Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Charles Love Executive Director of Seeking Educational Excellence reflects upon growing up in America in his Black community of Gary, Indiana.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line now by Charles Love a scholar with 1776 Unites. He’s the assistant executive director of Seeking Educational Excellence. He’s a talk show host at AM 560 in Chicago.
And also a great essay written by Charles that we want to talk about. We must scrap the 1619 Project for an accurate account of American history. Welcome to The Tennessee Star Report Charles.
Love: Michael, it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Leahy: So tell us about your essay. Why must we scrap the 1619 Project?
Love: Well, I wrote my essay because I was hearing all the noise at the time, which obviously has shifted since then. It’s gotten louder. But what I saw was missing in a lot of these arguments is logic and context.
Everything that people argue has a sprinkle of truth in it, just enough to get you again so you can’t just say everything in it is not true. But the problem with the project is even some historians, as you know, took it to task.
But it’s beyond that. There were factual errors. But where there weren’t factual errors, there were lies of omission and they just took facts and took conclusions that made no sense. So I wanted to highlight that in my essay, but also use it as an example.
People understand things better when you tell stories. So I was telling a basic, simple story. I was telling my story about my upbringing and the people around me in my community in a majority Black town. I grew up in Gary, Indiana.
Leahy: Gary, Indiana. Not Louisiana, Paris, France, or Spain. From the music man.
Love: Yes. So the music man. So knowing that I felt that I had a pretty unique and interesting way to describe the way they should present the information if they wanted to present it, as opposed to the way they were doing it.
Leahy: Did you grow up there in Gary, Indiana, about the same time the Jackson family, the Jackson Five, was growing up there or were they a little bit before you?
Love: They were a little bit before my time. Especially since they left so young. They were gone by the time I was born. But I was born right when the city was breaking from being segregated.
As I say in the essay, they had elected the first Black Mayor at the same time as Cleveland and LA did. And they had what we all later called the White flight. So it was segregated at the time I was born.
And when I was really little, people were slowly starting to move into other neighborhoods. I was growing up right through that transition and seeing the change in the shift living in America, my childhood and my day-to-day life was not what we hear on the radio and see on the news. And that’s what bothers me.
Leahy: What did your folks do in Gary, Indiana, when you were growing up?
Love: My parents?
Leahy: Yes. What did they do?
Love: My mom was a housewife and my dad worked at the mill. We were kind of a steel town.
Leahy: A steel town. That’s a job working in a steel mill, isn’t it?
Love: That’s what he did until he retired. And so that’s what we did. And my family did.
Leahy: I’m guessing, Charles, you never mess with your dad, because if you work in a steel mill, you’re strong and you don’t put up with anything.
Love: Well, as I said, my mom was a housewife. So there were those classic parents, mother-father roles that you can’t speak of today. You know the P-word. (Leahy chuckles) But that’s what my household was like and many in my neighborhood at the time.
And I got to see the shift because I was old enough to not notice the difference, but see the difference because I was like 8, 9, and 10 and 12. Here’s one interesting thing. We often hear about the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the Black community.
But I’m old enough that things were different. I was coming up during the shift. One thing I didn’t notice and write about until I was an adult, but I started to notice it. All of my friends, I grew up in a community with a lot of people my age.
We all played, ran around, and all of them either had their father at home or knew their father really well. They were active. By the time I hit high school, they were all living in single-family homes.
So it’s not that they were born out of wedlock, but the family dynamic shifted over the course of their childhood.
Leahy: Why did that happen so quickly?
Love: I don’t know. I think that for them it was just more circumstances. It wasn’t the same thing as it is now. I don’t think it was the cultural shift as it is now. I don’t think it was media and all that kind of stuff.
But I got to see how it affects kids, though, because I noticed how my friends were different when we were 8, 9, 10, and 11. Same kids, same neighborhood. I walked into high school, and they were just different because that loss of a father makes a difference.
And so now when I hear people talk about it now, I’m like, I know for sure it’s different because you’re talking about going your whole life and your childhood, without knowing your father.
I can tell you about people who grew up with their father in the house until they were nine to 11. And by the time they were 16, they were defiant and they were getting into trouble. Not that no one else gets into trouble but there was not that stern figure to put them back on track.
Leahy: Did you go to a public high school in Gary, Indiana?
Love: Yes, I did.
Leahy: What was that like?
Love: All the way through. It was actually, as I write an essay, tremendously wonderful. I think my essay spins the narrative that you hear about the Black people. So my concern is that there are problems for sure that need to be fixed.
But too many people both Black people because they’re trying to prove a point, and White people because they don’t know any better, keep telling a tale of Blacks being underclass across the board. they’re all poor, they’re all uneducated and they’re all criminals.
So do we have problems in each of those lanes that need to be addressed? Of course. Is the percentage higher than Whites? Yes. But they act like it’s all violent crime in the Black community.
Everybody talked about how it’s higher than Whites, but the percentage of violent criminals is like two and a half percent. So most of us aren’t committing violent crimes. Yes, we have a poverty rate that’s higher than Whites, but it’s like 18 percent.
Too high? Yes. But that still means 80 percent of us aren’t in poverty. So my childhood was great. I went to an elementary school at the time. The city is smaller now, but at the time we had six high schools and lots of elementary schools.
I don’t know 50 or so. When I graduated high school, every valedictorian went to my elementary school.
Leahy: No kidding?
Love: From the public school down the street. I tell this often. I went through K through 12 and never had a White kid in my class, my same year. I only remember two in the school the whole time, and neither was in my year and both left before they graduated.
So you can’t call it a race thing. The city was not that socioeconomically diverse. There were really poor, poor working class and a few middle-class people. So you can’t really call it that either. But they focused on excellence.
What I try to focus on what we talk about at Seeking Educational Excellence, we focus on STEM and you focus on what you can change and don’t worry about the others. And so my experience was great.
I often say that I don’t think a middle-class White person, White picket fence in the suburbs had a different life, at least when I was growing up, as I did. So maybe their vacations were a little nicer. (Chuckles)
Maybe they had some nicer toys, but I didn’t want for anything. And I think I have the traditional American experience, as anyone else would.
Leahy: Grant Henry is in studio with us. He has a question for you. Go ahead, Grant.
Henry: Charles, the last paragraph of your article says, I suggest we take a different approach than the critical race theory approach of the 1619 Project. Instead, let’s take one that my teachers took when I was a child.
We learned an accurate account of American history. Charles, what do you say to someone and help us understand how to respond to this point when someone says, well, that’s what critical race theory does. It presents an accurate account of American history. What’s the response there?
Love: Wow. You’re going to make me do that in under a minute?
Henry: I’m sorry.
Love: The answer is twofold. The answer is, this not what it does, because what they do is they shift. If we want to say that history is not being too barely, and it’s making Whites with the savior, what they’re doing is only pointing out the Black.
I mean, the negatives of Blacks, which is not true. So they’re still leaving stuff out if that’s the case. But the real argument is all this talk about CRT is a waste because what’s being pushed in the schools that are upsetting students and parents, it’s not CRT.
Call it what you want. When you teach two boys kissing and you make that mandatory reading. When you say transgenderism is going to be taught in junior high school. When you’re saying that White privilege is going to be telling things of that nature, you’re not teaching accurate history.
You’re giving your opinion, whether it’s right or wrong, and you’re forcing it down parents’ and students’ throats without any say.
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Photo “Charles Love” by Seeking Educational Excellence.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Bob Woodson founder of The Woodson Center and 1776 Unites to the newsmakers line to discuss his new book, Red, White, and Black, and highlight a few of the chapters and their context.
Leahy: We are welcoming to our microphone right now our good friend Bob Woodson, civil rights pioneer and the editor and contributor to a great new book, Red, White and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionist and Race Hustlers. Welcome, Bob.
Woodson: I’m pleased to be here.
Leahy: Now I’ll tell you what. Talk about a family of intellectual thinkers. I’m delighted to find out about this book. It is published by Emancipation Press, a new imprint of Post Hill Press. Post Hill Press is based in Nashville and New York. And I’m guessing your editor there was the great Adam Bello.
Woodson: Adam Bello was one of them. Yes. David Bernstein, I work with him and Adam Bello. He and I go way back because when he was with the basic books, and then he published my first book. One of my first books was Triumphs of Joseph. He worked with me on that. Adam is a good friend.
Leahy: Adam is also a very good friend of mine. He published when he was at Harper Collins. He had the Broadside Books imprint. My first published book that wasn’t self-published, called Covenant of Liberty, about the Tea Party movement back in 2012.
And also the first book from Emancipation Press was by my good friend Bishop Aubrey Shines, Questions About Race that was published back in October. I have read the outline of this book.
You have a who’s who of great thinkers with great essays, including our own original all-star panelist, Carol Swain, who’s written a couple of essays here as well.
Woodson: Yeah. Carol is one of our stars. She did a great job on Fox last night, and as she does, she’s almost a regular there. So we are really proud of the group, an outstanding group that we brought together not only scholars but also the community activists because we really believe that one of the ways that we can help recruit people to re-embrace the principles of the founders is when we can demonstrate that following yet as the foundation really improves the quality of your life.
Self-determination, perseverance, you know, achieving against the odds. America is a country of second chances, redemption, and transformation. And so we try to celebrate the values of our founders by illustrating them in this book.
Leahy: John McWhorter has a great chapter. Slavery does not define the black American experience. Tell us about that chapter.
Woodson: What he’s really saying is that the radical left would have you believe that American Blacks are defined by oppression and slavery. That is not the total story. So what we do in this book and in this essay is that we counter this false narrative that somehow Black American’s history is defined strictly and limited to oppression.
Here, we celebrate the fact that when whites are at their worst, Blacks were at their best. When we were denied access to banks, we established our own. When we were denied access to hotels, we built our own.
We had our own education system. 5,000 schools were built by Booker T. Washington and the CEO of Sears. And so Julius Rosenwald. So we really provide evidence to refute the notion that Blacks are defined by oppression and slavery. So John McWhorter’s chapter supports that whole thesis.
Leahy: What I find interesting about the book is this is not all the writers are not Conservatives. For instance, Clarence Page, a well-known liberal reporter, and columnist has a chapter.
Children achieve the expectations we teach, turning a path to the more perfect Union begins with our guidance. Tell us about Clarence Page and how he came to be included as one of the authors you selected in this book client.
Woodson: Clarence Page has always been a long-time friend of mine. We never voted the same way, but he shared a passion for the virtues and principles of this nation and has always been projected in his writings.
And so Clarence was born in Middleton, Ohio, the same place that J.D. Vance. And they were trying to desegregate poverty as we are trying to de racialize race. Clarence did an important seminar interview with J.D. Vance and me in Cincinnati right up the road from Middleton to emphasize that the biggest barrier for people who are disadvantaged in America is not race.
You cannot generalize about race, but it is a lack of opportunity to progress. So Clarence and J.D. did this talk about the common ground between low-income and working-class white and lower-income and working-class Blacks that they have more in common than they do their racial differences.
And so Clarence has been a leader and standing up for that principle, that America is a country of redemption and transformation and a country of second chances.
Leahy: Charles Love has a great chapter. Critical Race Theory’s Destructive Impact on America. I see this all the time. Tell us about what Charles argues in that chapter.
Woodson: Well, critical race theory, we used to call that prejudice. We used to call it stereotyping. It’s just a fancy name for stereotyping. If stereotyping was bad and evil when it was applied to Blacks is bad and evil when applied to whites or anybody.
Nobody should be defined by the color of their skin. That tells you nothing. And yet that’s what critical race theory tries to make a case that whites are engaged in racism and therefore are engaged in white suppression of Blacks.
And so we really rip apart this whole notion and we go back to the King doctrine that we should be judged by the content of our character and not to color our skin. But this poisonous doctrine is bad for everybody.
It exempts Blacks from any personal responsibility. And nothing is more lethal when you have some doctrine that says to people there exempt from any personal responsibility because of their color.
And therefore the destiny of Black America is determined by what white America will concede. And that’s really sowing the seeds of self-contempt to say to people that somehow your destiny is determined by people who don’t like you. That’s poisonous to this nation.
It’s poisonous. These essays serve as given the foundation to attack that. We have developed so far, the 10 lessons that our curriculum has been made available free online. We’ve had 11,000 downloads in just a period of two weeks.
Leahy: Bob Woodson, that sounds like a great effort. And we keep us posted on how that goes. A Civil Rights icon. Great thinker. Great intellectual editor and contributor to Red, White, and Black, Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers. Bob, thanks so much for joining us. Come back again if you would please.
Woodson: Thank you for having me.
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Photo “Robert Woodson” by Gage Skidmore CC By-SA 3.0.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Professor Wilfred Reilly from Kentucky State University to the newsmakers line to highlight some chapters of his book Taboo and his contribution to the bestseller Red, White, and Black.
Leahy: We are delighted to welcome on our newsmaker line, Professor Wilfred Reilley of Kentucky State University and author of a great book, Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About. Welcome Professor Reilley.
Reilly: Oh, thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Leahy: Your name keeps coming up because you also were a contributor to the book Red White and Black. You’ve got a couple of chapters in that book. We talked earlier today with Bob Woodson about that. And that book is published by the Emancipation imprint of Post Hill Press. You are prolific, Professor Reilly.
Reilly: Well, yes. I mean, as an academic, I try to write as often as possible, and I think this was an important topic to write about. Bob Woodson, obviously, is one of the organizers for 1776 Unites, which is kind of the Black business and social science community’s response to The New York Times 1619 Project, which, frankly, just got a lot of things wrong.
And there was a collection of essays that was put together as part of the launch of 1776. I wrote one about the positive side, essentially, of American history. I mean, obviously, we’ve reframed this including some of my ancestors.
We beat the Nazis. So it’s important to remember that. And when Bob called and asked if I would be willing to have that essay and another one included in this book, Red, White and Black, I said, yeah, of course, I’d be honored. And I will say that book, when it dropped, was number one in the world.
We’re definitely tracking it against, say, Ibram Kendi’s project or the book from 1619. And, of course, all the other volumes out there. But I’m glad to see it’s doing well. And it’s still out there right now. It’s available on Amazon and pretty much anywhere else you might buy a book.
Leahy: Yeah, it’s got very good ratings on Amazon.com. Your personal history is fascinating to me. You have a Ph.D. in political science, I guess, from Southern Illinois, and a law degree from the University of Illinois. Why did you decide to become a University Professor instead of a practitioner of law?
Reilly: Well, I’ve done a bunch of different things. I’ve also been a coach, although briefly. I worked in the sales and trading floor environment, which is probably the setting, honestly, where I’ve been the most financially compensated, even including training in the law and so on down the line.
But I wanted to teach. I enjoy academia, at least leaving aside politics. And so we’re not especially severe in my school, but I like teaching kids. I actually teach in a historically Black college that’s located in Appalachia.
So there’s a good chance to genuinely help people and a lot of those other things. I graduated from law school when I was 22, and I actually was very glad to get an acceptance or get an offer from grad school.
So I didn’t have to immediately move into some intense legal field, white-collar criminal prosecution, or something like that at that age. And most of the other things that I did, I was a canvas manager, as I said of working on those sales and trading floors.
I did those while I was going for the Ph.D. because I don’t like the taste of Ramen noodles all that much. (Leahy chuckles) You’re generally expected to teach. It’s not a bad job in and of itself, and that’s what I ended up doing.
I went out on the job market and I was lucky enough to get four or five different offers and ended up accepting one in the state university system in Kentucky. I may take the bar in Kentucky so that I’m available as a practicing attorney, but I don’t think that’s going to be my focus for at least the next decade or so.
Leahy: So the other book from 2020, Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About, what are some of those facts and why can’t you talk about them?
Reilly: Most of the time the book looks at sort of cancel culture, which is this idea that there are all these things that everyone knows that you’re not supposed to say. So I just break them down going through these chapters that white privilege, this is one of the facts that are almost meaningless in the univariate, since there are a ton of things what your ‘social class’ is, how attractive you are, and is your father present, and if you’re under 25, that predicts where you’re going to go in life much more than your race.
The opening chapter of the book is just called The Police Aren’t Massively Murdering Black People, and it breaks down some of the things Black Lives Matter, as the movement says, and compares them with reality.
In the most recent year on record, the total number of unarmed brothers, unarmed Black men shot by police officers was 18. The average person who leans left politically, by the way, thinks it’s between 1,000 and 10,000.
That’s a major study from the Skeptic Research Center. So I found out that this just isn’t true. We all oppose police brutality, but the movement is based on simple dishonesty, to say the least.
There’s a chapter that looks at the actual rates of interracial crime, violent interracial crimes are incredibly low. The person most likely to kill you is your ex-wife. About three percent of crime. But when it does occur that’s actually about minority on white. There are all these different taboo topics. Why immigration should probably be merit-based.
There’s a chapter on IQ. There’s a chapter taking down the alt-right and looking at some of the things the right gets wrong. So the whole idea of the book is to give people ammunition in the sense of what are the actual facts around these public debates people keep screaming about.
Is what, for example, Mr. Cuomo is saying on television, is that accurate point by point? Very often we find out it’s not. And again, that’s a book that did pretty well, because I think a lot of people wanted to see. And it’s written from a center-right perspective, but fairly unbiased.
I think a lot of people wanted to see what is the actual data around all these issues that I’m told we can’t discuss. Where I’m told I just have to kind of listen sympathetically. Are the people doing the talking being honest? No.
Leahy: Professor Wilfred Riley, Kentucky State University, here’s my question for you. How is it that you developed the intellectual courage to talk about these things? What is it that gives you the ability to talk about them? And what kind of pushback do you get?
Reilly: I think the question itself is interesting. One of the things for me, I often jokingly say men’s events and so on. And I grew up in real America. That’s kind of accurate. I grew up in a blue-collar Black-Irish-Italian neighborhood in Chicago and moved to a similar neighborhood in Aurora.
I know that I have other employable skills, jokes aside. Going back to blue-collar but skills I picked up as a young man. I lived a fairly normal less. As you mentioned, I went to law school before grad school and so on.
So when I entered the academic exchange of ideas, I did so as a taxpaying citizen. I’d already worked for good pay. I was kind of a center-right politically. I was an adult. I got to hear some of these things that I think many people heard at age 17 or 18 and think about them logically.
And a lot of them struck me as kind of nonsensical and left the idea that your race matters more than whether you’re born rich or poor. That I remember being something I found just an idiotic idea.
And I kept asking for proof of that. Has anyone tested that? There are a bunch of potential docs here. Has anyone gone out in the field and looked at that? I think that that was my approach. And as I said, one of the chapters in the book looks at some of the alt-rights claims as well that diverse societies don’t work.
My one line here we’ll go back to ancient Rome they do 98 percent of often non-diverse societies. A lot of the things people say, picking up those methodological, as they’re called skills from academia later in life struck me as being very poorly defended.
Another one from the left, the concept of white fragility. This is Robin DiAngelo. White people get very angry and defensive if you criticize them about bad things white people have done like engage in racism.
I don’t think that’s a white thing. I think that’s universal. If you were to accuse a bunch of Latinos, for example, to bring up high rates of illegal immigration in the Latino community. Or if you were to criticize a bunch of Black people unprovoked about lower SAT scores or something, you’d get some anger and some yelling.
A lot of this didn’t strike me as based on reality and I think I was able to see that because I came to it a bit later in life from a fairly stable position. And I think that’s true of a lot of very original thinkers.
Thomas Sowell was a sharpshooting instructor in the Marines before he went to college. And he initially went almost as a joke. But he turned out to be one of the brightest students. And he went from Howard which is a top school to Harvard which is probably the best in the country.
And so he came out as the sort of very well-formed, veteran, conservative academic. So again, we need to diversify the universities in a real sense, ideologically and some. But that’s where I came from.
Leahy: Does the fact that you teach at Kentucky State University, a historically Black college rather than an Ivy League school, give you more freedom to express your views?
Reilly: Probably it does. One of the things that someone said jokingly during a KSU golf event about a year and a half back was if everyone’s a well-off Black guy, it’s hard to feel too much white guilt.
And that is a humorous comment. But it’s also true. I think, where you see the most hysterical restrictions of speech, this sort of thing, that doesn’t tend to be the great Black schools like KSU or Centre or Morehouse.
It doesn’t seem to be the military sort of institutions, Texas A&M or the Citadel, any of the place, the community colleges, the places that draw from just sort of normal American citizens. It tends to very specific, sort of upper-middle-class, almost entirely white institutions without criticizing these. The schools in Portland and Portland State or Evergreen obviously, I become internationally famous and the Claremont Colleges.
So I think that that idea of guilt or that my ancestors descend or something like that, you don’t see very much at an HBCU where most of the professors are going to be Black. So you’re going to have Black Republicans and Black businessmen, and so on down the line.
I think it’s assumed that even your white colleagues obviously wouldn’t be racial bigots, so they wouldn’t be teaching at a Black school. So, yes, that probably helps a little bit. It’s hard to call me a Nazi.
Leahy: (Chuckles) Professor Wilfred Reilly, author of Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About. Come on down to our studio here. We’re not too far away. Frankfurt, Kentucky, down to Nashville. Not too far. Come on in-studio someday and talk with us then.
Reilly: Sure. I’ll definitely get in touch when I’m in Nashville.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Wilfred Reilly” by Wilfred Reilly.
