GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good, y'all? You are listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby.
B A PARKER, HOST:
And I'm B.A. Parker. And this week, we're revisiting a series we call Word Watch, where we go deep on a piece of language that is making our antenna twitch or is really sticking in our teeth. And so we figured we should turn our sites to felon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Convicted felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Convicted felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Felon.
PARKER: A word that seems to be everywhere right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Convicted felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: Convicted felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: Convicted felon. Felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: Convicted felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11: Convicted felon, Donald Trump. Donald Trump...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12: Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: A former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: And that word is, of course, in the discourse, because former President Donald Trump was recently convicted of a felony. And so now he has this permanent label - felon - affixed to him, just like Mr. President. And a lot of folks are really happy to stick that label to him, including people who might otherwise be skeptical of how our criminal legal system does its business.
PARKER: Right. And obviously, Donald Trump's circumstances look very different from the 19 million other people in the U.S. with felony convictions. I mean, 19 million, which, I mean, is about the population of the state of New York.
DEMBY: It's bananas. Wow.
PARKER: But felon is a label that tends to stick to people, and it's a label that we often really enjoy sticking to people.
ARIF SHAHID: And I think I walked into the store, and they said, you need ID. And I handed them that, and the guy looked at it, and he said, oh, you're a felon. And I remember the shame I felt. My feeling was this guy has an opinion about who I am as a person based on that one five-letter word.
PARKER: And so we're taking a look at that five-letter word, felon, which has a particular power to constrain people's lives.
DEMBY: And we're looking into what that word tells us and can't tell us about the millions of people carrying that label around.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: All right, y'all, we figured we should start off with a dude who has literally used felon in his public name.
SHAHID: Arif Shahid is my given name. I perform under Felonious Munk all over the world as a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, fairly good dancer. Fairly good. My knees aren't what they used to be, but I still, you know, I cut a little rug, smaller rug, Persian rug, prayer rug.
PARKER: (Laughter).
SHAHID: But, yeah, I've been known professionally as Felonious Munk for a little over a decade.
DEMBY: You might have seen him on IG or doing stand-up on TV.
PARKER: But we wanted to hit him up because he jokes a lot about navigating the world as a formerly incarcerated person.
DEMBY: Do you remember the first time you were referred to as a felon?
SHAHID: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there's so many things that people can't ever relate to about coming home from prison, and I hope they never have to. But you don't feel like yourself. Whoever you were before you went in is gone. And I came home, and I remember trying to cross the street, and the cars were going so fast. And I can't tell you why the cars seemed to be going any faster other than I had not been on the road with a car in forever.
But I remember going into a place and I didn't have my ID. All I had was my ID card from prison. And I had to use that. I think, at the time, I was still smoking cigarettes. And I think I walked into the store, and they said, you need ID, and I handed them that, and the guy looked at it, he said, oh, you're a felon. And I remember the shame I felt because I would have much rather just gave this guy a state-issued ID, got my cigarettes and went out and had been ashamed about the fact that I was smoking.
But now my feeling was this guy has an opinion about who I am as a person based on that one five-letter word. And when I came home, and that guy looked at my ID, it struck me that I would never again be able to walk into a room as myself. I would always walk into a room as convicted felon.
PARKER: So Arif started performing under the name Felonious Munk when he'd been out for about a decade. He said a friend of his joked that he was a peaceful dude, a felon who wanted to be a monk.
DEMBY: He's also joked, though (laughter), that he wasn't as peaceful as he seemed. He just knew that getting into fights would have landed him back in prison.
SHAHID: So yeah, you know, I leaned into it, so you can't use it against me. I think that was always the joke, was I started doing that because Obama talked about doing coke in his book, and he still became president.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
SHAHID: And I was like, well, if he can talk about doing coke, I can talk about selling it.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAHID: And that's where we are, and so saying I was Felonious Munk made it easier for me to embrace that and not feel like I was hiding a part of myself.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: So that's the story of one person who came to this kind of begrudging acceptance of this label that he's carrying around, but we wanted to know why. What work is that label doing? What practical use is a word that includes everyone from Arif to El Chapo to Donald Trump?
DEMBY: (Laughter) That is quite the spectrum.
PARKER: That's true.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JOSIE DUFFY-RICE: I don't think that actually, the fact that someone's been convicted of a felony tells me anything about who they are.
DEMBY: That voice you're hearing belongs to...
DUFFY-RICE: Josie Duffy-Rice. I am a journalist and a writer primarily, and I focus on the criminal justice system.
DEMBY: Josie is the former president of The Appeal, and the host of the podcast "Unreformed."
DUFFY-RICE: In particular, I focus on prosecutors and police and prisons, but in general, I'm interested in the ways that this system influences other systems.
PARKER: Gene, you talked to Josie about the impact of the word felon. Let's get into it.
DEMBY: So we're talking about the word felon, and I guess I should start with Donald Trump, who has now been convicted of a felony. As somebody who has been trying to get people to think about, you know, our criminal legal system, I imagine, in a moment like this, a lot of people who might otherwise agree with you, or be open to listening to you, weren't really trying to hear about why (laughter) calling somebody a felon is loaded - you know, 'cause they were enjoying celebrating the fact that Donald Trump was convicted.
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah, definitely. I mean, like, one of the lessons of, like, messaging and communication is you have to meet people where they are, and I did not spend a lot of time (laughter) these past few weeks trying to remind people about why not to call someone a felon, because it's - people - it just - there was not a lot of space for people to hear that, and I understand that, right? At least in the immediate aftermath - like, the day of - I was like, let me just be quiet (laughter).
DEMBY: So Donald Trump is, like, hardly the median or modal person with a felony conviction in the U.S., and I wanted to talk to you about that.
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: Like, what can you tell us about how the material realities of this conviction might look different for him than it does for the millions of other people who are convicted of felonies?
DUFFY-RICE: Oh, drastically different. I mean, what we often see for people who have been convicted of a felony is they can't get a job. They can't get housing. You know, they fall behind, kind of, on every facet of their life, whether it's paying child support or paying their bills or, you know, becoming kind of part of civic society, and that goes back to that they can't vote, right? So there is a sort of societal death that happens to many people convicted of a felony - not everybody, but many people - and that's not going to happen to Donald Trump, right? He's not going to feel like he is suddenly on the outside looking in to the rest of people in a society who have the legal right to participate in the American experiment, right? He's not going to be left out of that.
DEMBY: Right. He's going to raise $70 million after being...
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah, he's going to raise $70 million. Exactly.
DEMBY: Right, after being convicted of a crime.
DUFFY-RICE: Right, and that - I mean, to your point, what you just said made me think, you know, there's this other element to this, which is, like, being convicted of a felony makes you kind of a pariah, right? People are less likely to give you money, not more. People are likely to categorize you as being a bad person, right? For most people, you kind of have to go above and beyond for the rest of your life to prove that you are not, you know, the worst of the worst, and Donald Trump doesn't have to do that. In fact, he's benefiting from this other dynamic, which is that the fact that he's been convicted - he has a lot of supporters who think that that is evidence of him being the best.
(LAUGHTER)
DUFFY-RICE: Right?
DEMBY: Right.
DUFFY-RICE: And that doesn't usually happen, ever. I'm trying to think of other examples, and I kind of can't.
DEMBY: Yeah. Right. Also, obviously...
DUFFY-RICE: Yes.
DEMBY: ...Donald Trump is, like, a very singular figure in American life in so many ways. For instance, the ways that most people get felonies in this country is they take plea deals.
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: And they take deals because, you know, somebody throws a book at them.
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly.
DEMBY: And they say, all right - we have, like, 10 charges against you, and so you got to kind of do this weird calculus...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...If you're a defendant, like, well, can I beat all 10 of these charges, right? The math is really bad. It's really against you.
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah, the math is really bad. Absolutely. That's - I mean, that is the secret to the system, right? And the truth is that we really do think of at least the charging part - that, like, what-were-you-charged-with part of the criminal legal system - as being kind of a science. It is not, and it is not even an art. It is a ball of chaos.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
DUFFY-RICE: And, you know, we have an incredibly inflated criminal code, where basically, like, I can't - I probably can't find a, you know, statute that is going to let me arrest you for brushing your teeth...
(LAUGHTER)
DUFFY-RICE: ...Right? But there are plenty of behaviors that happen in everybody's life, where if they wanted to convict you of something, they probably could. I was just talking to someone the other day who said their child forged their signature on, like, a...
DEMBY: Like, a school trip or something?
DUFFY-RICE: ...School trip. Yeah, a school trip form, and they're like - they're a criminal lawyer, and they're like, you know, that could be a charge.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
DUFFY-RICE: .And I'm like, yeah, that's a problem.
(LAUGHTER)
DUFFY-RICE: That is, like, a sign of a problem, that basically, you know, the criminal code is massive. It's bloated, and it's that way on purpose, right? It gives prosecutors a tool to punish people in various ways for various behaviors, and it's usually used as an incentive to essentially ensure that people will take a plea deal, because going to trial is expensive, and it takes a lot out of prosecutors, and they would much rather you plead guilty. If you plead guilty, you can appeal. And then your case is over, and we move on. But in general, like, we - prosecutors, I mean, the entire system is very invested in a good guys versus bad guys perception of society and of people because that is where they thrive. It gets much messier when you have to grapple with the idea that people who have been convicted of a felony are also people.
DEMBY: And this image we have of people being convicted by a jury of their peers is mostly from TV and movies because in real life...
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...About 95% of all cases end in plea deals on the...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...State level. At the federal level, that number jumps to 98% - right? - so almost nobody ever goes to trial...
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...Which is another way that Trump is an outlier among people convicted of felonies. But what are the social repercussions of having all these people in our country who walk around with this designation of felon?
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah, I mean, there's so many, and they're on so many different spectrums. But to your point, let's just talk about kind of the general social repercussion. You think about stuff you did when you were younger, like, underage drinking, or drugs or stuff that lots of kids are involved in. And if they don't get involved with the system, they're not later calling themselves a criminal or a felon because they committed a felony technically. You get that designation if what you've done has been adjudicated by a system. And that isn't really necessarily reflective of what you've done. It's reflective of your involvement in this other thing. And the rest of us get to be different people than we were 20 years ago.
But if you've been involved in the system, you never really get to be that. You just never really get to be that. You're explaining it for the rest of your life. So, you know, I wonder what we lose when we are constantly demanding that people who have already, quote-unquote, "paid their debt to society," a term I don't love, but let's just go with it - right? - then spend the rest of their life, you know, filling out a rental application or applying for school or wanting to be part of the PTA or applying to get pre-check at the airport and constantly having to answer the question, have you ever been convicted of a crime? Like, do you have any felony convictions?
Part of the problem is that that question spans so many things. So it could mean you've done something actually extremely harmful, or it could mean you've done something much, much smaller. But in general, we come at the spectrum of human capacity for harm and the spectrum of human capacity for change with a binary. You're either good or bad. You're either criminal or not criminal. You're a felon, or you're not a felon.
DEMBY: Why do you think it's so sticky? Like, why do you think that that binary is so...
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...Sticky for us?
DUFFY-RICE: You know, farming out your sense of morality to a different system who gets to define it and punish for it is seductive. It makes the world easier for us to process - right? - and it gives us a shorthand with which to describe people. This person is a bad person because they're a criminal. This person is a bad person 'cause they're an illegal. And I think that people really like easy binaries as a rule. And I'm not above that either. But I would say before a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump had not been convicted of any felonies. He was not a person with felony convictions, and he was the exact same person. He had done all the exact same things.
If you thought he was bad before, the fact that he's now been convicted in a court of law doesn't change that. If you think that what he has done is harmful and is wrong, to me, that's a very different question than, is what he's done illegal? And I think even when we think about the case in Manhattan, I think prosecutors had a case, and I think on the list of things that Donald Trump has done that have been harmful, that was pretty far down on the list, to me.
And I think we get very caught up in what the law says is wrong, and we sometimes let it override what we know is wrong, right? And that, to me, is giving the legal system far too much power.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISCO & FRANKIE BLANCO SONG, "F.W.M.")
PARKER: When we come back...
DUFFY-RICE: The test of our lives is to be able to see ourselves in other people and to see ourselves in other people suffering. And to me, that's the only way that we can operate in a functional society is to be able to try to understand people who have done wrong.
PARKER: That's coming up. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF DISCO & FRANKIE BLANCO SONG, "F.W.M.")
DEMBY: Gene.
PARKER: Parker.
DEMBY: CODE SWITCH.
PARKER: We've been talking about the word felon and its implications with Josie Duffy-Rice, a journalist who covers the criminal legal system, and Josie argues that one of the reasons that felon is so seductive is because it occasionally gets attached to folks we really don't like.
DEMBY: And while most people assume that, you know, the verdict would not really change people's opinions on whether they thought Trump was a good dude or a bad dude, one Reuters poll found, in the immediate wake of the conviction, that 10% of Republican voters said the guilty verdict made them less likely to vote for Donald Trump, which is surprising.
PARKER: I mean, caveat - obviously saying you're less likely to vote for him doesn't mean you won't when it's time to cast your ballot.
DEMBY: Right, exactly, but, you know, 10% - that's not small, and so I asked Josie what she made of that swing.
DUFFY-RICE: You know, there is a large segment of our population, on both sides, who puts a lot of trust and faith in the law, and, you know, I don't know what your group chats were looking like after he was convicted, but my extended family group chat is just like, Hallelujah, thank God, nobody's above the law, and I remember this, too, after the Ahmaud Arbery convictions, which happened over Thanksgiving, when I was with my family. Like, there is a real kind of solace and relief found in the idea that the legal system has convicted someone that we find despicable, and there is a kind of schadenfreude, which I get, when they convict someone who has been thought to be above the law - right? - who has been - who has said, I could go in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn't lose a single vote. And so I think that there - that exists on the right, as well, that there are some people who think, well, the legal system ultimately determines who's right and wrong, and they have determined he's wrong, and so maybe he's wrong, so maybe that's the 10%, but I'm so curious as to, like, how was his behavior acceptable to you before these 12 strangers told you it shouldn't be? How were you justifying it? And I think in a lot of ways, that's a major way in which I find the system so insidious is that it allows us to justify behavior that has not been adjudicated in a court of law - right? - in a way that I think, again, farms our own kind of moral guidelines out to an arbitrary system.
DEMBY: In all the ways that the trial for Ahmaud Arbery's murder and Donald Trump's trial for campaign finance violations are different - right? - this point about the court being the designator of morality - it sticks with me, because one of the things both these trials seem to have in common is that the reactions we saw seemed to be about resolving these bigger issues in society - right? - giving people a sense of relief for all these larger...
DUFFY-RICE: Yes.
DEMBY: ...Political and social questions that have not been resolved otherwise. Like, Ahmaud Arbery's case...
DUFFY-RICE: Yes.
DEMBY: ...Is carrying the weight of every other time a Black person has been killed by a white person in some racist incident, and Donald Trump's conviction this month is sort of a proxy for a lot of people for all the other things that they feel like he should have be punished for.
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: And so it's almost like the specific charges at issue are there, but we're actually talking about something broader.
DUFFY-RICE: Right. I think that's exactly right, and I think another kind of major difference - right? - between Donald Trump and the rest of the country is that Donald Trump was the state.
(LAUGHTER)
DEMBY: Right.
DUFFY-RICE: He was the executive...
DEMBY: Right.
DUFFY-RICE: ...Right? And so in the same way, that if I get arrested tomorrow and go on trial, it is the entire state - right? - that's what they got there. There is the state versus the defendant. It's the entire government versus me. With Donald Trump, it's a little messier. He's a private citizen right now, but he was the most powerful man in the country, and he might be the most powerful man in the country again.
DEMBY: Right.
DUFFY-RICE: And so it is not accurate to group him with the rest of defendants across the country, regardless of his politics...
DEMBY: Right.
DUFFY-RICE: ...Right? Because he's not the same.
DEMBY: I mean, this is - again, when O.J. Simpson died, I saw quite a few people saying that they were annoyed that people were talking about him as if he was a killer, because he was acquitted of killing Nicole Brown...
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...And Ron Goldman, and it was one of those things that was really fascinating to watch, because, you know, these are Black people I'm talking about. It was like, oh...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...So we generally understand...
DUFFY-RICE: Right (laughter).
DEMBY: ...That the criminal justice system is a terrible...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Terrible arbiter...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Of guilt, right?
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: Whenever a...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Cop gets off, people are like, I'm not surprised, because the system...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Is messed up.
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: And so in this case, people are like, well, this is what the system determined, so obviously - right? - like, we can't come to any other...
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly.
DEMBY: I just think it sort of underlines or illustrates your point about the ways that people...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Sort of came like, oh, well the criminal justice system has done a really good job adjudicating...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Culpability in this case, because it came out with an outcome that I like - for whatever reason - but it is...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Terrible because it came out of an outcome I don't like in all these other ways, right?
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly. No, that's such a good analogy with the O.J. Simpson thing, because it's so true, and the truth is that a system that is just half the time and not just half the time, or however you want to kind of allot the percentages of that pie - that is not a just system...
DEMBY: (Laughter).
DUFFY-RICE: ...Right? The fact that they sometimes agree with you does not mean, in that situation, the system was just, as much as I think it means that, like, the system is arbitrary, and it doesn't have to get it wrong every single time to be kind of impermissibly flawed. Our system is not always capable of holding people accurately accountable for their harm. It's rarely capable of that.
DEMBY: Donald Trump himself accused Hillary Clinton, and a gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, of trying to give people convicted of crimes their rights to vote back, so they could cancel out the votes of...
DUFFY-RICE: I know.
DEMBY: ...Crime victims and the votes of people in law enforcement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: They are letting people vote in your Virginia election that should not be allowed to vote.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Booing).
TRUMP: That is sad, so sad.
DEMBY: And so Trump has been on the side of those people that support disenfranchisement for people like him now...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...People with felony convictions. Can you explain how this might play out for him? Like, do you imagine...
DUFFY-RICE: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...That he'll ultimately be allowed to vote in Florida, which is where he lives now?
DUFFY-RICE: I actually think that he will probably ultimately be able to vote. I think the idea that you could not vote, but you could be president is, like, a flaw in the system. But it is a good example of how there is a real kind of belief that it - that so many people have that it can never be them, right? It couldn't be them. Donald Trump talking about how people with felony convictions should not be allowed to vote is, to me, such a signal of the gap between who is allowed to get in trouble and who's not. Like, we are talking about someone who has flouted the law so drastically, and it has never really crossed his mind it could have been him. It never crossed his mind, really.
DEMBY: Right.
DUFFY-RICE: And I think what that says to me is just that, like, there are people who don't live in fear of the criminal justice system determining them to be a felon. And I think he was one of them.
DEMBY: It's this idea that he will never be on the business end of that...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Policing and that prosecution, right? It's like, oh...
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly.
DEMBY: ...Because the people who are stopped are intrinsically and obviously criminal...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Right?
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: And I am...
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly.
DEMBY: ...Not that, so why would I ever have to...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Worry about the cops stopping me?
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, like, the example I think about with that all the time is sometimes you see police chiefs' or cops' or sheriffs' or prosecutors' kids get in trouble. I think a case I'm thinking of is a kid who was drunk driving and hit a van and killed a family. This was years ago, and I can't even remember where, but, you know, killed people in the car. And all of a sudden, the tone of his father changed, right? It was not, like, this kid is incorrigible, is, you know, unfixable and should go to prison for the rest of their life, they were old enough to know what's wrong. It was, oh, my God, it's my kid. He's a kid.
DEMBY: He made a mistake. Right.
DUFFY-RICE: He did something - he made a mistake.
DEMBY: A terrible...
DUFFY-RICE: He did something horrible, but he's a kid, and I see it now because it's me. I think the test of our lives is to be able to see ourselves in other people and to see ourselves in other people suffering. And to me, that's the only way that we can operate in a functional society is to be able to try to understand people who have done wrong. I think that Donald Trump, this current - the case he just got convicted in is kind of interesting because I don't think - I'm trying to say this without justifying anything he's ever done. But I understand why he - I understand that to him, it feels political. And what he is identifying is the arbitrary nature of what it means to be prosecuted.
DEMBY: Absolutely. You made the point that this category of crimes we call felonies is so large as to be essentially meaningless. Like, something might be a misdemeanor...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...In one place, there might be a felony somewhere a couple of miles away. People who have felonies include people who have never spent a moment behind bars and people who are serving...
DUFFY-RICE: Right.
DEMBY: ...Consecutive life sentences in supermax prisons.
DUFFY-RICE: Exactly.
DEMBY: Like, Josie, is there any utility in the word felon? Like, do we need a different word altogether or?
DUFFY-RICE: I don't think there's any utility in the word felon. I don't think there's any utility in it. I think with more specifics about what that felony is, it might tell me something about someone. I think, in general, what I'm interested in is identifying people with people-first language. Even to say - and it doesn't feel like a major thing, but to describe someone as a person who's been convicted of a felony versus a felon, is to say that they are a person that has dealt with this thing. That's, like, seven words versus one...
DEMBY: Yeah, right.
DUFFY-RICE: ...Right? But that's because they are more than this one thing. It's a more complicated language because people are more complicated.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: And like we said, there are 19 million people marked by this label.
PARKER: So we wanted to circle back to Arif Shahid. He's a comedian we heard from before, who is known as Felonious Munk.
SHAHID: I've been home 26 years. I did a show in 2017 in Washington, D.C. Did a great show. The previews were great. It was the most draining experience in my life 'cause I had to tell the truth about myself. But The Washington Post did an article, and I remember they didn't just review the show, they came out and they talked to me. And I thought they asked really good questions. And then the headline said, former drug dealer wants to say more than sorry. And it hit me that as a father of two, Emmy-nominated TV show, movie, theater, stand-up comedy tours - nope. Former drug dealer.
PARKER: We asked Arif what we should do about this word.
SHAHID: I think if we're going to use felon to say, none of you get opportunities until you've proven yourself, sure, but that's not how it's used, right? That's not how it's used when a guy from Stanford can sexually assault a woman behind a trash can and only do six months because the judge says, I'm trying to protect your future. And I guess I don't have one, you know? I've been home long enough. I've had enough success to just kind of wash it away. But I think if we're going to use those terms without context, especially in this country where race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender presentation, all of those things can be held against you, then you add felon to it, I think we need to, you know, especially in our community - I'm a convicted felon, ex-felon. I think it's time to put it away. I've had this conversation with my manager a lot that I just don't want to be known as Felonious Munk anymore, simply because I think people are using it for the wrong way. It's like Dave Chappelle's I think they're laughing at the wrong part of the joke. And that's kind of how I'm feeling now. It's like, all right, I don't want to be associated with Donald Trump. He's a felon.
DEMBY: (Laughter) Wait, so you're thinking about changing your name?
SHAHID: Yeah. I think I will just use my real name. It's a beautiful name. I have a good name. You know, it's not like Arif Shahid is a bad name. It's not like it's forgettable. It's just I thought Felonious Munk was funny. I thought it was a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. You know, using that word, I've reclaimed it. I've given it the power that I felt like it should have. But there comes a time where it's out of your control. And once it gets out of your control, it can be used against other people. And that's where I'm starting to look at, OK, do I want everything to be Felonious?
I'm on this podcast likely because of my experiences as a - I can speak to it, but I don't want it to continue to be the first thing that people know about me. And it's hard for that not to be the first thing they know when you present as, hi, I'm Felonious Munk. So, you know, not only do I think other people need to reconsider the connotation when we use it, but I think it's time for, you know, the people who kind of revel in having turned their lives around to say, yeah, that's a thing. That's a part. That's one of the things on the list, but, you know, primarily, I'm a dad. I'm a husband. I'm a very funny person. I'm a silly guy. You know, just - I'm a regular person most of the time.
PARKER: I get it.
SHAHID: With excellent fashion sense.
PARKER: (Laughter) We can't see you.
SHAHID: That's why I said it. Can't check me.
(LAUGHTER)
PARKER: So, Gene, has it changed your mind about the word felon?
DEMBY: I mean, Parker, you know, listening to both Arif and Josie reminded me of how, like, in our other Word Watch conversations, sometimes the issue with whatever language you're talking about is that the language in question is just not specific enough, you know what I mean?
PARKER: Right. Like, when y'all talked about the acronym BIPOC and how it flattens a bunch of different populations into one big category. Like, perhaps too big of a category to be practically useful.
DEMBY: Exactly. And that seems to be a big part of what's going on with felon, right? Like, I'm not saying that people should not be held accountable for the harm they've done, but we have this word that only tells us in the broadest and vaguest possible way that this person has been determined by the criminal justice system to have transgressed in some way. Like, weed possession, spree shooter, they're all in the same category.
PARKER: Right. And you don't know from the word felon what accountability should look like relative to the transgression.
DEMBY: Exactly. Just, like, there's, you know, just punishment, right? We just know that this person should be punished. And, like, leave Trump aside. He's been able to shrug off, like, so many labels, right? Like, why would felon be any different for him? Also, he's probably going to be able to vote. He's probably not going to go to prison on these charges, you know?
PARKER: But for some, the kind of moral satisfaction that comes with getting to refer to him, like, you know, in the hugest of quotation marks, "lowly, common criminal, " even if no other consequences come his way, that's also what gives felon its sting and stickiness for the millions of other people we call that.
DEMBY: Yeah. So maybe we should be more mindful of how and when we're using it.
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DEMBY: All right, y'all, that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch, all one word. If email, if that's more of your thing, ours is [email protected]. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to our newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.
PARKER: Another way to support our work here is to sign up for CODE SWITCH Plus. It's small, but really makes a difference for us, and you get to listen to every CODE SWITCH episode without any ads. Check it out at plus.npr.org/codeswitch. And thanks to everyone who's already signed up. This episode was produced by Christina Cala. It was edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Josh Newell.
DEMBY: And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Leah Donnella, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams and Lori Lizarraga. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker. Hydrate.
DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.
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