← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
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- [00:04]
A
You are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:09]
B
We should be careful about where we ask for things that deviate from universal principles, particularly from a Jewish perspective. Just as other groups are vigorously protected from discrimination, we should demand that we be vigorously protected from discrimination. But when it comes to things like protection from the disgusting speech of others, we are better off to say that is one of the rights that we have as Americans to engage in speech, some of it disgusting speech. But we'd rather live with that than with a society where those in power make decisions about what can be said and what can't be said and politics devolves into a competition for who gets to interpret the rules. I don't think that that is good for the future of our country, and I don't think that the Jews are going to win that.
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A
Welcome to part two of my conversation with Yasha Monk. Yasha, I want to pick right up where I teased we would be going here. You've been a sharp critic of identity politics. We've gotten into some of that in this conversation or in part one of the conversation and its corruption of the American left and the danger it poses to America's classically liberal democracy. You have said and you've written about how what you as a liberal think of as liberalism and what you kind of came of age with in your liberal worldview is not what it represents today. You almost say what liberal politics and ideas represent today is almost unrecognizable to liberals who came of age and kind of got engaged with liberal ideas and liberal politics when you did, can you speak to that?
- [01:50]
B
Yeah. I mean, look, I grew up in Germany at a time when the country was pretty culturally homogeneous and where just the fact of being Jewish and being an immigrant really made you the odd one out. And a lot of what I admired left wing politics for at the time was a promise that you can be a full member of society and you're going to be treated with equal dignity and equal respect, irrespective of what your religion is, irrespective of what your cultural origin is. It was a vision of a society in which, of course, a lot of people would give big importance to the religious faith or to the cultural community to which they belong. But it wasn't the defining thing about you. Right. When I had lunch with you, or when I tried to figure out who to invite to a panel, or when I was in the process of interviewing people for a job, I might be aware of the fact that you're this or that, but that wasn't meant to be the decisive factor. And I think that that is both a more appealing vision of what a truly equal society would look like, and, by the way, much more likely to work in favor of vulnerable minority groups, whether they be Jews or African Americans or Hindus or whatever else, then this kind of strange, multiculturalist, identity politics driven attitude which has become incredibly ingrained in our society in a very short period of time, in which actually those forms of colorblindness are themselves deeply suspect, according to some people, even an indication of actual racism. In fact, you precisely must think for every panel, do we have the appropriate numbers of people of various genders and sexual identities and ethnic backgrounds and religion where, you know, the color of your skin is not meant to be something that we abstract away from in deciding whether to hire you, it is in many cases going to be the decisive factor and in which that is even influencing how we think about pedagogy. I want teachers to try and create a culture in school in which people make connection with people who are very different from them. That is the goal of learning to be a member of a diverse country like the United States, in which we can function together and have civic friendship with each other and, you know, have common enterprises from the defense of our country and the armed services to corporations and other kind of civic associations instead. It's now become very fashionable, particularly in the elite fancy private schools in New York City, but all around the country, to go to classrooms sometimes when kids are as young as 8, 7, 6 years old, and break them out into affinity groups and tell them, the most important thing about you is that you're black. The most important thing about you is that you're Latino. The most important thing about you is that you're Asian American. And I just think that that really goes fundamentally against the vision of a society that celebrates cultural diversity, that encourages us to see the commonalities in each other and to get along and to build ties to each other.
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A
In your book, in the Identity Trap book, you go through some chilling examples. But why you call it a trap? Use the term trap. Why is it a trap?
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B
I think we live in a deeply diverse country in the United States, and I think that's a wonderful thing. One of the things that attracts me to living in New York City rather than in Stockholm or Copenhagen or somewhere, is the amazing cultural diversity we have, which enriches the city in a million ways. And I certainly don't share a kind of 1950s, 1960s vision of American identity where to be a good American, you sort of have to become indistinguishable from each other and we're all eating mashed potatoes and apple pie in front of our TV dinners. But where I think the concerns start is where we're giving up on the universal principles that alone can structure a successful, diverse society. Rather than saying that we have a common set of rules which impart rights, but also duties which set standards for how you're expected to behave and how you're going to be judged, we make every element of society a product of group negotiation over who has powers, over who gets what part of a pie, over who gets access to what kind of benefits. We talked about this a little bit in part one of our conversation in pedagogy, right. I absolutely love the idea of show and tells. Bring in something from your culture that you're proud of. That's something that makes the beauty of a school community. What I don't like is something where you're saying, now we're going to split the kids up into different groups and the black kids go over there and the Asian kids go over there, the Latino kids go over there. And by the way, you have a white group that I guess Jews are expected to go into. By and large, that is a really simplistic way of signaling, not of listening to what's important to people and letting them express that, but of imposing on them one very simplistic, rigid idea of, of identity. And of course, I think this has really bad consequences when it comes to distributional fights. During the pandemic, there was moments when some states prioritized people for the vaccine based on their race. In the state of Vermont, for example, there was more broadly guidance from the CDC that we shouldn't prioritize the oldest Americans first, even for the most vulnerable to Covid, but rather prioritize a much larger, broader set of essential workers because they were more diverse. Even though the CDC's own model projected that would lead to more people dying. This is a way to force people into the most brutal form of ethnic politics where they're going to say, well, if whether or not I get access to this life saving vaccine or this life saving drug, or this job or this other kind of benefit just depends on my numbers. Well, I better find a tribe to belong to and I better organize myself around the tribe and we're all going to fight to the death in a zero sum battle for resources, that is not going to be good for anybody. And it's least of all going to be good for groups that have historically been marginalized and Discriminated against in our society.
- [07:41]
A
How do you feel about, for instance, historically black colleges in the United States? Colleges that are, I think, overwhelming majority, if not entirely African Americans, Black Americans, and the institution is proudly deferred, defines that as central to its mission.
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B
So, look, I think given that America's very particular history and the fact that these colleges were usually founded at a time when African Americans were excluded from most other institutions of higher learning, you know, they have a proud tradition. They play an important role today, a lot of the elite HBCUs like Howard, but most of them really specialize in educating people in very poor communities that may otherwise not go to college at all. They're very good at dealing with students who may have a lot of life challenges, who may be working at the same time as they're studying, et cetera. And so I think they make a big contribution towards building and growing a bigger black middle class. I think it's one thing to recognize the importance of those institutions have historically played and to hope that they continue to thrive. It's another to want to create more segregated institutions. And these aren't segregated, by the way. Most of them do admit non black students. But it's quite another thing to want to create forms of segregation in. In context where they've never existed. So a lot of elite colleges in the last 10, 20 years have built separate dorms for black students because supposedly black students on these elite college campuses that are very progressive feel so unsafe from their white classmates that they need to live in separate quarters. That, I think, is something that's often encouraged by college administrators. It's often not the organic product of real demands that most students have, but. But rather of an ideology that is pushed by professors and administrators. And that, for example, I find to be deeply, deeply troubling. So we can make certain allowances for aspects of our society that were shaped at a time when we had deep segregation and deep injustices, and then recognize that they have some positive role to play today. That doesn't mean that I think that's the right model for society as a whole. And certainly when IVD colleges say, let's build a dorm that's only going to be for black students, I think that is very much a step in the wrong direction.
- [09:51]
A
One way to think about it, as I'm listening to you, is that if you buy into a pluralistic institution of higher learning, implicit in that and explicit in that is there is no segregation. Right? Whereas if you go to an institution that is about celebrating, honoring, and being focused on a particular group, it is actually assertively not pluralistic, which is okay, by the way. But I think what you're expressing frustration with is what there's been people going into pluralistic environments that are explicitly pluralistic, and then when they get there, certain groups are kind of protected from the pluralism.
- [10:25]
B
Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. And of course, there's a distinction there about religious belief as well. I think that in general, if at Harvard University you are allowed to have any kind of religion other than one particular one, or if you're allowed to criticize every religion other than one particular one, that would be deeply antithetical to what the supposed values of that university are. Now, on the other hand, if you have a Christian college or a Jewish college or a Muslim college, and part of the explicit deal is that you are meant to believe in a particular set of religious ideas in order to join that college, obviously that college should, within reasonable limits, be allowed to make rules about the kind of religious views you're supposed to hold that are much more restrictive than that which Harvard could legitimately uphold.
- [11:11]
A
Okay. I mean, the question is, at some point, at these places where these policies that you describe or that you're describing now, you cross the line from race sensitive policies to outright racialization in what should otherwise be pluralistic environments.
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B
Yeah. And I think that certainly in the way that college campuses operated in the last 10 or so years, we were very often far beyond that line. Coleman Hughes, the great writer and podcaster, had the story of his first day at Columbia University. And Coleman's father is African American. His mother is Puerto Rican. And as part of the orientation at Columbia University, on his first day there or his first week there, he's asked to join an affinity group. And so he has to make a decision on his first day of college. Do I join the black affinity group or the Latino affinity group? Do I think that my father's identity or my mother's identity is primary to who I am, which is not the way that he thinks about himself or his place in the world. And that's just one little example of the myriad ways in which these colleges sort of send the pedagogical lesson that you should, in fact, think yourself primarily in terms of your skin color, in terms of your race. Dalton School had for a while, I don't know if they still do, on their website, this really interesting explanation of why they use affinity groups and so on. And they wrote, part of the purpose of a progressive education is to get children to understand themselves as racial Beings. Well, I would have thought that part of the purpose of a progressive education in a diverse society is to, yes, recognize that you have certain cultural origins and that you might be a member of a certain ethnicity, and certainly to celebrate if you have a strong pride in your culture, if you have strong religious commitments, but to actually see that these things don't necessarily define you, but in particular, the color of your skin is not the most important thing about you or about any other member of your society. So I do think that in the understandable attempt to grapple with real racism, real forms of exclusion that have historically existed, we've gone down the looking glass here and ended up upside down.
- [13:09]
A
In your book, the Identity Trap, you talk about the three attributes of the Identity Trap, and the first of those attributes is the lure. So, a, can you describe what you mean by the lure? And is this what you're talking about here? Is this the lure?
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B
Yeah, the lure is that you look at American history, and of course, there's deep injustices throughout our history, from slavery to Jim Crow to the internment of Asian Americans, World War II. You can tell a story of America that exclusively consists of these injustices, which would be a mistake, but they are a big part of our history. And that's something that we absolutely need to acknowledge. And so I think there's something noble about people who think I want to do anything I possibly can to fight against the ways in which the history of race injustices still shapes our society as it does. Right. And I think that what historically has actually done the biggest contribution in making our societies more just in respect and making our country today much less racist, much less sexist, much less homophobic than it has been for vast stretches is universal ideals is the attempt to live up to the standard which has existed in our founding documents since at least 1776, but which for a long time has been honored as much in the breaches as in the observance that you're not supposed to discriminate against people on the basis of those descriptive identities. But that work is slow and it's hard, and it doesn't always succeed immediately. And so people who are impatient, understandably impatient, see the lure of saying, let's throw those principles out. Those principles haven't miraculously delivered a fully just society, so let's give up on them. Let's instead build this society where we give special treatment to members of minorities and perhaps we give a little bit less good treatment of members of majority, and that'll somehow even out the injustices of the past. Well, unfortunately, that's not how things tend to work in reality.
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A
So can you go through the other attributes of the trap?
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B
The trap has a number of dimensions. One is on the personal level, which I actually care deeply about. There's this kind of sense that there's some of this criticism of the left. It was made a little bit more a few years ago that the problem with young people today is that they're all these unique little snowflakes. I think we are all unique snowflakes. I think we are all different from each other even further. Six billion human beings in the world, or more than that. Now, we actually all come with our own idiosyncratic views of the world and aspirations and talents and flaws. And I think that is something we should honor. I think, weirdly, one of the ways in which this lure fails is that the sense of recognition and of affirmation in the individuality that people actually do, I think, seek, they will never get from this kind of identity politics outlook. Because all it says is you are defined by the intersection of your identities, right? If I know that you're white and that you're male and that you're Jewish and that you're whatever, then that will give me who you are. But of course, that's not true. My brother stands at a reasonably similar intersection of identities than I do. Not exactly the same, but pretty similar. But he's a very different person from me, right? And so if a way that I want recognition of who I am from society, which is a deeply human desire that we all have, is through this ideology, I will in fact be frustrated because all it will tell me is that I'm supposed to be exactly the same as the other guy over there who happens to share the same ascriptive identities. Now, more broadly, we run into all these political risks that we've started to talk about. Politics in which you are encouraged to see everything through the lens of your group. Belonging is not going to make society more harmonious, and it's certainly not going to make it more just when you send all of these different kids into different affinity groups. There's one group that I didn't mention earlier, and that's white group. And now when you talk to the black group and the Latino group and the Asian American group, it's sort of clear what you're going to say at Dalton School. You're going to say you've been discriminated against in all of these ways. For you to band together and take on identity as African Americans and Asian Americans and Latinos is noble and you should fight for the interests of your group and that's how you're going to make a better society. That's very, very tempting. Well, what do you tell the white people? You're not going to tell them the equivalent of that. You're going to tell them, well, actually you've had all these unfair privileges and your ancestors have done terrible things and you should feel ashamed. You should fight for your group to less influence over American society or something like that. That might make people uncomfortable. I don't mind about that. I think discomfort is part of a good education every now and again. But I just don't think it's going to work for every anti racist and every traitor to their own group in quotation marks that you're going to educate in this way. I think you're going to get two or three kids who say, well, hang on a second, the message our school is sending is that what you really defined by is your ethnicity. And all of these other people are saying, all right, I'm going to fight for the interests of my group. Well, I guess the most important thing about me is that I'm white and I'm going to fight for the interests of white people. So let's go do that. And you see that playing out in our politics. You now have this kind of multicultural coalition of people on the one side at least in the way in which the leaders of a Democratic party often talk. And then you have on the other side increasingly leaning into white identity as the thing that holds together the resistance to that. And that is going to lead to terrible zero sum conflicts. And in the middle of our society, part of which we're already seeing play out. And by the way, there's no particular reason going back to the lure in the trap, to think that an all out fight and brawl for power is systematically going to favor the historically most disadvantaged groups. By definition, the groups that are in the majority and that have historically held the power are probably likely to win if we turn society into a zero sum conflict in which different identity blocks are competing for resources.
- [18:43]
A
So some listening to this conversation, and I guess this is where I want to wrap up, some listening to this conversation will say, okay, Dan, you are Jewish. You talk a lot about Jewish identity and about Jewish community. And a lot of our listeners I think are sympathetic to how I talk about it or share my approach to it. And you yourself are falling into the identity trap. Again, I don't agree with that. I have my own response to that, but I'm curious how you respond to that. Is there a healthy identity trap?
- [19:12]
B
Well, I think there's a healthy identity. I don't think there's a healthy identity trap, but there's a healthy identity. Right? It's been a pains to emphasize, I think if a lot of immigrants from India in our country, I think if they feel proud of the heritage and they are practicing Hindus and they continue to speak the languages of answers, whether it's Hindi or Bengali or Punjabi or something else, if they keep up the Kolnu traditions from a kindness of origin, all of those wonderful things that enrich this country and to have that strong sense of identity and preserve it from generation to generation, to me is completely compatible with also being fully American and proud of being American and having solidarity with fellow American citizens who don't have the same origin. And it's a very positive thing. I think it's a very good thing. If Jews have a strong identity. I'm a secular Jew. But if some Jews have a strong religious identity, if you have fixed social ties with each other, all of that enriches us as a Jewish community and enriches the United States and has tremendously enriched the United States over the last 150 years. I think where I start to be concerned is if we fall into the trap of organizing all of our politics around those forms of identity, of embracing or accepting as a vision of America, a kind of mosaic of competing groups that live next to each other with no real sense of civic friendship, just tolerating each other's existence, not sharing a common commitment to the ideals of the Constitution, to the founding principles of the United States, but simply an acceptance. And there's a set of rules, and under those rules we compete with each other for access to resources. But really, if the others went away, that would be better. That, I think, would be deeply depressing. And I will say, just to reiterate the point, which perhaps we have a mild disagreement, perhaps we don't, that particularly from a Jewish perspective, we should be careful about where we ask for things that deviate from universal principles. Just as other groups are vigorously protected from discrimination, we should demand that we be vigorously protected from discrimination, which is very real. But when it comes to things like protection from the disgusting speech of others, that is something on which the First Amendment puts very severe limits. And it puts very severe limits on that for a very good reason, because historically we have found but all of us are safer in our full rights as Americans if no bureaucrat has the right to tell us what we're allowed to say and what we're allowed to listen to. Even if some people say horrific things out there in the world, as they do every day about every group in this country, we're better off to say that is one of the rights that we have as Americans to engage in speech, some of it disgusting speech. But we'd rather live with that than with a society where those in power make decisions about what can be said and what can't be said and politics devolves into a competition for who that official is and who gets to influence them and how they're going to interpret the rules. I don't think that that is good for the future of our country. And I don't think, by the way, that the Jews are going to win that fight. So I don't think it's good for the Jewish community either.
- [22:15]
A
What about more practical day to day aspects of Jewish life, for instance? I mean, I'm just going to give random examples that people would cite. Why do public schools in New York City have to be closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the high holidays on the Jewish. On the Hebrew calendar? Why does every non Jewish kid in New York City have to be subjected to schools being closed on those days? Why does there need to be a kosher dining hall whose kitchen and dining room complies with Jewish dietary laws? Why does there have to be a dedicated kosher kitchen and dining hall on an American college campus that's not Yeshiva University? I've heard these examples cited in criticism of the role of Jewish identity, or the critics would say it's Jewish tribalism in just daily American life. How do you respond to those kinds of examples?
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B
Well, this certainly doesn't have to be in the sense that if some college decides not to offer kosher food, perhaps there's not a large number of Jews attending that college. I think that would be perfectly fine and appropriate. But there's basically two kinds of attitudes about how to think about the separation of church and state. One is the more French attitude and one is the more American attitude. I think it's fine to have different traditions in different countries. I think both coherent within themselves. The French tradition is to say, no, no, we're universalists, we're not going to make any of those kinds of adjustments. There's no Kush food, there's no halal food. If it so happens that the food that we've traditionally cooked here doesn't fit your community, Tompi, bad luck. You can bring in your own food, not our problem. I think that in a deeply diverse society, it makes more sense to be pragmatic about those things and to say we want people to eat together. We want the friendships that will come from people sitting next to each other in the canteen. We want to precisely work against the segregation of communities into different spheres where they don't interact. And if what it takes to do that is to make sure that there is halal food for Muslim students and kosher food for Jewish students, vegetarian food for students who don't want to eat meat on whatever religious or secular grounds, and that allows all of these people to sit next to each other and have a conversation together, I think that's a very good thing for the kind of society and the kind of institution that we want to create. And so New York City observes Rosh Hashanah and other holidays in public schools because there's a lot of Jews in those schools. I'm going to guess that Oklahoma City does not, because there's not a lot of Jews in Oklahoma City. But of course, if you're a Jewish student in a public school in Oklahoma City, you're not going to be punished for staying home for those religious holidays. But, you know, in New York, which has historically been a very Jewish city and it has a lot of Jews, it makes sense to observe those holidays in other parts of a country where there's four Jews in a big public school, closing the whole school for those four Jewish students probably doesn't make sense. I think on these things, it makes sense to be pragmatic always with the goal in mind of how do we create a society in which people are included, in, mature, are not discriminated against, but in which we're not so defined by who they are that it actually puts obstacles to us preserving the links within our community, but also forging these really strong links between communities.
- [25:14]
A
All right, Yasha, we will leave it there. Thank you for this conversation. We covered a lot of territory. For your sake and your time, I would hope we covered a sufficient amount that you don't have to come back on. But I think you prompted a number of things that I will probably want to revisit with you at some point. So this will not be the last time you are invited on the Call Me Back podcast. But until then, thanks for doing this.
- [25:34]
B
Thank you. Let me get some work done, and I'll be happy to come back anytime then. Okay.
- [25:47]
A
That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members only show Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where nadavayalamit Segal and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling. To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arkmedia.org that's Ark Media Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar. Arc Media's Executive producer is Adam James Levin. Already our Production manager is Brittany Cohn. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio Community Management by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. Sam.