Roland Martin’s Deleted Post and Jamilah Lemieux on Black Relationships

Summary

Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay

Episode: Roland Martin’s Deleted Post and Jamilah Lemieux on Black Relationships

Date: April 21, 2026
Guest: Jamilah Lemieux (Author, Black Single Mother)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into several crucial topics impacting Black communities: the public controversy over Roland Martin’s deleted post following the Justin Fairfax murder-suicide, the dynamics of how Black media and leadership respond to violence against Black women, and an extended, probing conversation with writer Jamilah Lemieux about her new book, Black Single Mother. Throughout, Van, Rachel, and Jamilah examine the intersections of race, gender, family, accountability, and how we discuss relationships, community, and harm in Black America.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Do You Get Involved in Friends’ Relationships?

[00:56–03:53]

• The hosts and Jamilah discuss whether they'd intervene if a friend or their partner was harming a relationship (e.g., cheating, neglect).
  • Jamilah: “If my friends have questions about their relationship...I will answer. But getting too involved, problematic.” [01:31]
  • Rachel shares hesitation due to past awkwardness or backlash after intervening.
  • Van and Jamilah agree: if children or clear harm are involved, it’s different, but otherwise, “I normally stay out of the whole fucking thing.” [03:28]

2. Mary J. Blige and the Burger King “Crispy Chicken” Ad Controversy

[06:19–16:13]

• Discussion of Mary J. Blige's refusal to laugh about her 2012 Burger King fried chicken ad, which drew accusations of racist stereotyping.
  • Mary J. Blige: "I would never laugh at that. Because my, my true honest to true fans did not think that shit was funny." [07:02]
  • Van: "I don’t think that we’ve come far enough to sing for chicken quite yet. I think that racism has to be completely destroyed..." [10:19]
  • Rachel: Raises the cultural-historical context—singing for chicken “was used in advertisements to make us look a certain way...because it was used in advertisements to make us look a certain way, it still hits the same way as blackface." [16:13]
• Both hosts recognize this controversy as a uniquely sensitive subject for Black artists, given historic racist depictions.

3. Roland Martin, the Fairfax Tragedy, and Black Media Accountability

[18:36–47:25]

• The episode’s core: dissecting how prominent Black media figures, especially Roland Martin, framed the murder-suicide by Justin Fairfax.
• Roland’s initial post highlighted Fairfax’s legacy and pain, but was heavily criticized for centering the perpetrator, not the victim.
  • Rachel: "Roland Martin was wrong in how he addressed this tragedy. His responses thereafter…was completely off the mark. His show thereafter, the timing was off." [23:10]
  • Van: "If you decide that your final act is going to be to murder your wife...you’ve lost any type of availability to honor.” [30:29]
  • The hosts address a pattern in media of deferring to men’s "legacy" and pain, especially when the perpetrator is both prominent and known in the community.
  • Van: "The bigger question is what happens when the feedback begins? ...What I don’t understand is after the miss, after the miss, the violent triple double down." [35:23]
• They also discuss mental health as a factor, but question centering it at the cost of the victim’s story and broader issue of violence against Black women.
  • Van: “Is all of the stuff that you’re doing ... for the healing and protection of a community, or is it something that makes you a star?” [45:16]
  • Rachel: "We have to talk about femicide. We have to talk about violence to Black women in the community... it’s so much deeper than that." [39:02]

4. Interview: Jamilah Lemieux and Black Single Motherhood

[50:25–137:31]

Jamilah’s Vision for Community

• Jamilah describes her "Baby Mama’s Bill of Rights" for a more just society for single mothers.
  • "All single mothers deserve to have ... equitable share in the financial, emotional, physical cost of raising a child…empathy, a village, work that pays a living wage..." [51:40]

On Shame, Stereotypes, and Family

• Jamilah details her journey from shame about single motherhood to pride, and why she wrote her book.
• She interrogates the harmful myth that single mothers' situations are inherently dangerous/broken—and how those myths get weaponized against Black women.
  • "So much of...the challenging statistics as it relates to single mothers...are directly tied to poverty...not single motherhood itself." [58:08]

Nuclear Family & Black Community Dynamics

• Jamilah, Rachel, and Van analyze the overemphasis on nuclear family and how family structures are more diverse and complex.
  • "There are an infinite number of combinations of what can make a family...for the first six or seven years of my daughter’s life, I didn’t think of us as a family." [61:29]
• The myth of the "bitter baby mama," impact of class, colorism, and generational norms.

Violence, Historical Context, and Accountability

• Extended dialogue on why Black men have historically been centered, sometimes excused, and the urgent need for accountability and new models of communication.
  • "There is this widespread belief...that black men and boys are so much more endangered...that we cannot hold them accountable for harm." [66:45]
  • "At no point in our history...have the needs and concerns of Black women been treated with the same seriousness as the needs and concerns of Black men." [68:31]
• Jamilah underscores rape and sexual violence as overlooked compared to lynching in Black historical memory. [68:31–73:17]

Gender, Power, and Socialization

• Probing the roots of prioritizing Black men—white supremacy, patriarchy, religion, family, pop culture, and government policy (e.g., Moynihan Report, "welfare queen" myth).
  • "We as a community have made a project of restoring the dignity and manhood to the Black man...We haven’t talked about restoring dignity and womanhood to Black women." [93:13]

How Black Men and Women Relate

• The hosts and Jamilah discuss generational and regional differences, interracial dating, colorism, and media representation.
  • Van and Jamilah go back and forth on whether “colorism” and interracial relationships are overemphasized in media representation compared to everyday Black communities. [80:17–87:07]
  • Jamilah discusses changing NBA demographics and its implications on Blackness, identity, and opportunity. [89:47–92:28]

Community, Empathy, and Decentering Men

• The ending conversation centers around what "decentering" men means—moving toward communal, equitable relationships where accountability isn’t seen as a threat.
  • Jamilah: “Decentering men means the world should not revolve around them…doesn’t mean destroy or dispose of men.” [101:19]

Holding Friends Accountable (Again)

• Returning to the initial question: Should friends check each other on relationship issues?
  • Jamilah: “If you know that one of your friends...is cheating on his wife or being dishonest...your friend who loves you should say to you, like, come on, that's not cool." [125:12]
  • Van: “There are a lot of things that men accept from one another that they shouldn't...” [128:28]
  • Rachel: Shares personal wariness—many people don’t want outside opinions and friendships can be lost over such involvement. [128:06]

Who is This Book For?

• Jamilah: "Single mothers who have not come to terms with what that identity has meant...But I ultimately think that it's a discomfort you can get through." [135:05]
• The book’s lessons apply far beyond single parents—building empathy, interrogating norms, and building stronger communities.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Van Lathan:

  • “I don’t think that we’ve come far enough to sing for chicken quite yet. I think that racism has to be completely destroyed ... for Black people to sing for chicken.” [10:19]
  • “If you decide that your final act is going to be to murder your wife in the home where your children are...you’ve lost any availability to honor.” [30:29]
  • “I legitimately and honestly think that Roland Martin owes the Black female listeners of his platform an explanation and an apology.” [47:25]

• Rachel Lindsay:

  • “Roland Martin was wrong in how he addressed this tragedy...there should not have been a carousel of pictures of you with Justin Fairfax. This man is a murderer.” [23:10]
  • "We have to talk about femicide. We have to talk about violence to Black women in the community." [39:02]
  • On Black single mothers: "The more I would talk about it...I would find that there are so many other people who have been longing for that honesty and vulnerability..." [54:52]

• Jamilah Lemieux:

  • "I felt bad for being an unwed mom, you know, like, my daughter has lived a fabulous life...What am I apologizing for? What am I feeling ashamed for?” [54:19]
  • "There is this widespread belief in the Black community that Black men and boys are so much more endangered...that we cannot hold them accountable for harm." [66:45]
  • "Decentering men means the world should not revolve around them...that doesn't mean destroy or dispose of men." [101:19]
  • "If you know that one of your friends...is cheating...your friend who loves you should say to you, like, come on, that's not cool.” [125:12]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:56–03:53 | Do you intervene in friends’ relationships? | | 06:19–16:13 | Mary J. Blige, “Crispy Chicken,” and cultural stereotypes | | 18:36–47:25 | Roland Martin, Fairfax murder-suicide, and media accountability | | 50:25–58:08 | Jamilah Lemieux on writing & shame around Black single mothering | | 58:08–66:45 | Family, poverty, the nuclear myth, & Black community dynamics | | 66:45–74:39 | Power, patriarchy, and Black gender relations | | 74:39–87:07 | Generational divides, colorism, and interracial relationships | | 87:07–101:19| Accountability and the need for expansive empathy/social reform | | 120:08–134:31| Should friends actually intervene? (Revisited, nuanced discussion) | | 135:05–137:48| Who is the book for / where to find it? |

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Episode Tone & Delivery

The conversation maintains an incisive, candid, yet respectful tone. Van and Rachel are unafraid to critique media icons, examine their own biases, and challenge Jamilah and each other. Jamilah brings a calm, evidence-based, yet personal perspective, consistently connecting the personal to the structural and communal.

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Takeaways

• Accountability: Media and individuals must prioritize victims and honest reckoning over allegiance to male egos or community status.
• Context Matters: How we discuss and “honor” people after acts of violence remains a critical test of where our communal loyalties and values truly lie.
• Empathy and Openness: Understanding single motherhood and Black relationships requires shedding shame, broadening definitions of family, and rooting out harmful gendered myths.
• Real Change: Building stronger, safer communities demands action—holding each other accountable, decentering men as default leaders, and fostering communal care and listening.

---

For the full conversation and deeper understanding, read or listen to:
Black Single Mother by Jamilah Lemieux, and this unmissable episode of Higher Learning.

Transcript

[Jamila Lemieux]

Foreign.

[Van Lathan]

What is up? Higher Learning is on.

[Rachel]

Is Ivan Lathan Jr. And it's me, Rachel and Lindsay.

[Van Lathan]

Jamila Lemieux is on the podcast today. Black Single Mother is the name of the book.

[Rachel]

Yep.

[Van Lathan]

We talked to her for nearly two

[Rachel]

hours, which means it was a great conversation, guys.

[Van Lathan]

It's a great conversation.

[Rachel]

So many ways you can talk about this book and I feel like we only tap the surface.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah, we. We got into a question at the end. I want to know particularly the thought warriors. We talked about a lot of things that are more important in this question, but particularly want to know the thought warriors thoughts on this. Do you get involved in.

[Rachel]

You can hear that.

[Van Lathan]

Yes. What's going on? You have some pork this morning?

[Rachel]

Onions. I had a lot of onions last night.

[Van Lathan]

Bacon and onions.

[Rachel]

I didn't have any bacon, actually. Sorry, sorry. Okay, do the question again.

[Van Lathan]

Do you get involved in your friend's relationship issues? Like, if you saw a friend doing something that you thought was detrimental to their relationship, infidelity, like leading somebody on, all of that stuff, do you get involved in that? Like, we ended up having a conversation about this towards the end because of the conversation, if your homie's taking care of his kids and all of that stuff like that. I forgot what I had said to her. Then my boys catch me up on whatever. We talk about all that stuff. But do you get involved? Yeah, Jay, do you get involved?

[Jamila Lemieux]

No, I don't get involved. I think if my friends have questions about their relationship, they bring it to me, I will answer.

[Rachel]

But getting too involved, problematic. Would you get involved if you saw your friend's significant other doing something separately? We didn't talk about that, but that's.

[Jamila Lemieux]

If I see my friend's significant other doing something they're not supposed to be.

[Van Lathan]

Oh, if I see the homie girl. Oh, I'm sitting doing something.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

If I see the homie girl, I would talk to her.

[Rachel]

You would talk to the girl?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, yeah, I'm getting involved.

[Rachel]

Yeah, Yeah, I would talk to her. I don't know if I'm more on you with you.

[Van Lathan]

I would talk to her. I probably wouldn't say anything to him.

[Rachel]

Have you had to do it before?

[Jamila Lemieux]

No, but I've had experiences in my own relationship and with my friends about getting involved in each other's relationships.

[Rachel]

Never ends well. It just depends who it is. Like, for me, I would want to know. Like, if you're my friend, I would want you to tell me because I'm not going to take it out on you, but I Have been in friendships where I've been involved in that. And then you say something and then they take it out on you or they're awkward around you because you know something. And then they go back and maybe they feel a little shame or whatever.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Fair.

[Rachel]

Very complicated. Very complicated. But if you do get involved, if you don't get involved and they find out you did know, that's the other scary thing. But who.

[Van Lathan]

You ever see Heat?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Heat?

[Van Lathan]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

No.

[Van Lathan]

Walks in, sees shaherless girl with another guy, goes up to her, says hey, you will give him another chance. Go home. Something like that. But like I, you know, if there are children involved, I said this wrong when I was on the. We have gotten involved in a play approved crew. Like we have gotten involved. If you're not taking care of your kids, you're not being. Whatever, whatever. But like I don't know, normally relationship stuff, I don't know what's going on in your household. I stay out.

[Rachel]

You don't want to know.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah. If you were harming her, beating, whatever. But if it's like emotional stuff or stuff like that that's happening, I normally say out of the whole fucking thing. All right, but we talked about that with Jamila. But we talked about like way more stuff. A lot of stuff that's like the candy at the end of it for me to make a fool of myself. She's brilliant. Her book is Black Single mother. She'll be on the show in a little bit. Donnie, what about you? Before we get into the top of the show, do you get involved?

[Donnie]

I don't. I'm very mind my own business kind of person. So I really don't put myself into other people's situations if I can avoid it.

[Van Lathan]

Did you get involved with what happened to the Pistons? Cause you was talking a lot of shit when the Pistons beat the Lakers not too long ago. You was talking a lot of shit and you talked a lot of shit in the group chat when that happened. But now the Pistons came out and got pissed on. Right? They got pissed on. We did by the magic. So do you have anything to say?

[Donnie]

It's a game one. I say the Magic match up well with the Pistons. We are rusty. We had several days off because we're the one seed and they took Jalen during out the game. But you know what? Game two is coming up on Wednesday. I feel like we are definitely going to show up and show what a one seed does to an AC.

[Rachel]

There you go.

[Donnie]

Like 12 or more.

[Van Lathan]

Oh well. Da da little da da da all

[Jamila Lemieux]

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[Van Lathan]

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[Jamila Lemieux]

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[Van Lathan]

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[Donnie]

the show yeah, let's talk about Mary J. Blige. She was on a recent episode of House Guest with Scott Evans and spoke about her Burger King commercial from 2012, which she says is not funny, but let's play it. And I guarantee nobody is watching this without cracking a smile.

[Van Lathan]

What's in the New Chicken?

[Jamila Lemieux]

What's in the New Chicken Wraps, Mary

[Rachel]

Crispy chicken, fresh lettuce, three cheeses wrapped up.

[Donnie]

Now let's hear from Mary on the House Guest podcast.

[Van Lathan]

Are you in a place where you can yet laugh about that Burger King commercial? No. No I'm not.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Because I would never laugh at that. Because my, my true, honest to true fans did not think that shit was funny. Yeah, the whole way that shit went down was wrong. The whole way they shot it was wrong. It was set up to make exactly what happened in the press happened like that. You really feel that way.

[Donnie]

Yep.

[Jamila Lemieux]

And so it's still not a laughing matter to me.

[Rachel]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know, because I was deeply, deeply affected. Now I learned A lot from it. Yeah, but it's not something I'm like, no, it's not fucking funny, but laugh, you motherfuckers, if you want. Still, I don't care. I hear that. But the bottom line is my fans were confused. The real, true fans, not the people

[Van Lathan]

that dip in and dip out.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yes, but the people was like, what's going on? And I didn't really know what was going on.

[Van Lathan]

Right.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But I had bad representation, bad management, bad everything. And everybody dropped the ball and I'm holding everything. Yeah, that was a learning curve, but it's still not funny.

[Van Lathan]

So she said at the time, I agreed to be a part of a fun and creative campaign that was supposed to feature a dream sequence. Unfortunately, that's not what was happening in that clip. I understand my fans being upset by what they saw, but if you're a Mary fan, you have to know and never allow an unfinished spot like the one you saw go out. Burger King spoke at the time and said that it had been released prematurely before all the licensing final approvals were obtained. Uses of the Blige song. We would like to apologize to Mary J. Blige and all of her fans for airing an ad that was not final. All right. I was at TMZ when this happened, and I remember the outcry. And I just remember how people just being like, what the fuck is going on?

[Rachel]

Not the outcry.

[Van Lathan]

There was an outcry.

[Rachel]

Okay, first off, I wanna give a shout out to Scott Evans doing his thing, for doing his thing with this show, which is so good if you don't watch it, but also for his professionalism in that moment, because you could tell he was like, can we just laugh about it? And she was like, fuck, no. And he was like, oh. And, I mean, he didn't crack a smile. He held his composure. He met her where she was, of course. I mean, very much so. Handled it exactly how he should have. I don't know if I could have done that, because it is funny. And I don't know. I get confused with Mary's response here because it almost feels like you don't know why people were upset. Because my immediate question, and I wonder, if I was in that, doing that interview, would I have asked. This is. You say it was unfinished. I would have loved to know. What did we. What were we supposed to see? Because it sounds like you were always going to be singing about fried chicken, and that's what people had an issue with. And I don't know how, if we had had the Finished version, it would have been void of that. You were singing about fried chicken. That was the whole crispy chicken. That was the whole d gist of the commercial. I mean, that was her voice that said, what's in a new chicken? Was that her who said that?

[Donnie]

Okay.

[Rachel]

I'm just saying I'm curious. Like, I would have loved to have said. Okay, well, can you tell us what we were supposed to get for the people who are confused?

[Van Lathan]

All right, so this is. I've long talked about, had conversations about black people singing for chicken in commercials. I see it all the time. I don't think that we've come far enough to sing for chicken quite yet. Now, remember, we talked about Jamie Lawson. Talked to Jamie Lawson, Should I say, in our conversation with Jamie Lawson, she said that sometimes, you know, we hamper black artists ability to do things because of our cultural values or what we think is where. I don't think that we're to the singing for chicken level yet. I think that racism has to be completely destroyed. No more systemic racism. No more cultural racism. No more racism of any kind for black people to sing for chicken.

[Rachel]

What if they're eating chicken on camera? Is there a difference to you? Right. Because I don't feel the same visceral reaction that when I watch a Wingstop commercial and I see a family gathered around the table eating wings.

[Van Lathan]

Yes.

[Rachel]

As I do when they're singing about it. Well, they can cause to me, there's a difference.

[Van Lathan]

We eat chicken. Right, Right. Another thing is, I don't know how many times in my life as a black man that I've seen somebody eat a piece of chicken and then sing

[Rachel]

and become possessed by the chicken spirit to sing.

[Van Lathan]

The chicken spirit possesses it. And then you sing for the chicken. Now, you know, sometimes I've seen my mama do a little dance. I say even that's borderline at this particular point in our history. Oh, no, the singing for chicken is just a thing. I don't blame Mary J. Blige for this. I never have.

[Rachel]

Who do you blame?

[Van Lathan]

So if you are a Mary J. Blige, you have a team of people that normally vet things for you and put you in a position to go out and do stuff. Is it Mary J. Blige's responsibility at the end of the day? Cause it's her singing about the chicken. Yes, it is. At the end of the day, it is Mary J. Blige responsibilities. Her voice is her singing about chicken, chicken wrap, crispy chicken and ranch and all that shit. But somebody told her, yo, It's Burger King. It's a chicken thing. This is good. It's gonna be cool. And a lot of times, people in Mary J. Blige's position rely on people who have knowledge of the marketplace, knowledge of all of that stuff. I always thought they set Mary J. Blige up at what point?

[Rachel]

So I don't blame Mary J. For this. And I even have to look at the timeline. Cause I was like, did she do this commercial after the divorce or before the divorce? Because, damn it, the way her divorce went down, I don't blame her for singing for the Crispy Chicken.

[Van Lathan]

Would you sing for the crispy chicken now?

[Rachel]

Right now, yeah. As tax season hit.

[Van Lathan]

As tax season hit.

[Rachel]

Absolutely.

[Van Lathan]

So what you talking about then?

[Rachel]

But that's what I said. I was gonna give her some grace. Because of the financial strain. Cause I. Because she had a very messy, very expensive divorce. She lost a lot. But this was before the divorce. But as I move on, I would say, at what point, I agree with you. She has people do all the logistics, stuff that she doesn't have to do. She's the talent. She's the creative. She's the artist. She comes in and she does her thing. That is an original Mary song. So the moment the lyrics got changed and you were singing on a microphone, like, did you feel uncomfortable at that point? Like, that's where these are the questions, where, yes, to a point. They handle it. Her team. But at some point, she had to put her voice on those lyrics. She had to know she was standing in a microphone in the middle of a Burger King. She had to know a white man was gonna look her dead in the eye and say, mary. You know what I mean? Like that at some point, there's a level of responsibility, but it is shared. To your point, I don't look at Mary and I'm like, how dare you? But I would. It does make me sad that she does it 10 years later. More than 10 years. 14 years later. She's not laughing at it. Like, she's still.

[Van Lathan]

That shit is not funny. She got called a coon.

[Rachel]

Yeah. 14 years. Like, I've been called a lot of stuff, right? From who I married to my divorce. I'm past it now. But, like, if I'm married, it's like, you know What? That was 14 years ago. It sucked when it happened. And it sucked that people didn't give me the benefit of the doubt and I lost friendships. And, like, I look at it now, and I'm like, mary, what the fuck are you doing? So do you think I'm very self deprecating though?

[Van Lathan]

Do you think that in say five years you'll be able to laugh at the Dr. Umar Snow Puppies post?

[Rachel]

I laughed. I told you it's funny.

[Van Lathan]

It was funny.

[Rachel]

I said it was funny when it happened. But I am very. But different people, right? I'm very self deprecating. I think to sit in the chairs that we do and hold these mics, you cannot take yourself too seriously. You have to move past criticism and judgment that strangers have of you. Whereas a Mary doesn't necessarily have to do that. Like she's not a cultural criticism. You know, she's beloved in so many ways. So I think this was much harder for her. And then this was before the divorce, which was again hard for her. Cause she. See, you know, people have all their comments about that too. But I'm sorry. Then I went down a dark hole. I started listening to like looking at all the spoofs that they did. The Second City, that improv group. They did. Yeah, I had a good morning.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah, it was funny. It was funny.

[Rachel]

It was funny. But I do hate that she still feels like losing friends is crazy over this.

[Van Lathan]

Nah, that was a professional embarrassment. And look, I like the fact that she took it that seriously. Honestly, I'm not so sure if a moment of cringe is worth the chicken investigation that we've done on this for like the last 14 years. Cause it's a moment of cringe, right? We see these all the time. There are things that are deeply destabilizing and harmful. And this was some chicken fun. But see it all the time. Sing for the chicken. And they only want it seems, I guess there are commercials where white people sing for chicken. But I need more. I need more white people singing. They seem to only want us to sing for the chicken.

[Rachel]

But you know what it's like, it's kind of like a whiteface thing. Right? Whiteface doesn't exist.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Right.

[Rachel]

Just like white people singing for chicken isn't a thing. Because neither one of those are rooted in any kind of racist historical context. They used to have cartoons of black people singing for years and films and advertisements of black people singing and dancing for fried chicken. Black people could own. That was what they mostly had access to when it came to livestock. So they, they ate chicken and made it a black southern cuisine because that is what they had access to. So it became a cultural staple. And then they took that and they made it us cartoonish with it. So the ad. So because it was used in advertisements to make us look a certain way, then it still hits the same way of like a black face, which has racist historical implications as well. And how they would use that to depict black people. They did the same thing with chicken. So we're just not there yet. We're just not there yet.

[Van Lathan]

All right, warning. We are going to take a short break, but on the other side of this break, the story that we are going to talk about involves murder. It involves unaliving. It involves a lot of violence and terrible things happening to black women. So a trigger alert on that.

[Rachel]

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[Jamila Lemieux]

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[Rachel]

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[Van Lathan]

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[Donnie]

Last week, news broke that former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, Dr. Serena Fairfax, before killing himself shortly afterwards. On Instagram, Roland Martin reflected on his shared fraternity history with Fairfax and revealed that Serena had once recommended he speak at Norfolk State University. This is what Roland Martin's post said. Today's hashtag, Roland Martin, unfiltered is going to be very difficult. I knew Justin and his wife, Dr. Serena Fairfax. I was simply stunned this morning when hearing the devastating news of the murder suicide. Justin was my A5A brother and in the same Sigma PI Phi fraternity chapter, Beta Nu. Last year, Serena texted me to tell me that she recommended Norfolk State University have me as their commencement speaker and was saddened when they picked someone else. Serena, a dentist by profession, was an accomplished woman in her own right. I was personally aware of how devastated Justin was about the two sexual assault allegations made against him when he was 48 hours away from becoming governor of Virginia. In the wake of Governor Ralph Northam's blackface scandal, his political career never recovered. We often texted, but did not in the last year. I am so saddened for their two children. They are now left without a mom and dad and now have to carry the emotional toll of Justin's actions. Domestic violence is real and so is mental health. I have booked two black male mental health experts to speak on this tonight. Please be in prayer for those kids, Serena's family and Justin's. This tragedy had altered the lives of many. Were you guys reactions when you saw this post that was later deleted?

[Rachel]

And why was it deleted?

[Donnie]

Well, Roland Martin says why it was deleted. He says, last night I received an email from Sigma PI Phi Fraternity Incorporated leadership regarding my IG threads Facebook post on the Justin Fairfax murder suicide. He said that it said that the grand. I don't know how to pronounce this. Grammata was requesting that I ask you to remove the reference and pictures related to Sigma PI Phi on your post in order to adhere to Boulay's social media policy on sharing member names and images of our society on social media.

[Van Lathan]

Okay. Sigma PI Phi, I'm actually.

[Rachel]

That's the boulevard. That's the boule. That's the boule.

[Van Lathan]

What's the boule?

[Rachel]

You know what the boule is? I feel like we've talked about it.

[Van Lathan]

I know what the boule in terms of the. Every time I've ever heard the term boule. It's a pejorative. I know what the boule in terms of, like, social structure is. Like the boule, the bourgeoisie, like all of that stuff.

[Rachel]

No, no. The boule the bourgeoisie is one thing. The boule is a fraternity. It's like a group of men. I'm gonna give you the right thing. Founded to create a network for black professionals. Originally physicians, dentists. It's like a Jack and Jill thing, but just men. Men are only a part of it. It's an invitation only for distinguished black professional men.

[Van Lathan]

Now, every time I've ever. I've heard it in response, legitimately, until we just read this, I thought he was referring to the Alphas asking him to do that. No, but it wasn't the Alphas. Okay, so.

[Rachel]

No, but it's another group of men.

[Van Lathan]

Okay?

[Rachel]

And that's the point. It feeds into some of this conversation as to. There was an outcry. Donnie asked the question and. Sorry, Donnie didn't answer it. I wanted you to read that part. Donnie asked the question of what our response was, and there were a lot of people who responded. And the. The backlash and the outcry was major, particularly from women. And Roland Martin was In the comments, responding back, defending it. But when the Boulay asked him to take it down, then all of a sudden it was something that he could respond to and remove. And that just feeds into some of this conversation that we're just gonna have.

[Van Lathan]

Okay, what were your thoughts about this whole thing? Because Roland Martin then goes on to have a different show. He has a show that night. I watched the entire show. He had two black psychologists on there. They talked about the mental health of black men. They talked about. One psychologist, talked at length about how black men existing. And it's interesting that Jameela is on today because we're gonna talk about some of this with her. Black men existing into inside of, should I say, a white supremacist framework. They are taken out of the true selves of them as Africans, and it causes undue stress, strain. And we see a lot of this snapping and breaking and this harm done to the women and people around them.

[Rachel]

Yeah, okay, I'm going to start this off by like, this is not. I'm not here to personally attack Roland Martin, but Roland Martin was wrong in how he addressed this tragedy. His responses thereafter, his social media post was completely off the mark. His show thereafter, the timing was off. And even the show the next day, in the way he did that with finally bringing a woman on to talk about it, felt as if he was bringing a woman on to justify the thoughts from the previous panel of men and to criticize his critics who were talking about the way that he addressed it originally. There was a lot of, well, this is what people were saying to me. And this is. And, sister, this is what women were saying to me. And it felt like he was using her to justify his actions and almost to rebuke some of the criticism that he was receiving from other women, rather than using her as a woman to give the perspective of what was happening, which to me should have always been done in the original coverage of this, it felt like she was being used in a completely different way. At least that's how I took it when I watched his second show, not the first one that he did. Here's the thing. We deal with having to cover people that we know in a different way than the public does all the time, and they get in trouble, they do something we don't agree with. And you personally wrestle with, how do I approach this situation with honoring maybe a relationship or the way I knew this person versus what they did? That seems to be the complete opposite. Opposite of who I know them to be. I would never do that with this situation. And I don't understand why Roland Martin could not see that, especially in the backlash that he was getting. There should not have been a carousel of pictures of you with Justin Fairfax. This man is a murderer, and he murdered his wife in a heinous way with the children in the house where the son had to discover his mother and his father killed and had to call 911. You talk about how well you knew him. The reality is you didn't know him that well. And I think that that's something that people have to realize is only you really know you. Right. If I did something that you thought was out of character, you'd be like, man, I don't really know her like that. Like, maybe you didn't know that side of me. Maybe I wasn't giving that side of you. The end of the day, Roland Martin even admits on his show, I didn't know he was going through a divor. I didn't know he was in a custody battle. You knew him, but you didn't know him that well. And I think that that's something that you have to reason with personally before you get on a microphone and start talking about it and what felt like it was a defense, offense, not a defense. I don't want to say that. Take that back. It felt like you were centering him and his life and his legacy and his troubles, rather than the victim of the wife who did everything right in regards to whatever was happening her behind closed doors. I mean, this is a woman who. And you wonder why. Just like the response, though, from Roland Martin and the men that were discussing this on this panel, you wonder why women stay in certain situations or they feel like they can't speak up or nobody will believe them because Dr. Serena did everything right and. And she still ended up dead. She filed for the divorce. She got custody of her kids. She was looking to separate. She basically was standing up for herself and for her family, and she lost her life at the end of the day. And I don't know Justin Fairfax. I don't know if he had a history of depression. I don't know if he became situationally depressed because of all the things that were happening for him in the last eight years, with his career, with his reputation, with the allegations, with the divorce, with losing custody, with losing his house. I don't know that can lead anybody when their whole world as they've known it, that they've built, falls apart. It can lead them down a certain path. But this is what I will say this is what I do know. He killed his wife and he killed himself. He didn't just take his own life. He didn't take everybody's life in the house. He killed his wife and then he killed himself. And it's almost as if it felt. It feels like it's a vengeful, intentional thing. You do not get to move on. She is somebody who still had her job, who still had her reputation, was moving on, was keeping the house, was keeping the kids, was getting the divorce and the separation she wanted. She was saying no to him, and she was moving on. And you said, no, you don't get to do that without me. I just don't understand how we are not talking more about that now. There is a space to talk about men and their mental health, but this was not the time to do it. This was the time to talk about this tragedy that happened. If you're going to cover it, if you choose to cover it and talk about her life, talk about what the children are going to have to go through. Not a man who murdered someone who has been accused of multiple sexual assault. Allegations like. That is not the time for you to tell us. And he wasn't the only one. Okay. I keep saying Roland Martin because he did the show. This is not the time for you to do this. And this is why people were so upset. I'm not saying that there isn't a mental health crisis with black men. I'm not saying that black men don't need us or we need to have a conversation around it. But timing is everything, and this was not the time to do it.

[Van Lathan]

So a couple of things that have come out lately. One is that 60 million men were involved in an online rape academy, as reported by cnn, where they were drugging and raping their wives, then disseminating these videos amongst each other. You had the Justin Fairfax murder, suicide. And just recently, you had a man in Shreveport who killed his entire family and then killed himself. So, look, let's talk about all these things differently. So honoring someone. We've had this conversation before. You have to live a life that is worthy of honor. Anything else is a note.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, right.

[Van Lathan]

You note something. Hey, noted. This person did this. It's a part of their story. You can't take away a part of somebody's story. If you do all of these great things, Cesar Chavez, you do all of these things. These things now have to be noted. This is the person, but the headline on Cesar Chavez, by his own doing, by his own life and his own action is that he was a serial abuser of young women, the pedophile and a molester. That's the headline. Because the lives that you changed and ruined in that situation, the hurt that you've done is very profound.

[Rachel]

Children. Children and young women. I just want to be very clear, because they were children.

[Van Lathan]

Children and young women. So the hurt that you've done, that becomes the headline. And like, you know, living a life and you're not talking to a perfect man, but living a life that is worthy of honor is your responsibility. That's your responsibility. You guys, please. You're not listening to somebody who is spotless and worthy of moral praise tell you this. It just happens to be a fact that living a life that's worthy of being honored is on you. That's what you have to do that. And if you decide that your final act is going to be to murder your wife in the home where your children are taking her life and subjecting your children to indescribable trauma, you've lost any type of availability to honor. You've lost to me. You're now a murderer. You're a murderer, and you're an orphaner of children, and that's what you've done. So I don't think. And this goes for more people. This goes for Chris Benoit, the wrestler who's wrestler killed himself. Killed like, all of that stuff. Like that killed his whole family. All of that stuff. That's the deal. So you don't honor that. I'm interested in, like, why this has become so controversial. I'm interested particularly in why Roland dug in here because it was personal. But I think it's more than that.

[Rachel]

I do, too.

[Van Lathan]

Right. So it's more than that. Sure, he knew Justin, but by his own admission, he didn't know him that well. He didn't know he was going through a divorce. He didn't know he was going through a custody battle. He says that. That he didn't know that. So there's not a friend that I have right now that I would not know that about.

[Rachel]

Right, Right.

[Van Lathan]

There's not a friend that I have that I would not know that about. The bigger question is not that you missed because everybody misses. I've missed. You guys have seen it. The bigger question is not that you missed. The bigger question is what happens when the feedback begins? What happens when the conversation begins? A conversation that's not being held by, like, a bunch of people who are looking to attack you for anything. You wore the wrong shirt, you said the wrong thing. You didn't use the right pronoun. The conversation has happened, happening amongst women who feel unsafe. A bunch of. Around a bunch of women who are know of are reacting to a situation where they could go to sleep with somebody and wake up dead in the morning. And they want that taken seriously. All of us as men, particularly our OGs, all of us as men,

[Jamila Lemieux]

we

[Van Lathan]

have a responsibility to stay violently in community. Like violently in community. When I say like uncomfortably in community. And the reason why we have that is because power, influence, you know what your status is, it sometimes insulates you from community. It insulates you from being in a situation where you're having a conversation in good faith where someone is saying to you, hey, this is not the right way to go about that. And you have to actually give some Runway to that idea. That to me, in this situation is the only thing I didn't understand. I don't understand the honoring of just. I don't understand the whole deal. I don't. But you know, people are different. If someone were to tell me right now, do you think that Roland Martin did not give a fuck about what happened in this instance, I say that's probably not true.

[Rachel]

That's not true.

[Van Lathan]

Right, but, but, but what I will say is I don't understand that post. The post could be a miss. That's fine, everybody. Misses. You guys have seen me miss. I could be missing right now. What I don't understand is after the miss, after the miss, the violent triple double down, all of that stuff to where, hey, this is coming from a group of people that you've devoted your life. Black people. Black people. A group of people that you've devoted your life to protecting. You've devoted your life to telling them, hey, that thing right there is coming here to harm you. That thing right there is going to be the thing that's going to take away your voting rights, that's going to take away your clean water, that's going to take away your health care. Are you saying that you won't identify that thing if you've shaken hands with it before?

[Rachel]

Right.

[Van Lathan]

And so that is a question. We talk a little bit more about this with Jamila in a second. But that is a question that as men and as people, we have to continue to push ourselves on. Because at the moment that people were like, yo, this is not it. And let me tell you why. I'm not talking about trolls, I'm not talking about anyone who has been waiting to take a chunk out of Roland's ass. I'm talking about just People that went, ah, pull me to the side, man. I'll say one thing, last thing. When the January crash out happened, right? There was somebody on Twitter, I can't remember this tweet. And they said something to me and it's. And they said, I don't know if you respect her all the way. And he didn't say, I don't know if you respect her. Because if he had said that, it had been easy for me to be like, oh, you know, what the fuck you talking about? That's my sister. Of course I respect her. I don't know why he phrased it that way, but he said, I don't know if you respect her all the way. Like, all the way. Which made me think for the first time in my stupid life that there are varying degrees of respect. And I guess I knew that, but maybe I didn't. So I was like, huh, what does it mean to respect somebody all the way, the full way? I really sat with that. And in this situation, you would have just thought that at some point. And it kind of still hasn't happened.

[Rachel]

No, it hasn't at all.

[Van Lathan]

That Roland would have sat with the response that he was getting from people. Does it change all of the stuff he's done?

[Rachel]

But I think that's really profound in what you said, because it's kind of where I wanted to go with it. And we have this conversation with Jameela, which we really get into some of this. It naturally leads there, cause of some of the themes in her book, but because of what Roland Martin has meant to the community or has done so much, and it's rooted in us in black people. It's almost as if he couldn't conceptualize or understand. It's almost like, but why would you think that about me when I've done this? And it became very defensive and personal for him, as you saw the way he was responding to people on Social and even in his show thereafter, rather than just saying, and this is the conversation we have with Jameela, black women are upset, or even black men are upset. Just the black community, because it wasn't just women are upset. Let me listen and try to understand and hear where they're coming from. Simple as that. It just is about coming and listening. You might have still walked away with the exact same thing, but instead it was as if you had your armor on, ready to fight because of all that you've done before, rather than, like you said, people miss, people get it wrong. You might be clouded by a personal judgment or Maybe something happened that week where you feel black men are being attacked or not understanding. It became almost as if he was more into defending where he was coming from than just coming and listening to what people were saying. And the reason people were so upset is because people do revere his voice in the community. People do respect Roland Martin, and they were disappointed. It wasn't just. And I'm sure there were people who were looking for an opportunity to come at him. It really was a confusion of like, why are you saying this? This isn't what. How I would think that you would respond. And then you saw other men responding in the same way. And then it goes back to black men and black women being able to talk to each other of why are you so adamant about not trying to listen to what it is that we're saying here? Even the conversation that he has on his show about the health of black. Of black men in the mental state, it's almost as if people were saying, well, why are you talking about this? Why are you centering this? And he's like, well, this show might help a black man who's in a similar situation. There is truth in that. But at the same time, we have to talk about femicide. We have to talk about violence to black women in the community. And that's a conversation too. How do black women feel? How black women, what is their position in all of this? Why do these situations happen? It's not just solely black men and their mental health. And if you solve that, you can figure it out. It's also the way black women are perceived. Women are perceived. It's so much deeper than that. And I think had he had a more diverse panel, you could have gotten into some of these deeper conversations that I feel like you, me and Jameela do as we, as we are discussing her book. It was very one sided. This issue didn't happen just because of a black man's mental health. It's bigger than that. And he was not open to have those conversations. And that's where I'm like, I don't understand why. I mean, I do, but it.

[Van Lathan]

So there, you know, in a situation, number one, the, the mental health component exists because of. You can't, you can't discount the mental health part of this because of the, the actual happening. You. We like to think that only an insane person would do that, right? So you have to go like, what's going on? We did. We do this all the time. We do this all the time when people, like engage in mass shootings and all that stuff. You read like crazy manifestos. You go, like, this person obviously was like dealing with something, and if we're able to stop that thing that they're dealing with, do we stop this outcome? But what I will say about this is that, like, there is a specificity to this, with this type of occurrence. And there's a belief that the woman is something to be killed, that the woman is something to be eliminated once she displeases you and, you know, whatever that would be. It's like you catch somebody cheating, you catch this boom, boom, boom. You go, the woman is something to be exterminated if she becomes too much of a nuisance. And then once you've exterminated the woman, you can't live in polite society anymore, so you must exterminate yourself. Then once you've exterminated or before you exterminate yourself, you don't want your kids to go through this trauma, so you kill them, then you kill yourself. So you do all of this stuff because someone crossed you in a way, emotionally, that was displeasing to you. And there has to be an intellectual thought that forms before the rage builds. And the intellectual thought is that this is unacceptable.

[Rachel]

Right.

[Van Lathan]

What's the penalty and what's the penalty that's meted out?

[Rachel]

Can I just add also with that before the divorce, to your point about like, what's the penalty? It's also, he was accused. Cause I don't want this to like go by the wayside. He was accused for a violent sexual. He was accused two allegations of sexual assault. That is an act of violence. He ultimately ended his life ended with violence against a woman. I will just say that when she decided to divorce him, that's like, it's. She didn't. To the point that you're making of. You're supposed to do certain things, like, you cross me. She left. She was leaving him. Right. She didn't divorce him immediately when the allegations happened. Now she's divorcing. You're supposed to stand beside me. You're supposed to be there. She was moving on away from him, past that. And it goes into your point. I just. Sorry to interrupt you of like how she's supposed to be in this, like what she's supposed to do or you went too far, which adds to the rage, the emotion. But he was accused of something and in the end he committed a violent act against a woman. Right.

[Van Lathan]

And to me, that part of it is sort of being under discussed because how he ended her life and his life is almost confirmation of what type of person he was and what he was capable of and what he very likely did. And so all of this stuff was a profound unforced error. But in it, particularly on behalf of Roland. But in it though, there still is an opportunity to do a bunch of different things. Number one, to listen and exist inside of the space and the groups that you have cultivated and be truly open hearted to what people are saying. And then also to talk about the life of this woman who her life is, the life that was taken about her life, about how she went about her life as a mother, how she went about her life, forget about it. As a mother, as a person who was also a mother and had her own professional life and had her own dreams and had her own visions and versions and of her children that she wanted, regardless of being her, his husband, his wife, regardless of being hers, she had the way she wanted her life to go. She wanted a way that she wanted her kids life to go. Ago, she had things that she had done all that taken away because of somebody else's emotional inconvenience, like to talk about her. And then when we get to a situation to where we've done, number one, discussing the victims, discussing the issue of violence, domestic violence, femicide, we can then talk about, well, what are the things that we can do to make sure that young men don't develop violence, violent and psychotic tendencies that lead them to these type of outcomes?

[Rachel]

Right, right.

[Van Lathan]

Like we can talk about all of this stuff, but we, if we don't prioritize the things that we're discussing, it seems like we're choosing a set of priorities 100%. And then like when you double and triple down on it, then it starts, people start to ask the question. And you know, Roland's been so consistent over the years that it's a hard question for people to ask. But we gotta ask this of all of our OGs. We gotta ask this of me, gotta ask this of everyone. Is all of the stuff that you're doing, all of the work that you do, is this for the healing of a community and the protection of a community, or is it something that makes you a star, man? I want this podcast to be listened to by everyone, everybody. I don't want it to be a small podcast, I don't want it to be a medium sized podcast. I don't want it to be a medium biggish podcast, which what it is, it's medium biggish, right? Like I don't want it to be that I want it to be the greatest thing that's ever happened. I want everything that I do to be the greatest thing that ever happened. Always. Right? I want that, and I want people to know that I am the guy doing the thing, as I'm sure you do, as I'm sure Bill does. Anybody that put their face on the front of it. You didn't put your face on the front of something. Not for people to look at you and think that you was the nicest motherfucker around. However, I will say this, that in doing so, I want people listening to this to get the right information, to have a clear and true evaluation of me and how I care about them.

[Rachel]

You're also not motivated to do this just to be known, just to be clear.

[Van Lathan]

Well, I don't think he is either.

[Rachel]

Well, no, I. I'm not accusing him of that. But you said, when you gave the example, like, is it this or is it this? And I'm saying for you personally, you might want people to know you're the one saying it, but your motivation, your intention for doing this podcast, for saying the things that you say, for the opinions that you have, is not because you want people. It's not an ego thing. It's not pride. I'm not saying that's him.

[Van Lathan]

I'm saying, and I'll be honest with you, in this type of situation, and I know this. This happened before. I know we gotta go. I legitimately and honestly think that Roland Martin owes the black female listeners of his platform an explanation and an apology. And, like, not all of them, like, oh, like, from sea to shining sea. Not all of them had a problem with it. I'm sure some of them understood. But in this situation, I think this was such a horrendous thing that it probably would be a good idea to be like, yo, this is me, Uncle Ro, who's been down with you for a long, long time, fucked with you for a long time. I got this wrong. I didn't mean it. And you guys always know where to come for protection, which is, you know, the Blackstar Network, which I'm still gonna fuck with. I'm still gonna listen to it, but I don't know, we were just in a real bad spot as a culture in that situation. And we'll talk more about this on the other side of it with Jameela. Tough, tough, tough story. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy, seasonal produce and some very tasty limited time flavors. New Whole Foods Market. Peach apricot rose Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch. As is their trending mango Yuzu Chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 Strawberry Pretzels make a great sweet snack.

[Donnie]

That sounds delicious.

[Van Lathan]

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[Jamila Lemieux]

When I have a crush on a guy no one knows, be careful.

[Van Lathan]

I wish Nikki loved me more than

[Rachel]

anyone in the entire world.

[Van Lathan]

Who you wish for? Obsession is 96% fresh on rotten Tomatoes.

[Rachel]

I love you so, so, so, so much.

[Van Lathan]

It's blood soaked nightmare fuel. Brooke I just bludgeon put on her.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You have been warned.

[Van Lathan]

Obsession. Rated R under 17. Animated without parent only theaters May 15 with special engagements in Dolby. Tough story. All right, that's enough. Jamila Lemieux joins us on Higher Learning. Jamila, Jamila. Jamila Lemieux. I've called her Jamila forever. Jamila Lemieux joins us on Higher Learning today. Writer, cultural critic, author of Black Single Mother. Real life Tales of longing and belonging. And when I say writer, I mean prolific prolific writer. The LA Times, the Nation, Essence, Playboy, Shout out to Phil, the Cut, the Guardian, Color Lines, the Washington Post, wired, self inverse, Refinery 29, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Nation, one of my favorite publications. And Vanity Fair. We talking about legacy shit here. How are you doing, sister?

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know I'm here. The great Mariah Carey once said, I'm doing the best I can with what I got.

[Van Lathan]

What would make you do better?

[Jamila Lemieux]

A completely new society.

[Van Lathan]

Okay, tell me what your new society would look like. Black Single Mother is the book. Oh, look at that guy on the back who he's wrote something for. What would your society. Let's start there. We'll talk about the book and what's inside of it and how you're relating to the world. But what would your society look like? The society you would build?

[Jamila Lemieux]

So one of the first things I would institute, as you recall, because I know you read the book at the end, there's the Baby Mama's Bill of Rights and it's a list of about 10 things that all single mothers deserve to have in order to successfully raise their families and live fully actualized lives. So I would want all single mothers to have, if there is a co parent present the full participation and support and equitable share in the financial, emotional, physical cost of raising a child. Empathy. A village work that pays A living

[Van Lathan]

wage,

[Jamila Lemieux]

access to healthy relationships with both platonic friends and potential romantic partners. And love.

[Rachel]

I like that. I'm for that. We should implement. Well, whoever can implement that, we should push that forward. Okay. The book Black Single Mother. You start off the book and you're saying how you used to feel shame with the title or guilt with the title, but you don't end the book that way for. Cause I want everybody to read it. So I don't want to get in too much. But talk about why it took you five years to write this book. Why now? Like, what was going on that you said, this is the time to write the book.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, it took me five years to come up with a book to write. I had a literary agent. I had a national profile. I had a big social media following. I absolutely could have published a book, you know, 2012, 2015. And I just couldn't come up with what to say. Right. And a few times my agent said to me, like, yo, you know, I knew I wanted to talk about black women and how we experience race and gender and identity in this country, and I wanted to talk about black girlhood. But, you know, people would say, you should do something about black single mothers. And I'm like, no. Cause it's one thing for me to be on Twitter sharing about it in real time, but when I'm not on Twitter, I'm trying to correct that. I'm trying to find a man. I'm trying to settle down, you know? And so, like, if I write a book and call it, you know, and talk about black single motherhood in such a substantial, you know, tangible, forever way, I thought it would mean that I would always be a black single mother, that I was gonna somehow doom myself to that. And eventually, you know, I realized, like, this book needs to exist. You know, there hasn't been a substantial nonfiction book about black single motherhood, despite the fact that so many of the mothers in this country who are black are parenting as single mothers and hasn't been covered in any exhaustive way. And when we are talked about is in these small soundbites and stereotypes and being blamed and shamed for the state of the community. And so, you know, I tried to write the book that would have helped me as a new single mother. And so. And through the process of writing the book, if there was any residual Shane, I shook it loose. And even just in the month that it's been out and just talking about it, I'm just like, I felt bad for being an unwed mom, you know, like, my daughter has lived a fabulous life. The first time I met Van, we were backstage at a BET Awards event so my daughter can meet new additions.

[Rachel]

Oh, wow.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know, like this is the type of life that she's lived. She's had a great life with three parents who love her. And so what am I apologizing for? What am I feeling ashamed for? I have a great life. I've had an interesting career. I've had great friends, I've had great sex. I've had meaningful relationships. Like whether this ends with me and another baby and a ring or me and just a ring, or maybe just me and a life partner or me in a house with three friends like the Golden Girls. I've lived a great life as a single mother. Every moment of it, you know, has been worth it.

[Rachel]

Can I, can I zoom in? I love that you said that and I love that you start off talking about how you felt guilt and shame. And this is totally separate. But I'm divorced. Publicly divorced is messy and I felt that way about it. But the more I would talk about it or the more I would just tell my story, I would find that there are so many other people who have been longing for that honesty and vulnerability which you put in the book. And that's what I also love, is that this is community. You're telling other stories in the book as well. For the non mother.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Right.

[Rachel]

Like myself. What would you want them to take away from this book? Or even like the man?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, I mean there. Excuse me. I think there's something in this book for practically everyone, you know, for women who are not mothers, whether that's something they're considering or something that they've rejected or you know, somewhere in the middle. I want to heighten their sense of empathy for the single mothers in their lives and also for them to recognize that single motherhood is a valid path to a happy family. You know, and like I think it, there was once a time I was like, you know, it's not ideal, but we can make it work. I don't think we have an ideal. Like this week I've watched men and some women who would not have engaged publicly with my book about black single motherhood. I am a middle class, college trained, light complexioned, AKA I went to Howard. I've worked for certain procedures, excuse me, certain institutions. Right. Even though I'm a single mother, I've been able to comfortably exist in certain spaces that are not always made as comfortable for black single mothers. Right. But me choosing this topic, it's One thing to talk about police violence, Right. But when we start talking about this intra communal situation that we have now, it's like, you're embarrassing us. You're airing out our dirty laundry. There are people who felt compelled to pay tribute to a murderer less than 24 hours after he committed his crime. A murderer who'd also been accused of rape, they pay tribute to, but won't acknowledge. My book after years of relationship. Like, I watched that happen. So there's this crazy dichotomy between how great my single mother life is and not just me. Like, I interviewed 21 other black single moms in the book. Different class backgrounds, different parts of the country, different ages. And overwhelmingly, is there a struggle there? Absolutely. But essentially these women are happy with the families that they've created. Their children are happy and thriving, you know, and so there's the reality for single mothers for so many of us, and then there's the idea that exists in so many people's minds. Right. And also what people neglect. And I didn't. I wish I'd had this analysis when I was writing the book because. Because it's something that I've really honed in on while promoting it. I grew up the child of a single mother. You know, my dad was very present. And because he was present and kind of known in the community, I was very proud of my father. Right. But I didn't understand why my mom didn't have a man. Like, what's wrong with you? You don't want a man? But I didn't want my dad in the house. I wanted my mother to find a stepfather. I had just accepted my parents as not a unit. Two separate people who exist separately, that was fine with me. But I felt like my mama should have had a man. And when I look back on what I was lacking and what I was missing, it wasn't a father figure, because I had one. It was one I wanted to see my mother supported and loved. But also it was money. Right. I don't think that if we. If my mother made six figures, I wouldn't have been complaining about there not being a stepdad or wondering why she couldn't find somebody. Somebody, you know, I think I would have largely been satisfied with the life that we had so, so much of. So. So when people talk about the challenging statistics as it relates to single mothers and the less likely to graduate high school and less likely to, you know, graduate college in a certain amount of time, more likely to go to. To prison, those statistics are directly tied to poverty, Right. So poor people are struggling. The children of poor married people are struggling, right. With college graduation and workplace attainment. So we have this idea that it's single motherhood that's inherently broken, and it's like, no people who are poor struggle.

[Van Lathan]

Right. Do you find the idea of the nuclear family either antiquated or over obsessed about in American society?

[Jamila Lemieux]

I definitely think that the idea of the nuclear family is over obsessed about. You know, I don't think it's antiquated. I don't think we've grown past it. I think we need a concept of family that is more expansive. Right. So there are an infinite number of combinations of what can make a family. You know, a family is two or more people, you know, joined by love or by blood or both, you know, like, for years. So something I notice all the time now, I see single mothers and their children doing professional photo shoots, right? And they post them on social media and people gas them up. Oh, you look so cute. Oh. And yes, there's occasionally people, where's the dad? There's no dad there. But for the most part, like, it's overwhelming love and support and affirmation and, like, that would not have been the case around the time I had my child in 2013, you know, and I never felt. We've never had a professional photo shoot. You know, we've taken pictures together at things. We've had professional pictures taken of us at events, but we've never, like, I've never booked the studio or went to Sears or whatever, and like, let's do a family photo shoot. Because I thought that was something that a family did, right? And for the first six or seven years of my daughter's life, I didn't think of us as a family. I thought that I would. It would be a family once there was a man there. And I remember hearing Caresha from the city girls say, you know, she wanted to start a. Settle down, start a family. Right. She's got two children, you know, and like, to be fair, I do think that maybe if I had more than one child, I would have recognized us more readily as a family because it was the same hangup I had with my mom growing up. Two of us doesn't feel like a family. It's just two people in a house.

[Rachel]

Right.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know, and so now I recognize that, like, we absolutely, the two of us are a family, you know, and our family is bigger than that. It includes her dad and stepmother and younger brother and Nick, who's, you know, my parents and my siblings. But the Two of us are sufficient. We are a family type. There are a lot of other family types that also work. The nuclear family can work and it can also be deadly. And I feel like as devastated as I am by the events of the past month. Right. All these high profile incidents or high profile social media because they're not necessarily getting a lot of traditional media coverage, but these much talked about incidents of black women and children and a couple of non black women being killed by their partners. And these are husbands. There was a woman in Chicago killed by her son. They're from an elite family. The father was a big deal. There's a park named after him. The mom was naked. The son's a cute. These are people who did things the right way. Justin Fairfax was again, even in death. People are paying tribute to him. He murdered his wife with his children in the house. And people's first instinct was still to say, I had the honor of serving with him on this committee five years ago. Right. That's still the esteem in which he was held, you know, and so, like, we can't pretend that the nuclear family can save us from the tragedy of living in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that was not built with any black person's needs in mind.

[Rachel]

Is there a myth about black single mothers that you even think sometimes black communities unconsciously reinforce?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Oh, absolutely. There's a bunch of them, I think. One, there's this idea that black single mothers are typically irresponsible, you know, that we just all got pregnant on accident and didn't put any thought or intention into when we had our children, you know, And I think that, you know, I will admit I was, you know, I got pregnant under irresponsible, quote, unquote, circumstances. Right. But, like, the responsibility showed up when I had the child to raise.

[Van Lathan]

Right.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know what I mean? And so, like, these same people would be just as judgmental if those women chose to get abortions.

[Van Lathan]

Right?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Right.

[Rachel]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

And so even if it were like, hey, I do see, he's an inconsistent guy. I don't think he'd be a great dad.

[Rachel]

This is.

[Jamila Lemieux]

This is probably not the best circumstances under which to bring a child. You'd be shamed for having the abortion. Right. Like, when the discussion about black femicide started bubbling up on social media, I saw a number of accounts purporting to be black men talking about the number of babies, quote unquote, that are aborted by black women. You know, like, we're the real killers. Are you all. We could never Kill you as fast as you kill our children. Right. That's the message. And so there's the idea of black women being sexually irresponsible. I think the archetype of the bitter baby mama has gotten a lot of coverage in pop culture, you know, a lot of rap references, you know, a stock character in movies from time to time. And so like there's this belief that, you know, single mothers are, you know, forever in love with their ex or, you know, resentful that things didn't work out. I know so many more women who left, you know, than who were left by right and I. And the men, the women I know who were left, like it was an abandonment, it was a cruel leaving, it was a I'm not going to care for my child kind of leaving, you know. And I think also there's this belief that these women always, from day one saw what kind of men for the ones who don't have solid co parents, that they always knew exactly what kind of dude he was and that from day one he was nothing but red flags. And there's no way he could have presented differently. And that's so often not the case. You know, like anyone who's a woman knows that like we've met men who presented one way at the beginning of a relationship. And you know, whether it was something, you know, like whether it's the representatives. Yeah, we meet the representative, you know, and the representatives get people pregnant. And I don't think that we should shame women for choosing their to have their children, you know, particularly when they're in a position to comfortably do so.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah, you know, so relationship dynamics between black men and black women like sort of undergird this idea when you talk about blacks single mother. What would have to be different between black men and black women to have families where it was a black man and a black woman in a long term relationship or married. Like what communication glitch is happening right now to where. I mean, I don't know any numbers or statistics off the top of my head, but it seems like everybody believes that that's in some sort of grave peril like black men and black women. Where's the communication gap to you right now?

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think the cap. So there, there's as I discussed in the book, this like at the foundation of all my theory and thinking around black people and gender for me is the belief that, or rather it's my conviction that there is this widespread belief in the black community that black men and boys are so much more endangered and vulnerable and disenfranchised than black women and girls, that we cannot hold them accountable for harm. That we should not be critical of them, particularly in public. That however they show up in relationship or community is essentially a somehow our fault. You attract what you are. You know what I mean? Men only do what they allow you to do, right? So somehow we're responsible for their behavior or for picking the wrong ones, or we should put up with it because black men deserve our undying love and support. And I absolutely, without hearing my parents were not the ones pushing that. Drilling that into me intentionally, at least. You know, I don't think anyone was intentionally pushing this messaging. But I think that it is the result of how we have failed black women in so many ways. I think about all the black women who are. Who are critical to the civil rights movement and the black power movement, who were relegated to the background so the men could be up front. Because we're imitating what Europeans do, right? The man is the head. The man is in front. You know, we wanna uplift, empower the black man.

[Donnie]

So.

[Jamila Lemieux]

So we're not addressing the sexual assaults taking place in the movement. We're not addressing the domestic violence taking place in these movements, you know, so, like, at no point in our history as black people in this country have the needs and concerns of black women been treated with the same seriousness as the needs and concerns of black men. So when we talk about the history of violence and oppression in this country, one of the most common discussed facets of that is lynching. Right? We almost exclusively talk about the lynching of black men and boys. Right. We do not acknowledge the fact that there were women and girls who were lynched at the same rate. Of course not. But here's what black women did experience at a higher rate. Sexual violence at the hands of. Of white men and boys and black men and boys. Right. At no point in this country have black women had true, true bodily autonomy, you know, and so we don't learn these things in school, you know. And so anyway, the scholar, Treva Lindsay, Dope. You should absolutely have her on the show and talk to her, particularly with what's going on right now. She's very accessible, very, you know, not an academic type of academic, you know, but, like, she has this book called America Goddamn. And it's about how black women experience violence and how they experience life at the intersection of race and gender in this country. And she talks about the fact that, you know, lynchings have been kind of like the definitive act of violence against black people. But not rape. You know, when so many more women experience sexual violence at the hands of our acknowledged direct oppressor, the white man, you know, who we acknowledge as well as by some of our own brothers. You know, like Rosa Parks was an anti rape activist before she got involved with what became the Montgomery bus boycott. She traveled around the south, she was notorious. She was in danger. All these white folks knew who she was. This little small middle aged woman traveling around the south, excuse me. Reporting on the rapes of black women at the hands of white men. Like the rape of Recy Taylor, which is a young married black woman who was gang raped. That's not treated. That's not a story we all heard, right? You know, so our men and boys grow up with, you know, even if they have a mom in the house, so little context about the experiences of women and girls, right. When it comes to men. And this is universal, right? This, this is, this isn't all men, you know, yes, all men, like, or I should say the vast majority of men just don't get this level of discussion or introduction to the experiences their female peers. And so like they don't have adequate empathy for them. You know, they're not raised to value black women the way that we're raised to value black men. Like one of the clearest messages to me in my community at my school, you know, I went to this very pro black, you know, magnet public elementary school and the boys were a priority. The black boy, the endangered black boy, the endangered black male. Since I was a 12 year old, I knew that black men and boys were part of my responsibility as a black person. Right. That I was behold. We had to protect you. I knew that we were supposed to protect you from the system, which meant that if you harm me, I can't just think of what happened to me. I have to also think of what might happen to you. And that's something that so many black women and girls have had to reckon with over and over again. If I tell on this person, what happens to them is literally what played out with Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez. Her fear that if she says this guy has a gun, the police are just gonna shoot first and ask questions later. So he was in danger. She was in danger. Right? And so so many of you all just don't know that we're walking around carrying this weight. And what that looks like sometimes is the pissed off 55 year old at the DMV who can't stand niggas and hasn't, you know what I mean? Had a loving relationship in 15 years since she finally left her baby daddy. You know who.

[Van Lathan]

Can I ask one question?

[Rachel]

Go ahead, go ahead.

[Van Lathan]

So, a couple of things. It's funny, one thing that you said that's interesting to me is growing up in the Deep south, the rape of black women was always something that was reiterated to me. But if I'm being honest, it was reiterated to me and how it stole the dignity of the man. The man could not protect his woman against being raped by a white guy. So it was like, think about, like what you're going, you're getting. Your woman is being taken. It was never like. Even when I thought about that, I was watching this Public Enemy video back in the day. And the woman gives birth and then the man holds his child and the child is white.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

And it's like, look at him as he confronts this robbing of his dignity. Because obviously this was a slavery situation with a mass. I had sexually assaulted this enslaved person. I will ask you this, though, just so I'm clear. You think that the conversation between black men and black women is exclusively about black men. Do you think that there's any conversation that's holistic that has to do with black men and black women as a unit? Or do you think if black men and if black men are better, then black men, black female and male relationships will be better?

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think that the conversation has been largely about the needs and the concerns of the male and that it's not just like a yes, if black men were doing better, black people would be doing better. If black women were doing better, black people would be doing better. But I think in terms of this, it's like, we're not going to see more nuclear families with heterosexual couples, more happy heterosexual units if the men don't get attuned to what the women are experiencing. You know, like women of all races at this point are choosing peace over cruelty over, you know, men who are, excuse me, men who are selfish or non committal or, you know, who've been red pilled and now have these unreasonable expectations of what a woman should bring to the table. You know, I think that, like, my dating preference is men in their 30s. And I think the sweet spot for men is between, like in this moment in history, I'd say between 34 and 38, you know, in terms of men who are really socially aware, you know, and like millennial men came of age at a time where there was public discourse about feminism on social media on a regular basis. You know, and some of them had the opportunity to really engage with those ideas and be challenged. And, you know, I found that, you know, I'm an older millennial. I'm talking about the millennial guys that are kind of like the. The middle of the group.

[Van Lathan]

Like, what age you talking about? Like, right there.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Like, I say, like, 34 to 30.

[Van Lathan]

34. 30. Oh, so that's the. Okay, so that cohort you're talking about. Yeah, like. Yeah, yeah. But.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But it's okay. But I. But I would even. I'd say, you know, 30 to 39.

[Van Lathan]

Okay, cool.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know what I mean? That window, in my experience as friends and as, you know, romantic partners, they just have a different sense of understanding of patriarchy that I very rarely get with Gen X men. You know, or even some of the slightly older millennial men, you know, they have a different respect for women. You know, they don't say things like, since me too, I don't know how to talk to women anymore. I don't stop women no more because of me too. Like, what do you mean you don't stop women no more because of me? Explain exactly how that works out. They're just progressive. They don't tend to be homophobic. The way that, you know, when you have a conversation with a man who, like, I will say, the. The vast and just, like, in terms of dating, like, the intentionality and the kindness and the, you know, the. The vast difference between 38 and 42 has been mind blowing.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know, like, these are both millennial men. You know what I mean? But, like, that 42 year old, you know, I think so much of what we're dealing with, with men right now is like, What? I'm sorry?

[Van Lathan]

No, nothing. That breath was so telling. But go ahead, keep going.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, I just think that, you know, men are not happy with the way patriarchy and capitalism is shaking out for them. They're disenchanted, as most of us are. It's not a good system. It benefits the very least of us. Right. And some of them are blaming women for their unhappiness. You know, in the manosphere, it's men, period. Right? White men, Asian men, Latino. They're blaming women, period. But when it comes to black folks, it's black men. Like, Van, when you talked about the lack of dignity for a man whose woman was seized by a white man. Right. Like, to this day, throughout my whole life, I've heard people parrot the idea that black women are somehow complicit with what the. Excuse me, with what the man has going on. Right. That Black women are complicit with the system. Right. We chose the system over having a man in the house. Right. Not just. Right.

[Van Lathan]

Talking point.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, right. We, you know, we are working hand in hand with the white man standing. Take down the black man. That's our agenda. That's what the black feminists are doing. That's what you're doing. Being public and dating men who are not, you know what I mean, black. Like, we are part of this agenda to harm men. Like we are. We're the problem. You know, it's.

[Rachel]

It's true.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I did.

[Rachel]

He loves this. He loves that.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You pointed out my ex is not black.

[Rachel]

Keep going.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, it's true, but it's like while we've watched our men have the freedom to date whoever they wanted correct safely from us, we weren't going to harm them. White people might harm you. Right. So it's not that you can necessarily always have a white woman, but when it came to us, the, the worst you might get is the eye roll.

[Van Lathan]

You know, like, about, like you think that it's been. You think, you guys think that it's been culturally accepted and codified inside the black community for a black man to have a white wife?

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think it's been culturally codified and accepted in particular black communities and it's been accepted amongst black celebrities. Is it always going to be a hot button topic? Absolutely.

[Rachel]

But the only. I feel like pushback that you get is from black women, but not from. I think she's talking about outside of that. Like, whereas opposed when we do it, it feels a little bit more widespread.

[Van Lathan]

The criticism, a point of gentle pushback. I have never experienced that if where I'm from.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But it's where you're from.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah, but it's not just Baton Rouge. It's like where I'm from.

[Jamila Lemieux]

It's not la.

[Van Lathan]

It's. Well, LA is a different situation. Right. By the time you get, like, by the time where I'm from, in the black communities that I've been a part of, if you walk into. I'm not talking about amongst people who make a million dollars a year, like, even like sports stars. When I was growing up, I would always just look at my dad. Like, there you go. He's a white girl. Like, it just like, to me, I don't know.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But you are from, like, you are from Negronia. You are from black people and generations of black families.

[Van Lathan]

Why would I say that is like, why doesn't that matter? Like, why do. When we have these conversations. Why do we orient these conversations around these sort of cosmopolitan, hyper capitalist metropolitan areas where you don't really have. It's almost like we're using LA Hollywood as a reference point and we're saying your experience amongst an actual.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I can tell you exactly like black culture.

[Van Lathan]

Let me tell you, that's generational deep matters less.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I'm gonna tell you exactly why. It's not that it matters less, it's that the places where it happens frequently are epicenters of culture. So they're creating the movies and the magazines and the artwork that young people consume. That people across the world consume. Right. I'm sure if you are a NetFL subscriber and you lived in another country, you would think all the black girls were biracial because that's what they.

[Van Lathan]

Excuse me. Thank you. I bring that up, and I am. Hold on, wait a second, though. Excuse me. I bring that up and I'm consistently over and over shouted down and said that I'm over obsessing about that. But what I'm saying is that, oh,

[Jamila Lemieux]

I have a lot to say about

[Van Lathan]

Kobe Jones in the fucking movie is all I'm fucking saying.

[Rachel]

That's not the part where we say, you obsessed.

[Jamila Lemieux]

No, no, no, no.

[Van Lathan]

Like, I've. I have a database on my notes app about the. I can show you right now, I have a database of young black biracial actresses. A new one pops up every day.

[Rachel]

And that wasn't the night. We've talked about this.

[Van Lathan]

Remember when I said every woman on the HBO show and I said, it's a bird? And you was like, that's not even true. I'm telling you, I watch all of this shit and there is. And there is a thing that has

[Jamila Lemieux]

happened, but when you bring it up,

[Van Lathan]

when I bring it up, people go, there's Van Obsession again.

[Jamila Lemieux]

No, I'm waiting to bring it up. I like to think of myself as the nation's foremost thinker on biracial, Even though I know Van is going for my title. He's more visible. But I have the lived experience because I have a biracial parent. So I've seen what this shit looks like. Up hand, up close. But anyway, without getting into a tangent on that, but yes. So, like, I believe you. Yes. So the black accent, the representation, like, the representation that we're exposed to so often emphasizes the abuse and superiority of whiteness or proximity to it. And so the fact that so many of our esteemed Hollywood, you know, legends ended up in interracial relationships and with grandchildren who don't look black at all, you know, like, I think that's why it is such a big conversation point. And also again, for like, if you're a black woman who lives in la, you know what I mean? Like, as somebody who I moved here from New York, I grew up in a mixed race neighborhood in Chicago that was known for interracial couples. And I'm not saying it was always comfortable for me, but yeah, there was definitely times where I was kind of like, damn, just all y' all in here with Becky. But like, even from cities where it was normal, it's been normal in every city I lived in, coming to LA was overwhelming. You know, coming to LA and just seeing the volume. So again, like, LA is telling the world what black people look like. And it's also a bunch of black folks who grew up middle class, who have large. Who didn't come from places like you that are, you know, telling black stories.

[Van Lathan]

Last thing I'll say about this, number one, I will say this. This is an issue. I do think this issue is slightly overstated. And let me tell you why. From my perspective, number two, in la, LA is a lot of things. If you go to, if you go that way, it's black couples together. Now if you are in, if your LA is Beverly Hills, West Hollywood or the places where people are congregating like that, then yeah, you're talking about that. But if you spend time like when I go to the Court Cafe on like, and I'm. It's black families together. It's black people together. Is black people together doing their thing? When you. Depends. So when you say, when people say la, a lot of times it depends on like what your LA is. And that's a. And I'm being for. I'm. I'm not being glib when I say that like we. This where we stay at. So we go to the Soul House, we go to these other places and these brothers sometimes move different around that. That's true. I guess my point in pointing out some of these dynamics is the fact that like, I have an understanding and we all, we have a, A push and pull on this about black and what's black. And no black is better than this black and what it is. But there is sort of this blackness that is sort of this more. I guess Boule understood upper crust Jack and Jill blackness that interrogates, that gets interrogated in a way for all black people. And if it gets the niggas that I work at Autozone that even if they around and they bad people. I'm not a great partner. I'm not like a great guy as far as my dealings with women. A lot of times I'm respectful of women's. But a lot of time I'm selfish and I'm like. And I lie and I'm duplicit. This and I'm all the same shit. That ain't shit. Niggas are. But when you look at the way people that, where I'm from, prioritize relationships, Black women is what they fuck with. Black women is what they love. Black women is who honestly will have them right in these situations. And I think even the conversations about the movies and the product that's being put out, you really can't make a movie, a romantic comedy with an interracial couple. You cannot make a romantic comedy with a black man, white female, interracial, a couple. That movie's for no one. No one's going to see it. Like nobody's going to see that movie. Like in. In Hitch. That movie was originally meant to star Cameron Diaz.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I know.

[Van Lathan]

Can't do it. You have to put in a Latina. So that is acceptable, but not just to white audiences, to black women. So that movie is acceptable to black audiences. Right?

[Jamila Lemieux]

To black women.

[Van Lathan]

To black women, to black people. I'm gonna be real with you. I'm probably not going to fuck with Hitch as much if Will Smith is up there in a relationship with Cameron Diaz.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I've never seen Hitch because that whole let's do a Latina as a compromise, that never works for me. I've never seen any of those movies.

[Rachel]

Did you see something new?

[Jamila Lemieux]

I did see something new.

[Rachel]

Did you see something new which.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Sanaa Lathan.

[Rachel]

Sanaa Lathan.

[Jamila Lemieux]

White man, right?

[Van Lathan]

Those movies, like those movies. That movie might work because black ladies might like black ladies did go out. Black ladies might.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But they only made it one sense that came out in.

[Van Lathan]

But what I'm saying is like there is still. Because a lot of this has to do with racial self consciousness and racial self esteem. And a lot of brothers still look at men and I don't know if this is even fair, but a lot of brothers still look at men that have white wives as having just inherently low racial self consciousness. Low racial consciousness and low racial self esteem. They look at them that way.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yes, there are some particularly people, rappers, people who are raised or people who are raised in a very black context. Like you, you know, like I went to Howard when I go to reunions, have many of them marry white no. Have a whole lot of them married, light skinned. Yes. You know, so I think that like even among black men who are black wives. Black wives, Black wives, like oftentimes the black wife is light complexion, you know, But I lost my train of thought for a second. Hold on. You were talking about the high. Oh, so here's the thing. Like, here's where we're seeing an actual tangible, like results of these interracial pairings. Right. The NBA, the complexion of the league has changed drastically from when we were kids. Right. There's all these Jaylins and Jadens now, you know, and at first, you know, I kind of thought it was funny. I was like, oh, the irony, you know, Like, I'm curious to see what are black men going to say when one day they turn on a basketball game and everybody's mixed race. Right. Or mixed race looking and knowing that their interest or the interest of some black men in white women is what led to this. Right. Or light complexion women. Cause some of those, you know, players may just have light skinned moms. But what I had not considered, and I reached out to two prominent black male writers who cover sports and I said, I think you should do something on this. And neither of them wanted to touch it. But for so long there was this myth because it didn't happen for many people, but there was this idea that basketball could be a ticket out the hood. Right. We saw it work for Allen Iverson, we saw it work for LeBron James. Right. You've got the talent, you've got the drive. You can completely transform your family's circumstances. These NBA biracial guys have former athlete fathers.

[Rachel]

Yep.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know, their parents are well to do. They're from the suburbs. You know, they're not from particularly black areas. You know, they went to the best training camps, they went to the best schools. You know, they're not from here. Yeah. Like, these are like GMO biracials. You know what I mean? Like they're genetic, they're engineering.

[Van Lathan]

Jamila, this is such a conversation.

[Rachel]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

We talk about this so much.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I know, I'm like, I've been dying,

[Van Lathan]

but this is such a conversation. Like, but let me tell you something else though. We'll get back on. I'll steer serious, back on track so we can get back to. But I brought that up on Twitter one time and this is where the kind of thing gets reversed. Cause me, 46, old nigga, Gen X, er like right there, Gen X or 1980, I bring that up and I go, hey, you know, these guys like, they not from the trenches anymore. Look at all of these guys. Yeah, they got, they got the Duke haircut, they got the whole nine. Whatever. The cohort of black men that you're talking about are the ones that admonished me. They're the ones that went, you guys are so obsessed legitimately. They said, I got killed for a day. You guys are so obsessed with this poverty ritual, with this belief that you gotta play your way out of poverty, that you have to play your way into this. And I'm like, I'm not really obsessed with that at all. What I'm talking about is there was one conduit for young black men to be able to get out of it. Not one, but it was one of the conduits. And this is gone because your dad played in the NBA, because you've had a skills trainer since you were five or six years old, because you were raised in the AAU system, There's a cost there. But having that conversation, particularly if that conversation is around the racial and I guess, ethnic identity of the player or B, their access to all of this extra training and stuff like that, that's seen as non woke. That's an unpopular thing to do. And that conversation has been being had as we watch all of these players. But you can't have it because if you do, you're the asshole.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You're the asshole.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah. They've convinced us that us as black people, male or female, having any sort of critique of interracial dating is just as bad as a white person feeling that way. You know, there's this people that we are, particularly when we're talking about black men, it's like, how dare you deny him the right? You know, black men died. Black men fought, you know, and have put their lives on the line consistently for white women, you know, to have white partners.

[Rachel]

I'm gonna go back to something you said when we were talking about prioritizing black men and how we were like, what you saw in school and growing up, I'm wondering, and it's probably not one. It's not one thing for sure. But where do you see, where do you place the blame, if you place blame at all? Is it in white supremacy? Is it in the patriarchy? Is it in religion? Is it in with the family unit, the pushing that forward? And maybe like, maybe you look at mothers, maybe that maybe coddled black men, or maybe it was instituted because it didn't just start with, hey, I don't know, like we. It was just innately within us. It's something that was created. Where do you think. Where do you place blame of as to why black men may have been prioritized rather than black women?

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think there's a few roots to that. I mean, ultimately it is, you know, this is. This is a white supremacist patriarchy. You know, the black man holds one part of that identity. He's a man. You know, and we as a community have made a project of restoring the dignity and manhood to the black man that he deserves. That that's something we talk about, but we haven't talked about restoring dignity and womanhood to black women. And we do talk about that. For black women, it's always exclusively in some type of respectability, politics, costume. Right? Like the dignity of the black woman is tied to you not having children out of wedlock. It's you not twerking. It's you not dressing like a hoochie. Right. It's you carrying yourself a certain way. That's how we restore respect to black women. You have to earn it. But for black men, it's like they deserve to be leaders. They deserve to be, you know, the heads of the household. And, you know, in the book I talk about the moyhan report of 1965. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a sociologist who later becomes a senator, and he prepares this report for the president and says, hey, we can give black people affirmative action. We can give them welfare. We can do all this stuff to help them along the way. And yes, be clear, racism has been very bad and they have suffered. But ultimately, the problems with the black community will not cease until they address the matriarchal structure of their families. Black women are the heads of their household. Their men are emasculated and weak. They need to go to the military, and the women have to stop domineering their men. And this report was endorsed by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young and all these prominent male leaders. And it has reborn itself over and over again. The name of the report is the Negro Family A case for National Action. And we've seen it in so many ways manifested in how black single mothers have been. And mind you, only 25% at that time. I think only 25% of black children were born to single mother households back then when he created this report. Right. Today it's 75% are born to unmarried moms. You know, we don't have the clearest data that says, because there's a spectrum of what co parenting can look like. And so we don't have a clear picture of, like, how many moms are doing it all alone, how many moms have 5050 custody, how many moms have the every other weekend arrangement. That is so popular and pervasive, you know, but so there. That contributed to this idea that black women were directly responsible for many of the problems of the community. And then you have Ronald Reagan and the welfare queen mythology, the idea that black women are just living off the system. And black preachers and politicians glommed onto that and parroted that. And rappers essentially have parroted and repeated this same idea that lazy, trifling, no good black women, you know, are responsible for so much of our challenges. So there's that. You know, I think because this is a patriarchy, we wanted to free the black man. And there was a belief, I imagine, among a number of black folks in the civil rights and black power movement that if the black man got his rights, he would open the door and free the black woman too, you know, and that's just simply not how things have played out.

[Van Lathan]

You know what's interesting for a couple of things, Number one, I think, and I talk to my brothers about this a lot. I don't think. I think that there's some black men want to be free, but then some black men want to be white, and they see white as a way of being free. Right. The whole allure of Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is a dominator. He never has to say he's sorry. Right. He never has to say, hey, he doesn't have to be a part of community. He is like a cult leader where people follow whatever he does. He gets to put his thumb on the scale whenever he wants. Some people see that as being freedom. And the reason why they see that as being freedom is because that's kind of what America tells you, Right? America puts you in deep conversation, deep conversation, deep competition with your brother, and the one who sits at the head of the table is the boss. And everything comes down from that. That's like a white capitalist framework of manhood and masculinity, and we need to reframe that. Right. Do you want to be free or do you want to be white? Right, That's. We have to talk about that. We have to discuss that. Interestingly, though, our conversation around this has been centered on men.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

Like, this has been a male centered conversation. Because going back to a question that we talked about earlier, the question is, what's happening between black women and black women and black men? Like, what's the conversation? Glitch and it's. This is what black men need to do. So there's a conundrum there. And the conundrum is both we can't have everything focused on black men. We can't have everything centered on black men. But there's also the belief and the understanding that black men can do specific and oftentimes dramatic harm. So they need special attention. So we can't make everything about black men. But then in our conversation, everything is about black men. So, like my. The response to what happened. We can just talk about it like we're going to talk about it in another. The response to what happened to what happened with Justin Fairfax, across the board, grotesque. Like for the people. We're going to talk about it, we're going to discuss it. Across the board, grotesque. Across the board, grotesque. Down the line, though, with that situation down the line, you're seeing what happens when these particular guys go bad, when they don't go bad, when they fucking flip out. They do unimaginable shit, right? Unimaginable shit on scales and in numbers. That's different. So there's somebody demonstrated by this conversation that has to say they need, if not special care. They need direct action from someone, particularly other black men. We had Wes Moore here. Wes Moore said it. That's what Jason Wilson does at the Cave of Adullam. Like, Jason Wilson, his academy is just for black boys. It's just for black boys. And there are some people that have criticized it, that have gone, well, our black girls need help and stuff like that. Jason's point is, yes, they do. But, like, what I'm seeing right now is a young. Are young men, particularly in Detroit, who can be incredibly violent, who can hurt the women around them, who can hurt the women in generations before them that are in their house. So I have to teach these boys to emote. I have to teach them dignity. I have to let them cry. I have to teach them achievement. I have to make sure that there is a father in the home, even when there's another father in the home. I have to create community from them so they understand comprehensive masculinity. So I do see in these conversations sometimes a specific criticism, a call for specific help, but then also a call to de center. And sometimes I don't know what to do with that.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think, you know, there's enough work and enough hands to go around to get everything done. You know, Like, I think that we get. It's easy to. And I'm guilty of this too. We can get caught up on just a bad idea that somebody had on social media. We must defeat this bad idea. This is one random person with 500 followers, you know, but they're saying we must decenter men. We must decenter men. And I think also, you know, and so now we're all laser focused on telling her why we can't decenter men as opposed to thinking about like, why would she say decentermen in the first place?

[Van Lathan]

So you're against decentering men.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think that de centering men has been misinterpreted into meaning that men no longer matter or not a focus at all. I think it's decentering men means the world should not revolve around them. They should not be the censor of our universes. Right. That doesn't mean, you know, destroy men or dispose of men. It's like you are not the sun that I rotate around, you know, and so there have to be specific efforts that are made to address the violence in the black boys. But there's also efforts that are not being made with black girls. And I'm not saying that that particular school has to address them, but like there are interventions that girls require that they're not getting either. I'll give you an example. Like when I was 11, 12, and I started having the ability to walk around my neighborhood by myself and like maybe take the bus or go to a coffee shop or whatever, that started a years long endurance of street harassment from fully grown men. That has impacted me to this day. When the guys in their 20s and 30s would do it, I'd kind of rationalize it, like, oh, they think I look mature. I just look grown for my age. When I look at pictures of myself at 12, 15, 21, I looks like a baby, you know, but the 20, 30, you know, under 35, okay, you know, whatever. But like the 40 year olds and the 50 year olds and the 60 year olds, they were, these men are my man, my, my father's age, you know, my, my teacher's ages. And they decided disgusted me so badly to the point where I, at my big age today, feel uncomfortable being approached by substantially older men, you know, who now feel they're doing me a favor, you know, because they would prefer someone 10 years younger than me, you know, but like I, I still get the ick. And nobody, no one ever talked to me about street harassment. You know, nobody ever told me that was a thing. I didn't talk to my friends about it. I took responsibility for. I was afraid that if I told my parents every time I Go outside. Men make me uncomfortable. They were gonna keep me inside. They were gonna make me not wear short skirts or lipstick.

[Rachel]

You know, I think there's also the thought of that's just what men do.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yes.

[Rachel]

Which is what was excused. And to your point about, you know, the conversation, how we've been talking about men, I think you made such an excellent point. When you're like, it's not about, we're trying to de center men. We're trying to, like, get rid of them. You have to talk about. The reason we've been talking about men, in my opinion, so much that this podcast is because to understand why women are in this place, why there's a stereotype, stereotype about a black single mother, why women feel the certain ways that they do. When you just shared your story about the catcalling and stuff for men, you have to understand the history of the power that's been given to men or the way that men have been prioritized, or the way that men have even been coddled in certain ways, or what we've been told to accept. That's why it seems like it's so much about men, because you have to understand how we got here. We didn't get here because this is just what women were supposed to be in society. We got here because it's been the way that they've been taught to think. Which is why I asked you the question, like, where do you think it stemmed from? So many different areas. It's just a part of society. So you have to talk and understand how we got here. And that's talking about men.

[Van Lathan]

I'm for it. All I'm saying is I have no problem with it. All I'm saying is that they're just for rhetorical clarity sometimes. Right. Like, I have no problem with that. I have no problem discussing it. I have no problem with understanding things in the context that I believe them to be true, but then also adding context to things that I do think are overstated and untrue. Not specifically about black men, because, you know, we can have those conversations, and I know these niggas, but specifically about black relationships and black relationship dynamics. I think there are some things that are truer in terms of, like, social media and conversations and not as true the more black people, you know, I just completely believe that that's true. But what I'm saying in this particular conversation is, if so if I say what, like, how can black men and black women be better to each other? And then we have a conversation about black men well, then what I need to be able to do is do that work. What I need to be able to do then when I say, When I say, hey, I'm going to focus on the, the group of people that we're saying is responsible for the totality of this broken relationship or this broken communication. When I, if, when I'm, when you say, yeah, things will be better if black men understand how much harm they're doing, well, then I need to be able to do that work. And then we need to, then we have to center men because we're saying that they're the center of the problem. And if they're the center of the problem, the only way to the solution is to center them. And so, like, there's, there's competing narratives sometimes that come out. Right. Like if, like, you, you don't want to get into a situation where you make harm about a black male mental health situation or about raising comprehensive black men, you don't want to make that harm about that. Right. Because I was raised by a non comprehensive black male. My dad was not what you would call a comprehensive man. But his edict and his law, as far as it dealt with physically harming women, can't talk about emotionally harming. But as it dealt with physically harming women, putting your hands on women, putting a woman in a dangerous situation, he was very clear on that. He was clear on what it was to be a gentleman. He was clear on lots of things. He was imperfect in a lot of ways.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But, but something I think about often. Your father said to you, Your father, great man, obviously did a really great job raising.

[Van Lathan]

Talking about the conversation we had when I was 16.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yes.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

So, but, but, and so he tells him that basically it's time for you to start having sex. You know, and so it's like even this is what even the good men do.

[Van Lathan]

Right?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Right. And so I think that's the thing that we need to realize that there is unlearning that all of the men have to do. And that's not to say there's no unlearning for the women and girls. And I don't want you to say black men are the center of the problem. They create the problem. They are the problem. It's not that black men are a problem. It's that patriarchy is a problem and that we're all suffering as a result. Right. And so are there things black women need to do? Absolutely. Are there are women who don't know how to listen to a man's feelings and allow him to be vulnerable or emotional. Do I think that is the majority of women? No. But are there women that are that way? Absolutely. Are there women who are violent? Yes. Are there women who are unkind? Are there women who are colorful? Like all the thing, all the character flaws and issues and emotional trauma, you know, that you can find in a human being, you can find in black women. As it relates to this inability between us and you all and getting along and finding love, I think the biggest thing would be it's not necessarily empathy because I think if black women were any less empathetic to black men, you all would be in a far worse conditions than you are now. I think a lot of black men survive because of the empire of black women. Right. So it's. We have to. The de. Centering is not about. I. I think all of us need to again remove the man from the center of the universe and create a universe that is expansive enough for man, woman, child, non binary. We are all in the middle. Everybody's needs and everybody's concerns count. Right. But like for us, doing that work does sometimes look like decentering men. Because you know, you all, even if you grew up in a two parent household with a father who loved his mother and respected her for the most part, like it's unlikely that you felt the exact the same social pressure to marry and have children that a woman might feel. Right. Because I'm trash to a lot of people. There are so many people who say to me online, but you're a single mother, nothing else. That's a complete sentence. That is the insult. I don't have to know another thing about you. So it doesn't matter how accomplished I am. I have a Wikipedia page and you can google a bunch of cool stuff that I've done over the years. I am a single mother, so I am a failure. That does not define single fathers the way that it does single mothers. Right? Absolutely. So it is not that all the work is to be done by the men, but there is this lack of understanding for us. And I think that women have tried very hard to be empathetic and to understand black men and to censor their needs and concerns and have done so much emotional labor. And what we're seeing now is women who are like, I'm hurt, I've been traumatized, I've been mistreated. And I will say this about me personally, because I can talk about these things at length, passionately. I will be honest. I am saying I do not have a ton of romantic trauma as it relates to black men. I've only dated black men, but I do not have. I haven't been hit. I haven't been lied to a bunch of times. You know what I mean? I've had some bad experiences. I've had some disappointing experiences. I've had my little feelings hurt, but I haven't been put through it. Nobody's dogged me out. Right. That's not every woman's experience. But for the women who have been like the stories of the women I'm in community with, you know, I think of the 21 women I interviewed for this book, it's just so common that women have had these devastating experiences. And even with that, I've been sexually assaulted. Well, I think we've all been sexually assaulted countless times, if we talk about what sexual assault means, certainly. But when we would think of something, we would consider the big R. I've experienced that twice, you know, and when I was doing standup, I would joke that, like, I got off easy, you know, because they're women who have experienced it far more times than that. And also, you know, mine were essentially strangers. These were not. This wasn't a classmate. This wasn't my pastor. This wasn't my dad. This wasn't somebody had to look at day in and day out. Right. But so many women are in community with their abusers. So they're like, I think, again, Black men. Simply just taking the time to better understand the experiences of black women is not this tremendous burden of labor. It is not asking you all to become completely new people and to. You know what I mean? It's a matter of just taking the time to know your female counterparts.

[Rachel]

And it's not a threat to them.

[Jamila Lemieux]

And it's not a threat.

[Rachel]

That's the big thing. It in no way takes away from your manhood to add, to understand and to listen.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah. So I don't know. So I don't have any specific criticisms of black women. I don't. That would be odd, right? I don't have any specific criticisms of black women. I do have specific criticisms. The way black women and black men talk to each other.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Other.

[Van Lathan]

That's what I'm talking about. I don't have any specific criticisms with black women. Every single time I've been done wrong by a black woman, that's what happens in relationships. I don't look at it as, hey, somebody over me when I was 16, 17, 18. Now I gotta go get all money and be the big dog. Hey, this girl went off and did this. This is the way These women are. I don't, I don't carry that trauma like that. And the reason why I don't. I was able to not care. It is the same reason why I was able to analyze what my father said for what it was. My father actually did the best job as a dad, even though he failed in a lot of ways, because he taught me to actually not be like him. He taught me to question authority. He taught me to question the information that I was getting and ask whether or not it made sense to me. Right. When I did that in front of his face, he never really fucked with it. Question everybody else, except for question me. But when I saw that, I was like, huh, well, that doesn't seem like it makes any sense. And then that helped me contextualize him. But I'm not talking about black women needing to be more empathetic. The black women that I know have almost died of empathy. My mother, my grandmother, my sister Kalika. Like, they've extended infinite empathy, empathy that you can't even. I'm not talking about that. But what I am talking about is like an animus, hyper combative, almost commodified version of social media conversation that is not productive or helpful.

[Rachel]

Sure.

[Van Lathan]

And that right there. I'm not talking about specifically anything about black women. I understand all the criticisms that people can make and throw all kinds of examples. I understand the dangers that exist with black men that aren't comprehensive, that are angry and violent and don't understand and can't appreciate and communicate with their female counterparts. And I'm talking about just in community with women, period. How you empower women, how you share with women. I'm constantly and consistently working on that here, trying to be better. I'm just talking about specifically not the me, not the you, but how we talk to one another. And there has to be space to have that conversation. There has to be space to get on there. How many, how many times in the world can you remember me specifically on this podcast criticizing black women? Never, Never, never, ever, ever gonna happen.

[Rachel]

But you're mainly talking about social media.

[Van Lathan]

But I'm talking about. That's what we're all talking about. Like, we're like, like what? Like what we're essentially talking about. And that's why I think a lot of the conversations that we have, sometimes they mutate a little bit when we include too much that happens on social media. They, they, they, they become a little, they become odd and weird because I go home and all of these relationships might be fucked up and I see Black people working together. I see black people doing it together. I. I think we have an absolutely brilliant opportunity to raise a new generation of black boys. And to me, it's one of the things that sometimes frustrates me because I'm protective of young black men. I'm protective of them. I care about them. I care about communicating with them. I know this is the last thing I'll say is that a lot of times it'll look like coddling, but I know I can't talk to some of my brothers the way I can talk to you. There's a different language of communication that they learned. They learned that we can communicate until there is a tinge of disrespect. And now I'm seeing red. Now we gotta fight. Now the communication is gone. So I'm not coddling anyone. I'm attempting to communicate with someone in a way that is primed to see everything as a threat. Primed to see everything as, like, his masculinity is so turned up that he needs sometimes an older nigga to be a little softer with him, to, like, be a little bit. To communicate with him in a way that doesn't in any way push him over the edge. And a lot of times when you do that, N is like, van's going soft on N. Van's doing this, Van's doing that. I know that making enemies in situations like this is not the way to go about it. You make enemy, you make friends. Actually, by giving people the opportunity, you change lives. This is truly the last thing I say. By giving people the opportunity to know that they're limiting themselves. They're limiting their relationships with other women that they know. They're limiting their personal emotional growth. They're limiting themselves by adhering to a white male framework of masculinity that's only ever killed their fathers and raped their mothers.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I think, and I don't think most of us would criticize you for adjusting your tone to that. I mean, you're saying you get pushback for it. But I think that most people who think critically and reasonably about these issues understand need to reach people where they are, you know? But I also say it's not the only approach that works. Like, I think, particularly when it comes to online, you have to recognize, like, is this somebody who's capable of or interested in meaningful discourse? Or is this somebody who's here to be chaotic, to be misogynistic, to be hateful? Right? And so, like, I've had real conversations with men where we disagreed on social Media. And that doesn't get as much attention. Yeah, we absolutely have. Right. That doesn't get the attention that it does when there's a bunch of clapbacks. But there's times where it's like, I look at a man's timeline and, you know, you're blaming Ashley Renee for her own death because she was in a relationship with a white man. And you're talking about, you know, all these nasty things about black women as single mothers. And it's just kind of like, I can clown you, and I have the gratification of me clowning you. But also people are seeing that your ideas are bad and I'm ridiculing you. And so I think there is a space. And I know it's tricky because, you know, you're very well known public figure, you're a man that a lot of men admire. But there is a time where, like, you shooting down those bad ideas, you know what I mean? Like, it can be humorous. It can be, but, you know, like, being like, nigga, no, you sound crazy. Why are you talking to women like this? Like, really checking them, I think is so important. And there are men on social media, you know, who make a point to, you know, they say, hey, tag me in if the guys are, you know, cutting up. And they do, and they, they go at women. Like, I think we need to see that. Like, I think there's been a lot of hand holding and a lot of trying to reason with. And that is an important part of the strategy. But I also think the strategy needs to be expansive enough to know that, like, not everybody's gonna get, you know, when somebody's heels are so dug in to what they believe, you know, like you're OPP to them anyway, so, you know, bring it down.

[Van Lathan]

I mean, to me, we call out bad ideas on here all the time. Unless I think, unless I have an inclination that the person is well meaning because I give space for raw because my deprogramming is ongoing. And it was like, really labor intensive. Right? It really was. Like, I didn't hear the term patriarchy until I got to college. And this was back in the day where these terms weren't just floating around the Internet for you to pick em, you know what I mean?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Man, do you remember the first time I did your podcast?

[Van Lathan]

I do.

[Jamila Lemieux]

I was on the Red Pill podcast years ago. And one of the things that we debated was, should a man check his friend if he's cheating on his girl or not taking care of his kids? And at that point in Van's life. He was like, I don't get into another man's business.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah.

[Jamila Lemieux]

You know what I mean?

[Van Lathan]

You know who checked me on that, though?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Me, nigga.

[Van Lathan]

But not besides you, though. You know who checked me on that, though?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Who?

[Van Lathan]

The rest of the crew. Because the cheat on a girl thing is one thing. Like, getting into people's business about their interpersonal relationships, to me is a question. Like. Because, like, to me, what's going on in your household, like, between you and your girl? Like that. That's a quagmire. I'm still. But my crew checked me on that. And the reason. Because we do do that. My crew, like, when I thought about this for a long time, my crew checked me on that. My boy Ian was like, which nigga in our crew has not been taking care of his kids?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

Like, which nigga in our crew? Like, which nigga in our crew? Like, would we. Like, there was literally a guy that we used to fuck with. And, like, we all sitting around and he's like, I haven't seen my little nigga in six months, and I don't want to say nothing. Ian said to me, van, you looked at him and were like, six months, you ain't seen your son? I was like, you need to get off the Madden and go see your son.

[Rachel]

Then why do you think you responded like that?

[Van Lathan]

Because I think I. I think I was bundling the issues. I think that. I think that was bundling the issues. Like.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But I've heard you talk about this. I've heard you talk about how, like, there was a time where you didn't feel, even with something like, like a child, that it was really your place to challenge another man.

[Van Lathan]

I mean, I don't. I'm not apt to get into your business if the business, to me, seems like regular nigga shit, right? And I'll tell you, like, if you. Now we are older, and so now everything that we think about now is about, like, the family. I have a friend of mine some time ago was going through some stuff, and my relationship with the women in his life and the people that I know, like, hey, bro, we too old for this. We gotta kind of do whatever, Whatever. They do the same thing with me. But it's difficult. Like, I. I see this with women. I see women hold each other to a lot higher of a standard than men hold each other, too, right? And there are also, like, friendships that rotate in and out more. These guys that I'm talking about, I've been friends with them since, like, my Boy, Ryan, we met the first day of first grade. I've been friends with him for a long time. Like, I know how he is. I'm still not gonna get involved in what's going on in his relationship unless he's putting somebody in danger. Like, none of my guys beat up on any women. None of my guys. I'm not getting involved in what's going on in this relationship. I'm just not going to. The father son thing is different, and it's always been different, but that was never a thing that existed inside of my crew. And when they heard that, they were like, van, that's actually not true, but I think I bundled those two things. But if you going through something with your girl, if I think it's harming,

[Jamila Lemieux]

or

[Van Lathan]

I might give. Like, I might give advice on it, but I'm not gonna call you out in an interpersonal relationship. Hey, you need to do better.

[Jamila Lemieux]

And see, I think that's. Hopefully when we sit down on your next podcast in 10 years and we look back on this moment, I'll say, man, remember when you used to not check your man about how they treat their women? Because I think the refusal.

[Van Lathan]

Hold on one second, one second. Treat their women as one thing. Okay. It would have to be something that I know. Treat that women as one thing.

[Jamila Lemieux]

When you said regular, nigga. Shit, right?

[Van Lathan]

Well, when I. Well, when I'm talking about regular is like. Like, now we're just gonna get into some. Like, when you're in a relationship with a woman, there are all kinds of ways you can make her unhappy. Some of the ways you can make her unhappy are profound. Some of the other ways that you can make her unhappy or less. So I have a friend that his girl used to get on them all the time about smoking weed. I'm not about to sit down and have a 30 or 45 minute conversation about how you should stop smoking weed if your girl wants to you to stop smoking weed. That is your thing. And like, to me, if. If you tell me you about to go out and do some dirt, I'll be all right, nigga. Like, I might. But I'm not gonna. Like, I'm not. That's.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But I guess that when you talk about, like, serious harm, it's not always physical violence or emotional abuse. It's. Man, my girl keep calling me, you know, tell her, you know, if she asks you say you were with me, I'm gonna be out with my other bitch. You know what I mean? It's like knowing that, but just the idea Good. You know, but like knowing that one of your friends and I hold like do hold our friends to these same standards. So we have these conversations with women when they, you know, when they're treating a good man wrong, you know, so it's like if you know that one of your friends and maybe this just isn't an issue in your career and that's why you haven't thought about it. But one of your friends cheating on his long term partner, you know, or cheating on his wife or you know, being dishonest, leading women on, you know, like hearing Tamila. Yes.

[Van Lathan]

Being dishonest, leading women on.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yes. VAN those are anti social but behavior. That's why we have the relationship we do, Van. Between men and women.

[Van Lathan]

But what I'm saying is being dishonest, like leaving women on.

[Jamila Lemieux]

There's a difference between. I didn't eat that cheesesteak for lunch. I had a salad and no, I haven't been having unprotected sex with other women. Lying and leading someone on can be dangerous, Right? It can be cruel. Like, particularly at our age when women's fertility is the question. Like the idea of leading a woman on and making her believe that you're going to marry her and breadcrumb, you know. Yeah. I keep telling her I'm gonna get her a ring, but she know I ain't trying. Like that's the type of thing that your friend who loves you should say to you, like, come on, that's not cool. She, she's a nice girl. Let her, let her go if you don't want her. It's not about you becoming his father figure in that moment. It's simply you respecting him enough as an adult to say, hey, you're making choices that could harm or are harming this other person. And I'm pointing that out to you.

[Rachel]

Now, you don't think you appoint like to somebody in the player proof crew? I feel like you would say that too.

[Van Lathan]

Say what?

[Rachel]

Oh, okay.

[Van Lathan]

No, no, no. What you mean like I would say what?

[Rachel]

The very example that she gave. They're leading somebody on and making them think that they have a future with them that they don't, you know, it's never going anywhere. You wouldn't be like, hey, I like

[Van Lathan]

for that conversation to arise. It would take such a direct set of circumstances, Right? Like it would take such a direct set of circumstances for that to even be a conversation about that type of situation.

[Rachel]

Right.

[Van Lathan]

Because you know what else I'm not going to do? And I've never done with any of these guys, I haven't talked to them about the way I feel like their women are treating them. Never your girl, like, you know, what's going on in your house. I'm not in the house. I'm not a part of it. I've never. If I. We go somewhere, she. She in your ear, we go somewhere, whatever's happening, I'm not in any way, shape or form, in any way, shape or form gonna get involved in how I think she's actually even treating you.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But that's not good either, man. It's like, again, I know you only have one perspective. You. You don't see both sides of the text messages, right? You don't hear, you know, in the bedroom, you don't know all the things.

[Van Lathan]

But.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But when we observe things, like if you were at your friend's job and their boss just talks them crazy, you wouldn't be like, damn, are you happy here? Like, how long?

[Van Lathan]

It's a different situation.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Wow.

[Van Lathan]

Because you're not fucking the boss. So the emotional part, yeah, it's a totally different situation. Like in that situation, I'm looking at it, I'm like, hey, man, just let you know, in your job there should be. But in this situation, number one, I don't know what you did. I don't know how, what she's been putting up with. I don't know what the hell is going on. I might be like, yo, is shit straight?

[Jamila Lemieux]

And that's the difference between male friendships and female friendships.

[Rachel]

Can I be honest, though? And this is because I've been burnt. If this was me talking to my homegirl, I rarely comment on the guy. I would only comment to my friend because I have lost friendships when I got too involved with giving an opinion because they don't want to be fine.

[Van Lathan]

They'll be fine. And then they gonna be mad at

[Rachel]

you, and then they look at you. So I actually don't talk about the significant other. I'll only talk to my friend as my friend because I just don't want to get involved with that. And then I'll only go so far as to what. Unless it's harmful.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Right.

[Rachel]

We're talking about something totally different. But I only just talk as a friend. I don't want to get involved in your relationship because it gets sticky and you become a scapegoat. At least that's what's happening in my experience.

[Van Lathan]

And also, just last thing I'll say about this, it's just there's a lot of back and forth. It's like hey, we got a party to throw. Is so and so. No, I'm not friends with that bitch right now. Three months later, six months later, you friends with the bitch again. Like so. So to me, I think there are a lot of things that men accept from one another that they shouldn't. But if I'm talking about just with my friends and what's going on in their household, there's just never gonna be a time, never gonna be a time where I'm going to feel comfortable like catching you up on what's going. If you ask my advice, which happens all the time in this relationship, free flowing brothers, we love each other. Like my guys call me crying about shit that's going on, like, that's different. But just with me going, hey, blah, blah, blah, Nah. I'm just like, nah. Like men get territorial, it's weird, it's whatever. That's not what to me, these relationships

[Jamila Lemieux]

is based on and I think part of the de centering of men and taking men out, the center of the universe means that existing in a world where you can challenge a man that way and it's not a threat to his manhood or his identity or your, you know, it's simply human to human. I'm observing something, you know, that I don't think is in your best interest. Like, hey, you're married, you got a new baby and you're stepping out. Like, is this what you want? Are you, you know, are you happy? Do you, you know, do you think she deserves this? Like, so it's not about like, hey man, you're wrong, you're bad, you're terrible. But like asking questions like, what's going on with you? Are you okay? Do you need anything? You know that. Checking in?

[Rachel]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

So last thing I'll say about this, we had a homeboy back in the day. He had a girl, he was in love with the girl. Now this girl, we've talked about this before, this girl was a lady that I thought was fascinating. She say new things and like, different have been all kinds of different places. But she had been with some niggas, just put it. Like, she had been with some guys. Guys, she had been with some guys. Like, you know, a lot of guys around. She was a sexually free lady. I had no problem with this. Obviously, like, if you know Van, you know, Van doesn't give a fuck about that. Everywhere he would go, someone would tell him about his relationship. There was one guy that he could hang out with that was like, brother, if you like it, I love it. If You. I don't have a. Because when you start getting into these judgments or these conversations, these conversations just aren't oriented around these things that we can all agree are wrong. These conversations start to become, I think this is the wrong person for you. These conversations become, think, I think she's too loud. Or I think this. These conversations. When you start getting into stuff like that about people, these conversations start to take all different types of. And I'm not gonna be the one that's gonna make you go into your relationship and feel bad about it.

[Jamila Lemieux]

But that was an example of a time where you didn't need to step in and say you're doing something weird. If anything, it would. If anything, it would have been a time to be empathetic. Like, yo, niggas are being weird about your girl. Like. And I'm.

[Van Lathan]

But. But once again, though, what I'm saying, what I'm trying to say is that's a time when other people felt like they did need to.

[Jamila Lemieux]

And so, look, that is the rare instance in which men are challenged about their behavior for wiping up a slut.

[Rachel]

Right?

[Jamila Lemieux]

That's when it's like, yo, man, I can't sit. If she'd been a sweet Christian girl with a denim skirt to her knees and cooked peach cobbler every Saturday, and he dogged her out mercilessly, none of those men would have said a word to him.

[Van Lathan]

Telling you. The point I'm trying to make is this. First of all, there have been girls that we all be like, when we talking amongst ourselves, we don't like her.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

Never touched anyone, never did anything. Blah, blah, blah. We don't like her. For whatever reason, we don't like her. If you bring her around when she is in front of me, I like her.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

Like, when she is there. If I see y' all getting into it the most, I might say we was driving around LA one time, I was like, hey, man, just can we have peace? Guys get involved. You're right about what you said. Guys get involved when it's something that's threatening to their moral judgment and values.

[Rachel]

Right?

[Van Lathan]

And what I'm saying is, to me, the son thing, probably threatening to my moral judgment and values. But like everything else that's going on in your relationship, I don't know if your girl has cheated on you. I don't know if your girl has stepped out on you. I don't know if your girl. If you. And I don't know what the backstory is for me to be able to get involved in what's going on in your household, I don't know what's happening. If you want to talk to me about that, cool. But, like, you go into these situations with people and you get involved being in their relationships. And to me, that's just not a thing I want to do with my friends. I just. Like, none of them have I ever gotten involved in your relationship.

[Rachel]

Not unless I've asked you to.

[Van Lathan]

When all of that stuff was going on is one time I ever got involved.

[Rachel]

I kind of wish you would have

[Van Lathan]

more, but what I'm. But, like, what I'm saying is you with the nigga with the abs. I feel like you like it. You asked me to come over, I'm coming over. I'm helping out. But other than that, you'll figure there was shit that I.

[Rachel]

There was shit that I learned you did disagree with. Yes.

[Van Lathan]

And I said, that's wrong. But did I come to you and be like. And that's when I thought you were in the wrong.

[Rachel]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right?

[Van Lathan]

And did I come? No. Like, hey, y' all asking me. That's not right. But other than that, y' all married. Like, what the. Like, they married. Why get involved with their marriage for? Wait. I just. This is a. I think people do too much of this, which is why I'm digging in here.

[Rachel]

Yeah. I've been burned. So that's why maybe I'm a little different. Okay, the book. This has been such a good conversation, too, because one of the first things I asked you was, if you're not a single mother or a mother or you're a man, does the book apply to you? And this whole conversation we've been having opens up so much that I know and you know. Cause we've read the book. But, like, that everybody else can dive into. Tell everybody where they can find the book. And then I'm just curious. Cause this might not even be the case, but who do you think this book will make the most uncomfortable? And do you even care?

[Jamila Lemieux]

Oh, that's a great question. So the book is found everywhere. Books are sold small and large retailers. You know, if you can use a black indie bookstore, please do. Reparations Club in la. Kindred Spirits Books in Houston. Call and response in Chicago. I'm on tour. You can check my Instagram for all the dates. I'm going to a bunch of cities. Who will make this book the most uncomfortable? I think. Single mothers who have not come to terms with what that identity has meant for them. I hope that it's healing for them, but There may be some discomfort in engaging with it directly, but I ultimately, I think that it's a discomfort you can get through. You know, like, my daughter's father read this book and liked it. You know, I talk about our relationship. You know, my father read this book and liked it. I talk about our relationship and his complicated relationship with my mother. You know, like every man who. I have not gotten a critical word from a man yet, every man who has talked to me about reading this book has really enjoyed it and said they walked away feeling like they learned things about women and about mothers and maybe about their own mothers. So, you know, I think it will only. It will. There'll be moments of discomfort because it will challenge you to reconsider some of the things that you think of when you think of black women, family, you know, maybe black men. But it will only truly make you uncomfortable from beginning to end if you are committed to opposing black feminism. So if that's your pov, if you have a problem with, you know, theory that advocates on behalf of black women and girls specifically and advocates on behalf of black LGBTQ people and says that, you know, black women and men need to experience equity in our community. Right. We're not the same. We have different, you know, we're all different people. We all have different talents and different needs and. But, yeah, I think people who've been my opps will remain my ops. But I think that anybody who's open to the messaging of this book and receives it fully shouldn't be uncomfortable at all.

[Van Lathan]

Okay, so I looked and saw that there is a talk on Thursday with you and April Rain.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

Shout out to April. Download the Spill app. If you haven't downloaded it, you can, I guess, watch it on Spill. But you can also go, where's the talk at?

[Jamila Lemieux]

It's on Spill. It's a live Spill.

[Van Lathan]

Oh, it's a live Spill. Okay, cool. Okay. Live Spill.

[Rachel]

Okay.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

April's awesome.

[Jamila Lemieux]

By the way, when is this episode gonna air?

[Van Lathan]

Tomorrow.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Tomorrow. That's right. Okay. So. Okay. Actually, I can mention. So I'll be in Houston on Friday, April 24, at Kindred Stories Books, Black Owned Howard Graduate Owned Bookstore. And next week, I'm doing three events in Chicago. Following week, I'm doing Miami with Phil Agnew, and I'm doing Atlanta and Decatur. I'm going to be joined by Tally from the Jokes on youn podcast, who I'm obsessed with. So the tour is touring. I'll be back on the east coast this summer as well.

[Rachel]

Congratulations. Congratulations on the book on everything.

[Van Lathan]

Shout out to Phil. Phil's one of the good brothers out there. I love Phil. Phil's like one of my low key heroes.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

I look up to Phil a lot. All right, Jamila, Mila, Jamila, thank you for joining us. Like, everybody go get the book. It's available wherever you get books. Now I see that Damon Young is back here.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Yes.

[Van Lathan]

Another brilliant. Got Marc Lamont Hill, Tiffany Cross. You got a lot of people on the back cover of the joint. Like, it's fantastic. The whole community is behind you. All right, love you, sis.

[Jamila Lemieux]

Love you.

[Rachel]

Thank you.

[Van Lathan]

All right, that's enough podcast. This is kind of a heavy one, right?

[Rachel]

It was heavy. We started off light.

[Van Lathan]

We did chicken. Like the chicken store, crispy chicken.

[Rachel]

It's gonna be stuck in your head all day. Yeah.

[Van Lathan]

All right. Take theme caps off and do not stop. Lauren Van Lathen Jr.

[Rachel]

I'm Rachel. Hey, guys.