L.A. Times correspondent Tyrone Beason has spent the last year and a half talking to Americans about their hopes and fears for the future. This is what he found.
Since the start of 2021, L.A. Times national correspondent Tyrone Beason has been on the road. He’s doing what a lot of us are thinking about: he’s on a quest to find out what’s up with the United States. In a year-long series called “My Country,” Beason has been trying to find the things that bind us, while also trying to make sense of the issues that keep tearing us apart.
Today, we check in with Beason and hear some of his dispatches. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times national correspondent Tyrone Beason
More reading:
Read Tyrone Beason’s full “My Country” series here
In the vastness of the Inland Empire, people of color find ‘peace in these troubled times’
This California wine country town is multicultural. So why do so many feel invisible?
Tyrone: I came out to the desert to breathe some fresh air, to lay down some burdens, not think so much about the state of the country. But of course, there's nowhere in America you can go and not be confronted with our identity crisis.
Gustavo: Since the start of 2021, my colleague Tyrone Beason has been on the road.
He's doing what a lot of us are thinking about: He's on a quest to find out what's up with the United States.
In a yearlong series called “My Country,” Tyrone has been trying to find the things that bind us together while also trying to make sense of the issues that keep tearing us apart.
And right now, what's on his mind is the midterms, and what the results will say about the country he's trying so hard to understand.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to The Times, essential news from the L.A. Times. It's Friday, August 19, 2022.
Today we continue our series of episodes about the stakes of the 2022 midterm elections. We’ll talk to Tyrone about what Americans all around have told him about what pains them and what gives them hope.
Tyrone Beason covers the U.S. through the lens of race and culture. Welcome to The Times, Tyrone.
Tyrone: Very good to be here. Thank you.
Gustavo: So your “My Country” series, man. It's gorgeous writing, a lot of traveling. Big, long, elegant stories that really are doing a great job of just showing everything that this country is about right now. What inspired you to do it?
Tyrone: Honestly covering the 2020 presidential race. I came to the L.A. Times to join the team that would be following the Democrats and eventually going out to Iowa and South Carolina and all these places. But at some point my editor and I decided that what I would do is look at this election through the lens of race, which is a perfect way to do it, especially during the sort of post-Obama and then pre-Trump era and pre-insurrection era, as we would come to find out.
I felt like these tensions were one of the main drivers of our sort of national crisis around who we are, who belongs, from integration to Black people's relationship to law enforcement to income inequality. And I wanted to find out just what was stirring in the belly of that beast while writing about the candidates and the races. To me, I think there's a national story. There's a story that sort of overarches our politics.
You know, it's a new century. We have changed so much. Demographically, we're gonna become a majority minority country at some point in the relatively near future. I feel like some of that anxiety over change and who's gonna fit in to this new America; I think some of that is what was driving our politics and driving people to vote the way they were voting. To act out the way they were acting out. And I just wanted to understand that and make that a sort of a subtext in all of my work. And it wound up being a perfect starting point for doing a series that was only about that. So after the election, I was in Phoenix, I was out there. I was probably 10 feet away from the dude with the sort of buffalo horns who was one of the insurrectionists….
Gustavo: The QAnon shaman.
Tyrone: Yeah, the QAnon shaman. I had a picture of him on my iPhone. So when I was watching the insurrection live on TV really, and his picture came up, I was like, oh my God. I saw this guy. I heard him talking about, “wait until January,” trying to console those people out in front of the Mariposa County elections office who had basically lost the election even though they had refused to accept that. And I just felt like, wow, wouldn't it be great to travel the country and try to understand how moments like this have deep roots in our conflict over race, identity, whose America is this? 'Cause I think that's what they were really screaming about in Phoenix and obviously they're almost literally saying those words during the insurrection.
Gustavo: When you started, were there themes or topics that you knew you wanted to hit, or was it more like I'm just gonna go around the United States, literally pull over to wherever you thought there was something interesting worth checking out?
Tyrone: A lot of my stories seem random like that, but they have a reason. So each one of them takes a topic, and then I find a place that I believe will help me explore that topic. So the first story in the series was actually a road trip to the inauguration.
Tyrone tape: Where do you feel like the country's going? I'm on my way to D.C., obviously, for the inauguration, but I wanted to stop here because I think the story of this city tells us a lot about where America's head's at.
Tyrone: And because I'm writing about it through this sort of racial sort of context and through my own belief that what people are trying to foment is another kind of a civil war, maybe not with giant armies and that kind of thing, but why not start it in the South? I'm from the South. I was born in Kentucky and I covered South Carolina. I covered those primaries. I saw President Biden accept the victory in South Carolina. I was like 15 feet away from the guy and saw the tears in his eyes and started to understand why he felt it was necessary to thank the Black people of South Carolina for elevating him to victory.
President Biden tape: As I stand here today because of the minority communities I am very much alive because of you…
Tyrone: So I started it in a place that was relevant to the story. And each of these is relevant to some aspect of American life or its culture or its history. And that's the way I frame this. But then I leave myself open to possibility as I travel. Open to different voices entering my sphere and allowing myself to shapeshift and question my own assumptions along the way.
Tyrone tape: So I came here to kind of to think a little bit about why it is I felt and still feel that it's race, identity, belonging, calling oneself an American. All those things seem to be at play right now.
Gustavo: That's what I like so much about your series is that you're always, you're questioning people, but you're also yourself. And in that first road trip, you focused a lot of it on Charleston, South Carolina. Why there?
Tyrone: Because that was the birthplace of the first Civil War. I mean, I really took a kind of a high school textbook sort of factoid and I just went there. Also, Charleston will tell you everything you need to know about the South and about the way the country formed and on whose backs it was formed. The whole city was built by enslaved Africans. If you drive through the low country of South Carolina, you can see the sort of the dikes and the former rice paddies, which are now sort of bird sanctuaries. And so the ghosts of the past are everywhere in and around Charleston. And I would need my locations to resonate like that. You know what I mean? I need to be able to feel the spirit of the country and the place. And there is no better place to understand this conflict, actually this contradiction, between our high-minded ideals and the way we actually do each other than in Charleston. And so that's why I wanted that to be the launching pad.
Also, I didn't just start it in Charleston. I literally started my trip in front of Mother Emanuel AME church, where as you remember, in 2015, a white supremacist pretending to be part of a Bible study, wound up massacring nine African Americans to start a race war. And this happened actually in the days after Trump announced his presidency, by the way. And so it was a really sort of heavy, heavy place for me. And I'd been there before and that grief that I felt first time I visited that church – I mean, I wanted to start there. I wanted to start with my grief and my dismay and drive from an emotional place as well as a physical starting point.
Tyrone tape: The massacre here hurt me, in a way that I'm still trying to understand. And I think that's true for a lot of us in the African American community. We carry the suffering, the pain of other African Americans with them. For us, it's not news events. It's the condition that we find ourselves in in this country.
Gustavo: As you're going on that first road trip, you eventually end up in the capitol a couple weeks after January 6th. What was the vibe when you finally got there?
Tyrone: Ha. Like one of those sort of summer blockbusters to movies where it's like the end of America and some alien comes and like clears out all the big cities.
I've never experienced anything like that in my country. How do I explain this? When you arrive in D.C., you are immediately struck by the grandeur of its monuments and its federal buildings. I was struck by the total silence of that entire neighborhood.
Tyrone tape: You know, it's really creepy to be out here. There are a dump trucks in the street here. There's a cordon in here, so you can't get into uh Lafayette Park. This is an important inauguration. We're about to swear in the first Black woman of color as vice president of the United States.
The United States doesn't get a lot of moments like this. We haven't allowed ourselves to have a lot of moments like this. We got Barack Obama, basically. And that's it. So the idea that I've made this trip across the country and then up through the South, talking about how America keeps failing to redeem itself for its sins when it comes to race and, and who belongs, who doesn't.
You know, thinking about how we seem to be at war with ourselves, at least ideologically. And to get here when we should be sort of rallying around this very important moment, regardless of where we stand, it's important that she will be up there on that, on those steps tomorrow being sworn in. And hardly anybody will get to see it in person. I guess it doesn't make me sad. It makes me mad.
Tyrone: National Guard troops were blocking roadways, entry points, to these public monuments, to our capital to prevent more rioting, to prevent more sort of chaos. And so I'm walking through the capital a couple days before the inauguration, the biggest day of the year really, or the cycle, when you think about it in terms of its ceremonial meaning, and there's nobody there but armed forces and police officers. And it was so chilling and it really validated to me that there's something bigger going on here even than Trump.
I think we're going through some sort of tectonic shift, and there's a lot of Americans who are not happy with what they think their place will be in our future. And it's the same time with this amazing flowering of other people of color, gays and lesbian women who found their voices in a way that they never have. It's amazing to think about that in the total silence of our National Mall and the parks around the White House. And to think about this period that should be so celebratory, regardless of who wins. This is our moment. It's an inauguration, it's a peaceful transfer of power, and to feel no peace.
Gustavo: More on Tyrone's journey after the break.
Gustavo: Tyrone, your series has jumped around in places and topics. And shortly after you started in the South or your road trip, right to D.C. for the inauguration, you ended up going down to the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego. Why there? And what did you find?
Tyrone: Part of this series is about identity and belonging. And I did that intentionally. It's not just about race. It's about this eternal question in the United States of who's in and who's out, who do we allow to belong and who do we forever treat as if they are from another planet? Certainly, I understand that as an African American, right? That's an inspiration for the whole story, my own background as a Black guy in this country and who deals with some of these issues, but it's not limited to people like me. It is also the story of other brown people who make this country run and who also provoke us to talk about these contradictions. And so obviously, in the Trump era, there was this Remain in Mexico program that basically forced asylum seekers, migrants coming up through Mexico, to remain in Mexico while their cases proceeded in the United States.
And so what I wanted to do was to go to the border and meditate on that line, that dividing line between who's in and who's out and think about our country in that context at the same time that the new president Biden was trying to sort of reform and do away with the Remain in Mexico program and implement a more, in his eyes humane process for the migrants and asylum seekers.
CLIP: The Supreme Court has certified the ruling it issued June 30th, allowing the Biden administration to end the Trump-era remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers .
CLIP: Federal immigration law gives the executive a lot of authority over who gets into the country and who can stay in the country.
Tyrone And it was an incredibly powerful trip because the border really means anything. And I was actually inspired by Donald Trump, who famously and repeatedly said, if you don't have borders, you don't have a country.
Trump tape: A nation without borders is not a nation.
Tyrone: And I'm like, that's true technically, but actually you don't have a country unless you have a way for people to feel like they belong. And unless you make people feel like they want to.
CLIP: Build that wall [chanting]
Gustavo: What did you think of the wall when you finally saw it?
Tyrone: I'd seen it before. And it's funny because it's not a wall, it's a fence. It's an iron one and in some places it's a double fence, and it says a lot about this idea of sorta fortress America. The idea that we erect not just one, but two walls to keep people out who we don't think belong. But of course the wall is also a representative of this great contradiction because there are at least 10 or 11 million undocumented people working and paying taxes and raising families and sending their kids to school in this country. And for the most part, we don't say a word about it until we have to decide whether they truly belong. And that's where the immigration debate always gets gummed up. So I wanted to take that wall and not just think about it as a barrier, but as a conduit and as a representation of a physical manifestation of our inability to decide what this country really is and who really should be here.
Tyrone tape: I walked away from my experience on the other side of the border feeling a bit mixed because I know that the chances of people from Central America and from Haiti getting asylum anytime soon are pretty slim, but that's not something I wanted to tell the people I met because for them, the United States is everything.
Gustavo: And then this past March, you went to California's wine country. And when I saw the name Paso Robles, I'm like, oh, hopefully Tyrone's gotta take a little break, go drink your Charnas or whatever they grow there. But you found a whole other story. What'd you find?
Tyrone: Yeah. Yeah. I wish. It's a lovely area and I'd actually never visited that area before. And again, taking a place that seems familiar to us. You know, it's California wine country. Pretty bougie, and it is in a lot of ways, but what else is there? And what I'd been reading was that they'd had this sort of controversy and debate over critical race theory because a group of concerned citizens in the wake of the George Floyd protests had campaigned to reinstitute an ethnic studies program at the local high school. And it became this sort of debate and it exposed this fissure. There's a white sort of power structure in Paso Robles, as it is in a lot of cities that are super. In California, but still sort of run by white folks. And it's also quite conservative. And so you saw this sorta fissure revealed in the controversy over whether or not to have an ethnic studies program and this discussion over whether it would advocate for what conservatives were calling critical race theory. Taking this sort of obscure legal philosophy and approach from the '70s and applying it to our sort of racial and debate over what America is today. So I wanted to understand what that was like.
I talked to one student, Mel Ruth González, at the high school, who's super cool. And she was just confused about why this was even a huge controversy in the first place.
Tyrone tape: This class is the class to make everyone feel safe, to open up their mind and, hear the opinions of everyone, you know, learn about the many ethnic cultures in the United States that helped shape America to what it is today.
Tyrone: She was part of that group of people who were campaigning for the class and for her as a young Latina, it's like, why wouldn't you want to experience the stories of other people good and bad: stories of tragedy and stories of triumph that's America? And certainly for immigrant communities, which is what her family represents.
Tyrone tape: People just think that America started with white people. No, no, no, no, no. This was such a hotspot for immigrants. Like, come on, look at us. We are such a diverse country.
Tyrone:, It was really fun to talk to her because she's so enthusiastic about finally having a class that'll give her that boost for her identity and for her people, but then to think about how others are offended by it.
Gustavo: And at this point, it's spring of this year, and you're uncovering these stories, you know, scratching below the surface to use that cliche. How was that affecting your thinking of where the nation's politics were in March of 2022 and how much had they progressed as you've been on the road?
Tyrone: I think we all know now that it regressed. As we learn about the depth of the organization of the January 6th attack on the capital. And as we see this uh, sort of slow March of voting rights laws across the states and laws, and laws preventing teachers from talking about the LGBTQ community, this did not end with January 6th. It did not end with Donald Trump. This is a part of the national conversation. And as a reporter and again, as a Black gay guy in America, I know that these are arguments we've had before. So it really sealed my conviction that these stories are important because political cycles don't end the debates that politicians use to get votes and they've doubled down, right? And these sort of culture wars continue. And so it really drove me and inspired me to keep looking.
Gustavo: And you always hit on the big topics. And of course, the past couple of months, the biggest topics have been abortion LGBTQ rights. So where did you go to illustrate themes?
Tyrone: Those stories were really to try to understand why this Roe v. Wade decision, the one overruling it or overturning it, was written this way. It's pretty broad and it basically invites challenges to other constitutionally guaranteed or court-affirmed rights and privileges for other types of people, certainly in the the LGBTQ community. But think about it: I mean, say my lifetime or my mother's lifetime, Black and white people can't get married. Two men, two women can get married. There's been this opening of sort of understanding toward the trans community and people who are nonbinary. Think about all the things that have happened since then. Women have a vastly different place in American life than they did when my mom or grandma were born, you know? I kind of felt like all that was on the table, and a lot of experts believe the same. So with those stories, I talked to people who were both queer and women. Or who were people of color and who have an experience writing about or advocates for civil rights, you know, and queer rights.
Tyrone tape: I really do hope that even though there will be a lot of resistance and there will be targets towards our community, we still need to be here. We still need to fight. Cause the fight never ends until all of us are safe and they're not gonna be safe until we codify the laws. So we get the right people in office. Do we have some people that actually represent who we are as a people?
Tyrone: And so as part of that, I decided to just go and again, feel the mood. A lot of my stories are about the mood, the climate, the tone, and the Roe V. Wade decision, when it finally came out, I mean it was leaked months ago, but then it finally came out and the next day it just happened to be Orange County pride.
Tyrone tape: I think we need to take back pride as it was before a riot, it started as a protest. It should be a protest. We need to go back to our roots and be in the streets and be active and vote and get the people around you to vote, too.
Tyrone: So this intersectionality was really important to me. I know it's an overused term, but honestly, I was looking for people who represented the different sort of conflicts in American life. And, this war that a lot of us have to fight in order just to be accepted and to live our lives freely. So // those stories wind up, not being just about the abortion issue, but about all these other transformative moments and the civil rights history of this country that have allowed people to just be in the country.
Gustavo: And what I liked about you coming to where I'm from, Orange County, California, is that this is another place that historically of course, was very, very Republican, had a lot of anti-LGBT politics come out of it, and now it's completely changed and it's getting more and more purple. And, I mean, the fact that there is an orange county pride says so much.
Tyrone: I mean, Orange County has an ethic mix. That's a little bit different from say where I live here in L.A. and from maybe the west side of L.A. And so I wanted to find people who were young and fired up about this, but also who are thinking about the future, are thinking about their place in the country 20, 30 years from now, will they be able to enjoy the same sort of freedoms that I did for this little blip in time when I was coming of age. And so it was really important for me to go to a place; the historic center of Santa Ana, where several hundred people had gathered to celebrate their community. Also to think about what it might mean if this Supreme Court decision opens the door to the erosion of their rights and privileges.
Gustavo: We'll have more on Tyrone's "My Country" series after the break.
Tyrone tape: So I'm here in the Inland Empire, in Moreno Valley, um, on a perch that gives you a good vantage point to take in the suburban sprawl, but also the really beautiful Ranchlands that are more of a common site for those who lived here for a long time…
Gustavo: So, Tyrone, the latest piece of your series goes to the Inland Empire in Southern California. What was the story that drew you to go out there?
Tyrone: Well, it's a story that's a long time in the making now. Certainly people. Who have lived in the Inland Empire for years know that it's been changing steadily for decades and becoming more Black and brown. So I'm coming into it as a newbie, right? I don't know the Inland Empire as well as I do L.A. and I only knew it from what I saw passing between L.A. and, say, Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. I think for most of us, it's on the 10 or the 60 of one of those highways heading to Las Vegas, you passed through the Inland Empire. And so I wanted to understand how people of color could make a life out here and it's this constellation of suburbs. There's lots of freeway interchanges, there's office parks, full of warehouses that are like a million square feet or more in size. And ranches and just badlands. And it looks like a mess from the road. And even from the air, if you're flying into LAX, you fly over the Inland Empire before you reach L.A. And so I wanted to understand what was there in this sort of mess, this sort of grid gone wrong, and to find the American dream there.
Tyrone tape: Is this possible for Black folks and other people of color to live the American dream here?
Yes, it is. But you can have anything you want. If you apply yourself. Ain't nobody gonna hand you nothing.
Tyrone: So I honestly went looking for the American dream in a place that I had sort of written off, and I wanted to challenge my own stereotypes in my own sort of dislike, at least as far as I knew from the vantage point of my car, on a highway of this place and to make it a real place and understand how other people do.
Tyrone tape: So What is the thing you think that is most, uh, that you prefer here? That you didn't get in L.A.? Like, what is it…
Peace. That will be the main thing I can think of.
Peace.
Nice..
Tyrone: And I have to say this, I didn't put it in the story, but we had spent a couple years, certainly 2020, and early 21 talking about police violence the Black community. And if you go to any city in America, you will undoubtedly see someone wearing a t-shirt that says I can't breathe, you know, referring to the dying words of George Floyd and sadly others who've had these encounters with law enforcement and while the story wasn't about that idea of having so much tension in your life that you can't even take a deep breath and enjoy being on this soil that is what drove me and what made these comments so powerful to me when people said that they came out there and what they found was not just affordable housing, which is declining, of course, because as prices go up all over Southern California, but they found peace.
Gustavo: But even as Black folks moved into the Inland Empire to find that peace, the good life is still not completely there for them yet.
Tyrone: Yeah, and the good life wasn't there before. A lot of the communities out there have miserable histories of racism and segregation. Klansmen were basically staging parades off the city hall steps in Fontana up until like the eighties, really. So the Inland Empire comes with its own baggage. It’s not a particularly welcoming place if you read a history book about the region. But still there's this possibility, but I kept going back with this story going back and forth because I know that it's not great for everybody. I talked to a warehouse worker who… he's been working in these jobs for years and he talked about the rampant exploitation and abuse of workers just so that we can get our deliveries in two days here at our homes in L.A. and other cities.
Tyrone tape: So, what, what do you want politicians to do to make life better for the warehouse workers in the Inland Empire holidays? so he wants, um, basically to hold them, to hold the companies accountable, to pay living wage and to pay, uh, or to give them, allow them benefits. So these folks don't have to get a second job or have their wife work two jobs. And, um, just to make end ends meet here with the high cost of living.
Tyrone: The hard work that goes into making the logistics industry, which is pretty much a predominant sort of field out there, make it tick, means that people like him are living on the margins, even as others in my story are living their American dream. And I wanted to make sure to get those parallel lives fleshed out because while some people might find a kind of piece that they didn't get in the city in L.A. or Long Beach or San Diego or wherever, there are others there who have no peace, because life can be very hard in the Inland Empire. You know, it’s long commutes and long days and hard sweaty work. It's not as affordable as it was when this wave started happening a couple decades ago. So I wanted to make sure to reflect that as I moved through.
Gustavo: Tyrone, you've gone through the South. You went to D.C., you went to rural towns, the border. We didn't even talk about what you found in Puerto Rico, but we gotta give people a hint of it so they could read the entire series. But finally, November's coming. How are you feeling about our country right now as a midterms loom ahead?
Tyrone: Well, uh, sick. My stories are very honest. There's a kind of disclaimer that says I'm writing about this based on my experience as a Black man in America. And so I felt sick when I started it because of what I'd witnessed and just how I've lived and encountered my country. But as we look at these culture wars and these conflicts and this sort of push for power, both sides, I just don't see a resolution. I don't see us coming together. And I launched this series looking for signs of healing and redemption. And there are some, but I don't believe that there are enough. I don't know that we're in that head space right now. And that really worries me.
My hope is that a new generation of Americans will decide to actually learn history, speak to each other, open up and reveal themselves in a way that they did not feel confident doing before. That people who have sat on the sidelines or didn't want to hear stories like mine will open their hearts and start to listen. And that we'll try to have a country again.
Gustavo: Tyrone. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Tyrone: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Gustavo: To read Tyrone's "My Country" series, go to latimes.com/mycountry or follow him on Twitter @Tyrone_Beason, that's B-E-A-S-O-N. You can follow him on his reporting.
And that's it for this episode of The Times, daily news from the L.A. Times. Ashlea Brown was the jefa on this episode and Mike Heflin mixed and mastered it. Our show's produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasha Broussalina, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our intern is Surya Hendry.
Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera, Heba Elorbany and Shani Hilton. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
Like what you're listening to? Then make sure to follow The Times on whatever platform you use. Don't make us the Poochie of podcasts. I’m Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.