Civic Cipher 121022 Why is CRT so Scary to Conservatives? (Part 2)

as the Father of Harlem. You know, one of the things that we talk about on the show from time to time housing discrimination, and we're going to help paint a picture of what that could look like. And of course, one of the stories of how you know Harlem became one of the places where black people are okay to be so first and foremost, So we're going to talk about how to become a better ally b a Ba Baba.

So Today's Baba is sponsored by Major Threads Men'swear. If you want to check it out, hit majorthreads dot com for some quality menswear. All right, Today's Baba is a bit self serving, I admit, but we decided together that we should let you know at length exactly how you can support us. It's sort of weird to ask you to support us because I don't know. It just feels weird.

But we feel like this story is relevant no matter where you live, because this gives insight into exactly why what has become known as critical race theory is under attack and how those attacks can exist. Because if you are of the thinking of me and Q, you might think American history is necessary to explain how we got here, why we are where we are, and what we can do in the future, what we can avoid in the future, how we can move in the future to create the

reality that we want. We feel like that education is necessary and people that have arguments to the contrary sound just like this one. And so when I read this, I got surprised and I really felt strongly about sharing it with you. So forgive the fact that it's feels a little localized. I promise it's not and it's not intended to sound that way, but I'll read. The guy got elected here. His name is Tom Horne, and he's

elected to the Superintendent of schooling. So he's in charge of the churance well not mine and not cues, but you know, in general, and he has you know, a plan of how he plans on changing things to you know, create successful students. And some of them sound very sensible. You know, he wants to you know, put an emphasis on math, and you know, all these sorts of you know, neat ideas. But when he got to topic five, he

had quite a bit to say. So this is copy paste from him through the as central article that I read. Number five eliminate critical race theory. Okay, so we're just going to read and break it up, you know, and react to it. All right, He says, I believe we are all individuals, brothers and sisters under the skin, entitled to be judged by what we know, what we can do, our character, ability to appreciate beauty, and so on. Race is irrelevant to anything. Critical race theory teaches the opposite

that race is primary. They divide students into oppressors and oppressed based on what race they were born into, which is not their fault. Here's a direct quote of what the Tucson District talks students before I put a stop to it in twenty ten. I got it directly from their curriculum quote. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step by step progress, critical race theory addresses the very foundation of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning,

Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. I'll just finish reading this and we'll go back wherever I go. I ask liberals why the critical race theory movement would be against enlightenment, rationalism or any of the other concepts listed in the quote. No one knew. I believe this was the biggest philosophical divide of any statewide race. Are we individuals or are we exemplars of what race we

happen to have been born into. Some say critical race theory is a graduate study not taught in K through twelve schools. False. I have a list of two hundred and fifty Arizona teachers who signed a shocking statement promoted by the National Teachers' Union that if critical race theory were banned, they would defy the law. They would not have signed it if they were not already teaching it. They come from twenty five school districts, including the largest ones.

Teachers must teach. Academics not use their power over a captive audience to promote their personal ideology. That is unprofessional conduct. Now, if you had never heard anything else except that, if you didn't know anything else except that, that might sound measured, That might sound diplomatic, That might sound like he is taking time with both sides of that argument and is landed in a place that is fair, that makes sense, that it's based in a shared reality, and so forth.

But if you're like Ramses, or like you who's holding his head with his eyes closed right now, you realize that that is the Those are the words of a person who is If I were to put it kindly, I would have to say, this man is ignorant.

like there's nothing different about us under the skin. Sure, you and I have made the arguments multiple times on this show and our discussions with people in person, that there are far more things that we have in common than that divide us. However, there are very very obvious truths to the differences that come with this skin.

It's no, you guys are using that to take make away true American history from our student that way, and that's what we're going to define because critical race theory, as expressed by him is a postgraduate study, right, but his party is using that very very They're using a term that people aren't familiar with so they can define it when they can define what this means to you, and it's your first time ever hearing it, then you can wholesale buy into it and stand next to them

opposed to something that's just on its face not true. Right, And a lot of us our means to do scholastic research. It's not that it doesn't exist, but why would we when we can just click on this thing that this guy said, believe it, and then feel the way he feels and he counts on that. Right. So, anytime you have people that use very, very measured language like this, they purposely try to sound reasonable and not extreme so

that it's easy to buy into their rhetoric. The idea he's ignorant, though it would be us being willfully ignorant.

for the sake of argument, you're describing your reality. The rest of us don't have that reality. Race is very relevant to everything, Okay, Tom, You believe that we are all individuals, brothers and sisters under the skin. I love how that sounds.

that's not true. That is your reality. And American history, the way I remember it, gave everyone, myself included an increased capacity to empathize, gave us more insight into the wise questions that are very profound for a young child to be asking himself, a young child in Compton, California, to be asking himself, why do all the people on TV look like this? Why all the poor people look

like that? And why the police are always doing this to these people and they're always friendly to those people, And why our outcomes more like this over here and less like that over there. Nobody taught me anything about critical race theory or American history in kindergarten. When I went to school, I knew full well white people had it better than black people, as illustrated by the fact that at that time I remember vividly wishing I had been born white instead of being born black. What in

the world is this. This is hard, this sucks, this is scary. Okay. So whatever you think you're trying to protect people from by educating them, I think that you are creating the monster that you're trying to avoid with this type of ideology. Because once I learned the whyse once I understood okay, this led to this, and this led to this, and then this led to this, and then here we are. Oh, okay, God doesn't hate us. We weren't just born to die. We weren't just born

to do the work for these people. We can have nice things too. We just have different battles to fight, we have different paths to walk. That changes a lot. That's inspiring. I can't change the color of my skin. I can't change the culture of my people. I can't change our history. But if I know where I came from and I know why I'm at where I am, then I can see the progress and I can see that progress as possible. This is my perspective, okay, And

what happened to me I learned that. In addition to that, I learned how to empathize with other people as well. Because I had to learn about Cesar Chaves, right, I had to learn about. When I came to Arizona, when I was young, I had to learn about all the Native tribes, not just the ones in the Southwest, but all over the country. Okay, that's American history. I learned about how all those treaties were broken, how this country was stolen, how right now we are sitting on unseated

ancestral lands of the Akima and Oadam peoples. Right now you're hearing my voice come from those people's lands. I learned that. I learned that Native American people aren't just a part of history, that they're still alive right now, still suffering from the things that happen, and that is not their natural state. I needed to learn that because

without context, you just see what you have. You don't know why they're there you and if in a young mind you might think that's just the way it's supposed to be, because that's the way it is. So you're skipping over all of these things under this thin veneer of you know what you what you say is protecting children. Right, there's there's a point here where you say, uh. Critical race theory teaches the opposite that race is important, race

is important, divide students into oppressors and oppressed. No, at no point when I learned American history, or indeed when I got into college and actually started to touch on things that would be considered critical race theory, were was anything ever categorized as oppressors and oppressed. From what I recall,

it was just facts. This group of people had the legal right to own this group of people, and everybody in the country who looked like this was owned at a point, and then later they could be free, and they could also be caught and sold right back in this slavery. And then when we learned you know, we talked about the Willie Lynch letter a few episodes ago. Learning getting that historical context, I watched Roots when I was in the fourth grade and Missus Bomb's class at

Solano Elementary School. That really happened. And then I realized, Wow, you can't speak your language, none of this stuff. And this was in the early nineties. So there's Africa, you know, the medallions, there was leather ropes or whatever. I started to get it. I started to make sense, there's something to be proud of. We're not you know now days when you see people searching for something to latch onto, go ahead, Q, jump in right here.

father Detroit, my mother making Georgia. The look on the gentleman's face was even more confused, because he's like, in his mind he has to be wondering, why doesn't this guy understand that I'm asking him where he's from, not where he was born. And someone else at the table lifted their arm because they were also melanated, and rubbed their skin, like, no, brother, where is this from? And in that moment, I was embarrassed because I now understood what he was asking me and knew that I had

no idea how to answer him. And that is the truth for all of us, of millions of black Americans, you know whose lineage traces back to slavery and slat country. Having been denied our proper ancestry, our proper ethnicity, and our proper culture. There are tens of millions of us that are now looking for something that feels more regal, that feels more dignified, and that's more to be proud of than just being the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and

great great great grandchildren of slaves. And it's why a lot of this really really empty rhetoric is being appropriated so quickly. Anything that makes us out to be something more, we're just grabbing on to it and a need to feel more proud about where we're from and to put ourselves in a better position when it comes to the hierarchy in this place, where we have been for large

portions of the country's history oppressed. You know, far more years our people were owned and did the labor of building this country then we've been free, quote unquote free because even that freedom didn't come with anything that would make you have the liberties and the autonomies of a free person. No land, no money, no animals to farm, no animals to help farmland that you did get, like nothing that was supposed to come with freedom, No forty acres,

no mule, no money, no capital. And then if you were able to try to get a little bit of that, we're going to restrict what you can do with it. Where you can go, where you can eat, where you can use the restaurant, all of these seemingly normal and benign things. Now that we get the pain as progress

were once denied of us. Right, So it put us in a really really troubling position of forever looking for a history that we were not allowed to learn, right because the victors get to propagate their own story or not tell it at all, or mister, it's not tell it at all. They've always been the heroes in this story, right, we celebrated the Pilgrims. They're just trying to as we did. We dressed up as Pilgrims and presented this story that was blatantly false because the people that wrote that story

again get to be the heroes in the story. They get to be the good guy. So it's you know, it's it's always been a dangerous and kind of listen, it'scouraging place to be in, but here we are. It's definitely a way of indoctrinating children intentionally, and one side of this is we want to tell kids the truth. The other side is we don't want to tell kids anything, And well it's we want to tell kids the opposite of the truth, a whitewashed version of the truth, or you know, something like that.

I needed to learn about unfair policing. I needed to learn about all that stuff we and everybody else needs to learn about Tulsa, about black walls, that thing that Tom Hanks expressed that he was pissed that he didn't know about it. He was an adult, and for a man like this to come in and say, Nope, we don't want to make kids feel bad, I think that's an insult to kids and an insult to everyone else, and an insult to our future. But it's important you

know that so you know how to deal with it. Right, Let's move on. It's not for the way black history fact today's way black History fact comes to you courtesy of the Black Information Network Daily Podcast. Check out more at binnews dot com. Again, we're talking about Philip A. Payton Junior, aka the Father of Harlem. Start us off with a quote. Human lives honeycombed with little woombs, thick

with human beings. That is how a white journalist and co founder of the NAACP, Mary White Ovington, described the filthy tenements that black New Yorkers were relegated to at the turn of the twentieth century. As more rural Southerners arrived in the city, the teeming Manhattan slums in which African Americans are living, had become the most densely populated streets in the city, nearly five thousand people per block, according to one count as landlords rendered almost exclusively to

white tenants. At the same time, construction had started on the subway line from Lower Manhattan to one hundred forty fifth Street in Harlem, a neighborhood where an enterprising black businessman named Philip A. Payton Junior would send the same slum dwellers, saving them from places where they faced discrimination and police brutality. The circumstances were dire, as noted by

Jacob Breese, the chronicler of urban poverty. He wrote in nineteen hundred in a Ten Years War, an account of the battle with the slum of New York, that perpetual eviction is their destiny. In the years that followed, Peyton steered black New Yorkers to the area the subway opened up. Harlem was white and home to wide boulevards and brownstones and rowhouses. It would become the nexus of a community

whose cultural output helped shape twentieth century America. Little in Peyton's early life I pointed toward a career as a real estate mobil. Born on February twenty seventh, eighteen seventy six, in Westfield, Massachusetts, he dropped out of college and went to work in his father's barbershop along with his two brothers.

They did so over the objections of their mother, a hairdresser, who argued that it would make lazy men of them, as Philip Payton told the author and educator Booker T. Washington for his nineteen oh seven book The Negro in Business. While Peyton's two brothers graduated from Yale and their sister earned a college degree at what would become Westfield State University.

His ambitions took him in eighteen ninety nine to New York City, where he worked as a barber before getting a job as a janitor in a Manhattan real estate office. Shortly after he married, Peyton opened a Midtown real estate

office with a partner. In the fall of nineteen hundred, When the business flopped after a few months, he struck out on his own, sustained by the sewing work of his wife, Maggie, The couple moved to Harlem, where there was a high vacancy rate in the many new brownstone buildings. White landlords found an answer to their financial woes and black tenants with ads that read colored tenants Welcome. Colored man makes a specialty of managing color tenements, Peyton positioned

himself to guide black tenants from Midtown to new homes. Quote. My first opportunity came as a result of a dispute between two landlords and West one thirty fourth Street, he recalled in an interview with The New York Age, a black newspaper. He goes on to say, to get even one of them turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants. I was successful in renting and managing this house. After a time, I was able to induce other landlords to give me their houses to manage.

The landlord believed that having a building filled with black residents would complicate his rival's leasing efforts.

toward trying to solve the so called race problem. The company's brochure stated that race prejudice is a luxury, and like all other luxuries, can be made very expensive. In New York City, the very prejudice which has heretofore worked against us can be turned and used to our profit. At its zenith, Afro American Realty was leasing or mortgaging about two dozen buildings, turning Harlem into a magnet for black families throughout the city and the rural south, and

even recent immigrants from from the Caribbean. But the company promised ten percent profit to its investors and was unable to deliver so much so soon a few dozen holders successfully suit in nineteen oh six, and while Peyton was still able to pay his first dividend the next year, he shut down in nineteen oh eight. Peyton found success in his third act, the Philip A. Peyton Junior Company. He closed his biggest deal in July nineteen seventeen, buying

six apartment houses worth more than a million dollars. That's a lot of money back then, but he died a month later of liver cancer at his summer home in Allenhurst, New Jersey. Even in recent decades, Philip Peyton has been remembered as the father of Harlem. Before he arrived, most of its black residents were servants in wealthy white households.

His own ambition, along with racism in the housing market and the glut of unsold homes in Harlem, pushed three quarters of New York City's black population there by the end of his life, including those who would usher in the Harlem Renaissance in the nineteen twenties. We should probably do the Harlem Renaissance because people don't.

still very real thing. Like all the things that I mentioned earlier when we were talking about why teaching American history is important, I want to call it American history because again, critical race theory technically is the academic level.

Again if you can share the content, like the content, you know, find us on YouTube, you know all everything's on the website. We're trying to do something special for you. Fine, but truth is, we appreciate all the support you've given us so far. Right until next week, y'all y'all.