September4, 2024. Justin J. Pearson. Part 2

Published Sep 4, 2024, 9:30 PM

Ramses Ja and guest co-host Q Ward are back with part 2 of their conversation with Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson. 

And now part two of our two part conversation with Representative Justin J. Pearson, community organizer and state representative for District eighty six and Memphis, Tennessee. This is the Black Information Network Daily Podcast with your hosts ramses Jah and q Ward. Having this conversation is cathartic for me. Ramses is the hope in this tandem. He's the optimism.

He's the person that touches me on my shoulder and reminds us that we have made progress. I am the real I don't want to say I don't want to say angry, militant. I'm the Malcolm to his Martin. But there are days where I ask those questions, what of our progress? And what of your time? You know, how long is this supposed to take? And how long are we supposed to endure the position that we've been put in? But Ramses has to remind me we started a lot further back than we are now, and like you said, our responsibility to those unfulfilled promises is to keep fighting for them. With this election coming really really soon. The I think the good and the bad of Vice President Harris being the nominee with such short notice is that she has this electric excitement, but she doesn't have a long runway. So as we prepare to look at what we're facing with this upcoming election, from your point of view, what are some of the most pressing issues that are facing Black Americans as we take out to the polls to use our voice to hopefully cause and perpetuate some change.

Now, I think what says stake for us, first and foremost is our civil liberties and civil rights right. Our right to have access to the ballot box is at stake because we have somebody who says he wants to be a dictator on day one, and if his people vote for him, we won't ever have to again. Right, democracy most benefits the people who have been hurt the most. It benefits the people who have been pushed to the perphery. It benefits the people who've been pushed down because it's our opportunity to have a voice and a say in what goes on. So for us, we've got a whole loted stake when I think about particular issues that are at stake. Economically, there's a guy running for president of the United States who's saying he wants to cut taxes for billionaires, to give them more money, to give them more resources to build spaceships, to go to the moon. For us, we need more economic resources in our communities and investments directly to the people. And that needs to look like investments in education. That needs to look like investments in entrepreneurs That needs to look like investments in housing so that we can actually be home owners and own land and own property, particularly after the two thousand and eight crash wiped away over half of black people's wealth that they have built up over the decades after having homes that got stolen by big corporations and banks like we need real investments in our community. And I'm an environmental and climate justice active as an advocate, and that is an issue that is core to us as black people. We disproportionately live near polluting facilities that hurt the air we breathe and pollute the water we drink and soil. The soil that we plant in is also being polluted by these corporations. Our neighborhoods are becoming what doctor Mustafa Santiago Elite calls sacrifice zones, all for the benefit of corporations We disproportionately have Asthma, a black child with asthma, it is ten times more likely to die from it than white child. Black women three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women. These aren't accidents. These are intentional decisions that are being made. You look at the Project twenty twenty five plan that they have to take national and they're talking about how they're going to cut access to healthcare, how they're going to harm our communities and destroy administrators and administration such as the Environmental Protection Agency and other entities that are supposed to protect labor rights, like he brags about hurting labor and hurting unions, which have been the only means for the majority of people rather to access the middle class, because unions are able to guarantee good wages, are able to guarantee healthcare, able to guarantee some of the services that corporations should be providing if they weren't so invested in just supporting their shareholders and supporting their CEOs. I think in this election, we have to deal with gun violence. Gun violence is the number one killer of children in our communities, disproportionately killing Black people in our neighborhoods. Almost every single day. We got a lot at stake in this election, and if we sit it out, if we're silent, if we allow for this white supremacist, domestic terrorist to once again be in the White House, we aren't just setting ourselves back to live in a moment and to live in a time where the puppet of corporations is in a position of power. We're harming ourselves for generations to come. They already change the court system, already change the court system, hundreds of Trump appointees. We're taking away rights as relates to environmental and climate justice, taking away rights even for him, giving him immunity right over certain things that he has done. Like we're seeing the ramifications of one term with him, a second term is going to be devastating, not just for a generation, but for the next several.

You know what I was I was going to ask you to talk about why people should vote in this upcoming election, but I think you nailed everything to the wall. That's a pretty exhaustive list there. I know that there's more reasons that people should vote, and obviously it's our responsibility and a democracy to help shape the democracy. Again, there's a lot of people that have sacrificed so that we can participate. But if anyone needed a reason, you can just rewind the last minute or two and find it there. So it doesn't make sense for me to ask the question I was going to ask, but rather I would like for you to answer this now that people have to have a reason to get out and vote and they know what's at stake. Clearly, voting is one part of this battle. People need to do more than just vote. So let's say someone's listening to our conversation today. They know that they're going to vote, they know who they're going to vote for, they know what they want the future to hold for them and their posterity. What else can they do besides vote to help support, sustain, grow, establish, develop. You know, and you're in a position that we are not in because you're in the inside. We are media folks, and we try to highlight what you do, but you know, the intricate ins and outs to our listeners that are saying, look, we're energized, we're fired up, we love your message. We're going to vote, but that feels like half the battle. What else can I do? What do you say to that listener?

Absolutely, democracy is not just voting, is what happens in between elections, and I would encourage everyone to go to ballotready dot org. You type in your address and you realize all the people who are running for office in your community. Because Vice President Harris and Governor Walls are not just the folks that are on the ballot. You have state representatives like myself, You have state senators, you might have a sheriff, you might have a mayor, you might have a US Senator who's on the ballot. So understand all of the folks who are running for office. Go to ballot Ready to find that out. The second thing I think that people really can do is attack themselves, either to an issue or to a political figure. Right. And when I say that, I mean in holding them accountable. There you go are a part of Memphis Community Against Pollution. Right. So it's the non profit that we have focused primarily on environmental climate justice for southwest Memphis because it's surrounded by seventeen toxic release inventory facilities. Right, that's the issue. So if you're interested in an issue, you need to be a part of an organization that is sending emails, that's making phone calls, that's writing letters, that's really doing all that it possibly can to hold the people who are in positions of power accountable for the things that they said they would do when they would run for office. And if your person, for whatever reason, loses, you still need to hold whoever wins accountable for doing what they are supposed to do while they are in office. Don't just wait two years or four years or eight years in some cases and say, well, now I need to get back on the pony. No no, no, no. You got to show up to city council meetings. You have to show up to county commission meetings, you have to show up to land use control board means, you have to show up to school board meetings if those are the things that you were passionate about, and not just wait until election time and so attach yourself to issue and then when it comes to particular candidates. Right, we got vousinj dot. People can sign up for what we call People Power Times. It's our own newsletter where I provide updates on what I'm working, on what I'm doing, and if people have anything to say to me about what they would like to see or what they don't want to see, you can be in direct contact. I view my job as being of service to people, right to the people of District eighty six, but to my wider community of people who I know support me, who are care who I know are invested in helping to build a better country. And so I really do believe that being attached to issues, but also to holding political leaders accountable by being in their inboxes Instagram and them tweeting them whatever it is that you need to do is so imperative because you don't want people to get in position and to think that you've gone away. And it doesn't take a whole lot of people to make a politician or a public servant recognize that something's going well or something's going wrong, and so you have to stay engaged in holding them accountable on the issues.

A here today with Representative Justin J. Pearson, a community organizer and state representative for District eighty six in Memphis, Tennessee. I think there's something to that too, because and I'm so glad that you how about this. When you were first saying attach yourself to a political candidate, that sounds scary until you say the second part, which is to hold them accountable. Because what we've seen since twenty sixteen, sixteen seventeen ish. Yeah, since Donald Trump's rise to like the national political stage is people simply attaching themselves to a candidate. There were different points along the way, but I think that probably for both of us, the one where it was no longer conceivable that anyone could vote for this guy was when he was on that bus, that access Hollywood bus and he says, you know, you can walk up to him and grab him by the P word. Any decent human being wouldn't talk like that. A person running for the highest office in the land in person represent the United States of America, the entire country, who feels that way behind closed doors, Obviously that shouldn't work. But because people have attached themselves to a candidate, not necessarily to hold the candidate accountable, what we end up with is people sort of worshiping this guy and subscribing to this cult. And that brings me the thought because you know, he's back in the news being re indicted on charges that he was already indicted on because of the Supreme Court ruling that you alluded to earlier. So give us your thoughts on just kind of that that whole thing and how that hits you, because I know a lot of people are still trying to sort how to feel about like acqu is one of these people. Because we talk about all the time, how are we in this paradigm? This is the worst time line that we could possibly be in. So, you know, give us some insight into the most recent Trump indictment, how that hits you and help us make sense of it.

Yeah, Well, this new indictment by Jack Smith, it really makes sense in light of what the Supreme Court says. Yeah, sure, what he has, what he has immunity of or about right? And Jack Smith says, this man has still committed crimes and what we can have happened is him go away scott free because of this decision you all have made. And so the new indictment is to take into account what Trump's appointees on the Supreme Court have now said that he is allowed to do and to clarify that there's still a significant problem with how he has behaved and what he has done and we need him to be held accountable for that. What this is what equal justice under the law looks like. And so if the law has shifted, that doesn't change the fact that there's still a need to hold him accountable. And so that's the lens of the paradigm in which I would view this new information. But the second lens of which to view it as black Americans as people many listeners of people who are not of privilege in the way that people like Donald Trump is is he represents an attempt to maintain the power of whiteness and whiteness as an identity. For a long time people talked about democrats are talking too many identity politics. But what you really have to realize is the biggest person talking about identity politics is actually Donald Trump and all of the people who follow him. It's an identity politic that says whiteness equals currency in America, and so anything that challenges whiteness is bad. And so a black woman running for office is a challenge to whiteness. That is bad. A white woman building mean an amazing ticket with a white guy, Tim Walls, who a veteran who's a football coach, right, he just ploys the idea of white supremacy and a separation and division that they've been trying to put forward. That even that threatned whiteness. And so when it comes to his policy, his ideas to the way he talks, how vulgar he is, the fact that he has been tried and committed of rape. Right, like all of these things that in any reasonable person you would say, there's nothing in me that will allow me to support this person as a human being, let alone as president of the United States. Right, those things don't get checked. Right that people don't hold him accountable to that because.

It isn't about who he is or what he says, or the policies that he's proposing. It is about the maintenance of the power that whiteness has in this country. And you have affirmative action, you're challenging whiteness being all powerful. If you have a textbooks that are talking about the theft of people's lives and human.

Trafficking and sex trafficking that happened for centuries in this country through the period of slaveman. If you talk about those things, you're threatening the ideology and the powerfulness of a purity of whiteness that they have really worked so hard to construct and to construe in a way that leaves them harmless to the effects that whiteness and racism has had on everybody else. And so what we have to view Trump through and the lens we have to view him through and JD. Vance and all these other weird people. Is that they are actually most interested in preserving the power of whiteness, which came down to, right, and I can't remember the exact person who said this quote. It came down to this idea though, right, that the lowest white man will always think he's better than the most intelligent, the most articulate, the most capable black person. Yeah, that is all they're banking on. Because if you do that, if you have that distraction, as Tony Morrison said, right, if you have that distraction of racism, then they never figure out that they too being exploited. Right, They never to figure out that their state legislature, like in Tennessee, didn't expand healthcare, which is why they're dying on the way to the hospital and why they are thousand dollars worth of debt if they survive. Right, you distract them right with this, with this false ideology about the power of whiteness, that they never get to the causes of what is causing the harm in my life. And that is what we have to be so intentional and thoughtful about continuing to elevate to people's consciousness. It's like, you need to be more conscious. It isn't. It isn't saying just be woke. You need to always be awakening. But you really do need to see the whole picture of what's going on, because you're being misused and you're being manipulated. But they're doing it because they want you to feel good that you're abusing a city, right that's majority black. They want you to feel good because you're expelling lawmakers who are black. They want you to feel good about that so that you don't pay attention to the erosion of your own rights, to the reduction of your own dignity. Right. And if they can keep you focused on you being better than somebody else by stepping on them, by talking about them, by othering them like they do immigrants, then you never pay attention to the fact that you don't have your health insurance to clean your own teeth, and your children don't have enough food to eat at night, and the air that you are breathing is toxic. You know, it's a distraction from the real issues.

What an intellectual labyrinth is laid down when you realize the white supremacist doesn't even love the poor white person. They just love to exploit them and can use that indoctrinated hate, as he said, as a distraction, so they don't even notice they're being exploited, and they actually participate in their own exploitation at the behest of downing others. That is a wow. I wanted to ask you something else. I don't even want to talk anymore now, just let that that was just such a powerful import I've never heard that articulated that way.

Yeah, and and let me interrupt. He's had this conversation on the show with guests, with listeners, with me, and I think that, you know, we'll take thirty minutes to break that down, but you did it masterfully. And the truth is, like you know, you you you, And I think that that comes from someone with that intimate level of insight and someone who's kind of been through it, been able to experience it, because all these things that you're talking about have have You've experienced them, right, And so to articulate it in such a way where there's validity to it, but also kind of the emotional gravity that it that it's that it's necessary there to like really convey the heft of it all. We really needed that around.

Yes, so we appreciate that.

Yeah, I mean, justin what's next?

I know we got the election coming up. Beyond that, in your world and your life and your career, what's going on? What do we need to know about? How can listeners, how can we be more involved? How can we help support amplify? Please let us know what's going on with you and what's next.

Yeah, I mean, so we have an election at the same time. Bright October sixteenth through the thirty first is early voting. November fifth is the big election day. But I'm encouraging everybody go early vote. Please just get it out of the way. October sixteenth through the thirty first. Find out where you can go early vote because you don't have to go to your specific precinct. You don't have to do those things. Just find out where you can go to early vote in your community so that you can get your vote in and get it out of the way, and don't wait on November fifth for us to stay in touch. Go to vote justinja dot com. It's a quick thing to fill out. We'll add you to our mailing list and we don't spam people. We just try and keep your breast of the things that are happening and going on in our community and ways for you to be able to engage, whether it be sending emails, whether it be showing up to something in person or virtual, and then on social media at Justin J. Pearson and at real Justin J. Pearson on TikTok. Because part of the thing that is shifting in Tennessee and what you all are helping to elevate here, which I greatly appreciate, is that we can't overlook the South. We can't overlook Tennessee because right now you have so much jerrymandering, you have so much repression of the vote and oppression of the people, that it looks like that's too far gone. Right. Ol Gore is from Tennessee, right, Bill Clinton's vice president, Right, Like, it wasn't too long ago that Tennessee had more sensible Republicans, had more Democrats and positions of power. But we see what racism and what white supremacy with power can do to us and can do to our electorate and can do to our politics. One NotI five black people in the state of Tennessee cannot vote that's not accidental. It's called fell and disenfranchisement with the attempt to create political deprivation of black communities. These things are not accidental. That are happening, and we do need the elevation right. The opportunity to be here with you all is obviously extraordinary, and I'm just like so thankful that we were able to follow through and y'all were like, we want to do it, and you actually have done it, and I'm just like really humbled by it. But sharing out what's going on in our state, such as the threats to take away our right to to sales tax revenue, or the overreach of government to say we can't have ballot questions related to gun safety measures, or when we had legislation to armed teachers, Like people need to see what is happening, because my my fear is that folks are only envisioning racism and bigotry through the lens of black and white cameras of the fifties and sixties, and they are not seeing it through the HD lenses of these iPhones and these Samsungs, and the and the YouTube and the Instagram ai and the ai iai bots. Right, like you could see it today, what is happening, what's going on? And we don't need to constantly be reflexive to see the harm that these systemic issues are having on us today. Right like, these are all vestiges of races and vestiges of slavery that we're experiencing, and we need to be eyed wide open to it. We need to articulate it, we need to be honest about it, and we need to be not afraid. We can't be afraid of these folk. We got to speak up, we gotta fight back, and we got to use our voice, our platforms, our energy to do everything that we can. And you can never discount the power, the power of showing up, the power of speaking out, the power of sharing that tweet, the power of sharing that Instagram post, sending it to somebody that you care about, that you love about, so that they understand that the South is fighting the South is worth fighting for. And y'all, the South is where the majority of black people in the United States of America live. So we cannot forget it.

Well, you mentioned being grateful for being on our show, but you must know that we kind of like manifested you. So when we say that We're grateful like we were able to know you before you were able to know us, and so this is this is very meaningful. And actually I'll share a bit once once we're all done, but right now, I want to thank you for your time, your your brilliance, your insight, and your commitment to helping our people, our brothers and sisters, to our people and our country. You are This will sound thinner than I wanted to sound, but you are unique. Today's guest once again is Representative Justin J. Pearson, a community organizer and state representative for District eighty six and Memphis, Tennessee and so much more. It wouldn't surprise me to see you elected to the highest office in the land at some point in the future.

Worry, I'm a be there, so I'm make sure to get you absolute joy, love yall.

I appreciate Joe.

Yes sir, Yes sir. This has been a production of the Black Information Network. Today's show is produced by Chris Thompson. Have some thoughts you'd like to share, use the red microphone talkback feature on the iHeartRadio app. While you're there, be sure to hit subscribe and download all of our episodes. I'm your host Ramsey's Jaw on all social media and follow q Ward at I am q Ward and join us tomorrow as we share our news with our voice from our perspective right here on the Black Information Network Daily podcast

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