Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox and welcome to With Friends Like These, where we talk about the differences between us without letting them divide us.

Not today. Today we are definitely talking about divisions. We're talking about divisions because we're talking about racism and hate.

And actually, sometimes the way that racism isn't about hate, it is just racism. Hate springs from racism, I think. Not really the other way around. Racism is a system. Hate is an emotion. They're both damaging.

We're going to talk about both from different angles, but they intersect.

Second part of the show, I'm going to talk to Ibrahim X. Kendi. He's the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist. And was also the author of Stamped from the Beginning, a National Book Award winner.

He notes on his website. He's the youngest ever winner of the National Book Award. But at first is Arjun Singh Sethi.

Arjun Singh Sethi is a community activist, human rights lawyer and law professor based out of DC. He's the editor of American Hate Survivors Speak Out, an MPR best book of 2018. Coming right up.

Hi, Arjun. Welcome back to the show.

Hi, Anna Marie. Thank you so much for having me.

So, you know, we talked about having you on the show in the immediate aftermath of the El Paso shooting and in the Dayton shooting because it was the anniversary of very closely anniversary of the massacre at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

And then also the anniversary of the anniversary of the publication of your book, American Hate Survivors Speak Out.

And obviously it didn't quite work. We didn't get you that week. We kind of been juggling some things. And I did have a thought to myself, it's not like this is going to be something that doesn't need to be talked about.

But it turns out as I was looking at the news today, not only is this relevant in a general way, not only is talking to you about hate crime and hate violence, stimming from white supremacy, it's very specifically in the news.

Six people have been arrested since El Paso for plans to commit mass violence and four of them were explicitly talking about white nationalism in their plans.

One of them quoted Trump in a post and one of them was one of the very fine people who showed up in Charlottesville.

And then just this morning, I saw a story about children on a bus going to head start programs in Idaho that the manager of the program or having to take the signs that identify the bus as a head start program for migrants off of the bus because other drivers on the road were harassing the children.

I know that this stuff was happening before we had it in the news all the time.

Right? I mean, it is where is this is it really are we just noticing it is it worse?

Like I have trouble kind of making sense of that because one of these people quoting Trump seems like, oh, this is new and bad and worse.

But I also read your book. So it seems like a continuum as well.

So I think it's a little bit of both. I think hate has berated through the everyday lives of vulnerable communities in this country for a very long time.

There is no question that when Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States on through the election and inauguration, there was an absolute uptick and hate violence.

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