A Discussion About The January 6 Insurrection And Systemic Racism – Episode 10 featuring Linda Franks & Dave Kartunen

Linda Franks

This is the Fair Fight Initiative podcast. I’m Linda Franks, the executive director of the Fair Fight Initiative in Baton Rouge.

Dave Kartunen

And I’m Dave Kartunen of the Fair Fight Initiative in Boston.

Linda Franks

Welcome back, Dave.

Dave Kartunen

Why, thank you, Linda. It’s good to be back. We got a new format!

Linda Franks

Yes, we do. And I’m totally excited about it. I love giving people, you know, just a straight no chaser type of information and inciting conversation and discussion. And I think this new format is going to give that to the people.

Dave Kartunen

And that’s not to say that we don’t want great guests. We’re always, and certainly going to check back in with the wonderful guests that we’ve had going forward in the future, but this is the summer brew.

Linda Franks

Yes, it is. And what a brew we have brewing huh Dave?

Dave Kartunen

I look forward to the day when we don’t have a brew. That means we’ve been successful.

Linda Franks

From your mouth to God’s ears. So, Dave, stop me if you’ve heard this before, because I don’t think you’ve heard this before since like in the 1700s. Right. Okay.

Dave Kartunen

That’s about right.

Linda Franks

So, the unfolding saga, which is the January 6th insurrection and hearing and all of the details, the tidbits that are coming out that really show that, oh my God, we had an insurrection and a plot to overthrow our democratic process here in the United States of America.

Dave Kartunen

This was not just a bunch of angry guys with bear spray who decided to go break stuff. There was a plan.

Linda Franks

Exactly. Yeah. And, I mean, I don’t understand how people did not realize that from the beginning, but there are those of us sometimes that just really need to be inundated with, if we will receive it, the facts. So to speak of the chaos, right? I mean, I cannot believe some of the testimony that I am hearing. You know, in particular just to what lengths the corroboration there was between some of these groups, and in some of our officials in high government is just amazing.

Dave Kartunen

And when you don’t think that the January six hearings have to do with our broken system of criminal justice and systemic racism Linda, I have two questions for you. What would have happened if the insurrectionists were black or brown?

Linda Franks

I can tell you one thing that I do know. There would have been casualties. Quite a few people would have been killed on that day trying to get into the Capitol.

Dave Kartunen

And I think on top of that, the level of preparation that would have gone into that day. Right. Oh, there’s the potential that black and brown people might be protesting out in front of the Capitol. They would have come out with the tanks. Right. The tanks would have been out there. The army would have been out there.

It was like when, you know, President Trump tried to get the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, to clear the streets with the Army.

Linda Franks

For the photo op with the Bible, right?

Dave Kartunen

Yes. So here’s the second question I have for you. This isn’t just systemic racism from a color of a skin perspective, but there’s another sort of systemic sexism that is on display in this case. And my second question for you is, why is it that only women have to speak the truth to power and testify in these hearings?

Of course, there have been male witnesses. However, the people closest to the action, the only people that seem to be brave enough, in this case, to come forward and say what they saw have been women.

Linda Franks

I’m going to answer this from a mother’s point of view. I’m just going to come straight at you. When we think about safety and when we think about integrity, we’re thinking about how does it affect not only our children but the world that they’re going to have to live in. And we would move mountains to make sure that our children, that the people we love, will live in a better place.

I don’t know if that’s just the way God made us as nurturers, the ones we are with the wombs, we carry people in our bodies. Right. That we feel that it is our obligation to speak up and speak out and put ourselves out there. These women are amazing who have been coming forward.

And I’m proud of my gender. When you put it that way. You know, Dave, because these I mean, what would keep you from wanting to preserve this democracy at all costs? To be able to guard and protect the Constitution of the United States, to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

So. Yeah, Mothers? You’re messing with our cub honey. You’re messing with the very concept of what our lives are. And when you do that, you know, women, we come out fighting and scratching.

Dave Kartunen

You know, I certainly think it starts there. But then I look at every other civilized country where democracy seems to be working well and people are held accountable. Right. And the most interesting thing that I read about this phenomenon is that the only social safety net in the United States these days seems to be women. And that had to do with what we expect from women for child care, what we expect from women to leave their jobs, to take care of children, and what we expect from women to fix things.

And in this case, the fixing the thing is our entire democracy, while somebody like I’ll point out to people as a contrast, Pat Cipollone, who was the White House counsel in this case, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming after this bombshell testimony to come say part of what he knows, but he still uses this flimsy, privileged excuse where he’s like, I can’t talk about what I talked with President Trump about.

But then he freely talks about what he talked to other White House staffers about when he was the White House lawyer. So he’s undermined his own sort of privilege claim when he does that. And it’s like everyone’s like, oh we have to be nice to him because he’s a white man in power and, you know, that’s a very delicate we must, you know, have some real institutional comedy here where everyone gets along and we value that. And then the second person, the more egregious example is Donald Trump appeared to have an eight-point plan to overthrow the government, which ended with unleashing a mob to hang Mike Pence. And yet Mike Pence still sees no need to come in and testify to what he knows. And worse, the entire sort of political community, the media, the opposing politicians, the people in the committee were like, oh yeah, I guess, you know, that’s probably okay if the person who, you know, was the target of a hanging doesn’t need to come in and talk about it because, you know, he’s white and powerful. So, you know, we have different rules.

Linda Franks

Let’s not forget Mark Meadows, right? I mean, we’re all in this drama, right? He allegedly had a conversation saying, I’m going to get your vote, hey, come get your people. They are out here about to tear up the Capitol right? Call them now. But he, oh of course, no.

Dave Kartunen

Linda, we must remain civil. These are white men in power, so we must remain civil. Everyone be nice.

Linda Franks

I can imagine what that scene would of looked like. Like you said, in preparation for my brothers and sisters of color coming out to protest the systemic racism that we’ve had to deal with since the inception of this country. The National Guard would have already been deployed there, like you said, tanks and armor and riot gear.

And the first person to have broken through a barricade would have been shot dead, not coming in, God bless her soul I mean no disrespect, not coming through a window on the inside of the Capitol, but definitely before you ever even got on the steps. Let alone to be able to raise a gallow.

Dave Kartunen

The flimsy barricade that was in place right? That flimsy barricade that was in place, the only preparation that they had made for the day. Right. All right Linda will stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but we have the tale of Sam Dobbins, the now former police chief of Lexington, Mississippi. A stunning but not surprising article in The Washington Post, which we will link to on https://www.fairfightinitiative.org/fairfightpodcast/. Sam Dobbins is caught on audio recording by a black subordinate, who was a sworn police officer, admitting to killing 13 people in the line of duty, bragging about it, including one case where he bragged about shooting a man more than 100 times.

Linda Franks

Yeah.  In Mississippi. You know, I think it was Nina Simone that coined it better than anybody else. You know? Damn. You know, damn Mississippi. To me it resonates on so many different levels. For one, you have this black man who is, you know, going to work in this police department and realizes, I can’t do this.

The culture here is just too toxic for me. I can’t do this. But before I leave, I’m going to do my best to make sure that this person is no longer in power. And if he is, there will be some serious questions as to why. According to the article, Mississippi has a one consent rule for recording. So this young man, you know, recorded this conversation and now this police chief has been terminated.

I mean this is the thing, and I can’t stress this enough is that in my life, in my culture, this is not I don’t want to say it’s not news to me. Okay. When we think of the strong arm of the law, we think of these people who are in these small rural areas, these sheriffs, these police that have immunity, they can kill with without any type of, you know, worry of retribution. It’s in the line of duty. You know, they can target black bodies all day long. And from the reports, this young man that he’s talking about shooting 119 times was not even armed. Right? But then he was so quick to say how oh, you know, you know, I got off on it. They are going to believe what the officer says.

And so I think it’s time for our country to start looking at this overarching immunity that, you know, police officers have that allows them to be able to operate with their biases and with their prejudices and to target our communities and really devastate families and individuals.

Dave Kartunen

And so we pick these two stories because they are timely and because they need attention, but they also provide food for thought. So I’m going to give you two different ways to do this. You can go to FairFightInitiative.org. You can click on the education section at the top and scroll down to systemic racism or go directly to the URL, which is https://www.fairfightinitiative.org/systemic-racism/.

And this phenomena in these two events, which are two stars in a constellation of criminal injustice and systemic racism, tie neatly through a diagram and an explanation that we have on our site that you can read for yourself. What feeds into this system of systemic racism is individual racism. Right. So we have former chief Sam Dobbins here with grotesque individual racism against black people that he is ultimately allowed to weaponize into institutional racism by climbing the ranks and becoming the chief of police. We have a system, Linda, that not only allows for this but has clearly, in this case of the Lexington, Mississippi Police Department, rewarded this type of behavior.

Linda Franks

Exactly. And that’s you know, that’s the thing when you’re tying it in with the individual and the institutional, because you have these people who have been raised in a system and environment that promotes and support the thinking of the other of being less than, of being not privileged enough to be able to be afforded equal justice.

Actually not even being able to say, you know, that they are not even worthy of it. Right. And so you bring that into the places of power that you now occupy. And, of course, then you influence the culture of your departments and of the different systems that you put into place. You make sure that that bias is embedded and it just permeates everything from housing to education to the whole nine. Yeah.

Dave Kartunen

Yes. And certainly in the case of law enforcement. But if you want to see an example of how institutional racism has really been at work, just go back to the January 6th hearings right? So we have the individual racism of Sam Dobbins, where the racism that a person feels and the way that racism influences how they treat others is weaponized into institutional racism, where not only he is rewarded for this type of behavior to climb the ranks, but then he gets to make the rules.

Well, if you need a 400 year example of that? Let me just point back to the halls of Congress where institutional racism not just seeps into society in this case right? It’s the entire groundwork upon which society has been built. Right. The rules, the laws, and the guiding principles that inherently favor white people all the way back to the beginning. Just go back and read that 3/5 compromise where, you know, owned slaves only count as 60% of a person favoring white people over everybody else. Right?

Linda Franks

Including women, right?

Dave Kartunen

Absolutely including women. Who also did not have the right to vote.

Linda Franks

It was the land-owning white male.

Dave Kartunen

And only then.

Linda Franks

Exactly.

Dave Kartunen

And you still see this 400 years later when we deliberate through an attempt to overthrow this very system. And so this is a group of people that tried to overthrow this system, in part I would argue, because they see that it’s no longer working in the way they think it was intended for their benefit. And so they use violent means to try and wrest it back.

But even when that is so bare in front of us, we still sort of sit through these hearings to say, oh, well, you know, we need to protect the powerful people because they get special rules. And, you know, we don’t need to bother Mike Pence because he’s out pretending like he might be president one day, and that’s very important for him.

You know there was one line, and I would leave this institutional racism with this line, and if you go back and watch the most recent hearing, Eugene Scalia, who was secretary of labor and a big player in this whole January 6th saga, his testimony got aired in just a snippet during the hearing. He is, of course, the son of Antonin Scalia, who is the author of some of the most regressive Supreme Court opinions of the last 50 years.

Of course, rises to power largely because of who his father was, becomes the Secretary of labor under Donald Trump, and testifies to the committee that he tried to invoke the 25th Amendment. And then they asked, well, when it didn’t work, why didn’t you just resign? And he said, and it will sit with me forever because then I would have been powerless to do something.

And on its face, that sounds like something virtuous. But what you’re getting at there is people like Eugene Scalia’s worst nightmare. Right? And suddenly I wouldn’t have any power. And in the midst of all of the other earth-shattering revelations that have come out in the January sixth hearings, I just go back to that one thing that he said Well, why didn’t you do something, you know, virtuous? Why didn’t you do something of, you know, a moral standard? Because then I would have been powerless.

Linda Franks

Yeah. You know, and at the very core of the day, you hit it right there. You know, it’s the unhealthy and erroneous idea that this system has to have this power over others, you know, to have this level that says that I’m above you and I have the power to do whatever I want to your life.

And I will not relinquish that power. I will have it in every aspect of your life and you will live with it. You know, this is what it is. This is what it is. This is my worth. This is who we are. Right?

Dave Kartunen

And then imagine what people with bear spray and metal rods and clubs think when they’re confronted with the idea that really they don’t have any power. And now they’re being asked to share that power inclusively with people who they are individually racist against.

Linda Franks

Who have been who they have been conditioned to believe, have no place and no worth in this society. Yeah. And then that’s sad. And we’ve got to get past it. We just got to keep telling them, you know, that we’re not going to stop until everybody’s heard it.

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