56: Critical Race Theory in Real Life (w/Dax-Devlon Ross)
In June 2020, equity consultant and journalist Dax-Devlon Ross—who you might remember from Conspirituality 4 that very same month—published an essay called “A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age.” In it, he applied his decades of experience as a nonprofit executive and program facilitator to have an honest discussion with, as the title suggests, his white male friends. A year later and the book version of that essay, called “Letters to My White Male Friends,” has been published by St. Martin’s Press. There couldn’t be a better time for this conversation, given the heated skirmishes around the meaning and manipulation of Critical Race Theory in our politics. Dax joins this week as a co-host, nearly a year to the day since his last appearance, to discuss the topics in his book, including the many years of lived experiences that cut through the academic rhetoric and political posturing concerning race in America today.Show NotesA Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age (the original essay)Letters to My White Male Friends
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Conspirituality 56 critical race theory in real life with Dax Devlin Ross.
In June 2020, equity consultant and journalist Dax Devlin-Ross, who you might remember from Conspiratuality 4 that very same month, published an essay called A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age.
In it, he applied his decades of experience as a non-profit executive and program facilitator to have an honest discussion with, as the title suggests, his white male friends.
A year later, and the book version of that essay called Letters to Why, called Letters to My White Male Friends has been published by St.
Martin's Press.
There couldn't be a better time for this conversation, given the heated skirmishes around the meaning and manipulation of critical race theory in our politics.
Dax joins this week as a co-host, nearly a year to the day since his last appearance, to discuss the topics in his book, including the many years of lived experiences that cut through the academic rhetoric and political posturing concerning race in America today.
I could talk for hours about Dax and his new book.
I've actually lived through every single one of his books.
And in fact, we were both columnists for the Daily Targum back at Rutgers in the 90s, where he covered the same topics in Letters to My White Male Friends, and I was the religion correspondent.
We first met on the basketball court in 1993, though we really didn't become friends until the end of college.
There are still moments in the book from that era that jumped out, like the fact that we both happened to be in the march that shut down Route 18 en route to then-President Fran Lawrence's house, two of a few hundred students angered by the fact that Lawrence was giving credence to the bell curve.
And ironically, Charles Murray published his latest book, which is also on race, the very same day as Dax's came out.
So point being, race is and always has been a contentious topic in America, and let's be honest, around the world, for as long as humans have been here.
Call it tribal warfare before whatever you'd like.
But having lived through so much of this new book with Dax, I'll just say that my life has been made richer, more meaningful, and more honest because of our friendship.
Even today, and I know we'll get into critical race theory during this discussion, which is really just the latest iteration in a nation-long conversation that many have tried to ignore, I see so many white people offering monologues without any lived experience of racism on their social media feeds.
And while my lived experience of racism has predominantly been with DAX, including the only time I've had a gun pointed in my face, and of course, the St.
Thomas incident, which is in the book, it's been enough to believe people when they discuss their problems with encountering racism.
This is not an academic book, even though Dax is a lawyer and could have written it that way.
This is a book about living as a black man in America and all that that entails.
Our friendship is the most important in my life not only because Dax is a brother that I love dearly, but also because at every step of the way, it's made me a better person.
Now, having also operated a publishing company with Dax for many years, I'll finish this by saying I am very confident that this book will take him places that all of those tens of thousands of journal pages and poems that were only shared between us, which at the time were the only eyes willing to give another writer a chance, did not take him.
But the reality is that all of those pages are in letter to my white males friends and so, so much more.
And I could go on and on, like I said, but what really interests me this week is how the book landed with Matthew and Julian, who only know Dax through me.
So I want to really have them lead this conversation or else it'll get very esoteric and chummy throughout as it usually is when I talk to Dax.
But I do being His closest friend, I do want to point out that there was an error in the book, which I didn't tell him about yet.
But the one sentence where I am mentioned, it's about sharing bongs, blunts and boxed wine, which if that is on my gravestone, I am great with.
But I want to point out that it was Carlo Rossi jugged wine.
And for the poet that you are, Dax, I know you wanted that other B in there, so you went with boxed wine, but let's be honest, it was glassed wine.
$10 a gallon and many, many nights with it.
Yes.
Now that said, I want to punt it to Julian to lead this conversation.
Hi Dax.
Thanks so much for being here.
Your book weaves very skillfully between an intimate memoir and the broader political and even legislative history of race in America.
I want to start with your opening section, which includes your coming-of-age story.
You describe growing up in the well-to-do D.C.
neighborhood of Shepherd Park, in the quite protected bubble created by what you call the dozens and dozens of Huxtable-like families around you, and you speak of vacationing in Martha's Vineyard in Jamaica, and then the pride of getting accepted into the prestigious Quaker school, Sidwell.
Now, once at that school, you talk about the complete lack of any open and direct addressing of contemporary racial issues, even as you sat in the classroom and listened to discussion of texts like To Kill a Mockingbird.
And you specifically mentioned big national news stories involving black men falsely accused of rape and murder happening in a kind of compartmentalized parallel reality.
As your classmates and teacher obliviously work their way through abstract discussions of Shakespeare's Othello, right?
You say the silences around race penetrated the classrooms.
When it was discussed, slavery was referred to euphemistically as the peculiar institution.
I'm just curious, what dawning realization were you grappling with internally at that time?
Well, first of all, I just want to thank both of you for the introductions.
It means, as a writer, and as Derek has already pointed out, You know, you just to have people take your work seriously and to and to contend with the ideas that you're trying to communicate is incredibly meaningful.
You know, so just thank you both.
Thank all three of you for having me on the show today and sharing your audience with me for a little bit of time.
You know, to answer the question, I think, you know, there is no you don't you don't have words for it at that age.
In many respects, you know, the thing that you're wrestling with is an inchoate feeling and sense of shrinking in space and time and almost like getting smaller and smaller in there.
And I do use this sort of metaphor of size and the shrinking as a really intentional visual metaphor for people because I talk about having entered that place, into that school that I do care deeply for and I do still have lots of strong relationships with and I don't want to make it seem as though I had an all bad experience because that's not what it was.
But I do remember entering that space as a very kind of vivacious young person.
As a person who is expressive, I love to be in plays.
I just, I wasn't self-conscious of my, I wasn't this sort of overly self-conscious being and really kind of deeply in this sort of space where I was, you know, always thinking about my actions.
But when you're in an environment where you are clearly the minority, and it is very evident that we're having conversations about, and specifically text that has been already identified and defined as the sacred text, the text of the most important, the things that cannot be touched, they're sacrosanct.
And you understand and see that you don't show up in there, and your experience doesn't show up in there.
And for me, because my experience had been so rich, and because I had had such a powerful black experience growing up in DC, in the communities that I'd grown up in, and it felt so validated in that world, it was almost like perplexing and confusing in the sense that how do we not find time and space to reckon with this And so I think for me, it's the lack of language, the inability to articulate it, which is so powerful for a 13-year-old, 14-year-old.
And so therefore, what you end up doing is you start to kind of point inward to yourself and assume that something is about you, that somehow there's an absence or a lack in you.
And I know that some of my friends, I don't know if my friends, some people, they struggle with that.
And so they either decide to purely invisibilize themselves, meaning purely assimilate, In that environment.
And they kind of, you know, just sort of identify wholly and fully and completely with that.
Or they, you know, rebel hard against it.
And I did have a, there were a lot of students in that school who did rebel against it.
And I remember by the time we got to high school and Rodney King happens, you do see a strong contingent of black students at the school who are speaking out.
But then you have kids like me who I think, I wasn't, I was always smart, but I wasn't necessarily an intellectual at that point in my life.
I wouldn't consider myself.
So I think I ended up filtering all of that into, all of that angst, if you will, into sports, into the social landscape, because that was where I was seen.
And in those kinds of environments, we see it over and over again.
Me being a young black man who has some sort of athletic ability, if you're able to perform in that way, that's where you start to get validation.
And as a young person, you go there, you go there more because we're all looking for validation.
So I would say that's how I processed it initially.
Yeah, I have a perfect segue from there, but I wanted to ask you first.
You talk about how for both you and your white fellow students, the normalized absence of black authority figures, and yet the prevalence of subservient people of color, has two very different types of impact.
You know, this book was written in many ways intentionally to explore my parts of my experience growing up with the intention of helping people reflect on theirs.
So I always tell people, this is a small book.
This isn't the tome.
This isn't me saying, here is my life story.
I wanted to choose parts that would encourage, engage, and maybe even inspire people to do some of their own reflection.
And so what I experienced at Sidwell is what I think a lot of people experience, whether it's a private school or not, is the case that Their experience with black authority figures, quote unquote educators, specifically in the educational context, is quite often very limited.
Even when I became a teacher, the norm was for black men in particular, you get pushed into becoming a dean, right?
So that's an authority figure, yes, but it is not a figure that is of authority of expertise in the classroom.
And because this country places so much value in such a premium intellectual capability and ability, to not have formative experiences where you're interacting with Black folks who are demonstrating expertise over subject matter, I think, has real latent effects on people's ability to embrace and accept black people as intellectual and expertise and as holders of intellectual expertise in the professional space.
So therefore, we see lots of pushback around that in corporate spaces, institutions, challenging people's credentials.
We saw when Nicole Hannah-Jones is constantly saying that what you have is not good.
It's like, That's cool, but it's not what it needs to be.
And that's a normalized thing that I think when you have a collective of people, generations of people growing up without those kinds of intimate experiences early on, it can lead you to have not necessarily quote-unquote racist views, but it's that problem that we've identified in the last year, these sort of non-racist notions that by being non-racist or not racist, that is enough.
So I am not actively prejudiced.
But I am not actively reflecting on and engaging with the fact that my life has had absence of color in particular spaces of authority and expertise that are so important in this society.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so you, uh, to, to go back to where we were, you, you transition into, into sports, right?
Into, into getting validation and acceptance for your athletic abilities.
I, I want to hear about your realization.
Cause this, this really struck me as a, as a someone who grew up in South Africa, this really struck me when, when you go at the start of eighth grade and play basketball with the Kingman pythons, it sounded to me like you were caught between two worlds and belonging to neither.
Is that how that was for you?
I'd actually say it was three worlds.
I actually started to think of it as my relationship to DC was a triangle.
Because even the way the city is designed, I lived uptown.
I went to school sort of like west of the Rock Creek Park.
So I went to school and then I played basketball downtown.
And so in the course of any given day, I was shuttling from neighborhood to school, to school, downtown, back up to neighborhood.
And to your point, I think accurately put, at a certain point you feel like you're not of any of those places.
I did not know that that would have value for me later on in life, of course, the ability to navigate multiple spaces.
But as a young person, it does present, I think, some sort of identity.
I don't know if crisis is the word, but identity challenges.
So yes, that was absolutely the experience.
The way I read it was that at Sidwell, You're, you're welcomed into this world, but you don't see yourself anywhere and no one is supporting you in dealing with the realities of your internal sort of awakening to, to the reality of the situation.
And then you go and play with this basketball team where they're not accepting you because you're the kid who's, who's going to that fancy school and you've been hanging out with all these white people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's a, and that's a hell of a thing that I think a lot of, I think a lot of young people, um, a lot of my friends, at least a few of us, at least in different, different iterations of it.
experience that displacement, which I often think is like a kind of level of consciousness and reckoning that I think my white peers, it's just hard for them to understand that at that young of an age, I'm negotiating identity on multiple levels so that I'm trying to fit into this environment and succeed.
Then I have to be black with my boys and when I'm playing ball, it's like they're questioning the authenticity and rightfully so to the extent that To the extent that they don't have those experiences and they're wondering why I'm different.
You know, when my dad picks me up in his car and they're like, yo, why, you know, I never forget they would say to me, like, oh, you're on his team because your dad paid for you to be on his team.
And then when we would get dropped off at night, I would be so ashamed of where I lived.
I had to be ashamed of living in my home that I grew up in because I know when my friends, they have to keep driving, that the bus would keep going farther downtown and their experience was very different.
And I don't have the language to understand that or sort of extend myself.
Neither do they.
So last question before I hand you over to Matthew.
You write about a really key moment and Derek brought it up.
In terms of your political consciousness, right, being at Rutgers, and if I'm remembering correctly, the head of the university decides to host Charles Murray, who at that time had recently published The Bell Curve.
Tell us more about that.
Well, so factually what happened was, so what took place was the book was published, and I want to say the book was published in the summer, late summer of 94.
That's between Derek and our first year of college.
We arrived back on campus, the book is published around that time.
That October, President Lawrence, the university president at the time, was at a board of trustees meeting in which he made a remark to the effect of black students not being able to perform up to the standards of their counterparts on these standardized tests.
He, of course, meant it as a way to say, I think later on, contextually, he was trying to communicate.
And that's why we need to make sure that we are continuing to do our work to ensure diversity.
That's where he explained it later on.
But it doesn't come out, that statement doesn't come out until the eve of Black History Month.
So that's the people, somebody had that information.
knew about it and waited until the end of January.
And I'll never forget this to publish a story about that.
And then that's sort of when things kind of trigger off, because he then has to explain what were you thinking?
And that's where you find there was a New York Times article in which he says, you know, I don't know what I was thinking.
I had been reading reviews of Charles Murray's book at the time.
And so that's where the connection was made directly.
Again, we talk about how ideas enter our minds, when and how they start to kind of, even if we're not consciously thinking and reflecting on how they're penetrating our consciousness, they are.
And clearly in that instance, that happened.
And it caused huge, obviously, backlash on campus.
And the idea from Murray, just to be clear, is that IQ has some racial vector about it, yeah?
Ultimately, yeah.
Why that matters to his argument, at least the argument he was making at that time, was our investments in social programs are useless because they will not change these fundamental factors.
You know, and that's the gross, the grotesqueness of it is that it was being used as a political device.
He was using pseudoscience as a political device, and that is so deeply troubling about I also just want to point out the environment, because that plays a role.
Dax and I both lived on the Livingston campus.
Livingston was created as a separate college as part of the Rutgers ecosystem in the late 60s, specifically to facilitate predominantly minority students.
And it was one of the most racially diverse campuses in the country at that time.
It was also designed by a prison architect.
Specifically.
And so, when you were in the quads where we lived, they're underground.
You can connect a lot of the campus underground, but there were riot-proof doors under there, and all the doors were super heavy, and the rooms were designed like prison cells.
And that was where I lived for two years, I think Dax lived for two years, until we went off campus.
So, imagine that being your And so hence the word panopticon, right?
that you live in.
And then Lawrence comes out with that.
So it was definitely, there were a lot of protests at that time and that campus.
And so hence the word panopticon, right?
The sense that you can be seen, right?
From wherever you are, you can be observed and controlled.
It was also in the middle of an ecological preserve.
And so you had to take a bus to get there from the main campus.
So it was isolated.
All the other campuses were, even Bush was much more accessible.
This was put out as far from the campus as possible in the middle of an ecological preserve, as well as the commuter parking lots.
So on all four sides of the campus, you had a lot of space that separated for so that you could easily be identified if you were trying to escape.
It was it was a real mind trip.
You know, I didn't know all of that.
And I'm sorry to keep using time here, Matthew.
I know you want to jump in, but that you just described Soweto.
You just described the way Soweto was built on a much larger scale, but controlled entrances and exits.
Ability to see what's going on at all times, shut things down when they need to be, you know, send in the troops when necessary.
So that is, that's hitting me hard.
Well, you think about that's not that different necessarily, even then, you know, public, we call them projects in places like New York, like the design of those places in many ways is always around the facilitation of ingress and egress of the people who need to be able to get in, isolate, shut down and contain.
They're containment facilities in many respects, right?
They're basically containment facilities, and they're designed in that way very intentionally.
Dax, since we began with some of your experiences at Sidwell, I have a couple of questions related to that.
But before that, I wanted to roll back and embarrass you with a little review, because in general, this is what I have to say about the book, that I really cherished it.
Derek and Julian know that I'm I'm pretty much a hard ass on books.
I basically don't like much of what I read.
This is a rare positive for me.
I'm not liking this book because I think I should.
I'm loving it because you really pulled off a rich and complex And yet really direct, I would call it a landscape painting of the flatness and the failure of white liberalism, of the white imagination, and also I would say of Of white spirituality.
I'll get to that in a moment.
You do it, as Julian suggested, with zero jargon.
The voice is open and approachable.
You don't pander.
You write as a friend, but not to make friends.
Or at least you write with boundaries that say solidarity or friendship is possible between white men and black people if it's honest and earned.
And, you know, while I describe it as a landscape painting, there are these abstract brush strokes of sunlight that, like, slant in, and it gives the book the dimension of a kind of spiritual appeal Without explicitly sourcing the kinds of theological themes that I often associate with Black liberation writing, except I guess for Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, people like that.
So, I'll come back to that, to that bit in the end, but I wanted to start with two thoughts about your description of Sidwell and being 11, 12, 13 years old.
And you said that you didn't have the words at the time, and I want to suggest that you had a very powerful memory, however, because I think you've been able to recall certain impressions that are really stunning.
This one, you write, I remember watching my white classmates move through the halls with such ease and thinking that like with such ease and thinking that like me, they were all of 12 yet seemed to know their destiny was to rule one day.
I remember those feelings so distinctly, you know.
And so much of it is about like how an atmosphere can reinforce, you know, and I don't know if privilege is absolutely the right word.
I mean, I think it's, there was this absolute sense amongst so many of my students.
And because it had not, there was no questioning and sort of inner conflict.
Now, I don't want to sort of gloss over the complexities of their experiences.
And I know a lot of folks had really complex experiences because some of my classmates, you know, they were scholarship kids and it wasn't, but I, but I, but I want to say by and large, there was this, there's just a level of confidence that's, that's, that's bred in those kinds of environments.
And that confidence allows for people, and as I talk about in the classroom experience, to, and you've probably all encountered people like this, who you can't imagine actually know exactly what they're talking about, but when they speak it, but when they communicate it, there's a level of certainty that you just find It's more challenging to challenge than you might otherwise think, because there isn't a sense of doubt when that's articulated.
There's a sense of, this is truth, and I'm willing to actually stand on that truth, so yes.
And I don't think I even necessarily envied it.
I marveled at it.
It wasn't like a thing I was jealous of, but I just was like, wow.
Did you ever have the feeling when you watched that confidence in performance that you were watching a bullshitter, though?
I mean, I think as you get older, as I got into the classroom, so I would say like, you know, your first days, everybody's kind of figuring it out.
But what you encounter, and what I think I see a lot in the corporate world, I see a lot in the business world, is that there are people who have mastered the art of BS.
I mean, these people Just like anybody else, my classmates didn't do their homework sometimes.
Just like anybody else, they didn't have the actual answer, but what they were able to do and what I think we were encouraged to do was to still, you know, I don't wanna say fake it till you make it, but it was to assert some form of authority and agency, even when you don't necessarily have clarity or actual sort of substance to offer to a particular conversation.
I think I'm focusing in on it because there are so many passages in the book that point to this mindset and this bearing in the world as being, as depriving the person of a kind of dignity.
The dignity that would come with intellectual humility or self-consideration or just empathy.
And I think as I read the book, I kept coming back to that line and thinking about the 12 year old boys who felt that they were going to rule the world.
And when they have their complex experiences, I have the sense that for many of them it's psychologically expensive to have that self-perception, to keep it going, to continually be hyper-vigilant about their own perfection or their own entitlement.
Uh, to, to, um, you know, they're constantly focused on their contested positions and their own dominance hierarchies.
And so, and that's very narrow.
And so, it's really little wonder what that when, when you're, when your white fellow students are so preoccupied with what I would say sometimes is a faked confidence that there's no room for historical vision, for empathy, for really challenging, you know, the, the, the basis of self-perception.
things like the meritocracy.
So that's something that came up.
You just, I think, and I'm really grasping what you're talking, what you were mentioning in sort of the opening.
When I say the harm, and people, and I want to be clear, there's different forms of harm that people can experience because of their deprivation of deeper relationship with people who have different pigmentation, right?
Some folks can write about it from a policy standpoint, meaning like there are definite points in our American story where folks would rather cut off their nose to spite their face when it comes to just like the distribution of resources.
Because, you know, we can look at the ACA, we can look at a number of things and people, we can see very substantive, practical ways in which people operate against their interests.
But what you're getting at and what I've also really tried to drill down on is there's a level of like even sort of naturalistic joy and even a kind of exploratory wonder that isn't allowed for in that environment where there's ultimate, where competitive, where the sort of notion of competition and the notion of supremacy and superiority are so highly prioritized.
and valued.
To me, that's a deprivation because you don't allow, you're not allowing in space for, you know, for your journey to deviate.
And for your journey to go to do the wandering path that needs that is required and necessary sometimes for the kind of growth that you want to take place, which is why I think so many folks are coming to these kinds of awakenings for themselves in middle midlife, you know, because it's the case that their journey has been so sort of in many ways lockstep with what has been defined as the sort of sort of the key definers and characteristics of success.
And those tend to not have anything to do with, you know, walking, walking your own walk or deviating from the path.
So I do think that deprivation is spiritual.
I do think it is, it is existential.
And I do think that it is one in which, you know, you, you, you end up really not, like I have friends who grew up in DC, I imagine, and don't really know what the city was they grew up in.
For me to tell them stories of black DC, that is an open, it's a revelation to them.
And it's like, damn.
Man, like, you know, that's a wild thing to me that that part of our city, which is so much a part of our city, felt like it was not a part of your journey and your experience here.
And that therefore you devalued it, or therefore just didn't seem that it had any worth in your journey or had any value to add to your experience.
And what that could have done for you, what that could have added to your life.
How that could have made you more, made you a more joyful person.
That's what I want people to think about is that there's often this sense that when we add, when we try to, when we center conversations around race, it's this notion of, of I'm going to lose something.
Something's going to be taken from me.
And even when I see people enter conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace is so much, Oh God, I don't want to do this.
This is going to be horrible.
And I'm like, wow, you know what?
The people I work with and do this work, these are the most joyful people I know.
They're the most open, curious, interesting.
Why do you assume that this is going to be such a negative journey just because it's going to ask you to do some kind of reflection?
Well, I think that really cuts to the heart of something as we look at how diversity, equity and inclusion trainings have become part of this focal point of a moral panic, because that's exactly what's on offer.
It's something very tender and something very vulnerable, and it can feel revelatory in the moment in which it's broached by the organization that brings the trainer in.
And, you know, there's a existential and therapeutic and I would say spiritual dimension to it that people just aren't prepared for and have to, you know, not to make excuses but would probably do well to be eased into or to get into the mindset of, oh my gosh, I have to reconsider my interdependence with all living beings actually.
In order to start to understand what's on offer here.
But that's even why the book is designed the way it is.
It's that I want to walk you up to the place.
So many of us want to just get to the action, want to go and do the thing, get to the work.
And I want folks to know that, and I even do this in my own work in facilitative spaces, is that I'm not going to start with a conversation about structural racism.
Actually, that's not going to be where we begin on day one, really.
We need to calibrate and do some work internally and do some reflection work and do some journey work before we get to understand and think about systems and how they operate.
Because if you just come to be what we see in our national discourse, If you approach people with a conversation around systems, they often will shut down because quite often it's very difficult to grasp how these systems operate and how you might be a participant within them and benefit from them without really having had anything to do with designing them or sustaining them.
But you just by virtue of who you are, how you present, you're able to benefit from them.
And I think that's so to start in that place, people I think are going to reject it.
They are going to have resistance to it.
That's why it's valuable and important to begin people's journey with just like some self work.
Let's look into life.
Well, in a way, if there is that immediate experience of rejection, I wonder how much of the time that is counterproductive in terms of just not getting it at all, not getting what the deeper point is.
All, I think all trainings and all trainers are not, not built the same.
It's like with anything else, you know, it's not all cars aren't the same, all televisions, all everything are not the same.
And I think sometimes there's a notion that there isn't, um, there aren't sort of levels and sort of, um, even styles and approaches that are more appropriate for certain environments, certain settings, certain people, like, I would not necessarily, I would by no means use the same tools and techniques that I would necessarily for young people that I would for more mature people, people who are more advanced in their work.
I have a different starting point than I would with people who are clearly having a beginning part of their journey.
So there's like, but we talk about it in our national discourse as if it's a blunt object, as if it's just this one thing that is used and done and all of it just needs to go away.
Because in the way people cherry pick, because that's what people tend to do, they just cherry pick.
The way people cherry pick information, they find the most incendiary and they decontextualize it.
They find the most incendiary piece of whatever they can find, whether it's a reading or an excerpt from some training that they heard about by somebody else.
And they present it to the sort of willing public who's already been primed.
Who's already been primed to sort of have this, you know, to have an association, a negative association with it.
And it's like giving meat to the, you know, and people just go after it.
So I, I like to contextualize everything because that says we are creatures of context.
We need to have context is always part of our, part of the story that we're telling at any given moment in time.
And that helps us understand it and make sense of it in new ways.
So, yeah.
I have one more question about childhood stuff because I'm sure we're going to get more into DEI and so on.
I think one of the most stunning passages for me in this book was your description, probably during the Sidwell years, of visiting the homes of your white friends.
And I have a quote here and I'd like to just read it because it's kind of amazing.
Roaming through the homes of my white friends was its own education.
The homes that I grew up in were equally adorned with family photos, art, and books.
But I was accustomed to black faces smiling at me, black and African art in the halls, once enslaved ancestors and freedom fighters on the walls, black authors on the shelves, and black music in the air.
More than anything though, those homes gave me a sense of purpose and pride, a connection to the broader black diasporic family and the struggles we had endured and overcome.
I never felt that sense of communal pride in the homes of my white friends.
The art was awe-inducing, but I hungered to learn something important about what my friends believed and how they felt about the world, yet I couldn't seem to penetrate beyond the surfaces surrounding me.
I couldn't look at the photographs on the walls and gain a better understanding of where their people came from and what they'd gone through to get here.
This isn't a judgment, and I hope it doesn't come off that way.
It doesn't, by the way.
It was my experience.
From what I saw, art, literature, music, even family, meant something different to you than me.
My parents needed to counteract America's chronic subordination of the Black experience.
Outside of our brief, sanitized studies of slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and civil rights, We weren't taught about our journey in America, let alone in the world at large.
Our parents' solution was to turn our homes into African-American shrines, museums, and music halls.
The parents of my white friends didn't have to instill their kids with a sense of white identity and self-esteem at home.
The privilege of supremacy is silence.
White superiority is ingrained in the unspoken ideology and institutional prerogatives that guide our lives.
Therefore, white parents were free, as in unchallenged, to express their individuality and unique sensibility, their personal aesthetic tastes and preferences, if you will, without ever having to interrogate why, as free-thinking people, most of the authors on their shelves and artists on their walls were white.
You might want to consider staying with this writing thing.
I think you're onto something here.
So my first question is, did any of your white friends roam around your home?
So I would say that growing up, if I'm just talking about my Sibwell experience in a singular way, what I found and I encountered was that, at least for me, There wasn't a kind of reciprocity around coming into my world as it was going into their world.
I think that happens a lot.
I often joke about, you know, when I was younger, like we think about dating across race, typically means that if I was a black man dating a white woman, it would mean I'm going to enter her world, usually.
And I'm going to have to experience an immersion into the white world.
I think that's part of, again, the benefit of privilege is that the assumption is that The world in which we are going to immerse ourselves is going to end up being the one that has been normed for us, and the default for that is white.
And so absolutely it's the case that I was invited to my friends' houses, in their homes.
But I felt as though, like, It just wasn't even an option.
And I look back and I'm like, maybe I should take some responsibility for it too, because maybe I could have taken more effort and put more effort and energy into inviting people into my world.
But it seemed as though the sort of energy, the flow, the way it worked, it was us in their world.
And I want to give you something, just as an example, like a friend of mine, He sent me a prom picture the other day, and it was so interesting because the friend who sent it to me was a black friend of mine.
We had gone to middle school, we went to high school together, and he and I and his girlfriend and my girlfriend, we went to prom together.
He at the time was living with one of our white classmates.
Whole other story why he was living with them, but that was what it was.
So therefore, our white classmate, who was also our friend, to a lesser degree, but still a friend, he and his friends were also at the house that night before prom.
So we all took a picture together.
Meaning us four, the four black folks, the couple, two couples, and the white couples.
And then we all got into cars and went to different places for dinner.
And then we sort of found each other.
And I think I was like, what the fuck?
How on earth was it the case that we just, there was no intentional immersion in that moment.
It was like, you go your way, I'm going to go my way.
And we're on the same porch and we have the same destination in mind.
What I say in that is that I think like, I don't know how much of a sense of curiosity there was about my world.
I don't know if there was a lot of curiosity about the world.
Or valuing.
Or valuing of what it was.
I was entering their space.
I was coming to their door.
I would imagine that it's not just curiosity, but the sense amongst the white friends that they would be encountering history, that they would be encountering a moral universe.
Maybe that's a little bit overstated, but I certainly have, I have the sense as a boy that, you know, amongst the black friends that I had, that I didn't go visit their houses either.
But I had the sense that if I did, I would be in a And it would be, I would be like traveling in my own country or something like that.
But I want to come back to the emptiness of your, the blankness of the homes that you were visiting, because I really think they express something about the emptiness of The dominant life, or the sort of dominant culture's life that is so ubiquitous that it becomes invisible to those who are using it.
You know, you're actually flattering, or at least you are in your boy's voice about the art was awe inspiring.
But, you know, and you write that therefore the white parents were free, as in unchallenged, to express their individuality and unique sensibility, their personal aesthetic tastes and preferences, if you will.
Yes, perhaps also, but there's also an aspect of that that's totally a fucking mirage, because the default of the culture is just consumerism.
The corollary of not having to stalk the house with evidence of your history and your lineage and your moral gravitas is that you're just blown by the wind with regard to whatever the decor is of the time.
There's a vacuum of material gravity.
Is that kind of the result of a certain level of privilege and dominance?
That there is not a need for a communal lived experience that has some kind of history and some set of values associated with it that have been hard won, where you've had solidarity with one another and you have icons that really represent something meaningful, soulful?
One of the most haunting questions that came up over and over again when I was a child was, where are you from?
Or where is your family from?
And I'd never had an answer for that.
There is Germanic Polish heritage on my father's side.
There's Scots-Irish heritage on my mother's side.
But as a white person, I kind of come from everywhere.
And that means that I don't really come from anywhere at the same time.
And so even in a progressive, I would say, not anti-racist, but certainly racially aware household that I grew up in, the writers didn't have to be white.
the books on the shelves didn't have to be white.
But if we had James Baldwin or Richard Wright on the shelves, it was part of a kind of cultural tourism.
It wasn't about like, it wasn't like I needed this to help me survive.
So it's really weird because I kind of long to see your childhood home like that and to have the sense of what it would be like to know where one is from.
Yeah, and what's next?
For me, growing up, there was a kaleidoscopic painting that my father had of Malcolm X. And I thought it was him for when I was really young.
I thought it was my dad.
But the fact of that is there, present.
You know, we talk about, so that's a symbol and a signal that's sent to me.
There was, I remember another, there was another picture or painting or sort of at the time in the seventies, there was this kind of, I forgot the kind of the style that was very prevalent at the time, but it was like a cloth kind of, these sort of cloth, but it was this black mother holding her baby.
And it was like this, these sort of They were of those times, and in many ways it might be considered like very kind of time-bound art, you know, it may not have this sort of quote-unquote timelessness, but at the same time for me it was affirmational in all these ways that I didn't have to, I didn't consider the fact that those were very intentional choices that were being made so that I grew up, because I'm doing it now on my own daughter, that I grew up
And in a way that felt that was being filled up so that when I walked out into the world and I went to the National Gallery of Art down the way and I went to such a Smithsonian's and I didn't see stuff like that.
I wasn't wondering where I belonged and whether or not I had a story that was connected to the larger narrative.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
I see you, Julie.
Yeah, I just I just found something out this morning that blew my mind.
And I wonder if you guys had seen anything about it.
You know that Questlove has this new movie that's coming out that is from the Harlem Culture Festival that happened in 1969.
I think over multiple weekends was the impression.
And and it's just like not something that's been on the on the landscape in terms of when we think about that period of time.
And just seeing some of the footage, I'm like, this is amazing.
How come I never knew about this?
I feel like that's like the refrain of this era right now, when it comes to specifically things having to do with the black experience.
Like, how come I never?
Yeah.
Why was this not?
And the thing is, it stars, you know, it's James Brown, it's B.B.
King, it's Gladys Knight and the Pips, it's Nina Simone, it's all of these incredible black artists, but because it was all black artists in Harlem, you see the Woodstock movie, Ad Nauseam, You've never seen this!
You've never seen it, right?
It's like, these were the people who were fighting for the revolution with their, you know, with their LSD and their body paint.
Meanwhile, here's this other thing.
Stax Records did a really amazing, there was a documentary that came out a few years ago on Stax Records.
They had like this sort of similar outdoor festival, I think it was in the Bay, in Oakland.
So these were affairs that were clearly significant and symbolic to sort of black liberation that have been in many ways just sort of Distance from the story, because what we get and what we saw and what I was educated around was very much a sanitized, milquetoast, watered-down version of our story, which was designed in many ways to appease white people.
And that's why I talk about the Clarence Thomas piece in the book very much.
I want people to really understand and sit with the fact that when we think about these issues, that was for white people.
Clarence Thomas was nominated and he became a, not for black people.
It was for, because it needed, you needed to be able to feel like you could, there could be a black Republican in the highest court of the land that would demonstrate that we were somehow moving forward in race.
Like that was the mindset.
Black Republican in progress somehow.
I wanted to ask you about that because you highlight the important differences between the appointments of Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall.
And as part of your correcting, as you just did, the impression that Thomas represents some kind of victorious example of equal opportunity, right?
That here's this Republican black judge.
I mean, and you think about like, Just what I also want and that's why I wanted to get that was a very important chapter or at least letter to kind of connect to the later the later chapter the culture of disbelief because so much of the pushback even in that moment came from people who would know better than anybody else whether this is a qualified candidate for this role meaning like if you have every major
Insignificant, sort of organizing body that represents the interests of the people that, you know, the black folks, the people, working people saying, this is not the guy.
Even by your own standards, he's not the guy and you still press forward.
That to me says something about just your, both your unwillingness and disbelief in our experience and our valid, but in our, in our, you know, the validity of our perception, but your own prerogatives are the ones that drive and define Everyone else's experience of things and you will change the rules when it is when it is convenient and important and valuable for you.
And we see you.
We see that.
And we've always seen it.
And now we have an opportunity to tell you about it, not so that we can shame, so that we can start to be more honest with one another.
Right.
Like power is a power.
Power.
Power.
Someone asked me last night in the conversation, like, hey, you you talk.
There's a line in the book that's like, you know, everyone, white men are everyone's You know, everyone's, you know, target, no one's focus, you know.
I wanted to be very clear about that.
And I see you laughing, Matty.
I wanted to be clear, like, you know, people, we act like when we have these conversations, let's look at, you know, if you look at every major corporation in this country, we look at, like, still the Senate.
I mean, it's still a predominantly white male led country.
And yet we don't have a direct conversation with white men.
And it seems odd to me that we don't.
I'm laughing just because on my screen right now I have the quote, I write the letters herein to my white male friends because you are everyone's target but no one's focus and I wanted to ask you about that but I'll let you leave.
Having all of these data points that you, that you bring in, uh, uh, really helpful in terms of getting, getting my head around, uh, systemic racism with, with a little more clarity, right?
I really appreciated how your, your legal acumen and scholarship came into play and how you referenced specific, really important cases.
Um, it connects the dots, I think very starkly.
Can, can you talk to us about, uh, the 1976 Washington versus Davis case?
Is that like easy to pull up?
I mean, yeah.
I mean, this one is incredibly valuable and important, you know, and it's really complex.
And I think the most significant aspect of it to my mind is, of course, the fact that Here was it.
So it was set in Washington.
It stems from a Washington, D.C.
police department, police force at the time.
And at the time, there was a disproportionate number of the police officers in Washington, D.C., which at that time were white.
And so it came down to this test that was the qualifying test for being able to become a police officer.
And so someone, Davis, he, among others, took the test.
Black man was not able to pass the test.
And he then, therefore, challenged the validity of the test.
And this has become more of a sort of prevalent thing, I think, that's happened with the SAT and other culturally.
This is before, I think, we were really defining things as potentially culturally biased.
But there were certain questions that were being asked on the test that were clearly ones that you would need to have some very specific cultural experiences that had nothing to do with policing.
Nothing whatsoever to do with policing, but that would have everything to do with, have you had experiences like in the woods and hiking and or like, you know, being a woodsman, like things that you would know that would, that predominantly black, like folks, black folks who grow up living in inner cities might not have access to that information and somehow it lands on a test.
But the Supreme Court actually rules that this is okay.
That these kinds of questions are fine on the test, and that actually sets a precedent for how we're going to deal with these equal protection claims for many years moving forward, and specifically how we're going to deal with racial discrimination claims.
Such that, you know, when you fast forward a decade from there, that is the fundamental basis for, you know, for the McCleskey vs. Kent decision.
The Washington versus Davis becomes a sort of precursor for what we see happening a decade later, when you have this poor guy, Warren McCleskey, who's got every bit of proof in the world that if you are black, you're going to face the death penalty, and you're going to face the capital punishment trial, you're going to be charged.
And David Baldis, who's, you know, this phenomenal statistician had, you know, run this in this regression analysis that demonstrated that over this, you know, 30 year period, predominantly black folks were being sentenced to death.
So it's just what it means is that the Supreme Court is a foundational space where we where we see this sort of fulcrum kind of constantly being sort of pivoting and absolutely.
And that's what I argue as a lawyer, even though I didn't love law school, we have to be able to reckon with and deal with the fact that it has played a significant part in both facilitating and sustaining systemic racism.
And therefore we have to get at the Supreme Court, have to get at court decisions if we have any hope at all of really addressing specifically issues having to do with the criminal justice system.
Right.
So that's the part of it.
This to me really hit me as crucial.
I mean, I hear you saying that there's been this underhanded reversing and weakening of civil rights legislation by the courts.
You say on page 83, my assertion is that by the late 90s, the conservative agenda had become so deeply ingrained in our generation that its arguments seemed like perfectly normal, rational, and necessary extensions of democracy itself.
Of course, more prisons would protect law-abiding citizens.
Certainly, cutting welfare would stimulate a strong work ethic.
Without question, ending racial preferences would restore equal rights for all citizens.
These were artfully framed as common-sense solutions that any smart, fair-minded American ought to support now that racism has ended.
And if a law or policy happened to disproportionately impact black people, well, at some point black people just needed to move on from slavery and stand on their own like everybody else.
So following on from that quote, and you already have selected the cases I wanted to ask you about, but the last one is the Racial Justice Act of 2009 in North Carolina.
Yeah.
I mean, that that was a defining experience for me as a journalist.
You know, I sort of stumbled into that case through some circuitous means by learning about it.
However, I learned about when I when I heard about it, I was blown away.
I was like, why is this not national news?
Why are people not talking about it?
And it was because it was the first statutory law on the books that was designed to circumvent what McCleskey v. Kemp had done.
Because McCleskey vs. Kemp had made it ostensibly impossible to overcome the legal hurdles that were put in place to get at the ways in which racial discrimination actually operates within the system.
So then what the law does says is that you can actually use statistical evidence.
Because in McCleskey vs. Kemp, I talk bad about Justice Scalia in here for good reason, because I think Scalia was an incredible, he was an archetype of this sort of project to really dismantle and discredit.
All the gains that have been made in the civil rights era.
He was very much a tool in that enterprise.
And it's not.
And that's why Amy Coney Barrett is so dangerous in that regard, because she's purely an acolyte of Scalia.
But ultimately, Scalia makes he's the deciding vote.
And I even write about how there's a memo that surfaces after Thurgood Marshall's death in which he ultimately says, I agree with this decision.
I agree that there's discrimination here, but we can't do anything about it.
So I'm going to side with the majority here.
Right.
That is a It's a freaking crazy thing to think that a Supreme Court justice is gonna say, nothing we can do about racism, so I'm just gonna side with it.
So the Racial Justice Act said, you know what?
We're gonna create a state law that says McCleskey does not hold here.
You can use statistical evidence to demonstrate that there is a pattern or practice of discrimination taking place.
And matter of fact, not only can you use it to demonstrate it wasn't, you don't even have to find the specific evidence of in your case.
All you need to really, in order to be able to get a rehearing, All you need to be able to demonstrate that there was a pattern in the state, in the county, or in the court over a 10-year period during which you were convicted.
This is profound, right?
Because it opens the space for us to begin to look at the charging and the whole process, because they're called decision points.
These are death penalty cases.
I'm sorry, I should clarify.
So thank you for bringing that in.
This is all death penalty.
And that's the other thing about it.
It wasn't like they were looking at every single criminal justice, every single case.
It was purely people who were on death row.
And we were asking, at a minimum, we should know that racism was not part of their decision.
That's all we were saying.
At a minimum, before we kill somebody, we should at least be really sure that we're not killing them because of racism.
And what we found in that trial was, despite, again, another regression analysis that demonstrated over a 20-year period, you could find that Black folks were being excluded from juries, that Black people who were arrested who were African American were more likely to be charged and later convicted by.
You saw it all there, and you still had this pushback.
and ultimately defanging of the law three years later.
And it was a constant litigation because the conservative district attorneys throughout the state of North Carolina just couldn't possibly deal with this reality.
It reminds me, you quote very powerfully, James Baldwin saying, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty when it is operating not only in the classroom, but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal and the most determined resistance There's no point in pretending that this won't happen.
I wanted to quote that and bring also the subject of your, I don't know if it's a transition or at least a career shift from law to diversity, equity and inclusivity training.
into the conversation and to re-quote this line that I cited before, I write the letters here into my white male friends because you're everyone's target but no one's focus.
Because what you described so eloquently is that After working for many years in this training space, you suddenly see your economic star shoot up because George Floyd is murdered.
And so in June 2020, your phone is blowing up and everybody wants to be your focus.
And so I wanted to talk about the difference between the target and the focus a little bit and ask you, first of all, if you can say a little bit more about that.
There's a lot of fear that white men, specifically white men in power, are able to just instill on the larger society more broadly just by virtue of the fact that There's so much power and privilege that white men hold in this society.
And I think that I don't necessarily feel intimidated by that, largely because my entire experience has been in classrooms, on playing fields, and having deep and close relationships with white men.
I think the sort of awe and the fear that white men, whether it's fear that shows up as the sort of awe relative to Elon Musk or the awe of Jeff Bezos, there's a kind of awe that even white men in power who have wealth Inspire, such that when we get into these conversations around race, I've seen it happen too.
There's a need to coddle, there's a need to hold their hand, there's a need to let folks know that it's okay, we don't really mean you, you're not that like, not you, you know, you're separate, you're different.
And because it's a recognition that to stay in good favor with these white men is to be able to continue to have access to resources, opportunities, and quite frankly, survival, which is very real.
You know, the fact that matter is that people have historically had to moderate and modulate their behavior around white men because white men in the room have tended to have the power.
I see it all the time.
When the CEO walks in the room, everybody just sort of like, you know, kind of gets in line.
They no longer speak.
Whatever ideas they were sharing before, they kind of like wait for that CEO to articulate and then they might.
So what I wanted to do was to not do that, was to not allow, not to let this, I want everybody to read this book.
But I didn't, I wanted to say, you know, I know, you know, I could talk to white women about this.
I could talk to many different people about this, but I wanted to really have this conversation with people who I had a lifetime relationship with, which is white men.
And meaning like Derek and I, you know, he's one example of this is, you know, he can tell you this is 30 years.
This isn't like we just became cool and we kind of have a superficial relationship.
You know, this is somebody who was a best man in my wedding, somebody who I had.
So therefore I feel like if I If anybody can have these kinds of conversations, it's gotta be people like myself who've had a lifetime of intimate, deep, and I think intellectual and personal relationships.
So that's why I gotta focus here.
I gotta.
Well, can I just ask one thing, Matthew?
Yeah.
I found myself curious just at one point, Dax, about the Scalia stuff because it sounded like you were sort of imagining a reader who sees Scalia as some kind of hero.
And I'm wondering how many people who you think are actually going to, and this, I'm actually, I'm genuinely asking this because I don't know.
I don't know enough about this culture, even though I've lived here for some decades.
How many people who would be moved to read this book do you think would see Scalia in a, I think you said you tend to valorize him.
I, well, I guess maybe this is, this is my own little sort of like, uh, you know, my, my parochial at world law, like he is a hero in the legal field.
He is a heroic figure.
And that's largely because of his originalist, because for those, for those Americans who are really ascribed to the originalist approach to reading the constitution, which is to say, we should not in any way interpret, we should not apply a modern context or our sort of any kind of historicity working.
We should focus on what was intended by the founders That's why I go back to Amy Coney Barrett being such a significant sort of decision.
It was a very intentional, symbolic decision to have her become the most recent Supreme Court Justice, and it was a very intentional linkage to her
as an acolyte of a Justice Scalia because there's an idea that exists in our society that the Constitution is sacrosanct and that we should only look to interpret it in the light of the ways in which these brilliant people who were clearly bestowed upon with genius by the God shining down on them had at this one moment in time.
So that's the sort of disruptive.
And to some extent, to answer more plainly, At some point you got to kind of like think about who you got to like almost create, you have to create your audience in some fictional, in some way.
So that's, you know, it's a little inside baseball, a little inside baseball happening in that conversation, admittedly.
Well, I wanted to ask further about that, that in, I mean, you have lifelong friends like Derek, but then also you're addressing the public.
And, you know, you have to, in an epistolary book like this, imagine your way into some general.
generic white males inner life but without stereotyping without pandering so when you close your eyes and feel your way into the you into the second person that you're addressing conditioned by all the historical realities that you describe like what are the first things that come to mind well i will say this i'm I actually had different points in different letters.
They were somebody in mind.
Oh yeah.
There was a conversation that I might've had with this, with this.
So like the culture charity conversation for me, that was like a lot, there's been a lot of, you know, People I interacted with in the nonprofit sector who I think they comprise sort of the sort of collective of that status that I think is the intended audience or the intended group to whom I am.
And so there's an archetype that I'm probably working with in that.
Similarly, when the culture of disbelief chapter, because it's so it intersects with the criminal justice system, I'm typically in that I would say I'm talking to people who are interacting with, in some way, shape, or form, the justice system, whether that's police, law enforcement, whether it's prosecutors, judges, that becomes the audience.
And then when I think the culture of expropriation chapter, that is really me talking to a lot A lot of people who move to these cities and just sort of love the idea of the urbanized landscape and don't really want to have to sort of trouble themselves with the fact of what had to happen in order for this place to feel so cheap and undervalued for you to be able to live in and get this great deal.
So there were different audiences of people, I think, who comprised sort of a collective for that particular story, a particular letter.
You know, on that point, I just want to quote you here again.
Gentrification, you write, is part of a tradition of rapacious expansionism and extermination, inextricably linked to that legacy of violence and domination.
Generations of forcible property seizure has numbed and blinded white people to the deep historical harm that their fellow citizens of color experience whenever yet another space they occupy is taken away.
It has made well-intended white people complicit in this tradition of organized theft.
Collectively, I call this the culture of expropriation, and it is another way in which racism harms white people.
Like, where you end that paragraph is like...
You flip upside down somehow because what you're, I think, and going back to touring your friend's houses when you're a kid, it's like somehow there are these historical economic forces that most individuals are blind to that in following their own better stars and they want the better school and they want the loft apartment and shit like that.
That they move towards the gem, they move towards the shiny thing.
But you end the paragraph by saying, and this is another way in which racism harms people, white people, and I'm like, yeah, because it's really weird to wind up in a city that is an ersatz City.
It's really strange to wind up in a place that pretends to be the south side of Boston.
It's a really weird thing to wind up in this renovated series of warehouses that became available because of, like, you know, free trade agreements in the 1980s.
It's really weird to basically live in a plastic life and to think that you're happy and to think that you're So to think also that you're in an edgy, funky, diverse neighborhood, right?
Yeah, no, you're just collecting the spoils of structural inequality.
To me, that's the warping effect of it, is the numbing component to it.
It actually numbs you to the thing that had to happen for all of that.
And you walk around and you say things like, and I say people should know, I'm writing, even in that story, I'm talking about myself as somewhat of a participant.
I'm not writing as if I did not actually participate to the extent that I, as a black middle class person, would participate in taking land.
What I want to be clear, this is not me on high saying I figured it all out, as I hope you encounter throughout the book, is there are experiences, I try to explore my own gaps, my own awakenings, to understand they were warping me, that was having an effect on me as well.
If I can name one aspect of the book that I think is most powerful, actually, it's that ability to be basically a spirit walker between those two worlds.
Because I think it lends incredible credibility to your historical, economic, political analysis, and you're able to speak really frankly across this line that I don't think, I'm not really seeing in many other places, if at all.
So I just want to acknowledge that.
to acknowledge that.
Yeah.
Lifetime.
It's a lifetime of, I mean, it's a lifetime of struggles, a lifetime of, of having to come to reckon a lifetime of like, this is, and I've heard that multiple times now, and I take it really, really, I'm appreciative of the fact that I am someone who seems to be able to communicate in a way that people can hear it and feel accountable at the same Hear it and feel like, while this person's challenging me, I also feel like this person is not coming from a place of judgment, in a place of like,
Of unwillingness to hear.
Like, I just don't want that because I feel like we have enough of that in our society, frankly.
I just feel like we have a lot of finger pointing without really taking into consideration the ways in which and the extent to which we all participate.
Like, if you live in America, you're part of capitalism, right?
If you live in America, you are part of some of these systems.
And so we have to have a little humility here to recognize that.
Yes, and if structural racism puts you into a gentrified neighborhood where you have depoliticized yourself and the only thing that you can do is chase like a better fucking coffee or create more hipster food places or like like just just consume more and better and more virtuously and have this kind of like I don't know, fiction of history about it.
This is not pleasure, it's not happiness, and it's not communication.
Why don't we talk a little bit about the critical race theory controversy that's happening, this culture war football that's being tossed around right now.
I just started to have a hunch in the last couple days, and maybe that's because I'm slow on the uptake, That this is a this is a wonderful smoke screen for all of the voters rights that are being taken away systematically across different states.
But I saw something yesterday that said in the last six weeks or something Fox News had used the term critical race theory something like 350 times.
Yeah, that it's definitely the new bogeyman.
What from your point of view, Dax, like what's going on with that?
Do you want to sort of enlighten us as to what critical race theory is and isn't?
It's interesting because as I talk about in the book and I write about, like, for instance, Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.
Yeah.
And I write about that with this sort of notion, because that was a precursor to this very kind of moment where he was arguing against this sort of multicultural education and ostensibly arguing for the return to our focus on Western civilization and the greatness that it actually could have.
So it's a progenitor to this same kind of argument that's being framed.
And I talk about it in that book.
And I talk about in the book how George H.W.
Bush adopted the framing of political correctness that was first articulated by Alan Bloom in 87.
In 1991, he's delivering the commencement address to the University of Michigan.
It's the first time that it's actually noted in public that it's that firm that turned politically correct.
And it's a complete strawman argument even then.
Like, it's not actually based on a legitimate sort of discourse that had been taking place.
It was a fictionalized debate that then became a legitimate debate around these sorts of things.
So I just would suggest at the outset, with any kind of critical race theory conversation, that there's history for this.
There's precedent for this.
And let's be clear that this is part of a larger project that is, whether it's Heritage, whether it's American Enterprise, whether it's the Manhattan Like, there's a whole bunch of these think tanks whose people spin these ideas for a living.
I started to see the critical race theory argument starting late last summer.
It was the National Review started first.
National Review is often like a bellwether for where these conversations are going to go.
And you started to see the headlines back last August, last September.
The first thing they started to do was question this idea of the reality of systemic racism.
So that's part of their first, layer one of the project is undermine the legitimacy of systemic racism as a legitimate form.
You started to see headlines in the National Review that were questioning it, questioning it, and then you see other places like Reason.com, like places that have presented themselves both as national publications and as quote-unquote unbiased publications that are quote-unquote presenting factual information or at least trying to disabuse people of the rhetoric and the ideological nonsense and mumbo-jumbo that is permeating our atmosphere.
So throughout, of course, Donald Trump's, you know, his elevation of this sort of, again, whatever the policy was, the executive order he signed, that was part of it.
Well, probably just after seeing Rufo on Fox News, he said, oh, I got to do something, right?
I mean, this is exactly what you know happens.
I mean, these think tanks love it because they're like a mainline to the ideas that end up becoming mainstreamed.
I mean, they don't even have to be highly funded and sort of deeply and sort of broad.
I think about the left's infrastructure around sort of progressive politics and the sort of level of amount of investment that goes into sort of movements for whether it's democratic voting rights or whatever you call it.
The right does not need, they have a few big takes, pour a bunch of money into them, and they let it rip.
And they have a well-constructed echo chamber.
And they have a well-constructed echo chamber, right?
So they don't need to have this larger sort of apparatus that is built around sort of, you know, to actually sustain this.
So I just would suggest, and I just think that, like, it is deeply troubling to watch this.
I was in Loudoun County two weeks ago, myself.
And Loudoun County, I think some of you might know, because that was the latest.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a big school board fight that was happening out there.
And it just so happened, complete coincidence, my wife and I were in Loudoun County for a couple of days.
And I remember driving along.
We went for a drive.
We were staying at this resort.
We went for a drive.
And I ended up on this highway that was named after, still named after a Confederate A Confederate officer, and it was along this, it was like the Civil War trail.
That's what they define it as.
This is a Civil War trail.
Mind you, these are all just Confederate sites.
It's all just the sites.
But the one that caught my attention was, it was called Mount Defiance.
And Mount Defiance was, and let's just, exactly, your eyes bubble up, but This isn't even a mountain.
This is a rolling hill that they have renamed a mountain.
And it marks a defeat.
It actually is a marker of a loss in the Confederates.
And the only victory, the pyrrhic victory of that moment was Robert E. Lee was able to get his army farther north so that they could come up with some kind of... So it wasn't as if there was a win, it was a loss, but they call it Mount Defiance because there's such There's such a history and a richness of the tradition of resistance, and there's such glory that people have in these sort of lost causes.
So to call it Mount Defiance, to me that says a lot about the fact that Loudoun County was a place and space where we're seeing the pushback of CRT, and it helps frame for me an understanding of what really this is about is fundamentally Ideologically, these people don't want anybody putting any ideas on them that they didn't concoct for themselves.
And it's fundamentally about that.
And I see it over and over again.
I hate the fact that we have to put so much time, effort, and energy into it because it's not a legitimate actual discourse, but it nevertheless has to happen that we talk about this stuff on some level.
It seems to me highly unlikely that actual critical race theory is being taught to kids in elementary school or high school, right?
Highly, not only highly, but I think about, go back to my experience.
So what you have is kids like me who are in a classroom where you have teachers who have not themselves been in any way made aware of, of race and racialization, how they've been racialized in their own history.
So therefore there's an inability to teach me.
So what I struggle with so much is the hypocrisy around this sort of, you know, this, this, this drum beating argument is that you didn't give a, I don't give a shit.
When kids like me were in class in school, we weren't getting any bit of the history that we needed.
And then we were sort of having our experience completely erased from the narrative.
No one cared then.
What it suggests to me, furthermore, is just that there's an idea still of who American is.
Who has a right to tell the story, to hold the story, and to be the shaper of the story?
To your point, I know that these folks don't know what they're talking about when it comes to critical race theory, because all that critical race theory is trying to do is to give us some language and some lenses to understand the way systems have operated.
It uses all, it uses facts, data, history, all the things that are necessary part of the scientific and rational analysis to draw conclusions that can be helpful and supportive of us being able to deconstruct some of what we're experiencing as our current reality.
Healthcare system, it is very evident that the healthcare system was, it was a racialized Here in D.C., they had to build a hospital because, you know, Civil War veterans could not go to a hospital.
They had to build a Navy hospital for them because they couldn't go to any other hospital in D.C.
That is a fact.
That is not someone, that's not propaganda, right?
And it is also, and I've been telling this story for the last couple of nights because two nights ago, my wife and I had an emergency at home and she was going through, she had an emergency situation.
We had to call, you know, paramedics to the house the night before the book comes out.
We're going through this, oh my God.
She's in excruciating pain.
This is a young black woman excruciating pain.
And I watched the ER.
There's paramedics come in the house.
They're very casual about it.
They don't really seem to understand.
They keep trying to minimize the pain that she's experiencing.
They keep saying, questioning the pain.
I'm watching it.
I call her doctor and I say, she's having extreme pain right now.
He's like, well, what you need to do tomorrow is.
I'm like, dude, she's sick now.
We go to the ER room.
They're like casual about it.
You're not really in pain.
And I'm like, this is what happens.
To black folks all the time.
And to me, we're trying to, by developing a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of systems, we can begin to understand how systems have been designed.
And yes, people participate in those systems, but the systems design is actually the problem.
Because the paramedics in that moment were saying to us, we can't do anything because the system says we can't do anything.
But my wife is sitting here in excruciating pain, and she's telling you she cannot, she thinks she's going to die right now.
And you're like, well, you know, I don't, but it's just to me, like, it's, it's, It's hard for me to deconstruct, to separate my personal from this.
Yeah, I mean, that's that's fucking awful.
And I hope she's OK.
She is, and I only share that story because she's okay.
I will not be sharing that.
She is okay.
Thank you for asking.
Dax, you write, I do not pretend to think what awaits you will be easy.
You're addressing your white male friends here.
You write, I know that it will be difficult to exhume the racist ideas you have absorbed, but the culture of disbelief has come at a steep cost to both of us.
If you ask me, the harm that white disbelief does to you, it is this.
It corrupts your relationship with your dignity.
It alienates you from your nature.
It turns you into your own worst enemy.
And a little bit later you write, am I doing all of this work?
And I should just let the listeners know that there are so much Socratic Wonderful Socratic prompting in this book, these questions that come.
Am I doing all of this work because I am afraid of losing power and legitimacy?
Because I am fearful of being exposed or called out?
Or am I doing this because I am truly ready to embrace what's next even if it remains unclear to me?
And this is where I want to come back to what I said at the beginning, which is that without using the Theological reference points that are so often embedded within black liberation literature, it really feels like there is a subtle and yet persistent spiritual call or appeal to the development of structural awareness, to the development of a sense of interdependence
So that the person that you're writing to can actually adopt a mature position in the world, not only towards racism, but towards the fact that they are actually responsible, they come from somewhere, they depend on other people, and they are responsible for care.
What's your inspiration been for that theme?
I think you named it, you know, in many ways.
Even in a secular sense, I was raised with certain, in a tradition.
Even if it didn't have to be housed within a sort of physical place of worship, it was deeply intertwined with liberation theology and the belief that In many ways, like, liberation isn't necessarily tied to just this notion that we have a freedom, which is a freedom to consume in this country.
That's kind of how we understand freedom.
But this idea of liberation as being able to sort of have a self-determining And, you know, a self-determining, to have self-determination.
And so even that notion which you just quoted for me was really helpful to hear back because it brought me back to this idea of the corruption of one's relationship to one's own dignity.
And the specific ways in which I was thinking about that, and I often find myself thinking about that, is that I watch sometimes white people go through like acts of contortion in order to rationalize what is very obviously something that is racist.
Meaning like they wanted to be everything other than what it is.
Like, oh, no, it was not that.
It was really this.
It was that.
And I'm like, I understand why you're doing this, because this is a person you love and you don't want to have to deal with the fact that a person that you love maybe is really deeply, is deeply struggling or deeply is a deeply racist person, which I saw happen with a young man.
And I write about that in the story, like watching after the Breonna Taylor decision.
And I was working with a group of people and this young man, I watched his skin just like change colors because he was saying, and he couldn't even look me in the eyes.
And he was like, I have people in my life who I know I love, but I know that they just have a very different opinion about everything that's happening right now.
And I just think that's what it's doing to him in that moment.
He knows what's right.
He knows what's right.
But he also loves his family members.
He loves these cousins or whoever it is.
And he can't reconcile these things.
And to me, that is a harm.
That is crazy.
For you to not be able to live in wholeness with yourself, for you to have to have a divided self so that you can rationalize and keep loving people that you know, hold malice in their heart, or hold emptiness in their heart, or hold just deep hatred in their heart, and it's irrational.
I feel for you that you have to like find some way to reconcile that and hold those people and still try to move through the world.
That to me feels like a hell of a weight.
That feels like a hell of a weight to have to walk around with, to know my mom is this way, or my grandmother, or my grandfather.
They have these beliefs, and I can't change them.
But I can't leave them.
But I can't change them.
I'm sorry.
I don't want that.
I don't wish that on anybody.
That's existential angst to just have to live with and wake up with.
To know that when you're looking at me, you know that as much as you care and you're in a relationship to me, if your friends or your family were to see you right now, that would put you in a compromised place because then it would be like, you'd have to make a decision at that point.
And so therefore, you actually want this relationship that you have with me to be isolated, to not be visibilized, to be held in sort of dark shadows because you don't want it to be public because then you have to deal with the fact of your family will ask, are you a traitor to us?
Like, this is some deep shit.
But this is what our legacy has done.
And it's constantly divided.
It doesn't just divide us, it divides souls, you know?
And so I'm helping.
I want people to have to live in some more, in better alignment with, in better relationship with themselves.
And I just definitely believe that this thing that we're dealing with in this country called racism, which is tribalism of another name, is at the crux of our inability to have a sort of holistic, reconciled relationship with one another and ourselves.
