This is the Unregistered Podcast, and I'm Thaddeus Russell.

This is a show about ideas, people, and behaviors that are considered inappropriate, out of bounds, or beyond the pale.

The things you're not supposed to talk about if you're a schoolteacher, a college professor, a businessman, a politician, a parent, a neighbor, or even a podcast host. These are the things you're not supposed to say or even think if you're a good liberal, a good conservative, or a good citizen. Each week, I'll interview a person who has something bad to say. They might be a

journalist or a professor. They might be a porn star or a drug dealer. They might just be an ordinary

person with an ordinary job who doesn't care about the rules of polite society. I'm not interested

in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker. I'm interested in people who break the rules of polite society. I'm not interested in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker.

I'm interested in people who break the rules of conventional thought and to expand the

scope of what is possible to say in our society.

I'm interested in people who make me think.

In 2005, I was essentially fired from my job at Barnard College, and the reason I was given was that my work, in particular my work on race, was, quote, dangerous, improper, and frightening, and had no place in the academy.

That work was later published in a scholarly article

and in a renegade history of the United States. By and large, academics have ignored that work,

but there have been a few professors still working, some with tenure, some who are prominent

in their field, who have found the work and have found common cause with it. Now, there

aren't that many of them. In fact, it's only been a few. But one of them, who has gotten into a lot

of trouble on his own, shares so many of my analyses of race in America and is so brave in his

willingness to talk about them that I was willing to go almost anywhere, even Texas, to interview him.

This is my interview with Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston, Shane Lee.

So we're in Houston, Texas, in a fabulous holiday In Express next to the I-10 freeway.

And I'm here with one of my very favorite professors of all time, a guy who I got to know about five years ago, but only online, because a mutual friend of ours

recommended him to me. And he said, man, you've got to read this dude's essay on Lil Wayne

because it sounds a lot like you. And I did. And it is still to this day one of my favorite

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