This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: This is Tonya Pinkins with my You Can't SAY THAT podcast on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:10] Tonya Pinkins: It's a joke amongst many black folks that if a white person is smiling when they start speaking to you, some bad shit is about to go down.

[0:20] Tonya Pinkins: I found most Northern progressives to be excellent at performing tolerance, but their words cannot mask the repressed resentment and political correctness.

[0:30] Tonya Pinkins: Sometimes they fooled themselves, but not me.

[0:34] Tonya Pinkins: I think people who lack self-awareness are very dangerous.

[0:38] Tonya Pinkins: But my next guest is a white guy who I actually think gets his privilege, doesn't apologize for it, owns it, and uses it to serve helping those who but for the color of their skin might have excelled far beyond him.

[0:54] Tonya Pinkins: I have been given the dream opportunity to get and sit and listen to people tell me about their lives.

[1:01] Tonya Pinkins: One of my favorite things.

[1:02] Tonya Pinkins: And so sometimes it's people I haven't seen in a long time.

[1:05] Tonya Pinkins: And from the minute they walk in the door, we start talking, and Dori barely has the chance to catch us.

[1:10] Tonya Pinkins: So today you have my friend Ron Russell from Epic Next, and you're just gonna have to catch up because we started talking and the recorder came in after.

[1:20] Tonya Pinkins: Welcome, Ron Russell.

[1:22] Ron Russell: Good stuff.

[1:24] Ron Russell: Um yeah, it's it's really crazy.

[1:26] Ron Russell: Funnily, um, what I what I realized the other night was this whole insane high school system in New York.

[1:34] Ron Russell: Um a great example of the impact on an entire system of deeply embedded institutional racism, right?

[1:46] Ron Russell: That is like you know, I was Ibrahim Kendi, do you know do you know his stuff?

[1:51] Ron Russell: He wrote a book called Stamp from the Beginning that I think you would love.

[1:54] Ron Russell: It's really research-based.

[1:55] Ron Russell: Uh, it's a sort of a definitive history of racist ideas.

[1:59] Ron Russell: But his new book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, he says this thing like, we're left in a culture, a culture of racism with no racists.

[2:05] Ron Russell: I mean, he's exaggerating, of course, right.

[2:07] Ron Russell: But this idea of like this whole system, this whole crazy high school system was built by racism for racists, right?

[2:16] Ron Russell: If that's why it exists the way that it does.

[2:18] Ron Russell: And if arguably some of that is gone and you don't see it on the surface, it's still the whole, the whole thing is just about keeping people separated.

[2:26] Ron Russell: That's what it's all for.

[2:27] Ron Russell: And it's all been built by people, many probably with the right intentions, to like try to rectify that.

[2:34] Ron Russell: But you make these little changes and it just makes it worse and worse and worse.

[2:37] Tonya Pinkins: So give me an example.

[2:39] Tonya Pinkins: You said right now you're in the high school process.

[2:40] Tonya Pinkins: What is that?

[2:41] Tonya Pinkins: What is the high school application process?

[2:42] Ron Russell: So you've got um, you gotta choose 12, up to 12 high schools, right?

[2:48] Ron Russell: Um, to to go to.

[2:50] Ron Russell: You pick, right?

[2:51] Ron Russell: And they call it, you know, student choice, because you get to choose your 12.

[2:54] Ron Russell: It makes sense if the entire system were just lottery-based.

[2:57] Ron Russell: Okay.

[2:58] Ron Russell: That would make a lot of sense.

[2:59] Ron Russell: If everything was just a pure lottery, you'd pick the 12 that you want, and you'd hope the algorithm works out, or whatever number it would need to be to make that work out.

[3:07] Ron Russell: Maybe it's bigger, maybe it's 16, maybe it's eight.

[3:10] Ron Russell: But it's not.

[3:11] Ron Russell: The whole system is rigged with every one of the schools uh in Manhattan that are schools that have interesting and rich programs.

[3:22] Ron Russell: Forget about whether or not they have good test scores or not, but just like do something other than just dumb old style education.

[3:28] Ron Russell: Every one of those schools, 90% of those schools, are set up with all of these restrictions and rules, right?

[3:36] Tonya Pinkins: Where they give me some examples.

[3:37] Ron Russell: So, like, for instance, to get into the iSchool, there's a rubric that gives you a certain number of points for what you got on the state math test, what you got on the state ELA test, what you got on each of your four main subjects in seventh grade, attendance, right?

[3:57] Ron Russell: So every time you had an absence, you lose X number of points, right?

[4:01] Ron Russell: Those points are all put into this giant rubric, right?

[4:04] Ron Russell: Figured out, and then they say, okay, well, here is the 130 kids we're gonna offer admission to, starting with the one whose point score was the highest, right?

[4:13] Ron Russell: And they go through then and offer those people admission.

[4:17] Ron Russell: Now, when they look at Imogen, my daughter's sheet, they start with her number one.

[4:23] Ron Russell: They take her number one and they try to see if that matches up with did they did they invite her to a slot?

[4:29] Ron Russell: Okay.

[4:29] Ron Russell: Does that make sense?

[4:30] Ron Russell: So that's why you have to list 12.

[4:32] Ron Russell: Because if your first one they didn't invite you, then they go to your second one, then they go to your third one.

[4:36] Ron Russell: But the the way that the whole thing is set up is um makes it extremely difficult to make any kind of coherent choice, because if you know there's only 26 slots available at school X, right, this school that you want to go to, and your point score isn't perfect, right?

[4:55] Ron Russell: Which very few kids are, you don't have any idea how many kids are applying, what they're gonna pick.

[5:01] Ron Russell: Do you get what I'm saying?

[5:02] Ron Russell: So suddenly what happens is you're just really guessing.

[5:04] Ron Russell: You're just guessing based on like, well, I hope this works out.

[5:08] Ron Russell: Um, and so as a result, it's it's sort of painful to go through the process of uh of watching.

[5:15] Ron Russell: My daughter has a very, very low math score.

[5:18] Ron Russell: Everything else very high.

[5:19] Ron Russell: She's a very low math score, and by their standards, I don't think it's particularly low, but by their standards, it's is very low.

[5:25] Ron Russell: So she is consistently being penalized for that math score at schools who state that their values are things that she would absolutely be the right fit for.

[5:34] Ron Russell: Do you know what I mean?

[5:35] Ron Russell: So you you the standardized tests then are taking an unbelievably large role in this, even though there's absolutely no proof that they have any impact on whether kids do well in high school.

[5:45] Ron Russell: In fact, it's proven that you can't really track those two things at all.

[5:48] Ron Russell: Right.

[5:49] Ron Russell: And they know that, and they would say that, and yet they're holding up this image of what matters to them.

[5:55] Ron Russell: Now, Richard Carranza, the new school's chancellor, what he's doing is he's going in and he's saying, segregation in this city, educational segregation has to end.

[6:02] Ron Russell: This is the most segregated city in America.

[6:04] Ron Russell: Um is it one now?

[6:05] Ron Russell: Because it used to be Chicago, and this was number two.

[6:07] Ron Russell: We're number one now.

[6:08] Ron Russell: Okay.

[6:08] Ron Russell: We're number one.

[6:09] Ron Russell: Woo!

[6:09] Ron Russell: We are the most segregated educational system in the country.

[6:12] Ron Russell: And so when um what he's trying to do is get these schools, some of these schools that have the right values to commit to 60% of their students being low-income students, right?

[6:24] Ron Russell: Below beneath a certain income level, which is fantastic.

[6:27] Ron Russell: I'm all for it.

[6:27] Ron Russell: It's Epic Next, our youth company participates in this work with him and with uh Integrate NYC.

[6:33] Ron Russell: Um, but it it is it's beginning to feel to me like why don't we just really fix it?

[6:33] Ron Russell: Like, why don't we just fix the whole thing by just utterly randomizing it completely, and then every school in this city would have a population that is representative of the city.

[6:53] Ron Russell: Do you know what I mean?

[6:54] Ron Russell: And people wouldn't like that.

[6:55] Ron Russell: I know.

[6:55] Ron Russell: And then guess what would have to happen is the schools would have to actually get equitable resources to make that work.

[7:01] Ron Russell: Right?

[7:02] Ron Russell: Um but they're never gonna do that.

[7:04] Ron Russell: Yeah, yeah.

[7:04] Ron Russell: No, that's that's not gonna happen.

[7:05] Tonya Pinkins: You know what I mean?

[7:06] Tonya Pinkins: So it's like it feels a little bit like this daring thing that Karan's is doing that the post is ripping all of our partners a new uh, you know, for you can say assholes.

[7:15] Ron Russell: Okay, I can say assholes.

[7:16] Ron Russell: Everybody's getting getting their assholes ripped for for uh reverse racism, one of my least favorite phrases.

[7:24] Ron Russell: Um, whatever the hell reverse racism is.

[7:26] Tonya Pinkins: So yeah, exactly.

[7:27] Tonya Pinkins: What is that?

[7:28] Tonya Pinkins: What is that?

[7:29] Ron Russell: Pointing in words, I don't know, I have no idea.

[7:31] Ron Russell: But anyway, they they're being torn up about this uh because he has been just going through the entire rank of everybody in the schools and saying, you're biased.

[7:39] Ron Russell: I'm sorry, you've been in the system too long, and you think this is right, and you're not you're not the best person for the job, and you bring a lot of bias into the job.

[7:46] Tonya Pinkins: Wow, and he's just firing people firing them.

[7:48] Ron Russell: And wow.

[7:49] Ron Russell: And so, you know, that's not very popular.

[7:52] Ron Russell: But then his this idea that he's gonna somehow fix it with this low income maneuver, right?

[8:00] Ron Russell: I mean, really like six months ago, I thought that was brilliant.

[8:04] Ron Russell: But now that I'm actually doing the system as a parent, I'm like, that is so like nicking around the edges.

[8:10] Ron Russell: That's just is just messing about a little bit, making they're only gonna be about 10% of the schools that have agreed to do it.

[8:16] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, so doing this low income thing is not gonna apply to everybody.

[8:20] Ron Russell: They have to agree.

[8:21] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[8:21] Ron Russell: Why do they have to agree?

[8:25] Ron Russell: Well, that's strange.

[8:26] Ron Russell: I it's interesting to me because I went to Whitney Young High School in Chicago.

[8:29] Tonya Pinkins: Have you ever heard of it?

[8:30] Ron Russell: Uh yes.

[8:31] Ron Russell: Whitney Young um was a magnet school, one of the first big magnet schools, and they built it on the west side of Chicago.

[8:39] Ron Russell: They spent a lot of money.

[8:40] Ron Russell: I guess I'm out of high school now.

[8:42] Ron Russell: Oh my God.

[8:43] Ron Russell: A long time, 30 or 40 years.

[8:45] Ron Russell: I went to school with Michelle Robinson.

[8:47] Ron Russell: She was an underclassman.

[8:49] Ron Russell: Michelle Obama, for those of you who she wasn't that then, but um, it was built on that model of we were moving this school into a very poor neighborhood.

[8:59] Ron Russell: And so uh percentage of those students were guaranteed placement in the school.

[9:03] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[9:03] Ron Russell: Uh it also had a a school for deaf or hearing impaired was the the terminology at the time.

[9:09] Ron Russell: And the school was built on trying to maintain this racial and economic balance for all the students.

[9:15] Ron Russell: And it it consistently has really, really high test scores.

[9:18] Tonya Pinkins: So, you know, I guess I have a sort of bias towards that kind of program because that's the kind of program I think I got into.

[9:25] Ron Russell: Though definitely high test score people could get into that school as well.

[9:29] Ron Russell: But it was like you couldn't not let people who lived in that community go to that school.

[9:33] Ron Russell: They had the they had the right to go to that school because it took over their community.

[9:37] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[9:38] Ron Russell: And I think that that's what a fully a fully randomized system would do.

[9:43] Ron Russell: It would give everybody real choice.

[9:46] Ron Russell: You know, you could pick based on geography, you could pick based on something like this school has a cooler arts program than this other school.

[9:52] Ron Russell: Do you know what I mean?

[9:53] Ron Russell: You could pick because you heard they have a great math teacher.

[9:55] Ron Russell: You could pick because your cousin went there and loved it, right?

[9:57] Ron Russell: You just pick, right?

[9:59] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I think that people try to do things easy.

[10:01] Ron Russell: Like is it Daniel Pink who wrote Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, and he says we're just always looking for the easy solution.

[10:08] Ron Russell: I feel that way as a teacher at NYU.

[10:10] Ron Russell: We now have a policy that we have to ask all of our students on day one, what is your pronoun?

[10:15] Ron Russell: Right.

[10:16] Ron Russell: And uh, it doesn't tell you anything about a person at all.

[10:19] Ron Russell: But now we've solved that problem.

[10:20] Ron Russell: We don't have to worry about discriminating against anybody because of their gender, because we asked them their pronoun, and it's like, no, actually, it's a lot more complicated than that.

[10:27] Tonya Pinkins: Do you feel like the world has become in your lifetime, much more concerned with covering its ass?

[10:33] Ron Russell: Like I I because I can't shake that feeling, and I'm sure I'm wrong.

[10:35] Ron Russell: I'm sure it was just as much cover your ass going on when I was 20, and I just didn't see it.

[10:40] Ron Russell: But it just feels like that's that everything we do and running a business, it it makes me insane.

[10:45] Ron Russell: Sexual harassment being like the big thing right now.

[10:48] Ron Russell: The endless compliance that my company has to do around sexual harassment, not that I changes anything.

[10:55] Tonya Pinkins: Exactly.

[10:56] Ron Russell: Yeah, I'm all I'm doing is filling out paperwork.

[10:59] Ron Russell: I had this argument at a big meeting with the unions.

[11:02] Ron Russell: They were sitting there, and I was an elected at the time, and they were like, okay, well, we'll get people to watch a video and we'll get people to take a test, and then we'll get them to sign this paper and we'll get them to sign that paper.

[11:12] Ron Russell: And everybody patted everybody on the back and was like, look what we're doing, we're doing.

[11:15] Ron Russell: And then, you know, I'm that, you know, this this the sore thumb, the thorn in everybody's side.

[11:20] Ron Russell: I'm like, well, you know, I happen to be a person who when I am um being sexually harassed, I freeze.

[11:28] Ron Russell: So I could have read all of your papers and signed them and done all of the videos, and in the moment that it is happening to me, I leave my body.

[11:37] Ron Russell: There is nothing I can do.

[11:39] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[11:39] Ron Russell: So I don't think I'm alone in that.

[11:41] Ron Russell: So what is all these programs gonna do for me?

[11:44] Ron Russell: And so there was just this silence, and literally people just tried to avoid me for the rest of the day because I had ruined the whole plan that they had solved sexual harassment.

[11:54] Ron Russell: And the one plan that I did put forward, um, which was, and I put it out to the members of Actors Equity, I put it out to the members because I knew the the elected would not go for it.

[12:05] Ron Russell: Um, it was to create a third-party online platform that would allow people to report sexual harassment in an encrypted way where they could release the burden for themselves, and then they were free to not do anything until they wanted to.

[12:23] Ron Russell: But the way the system worked was if someone else was also harassed by that person, they would get a notification.

[12:30] Ron Russell: And it would say, Do you want to go for do you want to proceed?

[12:30] Ron Russell: Do you want to meet that person?

[12:34] Ron Russell: And always putting the power in the hands of the person.

[12:38] Ron Russell: And to me, the beauty of that is that there are people who are carrying these kind of burdens for 50 or 60 years.

[12:44] Ron Russell: There was one union leader I met with who told me that uh one of their members called and said, you know, when 50 years ago, I went in for an audition and um a producer took off his shirt.

[12:55] Ron Russell: And she just thought, why is he telling me that?

[12:57] Ron Russell: And I'm like, well, he's been carrying that for 50 years.

[12:59] Ron Russell: Right.

[13:00] Ron Russell: And taking off your shirt 50 years ago is different than taking off your shirt today.

[13:04] Ron Russell: And wow, if he had a place he could have put that and not be carrying the burden, and it might help somebody else because abusers don't stop.

[13:11] Ron Russell: Right.

[13:12] Ron Russell: It keeps going on.

[13:14] Ron Russell: But the the members voted overwhelmingly for that kind of system to be implemented and funded, and the electeds voted it down in favor of having a um what was it, a president's committee to talk about it.

[13:25] Tonya Pinkins: Right, exactly.

[13:26] Tonya Pinkins: You know, they do a lot of talking about things.

[13:28] Tonya Pinkins: We talk about it, and I don't know that there's really a commitment to a solution.

[13:32] Ron Russell: Right, I agree.

[13:32] Ron Russell: I mean, just recently going through a new protocol for NYU, and NYU is not alone in this, it just happens to be the one I know about, because we are we're doing a program with miners there, and NYU students, grad students, would be mentoring those miners, right?

[13:51] Ron Russell: So this just what I just said becomes an extremely complicated wasp's nest for lawyers because you've got not only do you have outside adults and outside minors coming in, you're also nexusing with people who go to school there, right.

[14:05] Ron Russell: So it creates this kind of crazy web of potential lawsuits and liability.

[14:09] Ron Russell: Right.

[14:10] Ron Russell: And so in the middle of the process, which took about six months to make it possible, and no small amount of money that needed to be added to all these insurance riders that everybody had to be signed off on.

[14:21] Ron Russell: Um it just became really, really clear that in none of this were was there any concern about the students. There wasn't anything about the young people. Do you know what I mean? None of this was protecting them in any meaningful way. What it was protecting was when the lawsuit happened or when compliance was violated, then it was protecting NYU. Right? It was arguably they would say, I know what the lawyers would say, they'd say, no, you're protecting Epic. That's true too, but I don't really. If someone on my staff in some way endangers a minor, I don't want to be protected. That's certainly not the first thing I'm gonna think of. I'm gonna want justice. Do you know what I mean? And if and if and if it turns out that my company was not clear that we do not allow that, or my oversight was not good enough to catch that person, we should close. Okay. Do you know what I mean? Like I like it. I mean, that's just I like that kind of accountability. Do you get what I'm saying?

[15:18] Tonya Pinkins: I do. I don't need a lawyer to help me make sure I don't have to close because someone hurt a child in my presence. I mean, come on, like you. So anyway. Yeah, no, that that's gonna bring me to my introduction, because I don't know how this will be edited together and nobody knows who I'm talking to or why we're talking about what we're talking about. But my name is Tonya Pinkins, and as you can tell, we are saying some things that you don't hear very often. Um, my guest is Ron Russell. He is the Epic co-founder, executive director, and site manager at BHSWCA. What is that? And that's uh one of the high schools that Epic founded, co-founded. Can you tell us what that acronym is?

[15:55] Ron Russell: EPIC stands for Bronx High School for Writing and Communication Arts. We call it Bushwaka. And his co-founder is his wife, Melissa Friedman. And I should have had her here. We'll have to give her her own time, but I figured since you all run a company that is in high schools, we needed one of you at a time. Ron has an MFA in directing from Louisiana State University, a BA in neuroscience theater from Oberlin College. After founding the nationally acclaimed Summer Theater Enrichment Program at El Centro de Servicios in Lorraine, Ohio, Ron came to New York as education director at Theater for a New Audience. There from 1996 to 2001, Ron administered one of the nation's most in-depth programs for introducing New York City public school students to Shakespeare, serving over 25,000 students during his tenure, and he created new programming, including the playwrighting program at Project Renewal, an assisted living facility for homeless men.

He has also directed extensively in New York City, including 15 off-Broadway productions, 14 for Epic, including most recently James Waller's The Winning Side, Nalaja Sons, Pike Street, and Kate Fodor's Hannah and Martin. Epic's productions have reached over 200,000 audience members in New York City, across the nation and abroad, including over 30,000 high school students and nearly 20,000 first-time adult theater goers. Asking challenging questions about American politics, history, and ethics. Epic's youth company, Epic Next, has now reached over 35,000 audience members with new work devised from research and interviews about issues of educational inequity and segregation in New York City, empowering families, educators, and policymakers to take actions.

Ron's classroom experience includes over 15 educational sites, and his work as an educator in New York City has been recognized by citations from Municipal Arts Society and Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. Welcome, Ron Russell.

[18:02] Ron Russell: That was a mouthful right there. But what an impressive resume. I didn't even know all these things about you. When I think of you, I remember um meeting you, I think, at a panel that was at the Signature Theater on Diversity in American theater. And you know, I've come to Epic and done some work with the students. And what I often think of you as, I think of you as kind of one of the most woke white men I know. And no, and that that really does mean a lot to me because I often say I would prefer a Southern racist to a northern liberal any day because uh a Southern racist is really clear. They have clarity. And when someone has clarity, they are trustworthy. You can trust them to be who they are and to act according to their values and their beliefs.

And oftentimes, I feel that people who want to call themselves progressive are lacking in clarity. And so therefore they are not trustworthy because if you push one of those emotions or resentments that they have, they're gonna act according to the emotional thing that's coming up rather than to any kind of clarity they have about things. So, you know, I feel like when you talk to me about your upbringing and your experiences, I don't feel that you are repressing resentments. I don't feel like you are, you know, giving me shame or guilt or political correctness about what you're talking about. I I my experience of you is that you walk your talk. And so tell us a little about your background in New Orleans. And I know there was a friend of yours that you talk about and the difference between the outcome of your life and the outcome of his.

[19:42] Ron Russell: Yeah, um I uh I I am, I think, I think I have to say I am a Southern racist. Um I think that's the right way to say it. Um because that stuff doesn't go away. It doesn't just disappear. I definitely grew up, and I this is no uh diss on my parents or any of my family. I grew up in a dream uh in which white people were had supremacy. Um and that dream was, you know, to use uh like Baldwin's quote, uh people who believe they are white. I believed I was white. And I believe that afforded me not only the privileges that I kind of knew I was getting even when I was young, but it afforded me the ability to uh I don't know, argue that those privileges were deserved. Does that make sense? As opposed to just get them and be like, well, that sucks that I got privilege there, but I'm gonna take it.

You know what I mean? Like, you know, um, I think a lot of times that's what drives me crazy about northern liberals is this idea that they want to argue that they earned their way that there's a meritocracy in there. There's a meritocracy involved, or that they they've always had black friends and invited black people into their home when that was dangerous to do so and all that crap that I'm just like I okay, cool, but let's just admit it like white people grow up in this kind of a dream of supremacy. Very I'm sure some don't, but I don't know any. Well, I mean, I can I can I imagine that people in Appalachia, you know, like the people Lucy Thurber writes about, they didn't grow up that way.

And from what she's told me they grew up in the same way that we as black people. I mean, like you think about the fact that poor white people, that's where cracker comes from. Yeah, you know, elitist white people calling poor white people crackers. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you're probably right. So I I guess that yeah, Lucy Ferber's a really good example. Someone who talks very well speaks very well about that. So, yeah, um, when I grew up, I grew up uh in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and I had a um uh close friend who his mother and my mother were in this sort of very odd relationship that you find a lot in the South, where she was what we called our maid. But that's not really that doesn't that's not her job description.

Her job was sort of being my mom's best friend from my mom's perspective. I don't know what she thought. Do you know what I mean? Like I don't actually have any idea what her view of the relationship was. I'm not gonna try to put myself in that. But she was kind of my mom's support system, I guess. Maybe best friends the wrong way to say it, but like support system. Um, and my mom had had a lot of trouble with my dad, and they were they were separated, and so uh did she get paid for her being a support system for best friends? She did. Okay, she did. She did. That was her job, I guess. I don't know. Again, I I'm I'm not one to speak on that kind of complicated relationship. But um the uh she had a son, same age as me.

We went to the same schools uh growing up uh for a while, uh until of course my white privilege kicks in, and I am given the chance to go to opportunities that he's not given a chance to because of geography, probably, but uh, you know what I mean was the excuse that they gave he didn't live in the right area. Um, but definitely it had to do with with the color of my skin. I don't remember there being anyone except this one guy named Enoch in the program that I went to. I should say, context-wise, the schools that I went to were terrible schools. They were just terrible schools because we lived in the poor neighborhood. Okay. Right. They were just garbage schools. So they had a program for gifted and talented kids, right?

That allowed you to, within that crap school, have a better teacher. Okay. Three days a week or something like that. You get you get what I mean? And as it grew in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this is when we were living in Baton Rouge, as that grew in Baton Rouge, more and more opportunities presented themselves. So the thing about um this young man that I grew up with was that he was a really straight-laced kid. He was like the good kid, he always got good grades. Um we we spent a lot of time together in and out of all through middle school, but we saw each other some in high school. But it was funny because he ran with this very uh clean-cut crowd, um, very much about um about getting good grades and going to college and all this conversation.

And I was a terrible kid. I mean, I was one of the worst kids you can imagine. I was such a little jerk. And no one wanted me at their school. I got kicked out of several high schools. Um I left sophomore year with just like a couple of credits. I had like just a few credits, you know what I mean? Again, and so what I always talk about is the fact that like nobody's gonna let uh a white kid have that happen to them in Louisiana. Yeah, you're not falling through the crack. It's not gonna fall to the crack. There's like endless trampolines down there when you do slip, you know what I mean. It really goes on forever. It's like an infinity of nets. And so they ended up kind of rescuing me in my case, it was by going to this boarding school that I went to, Louisiana School for Math Science and the Arts, um, which was in northern Louisiana.

And you know, I I'm sure from again, from their perspective, I earned my way into it. I took all these tests and did all these interviews, and they were like, Oh, you're so bright, and we're gonna save you. You know what I mean? Um, so but again, when I think back on that experience at that school, there must there were 400 students there. I don't think ever during the two years I was there, there was more than two African American students. There was some diversity around uh Asian students and uh students who like Indian students, there were several Indian students there, but I don't remember. There was I remember one African American young woman. I think there were I think she had a friend.

Um so but that's kind of Louisiana back then, especially northern Louisiana. Um and so the uh so we he and I lost touch. And about five years after I left Louisiana for good, um I found out through my mom that he was on death row. Um for a murder. Um that is just almost inconceivable to me how that could have shook out. And I did some research to try to figure out well, where did this start? I mean, what you don't just up and murder someone, I don't think. Um and no, there was a history, there were problems that occurred when he he left college under some sort of mysterious circumstances. Do you know what I mean? It I don't even have to go through the whole story. Basically, um he just he was not in a position for whatever reason to um to have the kind of advantages that I had had. And I and I don't know if he committed the crime or not. I have no idea. Okay. Um he's not he's no longer on death row.

[26:16] Ron Russell: We're all, he's he's is he did he survive death row? He survived death row. He got exonerated. He was the evidence, I guess. Uh I don't know exactly what happened in terms of the exoneration, but he was he was spared death. He's still in prison. Okay. Yeah, I I mean, like, we're all, I think, so much more than the worst thing we've ever done in our lives. And I I did a play uh written by Alexandra Camon called Time Alone out in LA. And I it was, you know, I met a lot of young people who had murdered people. Yeah. And uh through some programs that uh the governor put through, these kids were out, and they were men now. So many of them had spent half their life in prison, and they were really nice people.

Like I had an idea of what a murderer is. And then you meet these people, and they're just people and they're nice people and they're talented people and they're smart people and they're funny people. And um, you know, we make this idea of what a murderer is. You know, I I I like to think, even just as an artist, that anything a human being is capable of, I'm capable of. Right. So I could be a murderer too. Exactly. You know, yeah, I know, and exactly. And I I think the this the story only makes sense to me. And the only reason I use it is just to speak about the fact that there is really legit no reason why I should be in the position that I'm in. I was be below a lot of I think a lot of white men get to where they are just by basically hiding in and being mediocre and no one calling them out on it. You know what I mean?

[27:39] Tonya Pinkins: I'm glad you said that. Because it just because they're just white men. I was not mediocre. I was extraordinarily bad. Do you know what I mean? I it wasn't like it wasn't like I was coasting. I was I'm not gonna even believe that because you have accomplished so much in your life. I'm telling you, I was bad. I was a bad, bad kid.

[28:01] Tonya Pinkins: Thank you for listening to part one of my interview with Ron Russell. Part two is coming up next. Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT with Tonya Pinkins, part of the Broadway Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Dori Berinstein, edited by Alan Seales, with music by Anthony Norman. You can find more information and other great Broadway-related podcasts via Broadway Podcast Network.com/slash You Can't SAY THAT.