Debating Race and Incarceration with Vincent Lloyd

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman before I introduce my guest I'd like to give a short preamble I often get the critique that I don't get enough guests that disagree with me on my podcast especially on the issues of race and racism which is where my opinions have been the most controversial the idea is that I'm creating a sort of echo chamber of people that mostly agree with me now I can see how you might think this if you don't see what goes on behind the scenes behind the scenes I've invited countless of my critics onto this show and the near unanimous response is just a refusal to speak with me on the identity politics left there is an actual philosophy of not talking to or debating people like me this is the same philosophy that leads undergrad and increasingly grad students to cancel and shout down invited speakers so that is the main reason why you don't see more guests who disagree with me it's not for lack of trying on my part some of you may remember that I wrote an open letter to Ibraham X candy asking him to have a public conversation where the entire sum raised would go to a charity of his choice and he declined ever since then people at his public speaking events have been asking him why he won't speak with me which I think is great and he's consistently responded that I quote misrepresent his work without ever giving a single example of course in any event that's the only public reach out I've done but behind the scenes there have been many private reach outs to pretty much everyone you would want me to reach out to but the answer is almost always no one extremely prominent anti-racist writer who I won't name for privacy's sake actually agreed to a debate and then dropped out once they learned that I was on the other side of it so that's the attitude I've been dealing with on this topic for years and that brings me to my guest today Vincent Lloyd is a professor at Villanova University where he directed The Black studies program leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative Justice and has published books on anti-black racism including black dignity the struggle against domination now Vincent is one of those rare guests with whom I have profound disagreements on the topic of race but who's actually willing to have the conversation which I'm very grateful for Vincent came to my attention because of a stunning essay he wrote about his experience teaching a summer course on racism at the Telluride Association he'll tell the full story in the podcast but essentially his class was destroyed from within by a single hyper woke person it's a crazy story and I think it shocked him and forced him to reckon with the anti-dialogue pro-intimidation component of the campus far left in any event Vincent and I began by talking about this strange experience of having his class imploded and then we move on to debate our substantive disagreements about racism police violence race versus class whether prisons are necessary and much more so without further ado Vincent Lloyd [Music] okay Vincent thank you so much for coming on my show thanks for having me looking forward to the conversation so I plan to talk about your excellent and interesting riveting and um disturbing in some ways article on your experiences teaching a seminar at Telluride um and you know also your book of black dignity uh so we'll get to all that but first I just want to know a little bit about you what is your background how did you come to um care about the issues uh you know the all the related issues racism racial inequality philosophy so forth sure yeah so I I'm a professor now at Villanova where I directed The Black studies program for a few years I mainly teach in uh religion but also a philosophy I I started out thinking about some of these issues when I was uh well first in undergraduate uh doing some campus labor organizing working with janitors dining hall workers and trying to see uh how we could get a living wage for for all the folks working on campus and then when I moved to Atlanta uh and uh questions of race were front and center unavoidable I started sort of uh re-imagining my own story and imagining you know what it would mean to think deeply about questions of being a black American so when was that uh when did you move to Atlanta uh 2008 okay and you've been and before that you spent some time in South Africa organizing right I did yes yeah so um what do you teach in religion yes I do courses on uh religion and race religious ethics uh questions of uh what it means to to try and be a good Christian in uh 2020 in 2022 2023 um interesting okay so so let's talk about your article um first can you just kind of frame what's happening because this the kind of thing that happened in your classroom where you're teaching um a study on I I think a class on race and the limits of law right with a seminar of 17 year old students that were made it into this very selective kind of summer program where they took college level courses right and uh what started you know initially very promising and you had done this once in the past right yes began to break down in a very strange and um unhappy way so can you describe sort of what the course is how you plan to teach it how it had gone in the past and then tell me what happened sure yeah so this is a course offered through the Telluride Association a program for high achieving high school students who are on a trajectory to Elite University education they spend six weeks together living together but also taking a college level seminar uh and where where is it yeah so they have locations both at Ithaca New York at the Cornell campus in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan campus and you were at Cornell right I was at Michigan Michigan okay um uh so the the course the the seminar was called race race and the limits of law in America we were going to look at issues of immigration indigeneity prisons in the U.S mass incarceration um anti theories of anti-blackness intersectionality and and other sort of questions of race that are swirling around uh Contemporary American culture and the as you say the the course uh was a seminar so uh you know what a Summoner means is we're sitting around uh a big table where each sort of sharing what we notice about a text that we're reading uh questions that we have concerns that we might have about the text uh what it makes us think of what our experiences uh illuminate for us about about a text in the set of issues that it's speaking to uh and playing off of each other hearing one person talk and then you know being inspired by them to say something else and say something else and and dig deep into the text through this sort of uh iterative process uh and that that's what happened in 2014 when uh the same course at Cornell and then in 2022 uh at University of Michigan it went quite quite differently so in 2014 you mentioned that over the course of the several weeks the kids became very close as as one hopes for and even uh you had them didn't you have them at your apartment and you had like it was a very you guys you all you guys all got very close and it was a very rewarding exchange and we're talking about kids from different backgrounds right exactly yeah from all over the U.S as well as abroad there were three or four students from outside of the us as well okay so what was the moment when it began to go wrong in 2022 . so at the end of the first week the um the person who was sort of like a camp counselor sort of like a teaching assistant uh came to uh myself in the co-instructor uh and said uh the first week was on indigeneity and the the this uh teaching assistant camp counselor type person said uh some of the students are frustrated that uh we're not talking enough about anti-blackness um and uh you know I tried to uh point out that the syllabus had you know uh several weeks on anti issues related to anti-blackness on prison's intersectionality theories of antibactness Etc uh coming up but um there was a sort of insistence that uh each week each day it should be exclusively focused on anti-blackness every issue should be routed through that framework uh which you know I I agree that anti-blackness is a hugely important theoretical framework to think about that's why we spent substantial yeah and when we kind of anti-immigrant anti-immigrant um so your ta was was your teach ta channeling his or her own grievances or channeling the Grievances of of someone else so that was unclear it was represented as channeling um the Grievances of the students but I I imagine this person was quite uh had quite strong views themselves uh and it also uh strikes me that when you have a group of a dozen uh 16 17 year olds who are away from away from home away from their parents living some for the first time living together in a really intense experience thinking that their uh chances of college depend on this you know this experience uh they're quite susceptible to uh influences from from around them as well so um so so keep going with the story what happens when you're confronted with this critique and I guess for context are you and so you're co-teaching this course yes are you and the co co-teacher is it understood that you are in charge of the curriculum or is that the structure of this yeah so the Telluride Association hired uh contracted the the two of us to teach a college level seminar uh and that was that was clear um it seemed like that that was clear it was advertised to the students this is a college level seminar that you're going to be taking that was the centerpiece of the summer summer experience uh the totally right Association had had been in some flux post 2020 post George Floyd there had been pressure from black Telluride alumni to transform the way that the program operated to Center anti-blackness uh but the association is large and um mainly run by Young alumni or often volunteers and have a whole variety of opinions and levels doesn't it boast it boasts alumni that I imagine um anti-racist Progressive activists would be uncomfortable with like Francis fukuyama who's a conservative right as well as some others right yeah from the the other uh the other side uh the sort of left left side the Telluride Association itself has been a place where Left Right and Center have all met Stacey Abrams right is also an alumni alumna as well as figures from the right um so that uh that um so Democratic exchange of ideas has been you know across viewpoints has been at the center of the the Telluride Philosophy for a long time which I think is very valuable um okay so you're you're hit with the critique that every day should be on anti-blackness rather than only two out of three days what do you do at that point yeah so we try to communicate that uh we will be uh uh approaching these issues soon and um you know if the students have concerns they're happy to talk we're happy to uh bring in uh you know other voices there are many opportunities in the structure of the course for students to bring in readings that they do on their own to sort of share with it with a with a course uh to uh to bring in an artwork or you know an article or a current event that uh they're they're finding interesting uh to uh contribute so that could be a way that they can co-create the the class with us if they're issues that they feel or not being addressed in the second week we try to do a mock Court uh my court is a common thing that one does in law schools but sometimes in undergraduate classes as well where you have one group of students who's one team of lawyers another group is another team of lawyers uh and this this also goes goes wrong uh some of the uh afterwards the students worry or complain that uh some of them are forced to represent a side that they don't believe in that they think is unjust uh that this exercise was framed as one in which uh we're exploring the limits of law how law mismatches with Justice and you know also providing opportunities for Young Folks to figure out is this something you would want to be would you want to be a lawyer would you want to argue for for a position that you might not not agree with um uh and you know so the one of these mock courts in the second week was around uh issues of immigration and other was around issues of mass incarceration uh and the um yeah the students reacted poorly to that interesting um so as the as the class progresses there was uh one sort of leader ringleader among the students who you who you call Keisha which I assume is not her real name um and when did when did that when did her um her sort of persuading her classmates that there was a larger problem with you in particular when did that begin yeah so this um uh who who I uh give the pseudonym this person who I give the pseudonym Keisha to was uh both the camp counselor and teaching assistant she was in charge of uh in charge of the students lives how old was was she was she the same age as a student uh she's uh College age okay um so uh she was in charge of their their lives for the sort of 23 hours a day 21 hours a day when they were not in uh in the seminar uh including when they ate to when they uh you know had free time uh and so on when they could talk to their parents uh all of that uh so uh there was a really um she had a lot of power in the lives of these students and had a very strong line around um the need for uh each of us to confront uh anti-blackness in the world and in our own lives and to transform uh in a really deep investment in sort of personal transformation again uh it seems very well motivated right that there are all sorts of forms of racism around us those that we notice and those that we don't and that we need to continually be asking questions about the world around us and about ourselves uh but uh it seems like there are ways to do that that are more productive and ways to do that that are less productive uh and this uh this program was structured such that uh when the students were not in our seminar not in the seminar for the three hours a day every morning uh you know originally in 2014 they would do fun things it was like summer camp in the afternoon would go to a lake or uh go have ice cream or you know um organize a picnic or something by 2022 uh it was anti-racism workshops it appeared almost every afternoon um uh that Keisha and uh was leading uh and you know uh it appeared that these were basically inculcating um ideas uh that uh Keisha believed uh in in the the minds and lives of the the students rather than sort of uh discussing them or having a kind of back and forth uh open-ended seminar style discussion which is what uh I thought the program was mainly about so when did it get to the point where um where the students essentially rebelled right when did it get to the point where the the classroom was no longer functioning like like a seminar classroom when in how so but by the second and third week of this program the white students in the and a couple of the Asian and Asian American students were speaking less and less contributing less to the seminar uh and uh why do you think that was I think they were being told in these anti-racism workshops in the afternoon that they needed to Center the voices of their black classmates which again is well intentioned but also fits awkwardly in a sort of seminar space where we're each uh bringing our our own experiences and interrogating those experiences right and allowing pressure to be put on them and then putting pressure on on others um so by the second and third week the uh participation was uh shifting or skewing uh and then by the the fourth week it did come to a head uh where um somewhat ironically uh in this seminar uh students uh ostensibly represented by this Keisha figure uh interrupted the seminar and said uh we want you to lecture to us about uh anti-blackness rather than to have an open-ended seminar discussion about a different topic or about anti-blackness uh yeah so they wanted a lecture and they wanted each lecture to Center anti-blackness and they wanted me to correct um or reprimand people who were saying thing uh you know statements that were not sitting within the theoretical framework this anti-blackness framework that they were so that's interesting to me because it I mean given uh the ti Keisha's world view it makes sense that she would want to focus on anti-blackness that seems like it's at the core of her worldview why would she want to get rid of this seminar and just have you lecturing because if anything that seems more of a let's say old school teacher talks to class um you know not that's that's hierarchical in some way right that seems a little bit at odds with the general Vibe I'm getting yeah and I think that's it in irony that we need to work through in our current moment right where there are demands for uh radical democracy and egalitarianism that often also come with demands for um Authority and uh sort of a hierarchy and I think we were seeing seeing that tension play out in this in the seminar or uh I I was uh uh it was as if I had uh you know it was as if the only proper learning that could happen would be if I were uh imposing uh my my views on the on the group uh and uh but I'm curious about that why how did she square that in her head what was the purpose of centering you rather than the student voices yeah so one one version of this and again I think there are some incoherence in the in the in the view one version of this was that uh the black students who were part of the seminar were uh less well prepared on nikisha's account than the other students they weren't ready for a full open seminar discussion uh and uh so the seminar discussion the sort of open-ended Democratic um uh conversation would be one that would necessarily privilege the voices of the non-non-black students only by simply conveying information me conveying information to them uh could the black students get what they needed which was the information to allow them to rise up um into uh the kind of academic Excellence that uh they wanted if I were cynical I would say kids didn't want to do their readings or didn't want to be called out or it'd be so obvious that they didn't do the readings because doing the readings is like can be hard and tedious sometimes yeah and we we did see a uh I didn't do all my readings at Columbia I could tell you that yeah there was certainly a decline in participation in uh in both readings uh and showing up on time and uh doing writing written assignments as well when you went to the lecture or just in general yeah we never we never exceeded to the full uh full lecture thing but yeah by the by the fourth week uh only two or three students were turning in written assignments and um uh more than half of them are not showing up on time did they fear the consequences of a bad grade at all or yeah so one of the the things about this Telluride program is that there are no grades right it's just for the love of learning uh which you know uh and they're written evaluations but the that in evaluations are just describing um how the student participated in in the class uh yeah so on the one hand there's something uh really lovely about that and aspirational about that to say let's just talk together and you don't have to worry about you know all your whole High School career you're focused on grades and here we can you know uh just think about issues that really matter and that could transform us without worrying about grades uh uh on the other hand that that can uh go wrong when it feels as if um when it's an excuse to avoid frustration which is part of learning part of intellectual engagement okay let's let's um let's get to the end end of the story here so um so you get confronted with this lecture request and if I remember you ended up sort of compromising finding some compromise structure and then you got to the point where you needed like mediation with the administration how did it get there and describe that exactly so uh we invited the students over uh to my house on in the at the end of the fourth week of class to share a meal together as well as discuss one of the readings Frank wilter since afropessimism and the students uh represented by uh ostensibly represented by this Keisha figure demanded lecture I talked for a little bit um then we had a fairly productive discussion I again reiterate reiterated that I don't think lecture is the most productive way like we we seminar is um what I was contracted to do to facilitate a seminar the uh this I made the Keisha figure said she said she's going to take the students and leave and not not share the meal with us uh the next day after that uh that weekend um uh after uh I'd reached out to the Telluride Association leadership uh the students uh each uh read part of a statement each uh read a paragraph of a joint statement uh naming all of the uh harms that they had suffered in the seminar over those four weeks and uh at least implicitly demanded an apology and transformation of the of the seminar and what were those harms yeah so some of these uh included things like uh using the word negro uh to explain uh what was happening in Brown versus Board of Education the Supreme Court case that uh uh ended legalized segregation and education uh which you know uh there is some contest over language usage now but uh you know uh it's something that we could have talked about right something that could be a discussion of uh they said that my body language was uh uh aggressive to the black students apparently I don't know what that could have been about uh there were a couple of other things that students had misheard and interpreted as being um sort of offensive in in whatever ways they uh they once misheard me referring to one student by another's name uh I'm not a perfect teacher I do make mistakes but um it seems like that there are all sorts of ways that one can have a dialogue about the mistakes that we're all making as humans and uh move move forward more constructively uh rather than sort of um confrontationally like I'm scandalized by your body language in the past 15 minutes I feel attacked um no but I mean you seem you're fairly I mean I don't see it I struggle to see how someone could unless you're somehow you know a tyrant behind closed doors interpret your general Vibe as as aggressive or it's it's uh that's a little bit shocking to me um I mean it seems like well let me just ask you it this way what accounts for the difference between the success of this program in 2014 and uh 2022 did you change did the character the students change did the surrounding culture change to what extent would you blame these variables yeah I didn't change I don't think the character of the students changed uh I think the culture changed I think the uh the the presence of this uh particular uh charismatic figure who was serving as a teaching assistant changed and I think the Telluride Association itself had mixed uh mixed messages that it was communicating to to the students and to the the teaching assistant about the purpose of the program uh in 2014 it was very clear that this is a academic seminar a college level seminar you're a high school student and you're going to get a taste of university life and that's the centerpiece of the summer experience in 2022 uh some of the messaging uh that uh students were or and particularly the teaching assistant were receiving was that this is about a transformation becoming an anti-racist uh and the seminar is one component of that but not the the centerpiece of that so uh you went to the administration they you know they had read you know read this list of grievances against among other things your your body language um what happens then how does it resolve yeah I think this is a point where there was a real uh failure of uh leadership from the administration uh which was quite frustrating to me like that we asked the totally right Association to communicate to the students and the teaching assistant uh that the seminar is at the core of the summer experience and that I was contracted to teach a college level seminar uh I'd done this before the association hired me again trusting that I would do this well and the association uh did not want to intervene at all didn't want to communicate with the students didn't want to communicate with her or didn't want to convey a message to the to the uh teaching assistant uh in one sense there's something animal admirable about their faith in democracy that's so strong that uh you know they're they're going to allow this Democratic experiment to run even if it even if it becomes a sort of catastrophe and then next year they'll try something different though try and improve they'll learn learn the lessons there is something admirable about that but in this case with 16 or 17 year olds uh whose parents may not know what's going on right whose parents send them to this experience to get a college level class uh it does seem like there might be an added responsibility to to create the kind of structure such that uh this sort of thing doesn't doesn't happen it's interesting uh I had Mark Andreessen on this podcast recently who is a big VC investor guy and we were talking about organizational structures organizations that operate he he runs his business like a very Unapologetic hierarchy there was a boss my word I guess there's two bosses in that case um and their word goes and that's how the ship is steered right and if you have a problem with it you don't have to be here that's the attitude and in his case he feels that is essential to the success of the institution um and he said something that I thought was interesting and your case seems like a prime example of whether or not you agree with it as a general observation which is when you try to get rid of hierarchy completely and have a flat structure what you get is not democracy and Kumbaya and a commune and the kibowitz what you actually get is an unplanned hierarchy which is to say someone comes along who is ambitious and fills the vacuum that has been left by the fact that there's no planned hierarchy um does that does that seem like a fair characterization of of what happened in this case yeah so I'm certainly sympathetic with it that that view and uh you know this uh Joe Freeman's wonderful article the tyranny of structurelessness you know it fills us out uh Wonder wonderfully and it's influenced me as I've been thinking about through political organizing over the years uh in this case I I mean I think we're at a a cultural moment where people are suspicious of authority and with good reason right the authorities who've betrayed are trusted local levels and in National levels uh on the other hand Authority is also something that we live with all the time right trust the authority of a dentist right we don't want to make our own judgment about our teeth we defer to someone else's judgment so I I think we we have to find ways to navigate these questions of authority in in complex ways in nuanced ways that allow for accountability allow for deferring to others at times but also you know uh can uh persist in a commitment to Democratic life together so did the class make it to its conclusion uh no so after the uh after this list of uh grievances was read at the start of the fifth week there were two weeks left uh uh I told the Telluride Association can only persist in this if uh you intervene if the the leadership of the association intervenes uh they would not intervene uh so I offered to meet with the students individually if they wanted to to read any of the written work that they wanted to produce uh none of them wanted to meet none of them wanted none of them sent in written work uh of the students who who remained there uh and I I understand that the um this teaching assistant this Keisha figure just uh sort of took my place and lectured to them for the remaining two weeks interesting there's a there's an old Louis CK joke where he says you can actually uh you can bring a plane down just by being on a plane and yelling down loud enough over and over again people will panic and you will literally bring they will land the plane right I mean something about this has that character to me um well first of all I'm very sorry that that seems like a emotionally difficult experience for for a professor to go through um how did you how did you fare through it all how did you feel through it all yeah so I think I did much better than the the students who I I'm sure were experiencing various forms of mental health crises during this uh during this time uh their whole world was in this house that they they were living uh uh in with uh each other and with the the this teaching assistant figure for 24 hours a day I uh family my partner was pregnant pregnant uh you know my daughter was going to Camp a musical theater camp and we were doing all sorts of normal things enjoying the summer in Ann Arbor so this could be just one one little bit of my my life uh which could um uh compartmentalize uh whereas the students were uh sort of fully immersed in this world [Music] so the world that the TA created seems to me cult-like in a few ways one is that everything is subsumed to one value namely anti-blackness there is no plurality of values and this is what most most Cults are like right whatever the cult worships that is what 24 hours a day is devoted to the second thing is that there is no value placed on disagreeing about values if you disagree you are a traitor and a blasphemer and a heretic and an evil person um and this is this is the uh I mean as a as a religion Professor I'd be curious whether or not you agree with this but I think this is substantially the culture that Cults have created and um fundamentalist religion of all kinds have created um and Academia at its best is supposed to Value diversity of thought and disagreement constructive disagreement and that's what I'm all about on on this podcast and in general um and I found you know when I was at Columbia there were you know your whole there's this whole Fiasco is like it's uh not actually that surprising to me because though I've actually never seen something quite as bad as what happened in your seminar um I've I've certainly seen I mean I was in one class a philosophy class it was called philosophy and feminism when I was probably sophomore at Columbia and it was uh we were reading you know Foucault we were reading um Judith Butler um and it was probably reading some of the some of the same people that you were reading in your course and the professor was very much a a dogmatic I would say admirer of everyone we were reading right like no one we were reading really was to be criticized and that message was communicated I took many other classes at Columbia sometimes we read those same people but the professor would signal look everyone we read this semester is up for criticism if you think you found you found some tension some contradiction some flaw you know speak your mind this is the point professing this one class it was much more like Sunday School in that the point is not to ask why Deuteronomy condone slavery if it's a moral book the point is not to ask why you know Leviticus says being gay is an Abomination the point isn't to like critically question what you're reading the point is to learn the truth with a capital T and I know it and I'm going to tell it to you so that's um that that style of teaching one thing I noticed is that people would raise their hands way less in that class like people would not um people people just would not participate and I would go to that class and just be bored because there's a hundred people sitting in the seminar all of whom have may have interesting insights and everyone every time she pauses for questions no one says anything whereas in my other classes where we might read some of those same texts people are participating it's it's vibrant it's fun people are disagreeing and so forth um and I think there is a a definitely a strain in higher education that I've noticed when I was at Columbia and I also took classes at Barnard where the the classrooms are basically run by people that are more activists than professors in the sense that they don't like uh disagreement and it it changes the whole character of the classroom and I think it's a very big problem um in in higher education right now I'm curious if that is something you have noticed or if you think I'm I'm over overselling this problem sure and maybe to start by circling back to your original remarks about uh Cults um I guess what one point that I I uh haven't mentioned is yet here is that uh two of the students from this this seminar who had uh heterodox views who were not fully on board with this anti-blackness is framing everything uh were eventually removed from the program uh and by the by the fourth week uh it was only the only students who remained were students who were voicing an agreement with this this framework so were they removed by an outside force so uh I'm it's a little bit unclear exactly what America was Mutual uh I I think the students wanted to remain am I understanding is that there was a recommendation made to the Telluride Association leadership that they'd be removed in the Telluride Association leadership acceded to that that recommendation um yeah so that there is something uh further cult like about that kind of atmosphere only having those who are on the same page within the uh within the the community and that um you know I I do think a bit about religion and culture and this sort of thing and uh I think uh in my academic work uh these these terms like fundamentalism and culture often used polemically right to just describe the groups that one doesn't like but there are also real structures right and and um uh common denominators amongst amongst groups that are closed uh don't don't tolerate dissent uh and uh are sort of have a singular purpose and and charismatic leader that uh are I think worth uh reflecting on and um uh worrying about uh on the the question of higher education today uh right after this Beast came out and even before you know I I've heard from many colleagues particularly at liberal arts colleges particularly in uh some of the State University Systems that uh they've experienced very similar things sometimes a little bit worse sometimes not quite as bad but you know uh as as you're describing this sort of phenomenon both in terms of uh the uh how the uh instruction goes that there's a singular Point rather than an open open conversation but also uh strong load student strong load charismatic students uh pushing the conversation in particular directions and and uh shutting off the The Faculty leader uh from uh being able to run the seminar it is happening uh over and over again in different institutions I don't think it's at every institution I teach at Villanova which uh I I think we sometimes only half jokingly say we have the opposite problem because we have a lot of students who are coming from Catholic high schools who are used to deferring to Authority who come into Villanova and are you know just eager to uh treat the instructor as an authority authority figure and we have to get them to uh block that instinct so I think there is a lot of variation from institution to institution institutional culture to institutional culture yeah so there's um another aspect to this I think I think it's the writer Douglas Murray who has this quote about these sort of Campus meltdowns that have become a a Trope in the news you know in the past I would say eight to nine years um the surprising thing I think he said is is not that the students would Rebel or that young people would Rebel throughout American history at least throughout much of the 20th century let's say nothing has been more normal than for a group of anywhere from 15 to 25 year olds to get together and say we're taking over the system's messed up Etc the 60s right um the surprising thing is that the adults caved in right that the administration just let it happen what do you think accounts for the fact that the administration didn't just say look you're in a seminar you knew what you signed up for you know Vincent's in charge I'm sorry this is you know yeah so part of this is probably a quirk of the Telluride Association that the many of the the leaders of the Telluride Association are alumni of these programs are really committed to this uh radical Democratic ethos and uh you know uh uh believe that they're learning from the failures of of that that uh ethos and I should say you know I think these student movements are also uh really important right they're they're uh helping us you know us older folks uh notice things that we miss right no injustices that that we missed when when we were younger or and that we continue to miss today that uh we need to transform how we teach we need to transform how we engage with the world uh and the the challenge is just figuring out where are the spaces uh uh where uh where we can do that effectively right so if the seminars of space the seminar has its uh can do some things and cannot do other things and it seems like uh recognizing the autonomy of that kind of Space is really important there might be spaces you know workshops where you're learning skills where you just need a package of knowledge that's communicated from one one person to the people in the workshop if you're going to organize a union in your workplace you need a you know pieces of information about how to do that effectively you don't need a seminar on on how to do that um so I think recognizing the the distinct distinctness of different sorts of spaces in our political lives is also really important okay so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about uh your book Black dignity and your your philosophy that you sort of sketch out their um I'll put my cards on the table I'm fairly skeptical of a lot of the ways that you frame the issue of race and racism so uh you will you should expect probing and skeptical questions from me but before we get to those what uh can you sketch out your motivation and general picture of of black dignity as a philosophy what does that mean to you and why is that important thanks yeah so they maybe also talk about you know domination and and and the other major themes of the book sure uh so this book Black dignity uh was motivated by uh noticing that there are really important transformations in how we talk about race happening in the U.S there are social movements that are again sort of calling us to uh questions of justice that had been ignored before and you know rightly uh naming anti-blackness is different from other forms of racism different different from other forms of cultural difference so I wanted to to think you know um how can we come up with a kind of theoretical or philosophical framework to understand these these claims uh that's not you know philosophical in the best sense right that's uh probing and dialectical and and uh developing over time attentive to history attentive to the nuances of different concepts and and how they're different from each other like too much of the sort of discussion around uh anti-racism and anti-blackness is what we found in the seminar the sort of dogmatic and um basically retweeting right uh uh um claims that seem appealing uh I find those claims appealing too but I want to think with them I want to argue with them uh and so that that's the that was what motivated the book uh and I I found that dignity was um uh uh well sometimes we think about these activist movements as just political but I I noticed that there's all this moral language around them sometimes even spiritual or religious language around movements like black lives matter uh dignity is uh in the first line of the movement for black lives platform and the affirmation of of dignity uh so I wanted to really think about what does it mean to uh investigate the moral foundations of of a social movement so um so I guess there are many places we can go here one thing I noticed uh in your book is you and you start out the you sort of start out the book talking about these cases of unarmed black Americans killed by the police or in the case of Trayvon Martin killed by um a citizen a neighborhood watch uh vigilante justice guy um George Zimmerman so Trayvon Martin Michael Brown George Floyd these these these uh these people feature heavily in your sort of opening sketch of racism in America and on my reading you seem to take it as their their their deaths as prima facie evidence of racist of racism right at least in those cases and perhaps a racist Society um for each one of those though there there's there's analogous cases of white people killed unarmed um white children killed on arms sometimes right and I could I could name them um you know if you want and there's dozens of those each year so why how do you explain those why do you view in in view of the fact that those same kinds of atrocities um happen to unarmed white people ha why do you seem why does it seem that you see those as prima facie evidence of racism right so I think uh you're raising an important point that if you zoom in on just one uh one incident uh you can tell uh you can raise all sorts of concerns about that that incident and uh you know whether uh one framework is the best one for for understanding that is racism the best framework for understanding this this particular incident but when you have a tapestry of uh the incidents of police violence of uh microaggression of economic wealth inequality of environmental racism of uh all sorts of of you know the disproportionate incarceration of black folks in the U.S right uh you have this whole tapestry of um uh data points right in which it seems as if uh uh black folks are uh being disproportionately harmed um how do we make sense of that and and my contention was that uh you know following both the language of black Justice movements and black studies scholarship the afterlife of slavery is really important to to make sense of all of those data points together not just one particular one if slavery um required uh shaping them uh not just laws but also cultural practices and habits and ways of feeling and reasoning and social structures and institutions when you get rid of the laws that authorized slavery all that other stuff continues and I think we're seeing the effects of all that other stuff continuing in all of these different data points including these uh deaths uh around police violence so I want to impress you on that though because I could I I don't think we I'm not sure we have enough time to you know you mentioned maybe seven or eight different sectors all of which could take up and have taken up you know bookshelves but I I do want to pin you down on this on this one issue because it is it's how you open your book and you reference this at many points throughout the book so I'm you know like in the case of just like in the case of George Floyd right what I saw when I saw that I saw in the knee on the neck for eight minutes one of the most brutal videos and murders that that I've seen in my lifetime um I've also seen a knee on the upper back of Tony timpa who was a white guy killed in either 2016 or 2017 in Dallas uh while the the cops are making jokes about him waking up for school and they they kill the guy right and the cops were not punished uh at least certainly not for years and the case you know that nobody knew about that case really right there's it was on video but it just because the victim happened to be white it didn't make uh National it didn't make the national culture it wasn't on people's lips so when I saw the murder of George Floyd in my mind I I knew that this kind of thing also happened to a white guy so where was the evidence that the most likely or only cause of this was that the police would only do this to a black guy well actually he's a video of them doing it to a white guy a couple years ago so my theory of it has to be sophisticated enough to take in both examples which not to say it wasn't racist um as a motivation truthfully none of us can mind read in that way we can just make our best guess based on our overall world view and our overall guesses but again I think this seems to me to be a pretty a fundamental problem because this is we could talk about all those other sectors this is really the one that people feel is unambiguously has to be racism right we can debate about disparities we can debate about whatever but this seems to be I think it comes earlier in your book because it's you know it's the most emotionally compelling evidence and it seems to me to not be the strongest kind of evidence for a racist Society thanks yeah thanks for erasing this which is a great one to dig into and to think about a great issue to dig into and to think about uh right so I I think we need to condemn police violence in all of its forms wherever it happens to whom whomever it happens and think about why why does this police violence happen what is the culture of machismo in police forces the culture of violence that uh is bred in police forces it leads to these horrific uh incidents and where do police forces come from right their history police forces arise in the South to uh as a successor to slave patrols to to manage black populations in the South and the north police forces arise to manage the working class right the bosses and you know uh big businessmen want to keep their their Factory workers in line and the police forces are a tool of that uh and so if we're going to look at particular incidents in the present we have to think about that longer history of policing uh as well as a cultural policing that's spread now uh and uh be really critical critical of it it in terms of the intentions of a particular person uh I agree you know the mind is a mystery right it's probably not the most useful to think about the uh particular intentions of one person at one time but what uh these incidents uh allow is a broader conversation about you know how does uh how is there a tapestry of problems that had been ignored right uh police violence uh had been uh largely ignored and now we're having a conversation about it right that's important that conversation should expand and deepen and and involve uh police scientific white folks and black folks in the history of policing but it should also involve those broader stories about uh anti-blackness in all of its forms as well including wealth disparities and so on so um so I think I think you and I have also different assessments of the overall value of the BLM movement what I would say in my assessment is to give the BLM movement it's due I would agree with what you just said that before 2013 the issue of police killing unarmed Americans was relatively not on the radar I would say right I mean there was Rodney King in the 90s which was a beating um but there was like it just was not in the National Consciousness to the same degree and not only that police officers who did horrible things almost never got held to account before BLM and you can just look and that doesn't matter whether the victim was white black Hispanic or Asian police officers just certainly almost never went to prison for even the worst of murders but often didn't even get disciplined in in a in a smaller way BLM changed that right and I think that's that's a good thing because those incentives constrain and influence police Behavior if a police knows that he can be sent to prison or at the very least be disciplined for a wrongful Act it holds them to account right and the influence of police unions to protect police officers has been like teachers unions in my in my opinion you know outsized and to the to the detriment of the populations served in both cases but uh but the problems with BLM are are one that I think it fundamentally misdiagnoses uh American society it says the I mean if you I know you'll recall but for my audience when BLM first really dropped there was a huge black lives matter versus all lives matter um debate and BLM was an actual movement all lives matter was basically it wasn't a movement it was a slogan that was a a reaction to the movement and the reaction was are you saying only black lives matter how come you aren't saying all eyes matter don't all lies matter wouldn't you agree with that and of course the the sophisticated retort from BLM was this they would say of course we think that all eyes matter the problem is that our society doesn't value black lives as much so we are seeking to correct that imbalance right that's that's why we're placing an emphasis on black lives what's interesting to me about that diagnosis is that it doesn't reflect media coverage of police killings of unarmed people so for example I just listed I could list you five more names of white people you know Daniel shaver is shot um like like execution style um um uh uh uh what's his name there's a Autumn steel shot by a cop who was spooked by her German Shepherd there's a six-year-old kid who's whose name I forget it's it's actually hard to keep these names in your head because no one is saying them and yet it's a couple dozen white unarmed people get killed this way every year and this there's just silence in the media what's interesting to me about that is it seems to cut exactly against blm's argument that we don't care about black lives truth is the only time we care when police kill somebody is if the victim is black so that's the first way in which I think BLM is just it is um a diagnosis of a society that has moved on from that level of racism I think that level of racism was undoubtedly true in the past um and in the living memory of older folks but I think America has progressed beyond that level of racism and you can see that in the media coverage in what the media cares about you can see people's values and what they care about and then the second thing I would say is in the the climate of promoting and apologizing for riots and violence that caused uh what Pew recorded was the single largest year-over-year increase in the homicide rate in American history in in 2020 detrimental specifically to to Black Americans in particular who like higher rates even proportional to that even relative to that increase and the total Silence about the black business the black owned businesses and just businesses in general destroyed and looted um the total lack of empathy for the violence caused by the riots in 2020 is to me a shocking moral failure of the BLM movement so that's what I would say I give them props for putting the issue of police killing on the radar um with the caveat that that's an issue that affects in terms of unarmed people killed by the police maybe less than 100 people a year I but I get I give very big demerits for encouraging and creating the environment of the riots which led to excess thousands of homicide deaths and not to mention victims of crime and the overall misdiagnosis of American society as as uncaring about black lives when the evidence to me points in the opposite direction thanks yeah so again you're touching on lots of complex issues here around the crime rate and all sorts of different factors and different explanations that can be given for the particular uh issues uh that we're that we're seeing in the last year you know on the on the frequency of uh police murders uh you know we might think of uh lynchings uh of you know a few Generations ago where you know there were not tens of thousands of lynchings right there were uh you know dozens a few hundred uh uh lynchings they included not only black folks but also Jewish folks and uh Asian uh Asian American folks uh but lynchings became a symbol of underlying anti-blackness underlying you know uh cultural patterns and forms of violence that were legacies of slavery and so you know anti-lynching bills right uh were uh opportunities to address and open conversations about those those deeper legacies on black lives matter more generally you know I think there's a tendency to think about black lives matter as a kind of abstraction that has a platform and a set of beliefs uh and then people who are a member or not a member whereas in fact you know I see black lives matter as naming uh folks in communities who care about Justice right who feel like their concerns aren't being heard who have you know cousins who were incarcerated and didn't get a good lawyer right folks who have you know uh brothers and sisters who had bad encounters with the police and who are trying to find a place to speak up to speak out about those issues and finding in the slogans around black lives matter both the negative ones and also the positive ones black love right black magic black Excellence right finding in those slogans ways to pursue pursue Justice uh that that uh is of existential concern to them yeah um okay so I mean so this equation with lynching or the the the the the uh the move to lynching I think that I think that really misunderstands the general character the problem with police violence because I mean lynching lynch mobs were extrajudicial like intentional murders and tortures um often uh just from citizens to to black men that were alleged to have Commit some often imagined crime right and and it was you know the Town Square Gathering to watch you put a black guy in a tree it's like it's it's it's that kind of thing is impossible to imagine in America now and the equation with a police that a policeman that gets a 9-1-1 call often from a black person that there is someone being threatening in public and it goes south um we should not to say this is all the example some of them are murders but many of them are examples where a policeman is being called to the scene of a crime again often the call is coming from a black victim of that that alleged crime and gets into an altercation which ends in them pulling the trigger sometimes the trigger is pulled rightly sometimes it's pulled wrongly and some people shouldn't even be cops some people go berserk and they have no no business having a badge and they should be in prison others are are cops that had to pull the trigger to protect either their life or the life of someone in the vicinity such as the the Micaiah Bryant case where you know she was on the backswing of what could have been a fatal stab and he chose to pull the trigger at that time and nevertheless received all kinds of criticism for it um to me to to make the move to to explain our caring about that issue in terms of it being similar to lynching is I think to gloss over all the very important differences uh that make those two things not analogous yeah I think you're making a good point of these these are not the the same thing right and there are there are important differences but my point here was that uh these are both things that uh are uh you know there may not be a huge number if you're you're looking at the data a huge number of police killing not a huge number of lynchings and yet they have a huge symbolic function right that they uh they don't agree with that yeah make black folks feel scared right yeah in various ways and and that that has real power right that affects the cheapest people's real lives sure I mean so in in some sense it's like a plane crash which is there could there can be one every 10 years but it will people will still be afraid if they go up in that plane but I also think the media plays a role in um just totally miseducating and non-educating and not educating people at all about the true likelihood of them being a victim of such a such a police encounter or Police Murder I mean we're talking about we're talking about in terms of unarmed Americans killed by the cop each year we are talking about lightning strike levels of um your likelihood to be this uh to be a victim of that um literally uh and most people don't know that like most people don't know that who who think that they're educated by you know reading mainstream newspapers and such you know you know you think you would know that if you're just like a casual reader of the New York Times but that's not really going to appear there actually um in in my experience instead what you'll what you'll see is like articles saying I fear jogging while black but you know presented as if that's a rational fear where I feel it should be presented as okay we can understand how you came there we can understand these videos have symbolic resonance but what the media should be doing is to say similar to a plane crash your odds of actually being a victim of this are are extremely low and you should understand that you can feel secure at this point as a black person you do not have to uh don't be misled by the few news events that happen because the news is by definition the outlier what makes the news is by definition what is not normal right everyday interactions don't make the news because they're not interesting um and I think the media has completely abandoned its responsibility to Tamp down on uh on black people's fears of being victims of racism and I think that has had a psychological effect on black people because to live in fear is is really no way to live especially if those fears are not actually justified by your likelihood of being harmed right like if it were actually true that you should fear you know every interaction with a cop then I think it would be okay to feel that fear because your fear is in proportion to reality but I think the fear because the media seizes on these stories out of context of any kind of statistical proportion I think it creates it creates fear and paranoia of being a victim of racism that need not exist yeah so this may be another another point where we where we differ a bit uh it strikes me that you know a half century ago people were racist in public right you could tell the Races they were they were saying I'm a racist I I don't like black folks now they still have racist uh outcomes right you still have racist Behavior you still have uh disproportionate um you know anti-black you know the facts that that uh um on all fronts on all sorts of fronts uh but you don't have the people self-identifying uh hey I'm the racist so you know I think I would worry more about the the paranoia and the fear and those sorts of emotions and existential concern coming from from that diamond Dynamic right that racism still exists but it's it's submerged and so you don't know exactly where it is so it makes black folks you know live uh with anxiety uh rather than um yeah the media amplification so how do you distinguish between the belief that racism has actually declined like there are just far fewer races today and the belief that racism has just gone subconscious it's there but they're afraid to say it now because those two worlds could look pretty similar right what kind of uh in your view what what evidence suggests that we are in World B rather than World a yeah that's a great question and you know I think that there can be a lot of focus on identifying who are the racists and who has racist intentions uh and you know I don't find that particularly uh useful you know I think it's more useful to look at you know the uh gaps in wealth or income uh look at the incarceration numbers and uh look at um you know the experiences of police not not just a police uh killings but in you know have you had a negative encounter with a police officer in your life do you know someone in your family who's had a negative encounter with the police officer where are people uh living right there all sorts of you know New Dimensions of anti-blackness in New York Times this thing about back appraisers and black developers now having all sorts of uh troubles in in their careers uh just in the last couple weeks so it seems like they're all sorts of dimensions of uh anti-blackness Beyond uh the police killing things that that we're that you know the focus on police killings helpfully uh pointed us to and opened up conversations about those um so let's talk about the disparities because you've pointed to disparities a lot in this conversation you know I I've coined the term disparity fallacy for the idea that a disparity between two groups is necessarily or probably or definitely cause caused by racism and uh the reason I I came to this belief is because we talk a lot about race in America today as in white black Hispanic Asian the categories that were solidified during the Carter Administration for in my view fairly arbitrary reasons um but that's a whole separate conversation about the social construction of race and so forth anyway we talk very little today about ethnicities right about um black Americans descended from slavery as an ethnic group as opposed to black Caribbean's black Jamaicans uh black trinidadians black ghanaians black Nigerians similarly with quote unquote white people we talk very little about the cultural and outcome differences between white Americans of Irish descent versus of French descent versus of German descent versus of Russian descent and when you actually look into this and I encourage anyone to if you people don't have very much time to you know read books about the subject but just go to Wikipedia and look up household income by ethnic group or personal income by ethnic group you will get a list from 1 to 100 with massive disparities between ethnic groups of the same race you will find that whites of Russian descent earn way more money than whites of French descent you will find blacks of Nigerian you know Nigerian Americans earning way more money than Haitian Americans huge disparities which no one reasonably attributes to racism because we're talking about groups of the same race groups who often can't even be distinguished by the races who would be being racist towards them um and yet these disparities persist very long and each one of them I think has a unique story that is a difference of uh you know an effect of all kinds of variables such as occupations that that ethnic groups can specialize in as a culture all kinds of attributes right like and what my view is that disparity is actually the norm not the exception we think we think there's a disparity between some groups two groups like something has gone wrong um necessarily uh when in fact disparities actually the typical state of a Multicultural Society where cultural differences matter and yield to different outcomes and differential success in different sectors and nobody views for instance the the the large disparities between whites and Asians as inherently problematic um and and yet all of that reasoning is suspended in the case of black white differences where it only has to be due to institutional racism or to the legacy of slavery and none of the other causes of disparity which seem quite powerful everywhere else in the world magically they disappear for this for this uh one example so I am so so I'm skeptical of your gesture towards those disparities as again prima facie evidence of a racist anti-black Society I certainly agree that there are all sorts of uh cultural differences uh and uh outcomes of various forms that accompany those cultural differences and you know it it's uh can be quite interesting to to look at them uh the claim that comes out of black Justice movements in recent years and over uh the decades uh is that there's something distinctive about anti-black racism that's different from all the this wider World wider terrain of cultural difference and if we think back to you know uh slavery itself you know I I think it makes this uh plausible right what does it take to uh make it uh acceptable to treat someone as an object rather than a person to treat a a an enslaved person not as a human being right but as equivalent to uh you know a cow or uh you know a a piece of Machinery right it takes all sorts of uh uh work on oneself right so shaping how one thinks shaping how one feels it takes all sorts of Institutions political institutions cultural institutions to make that that possible it's so um counterintuitive right to treat a person another person as not a person uh and so you know I I think that like realizing how much it takes to allow people to be so inhumane at that moment of slavery makes it makes it plausible and I think even likely that the anti-black outcomes that we're talking about the anti-black differentials that were talking about are different from this wider wider wider world of sort of cultural differences that you're alluding to so I mean I I would it's not quite the claim you're making but I would agree that anti-black racism is the the deepest kind of racism that has plagued America by far so nothing I'm about to say is is denying that as a historical fact but when you say when you appeal to slavery I think the history doesn't really support your model here because I think my guess is you will agree because this is like widely agreed I think in across the political spectrum of people who study race is that um white supremacy didn't come before slavery it came really after slavery as a justification for slavery the first fact was that there were white and black indentured servants in Virginia right indentured servants which were treated very much like slaves but they had a time limit many of them died lived in brutal conditions and over the course of the 17th century for various reasons um black people slavery became racialized for for reasons of convenience and all kinds of reasons but the the philosophy of white supremacy and the badge of inferiority associated with skin color was not the reason that they enslaved black people's other way around it was black people it was a convenient marker to Mark eventually the difference between slave and free even though it didn't start that way and then they had to justify in America how it is we can preach freedom and simultaneously enslave so much of the population and that's how the philosophy of white supremacy really became popular was as a as a post-hoc justification for the fact that there was this big population enslaved that was all of One race um so that's the first thing I would say in terms of it's not like the the the affect the affect of racism that caused white people to enslave black people and the second piece of evidence for that it's not like the affect that caused people to enslave others is just like slavery has been uh uh perpetrated by every group on it people of its own race you know slaves were black tribes were enslaved in Africa by other tribes um and then sold for rum and other Goods right so those black tribes didn't require anti-blackness in order to enslave the tribe that they were warring against like you know the Dahomey tribe that was depicted Rosalie and the woman King but was actually like one of the fiercest um slides of tribes that profited the most off the slave trade slavery has been in China for thousands of years and was only outlawed in like the early 1900s in Korea Russian serfdom the Slavs Arabs enslaving millions or like 14 million Africans over the course of a a thousand years like this is as I would agree with your statement that slavery is like deeply counterintuitive to me and you and to Modern people like the the notion of treating someone that way is deeply counterintuitive and you have to do work to even put yourself in the mindset of someone capable of of of enslaving someone but the fact is for most of human history for actually all of recorded human history until a couple hundred years ago you find almost no arguments against slavery full stop right not in the Bible certainly not in the Quran um not like there may be like hints of it in Buddhism but not really what you find is basically no one wanted their people to be enslaved but no one had a problem with slavery as such until like the 1600s 1700s when people started making arguments um against slavery full stop so I think I think like the whole world has become somewhat more Progressive on that issue which is a great thing but it's actually I don't think it was counterintuitive to pre-modern people to to to make war and to enslave and and so forth yeah I think it uh it is important to appreciate that injustices in general and slavery in particular has had a long history and uh exists in many many places but we also need to appreciate the distinctiveness of the Middle Passage right the stripping of individuals of Family Ties of language of cultural heritage of religious religious tradition transporting them over an ocean right in the in appalling conditions and then uh uh making you know what we get in that in that case of the Middle Passage is something like domination in laboratory conditions right master and slave script of uh all of the complications of the world uh where their only identity is that of enslaved right there no longer part of a community there there's no longer there's a minimal sort of legal uh if any legal protection and so you know I think uh in in other cases of slavery right there there are more uh there is more complexity and cultural complications and uh some some legal protection in this case of the Middle Passage there's something really dramatic and you know focusing on uh and appreciating uh this human problem of domination that we all have a will to dominate each other but you know we can see that in its purest form in the Middle Passage because the the identity of the enslaved uh is purely that of enslaved everything else Stripped Away that that puts particular importance in in force uh in in this transatlantic slave slave trade yeah so there's a book called slavery and social death by the Harvard sociologist um Orlando Patterson and um it's basically a survey and a theoretical analysis of slavery a kind of quasi-marxist analysis of slavery worldwide including uh slavery in the Americas and he says a few things in there that I think I think a challenge the uniqueness of American slavery um not not that it does not challenge the um brutality it agrees with the brutality of of American slavery but also points to the brutality that we don't really like to study as much of of slavery in other uh civilizations other countries Etc and he says something in that book which is there is no there's many differences between the laws governing slaves and different uh and all the different examples I might have mentioned and more for the past ten thousand years slavery on every inhabited continent but there is no known Society um in which uh the Whip or something like it was not used on slaves because fundamentally how do you force a laborer to work when they have no incentive to work when they have stand to gain nothing from their work they're not being paid you have no carrots to offer or you have very few and the only thing you can offer is the stick metaphorically and and literally um you know there are there were bones strewn across the Sahara Desert because of the slaves taken to to the Muslim world since the early conquests uh in in the 7th and 8th centuries and I think there are just there's Untold suffering that we don't really look into or unpack enslaved societies around the world because naturally As Americans we are more interested in our own Society I think that's okay I do think we should study American slavery more than we should study slavery in the rest of the world because that's our country but I do think I think we have taken it to an extreme where we um we we want to believe that we were that this country was like especially cruel uh uh and I I don't think that I'm not sure that's actually justified by a global and historical survey of slavery yes and I I do think we can get uh I think uh investigating slavery and its after lives in lots of different contexts is is important and we can get distracted by the sort of political claims around the goodness or Badness of of America what it strikes me from a perspective of Ethics in The Human Condition is that you know uh and teaching it in augustinian Catholic University one of the things that uh Saint Augustine is really into is thinking about the will to dominate right that every human has within uh within him or her right this uh will to dominate others and it's something that we all Wrestle with uh and it's something that we wrestle with at an individual level and at a collective level at a national level at an imperial level in the Roman Empire uh and uh it's something that we can see in its clearest form in this this case of slavery but it's something that no we we all need to be uh thinking about uh the manifestations of domination in uh in anti-blackness but not limited to anti-blackness right we also need to think about forms of economic domination forms a patriarchy that have domination don't into them forms of homophobia that have domination built into them so I mean I agree we shouldn't be uh sort of stuck on the the the fact of the Middle Passage but we should use that to open up conversations about domination in our individual lives and collectively so um so in in your book you you towards the beginning you you sort of talk about how you're not going to engage with like Kant and how you generally correct me if I'm wrong avoid incorporating European philosophers in the European philosophical tradition into your conception of black dignity is is that roughly correct right so there are a couple of ways that we often think about dignity one uh as sort of high status or nobility right the Dignity of a bishop or the Dignity of a duke or Aristocrat uh and then later in uh human history European history I think of dignity as something that's Universal each of us has some dignity inside of us so Democratic conception of of dignity uh and while these both are you know important and useful I think and still exist in in Con in the way we we talk and you know have helped make important advances in international human rights regimes and others there's another conception of dignity that uh I want to call our attention to that's the dignity that comes up in Justice movements and particularly in Black Justice movements the dignity that that is Manifest in struggle right struggle against domination so that's what I want to focus on in the book [Music] um um so I mean I I I perceive a potential tension in that which is the following throughout your book you you valorize people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King who who I also both of whom I admire deeply um as some of this sort of intellectual and activist heroes in in the narrative uh I I know for a fact both of them were very much steeped in the Europe European philosophical tradition and Martin Luther King spoke in his in his famous essay my pilgrimage to non-violence of reading Plato Aristotle Kant Mill lock Rousseau and um he called them Masters right not not in the slave connotation sense but in the sense that they had mastered ideas and thinking and he learned a great deal from them and Marx as well um and so so presumably you you you admire these people very much but you don't follow their lead in incorporating that tradition that European Enlightenment tradition do you view that as attention at all or or uh is is that reconciled yeah I agree with Douglas and King here had uh and many others in the black tradition the black intellectual tradition is one that is uh both growing out of black experience in the US but also in dialogue with European thought of All Sorts uh and that's where it's richness where its richness comes from uh and you know in in you know we have a lot of uh books about dignity from from the European uh European perspectives I wanted to think about what does it mean to approach this topic focused on but not exclusively uh engaging with with black sources uh in the US so uh I noticed in your book some some gestures towards the idea that Martin Luther King was a radical uh can you explain that it yeah so I think there are a lot of different ways to understand uh King uh and you know there's one story that I uh well there are a couple of stories I don't agree with one story uh takes a king to be basically a secular liberal who just wants to make things gradually better nope I agree I agree with you he was not secular yeah and I mean it's amazing you go to the Washington DC Monument to King there's no talk about God no talk about things secular I mean so I'm an atheist and I'm a secular person so I think I kind of understand that mindset and I think people sort of want Dr King to be secular secular people do because it it makes more sense they want to downplay the centrality of his Christianity to his message but the truth is you have to read what he wrote like Christianity was one of I would say like maybe four major pillars of his thought yes yeah uh and I think that's what makes his thought uh radical right that there's a a possibility that the world to come could be could be uh dramatically different from the role that we have right it's not just a matter of uh looking uh around a problem here a problem there what are the sort of policy fixes we can come up with to to address this or that there might be really deep uh problems baked into our world there might be we might need a tragic sensibility right to to appreciate the the depths of the injustices in our world uh which comes along with uh you know a hope for uh dramatic transformation right that uh we can if we are committed to struggling against Injustice the world could uh and has different moments dramatically changed in ways that surprise us uh so I mean I think that some of the radicality of King there of course on on first order policy issues he also uh you know on anti-imperialism on capitalism on so forms of racism uh throughout his career not just at the end but throughout his career he says things that today would be perceived as quite quite far to the left so here's my problem with Dr King was a radical um so far as I can see it every Martin Luther King Day this happens right people quote Martin Luther King's famous statements about common Humanity I look forward to the day when little little black boys and a little white girls little white boys can hold hands right this Shining Moment where so many different kinds of people from America resonated with the same message and temporarily came together to strike down you know apartheid in the south um right and so so there's these amazing statements of common humanity and every Martin Luther King day I read a slew of the same article which says don't you dare think that that's what Dr King was all about he was also about radical aggressive protest he was the implication the subtext of this is Dr King would really be about BLM philosophy and tactics today so don't you reduce him to that sanitized um version of himself that is palatable to white people right he was really a radical and when you ask for evidence of him being a radical there's a bait and switch that happens which is people start talking about the Vietnam War and full employment policy which he supported in Universal Health Care which he supported and issues that are totally different from common humanity and the meaninglessness of race and I feel like the the topic has just been changed where you know you you one you know this hypothetical person has it attacked me for saying I'm misrepresenting King's beliefs about racial identity he was really an end non-violent protest um and then when I ask you for evidence you're talking about the Vietnam War and you're talking about if it's Bernie Sanders type policy which I agree all of those were very radical at the time and some are still radical today um but it's not there's a bait and switch there which is like Dr King was all about that she was also all about that uh we are united in in and that race is a meaningless ultimately meaningless trait that has no business dividing us for any reason she was he really spoke with one voice on that issue throughout his um throughout his life and once the aims of the Civil Rights Movement were achieved the main legislative aims um he largely pivoted to being more concerned about organizing around class than around race and in his final book his so-called radical phase the second chapter is a sustained critique of the Black Power movement where he ends by recommending they change their name to power for poor people because class is the main is the more important variable post 65 in his mind to organize around so look none of us know what Martin Luther King would say today none of us can Channel him and I think it's valid to say I I hate when people um ventriloquize the dead like I think it's absurd but we know what he said in his life about the analog to BLM at that time which was the Black Power movement so that's my problem with the King was a radical argument thanks yeah so I think it is quite tricky as you say to uh I mean there's a general problem with ventriloquizing the dead but there's a more specific problem with King and that he's a great auditor he's a great rhetorician but he speaks to different audiences in different ways and uh he speaks to different audiences in different ways over time right depending on the context and he's very responsive to what's happening in American politics at different different moments and you know what issues can get traction I think it is his theological Vision that's important here to keep in mind right so that this uh image of the the little white girls and little white boys holding hands um uh and uh you know all the children uh living happily Now isn't this eschatological Vision right it's at the end of time this is the thing that we're pursuing that we can dream of uh and we have to think about you know what are the particular tactics that we can pursue right now in order to move toward that that dream uh and those tactics involve uh you know as a prerequisite understanding the the ways in which anti-black racism manifests in our society and addressing those it also involves understanding the ways that class uh and economic inequality manifest in our society the ways in which uh lack of access to healthcare and other issues are you know causing injustices and organizing around those uh but with this vision in mind of you know a time to come a land of milk and honey to which we can uh we can Aspire in this on this uh eschatological Horizon at the End of Time rather than tomorrow or uh at a moment that we can map out from here to there okay pivoting slightly what is your critique of multiculturalism and can you sort of Define that for people sure so in the book I I suggest that after the black power era that we were talking about which followed the Civil Rights Movement uh the U.S went through uh perhaps half a century from the late 70s to uh early 2000s of multiculturalism which was a a regime for understanding and managing racial uh and cultural difference and where uh we were to appreciate the specificity of different racial communities different cultural communities appreciate that each has their own uh struggles uh that we can stand in solidarity with them around their own particular problems uh and uh also their own tasty Foods their own colorful clothes you know all of these things that we can appreciate and you know ultimately we can uh everyone brings a meal to the potluck exactly yeah yeah that's what I grew up with too yeah yeah uh yeah that was my my childhood uh and you know there's some something powerful about that right the sun said you know we're we're a nation where all sorts of different people can get together uh it can live together happily and if only we fix a few problems around the edges we'll achieve that Vision uh you know I think that the Justice movements that have emerged in the 20 2010s 2020s are naming the way that that Vision misses a huge uh uh huge problems of uh Injustice around anti-blackness as well as around uh indigeneity and other other issues that you know a patriarchy right that uh continue uh to the to this to this day and you know will not be solved by just imagining everyone can bring their their own food to the to the potluck but you know require a deep analysis of History a rigor rigorous analysis of the the concepts involved uh and involve struggle right involve organizing together with with those neighbors and community members and family and friends against these these forms of Injustice so what kind of concrete policies if if any does that translate into I mean you're you're not really um is really a policy maker or anything like that but presumably you have some kind of concrete recommendations or broad gestures in in the policy direction that you would like to see vis-a-vis multiculturalism transforming Society Etc yeah I think we're at a really difficult moment in that uh there was one Paradigm that uh we were used to and uh it's being we're seeing that that Paradigm got things wrong it's not clear what the new paradigm is going to be we're at a moment of experimentation we're at a moment of trying out new new different ways of thinking about race I think that's part of the the challenge in this Telluride experience we were talking about earlier in that uh you know this moment of experimentation is also a vulnerable moment where where things can go wrong uh but we think it's an accident that the uh sort of woke critical race Theory philosophy imploded a classroom do you think any any philosophy with respect to race would have been equally likely to implode such a classroom uh no I I think the like the Multicultural like taking the Multicultural ethos for instance as a comparison case yeah I think the Multicultural ethos would have led to black students not finding their voice and being disempowered I think in uh you know how come how come because uh there are indeed ways in which um why would they not just bring their food to the potluck so to speak yeah because there are uh habits that are so ingrained in how we live together uh that uh make uh Blackness marked as you know um poison the black food and it's brought to the public marked as as poisonous and something to avoid that uh you know you can't have a happy potluck if everyone's looking at that food and saying that you know that that's tainted stuff you don't want to try that over there uh you know it's maybe not quite that extreme in a seminar space but there is something like that going on and we need to find Tech mix to uh to write that right that um wrong um so I guess this may be my last question I'm trying to search myself to see if I have any more um maybe two more questions so what are your views on Prison abolition I know this is something that you've you've thought about yeah I don't think I think the prison is a moral Abomination I think the uh if the choice that we have today is releasing everyone is incarcerated or keeping about two million people in cages we should release it when it's incarcerated everyone including murderers and Psychopaths yeah I think the the injustices that we're committing right now by keeping to around two million people in cages is so uh gross so uh grotesque and that it needs to stop right now and we can communities are experimenting with ways to to deal with the the problems that you're alluding to there but uh right now we see we have we're doing we're doing a horrendous evil and we need to stop it would that apply to prisons worldwide or specifically to American prisons only you know the prison you know keeping a person in a cage uh is a problem right keeping a person in cages something that should never happen uh whether that's in the US or whether that's in uh you know a prison with a slightly thicker mattress in Norway so it's a it's a worldwide abolition right I mean the problem is immoral one it's not a not as um what um what do you think should happen when someone murders someone else and is caught yeah I think we're at a moment where there's all sorts of uh important experimentation happening with uh forms of transformative justice of uh bringing together communities bringing together those who've been harmed uh and uh naming those harms and together collectively as a community as family members as loved ones coming up with a with a path forward exactly what those outcomes will look like no I'm not sure but I trust in the the local Grassroots communities to find ways to to uh figure that out and to draw on the wisdom of ancestors and past practices uh that existed before the rural prison and before the the prison was a thing before we kept people in cages in order to before they were in prison most murders were like killed the death death penalty or stoned to death we look at the Bible look at look at what what are the historical practices from our Traditions about how to deal with murderers and rapists the death penalty prison is actually relatively speaking relatives are pre-modern people actually Progressive right am I wrong about that uh you know the Justice systems in uh Years Gone by are complicated sometimes there was money exchanged in in response for for uh you know a relative who was killed there are all sorts of different things that were done in the past we don't I don't think they're we can't we shouldn't be nostalgic right we shouldn't uh say you know things were better before 1800 or something like that but we should be open to uh learning from uh you know the the wisdom of the past but also particularly uh communities where you know people are dealing with uh harm all the time I think they're uh black and poor communities in the US where it's clear that police in the criminal justice system is not going to make things better the state is not going to make things better I I have to admit I'm really unsatisfied by your answer to what do you do with a murderer because it seemed it gestures toward like vague Community family meetings what happens if the person murdersing it like what do you do with someone that rapes a child do you have a family meeting with them I mean that sounds insane to me and I want to be charitable to your answer here right and I think these are uh you know human beings are complicated creatures if they're causing harm we we all have been harmed and we all harm others and we need to appreciate the complexity of uh of each of us including those who are causing uh grotesque harms we also need to be able to keep our communities safe right and sometimes that moves means removing people from Community sometimes it means how do you do that right you know a prison yeah I'm not a not a policy person but I can see what it means to keep someone in a cage and I can see that that isn't helping something uh that isn't the the proper Solution on immoral level it's also not the proper solution in terms of uh the person coming out of coming out of being held in a cage and now now they're supposed to be a good person it's just uh it doesn't seem like the transformation that the person promises is actually happening and if you take someone away from their loving relationship that I agree with I mean I agree our prison the American prison system and and there are others that are probably as bad um does a piss-poor job of rehabilitating people and isn't even oriented towards that purpose basically people go to prison they try to survive they um they learn you know they they get buffed so that people don't with them they learn to fight and survive and they try their very best to do that and then they come out often more hardened psychologically than they did when they go in and that's even in the best of cases right even in the case where this person went in with a totally um Noble urge to recognize how they harm people whatever they they often end up like you know I just had to survive in prison right and you you leave with that survival mindset I think which is which is very much a shame which I think is really about love right if you're not being loved if you're away from the people who love you if you're if there's a wall between you and those who care for you and make it it's really hard to see how you can come out a loving person to those around you yes yeah people do and um I don't I just don't understand how you you seem to be operating in a picture of the world where there are no there are no people that just want to do bad things for no reason right like everyone's everyone's pathologies everyone's you know the violent tendencies of a particular person have to be a product of like circumstances that can be changed or not being loved enough and we we will have some effective way to reform people through conversation which seems to me um like wildly different from The Real World where in my view like some significa some significant fraction of prisoners fit that description where like the right therapy mixed with the right um the right lifestyle changes and Community coming around really and this this person was never a problem for the community again I I have no trouble believing that applies to some fraction of people in prison I would never I couldn't put a number on it but there are no doubt there's no doubt also a significant fraction of people that actually enjoy harming other people and have inherently violent tendencies or if not violent then predatory right like how do you explain the like people that have had every advantage in life um loving parents and yet go out and commit all kinds of crimes and need not even be violent crimes it could be like fraud right like white collar crime how do you explain why collar criminals born with a silver spoon in their mouths and loving parents I think I don't think that human nature is is inherently good and that we're all waiting we're all just waiting for reasons to be good I think that's half the story that's you know that's most people half the time but the other half of the story is that um we are we have instincts to exploit um almost everyone is capable of hurting others and some people I think actually enjoy it uh and you know I don't know if you watch any serial killer documentaries but you know half the time they do find a story about how the father was abusive but half the time they don't half the time it's like this kid had a great family and he came out the womb like torturing cats and and and it's it's an anomaly and it's unfortunate but the idea that you can just reform people without warehousing them without removing them from the population of people that they want to exploit seems extraordinarily naive to me well I I know you have a strong position on media criticism and I wonder if the same uh kind of criticism might apply to these serial killer documentaries in the role that they have in our our cultural imagination right that uh if we focus on these few people right these few incidents that are uh that do have serious mental health problems right that uh May that we may not right now have the resources to treat right you know they're they're uh if we focus on those people we get distracted from the from the real problem right from from an analysis of the complications of the world uh that uh you know uh reflect the The Human Condition in general rather than this sort of anomalous group that the media likes to focus on uh and to go back to my my favorite uh Saint Augustine here right we do it all have a will to dominate and a will toward the good right and these are competing and the and the way that they you know the will to dominate can be suppressed in the will toward the good it can uh be allowed to to to grow is when we have good role models and we have loving communities that we live in uh when we have you know forms of accountability and structures in in which we live uh and when we can uh acknowledge the the harms that that we uh that we uh create and you know that have been done to us and you know I think in the vast majority of cases right uh um you know the state is not in a good role to uh be you know the one admitted saying you're a bad person you need to go away you're a good person you go away it's the current you know the system we have is you know trusting the state which everyone's suspicious of it who else should be trusted who better yes I mean I think right we're in an era where there are all sorts of experiments in transformative Justice happening at the local level in Grassroots communities where folks are saying you know uh that in this neighborhood get get together and sort of bring bring those uh who've been hard who defines what's a community though this is a problem I mean in New York I live in an apartment building I know a couple of my neighbors if I were to go berserk and murder someone who who would count as the community authority to decide what is to be done with me and again so these examples of going berserk out of the blue seem like they're in the the serial uh serial murderer uh documentary genre of uh 40 of people in prison are are there for violent crimes those are obviously most of those are not murders but we're talking about violence you know that's not small right when when folks are are uh I assault somebody yeah when folks are poor and don't have a lot of options there's all sorts of stuff that happens in order to to survive uh and you know much of that is not ideal right but it's also uh not uh stuff that you know uh is going to be fixed with a state solution and you know it may not be perfect right I agree that there are questions around what counts as a community there are questions around you know how do we create structures of accountability at the local level but if we're going to choose between trusting the state and trusting a you know a local local something at the local Grassroots level I want to my my faith is in the in the local community the Grassroots love I mean it seems like a classic tyranny of structurelessness situation where you get rid of the the bad guy the state which I agrees is perpetuates all kinds of injustices and then the person who takes command ends up being the most aggressive person in the room that everyone else is afraid of and then there's the decisions are made by the local Tyrant as opposed to the judge you know and and the criminal justice system and and the the the the thing about democracy is that at the very least I have some say in terms of who I vote for if I'm upset with the regime and the status quo but I have no say if it's just the most charismatic tough person in my community that ends up calling the shots I can't vote him or her necessarily out of office I have no social contract with this person my level of power may just be proportional to sort of my sway in the community I may be a nobody but I am one person one vote with with respect to the state and there's something to be said for that minimal as it is level of accountability relative to basically Anarchy yeah I agree it can be a problem that uh the tyranny of structure structuralistness at a local level can be a real problem we need to develop structures of accountability at the local level and it's not clear what they're going to be but we can experiment right if we see something's going wrong we see the state is doing a bad job of this we see the prison is doing a bad job it means that we need to try out new things and we need to try them out at the local level not at the national level if crime goes up by a factor of like X percent would you consider that a failed experiment is there some value of x such that like if crime went up by that much under such an experiment you'd consider it failed yeah so I I think uh aggregating data at the sort of national level or even City level um often obscures what's actually happening right why uh because it um there are all sorts of different things that count as crime okay so let's forget about every crime except homicide because every homicide leaves a body and it's the most reliable maybe the only truly reliable crime metric because people don't often get rid of body like we usually know how many homicides there are because it leaves evidence if homicide were to go up is there some value of x where if it goes up by that much that percent you would consider like any given local experiment to be failed you don't have to come up with a number I'm just saying is is that would that be a an Evidence of failure if it spiked by some unacceptable amount yeah so here here I think I agree with it the Italian philosophy that things fail and we try again and we try better and they might fail again but we try again and we try better it doesn't work you're saying yes like that that would be a possible dimension of failure yeah I mean if people are getting harmed uh yeah and more more and more people are getting harmed something's going wrong we have to try something new so what went wrong in 2020 when we had this single greatest year-over-year increase in homicide in American history according to Pew and yeah when you say that failed experiment in something right so I mean these are what must it not have been these are very uh I mean everything Circa 2020 is Complicated by economic issues by pandemic by all sorts of reconfigurations in the American landscape no but it didn't happen in a pandemic happened in the whole world homicide increase happened in America right I mean number of guns in the US I mean there are all sorts of factors a sort of cultural violence in the US is different from other places in the world I think one country had riots in every city and a racial Reckoning about police and that's that's like by far the most obvious cause of of the um subsequent rise in homicide in my view but that maybe that's a debate for another another time um you know because we had guns the year before we had you know and it's mostly illegal guns not Second Amendment guns that are doing the the harm but I mean I guess my what I'm getting at is like but what what metrics would you be looking at for success in these like transformative Justice experiments what what are you looking to that's like this community did it right because look at what happened what is that great yeah so uh if um a community members feel safer if they they feel as if they're being they're less likely to be harmed if they feel as if uh when they have been harmed they're happy with the outcome right if you look at surveys or Crime Victims now many of them are not happy with the outcomes when the when the perpetrator goes to prison they don't think longer prison sentences are a good a good idea right so I mean I think these sorts of metrics of you know how how does uh are those who who survived forms of harm um satisfied with with the the outcome and with this re-weaving of the the fabric of their Community those seem important to look at so what role do the police play in this Vision do the police still exist as they do today or are they gone or is it how do you how do you view that so again I I'm not a not a policy person but it doesn't seem like we're at an important uh important moment where mental health professionals are being recognized for the important role that they play in uh in communities where you know we're uh wondering do you really need a police person to be directing traffic right could there be other sorts of professionals that could be directing traffic you know what what are the uh if we we've been fostering a culture of violence among the the police how can we narrow their role of police such that uh uh others who are a better fit for um you know other professionals who are better fit for for the jobs we need them to do can be assigned to those roles so uh you would say leave the police intact but have them do the work that they're best at all right so I think things are like not directing traffic anything else I think we're at a moment of scaling down when there are mental health crises you don't need a police officer you need a mental health counselor right uh it well it depends if the um if the person having a mental health crisis if if violence the potential of violence is part of um part of their Mental Health Complex and in many cases people the people calling 9-1-1 are their own mothers who know their mental illness better than any uh mental health professional and know have been negotiating it for years um and no generally know how to calm them down when they're having an episode better than anyone because it's like unique to each person often and the fact that they've called 911 is is sometimes um a result of the fact that like I can't handle this one and I'm scared right how is a mental health professional with no with no um physical skills in terms of how to protect yourself how to subdue someone uh while keeping them safe going to necessarily be the default in that situation I don't necessarily see how that is an improvement my my own my own view would be that what what you want in that moment is someone who is extremely skilled physically who knows how to subdue somebody without harming them right it's like the Paradigm is like a Jujitsu black belt because Jiu Jitsu is all about how to like restrain someone without necessarily injuring them at all and I've talked to at least one cop on my podcast he was a black belt in Jiu Jitsu and talked about the number of times he never had had to go to his gun because he had such physical skills that he wasn't afraid if someone threw a punch at him if someone came at him he knew how to how to deal with it in a way that didn't harm him or them 99 of cops don't have that level of skill so what you want is someone with that kind of skill um and you're not that's that's not the skill of a therapist like we're not talking about a therapist yes I agree these are really uh complex and tragic situations mental health professionals sorry yeah these are really complex and tragic situations where families are are grappling with uh those they love who have the potential to harm others uh and if there's someone you love uh you want the situation to de-escalate right you you don't want the situation to get worse and worse uh so uh you know the tool that we need for that job is someone who knows how to de-escalate the situation right maybe they're well-trained police officers who know how to de-escalate that situation it seems like given the culture of policing in the U.S today it's unlikely the case uh it may be the case that you know you want mental health professionals in the lead supported by you know others who you know have other skills that could be useful but uh you know if the focus is on de-escalating is on sort of uh cooling down the situation rather than heating it up then I think we really need to think carefully about what's what are the professionals who should be in the lead in that situation I agree de-escalation should be the priority the problem is that de-escalation is not always possible in my view um I I think I mean I'll use an example given to me by former uh head of Baltimore PD Anthony Barksdale he said he got a mental health call and um it was from the mother and he was having an episode probably schizophrenia um and he was able to calm the guy down he thought okay good this is gonna be fine we're gonna we're gonna get him to put him in the cop car get him to the hospital get him the health help he needs and always going well until suddenly in in in the boy's mind he became a dragon and now he's fighting the dragon right how do you how do you de-escalate in that in that situation what you're what you're dealing with is a mental illness that there is no Pat formula there's not even a sophisticated Formula One can learn in school to necessarily um switch somebody off in that scenario right like at the end of the day you have to be able to protect the people around that person because the person is not is having a break from reality right um I I I'm very skeptical of the notion that there is this skills there is such a thing as being good at de-escalating but it only goes so far right like there's no such thing as as like the Jedi Mind thing where it's like you're so good at de-escalating that you can just reliably 99 go into a situation and get two people to stop fighting hey like have you ever tried to stop two people fighting it's it can if they want to fight it's pretty difficult even if you know them right like and if you don't know them if you're like a mental health professional oh I studied how to stop fights for four years it's like okay I'm sure you're you're better at it than average I'm sure you're quite good at it but the problem is the skill naturally maxes out at a certain level and then you have to be able to I mean I often think of like the mental health thing as you know we send the first mental health you know person to to a mental health call and there there's some success stories until there's the time that uh the mental health person gets beat into a pulp and then we start and then we say okay well we're gonna give you guys pepper sprays and then slowly one step step by step we end up Reinventing the cops um at least that's one plausible outcome I think yeah I think that's a real worry and one that we have to be careful about right that we come up with alternatives to uh cultures of violence in in the police uh and then they start to look like the cultures of violence and police it's a a real worry uh but we also need to tolerate experimentation we need to be okay being frustrated with some things that aren't working perfectly when we see we have a system that's not working well it's going to take some time to figure out what what works better and and there will be some mistakes along the way and we need to collectively tolerate that on the question of the you're sort of schizophrenic in the police car example uh I agree these are these can be very challenging situations and you know I have no expertise in in Psychiatry I know there are Mental Hospitals where there are a lot of schizophrenics and they they have ways of uh you know they're used to dealing with these sorts of extreme situations uh without calling the police into the Into the Wilderness I mean they have they have chemicals that sedate you great so there there are a range of uh so is that the suggestion to have I mean that's you know I I think that yeah the thought is that um you know there are a world of professionals who uh every day deal with uh folks in mental health crises who deal with schizophrenics and you know that's a skill set that we ought to take advantage of and uh that we ought to um you know uh bring into uh sites of of crises particularly among foreign black folks uh who you know uh are often uh not on the you know not um uh getting the mental health services that they they need okay Vincent um I think that brings me to the end of my questioning end of my uh my grilling you've been a great Sport and can you please tell my audience where to follow your work or if you have on Twitter handle website um and and book so so that they can they can find you yeah I'm very low Tech I'm not on Twitter but uh my the book Black dignity is uh available from Yale University press all right Vincent Lloyd thanks so much thank you all right that's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or 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Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 33,865

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music

Id: c8iuEprjv6I

Length: 125min 18sec (7518 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023