Black Gen X Men and the State of the Family

What's good, y'all? Welcome back to the Onyx Report. Black masculine news for the day. Hope everybody's well. Like, share, subscribe, join, donate, hit the hype, support the show so we can continue to bring you this independent blackmail thought.

So, today I want us to have a conversation about black Gen X men and the state of the family, the state of where black the the black family is in regard to where black Gen X men find themselves. And I chose Gen X because I think there's a a sort of crossroads that a certain part of the Gen X uh group kind of experienced. And yes, um I find myself in that group. So there were certain things that I found uh useful to kind of focus on.

Now, we're going to cover two videos today. One of them in their entirety, and one of them uh we're only going to deal with a portion of it. First one is dealing with uh one of the AI channels that is out. This one is uh Frank Educates and retired Frank. Um and uh I found some very useful, very interesting information uh kind of brought and put into a short format that's pretty good. Um of course I play things at one and a half speed. So we're going to get through uh the majority of this one and I will stop for commentary.

The second one is uh a conversation between Dr. Mark Anthony Neil or I'm sorry, no Dr. Mark Lamont Hill, excuse me, and Deleno Squires. Uh there's a conversation they have about the fall of the Black Family that we're going to get into. Now, we're only going to cover a portion of that cuz it's almost 2 hours long. However, uh depending on how you guys what you guys think of the interview, uh you let me know in the comment section if you want me to to keep responding and I can do a couple of chapters over the next few days or if you just want me to stop where it is and leave it wherever we leave off in today's show, we can do that. So, make sure that you give me a response about whether or not you want me to continue to look at the conversation between those two gentlemen uh or not. It's entirely up to you. I can move on to another subject uh or we can continue uh over the next few days. Like I said, I don't know how much of the interview I want to do. I'm just going to play it by ear, but uh let me know nonetheless.

Now, this of course uh is what I was telling you about and so let's deal.

>> You ever watch a man in his late 40s pour a drink at 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, help his daughter with her algebra at 5:00, take a call from his mama's nursing home at 6:00, and then sit in his truck in the driveway at 9:00 just to get 10 minutes of quiet before he walks in his own house? You know that man. You might be that man. Folks call him grown. They call him solid. They call him the one who handles it. Nobody calls him tired because he won't say it. I'm Franklin and today we're talking about a very specific stretch of black men nobody really studies on purpose. The brothers born between 1973 and 1980. The late Gen X cats. Not the older Gen X who remember Reagan getting elected. Not the millennials who remember 9/11 in middle school. The ones in between. The ones who turned five right when crack hit. Turned 10 when the bodies started piling up. and turned 16 when the federal prison population had already multiplied several times over. The ones who learned how to be men in one of the loudest, most violent, most surveiled stretches of modern black American life and then grew up and got handed the bill for all of it. The drinking, the silence, the overfunctioning, the suspicion of every doctor in every form. A lot of it traces back to a window of time most people don't even know was a window.

Let me start with what these men are actually doing right now because the behavior is the receipt. Researchers at Ohio State led by Hui Jang ran a national study on generational health and they found something most people missed in the headlines. Heavy drinking and street drug use have been climbing across generations. And the study flagged late Gen X and early millennial black men as a group where those numbers stand out. Born roughly 1973 to 1980 on the Gen X side. That's a group whose drinking probability climbed and whose street drug use.

Now, let me say I am in this generation and I am experiencing everything he's talked about in terms of when I was born, what things were taking place when I was growing up. He's dead on. However, I want to add to this. Drug use, drinking may be going up for the for for our demographic. But it isn't just that because, for example, I've never done drugs. I've never gotten into drugs. Um I don't I don't drink, but you may find other ways that are unhealthy on in their own right. Whether it be food, uh you know, especially fast food, uh whether it be, you know, sometimes it could be a sex addiction. There there are all kinds of ways for this tension to be kind of dealt with because really what you have people doing is self-medicating. That's really what it comes down to. And there's a lot of self ways to self-medicate. Some are more dangerous than others, but many can be dangerous in a different way over time. So, I just want to add it doesn't have to be limited to just drug use and alcohol. It can manifest in a lot of different ways that cause their own problems.

>> Ticked back up after years of decline. Now, if you stop right there, you get the lazy version of the story. Black men in their late 40s drinking more, doing more, dying earlier. That's the version that ends up in a think piece somebody's nephew shares on LinkedIn. But the full story is why this exact birth window. What happened to a 5-year-old in 1980 that didn't happen to a 15-year-old in 1980? What hit a 10-year-old in 1985 that the kid born in 1965 had already aged out of? Here's where it gets specific. In the late 1980s, the homicide rate for young black males in their teens climbed sharply, more than doubling in a handful of years. The kids born 1973 to 1980 were between 4 and 16 years old during that window. So picture the math. If you were born in 1975, you were nine when the killing started climbing and a teenager when it peaked. You didn't read about the crack era. You lived inside it as a child. Your cousins were the statistics. Your block was the data set. Your elementary school had assemblies about it. And while that was happening to you on the ground, the federal government was busy making it permanent on paper. Georgetown's O'Neal Institute laid out the receipts. The 1986 sentencing law created a 100 to1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine. Five grams of crack got you the same mandatory minimum as 500 grams of powder. About 80% of the people charged with crack offenses in federal court were black. The federal prison population for non-violent drug offenses went from around 50,000 in 1980 to roughly 400,000 by 1997.

>> So now this is basic information and I'm sure many of my listeners already know this whether from study or from life experience. Um, but the reality of it is we do have to maintain our understanding of our particular history and what that relates to, what that has produced in our own lives. Because I think when you we go too far, some people with with the various political ideologies that we battle back and forth with, sometimes we can overlook some realities that can't be sidestepped. This was a reality I grew up in. I was 74. I was born in 1974. So everything he's talking about was I'm dead on. I'm dead on. I remember all of this happening right around the same time. So anyway.

>> So when you were in third grade learning cursive, Congress was writing the law that would empty out parts of your neighborhood by the time you graduated high school. And then look at who got caught in it. A study published through the National Institutes of Health tracked the lifetime risk of going to prison by birth year. For black men born 1965 to 1969, the older Gen X, about 22% could expect to serve time. For black men born around 1981, the millennials right behind our group, the lifetime risk climbed to about 1 in three. The 1973 to 1980 cohort sits right on the slope between those two numbers going up. The reason wasn't a new decision to lock more people up. The laws written when you were a kid started biting when you became a teenager. So now you understand the floor these brothers were standing on when they became men. Crack at the door, homicide at the corner, federal sentencing in the air, and a country that had decided the answer to all of it was cages. You still with me? Good.

Because here's where it gets interesting. This same cohort, the one the data says is drinking more and using more, is also statistically one of the most involved parenting groups in the country. And almost nobody talks about that out loud. The CDC ran a national health statistics report that Newsweek wrote up a few years back. They looked at fathers who lived with their kids and asked who was doing the daily care, bathing, dressing, diapering, helping with the bathroom. Around 70% of black fathers said they did that every single day. About 60%.

>> And keep in mind, this is regardless of whether or not they're married to the mothers. So that's one of the things a lot of people choose to forget about. They rate the state of black fatherhood based on often marriage and cohabitation. But there are fathers that don't marry the mothers and sometimes don't live with them. Sometimes live real near to them. You know, sometimes in a basement, you know what I mean? Sometimes they sleep on the couch. There are all kinds of arrangements, but they still tend to be the most involved fathers. So often when you hear those kind of talking points thrown at black men like you know the divorce rate and and the the deadbeat dad the the data actually shows that because we are the most involved we tend to be off you know constantly involved in our child's lives regardless of living situation or marital status.

>> % of white fathers, about 45% of Hispanic fathers. Black fathers were the highest group in the country on daily hands-on care. The absent black father story is a story the data tells a different one and it gets sharper. A peer-reviewed study by Jay Fagan in the Journal of Family Issues looked specifically at low-income black fathers, the group the stereotype was built around. Resident, non-resident, didn't matter. They were no less involved with their children than fathers of any other racial group.

So, what does that mean for the man we're talking about, the brother born in 1976? It means he's drinking on Tuesday and helping with algebra on Tuesday. Both things. He's the one who showed up. He's the one who decided whatever happened in his house growing up, whether his daddy was there or wasn't, whether his daddy was working three jobs or locked up or just checked out, he was going to be different. And he is. He just doesn't get a parade for it. He gets a Newsweek headline every 5 years saying the myth isn't real and then everybody goes back to acting like it is. And here's the part nobody connects. The overfunctioning at home is part of the same nervous system that produces the drinking. You don't get one without the other in a lot of these men. The vigilance that makes you a present father is the same vigilance that won't let you sit still on a Saturday. The control that keeps you sober at your kids' recital is the same control that needs two drinks to come down off at night. The job that lets you afford the house is the same job that's been telling you for 20 years that you're lucky to have it.

Speaking of the >> And this relates to John Henryism as we talked about a few weeks ago, right? The the just the unending drive to support to finance through labor and sacrifice of one's health for the benefit of others. This is where that comes in. And black men are notorious for that kind of work because it's a social expectation as well as you know we love our families, we love our children, we want to provide for them, right? But the the effect on our own physical system is unprecedented.

>> Job. Let me talk about the money because this is where the story gets really uncomfortable. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis put out a report in 2024 on the income gap for black workers. They looked at W2 earnings, actual paychecks, not surveys. In 2019, the median black man was earning about 62% of what the median white man was earning, 62 cents on the dollar. And the gap between 2009 and 2019 actually got wider at most income levels. Black men were the only male group in the country whose earnings fell relative to white men over that decade. Not stayed flat, fell. Now think about who was working through that decade. The 1973 to 1980 cohort. The brothers who were 29 to 36 years old in 2009 and 39 to 46 in 2019. The prime earning years of their lives. The years when other groups were compounding raises, building equity, getting promotions. This group was watching their relative position get worse. The reason wasn't laziness. The structure of work in America shifted and they were the ones holding the short end. And while that was happening, something else was happening at the same time. And this is where you start to feel the weight on the man's shoulders. A study using the CDC's behavioral risk factor surveillance system found that roughly 31% of Gen X are sandwich generation caregivers. That means they're taking care of a parent and a child at the same time, compared to about 6% of baby boomers, five times the rate. And the same study found Gen X caregivers report higher mental distress than the Boomer caregivers did.

I literally just got off the phone with my mother. And you know, my stepfather has been literally falling. He He was He was in rehab for a couple of months behind a very bad fall he had on February 9th, same day my biological father passed away. He got out, but he's still having a lot of health issues. So, I literally just got off the phone with her about helping with, you know, more, you know, extending more resources to help with that, trying to find a daycare of some sort to come in and and and provide some help. It's it's literally what I've been going through for years now, and my generation of men can definitely understand what that crossroads is about, the sandwich generation. But I also wanted to add another component of the stress here. Uh, and this is a shout out to Antonio Moore. If you check his channel out on YouTube, one of the things he talks a lot about and has been doing so for the last few years is this really kind of gambling epidemic that's going on with black men. And it in and of itself is a problem because we're heading into some insecure economic uh you know moments where we don't know how long they're going to last. But uh you know it it is unprecedented in terms of the amount of money that black men are finding themselves losing. And I think in many ways it is another form of self-medication. It is another form of stress release um you know playing out in a particular way. But nevertheless, it is another thing that impacts us. So you have to factor things like that into what you're hearing now to get a better understanding of what our economic situation is. There are there are a number of us that are doing better uh there are a number of us who have made it into the middle class, you know, more so than past generations. But that doesn't mean that that comes without its own trials and tribulations.

>> More anxiety, more frequent bad mental health days. So, the man born in 1976 is paying for his kids' braces and his mama's blood pressure pills out of the same check. The check that's been losing ground for 10 years and nobody asks him how he's doing because he's the one who handles it. You see how the picture starts to fill in? You see why the drinking is going up?

Now, here's the thing. You'd think a man under that much pressure would go talk to somebody, get a therapist, get on a medication, get into a men's group, something. He doesn't. And the research says he doesn't in numbers.

>> Now, I do want to ask and let me know in the comments, how many of you even have someone to talk to where you can actually be heard, understood, and that person knows what your struggles actually are. Just curious. Let me know in the comment section. A 2023 study by Coleman Karumba and her colleagues looked at black men and mental health help-seeking. Black men seek mental health care at significantly lower rates than white adults. The drivers they found were the things you already know if you grew up around these men. Self-reliance, emotional control, the idea that asking for help is what other people do. And it gets deeper. Research out of the National Survey of American Life found that black men can have lower diagnosed rates of some anxiety and mood disorders than some other groups. But when they do have one, the chronicity is higher.

>> We also have to factor in how few black male therapists there actually are, right? And we've had black men have been having these conversations for decades now about how they've been treated often by gyocentric or uh women uh therapists, right? A kind of lack of understanding, a kind of a an exploitive kind of take. We've seen the the therapists on Twitter in the last 5 years who've gotten up there to ridicule black men, to dehumanize them. And definitely, we've had conversations in the past about uh couples therapy and marital therapy where you'll have a female or a feminist therapist who will side with the with the woman in the equation and double down on the man as if he is inherently a problem. So, black men have reported these kind of issues for years. And you'll notice how they don't come up on these studies about why black men don't seek therapy. But if you don't trust the institution and the the the the whole field is predominantly female, moving to over 90% within the next few years, I don't think it's an accident that black men are withdrawing for from certain types of therapeutic support. It's if if you can't trust it, it's understandable.

>> It lasts longer and the treatment utilization is lower. The difference is duration. They carry it longer and get less help when they finally name it. Put that together. A man who came up under crack era of violence, watch the federal system gear up to swallow his cohort, hit his earning years, and watch the gap widen, picked up his mama's care and his kids' care at the same time, and learned from everything around him that the move is to handle it yourself. That's the man drinking on Tuesday. Call it what it is, a logical conclusion to a 30-year setup.

Now, let me give you the cultural piece because this one doesn't get talked about and it matters. There's a scholar named Bakari Katuana and another one named Pero Dagovi who write about what they call the hip-hop generation and they split it. The older cut, black folks born roughly 1965 to the mid 1970s came up inside what people sometimes call nation conscious rap public enemy KRS-1, conscious rap that was teaching black history while it was rhyming. The younger cut, born late 1970s into the early 1980s came of age after that wave broke. They came up in the gangster rap era, Death Row, No Limit, the shiny suit years. JTore Daily summarized this work and described a documented gap in historical consciousness between the older and younger ends of that generation. I'm not here to argue one era of music was better than another. That's a different video. The point is this. The man born in 1968 got his history lessons from Chuck D when he was 15. The man born in 1978 got his worldview from a different set of records when he was 15. Same neighborhood, same parents, sometimes different curriculum on the radio, and it shows up later in life in how the two men interpret what happened to them. The older brother is more likely to frame his life as a political condition. The younger one is more likely to frame it as a personal hustle that didn't pay off. Same conditions, two different mirrors. That matters because the way you tell the story of your own life determines what you do with the pain. If your pain is a political condition, you might organize, you might write, you might call somebody. If your pain is just your personal hustle not paying off, you sit with it alone and you pour a drink.

So now stack it all together one more time because I want you to see the man whole. He's between 44 and 51 years old right now. He was a small child during the worst of the crack violence. He was a teenager when the federal prison machine got built around his cohort. He came into the workforce just in time for the gap to widen against him. He's raising his kids more hands-on than the stereotype says. He's taking care of his mama. He's drinking more than the generations before him. He avoids therapy. And the cultural language he was handed at 15 taught him to read his pain as a personal story rather than a structural one. Call him what he is. A man carrying the bill for choices made by people who never met him with tools that were handed to him by accident in a culture that told him the right answer was to handle it.

And here is what I want you to do with this, because I'm not in the business of just laying out the autopsy. If you're that man, the first move isn't a self-help book. The first move is just naming the window you came up in, not as an excuse, as context. The drinking is a coping tool that worked for a long time and is now starting to charge interest. The avoidance of doctors is a learned response to institutions that have a documented history of treating your cohort like a problem to be managed. The overfunctioning at home is one of the most quietly heroic stories in American family life that does not get a single magazine cover. Now, none of that means you keep doing it the same way for the next 20 years. The sandwich generation data is clear. The men carrying both ends are not winning the carrying. They're getting sicker doing it. So, the work, if you're going to do any work, is the work of letting one or two things go. Telling one person the truth about what your week actually looks like. Going to one appointment you've been putting off. Don't do it because somebody on the internet told you to. Do it because the math on your body and the math on your time both ran out about 2 years ago, and you know it.

If you love a man like that, the move is even simpler. Stop asking him if he's all right. He's going to say he's good. He has been saying he's good since 1987. Ask him something specific. Ask him when's the last time he took a day for himself. Ask him who calls him to check on him. Ask him what he's been drinking lately and how often. Not as an attack, as a witness. Because part of what these men never got in any of the windows we just walked through was the experience of somebody seeing the full load and saying it out loud back to them. Just naming it. Just saying, "I see what you're carrying." That's the whole thing. The drinking, the silence, the parenting, the working, the carrying, the not.

>> And this is why I asked you if you have somebody you can actually have that conversation with. Not many of us do, right? I only have, you know, I have a couple of friends that I speak to that are hours away. Very rarely do I get to see my friends in person. It is what it is. But just like the video said, and just like many of us and how we roll, it's about getting it done. I don't, you know, I don't fixate about that. I don't worry about that. It is what it is, right?

>> Asking none of it is random. None of it is a character flaw. It's a generation of men who got handed a specific window of American life and learned to survive it the only way they were taught. And most of them are still here, which given what they walked through is its own kind of miracle. Appreciate you sitting with me on this one. There's another video right there on the screen.

All right. So, uh, check out the channel. It's interesting, especially it's uh some of its videos on black men. Um some of the generational accounts are pretty useful. Uh but in this context, I wanted to kind of frame this in terms of how black men experience life and then engage in the family. In order to do that, we're going to talk about this video here. So, this again is a conversation between Mark Lamont Hill and uh Deleno Squires. Uh I I probably mispronounced that. Um I'm not, you know, as familiar with Delano. I've I've ran across him a couple of times online uh in terms of his content and I've heard about his most recent book, The Vanishing Black Family. I've only heard excerpts uh from him uh about what it's fully about. I haven't read the book yet. Um but this conversation seemed like it was kind of interesting and I, you know, I got sent it a couple of different times. So, um let's delve into it. And like I said, I don't know how much of this we're going to cover today, but uh you all let me know if you want me to continue or move on to another subject. Uh, but I wanted to if we're going to talk about the the black family, whether it's vanishing or not, you know, we're gonna see what that's about and what we what we believe as far as that's concerned. I think the state of where black men find themselves is an important part for us to take into consideration before we dive into this conversation. Right here we go.

>> The most vocal leaders in our community are far more invested in retaking the White House than rebuilding the black family. Um and that that troubles me and and particularly as it relates to issues of uh equity, racial equity, what people like to talk about. Um, the biggest to me area of racial inequity is as it relates to family structure. So that was one of the reasons that I wanted to write the book now and I think now is the right time.

>> So So here here's where it gets interesting for me and again I read the book and and I appreciated you giving a sense of history. I think one of the things that people don't do enough of especially when they're making their case politically is they don't invoke history. They don't uh talk enough about how we got to where we are or if they do they they offer very selective reading of history and I don't agree with your your reading of history at all times in this book but at least I think you make a good faith effort to to take on a lot of these issues. You begin with slavery.

>> Mhm.

>> Many people on the right don't uh many people like to ignore uh the history relationship between uh America's birth as a slaveholding state and that has had in our lives and our families our our economic outcomes everything. So so talk a little bit about that. What is the relationship between slavery and this black family that you've seem to see as in crisis you say beyond right you say was in crisis you know talking dec right so how do we get there and what's the relationship of slavery to that.

>> So so let me let me um sort of frame my comments this way because because you're right I want to give a context for the argument that I'm actually making so so today in Washington DC nation's capital right chocolate city 77% of black children are born to unmarried parents compared to 7% of white children that's a 70 percentage point gap now I worked at DC government for 15 years we had we have an office of racial equity. And when the equity, you know, plan came out, it had indicators for all types of stuff. None of them had to do with family structure. So, at a certain point, it strikes me as as strange that the people who care most about racial equity will they they demand equal outcomes in the schoolhouse, the courthouse, and the jail house, but they ignore the most important building, which is a home. And again, I just gave you DC, but nationally, it's about 7 out of 10 black children are born with unmarried parents. About 45% of black children live with a single mom.

>> But understand, remember, we talked about earlier, that does not mean that black fathers are not involved. We are the most involved fathers across race. We just may not be married or living in the same home. And I do think that is important. Don't get me wrong. I do. I think if if nothing else, it doesn't teach kids what how you know how long-term relationships are sustained. And I think it's critically important, right? Cuz you learn things even if it it's never spoken out loud. You learn through observation. When you're in a a functional family, how does a functional family, how do the mother and father in a functional family, and obviously we're talking about a nuclear family, right? How do they argue and and resolve conflict, right? How do they express affection? You know, how do they how do they deal with the in and out of day-to-day life when things aren't exciting? When people aren't jet setting to trips all over the world like we see in social media? How do people negotiate everyday life when it's just not that exciting? It's just a Tuesday, you know, how do how do especially fathers when they come home, are they sitting in the car for a half hour before they come in the house because they they really just need to gear up for what they're going to deal with or do they come in happy, not able to wait to see their families? And that's not a blame toward men. It's really speaking to stress, right? But just the day-to-day observation of how a functional family relates. If you've never seen that, you have to study it and try to create it. And a lot of that depends on who you choose to get with in order to do that. Whether it's a girlfriend, long-term relationship, or wife. The the question I'm asking is, you know, if you've never seen a functional family, how does who you pick and how you get along every day play into the stability of the family? Right? All of that is critical. Whether you're married or not, those are things that we, you know, we we have to figure out. Even if you're going to travel, even if you're going to be a passport bro, even if you're going to find a wife or a mother of your child in another country, we still have to answer these questions for ourselves, right? We may be sidestepping the dysfunction in the families we grew up in, but we have to make sure we're not bringing it to new environments. We have to make sure we can actually adapt to a functional environment. Because most of the brothers I know who are traveling are traveling to cultures or to places where they have cultures that appreciate masculinity, right? That appreciate men and the sacrifices men make. But we also have to make sure we don't carry the dysfunction with us, right? We got to make sure we know how to navigate that. That can be difficult to do when you've never actually witnessed a functional relationship. So anyway.

>> Um so to be a black child born to and raised by your married parents through your 18th birthday is now the exception and not the norm. Um, so it was important for me, you know, to start with with slavery because I mean it was it's a formative and and sort of foundational event in the life of the black family. Um, what I argue in the first chapter is that the institution of slavery and institution of marriage are two completely incompatible institutions. And to your point, sometimes some black conservatives and I think they mean well will actually jump back to slavery and make somewhat simplistic arguments at times. Well, the black family was more intact during slavery. You know, therefore, you know, that has nothing to do with where we are today. Now, I think there's a nuance in that argument, right? Because as I said, the two institutions are incompatible. When when you get married, there's certain duties and obligations that come, certain rights and privileges that come with marriage. So, for instance, the the assumption that you would live with your spouse or cohabitation. Um the assumption of sexual exclusivity and monogamy. The assumption particularly from the husband to the wife of provision and protection. But if your own if two of you are owned by two different people, even by the same person, and that person says, "I'm going to sell you off to the plantation 600 miles away, or I'm going to insert myself um into your relationship sexually and and and violate either wife or husband for that matter, right?

>> Then there's certain things that cannot happen." So I argue that slavery distorted and deformed the black family but didn't destroy it. And and part of you know recounting that history is to say one enslaved men and women actually did marry under that institution. Many of them through their own words were deeply desirous of of marriage and relationships. And then one of the things that you see when emancipation came is that people were traveling hundreds of miles to track down loved ones and family members taking out ads. There's a a project called you know last scene project I write about in the book that digitized ads from newspapers across the country where men and women were looking for spouses and sometimes traveling hundreds of miles to find them. So, so you saw a deep deep desire to be reconnected to one's kin and and one's spouse. So, ultimately it was important for me to tell an honest history of that um because I think the facts matter but it was also important because the narrative matters and I think people on on the sort of ideological left.

>> Will draw a straight line from slavery through black codes, Jim Crow laws, um mass incarceration, redlining, war on drugs and say these are the reasons the black family is, you know, in the state that it's in today. All of those I would characterize as external threats.

>> Um.

>> So you threats you're saying they're not the only threat. They're just they're the to use your language external threat meaning that um they play a role but there's also this internal thing of family crisis.

>> Correct. But I I would say slightly different. I would say um and I characterize it this way in the book. The the natural response for human beings and particularly for men to an external threat is generally to fight. Right? The least efficient way to to get something out of a man's hand is to try to rustle it away from him. Right? If you or I heard some go bumping night in our home and our wives, you know, look something going on downstairs. We're going to defend ourselves with whatever means we have available. Right? Because our instinct is to fight external threats. Um, but when the threats are internal or when someone comes posing as a as a friend or an ally, giving you something that they say is a gift and a benefit to you, then you you have a very a very different way of interpreting that you you let your guard down, your defenses come down. And that's why I get into the next two chapters on welfare and feminism. Um, but but go back to the to the narrative piece. I just put a pin on that. The narrative is important because if someone says it was their fault, white supremacy, systemic racism, white people, however they want to characterize it, then more often than not, the response to that is, well, then it's it's their responsibility to fix it. And I take a completely different perspective. Um, which is to say something could be someone else's fault, but it's my problem now. And the the the through line of this book is that the revival of marriage and reconstruction of the black black family is something that black people and black leaders specifically have to prioritize.

Well, as far as black men are concerned, I think you have an increasing percentage of men who are starting to question whether or not that can happen um in terms of the repair. And that has a lot to do with relationships between black men and women and the influence of the state, the influence of policy. Now, we have a two-pronged response to that. We have the black male political agenda where we outline the kinds of policies and I'm not talking about the agenda itself. What I'm saying is there's a kind of ethos involved with us, you know, marking out the kinds of policies that would make it such that we could actually function in families and community and society in a way that's far more constructive. However, this is where the second prong comes in. If we cannot move policy that way, if we can't generate enough uh mobilization to make that happen, if people are disinterested and unwilling, particularly the institutions involved, right? The other prong is that you have black men who are willing to do the kinds of things we've talked about for for some years now. I told you uh you know a little while ago there's a the a chart that I kind of developed that's you know pretty pretty basic as far as you know black men you know here in the in the United States that you know support my channel that you know kind of believe what we believe it's pretty basic along those lines and it's simply this right you got brothers that are leaving the country to find functional situations not just relationships but also an environment that isn't rooted in um you know dehumanizing them you have monkhood All right, whether they're traveling abroad or staying here, you got brothers that are socially withdrawing from society. You got short-term non-marital relationships. You got long-term non-marital relationships. And then, of course, you have the use of the sexual marketplace value framework as a guiding principle for how men negotiate relationships. These are the methods that are used when politics and policy is not able to address their concerns. So this idea of just, you know, taking it on the chin and we're going to fix the family ourselves without government. Uh there there are some caveats to that, right? And then of course the idea that you hear more on the left that government needs to fix everything. That that doesn't work for us either because there's been, you know, we haven't seen a period where for a sustained indefinite period of time, right, policy has worked to our advantage. So, we're kind of caught between, you know, a rock and a hard place. Waiting for government is not going to happen, right? But at the same time, you know, just fixing the family just on some good old, you know, what do you call it? Uh, good old willpower. That alone doesn't work. Because if you're dealing with an uncooperative, unsupportive um you know uh wife, spouse, whatever you want to call her, if she's operating from a a black feminist or feminist agenda, she's framed herself as an independent figure that doesn't need you. She's trying to get custody, uh child support, alimony in an exploitive fashion, you know, and we could talk about a wide variety of things that black men have experienced over the years. That's difficult. And and the and the whole notion of we'll just find a good one. Well, we've already seen in the spaces we're in and the conversations we're having, how much that doesn't work, you know, and one of the things people find out is how people act, but it may take a few years before you really find out what she's about. And of course, that doesn't deal with what kind of stresses, stressors, and other issues may pop up that, you know, generate a response you can't anticipate. So, my point here is that black men in the spaces that I align myself with have a two-pronged approach. We do outline the policies that we advocate for. We will work with politicians who are interested in catering to our views and we may push more fervently along those political lines to make the reality we want to see occur. However, to the extent that that is not in place at the moment, there are alternative strategies and those alternative strategies may be distasteful to the mainstream. But these are survival patterns that black men have developed on their own over the last 6 to 8 years. And some would take it back 10 to 15 depending on what we're talking about. But at the very least, this five-stage breakdown right here explains to you the not this this is what happens, this is what black men have figured out regardless of politics. So to the extent that society and or black women want black men back, these are the things that are being negotiated. And the reasons these five things are are occurring is because they haven't been able to trust the system. They haven't been able to trust the family court and they haven't been able to trust how many women have been socialized into exploiting men as a normal u uh anticipated strategy, right? Meaning if they were raised in an environment where all they saw was women who were not only able to take advantage of men but who were willing to use the family court to for revenge, for frustration, for men failing their expectations. As long as you have people socialized in that kind of system, then how many black men have to walk into that wood chipper, you know, and find out the hard way what exactly what kind of marriage they were exactly in when she gets frustrated. And as long as that power remains within her grasp and you have relative relatively none, the whole notion of putting the family back together is going to be in question. And so when you remove government, you know, I'm not saying we can rely on government, but at the same time removing it from the equation and just using spit and polish to fix the family, that in and of itself doesn't work either. But let's go back. I I would never discharge that um responsibility onto white liberals or white conservatives for that matter. Um and I think that we have the moral, social, cultural, spiritual capital um to do that.

So So So that's why getting the narrative straight, right? Like what was the actual impact? I I would say if I was to to characterize it, I would say it's we can see a legacy of determination and survival when it comes to slavery and the black family. And I think that should be used as an inspiration to say if if our forebears could build at the worst of moments, we can certainly rebuild um when we have more political power, economic power, uh and you know, representation than ever before.

>> So I want to make sure I understand this correctly. I think I do, but I want to clarify your audience as well. So for you, there is this thing called a black family. It exists. It's healthy. It's it's thriving. it's or at least it's normal and human. Um, there's an institution of slavery that disrupts that in every way imaginable.

>> Um and even one of the things I thought was interesting was you talking about sort of how >> even the threat or rather even yeah the threat of losing a family would also stop you from running away there's an idea here that >> if we escape we could be separated forever and there's there's a kind of emotional scarring or torment that can come from that. It was really important point because people why you just leave why did I leave together? It's like nothing was that simple. I hate any slavery conversation that that's start >> if I was on plantation I would have done you would have done enough exactly so I always start there but then I think where you and I diverge or at least where I started to have more we do diverge but where my point where I had questions >> was in those next two chapters when you start to talk about the assault on the family right you don't ignore again which I appreciate the fact that the institution of slavery and even the kind of post uh slaver slavery uh economic and social order created extraordinary pressures on the black family certainly created black poverty it certainly intensified black poverty probably better way of putting Um, but your basic argument is that the solution.

was worse than the cure. I'm sorry. That the, that the, uh, I totally screwed up. That the cure. Yes. Yeah, I got you. I got you.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, got you. A smart guy. I want to make sure I say it right. So, um, that, you know, that the, that the government solution to poverty

was a set of programs that depended upon the separation of the black family or the dismantling of the black family. There was almost like a Foucauldian bargain that was made in order to create this black thing.

You're, you're specific. You're specific.

>> It's interesting he uses that term because I've used it exactly when describing the impact of not only the welfare system but the family court, right? A Foucauldian bargain, right? Um, where women were offered, uh, something that was ultimately poisonous and detrimental to themselves in the long run for short-term gain at the expense of the family and, of course, the men in question. I agree with that. Specifically talking about the Great Society programs in part, not only, but, you know, part of what you're talking about is, is, or, or actually, no, you're talking about the anti-poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson.

>> You're saying that, hey, we're going to give you a bunch of welfare, we're going to give you a bunch of state support, but you got to stay unmarried, you got to stay single.

Daddy can't be there, and if he is, he can't acknowledge his presence there. And so, disincentivizes people to not, um, be married, not have these family structures that we need so badly, uh, as a price to end poverty. Is that a fair characterization?

>> Yeah, that's, that's, that's a fair characterization. Um, I think, yeah, as I move from chapter one to chapter two, again, I move from sort of the external threats to, um, policies that were framed as beneficial to African-American families. And, and I think it's important to say that. I want to make one thing clear. I'm not saying, I'm not saying in the book that the, the liberals that crafted welfare policy were doing it in order to destroy the black family because sometimes, I know some people do say that. I'm not making that argument because I try to be very careful about assigning motive to people without sort of a preponderance of evidence, right?

That's just my. We come back to that too, because there was a moment where I thought you should have assigned some motive and it seemed very interesting that you didn't. But.

>> Yeah, so, but what, what on a foundational level, and this is where I think, um, matters of worldview actually, ma-, actually come into play, right? What I say in the book is that any change to family formation dynamics involves at least, uh, a change to one of three foundational elements. There's the institution of marriage, that's the foundation. There's the role of the man. There's the role of the woman. We dealt with marriage with slavery. So, I, you know, I said, um, slavery deformed and distorted, you know, black marriage patterns, but it didn't destroy the black family. In chapter two, I said that welfare displaced men, um, particularly black men from their rightful role and duty as providers in their household. Now, this has happened through a series of sort of complex cultural, social, economic factors, historical factors, but ultimately, that's, that's the charge that I make.

Um, part of it is the incentives that were in programs. So, most states, married couples could not receive welfare. And in fact, and I know you've heard this more than many times, man rule, right? So, if, if a man, a substitute father, the government will call a substitute father, some mother's boyfriend who may come over several times a week, if he was in the house, they couldn't, they couldn't receive government aid.

Um, so it created an incentive for no man to be in the house in order for a woman to receive aid for herself. And I would extend that to say even long after, uh, aid may not be in the equation, women have grown comfortable with being independent to the point where many actually appreciate that relationship model. I've heard women say it in my own family, right? They, they appreciated the independence. They appreciated that they didn't have to rely on this man to make decisions about the kids. And they, and they were talking about the father of their children, right? The idea being that they can make decisions. They could, they could have their own household and and their own kids. And the man just had to stay within arm's length. Close enough for for her to call him in when needed, right? Close enough to exact resources from him. Close enough to negotiate decisions that she felt like including him on. But because of the state and because, or really in this case, the family court, she had complete power over determining who was even in the family, to what extent the father is in the family. Right? So even though he's talking about this really being framed during this era where welfare is the institution that this is mitigated through, I would, I would also add in, you cannot sidestep the importance of the family court in this discussion. And we can also add in the pill and things of that nature. I mean, really, you're talking about a perfect storm between the 1960s and '70s that reframed the entirety of the black family and how it's structured. And much of that was filtered through institutions and policy. This is why I'm not of the mind that you have to, you, you, you got to ignore government. We just need to stand up and fix it ourselves. No, government was instrumental in breaking it down. And it is needed to fix it on an institutional level. However, I also understand that they have no incentive to do so. And they've never demonstrated any great love for black men or black folk for that matter, which is why black men have adapted and created their own negotiating, uh, practices outside of waiting for government to fix the problem. But can it be fixed without policy? I doubt it. Mainly because policy created a lot of this. Mainly because policy enabled a lot of this. And you have generations, just among the women alone, generations of beliefs that have been subsidized through policy for generations. Again, where they've learned to make decisions and see the world outside of their relationships with black men. This is one of the reasons black men are going elsewhere to find coupling, to find family formation, because they actually want women who want to engage with them when it comes to building family, not treat them as, you know, uh, side options that are only useful at her whim, right? Because really, what it is, is a power play. It's really a power play. And as long as the state has backed black women to the extent that they have over the years, they have the power in line with the state and with various institutions and policies to function in regards to that black men don't. That's, that's really the bottom line of it. So when you try to say you don't need government, the problem is you have to contend with government behind her to negotiate your family structure. And to the extent that you find a woman that agrees with you, that's great. Until the day she doesn't, until the day she's changed her mind. And I have seen that far too often. I've seen agreeable women who supported the program that this man was on, the idea of family and how he saw things, and whether she was seduced by another man, by her friends and the sisterhood, uh, you know, by her desire for more resources, her boredom, whatever it may be. The moment she changed her mind, she was able to bring in influences that he could not control or compete with. And it left her in almost a completely decision-making capacity that he had, you know, couldn't rival with. You cannot dismiss that to make these conservative arguments. But at the same time, I agree you can't depend wholly on government. And this is why I support where black men have created their own solutions. And if you want them to give up these solutions and re-engage the institutions that most societies, every society is dependent upon, you know, when it comes to coupling, family formation, and the family itself, you're going to have to give black men what they need in order to function, you know, in a family setting. If you're unwilling to, they're going to continue to adapt. And I support black men's need to do so.

Let's continue.

>> And for our children, that's a really bad policy incentive, right? And one of the things that I write about is, you know, I quote Johnnie Tillmon, who was a welfare rights activist, because at a certain point in the 1960s, poverty became both feminized and racialized. I'm not using those as pejoratives. I'm saying, um, that that women were bearing the brunt of it because they're the ones taking care of children. And black folk were bearing even more the brunt of it because in 1959, the black poverty rate was about 55%. Right?

>> So, but Johnnie Tillmon said that welfare is like a super sexist marriage. You trade the man, you trade your man for the man, but you can't divorce him if he treats you bad. I think I thought that was a perfect encapsulation of what those policies ended up doing. And what you see from the '60s through 1996 is an explosion of welfare spending. I'm talking about going from in, you know, several millions to to the hundreds of bill to, um, like, you know, 80 some billion by the time we get to, 60 some billion by the time we get to 1985.

Um, and a disproportionate number of those people were, were black families. So, yes, that's, that's my charge that the government, and this is the irony, going back to Johnnie Tillmon. You trade your man for the man for the man. And the government had no problem playing a substitute father. That's the government in, in the role of elected officials, right? Who promise to aid and then can run and say, if you vote for me, I'll, I'll give you, you know, more, more social welfare programs. And the unelected bureaucrats that run the poverty economy, the statisticians, the case managers, the administrators, um, everybody got something out of that iron triangle. And the person who was, ended, ended up being left out of that relationship was the black man in the form of husband and father. So the government had no problem playing the role of substitute father. And, and I, and I talk about that in chapter two and talk about the effect that that had moving forward through the decades.

>> And we have to understand how intentional that was. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't an accident, right? Coming off the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. And I, and I don't care if you like the Civil Rights Movement, if you love it or if you hated it. It's not about that. It's about the role it played from the vantage point of white folk, right? The Civil Rights Movement was a threat. If nothing else, it not only, you know, spurred independence movements around the world, it embarrassed white elites, right? Because during the Cold War, you had people looking to, you know, the Soviet Union. They were looking at America. And the question was, which culture, you know, was going to lead the world, whose influence should we follow? And that also included not just culture, but the economic systems in question, right? Well, that said, now you have this population between 10 and 13% of the population, this small, relatively poor population that now, thanks to media, can be seen all around the world being attacked by police with dogs, and little old ladies being bitten, and men being, you know, bloodied on the street, children being hurt. This caused a national, an international level of embarrassment for the West, right? And then you started to see more and more black leaders speaking out, not only espousing the the historical narrative that led us there in the United States where slavery was legal, but also really demonstrating, even at the loss of their lives, the extent to which the state was willing to eliminate them to keep them quiet. This had a profound impact on a global scale. A population that small, that poor, that politically powerless cannot have access to that. And so what did they do? Systematically took us down, right? And that's where you end up. That's why we end up in the situation we're in where you have this kind of blowback. And welfare was one way of attacking black America, black families, and black men by dismantling the family. And this is critical. We cannot forget this. We can't downplay it. It is critically important that we remember how this functions because at the end of the day, it is the motivation for why these policies were supported. None of this was accidental. None of this was a product of, you know, a poor culture, weak. No, this was a systemic and political attack, and it was not an accident by any measure. Right.

Here we go. So, couple things I want to kind of unpack for clarity, but also to push back a little bit. You're not disputing that the systemic structures or the systemic forces created the extraordinary levels of poverty that black people, and black women in particular, were facing. You, you stipulate that.

>> Yeah. I mean, when you say systemic, I want to make sure I'm following your argument. So, when you raise that, what types of things would you be, would you be talking about?

>> So, when we get to the moment where Lyndon Johnson is responding with these anti-poverty programs,

>> Um, this is, I mean, it's crazy to think about, but this is basically only 100 years after legal enslavement.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Um, black folk still denied access to the full labor market. Um, only denied to living wages. Uh, we're, uh, excluded from various forms of social participation. Um, there, you know, when you look at the rural South in particular, I'm just thinking about, oh, we can look at the North examples. I mean, the type of abject poverty that black folk were dealing with, uh, required some kind of intervention, some kind of response. They, they weren't going to behave or perform their way out of these conditions. That's what I'm saying. These are structural issues. They didn't, they didn't behave their way into them, and they're not going to behave their way out of them. Um, there are forces that, that, that put them there.

>> Um,

>> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair argument. I would say this, right? So, the median occupation for a black woman in the South, call it circa 1940, was a domestic. Um, and even at that time, where let's say a woman was a domestic and a man was a sharecropper, they were still more likely to be married and, and have their children within the bounds of marriage than some college-educated, you know, black men and women today. So, so what I'm saying, I'm not denying that there was systemic and structural factors that affected the types of jobs that people could get in that time period. What I'm saying is even then, when, and their wages, right? Um, I'm saying that even then, they were still more likely to be married. And the irony is, and I talked at length about, you know, Du Bois, he was seeing the dissolution of the black family more so in the northern cities, less than, than the South, right? He, so he was saying urbanization as as a bigger problem than, you know, people still relying on the agricultural economy. So, so I'm not, again, I'm not making an argument that economic factors do not matter. I actually will state upfront, and I'm a man. I have two daughters and I have two sons, and when my daughters get to that age, I would tell them a guy should not even think about dating anybody if he doesn't have at least three things settled. A legitimate source, uh, of income, right? So, stable, legal income. Someplace to lay his head at night, so he's got a roof over his head that he can call his own. Way to get to get to it.

>> Okay. So whether taking SEPTA, MTA, or a model, whatever, or he got his own car, he needs a stable source of transportation, right? That's basic stuff. But, but what I'm saying is sometimes the, the economic analysis overpowers sort of the historical narrative to the point where say, oh, I was just, you know, because, uh, you know, the jobs moved away, deindustrialization, and again, I'm not saying it didn't have some impact, but at a certain point, we have to ask ourselves, Mark, and sometimes social scientists will do this today, they look in low-income neighborhoods and say, there aren't enough marriageable men. Well, I could get with that argument if the issue was just a general decline in marriage rates. But, but what you see is that men and women are still having babies together, they're just not having them within the bounds of marriage.

>> So, so I'm going to, I'm not even at the marriage party because I hear, I just want to sort of establish first.

>> Because you're, because you're bringing marriage as another factor. So I'm, I just wanted to at least make sure we're on the same page about the forces that create this poverty in 1965, because, because in 1965 or 1945, there's abject poverty, and the marriage rates have hit the percentage drop that would come afterwards. I'm saying we didn't get into the boat because of marriage. What, even if I accepted that the lack of marriage is making things worse, I don't accept that. But let's say I did. I'm saying before, before we even get from bad to worse, we're still at bad. And I'm saying we got to bad because of these social forces, because of poverty, or, or forces that create poverty, the, the, the, the sort of after-effects of slavery. We're talking about the effects of, of, of racial capitalism, basically, uh, which, which creates a kind of racialized class in this United States case, the Negro, who whose labor is exploited and who basically is

>> is placed at the underside of the American economy. I'm saying that's what gets us there. So when the intervention comes,

>> Mhm.

>> Because this is where I think you and I, I don't think we, and I see you not completely agree with what I just said. But, but, but at the very least,

>> We're in the same argument.

>> We're in the same neighborhood with.

>> Yeah. That's, that's fair. That's fair. That's fair. Right.

>> Where we disagree is you're saying, so then they come in with a cure.

>> Mhm.

>> What should the cure have been?

>> That's, that's a good question. I mean, some, you know, historians or culture analysts will say, uh, black Americans, and again, you're talking about people in different regions, different educational backgrounds, we're, we're beginning to make the climb up, right? It, it wasn't perfect. It wasn't economic parity, right? We, we can, we can all acknowledge that there were certain things, you know, uh, systemically and legally where black folks were barred from purchasing homes in certain places and, you know, getting access, access to certain types of of of services and goods. So, we can, we can stipulate that. But, but I would also argue, you know, black folks owned businesses back then. Um, you know, even if, and the irony, we didn't even talk about this part, but the families were much bigger back then, right? So, you're talking about, you know, my, my in-laws are from Baton Rouge. My mother-in-law was born in Mississippi. My father-in-law was born in Louisiana. My mother-in-law is the second oldest of 12 kids. Guarantee that she would.

>> Yeah, that was that was a constant, especially if you were coming out of an agricultural environment, and you'll find that the world round. The more you know, the more families dependent on agricultural labor, the larger the families tended to be. It was a very practical way of dealing with an extreme amount of labor that needed to be done. So that's definitely an understandable dynamic. I think the answer to Mark Lamont Hill's question though is you could actually extend resources because, mind you, this is taking place during the Great Migration, right? This is taking place during a time period where black folk are migrating from the South up, you know, up to the North generically speaking, whether it was the literal North, the East Coast, the West Coast, they were coming out of the South in unprecedented numbers, primarily for good access to employment, employment that wasn't rooted in exploitive practices like sharecropping, you know. This is one of the main motivations. So you had a lot of poor people migrating up North, as well as some who were business owners. So if you're going to talk about welfare, it could have very much been focused on the fact that people were impoverished and not the gendered aspect of it. See, a lot of those policies were were really rooted around World War II, and they were geared around widows, right? White widows at that, right? The absence of men were part and parcel to that dynamic when, you know, just kind of glibly applied to black America. This meant that the, you know, the exclusion of men had a far different impact because it was a different situation and a different group of people, right? So the, the exclusion of men for s-, for those who were migrating and trying to start a new life in a new environment was detrimental, and the long-term familial effects are still being felt to this moment. So, I think the answer would have been yes. They needed support. They needed some kind of of access to, you know, some type of labor that was far better than what they were getting in the South, but it didn't need to exclude black men, right? Anyway, um, here we go. Wouldn't live in no mini mansion, right? She's 86. I hope she don't mind saying that age, but so, so you're talking about people, yes, poverty rates were higher, homes were smaller, uh, resources were less, um, you know, uh, less available. Access.

>> True. But, but they can write recursive. They can write do arithmetic. And, and now we, we have issues where school districts are spending $30, $35,000 a student, and the, the numbers are not looking all that great. But, but fair, we can, I'll stipulate that society in no way, shape, or form was equal as it related to to race, um, economic opportunity outcomes. I'll stipulate that point. But what I'll still say is that the families were, were still far more intact. And I think one of the things that, um, and I talked about this in the book, like even Lyndon Johnson said, you know, he talked about the importance of family. And when Moynihan, you know, finished his report, you know, on the Negro family, he said all the, I'm paraphrasing, but all the the resources of the federal government should be, you know, directed towards improving life in the black family. I just don't think that welfare policy as they created it actually accomplished that. And to your point, I do think, uh, it ended up making things worse. And, and welfare dependency, which Handlin in '65, the increases in that he saw as, um, a consequence of family breakdown. I argue in the book that it ended up becoming a cause of family breakdown between, you know, 1965 and to where we are today. So.

>> Okay. Now, I'm going to stop here for now, and you guys let me know if you want me to continue, uh, with this or just move on to another subject. But before we go, I do want to replay Dr. Bobby E. Wright as he breaks down what took place in the 1970s after the rise of black folk in the 1960s and what ends up being the case by the time you get to the 1980s because I want us to be clear about the impact that this had. I mean, the, the, the movements that took place and the response that I don't believe is an accident by any measure, the response toward black America and why these practices were put in place to dismantle the family and to underdevelop black men at, at in most ways possible. Check this out.

>> We all know they care. See what happened in the '60s. Why we lost the battle in the '60s? Why you never hear nobody talk about the '70s? How many of you people here talk about the '70s? Nobody. Came about the boy in the '60s, and here we are in the '80s. You know, ain't no nobody talk because in the '70s, those whites regrouped and wiped us out.

>> You see here's what happened. White women saw their men in trouble. And like all female animals, anytime the male gets in trouble, the female attacks.

>> That is a law of nature. It is.

>> A law of nature. If you don't believe it, we can prove it in a zoo anytime you want to. Now, what happened? White women came out and captured our women and convinced us that white women were not as racist as white men, and convinced us, or convinced our women, that they would place them above their husbands, their brothers, their lovers, their children, their sons. And we then the white gays came out and convinced our gays it was a gay struggle and stole our gay, you know. Okay. White students came out and grabbed our black students and said it was a student struggle and wiped out our black students. And all of a sudden, we be wondering where's the fight? You know what I mean? Is it's not about. So now they're coming up with books such as book is the declining significance of race, brother named Wilson wrote that book, who is the chairperson of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago. That very revealing because out of that same department came who came, who, black.

>> E. Franklin Frazier. In 1939, that is the Chicago school where you show. So what, what Wilson is saying, this brother wrote this, the decline in significance of the race, and race is declining in significance, and now class becomes important. Of course, Wilson is the only black in the department of sociology at the University of Chicago. That's one reality. The other reality, he has a white wife.

>> Now, race declines every night for him. You know, I mean, that's what it's all about.

>> Okay. So, one thing I want to point out as we close out for today, that each of those movements that appropriated various demographics of of the black community at a critical juncture, right? At a critical juncture, at the, at the time period we would call the end of the Civil Rights Movement, even though that movement wasn't supposed to end, we can talk about how it was hijacked by the CIA. We could talk about, you know, the various ways that people were brought in to disrupt it. We clearly saw during the Black Power era the ways COINTELPRO played a role in dismantling black movements along those lines as well. But one of the ways we can talk about that each demographic that was appropriated ideologically, you know, as he was pointing out, whether it was the women, whether it was the LGBT, whether it was the intellectual class, whether it was the students, each particular group were seduced by the white version of that group that had resources that we didn't have. One of the reasons that black women were able to be seduced the way they were is because white women offered policy. They offered, whatever advancements white women got, black women would get. That was the lure. They came with money. They came with policy. And we have to take that into account because that was one of the critical methods used to break down the black community at a very critical time period. Right? And we're seeing the fallout of those decisions because that's what the significance, or that's one aspect of what's significant about Trump's election when he dismantled those institutions that black women had been offered and given from the 1960s all the way to now. Whether you're talking about the newest version of affirmative action with DEI, or whether you're talking about access to welfare resources, when Trump dismantled those, black women's feet touch the ground much the way black men's have always been on the ground for the first time in decades. They have no safety nets in the way they've been used to. They're living lives the way black men do, and they're not enjoying it. Right? But this is the fallout. They haven't had to do so in 50 to 60 years, and it's coming to bear. So, I want to hear your thoughts on this. I want to hear your experiences. I want to hear your reflections. And of course, let me know if you want me to continue this or not. Uh, I'll look to see if I get 10 votes to continue it, then I'll keep going. If I don't get 10, then I'll just move on to something else. But anyway, thank you all. Highlight y'all later. Peace.