The episode is dying to own the liberals or voting against your best interest.

Let’s Talk About Race (LTAR)

Dying to own the liberals

LaNita Duke (00:01.313)

Althea, you wanna just take over?

Althea (00:03.778)

Sure, I can do that.

Althea (00:08.774)

You are listening to LTAR Let's Talk About Race. I'm Althea Billings. I'm here with our lovely panel and we have a lot to talk about.

Althea (00:20.398)

The episode is dying to own the liberals or voting against your best interest. My first question for the panel here has to do with the issue of crime or the perception of a crime wave. When you listen to Republican lawmakers, they often paint a picture of crime running rampant in urban areas. I can personally attest to some people finding out that I live in Portland, not even a particularly large city.

and giving me this look like, are you okay? Are you safe walking around as a woman? So right, Republicans have painted this picture of crime running rampant in urban areas and in blue states. But when you look at the facts, the hard numbers about homicide rates, about violent crime rates, red states have higher numbers of these things. So what do you make of that panel? What do we take away from the...

crime disparity in red and blue states. Let's start with Reverend Cecil.

Cecil (01:36.553)

I'm not sure what to make of this. You know, a number of factors.

are a part of this. So it includes health, education.

Cecil (01:54.141)

whether or not one has access to weapons. It includes whether or not there are access to adequate mental health as well as physical health.

I think in part it means that we have to look more closely at a lot of factors which impact these issues, including how we are able to make sure that people, regardless of where they live in rural or urban environments, whether or not they have access to good education, good health.

resources, mental and physical. So it's a lot deeper than I think I'm able to answer in a few minutes.

Althea (02:58.602)

have to agree with you. I also think that it's a pretty deep and complex thing to paint with a broad brush, right? Let's go to Professor Johnson. What are your thoughts on this?

Dianne Johnson (03:18.404)

In considering this question, I do think that there has been an overt effort to cast blue states in the media as experiencing these higher rates of crime, specifically gun violence and murders. And I think that's been intentional.

Dianne Johnson (03:47.28)

So it is interesting to look at the actual statistics and see that the murder rates are higher in red states than blue states, that over half of the murders are suicide, which I think gets left out of the conversation and it should be at the top of the conversation.

Another thing that, when I read this question, kind of resonated with me is this identity politics, where we're looking at what red states and blue states when actually this should be a bipartisan concern. And we are making a point here that there is definitely an effort to skew the appearance of crime. And

I think there's also when you do that, when you kind of cloud the information, then you don't have to take accountability or action on anything because we stay in this state of confusion. And this is such an important thing to America, to both urban and rural communities that

To me it's important to look past the red and the blue divide and try to approach this from the better good perspective.

Althea (05:31.842)

Let's move on down to Mary, your thoughts.

Mary Li (05:35.712)

Well, I think I'm going to take an opposite view of this. I don't think it's all that deep. And I think we actually already understand the dynamics here and likely just