I'm Ezra Climbed. This is the Ezra Conchell.

Hey, this is Ezra. I'm outsec. I have cold and flu season this year. So we wanted to share a recent episode from our colleagues

over at First Person, another great New York Times opinion podcast. This is a conversation with Marie Smitchell. He's head of the progressive working family's party, and he wrote this much talked about much discussed essay about the internal conflict of royal and international relations.

This is Ezra. I'm outsec. I have cold and flu season this year. So we wanted to share a recent episode from our colleagues over at First Person, another great New York Times opinion podcast.

This is a conversation with Marie Smitchell. He's head of the Progressive Working Families Party, and he wrote this much talked about much discussed essay about the internal conflict set of royal

and in some cases paralyzed progressive organizations in recent years. Enjoy.

From New York Times opinion, I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro, and this is First Person. Talksick, problematic, impossible, broken. Those are just a few words that have been used to describe the internal workings of progressive

organizations in recent years. Me too and the Black Lives Matter movement have forever changed our workplaces, and I'd say for the better, but in many organizations on the left, they've also caused paralysis. Take the ACLU. In 2017, it defended the white supremacist March and Charlottesville on the grounds of free speech.

In the aftermath, employees revolted, saying that the leadership was harming marginalized communities. What followed were years of infighting and what the times called an identity crisis. And the ACLU is far from alone. The left is eating itself. And Marie Smitchell has had enough. He's the head of the Working Families Party, a progressive political party, and he's been an organizer for two decades.

He recently wrote a provocative essay about why it's time for a reckoning with the workplace reckoning. Today, Marie Smitchell on the inner turmoil tearing the left apart.

Marie Smitchell, the working families party.

Marie Smitchell, the working families party. And it describes its mission as uniting people across race and geography against the wealthy and powerful who in your telling use divisions among working class people against them.

Were you always very attuned to social justice, even as a kid?

Well, some of my first experiences was literally around the kitchen table with my grandmother, who was an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, who came here and worked in other people's homes to care of other people's children.

And she struggled really hard to get a sort of foothold in this country.

Where was the kitchen table?

The kitchen table was in Long Beach, New York, which is a suburb of New York. And everything that I now am fighting against as a young person, I saw my mom was a union nurse.

My dad was a union electrician and he was injured at the job and I saw his struggle to be treated fairly by his employer after an injury that took him out of the workforce.

All those things I think built in me pretty early on this fire to challenge those barriers because they just did not feel fair to me. They did not sit with me.

And then the other piece, you know, by the time I went away for college, I can't tell you the amount of times I was pulled over by the police.

I can't tell you the amount of really traumatic experiences that I had as a black boy, you know, a nerdy black boy that was fascinated by ideas and unfortunately the systems like the school system didn't know what to do with me.

And often tried to extinguish my passion for words and ideas and social change. And that only built a bigger fire in me.

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