Episode 208: The Third Reconstruction

This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every week is special on our podcast, but this week is really, really special. We're joined by one of my best academic friends, one of my best friends as a whole, and one of the truly great scholars of race and democracy in our society. He's been on our podcast a number of times before. But today we are really privileged and fortunate to have Dr. Peniel Joseph with us to discuss his brand new book, which is just out this week, which I hope every one of our listeners will be reading in the next few days. It's called The Third Reconstruction. Peniel, thank you so much for joining us at such a busy time to talk about your new book.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeremi. Thank you.

Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair for Ethics at the LBJ School and the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of numerous seminal groundbreaking books that have shaped the way that we think about our history as a society.

He began his career writing some of the cutting-edge scholarship on the Black Power movement, then went on to write about Stokely Carmichael and Barack Obama, and now, of course, this really great book on The Third Reconstruction. I should also mention, I almost forgot, his wonderful and really groundbreaking book on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as The Sword and the Shield. And now, as I said, we have The Third Reconstruction. Before we go to our discussion with Dr. Peniel Joseph, we have, of course, Zachary Suri's scene- setting poem. What's your poem titled today, Zachary?

The Third Reconstruction

You're stealing his title. Come on, man. Shamelessly. Go ahead, Zachary. Let's hear it.

The Third Reconstruction. The first time I ever saw a voting booth, I voted for a black man. My father let me check the box in the basement gymnasium of a high school in Madison. I stood on his feet, probably at four years old, as I maneuvered the pen over the seemingly interminable names. As they fed the ballot into the great machine, I watched the digits advance on the little screen and held my breath.

The first time I ever heard the President of the United States, it was his voice on the radio. It was his face on the television screen. And when I first understood what it meant to be an American on a corduroy couch on January 20, 2009, they were his words.

The first time I ever saw my father cry, I was watching the same man from a pulpit in Charleston. I was hearing the same voice cry out the words of that ancient song. He was asking for grace. He was demanding our epiphany. He was saying that, in the end, they will always lose. And the first time I ever cried for a reason, it was his eulogy from another pulpit in Atlanta, singing the praises of John Lewis, a man I saw once in a giant auditorium from afar, just as, in the same auditorium, I saw that same man speaking to the stars.

And though I never understood his words, though what he was trying to say was never really clear, it made all the difference in the world, even if, in the end, they do sometimes win.

You're going to make me cry again, Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem is about how powerful it was for me, as a young person, born at the turn of the 21st century, to grow up with a black man as president, how important and how transformative that was. And I think that that's really the core of what we're talking about here in the Third Reconstruction. Absolutely, the promise and the peril of that. Indeed.

So, Peniel, one of the things I love about your new book, and what's unique, I think, to this book from the rest of your work, is this book, you're really quite personal. You talk about your mom, and you talk about what Obama meant to you pretty early on in this book.

Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, as a fellow writer, the older we get, the more introspective we get. And we're also trying to flex different muscles. So I think putting in memoir and writing in a different way was really exciting, in addition to the historical and the political analysis. So I'm really excited about the book in that way.

You have a really powerful statement. You have a lot of powerful statements in here, but one that jumped out at me pretty early on, around page 23. You say, American history, since the end of the Civil War, has involved a struggle between Reconstructionists and Redemptionists for the nation's very soul. The contrasting approaches of these two perspectives have shaped the nation's entire history, not only on matters connected directly to race, but also in how Americans have defined citizenship, which is a key topic in your book, the national identity and democracy since 1865. What do you mean by that really powerful sentence?

Well, no, thank you. I think it's like me and you have had these conversations for really two decades now, and I think the further you become a student of history, the past, the more it enables you to understand the present. So I think when we think about Barack Obama, and Zachary's great poem was just about Obama, but also people like John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer, and then we think about the movement for Black lives, and then we think about Trump and MAGA and the Tea Partiers and the birther movements. The way in which I argue in the book that we should make sense of January 6th, both the white riot, but also the hearings and the debates about it.

Justice Ketanji, you know, Jackson. How do we make sense of all the things that are happening around us? And I think Reconstructionists versus Redemptionism is really what has framed American democracy from 1865 to the present. And I think there are times when Redemptionists win and are winning that debate, and there are times when Reconstructionists are winning that debate. And I think Obama was so important, and I argue that he's the first hinge point for the third Reconstruction, because you look at how that affected Zachary, how that affected all of us.

It affected generations of people, both in the United States and globally, because it made people think that we could be a multiracial democracy for real. You know, France doesn't have a Black prime minister. The UK doesn't seem like it'll ever get a Black prime minister or even a South Asian prime minister, whether they're conservative, whether they're Tories or liberals, right? It's a real big deal.

And so I think that when we see and frame it, Reconstructionists versus Redemptionists, we're able to say a lot about not just race, but about American democracy, big government versus small government, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and like you were alluding to, really citizenship and dignity, and how is that going to look, even in Austin, Texas, our own beloved Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin, because even in liberal and progressive states and cities and paradigms, you have Redemptionist inclinations that frame when we discuss school choice or we discuss climate change and environmental racism, segregation, when we discuss political power or wealth and equity.

So I think it gives us a good conceptual tool to understand why Charlottesville, but also why Obama, right? And Obama in Richmond, Virginia, and how did that happen? In the Capitol of the Confederacy and the night before the election, he's in tears and there's over 100,000 people there, predominantly white. And so people would say, well, wow, that's amazing. How did that happen? And I think this gives us a framework in the history that's told here, a way for us to conceptualize both the past, the present, and hopefully the future.

Right, and you see a cycle, right? I mean, in some ways, you're doing your own cycles of American history here, right? You see these cycling through these moments of Reconstructionist promise, the first one after the Civil War, the second one after the Second World War, reaching its pinnacle with the Civil Rights Movement and the third with Obama. And you see also in each case a pushback or a backlash, as you call it, right?

Absolutely. I think we are in these unhappy patterns of history and we can see it in all three periods of Reconstruction. I think the reason why we usually focus more in the second Reconstruction than the first is because it provides us with a context to get to Barack Obama. And like I say in the book, it's not just Barack Obama, though. That second Reconstruction really configures a social justice, racial justice consensus for the next 50 years. And that's how we get Hillary Clinton. That's how we get John Ossoff. That's how we get really the most wealth and power and equity that people of color have ever had, and women, in the whole history of the republic. It's from 63 to 2013.

When you look at our republic before then, you don't have as many people of color and women who are elected officials, who are businesspersons and entrepreneurs, who are successful, fabulously successful, who are able to create wealth, who are able to become leaders in so many different industries, not just acting and pop culture and sports, but in the sciences and at universities. I mean, me and you are examples of that. So I think that period is hugely, hugely important.

And it makes sense that during that period, people thought that Obama's victory was sort of going to be a capstone. But as we see, and I try to delineate in the book, especially when I talk about Obama and BLM and sort of that creative tension, Obama was really not just the end of one era, but it was also the beginning of a new period of reconstruction where you were going to see that kind of backlash against everything that Obama represented, because he represents so much.

You know, I think it's really interesting the way you describe the sort of cyclical nature of American history and of this reconstruction at a societal level. But how do we understand it at the personal level? How can people who voted for Obama in 2008, 2012, and then turn around and vote for Trump in 2016, how do we understand that phenomenon, that those two conflicting ideas can perhaps exist in the same person?

Well, I think that those two ideals can exist in the same person, but part of it is how we tell the narrative and the story about Barack Obama and also American history. I think one of the most powerful aspects of all three periods of Reconstruction is the narrative power, the narrative power, both by Redemptionists and Reconstructionists. So in the first Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is the Lost Cause Redemptionist narrative, over and above the Emancipationist narrative, the abolition democracy narrative of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.

In the second Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is going to be King's narrative, the I Have a Dream narrative, John F. Kennedy's narrative, the narrative that it's a moral issue of civil rights and human and political rights.

And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.

And those protesters shouted, the whole world is watching. And they were really mocking the United States. They were mocking the notion of American democracy because in certain ways, when we look at 1968 in Chicago, they were saying the whole world is watching that American democracy is a sham. We are being beaten and brutalized, including there were grandmothers being beaten by the Chicago PD in the summer of 1968. You flash, you fast forward 40 years later and it's a peaceful demonstration with really a couple of hundred thousand people in Grant Park celebrating a president-elect who many thought was an impossible dream. That's really, really powerful. So that narrative seems to be winning.

And then we see the birther narrative, the Tea Party narrative, and really the Trumpian MAGA narrative is really the first narrative, I would argue, since the Reconstruction era. So I think Trump and MAGA, the narrative is even more powerful than George Wallace. t's more powerful than Reaganism. It's more powerful than Goldwaterism, right? Because it goes back to that 19th century, that idea that Black success was going to repudiate white privilege and white supremacy and had to be stopped at all costs. So we are locked into this narrative war.

And then BLM, Black Lives Matter, has another narrative. And their narrative is a narrative of really radical and revolutionary abolition democracy. And what Du Bois meant by abolition democracy was this idea of a world after slavery that was free of systems and institutions of punishment and marginalization and death and anti-Blackness. And that was going to be a multiracial democracy where all people were going to have positive outcomes and aspirations and opportunities. And I think when we look at those different narratives, the 1619 Project versus the assaults on so-called critical race theory, we see how important the power of storytelling is.

So I still think Barack Obama, hugely important. I admire him a whole lot. But what I show in the book, the narrative that Black Lives Matter was articulating was really equally important because it was a narrative of Black dignity from below, people who perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama never would have met in their lives, people who are incarcerated, people who are on the margins, people who are disabled mentally and physically, and that those people mattered and that the president didn't understand their suffering at the level that the people who were experiencing it understood.

And that's why I have a part in the book where in December of 2014, he has a meeting, Obama has a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists in the White House, and they're going back and forth on change. And I say that Obama at that meeting never could have imagined a Donald Trump presidency. And the juxtaposition is that the Black Lives Matter activists, the Ferguson activists, absolutely could. And they were warning him in that meeting, this is coming, this is coming. And he absolutely refused to believe it until 2020.

One thing I show is that the optimism of 2004 and 2008 is replaced in 2020 with one of the darkest speeches Obama ever gives during COVID at the Democratic National Convention, which is, of course, on Zoom at that point because nobody can be there in person. And Obama says that democracy is in peril. This is the person who's absolutely the most optimistic leader of any race of his entire generation. He switches because he sees the coming storm that I think BLM had already witnessed.

It's a part of your book that I think jumps out, and I have those pages marked up as I mark things up when I enjoy reading them. Right before that section, Peniel, you talk about Barack Obama as the first president to visit a federal prison, right? And I didn't know that, actually. So at some level, he is trying to reach out, right? And part of what I feel is underlying your argument in your book is that there's a certain desire to connect, but yet there's also an exceptionalist narrative that he carries and perhaps a naivete about the pushback, the backlash. And your book is basically reminding us that every moment of progress seems to spark this backlash. What should Obama have been doing that he wasn't doing but that he could have done if he had known the history you outlined so well here?

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and I think me and you agree with this, Jeremi, is that we need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but that doesn't mean we don't need a positive story of America, right? And I'll say that again. We need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but it does not mean we don't need a positive, consensus-building, aspirational story of America. Martin Luther King Jr. called it building the beloved community.

So what I mean by that specifically is that, you know, Obama needed to tell us about not just the beauty but the bitter parts. And I know that's not great for campaigns. I completely understand that that's not great for campaigns, but it's super important for us to have a narrative that can talk about histories of racial slavery, anti-Semitism, discrimination against women, queer folks, Latinx folks, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, disabled people, just the whole gamut, but also talk simultaneously about the activists of all colors, of all backgrounds, who've pushed back against that, who've dreamed of a different, reconstructed America, a multiracial democracy, an abolition democracy, and have pushed all of us into getting Labor Day, Memorial Day, rights for veterans, rights for poor people, who want to end homelessness and racism and anti- Semitism, who really want to build that beloved community and make this country a shining city on the hill.

So I think that that story is what's so necessary. That's why I'm a supporter of the 1619 Project. I think, like anything, it can be criticized. Nothing is completely perfect, but I like the idea of this new origin story for American history that looks at the good, the bad, the ugly, but also the beautiful parts of American history. And once we provide people those parts of American history, it makes them stronger. It makes our democracy more stronger. It makes people more patriotic. It makes people love the country more once they understand all that we've been through, and it makes us try to change, as James Baldwin says, to achieve our country for the first time. So Obama didn't give us all the benefit of the doubt. I think we're all stronger than politicians ever assume. I think we're smarter than politicians ever assume. I think we're more resilient, and we have more empathy and compassion than politicians ever assume.

So you could talk about the bad that happened during the first, second, and third Reconstructions, but like I do in this book, I also talk about the good and the promise and the potential. That's the whole thing. So what we have to say is that, yes, we can be the greatest country ever on the face of the earth. We're not quite there yet, but there's many people who have strived to make us that golden, that shining city on a hill. And I think Obama starts to do that really starting in 2015 when he's not facing any elections. He starts to do more of that.

A great speech on history at Selma, a great speech towards the NAACP about mass incarceration. He starts to knit together a much more humanistic story where he's more comfortable talking about the flaws of the country, because if we just keep on talking about American exceptionalism, we can't explain the gun violence in the country, the racism, the police brutality, by saying all we're doing is constantly perfecting our union. It's a bedtime story, but it doesn't mean we can't have this positive feeling and this love of country, but we have to love the country enough to criticize the country.

Right. I agree 100%. I think that opens up another really important question that you raise so well in the book, which is, and it's an issue through each of the three reconstructions. How do you get people who have had power to feel comfortable sharing it with those who have not had power? And you make the point in the book very well that there's a through line, you call it, from Nixon to Reagan to Trump, of those who have had privilege, often racial privilege, but not exclusively, it could be economic privilege that's not always racial, hoarding that privilege, not wanting to share it. How do you craft a narrative along the lines you just described that makes people comfortable sharing their privilege, Peniel?

Yeah, I think that's the test and the challenge. And I think part of it is laying bare the most important parts of our history. I think you can see why from a redemptionist perspective, there's been such an assault, not just on the critical 19 project, but calling any kind of effort to have a more complex, truthful American history, critical race theory that is somehow anti-white and going to brainwash our kids. You could see that from a redemptionist perspective because stories are really the most important part of all of this. And I know you agree, the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our families, the way in which I tell my daughter, you tell Zach, it's so important, the stories we tell.

So the 1619 project and the way in which so many hundreds of thousands of teachers were using that and continue to in certain states that are allowed to use it, that was important because I think when you tell a deeper story of American history, it means that the newer generations, people who are the sons and daughters of those who are in power are going to be much more receptive to the idea of power sharing. Because yeah, we can legislate this, we can come up with policies, we can come up with nonprofits, but then at the end of the day, the institutions are us. We are the institutions, right? And so we have to have a baseline understanding of American history.

I think these three reconstruction periods are really the most important parts of our history. So I think the more in which we're able to craft a narrative that's inclusive, a narrative that lets people see themselves in that story, but also understand what happened with Tulsa, what happened with Japanese internment camps, what happened with the long and bitter history of anti-Semitism here in this country, what happened with what we've done to our Latinx, our Hispanic population, what we've done to indigenous folks, what we've done to AAPI folks and queer folks, the better off they're able to understand how we can build that beloved community and really the sacrifices that are going to be called for. Because we've embedded a system of unequal power relations and when people hear this word equity, they become frightened because they think their kid's not going to get to the right school and have the right outcomes, or they're not going to any longer have access to the same neighborhoods.

But power sharing means not that you're going to be diminished, but everyone is going to be, or more people are going to be elevated. And I think part of that, the central part of this is the story we tell about America and us and our place within America.

I want to be careful how I phrase this, but how do we tell that unified American history? How do we come to one narrative of our country that acknowledges the many flaws, the many, I don't want to say mistakes, but tragedies in our history without splitting us into people groups, if you understand what I mean? How do we use this difficult reckoning with our history to create unity and not division?

And Zachary, before Peniel answers, maybe you should also share your struggles at your school over these issues, struggles you've had in diversity council and elsewhere to get people to come together around these issues.

I think what I would just say is I think there's an unwillingness sometimes among certain people to recognize the complexity of these issues, that it's not as simple as splitting people into people groups or to say that these are the oppressors and these are the oppressed. It has to be a nuanced understanding. And I guess my question is, how do we have that nuanced understanding, but also come to some sort of consensus about our history and what we need to do moving forward?

Well, I think that's a great question. I think, one, we have to be willing to speak truth to power, because there are structures and systems that have oppressed folks and continue to. I think, two, we have to learn and listen to each other's stories. So I make it a point of reading, obviously, not just African-American history, but histories of, we see the late Barbara Aaron Reich just passed away, histories of white working class, histories, think about Tommy Orange and They Are There, history of Native people, histories. I read Julian Zeller's great book on Rabbi Heschel, histories of Jewish Americans, just histories of the whole multiracial component of the United States.

It's important to read that. But we also have to acknowledge that the core feature of American democracy, one that I think has been a stain on our democracy, but also has been unifying, especially for redemptionists, and in certain contexts for reconstructionists, is really anti-Blackness.

And so anti-Blackness is what creates the racial caste system that Isabel Wilkerson and others talk and write about, that hierarchy. You think about the caste system as a ladder with Blackness at the bottom, whiteness at the top, and other racial groups in between trying to figure and oscillate between both of those poles where they fit in. So I would say, Zachary, there are oppressors. It doesn't mean that somehow all white people are that. But systemically, there is a system of white supremacy in the country that goes back to the founding of the country. But in 1865, we actually had a way out through Freedman's Bureau, reparations, through land and equity for African-American farmers. We actually had a way out of white supremacy.

And what we see through the history of the Third Reconstruction, the First Reconstruction, and I write about it in this book, is that it was violently repudiated. It wasn't just policies and Black codes and convict lease system. This was organized systematic terror. When we think about January 6th, 2021, January 19th of 1871 is when Congress launches the official investigation into Klan violence. And by March of 1871, there's going to be public congressional hearings that lead to the enforcement acts during the Grant Administration.

So this is big news. Thaddeus Stevens is saying colored people are being slaughtered by the thousands in the South. That's what Thaddeus Stevens is saying, the venerable congressman from Pennsylvania, who is one of the stalwart abolitionists and reconstructionists of the time period. So we have to be courageous enough to call that out, especially now because we're facing a backlash that really happened very quickly after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and has really been congealed in legislation, but a backlash against that kind of truth-telling. But we have to listen and learn about each other's stories, Zachary. I would say that's the biggest thing.

We have to listen and learn about each other's stories. And sometimes people will say, well, my group suffered, your group suffered. The organizing principle of the suffering actually has been anti-Black. And it's important for us to understand that. That's why the struggle for Black equality and Black citizenship and dignity is a universal struggle. It's just universal and Black, because if we get that, no other group is going to somehow be isolated and suffer because anti-Blackness has been the organizing principle of the racial caste system, both in the United States and globally.

So part of it is courage. Part of it is listening. Part of it is going to be struggle. It's going to be struggle because it takes White people who are in solidarity with anti-racist movements to really help us push forward. And in certain ways, I think 2020, one of the most optimistic aspects was the number of White people who were out in the streets alongside of Black and other people of color during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer. And we had never seen that level of outrage or commitment in either of the first two periods of Reconstruction. So that still gives me hope.

I wonder, though, how do you approach an issue like since it's Labor Day, labor unions, right? Where you have a structure that was in some cases created to try and keep Black people and people of color out of the workforce, but at the same time, in other cases, was created to help Black people attain greater rights in the workplace. I guess my question is, if we're looking at every issue of American history through this understanding of anti-Blackness in America, how do we avoid overlooking the economic, the otherwise social and political divisions that also shape our country and an issue like organized labor?

I think we look at it simultaneously. I think labor is a great example because I talk about SCIU 1199. My mom was part of a labor union for 40 years at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. So that's very near and dear. In a lot of ways, my politics were shaped by labor and labor movements and reading about labor movements.

Labor is a complicated issue. On the one hand, when we think about labor movements, a lot of times we always leave out enslaved Black people as part of labor movements. I think the work of Robin Kelly and Saidiya Hartman and other scholars have really gone a long way towards rectifying that. So we've got to think about labor capaciously. Then at the same time, we've got to be truthful about both labor that has been anti-racist, even in the 19th century.

You think about the Wobblies, the international workers of the world versus the Knights of Labor. You think about the CIO versus the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations versus the American Federation of Labor. You think about Eugene Debs' socialism versus Hubert Harrison's socialism. So we have to be very cognizant of the pitfalls of just saying, oh, we can have Black, white, unite, fight kind of slogans. But one thing I'll say, Zach, when we think about contemporary labor, it's become much more multicultural and much more multiracial. Bus riders unions, justice for janitors.

1199, SCIU is the most multiracial union in the country. So we have to tell that complete story. The story of Black people forced to be so-called scabs because they weren't allowed in labor unions, but also the story of utilizing the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, DRUM, and the different revolutionary union movements coming out of Detroit and wildcat striking against the UAW so that Black folks could be foremen and have dignity on the shift line and on the worker line.

So we have to tell that whole story. And I think telling that whole story now, when we think about labor and so many immigrant laborers, in terms of we've got 11 million undocumented in the country. So many of those are Spanish speakers, but there's also from West Africa, from the Caribbean. And how does that shape the labor movement, especially household labor? Most of us, me and your dad are generation X. If we live long lives, we're going to have Caribbean and Spanish- speaking home health aid workers, because unless you're somehow healthy until you're 100 years old, you don't need anybody. I mean, maybe that could be your dad. He's going to be fine, right? I hope so. I hope so.

Most people, millions across the United States are going to need them. So I would say this requires courage because yeah, you have to remember Dr. King pissed people off. Obama pissed people off. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker. You're not always going to get the standing ovation when you tell people what they need to hear instead of telling people what they want to hear.

But one of the things King says in his speech, a drum major, for the drum major speech is that he's not interested in molding some kind of phony consensus. He says, I'm a builder and I'm going to shape consensus through my organizing. That means you tell people what they don't want to hear. So part of this, it requires courage on us, really. And again, it requires a lot of study and listening and patience because yes, the story is complicated, but there are some really robust truths that we should all be willing to articulate. And I think at our best, we do.

I think you think about the president and the student loan forgiveness and when people were pushing back, the White House was tweeting out all the PPE loans that conservatives had gotten from the government and not paid back. Millions and millions of dollars, but they were upset over these 10 and $20,000 loan forgiveness. So we have to be ready to speak truth to power.

And I think in certain ways, because of the times we live in, sometimes people think it's going to be easy. Like you saw George Floyd, you saw the millions of people in the streets, but that didn't translate into the policy at the federal level that a lot of people thought or assumed. So there's been no George Floyd Justice and Policing Act passed. There's been no For the People Expansion of Voting Rights Act passed. There's been no John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act passed. So part of it is we have to be in it for the long haul, Zachary. We have to be in it for the long haul because the backlash is right here. It's thick. It's among all of us, especially us.

We live right here in Texas, even at the University of Texas. The backlash is here. And this is the point in our history where you can see it's a time for choosing and actually living up to your commitments and principles becomes the hardest thing to do in this time rather than in 2020 or 2008. It's easy in 2008. It's very easy to say you're on the right side of history. You've got 69 million people backing you up. It's harder when you're in that minority, and we have to, again, be principled enough to live up to our commitments at this point.

So, Peniel, I want to close by quoting part of your conclusion, and then I want to ask you to reflect, if you would, for a few minutes at our closing on your mom because I think she's sort of the angel hovering over this book in many ways. I've known you for so long, but I've learned so much about you reading this book. There's a wonderful photo of you and your mom. Also, little tiny Peniel with his mom. I love that photo, by the way. Worth the price of the book just for that. But you write at the end beautifully

I believe that the struggle for black dignity and citizenship can be achieved in our lifetime, but it must continue even if it takes several lifetimes. And then at the very end, you say today in the midst of another period of reconstruction, which you've described so well for us here, we have a grave political and moral choice to make. I choose hope. It seems to me a lot of that hope comes from your mom. And I'd like to close, if you're willing, just reflecting on her influence on your analysis and all that you've shared with us today.

No, thank you, Jeremi. Yes, my mother, Germaine Joseph, 83 years young, still lives in Queens, New York. Really my biggest teacher and the most influential person on me intellectually, politically, morally, the whole works.

Haitian immigrant who came to United States in 1965, worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for 40 years. I was on my first picket lines in elementary school and really somebody who encouraged me and my older brother to read and to write and to think, but also to be active, to be active citizens. If you believed in something, she was fine with you going out and demonstrating that belief.

Certainly, she wanted you to be careful, but to demonstrate that belief. And so she's been hugely, hugely important. The history of Haiti and the Haitian revolution, which I discuss and its connection to Black American history, the connection between Black feminism and these different social movements, but also just American politics and history. She's a big fan and reader of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy alongside of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Really loved reading books on not just the Haitian revolution, but Theodore Roosevelt and the American presidents. I remember getting my first book on the American presidents and kindergarten with her from the local public library in Queens. And that was a book that we used to always check out, check back in, check out, check back in.

And the final president there, initially when we checked it out was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was the president. Reagan had not been elected yet. And so they had Jimmy Carter's 1977 and they had a dash. And I remember that book, right? And that's how I memorized the first 39 presidents of the United States. So she's been my biggest champion, but also my biggest teacher.

And she, again, throughout the book, I look at these different Black activists, a lot of them Black women like Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, but she's been my biggest example. And she does provide me a measure, a large measure of hope. And hope really is a discipline. It's a faith and it's a discipline and it's a belief. And it's a discipline based on our practice. I think sometimes people who don't feel hopeful are really not out there in the world trying to help and do good.

I think the more you're out there in the world trying to help and do good, the more hopeful you feel because you're not just reacting and sitting back on the couch and woe is me and you're actually rolling up your sleeves and getting into the arena. And it's important for us to do that. And I think my mom did that just through example of going to work every day, very, very long commute from Queens Village to East 92nd Street every day, sometimes six days a week, like I write.

So it's really, you know, our parents worked harder than us. And as you know that better than me, Jeremy, and, you know, it's really important for us, all of us who are so privileged to be able to read and write and study, to remember that there were generations who absolutely worked harder than us, suffered more than us, right. And were more resilient than us.

So the only thing we can do is try to match their courage and that resilience because we have given, been given so much privilege in our lives, right. In our lives, we're never going to work as hard as they did. We're never going to have to go to another country, learn another language on the fly like they did, right. I mean, this is extraordinary. So they're the role model. So really we have no right to complain personally. And I don't mean politically, but I mean personally. So the example that she set and the discipline that she exemplified is really something that I, that lives within me to this day. And so the book is really dedicated to her and, and, and these, these Black and really other women, all women who've, who've shaped so many of us men who've been fortunate enough to be at their, at their, the stool by their feet, just taking in their wisdom.

Yeah. Well, as you know, Peniel, in the Jewish faith, we, we have a phrase, Lador Vador, which means from generation to generation. And, and I think that captures your book so well, your book is a mitzvah because it, it captures the importance of one generation teaching another.

And we go through different periods of reconstruction because sometimes we forget and to remember and to learn the history and to keep building on that history and improving ourselves and pushing harder in creative and hopeful ways. I think your book is a chronicle and analysis of that, but also an inspiration from your mom for us to do more of that. I encourage all of our listeners to pick up the book, The Third Reconstruction. It's now available and in every bookshop, go pick it up, go find an independent bookstore to buy it from. Peniel, thank you for joining us today.

Oh, thank you. Thanks to you and Zachary. Thanks for reading it. And I really enjoyed this conversation.

So did we. Zachary, thank you for your really tear-jerking poem and for your insights and for your bringing these issues every day into the discussions you're having with young people, which is so important. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.