112. Jeremy Whitley on Book Bans, Religious Overreach and Navigating With You Vol. 2

Yeah.

I, I agree.

I think, um, a- again, we live in the Bible Belt and like, you know, the unique thing about North Carolina that I guess is not all that unique, right? But, you know, they'll, they, they call North Carolina a sort of purple state, and it's really like, nah, we're like a red state with a few like blue speckles, right? And they just happen to be super densely populated areas.

Um, and so I guess all that to say like we end up spending a lot of time around people with very differing viewpoints on things.

And, you know, I came of age and the, the Obama's second election was the first one I was eligible to vote in.

I turned 18 in 2009.

So, uh, it's weird to like have sort of come of age politically in this time that almost felt like a utopia in a way.

Like this is the ideal, like this is what America is all about, and I'm like super involved.

I was, um, I was leading, uh, my college chapter of the NAACP, so we were doing like voter registration drives and candidate forums and like just c- really grassroots political work, right? And to kind of see what it devolved into, you know, over the course of the next now 12, 15 years, you know?

Yeah.

Um, it's also like, I don't know, it feels very unique to have like the same sort of regime running three elections in a row.

So it just feels like it's been another half of my life [laughs] that we've had this political reality.

Yeah.

But I think the, the challenging part for me is how much people have been weaponized against other people, and I think it's because the work of politics is difficult.

Like it is difficult to convince someone that you are an agent of good.

It's much easier to convince someone that the other person is bad and, you know, e- even easier than that to say, "Oh, we don't have to look at this person as an individual.

This group is bad.

I don't like this group, therefore follow me." And I think that's, you know, the sort of what we've been cultivating for the last however long, and now we've, we're at this point where it's just like throwing rocks at folks, and it's crazy.

And I don't know how-

Yeah

... to get back to like a happy medium, if there is-

It, it-

... a such thing.

It's so strange to me because, I mean, you'll, you might remember like my freshman year of UNC, so I, I went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, uh, and it started there in 2002.

And there was this huge thing about our summer reading as incoming freshmen in 2002 was a book about the Quran.