Today, we’re diving deep into what it really means to be a “purple person” in a world that constantly pushes us to pick a side. I’m sharing my personal journey through the political landscape, where I found myself grappling with the idea that we don’t have to fit neatly into red or blue boxes. It’s all about finding that middle ground and being open to a mix of perspectives—not just the extremes. From hot topics like abortion to the frustrations of our two-party system, I’m here to embrace the messy, nuanced conversations that so many of us crave. So grab a comfy seat, maybe a snack or two, and let’s unravel the colorful complexities of our beliefs together!

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we explore the concept of being a 'purple person', which means embracing views from both sides of the political spectrum, rather than fitting neatly into red or blue boxes.
• We talk about how our upbringing shapes our political beliefs, and how navigating life's complexities can lead to a more nuanced view of issues like abortion.
• James shares his journey from a passionate young liberal to identifying as a purple person, highlighting the importance of questioning and evolving one's beliefs over time.
• The podcast emphasizes the need for open conversations about politics, arguing that many Americans share a more blended perspective that transcends traditional party lines.

Links referenced in this episode:

• jamesabrown.net
• newsbreak.com

Hello and welcome to the Weekend Note.

I'm James Brown.

Thanks for joining me.

You can check out my work@jamesabrown.net that's jamesabrown.net five days a week I post about a minute of content that's also aired across the Nation on about 15 radio stations at this point and on newsbreak.com and I decided that's not enough content that I'm gonna keep going.

And one big reason for that is a response that I have been getting from my daily content.

It's been really interesting being syndicated and I hear from a lot more people now and many of them say, be James.

I like it, there's more to it and I want to hear more of the conversation and macro.

I want to.

I don't want to just have the conversation started.

I want you to have the full conversation.

So I think on the Weekend Notes I'm going to do that.

I'm going to choose whether it's something that I've covered during the week or something I haven't got to or something that I don't think fits in a minute and have more of that full fleshed out explanation of my point of view on it.

And this is a good week for it because one of my pieces got a lot of response and both positive and negative and a lot of neutral, too.

It's very strange.

It's a wide spectrum of responses.

So I'll start with the negative because I think it's worth embracing.

The piece I'm talking about is I'm a purple person.

And anyone who knows me well knows that I am a purple person.

I have views that are across the political spectrum.

I don't neatly fit in any box and I abhor being shoved into a box.

I've abhorred it my whole life because as a black dude, you get shoved in a lot of boxes, some positive, some negative.

I fit into some of those boxes pretty neatly and others I don't.

For example, politics.

And that's what I was talking about in terms of being a purple person.

Not blue, not red, but purple.

Take a topic like abortion.

It's a hot topic.

It's a difficult topic.

I don't think it should be banned, but I'm not cheering on it.

I think the best explanation of where I stand is the safe, legal and rare standard back in the 90s that it shouldn't be a thing, that we should cheer like it has been.

As the whole thing has gotten more and more divisive and more and more of a political Football.

I think it's a thing that should be done carefully when there's no other options.

I also don't think it should be fully banned.

I think that that's going too far.

And I think that, and I think most Americans agree with me that, that we need to find a middle ground, that the purple nature is the best way for us to find a suitable standard for us all to feel comfortable living under in that circumstance.

So when I declared in that commentary piece that I'm a purple person and I'm proud of it, I meant it.

I meant every word.

And some people said that.

What are you, an idiot?

This is our we.

It felt a lot like the rhetoric we hear around election day seemingly every, every other year, that this election is the most important election of your lifetime.

You must vote.

You must vote.

And I don't mean vote, you must vote the way I want you to, because this election is more important than all the others.

And whore that.

I'm not saying elections aren't important.

I'm saying that the veiled attempt to shove.

To shove people into voting the way you want by simply telling them that it's important and that you're an idiot for not thinking about it the way they do is quite insulting.

But it's become an incredibly.

It's incredibly common to approach things this way.

Another comment I saw was that I was childish for thinking that, hey, that this, this blue red dichotomy was idiotic.

That it's not reflective of the entire diaspora of opinions and thoughts and feelings on politics across this nation.

And while I would agree that most people are more blue than red or more red than blue, I think there's a sizable amount of us that if we actually sat down and broke bread and, you know, shared some, you know, mixed company time, that we would find that there is a middle ground if we were to be able to accept that there are things that, that will never, you know, bridges that will never be able to build from our opinions to their opinions.

And so if you think the idea of me or, or any other person declaring that, hey, you know, like, I, I'm not picking a side in this, this battle, this rigged system of these two trench warfare backgrounds pushing and shoving for control of the narratives, forcing us all to fit in boxes that we don't fit in, then I accept it, I accept your criticism.

I'm fine, because I'm the guy saying we don't have to all agree, the people who make that kind of argument, the kind of argument that we all must fit in a certain box that we all must declare our colors like we're Crips and Bloods and go to war.

They're the ones making demands on everybody else.

All I'm trying to do is live and let live.

That's why I'm a civil libertarian.

I'm a civil libertarian because I have my opinions and I want you to get off my lawn and leave me alone.

I want to mutually agree to build certain structures that feed us all, that take care of us all on a limited basis and you stay the hell away from me.

Because as I'll get into later, I felt for a very long time like the structures that each side of our political spectrum have shelved on the rest of our society have been archaic, have been chafing, have been disappointing and don't reflect the world.

My worldview don't reflect the worldview of most of us.

But we're.

We're forced into this into agreeing to.

To poorly conceived rationale that we must choose one side or the other.

And you know, it speaks to one one massive flaw in our Constitution.

We're first past the post system which I don't think the necessarily the founding fathers quite understood that would lead to strictly two parties and two parties that would collude to.

To decide that the rest of us don't get to have a say that make other parties forming be hard.

I doubt they had that in mind when they did that.

But that's what happened.

That's what we have and I accept that.

But I don't have to agree with it.

I don't have to like it and I don't have to say that hey like that.

You're right.

So that's one chunk of the responses that I got from telling folks that I'm a purple person.

And then there's the other side of it.

All the folks that asked why so why?

Why am I a purple person?

Why do I have thoughts and opinions that span the gamut across the prison?

Every bad metaphor I could think of at the moment.

Part of it is that I'm human.

I think we all do.

And part of it is my upbringing so grew up.

I'm a black man.

For those who don't know.

Big shout to all you guys watching.

And I grew up poor and without very little, with very little.

We grew up on the system and we clawed our way up to some sort of respectable life living in public housing.

My mother lives in public housing to this day.

And I grew up with a sense that our system that something was askew with our system that folks like my mother, you know, a person with a ged, didn't have much of a chance.

And that I watched countless people around me sort of strive for more and get swallowed back in by the wider system and that the system itself was poorly structured.

And I think that led me to be susceptible to, I think some pretty far left political opinions pretty early in my life.

And when I started to learn about Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Richard Wolff and I don't think there was ever a point in my life where I would have called myself a socialist.

But I think in certain, in certain respects I held some of those opinions back.

Especially when I was back in college.

I was actual hyper partisan and I love to argue, I love to, in debate and I love to talk politics and all those things.

I bought in that, you know, as one of the few from my family to go into the classic system and become a college student at a four year university, Niagara University.

And as a rebellious, stubborn, driven, highly opinionated young guy with increasingly skewed politics and a conservative campus, I found myself, you know, leaning into a lot of the stuff that I just described.

I was the guy with the John Kerry sign outside my dorm room.

It was on my, it was on my dorm room window.

I was a guy who, one of the few people on my campus who was protesting the Iraq war.

I found myself going home and hanging out with anarchists and with socialists and lefties of all sorts.

And I love a lot of these people.

I think a lot of them have good hearts, whether I agree with their politics or not.

But I think at that point I probably would have called myself a Democrat or a liberal or very liberal as I think I was, was on my Facebook profile at one point.

And what I knew was that if we were just, you know, we would just elect the right person, if we would just give the right person the right amount of power, that, that everything else was going to be fixed, that the system was just going to be just healed by this great man of history.

You know, it was one of those, the first times I heard that, that term going back to high school, I remember learning about FDR and how FDR instituted all of these, these new programs, some of which, you know, my family benefited from, that fed the poor and electric, electrified the south and, and, and created all sorts, just re, refashioned government and the worldview.

That I had was that, hey, all we need is that again, we'll just have someone new come in and they'll have all the answers and they'll be.

And we'll just build a new world.

And like.

Like, I think it was Chris Matthews who said he had a tingle up his leg.

I was watching, and I don't know if I had a tingle up my leg, but I certainly was impressed.

He's one of the best speakers I ever saw.

Still one of the best speakers I ever saw.

And for sure, at that point, I became a Democrat.

I was clearly a Democrat.

I was going to be a Democrat.

In fact, that fall, a friend of mine and I drove an hour.

I was.

I was at.

I was out.

Our school was at Niagara Falls, outside of Niagara Falls, New York.

We drove an hour back home to Rochester, New York, to vote.

That's how enthusiastic I was that I thought that, hey, all we got to do is get one of these great men in history.

And if it wasn't going to be John Kerry at that time, it was going to be Barack Obama.

Yeah, holy crap, it's going to be the black president, you know, And John Kerry, of course, lost.

And we saw the Iraq war rage on in Afghanistan, and there was all this fear of, you know, things getting worse.

And I saw the West Clark, you know, interview about the potential of more wars across the world in the post 911 paranoia was sweeping over our nation, and I felt, man, I gotta pick a side.

And, boy, you know, like, you know, these lefty people, they got it all figured.

And then college was over, and I'm bumming around for about a year before I got a job and I started working overnight at a TV station.

And I wanted to move down to New York from Rochester, so I took a visit with a old friend down there.

And I was living.

I was sleeping on the couch of his shitty apartment.

And we went.

We were down in Manhattan and we stumbled upon a Barack Obama rally.

I really didn't know.

I didn't know he was there.

And it was at one of the parks, and, boy, this was a hell of an experience.

He walked out to Touch the Sky by Kanye West.

I never thought I'd see a politician roll out to rap just like, holy crap.

At that point, it seemed pretty, like, thrilling.

And he went on to, you know, talk about Iraq and how he wanted to win the good war in Afghanistan.

And he wanted to end the bad war in Iraq.

And I'm like, yeah.

And in hindsight, that seemed pretty weird, once you think about it.

What, like, weird, like good war, bad war?

All right, it sounded good, and it got me.

But the thing that mattered most to me was that he promised to shut down Gitmo.

And for those of you who don't know what Gitmo is, it's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It's a part of an army base on the island where what we did was we took terrorist suspects, we tortured them, and we held them.

And I still believe we hold dozens of them today without due process, without any legal proceeding and a gulag.

And Barack Obama promised that he was going to end this after he won.

That didn't happen.

I can't say he didn't try, because he did try.

Didn't happen.

He got some pushback, and then he gave up.

And I, I.

There's this moment that's.

That's vivid in my head.

It's.

I was in a backseat of my.

My housemate's car.

He was a professor much more liberal than I am, even at, at that point.

He was, and I'm sure he is now.

And I remember yelling that you hire a constitutional law professor.

So they were.

And my friends, they didn't know what to make of me, and I didn't know what to make of them.

And in hindsight, I felt like, boy, that was so naive.

But I think it was in that moment, in the months that followed, where I truly started to some things.

I've always been a contrarian, and I've always challenged myself and my ideas and my thoughts, and I wondered why all this mattered.

Why did it matter that Barack Obama, the constitutional law professor turned president, who I had high hopes for, wouldn't just leave a gulag on a military base and have all sorts of black sites, not let alone all sorts of warrantless wiretapping and spying across the world.

Let's leave all that out.

Let's leave the drones out.

Let's.

And all that out.

Just bombing people indiscriminately, you know.

You know, murdering American citizens.

Let's leave all that out for a moment.

All that came later.

And all that pissed me off, too.

But what really, what started to snowball was, why did it matter that a constitutional law professor turned politician wasn't keeping his word?

There's something deep inside me, and I still don't know quite how, that was embedded in me.

I'm still working my way through that.

I bet I'll be fully gray by the time I figure that one out.

But that I believe in this country.

I believe in our imperfect systems, like the flawed men who founded this country.

That our purpose, our perpetual purpose as Americans is to leave this country better than we found it.

That we build upon the systems we have, we alter them, we debate hard, and over time we reshape them to better suit the better suit the long arc of history.

And I think that begins with the Constitution.

And I found the bipartisan decision to start a gulag, to hide a gulag and then keep a gulag as an affront to all that.

And for me, what followed was a long, long process of questions.

Okay, so why am I a Democrat?

I really didn't have an answer.

I had because I'd listened to somebody like a Ron Paul and I'm like, I have some.

I agree with a lot of this guy.

He's not a Democrat.

I listen to somebody like a Thomas Sowell and I'm like, this guy makes a lot of sense.

He's not a Democrat.

Like, why am I a Democrat?

And then I listen to someone like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney and I'm like, some of their stuff makes sense.

I'm not sure I'm in that club either.

So what I found is this.

I went through this soul searching, deep process of trying to understand why I believe what I believe and where those beliefs fit on our political spectrum.

And what I found was I was purple.

That I got some Bernie Sanders in me.

I got some Thomas Sowell in me.

That I got some Noam Chomsky in me.

That I got some Ron Paul in me.

That, hell, I even got some George W. Bush in me.

I still think his.

Whether we like no Child Left behind that's on legislation or not, I think his forever quote for me, the soft bigotry of low expectations, it's not only, you know, crazy memorable, it's true, about how we treat the people who go through our public school system in our inner cities, people like myself, where we're not expected.

The expectations for black people in these programs, they're lower.

They're lower than our counterparts, even the poor white counterparts.

It's lower.

It's disappointing.

It's horrifying.

So that led to me declaring myself an independent and me sort of watching as the Democratic Party went further, further adrift to its, you know, leaning toward Democratic socialist ways.

And then it's a sort of mainstream component drifting left and watching the sort of like downfall of the Bush, Cheney, Reagan Republican Party and sort of seeing this rise of MAGA Stan on the other side.

And I look around and I'm like, none of these places fit me.

None of these places suit my perspective.

I don't find myself reflected in how they're going in the world.

I could pull threads from each of these worlds.

For example, I think that, I think that we definitely should enforce our border.

I also hate the, the idea of a wall.

I think the idea of just opening up the border and just bringing every, everybody in and just allowing anyone to have access to the resources in this country.

The social safety net helps exhaust the social safety net quicker.

The priority should be the people in this country first than everybody else.

I also think that we should make it easier for people to migrate to immigrate into this country.

That we should, that it shouldn't be a seven year process.

Maybe it's a two year process, maybe it's an 18 month process, but it's, it's not.

There's no reason why it should take seven years.

My perspective doesn't neatly fit in either camp.

And I often find myself in conflict with both worldviews, both visions of things.

That's why I lean more in the civil libertarian world.

And even there, it's not a clean fit.

It's a fit.

It's not a clean fit.

I'm left to call myself purple now.

It's not easy being purple.

I've been thinking maybe I need to start a purple party because I, I feel that these existing cohorts are doing all they can to eradicate each other while ignoring the perspectives of, of a large cohort of the population who aren't ideologically pure.

Even if you're mostly blue, you're, you're probably not completely blue.

Even if you're mostly red, you're not completely red.

Most people are somewhere in the middle like me.

And I don't like the idea of shutting my mouth and conceding that.

Man, your thoughts and opinions shouldn't matter because you don't subscribe to, you know, Democrat magazine or Republican quarterly.

It feels wrong.

I won't stand for it.

So that's a little bit of my path from very liberal to purple.

I'm proud of it.

Now.

I don't know where I'll go from here.

I doubt I'll become a full fledged Republican or MAGA guy.

And I don't see much room for me on the left at all.

I'm not concerned with plastic bags being, you know, forcing everyone to not have electric stoves or, or getting rid of magic plastic bags or, or, or, or electrifying school buses, or in all these sort of micromanaging, strange predilections of the left as we see here in New York State.

And honestly, I don't dig the conspiratorial Nick Fuentes Culture war.

They're coming to kill us.

Tim Pool Weird Modern Conservatism of the Right so what I so where I find myself is just sort of a man without a country, which honestly feels right.

It feels like home for me.

For anyone who knows me well, I'm.

I don't.

I don't fit neatly into boxes.

I don't think I ever will.

So what do you think?

Let me know in the comments on jamesabrown.net on that note, I'm James A.

Brown, and as always, be well.