The story of a black, American litigator, a mother and a wife, who got frustrated with being a black face of the law in America while "The Law" was doing nothing to stop cops from using black men as shooting targets during the age of Trump. She left her home and practice in the middle of a trial to figure out who the Trump voters were. She ended up collecting interviews from over 50 Southern Trump voters about racism in America and etching them into history.
In August 2017, Nicole Blake Chafetz drove away from her family and law practice in Seattle, Washington. She'd spent the evening thinking about her father and trying to figure out what he would be doing in the age of Trump. Nicki's father was a civil rights warrior. He hosted Martin Luther King Jr. twice to her small home town of Evanston, Illinois. King was probably attracted by the civil rights work Blake's father was doing in Evanston. Rev. Jacob S. Blake, Nicki Blake's father, was one of a two-man team that got the Jim Crow laws of Evanston, Illinois overturned just in time for Nicki to attend an integrated grade school. She considers both men her personal heroes. Rev. Jacob Blake, a black pastor; and Rev. Charles Eddis, the white Québec citizen who had moved to Evanston to live in a black neighborhood and help break the color barrier, marched and protested until the public grade schools were integrated.
Nicki pondered that night. Her father wouldn't be doing nothing and neither should she. But she didn't have her father's charisma so...she got up, packed, a bag and left to write a book about who they were. Who are these people. That is all she could do. She doesn't have many non-legal skills. But as a litigator, she can analyze and cross examine.
Under Trump, Blake had become aggravated. As the former managing editor of her town's high school newspaper, she found (aside from Costa and a handful) that the press was not doing their job. No one seemed to know who the Trump base was. She saw them on television occasionally looking all crazy but...were they...ALL crazy? What KIND of crazy. Blake thought that we couldn't change the world back to normal unless we understood who they were and what they needed. So she set out to find out. During her travels, she decided to focus on the South so she drove through the West to her home state of Illinois and then...took a right at Chicago to Texas and began driving toward the traditional Confederate states where she felt like a fish out of water.
As an academic kid who grew up in Chicagoland and then transplanted to Seattle as a young public defender, Blake calculated that she had spent approximately eight days in her entire life South of the Mason-Dixon line, and half of that as a child in Disneyworld. The Southern interviews had a fish out of water flavor to them, slightly tinged with the fears that Northern blacks have about visiting the South ever since the death of Emmett Till.
There are plenty of Southern blacks who grimace when Northerners talk of the fears they have of traveling in the New South, scared that the New South might not be much different from the Old South. Nonetheless, those fears are real, palpable, and not entirely displaced. The lessons of Till are still the lessons of Till.
Southern blacks hovered over Blake providing her with suggestions and concerns along the way.
These are the interviews.