, political philosopher Danielle Allan. Danielle is the James Brian Conant, professor at Harvard University and author and a Washington Post contributing columnist. Welcome, Danielle.
Danielle Allen [00:01:44] Thank you.
Farai Chideya [00:01:46] Suketu Mehta is the author of several award winning books, including This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto. His work can be found in publications like The New Yorker, National Geographic, and on NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered. Hi Suketu.
Suketu Mehta [00:02:01] Hi, Farai.
Farai Chideya [00:02:02] And next, we've got author Anna Malaika Tubbs. She is an educator and advocate for women and children's rights around the world. Her work is featured in publications like Time and New York Magazine. And her first book, published in 2021, is the New York Times bestseller The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. And we were glad to have you on the show to talk about your fascinating book. Thanks for being here.
Anna Malaika Tubbs [00:02:28] Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya [00:02:30] Finally, we're joined by filmmaker Bird Runningwater. He's the CEO of Cloud Woman Media and the co-executive producer of the TV series Sovereign, which is currently in development as network television's first Native American family drama. Hi, Bird.
Bird Runningwater [00:02:44] Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya [00:02:45] So I'm thrilled to be doing this with all of you. And I'm going to start just with a micro framework on kind of how I grew up, so you know a little bit about my humans. So my mom is Black American from mid-Atlantic, Mason-Dixon families who were free Black farmers before the Civil War. Some endured racial terrorism because that's the thing. My dad's side is the side that struggled with colonialism in Zimbabwe. And I got to see what the values were for good and bad on both sides of my family. And I think that in general, I love my family's values, aside from patriarchy, but we may touch on that later. And among the values I would say my family embrace are strength, a bit of stoicism, a double edged sword, an unremitting love for this country, even when the country didn't love us back. And that is fascinating to me. With all that said, Bird, where do you start? As an indigenous American who has lived with two tribal affiliations and done extensive work globally with indigenous people, where, you know, when we talk about American values, where do we start?
Bird Runningwater [00:04:02] That's a really good question. You know, I was so fortunate to grow up on my father's reservation, the Mescalero Apache Reservation. Well, before dating myself, well before the Internet and cable TV, cell phones, all of these things. I grew up in a very insular, Apache speaking community that was very rich in culture and traditions and ceremony. And I feel so grateful to have had that because it really provided me with a strong foundation before. And I was also kind of part of the quote unquote, majority of our reservation community, which I think was really fortifying before I went out into, you know, a very different world where I was considered a minority. But I feel like the values that were kind of instilled in me are these four Apache values that we teach and keep through all of these years since we arrived in to our ancestral lands through migration in southern New Mexico. But it's honesty, generosity, pride and bravery. And these things really kind of teach us how to continue to care for our relatives and our community and our land. You know, I think one of the strengths also is that I come from a matrilineal, matriarchal society where women are centered and they are the, you know, the center of our world, in our universe and the leadership. And I have to say, once I stepped outside of those founding principles and values out into, you know, the American world, quote unquote, there are a lot of conflicts, you know, But I just feel like because I had such a strong foundation that really continues to guide me and to navigate. And also, when I started working at a global level through the Ford Foundation, when I worked there and then the Sundance Institute, you know, I started realizing that there were indigenous people around the world who held very similar values, almost the exact same values, and that we were all experiencing this level of erasure and invisibility all within these colonial societies that have, you know, intruded upon our lands. So there's a lot of camaraderie and shared values about how we try to advance our imagery and storytelling.
Farai Chideya [00:06:07] Yeah. And Anna Malaika, I can't help but think about W.E.B. Du Bois and the double consciousness. And I'm just going to be honest. I mean, the past few years have been ones where I have really challenged my white friends to live equity, and I have ended one friendship because I was being verbally abused on race and gender by someone's husband. And I just said, this is not the era where I can carry this weight. And I think speaking up is also one of my family's values. What kind of values for you as someone who's a historian of many things, including these three seminal mothers of the movement? Where do values live for you? Hmm.
Anna Malaika Tubbs [00:06:47] I will share a little bit about my own personal background and kind of what brought me to writing this book really quickly. My parents both were lawyers, and my mom specifically advocated for women and children in the U.S. as well as abroad. And so through her work, we had this privilege of traveling from country to country abroad, my siblings and I. And so I grew up in places like Dubai, Estonia, Sweden, Mexico, Azerbaijan. I went back and forth from Ghana, where my dad is from, and moved back to the U.S. when I was a teenager. And this was really fascinating for me and my own identity as a Black woman and hearing from so many different people how progressive the United States was and then moving here and seeing it from this new angle, really as somebody who had been in all these different places and had a very feminist mother and both my mom and dad, very radical, I would say, in terms of their wanting to teach their children about all of these different histories, about challenging systems that are oppressive and about challenging injustice, and to not feel like you have to hide your fear or feel like you have to deny it, but instead to use that fear as a force and motivation to change something. That's really what my parents instilled in me, is you can't just accept things as they are if they are not treating people fairly. But instead you have to believe you can do something about it, no matter how scared you might be to do that, to find that bravery. And you can always look at others who came before you. For me, there are a lot of reasons I wrote about these three mothers in particular, but in studying them, it further confirmed this theory, especially for the mothers of Black children. What it means when you have kids in a place that is going to tell them that they are not worthy of life, that they are not worthy of dignity, that they are not worthy of being treated with respect. And obviously you do not feel that way. Obviously, you cannot accept that circumstance as it is. So you have to envision something beyond what's readily available to you. You have to believe that something else can be possible, and then you have to find a way to create that change. My family, as well as these three mothers, really valued community. It's not about putting everything on one person's shoulders, but instead to really find the team that we are all a part of and to say, I'm going to do my part, whether that has a Black woman, whether that's as allies in these fights that we're all trying to solve, we have to rely on each other because I think together we're coming up with really different ways of looking at where we are as a nation.
Farai Chideya [00:09:34] Yeah. And Suketu, you know, obviously listening to Anna, she had a very global childhood. I had a less global childhood, but much more so than most Americans, because when I was four years old, my mom took me and my sister to Zimbabwe and I remember feeling very at home. But it was the first time that I had felt American. You realize in the absence of being kind of surrounded by Americanness and what Americanness is. So tell us a little bit about your journey. I mean, obviously you've written about so many different things. Maximum City is still one of my favorite books of all time, and I love your current book about immigration and and how do you bring an immigrant's perspective as well as all the other things you are to the table of values.
Suketu Mehta [00:10:18] So I was born in Calcutta and I grew up in Bombay and Jackson Heights in Queens, and I came to Jackson Heights when I was 14 years old with my family. It was not a happy event when I got there. I missed Bombay, like an organ of my body and the Queens of 1977 that my family got to was still pretty racist. The aggressions in my school, which of all the boys Catholic school. There weren’t microaggressions. They were macroaggressions. I got pushed down the stairs. The teachers called me a pagan.
Farai Chideya [00:10:55] Wow.
Suketu Mehta [00:10:55] But that same place, Jackson Heights, now is arguably the most diverse neighborhood in the country. The zip code where I grew up. 11372. Has 160 languages, which are spoken in that one zip code now. And I realized that this is the American exceptionalism. It's a country made up of all the other countries.
Farai Chideya [00:11:17] Exactly.
Suketu Mehta [00:11:18] It's very important that we acknowledge this narrative that people have come here from all over the world. And, in large parts of the country, they are living in harmony. They're living with an acknowledgment of each other's… not just each other’s differences. but each other’s excellences. So in Jackson Heights, I got to know what a Colombian arepa taste like. Colombians like to know what an Indian samosa tastes like, and cities like New York City, a city where this kind of diversity is valued, also do well in the global marketplace because, you know, these highly educated silicon tech executives and finance people and they don't want to live in a monoculture. After their day at the bank or the tech firm, they're going to go out and they want to be able to have a choice of. So I realized growing up in New York, in Jackson Heights, that this was a place that I belonged and everyone else belonged to. And it wasn't until 2016 and Trump's election that I saw that old Queens. And it's no accident that Trump was born in that old racist Queens that came back with a roar. That's why I wrote This Land is Our Land, because I wanted to reaffirm that narrative of America as a place that fits all the other places.
Farai Chideya [00:12:46] So, Danielle, I want to get in a second to something that you have been writing about, which is the House of Representatives, one of the big superstructures of government. But before we do that, I want to get your take on where you center this question of American values, what they are and why.
Danielle Allen [00:13:04] Well, I'll start with my family as well. It was really beautiful to listen to everybody's stories. I come from a line of people with a deep and almost inexplicable commitment to democracy. On my dad's side, my granddad helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the forties, that was taking your life in your hands, as you all know.
Farai Chideya [00:13:24] Yeah, absolutely.
Danielle Allen [00:13:25] On my mom's side, my mom's white, my dad's Black, on my mom's side, my great grandparents helped fight for women's right to vote in the early 20th century, and my great grandmother ended up as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the thirties. So I still have our little sort of pocket sized rules of order for running meetings. So in other words, on both sides, these were people who, when the world told them something was impossible, you know, African-Americans can't possibly have social equality. No women can't possibly have the right to vote. Their answer was not only is it possible, it's necessary. So I grew up in that context of deep commitment to empowerment. My family was engaged across the political landscape. I remember one year in my childhood where my aunt was on the ballot in the Bay Area in California for Congress, for the Peace and Freedom Party on the far left side of the political spectrum. In the same year, my dad was running for Senate from Southern California as a Reagan Republican. So they used to have super intense arguments, you know, family dinners and holidays and so forth. My dad was like the skinny guy always wearing tweed or smoking a pipe, smoke curling around his head. And my aunt was a really big woman. She was gay to this huge belly laugh. And they would go at it. You know, my dad was arguing for market liberties and civic virtues, and she was arguing for public sector investment across all segments of society and experiments in living. But as a kid, the thing that I took in was that they actually shared a goal, which was empowerment for their families, for their communities. So that's very deep in me.
Farai Chideya [00:14:50] Oh I relate so much, like my mom was a Peace Corps volunteer, a bunch of my uncles were military. We have liberals and social and fiscal conservatives. So I love that story. And now let's talk about the House of Representatives. You wrote an op ed recently, and I first heard this like 20 years ago, and something just clicked in my brain and I was like, oh, oh, okay, that's a game changer. So what are we talking about? What are you talking about?
Danielle Allen [00:15:19] Well, I think it's pretty clear we're all pretty frustrated with the state of our democracy currently. It is unhealthy in so many different ways. There is a polarization, but there is also the failure to solve really pressing problems, whether that's about climate or gun violence and other kinds of safety issues or even issues around migration and wanting that to be a system that works for all concerned. So we have a broken democracy and the question’s what to do about it? Lots of times we forget that the first branch, the foundation piece of a democracy is the House of Representatives. It's Congress that is the body that's supposed to be closest to the people, most responsive to the people, most directly accountable to the people. It was supposed to grow over time as the population grew. And so the dynamics in the House are supposed to really be flexible and adaptive as the population shifted. It's been frozen in place for the last 100 years to such a point that the British Parliament is bigger than our House of Representatives. The German Bundestag is bigger than our House of Representatives, and I believe if we want to get real inclusion in our politics again and actually effectiveness, that responsiveness and direct accountability to people, it's time for us to uncap the house, let it grow again, and really reconsider representation and how it works.
Farai Chideya [00:16:34] Bird, I want to switch to the question of culture. Sometimes culture is framed as soft power and how rich and vibrant a culture is is a form of geopolitical power. And the United States has had so much soft power of media storytelling. But for a long time, Native Americans were just basically people to be shot in Westerns. And you have spent decades changing that landscape. What we're seeing is that from the 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report out of UCLA, indigenous Americans remain very invisible compared to many other groups in Hollywood, but that there's a lot of interest. Illuminative have found 78% of Americans wanted to learn more about indigenous people. So how do you reconcile what's going on? And tell us a little bit more about the arc of your work? Because it's really you've done tremendous things.
Bird Runningwater [00:17:35] I see how concise I can be with such a large concept. But, you know, I think going back to kind of the way that I grew up without television and a lot of media influence with my own kind of culture, I never consumed, you know, the historical Western genre narratives, which in a sense are kind of colonial or propaganda. The Indian is always supposed to die in order for America to prosper. So much of the erasure and invisibility that we experience within popular culture, media and even education, you know, has really led to the narrative that we're gone. The land was free and open. Nobody was here. It has really been perpetuated. But when Illuminative of took all of their… there was a massive study that they did back in 2018. They really took their focus groups of every demographic, every age group, social media analysis, congressional analysis, and honed in to understand, you know, what you've been told. We've been duped by your media systems, you've been duped by your educational systems. And when people had that revelation and started to understand why that happened, yeah, 78% said, we want to see more. We want to know more. You know, and I think we've been trying to leverage that data and those statistics as part of our efforts to get more representation within our media systems. And that's been helping. You know, and I think lockdown happened right around the same time as kind of like our racial reckoning happened. And so we're finally started to see some of our first TV shows. But I had been working in feature films and documentary for 20 years prior to that and going on 26 years now. And the struggle is real because a lot of decision makers who make the funding decide what programming gets supported and developed and greenlit and on the air do come from the people who don't know that we still exist. And so there's a lot of infrastructure building and institution building by our community that continues to happen, I think protect our stories, protect the voices and protect the storytellers to really ensure that the authenticity of our narratives are really what is continuing to push forward. And we have reservation dogs, which is really kind of the beacon for our community. But also, you know, there's a lot of films like on Hulu and, you know, like Netflix is producing massively, probably like in the Tens of Millions, you know, feature film right now by a Navajo trans director. And that's exciting. Yeah, I feel like if you go back to the establishment of the democracy, you know, Yes. You know, the founding fathers did borrow from the Iroquois Confederacy and the style of governance there, but they obviously left out the strong piece of matriarchal elements of the Iroquois people and morphed it into their own thing. But one of the things about tribal sovereignty and indigenous nationhood in the United States, thankfully, and our contemporary governance structure, is that when the French arrived and when the British arrived, they made treaties with tribes were kind of the foundations of tribal sovereignty and were also mentioned in the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution. Those three things really provide the framework for a whole separate canon of American law, which is Indian law, which when we look at governance and decision making at the congressional level and at our Senate and even with judges across the country, they're still a part of. That cassette who don't know anything even about our own indigenous nationhood. So popular culture really is one of the things that I think has such a huge impact on governmental decisions. And so that's why when I graduated from public policy school with my master's degree, I could have gone into public service, but I kind of just ended up on this path, you know, with media and storytelling. And I have to say it's been really quite helpful in the larger struggle.
Farai Chideya [00:21:33] Yeah, it's been magnificent. Danielle?
Danielle Allen [00:21:34] I would just love to add something there about the really important body of Indian law that so many people don't know anything about. I have been fortunate to be working in the civic education space in recent years and designing curriculum for grade eight sort of yearlong civics curricula. And one of the things that's been most exciting has been to integrate Indian treaties alongside the Constitution, to show people that the legal structure that pertains on this continent is more than just the Constitution. Actually, there's other things with constitutional status. The sort of lack of knowledge about that is really profound. So I really appreciate, Bird, your calling that out and all the work you do.
Bird Runningwater [00:22:14] Thank you for your support on that.
Farai Chideya [00:22:16] And Suketu, Anna Malaika, I would like both of you to weigh in on a space of very contested American values right now, which is academia itself and knowledge itself. It's like, okay, I'm seeing some really scary memory laws. You know, I grew up in the library. My grandmother volunteered, my mom volunteered. I am so grateful to all the librarians who lavished attention on me. But we now have book banning like at scale. Suketu, why don't you start?
Suketu Mehta [00:22:48] A few years ago, during the pandemic, I bought a house in rural North Carolina, and I go between very urban Greenwich Village, where I teach at NYU and Pittsboro, North Carolina, where my neighbors are half gun nuts and half a yoga teachers. It's a really interesting combination, and I really have been having some intense conversations with my Republican as well as Democrat neighbors in North Carolina. And, you know, North Carolina is doing really well right now because it's future is in tech and academia. I live within a half hour drive off Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NC State. And because of this, the state and particularly the triangle area is experiencing some of the highest growth rates and housing values in the nation. And it's not including some of my neighbors in the rural area that I live in. So it used to be that the working class or people without a college degree gravitated towards the Democrats. Because the Democrats are the party of, you know, unions and pro-labor and folk. And now, puzzlingly, the same group seems to be favoring the Republicans. So it's a question of narrative. Now, I teach at NYU. I know the kind of efforts that are made by people like Ron DeSantis to change the curriculum, abolish tenure, at the same time at places like NYU I also don't find a lot of my neighbors in North Carolina represented. So among my students who tend to be liberal, urban, international… There's a kind of debate which is have a pretty narrow ideological spectrum, and I'd like to involve more of my neighbors in North Carolina in the debates that are taking place in Greenwich Village. I don't quite know how to do this. I know there's just enormous gulf between the two. In cities like New York, we live in bubbles, but we have a series of national bubbles where we really have voted our friends out, and we really have very little conversation taking place across the divides. You know, it's really interesting when when my parents come to North Carolina, everyone, all the gun nuts, the yoga teachers, they all gather on my back porch and my mom makes them Gujarati food. And, you know, they talk about food and family. And even in North Carolina, you know, I found that the narrative was more complex than people in New York think. So they are in favor of food and kinds of immigration for even people who are, you know, I would consider them racist whites. I'm shocked at some of the things that they say, but they’ll also express admiration for the Mexican who work as landscapers. They admire hard work and family and religious values… So all I'm saying is that this debate is more complex than we realize. And the only way that I realized it was more complex was by actually moving and going and speaking to people out there.
Farai Chideya [00:25:58] I love that. I mean, I have, as a field reporter, been to 49 of the 50 U.S. states. And the one state that I'm missing is South Dakota, where I actually have relatives by marriage through, you know, my aunt married a German-American from a farm town of 800. And it is through those travels that I began to understand America and also getting to visit the Crow Nation and many other indigenous parts of the U.S. But yeah, there's definitely the urban bubble syndrome. How do you deal Anna, with the current debate over knowledge and the role of knowledge in our national value system?
Anna Malaika Tubbs [00:26:37] I mean, I really think it's one of the most important questions we can ask right now, especially all of us as writers or storytellers. The place that I moved back to in the U.S. and I came back as a teenager was Laramie, Wyoming, and I was there as a teenager. Everyone had warned me, you know, Laramie, Wyoming, is this, you know, terribly conservative place. It's going to be really dangerous. You know, people told my parents, don't take your children there. It's going to be dangerous for them. And what we actually found was that there was just a lot of curiosity about us because there was such little exposure. It wasn't this sense where you travel somewhere and you actually feel like you're in danger because of somebody's feeling about you or your people. And this is not to excuse, you know, some of the ignorance, but there is just this curiosity because there's very little exposure. And so I tell this story because really this question of knowledge is something that a lot of people don't realize. It will help all of us feel more connected to each other. A lot of people feel this fear of knowledge, this sense that if I know about the pain that somebody has gone through, if I know about somebody's history and the violence that maybe my own descendants caused for this group of people, that somehow that's going to trap me or make me feel terrible. So I'd rather deny that or I'd rather live in this place of ignorance when in fact, what we see over and over again is that we all heal when we have the knowledge of how we arrived, where we are as a nation today, we all heal. When we're not sitting there kind of unaware of somebody's history or their past or how they came to where they are today. We all really benefit from these moments of sitting on our neighbor's porch and eating food that we've never been exposed to before. So that's really the kind of shift that we need in the US, and it's something that's entirely possible. We see this in nations across the world that when we face these painful histories, that's how we actually are all able to find peace. That's how we're all able to let go of feelings of guilt. That's how we're able to find a path forward. And so that's how storytelling becomes even more important beyond books. Because unfortunately, governors like the DeSantis are trying to take control not only of schools, but he's recently appointed somebody to look at Disney shows and to make sure that children are not being taught any kind of critical race theory. And that's where people who write movies, who write TV shows, who are putting commercials out there. And we become even more important because we have to engage in that battle and in that fight. And for me, I've always been really passionate about taking things that feel so complex theory that we often relegate to academia and making it accessible to people, making sure there are tools out there that everybody can understand and engage with, because we are all really at the precipice of this fight. We cannot sit down and say, That doesn't concern me. Every single person who is a storyteller, whether that's somebody who's proposing law, this is also really a way of telling a story about what our nation needs and where our nation is going. We have to engage in this and especially meet children where they are and engage them in the conversation, push them to challenge what authorities are telling them as well.
Farai Chideya [00:29:55] Suketu?
Suketu Mehta [00:29:56] I couldn't agree more with Anna, just to add, I think it's not just in the United States that storytelling is important around the planet. We'e feeling a global war of Storytelling. What of Modi, Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban… a populist is a storyteller, someone who can tell a false story. Well, the only way he can be fought is by telling a true story better. So we've got to be able to tell true story better. And this is why storytellers like us, filmmakers, journalists, writers are being hounded, murdered all over the planet because the populists know that we are their greatest threat.
Natasha Alford [00:30:41] That was award winning author Suketu Mehta speaking with hosts and creator of Our Body Politic, Farai Chideya, along with James Bryant Conant, professor at Harvard University, and Washington Post contributing columnist Danielle Allen, New York Times best selling author Anna Malaika Tubbs and Bird Runningwater, CEO of Cloud Woman Media.
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Natasha Alford [00:31:16] Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm senior correspondent for The Grio, Natasha Alford sitting in for Farai Chideya. We're sharing a special panel led by our creator and host, Farai Chideya from the 92nd Y’s State of America Summit. Farai and her guests talk about the rise of ethno-nationalism, then break down how they see the future of our country. Let's listen.
Farai Chideya [00:31:41] Danielle, when you look at this moment of global ethno-nationalism, and that's you know, how we discuss it on the show is that there are all these ethno-nationalist movements in different countries, and they're both different from each other in the specifics of the medium. But they all are really about weaponizing identity for power and money. How do you meet that moment? Like, you really spent a lot of time on the structures of government. What is the story that people need to tell of pluralism?
Danielle Allen [00:32:15] Well, Farai, I think you've just asked one of the most important questions that there is. And yes, I mean, I talk a lot about conflict entrepreneurs, and I'm glad that you put that in the context of a global movement, global ethno-nationalism. I'll just tell a little story. I am a columnist for The Washington Post, have been a columnist for about a decade, and I did an awful lot of writing in 2015 and 16 leading up to the Trump election. I was one of the first people to say that we had to take Trump seriously, that you couldn't sort of laugh about it. There was something happening. I wrote a column to that effect in September 2015, and I was just like super aggressive about going after the the problem of the potential of electing him and so forth. And so, as you might imagine, I got massive amounts of hate stuff and pictures and gossip as in the whole kit and caboodle. And it was having a big effect on me personally. I mean, I was literally, you know, making your ad, I really want to go out like, who are all these anonymous people who are directing all this stuff at me? So I asked a friend of mine to do a sort of social media archeology of it for me and try to figure out where it was coming from. And he worked out that was actually mostly coming from Eastern Europe. Oh, interesting. Which was a huge relief to me because I'm like, oh, my gosh, I can love my fellow Americans again. And I don't want to pretend we don't have that here at home. We do have it here at home, too. But it really does matter that there is a global network of conflict. Entrepreneurs who are precisely, as you said, are sowing more ethno-nationalism and stoking divisions for the sake of their own personal power and aggrandizement. So the question really is, how do we fight that? For one thing, we have to name it really clearly. We have to teach ourselves to see it. But it also means the other thing we have to see to look at this point is the fact that there can be people across a pretty wide ideological spectrum who aren't in that category. All right. So it's not that every single person with an R after their name is in that category, for instance. Absolutely. And I like to drive that point home by pointing to state level politics. Actually, when we look at our national politics, we do look like we're just totally polarized, sort of 5050. And we imagine that we are at each other's throats and each side paints a pretty extreme picture of what's on the other side, in all honesty. But if you look at state ballot propositions, you see something quite surprising. We are quite regularly able to achieve supermajority votes for things that are pointing in the direction of inclusion and fairness and helping out the person getting the short end of the stick. So Mississippi in 2020 passed in a new state flag, getting rid of the old emblems of the Confederacy with new iconography with a supermajority vote. That means more than two thirds of the voters, Republicans as well as Democrats, therefore participating in that change. Or in Florida, a supermajority voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed the service of their felony convictions. That happened in 2018. So, yes, there's a broad ideological spectrum in this country, and there's a supermajority of people out there who are not ethno-nationalist. All right. We need to find each other and link arms despite our pretty intense disagreements. Name the conflict entrepreneurs and be ready to draw a bright line and defend the practice of constitutional democracy with one another, space for pluralism and so forth.
Farai Chideya [00:35:33] I want to run through everyone else on the panel and ask you to tell me about a strategy that you think can work for us to connect across divides or a specific way in which you have connected, and Suketu I'm going to start with you. You know, you have talked about your two homes and you know how you, yourself and your family, when they visit bridge the divide in your community. Any thoughts or tips or strategies.
Suketu Mehta [00:36:01] Sure, so in 2016… that dread year when Trump got elected. At that same time my brother in law, Jay Chaudhuri, he called me from Raleigh, North Carolina, and he said, I think I want to run for state Senate. And they say with a name like Chaudhuri in a district that's 89% white. Are you kidding? But because he's my brother in law and I love him, I went down and campaigned for him and my two sons came down and we campaigned all around the Raleigh area and its suburbs. And his opponent was a white man who kind of took his election for granted. And Jay, who had to train his own campaign staff in how to pronounce his last name, went out and knocked on 10,000 doors, and he won a majority white district in a landslide. He's now not only the first Indian-American state senator in North Carolina history, he’s the Democratic whip in the state senate. So he did it and it showed that all politics is local. He went and spoke to people about what they were really concerned about, which was teacher salary. They didn't care that he was a brown man. They liked his policy prescriptions and they were open to it. And really seeing that campaign up close was kind of inspirational for me. So one answer of bridging the divide is by actively participating in politics at all levels, whether it's school boards or with the city council, and not being afraid to take your narrative out there. So Jay never apologized for being an immigrant. In fact, he celebrated it. He talked about his own family's immigrant roots and how they had contributed to the country. And we really responded to it. And when it comes to immigration, we're so apologetic, the Biden administration has been really very apologetic about immigration. It continued to enforce Title 42 that Trump and our law, which said basically asylum seekers constitute a public health hazard to the country. You know, I think seeing my conservative neighbors in North Carolina, people respond to narrative and they respond to the narrative about immigration, many say it loudly and without apology.
Farai Chideya [00:38:29] Wow, what a story. Amazing. And congrats to your brother in law. And. Anna, what about you? What is a success story or strategy?
Anna Malaika Tubbs [00:38:37] Yeah, for me, it's been a really interesting experience having a book out there about motherhood and how many people have told me audiences from all different backgrounds, how hearing my book and reading it was the first time, which is kind of ridiculous. But the first time they understood Black plight in the United States. You know, a lot of I'll say white women, for instance, who say now that I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a mother and her child, and I look at it separate of all the things that I was kind of taught to fear, which might be Black history or critical race theory. And I'm looking at it from this universal experience of a mother and her child. I now understand how awful this is. I now understand the atrocities. I now understand how differently Black women are being treated in the United States differently than I. As maybe at this said, white mother might have felt she was treated and her children and their safety and fears that she might have as well, and the ways in which those fears differ. And so that was something I wasn't necessarily expecting. You know, I thought, of course, I'm saying a lot of new things about these particular mothers because they were not really studied before my book. And so I thought that was really going to be my contribution to the canon of civil rights books and books on MLK Jr and Malcolm X and Black History and Black feminist history. But to be a bridge for so many readers to say I finally feel like I am somehow welcome in this conversation, or that I now understand some way in which I can relate to this, I think, is a lesson for many of us to be thinking about. Yes, the universality of a lot of human experiences without erasing the differences that we have based off of our different identities and using that as a moment to say, You see this? Saying that we share, you know, the fact that we're human beings Now walk through this history and see how someone might have been oppressed or how someone might have been pushed out of an opportunity or how someone was put in danger from the moment that they were born or even in utero. And what are you going to do now that you've had this human connection and learned about this individual story? So that's my piece of advice.
Farai Chideya [00:40:58] Bird, you know, you mentioned Reservation Dogs. You got a great shout out in The New York Times coverage of that, and you get shout outs all the time for your transformative work in film and television and storytelling. But other than your magnificent work, what other spaces do you look for, wins or successes or strategies?
Bird Runningwater [00:41:20] Yeah, well, I think Anna touched on some really interesting points. You know, the knowledge piece and also kind of the humanizing piece. And I think that, you know, originally when I went to public policy school, I intended to work in education policy before media grabbed me and took a hold of me. But, you know, I feel like, you know, according again to Illuminative research, you know, the majority of American state educational curricula standards don't teach about us past 1900, if even at all. And they don't teach about us past junior high. And so, you know, there's a lot of us who are really, you know, lobbying and working to really empower, you know, statewide native education communities to really push for, you know, representation in education standards, to really kind of, you know, create knowledge, which could also help to humanize us, you know, because I feel like there is a lot of fear, especially in states where, like, you know, my mother's tribe is from Oklahoma and I went to high school and college in Oklahoma. And Oklahoma has a very particular history about being Indian territory where all the tribes are removed from across the U.S. and placed there because it's the last piece of unwanted land and westward expansion. So now there's a whole new modern history that still exists today of, you know, the Indians are still in the way, you know, the Indians are still there, that they have special rights. You know, there's all of these misinformed narratives, which I think if you just kind of had inclusion at the educational standard level, you know, it would really destroy those myths. And I think that that's so much of how I feel, like our work kind of coincides with those of us in the media arts community and then those of us who also have understanding of educational standards. But one of the things that, you know, going back to the media side and working with, you know, global indigenous directors and Native American directors specifically, you know, I always told them as like, you know, you have 100 plus years of American cinema that you're trying to deconstruct while you're trying to create something innovative and authentic and new. And and I think all of us underrepresented, marginalized communities in the American, you know, cinematic canon, you know, deal with that. You know, it's kind of like working now within this American canon, you know, a film to really deconstruct the filmic history of us, to really try to unlearn, humanize, build knowledge, build allies, because that's really the only way that so much of this can help. And I know when Illuminative was doing their research, Standing Rock was going on, you know, the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Farai Chideya [00:43:54] Yup, I went myself.
Bird Runningwater [00:43:56] So many of us like really today, if there's an article came out Hollywood Reporter, we credit Standing Rock and the Water Protectors for standing up and sacrifice, making that sacrifice because for the first time it got national media news, you know, attention. Like again, we were on the American consciousness level, which really kind of influenced so much of what's happening in our media today.
Farai Chideya [00:44:22] Well, I mean, we have to stop it here. I have more questions, of course, but we do not have more time. And I want to thank all of you for joining us and for your incredible work. This ends our conversation called What Is America? on how American values, influence and shape our political parties, our friendships, our families, and our world. With the 92nd Y’s State of America Summit, we have been speaking with Bird Runningwater of Cloud Woman Media author Suketu Mehta of NYU, Harvard professor Danielle Allen, and author Anna Malaika Tubbs.
Natasha Alford [00:45:02] And that was veteran journalist and Our Body Politic host and creator Farai Chideya.
During our panel, we heard from author Anna Malaika Tubbs on motherhood and building community in her book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. We're thrilled she's agreed to join us again and read a short passage from her book and told us about why she chose this passage.
Anna Malaika Tubbs [00:45:32] So this passage comes from the chapter where I talk about how the three mothers have all lost their sons before their own time and how, unfortunately, that is still such a common experience for Black mothers in the United States and very reflective of the dehumanization that Black women continue to face, but also a celebration of the ways in which they're pushing against that dehumanization and continuing to create life in a variety of ways. And we really see that for many communities of color, communities who have been pushed, the margins, we face dehumanization, but we continue to push against that and really envision what the world can and should be.
Natasha Alford [00:46:15] And now here's Anna Malaika Tubbs reading from her New York Times bestseller, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.
Anna Malaika Tubbs [00:46:27] For many Black activists, the plight Black mothers face was and is a driving force in their work. Nowhere can the denial of Black humanity be seen more clearly than in the treatment of Black mothers and their children throughout U.S. history. Black women are the only people who have legally been deemed the givers of non-life, the givers of property. And as Fannie Lou Hamer puts it, Black people are the only ones who have had babies sold from their mothers and mothers sold from their babies. Her words shine a light on the way in which this has propelled Black people to work on behalf of the salvation of the United States. Committing themselves to use their pain to inspire change. In James, Malcolm and Martin, we witness the direct connection between their heroic work and their mother's. They carry their mothers with them in everything they did. Contrary to previous tellings, these men were not individuals who are born ready to change the world. They are instead part of a larger whole. Part of a generational bank of knowledge that was passed on to them. They were products of what their families and environments taught them and very specifically what their mothers taught them through both their words and their actions. All three men were well aware of this. They saw their mothers as their primary guides, even when they were away from them. And even in Malcolm's case, when they were separated from them at a young age, these men gave credit to their mothers and had a deep understanding that they could not be who they were without the lessons they inherited.
Natasha Alford [00:48:26] That was author Ana Malaika Tubbs reading from her New York Times bestseller, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter @OurBodyPolitic. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch. I'm guest host Natasha Alford.
Farai Chideya and Nina Spensley are executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booking producer. Anoa Changa is our producer. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Monica Morales Garcia is our fact checker.
This program is produced with support from the Luce Foundation, Open Society Foundation, 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.