(242)S11E3/10: Uncovering Racism
Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. It is that time in the season when we take a little break because it is the end of a section. We just completed a section in our season on propaganda on race, how propaganda is wielded in regard to racism. And so we are going to kind of stop here for a minute and hopefully, I'm gonna convey to you a few conclusions, maybe a little bit of recap, and then importantly, the resources, some of the resources that I want to highlight and recommend for you as you pursue further study, as well as mentioning some conspiracies that I didn't get to because I really only generally highlight one conspiracy, in every section, but there's so many more that I I have to choose from. And so I want to give you guys some extensions for further research if you'd like.
Derek:Now in this section of the season, you'll notice that I did a lot more interviews than I did for our section on abuse and I I didn't do any, at least not at this point while I'm recording this. I have not done any interviews in regard to the the first section, just propaganda in general. Now I've done, I don't know, maybe eight or 10 interviews so far that I've I've recorded already for the season on propaganda and but I've reached out to a lot of people. I mean, book I'm reading is usually the best book at, you know, whatever whatever I'm reading in the moment, that is the best book at that point. And I'm like, I gotta gotta contact this author and talk to them.
Derek:And I've contacted a lot of the people that I have read. Some of the people are dead, some of the people I wouldn't be that interested in. But yeah, I've contacted a lot of people and and even people that that aren't on my Goodreads list. Like, I'll just throw out some names here of people that I have contacted. I contacted the Christian rapper Propaganda after reading his book Terraform and and listening to some of his music which which deals with certain aspects of racism.
Derek:I've contacted Tom McDonald because he's got a song on Propaganda. And honestly, I mean, I know that he's he's I think he's pretty far on the right as far as people view him. But I mean, what you'll notice is a lot of the people that I interview end up being more on the left side of the spectrum. And it's I want you to understand it's not at all because I only reach out to people on the left side of the spectrum. I've reached out to Marvin Alasky who is, you know, an individual in the PCA, a conservative Christian denomination of which I'm a part.
Derek:He was the head of World Magazine, Discovery Institute, part of that. So Rachel Denhollander reached out to her. I I've reached out to a lot of people. I would say probably like, I don't know, sixty sixty different people that I've reached out to. You like YouTubers who who do various sorts of things.
Derek:I've reached out to a lot of people, people from Behind the Bastards podcast. Okay? So you get the point. Now, for the most part, nobody I mean, there are a lot of people who don't respond to me. Right?
Derek:I'm a nobody. Who am I? I I don't even you know, I just I'm from a small podcast they've never heard of, so I I don't have a PR person who's gonna reach out to them. So most people just ignore me. There are some people who are polite and and respond and just say they aren't interested.
Derek:And then I've I've had I had one who was pretty blunt about it. She just said when when I told her what podcast I did and what we're about, she's like, Nah, I don't want to do that whole Christian thing. I forget exactly how she put it, but she said something like, It wouldn't be good for her, right? Well, I appreciate the honesty, okay? I genuinely do.
Derek:Like I would rather have somebody not play these niceties and just say, Hey look, I'm not gonna do it. Great. I I respect that. But that was kind of a glimpse into this whole propaganda world in and of itself, trying to to get these interviews with people. Because what that one person said, what that one author said, I think is probably true of more than just her.
Derek:You know, with so with with this individual, it was, oh yeah, Christian, you know, talking with a Christian wouldn't look good for me. Okay. For some other individual or individuals who are on the other side of the spectrum, the more the right of the spectrum, they're like, we're talking about propaganda and uncovering that in the church or uncovering it in government which, you know, we we like our government, we're from a, you know, the The United States Of America and our founding fathers were Christian, like, we can't soil that that reputation. Right? So I I think it goes it goes on both sides of the aisle here.
Derek:But for that one lady to to say, like, can't really associate with Christians because it wouldn't be good for my book sales or whatnot. I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about in this season, is this polarization. Like, I would love to sit down and talk to I've watched, this this, great YouTube channel, The Second Thought, by this guy who's like a Marxist. I would love to talk to him. I would love to talk to Tom MacDonald.
Derek:I would love to talk to Marvin Olasky. Like, I would love to talk to all of these people, right, left, center, and and hear what is going on in their experience in their heads. It could be a wonderful thing. But what this one individual showed, and and I think is, again, is representative of more than just her, is that people are trying to be really cautious about how they sell themselves. I mean, in in an age of, you know, with Instagram, Facebook, whatever, TikTok, whatever like is going on right now as you're listening to this, whatever the big thing is, you have to present yourself a certain way.
Derek:You can't just uncover and reveal truth, you have to have some sort of facade, some sort of way that you present yourself. You can't have a discussion with certain types of people, you can't have a discussion about certain types of ideas, that just wouldn't be good for your image. An image is what we're selling, not truth. And it's when you can't have those kinds of conversations with people from all over the spectrum. It's when you have this polarization that there are, I mean, you see that you are extremely propagandized.
Derek:Now I understand the arguments with people, I think it was like Dawkins who refuses to or refused to engage with with certain brands of Christianity or Christians in general in a debate, where he's like, I don't wanna validate that position. He thinks it's so ridiculous and so stupid. I mean, should we have debates with neo Nazis about the the humanity of Jews or minorities, black people, whatever. I'm not convinced that we should, and there are certain things that we, I guess, we all just think are are too crazy that you'd validate it by by discussing it. So I don't know where that line is.
Derek:Nevertheless, it was at least something interesting to me to observe while I was reaching out to people for interviews, and it's something that that maybe you should chew on too and figure out at what point are you validate validating something that shouldn't be validated, and at what point are you giving in to propaganda and becoming polarized, and refusing to be willing to think critically or to view the humanity in somebody else who might disagree with you? And you know, maybe as I'm talking here, maybe that's the line for me. You know, I think of this guy named Daryl Davis, I believe is his name, who he's famous because he he's all over like the different news stations and and YouTube and stuff because he's this black guy who sat down and and talked with or or converted like over 200 KKK members to come out of the the KKK. Now, he didn't do that by like posting cool Instagram photos of himself. Not that posting cool Instagram photos of yourself is bad, but that's not how he did it.
Derek:He sat down and he had conversations with them. Okay, I I can understand Dawkins not wanting to have a debate, right? Maybe he's he's scared that he'll not represent his position strongly enough and and some people will end up believing the Christian. Maybe he thinks Christianity is too crazy, too harmful, like whatever he thinks. Okay.
Derek:But, I don't know, it seems like having a discussion about things and and being asked questions as one tries to understand your thoughts, it seems like that's on a different scale. And it seems like that's what somebody like Daryl Davis did. Right? He sits down and has has a discussion with somebody like those in the KKK who a lot of black people probably would view as almost subhuman, right? Even if they wouldn't say it, right?
Derek:I view them as practically subhuman, right? It's hard for me to love them. Yet, Daryl Davis sat down and had conversations with them. And conversations, relationships, discussions, those aren't validations, I don't think. And so I think we need to be careful about this idea of refusing to validate meaning we can't be in conversation with people.
Derek:If that's the case, then, Daryl Davis and his conversion of the 200 plus KKK members shouldn't exist, right? That's not a good thing that he sat down and he talked with them. Anyway, that is not the introduction I planned, but yeah, hopefully it sheds some light on the process as as we dig into the rest of the season. So let's let's get to this episode in particular, discussion on our our concluding to the the section on race and propaganda. When it comes to recommending resources for race, it is very difficult for me because this is probably one of the topics that I have read the the most on in the last several years.
Derek:Politics, race and and you know, non violence Christianity would be the the three topics I've read the most about. So there are lot of these books that that I've actually read prior to studying for for the season on propaganda. And so I'm not gonna remember a ton of details about each of these, I just remember these books as as standing out. So what I would recommend is go to for my Goodreads reading list, I have a propaganda, truth, atrocities, conspiracies reading list. So you can go check that out for specific propaganda related stuff.
Derek:But then you might also wanna check out the my racism or race and gender equality. I forget what I titled it, but you can go check out that that reading list as well. And there's gonna be some things in there that I didn't end up labeling as propaganda because it was before I I had propaganda in view. So you can go check those out and that might be helpful for you too. So let's start off with recommendations for kind of like the the larger scale systemic view of things.
Derek:I think it's I think it's important to understand how racism is is baked in, or or where you're gonna see people argue for racism baked into the system. And so I'd recommend books like Chokehold, which I really liked because it's I believe the author is a black guy who was a prosecutor, a DA or something. And so he kind of is able to give you a perspective from from that side of the law as a black man, and and kind of how he changed his mind on on some things. And so that was really really valuable in my opinion. You can do similar things in in regard to the criminal justice system, the condemnation of blackness that that gives you a much longer history than Chokehold does.
Derek:You could also do When Affirmative Action was White, Race for Profit, and my my personal favorite, the one that made things click for me in regard to systemic racism, was The Color of Law. Man, that book just be because it's so dispassionate, I mean, I felt like it was dispassionate, but he just gives you historical fact after historical fact after historical fact, you just have event after event after event. And most, if not all of them, I think that he he conveys purposefully or unintentionally, I don't know. But they're they're largely from non southern places, you know, like Indiana, California, like, you know, I thought I thought it was just Southerners who were mostly racist and killed people and bombed houses. Nope, not not at all.
Derek:So the color of law is is just a great way to see just historically without even making all these these value judgments just like it's baked into the system. Dog whistle politics also kind of gives you a good view of of how language has kind of changed and shifted around different different ideas that, well, know, that's not racist. Okay. Well, but but how how does language kind of cover up things? So that's good.
Derek:And then, one that that for most people who listen to this podcast would be in The United States. But so some of these things might not some of these books might not be all that meaningful to people who are outside of The States. But one that I think is absolutely fantastic, which it deals on the governmental level too, but it's something that I think also helps you to understand race and how cultures, you know, have been, not destroyed, but subverted and undermined and exploited and just it helps you to see that the tendrils are much longer than than just in The United States and they go back much farther than, you know, two hundred years or one hundred and fifty years, the civil war and or Jim Crow or whatever. And that is the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The it's a fantastic book.
Derek:It's one that is actually on my to read again list because it was so good and I just wanna I wanna go through it again so that I can remember more about it. But it's a a fantastic book that shows you the exploitation of Africa and you can you can see then when you read some other histories in The United States or or whatnot, you're like, okay, so, you know, here's what's going on in Africa, here's here's what people are doing, and and it just helps you understand the views about people, why, there's poverty in different places and stuff. And we'll get more to that too when we get to our discussion of Haiti in the government section. So for our next section of recommendations, I think I would follow similarly to the way we did, the way I recommended your resources in regard to abuse was, hey, let's look at specific examples and then let's go and explore the mindset or the beliefs that people have and see how did we get to where we are. So I think that kind of seeing how things are today or or in modernity or recent history is really helpful when we go back to history.
Derek:Let me give you an example of of why. So one of the things that I think I know I experienced in my own life, and talking with my wife, she had a similar experience, where it's, you know, 2015 in Ferguson, Missouri, and you're like, wow, police police brutality, like, there's there's really not that much going on. And then this one instance happens and now all of a sudden it seems like the black community is up in arms about this this one instance of police brutality that really is questionable. I mean, was was he a threat? Was he not a threat?
Derek:No. So so that's kind of the the mindset that I had at that point. And because to me, who lives in white suburbia or lived in white suburbia, that seemed new. Like, that was news to me. I didn't know that, you know, I don't see police brutality.
Derek:But when you read a book like Chokeholds or The Color of Law or Condemnation of Blackness, which Condemnation of Blackness maybe should go in the next category because that kinda goes further back, But when you read those sorts of things, Race for Profit, when you read that, and and you kind of have a vision for what modern problems are, and then you go back and read some of the books in this this next section that I'm gonna get to, you're kinda like, oh, no, no, no. This these aren't new problems. Like, this is stuff that they were, the black community was complaining about a hundred years ago or more. These are things that have been ever present, but because I'm not a part of the black community and I don't have many close black friends or, you know, people who are going to really open up about that kind of thing, of course, I don't know about it. And so understanding modern problems, I think, gives you eyes to see things in history that have carried over into modernity.
Derek:So Souls of Black Folk is great. W. E. B. Du Bois is fantastic.
Derek:I like him over Washington. Booker T. Washington, I read his book, I can't think of what it's called at the moment, but yeah, that's a topic for another day. But Souls of Black Folk, highly recommend Washington. I'm sure it's worth the read, but not too wild about it.
Derek:One of one of the gems that I found here that I did not expect, I just thought it was gonna be another book that I read, but it ended up being one of my favorites in this in the category of race, is David Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world. Man, that is especially particularly for Christians, Man, he he zings them at you and you're like, holy cow. And he just views The United States as Egypt. Like America, The United States is Egypt oppressing people, like God's justice and vengeance is coming. And it's particularly particularly powerful when, you know, today a lot of conservative Christians are are decrying abortion and saying, well, or or homosexuality saying, our nation is gonna get judged because now we have gay people, right, coming out and being being open about it.
Derek:And you're like, do you do you recognize, like, who your forebears are, who our forebears are? Do you recognize, like, the the people that we look up to? Whitfield, Edwards, those kinds of people. Do do you recognize what they were responsible for and like how bad, how terrible that stuff was? Reading Frederick Douglass, he talks about how Christians Christian masters were the worst ones.
Derek:The more religious they were, the worst they were. And and you get some of that in David Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world as well. He just he lays the fire on. He's like, judgment, like, is what what is coming upon you. And largely because of the Christian Christians who are justifying slavery and perpetuating the system.
Derek:So I highly, highly recommend that book. Fantastic. So some of the other ones, let's see. Medical Apartheid is going to go back a little ways and talk about how people were treated. There's a book, I forget what it's called, I don't think it's this one, but there's one that talks about the way that African women were treated by father of gynecology.
Derek:We talk about that a little bit in the interview with Kyle in this section. So those are really great. If you want to into more into modernity and and get, you know, more biographical, autobiographical examples, you got Radio Free Dixie, which is about Robert F Williams. Fantastic. Like, one of the I think the coolest civil rights leader, but he doesn't really get attention.
Derek:I let's see. Sorry. The Myth of the American Dream and White Like Me are are more modern, and they're written by from a white person's perspective. White Like Me, I remember really really liking because he kinda gives you some insight about how a white person changed their views through their experience. And so that resonated with me.
Derek:If you're white, it might resonate with you in particular. How do you convert to seeing racism? If you want to get into the police system, I Got a Monster is a really powerful look at one particular instance of policing in Baltimore and just the corruption that abounds in it. A Knock at Midnight also gets into the criminal justice system. And and Waiting for an Echo also.
Derek:So that's that's kind of my recommendation for more of the biographical if you want to kind of take a course through history, through through like particular examples of people through history. Then, you know, going all the way back to David Walker and W. B. Du Bois and and then Robert F. Williams and then up to the present and and some of the policing sorts of things.
Derek:In terms of religious look, if you wanna kind of some Christian perspectives, or or I shouldn't say Christian perspectives because I mean, that, that category is so broad in terms of books. These are just unique, unique recommendations that I would have that that stand out. There's a lot of there are a lot of books on race from Christians, and a lot of them just kinda say the same old thing. But these particular examples I found powerful. One of them was Bad Faith by Randall Balmer and that goes into the history of of the religious rights.
Derek:So if you wanna take a look at politics, religion and faith, that was good. You can listen to our interview from this section. Reconstructing the Gospel, I I like that book quite a bit. And it also deals a little bit with with politics and such. The Color of Compromise is is good and I know that they've got, I think, a series on Amazon Prime about that.
Derek:And then Reading While Black is also fantastic. And you've got people from across the spectrum on there. Jonathan Hartgrove, I think, is the author of Reconstructing the Gospel. He's probably more what people would call liberal. I think he he went into actually a black denomination.
Derek:I think he's a pastor there if I remember correctly. Randall Balmer, not sure exactly, probably middle middle left. And then Ja'Marr Tisbee, I don't know where he is now. He used to be in my denomination but wasn't too happy with it, understandably. And then Esau Mccauley, I think, would probably be considered more conservative.
Derek:But I guess he's woke now because he's writing about race. And then, let's see, getting into just some of the the coolest stories that that give you kind of example of how the government has dealt with some some people, some people who've kind of shaken the what's the phrase? Shake it not shaken the cat. I don't know. I don't know.
Derek:Rock the boat. That's it. Rock the boat. Asatah Shakur, man so, you know, Tupac. Well, his, I think, aunt was, like, in prison and got busted out of prison and was, like, charged with killing a cop and all kinds of things.
Derek:It's a really, really shady case that they have against her and she ended up fleeing to Cuba just like Robert Williams fled to Cuba when when their trumped up charges against him and everything. But her man, she is her autobiography is just fire. Like it her wisdom and just the way that she puts her words together are very incisive, very thought provoking, and and I really enjoyed her autobiography. There's the Chicago Seven, which is they've turned it into a movie. You can you can read about it.
Derek:I'm sure there are all kinds of books about it too. And it's it's just so fascinating. The movie was great. I loved it. I don't know how much it was embellished at all there.
Derek:I think a lot of it was was pretty spot on but it's it deals with kind of the propaganda against people, especially the black community there too, and war protesters. And there's there's a big connection there. You know, Martin Luther King Junior, he really rocked the boat once he started digging into the war and economics poverty. And like I said, he was assassinated a year to the day after he gave his speech on poverty in Vietnam. It didn't take too long for him to get killed after that.
Derek:So you can go read read conspiracies about MLK. We'll we'll recommend a few later on this season. I don't really get into that because it's it's controversial, but that would be something you could look at too. There's a book that King wrote called or a compilation of King's writings called The Radical King, which is really interesting to look at. Doesn't I don't think it deals too much with what we'd consider propaganda, but it it might give you uncover some of his ideologies that people don't know as much.
Derek:Right? Everybody always focuses on the race, and they like to kind of brush under the rug the anti war and anti poverty aspects. But it's important to understand all that he believed and that might help you understand some of the conspiracies surrounding him. And there's Carl and Anne Braden. Their story is really interesting if you want to get into how communities are polarized and and how people were treated for for helping the black community.
Derek:Of course, McNamara's Folly which we did an episode on is fantastic. You could also take a look at Turnaway Study on abortion which there's some racial components of that that they uncovered as far as who gets abortions, why they get abortions, all kinds of things that surround that and the propaganda of abortions from from the conservative right, like what are the things that they say about why women get abortions and why are women actually getting abortions and who is it and why is it that that those individuals come to that position that they do. And I also, if you go back to my season on abortion, I am strongly against it from a moral standpoint, but in the season on abortion at the end, I get into the racism of the, you know, that abounds in abortion, not not, you know, the idea that black babies are getting killed, but just the idea of the demographics of who are getting abortions and how that has changed or not changed over time and the injustice that that shows. So those would be some recommendations there too if you're interested in the topic of abortion and race.
Derek:You could also look at some other things, The Birth of a Nation or The Slave Bible, those are a movie, and then of course The Slave Bible which they used to control the slaves. Two huge pieces of propaganda. I don't know that I'd want to sit down and really watch The Birth of a Nation but, you know, to read about it and understand how that was introduced in American culture and the impact that it had. It came out right around the time of another film that we're gonna talk about later in the season called The Black Stork when we discuss Eugenics. Getting on into some of the different conspiracies that are out there, you should definitely check out the MOVE Bombing.
Derek:It's a fascinating story and yes, of course, did try to get an interview with Mike Africa Junior, but I didn't. But the Move Bombing, right, there's this this group in Philadelphia, they they cause problems, right? They're loud and obnoxious and smelly and they've got farm animals in their yard and stuff. But there's a whole lot that goes on in in in in this case where basically, the Philadelphia Police Department, they literally drop an aerial bomb, like a satchel of c four so it's not like a it's not like an army bomb, right, a huge bomb but it's a satchel of c four that they drop from a helicopter onto a residential house and it ends up burning just this whole block that's almost exclusively a black community or it's largely a black community. There's a lot that goes on into that and and just the different conspiracy theories about them.
Derek:I think one of the the documentaries is called Let the Fire Burn. I don't remember if that's the HBO documentary or not, but there are a couple of good documentaries out there talking about the move bombing and just the way that police handle situations and and just the different ways that certain groups of people, like whole communities, don't really have recourse against the city when they make their their housing go up in flames. Why did they do that? Would that have happened in a white community? Probably not.
Derek:You can take a look deeper into things like the Tuskegee experiments. Fred look at Fred Hampton and his assassination by the FBI, MLK. You can look more we're gonna get into Gary Webb and and cocaine and all that stuff when we get to the media section. But you can definitely check out the crack cocaine epidemic and Gary Webb's book, Dark Alliance, and all that stuff. Of course, Emmett Till, you could take a look at him and bunch of other people and just the system getting the murderers off.
Derek:I know that there was recent talk about trying to convict, I think it was a lady who was involved in it too, the one who accused Till and kind of trying to find justice for him after all these years, but I think that kind of fell through. If you wanna look at other conspiracies slash, you know, different atrocities or atrocious things that have happened in regard to race, things that maybe were covered up or things that have gotten buried in history, lots of different angles that you can look at this stuff from but you can take a look at the Buck v Bell case which isn't particular specifically about race necessarily but there are a lot of people of minority status or poverty status who the case was used against in regard to Eugenics. We're gonna have a whole episode on that our season on scientific medical section, but it might be worth exploring at this point. Along with the sterilization of Native American women, you could take a look at the war on drugs, you know, how did it come about, take a look at, you know, why Nixon implemented that and, you know, the timing of it coming right after the civil rights movement and who it affects disproportionately.
Derek:Take a look at Otabanga in the Bronx Zoo, right? We had this African guy, I forget where he was from, maybe, I don't think he was from The Congo, I don't remember exactly. But Otabanga, right? You got this black guy, you put him in a zoo next to the chimps, right? Nineteen o six I think.
Derek:So we're talking about the twentieth century. We had a man in the zoo. Vertus Hardiman, he's got a book called A Hole in the Head and he got a hole in the head from government experiments similar to the Tuskegee experiments. And then Ida B. Wells' Red Book, right?
Derek:She was tired of, I think some of her friends were lynched because they'd accuse black guys of raping women and then they'd just lynch them, right? When really they just wanted to steal their store or their property or get rid of the competition. So she created this red book that that talks all about various lynchings. Again, this is just scratching the surface. You could also go check out Brian Stevenson's stuff at EJI, you know, the author of Just Mercy, Equal Justice Initiative, I think, is his organization.
Derek:He's got, you know, they they have all kinds of lists of just the different terrible things that have taken place. Like I said, there is just absolutely so much stuff out there. So as far as other things that I didn't get to that I really wanted to that looked good, but I don't know if they are, there's The New Jim Crow, which I know is really popular. And then the book, Buried in the Bitter Waters, looked interesting to me. I've got a lot more that I've I've saved over time in my Audible list or Scribd list and stuff, but those two kinda stood out to me as as ones that I'd like to get to in the near future.
Derek:I think that's that's pretty much it for our episode here. We'll keep recapping racism in particular because we're gonna see it pop up more and more throughout the season. We'll continue to recap it and touch back and see how it applies in other areas as well. But hopefully, gives you a good start for some homework. That's all for now.
Derek:So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.
