This week, U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona speaks with Farai about how his past experience as a Marine combat veteran helped him keep himself and fellow congresspeople safe during the insurrection on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol building. The pair also discuss the mass shooting in Buffalo and how replacement theory is a driving force for racial discrimination. 'Our Body Politic Presents' features Pushkin Industries’ podcast, “Getting Even With Anita Hill", with Anita Hill's interview of legal scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw on Critical Race theory, a term Crenshaw helped coin in the late 1980s, that is now central to America’s culture wars. And on our weekly segment, Sippin’ the Political Tea, Farai speaks to two veteran journalists and longtime residents of Buffalo, N.Y., Rod Watson and Sandy White, about the impacts of the racist mass shooting on their community.
Farai Chideya:
Hi folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We'd also love you to join in financially supporting the show if you are able, you can find out more @ourbodypolitic.com/donate. We are here for you with you, and because of you. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic, I'm Farai Chideya. Americans are mourning yet another deadly mass shooting by an active and self-proclaimed racist and white supremacist. Last weekend, an 18 year old white gunman shot and killed 10 people and injured three more at a supermarket in a majority black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. This attack follows a painfully familiar playbook, a young radicalized white male explicitly moved by fears of "white replacement commits acts of terror on an unexpecting community." We have seen this with the murders at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, among many others.
Farai Chideya:
We're going to talk to black journalists from Buffalo later in the show, but we wanted to start with a member of Congress who has been looking at the chess board of politics through experiences, including being a combat veteran, the child of immigrants and an Ivy League graduate. And who's plugged in on the rhetorical warfare that played a role in both the insurrection and the killings in Buffalo. He's US Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona's seventh congressional district, which includes Phoenix and its Western suburbs. Welcome representative Gallego.
Ruben Gallego:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
I have to admit what caught my eye recently was your interview about the insurrection, and you were pretty blunt that, despite being unarmed and some members of that mob being armed, you were determined to save your life and help your colleagues save theirs. So when did you first know that your life could be in danger?
Ruben Gallego:
I think when I started seeing the Capitol police try to grab any piece of furniture and try to barricade the door. I had already gone to the point where I knew that I had to get ready. And my usual MO is that I always rather be ready and wrong than wrong and not ready, and that comes with when it comes to anything in life, to be honest. And I had already heard, obviously from the police that the police had been breached. I had heard gas cancers going off, we had heard the pounding of the door. And so that put me into overdrive.
Farai Chideya:
And you talked about trying to organize your fellow members of Congress to use things like pens to defend themselves. How did you present this as an option?
Ruben Gallego:
Well, I turned to a couple members that were standing by me and I first had to tell them to get into the moment. And this is not a very uncommon thing, one of the things that I discovered in war, especially when we had some replacements come in after a couple of our first group of guys had died was that, the first time they saw a combat they couldn't actually fully accept what was happening. A lot of time human nature is not necessary fight or flight, it's just freezing, or you try to rationalize that, whatever is happening is not happening.
Ruben Gallego:
And so I turned to my members of Congress, I told them to take off their jackets because we were going to have to run or fight. And you didn't want to have a jacket on in the meantime. And a couple of them said like, "Well, why? This is the safest place." I'm like, "It's not. We're not in a safe space. You need to get ready for that." And I just started telling like, you need to start looking for weapons, like anything we can break apart, anything we could use to stab people. We're in a situation where we're going to need to defend ourselves.
Farai Chideya:
I went out and I covered the peaceful part of the Stop the Steal rally, but I knew it was going to get violent because of my background in researching this and doing field reporting, and I did not want to be there for that moment. But do you feel there was a failure of intelligence or communications? And if so, who do you put in the driver seat for that?
Ruben Gallego:
I think there was a failure in creativity, more than anything else. I think there was a lot of intel out there. I just believe that there was a portion of the Capitol Police management that just did not understand the full complexity of what was happening. And als wasn't creative about the situation that they were going to potentially meet. I think if you're a planner, like I am, you always look at all the situations that could arrive. If you look at a situation from a law enforcement or military perspective, you should have planned for the worst, at all times.
Ruben Gallego:
And I think there's a leadership failure in that regard that their thought process was something akin to just a normal protest when they should have been really planning for the absolute most. Now, obviously there was some steps that were done correctly, there was some request for the National Guard to be ready. That was denied at the higher level. I think there was a delay, purposely by Donald Trump, to delay the deployment of the National Guard to the Capitol. But there was just a general lack of real creativity and understanding what potentially, at that point protesters, but eventually insurrections could be doing.
Farai Chideya:
Every day you show up for work in the halls of Congress, you end up working with people who either poo-pooed the insurrection or refuse to impeach former President Trump on the charge of inciting it or both. And now we're watching more information leak out about revelations from the house select committee investigation. How do you personally deal with working with people who didn't or sometimes don't view the insurrection as a threat?
Ruben Gallego:
Well, I don't really work with some of the hardcore insurrectionists, and that's what I call these members of Congress. The ones that deny that January 6th even happened the way it did, the ones that deny that there was a free and legitimate election or try to proclaim and still proclaim that it was a still an election. There are some people that I do work with that voted to de-certify the election, but that was largely their only thing they did and... I've made my separate piece with them on that, some of it is tough to swallow, but it was their constitutional right to vote that way.
Ruben Gallego:
I disagree with how they voted, but there was nothing illegal with what they did. But if you were there inciting the crowd, if you were encouraging people for months and months on end to believe this lie, if you were even after the insurrection on January 6th, you are still trying to make excuses for it or change what it actually was, then it's difficult for me to... Not difficult, it's not difficult, actually, I should take that back. I just don't work with them. I can't. I can't in my soul. I just can't. I love this country so much and I haven't been willing to do many things for this country and to see some people try to destroy it, I just can't make my myself work with them. It's just not in my nature.
Farai Chideya:
And so, at this point, what are you looking at from the house select committee and the justice department as you're tracking the revelations?
Ruben Gallego:
Well, I want the truth. I think the most important thing is that we need to know who was involved and to what extent, I think that's the most important thing. I want to know how it happened, I want to know who was encouraging, I want to who was supplying it, who was paying for it. And I want to know what level of coordination and how high did they get. In terms of the DOJ, I want them to take this more serious. It's great that they filed a couple, I think it was like 15 or 16 people with insurrection charges, but clearly there was more people involved and I want them to take this serious and understand that democracy is actually being threatened by these actions because an insurrection that is not properly prosecuted, it's just a test run.
Farai Chideya:
I was not surprised that more Latino voters voted for President Trump when he ran for reelection the same for black voters. How do you think the party should message to Latino voters in the midterms?
Ruben Gallego:
Incumbents always do better with minority voters, especially black and Latino voters. That wasn't a shock, but I think what does matter is how you message them all the time. And I think the most important thing is, we need to be messaging Latino voters as really separate from every other democratic base. And we should really invest in them and invest them in a way that we actually know what they care about. And if we do that that's how you get Latinos back.
Farai Chideya:
And of course Latinos as well as black Americans, as well as immigrants are overrepresented in the military. And as a combat veteran-
Ruben Gallego:
Yeah.
Farai Chideya:
... A member of Congress, you have worked on veterans affairs and global security in addition to serving the nation in combat in what sounds like a very wrenching situation watching so many other members of your teams die, but here you are, you're in Congress. What's top of mind for you about how America serves veterans and current members of the military?
Ruben Gallego:
When I got shipped to Iraq, I got my papers and I was in Iraq within three months, and fighting it out and then back to the United States within seven months. And as soon as I got back, they basically, as reservists, they kicked us out. I was suffering very severe PTSD and going to the VA. At that point, it was awful, I didn't get treated properly. I got denied services because I didn't have the right paperwork. And it made me feel as if maybe I was undeserving of help and maybe I was just being soft.
Ruben Gallego:
And I carry that to this day. Now that I'm here and I at least get to help make decisions, I remember how I was treated by the Marines when I was enlisted. I remember how I was treated back in the day when I first try to get help for PTSD. And I bring that knowledge to the VA [inaudible 00:10:32]. I bring actual war fighting and what the effects are to the Armed Services Committee, because when everyone wants to talk about war and planning, they think about generals and what they're doing, but they really don't think about the 18, 19 years old scared, infantry men that's really the first person to actually do... That does all these major operations. And I'm the person that thinks about that person.
Farai Chideya:
What do you think since you are someone who also has been mapping the shifting geopolitical order, what do you want to see the US do regarding Ukraine? What do you want to see happen?
Ruben Gallego:
Well, what do I want to see, number one, I want to see free and independent Ukraine, and I don't think it's appropriate for us or any other free independent country to ask democratic elected country to seek peace by giving up their sovereignty. We don't have a right to do that. It's just something that I just can't imagine that we ask another country to do. Does it mean that we have to actually send troops? No. I think at this point, Ukraine has proven itself that it can defend itself if we give them the weapons that they need to defend themselves.
Ruben Gallego:
And I think that is something that the American public is aligned with. What I don't think they're aligned with is for us to get men and women involved. And look, I would be very hesitant to do that. I've been very supportive of Ukraine and helping Ukraine create deterrents and now fight back, but I just cannot commit more men and women to a war that I don't necessarily think like... Number one, I don't think the American public is with, and number two, that would be in our largest interest, especially in trying to prevent an overall large scale war directly with Russia.
Farai Chideya:
That's us Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona's seventh congressional district. Coming up next more of our conversation with Representative Gallego, including his reaction to the Buffalo mass shooting. Plus Sippin' the Political Tea with two veteran journalists based out of Buffalo, New York. Rod Watson, Buffalo News columnist, and Urban Affairs Editor, and broadcaster and entrepreneur, Sandy White that's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just tuning in, we're continuing our conversation with Arizona Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego, Representative for Arizona's seventh congressional district, which includes Phoenix and the Western suburbs. Representative Gallego state contains hundreds of miles of US Mexico border. There's been plenty of racial rhetoric around immigration, including some that has inspired violence, like the racial shooting of Latinos by a white supremacist in El Paso in 2019. So I asked about his perspective on this latest attack.
Farai Chideya:
I do want to ask about the racial killings in Buffalo, which obviously are part of what in many cases seems to be escalating extremist violence and could continue to escalate with some of the rhetoric and some of the mobilization among people who hold certain views and certain theories. What do you want to see the federal government do about racial and anti-immigrant violence about weaponized xenophobia?
Ruben Gallego:
Well, look, we need to treat it as a serious threat to our national security. And it is. The way that we actually fund terrorism and terrorism prevention in this country, it's actually 90% foreign terrorism, foreign based terrorism, foreign encouraged terrorism, and 10% domestic terrorism. When in fact it needs to be flipped. Our biggest threat as a country, an existential threat is domestic terrorism. And when black people are targeted because of who they are, and unfortunately the black communities is too used to that, but in the way that they've been targeted by violence again, because this happened in Atlanta before, let's not forget, we need to deal with that. Latino community also was targeted in the same way in El Paso where this white supremacist chose the most Latino area of the state, drove to it and drove into Walmart and tried to kill as many Latinos as possible.
Ruben Gallego:
And the only way we actually start dealing with that is we actually deal and treat it as a real threat. You're not just targeting Latinos, you're not just targeting black families, you're actually targeting the American way of life. People should be able to be who they are without being threatened by terroristic violence. And lastly, the politicians need to understand the power of their words. It's not a coincidence that both men that attacked in El Paso, that attacked in Buffalo, are using political speak that is being echoed by the Republican party right now, not the whole Republican party, to give them credit, but some of the leadership within the Republican party, the top leadership Republican party. At least Stephan, someone that I went to college with, using that those words right now of replacement theory, telling people that Democrats and liberals "are trying to replace white voters with Latino voters" and in Buffalo, the terrorists said that black voters were replacing white voters.
Ruben Gallego:
That's dangerous because those words matter, they don't rise to the problem of someone actually bringing a weapon and loading a weapon, but you're loading that person's mind with hatred. And when politicians speak that way, it validates it. And trust me, I remember being in Arizona in 2010. I had been back from my Iraq for about five years and walking around in my Iraq, Afghanistan veteran hat or something, I would still be told to go back to Mexico. I was never born in Mexico. When you have a major political party just trying to stoke up division, it has ramifications. And these Republican politicians, these leaders, I should say again, use race to stoke up a certain voter, in the process, they actually stoke up these terrorists that attack black and brown communities.
Farai Chideya:
In 2010, I interviewed sheriff Joe Arpaio among others, and of course you represent Arizona's seventh congressional district in the Phoenix area, including Maricopa County, and sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of civil rights violation for racially profiling, particularly Latinos, later became president Trump's first pardon. And during the same project, we also spoke with sheriff Tony Estrada who had a completely different view of the US Mexico border. But for me, those interviews in 2010 gave me a bead on the way that the US Mexico border would be a national issue, one that could be weaponized. And now, you're seeing people, including the shooter in Buffalo citing replacement theory, about immigration. So how do you as a Congressman talk to your constituents about the border and about what used to be considered fringe theories like replacement theories that have been gaining in steam?
Ruben Gallego:
As someone that's lived in Arizona now for 17 years, and just being Latino, I know of replacement theory, it's fringe for the majority of the country, but it's not fringe for, I would say, a significant number of Republican politicians. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was not the first and no was he the last. In Arizona, it's easier to talk about the border because it's not theoretical. Arizonan see the border as many things. And one of them is, definitely, an opportunity, you can cross the border, go visit family, go start businesses and vice versa, by the way, people forget that, Mexicans also have a lot of businesses in the United States.
Ruben Gallego:
But we also aren't naive that there are problems at the border, and there's certainly no way we cannot deny it. There are still obviously people crossing the border illegally and there are ways that we should take care of that in a very sane manner that doesn't involve race and invoking race, which is what you see a lot of Republicans do. We have to talk about the complexity about the border, about how we do need more sane enforcement that doesn't violate people's individual rights, while at the same time, we have some compassion for those that are coming over and asking for asylum that truly deserve it. And also trying to figure out how to bring people here legally, that we need for our workforces.
Ruben Gallego:
And then lastly, what to do with the 8 to 11 million immigrants in this country that are here illegally, but have started families, started businesses, own homes, that want to stay here and we should try to find a way to legalize them without punishing them for going through in process. There's, it's a very complex thing, but nobody wants to talk about this complexity and the nuance, but it does matter, and it does exist.
Farai Chideya:
One last question, and that.. We ask this of a lot of our guests. We talk about a lot of heavy stuff on this show, and this was no exception, but what gives you joy?
Ruben Gallego:
Well, I love mornings with my family, I have a crazy dog, I have amazing son. And In the mornings, the crazy dog and my son, they all crawl into bed and we spend the good 30 to 40 minutes just being in bed, either sleeping more or just talking more, it's very fulfilling.
Farai Chideya:
That sounds like a little slice of the American dream right there.
Ruben Gallego:
Yeah, it is.
Farai Chideya:
Representative Gallego. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ruben Gallego:
Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Farai Chideya:
That's US Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona's seventh congressional district. And now we're going to bring you more of the, Our Body Politic present series stories and conversations from independent voices in audio. This week, we have highlights from the podcast getting even with Anita Hill. Hill talks with legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term critical race theory about its origins in the halls of academia and its original intent. The white supremacist who killed 10 people in Buffalo cited, not only replacement theory, but critical race theory or CRT as something that motivated him. What's being called CRT in today's culture wars isn't actually CRT, but that doesn't matter when people are being incited to violence. The push to use terms like CRT as weapons has real world consequences. So now let's hear from the scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term, again, in conversation with Anita Hill.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Just like you cross intersections and there's traffic moving north and south and east and west, black women have been impacted by the combination of race traffic, gender traffic. So that's where intersectionality came from.
Anita Hill:
That's legal scholar and professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. When she introduced the concept of intersectionality in the late 1980s, Crenshaw was underlining the ways that race and gender discrimination converge. As a student, she saw how laws that address race and gender separately fail to deliver justice to those at the intersections. But intersectionality isn't the only phrase that Kimberlé Crenshaw has coined. Crenshaw is one of the handful of legal scholars who originated and developed critical race theory.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
In layman's terms, I would describe it as the study of how law consistently supports institutionalized forms of racial inequality.
Anita Hill:
Like intersectionality, critical race theory was originally developed to unpack issues of identity and status in our justice system. And like intersectionality, critical race theory has become a household phrase, it's also become a cornerstone for a national attack on education. It's used to shut down any additions to the curriculum taught in American public schools, which would more accurately reflect our nation's history.
Anita Hill:
I'm Anita Hill, this is Getting Even. My podcast about equality and what it takes to get there. I'll be speaking with people who are improving our imperfect world, people who took risk and broke the rules. In this episode, I'm talking with Kimberlé Crenshaw about critical race theory. Crenshaw, and I have known each other since the 1980s.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
I think people need to know that at the time, Anita, there was just a handful of black women law professors. We all either knew each other or knew of each other. We could all get in a minivan.
Anita Hill:
If we had a lunch meeting, we just need one table, right?
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Yes.
Anita Hill:
Crenshaw and I both found that our formal education lack teaching about race, racism in the law. For Crenshaw, that meant creating the theories that were missing, writing them herself.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
We like to think of critical race theory not so much of a thing, but of a way of viewing a thing, a way of viewing what we think race is, a way of understanding why it is utterly predictable, who's most likely to be the CEO and who's most likely to be the person cleaning the CEO's office. Race is still a primary factor in determining access to the good things in life. As long as race is a predictive factor, we would want to understand, well, how does it happen 50 years after brown versus board of education, after the Civil Rights Act of 64 and 65, why do we still have these problems?
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Critical race theory, attempts to ask those questions and provide some answers from the vantage point of the law. We didn't know it was called critical race theory, but we started the thinking as a way of understanding why when we arrived at Harvard Law School we saw ourselves as advancing the cause of racial justice through learning how to be good lawyers. And we got there and found that there really weren't any courses that were dedicated to sharing the knowledge about how to do that.
Anita Hill:
When you get to a place and you know something is missing, you know it's needed, you all were inspired to do something about it.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Yeah. We were coming so inspired by what had happened during the first 15 years of the Civil Rights Movement. We thought, of course, it's going to continue, these are the new lunch counters. And we got there, Anita, just as the Supreme Court was beginning to push back, and beginning to say, we're at the end of the road, we've done all the reform that's necessary. So telling us why there wasn't more coming became the text that we were reading and critiquing, and that critique became critical race theory.
Anita Hill:
This was a conversation happening mostly inside law schools and not even in all law schools at that.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Yeah. People started reading it in political science, in sociology, in American studies and cultural studies. That's where it existed until like last year. Evidence of that is the extent to which it was challenging for people to think about race and racial power outside of the framework of an individually biased person. There was sort of a bipartisan discomfort with some of the core ideas in critical race theory, where race does not go away because you don't name it, racism is not something that you can solve by being colorblind. My analogy has always been, we realize that we built our institutions with toxic material like asbestos. We don't think the solution to brown lung disease is to not notice that the asbestos is there, not use the word or terminology asbestos, and to criticize those experts who can tell you where the asbestos is tucked away in our institutions. We would never do that, yet we've done that with race and racism.
Anita Hill:
Can you talk about how your early education got you to thinking about race, gender and the law?
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Well, Anita, it's not even my early education, it's sitting at the dinner table. My mother was what we might call a race woman of the 20th century. She was born and raised in Canton, Ohio. And partly because her father was the town's physician, they weren't constrained by concerns that many other folks had to worry about. The way that segregation was reinforced in the North was through economic punishment. And because they relied on the black community for their livelihood, they were freer to demand certain rights.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
I was raised in the town that she grew up in. The history was built in the geography, everywhere we went. That was the place that didn't want to serve us at the counter, that was the movie theater that didn't want to let us sit where we wanted to sit. A lot of my childhood was trying to navigate how to think about this thing that happens, this thing called racism. So going to school was a process of trying to figure out, well, why aren't we talking about this?
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
One of the strategies that has been much discussed is to raise precisely that argument, that brown versus board and the entire legacy of that monumental case was that, democracy requires equitable educational opportunity. It doesn't end with just segregation, it includes the content of education, it includes saying that there's only one story that is the permissible official story of America. We cannot have equal citizenry when we're not willing to tell the full story of when our society embraced inequality and what the echoes of that embrace continue to be.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
The Fourteenth Amendment does embody a value, and these laws undermine that value. That's what we need to be able to teach our young people, that's what we need to be able to say to ourselves and to our elected officials. And that's what we should hold them accountable to that value that was fought and died for, that value that was resuscitated in mid 20th century. And that value that has to rise again, if we're to save this country,
Anita Hill:
Kimberlé Crenshaw's work has helped move us to a more equitable world. If we limit critical thinking about inequalities, we will pass problems of racism on our children. Crenshaw's words are an urgent call to action because learning the truth is how we can equip the next generation with the tools they need to reach equality.
Farai Chideya:
That was an excerpt from the Pushkin Industry's Podcast, Getting Even with Anita Hill, and you can hear more episodes wherever you get your podcast. Coming up next, our weekly round table Sippin' the Political Tea. Here's from Buffalo based journalist. We've got broadcaster, Sandy White and Buffalo News columnist, Rod Watson. You're listening to Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. Each week on the show, we bring you a round table called, Sippin' the Political Tea. Joining me this week is Buffalo News columnist and Urban Affairs Editor, Rod Watson. Thanks for joining us Rod.
Rod Watson:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
And we also have veteran Buffalo broadcaster, longtime resident and entrepreneur, Sandy White. Welcome, Sandy.
Sandy White:
Happy to be with you.
Farai Chideya:
It just makes me so grateful to have you both with us. This past Saturday, a white supremacist traveled about 200 miles to target people at the top supermarket in a majority black neighborhood in Buffalo, and he murdered 10 people and injured three before surrendering to the police. Before we talk about this explicitly racial killing, let's talk about Buffalo and about being black in the Western New York area. Rod, I know that you have been a member of encovered this community for three decades. Let's just start out by asking, what the Buffalo community means to you and what you see with the black community in Buffalo.
Rod Watson:
I see the black community in Buffalo and Buffalo as a whole as a microcosm of the United States. The same racial and social economic problems we have here in Buffalo, I think you'll find in any urban city and the lack of progress on dealing with those problems here in Buffalo, probably mirrors the lack of progress in dealing with those issues across the country, which is why we have the conditions that we have. And it just doesn't seem to be the willingness to deal with those problems. For a long time, African Americans have been told and have permanently believed that, your vote is your voice, getting to the ballot box and electing people from the community people who know what the community needs, that was the solution. And yet we've had a black mayor, the first black mayor here in Buffalo was elected in 2005.
Rod Watson:
Last November, he was just reelected to his an unprecedented fifth term. And during that tenure of 16 years now going into his 17th year, conditions have not really improved that much, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of education, in terms of housing, in terms of employment. If the people from the community who supposedly look like you understand those problems the way that you do, if they don't work to change them, then what is the answer? And I think there's a lot of frustration we're feeling right now around that. And this is just, the shooting deserved to highlight that frustration that's been bubbling up for years.
Farai Chideya:
It's definitely true. I mean, you see it in cities across America, like my hometown, Baltimore. The community I lived in for 10 years in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Let's turn to the shooting, how does it frame up the importance of issues that you have been covering for years?
Rod Watson:
I think it was really telling that this shooter pick this particular neighborhood in this particular city. According to the online documents that people have been researching, he looked at a lot of other areas between here and his hometown. Buffalo is about 33, 34% African American. He looked at Rochester, which is about 50, 60 miles away. It actually has a little bit higher percentage of African American, but Buffalo, the African American community is more concentrated in a small area. So that's why he targeted this area, and particularly this neighborhood. It goes back to the whole, what I call, the sense of otherness. There's this sense that white people, this country are feeling undersea, even though they dominate in every major profession, they control the leverage of power. And yet there's this sense that blacks, Hispanics, other people of color are taking over and that's what's driving. The sense of otherness.
Rod Watson:
We can see that right now in the sort of backlash against the so-called critical race theory, which isn't even taught in high school, but it doesn't seem to matter. Facts don't matter anymore. But if we had an accurate teaching of history in our schools, I think that would do a lot to dispel these kinds of myths about people of color. You look at the social economic statistics where you look at gaps in wealth, the gaps in income, the gaps in educational entertainment, the gaps in employment. And it's easy for white who have been acculturated by some of the right wing news outlet to look at that kind of data and say, oh, okay, there must be something wrong with those people. Those people are dragging us down, those people are the problem.
Rod Watson:
And yet they can feel that way because we never done a good job of teaching how those conditions arose. They don't arise by accident. They arose based on systemic policies that were implemented throughout this nation's history. And you don't even have to go back to the slave trade, talk about it, obviously that's where it began, but you can just go back to the post World War II era, new deal programs were implemented and the suburbs were built up, and the way those programs were implemented to deliberately shut out and exclude African Americans.
Rod Watson:
And so when you look at what's happening today, the descendants of the people back in the 40s, they were given a leg up, in terms of education, in terms of housing loans while blacks were redlined out of those opportunities. And so now when you look at things today, white young person today wants to open a business. The wealth that was created back then. If he can't get a business loan, he can go to uncle Joe, he can go to aunt, he can go to grandma or grandpa because they were allowed to accumulate that wealth back then, whereas a black person today who wants to open a business and can't get a business loan, he doesn't have that to fall back on because of the systemic policies. T.
Rod Watson:
The way they were implemented back then means that there was no groundwork to accumulate that wealth that could be passed on for generation to generation. And yet, most of us don't understand that today. And so when we look at the inequities, we tend to want to blame the victim without understanding that it was the systemic effort to create those kinds of inequities and pass them down for generation to generation. If young people were taught that today, they would have a whole different attitude, I think, when they see a person of color.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah.
Rod Watson:
And I think that would be tremendously important, but there's so much opposition to that. And I don't like to deal in conspiracy theories, but you have to wonder if that opposition is based on the fact that, if white students in schools today understood that then they would be more amenable to change, and change is threatening to a lot of people.
Farai Chideya:
There's a lot of food for thought there. Sandy, tell me about the work that you've been doing in Buffalo as a business owner, as a volunteer. And what does your community mean to you?
Sandy White:
My community means an awful lot to me. I started out here in Buffalo as a young journalist and moved to Los Angeles and returned. And I returned to be engaged in public service, involved with my community in many different organizations. Those that would make impact, those that can transform. And as an entrepreneur, I'm still working in the community on many levels to make the transformation.
Farai Chideya:
And so, let's turn to the killing, Sandy. The question is, what does it mean that this happened? And on a personal level, how has your sense of safety changed since last Saturday?
Sandy White:
I stayed in bed on Sunday, all day with my cell phone just doing what I could to connect to local national reporters that were in town, to provide information. The irony here is that, on Saturday, my production crew, we were out with children at what is called the Freedom Wall. There are gigantic murals that line the street from W.E.B. Du Bois to Dr. King, to Malcolm. So that children can see these gigantic figures of history, but I was a little nervous out there with the children. So I called the police to make sure that they were aware that we will be out there. I had no idea that three hours later we would hear about the carnage blocks away.
Farai Chideya:
You are listening to Sippin' the Political Tea on Our Body Politic. I am Farai Chideya. And this week we are speaking to voices from the black community in Buffalo, specifically two journalists people with roots in the community, Rod Watson, Buffalo News columnists, and Urban Affairs Editor, and Sandy White, a veteran Buffalo broadcaster, longtime resident and entrepreneur. Sandy, what impact is this mass violence having on the community? And frankly, how are people processing this level of racial hatred?
Sandy White:
I think what was happening in Buffalo, there are people like myself doing what we can, wherever we are to help to reach out to the deceased families. And it's really tough.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. Families that might not even be in the area anymore, I'm guessing too, people whose kids moved away and things like that.
Sandy White:
Buffalo, it's like a lot of Northeastern city. We had a certain amount of brain drain, that's the way I term it, where the bright African Americans, those that with drive and desire, they left because of the racism that existed in the city. And they knew they couldn't find a job here. So they went down to Atlanta and to Charlotte and to maybe Maryland and different parts of the country because they knew, many of my friends knew, they just couldn't make it in Buffalo. They would not be an opportunity. So what we have here is, Like Rod said, a microcosm of what has happened across the country and is happening on a regular basis. So people are like, how could this happen? People walk and shake your hand and smile every day and you don't know their hearts. And it's really made me think again about who I'm talking to and who I'm dealing with.
Farai Chideya:
So Sandy, I've covered white supremacist and white nationalist as part of my career for 25 years, and I found myself just very frustrated with newsrooms that would not take domestic terrorism seriously. It was like, that's just a fringe, et cetera. I'm like, the fringe is building a movement right under your noses. I guess what I would say is that, I'm not surprised that we've reached this point in history. Obviously is horrific, but I also feel like it's part of my work to do, to be part of trying to cover this.
Farai Chideya:
And that does give me some sense of purpose, and I do have... I do have faith that we can make a difference. It's just that if we had only done more, say five years ago or 10 years ago, we wouldn't be here right now. You and Rod both have extensive histories in news and in community, and we saw certain news organizations like the Associated Press refer to the 18 year old gunman who shot and killed so many people as a teenager. But the AP referred to 18 year old, Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by the Ferguson Missouri police in 2014 as a man, how does the media cover black victims and killers differently than white victims and killers?
Sandy White:
Well, if you look at history, this is nothing new. There were men and women that were lynched in the earlier part of the last century for just walking out the door and tipping their hats and saying, hello, but the media played a key role in fanning the flames and infuriating those that did not want to see the blacks that were moving from the south to the north. There was one central underpinning, and that's fear. So fear is being feed and being digested by the nation. And what is a result, especially if you get it every evening and certain cable channels, people think differently about groups and they're more fearful. And then there's policy that's put in place that, basically puts people in certain groups and certain neighborhoods without resources. There are people that are actually in power that know what they're doing and they're taking steps to divide this nation.
Farai Chideya:
And Rod, you wrote this recent Buffalo News column that really stuck with me. And I would just love it if you could read a little bit of it for us.
Rod Watson:
Sure. Part of the column dealt with what Sandy was just talking about, the fear that's being stoked and dealt also the issue of guns, a lot of people think guns will protect them. But part of the column said that, a side arm can't stop hate, a handgun cannot shoot racist rhetoric. There is no bullet that will penetrate a demented ideology that makes every person of color an other. There is no arm self defense against the warped idea of Americanism that filters down from politicians and talk show hosts to bring latent hatred to the surface with deadly consequences. And I was trying to get at what Sandy was talking about when she mentioned some of the networks that specifically pedal in this kind of hatred and this kind... Creating this sense of otherness, that they are less than, they are threatening, they are coming to take your country.
Rod Watson:
Except for native Americans, we're all immigrants, except for some of us who forced immigration wasn't by choice, but we're all immigrants. And so this sense of otherness that they're trying to create and perpetuate is really behind a lot of this. Will anything change as the result of this? I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. I mean, how many will it take? I mean, in other cases nothing has changed. Will it change this time? I don't know. But I think one thing that... One positive, perhaps that will come out of this particularly here in Buffalo is highlighted the disparities and the lack of opportunity in black neighborhoods. The Masten District, where the Tops Market is located, the Buffalo is divided into nine council districts, but Masten District where the Tops Market is located is the heaviest African American district in the City. It's 82% black. It has a poverty rate of sounding 35.6%.
Farai Chideya:
Wow.
Rod Watson:
That's one of the poorest parts of one of America's poorest city. I think the closing of the market as a result of the shooting just sort of put a spotlight on the lack of opportunity and the lack of resources that have been put into this community over the years, despite the fact that our Mayor Byron Brown actually is from this neighborhood. He represented the Masten District when he was a Common Council Member, [inaudible 00:47:03] nothing has changed, but that's what happened in a city like this, where resources have devoted to the Waterfront, we've got build up a thriving medical campus, a thriving Waterfront, a downtown area. And Buffalo has gotten a lot of positive publicity in the last few years because of those developments. And yet, if you talk to the people in the African American neighborhood around the Tops market, it has not reached them.
Farai Chideya:
Sandy, you've been very active in the Buffalo community on so many levels, how do you react to the questions about leadership?
Sandy White:
Well, when talk about leadership we can say a lot could have been done and a lot is taking place. And there are major projects like the Northland Workforce Training Center, for example, where lives are being transformed. But getting that word out in this world of media, where things are just passed around very quickly, and then it's dismissed, it's very difficult. But the Workforce Training Center in Northland is a phenomenal project and the mayor led that project. And I think he wants to do even more. He sees some of the problems that have existed, he realizes work could have been done and will be done from what I understand. But to take a brush and say, nothing has been done would be inaccurate. We're working together to get it right.
Farai Chideya:
Thank you, Sandy. Thank you, Rod.
Rod Watson:
Well, thank you for spotlighting these issues.
Farai Chideya:
That was Rod Watson, Buffalo News columnist, and Urban Affairs Editor and Sandy White veteran Buffalo broadcaster, longtime resident and entrepreneur.
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 the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Jonathan Blakely. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly and Steve Lack are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers.
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 Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
I want to thank the full team at the podcast “Getting Even,” written and hosted by Anita Hill. It is produced by Mo LaBorde [LUH-Board] and Brittani Brown, with editor Sarah Kramer, Engineer Amanda Kay Wang, and Showrunner Sachar (SA-sha) Mathias (mah-THIGH-us). The Executive Producers are Mia Lobel (low-BELL) and Leital (LEE-tal) Molad (mo-LAHD). The podcast is a production of Pushkin Industries.
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