← We Can Do Hard Things
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Hello, everyone. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. This is Amanda. And in this month's episode, we are diving headfirst into the thick of it. We're going into the actual minority rule conspiracy at play right now in the United States. Today. We're discussing the gerrymandering battle and racialized redistricting of the south following the Supreme Court's Calais decision, which is erasing black majority Democrat congressional seats to rig the upcoming midterm elections for Republicans. We're tracing all the way, way back to talk about the real why of why they are so afraid of black political power. We're telling the history they never wanted us to know, including the only time Americans threatened our own oligarchs. We are learning the playbook and we are learning the solutions. I'm joined by one of the most dynamic, wise, dangerous in all the right ways, leaders of our time, Representative Justin Pearson, whose 9th district of Memphis, an historic heart of black political power and Democratic promise, was just cracked by the Tennessee Republican leadership. We will see that although these times for us feel excruciatingly unprecedented, there is not a damn thing new under the sun, which is bad news and good news, because we already know the playbook and we already know the solutions. Amid the facts and history and reality we are uncovering today, there is something big I want us to claim. These efforts to dismember black political power is, yes, morally repugnant and obscenely anti democratic. And yet we really need to stop talking about these attacks on the black vote in terms of fairness and decency and morality of defending minority rights of black people. This is real and true, but it misses the forest for the trees. Because when we talk about it in terms of defending minority rights, we are making invisible the actual minority at issue here. The tiny minority of wealthy, powerful elite in this country who have a stranglehold on our economy and policy and press and who are running this nation for their own good and against all of ours. The oligarchy fueling the radical anti democratic agenda, including attacks on black political power, is doing so not just to eliminate minority rule of black people, but to solidify their own minority rule of our nation. This is so important to understand and we're going to break it down carefully today. But at its core, attacks on black political power are not about making sure minorities don't have a rightful say in democracy. Attacks on black political power are about the fact that black political power in economic interest based alliances is the oligarchy's worst value nightmare. It's about the Fact that black political power in coalition is the single greatest threat to minority rule. As we'll see. It has prevailed in toppling oligarchy before, and it can do so again. And that is how we need to understand this issue. When we talk about defending black votes, we are actually talking about defending majority rule against the radical minority rule stalking and suffocating our democracy. If we question whether we're actually living under minority rule right now, we have to ask ourselves, if we are not living under minority rule, how is it that 90% of Americans want universal background checks before gun sales, but the ruling class has not and will not ever pass that and instead consigns us to live in a nation in which guns are the leading cause of death among American children and teens? If we do not live under minority rule, how is it that 77% of voters support taxing billionaires to make the ultra rich pay their fair share, yet the ruling class has ensured that billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than a teacher or firefighter? How is it that 2/3 of all Americans support a nationwide law protecting abortion, yet the ruling class is actively prosecuting women who have abortions or even miscarriages? How is it that more than 60% of Americans oppose the United States sending bombs to Israel, and yet the ruling class has sent Israel 16.3 billion of our taxpayer dollars in direct military aid since the genocide began. How does this happen? How does the ruling class serve its own interests against ours? Its only goal is to preserve consolidated power. And the primary way they do this is to divide obvious economic and democratic coalitions. They manufacture dividing lines and stumbling blocks between groups whose actual economic and social interests are the same and who without these dividing lines, would create a coalition to topple the ruling class. And the ruling class's primary tool for manufacturing dividing lines is race. As historian Theodore Allen demonstrated, whiteness defined through European ancestry was a calculated solution developed by elite leaders to protect those elite leaders from the economic and physical threat of laboring class solidarity. They literally invented whiteness as a political class. In the 17th century, wealthy landowners relied on both white indentured servants and and enslaved African people. Back then, the social division was not primarily race, but class. Poor Europeans and enslaved Africans worked and lived and very dangerously to the ruling class rebelled together in Bacon's Rebellion. In 1676, poor European indentured servants, poor free black people and enslaved Africans formed an uprising under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon to revolt against the colonial elite Burning the capital city of Jamestown to the ground. Elites terrified by the power of this multiracial laboring class unity realized that their undemocratic stranglehold on power could be toppled by the power of this coalition. So they consciously developed a divide and conquer system of racial division. They literally invented whiteness as a political class. They did this by passing laws that granted poor European laborers minor social and material privileges over over enslaved and free black people, giving them roles, policing black people and elevating them to a higher legal and social standing. There is not a new damn thing under the sun. The words of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner arguing that the nation could not withstand the role of white power planter enslaving oligarchy in 1860 are equally true today. The oligarchy hesitates at nothing to serve its selfish needs. There is nothing in the national government which the oligarchy does not appropriate. It has held the keys of every office from the President down, compelling all to do its bidding. It organizes cabinets. It organizes courts. It directs the army and the navy. It manages every department of public business. It presides over the census. It subsidizes the national press. We shall expel the oligarchy from all of our seats of national power and drive it back within the states. This alone is worthy of every effort. For until this is done, nothing else can be done. As in pre Civil War South. We are living in a time of oligarchy where the wealth hoarded by the top 1% of Americans exceeds that of the bottom 90% of Americans combined. Where our economy and policy works for that 1% and fails the 90%. My hope is that through our conversation today we will see and know that joining the fight for black political power is not just the right thing to do. It is the absolutely necessary thing to do. If we don't want to continue to be lorded over by the elite minority running this nation in their own interests and against ours. Let's jump in. First, a real quick review of the recent redistricting wars and the Supreme Court's Calais decision. How our system works is that our congressional districts, which each elected member of the U.S. house of Representatives are intended to be of equal population so that every district has roughly the same number of people. Over time, people move and populations change. So in the US we have a census every 10 years which counts the population. And we redraw congressional districts as well as state legislative districts to make sure that the population is equal and in each district. But it's in the middle ish of the decade, so we shouldn't be talking about this at all. You say yes, you are correct. We should not. But we are, because in the summer of 2025, looking at what would be an ugly midterm election for him, Trump met with Governor Abbott of Texas and directed him, contrary to law, to have the Texas Legislature redraw the congressional district maps mid cycle to dilute and bury Democratic voters across the districts and and ensure that Texas yields five additional Republican seats. After Texas did this, California responded by redrawing their maps, adding five Democratic seats to level the playing field. Unlike Texas, California sent the redistricting to a ballot referendum where it was approved by voters. A number of states followed, including Virginia, adding Democratic seats approved by statewide election only to have those 3 million votes thrown out by the Republican dominated Virginia Supreme Court, which nullified voter approval for redistricting. Florida added a new map to eliminate four of the only eight Democratic seats in the state. All of this happened prior to the Supreme Court's April 29 Calais decision. Here's what that case was about for generations, Section 2 of the Voting Rights act has been one of the most vital safeguards against racial discrimination, outlawing state and local governments from enacting voter rules that result in racial discrimination. Prior to the passage of the VRA, there were fewer than 75 black elected officials nationwide. Since the passage, 1500 black officials have been elected, but the Supreme Court eviscerated this critical Democratic safeguard of the Voting Rights Act. The background on Calais is that the 2020 census found that Black people constituted 1/3 of Louisiana's population, but the Republican leadership had redrawn the district to spread out that black vote, ensuring that only one of the six congressional districts in the state was majority. Black voters sued under Section 2 of the VRA and federal courts agreed that the map illegally diluted black voting power, which then resulted in a court ordered second majority black district. Immediately after championed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and conservative groups, non black voters sued again saying that the new map unconstitutionally relied on race and disadvantaged white voters. The U.S. supreme Court ruled six Republicans to three Democrats to kill the new map. They ruled that one the state's map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander against white voters and two states can absolutely create districts with specific partisan purpose, meaning they can create districts distorted to ensure that only Republicans or only Democrats ever win those districts as long as they don't ever admit that maps were created on race. In other words, you can take a state in which 1/3 of the population is black and make sure you divide that black population equally among a total of six districts to make sure that none of them are majority black, eliminating black voting power as long as you pretend that you didn't notice that the people were black when you were carefully, evenly distributing the black people among the districts. Which is exactly what happened immediately following the Kelly decision. The day after the ruling, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry took the unprecedented action of second suspending the state's already in process U.S. house primary, in which tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots so legislators could redraw election maps to eliminate at least one, if not both of the two black majority districts. The Supreme Court also vacated a ruling against Alabama's 2023 map, which the lower federal court found to be racially discriminatory gerrymander, allowing Alabama to proceed with the racially discriminatory map so gerrymandered that only one of Alabama's seven districts is majority black, even though blacks make up 27% of Alabama's population. And in Mississippi state Republicans are targeting Mississippi's only majority black district, despite the state having the nation's highest percentage of Black residents at 38%. Georgia, South Carolina and Florida quickly moved ahead with their own redistricting plans. And in Tennessee, governor Bill Lee immediately called a special legislative session in which lawmakers voted to change the law, which banned mid census redistricting and fast tracked a new congressional map into law, completing the process in 48 hours to crack Memphis, the state's historical Democratic stronghold, the state's only majority black district, splitting the city's black population nearly equally across three separate congressional districts. This race to decimate black political power is familiar. In 1965, the south had zero black representatives in the U.S. congress. It has 31 today. And with the Calais decision and the Republicans response, black representatives and black representation face extinction once again. The question is why? Why are they so afraid of the black vote? Why are they so afraid of representation? What is it that they are protecting that is more valuable to them than democracy? The root of the answer has been for hundreds of years the same they are protecting minority control. Of course there is anti black racism, of course. But racism is not the objective. Oligarchy is the objective. Racism is the tool toward that end. We're about to step back into our American history and see that the fight has always been about oligarchy. Whether our government and society exists to be ruled by and for the benefit of a small minority of ultra wealthy elite whose wealth was accumulated from extracting labor and resources from the masses, or whether it exists to be governed by and for the benefit of the many, as it has always been in this country the game is is about oligarchy. The chess pieces are race because first, as Janaya Nelson said, in this assault against democracy, they are using the easiest vector anti black racism because it's the laziest thing you could do, and two, because black political power is oligarchy's kryptonite. It is right and correct that it be feared. Which is exactly why each and every one of us who do not want to live in a world of oligarchy governed by the powerful minority against the majority will need to be fighting like hell for black representation.
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this episode is brought to you with the support of our sponsor, MIDI Health. As we all might know by now, menopause isn't an overnight process. It can take years, and for some of these symptoms, you might not even recognize them as menopause or perimenopause. So you just go from doctor to doctor describing brain fog and fatigue and random anxiety, never connecting the dots. Midi Health exists specifically for this stage of life. MIDI Health is the only virtual care clinic for women navigating midlife hormonal changes from perimenopause through menopause. It was created by women for women and many clinicians are menopause experts and hormone trained specialists who actually listen and understand what's happening in your body. They'll help build a treatment plan around your specific symptoms with safe, effective, FDA approved hormonal and non hormonal options. Best of all, the visits are covered by insurance. Book your first virtual visit today at join midi. That's join midi.com. Let's talk a little bit about Oligarchic Minority Rule the word oligarchy originates from the Greek oligos meaning few, and archine meaning to rule. And when we talk about oligarchy, we are meaning a form of government or power in which a small rich minority uses its control over governmental institutions to transform wealth into rank, giving them ironclad control over the levers of political power, the most lucrative economic resources, and the cultural conventions that justify those special privileges. The pre Civil War Southern planter class was a literal oligarchy. In 1860, Southern white planters who enslaved 50 or more people and whose lives and wealth were made possible by the barbarity of slavery made up just 1/3 of 1% of the US population. The vast majority of southern families held no enslaved people. Enslavers of even one or more people made up less than 1.5% of the total population. And of this group There were only 15 total people in the nation who enslaved 500 or more people, the so called mega planters who controlled everything. This planter class oligarchy, despite being 1/3 of 1% of the US population, controlled more resources than the entire US combined. This class controlled 75% of the entire cotton trade on the planet and expansive land holdings. But let's exclude all of that and only count the so called property value of the enslaved population. If in 1860 you were to liquidate every single commercial bank in the United States, you would have $400 million in total capital, that would have been one tenth of what the southern oligarchy owned in human property bondage. If you combine the cash value of every manufacturing plant, textile mill, iron foundry in the entire country, that collective industrial wealth would have amounted to less than one third of the planter classes wealth. It was an obscene wealth based on obscene cruelty, and it was precarious. In the absence of captive labor force of enslaved people, the $3.5 billion asset of the oligarchy of more than $140 billion in today's dollars would be erased immediately. It was this staggering economic power of the southern oligarchy extended to unmitigated political power that placed a stranglehold on the nation and caused the Civil War. It was this staggering greed that the oligarchy needed to defend by any means necessary. And the oligarchy was facing, for the first time in history, the threat that this unprecedented concentration of wealth would be shattered. They would go to every length to defend their minority property interests against the democratic majority of the nation. And this is what the Civil War was about. Some of us are taught that the Civil War is about states rights. That's bullshit. Some of us were taught that the Civil War is about slavery. And that is in part, right. But the more real answer is that the Civil War was about whether the southern white planter oligarchy would control the nation. Similar to today, the question was whether the oligarchy would be toppled to preserve the nation and democracy. It was then and is now a battle between democratic capitalism and entrenched oligarchy. We're about to jump into some more history, y', all, and that does make me happy. But if you feel like learning history, isn't your idea of the sexiest day possible? Maybe. Take heart if it's not your idea of fun. It is vital nonetheless. Let's remember, please, that those who seek to take us back are studying it very, very carefully. Lest there be any confusion on that point. A man named Kevin Roberts wrote his PhD on African American history, specifically on the kinship, community and resistance strategies of enslaved African Americans. What did he do with that vital knowledge? Well, he architected Project 2025 as the President of the Heritage Foundation. They're locked in. And so are we. Here we go. Tragically, and contrary to common retelling of history, a sense of morality to defeat the inhumane scourge of enslavement was not the primary motivation for the Civil War. It was, as most wars, a war of two sets of elites with contrary economic and political visions. The Northern elite Wanted economic expansion, free land, free labor, free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United states, and vitally to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources of the seceding south. The southern elites opposed all of that. Their goal was to protect their oligarchic and power at all costs. All of which was predicated on enslavement. They wanted low import tariffs to freely export raw cotton to europe and to import cheap manufactured goods. And to maintain control. The southern oligarchs wanted to actively block and work toward the end of public spending on infrastructure, education and economic diversification that could empower poor white citizens and enslaved people. The war was about saving one of these visions of the future nation. Not as awful as the reality is about saving the lives of people held in bondage. Even lincoln himself wrote in a letter in 1862, well into the civil war, My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the union and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. When less than five months after writing that letter, Lincoln delivered the emancipation proclamation, it was less driven by moral clarity than from a calculated wartime strategy intended to crush the confederate war machine and bolster the union's military manpower by declaring enslaved people free only in those states still fighting the union, not in the northern states or in the border states he was worried about alienating. The proclamation authorized the enlistment of black soldiers, Depriving the south of its labor force while strengthening union ranks. And that wartime strategy worked after more than four years of one of the bloodiest wars in human history to date, with almost 1 million people slaughtered, the civil war ended in victory for the Union on May 26, 1865. Following the war, Lincoln's republican party remember that the republicans at this point were essentially the opposite of modern day. Republicans enacted several key measures to ensure the oligarchy was crushed. The 13th amendment outlawed slavery. The 14th amendment rejected the dred scott decision declaring all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens. It also required every state to provide equal protection of the law. The military reconstruction act divided the south into five military districts to enforce federal law and protect freed people. And the 15th amendment granted voting rights to black men, Completely flipping the southern electorate. Many of us know about these federal actions following the end of the civil war. Fewer of us know about the 12 brief, tumultuous, promising years of political transformation that followed because of those federal actions and the Incredible courageous patriotism and fierce political commitment of newly enfranchised black Americans. We had a multiracial democracy. For the first time in American history, the Southern oligarchy was faced not just with having their ill gotten wealth erased, but the reality that black people would not only exercise their vote in their own government, but that they would actually govern and critically govern in a way that would serve not the oligarchy, but the people. Which is what the oligarchs feared the most and still do. Which is why oligarchs are still doing everything they can do to disenfranchise black voters. Because the real nightmare isn't merely black voting. The nightmare is functioning democracy. Because functioning democracy has the dangerous tendency of asking dangerous questions like why are our schools underfunded? Why are our roads neglected? Why do a handful of people own so much? Why do we live with such unmitigated violence? Why do some communities get investment while others get ignored? Why does the tax code make the rich richer? Who is really benefiting here? And that's why this period following the Civil War was America's most dangerous democratic experiment. It was the first time America threatened its own oligarchs with the new federal laws and the Union army and civilian officials of the Freedmen's Bureau. In the south during Reconstruction, brave newly freed black Americans and newly enfranchised black men risked horrifying southern violence to vote, form political organizations and express their will forcefully on vital issues. In spite of their lack of land and resources, they began to immediately assert their independence from whites. Forming their own churches, voting in huge numbers, educating their children. Black people formed Equal Rights leagues throughout the South. These groups held state and local conventions protesting discriminatory treatment and demanding enforcement of the right to vote and equality before the law. As a result of this activism, in 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, approximately 80% of eligible black male voters were registered to vote less than two years from the end of the war. During the 12 years of reconstruction, over 1500 black leaders were elected or appointed to public office across the south. This included over 600 in state legislatures, including a shocking majority of the members of the South Carolina legislature, 20 black members in the US Congress, two black members of the US Senate, and many in prominent executive roles at the state level. These Reconstruction governments remarkably created the South's first free and biracial public school system open to both black and white children. Repealed discriminatory laws, rewrote apprenticeship and vagrancy statutes that had widely led to black people's re enslavement and arrest after emancipation and sharply reduced the number of capital offenses. The post emancipation years also generated the nation's first black colleges, including Howard University in D.C. and Fisk University in Tennessee. Black voters, 700,000 of whom voted, swung the 1868 presidential election toward Union General Ulysses S. Grant, who won by 300,000 votes. In response to black leadership's integration initiatives and empowerment, threatening the entire oligarchic system, the planter class funded the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups backed by local law enforcement to terrorize black voters or organizers and leaders, resulting in organized raids, lynchings, beatings, burnings and murders of thousands of black Americans. As white violence rose in the 1870s, the national US government, amid an economic depression, tired of defending black Americans, Northern politicians started to weigh the cost of holding on to the reliable black vote, which was only maintained through expensive southern enforcement and resulted in unpredictable and terribly messy white white terroristic violence versus acquiescing to the predictable state of southern white supremacy. Now that the oligarchy's wealth and power had been dramatically weakened in the middle of the national economic depression and then the age of coal and power and iron, Northern capitalists wanted those resources and the south had all of it. The south, which had received negligible subsidies in grants and bonds as compared to the north, needed investment. Poor weight farmers who wanted railroads, harbor improvements, flood control and land would be convinced that the privileges of these investments came at the seemingly small price of allying against blacks. So southern elite successfully convinced poor whites that their greatest enemy was black political participation rather than concentrated economic power. But the elite capitalist agenda wasn't concerned with racism as an end in itself, only as a means to an end. They were agnostic to racism. They were motivated only to preserve concentrated power and wealth. They would exploit racism if it served their ends or reject it if it didn't. As historian Horace Bond put it, without sentiment, without emotion, those who sought profit from the exploitation of the South's natural resources turned other men's prejudices and attitudes to their own end and did so with skill and ruthless acumen. So as usual, the wealthy elite and the politicians doing their bidding were the deciders. A deal was struck in 1877. The presidential election of the year prior was still in bitter dispute. The southern favored Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, had 184 votes and needed only one more to be elected. He had won the popular vote by more than 250,000 votes and should have been president. The northern favored Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, had only 166 electoral votes three southern states which held 19 electoral votes had not yet counted in the electoral process. If Hayes could get all of those, he would have 185 votes and be president. American votes were set aside. Black lives and freedoms were set aside and the Northern and Southern elites worked out their interests. In exchange for the south delivering all three states to Hayes. Hayes and the Northern Republicans agreed to withdraw all Union troops from the South. That is how we got President Hayes. That is how we killed the short lived, multiracial democracy of Reconstruction. How we portrayed the sacrifice of nearly 1 million dead in the Civil War, how we overturned the political and economic power of the courageous, newly emancipated black Americans, and how we allowed the south to re establish the violence of white supremacy for generations. And it is how we set the stage for exactly where we are today. We are taught that Reconstruction failed. That is a lie. Reconstruction started to work, which is exactly why it was systematically bartered away and dismantled. Let's look at a case study of how it started to work particularly and dangerously well in Wilmington, North Carolina, which became such an existential threat to minority oligarchy rule that elites orchestrated there. The only successful coup in US history. In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina was the South's most progressive city. A black majority town, it boasted a bustling integrated port and represented what the entirety of the south was could have been if the interests of the nation were served rather than the interests of the wealthy elite minority. If the nation that had won the war had not decided to return to the minority the victory that they had lost within just three decades of emancipation from slavery, over 125,000 black men in Wilmington were registered voters. And the city's thriving black middle class included 65 doctors, lawyers and educators, as well as business owners. Members of the police force and fire department. And black men held elected positions of power as city councilmen and magistrates. But the most dangerous threat to the oligarchy was the political alliance through which Wilmington achieved this success. It was fusion politics in which the populist party, comprised mostly of poor white farmers, joined together with the Republican Party, the party supported by freed black Americans, into one powerful entity. This coalition aligned against the Southern oligarchy's white segregationist party, the Democrats. The white poor, tenant farmers and workers of Wilmington did not fall for the segregationist propaganda saying alignment with the Democrats would give them scraps of privilege that would keep them poor, but at least keep them a cut above the black people. They could see clearly that the Democrats served the interests of the banks, railroads and Oligarchy rather than the common people, white or black. Through this fusion politics of economic interest alignment, the biracial coalition seized the political majority, sweeping the 1894 elections, ousting Democrats and electing republicans to local, state, and federal seats of power, and won the governorship in 1896. Once in power, the biracial coalition increased funding for public schools, reformed state prisons, set legal limits on interest rates, and enacted election laws that expanded voting access. They invested in infrastructure, rewrote state constitutions, and broadened political participation. They governed well, and for the first time, a southern government began serving the people outside of the white planter oligarchy. This fusion alliance of poor blacks and poor whites against the elite minority power was, and still is, the oligarchy's worst nightmare. The people's ability to see through racial hierarchical propaganda and know that alignment of class is the ultimate tool for political and economic changes. The oligarchs began a ruthless campaign to lure the poor white voters away from the fusion party, where their actual interests lay toward the party protecting only the wealthy. And they used what they always use, what the oligarchs are still weaponizing today. The oldest, laziest, easiest trick in the book, anti black fear and racism. They weaponized the press to publish false, outlandish accounts of the menace of black people to the state, stoked fears that the state would be overrun by black domination despite the fact that the fusion party was a majority white and inflamed the time tested fear of black men preying on white women. By November 1898, elites controlling the narrative had completely convinced the poor white populace that their greatest enemy was not the concentrated economic power of elites, but black political participation. Then came the violence, as it always does on election day, white police rode into black homes, whipping black men and threatening them with death for attempting to vote. And armed white mobs took over polling places, resulting in the democrats sweeping every position in which they ran. But because the alliance had posed such a significant threat, violence and winning was not enough. They had to decimate any vestige of this biracial progress. The day after the sham election, Democrats stripped black citizens of the right to vote, fired black men from their jobs, giving them to white men. Hundreds of armed white men burned the black newspaper to the ground, marched to city hall, and forced the republican mayor to resign, and then terrorized the city, killing between 60 and hundreds of black residents. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted for the coup or the killings. In the state's retelling of the history, the violence was a race war instituted by black aggression. And the coup leaders were brave heroes. Within just five years, the number of black voters plunged from 125,000 to 6,100. And no black citizen served in public office for 74 years. It was 94 years before one was elected to Congress. Although the violence and terrorism and lynchings persisted for decades, eventually it became politically expensive for the elites. So a parallel solution emerged. Minority rule no longer even needed a mob. It could use bureaucracy and procedure. The Southern elites created poll taxes, impossible literacy tests, grandfather clauses, registration barriers, white primaries, black codes, convict leasing, and of course, of course, of course redistricting. Black Southern voters were almost exclusively Republicans. So the elite power brokers knew that they could erase black political power by drawing districts to dilute Republican votes across different districts. Does this sound exactly and precisely familiar? And to be clear, then as now, it was not just black people who lost their voice in government. Anyone who did not align with the elite party lost their voice in government. And then, like now, the conservative party immediately reduced investment in public education and services, squashed labor movements and instituted tax schemes to make the rich richer. There is nothing new under the sun. The oligarchic playbook is the same. The people's solutions are the same. Let's turn now to using the playbook and solutions to guide our next steps. I am honored to be in conversation with Tennessee Representative Justin J. Pearson, currently running for Memphis's 9th congressional district. When billion dollar oil companies sought to pollute over a million citizens drinking water and seize people's land, Representative Pearson helped organize his community, forming Memphis Community against the Pipeline which successfully stopped that project. When the public utility tried to entrap Memphis in an unfair contract that would have raised Tennessean's utility bill, he fought back and stopped the never ending contracting. When Representative Pearson discovered that Tennessee's fugitive emissions were killing residents, he rallied and organized until they shut the company down. Also, when Elon Musk's Xai Data center was illegally polluting the community, he led the Environmental Justice Coalition to secure operations that more fairly protect Memphis's air, water and soil. The backlash against his anti oligarchy work for the people has been intense. He was expelled by the gop, led House suspended from all committees, and faced physical confrontation with Tennessee state troopers in public galleries of the Tennessee House. Representative Pearson's majority Black Memphis District 9, which he is right now running to represent, was cracked by racial gerrymandering on May 7 to eliminate his dangerously powerful coalition. Welcome to we can do hard Things. Representative Justin Pearson, thank you so much
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thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so humbled to be here with you.
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I feel like to know anything about you is to know that you are about your people and your place, so I would love to start there. Your work is deeply rooted in the people from whom you come. Dr. Kimberly Owens, Pearson, public school teacher for 23 years. Your father, Reverend Jason J. Pearson Sr. Who was a truck driver for 15 years until he went to Howard and is now a longstanding pastor. Your grandmother's a nurse and a bus driver. Gwen and Grandma Pearson, just tell us about your people and how they root you.
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C
Thank you so much for that thoughtful question. I mean, it's true my family means everything to me, and I've been really fortunate and blessed to have extraordinary parents, siblings, and some matriarchs, my grandmama Gwen and Grandmama Pearson in particular. But, you know, our story starts a little differently than some people imagine. My parents had kids as teenagers. My oldest brother is just 15 years younger than my mom, and I'm 20 years younger than both of them. So I've watched my parents really grow up. And I remember my mom's 30th birthday party, which was a lot of fun. But, you know, they come own struggles too, right? Watching your parents grow up and, you know, moving from one job, I think my mom moved from a job that was making 425 to 450. And so having those financial strains were a reality for us. But my matriarchs, my grandmamas always were home in Westwood. They were single moms raising five kids and six kids, respectively. But they taught us the sense of family being so important. So we'd have Sunday dinners, holidays we'd spend together, and it gave me a sense of groundedness. And even when I went off to college and my grandmothers had passed, there were other elders in the family who always would remind me of this Amanda. They would say, just never forget where you come from, because no matter if you are at a really nice school up in Maine or you're working, interning in Congress, or any of those things, you never forget the people who make you who you are. And I've been very blessed and fortunate to have lots of cousins, you know, hundreds of us right here in. In Memphis and Shelby county, literally. And so our family gatherings are always big. But it's to never forget that I've got parents who are well educated. One went to Howard. My mom got her doctorate degree, and I've got a couple of cousins who are incarcerated. Right. It is that spectrum of reality that I live in. And even in the rooms that I go in, whether it be the Oval Office, which we have the privilege to go in as advocates to end gun violence, or the State House, I carry that legacy with me. I carry those folks who didn't and weren't able to read and write their own names, but who fought for me to have this life. I think of them every single day because that's who I'm doing the things that I do for.
- [43:54]
A
Never forgetting where you came from is very powerful, and particularly so when where you come from is Memphis. I mean, it is really impossible to overstate the lineage of liberation that has been Memphis. So what does it mean to you to be made of and by Memphis?
- [44:20]
C
I always think of myself sort of in that way. Right. Made in Memphis. Memphis is an extraordinary place because of its history and its legacy, and also with the challenges that we consistently have to deal with. And even now in this current historical moment, we feel those challenges. Right? We're a majority black city, one of the blackest cities by population in the United States of America. And we're in a moment where that is being attacked, right? Black political power, black political leadership is under threat and under siege as a neo confederacy is being built all across the south and in this country with the President, United States, at the forefront of that. Right? So that is a burden that we are carrying. And also the blessing, right, that I think about and that I carry every single day is this is one of the most special places in the world, because it was here that ideas and ideals of liberation were formed and were fought for. When you think about America's history with lynching and the advocacy to end lynching, you can't separate that from Ida B. Wells Barnett. Ida B. Wells is a Memphian, Right. It is the loss of three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee, at the People's Grocery that sparks an entire movement to end and abolish lynching in the United States of America. It was here the first black millionaire, Robert R. Church, who was formerly enslaved by his own father, bought the first bond after Memphis was losing his charter to ensure that the city existed in the first place. It was here that you had the sanitation workers strike of 1968, oftentimes remembered, obviously, for the tragedy of the loss of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who was coming here for a second march. But is also the reality that there was a movement that was already here before Dr. King ever arrived of sanitation workers, of women who were working in laundromats, galvanizing and building power, of working class black people who honestly in this context had no reason to believe that things would change, that the conditions of life would improve, and yet they were willing to sacrifice everything for this ideal in our country to become more realized. And obviously we have the history and legacy of Dr. King which we cherish and hold here dearly. But it keeps getting pushed forward. We have the take them down 901 by clerk Tammy Sawyer, people who are trying to get the icon class of the Confederacy out of our city to the work we were doing to stop multibillion dollar crude oil pipelines from being built in our neighborhood.
- [46:51]
B
Right?
- [46:51]
C
There is a spirit of resistance but also resilience in the places that they keep saying are paths of least resistance. That's how we are perceived. But every day I get to wake up a Memphian, I'm reminded of the legacy of which we are part, which are people who refuse to bow down to tyranny, who refuse to accept the status quo as the way that it has to be, and instead have really charted a better future. From this place that I get the privilege of calling home,
- [47:27]
A
I had this moment recently where I realized I wasn't actually overwhelmed by what we had to do. I was overwhelmed by trying to remember everything we had to do. If you're anything like me, Skylight can help this all in one Digital smart calendar syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, whatever you're already using. I also love the Tasks feature. The first time I heard about it, they had me. The second they said quote color coding, family members. Yes, I love it and you will too. Families are better when they're working together. Right now Skylight is offering our listeners $30 off their 15 inch calendars by going to my skylight.com/ we can do hard things. Go to my skylight.com we can do hard things for $30 off your 15 inch calendar. That's my S K Y L I g h t.com we can do Hard Things I try to be intentional about the products that I buy for my family. So when it comes to laundry, I choose All Free Clear detergent. You all know this about me. I'm always thinking about the small, everyday choices that add up to how we take care of ourselves and the people we love. And in our house, Sensitive Skin is just part of our reality. So I'm always trying to make choices that help keep everyone comfortable. That is why it matters to me that All Free Clear is the number one detergent brand recommended by Dermatologists for Sensitive Skin. And that it's 100% free from dyes, perfumes and parabens. And the thing I appreciate is that it actually works. It tackles tough stains and odors, you know, real life, messy everyday stuff. But it's still safe for sensitive skin. So whether it's workout clothes, kids clothes, or just the constant rotation of laundry, I don't have to overthink it. Pick up a bottle of all free clear detergent for your next laundry day. Today's episode is brought to you by alma. When it comes to therapy, the changes can be so gradual, you don't even notice them at first. And then one day you realize you're reacting differently. You're calmer in situations that used to overwhelm you. You're not spiraling as quickly, but finding the right therapist can feel intimidating. There's so much searching, trying to figure out insurance, wondering if you'll actually click with someone. It can become this whole stressful process that delays people from getting support in the first place. ALMA has a nationwide network of more than 20,000 therapists and most of them accept insurance. You can browse their directory on your own, filter by the things that matter to you, and even see estimated session costs up front. So you're not going in guessing a year from today isn't that far away. Get started now@helloalma.com we can that's hello alma.com. w E C A N. So glad you mentioned the pipeline because one of the things that strikes me as so unique about you is that you seem to me to be a movement man who has decided that his greatest efficacy is in an elected position as opposed to these kind of curated and a petri dish politicians that we have that I don't know from whence they come. You are a resident of Memphis. You learn about the Bihalia pipeline. You're an organizer and a movement guy and it activates you, right? This predates your running for office. How did you activate and walk me through that to you running.
- [51:25]
C
It's so true. Petri dish politicians are real. And there is. There's gotta be a factory that I was never allowed into. That's hysterical. So look, I am actually one of the jobs that I hats that I wear. I'm leading the movement leaders hub for an organization called bold. We're all across the country, but I bring together leaders in rural, suburban and urban areas who are at the state house level, county commission levels to talk about the issues that are happening in our communities. So I can tell you more about nitrates in water and in aquifers, coming off of people who are farmers, or I can talk about air pollution, come from data centers. You know, there's a wide spectrum there because of the movement. And we need more elected officials who come from movement. And that's one of the things that I'm deeply passionate about, because I do believe people who choose an issue to become some sort of a subject matter expert in, by being in the trenches, by doing the real hard work, when you don't have all the support, you don't have all the resources, you don't have people encouraging you. Right. Like going through that to elected office, you understand the position very differently than I think the petri dish politicians do. And so for me, when we learned about this multi billion dollar corporation, first thing I did was go talk to my parents because I read the MLK50 article just to do journalism, an amazing online newspaper here in Memphis. And I said, hey, you know, they're doing this in Westwood and Boxtown. And my parents had no clue about it. Again, we've been here four generations. And so the fact that we were unaware and this was happening during the pandemic, we knew was an attempt to try and build something without our community being able to resist. But October 17th, my predecessor, God rest her soul, State Representative Dr. Barbara Ward Cooper, called a meeting of the pipeline company with the community, and my entire family showed up. We learned what they were offering and we knew how harmful it was going to be. And it was that moment that I realized we had to fight. And I actually spoke at that meeting and I told our community, I really was speaking to our community. I said, we have to fight now. Now, I had never fought multibillion dollar corporations before. I didn't really know how to do it. I'd seen some of the fights that were happening with Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone XL, sort of out there, but I never knew anything about it. I was working honestly with the CEO of $175 million nonprofit, and he and I were raising millions of dollars a year in workforce development. I had no experience really in community organizing, but I saw a problem and I applied all the skills that I had in raising money and talking to people with a lot of resources and brought those to the fight to talk to city councilors, to county commissioners, to go knock doors and meet people and share what was going on. Month after month after month after month, we started to find landowners who didn't want to sell. We found coalition partners, we found lawyers with the Southern Environmental Law Center. And I continued to share just with the public what was going on and convince, you know, pretty aggressively convince elected officials to get into the fight who were really trying to stay on the sidelines. And we were successful in that. And when my mentor, Guy Russ, her soul, she passed away In October of 2022, I wanted to continue that legacy because so she understood about power, which a lot of people who are politicians do not understand. Is your job is to serve as a conduit for your community. It isn't to keep the seat all to yourself or to have the comfy chairs and to send the press releases and then everybody be all happy. Like that's a weakness, right? It is. How are you using the position that you are in to change the trajectory for the people you claim to love and represent? And that's what I've been able to do and have been doing now, being an elected official, but a person who has never lost the movement that the job is not just to keep the title, to be in the room all unto yourself is how do you bring more people in, how do you build it, how you register more voters, how are you using it as a platform to fight injustice? That's why I'm taking on billionaires, because I think that's what the state representative is supposed to do. That's why we shut down sterilization services of Tennessee when the Environmental protection Agency told us that the cancer causing fugitive emissions were 40 times worse than they thought. That's what a state representative is supposed to do. And I think about the job more holistically, partly because I come from like a family that was, you know, born into poverty and there was nobody fighting for us. There was nobody really standing up for us. It was everybody just going along to get along. And I want to be the elected official, the public servant, the person who puts the people in my heart, my mind and my soul and always at the forefront. I want to be that person. For the kid who was growing up
- [55:46]
A
like I was, this piece that you're pursuing about movement work feels like the whole ball game. As opposed to, you know, the kind of elites of either parties that are blessing and allowing people to run. You know, you dance with the one who brought you, and if it's leadership, that's who you're dancing with. And we see where that has gotten us. If you're from movement and you dance with them, that's a very different outcome. So what would it mean and how would it look?
- [56:20]
C
I think one, we gotta find and support the people who are in the movement. Right? I mean, before, again, I was ever elected. There were people who came out of Nebraska, the Jane Clubs of the world. There were people who came out of these other big green organizations and some small organizations like Breach Collective out of Portland, Oregon, of all places, who were like, how can we help? How can we support? And they were able, because, one, they had been around a little bit longer, they were able to teach me at 25, some really important skills, some really important lessons to be a more effective leader without trying to overtake me. Right. They wanted to support our communities. And remember, the places that the movement grows the best, in my opinion, are the places where actually the most suffering is happening. And so it really takes true partnership. And true collaboration means that you don't come in as a savior, you come in as a supporter. And to build that type of coalition that is reflective of the world that we want to create is going to require people who go in with a sense of humility, a sense of love into communities where there's the most brokenness, but where there are a whole lot of people who are like me, smarter than me, even more capable than I am, who just need support in order to show their leadership potential, their skills, their acumen to be able to address some of the most significant causes that we have in our country, even in our community. I've been doing this work for six years now, and, you know, my mayors ignored me when I was telling them about data centers and the consequences that they would have to our water, to our air quality, why we needed to fight them. And Lee Harris, Paul Young, all of them said, nope, you're wrong. They can pollute as much as they want. It's not against the law. And it was over a year after all that was happening that Trump's Environmental Protection Agency actually agreed with me and with the people in Boxtown and Westwood, because the gatekeeping of the elite corporate Democratic class, corporate Republican class, like, they don't want us to actually have people who know and are proximate to the problems in positions of power. It's much easier to write off someone if you say, oh, they're just an activist, right? They're just an advocate, they're just a part of the movement, but they're not really serious legislators, not serious researchers. And when you start to combine those things and you say, oh, no, no, no, I am an elected state representative, and also I am still deeply intertwined with movements for social justice, racial justice, and economic justice, and I bring all of these facts to bear, it hurts their ability to hurt and harm your credibility. And I think what we have a responsibility to do, people who are in the movement is to find those other leaders and encourage them to run and when they run, support them, volunteer on their campaigns, donate to them, share their messages on social media. Because we really do need to have more folks who understand the struggles of regular, everyday people who are in power. And not just those who come from the right family, those who went to the right school, did the right summer programs or whatever it is that people do. So the petri dish politicians, right? But that is really what has happened. Like you get these hand picked people who they just happen to have all the right credentials, but when they get in power, the communities don't look any different. You know, they get a few dollars for a project here, a few dollars for a project there, maybe get a bridge built right in the district. But poverty keeps increasing. The Congress folks getting more money while their districts are getting poorer. They're getting richer while their districts are getting poorer. And that's happening on the Republican and the Democratic side.
- [59:58]
A
What you're doing is a threat to that whole structure. Many people might have first learned of you as one of the Tennessee 3. You had just been elected to office in 2023, which was the same year of the Covenant School shooting which killed three nine year olds and three adults. Can you walk us through what transpired?
- [60:21]
C
Before I was ever elected official, anytime I would see mass shootings, I'd always make posts and messages for the most part. And I would do the same thing everybody else did. Right. Like I said, my thoughts and prayers, you know, may God bless and keep and protect these families and those who've lost their loved ones. But once I was an elected official, I felt a different level of responsibility because now I'm in a position and I'm sitting alongside people who are in position who could actually do something right to prevent this from happening in the first place. And so I'd been serving in the State House since January 2023 in an interim role. I won the general election and then I got sworn in officially the same day of the Covenant shooting on March 27, 2023. So it happened the same day I got officially sworn in.
- [61:06]
A
Wow. The exact same day. I didn't realize that exact same day.
- [61:09]
C
And I spoke about that when I was being sworn in about like how we have to challenge the status quo. So I got sworn in. The session was had, it was a very abbreviated session. People spoke a lot about what was happening and then they sort of ended for the day. The next day we got to work. There were 7,000 people in the Capitol, 7,000, mostly under the age of 18, who were speaking up and standing up and saying, do something, Pass an extreme risk protection order, red flag law, and all these things. And I wanted to at least welcome them into the Capitol. And we have a time slot for that. And the speaker refused to allow for me to speak at all. And then when I said something ahead of every bill that I was speaking on, asking a question, I said, we got to do something about gun safety laws. He said, if you do that again, you'll be censured for the day. And then ultimately my voting machine gets turned off. And that's when we decide, you know what? We've got to do something. We go to the well of the House floor. But there's an important lesson here. What was happening outside influenced what happened inside. The fact that thousands of people had shown up, were marching, were protesting, were singing, inspired and motivated me, gave me a sense of courage to say, you know what? At minimum, we have to fight to make sure the voices of our constituents who are showing up are being heard. That I felt compelled to do. But there are only three representatives who went to the well of that House floor, and there were 99 of us total in that room. And we have to start figuring out how do we get and encourage the people who are too often on the sidelines when they should be in the center of the conversation, should be in the center of the fight, off of the sidelines. Because being Republican, light, being timid, being so moderate that you allow for things to continue to happen to oppressed people without ever challenging the systems that are designed and constructed in this way in the first place is what gets us into these horrible, painful situations year after year after year. And it's gun violence, for sure, which has deeply impacted my family as well. Since then, I've tragically lost a brother, right, by gun suicide called 988. If you're ever struggling. But if we don't have leaders who are fighting to challenge the systems, that is how we keep staying in this cycle. If you're not challenging healthcare systems that are costing people and charging people $16,000 a month, like I met a lady in Sumner, Tennessee, $16,000 a month for her breast cancer treatment because her insurance company dropped her. And so my fight started many years ago, right, in environmental justice. But as I've continued to be an elected official and do this work, I'm seeing gun violence as the number one killer of children in the United States of America in the state of Tennessee, I got to do something about that. Once I see a problem, the only way I think about it is, is there something that I can do to actually effectuate change on that issue? And that is very different than a lot of other people who say, you know what? That's not my problem. You know what? That's a different level of government. I go to city council meetings, I go to county commission meetings. I go to school board meetings, because those things directly affect the place that I call home and directly affect the place where I hope to have children and raise children one day. But that's a level of proximity that most people who choose to be politicians instead of public servants, that's their level of proximity, they say is too far.
- [64:20]
A
I mean, the gun violence is such a prime example of evidence that we are living under minority rule. I mean, if the 90% of Americans want background checks before gun sales, 90% of America. And we cannot and will not have that because they're not only not challenging it, they are working at the behest of the gun lobby and manufacturers. So there's all these issues we can point to that show that if it was actually a representative democracy, we would have different decisions being made. And so that all leads to why we don't have actual representation of what Americans want and what is actually in their interests most egregiously being systematically erased with this new racially motivated gerrymandering that we're seeing. So can you tell us what happens in the days leading up to May 7, what the legislature did, how people in Memphis are feeling? It's a dramatic and devastating situation.
- [65:38]
C
Yeah, no, it is. It's a hard time, honestly, to keep the faith and belief in democracy when you do see the intentional efforts to destroy representative democracy right before your eyes. And so if you look at what's happened in our state for the last 15 years of Republican rule, you've seen a continued erosion of democracy. This didn't just happen overnight, just like our expulsion didn't just happen overnight, which is why we needed to have. Before I ever got elected, we needed to have some stronger fighters in the state House and the state Senate. We needed to have people who were willing to shake the trees and make more noise, but instead, we had a lot of people, and a lot of them are still in office across our country, who. They're just going along to get along. You know, I just want to pass one bill. I just want them to like me. Right. And so that set up conditions for our democracy to continuously be destroyed. Without an opposition party. And that's ultimately very consequential to where we are right now. Because when you don't have a strong opposition, the people who are in power, they bend the rules toward their will. And you ultimately do end up where the minority opinion ends up, taking over what impacts the majority of people. And so in our state, for instance, we don't pass red flag laws, which we know most people want, including MAGA Republicans, even to the point we were able to force the governor to write an executive order to mandate you get a background check if you purchase a firearm. But that happens after our expulsion, that happens after the Covenant School shooting. After so much tragedy, so much heartache happens, then we were at least able to get that executive order, which could have been done before because we're losing our representative government in big part because of big money in politics. The corporations are buying the politicians that they want, not convincing the populace what is what they believe are good opinions and good ideas. And that obviously impacts representation. To what you're talking about, the Louisiana v. Calais decision of the Supreme Court, which I would think will be viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, which gutted the Voting Rights act, which is saying something right, really is. I mean, it will be in line in my opinion. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year. It will be in line with the Plessy v. Ferguson types of doctrines. Right. Where you taken away the most. The single most significant piece of civil rights legislation in American history, the Voting Rights act, all for the benefit of one president. Right. Our Supreme Court has been captured, I believe, to serve the President of the United States and billionaires. Our Congress has been captured to serve billionaires and the President of the United States, who is a billionaire himself. I don't think those things are incidental or coincidental. And the more that they can take power, the more they can silence voices of dissent. I think that is what they want to do. And in Memphis and Shelby county, that's what we experienced after the Calais decision. Two days later, Marshall Blackburn, United States Senator, says we need to take away the only majority black district in Memphis in the state of Tennessee. The next day, the President United States, calls the governor to take away that district and says he has a good call with him. Tragically, that's the same day that we were having the first black man, Lyon State Representative G. Hardaway, who passed away. And I saw the Governor on that same day and he was out taking pictures and trying to pray with this man's family, who was a Big voting rights advocate and against racist redistricting. And so it was very eerie. And then a special session was called the next day. Again, the first black representative who had passed away light in state on the day of his funeral, they called a special session to take away our majority black district. And these things, again, are not coincidental. None of it is incidental. We got 47 minutes to speak about the legislation, and they were snickering and laughing about that. They gave us 54 minutes combined to talk about the other pieces of legislation alluding to Brown v. Board. Right. Like, the racism is overt in our state, in our country, and they want us to look at what is going on and be like, well, this is race neutral. This is racist and is going to have racist implications. What we understand and realize right now in our state, and the reason I'm still running for Congress in District 9, is they made it harder, but they did not make it impossible for us to win. But their intention was very clearly that we need to dilute black political voting power. And in three days, 750,000 people who had been having a district, District 9, that was majority of the city of Memphis, a little bit of Tipton county, lost their representation, lost the ability to elect a representative of our own choosing in a district that was about 65% black, African American, because of racism, like. And it's been visceral. It's hard when you get people to call you and they say, they took me out of your district. Right. They took you from me. As what? My aunties have said, My God, aunties. That's hard to hear. And now we are feeling some reinvigoration because I've traveled these new counties. It's 15 of them. I traveled these new counties. I've met people there.
- [70:51]
A
Isn't it 300 miles or something?
- [70:54]
C
Yes, 200 miles.
- [70:55]
A
200 miles. They. They gerrymandered it to hell. That's insane.
- [71:01]
C
15 counties, 200 miles. And I've traveled every last mile, and I've been to every single county, and a lot of the counties are extremely overwhelmingly white in super majority white counties. But you know what? They're packing out churches, we're packing out community centers. And in Giles County. This is my favorite story. In Giles County, Amanda, where Pulaski, Tennessee is. Pulaski is.
- [71:24]
A
Oh, I know Pulaski. That's home of the Ku Klux klan.
- [71:27]
C
Pulaski, Tennessee, 150 people showed up to one of our meetings. We thought it was going to be two dozen. 150 said, no, we're ready. We're ready for you to be our congressman. We're ready for change. Like, this is not who we are. And I've got Republicans who come into these meetings and coming to these rallies and they're like, this is not the Republican Party. Like, I'm switching. I'm going to vote for you in the primary and then the general. I really believe my mom is right. What the devil meant for bad, God will turn into good. And that type of energy is helping us to be like, you know what? We're still going to get a representative. We're still going to have somebody who's going to advocate for us and fight for us. And I'm going to fight for all of us. Just like in the Tennessee House of Representatives. I never just think about my 72,000 people. I think about all 7 million Tennesseans. And that's going to be my same thing when I'm serving in the United States Congress. But there is yet reason to have hope. But it is really important that we call out the racism, the patriarchy, the sexism, the isms that continue to plague our community. Because the litmus test for America's progress isn't what's happening in New York and California. The litmus test is what's happening in the south, where dozens of seats are at risk. In Congress, over 200 seats are majority black, majority people of color in the state House and the state Senate. And they're already talking about how they can take away those seats as well this year and next year. And Georgia is seeking to do that in a couple of days. Tennessee is seeking to do that next year. And that political deprivation is so that you don't have people talking about environmental justice, you don't have people talking about racial justice, you don't have people like me who advocate for us to lift up the voices of the marginalized. They don't want that. And so instead of changing their policies and their positions to address the needs of our community, instead it's let us choose different voters. But voters are smarter than I think they give them credit for. And if we are proximate, if we can go knock those doors, have the money to go reach those people, we will have them on our side and understanding that they are trying to get us to fight each other so we don't ever look up and see who's really benefiting, right? Who are the billionaires and the billion dollar corporations that are actually profiting while we are suffering.
- [73:39]
A
When you're going to these places and you're seeing white voters. Is the veil being lifted about they're not actually working for us. When you have billionaires and then everyone else, and those are the two sides are folks who have been bred to think these divisions are true, which are not. Are they starting to see the economic alliance? Do you feel like that might be coming?
- [74:04]
C
That's what I feel, that the solidarity is being built around the economic issues because people's gas prices are up, people's grocery prices are up. And they know that. It's not because of an immigrant. They know it's not because of some trans child. They know it's because of an endless and needless war that the President went in. They're suffering while other folks are having UFC fights. Right. They're suffering while Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire. And they know that's not right. Right. That there's something rigged about the process. And it is rigged. It's just a system that's rigged for billionaires. It's not rigged for everyday people. Right. It's not rigged for black folks or for immigrants or queer folks or for women. Right. Like, it's rigged so that those at the top can extract more from the rest of us. And they are trying to distract us and obfuscate from the realities so that we do not organize and build power together. And that's why campaigns like ours matter so much, particularly in places like the south that have been neglected and negated and ignored by the establishment for so long. We're not getting nearly enough resources to build political power as our brothers, sisters and siblings in some of the battleground states. And because of that, we haven't been able to get our message to people about why things are the way that they are and why we need to have people who are going to fight for all of us to be able to live a good, quality life. Because ultimately, that's what we're advocating for, that everybody gets to live a good quality of life. Maybe you don't get a mega mansion, but you should be able to have a roof over your head. Right? You should be able to have some groceries that you can afford, a car that you can drive, be able to send your kids to college if that's what they choose to do, and not be an immense amount of debt for it. Like, there is a world that we're trying to create that is possible, that is being held hostage by a group of billionaires who just want one more billion, regardless of what that means for
- [76:07]
A
us and need us to stay divided, because that's the only way that they keep and preserve their power, literally, they
- [76:14]
C
profit off of our division. So if we stop being divided, they can't continue to increase their profits. That's what we have to realize and what we have to share with people. It's like, I am not your enemy. You can see me, you can touch me, you can talk to me. When was the last time you saw Elon Musk and touched him and talked to him. When was the last time you saw Peter Till, touched him and talked like, these people are on a different plane when it comes to how they move about the world and the amount of mansions that they're building to separate themselves from the people who they are continuing to exploit for their own gains and profits. You've got people, people like Mark Zuckerberg, right, Buying hundreds of million dollar yachts while laying off thousands of his workers. Like, that's what we're dealing with. They're buying 300 million dollar yachts while you're losing your job. They're using our drinking water for their data centers that are designed to take our jobs. They're taking human drinking water to cool computers that take our jobs. Like this should be unconscionable for most people, but we have to go talk to people, meet them where they are, share what's going on and do the hard work. Right. Of building that community, of that solidarity, and that's how we're going to win this race.
- [77:33]
A
My last question is going to be, how do we help you win? I want to ask you one question before that.
- [77:37]
C
Sure.
- [77:38]
A
Many white people have been newly awakened in the last 15 years by Trump's radicalism and chaos, and not two decades in. Many of us are already tired and jaded and teetering around hopelessness. Now I realize how absurd that is when you think about your ancestor angels and the hundreds of years of unmitigated violence and the resilience and really discipline required to keep moving forward. What do you say to those who have very recently started and just feel like, oh my God, they're rigging the system, there's, what's the point? We're never going to get anywhere here. Like, what do you say to us?
- [78:32]
C
I think, I think two things. One, hope is a discipline. It is not just a desire, it's not just a want, it's not just a prayer that you whisper into the. The air is something that you have to come back to consistently and nurture amidst the most difficult times, because that's how you are sustained through them and that's how we make it through together, right? It is carrying on with the ideal of hope for a better future, a better tomorrow, knowing that the truth of the matter is we will see parts of it in our lifetime, but there will be parts that we do not see. Which leads to my second point. Before anybody on this earth was ever born, there are people who are carrying the flame of hope, a possibility of what this country and what this world could become. And we are privileged to be here at this moment, at this time, to fight for the vision of the world that we want to see. But because there were people before you and I got here who marched, who protested, who showed up, who prayed and moved their feet, who advocated, who read, who. Who fought the system, who built the Underground Railroad, Right, who were abolitionists, who organized communities for freedom and liberation and justice before us. This is just our moment in our time. And it is hard and it is difficult. That should not be enough. And it cannot be enough for you to sit on the sidelines and say, you know what? It doesn't. I can't do it anymore. Because that reeks of privilege. To be able to say, you know what? I need. I need to stop. I'm done. I'm just going to go back to my shell, go back to my life, go back to my issues, go back to my concerns. Because all you have to think about is the fact that there are certain people who can't do that. I've got 819 families who have faced deportations in Memphis and Shelby county because of the federal unsafe task force of this administration, with the support of our governor and our mayor, who is a Democrat. 819 families who don't get to go back inside their shell. Thousands of people who have lost loved ones to gun violence who don't get to go back inside their shell. Thousands of women in this country who have faced the evil of people like Donald Trump and Epstein and all the people in those Epstein files, they don't get to go back inside their shell. And so our responsibility is actually to build community, to help us get through this. And in community, you still build joy. In community, you still show love. You do cry sometimes, but you have something that helps you sustain yourself, which is why in black African American prophetic tradition, in the Christian prophetic tradition, the church has always been such an important place. Monday through Saturday, you get called out of your name. You get called a boy. You experience the violence and the horrors of lynchings or incarceration or a president of the United States killing 100 schoolgirls. The first day of the Iran war in our nation that refuses to provide health care to people overnight, comes up with $2 billion a day for war. You experience those horrors as an advocate and as a person who's wanted to see a nation invest in its people, right? As an elected official, as a representative, and also just as a community advocate, and have seen it, refuse to do that year over year over year over year for your entire life. And they want to go to war and they create $2 billion. And then on Sunday, you go to church. I go to church. I got three churches. I go to Union Combined Parish, Christ Missionary Baptist, Community, Faith creature. I need a lot of church.
- [81:53]
A
Love it. These times call for a diversity of church resources.
- [81:59]
C
All of it. I need all of it. You hear me?
- [82:03]
A
Give me it all.
- [82:04]
C
Because there's a vision that keeps being projected, right, of a world that is not yet, but that is possible, and that persecution is a part of the process. But so is resurrection, right? So is hope. So it's the resurrection of our beliefs, of our faith, of our nation, of our world to something better where there is no more war, right? Where people who are hungry are fed, people who are naked are clothed, people who don't have health care habit, people who are in prison are liberated, right? Like we have to remind ourselves of that vision because that's the discipline, right? That's how you keep your hope alive, right? It isn't just by hoping that it stays, but as you nurture that and you build that in community and you come back to it week after week, day after day, because these are difficult times. And so I have some empathy. But also it's an acknowledgment of the privilege and that in this moment, our purpose is to continue to nurture our hope for the fight, which is not for just this presidential term. It is for a lifetime.
- [83:03]
A
There is nothing that would make me happier than when they took the beauty of and the just majesty that Memphis has been and thought that they were burying it. To see you come through this election, I mean, the word cracked, right? Even that's a gerrymanderrum. Crack, crack Memphis. Crack hope, crack your. Your spine of resistance, you know, to take what they tried to bury and thought it was a done deal. And then to see you come through this election and win as a representative of the 9th district of Tennessee, that would be a beautiful, beautiful thing. And that is a source of such joy and hope for so many. So everyone's going to go to vote.justinjay.com figure out how you can volunteer. Give your dollars. You have dollars. I know y' all have dollars. Give your dollars. Every little bit counts. This matters so much. As we said at the beginning of this podcast, supporting black political power is not only the right thing, it is the absolutely necessary thing. If we don't want to live in a world of oligarchy and any last thing you want to say to us, Representative Pearson, we are grateful for everything that you have done. We're grateful for your example of how you can work for the people. We're grateful of how you can become a political leader. Tell us what you need from us going forward.
- [84:51]
C
Yeah. One, thank you so much for this time. It's truly spiritual to be able to bring talk about my brother, talk about my grandmother's, our family story, all the way to this part of the story that we're sharing together. Yes. Go to VoteJustinJay.com we need your help. We need your support, and we need volunteers. Obviously, we need money. I'm not taking any corporate PAC money. $0. Because we're people powered and we want to be, you know, representative of the people. And we've got over 40,000 folks who are, on average donating $31 to our campaign who just believe in the vision that we have for the future. Yeah, it's people powered. It's amazing. It truly is amazing. But volunteer, take one shift to make some phone calls in particular. I know y' all all across the country, the globe, but you can take a shift, make some phone calls for a couple of hours because that's what's really going to help us to be able to reach voters, and that's how we're going to be able to win when people take ownership. And that's what we need people to do. Put democracy in your hands. Because this is ours. This is our country. It is, is broken, but beloved. And the way that we mended is by the work that we do together and in community together. And I promise you, I'm going to keep doing it with you, and I just love and appreciate you so much.
- [86:05]
A
Thank you, Representative Pearson. We are with you. Vote justinj.com I will see you there in a hot minute. We'll meet over there and start volunteering and giving and supporting you. So thank you. We're going to be holding you tight.
- [86:20]
C
Thank you so much. I appreciate you.
- [86:22]
A
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