Darren Walker

speaker

233 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 26 Oct

Darren Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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The Don Lemon Show · LEMON DROP | Darren Walker Says Our Democracy Is Strong, But It Is Not Guaranteed · 26 Oct 2025 podcast

I never thought about student debt.

Student debt was an abstraction because when I graduated from law school, I didn't have any debt.

I mean, I can't imagine what that must feel like today.

And so what I worry about is

Do young people feel, do those little boys and girls in small-town America, whether they're white or black or brown, wherever they are, urban, rural, east, west, middle America, do they feel, as I felt, that America is cheering them on?

I felt the tailwinds.

behind me, pushing me forward and putting me on that mobility escalator because that mobility escalator was moving in 1965 when I got on it in that Head Start program and provided me

with a pathway to dream, to say, I want to go to law school.

I want to move to New York and work at a big Wall Street firm.

I want to make enough money to not live the way I saw my mother living, from check to check, worried about whether you could pay the light bill before the lights got turned off.

Coming home to an eviction notice on the door.

Not being picked up after the student council meeting because your mother's car got repossessed.

All of those things left me deeply traumatized about economic security.

And that...

is why I went to Wall Street after law school and didn't go to work for the ACLU or one of the things that many of my friends whose parents were paying their rent and had more economic security could afford to do.

I didn't have that.

And so I think for a lot of us who are first generation black folks or white or whatever, first generation, the pressure

to make sure we finally get some modicum of financial security is real.

And that pressure and that tension between saying, I want to do frontline justice work, which is going to pay me nothing, or I'm going to go work at McKinsey or Goldman or a law firm is real.

And it's not always the same in other communities and other populations.

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