thanks for joining us. i'm wesley lowery and i'm here today with brandy collins dexter to talk about her. fascinating book, black skin had a really happy to be here with you and chatting today. brandy, thank you. thanks for having me. of course. well, so we got plenty of time. i want to dive into the book, but i figured just a table set a little bit hit. tell me in the viewers little bit more about who you are, your background and how you get to the point that working on this book. yeah so i come from an advocacy

background actually a lawyer by trade and it started chicago doing policy around people with criminal records and trying like remove barriers to employment and. one of the things that that became clear me was that it didn't kind of matter if you shift the policies. if you don't the culture. and so i became really interested, kind of like not just like narrative work, but in general. like what are the different of media ownership? what are the ways in which people are able to like communicate and plead their own cause? and so that took me into the field that's called media justice, which is media access and representation. and i did that at center media justice until i got brought onto color of change, where i spent many years overseeing the media, tech and economic justice department there. and so really kind of doing that work around advocacy and in doing corporate accountability

in particular and really looking at what are the different systems and institutions that barriers to black liberation kind of began taking on this journey towards writing the book and the thing that really set it off was when i switched over to the research side. so i was seeing a lot of black discourse online, a lot of political polarization and, you know, all of the things that we've been about and looking at, particularly in post-trump world. and i wanted to know answers to what i was seeing. and i felt like research out there wasn't meeting i needed in terms of answers. and so switched over to the research and it was while i was doing my fellowship harvard that i met the person that would eventually introduce me, my agent and a book was born. now a big part of this book you thinking about talking to, interviewing black americans and getting a sense of their power

optics and their politics in this moment and in this era that we live in. and this era is, obviously, in part defined by the election of a black president. and what comes that right that things kind of definitional of that. at one point, you know, i wanted be some conversation and some of your writing and so various points i want to go back in right at one point you're writing about kind of the message of the obamas and how they had painted the picture, the black american dream and write the obamas message was if we work within the system together, pushing lingering challenges. we can make it work for us that you get what you earn, that those who have previously held power keep us all out. and that those of us who are able to break through will come back. the rest of us that the public and private systems that shape our everyday lives aren't that the real problem? those who control the systems and the who don't show up to vote. can you talk a little bit more about the the kind of core ideology of the obamas as a political project, right.

and and the polity of black america in the decades between, you know, voting rights act and the election, a black president that lead us into era that we're in now, because much, much of what you about, much of the movements we've seen rise afterwards come as a response to. these types of politics. sure. so think you know, one thing to anchor this in is i grew up in illinois. i'm from chicago. my family is like multigenerational. chicagoans. and so, you know, the pride of seeing the rise of, you know, first senator obama and then, you know, president obama, like you could feel electricity on the south side of chicago. and so, like, i just i remember those moments and the pride around him and also a lot of that mirrored mayor harold washington, who was the first black mayor of chicago and what i fascinating is that he he became mayor, i believe, in 1983.

and it was a very polarized time. chicago is, one of the most segregated cities in a lot of racism, i believe king once said after he left there, if you want to know i'm paraphrase zane, but if you really want to know how, know real racism looks, you can look no further than chicago. and so the energy that took to get mayor washington elected in the early eighties it really took a coming together of community organizing. like this is also the era of kind of like post fred hampton assassination the city and he had built what called this like rainbow coalition of different groups coming together that had their identity interests but came together through know kind of shaping a shared economic agenda different things like this and so the leftover the hangover from from those groups combined with a lot of work organizing within black communities, a lot of work

around black media infrastructure. all of that was core to getting mayor harold washington. and i think a lot of folks right now, i think his name is kind of associated with the library. if people know him, it's like the first black mayor. but what they may not about him was that he was a leftist and a populist and he was also highly surveilled actually by the previous mayor, mayor daley one before he even got into office because of his activism. he was part of the mayor daley machine and then realized the flaws of that and, you know, moved out of that and began to challenge the daley machine and like a lot of the ways in which he rose to power the way was able to organize people around this. he was a populist, but one that talked a lot, hope and possibility and change. and that together we all create, you know, a mass swell of power

to challenge all of the systems. i've been working against this and all the leaders that have stood in the way of of equity. and so when i think of president obama and his rise, it very much parallels and is very much built on that infrastructure or this idea of black power. but also like equity across the board. but one of the things that i feel like we saw that was different with president obama is that a he was a little more green than mayor harold washington like before he became mayor. he was, you know, in illinois, a state congress and then was a representative going toe to toe. ronald reagan at the time. and so he was a seasoned political and so he knew how things worked and he wasn't necessarily going to be, you know, jerked around or have other people kind of take that lead for him. but also he was somebody who had

a healthy amount of skepticism around corporate power and a number of other things. and i president obama, what i see in him is somebody that took a of that energy really built off of that to build that model and expand it out across the country in places like south carolina and get people to believe that something was possible people hadn't really believed possible before because of the backlash we consistently see from like the civil rights movements from these like moments of equity. he really centered people around this idea that we could win. and i think, you know, one of the things that we've seen after that in part because he was coming in during the 2008 recession. but a number of other reasons is that black people at scale didn't necessarily win economically. there's lot of ways in which we still continue. the racial wealth gap continues to widen. wealth continues be concentrated

at extremely high levels, corporate power tends to, you know, maintain the status quo and provide cover to a lot of hostile entities that necessarily want to see equal rights for everyone. and so i think post-obama particularly younger voters, you're you're seeing a more critical lens applied not just to president obama but to government in general. and this idea that maybe government isn't the way forward for us, which is a little bit of a break. what we've seen traditionally with black voters and that's not everyone i think we've seen a lot of rise of black leftism and embracing. no, we need to force government to be accountable to us more. but either way, there's a scrutiny. the democratic party as as a political home for black people. but i think is it's leading to some different trends in terms

of the ways in which people with the political system. so so essentially through the election of a black president, we now got to analyze and interrogate limitations of a black president. yes. and that in those limitations is what we then found were black people who they themselves did not feel fulfilled, what by the promises as they were met or delivered or undelivered. yeah. and and so what we now see is an additional kind of political response to the presidency itself. you describe this set of people in some ways as black skinheads. yeah, right. and that's and not just on one side of the aisle or on the other side of the aisle. you talked to me a little bit about the of that term, right? because it was interesting to me reading this. and, you know, i'm doing some writing now specifically around a white supremacist movement. and so i engage that term primarily and context. but as you noted, you know, let's see, it had movement initially begins kind of rooted

in music and in a different type of space in a way that is more multiracial. and so can you talk to me a little bit about your, you know, how you get this terminology and how one, the history of of of the idea of being a skinhead politically but how we start to apply this label to the set people in different parts of the political spectrum who are now mobilized or engaged via, their disappointment in the limitations. a black presidency. yeah, i mean it's interesting to be having this conversation and right now with the the death the queen and a lot of questions are coming up around the role of monarch in colonial power or in a lot of countries in the caribbean and other places because this is this is kind of so the skinhead movement began in the sixties and it began in london, in brixton in a working

class community. and it was the first multi cultural in the uk which had up until world war two been pretty i say racially it's a, it's an interesting to frame it that way because race is kind of in some ways a uniquely american construct. but a lot of the that were part of the colonized nations of the monarchy weren't in england. let's put it this way. and then world war two happens. everything gets destroyed. they have to rebuild. and the windrush generation comes in. and so it's people literally in on boats from jamaica, from a number of other places moving into brixton in these communities and their living alongside white working class people and they're all organizing around the music. they're finding solidarity, their love of music, reggae

music, rocksteady, music, and they're also building this esthetic that's like very class. so a lot of them had to go to work. they had to wear combat boots to work. they had to keep their hair short. it was, you know, in mind you this is the sixties where it was more style for people. it's kind of where their hair long and you think the uk you think austin powers but this was a much more sort rugged subculture and esthetic and initially was this first multicultural in some ways political because of the working class elements and then what we saw was with you know thatcherism rise of neo liberalism a lot of economic continuing to happen that it a little bit and so the next generation of skinheads that started coming in were more hostile the windrush generation or to people coming from outside of the country and developing this more solidly nationalist

that was exclusive to the different other groups that resided in the country. and that's how you start to get to like white nationalism. and you have that are continuing to push back against that. but that's the tension that's playing out. and you see that mirrored actually over here as well with the rise neo-nazis in the us in the eighties and later but i think you know for this term black skinhead one it's a call to like you know what the identity politics within a multicultural society and how do those things you know play out particularly in a working class setting where people feel like they're losing and that others are winning and that people particularly, i think, black folks, this country feel like we've been here. you know, we built this country like even with my own, i had to do a dna test for research

purposes begrudgingly. but my dna traces back to 1600 slaves and. so like, i think when this has been home for so or even if it hasn't been your home for so long, but it's your home now and constantly tell you that it doesn't belong to you and you there's nothing owed to you that that starts to breed a certain amount of resentment, hostility and particularly that become directed towards political structures and parties and that's what i'm looking at with black skinhead. i'm at both the rise and develop in a black culture, the erosions of that and the ways in which black voters who are expected to just show up in and vote blue no matter who are starting really question that on left and the right you write that the skinheads were united by a frustration with the status and a sense that the working class was left behind and and you talk

about how that is a solid prism through which to understand black voters in both political directions currently who are breaking off from our kind of more traditional two party systems, both the black maga voters as well as of the black, whether it be marxist or more leftist voters who find themselves deeply dissatisfied with the options otherwise to them by our political system, you know, black skinhead also is the title of a kanye west song. well, the lead on that one, right know from from the yeezus album and one things i really appreciate about this book the way you interweave both cultural commentary and criticism, political analysis and then personal memoir as well. let's talk a little bit. we've kind of, i think, the basis of the political parts of this book. but let's talk a little bit about the cultural context right. you are a black woman from chicago and who wrote a book

that is titled after kanye west song. tell me a little bit about how kanye factors this book. yeah. so here's how he was in a lot ways, the place where i started from when i began doing this research. i think, you know, in 2019 i was looking at online black communities and how information moving in those different spaces and it happened to be around the same time kanye west dropped the jesus is king album and. he had already come out as a maga supporter. we had seen him at the white house, you know, pleading the cause of larry hoover, you know, having all of these sort of conversations, dialog with donald trump. but because he, i think, had to do publicity around the jesus f king album, he popped up and he kept making these comments like. no more living for the culture. you know, i'm nobody's slave. we're culture list, presumably

referring to black people. i'm building a new culture. all of these kind of things that. i thought instinctively, no that can't be right. that doesn't feel true to me. and so really examining whether or not was an outlier or, you know, part of a trend that was emerging with younger voters that was the journey that began book. and so i talk about i talk about my own contradiction and i talk about my own contradictions with kanye, i come at it in some ways as a fan. i'm a huge fan of his music. when the katrina moment happened where he talked about george bush does not speak, does not care about black people in some of those other moments of political challenge that resonated with me. you know, his mother is actually a pretty big chicago legend. she was one of the first people to talk about ebonics as a, you

know, coded black language. and in something should be preserved and seen as. part of how we developed our under the eyes of white and so to have all of that and then to compare and contrast that with him saying we were culture life that was really what i was wanting to examine in the book. and so that's what led me to these conversations with black voters looking pop culture. the other thing about it is that i'm a latchkey kid. my mom hates when i say that, but i mean was a flight attendant. my dad was a basketball coach. they were i was in front of the tv a lot. and how i associate things is, you know, a pop cultural memory and so people will randomly, oh, this thing happened and i'll be like, oh, that's just like that episode of saved by the bell i saw once. or it's just like this, like wrestling match. i saw it once and that's my natural way of since making. and so i tried to bring that to the book like really drawing

parallels between some of the political stuff that we're seeing and how that aligns with like pop culture moments that may be feel familiar for people and maybe feel familiar with people, but are interesting to folks in some way. and so throughout that kanye comes in and out as a ghost. but yeah, i look a lot at music. i look at, i look at all of these things that shaped me as a person and i think have shaped, you know, i would say generation, my generation. and i think generations as well. you talk about how black voters and black political kind of breaks down into different buckets of of broad upheaval. can you talk me a little bit about those factions of of black voters and black political thought? you cite dr. dawson and his kind of six buckets. can you talk to me about those a little bit.

yeah. so dr. michael dawson is a professor at the university of chicago, and he's done i think one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of black political identity. and when i was actually doing my research about online discourse in black spaces, i tried create my own chart of black political expression and based on what i was seeing. and it was like no, he he already has it. i can see signs of that. and so he really looks at a number of historical figures. i think this is the process also of years of interviews, data collection. he released black visions, i believe, in the early 2001. yeah, but it still remains again, one of the best attempts to really identify all of the different ways in which black people politically identify. and so there's category is, you know, there's there's black feminism as a category. i, i believe black nationalism

as a as a category a lot of these overlap. there's liberal there's or sorry disillusion. liberal as a category, you know, black conservative. but really, he looks not just at how people vote because at that point we were voting in a large bloc, but how people what people's political values and ideologies expressed and and how they self-identify. and so like i wanted to break down those categories and i tried to it using this kind of you worlds black ish cafeteria metaphor because i thought, one, it's really important for i think people to understand that black people are not a monolith, that we all have different categories, that we fit into an overlap and what is actually kept us tethered is this idea of linked fate, which is another

term, you know, from dawson, which is this idea that we have to like we have to work to enact to uplift the group and that, you know, when something happens to an individual within the group, it's happening to us and that is part of the reason why traditionally with black voters, seen someone who may express a personal ideology of being conservative, of being against abortion, you know, pro low regulation, no regulation on gun rights, and still consistent democrat voter, because ultimately we have felt for generations, as is dr. lee, a right worker, also talks about that the republican party cannot serve us and that the democratic party can serve us. and so people have black people have consistently voted in this bloc in service of our

community. but what happens when we think that it's no longer serving and or what happens when people don't necessarily feel an obligation of linked fate. know, i think pew's i did a research a couple of years ago that said that black people are far and away. were the group most likely to feel linked to fate by a significant margin? it was like 73% and i think the next closest group was in the mid sixties. i think it was like americans but that number starting to go down over time. i think people are starting for a number of reasons and i speculate why in the book aren't necessarily feeling as tethered to black culture. black people are, community. and so then how does that manifest in terms of how voting looks in a number of other different signs? and so that's that's part of what i'm unpacking in the book. it raises to me an interesting question. well, as we think about other minority groups with their be immigrant groups or other groups coming in and, to what extent we should assume that their

politics of their political behavior are going to be similar to that of what black americans have had historically that have black americans as a group have behaved politically kind of based on this concept and, this idea, this core tenet and belief linked faith are linked faith. so right. but what as we as we think about immigrant groups or other groups coming in is it a mistake to then assume they are also going to operate in the same. you know, i mean, i think that's an interesting question. part of when i doing the book, this was definitely a journey for me and i had a lot of moments that if you were talking to somebody, was like anthropologists or communication person, they would have been like, well, obviously. but i think, you know, one of the things that was interesting to me is when you say black, that can mean race, ethnicity or, culture. and that's not always for other groups. but you have race, this

census categorization. and that was something that was constructed. this country in part, you know, to preserve economic caste. and so you have people that come to this country over the last, you know, generations who come into this construct and have to check this census box that may not be like how they identify in their home. and that in and of itself is it's like jarring experience. and then you have, you know, some of the experiences that people have with policing and a number of ways in which hostility towards black people are asserted in that becomes this sort of traumatic bonding experience that forces people into this idea of blackness, but that is a very different thing than black as an ethnicity or, you know, versus, let's say, jamaican or something, and then black as a culture. and the culture that we built in this country specifically

through media, through black newspapers, through the shared story of not just struggle, but thriving and living and existing and all of the other the things that keep tethered together in linked fate. and so i think in previous generations, you saw, you know, black people coming to this country or people coming into this country and finding themselves in a black identity. and then engaging with black culture through, you know, segregated neighborhoods, through like these different institutions in which black people across class and ethnicity are working, living, eating together. and that's creating a shared identity. but increasingly, you see that people are becoming economically segregated, more segregated along a number of lines and so that feeling of black as something other than it's like traumatic bonding experience, i speculate is happening and less and it's not a guarantee that

people are going to come in and feel this like black solidarity or commitment to, you know, uplifting us at scale in the same way versus maybe their own ethnic group or their family on a more individual level, even beyond the broad idea of linked fate, you. kind of four points that largely seem to be shared consensus across black political thought, right? the first is that racism exists. second is that racial justice. however, define that is necessary. third, is it self-determination, land ownership, fundamental goals of the ability for black people to obtain and forth that there is that that having some type of black agenda is critical to achieving the three things that come before the how how firm you think that consensus is even as you dive in and talk to the various kind of black skin has a different parts of the the

economic spectrum right as read this and i was thinking you know there certainly probably are some members the right black republicans black maga folks might deny some these things now they might do that for political one might say as part of their political but but but i'm wondering firm you think these consensuses even if we accept as a premise they're massively divergent ideas about how to achieve those. yeah. i mean i think it's i think it's rapidly changing. i mean, that's the thing that to me, i'm i'm warning about in the book and part of this goes back to like my bread and butter background, which is in media and rights ownership, black owned and controlled media. that was the mechanism by which we built a shared story, i think a shared story of black culture and identity couldn't really exist pre civil war. you might have, you know, black

micro within different like physical but it was really at that time we weren't allowed to read the necessarily travel broadly. it was really hard to build this like shared story. it came after the civil war after the rise of media. i think in illinois alone there were like 150 black newspapers at, one point. and you had like the pullman porters on the rail lines picking up these newspapers like, the chicago defender, pittsburgh courier, others transporting them across country. and one paper would circulate among 100,000 people in their communities. so that's how you're building this shared. and through that, this idea that there is a struggle, that there is injustice, that there are these lynchings happening that you might not otherwise know about in all of those things. and as we see mass loss of media, of land and other things, i think that shared story is fading. and i think the internet

environment in particular has for a lot of it's just yeah, grifting from different entities who can you know come in and be the kind of black face of white supremacy, frankly. and can say, no, racism doesn't exist. that didn't happen to me. or, you know, it kind organize around these ideas that are very i think disruptive to the broader economic cultural and social struggles of black people and so that i think that's some of the stuff that we're up against. i think also as people move into segregated as we saw like black wealthy people move out of black communities and move into like white suburbs or other spaces like of that alignment or humanity of folks kind of erodes away. so then it's like, why can't you just pull yourself up your bootstraps? so there's like an increasing absence of empathy in a way in which, you know, black culture becomes a again increasingly

fractured along class lines. and so i think that's to me, i feel like that's what i wanted to talk about, because i think that's we're seeing right now. i'm curious you think about that, though. i definitely think that the the fracturing of, the media environment broadly, i think is a huge part of it in terms us no longer having and this is true it's not just the media environment. you have black americans in a ostensibly segregated world or in the era of integration now having access and having to fight that access still, but now having half of the door cracked open to access to spaces that had prior had previously been explicitly segregated right. and so because of that, the victories of one era must always lead the problems of the next era, right? and not that it even creates new problems or other, but it allows you consider new problems that didn't exist before. right. you can't worry about voting if you're not human. right. and so you get one.

and now you can now you can worry the other. you can elect a black president when you can't vote. now, now you can think about another thing. you can't you can't dream beyond a black president if you haven't had one. well, what obama does is to give permission to black, to suddenly start thinking beyond representational politics in different ways. not that there hadn't already been people doing that right. so they think about this era, not just in media spaces, but in terms of institutions across the board. we have black. we we've seen a erosion of black institution, whether that be in media space, whether that be each with each of his views, whether that be black economic centers and economic centers. right. there are any number of reasons these things, like i said, in some cases of these economies, environments set up explicitly because the denial of access, almost all of them are set up that way. and so now that there was access to other spaces, better resource spaces understandably see a splintering of the population

and yet because of that you start to lose some of your sense of shared collective black identity, both cultural and right. what we also now see in a more globalized world, a post-internet world right, is a world where there where people now the ability and access to information in some ways even specifically to be connected to the places where they are from to, trace their ancestry in ways that they had not before to connect with the diaspora writ large. right. and so in some ways what that does is it adds layers and complexity to our kind of collective black identity, right. but at times by the very nature of that, to splinter and split it in different ways. right. and us to begin thinking and debating about how those identities intersect in places where they were our. experiences are not the same. yeah, i'm in a way i think is really interesting as well i think beyond though and as you

know there is this sense in this moment of, you know, if you have a black presidency, this does become a pivot point, right? it becomes a thing that people are going to respond to in one direction or the other. right. and that for people, they are going to use it and take it as evidence of an ultimate victory in some way. and then there power are going to be responsive to that in one way or the other that that you see and i want to get into some of the specific people write about and talk about, i think done a really good job of kind of setting that like philosophical, sociological table. but you do a lot of like actually kind of on the ground where people work, which i think is fascinating part of this book right. but i think that the but i think that the the kind of the moment when you have such a level of black achievement, what that allows is creates permission structure for at least some of black voters. and the black citizens you document to opt out of the belief that racial injustice is

kind of a persistent issue that has to be remedied in some immediate. and in fact, i lean some of their other beliefs as well. and so what i wanted to talk a little bit about is are who are these, right? who are the folks both on the left, on the right, who are largely opting of the system we've constructed are increasingly opting out of the system as we've constructed it. the premise and the caveat that majority of people in your kind of cafeteria ever metaphor, right? the biggest table is still kind of the black established folks who are going to be democratic voters, folks who believe largely in operating within the systems as they are constructed, even though they believe the systems need to change or be reformed or right. but that not folks who are here necessarily for a full scale of things as they exist but rather, you know, folks who who believe in kind of the long arc of history working towards, you

know, a more equitable outcome. your book focuses on the people who aren't at that table, who are all the other tables. mm hmm. who are. who are those folks in this era? yeah. i mean, so this was, i think, one of my favorite parts of doing this book, because particularly i wrote it between. late summer of 2020 and then december of 2021. so we were still, you know, heavily haunted in the way we were socializing was really different. and the ways in which i was to even find my own community was through these interviews. and so i interview black voters between the ages of 18 and 108 and tried to get, you know, every political representation could. and so i speak to folks like one of my favorite people to talk to koryta, who is from mississippi but lives in the dc area now and is an irs agent, a retired one i think, and she's like hardcore

leftists feels like, i'm tired marching in the streets. i'm tired of voting for political who don't seem interested in things that are going to help my community at scale, whether that's medicare for all clearing student loan debt, you know, rerouting funding to police and to like social services, things like that. and and so she's started self organizing and organizing a of folks across the country. you know at the time i to her it was leading into the 2020 election and she was a write in campaign. nina turner that was like her candidate but like i found it fascinating she like other folks, i think it's like seven 33% or over 70% of black voters under five are potentially interested third party options. and so she was someone that was both thinking about how do we radicalize the democratic party? but also, does it look like to

build systems of support for those like third party candidates? you know, from green party, dsa and others? and so that that's one person i talked to that i introduce in the book. you know, i spoke with a sex worker who a -- actress actually went on to onlyfans and had this kind of like awkward approach you. you said you wrote you sent her a really long message. it was on a long message. i yeah. i also copied and pasted it wrong so it said i promise to, make things weird for you and was just like, oh no, she's going to she's like, call the web police. i'm going to get kicked off of onlyfans. it's to be awkward. but she responded, and we had this conversation and she really interested in stuff around you know how do we organize around human rights for for sex workers and came from what i would see as a black feminist politic and that sort of next wave of feminism and that fight plays

out online and what sort of policies and what decision do and and how hold decision makers accountable to ensure the full humanity of everyone online and off and so that was another example, i would say, of, of a left wing voter. and then i spent some time talking to some black maga folks. that was interesting in a lot of levels. it was funny because i was doing my video call with them and my mom who's like she's sort of a capital d democrat, but from like a political agenda standpoint, she she agrees more with bernie. she's like a former union president. all of these things. but she was like listening to the video call, like in the other room when i was doing it, it was like arguing like these are loony. why are you even talking to these people? i'm like, mom, i'm trying to do the full research thing. shut, but like they came from different perspectives. there were some that were very traditional family values had this idea that the black family

was being broken and that it was in part due to democratic party and some of the platforms, the democratic party. and that was their draw to republican and his republicanism and donald trump. there were some people that were libertarians and come from that kind of like booker t washington and so that we just need to build our own black communities we need to build we need to build black capital and government cannot will not us but they weren't necessarily like a religious or family's values. and then there were some people that were just, i just want to see something different. and to me, trump represents someone who can disrupt the status quo. that sound in a lot of ways very much kanye. and so like i spent time with some of those folks breaking apart, you know why it was that they got to that perspective. and what i actually found is that for a lot of the folks that i talk to, they still did believe that racism existed and that there was a need for some

form of a black agenda. they just felt like agenda did not include big government or, you know, included things like second amendment rights that was like a really big thing. the ability to like have guns to protect your own community. school choice was another big thing i saw. but yeah, it was it was really fascinating me because i was talking to all these people and all of them at the end of the conversation would like, well, there's no way i would talk to like a crazy socialist or there's no way i would talk to like a crazy maga person. but i'm like, y'all. that's how black organizing has traditionally happened. we have, you know, people come from like, you know, an affiliate randolph, for example, as a socialist and, you know, milton webster, i believe his name is conservative organizing gather around pullman porters to build economic agenda. in fact, the only in which we've been able to move an economic

agenda that benefits black people is through cross ideological organizing. so it to me was, you a little alarming that we didn't have this space in place to at least talk to each other and know that we weren't going to agree on everything, but that at a baseline, if we wanted to see build to economic power that we had to like, you know, be in the same space with each other now as you talk to, i want to focus on the leftist for a little bit, right? this is you talk to folks, black people who identify kind of outside of the mainstream because. they are to the left of where the democratic party is. it does feel like they are present in our media conversation very often. in fact, it like i say, all these black skinheads in one direction or the other end up present the public dialog right. and there's a lot of debate think within washington about who speaks for black americans, especially on the left, and how to and how to grapple with the

black activist class and where it sits and how it makes it further left than more black establishment class that maybe is more representative of the biggest table of black voters and therefore the base, the democratic party, since we're in washington and we're talking as said, you know what, do you make of that as as strategic tactical conversation? right. that that it is true that the black leftists and the black marxists are a smaller it's a smaller the tables. yet that doesn't that doesn't weigh in one way or the other about whether or not what they are saying is correct. and and and so how how do we grapple with the role of the black left is in the broader kind of of black political politics. yeah. i mean, i think it's interesting on so many levels. so one of the things that dr. wright talks about in her book, the loneliness of the black republican, is that because cause of the expert that lee white supremacy says turn of

republican party under nixon and and the dog whistle politics behind that black people increasingly black republicans felt like the republican party couldn't be a space for them and so they moved into the democratic party and she and she supposes the end or she says towards the end of book that this this movement of black conservatives into the democratic party and essentially taking over the party is part of what creates this conservative nucleus within, the democratic party and and so that and and that you still see signs of that in in local politics and with particularly conservative black women and, you know, in local elections and work. and so you have that. otherwise, as levine the but that that essentially otherwise if had not been for kind of an explicit decision made by the republican party we very likely still see black people as a

populist splintered across the two parties because there's a significant portion of black people hold relatively conservative political beliefs. not only that, but you would see black, i think, more pushing the democratic party towards the left, towards a more sort new deal era democratic party. they wouldn't be accountable by this subsection. exactly. conservatives, exactly. so like part of you know, what is interesting is that there's this inherent assumption that black people are conservative and it's true we're the most religious group. there's a lot of within the black community. but if you poll black people on what would be considered more left, this policy like medicare for all student debt erasure or you know other things like that economic policies. i guess i'll say more explicitly disproportionately people are actually more left and so, you know, i think in terms of where

the party is and now i think like an interesting dynamic playing out where we've seen some very prominent black left wing candidates like nina turner or i'll say india walton and even jamaal bowman at times who have gotten pushback. the democratic party, they've gone against them. they've like almost thrown more weight at trying to, like, throw the fire blanket over this like over black leftist candidates. then what's happening on the right and meanwhile, what we've seen in 2022 is that there were 81 black republicans running for office this year and many of them had support, you know, various levels of support from the republican party. and the folks i talked to in the book had been organizing for years and continue to organize like, you know, black republicans because they see space is an empty vessel. and so i think to go back to your original question, i think that the the party must make

room for a leftist politic. i think that it's important for, you know, the federal government and say this. i think that president biden has made some some really interesting moves the last month. i think the inflation reduction act has has been really strong you know, i think that some of the stuff around student debt, i would say he could go further, but it's something and it's been very relieving for black communities, those sort of tangible gains are direct to the progressive to left base within the party pushing them. and so i think that the democratic party has look towards the younger generation and see where they're at, see that many of them not afraid of third party, not afraid to vote for different candidates. i think bernie got the largest amount of small donations for for black people than any other candidate in the democratic

primary and really factor those in as the future of the party. um can those voices be the future of the party? if the party remains constituted with so black conservatives in it? i don't think so. i mean, i think that's part of the thing. right. i think some of talking points around the hill is that, you know, could it be that the republican party is going become the party of the working class? and part of that i think comes from one the popular. they're not afraid of populism and using populist language, speaking to people's sort of economic disillusion bit. but also when you don't feel like government is showing up for you in tangible ways, in some ways it's a lot easier to try to make the case that, well, why do you need government? you need government out of your life? our government does is take money out of your pocket. other government does is like, you know, put in jail or all of these stuff. like maybe we need to move away from big government. and i think that's the kind of tension point that's playing

out. so so what i'm hearing you saying and and correct me if i'm wrong in the paraphrase, but i'm just trying to like it out a little bit. part of what i'm hearing you say is that by governing so the democratic party does not show the value of whether it be government or the things can be done, and that that even as people continue to be failed. right. and so what that is going to do ultimately is lead to more adopting more conservative views or becoming buckskin heads in the other direction. yeah. or becoming more into marxism or looking this, you know, it's going to radicalize exactly direction. exactly. so we started that little section started by talking about kind of the black skinhead to the left, the marxist the leftist right. talk to me a little bit about you know, you describe as a bernie broad and this a few times c span, i promise that it wasn't my phrase. no one came to me for that. right. but the the but you said but but i say that to say you identify on the left clearly and right

you know of the left right and and you also spend significant amount of time in this book and in this space explore bring the folks who are on right maga republicans of black right what are the things you learned about them about they want and what's most and what's mobilizing them in these moments. yeah i mean i think thing that i learned for them from them was like deep frustration with local politics and local alderman and living communities like pullman and illinois, where i talked to lisa who was organizing you black maga people across the country, people who had seen divestment from their neighborhoods had seen, you know, quality of go, you know, in leaps and bounds. and we're blaming that on, you know, democratic leadership that

saw, you know, i, i would probably counter that you know maybe we look at republican government but like republican governors rather but i think that you seeing that signs of decay around them in their and feeling like government doesn't care that that was that was part of what was driving them towards republicanism. i think this thing around gun rights and the ability safeguard your community has proven to be a big draw for a number of black people that feel like sort of under there under attack in their community in a number of different. but i think mainly what i saw is that people all want to see small, small, independent businesses. you popped up in their community. i was a little bit surprised to see how talk in those spaces

revolved around corporate power and the role of corporations and corporate cronyism and like a number of other nepotism, like all these different things and a resentment towards the role of corporations in everyday life and feeling like the democrats party was too tethered to corporate power and again, we can we can talk about that a little more and how much that's like, you know, a real thing versus who's better at that at the anti corporate talking points, right. but like either way i think that for them that of corporate power and a corporatized government was like a huge whether you were like a traditional black republican, a libertarian or all of these things into republican party were coming out of election. we saw a republican candidate and donald trump receiving increasing amount of black

support where we are seeing republican candidates across the country receive increasing amounts latino support. again, we can talk about black people specifically because what we wrote about, bill, is understanding that the the democratic party remains multiracial party of our two political parties. and yet there are some some splintering some cracks in this in that coalition as look forward be it to midterm elections coming this year and races such as the governor's race in georgia or in texas, for example, but then beyond that, into senate races and the forthcoming presidential election, what do we expect to see happen and what do you expect to see happen? not in terms of who actually wins and who loses, but in terms of how black voters are going to behave and continue to behave. would you be surprise if if those numbers in terms of

support for someone like president increases even further or what are we to make of this split tearing of the black skin heads off from the broader black coalition? yeah. i mean, i think i think what's interesting is because of that the sped up environment that we in and the way that information moves and is turned over like i think in a lot of ways it's a lot less predictable than it's been in the past. and so i think anything could happen. like you, you don't know, necessarily what's going to get named and and become this kind of like death knell for like one candidate versus the other. but i'll tell you what, like in in terms of like of the things that i've seen. i think that for many generations, the republican party has not been supportive to black republican candidates. in fact, when i talk to a lot of those candidates in 2020, one of the draws that that black republicans were organizing on the local level, like one of the draws for them was that they

could do what they wanted to without having to deal with, you know, the national republican party, that they weren't always in agreement with and that they could organize their people kind like, you know, under cover. but what we saw this is that a lot more of those candidates, lot more black republican candidates were endorsed by trump, were endorsed by the american pact, were endorsed by a red renaissance, which is chemically six pack that she spun up. and so it'll be interesting to see with with that monetary support and you know more of an ability to speak to a broader of folks how that appeals to black voters on the local level. so that's one of the things i'm looking for. and i think republicans are seeing this as a test like. can we finally peel off that 25% that we've been trying to? because, mind you, you know, the odds are in their favor. they only have to get, you know, 25% of the black vote peeled off in order to solidify their

power. and so that that's something that they're they're looking to see if they can be successful at that. i think you know definitely looking at some of races with candidates that have been endorsed by know dsa just system of crowds and others to see how they're doing what kind of support they're getting, whether or not they're able like organize their constituencies. but i think that what we're is that as we continue see the hangover from covid and the recession and i think after the 2008 recession, we lost percent of black wealth in the beginning of covid, i think 50% of black businesses close to close their doors and didn't recover. so as we continue to see that economic decline and people feeling like represent and without tangible benefits at scale, is enough, i think we'll continue to see people more open to alternatives. the book is black skinhead reflections on blackness and our political future. the authors brandy collins,

bradley. this is a really great conversation and i appreciate you being here. we've been all over place politics, kanye west and, the future of black political thought. thank you so much and thank you for your book. you again.

esteemed guests, welcome to the 73rd national book awards ceremony. tonight's host is lakshmi, an emmy nominated food expert, television and new york times bestselling author. she is the creator, host, executive producer of the critically claimed hulu series taste the nation and the host and executive produc o