Don Lemon & Charles Blow On Trump's America: What do we do now?
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How did Don Lemon and Charles Blow frame the stakes of a second Trump presidency for Black America?
The internet becomes so polluted, so junky that people give up on it. Like it's so much disinformation, so much manipulation that people just give up on it and it dies. Neil deGrasse Tyson, he believes that he thinks that AI is going to kill the internet. We're not going back to 2020.
We're not going back to 2012, 13, 14, 15, Barack Obama. We're not going back to 2008. We're not going back to open changing and
Yeah, hope and change and then we have to start over in some way and maybe this is the time to do it. The folks like us who are on our side that we lost more than the other side won. And so I think if there's another election and if there is, this is my hope. I see what's happening to them who support Trump and how their moral authority has, if they ever had any, it is shattered to the ground. The truth is often insulting. I want a structure where everyone can operate without an oppressive force on top of them holding them down.
I once was lost in my search for God in America. You talked about a situation where as a child there was an older boy in your neighborhood who was a teenager. He has a unique ability to attract headlines.
Doesn't the buck stop with you? Choose your question carefully. There's five minutes left. I don't need to understand everything about how trans people feel and when they have surgery. I don't need to understand any of that. I know this is a human being. I do not believe in human suffering. I do not believe in using the state to make a person suffer. It is about humanity. bullying. It is about humanity. I will not stand on this playground and let you pick on the small one. How do you feel as a black man in this moment?
Obviously, we've known each other for a long time. I've always been, even though I had known you for a long time, we joke around a lot. We kid each other. We tease each other. I've always been a huge admirer of you as a person and also you as a professional talent. You are so talented and so smart. Likewise. Look at this. Yeah. Yeah. So let's start. You want to start? Go. Okay. So why'd you move to Atlanta? So I wrote a book about Black people returning to the South for power and consolidation of populations. And in the course of it, I convinced myself that I had to do it too. It made sense to me, not just as a theory, but as a very real thing that was a roadmap for my own life that on some level, it was unpublishable.
without my own action. What do you mean unpublishable? What did it look like for the guy in Brooklyn to tell everybody, okay, got it. So there was that, but there was also, I had really convinced myself in the writing that it was the most powerful thing that I could do. In some way, you have to be in New York, kind of. If you work for The New York Times, if you are a writer, if you're in this media business, you have to have a connection to New York, at least. Well, I think that many of the Times columnists do not live in New York, so that's not required. I do believe that the news media business is anchored in New York in a lot of ways, in television and in print. And a lot of the book publishing industry is in New York.
So that is very true. But there is a... A bigger question to me, are we going to do things for the rest of it? Or are you going to be altruistic and be in space with other Black people to lift the whole thing? I remember when I was about to go to college and I had a full scholarship from LSU. Called me down to Grambling. I was only 20 minutes away, but he called me. I needed to come into the office. White man. And he says, I also had a scholarship from Louisiana Tech. He says, LSU doesn't need you. Louisiana Tech doesn't need you. What he was saying, as I understood it, was they don't need to inflate their numbers with your account. Where you are needed is among the rest of your peers that you are going to give to them, but you're going to receive from them by being in community.
It is an altruistic choice. It is not the school with the most advantage for you. He's not making an argument. He was making an argument of sacrifice.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How did Don Lemon and Charles Blow frame the stakes of a second Trump presidency for Black America?
0:00–9:35
2
Why did Charles Blow decide to move to the South and what does 'returning to the South for power' mean?
9:35–21:48
3
How does attending HBCUs shape Black confidence and professional identity, according to the conversation?
21:48–47:44
4
Why do the speakers say diversity efforts are being dismantled and what are the consequences?
47:44–1:31:48
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Don Lemon Show
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