Episode 61 - Black Lives Matter GNY Leader Hawk Newsome
Date: 2018-06-16 | Duration: 1:16:01
Topics
Improving race relations Black community perceptions and experiences Interactions with law enforcement Legislative changes for law enforcement Prison reforms Reparations Study: prison violence reduced 46% by changes in prison food Salt-Sugar-Fat, the “golden combination” that produces food addiction
Transcript
[0:11]
Hey everybody, we’ve just a very special Coffee with Scott Adams. And as soon as you get in here, we’re gonna do an introduction. But those who are early get the benefit of this type of illicit, and it goes like this. Hawk Newsome, leader of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, is here to have a chat, answer some of our questions, and see if we can move the world forward a little bit.
Let me give a little bit of an introduction to Hawk and then we’ll start talking. Hawk, correct me if I say anything wrong about your bio. So, you were born and grew up in the Bronx, right?
[1:13]
You had two parents who were both activists, and you’ve been an activist your adult life. How would you describe the scope of your activism? What’s in and what’s out? What are you an active—not work—I just need…
Hawk Newsome: I try to fill it. If it’s injustice, if it’s a problem in the community, some folks will reach out with problems that aren’t necessarily criminal justice related or even racism related. Some people just simply need help. So my activism is really just boots on the ground community and helping people. Where we get coverage for in the media is mostly fighting against police brutality and things of that nature, but we pretty much—what people call—we try to help out the best.
Scott Adams: I’m gonna see if I can turn down your audio a little bit, get a clearer signal.
[2:15]
Your bio is interesting. I believe you were first a high school dropout, but then you got your GED and actually got your law degree. So, you worked your way up from a hard situation and you’ve been quite honest about having sort of a rough past. But one of the things I like is when you describe yourself, your first word is almost always “Christian.”
Now, that would be very compatible with the mostly Trump-supporting people that would be on this podcast. So starting there, you’ve got a lot in common. Many of you would say Christian first. I’m not a believer, but I love people who are because it gives them a code of behavior that I consider highly beneficial to the world. So I’m very pro-religion.
[3:15]
Now, you’re a leader of Black Lives Matter in the Greater New York chapter. For the people who don’t know much about the organization, how similar are the chapters and the various voices coming out of Black Lives Matter? Is there a range, or are you pretty much on the same page all over?
Hawk Newsome: There are 400 organizations around the globe.
Scott Adams: And how are the various organizations funded? Or you could just talk about your organization. How is your chapter funded?
[4:17]
Hawk Newsome: Just really quickly, there are 38 organizations that are a part of the Global Network. So most of the people you see on television who are out here doing work in these different states are not part of the official Black Lives Matter Network. The people who are doing the work are folks who are out here—grassroots, boots on the ground, getting it done.
Now, funding—drumroll please—my funding comes by way of PayPal and some people just send us checks. But we’ve never received any monies over 50 and $100. A lot of people who may be watching this podcast might have helped out as well. There’s no fairy godfather.
[5:19]
There’s no fairy godfather writing these checks for us.
Scott Adams: And if somebody wanted to donate, is there a URL or a place they would go?
Hawk Newsome: Absolutely. It’s blacklivesmattergreaterny.com and just click the donate button. Or if you’re on PayPal, you can donate to blmgreaterny@gmail.com.
Scott Adams: All right, great. And this will be on replay so people can play that back if they missed it the first time. Now, what do you think about all of this Kanye West stuff? Does it feel like there’s some kind of a shift in the universe? I’ve described it as maybe the beginning of a golden age in general, not just on the topic, but do you feel something in the air?
[6:20]
Hawk Newsome: Yes, actually. I speak to a lot of people from a lot of different religious backgrounds and I was on the phone with a woman named Alyson Charles. She’s titled “Rockstar Shaman,” and we were talking about this hard shift occurring. People who we consider lightworkers, like yourselves—she’s trying to bring a message of light and unity into the world.
I have this feeling that there’s a shift coming because right now our world is divided. Our world is in a really sad, desolate place. But I believe that people who have love in their heart are gonna come together and really make this world what it should be: a place where people care about each other, a place where people work together to actually accomplish goals and come together to help people. So I see it on the horizon.
Kanye West? I think he could have done a better job of articulating it to the Black community, but I think he’s on the right track.
[7:21]
Some things obviously I don’t agree with—slavery existed—but what I think he was saying, when he said slavery was a choice, this is the way I interpreted it: he was saying slaves should have revolted just like people now should stand up. Now, where he was absolutely and unequivocally wrong was that people should lift themselves up by the bootstraps. That’s kind of hard when you’re dealing with systemic racism. It’s achievable, but there’s a lot keeping people in place.
Scott Adams: If I could go back to something—there’s so much good stuff here that people are gonna want to hear from you on. Can you say—let me ask you another question about Kanye’s message about the mental prison and then his reference to slavery. Now, I heard somebody say, well, what he’s saying is it lasted 400 years, but do you think they could have cut a few years off of that if they had been willing to die for the change?
[8:23]
Obviously, lots of people were willing to die to try to get out of slavery. It’s not like that wasn’t a constant. But is it even productive to talk about the past like that? Do you feel that even having that mental model of slavery—is that helping us in 2018?
Hawk Newsome: Yes, because this is an important part of our history that we need to address before we can move on. When you see pictures of 9/11, you’ll see a tagline that says “Never Forget.” When you see the bombing of Hiroshima, you see things, you say “Never Forget.” But when it comes to slavery, people are like, “Get over it.”
[9:23]
Or, “Let’s stop harping on it.” That’s extremely problematic.
Scott Adams: Let me interrupt for a second. When people say that, do you hear that as trying to be helpful or trying to be critics?
Hawk Newsome: For the most part, when people tell us as a people to get over it, we find it as dismissive of our feelings. And if we’re talking about this hard shift, then we have to get in touch with our feelings. Most importantly, we have to listen to what the other person is feeling. We really have to listen and understand the culture in our hearts if we want to heal together.
Scott Adams: I’m with you. Connect some dots for me. I think the very hardest thing to understand if you’re not Black is to connect the dots between the history of slavery and institutional racism.
[10:24]
Can you put a little meat on the bones of what the current baseline or background institutional racism is, with some examples? Like somebody tried to do this and couldn’t—some problem happened in terms of real on-the-ground problems that affect you. Put a little meat on that for us.
Hawk Newsome: I’d like to clear up something first. People think that as an activist I would always have problems with the Republican Party. I have problems with the Democrats as well. There was actually a candidate who’s running for governor here in New York named Cynthia Nixon who had made a very ignorant comment earlier this week. She said that legalizing marijuana would serve as a form of reparations to Black people. When you talk about reparations, you think of the Jewish people who received monies.
[11:26]
Even though that wouldn’t come anywhere close to healing their pain. The Native Americans, the indigenous folks, they received money. The Japanese people who suffered under Hiroshima, they received money. Black people never received anything.
Now let me bring this back to your point about slavery. Cotton is what made America king. That industrialized us. That’s what built the wealth of this empire. Black people provided free labor for that. So you hear about all of this wealth accumulated, all of these families, and we did this for free. We suffered through it. You’ve heard the stories of families ripped apart. Scott, what people don’t realize is Irish Americans, Italian Americans—they could celebrate their history, their traditions, their heritage.
[12:28]
They actually have a heritage. Black people were intentionally cut off from their ceremonies. It’s one thing to be captive, it’s one thing to be enslaved, but all my ceremonies, our gods—like our gods from back in Africa—all of that was taken away from us.
Scott Adams: So bring that forward to how that affects you day-to-day. Give an example to make it real for us.
Hawk Newsome: Perfect example: Starbucks. People have negative stereotypes about Black people. They call the police and police help these people with these racist stereotypes. Just two days ago, a woman at an Ivy League school who was studying turned off the lights in a study lounge. A white woman came into that room and said, “I don’t believe you go here. I’m calling the cops.”
[13:30]
Scott Adams: Wait, first—if you don’t mind, I’d like to break in because if there are points where we might get lost on something, I don’t want to go too far. Would you say the way the folks were treated at Starbucks—the story is there were a couple of customers who were African American who were asked to leave because they were not purchasing something. Is that the right story? Do I have that right?
And the feeling is that the store and then the police who came were a little overzealous and that it would be hard to attribute that to anything but racism? That’s the feeling. Now, how do you know what is the legacy of slavery that’s crept into the current, and how much is it the “brand” of African Americans in 2018?
[14:30]
Meaning that you have a higher crime rate which influences people in the current, independent of anything that came from slavery? How do you sort that out? What are the things that are current versus the things that came from the past?
Hawk Newsome: I speak truth to power. If you just look at the media, every time they talk about Black people it’s not positive. Most readers paint the same picture. It’s always the Blacks who are robbing, stealing, and killing. We are the young Black people like the young woman in my organization who won the Princeton Prize for race relations—that’s not a news story. That’s not what you’re conditioned to believe. Sometimes I feel like the news is a tool to make white people feel safer living away from Black people.
[15:32]
People feel safer living away from sight, not in the same neighborhood. It’s so one-sided.
Scott Adams: I agree that whatever people see the most of, they think is true, and the news is serving up images that are painting a picture that’s negative. But if you could look, say, in just the last six months where we’re feeling some kind of a change of heart, as you say: would you say that the Republican Party has been doing a good job of trying to showcase positive African American role models?
Even the news has emphasized everything from Oprah—what do you make of the fact that when Oprah’s name came up as a possibility for president, nearly 100 percent of the world said yeah?
[16:33]
Basically, all she has to do is decide to be president and she can just walk into the job. Doesn’t that—I mean, that feels like a big deal, doesn’t it?
Hawk Newsome: Yes, but you have to keep in mind Oprah is heart-centered. This is what we’re talking about—people who lead with their hearts. Oprah is heart-centered. She’s helping people. She’s caring, she’s compassionate, she’s understanding. This is what the world wants. I even changed a lot of the vernacular in what I’m harnessing when I’m helping people. I stopped saying “we are fighting for this.” I say, “We are on a mission to end racism. We are on a mission to a more peaceful and just society.” I think us who are at the forefront have to really lead with our hearts.
[17:42]
Personally, I love Kanye and Colin Kaepernick being talked about, but I’m more concerned with regular people. I’m more concerned with uniting regular people.
Scott Adams: I’ll just pause for a moment. One of the issues that you correctly pointed out is if you see a lot of examples of African American folks doing bad things on the news, it just makes you biased. But on the other hand, if you see positive coverage of Candace Owens—I’m saying great things about you all the time—and Kanye got a lot of props from the Republican Party. At least you’re seeing lots of positive examples of hugely successful Black people in every field. That helps, right?
[18:53]
Hawk Newsome: Candace and Kanye are saying some of it right. But Candace—maybe more so than Kanye—Black people have a problem with. It’s cool to talk about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and bringing programs into our communities to help people with just that, but you can’t ignore institutional racism. You cannot ignore racism when you talk about that.
Scott Adams: Let’s get back to that because it seems to me that what I’m seeing, talking to mostly Trump supporters, is there’s this great untapped resource of people who would love to embrace the Black community into more the Republican kind of way of thinking. A lot of things that you say, that Candace says, are so compatible with the folks who just say, “Hey, let’s believe in our God, follow the Constitution, obey the law, do everything you can for yourself.”
[19:55]
But here’s the point. The Starbucks example could not be more perfect for me to highlight what I think is the remaining barrier. Because, like you said, it feels like the hearts are lining up correctly on both sides, like they are heart-ready. But there’s a psychological block.
And this Starbucks example is perfect because I think the white people looking at that story are gonna say, “All I see is somebody who broke the rules of the store and was asked to leave.” I don’t perceive anything beyond that. Now, you would agree that they—forget about right or wrong—they don’t perceive what you perceive, right? They don’t have a different opinion of how to solve the problem; they actually, literally, in every scientific sense, it’s invisible.
[20:56]
What do you make of that? Is it invisible because of confirmation bias? Do you think it’s a willful ignorance—choosing to be ignorant to the plight of your Christian brothers and sisters?
Hawk Newsome: If you look at Starbucks’ reaction, I think people should put their minds in this place: what if that was my kid who was waiting in Starbucks until his friend arrived so they could buy some coffee, and these people were jerks to him and then called the police to back up their jerkishness?
[21:56]
If they said, “That was my kid. My kid was just waiting for his buddy before they got a latte and they were rude to him, and then they called the police and the police immediately took the side of those employees,” they would be really pissed at the store and at the police department.
Scott Adams: All right, now I think we’re getting somewhere. Now, do you think that different people could interpret whether it was rude or just—they’re just not good employees? Because I can tell you that as a white person who deals with more white service people than anything else, sometimes they’re rude to me. If I were Black and somebody was rude to me, how do I know it’s just not the employee?
[22:57]
How do I know they’re just not rude, they just have a rude manner? How can I ever know the difference?
Hawk Newsome: That’s actually a really good way of looking at it. But the way the situation is handled, as far as the police being called on you… my understanding is that once the employees and the customers who hadn’t bought anything yet got into it verbally, it was that that caused the police to come. I don’t think it was that they weren’t buying anything that caused the police to come; it was the interaction, wasn’t it?
Same thing happened in Waffle House. A young Black woman gets into an argument with employees.
[23:58]
She wasn’t being loud or irate; she was actually sitting in a chair. The police were arguing with her, telling her whatever, and then they slammed her down to the ground, ripped her shirt, twisted her arm up, and said, “I’ll break your arm.” Black people, whether you want to believe it or not, we are treated like animals. We are treated like we are less than human on a grand level. People, businesses, corporations, and the police treat us like we are less than people. People look at it and say, “I don’t see that.” It’s not about what you see; it’s about what we feel. If someone punches me in the face, I don’t expect you to feel it. It’s my experience.
[24:99]
Scott Adams: I explain this as the “two movies on one screen.” It doesn’t matter to you that I can’t see your pain. Your pain doesn’t go away because I can’t see it.
Hawk Newsome: Absolutely.
Scott Adams: But there’s also a legitimate question about why we can’t see it. Do you think racism is the only reason? I think probably the audience is wondering this: are Black police officers any different than white police officers or any other kind of police officers in their treatment of Black suspects or citizens that they’ve detained? Do you notice that the Black officers respond differently?
[26:00]
Hawk Newsome: It would benefit them to know that out of college I worked at a prosecutor’s office. I was a paralegal. I prosecuted cases, then I was their liaison to the community. What I witnessed there was that the Black and brown cops were working so hard to prove to their superiors that they weren’t like us. They were actually more overzealous than the white cops. They were policing us harder.
Myself personally, and other Black men that I know—all of us professional—would be pulled over and be like, “Listen brothers,” trying to explain. Immediately they would say, “I’m not your brother.”
[27:00]
They had to disassociate themselves from their Blackness. There was one cop at the Dominican parade here in the city who said, “Listen, I’m not Black.” I said, “Yes, you are, until you take that uniform off, and then you’re a Black man just like the rest of us.”
Scott Adams: That’s interesting. So the Black police officers might try to overcompensate so they’re not accused of going too easy. All right, so let me ask you the sensitive questions. You’re one of the few people that I’d feel safe even asking because I know where you’re coming from. If police officers stop a 5-foot-6 Asian guy in a good car, are they going to treat him rough, compared to somebody they stop who is Black? Why or why not? Do you think there’s a difference, and what would be the source of that difference?
[28:01]
Hawk Newsome: Perceptions. Perceptions. Habit that Black people are dangerous, especially Black men. I challenge everyone viewing this: when you drive by a scene and someone is pulled over, watch and see where the officer has his hands. If it’s a Black person, it’s usually on the gun or in the vicinity. If it’s a person of another nationality, they usually don’t have their hands on their gun. We notice it.
Scott Adams: I love that observation. But let me ask a question. Do you think that difference in treatment is based on a statistical likelihood that they can’t ignore? In other words, the number of Asians in jail versus the number of African Americans in jail—
[29:02]
just using that as a proxy for likelihood of crime. If you don’t know anything else about the individual and you’re trying to stay alive, do you think it’s just the crime rate differences?
Hawk Newsome: Let’s just stay out of the weeds. Isn’t every person innocent until proven guilty? Isn’t each person you encounter different? You can’t go to treating an entire race of people a certain way based on these preconceived beliefs.
Scott Adams: All right. I think we’d all agree that’s where we want to go. I think that’s the one thing that 100 percent of all people agree on: that we’d like to be treated according to the Constitution, according to the Bible, treated equally.
[30:05]
But I’m just wondering… I make up this non-existent country called Elbonia whenever I want to do an example that’s not about real people. If the Elbonians had a very high crime rate, don’t you expect the police would have their hand on the gun when they came up to the car, even if the Elbonians are all white? Don’t you think the crime rate would be the primary thing that influences somebody whose job is crime?
Hawk Newsome: You can’t judge people based on their skin color. It’s unconstitutional. We need to deal with the psychology of the police officer.
Scott Adams: But in my example, the Elbonians are white.
[31:08]
If they also were easily identifiable by ceremonial masks or whatever, don’t you think the police would have their hands on their gun just because of the crime rate, even if they were the same race as the police officer?
Hawk Newsome: I don’t like breaking the rules to enforce the law. If it goes against the Constitution and the law of the land, then the police cannot do it. It’s profiling, and profiling is wrong. It’s just absolutely wrong. If we look at that example, the wave of mass shootings across America—
[32:10]
then America would be on high alert for men in their early twenties. There should be some searches or mass arrests or something crazy of that nature, because of the people who are going in and killing multiple people in schools. Oh wait, no. So if we’re gonna start addressing these dangers based on these preconceived notions, then America will have to take on a new approach to how they police young white males, because right now they’re looking like terrorists on American soil.
Scott Adams: Let me throw out an idea. I love the fact that you’ll even engage on this—your mind is just delightful. I got pulled over by the police not too long ago for speeding.
[33:14]
I went through the procedures that people tell you to stay safe: immediately pulled over, I put my hands on the steering wheel so they both could be seen, I rolled down the window and asked for permission to reach for my wallet. I made eye contact. I said, “Hello officer, what can I do?” We engaged in friendly banter and I believe that with any traffic stop, the policeman is gonna be a little bit on edge because he doesn’t know what he’s getting yet, especially if it’s a male. By the end of that, we were best friends and I ended up getting a warning.
Can you separate the cause of the problem, which might be racism, from the solution to the problem,
[34:16]
which might be what the Black community itself does? Even though it’s unfair, even though they didn’t cause the problem, even though you’re just a citizen who did absolutely nothing, you just got pulled over—would it make any difference if the solution is that Black people simply acted in the most innocent way? Would that help?
Hawk Newsome: There is so much to unpack here. Let’s talk about desperation. Let’s talk about these schools failing to educate our children, failing to keep our children out of these crime rates.
[35:33]
Now for your question: police are trained to deal with people who are uncooperative. That’s their job. There’s something called de-escalation. They’re supposed to de-escalate situations. So when people say, “If they didn’t want to die, they should not have resisted,” I’m sorry, you’re wrong. There are appropriate levels of force to use.
There’s a man named Desmond Morrow, a former football player. He was choked unconscious by the police department. Once the footage was released, this cop was fired from his job and appropriate action was taken. Running from the police is against the law,
[36:34]
but the penalty for running from the police is another charge; it’s not death. This whole conversation is like a kid spilling juice, a parent throwing them out of the window, and you saying, “Well, that kid shouldn’t have spilled juice.”
Scott Adams: In the case of the football player, if he had his hands on the steering wheel and was saying, “Hello officers, what can I do for you?” was that effectively what he was doing and he got roughed up anyway?
Hawk Newsome: Racist people use the police as a weapon. Some guys drove by him calling him names; he followed them and they got on the phone with the local police and said, “There’s a Black guy waving a gun at us.”
[37:35]
Police came, started hitting him, saying, “Where’s the gun?” He said, “I don’t have a gun.” They slammed him and put their hand over his throat and choked him until he was unconscious. Since this case went public, the officers were fired and all felony cases were dropped.
This is the problem: there are people out there who know how the police view Black people, and they use the police as a weapon against Black people.
Scott Adams: That’s similar to the case of the young Black man who was suspected of breaking windows and he had just a cellphone in his hand when they shot him.
[38:36]
In both cases, it sounds like there’s something in common: even before the police showed up, they were expecting to encounter a dangerous situation. So they had potentially two biases working: one might have been racial, but one might have been that they had been set up for a dangerous situation. It’s hard to unpack which is the Black thing and which is that they believe there’s a gun involved.
Hawk Newsome: I have a problem with the way the police are governed. If these police were better trained, they would know how to tell the difference between a cellphone and a weapon. Let’s change the rules the police play by. Let’s prosecute cops who break the law.
[39:38]
You have to go for legislative change.
Scott Adams: Hawk, you’re talking to mostly the law-and-order-loving group, and I’m pretty sure 100 percent of the people listening to this believe that cops who cross the line or break the law need to be dealt with quite harshly. Because if you can’t trust the police, you’ve got a serious problem. Are there specific pieces of legislation that would help keep the police accountable? Is there anything floating around now?
Hawk Newsome: Andrew’s Law. A man died in a police car after 17 minutes when he screamed for his life 70 times.
[40:38]
He asked for help for oxygen for 17 minutes and a veteran police officer sitting two feet away from him ignored him and he died. On that drive, he drove past a hospital. Now, Andrew’s Law would require that if the suspect asks for medical help, it would be provided.
Scott Adams: Is that essentially it?
Hawk Newsome: It’s actually on the books in a lot of states, but it’s just not enforced.
Scott Adams: So the legislation is in the state assemblies now? These are all state issues.
[41:38]
Hawk Newsome: Hopefully we pass them in enough states that we could pass them federally.
Scott Adams: Now, the interesting thing here is that there is so much in common between the white Republican Trump supporters and everything you’re saying. I’m sure there’s no policeman who ever had somebody die in their custody who was happy about it. In other words, 100 percent of the people who did these terrible things—not one of those people wishes they did that. They would also treat it as a mistake, don’t you think?
[42:39]
Hawk Newsome: You believe that they at least wish for themselves that they weren’t in trouble. They wish the lawsuit against them didn’t exist. But there are some sick people who wear badges. We can all admit that. People who hurt people, who killed someone and then got away with murdering someone. If you have that type of evil in a person, maybe they’re happy they took a life.
Scott Adams: Even independent of that, 100 percent of everybody talking about it wishes it wouldn’t happen,
[43:39]
albeit for different reasons. The cops maybe just didn’t want to get in trouble and lose their career. The victims didn’t want any of that. So solution-wise, Andrew’s Law being at least one piece—everybody’s on the same page.
Let me ask you this: why does the Black community give away its leverage by always voting Democrat? If they could at least sometimes split their vote, or show that they’re in play, they would have much more power. Why do Black people give away their power when the Republicans are begging to help?
[44:41]
Hawk Newsome: This is something that I’m fighting against. I’m not just saying vote Democrat or Republican. There’s the Democratic Socialists of America, there’s the Green Party, there’s libertarian. But I think most people believe that the Republicans are racist, and that’s just a fact. I know that it might come as a shock to some of you, but it really shouldn’t. You look at someone like Rudy Giuliani, who waged race war on Black and Latino men when he was mayor of New York City.
[45:43]
For him to be the presidential front-runner—it looks like this party does not care about Black people. And when you see the president saying that there were “good people on both sides”—
Scott Adams: I can’t let you get away with that one. That’s sort of a CNN lie. When the president said there are “good people on both sides,” he was not referring to Antifa on one side and the racists with the tiki torches on the other. That was the CNN interpretation.
[46:44]
He was referring to the fact that the entire event was around Confederate statues. There are good people who say they should go away, and there are good people who say they should stay—not for racist reasons, but for historical reasons. You may know that I’m anti-statue. I think that if you have something that’s literally a declaration, and it’s the most offensive declaration you could ever put up, take down the decoration.
[47:45]
When Trump was asked, “Are you saying the racists are good?” he said, “No, I didn’t say that.” He clarified it as clearly as you can. But do you believe that he intended to publicly side in an unambiguous way with racists, versus my interpretation, which is that there are people on both sides of the statue question?
Hawk Newsome: I was hit with a rock in my face. There were white supremacists there with guns, with weapons, and some of them were holding Trump signs.
[49:29]
Scott Adams: The issue was that the police believed that a group of Black young men were involved in some horrible crimes, for which they were later exonerated. This was the Central Park Five. Trump at the time ran an ad that said they should be executed because they were so bad. Did the Trump ad only talk about the crimes?
[50:31]
Hawk Newsome: You were calling for the execution of men and you didn’t know the facts of the case. You just acted out of pure emotion. Everybody in the city of New York knew it was Black teens. They were called “animals.” This was racism. It was all about race, and Donald Trump put out an ad calling for the execution.
[51:33]
The police wanted to send those men away. However, there were other rapes—this was a pattern in that particular area—and they ignored that and lynched these Black kids.
Scott Adams: Would you say that things were worse then than they are now in terms of racism?
Hawk Newsome: No, I think now is a little bit worse. With social media, it’s way easier for people to spread their hate.
[52:36]
Scott Adams: Where do you see the racism? How is it expressed exactly? Is it believing something that isn’t true, or is it the level of their anger or emotions on it?
Hawk Newsome: I just ask people to be really honest with themselves. When you hear that a Black person committed a crime, in this system, you’re guilty until proven innocent.
[53:36]
We have to operate from a place of truth. We have to strip ourselves of these protective mechanisms that make us say, “No, it’s not like that.” We have to strip ourselves of those layers and just see things for what they are. To use the expression, call a spade a spade.
Scott Adams: Well, I’m not gonna say that, but let me pose this interesting question.
[54:38]
White people, from my observation, would say that you’re seeing racism where it isn’t, or where it at least isn’t the dominant theme. Everybody agrees there’s some kind of baseline racism based on the fact that people will use pattern recognition and they’re not good at it. The best you can do is intellectualize it away: “It seems like this pattern is true, but I know it can’t be, so I’m going to try to treat it like it isn’t.”
[55:41]
That’s almost an unsolvable problem. You can never solve the Starbucks question because neither side will convince the other that they’re the one in the hallucination. So if you can’t solve that in the weeds, how do you take it to a higher level? You take it up to love, or to the legislation we can all agree on.
[56:41]
Whether or not you believe that was true, you would still want to improve the incarceration rate. It turns out that the solution we can often agree on—better education, prison reform, entrepreneurship. Do you think it’s fair to say that the Republicans could help you more than the Democrats? If the Republicans were to do something real—if they said, “I see this perception of Black people,” and they were to implement financial literacy courses in underserved communities—
[57:43]
Black people would have a high financial IQ and they could help themselves. If Republicans were to take real steps—you know, Kanye West is awesome, but do something real, real boots on the ground—you will shame the Democrats. Then Black America will turn to the Democrats and say, “Hey, you’ve been our friend for so long, why haven’t you done this a long time ago?”
[58:44]
Scott Adams: Jared Kushner is working on prison reform. I connected you to that effort. There was talk that if prisoners take classes that would be useful in the outside world, they would get time off of their sentence. Did you hear anything like that?
Hawk Newsome: Yes. Violence in some prisons was reduced by 46 percent when they introduced a plant-rich diet. There’s a lot of food and sodas that we are ingesting in our communities—
[59:44]
that are making us violent. Food justice is very real these days.
Scott Adams: So food as essentially a drug? You’re saying that certain foods are making people more violent?
Hawk Newsome: We have a program called Rejuvenation where we’re bringing clean food and mindfulness and meditation into the projects.
[1:00:46]
Fast food companies put addictive chemicals into these foods and send them into Black communities and poor white communities to get these folks hooked on food. Literally hooked. And then we turn around and say, “It’s your fault you’re fat.” No, they’re literally hooking people on food. Pepsi and Coca-Cola are doing it, and they’re paying off the NAACP so the NAACP won’t even call them out for it.
[1:01:49]
Scott Adams: That is fascinating. I’d like to see more about that. I love that kind of solution because nobody disagrees with good nutrition. When you’re talking about addictive chemicals, it turns out that it’s just getting the right balance of salt, sugar, and fat. There’s a book with that title, Salt Sugar Fat, where food scientists figured out the “golden combination” that actually produces food addiction. A tremendous amount of our healthcare, behavior, and crime problems are related to that one fact.
[1:02:49]
In concept, that’s exactly the kind of thing where you could make progress. Nobody’s going to disagree with good nutrition. Now, people have asked me about reparations. I’ve written on the topic. The legacy of slavery doesn’t really ever leave; it has a lingering effect. Some would say it’s real,
[1:03:51]
some would say it’s psychological. I say psychological is real. I floated the following idea: if you did a special tax only on the top 1 percent of earners and used that for 25 years of free college or vocational training for African Americans below a certain income. For 25 years, we try to level up. Education is the way to do it. If we couldn’t do it in a generation and a half, maybe there’s some other problem we need to work on. The reason I would limit that to a tax on the top 1 percent is that they uniquely benefit by helping the most disadvantaged part of society.
[1:04:52]
They’re the ones who get new people trained to work in their factories. For them, it’s more like an investment. Now, Cynthia Nixon’s idea was to put a special tax on legalized marijuana and use those funds to pay for reparations, under the connection that the drug laws have historically been so anti-Black in the way they’ve been enforced.
[1:05:53]
It’s sort of a poetic justice in using that source of money.
Hawk Newsome: People really need to look to the core of this problem. Jewish people received reparations. Victims in Hiroshima received reparations. Japanese Americans who were interned received reparations. Native Americans—I didn’t know about native lands.
[1:06:53]
We never received anything. I don’t think this is a topic that can be trivialized. If we’re going to talk about reparations, it should be a real, serious conversation. I think we should be given land. We should own the land we’re living on so we can have businesses within our communities, and Black dollars can circulate into Black communities.
[1:07:55]
My view of the African American community just looks like Black people owning their land, controlling the schools in their neighborhoods, and owning businesses. It’s a completely self-sustaining community.
Scott Adams: Most people like the vision you’re describing. But if you just gifted land to every Black citizen, they’d still need a job to pay the property taxes. Education is first, don’t you think?
[1:08:57]
Hawk Newsome: Look at the Jewish community, Scott. They’ve mastered this. They are self-sufficient.
Scott Adams: But the success of Jewish Americans is almost entirely based on education and staying out of jail.
[1:10:02]
Hawk Newsome: I don’t think formal education is the only way. I’m not discounting education as a whole—I have a law degree—but I think there are people with trade skills.
Scott Adams: Let me get you out of trouble. When you said business acumen in relationship to the Jewish community, you mean that it was in a cultural sense, not a genetic sense, right?
Hawk Newsome: It’s not genetics. It’s just folks knowing how to do business and working with one another.
[1:11:04]
Scott Adams: I’ve got a book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Bigly. It was written for people in their late teens or early 20s. It teaches a strategy for success—layering your talents together so that you don’t have to be the best at anything, but you’ve got the right combination. It covers everything from eating right to staying out of trouble. It gives them a way to proceed that doesn’t require you to be rich. It’s a strategy that you could take advantage of.
[1:12:05]
Thank you so much for sharing your time. I think everybody here appreciates the communication. There’s a friendly disagreement on a lot of points, but people understand where you’re coming from. Your willingness to even talk to us—you were Kanye before Kanye was willing to talk to the people who can help you. That’s the important part.
[1:13:05]
You’re talking to the people who can help you, as opposed to the people who already agree with you. That puts you on a whole other level. I know you’ve gotta run. We’ll talk again.
Hawk Newsome: Love to everyone who’s watching. Remember, leading—we’ll get there quicker, faster, and sooner together. God bless.
Scott Adams: I love it. Thanks. All right, now I know I’ve got the appreciators and the haters on here. Give me your opinion on the conversation. Was this useful?
[1:14:06]
The key takeaways are that you can see how easy it would be to work with Hawk. Even if you completely disagree on what happened in Starbucks or what happened with the police who stopped that guy, it doesn’t matter. The solutions end up being very similar no matter what you thought was the problem: training the police better, having new regulations that are enforced—everybody would agree with that stuff.
[1:15:08]
Training African Americans to have better strategies and manage money better—all things we could agree on. We can disagree violently on some of the details, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the solutions are pretty similar. If the Black community decides to find a productive partner with the Republicans, with Trump, with the folks who have the power and the money, there’s just a lot that can be done. I think the Republicans are very willing to do it. Just show us what to do and make your case that it would be productive, and we’re in.
That’s all for today, and I’ll talk to you later.