Reviewing Jemar Tisby's "The Color of Compromise"

Conversations That Matter Podcast Introduction and the Book's Thesis

Hello again and welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I'm joined today with my brother, David Scott, and we're going to be talking about Jamar Tisby's new book, Color of Compromise, and it came out, I think, about two, three weeks ago.

David, you read this, so why don't you tell me first a little bit about who Jamar Tisby is, why we are discussing him, why he's important, and then tell me a little bit about his book. Give like the 30-second synopsis.

Well, first of all, you're welcome for reading the book, but thank you for listening to this. I have bit the bullet for you.

We did the hard work, so you don't have to. David did the hard work. Exactly.

So, who is Jamar Tisby? Jamar Tisby is a young man. He is sort of up and coming in the, I guess we could call it the social justice wing of the Reformed Church. I believe he's a Presbyterian. He went to Reformed Theological Seminary, but he is very active in a number of evangelical denominations.

He's sort of a prized speaker right now. He has a master's in history. Those are his credentials. He's working on a doctorate, but even just with a master's, I think it's because of sort of who he is and what he talks about.

You should see his name on every conference, you know, front page of the Gospel Coalition. He is a hot item right now.

I know he went, or he's going to Mississippi, well, the Ole Miss, and they're known to be quite on the, how do I say this, they're on the social justice side of things. They're definitely more progressive in their history department there.

So he's, the reason we're talking about him, though, as you just pointed out, is because he's active in a number of different denominations. I think he's Presbyterian, right, if he went to Reformed Theological.

And in fact, one of the history departments I'm familiar with just recently did a faith and history conference of some kind, and he was the keynote. So a lot of undergraduate history students from Christian universities went to Calvin College last year, and I know this is not the only conference that he's done, but he was the keynote at this conference.

And I heard about some of the things that he said there, this is before his book came out, and it was a little shocking that they had grandstanded him, so to speak. Grandstood him, I don't know how you say that.

But yeah, so why don't you tell us what?

Grandstanded, I'm the one with the master's degree.

Yes, you're the English guy. So yeah, I just have an AA in English, I guess. What about, yeah, so that's what he does. But what about his book? His book's gone. I know it's been in a local paper where I live, in a secular paper, so people are paying attention.

What does it say?

What kind of an impact is it having? So this is really his, I mean, he's young, I'm sure he'll do a lot of things in his life. I wish the best for him, as long as he's doing good things. But this is kind of his seminal work, as far as, it's the expression of really the only thing that he talks about, as far as I can tell.

And if you watch his speech that he gives, a talk at a university, or even just a two minute clip, you know, the Gospel Coalition has a particular video, I think it was like, what do you wish Christians, white Christians knew about race, or understood about race?

So his basic sort of concepts that he, not only that this book is essentially entirely about, the whole point of the book, but also the concept that he is forwarding, and he's seeking the forwarding, is the idea that, and he says this in the introduction, is that racism never goes away, it just adapts.

And those are the exact words, he says that. That's his thesis. That's his thesis, but that's not just for this book, like, that's just his thesis, just period, whatever he's doing, that's his thesis.

Racism doesn't go away, it just adapts. So this is his historical proof text to demonstrate that that's the case.

The Book's America-Focused Historical Narrative

Now, does he go back, I know you'll give us more in a second about the book, but does he go back to the Reformation, because I know he's done speeches on racism and the Reformation and things like that.

No, he really doesn't. The book is very, in fact, that's one of the things that I think is a weakness in it, is that it's so entirely America-focused, which I get, like, it's a book about America, it's a book about the American church, but it's very American-focused, it's very monolithic in that way.

It doesn't really extend beyond the confines of the American church that much.

Okay, so that's his thesis. And how does, what does he use to support it then?

So really what he does is most of, the majority of the book is a, it's really a historical narratives piece. So I love historical narratives books. Those are kind of what I read in my leisure time, the little tiny bit of that that I have.

But historical narrative books are, can be done really, really well. And he's not a bad narrative writer, like his, you know, it's peppy and it's sort of kind of nice to listen to if the topic was nicer.

But it's basically a narrative piece that is tracing a sort of a thread of racism from colonization to present day. So what he's seeking to prove is through a lot of generalizations, very generalized, sort of a lot of generalization, then a couple little specific things picked out here and there.

He's trying to prove that America is racist, always has been racist. It was founded on racism. And the church, you know, the whole point of his thesis is because racism never goes away, and the church is implicit in it.

The church is sort of the fault in the way of the Christian evangelical church, at least the white church. And that's really what you get as it starts to go is it's really, this isn't a, he's talking about the white church specifically.

Well, there's, you don't even know where to start because there's just so many things in just what you said that would be interesting to probably pick apart. I mean, the idea that this country was founded on racism.

I mean, did he actually, he argues for that? This country was founded. That was the idea behind the United States.

Well, he, it's slavery. So slavery started with slavery. And then you go, he goes back to the Puritans. Puritans have slaves. He talks about Whitefield. He talks about Edwards. He talks about the slaves who came into Jamestown and sort of, and he actually, he does mention, he makes a lot of passing mentions of the treatment of the indigenous people.

I'm not sure when it became indigenous. It used to be Native American. Sometime in the last five minutes changed to indigenous peoples. So he makes a lot of references to indigenous peoples, but essentially white supremacy was a start and it is the, it's been like that the whole time.

And it is still that way. And the church has helped, helped it along all the way.

The Book's Omission of Eugenics, Abortion, and Margaret Sanger

Okay. So why don't we do this? Give us a preview of his solution to this. So I'm assuming there's a solution. It's not just, because it sounds very depressing at this point. You're saying, well, racism just never goes away.

It changes form. And the United States is thoroughly racist because of the church or the church is complicit in it, I suppose. Does he give any hope? And then why don't we go back and discuss in detail his solution and the evidence he uses to support his thesis?

So where's the hope? Well, even before that, I would mention when I first tried to pen just some, some notes about the book after I finished it, there was, I want, I always want to ask myself when I read a book, I really don't like, I always try to ask myself, what did I like about it?

What was good? There's got to, you know, you have to be able to take something away from, from whatever you're reading. So he makes a statement at the beginning of the book, which is interesting. He says, which I really appreciated.

He says all, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but all characters in history, all people in history are nuanced and they are full of contradiction. And so they're not going to line up exactly how we think, you know, we'll try to put them in categories, but they don't necessarily line up in those categories.

I thought, wow, that's really good because that's something that you don't see much in history today. Usually we live in an age where, you know, you said something 35 years ago, or you did something 35 years ago, and that one thing paints your entire persona today.

Like it marks you and there's no grace or anything. So I thought it was nice that he said that. The only problem is he doesn't really, he mentions it, but then he doesn't carry it into his narrative. So Jonathan Edwards, for example, is, is a, you know, great theologian, a great pastor.

He's a great example in all these ways, but he was involved in the slave trade. He had slaves. That marks his entire, essentially marks his entire ministry and his entire character. So there's sort of like the slavery and racism are the, that's, that's the sin that you cannot commit throughout the book.

If you commit that sin, then you sort of, your whole legacy is destroyed. So that was the one good thing. The other good thing are, at least it could have been a good thing, but it doesn't end up really being a good thing.

The other thing that I thought was kind of nice was he doesn't, he spends the majority of the book kind of castigating the South. And this gets into more of the historical narrative, but he castigates the South for slavery, obviously, but then he actually spends an entire chapter where he talks about the complicity of racism in the North.

And he talks about several different examples. It's what he leaves out. He leaves out the most blatant racist movement in our country's history. And he just doesn't even mention them. Or if he does, it's as a, it's as sort of as a weapon to beat the right, the Christian right with.

Are you talking about scientific racism? And I mean, that was a Northern kind of Philadelphia development that Southerners opposed strongly. Or are you talking about those like pre-evolutionary ideas, Darwinian ideas that eventually became, I guess, eugenics and the rest of it?

Is that what you're talking about when you say the most blatant form?

I mean, I would consider eugenics, I've taught history for several years on the secondary level. And I remember the first time I taught through American history, and you're looking at racism, and you're like, and then you get to the eugenics movement, and you read the statements of the people who were to the founders of the movement, founded blatantly on racist principles so much more than anything that you ever encountered before.

More than the Antebellum South, more than the colonial era. And Tisby doesn't mention it. He doesn't mention eugenics at all.

Wow. That's actually shocking if it's a book on racism and complicity in America or the church, and he doesn't mention eugenics. Does he mention Margaret Sanger at all? No. Margaret Sanger is not mentioned at all.

Not mentioned. That's really shocking.

The whole thing with abortion, though, and that was one of the most infuriating, I guess, parts of the book, is if you're reading a book that's supposed to be by an evangelical Christian talking about, you know, the sin of racism, then you would think abortion would be at the top of the list.

More Black people have been killed by abortion than, as far as I know.

Yes, it's not even close to anything else, yeah.

So, and it's not that he doesn't talk about abortion. He does, but he never mentions the, you know, the demolishing of the Black family because of abortion, and he only talks about abortion in reference to, like, it's virtue signaling by white Christians.

So white Christians will pretend that they care about Blacks because, you know, they rallied to abortion, or they'll pretend they care about Blacks because they rallied to abortion. But there's no actual vilification of abortion in and of itself as a racist means to exterminate the Black population, which, if you read Margaret Sanger and you listen to what she was advocating for, you know, that would be your takeaway.

So there's that. There's also eugenics, you know, Planned Parenthood. Those things kind of flow out of one another. But he really doesn't, he really doesn't talk about that. And what's so interesting is, rather than talk about that, because we're talking about the progressive era, so the early 1900s, it's not that he doesn't talk about that era.

He only talks about lynchings in the South during that era. So we're only going to focus on these incidents in the South, which

Only Black lynchings, I'm assuming. He doesn't focus on all of the white lynchings or anything like that. So here's a question. I do want to get to what his solution is eventually. But since we're already getting into the weeds here a little bit, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, I'm assuming he mentions Whitefield, have been the whipping boys lately.

And Edwards, both Edwards and Whitefield were treated, they're slaves as far as I know, with deep care and concern. In fact, Whitefield was very, I mean, you can credit him with introducing slavery into Georgia, but he was highly critical of the slave trade.

In fact, he preached sermons also against mistreatment of slaves, very much wanting to, if you're going to have slavery, do it within the confines and regulations of a biblical law. And they were imperfect men, but Edwards would have been the same way.

And does he get into, is there any attempt to mention that, at least give them the benefit of the doubt on that, talk about what the Bible has to say? Because, I mean, obviously the Old Testament Hebrew slavery system was regulated.

It wasn't wrong in God's eyes, biblically speaking. He regulated it. And then, of course, the Greek system, we have Philemon and the instructions for slaves and masters to get along in a certain way that honors the Lord.

And so it seems like in the New Testament, too, there's a regulation there as far as how slave masters are supposed to treat slaves, but it's never actually condemned as far as something that should be, like, there's no abolitionists in the apostles or the prophets, not like we think of an abolitionist.

So Edwards and Whitefield seemed to fit nicely into that tradition in a way, or at least in their minds, they would have thought that. Does he give any kind of consideration to maybe how they were looking at the Bible, and that may be being a legitimate way in their time, as men of their time, to look at it or no?

As to, like, systems of justification, like theological systems of justification. Or, you know, he spends a while talking about the misinterpretation and genesis of the Mark of Cain or the Curse of Cain.

Right.

He does sort of a... But that was used, that was more of a Puritan thing. That was, it is, I mean, he spends a lot of time on that. That was, because Edwards...

But he does, as to the nuances of the Old Testament and the New Testament texts, just the idea that slavery could potentially not be a sin in any circumstances, he really doesn't give any credence to that.

Evil, it's racist, it's wicked.

Jonathan Edwards and George... Does it prove text, does he use any Bible verses to back any of this up?

Very little. There's not much in the way of scriptural exegesis, but it's not, that's not the book. The book is tracing this thread of racism through the history of the church. It's not really dealing with, and he mentions that at the beginning of the book.

He says other books talk about the, you know, theological issues. My purpose is to prove that the church has been complicit in racism. That's his thing. So he really doesn't talk much about the theological...

Like, he talks about Dabney, for example, the... Robert Louis Dabney. Yeah, but he only, sort of, to use him as the example, like, look, this was the South's, you know, scriptural justification. They had Dabney to justify the white supremacy.

And Dabney is completely vilified. There's no nuance given to Dabney at all.

Ronald Reagan, States' Rights, and the Sloppy Use of History

Oh, that's really sad. There's a lot of good things that could be said about Dabney. Complex man, just like Edwards. But Dabney, in fact, makes arguments in the defense of Virginia, the South, essentially trying to say he has the welfare of African Americans in mind.

And, kind of, he shares what the Union Army and the policies of the Republican Party, how harmful they were. But I'm sure he doesn't mention that, Tisby. So, let's... Give me some of the... I don't want to get bogged down with Edwards, Dabney, or Whitfield, but...

How about Reagan? You want to get... Give me, like, the top three examples that are just, like, outlandish, that where Tisby gets way... He's wrong, just flat out wrong.

So, my favorite one is Ronald Reagan. He, sort of, vilifies Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is, sort of, painted as this white supremacy figure, which is very strange, especially considering that Ronald Reagan was actively speaking out against our, at the time, ally, South Africa, because of apartheid.

And he was... He wasn't afraid of sanctions, really. And he wanted to support South Africa, but he was very outspoken in his condemnation of apartheid. So, he doesn't... I'm not sure where that came from, or I should say, I wasn't sure where that was coming from until I got through that whole chapter.

So, in the... During the civil rights era, there's a town in Mississippi, I'm blanking on the name right now, but there were several, I'm sure you know it, several civil rights leaders who were murdered.

I believe there's... What, Selma, Alabama? No, not Selma. It's in Mississippi. But there were several civil rights... I think there's three civil rights. It's a very famous case. And Ronald Reagan started his campaign in this same town.

It's in the first 1980 bid for presidency. So, Tisby, sort of, paints it as a, for lack of a better term, a dog whistle to the right that he starts his campaign in this...

I think you're talking about Philadelphia and Mississippi, probably. Which one? Philadelphia, Mississippi. That may be it. At the Neshoba County Fair. Yeah, that's the one.

So, and his justification for why this is a dog whistle to... Because the event happened, you know, you're talking quite a bit before, you know, over, well over a decade before he starts his campaign there.

So, what is it? I mean, lots of civil rights leaders and lots of people have been killed all over the country in all sorts of different places in all sorts of different ways. So, why is this particular racist?

It's because when he gives his speech at that county fair, he talks about states' rights. And we know that states' rights equals racism. Oh my goodness. Anyway, there's no nuance to it. It's just, it's, you know, there's lots of reasons why people support states' rights.

There's lots of... It's not just because of racism, but...

Well, right now, it's sanctuary cities and legalization of pot. Right, right, right.

Especially after, yeah, especially after Trump, suddenly everybody loves states' rights. So, but it's because he's made this case so long. And that's where I think history starts to get really sloppy.

Because he's starting to build a decent case from the beginning of the book. But as he gets along, you know, he starts to push these assumptions farther. And that, to me, that was the point that, and it was almost at the end of the book.

But that was the point where I was just thinking, go ahead and run off everybody who supports states' rights, because states' rights is racist. Well, in Mississippi, it definitely is. So everything is racist.

Everybody is racist. Every movement from the conservative right is racist. There's no, you know, there's no two ways about it.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Redemption, and the Refusal to Allow Human Complexity

Okay, give me another example. Is there another one that is fun to talk about, maybe, or just interesting?

I always like how, it doesn't matter if it's a movie, like a documentary, you know, like a Ken Burns film, or it's a news story, or a book about the Civil War, everybody has to mention the infamous. Cornerstone.

What's that? The Cornerstone Address? Or no? No, no, no, no, no. Okay. But no, General Bedford. Oh, Bedford Forest, yeah. So it's a very, very short little mention. But, you know, there's no mention of him after the war.

There's no redemption. I think that's the main thing. So Bedford Forest, you know, he talks briefly, makes a mention of, you know, he committed these atrocities. And he was kind of a violent madman. And he would back the KKK and all these things.

But then he stopped there, you know. And we don't know about the rest of his, you know, the rest of his life. He rejected the KKK, that he advocated for civil rights for Blacks.

He's the one that issued the order to disband the KKK. That was him. Right.

So there's no redemption. There's no redemption in this, really, in this worldview. If you were ever racist at any time, you know, because, why? Because racism never goes away, right? It just adapts.

And I want to focus just for a moment on this Bedford Forest thing. So, I mean, it sounds like that could potentially be almost slanderous. He's not here to defend himself because he's obviously dead.

But this is a man who has a complex life. He was a slave trader for a little bit. But even in that, he was more or less ethical in a sense that, I'm comparing him to the other slave traders. He would not separate families.

He was known to be more of a gentler sort. But of course, he was a rough and tumble Scotch-Irish guy who got into fights. He wasn't a Christian. And, but he respected women. That's actually one of the big things about him.

He was always willing to defend a woman's honor. And that's actually how the Port Pillow thing ended up happening. And I don't want to get into too many details here. But it's very debatable. It's, in fact, very unlikely that he really knew what was going on at Port Pillow until after it had happened.

But he, after the war, ends up becoming almost like a, sort of an early civil rights activist in a way. I mean, he makes this speech in Memphis with a, it was a sort of early civil rights organization.

I forget the name. But he kisses a black lady at the end of it. And, and he becomes a Christian. And he's known, his slaves were the ones that fought with him. He frees at least 18 of 20 of them. And a lot of them just want to come back and live with him and sharecrop after the war.

And he's known to be a very merciful and kind-hearted. He's not a master at this point. But he's a property owner and he has sharecroppers. So, I don't know. That's just a very brief overview of some, the complexities of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

But yeah, I mean, this guy is kind of like the original, was he the first Grand Wizard of the Klan? But the Klan at the time was different than the Klan we think of now. Not justifying it. But it was, it's more complicated, I guess, is the point.

And you're saying that Tispy says at the beginning, everyone's complicated, but then he just kind of. He doesn't allow for the complications.

He doesn't allow for any complications, really. He isn't racist.

He's just a racist. That's all he is. And we're not going to focus on his anti-racist remarks, especially towards the end of his life.

Grace, Change, and the Original Sin Cannot Be Expunged

Yeah, okay. Which I think what's, what's disturbing about it is that it's coming from a different topic. So, we're supposed to be about grace. We're supposed to be about, you know, our whole worldview is predicated on the idea that people can change.

Right. That there is hope. And that change is, especially if you're reformed, change is not just possible. Change is inevitable if you come to know Christ. So, there's allowance for that. But it's contingent upon the color of your skin, it seems.

Because if you were a, if you were racist at any point, well, that's racist at all points. And it's not just you, because the whole, again, the whole point of this book is that, that the church and sort of whites at large were complicit in this racism and white supremacy.

So, even if you were, you know, so really, even if you were an Italian immigrant that came in, you know, and your grandfather came in in 1924 to Ellis Island, you're not off the hook because of the color of your skin makes you sort of complicit if you didn't, you know, fight for justice.

If your grandfather didn't fight for justice in your lifetime. So, it's the original sin. The original sin cannot be expunged. The color of compromise is white.

That's the color. That's the insinuation. Yeah. Any other things that you'd want to mention, not about the solution he has, but about the evidence he uses to back up his claims that the church is racist or America is fundamentally racist, that that's kind of what they're about.

Any other thoughts?

Well, I think, I mean, this is kind of a general thought. So, it's not super specific. But there's a conflation between individual and personal responsibility and collective and, you know, sort of group responsibility.

And I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes from. And the whole idea that racism never goes away, it only changes. Well, if you're talking about society at large, and, you know, to be more specific, he talks about, right, first the slaves come into Jamestown.

And so, then we have slavery there. And the South becomes sort of dependent, economically dependent on slavery. So, there's an example there. And there is an attitude because of majority culture and where the power is that perpetuates what you could argue is white supremacy.

But there's the group and then there's the individual. And the responsibility of the group falls on the individual and the responsibility of the individual falls on the group. There's not a whole lot of allowance for the sort of personal decisions that, you know, individual people are making throughout their lives.

Robert E. Lee is a good example of that. He really, interestingly, he doesn't, this is more specific, but interestingly, he doesn't really get in much to Robert E. Lee. Because Robert E. Lee, he's kind of the Achilles heel because he's an abolitionist.

He's fighting for the South, but he's against slavery. So, you know, so you have examples like that. So, he just doesn't really get into them. He doesn't get into Stonewall Jackson. He doesn't get into these things that are going to,.

That are going to throw a wrench. Just when you said, because you cut out for a second there, you said Robert E. Lee was an abolitionist. I think, did you mean to say more like a gradual emancipationist?

Because I think Robert E. Lee wouldn't have been like a Northern abolitionist type.

Oh, right. So, when I say abolitionist, I mean, I'm just, I mean, against slavery. Okay. So, he's a gradual emancipationist. He doesn't like slavery. He wants it to go away. I know, I know. He doesn't want it here anymore.

In case anyone wanted a nitpick, I just have to.

People always love to nitpick.

Well, I have to say this. I have to say this. So, we want to make it clear to anyone watching this, who's seeing us laugh, we're brothers, so we're going to laugh a little bit. I mean, we do take this seriously.

And we do think, we both think that the slave trade had, it was horrific. And slavery itself had many great sins attached to it. We don't, we're not endorsing that at all. We're not endorsing, you know, the way the Jim Crow laws in the North or the South.

Racism is disgusting. We don't like racism. It's the worst. It's the worst. But what we're saying is, I think, you can tell me if you agree with me or not, but I think in all forms, it's wrong. And that's the moral component to it.

And we think Tisby is, sounds like, from what you're saying, he's kind of like only focusing on, he's cherry picking. So morally speaking, he's not getting the full picture, which puts him in a position where he's actually even maybe slandering brothers and sisters in Christ from the past, misrepresenting them to forward his narrative.

History as a Tool for Activism and the Need for Better Historiography

The other thing is, he's not being, it sounds like a good historian. And I want to read something. This is a quote from Tisby from a talk he gave last year at a seminar, I guess, at Calvin College. And he says, Confederate monuments kneeling during the national anthem, the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter, we live in an age of protest and reform.

College students often stand at the forefront of these movements by lending their energy, passion, and creativity to virtuous causes. But the problems of today arise from circumstances in the past. Today's activists must pursue a deep knowledge of this nation's history, especially as it relates to race and justice, in order to change the present and the future for the better.

That quotation was given at a conference for Christian historians, undergraduates who are history majors. And I'm assuming there's probably some poly-sci majors and so forth. But he's speaking to them as a historian.

And hey, if you're going to be a historian, this is what you need to do. And there's a, I'm going to put this in the info section. This will be the first link. Actually, this will be the second link. The first link will be, David, you wrote a little short blog post.

About Tisby's book. That'll be the first link. Second link will be another blog written by Samuel Smith, who is a historian. And he critiques this quote from Tisby, because he was at the conference. And I'm not going to read his whole critique.

You can read it yourself. But he basically says, history answers the what's and why's, and does not really answer the oughts. And he critiques Tisby for becoming, for not looking at history with an eye to understand, as much as looking at history as kind of a treasure trove of quotations by which to further a political agenda.

Which is not really the way a historian should. Activism. History. Yeah. There's a place for, you know, obviously, using historical examples to further things. But he's, this is Tisby revealing what he believes about the craft of history.

And that's not really how history, it shouldn't be how it's done. You shouldn't be telling people that are going to go on to possibly be historians, that, you know, you basically use this for furthering social justice.

That's just going to destroy the very, the very discipline. So, so those are our critiques. You have anything else you want to add to that, or critiques for the way he uses history?

Well, I guess just briefly. Being a historian, I love history. History is fantastic. It's great. But it's the best, probably the best discipline ever, ever in history. But ironically, but what Tisby's doing is

No one ever wants to talk about the Civil War.

Why was there a civil, never mind. Why was it, why was it, why did it happen? You had one side wanted to build a wall, keep the North out. They said no. They said no people like that coming here. So they came down.

Oh boy. What, the main thing is just that it really, at the end of the book, because he makes so many suggestions at the end, that's the whole point of the book is to like, well, how do we move forward from here?

Given that the church is racist and that America is racist, given that, how do we move forward? And so it's a call to activism. And since the majority of the book is about slavery and what came out of slavery, you're sort of left with just like, wow, you know, you kind of just feel yucky at the end.

You're like, wow, everything's terrible. And that's, you know, it's just the worst. Wow, everything. And it's still so bad. And then you kind of zoom out a little bit and you start to think about it. And you're like, I mean, if the activism is so important, then why did not Tisby write a book about slavery?

How about today? Like that there's more slaves today than there's ever been. And that the country of Uzbekistan still picks cotton, ironically, cotton with slave labor to this day. And that the country of Mauritania has an estimated up to 20 slave population.

And that just last year, there was videos taken in Libya of slaves.

They're probably all obviously white Christians that are doing that, right? Exactly.

That's the problem. That's the problem. So it's hard to take the narrative seriously. It's just so bad. And the effects of it are still being felt. And you kind of think like, yeah, but the slavery is still going on.

Like there's going on all over the place. And it's not even just that, because you'd have the whole trafficking issues that are going on, even in this nation. So that's not to say that, obviously, he cares very deeply.

But whenever people, I would call it virtue signal, virtue signaling about things from the past, you always wonder, how much do you care about these things in the present that are happening right now?

What about that? There aren't mentioned, those aren't in his suggestions for, because you would think, you would think if it's a narrative about, you know, how bad slavery is, that the sort of carryover would be, all right, let's oppose slavery today.

That's not it. It's reparations. He talks about reparations in the end. So we're getting to the solution now. So solution, reparations. Yeah. So, yeah, so his solution's at the end of the book. It's a good segue.

I'm paraphrasing, I'm summarizing a little bit, but basically quotas. That would be one thing we need to see, you know, something that would demonstrate that we've moved past race or that we're dealing with racism.

Affirmative actions. Yeah, it would be. We need to see more, we need to see more black voices, black opinions. We just need to see more black. So affirmative action. He doesn't, he doesn't specifically use the words affirmative action.

It's basically what he's lobbying for, but not affirmative action. He's talking about on an individual level, which he makes some good suggestions. He's saying, know people, you know, who with, with different perspectives, you should get to know people.