S3E74: How the Great Lie Impacts us Today w/Dr. Jamila Michener

Dr. Jamila Michenerof Cornell University is our guest today. She shares her expertise and teaches us about the history of mindsets and structures set in place to help create and maintain the great lie in recent history and how those mindsets and structures continue to impact us today.

The interview with Dr. Michener begins at about 11:10. There was some unexplained static that we could not remove throughout her interview. We apologize for that but what she shares is more than worth the minor annoyance.

A transcript of the episode is attached and available with this episode. Please utilize it if the buzz is too annoying.

Transcript

Michael Burns: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to the all things to all people podcast, a place where we explore what it means to be on God's great mission together persons of every tribe, language, people, group and nation, where we wrestle with the challenges of radical love and inclusion of all cultures in one family, as a true Kingdom alternative to the world. Let's get to it. You are listening to the all things to all people podcast with Michael burns, and my co host, Jason Alexander. I am Michael burns. Today, Jason and I have the privilege of having a discussion with Dr. jameela missioner, from Cornell University. And we're going to talk about some of the modern historical structures and systems that were built on or remain as a result of that great live. So I look forward to our discussion today. It's going to be, I think, really interesting and exciting. And what a great guest. It's, it's great to have Dr. missioner, back with us, and we'll get to her in just a few moments. All right, Jason, I have some bad news today. I don't know if this is gonna ruin your week or your month or maybe even your life. But we are not going to have news of the squatch today.

Jason Alexander: 1:42

Man, I am surprised to the extent you know that you've overestimated my attendance upon news and big,

Michael Burns: 1:52

you know, you're doing really well with pretending like you don't care about Yeah, man. You're right. No, look forward to it. And let me tell you that we're not not doing it because of a lack of news on Bigfoot have. Certainly, oh, there's plenty. There's plenty of news out there, my friend. Right. We're gonna have a great story next week. Just you know, so keep your britches out and for that. I don't know what. Like you were in danger of taking him off randomly. Well, I've removed my pants. I'm sitting here alone.

Jason Alexander: 2:36

Yeah. That would that that would disqualify me. That that is no good. Yeah.

Michael Burns: 2:44

If Okay, if that was the case, and you just recorded these in like your boxers, I wouldn't tell the audience that anyways. So yeah, right. And yeah, thank you for that. Let's just move on, shall we? Okay. Great. So I have a question for you today. Because this question occurred to me this week, and I thought about it a lot. So I want to throw it out to you. If you were suddenly given the chance to time travel one time. Yeah, but you could only go either forward or backwards in time. Which would it be? Or is it let's say not even one time let's say like you had three times because then that makes it more of a choice, right? So you have three times but you can either go one direction all three times either into the future or into the past, which would you choose?

Jason Alexander: 3:45

Whoa. That is a good one. Right? Yeah. Yeah, well, I'm on the spot here. Now I want to I want to think about this for a while. My my my instinct is to save the past. There's something frightening about going into the future. Like what if you go too far? Gone? Well, then you just be in the resurrection age. Well, I suppose if you go far enough, yeah, yeah. Then Then future just to what you could just give me a one a one a route. What do you call it? One Way Ticket. Okay, so why the future though? No, no, no, I know that wouldn't be fair. I want to I'd want to wait for everyone. Let's go together.

Michael Burns: 4:37

Okay, so let's let's take out the age to come. And just normal human present age history, future past

Jason Alexander: 4:46

your past I there's there's something I mean, the whole enterprise is fraught with some serious hubris but but I think going in into the future is too far. Like, it's just I don't know something about going. I mean, it would help your gambling habit. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Remember Marty McFly, you know was able to Jason does not have a gambling habit. No, I just. I don't Yeah, not anymore. No, no. casinos, to me are the most depressing places on the planet. Oh, dude, tell me about it. They're just it's like this sharp juxtaposition of bright lights and happy sounds and people losing their shirt. Cigarette smoke.

Michael Burns: 5:41

Dude, we were. We were in Vegas a few months ago, first time we'd ever been there. We stayed in a hotel. And like, five in the morning, I would go and go for a run. And I'd come back in you have to go through the casino cuz every hotel. Right, right. And there were people there. It was kind of depressing. Because I was like, I don't think you're on the upswing of the morning. From last night yet. Yeah. Yeah. Still plugging into the machine. Yes. It's like you don't look good. And of course, that's not the kind of gambling that would help going into the future. But okay, so where in the past would you want to go? Like what event? Oh,

Jason Alexander: 6:18

oh, man, you should have prepped me. This is no, I didn't want to top your head here. I'm gonna be you know, sad about that. Okay. I mean, okay, so something like yes. So something having to do with the, you know, the New Testament, I think, pick, pick a page. I'd love to go there. That'd be cool. The resurrection of Jesus. That'd be pretty awesome. Yeah. I think I'd love to go somewhere in my own past to I think it'd be cool to, to really, I always wonder what some moment you really messed up and go back and fix Okay, so that that's, that's a great yeah, so um, but you know, you always wonder if your your past is as you remember it, I'd love to love to go back. And, you know, maybe maybe I'd use a couple of the scenes or the trips for that. Oh, but but that sounds selfish. I should do something else. Right. Maybe my wife's childhood gonna be cool to see. See her? I don't know. Huh? Yeah, well, would you Where are you gonna go? I mean, oh, easy. I need to go. Boom. Here you go. I don't even have to think about it. The crucifixion of Jesus. Yeah, that that would be that'd be a hard one to see. But yeah,

Michael Burns: 7:40

but I would want to see it. Yeah. Just understand all the events going on. The the crossing of the Red Sea. Oh, yeah. That'd be amazing. And the buildings, the building of the pyramids,

Jason Alexander: 7:54

the building of the pyramids. Alright, so now you open up so you want to go back and find the secret? So yeah, like or when they're putting setting up Stonehenge then what do you guys build in here?

Michael Burns: 8:09

You guys will never believe what happens in the future. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And plus you can see it you could meet the aliens who were helping them build it.

Jason Alexander: 8:18

That's exactly right. That's that's what else I tell you. It'd be fun to go back to whatever July was July 6. of this year in a Ashbury Ohio or wherever and see be at that. 24 Hour Fitness smart. And catchy glow. That's a good way. Ashlynn Yeah. Ashlynn Yeah. Oh, you wasted a trip. If you had three trips to the past, and that was one of your choices. You would be well,

Michael Burns: 8:51

if I was gonna go back to a Bigfoot moment. It'd be the 71 moment of the gimlin Patterson film The famous slate. Wait, now what? That's the famous video that was shot. 1971 It's called the gimlet Patterson. You know, the Big Foot walking? Oh, this is total on this beach. That's can't be news. Everybody seen that? footage? gimlet. Patterson. gimlin. Patterson film

Jason Alexander: 9:20

gimlin. So we are talking about Bigfoot, so well, we are it just always comes up somehow. That's right. It's at the center of everything. I'm not I'm not seeing it spelled gimlin Ah, I don't know if I can spell it. I think it's like g i am. l i n maybe gimlin. Patterson Bigfoot. All right. I'm gonna have to look into this. Patterson gimlin Patterson giveaway. I see it. Yeah. I've seen this image but I didn't know it was a real thing. Oh, it's

Michael Burns: 9:55

a video my friend. So all right. You You watch that and you're Life is about to change.

Jason Alexander: 10:01

All right. So crossing the crossing of the sea, the crucifixion. And this moment?

Michael Burns: 10:11

Yes. Because there's, there is no other possible explanation. And that's a real big foot. Okay, well, not now I am interested, it couldn't be a guy in a suit. It couldn't know. Because he would not hoax a thing like that. So there you go, my friend, you watch that video? Yeah, I encourage the audience still, you know what I encourage people to really think about, like, if you could go back and see any swing from the Bible would be present. Which one would it be? Yeah, think about that. In fact, I do that sometimes. It's like a thought experiment. I'll just sit they visualize being at a scene and kind of walk through it. So I love it. I love that. That's awesome. But dude, let's turn our attention here. Are you ready? Big interview today? Dr. jameelah? missioner. We're gonna have an awesome discussion with her. Yeah, no doubt. Very exciting. In fact, let's just not waste any more time and get right to it. So it is my great pleasure, as I said to welcome back Dr. Jamila missioner. With us today. jameelah. How are you doing? And welcome.

Jamila Michener: 11:26

Thank you. I'm doing as well, if I think any of us can be humming along

Michael Burns: 11:31

Strange Times, indeed. But we're still figuring it out. Let me give it a little intro here. jameelah is an associate professor in the Department of government at Cornell University, with research that focuses on poverty, racial inequality and public policy in the United States. And you have a book out and people can look it up on Amazon and get it if they would like it. It's called fragmented democracy, Medicaid federalism and unequal politics. That sounds like a great beach read for the end of the summer here.

Jamila Michener: 12:14

It's definitely a mouthful. It's much more interesting than it sounds.

Michael Burns: 12:19

I believe. So yeah, yeah, I, you know, had you on earlier in the year. And I meant to get the book then and buy it. And I realized, as I was kind of scheduling to have you guys like, Oh, no, I haven't, I haven't read it yet. I need to, I promise, I will soon hear no pressure, no pressure at all. But I want to talk to you today about an area that really is in your wheelhouse of expertise. And in essence, you know, this season and in the last episode or two here in the podcast, we've been talking about this idea of the great lie, which in macro form, going all the way back to Genesis three is the idea that some humans are superior to others, and some are inferior, and that we see that lie, that's not God's vision, God's vision is we're all equal as image bearers. But we get discipled into this lie and various different facets of it, and it keeps getting reworked. And throughout history, Paul dealt with it in in the first century, the the biggest, I think, the you know, there was Jew and Gentile and they both suck, they thought they were superior to the other. But you have social status, which is probably their biggest version of the lie. And in the last 500 plus years, it's been this idea of skin color, which then morphed into race. And Paul, very clearly, in the New Testament, especially in the letter, First Corinthians, addresses these mindsets that we're buying into their version of the lie that some were better than others. And they were arguing, you know, dividing over all these ways in Corinth, but he also challenged the structures of this social system. You know, when Paul says there is no slaver free. That's not just a throwaway line in the church. There's no slaver free. That's a monumental challenge to a structure system that touched every facet of Greco Roman culture, economy, government, I mean, you name it, it touches every part of it. And he challenged that all throughout his writing, but especially again, the letter of First Corinthians. And so that has led us to the realization that Paul was aware of the lie. He was aware of the mindsets that propped up the lie, but he was very aware of the structures the societal structure that were built on top of that lie. And then he was challenging the church to tear those down. And so when it comes to our version of the great lie here, what I want to talk to you today jameelah is is not so much we know about things like slavery and colonialism. But there's often it can have a mindset that sinks in like, Well, why are we still talking about these things? Those ended 150 plus years ago, when are we going to get over this, but the structures were built on that same concept, that mindset didn't end, in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, it continues on in their structures built into society, that continue today, kind of as vestiges of that mindset in that lie. So I'm gonna turn it over to you and say, tell us about these structures. So that, you know, like, Paul was explaining some of these things to the church, we can start to see them in society, but also maybe recognize when they impact that church. So please, please, enlighten us.

Jamila Michener: 16:21

Well, I will try. It's a lot I, I teach entire semester classes on these sorts of things. Right, now we're gonna do a half hour, right? So bear, bear with me. And I always encourage people when you're listening, and it's like, something is dense, like, if you're like, what, no, jot it down, do some googling, do some research, try to figure it out. Try to rely on trusted sources. But, you know, reviewed sources are always preferably peer reviewed, preferably not not like the Wikipedia page, or some guy's website or some lady's website, right. Um, you know, I really appreciate this topic, especially both the focus on sort of the lie at the root of a lot of the racial and other hierarchies that have characterized human history forever. But also, and especially the focus on the structures that stem from that lie. Because I think that the way that we tend to, when we think about things like racism, or racial injustice, or racial oppression, we tend to think about them on an individual level. So I'll have students say things to me, like, how can racism be so rampant when I know, I'm not racist, and I don't treat people of color any differently than anyone else? And my parents aren't? And my friends aren't. And I don't know one person who's like this. So how could it be this big, common thing that's shaping so many people's lives? And that way of thinking about racism, or other forms of prejudice, being sort of in people's hearts? And, you know, if I don't have it in my heart in mind, and if the people around me don't have it in their heart in mind, then maybe things aren't so bad, after all, or about it being something that was from a long, long time ago, and over time, or just on this inexorable path of improvement and progress. Like Don't we all get better over time? And if it was really bad in the hundreds, even if it was really bad in the early 1900s? Hey, isn't it better by now, because we have to be getting better, right, we have to be getting nicer and more, Justin. And while I would like to, it would be nice to believe that I think the focus on the kind of original lie that's at the root of all this shows that there, there are kind of perpetual patterns or perennial patterns that are playing out across human history cost places like so this kind of making hierarchies designating certain kinds of people superior and inferior, is really endemic to human existence. It's part of who we are in terms of our sinful nature. And so we see it everywhere and all the time. So I'm always surprised when people find it hard to believe, like, Oh my gosh, really, there's racism. And I'm like, What? This is what we have been doing as humans, and there's a specific history of it in the US, custom bad. But it really is a broader thing than that. And I think the way that you framed it has drawn our attention to how broad it is and how endemic it is. And then you go from that broad to like, Okay, what does that actually mean? What does that look like? How has it looked historically, and through these different what you call structures, right, and what I call structures too. And the good thing about sorting that out is that it helps us to understand when people say that like structural racism, which can sound like really highfalutin academic II, what does that actually mean? Or even when they say things like racism without racist Right, there's this this really well known sociologists, but Mia Silva, who says, Well, actually, you can keep having racism, even after people themselves are making an effort to not behave in ways that are racist, are engaged in racist practices. And people get really confused about that, because we tend to think our actions should correlate to outcomes. If people stop behaving this way, then we shouldn't see the phenomenon of racism being relevant anymore. And of course, there are people who still behave that way. But the point is that even without that, you could continue to see, you know, racism reproduce, and it happens through structure. So a great way to think about that, and to concretize. That is to think about it historically. Now, slavery, all of that stuff is very far away. Even if we start right after the, the end of slavery, or in the kind of next big historical period that comes after the end of the sort of practice of enslaving people of African descent. And we think about that next stage, which many people call that stage, you know, reconstruction. And it's essentially a period of time where we're trying to figure out what we look like in the us as a nation without slavery slavery had was, was an institution that had a large imprint in our economy. In our society, it structured social relations, knew who was who, who is above who was below who could talk to people a certain way, we had hoped, the the whole, the entire legal system are reflecting this, right? It's not as though if you were enslaved, you could just take your master the court, right? Like you didn't have any legal rights or representation. There's a whole like, set of social relationships, economic relationships, and political relationships that have to be rethought at that point. And that period of reconstruction is essentially an effort to start to rethink those relationships. Anytime there's like a possibility like that for really transformative change, there are people who are going to lose, and there are people who are going to benefit. So of course, the people who are going to benefit in the kind of period after slavery, primarily are enslaved people who now will be free. And now in an ideal world will be able to navigate social, economic and political relationships as free people, meaning there won't be laws and policies and rules and practices that continue to hold them back. Right? True freedom, not just we're not going to enslave you anymore, but we're actually going to allow you to live in a way that most other people live. And that's just not what happened in that in that reconstruction period. And, and in part, reconstruction represented the time when we began to make some of those changes, we start to see things like black representatives in Congress, and people who have representation in the political world, or who are started to really begin to give opportunities to economic opportunities, like ownership of land and things like that. And that really quickly gets stifled and redirected. And, and, and the idea is, first of all, a lot of the people who had the most to lose are very wealthy and very powerful, right. So the folks in the south who owned an even folks in the north, honestly, who benefited from industries like the sugar industry, and from industries like the cotton industry, and from other kinds of industries that had really been built on slave labor, are now having to like reconfigure how they're going to remain rich and powerful. And so what they do is they develop new structures, right? They develop new structures, and you would think that the new structures would be structures that were like a really sharp departure from the old ones. But instead, they attempt to develop new structures that are as close as possible to the old one. So before you had a structure of enslavement, where you were coercing people into working and into providing labor, essentially for free, under threat of violence, and you shift and you can't do that anymore, right. We got the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, you know, we celebrated what a few months ago Juneteenth people is like, what do you think about what you think about Juneteenth is celebratory? And I always say, Well, one thing Juneteenth What does that day represent? for those folks in Texas, who now two years after Lincoln has said that his place people are free, they didn't care about it. It was such an enclosed space. There was so much control over the information environment for enslaved people that they literally didn't care about, or know about being freed by Lincoln for two years. But finally, the northern army shows up and says you're free, right? But right Lincoln says this, the northern army says this. There are laws that say this, but you can't stop them. Working, you can't stop working, you're not working for free anymore, because that would be enslavement, and we're not going to do that. But we can rescue and imprison you if you're idle. And now idleness becomes illegal. And the that practice of black people, mostly for black people in the law, it's like illegal for anyone in practice is forced to keep to keep black people working, and where are you going to work, it's not like you can just go out and get a job, right? Who's gonna hire you, they're still deeply embedded biases and hatred and discrimination towards black people. And that doesn't change in Galveston, Texas, or really anywhere else, just because Abraham Lincoln says from a pie that these folks are free. And so everybody's in on keeping the system as close to what it was. And so who can hire you? Well, your former in labor can hire you? Well, it's just that now they have to pay you otherwise, it's enslavement. But you don't have any access to legal representation. You don't have any, many, many employees, people could not read, you don't have any way of seeing what that contract says and forcing that contract, stopping you're preventing yourself from being exploited. And so you get this system of sharecropping, many enslaved people go from that into a system where they're working, right, but what are they getting in a change? Well, I'll let you live off my land, I'll let you have fun. I'll let you sexually subsist in exchange for working my lens. That's kind of a lot like enslavement. It's just that that's not what it technically is anymore. And there are some other things that change, enslaved people get some basic rights, right. So you can't just in theory, you can't just willy nilly like murder, you know, the person who is working as a sharecropper on your on your farm. And if you do food, in theory, you could be brought to court in practice, right? Because those folks now actually have legal rights as citizens, they're considered people, right, and full people, not three fifths of a person anymore hold people. So there are some signs of progress. But there are still all of these structures, right, the way our labor systems are designed, the way our legal systems are designed, yes, you can bring somebody to court if they exploit you, or if they are violent against you, or if they threaten you, or women, if they assault you, sexually, or in other ways you can. But if you're a black person, and you're bringing a white person to court, we know from looking at legal records historically, that the vast majority of time you're not going to be successful, right. And so we still have all these systems, even post slavery, that sort of keeping people in place, right? Some of those systems that start to develop early on are systems that parallel the systems we see now, like imprisonment or incarceration systems, right, this is where we start to get quote, unquote, convict labor. So you make something like being idle illegal. And then you have a black person that's like, I just do not want to go back and work for the person that enslaved me, they are mistreating me, they are exploiting me, they are harming me, I will not work for them. Well, if you create that standard for yourself in order to try to protect yourself, but you're found idle, you can be arrested. And the prison system wasn't really highly developed them. So it's not like they had all these prisons and jails, they couldn't just keep keep lousy indefinitely. So what they did was they rented them out. They rented them out to local farmers to local, you know, plantation owners, to local businesses, and essentially continue to exploit the labor of people who had been formerly enslaved. Those kinds of practices of exploitation went on for a very long time in the south, right?

Michael Burns: 28:56

condition were often worse than slavery was right?

Jamila Michener: 29:01

Yeah, yeah. Many times they were. And in part because everyone assumed that they weren't anymore, right? Like, Hey, now you have your rights now your quote, unquote, free, nothing to complain about. And it was a long time before we started to develop legal structures to really fully and robustly protect, particularly black people in the south who had been freed in the wake of slavery. But even black people in the north who hadn't, you know, they're the, even when the Great Migration came in, many, many black people from the south migrated north in search of a better life. they migrated there and what they found, were these northern factories, right that weren't exactly plantations, but has some things in common, like really low wages and unequally low wages, right? For much of US history. And in many ways, this continues today, even though it's illegal. We see these huge gaps Between the wages that that black workers and white workers are being paid for doing the same work in the same role, right? The roots of that start really early on, all of these black people migrate north, they're trying to get away from the clutches of the kind of systems that are holding them down in the south people refer to the array of laws and policies that emerge in the wake of the reconstruction period, the reconstruction ends in the late 1870s, between 1865 when enslaved people are, you know, are fully freed, and 18, around 77, there really is an attempt to try to do something different is an attempt to try to have some enforcement in the south, make sure they're doing things differently, make sure they're not just re enslaving black people. And there are some legal there's some legal and political justice that happened. And then in 1877, the political winds really shift. Many of the, for example, black elected officials that had that were like the first, what have you, the first black elected person in Congress, the first black elected mayor, and so on and so forth. Many of those folks have gone, they're no longer in office or either voted out met, or many of them are threatened out. This is when we really see lynching tape go on the rise, right? You don't see much lynching prior to 18. The certainly prior to the 1860s, because you don't have to, I mean, folks are just enslaved, and they don't have any rights anyway. But really, after that, you start to see these different ways of trying to whether it's through violence, through coercion, or through legal and political structures, trying to force in particular black Americans into a way of sort of maintaining as much of the vestige of slavery as possible without it technically being that, and by 1870s, when the reconstruction, even the efforts to stop that from happening, the federal intervention in the south to kind of push southern states to do the right thing here that really ends. And that's when the system that many people called Jim Crow begins. And that's when you have these laws that are developed specifically to segregate and oppress and limit the kind of economic and social mobility of black people and especially their political power to because you need to restrain their political power. Right, they can't be voting, because then you might get different laws, especially in the south, where once black people were actually full citizens, like in many places in the south, they actually outnumber white folks. So you cannot have them voting. So you need literary literacy tests and poll taxes and threats, and the threat of munching and everything you can possibly muster, to keep them out of the political system are limited in the economic system, and disadvantage in the legal system. And that's what starts through the sort of Jim Crow laws in the late 70s, and continues on for a really long time, right? So we think of Jim Crow as essentially going from the end of the, the end of the reconstruction period in 1877, all the way to like 1963 64, when we get the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act. So that is a long time. And even though we might think of 1877 to 1964, as a long time ago, it's worth thinking about, like how many things get cemented, right? You've already had 400 plus years of slavery. Now you have almost another 100 years of Jim Crow of in creating all of these different policies to make sure that black people can't make much forward progress so that the benefits that were accruing to white Americans under the system of enslavement continue to benefit to them. And that's not just the like rich are continue to accrue to them. And that's not just like rich plantation owners are or corporate industrialists like want to be able to have cheap labor in their, in their, you know, in their factories and such. It's even like the person working the white guy that working next to at the factory doesn't want you to make more than him, right. And so we get things like even as things like a unions develop, unions are largely white, and they exclude exclude black people. And these different structures that develop that are thought to be like, you know, advances that get people higher wages and better working conditions and fewer hours and you get things like child labor that becomes elite that become illegal. You get things like health insurance that comes with certain jobs, all these things that we can take for granted now like a minimum wage, or, you know, standards, labor standards so that your employer can't be like, yeah, go in that toxic room and like clean it out for me. All of these things happen in the context where originally those things were over. alarmingly benefiting white workers who've got the higher wages, who got the increased protections. And when they went to court to try to enforce those things, they got them. Why? Because they had unions behind them. And they had and unions grew to have a lot of political power for many, many years, actually, until quite recently, black and Latino, and essentially, non white workers were excluded from those kinds of structures and institutions. And it meant they didn't have as much protection, they didn't have as much power in the workplace. And well, what does that mean? That translates to economically right? Now, we can think about lots of different arenas, and we see different but similar stories, right, like the details differ, but the trajectory is the same. So we could switch the housing as a different arena, right? So originally, immediately after, after slavery, and in the south housing is like not an issue, because hey, you're sharecropping, you're living on your the plantation owner, farm owners land, essentially in the same place you lived in slaves, right? If the North, as more and more free people are in the north, housing really becomes a problem. And this is when we start to get tenements and different forms of segregation, because, well, black people are being paid less. And they're the last hired first fired. So the unemployment rates are always higher, always. And there's actually no evidence that high rates of unemployment, no historical or contemporary evidence that high rates of unemployment in the black community have anything to glue willingness to work, right. And if you think about it, it makes logical sense. You have folks that were being worked to the bone from sunrise to sunset, when they were enslaved, they don't migrate north and expect to be sitting around doing nothing. These are folks who know how to work who know how to work hard. And in fact, some of the hard work in the North is nothing compared to the conditions that they were facing in the south. And they migrated North during the Great Migration looking for work. The whole reason you went north was because you wanted to work. So the idea that like, well, unemployment rates, unemployment is high among black people, they must just be lazy and not like working zero evidence, either historically, or contemporarily. For that, it's not that they don't like working, it's that they're shut out of labor market institutions. Wow, both like systemically shut out, not just like, oh, the guy doing the hiring is racist, right. But oh, like there are no laws preventing that guy from discriminating against you. And the laws that are in the books or not, when when when when we do get anti discrimination laws and employment, they're hardly enforced, right, like system level structural things that make that kind of labor market discrimination possible. So when you have high higher unemployment and low wages, well, it means you have less income. And so it's hard for you to be able to live in places that are nice, or even that have a reasonable standard of living. So you get these quote unquote, ghettos are, you know, they call them all sorts of things. tenements, the worst parts of town is, are always the parts of town where black people live, the parts where you have the toxic waste dumps, and the garbage sites and the other undesirable, the other undesirable things that nobody wants, okay, well, sick, the black people there will still charge them often very high cost of living, but just low enough that it's lower than anywhere else. And they have to be kind of funneled into these really specific segregated areas. It takes the federal government a really long time to intervene in that, you know, initially when the federal government first intervenes in the area of housing, it was the 1930s, before the 1930s. The idea was, it's your job to figure out someplace to live, even if there's a depression, even if the economy is crashing, like the federal government is not going to intervene. And then in the 1930s, you get the Great Depression, and we're experiencing something we've never experienced before. And so we get policy that we've never had before, under a president like Roosevelt, FDR, who's willing to do a lot is really to push the role of the government to its absolute limits, at least, you know, given his historical context up to that point. And he says, like, we should be helping people with housing, we should build public housing, right? We should give people loan so that they can afford to buy homes. This is when you get this idea of the American Dream means you have opportunity, mobility, you can have the home with a white picket fence. So you start to get these policies, but guess what, they really only apply once people, black people are not eligible for those loans like and it's not just by accident. It's because federal institutions like the Federal Housing Authority, say, well, we're only going to give loans to people who live in these green zones, right, and who lives in the green zone. Are people and who lives in the red zone for you don't give a loan at all black and brown and other people of color. And so the federal government invest billions of dollars and resources in making home ownership of possibility for Americans. And we see rates of homeownership skyrocket, starting in the 1930s, all the way through the 1950s. Just up and up and up and up and up, format life, many people just couldn't own homes. And we decided we were going to make it a federal prerogative to help people to own homes, you get things like, this is where you get into solutions, like Freddie Mae, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and all of these these lenders who are providing resources, why because the federal government is subsidizing them, but the federal government will only subsidize the homes in in white neighborhood, right. And there are so now you know, a lot

Michael Burns: 40:52

of us white neighborhoods create, like racial covenants, right, where they very intentionally won't allow non white people to live there.

Jamila Michener: 41:03

Absolutely. So even if you somehow are which there absolutely were successful, and wealthy black people who either started businesses that were successful, are entrepreneurial, and were able to make money, and you have the money, and you want to go live in these neighborhoods, the real estate broker isn't gonna take you there, when you ask them to show you nice neighborhoods, they're gonna take you to the book, The places the black people, right. And the end, if you do end up, going to be moving into a neighborhood with white folks, the first you need somebody who's willing to sell you their house, and we have these racial covenants that basically, because the tenants of the housing contracts are like, I'll sell you this house, but you have to agree not to sell it to a black person when you move, right. And so contraction, white people are contractually obligated each other, they bind each other. They say, well, we're all going to agree to keep these neighborhoods white. And if somehow you got through all of that, and you still moved on to the block, we had these kind of processes they called blockbusting, where the real estate agents would go to the other white people in the block and say, See, this is a black person on the block, now, your home prices are gonna go down, you got to get out. And they and people would panic, they sell their price, their houses, usually at a pretty high, are at a pretty low price, because they were so panicked and trying to get out of the neighborhood, those same real estate agencies take their houses that they that they bought at a low price through stoking racial fear, and so little tiny houses to black families or rent them many times, because black families could not get loans, rent them on predatory terms, to get much more profit than they otherwise would have gotten. Eventually the neighborhoods would become all white, or all black, the white people would be right white flight is what we call it on and off at odds with them, taking the jobs, the opportunities, the businesses and other things like that with them. And these this is these are processes that played out over many, many years, over decades in the United States, we don't start questioning those kinds of racial biases in housing, really, and truly questioning them until the 1960s. So we're starting in the early 1930s. And all the way through the 1960s. You have these, that's generations of wealth, that just don't get developed most people, their their, their most valuable asset is their home, and you just have a generation of black widow who cannot have that valuable asset, which means they cannot then pass on that wealth to their children, which makes it harder for their children to get those assets and so on and so forth. So when people say, Oh, look at that the 1930s that was so long ago, the 40s or the 50s, or even the 60s, it was so long ago, I would tell my students, why don't you go home and ask your parents where they got their downpayment for their house. And many of them will come back and say, Oh, my grandparents, but it's about and where did you go last your grandparents where they got their down payment for their house? They'll come they'll say, Oh, my grandparents said that their parents lent it to them. Okay. It's one of the main ways that we get resources to build wealth is through intergenerational transfer of those resources. And we created processes, even if it was 100 years ago, that or more 150 years ago, that stopped that intergenerational trend transfer because you couldn't make those resources in the first place. Well, guess what, that is going to have intergenerational effects and to say, oh, but it was 150 years ago. It doesn't matter now. But that's not the way that works. That's not the way the wealth generation works. You know? Yeah.

Michael Burns: 44:36

Yeah, just housing. You could, oh, dozens of other examples. We can keep going. We would and I know you could. But I you know, let me tie in one and you can redirect me if I'm wrong here. But you know, as we talk about how these structures continue on to today or to effect today, not just generational wealth, which you mentioned. But you you have this systemic, you know, for at least 100 years after the Civil War structures that are intentionally by law, segregating out cities. That's why all the major US cities are segregated. That didn't just happen because people like to live by people around them. That was very intentional, to sort of put people in groups. And then you have a system where our education system is now tied to property taxes, and you get better schools, if you have a better neighborhood, and worse schools, if you have a worst neighborhood. And now those structures are all built in place. And they you can route these all back to this live, right?

Jamila Michener: 45:45

Yeah. And they're and they are all connected, I always tell my students, that disadvantage is cascading, when you disadvantaged people in the labor market, they have fewer resources for housing, so they can't build the wealth that they need to do well in the housing market. Now, they live in bad neighborhoods, but we have a housing to education, somehow they go to bad schools. And of course, education affects your occupational mobility, what kind of jobs you can get, what kind of income you can earn. So now they get that job. And all of these things continue. And one of the things that that my students are often uncomfortable with, when when I start to talk, in these terms is like, what about personal responsibility and agency? Like why couldn't you know, some people made it? Often my students will say you, you're a professor at Cornell, and you're a black woman, like you did it. And I did grow up in low income, black and brown communities, right. So it's like, well, you're here that means it's possible. It's possible. And I would say there's a difference between possible and probable, yes, you can always find the people who, and I always say like, as far as my own story, it's mostly luck, right? I was flunking out of school through most of my early years, largely because like it was so bad. I remember third grade living in a neighborhood where two people had been killed on my block that year. One of them was a boy who was eight years old, and I was eight years old. And it was like, What did school matter for? A booth could just take me out at any moment, why am I gonna go to school in an effort, just whatever, I just have fun, just enjoy every day. Because all that other stuff, it's not going to happen for me, it doesn't happen for people like me, I happen to get lucky. And my parents were able to scrounge together enough resources that we moved, when I was in white before I started fourth grade. And we weren't in a great fancy neighborhood, it was just a little better, what's better than he was getting done down, there was an abject poverty. And that difference, just having a little bit more space, to breathe, to not fear for for my life, I was able to do better. And I realized, like, wow, this might be a way out. For me, this might be a way I don't have to keep living in this environment. But to say, if you're not exceptional, and breaking through barrier after barrier after barrier, that you must not have personal possibility, when all the folks who are no different from you in many ways, except for the color of their skin, in terms of their hard work, their level of personal responsibility. They just don't have as many breakthroughs. So they get to fail a little, it gets a mess up here and there, and it's up in color. And they still end up fine. They really mess up. There's a there's a safety net, they can ask their parents to help them. They can be okay. They don't end up dead. And, you know, until it's just so different, like yes, personal responsibility matters. Yes, personal agency, people who have control over this over some of this, they can make choices. But these structures really constrain your choices. Can we make choices? Yes. Are the set of choices available to different people dramatically on the basis of race? Yes. And that continues to be true now. So you mentioned that, hey, some of these things continue. If we think about the housing bubble, the housing market crash that happened at the end of our last at the tail end of our the beginning, rather than started our last recession. And we look back at numbers from you know, 2008 2009 in that time period, right before the housing bubble burst. We have all this information on subprime loans. And it's really interesting. This, there's a study that shows that a white family making$30,000 a year was less likely to get a subprime loan than the black family making $200,000 a year holding constant their credit records. It's not because of your credit record. It's not because you're not doing or if your family making $200,000 a year, you probably have done all the things in a material superficial All right, you've been working hard, you've been financially responsible, you even have a good credit record. But now like family over there making $30,000, they're gonna get a better rate on their mortgage than you. And when the bubble burst, when the housing market bubble burst, people with those subprime loans, they're mortgages believed they lost their homes, we know that black and Latino families were more likely to lose their home, that was their source of wealth, that was the intergenerational wealth, they were going to transfer to their children, that was how they were going to have upward economic mobility. And that was taken away from that. And it was more likely to be taken away from them in 2006, and seven, and eight, because they were black, or because they were Brown, these processes that started in the Jim Crow era, and they many of them still, in the same way, not in the same form. And of course, that's equal. And the federal government ended up when that data emerged, the federal government ended up taking some of those banks, Bank of America, other banks TAs, taking them to court, and getting them to pay billions of dollars in restitution, because it was illegal. And that's the difference between now in the 1950s. In the 1940s, you get in trouble for it, it's illegal. But that restitution didn't, for the most part, get those families, their home back home, it didn't restore their wealth, the racial wealth gap widens after that last recession, virtually because of those housing disparities, and racial differences. And so we're still struggling with many of these things. Now, we don't want to be, we want to say, but everything's okay. But if you just try hard, and you're personally responsible, and you're fiscally responsible, it's going to be okay. And sometimes we want to believe that because we feel implicated, my students will say to me, but are you saying I'm not at Cornell because of, because I worked hard. And, and it's like, if the implication is that there are some people who are they are, irrespective of their their hard work, because of structural disadvantage. That That means there are other people who are where they are, because of structural advantage. And it reaps the people like you're saying, I have an advantage just because of the color of my skin. And you're saying that I don't deserve what I have. Because of it, I didn't work hard because of it. And that folks can get very defensive. And I always say, That's not what I'm saying. You can work hard, and you've gotten where you've gotten, no one wants to take that from you, right. And no one wants to say you don't quote unquote, deserve it, or you shouldn't be where you are. It's not a zero sum game, I got to drag you down to get right, this the same lie. But if you want to lift those other people up and say that they deserve better, it must mean you want to pull me down and say that I deserve less. But that's not true, right? I think the argument that we all believe, or many people believe in their heart is that we all ought to be on a good plan. So we all ought to have access and opportunity. And I don't want you to have less, but I don't want to have less either on account of like the color of my skin and the way that our institutions have traditionally historically been set up. And the way that many of them continue to operate it, the way it shakes out, is that people do face disadvantages because of their race. And all that we do by surfacing that and pointing to the specific institution, labor market institutions, housing institutions, schools, educational institutions, go on carceral institutions, incarceration is a major channel through which we've created racial inequity over the last 60 or so years. Right. Um, and, and it's deeply divided by race. And it's not correlated with people's behavior, all those people just commit more crimes. Actually, there's evidence to suggest that irrespective of how you're, you're likely committing a crime, you're more likely so if I'm just as likely as committing to commit a crime as anyone else. But if I'm black, I'm more likely if I do commit it to be caught. And to be in prison for longer, I have a harsher sentence. And once I get out, it's going to be harder for me to find a job with that sentence, because I'm still facing all of the pre existing forms of discrimination in the labor market. But now on top of it, I have a criminal record, and so on and so on these things compound like interest. compounding interest is usually a good thing. If you have money to save, you know, you're like, I'll get more and more money. But compounding interest, it's what's compounding is disadvantage. It means it's deeper and deeper in terms of how embedded it is, and harder and harder to address. And then people are expecting it to somehow naturally go away over time. And when it doesn't, they're like well, we've done all we can now it's up to these people to handle it themselves. But that doesn't make sense given our knowledge of the institutions and how they operate. Individuals can't be responsible for addressing and counteracting institutional processes, they can try and they certainly have some choice that they can exercise. But there's a ceiling on that. And one other example that just came to mind, and then after this, I should probably come down. Now we'd like to I worked up, go ahead, I get passionate about these things. But you know, this idea that so much of this is contemporary, I always have my read this study called discrimination, the low wage labor market. These two researchers one, her name is Eva pager, she actually unfortunately recently died of cancer at a really young age but, and booth Western, like really prominent scholars of Harvard, who did this experimental study. For a long time, there had been research that showed that, um, you know, there's just a difference in employment between black folks and white folks, right. So why is it? Why is it so much harder for black people to get jobs, and many people said, like, maybe it's just initiative, maybe it's their soft skills, like, they don't know how to talk to people, they don't know how to interact there. But it has something to do with you with what you're doing as an individual, your merits or your effort or your qualification. And it was really hard to tease that out just using like, I don't want to get too technical, this using like, statistical correlation, right? It's like, Well, a lot of times many of these things are correlated with each other. So how do we know what's really the cause? Right? So Western, Ruth, Western and diva, Pedro did this great experiment. And because they were at Harvard, and they had a ton of money, they could afford to do this. What they did was they brought on all of these people, they call them testers. They were all men, they decided they wanted to hold as many things as possible. So just men, they had black testers, white testers, Latino testers, and they trained the testers, they train that the image, they were all like, similar in as many ways as possible, same high, low haircuts, same dress, they train them to have equivalent eye contact body language to behave the same way as in job interviews. So all those soft skills, all those qualifications concept, then they made their resumes the same, right, different names, same resumes, these guys had the same exact qualification, they designed this elaborate study to ensure that they had the same exact qualification, then they sent them out to apply for low wage jobs in New York City. They just, they had them apply for 1000s of jobs. And they had the tester same test, there's a bike for the same job. So you'd have the black tester, the white test, the Latino tester apply for the same job, right. And what they found out was all of these things held constant. The black testers, when they applied for jobs, were 50% less likely to get a callback, they have the same resume, they're behaving the same way in interviews. They're dressing the same way. They're coming across the same way. But they're 50% less likely to get a callback, the only distinguishable difference is that they're black. And what they also found there were the there were several processes that that disadvantage the black testers. So often, the testers would show up at the same site, it would be like people come apply starting at 8am. So they send the testers they show up at the same site to apply for the same job. At the same time. It's always someone that their first that their last you go in order. And the people doing the hiring would come out and say you you you come in the rest of you go. And often the ones they were calling were the white men. And there were all of these other practices, they send people into the same like, let's say Radio Shack, Radio Shack says a tiring when you go in you go all in the same day, you send the black tester in first. And it's a position for a salesperson. And they go in and the manager is like, oh, the sales position is taken, but we have a stock boy position open. Okay, thanks. Give me the application. I'll fill it out. The white tester goes in next. Oh, great. We really could use you to fill the sales position. Even when people, they put the contact references on the resumes and then one of us see who's more likely to call actually to check the references. And for black testers, they call to check those references. And often for white testers, they did not they gave him the job without checking the references without running the background check. I mean, it just fell in layer upon layer upon layer. And this was an a randomized experiment. They've sent all out to different places that it's the best evidence we have. And since then, they've been a bunch more similar kinds of experiments. We just keep getting more and more evidence of this that study was originally done in the early 2000s. We've updated versions of it, it's still happening. Like, you just can't say what it's equal for everybody, you just have to be qualified, you just have to try hard. We just have oodles and oodles of evidence that that is not true. It was not true in the late 1800s, or the early 1900s 1920s, or the 1950s. And it's not true now.

Michael Burns: 1:00:26

And here's what's interesting to me. That's, that's all fascinating. And to kind of connect it to this idea, and again, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm going to wait oversimplified, but I think if you could go back and ask those people doing the hiring, are you racist? Do you think that some people are inferior and superior based on the color of their skin, none of them would say yes, but if we follow the dots, and we go back to the lie of Genesis three, and then through to go mezzi, on his days of rah, rah, and the idea of black and white people and the races and so on, and then you go post civil war, and you have, well, black people are more likely to commit crimes or bad black people are more likely to be lazy, and that work and and those are definitely built on the mindsets of the lie. And then you have the structures built in that sort of magnify those things so that black people are much more likely after the Civil War to get sent to prison or to not be able to work. And then that sort of reinforces that stereotype. And then you have that in your mind, and you get discipled into that way of thinking as a culture. And then every time you encounter a black employee, who maybe is lazy, you got all Yep, there you go. That proves the rule. But when you see a white employee who's lazy, you just oh, that that's an aberrant person, that's not you know, working hard. And so it sort of suddenly we get discipled into these things. And the same thing happened for Paul in his generation with social status, as happens with us. And that's where he really challenges the church and says, You can't let that sort of thinking, get into the church, you have to examine these inequities in the culture. This is what he's really getting into the latter part of chapter 12 of First Corinthians, he says, you have to be aware of the structures in these mindsets, so that they don't just come into the church. And if you had were coming in for a landing here, Jimmy and I thank you for your time. If If you had to answer in like a really quick minute or so, you know, if someone asked you, why is a Christian? Should we know all that stuff? How would you respond to that?

Jamila Michener: 1:03:00

Hi, yeah, I think, um, I think two things. One is, if we don't know, we fall into the same exact traps that you just talked about, and we don't even realize we're doing it. So you're right. They went back and they asked the people, do you note like, Why did you tell this person that there was no position, and that they should stop what? And they were like, the employers were like, Why no. And that's the thing, if you don't, if you're not aware of this history of this present context of these patterns, you're going to fall into the same kinds of practices, honestly. And it doesn't matter how much you don't want to and how good of a person you are, it will happen out of ignorance. And as Christians, it is in opposition to what we believe we if we believe that we're all made in God's image and that we're equal before him, then we have to treat one another that way. And we're not really equipped to do that, unless we understand the way that that that can get messed up. And unless we do everything within our power, and we all have different kinds of things that are within our power. But unless we do everything within our power to be part of that problem, and it's very easy to be a part of a problem if you don't know anything about the problem. If you're ignorant of the problem, you can easily be one of the people aggravating it. Once you know more about the problem, the details of it, the nitty gritty of it the way it manifests in people's lives in your life, then you can do something about fixing the problem. If you're someone who hires you can think a little bit about why you seem to walk right over this application and spend more time on this one. You can think a little bit more about why this person really annoyed you when they did. That person didn't we can turn the lens on. ourselves and try to be more critical in how we approach our whatever power and influence and ability we have in our lives. And it also, and this is the second reason, I'll quickly say why it's really important for us to know, as Christians, it's important for us to know because this is affecting the lives of people who we understand to be brothers and sisters in Christ. There you go. Lots of people didn't were supportive of us, who are supposed to understand who we're supposed to comfort we're supposed to support. How can you do that? When there's something that is fundamentally shaping my life, and you refuse to recognize it? That makes it really difficult to experience Christian brotherhood and sisterhood in the way that we're supposed to. And I get it This stuff is hard. My students say all the time. This is so depressing. This is so hard. Can you teach? Like, can you show us the upside, and I'm like, I want to give that to you. And every now and then I'll throw a bone in the cylinders, I'll say, here's a good thing, you know, because it's very difficult to like, recognize how fallen and broken the world is, in particular, our world, our country that we live in, in particular, all lives, all institutions that we inhabit, that is a hard pill to swallow. And so I understand that the inclination but desire to want to avoid it and say, Oh, no, this stuff is in the past, or, oh, it's just whining and complaining, Oh, you're so disadvantage, though. Victim culture, like we have all of these things to be able to attach those labels to give us a free range to brush things off, and not have to truly face how hard it is to grapple with these realities. They are realities, they are empirically verifiable realities. And if we don't grapple with them, we will likely perpetuate them. And that is just not correct slide.

Michael Burns: 1:06:47

Yeah. Well, there you have it. I appreciate that. So much, so helpful. Before I let you go, I want to have a little fun with you. We do a thing from time to time here called the flip of the coin five, I'm gonna give you two choices and you got to pick one as quickly as you can without thinking about it. You ready? Okay. Ready? There we go. When it comes to cuisine, Indian or Italian, Indian, nice. If you had to watch a game baseball or football. That's hard because I want to say, but okay. Okay. Do you have a favorite sport?

Jamila Michener: 1:07:27

Probably swimming. I used to swim in high school. So I know that's not a common favorite sport, but I love watching

Michael Burns: 1:07:34

Olympic thing, you know? Yeah. Okay. All right. If you if you got to time travel, would you travel to the past or the future? Yeah, definitely the past. Yeah. As a historian, I would expect you to say that. And I'm worried we won't be careful about that. All right. Yeah. r&b or disco, r&b. Oh, okay. All right. That's what I grew up on. Okay. And if you if you had to take a vacation, at a resort or in the woods. Oh, there you go. All right.

Jamila Michener: 1:08:11

Yeah, I live in upstate New York. The winter in my backyard. I get enough of that. All right.

Michael Burns: 1:08:17

Jimmy, the missionary your book is fragmented democracy, Medicaid, federalism and unequal politics. pick up a copy today. You can get in my Amazon. Thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. Thanks for listening, everyone. Thank you for joining us on another episode of The all things to all people podcast. If you have any questions, feedback, thoughts, write me and all things to all people podcast@gmail.com. And please take a moment if you like this podcast, to like it, subscribe, share it, if you can help more people find this podcast and help us out. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.