Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
Happy Independence Day. We're on vacation with that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today. Doctor Marcus Anthony Hunt Stopspy to talk to us about the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre and the quest honor it. But first we have actor Griffin Dunn on his new book The Friday Afternoon Club, a family Memoir.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Griffin Don.
Thank you for having me. Molly.
I really wanted to talk to you about this book because it's not really politics, and Jesse.
Is always like it's Fast Politics, Molly.
But I felt like we should talk about it because your story is in the intersection of all of these different important political moments. It can you talk to us about just growing up in LA and a little bit about what that looked.
Like bagging up than just La and the book does intersect with many moments and really in history. In order to get to my childhood and growing up in Los Angeles in my teen years, I had to as this was always subtitle in my mind, a family memoir, I had to go all the way back to Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution that you know, drove my mother's family to No Gallas, the border town in Mexico and Arizona,
and the Irish famine. And I was always conscious as I was approaching Hollywood, you know, I would be passing you know, World War two, how that intersected and my mother's side of the family and my father's side of the family, my father in particular, who was in fact a war hero and fought in Battle of the Bulge.
So when I was growing up first in New York, where my father was in live television and that occupation brought him to to Hollywood in nineteen sixty where television was you know, still black and white and about to maybe go into color. We were in this house that my probably my mother bought. She was from a family in Chicago. Her father was a Griffin and there was a Griffin wheel company and they it was really an empire, and all the wheels in America, on train on pullman
train cars were with Griffin wheels. So my parents were very social, my father in particular, and they were married and gave parties with you know, some of the greatest movie stars, most elegant, glamorous, David Nivid and you know, Joseph Cotton, and also great directors of that time. But they were all you know, this is now in the early sixties about to approach, you know, up to the
mid sixties, their best films probably were behind them. Dennis Hopper, who was also a guest in her home, would in just a few years be making easy writer and and sort of render these great old stars and directors, you know, out of touch, very difficult to get work now. Of course, as a child growing up in this house, surrounded by all this elegance and extravagance, you know, I didn't know
these people were as much as you know. They were funnier and charming and made me laugh as a kid, but I wouldn't know who they were until I looked at my father's scrap books, and he'd been divorced, and he luckily kept a record of these amazing years and in our house and in his life as he traveled, you know, to Europe with these people and would visit royal families, and social interaction, particularly with you know, wealthy and powerful and famous people was at that time his priority.
So one of the things I think about when I think about Dominic was that he had this very interesting second act where the murder of your sister ended up being the kind of galvanizing force where he became a kind of you know, a chronicle of society crime, but also, you know, in his own way, a sort of someone who was really a person who was trying to change how domestic violence and trying to stop that and shine a light on it, and also you know, changed the
way that men were punished for things like that. It hasn't really changed, but there was really a quest there, I think, a sort of quins oud a quest. So can you talk about that, because that is such an I always am struck by things like that.
Yeah, well, you're exactly right. I mean, in the years prior to Dominique's murder, my father had gotten sober, he had really reassessed his life. Everything had been stripped away from him, money, all these social and powerful contacts he had, you know, had abandoned him, and he was in exile, self exile in a little town in Oregon where it was car broke down, and he tried very much to
be writing. He wanted to write. That was the profession he envisioned for himself, and so he would write us these letters, Dominique, Alex and I, these single space letters, and you could see he was working on his forum, trying to find his voice. And he came back to New York, and then Dominie, as you said, was attacked and it changed at great cost. After the trial of her killer, in which we were as a family put through the mill of having to listen to the defense.
A man dragged my sister's name through the mud. It was a dirty but common strategy, blaming the victim for their own death. This was a textbook case of which the jury bought completely and was kept out of watching the testimony of a previous girlfriend of the killer, who he had put in the hospital twice and hit her so hard and just joined at her eye socket and her jaw. It beat her senseless twice and put her in the hospital twice. The jury was kept out of
this because it was prejudicial. I guess it's prejudicial to have a prior history of violence against women. It speaks I all of your character. So they were kept out. They were kept out of seeing a tantrum that the killer had and the Roman had to be dragged to the ground by the bailiff, and then the killer has to date served three and a half years for manslaughter. They didn't even call it murder. So this changed all of our lives. But this is where my father found
his voice and his cause and his purpose. And so whenever he wrote about of which he became a reporter, a very high profile reporter for very high profile cases. And so when he covered OJ he never lets you forget about the Browns or Nicole, and he never lets you forget about Lana Clarkson. When who Phil Specter killed media called a fourth rate actress's His daughter was an actress. My mother, who had MS, was in a wheelchair all
the way through. We wheeled her into court every day in our formation of my brother and I on either side of her chair and my father pushing. We thought this trial would kill her. It did just the opposite. She became an activist as well for victims rights, and she started a group called Justice for Victims of Homicide in California, and she made laws Marcy's Law that protects the right of victims of being notified when the killer is out on bail, let out of jail, or prison.
You think that would be common practice to notify a family. You know, she has other jault laws and they're instituted in twenty three or thirty other states. In California. So my parents, who I never detected, really any political passion from. In fact, you know, while I was growing up in idolizing Kennedy, they voted for Nixon. But you know, this changed all so they became very political, which does make me, I think, an app guest for your podcast.
Yeah, when people are able to turn terrible tragedies into galvanizing moments.
You know, it really is.
And I remember how Dominic covered the Nicole Brown Simpson murder and just it was a real sea change for how we talk about victims.
Yeah, it still happens though. When he was covering OJ he was so personally invested for obvious reasons. But what the Dream Team, I'm putting that in quotes, the tactics that they were using. I would see him because it was televised. I would see him in the spectator's office. He always sat with the Browns. I could see the toll it was taking on him. I'm in New York and I can see in television that I think He's going to have an heart attack just having to go
through this over and over again. He'd done trials like this before, but this one really took a toll on him.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it really is.
The way that Dominic covered the Nicohole Brown Simpson murder, the OJ Simpson trial and a lot of these other trials really was a sort of sea change for standing up for victims and you know the experience of the victims' families in ways that we probably hadn't seen before.
Yes, however, I kind of relived our circumstance in nineteen eighty three when Harvey Weinstein's came was thrown out in the highest court in New York because in our case I described to you, you know how the jury was not allowed to watch the testimony of the killer's previous victim in domestic violence. The reason that the judge said he did this when the world came crashing down after Dad stood up in the court room and called it unjust. He said that he wasn't on trial for beating up
and putting in the hospital twice the woman that was testifying. Therefore, the jury should not hear it. When the New York courts threw out Harvey Weinstein's case. It was for the exact reason. When other women who testified about their experience of abuse with Harvey Weinstein and testified very effectively, the New York courts ruled that's not what Harvey was being tried for, so they threw that out and there for
the whole case. So it hasn't really quite changed. Judges still get to choose whether a history of domestic violence is relev UNDERDT. Incredibly enough.
Yeah, but the idea of the victim's family being injected into the coverage is new and important, or was at the time very new and important. I'm wondering if you could talk just for a minute about what the sort of lessons of this literary family. I mean, we all have them, the sort of broader lessons that you learned writing this book.
I always thought I would write a book. It was
on a bucket list of mine. I'm from a long line of storytellers, and I envisioned writing a mostly humorous book that would be along the lines of David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty of it being sort of different chapters that were both funny and touching about my family and having them intersect over the years, and when I started to write chronologically, in order to do that, I kind of had to wait a few years, not to get out of the yoke of being from a literary family,
and what would they think or that I was going to do a tell all of anything. As time went by, when I looked at my loved ones and then, you know, in my family who were no longer with me, their arcs, the arcs of their character really became clear to me. When I was writing chronologically, I could see the incredible
transformation of my father. So I was able to write about his weaknesses as a young father and a young husband and see that, you know, the shame that he was he was burying and you know, was struggling with alcohol and his closeted life. And I could see the loneliness of my mother. I knew where they were going to end up. I knew that they you know, I used as an epitaph of my father that he once said to me when I was criticizing him for something, and he said, what could I say, kiddo, I'm a
work in progress. And I looked at all these characters and I knew and I thought of them I mean, as much as I produce, I make movies, I think they were characters who I loved very much, and I knew where they were going to end up. I walked away. You know, when I finished this book, the hard part was not writing about Dominique and being attacked and on life support and going through what we went through in the trial. Because I was in company while I was
writing it. They were all so vivid, right, you know. The hard part was finishing it. I kind of went into a state of mourning when I was finishing it, and quite honestly, now I'm in this next chapter, you know, promoting and talking about these these people in my family. I feel them all over again and it's quite emotional.
You know.
My job is to be sort of in service of their memory at this point, which was not as clear a thought when I was writing it. I just wanted to tell their story. That was my original intent, and then I just kept on doing it. When I was finished, I went, wow, look at these people. Wow, and I'm related to them.
Yeah. Oh, Griffin, thank you so much for joining us.
You're very welcome. Thank you, Mollie, good to talk to you.
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Doctor Marcus Anthony Hunt is a UCLA professor and the author of Radical Reparations.
Welcome to Fast Politics, doctor Marcus Hunter.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you and the whole team for having me.
We're delighted to have you.
And it feels very much like something we should be talking about right now, because the Supreme Court, in their infinite fucked upness as one of their first decisions, and I feel like it flew under the radar, but when I saw it, I was like, of course, those fuckers, So let's talk about the Tulsa massacre and also the Supreme Court's just continual talk to me.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the intense things, especially around Tulsa. I was fortunate enough to be invited by doctor Tiffany Krutcher and the Terrence Krutcher Foundation and Justice from Greenwood just earlier this month for their legacy festivals celebrating one hundred and three years since the Tulsa race massacre, and they were really hopeful about the possibilities of the Oklahoma Supreme Court doing right by the survivors
and the descendants. And so I was in DC when the decision came down that they won't even get their day in court, which is wild and it's even wilder because now there is a mountain or mountains of evidence that demonstrate that this did actually happen. And I also think a lot about the fact that when we hear about descendants, when you meet them, like Mother Randall, who I had the opportunity to meet while I was there, she's a descendant, she's one hundred plus now, but it's
because she was a child when this happened. So the children who witnessed, experienced and survived this never got a chance to go before authorities and legal authorities and testify and share that this crime happened to them and their community. And the fact that they won't even get an opportunity to present that before a jury of their peers is really really disheartening and just a reflection of how deeply important the issue of reparations of reparative justice is.
Yeah, I know that everyone who listens this podcast is educated enough to know about the Tulsa massacre, but would love it if you would just give us like a little bit of background on it, for just the people who are not completely read in on it.
The Tulsa race massacre, which, by the way, I think is still an adequate term to describe what happened. There was a thriving black community in Greenwood, a neighborhood in Tulsa that had actually arrived as formally enslaved people who were enslaved by many of what are called the civilized tribes, the Native Americans, who were made to participate in a trail of tears. Folks don't know is that as they were participating in a trail of tears, many of those
tribes brought along with them enslaved Black Africans. And so those folks then later become the founders of a community and a city named Tulsa, but the founders of a community that blossoms in to what affectionately becomes called Black
Wall Street. And in nineteen twenty one, over two days May thirtieth and thirty first, one of the most horrific acts of domestic terrorism occurs whereby there are rapes, there are bombings, burnings, hangings, shootings, and death of all of those black residents who were in that community just because they had become so successful. And so part of what's happened over the years is one it's lived as a mythology,
only really held together in some ways. Shout out to the great sociologist Charlie Wilson and a GAP band because they keep it.
In their name.
Greenwood, Archer and Pine is what GAP stands for for people who know the Gap Band, and one of the most famous songs is called You Dropped a Bomb on Me. They codify it in music as a way to say and keep the memory alive that this happened to the community. Charlie Wilson and that band are descendants of the Greenwood massacre and the Tulsa Race massacre. And so part of what's happened in recent time is that once Miss Breonna Taylor and mister Floyd lost their lives, there became renewed
attention to this issue. As the one hundred year anniversary was approaching, and so there's been a lot of action around it. But in the last four years it was getting some forward momentum for the very first time, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court has decided that there's not enough of a case from their judgment that it warrants them having an actual day in court.
Yeah, it's just heartbreaking. And there aren't that many survivors right exactly.
There are only right now three living survivors. And then when you go to the community, which is really deep, and I encourage all of the folks who are listening to us to, you know, take some time and go visit Tulsa, because most all of the people who survived it stayed, they didn't leave, and so there was also like you go into the museum that they have there, and there's, for example, a letter that a friend who's living in Detroit writes to a survivor in Tulsa says,
you know, I read in the Chicago Defender about how this happened down there, and here's forty dollars for a bus ticket that I'll get you to Detroit. Come on up here. And he writes back and he says, thank you so much. I really appreciate that you care enough about me, But I'm sending the money back to you because I'm staying in Tulsa. So that's also just to
say that people stayed. So most all of the folks who are native to Tulsa, the black natives of Tulsa, not only are many of them Creak Indian, but also they never left, so they're still there. So there's a community of repair that is still there that has been waiting for over now one hundred and three years.
This Supreme Court terrible, is not anything new. But is there any way to go around them? Is there anything that these survivors can do? Is there any other legal recourse?
Yeah, one of the recourses that we have, and this is part of what happens in this country, is that we no longer have government and there is not necessarily public education around civic engagement. But we know, as you know, there are three branches of government. Only one of them is the judicial. The other one is the legislative, which, of course, we can think about our elected officials passing, for example, the Tolsa Race Massacred Descendants Fund.
That could be an act that is passed in Congress.
Okay. The other thing that we know is that there's the executive branch where you have the president, the White House, the Vice president, and their entire staff that can execute
either orders or actions on behalf of this community. And so one of the things that I've been up to for the last four or five years, working with Congressoman Barbara Lee, is trying to encourage the bid To Harris administration to more publicly use the bully paulpit to bring more attention and public awareness to these issues, because underneath the horror and the terror is a very positive story because these folks, like Mother Randall have kept the faith.
They still believe that America can do right. Can you imagine you watch your whole community be bombed and terrorized for two entire days, then many of them were put in internment camps afterwards, which many folks don't know. And fast forward after being over one hundred years old, you still believe in the American justice system, You still believe in the American legislative system. They still vote, you know
what I mean. And so it's really about getting the right light shed on this issue because when you find out most Americans find out about this, and their hearts go out to these folks, their hearts break for them.
And the question is why.
Has the Bida Harris administration not shined an appropriate light or reparative justice across the nation where so many communities are activating based on the idea of democracy, working and trying to protect and defend that democracy.
Why have we not seen the.
President travel down after this announcement, came out and sit with mother Randall and just comfort her. That is it taking a position that's just recognizing the compassionate humanity, and then it in charges the media to follow the story, you know.
Right right?
And also, I mean I think the position that they should have their day in court is not a controversial position.
It's a very you know, it's a very American belief, you know, like we're not saying that the court is going to be in your favor, but you, after knowing what happened, you should be entitled to your day in court.
Yeah, that's my feeling too, So, uh, talk to me more broadly though, there are some.
Like it does feel.
Like, well, there have been a lot of steps back recently towards racial justice. I'm thinking about like the other stuff the Supreme Court has done. There have been some big wins too.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean, for me, this whole journey in terms of like national federal government legislation. Things started with Congressman Barbaroly calling me on my personal phone five now six years ago and saying that she wanted to write legislation to create the first Every US Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission. I couldn't believe I got that phone call I saw in two o two.
I thought it was the IRS. I thought it was you know.
Student Loan, and I almost didn't answer, you know, and when I answered, it was her And.
She saw me on c spam Book TV doing a panel.
I was moderating a panel on slavery, and she said, I watched it and I just wanted you to know how amazing it was and that you're doing good working. If you're available, I would love for you to work with me on this, And you know, I said, of course.
And over the course of that journey, I've met so many people from so many different walks of life, so many different races and religions and ethnicities who are all working around issues of truth, reparations, reparative justice, equity, anti poverty, voting rights that most of America doesn't get to know about.
And so part of what I've been feeling a lot about is like people would be surprised to find out that there are so many towns, cities, regions, states, and areas of the country and worlds where black people are not the dominant majority and they're doing a reparations process. You know, California did the first in the nation ever reparations commission, and they didn't even become a state until
eighteen fifty. And the nation did not fall apart. California didn't succeed from the Union, Northern California didn't become its own state. Los Angeles is still intact because it's a democratic process, and it demonstrates that you can use this process to actually find out where the harm lies, where the damage is. And it's really just saying, why can't we use reparations as an invitation to create a more
beautiful America. I mean, that's my position on it. And when you talk with a lot of people, that's the place that they're operating from. It's not from a place of anger or hate or rage or zero sum. It's like, rather than waiting for another war to come, another conflict, another virus to kill people, and then to use that to unleash all of the full resources that America has
in its arsenal. We could actually just use the premise of our history native land dispossession and enslavering Black Africans as the kind of continuous permission to build a better nation. We could just do it from that place and it would be beneficial to everyone.
Yeah. I also think that it's a question of like are we.
Of country that is fair and just or are we a country that is not fair? You know, like this is I mean, who do we want to.
Be that's right?
And are we a country that continues to operate with multiple injuries?
The answer is yes.
If we were a national foo fotball team, it would be like, you know, Aaron Rodgers got injured the first game with the Jets ACL tear, you got to go have surgery. Not only do we have an ACL tair, then we had a knee tair, a back tair, all of these different things. When people say trail of tears, when people say slavery, when people say Jim Crow. These if we think about the body, these are injuries to
the body. And yet and still we then go to war multiple times over our history, and we think that we're fully healthy in when we're doing this, rather than being on the field of the global stage, playing injured all of the time. And of course, when you have an injury and you have to go to the hospital and go through a healing, it isn't the most fun thing initially, But when you get on the other side and you're actually healed from it, you're back better than ever.
You know, you can then take on what's ahead. And we know that the world has so much more other things that are on the horizon, other challenges that if we continue to be on a global field playing injured, I don't know how long we can keep pace.
No, I agree.
I also wonder a little bit about how it might fix the sort of brokenness in America.
Yeah, one thing that could happen is that we could really get into the point that once upon a time, not long ago, there was no such thing as white people. It just did not exist. And the reason why whiteness was working is because there was a dominant majority that was experiencing a kind of dominant experience of upward mobility, of you know, American dream happening in your family, the
kind of Horatio Alger story. But what we've been seeing for the last fifty years in white communities, for so called white communities, opioid epidemics, the loss of intergenerational wealth, educational outcomes declining, people dying of early ages. All sorts of things that traditionally were thought to be happening only in marginalized communities are now happening amongst a dominant group. Hence the tea Party, they insurrect, all of they occupy
Wall Street. And if people start to understand that whiteness is a scam and at the very least one of the most toxic identities ever created, then we can start to think, like, Yeah, why am I invested in an identity that's.
Literally killing me and other people?
Why am I invested in something that makes me responsible for a US government that created a three fifths clause in its own constitution? Why am I invested in identity that is no longer returning the benefits that they promised me? That is I think a big part of it is understanding that a lot of these things that people are in vested in are lives that were told to them so that they could feel okay with being in a kind of dominant experience, and that experience is becoming less
accessible for everyone. But with the affirmative action conversations and Supreme Court decisions. It just keeps feeding the distortion that when black people or a LATINX folks or Asian Americans are getting success, it's at the expense of the dominant majority, when in fact, LATINX, black and Asian folks are not experiencing this super generational, once in a lifetime generational mobility.
Most Americans are finding a loss at it, and rather than attending to that, they just distract us with stories about the fearless fun is just for black women.
That's unfair.
You know, Evanston is going to give out ten million dollars to descendants of African American descendants of slavery.
That's not fair.
And it's like, but we learned when a coronavirus came something we never expected to happen and killed millions of people, there were trillions of dollars available. People got PPP loans, including members of Congress, and no one bad it than I. So we know that the resources are there, and we know that they don't take away from somebody. It wasn't like the PPP loan was money that they took from San Francisco to give the Los Angeles.
It didn't work like that.
It came from the collective pot that we call the United States government and it went to everyone in need. And that's what reparative justice is about in the first place.
So there's some anxiety that Biden is not performing as well as he has historically with black voters.
What could he do to win black voters?
What he can do is one listen more than he speaks, to take and make the meeting with Congresswomen Barbara Lee that she's been waiting for his entire administration. We've now done three open letter campaigns, public open letter campaigns, including one that she coordinated with her colleague, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson, league Congresswomen Corey Bush and Congressman Jamal Bowman. They've asked for a meeting.
That was it. There's been no meeting.
And Congresswomen Barbara Lee is the highest ranking black woman in the US Congress. How can you just decide not to meet with her? That tells me everything about what you think about black people and black voters. And part of what happens is when you try to make them accountable for that, there's this pushback of like, we're the
most diverse administration. Ever, on day one, we put forward a racial Equity Executive Order, the first of his kind, Katanji Brown, Kamala Harris, and it's like, I don't weaponize black representation to silence people about the things that the community needs, especially because some of the things that they're acclaiming, for example, the most diverse administration, the Racial Equity Order,
all of these other gods. They closed the black white wealth gap at percentages not seen in many years or in decades.
That is the responsibility of every president.
If we're talking about society that was founded on enslaving Black Africans, there was a gap when you got the job that you got to close. That's always every president's job. So you're doing it, okay. But why you were hired, why seventy two plus million people voted for you, was because Breonna Taylor lost her life. Was because George Floyd
lost his life. And you brought George Floyd's grieving orter to your office and you told her on national television you would get this done for her, and you would bring her back to the Oval office and sign this bill. Four years later, that has not happened. Four years later. There have been multiple state of the unions where Breonna
Taylor's name has not even been mentioned. And I think as citizens, as people who care about our democracy, we all have a duty to ensure that this remains an unfulfilled promise and not a lot, because if we start to live in a world where elected officials are allowed to publicly on camera lie to black children, then what are we here for?
Such a good point. Thank you so much for joining us.
You already know.
Thank you so much for holding the space and for modeling for your colleagues across the media spectrum that these kinds of conversations are really needed and actually really positive.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.