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- [00:01]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Instagram. Teen accounts have automatic protections for what teens see and who can contact them, plus time management tools and Instagram will continue adding built in safety features to help create age appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online@instagram.com teenaccounts. We live in a moment now where the backlash to DEI is such that it's bone chilling. Yasha, you know they are shaking down the greatest institutions of higher learning that have ever been created. They are shaking them down like protection rackets in Brooklyn in the 40s or something. It's astonishing, but it is a reaction to something else that happened that was unbelievable. And now the good fight was with Yasha Monk.
- [01:05]
Yasha Monk
There's something strange about the summer of 2020. A global pandemic had the world in its grips. After the murder of George Floyd, we had the biggest demonstrations for racial justice in human history. We were in a moment of deep cultural ferment, perhaps at times in a form of moral panic as well. And yet these seemingly momentous events have nearly disappeared from notice since then. We have done very little to reflect upon them. Well, I've been on a mission to change that a little bit. We had a couple of really interesting conversations about COVID on this podcast today. I want to talk about the nature of that cultural moment and the long term political consequences it has had. And of course there's nobody better to talk about this than one of my absolute favorite writers. Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of three wonderful books, the most recent of which is about to be published. It is called Summer of Our the Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. We talked about that summer of 2020, about what hopes it represented and how in many ways it went wrong in ways that still shape our politics. And in the last part of this conversation, which is reserved for paying subscribers, we talked about the promise of a post racial politics that seemed to be in the air when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, and how that promise fell apart, what we should or shouldn't retain from it, as well as the ways in which Donald Trump is now dangerously shaping the country and what it would take to to create an effective, inspiring political alternative that can actually get us out of this dangerous political moment. Please support the podcast. Please help us be able to offer you these conversations every week and gain access to every full conversation. Stop having to listen to these annoying little reminders. I tell you. Please become a paying subscriber by going to jasamunk.substack.com. Thomas Chatterton Williams, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:55]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thanks. It's good to be back with you, Jascha.
- [03:58]
Yasha Monk
It's always a pleasure, Thomas. So your new book is all about the summer of 2020, but really more broadly about what the summer of 2020 tells us, tells us about this juncture of American history. It's funny reflecting back at those events as I was, obviously, during reading the book, because they seem so momentous at the time, and I think that they are deeply impactful on where we are today. And at the same time, it feels so remote. The pandemic has in many ways been pigeonholed, memory holed. It's rare that we think about it these days, you know, in part because it was an unpleasant time. I think people like to kind of bracket it out. But even the racial reckoning, which more than the pandemic is really at the heart of your book, feels like something that we're really downplaying now. You know, these were the biggest protests against racial injustice probably in the history of mankind. As you point out, they did go hand in hand with significant public disorder and a strange cultural moment motivated by very real anger, very real injustice. But that could nearly be described in parts as a strange kind of mania. All of us pretending that people like Ibram X Kendi and Robin Diangelo were the great sages of the age. And even some of the ideas that animated that particular strand of it now have been memory hold. And we pretend that, you know, we never believed in them. Talk us through this strange paradox.
- [05:25]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, it's so strange. You know, this was one of the most momentous and I guess like passionately felt moments or years in our collective lives. But today we almost have this impulse to only focus narrowly on the present and to act as though that time isn't still relevant to the political and cultural events that we're dealing with now. And I think that it's inextricable from the present moment. This was an enormous rupture. It's really one of those, I think, hinge years where there was a before and there was an after, like 1968 or maybe 2001. It was a pivotal moment. And there's a kind of criticism that you get whenever, especially if you're not a supporter of Donald Trump. You're not in the MAGA movement if you're a liberal who insists on pointing out the kind of, I think, self sabotaging overreach that the progressive left subjected us all to when they were ascendant in the. In the institutions that really influence our public lives. When you point that out, there's this kind of reflexive response that that's beside the point now because, you know, people are being snatched in front of the Home Depot or all of these other kind of egregious abuses that the Trump administration really is doing. They say it's beside the point, or they say, you know, it didn't happen like that. There's a kind of. There's a kind of, you know, desire to downplay the excess of five years ago. And so, you know, I think you cannot understand the intensity of the backlash that really is, I think, worse than what happened in 2020 that we're living through now without understanding the kind of cultural events and ideas that didn't cause, but absolutely provided a kind of justification for the abuses of power that are happening now. You can find any number of examples, but there's always an argument that you've been one of the best voices pointing out that wokeness, or whatever you want to call it, is a kind of. It creates the reactionary backlash. These things feed off of each other. And the only real solution is a principled liberalism in the middle that many people don't want to actually buy into or get exhausted from attempting to buy into.
- [07:59]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, and I think one of the concerns that we've obviously shared in this space is that a lot of people want to say, on the one side, there is this form of right wing authoritarian populism, demagogues like Donald Trump. On the other side, there is, you know, wokeness, and you have to choose because they're enemies and because the political sphere feels increasing like it's split between them. You have to think about which of those two is the lesser evil, and then pick your side. Now, some people might pick the side of Trump. A lot of our friends and acquaintances in our social circle will then pick the side of the liberals, trans. On the left. And you know, the argument that I've always made, and I know you've always made as well, is that this is a false way of thinking about it. That one, when you put these forms of left wing illiberal thought in competition with those forms of right wing illiberal thought, often the right wing forms of illiberal thought are going to win. And I think there's plenty of evidence for that from around the world. The second, that it's a forced choice, that these two movements actually nourish and reinforce each other, that each is the excuse for the other. And the only way to break out of that really dangerous spiral is to have a principled alternative which allows us to live more peacefully and sensibly together. Take us back to that moment in 2020. The pandemic is raging. You know, there's still very heavy restrictions on people being able to leave their homes to socialize, to go to church services, to attend funerals. And then those videos of George Floyd dying in the streets of Minneapolis, of being murdered in the streets of Minneapolis, are starting to make rounds on social media. You're in Paris at that point, sort of. When did you recognize that this was going to be a seminal cultural moment, a turning point in how we think about race? And how did you perceive those events at the time?
- [10:00]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, I remember that moment so vividly, and it's early in the book. This kind of. I was not. My family and I were lucky to have left Paris at the beginning of the pandemic, and we were sheltering in place closer to the ocean in the west of France with some friends at their house. And I remember, you know, I was, you know, had six hours, and I went upstairs to the office I was using and went onto Twitter and saw this video that, you know, you saw so many videos of violence over the years, years. You know, this one really stood out. And I said to myself at the time, wow, that's really. That's really something awful. But I was still amazed by the degree to which it went viral, as I think everybody must have been. But if you pull back and look at that moment and remember it, you know, we had been, by that point, locked down in a way that none of us really have a memory of. You know, that had nothing like that had happened in our lifetimes. We were all quarantined. We were all also dealing with kind of. Of relatively novel technologies that have changed the way that information is disseminated and the way that people collectively organize around the same few memes and the same few arguments and ideas. This book is really trying to make sense of the way in which whatever happened in 2020 couldn't have happened without a confluence of at least three factors, which is the pandemic, the racial reckoning, and the kind of specter of Donald Trump that's haunting all of it and intensifying every political disagreement. So we're all organized around this kind of homogenous reality that's coming to us through the screens that we're glued to. And the pause of our real lives gives people a lot of time to reflect on issues that they might not be able to devote so much attention to were they still having to go to work and take their kids to soccer practice and all that. So there's this kind of downtime as well. And if you remember, there had been for quite some time by that point an urge to rebel against something. And part of the country was rebelling against lockdown orders. And that was considered politically unacceptable. If you were not part of the right, that was not to be done. And those were grandmother killers and all of this selfish people who wanted to operate their hair salons while a black plague was descending upon the country. Because this was also already, by that point, a racialized pandemic. You know, the New Yorker ran a piece called the Black Plague. And you know, there was a kind of biological racecraft applied to the idea that poor people in certain communities who were working in certain types of more high risk jobs and were, as a result of that, at greater risk of exposure and at greater risk of death. Death from COVID that it was actually, in fact, a racial effect of the pandemic. These things were kind of conflated.
- [13:05]
Yasha Monk
As a side note, explain to our audience what you mean by this term racecraft, which I think is a really useful term that has come to be in use in certain circles, but I think is still not known that widely as coined by Barbara and Karen Fields. Tell us a little bit what you mean when you say worse with biological racecraft, where the New Yorker and other mainstream publications were kind of portraying this as further as a natural biological basis to the racially disparate effects that the pandemic may have had at a certain stage of its development later on. Actually, the pandemic, in a way that was never broadly covered in the media, ended up affecting and killing proportionately as many or even more white people than ethnic minorities.
- [13:49]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, it's the slipping of race into a kind of explanation where other factors actually can explain what's going on. But race, it's not racism. It's the use of the kind of idea that racial difference is real and it's a reification of the racial categories. So a good example that Barbara and Karen Fields, the two scholars who are sisters who coined the term use, is that there's this swimming pool that's segregated or is effectively segregated, and a bunch of inner city black kids are brought to the pool and start to swim, and all of the white people get out of the pool and they say that they get out of the pool because the kids are black. They couldn't swim in the pool. And the police come and the Kids have to leave, and the kids can't swim in the pool because they're black. That's not why they can't swim in the pool. But race just slips in. And we almost, without thinking about it, think that that's actually. There is an explanation in which the color of one's epidermis actually is the reason they can't swim in a pool. When there's all these other assumptions and kind of like gestures and habits and ways of thinking and seeing difference and making meaning in that difference that are at play, that have nothing to do with anything biological. So I'm saying that there's slipping in. There's a racecraft in saying that this was a black plague, and black and brown people are more at risk from COVID when in fact, what you're talking about is people that work in certain jobs, people without certain economic means at their disposal, all of these factors. But there is nothing biologically or racially real about the discrepancy in the numbers we were seeing. And so that kind of slips into the conversation and makes it about white supremacy and all these other things instead of about epidemiological responses to an epidemic that is still unfolding. Does that make sense?
- [15:50]
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- [16:20]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, one way to capture is. I don't think that gets to the full breadth of what Karen and Barbara Fields is saying here is that, you know, in France, social scientists tend to look at class but not race. And so they see everything through class terms, even when there's a racial dimension. In the United States, we tend to look at racial differences, but not at class differences. And so some of these early differences in who was affected by Covid had to do with differences in age structure and family structure differences, and who's likely to be in certain kind of frontline jobs. Those each have reasons that have to do with America's history and therefore also of certain forms of racial injustice. But to sort of go from, you know, black people at this stage of a pandemic are more affected by Covid in part because perhaps they're more likely to work frontline jobs where they're continuing to be out there during the high phase of a pandemic to Saying this is the Black Plague, and there's something kind of nearly metaphysical about the way in which it attacks the black body. You know, that's what I think the Field sisters would rightly decry as a form of race craft. To go to this moment, I mean, it's interesting to look at a few of these different elements, one of which is the pandemic, and then the way that intersects with the online world. The first thing is that I think pandemics bring us in touch with our mortality. And moments in history when we're in touch with our mortality, whether that is the actual plague or other pestilent diseases or wars, is that they tend to create millenarian movements. And I think there's a kind of obvious connection between those two things that was somewhat missed in 2020. I mean, there was something about the Summer of George Floyd, which was a millenarian movement. And I don't think that is a coincidence that that came at the time of the pandemic. A second more prosaic reason is that you are locked in at home without being able to go see your friends, without being able to go see family. And then when this happened and the first protest broke out and a thousand public health officials said it is good for public health for people to go protest, it was the one experience of collective effervescence. You could have. You couldn't go to a concert, you couldn't go play basketball with your friends, you couldn't go to church, for that matter, you could go take part in those protests. And that surely was a very important element of this as well.
- [18:56]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Well, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say when, when we went off into the conversation on a racecraft, is that, you know, it was politically unrespectable to go out and rebel against stay at home orders or anything like that. That was associated. That was right. Coded. But suddenly there was a righteous cause that you could actually join and that would allow you to go outside and rebel. And it would be seen through the prism of moral clarity, and it would be completely different. You were told, you were even told by public health officials that it would be different because racism is also a pandemic. We were told there was a letter signed by over a thousand public health officials and physicians that said that they could not in good conscience tell people not to mask collectively in the fight against racism when, just prior to the day that George Floyd was killed, Their. Their. Their guidance was to make sure you do not mask collectively. So this was. This was really something that happened. Like with a flip of a switch. Like one day we're shaming people for being out in the streets, the next day we are actually shaming people for not being out of the streets. And I mean, literally not. You were. Where is your black square? On Instagram? What are you doing in this moment of racial reckoning? You can't just be sitting home and being complacent or self centered. So that was really a shocking thing to see. And I think you're right about the millenarian impulse. There was a kind of sense of the institutions that we believe protect us clearly are letting us down. The President's on TV every day saying, maybe drink some bleach, maybe shine light inside your body. Things like this. He's kind of cavalierly playing with the body. Politicians. And I think people felt. And this is one of the things that I think is very moving about the moment. I don't mean to disparage it entirely. I mean, I think there was very earnest kind of goodwill that many people in the country felt about earnestly trying to improve the society and fight something that seemed horrific, you know, that this man was so callously kneeled upon for 10 minutes essentially until he died in plain daylight in front of a bunch of onlookers. And people themselves were feeling vulnerable and were outraged that a policeman could so cavalierly play with their safety as it felt like the President of the United States was even cavalierly playing with all of our safety and his mismanagement of the pandemic. I think there was a real empathy or sympathy that was genuine, but I think it's had all kinds of disastrous consequences, especially when we got to the point that lawlessness, disorder, rioting, looting, violence, all of this can be justified when one is feeling that their kind of political disagreements are not being taken seriously through the proper venues.
- [21:54]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, I feel like one way to think about this is to try to separate out the noble core of that moment. And like you, I share the instinct to say, you know, the biggest mass protests against racism in favor of racial justice in the history of humanity must have something noble about them. And I've always believed that we shouldn't cede the term of anti racist to people with a very peculiar brand of ideology rooted in a particular kind of form of critical race theory. I'm deeply and proudly and fundamentally an anti racist. I'm just a universal anti racist somebody who opposes racism on universalist grounds. Because I don't think that race or those forms of race craft have anything to do with the worth of an individual human being and therefore oppose social arrangements which denigrate people or relegate them to second class citizenship, or mistreat them on the basis of that racecraft. But there's that very noble instinct which is, I think, what brought the vast majority of participants out into the streets, into these protests in a particular historical moment that also helps to explain some of that collective fervor. And then there's sort of a form it took. And one part of the form it took is like any mass protest that you then end up having, you know, riots and public disorder. Not like any public protest, but many. But somehow we weren't willing and able to talk about that, right? Like the nobility of a cause in whose name those riots were happening, even if in many cases they really had nothing to do with them, either in terms of who the people rioting were or the nature of a rioting, like, you know, robbing stores in SoHo in New York. In any way contributing to that goal somehow made such big swaths of mainstream media unwilling to criticize or even just to acknowledge that. And, you know, you had outlets like NPR running articles in favor of looting. Right. By highly privileged people who are writing these pieces. Of course, you know, the second question, the second tragedy I think of that moment is how is it that that anti racist instinct, which I think for most people was a universalist instinct, was an instinct to say, why is it that disproportionately many black people are killed by police in this country? Right. Why is it that the history of slavery still has all of these after effects in our society today, then got commandeered by this very strange ideology, you know, promulgated by the sort of sages of 2020 like Kendi and D', Angelo, who were sacralized, who, you know, whose ideas were pushed forward in such a way that the mildest disagreement with them felt like sacrilege, and that mainstream outlets killed articles by regular columnists and contributors and staff writers that would criticize them in any kind of way for fear of their own staff and outside reactions, etc. And then somehow, five years later, we pretend these ideas never existed and those figures have basically fallen out of public life. So what is the kind of tragedy that all of this energy doesn't get channeled and fomented into building an ideology that can actually improve America and help the country live up to its grandest promise, but rather gets hijacked by these ideas that feel all powerful in 2020 and now are not fully. I don't want to overstate the Point, but to a large extent, disowned even by the people who were its loudest mouthpieces not half a decade ago.
- [25:32]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
One of the reasons you can't cleanly extricate the current crisis from what preceded it is because. Take, for example, the backlash against DEI and things like this. That backlash is not coming out of nowhere. The. The truth is that very few black people actually find themselves living day to day in the same circumstances that George Floyd was living in. He's a real member of the kind of American subaltern the man is impoverished, without education, without resources or connections, addicted to drugs. He died as a black man, but he also died first and foremost, I would argue, as a poor man. And that is not a condition that is universally shared by black Americans in the year 2020. What this quickly became. And also I would say that the numbers of unarmed black men who are killed in police custody are actually quite low in a nation of this size. They're higher than is acceptable. They're higher than in comparably rich countries. But it is not the kind of genocide or epidemic that it was described as at the time. But one thing that actually caught on very quickly was that the way to. When inequality and racial bias and oppression become expanded, it can become an HR issue. It can become an issue of access to elite institutions and greater equity within kind of the meritocratic spaces that everybody wants access to. And so the issue of George Floyd's death was able to be used almost metaphorically in a way that his kind of victimization was a garment that could be donned by anybody who. Who could claim membership in that identity group. And you saw really pretty extraordinary things happen in 2020. Nothing actually shocked me more than what happened at the Poetry foundation, if you remember this. You know, the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical fortune endowed the Poetry foundation with a $257 million endowment. They were in charge of Poetry magazine in the wake of George Floyd days. After George Floyd died, you immediately had people who have no life experiences that resemble George Floyd's whatsoever, claiming that the entire Poetry Foundation's board and operating structure had to be reimagined and the endowment had to be made available to them so that they could figure out how to use it to fund black. I forget the phrase. But like black flourishing, things like this started to happen. It mattered that, you know, George Floyd died, so my play on Broadway has to be funded. George Floyd died. So I need this fellowship at Harvard. You know, this was really happening. So we live in a moment now where the backlash to DEI is such that it's bone chilling. Yasha, you know, they are shaking down the greatest institutions of higher learning that have ever been created. They are shaking them down like protection rackets in Brooklyn in the 40s or something. It's astonishing shame if something bad should
- [28:48]
Yasha Monk
happen to your lovely university you've got over here.
- [28:50]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Exactly. But it is a reaction to something else that happened that was unbelievable actually, that George Floyd died. So I have to run the Harvard Law Review. So it's not the same in proportion, but it is not exactly a kind of unimaginable reaction to previous shakedowns that were happening. What happened at the Poetry foundation was like a mixture of. I call it in the book. It was a combination of Barbarians at the Gate and MAU Mauing the Flat Catchers. If you know these two books, you know, it was a hostile takeover with the techniques that Tom Wolfe was already remarking on of kind of playing on racial guilt. And it was effective and it inspired an enormous amount of resentment. People, people who are angry about it haven't forgotten. People who thought, you know, this was a response to an outrageous death of a man in Minneapolis seem to have memory hold the extraordinary abuses that were countenanced and sometimes even deemed necessary.
- [29:50]
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- [30:20]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, I have a few thoughts on this. I mean, one is that often in politics, the anger is elicited by one thing, but the sort of area in which somebody has agency doesn't match that cleanly. But that's what it ends up having impacts on. To use a completely different example, the reason why the Trump administration is going after the universities is probably to be found in Comparative Literature departments and perhaps Departments of American Studies and Departments of Middle Eastern Studies or something like that. But the federal government doesn't fund those departments. It funds mostly scientific labs through the NIH and other kind of funding bodies. And so, you know, it's able to go after the hard sciences, even though what it's angry about is the humanities. And so there's a sort of weird, I mean, beyond the fact that, as you're saying, it's just an immoral protection record, you know, Mafia style shakedown to begin with. It's sort of a weirdly misplaced attack because that's where the tool is. Very different thing, but the sort of structure of, you know, we are angry, and rightly angry, at the fact that a lot of African Americans still live lives of deep disadvantage. And this creates this format around the fate of somebody like George Floyd, who's a complicated figure, but shaped, as you're saying, perhaps in certain ways by his race, but certainly also by his class. But it's not very easy to take somebody who's living in the poorest segments of the Twin Cities or in stretches of Baltimore or in the south side of Chicago, or in the poorest parts of New York and somehow elevate them to some form of affluence. What you can do is to take those people who are already relatively elite, who are already poets or already at an elite university, and say, well, they should now be promoted and visualized, et cetera, right? And so the anger which isuscitated by the fate of the poorest black Americans, then somehow turns into every fellowship from a prestigious program, every slot on this theater schedule, every dollar from the endowment of a poetry foundation has to go to these comparatively, relatively privileged people. And there's a kind of weird misplacement there, right?
- [32:45]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
There's a very weird space because this idea of representation, through the magic of representation, an Ivy League educated, upper middle class person who has a similar physical appearance in certain superficial ways to George Floyd has to be made whole even when, and I think this is inextricable from the backlash, even when objectively, regardless of ancestry and historical circumstance and oppression, they're probably in an advantageous position vis a vis most white Americans. And see, that is something that I think a lot of people were seeing with their own eyes, that people that were already doing better than them were also somehow representing or being represented by George Floyd and being given advantages that were just compounding the spoils they've already received in that game of representation. And so I think that that created oftentimes extraordinary racist backlash that's unjustifiable. But also it was an awareness that these people are already getting by fine in the meritocracy. It was a very strange thing to witness. You know, like, I have a good friend who I met by profiling him a couple of years ago, Michael R. Jackson. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, just a brilliant guy. And, you know, he's black. And he said, George Floyd died. And one of my, like a theater goer writes me and says, I need to buy you a bulletproof vest. And he says, why? He says, I don't need that. And I'm like a success. That's almost. It's insulting even I'm a successful playwright. And the guy just kept demanding that he needed him to be safe and that it was open season on black males. So he just as a joke, said just Venmo me the worth of the guy venmoes him $400. This stuff was happening just like that. Any Pulitzer Prize winning playwright is a stand in for the American subaltern. And it's disrespectful to the actual plight of George Floyd. It trivializes the challenges that he was actually against. To think that giving any black person within your vicinity $5 by Venmo to get a Starbucks, which was happening, that that somehow is addressing the deep and severe inequality that does have roots in the American the slave trade and American chattel slavery and the African slave trade. To think that that can be redeemed by just reaching for any person of color in your vicinity and trying to make them whole in some small way that makes you feel good. This was kind of the madness of 2020. You know, I think the black square phenomenon where white people were not even interacting with black people, but were just amongst themselves exerting a kind of pressure to perform the care of black people that never even required the presence of a black person. This was astonishing. It had physical instantiations in places like Portland. You know, there's these neighborhoods where not a single black person lives. There might be somebody sleeping on the street nearby, but no one owns a home in these neighborhoods and every home had Black Lives Matter on it. There's more Black Lives Matter signs than black neighbors. And this is just, it's intra white kind of status jockeying and virtue signaling. And I think that rubbed a great, a good proportion of the country the wrong way. And, you know, this is also linked to the phenomenon that really gets short shrift still is that Trump built in, coming back in 2024 after the, you know, the pandemic loss in 2020, he steadily built increasing support among blacks and Latinos and other people of color, so called people of color who felt alienated from that kind of white virtue signaling too.
- [36:40]
Yasha Monk
One thing that strikes me is that in 2016, Trump during the election campaign said explicitly addressing African Americans, vote for me. What do you have to lose? And rightly that elicited a lot of outrage of people saying, what do you mean black people don't have anything to lose. A lot of black people have a lot to lose in this country. Right. And somehow in 2020, that line by Trump became the standard representation of African Americans in the mainstream media. That the state and the fate of the average black person in the United States is so dire that they got nothing to lose, basically. Right. And they don't have anything to lose if people torch down neighborhoods, many of
- [37:20]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
which are disproportionately their own businesses.
- [37:22]
Yasha Monk
And of course, I mean, I thought about this a good amount when I was writing the great Experiment, and I looked into a lot of figures and data, et cetera, about various minority groups in the United States, particularly African Americans. And you know, there's sort of two truths that we have to hold in our heads at the same time. And somehow that seems too complicated for a lot of political discourse. And the first of those is that the average African American is doing pretty well. In fact, the average African American is now more affluent than the average European part because the standard of living of the United States is now much higher than that of Europe. But, you know, on like, all the relevant metrics, the average African American is more affluent than the average European. And, you know, I have a line in that book. You know, the average African American lives in the suburbs rather than the inner city. They have a white collar job rather than a blue collar job or an unskilled work. They have employer sponsored health insurance, which is of course a sign of having a relatively high quality job, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. At the same time, there is a disproportionate share of African Americans who do suffer from the kind of compound disadvantage that George Floyd suffered from that is not the majority of African Americans, not anywhere close to it, but it is proportionate. And there's absolutely also Latinos, Asian Americans, and of course, white people who suffer from that compound disadvantage. But it is disproportionately high. And obviously, when you are in some parts of a country, whether it's the south side of Chicago, certain parts of Philly, et cetera, you see that. And that is a real challenge. We what's so frustrating about this conversation is the inability to keep those two things in our heads at the same time, that there's now a big thriving black upper and upper middle class, that the average black American leads a pretty decent life by comparison to any other country today and any period in the history of mankind. And that there's also a tragically disproportionate share of black people who, because of the legacy of slavery and a million other things still do continue to suffer from those kind of injustices. And a politics that takes all three of those insights seriously would be a lot more productive than one that only focuses on one of those three points.
- [39:35]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
That's right. It would require a kind of nuance that I think is actually difficult to achieve because of that technological component of the past 10 to 15 years that we're thinking about when we think about the social justice movement that really rose up to dominate institutions. You know, one of the things that's at play here, yes, class is raced and race is classed, but neither is a. Is a, is an adequate stand in for the other. Most poor people in America are still white numerically by far. And plenty of black people have never experienced anything like what George Floyd lived through prior to his death. But one of the things that I think distorts the public conversation and our politics so much and has really become a huge problem since about, you would have to say since like 2012, 2013. But it's the rise of Twitter and other social media platforms with the iPhone in the pocket and the camera technology we have and the ability to disseminate videos and the algorithmic sharing of feeds. People have no conception of the amount of unarmed black people that are actually killed by police. I mean, I think the year that George Floyd died, people fought 1000 unarmed black people a year when they were polled, died a year. It's not, it's not close to that. It's. It's. It's like 25 in a population of 44 million in a nation of greater than of like 330 million. It's absolutely abhorrent. But it is not the thing. It is not the genocide that some people were saying there's a black genocide, as the. The letter to the Poetry foundation board actually stated. It's nothing like that. But the kind of ubiquity of the spectacle of black death and this notion that black men are being stalked and this kind of. This incessant display of black pain and suffering and violence against what was at the time called black bodies, I think that really shaped the politics around this being a kind of emergency that couldn't rely on the usual way of doing business and any means necessary was required for that kind of. For an intervention against the kind of, you know, precarity with which black people's lives are lived. You know, this is. This is a feature of a society that doesn't have a sense of how large it is or how what the actual face of, you know, numerically, most people killed by police are also white. But very few people actually appreciate that, you know, what? The people think that there's more black people in the country than there are. Even so, there's a lack of understanding of. Of numbers and probability and frequency of occurrences that I think really distorts what we're talking about when we talk about class, race, law enforcement. And I don't know how to actually get over that. When you look at people's perceptions of black crime, it's also similarly distorted. And since Elon Musk took over Twitter, you get this kind of incessant black crime porn that makes people think that, you know, black people are much more deserving of violent responses from the police than, in fact, we are. So the whole thing, I think, gets social media exacerbates all the kind of discursive problems that we're seeing.
- [43:07]
Yasha Monk
Another element of the summer of 2020, which seems peculiar in retrospect, and which I think does help to build your thesis that all of this led to considerable backlash, is the cancellations of people who had minor or imagined transgressions against the politics of the moment and just the kind of culture of collective irrationality around some of those things. You know, I've written about a bunch of these things. I mean, listen to. To his podcast will recall some of these examples of a Latino utility worker who is accused of doing a white supremacist sign when he just has his hand dangling out of a truck. The sign he's accused of making is just the okay sign, which for most people in America just means that's okay. But in some weird corners of the Internet has become so so far, right? The professor who holds a lecture about filler words advising people not to say ah and am and well, and you know, who then for his, you know, one third Chinese student body also repeats a few times the most common Chinese filler word, which has some passing resemblance to the N word, and thereby, you know, gets denounced by his dean and suspended from his teaching. We can go on with those. You know, I want to make two points about this. The first is how the background of a pandemic had, I think, a lot to do with that as well, that if you have all day to sit at home and find things to be upset about on Twitter, if you have staff meetings in which you're not physically in the same room and you can't look each other in the same eye and you can't take somebody apart saying, hey, let's work this out, that Makes it much easier to, you know, all take to slack or take to, you know, zoom chat and say, this person is evil. They're going to be fired right now. And I think a lot of the most absurd examples of what happened happened in 2020 are product of that. But the second is that that I think does have lasting impacts in ways people underestimate. You know, by definition, everything that we read about in terms of these cancellations are stories of relatively prominent people at relatively prominent institutions. Otherwise we wouldn't read about it. Right. It wouldn't make the New York Times. But I'm just struck by how many people who are actually quite sympathetic to WOKE ideology in various ways, who are certainly sympathetic to the protests over the killing of George Floyd, have since told me about their personal stories, you know, in obscure organizations involving obscure people being canceled in the same kind of way. And I do think that when you're trying to look at why it is that so many Latinos, Asian Americans, some African Americans, Republicans, have moved away from the Democrats over the last five years and why so many young people who I think often experience those cancellations in middle school, right in their communities, have become quite skeptical about the political left in America. I mean, Joe Biden's age and all of that obviously played a role as well. You know, I think that does have some of its roots in that really unforgiving culture of consolation.
- [46:26]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, forgiving is the word. There's such little space for grace anywhere now. And I think that that is directly related to the kind of ease with which somebody can just become a representation of something abhorrent that's not attached to an actual person's complexity. So you're interacting with people. The pandemic made us retreat to our screens. You don't walk out into the hallway and work things out, but you make an example of your own. You perform your own values by targeting somebody who represents the wrong values, and you jockey for status and position that way. Let's not forget these types of purges. As Hannah Arendt even pointed out, purges are job opportunities. People were getting rid of people with outmoded ways of thinking and sliding into promotional slots in the organizations that they thought that they would run better. That's part of it. And then what you're talking about also that I think is really important is that cancellations are just the things that you read about, and as you say, they're at the institutions that you read about. But the much more important thing going on is the onlooker effect. The amount of People you never read about being canceled because they watched the example be made and then they self censored. And that really, really is, I think, pragmatically very ineffective. If what you want to do is understand the polity that you live in, you have this situation where people have preference falsification. You're continuously surprised at the amount of support someone like Donald Trump has because everybody's unwilling to say what they actually think about issues because there is no grace extended and there is no notion of good faith disagreement on certain issues. So every election, how is he winning, how is he gaining with black males, how is he gaining with Latinos? Was because no one's telling you what they actually think. And that is, I think, maybe the most destructive consequence of the kind of identity left coercive virtue signaling and mono thought that really dominated the most influential academic media, cultural spaces. That we all have to, you know, make this society through cancellation to this day is really downplayed. You know, anytime you try to talk about one of the things that you mentioned, or any of the ones that I mentioned in the book, the response is Trump is disappearing people or any number of. What about isms? But the idea that politics can be conducted where, you know, where, you know something is only wrong when it's done against the values that I hold, I mean, that, that just doesn't work. That, that cannot work. And so I think that, you know, this is probably the most naive thing I'd advocate for, but there really has to be some kind of move back to extending grace and allowing for people to, to, to disagree and trying to have that kind of nuanced compromise or negotiation about what values can be. And especially when we're talking about values that are not yet set as agreed upon norms. Most of the cancellations also happened on kind of contested norms that were not yet set in place. Like even more than race, around gender, that somebody could be canceled for saying the wrong thing that wasn't yet agreed upon or it wasn't yet a consensus. And that was kind of a way of staking out the territory, you know, making the example of somebody so that you now have a new norm. And I think that that was extraordinarily destructive. And if you're, and I'll just end the point by saying that if you're actually just trying to achieve greater dignity and inclusion for say, trans people, well, what did that actually achieve? Because it was a Pyrrhic victory, because now there's even less than there had been prior to that kind of moment where we could say that they overplayed the hand.
- [50:36]
Yasha Monk
One of the ways in which that moment has stayed with me. And I think will stay with me for the rest of my life. Is that I do feel I've experienced what it feels like to live through a kind of collective moral panic. You know, I want to be clear that the punishment that were meted out in 2020 were not comparable to those that were meted out in salem in the 17th century or in China in the 1960s. But many of the mechanisms were right. The accusation of a fraud, crime, of a weird behavior, which were often extremely circumstantial. The fact that anybody who then came through the defense of that person themselves immediately made themselves guilty and subject to attack. The forms of enforced silence. I mean, I'm just struck by how in those months and years, people, when you would talk about certain subjects in, you know, a random Starbucks somewhere where you didn't have any reason to think, but anybody who knew you was anywhere around would just, like, inadvertently and without being conscious of it, just like, drop the level of sound which we're speaking by an order of magnitude and suddenly whispering. And, you know, sometimes I pointed it out. You realize you suddenly started whispering. And people were kind of taken aback and shocked by it. But. Oh, yeah, I guess that's right. You know, I was subconsciously worried that some might overhear what I'm saying. And that, to me, has, I think, I guess, positively framed. Revealed something about human nature that I had read about in books but that I now understand more fully. I suppose that's a positive thing, But I think it. I'm quite an optimistic person. I think, in general, has made me a little bit more pessimistic about human nature. I mean, these forms of collective moral panic are ever present human possibility. And they're present on the right as well as the left. And they're present in the service of exclusion and nationalism, as well as the supposed service of, you know, fighting for the inclusion of minority groups. And if we don't learn that lesson of always being on the guard against those forms of, you know, collective mania and punishment, I think it's going to have very bad effects in. In all kinds of ways.
- [52:55]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're really talking about the fundamental aspect of human nature that is searching for scapegoats, designating scapegoats, and the kind of. As. As Rene Girard points out so well, the kind of communal cohesion and harmony that's achieved through the designation and punishment or outcasting of the scapegoat. That's so real. And I think that why 2020 matters so much to me and why I couldn't just move on and worry about the next thing is because you're right, that is the first time in my life, I'm 44 years old, that I ever saw that play itself out. And it's terrifying. And people think that there's no big deal and you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. And if some privileged editor loses a job, why are we all sitting here talking about it? But the effects are much more destructive than that. And guilt by association is one of the most nefarious things that you can have in public life. And the shaming of people who don't try and convict somebody based off of the accusation, I think that's one of the scariest things was really weaponized at this time. And then what has happened is that we do have to acknowledge that everything is more intense and disturbing and dangerous when it has the power of the government behind it. But any number of kind of punitive measures or. Things that look like cancel culture that the Trump administration is doing, you can find a precedent for that that happened in the years preceding in any number of institutions that were brought about by the left. And so this always forms the kind of, and it might be a cynical justification, but it forms the justification in their minds and in their excuse making that they use for why they're doing this now, because you have a situation where both sides see that the normal way, the liberal way of doing business can't be, can't be demanded of them in a state of emergency and this is emergency and they have to win at all costs. It's a zero sum game. And so, yeah, I've been left a bit more pessimistic too. But I ultimately do think that I just have to believe I really, this is the part of me that was shaped during the, you know, the Obama era. And I can't quite shake it. I have to believe that that glimpse of a kind of multi ethnic society that wanted to transcend the divisions and oppressions of the past, I have to believe that that still is really possible and country wants and that we're on a detour, a very dangerous one, more dangerous than I had thought even in 2016, but that we ultimately do have the ability to and want to get back to that kind of direction that Obama, I think really like opened up when he showed that the country was happy at the idea that it could perhaps become post racial.
- [56:00]
Yasha Monk
Thank you for listening to this conversation with the wonderful Thomas Chatterton Williams. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about Barack Obama. When I arrived in the United States in 2007, Obama was just rising as a serious primary challenger to Hillary Clinton, and so his hopes for a different way of thinking and talking about race, for a different future for the United States is still in the way that I perceive this country. Which elements of those hopes he elicited can we hold onto? And which have become unsustainable, have seemingly been disproven by the events of the last nearly two decades. We also talk about the administration of Donald Trump, about the ways in which it is attacking the rule of law and the separation of powers in dangerous ways, and about what it would take to build a political alternative to our current politics that is actually able to move us beyond this moment. Why it is that we don't have to choose between the kind of search and conversation about the summer of 2020 that we've just had and the desire to build that kind of politics to support the work we do here. To gain access to every full episode of the Good Fight and to get full access to this conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamonk.sapsak.com and since I really do want you to hear the rest of this conversation, I'm throwing in a special discount today. 25% off. That means it costs you just a little bit more than a dollar a week if you go to yashomo.samsung.com the good fight thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two if you have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [58:29]
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this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International Life License.
- [58:34]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.