Fireside Chats, Episode 59: The Black Moderate

Summary: Rondale Williams is a veteran of the US Navy, a software engineer with a college degree in history, and a moderate black man in contemporary America. It's the latter point that makes him unusual, at least from the perspective of modern politics, which often considers minority voters reliable blocs, and not individuals with unique thoughts, ideas, aspirations, and ideologies. Rondale and I sat down for a little over an hour to discuss his unique path through life, growing up in Hartford, Connecticut around black nationalist influences, right on through his time here in Southern California, where he found himself in a tech industry being overrun with a virulent strand of PC culture, the kind of culture that long ago lost sight of what egalitarianism and merit is all about.