- [Narrator] The following program is sponsored by National Grid through its Project C, National Grid is connecting communities to clean and sustainable energy.

Creating a workforce to support renewable energy, working to support neighborhoods and their revitalization.

- Not everyone who votes for Trump is a racist, but every racist voted for Trump.

- You stand up in the house floor and criticize.

I don't know what you're talking about.

- [Philips] They're on opposite sides of the same issue.

But can a good meal help settle their beef?

Come on now.

- No, I don't think so.

- [Philips] It's food for thought as guests agree to eat and argue.

- Joe Biden didn't bring the virus.

- I didn't even mention Joe Biden.

- Let's get real.

- The only people that can destroy this country is us.

- Who's right?

Former US attorney and former New York City Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter.

And James Lawrence, conservative talk show host sit down with me Julian Phillips, at Hendricks Tavern to dish out the facts.

Zach, okay.

James.

It's good to see you.

Have a seat.

- James, good to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

- That's right.

- When I was approached about doing a show on race, stereotypically would be, you know, a white person and a black person from the right and the left.

That's something that we see all the time.

What about having a black conservative person on?

And I thought about that.

Thank you so much for having us.

Is that Chardonnay.

- Yes sir, it's Chardonnay.

- Thank you, thank you so much.

And I thought about it.

And I said, maybe that's a pretty good idea.

And so here we are.

So we have Zach Carter, who is well known as a US Attorney, most notably for presiding over the Abner Louima trial.

Of course a New York City Corporation Council for the city of New York.

And we have James Lawrence, who is a conservative talk show host and also a politician who ran for Congress.

A graduates of Air Force Academy.

And what I call as my good friend, a gun toting F50 Ford, a pickup truck.

- It's an F-150.

- F-150.

- F-150.

- With some weapon I think you have.

AR-15 - Well, we could talk about what an assault weapon is.

I mean, I have rifles, - Okay, you have all that stuff.

Anybody doesn't get anything else out of this show, is that black people are not monolithic.

We all don't think the same way.

The thing that's first and foremost now in people's minds is Critical Race Theory.

So I came up with a definition of, in fact my producers are Eric Cam.

And it says this, "Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old.

Okay, the core idea is that race is a social construct.

And that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of Critical Race Theory, or CRT, the acronym emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, created by legal scholars, Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others."

So that's what Critical Race Theory is.

Some of your Republican brethren and sister, they don't want Critical Race Theory taught in schools.

- First of all, I'm a big student, and a huge fan of teaching history, all history.

But here, especially American history, and black history, is American history.

So I for one, think that the more history you teach, the better off you are.

You get into a little bit of a divisive conversation, when you try and label something that's just education in history as something that's racially charged.

And I think what happens is, people on both sides have a tendency to label Critical Race Theory according to their preconceived notions.

And we need to stay away from things that divide us because one of the biggest issues in the country right now is we need more unification.

- I'm also a fan of history.

I'm a fan of the honest telling of history, both things that should be celebrated, and things that we should be embarrassed by and seek to correct and to avoid duplicating.

We should help to educate our kids about how it is you can have difficult conversations and move forward in developing solutions without starting, you know, basically a rhetorical World War Three because that's not necessary.

- What we're looking at around the country right now.

You have local jurisdictions where you have parents that are incensed about changing the school curriculum.

We don't want them to feel hurt by this.

But it's history.

It's our history.

Slavery is our history.

Why should that not be taught?

- I think educators need to establish curriculums that give the full breadth of knowledge that's required to teach our students.

- So we have history books that we are given in school from elementary school all the way up.

- And they're all no good.

- Right.

Thank you, okay.

- Well, they certainly leave a lot of stuff out.

- Yes they do.

- I have a 75 year old real estate person.

Wonderful, wonderful Italian woman.

She still believes that Columbus actually discovered America.

We have politicians here that still promote that.

Well, you know, it promotes Italian heritage.

What about Mother Cabrini?

What about Leonardo da Vinci?

You got all these great Italian scholars.

A story about- - What about Amerigo Vespucci who was a much better navigator than Columbus and actually got his crew to the right place.

- Okay, so here we go.

- That's why it's so important, frankly, for there to be an honest, and thorough, and nuanced teaching of history.

Because the impact that has on all of us, black, white, all of us is critical.

I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that I was rooting for the Europeans when I was reading European history.

When they talked about manifest destiny, and the divine right of kings to go forth and explore, and plant your flag in somebody else's land and claim it as your own.

I said, "That sounds cool to me."

Growing up, and frankly, in an all black environment, I grew up in Washington, DC, at a point in the 1950s, when it was validly nicknamed Chocolate City.

- Right.

- I had history taught to me, by well meaning teachers who were predominantly black, and it was still taught from a European perspective.

It wasn't until leaving that environment and going off to college, that, you know, you began to realize how your views had been formed by a very one sided narrative.

- And that's where we are.

But I'm gonna stop for one second here.

I am not gonna sit here for one more minute, and I'm the only one that's eating, you're sitting over there.

- I'm eating.

- You're like a tight conservative.

I haven't seen you put up a fork in your mouth yet.

- I'm waiting for you to bring up something we can disagree on.

You know, take a visit in Washington DC, we'd be in much better shape right now.

We need a history curriculum in this country that teaches young people the truth about our history.

We need textbooks that include all the information and all the relevant information presented in an unbiased fashion.

It needs an overhaul.

And unfortunately, most of the educators in this country, probably because of funding constraints are moving away from history, blending English curriculum, and history curriculums into humanities.

I know what's gonna lose out, it's not English, and it's the wrong decision.

- Let's go back to the Revolutionary War.

Most people don't know that there were 8,000 plus soldiers that were African American that were fighting for the Revolutionary War.

- That's 'cause they never sang the second verse of the national anthem.

There was reference to freed African Americans that fought on the side of the British.

But it also highlights the fact that blacks have been involved in every conflict that this country has been involved in all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

- Absolutely.

- It's a fact.

But most people don't know that.

- People don't know about all the black spies that worked for the American Revolution.

You know, that work, they're thinking that they will get their freedom, and some actually did not get it even though they were hoping they would get that freedom.

We also don't know about the 20,000 plus blacks that worked for the British, because the British were granting them their freedom.

But my point is for those folks who, you know, give me liberty or give me death.

Patrick Henry, you know, don't tread on me.

It wasn't all people of non-color that are responsible for us being where we are today.

My point is, we need to get there because I think that if we do, there are some people that that can't be saved or salvaged.

But I think there are a lot of people that can.

Let's face facts.

If we start attracting more diversity in terms of school policymakers, school teachers.

I mean, who's writing these textbooks?

Who's writing these curriculums?

You need people with different perspectives to get involved.

Why don't you volunteer to teach in your local high school?

- 'Cause I do my part.

[Lawrence laughs] And I remember back in the 80s, when I was manager for Community Relations for a local TV station, the thing that I was so incensed about at that time, was that everything that they had on Black History Month was Neil Armstrong and, you know, Muhammad Ali and all that and I think that a lot of folks are comfortable with that.

Because it really doesn't affect them.

And I'm talking about people that don't look like us.

So I started doing things on black inventors and black scientists.

We got a lot of letters in.

That can't possibly be.

There's no way that a black person could have been involved in, you know, inventing long haul refrigeration for trucks.

Got a flurry of letters from people.

- Did you write about the invention of Jack Daniels who came up with the original recipe?

- No, I didn't.

That's a very interesting story.

- It is absolutely.

That the recipe for Jack Daniels was actually a recipe that was came up with by a slave that worked for Jack Daniels.

And historically, he was someone who was revered by Jack Daniels.

- What do you wanna...

I don't know that it has actually occurred to me until just now when you were giving that recitation of all the African Americans who have distinguished themselves in some extraordinary accomplishment.

That tells less than 1/2 the story, right?

Because what seems to be being resisted now is in addition to talking about George Washington Carver, and all the things that could be done with the peanut, is all of those people picking and shucking those peanuts?

All right, about sharecroppers.

All right, about how often they got cheated in negotiations with the owners of that land in terms of what their fair share of the annual crop was going to be.

And I don't think that the formal definition of Critical Race Theory is what really matters, that can be a distraction too.

- Sure.

- I'm not one of those folks who say, "Oh, we shouldn't be concerned about it, 'cause it's not really taught."

Well, maybe it should be.

- I think that what we need to do, whether it's through lawmakers or whether it's through, you know, finding some way to get educators to include diversity in our schools, in our institutions of learning.

- The the problem with lawmakers is that lawmakers make laws, right?

By definition.

I don't want there to be a law about what can and can't be taught in a public school.

- Being a former lawmaker, I have to agree with him, not once have I ever advocated for passing legislation that handcuffed educators in terms of what they were gonna teach.

- Okay.

- Now, that doesn't mean that we don't get engaged, and we don't get involved.

One of the things that we can have an impact on if you have children, parents can get involved at the local level in their schools.

They can go to their local school boards, they can discuss what the curriculum looks like in their schools, and their voice matters.

- Educators in my view on the issue of this phony issue of Critical Race Theory, this is only when politicians have gotten involved, when anybody ever heard the term Critical Race Theory used.

- 'Cause it has been around for 40 years, I never heard of it.

- It's the lightning rod of the term.

And if we just got back to basics, and taught history, and stop worrying about the newest catchphrase, like Critical Race Theory, we would be a lot better off.

- I think you guys seem to agree that this is something that should not be handled by lawmakers, but should been handled by educators.

Okay.

I kind of disagree with you.

But let's move on.

There's one thing that we can do as Zach goes for his chicken.

It almost seems like every time people of color get to a certain point, economic status or whatever, you can go to the turn of the century, from the 18th century to the 19th, or the 19th century to the 20th century, where you had a lot of blacks that were in positions of power, and in the halls of Congress, they had towns that were thriving, Greenwood, Rosewood, and all of a sudden, something came up.

Jim Crow, always something that was a road block to success.

Now we have a situation in the last election with Trump where he lost and they were major sectors of this country.

Pennsylvania are the folks where the Republicans, your folks did not win.

And those are the areas where there's been major contention.

So now we have to change the rules.

Again, making it difficult for people to vote, whether it be something as simple as well, you know, if you're standing on line, nobody can give you water.

- As you know, I come from New Hampshire.

And there is not a large minority population that you could say that any laws that they pass in that state are targeting to disenfranchise their vote.

New Hampshire did have some laws that were passed, that were aimed at making sure that only New Hampshire residents get to vote.

Now, do you think that it's an important thing to make sure that everybody that goes to vote is legally qualified to vote, meaning that they are a citizen of that state that they're voting in?

'Cause I do.

And this is personal to me, because as you know, I lost a hotly contested congressional race by a very narrow margin.

- That I know.

- And at the time, New Hampshire had some very liberal laws that allowed potentially thousands of college students that may have been residents of other states, that may have voted in other states as well.

And they voted in that election, some of them with an affidavit without showing any other proof of residency in New Hampshire.

- I am all for anything that supports the integrity of the process.

I think in the long run, that favors us.

Unfortunately, there have been Democrats who have taken the bait from the opposition and pretended that fraud is not even a theoretical possibility in the abstract.

That's too extreme.

We do in a really fundamental level need to have a process efficient to establish that the person who cast the vote is the person who... That they are who they say they are.

But a number of the voter suppression laws that are spreading like wildfire over the country have absolutely nothing to do with the integrity of the election.

There's a strong evidentiary record that the only reason why they are suggesting some of these initiatives is solely based on race.

And if you can establish that it should be game set match.

- Race should never be a factor when considering passing new laws to determine eligibility to vote.

It's against the law already.

- The fact is that most analysts say that there was no widespread fraud in the election, but yet still on January 6th, we had thousands of people that stood in the Capitol saying, "Stop the steal."

And people died.

If you look at the composition of the people who stormed the Capitol, they didn't look like you and me.

You know, they didn't.

- It wasn't completely homogenous, it looked like New Hampshire to me.

So laugh at that.

- That kind of makes the point.

[panelists laugh] - I really think it does.

But there are other things that are going on in this country too that are a concern to people of color.

And one issue is police reform.

So now we have a situation where folks are trying to make a difference.

And we come to another catchphrase, we talked about Critical Race Theory.

Now, we're talking about Defund the Police.

So what does that mean?

And how does that help us as black people?

- It was this immediate reaction, emotionally charged reaction to the George Floyd homicide.

It was hyperbolic.

And that should not be taken literally.

Now are there a handful of people who believe that somehow we could magically abolish the police that we can defund the police entirely and still have a civil society.

Yeah, there may be a handful of people who subscribe to that.

And most of those people that just being stubborn.

Most people understand that police are called upon to do more than what they're capable of doing.

- Right.

- When police officers are called to the scene of someone who's acting out because they have a mental disturbance, they're not generally equipped to handle that.

And we should be investing as much of our resources as we can to make sure that when somebody calls a 911 operator and says that my son, who is off his meds is acting out and he's got a butcher knife and threatening people that they send the right people to the scene.

- All right, that makes sense.

But then we have what is called the agitator, do you have two folks that were going out and you have those bullies trying to egg them on, you know, in the school room, and I'm wondering if the folks that are egging a situation on where it shouldn't be and is detrimental, the folks that are trying to get to the bottom of something that can make a difference.

Our media and even politicians that are tearing people apart.

- Or pouring gasoline on the fire.

- Absolutely.

- Of course.

- As a son of a longtime law enforcement veteran, as you know.

- Absolutely.

- I have some pretty strong opinions on this, the concept of Defunding the Police carte blanche is not acceptable.

No one in society that is sane, would be an advocate for that.

What we're really talking about is police reform.

And a lot has transpired since George Floyd, don't get me wrong, the overwhelming majority of police perform their duty very well.

- I don't think anyone- - We're only talking about isolated incidents.

But those isolated incidents that would have been overlooked in the past here recently have been investigated.

Several law enforcement officers have been prosecuted, and several of them have been convicted.

The majority of this cases were heard by majority white juries.

- From your presiding over the Abner Louima trial, which got not just national, but international attention, where do you think we are when it comes to racial justice in our system?

- When you think about change, social change, there's always a couple of steps forward, and then a couple of steps backwards.

But with the advent of the body camera, you know, even before the body camera, the fact that everybody had a video camera in their pockets, that changed the game.

We now have a much better, stronger evidentiary basis for deciding who's telling the truth and who's not.

And when you talk about all white juries, it's like the Ahmaud, the Arbery case.

Because there were people who were surprised that there was that kind of positive outcome.

But that I think that happened for a peculiar reason.

The attorneys for those guys were so intent on making sure they were no blacks.

But they rejected all blacks out of hand and barely examined the white jurors.

And we got an absolutely fair result consistent with that.

- And I think that's good.

That's sweet, poetic justice.

And once we also, this desert here, the George Poll.

- I'll be grabbing that in a second.

- I haven't tasted it yet.

- Well, you better taste it.

Because you know, I've had this before, you haven't had.

I just wanna tie in one of the things is there's so many things we can talk about here.

But when it comes to justice in the system, we have now a black woman who has been nominated for the Supreme Court.

I would tend to think that this is progress for us.

And it's not because she's a person of color, but she she has extraordinary accomplishments behind her.

- I believe that this particular pick is extremely highly qualified.

And her resume speaks for itself.

However, I couldn't be in more disagreement with the way it was rolled out by the Biden administration.

I think the fact that he made it known before he released this pick that he was going to pick an African American woman cheapened the experience of this pick.

- The path of least resistance for Biden would have been not to even mentioned race, that would have been the path of least resistance.

- Shouldn't that be the goal.

- But no.

It's really an issue of whether we have reached a point in our history where we don't have to talk about it explicitly anymore.

And I don't believe we reached that point in our history.

I sometimes feel like I'm driving in a car, on a family trip, with a bunch of kids in the backseat and white America's sitting in the back seat.

Are we there yet?

[panelists laugh] Americans who want to feel that I'd love to have somebody on the court who has walked a mile in my shoes.

All right.

He was basically proclaiming loudly to them that, yeah, there's going to be a descendant, a female descendant of slaves who is going to be able to look at all those cases that come to the court and view them from your point of view.

For him to loudly proclaim that rather than soft peddling that, I don't have a problem with it.

- I think our multicolored fabric that is America is our biggest strength.

However, we need to get to a point where we can acknowledge that and also acknowledge the simple thing that what binds us together is stronger than anything else.

So it has to be America first.

- Let's get real.

Clarence Thomas was selected because he was black period.

Didn't hear a lot of Republicans complaining about affirmative action in that regard.

- I wasn't old enough to say something back then.

When I ran for Congress, the media wanted to make a big deal out of the fact that I was the first African American to run for federal office in New Hampshire.

They wanted to make up big deal out of the fact that I was the first African American to win a major party's nominee for federal office.

And that may be a relevant historical factor.

But I always answer that the same way.

I don't want you to vote for me because I'm African American, I want you to support me because you believe that I am the best, most qualified candidate for the job.

And I want people to view me that way.

It doesn't mean that I forgot where I came from.

Because I know that everything that I've achieved, that, that was on the backs of those who struggled before me, and I'm very connected to that.

But I think it's very important for us to move forward as a nation, that we understand the history, and we acknowledge it.

But we move forward knowing that if we work together, that we are stronger.

The only people that can destroy this country, as far as I'm concerned is us.

By tearing ourselves apart.

- Absolutely.

- By focusing on what divides us and it's time for us to put that away, and understand that at this critical juncture, it's important for us to understand that we all have more in common and we need to be in it together.

- Amen.

Let's all raise our glasses to one thing.

Here is to diversity.

Here's the moving forward.

Here is to unity.

And here is to "Eat and Argue."

- Slange Var.

[dramatic music] - [Narrator] This program was sponsored by National Grid through its Project C, National Grid is connecting communities to clean and sustainable energy, creating a workforce to support renewable energy, working to support neighborhoods and their revitalization.