interviews
The Uniqueness of Electrification in The United States
by Gretchen Bakke
September 10, 2021
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid, and visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin. , Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by franknews. This interview was originally published in February 2019.
frank: I have your book here, it's such a great framing piece that simplifies something so complicated.
GB: Incredibly complicated.
I would love to talk about energy democracy. How people want to move forward, and what sort of policy needs to be in place.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
One thing that's remarkable about systems everywhere, is that there's some sort of universal electrification. Just the idea. That idea seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look for example, at Lagos in Nigeria, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. Even poor people means middle-class people, right? There's still a grid there, but it's like two or three generators, a bunch of cables, and it runs for one building or maybe two buildings. It uses heavy fuel oil, usually diesel, so it's a much more polluting thing.
The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve.
I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped, overhauled, or given a new shape at the lowest levels, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, with no interruption whatsoever, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – it might be that I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military. But give an inch and they take a mile. You don't want that to happen. I think that's one question. I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electricity systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced, while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down. But also has the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect. It's hard to manage, and it's hard to figure out how to pay for the grid if you do that, because you still have exactly the same giant infrastructure, but the way you make money off of it is removed.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an orchestrator. What we need is an orchestrator to make all of this complexity work together. It was still this idea that it would be a person. What I’ve found in the three years since, is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess. I always imagine a real button on the wall, but this will be on your phone.
Then if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, but you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where we lose democracy, actually, and we lose equity. Even though there's some sort of dead reckoning sense of where we want to get to.
We tend to think of renewable energy as good, but eventually those companies will accumulate the same amount of wealth and power as coal or oil. The question becomes, like you said, what are the challenges and how do you move forward?
And how does democracy need to be reformed? Because if you think of it as kind of old school democratic, then a house can be an entity that can vote somehow forward into a management structure, which then represents it up. Along the way, you can do that with little company forms. Like I have my own little electricity company, and this is how much I make. My block is represented by this other kind of electricity company, and that goes up. It's not rocket science, we know how to do democracy in that way.
The question is, does democracy in that way work? Does it only produce a trickle up of funds and a trickle down of responsibility and risk?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The premise is, and the fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but the bigger system, you can't just build a parallel system next to it. It's too expensive to do that.
The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it.
There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it. The expertise and the technology has the same structure. If we have 80% solar feeding into this grid, here's what happens when a cloud goes over at the level of five seconds. Now, this is a giant problem, and there's electrical engineers working on figuring out how to make the grid function in this case. There's a push behind the expert. At the expertise level, people are interested actually, in the larger infrastructure. And nobody else knows enough to get around it. It might just be like inertia when you sit there. One thing that I really have seen is that the way in which reforms are happening in the western part of the US, and the way that they're happening in the northeast are quite different. There are different logics at work that might actually, in 100 years, if we're still here, and not completely roasted to death, produce two systems with fairly different underlying structures.
What is the difference?
The west is inter-regional cooperation. The west is really like, how do you deal with the fact that you have hydro in the Pacific Northwest, and you have wind in the Dakotas, and you have all this solar on the south. It turns into this regional balancing of renewables that then depends a lot on people being able to take themselves off the grid in order to manage that in a reasonable way, but it's huge. That's why you have all these fights in California saying, we don't want to import any coal power from Idaho, and Idaho is saying, "We don't want to be part of this thing. You're going to force all of your renewables on us." The reason those fights are happening is because what's developing is, in fact, a very large regional balanced, renewable system.
What's happening in the northeast, because it's so much denser is, micro grids that can island themselves, but for the most part are interoperable. It's a very different shape. It's like a foam in the northeast, all these little bubbles that are stuck together. If this will happen, we'll see, but that seems to be the direction it's going. Whereas there's very few little bubbles developing in the west. What happens in the south is up for grabs.
Is one better than the other?
The grid is always about geography. It's always a local system. What you have available to you geographically determines what you're capable of doing. You can have pumped air storage in Alabama or Mississippi. The way in which the weather affects the grid is interesting. During Hurricane Harvey, one of the things they learned was that the solar panels stay on the house if the roof stays on the house. Really the weaker link is not how a solar panel connects, it's how the roof is connected to the building. These are things that in the West Coast, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest, are just not problems. The storms aren't that ferocious, but on the East Coast they are. There needs to be a reaction to that, that provides the resilience they all like to talk about. What they also found after Sandy, is that communities that had one house on a block that had electricity came back much more quickly. They had a sense of cohesion, of social cohesion, of neighborliness, and there was less sense of trauma, things will rebuild quickly, and everything worked better. In that in that case, you want to be able to have a micro-grid even if it's at the level of the home.
The idea of being islandable seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building, and people were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor in that skyscraper were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
Problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There's a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant, didn't understand what it was as a system. Those interventions were people putting solar on the roof, and then they're super mad that when their house blacked out. I know a lot of people who have bought diesel generators instead because during a blackout you get to have power.
It was also just this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else that has been so damaging to the system. There were a lot of interventions happening in the grid, and I just thought well, we need a primer. That's a super practical side of it.
The other side was this desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.”
But the uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
There are pockets that are not that way for historical reasons, and ideological reasons. The fact that the business community has been so interested in the book, I think it's been really good, I hope. I hope it's really good. Those were the two pieces. It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
Not to glorify China because it does not need to be glorified at this moment, but I did see one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not about just money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison has been upgrading their system, and the way in which PG&E was not upgrading their system. At this very basic level of how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has, and I would say at this point, it might be interesting to talk to Southern California Edison. Because there should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same. With the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, this grid. I embrace this, the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us, and if I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
It's not like this Occupy Wall Street movement of electricity independence, we'll just destroy the entire country. One spark at a time. Even the companies do it wrong, and they're well trained people. I think there's a place for expertise in the future. If you want universal electrification, there's a place for expertise in there.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but the reason I say it has to happen at the level of policy, is that as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change. I don't know if you've seen this yet, but you should, you will – you stop seeing a house with like two solar panels on the roof. Every single rooftop should have solar. Where you're moving away from private decisions about household electricity use being mimicked in the infrastructure into a larger, statewide decision. For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there's laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think law saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? I find that interesting, in a good way. Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly.
Without global warming, we will be doing this anyway. The question is if we need legislation to make it happen, because we need it to happen faster.
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There's a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier than thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that? I feel like there are people who have believed that climate change is happening for a while, and now what they really want is action, and that group is growing every single day. People are just like, "Could somebody do something, please? Someone."
Anything.
Anything. Anything will be fine. I believe that each of those anythings, if they can be done, then opens up a whole new world of possibility. I can say, "Yes, we just need to get rid of fossil fuels, no extraction, no sale, no trade, no use." You can say that. I would be fine with just, we're going to stop having cars with engines in them.
Yeah.
I mean France said that. France is all nuclear, so they can. I guess it's still kind of how do we knock down a giant fireball, and while, by the way, we're doing that, try to make the world a little more equitable. The number one thing I would say needs to happen at the small level is that people with rooftop solar or small wind, need to be able to keep their lights on. That just has to happen.
How does that happen?
Essentially the problem is that if there's any electricity feeding into the system, when the men working on the system try to bring it back up, they get electrocuted. There just needs to be a switch, essentially, that automatically takes anything generating electricity off the system. There are places where this is being discussed more seriously, but if you have a diesel generator that already happens. You can do it with solar.
You can do it...
Yeah. To run a microgrid with solar power is more complicated technologically than with a diesel generator. With diesel, you actually have to go turn it on, and in that act of turning it on, you make a signal that says this house is an island. But with solar, it just stays on, there isn't any break. There would have to be some sort of artificial break put in, like maybe your power goes out for 45 seconds and then comes back on again. I don't know how it would work, but I could tell you that it's not so complicated.
It's a legislative problem, and it's a systems engineering problem, but it's not a technological problem.
I think the argument that everybody starts with is the good one, which is that electricity is everything – it's money, it's information, it's family, and some ways it's communication. It's the sense of how you're connected to the world. Just the idea of a blackout is a ridiculous misnomer, because the lights are not what matters anymore. If the electricity goes out you don't have running water anymore in your house. It's become this completely essential substructure of everything that we are and do.
Of course we should be interested in it.
We can't remove it anymore.
interviews
You Can't Serve Us, if You Don't Know Us
by Jecorey Arthur
August 27, 2020
This interview with Jecorey Arthur, Louisville Councilman-Elect, Professor, and Musician, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
My name is Jecorey.
I'm also known as Corey to my family. I was born, raised, and still live in the West End of Louisville, it has the highest concentration of Black people in the state of Kentucky. I'm the eldest of 13 siblings between my father and my mother's side.
I'm also known as Mr. Arthur, when I'm working with my little students in public schools, in community centers, at the Boys and Girls Clubs, or anywhere there's youth - the porch or the park.
I'm also known as Professor Arthur to my big students at Simmons College of Kentucky, which is our city's only HBCU. I'm in the music department and helping lead our ADOS Center, a department for social justice.
I'm also known as 1200. I am a performing artist, a recording artist, and a composer who makes hip hop music and classical music. I'm a classically trained percussionist. I got a bachelor's and a master's by age 22 at the University of Louisville. I've performed with our city’s symphony orchestra and symphony orchestras around the world.
I am the Councilman-Elect in Louisville, Metro Council District 4. In November, if no write-in candidates jump into the race, I will be the Councilman. I am the youngest elected metro council person in city history, maybe even state history.
Tell us about your district.
The district encompasses downtown Louisville, our business district, and every surrounding neighborhood. The East End tends to be wealthier with higher homeownership rates. The West End, where I'm at, has some of the poorest neighborhoods in all of the city, and, really, in all of the region. It is predominantly Black and very neglected. It [District 4] encompasses all of the issues that exist in Louisville. It is the most homeless district, the most starved district, the most segregated district, and the most dangerous district. If we fix this district, we can fix this city.
I am curious about how you ran your campaign.
I am Black. Beyond being Black by look, I'm Black by lineage. Meaning, I have inherited debt, I have inherited trauma from generation after generation of neglected people, of enslaved people, of Jim Crow people. That was the lens I announced my campaign from. I have been very clear from the start that my goal is to fix Black Louisville.
And that ruffled feathers.
People often confuse Louisville as progressive and compassionate - one of our nicknames is the “Compassionate City.” But when my ancestors were escaping for freedom, they didn't stop in Louisville, they ran across the Ohio River and into Southern Indiana.
A lot of people don’t know that Louisville had one of the largest slave ports just because we are right up against the Ohio River. A lot of people don't know that the slave named Jim Crow was in Louisville. A lot of people don't know that the Lewis and Clark expedition had its roots in Louisville and that York, the slave who made that expedition happen, lived most of his life in Louisville. And they also don't know that Harlem Bartholomew based his plans for urban planning, redlining and pushing Black people into modern concentration camps and ghettos, out of what he did in Louisville. Louisville is the worst in terms of racism, in terms of segregation, in terms of income, inequality, wealth, inequality, the racial wealth gap, the lineage wealth gap.
When I announced that I was going to headbutt those issues directly, I was told to shut up about race and to not talk about being black. Don't talk about those issues. Don't talk about homelessness. People don't want to hear that. It will scare people. Louisville is not ready to have that conversation.
Fast forward, and a few months later, COVID hits and destroys our country. And everyone's talking about racial inequality. Fast forward beyond that, and Breonna Taylor’s story is global. Now everyone is talking about Black life. Well, we have been saying these things. I was addressing these issues before and when I announced and I was told to shut up. All of a sudden it's trendy to talk about Black issues. I was here before the protests, during the protests and I will be here after the protest doing this work.
So now, as one of the voices of the protests, as one of the faces of the protest, I am going to be on the other side of the table on the Council and will be able to impact some of that change.
How do you see development and planning and gentrification linked to police terror?
A billion dollars of investment is coming to the West End of Louisville. Blocks are being purchased by our city's government and renovated. Entire neighborhoods are being completely shifted, and people being displaced.
Beecher Terrace, a public housing development, is being torn down and replaced with mixed-income housing. The 1,300 people who lived there are gone and not all of them can come back. Less than a third of them will be able to come back in and get an apartment in the renovated Beecher Terrace. All over the city Black people and poor people are being displaced under the guise of renovation.
From gentrification to racial banishment. When you update and upgrade, you displace people. It's always assumed that they have somewhere to go, but often we see that they don't, people have nowhere to go besides a prison yard or a graveyard.
Breonna Taylor’s home was part of several no-knock warrants and one home was being acquired by the city. When you look at the history of the United States government if they killed hundreds of millions of slaves and indigenous people to get land, why would they spare Breonna Taylor's life to get land? It is one in the same.
To push that point even further with data. The 2020 census data shows that our district is currently 44% Black. Over the years it has been as high as 73% percent Black. So you mean to tell me over the past decade, we went from three-quarters Black to less than half Black?
In your new position, you'll be wielding political power and working from within the institution, rather than against the institution. I'm curious how you view political power in the office you're about to step into and how you feel about working within the system?
There are so many issues that exist in our city, and specifically in our district. The big five are: people don't have money, people don't have housing, people are not safe, people are starving, and people are not healthy. I think we have to start with people's economic condition because that impacts all other issues. MLK once said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
For example, when it comes to housing, I hear people say that we need to build affordable housing. I would rather create a reality where people can just afford housing, instead of continuing to build cheap housing. It makes much more sense to me to make sure that people have the means to buy or rent a quality home.
We don't have a system in place for communities to not be exploited. And a solution would be to implement what I've called Community Commandments - agreements between our residents and the developers who come in and want to set up shop. I live at the corner of 15th and Jefferson. There are three empty lots next to me. If I don't know what's happening, developers could drop in yet another liquor store or yet another Dollar Store.
The developers come to our neighborhoods, but they don't necessarily serve our neighborhood, because they don't belong to it. My goal is to make sure that the community is organized and educated in such a way that we can fight back.
You mentioned the idea of developers coming in and missing the mark about what a community needs because they don't come from there. How do you see that playing out in politics?
I've never run a political campaign in my life, but what I noticed very quickly when we started to run our campaign is that everybody was talking about our issues, about being poor, about housing, about safety, about health, about inclusion, from a third-person perspective. I talk about these issues because I have lived these issues. There is a very different level of commitment from a politician when you live the issues that other politicians talk about.
To a certain extent, people are vetted to be politicians. I was never vetted to be a politician. I have always been one to speak out against some of the work of politicians and look at them as the opposition. But I am the newcomer, the black sheep of the Metro council, and I'm interested to see how it plays out.
You spoke before about the failure of Black idols - can you elaborate on that?
As a Black person in America, you are 13% of the population, 40% of the incarcerated population, 40% of the homeless population, about 50% of homeless families, 40% of school suspensions and have 2.6% of the country's wealth. But when you look at our entertainers, athletes, comedians, actors, and musicians, you might think that Black people are doing all right, because of the perceived success that they cast into the public light. The issue that we face as Black People is that we don't have anything. But there is this perceived idea of us having something because we see people on social media and on TV who have something. It creates this decadent veil, a phrase I have stolen from LA Attorney Antonio Moore.
It shields the failure to invest in Black America. It looks like we have fixed our problems because of the image relayed in the media - we are thriving, we are succeeding.
And it's sad. I mean, Jay Z is a perfect example. When you break down Jay Z assets, some of those assets have been detrimental to our community, such as the liquor company he invested in or such as prison ankle bracelets that he invested in. When you look at Oprah, what has she done for the black community? She built a school in South Africa. Meanwhile, Chicago has been setting record high shootings and killings for the past decade.
American culture is Black culture. Our largest exports in a lot of spaces – sports, film, and television, reflect Black culture.
What you just said about exports is so profound. If you look at the history of America, Black people were the imports, and made the exports. Nothing has changed.
The people who "make it" fail to realize that when you make it out, there are still millions of people here that are stuck. So now you are a symbol, but what does that mean? What does that do for us? We're still here.
I'll use myself as an example. Before COVID, I got to travel the world, making music and teaching. But, it doesn't matter if I'm performing on stage with orchestras as a soloist around this country when less than 2% of orchestras are Black. There is no access for my folks in these groups that I am a token in. It doesn't matter that I am a teacher, when Black men are 2% of the professional teaching field. It doesn’t matter that I have a master's degree, which was celebrated as something so wonderful when in the Parkland neighborhood, where I am from, 0.3% of residents have master's degrees.
Parkland is important because that's where Muhammad Ali is from. And I would say Muhammad Ali, before all of these celebrity activists, Muhammad Ali was the cream of the crop of, of a celebrity who didn't sell out. He spoke out against issues no matter what. And he was from Parkland where I'm from. I actually played him in an opera with our orchestra. Muhammad Ali was very clear about letting you know, I don't care if I'm sitting on this yacht because the people back home are dirt poor. They have nothing.
We named our airport, Muhammad Ali international airport. And I got invited to a think tank about how we make it reflect him and his culture and what he believed in. I said, well, you already failed because you named the airport after him in a city where 45% of the Black kids live in poverty and will never step foot in that airport ever. They will never be in that airport to fly anywhere. They will live and die in these neighborhoods that Muhammad Ali spoke out about fixing.
Right. How much of these issues do you feel like you will be able to tackle on a local level?
A lot of this stems from centuries-long issues, systemic issues. We can’t fix all of it locally, specifically the racial wealth gap. We can't close the racial wealth gap in Louisville without closing the racial wealth gap in America. When you have families in my neighborhood that are making $9,000 a year, you can't lean on a city government that is already pinching pennies. The federal government needs to address this issue. The federal government needs to pay direct payment reparations to the American descendants of slavery.
Black Enterprise predicted by 2053 Black wealth would shrink to zero. By 2030 low skill jobs in the Black community were predicted to disappear by McKinsey & Company. With the COVID-19 pandemic, these dates are getting moved up. That is concerning, and it is even more concerning when Donald Trump and Joe Biden are our only two options.
We have paid billions and billions of dollars in reparations to Japanese Americans and Native Americans. And we've seen reparations happen overseas with our Jewish brothers and sisters who were tracked down all over the world to receive their reparations. The argument is always that we can't afford that debt, but the debt already exists, we just never paid it. I want to be very clear as we talk about solving these issues in Louisville, that these are bandaids. These are minor fixes, but what is going to transform America is direct payment reparations and a program of protections and rights and laws for the American descendants of slavery.
I have one more question for you now. Are you encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden?
Hell no.
I'm writing in and I'm prioritizing down-ballot. I'm not encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden.
Does that feel dangerous to do?
Well, I'm 28, so I don't know everything. But what I do know is there are people, including Joe Biden, who have been in elected office for decades upon decades who have such horrible track records. People are scapegoating Donald Trump as we sit in this "divided America." Trump has only been there for a term. What about the 231 years of presidents before him that got us to where we are today?
I get a lot of pushback online for my position. It's usually from white folks who will say, "Well, we are going to have another term of Trump." White people voted for Donald Trump at a 54% rate. Why are you telling me to fix the issue that you created? You need to call your cousins and your aunts, your uncles, and your grandparents, and tell them to vote for Joe Biden. Don't call on me to fix your issue.
There is no encouragement for me to vote for either candidate. A lot of people want you to vote for their interests, but they don't want you to vote for your interests, especially if you Black.
Do you feel like there's a possibility he doesn't concede if the numbers aren't overwhelming?
Well, I'm less threatened by the people who tell me who they are. I am more threatened by the people who don't tell me who they are. We know who Donald Trump is - he just laid it out. Who is Joe Biden? Who is Kamala Harris? Who are they? One day Kamala was Black, one day she's Indian. One day Joe Biden was saying that we were predators and need to be swept out of society, and then one day he's saying that if you don't vote for him, you ain't Black. They confuse me. I don't know what they believe in. I don't know what they stand for, but I know exactly what Trump stands for.