RFK Jr. The Defender - November 01, 2023


Civil Rights Then and Now with Hylton Bros


Episode Stats

Length

40 minutes

Words per Minute

171.09032

Word Count

7,009

Sentence Count

448

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary

Keith Hilton is a law professor and author, and Kevin Nathaniel is a world-renowned world-music artist. These two twin brothers took radically different paths in life, but today find themselves converging in agreement with many of the things we ve been fighting for in this campaign. And welcome both of you to the show, where we ll talk about why they have two different names and what they do to honor their twin brother Bobby Kennedy. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was performed by Bobby Kennedy Jr. and the Kennedy Center for American Engagement. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. It was edited by David Axelrod. Special thanks and production by Kevin Nathaniel Nathaniel and Keith Hilton. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, and to our producer, Kevin Nathaniel. We hope you enjoy this episode and remember Bobby Kennedy Sr. and his life and legacy. Thank you, Bobby Kennedy, for being a hero in our lives and for supporting our campaign. Love you, always, always. Rest in Paradise, Always, Always Love, Always Remember, Always Fight On. -Eugene and Bobby Kennedy -John Singleton - Thank You, John Singleton, John McCain, Sr., Sr., JFK, Sr. & Robert Kennedy, Jr., Sr. John Aviles, Jr. , Sr., Jr. & Sr. - Sr. Kennedy Jr., Jr., JFK Sr., & Sr., and Sr. etc., etc. - Jr., etc, etc. etc. & Co., etc., & all the rest in service to the cause of civil rights, etc., and so much more. . . . etc. ...and so on and so on. And so on, etc.. and more! And much more . Thanks, John, John Kennedy Sr., John, Sr.. and Sr., & Jr. & Co. & Jr., & Co.. & Alyssa, etc.... Thank You. , etc., etc., & etc. Thank you. etc., etc. . & so on & etc.. And so much so on... etc.. & so much, etc, & etc., And so, etc


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:01.000 I'm very happy today.
00:00:02.000 We have two fantastic guests, and I know that you're going to enjoy.
00:00:06.000 They're twin brothers, but they have two different names.
00:00:09.000 We're going to find out why that is.
00:00:11.000 One is Keith Hilton, an American law professor, and one of the top tort scholars.
00:00:15.000 He is currently the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University Law School, a prolific scholar, widely recognized for his work across a total spectrum of topics in law economics.
00:00:31.000 Hilton has published five books and more than 100 articles in numerous law and economic journals.
00:00:36.000 And Kevin Nathaniel is a celebrated world music artist who was toured internationally but was forced into becoming a medical freedom activist in New York City.
00:00:45.000 When the COVID crisis shut down the entire entertainment industry, Kevin connected and worked with New York City activists, resisting lockdowns and mandates, including the New York Freedom Rally, Teachers for Choice, and Children's Health Defense.
00:00:59.000 These two twin brothers took radically different paths in life, but today find themselves converging in agreement with many of the things that we've been fighting for in this campaign.
00:01:10.000 And welcome both of you to the show.
00:01:12.000 Thank you.
00:01:13.000 Tell us first, why are you twin brothers with two different names?
00:01:18.000 That's up to him to answer.
00:01:21.000 Right, and that's nearly my fault.
00:01:24.000 First of all, where am I talking to you from?
00:01:27.000 I'm in Japan.
00:01:29.000 Okay, you're in Japan.
00:01:31.000 And Keith, I'm going to say where you are.
00:01:34.000 I'm in Boston.
00:01:36.000 Okay.
00:01:37.000 Go ahead and explain.
00:01:39.000 You must have changed your name.
00:01:41.000 Yes, and I didn't change it at all.
00:01:43.000 I'm in Japan exactly for the reason, some of the reasons you mentioned, for music.
00:01:48.000 I was just playing in Kyoto last night, got up early this morning.
00:01:52.000 I use Kevin Nathaniel basically as my stage name.
00:01:56.000 So all the music I produce and all the music events I do and performances are under Kevin Nathaniel.
00:02:03.000 I keep the name Kevin Nathaniel Hilton, but I don't use that as my stage name.
00:02:08.000 So I just in general use Kevin Nathaniel.
00:02:10.000 That's why.
00:02:11.000 And are you in Kyoto right now?
00:02:14.000 I'm in Shiga.
00:02:16.000 I was in Kyoto only a couple of hours ago.
00:02:20.000 Because I was there, I guess it was about six months ago, Cheryl and I. And over to Kyoto, we stayed 10 days there because I got surgery there on my throat.
00:02:31.000 Special surgery they invented in Kyoto.
00:02:34.000 That's the only place that they do it.
00:02:36.000 And it helped me a lot.
00:02:37.000 My voice probably sounds really bad to you, but it sounded much worse a year ago.
00:02:42.000 And both of you, your dad was deeply involved in the civil rights movement in our country, correct?
00:02:50.000 Yes.
00:02:50.000 That's true.
00:02:51.000 As we know, there's a picture that surfaced of my father with Bobby Kennedy Sr., and it's from a picture from the Jefferson Jackson dinners from 1967 in Detroit, in which Bobby Kennedy came to Detroit.
00:03:09.000 My father at the time was very active in the Democratic Party.
00:03:13.000 He was Vice Chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party.
00:03:17.000 He was doing a lot of work in politics.
00:03:19.000 Of course, he was in constant contact with the heavy hitters in the Democratic Party.
00:03:25.000 So, of course, when Bobby Kennedy was coming through Detroit, he was spending time working with him, talking to him, I imagine going places wherever he was going to help and assist.
00:03:37.000 And he was definitely a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy in 67, and I delved into all the reasons why, and believe me, I know why he was a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy in 67.
00:03:54.000 Yeah, my dad was first as counsel in the Senate, but more importantly during his role, he was Attorney General of the United States, was leading the Kennedy administration's battle, civil rights battles in Alabama, Mississippi, and other parts of the country.
00:04:10.000 And twice sent federal troops to integrate Ole Miss and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.
00:04:18.000 The first two Black students at the University of Alabama were Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood.
00:04:24.000 And in fact, I was with the other day, I was with the children of some of those students, Malone and some of the other students who were, you know, who integrated at the University of Alabama.
00:04:36.000 And so what was your path?
00:04:38.000 To where you are today.
00:04:40.000 When you say my path, to where I am today, which is sitting here in Japan.
00:04:45.000 I began going into really great educational environments.
00:04:51.000 My father was very strong and very big on education.
00:04:54.000 So he made sure that we were doing very well in school.
00:04:58.000 And my mother, too, they made sure that we were doing very well in school.
00:05:02.000 I credit them for that.
00:05:03.000 So both Keith and I went to, at the time, the top schools in the country.
00:05:08.000 Of course, went to Harvard.
00:05:10.000 I went to Yale.
00:05:11.000 Well, so of course, I was interested in arts and music.
00:05:14.000 And so I went really quickly into music, and that kept growing.
00:05:20.000 And when I came out of school, really, that's when I found my passion in the world of world music and African music.
00:05:29.000 And I began to build and make instruments and create music and work with some really interesting music groups.
00:05:36.000 Music projects, which has led me all over the world, which kind of, you know, is a constant progression to lead me to where I am today.
00:05:44.000 That's part of my path.
00:05:45.000 And part of it was sort of a, in a way, a rebellion to my father's constant pressure for me to be a lawyer like him, but in a way, a sort of a desire to find what was in my heart.
00:06:00.000 And that effort to find what was in my heart led me on this path.
00:06:05.000 And Keith, you took a more conventional path through...
00:06:08.000 You could say it's more conventional, though I remember having a conversation with a colleague, and I think there were other people in conversation, and so I mentioned, well, my brother is a musician and artist, And here I am.
00:06:23.000 I'm studying law and economics, writing in the area.
00:06:25.000 And one person said, oh, wow, you guys went in such different paths.
00:06:30.000 And another person said, well, no, actually, I think it's the same thing.
00:06:35.000 So the other person, I guess, had, I think, the better answer.
00:06:39.000 Because what I see myself as doing is, although I'm writing stuff about the law, antitrust law, tort law, when I'm working on something, it is not very different from, I hate to say it, an art project.
00:06:52.000 I mean, it's like I have a canvas in front of me, and I'm thinking about the different things that I could say.
00:06:59.000 And I'm concerned about a lot of the same things that an artist would be concerned about in producing an art project.
00:07:05.000 So in some sense, we haven't done things that are that different.
00:07:09.000 To some extent, we both, I guess, departed from what my father wanted, because my father wanted All of his sons to come practice law with him in Detroit.
00:07:20.000 Kevin went off to music.
00:07:22.000 I got a PhD in economics.
00:07:24.000 On the other hand, I guess I should mention my father departed from what his parents wanted.
00:07:29.000 Exactly.
00:07:30.000 His parents wanted him to stay in the church because my father grew up in the church.
00:07:35.000 His father was a pastor.
00:07:36.000 It was church 24-7 in his house.
00:07:40.000 And he went on to become a lawyer and, you know, did business deals and, you know, worked at all sorts of litigation, even civil rights litigation, you know, criminal cases, civil cases.
00:07:53.000 You know, many of his family members in Roman, Virginia were upset with what he did, were upset with his decision to leave the church because they thought that was such an important role that their family, that the whole family had been involved in.
00:08:05.000 And they thought it was...
00:08:07.000 It was just an extreme departure from what was expected.
00:08:12.000 I want to add, Keith, you're absolutely right.
00:08:14.000 I remember at the funeral for our grandmother, there were several family members that criticized our father for his choice to go into law and business at the actual funeral.
00:08:28.000 I remember that.
00:08:29.000 So yeah, I agree with what you're saying.
00:08:32.000 In fact, I've said that to people too.
00:08:34.000 I said, well, I chose the path of art, but Keith chose the path of going sort of one step further with the whole legal idea, with the whole idea, going into the theoretical realm of it.
00:08:47.000 But I think my father...
00:08:48.000 Go ahead.
00:08:50.000 I think my father's growing up in the church had a big impact on his approach to the law, how he viewed the law, because he grew up in the black church.
00:08:59.000 His father had worked in the railroads and then became a pastor.
00:09:04.000 This was at a time where his father, my grandfather, had become a pastor.
00:09:08.000 We weren't that far out of slavery days, maybe a generation at most.
00:09:13.000 And so the moral messages that they were dealing with were of a very serious nature.
00:09:18.000 The lessons they had to impart were very important.
00:09:21.000 And I guess I had the sense, looking back, that the largely men of the church at that time felt that they were doing something extremely important.
00:09:29.000 I could see how my grandfather would be upset with my dad's decision to leave that.
00:09:34.000 Yeah.
00:09:34.000 Well, they also, I mean, he grew up in the height of Jim Crow because I was, you know, born in Virginia, raised there to live there until I was 13 years old.
00:09:44.000 So that would have been 19.
00:09:46.000 Well, I would know.
00:09:47.000 I left Virginia in 68, the year my dad was killed.
00:09:52.000 I was 14 at that time.
00:09:55.000 You know, Virginia.
00:09:55.000 What part of Virginia?
00:09:56.000 When I was in McLean, you know, McLean at that time was not a suburb.
00:10:01.000 It was a rural kind of horse and cow country.
00:10:03.000 And, you know, we were raised on a farm with cows and horses and chickens and everything else.
00:10:10.000 But it was also at the height of Jim Crow.
00:10:13.000 And, you know, it was illegal for a black man to marry a white woman or vice versa in Virginia.
00:10:20.000 Public parks were segregated.
00:10:22.000 Our schools were segregated.
00:10:25.000 The prisons, mental institutions were all segregated.
00:10:28.000 Drinking water fountains were segregated.
00:10:30.000 It was illegal.
00:10:31.000 And of course, public transportation, public restrooms were all segregated.
00:10:36.000 I, you know, I've told this story before.
00:10:39.000 There was a Black man who worked for my family who had served in World War II during the Seabees.
00:10:46.000 The Blacks weren't actually allowed to fight until the end of the war when Truman came in.
00:10:50.000 But there is a lot of them serving in the military and other roles, including the construction brigades, the Seabees.
00:10:58.000 And he served in the Pacific, which was for hazardous duty, building airstrips as they jumped across through the Japanese islands toward the mainland of Japan.
00:11:08.000 He's about 6'5", incredibly brilliant man and dignified.
00:11:14.000 And but when I started hunting and fishing when I was very, very young, and he'd drive me across the state, and I would have to go into the restaurants and diners, buy the food for both of us, we would eat it in the car.
00:11:26.000 He asked me one day to buy shoes for him, because he wasn't allowed into the shoe store.
00:11:32.000 So I went in and picked up the shoes, then he tried them on the curb on the sidewalk.
00:11:36.000 And if they didn't fit him, that was too bad.
00:11:38.000 But anyway, you know, your dad grew up in Virginia at that same time or lived during that same time.
00:11:45.000 And I'm sure that that was, you know, one of the central gravities of his life.
00:11:50.000 Oh, for sure.
00:11:52.000 Yeah, for sure.
00:11:53.000 In fact, I'll let you go, Ken.
00:11:56.000 Okay.
00:11:57.000 Yeah, I want to support that, too.
00:11:59.000 What you're saying is that, oh, yeah, just to tell you one of the stories my father told me about when he had first day In college, he met my mother at Talladega College.
00:12:11.000 The first day they landed in college, the Ku Klux Klan.
00:12:15.000 Now, Talladega College was a Black college.
00:12:19.000 It still is a Black college.
00:12:21.000 At the time, Blacks who wanted to go to college would go to Talladega.
00:12:25.000 That was one of the Black colleges.
00:12:27.000 Because, of course, they weren't being allowed in other Other colleges, largely.
00:12:32.000 But the first day they got on campus, the Ku Klux Klan rode through the campus to basically scare and frighten all the college students.
00:12:41.000 That was the first day.
00:12:42.000 And I want to mention, too, that shortly after he got out of college, he told me a story about him going out with my uncle, whose name was Pop Foster, and they had had some drinks and they sat on a stoop.
00:12:54.000 This was somewhere in Alabama or Georgia.
00:12:57.000 They sat on a stoop and were talking.
00:12:59.000 And it was at night and they saw a cop car pull up and they saw the cops get out of the car and they looked at each other and literally said goodbye to each other because it was commonly known that if you were Black Caught out at night.
00:13:17.000 And if you were sitting by yourself in some southern towns, that if the cops pulled up on you at night, you might not be going home.
00:13:26.000 It was a very serious time that he grew up in that way.
00:13:29.000 I want to take that and thread that to a story that I heard about your father and your uncle Going to get Martin Luther King out of jail in, I believe, 60, it was before your uncle was elected president, and that Martin Luther King had been arrested and given a very stiff sentence, a stiff prison sentence.
00:13:55.000 And your father and your uncle literally ran To get Martin Luther King out of jail.
00:14:03.000 And really, for someone to hear that and read it in Google, you don't really realize the environment that was happening.
00:14:10.000 You don't realize the gravity of what happens when Martin Luther King was given a stiff prison sentence at that time in the South.
00:14:19.000 The gravity of it is he might not be coming out of that sentence.
00:14:24.000 So, and I believe that's why your father and your uncle ran to get him out.
00:14:29.000 This is before many of the, you know, much of the work that Martin Luther King was able to really do after that time.
00:14:37.000 He did a lot of it while your uncle was president, but they ran to get him out.
00:14:43.000 When he was given that really harsh six-month sentence, which probably would have meant chain gang.
00:14:51.000 Let me give you an addendum to that story.
00:14:56.000 My father grew up in Boston and then in Brookline, and they just didn't have any contact with black people and had no knowledge of the civil rights movement.
00:15:06.000 But he had a couple of things happen.
00:15:08.000 When he played football at Harvard, there was a black member of the team.
00:15:12.000 And when they toured in some of the Southern states, he was not allowed to stay at the same hotel.
00:15:17.000 And my father at that time protested that and made it so that they would all go to hotels that they all could stay in.
00:15:25.000 And then when my father was at University of Virginia, he invited Ralph Bunch, who was a secretary of the United Nations and was famous for international leader who had been flirted with the Communist Party.
00:15:39.000 He invited him to speak at the University of Virginia.
00:15:41.000 And at that time, it was illegal to have integrated crowds in Virginia.
00:15:47.000 And Ralph Bunch, when he got there, he stayed with my father in his house.
00:15:52.000 The Klan protested outside and burned a cross outside their house.
00:15:56.000 And my father and mother just got married.
00:15:59.000 And this is the first that they'd seen of that.
00:16:02.000 But my father was indignant about it.
00:16:04.000 University of Virginia originally said, you know, we can't do it.
00:16:07.000 It's illegal against the law.
00:16:09.000 He wrote a brief and he organized a student petition and they ended up It was the first integrated group in the University of Virginia, but still, when he was running, it was not an issue that was prominent on his mind.
00:16:22.000 He was concerned with the mafia and a bunch of other issues that he'd been with.
00:16:26.000 And then Coretta King called And said, Martin is in prison in Alabama.
00:16:32.000 They put him in jail.
00:16:33.000 They pulled him over for a traffic offense.
00:16:35.000 I think it was like a tail light out.
00:16:37.000 And like you said, I think they came in a six month sentence.
00:16:40.000 And Coretta was scared that it being Alabama, he might not come out of the prison alive, the jail alive.
00:16:47.000 And she asked my uncle to intervene and ended up with my father, who was running his campaign, his campaign manager.
00:16:54.000 And my father at first said, the first voice in him was the political voice that said, it's better not to get involved with this issue because we'll lose the solid Democratic vote in the South.
00:17:05.000 It was all white at that time.
00:17:07.000 You know, Blacks at that time were voting Republican.
00:17:10.000 They were still the party of Lincoln.
00:17:11.000 He got the message when he was at Hickory Hill, which was about 10 minutes from National Airport, which is now Reagan Airport.
00:17:18.000 And he got in the car and he started driving to airport and he started thinking about it.
00:17:25.000 And it was, it started irritating him.
00:17:28.000 Just the part of it that was the bullying part, because he hated bullies.
00:17:33.000 And when he got to the airport, he had flipped and he went to the payphone and put a bunch of times in and he got the White House where he got the Senate, you know, the Senate switchboard to get that sheriff on the phone.
00:17:49.000 And then he read that sheriff the riot act saying, you know, my brother's going to be president and you better make sure that nothing happens to Dr.
00:17:58.000 King.
00:17:58.000 And they ended up releasing him.
00:18:00.000 And the public didn't find out about it, but Coretta knew about it.
00:18:04.000 And Daddy King, who was Martin's father, who was a preacher himself, very influential in the Black movement.
00:18:12.000 And it's one of the reasons that my uncle won the Black vote, which put him over the edge in 1960.
00:18:18.000 He had the lowest margin, the slimmest margin he won of any president in history.
00:18:24.000 And it was Black votes in the South that put him over.
00:18:27.000 I was going to just add as a footnote about my father's experience, because it's connected to all these things, that he grew up in Virginia, Ronald, Virginia.
00:18:36.000 He could not go to UVA at the time, because UVA was a white institution.
00:18:41.000 So he got into Boston University.
00:18:43.000 That's where he went to law school.
00:18:45.000 And so he had the experience of Living in Boston and going to BU and then going home to Virginia to segregated train stations, segregated drinking fountains, all the things that, you know, you're talking about.
00:18:58.000 That was during his law school time.
00:19:01.000 Yeah.
00:19:01.000 So then he moved to Michigan.
00:19:03.000 That's right.
00:19:04.000 Well, there was an army.
00:19:05.000 He went to the army for a few years in Clean, Texas.
00:19:09.000 You know, they're married.
00:19:10.000 Our oldest brother, our older brother, was born in Clean, Texas.
00:19:13.000 Then they decided to move to Detroit, Michigan.
00:19:16.000 Yeah, and actually there's a big difference between moving to Michigan and moving to Detroit.
00:19:24.000 At that time, Detroit was a boomtown.
00:19:27.000 It was in good shape.
00:19:31.000 Detroit was a boomtown, but Detroit in many ways was, and I use this word clearly knowing that it's a delicate word to use, but in many ways it was a mecca for Black people all throughout the United States.
00:19:45.000 That's where Motown Records was there.
00:19:48.000 Yes, and it was also a place in which the Klan was not in full swing.
00:19:53.000 The Klan was not working in Detroit.
00:19:57.000 And even on my mother's side, there were relatives, my mother's uncle, that left the South to come to Detroit because they were threatened by the Klan.
00:20:08.000 Exactly, exactly.
00:20:10.000 So the uncle, and you're talking about J.S. right now.
00:20:13.000 Yes, yeah.
00:20:13.000 He brought a lawsuit to enjoin the, I think, Attorney General of Georgia from barring teachers who were part of members of the NAACP from working as teachers.
00:20:25.000 He was successful.
00:20:27.000 He enjoined the Attorney General of Georgia, and he immediately got phone calls from the Klan saying, you have 24 hours to get out of here.
00:20:34.000 And that's what sent him to Detroit.
00:20:36.000 Wow.
00:20:37.000 And what happened to you during COVID, Keith?
00:20:40.000 Because your brother ended up becoming an activist.
00:20:43.000 Right.
00:20:44.000 Well, you know, I mean, I just did my thing, just complied with all of the requirements.
00:20:50.000 I got vaccinated.
00:20:51.000 I came to the office when I could.
00:20:54.000 I wore the mask at times.
00:20:56.000 And so anyway, that's how I muddled through that whole COVID. Did you guys talk to each other about it?
00:21:02.000 Oh yes, yes.
00:21:02.000 We were in touch a lot.
00:21:04.000 Yes, we talked all the time, you know.
00:21:07.000 In fact, the funny thing about it.
00:21:08.000 A lot of families got divided, you know.
00:21:12.000 I joke about this all the time, but so Kevin and I were in touch with each other a lot.
00:21:17.000 And I remember Kevin telling me very early during the COVID lockdown period, very early, All of the stuff about this is a lab leak out of a, you know, a lab in China.
00:21:27.000 That's what it looks like.
00:21:27.000 And at that time, I was thinking, oh, you know, this sounds ridiculous.
00:21:31.000 That just can't be true.
00:21:33.000 This was early.
00:21:34.000 So then, what do you know?
00:21:36.000 Years later, I find out that it seems to be exactly what happened.
00:21:40.000 Yeah.
00:21:41.000 You guys ever look at each other and say, I wish I had that haircut?
00:21:44.000 Yeah.
00:21:47.000 Yeah, yeah, sometimes I wish I had a little laugh wrong.
00:21:52.000 You're the two most different identical twins I've ever seen in my life.
00:21:56.000 You know, and we're actually very good friends.
00:21:59.000 Kevin has dreadlocks and glasses and kind of a, I don't know what, like a Doc Holliday facial regalia.
00:22:09.000 And Keith has a very conventional haircut.
00:22:15.000 They're both good looking guys, but I've never seen two identical.
00:22:19.000 I would never place you guys identical twins.
00:22:23.000 That's true.
00:22:24.000 I don't think anyone would now.
00:22:26.000 20 years ago.
00:22:28.000 We were little kids.
00:22:29.000 Yeah.
00:22:30.000 20 years ago, we were identical.
00:22:35.000 Go ahead.
00:22:36.000 What were you going to say?
00:22:37.000 Yeah, what I just wanted to say was that the connection is very clear to me, actually your work too, because I feel like your father was so strongly connected to the civil rights movement that actually the civil rights movement and a lot of this actually flowed into a lot of exploitation.
00:22:59.000 And oppression flows into what we call corporate capture.
00:23:03.000 And so really, I feel like you are a direct progression of your father's work.
00:23:09.000 Some people, I don't know if they see that that way, but I see your work as a direct progression.
00:23:15.000 I would say so too, frankly.
00:23:17.000 I would say so.
00:23:19.000 My reason for saying so is that Your father was a dissenter on the Vietnam War at a time when that kind of dissent was difficult to do.
00:23:29.000 And I think...
00:23:30.000 You know, what I would want to spend my time on is making sure that we start rebuilding equity in Black communities, which have been systematically stripped out of African-American communities during the 2000s, by many, many, by redlining, which have been systematically stripped out of African-American communities during the 2000s, by many, many, by redlining, by, you know, just
00:23:54.000 You know, like Wall Street is one example, systematically closed, but the redlining, 2008 mortgage crisis, which, you know, those exotic instruments were tried out first in the Black communities.
00:24:07.000 And, you know, the Black communities that did have a lot of equity in their homes in Harlem and Bedstein around the country lost that equity at that time.
00:24:17.000 And then COVID, 41% of Black-owned businesses will never reopen, and a lot of them had Three generations of equity in them.
00:24:27.000 If you don't own a home, if you've got a whole community that doesn't have a high home ownership, they have no access to capital.
00:24:35.000 A lot of small businesses will mortgage their home and get enough money to start a business, but if you don't have access to capital, you can't start a business.
00:24:43.000 Yeah.
00:24:43.000 In the whole...
00:24:45.000 You know, later in my father's life, a lot of his activity was in the banking industry and basically small business banking.
00:24:52.000 You know, that's a major issue there because the way banking regulation has worked, it sort of choked off or choked out a lot of the small businesses, small banks that might have dealt with black owned businesses in the cities.
00:25:04.000 You know, that avenue of economic growth has sort of been made much more difficult to work nowadays.
00:25:10.000 And so that would be an ideal area for change, for trying to change the banking regulations so that small community banks with a focus on development and Black urban neighborhoods could actually thrive because they have the information on who the people are who are starting businesses, What kind of risks are involved in lending to them?
00:25:30.000 And that information isn't there, isn't locked up in the big banks at all.
00:25:33.000 The big banks, they have all their algorithms and they don't have that kind of information.
00:25:37.000 So that would be a major way in which we could change things, which would go in the direction No, I agree.
00:25:50.000 That and education are the two things we just need to flood right now with effort, with money, with innovation to try to figure out how to...
00:26:02.000 You're never going to get rid of the efforts to get rid of, you know, racism is kind of ingrained in human behavior.
00:26:10.000 Tribalism of all kinds are always looking for differences in each other.
00:26:15.000 And it's always going to be part of the human society.
00:26:18.000 So what you want to do is equip people and make them strong and confident.
00:26:23.000 Young Black men and women should have the strength and confidence and know that they're going to run into these kind of impediments in their lives, but that they have opportunities That they have wealth and equity.
00:26:36.000 That's a base that provides them a strong base so they can go forth in the world and encounter all of these difficulties and the biases or whatever impediments that all of us have as human beings and overcome them.
00:26:49.000 But if you don't have a good education to start with, you're not going to be able to do that.
00:26:54.000 And if you don't have that access to capital, you can't do it.
00:26:59.000 And the way that the Fed operates with quantitative easing that floods the economy with money and then strips it out and encourages people to borrow and to put their assets on the line and then makes money hard, makes money more expensive, and then everybody goes bankrupt and the big industry and then everybody goes bankrupt and the big industry comes in or the big BlackRock, State Street Vanguard come in and
00:27:21.000 I saw a specific example.
00:27:30.000 recently I went to Lee Harvard, which is a black community in Cleveland.
00:27:35.000 And it used to be a booming community.
00:27:39.000 All the businesses are now boarded up.
00:27:41.000 It's like the apocalypse there.
00:27:43.000 And there's two or three businesses that survived COVID.
00:27:45.000 We met with the business owners.
00:27:47.000 They're all now going bankrupt because they cannot get access to capital from the little banks because the little banks, which are the only ones that will loan to black people, they now, because the The price of money is so high that with the interest rates are up at 7%.
00:28:02.000 So their treasury bills, which are their reserves, have been severely diminished in value.
00:28:09.000 And the banking rules don't allow them to lend or make it very hazardous for them to lend when their reserves are low.
00:28:17.000 They're now hoarding their liquidity.
00:28:19.000 And this one woman who survived, she has an 80-year-old sausage business that provides employees.
00:28:26.000 And, you know, and pride for this community.
00:28:29.000 She needs some capital to change some of the machinery that she was using, and she cannot get access to capital, so she's closing the business.
00:28:36.000 And all of them had stories like that, that we just can't, you know, we have a thriving business, but we cannot, as Black Americans, cannot get access to capital because The big banks won't want it to us because they don't care about small business and they don't want a loan in our neighborhood.
00:28:53.000 And the little banks that were the only ones that would make capital available, you know, now are being destroyed through the high interest rates.
00:29:02.000 Through high interest rates or through regulations that they really can't manage to deal with.
00:29:07.000 I mean, what do you think the path forward is?
00:29:10.000 You know, the priorities should be...
00:29:13.000 Do you want to take that or do you want me to start, Kevin?
00:29:16.000 Oh, you start, because you're...
00:29:18.000 Okay, so for priorities, well, what issue would you want to start with, with priorities?
00:29:23.000 I mean, you know what, if you were president, what would you do to reinvigorate Black communities around this country?
00:29:31.000 Well, first you mentioned education, which I agree with you completely.
00:29:36.000 And I'd be open to all sorts of suggestions.
00:29:38.000 I happen to be a big fan of school choice.
00:29:40.000 I have to say that people ought to have the freedom, ought to have the same freedoms that wealthy people have to go to whatever school they want to.
00:29:48.000 In fact, there's a very interesting video where Milton Friedman is making that pitch to an audience in Harlem.
00:29:54.000 And it's kind of amazing how that whole event goes down.
00:29:58.000 I think that's sort of a base, a sort of starting point.
00:30:01.000 School choice strikes me as a very important factor in there, both to give people options And also to put pressure on the public schools to improve because they, you know, they should improve if they see they are at risk of losing funding through students choosing other places.
00:30:19.000 And also, I think there's a matter of freedom.
00:30:20.000 You know, I think there are all these complaints about what's being taught in the schools nowadays.
00:30:26.000 And, you know, as long as you have certain things that you expect of students that, you know, you can implement it through exams, then students ought to be free to sort of learn the things that they think They want to learn, their parents want them to learn, subject to the requirement that they meet competency exams in certain areas, English, math, etc.
00:30:44.000 But subject to that requirement, if you want to study, if you want to go to a school that emphasizes a particular thing, you want to go to a school that emphasizes religion, you know, if you want to do that, then we ought to allow these things.
00:30:57.000 But the big objection is that you're going to be robbing the public schools that, you know, badly need this money, that you're going to be robbing them of their revenues.
00:31:06.000 Right.
00:31:07.000 And so, you know, by that argument, the public schools could become infinitely bad and students would have to stay in it.
00:31:13.000 We're not running the system to make sure the schools keep captive students.
00:31:17.000 We're running the system to make sure that students are educated.
00:31:20.000 And to me, if the school choice plan helps in that regard, which I think it would, then that's the argument for it.
00:31:27.000 And hopefully, instead of causing the schools to disappear, it would cause the public schools to improve.
00:31:32.000 Well, there is an argument that would say that public schools have shown a trend of becoming worse and worse.
00:31:40.000 Over the past, say, couple decades.
00:31:43.000 And I think that anything that would put pressure on them to actually try to improve the situation and make it more of an educational environment.
00:31:52.000 Because right now, I've been into some of these public schools and I've seen some very kind of horrific situations.
00:31:59.000 So yeah, I have to agree with you on that.
00:32:02.000 The Institution of Examinations, I mean, so that was one of the innovations here in Massachusetts.
00:32:08.000 With the MCAS exam.
00:32:09.000 But it's been another state student.
00:32:10.000 New York has had its regents exams for some time.
00:32:14.000 And some people don't like examinations.
00:32:17.000 On the other hand, they're a good check on making sure the schools are doing their jobs.
00:32:21.000 And I don't see any other way around that other than to have students.
00:32:25.000 You want the examinations to be rigorous enough that they would force the schools to educate the students.
00:32:32.000 And what was your reaction to the Harvard case, the affirmative action case?
00:32:38.000 Well, I disagreed with the majority because, and maybe I'll just admit, I'm a good friend of David Evans, who was running, you could say he was running Affirmative Action at Harvard for 50 years.
00:32:51.000 He just resigned a few years ago.
00:32:53.000 And he's a very thoughtful person.
00:32:57.000 You know, there were so many falsehoods about how Affirmative action was being implemented by Harvard.
00:33:04.000 They were adopted wholesale in Justice Roberts' opinion.
00:33:07.000 So that struck me.
00:33:08.000 That gives just a base of sort of falseness to the opinion to begin with.
00:33:13.000 And so they were trying to do something that...
00:33:18.000 It was addressing and solving a social problem in sort of an intelligent way.
00:33:24.000 Evans was working with a lot of people.
00:33:25.000 Most of the decisions were entirely sensible.
00:33:28.000 And I think the district court found that in the Harvard case.
00:33:31.000 The district court got to look closely at what people were doing and persuaded.
00:33:36.000 And so I disagree with what the court did.
00:33:40.000 I mean, I think actually...
00:33:41.000 Keep saying I wrote a paper on that one, too.
00:33:44.000 I wouldn't side completely with the arguments of the dissent.
00:33:48.000 I think the dissent in that case makes some arguments that I wouldn't side with.
00:33:53.000 On the other hand, the majority's arguments, you know, I certainly disagree with.
00:33:57.000 And I think there is a very sensible, I would say even conservative, argument for affirmative action.
00:34:05.000 In fact, when you say the term affirmative action, it's such a loaded term That people have different interpretations of it.
00:34:13.000 People run in completely different directions once you say the term.
00:34:17.000 But let's just say taking race into account in the admissions process, I think there are some very conservative arguments for doing so.
00:34:27.000 Let's hear that argument.
00:34:29.000 Well, okay, let's take the case that everyone seems to agree with.
00:34:32.000 So many of the people who oppose affirmative action have said things like, Take the case of a kid from Appalachia whose parents are in bad shape.
00:34:43.000 A white kid from Appalachia.
00:34:46.000 A white kid from Appalachia who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and gets himself into a position where he can get into Harvard or look like he can compete in Harvard.
00:34:54.000 Harvard takes him, which of course happens all the time.
00:34:58.000 And then the argument is, but race.
00:35:01.000 But no, race is a different thing.
00:35:02.000 You know, race should be irrelevant.
00:35:05.000 It shouldn't be part of it.
00:35:06.000 And I think all of the people who are in favor of using race into account are simply saying, look, race is an important statistic in making an inference about the difficulties that someone has overcome to get to that stage.
00:35:22.000 It's often a very powerful statistic.
00:35:24.000 It's often pretty darn good in helping you I figured that out.
00:35:29.000 And we could talk about different ways.
00:35:31.000 You know, one is race combined with zip code.
00:35:34.000 And you know as well as I that there are plenty of zip codes where students are going to come out with a big disadvantage or have to labor under a big disadvantage to get themselves at a level where they're getting into the Ivy League schools.
00:35:50.000 But then I guess the position of a Justice Roberts would be, okay, fine, that's just the zip code.
00:35:57.000 But if someone grows up in the suburbs, it's a black kid who grows up in the lily white suburbs, why would you take race into account in that case?
00:36:07.000 And here I would say, sure, there is a weaker argument for taking race into account.
00:36:14.000 But even then, a lot of the black kids who've grown up in the lily white suburbs have dealt with Obstacles that their white counterparts haven't dealt with.
00:36:23.000 I can give you an example.
00:36:25.000 So I actually have a son at Harvard right now.
00:36:30.000 And he had a 4.0 and his test scores were pretty darn perfect.
00:36:36.000 Pretty darn perfect.
00:36:38.000 He's had a few of his high school teachers who would say this kid would have gotten into any college he applied to, even if his color were green or blue or whatever.
00:36:46.000 So he's a good case to talk about because I don't think there's an argument in his case that he benefited from any kind of relaxed policy or anything like that.
00:36:55.000 I think he would have gotten in whatever color he was.
00:36:58.000 But he doesn't even know some of the things that happened.
00:37:02.000 There was a teacher in his grade school.
00:37:05.000 I pulled him aside and tried to teach him some extra math one time.
00:37:09.000 He came in and tried to use that sort of new math in a class.
00:37:13.000 A teacher of his discovered that and just went nuts about it.
00:37:18.000 Just went nuts that His dad would try to teach him some math that wasn't in the curriculum.
00:37:25.000 Now, I don't know if that had anything to do with race, but it certainly made me wonder about it because I did wonder, well, if this had been a white kid and a white father and the teacher discovered that the dad had taught the son some additional math, would she have gone berserk in the way that she did?
00:37:43.000 She went nuts and she threatened to remove him from an advanced math class that he was in.
00:37:49.000 Which, in the end, she did not do.
00:37:52.000 But I'm just offering that as one example of the sorts of things that happen that in many cases are correlated with race.
00:37:59.000 That's why, although the question is how much weight you give to it, it's certainly a relevant statistic in determining what kind of obstacles people have to deal with and overcome.
00:38:08.000 And it's not a solution.
00:38:09.000 What the Supreme Court said in the case, which is, oh, you can talk about it in your essay.
00:38:14.000 It's not a solution because a lot of these kids are young kids who don't even know What sort of obstacles they've overcome.
00:38:20.000 You know, it's only the obvious cases where they would know that.
00:38:24.000 So I would say that, you know, again, I think this is a fairly conservative argument because I'm saying whatever you think is right about the Appalachian case, you can certainly make that argument using race instead of Appalachian because that's just the reality.
00:38:40.000 I think you'd agree yourself that race is still a relevant statistic in inferring whether someone has had to put up with Yeah, I think one of the most interesting arguments is the legacy arguments, which I don't know how much of a Harlan's class gets because they had a legacy there, meaning they had an ancestor there.
00:39:04.000 But, you know, legacies, I would say, are probably 99.9% white.
00:39:10.000 Right.
00:39:11.000 Well, you have legacies, you have the team, the sports teams that are recruiting and taking in a fair amount of students and those aren't the minority students who are taking, for the most part, who are taking advantage of that because you have a ton of teams and they're all recruiting their people.
00:39:26.000 So legacies, sports teams, you have all sorts of ways in which sort of special advantages are given to some applicants.
00:39:33.000 And if you in the end, if you ask, you know, how important is this issue?
00:39:37.000 Well, it's a tiny problem.
00:39:39.000 I mean, it's a molehill of a problem because there's so few cases, you know, the sort of the vast majority of black students in Harvard today are quite competent and would get in affirmative action or not.
00:39:52.000 And so we're talking about a relatively small, small, surgically applied tool.
00:39:59.000 The Roberts opinion sort of makes it sound like it was a check the box thing where, you know, if you just check the box and said you're black, you got in, which is just an absolute falsehood.
00:40:09.000 And the other absolute falsehood that the Roberts opinion relies on is a theory that race is kind of irrelevant in making an inference about the obstacles that someone deals with in today's world.
00:40:20.000 It's not irrelevant.
00:40:22.000 Yeah.
00:40:24.000 Well, it's a pleasure meeting you guys, and this has been a really, really enjoyable discussion.
00:40:30.000 Thank you so much for sharing your day with me.
00:40:34.000 Well, thank you.
00:40:35.000 Thank you.
00:40:36.000 It's been a real pleasure and a real honor.
00:40:39.000 And by the way, I was very close to Dave Evans as well.
00:40:42.000 Oh, really?
00:40:43.000 Okay.
00:40:44.000 He's a fantastic, fantastic guy.
00:40:48.000 He is.
00:40:49.000 Well, guys, thank you so much, and I hope you'll come back and join us again.
00:40:54.000 I look forward to it.
00:40:56.000 Yeah, thank you.
00:40:57.000 Thank you.