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Speaker 1: La Brega is back this season.

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Speaker 2: We're spending time with the people and symbols that represent

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Speaker 2: Puerto Rico.

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Speaker 1: We're proud Borricos and what does that mean?

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Speaker 3: And we are still terrified.

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Speaker 2: We're telling stories about champions from a place worth fighting for,

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Speaker 2: stories that will inspire you no matter where you're from.

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Speaker 2: Come ok, wow, this is La Brega Campeones. Listen early

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Speaker 2: and ad free with Fluo Plus.

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Speaker 3: It's Maria no Josa and I have a quick favor

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Speaker 3: to ask you. If you like listening to Latino USA

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Speaker 3: on Spotify, will you take a second and hit follow

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Speaker 3: us on the show page because I want to make

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Speaker 3: sure you don't miss a single episode and that you

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Speaker 3: don't waste time looking for episodes every week. And if

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Speaker 3: you found us through one of Spotify's daily mixes, following

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Speaker 3: the show directly is the best way to keep the

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Speaker 3: episodes coming. Yes, and here's the show. Jelani Copp is

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Speaker 3: an award winning author, a New Yorker staff writer, a historian,

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Speaker 3: and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He's also the first black

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Speaker 3: person to serve as dean of the Columbia Journalism School,

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Speaker 3: and he is a proud first generation New Yorker.

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Speaker 4: My mother was from Alabama and my father was from Georgia,

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Speaker 4: and they met in Harlem. They had both left to

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Speaker 4: the South for reasons that were the same as millions

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Speaker 4: of other black people in the Great Migration.

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Speaker 3: Jolani grew up in Queens with parents who didn't shy

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Speaker 3: away from talking about are country's racist history.

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Speaker 4: And unlike many parents who don't talk about their youth

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Speaker 4: and they don't talk about the difficult things they witnessed,

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Speaker 4: my parents actually did. They did talk about segregation, and

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Speaker 4: so I think I got a sense of what had

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Speaker 4: led them to come to New York. My father, he

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Speaker 4: was big on kind of using his life and the

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Speaker 4: things he had witnessed and seen to try to explain

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Speaker 4: to his children, like what they would encounter in the world,

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Speaker 4: which is maybe that's what drew me to history, you know,

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Speaker 4: that's what he was doing with his personal history. My

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Speaker 4: mother was very different, Like my mother had a undiminished

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Speaker 4: pool of anger about those experiences, and that was maybe

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Speaker 4: the beginning of you know that branched out from there

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Speaker 4: to much more complicated I think understanding.

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Speaker 1: Of the world today.

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Speaker 3: Jilani spends a lot of his time as a historian

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Speaker 3: reckoning with our country's complicated past, while the nation's highest

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Speaker 3: office is hard at work trying to rewrite his country's past.

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Speaker 5: Well, the National Park Service has removed the reference to

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Speaker 5: Harriet Tubman from away page about the underground Railroad. The

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Speaker 5: protests happening right now with the Stonewall National Monument after

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Speaker 5: a Pride flag was quietly removed by the order of

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Speaker 5: the Trump administration.

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Speaker 3: And at a time when this administration and the right

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Speaker 3: wing are trying to snuff out any cultural diversity and

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Speaker 3: make the country wider, to.

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Speaker 5: Get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish

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Speaker 5: is a middle finger to the rest of America.

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Speaker 1: This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country,

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Speaker 1: not for the Latinos.

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Speaker 5: These corporations and universities have adopted so called diversity, equity,

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Speaker 5: and inclusion policies that punish Americans for being white, Asian,

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Speaker 5: or male.

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Speaker 3: It's all part of what Jilani calls demographic paranoia, and

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Speaker 3: it's nothing new from Fudro media. It's Latino Usa. I'm

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Speaker 3: Maria no Josa Today a conversation with author and historian

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Speaker 3: Jilani Kha. We talk about race and the historical parallels

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Speaker 3: between immigration enforcement now and the hunting of black Americans

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Speaker 3: in US history. And we also look to the future

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Speaker 3: and how we should be thinking about the upcoming midterms

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Speaker 3: and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States.

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Speaker 3: Jilanni Cobb, Welcome back to Latino, Usay.

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Speaker 4: It's good to be back.

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Speaker 3: A few months ago, Jeelani Cobb published a book titled

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Speaker 3: Three or More is a Riot, Notes on How We

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Speaker 3: Got Here twenty twelve to twenty twenty five. It's a

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Speaker 3: collection of essays he wrote for The New Yorker about race, culture,

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Speaker 3: and democracy. The book opens with a piece about the

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Speaker 3: twenty twelve killing of Trayvon Martin, a black seventeen year

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Speaker 3: old high school student in Miami.

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Speaker 4: That was the first thing that ever wrote for The

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Speaker 4: New Yorker.

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Speaker 6: The shooting death of a young man in Florida as

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Speaker 6: spot outrage on social media.

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Speaker 7: Nobody disputes that George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

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Speaker 1: Rush Today's is its second degree murder? Or is it

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Speaker 1: self defense?

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Speaker 2: After deliberating about sixteen hours, the jury and the George

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Speaker 2: Zimmerman trial came back with its verdict.

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Speaker 8: We the jury find George Zimmerman not guilty and so.

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Speaker 4: He's acquitted of killing Treyvon Martin, and Alicia Garza, who

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Speaker 4: is an organizer, writes a Facebook post that ends with

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Speaker 4: the words you know, our lives matter, which then becomes

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Speaker 4: black lives matter, and that's where that phrase begins bouncing.

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Speaker 4: Around two years later, nine people are killed in the

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Speaker 4: basement of the Emmanuel Ame Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

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Speaker 2: The deadly shooting inside a Charleston, South Carolina church is

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Speaker 2: being investigated as a hate crime.

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Speaker 4: A shooter opened fire during a prayer meeting in the

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Speaker 4: church Wednesday night. Dylan Rufe was taken into custody for

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Speaker 4: committing the homicides. He says that he was inspired to

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Speaker 4: do this by the reaction to Trayvon Martin's death.

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Speaker 3: His friend's telling me it was a planned six months

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Speaker 3: in the making, fueled by Rufe's unabashed racism.

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Speaker 5: He saw that the blood in general as a race,

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Speaker 5: was bringing down the white race.

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Speaker 4: The terrorists said. He wanted to start a race war.

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Speaker 4: To a lot of African Americans, it feels like we've.

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Speaker 1: Been in a race war for the last four hundred years.

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Speaker 4: And I thought that if I was trying to find

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Speaker 4: something that was really at the center of all these

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Speaker 4: other currents. I should start there and then work my

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Speaker 4: way out.

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Speaker 3: Why is the title three or more? As a riot?

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Speaker 4: In South Carolina in seventeen thirty nine, there was a

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Speaker 4: slaver volte called the Stono Rebellion, and in the aftermath

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Speaker 4: of it, the colonial legislature passes a law that essentially

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Speaker 4: defined a slave revolt has three or more negroes outside

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Speaker 4: the company of a white man. And there was this

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Speaker 4: concern about there being like how many black people are here,

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Speaker 4: or this concern about the demography. Also, South Carolina was

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Speaker 4: a colony in which the white population was a minority,

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Speaker 4: So it was this demographic paranoia. And the more I

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Speaker 4: thought about it, we are dealing with the consequences of

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Speaker 4: a demographic paranoia. Now, that's what ties together everything from

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Speaker 4: Trayvon to Minneapolis. It's about demography and has been since

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Speaker 4: the founding of this country.

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Speaker 3: And a lot of the essays right are about how

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Speaker 3: every victory that people who are not white in this

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Speaker 3: country is met with incredible backlash. In fact, I called

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Speaker 3: it the US mambo three steps forward, ten steps back. Yeah,

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Speaker 3: So can you talk about the historical connection that you

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Speaker 3: make between the passing of the Voting Rights Act in

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Speaker 3: nineteen sixty five and where we are today.

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Speaker 4: Then, So, in August of nineteen sixty five, then President

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Speaker 4: Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of nineteen

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Speaker 4: sixty five, culminating of the Civil Rights movement.

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Speaker 9: It is wrong, deadly wrong to deny any of your

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Speaker 9: fellow Americas the right to vote in this country.

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Speaker 4: And about seven weeks later, in October of nineteen sixty five,

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Speaker 4: he signs the Heartseller Immigration Reform Act.

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Speaker 6: This bill says simply that from this day fourth, those

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Speaker 6: wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the

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Speaker 6: basis of their skills and their close relationships those already here.

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Speaker 4: And those two actions really set the table for the

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Speaker 4: dynamics that we're looking at now and the crisis, the

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Speaker 4: kind of constitutional crisis we found ourselves in, the reactionary

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Speaker 4: politics that we find ourselves in. Because the Voting Rights

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Speaker 4: Act changes the face of the American electorate all of

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Speaker 4: a sudden, these millions of African Americans who have been

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Speaker 4: completely excluded from the political process are now enfranchised, now

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Speaker 4: able to vote, and it means that American politics will

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Speaker 4: now be accountable to a different set of people. Prior

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Speaker 4: to this, we don't actually know what the proper results

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Speaker 4: of any American election prior to nineteen sixty five would

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Speaker 4: have been, because you had more than ten percent of

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Speaker 4: the population who couldn't vote, people who at the risk

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Speaker 4: of their own lives if you tried to cast the

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Speaker 4: balot amount of cost of your life. Johnson's changes both

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Speaker 4: the demography of the nation and the demography of the electorate.

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Speaker 4: And that is what we have seen. And I also

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Speaker 4: tell my students to look at these parallels. When you

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Speaker 4: see moments of the tremendous upsurge of kind of reactionary

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Speaker 4: politics around immigration, look very closely, and you will see

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Speaker 4: an upsurge in attempts at voter suppression to those two

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Speaker 4: things go together. They go together because they follow the

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Speaker 4: same objective saying that there are too many of these

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Speaker 4: people who we don't know who they are. They may

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Speaker 4: vote in ways that we don't want them to vote,

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Speaker 4: and they will get in the way of us pursuing

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Speaker 4: a particular agenda.

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Speaker 1: When we come back.

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Speaker 3: I asked Jolani Kopp about the connection between the slave

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Speaker 3: patrols of the past and ice enforcement today and later,

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Speaker 3: we look at how we should be thinking about the

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Speaker 3: US US as we approach the midterm elections.

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Speaker 4: Given our experience with January sixth to twenty twenty one

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Speaker 4: and the attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power BESHI,

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Speaker 4: I think should be in the front of our minds

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Speaker 4: as we think about any subsequent election.

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Speaker 1: Stay with us.

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Speaker 8: Yes, if you're looking for some of the sharpest takes

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Speaker 8: on film and television, I hope you'll tune in to

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Speaker 8: Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

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Speaker 5: Over here.

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Speaker 2: At Critics at Large, we like talking about what we loved,

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Speaker 2: but crucially what we hate about what we're watching.

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Speaker 6: But even more we like making sense of what's happening

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Speaker 6: in the culture right now and how we got here.

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Speaker 8: Join us as we make our way from Eddington to

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Speaker 8: Moby Dick, from Ted Lasso to the Rise in Therapy

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Speaker 8: speak from the Pit to Luigi Manjoni.

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Speaker 3: It's Critics So Large from the New Yorker. Wherever you

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Speaker 3: get your podcasts, it's Latino USA. I'm Mariao Josa. Let's

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Speaker 3: get back to my conversation with journalist, author, and historian

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Speaker 3: Jelani Cobb Jelanni often talks about the parallels he sees

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Speaker 3: between what's happening with the current ICE rates across the

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Speaker 3: country and the slave patrols from the eighteen hundreds in

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Speaker 3: the United States. Earlier this year, he also wrote a

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Speaker 3: piece in The New Yorker titled what ICE should have

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Speaker 3: learned from the Fugitive Slave Act? Talk a little bit

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Speaker 3: about why the Fugitive Slave Act is in any way

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Speaker 3: compared to what's happening now with ICE.

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Speaker 4: Looking at what happened and what began to accelerate, culminating

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Speaker 4: in the conflicts we saw in Minneapolis, the presence of

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Speaker 4: a federal force that is snatching people who have lived

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Speaker 4: in communities for a very long time, who are woven

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Speaker 4: into those communities, who have deep relationships of mutual responsibility

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Speaker 4: and affection and all the things that go into people

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Speaker 4: who make up a community.

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Speaker 7: The only way we can fight that is by doing

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Speaker 7: good and kindness. And there's so many people in Minneapolis

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Speaker 7: right now doing that, block by block, helping their neighbors,

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Speaker 7: safeguarding their neighbors, feeding people.

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Speaker 4: To see those people taken and not only taken into custody,

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Speaker 4: but to have the knowledge that they're going to be

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Speaker 4: delivered to a place where they may suffer physical harm.

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Speaker 4: So I have this idea and a democracy, the fundamental

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Speaker 4: civic unit is neighbor. And when you think about the

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Speaker 4: relationship of a neighbor, it cuts through a lot of

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Speaker 4: other kinds of complications. What do you think about immigration,

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Speaker 4: Oh well, people will have opinions that are all over

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Speaker 4: the spectrum about this. What do you think about your

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Speaker 4: neighbor being snatched out of their home and taken to

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Speaker 4: a place where they're going to be harmed. There's less

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Speaker 4: of a spectrum about that, and it's easier for people

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Speaker 4: to understand the moral outrage associated with that. In the

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Speaker 4: eighteen fifties, the first time we saw this kind of

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Speaker 4: large scale in the United States after the passage of

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Speaker 4: the Fugitive Slave Act, which you know about roughly one

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Speaker 4: thousand people escaped from slavery each year over the course

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Speaker 4: of the nineteenth century up until the Civil War, that

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Speaker 4: population came to be about one hundred thousand people who

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Speaker 4: had escaped slavery. Southerners thought about this in financial terms,

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Speaker 4: this is a tremendous financial loss. They pressured the federal

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Speaker 4: government to do something about it, and what the federal

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Speaker 4: eighteen fifty that created a federal bureaucracy charged with tracking

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Speaker 4: down people who had escaped slavery and then dragging them

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Speaker 4: back into bondage. And naively, legislators in Congress thought that

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Speaker 4: this was going to be something that placated angry Southerners,

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Speaker 4: angry slaveholders. What it actually did was enrage Northerners who

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Speaker 4: had a spectrum of ideas about the question of slavery

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Speaker 4: and abolition and all these other kinds of things. But

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Speaker 4: the thing that they did not have complicated feelings about

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Speaker 4: was whether they were prepared to see their neighbors snatched

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Speaker 4: away in the middle of the night, grabbed off the street,

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Speaker 4: and transported to a place where they knew they were

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Speaker 4: going to suffer physical harm.

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Speaker 3: And so today you're saying what we witnessed in Minneapolis,

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Speaker 3: or in Los Angeles or in Chicago is essentially what

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Speaker 3: it really means is that there's a tighter knit relationship

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Speaker 3: in our country than the federal government in Ice and

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Speaker 3: Trump could have imagined.

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Speaker 4: And not only that, you know, I think it comes

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Speaker 4: from the same place. Now, these are different situations in

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Speaker 4: different times, and so on it comes from the same place.

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Speaker 4: And I also think that the fundamental element here is

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Speaker 4: not just moral outrage, it's the willingness to risk your

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Speaker 4: own life to make this point. Because Alex Pretty was

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Speaker 4: killed after renee Good was killed, and renee Good was

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Speaker 4: killed after other people had been killed previously. And so

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Speaker 4: it's not like people were unaware of the fact that

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Speaker 4: there were a life threatening jeopardy by confronting Ice in

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Speaker 4: this way or raising your voice and registering your protests.

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Speaker 4: People knew that, and they did it in negative seventeen

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Speaker 4: degree temperatures, night after night after night protesting. That's saying

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Speaker 4: that they are being motivated by something that is much

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Speaker 4: deeper than a kind of I disagree with you on policy.

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Speaker 4: I think this is something that goes to the core

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Speaker 4: of people's moral understanding of who they are.

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Speaker 3: So if there are people and I've made the comparison

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Speaker 3: around the Gestapo asking people for their papers getting onto

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Speaker 3: buses and trains and frankly anywhere, now, should that comparison

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Speaker 3: be made, should it not be made? Should we say?

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Speaker 3: Should we say, well, the Gestapo, but the Gestapo was

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Speaker 3: kind of impacted by the slave controls.

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Speaker 4: Sure, And also, you know the extent that Nazi Germany

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Speaker 4: looked at American policies as models for what they were

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Speaker 4: trying to construct there. It's uncomfortable maybe for people, but

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Speaker 4: that's true at varying points. The Nazi regimes sent German

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Speaker 4: lawyers to the United States to study segregation as they

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Speaker 4: were attempting to implement the Nuremberg laws, and you know,

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Speaker 4: a whole array. You know, South Africa does the same,

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Speaker 4: by the way, like we talk about apartheid, but apartheid

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Speaker 4: is modeled on American segregation, and it's they attempt to

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Speaker 4: create a kind of two point zero version of it.

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Speaker 4: And so the United States, wittingly or not, exports these

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Speaker 4: ideas that are used in repressive regimes around the world

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Speaker 4: in different ways. And so there's that part of it.

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Speaker 4: But I do think that the Gestapo example is important

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Speaker 4: because that is legible to people. They understand that this

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Speaker 4: is a violation and that the United States Supreme Court

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Speaker 4: has said that profiling people on the basis of how

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Speaker 4: they look or the language that they're speaking in a

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Speaker 4: country in which there's no official language is a valid

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Speaker 4: basis for ice or immigration officers to make some sort

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Speaker 4: of intervention. And so what is that, if not creating

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Speaker 4: a kind of racial hierarchy, certainly at racial hierarchy in

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Speaker 4: the presumption of who belongs who could be a citizen.

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Speaker 3: Can you talk for a moment about the importance of

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Speaker 3: this solidarity between the Black community and Latino community, who

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Speaker 3: everybody thinks are all immigrants. But okay, and we also

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Speaker 3: know many black folks are being rounded up and deported.

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Speaker 3: But what do you see now historically that is important

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Speaker 3: about this particular moment where many Black Americans are coming

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Speaker 3: out in fact to support their neighbors.

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Speaker 4: I think it has to be built around the kind

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Speaker 4: of familiarity in understanding of struggle and to understand the

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Speaker 4: dynamics and say, oh, okay, I didn't learn all this

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Speaker 4: history just to understand the condition of black people in

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Speaker 4: the United States. I learned all this history to understand

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Speaker 4: the condition of humanity and the ways in which these

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Speaker 4: lessons are applicable across different circumstances, in different situations. I

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Speaker 4: think that recognizing in humanity can do one of two things.

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Speaker 4: It can harden you, it can make you cruel in

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Speaker 4: your own right, or it can give you a sense

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Speaker 4: of empathy in understanding a way of translating and understanding

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Speaker 4: the humanity of other people. And that's the best of

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Speaker 4: what coalition building I think can do.

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Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Hey, we're back.

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Speaker 3: I'm going to wrap up my conversation with journalists and

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Speaker 3: historian Jelani Cobb. We've been talking about how the past

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Speaker 3: helps inform our present. Now we're going to shift gears

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Speaker 3: and look towards the future, to the midterms and the

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Speaker 3: upcoming two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States.

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Speaker 3: So you're a student of history, a professor of history,

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Speaker 3: a writer of history. How concerned should we be about

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Speaker 3: these midterms?

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Speaker 4: I think that given we have seen the DLJ weaponized

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Speaker 4: effectively as a part of the executive branch, as the

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Speaker 4: partisan part of the executive branch, and given our experience

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Speaker 4: with January sixth to twenty twenty one and the attempt

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Speaker 4: to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, which you know,

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Speaker 4: that's I think should be in the front of our

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Speaker 4: minds as we think about any subsequent election in which

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Speaker 4: essentially the same people have control over the gears. And

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Speaker 4: then the other part that I think is important is

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Speaker 4: that Donald Trump has been impeached twice and currently one

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Speaker 4: of the kind of footnotes about impeachment is that it

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Speaker 4: has never happened while their own party held the majority

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Speaker 4: in the House. But if the majority in the House

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Speaker 4: were to flip, then the insurances against impeachment would go away.

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Speaker 4: And so I think that that's in the back of

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Speaker 4: their minds. It's a calculation to prevent that from being

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Speaker 4: maybe the third ones the charm who knows. But we

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Speaker 4: know that there is a willingness to subvert the transfer

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Speaker 4: of power. We've seen that before. We know that there's

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Speaker 4: a DOJ that is willing to pursue kind of partisan scores,

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Speaker 4: to settle parsan scores on behalf of the president. We

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Speaker 4: have seen that, and we've seen the deployment of a

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Speaker 4: really unchecked military authority in Ice and the deployments of

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Speaker 4: the National Guard. But I don't think it's impossible for

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Speaker 4: us to have a scenario in which of those things

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Speaker 4: are used to prevent or subvert, or complicate or impede

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Speaker 4: the upcoming midterm.

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Speaker 3: Elections, which gets to the point that you brought up earlier,

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Speaker 3: which is about demographics the electoral body. If you have

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Speaker 3: ICE agents stationed anywhere near that's right, a poll brings back,

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Speaker 3: reminders of the poll tax.

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Speaker 1: All of it right, all of those things.

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Speaker 4: And the fact that we now have incontrovertible evidence that

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Speaker 4: ICE poses a threat to American citizens. This is not

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Speaker 4: a question of your citizenship status. And so is it

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Speaker 4: reasonable for someone to see federal troops at their polling

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Speaker 4: place and then be anxious about casting about Yeah, that

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Speaker 4: would be a reasonable reaction. And so that's all a possibility.

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Speaker 3: So, Jilani, we're approaching the two hundred and fiftyeth anniversary

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Speaker 3: of the declaration of independence, So how do we understand

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Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty years quite young as a country

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Speaker 3: in terms of what the next two fifty could look like.

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Speaker 4: One of the things that is notable about this country

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Speaker 4: is the distance that it traveled between power was conceptualized

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Speaker 4: and what it ultimately became. And it's because of the

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Speaker 4: success of decades of struggle waged by people who have

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Speaker 4: been left out of that original compact that the country

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Speaker 4: is forced to become more and more adherent to an

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Speaker 4: actual concept of democracy. I think there's beauty in that story.

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Speaker 4: I think that that's that should be the story that

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Speaker 4: we tell with pride. But instead, when we look at

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Speaker 4: the removal of the National Park Service, you know, plaques

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Speaker 4: around Stonewall, when we look at the removal of the

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Speaker 4: slavery plaques from the President's House in Philadelphia, when we

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Speaker 4: look at the ongoing I mean, the attempt to remove

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Speaker 4: Harriet Tubman from federal website. What they're trying to do

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Speaker 4: is present an airbrushed version of American history in which

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Speaker 4: there never were these problems. But you deemphasize these problems,

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Speaker 4: and if you take away the problem, you remove the

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Speaker 4: capacity of anyone to be heroic, because in the classic sense,

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Speaker 4: the hero is only as powerful as the scale of

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Speaker 4: the problem that he or she confronts. It's like, it's

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Speaker 4: because slavery is such an entrenched problem, such an entrenched

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Speaker 4: issue that it threatens to destroy the entire country, that

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Speaker 4: you actually get to understand who Abraham Lincoln was, absent

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Speaker 4: that he's just a tall dude from Illinois. You have

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Speaker 4: to be able to confront that. And so that attempt

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Speaker 4: some months back, when the President said that he was

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Speaker 4: disturbed at the Smithsonian spent so much time talking about

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Speaker 4: how terrible slavery was. This is ab Slonian African American Museum.

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Speaker 4: So yeah, like that's the point, and the point of

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Speaker 4: it has to be like, how did we navigate that?

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Speaker 3: Chi Laniku, thank you so much for joining us on

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Speaker 3: at the USA.

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Speaker 4: Thank you, it's always great to be here with you.

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Speaker 3: Our episode was produced by Renando Lanos Junior. It was

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Speaker 3: edited by Revecca Ibarra. It was mixed by Stephanie LAbau

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Speaker 3: and Julia Caruso. Fact checking for this episode by Roxana Aguire.

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Speaker 3: Nancy Trujillo is our production manager. Fernando Charvari is our

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Speaker 3: managing editor. The Latino USA team also includes Luis Luna,

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Speaker 3: Dori mar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, Monica Morales Garcia and Adriana Rodriguez.

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Speaker 3: Pennile Ramirez and I are executive producers. I'm your host

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Speaker 3: Maria no Josa. Latino USA is part of the iHeart

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Speaker 3: Mike Uldua podcast network. Executive producers and iHeart Leo Gomez

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Speaker 3: and Arlene Santana join us again on our next episode.

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