Identity Politics Debate: John McWhorter & Michael Eric Dyson

it is the degree to which black people have been systemically denied opportunities that other people can take for granted and as long as we deny the lethal limits that are imposed upon black american folk or black folk more broadly as a result of the very identities we speak about then those identities have to be taken into account if your visceral sense of what voting is supposed to be about is sticking your thumb down against white hegemony it can distract us from frankly the less theatrical sorts of things that really can make a massive difference i think that it makes us not have as much imagination as we might always have in trying to make black lives better hello and welcome to intelligence squared i'm your debate host and referee john don van and today i am asking this question is the appeal to identity politics a way to win elections does such a focus serve beneficially to organize and mobilize citizens whose interests and very presence and politics tends to get marginalized or does it miss the point that each voter is an individual and membership in a group is but one and not always the most important consideration in who that person will vote for on the one hand today we have the most diverse congress in american history but on the other we saw president trump netting record numbers of minority voters in the election that we just come through so what are those outcomes tell us about identity politics and whether appealing to them is a winning strategy or not well that's what we're going to debate with two gentlemen who have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue and in fact debating each other in the past on a variety of topics i want to welcome them both first now professor john mcquarter is an author and contributing writer at the atlantic and a professor at columbia university john thank you for joining us and welcome back to intelligence squared my pleasure and opposing you will be dr michael eric dyson of vanderbilt university he is a new york times contributing opinion writer and a contributing editor at the new republic michael thanks so much for joining us again at intelligent squared thank you my friend thanks for having me just before we get started i just want to ask each of you a very very simple question which i think will give us some indication of where you're going to argue on the central question and that question to you is i'll start with you john mcwhorter what does the term identity politics evoke for you the way we use the word identity today is not something that someone 50 years ago would have recognized rather when we say identity it's a shorthand for how a non-white person feels in relation to a white hegemony that's what we mean by identity and identity politics proposes that all people who are not roughly white americans will see themselves primarily as that not white person in an eternal kind of conflict with the powers that be who are white that is what we mean by identity in 2020. thank you and michael the same question to you what does the term identity politics evoke for you well for me it evokes a history of un the undifferentiated mass of white identity seen as universal since whiteness has signified and symbolized uh a strictly universal conception of self anything that departs from that was seen as a kind of identitarian bet noir it was offensive and it was in some instances most instances inauthentic so when i hear identity politics i hear uh the for the first time a constructive engagement with identities that fall outside the parameter of the hegemonic white identity that has often been identified as the universal identity and therefore shorn of its ethnicity and race and articulated as an ideal that is adhered to by everybody and those who don't uh are unfortunately and tragically seen as somehow doing the wrong thing all right thank you michael and thank you john for for giving us a little bit of an insight about how you're going to argue uh the question that's the central question of this debate and it's whether the appeal to identity politics is a winning strategy john mcwhorter are you yes or no on that question i would have to say no okay what's your argument go for it my argument would be that the idea that to be a person who's not white is to primarily think of oneself as not white and as not being seen fully by white people is something that can seem very normal to college town hyper educated people like us but i think that it's much less normal than we often think i think that we pointy-headed people tend to overstate and to exaggerate the extent to which a person who is not white needs to be seen fully by those who are in power in order to achieve or even to feel good about themselves and so of course what we've seen in the past election results is what from the academia slash mainstream media slash workstar perspective looks bizarre which is that more than a few black and brown people happily voted for donald trump who is clearly and there's no no dispute here he is clearly a casual bigot in the archie bunker sense i am quite sure that donald trump does not see me fully that he wouldn't if he met me that is certainly true but that is not the mic drop disqualifier for a vote of as many black and brown people as we might think and most importantly the people who voted for him were by no means all bow tied conservative types who are in some kind of question as to whether or not they really belong to the black or the latino race you can see that a great many of the people who voted for donald trump for whatever their reasons and i was not one of them but for whatever their reasons were people who nobody could say were not authentically black or brown culturally so i think we just need to open ourselves up to the idea that identity politics may be one strategy that somebody might espouse and to make coherent and sustained arguments for but it is not universal and unquestioned morality itself it's one way of looking at things that's popular especially among a certain type of person usually highly educated and concentrated in cities and college towns all right michael so the way that we've set this up as um a dichotomy uh basically if uh john is arguing against this is arguing no on this question you are the yes so why please make your case on why appealing to identity politics can be a winning strategy sure i suspect that uh you know john and i have overlapping interests and arenas of agreement as well as dispute and disagreement if we were to have a venn diagram but since we're heading for uh or aiming for a far more um linear or at least uh discrete sphere of engagement i'll say yes um look when we talk about identity what has always interested me is that in the modern west and even in the ancient uh european cultures for that matter uh identity was not necessary to be articulated because it was the common presumption of those uh who participated in the culture in the race in the ethos in the ethnos those who were capable and competent as citizens of a defined region or group of political interests um had laid out for them a set of expectations a set of norms a set of ideals and a set of practices habits and dispositions in an aristotelian sense that constituted the virtue of their identities but those identities need not be articulated against the backdrop of an offending or a dissenting uh reality not to suggest that there were no uh catastrophic and cataclysmic differences that were being unleashed on particular individuals or communities and against which they had to assert a kind of uh collective and homogeneous uh self-conception in order to offer self-defense what i am saying however is that in the way we mean it in the modern sense of identity politics uh ably uh uh to a degree by professor mcwhorter the thing is is that look the greeks the romans the italians the jews the irish the polish you know folk all have had identities but in subsuming those identities under say more an ethnic or a or a national identity it was not necessary to articulate a specific racial conception of self that was brought into existence when uh the powers the ingenuities and the intelligences of europe are sharply juxtaposed to those who fall outside of its circumference and its realm so whether it's africa or parts of asia and the like and so in our modern day when we think about identity politics you know the complaint is look why can't we be unified after all the motto of the country is e pluribus unum out of many one why can't we forge a kind of common destiny um where we're able to generate uh a unified conception not not uniformity but unified that says all of those differences can be brought together and reasonably coherent made reasonably coherent under the same umbrella and that sounds like an ideal to which many of us should aspire but the problem is that in our modern conception identity politics is really the default position of those who have been white those who have been in the dominant culture and those who don't fit into that mode are seen as somehow less than inferior to or estranged from uh an ideal that has been articulated as normative and universal but the problem is the universal and the normative really is a default position for whiteness whiteness hasn't been outed as one among many other ethnic and racial uh aggregations and identities and as a result of that uh whiteness looks less and black and brown and red and yellow and indigenous and all the others look like they are carrying the banner of a kind of ethnosauric identity right outmoded outdated ethnosaurs dinosaurs of ethnicity and race that really don't comport well with a modern conception of a multi-variegated multi-hued very complicated collection of different peoples and why after all should we make identity the premise of our engagement with society and the basis of our citizenship and i think the problem is that once whiteness gets dethroned as the de facto headed you know the head identity in charge all the others uh begin to challenge it and those who are defensive on the on the white side or the dominant side look at everybody else and think oh you're not playing the game fairly when indeed i think identity politics was played from the very beginning it's just that white folk didn't have to acknowledge the particular and specific roots of their identities the specific norms that nourished their conception of self the virtues that gave meaning to who they are as human beings and therefore those who are black and brown and red and yellow and indigenous and the like uh have had to play a kind of catch-up game when indeed uh from the very beginning identities were cherished it's just that they didn't have to be named because they were universal they didn't have to be talked about because they were presumed to be shared by the most people in the society and they didn't have to in one sense be ranked because at until there was difference until there was something to compare them to and in our society that's where we are for the last 50 years okay thank you michael john i think what i hear from michael is uh not complete disagreement with your position by the way but an argument that in the longer run over the longer hall identity politics has a place and can be a winning strategy so i'd like you to respond to that well you know what professor dyson is saying is drop wisdom without a doubt however with full understanding and full respect for what he's saying i think that there's also a kind of idealism in it and i don't mean in an idle sense but i mean that the sorts of things that professor dyson is saying are ones that a lot of us are very used to hearing and it's not that they're wrong but they are highly idealist ideas of how human beings are to get along and to get ahead in the diverse societies that have existed especially over about the past 10 000 years when civilizations create societies that are multi-ethnic and absolutely inevitably strategified inevitably when you have groups of people coming together some people are going to have more power than others those relationships are going to shift over the centuries but the idea that we often hear that the conception of whiteness as default is unchallenged in the united states is one where it's one of those things where i'm not sure that we're always harkening to the change that's actually happening on the ground and so so common it is these days and this knows all level of education is a white person who says oh that's so white that's something that has penetrated the zeitgeist really especially over about the past 25 years it'd be one thing to say in 1985 that people need to get past the idea that white is default but the question is whether we can say that with the same degree of confidence now now is there no racism of course there's racism is there still a sense in many quarters that you know wonder bread and white skin is somehow the real thing and then everything else is other of course but the issue is degree and i can guarantee you and i'm getting old enough now to remember a different time there was a time and it wasn't that long ago when white people weren't walking around saying oh that's so white and looking down on themselves a bit for not being brown people and that's an indication of progress more to the point i think that there's an idea that this business of dismantling this sense of whiteness as default is somehow necessary to black people getting ahead and i know how plausible that sounds we hear it so often expressed with such passion and with such articulateness but i'm not sure that it's the mic drop proposition that and i don't mean that as a pun on professor dyson's name but my proposition that we often hear because this is what's going on we black people are a group who have developed a tradition it is a political tradition it's an intellectual tradition and now it's thought of as a moral imperative to stand before the people who don't see us as quite whole who see us as other who see us as a subgroup and say stop looking down on me now you expect them to jump in to do it nowadays it's become especially fashionable to say if you don't stop looking down on me you're a racist basically means moral pervert stop looking down on me and the question is why does it matter so much to be perfectly honest i could not care less whether a white person doesn't see me as quite whole and i felt that way long before i had any success in life to me life is about a great many things i'm an individual and i don't mean that i'm not a black individual but the question is how perfect are we waiting for the world to be so to stand before people and say stop looking down on me or you're a moral pervert if i put it that way notice that it sounds like it's almost futile you wonder whether it's going to work as well just saying give up your power as opposed to very gradually working to take the power yourself give up your power white people notice that it only ever works so well and this is finally the thing let me bring this into the conversation as as you've said we're speaking at something of a level of idealism um but we've just come through an election michael where president trump actually picked up support among black men compared to last time in terms of his percentage of the vote and also among latino voters what does that development have to say to the question that we're here to discuss about whether identity politics is a winning strategy or not well i don't think we'd make too much of it and i i give kudos and and do and so um he represents a particular viewpoint in this country that that in one sense not that he would ever vote uh for donald trump but that is open to non-traditional alliances that might be forged and that might be revealed in the fact that there was an uptick in black people who voted uh for donald trump only those people who don't know black culture and its you know uh differences its internal systems uh its disagreements and its if we can almost call it inherent moral conservatism uh would be surprised by that i would argue indeed that the republican party writ large in total could have far more black votes bodies interests and investments if it weren't for lethal pockets of bigotry that outlaw the bodies of the black people whose hands might pull the levers uh to to validate and certify uh a conservative approach to life so to put it bluntly if there weren't so many racists uh who were prominent within certain aspects of republican ideology and politics a lot more black people would support them so there's no surprise in the uptick but let me say this very briefly in response uh to professor mcwhorter mcwhorter's claim about it's basically about cs to a certain degree i would suppose that would be the case but for the most part i think mature black people have lived their lives uh without depending upon uh the the kind of support of white americans without the permission to exist otherwise we wouldn't do anything even in slavery uh when black people got passes on certain uh plantations to go out and fish and hunt and visit their loved ones and go to church uh there was a kind of uh willful autonomy carved out amidst the vicious brutality of white supremacy on the plantation so black people have never begged white people for recognition except in this sense stop presenting obstacles to the full flourishing of our communities and the self-realization that is critical for a a a a robust conception of americans uh identity what do i mean so it's not an individual thing hey see us and let us do what we have to do and as mcwater says then we'll seize the power to do it as opposed to asking you although frederick douglas said nobody ever gives it up you got to seize the you know in one sense he's frederick douglass like right you got to you can't ask anybody you got to seize the means you got to take the power from them but when it comes to the fact that their ideas about blackness have not only moral support but legal support there's the problem when they have the support of the state backing their beliefs so that apartheid was not simply an individual white belief about black bodies it was the state and law that was organized against black people so at that level there was a back and forth between existential assertions and political realities and that's what we're fighting for in identity politics we're not seeing simply talk about the politics of recognition we're talking about the politics of respect yes we're talking about the politics of power and to share the resources that black people uh and others are um you know certainly deserving of gentlemen i don't understand i don't know you go ahead and the reason i don't understand is because it seems to me that black community has certain needs that can be addressed in certain ways and i don't see the relationship between the effort that we've been involved in particularly in 2020 but it's been a long time coming in teaching white americans to think of black people differently and that is something that a lot of people are putting an awful lot of effort into lately and have for a long time and making lives better especially for poor black people and it seems to me that there is a conception out there that in order to make life better especially for poor black people we do need to address black people as those who must feel a sense of their fist up like malcolm x at the white hegemony and i don't think that that is the way a critical mass of black voters feel to the extent that a great many very smart and well-intentioned writers do and so what i'm saying is that if we're going to have an identity politics what worries me about it is that there is a human tendency to suppose that you're going to mobilize people by calling certain people racist by pointing to the racist traditions for example of the past which are very much there unearthing subtler but still powerful racist currents in the present and i'm not sure that's necessary if black america basically needs four things and these are the four this is important black america needs four things one we need to stop the war on drugs two we need to teach reading better three we need to make long acting reversible contraceptives available for free to all poor women four we need to get past the idea that a legitimate american goes to four years of college and stressed vocational education frankly all four of those are it and yes i didn't mention the cops because there would be much less of a problem with the cops if there were no war on drugs and we emphasize vocational school more that's it now however you feel about those four things i don't see how forging in identity politics and teaching people that the white man doesn't like you is necessary to doing that kind of on the ground work and so i feel more rustinesque than malcolm x esque i'm very concerned with making things better but the identity issue strikes me as something that this is the terrible thing and and dr dyson i mean mike i do not mean anything disrespectful but sometimes i find that view easy it's easy to be angry at what white people have done especially since they've done so much but it's a different thing to get out on the ground and do what people who need help actually need to do and i'm not sure that being angry at white people is what they need right look i think that's thank you for that uh a couple of things first of all as you well know the masses of black people are not consumed by anger they're consumed by the desire to make life better for their people for people in their family for the people in their communities they are consumed utterly with trying to redirect resources so that they would relieve them from marginalization and move people into mainstreams black people are fairly obsessed with every means available for uplift um and if we are accused rightfully so at some points of excesses of respectability politics the fact of their existence um as outlined by evelyn brooks hickenbotham in her book uh about black women involved in baptist circles in the late 1800s early 1900s from which the term is derived her book respectability politics it means that black people are obsessed with the means by which they can participate in the broader circle of american society gain access to the broader circle of american privilege and to do so with hard work working harder than white folk as you well know professor mcwhorter a common saying among black people is you got to work twice as hard just to get involved in the game that many in a way that many white people can take for granted and so the reality is that black people understand the necessity for elbow grease they understand the necessity for diligence and assiduity they understand the need for applying their high intelligence to the problems at hand to make certain that they can overcome that's their own and if you go to any black church and i've been a ordained baptist minister for 40 some odd years uh what you hear in these black churches and these institutions of religious affiliation is that you got to do it and you got to use what god gave you to move forward what's that in your hand moses that's a rod use that rod to overcome so i think it's a scandalous stereotype that is often applied to black people as if we don't already get and understand the necessity for hard work and i dare say when you talk about uh the war on drugs which has been devastating uh to black america and the like when you talk about reading literacy is critical right uh to the perpetuation of a legacy of uh if you will liberation and emancipation and when you talk about uh i think you talked about you know that four-year institutions are not the only ones uh available and open uh that will provide a an elevator or an escalator if you will into uh the middle class that's extremely uh that's extremely valuable for people who have been historically and systemically denied and then also of course when we talk about uh uh contraceptives i'm sure that might be the most controversial claim put forth uh but what's interesting is that when we have arguments in this culture about access uh to contraceptives and when we talk about the ability of people to make a choice and to have the the ability uh to to terminate a pregnancy or move forward or to have family planning where it won't even become necessary uh that has been quite controversial so at the end of the day for me there is no question that black people believe all that stuff but here's the problem if you have it's not about a stereotypical oh the white man ain't nothing and he's holding us back i think that is a dis that does disservice to the sophisticated and nuanced very complex arguments that black people have made black thinkers black theorists black intellectuals black ministers and the like black professionals at a certain level uh and people on the ground by the way that there are barriers that prevent the flourishing all we want is what everybody else has my point simply is this that there are enormous barriers that i'm afraid professor mcwhorter you may not be taking into full account it is not the kind of politics of agreement that black people prosecute in the war against whiteness it is the degree to which black people have been systemically denied opportunities that other people can take for granted and as long as we deny the lethal limits that are imposed upon black american folk or black folk more broadly as a result of the very identities we speak about then those identities have to be taken into account let me end by saying this i actually i i i make this one final point let me make one point i'm sorry my point is everybody white folk and everybody else have an identity it's just that black people have made it explicit i want to jump down because i i i'd like to try to move to some other areas john i will let you respond but my request is going to be can we try to be a little bit a little bit more terse and i'm saying that with respect because i have a few questions that i'd like to go to that anchor the conversation will re-anchor the conversation in the question of electoral politics but i understand and i'm hearing that the both of you have long experience with each other and in a way i've i've never moderated a debate where i had to do so little because you're doing it so well on your own but i'm just asking for terseness thank you i will be terse michael you're misunderstanding my point which is that i'm not saying that the black immunity has a tendency to think of the white man getting me down and that's what we need to face i'm saying that that's a problem with the black intelligentsia of which i am one but i think that there is a gulf between what writerly and medialy people tend to say on behalf of their fellow black people and what exactly as you say the black minister the black preacher the black community activist often is thinking of and when you talk about the racism that has been part of this country and still is you're talking about these things in your signature way which is that you are possibly the most articulate speaker on race in the past 100 years but what that means is that you use the words with a certain power and goodness they ring they ring out but i still say and john i'm almost done i still say i mentioned those four planks and anybody who's listening to this rewind and listen to what they were i don't see how white racism be it over or cover stands in the way of a sustained push towards any of those things and if we did all four of those things and black america turned upside down in the generation which it would then i just question why we need to think so very much about the racism there are barriers and they need to be taken away where they are there but the four things i mentioned are such that we could do that work alongside while also turning black lives upside down let me break in in this and my observation from outside this is that the two of you are now you've staked your ground and you're somewhat circling each other but to a degree where you're beginning to repeat the point you've made already and i'd like to move forward with just putting this specific in front of you we had candidate joseph biden pledge to nominate to the supreme court a black woman very very specific appeal it would appear to identity politics and i'd like to get each of yours takes on that as a political gesture what what it signifies to you and michael you weren't you did not have the last word in the last round so i'll start with you on that question the fact that the now president-elect made this pledge very very specifically what is your take on it in the context of the topic that we're having in terms of did it help him get elected is it important was an important thing for him to say i think it was an extremely important thing to say first of all i can't remember any president being that particular that specific uh that overtly committed to a principle of you know racial justice seen as the fulfillment of an american dream that is to say that it wasn't simply a two-a-day it wasn't simply uh capitulating to uh forces that demanded a kind of politics of grievance it was the recognition that the best route uh to american redemption went through those uh powerful thickets of race of gender of class in this country without which america wouldn't be what it is today both in terms of its most edifying elements and in its destructive and vitriolic expressions so for me uh president biden did a powerful and wonderful thing by acknowledging the commitment of a constituency that happened to be black folk uh to a particular party uh often unrecognized often exploited within that party uh to no good benefit uh when it came to a certain um you know victories and certain uh sorts of rewards for those victories that were achieved as a result of the black vote so i think what he did uh was was powerful and i think what he did uh is ultimately redemptive in that quite american sense and john what's your take on that if there were a black woman on the supreme court my heart would swell to bursting like the grinch in the cartoon i would think that was wonderful just as i felt that way when barack obama was elected i'm often called a conservative i'm not one i am a liberal circa 1960. i would fully understand the symbolism i would fully understand the justice but i worry though that if we're going to if this is going to be about identity politics if that's our topic then the problem is that often if the idea is that the most interesting thing and the most valuable thing about a black person is that they are not white and that they are therefore inherently disempowered then we can often end up on a slippery slope of forgetting about the content of our character and quite frankly if president biden and i'm so happy to say those words but if president biden nominated a black woman to the supreme court who wasn't every bit the high achieving scholar and jurist that one expects a supreme court justice to be then i would be extremely disappointed because that would be an insult to professor dyson to me and to all black people in terms of how intelligent because why would he oh well for goodness sake we have a culture where very often black people are viewed because white people are told that this is the way they're supposed to view us as these symbols of racist oppression rather than as whole human beings and so he might his handlers might forget that the idea is to have a black woman who in her qualifications is equal to everyone else i would have to see that they did that before my heart swelled so i just have that caveat about it as the demand for telemedicine grows so does the need for connectivity 5g meets that need qualcomm remains focused on giving doctors and patients superior security-rich 5g connectivity learn more at qualcomm.com invention age let me let me let me just very briefly respond absolutely in terms of the swelling of hearts uh our hearts sing together perhaps the hallelujah chorus is appropriate to insert here uh for both of us but but but see that's the problem the problem is that uh black people already having achieved not being recognized is the obstacle the impediment the barrier that prevents the recognition of high black intelligence in the face of obdurate white resistance for instance if we now look at the trump administration the vast mediocrity the horrible inferiority that was unleashed on this country has been little remarked upon in a consistently rigorous fashion that acknowledges that at the end of the day perhaps one of the greatest victories of and triumphs of having uh donald trump as president is that hopefully it will sound the death knell to the inherent superiority of whiteness because this has been a relentless march toward mediocrity and mendacity and the convergence of the two has resulted in the subversion of democracy in an especially um i think horrible and an especially terrorizing and in an especially terrifying fashion on the other hand uh i agree with professor mcwater it's with this caveat to his caveat uh and perhaps we can have some caviar the question is do we uh do we often not acknowledge the pre-existing condition of black intelligence that is wiped aside that regardless of black people having high intelligence regardless of black people making the grade cutting muster passing muster or or making the grade we are consistently denied the opportunity to flourish in those particular precincts so i think the the the obvious thing is let me give one very brief example i was on a plane two white women saw me they had seen me on tv and they knew oh my god this is a guy who speaks you know about race and and and and gender and so a white woman came over the loudspeaker she was clearly the pilot the two white women looked at me and said dr dyson what do you think about that and i pretended i didn't know i said what is that and they kind of cutely nodded at the uh at the front of the plane where the pilot was i said oh a woman flying this plane i tell you what i'm so confident that they have they have checked her out so thoroughly she could probably fly this bird upside down and land on a dime and give you change so i think the presumption is that those who make it through like a mick water like others who do well in this culture have shown keen intelligence not the kind of condescension that some white people feel obligated to manifest in the face of black people but the recognition that so much high quality has been ignored that it's about time that it finally gets integrated into the fabric of american consciousness did the election that we just come through point out that there may be an over generalization in use when the term hispanic or latino or latinx is applied to the body politic john mcwhorter yes and i say in half a sentence in response to what professor dyson just said nicole hannah jones pulitzer and i'll just leave it there brilliant woman great choice no i think you misunderstand what i mean that's the kind of condescension that i mean in that she was proven wrong about her central claim and yet given a prize like that and it's still uh but that was a look look i'm so sorry to have to say that but anyway about the latino issue yes we have um a very large latino group in the united states and there's a great deal of diversity among them and i think the time has passed when we can afford to think that latinos are roughly those people who aren't white and are black and probably speak spanish there needs to be a more strategic approach to what a latino person is they themselves often don't feel like the one thing that they're often seen as from the outside and so if one wants to have strategic voting coalitions yes it's clear that this notion of there being a group of people that we used to call hispanics who are all the same it just isn't empirically suitable anymore and let me briefly say to that absolutely right um are you talking about a white cuban from miami are you black dominican from washington heights exactly yeah so that when you talk about the broad diversity uh constituted within that rubric latinx latino hispanic as professor mcwhorter has indicated there is broad diversity and complex heterogeneity that constitutes the beautiful um and uh you know mellitus diversity of identities that can be collected under that umbrella and hence it's very difficult to try to predict electoral behavior of this undifferentiated mass called latino so i think it's especially necessary uh to see those complicated diversities as it would be in application to black people but let me very briefly say this in defense of nicole hannah jones i would think that this is the higher standard to which some black people are held there is no doubt i i have to do a timeout just for people who don't know what you're talking about take two sentences to remind people right now hannah jones was the lead figure uh and editor behind the new york times 1619 project meant to memorialize and to rethink the position of black people vis-a-vis slavery uh in american society 400 years after the first 20 souls were extracted from their rest in african soil and uh brought here uh to america and jamestown uh to serve as enslaved human beings and so the 1619 project uh is that is that effort i will say this that to me nicole hannah jones deserves such extraordinary praise and that pulitzer because she made 1619 totemic in a way not in terms as an avatar of racial agreement or black protest but as an acknowledgement that the history of america has been broadly written by people who have not paid sufficient attention uh to the to the to the powerful impact of enslavement and in her suggestion that in the 13 colonies the people who constituted what we now know as the united states of america might have considered race or specif specifically enslavement uh in their um if you will uh reflections on how to form a nation would seem to be obvious to many of us and even those who oppose uh what she has done have come to acknowledge that but i'll say this that of course mistakes will be made in blindnesses will be had but the overwhelming power of that project has been to situate 1619 as both discursively and intellectually and culturally as a moment to reckon with that that is a symbol of how the culture has refused to deal with that history we need a separate debate about that and i'm going to leave it there but yeah i think that we should go back to john what was your next question before we run out of time my next question regards the democratic party flipping georgia and whether that is an indication that an appeal to the identity of black voters there was decisive in that outcome and the work that stacey abrams has done there the former gubernatorial candidate uh who did an enormous amount to register hundreds of thousands of voters um whether that is an example in terms of what we're talking about is entity politics as an electoral strategy uh is evidence that it's that it works or or not so uh john since uh you were you gave me the pivot on that question i'll take that question first to you um oh this that's a specific issue and if the issue is that the republicans have gone so low as to try to suppress the black vote out of a desire to have fewer democrats voting and seeing that is the most pragmatic way to do it you can call this racist you can call a pragmatic you can call it both but if that's what's going on then naturally to say to black people in those districts somebody is trying to keep you from voting and frankly to try to light a fire under people by saying that this is ominously similar to and i know a lot of people say it's exactly the same i don't think so but ominously similar to what was going on before 1965 then sure bring on the sense of identity but my issue is that you can't assume that those same people are going to vote with their identities on other issues such as that president biden can be argued to have some blood on his hands in terms of race in various ways we don't need to go into with our limited time but it's black women who were responsible for how far he ended up getting in the primaries their sense being that their identity as black sub-alterns would not completely decide their choice in who to put forward in the primaries that's normal and so i think we just need to understand that if there's going to be identity politics sure it can be used surgically but it can't be seen as what black america's voting story is always going to be regardless of issue or we end up not getting things we need yeah look i i think that um georgia was an extraordinary example of the maturing of black political power the savvy that we can apply yes to to adjudicating competing claims about what is fair and not here is a woman stacey abrams who lost what the gubernatorial race by what 60 000 votes there by a man who was then the secretary of state now the governor as they ran for governor how unprincipled that might be uh in the face of obvious concerns about justice we can we can leave for another day but i think uh manifestly so but i think what stacey abrams did in georgia is extraordinary yes 500 000 people have been purged from the rolls largely geared toward and aimed at african-american voters the attempt to suppress the black vote was explicit it was ruinous and it was a a rejection and a repudiation of the best ideals of american democratic processes small d so stacey abrams went to work not bitching not complaining not convicting but went to work on the ground as professor mcwhorter talked about it on the ground got 500 000 people restored in terms of voting and added another 300 000 uh for good measure yes the white suburbanites uh in georgia uh came out finally thank god but the overwhelming white majority in this country voted for donald trump most white people who voted voted for donald trump without the presence of a jim clyburn uh a black democrat from south carolina and the expertise of an ingenuity of black women organizing and mobilizing around the country to help georgia in its prospect of defeating the attempt to suppress the black vote uh joe biden would not now today be president of the united states of america so it's not simply a matter of reflexive identity politics it's about acknowledging a constituency that has been broadly the backbone of a party that has not often paid its rewards and acknowledged its contributions and finally is doing so john we're doing it we're doing this conversation in in the midst of a pandemic in which it is clear that um that communities of color are more vulnerable there have been more deaths among black and indigenous people than anyone else and if you have a situation like that does pointing it out and organizing a response around blackness makes sense or does that is that does that offend your sense of identity politics in the way that you've described it in this conversation so far one of these willfully controversial black figures who doesn't like it when medical activity targets black people specifically because we need to get past race and that these sorts of things are sometimes dangerous because of the tuskegee experiment by no means no if we're talking about an actual statistical tendency that's painfully clear then of course we need to talk about rates my point is not this tired idea that we need to get past race and all be individuals no it's high too early for anything like that in any of the lifetimes of any of us here that's not the point it's not all about all of us are just individuals and stop thinking about skin color that's corny it's anti-empirical and it would leave an awful lot of people in the lurch to the extent that covid affects black people disproportionately you have to think about it and i'm dismayed by the occasional voices i hear that say that we're supposed to pretend that isn't true and talk only of class or we're supposed to massage the statistics more carefully than we ever would in any other situation know where racial disparities are real and where it's obvious what can be done to alleviate them sure we've got to think about race i don't call that identity politics i call that common sense my problem is where we take identity politics into a vision of everybody who isn't mitt romney as the sub-altern growing with an ore down below decks on the ship and we figure that that's going to determine their entire sense of who they are and what they're for i'm afraid that that is true more of journalists and college professors no offense to professor tyson than it is of ordinary people um when we think about uh the the dual pandemics maybe they're three maybe there's a triple pandemic in the 90s they talked about syndemics the convergence of two um you know simultaneous um you know pandemics right on the one hand uh covet 19 and if we can uh fashion it so perhaps covert 1619 in deference to uh people we had before um and how about this covert 2016 where we've just uh recently hopefully gotten rid of that virus and will be gone uh january 20th but here's the point um yes uh we must acknowledge the degree to which uh some skepticism among black people about you know the vaccine or science and so on and professor mcwhorter alluded uh to the tuskegee experiment but black people are not afraid of science they're afraid of scientists they're not they're they're afraid of those who make use of the science please don't mistake them for many of the inexplicably um you know conspiratorial white brothers and sisters who gather under the rubric of trumpism who are anti-science who are anti-evidence uh who are anti of the rigorous application of hypotheses uh to particular phenomenon that we see in the world and so african american people black people more broadly certainly suffer in disproportionate fashion from all of these pandemics and don't they enjoy or at least aren't they marked by a similar claim on the one hand pandemic uh that is about a virus is about i can't breathe it turns your lungs into sponge uh the pandemic of police brutality that we haven't spoken of much here that is real that is powerful uh leads some black people like eric garner like uh you know mr floyd george floyd to say i can't breathe because of the the vicious uh denunciation of their very humanity in the case of mr floyd beneath the knee of derek chovin who depressed his already mortally you know severely asphyxiated column and just choked him to death so the point is that yes black people in this pandemic have to be acknowledged the pre-existing conditions some people would say well why don't black people get better health care yeah that's the 64 000 question we need access to better health care most black people use the emergency ward still as health care maintenance by the time you get to the emergency ward the disease is well developed and you're in bigger trouble so i agree with professor mcwhorter that it is not only uh you know about common sense that we should pay attention uh to the disproportionate impact on african-american people in this country but in that sense uh the politics of identity of identifying and recognizing and acknowledging the specific manifestation of hurt and trauma in a particular community is not to do disservice to them but to acknowledge them as worthy of being paid attention to in specific fashion so that their grievances so that their hurts and their illnesses uh can be relieved i i don't see much daylight between the two of you on that particular question therefore but i want to bring to john as we wrap up john um to bring this back to the topic of whether identity politics is a beneficial to a party or an individual a politician who practices them do i understand your point to be that in a game where persuasion is important persuading people to vote for a person or for something that identity politics is going to be unappealing to white voters and therefore ultimately a losing game for those who practice them if you believe that the votes of whites are needed is that part of your argument or am i distorting what you're saying um it's not something that i think about a whole lot but to the extent that identity politics does tend in practice to involve a demonization of something as amorphous as whiteness to the point that for example these days we're being told that no matter what kind of white person you are you are complicit and evil just by getting out of bed and not holding up a picket sign that's tough and yes that is alienating increasing numbers of people and not just the white people quote unquote out there that we always talk about which i think is a euphemism for don't have a ba but it actually is now becoming regardless of education level i see it in myriad ways so to the extent that identity politics tends to be strident and accusatory and anti-white yeah i think that a significant number of people are getting tired of it and it creates those people who jump the fence and vote for you know moronic baboons like donald trump out of a resentment at being looked down on but on the other hand i'm thinking just more of black people if your visceral sense of what voting is supposed to be about is sticking your thumb down against white hegemony if that's your guiding principle the black vote is about not liking the white man getting the white man off of our necks etc you can think of george floyd as a metaphor in that sense with the tragedy that happened to him if that's the main thing maybe it's not the only thing but that's the main thing you're thinking about it can distract us from frankly the less theatrical sorts of things that really can make a massive difference in black lives such as please rewind and listen to my four points i think that it makes us not have as much imagination as we might always have in trying to make black lives better and michael you've argued uh throughout implicitly at some points explicitly that identity politics is also played by white politicians playing to a white identity so in that context the question i i put to john does alienating white voters through the practice of uh of identity politics matter is there is your feeling a sort of yes it matters or is it so what that doesn't really that's really not the central point here well neither of those i think first of all before we get to that we have to acknowledge that when identity politics favored white brothers and sisters because it was seen as universal and therefore normative and therefore american then there was never an issue the great philosopher beyonce giselle knows said that uh it has been said that racism is so american that when you challenge racism it looks like you're challenging america so to take off on uh beyonce's point there uh when you know w.e.b du bois in 1903 in the souls of black folks said look i'm not trying to be bathed in an ocean of whiteness neither and some people would be surprised that the boy said that am i trying to enshrine my particular viewpoint as the sin queen known uh cinquenone of of existence here for american citizenship in other words we're trying to come uh to a position where we can acknowledge uh the vibrant diversity and the the beautiful heterogeneity of american identity no matter how it comes at us but there is no need to pretend that certain identities haven't been elevated and others have been uh demoralized some have been excessively rendered angelic and others have been rendered uh have been dehumanized so that we can live in a culture where a 17-year-old white kid can shoot two people by the way two white people who are black lives matter protesters in wisconsin and get a pass the police don't check him he gets to go back home in another state uh recently uh two million dollars was raised uh for his bail uh to get him out of jail and uh you know it is it is remarkable that the same protesters uh who who argue for uh black inclusion in american society uh are seen willy-nilly by definition not just those who are the exception who quote loot but just by virtue of their protest are seen as people who need to be we need to get rid of because they are somehow challenging the fundamental propositions of american decency uh and democracy so for me uh white identity politics is nearly redundant uh what we mean here is that the appeal to whiteness as the basis of identity is the practice of american culture and what we have to do is to disentangle a certain conception of whiteness from a certain conception of politics and say that at the end of the day if we were to have just politics the degree to which we are able to recognize the historic legacy of inequality against black people because they were black because the laws were invented um in part to contain them if the 1857 roger b tawney the chief justice of the supreme court said that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect that is legally entrenched there is a jurisprudential rationality that is the predicate for the suppression of black humanity that is different than the history of white struggle for self-recognition uh in this culture so yeah i think that sometimes acknowledging the hurts of white people is appropriate of course when you look at the newspapers and other studies that talk about the loss of white life and we we don't even talk about whiteness in terms of class there's difference there's a different from being uh from kennebunkport maine as opposed to hope arkansas so yeah we've got to acknowledge all of those differences and i'll end by saying this if white brothers and sisters could join black brothers and sisters and latino and indigenous and so on and asian brothers and sisters and recognize we got far more in common than we have apart that our common humanity the bruises the hurts the offenses to which we are subject could engender in us a kind of politics of empathy that would take us much further than the denial of the humanity of the other so that the manipulation of a donald trump figure would be greatly reduced because we would be invested instead in a beautiful simpatico that could be shared broadly uh in the land thank you michael and thank you john i i want to thank you both as we wrap up this conversation for the way that you've conducted this um it's our goal to to pursue discourse in a way that suggests there's an ability to listen to one another and to be civil and the two of you definitely did that starting from the beginning where you told us that in a way you had so much in common and that you you were willing to do this exercise but you actually agree on a lot and i would like to take one more you the two of you have been just terrible at being terse so um i want to i want to ask you just to give us a very very brief wrap i want to put this question to you but i'm not i'm not asking you to dumb it down but to be precise let me put it that way i'm just wondering if you could share with us the thing that you said at the beginning that you you do agree on a lot and i'd like to hear the main point of what that agreement is in as each of you perceives it so john where do you agree with your opponent in this conversation michael in other words where are you not really an opponent well you know i'm i'm not a minister i'm a i'm a podcaster and so i i i lack the mellifluous ability but i would have to say that i while i remain unconvinced that white people need to learn that they're not the default category before the black community can excel as a whole group i think that dr dyson and i have always agreed that there is definitely work to be done neither one of us are people who are interested in the idea of black people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps many people have often thought that was my position i think it's getting to the point where people realize that that's not me if anybody thinks that's me they haven't read me in 15 years and i wasn't even saying it then so i think that we agree that work needs to be done we just sometimes differ on what the pathway to the mountaintop might be that was 42 seconds that was really good michael can i put the same question to you where do you basically feel that you and john mcwhorter do agree we appreciate the effort necessary to make this nation a better place we agree that that effort when engaged in with honesty and integrity will result in a nation that will be far stronger and far better than being appealed to by the unmolested bigotry of a fascist president who refuses to acknowledge the humanity of all of its citizens when we can move beyond that to an acknowledgement of our common humanity and our common decency the world in which we live is a better place on that the two of you agree i want to thank you john mcwhorter and michael eric dyson for taking part in this conversation and for joining us in intelligence squared thank you so much to both of you thank you for having us and i want to thank you our audience for tuning into this episode of intelligence squared i hope you enjoyed it and learned from it as much as we did and i want to let you know again that intelligence squared is a non-profit that is generously funded by listeners like you and by the rosencrantz foundation clay o'connor is our ceo david ariosto is head of editorial amy kraft is chief of staff in leeds production shay o'mara is our consulting producer damon whittemore is our radio engineer robert rosencrantz is our chairman and i'm your host john donven thank you so much for joining us

Channel: Open to Debate

Views: 147,366

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, IQ2, IQ2US, Intelligence Squared U.S., debate, live debate, I2, nyc, politics, conservative, liberal, identity politics, identity politics debate, debate identity politics is tearing society apart, michael eric dyson debate, John mcwhorter debate, intelligence squared debate, black identity, black identity politics, michael eric dyson, john mcwhorter

Id: 4YE8NMx2lY0

Length: 63min 42sec (3822 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Hate to say it but Dyson kinda suffers from that Jackie Chiles thing where he loads gratuitous synonyms into sentence for no apparent reason other than to display his vocabulary. It’s painful to listen to.

[u/Ghost_man23]

Listened to this in the podcast form a few days ago. Overall a good debate - McWhorter continues to be the most well reasoned voice I've heard on modern race relations. There were also a few points that Dyson made that McWhorter agreed with that surprised me so it was interesting to hear him engage with this perspective so directly. I'm really looking forward to McWhorter's book - I hope it gets some more mainstream attention.

[u/CarlGood2CU]

isnt michael eric dyson the guy who said stephen fry was a mean mad white man or something in a munk debate?

[u/ima_thankin_ya]

Post Justification: John Mcwhorter has previously been on Sams podcast. The debate is about the use of identity politics in elections and in politics in general, a topic in which Sam has visited frequently.

[u/[deleted]]

Does MED use that Beyonce line in every debate and interview he does?

[u/SoftandChewy]

This YouTube comment sums up Dyson perfectly:

Moderator: What time is it?

Michael Eric Dyson: To address our culture's current notion of time vis a vis the black person's existence entails examining the conception of how black people's history is understood in contrast to the predicate of identity politics which is a sine qua non of the white hegemony that constitutes the backdrop of a racial constitution unlike any other in the individual's modern sense of the reality of our cosmic temporal narrative.

[u/jacob_prager]

The preacher prof. Dyson is making a strong case why European Whites should assert their own identity and not consider it universal, thus more necessary to defend. That's why White Nationalists appropriate gladly arguments from the US/Canadian/UK SJW Left.

[u/[deleted]]

"You're just a mean mad black man."

[u/McClain3000]

All other things aside how can some people be so unaware of how long they are talking, I listened to their opening statements so far and Dyson’s answer was at least 3 times as long as Mcwhorter’s. This is one of my biggest pet peeves.