Lizzy: Hi, I'm Lizzy Ghedi-Erlich.

Lisa: And I'm Lisa Hernandez.

Lizzy: And we are your hosts for Scholar Strategy Network’s No Jargon. Each month, we'll discuss an American policy problem with one of the nation's top researchers without jargon.

Lisa: And we are definitely in need of expertise and guidance and all the things that can help us make sense of things or process everything that's gone on with, I mean, the elephant in the room, the big election, and the results of the election, right?

Lizzy: So that did just happen, folks. We are joining you, this podcast was actually recorded just a few days after the election. We're here on Friday, November 8th. You are hearing this, the next week or later, but everything's still raw. Everything is fresh. For some of us, I should say. And I think there's others in our community who maybe are feeling like none of this is new or different at all. And I'm really interested in exploring that and continuing to let, expert voices from the US tell us what they know and have that be added to things that we can use to arm ourselves for what's ahead.

For this month's episode, I spoke to Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. She has deep expertise in American politics with a particular focus on racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, and political behavior.

She's the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream, and a forthcoming book that's coming out next week, How to Build a Democracy: From Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan to Stacey Abrams, about these three African American women from the U.S. South.  She writes a weekly column for The Amsterdam News, co-hosts a New York-centered podcast, FAQ NYC: The New Yorkest Podcast, and joins journalist Maria Hinojosa on the political podcast In The Thick.

Here's our conversation. Dr. Greer, thank you so much for coming on No Jargon.

Christina: Thank you for having me.

Lizzy: So, you know, we write scripts for these things. Obviously, we kind of lay out the questions that we wanna ask researchers to draw out specific things from their research and it just feels like everything has changed so much that our normal modes of operating are also not as much meeting the moment. And so our script today is relatively bare. And my goal, knowing who you are and what your expertise is, is really to give you the floor. I am so interested in what you have to say about what just happened, and so I hope that's not too big of an opening salvo to just start there. Like, tell me what going on right now.

Christina: Yeah. So thanks for having me. So for your listeners, you know, we're having this conversation just days after the 2024 election. I'm in a moment of, you know, I told my students, you have to go through, I didn't know if you knew this, there are now seven stages of grief. I thought they were just five; I'm behind the times. So I'm gonna allow myself time to rest and go through the seven stages of grief and rest maybe a little bit more and then I'll get back to work. You know, my grandmother used to always say about this country, the only time you should be surprised is when you're surprised, and I have long since stopped letting this country surprise me.

It disappoints me consistently, but it doesn't surprise me. So I'm currently in the moment where I have a business relationship with this country. I live here. My ancestors built it, free of charge, by the way, and my emotional investment is still here, but with these very real and raw feelings, I'm going to allow myself to think about how participatory I will be in the future.

I know I'll be participatory in the future, right? So some of the stages of grief were anger and pain and disbelief and denial, and all blame all the things. But as black women and the keepers of democracy and the Democratic Party, I think a lot of black women knew the possibility of an unqualified Donald Trump, someone who has 34 felony convictions, thrice married, five children by three different women.

Things that black people could never have on their resume if they expected to be president, let alone, you know, CEO of anything. But, you know, the vitriol that he spewed, the division, the egregious draconian policies that he promised, the types of people that he promised to bring into his inner circle, to the highest echelons of our esteemed government. Black women still knew it was a possibility that folks would choose him over a supremely qualified, supremely qualified candidate in Kamala Harris with a very short runway, a near perfect campaign, as someone who studies and writes about campaigns, a near perfect campaign.

But we can talk about the failures of, you know, missteps of the campaign. Sure. But let us be clear, when you look at sort of the data that's rolling in from various states, and it's like, well, you know, the Democratic senator in  Michigan or the Democratic senator in Wisconsin, or the Democratic governor and lieutenant governor all straight down the ticket in North Carolina, Democratic senator in Arizona, all these democratic gains.

But for some reason, folks couldn't vote for Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. And you can tell yourself that it's about international affairs or policy or inflation even, but we all know. A large, large segment of the population couldn't do it, wouldn't do it for this black woman at the top of the ticket.

So the first time around when Donald Trump won in 2016, it felt like it was Donald Trump. This time it feels like it's America and the fact that the coalitions that he was able to build yet again with white women. I always cite my colleague Jane Junn from USC, who talks about how white women have never voted in the majority for the Democratic Party since we started collecting data.

They've only done so twice. That's not their resting point. They've only voted for the Democratic presidential candidate two times 1964 LBJ, and 1996, Bill Clinton, second term. So this idea that white women would get on board for what is in their best interest. And obviously a woman's right to choose was front and center because if we go to the polls for economic issues, I would argue that making someone have a child is an economic issue.

I would argue that having another mouth to feed is an economic issue or a right to healthcare mammograms, annual checkups, the list goes on and on. Contraception, IVF treatment, that is an economic issue. So the fact that white women yet again went with the Republican party is not surprising. But it is disappointing. The fact that certain Latino populations, the week before the election felt that Donald Trump's comments were a bridge too far the week before the election, not the weeks leading up to it.

So that's a conversation that needs to be had. The list can go on and on as the exit poll data comes in. So I think we're in a moment of reshuffling the deck and figuring out what coalition building looks like. Figuring out how people ride the coattails and the hard labor of black women in the political process and going from there.

And we can talk about the campaign process, but I think we would be real remiss if we did not really extrapolate how someone like Donald Trump, as charismatic as he may be, and he is been in our political imagination for 30-plus years in our living rooms saying that he's wealthy. We know he isn't, saying that he's a great businessman, which we know he isn't, promising that he will deport on day one, yet still picking up significant Asian and Latino numbers.

So we're gonna be in some rough times for the next few years because I do think that he's gonna surround himself with some of the most divisive, guttural, hate-filled individuals who have been planning for this moment. Wishing and praying for this moment to take us back to a moment in America's very recent history where whites controlled things. We know that 2040 is their sort of scared moment when Latinos take over as the top demographic.

So you need to make sure that, you know, white supremacy has to involve more than just white people. And so that's part of the project. The same way patriarchy has to involve more than just men. And we've seen that's been part of the project. So I always remind my students that my parents did not go to integrated schools and they're only in their early seventies.

My mom never went to school with a white person. Not because she didn't want to, but because she couldn't. Their first elections, they could not participate in. So this American history that we're in is very recent, the full protection of the Voting Rights Act, which was only codified in 1965, which has been consistently rolled back over the last few years.

We're seeing the triumvirate of acts that I always call them, the Civil Rights Act of ‘64. Voting Rights Act of ‘65 and Immigration Act of ‘65. Those three, if you look at them in part and parcel, they're all being rolled back and they will be significantly rolled back in the next four years. And sadly, the people who voted for Donald Trump are most likely gonna be the first ones on the chopping block.

So I'll pause there.

Lizzy: Thank you for that. Thank you for laying everything out, I think, the stakes in that way. I'm seizing on what you said about how, you know, the project of white supremacy needs to involve more than white people to continue expanding. The project of patriarchy needs to involve more than just men. And how we are, we're seeing that, you know, as you also described in these exit polls, that people who, seemed so easily to me to be the targets of those systems, like who would stand to be the most harmed by them still choosing to support those systems and to sort of throw their hat in for this.

And, you know, your explanation of how having to choose a Black woman leader was part of what made that was the choice that people made, that they could not do that. So they made this other choice to throw their lot in with these systems. Regardless of what maybe was any individual person's tipping point, I have to ask where you think we might go from here.

And I know that this is all so soon and we still are in that rest period, so I don't wanna put you in a spot to sort of prognosticate, but as a person whose understanding of history is so deep, maybe I'm wondering more about if there's anything you can share from the other moments when we've seen. People joining forces with these harmful systems and what it might, what we need to do next as the effects of those systems are gonna come down.

Christina: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the big worry is, you know, what happens to the press? You know, how do we disseminate information? We know that Donald Trump does not like critics, and we know that in all authoritarian regimes, the first thing that you go after is the press because that's how people stay educated.

You know, I think about on November 6th, a friend of mine sent me a Nikki Giovanni poem about Rosa Parks, but so much of the poem was actually about the Pullman car porters. If anybody knows African American history and how Black men worked on the trains from the north to the south and there's a deep history of them doing so, but they spread information and they brought the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News and the Pittsburgh Courier all the way down to the South so people knew what was going on and they could share information.

Journalism is power and so my true concern is: where do we go? First and foremost with journalists especially since so many owners of these outlets are friends and supporters of Donald Trump. He doesn't really have friends, but people who support him are afraid of him. My second is, you know, if we think about the first term, I always say that Donald Trump was case in the joint.

He didn't know what he was doing. He had unified government, didn't know how to use it. He did have some good Republicans around him who said, excuse me, sir, this is a bridge too far, I actually won't do that. They were promptly fired, but they still actually said there are guardrails in place and there are lines I won't cross.

Mike Pence being sort of the biggest line that he wouldn't cross and certify an illegal election for Donald Trump when he called on people to attack the U.S. Capitol. So we know that his first order of business the first time around was a Muslim ban. Executive order and the court said, excuse me, sir, that's actually a bridge too far now.

He spent four years stacking the courts with very young, very inexperienced loyalists who will do his bidding. He also stacked the Supreme Court. So that being said, I don't know the checks and balances and the separation of powers and the guardrails that the framers talk about in Federalist 51 and how those held relatively strongly. I would argue in the first term of Donald Trump have been strained so much and the norms of how we were supposed to behave have been pushed to the brink because a lot of things aren't codified in law. They've just been norms about how people behave. You know, you have Richard Nixon resigning, you have Jimmy Carter selling his shares and his family's peanut farm 'cause he doesn't wanna seem improper.

We have Donald Trump never showing us his taxes, his medical records, or divesting from his businesses. So the way the media has allowed this man to just be a free white man in this country and sort of have people say, yeah, I wanna do that too, has moved us to a really dangerous point. And so I don't know what his first order of business will be.

I don't know if Steve Bannon and Steve Miller  want to move beyond just Latinos and start going for Haitian immigrants or Asian Americans, or we move to show us your papers because they said, you know, cops should have full reign and, and, and immunity. What happens when you release and pardon all the January 6 people, he's already emboldened so many MAGA folks who just have been walking up to people of color demanding that they show their citizenship or letting them know that they're not welcome and don't belong. So the type of wild racism that used to exist in the fifties, sixties, and even the seventies that went away and went underground, it did not go away. It went underground, is now being excavated again. And you're seeing these very angry, largely white and Latino men, as we've seen in some of the anecdotal videos who are making demands of people that they view as their enemy within our own country. So I can't call it as the as the old folks say. I do know that if you're in a mixed status family, it's gonna be a lot more stressful. If you have kids in public school, it's gonna be a lot more stressful because they're going to defund education.

If you live in cities, it'll probably be a lot more stressful because. Money will be starved and Donald Trump disrespects mayors that he feels don't agree with him. So transportation will be harder, provisions on water safety and food safety that we're starting to see the effects of his first administration in our food.

He'll take credit for the economy that Joe Biden has built up these past four years. We're gonna see a lot more climate refugees from places that supported him trying to figure out where they're going to go. And we're gonna see a lot of people moving to blue cities in these red states to try and build a life because they know it's no longer safe for them.

Whether they have hospitals that have been closed in their suburban or rural areas, or if they're LGBTQ plus or trans or if they're people of color, specifically Black people who live on the outskirts. Maybe they're moving into cities, but also white liberals who don't like the outcome. They might be moving back into cities and trying to figure out how to be in safe spaces and safe enclaves.

And that obviously changes the electoral map moving forward. But Donald Trump has also promised to like not have elections. So do we have midterm elections? Do we have a presidential election in four years? I'm not being hyperbolic. We have existed as a country because when George Washington served two terms diligently and then stepped aside, that set the precedent of what we do.

Donald Trump has said he'll figure out what he feels like doing now if he makes it four years and, however, he'll be 82, 83.We also have JD Vance and the billionaire class that has decided that he is young and he's ambitious and they can just essentially write whatever they need to write policy-wise, and he'll promote it and co-sign it. He and his wife, by the way. So we are in for, I would argue, some dark days, but for me, at least as a Black person in this country, if I don't have hope, then I have nothing.

Lizzy: Two things I wanna pull out from that. Acknowledging how this is a relatively unprecedented moment in the context of U.S. history and the way that you have just this particular man, this one of our two main parties preparing to go against so many of these norms that did previously govern both even while there were also, you know, stark differences.

And, and yet also this unprecedentedness and this feeling of newness for some of us. And how there actually is much precedent and how this isn't as new for others of us. And specifically just the tradition of Black Americans in the U.S. living in conditions that now seem like they're, you know, growing in both the consciousness and the reality of other people.

And so lessons that we can learn about, you know, what resistance that came from those spaces specifically looked like, I think is of interest to a lot of people who are listening today. And then the second thing I wanna pull out is about the media. Because this is something that really troubles me as a person who's studied communications and how we kind of conceive of our political selves and our identity and how communications are transmitted throughout groups of people.

And I hear, you know, you're talking about sort of the inadequacy of the traditional media we have that has been covering Donald Trump and politics. And I'm also really concerned about the new ways that media spaces are emerging and how that idea of, you know, Pullman Porters smuggling the truth out to people from who it was barred.

Like those people who received it from them seemed, you know, were happy to get it and could use it. And now I worry that that's, we're not in quite the same situation. We've instead built up these sort of parallel closed systems of information that I'm at a loss to think about how we're gonna breach.

You know, if the traditional media is attacked, that's bad. And there's still this whole other media space out there where people have been trading a lot of the ideas that they operationalized to vote the way they did. And I'm just interested to see if, again, as someone who has this deep knowledge of U.S. history in particular and how things might be different versus how things might actually be the same, what you think about that.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, I don't think what, for at least me as a Black person, what went down on the morning of November 6th was any different from what was November 3rd? I mean, this is what Black women consistently keep trying to tell people yet. No one seems to hear us, so none of this is new. We said all of this in 2016.

The problem is white people don't understand the capacity of white people. I'm gonna say that again: White people do not understand the capacity of white people. Black people have been on the short end and the brunt of white supremacy and anti-black racism and patriarchy and capitalism. Those are the four legs of the table that bell hooks lays out for us for a really, really, really, really long time.

And even though we've made some great progress in this nation, not just in the last 400 years, but in the last 55 years, we've made extreme progress and America's nothing but progress and regress. And we advance and then we pull back. And then we advance and we had reconstruction and Jim Crow. Like we understand that, but we also understand that there are some people, not all, but there are some people, some white people in this country who are so wedded to white supremacy and anti-blackness and a cruelty, a true cruelty of making sure that other people are subservient and beneath them, that they will stop at nothing to do that. And they know that they aren't as qualified and they know that they're angry. That all that there's this diversity and women have rights and people of color have rights and Black people have rights.

I mean, it's just, it enrages them and we keep trying to tell people there is a coordinated effort to make sure that these rights that have been so hard fought in blood, sweat, and tears will be stripped from us and by us. It's not just gonna be Black people. It's going to be a lot of other groups too.

And nobody seems to hear it until all of a sudden after 2016. And then the repealing of Roe v. Wade under Supreme Court Justices that we told you would be put in place, we told you he wouldn't stop at Roe v. Wade and he'd start coming for overall women's reproductive rights and IVF and birth control, the list goes on and on.

How many times can we say we are not being histrionic and the sky is falling? We are telling you we are the canaries in the mine. We are both women and we are both Black people, and we understand the cruelty that lies ahead, and nobody seems to hear it until it happens to them specifically. So this is the level of exhaustion that you're hearing from a lot of folks who are just like, well, what should we do?

And I was trying to tell people the joke where it's like when we were growing up and we'd have lots of parties at my house and, you know, folks are coming at seven. Lots of things need to be done. The one thing that would make my mom go insane was if I walked up to her and I said, well, what should I do?

And she would say, look around. Like there are bathrooms that need to be cleaned and trash bags, trash cans that need to be emptied and clothes that need to go upstairs, and like all these things. And so Black women are begging people, stop asking us what needs to be done. Look around, you see what needs to be done.

You see what needs to be done in your family. You see what needs to be done in your community. You see the hard work that possibly needs to be done in yourself yet, and still it's head scratching and pink-hat wearing and trying to figure it out. So no, there will be no more marching in solidarity. No, you all can march and figure it out, but like the time of this, I don't know if it's feigned ignorance, I don't know if it's real ignorance, but we have cards now that we must play, like not the cards we want 'cause that that ship has sailed, the cards that we have. And these are really, really hard cards and they're not in our favor, but we gotta figure something out. And Black women are like, you know, we told you that this, this was a possibility.

So the second part of your question was about media and how that works. The right has always been a step ahead in the fight, like Democrats tend to have wins and they put them on the wall in a frame and they look at them and they congratulate themselves and pat themselves on the back and forget that Republicans are really mad that there was a win and they get back to work right away.

So after 1973, they got back to work. It took 'em 60 years, but they still repealed Roe v. Wade like they promised. Democrats got Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and were so proud of themselves. Like we're not the racist party. They lost 1,200 seats around the country in lower offices. They haven't worked on building up the infrastructure of the party.

They haven't thought about the diversity within the party ideologically, but hey, now here we are. And they're scratching their heads saying, well, why doesn't the 2008 playbook work in 2024? I don't know, 'cause you haven't thought about your party. Well, Republicans have been building up non-traditional media sites and going with podcasts and sort of people who are just spouting Republican talking points and conservative ideology, whether it's a wellness podcast or a politics podcast or a sports podcast, they are organized in that way of being on message.

They're also not penalized in the same ways that Democrats are penalized when they go off script. So we have this new media that allows the right wing to disseminate information quickly and consistently. Because what we've seen with someone like Donald Trump and his followers is that they say the same thing over and over and over again until it becomes truth.

And then you start asking yourself, well, is it true? Even though you know it's not. So they're essentially saying, well, who are you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes? And people start to say, well, I guess I'll believe you because my own eyes, I don't know. I'm looking at something that is the opposite of what you're saying, but you keep saying that what I'm seeing is wrong, so now I just believe you.

So that's the moment we're in. And then add on top of that, a sprinkling of misinformation and disinformation from our friends in Russia or our billionaire class that controls social media. And we are in the moment that we're in.

Lizzy: I am with you in this moment and it is pretty dire indeed. And rather than ask you for more direction, I'm thinking of your forthcoming book and how, you know, this is a space where you collected stories about women that I think could be illustrative to anyone. I just wanna invite you to talk about some of the things in that book, some of the things that stuck with you, maybe from those biographies or from the process of your creating that book is also of interest to me.

Christina: Yeah, well, I mean, I thought about this a long time ago and you know, pre-COVID, so there you are. That's why it's coming out next week and not five years ago, but the hard work of Stacey Abrams and how close Stacey Abrams came to being the first Black female governor in the history of the United States, something which we've never had in the country.

So we've never had, besides mayor, as the highest black executive office we've had for Black women. And so in the past we've had two Black female senators, Carol Mosley Braun in 1982 from Illinois, who served one term; Kamala Harris, 2016 from the state of California, who served a sprinkling of a term before she became vice president.

But as we know, vice president isn't president, so I was curious about the role of Stacey Abrams as a potential executive, and I was wondering like, where does she come from? Right. This long line of, you know, I live in Shirley Chisholm's district, former district, and Shirley Chisholm's brilliant, obviously first Black woman ever in Congress in 1968 and ran for the presidency in 1972.

And Black men and white women didn't support her by and large. So there was this confluence of intersectionality of race and gender that she spoke so eloquently about. But I was also really curious about Barbara Jordan, who's the second woman, Black woman, to go to Congress, but she's from the U.S. South, so she's the first Black woman from the south.

And what does that mean as a Southerner? Because it was my first book, Black Ethnics, it wasn't lost on me that Kamala Harris and Shirley Chisholm and Barack Obama are not Black American. They are not descendants of U.S. chattel slavery, and that's not a statement to be divisive. It's just a factual statement that they're not Black Americans.

And so the vast majority of Black people in this country are Black Americans. But I thought, well, how curious is it that our first Black president, our first Black vice president, and Shirley Chisholm, who's the first Black woman to run for the presidency on a major party ticket, none of whom are Black Americans.

And so I was wondering where does Stacey Abrams come from in a Southern  tradition and a Black American tradition and essentially make the argument that if Fannie Lou Hamer, who's brilliant with external politics and organizing, which Stacey Abrams, as we know, was brilliant at, with Fair Fight and so many other organizations that she worked with to help deliver not just Joe Biden, to the presidency in 2020, but also two Democratic senators from Georgia.

That they had not seen in several, several decades. And then also Barbara Jordan as an electoral politics mastermind and eloquent speaker who was able to get people to think through policy issues differently as Stacey Abrams did when she was minority leader of the Georgia State House. So I was essentially saying, well, if Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan had a baby it would be Stacey Abrams.

And I also, just as an aside, my favorite president is LBJ, and I always have my students, they have to have a favorite president to help them understand that like all of these presidents are flawed and you may love something about a president that someone else doesn't. And it's just, there's certain constraints that presidents have and it's complicated, and I want them to think through why it is that they like this person. I love LBJ. Why? Because he helps bully folks into passing, helping him pass the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Immigration Act, Housing Act.

But obviously if you talk to certain men of a certain age, you know, they hate LBJ because of Vietnam. It's also complicated because he was a great mentor to Barbara Jordan. While she was in Congress because he was at one point in time the master of the Senate. But he had spent time in the House before it became, he had spent time in the House, then he became a senator and then vice president, and then ultimately president.

So he was, and Barbara Jordan's from Texas, so he was a mentor to her, but his arch nemesis was Fannie Lou Hamer. So the complexities of one man in a particular time I think is also important for readers to understand. So I also just, you know, as we looked at Kamala Harris. Possibly ascending to this major role I wanted people to understand that her success didn't happen in a vacuum, and even her vice presidential success didn't happen in a vacuum. It's from many, many decades of Black women organizing and thinking about policy and thinking about collective action and thinking about coalition building and thinking about ways that they can work with people across the country and not just in their particular region or their particular state as a way to advance causes that help not just Black women, but American democracy writ large.

Lizzy: I really appreciate hearing a little bit about how things work in your classroom, I think that's really neat. And also just the development of a book and why someone chooses to pursue, you know, a certain just area of interest to them and then what, how that can serve the people who will be reading it.

I think there's gonna be so many people now in the future who are looking to folks like you to educate them and to give them something to think about and to learn about new people in history. And, you know, as we come to the end of our time, just talking today, I wanted to keep it open-ended and toss it back to you.

Is there a final message, anything you think we haven't covered or just what would you like to be your last word to our listeners?

Christina: Yeah, I think, you know, you are allowed to feel whatever you feel and you are allowed to sit in those feelings, but I would implore people to not get stuck in those feelings. And so you go through whatever you need to process. Give yourself time to pick up the pieces and then get back to work. I think a lot of people don't fully understand that like this American project is a marathon and it's not a sprint, and it's not online activism.

It is in the weeds back breaking work sometimes, and if it's to work, then we all have to collective action is what we talked about. My Intro to Politics class, right? We can't be free riders. But we do have to have some sort of collective action. But it's a long, it's a long journey. I mean, Black people know how long of a journey it has been in this country.

Just thinking about obviously the strides from my generation to my mother's, but from my mother's to my grandmother's massive strides. So, dust yourself off. Gonna go through the stages and really think about who you want to be in community with to pick up the pieces and fight. And fight in whatever way that means for you, 'cause we can't do it all. I also believe in rest. Rest is resistance and you can't be at war at all times. And so that is not being lazy, it's just allowing yourself time to like think about things, but also reading things. I mean, American history. I used to have a podcast on the Grio and my tagline was, Black History is American History.

And most people don't know anything about Black people. They don't know anything about Black people in this country. They don't know about the people who built this country. They don't know about the people politically who built this country. And so if you don't know that, you don't understand this moment and this moment feels wild and strange and new, and, but if you read about Black history before they take it away, it helps contextualize this moment and ground you in this moment.

Also, it's your history. Like you should be annoyed that your schools did not teach you. You know, when I say Shirley Chisholm in New York City in my classroom, and no one knows who she is, no one knows who the first Black woman in Congress was in 1968. No one. Barbara Jordan is just a miscellaneous name. Fannie Lou Hamer is a name no one's ever heard of. So it's, as my grandmother would say, a sin and a shame that we allow our history, which our shared collective history to just go ignored. So I would say read.

And the last thing I always tell people to do is politically tithe. So you invest in the things that you want to see grow. And so with most people's religious institutions, they have tithing, you know, church, synagogue, temple, whatever it may be. And this is, you know, you see someone running for office, local level, state level. Whatever it may be. You have to invest in them so that they can actually think about policy and ideas and not worry about money all the time.

And by politically tithing, it's $5 here, $10 there, but you're investing in the democracy that you want to see. And so when we have, you know, some of these State House races that nobody really pays attention to and people, some egregious, horrendous people keep going back to their state house, you know, term after term, 'cause no one's watching the store. It's like we need to make sure we support people who are trying to change that 'cause there are a lot of people who are working really hard to invest themselves in this democracy, whether it's school board or, you know state senate or county commissioner here or there, or wherever.

So politically tithe, that's where I'll leave it.

Lizzy: Thank you so much for all of that Dr. Greer. I think there's, you know, this is clearly a time of so much contemplation, but those are things that I think people can do and explore and I think people are looking for that as well. I really, really appreciate you being able to share that with us today. Thank you for giving us your time.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Lizzy: And thank you everyone for listening. For more on Dr. Greer's work, check out our show notes at scholars.org/no jargon. We'll try to put a link to the seven stages of grief in there 'cause that sounds like something folks can use. No Jargon is the podcast of the Scholars Strategy Network, a nationwide organization that connects journalists, policymakers, and civic leaders with America's top researchers to improve policy and strengthen democracy.

The producers of our show are Dominik Doemer and Wendy Chow. Our audio engineer is Peter Linnane, and if you liked the show, you can subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. You can give us feedback on X, I suppose, formerly known as Twitter, at No Jargon podcast or at our email address, [email protected].

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