Mass incarceration in one we disproportionately punish the poor and those of color, and im concentrating on the other side where we give impunity to wealthy, powerful people who sit as c. E. O. S and chairman of the powerful corporations. Cohan charles blow, Jesse Eisinger, when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following bank of america. Life better connected. And by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Cohan good evening, charlie is away. Im william cohan, special correspondent at vanity faimplet we begin tonight with charles blow, he is a bestselling author, commentator and visual oped columnist for the new york times. His recent columns have grown increasingly critical of the trump administration. Many see him as one of the leaders of what can loosely be called the resistance. I am pleased to have charles back at the table. Welcome charles. Thank you. Cohan great to have you here. My temptation would be to immediately start with Current Events which is tempting, but im going to resist that because i really enjoyed your july 3 column which is called, of course, the hijacked american presidency. Im going to read a little from it because it was so powerful, i thought. You start by saying, every now and then, were going to have to do this, step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trumps parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full devastating truth. We must remind ourselves trumps very presence in the white house defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, trump has lowered the office with his whiney, fragile, vindictive pettiness. The presidency has been hijacked, and there are no words to express it. Theres no new and novel way to catalog it. It is what it is and has been from day one, the most extraordinary and profound electoral mistake america has made in our lifetimes and possibly ever. Powerful stuff. Why . Why senat why not . There are a lot of different people who play different roles in society. As a writer, journalist, even opinion journalist, part of the job is to bear witness, and to that extent, what else should i be writing . You know, how else should i be considering what is happening . There are reporters who their job is to follow the daytoday in every incremental change. My job i considered in a different way, it is to kind of step back a little bit and offer some perspective. When i do that, it is shocking what we are witnessing. Cohan was there a catalyst for you with the Trump Presidency or the very act he was even elected or nominated. Rose how far back did it go . Is it you being a new yorker, recognizing what donald trump is all about, being a new yorker . I think all of that is true. I mean, you cannot have lived in this city and not register that he was a part of the city, a social presence in the city, an economic presence in the city, and that there was a kind of vialnesvial vileness to it. There was a declasse part of him that people registered. That it wasnt an aspirational thick if you lived in new york city to be like trump or like him, it was a joke, and he treated his own presence in the city very much, a lot of it was appearing, you know, on comedy shows. Cohan howard stern, the tabloids. Absolutely. Even when he appeared on kind of more mainstream shows, it was kind of a comedy act, and, you know, he shows up in, you know, World Wrestling federation and all sorts of things, and he kind of played with it, and we looked at it in a certain light, but we never took it seriously. You know, but you catapult from that position to him as a politician, a serious contender for the nomination of the republican party, and then to actually become president , and then all of the comments and all the things he said have a different weight, and they were incredibly distasteful. And its not just, you know, the flirtation with women. You know, he pushes past that to bragging about assaulting women. Its a very different thing. This is the same person who took out you know, people dont remember this. He took out fullpage ads in new york city newspapers, including the new york times, after the center park jogger episodes calling for these kids to be, you know, executed, and there was a lot of mee of a f heat around it at the time. Even after they were cleared, he still wouldnt take it back. There is something problematic about the character of this person, and to take that character and to see ut play out it play out real time, not just historical fact, but in realtime he is committing even more offenses, more sins against society. Somebody has to keep pulling the lens back and saying this is not normal and this is not right, and whatever your reasons, you know, you can make an argument you didnt like Hillary Clinton cohan and people have. Yes, and you can make an ideological argument you were opposed to obamas policies because he was liberal, maybe you are conservative, but you had other choices and you chose him, so i cant separate you from him. Cohan was there some point you decided you had to sort of take up the pen or the Computer Keyboard is this. Part of the writing for me is just the exhaling of what i believe, and im trying to be as true in that as humanly possible and not have that you know, not steer towards trying to get people to click on something, not steer towards trying to win an audience but simply to express the truth of what i believe, and if that finds an audience, great. If people can use that to help fuel their fire, great. If it changes someones mind, great. But that is not the objective for me. The objective for me is this is the truth of what i feel about this situation in the moment. You know, sometimes people are shocked when i say im not trying to change anybodys mind. Im not. If it does, great, but i am trying to document what is happening and how i feel about what is happening, and i hope that that is helpful, but that cannot be the motivating factor for writing, i dont believe. Cohan would you ever see yourself actually marching on washington or being more of an activist than just in your column . It has happened columnists have become activists and involved politically. No, i cant see it and, also, i do believe that different people in society play different roles. I think the artists, whether or not you consider columnists sort of a high level of writing or not cohan its hard work. Exactly. But writers in general have a role, and its not necessarily what people consider, you know, front line, but i believe that it is front line, i believe that history has shown us that the kind of capturing and distillation of thought is an incredible motivator in terms and also kind of framing mechanism for activism and that that is a special role unto itself, that it is not passive, that writing is an action, and that action is sufficient. It does not require an additive thing to make it active, and that, you know, what history shows is that, when people attack societies, very often they attack the arts first because they understand the power, but they attack the poets. You know, that so you do have skin in the game, its just in a different way. Cohan have you been attacked, accused, have you felt any of the barbs . Do you feel somehow threatened now that the pen is mightier than the sword . Well, you get some people who, you know, cross lines and occasionally you have to alert there is a whole mechanism where you have to alert the security and they talk to police. So that happens. But it is really important, i believe, that you never be afraid. I believe that art is, in fact, the absence of fear. You know hammer, the infamous civil rights icon said whats the point of being scared, right . In her quote, she went on the say, all they can do is kill me and it feels like they have been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since i was born. Im a product of that southern environment, and i do have that posture of what is the point of the fear . What does what do i achieve by being afraid . Cohan you have been a fighter your whole life since you grew up in gibbsland, louisiana, less than a thousand people population. Yes. Cohan youve come a long way from there. How do you do it . Theres a very rich history in the south, and there was a very rich history in my particular neighborhood, and i never ever felt compromised or limited. I never heard anybody when i was a kid tell me no you cant do something. If you could dream it, they would say, that sounds like a great idea, now how do you get it done. They would help me figure out how to get it done and i would get it done. Cohan beyond your parents or i went to a school that was started as the First College in northwest louisiana to educate the sons and daughters of former slaves. That school is my high school. Its still in the same spot. They combined it with another school. It used to be coleman, now its gibsoncoleman. I look at people, a lot of people in the north, in movies, where black people are struggling to get reputation and people want to see the spike lee movie and complain in the theater there were no black people on the walls. And i think all i ever saw were black people. They were the originators of the college. They were erar erudite and taugt latin, and in growing up with that, you emerge without the social racial scars. I just never had that baggage. I never had the sense i couldnt be the smartest person in that room because every room i went into, a black person was the smartest person in the room, so the idea it couldnt be me never occurred to me. Toni morrison said i always thought i believed i had the moral high ground, that anybody who would even dane to assume they could be racist to me and i was somehow lesser than them was so outrageous to me and i was such and in the moment it happens, i immediately assume you are morally compromised. Cohan but you recognize this is an unusual experience. Its the only experience i have. But i do kind of cohan youre an educated man i temper myself when i talk about it because there was a segregation involved in it, not because black people wanted to be sprarkts but white people didnt want their kids to go to school with us, and we had the educational experience all to ourselves and it wasnt a negative. It was the Oldest School in that whole area, and when we would we came into spaces carrying that and understanding that this is that whatever kind of history you have or your school or whatever, what you think it is, i have 100 years of amazing black people doing Amazing Things against all the odds, and theyre on my back, and im on their shoulders, and that idea i carry with me all the time, that if they could do that in the middle of nowhere, then what is impossible . I couldnt get over the idea that something could be impossible to me. It just didnt make sense to me. Cohan that was reinforced by going to grambling, which i gather you didnt want to go to, but you went and you said that sort of reinforced this idea because everyone around you was i didnt go because it was too close. It was 20 minutes from my house. I wanted to run away. Cohan where did you want to go . I wanted to go to william and mary. Cohan huh. I got a brochure. I never applied. Cohan the polar opposite of grambling, i would think. I was kind of trying to run away. Even though it was in the south, it felt north to us because we were in louisiana. I read the description back then. We didnt have google, so you get this big book, had all the colleges and they have descriptions. They had a great description and i thought, that sounds good because it sounds like me. The recruiter gave an important sneecht had an impression on me. I decided to go to l. S. U. , i got a full scholarship. He said l. S. U. Doesnt need you, grambling needs you. It really made an impression on me because what he was saying to me is youre not just coming here to get something from us, i want you to come here to give something to your fellow students, and that is the way that i kind of navigated college was that it was that i was giving as much as i was getting. Cohan and, i mean, you were a standout in high school intellectually. You were editor of your high school newspaper. You were a standout at grambling, magna cum laude graduate. Did you always know you wanted to be in journalism . You did that in high school and college. Did you want to change the world . I had no desire to be a journalist. I majored in english and prelaw because i thought i would become a lawyer. I liked writing. When people asked me the question you asked before which is how someone goes from being on the visual side to writing, i tell people cohan especially at the new york times. I tell people the fluke is how i went from being someone majoring in english to being on the visual side. That was the fluky part. The writing is like coming home. Thats like something ive always done. But journalism just wasnt a profession in my world. Im from a tiny town, the closest newspaper was eight miles away anit was a couple of volunteers, they did it on the side and had another job. So the idea as a journalist as a way to make a living didnt exist, so i didnt have a role model that would say this is something i wanted to do, but the idea of expressing was something that was important to come a politician, and part of that cohan you wanted to be governor of louisiana. I wanted to be governor of louisiana. That was the thing. No more. laughter cohan you were inspired by edward edwards, of all people . Inspired, in the worst possible way, not that i dont like him, but in the worst possible way in the sense that i tell kids, this is not aspirational, do not do what i did, because i went on a tour, it was a bunch of kids from north louisiana and some program, and we went to the governors mansion. First, we took a tour of the capitol building, and they were pointing out all the craziness that happened in louisiana politics, it is truly a crazy history. This one got shot here, and his wife locked him up in an insane asylum. It was just craziness. Cohan famously so. Yes, famously. So we go to the governors mansion, and governor edwards, at the time, strolls in, and, you know, hes just like the most magnetic, interesting, flamboyant character, you know, and he was a folk hero in a way. One of his elections, the most popular Bumper Sticker in the state was vote for the crook, its important. Because he was running as david duke who had been the grand wizard of the ku klux klan. Everyone knew edwards was a crook, but they kind of liked it. It was fascinating. Cohan the same state hughie long was a politician of some renown. Yes. I looked at it and said these guys are having a ball down here, i want to be the governor. So it wasnt an honorable decision to make, but there was a part of me also that really did believe in public service, and all of my heros as a kid were people who had kind of changed the world and, you know, i had posters of Martin Luther king and a tshirt with Martin Luther king. I liked him in the way that other people like rock stars and athletes because, to me, he epitomized something that i aspire to. He was incredibly educated which is something that gets glossed over a lot. I mean, how incredibly educated and how eloquent he was and not just, you know, in the kind of inflection of the voice, but if you pick through the speeches, the incredible breath of the references hes making you know, greek references. And im thinking to myself, half of the people in these audiences dont understand what theyre hearing, but hes making them and grounding them in kind of southern gospel, and this idea that you could bridge those two worlds of the highly intellectual and the common southern language. Cohan they certainly felt his passion. Absolutely, you could feel the passion, but i think, intellectually, academically, those speeches are stand apart from just the passion. They are incredibly wellcrafted. He was writing them. There are no speech writers. This is him. The idea that he could span all of Literary History and real kind of on the ground history and weave that into a narrative that made sense for people, many of whom had not maybe they finished high school, not gone to college, and still make all that makes sense and to speak to all those different audiences was an incredibly powerful thing for me. I still think, in a way when im writing now, that i think of them as sermons. Cohan what i read at the beginning to have the show sounded like a sermon, had that kind of power. Cohan also there is the kind of also there is the kind of practical nature of preaching, which is youre really talking about the same subject every week, you just have to find a different way into it. Cohan you can probably relate to that as a columnist. Right, a columnist is very much like that. Cohan so do you have a journalistic hero, or do you just sort of i did not i mean, ive never thought i was going to be a professional writer, so and i never desired to be a professional writer. So when i starred this column, it was very visual and dataintensive and it just kind of morphed into more of a writing job, but, for years, after i started this problem, when people asked what i did, i wouldnt have a long explanation. I couldnt make myself say writers because i thought of writers as other people, not me. Cohan you left the times and went to National Geographic, i guess, to continue to work on your visual side. Yes, i was the art director of National Geographic magazine. Cohan which is a beautiful opportunity. But you came back, which is rare, and now youre writing this column which is, you know, obviously an incredible accomplishment. Are you as data driven now in the writing of the column as you sort of were when you were doing the visual column . Because with your trump columns, well call it the resistance columns, these feel very passionate as opposed to data driven but maybe they are data driven. Theyre not as data driven, obviously. Cohan explain what that means. What were you doing with data that you were well, i mean, when i started, i just wanted to use data to make a point. The pages were about perspective. But i wanted to make a point using data. Cohan you wouldnt write something until the data i would follow the data. If i found a good data set that i thought was interesting, then i would write about the data that i found. Cohan like that dating column, where people werent dating as much. Exactly. But that meant that you werent necessarily following your passion and your, you know, what appealed to you intellectually that week, you were really following data. So i