Started From The Bottom with Justin Richmond

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Malcolm Gladwell and today on Revisionist History, I have a special treat I'm going to play for you an interview I did with an old friend in Pushkin co conspirator Justin Richmond, who you may know from our music show Broken Record, which Justin has made happen since the beginning. But now Justin has his own gig. He's the creator and host of a new podcast called Started from the Bottom. It's a show about origin stories, particularly the origin stories of men and women of color, how they climbed their way up the ladder, the obstacles they overcame along the way. And for this episode that I'm about to play for you, I turned the tables on Justin and I interviewed him. We did it in front of a group of students and faculty at Medgar Evers College on the side of the old Evie Field in Brooklyn, New York. As someone of West Indian heritage, let me just say how gratified I was at the heavy West Indian turnout for this, And in good West Indian fashion, they asked some pretty good questions at the end too. So here we go my conversation with my good friend Justin Richmond.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello, who is this song? Check? Check ye a single race, So welcome. This is the first time I've ever done anything like this, and it is certainly the first live taping of started from the bottom. So thank you so much for coming, Malcolm, thank you so much for doing this.

00:02:03
Speaker 1: Not at all, it's my pleasure, Justin. I've long dreamed of being on a stage with you.

00:02:08
Speaker 2: I can't imagine that's true, but it's very nice of you to say no.

00:02:13
Speaker 1: I think I hope this is the start of many of these Justin, But I think premise of today's is that I'm interviewing you, right, That's not our plan.

00:02:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, Look, we.

00:02:23
Speaker 1: Want to get the Justin. We want to get the Justin Richmond.

00:02:26
Speaker 2: Origin stories, a little introduction in me, I guess, yeah, yeah.

00:02:29
Speaker 1: The which you know. I love these things because I've often I'm a firm believer that if you want to get to know somebody, even if they've done a lifetime of interesting things, if you just do the first twenty years, you get most of what you need. Right that it's a surprising how much you can glean from. So let's start. Let's do the Justin Richmond analysis and I wanted to start with a thing we have in common. Now you might look at us and say, what on earth do they have in common? But we do have one very significant fact in common, which is we're both the product of biracial marriages. Yeah, and I wanted to start with that. First of all, you're more obviously biracial, and me, I don't know how that happened. You, I'm a little more subtle yours.

00:03:15
Speaker 2: Your dad would say it's his jeans.

00:03:18
Speaker 1: So you're tell me about your parents. Let's start with those two. How did they meet?

00:03:22
Speaker 2: Justin to start with that, they met at Compton Community College. So he grew up in Compton and and my mom was there for I don't even know why she was there, but she was there. She was friends with someone there and so she was there. They met.

00:03:36
Speaker 1: Where does your mom grow up?

00:03:38
Speaker 2: My mom grew up in a city called Almonte, which is by Pasadena. My mom grew up on the racetrack. Her dad was a racehorse trainer, so she grew up on the racetrack. And Yeah, they're very different people even to this day. And it might be because they've never seen them together, but my kids still cannot wrap their heads around that my parents, like you know that there's any relationship between them or ever was you know, they were never together, they were never married, but yeah, like they liked they just liked each other, you know.

00:04:11
Speaker 1: So how long were they together.

00:04:14
Speaker 2: Off and on? About five years? Four years?

00:04:17
Speaker 1: So you have very few memories of the two of them as in a couple.

00:04:21
Speaker 2: Very few early on, Like I remember being over at his house because I have two half brothers, so early on I remember being over there with them, going to Disneyland on occasion. Well, yeah, the memories are very sporadic early on.

00:04:34
Speaker 1: You know of them, and you're raised by your mom, raised a bit by both, but primarily by my mom. Yeah, and where you grow in Long Beach or yes.

00:04:44
Speaker 2: In Long Beach. And then at five, my mom moved to the city of Orange, which is in Orange County, which is about twenty minutes south of Long Beach.

00:04:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what is Orange?

00:04:54
Speaker 2: Like Orange and far as places in Orange County, go is pretty diverse. There's a large Latino community there, but aside from the Latino population, it's overwhelmingly white. And that was it. That was a change from me even having white parents, like even having like my mom being white and having that whole side of my family be white. I never thought of it that way until I showed up. You know, she moved there right before I started, a month before I started kindergarten. And I remember my first day of kindergarten. I rolled up and I had this is ninety four, so I had a Power Range of shirt on. I thought I was real cool, Power Rangers lunch box. I really thought I was nervous, but I thought I was fresh. I thought it was good, right, And I'll never forget this kid who was in line in front of me, like, look back at me, and this is the first time. Like again, I'm like, I'm not really realizing the differences between us yet. But he turns dound and looks at me and goes, are you poor? Are you poor? Yeah? Yeah yeah? And I was like like you what do you mean? And he's like, you look poor? Are you poor? And I was like what, you know, I was just deflated. I didn't know exactly what to think about it at the moment. I was. I was just deflated just because you know, your five year old you go into kindergarten. Ryna. We had just moved, and I thought it looked good, but apparently I looked poor. I remember his name?

00:06:16
Speaker 1: Should you tell your mom?

00:06:17
Speaker 2: Yes, I did that. I remember that. I remember, I remember going home and talking to my mom and uh yeah. I mean that's when I think her hope was that it would take a little bit long for those dynamic, for that dynamic to set in, right. But that's when we had, you know, when she started talking to me about the fact that I am now at this overwhelmingly white place and many of the people I'm going to be around are likely growing up, if not out and now racist, racist things being said in their household, They're going to be parroting those things back.

00:06:55
Speaker 1: At that. So if I asked you in say, in middle school, to how you would describe yourself racially, what would you have said?

00:07:03
Speaker 2: Black? I knew I was black, you just because because of my experience, Because of that experience going to the so you know, off, I would say, off and on. Between kindergarten and ninth grade, I was going to overwhelmingly white schools, and you know, these are places where I would get called nigger. You know. So when you're getting called nigger, you know what you are, you know. And then I go talk to my dad about it. He goes, well, you are niggas, so but you know that was like his way of trying to be like, yeah, you are niggas, so yeah. You know. So I definitely knew what I was. I knew I was black. And where it got well, I see where it got difficult was when probably in junior high, when it was teachers who I think sort of interacting with me differently because of my color, you know, like I had. I got in a lot of trouble because I grew locks, and I remember they wanted to kick me out of school. There was a there was a neo Nazi kid named.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: Your name, and all these people like on the bulletin board, where are you man?

00:08:06
Speaker 2: Right? And every day with him go you know, it was go back to Africa. I mean it got to the point police got involved, you know, and he never got kicked out of school somehow. But but I would say the point in junior high is when teachers I started getting just weird comments from teachers and weird nothing I did was ever good enough. There's always a perception that I was lazy. And that's when I think because I was. I was always a smart kid and because my dad played football, because I was so tall, I was always tall. The perception was always that I was going to go and be an athlete. But from early age, I realized I wanted to cut against that. Like I didn't want okay, cool, Yeah I can I can play ball, I can do that. But what I realized I really wanted was to show people, Like early on, I kind of got this need to prove people wrong in me, and so I felt like I always wanted to be. I always wanted to be the smartest person in the room at that point as a young kid, and I didn't always have the confidence that I was, but I deep, deep down somewhere I wanted to be. And by the time I got to to junior high and the teachers were sort of I have these these odd interactions. I think that's when I started to That's when my my interest in education started to wane and my I would say, my pride and myself started to win.

00:09:23
Speaker 1: How many black teachers did you have in your public school experience?

00:09:27
Speaker 2: Zero? Zero?

00:09:30
Speaker 1: They got something to do with it.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: I think that's a big thing, has a big part to do with it. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, you got it. And that's the premise of my show, if you're not around, if you're not around people who look like you, who are successful, you know. And my dad, God bless him, you know. He was an NFL so to degree was a success. But my dad and I love him. But you know, he also like has a very small way of thinking, you know, and so I never really felt like I had someone.

00:10:02
Speaker 1: What do you mean by a small way of thinking?

00:10:06
Speaker 2: For him, it was always like, yeah, just go be a cop, you know, Like that's sure money. Like you can go be a cop. You can get one hundred grand a year. With over time, you can make like one twenty Like what are you doing with this college thing? What are you doing with school? You know, like they didn't. He couldn't get that I wanted to be that. I wanted to be an educated brother. You know, he couldn't get it. I say, a lot and a lot of my family didn't. It's difficult to talk about because I like, in so many ways they were successful, you know, But at the same time, I knew there was a level of life that I wanted to achieve that no one in my family had achieved. You know. My dad wanted me to go be a cop. Because he's like, that's guaranteed income, you can and you can do it. But I just had other aspirations. So it was it was a weird thing between growing up in a white world that didn't necessarily believe in me and growing up in, you know, my black family in a black world that kind of had a way of thinking that wasn't They didn't understand what I was trying to do.

00:11:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, your dad's not He's not one hundred percent wrong being a police officer. And I'm not saying you should have done it. I'm just saying from his position, being an LAPD officer is assuming that's what he's talking about. Yeah, that is a good job.

00:11:23
Speaker 2: It's a great job. I mean in terms of, like if you look at just like income and like what you could provide for your family, Like, it's a great job.

00:11:30
Speaker 1: But it's the means of there's all an entire generation of largely black men who grew up in LA for whom the LAPD was the stepping stone. I mean, you got a job in the LPD and then your kids got to go to college. I mean that was like he's reflecting something that was real, right.

00:11:46
Speaker 2: No, it was a real thing, and I don't. At the time, I was very I was always upset when you bring it up. You know, now I understand why he did. But you know, when you have a dream and something you want to accomplish, hearing things like that don't instill confidence in you. Because I always have to hear these quies like well, what a school doesn't work out? It's like, well, what do you mean? What was like? You know what? Like by the time I get to college and I'm meeting people, I'm like, I can very much tell that this isn't their experience that they had, Like what a school doesn't work out? It was just expected? You know?

00:12:16
Speaker 1: Is it your dad? Does he not think you're smart enough for college? Or does he think the obstacles facing a young black man are too high? What's his what's his theory?

00:12:27
Speaker 2: I don't know. My dad thinks he's the smartest man in the world, so and I think based he also thinks he has the greatest gene pool in the world, so I think so, I think based on that he knew I was very smart. That was his belief at least. But with my dad, I think it very much had to do again with like his perception of what was possible in the world. You know, he grew up in a place called Eudream of Village and Compton, which was a housing project that closed down because the soil was toxic. Like they didn't know what at the time, but the soil was toxic. So people were getting sick and cancer and dying, babies being born deformed. And I think it was also a sense of maybe his dreams were limited to or his not his His dreams were big, but I would say his dreams were at some point, I say, his dreams are crushed as well. You know, my dad did get kicked out of the NFL. The story as it's been told to me, So my dad got drafted by the Colts in eighty four, I want to say eighty five, and the team captain, a white dude, called my grandmother a nigger, and so my dad whooped his ass. They had it. He got reprimanded, that had a team dinner. It happened again, my dad whooped his ass and he was kicked off the team. And I think when that is, when that's what happens to your dream, I think you start to worry in some way.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: Was it his dream?

00:13:44
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah. Yeah. Does he still have regrets today, I'm sure he does. I don't think he regrets that, Like, I don't think he regrets whooping the team captain's ass or anything. But yeah, I think he wishes it turned out different. Absolutely, you know, yeah, does.

00:14:03
Speaker 1: He understand what you're doing now?

00:14:06
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, you know the first the first time he really got it. Well, he got it when I went. When I got into Berkeley, he was kind of he was shocked. I was shocked. My whole family was shocked. I couldn't believe it too, so much so that I remember I drove up. I drove up, I wrote the counselor. I was like, listen, like, I got some I gotta I gotta talk to you. I didn't want to do it over email, didn't want to do it over phone. Like I needed to look this lady in the eyes. So I was like, hey, can I meet you? And she's like, yes, sure, sure to come down this date this time drove up to Berkeley and yes I was. I was like, look, I got this deferred a mission. This is real. Yeah, this is real, justin, justin.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: You're living in Orange County at the time.

00:14:49
Speaker 2: I'm living in La in La. You drove six hours yeah, to Berkeley, yeah, six seven eight.

00:14:55
Speaker 1: To ask official of Berkeley whether your acceptance that it was real.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: I came that far. I wasn't gonna lie. And then also like try to figure out how to run a place up there and pay a mission just to not so I drove up there, and you know, so, I'm is this real? And she goes, yes, this is real? So I go, so I could start January fifteen, Yes, you can as a philosophy major. Yes, okay, and I can switch my major if I want once I get in, yes, right, you know. And then and then and I'm kind of trying to work up to also like so, and I asked, I said, listen, I'm gonna be honest with you, Okay, Like I don't have a high school diploma, I don't have a GED, I don't have an equivalency, so you should like so based on that now you said already said this was real, but based on now, with this new information, based on that, is this really? Is? Can I really come here?

00:15:47
Speaker 1: We skipped a step. The step we skipped was you didn't graduate from high school?

00:15:52
Speaker 2: Na I left at fourteen?

00:15:54
Speaker 1: At fourteen?

00:15:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I left at fourteen.

00:15:57
Speaker 1: I also didn't graduate from high school, but that's because my mom called the principal and said, Malcolm won't be coming in. He's more productive at home. That was it. So everyone was like, okay, fine, like that's you know, that's a very that's the world I grew up, and it was forgiving, understanding, do what you want kind of world. Wait, you left high school at fourteen to do what?

00:16:19
Speaker 2: Yeah? Nothing good? Yeah, nothing good. I would say I was pretty beat down by that point, you know, like confidence wise, I didn't know what I was doing. So yeah, I left and I was I was just doing my own thing.

00:16:38
Speaker 1: What's your mom doing when you're doing this?

00:16:40
Speaker 2: So here's what happened. Was so like basically my freshman year high school, I was so rock binding with my confidence, Like I had basically like a zero point something GPA, like I had like no GPAs. It was literally zero point something. And the only the highest grade I got was I thought it was a C, but it turns out it was a D. I got a D in journalism. Yeah, and the teacher pulled me aside. He's like, justin, you're too smart to fail. You deserve an F I'm not gonna give you a F. I'm gonna give you a D. I was like, oh, thank you, mister Muller. But it was like a zero point something. So they said you're gonna have to go to continuation school, which was just like a school, like, you know, for for fuck ups. And my mom was like, you're not a fuck up, so you're not gonna You're not gonna go there. I go, okay. She's like, I almost have you stay home, and uh, this it sounds crazy, but I got to give her credit because it didn't work for a bit, but then it really worked. She's like, I'm just going to stay home. You're gonna read the paper every day while am at work. I'm gonna come home. You're gonna have a little report on a couple of items you read. And of course, you know, for the longest, like I just took advantage. I didn't do it, you know, like I just didn't. She didn't want me being with fuck ups because she did. She already could see I think that my confidence was shot and that was just gonna be worse, so she pulled me out. I took advantage of it. I didn't do much until I was like almost sixteen. Common story, I feel like for a lot of people. I got a copy of the autobiography of Malcolm X and it really reignited my ambition. So then at that point, I'm roll in community college because I didn't really want to deal with like trying to start over from my freshman year of high school. So I rolled in community college and just did that for about four or five years, and so I could transfer. I transfer. So I started that at like just before I turned sixteen, and I transferred to Berkeley at twenty one.

00:18:32
Speaker 1: Let me see, we'll get back to Berkeley and how things turned around for Justin in a moment. Back to my conversation with Justin Richmond at the Edison O. Jackson Auditorium at Medgar Evers College. Justin was finding his place at Berkeley. So you have a kind of loss of confidence and do you get it back in Burke at Berkeley.

00:19:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent. Gabrielle Williams right here. I met Gabrielle at Berkeley. She was doing her PhD. We met at the Black Student Lounge or it was the the that was like her her student job thing, and she was listening to music and I heard, so we connected and there was a professor there by the name of Ricky Vincent. He was like the pre eminent funk music scholar and was writing a book on the Black Panthers, and I had a strong interest in the Panthers. So like between like Gabrielle and Ricky Vincent and all these other black folk that looked like me that I could relate to. And for Gabrielle coming from from La southern California, like there was just a lot in common. It definitely a hundred percent helped me. But but she also helped me through a lot because there's many times I've called Gabrielle, including when I took this job at Pushkin, like I really do this, this is a smart move and shout out to talk. You know, when I got into grad school, Man, should I really take out these loans, Gabrielle, I don't know. It's a lot of money, Like I don't want to be in debt, and Gabria was like, justin, just come on, is what you're supposed to do. You're going to school, you got to pay you unless you can afford it, take the loan out and go. So yeah, I definitely got a ton of confidence right there, not that I'm you know, and then slowly along the way ebbed and flow like as new situations arose, and I sort of fell into journalism because I couldn't really, I couldn't get a job after college, and I knew I kind of went in wanting to be a professor by the time I got to Brookley's like, I kind of want to do my bachelor's, get a PhD, then teach. But then I sort of fell out of love with with higher education just because of the bureaucracy element. Sorry, wonderful to have us here. But I would talk to Gabrielle, I would talk to my guy Ricky Vincent and sort of be like, well, what is it that I like to do well? I like the idea of writing and connecting with people, communicating people. I like the idea of researching. And so that's when like the idea struck to do journalism. I started get involved with RAO around town KPFA, which was the PACIFICA station in Berkeley, the campus station. I took a journalism class, so I kind of and it just snowball from there where I fell into journalism. But by the time I like I get a job. I'm twenty five, I'm at NPR and my girlfriend got pregnant, who's now my beautiful wife, Danielle. We have two beautiful kids, Crin and Ella. And I was making like thirty thousand dollars a year in PR, paying back loans and bout to have a kid. My confidence, I say, at that point sinks back to all time low. And I have a friend named Drew who took me to Cuba. It was just like, I sense you're kind of going through it. Let me, let me take you to Cuba. This is when Cuba opened up. I was like, I can't really forties, like I'm gonna pay for it. You sent me back whenever. So me and Drew went down And this is the most random incident in my life. This is the most random thing that ever happened in my life. Is We're in Cuba and Havana. I've driven to Mexico twice, but other than that, I've never left the country. And uh, I run into Quincy Jones in Havana and Quincy Jones like, I'm like, damn, that's Quincy Jones. I want to I go, hey, Quincy, can can I get a picture? And he goes yeah, and he doesn't get up. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna sit down and take a picture of Quincy. And he started asking me, what's your sign? I go Leah, I go leo. He goes on leo rising cool. I don't know what that means. He just starts talking to me and we have like a three hour conversation. We have dinner.

00:22:39
Speaker 1: He never told me because you and I met Quincy like five years ago.

00:22:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a full circle moment for me because we ended up going to Quincy's house. But I had like a three hour dinner with Quincy Jones in Havana. At my lowest point, I'm making like no money, I'm broke. My wife was looking at me crazy because it's like, why are you in Cuba running around like she didn't know if I was maybe not gonna come back or what. But I met Quincy and from that he was like, oh, you're you're a cool brother. Man gave me his gave me his card, and normally I wouldn't have, but I felt I was like, okay, this man discovered Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Ray Charles, So I was like, you know what am I going to do, not reach out, not reach so I could use all the help I could get. So I reached out to Quincy and it was like, look, look Quincy. Like I realized I didn't want to reach out with nothing. So me and my friend Sinari Glinton, one of the few black men at MPR that sort of took interesting me right away, sort of noticed when I was there that I needed I needed his his guidance. We decided I shouldn't just go to him with nothing to offer. So I was like, look, I'm a journalist, I working on a PR, working audio everyone. You know, it's twenty sixteen. Podcasting is sort of new, but people are starting to have them. You've done everything from you know, everything across media that you could possibly do except for podcasting, Like we can make you a podcast. And it was like great, So you know, it wasn't that easy, but it was a couple of meetings, finally got into a great got to sign some paperwork. I still have it framed. It's like me and Quincy Jones signature, which is the craziest thing in the world to me. But what happened was I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't sell the thing I realized I didn't know the first thing about business. I've been flying blind my whole life, just trying to figure things out and taking out loans. I don't know what I'm doing. And that's one thing I did for this show. Occurred to me. It's like, if I could just talk to if I could talk to someone else, some other black man who has like money, Magic Johnson Byron Allen, who at that times about the Weather Channel. I was like, I bet they could tell me what to do because I was in these rooms just like realizing like I don't understand this jargon, I don't understand the speak, and I'm failing, you know. And so it really occurred to me at that moment, how important having people who look like you, who you can point to in your life, you can point to a successful at this particular thing. How that can really be. It's not the only way to figure things out, but it's, man, it makes things so much easier. You know.

00:25:04
Speaker 1: Let's go back a moment and say, what's the version of your life where you wouldn't have suffered that kind of crisis of confidence.

00:25:16
Speaker 2: I can't imagine.

00:25:17
Speaker 1: Give me a version, Give me a version where it's where it's easy in the United States.

00:25:28
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't think. I don't think you can have it easy being born black in the United States. I don't think it's I don't think it's possible. I would say best case scenario is, you know, like a Carlton type or something from Fresh Prince or something. You know, we're like, Okay, you succept but like, are you really how successful are if you're not acknowledging the whole part of yourself. So it's hard for me to answer, but I guess in a scenario where there is no And this is interesting because I'm also thinking about this from my kids now, like they're getting a much different life than I had, access to different kinds of people and education and two parents who are supportive of each other and supportive of them together. Uh so I think. But but I mean, I guess, like for me, it's hard for it really is hard for me to imagine. But but maybe I guess the best case. You know, It's funny I used to I used to dream that I was like a as a kid, that like like I was like a Huxtable, you know, which is maybe a little controversial now but like, maybe that would have been a best case scenario. You know, Dad was a doctor, Mom was you know whatever, in a Brownstone, and.

00:26:30
Speaker 1: Give me the worst case scenario so you don't get into Berkeley. What happens is that the key moment.

00:26:38
Speaker 2: Not probably getting probably getting the Malcolm X autobiography, because that was I was in a pretty bad spot there. But I'll say before I came to Pushkin, I almost gave up again, like when you don't have examples of success around you and you don't have people who can teach you about money and how to not even like in a gross like uber capitalist way, but just like how to accumulate it so that you can't have the things you want and need in life. Like I didn't have that. So I almost journalism, even though you know I love it and I wanted to be in it, almost left it. I had a job offer with ADP, the UH Payroad Processing, to do outdoor sales with ADP, because I was like, well, I'll just go do sales, you know, like I'll just I'll make some money doing sales. And I almost took that offer, you know, And that was maybe six months before before I got an email from from you from me, LaBelle and from you to come up for Pushkin, which which I would say changed again my trajectory thanks to you, Jacob Weisberg, you know me and LaBelle. Yeah, man, because because it was also bleaked in a little bit, you know, it was also it was tough.

00:27:48
Speaker 1: Then, man, we'll take a quick break and get back to Justin's story. We're back with Justin Richmond in making sense of people's life stories and trying to figure out what's the difference between in America between a black life story and a white life story. One of the things, and it's very, very difficult to convince persuade white people of this fact is it's how many strikes you get, or how many chances you get. If you are a upper middle class, well educated white person, you get like ten chances. You can screw up nine times, and the system will catch you every time and start you over again. And if you're in the same position as a young black person, you maybe get two. And I remember this is a weird example of this, but there's an incredibly interesting book that was written about a suburb of Buffalo, a wealthy suburb of Buffalo. I think it's Williamsville. Not Sure Amherst. The book I think is called the Safest City in America. It was about how there's no juvenile delinquency and Williamsville. And the reason is not that there's no misbehavior among juveniles. It's that they just call us something different. Right, it's high jinks, it's sewing, no wild oats, it's it's oh so and so it just has to learn to be. It's everything is getting. Everyone gets so many different chances that no one ever looks never comes to the definition of juvenile delinquency. And like that that thing, this question of how many chances you get? Is it sounds listening to your story that you are very close to running out of chances.

00:29:48
Speaker 2: It's even like more than that. It's just it's like I didn't even know that I had chances, you know, and maybe I didn't. I never knew I had chances. You know. There's a point where, you know, I guess in your example, the difference would be in those instances those kids in Buffalo, they're thought to be behaving badly, whereas when you're a black kid misbehaving, you're bad. You know you yourself.

00:30:09
Speaker 1: Oh, it's absolutely define differently, you're.

00:30:11
Speaker 2: A terrible person. You can't you can't succeed, you can't do None of this is for you, you know. Yeah, and so that's where I was at, which is a pretty bleak place.

00:30:23
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, my speaking of father, So my father who passed away a couple years ago, but actually today, weirdly is his birthday. My mom always says to my dad that that his motto was nothing bad will ever happen, which I've thought about a lot. Partly that's the function of his personality. Had this kind of unstoppable, unthoughtful personality. But he was also a came from a stable English family. He was well educated, he was very intelligent. The system always worked for my dad. He was a nice person, he was depending on he was charming, he was people liked him. So it made sense that his theory of life was nothing bad will ever happen. My mother would have made you know, she's a mom. She would imagine all kinds of horrible and he would just he would look at her, uncomprehending me. It was like, no, no, no, no, nothing ever bad's gonna happen, right, And it was essentially true of like that message, I was just thinking as you were talking about your dad, the difference in messages sent to the two of us at a young age. I have this dad who just thinks it doesn't even occur to him that there's ever going to be any you know, detour of it's a runway.

00:31:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, Yeah, something about opportunity and something about the way in which society asks you or demands that you think about yourself. You know, it's like sometimes you don't get an option and how you want to think about yourself.

00:31:52
Speaker 1: I feel like the one thing that I don't maybe it's fine this way, but the transition is still really the way that your life kind of turns around. I don't eve turns around. It's not like people were living a life of crime, but you know what I mean, Like.

00:32:10
Speaker 2: It's not hamminated myself.

00:32:13
Speaker 1: Something happens. It's really kind of interesting and mysterious to you. In your twenties, it was a bride.

00:32:22
Speaker 2: It was like, yeah, between it was just building up my confidence. I guess between fifteen and now, I'm still trying, you know, like from that time I did drop out of high school to like just getting through college, Like what motivated me was a sense of failure I was like, man, if I don't get a high school, if I don't get a college diploma, like what I have an eighth grade certificate? Like what is that going to do for me? You know? So that was kind of like this real like it wasn't like a carrot type of motivation, was like you know, and and then I was like, well then I couldn't get a job. And then I went started interning and I got into grad school, and then that gave me another Okay, now it's grads. When I got to figure out grad school is a big scary thing and do that, and then I get out of there. I get right into this job at MPR and within them two months, like my girlfriend's pregnant, you know, and it's like now it's like, well, I got to figure out how to provide. So like my whole I feel like every step of my life up until recently has been about how do I just how do I not how do I not fail? And that's sort of been my motivation to succeed. And I'm trying to figure out a way now to be motivated now that that like that's why I'm on this journey. They just trying to talk to successful people. I've been lucky enough to be. You know, first time we met in Santa Monica, I was like, day, I can't believe I'm gon go meet Malcolm glad Well. That's crazy. And you know, we had a very lovely conversation. I just remember, like, I can't get out of here without asking like, like, how did you get comfortable having money? And I asked you that, what did I say? You're like, I just wanted to be able to do my own thing. I wanted to have my freedom. I wanted to be able to I never wanted people to sign things to me or to be told what to do, and so and I was like, damn, that's a great answer, you know. And but that's why that's largely why I'm still, you know, I'm still trying to figure out this this this world, in this life and navigating different things. So that's why I'm that's why I'm doing this and talking to people like Charlemagne the God and people like Susie Orman and just different people who, you know, against the odds, against all odds, like figured this thing out, you know. And my hope is that people listening to it it inspires them, not only to take big swings, but also to seek out real world, real life mentorship, you know, like, obviously I want this to be a platform of mentorship for people. So hopefully you walk away having learned a lot and feeling boosted. But also like I think, you know, you need to have real life mentors, and I've been lucky enough to have so many, Gabrielle, you, Jacob, all kinds of different people. I'm hoping that I try to figure this out, people will figure it out alone, alone with me.

00:34:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's toughly well, thank you. Justin we'll let's do some audience questions funny and if.

00:35:00
Speaker 2: There are any questions, they could be for me or Malcolm.

00:35:05
Speaker 1: It comes on.

00:35:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you.

00:35:07
Speaker 3: My name is Kevin Nesbit, an educator, one of the administrators that create the blockages you talked about now. But thank you so much for the way you presented this good eurodureaucracy, a good VP, as I call myself. I've had many friends that come from biracial families, and I think as someone that does not come from a biracial family, there's always this belief that there's some sort of protection that you might receive from your whiteness if you choose to adopt it or if you choose to embrace it. And because I appreciate the way that you said you understood immediately you were a black man and that you had no choice, because even if you wanted to imagine something, other society told you, know, you're a black man, right, And you gave many examples for that. But I have other friends that, throughout their journey, they've been able to say, well, it's it's not that it's a choice, but it's a little messier than that for them because they're both black, they're both white, and they grapple.

00:35:57
Speaker 1: With what that means.

00:35:58
Speaker 3: Did you have any moments where you felt that having a parent that was white actually enabled some moments of protection or other as Malcolm described it, maybe one more choice, right, one more set of options. That's my question.

00:36:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, hard for I guess. I don't want to speak for other people, but my belief is when I talk to when I hear these stories, it's just that there's a bit of them deluding themselves. Perhaps you know, I don't, but hard to say. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I didn't feel that maybe if i'd had a different mom, maybe it would have been different, but I was never allowed to think that anything different, you know, thank you.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's a this is my grand theory of biracial marriages. There's a big difference between black father, white mother, and white.

00:36:45
Speaker 2: Father, black mother, which would be here.

00:36:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're actually very different kinds the Historically, what a biracial marriage was was a white man and a black woman. That was the acceptable form for society. Goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. That's what it was. It was never the reverse, and only really recently have you seen black men marry white women. And I think the road is a lot harder both for the for the marriage and the children. It's a lot harder when your father's black and your mom is white.

00:37:16
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:16
Speaker 3: I decided it looks like on the cases I'm thinking about my friendships with it was largely what you described with the traditional and maybe the household of the fathers, whether it's separated or not, later on, there was some sort of protection that dad would You'd have another outcome, right, you have another choice. So I just wanted to hear a bit about that.

00:37:33
Speaker 1: I think society views a black man white woman as as being subversive and in a way that they don't view the reverses being subversive.

00:37:43
Speaker 2: Thank you, that's true.

00:37:46
Speaker 1: Hello.

00:37:47
Speaker 4: Firstly, thank you Malcolm and Justin you guys are It's just been a joy to have you here. And I've just enjoyed this whole conversation. I just wanted from you, just in like a SoundBite or maybe just like a quick statement, like words of advice from one biracial man to another biracial man and just how to like navigate the professional world and how to just keep your bearings and keep yourself grounded.

00:38:17
Speaker 2: Man, I'm not listen to my show because I think there's people far greater than me that are going to be given advice. But I would say to this point, in the instances where I haven't code switched, I've always been much more successful. You know. I don't know if that's because I've been lucky, but also some of it comes down to my like I also think you shouldn't capitulate. So also like if someone doesn't want you, like I do have imposter syndrome yet and still it's like I do somewhere in me have this belief that like I can't help but be myself, you know, And I think as long as you just are true to yourself, whatever that is, however you view yourself, identify yourself, behave like yourself, like I think that's all you can do. And I think in those instances, like just knowing that you bring a lot to the table being you, then you do you being someone else. And if you don't, you'll find out, right, like, sometimes it doesn't pay to be me certain situations and I've you know, I've found out. But okay, then find that one's not for me. Let me go to the next situation where it is good for me to be there. You know, I was at MPR before I was at Pushkame with Malcolm, and that was a place that I was authentic to myself. But it didn't feel like that was It wasn't appreciated. And you know, so I got out to go where you're appreciated, and go where you're appreciated. Yeah, yeah, thank you, Yeah, more question.

00:39:44
Speaker 5: Oh well, gentlemen, thank you so much. So you both made a biracial and I wanted to ask mister godwell, justin identifies as black and yourself, I.

00:40:00
Speaker 1: Don't think about it. I think that's the difference between having I have a West Indian mom justin as an African American father. If you're a West Indian, you don't think about race in the same way. It's not this omnipresent thing in your life. So I was I just think of myself as I don't know when I grew up. It was never forced. I mean it's never I was never forced to answer that question. My mom thought of herself as a Jamaican, not as a white person or a black personer. So I don't have a I don't have a a kind of easy answer that you had a couple layers because Jamaican and then growing up in Canada, which I feel like this is probably very different then yes, Canada. Again, I never I never got the the the racial experience of as all of you and everyone in this room knows, the racial experience of living in this country is just profoundly different from the racial experience almost anywhere else.

00:41:05
Speaker 5: Would life have been different if you were a darker complexion?

00:41:10
Speaker 1: Probably probably, I guess, although well, black people always know that I'm biracial. White people don't necessarily know, so it would have made my uh. I have to tell my favorite story ever along the grounds is as running down. I went for a run one day in LA and running down Ocean Boulevard and this black guy in a gorgeous open portion n at eleven, like one of those tricked out ones, like one of these incredibly handsome black ones, looks at me, sees me running, stands up, so he's like, you know, he's through the roof of his car, raises his handling and says, I love what you do, bro. So like I get a lot of love.

00:41:59
Speaker 2: And that.

00:42:00
Speaker 1: So if I was darker, when I get more love from that, I mean maybe, but I can't see how it got even more than I already get.

00:42:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you very much. Okay, all right, thank you so much, guys, and thank you to MegaR Evers College. You know, higher education is wonderful.

00:42:30
Speaker 1: This was the perfect way to launch Justin's new show, started from the bottom, and I urge all of you to subscribe to it right now and never forget. If you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, you hear all story. No ads, believe me, it's worth it. Thanks to everyone at Mega Evers College for hosting Justin and me, especially Alexis McLean and Peter Holloman. Special thanks also to Keishaw Williams, our associate editor, who is also a Medgar Evers alum and had the wonderful idea of bringing us there. Division's history is produced by lem And Gestu, Amy gains Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith. Today's episode was produced by Kishelle Williams, David Jaw and Amy Gaines. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Ben Tolliday and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to Julia Barton. I'm Malcolm Glawell.