Hello and welcome. It is Eric Erickson here. The Eric Erickson show this fine day. I hope the weather

is beautiful where you are because it's kind of getting grim where I am. Those of you in Texas,

I hope you survived the storms last night. The phone number, if you want to be on the program,

87737-7-7-4-25. I want to begin with a sticky subject.

Full disclosure out of the gate.

I don't like talking about race-related issues

because I know through my upbringing,

I don't necessarily have the quintessential

American upbringing.

I grew up in Dubai, moved there when I was five years old.

We were definitely the minority in the country.

There was a time when we as a family would tell people we were Swedish with our

last name and my dad, we could get away with it when there were terrorists throughout the

Middle East who did not like Americans. And we would come back to the states during the summer

and live in rural Louisiana with my grandparents. My grandfather had been the mayor of my small town,

Jackson, Louisiana, back during World War II. He built a grocery store in the part of town

that was increasingly the black community and had great relations in the black community.

He was actually, if I recall the story right from my grandmother, lost his reelection bid

because he passed an ordinance requiring that people chain up their mules and horses

because people were complaining about them going into each other's yards, eating each other's

vegetation in the war gardens or the like. I remember my grandmother telling me that, but it's,

I didn't grow up there. Move back to Louisiana for 10th grade, started off at a small Christian

...