C (2:56)

Did you know before it happened that this was going to be a really important moment in your life?

D (3:03)

I had no idea. All I knew is that I wanted to challenged the man. I wanted to challenge his ideals. I wanted to get to the human part of him. I wanted to talk to him about his humanity as it relates to the. The people he was kind of denigrating. I was looking for some honesty and some, some truth. I thought it was worth an effort. I mean, because remember I talked to him in 1976. I'd already sized him up as a person who was kind of troubled in his thinking and I wanted to investigate that and in a setting that required both of us to be honest about how we felt. And I asked him questions in a way that he couldn't spin. He had to deal with me as a human being asking a question. And I wasn't so much worried about me being a journalist. I was asking questions for the African Americans and the Jewish people who had been excoriated by his actions. You know, I saw a man who was hell bent on doing everything that I, and people like me had been able to accomplish along the way. And I just had to confront that and I couldn't leave it undone. If he was going to be elected, he was going to be elected in spite of the fact that his humanity had been exposed or his lack thereof when it came to Jews and blacks and minorities. Because, you know, it's like he looked like something he was not. And what I mean is, as the song goes, and that's James Baldwin quote. Is, is how can I believe what you say when I see what you do? I wanted to have a real conversation so that people would have an opportunity to make an informed decision when they went to the polling booth.

C (5:05)

What did you do to prepare?

D (5:08)

I did research on him from morning to night. I looked at all of the television shows he'd been on. I looked at all of the documentaries that he managed to be a part of. I read transcripts about his statements, things that he wrote and things, things that he had said about Jews belonging in the ash bin of history. And blacks, never a mule, contributed more to the, the building of America than, than black people. So things like that. I didn't make up anything. I just read back to him things that he had said.

C (5:48)

And nobody vetted or looked at your questions in advance, right?

D (5:52)

No, no one.

C (5:54)

So you said that you were scared.

D (5:56)

Yeah, I was.

C (5:57)

And you made yourself vulnerable.

D (5:59)

Yeah, exactly. Because I wanted to talk to him as a human being. I wanted him to See me as a human being, not as some journalist, not as some mic stand or somebody holding a mic, you know, not as a suit and tie. I wanted this. I wanted him to see me as a human being. Yeah, I was scared, absolutely. And I am yet fearful. I am yet fearful for the country for the same reason that I was fearful then, because people are just absolutely nuts. The only thing that matters to them is their reality. And in their reality, a black person, or anybody who is not white in their reality is capable of doing anything untowardly. Not even worthy of breathing the same air, not even worthy of being in the same space.

C (6:54)

Did you have the sense that you were taking a risk?

D (6:57)

Yeah, I did, because of the letters I got and the phone calls that I got. I had changed my phone number, and obviously some of my friends on the police department felt that I was at risk because they would escort me to work and then escort me from work back home. And for, like, months, I didn't go anyplace but work at home. They gave me a pistol. It was the first time I had a pistol in my possession since I left the Marine Corps in November of 1973. Yeah, I was concerned.

C (7:32)

And there were lots of phone calls to the station, right?

D (7:37)

There were so many phone calls to the station from Duke supporters that the phone line crashed. Receptionists couldn't handle any more phone calls. And there were protests at the station. His supporters started calling, and then my supporters started calling. So there was a dueling protest taking place from supporters and opponents.

C (8:01)

There's a way in which I've thought about this, that whether it's the District 81 race or the Senate race or the governor's race, that they were much more than just elections, that it became this bigger movement and cultural phenomenon. And part of it is the signs and the hats and the shirts and the bumper stickers that they would be kind of everywhere. And it was inescapable, but it also just. I think it generated the sorts of conflicts. It made everybody angrier. There was this kind of, like, air of dread and hostility that I can remember feeling. Again, it was just like more than an election or a political race. It just felt like a kind of, like, culture war or something. And I don't know if there's specific ways in which you felt that or if you agree with that sentiment.

D (8:53)

No, it was more of a culture war in the sense the scab was being pulled off the wound. When blacks seek parody and it appears that they are making progress, then it ratchets up the anti black Movement in the sense that, well, if blacks are getting parody, then that means we are getting less parody. That means that we're being pushed out. So we better do something to right this ship before we find ourselves underwater. So, yeah, there was a shift change in the sense of how do we approach this without seeming like we're anti black? How do we change the conversation? So, yeah, it's a movement that continues today.

C (9:45)

You mentioned a scab and a wound. Like, what is the wound in your mind?

D (9:50)

The wound in my mind is slavery. It was never reconciled. The great sin in America has never really been addressed. I mean, it's. It's painful. I mean, you were asking me about things that occurred during my childhood, like witnessing the bombing and the killing of the four girls and the torture and the mutilation of Emmett Till. The pictures I saw when I was 4 years old getting beaten with a chain for drinking out of a white person water faucet. I mean, those kind of things. I mean, there needs to be a healing. I'm going to quote James Baldwin again. You know, there are many ways of which to be despicable that would quite make the head spin. But for one, to be really despicable is to be contemptuous. Other people's pain. And I think that, you know, when people say you ought to get over slavery, I mean, 400 years of dehumanization, 400 years of oppression, of subjugation, 400 years of doubting your own self worth. Can you imagine what it's like to walk into a room where you're the only African American and wondering whether you're good enough to be in that room? Can you imagine looking in a mirror and saying to yourself, you know, but for this blackness, you know, I could be somewhere and be comfortable. I could go to a place and not worry about being confronted, or I could drive my car and not worry about a police officer stopping me for some ridiculous reason and gunning me down and telling people that I resisted arrest, or that I could just travel the world and just be left alone. Just to feel the freedom of just enjoying life, just enjoying the scenery, just watching nature and not be worried about being accosted because I'm somewhere that I'm not supposed to be and I just happen to be wearing the wrong color skin. I mean, give me a break. What human being can honestly say that that wouldn't grate on them from time to time?

E (12:19)

I'm Van Newkirk and I'm a senior editor at the Atlantic and host of the podcast Floodlines.

F (12:26)

My Name is Clint Smith. I'm a writer, a teacher, and a poet, Author of the poetry collection Counting Descent and the forthcoming nonfiction book how the Word is Passed.

C (12:37)

Van, you end the first episode of Floodlines by saying that Hurricane Katrina was not the disaster, and the disaster was what happened after. What you show really powerfully in the series is that the disaster is also what happened before. It's the stuff that Katrina revealed that had been around for generations.

B (12:57)

And I think that's true about David.

C (12:58)

Duke, too, that he exposed and inflamed what was already there. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on learning about and spooling out this work of history where the prehistory is also so important.

E (13:11)

Well, one thing that I've come to appreciate about researching Katrina and also thinking about folks like David Duke, about modern moments in white supremacy and racism, is we have a tendency towards this disaster, thinking that, like, that thinks of catastrophes as this thing that just sort of happened. Right? Oh, my God. This is. This is a wild thing that's occurring. But we're not really good at institutionally as a country, as commentators often at understanding how disasters are less new things that come out of nowhere than exclamation marks at the end of a sentence. And I think that's true of Hurricane Katrina. It was clear to people who were watching in New Orleans that a hurricane could and would at some point, cause untold devastation in the city. And that was just something that lots of people knew, but not a lot of people did a whole lot of stuff about before it came. It's understood that poverty and concentrated poverty and racism are things that will always contribute to disasters, but nobody really seems to think about those things until it actually happens. And that's one thing we hopefully shed some light on with Floodlines is that deep history. We keep saying history repeats itself. That's only because we allow it to.

C (14:36)

Clint, you grew up in New Orleans like me. We went to the same high school. Shout out to shout out to Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin. You're eight years younger than me, so I was between eight and 11 during Duke's rise to power. You were too young, I'm guessing, to remember that time. And I was 25 and living in D.C. when Katrina hit, and you were in high school. So I'm curious how you think about these events as being in your past and present and in Louisiana's past and present, given how they've intersected with your life.

F (15:08)

So, for Katrina Specifically, I was 17 years old when the storm arrived, and I was three days into my senior year of high school. And so my family and I evacuated. Our home was destroyed. We had, you know, eight, nine feet of water. I finished high school in Houston, living with my aunt and uncle in a suburb of Houston in Missouri City, Texas. And it's been this interesting thing for me in which I've only begun to understand the sort of emotional and psychological implications that Katrina had on my own life as I've gotten older. I'm 31 years old now, and I think I'm only beginning the process of engaging with the sort of trauma, in many ways, that that moment enacted in my life and obviously in the lives of so many other people. But I think for a long time, I sort of swept it aside because I was like, well, I wasn't in the Superdome or I wasn't in the Convention center. We were so much more fortunate than so many others, which is true. But I think as a result, I minimized the impact that it had on my own life and tried to make it seem as if it didn't have an impact when I think being uprooted from the only home I'd ever lived in at what was I had imagined, as many seniors do, would be the culmination of your childhood with all of the people who you spent it with. And so even going back home to New Orleans from me now is a strange sort of cognitive dissonance in the sense that I go back home to a home that I never lived in as a child. We're back in New Orleans, but live in a different part of the city now, different house. And so much of the landscape of my childhood looks different than it did. Like, so many of the homes on my block didn't look like Katrina hit a month ago, much less 14 years ago, you know. And so it is a sort of interesting thing to go back to a place that is my home, but that in many ways feels so distant from the home that I knew as a kid. And then, you know, the politics of David Duke, I think, and we can talk about this more, sort of animated my childhood in a way that, similarly, I didn't fully understand when I was a kid. And then looking back, I was like, oh, this was the same sort of sentiments that made it so that David Duke won, what, 60% of the white vote in 1990 when he ran for Senate, and 55% of the white vote when he ran for governor in 91. Those same sort of animating features were all around me, you know, in school or when I played soccer in so Many of the spaces that I was a part of in ways that I, looking back sort of retrospectively, am able to identify in ways that I wasn't able to as a kid.

C (17:51)

Yeah, I mean, that all resonates with me really deeply. And thinking about how the Duke story stayed with me in ways I didn't really fully understand until I started taking on this project. And it stuck with me more in the realm of kind of emotion and feeling than in specific events. I can remember feeling scared and confused more than I can remember what happened specifically during the governor's race or during the Senate race. I'm wondering with you, Van, one of the things that I really wanted to convey in the season of Slow Burn was that kind of sense of feeling and emotion along with the kind of plot. And so how did you think about that as you were working on your series?

E (18:40)

So I think it became clear really early on, number one, that, like, you know, we like to think of ourselves going into projects, a lot of projects, as Tabula Rasa. I know this is probably not true for you on this project, and it definitely didn't end up being true for me on this project. Although, you know, I only watched Hurricane Katrina on tv. The reason why I was interested in the project in the first place is flood destroyed my own hometown in 1999. Hurricane Floyd hit eastern North Carolina. And so I brought with me my own emotional context, subtext, whatever you want to call it. And it was very clear to me when I was kind of resonating with people who I was talking to, when Clint just had a great rumination on nostalgia and how this kind of disaster really disrupts it in a real way and how it can also. It amplifies it. And also, like, in the act of destroying sacred spaces and meeting places can really short circuit the comfort places of our brains. And so when people got to talking about stuff like that, about how, I mean, we took Leanne back to her old neighborhood, where now it's, you know, mostly folks who don't look like her anymore who make a lot more money live there. Now, that moment, that emotion. I don't even know what you described that emotion as. It's this mix of longing and feeling sort of swept aside. We wanted that to be the bed of the show. And it's interesting because I could not have written an article that portrayed that emotion. Cause I don't know what to call it. I don't even know how to describe it. I'm clearly struggling right now. But it's something that I think comes through.

C (20:36)

So I want to talk about the similarities that I see between these stories in big ways and then maybe in a couple specific ways. So the parallels, I think, are pretty obvious, some of them, and that they're both, I think, fundamentally about racism and anti blackness and the potency of that, about institutional failures, about, you know, individual heroism and a lot of different ways. But there are just some specifics that are so striking to me. You know, Van, you talk about the ways in which Katrina was spun, that the victims were made into the perpetrators and the powerless were demonized, and that's what David Duke was trying to do.

E (21:24)

Yeah. One of the, you know, the sources that we were looking at in terms of the ways, the more legitimate media spin and mischaracterization of looting and things like that in the city, how those affected real people, was David Duke's blog. And, you know, at the time, he was like using those reports from news orbs on the ground to say that New Orleans was in the middle of a race war. He was telling white folks to pick up arms. And actually, I think there is actually some evidence that folks like the people out in Algiers Point who were going and arming themselves and shooting black passersby may have at least had some of that information coming back towards them from those sources.

C (22:10)

Yeah. And you mentioned the barricade. The barricades. You know, I talk in the first episode of Slow Burn about Jefferson Parish building this barricade in 1987 to keep Black people from New Orleans out. And it got torn down. The city of New Orleans tore it down. But it was there. That was the impulse. And during Katrina, which is this extraordinary time and moment, there wasn't anybody there to tear that barricade down. It just went up and it stayed up.

E (22:39)

Yeah. I think you look at the underpinnings of barricades, of the impetus to put one up of what I think David Duke knew was a kind of latent fear. I mean, it's not just. It's not specific to Louisiana and the community surrounding New Orleans. I think you see similar stuff in Atlanta, Georgia, where the name of the city becomes almost a dog whistle for certain things.

B (23:10)

Right.

E (23:11)

To people in the suburbs, the people who are living outside, who don't want those folks coming to where they live. I mean, of course, David Duke comes along in the layers of white flight in the middle of the heyday of white flight, and that's his introduction to the scene. Right. So I think these are not separate stories at all.

C (23:31)

And you wrote a piece, Clannon 2015, about what it was like to go back to your flooded house after Katrina and how you found it so difficult to capture what you saw that day and words. And you also wrote in that piece about the psychological toll exacted on black journalists who are constantly forced to report on black death at the hands of police and who find themselves writing the same story merely with different victims. And that last phrase really stuck with me. The same story merely with different victims. And it made me think, you know, the context in which you wrote that was about the burden of that. And the feeling, I think, of we're writing these stories. Black journalists like yourselves are writing these stories. And is anything changing? Is anything is making a difference? And so in talking about these stories, these two very big stories where so many commonalities are there, it makes me wonder about the efficacy of telling these stories and about what we're able to accomplish and what we're trying to accomplish.

F (24:39)

Yeah, it's tricky. You know, I mean, I think that we are in a moment now that certainly to me feels like something very different than. Certainly than I've experienced in my. My adult life or my entire life, and certainly feels like a. A potential inflection point in the history of how this country reckons with its relationship to the history of race and racism that brought us to this moment. I think it remains to be seen what sort of momentum exists moving forward. I think it remains to be seen to what extent it is a moment versus an ongoing reckoning. And, you know, it's interesting because this is a sort of conversation Van and I and other friends have had around, you know, the anti racist reading list or the anti racist podcast lists or the anti racist, you name it list, and what are the potential benefits and what are the potential limits of that sort of phenomenon? And for me, you know, and Van can hop in here and share what he thinks, but I think, for me, I think the. I've been thinking differently about the language of humanizes because in my own writing of this book about slavery, I was really struck by an essay written by Walter Johnson and the way he talks about how we, you know, our efforts to talk about it, slavery being dehumanizing, actually rejects the notion that the institution of slavery was inherently something that relied on the humanity of enslaved people. And I think, you know, it's not to say slavery is the same as Katrina, but I think that that sentiment is relevant in the way that we think about historically marginalized communities and the way that stories lift up the sort of granular aspects of, like, what it means to be a person. And, you know, what does it mean to call that humanizing versus to, you know, to think that it. Is that a process that has to happen, or are these. Have they already always been human?

E (26:31)

Well, I mean, just like that point you raised about the function of storytelling and what people, you know, this story or that humanizes people, I really think, you know, hopefully we were successful in doing this. There's a bit of a savior complex in storytelling that I don't enjoy. And I really believe the best way to use audio storytelling, to use the written word in the service of people, of toppling systems of power, et cetera, is to amplify, document, collect, curate, amplify. And that's what we tried to do with Floodlines, and that's why we have a voice like Leanne's, right? She carries so many things and says so many things, and the key to the show is just letting her say them.

F (27:25)

And I think that the point around amplification is important because I think that amplification creates a level of proximity. Like, I think that that's something unique to audio for me, is that, like, I think about, for example, Ear Hustle, the podcast from San Quentin Prison. And I think for many people, that is the first time they have heard the voices of people who are currently incarcerated for Floodlines. I think it might be the first time that a lot of people have heard the story directly from the mouths of people who were impacted by Katrina at all or in a specific way that is shaped and animated by poverty. Right. Because what is also true is that my Katrina story and Josh's Katrina story is different than Leanne's Katrina story. Right? And they all reflect a very real set of experiences. But I think the stories that people are more likely to have heard are from those who maybe they share a socioeconomic background with or approximate to in a different sort of way, because of their profession, because of their education. You know, there are limits to proximity as well, right? Like, you can go on and on about a history of people who were proximate to other people and still did terrible things to them, maybe did terrible things to them because of their proximity. But I do think at its best, proximity can be a catalyst for empathy. Right? And thinking differently or more holistically, or reconsidering some of the ways that you might have thought about a phenomenon and the people entrenched in that phenomenon.

B (29:09)

To hear the rest of these interviews and all of our bonus episodes from this season, you need to sign up for Slate Plus. We couldn't make Slow Burn without the support of our Slate plus members. To become one, go to slate.com slowburn and now, as promised, some news about upcoming seasons of Slow Burn. Earlier this year, we announced that Noreen Malone would be hosting season five, which will cover the run up to the Iraq war. I'm happy to report that you'll get to hear that season in the spring of 2021, and trust me, it's going to be great. So that's Slow Burn Season five. I've also got an announcement about Season six. It's going to be hosted by my friend Joel Anderson, who you know from our season on the creative lives and tragic deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. this time around, Joel will focus on another pivotal moment in American history, the 1992 LA Riots. Look out for season six of Slow Burn on the LA Riots later in 2021. Season four was produced by me and Christopher Johnson. This episode was produced by Chow Tu, editorial direction by Lo and Liu and Gabriel Roth. Madeline Ducharme is Slow Burn's production assistant, and Sophie Summergrad is our assistant.

C (30:25)

Producer.

B (30:26)

David Gross composed our theme song.

C (30:28)

Thanks for listening.