Camille Foster (4:44)
My name is Camille Foster and I am Tangle's editor at large. Just got here, and the reason I joined Tangle is probably for the same reason most of you became subscribers in the first place. I prize thoughtful, transparent and reliably curious journalism, the kind of journalism that helps one make up their own minds. I'm not out there looking for another reheated hot take. That flatters my biases, but I'm always eager to read the greatest arguments I can find from across the political landscape, especially the ones that I'm inclined to disagree with. And my sense of things is that's what is required of a well informed citizen. Tangle is obsessed with producing exactly that kind of journalism and I'm eager to help advance that effort through my contributions to the newsletter, our weekly podcast, and beyond. I'm grateful to be here, I'm grateful you're along for the ride, and I really do look forward to us getting to know each other a little better. So to that end, I suppose some sort of brief bio is in order. I'm a first generation American of Scots Jamaican ancestry. At 16, I somehow convinced the most gorgeous girl in my high school to go on a date with me. We celebrated 20 years of marriage just over a week ago, and Today we've got two extraordinary kids, Leah, 7, and Cohen, 3. I've spent most of my adult life helping to build companies in a number of different industries, and about a decade ago my eclectic entrepreneurial pursuits led me to the world of media commentary and journalism. From my new perch here at Tangle, I'll survey everything from economic and foreign policy to science and tech journalism, media criticism writ large, civil liberties in particular, all things Cormac McCarthy and various other literary interest I have Humanity's search for meaning in the cosmos is another thing that I'm very interested in. In fact, I produced a multi part documentary series which was funded by the Templeton Foundation. It's called Dispatches from the well. I'll ask someone to put a link to it in the show notes. You should really check it out. I mean, it's, I think, pretty fabulous stuff. I'm quite proud of it, but I am certainly biased. And there's a universe of other things too. But interestingly, if you're already familiar with my work, or if you've been listening to the Sunday podcast, then you probably noticed something conspicuously absent from that list of things I'm interested in and planning to cover. Over the years I've developed a bit of a reputation for my often unconventional, if always reliably well researched, commentary on various issues at the intersection of race, identity and politics. I'm even under contract to write a book about this topic for St. Martin's Press, which I'm certainly making some progress on, but it's going to take a little while and it's changed in some ways from what I pitched. That said, I was a little reluctant to tread some of that same ground in my inaugural contribution for Tangle. I just kind of wanted to mix it up a bit. But with some encouragement from Isaac, and considering we are at the five year anniversary of this uniquely consequential moment in American history, the 2020 RA racial reckoning, it seemed appropriate to weigh in on this a bit. So that's what we're here to talk about. Today, and that's the piece that I'm going to read for you. I followed the evolution of racial justice activism since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in around 2013, after the death of Trayvon Martin. I anchored live broadcast during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown. But the extraordinary expansion of that movement in the summer of 2020, what some described as the fastest growing political movement in US History, was unlike anything that preceded it. In the midst of a global pandemic, American politics, media, and culture were swept up by a phenomenon whose legacy remains deeply misunderstood. Even after countless retrospectives, many of which were published in the past few months by the most prominent media outlets in the we've yet to fully appreciate what the movement achieved. Most of the analysis focuses on what didn't materialize. People expected sweeping legislative victories or lasting institutional reforms. Others highlight the unintended consequence of overstating the danger posed by policing, which in some instances led to something like the Ferguson Effect is what it was called during the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement, where there's this kind of spike in violent crime associated with these waves of activism. But as the Black squares took over Instagram back in 2020 and scores of corporate equity pledges were published online, I began to suspect that the most enduring legacy of the moment was bound to be philosophical in nature. In the end, the racial reckoning really reshaped the way that we talk to each other and talk about ourselves. It changed the way that we think about justice and the way that we encourage our children to see the world. A reckoning implies a confrontation with the truth, but this was something else, a kind of race monomania, less a moment of moral clarity than a refurbishing of the essentialism that crudely obscures our collective similarities and exaggerates our differences. Race during this period became the quintessential lens for political and moral analysis, not just the feature of our identities, but a framework for interpreting nearly everything. Hey, Black child. Almost two years after the pandemic drove us from Brooklyn, and just a month before the birth of our second child, my family relocated back to the east coast from California. There are a thousand small things to manage during a cross country move like that, but one particularly large thing emerged on a February morning when I was shuttling our 5 year old daughter to her first day at a new school. On her best days, Leah is the most gregarious and talkative person in our household. That morning she was all contemplation and single word replies. In a few minutes she'd be dropped into an already formed monastery class just a week after saying emotional goodbyes to her former classmates and a teacher she absolutely adored. I did my best to try to keep her spirits up, but I was preoccupied with my own ruminations about Leah's big day. I hoped she'd make new friends right away, that she'd forge an instant connection with her new teacher, and that the Chernobyl scale meltdown that would almost certainly unfold on the threshold of her new classroom, that it wouldn't last more than 10 or 15 minutes. We were a bit of a mess that morning, but as we drove into the parking garage and exited the car, the atmosphere felt noticeably lighter. The maelstrom of morning drop offs had ended at least an hour earlier. Showing up a little late was a good call. The elevator arrived immediately and we stepped aboard, still holding one another's hands. The ride up was quick, but just long enough to let a modicum of relief take hold. We stepped out of the elevator and into the school's reception area. Leah was scanning the room and gave my hand a quick squeeze. Then something caught my eye. Near the entrance stood a credenza and a bulletin board covered with a haphazard assemblage of Black History Month material, books on small plastic stands, postcards and flyers, and at the center, nearly the focal point of all of it, was a half letter sized, staple bound children's book with a glossy cover that barked its title in oversized block letters hey, Black Child. No doubt the display was conceived with the best of intentions, an effort to be inclusive. But I stopped imagining Leah greeting me at the end of the day with a wide smile because things worked out much better than I expected, and started wondering what assumptions her new teachers might already be holding the moment they meet her. Would they see Leah the way we do at home, as a singularly curious and deeply imaginative child, A child that's becoming more herself every single day? Or would they see a systematically disadvantaged minority, seared by struggle, in need of special handling and extra care? At five years old, Leah loved stargazing, had a budding interest in photography and physics and kind of philosophy as well. I can remember her asking me once, daddy, is infinity invisible? It's a weirdly profound question. Leah also has this diverse musical taste, which I perhaps helped cultivate a little bit. She loved Donny Hathaway and Michael Jackson, at least Jackson 5, Michael Jackson, James Taylor, and Lana Del Rey. She had, and still has, a rich inner world and an appetite for not quite age appropriate narrative fiction, which I'VE always been happy to indulge. I think, you know, reading Call of the Wild with the five year olds is a little ambitious, but she was super interested and we skipped the part towards the end where the raid on John Thornton's camp happens. She didn't need that detail to understand the substance of the story and seemed to enjoy it pretty well. But Leah had no conception of herself as a member of a racial group at that time, or as a black person in particular. And why should she? I was still wrestling with those thoughts when we found our way to Leah's classroom, and we were still holding hands when Leah's new teacher came out to greet us in the hall. This woman was a stranger to us and not at all like Leah's former teacher. She was noticeably younger, a woman with a much more quiet demeanor than her former teacher. But as she bent to meet Leah at eye level, greeting her by name and just about to open her mouth to say more, Leah slipped her hand out of mine and threw her arms around her new teacher in a desperate hug. I can't recall if Leah looked back as they entered the classroom together, but I certainly recall her teacher shooting me another confident grin. I was relieved to see Leah make an immediate connection with her new teacher. In that moment, I might have been contemplating a recent headline I'd read in the New York Times professing the importance of children sharing the race of their teacher. While that segregationist prescription would apparently satisfy both the concerns of Jim Crow era bigots and modern racial justice activists, the lack of any obvious ethnic or phenotypic similarities clearly didn't make much of a difference to Leah and her teacher. That morning, months before Leah was born, I interviewed historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. Via Skype. He was short on time, and our exchange was brief, but over the course of the call, we discussed various things James Baldwin, whom we both adore, and the subjective and artistic dimensions of doing history. And towards the end of our conversation, Dr. Gates offered an observation I'd heard paraphrased numerous times before. There are 42 million African Americans, he explained, that means there are 42 million ways to be black. This adage is something that he imparts to his students in his Harvard classroom at the end of each semester, and the idea resonated deeply with me. So deeply, in fact, that upon first encountering it, I had a thought. In fact, I asked myself a question. If there are as many ways to be black as there are black people, what exactly is blackness, and why should I bother with it at all? As the conversation was wrapping, I decided to share what may be my most controversial and for others, my most confounding and unconventional belief. I don't self identify as black and I can't imagine a valid reason to do so. Gates response to this was polite, brief and frankly a bit perplexing. He said, though you might see yourself as simply a human being when you walk in a room, very few Americans see you that way and that means that you inherit, whether you want to or not, all these stereotypes and connotations that are just part and parcel of being a black male. And you have to know that. And if you have a child, your child has to know that it's a form of self protection. Sooner or later you're going to encounter anti black racism and woe to the person who doesn't know that history. As I think back on it now, it remains frustrating to me that even when talking to a person who acknowledges the crude, nuance, flattening qualities of race, I still encounter resistance when insisting on full autonomy for myself. And that I would need to make a similar request on behalf of my daughter or son heightens the register of that frustration substantially. I've tracked the strange winds, both culturally and politically, that have helped to bring us to a point where such requests feel obligatory for me. I've spent a lifetime advocating for my own autonomy, but having to request amnesty for my daughter and son from having a racial identity imposed on them. That's a potent reminder of the odd and somewhat newly ascendant philosophy of racial equity. A James Baldwin quote comes to mind for the sake of one's children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion.
