Dr. Angela J. Hattery & Dr. Earl Smith | Policing Black Bodies, Prison Inc., & The Poverty Trap

00:00 Embrace yourself, because you're about to dive into another free first hour episode of the Higher Side Chats. And we just want to let you know that whether your looking for a companion through your paranoid insomnia, entertaining yourself through one of life's mundane activities or trying to ward off the internal screams from all those sad smothered souls around the office THC is here and you should know that every episode of the higher side chats has an entire second hour for plus members Sign up at thehiresidechats.com and you'll get years of plus show archives, lifetime forum access a special invite to Greg Carlwood's monthly joint sessions MP3s of THC music bonus episodes tour videos and 10% off t-shirts grinders And whatever else ends up in The Hireside Store It's $8 a month that you won't miss so become a Plus member and treat yourself in these troubled times always action packed and commercial free

00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. 1930s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the fireside chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. I'm Greg Carlwood These are the higher side chats. All right, people another day another deep dive into the machinations of the big machine from sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and if you ask me it's getting harder to have an open-minded non political conversation or drill down into the nuances of nearly anything these days whether its viruses vaccines climate or current events because the propaganda of the political parties have bagged in tag nearly every idea and ideological position

01:55 and convince the masses to shut themselves off from anything that smells of the world outside of their personal bubble. It's a dangerous place for people to be when they stop talking to each other, but we will walk through the minefield as we do because to me conspiracy culture has always meant examining unseen and secret plans of the Capstone Cabal coordinating advantage for themselves selling us on slogging through an unfair system as we grasp for the lost idea of the American Dream, and going to great lengths to make sure that middle class and working poor are too busy arguing about abortion, religion, sports racism privilege and the rest of it... ...to work together on things that matter most to people at the top.

02:37 So today we're going to re-examine the systematic attacks on the black community since the time of slavery, the socioeconomic roadblocks they've had to deal with and the heavy hand of the criminal justice system in keeping the American caste system in place as best it can. To do that, we have here today sociologists Dr. Angela Hattery and Dr. Earl Smith two PhD level professors dedicated to educating people on these very things winners of multiple awards and authors of several great books together with titles like Prisoner Reentry & Social Capital The Long Road to Reintegration African American Families Today Myths And Realities

03:16 the social dynamics of family violence, policing black bodies how black lives are surveilled and how to work for change and gender power and violence responding to sexual and intimate partner violence in society today just to name a few. They're two highly educated experts with over 30 years experience that have gotten very comfortable with uncomfortable conversations and I salute them for it Smith and Hattery welcome to The Higher Side! Thank you Thanks for having us. Oh, well thanks so much for doing this I reached out after reading policing black bodies and thought you covered a lot of ground that would be beneficial for us to talk about and just say you guys have a little bit of context i've always tried to make the higher side chats are very broad and non-political quote unquote conspiracy show

04:04 I've always found it weird that the shows that have built up this conspiracy genre are usually white, conservative American men soapboxing about how unfair the system is. And it is unfair for anyone who's not connected but to me conspiracy means looking at the military putting chemical sprayers in the Pruitt-Igoe projects and St Louis or dark aspects of big pharma's history such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments or running birth control experiments in the Philippines that hurt a lot of people, or using the criminal justice system to destroy black families and keep them in poverty. Or stealing land from Native Americans—it's all in this soup if you ask me! And we common folks should be united by these things but for some reason it descends into a debate over who has it worse? How

04:53 How bad is it really for one group over another? A situation I'm sure you're both well familiar with by now to some degree, right. Absolutely we hear these questions a lot and how do you usually address it when this kind of stuff comes up that could take an entire broadcast actually but I think what we try to do is use facts and point people to history reality numbers Not that we have to get overly bogged down in the numbers, but one of the strategies that I use in class when I'm confronted with this kind of a question is To point out what the facts are. So if you're thinking about the criminal justice system

05:37 almost 50% of people who are incarcerated, just less than that. About 45% of all the people we have locked up in a jail cell are black men and yet black men make up only 6% of the United States population so that's probably suggesting something is going on right? That if it were just And people toss the word random around without really understanding statistics, but if it were just random. It wouldn't look that way right so asking people to think about disproportionality Another strategy i use is to ask students if they can imagine a situation in which a statistic like that would be reversed. Can they imagine living in the united states and instead of black men being almost ten times more likely to be incarcerated than they are in the population what would it look like if

06:32 white men's incarceration rate were 10 times their membership in the population. Like, can you imagine that? And if you can't then there is probably something going on those are just some of the strategies that I use And i want to read a quote from policing black bodies that i think most of our audience will appreciate you say we wrote this book to make people uncomfortable to disrupt stereotypes about black bodies and to debunk myths and poke at deeply held ideological beliefs to expose the machine of racism. This book is meant to invoke discussion and controversy. Everyone who reads this book will likely find something they disagree with, and that's okay. What we hope to do is get people thinking about the issues in ways that they haven't thought about them before as systemic and deliberate." I think that really nails it—in particular, that ending.

07:28 I love a good, raw conversation. But can you elaborate on the stereotypes and myths that you tend to face most often with this sort of material? Okay so follow up on Professor Hattery's point about the black men who are overly incarcerated even though they are less than 10% in this general population. So we have in our larger society stereotypes about black men, black boys, black teenagers. Black men we have stereotypes about these folks that they're always up to something that's not legal. They are big monstrous types and if you don't watch out they're going to get you so when we lay out the argument that you just heard

08:30 one of the chapters that we have in the book, exonerations. So what that tells us is that it all starts with the police because these guys obviously are up to something they did something so We have to surveil them and then when we catch them, we arrest him, we convict him and then we lock him And that's a good thing because now they're off the street, blah-blah-blah. So goes the argument so goes the stereotype." What we did in one of our chapters near the end of the book, we said okay then why is it that we now see and the public sees because its become apart of a public conversation all these exonerations taking place

09:20 meaning people did not commit the crimes for which they spent on average of 15 years in prison, and why disproportionately are those who are being exonerated black men? I mean put the two things together. Connect the dots you've arrested somebody on the front end for a crime they didn't commit because you think that this is what they do And then 15, 20, 25, 40 years later you have to let them out of prison because the slow moving system has found out hey guess what? They didn't do it.

10:02 Not a technical violation, but they absolutely didn't do it. And disproportionately you can look up the data those persons mostly men few women are involved mostly men who are being exonerated of black men I don't know what else you have to talk about Something is absolutely wrong here So the stereotype out there is that these black man? I mean Oh God We use a little video sometimes called The Slowest Car in Town. And there's a highly professional black male with his suit and tie on, and his briefcase is probably made in the 70s. He starts off on the top floor, and by the time he gets to the bottom different whites have gotten on and off the elevator. By the time he gets to the first floor

10:57 The portrait of him is that he's a criminal, drug addict, foeman at the mouth. And it's just the imagery of who he is as a black man in American society. So the stereotype exists people can say I don't see it. I've never heard of it and that's why we talk about it in the book because it's real and it's deadly. It's absolutely deadly If I could jump in there and dive down just one slice even more deeply into the exoneration. We actually gave a talk many years ago, and a provost actually at a highly ranked college said well you would expect more black men to be in the group of exonerates because black men are more likely to go to prison to start with

11:45 And we said, OK. So that's an example of getting some pushback and in fact when you drill down even farther into those numbers black men are 1.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than they're even represented in the prison population to start with, so even there in that deep dive slice yet again the numbers themselves tell a different story right? So if black men are 40 or 45 percent of the prison population we'd expect them to be 40 or 45 percent of the exonerated population but instead they're more like 75 or 80

12:22 And I don't want to have your listeners be too tied up in the stats, but I think that they can help underscore that there's something going on that's not just random. A lot of it is caused by the social stereotype. It's out there and we have examples and you've heard it because they're really simple and clear young black guys They go into the store and automatically it's assumed they're in there to steal something. I wouldn't expect that to happen to my young white male son or cousin, but it happens disproportionately to young black men and it also happens to people who are visible movie stars

13:13 It happens to Oprah Winfrey. She's not a male, but it happens to her. It happens to Forrest Whitaker, big movie star, Oscar-winning movie star. So it doesn't matter what your achievements are if you fit that demographic then that stereotype sticks and it shouldn't I mean it absolutely shouldn't and yet People in that demographic know by the time they're probably 10 or 12 if not sooner This is what I have to deal with throughout my life. Yes, great points and I'm reminded of a Dave Chappelle special recently where there was a tough-looking young black guy in the crowd and he gives him shit for a minute as A comedian should but then he says hey

14:03 Be easy on the sky because he's under a tremendous amount of pressure to be perfect you know and it's not the same kind of pressure that other young people deal with and young people are perfect they're constantly making mistakes so. If you criminalize what is just misbehavior or criminal eyes typical coming of age lashing out that's how you get into the. No school to prison pipeline situation and it does start very young with this kind of bias and i do like really creative ways to examine injustice and i think exonerations, is a great one another one is like how did they get in the system in the first place and it is

14:45 through that school to prison pipeline a lot of the times. Yeah, absolutely and I think for your listeners who may not spend as much time thinking about this as we do which is probably a lot of them, I think even when we started looking at the school-to-prison pipeline, we were thinking of the pipeline from juvenile detention to adult prison that once a young man or woman but it's way disproportionately men of any race once a young man is caught in the system of juvenile detention and is accumulating priors, that key word in sentencing. That they're then disproportionately likely to be sucked into the prison system and when we started reading and paying attention more carefully To what you were just describing which is the criminalization of misbehavior or mischief

15:38 It was pretty stunning to see that kids were being arrested as we detail in the book, you know the case of a kid just one county over from where we were living at the time who was arrested and handcuffed and put in the backseat of a police cruiser for taking a 65 cent carton of milk off the lunch line. It's just absurd and you might say okay well that was rare but it's really not that rare There are tons and tons of cases of kids being arrested in schools for things like that. There's another case of a kid who took some chicken nuggets, and usually when you dig down into the story it's not even took. And so I want to make sure that the listener isn't sort of falsely lulled into thinking well yes! That kid took the 65 cent carton of milk they should pay for that You know this case the kid was on free reduced lunch

16:27 the kid was entitled to a carton of milk for free. You know, one of the chicken nugget cases, the kid claims that he was hungry that his buddy had a lunch plan and gave him chicken nuggets off his tray. And so like first of all there's nothing that the child and I want to emphasize these are children there's nothing the child did it was even wrong. And even if they did take a carton of milk? I mean when I was a kid Growing up something like that probably didn't even make it home Maybe if you were a sort of serial poacher of the carton milk, someone will call your mom. Hopefully not your dad in my case who was harder but somebody might call your mom and say what's going on? But more likely than not it would have meant you had to stay after school and bang some erasers on the brick wall on the playground or something like that. And so this idea that we have criminalized the most ridiculousness

17:29 It's devastating to Black families because when that happens, those kids often do end up in juvenile detention or if not as some other folks have documented 50% of black children have some touch with the foster care and child protective services child welfare system. And if they get touched, that doesn't necessarily mean they go into foster care. But if they're touched by that system then if they steal the 65 cent carton of milk, they're definitely going to juvenile detention and now they are in the system and so that sort of first point of contact it's hard to overstate how important that is in completely ruining someone's life those systems... They're just nearly impossible to get out of So there are devastating consequences

18:20 Yes, yes. Great points and I went to private school for most of my life until I got kicked out and had to go to public school when i saw there was a cop walk in the halls I was definitely shocked I don't know if this is appropriate but I agree it's gonna affect black kids even worse but This is an interesting one so when i've tried to do shows like this in the past i've actually gotten feedback from black guys that say. We don't need your liberal coddling it's insulting and put us in a position of inferiority to you to even insinuate that we need your help or that we need this donor white boy to do a show about black people,

19:00 It's like damned if you do, damned if you don't. I'm sure you've heard this from people with these sorts of opinions. How do you typically respond to that? Earl doesn't have to deal with it the same way I might but I am curious when you face that what do you say? It's a great question! I get it all the time What does a white person know about policing black bodies and one of the ways that I respond to that is I don't know what it feels like. I can't know what it feels like because I'm not black But I have learned that you have to sort of walk the walk not just talk the talk and so you have to really listen and You have to really demonstrate That you've thought about the issues carefully and systematically And also, I think as a white person it's about centering the voices of black people. So this isn't my opinion

19:52 I mean, i'm only the expert because I've studied and interviewed and observed and done science to be able to arrive at data points and empirical analysis. To be able to make the argument you know? I think it's a fair critique. I think white people need to hear that critique And be okay getting it and still get back in The ring to do the work, but I'm going to toss that to Dr. Smith. Well, I mean, I would argue that I've had to do the same thing study research spend time in one classroom after another classroom after another year after another year. It takes a long time to pick up bachelor's degrees masters degrees ridiculously long time to pick up a PhD degree

20:43 So just being of the demographic doesn't make you an expert on the topic. And we make this clear, I make it clear and this is why we have a lot of sort of lightweight talk that passes around about mentors and who can be a mentor? Do you have to be an NBA star? You have to be president United States those issues are talked about, but in reality on the ground you're basically talking about having people in other people's lives who can help them steer the course. Follow the pathways that keep them away from police, that keep them away from juvie, to keep them away from the state prison system and that's real and there are real issues

21:33 in and around the quote unquote black community that need to be addressed. And I'm glad that you brought this up, nobody needs anybody telling them anything but what people often need is a little good advice. Yes. And I would argue that that advice can come from anybody who's not trying to harm We don't need snake oil salespeople selling people down the drain, but we sure need people to keep relaying the message that there's nothing wrong with graduating from high school. That there is nothing wrong with and this is going to inflame some folks so get ready. There's nothing wrong with not making babies

22:23 Okay? At 14 or 15 years of age. Because our data shows that you need to be well equipped and prepared to take care of those babies, especially in a society where the social safety net is shrinking and disappearing as you mentioned in your introduction the disappearance of the American dream So we do need people inside of these communities working with young people, keeping them on the straight and narrow. As far as I'm concerned, as far as we're concerned, I don't care they can be from the Philippines, they can be from wherever, as long as they are not looking to harm folks

23:10 I'm going to stay away from the baby conversation. But it's a real conversation, but what I will say is one of the things I find really enlightening about teaching the book Policing Black Bodies in a class in a diverse class of students is remembering that for the most part we're all educated in the same system so when we talk about the history of sort of how we got here and we talk about the constitution and we talk all of the early forms of policing black bodies, the black students are as surprised as the white students. Because that's not really taught anywhere a lot of students up every race tell me yeah I sort of heard about Black history in school was from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King and that's kind of it you know the highlights and so i think it's also instructive to remember that with very few exceptions we all came through the same system which does not teach

24:07 the kind of stuff that's important to understand these topics regardless of who your identity is. I was teaching a course last semester with a lot of women from various parts of the world, Northern Africa, Ecuador, China, Bahamas...I don't know it was just unusual mix of primarily women who came here from someplace else There were a couple of African American women in the class as well who were born here. And this was a class looking at various race and ethnic groups, the sort of race and ethnicity 101 you know who came over on Mayflower? Who came through Ellis Island which groups used various methodologies of upward mobility to enhance their

25:08 situation socially, economically, politically. And after two or three classes this young African-American woman pulls me aside and she says oh my gosh I never learned about these things and i mean she was on it! I don't think she missed...and we got interrupted with COVID 19 when they closed all the schools but up until the point where we were pushed out She was sitting there, bright eyed taking notes. And I said to myself, I'm thinking don't they learn this stuff? Nope. Why aren't they knowledgeable about some of these basic facts and that's the problem schools buy textbooks from companies that the board or whatever whoever it is depending on what state approves and they want to make sure that this isn't in it

26:11 And these facts might be too hard for third and fourth graders, and they strip out certain stuff. And if the textbook company doesn't abide by the rules, they don't get the contract." Now you're talking about politics! But it interrupts education. I'm sure you and your listeners have seen the data. You look around the world and you look at where we are with mathematics, science history. We don't come close to some of these other countries and I'll say this and since we have a little bit of time i think this footnote will work. We taught a summer course couple of summers ago for young boys young girls teenagers who came from

27:02 Oh, they came from the Balkans. They were high school kids on an exchange program for the State Department and we taught a class with these kids in it and I'm thinking oh gosh how are we going to get through this? And we took them through some of this stuff we're talking about now and we may have shown a clip from Roots, the first iteration of Roots which we ended up buying the complete DVD set for one of their teachers to take back to the Balkans because they didn't have access to it. My point is, those young... I'll just call them young people were so up on US social history it was mind-boggling

27:54 I mean, I'm telling you. Can you remember the example? Yeah we taught on the 4th of July so we asked the American students to talk about the history of the Fourth of July and it took about five minutes and we asked each of these kids to talk about the history of the independence in their countries and they went on and on for half an hour citing things that had happened in the 15-1600s and they just really ran circles around the American kids. It was kind of pathetic. Absolutely unbelievable This is what we're up against. And so when people say, well I don't believe that or this is fake news, I mean these numbers of deaths from COVID are not fake news and yet if you can stand it night after night watching the news the numbers are deadly and then there'll always be a clip of some people in the parking lot somewhere coming out of a store and saying I don't believe it

28:50 I want my freedom. Why should I put on the mask? Right, well it's tough to know what to believe these days because there are so many people who have an agenda behind the information they're putting out. There's moneyed interests involved that have been here for a long time and it's like man maybe we should've restored some faith in our institutions before we had a crisis situation because that's where we are now and it's just chaos but yeah we are really cruising along here and I wanted to dive into if we could a little bit of the deep history here I've heard you in a previous interview say that there's always this debate is it race or is it class and its actually just both shouldn't be difficult to say that, there are both things that keep poor people poor and their things that keep black people poor. And sometimes they overlap there is definitely a venn diagram there of a huge place in the middle but a lot of people fall into n

29:43 So if we're going to talk about the history, obviously we know a bit about slavery. But we hear terms like Jim Crow or Black Codes and I'm not sure everyone really knows what those terms mean. We see ghettos in inner cities today and people still have the thought of well why can't black communities just get it together? Slavery was a long time ago but there are a lot of institutionalized socioeconomic disadvantages when it comes to things like bank loans ownership of property, education as you said and aggressive policing of course. But when it comes to some of these less obvious mechanisms that work to keep black communities poor what are some of these factors and aspects of history that you think are important to highlight that are pretty unknown? Well the race class issue is very important because it plays out differently for different racial and ethnic groups

30:41 We recognize in the US census five or six quote unquote races and one or two ethnic groups, ethnic groups who also have a quote race. And as we explain all the time these things are not fixed they change and in fact if you follow the debate coming up to the next census there was this attempt to put in another category called It's MENA, and it did go in 2020. But it's out now. Oh okay Middle Eastern North Africa acronym MENA The last thing I saw about a week ago was the census pulled it back out And so those kinds of structural issues show us that race and ethnicity is kind of fluid

31:44 And it has changed over time. So when you have a race class debate, it's unfortunate that it's always an either or debate. We don't see it that way. It has to be connected because they're intertwined. So a young white male just graduated from college just got a job is hypothetical he's going to go off and make his way into the world To do that, you got to have money. And you gotta have money to pay the rent. You gotta have money to put first month rent a month of security, the utility companies that give you water and lights and electricity and of course cable when you look at that bill it is huge for somebody just getting off the ground

32:45 Now, we know for the same work you take two people one white one black and we could put in different racial ethnic groups but I'll just keep it white and black. We know for the same job it's clear even in our business and academia that a white person is going to be paid more. And so you ask the question why? Why is that what is the tax that's being levied here? Why are we paying the white person more? It depends on who you're talking to and where this is taking place, but you'll get this. Well that's just the way it is." So something is happening right from the jump so now these persons who are starting off making their way into the world there's various handicaps there's a price to be paid for being black later on you might want to buy a house

33:41 Now you have to have 20%, 30% for the down payment. You got to do this through the bank, most people don't have that kind of money where they can just go and buy a house. The bank's going to ask you all kinds of credit and a lot of those questions are tied up in history. Well for sure I mean i think that Let's just stick with the example of buying a house because I think it is one of the most... It is also one of the most illustrative of the kind of deep inequalities that started hundreds of years ago, right? So if we just go back hundreds of years white people could buy property including other people

34:26 make it use that property to leverage more property and more loans right so we talk about examples like john brown who founded university. Was there ship builder any also people he was a slave holder and he could not only use those enslaved people to build the ships for free, but he could also use those enslaved people as collateral to get more loans to build his business. So now John Brown is- And he did! He did and John Brown is super wealthy right? And John Brown was probably very smart and he probably worked really hard But part of the way that he amassed all that wealth was by owning other people who couldn't in turn own anything at all Right? And all of that wealth

35:11 the part that he held on to, which we all try to hold onto some right? Gets passed down intergenerationally. And so when we think about the fact that even low income poor white people still have 10 times more wealth than low income poor black people, the linchpin to most of that is owning a home or owning part of a home even if it's a double-wide trailer in a rural community that's isolated and poor, there is still some equity in that that can be leveraged to pay some college tuition or help a kid buy their own home or pay bail when you get arrested. And when we begin to disentangle all of that it doesn't mean that poor white people aren't disadvantaged. This is where the race and class factor come together. Right. Let me add here fast forward from back then to now

36:04 2019, Newsday. I don't know if Newsday is circulated as far as San Diego but Newsday is a Long Island, New York newspaper. Newsday did the classic experiment using testers to see if the housing market in Long Island, New York was open to everybody And guess what? That test is so old. People have been doing it since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Newsday sent testers out, a white family or black family that kind of thing and they came back really really shocked at least they were shocked I wasn't shocked They came back shocked that the housing market is as segregated and covenant

36:57 as it was back in the 1940s, 50s and 60. This is 2019 experiment so you can see where some people are locked out of the market or they're sent to certain sub-markets zip codes with the houses are gonna definitely go underwater they're overpriced and all that stuff is being done systematically It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible, and I don't think...I mean i'm sure whites get charged overprice for houses, overprice for cars but in many of these research experiments it's non-whites who get the short end of this stick

37:40 Yes, I understand. And to me one of the major problems is that poor white people have been conditioned to identify more with the Rockefellers or the Morgans than their fellow struggling black counterparts and by the same token- They're white! We have an ideology in this country that says if you're white you're better than everybody else now people will say oh no You know we're all equal in that With this COVID and all this mess that's going on with COVID, and telling people whether we should send our kids back to school or not. There is now front page stories this week where white parents are coming into quote unquote pods so that their kids can be taught by private tutors quote unquote teachers an have made it clear that essential workers That's a code word essential workers

38:40 Kids will not be allowed into their pod. You hear me? Mm-hmm Now these are the people who brought you that pizza that you needed, that Chinese meal for your family because you didn't want to get COVID These are the people who did that essential workers but now they're kids will not be Allowed into these pod circles that are growing up all over the country especially in suburb I don't know if it's reached California yet, but it is definitely here on the East Coast. And this is where the legacy of all these other systems like chattel slavery... Think how deep it is that I have to tell you

39:27 that the third president of the United States owned people. Not all of them did Well, he did because he's more famous than so many others George Washington Jefferson was unfreaking believable He owned people, he reneged on promises that he made to that woman he raped and gave four or five kids with And yet you layed out in class an I can tell you The Dean or somebody else will be calling you up because you can't lay out that kind of truth. That's deep truth." Well, that's the kind of stuff that we like to talk about around here—the raw stuff! We're talking about it! Yes and so something I also just sort of learned about in recent years is that there are unknown aspects of history where Black communities did thrive they used to call Washington DC Chocolate City

40:23 There was a thriving black community in New York that the elite leveled so they could have Central Park, Seneca Village. And there was a Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma which was dismantled after the Tulsa race massacre. What can be said about these situations where black communities did quote unquote pull themselves up by their bootstraps so to speak only to be kicked back down to the bottom rung of the ladder. For those people who say, why can't they get it together? Slavery was a long time ago." Well here are some examples where they did and then it was like nope got to knock you back down. No I mean I think those are such great examples and I think in many ways the whole argument of the book Policing Black Bodies is about

41:07 understanding that the criminal justice system is just the latest tool, to use your words, to knock black people down. To keep them from forward progress you know if you look at and you mentioned several examples of these historical facts whether it's The Black Codes or Jim Crow Those systems came in place when suddenly black people were starting to get more freedom, right? So the first is emancipation. So suddenly you have four million black people who are free that's pretty scary too white people

41:44 who were like, oh my gosh. What's going to happen? And not only afraid physically but I think fairly they were afraid they knew that black people were hard workers because they'd been extracting their labor for hundreds of years and so they were afraid like wow if they get a little bit of freedom what's gonna happen to me what's gonna happen next and i think that was especially profound to go back to your earlier point, the people that most afraid of that were low income whites. Right? Who were also on the economic margins and so the landed whites, the plantation owners co-opt low income white people many of whom are also sharecroppers quite frankly into a race war right? Yes. A collusion against black people and once that happens

42:29 It's sort of never been able to be disconnected. So, you know you move forward and at that point you start arresting black people for loitering so you can put them in a plantation prison so they can continue to pick cotton that sort of Plantation economy begins to wear itself out a little bit as industrialization moves forward And then you have the system of Jim Crow which frankly cost poor white people a heck of a lot of money because duplicating every single institution even if it was of lower quality, was darn expensive. Two hospitals, two waiting rooms at the bus station, two swimming pools... That's a lot of money that could have been invested into something else! Two movie theaters but white people buy into that as a way of marking and declaring their whiteness

43:20 you move forward. And, as we argue in the book, the modern day criminal justice system doesn't look anything like the criminal justice system of a hundred years ago because Jim Crow kept black people for the most part and you have some great examples of black successes but for the most part kept black people from accessing the American dream once the Jim Crow structure begins to fall apart something else comes into place. And what is it? It's the criminal justice system, right? So it sort of at every single turn where black people begin to get some power, the white supremacist structure figures out a different way. Look, the modern example right now today is voter suppression. Okay? You have to make a law

44:12 to allow people to do something that we all stand up in the first grade with, you know, salute the flag and were very happy because as citizens you can at least vote regardless of your color blah blah blah. Well guess what? It doesn't work that way So you fast forward today and you have redistricting, gerrymandering. You tell people to go to the firehouse that's going be open till nine o'clock to vote and the place is closed when they get there. You got all that kind of crap going on even with Congress fooling with the Voting Rights Act in 2020

44:58 So it is unbelievable that these other kinds of systems are in place. And if you're white, and this is a part of the discussion now since the murder of George Floyd. If you're white, you never had to think about those things. You never had to actually deeply think about where am I going to go to shop when we don't have grocery stores in these communities in cities like Chicago? Not in deep rural Mississippi even though they do not have them there either in the Delta area where we did some research, but in big cities like Chicago. You go into New York Harlem is fashionable right now I'm sure you've heard of Harlem yeah of course Harlem is where blacks were like Tulsa and some of these other places right now the gentrification movement in Harlem it's unbelievable

45:54 similar to what happened with the building of Central Park. People are being moved out, whites and others but people with money are moving in they're taking these old brownstones they're fixing them up the places look fabulous and all this just keeps pushing a good sector of the black population further and further someplace else. In fact I'm not even sure where pushing where And it's deadly. It's absolutely deadly. I want to go back to a point you made about voting because one of the things we talk about in the book is felony disenfranchisement and, you know, I don't know why whoever thought up the idea that people with a felony shouldn't be able to vote

46:40 But it's quite curious that felony disenfranchisement becomes super important after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, right? So it's after that you start to felonize possession of pretty low-level drugs that Black people use. And pretty soon you have huge swaths in the Black community who now do no longer have the right to vote—just 30 or 40 years after they got their right to vote. I don't think you can underestimate or overestimate, I mean how important that is right? It's another tool for keeping black people

47:17 out of any position of power. I mean, we talk about it in the book and I talk about it in classes all the time. Forget about voting for the president and there's some excellent work about various presidential elections and the role that voter disenfranchisement played in that but when you disenfranchise black people disproportionately low-income black people, that means in a precinct or very few people in that community are going to be able to pick the chair of the school board or the prosecutor in their county, or the sheriff. Or any number of people who will have a direct impact on their daily life they're locked out of the political apparatus which contributes to you know the devastation in those communities and then you make examples out of individuals we generally don't talk about individuals

48:08 But you make examples out of individuals. I'll give you two of these examples. There's a Black woman, she was probably in her upper 30s. She got out of prison. She had no idea how all these laws work and she went and voted. Do you remember that? Yeah And she'd been given a prison sentence for voting. She said she just didn't understand the laws Then when you go back to the school-to-prison pipeline There's the headlines passing around this week of a young African American female student who didn't do her online homework, virtual class. She didn't do the homework. She's been incarcerated in a juvie for not doing the homework. We've criminalized voting. What's the charge? Probably truancy or something like that. I'd have to look it up but this is in the news this week

49:10 What you guys are making a lot of excellent points and angie i do really like that point that the dirty secret is that the people in the one percent have used poor white people to focus down on black communities instead of focusing up on. the 1% that has half the wealth of the entire nation. And it keeps us fighting amongst ourselves and allows them to keep running the show, I think that is an important aspect. Yes, prisons are also such cesspools because they have no advocates. If an ex-con cannot vote, cannot make any decisions about the state of prisons then people just ignore them and then their labor and rape factories really it's really cruel and unusual punishment that it's common knowledge that if you go to prison well good luck getting raped hope you like being raped like that messed up yeah and it's because no one is advocating for the prison population but another thing I wanted to try to fit in here was prison labor

50:09 I think we're aware of prison labor, but it gets pretty gross when you examine the details. You write about plantation prisons that popped up after the Civil War that even in the 13th Amendment has a loophole where it says, We're abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime." So what do they do? To quote your book There were laws that allowed the police to arrest black men for status offenses like loitering and incarcerate them, specifically at plantation prisons during planting and harvesting seasons when the demand for this free black labor increased dramatically. These same men were released conveniently after the planting or harvesting season ended their labor extracted at no cost

50:52 because the state no longer wanted to pay to house and feed them. And that is just one aspect, but can you talk to us about how this soft slavery continued well on after the Civil War and prison labor is still going on today? Well we have a beautiful example here. We put together a course...we taught at a very private elite liberal arts college for a long time. And we put together a course in the summer, specifically to fight the notion that students need to go overseas study abroad. To learn something about culture and we put together a course saying you know darn it You need to learn something about what's going on in United States And so we put together this course called social stratification in the South

51:51 and people can Google it, and they'll see social stratification in the Deep South. If they Google it you'll see articles written about the courses so unique course with full credit for their students who took the course we got on a bus And we went into the deep south We had white students black students Puerto Rican students Chinese students A real mix of students men and women I'm gonna tell you something When you hit deep into Louisiana, Mississippi with that kind of a crowd you attract attention. So we've taught this course like four times but the point is one part of that course was to look at plantation prisons and we ended up with a real neat experience

52:51 at Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. And Parchman is... It's like 50 miles by 50 miles? Unbelievable, just unbelievable prison farms and over the course of the four times we taught it every other year they moved into the business of catfish farms and if you know catfish farms were lucrative throughout Mississippi And once the prison took up catfish farming, and we write about this in a paper we published. The private businesses went under because they couldn't compete with free labor in walking around the town that surrounds the prison

53:41 We could see prisoners in striped uniforms, the various uniforms that said something about their status. We could see prisoners working in town doing everything from cutting grass to carpentry painting in these little towns surrounding the prison. The prison labor system is unbelievable So I want to give a couple of other examples that i think are really important for your listeners. We actually have no problem with inmates working, we think that inmate work as opposed to labor is really important

54:24 You know, we've spent time in prisons. Something that's not in the book but our next upcoming book which we'd love to talk to you about when it finally comes out another year or two is on solitary confinement and We spent three summers doing interviews and ethnography in solitary Literally, we were in solitary confinement units in a state prison system We're in favor of inmates having opportunities to work many of them want to work It gives you something to do you can learn some skills For some folks, those skills will even translate into a job after they get released. Certainly not at Parchman but in many prison systems they earn something

55:04 which allows them to buy some commissary items or pay off a little bit of a finer fee. Buy water? So what we have a problem with is the extraction of that labor for no value, so the example that Earl was starting to give about the bottled water... We know someone in a prison system in New York who sews sweatshirts he works in a sweatshirt shop and he makes 33 cents an hour in the sweatshirt shop A bottle of water in the commissary is still a dollar, just like it would be at Giant or Safeway or Publix or any local market. So he has to work three hours to earn enough money to buy one bottle of water. That's what we have a problem with. But he has to buy the water? Because the water in the cellar was dirty and gross! Yeah but you can't drink it Right so that's what we have a problem with Is that... You know We would challenge your listeners To think

55:58 Would I be willing to add a $10 an hour job work three hours to buy a $30 bottle of water? That would be absurd, right. The fact that we detail in the book and in a classroom again encourage your listeners if you prison industry is especially the state system you know, we can only speak about the states that we've looked at. But most states function this way that if you're a state agency, you have to buy furniture and cleaning supplies from the local state prison industry system. So in Virginia it's called Virginia Correctional Enterprises, VCE for short

56:40 We talk about in the book being new to the university and you go through training about how you have to learn by furniture and all that stuff, but you would have to do any job if you don't think about just buying furniture from vc. If you don't dig underneath that you probably didn't realize your buying it from prison system so we decided to investigate a little bit of virginia correctional enterprises We sat in the library at this particular university and opened up the catalog for furniture that you can buy from Virginia Correctional Enterprises, and we could literally see the very chairs that we were sitting in. And the chairs retailed for $600 a piece

57:19 Someone working in the free market making furniture would make around between 18 and 22 dollars an hour Inmates make 54 cents an hour. And so they're not paid, you know They have to work what two hours to get a bottle of water but the chair still retails at 600 bucks right? It's not like it retails for a thousand percent less than just because you didn't pay the laborer an equivalent wage, right? So you work in a state organization. Students love these stories because we go, Go look at your dorm room furniture! Google your dorm room furniture and you'll figure out that someone was paid 54 cents an hour to make that furniture. And the university had to pay the same as they would pay at IKEA, right? That's what we have a problem with. Industries making tons of money off mostly black people's free labor!

58:12 Right and there is an old phrase something to the degree of a child who doesn't feel included in the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth I've always liked that because it's like you have to give people a path. You can't just ignore them and Give them no options because for your own safety That's a bad policy Because people need to feel like they have some hope or they're just gonna be willing to take you out with them, you know If all I have is prison well i'm going to take you out with me and it's like It's a real chaotic situation To have people who?

58:47 do not feel as if there's any way to succeed, it's like backing a scared animal into a corner. They're just going to lash out because why not? I love your description because it really resonated with what we saw and what we've learned about solitary confinement so... A lot of people might be surprised or grossed out to know sometimes inmates in solitary confinement will throw their bodily fluids and stuff on guards, on COs And why would you do that It's gross disgusting but when you think about what you just said if that's the only thing they can control. Do it to feel some sense of control right yeah i think your point is a hundred percent right on and if u couple this question of prison labor with

59:36 a discussion of bail and fines and fees, you know 20 to 30 percent of people who are incarcerated today are there because they can't pay bail or they can't pay a fine or fee. If you gave them a pathway by working in the kitchen or answering the phone for the DOT as they do in New York, or making a license plate or something to earn money so that they could pay off that debt. I would think you would probably get some good work out of folks. They would be motivated but at 30 cents an hour and you'll never ever... And that's at the high end of the pay scale. A lot of people are making 10-12 cents an hour. How hard are you going to work

1:00:16 to get out of that, it's not motivating. Right? Exactly! I agree with you and so we don't have a ton of time left i wanted to leave some space for solutions of course a lot of this stuff will just be hypothetical because we don't really have the decision-making power that we might want, but this systemic racial inequality has been going on in America for as long as we've had black and white people. And these poverty traps we've talked about affect us all how do we even approach lasting solutions without furthering the divide? And this is always where we end and this is where it's hard but right We're better at describing the problems I would say there are sort of two tracks one

1:01:02 We have got to talk honestly about our racial history and not pretend it didn't happen or pretend that it ended 400 years ago. I think we have to be honest about that, and we have to look at these embedded systems that allowed certain people to make money and amass wealth and other people not too like that's an important part of the conversation We can't move forward until we talk about that. When it comes to the criminal justice system, I think some things that would alleviate the outcomes if not the root causes...I think some of the things that would alleviate some of the outcomes would be things like decriminalizing a lot of drugs. That's happening! We lock up about half-a-million people a year 20% of the prison population is there for low level drug possession. Crazy! It's crazy right?

1:01:52 So that's one. 20 to 30 percent are in jail or prison of people who are incarcerated, are in jail or prison because they can't pay bail and yet every study and we have colleagues doing this work every study that's been done suggests that like 99.9% of people who are charged show back up when they're supposed to so eliminating bail money bail for the vast majority of cases I mean maybe you don't send the axe murderer back out on the street but You know, we're locking up people who've never been proven guilty. They've never been convicted of a crime." We need to rethink the use of police. We don't go near the whole question of defund get rid of the police but we think you need to rethink the use of police. We saw something the other day where police were going to go after people who came into this state

1:02:46 Oh, yeah. When quarantined? They said well you don't need police for that we need to also get really serious about space travel. Amen! I know you're going to laugh but think about all the money that's spent on space travel And I don't think we can name five things that we've gotten in return for this. We need to get out of Afghanistan, we need to stop flying jets over the ball stadium. You know how much money it costs to put five of those blue birds that fly over this Blue Angels over the stadium?

1:03:31 I mean, it's unbelievable the cost for that. We need to stop doing these... Get out of war! Get out of the business of war! Let the Afghanis go and do their thing. We need to get out of that particular business. It ruins lives. Men and now women get tied up in that. And then when they get back home they can't get the medical care that they The VA hospital is the worst hospital system on the earth. Clean all that mess up." We had lunch with a student, former student who worked at Walter Reed Hospital and here's the description I don't know if you pay attention to the racetrack where they run horses not right now but when they have horse races in Belmont and all that there's something called the backtrack or something like that And this is where all of the attendants live

1:04:30 This is where all the people that clean up the horse crap live. This is where the people who walk the horses live, and in many of these backtracks these are some of the worst slums you've ever seen no heat No air conditioning People sleeping on cots and yet when the race comes out oh my gosh people got on these big hats They're sipping mint juleps running these horses in the ground This is the kind of stuff that needs to come to a halt. Put this money, put all this wealth to use to take care of people." I mean good God you couldn't give people more than $5 and 75 cents a day for food in food stamps? What are they going to do eat themselves to death? Yeah right well there's a lot of people who talk about food stamps itself being

1:05:26 Kind of a conspiracy to support only the corporate food companies because like you said, the farmers market they don't have the machine. Right! Who's got the machine? KFC has got it, Walmart's got it, Kraft macaroni and cheese you can purchase... Wonder Bread, all these things that are bad for us and corporate controlled because they know their crushing the middle and lower class. So they're like alright let's put our lobbyists in the government to give people some money that they can only selectively use on our products give it right back to us and feel as if we're doing something for them That's the other thing get rid of any lobby organizations

1:06:05 What's that thing in 13? Oh, Alec. Do you know about Alec? No. Oh, Alec is a It's like a super lobby group that pulls together. It's an organization of politicians and corporations, and some corporations that have... Well Walmart recently left ALEC but lots of corporations are in ALEC and they write bills for politicians. Yep they write them. They write the bills. And so the bill might be something like A lot of Second Amendment bills come out of ALEC because there's a lot of money made in selling ammunition, for example. Yeah you got to check out ALEC and your listeners should check it out because they literally write the bills that politicians bring to the floor and they do it at both the national level and also at the state level It's a really fascinating way in which you're propping up these businesses through this legislative system that appears to be free and equal to all of us

1:07:06 but clearly isn't. Right, man it is a tangled web of corruption out there and it's hard to unravel at all some solutions that you mentioned in the book that I liked well of course you say We should pass laws that prohibit making money off policing. There should be no finances involved at all, because obviously that's where you get corruption and you incentivize putting more people in jail and ticketing more people. You can't do that because it's going to get slanted and is going to get out of control as it is. Uh, you've also talked about dismantling the private prison system definitely pro on that All felony disenfranchisement laws need to be immediately repealed. And this one was pretty creative, you say attorneys should be required to hold malpractice insurance and those wrongfully convicted should have the right to sue for damages I really like that! I've actually thought that police officers should have a form of malpractice insurance

1:08:01 If you're killing a bunch of people, you're gonna get priced out. It doesn't matter what the police union wants to protect. Doesn't matter what the police chief wants to protect if you get insurance, a third party insurance company involved who only cares about those numbers, you will be priced out and we can reward the good officers who will make a living wage because they've done the right thing." So I like that idea but I've never heard it applied to attorneys that's creative. I like your idea of police officers. Prosecutors are never held accountable for anything. There needs to be a way to hold these prosecutors accountable, especially the ones that hide evidence, you know cheat lie set up these phony grand juries take the secrecy out of the grand jury process what's the big deal? We want to know how these people see what they've been asked to look at but we never know

1:09:00 and stop the killology training of the police. Take them out in combat boots, take away the long rifles, take away the cargo pants and just have them serving protect. They're not soldiers look I mean we see the soldiers in Portland in terms of what's happening there and many many many police forces including Ferguson show up as if they're in Iraq or somewhere. Yes, and I know we're running out of time but just thinking about like mentioned a little bit ago We spent time doing research in solitary confinement units at a huge prison system in a rural state that has suffered A lot of economic downturn And if you live in one of those states and you know rust belt states are an example Of those States Ohio Pennsylvania parts of New York

1:09:57 you know, a coal mine or steel mill shuts and you build a prison? What kind of economic development is that?" And what does that say about our country that we think that's the way to lift people out of poverty is to build a prison lock some of them up and make the rest of them keepers at the gate. No other country does that. All these wardens have gone to Norway, Switzerland and they get on TV and they say oh my gosh you know they treat people in prison at these places like human beings. They want them to be better people when they get out when they're released

1:10:38 There hasn't been, and this has been going on for a long time now. There hasn't been one thing that I can see we can see that has been brought back from those visitations and implied here in the United States not one. Right getting sent to prison is just devastating for a person and there's just no path back in America very sad. There is none I mean Pelican Bay out where you are close their solitary units, quote unquote on paper and rename those cells something else. Administrative segregation And they're still solitary cells I mean it's that kind of nonsense that's going on

1:11:24 Man well so many problems so little time but i do think we covered a lot of ground definitely glad we can highlight aspects of our racial history that don't get into the conversation as often as they should i'm glad we could talk about poverty traps that people, all races can get stuck in and can you night around trying to improve and. I commend you guys for focusing on something that is so raw. Before we go, do remind the people of your work that you've done together—the website and anywhere else—that they should follow up to dive deeper into your work!

1:12:00 Yeah, that would be great. I think the best is to go to our website which is www.smithandhattery.com so it's S-M-I-T-H A-N-D H-A-T-T E-R Y dot com We have a blog that's pretty active we see all of the books that we have you can arrange if you want to invite us to speak on a program like this So we're really grateful for the opportunity And yeah, thank you very much for the exposure and the conversation. It's been really awesome. Yeah! Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you guys I appreciate the time and all your credentials are very impressive for little old me and a lot of good information do take care and keep fighting the good fight Thanks. You too. Take good care All right. Smith & Hattery for the win. I thought that was a real enjoyable conversation

1:12:56 i appreciate their approach of hey let's just talk about this it's raw and uncomfortable. We will have some differences of opinion a lot of the stuff does just need to be talked about you know i like that if we keep letting things go on attended then we don't do anything to fix them, that said i'm sure there will be listeners who saw this episode pop up and they think It's gonna be a bit overkill given that we just had Angela J. Davis here talking about very similar things, I get that but i did it for a couple of reasons one when I want to cover subject sometimes I send out several emails and I might hear back from just one person

1:13:39 And that was the case here but then doctor had re ended up getting back to me a few weeks later. And i thought you know i still wanna do this because when i talk to angela jay davis she was pretty clear that she just wanted to keep the conversation on the criminal justice system and prosecutors of course rightfully so it is her expertise I understand that. But i felt like we left a lot of socio-economic and structural elements that really needed to be folded in off the table, and i feel better now about covering the full picture or at least a more complete picture because i think smith and hattery are pretty strong when it comes to talking about those other elements that make american life more challenging for some of us especially in the history which is really what i wanted to focus on

1:14:32 Personally a lot less interested in a deep and thorough conversation about ethnic categories and their fluidity or. I guess race philosophy because i just don't really know what to do with that but there are real practical things that the system has done to black communities that are pretty shocking, I mentioned some of them in my intro and of course we all know about a situation like Waco but what if it was an attack that only hit a black community would you know well look into the Tulsa race massacre, in fact just let me read you the quick version from Wikipedia. The Tulsa Race Massacre also called the Tulsa Race Riot

1:15:16 took place on May 31st and June 1, 1921 when mobs of white residents—many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials—attacked black residents and businesses in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called the single worst incident of racial violence in American history The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district. At that time the wealthiest black community in the United States known as Black Wall Street More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and as many as 6,000 black residents were interned in large facilities

1:16:03 The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead, but other sources have put the number well into the hundreds. I mean i didn't even know about that until fairly recently and there's some serious conspiratorial black history that i wish we were more aware of in conspiracy culture so today was an attempt to get more into that more into the poverty trap as well something less racial in nature but also important to understand I think Dr. Hattery nailed it when she mentioned how the lower and middle class workers have been conditioned to think in terms of black and white, just like blue and red, and that these are the key divisions that keep the system intact. I absolutely think that's true! The elite throw poor white people a quarter and poor black people a dime, and we spend all our time arguing about that 15 cents you know?

1:16:59 Also getting into the prison industrial complex and reconfigured slave labor and plantation prisons. That stuff is exactly what I had in mind too, so that was also a good section So I liked it! Hopefully those of us who hold different opinions on masks can overlook a few COVID comments that made their way in there Obviously that wasn't in their book And I tried to just bring it right back as best I could Really no big deal i think we're all having these kind of conversations right now in the second hour we got more into the debt p&h system, exonerations and particular man it's a shame we didn't get there faster. I actually mentioned the bird watching example and i think that woman did actually face a charge for that but that was really interesting exoneration are overwhelmingly for black men well what does that mean means you put a lot of black men prison for things they didn't do

1:17:57 So what good is it citing crime statistics if you're not gonna include exonerations? We also talked about reefer madness and racism, black families and social norms and tax policies that perpetuate poverty. And keep the poor in middle class from establishing multi-generational wealth. I think that is so important we know why the elite stay the elite a lot of times it is that they circle the wagons around their kind And they pass it all down through the generations including the playbook for what they wanna do so, it's not surprising to me that multi generational wealth is something on their minds and something that they. Try to make sure they can throw a wrench in when we're trying to achieve that goes part and parcel with the education conspiracy were trained to be obedient workers not free thinking entrepreneurs you know the drill sign up for plus if you appreciate what im doing around here

1:18:58 I know i'm still gonna get some cancellations for this one and some backlash because some listeners see anything that tackles black issues as me being a shill for Black Lives Matter. Or buying into the big liberal agenda and that's just sad because so much of black lives matter to me is. And elite funded operation in social division i agree with a lot of those people it is a corporate slogan doesn't really say anything we change our profile picture people who don't go along with that must be racist, end most donations that are sent to black lives matter

1:19:36 which people think are going to lift up black communities, actually just go to the DNC or to the Biden campaign. And that is very gross! So yeah Black Lives Matter to me... The movement in its current incarnation is largely an empty gesture but the system is still slanted against some people and we need to unpack it both can be true but instead of standing in the street with a sign confronting police officers maybe just include some black businesses in your rotation to me just going to a few local black owned restaurants is gonna do a lot more than sending a check to be lm. But either way i try to be fair on this one and i threw out a lot of the negative feedback that i got on the last episode of this nature, and tried to see what today's guest would think of some of that feedback

1:20:31 If it had any value, I definitely tried to throw it out there. Although I think a lot of those people based on their language and the aggressiveness of their comments, I'm sure they've given up on me already. I don't think this came up until the second hour but I think it's also important to reiterate that I feel that the media selectively shows us white cop-on-black man incidents to increase racial tensions and try to get these riots started So I try not to just focus on the specific murder by cop thing, because that's a manipulated aspect. But to look more broadly at policing and as their book title says surveillance and management and monitoring of black men there is a lot there starting with kids

1:21:19 You can think whatever you wanna think but for me it was a disservice to the black friends i do have that we, have gone along time without bringing some of this stuff up. I think its always in the recipe and i do hate to be thought as trendy with this kind of thing but here we are so just hope majority of THC listeners can see what i was trying go for I don't think we need to hang on every word here or be so uncompromising and rigid when we hear a point or two, we might disagree with. Maybe just let it go sometimes and bring the conversation back to common ground but even if we disregard the super aggro negative feedback i've gotten lately

1:22:05 I'm also just hearing that a lot of people understand that i'm trying to get into some nuance here but anything political or cultural is just very fatiguing right now. 2020 is just a very heavy year and we have a mix of listeners where some look to THC, to help them cope some come looking for hope and someone hear something completely out-of-the box unrelated to what they're getting everywhere else So I'm gonna try to get a lot weirder in the second half of 2020. Of course, guest suggestions are always valuable because those are some of the hardest shows to do if you are plus member there is a forum thread that is for guests suggestions don't be shy! I really enjoyed today's guest and I hope that we all got something out of this show but also really had a blast with Phoenix Aurelius Bruce Fenton and last episode with Josh and Tim

1:23:04 In fact our next guest is or was supposed to be chris noles but the east coast is getting hit by a hurricane right now and he hasn't had power for like three days now man. Twenty twenty am i right guys at the show will go on thanks for listening dig deeper into smith and hattery if you wanna digest more their work And I'll see you next time. I've done my part, your move racial oppressors poverty perpetuators and plantation prison operators Your fucking move. They built a little out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class overcome their shining now we're calling

1:24:01 Your Highness and the world scream, save me THC. They destroyed the bonds of friendship and respect between the only people left who'd even look them in the eye and make a fortune off the same one that they tortured And the world, save me THC Look for Jesus

1:24:43 And we'll say, Mr. Jesus, don't you know who can tell me if it's true? There's a chance to be built a little some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class overcome their shining now we're calling

1:25:30 Your Highness and the world scream Save me, THC.