Cut to the Chase - Friday, June 5, 2026

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1. you're listening to kpfk 90.7 fm in los angeles and on the web at kpfk.org
2. pacifica radio for all of southern california and beyond
3. And welcome to another edition of Cut to the Chase.
4. My name is Sly Rivers, aka Sylvester Rivers, whichever you prefer.
5. Just don't call me late to dinner.
6. This is a program that we are truth tellers.
7. We get people who have analysis and information, and you, the guests, later on in the program, we will open up the phones because we're talking to.
8. I'm excited about this interview.
9. Brother Steve Phillips, who wrote us several books, the one we're going to talk about, somebody actually came in and gave me this.
10. They said, look at this, how we win the Civil War.
11. I said, oh, my God, I've been thinking about that for decades.
12. Somebody, matter of fact, asked me, they said, you know, when all this madness comes, they said, do you think we're in Civil War?
13. No, they said, do you think there's going to be a Civil War?
14. I said, we've been in a Civil War.
15. And then this book dropped in my lap.
16. Steve wrote this book, How We Win the Civil War.
17. He also wrote Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?
18. And what is it, The Brown?
19. Let the other one, Steve, welcome to Cut to the Chase.
20. And introduce yourself and tell me that first book you wrote.
21. Okay, you're muted.
22. Hold on a second. We don't hear sound.
23. Okay. Can you hear me now?
24. Yeah, we got you loud and clear now. Thanks, man.
25. Okay, great.
26. Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here for part of the conversation.
27. No, you're the whole conversation today, Rob.
28. Yes. Glad to be here to be part of the conversation.
29. Okay, got you.
30. Right.
31. Yeah, the first book was called Brown is the New White.
32. We were trying to lay out there and explain really how Obama won and how it was a function of the country's changing demographics and not an issue about just his singular gifts.
33. Obviously, he was gifted. So we're trying to make that case in terms of understanding politics and then how we win the Civil War and then our white wins more than everybody else because we have not yet won the war or convinced everybody of these arguments.
34. So true that. So you wrote a couple of books. This one, How We Win the Civil War. So tell us about yourself a little bit. So people get a background before we get into the I don't want to say meat and potatoes because I'm vegetarian. I'll say salad and beans. Go ahead. What got you into writing these books? Who are you? People say, well, who's Steve Phillips? Who are you, man?
35. Yeah. So I'm a writer, activist, organizer. I'm literally a child of the civil rights movement. Grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. My family.
36. Hello, Buckeye, y'all. Go ahead.
37. There we go. We desegregated the neighborhood we lived on, Dartmoor Road. My brother was the first black student at Fairfax Elementary School.
38. Wow.
39. And one of my earliest memories was actually my dad took me to see Martin Luther King when he came to Cleveland.
40. I was like three years old.
41. He put me on his shoulders And we also civil rights books around the house I read all the biographies of Dr King in the local library
42. And so I was very shaped by the civil rights milieu.
43. And then my grandfather was a minister, Glenville Church of God, Reverend A.R. Cochran.
44. And so I grew up in that tradition as well.
45. And I had an interest in electoral politics all along.
46. My next-door neighbor, Art Brooks, ran for state legislature.
47. I went to his victory party when I was eight years old.
48. So I had all those elements.
49. And so for me, in 1984, when Jesse Jackson ran for president, I was 20 years old, college student, trying to understand what was going on in the world and how to make a difference.
50. We brought all those things together, civil rights, legacy, and tradition, religious language and metaphor, and an expression in electoral politics.
51. So that was a very defining aspect of my life.
52. I've been trying to build the small R rainbow ever since.
53. And really this concept, when the old minorities come together, they comprise a new majority.
54. And that's really been directly my life's work, whether organizing or writing about it or doing any other realm of activity to advance building that cause.
55. Beautiful, beautiful story.
56. So now here we are, 2026.
57. Trump is in power.
58. and he's creating havoc.
59. Or is it havoc?
60. Is it not just a template of what's been going on?
61. What this book does, which I really like about it,
62. is that it shows historical commonalities of the tactics that they used then and now.
63. It's almost like they went back and said,
64. okay, what were they doing to keep in power, they being the white nationalists?
65. and you have in that book, you outlined different laws, different tactics.
66. That's the beautiful thing about it.
67. Just comment on that before I ask you specific questions.
68. Yeah, so originally, so I wrote the first book around this new way to really,
69. because I was, because to me, and I was talking about my own history
70. and seeing the civil rights trajectory, the Jesse Jackson campaign.
71. Jesse went from 3.5 million votes in 84 to 7 million votes in 88.
72. He was the highest runner-up in history to that point in time in 1988.
73. And so it was very clear to me that Obama's election was an extension of that movement and those changes within the country and the demographic changes.
74. But people didn't understand that.
75. They kept thinking it was like a one-off or just because Obama could give speeches.
76. So I tried to quantify quite literally what was the Obama coalition.
77. And 80% of people of color, 39% of whites, that's the majority of people.
78. Then my publisher came to me a few years later and asked if I was interested in writing another book.
79. And this was after Trump had been elected.
80. And my first thought was, well, let's look at this moment and let's use the Civil War as a metaphor in terms of being so much division, so much hostility, et cetera.
81. Then when I got into it and I started researching, it became clear that quite literally the Confederates never stopped fighting the Civil War.
82. And then most prominently, which I didn't even know until I started researching the book, because obviously everybody knows Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, but the public at large does not know when he was assassinated.
83. It was just five days after the ostensible surrender at Appomattox that he was assassinated.
84. John Wilkes Booth went to hear Lincoln give a speech outdoors at the White House the Tuesday after that Sunday surrender And he just made a very frankly tepid comment about people voting in Louisiana
85. John Wilkes Booth turns to the person next to him and says, that means N-word citizenship.
86. That is the last speech he will ever give.
87. And that Friday, Wilkes Booth went into the Ford Theater and shot Lincoln in the back of the head.
88. And Will Smith was a proud, unapologetic, white supremacist confederate.
89. And so that's not surrendering at all.
90. And so then you move to Andrew Johnson becoming president as the vice president.
91. And it's a cautionary tale in terms of who you choose.
92. And so he was, Andrew Johnson publicly, unapologetically said, this is a white country.
93. and as long as I am the president, it's going to be a white government.
94. It opposes civil rights laws, it opposes everything.
95. So you just take that all the way up to the civil rights movement and up to today.
96. So what I was trying to illustrate, two things.
97. One was that the Confederates have never stopped fighting the Civil War.
98. We remain engaged in this existential battle over what is this country.
99. Is this a multiracial democracy or is this a primarily white nation, a white male nation?
100. And so we have that reality. And then I was also trying to show the path to power and the places that have made progress and what the formula was in terms of them being able to move things forward. Georgia and Harris County, Texas and Arizona and Virginia, etc.
101. That's very interesting.
102. southern white power structure had slaves. So they were getting a lot of power. Now, if I'm
103. incorrect, let me know. A lot of power. So they wanted to move slavery up to the north. Now,
104. of course, then that would mean the whites in the north, their jobs would be lost. So they didn't
105. want that. So that's one reason. So it wasn't about any moral conviction, as you well know,
106. because Abraham Lincoln said, and I probably said on this show many times, if there's a superior
107. and inferior race, I have no doubt that the white race is superior and the black race
108. is inferior. And if we do have to, so that war continues. And right now you see two factions
109. of white nationalism fighting over it. Is my analysis correct or am I totally off base?
110. No, it's largely correct. I mean, it's, I would, you know, kind of chuckle as you were
111. saying that because lincoln did say that in one of these speeches trying to say he's not too much
112. for black people but what's uh i don't know i'm using probably the wrong word but notable
113. is that even with that point of view he was still uh unacceptable to the hard the most hardcore
114. white supremacist and nationalist and so even lincoln saying oh whites are better and trying to
115. to calm those fears, they were still terrified.
116. That's the essence of what even the succeeding from the union was.
117. You had an election where the candidate who was backed by black people won and the losing side could not accept the election Very similar to 2021 And so they took it all the way to actually
118. January 6, 2021, you're referring to.
119. Yes, exactly.
120. And so when people stormed the Capitol carrying Confederate flags,
121. wearing sweatshirts, saying MAGA Civil War, January 6, 2021.
122. And so, yeah, even though Lincoln was not, you know—
123. And didn't he not also say that if he could keep the Union and keep slavery intact, he would do so?
124. And if he could keep the Union and exonerate or exile or free the slaves, he would do so?
125. So his main thing was to keep the Union.
126. Go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt.
127. Yes, no, that's true, and he did in fact summon and task somebody with running the numbers on what it would cost to ship black folks back to Africa.
128. So we shouldn't be under any illusions about Lincoln being Black Lives Matter champion.
129. But if you look at the realm, certainly of all the presidents and many of the white people in the history of this country, there has been nobody else who took the country to war to defeat the white supremacist.
130. supremacist. And so there's a lot, you hear a lot of like lip service, et cetera, but Lincoln
131. actually committed the resources of the entire country, including the, as well as the military
132. might of the country to defeat the white supremacist.
133. Well, let me ask you that. Was that the white supremacist he wanted to defeat or the white
134. supremacist who wanted to succeed from the state?
135. At some level, that doesn't matter because what his motivation was, because that of what his
136. action was because lots of people talk and after george floyd was murdered you know saw different
137. people you know was it uh jerry jones from the cowboys taking a knee different people in congress
138. wearing cantaclaw for a couple days so people do whatever kind of performative exercises but
139. clearly obviously slavery was uh not a good thing for black people and even today right you see very
140. little willingness and motivation, even after Floyd was killed, the racial reckoning period,
141. a reluctance to use the power of the government to address the conditions that black people were
142. facing. And Lincoln used the power of the government to go to literal battle. That resulted
143. in us no longer being legally slaves.
144. So that, I think, has to be appreciated from a historical context, regardless of the complexity
145. of his motivations and his thinking.
146. Well, I just heard you say that he fought against slavery because it was so bad.
147. But I just heard recently that slavery was good for black folks because it taught us
148. skills.
149. And there's no other way you can learn skills than to be held in human bondage.
150. Twenty lashes if you don't get the lesson right.
151. Exactly.
152. So critical race theory was amazing how the critical race theory was basically looking at how the judiciary system was used to empower the Confederates or white nationalism or how it affected.
153. I wouldn't shouldn't say that how it affected society in whole as a whole.
154. They were lost.
155. Can you pull out of your memory some of the laws?
156. Because this was so amazing to me, some of the stuff they put in place to keep the Confederacy going.
157. Can you pull some of those?
158. out of your head? Well, yeah, there's a lot of different aspects. One, the most central really
159. was the whole piece around the voter suppression, right? And so Mississippi and South Carolina were
160. majority black at the end of the Civil War, so they had to suppress the vote. So they come up
161. with all of these different measures, right? And they had, what was it, an eight-box rule
162. and that there's – to be registered, you have like eight boxes around different questions about the government and the constitution.
163. If you didn't get all eight of those questions right, you couldn't register to vote.
164. And then bear in mind it had been illegal to teach black people to read.
165. And so you –
166. Listen, people, did you hear what he said?
167. It was illegal to teach black folks to read and write.
168. Illegal.
169. And now we have people who say, I don't like to read.
170. Go ahead, I'm sorry.
171. You're right.
172. I just wanted to put that point out and emphasize what they were doing to keep their power and keep us in check.
173. Yeah, no, 100%.
174. So you have that kind of – that's one example.
175. One thing that I didn't even know until I was researching the book, writing How We Win the Civil War, is we had for about 30 years in this country whites-only primaries.
176. And certainly in the South and in Texas and other places.
177. Legally.
178. Legally.
179. It went to the Supreme Court like three times, and they went back, so you have to modify it, et cetera.
180. They're trying to argue, well, a political party is not a governmental entity, so it's not under the laws of control of the government.
181. So a political party can have a whites-only primary so long as the general election has everybody participate in that.
182. But in the South, it was a one-party region, and so winning the primary was winning the election.
183. And this went back and forth, up and down to the Supreme Court over the course of 20 to 30 years.
184. And people unapologetically standing up and saying, yeah, we should have primaries where only white people can vote.
185. So you have that.
186. Then you have a lot of the statues finally came down almost 150 plus years later.
187. There was a massive statue and monument in Virginia to Robert E. Lee, the general of the Confederacy, decades before we could get the Lincoln Memorial created.
188. And there was – bear in mind, Lincoln was killed in 1865.
189. We didn't get the Lincoln Memorial until like 1920s.
190. And this is because the Confederates did not want there to be a memorial to somebody who had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
191. So, you take all of that and then you get into things like the GI Bill and the carve-outs in the New Deal.
192. And so the southern descendants of the Confederacy who were in Congress carved out of the New Deal protections that you would not provide protections and benefits to domestic workers who are largely African-American and to farm workers who are largely Latino.
193. And so this structurally builds in the racial wealth gap in terms of who actually has access to the kinds of jobs and revenues that will be able to lift up their families.
194. And then on top of that is the GI Bill, which largely went – basically gave billions of dollars to white people and created the white middle class within this country.
195. And so that kind of lost to history and all this talk about handouts to people of color But the largest handout was to whites that created the middle class after the war So we all hear people celebrating the New Deal the New Deal
196. But from what I understand you saying is that it was not handed out to us, us being those who melanated you.
197. Correct.
198. Well, and they very specifically in the negotiation and the legislation carved out and said these benefits are not going to extend to domestic workers, which is almost universally African-Americans.
199. It was not going to extend to farm workers.
200. So you have these kinds of conscious exclusions of – and not just exclusions but inclusions and preferences being shown to whites through the official public policies of the city, states and federal government.
201. So in the meantime, local laws were being written to deny black folks not only of their voting so-called rights, but just of their humanity.
202. And then, because, you know, my family had to fight, I don't know if it was the Klan, but white supremacists in the South, they had to fight them.
203. And I don't know if anybody was killed or not, but then they came up north, that migration to the north, because a lot of people were tired of fighting, you know, daily 24-7 battle, fighting anything.
204. If you look at somebody, you're going to get hung, et cetera, et cetera.
205. Statutes.
206. So now what is so amazing about what you're writing is bring it forward and you have the same thing going on.
207. You want to talk about that comparative historical analysis of those laws and what's happening now?
208. Well, a lot of those things are actually coming back.
209. Just in terms of the thing we're talking about.
210. Oh, they're coming back.
211. Right.
212. So the stuff that we were talking about before, much of this has actually been documented in Richard Rothstein's book, The Color of Law, where he actually goes through and talks about these different pieces.
213. Things like, you talk about restrictive covenants.
214. They're built into the local laws that you cannot sell a property in this region to a black person.
215. One of the main engines of wealth creation and economic mobility in the country has been homeownership and the increased value of property and real estate.
216. And so when you bar black people from buying in a certain area, and I thought about this in my first book.
217. I have a section about why white people have all the money.
218. And I get into this issue around the racial wealth.
219. First, I say, you know, the history of this country is actually quite simple and short in that you had people from Europe come over, displace and kill many of the indigenous people who lived here,
220. found that it was very laborious to do the work in the fields to get the cotton picked
221. so you could ship it and make money.
222. And so they shipped in human beings from Africa to do that work
223. to generate the profits and the wealth within this country.
224. And now we've had a racial wealth gap in the country ever since.
225. And the question is when would it have actually been redressed?
226. When do we tackle that?
227. And I use the example in my first book about the home I grew up in.
228. I mean, actually, you know, these here get our neighborhood.
229. We moved in the suburbs, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
230. It's a few miles away.
231. My grandparents lived in the city of Cleveland And I went back and actually looked at the economic uh records in that marie the house in the suburbs
232. had almost doubled in value
233. and had gone uh... you know for like seven hundred thousand hundred fifty
234. thousand dollars in value
235. my grandparents plus in the city
236. had only got up late ten thousand dollars in only like thirty forty
237. thousand dollars in value to start
238. so
239. And it was actually that money, that equity that in the house we had in the suburbs that my mom used to got a home equity loan to be able to send me to a private high school that gave me the connections as well as some of the platform and educational opportunities that then led me to, you know, have propelled me really my whole life.
240. And so by lot goes back to this real estate and home ownership piece.
241. So these racial covenants that restrict black people from having that kind of economic engine have been very fundamental to the perpetuation of the racial wealth gap in the country.
242. So that's one piece.
243. Reparations now, y'all.
244. Reparations now.
245. I mean, there's a lot of documentation of why repair and reparations should be paid.
246. and it's just
247. phenomenal that then the excuse is
248. no money when you have billions
249. I'm sorry, trillions
250. going to kill people.
251. Somebody did a
252. actually in our most recent
253. podcast
254. Steve Phillips, we have
255. we're talking about asset management in this country
256. and how there are all these trillions
257. we don't even know about or access
258. or think about
259. and somebody tweeted out after the COVID first hit,
260. Congress passed a bill in a matter of days
261. to move a trillion dollars to respond to the COVID epidemic.
262. And somebody tweets out after that,
263. so we could afford reparations, right?
264. Right. Wow.
265. I want to go to the last part of your book,
266. but before I do that,
267. so you outline laws,
268. just everything that makes this a white nationalist country.
269. You even have Ann Coulter saying that she couldn't vote for Vivek Ramaswamy
270. because she's WASP, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
271. So my question to you is, are we in denial?
272. Because, you know, we think things are getting better.
273. but as this book shows you it's an ongoing thing and in with the complicity with the complicity i
274. want to say this with the complicity of the so-called progressive party the democrats
275. are we in denial is there a cognitive dissonance going on because we think things are going to get
276. better we think this is no this is has started out is was this is my opinion right here a white
277. nationalist country. Are we in denial, Brother Steve Phillips?
278. Oh, absolutely. And it's denial and it's denial at our great, great peril. And that's really why
279. I have to keep trying to write these books and try to get out and share this analysis.
280. It's like I was saying, first, that the election of Obama was a function or was made possible,
281. would not have been possible, the way you put it,
282. without the demographic revolution in the country.
283. This country was 12% people of color in the mid-1960s,
284. and it now 41 people of color And I actually run these numbers If Obama had run against Reagan in 80 and 84 and gotten the same percentage of each racial group that he got he would have lost
285. He wouldn't have been able to beat Reagan because the country wasn't diverse enough yet.
286. And so you look at that as this one underlying fundamental reality.
287. Then it's no accident that this current president followed the first black president.
288. And so this level of anger and resentment and fear about the changing racial composition of the country is and has always been an animating force within the country's politics.
289. And that's one of the main things that we're in denial about.
290. And it is very dangerous.
291. And I think there's no better example, I feel, of the failure to appreciate the nature of the fight we are actually facing than what happened when Joe Biden came in in 2021.
292. And we had an opportunity. If we had had clarity that we were fighting a fight, which was not just, oh, here's some ideas that are a little more conservative here, some ideas that are a little more liberal, and we'll discuss them in the public square of ideas and the best, most rational idea will prevail.
293. That's one hoped-for conception of what's going on in this country.
294. Another is that we are still engaged in a civil war.
295. There are no rules.
296. There's now no respect for the other side.
297. People are willing to do anything to defeat and destroy the notion that this should be a multiracial democracy.
298. And most particularly, they're willing to and focused on trying to stop people from voting, particularly in the context of this demographic revolution.
299. So that's, in terms of how, as I was saying before, in terms of how the things we've gone back to, we used to have this very explicit exclusion.
300. So we used to have, well, still have in some places, the runoff elections that was fostered in Georgia originally by this guy, Grover Norquist.
301. I like to break his last name, but it was a Georgia state legislator who put forward this runoff election and explicitly did so because he wanted to dilute the power of the black vote.
302. And so and there's quotes from him to to that effect.
303. and because he was concerned that if the black vote consolidated and the white vote split
304. and um then that would be a difficulty so they created runoff elections to be able to actually
305. do that and that was an explicit piece now more recently um since uh um denmark groover that's
306. his name the georgia legislator he's also the person who put the confederate flag back into
307. the Georgia state flag.
308. So this turns out to be good for any unclarity around his politics or his worldview.
309. But now that Warnock has won, Raphael Warnock, Senator, has won so many runoff elections
310. in Georgia, people are saying, well, maybe we should get rid of runoff elections.
311. But it's a specific example of trying to suppress the vote and try to minimize through
312. racial terror, through administrative difficulty, through hiding information, misinformation,
313. That's what's coming back now. And so there's such an unapologetic offensive now with the Supreme Court having opened up the floodgates.
314. It's interesting also that I think Malcolm X even talked about this, and if not, I'm pretty sure he talked about it in a similar context.
315. I think he was talking about the Civil Rights Act, but still the Voting Rights Act. Why do we need a
316. Voting Rights Act in this country. We have the 15th Amendment that says that you can't discriminate
317. against the article of oppression. Why would we even need a 15th Amendment? We'd have to go to
318. war to actually get that. And so there's that whole question around why do you need additional
319. legislation to make sure that people are not stopping people from voting? And then if we
320. think that's a necessary thing, why does it have to be renewed on the regular? And we do it every
321. 20 years or so. So that makes it a whole vulnerable piece. So this focus on trying to weaken the laws
322. and open the floodgates to voter suppression is really one of the most fundamental ways that they
323. have tried to maintain their power and really take us back to an era where we were much further away
324. from being a multiracial democracy. Okay. We're talking to Steve Phillips. You're listening to
325. cut to the chase.
326. And yes, we were going to be
327. taking your calls a little later on the program.
328. 818-985-5735.
329. Hit option
330. one. That's Bob Marley in the background.
331. He's saying
332. this song is called War.
333. War.
334. Everywhere is war
335. Yeah, he says until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior
336. Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
337. Everywhere is war
338. Me say war
339. Until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation
340. Until their color of man's skin is no more significant than the color of his eyes
341. there's war.
342. Bob Marley, by the way,
343. this is,
344. this song was a speech
345. given by Haile Selassie at the UN,
346. I think, I might get the date wrong,
347. I think 62, 1962,
348. Haile Selassie went to the United Nations
349. and gave this speech.
350. And so what Bob Marley did
351. We'll just transpose the lyrics and make this song called War.
352. So you're listening to Cut to the Chase, 818-985-5735.
353. Hit Option 1, those colors on the line.
354. Remain patient.
355. I got Will working hard.
356. We thank him for his board op.
357. And on the Zoom line, we have Brother Steve Phillips.
358. And he's talking about his book.
359. We're talking about his book.
360. for the most part how we win the Civil War.
361. People say, what are you talking about the Civil War?
362. Yeah, the war is going on.
363. According to Steve, he says that the war never ended.
364. It never ended.
365. It just changed looks.
366. It changed faces.
367. It changed tactics.
368. It changed, but you know, you see the same tactics today.
369. So that's what we're talking about today on Cut to the Chase.
370. I'm going to get, this is getting,
371. it's going to get even hotter up in here, y'all.
372. there's a couple of decisions.
373. I want your opinion on that. There was a decision
374. in 1984
375. called
376. Plessy versus Ferguson.
377. That opinion
378. said that
379. you equal except all things are equal Tell me Separate but equal Separate but equal Right And this is an example of the attempt to the continuity of the if you define the Civil War as the battle as this existential battle over is this a multiracial democracy or is this a fundamentally white nation
380. That is the battle which has never ended and which rages to this day.
381. and so you saw after even after the civil war it raised throughout the rest of the uh 1800s
382. as i was saying they assassinated lincoln and then johnson came in as president and tried to
383. oppose the civil rights legislation to bring about some measure of equality people who had
384. been held in slavery not just held in slavery who had been held in slavery and had done the work
385. that had made america wealthy and so what are we doing about those people and so that's when we
386. That's when the Congress moved to elect the other grouping of folks and they passed the constitutional amendments, 13th, 14th, 15th amendments.
387. But then fairly quickly, there's trying to effort to restrict those and try to limit the reach of that.
388. And that's really what Plessy versus Ferguson was.
389. I think it was 1896, I believe, that there was a suit.
390. The Supreme Court said that you can have legalized segregation.
391. It's fine to segregate people legally, explicitly, whites only, coloreds, so long as they're saying the facilities are equal.
392. And so the way they were doing that, they were trying to narrow down the reach of those post-Civil War constitutional amendments, 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, and saying, yes, the amendments say that you can't discriminate, but it doesn't mean that you have to let people ride on the same train cars as long as they're quote-unquote equal.
393. So it was one example of Supreme Court being quite complicit in the ongoing struggle to limit the reach of efforts to make this country more equal and just and to do their part in the effort to keep this from becoming a truly multiracial democracy.
394. Okay, so you had the Plessy versus Ferguson decision in 1896, and then came the Brown versus Board of Education.
395. Yeah, I think it was 1954.
396. Now, my contention is some people say, oh, that was great, it was great, great, great.
397. But my contention is this.
398. It's not integration, it's assimilation.
399. So if Plessy v. Ferguson was actually equal, it might have been more effective.
400. The problem was it never was and never would be equal.
401. So people, you know, they celebrated Brown v. Board of Education.
402. But what that did was not give us any freedom.
403. It assimilated us into a system that trained us, the school that then made us more dependent.
404. And I'm saying this, now this is just my, you know, a lot of people don't agree with this,
405. But Plessy v. Ferguson, if it did what it should have done, I think it would have been better than Brown v. Board of Education.
406. Because you look at it, when we did have equal facilities, all the cities that came up were burnt down.
407. They were burnt down So you know the thing is it not integration it assimilation Your thoughts Yeah no there an argument to be made for that I often you know I will reflect this
408. on the people that, you know, if I had ever received my 40 acres and a mule, I wouldn't
409. care if you call me the N-word, right? I mean, so it's like, what is consequential? Is it your,
410. you know, insults, or is it you're denying me a job and not denying me, you know, economic progress,
411. et cetera. And so there's a case to be made, and there's a case to be made in that regard.
412. More fundamentally, I think more relevant to this moment is that I do feel we were locked into
413. a framework that had limited utility let's just put it that way in that the you know i think the
414. aspirations were correct or wanting not having wanting to not have legalized segregation wanting
415. to have students have access to good schooling have access to good facilities as well as the
416. most trained teachers etc so that was all very laudable and so you can see why that was the
417. thing of that moment, but for us to be locked into that framework for so long.
418. So I served on the school board in San Francisco.
419. The bell they gave me when I left the school board behind me in my Zoom here.
420. And we had a desegregation order.
421. This was the 1990s.
422. And when we got tens of millions of dollars from the state for, because of that desegregation
423. order, but it was all premised on this theory, which is fundamentally what Brown v. Board
424. education rights, that black kids and white kids need to sit together, which is a different
425. issue than black children need to have quality schools, quality instructional materials,
426. trained and effective teachers.
427. And are we moving money towards those types of things?
428. So we had to kind of play the game around the racial composition of the schools because that's what gave us the money to be able to hire teachers and pay for the teachers.
429. What's relevant about that for this moment, because this administration and this federal moment that we're facing is taking such a wrecking ball to the totality of the infrastructure and the premises of the civil rights movement that it creates the obligation, which I guess is also an opportunity, to rethink these things.
430. is what do we think should be the programs, the policies, the laws that will really bring about black liberation, true equality, true multiracial democracy.
431. Wow. We have a caller on the line and we're going to get to you in one second, caller, but just a couple of other things I want to comment on.
432. So you see strategies from the Civil War on up to today.
433. And one of the new strategies is black faces in high places.
434. I liked in your book how you talked about Clarence Thomas.
435. And I would go further and say he was probably not only elected because of his blackness, but because I think he was threatened.
436. You know, you do the right thing.
437. And if you don't, we know your family, blah, blah, blah, blah.
438. I won't say that.
439. But then also you mentioned that if you had your 40 acres and a mule, that you wouldn't need any money.
440. There's a saying that says you wouldn't care if they called you the N-word.
441. The fool is not the one who calls you out of name The fool is the one who answers So we need to do that So we see that the strategy in your book is like get black folks to be the face
442. Let me ask you this.
443. Is Kamala Harris, was Kamala Harris to you the Democrats, the Republicans got Tim Scott?
444. Was Kamala Harris the Democrats, Tom Scott?
445. Oh, no, no, not by any stretch of the imagination.
446. I've known Kamala for a long time actually.
447. I'm in San Francisco and so I – we kind of came up together in many ways.
448. So I've seen her trajectory.
449. So she's not Malcolm X or Fannie Lou Hamer but she's certainly not on the conservative
450. side.
451. So she is who she is.
452. She's a politician.
453. elected official. And then that's the other thing is that, you know, just asking to talk about the
454. power is not in the White House, it's in our house. And so it's really about making the elected
455. official be responsive to what actually has to happen. So I think it's of limited value or
456. utility to be looking at. I don't think any of these elected officials are going to save us.
457. And so it's a question of can we build the movement and can we build the power and the force
458. which will then push the elected.
459. So we did, I remember, I had this, I experienced this in 1989.
460. I was part of the student movement, statewide black student alliance
461. and the statewide Latinos, the Metcha, the statewide Asians,
462. and a lot of progressive whites.
463. So we did a march for educational rights in Sacramento,
464. the state capitol, to the state capitol demanding more money for education.
465. And we couldn't get the, when we were planning it,
466. We couldn't get the state elected officials to be responsive to us or to be supportive, et cetera, including Willie Brown, who was the speaker of the assembly at the time.
467. But when we showed up at the Capitol with 5,000 people, who popped up on stage but Willie Brown?
468. Because he looked outside and he saw all the people who were out there.
469. It's like, oh, okay, what's the thing?
470. If the people lead, the leaders will follow.
471. So I put Kamala in that category. And we need to be finding people who more come out of the movement and who have been part of the expression of the struggle for justice.
472. I think that's what happened in New York, right?
473. Mamdami was very connected to the Working Families Party and to the community organizing groups there who had been on the ground trying to advocate for justice and equality and better policies.
474. And he came out of that movement and they helped to propel him.
475. And so then he was much more tied to the forces pushing for real change than a lot of the other people on the Democratic Party.
476. Okay. I hear you. I have to agree to disagree with you.
477. Only because I see who she had backing her.
478. Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney. Oh, my goodness.
479. Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney.
480. And refusing to denounce the war.
481. Matter of fact, supporting the war.
482. But that's on us. Let's go to the calls.
483. We have a call. You can call back.
484. There's one on the line.
485. 818-985-5735.
486. Hit option one.
487. We are talking to Brother Steve Phillips.
488. He wrote several books.
489. The one we're specifically talking about today is How We Win the Civil War.
490. Yes, you heard How We Win the Civil War.
491. In other words, it hasn't ended.
492. That's what he says, and I agree with him on that.
493. We have Kamal from Compton.
494. You have a question for Steve.
495. not really more of a quick comment
496. go ahead
497. alright, Frida Land
498. first I'd like to acknowledge
499. the venerated ancestors
500. Malia Washington joining them on last Tuesday
501. oh god yes, that was so sad
502. yes, I know she was close to you too
503. she introduced me to your show
504. anyway
505. and my email address is included
506. in case you or any of the listeners
507. want to get details about her celebration
508. thanks to Steve
509. and I'm reflecting on Steve Coakley.
510. I worked with him, rest in peace,
511. Phillips, for these thoughts on liberation.
512. The Constitution is designed,
513. and white nationalists don't care about breaking the law either,
514. to provide loopholes so that they maintain power.
515. Your historical analysis is on point at every point.
516. As a citizen of the Republic of New Africa,
517. not to be confused with a spokesperson for the RNA,
518. I think it's an excellent opportunity to maximize the desired creation of a nation.
519. I agree.
520. Land-based, focused on legal plebiscite, but by any means necessary.
521. Kamal, thank you.
522. Kathrila Land.
523. So he's talking about the, there was a movement by Obalio, I forgot his name.
524. In other words, it was for black folks to get a section of land in the South.
525. In other words, you know, we don't want to assimilate.
526. We want our own, and a lot of people are pushing toward that, but that's almost like succession.
527. You succeed, we have to have the power.
528. That's almost like succession.
529. And then the question is, can we, I think in your book you talk about Rodney,
530. and you said his thing was, can we all get along, that famous saying, can't we all get along?
531. But here's the question.
532. Some of us don't want to get along.
533. Why should we want to be along?
534. When I was in college, it was like when we ate in the cafeteria, basically all the black folks sat together, all the white folks.
535. Then we integrated sometimes, but it wasn't forced integration.
536. It was like, hey, we're comfortable.
537. But we still had those friends.
538. So what are we doing?
539. Are we forcing this concept?
540. And does this maintain power?
541. I'm just rambling now, so maybe you want to comment on that, and then we'll go to our next caller.
542. Well, it's interesting. I've mentioned that one of the probably most formative experiences of my life was the Rainbow Coalition work and Jesse Jackson's campaigns in 1984 and 1988 and that being tied back to the civil rights movement and recently passing away and feeling the profound void in terms of national politics and organizing.
543. And so one of the things I would even commend to the listeners, this is a film, a documentary called Nation Time, which was about the National Black Political Convention of 1972.
544. And I think it's instructive as we think about how do you organize and how do you project a voice that can lay out an agenda, that can lay out a policy agenda, that can impact those who are in positions of policymaking.
545. So you had Jesse Jackson. You had Amiri Baraka coming out of Newark and coming out of the Congress of African Peoples. You had Dick Hatcher, an elected official, the mayor of Gary, Indiana. All those different sectors coming together.
546. Civil rights tradition with Reverend Jackson, the more black left nationalist sector with Mary Electeds, with Richard Hatcher, all coming together.
547. And there were 10,000 people who came to that convention.
548. And that was a force within the national political discourse and discussion that could advance an agenda that could potentially make some progress at the city and local level and could be able to push things in a more progressive direction
549. And so as I think about where we're at in this moment, those are the kind of things I'm thinking about is how do we strengthen and solidify and elevate the leadership from the respective communities, Latino communities as a whole.
550. other issue in terms of where is the leadership, where is the progressive leadership, which is
551. explaining and educating and moving that community to a posture of being, pushing for progressive
552. social change as an ongoing, consistent matter. So that's the thing about the rainbow. You need
553. to have a strong black stripe, a strong Latino, strong Asian, and strong progressive white.
554. So that's kind of my thought about what he was saying. I mean, I'm familiar with the
555. Republic of New Africa and that work and the whole concept.
556. Thank you.
557. Republic of New Africa.
558. Yes.
559. Yeah.
560. So I feel that there's a way for those types of energy and organizing to be manifested in this contemporary environment,
561. which honors that orientation and contributes to pushing this country overall in a more progressive direction.
562. I like it.
563. Barry from Joshua Tree.
564. What you got to say?
565. You have a question, please.
566. If it's a comment, just make it short of a question.
567. You can go 45 seconds.
568. It's actually just a comment talking about why Obama won the first term is I don't think any Republicans wanted to run at the time because we were in the start of a depression.
569. The whole real estate market, we were like Bush had run the country into the ground.
570. Obama came in, somehow patched it together and put it back together.
571. Hey, Barry, that's a good theory, but that's a good theory.
572. But how do you talk about he ran against Hillary?
573. Maybe because she's a woman?
574. Probably.
575. But I think we're in the same sort of position now where Biden came in after COVID, which totally wrecked the economy.
576. A whole new ballgame.
577. And he patched it back together and got us back in it.
578. And now we've got another Republican just running it into the ground.
579. It's like they're supposed to be the economically advanced, you know, don't waste money.
580. But every time they leave office, we're left in a real mess.
581. And that's basically all I wanted to say.
582. I'll listen back.
583. Thank you for your comments.
584. We'll see if Steve has any comments on your comments.
585. Yeah, well, I think it's an important underlying principle that needs to be clarified.
586. And it's a very common misconception, frankly, in terms of you hear in the media, the mainstream media, all these different people like Ezra Klein and other folks don't actually understand what's happening in terms of politics in the country.
587. And there's this view that every election starts afresh and that all the voters come to the election, come to the polls with no preconceived conceptions, no allegiances, and they're going to process and make it their decision around who to vote for based upon either the economy or based upon this.
588. That's not how human beings function.
589. That's not how electoral behavior works within this country.
590. The vast, vast majority of people in this country know which side they are on.
591. And this gets back to this existential battle.
592. Is it going to be a multiracial democracy or is this going to be a white nationalist
593. nation?
594. And in that context we continue to underestimate the power of the appeal of the racial fear and resentment that is being stirred up among white voters As George Wallace famously said the segregationist governor of Alabama
595. says, I tried to talk about schools and taxes and roads, and I couldn't get them to listen.
596. Then I started talking about the N-word, and they stomped the floor.
597. Say what?
598. And that's a quote from George Wallace explaining his political rise and his power is that all these other issues.
599. But then when you went to the core piece around the racial fears and anxieties.
600. So that's the fundamental misconception.
601. I think it's very important to understand where we're at and where we go politically now, because that many people in the media and democratic politics, et cetera, have this notion that I would reason Trump won because the voters think about the voters.
602. if it's all the voters, the vast majority of the voters, switch their allegiances because of some other factors.
603. And that's not at all what is happening.
604. Fundamentally, we are very divided.
605. The good news is that our side of the division in terms of people of color and progressive whites is bigger.
606. But we have to lean into and invest in and commit to mobilizing that and fighting for that
607. and putting forward an agenda that will inspire and bring people out.
608. That's what has to happen, not being at the mercy of the gas prices or egg prices or these types of things.
609. 818-985-5735.
610. We'll try to get through the callers we have on the line.
611. But I love what you have.
612. You have solutions at the end of the book.
613. You have tactics to win.
614. One of the tactics you talk about is what they call universal basic income.
615. Universal basic income.
616. Basic income. Now, Cuba has universal basic income. Of course, they're under attack, obviously, for different reasons.
617. Well, basically because they could be a template. You go there and you say, oh, we could have this.
618. They don't want that. They don't want that. But before I ask my question, there's so many things I want to ask you.
619. We don't have enough time. We're running out of time. Can you believe that?
620. you mentioned
621. oh god I lost my thought
622. let's do this and I'll go back
623. to that so universal basic
624. income oh here's what I was going to do
625. this quote here in your book it says
626. 73 now this is like
627. the stimulus plan they gave checks everybody was
628. happy but a lot of Europeans
629. don't want that 73%
630. and 64%
631. respectively
632. this is among black folks among
633. whites the approval rate is
634. just 35%. Now, this is the approval rate for universal basic income. In other words, white
635. folks don't like, we don't want handouts. If it helps them, then we don't like it, even
636. if it hurts us, which seems to be the thought process. But yeah, universal basic income
637. for people. And it could be done easily. They gave out stimulus checks, and then the cost
638. millions of dollars to put Trump's name on it
639. to make you think it came from him.
640. But before we go to the next caller,
641. any comments of what I just said?
642. Well, fundamentally,
643. universal basic income is a concept
644. that Martin Luther King popularized
645. in his last book,
646. Where Do We Go From Here?
647. And he says all these other ways
648. we dance around the question of poverty,
649. let's try this program without housing,
650. this program over here.
651. He says ultimately the best way to address poverty
652. is to address poverty.
653. And they just provide a basic floor of income so nobody actually has to live on it Oh that makes too much sense It makes too much sense and so now we have California It doesn support capitalism
654. Right, so Michael Tubbs, who was the mayor of Stockton, created Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.
655. There's now 200 mayors across the country, and Michael's got this organization, End Poverty in California,
656. that's championing this concept.
657. But you're right, people see it through their own racial lens and only want the resources for their group,
658. than not others, some people.
659. But the concept is a very important public policy issue
660. that we should be championing in this day and age.
661. You know what?
662. We only have a couple of minutes left,
663. so I don't know if that caller is ready to be heard.
664. So give us a wrap-up of your books,
665. what you expect in the future,
666. and maybe in your last part of the second part of this book,
667. which we're talking about how we win the Civil War.
668. What were some of your strategies?
669. And, you know, there's a lot of strategies,
670. but we also have to have strategies in how to implement those strategies.
671. Well, the fundamental, let me say two things.
672. One, I talk about the importance of leaders, level five leaders.
673. And so I had the privilege and had the privilege of meeting Stacey Abrams in Georgia over a decade ago
674. and been supportive of her journey to register people of color,
675. get them to vote and to change the composition of the electorate of the voters in Georgia,
676. which led to sending two different senators from Georgia, which led to flipping the whole
677. United States Senate back in 2021. So finding the right leaders who are doing this kind of work,
678. backing them, putting your reputation, your resources, your networks behind them is one
679. piece. We've got a minute left. Keep going. And the other is voting. We need a crusade for
680. democracy in this country. If everybody voted, we would be able to advance an agenda of justice
681. and equality and multiracial democracy. And that's why they're so much trying to push it down. That's
682. why I talk about a million precinct captains. Make your own virtual precinct. Identify 20 people who
683. are in your network, your family, your neighborhood, and make sure all of them are registered. Make
684. sure all of them vote. And y'all, we've been listening to Steve Phillips. We've been focusing
685. on his book, How We Win the Civil War.
686. How We Win the Civil War.
687. Unfortunately for those callers who called in,
688. you have to call in earlier because, you know,
689. we could have gotten to you, but you wait until the last minute.
690. You wait until the last minute to vote, and I think you're right, Steve.
691. We need to restructure the voting process.
692. I think it should be a holiday.
693. There's a lot of things that should be done, could be done.
694. I think you mentioned that in your book.
695. anyway, we're out of time, so I guess I better get off.
696. My name is Sylvester Rivers.
697. You've been listening to Cut to the Chase.
698. Hey, Steve, man, I enjoyed the interview.
699. Are you going to allow us to invite you back?
700. I'll be happy to.
701. All right.
702. Appreciate the time.
703. Thanks for having me on.
704. We're out.
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