The Crisis of the Imagination and the Persistence of the Value Gap with Q&A

how y'all doing y'all all right it's good to be here I am delighted to be here as opposed to the 25th anniversary of the National Action Network I'm actually really I prefer to be here than there it's good to see old friends thank you being sterling for that amazing introduction you know I called my mother or my mama before I came up in you know I said mom you know I know we country folks from Mississippi but your babies at Yale and she said y le I said yes Yale my and she said well okay do you best I said all right all right I will so I've been traveling around the country and in some ways I've been trying to provoke a conversation about where we are with regards to matters of race trying to offer an account of how we got to this moment and to think out loud with others about how we might address it and so what I want to do tonight is is to talk a little bit about that and then hopefully provoke anger you so that we can have the kind of conversation I think we ought to be having in the nation more broadly so let me just jump in that is that jump into it is that ok so I've written a book for a popular audience and this has required a shift in my writing and an insistence at least on the part of my editor to suppress my scholarly tendencies we had a tremendous battle over footnotes and I wrote the first when I wrote the first version of the book he came to my office and princeton from New York and said he didn't like it that I had to do something else so I literally had to write another book as such the philosophical scaffolding of the book is in the background and I suppose that is a good thing after all I do want folks to buy and read the book but what I propose to do this afternoon is to give a brief account of the philosophical backdrop of democracy in black to make explicit my commitments and how they drive the conclusions of the book and what should become clear is that the book at least in my mind although written for a broad audience is in fact an extension of my previous work on pragmatism and black politics now I suppose I should say something about the motivation I think of myself as a public intellectual of sorts and I'm aware that the phrase obscures more than it reveals and today public intellectuals function more like pundants right we're on television and radio tossing around opinions about everything and I'm implicated in it all right I find myself one shows like Morning Joe trying desperately to say something that's new eyes than thoughtful as I said among people with whom I have very very deep disagreements and oftentimes all too often the medium gets in the way so I'm well aware of the perils of public intellectual work but I wanted to write a book that reached beyond a narrow set of considerations in the Academy I wanted to enact what John Dewey commends in his essay on the influence of Darwin on philosophy that philosophy is best as a form of social criticism that we are at our best when we bring our skill sets to bear on the problems of society so in my hands this formulation takes takes on the form of thinking carefully in public with others thinking carefully in public with others that's my definition of public intellectual work but there is another motivation as well I wanted to write a book my mama could read and she's currently on Chapter seven so democracy and black is divided into two distinct but related parts I'm going to be taught focusing on the first part this afternoon I'll say a little bit about the second part the first half of the book offers an account of the persistence of racial inequality and the second half examines the complex ways black politics and black political actors contribute to our failure to address substantively that inequality underlying both is an unstated concern about the arrest of our moral and by extension are politically imagine our political imaginations the arrest of our moral and by extension our political imaginations I'm fond of telling my students that Emerson tells us that God speaks to us through our imaginations isn't that a wonderful phrase wonderful formulation that God speaks to us through our imaginations and I often ask my students when I invoke this right if that's true then what is the devil doing in so many ways at least I suggest this implicitly in the book that we are experiencing a crisis of imagination in the rest and the resting of the imagination and I mean by this something more than a failure to be creative rather than something about who we are as Americans has actually gone out of focus some sort of major moral failing currently defines our way of being in the world now to my mind imagination registers much more than creativity or the ability to trade in that which isn't real the fantastical and here I'm thinking about that moment in shelley's a defensive poetry quote a man sick to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively he must put himself in the place of another and of many others the great instrument of moral good is the imagination the great instrument of moral good is the imagination your imagination involves at least two senses one is the ability to see the as yet to see the as yet a willingness as the religious historian Charles long notes to see beyond the opacity of one's condition to envision the possible right long had in mind black slaves and what he calls appropriating Hagel's language right the lithic imagination right right quote the hardness of life or of reality was the experience of the meaning of the oppressed own identity as opaque reality itself was opaque and seeing opposed to them since that affirmations of black is beautiful such that God is red right these were these moments of reaching beyond the opacity of one's condition right Bob Moses tell told me the story once of organizing sharecroppers in ruleville Mississippi and they were getting on a bus and folk or nervous because they knew where they were driving they knew what they were driving into and folks were scared because they knew that they could be arrested they knew they were going to be brutalized and this this person just kept singing at every moment and Bob said to me she's she was singing every spiritual that she knew and then they realized what she was doing she was trying to fortify their spirits to give them the courage right to face what they were about to face and this person wasn't the person that we actually know today at that moment she was just a sharecropper it was fannie lou hamer now what was it about her experience as a sharecropper which would lead her to believe that our actions could lead to something otherwise nothing in her experience would give her right the resources to imagine the world other than what the world had been right but there's something about the imagination that fortifies the spirits the spirit I've written about this elsewhere in fact I talked about this in I think this very room to think about the imagination as as the site of the prophetic right that it is the imagination in the exercise of critical intelligence right which envisions the possible as a basis to critique and dismantle the current limits of one circumstance the imagination bound up with what John Dewey describes as dramatic rehearsal this is central to the exercise of intelligence as he's kind of appropriating what we do in the Latin in the context of the lab and experimentation imagining what might be possible and then testing it in experience running on what William James might say as running ahead of the evidence right in which we can bring the fact into existence I like to tell the story of my brother my older brother who he didn't want me to follow him to play baseball and so they would jump a ditch and then he would look back at me and go and one day I just decided I was going to bring the fact of me being able to jump the ditch into existence and so I just jumped it and then ran and they put me in left field I didn't catch one ball but imagination involves that ability to see the as yet to think about the possible as a basis to critique right current arrangements but imagination also involves empathetic projection that second emphasis remember Shelley's definition right that the person must put herself in the place of another and of many others so it's not just simply the ability to see the as yet it's also about empathetic projection what John Dewey calls or describes as the end that animating moral judgment that is feeling our way beyond the narrow consideration of ours alone to take up the concerns and aspirations of others in his ethics he talks about this as empathy right or sympathy in summer so the imagination isn't just about the world as it is and as it could be it is also about who we take ourselves to be and how that emerges in our relations with others particularly those who are not seen as one of us so these two dimensions of the imagination today we find ourselves in these dark times unable to imagine otherwise it seems to me the world as it is seems to be our permanent docking station not only are we not only does it block our ability to see the possible it impairs our ability to empathize with those who are not us and I hope you can see how I'm trying to characterize reactions to Bernie Sanders campaign and those venom that we see at some of the Trump rallies right we can't imagine right free education we can't imagine single-payer and we want to build a wall right ugliness the right emblematic of who we are now I want to say that the crisis of imagination says something about our characters right remember imagination is bound up with the idea of empathy and sympathy right what Shelley noted as putting oneself in the place of another end of many others and in some ways this is all about characters and this is really important to the book and I'll make that clear hopefully later and here I'm thinking about character following doing is following Aristotle as the interpenetration of habits character as the interpenetration of habits character makes us a certain kind of person right with an historically developed pattern of behavior this point is really i mean at this point is really i think important to the very way in which i try to shift the ground from amer dolly and frame too much more but I kind of run Democratic virtually but we'll talk a little bit more so we live in a time where the superordinate value it seems to me it's putting oneself over and against another the superordinate value was putting oneself over and against another and I think this is particularly the case when it comes to race matters I want to read a section from the book if you don't mind Christine Frazier cried softly she had been through hell and back and the wounds had not healed Chris had worked hard all her life she and her late husband had dreamed big dreams for themselves in their family they had played by the rules but when Chris lost her home to foreclosure in 2012 everything changed now at the age of 65 she was out of work and forced to live in a senior facility her cherished hung gaan her health deteriorating and her dreams shattered quote me and my husband had a business for 25 years she said in disbelief I raised my daughter in that home I wasn't a new homeowner I had been there for 18 years before the eviction Chris had lived with her 85 year old mother her adult daughter her four-year-old grandson in a triplex home in a suburb of Atlanta Georgia the upstairs had three bedrooms two baths and two big living rooms there were two separate apartments downstairs the house sent on a large plot of land with lots of open space where Chris's dog Sheba could run around a minister who was a little person had designed the house quote he had been an architect I guess and there was not a square room in that house the way he designed it that's why I fell in love quote within a year of moving into their home their her house and her husband lost his legs because of diabetes and had to use a wheelchair quote but here's the kicker chris said since the house had been built for dwarf once the ramp was built he could maneuver in that house just like anybody else because the switches were lower it was like God sent us there but when Chris lost her job in 2009 she struggled to make the payments the house was underwater she had already paid two hundred forty thousand dollars on a home now valued at 40,000 her mortgage changed hands at least three times in six months Chris tried everything to prevent foreclosure but the latest holder of her loan investors one corporation decided to evict her President Obama had created a plan to help distressed borrowers but Chris couldn't take advantage of it the program required that homeowners be current on their mortgage and she was not but if you current on your mortgage chris said you don't need modification the game seemed rigged to protect the mortgage lenders now the cap county sheriffs and deputies arrived in the middle of the night on May second 2012 to a victor quote they came in like I was a dope dealer at three in the morning they drilled a hole in the lock in my front door they drilled out the lock and just came in my house it was the most terrifying moment that I can remember in my life my grandson is six years old and to this day he does not like police officers because he remembers he remembers quote she's crying as she's telling me when the police stormed into the house they ordered Chris and her family to get dress immediately then they proceeded to empty the home of a life's worth of memories it was chaos for seven hours the police piled Chris's things onto the street no one could help the police had cordon off the area quote they told me to pack up as if I had just had a fire at my home and take my immediate possessions and I had to leave immediately she remembered everything was scattered without any care across the lawn with no place to go the family slept in the car except for the family dog the police made provisions for Sheba quote that was the part that I think came out in the eviction when they came from me at three in the morning when they came for me at three in the morning they didn't have a place for me and my family to go but the animal shelter came because they knew there were dogs there they came with the place for my dog so in the context of the Great Recession of 2008 over 240,000 homes and black America's laws so one of the motivations of the book is that I was trying to figure out right besides the fact i want to be a public intellectual i want my mama to read a book and all that other stuff one of the motivations was trying to figure out how could everybody talk about recovery when i was looking at the statistical data suggesting that black america was in crisis how could people be talking about that we've turned a corner economically right when i was just looking around at my family my friends families and seen that many were losing their homes many had re-entered the job market if they were lucky right not making nearly as much having to choose between paying the rent and putting food on the table because many of them had lost their homes and entered into a brutal rental market right so 240 thousand homes lost right now we saw between 2008 and now that black white wealth is 13 times that of blackwell and here we are finding ourselves right now in this moment where african-american unemployment is 10.1 percent unadjusted right at the height of the recession in 2008 when people were screaming that we were in crisis the national unemployment rate was not when a person on top of that reality right of losing homes I don't think we've seen this kind of loss of wealth and black America since the collapse of the Freedmen's back in the 19th century right on top of the fact that we see folks right struggling to re-enter the labor market thirty-eight percent of black children are now in poverty live in poverty my home state of Mississippi fifty percent of african-american children of growing up in poverty for the first time in the history of us taking the data they're more poor african-american children than there are poor white children and their three times as many white children in America as there are black children and then you combine that with the fact what that folks have been green in public as if right the police have lost their damn minds and mothers and fathers and uncles and arts right and friends have had to bury their babies have had to bury their loved ones in this kind of public act this public ritual of grieving a grieving that has gone viral right that is shaping right the souls of another generation but people are talking about recovery how could they talk about recovery maybe these people are disposable maybe they are invisible well they must be they must be but something else must be going on here right and so I wanted to think about that much more carefully right so I'm talking about the imagination the imagination as the ability to see beyond our current moment as the ability to empathize right to find oneself in another right right and so part of it what I'm talking to think about right is that there's something fundamental we talk about the achievement gap we talk about the entity gap there must be something at the heart at the bottom of all of this and what I call what I call the value gap see in the book I maintained that democracies require require particular kinds of dispositions to work admirably but something has distorted and disfigured our national and individual character remember I said this is about character if the interpenetration of habit the kinds of human beings we are right something has distorted who we take ourselves to be and I want to call this the value gap and what is the value gap the value gap is the belief that white people white people are valued more than others in this country this belief isn't the belief this belief isn't the possession of loud racist people running around with white sheets over their heads or swastika tattooed on parts of their bodies rather this belief animates our social practices our political arrangements and our economic realities the value gap we think about at that moment in which the u.s. is giving voice to a notion of freedom what time very moment is giving voice to an idea a freedom is predicated upon intimate understanding of fun freedom right you think about the moments of war over the slaves who might say in others in terms of their their understanding of the Civil War right put the butt thought over the issue of slavery and then we get radical reconstruction where we fundamentally try a multi rate a multiracial democracy what do we get in response we get the value gap in a response what do I mean convict leasing it's not undone until the 1940s you can't think about a city like Birmingham unless you think about the back labor that built it right we get Jim and Jane Crow laws right we get the export right of Jim Crow to to to to to the Philippines to to Haiti to Cuba right we see the value gap assert itself limiting right the very ways in which we imagine most kind of genuine multiracial democracy go move fast forward to the mid 20th century and and we have what a massive movement for freedom and dignity on the part of black okay what do we get in response we get a reassertion of the value gap we get a call for law and order we get the tax revolt in Northern California a reassertion of the value gap even when we elect our first black president and people are suggesting that we turn a post-racial corner what do we get we get the vitriol of the tea party at an attack on the Voting Rights Act a reassertion of the value gap and in each instance there's progress in each instance there's progress but progress is arrested by a reassertion of that value gap and this is what I think people mean when they say things haven't changed right it's not that 19 2016 is the same as 1960 which is the same as 1860 but what is the same is that why people have value more than others under different material but see we have to think about this in a much more complicated way it's not just simply about loud races i always tell the story of the fact that my father my father was a very complicated man was the second african-american height at the post office in Pascagoula Mississippi that's high cotton back in the day okay and Pascagoula is the place where former senator Trent lots from it's the place where william faulkner honeymoon and his wife tried to commit suicide in the Gulf of Mexico it's a morbid story but I'd like to tell it anyway so he gets the job at the post office so he decides to move his family with the precocious kids to the other side of town and to give you a sense of my father he's a Vietnam veteran right and as we moving at one time when we we weren't in the house for too long and the kids in the back shout out our back door window with the Pelican and my dad responded with a 12-gauge shotgun and blew the limb of their magnolia tree office said shoot Becky again and as we were moving in the house a little few weeks earlier the police drove by really slowly and my dad took out his keys and says yeah on it it's mine but I'm playing outside with my taco truck I'm wrong those old Tonka trucks Romero's Tonka trucks at my old top my old tuck a dump truck and I'm making my truck noise and then all of a sudden I heard stop playing with that and it's the first time that I had been called and I run inside and I grabbed my truck and I run inside and I tell my father this man who respond in the way that he did and I could literally see the past kind of consuming and he ran outside I don't know what he did but three months later there was a for sale sign in those folks house at that folks you know but that's the way in which we tell the story of American racism right a family which achieves the American dream they ever see they get a big house on the hill some child gets wounded by some mean-spirited adult who calls them inward and then she has to spend the rest of her life proving that she's not that's too easy because I had already known I had already learned the value gap before we moved because in my old neighborhood when it rained my neighborhood used to flood because the pipes were bad the sidewalks weren't paid the baseball diamond the ditch that I wanted to jump over to play baseball it was rarely could the houses were smaller the neighborhood was choked by the cycles of layoffs layoffs by the paper mill the 4d plan engl shipyard everything in my environment in the old site on the east side of town told me that I was somehow less than but I was somehow value and that my mother and father had to spend day in and day out proving with james baldwin says in the uses of the blues trying to keep something from taking root in my soul that is from keeping me from believing with white folks said about hmm the value gap it's not about people who are the loud races that's too easy it lets us off the hook right focusing on the value gap I think also at the level of abstraction helps displace American exceptionalism the idea that America is the Redeemer nation or the city on the hill or as Reagan would say the shining city on the hill this idea on what the late Secretary bercovich called the American ideology secures the inherent goodness of the country so much so that our practices can never that our practices can never call it to question the ideals that purportedly animate our social world it allows us to be racist and committed to democracy at the same time and here I'm thinking about Gunnar me Ross classic 1944 book the American dilemma and this book has provided the dominant frame for how we think about race relations in this country since its publication that the problem that the problem is our practices the problem is that our practices don't align with our Creed it's all we need to do is live up to our cream yeah reject but I reject the medallion frame right that is the problem is the gap between our practices and increase our Creed that what we need to do is engage in a kind of imminent criticisms of sort measuring our current practices over and against our stated ideals right and that becomes the basis of criticism because I think at its root this riggs the terms of the critique American exceptionalism Riggs the terms of the critique when the point of departure is the gap between the ideals and the practices practices usually typically born on the backs of the South that barbaric right if only the southerners would get themselves right and I keep telling my students flipped it's not in the South right we're always on the road to a more perfect union right we're always on the road to a more perfect union we once owned slaves we don't anymore see women didn't vote now they do see it's always evidence of our inherent goodness but I want to take a different tact right remember democracies require certain kinds of people to work I want to celebrate the cognitive virtues of free inquiry and openness to others and the diversity of opinion in communication all of which evidence is a genuine concern for something like the public good that is a willingness to take up concerns beyond narrow self-interest right we could render this as a kind of democratic virtues what the value gap does in my view is distort and disfigure the personality of those shaped and formed by it in other words the value gap blocks the way to the development of the kinds of purses democracies require here we aren't talking about American exceptionalism a failure to live up to our ideas no no need to invoke some idea of the shining city on the hill or the redeemer nation no instead we take up what it means to clean democracy as our own and what that demands of us the emphasis on character this emphasis on character the kindness of people we are leads me to talk about habit formation in the book so there's a chapter on racial habits right and how those habits sustain the value gap right use of my use of habit following John Dewey as that which i use habits following John Dewey is that which encompasses private behavior patterns and the stuff we inherit that help us move about the world social system stories believe Smith's virtues excellences as well as vices feelings right Rachel habits ought to be seen as a particular kind of social habit that sets the stage for individual habituation as do ii writes in a common faith quote the community in which we together with those not born mesh is the matrix within which are ideal aspirations of blowing and brent the source of the values that the moral imagination projects as directive criteria and as shaping purposes and called so we come to virtuous behavior than not by some heroic act of the will but in the context of social arrangements that obituaries to act in accordance to what is considered virtues who we are them is deeply bound up with the place we initially find our footing to my mind racial habits sustain the value gap we know whenever we hear the phrase you know I just want my kids to go to a good school social scientists have unpacked what they mean that means that essentially means how many black and brown people go to the school when we talk about we want to live in safe neighborhoods we know what that means we know when we talk about American racism as you're simply being called the inward or just simply about police brutality right we lose sight of the way in which it works I mean a colleague of mine down at Rutgers as a social scientist talks about social networking right Nancy do Thomas all right and what she did she wouldn't interviewed all of these folk from New Jersey and Tennessee all right actually what she was doing was really fascinating where she interviewed these white folk and they would say I'm sorry to say but these black people are just lazy they just want both the hand stuff up they want their dependent code they just want government to hand him something and it turns out that his dad was really close with the union boss of God in his job another interviewer would say I'm sorry to say but black people are lazy right they don't want to work they just want to be on welfare right and have babies and it turned out not only through this friend give him the test it gave them the answer to the test that got him the job and these aren't folks who are explicitly racist they just hang out in their social networks and it just so happens that our social networks are seventy-five percent white think about your friends and think about how opportunity passes along your social networks right think about how many opportunities come before you as opposed to you right and so we think about racism right we think about the problem of the value gap as being the loud races the folk who are showing up at the Trump rallies and doing all of this ugly stuff when in fact is right all of us I tell my students all the time white supremacy doesn't require why folk to work hmm not a preach Rachel habit sustained the value gap in my review they block the way to the kinds of dispositions I think needed for democratic life right they block the way so people because of their habituation right and because of the value gap right well choose to act in ways right that undermine democratic commitments and this is not about right living up to ideals right this is not about the the idea of America as the redeemer nation this is about what we're doing in our day-to-day lives the choices we're making that make us who we are and then of course this is then routed I'm going to come bring it to a close in a minute this is rooted in deep-seated fears deep-seated fears so right after white right after the chapter on racial habits i turn to white fear right those things that deep in the value gap remembers the crisis of imagination imagination right that we're rested we can't see beyond an outwardly feel like we're stuck right we can't see the possible and then we can't see others well how does this happen but i want to say we're a bitumen to the value gap and the value gap also sustained is sustained and stoked by our fears white fears you can trace it all the way back to Genesis notes think about it in the chapter in which said wonderful the one that famous phrase from Jefferson now I'm teaching right your signal walking all out here right that wonderful moment in in Jefferson's notes where where he says what right I fear for the nation right because it's late we remember that medline it's actually in the section on habit formation because he's writing about the ways in which the children of slave masters are socialized in the face of the violence exact the bodies of slaves okay so he's talking about how they themselves are habituated into a certain kind of moral economy right in that moment but Jefferson at that moment is worrying he's fearful about what slavery will move right divine retribution even looking at the second inaugural I thinks about the bloodshed of the civil war in terms of divine retribution right and then of course to worry about black revenge what will these people do haiti scared the out of people i have to say it that way right so black revenge right black very bitter revenge only then somehow these people got to be angry they can't be waiting for you right but gotta be angry they got to be we need some evidence that they're going to exact revenge right or fear they're biologically criminogenic they're inclined to destabilize the moral economy of the nation right so there by definition either Willie Horton a bigger Thomas two sides of the same color right from the right and the left for you by nature that or their environments have produced have made them that all right and guess what this is something really important I've left the text white fear is so pervasive it can generate these moral panics that can drive public policy super predator is just one example right John d'alelio who was a colleague of ours at Princeton remember him Jennifer right he was at the sort to see you remember he was at the source of this language of the super printer that they will perdue we were producing criminals who had no no could not in any shape form or fashion be held responsible by the Society of viral social norms and moral norms all right they were unlike anything we could have ever imagined and more of them were coming right John d'alelio in 2001 said if I had to do it all over again right push more for for prevention because the data proved he was absolutely making things but the idea of the super predator right pushed public policy think about the knockout campaign that was just a couple of years ago right one video goes viral of these of these young black men randomly knocking people out the new york state legislature immediately passed laws driving policy driving policy right moral panics rooted in assumptions about who these black people are right rooted hint the value gap habituating us in particular sorts of ways right but what's so fascinating about the value what's so fascinating about the habits and what's so fascinating about white fear in particular is that it affects black political behavior this is the transition to the second part I'm so afraid of triggering your fear but I have to don the masks I have to dance the racial Jake because it's your fear right that actually right threatens my well-being all right so that off-colored joke that we have to just sit there and take the fact that you know we're we're working moving through our social environments out in our schools and our workplaces and we have to endure the fact that somehow this doesn't feel right but you know as kids you would say we have to we have to swab we have to bear it white the fear of white fear limits and constrains how black people behave politically Obama has to send racial dog whistles that thought about codes the code language about busing and all they like he has to send racial dog whistles in order to lay the concerns of white voters that he's not a match in candidate for black revenge all right so he has to do he had his sister souljah moments over and over again he did so at the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington suddenly has to remarry african-american history says that black power becomes a moment with lawlessness only right where people are seeking handouts as a pope is remember he says we lost our way as he read net re narrates the black freedom struggle in Selma Alabama the black freedom struggle becomes simply an example of American exceptionalism in Barack Obama's hands but our fear of white fear keeps us from telling the truth so white people according to sociological data don't want to be viewed as racist right and black folk don't want to trigger white folks racism and so guess what we do we dance the dance but I'm thinking about Malcolm and he said stops we talk to them tell them what kind of hell you've been catching and let him know if they're not ready to clean up the house they shouldn't have a house they should catch on fire and burn down ain't trying to burn down people's house don't get scared no he's he yeah but what he's insisting on is a kind of Frank speech a kind of honesty a kind of honesty that will break open the possibility for the kinds of conversations we need to have in the kind of work we need to do to uproot the habits that sustain the value gap all of this will require a different kind of politics a different kind of politics the second half of the book takes down I find myself I found myself in North Carolina with the four together movement with Reverend Barbara as it was organizing among you know my fokin in the mountain blue mountains of North Carolina LGBTQ undocumented workers right teachers right prison reform right an extraordinary coalition of folks so we saw I saw I witnessed the largest mass mobilization of progressive voices right a rainbow coalition and the truest sense of the word the largest mass mobilization since nineteen sixty-five I found myself in Ferguson trying to understand those young people who were trying to reimagine right politics right reimagine african american politics challenging this custodial model because not only the valid not only does the value gap distort our characters it distorts our politics and what we need right is a radical revolution of value and what is the revolution of value of course those of you who've read where do we go from here chaos or community dr. King talks about a revolution of value I take it up in a different sort of way if we're going to have if we're going to uproot those habits that sustain the value gap we need a revolution of value that revolution of value involves what right that we have to change our demand of government we have to change our view of government we change our view of government by changing our demand of government that requires imagination we have to change our view of Blackfeet if we're going to change our view of black people we're going to change our view of why people and that will require imagination and I say in the book that only white people can kill the idea of my and then lastly I say we have to change what ultimately matters to us we can't have a society organized on greed selfishness and narcissism and claim to have a robust conception of a public good some of us preachers are think a graduate of this this institution Otis lost the third we're talking about a moral economy 101 right to understand what does it mean to say that this is a moral argument and a political argument all at once right but if we're going to have a revolution of value we need a strategy in the streets a strategy at the courtroom and sometimes a strategy at the ballot box so we need to reimagine politics because imagination is the work of seeing what is right in front of us in the glaring light of what could be as an instantiation of our best selves something towards which we can reach you know in my other work at black perfectionism you know there's the image of black Democratic perfectionism there's the image and perfectionism of the staircase reaching for a higher self leaving yourself behind well I'm also mindful of that wonderful African American notion of life ain't been no crystal ste kind of blues soaked sense of what it means to reach for a higher self in the face of darkness and evil we need to understand that democracies could should be conceived as a moment as Sheldon Wolin rights of experience a crystallized response to deeply felt grievances or needs on the pat on the part of those whose main preoccupation on the part of those whose main preoccupation is to scratch out a decent existence right we might have to turn return to the small scale because in my view small scale is all we have we might have to think about democracy as standing in opposition standing in opposition and the importance of that standing to the continuous recreation of political experience the continued recreation of the conditions for the possibility of a new self I like to think about this as a kind of politics of tending that I get out of my reading of Sheldon Wolin and my reading of the great Ella Baker this politics of tending is one that quotes centers politics around practices that is around the habits of competence or skill that are routinely required if things are to be taken care of Sheldon goes on to say that tending is tempered by the feeling of concern for objects whose nature requires that they be treated as historical and biographical beings the beings are such as to need regular attention from someone who's concerned about well-being and is sensitive to historical needs imagination as an act of empathy imagination as an act of empathy is central to the politics of stuff tending in that it opens us up to the wounds and joys of others enables habit formation that affirms the dignity of our fellows and encourages a willingness to embrace those receptive practices as ROM kohls talks about those receptive practices of listening and of being still as critical features of a mode of democratic struggle tending then gathers around politics gathers politics around rooted knotted practices doings and sufferings that evidence habits and dispositions forced over a life lived to be open to such experiences to tend to the roughly human hands that mark a life of toil to bloodshot eyes that signal too much drink to raucous laughter that offer a glimpse of the depths of joy and sadness and to tend to the blank stare that reveals either defeat or possibility tending can be expressed in miss Bella Baker's powerful question even when her memories had long faded who are your people the question subverts a sociology as Ralph Ellison would put it that reduces the depth of experience to flat statistics of path by seeking an account of love and wound that constitute the ground beneath one's feet and the conditions for the possibility of a higher self the conditions for genuine democratic politics we need a new kind of imagination in the face of the darkness we face and so I in the book with this paragraph yes all right y'all all right I've been talking all this all around the country so I don't know when to shut up but we want to have a conversation right I in the end as a mirror Baracus poem SOS I use that poem in the book come out come out come out because if we're going to change how we view black people black people got to change how we view ourselves we're going to start organizing at the margins of our community right and this is what black lives matter these young folk is suggesting to us right right the crisis engulfing our communities in the nation calls for all of us to come out and to come on in to work on behalf of democracy an extraordinary challenge lies before us failure awaits us to failure for weight sensitive but no matter generations before us generations before face their difficulties we will face hours with courage and the conviction that American democracy depends upon us we will disturb the peace of the status quo and dare to imagine a new creation a different way of being in the world but first we must turn our backs and we do so for more just a democratic society with a revolution of value about campaign to talk about that continued grassroots organizing an ongoing direct action in the streets we can set a new course for this nation black people have done it before in our resistance against slavery we offer new path for the country after the devastation of the Civil War we put forward a more expansive idea of democracy as we legislated in state houses throughout the reconstructed South we've changed the course of the nation by leaving the rural south and moving into cities into search of freedom we connected our oppression at home with the effects of empire abroad and challenged directly u.s. foreign policy this is the heart of democracy and black efforts to imagine a democratic way of life without the burden of the value gap or the illusion that somehow this country is God's gift to the world we have marched we have rebelled we have loved and we have hated and in each Loma America and succumb to the belief that some people are better than others simply because they are wacked we see this again to them there are those among us willing to turn their backs on democracy to safeguard their privilege we won't allow it we won't allow it no more sweet talking no more dancing no one can be comfortable and no individual organization can say they alone represent black people we are the leaders we've been looking for together we must close the value gap and uproot racial habits by doing democracy once again in black if we fail this time and if there is a God I pray that we don't this grand experiment and democracy will be no thank professor loud and we offer you a chance he'll feel the questions that I would like to ask you to identify yourself just we have some idea who you are and after 10 to 15 minutes we have a reception for you lepa and he has brought us to sign copies of his book so if you'd like a copy of this book you can get it and you'll sign during reception the Lord open for questions mr. Fred Tucker knows this I've heard you know the presidential quiz going on he jus lyin Ted Cruz totally these costs yet the people it is right yeah foolish rightly level but how does it look guys they look 50 wanted tech room he'll get the ethnic groups right Mexicans right well you know we could tell a story of the history of the civil war before it happened by just simply telling Americans the history of American religion because the slip happened before the war actually had Civil War was actually happening in American religious institution oh absolutely you think about Methodist North Methodist South you think about splits right there all over the question of Slade right so it actually creates David wills talks about this and his extraordinary little little book I shouldn't said that but is his powerful book right where he kind of details the way in which we see schisms within American traditional doubt than our mainline denominations in particular right kind of pre prefiguring what would happen that would introduce modern warfare 2 the world but think about what just happened in Mississippi H house bill 1523 that was just side in the law by governor Bryant so-called build about this freedom which is simply an anti-lgbt go right an anti-lgbt bill that has everything to do with right policing the morality right of fellow citizens in the name of one's religious beliefs so if I own a business and I don't want to serve to a same-sex couple I don't have to but the extension that that the law is written in such a way that it actually extends if you live in a small town and they know that you shacking up with such-and-such they don't have to sell to you leave right on the head of sexual side shacking up I should have said that might need to translate that right living with someone and you're not married y'all got that here ought to make sure Chris tell sometimes you have this inside of language you know you got to make sure you got performing you know insider is that so so part of what we see is right you know kind of hatred and bigotry hiding behind the mask of religious piety and that's not new to the United States I actually just you know religious piety is the mask hatred is its name is its true name and so Trump is not surprising mr. Garth neither his cruise cruise actually when he was in Texas tried to pass legislation banning dildos it's just repressed but I something's going on and then you combine that with the fact that it's in North Carolina that the legislation in North Carolina and then recently in Tennessee right I mean and in the region where people are struggling to put food on it in a region where people people the quality of life right right is it's just simply deteriorated and so what represents add values discourse right it's so fundamentally this stupid but anyway yeah any other questions yes I'm sorry to get you named up all right guys absa right this is one of the moment and James Baldwin's notes of a native son where he says that we have to we have to become blank in order to wash away your guilt so we have to leave the particularity of who we are at the door right in order to into so many different spaces right in some ways color blindness is this kind of discourse right everyone else has to be colorblind while while others get to stay white I get to skip inhabit the normativity of whiteness and all that it accrues right so so part of what I'm what I'm trying to capture there is the way in which our political discourse off has often been and historically in contains today shaped by an unwillingness to unsettle certain kinds of racial assumptions so the first thing we can't do is be angry in public right and remember there's a discourse about Obama's coolness and underlying right is the fact that he can't get angry and the one time he did he got in trouble remember it was stupid for the police officer to death about with regard to Henry Louis Gates right and all hell broke loose right because he revealed emotion at that moment right and so there's a sense in which the way in which we engage in the political domain and political discourse is really about tending to write the state of our interlocutor right and Obama has done this over the course of the last eight years right he's trying to reach across the aisle but maybe I should be very honest I'm forthright in the book I call Obama a Melville Ian confidence man selling the snake oil of hope and change but he's not the latest one he's I mean he's not the only one he's just the latest one yo Clinton was a no billion confidence man Jimmy Carter was a million confidence right I think two years into his presidency jesse jackson called Carter a traitor right and Bill Clinton just recently revealed in Philadelphia right is in his defense of the 1994 crime bill his Jana's face nature so so the point here is that there's a there's a sense that we have to translate our political concerns right into language that's much more universal otherwise we trigger the concerns of our white fellow services that we're somehow condemning them that we're triggering guilt in them that we're accusing them of being racist that we're accusing them of being responsible for slavery and the like as opposed to thinking about the value gap and how all of us are habituated how the society is organized take think about this we learn race in new haven by just simply navigating new hate no one has to say a word you learn race but just simply moving about New Haven where you dry what neighborhoods you you know where the neighborhoods are Clarissa Heywood has a wonderful text of political scientist right has a wonderful text about learning race spatially right it has nothing to do with people being bad people right it's just a way which way in which we are habituated right I learn raised by the way in which I Drive down stuyvesant avenue and trick right generalizing about who lives there what they will do why you know I shouldn't drive down there to certain out keep my head on a swivel right right right all sorts of assumptions are working and this is not about bad people it's about the way which race organizers space right organize this face yes using the volume gap in America is particularly strong more stronger than elsewhere areas that we need to the strength of the South imagination that you're talking about or is it something particular about whiteness and where you've been talking about possible rather than going thank you I want to say that the value gap a value gap can be manifest under different conditions and motivated for different reasons and for different purposes aims and ends but to say that is not to say that the value gap under particular instances can be motivated by particular histories right so the value gap in the United States when we're talking about it here right is motivated by a certain idea by a certain understanding of whiteness and how it has organized a suicide now one could then I think move out from that claim right if we begin to think about the coloniality of lightness right and the way it has impacted the organization of the globe right and here the person I'm thinking about is of interesting theories that could help us think about this would be Sylvia winter and the way of what she's talking about the way of what she's thinking about how the notion of the human gets articulated in the context of your life which has everything to do with the construction of the notion of the West in relation to the rest so to bring it home a little bit more specifically so there is the kind of general general case that wherever their majority populations minority populations can find themselves subject to a certain kind of treatment that that can be described as the value right that their value less than others or the majority is valued more than they are right and then that evidences itself in the very way in which that society is organized now to say that isn't to say that that's generally that that that general description doesn't require historical specificity because the value gap takes shape under particular historical conditions in the United States those conditions have everything to do with the institution of slavery Jim Crow right and racial apartheid that organized the society right now how do we think about whiteness right as a kind of ideology in relation to you know kind of colonialism right and the way in which is nized relations sayin in the brown and black parts of the world the whiteness of whiteness has evidenced itself in various institutions and social arrangements right Hillary Clinton in Africa saying it's been 50 years since decolonization it's time to get over it lets everybody make money and you just got to say really right given the way in which Nigeria the way in which the ball the way it was to come all of the kind of vestiges of colonialism continued right to evidence themselves in the very structures of governance and and the economies of these various places so whiteness is doing work so it might require us to think about right the very construction of the west and the Imperial imagining and the role of whiteness in that Imperial imagine by giving the value gap content at the global scale right does that make sense you sure because so so part of what I'm saying is that there's a general claim that people are valuing all the time right but that takes place under particular conditions with particular histories right so I'm talking about the u.s. context but I think there's something that can be said right more generally because of the way in which whiteness informs right the Imperial project general and here I'm thinking about whiteness as a component of the coloniality of power the claim is the claim still are the claim still holds not not so much about whiteness ice the claim holes that there are context in which you have majority populations and minority populations that that are standing in relation to each other in which the majority population is valued more than the minority population and the society is organized to reflect that right so it's not necessarily tethered to some idea of why this right I have to give it up too much of a historic since to kind of just map it on to the world that such right right so i think there's about there's a value gap we can see it right in the context of cultural groups interacting and in the context of say what is nigeria right the relationship between the Fulani and related I oza and evil right how that gets manifest right we can talk about this in a number of different ways now that's kind of complicated because the ways in which the boundaries were drawn and and how rubes were it was yes joy will not be something grand about you down right maybe how do we yeah if we're trying to address that black and brown boots and we're also trying to address the imaginary bank imagination while while majority population right the best of the black freedom struggle has always been about justice it's not just simply bit about black people know what I mean but I'm what I'm saying so no no absolutely so I want to begin with that premise that to talk about democracy in black is not just simply talking about democracy in relation to black and brown people I just to be talking is to talk about democracy or such justice is the animating principle right justice involving standing in right relation with others right standing in right relation of course signals my my engagement with Philip petted and discuss discourses of domination and the light right the way in which I even understand Baldwin's and version of love right is to stand in right relation with others with an abiding an intimate concern for their well-being right that's how I understand the politics of love right so you're absolutely on point here remember I said the revolution of value involves changing our view of government which means we have to change our demand of government changing our view of black people which means we have to change our view of white people and changing what ultimately matters to us now my editor for variety of reasons would let me go occupy at that moment right now Eddie don't do that I couldn't even use the word neoliberalism right um which I'm thankful he suggested not but the whole point is that to change that we can't have a society organized along the lines of greed selfishness and narcissism but precisely because the new economy that President Obama talked about in the state of union right is implementing of greed narcissism selfishness and narcissism with its fundamental values being competition and rivalry which transforms each of us from citizen into entrepreneur we're self-care right means that you are a pursuit of your own interest in competition with you who are pursuit of your own interest and if you fail to secure your interest it has nothing to do with state has nothing to do with the robust conception of the public good it's your fault you're solely responsible and so what we see in the literature charles Murray Charles Murray's late last book the bell curve got right was an interesting sorts of ways of mighty migrated right the various stereotypes and characterizations of the black of black communities and particularly the black poor and began to apply it to white communities and the white people if you read the kinds of articles that were coming out of the National Review around the white people who were supporting Trump these are the folks who are made bad choices they are probably high on opiates right there meth heads right there they're not working hard they're looking for a handout we see the description of the white for right looking a lot like the description of the blackboard right just as Toni Morrison with tongue and cheek called Bill Clinton's treatment by pastured and others he's the he's being treated like he's the first black president we can now say that white poor folk who didn't treat it like they're black porfa in interesting sorts of ways and so you look at the data any case at my colleague of mine in the Economics Department of kristen has along with others shown that white men with high school education of dying and alarmingly fast rate they're dying younger but Washington Post just this past Tuesday released an extraordinary front page cover story showing that it's actually white women who are catching the most health right when you look at the data right now what's how does this this man testing itself it's manifesting itself in the typical way in which American populace in the manifests itself right you have people who are banking to the right ok so the right so you see populism from the right so it's ironic that you have a billionaire is the face of it right but what do you here among Trump supporters right that the policies of the new economy right have made it such that they can't imagine dreaming real dreams that their children's lives will not be better than their own right and the reason why their wages at flatline is because we're giving it to people who don't deserve right you're giving your taking from people who work hard and giving it to people who don't work hard scape covered right the reason my house isn't worth the damn anymore is because we're paying too much attention to these illegal immigrants right so you see this right we want to build a wall you see the kind of vulnerability of the white working-class being articulated right in a kind of nativism and a kind of scapegoat kind of rhetoric that we've seen over and over again over the course of American history right think about Todd Watson remember Tom Watson starts his career with a shotgun in his hand defending black farmers and then he ends up is one of the most notorious racists coming out of Georgia KKK populist e all right George Wallace said he would never be out niggardly again because he began right with the kind of populism that connected a lost race right but then you look at what's going on with among Bernie Sanders right that's occupied he just didn't emerge out of nothing right this is these are the sentiments of Occupy right as we see right the the rigidity of the class structure right and as we see that the top one-tenth of a percent right are raping robbing I shouldn't use that virk mobbing the country's coffers right in the name of security right in the name of a range of other that's right just right so so the that chain what ultimately matters to us right cuts across right this right but we have to be attentive to it and Bernie Sanders is learning that firsthand because we don't want a lefty version of lifting all boats can we get a couple oh you see in understand that I'm sorry I'm to liable in danger unfortunately to try and keep us honest emblem

Channel: Yale Divinity School

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Id: 9uqcxjgm5Vc

Length: 71min 13sec (4273 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024