Entrepreneurial Appetite

Steadfast Democrats: A Conversation with Chryl Laird, PhD

• Chryl N. Laird • Season 6 • Episode 3

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Discover the complex world of Black political behavior with Dr. Chryl Laird, an associate professor at the University of Maryland College Park, as we uncover the intricate dynamics that shape political loyalties within Black communities. Dr. Laird takes us through her compelling research, including insights from her book "Steadfast Democrats." We explore the cultural factors and social pressures that influence voting behaviors and the strategic support for the Democratic Party, even amid socioeconomic advancements. This episode promises an enlightening exploration of race, politics, and the profound influence of social ties.

Dr. Laird enlightens us on the theory of racialized social constraint and introduces us to her groundbreaking experimental studies, which reveal the powerful role of social networks and peer awareness in political decision-making. We discuss how these dynamics play out within predominantly white institutions and predominantly Black communities, offering a nuanced examination of social influence and expectations. Our conversation also ventures into the world of prominent Black figures, questioning how their shifting social circles impact public perceptions and political alignments.

As we navigate the evolving political landscape, Dr. Laird shares her insights into the unique challenges faced by Black women in politics, emphasizing the role of intersectionality in shaping political affiliations. We also delve into the impact of third parties on the two-party system, with a focus on the potential of movements like Andrew Yang's Forward Party. Through engaging discussions, we raise critical questions about loyalty, representation, and the future of Black political participation in a rapidly changing world. Join us for this thought-provoking journey into the heart of Black politics.

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Langston Clark :

Hey everyone, thank you again for your support of Entrepreneurial Appetite. Beginning this season, we are inviting our listeners to support the show through our Patreon website. The founding 55 patrons will get live access to our monthly discussions for only $5 a month. Your support will help us hire an intern or freelancer to help with the production of the show. Of course, you can also support us by giving us five stars, leaving a positive comment or sharing the show with a few friends. Thank you for your continued support. Welcome to another throwback episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite. In this episode, we feature a conversation with Chryl Laird, an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland College Park, who is co-author of Steadfast Democrats. How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. I want to transition our conversation to our speaker for the day, Dr. Chryl Laird, who is a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland College Park, and the good things that you were doing at the University of Maryland College Park. And the good things that you were doing at the University of Maryland College Park.

Chryl Laird:

So good evening. As stated, I am associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland College Park. I do work on Black politics, specifically looking at Black political behavior, considerations about Black identity that people kind of use as a lens for them to make determinations about their politics. I also do some work on gender politics so I can talk a bit about my project that's going to expand a bit on the book and thinking specifically about African-American women and men, but specifically looking at women and how their gender politics inform a lot of the political behavior that we observe them doing.

Chryl Laird:

In terms of other things the book has done very well so it was the winner of the Book Award for my discipline this past year in 2021. It also got a lot of media attention, so I've done some interviews with NPR Code Switch. We wrote a piece in the Atlantic, there was something in the Washington Post, the New York Times and recently I even did an interview with Newsweek about Black conservatives and the rise of Black conservative Black Republicans that are kind of becoming more in the forefront of the Republican Party as well as running for political office. So that's just something to probe out my work and I'm definitely excited about this conversation and look forward to your questions.

Langston Clark :

So, dr Laird, one of the things that I don't typically do is get into the history of our authors. You have an interesting background because I saw your Vita, which is like your resume for folks who don't know that, who aren't in academia. You went from Maryland to Maryland. It's not all the time that folks get to start at one university, because if you have your doctorate, I know people get hung up, especially because you went to Ohio State. A lot of Buckeyes are like the Ohio State, but to me it's always where you went to undergrad. That's your school, me too. Talk about how you went from the University of Maryland to get back to the University of Maryland and what that means for you as a scholar.

Chryl Laird:

Sure. So I did go to undergrad at the University of Maryland. I was a double degree in government and politics and African-American studies, so I actually graduated from the very department that I am now working in. I then went on to graduate school at Ohio State University, the Ohio State. I did my master's and PhD and I mean I would almost say that it was serendipitous that I ended up being able to come back to Maryland, because I was at two other tenure track positions prior to returning to the University of Maryland. So I was at St Louis University for three years, so about 2014 to 2017. Maryland, so I was at St Louis University for three years, so about 2014 to 2017. And then I was at Bowdoin College for four years after that. And then I was contacted by the University of Maryland's government department indicating that they were looking for doing a target of opportunity hire by hiring more faculty of color in the department. At this time we don't necessarily have that many. We actually doubled the amount because two of us were recruited Marcus Johnson and myself, who also is a graduate of the University of Maryland. So in fact, two of the new faculty that are in the department that are African-American are actually people who graduated from the department as undergrads. It's very exciting.

Chryl Laird:

You know, my inspiration to become a political scientist started at the University of Maryland. Scientist started at the University of Maryland. I used to be in undergraduate courses with the late Linda Faye Williams as well as Ron Walters, who both have been quite prolific in their writing and political science and really sets the bar for understanding Black politics, white privilege systems and structures of oppression, institutional racism. They were basically just the people I looked up to when I was there. So the opportunity to come back to the University of Maryland I was contacted about this was truly exciting.

Chryl Laird:

My mother lives here. All my friends from when I was growing up a lot of them still live in the area. I had a very positive experience growing up in the community around Maryland. I was actually in Montgomery County school system, so I went to public school for all of my degrees. All of my education was public education. I'm a very strong believer in public education and am excited to be back in a space where I can continue to live out that legacy of those who came before me and also creating new opportunities for others that will come after me.

Langston Clark :

It's a fantastic journey to be able to go back to where you were. You literally get to be in the shoes of the people that you admired in your journey. I felt that was an important and unique story for you to tell, but you also have another story. Well, first, before I get into the talking about the book, I have to acknowledge the fact that we were both at Ohio State at the same time. I was there for my master's degree from 08 to 09. Yep, I was real quick. So I did. My Black Graduate Professional Student Association paid my dues one year and then I was done. I taught for a year in Ohio and in Columbus, but I don't think we ever crossed paths. I'm still waiting on my T-shirt from Black Graduate Professional Student.

Chryl Laird:

Association. I understand, I just say, but, giga, we probably knew some of the same people because Melissa Crum was our homie.

Langston Clark :

Melissa people, because Melissa Crum was my homie. Melissa is my homie and I'm going to send her this episode because I've been talking to her for like 10 years about getting my t-shirt.

Chryl Laird:

And then there's Kamara Jones. I don't know if you knew Kamara Jones, yeah, so I'm still friends with Kamara because she lives out here in the DC area. I remember Bennett, absolutely, absolutely, all the same people.

Langston Clark :

Mine is like an ecologist. I know that whole group of people. We was real close that year. I was there it was that was.

Chryl Laird:

That was a really good experience, though. Yes, yes, you guys are very, because you know, when I was in political science there at the time, you know we were pretty staggered. You know we were pretty staggered, like when I entered into my cohort for my first year in 2006,. I was the only Black person in a cohort of, I want to say, 20. Since 2025, students, we were abnormally large and the PhD program had a high yield that year and I was the only Black person and each cohort had, like, a Black person, and we all came from the same.

Chryl Laird:

We all matriculated through the same undergraduate program that leads to you basically becoming a political scientist, which was the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute in political science, which is equivalent to a McNair or a Mellon, but it's specific to political science. So we all were, oh, I graduated from Bunche this year, I graduated from this Bunche this other year. We were staggered across. So we all were, oh, I graduated from Bunch this year, I graduated from this Bunch this other year. We were staggered across. So the AFAM department at Ohio State was often where we got our friends, because there just wasn't as many of us in the other department, I think. In fact, someone one of my senior peers probably, I think married another person who was an AFAM history PhD. So yeah, we were small and people were always surprised that there were actually Black people in that department, which says a lot about our reputation as a department at Ohio State.

Langston Clark :

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I always remember Ohio State being the school that had the most Black graduate and professional students in the country, and when you said you were the only one in your cohort, I would have at least thought it would have been two of y'all every year coming through.

Chryl Laird:

It's interesting because you know that's really dependent on the core faculty who are in a place, which is again partly where I'm thinking about my own positionality and my legacy at Maryland and what I would love to be behind in creating. Because at Ohio State, you know it was key faculty, like William and like Nick Nelson. Dr Nelson was one of the key factors in our political science department for why we were able to matriculate so many African-American students and even before that there were other scholars that were there who were very Maryland. The University of Maryland and Ohio State were some of the top programs in our field of producing Black PhDs.

Chryl Laird:

And then over time it dwindled and I think as Nick Nelson and others started to become more senior, some of the trajectories of those departments just weren't necessarily focused on wanting to maintain that tradition and as a result, you know you started to see it declining and especially as a department that was heavily quantitative because of its training and focus, that also, I think, led to application assessments. I would say that often didn't yield as many students of color as it could because the expectations for one's entry into the program were high because of that quantitative rigor. But I think it often meant that they were underestimating the capabilities of a lot of students and I was not the strongest quantitative student and yet here I am as a quantitative scholar. So you know, my hope is at Maryland to kind of return back to a period where we were really putting in that investment into Black intellectuals and Black minds to be out there in the field asking the questions that nobody's asking.

Langston Clark :

I think it's interesting that you get to go back to where you were, to be a faculty member, to be a professor, to be the person who mentors the next generations of masters and doctoral students through. And I think what a lot of people don't realize, who maybe aren't in academia, is that you build on the prior knowledge of folks behind you. And so, before we started talking live for the podcast discussion, you had mentioned that part of what this book is is a foundation for folks to continue doing similar research about how social forces impact Black political behaviors. And so, as we transition back to the book, or to the book, can you tell us the story behind the book? How do you and Dr White get together, come up with the idea, develop the study and go ahead and make this thing happen?

Chryl Laird:

Sure. So Dr White and I actually met while I was a graduate student, because Dr White got hired in the political science department at Ohio State. I was into my fourth year of my program and my prior advisor was not going to be in the department any longer, and so now I needed to make a transition to a new advisor, and Ishmael White and his wife, karine McConaughey, who also does gender politics and state and local politics, both arrived and so I transitioned over. So now I had to like recalibrate my entire dissertation project, need to reconsider all these types of things. Advisor switches are a lot of work, but nonetheless it transitioned and I was interested in looking at linked fate and looking at instances of emotional connection with this feeling of group connection. Right? So linked fate is this concept of? Do I believe that what happens to the group has an effect on my own individual life? If I feel strongly about that, often that is predictive of all kinds of behaviors we see of Black people, like it predicts them supporting Black candidates, predicts them supporting racial policies. You know it's defining, often to the lens in which they often view explicitly racialized spaces, and so that part of it was where my dissertation was going to be kind of re-examining some of the material that already existed, the scholarship that already existed, and Ishmael was like, ok, well, I want to do this other project too, where we kind of maybe take some of that thinking because Link Fate was also seen as the predictor of democratic partisanship, it was like but that's not necessarily the case, because you know and I know, and so then we started just talking about what it needs to be Black and how our Black politics work and our intuition on why linked fate actually doesn't seem to be as predictive of Democratic partisanship in the way that people kind of assume that it is predictive. Because Dawson's book in 94, behind the Mule, was seen as the seminal text to tell us about Black politics and it does a lot of work. It is still should be read, is required reading, should be read, should be built from, because I think he leaves a lot of pieces there that are of value and important to scholarship going forward. But this was a thing that we just couldn't find support for with the data and I think even Dawson himself probably wasn't necessarily trying to make this strong claim himself either, but he did think it was something that was informing the partisanship. And so once we thought about that, we then sat back and said, ok, but if we think it's not linked fate, then what is it what? What should we be thinking about about the lived experiences of black people that would create this unique phenomenon? And one of the things that we thought about were our social connections. Black people are social people. You know.

Chryl Laird:

We look at other literature, even Melissa Harris Perry's book Bibles, barbershops, bet, everyday, top Black Political Thought. You know she wrote that back in 2004. But when she writes that piece she's speaking about how Black ideology, black politics, is found in everyday conversations. It's an everyday talk, it's being at the barbershop, it's watching the TV, it's, you know, it's just such a very regular part of where we are. Where, you know, in other communities I would say particularly, you know, amongst white communities oftentimes talking about politics is seen as like faux pas, right, it's a thing you don't do, it's a thing you avoid. It makes people really uncomfortable. We were Black. People like to talk about politics. We talk about politics all the time. We talk about it with each other, we get in debates about it, but there's clear understanding about partisanship. That, if anything else, is clear as day.

Chryl Laird:

And so Ishmael and I decided from there that let's really start to problematize how we prove this behavior. How do we prove that Black people just know, they just know, we just know. We know from what we hear, what we converse about, what we talk about, how we talk to each other. We know, and so we started to unpack it from there. It was like, ok, we need to probably come up with a way to design this, we need to theorize about, you know, what will we call this Like? What is this phenomenon? And what we settled on is this argumentation around?

Chryl Laird:

You know, even as we see, because you have to kind of come up with the counterfactual right Like this is the big thing for political scientists and people who do scientific modeling and testing is, you know, you need to come up with one hypothesis to test and expectations, but particularly, you also need to demonstrate why is someone who should be doing something not doing that thing? Or, if they are doing that thing, why are they deciding to do that thing when they should be thinking that they could do something else? And one of the things that we looked at was Black people. In terms of economics, right, there is a good amount of Black people not the majority, but there is a sizable portion of the Black community that has moved up in class status, who is at a higher SES bracket. I mean, we are among those people, right, as professors.

Chryl Laird:

We are in a space where someone any Black person really, but particularly those who have moved up in class are at a position where they could rationalize a calculus that would say that I could come up with a rationale for why supporting the Republican Party would actually be supportive of the Black community. They would come up with it this is they would and they would probably dovetail it off of Booker T Washington. They'd be like, yeah, like what he said, right, it's important for black people to have their own and do their own and all this kind of stuff. And so then we said, okay, but then we don't see. We don't see that class-wise, and we don't see it with black conservatives, people who actually identify as black conservatives one would expect them to do, especially since they are the most likely to have a calculus that would say that's what I should do.

Langston Clark :

I want to palm right there just for a second, because what we see on TV Candace Owens, larry Elder, the whole new young millennial Gen Z group of them, and those are outliers that's that's TV. That's not the norm, because we all know we got some conservative people in our family, you know some moderate people. We're not the most liberal people in America like, if we're being honest. So what we see on TV about black conservative, that's that's not a true representation of what it means to be a black conservative. And I have one personal issue about black conservatives on TV. They talk to other black folk as if we don't. We don't know what those arguments already are. They taught the other Black folk as if we don't.

Chryl Laird:

We don't know what those arguments already are. Candace Owens book is entitled Blackout how I Made it Off of the Democratic Plantation and in my mind, that book is not actually written for Black people, it's. It's made for a white audience and I mean it's smart, like I'm not even mad at this. Do what you need to do to make your coins, if this is how you want to feel. Do you want to do this Like? That is strategic. That appeals to white individuals, especially those who don't want to be considered racist.

Chryl Laird:

I read a Candace Owen book, I carry it, I hold it up, I quote it. I sound like an informed white person because I am quoting a Black person who I look up to and is aligned with my politics, since the Republican Party is, for all intents and purposes, the party of white people and that the majority of white people vote for the Republican Party. Right, that thinking was something we thought about. Right, the conservatism. How do we have people who are conservative, who are fiscally conservative, who may be religiously conservative, who are socially conservative, who have reasons, rationales often tied to their economics, even SES status, to behave in a way that would be more in alignment with the Republican Party's platform and they don't, and we said that that is because it's more than link fate. It's the social aspect of it. It is who people talk to, which relational ties people care about, and a clear understanding of a expected behavior, which is we vote with the Democratic Party, and that that is something that has crystallized over time Used to be the Republican Party, now it's the Democratic Party but that this idea of supporting the Democratic Party is one in which it doesn't just originate from nothing and it's not sheep behavior. This is a strategic decision that a system and structure where it is a two-party system winner take all majority, winner, majority who wins the votes gets the votes type of system.

Chryl Laird:

We are constrained to be able to effectively influence politics If what I'm trying to get out of politics is things that are going to improve my life, but in order for it to improve my life, it must be things that actually improve the group, because I can't escape it's like the Frantz Fanon in escapable blackness. I'm black. Therefore, if black people are being treated certain ways, then I'm going to be treated a certain way, and so my best bet is to try to be more collectively minded in my politics, more collectively minded in my politics and I almost feel obligated to in some cases, even if I have reason to do otherwise, because the community has let me know what is expected of them, and also, if they don't, if I did not follow them, what the repercussions would be for doing.

Langston Clark :

Let's talk about the PWI study and the HBCU study. I'm hardcore HBCU because I went to one.

Chryl Laird:

As did Ishmael, he went to Southern University.

Langston Clark :

But I went to two PWIs. Give us the foundation of those studies. And what were the differences between what happened at the PWI versus what happened at the HBCU, if there were any?

Chryl Laird:

Sure. So theoretically, our concept that we lay out in the book about the social process that we think is happening, the social pressure process we called it racialized social constraint and we argued that theoretically there are kind of some key tenants to this theory, particularly right that there's a long history and understanding of how people behave in the group in terms of an expected behavior. We borrowed from social psychology's theory about role, identity and that people understand that their role as a member of the Black community is to follow this expected norm of behavior. And we had to establish that something is a norm. To establish something as a norm is very, very hard. So if you were, you guys read in the front part of the book. A lot of that was norm establishing collective action, behavior, group-based political action. Political behavior is a foundational cornerstone of Black politics. It is key, and so then, once we have that understanding, then we broke it down into okay. Now what we know is if people have an understanding of the norm, they know what to be expecting of it and they also have social ties in the community and they're aware of the repercussions that one will basically experience as the result of them somehow defecting or sidestepping away from the expected behavior, which would be voting for the Democratic Party, then this means that they now have to be able to deal with the consequence of what's going to happen for that.

Chryl Laird:

So that's how we ended up with these studies, because what our goal was with the Historically Black College that we did our study at, which is, in fact, Southern University when we went down there, our goal was to use to leverage the institution itself as a form of social pressure. So what we were going to do is create a scenario where people had to choose between their self-interest motivation, like a monetary incentive, versus a group interest motivation, and at the time, this was like 2012. So it was the Romney-Obama election. So we devised an entire experimental design where we told people hey, we're going to give you money to donate to political organizations that support these two candidates. We are going to literally give you the money and in fact, we're going to give you the money, but for every $10 you donate to one of these campaigns, you could potentially get a dollar for yourself and we're going to randomly assign you. So we never know when it's going to happen. But in fact, we did right and we debriefed them after it's done, because I had to get through IRB. But essentially the goal was we want you to be in a situation where you have been placed into the category or the situation where you are going to be able to donate money that we have given you and you now have to make the decision to donate it to Mitt Romney, because the Mitt Romney scenario is the one in which you will get an individualized personal monetary benefit. So we gave you $100. You decided to give, or we gave you $10, you decided to give $5 to Romney. We would give you $5. You would walk out with money in your own pocket and nobody would really know what you were doing per se when you did this.

Chryl Laird:

Now, in the case of the HBCU, what we were able to do is say, okay, well, in one condition, people won't get any incentive for any candidate and we just want to see what they're going to do. That's our baseline. And then the next condition was like OK, well, now we're going to give you this incentive to donate to Romney so that you can get a personal gain, but you have to make that decision on your own Right. So then people have to decide what they're going to do. And in the third situation we said, ok, same premise, same incentive, except now we have to publicly notify people about campaign or organized political organization donations, and so, as a result, we are going to publicize this in the student newspaper. So now we're leveraging the HBCU because in this situation, your peers peers just broadly construed, not your best friends, not your maybe, maybe your best friends but like random black people on this campus, will know what you did. They will know that you gave your money to Mitt Romney, and what we see there then in the comparison is that in the control, most people gave their money to Obama.

Chryl Laird:

In the situation where the incentive was there but people wouldn't know what she did, people seemed more likely to give to Romney because now there was a self-interest motivation. And then, when you got back to the constraint of now letting people know at the school what you money, like the incentive, than people who did not put their social ties over the money right. So I think that's a big thing as well, because what it says is that, even in the absence of pressure, most Black people understand the expectation right. And so when we did it at the PWI, we switched it up there, because what we got from a lot of people was well, how do you know that the pressure is actually racial? How is it just not maybe a peer being in the presence of them?

Chryl Laird:

So when we were at a PWI, we were able to actually leverage white people participating in the study with the Black respondents, and so we set it up where people were paired into pairs and they were making a very similar type of decision about donating to these political organizations that support one of the candidates. And in this case, we had white and Black people who were in on it. They were part of the study, but they were pretending to be people who were subjects in the study participants and we told them hey, ok, so this is what we're going to do. You two the respondent and you are going to walk up here, we're going to tell you about this whole thing that we're doing, giving people opportunities to give money to campaigns. We're going to give you the money so it's no money out of your own pocket and then you guys are going to go in this room and you're going to make this decision about who to give to. And the Confederates were told, the Confederates being the people who participated, not Confederate soldiers.

Langston Clark :

When I read that I was like I had to think about that phone. I'm not, I'm not a blunt person. Yeah, hold up Confederates In the doc program. I was like Confederate anyways, go ahead.

Chryl Laird:

It's such a weird term but we were not necessarily keen on it for the study either, but that is the technical term, but basically the people who are in on it like y'all all of the money that we gave them into the box and walk out. So because in that case too, not only were we able to not individually assess, is it racialized, because in one case the subject or respondent is going in on their own. In another case, the participant is going in with a Confederate, but the Confederate is white, and in another situation a participant goes in, they're going in with the Confederate being Black and it's random assignment. So people are being randomly assigned to which one of these conditions that they're going to be in. And again, the goal here is one, a clear statement of the norm. And two, who creates the pressure to conform to the expectation. And what we found is that the donations that were given to Obama were the highest in the condition where a Black respondent was going in with the Black Confederate and the Black Confederate was making the statement of the norm, acting on that statement and then walking out. So we were able to really pin down that a white Democrat, because the concern normally with white people and this type of social pressure is that I actually don't know where most white people might be in their politics. Like I can't just look at a white person. I know that Right. So, like in this case, we actually made it very clear the white person that's in the room with you is a Democrat. Like they are a Democrat because they're about to give their money to Obama. Does that do anything for you in your behavior decision? Because in this case, you could choose to give their money to Obama. Does that do anything for you in your behavior decision? Because in this case, you could choose to give to the campaigns. You could give to the Romney one or the Obama one, or you could keep the money for yourself.

Chryl Laird:

The black pressure condition was the one that did the most right. So it led to higher donations to Obama. It led to higher support for him, less people pocketing the money for themselves and more likely to give the money to Obama when they were aware that another and they don't know that black person they don't know them, they'll never see them again. So doing it at that white institution allowed us to have the white Confederates, which made a big difference in us being able to test that and it was more individualized because I literally had to walk around with a gang of people like I had, because we also gender match.

Chryl Laird:

So if they self-identified as male or female using a binary gender scale, which is constraining but still nonetheless, that was what we had.

Chryl Laird:

So if they said that they were male, then we paired them with a confederate that phenotypically presents as male and the same with a woman. She said she's a woman, another person who phenotypically presents as a woman, with me at all times running the lab at the location on the campus when we were doing it, because I had to basically interchange them as different people were coming up who had been assigned to different conditions. So it was a lot going on there, but it worked out really well because it made it very clear that if the question of pressure and expectation is being thought of as being just any Democrat, that no, this is a racialized phenomenon. Black people care about what other Black people think a lot, a lot, and often I think the legitimacy that that is given and the credence and the understanding of why that is important is incredibly diminished when people talk about it in politics because they think it is just a fleeting, passing thing.

Langston Clark :

There are two key concepts that stood out to me that seem similar but are different, as you've already explained, but I'm going to ask you to kind of revisit those. Linked fate versus racialized social constraint. What's the difference between those two concepts or ideas?

Chryl Laird:

Sure, so linked fate comes out of the literature actually on common fate, which is interesting because common fate actually is something that comes from the gender studies literature, right, and this idea of you know, if we want to understand why more women are not seeing themselves as women, what's some of the problem with why that happens and they talk about, you know, this idea of the common fate and that women don't have necessarily high levels of common fate, and part of the reason is, and that women don't have necessarily high levels of common fate, and part of the reason is because they're typically in spaces and places where men and women are present, let alone fluidity within the gender, they are not. The highest levels of kind of woman's consciousness that you then observe are typically in all female, all women's spaces, likewomen's college. So with common fate, the literature builds on that within Black politics, and Dawson and also Jackson, gurwin and Hatchett and others have written about this idea that Black people, because of their shared historical experience, because of their understanding of what it means to be Black in the United States, that they have this common fate and they have come to understand their politics through a lens in which they think of themselves as people who are impacted by things that happen to the group. So the question that's typically asked then is do you believe that what happens to people will have an impact on your own individual life or have an effect on your own individual life? And then people have to indicate no, maybe a little sometimes and a lot. And most Black people indicate that this is a lot.

Chryl Laird:

Right, that they typically do this a lot of the time, and then what they found then from what then serves for what's important for linked fate is that linked fate is seen as the cornerstone of often how Black people make assessments about their politics, even when they have very minimal understanding, potentially, of all of the information about what is going on in politics, and they call this the black utility heuristic heuristic meaning a shortcut. So if I believe in link fate, then it is the most politically efficient for myself to see things that are happening as a group as a proxy for my own individual concerns and issues. And so if I get asked about you know how should we respond to a particular environment policy and I don't know details about the environmental policy I'll probably look to a Black organization to tell me what I should, and they don't even need to tell me all the details, I just have to trust that Black organization. So if my Black pastor at my church talks about it, or if I get a flyer in the mail from the NAACP or whatever, that is meaningful for me, because I didn't know that much about it and so I needed a shortcut to tell me what I should do.

Chryl Laird:

The difference there, within racialized social constraint, is that linked fate is an individualized within self-assessment. I'm assessing this, I observe the political world and I'm making assessment of myself. Racial and social constraint is the social nature in which Black people operate, which is Black people tend to be in predominantly Black social networks, and that's not just by accident and that's not even necessarily deliberate per se. A lot of that has to do with residential segregation, right Like that. These Black communities and Black everyday life is very much contained in spaces that are homogeneously black, and you talk about racial homophily in the book that, even if we're talking about just the day to day interactions that a black person typically would be having, on average, most black people are going to be interacting seven, eight, nine times out of 10 with other black people, and that serves as a really important mechanism then, for how racialized, socialized, how racialized social constraint can work, because that means then I will be held accountable by people when I step away from an expected behavior.

Chryl Laird:

That is, a normalized, like, understood way in which one is supposed to conduct themselves, and so linked fate doesn't necessarily have as much social dynamic processing going on.

Chryl Laird:

With that. I'm not necessarily worried about my relational ties, connections, expectations of the group. In fact I'm using the group and what has happened to the group as a way to understand my lived experience and what's happening to me and what could happen to me because of what is happening to the group. So I think that those are concepts that are not completely foreign to each other. But you know, when we find in our data that someone can have high linked fate or low linked fate and still predict in certain ways in our results, then I think for ourselves we are like, ok, so the linked fate isn't really doing it. It's in fact this other awareness of the group's consideration of me and how I look essentially amongst others, if I was inclined to be a person who would potentially step away from the expected behavior that the group wants from us and what we have seen as the most effective means for trying to be able to have a political voice when we are dealing with the constraints of the system that we are dealing with.

Langston Clark :

There was a point in the book where y'all talked about social distance, and when I say social distance I don't mean like for COVID-19, I mean like socially distant from other Black folk. I'm wondering if you could explain a little bit about how you think Black folk who are isolated from other Black folk, how their politics change, and I'm immediately thinking about Herschel Walker.

Chryl Laird:

I knew you were going to say this.

Langston Clark :

In part I'm a sports scholar. This literally just popped in my head because you know what happens to Black athletes at these elite white schools. They get treated differently. It's separated from the other Black folk in the Black community. They may have like their little bubble on the football team or the basketball team, but that's not a pure representation of whole Black community. In fact, I would argue that athletes playing D1 or making it to the NFL NBA are outliers in a number of different ways. What happens to the Black outliers?

Chryl Laird:

So this is a big thing and I think this is how we were able to explain a Herschel Walker and many others like himself, candace too, a lot of these guys and women, right. What we say from this is the way to hold people accountable to. The norm is that we maintain these strong social ties. Black people have such strong social ties to the Black community that it is putting too much at risk in terms of not only your livelihood going forward socially, but it could have fiscal, economic community challenges for you. You're watching Stacey Dash, you know, attempt to make her way back in. After her steps away from the community, right Like now she's doing what? Like Celebrity College Hill, she's doing all these things to try to gratiate herself back into the Black community because she knows that people really aren't checking for her like they used to, including her own cousin, dane Dash.

Chryl Laird:

That loss of the reputational sanctions are massive for people and if your ties and your life and your livelihood are based off of. I went to an HBCU and it's the Black people at HBCU that will be the people to pick up a phone and get me a job. They'll be the people to pick up a phone and get me into an organization my one, my kid and Jack and Jill. They'll be the people to talk to them about that. You know that they'll be the people that I call on for whatever. Whatever I need, I have a legal problem. I got to call somebody. You have to worry about not only how you would be seen within your own peer group family, friends and people that you know but also in how you will be seen by other people within the community with a known understanding of how this is supposed to operate for you, and I think that what we see with someone like Herschel Walker and Candace and others, as your social circle becomes more diverse, as that circle stops to be as much as defined, or at least comprised of empirically predominantly Black people and more non-Black people in this case white people enter into that space, the less you feel the pressure of the expected norm of behavior, which is democratic partisanship, you will feel more comfortable, especially if you are one of these people, like I talked about before, that places money over social ties.

Chryl Laird:

If that is the case, then you are not worried about the loss of the social ties because you're just trying to secure the bag and you are surrounding yourself in a social environment that reinforces the decision that you have made. No one's interrogating that. In fact, what we typically hear from Black conservatives and if you read the books like Leah Wright, riggers, the Loneliness of the Black Republican and even some of the other books that have been written by Black conservatives they typically talk about how much they've been called Uncle Toms, how much they've been called sellouts and, honestly, that is a reputational sanction. It is, in fact, one of the few things that Black people have to be able to create a collective action behavior when many people could just decide not to do it. So this is the power that is there is to keep people from slipping away in ways that would be dangerous for the group as a whole, which is why you only see a few people kind of decide to do that, because those people are willing to take the risk that comes with that, because they're not necessarily concerned about the social loss. They've made up for it with white peers and they also may be prioritizing that monetary and reputational benefit that they're getting from their new social ties over the ones that they lost, which would explain Pershall, in my opinion.

Chryl Laird:

It would explain Kanye West, in my opinion. I mean, you go from being out of the shy mother with a PhD in like African-American history, you know you hang out with Jay-Z and Beyonce. You move to Bretwood with the Kardashians in your white on white on white on white on white house in that neighborhood you lose your social tie to Beyonce, jay-z. You lose a lot of the black friends that you used to have. Suddenly, your ability to come out and say something like slavery is a choice feels real cute because nobody willing was there to check you before you decided to go and say that. Because your comfortability with speaking in that kind of way publicly has changed as a result of the social space in which you've put yourself.

Langston Clark :

I never thought about it that way, how you hadn't break down.

Chryl Laird:

And on top of that, I think on top of that, that is the case, but I think you know, watching him try to walk that back, I feel like something went off in his brain. He was like that's that's probably not good. Where you know, like a Clarence Thomas, also interracial relationship, open white wife in terms of where she sits in her politics, and he's part of the Federalist Society. He went to Yale, he graduates and is part of a particular set of people coming up the ladder within his work in federal government. He gets put as up as the pedestal of we need to protect Black men by white Republicans in his own hearing process. Right to demonize a Black woman about what she's doing and she's part of the system. Right. She's the big bad hand of the white man coming down on this Black man, right. And so he is now positioned in this way too, where his social ties. You don't have to really worry about what black people think about him.

Langston Clark :

I got a question. This is not one of the questions we went over at the beginning, but I've been wrestling with this. Ok, before all this stuff that just happened in the Supreme Court. I was wrestling with Freeway Ricky Ross, the real Freeway, not rapper. Yes, out of jail. Yes, he's welcome back into community. Yes, there's not a lot of critique in my mind. He he killed a lot of babies, a lot of crap babies our moms, dads, families broken, destroyed because of that. He never killed anybody. He was non-violent drug dealer. That's part of the story, but he did a lot of damage. He gets to come back. If you had to put freeway versus clarence, thomas, yes, who's worse I feel like black people would say clarence thomas.

Chryl Laird:

They will always say clarence Thomas. Yes, who's worse? I feel like Black people would say Clarence Thomas. They will always say Clarence Thomas. Say Clarence Thomas For a number of reasons. So one I actually have a paper on this, so I'm kidding you to speak to this. Specifically on the crack cocaine epidemic and where Black people place the blame for flooding our streets right, which is unlike the government, because of the series that came out at the time that Gary Webb was writing and saying the federal government seems to be doing some stuff, and Freeway Rick Ross himself in interviews has been. I mean, where the heck am I going to get cocaine from? I don't got a passport. So if cocaine is flooding our streets, I am not necessarily the crux of it all. But let's say you are going to. You know what drug dealers are bad, you did a bad thing.

Langston Clark :

You got. No, I'm not even saying that, I'm saying the kingpin, the guy at the top.

Chryl Laird:

At the top. You're at the top, top. You know I feel like Clarence. You know it depends on how you define damage. That's true fact. It would depend on how you define damage because I would say that, thinking about Kingpin drug dealers, I mean, jay-z got a whole career.

Langston Clark :

I don't know if Jay-Z was a Kingpin, though.

Chryl Laird:

He wasn't a Kingpin. But there is a place, I think, in Black culture where people who were big, like a Frank Lucas I mean, we did home movies on him, right Like these, are not necessarily people who are seen. They are business this right Like these are not necessarily people who are seeing that they are businessmen, right, and their business is drugs. And there's business women. You know, they even have a main gangster with women and there's a whole series that you have on BET Her, I think BET Plus that talks about women who did this stuff as well. I think that that has a different space because I feel, like Clarence Thomas is, he is more in an exceptional space than a freeway.

Chryl Laird:

Rick Ross, right, you are taking over not only a seat on the Supreme Court but the seat held by Thurgood Marshall. You have huge shoes to stand in, huge shoes to stand in, and we as a community got behind you at the time. We even desecrated a Black woman who was coming forward with seems like legitimate claims now when you think about it and was right at the time and called it like she saw it and took his side because we were going to lift a Black man up for the purposes of what was needed at that time, which was we wanted somebody to replace Thurgood Marshall who looked like Thurgood Marshall. Right Was another Black person who looked like us, and he now has gotten on there and basically made decisions that seem to go against group interest. What the group interest motivations and the group interest perspective is? Democratic Party, more progressive policies, especially on race and race-based type decisions and policies, and you are there and a benefactor of said policies that people died for. You're a Southern Black man, black boy at one point, who comes up the ranks, benefits from affirmative action to be able to go to Yale and now wants to sit there and roll it back.

Chryl Laird:

I feel like it is a betrayal that is even more concerning for people than even a freeway. Rick Rupps Well, I feel like people have a lot of problems with him. We have a lot of problems with any drug kingpin that's messing up their communities, but there is truly a specific place in people's hearts for the betrayal that they are feeling or the sentiment that they have about Clarence Thomas, and I think it doesn't also help that he is married to a white woman and it's fine in that. Loving the Virginia, yes, interracial relationships, lots of black people. We have seen the hue and the colors of black people all over the place.

Chryl Laird:

You know I cite Drake and Kate in his book Black Metropolis from the 1920s. Even there and then at that time they were talking about interracial relationships. In Brownsville, chicago, they were talking about that and the they have Black mating. They can't live in their white neighborhoods no more. So now they're going to live in the Black neighborhoods. Nothing against that. But I do also think that that is another piece of the puzzle that people are like nah, especially when your wife also makes the statements that she makes.

Langston Clark :

I also think other brothers hide their wives when they're white. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a thing. We never saw Russell Wilson's ex-wife.

Chryl Laird:

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a thing. We never saw Russell Wilson's ex-wife yeah, never saw her. You kind of don't see it, and there's a whole spousal politic that goes on there with that. We see that are kind of taking on being more active within the Republican Party that are African-American, are large part male. Yeah, and trying to think about the politics there for why that is is also some of my next research work.

Langston Clark :

Before we get into that, I want to ask this question and then I want you to talk about what's coming next. You know the title of the book is Dead Fast Democrats. Admittedly, I went to a Ford party meeting, ok, because I was actually trying to get Andrew Yang on a podcast. Actually, it would have been dope if I could have had you and Andrew Yang having the conversation. That's what I wanted. I want to have a black author and Andrew Yang talking about politics, ok. So I went to the Texas Ford party meeting and it's really interesting. I was the only black person there I'm assuming. I'm assuming everyone else was white Never went ahead and had a camera on.

Langston Clark :

There was somebody, there was Latinx or Hispanic, because of the last name man. But these people all over the place, they were asking what your political history was. One person's like yo. I voted for Bush. I political history was One person's like yo I voted for Bush. I voted for Obama. I voted for. Was it Ron Paul? Then I voted for Clinton. Like they're just all over the place, but they're in this new movement and I haven't read Yang's book yet, but I don't know where this new thing fits. And if it grows and it becomes a thing. What happens to being a steadfast Democrat? Because it's not, because forward isn't necessarily oppositional to Democrat, like in this binary. It's oppositional to the two party system that we already have, and a lot of black people like yo. Democrats don't do anything for us.

Chryl Laird:

So I think it's a. It's an excellent question, because people have pushed back in this two party system for quite some time. They have a problem with it. Now I will say this this is one of the only laws that actually exist in my field, because we typically are in the space of estimation. Everything is trying to get as close to the truth, but we can't actually know the truth because we rarely have the whole population ask a question to be able to determine that outside of the census. So everything is with an estimation, but the one, and so everything is theory. Everything is with an estimation, but the one, and so everything's here.

Chryl Laird:

The one law, the literal design of our political system, down to its bones, is made it so that two parties almost will exclusively be the dominant, two parties at this level. And what you will see happen is, when the emergence of a third party comes, one of the parties will co-opt it, like we saw with the Tea Party. So the Tea Party emerged and everybody said it's going to. Of a third party comes, one of the parties will co-opt it, like we saw with the Tea Party. So the Tea Party emerged and everybody said it's going to be third party, it's going to be the Tea Party. We got Tea Party candidates, yada, yada, yada, and yes, they were Tea Party candidates, but they are now in the Republican Party. Now what I will say that's been effective about the Tea Party is that the Tea Party has been able to move the Republican Party with them. So they've moved them less from the center and more to the right, which is an effective strategy, especially since they've managed to also get their constituents to move more to the right as well.

Chryl Laird:

Right, because typically, from a theoretical standpoint, it would actually not make sense to move to the polls. You wouldn't want to move to the far right or the far left of any kind of single dimension type of concept like this, because the assumption that you're making is that there is a lot of people out there. But if you look at a normal distribution, basically in stats, you look at a normal distribution, so the world is all normally distributed. That's typically what people say. Everything is normally distributed. Think about the bell curve, that book, which was for like, nonetheless. Right, you think about a bell curve and so, as a result of that, most people should be packed in the middle, and that's where everybody should be trying to aim for the median voter. And then the tails are where you have your most strong partisans. Or if it's ideological, ideological, people like your ideologues are out here and few people are that. But now, when the middle is getting messy and people are actually moving more in kind of this bifurcated polarized space because the parties are also moving into this bifurcated polarized space it then means that that third party has been very effective at taking the Republican Party away from, like the era of the Olympia Snows, the Mitt Romney Republicans, even to some degree a Reagan Republican, and moving it into a more openly politically hostile and aggressive party that it's become, which they support in lots of ways.

Chryl Laird:

And so I think for someone like Andrew Yang and his party, what will be big for their survival is one can they win things at local or state level elections? Because that probably will be the most likely place where they would actually be able to gain some headway, which is not a bad thing. I mean, local elections are decided, school boards are decided at that level. State level elections state ledged. That means you change and you could change constitutions. You could do a lot of stuff. State level constitutions, a lot of stuff at that level. We often ignore it. We focus a lot on the federal level, but at the federal level even then, you know, you could probably get some people in the Congress who represent that party, but getting someone into the executive branch, that that's going to be a hard sell. Yeah, that's going to be a hard sell because the system is just not.

Chryl Laird:

Neither party has an incentive to allow for a third party entrant and so neither one. So, like when we look back to like 1992 and Ross Perot ran, and it was George HW Bush, bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Ross Perot was like a third party candidate right. He was basically this guy with a ton of money and was able to pay his way to the podium to be in the political debate at the general debate Right. And when they look at the data, the people that he was able to pull as voters to support him were people who would have voted for George HW Right, but never enough for him to actually win. So I think that will be Andrew Yang's consideration. It should be some of the considerations of that party, of what Andrew Yang's thinking about. He's thinking about the coalition. If you're describing a meeting where they're trying to garner support and it does not have a sizable Black contingent. That would be concerning for me, right, because you're not necessarily going to get the White voters.

Langston Clark :

It was a tiny.

Chryl Laird:

Small group.

Langston Clark :

It wasn't a huge meeting. It wasn't a huge meeting. I was probably higher. Like, if we compared it to the general population, it was probably a higher percentage of Black people in that meeting than in the general population.

Chryl Laird:

In the general population. That's pretty good, and then I think then he also, then they as a party probably need to think about OK, so which, which one of these parties are we going to really try to influence, to meet us where we are at the federal level, because it may be very hard for us to actually gain sea legs, to go for something like the presidency and actually win. And maybe that's not what your goal is. Maybe the goal is I'm trying to put something out there that now candidates have to respond to. I'm trying to put something out there that now candidates have to respond to, and I'm less concerned about the win and more about trying to bring attention to an issue, to a concern, to a set of issues, with the goal of forcing the candidates to now have to engage in conversation on those issues. But when you look at local level, I mean there's like Constitution Party, there's the Green Party, there are other parties and in a lot of places they do win electoral seats. It's just a matter of the funding, the backing, the campaigning. Can you get people behind you? They don't have the DNC or the RNC or the DCCC and the RCCC backing them in the same kind of way. So, like where do you get the support to run the campaigns? Is the grassroots action and the grassroots arguments that you're putting forward appealing to the electorate, especially appealing to electorate if you're trying to even convince Black people to be part of it?

Chryl Laird:

Black people are very pragmatic. They're very pragmatic. A lot of voters are pragmatic, but Black people are real pragmatic, like everything. I feel like Black people have been through so many traumatic things historically. Either we've experienced personally or we know our people have experienced it. Maybe even the generational trauma is like living in our beings, but we aren't easily bamboozled. I feel like it is why we are still here after everything that has gone on, because we update and we question and we don't immediately trust. We question and we don't immediately trust and we think about what will lead us to the best situation. That may be suboptimal, but it is the best of what we've got Right.

Chryl Laird:

So when Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders are at the beginning of the primary season going into the 2020 contest, we were talking about how oh, it's Bernie, it's people who did it. Black people in South Carolina knew that high noon will be here and it's Biden yeah, and that was it. They didn't care who was talking about some people who did it. They were like that's great, he seems like a nice man, but no, because they're going up against Trump. We don't have time to play around. Y time to play around. Y'all about to leave us astray. And so Black people and Black people across the South if it was like 25, 30 percent or more Black people in those communities they voted with Biden because he was the practical, pragmatic choice and many of them like him.

Langston Clark :

And it doesn't get framed. That way it doesn't get framed. But even though it's like yo, I like what Buddha Judge and what Bernie talking about. But we got to win. We got to win. It's a pragmatic decision.

Chryl Laird:

It's a very pragmatic decision because there's too much to lose Now. That doesn't mean we won't complain. I mean that's the other thing, right? Black people can very much be supportive of the Democratic Party and still be critical of the party, as we should be, as like its literal base. If anybody should be able to criticize the party, it should be us, because we keep you alive regularly when you want to take adventures off into.

Chryl Laird:

Let's put a black president up. Let's get a white woman up, like we right there, like 98% of black women supported Hillary Clinton when her own white sisterhood did not support her. They did what they did before and what they have always done, which is 50 percent of those women 51,. 52 percent of them voted for the Republican. That's right. They should be critical of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party should be more of to know what they should be listening for, which is why Stacey Abrams is a phenomenal person, because she did something that they're all like. I can't believe we had Georgia Stacey's like. I know we won't get Georgia. Like I've been on the ground, I've been doing the work that you all won't do.

Langston Clark :

I'm going to ask a last question, but it's a double question. This last question is what are you currently reading and what are you currently working on, like what's coming next from your authorship?

Chryl Laird:

OK, so I can talk about what I'm currently working on. I have a lot of books I'm reading, so what I'm currently working on is the research that I did with Ishmael White was very broad. We kind of look collectively at the black, at black people. I'm working on another project with Julian Womble, who's an assistant professor at George Washington University, where we want to kind of get more into the gender dynamic because there is a gender gap, even as we see this pattern of black people as a collective voting for the Democratic Party, there is a gender gap where black women tend to vote more likely, identify more likely with the Democratic Party than Black male counterparts and we are trying to look into why that is and we argue that we think that the socialization that Black women have and their understood role as basically caretakers of the group and the group's expectations of them to perform said role very much dictate a lot of their politics and further that they are even more highly identified with their Blackness in a lot of ways because of this intersectional space in which they find themselves at margins, both on race and on gender, let alone other marginalized positionalities that one could be in, but that these two are like explicit. Right Like I can look at you and see phenotypically these types of expressions of these social constructs, and that that then has a particular impact on Black women. And the data seems to be yielding some pretty strong results. Right Like we found that people who have high levels of what we call racial identity salience, but particularly thinking like how important is being Black to me, aspects of how Blackness is defining to who they are, their sense of self, black women are strongly there and, in fact, when you ask them those same questions with respect to gender, they answer the same way. So, for Black women, when we think about intersectionality, we often see them as like two independent operating things. They're there but they're independent from each other. This is kind of building off of Crenshaw and others who've talked about intersectionality. It's the whole. It's the whole of these two spaces. Right, it's not I'm a woman and I'm Black. No, I'm a Black woman and that means something specific.

Chryl Laird:

One of the interesting things I think will be found in our data is that when we assess, like perceptions of discrimination and who receives discrimination, and we ask Black women, you know, do you perceive discrimination for Black? How do you perceive discrimination for Black men, black women, black people and then white women. They don't perceive discrimination for white women at all and the correlation between their perception of discrimination for themselves or anybody Black period versus Black, white women, that correlation was negative. They were like we see no commonality at all with these white women, and part of that, I think, is because white women and Black women if white women are dealing with instances of white supremacy and challenges from whiteness, it is most likely going to come in the form of white women Right and so then, so that's some work I'm doing. I'm also doing some work on linked fate and collecting more data to look at empirical measurement around this and kind of dissecting more of what this variable in question means, because I don't think we totally understand some of the nuance, thinking about class dynamics in that and how Black elites tend to define a lot of the Black agenda, and what does that then mean for something like a linked fate?

Chryl Laird:

And then, in terms of books that I'm reading, I read a lot of books, so I'll say, because I'm halfway through, but like a ton of books at this point, I think one book that I'm reading, I'm like literally looking around my room to see what I have around here. I did start reading a book recently about sundown towns, seeing how this is a club thinking about Black perspective, black understandings, and that book has been really interesting because it just talks about the pervasiveness of sundown towns and I think even as a Black politics scholar I have underestimated the pervasiveness of sundown towns. My own hometown was a sundown town and how one would define that, how one would think about that. I'm opening up my phone to see if I can get my nook to open here. Talk about that. I'm also reading a book called the Violence, which actually talks about another pandemic that has happened, except it's resulted in people becoming violent with one another unexpectedly and unprovoked. So it's a book of fiction but it is a fairly interesting book. That book is by if I can find the name of the author, it's a novel, but right now I can't even see the bottom of their name. But that's been a very interesting book. Sundown Towns is by James W Lowen, so that's been pretty interesting as well. I'm also reading another random fiction book, the Proposal by Jasmine Gilroy. I just thought that that would be a fun read.

Chryl Laird:

I also am reading because I'm prepping for my class in the fall. My students are going to be reading the book the Racial Contract and that book has been really fascinating to read. Charles, what is his last name? Mills' Racial Contract, mills. Thank you, charles Mills. Charles W Mills yes, charles W Mills, the Racial Contract, where he kind of deconstructs understandings of race, taking on a global perspective. Jamaican philosopher. Passed away not too long ago but was highly recommended as a book to be an anchor text for Black politics, because I want to take a diasporic approach with how I discuss Black politics. So I'm going to have my students looking at that also, reading some of like the 1619 project and then blending that in with literature from Black politics within political science and some contemporary political things.

Langston Clark :

And then, yeah, I have other random books I'm reading, but I think those are the key ones I've looked at lately. That's part of the life of a scholar If we read. I have like tons of half halfway read through books and things like that, but we always finish them most of the time.

Chryl Laird:

Most of the time, or at least you. Yes, I've renewed the Violence several times, but it is actually very good. I want to say the author's name is like Delilah Davidson, but it is an excellent book that makes you think a lot about society, societal norms, the breakdown of society when things like plagues, pandemics, cis races like that happen, but also makes you think about humanity. So you know it, it is been an interesting read. My other plan was also to read Viola Davis's memoir Finding Me, because I saw her interview with Oprah Winfrey and I was like honey. Now you have lived a life and I just find her to be phenomenal and I'm super excited about the Woman King coming out.

Langston Clark :

For sure, for sure. We got books and movies you're going to see. So thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Again, everybody, the book is called Steadfast Democrats and be on the lookout for her future works and thank you all for joining us. And again, dr Laird, thank you for for blessing us with the conversation. I appreciate it.

Chryl Laird:

Thank you for having me.

Langston Clark :

Thank you for joining this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite. If you like the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.