Dog-whistling Donald
Cornell Brooks on the dangers of Trump’s subtler racist dog whistles — and why so many people in this country are afraid to use the word racist — plus the law enforcement case for legalizing marijuana, and another installment of In Case You Missed It. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.
Trump’s “shithole” comment may be his most blatant racist remark to date. But are his more subtle racist dog whistles even more dangerous? And why are so many people in this country so uncomfortable with using the word racist? Rebecca sits down with Cornell Brooks, a lawyer, ordained minister, and activist who formerly served as the 18th president of the NAACP, and Patrick Cokley, a longtime disability rights advocate who serves as the administrator of the LEAD ON update which provides resources on technology, employment, and education related to disability. Next, following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ rollback of the Obama-era policy that paved the way to legal pot, Rebecca talks with Inge Fryklund, a former Assistant State’s Attorney in Cook County who serves on the board of Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which is devoted to criminal justice reform and stopping the war on drugs. But first, The Slevinator returns with the news of the week in poverty and inequality — and an outfit made for radio — in another installment of In Case You Missed It.
This week’s guests:
- Cornell Brooks, Lawyer, Ordained Minister, 18th President of the NAACP
- Patrick Cokley, Administrator of the LEAD ON update
- Inge Fryklund, former Assistant State’s Attorney in Cook County, Board Member of Law Enforcement Action Partnership
For more on this week’s topics:
- Read more from former ASA Inge Fryklund on the law enforcement case for ending the war on drugs here — plus how legalizing drugs would strengthen democracy, address inequality and child poverty, bridge the police-community divide, and curb violence.
- For more from Patrick Cokley, check out the Lead On Update, a weekly roundup of disability news and culture.
This program aired on January 26th, 2018
Transcript of show:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, a conversation about race and racism in America with Cornell Brooks, former head of the NAACP and Patrick Cokley, a long time disability rights advocate who, in addition to being married to the great Rebecca Cokley runs the LEAD ON update. Next, following Attorney General Jeff Session’s rollback of the Obama era policy that paved the way to legal pot, I talk with a former assistant state’s attorney to hear the law enforcement case for legalization. But first the Slevinator returns to join me for another round of in case you missed it and Slevs, I have to say some people have faces made for radio but today you seem to have an outfit made for radio.
JEREMY SLEVIN: Oh, thank you. [LAUGHTER] So you’re saying this outfit should never appear, it should only be discussed?
VALLAS: I’m just saying it is something, it’s actually, it’s almost blinding. [LAUGHTER] I think is the honest –
SLEVIN: I like how the truth comes out when we’re on air because when I walked in you’re like wow, nice sweater. Then you throw me under the bus.
VALLAS: Secretly I just wanted you to keep it on so I could say that while we were taping.
SLEVIN: Yeah, or maybe you really do like it and you just want to make fun of me on air.
VALLAS: All of these are plausible theories but that’s not why I have you here. I don’t have you hear for your colorful sweater that listeners can see on twitter when the episode posts. I actually have you here to update you on all the stuff we have going on this week so in the news Trump is at Davos speaking to world leaders. We’re actually taping as of Friday morning he’s doing it as we speak.
SLEVIN: As we speak.
VALLAS: What are we hearing from Trump?
SLEVIN: So of course Davos hosts the World Economic Forum which is a gathering of the world’s elites, corporate titans, not the most natural place for Trump to go given his agenda but it turns out really rich people like giant tax cuts for the rich so it’s actually despite his rhetoric this is a pretty fitting place for Trump to go. He included in his speech a mention of getting people out of poverty and into jobs. And the subtext here is —
VALLAS: I want to use his words too, right?
SLEVIN: Oh I’m getting there.
VALLAS: Oh well I’m scooping you, sorry.
SLEVIN: Scoop away!
VALLAS: No, go ahead.
SLEVIN: I was going to say the subtext here before we get to the words is that they are laying the groundwork for deep cuts, further cuts to programs like Medicaid and food assistance and housing assistance. They usually call it welfare reform and now they’ve stopped doing that and what Trump said today was that the best way out of poverty is a “big beautiful paycheck”
VALLAS: It seems that “big” and “beautiful” seem to be the only adjectives he really knows, also there’s “yuge”, there’s no ‘H’ in that one, it’s “yuge” but in addition to “yuge” there’s also big and beautiful whether it’s a wall, apparently here it’s a paycheck of course the irony being if Trump were serious about helping people climb out of poverty through big beautiful paychecks maybe he would I don’t know, raising the poverty level minimum wage or not roll back Obama-era rules that would have allowed people to earn the wages they deserve for overtime work, maybe he wouldn’t be let employers steal their workers’ tips, all the things that we’ve been watching him do throughout the past year.
SLEVIN: And of course this comes off the heels of new Medicaid rules that take away people’s health care, take away people’s Medicaid if they lose their job. What it doesn’t do is actually give people a job or raise wages. The irony of all this talk of we need to get people into work is they’re doing the side where they take away their benefits but they’re not doing the side where they actually invest in jobs or try to place people into jobs or train them for jobs. There’s nothing on the jobs side. It’s all just the taking away the health care side.
VALLAS: Now of course Trump is going to, in his state of the union which is going to take place early next week, it’s actually on Tuesday night, the January 30th so I think his speech at Davos is being watched as a preview of what we may hear in the state of the union, lots of folks expecting he’s going to make big promises on the infrastructure front which he of course is going to claim will create jobs but experts who have taken a look at what he’s planning to do on that front have laid bare that the emperor yet again has no clothes and what it really is is a plan to enrich Wall Street and investors in the name of creating jobs, that’s not actually what this plan is about. More to come on that front I’m sure after we hear more in the state of the union. But that’s not all that’s going on this week, Jeremy, you mentioned the Medicaid so-called work requirements that Trump announced super unprecedented, the first time in the history of the Medicaid program that states will be allowed to take healthcare away from people who can’t find work and a lawsuit was just filed by the National Health Law Program actually challenging this new policy as illegal, as people has started to look at Kentucky, the state where Trump first approved one of these Medicaid work requirement’s waivers, people have started to notice some really egregious stuff in what Kentucky wants to do. Tell us a little bit about some of those terribles.
SLEVIN: So Kentucky was the first state to get these rules approved for their state and it turns out they’re pretty awful. And harken back to the Jim Crow era in some cases. So The New York Times reported this week that part of Kentucky’s requirements are to require people to pass a so-called health or financial literacy test, if they lose their Medicaid benefits and then want to reapply. So they take away your healthcare and then to get it back you have to pass a form of literacy test. Now there, I don’t even know where to start with the problems and racial implications of this but for example someone with a mental health issue to require them to pass some sort of literacy test to get care is so cruel and inhumane it’s beyond me.
VALLAS: So other stuff happening this week that’s sort of in a similar vein, Scott Walker, Governor Scott Walker actually gave a speech, his state of the state speech this week and folks have all been sort of lining to applaud the announcement in that speech that he was going to be creating a new state child tax credit, taking a page out of Marco Rubio’s book by embracing that particular avenue and folks are all kind of cloaking him in the plaudits of look at him crossing over the aisle to do something against type but what else was buried in that speech that isn’t getting any attention?
SLEVIN: So, this is, I’ll note after Walker has spent a career slashing education and funding for child care in the state of Wisconsin and now at the end of his term he’s seeking to get credit but buried in the speech was a lot of really awful proposals including and you can discuss the details even more, basically work requirements for parents who receive food assistance, who get food stamps. So it’s basically he’s saying I’m going to give kids this meager, $100 tax credit and at the same time I’m going to take away food assistance for the parents, essentially taking away food from the kids which is beyond the traditional often proposals for work requirements that don’t include parents of kids. Just another egregious policy from Scott Walker.
VALLAS: And another attempt in the course of this broad trend of Republicans all trying to figure out how they can make it even harder to access already meager programs that help families afford basics. In the case of nutrition assistance, workers are already required to work in most cases. There are certain exemptions, one of those is parents with kids and particularly parents with young kids in recognition that caregiving responsibilities might be a reason that someone isn’t working a certain number of hours per week. Scott Walker, apparently doesn’t think that’s good enough, no food for you or in this case no soup for you, Wisconsin. So one last headline that needs to get called out this week comes from New York City.
SLEVIN: A couple more actually, the one you mentioned —
VALLAS: Oh, two more, sorry, I’m taking away your role her, Slevs, I’m trying to shorten it inadvertently. [LAUGHTER] You’re clinging to your radio time.
SLEVIN: So in New York City the subway is notoriously inaccessible and there have actually been lawsuits filed claiming that it discriminates against people with disabilities. That’s because 75% of the subways don’t have elevators, maybe people with disabilities can’t access them. And there was a proposal to build one in downtown Manhattan, add an elevator to the stop.
VALLAS: Right near Wall st.
SLEVIN: And now some people are saying wealthy groups in downtown Manhattan are saying, are trying to block the elevator from being placed there because they say it increases the terrorist threat. So blocking people with disabilities from accessing the subway.
VALLAS: I sort of want to pause to let people take that in right, I’m sorry an elevator that would help people with disabilities access the subway just like the rest of New Yorkers can’t do that, way too dangerous because of terrorists? It’s almost mind boggling that that’s where they went.
SLEVIN: I’m sure none of them have elevators in their fancy upper west side apartment buildings either.
VALLAS: Well, apparently elevators are how the terrorists win so I’m doing a lot of side eye here from both me and Jeremy that you can’t see and maybe we’re not doing it well enough if you also can’t hear it, dramatic side eye should be heard as well as seen. So what’s the other story from New York City?
SLEVIN: So and I’m sorry that this has been a bad news day but Amazon Go —
VALLAS: This one’s not from New York City, sorry.
SLEVIN: This is not from New York City, but Amazon Go, so they have opened their first brick and mortar shop, grocery store.
VALLAS: What are they calling it, Amazon Go?
SLEVIN: Amazon Go, which is also isn’t it a name of another product? Anyway, it’s in Seattle and basically they don’t accept food stamps. And what the grand irony, they’re not accepting food stamps at this store, studies have shown that a majority of Amazon warehouse workers actually are on food assistance. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon is one of the richest people in the history of the world now. So it is like a microcosm of everything that is wrong with our society. They’re putting up these brick and mortar stores that are putting other grocery stores out of business, their own workers have food stamps and they’re not accepting food stamps at these stores, it’s just not —
VALLAS: So Amazon Go, Amazon Go the store for you unless you are on food stamps which if you work for Amazon you probably are. So that’s all the time we have for in case you missed it Slevs, again love the sweater, really do and our listeners will as well as soon as I tweet shame it out. Don’t go away, lots more Off Kilter after the break, first a conversation with Cornell Brooks and Patrick Cokley about the conversation on race in Trump’s America.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Trump’s ‘shithole’ comment may be his most blatant racist remark to date. But are his more subtle dog whistles even more dangerous? And why are so many people in this country so uncomfortable with using the word ‘racist’? To unpack this and more, I sat down with Cornell Brooks, a lawyer, ordained minister, and activist who formerly served as the 18th president of the NAACP. He’s also a visiting professor at the School of Law and the School of Theology at Boston University. We were joined by Patrick Cokley, a long time disability rights advocate who serves as the administration or the LEAD ON update, which provides resources on technology, employment and education related to disability, let’s take a listen.
So just to start, and where do you start in a conversation about race in this moment, in the recent days between President Trump’s widely noted and remarked upon quote, unquote “shithole” comment, as well as an exchange he had with some members of the Congressional Black Caucus in which he was told that their constituents would be harmed by his Medicaid work requirements policy, they noted not all of their constituents are black and he responded befuddled, apparently befuddled, then what are they? In the wake of both of these sets of comments there have been a lot of very well deserved discussion about how much open and overt racism is being not just tacitly but explicitly condoned at the highest levels of this country and yet we’re also watching simultaneously tremendous discomfort on the part of so many pundits, commentators and even members of congress with actually calling out racism as racism when it happens. Cornell, would love to get your throughs just to kick us off.
CORNELL BROOKS: Sure, sure. I think one of the things that strikes me is when you have the convergence of intent and ignorance, people are much more likely to call out ignorance. So in other words, to the degree that the president says things about African-Americans, about any number of races or ethnicities out of ignorance they’re willing to call that out. But where there is evidence of bad intent, racist intent, bigoted intent, prejudiced intent, there is a reluctance. And so there’s a presumption of goodness that does not exist. So where you have a president who is referred Mexicans as rapists, who has called into question the judicial suitability and temperament of a federal judge is a consequence of him being Mexican, who has used the works ‘SOB’ as racial code for the ’n’ word in Alabama in reference to Colin Kaepernick. We’ve seen over and over again from the birther arguments to the arguments about the Central Park jogger case, a president who has demonstrated not only racial insensitivity, not only ignorance about those things relating to race but bad intent, racist intent. And it seems as if people feel that by calling someone a racist, in calling their actions, their deeds and their words racist, that this somehow makes them judgmental. It calls into question their ability to be open-minded, to be graceful, to give people a second chance, to be open to whatever it they have to say, but the fact of the matter is when you walk around with the intent to harm others based on their race, based on their ethnicity, based on any immutable characteristic is in fact wrong, point, period, paragraph. And just because you hold the highest office in the land, in this republic, does not immunize you from being a racist or being called out as a racist.
VALLAS: Patrick, your thoughts.
PATRICK COKLEY: I think one of the other interesting pieces when we think about racism and especially even when we think about ableism as well, is that we have been taught for those of us, depending what generation we are that racism exists in functions, in access, racism is separate water fountains, racism is not being allowed to apply for a job because you’re on this list.
VALLAS: It’s people wearing hoods.
COKLEY: Indeed, it’s people wearing hoods. And what the reality of our today is is that racism is actually more than just that. When you are calling out racism or racist actions you are then also required to turn that lens upon yourself. And we’ve seen that brought to us from multiple communities. We’ve seen that from communities of color saying ok, yes we understand that technically this is equal footing but we are not all starting at the same place. We’ve seen this in the disability community when asking for rights or requirements that are mandated as equal for everyone, people saying well it’s really hard so many we shouldn’t do it. And that unnerves a lot of people. They want to be able to say an action or a statement was racist but they are concerned that if they say ok, well what the president did or said was racist then he is a racist then they have to then look to themselves and say I’m now responsible for his actions because of his role as the president. I’ll also say one other thing that is slightly unnerving. Not to downplay the actions of the president because I don’t think many of us were surprised. Like Cornell, like you said we’ve heard many of these remarks before.
VALLAS: Certainly not new.
COKLEY: Oh, indeed, what unnerves me is also this yet another smoke screen, yet another opportunity to distract us from a broader issue and when we’re talking about immigration especially and denigrating countries that largely are people of color. Are we then taking away the attention from individuals who need our attention who already have immigrated who are coming to work certain jobs? Are we taking attention away from the fact that individuals from those countries when they do legally come also tend to ask for more rights as workers? They tend to ask to be regarded with the same sort of respect. I think we’re seeing some of the same things in New York with the fast food unions and the request from large populations to be treated equally as workers. But when you denigrate where they’re from, when you call their countries “shithole” then you give an excuse to a broader population, a broader set of people to say well we don’t have to think as critical about their needs, about their wants. We don’t have to give them accommodations for work if they can’t work we fired them and replace them and I think that’s the place where it ends up most dangerous and most concerning.
VALLAS: And a lot of speculation since Trump took office and before Trump took office in the White House about whether his incredibly offensive and always eye catching tweets and comments which themselves become whole news cycles then eat up an entire day, are an intentional distraction in the form of chaos theory to keep us from being able to pay attention to and follow in a meaningful way and particularly keep the media from being able to follow in a meaningful way the actual actions that his administration is taking that are incredibly harmful to so many people. But I want to dig into part of what both of you have gotten into is fear, fear that unpins the reluctance to call out racism when we watch it in action. Is part of that that we’ve learned or that some of us have learned the wrong lessons from the 2016 presidential election? Is some of it about a fear of turning people off if we use the R word to describe racism when it plays out because we’re afraid that we’re not going to be a part that is a big enough tent that we can bring in these white working class voters that so many in the Democratic party are so interested in now going after? Cornell, your thoughts.
BROOKS: A couple points, first of all, the fear is related to a kind of paralysis of politeness which is to say we all endeavor to be polite, to be well mannered, to exercise a certain degree of decorum, particularly with respect to people who occupy positions of authority, so we’re unusually deferential to them, we give them the benefit of the doubt. And it causes us to literally paralyze our conscious, our ability to morally critique when we should. Point two is that this notion that somehow if we’re less critical of the president’s overt racism, this will win us points with white working class. But what we saw in the last election was the triumph of the politics of authenticity. To the degree that Senator Sanders was perceived as being more authentic, more real and interestingly enough, Donald J. Trump as a candidate was perceived as being more authentic and real to the degree that they were understood as candidates who speak transparently. Our critique should be transparent and real and authentic. So when you see people literally engaging in behavior that imperils and endangers other people, you gotta call it out.
So here’s the thing, in the name of being polite, here’s what we’re overlooking. This president is racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic behavior perfectly correlates with hate crime in this country. We have immigrant children who are likely to be beaten up and bullied as a consequence of presidential rhetoric. So we have a president who through his racist commentary has done something fairly if not unique and distinctive which is to say he has both imperiled immigrants at home and Americans service personnel abroad to the degree that you use this kind of racist language we have our allies abroad who may be less likely to be protective of American troops, or our enemies more likely to hurt them. That’s what this commander in chief has done. And every time I have a sense of being polite, of being artificially cordial, we overlook his racism, his xenophobia, his anti-Semitism, his ableism, you pick the prejudice because he has engaged in almost all of it with literally homogenizing the harm and the hurt that he’s done and he’s engaged in.
COKLEY: Cornell, that’s a great point. And I think you really speak to the fact that that fear also causes motivations and actions that don’t fit in with necessarily making choices that work best for everyone. One of the reasons that marginalized communities, be they individuals with disabilities, people of color, often times end up afraid is because they find themselves in places where they’re told if you just act a certain way, if you just behave a certain way, if you just comport yourself in a certain manner then you will be less likely to be marginalized, you will be less likely to be discriminated against. You won’t be like those people, you will be like an average American. And what the behaviors that we have seen tells us is that no matter how you behave, no matter how upstanding you are, no matter how well you seek to merge and maintain an identity inside the mainstream that makes everyone comfortable, you are still not wanted you will still be thought of as less than. And that I think we’ve even seen that play out even further with the response of the Democratic party, with the response of people who’ve been anti-president from the beginning. Not only did Donald J. Trump’s win sort of codify the idea of general, more casual racism and ableism but it also took a lot of people who’ve been talking about inclusion, who’ve been talking about gender equality and made them question whether or not they were doing the right things or doing what was necessary to get to power. Suddenly all the folks who had been saying let’s put women out front, let’s put people of color out front, they said well maybe we’re doing it wrong. Maybe we need to go back to the adage of when, maybe we need to find ourselves a nice, old, white guy to speak the liberal agenda. And that’s the bit that’s most unfortunate because out of a fear response they’re turning away from what is really necessary to keep inclusion and justice going in our country.
VALLAS: So another place where racism not overtly but implicitly and through dog-whistle politics is playing out as we speak and we’ve talked about this on the show now a couple of times over the last several weeks is around what Trump and his colleague in congress Speaker Paul Ryan often like to call quote, unquote and I’m put huge scare quotes around this, “welfare reform” and that there’s been this years long quest on the part of Paul Ryan to redefine basically every program and policy that helps struggling families make ends meet as welfare. A well-known, well understood dog-whistle that the American human brain hears and then goes immediately to images that they’ve seen through the media over the decades of black people and particularly quote unquote, “urban” black people. It’s the myth of the welfare queen all over again. And so I bring this up in this moment because it’s related to the ongoing conversation of where are we calling out racism as we see it and I personally continue to bang my head against the wall and to tweet and to all the things we do in the 21st century when we are as frustrated as I am to see many in the media just repeating the talking points and the frame of welfare and welfare reform with apparently no awareness of the fact that it is not just a Republican talking point but a dog whistle in itself. Cornell, your thoughts.
BROOKS: I think part of the problem is due a lack of historical depth. So when we talk about so-called social welfare programs there’s not an appreciation of the degree to which this country certainly going back to President Roosevelt has created all manner of ladders of opportunity for people. So when my father who was a military officer or my brother who was an NCO, they served in their country in uniform, they received certain benefits in terms of VA loans, assistance for college, no one considers that welfare. But when we provide benefits for corporations with the hope that they will invest in communities, with the hope that they will hire people, with the hope that they will put money into research and development, we don’t call that welfare, we call that opportunity creation. Well how is it when we have working class people, middle class people, poor folks in this country who need opportunities and we make critical, thoughtful investments. As I like to remind people, I’m a graduate of Yale Law School but I’m also a graduate of Headstart. Headstart to me was a wise, thoughtful, research-based investment in children that pays off, we know that. This is not welfare. Small, social policy, smart social investments are in fact investments. Now if you want to make a critical argument based on research, based on evidence, based on outcomes, that’s one thing. But to use these basically this vocabulary of dog-whistle racism, needs to be called out and that’s exactly what this is about.
It’s all the idea of creating work requirements, that is just outrageous. It is absolutely outrageous, and to have people who have the best health care on our dime in Congress and in the White House lecture the rest of us is completely hypocritical. When the president has a physician we paid for soft peddle his medical condition again on our dime, do we call it welfare? No. It’s what we do for our president, the question we have to ask is what is he or a set of health care policies or quote welfare policies doing for the rest of us.
VALLAS: And do we call tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations welfare? No we don’t. All really strong points, Patrick you were looking to get in there.
COKLEY: There’s a long standing history also that we’ve seen, like we said, not only dog-whistle politics but of sort of this rhetoric around individuals who [are] receiving supports. And in that history we always see them taking whatever population that is either needing of support or need that support and attempting to either denigrate them in some way or the other. And I think that you make a very excellent point in that the welfare queen, those of us who grew up during the crack epidemic of the 80s which we all know was this false idea but this —
VALLAS: She never existed. She was made up by President Reagan because he knew he needed a face for his divide and conquer politics, just throwing that context in.
COKLEY: Indeed, indeed, and what’s happened is we see that process continue. They take a new group and they hold them up and say these people are responsible for you not having the services you need when in reality all of are representative of these groups and we saw especially with the welfare queens in the 80s and there is a move by certain people to tie it to Medicare, to tie it to individuals with disabilities on Social Security and say they are the reasons why we don’t have the resources we need to make the country move forward and the reality is that these communities represent groups of Americans that are closer to us that we think that are in need of all of these tools and resources. For the disability community especially the research has been done, the data is out there, these individuals want to work. They are not receiving Social Security or receiving additional incomes or supports from the government because they just a tax on the system, because they’d like to spend their days playing Xbox, they’re receiving these supports because they need them to survive and given the opportunity, they would work. So we have the data that tells us that and yet the rhetoric continues to be to let’s promote the idea that anyone who is receiving government supports and services as being lazy, not as being recipients of a tax base that they’ve paid into. Not as being American citizens who voted for these services and are required that they should be accessible to them and to any other American that needs them and instead used as a fake poster child, a fake model or an excuse for disengagement from political leaders and that’s unfortunate that we still see that.
VALLAS: I mentioned before Trump’s response when he was confronted with apparently new information that not all of the people who are constituents of members of the Congressional Black Caucus are black. And apparently not all people who turn to Medicaid for health insurance he learned that day are Black. These might have been new pieces of information to him, they’re not new to us or to our listeners but a lot of the responses in the wake of that exchange from well-meaning advocates and folks who are strenuously fighting back against these harmful and counterproductive Medicaid work requirements, a lot of the responses in that moment were wait a second, most people who receive public assistance like Medicaid are white and full stop the response sort of ended there. And I personally found myself incredibly frustrated with how limited the discussion about why what Trump said and why his ignorance on this subject and his overt racism and his racist policies in this space became so binary and so limited and free of nuance and free of the harder work that we need to do as a country as we talk about these policies, these programs and the people who they help. Would love to get your thoughts about how we can do better and what’s wrong with the knee-jerk response of but wait a second most people who get help from the government are white as our only response.
BROOKS: One of the things that I think is helpful to point out here is you have, the president’s rhetoric suggests a certain ignorance. But you can have the ignorance by choice or you can have ignorance as a smoke screen. The president did not spend his formative years in Norway, he spent his formative in New York City, which is not a particularly un-diverse community. So I’m not entirely sure how much of his, this he doesn’t know as opposed to what he claims he doesn’t know. But going beyond this binary are most of the people who receive social benefits or investments, people of color or the majority who are in fact white, going beyond that the issue becomes irrespective of what color or ethnicity degree of ability or disability people have, should we be making these investments? Are they good for our citizens and do they move us forward as a society and a community. Those are the questions that we don’t get to and to the degree that we use majority white to legitimize minority black and brown, delegitimizes the whole question and proposition morally.
The fact that we always have to, so as it’s like in gender terms when women are harassed and raped and brutalized and sexually demeaned, if a man says well I object to that because it could be my wife, it could be my daughter, it could my aunt or my grandmother, does male genitalia legitimize claims made by women based on gender bias, discrimination and demeaning behavior? That’s ridiculous. But this is what we see all the time. And so it’s up to us to be more morally mature to take people’s moral claims at face value so that if the majority of the people receiving some kind of social investment or benefit were any particular group they’re still Americans, still citizens, and even when they’re not citizens there are people who aspire to be citizens, we should evaluate the investment based on the investment.
VALLAS: And I love how you put that because the implication that maybe well intentioned people who were part of contributing to that knee jerk response of oh but most people are white if they get public assistance, the implication there of course is these programs are ok because white people are helped by them. These programs are ok because they’re for white people as though if they weren’t the majority of beneficiaries they would not be OK programs or ones that we need to be defending.
BROOKS: They would be morally suspect.
VALLAS: Right, exactly.
COKLEY: It very much goes back to that earlier fear discussion too as well because it should be enough to say we wish to help other Americans, in fact the data tells us that most Americans are supportive of helping other people in need but that justification, that belief that if we can shroud these actions, these processes, these programs in what is deemed as sort of this broad scale respectability then suddenly they will be OK. I think another interesting piece with that fear is something Cornell, that you hinted at that worries me which is also how much of this is lack of knowledge of the President’s account or really just him attempting to again to sway us away, to get us to turn away from what’s actually going on. In this conversation about countries that are not Norway, let’s say, in this conversation is he then again pushing us away from paying attention to why congress does not seem to want to give supports to all Americans. Why they’re attempting to create work requirements for a community of people that are in most cases are already working and would like to be able to work more in order to keep receiving their benefits from the government. And there are many who could say well this is all his personality, he’s brash, I think there are some who could say maybe this is more calculated and maybe, and drawing attention to what many presidents thought of as a side show we then don’t pay attention to the policy priorities that are taking place.
VALLAS: Patrick, you have two kids, you and the woman I often refer to as ‘Cokley’ who in this moment that’s not super helpful and fair to you because you are also Cokley but folks on the show know her as ‘Cokley’, Rebecca Cokley. You and she have two young children. How are you talking to them in this moment about race and about racism and about the president’s role in creating a climate as we’ve been discussing that makes racism not just ok but something that many people now feeling emboldened to embody?
COKLEY: Indeed, I think both of our kids attend a school that is a Spanish-immersion school and it’s very diverse. We tease them and say it’s looks like a Benetton ad. And one of the things that we talk to our kids about, we even talk to their friends about is not just fear, not just be afraid of we have a president that seems to not support or be as interested in your welfare maybe as other president but we say the first thing we’re going to do is we are going to remember our values. We are not going to shy away from talking about what’s right, we’re not going to shy away from talking about inclusion and making safe spaces for our friends and our family and for anyone that needs those safe spaces. We then encourage them to consistent attempt to do what is right, to not exclude people, to think about other people’s feelings and when confronted with ideas of exclusion or racism to speak up for them and ask for help. That’s their day to day, it’s not going to be oh you have to build a wall or you have to make a policy, it’s thinking critical about how do they want to give and to grow to make those decisions.
VALLAS: For more of my conversation with Cornell Brooks and Patrick Cokley, check out our bonus episode on iTunes. More Off Kilter after the break.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Earlier this month Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Justice Department policy that paved the way to marijuana legalization and ordered federal prosecutors to enforce the laws that Congress makes. That directive has now created a mess of confusion in the 29 states and D.C. that have legalized marijuana for medical and/or recreational use. And among the 60% of the U.S. population who lives in one of those places, me included. To help me unpack this I’m joined by Inge Fryklund, she’s a former assistant state attorney in Cook County who now lives in Oregon a state that allows recreational marijuana and she was also involved in that state’s legalization campaign. Inge, thanks so much for joining the show.
INGE FRYKLUND: Well thanks so much for asking me.
VALLAS: So just to kick us off help us understand kind of the 101. What did Jeff Sessions do, what did his rollback of the guidance mean and where do things stand right now legally?
FRYKLUND: To understand that I think we need to back it up to the Obama administration. Remember, we have had marijuana as schedule 1 on the books for the federal government since Nixon in 1971. And that law has, that’s not been changed since then. The Obama administration did not change the law. And I do fault them for that. Instead, what the Justice Department did with a memo authored by I guess an assistant Attorney General named Cole, the Cole memo said we’re not going to enforce it. Which I’m a lawyer and thinking strictly from a rule of law point of view not changing the law and saying hey let’s not just enforce the thing is really not very good public policy. But that’s where we were. And what the memo, it was a three page long memo said that U.S. attorneys in the 93 separate district that the U.S. is divided up had the, were discouraged from prosecuting things which were legal under state law and the various states took that as pretty much a go ahead that the federal government is not going to bother us and we just have to enforce our own law. And the Cole memo also said that the states, to have a free pass here clearly had to be enforcing their own law. For example making sure that marijuana stayed out of the hands of kids and that’s something which could be prosecuted. So that was the status of the U.S. attorneys being directed to just hold back. By removing that memo Sessions is sort of turning the clock back to pre-Cole memo times, all the way back to 1971 with the U.S. attorneys free to prosecute what’s on the books and that would include violations of federal marijuana law, even those things are now legal under state law. So that’s what we’ve come to today.
VALLAS: So now taking us from that background to where things stand. I mentioned up top that there’s a whole array of confusion in the states where things have been moving forward in terms of regulating marijuana for medical use, for recreational use and so forth, whole kind of business areas have cropped up in the states and also people like myself who use marijuana for medical or for other purposes are also sitting in a mess confusion wondering what comes next. How do you see this playing out in terms of where things go in the states where this is some sort of legalization?
FRYKLUND: My personal guess is that there is not going to be a huge amount of change for a number of reasons. One of them is that this Cole memo and the withdrawing it is direction to the U.S. attorneys, these are the people who are in charge of federal prosecutions in majority of states there are 93 different U.S. attorneys, it’s all divided up geographically. And if you recall back when Trump first took office he instructed all 93 U.S. attorneys to resign which they either did or were fired. And he’s just been very slow to fill those positions just like he has with a lot of other positions. When I checked yesterday I think there were 46 of 93 had new[ly] confirmed people and 12 are in the nomination process. He also just appointed 17 for interim positions for which there are no nominations. So the U.S. attorney’s offices around the country who have to make decisions on marijuana prosecutions have appointed heads for only about half of them. And others are just being run day to day by whoever the career people were or now by an interim who is not going to be making a whole lot of changes.
So the fact that Trump has not been filling managements positions also means that there just aren’t that many Trump appointees who are going to be able to do anything differently. So that’s reason 1 for not getting too excited about this. A related reason is that withdrawing the Cole memo does not provide any additional funding to go chasing after marijuana. All it did is say that instead of ignoring which are things that are violations of federal law, the U.S. attorneys can make their decisions about prosecuting or not. Well they’ve got the same amount of money that they ever had and they’ve got a lot of responsibilities in their areas.
And any prosecutor, I remember back when I was a prosecutor in Cook County, Chicago in Illinois, there aren’t time and people enough to prosecute everything that could conceivably be prosecuted. You’ve got to prioritize. And the U.S. attorneys in each district are going to have to make some decisions. Do we go after bank robberies or do we chase people who have legal marijuana? So there’s going to be a lot of day to day individuals decision making and I would be surprised if there is a whole lot of shifting resources towards marijuana and dropping some of the more serious crimes, civil rights violations, that the citizens in those areas actually care about. And how a U.S. Attorney behaves in terms of prosecution influences how the citizens are going to feel about the job that he or she is doing and the Trump administration and you don’t want to antagonize a whole lot of voters with the House up for election and a third of the senate come November I see them [INAUDIBLE] prosecution of crime that impacts things that citizens really care about. So that prioritization problem is kind of number two reason for nothing being too excited.
Reason number three is that as you pointed out earlier 60% of the population lives in these areas. 29 states have some form of legalization and the states who have legalized adult use, by the way I really don’t like to use the term recreational marijuana. Has anyone ever gone out for a recreational beer, let’s just say adult use. They are raking in the tax money. For example in Oregon which legalized adult use only three years ago the initial projections were something like $14 million a year in tax revenue. Last year they brought in $62 million so this is turning out to be wildly profitable for states and now with some of these new tax law changes limiting deductibility of state and local taxes it’s going to be harder for states to be raising taxes, local whether it’s state income tax or sales tax or whatever so it’s going to be important to have this revenue source. And thinking back to prohibition of alcohol which was repealed in 1933 one of the real drivers of legalization was the government’s need for tax revenue which alcohol taxes provide so when states start seeing that there is a threat to their revenue streams that is going to bring bipartisan objection out in force. That’s a sure financial incentive I think is the third reason for thinking there’s going to be huge pushback.
VALLAS: And we actually are already seeing that kind of pushback including from Republicans in congress, Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky all in the days immediately following Sessions’ big announcement that he’d be rolling back this policy already responded with very sharp blowback as well as Congressman Dana Rohrabacher from California who actually went so far as to accuse Sessions of a quote, “profound misreading of the Constitution which allows states, not the heavy handed federal government to determine such issues.” So a strong states right criticism of this overreach as they are framing it and it brings up another point of some hypocrisy here because you’ve got an administration that throughout the recent days has been all out there in full force talking about state’s rights and state flexibility when it comes to taking away Medicaid from low income people who can’t find work and yet apparently doesn’t care about states rights when it comes to either medical or as you put it, adult use, which I like very much I’m going to change my lexicon now, adult use of marijuana.
FRYKLUND: Yeah, I think there is a tremendous amount of hypocrisy going here. Apparently Sessions believes in states’ rights especially if it means it can be used to disenfranchise minority citizens or take medical care away. But what’s become of states rights as a rallying cry when now we want the federal government stepping into something that the states have decided to do. And this as you pointed out brings in the libertarian wing of the Republican party, people like Rand Paul who just do not want the federal government in the midst of what the states are doing. So for all these reasons I think there is going to be so much blowback, so much general discouragement of individual U.S. attorneys to further that I would just be really surprised if we see some massive let’s go after legal marijuana.
And I’m also hoping that this is going to bring more attention to the historical question of how we got here in the first place. And that story going back to President Nixon I think is a fascinating one. Marijuana had been illegal since I forget if it was 1935 or 1937 but it was no big deal. But Nixon decided to declare a ‘War on Drugs’ for his own personal political benefit, that’s when the arrests started to sky rocket. And according to both his tapes and the [INAUDIBLE] I think they called them a memoir, he after he had convened a commission chaired by Governor Shafer of Pennsylvania, well respected guy to study scientific evidence on drugs and make recommendations for scheduling as to how serious they were. The commission came back saying marijuana doesn’t belong here at all. It’s no more addictive than caffeine which I know about. And Nixon essentially threatened Shafer saying you had better get your people in line, this is going to be schedule 1, as that of heroin which was flying in the face of the scientific evidence. And again according to these memoirs of his henchmen, the truth of the matter was that Nixon wanted to go after both Black people and hippies. Which he couldn’t do directly but he could go after their drug of choice. So it was very specifically decided for reasons of racial animosity to make marijuana illegal and I think the more that that particular angle or the history behind this is publicized, the harder it’s going to be for people to say that oh, this is really dangerous, we’ve got to keep it on the federal drug schedule which also is why I would oppose any move to move it down to schedule 2, or schedule 3, it should just be gone entirely.
[…]
VALLAS: And in the last minute or so that I have with you there’s also some hope among advocates for legalization along the lines that you’ve just been describing that Sessions’ action could actually mobilize not just folks out there in the streets pushing back, the general public at the state level but actually potentially could spur enough push back in congress to pass some kind of legislation that locks into stone the Cole memo in a way that it could no longer be played with by future administrations as we’re seeing now do you think that that’s a potential outcome here and how do you think this all ends up?
FRYKLUND: I think that a huge amount of blowback may well have the effect of changing some law but I don’t want to see just oh let’s lock the Cole Memo in, no there’s been congressional action for the last couple years saying no federal money spent going after medical marijuana and there is some movement to stem that to adult use. But rather than keep the law on the books and say, let’s continue not enforcing it I want them to go the whole nine yards and say this law has got to be repealed. So I hope we’re going to be able to harness some of this blow back that’s coming not just from street level activists but from all the businesses and venture capitalists who want to invest to finally get this problem solved. That’s my hope.
VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Inge Fryklund, she’s a former assistant state’s attorney in Cook County she now lives in Oregon, a state that allows recreational marijuana thanks in part to a campaign she was part of there, Inge thanks so much for joining the show and for your work on this and we’d love to have you back in the weeks ahead as this continues to play out.
FRYKLUND: Thank you so much and I’d love to be back again.
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.
Transcript of bonus interview:
VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Trump’s ‘shithole’ comment may be his most blatant racist remark to date. But are his more subtle dog whistles even more dangerous? And why are so many people in this country so uncomfortable with using the word ‘racist’? To unpack this and more, I sat down with Cornell Brooks, a lawyer, ordained minister, and activist who formerly served as the 18th president of the NAACP. He’s also a visiting professor at the School of Law and the School of Theology at Boston University. We were joined by Patrick Cokley, a long time disability rights advocate who serves as the administration or the LEAD ON update, which provides resources on technology, employment and education related to disability, let’s take a listen.
So just to start, and where do you start in a conversation about race in this moment, in the recent days between President Trump’s widely noted and remarked upon quote, unquote “shithole” comment, as well as an exchange he had with some members of the Congressional Black Caucus in which he was told that their constituents would be harmed by his Medicaid work requirements policy, they noted not all of their constituents are black and he responded befuddled, apparently befuddled, then what are they? In the wake of both of these sets of comments there have been a lot of very well deserved discussion about how much open and overt racism is being not just tacitly but explicitly condoned at the highest levels of this country and yet we’re also watching simultaneously tremendous discomfort on the part of so many pundits, commentators and even members of congress with actually calling out racism as racism when it happens. Cornell, would love to get your thoughts just to kick us off.
CORNELL BROOKS: Sure, sure. I think one of the things that strikes me is when you have the convergence of intent and ignorance, people are much more likely to call out ignorance. So in other words, to the degree that the president says things about African-Americans, about any number of races or ethnicities out of ignorance they’re willing to call that out. But where there is evidence of bad intent, racist intent, bigoted intent, prejudiced intent, there is a reluctance. And so there’s a presumption of goodness that does not exist. So where you have a president who is referred Mexicans as rapists, who has called into question the judicial suitability and temperament of a federal judge is a consequence of him being Mexican, who has used the works ‘SOB’ as racial code for the ’n’ word in Alabama in reference to Colin Kaepernick. We’ve seen over and over again from the birther arguments to the arguments about the Central Park jogger case, a president who has demonstrated not only racial insensitivity, not only ignorance about those things relating to race but bad intent, racist intent. And it seems as if people feel that by calling someone a racist, in calling their actions, their deeds and their words racist, that this somehow makes them judgmental. It calls into question their ability to be open-minded, to be graceful, to give people a second chance, to be open to whatever it they have to say, but the fact of the matter is when you walk around with the intent to harm others based on their race, based on their ethnicity, based on any immutable characteristic is in fact wrong, point, period, paragraph. And just because you hold the highest office in the land, in this republic, does not immunize you from being a racist or being called out as a racist.
VALLAS: Patrick, your thoughts.
PATRICK COKLEY: I think one of the other interesting pieces when we think about racism and especially even when we think about ableism as well, is that we have been taught for those of us, depending what generation we are that racism exists in functions, in access, racism is separate water fountains, racism is not being allowed to apply for a job because you’re on this list.
VALLAS: It’s people wearing hoods.
COKLEY: Indeed, it’s people wearing hoods. And what the reality of our today is is that racism is actually more than just that. When you are calling out racism or racist actions you are then also required to turn that lens upon yourself. And we’ve seen that brought to us from multiple communities. We’ve seen that from communities of color saying ok, yes we understand that technically this is equal footing but we are not all starting at the same place. We’ve seen this in the disability community when asking for rights or requirements that are mandated as equal for everyone, people saying well it’s really hard so many we shouldn’t do it. And that unnerves a lot of people. They want to be able to say an action or a statement was racist but they are concerned that if they say ok, well what the president did or said was racist then he is a racist then they have to then look to themselves and say I’m now responsible for his actions because of his role as the president. I’ll also say one other thing that is slightly unnerving. Not to downplay the actions of the president because I don’t think many of us were surprised. Like Cornell, like you said we’ve heard many of these remarks before.
VALLAS: Certainly not new.
COKLEY: Oh, indeed, what unnerves me is also this yet another smoke screen, yet another opportunity to distract us from a broader issue and when we’re talking about immigration especially and denigrating countries that largely are people of color. Are we then taking away the attention from individuals who need our attention who already have immigrated who are coming to work certain jobs? Are we taking attention away from the fact that individuals from those countries when they do legally come also tend to ask for more rights as workers? They tend to ask to be regarded with the same sort of respect. I think we’re seeing some of the same things in New York with the fast food unions and the request from large populations to be treated equally as workers. But when you denigrate where they’re from, when you call their countries “shithole” then you give an excuse to a broader population, a broader set of people to say well we don’t have to think as critical about their needs, about their wants. We don’t have to give them accommodations for work if they can’t work we fired them and replace them and I think that’s the place where it ends up most dangerous and most concerning.
VALLAS: And a lot of speculation since Trump took office and before Trump took office in the White House about whether his incredibly offensive and always eye catching tweets and comments which themselves become whole news cycles then eat up an entire day, are an intentional distraction in the form of chaos theory to keep us from being able to pay attention to and follow in a meaningful way and particularly keep the media from being able to follow in a meaningful way the actual actions that his administration is taking that are incredibly harmful to so many people. But I want to dig into part of what both of you have gotten into is fear, fear that unpins the reluctance to call out racism when we watch it in action. Is part of that that we’ve learned or that some of us have learned the wrong lessons from the 2016 presidential election? Is some of it about a fear of turning people off if we use the R word to describe racism when it plays out because we’re afraid that we’re not going to be a part that is a big enough tent that we can bring in these white working class voters that so many in the Democratic party are so interested in now going after? Cornell, your thoughts.
BROOKS: A couple points, first of all, the fear is related to a kind of paralysis of politeness which is to say we all endeavor to be polite, to be well mannered, to exercise a certain degree of decorum, particularly with respect to people who occupy positions of authority, so we’re unusually deferential to them, we give them the benefit of the doubt. And it causes us to literally paralyze our conscious, our ability to morally critique when we should. Point two is that this notion that somehow if we’re less critical of the president’s overt racism, this will win us points with white working class. But what we saw in the last election was the triumph of the politics of authenticity. To the degree that Senator Sanders was perceived as being more authentic, more real and interestingly enough, Donald J. Trump as a candidate was perceived as being more authentic and real to the degree that they were understood as candidates who speak transparently. Our critique should be transparent and real and authentic. So when you see people literally engaging in behavior that imperils and endangers other people, you gotta call it out.
So here’s the thing, in the name of being polite, here’s what we’re overlooking. This president is racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic behavior perfectly correlates with hate crime in this country. We have immigrant children who are likely to be beaten up and bullied as a consequence of presidential rhetoric. So we have a president who through his racist commentary has done something fairly if not unique and distinctive which is to say he has both imperiled immigrants at home and Americans service personnel abroad to the degree that you use this kind of racist language we have our allies abroad who may be less likely to be protective of American troops, or our enemies more likely to hurt them. That’s what this commander in chief has done. And every time I have a sense of being polite, of being artificially cordial, we overlook his racism, his xenophobia, his anti-Semitism, his ableism, you pick the prejudice because he has engaged in almost all of it with literally homogenizing the harm and the hurt that he’s done and he’s engaged in.
COKLEY: Cornell, that’s a great point. And I think you really speak to the fact that that fear also causes motivations and actions that don’t fit in with necessarily making choices that work best for everyone. One of the reasons that marginalized communities, be they individuals with disabilities, people of color, often times end up afraid is because they find themselves in places where they’re told if you just act a certain way, if you just behave a certain way, if you just comport yourself in a certain manner then you will be less likely to be marginalized, you will be less likely to be discriminated against. You won’t be like those people, you will be like an average American. And what the behaviors that we have seen tells us is that no matter how you behave, no matter how upstanding you are, no matter how well you seek to merge and maintain an identity inside the mainstream that makes everyone comfortable, you are still not wanted you will still be thought of as less than. And that I think we’ve even seen that play out even further with the response of the Democratic party, with the response of people who’ve been anti-president from the beginning. Not only did Donald J. Trump’s win sort of codify the idea of general, more casual racism and ableism but it also took a lot of people who’ve been talking about inclusion, who’ve been talking about gender equality and made them question whether or not they were doing the right things or doing what was necessary to get to power. Suddenly all the folks who had been saying let’s put women out front, let’s put people of color out front, they said well maybe we’re doing it wrong. Maybe we need to go back to the adage of when, maybe we need to find ourselves a nice, old, white guy to speak the liberal agenda. And that’s the bit that’s most unfortunate because out of a fear response they’re turning away from what is really necessary to keep inclusion and justice going in our country.
VALLAS: So another place where racism not overtly but implicitly and through dog-whistle politics is playing out as we speak and we’ve talked about this on the show now a couple of times over the last several weeks is around what Trump and his colleague in congress Speaker Paul Ryan often like to call quote, unquote and I’m put huge scare quotes around this, “welfare reform” and that there’s been this years long quest on the part of Paul Ryan to redefine basically every program and policy that helps struggling families make ends meet as welfare. A well-known, well understood dog-whistle that the American human brain hears and then goes immediately to images that they’ve seen through the media over the decades of black people and particularly quote unquote, “urban” black people. It’s the myth of the welfare queen all over again. And so I bring this up in this moment because it’s related to the ongoing conversation of where are we calling out racism as we see it and I personally continue to bang my head against the wall and to tweet and to all the things we do in the 21st century when we are as frustrated as I am to see many in the media just repeating the talking points and the frame of welfare and welfare reform with apparently no awareness of the fact that it is not just a Republican talking point but a dog whistle in itself. Cornell, your thoughts.
BROOKS: I think part of the problem is due a lack of historical depth. So when we talk about so-called social welfare programs there’s not an appreciation of the degree to which this country certainly going back to President Roosevelt has created all manner of ladders of opportunity for people. So when my father who was a military officer or my brother who was an NCO, they served in their country in uniform, they received certain benefits in terms of VA loans, assistance for college, no one considers that welfare. But when we provide benefits for corporations with the hope that they will invest in communities, with the hope that they will hire people, with the hope that they will put money into research and development, we don’t call that welfare, we call that opportunity creation. Well how is it when we have working class people, middle class people, poor folks in this country who need opportunities and we make critical, thoughtful investments. As I like to remind people, I’m a graduate of Yale Law School but I’m also a graduate of Headstart. Headstart to me was a wise, thoughtful, research-based investment in children that pays off, we know that. This is not welfare. Small, social policy, smart social investments are in fact investments. Now if you want to make a critical argument based on research, based on evidence, based on outcomes, that’s one thing. But to use these basically this vocabulary of dog-whistle racism, needs to be called out and that’s exactly what this is about.
It’s all the idea of creating work requirements, that is just outrageous. It is absolutely outrageous, and to have people who have the best health care on our dime in Congress and in the White House lecture the rest of us is completely hypocritical. When the president has a physician we paid for soft peddle his medical condition again on our dime, do we call it welfare? No. It’s what we do for our president, the question we have to ask is what is he or a set of health care policies or quote welfare policies doing for the rest of us.
VALLAS: And do we call tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations welfare? No we don’t. All really strong points, Patrick you were looking to get in there.
COKLEY: There’s a long standing history also that we’ve seen, like we said, not only dog-whistle politics but of sort of this rhetoric around individuals who [are] receiving supports. And in that history we always see them taking whatever population that is either needing of support or need that support and attempting to either denigrate them in some way or the other. And I think that you make a very excellent point in that the welfare queen, those of us who grew up during the crack epidemic of the 80s which we all know was this false idea but this —
VALLAS: She never existed. She was made up by President Reagan because he knew he needed a face for his divide and conquer politics, just throwing that context in.
COKLEY: Indeed, indeed, and what’s happened is we see that process continue. They take a new group and they hold them up and say these people are responsible for you not having the services you need when in reality all of are representative of these groups and we saw especially with the welfare queens in the 80s and there is a move by certain people to tie it to Medicare, to tie it to individuals with disabilities on Social Security and say they are the reasons why we don’t have the resources we need to make the country move forward and the reality is that these communities represent groups of Americans that are closer to us that we think that are in need of all of these tools and resources. For the disability community especially the research has been done, the data is out there, these individuals want to work. They are not receiving Social Security or receiving additional incomes or supports from the government because they just a tax on the system, because they’d like to spend their days playing Xbox, they’re receiving these supports because they need them to survive and given the opportunity, they would work. So we have the data that tells us that and yet the rhetoric continues to be to let’s promote the idea that anyone who is receiving government supports and services as being lazy, not as being recipients of a tax base that they’ve paid into. Not as being American citizens who voted for these services and are required that they should be accessible to them and to any other American that needs them and instead used as a fake poster child, a fake model or an excuse for disengagement from political leaders and that’s unfortunate that we still see that.
VALLAS: I mentioned before Trump’s response when he was confronted with apparently new information that not all of the people who are constituents of members of the Congressional Black Caucus are black. And apparently not all people who turn to Medicaid for health insurance he learned that day are Black. These might have been new pieces of information to him, they’re not new to us or to our listeners but a lot of the responses in the wake of that exchange from well-meaning advocates and folks who are strenuously fighting back against these harmful and counter productive Medicaid work requirements, a lot of the responses in that moment were wait a second, most people who receive public assistance like Medicaid are white and full stop the response sort of ended there. And I personally found myself incredibly frustrated with how limited the discussion about why what Trump said and why his ignorance on this subject and his overt racism and his racist policies in this space became so binary and so limited and free of nuance and free of the harder work that we need to do as a country as we talk about these policies, these programs and the people who they help. Would love to get your thoughts about how we can do better and what’s wrong with the knee-jerk response of but wait a second most people who get help from the government are white as our only response.
BROOKS: One of the things that I think is helpful to point out here is you have, the president’s rhetoric suggests a certain ignorance. But you can have the ignorance by choice or you can have ignorance as a smoke screen. The president did not spend his formative years in Norway, he spent his formative in New York City, which is not a particularly un-diverse community. So I’m not entirely sure how much of his, this he doesn’t know as opposed to what he claims he doesn’t know. But going beyond this binary are most of the people who receive social benefits or investments, people of color or the majority who are in fact white, going beyond that the issue becomes irrespective of what color or ethnicity degree of ability or disability people have, should we be making these investments? Are they good for our citizens and do they move us forward as a society and a community. Those are the questions that we don’t get to and to the degree that we use majority white to legitimize minority black and brown, delegitimizes the whole question and proposition morally.
The fact that we always have to, so as it’s like in gender terms when women are harassed and raped and brutalized and sexually demeaned, if a man says well I object to that because it could be my wife, it could be my daughter, it could my aunt or my grandmother, does male genitalia legitimize claims made by women based on gender bias, discrimination and demeaning behavior? That’s ridiculous. But this is what we see all the time. And so it’s up to us to be more morally mature to take people’s moral claims at face value so that if the majority of the people receiving some kind of social investment or benefit were any particular group they’re still Americans, still citizens, and even when they’re not citizens there are people who aspire to be citizens, we should evaluate the investment based on the investment.
VALLAS: And I love how you put that because the implication that maybe well intentioned people who were part of contributing to that knee jerk response of oh but most people are white if they get public assistance, the implication there of course is these programs are ok because white people are helped by them. These programs are ok because they’re for white people as though if they weren’t the majority of beneficiaries they would not be OK programs or ones that we need to be defending.
BROOKS: They would be morally suspect.
VALLAS: Right, exactly.
COKLEY: It very much goes back to that earlier fear discussion too as well because it should be enough to say we wish to help other Americans, in fact the data tells us that most Americans are supportive of helping other people in need but that justification, that belief that if we can shroud these actions, these processes, these programs in what is deemed as sort of this broad scale respectability then suddenly they will be OK. I think another interesting piece with that fear is something Cornell, that you hinted at that worries me which is also how much of this is lack of knowledge of the President’s account or really just him attempting to again to sway us away, to get us to turn away from what’s actually going on. In this conversation about countries that are not Norway, let’s say, in this conversation is he then again pushing us away from paying attention to why congress does not seem to want to give supports to all Americans. Why they’re attempting to create work requirements for a community of people that are in most cases are already working and would like to be able to work more in order to keep receiving their benefits from the government. And there are many who could say well this is all his personality, he’s brash, I think there are some who could say maybe this is more calculated and maybe, and drawing attention to what many presidents thought of as a side show we then don’t pay attention to the policy priorities that are taking place.
VALLAS: Patrick, you have two kids, you and the woman I often refer to as ‘Cokley’ who in this moment that’s not super helpful and fair to you because you are also Cokley but folks on the show know her as ‘Cokley’, Rebecca Cokley. You and she have two young children. How are you talking to them in this moment about race and about racism and about the president’s role in creating a climate as we’ve been discussing that makes racism not just ok but something that many people now feeling emboldened to embody?
COKLEY: Indeed, I think both of our kids attend a school that is a Spanish-immersion school and it’s very diverse. We tease them and say it’s looks like a Benetton ad. And one of the things that we talk to our kids about, we even talk to their friends about is not just fear, not just be afraid of we have a president that seems to not support or be as interested in your welfare maybe as other president but we say the first thing we’re going to do is we are going to remember our values. We are not going to shy away from talking about what’s right, we’re not going to shy away from talking about inclusion and making safe spaces for our friends and our family and for anyone that needs those safe spaces. We then encourage them to consistent attempt to do what is right, to not exclude people, to think about other people’s feelings and when confronted with ideas of exclusion or racism to speak up for them and ask for help. That’s their day to day, it’s not going to be oh you have to build a wall or you have to make a policy, it’s thinking critical about how do they want to give and to grow to make those decisions.
As it relates to race, it’s one of those things, especially having kids who are, they’re interracial, they’re biracial kids. So they don’t only have the background of their mother, they have the background of me as a black man and they’re going to have to navigate a path even there that is different than the one that I walked. But what that means is we also have to have conversations about their identity, about learning all of those things. We read to them books like “Martin’s Big Words”, it talks about King’s assassination. We recently read a book about, they’re called “Little Leaders” and they’re numbers of women of color, but then we also read them books about San Francisco where their mother is from and about the disability rights movement because we want to fill their toolbox with enough pieces that when faced with racism, faced with questions about their identity it’s not defined by that person in the polo shirt and the khakis waving the nazi flag. It’s not defined by a president who refers to countries that their godparents and friends are from as ‘shithole’ countries. It’s defined instead by the knowledge that we’ve given them as their parents and the values that we’ve passed forward and for us especially those values that we defined as inherently American values. Justice, inclusion, if you want to take it there, nobility, bravery, but how about the courage to stand up for what you believe in. and I think that’s going to be the big thing for them.
VALLAS: So Patrick also digging deeper into what’s behind the policies such as work requirements in programs like Medicaid one of the things that I think is completely missed in discussions of why these are not just cruel by counterproductive policies is about the tie that it has to the labor market. The choices that it takes away from people who are struggling to stay afloat in a low wage labor market that chews people, spits them out and doesn’t pay them enough ever in that process to live without needing to turn to Medicaid or nutrition assistance or any other programs to feed their families and have health insurance. It forces people to take jobs that they otherwise would have sufficient bargaining power and choice not to take while they look at something that’s actually a decent living wage. You have real thoughts on this and how this connects to other parts of our history.
COKLEY: Indeed, there’s a long standing history of creating a worker pool that is cheap and at times does not have like you said the resources necessarily to advocate for themselves. And their policies and practices that are put in place to keep these groups at that area. We’ve seen this specifically with Latino communities, with migrant workers who are unable to advocate for better jobs, better pay, we see it specifically with individuals in the disability community having to take subminimum wage jobs and though yes it’s done under the pretense of well this is giving them work experience. This is no difference than the periods where you have large populations of individuals being utilized as cheap labor. And we’ve seen this expressly with Latino community and migrant workers and we’ve seen it as far back as the institutional period for individuals with disabilities and in a modern sense we see it with subminimum wages, being allowed to pay individuals with disabilities lesser wages to do what seem like mundane tasks but they do it under the auspices that it is for educational or employment related reasons.
VALLAS: It’s for their own good! We’re just helping them.
COKLEY: Indeed and yet what we’ve learned from the Department of Labor is these go on for about 35 years at a time and meanwhile what you have is a large number of businesses taking advantage of a cheap labor pool that has no ability to say that they do or do not want to do this work or develop into something else and I thin that we all know that that sort of labor pool has an even longer history in our own country, cheap labor, unable to make their own decisions sounds very much like slavery.
BROOKS: I think Patrick is spot on because when we were talking about the welfare queen of the 1980s I was thinking about the period of the 1870s. So you have a group of Americans who didn’t represent cheap labor, they represented free labor as in slaves. So in the wake of Emancipation Proclamation, 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, we see the beginning of freedom and economic rights across the south. We see African-Americans elected to the Senate, to the House of Representatives. We see the first laws supporting public education, supporting the rights of women, some of the first laws speaking to worker conditions, these are by former slaves who were thrust into the public sphere but within a few years they were morally and politically delegitimized militarily suppressed and these worker productions. These investments in public education and the rights of women and people of color were rolled back within an astonishingly brief period of time. That’s not just an interesting tidbit of history. It is contemporarily and morally and politically instructive in the present which is to say when you have people in movements that are delegitimized morally and politically, then we will see an erosion of worker protections. We will see an erosion of investments in education. We will see a diminishment of the rights of workers and people based upon race, ethnicity, based on ability, the point being here is it’s not a matter of historical hyperbole or histrionics or [INAUDIBLE], the moment we’re in a serious moment. The moment we’re in is a moment in which we need to ring the alarm bells. What’s happening with this president using the regulatory landscape to given free reign to corporations to rip off people, rip off their rights, use their labor is a serious moment. All that this administration is doing while we are falling prey to distraction by tweet is serious. And so it’s not merely a matter of resisting his most offensive comments and obvious policies, it’s a matter of resisting, paying attention, giving due attention to and focusing on what we’re seeing that’s happening below the surface which is a point that Patrick’s been pointing out and emphasizing throughout this discussion. Don’t be distracted. We‘ve got to be focused.
COKLEY: Indeed, I think one of my main worries is as we’re seeing this groundwork being laid the thing that’s going to come next and what’s going to happen is if we attempt to address this individually meaning that if African-American groups say well this is not going to work for our communities, these things will happen, or if the disability community comes over and says this ableism isn’t going to work out. We’ve seen that when we address these individually we get the brush off. You know it’s not so bad, you guys are always so worried about these things. Oh, it’s not so bad they’re trying to make things accessible. We even see this for women demanding equal access to the C-Suite, you know what it’s not that big of a deal, ultimately everyone is going to get there but what unnerves me is that that individual tact is not working and while we sort of throw ourselves one at a time at this issues again there is an opportunity to build more structures that say well not only are we not going to give you that you should be worried about the women you should be worried about people with disabilities, you should be worried about immigrant populations. So instead we end up with something that in the Black community we’ve often talked about as the crab in a barrel story. The idea is that you put crabs in an open barrel and the crabs could get out but what happens normally is one crab gets to the top and instead of being able to get his way to freedom one of the other crabs yanks him back down. That’s a apocryphal story we use in the Black community for our own unity. But it’s definitely appropriate here because it’s a reminder that to really address this systematic structures that are being put in place. This thing that says that it is OK to take a group of people and relegate them to the cheapest form of labor with no voice. It’s going to take all of us to work together to destroy that system. And it’s going to also take all of us to call it out, to bring it to light and to share to a lot of Americans who may not be aware of crab in a barrel syndrome that these things are going on.
BROOKS: Can I speak to the point that Patrick raised? This is critical. Where you have millennials who are invoking the scholarship of Kimberly Crenshaw in terms of intersectional analysis, I would say it’s necessary but not entirely sufficient. Meaning our analysis of the injustices we face need to be intersectional, we need to understand how race and gender and ability or disability and class all intersect but we also need to appreciate that we need to be intersectional in our analysis but also in means and ends. Our coalitions need to be deep, like I like to put it, we don’t need to have these press conference coalitions. When the leaders show up, everybody has the same set of talking points but we don’t use the same vocabulary, we don’t talk about one another’s issues and to Patrick’s earlier point, people don’t show up for one another’s concerns. Like when it comes to anti-Semitism we don’t have to have Jews out front on that. Black people need to be out front on that. When it comes to the ways in which this administration has taken on the disability rights community, we don’t need to have people with disabilities taking on that issue, you need other people as well. The point being here is our coalitions need to be deep. Deep in terms of our analysis, deep in terms of our means and ends and how we define our aspirations. It not a matter of your group getting to where to where it should be and my group getting to where it should be and us ending up in the same place somewhat together. It’s about us getting there together.
VALLAS: In the last couple of minutes that I have with you guys and I wish we could do this all day because there’s a lot more to talk about and we’re only scratching the surface it’s the where do we go from here question. I don’t feel right ending even the first of many conversations on this subject without talking about how we look forward and what forward could even look like and how healing can occur in a time where it’s hard to even imagine a climate that can support healing on these issues and for this country on this front. Cornell, if anyone has thoughts on this, I’m going to get it’s going to be you.
BROOKS: I think a lot of people have thoughts on this but I’ll just note where we are in terms of time. So this being 2018 is a certain synchronicity of history and morality in the sense that this is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, 50th anniversary of his poor people’s campaign. This is a moment in American history where our constitutional freedoms are under assault. Our assumed commonly shared values are under assault. We have a nation where resistance is the watchword. I think it represents a historic opportunity. In this respect, we need a mass movement, pro-democracy movement that enshrines the right to vote as being more than the opposite of voter suppression but mass participation in our democracy. We need automatic voter registration. We need to do and adopt every measure to modern our democracy. Here’s why. To the degree that we encourage more people to participate in the democratic process and we tie that to economic justice Dr. King lived for voting rights. He lost his life at the point of economic justice. Marching with sanitation workers in Memphis and literally being killed in the midst of a fight for economic justice. This is the time for us to have a pro-democracy movement devoted to economic justice and I would say on a benedictory note to heal this country because we can have great government, great policies, great programs, a well-functioning democracy but if we brutalize and demean and degrade our people as people they are less as citizens. And I just want to note here, I grieved in my soul and in my spirit, tone and tenor, that we have somebody in the White House who talks about grabbing women by their genitalia, we have someone in the White House who has mocked a journalist for his disability. When Jeffrey Lord was fired from CNN using a ‘Heil Hitler’ sign, we understood that. We elected a man who has mocked a journalist for having a disability. The tone of the country is just not where it needs to be. So yes we need to have a pro-democracy movement, yes we need to fix voting rights, yes we need to pursue economic justice but we also need to realign ourselves morally and get back to speaking to people with a certain decency, a presumption of shared humanity. Because what we’ve come through, this is beneath us.
VALLAS: Patrick, you’re going to get the final word. It’s a dangerous place to be.
COKLEY: Oh gracious, I think that there is an opportunity here for a new generation of Americans that we have coming forward. There are a lot of those who like to talk about the millennials in a derisive tone and denigrate some of their ideas, and yes it’s easy to make fun of their hipster bars and their demands for artisanal mayonnaise stores.
VALLAS: As a self loathing millennial I appreciate all of that, thank you.
COKLEY: Indeed, but I think one of the greatest things about the millennials is that they are a generation that believes in bringing their whole selves to the table. They do not think about the concepts of race and gender and equality and social justice as separate boxes but as uniform pieces of identity and that makes them expressly skilled more so than any generation before them to have the conversations and to build structures that are inclusive of as many people as possible. Cornell mentioned Dr. King’s last days in Memphis supporting the sanitation workers and in his last speech he happens to talk about a call for unity and I think in many cases in the Black community we’ve assumed that that call for unity was one expressly for us as African-Americans. However, I think we should consider for our future that that call for unity was not just for the Black community. That was a call for a connection to all people who believe in justice who believe in inclusion and equality and if we are to move forward it’s time for us to throw away all of those old boxes. Not saying we give our identities away but understand that sometimes the trans community is going to work for disability justice and sometimes the disability is going to carry the torch for African-Americans, sometimes the Af-Am community is going to be people who are standard bearers for immigration and sometimes the Latino communities are going to make sure that Asian communities are no longer placed in internment camps. All of these things, all of these are opportunities that we have to move forward and the only thing that keeps us from them is not the intolerant person in the White House, it’s not the rhetoric, it’s not the terrible actions of racism destroying our bodies, it’s in ourselves. We need to look forward, we need to build actual true coalitions and pull ourselves together and get to the work that needs to be done.
VALLAS: Patrick Cokley is a blogger and the administrator of the LEAD ON update which provides resources on technology, employment and education related to disability. Do you also want to tell people who you are on Twitter?
COKLEY: Yes, you can also follow me in one of my more personal roles @Angry_Negro, you can even check out my personal blog, “Tales of the Angry Negro” if you want to find some amusement for your weekends.
VALLAS: Worth a follow and Cornell Brooks is a lawyer, an ordained minister and an activist who formerly served as the 18th President of NAACP, he’s also a visiting professor at the school of law and the school of theology at Boston University. Thanks to you both for joining the show and for your wise counsel.
BROOKS: Thank you.
COKLEY: Thank you for having us.
