Lenny McAllister’s new book challenges echo chambers, calls for a return to faith and second chances

We first met Lenny McAllister, a longtime, unabashed Black Republican, while covering the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and have kept in touch over the years.

McAllister is a radio talk show host and frequent commentator on outlets such as CNN and Fox. His latest book, “A Venn Diagram of One: An American Story,” was released Aug. 11. He spoke with MSR before the release.

“I know who I am as a Republican, and I know my history as a Republican,” he reaffirmed. “I still can be a Republican and look at the people that have hijacked this party … There’s a lot of things that have transpired with this iteration of the Republican Party and many of its leaders that contravene what being a real Republican is.”

“A Venn Diagram of One” “is not a sanitized memoir or a tidy policy manual,” according to the book’s press release. “McAllister shares the story behind the labels, and shows how his life became proof that America’s best strength has always been found at the intersections: out of many, one.”

McAllister was born in Pittsburgh in 1972; he and his mother almost died during childbirth. His mother, Carol, ran a daycare out of the family home before she died in 2006, and his father, Leonard Sr., was a computer technician and an electrician for a local steel mill. The McAllisters lived in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb where their son grew up playing football, basketball and baseball.

Lenny later enrolled at Davidson College in 1989 and was going to walk on to the school’s basketball team, but declined after the coach left, and instead was a pitcher on the baseball team. He eventually left school in 1992 for a sabbatical that lasted a decade, during which McAllister became a first-time father at age 21. He later re-enrolled at Davidson and graduated with a history degree.

He unsuccessfully ran for political office several times, losing once by only 56 votes, and represented the Hip Hop Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention. He has hosted talk shows on Pittsburgh cable, Pittsburgh’s KDKA Radio and Chicago’s WVON over the years, and provided timely commentary from an Afro-centric perspective on political panels.

McAllister’s latest book explores several themes:

Faith

 “Faith is how I got here. Faith is also how America has gotten to this point in our career, in our lives, in our families, in our communities, whatever the case may be,” McAllister said. “America is supposed to live up to those principles and these promises. If you have faith that those things will be there, you will eventually find your way.”

Second acts

 “In America, we’re supposed to be able to provide people the opportunity to reinvent themselves and be able to find that pursuit of happiness in an ongoing fashion,” he continued. “I bring up a lot of second acts in the book … I talk about second acts in the book from my parents to my lovely wife, to myself …”

Breaking down echo chambers and reunifying as a nation

 “We are a nation of over 300 million residents and citizens. We need to be able to knock down the echo chamber so that we can hear each other once again,” McAllister stressed. “We can’t only look in our echo chamber for the solutions, because all that does is reinforce the flaws, reinforce bad notions, bad behavior, flawed information or misinformation. Let’s knock down the echo chambers, and let’s reembrace what makes us different in order to help make us great again.”

The author-commentator is on the road promoting “A Venn Diagram of One.”

McAllister reaffirmed that the book “reminds all Americans that, one, we need to know our history. Two, we need to understand that we have all been through struggles, regardless of who we are. We have all gone through some form of discrimination, some form of obstacle and some form of disappointment, and we cannot allow the disillusionment to be the foundational feeling.”

Especially Black Americans, he surmised.

“We have to allow the faith, the pride, the long-term memory and the fortitude necessary to move past those obstacles to get to those second acts,” McAllister stressed. “There’s a lot of generations now that don’t remember the Cold War, don’t remember a whole lot of economic angst until the Great Recession and COVID, and they look at these times as the most divisive times we’ve ever been through.

“You and I can both remember the aftermath of the Civil Rights era going into the ’70s, and then what the ’60s were like,” McAllister concluded. “It’s important to remind Americans, not just young Americans but Americans overall. We’re a tough lot that have succeeded in spite of ourselves, and there is a litany of 250 years of examples.”

For more information on the book, visit www.lennymcallister.com/.

Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.

Copyright © Charles Hallman