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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Unlike my father, I did not have to go to a public college at night school. While enlisted in the military, I got to attend film school at a private university and got to move to New York City as a young man. But shortly after, I finished the twin crises of film production, moving to Canada as part of a union busting effort, and the September 11 attacks of 2001 wiped out many of my work prospects. By the time my dad passed away in 2003, I was desperate for any type of work, was sometimes going hungry, and was unable to afford my own housing. While living with my recently widowed mother, I applied to be a New York City police officer to try to get back on my feet. From research I have conducted long after that time, I've learned that I did it for many of the same reasons others do. As a last ditch chance at stable employment when I couldn't afford to pay for food, rent, or my student loans. Plus, I told myself, as a black gay person, I could be a good cop. Maybe I could change the system from the inside. It was the early 2000s, and legal rights for gay Americans were on the upswing. Maybe I could be a part of that. I tried to convince myself and of tampering not just racism and homophobia, but the rising Islamophobia caused by the war on terror. Mercifully, the NYPD did not hire me. The Overseer Class A Manifesto is the latest book from journalist and inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of Social justice and Reporting, with emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community at Northwestern University Medill school of journalism, Dr. Stephen Thrasher. Dr. Thrasher, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Thank you so much for having me on.
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B
You write in the opening pages of this book that this is intentionally a book of ideas, more so than it is a work of narrative nonfiction. Talk about that.
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A
It was really interesting hearing you read. I don't think I've heard anyone else read my book aloud, so that was interesting. And I'm sort of betraying the point that you just said, because there are a lot of stories in this book. There's parts of my story, there are lots of other people's stories. But that note was almost permission to myself because there is a moment in publishing right now which we'll joke sometimes as narrative hysteria that everything has to be sold as one meta narrative or one major narrative across an entirety of a book. And even though I hope that readers find interesting stories within the book that I've written, I was giving myself permission to write about ideas. You know the New Jim Crow is one of my favorite books of the past 15 years or so, which also has stories inside of it. And Alexander writes about her own story in the introduction, but she's a legal scholar and it's very much a book about ideas. And I wanted to give myself permission to tease out this idea of an overseer class without feeling like I needed to sell it at any stage in the beginning, through the writing process, or sharing with readers about it that this is just one story. You'll dip in and out of my story. And I try to tell stories, but I really wanted to play with ideas that I found interesting and give readers permission to think about those ideas and pull them into conversation with their own experiences.
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B
How how much of the idea of the overseer class did you have going in versus how much of did it did you tease out while you were actually writing it?
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A
There are a couple different stages in my life where I think I was trying to figure out what an overseer class. The first was when I was reporting in Ferguson in 2014, 2015, and reporting on a police department at the time that was entirely white, or it was almost either entirely white. They maybe had one non white officer, but none of them were black. And they Darren Wilson, the white police officer, had killed Michael Brown. And then over the ensuing years, I started seeing how often I was seeing black cops in my visual field of consciousness in fiction and nonfiction media. And I was really thinking about the ways that a class of people was overseeing us. I can't remember the exact moment where the word overseer came to mind. It might have had something, if it might have been when I rewatched Django Unchained and saw the character of Steven. Unfortunately, I share a name with him of Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained. But I started thinking about what overseers the people would actually oversee plantations, what characteristics they shared with police. And there were other in my time in graduate school, I started in 2014, around the same time I was reporting for the Guardian and Black Lives Matter. There are many ways that the links between the management of black life and overseers and modern police kind of came to be. But I was thinking about it explicitly in terms of black cops. And then another time was when I was moving through academia and I realized that black administrators or black gay administrators that I thought perhaps were going to be my allies and shepherding me towards tenure were actually going were actually in those jobs specifically hired, I believe, not to help people like me. They're hired into those Jobs explicitly to keep people like me in line. And that's how I think I kind of started thinking about what an Overseer class was.
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B
One of the. I mean, just the title, the Overseer Class. I know it's what drew me to the book because I had also. I had never heard that term before either, but it really encapsulates everything in just those three words. Like, it's very easy to understand, I feel like what the book is going to be about or its thesis simply by the title.
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A
I hope so. And I'm so glad to hear that, because one, I adore the COVID made by this artist, Jamal Barber, who just does beautiful work. He also did the artwork for the folio edition of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and my first book, which I also love, the COVID of the Viral Underclass. But it took us many drafts to get to that. And this was immediately. I knew that this was the COVID I want to give a shout out to my wonderful agent, Tanya McKinnon, who is a black woman who represents some authors that I really adore and has always pushed me to think more theoretically, even though I'm a person professor, or became a professor in the time that I started working with her. But for my first book, I had finished my PhD and I knew I wanted to write about the criminalization of hiv. I wasn't exactly sure what form it was going to take. And then Covid hit right as I was working on a book proposal, and Tanya looked at my. She said, send me your dissertation. And looked at the end of it and said, oh, the last chapter is called the Viral Underclass. Build a book around that. You've done this work already around viruses. There'll be flash in the pan books about COVID that come out that are published quickly, that might not be very good, but you have already done this theoretical work. And then I went through the process of very kindly and humbly, I hope, asking the person who coined the term the Viral Underclass if I can use it as the title of my book. A wonderful gay activist named Shawn Strub. And he gave me his blessing, and I was really grateful for that. And then when I was developing this idea, I kind of riffed on that to make the overseer class. And I thought, now I have a phrase I can say as my own. I'm the one that coined this one. And so I'm glad that it spoke to you into saying what it was. But I found in writing two books now, I've contributed to some others, but these are my Only two solo books. I don't really know what the book is about until it's done and other people start reading it. And some good friends of mine read it, and one of them said, oh, you went from writing about the abuse to the abusers. And I hadn't even seen that, but I think that's sort of true. The Viral. Yeah, the Viral Underclass is about. My friend Fausto said this. The Viral Underclass is about the people who are harmed by the systemic powers, and the overseer class are those who are enacting them or overseeing them.
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B
So, admittedly, I did not read the Viral Underclass. I listened to several podcast interviews you did about it. I'm thinking now, though, I'm like, okay, well, does this book center the overseers? I feel like the answer is yes. I almost want the answer not to be yes for some reason.
- [09:10]
A
But I certainly think. I mean, I think looking at who I write about in the book, I do write about people who are affected by overseers, but I'm both trying to name individual overseers and talk about that. This is a class that people are swept up into, and particularly in the chapter about higher education, which is the most. If people know about me, probably the most newsworthy way people would know about me and my experiences as a professor being punished over the issue of Palestine. But I think that I'm trying to show this is a class structure that can easily pull people into it. And so I think the first issue of understanding a problem is to name it, but also for people like, you know, perhaps like me, who could have been recruited into the NYPD or who were on the tenure track and then knocked off of it. But. But we're expected to become part of this overseer class. I hope that it helps. I hope it helps people understand it. I don't fully want to give away the ending of the book, but I will tease out that the final conclusion chapter, which I'm pretty proud of and made me teary when I was rereading it recently, is about the opposite, about people who are not overseers. And, you know, Toni Morrison, you know, one of the people I write about a lot. I do identify with people who are the opposite of overseers, too. But as the COVID of the book shows, we are going to be talking about overseers in this book and the class that they make up.
- [10:40]
B
Yeah, well. And you name names. Which, again, as. As a reader, early on, I made a note to myself, like, wow, like, he's gonna say all the. He's gonna say all the all the names. So, so yes, this is a class, but you've identified by first and last name, you know, every single person in, in the class. There's no euphemism, there's no a person this, a person that. Which then I was thinking about, I was like, well, you're a journalist, so maybe that makes sense because, you know, sure, that's what journalists do, but I, I mean, I, I'm gonna guess you never had a thought of not naming names. No.
- [11:24]
A
Like, I mean, I, I, I think about everything. I do, I hope, but, but it didn't occur to. Yeah, it didn't occur to me not to name names if they happened. I think there's a tension in the book and readers and critics will respond to it of how much should personal intent count? Because I'm identifying times where personal intent is almost irrelevant. I think this is one of the, in the chapter that I'm writing about DEI and what certain corporate practices around DEI programs in corporate settings, or around things like employee resource groups in corporate settings, I've met very few people who are not well meaning, which doesn't change my critique of the structures and how oftentimes people hired into DEI jobs are set up for failure. It doesn't matter how much. It doesn't matter what their intent is, the amount of power they have, the budget they have, the personnel they have, where their job is situated. Within the corporate hierarchy, intent almost doesn't matter. And in that case, I think my critique is of the structural. And then there are people who act as overseers when they could make different decisions. And for me, as a journalist writing about my own life, yeah, like, if something is true and it happened, then I'm going to write about it. I don't like reading euphemisms, and there are times not to name names. I think about this very thoughtfully when I teach students and when I do some of my other work that's not really in the purview of this book. For instance, I just, I'm wrapping up kind of a year of writing about the effects of USAID cuts and what it's had on what, what, how that's affected LGBT health around the world. And so obviously, if I'm in Uganda, which I was, and, and a trans person there is telling me their story under threat of death, I'm going to be very mindful of not having, identifying them. But if I've been, you know, if I'm writing about an experience where somebody has a significant amount of corporate power, university power, governmental power, then I am going to write about them. And I think those are, you know, different ways, but I. Yes, I guess it wouldn't have occurred to me not to use euphemisms. I hate when I read stories. And I just kind of say, this person did this or this person did that. And if it was, you know, a recordable act that I had experienced, I'm mindful of saying this is my experience, you know, this is my perception of what happened. I can't speak to the intent of what somebody did, but I certainly can write about my experience of what happened, including. One of the launch points of this book for me was the fact that as a faculty member that stepped between our students and the cops at my university, it was the chief of police who. Who hit me personally, and he was a black man. And so I thought that it was important to name that, not just. Not for no reason, but because it actually got to the heart of what I've been thinking about. Why are so many. Why are so many police officers black at these primarily white institutions? And so whenever I can record things and back them up with facts, I like to write them out.
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B
I want to talk about. You did kind of an informal study about that that I want to talk. And. But before we talk about that, I, I mentioned that, you know, I listened to some. Some podcasts that you did when you were promoting the last book, and I listened to one where you talked about your personal line between activism between activist and journalist, and sort of the toggling between activist and journalist. Talk about this, this book and, and you know, where you fall on that spectrum as it relates to this particular book. Yeah.
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A
This is something I've thought about for much of my career is where. Where am I situated? Where are journalists situated? And I think that we are not objective. I think we are. We have a subjectivity, and we have to be honest with the readers about that. And it doesn't mean you're always screaming your opinions. Sometimes it just means situating where you are in, In. In relation to a story. I do think as journalism overall is overwhelmingly under assault, and I just learned recently, long after finishing this book, that of the 500 and change industries that the. That the Bureau of Labor Studies journalism has had the sharpest decline of all of them, of literally everyone that they look at. And so I think, you know, if we want to save our industry or make it a place where people can actually do their work, there need to be certain conditions so that it can be done safely. I feel very strongly the same way about the almost 300 journalists who've been killed in Gaza, Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon that we need for journalists to be able to do their work safely. And to be able to do their work means having a political position on things. There's no neutrality. If a journalist is riding in with an army and reporting from behind the gun lines of an army, that is also not a objective position. And this book I did, actually, it's not in the text of the book, but it's something that I thought about a lot, that I was. I was writing. It was kind of, what position am I in at the moment? And often I. Often. Journalists are holding multiple identities, right? We're reporting on a story. We might be doing so in a certain. From a certain racial or gender perspective. A lot of the story in this book is about me as a professor, as a university professor, being in relation to students protesting. And I felt like I was in that position to some degree as a writer. Like, I'm writing about it long after the fact. I did do reporting on some of the encampments too, for Literary Hub, where I write pretty often. But in the moment when the university police were descending on our students, I was aware, like, I am there as a professor. That is my job that I'm getting paid for. My primary responsibility in this moment is to students. They could be economics students, they could be science students, they could be journalism students. And I am there for the journalism students to make sure they can report carefully. But first and foremost, in that moment, I am a professor. And so I need to be able to do my job to make sure that my students are safe and secure, that they can express their First Amendment rights, and that regardless of any of these things, that no physical harm comes to them. So for me, that was actually a little different way of understanding my role in that situation than some scenarios I've thought about before. I might have told this story in the viral underclass. I've certainly told it in my teaching about LGBT journalism practices. But I wrote a story for the New York Times many years ago about a homeless shelter for LGBT youth run by LGBT people. And the shelter was not being run well. There were safety violations. There were safety concerns, and I wrote about that. And I had some members of the community say, like, please don't write about it. It's going to make it look like queer people can't take care of our own kids. Can we handle it quietly? And there I say, like, there's a difference between me as a journalist and an activist there, because I'm like, I'm here as a journalist to write about our community. And if we don't talk about this openly, you know, we'll be in the same position as the Catholic Church, you know, where priests got moved around between places and kids were not taken well. And I also see myself as a community member, but my responsibility there is to the kids. You know, like, I'm there as a journalist to make sure the person with the least power is not. Not being taken advantage of by the institution. And so there I do see myself as a queer person with an interest in this, but my interest is in those kids who are homeless and have nowhere else to go and making sure that my work makes their circumstances as safe as possible. And because it was the New York Times, this doesn't always happen. You know, it worked immediately. There were immediate reforms. You know, things happen. Then there are new safety inspections. All the issues got taken care of right away. And so there are some activists, some I think are probably well meaning, who thought, like, can we just do this quietly? But there I see a difference. And oftentimes the line is not, you know, the line is not clear. I've been part of behind the scenes efforts to help get our colleague Ahmed Shaheeb Eldon released from custody in Kuwait. And he finally got out. And I'm very grateful that he did get out. But it's interesting to see, like, journalists, some, and I'm not knocking the effort. I'm glad, I'm glad we all, we all work together to do whatever we could to help him get out. But it was interesting seeing some journalists I had thought are more present themselves as objective people. And of course they're willing to help their friend. And I think that most of us as journalists or whatever kind of work we do, care about people. And that is something not to deny that journalists do. I think that's something that we should admit that we do and interrogate. I hope that's part of the groundwork that I'm laying down in this book. It's like, think about when we have power, who are we helping? When are we helping them? I think journalists always have to be thinking about this.
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B
So I mentioned before this study that you did around the racial makeup of university police departments talk about that, that it was fascinating.
- [21:10]
A
I tried to. Amy. I'm not a quantitative sociologist by training, but I figured out a way to have a focused inquiry around this. But basically I had just started noticing that so many of the campuses where I was writing about these encampments had a black chief of police and it seemed strange because there aren't that many black people. I've gone to these universities, I've reported at them. Columbia, nyu, Harvard, Northwestern. So many of the schools I went to, I would look up and see who's the top. Who's either the chief of police or the head of campus safety. Sometimes their job is something like vice president of campus safety. And so often it was a black person. And I don't, you know, I don't make huge sweeping claims that this is what happens at every university, but even of the ones I'm looking at, you can see this huge disparity where if they have, you know, if. If 90 or so percent of them have a black chief of police, they have like 5% black faculty or black students. And that's a huge gap. And I started thinking about why, you know, why is this. Why is the face doing the disciplinarian work at all of these campuses a black one? And I think it's because there is a comfort in having an overseer figure, having somebody who looks like Stephen in Django Unchained be the one who's meting out the justice. And that is particularly effective if they are going after black activists, black professors, black students, Palestinians, Arabs, queers, trans people. I think it's helpful from a PR perspective to not have it. Not have that person look like an old white man, but to be somebody, they can say, hey, you know, this is a diverse person in a diverse job, keeping our diverse communities safe.
- [22:56]
B
You did something similar. So you've got. We've talked about police quite a bit. You talked about academia. You've got chapters also on. On politicians, on the military as well. And you undertook a similar study in looking at cities with black politicians, black mayors of cities. Talk about that study that you. You did as well.
- [23:24]
A
Well, I know in cities that I. I call them sort of bl. BLM Cities. Cities where I had report on the black lives from under movement in the course of my. In the course of my career. And I saw that only a small fraction of them had had an increase in black. Their black population since the 1970s, which is when good racial data started to get collected around the demographics of cities. Overwhelmingly, these cities have had declines in black population, some incredibly severe. More than 50 or 60% of their black population has been ethnically cleansed through gentrification, through pushing people out and making it so that they can't afford to live anymore. New York, where, I believe where you live is kind of in the middle of the pack of this. It's gone from about 25% black to 20% black, which is a decrease of about 20%. And over the same time, it's almost an entirely black political class in all of these cities. And so I found that really fascinating of why is there this disconnect between a black voting base and an increased black leadership? And I think that's something similar. I'm in my hometown now, where I'm talking to you. Oxnard, California, just outside of Los Angeles. And through my youth, Mayor Bradley was the mayor in Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. And I think he had a very different kind of political base than Karen Bass, who's also black now. But when Bradley was first elected, he was elected at the height of the black population in Los Angeles. He also had a long relationship with the Latino Chicano community, as it was called at the time in Los Angeles. He'd also been a cop for 20 years, too, prior to. Prior to entering politics. And so he had this. This power base that could be understood. Karen Bass became mayor at the lowest point of black politics. But she's very supported by the real estate industry, by the Hollywood studios, by a number of the people who are connected to the LA Olympics. One of the main things that I think she was elected to do or financially supported to do, is to manage these Olympics, which include a massive ethnic cleansing of moving black people who are unhoused off the streets. And I think it's actually easier for someone like her to do it then. Chief Daryl Gates, who was the white head of the LAPD through my youth and when the Rodney King beatings happened. And so I think that a lot of these mayors are supported by real estate industry, by business interests in different urban centers of the United States, to be the overseers of the smooth transition of capital and to make sure that their primary agenda, which is extracting value out of real estate, is served. And there are, you know, there, I think, are pretty clear diversions from this or times where it doesn't happen as they'd want. I think Mayor Brendan Johnson, Chicago, has had an interesting agenda. He did not come for being supported by the real estate industry. Also, of course, Mayor Mamdani in New York City was not wanted by kind of the ruling class. And so it'll be interesting to see how his mayor rally turns out. But I think a lot of these people were heavily supported and by PAC money and by corporate money, such that their alliance didn't need to be with their dwindling black electorate. It could be with their donors.
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B
So, you know, we've Talked about a bunch of the threads that are in the book that, again, involved your, you know, your journalistic pursuit and whatnot. There's a good portion of the book, though, that is also what I would characterize as being cultural criticism in media, and media criticism, which I know is something that is near and dear to your heart. One of the. One of the lines in the book that I highlighted that I really loved a lot is you wrote the most effective propaganda on me is the propaganda I like. I feel like I want to talk about some of this. Some of this media. Media propaganda.
- [27:43]
A
So I was. Yeah, there, there. I love the Naked Gun movies. That is my soft spot in this.
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B
I do, too, by the way, although I don't think I. It's been a really long. I. I have not seen the reboot. It's been a while since I saw Frank Drebin.
- [28:00]
A
Yes, I watched the reboot more for. For. For research purposes. You don't need to worry about. Were bothered with it. And then I also, which I had not seen or I had not seen a very long time, the film in the Heat of the Night, which was Sidney Poitier as Lt. Virgil Tibbs. And it is an excellent movie. I was upset at how good of a movie it is because I wanted to not like it, but I did like it. And I realized it's often the propaganda we like that's the most effective. If you see something as propaganda and you reject it, then it's not working. Well, it's when you least think about it, or it's when you're least aware of it that I think that I can do its work on you the most. And humor, which I love. I love to laugh. I think, I hope I have a good sense of humor, and I love to laugh. But I'm also aware when we're laughing, our defenses are down, which there are good things about. You're laughing, you're very much in the moment. You are not overly analytical, but that's when messages can actually permeate you the most. And so I think that, you know, if people love Law and Order or whatever things they love, they should be the most critical about it, because if you like it, you're going to be less likely to be critical of it. And I try to be honest with the readers in this book and myself, you know, in the things that I like and, you know, realize that I like and don't want to let go of and feel personally attacked if somebody criticizes them. Those are the ones I've tried to have the strongest analysis of because I know I need to do the interior work myself.
- [29:39]
B
So we established before I hit record that you and I are the same age. And so we grew up with all. All of the same. All of the same media.
- [29:46]
A
We're like within five days of each other.
- [29:48]
B
Yeah, I'm the elder by five days. But, you know, thinking. Thinking through media and media as propaganda is something. I also do a lot of work in that area. So I'm thinking about it all the time. And you know, my. I love Law and Order. That is my Law and Order, the original is a very important place in my heart. And in thinking about it as propaganda, though, you know, one of the things that I try to think through and like, sort of even still today, I love. I love it. I love it. I watch it probably every week still. And why. You know why. Right. Like, why am I still watching this thing that I re. I can recognize the problems. And again, much of the propaganda that you're talking about and certainly the seasons through the nine, 11 years, for example, and when I think back to when the show premiered, and I think I was in high school, I think might have a senior in high school or something like that when it premiered. But, you know, I grew up. You confirmed we were seniors. Okay, we were seniors when it premiered. So actually it wasn't the premiere year because I don't want someone to. Also a law and order historian to come after me. This would have been a couple of seasons in. But we get Anita Van Buren s epither Merkerson playing the police lieutenant, a black, you know, black woman police lieutenant who, you know, would. Is. Was an overseer. Right. In the vernacular of the book. And for me, you know, someone who grew up in racial isolation in a rural, all white area, to see an intelligent black woman who was the boss of men was so inspiring. And talk about. Talk about that balance between. And it's. And even today, I think about like, well, was I attracted her because she was an overseer? I don't think so. I mean, I was excited. She was the boss of the men, for sure. But that had more to do with patriarchy, I think then it had to do with this idea that she was gonna be an overseer. I don't know, talk about that balance for.
- [32:12]
A
So I'll start with the balance and then we'll get into the particulars of this character. Okay. The balance, I think to a degree. I use a food analogy to think about this sometime is that, like, people can be fit at any size. You can, you know, exercise and have good weight at any size, but nobody can be healthy. If you're eating entirely a diet of junk food, regardless of your side, if you're only eating Doritos and Twinkies entirely, like, you can't be healthy. And I feel that way about a media diet. If your media diet is entirely Copaganda or cop propaganda and the Real Housewives and that's the entirety of what you watch now.
- [32:52]
B
You just feel attacked.
- [32:53]
A
You know, it's going to, you know, affect the way that you view the world and sort of. And see what the possibilities are. And after. Yeah, I. Part of the origin of this book was that I never really watched Brooklyn Nine nine. Well, I've seen a couple episodes now, but it was very popular and got canceled by Fox. And then it got moved, I think, to NBC. And the day between, you know, its cancellation, there was all this writing about it at a time where I was doing almost 100% of my reporting about the horrors of police violence and, and police racism. And I said, like, I just couldn't find this funny. This is, you know, this is propaganda. And I got very attacked for, for saying that. And I. And then I kind of dug into it more structurally. And so many hours of policing, of, of scripted television are policing. And after the geor. After the killing of George Floyd In 2020, there were much. There were large protests around this. The Color of Change did this big, big report. And actors talked about black actors, how those are the only roles that they could audition for were cops, cops and more cops, some other first responders. And even now, if you look at the, you know, the top 10, the top 20 TV shows, just hours and hours of it are Law and Order Cops, you know, these different policing shows set in Chicago, Chicago Fire, like these different. And all told, those have an impact on what we imagine as possible. So you were talking about, you know, wanting to see this powerful black woman and part of, you know, we also being in charge of the men. And that brings up patriarchy. The next question I would have in that thinking as well, is that woman in that police position, you know, is that actually good for women, broadly, the women that come under their purview? And I don't have the data handy to answer it, but that, that is analogous to a theory called imperial feminism, which says deals with the same thing with, with women. And there I can answer the question. It's like, you know, just having a woman general, is that better for the women of the global majority, the women Afghanistan, the women of Iraq. And the answer is, I can guess. Yeah, sure, sure, there. I know the data. It's not. And so one of the things I started thinking about was just what does this allow us to imagine into being? I am, I have become quite fond of the, the prison abolition movement, which is thinking about what a world would look like without prisons. And that doesn't mean immediately getting rid of them. It means rather than debating whether or not a particular person should be in a prison, to think about what would a world without prisons look like? What would it take to make that happen? And reading people like Mariame Kaba. There are all these stages that have to happen before that. One of them is the police department shouldn't be the primary place you're putting your money. And I'm in it right now. I'm in my childhood library as I'm talking to you. If you put more money into the library, you're probably going to need less money in juvenile hall. And so I think when we see police officers, it actually has a direct effect on how people perceive where their government money should be going, where their taxes should be going. If we see police all the time, we're more apt to think, yes, we need police. I'm in danger. The police are the most important, you know, thing that we need in our society. People routinely will think that being a police officer is a very dangerous job when it's not compared to many other jobs because of this kind of programming. And so in the news this week, one of the things I've been thinking about is how Michael B. Jordan just signed on to be in the reboot of Miami Vice Versa. Michael B. Jordan had a career. He was on All My Children, he was on other TV shows, but he really became a Hollywood star with a beautiful portrayal of Oscar Grant in the film Fruitvale Station in, I think 2012 or so. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the air off the top of my head. But it was not too long after Oscar Grant had been killed by police in Oakland. And that's what really put him on the map. And the same actor who's gone from playing the victim of police violence is now going to be playing a cop. And the social, the cultural criticism I have of that is actually less about his decision as an actor or what roles he plays. But we absorb these people. He is now a larger than life movie star. He just won for Sinners, another role, I would say, that challenged racism. Prior to that, he'd also played Killmonger, who I think is actually the anti establishment character in Black Panther. And now he is going to very much be the establishment. And I think that has an effect on what we imagine is possible. I think, especially looking at just this one case, we grow to imagine that this is inevitable, that everything has to be police, everyone has to be a cop eventually, and there's no other things to imagine. And that's why I like to think about what other things could we imagine? And Law and Order. Those kinds of shows make it harder for us to imagine those, especially when they just take up such a huge percent of the program.
- [38:10]
B
You know, when you bring up Michael B. Jordan, too, in his trajectory, I'm also. Because you make this point in that you talk about him in the book also, this trajectory. And I'm also struck by the fact that, at least on the surface, at the surface level, one would say, well, this. This path of success took him from being a crime, an actor who plays a crime victim to police. I mean, not just police. Right. Miami Vice. So. And that's success. Right. Like, now he's successful because he's gotten in. He's in as a result of his success. And as evidence of his success, he now gets to be the copy.
- [38:57]
A
Yeah. And I'm reading him here less as a laborer performing the role and what he's choosing to do here I'm reading more the character.
- [39:08]
B
Sure. Yes.
- [39:08]
A
And, you know, and thinking. And there's. Which I find similarly depressing for related but distinct reasons. Feels like every. Every actor, every director that has any kind of success out of the indie world either ends up, you know, Marvel superheroes or Cops. There's sort of this inevitability that feels like it happens. And, you know, this is not to. I'm not passing judgment on their own politics. I write about Sidney Poitier in the book and write critically about multiple of his portrayals while also acknowledging he starred in A Raisin in the sun in the same era. I'm writing about and was one of the most important, you know, activists in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. So I. I'm less interested sometimes when they're on screen and the actor and thinking about what does it mean for us as consumers of stories and seeing the people who tell our stories make this evolution and what message is that giving us? And I think one of them is very similar, like Law and Order, that this is just inevitable. That, you know, if you see someone who could choose any role after winning the Oscar, I mean, his movies have made a tremendous amount of money. And this is what he's choosing to do, I think subliminally, that's just part of. Yeah, you know, Miami Vice makes cops seem cool again. And I'm. I like to think about things together without saying one causes the other. But I. I've seen over the course of my career, in the 10 years or so that we've had good data on how many police kill people every year, it's not changed much. It's been between a thousand and twelve hundred people, around eleven hundred people every year for a decade. And at the same time, police budgets keep going up, and the portrayals of them keep making them seem inevitable. And I think that those are connected. They're not causal necessarily, but they are connected. And the more that we are encouraged to think that Miami Vice is cool, the less likely we are to say we need to. The only way to reduce police killings is to reduce the size of police. The police departments keep going up even as crime has been going down. But the police, the officers, the crimes. The crimes the officers commit are not going down. And so I think that we have to be very critical about when we see these roles depicted in mass media and what messages they're giving us.
- [41:31]
B
Well, I want to stick on mass media for just another minute. What do you think? What role do you think nostalgia plays?
- [41:38]
A
For me personally, it pays a huge role. So I'll think about the naked guy. I don't want to let go of something I have a lot invested in. And actually, this might seem a little bit of a tangent, but I haven't talked this aloud in person before or in a public forum, so you'll be the first to hear. Here are my thoughts on this. There are ways that people I think are rightly critical of Harry Potter and J.K. rowling and thinking about her transphobia and also thinking about Michael Jackson and the legacy with child abuse. And I actually think there's something slightly different happening from when people say, oh, I don't want to let go of this music that I listened to before I knew that, or I don't want to let go of these books that I read as a child. I think there's actually something slightly different. Different from that than saying, I'm actually going to go to the new Michael Jackson movie or to the Harry Potter experience or the new Harry Potter on hbo. You know, that's being developed and photograph myself and put that on social media. I think that creates a different dynamic than just nostalgia today. Nostalgia pulls us in in lots of ways. But when I say at the movie, when I say in the movie, when I say in the book, you know, that I'm gonna try to have no more Naked Gun. I'm gonna fail, I think, especially given that I'm doing a film series where I'm showing a bunch of these movies. And I know people will think about them critically, but I also think about, okay, like, just what would it, like, what would it take for me to make space for new things I've seen? You know, some things that we feel nostalgia for are holding us back from having new experiences. And sometimes I think, yeah, I could, you know, if I don't. But if I had kids, I could show them Harry Potter like I watched, or I could show them one of the thousands of other sci fi fantasy writers because there's like, there's all kinds of new things to discover all the time. And so I think oftentimes nostalgia is not even a. Nostalgia is a defense for, you know, quote unquote. Not canceling something has little to do with cancellation. But you could also just use your time to discover new things so you don't have to let go of your memories of something or say, I need to watch this every year for the rest of my life. You could use those two hours every year to see something new. And that actually doesn't mean throwing away your thoughts about the old one or might inform your thoughts about the old one in new ways.
- [44:11]
B
So in the book, it actually, this appears in the chapter where you're talking about academia, but to me, it's actually the sort of a thesis of, of every chapter of the book, even though it's only expressed in the chapter on academia. You ask, is it possible to be a person from a marginalized background in academia or I'd say, or corporate or politics or police or the military without turning into an overseer. And if so, how?
- [44:41]
A
It's a tough question, and that's why I throw it at the readers and think about it myself. I think that the short answer is it's a question that's going to come up again and again and one is going to be tested on. But the structure of these organizations is to turn you into an overseer and sort of the idea of long term success, which either means advancing up the ladder or even just surviving laterally for a long period of time. All the incentives around it are to move people into being overseers. And some of that's very racialized or, you know, or around patriarchy or CIS heterosexism. And some of it is the ways that the forces which have Shaped how we work, have evolved from plantations. It's not to say that we are literally working in plantations now, but the evolution of controlling labor through whips and through brute force has evolved into management techniques that come directly from the plantations, and those are still at play. And they reward certain behaviors and not others. So we are continuously. We are continuously being pushed to give into an overseer impulse. But in the end of the book, I do give lots of examples of people who have. Not only people who have evaded these structures, but of different structures and different relationships between laborers that can be a guide for how we can avoid these impulses and try to create different. Different structures.
- [46:14]
B
There's. There's a question of complicity, right? I think in the book that is to me what to me like, one of the most interesting questions of the book and the most uncomfortable questions. Talk, talk about, just talk about how you think, how you think about complicity.
- [46:32]
A
We're all complicit. Or I'll speak for myself, I'm complicit. Accepting any kind of reward within these systems is a form of complicity. And even stepping back from the more intense moments of my academic career, I was becoming complicit in all kinds of things that I am against student debt. You know, realizing students have to go into debt to take classes with me, that there's a process to get into elite universities that favor some people over others. You know, there are all these kind of things that we become complicit and we say, like, okay, I see these things that are not in alignment with my values, but I'm going to try to do my job in alignment with my values. And sometimes we get to test them in extremely dramatic ways. For me, it was the decision about whether or not to step between the students and the cops. In some ways, even though that's been a very. There have been a lot of painful ramifications from that. I'm very grateful for that opportunity to think about what my values were and answer in a way that I think would have made my parents proud if they were still alive. And so try to see that as a blessing. Often the times, though, those decisions are not so dramatic, and we end up saying, yes, a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And there was a writer, Susan. I'm apologizing. I might be mispronouncing her last name. Abilewa, I think it is, who's Palestinian, lives in Australia. And she was denounced by Mehramdani, and she responded with a 15 minute video for the ages from a South Asian auntie kind of reading of the riot act with incredible kindness. But one of the things, she praised him on many aspects of his job. But she said, like you have been pulled into criticizing someone, you probably don't even know who I am or you don't know anything about me. The facts of what you're responding to are not actually the facts of what actually happened. And I would like to send you some of my books. But she said, beware, because the forces are going to keep pulling you in a direction that siphons off your soul a little bit at a time. And I think that happens to us constantly in higher areas, higher ed in politics and any kind of corporate structure. We all have to work. You know, there's no judgment in that. Unless you are so independently wealthy you don't have to work and then there is judgment in that. But most of us have to work doing something and the conditions are going to be imperfect. And we try to do so in alignment with our values. But the impetus so often is to, is to drift. And part of why I think an overseer, an overseer in some ways is a standard for management, a stand in for capitalism, or it's a figure in these processes that basically are meant to take labor and value from workers and pull it up. And those who help pull it up are rewarded. And those like union leaders are punished or would be union leaders are punished. For example, last, the night before you and I recording was the Met Gala. And Chris Smalls, who became pretty well known for helping organize at the Amazon. Helping organize Amazon workers at the warehouse in Staten island was severely beaten protesting outside the Met Gala while Jeff Bezos was the, his, you know, one time boss, you know, was the main sponsor. Everyone on the carpet is, you know, complicit in turning their eyes away from that happening. But that is a dramatic version of what many of us, you know, experience in our workplaces. And I have at times been hurt by co workers or colleagues who have not spoken up about my situation. But there are times that I have not spoken out about others. So I would hope that. I don't have an answer. I mean, the end of the book points to people and structures that I have a great deal of admiration for, although they've gone through some of the hardest things in human history. But I don't have a clear answer. I, I'm, I'm uncomfortable hearing that you were uncomfortable and I'm also happy that you said you were uncomfortable because I would hope that my writing Creates questions that make people uncomfortable because that can help us reflect. And I hope that I, I try to put myself in some of these situations too. At the light hearted end, you know, talk about the naked gun, but on more serious ways, thinking about yeah, I was like, I, I'm not, I'm somebody that, that believes in free education and yet I've worked in and systems that, that do great economic harm to people. I have a tiny bit of my life that I do some clinical health care work, mostly policy health care work and I love working in environments where all health care is free. I only get to do it when I volunteer in other countries. But you know, anytime I participate in the state in some way, I realize, oh, some economic harm is going to be happening somebody. So we're all complicit and I'm hoping that the book can help us not be defensive in our complicity, but reflexive, reflective, so that we can think about and see the structures we're in and start to try to imagine other possibilities.
- [51:49]
B
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I went into the book expecting to be uncomfortable. I mean that's why it's sort of why I wanted to read it. As I said, the title sort of told me what I needed to know there. From that standpoint there was not a, it was, there's not no surprises in the book, you know, from that standpoint it was, it was as advertised. And like you, you know, I, I believe everyone is complicit, you know, some way somehow. And I, I, I don't know, maybe it's a cynic in me. I cannot fathom not being complicit in some way somehow.
- [52:23]
A
I mean I start the, I, I was very grateful. The estate of James Baldwin. Lets me use, let me use his quote about black cops in the beginning and then at the, at the very front of the book and then I think between the table contents in the first chapter, I have two more epigraphs together. And I was so grateful to the estate of Toni Morrison and to the very living and wonderful Chiesay Lehman for letting me put these in conversation with each other. Because it's both Toni Morrison saying, if you're a teacher, you have to, you know, you have to like teach your students that they, when they get theirs, they have to help others. And then Kiese very eloquently saying, we know these pyramids are racist and sexist and homophobic and we still want to be the ones to get to the top of them. Like we want to be rewarded with these jobs. That's a huge, you know, I will, when we think about complicity like that has been a huge challenge for me the last couple years. I, I'm, I'm still, as you introduced me, I'm still on the payroll at my university, but that's going to end in a few months and they haven't been letting me teach. And even as I've, even as I understood maybe more than most, the harm that academic institutions can do to people, I still really want a job. I want to be rewarded in the system in some way and to be able to say, yeah, but I'll do the least harm in it as I can. And I honestly have no idea what the future will hold. But I do know that eventually I will do some kind of employment and whatever it is, will be complicit in some way. But it's only with an awareness of it that I think any kind of reform, let alone abolition, is possible.
- [54:02]
B
So you just talked about James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Kiesa Layman, ksa Layman's actually been on the pod before, so huge, huge fan of his and all three of them. This book, though, you talked a bit. You, you alluded to the fact that the book ends with some strategies. It also ends with suggested further reading, which is more of an eclectic list than I think people might guess. Talk about, talk about maybe some of the things that are on this list, but also just why end with this suggested further reading list?
- [54:39]
A
Yeah, so that was really fun and I was, I was so grateful. My, my wonderful editor, Abby Wess and Pub at Amistad was game for me, including that Maris Kriseman, who is a writer I like very much, and her book I Wanna Burn this Place down, had a list and I think viral Underclass was on it. And I'd been keeping a list and academic books used to have bibliographies, which I liked. And so I kind of thought of doing it for a couple of reasons. One, I'm a more non traditional professor now, but this felt still a bit like sharing a syllabus. I also am very physically into books and even though your listeners can't hear it, I'm enjoying looking at you right now in front of all your books. I am very physically oriented when I write books. I've organized after a lot of chaos, I've organized how I want to write my book, which includes having a white ball, a whiteboard wall that I can write on, and having a table physically with all the books. And what I do is I actually group them by chapters so I Have every book I'm working with within each chapter in a pile. I started this with the viral under class, and they're physically there, and that helps keep me from getting lost in the computer. I use tabs for what I'm referring to and I'll have them there. And that helps me also imagine the conversations that people are like, what conversations I'm seeing between different writers. So especially after I saw Maris book that she had put suggested readings, I thought, yeah, like, I wanna suggest the books that I read. And so, yeah, it might've seemed more eclectic, but these were. Every book in here is a book that I either cited internally or literally inside of myself or internally while I was reading it. It involves culture, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the original text, a lot of works of criticism. Also articles that I read that were meaningful to me, which I also physically print out and put in these piles with the books. Yeah, and highlight.
- [56:56]
B
You have a big apartment.
- [56:59]
A
No, Well, I mean, I have moved. I have moved these books between. It's so ridiculous. I have moved these books between places so many times. But I have found that it is, even if it's a relatively small place, like, I had a small desk in one place and I put half of them on top and then the other half on the floor. And I would move them back and forth when I was working with them. But I find that it helps me conceptually so much to physically have the books than to constantly be scrolling and looking for where they are in a Google Drive or something. And so, yeah, I wanted to include, like. And I included poetry. You know, I included some spiritual books that I read while I was. And so I just do it as a way that people. If something touched them while they were. Or maybe they, you know, maybe they noticed and didn't clock it as they're reading through. And then they get to the end and say, oh, they're all here and they can see what it was that I was reading. And to do further reading, I, of course, can't do justice to any of these books that I am citing. So I want to say, like, yeah, if an idea or a sentence spoke to you, like, go read the whole book.
- [58:04]
B
Well, I think in addition to the breadth of the titles, again, fiction, nonfiction, I think what also I found interesting. You mentioned Uncle Tom's Cabin. That was one, for example. That of course you talk about it in the text itself, unsurprisingly.
- [58:23]
A
But
- [58:25]
B
to see it in a further reading list as opposed to, say, a bibliography. And I am differentiating those two things. This idea that you're pointing essentially saying to someone, go read Uncle Tom's Cabin, I thought was an. It's, it's an interesting choice.
- [58:45]
A
Well, as I said before, I don't know what my books are about until somebody tells me. So you have helped me understand the distinction between bibliography and suggested further reading.
- [58:55]
B
Well, I just made that up to be clear. I just made it, you know, I'm not from academia, so this is like
- [59:00]
A
in my head, not, you are an astute reader. So I like, it's fantastic to hear that distinction. And I haven't thought about asking someone to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. But I do try to reclaim. That's one of the things I do from the beginning. I try to reclaim the name Uncle Tom. I think Uncle Tom has been unfairly maligned in history by cliche because people think of Uncle Tom as a sellout and in the original text, which is a very difficult read and you know, hard and well criticized for many reasons. But the figure of Uncle Tom himself was not. He was somebody who refused to sell out the other people. He's, you know, he told Simon Legree, I'm not going to tell you where the runaways went and he's whipped to death. He's the opposite of an overseer in that way. And so, yeah, maybe in my further suggested readings, because I'm just flipping through it now as I talk to you, I like pointing people towards source material. And when I was, I mean, I still have some individual students that I advise and I've been on a kind of a pre publication speaking tour in some university settings doing some presentations on this book and also on my USAID research. And so I've gotten to meet with students. But one of my favorite things is putting a book in somebody's hand, you know, or telling them like, this is something that you should read. So I don't think everyone should read everything in my suggested further readings. But I do like the idea of someone finishing the book and then seeing oh, James by Percival Everett. I had been thinking about reading that and I want to go think of it now and think about the figure of Jim or James from Uncle Tom's Cabin, from Huckleberry Finn and go, you know, go read that. I like of somebody seeing it and seeing. Because I put some titles of essays in here too. Oh, KZ Lehman's I'll be so Proud when My Daughter's President Runs a Corrupt Oligarchy and like going and reading the whole thing. So I'm hoping that maybe if someone just flips through at the end and something catches their eye and was like, yeah, I did see a sentence about that, that maybe I should go look at the original source material. I think I'm also influenced because I started as a blogger and my journalism heydays were in the height of blogging, so I would just hyperlink to things, you know, whatever the source material was. I came up as a journalist thinking, I'm citing a number from a study, but you can just go look at the study and maybe you'll draw your own conclusions. And so I think that's what I'm sort of suggesting people do too. You might have a completely different take, but if you jump on it from my book, you're gonna have an Overseer class prism and they're somewhere. And I'm curious to hear what people think when they engage in that reading.
- [61:52]
B
Well, people can find the suggested reading list in the Overseer Class, a manifesto by Stephen Thrasher. You can find Stephen on Blue sky and Instagram thrasherxy. You have been listening to Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Sommer, a new books Network podcast. I am your host, Sullivan Sommer. If you like what you heard, like, follow and drop us a rating on your favorite podcast app. We're on Instagram additionstothearchive and we're free over on substack2, where you can find more great author interviews. Thank you for listening to Additions to the Archive.