The Boys Are Back in Town: Live from Chicago

we are back with season two. We are going to be talking about everything from politics to pop culture, and we're gonna have guests on too. This season. History always matters and everything we cover, and of course this is an election year. We got mid terms. We're gonna be talking on this show in the midst of the launch of the presidential race. So there's going to be so much to figure out and to invite so many best friends, some old, some new to help us make sense of

the madness of the moment we're still living in. So today's episode is really special. Khalil, we got to do a live taping together in our hometown. The boys are back in town. We went back to where it all began, that's right. So it was actually on September eleventh, ye and it was a crazy rainy day. There was a torrential rain. There was also the Bears home opener. I remember that we got caught in some traffic monsoon conditions. But you know what they say about rain, like you know,

and rain for weddings is like a good sign. It's a sense of renewal, promise of a fresh start. I felt that way, perfect metaphor. We did the taping as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and we got to talk at this amazing venue, the South Sure Cultural Center, you know, where we both spent time and as kids. This just beautiful space that we sat in, like a

glass atrium, just about a block from Lake Michigan. You know, even on that rainy day, once it cleared, like the sun started to come in and just the space itself felt magical. It's a place where for many decades some of Chicago's elite Southsiders would go there to play golf, and you know, it was not a place that was

actually welcoming to everyone, but it is today. And that's what's so important about the Chicago Humanities Festival hosting it there, and for you and I to be in that space to not only talk about what it means to be chicagoing, but to do it with our own hometown community very special. So let's cut to the live tape. I mean, here we are in reality, but let's go to the recording. Let's do it just to place this moment in context. We're here at south Shore Cultural Center. I mean I

remember walking by here as a kid. I literally spent my earliest years at sixty ninth in Oglesby, which is four blocks from where we are, just across the street, at a place. It was a non discript apartment building, but I went to a nursery pre k place called Toddler's Inn. So Ben, Yeah, I grew up in south Shore. So I grew up not too far from here and played tennis here when it was still it was called the South Shore Country Club, but wasn't really a country

club anymore. And actually people from my neighborhood helped preserve it and then restore it. Yeah, there was sort of a discussion about what would happen, what its next iteration would be. And here we are. Yeah, it looks great, you know, here we are in Chicago, and we're in a city that's demonized all the time and that has all sorts of population changes going on, and even with

a mayoral race, you know, heating up. There's so many discussions about the city in its present form and its future, and so this question of like, well, what does it mean to be a Chicago and what is a Chicago identity? And a way to come at that is just to talk at least at the start of like what it means to us. Yeah. Yeah, so our producers of the show often tell us, like, our listeners only care so

much about Chicago. So since we're here, we get to lean into that a little bit and actually talk about our origin story. Yeah, so let's start with a Chicago What is your Chicago origin story? Yeah? How did you get here? Yeah? So you heard I teach at Harvard, which is you know what you think it is really snobby and arrogant and this sort of thing, but a lot of smarts to everybody. That's how long it took him to mention Harvard, Like that is the that's the

longest so far. It's a guarantee there it is whatever. Whatever. So, So it came up because I was teaching just this week, and we were talking about the fact that I happened to be a third generation Chicagoan. So my parents were born here. Shorty Ruff by the way, for a listeners, since he regards as my mother's nicknames as a tough customer. My mother was born here, her mother was born here,

and that's the third generation. And so it happens. My great grandmother, Laura Oliver, married in the nineteen twenties a man named Eugene Gavin. This is your mother's side of the Fantasies, my mother's side of who migrated from Mississippi. They both migrated from Mississippi. They could not marry there,

but they married here in the nineteen twenties. And so I take a measure of pride of actually being basically the sentence of people who got here at the turn of the century, or not quite the turn of the century, but in the nineteen twenties and therefore the early great migration. Yeah, so you you have a lot of roots here, a lot of routes. So I was born here and my parents, who were in the audience wave Boston's, Yes, they moved to Chicago in their early thirties. My father got a

job at the University of Chicago. So there they you know, I'm I guess I'm like that make me a first generation And and they stayed, you know, they moved here and stayed, which is another sort of you know, cities are about are measured in some ways by their um you know, their their ability to attract people and attract business and then to retain them, right um and so um. You know you're talking about the black migration, and you know before that, the you know, the beginning of the

twentieth century, and even before immigrants from Europe. Uh. And in the nineteen nineties, so many people from Mexico who moved here, and you know, to the point that Latinos are a third of the population. Now do you have

some Latino heritage? This is I'm just riffing here. So yeah, and then and then i'd say that, uh, you know, my wife and I had a kind of professional walk about where we moved all over the country and decided at some point about ten years ago that we wanted to come back home and we wanted our kids to be raised here around our family. And this is where sort of you know, we wanted to make our stand.

You know, like when you you live in other cities, there's a kind of there's a kind of great freedom at times of not being rooted there where you don't have to worry so much about the messy history, you don't have to own it, and here you have to own it, but the stakes are higher. Yeah. Yeah, so I h I have moved from Chicago since essentially I was twenty two years old, so unlike Ben Um, I haven't been back, and I've been enjoying the city by

virtue of family and relatives who live here. My mom lived here until quite recently her entire life had never lived literally anywhere else. So I'm a little bit opposite to Ben and that I chose not to come back to Chicago. But is this a good place to make your announcement at the return run from mayor? Yeah? Yeah, well isn't everybody doing that? I mean to bring that up inside Joe, because I said if I ever came back Chicago, I'd want to come back to be mayor.

So this is actually this is actually real talk. But but I want to say just one more thing about the other side of my family, which is more famous. And again, listeners of the show at least know this.

So it turns out that Ben lives today a couple of blocks from where my great grandfather, Elijah Muhammad, who was also a migrant from Georgia born in eighteen ninety nine, arrived in Chicago sometime in the night thirties and ultimately built the Nation of Islam, which all of you know is part of the Hyde Park, Knwid area and where

Ben and Danielle's family currently live. And of course that's another kind of Chicago story that makes not only the city quite unique and interesting, but also makes this entire area and thinking about a Chicago identity fascinating. Going something we talked about when we were thinking about this show, like where else in America could you imagine like Muhammad Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Jesse Jackson, eventually Michelle and Barack Obama and Harold Washington as notes of some of the most important

political debates movements in America. Pretty awesome. Hey, this is Khalil. We need to take a short break. We'll be right back. Welcome back to some of my best friends are I'm doing that time space continuum thing and I'm not at the live event. But now we're going to go back to the live event from the Chicago Humanities Festival, and so so we talked about, you know, what are our

Chicago origin stories. But there's a way where to feel like there's also a consciousness about being a Chicago and a kind of Chicago being sort of imprinted on your DNA. And we were younger before people really got tattoos of like the Chicago flag or anything like that or three one two tattoos or seven seventy three or so, you know, let's talk about that moment where we really sort of started to think of Chicago as integral to our identity. Okay, yeah, do it how you first? Okay, for me, it had

to do with driving. I could think of a specific moment. I think it's the summer after high school, so this is like nineteen eighty nine, and maybe it was nineteen ninety and I had a job as a bagel delivery man, I remember that. And then to have the white pickup truck. Then, see,

you had to you had to make it scary. I had a job as a bagel delivery man and I had to get up at five am, and it was called the Bagel Nosh and it was a bagel store on rush Street and Rush Street of nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety was sort of like in transition that if you're older, Rush Street signifies kind of, you know, something a red light district or a sort of like kind of sleazy a little bit, and today it's pretty gentrified and ritzy. It was sort of both at that moment,

or like probably more on the sleazy side. And now I'd get there at five am, and I'd have to pull in an alley behind the shop and like flash my brights to clear out all the rats who would scurry away. And then I would load up the truck with bagels and drive all over the city. And there was a feeling of as a young person too, of moving through the city at a time when there weren't a lot of people there and where it felt like

I kind of had ownership of the city. It felt like something out of like a Carl Sandburg poem, where like this this Goliath which is asleep and and and here I am, you know, seeing and part of the mechanism that's going to be when it wakes, and you know they're the only other people out there were other delivery people, you know, the newspaper trucks and things like that, and also traversing the city in a way that I hadn't before, either of going through the loop, but also

like the south side and you'd have to come back on State Street, down the State Street corridor of where there were you know, used to be public housing for miles, and I just felt like I got a better understanding of the city, of being a part of it, of its geography and its segregation. And yeah, I felt at

that point like like a kind of pride of place. Yeah. So, you know, people often say that you have to leave a city to actually appreciate what you've lost or what you had, and I think of this kind of consciousness Chicago consciousness of a slightly different way. So I was about nine years old when my father moved to New York. He'd left Chicago. He'd worked at Johnson and Johnson Publishing

as a photographer. He spent an entire career as a photojournalist, but he got his start with Johnson Publishing, and he leaves for Charlotte in nineteen seventy eight, land in New

York by nineteen eighty and he's still there. So I visited him about nine years old for the first time, and I'm visiting with his friends, his new New York area friends who have kids, and the mom in this relationship is keeping me for the weekend because by then my father was a bachelor, and so you know, he's keeping me for the summer, where I really spent a lot of childhood summers from about nine to fifteen or sixteen. And so I meet this brood of like kids of

all ages, younger than me, older than me. They welcome me into their family and within seconds of talking to them, someone's like, you have a funny accent. I was like, what are you talking about? And they were like, you just said ten And I was like what ten. They're like, no ten. I was like, no ten. Anyway, it was by Mississippi accent by way of Chicago that these New Yorkers who were my peers as kids were picking up on. And that was literally the first moment when I thought

to myself, holy smokes, like I sound different. Yeah, yeah, and so it's it's then you had to be like us and them, and I'm on team us. I'm on team Chicago. Well it did make me very proud out This is just did you did you do the thing? Where you then like went home and like practice, So you didn't say you said, Ken, Well, you know, I wanted to get to Harvard eventually, so I had to get rid of the accent. I mean, so so I had something similar. I mean maybe everyone does who's from

Chicago where you travel? And maybe maybe this is even more of a white thing where other where you meet people and they're like, oh, you're from Chicago. I'm from Chicago. And I would always call it like the double question, yep, because the next question was where are you from? Right? Not not from Chicago. They want to know if you're from Deerfield or Wheneck or whatever. They didn't really meet Chicago, ye. And so there's also that, you know, not just defining

it of another city, but of like suburb or city. Right. Yeah, So I wanted to talk about the first time I remember being pissed off as a Chicago in two and that is when I was about ten years old. I had to commute to Chatham from Regent's Park where I lived by that age. And this was Regent's Park is a fifty first and Lakeshore drive. To this day, you can actually see it on a clear day from from

just outside this window. And I was especially going to this elementary school at eighty third and Saint Lawrence called Dixon Elementary, and my mom just wanted continuity. So rather than me coming to go to Ray or something like that, I stayed going to Dixon. So I had catched the number one from Lakeshore Drive to Cottage Grove and the number four Cottage Grow from fifty first to eighty third

STREETEP Deep Deep Chicago, Deep Chicago. And I remember one winter day it was about negative forty degrees, as was commonly true back in those days, in early eighties, when global warming wasn't what it is today, and the bus took forever to come. When it finally arrived, it was so full with people it didn't even stop at the like and this is a memory series in my marria. I literally screamed out of frustration, picked up the nearest rock I could find, and hurled it at the back

of the bus. I mean, this is not a prideful moment, but it is the moment when I thought, like this city sucks, right, like trying to get to school and I'm freezing. So that was a story. The last one I want to tell about being a Chicagoan. Is so you heard about the Schomberg Center, which is a cultural institution in Harlem, been around since in nineteen twenties, really important place. But for anyone who's visited Harlem, has anyone

visited Harlem in this audience, Okay? You know Harlem mights think that black Harlem is the as used to be called, the Negro capital of the world, and therefore tremendous amounts of pride in that place. And I kind of spent the first couple of years as the director of the Schaumberg in twenty eleven, kind of pushing back against that.

I mean, like literally from the stage of the institution, reminding them that Harlem had never produced the political geniuses and the political grates that Chicago had produced, going back to Oscar DePriest, who was the first black person to go to Congress after reconstruction, and that Adam Clayton Powell Junior, who, of course, with the famous Congressman, didn't get there to nineteen forty four, and then of course all the other stuff leading up to the President Obama and all that

was just gravy. But I felt very prideful in Harlem reminding them that my city was actually better. Yeah, so that makes me think that there's another way that you you get a Chicago consciousness or for us, like we're as professionals, we've also studied Chicago. I've written about Chicago. It's part of our work, and so maybe we just talk about that a little bit, about approaching it the city when it becomes an idea that you are grappling

with in that way. And one of the things I started, as you know, you've written this book, tell tell everyone about well I wrote my first book is about public housing in Chicago. It's about Cabrini Green is called High Risers, but and and working on it. I also start to think about how little Chicago as a subject was part of my education. Was that true for you too? Did

you ever have like, yeah, no, it's formally. I we talked about this a lot, like situating ourselves as kids in this important city we don't remember, like being taught about this first black mayor in the moment, and the significance of that as something transformational both for the national politics but also for the meaning of the city itself. Even though we literally lived, you know, in the same

neighborhood as Harold Washington did. Yeah, I don't even remember, like, uh, you know when I say remember, meaning it could have happened. I just wasn't paying attention, but being assigned books like The Jungle or uh, you know, Upton Sinclair's muck Raking book. Remember Richard write books? You know, Native Son, h a Black Boy. I don't remember. Those were not books. It's part of the curriculum. Um, you didn't take the African

American Literature elective at Kenwood. Is that part of it? Yea, yeah, yeah, maybe, Okay, see you you you were you know, you were still wrestling. I was still whiteness, Jewish identity kind of thing still. So yeah, just it was not it was not so prevalent. So I think, you know, part of it was like just going back and devouring everything, studying the history of the city and the literature about the city, and like, you know, if you're going to be a Chicago writer,

like to try to learn everything about it. Yeah. And I think it's something about the richness of everything we experienced in a community of people nurturing us that made it possible to look back and later see the city as something worth knowing. So, for example, Ben's father as

the University of Chicago professor emeritus. We both were at Reagenstein as kids, but by accident I ended up writing about the University of Chicago in my work because it was the first real place for the study of the city and the study of the city as a place of immigrant assimilation. The study of the city is quote unquote back then race relations. And here we were literally part of this community at products of it and then

later able to look back on it. Yeah, And I think we write about it and other people do too, because the city is endlessly fascinating, that the history and the present is so frought with that history of you know, problematic stuff and interesting things, and it's alive in so many ways. I mean, I think about now that there's this John Bird's curriculum in the public schools, right, you want to tell them who John Burges, John Birds, the police officer who you know, was was part of a

midnight crew and a station two hundred people. Yeah, tortured more than one hundred men black men into false confessions, and as part of reparations, the city agree to teach

this curriculum. That's that's you know, I think, I think you know we we've talked about this before, even on the show when we're talking about critical race theory that I think both of us believe professionally and personally that you have to engage with the really messy and difficult history of a place and that is what is uh, you know it is you know you talked about on the bus in Chicago and hating the city. This is

a tough city to love. Yeah, this is a city that hurts you, and to be in love with it is like being in an abusive relationship. Sometimes that's how I feel relationship with you. I hope not. I hope not like it's dysfunctional. Um, and you know it, it's it is all of the magnificent things. And it is the richness of the history which is so so to fraught with who we are as a country and as a city that that makes us an important place and a place to try to to make it better in

some ways. Yeah, and I think it's fair to also think about some influences. So, um, we haven't talked about this on the show, but I think it's fair to say, like your brother, Jake, Jake Austen is here, basket and we all went to I school together. Jake is a couple of years older than us, but you know, we

had we had that experience. We all went to Kinnwood, and your brother was in many ways a booster for the city, um, long before you and I were even thinking about these issues, um, both as a as a zine editor and being able to describe the music scene in the city, like I mean, I wouldn't pay that close attention, but enough attention to know that this is what Jake was doing. He began writing about the city. He literally has a TV show called chick A Go Go.

I mean, you can't be more of a booster than that. A theme song, yeah you want to sing it now, but if in the podcast version of it is yea

and we'll lave it and it's fun. So so let's let's talk about a harder subject, which is you know, nobody really talks about Chicago now without talking about, say, the violence, right, And you know, you're either when you even talk about being a booster, you're sort of saying there's more to the city than that, but you're actually sort of responding to it or you're engaging with it, and it really is part of every conversation here, and I wanted to actually pick up on a theme because

you've sort of already talked a little bit about this. But a lot of the work that I do as an academic is around policing. And at one point, you know, someone asked us we met someone earlier today, said you know, like what inspired you to do the show? And the short answer is that we had an opportunity through the Pushkin, which is a company co owned by Malcolm Gladwell, the

journalist and writer, and Jacob Weisberg. But the idea of the show came because I was doing academic work on the criminal justice system I'd written about as a historian, and I was doing work with other social scientists around

how to think about a different kind of policing. And Ben was actually reporting on policing in the early days of Black Lives Matter, sort of from the Michael Brown moment to the Lakwan McDonald moment, and was on the ground reporting around the city about various forms of activism

and talking about the tough stuff. Like for us, it was not just the tough stuff and the questions about like what's wrong with your city, but it was also about trying to answer these tough questions and to think about like what's the future of the city, Like is this a moment for us in different capacities to talk

through what it means to solve for these problems. Yeah, yeah, I mean I know that as a Chicago writer, I am trying to push against the stereotypes of the city, you know, the shy rack image, or we have a there's a Republican running for governor now and he's been he's been really pushing this idea of the Chicago as hellhole of sort of adopting the language American carnage. This is a very adopting the Trump language to sort of you know, it's you know, it's also fear of crime

in Chicago and bail reform. But it's like it's an easy dog whistle and it's probably even more explicit than dog whistle um to rile up people. Yeah, I did. I did a reporting uh project once not too long ago, where I went around to twenty high schools in the city and my idea was I would interview and profile all the valedictorians of all these different high schools that that that there is much representative of the city and children in the city and then the public school system

as either victims or perpetrators of violence. Right, and you know, in some ways much much more representative of you know, most students. Yeah, and you know that was that was the thing. It was amazing thing to even just like to be inside twenty different high schools across the city. So I take a much shorter version of like how to defend against the negative stereotypes, and that is I just tell people, Chicago's the greatest beach town on Earth.

Each town where where where else can you have access to this amazing lake, like at just a crossing a bridge, It's amazing. So yes, that that's the simple version. But here we are, right, and here we are. M I got here on Friday and on the hour and a half drive, which was about as long as it took to fly here from the East Coast two Hyde Park. WBZ was reporting on the killing of a seventeen year old blocks away from our high school. He was out at lunch at a high school, stated high school student,

middle of the day at twelve thirty five. Yeah, and also was killed in a parking lot on East End, which is the very parking lot I crossed for ten years of my life to leave my apartment building to come to high school, to go anywhere else from Hi. Yeah, yeah, I mean I've been thinking about this a lot of just this young man. I think he just transferred to the school this year, and that this beautiful start to

the school year. I've been walking around the neighborhood and seeing Kenwood students out and about playing football and practicing band and lacrosse, and just like just so energetic and to think to think this his life is over. And you know, as much as I'm saying of pushing against the stereotype and writing about other things, this is a fact, right.

It happened, right, and and the reverberations are real. People make choices at that point to leave the city, to not send their kids to Kenwood High School to get away. You know, why would I if that's where danger is.

And and then there's all the sort of like political things that happen, you know, in this case, the school board accusing Lori Lightfoot of not keeping children safe, of you know, asking for more policing, all these other things that we know intellectually, like there's no police officer that

can stop that crime. You can respond to it in some way, and then you can say like maybe they could, you know, hunt these people down, but that's it's not a policing issue, but something something happened that that is both real and undeniable and and really tears at the fabric of our community. Yeah, yeah, Ben, Ben and I have been talking a lot about the depopulation of the city, um and and Ben's been doing some writing about it. Uh more generally. Uh, it's personal. I mean I think

that's the point. It's personal. It's not just it's not just our neighborhood, and it's not just the people who are one degree removed. As you know, a year ago there were a series of of just outrageous shootings in Hyde Park that we actually talked about in one of our episodes. And so here we are again. Many of you know, My mom left the city after having purchased a handgun for personal protection and told me, you know that her her handgun was on its way, And I'm like,

what are you talking about. It's like she's in her apartment on the citizen app and as far as she's concerned, they're coming for her eventually. She's got a shaky hand. Yeah, she's got yeah, this is not good. But I think you know, so now she's with us, but I think

I think we don't want that, right. So the challenge for us as people who do get to speak on behalf of the city, whether whether we get it right or wrong in terms of how we describe Chicago, the challenge for us is to simultaneously be honest about what these existential realities mean for people who live their lives here every day and simultaneously push back against the bad ideas that push us towards a past that is not

the source of the solution in this case. Yeah, yeah, So when Ben talks about policing won't save us, like, we do have to remember that in any instance police are reactive to violence. They actually you know, unless we could imagine a future where their checkpoints on every corner, which did come up in some of the conversation about what happened at the University of Chicago last year or in the fifty Thursday there. But as we know, that's

not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen. So we have to think about what do we want in terms of an infrastructure that is healthier, that is safer, that is more about economic security for people, and not to say that those guys who killed this guy needed more

money in their pockets and it wouldn't have happened. But what we're really talking about is a kind of society we live and where guns are ubiquitous, poverty is growing, and therefore the combination of people feeling like they're at the short end of a stick and they're all operating on short fuses. It's something we can do something about. Yeah, yeah,

and I think it's not. On the other hand, but in moments like this, we also have to recognize that there is some immediate need, that people are hurting and they're full of fear and they need something, and then in the void of good ideas, they'll be sort of these these these old ideas that have been tried already and we know don't work right um, and but that there really is trauma they're suffering right right now, and there's there's there's something you know, devastating and and I mean,

you know, another neighborhood. To many places, you know it's it's you know, it's it's it's why you know, it happens a lot, But when it's very close to home, you see it up close. Yeah, you have to recognize that. Yeah, so let's leave folks with three good ideas or about the future. Right, So three good ideas. One, we really do have to make sure that we give young people

summer youth employment and massive recreational opportunities. Both of us had them really important because we know, I'll just use the social science research tells us that kids who actually get to work at fourteen put money in their pocket. Kids who they're no barrier to the recreational opportunities they want or the ways to explore their own creative expression do much better than kids who essentially have a lot of free time. Two, we want to make sure that

we invest in violence interruption. Yeah, Chicago is really one of the birthplaces for this idea, but Chicago has been one of the hardest places for violence interruption to take root. It is being exported to Jacksonville, Ball to more. New York is one of the places with the most significant investment in violence interruption. And so one of the things that we know we don't know, we still haven't learned exactly what set this off. But violence interrupters get ahead

of it. They actually do the work that police can't do, which is that they have trust within those communities talk people off the ledge so that they're not inclined to use violence. Because, as public health experts day, violence is a disease and it is contagious and once you catch it,

you're much more likely to express it. So those two ideas about investing in our young people as well as investing in actual things that work to keep people from killing people, to me, are very productive and it's no reason why Chicago can't invest in those rather than continuing to have a conversation in this next mayoral race about how much policing, how much more policing. Yeah, and we're

reminding ourselves. I was talking about the governor's race when when the Republican candidate called Chicago a hellhold, there was an online sort of social media response of you know, post something about Chicago that it's you know, conflicts with that that shows it's beauty and don't just show the skyline and you know, this is a place full of love and this is a place full of beauty, and

those things are not erased. They're they're side by side with a lot of the problems, but they're they're they're not they're not. They're not gone. They're always here too. Yeah. So you know, we usually sign off the show in the way that most people know, and I think we're going to do the same. But I want to add to that that not only that love you, man, but I love this city. I love you, and I love this city too. All Right. Some of My Best Friends

Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by Khalil Jibron Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda k Wan, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. At Pushkin thanks to Leita Mulad, Julia Martin, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Gretta Kone, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow Chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young, from

his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his music at his website Avery R. Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at Pushkin dot Fm. To find more Pushkin Podcast, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And if you like our show, please give us a

five star rating and a review and listen. Even if you don't like it, give it a five star rating and a review, and please tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you. On this episode, we have to give us special thanks to the Chicago Humanities Festival for bringing us together and letting us speak at their amazing event. That's right, and we also need to thank Jake Austin, your brother, my brother, and the Goblins were

letting us use their music on this episode. Man, you can watch Chicago go online, look it up on YouTube and you know, definitely listen to the music and Chicago go. Wait. Wait, So on the show that we recorded in Chicago, you said that your great grandfather and your great grandmother couldn't get married in the South. Yeah, man, how come they

couldn't get married? Well, what I forgot to say is that my great grandfather was basically a white dude and basically makes it Wait when you say, when you say basics, what is basically a white through man? How well he he looked white? He was white presenting, and his siblings

passed as white, so basically his whole family considered themselves white. Dude, you you are talking about like running for office in Chicago or in Illinois, and you could pull this Barack Obama shit of being like my my great white great grandfather. Like you gotta use that. You gotta use that. You can't.

You gotta like put that forward, like that is power. Yeah, like you gotta you could have like only in America can the great grandson of a white dude from Mississippi, my white great growndfather and my