Ta-Nehisi Coates

And when he was first beginning working on his, you know, incredible, incredible piece for the Atlantic, the first thing he said looking at this was it reminded him of abolitionism.

And one of the things that people forget, because like the story of slavery, you know, becomes kind of compressed, is we forget slavery.

In the run up to the Civil War, how many white people were willing to put their bodies on the line to keep their neighbors, as my friend Jelani Cobb says, I'm just name checking now, as my friend Jelani Cobb says, to keep them from being dragged back into, I mean, there were pitched battles in the streets of Boston and Syracuse.

Sometimes these battles, a lot of times these battles were not nonviolent.

And so what I want to say is there is, I think, in the hearts of most people, like just this kind of basic goodness that makes it hard to watch like a five year old.

You know what I mean?

Get snatched or to watch like somebody's grandfather, you know, dragged out the house.

And people tend to respond to that, which, by the way, makes the need for what you were talking about at the beginning.

That's kind of why you need the other story.

But you need something to overcome that, that basic, you know, human sympathy.

Can I just say one other thing, even if I get an elongated answer?

I don't want to valorize anybody's death or anybody's killing, certainly, and I don't want to valorize martyrdom, but I will tell you, man, to see models of what I can only call good white folk has been really, really, really, really beautiful.

I think...

Sometimes, sometimes people who I agree with, people who are on my side of politics, sometimes, and I understand why we get exhausted.

We don't wanna explain things to people.

We don't wanna have to sit people down and have conversations.

Well, it's pretty clear some of those conversations have taken place.

And it's pretty clear that you have a population of people, a diverse population of people

who have become woke in the best, best, best possible sense.

And modeling that, modeling that for other white people so that it takes us away from telling, you know, me telling you what you're not doing.