Dissecting the Layers of Race, Privilege, and Class with Jared K Clemons

Discover the intricate intersections of race, privilege, and class politics through the lens of Dr. Jared K Clemons from Temple University, who joins us for a profound exploration that goes beyond the surface level of today's racial discourse. We dissect the labels of 'racist' or 'anti-racist,' and delve into the political economy's role in shaping these conversations. This episode promises to shed light on the subtle complexities of systemic racism and the paradox of diversity in higher education, inviting you to reflect on your own experiences and the broader implications for our society.

As we navigate through the terrain of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), we contrast the trajectories of DEI initiatives in the private sector against their academic counterparts, scrutinizing the Biden administration's economic policies and their varied effects on different social classes. You'll hear us tackle the challenges that come with educational reform and address the need for a multifaceted approach to systemic biases. This candid conversation provides a critical perspective on the current political and social dynamics within the Black community and offers a nuanced understanding of the durability of diversity and inclusion efforts post-George Floyd.

Wrapping up our discussion, we ponder the societal shifts as COVID-era subsidies come to an end and the impact on Black and Latin communities. Dr. Clemens shares valuable insights into his current work, emphasizing the importance of viewing race and class not merely as identities but as frameworks that shape our social landscape. Whether you're seeking to deepen your understanding of these complex issues or looking to be part of the conversation, this episode is a thought-provoking journey through the intersectionality of race, class, and politics, informed by both current events and historical context.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:35

Hello and welcome to VARM blog, and today I'm with Dr Jared Clemens. Who? Where are you teaching now, dr Clemens?

Speaker 1: 1:45

Temple University in Philly Temple yeah, temple, and you are in the dreaded field of political science, but you work in what I like to call political economy, to both remove the nasty stank of both economics and political science from your work. But to get into what we're doing, and we're going to turn this into the current moment a bit. But we were talking off air about your turn to the left and I was telling you about my first realization that systemic racism was real, which in a very material sense, which was just looking at actuarial tables and watching numbers compound on people of color and then realizing that my boss was a graduate from Morehouse and that explicit bigotry had nothing to do with it and also implicit bias had nothing to do with it. So the two most commonly talked about frameworks in the early aught discussions of race. I guess there were three. There's the legal theory, which was explicit bigotry. There was the emerging power plus privilege theory, which has kind of fallen away into whatever.

Speaker 2: 3:16

I actually saw a tweet when someone using the power plus privilege thing maybe a month or two ago, and I almost threw my phone across the room Because I thought it was done.

Speaker 1: 3:28

Well, even Abraham and X Kendi said that was dumb, so I figured that was their nail in that coffin. But I apparently was wrong and then I guess at the time the other thing that was really emerging was focus on implicit bias studies. I think that research is a little bit later when it really catches fire, but it was beginning in the early aught. It's probably beginning even earlier than that, but I was aware of it and starting to see it in the early aught. Now we have diversity training.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Well, I have had a kind of dual nature with this. I am obviously a melaninally challenged individual and, however, I am ethnically ambiguous and some people actually confuse me for being mixed-raced. I am, but I'm not that kind of mixed-race, so like.

Speaker 2: 4:40

Well, one of the most powerful things about race is that, technically, everyone should be racially or ethnically ambiguous, because that's part of the way that ideology is able to function.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Well, I mean, one of the things I realized as being part of the off-white hordes is that whiteness was provisional for me, like it is for a lot of Latin people for historically, until probably about a generation and a half ago for Jews. It's not that I wasn't white, I was, but that I wasn't quite white and rumors about having Black ancestry being called zebra as a kid and I grew up yeah, I grew up in a, also in a very racially diverse well, it wasn't racially diverse a very Black and white area. It was like 50-50 suburban ex-serv area.

Speaker 2: 5:40

So what part, what region of the country is this?

Speaker 1: 5:43

Central Georgia, central Georgia Central.

Speaker 2: 5:45

Georgia, central Louisiana. So you said that I was automatically assumed that it had to be somewhere in the South. Yes, it's a South thing.

Speaker 1: 5:53

And in the 80s too not the greatest time, probably one of the, you know, post segregation, probably one of the more bad times actually but so I'd had these questions of race in my head. I had, I think I've said I come from a very intermarried family. Both I have both Black and Korean cousins, and my experience of racial discourse, however, in college was radically different from the way it is today. And it was also shocking to me because, on one hand, our discussions about race became more refined and more and more well, I would say granular, but that's not true. But they became more refined, more clear. People dropped problematic language.

Speaker 1: 7:08

I remember it being explained to me that when I said a certain word, that means to cheat someone, that it was actually a racial slur of a race. I didn't know, so I didn't recognize it as such. So there was all this kind of latent unpacking. And yet, as I pointed out, as I became more and more liberal, except for the very, very well-educated people of color, my world became whiter and whiter. Ironically, like, it was just immediately clear to me that, like well, when I was hanging out with the problematic people as a blue-collar kid, there were Black people everywhere.

Speaker 1: 7:54

And now that I am at a state university, about to head into graduate school, there aren't that many Black people and they talk like me, and that was a kind of huge realization, at the same time that I'm having this realization that, oh, this structural racism stuff is very real. It's not something I'm learning from a book. I'm seeing it in the numbers and the stats and I don't know what to do about that. So I wanted to kind of tie this into your work, because there's two things into your history a little bit.

Speaker 1: 8:39

You talk a lot about the privatization of racial responsibility and I find that framework for addressing this to be very interesting. For example and I've kind of noticed this off hand since the end of the odds, actually there's this way in which we talk about checking your privilege but we talk about systemic privileges and I'm like OK, but what is this reflection doing for the systemic privileges other than maybe assuaging my conscience or changing if I accidentally use racial slurs? I don't understand in my common speech. Like what is this actually doing about the flip back over actuarial tables that I see going all the way back to redlining when I started looking at this historically when I'm working at an insurance company?

Speaker 2: 9:36

So yeah, that's a good question. I would say it has little to do with those things. So this might sound slightly controversial, but I think your point about as you kind of, let's say, ascended the class ladder, you've noticed that many of the black people that you were encountering had probably similar kind of, let's say, I know we love habitus here. It's a very similar kind of thing. Like you're kind of embedded in similar environments, your social science might be useful. You have a certain frame to understand certain issues that you're kind of just always enmeshed in, and one thing that I've discovered is there is a real way that certain people can materially benefit from white sympathy or white guilt or whatever white fragility or whatever.

Speaker 2: 10:34

The fuck Robin the Angel said and so I think part of it is like of course, yes, most black people in America are not going to benefit from any of the check, your privilege, you need to give up some of your white whatever are not going to benefit from that at all.

Speaker 2: 10:53

But in the areas where that type of language tends to have some currency, there actually can be benefits from it, whether that is in working in the academy. I see it all the time, especially after the George Floyd moment. Now some of that money is dried up, but when there was actual real money to get in the midst of that, or let's say the aftermath of that, a lot of the programs that I saw come out of it was definitely tapping into this oh, this is a white supremacist institution and so white people in these institutions need to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. And I remember I would give in a talk once and someone asked me why I didn't think that anything came out of the George Floyd protests and I said I think things did come out of the George Floyd protests if you worked at Goldman Sachs or if you worked in the academy. Outside of that. I mean, it's a fair question. I don't think that most black people have benefited from it.

Speaker 2: 11:54

But kind of as Aida Alfreida said before, black politics is very much a class politics and so I think part of the way you can understand it is by actually admitting that and then from there trying to do some of the evaluation.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Yeah, I mean it's one of the things that I've always both loved about Aida Alfreida but not always loved about all of his supporters, Because there is a certain kind of like socialist do bro that I think picks on to Aida Alfreida correctly, Like what he's saying is correct, but the reasons for doing it is kind of an obssolution for thinking about race altogether and in some ways I get that Like I kind of understand it and other ways I think that still leads you with a very like derasinated view of even what Aida Alfreida is talking about, Because he's not saying there isn't a black politics that's viable beyond a black class politics, but that black class politics is all we really have. However, a broad based class politics would be broadly copa aesthetic to a black politics, but since it doesn't call itself by that name, would also have the distinguished benefit of being harder to paint as something backlashable in a racial culture war Right, and I remember not to pick on Abraham X Candy as we're recording this. This is right after his most recent debacle.

Speaker 2: 13:36

Oh my god Sorry.

Speaker 1: 13:41

But I was kind of taken aback, I mean at first of the new race, of the new, like, let's say, race first or race reductionist I'm not sure if I would call. I think he was race reductionist. I think he kind of moved away in the last year, but not a lot View of thinking about race that you see in us, Kendi and D'Angelo et cetera. I was surprised where they went to it, because XKendi's first popular book on the development of race is actually, you know, stamp from the beginning is actually not bad.

Speaker 2: 14:20

Yeah, it's not new, Like it's a very good retread. But it's a good retread.

Speaker 1: 14:27

Like, if you're a white liberal, it is probably the first time you've read some of these things, unless you are educated in racial studies Like, but it's a decent retread. But then what I was going to bring out from XKendi what I found shocking, actually when you first did it was like this argument that was made that we need to collapse all kinds of racism into one category just called racism, in which you either four are against and that's how you and you're four are against it, consequentially based on your policy habits. But also that if something is good but is not done as an anti-racist action, even if it is good for racial outcomes, it is still considered a racist position. And I was like, in what world does that make either analytical or tactical sense?

Speaker 2: 15:30

Right, I haven't. So I suffered through how to be an anti-racist when it first came out, but I don't think he ever explicitly defines racism, or he does. It's very circular, if I remember right. So I remember reading the book being like well, how can you distinguish what anti-racism is if you don't actually define racism? And that's not to say that there's an easy definition. I mean people have been debating about what that is for, I mean for a very long time.

Speaker 2: 15:59

But to me, if you're going to insert yourself into that debate, it seems worthwhile to actually define what that is. And so yeah, either or. Fallacy aside, there was definitional problems as well with that text.

Speaker 1: 16:14

Yeah, I think he doesn't define it there. I got his definition from interviews and even then he doesn't actually define what racism is. He just says that he doesn't think that talking about systemic racism and implicit bias and bigotry separately is anything but confusing and I'm like but I don't think you. I'm like OK, from the standpoint of convincing people racism is bad, maybe I can see that, but from the standpoint of explaining how these different sociological and complex developments actually work, I don't see that at all.

Speaker 2: 16:49

No, I totally agree yeah that work.

Speaker 2: 16:54

I just I'm also always wondering what people think the in, what the aim is Like. What is what is to be gained from telling people that you are either like races or anti races and but also not defining it. But like what is like? What is that doing? Like I don't aside from? And then he also is like it's not a, it's not a state, it's an action. I think he says something that affects you aren't, but which I actually appreciate that intervention somewhat, because I do think that the way we use anti races, it becomes an identity like I am an anti races which is kind of because the book is like called how to be an anti racist but in the text he actually says it's something you do.

Speaker 2: 17:38

It's not like who you are, but I do think that is an important component. But if you're not going to like define racism and then like lambass people for not like explicitly being anti races, then I don't really know where to go from there.

Speaker 1: 17:55

Yeah, it's a. Well, I think that that economy, the whole anti racism is not an identity and also, really, according to Kennedy, racism shouldn't be an identity either. And he does say that. I mean, when I first heard X Kennedy, I actually found him refreshing from the prior generation of this thought, when everyone got who would be considered like, oh, just like the power plus privileged people.

Speaker 2: 18:25

Oh, got to be like OK, got it got it.

Speaker 1: 18:27

Well, he like he does seem. If you're dealing with that end of radical thought, he does seem refreshing. Ok, but that the one thing I'll say about that school of thought is, outside of some graduate students who took it on to blogs in the teams, that school thought never was popular with the broad public.

Speaker 1: 18:50

That was something that activists on campuses would throw at you Right and I think X Kennedy was popular with the broad public and that this was adopted in newsrooms. It was adopted in the Academy. It became a large part of corporate diversity, equity and inclusion movements and for a little bit after the Floyd protests, rebellions, whatever you want to call them it really seemed like that became the dominant way to talk about race. And I found it interesting because right before the Floyd moment, there was beginning to be a backlash to Robin DeAngelo. That was forestalled by the Floyd moment so, and a backlash not from the right, from both liberals like Jonathan Shea and leftists who were like, well, what is this really about? It seems like. Ultimately, we have come back to that. Seems like DeAngelo is no longer, broadly speaking, popular outside of academia anymore.

Speaker 2: 20:02

She had to get one last I was going to say one last scam, but you remember she had that other book called Nice White People, which was saying that it's not like the Charlottesville races that you should be worried about. It's like the nice white people that you work with, the nice white people in the classes, with you at school, that you should really be worried about, the ones that know all the right keywords and all the things. Those are the real races that we should be looking out for, which it didn't quite grab on the way that white fragility did. So I don't know, maybe she had just captured the zeitgeist and that was it for her, but I thought it was interesting that that book also didn't catch on in the academy in the way that it was in the academy.

Speaker 2: 20:50

But let's say it I know you hate this term in PMC circles.

Speaker 1: 20:54

Yes, I do hate this term, but I understand what you mean.

Speaker 1: 21:01

I have learned that I'm going to just give up on fighting that battle as long as people concede to me that it doesn't meet my definition of a Marxist theory of class, and then we're just going to never the twain show me Like it's fine, I'm not going to get mad about it, but you're right, it did become.

Speaker 1: 21:19

What I find interesting, and maybe you could talk about this a little bit, is diversity, equity and inclusion grew everywhere very fast, but in the private sector it seemed to rise and fall like within a year, almost just like, whereas I think in the academy except in states that explicitly ban it, which there's going to be more than a few it has largely fallen away, so much so that I was just at BYU recently, which you know outside of places like Liberty University, it's one of the most reactionary universities in the country and yet they were using they didn't call it DEI because that's bad, but it was like. I think it was diversity, inclusion and belonging like, and I'm like. So even they feel like they have to come up with something equivalent to it on a college campus now and that's in like the most conservative end of the LDS church.

Speaker 2: 22:38

Yeah, I feel like DEI is.

Speaker 2: 22:44

So there's a pretty good book about this out of sociology called the Diversity Bargain, and the author I can't her name is escaping me right now, but it came out maybe like 2018, 2019, but she pretty much interviews college students about their feelings on like racial diversity and one of like the modal responses is that people are like yeah, we like diversity because it's something I can put in my resume or it's something I can like talk about during my interviews.

Speaker 2: 23:13

So it has it's become its own set of like cultural capital, especially for, like you know, upwardly mobile like white kids, who probably have are not going to be embedded in any spaces where they're going to like meaningfully interact with black people. But being able to speak the language so somewhat, I think, is part of the reason that even some of them are more reactionary or, let's say, not as progressive institutions are willing to go with it, because it is you that's like oh, I can check this box off, which is a very cynical way to think about its use, but I think that that's kind of how it's being done. But I also want to add one other thing you said about BEI.

Speaker 2: 23:51

It also feels like the whole multicultural thing is coming back to, which is kind of odd because I feel like that had been done by like the middle of the Bush presidency, bush II presidency. But I've seen a couple like not it's like flyers and things where people explicitly say multicultural and I'm like that kind of it's interesting that that's kind of returning.

Speaker 1: 24:13

I don't know if you have the, if you've seen that. Oh, I've seen that. Actually, one of the things I think is driving that is that it's acceptable to conservative discourse. So, like in Utah and public schools, like we use that language, we don't use DEI language. We talk about inclusion but we don't talk about equity and we talk about multicultural diversity again, and cultural awareness.

Speaker 1: 24:38

And because it you know, if you're, maybe this is specific to Utah, but if you're like an LDS and you know you're a religious minority in the rest of the country but like you're also a majority here and the LGS church is kind of particular because their history is so recent, they're really concerned about being viewed as racist. Like a lot I'm like a whole lot of evangelicals who just don't really care. I mean, they kind of care but they don't care. Like the Southern Baptist Convention is not losing sleep over it most of the time. So maybe it's unique to hear, but I've seen that language being adopted here. There's also a sense in which, like in a place like Utah, like black female LDS conservatives, that's like a surefire way to get in the Congress.

Speaker 2: 25:39

Yeah, there was the one. What's her name? She was in Congress Representative.

Speaker 1: 25:46

Love yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:48

She's, she's, she's, she's, she's an Alphith, though, right.

Speaker 1: 25:50

Yeah, she's, she got ousted, but we have several more in the wings, Like also, yeah, In Utah. Weirdly, if you're a white dude, you're likely to be senator, but if you're like a junior Congress person, being a person of color, and preferably a woman, seems to be the way to go, and you know this phenomenon isn't new. It's just like back in the day when you go watch the DNC, you'd see a whole lot of like the same three black people. The DNC, the RNC you'd see the same three black people on the camera over and over again.

Speaker 1: 26:34

But there is a, there is a way in which there's an anxiety about this in conservative circles, particularly post-Trump, where we want to double down on reaction and even like we're even okay with being pretty bigoted on LGBT rights. Two ways we weren't recently, Like I've seen reversals to back to odds, talking points about even gay marriage, but what they don't want to do is see in particularly racist and the and for, and I think there's just frankly cynical demographic reasons tied into class about this. Their class coalition of upper middle class are actually upper middle class. Petit Bourgeois business owners is actually largely the GOP's base to be in a lot of ways Is more and more of color. It just is like. And so I think that and you've kind of seen this also, I think in a way and this will get us to maybe how we talk about this political economy aspect of it with Biden but, like for most of my 30s and I'm gathering, probably a good year yours too.

Speaker 1: 27:54

I don't know your age, but I'm assuming it's a little bit younger than me, but not a lot. Yeah, Okay, so you're you. You would have come in age. During this time there has been a an assumption that racial demographics alone Insured democratic victory, and there's been a realization that educational status is even more predictive of whether or not one votes as a Democrat than race, and that there's been a decoupling. Like people go, oh well, conservatives are always been stupid. Actually, it's only recently that most, like that, graduate degree holders are almost two way person Democrats. Let's say fairly, that's a generation and a half phenomenon, yeah, that's something I wanted to include in the paper.

Speaker 2: 28:56

You the, where I've been kind of laid out the privatization was that educational kind of chasm. But I had to cut it because, you know, journals have a very hard work out, and so I made use of the footnotes as much as I could. But that's definitely something that I feel like does not get talked about enough.

Speaker 1: 29:14

Well, how does education play into this, this role of the privatization of racial responsibility?

Speaker 2: 29:20

Yeah, so like one thing that I think is super fascinating and do you you're familiar with, like Barbara iron rights work right? So then, one of her most interesting books to me is the fear of falling book.

Speaker 2: 29:33

She talks about how you know, the middle class is kind of psychologically unstable, like they're always so worried about like upper mobility and like status and recognition and all these things in a way that is kind of leads them to some degree of almost psychosis. But one of the things that I thought was so fascinating about her is about this text, is there was one of the chapters where she was talking about the 1968 presidential election and she was saying that you know, we have this idea that like the Southern strategy, you know Nixon and Bosen, just like this overnight kind of switch and what she shows is like no, actually highly educated, especially white people were voting Republican even throughout like this period, like the Southern strategy was not even aimed at them for, like white, white professional collect white collar whites. But once it became clear that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had more or less like aligned on financial issues or at least transitioning into a finance capitalist society, what then? There was really nothing to contest or really to debate about on that end. And so as a result, like you start seeing more and more white professionals who are now really interested in like some of these questions of multicultural whatever.

Speaker 2: 30:58

And I thought that was really fascinating because I think there is a way that we tend to think like all of this kind of happens at once without thinking about oh, it actually matters that we have an asset based economy and for a lot of these people, like that's not an issue that they're willing to like talk about, and so it really significantly like narrows down, like the areas that you can contest, like politically, and so I think that matters, especially for my framework, because what I'm trying to say is that, well, if we have come to understand like black or racial justice, at least some of it, as being, oh well, black people have to, you know, have some access to property and generation. You know we talk about the wealth, rich, racial wealth gap and all that stuff. Well, that's kind of a problem, because part of having an asset based economy is that you have to have some people who are like debtors and some people are creditors, and so it's like necessarily zero. And so what I've been saying is like okay, does it? We shouldn't be surprised then, when a number of the issues like schooling, which always comes back to like property values or affordable whatever, like that, those issues are always the one that gets shot down, because that's an inch.

Speaker 2: 32:11

That's a situation in which people's material considerations are actually like conditioning or at least shaping the way that they understand the types of like, let's say, racial justice or anti racist policies that they're willing to support. And so most of the research that I was originally reading on the matter, most of this up to oh, there still must be some degree of like implicit bias, or people still must have some degree of like racial resentment towards black people, and I'm like that might be true, but even if we could pull out like the men in black, you know flashy thing, and like make everybody like forget everything they understood about race and still had an asset based economy, like we're probably still going to be in the same boat. And so, like I just think that there's a way that that that thinking about the kind of the political economy of all these things helps to clarify a lot of these inequalities. And I also don't know if that's just me being a crude material.

Speaker 1: 33:13

Yeah, well, I don't know. I kind of, as a person, is a little bit of a crude materialist. Just just at the end of the day, I think, yeah, it's very easy to explain to me. And people like, oh, it's difficult to explain systemic racism, and I'm just like, oh, no, it's not hard, like, all I have to do is do a multiplier by like your parents have money, they give you some of that money, you have more money and you continue earning money. Now, x person makes the same income as you. Their parents did not have money, their parents also did not have money, and so forth, I think.

Speaker 1: 33:53

Where it gets confusing, though, is there's this tendency to use a statistic about like quote white people as if white people are a homogenous group in this regard and they're not by class, and also they're also sorted by ethnic origins. There's certain last names in certain class strata that go back to certain places going very far back. I know One of the interesting things about like my familiar background is I have some of the good last names and some of the bad last names in my immediate history, and you know, my current, my actual last name, is very weird, so it's so people actually can't know that much by it. But there's times, you know, I mean you just, and I think that's that's interesting too. And conversely, this is true for black people as well. If anyone's ever studied it like, it's like there's been a black bourgeoisie. Now it's at a big disadvantage to the white bourgeoisie. It was shut out of. Depending on where you're at, between 200 and 300 years of accumulation, that's not insignificant. But there I mean, the development of a black bourgeoisie happened even before Jim Crow ended, actually significantly before Jim Crow ended.

Speaker 1: 35:19

And I think that history does have to be understood when we talk about this, because a lot of times when we're talking about like social policy that my favorite one is affirmative action who primarily benefits from that? Well, white women. For one thing Jews did for a while, and then like, if it does get to black people, eventually it's the children of these very early black families. And then also and this is the unfortunate rational core of ADOS complaints it's gonna say yeah, a lot of immigrants who come from very elite backgrounds in their home country. And what I tell people like the irony of us talking about like rich Nigerians is because, because our racist immigration policy means that, like, unless you're in the most pathetic of states. Coming over as a refugee. You're probably going to be the 1% of the 1% of those African countries you're coming from. Yeah, so.

Speaker 2: 36:24

The affirmative action thing is so fascinating because it's so, it's a circular argument, and so this summer I'm working on a book that essentially traces how, the why it is that the elementary and secondary education act was passed, and then subsequently like how did that eventually lead to the creation of the Department of Education? And even thinking about like affirmative action within. So I did some archival work at the LBJ library this summer and they quite a bit of archival work at the JFK archives, because it obviously those were the two administrations where most of this legislation well, what became?

Speaker 2: 37:05

the SCA was created and for affirmative action they're kind of, if you looked at like just exchanges between, like LBJ and Walter Heller and some of his other advisors, and they really don't know what, how to define what counts as discrimination. So for them they're like well, the Supreme Court says that we can't look at like different demographic kind of just how people are stratified demographically, because there's other reasons why people are, why cities are demographically structured the way they are. So that's not legitimate and so ultimately they come up with this definition was like discrimination is the result of like discriminatory, discriminatory action which completely circulars. I'm like what do you do with that? But like the original affirmative action executive orders were specifically about actual harms that you could identify and trace and rectify in government agencies at first. And so there's a I would read this book called inventing equal opportunity, which to me is like a good way of showing how it slowly morphs from very specific claims that you could clearly like litigate to. After you know, the Bakke decision is really weird.

Speaker 2: 38:27

Like affirmative action is fine if it leads to, if it for diverse reasons or whatever it says, which really is again kind of thinking about what I was saying earlier about like we'll support this because there might be some social capital at stake for, you know, white kids essentially. But then now I'm just kind of like well, what is it? Is it just D I? It can't be called. As we know, the colders are unconstitutional. They've been deemed unconstitutional for decades now. So if it can't be called as it's not D I, I don't think.

Speaker 2: 38:59

I'm like what is it? And I've asked I'm not an expert in affirmative action, but I've talked to people who kind of work in this domain and I'm just so confused about, like, what it actually is, and what I've come to realize is people don't actually want to define what it is because, like, that ambiguity is kind of what allows it to sustain itself in some ways, because I don't think that there is a specific policy, at least not within the confines of, let's say, previous rulings on the matter, and so I don't know if you have any insights, but I'm just at a loss at how to even think about affirmative action in 2022.

Speaker 1: 39:39

I'm confused if this ruling change for the elite colleges of which it affects matters at all, because we still have diversity statements, we still have all these subjective criteria and, in fact, one of the things that both conservatives and liberals have been doing away with and this is a separate rant but has been doing away with most forms of objective standards, except for stuff like subjective, like holistic background statements, which is going to favor and does we have evidence that it does favor the rich, even when they include stuff like diversity statements? Actually, especially when they include stuff like diversity statements, because you have to come from the right background to know what it is, to have the time and access to do the things to back it up. So you're not just saying I value people for who they are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like. And to prove it, you know like someone like me who's had the ability to travel all over the world at other people's expense may be able to pull that off from a working class background, but most people cannot, and I think that that's one thing that ties me to it.

Speaker 1: 40:59

The other thing that, though this was my whole thing about recently, or the education base around this and this privatization argument that you make. That got me really thinking Um is that there's also a way one the idea that we're going to fix education through its top elite end. To me that makes no sense. Like uh, um, two, um. While I am totally sympathetic to the systemic bias in uh standardized testing ACTSAT definitely, iq test, um, because they're always in a language and a language. You have to pick a dialect and that dialect's always going to have cultural and social uh implications. Once you pick it, there's really no way around that actually.

Speaker 1: 41:50

Um, the fact of the matter is, everything I've ever read on grading indicates that it's actually even more given towards systemic bias, even down to precise skin tone variation, um, which you do not see in the ACTSAT.

Speaker 1: 42:13

Which means that the people who are arguing this as a fixed to systemic uh biases, just they either are ignorant on what the actual data says or they are frankly dishonest. And one of the things that has been sitting in the back of my head to tie this into the political economy of this is while, yes, there has been more racial diversity at both elite and upper tier public universities and the last decade there's been less economic diversity. And when you add to this the second fact, it still remains that, for example, the number of black people at the poverty line has largely been unchanged since 2000 and fucking seven. Then what do we have? I mean, it seems to me that that that you have to explain. Well, either the educational benefit is not working, or the most disadvantaged people of color are not getting the advantages from these programs, or both like so well, I think the part of the issue is that people don't have actual what's the aim?

Speaker 2: 43:22

Like what are you actually trying to do? Is it? Do we just want proportional representation? Or in terms of like? Oh well, if I think you know, like you know, really talked about this, like is is racial justice? Just making sure that you know the amount of homeless? It's 13% homeless or black 40, whatever. Why is that what it means, or does it like?

Speaker 2: 43:47

It's never clear to me what it means, and there's also a way in which I feel like we live so much in the abstractions that we don't understand that there are many things that could be done for vast majority of black people, even if that wouldn't be in caution to Sandy Darity if he's watching even if that means the racial wealth gap won't be closed. I'm like if we I don't know let's just throw a policy out, let's say universal health care, and not saying that the solution, I think that there's a way that people on the left like tend to think of it as a fantasy of what obviously, I don't think is going to bankruptcy behind universal health care, but even not leaving a you know appointment and having to pay you know whatever absurd amount for, like some routine procedure seems like it could go a long way to helping black people, even if in the abstract, even in terms of the statistics, like we may not be seeing like that much of these gaps closing. I think part of that is like well, we have a market economy under capitalism, which means that there has to be some inequality, and so like, do we only care about, like closing the racial aspects? And I'm just like, well, I don't know how you even do that without engaging with happening in acid economy. Like if you look at all the interest like people are making wealth, people who have the wealth to put in like some high yield savings or whatever, like this is only exacerbating the same disparities, that disparities people are always talking about, but there's never any mention of those things.

Speaker 2: 45:27

And part of the reason I'm so fascinated by education is because we just expected to solve everything, like we expected to solve for each wealth gap. We expected to solve mental, mental health issues, expected to solve literally everything. And I'm just like, but it can't do that unless you actually, well, it can't do that, but it until we actually reckon with those other things, like I don't know what people want from it, and so I don't know if it's a lack of its ignorance or if it's just I think I tend to think it's more of a people just don't understand how this economy works. And so, because they don't understand how the economy works, like I do think that people believe very strongly in like equal opportunity, and I'm just like. Equal opportunity essentially just means equal opportunity for everyone to be exploited on the market. That's what that means in effect. But yeah, so I just I don't know what people are thinking about. What's the aim of some of these policies?

Speaker 1: 46:29

I was going to ask you then this this takes us to the Biden economy friend the show. Freddie Debord told me the other day well, when I interviewed him, I guess about a month ago that he thought that the economy was doing rather well under Biden and my response, which I expressed, to be fair, was like I can tell your sub sex doing well, because I'm like, in abstract it is true that the GDP growth is not bad right now. It is also true that brought basket inflation, not including everything that's important housing, education and food has gone back to its three to 4% range. Food still kind of bad, which disproportionately affects poor people.

Speaker 1: 47:30

When I saw the stuff Ackerman and been able to debate around this thing a majority report and I kind of sided with the other that it's not that that for the majority of people, since actually the Obama recovery, the recommendation of assets and wealth is so much that that, even if the general economy is doing okay, most people do not actually experience that benefit.

Speaker 1: 48:01

And they do experience both the indebtedness which has gone up dramatically it has gone down significantly during the beginning of COVID, but that's all been undone and and they also experience inflation and there was a lot of assumptions that, since inflation is good for debt holders, that it would be, broadly speaking, good for the poor. Some truth to that, but not a lot, because the lower down you are on the poverty rate and if you don't own your own home, you actually and if you're not college educated to talk about these quote PMC issues you probably actually aren't that affected in ways that you can see by. You know the cost of debt, you are affected by it, but it's not something that you see. So how do you think by dynamics is actually doing?

Speaker 2: 49:07

So I live in Philadelphia and I can say not well. So, like you said, I think that for I would even say just the top 1%, probably like the top 10 to 15%. Like the top 1%, you probably don't register any difference at all because you're just so wealthy. The next, like 15%. Okay, you might be annoyed that you used to be able to have paid $16, $12 or 10 I'm in Philly, so maybe $10 for a craft cocktail, but now you pay 14. Like, sure, you might be annoyed by that, but like it's not going to like systematically change your behavior and really any meaningful way. I think it's a little bit slow, that it gets tricky because, yes, we have GDP growth but I think I wrote a Twitter thread about that but if you actually look at where most of the growth is, it's in finance, it's in real estate, it's insurance, like. So, yeah, like, but these are things that people have to have. Like you can't not have most states. What is it illegal not to have? Car insurance in many states and almost all of?

Speaker 2: 50:13

them yes, yeah, so like the things that. So it annoys me so much, especially when I read the Wall Street Journal, because they're like, oh, like, why isn't like the interest rate, like curbing people spending I'm like, yeah, because they're spending most of their fucking money and like insurance and healthcare and like education, like it's not, like they're just going to Gucci and like making it rain. I mean, they might be, but I don't think that's what's doing most of the driving. And so I think there's a way that, because we don't actually tease out like finance from like other product, act like literally productive, like producing some type of like I guess you could say I'm not going to get into is the money, is money commodity big? But people like things that you could actually like. I don't know, like touch that you know, I guess that you could do that with money too.

Speaker 1: 51:02

But you see, you go. But like I also like strategically know how you're avoiding all the like nasty pitfall questions that are yeah.

Speaker 2: 51:11

I like don't not, not tonight, but yeah. Yeah, just think that there's a way that we never talk about that and I'm just like, well, that's part of the reason also that privatization of the economy was such a big deal, because capital is new, that if you could privatize things that people actually need it, or privatize like natural, natural monopolies, then it would be an infinite amount. You could pretty much raise the price for what as much as you want and like people are going to pay it, not because they didn't, because they were, you know whatever, because they had to, and so I just think that we really have like probably three or three economies for people.

Speaker 2: 51:51

But because all of our statistics are so aggregated, it's so hard to see kind of the, the way that they kind of break, and so that's what I've been trying to figure out. And then, specifically with black people, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal which I have outside sorts of issues with the Wall Street Journal, but in my opinion is the only paper in the United States where you can get at least halfway decent economic data or reporting I should say.

Speaker 1: 52:18

I normally have to go to the Financial Times because it used to be. However, it's still like if you throw out every gloss in the Wall Street Journal. I used to say, just throw out the editorial page, and I'm like throw out everything except for the stats right that's or good.

Speaker 2: 52:37

Exactly so. There was an article, maybe about a month ago, saying that black people because they are over represented in most of the service sector, so even like in, like what do you call it when you have like like help, like like home health aids and things like that, because they're over represented in those areas and because these are areas where you've actually seen some of the growth strongest, like wage growth, like they are disproportionately benefiting from a lot of the wage growth that Jerome Powell is probably fuming about right now and so, but that just never, I feel like that doesn't enter the discourse often. It's still like, but it's still like the racial wealth gap stuff, which, again, it's important, but like this is actually like one of the few times when, like black working people are actually doing somewhat better than the average person in terms of like relative, relatively like we can still talk about all the indebtedness and all of those things are obviously important, but by that one metric, there is some evidence which suggests that I feel like it just never gets brought up.

Speaker 1: 53:50

Yeah, I crunched the numbers on the racial wealth gap once at the request of my friend Colin Drum, who said that I was too flipping about it. So I crunched it and I saw that it was real, and it was real between working class people too. But I pointed out to him I could explain it and one sentence when I looked at what it was and I was like it's the results of 2007, it's still the results of 2007. The difference is a number of white people versus a number of black people that were able to hold onto the mortgages because of predatory lending prices in the odds, and that is still primarily what's driving the wealth gap. And I pointed to Colin, I was like the wealth gap isn't even the difference of a house. It's like half of the average value of a house. Right, and so I'm like so, it's like so.

Speaker 1: 54:42

When we look at indebtedness and whatnot, we have to assume there there's probably a difference. But people are probably slightly more indebted because they pay higher on average because these things, like the actual tables I was talking about at the beginning of our story today, they pay higher for these things. If they live in traditionally black neighborhoods, in quotes, then yes, but really that's something you could easily fix right. I mean fairly radical. It's impossible to happen in current conditions, but like so, are most things that we need to fix it but we could easily fix with just housing policy under a capitalist economy so

Speaker 1: 55:25

like it's. But that point you made about neoliberalism, I want to go into that because I think that's actually really insightful one. The idea and even as a kid, when people are still selling the stuff in the 90s that private competition and a natural monopolies would lead to lower prices never made sense to me because I was like but there's no competition, like you're telling me and I see this with the cable company back. Then you're telling me natural competition is going to compete and drive the prices down, but there's literally no competition. Now there's just now a person taking a profit where primarily all you had to do was meet administrative cost, and I guess you're going to tell us because it's a profit, there's an incentive to be more efficient, but again, there's no competition, they can just raise the prices.

Speaker 1: 56:24

So even like, even as a person and that when I realized this I was still a pretty die hard capitalist, be honest with you I just was like this doesn't make sense to me and I started seeing that throughout neoliberalism. The other thing I noticed and I noticed this a long time ago that this whole like we are getting this whole government and making it smaller is fundamentally not true. In fact, if anything, administrative bloat, administrative growth to look over all these fucking laws to get governed. These public private partnerships had led to a significant increase in the size of the government, purely for administrative cost right like.

Speaker 2: 57:04

Yeah, and the other thing that I feel like also doesn't get discussed much, or maybe not enough, especially not in the mainstream, is that one of the other added benefits of the this legislation of like natural monopoly, so letting some private company come manage like the water system in your town or whatever is, when shit breaks down, like the government, local government has to fix it, like they're not really usually responsible for the maintenance and the money, but because we don't have really any reasonable fiscal policy which I feel like is something that also doesn't get discussed enough on cities typically end up doing is issuing bonds and taking rich people's money to solve the issue and paying them interest to fix the issues that the private company is should, in theory, be responsible for. So it's great because you can you can off off all the costs associated with the management or the distribution of the item or the whatever it is in question and you don't have to pay for any of the management and upkeep. And when something has to be done for it, the city has to come to rich people for the money to actually repair it and they have to pay them interest, and because we don't raise taxes on anybody really, but especially not the government. So I feel like it's not. That's like the, especially in local governments. Like I look like in looking Philadelphia in.

Speaker 2: 58:22

You know, the city is right now doing okay financially because they kind of said I'm quite a bit of the federal money they got from, like the packaging stuff, but that's going to run out fairly soon and Philadelphia does not have the type of tax base to offset the money that they would have gotten from the federal government.

Speaker 2: 58:43

And so what's going to happen? Like, aside from them having to fall back on bond insurance, which obviously is springs attached, like usually leads to some more austerity in a city that's already suffering both with, like the, the opiate crisis, as well as like other types of things associated with social decay. And so I just yeah, I just feel like the kind of the vaccination aspect is in the time is back to racial inequality. If we're talking, we care about disparities, like if you are somebody who is on the, we need to be concerned about clothing racial disparities. These are things that you should be concerned about because this is going to disproportionately harm black people in Philadelphia, but not only black people, but if you care about the disproportionality, it's going to disproportionately harm people in places like Philadelphia or other cities where black people are trying to concentrate it. So yeah, the public economy just can't escape it like it's such a key part of understanding like racial inequality to me.

Speaker 1: 59:43

Absolutely. I want to pull this apart a little bit because I think this is actually a great thing to think about when we're talking about the problems with this. I've been talking about municipal bonds, the way to discipline through three public corporations, moody standard and then I think it's important for us to discipline what governments can even do. If you look at like, I think about a lot of like, the most put regressive mayoral cities in the country. Not, you know, chicago is one of them now, but like Jackson, mississippi and Jackson and then the legislature won't fund it. God bless Mayor Lumumba, but it's a hell hole. Yeah, like, and why the legislature won't fund it and then no way he's getting good bond rates. We lost them way more.

Speaker 1: 1:00:31

And since we have a particular like, as I've told people before, the federal government is basically an insurance company that kills people and that it is a military and it is. It is a backstop shitty insurance company that, like, somehow, despite the fact we don't have socialized medicine, managed to waste more money than even the most inefficient socialized medicine I've ever heard of. It is highly profitable, yeah, right, it is highly profitable for somebody, but not for the federal government. But it has currency sovereignty. It as long as it has relative power over international trade. I'm not a pure MMT, or I think you might know that about me.

Speaker 1: 1:01:14

Yeah but I am sort of a international balance of powers in MTR and that if you have the ability to force people to buy shit in your currency, you do pretty much. You have, within limits, a whole lot of power over the amount of currency you have floating around and debt can even help you as a in a way, as a government. In a way it would not help an individual or a state because the states do not have that kind of currency. Sovereignty cannot have that kind of currency separately, both constitutional, and they're just not big enough. I guess, like if California was independent from the United States, in New York, maybe it could pull something, but in general they cannot.

Speaker 1: 1:02:00

So, to tie this all back around, what people miss is most of the important things in your life are funded at the municipal and state level, where these kinds of financial controls are the most powerful. That is one of the reasons why. Despite that, if you look at all levels of tax burden in the United States, one of the reasons why we're hesitant to raise taxes is because we're taxed by a lot of different levels of government. Honestly, like when I actually crunch that and people like, oh, you're passed so much higher taxes like they do, but it's not quite as much higher as you think, because you're just looking at your your social security, medicare and an income tax, but let's look at the broad gamut of taxes and fees that you actually pay.

Speaker 2: 1:02:46

Especially now. Yes, that's a funny story. I got chart. I went to a concert earlier this summer. I got charged a printing fee for a PDF ticket. The fees have gotten to the master.

Speaker 1: 1:03:04

Oh my God, I've made a mistake of flying one of the two budget airlines to Atlanta and I had to talk to a counter person and I had to do it in a very particular way, not to be charged $50 to talk to the person that I was going to have to talk to anyway. But yeah, it was. It's just like I think it's ridiculous. I do kind of miss the libertarians when they used to talk about all those things as backdoor taxes, because in some ways they are both privately and publicly like. There's also like I'm like you know it's you don't hear about as in other countries at least not other developed countries as many people go and bankrupt from court fees.

Speaker 2: 1:03:52

So yeah, I mean they pretty much are private tax. I mean it's just taxes on the services that private industry is distributing.

Speaker 1: 1:04:03

And the reason why they're able to distribute is because they have a government fiat to do so, because it's not like they're actually competing on the open market. So like, like again, you would think, and part. You know I tell many stories about the complex way of things that make me a socialist. One of them, one of the many, was realizing that I didn't understand why libertarians liked insurance and I didn't understand why libertarians like public private partnership, because from their own theoretical mechanism they should never support that. In fact, that's actually the worst of both worlds from their own thinking. It's a price, it's, it's, it is rent, sinking, rent large. And then when you realize that you're just like, oh, they don't mean shit, like, and the ones that do aren't taken seriously, you do.

Speaker 1: 1:05:00

I did occasionally meet libertarians who'd argue against like public private partnerships and also even the concept of insurance, like and stuff like that, but they were never the ones anyone listened to. Like, I don't want to say that there was nobody who was consistent, but it was pretty rare. And when I realized that I was like, oh, and I think most people realize that even reactionaries aren't tend, don't tend, to be libertarians anymore, so it does tend to put to lie this, but also interestingly I think this is important for people misunderstanding how neoliberalism works or whatever we're in right now. I tend to think we're in the transition between neoliberalism and something else.

Speaker 2: 1:05:44

Yeah, it feels like we're kind of trying to revert back to Keynesianism without fiscal policy. Honestly, I actually want to talk to you about that because in doing some of my archival work this summer, one thing that kept coming up was how the economic accounts of advisors for both Kennedy and LBJ were adamant about like you can't just have monetary policy without like some active fiscal policy. So sure, like they were concerned about like deficit spending and so on, but it was in tandem with well, what are we gonna be doing on the fiscal side? Obviously, lbj kind of lost his grip with that with Vietnam, but like the Kennedy administration was pretty adamant about that, and I feel like what Biden is trying to do is ultimately have Keynesianism without any fiscal policy, or at least no actual explicit fiscal policy.

Speaker 1: 1:06:37

Well, this is. You know this is the I'm gonna use rational core of Truth of Things a lot tonight, people. Sorry, this is the rational core of the truth behind the Brenner-Reilly thesis. I don't like the Brenner-Reilly thesis a super lot, but their whole political capitalism I don't really know what they mean to that.

Speaker 1: 1:06:54

But this idea that profit rates are actually decided by governmental fiat right now in some ways due to like lending preferences and government contracts, I think is actually somewhat true. Like there's like one of the reasons why the tech sector which, if you like, just look at it on paper, you're just like how in the fuck would anyone ever make any money at this? Like it just doesn't make sense. And lo and behold, when the beginnings of this squeeze hit after COVID, when they actually started getting rid of QE, it didn't make sense. Later on, some other stuff started paying out. They started getting yields back on the bonds. That's the other thing about the debt costs. The government does have to pay out the yields on the bonds somewhere and someone's gonna get it, but now it's important because the stocks are falling Right.

Speaker 1: 1:07:51

So. But what you just realized is like oh, those profits were only possible in some ways, not because QE and I know this is where MMP is getting mad at me but not because QE was actually pumping tons of money into the economy in a direct way, because it was actually protecting asset prices and basically diffusing asset bombs over and over and over again. So venture capital, which in other scenarios in no way made sense, became a risk worth taking if you could leverage it off the cost of debt. Now you can do that, and so other means have emerged. It also got rid of all that excess money going into weird stuff like crypto and other things that just don't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 2: 1:08:42

Yeah, I think that one was especially weird, it was yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:08:46

It was a no way, but I think that really is interesting and just to tie this into race, in the beginning of the Biden economy there was still a talk of what was it like? It is right before actually Biden, but maybe it was during it. There's so much. It's hard for me to remember now because the last three years have been so Everything changes every six months, right, and yet nothing changes at all simultaneously Exactly. But like Spike Lee shilling crypto as a way for black people to get out of, like reliance on racist institutions, and I was like I just was shocked. I was like in what world does this make any sense? Particularly if the financial infrastructure and all the excess money that goes into making this viable these only work as long as people are pumping money into it goes away.

Speaker 2: 1:09:54

Right. So E Franklin Fraser I don't know if you're familiar with his work he had a really scathing critique of what he calls the black boos wasi, but he means it in jest, like he's essentially like. These are people who think they're boos wasi but they're really just like, not really petty bourgeois or obviously wouldn't use like BMC. But what he says in that is like yeah, there's been this talk about like you know, buy black and black banks and all of this. He's just like, but there is no way that that can exist outside of the broader financial system and he's writing about this in the fifties and so.

Speaker 2: 1:10:34

But there's been this kind of like through line in black thought, probably really going back to like the late 19th century, where people tend to believe that it is possible to have like a kind of a sealed off financing arena specifically for black affairs, whatever that is, without thinking about like well, where is the? Where do y'all think? What do y'all think people like to get money Like what is like I don't get yet. So yeah, I just think it goes back to like a fundamental misunderstanding of like how the economy works. And I think when you start thinking about the economy, and more so, like a one big balance sheet, as opposed to, just like you know, things happening in isolation. I think it becomes a lot clearer to see that the best that capitalism can often do is rob here to the pay ball oftentimes.

Speaker 1: 1:11:37

Yeah, I think that's absolutely. I mean, that's absolutely true and this is one of your points when you were talking about. There's a way in which asset economies, since they require debt, like they are in some sense way more zero sum than traditional productive economies, which now, to put my Marxist hat back on, I always say like look, you know the tendency of the way the profits to fall. I'm not sure actually exist in the economy as a whole, but you know what I do know it exists for Produced commodities where there is no capital exclusion, by that there's no patent or anything limiting the market access. Look at food, et cetera. Those profit rates are low and thus it's hard to get investment to renew them. As I pointed out back during the great formula shutdownage in some of the food crisis that they're getting in 2011, I mean 2011, 2021 to 2012,. God, I'm getting old Is that there's such low investment in those? Thus, there's like a lot of these key world commodities where there's like four factories and that's it and anything, anything at all, can cause a major supply disruption because we're also there's so low profit margin in the production. There's also no money in storing it, so there's no reason to keep backup supplies, because warehousing is gonna eat what little bit of your profit margin that there is, and it also on a small level, is part of why I've talked about like the petty bourgeoisie of the Republican base seems so much more reactionary than it used to be, and that is because a lot of them do exist in retail spaces where there's actually a very low profit margin and the taxes really do hurt them and so they don't get it, whereas the old petty bourgeoisie, which a lot of whom have now been professionalized and, I would say, semi-proliteranized this is my long-drait critique of the PMC thesis is like well, a lot of these people that we talk of as PMC, what they are are people who used to have petty bourgeois relations and now have wage relations, semi-proliteranized relations, but are protected by things like state contracts, like either as direct state workers, academics, or in things like tech and stuff where, like government, government contracts are a great bulk of the things keeping these businesses afloat. So in that sense they have been both pro-literanized and lost their petty bourgeois prestige. But also they don't really care if taxes are high, they can probably pay it because they're gonna get the money back anyway. It's almost like circular for them in some ways it's like contributing to your own job fund.

Speaker 1: 1:15:02

And so I think when people wanna see why elite politics in America is so weird and we're not talking about the 1% here, I think you're right, we're talking about the top 20%, top 30% and then there's people in the borderline, like teachers and nurses and like educated, credentialed and cartel people but who don't keep up with inflation et cetera. Like those people are weird even under the PMC strat of stuff. That's the other by. My other critique with the thesis is like it doesn't really explain what teachers and nurses and stuff do.

Speaker 1: 1:15:39

But bracketing those things aside and not worrying about the my technical critique of the PMC thesis, there's a real sense in which there's a petite bourgeois which is doing okay, it's, you know, but really doesn't have high profit margins, and then there's a professional class which is also doing okay but doesn't have to care about profit margins at all. And that's the competition for the voting basis of the parties right now. Right, and that's where all the interest goes. And so it doesn't surprise me that it seems like the Republicans have a weird petite bourgeois problem and the Democrats have a weird professional problem. Now, where do black people and poor people and working class people fit into this.

Speaker 1: 1:16:34

Well, it depends on their class strata, frankly. But one of the things that you have pointed out I think this is another small issue with the PMC thesis is a lot of black people, and specifically not just people of color specifically black people, because the anti-discrimination laws were well enforced in federal and state agencies, are in cartelized labor that has benefited from government investment, like you said. And so I mean when people ask me like, well then, why are black? You know, if Democrats aren't always great for black people, why are black people loyal? I'm like because, like, democrats run their workplaces kind of Right, like it. Just like there's a real like I was pointing out to people like there's a reason why in the places where black people could vote in the United States for FDR, that they didn't vote for FDR in the first term but they did in the other two, like, and that's because the Public Works Administration got a lot of people jobs unless they were in the Jim Crow South Right.

Speaker 2: 1:17:40

So Now, one thing that is fascinating to me and there's a really really good book in Bluepa Science that talks to, which I don't say this often there's a really good book in Bluepa Science called Steadfast Democrats, and what it's all about is, like you know, how is it that black people have stayed so committed to the Democratic Party as a block? And one thing they point to is, like you can't underestimate how important, like social institutions are within the black community, and I'd use that term I don't love it but for like how about a term like the black community? And so one thing that I've been thinking about is if what is one thing that is like, let's say, customary neoliberalism is kind of this atomization we have seen, even in among black people, like black people typically attended church more frequently than most other racial groups, that's, they're pretty much falling to similar levels now, especially post COVID. Even the number, the matriculation in, like black sororities and fraternities, is trending downward. All these institutions that have been so integral to making that connection between the Democratic Party and voting behavior among black people is in some ways starting to splinter. So one thing I'm wondering is like what's on the other side of that Can now we know that there is somewhat of a cultural sphere among black Americans. So black Twitter is a very real thing, absolutely, but it's to skew much more towards the again our favorite word again the black PMC that it does, let's say, black and poor and working people. And so I wonder how is that? How are black working people and black poor people, or how are they gonna be interacting with some of the upper strata of black America with the splintering of these institutions which were in many ways transcended class?

Speaker 2: 1:19:41

Like I went to, solidly, you know, I grew up a fairly middle class, comfortable upbringing, but my church had people who were petty bourgeois blacks. There were black PMCs, there were black working people who worked with the chemical plants, I mean, there was pretty much everybody in kind of similar shared space, explicitly political. But that's starting to disintegrate some, and so is it gonna be the case. And then obviously these things take time to filter through their society. But I wonder, in, let's say, 10 or 20 years, like what will black politics look like? What we start to see?

Speaker 2: 1:20:22

My hunch is I don't think that the Democrat black, even among some of the more, let's say, black capitalists who still vote for the Democratic Party because the Republican Party is just so overtly racist. What I think you'll start to see more is probably just like complete people just defect, like they just don't participate in voting at all. I think that's probably a more likely outcome than because I've seen some people say, oh, black men seem to be voting more for Republican Party, and I'm like I don't know how much of that was a Trump effect or a Republicans. It's kind of hard to know, because people are looking at data from the two presidential elections, and so I'd be curious to see, especially if Trump is not the nominee, how this will compare. But I do think that that's something that we should be thinking about in terms of like politics and the relationship to the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1: 1:21:13

Traditionally black men mostly sit on their hands right. Like when we talk about the black voter, we're mostly talking about fairly educated black women, right? Yeah, like not completely true.

Speaker 2: 1:21:28

I mean there's a big inner city poverty vote, like where there's like legacy machines and stuff, like in Chicago or even in Philadelphia, like the black turnout among like even the lower strides tends to be higher than other places out there, definitely in the South for sure.

Speaker 1: 1:21:46

Although, like, as I always like to point out, it was a black congressional caucus that got the Dixie Crab Machines when they all changed their party to R. Yeah, like that's, and I only I lived through that happening and it's just like. It's very weird talking to people who grew up in the Obama era and they're just like what are you talking about? I'm like the South was democratic until 2000 at the state level.

Speaker 2: 1:22:10

Yeah, I mean I'm from Southern Louisiana. I mean we had, I think, David Vitter. If anyone remembers him. He was like the first Republican senator that I think Louisiana had had since, I believe since Reconstruction, like it had been solidly democratic throughout that whole time and now a Democrat has no chance of winning any statewide office.

Speaker 1: 1:22:31

Yeah, although Louisiana and Georgia are two respective states are weird and that there's still some chance that Democrats can kind of do state level politics there because of-.

Speaker 2: 1:22:43

I'm not moving anymore. The Democrats are pretty much all but abandon ship in Louisiana. It's got-. It's looking pretty stupid. Now. I would say that was true up until Obama. But since Obama, like well, obviously we had John Bell Edwards, but I think that was a one off thing, because David Vitter was just such a terrible candidate.

Speaker 1: 1:23:03

Well, the thing is like, for example, with Georgia. The hard thing to explain is okay, so the state nationally goes for Democrats, but it's actually affected state level politics not at all Mm-hmm, like there's been. Like it's not like the subovers of Atlanta are sending black representatives to the state house or voting for Stacey Abrams Right, but even if they are voting for black senators, you know, at the national level, and I don't know why, but I suspect it's because you know, I remember after 2020, it was like thanking Atlanta for giving Georgia to Democrats and I was like Atlanta's always a black, democratic city. So is Macon, so Savannah, so is Columbus. Even Columbus is a little more questionable because it's a military base there, but like I'm currently.

Speaker 2: 1:24:02

I'm wrong, but I think that some of what has happened in Metro Atlanta is a lot of the more like Hop County areas which used to be more bright wing, have become more of the white again, our favorite term PSC areas. That's intangible Because of the DEI stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:24:21

Essentially, yeah, and also like there's been an influence of, like, middle Eastern and Asian immigrants to that area. But when I say that, do not picture poor people. Yeah, these are like special, these are special DVs of people and so like in Decatur especially. But, yeah, cobb County, cummings, has a mayor of color, I believe in the early 2010s. And for people who don't know Georgia which is most of my audience, ironically, even though I'm from there Cummings used to be a sundown town. That used to be a whole lot of Cobb County. I was born in the 80s. It wasn't that way in the 80s, but it was living memory. When I was a kid, we talked about it, we knew about it. It was and I remember this is so unfair and I have an advantage isn't from the South, but like people watching Lovecraft Country and learning what a sundown town was, and I was like and they're not old, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:25:32

Like I knew, my, ours was byer Texas, which was about 40, not even 40, maybe like 30 miles from my hometown, and I vividly remember my mom telling me when I was like a young kid that if you need to go to the bathroom, you need to go before we get to cross the state line, pretty much because there were no rest stops between Bider and Beaumont, which is like the next major city.

Speaker 2: 1:25:56

So you know, 20 miles for a four or five year old kid, that could be the difference between an accident. So yeah, I was all too familiar with sundown towns, for sure.

Speaker 1: 1:26:07

Well, yeah, I mean it's. I think I was more shocked at the well-meaning right liberals and then very young and very educated black people that I knew. To be honest, it was you know.

Speaker 2: 1:26:21

I had a question about cop counties. So is it more so like what happened to the, let's say, the more reaction more of the Gingrich type Republicans? Are they still there and just are outnumbered now, or have they moved elsewhere?

Speaker 1: 1:26:36

Some of them are still there and outnumbered. Some of them have moved further north into the mountains, into Marjorie Taylor Green's district, up there in the, up there in the foothills, which used to be poor people but is now one of the most expensive places to live in Georgia. So one of the things that's really changed in my lifetime the lower Appalachia, when I was a kid, had only had power for 10 years they were that late at like, but in the 90s it went from basically and poverty stick people in rednecks in the old sense of the term into luxury homes for people who wanted a vacation in the mountains and people communing in from running away from Atlanta by living up in the hills, and so there was a pretty dramatic shift in the voting population there and, conversely, the center of the state, which went from like 55% white, 45% black, went to like 60, 70% black and also, conversely, since these areas were ungentrified like, if you just go to make them like half the cities run down it's mostly turned to churches and hospitals. There's no tax base, et cetera, and so there's a lot of that where I grew up and actually it was an issue when I first became a leftist because the way that people would talk about gentrification and stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:28:19

I'd just be like well, if you don't gentrify these neighborhoods, what are we gonna do? Because there's like they become dilapidated shills. So, because the way this is so privatized, if you don't have money coming in, which means that people with money have to come in, then how do you revitalize this? And again, journey to becoming a socialist. That became my answer. But it was just like the anti-gentrification movement in and of itself, particularly as it existed in the late aughts through the aught teens, which just like totally insufficient for what I was seeing and tend to be like oh, you're talking about inner city areas and like the rich part of the country. You're not talking about poor urban areas in the Midwest or the South.

Speaker 2: 1:29:14

Why no gentrification? I've just come to realize or accept that it's just a signifier, like people typically just use it to mean like a certain type of white person I don't know one who is okay, maybe paying 625 for a coffee at Starbucks, like that's pretty much all that means. There's no, it's not grounded at anything dealing with political economy whatsoever. Like I remember, I lived in Durham before I moved to during North Carolina, before I moved to Philadelphia and Durham's a up-and-coming Southern city. So large parts of like downtown Durham are being completely overhauled with the typical gentrification markers, like there's an axe throwing place, there's a arcade bar, there's a coffee shop and everything.

Speaker 1: 1:30:01

Literally all the stuff though that, like you'd wanna do.

Speaker 2: 1:30:04

Right, I had like three of my favorite coffee shops where all of them like concentrated in the little area. But I remember being with one of my friends and he was just like man, like I'm just so tired of seeing like all these like rich white people come in and like raise the prices and rents and things, and I'm like I probably shouldn't ask this but like why the hell not? So I was like, well, would you be okay if it were like rich black people? He was like, well, yeah, because at least they'd understand the culture. And I'm like is that what this is about? Like, is that what this is about? So I feel like with gentrification, people have a certain like again, it's a signifier and they only focus on the cosmetic aspects of it without thinking about like the developmental side and like what it actually means from like a material standpoint.

Speaker 1: 1:30:53

Yeah, why are all these fail-so-and-white people coming to your neighborhood in the first place? It's because it's too expensive to live in the ones they used to Like. It's just. It's funny to me. I do remember looking at all the stats of that. I was like the only thing that seems true about this is white people have to learn not to call the cops on people for petty annoyances. That does seem to be a thing that we should be talking about. That's just being a good neighbor. If your neighbor pissed you off, third-chastain their yard. Don't actually call a cops on them.

Speaker 2: 1:31:24

Right. I also like if you moved to Brooklyn and are mad at because your neighbors are loud, like why are you living in? Why did you move to New York? Yeah, exactly Like that's not something. You should move to New York If you were that concerned about peace and quiet. Like that's not where you go All right.

Speaker 1: 1:31:39

like you know, come to my neighborhood, which is mostly Latin and it's pretty quiet, except for holidays, in which case it's loud as hell. But you just have to deal with it.

Speaker 2: 1:31:49

It's pretty quiet here too, except when Philadelphia I have to say I've lived a lot of places in by far has the most passionate fan base, fan bases across all of the major sports. So I will say like I've lived here for now like a year and a half and like all of the sports, major sports teams have done well. Like obviously, the Eagles went to the Super Bowl, the Phillies were in the World Series last year, looked like they might be heading that way again. Even the soccer team like went to the championship. So after like big sporting events, you hear a lot people do fireworks. Sometimes it might be gunshots, I'm never quite sure, but like there's a lot of commotion after sporting events.

Speaker 1: 1:32:26

other than that, like yeah, Well, white Mormons do fireworks for a month there in July, like, and then, and then my Latin neighbors God bless them will use any excuse ever to do fireworks and I can't blame them, even though I hate it. But now that we're getting into a centralized gossip, I will say I kind of want to end off on where you see a lot of this going. Now that we see like outside the academy, I think we can say DEI's pretty much washed up on the shores of the larger culture. There does seem to have been a broad cultural shift, like in entertainment, the dream of the 90s, dream of every channel being superficially diverse, seemed to happen. But at the same token everything from justice reform to talking about racial outcomes seems to have gone away. In some cases it's because, for example, the life expectancy difference between poor white people and poor black people is shrinking, but for very disturbing and bad reasons. Mostly poor white people are dying at younger and younger ages, not black people living longer. But the gap is closing, so to speak, and I think we've seen real change in some ways about a more diverse top 20%. I think that's real. I don't think that's perceptual. But on other issues such as, like I still, yes, everything in New York Times is framed in the way it's gonna affect racial outcomes, everything in NPR is framed in the way it's gonna affect racial outcomes, but in general it seems like we're a thousand years away.

Speaker 1: 1:34:39

I mean, in the beginning you said you felt like the George Floyd revolts didn't really do that much, except for you know if you're at Goldman Sachs or in the Academy. In a way. For me it's like people don't even remember it. It's like the whole vibe is gone and we just like, oh yeah, that's them.

Speaker 1: 1:34:58

When we ride it for two months in the middle of a pandemic. Like, to the point that some of my European friends thought that perhaps the US government was going to collapse, which was ridiculous, but nonetheless, that's what they were seeing. Like it was just like, it was like. It was like, it was like, it was just like. And now it's like did that even happen?

Speaker 2: 1:35:23

Right. Yeah, it's like, what do we have to show for it? Yeah, I mean, I agree Like. One thing I've always thought was an awful argument in favor of DEI, specifically at the corporate level, is when people make the argument that diversity is good for business, which I always was like. Well, a corollary of that is that if business is not doing well, it's gonna be really easy for them To cut it and say that we don't need to focus on this right now because it's not critical, which is exactly what happens. All these corporations, the minute that profits look like they might be in question, that's usually the first thing that goes. Now, one thing I have seen the corporate space that, because I have quite a few friends who work in corporate spaces, especially like corporate DEI and that kind of realm is.

Speaker 2: 1:36:12

Now people are complaining because the CEO we are really I mean, the bar isn't held at this point but people are complaining because DEI execs. There's a gap between the number of black DEI execs and white DEI execs. So I saw a stat that was saying that only 3% of top-ranking DEI officials are black, whereas 49% of them are white and probably more than that 60 something were white, maybe 12 or 30% were Asian and 10 or 12% were Latine, whatever. So people were saying now part of the reason that diversity isn't working is because the people who are at the top are not reflective of the general population. I'm like, well, they're never gonna be reflective of the general population because the racial breakdown, I mean, it's still also a class thing, it's still a class thing. So it's still a class thing. And so I think that's why I'm saying that it's important for the people who are at the top to become CEO, top exec and I don't know, in certain whatever corporation, you still have to have a certain amount of credentials and a certain amount of education and so forth. And so again, if you don't even deal with the political, economic issue.

Speaker 2: 1:37:38

If you care about the lack of corporate diversity, I think that because there are enough black people who, let's say, or love people who know, who have the frames to make grievance claims, I think it's never gonna fall fully off the agenda, but I do think that you will see. I think you will see corporations ultimately still like pulling back from it, but in some ways that is kind of so. I didn't I don't know if you ever you listened to the dig or if you listened to the dig podcast, but I did a interview pretty much talking about the paper that we were discussing earlier, where, even if there is no like systemic change, like there still would be somebody or some people who can take those grievances to the bank, and so I think you'll still see some of that. Like the Academy is weird because I think it depends on how you are in the Academy. Like most public institutions are really struggling right now, and so I don't think that people are as focused on that. I think it's your IV IV pluses, or even like prestigious state schools. I think it'll still be kind of the same thing.

Speaker 2: 1:38:49

But I think one thing also we can't like neglect is how much the, even though obviously Hollywood has had its thing with the strikes and whatnot, that language is still so dominant in so much of the thing, even like shows, that I wouldn't expect to see like the diversity stuff creep up.

Speaker 2: 1:39:10

It still does, and so I feel like that does a lot of work in keeping that discourse kind of percolating right beneath the surface if it may not, you know, be the top thing at the moment, and so that's something else that I think probably is going to be at play too. And even with like, I used to be a big like awards person and then I like woke up one day and I was like why do I care so much about the Oscars? Like this shit has no significance or anything whatsoever, but anytime there's, like you know, all the lead actors are white, that turns into like an Oscar, so white thing. And then in sports, you see, it's just. I feel like there is enough of a enough among, like the cultural apparatus to keep the, I think, relevant, but I think the broader economy is going to kind of suppress the relevance, at least for right now, but I don't think it's going to be fully extinguished. Interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:40:02

Yeah, I mean I want people to understand in some ways. I don't even think it's like regressive or anything, I just think it's kind of epiphenomenal. It's like like, yeah, it's probably good that there's more diversity on television, but does it change anything? I'm just going to point to that black poverty rate.

Speaker 2: 1:40:25

But I think, like I keep trying to, I can't discern whether or not people legitimately think that it does.

Speaker 2: 1:40:33

Again, I'm like you know obviously like I don't want every, I don't want to turn on the TV and all I see is white people. Like I'm sure, like I'm I'm glad that we are starting to in some ways reflect the way that the broader population looks. Yeah, I will apply that until the cars come home. I'm going to talk to people and Like, even when, like I'm giving an example, like when Angela Bassett didn't win the Oscar although she had seemingly been the front runner for most of the war season, and I remember being like I already know I'm gonna wake up to a flood of think pieces talking about how she losing this Oscar is, and lo and behold, like somebody tried to connect it to slavery and I'm just like that.

Speaker 2: 1:41:17

But I think people legitimately feel that way and I think some people are like cynically exploiting this because it's a way for them to. So I try to be more optimistic and hope that people mean well and just don't know, as opposed to like cynically, like using this for their own gain. But it's really hard for me to discern sometimes.

Speaker 1: 1:41:38

Cultural argumentum ad slaverym is gonna replace argumentum ad hitrallium as one of the most annoying tendencies on the internet. Like yeah, it's like that is literally Hitler, that is literally slavery. Yeah, I mean, I even kind of get annoyed when Marxists talk about wage slavery. To be honest, that which kind of we like? Yeah, I mean I get our point there, but maybe let's not do that. Like like so, angela Bassett, okay, yeah. Yeah, I, yeah. I don't know what to say about that I mean it's. Yeah, I mean I liked a woman King too.

Speaker 2: 1:42:33

Yeah, but that was by Ella Davis, by Ella.

Speaker 1: 1:42:35

Davis Fuck, now it sounds totally racist. What was the Angela Bassett movie she?

Speaker 2: 1:42:41

was in Black Panther, black Panther, black Panther 2.

Speaker 1: 1:42:44

Yeah, I know she's in Black Panther 2, but I was like that was up for an Oscar.

Speaker 2: 1:42:48

Yeah, she got an Oscar nomination. She was like the first Marvel, first person from a Marvel movie to get nominated for an Oscar. And what I kept saying was the Academy is like notorious about how much they hate comic people movies. Like if Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies couldn't get an Oscar nomination, why do we think she was gonna win an Oscar for Black Panther? But yeah, but what?

Speaker 2: 1:43:09

she did, I just yeah, I just assumed she was a Black Panther. There was a direct through line between her not winning the Oscar and then it was doubly problematic for some people because she lost Jamie Lee Curtis and they're the exact same age. So of course I've saw think pieces that said, oh well, this is further evidence of like white privilege, because Jamie Lee Curtis, as like a white woman, has the privilege of winning an award that Angela Bassett should have won. But I just go to show how, like since slavery, like Black women have always had things like taken from them and I'm just like this is a reach, this is a reach.

Speaker 1: 1:43:49

Oh wow, my assumption that the bias against comic book movies was so thorough that, like I figured, angela Bassett had to be another character and woman that I just didn't remember.

Speaker 2: 1:44:08

Like he fled, or won the Oscars because he died Like he did not die, he would not have won that award.

Speaker 1: 1:44:14

Absolutely. I mean like oh man, that's funny.

Speaker 2: 1:44:26

Yeah, I think DI is, let's say, on life support. Maybe not quite that bad, it's on the downturn but it's not out yet, so I think it's gonna still be lurking in the shadows.

Speaker 1: 1:44:42

Yeah, I think that's. It's gonna be interesting to see what happens now that a lot of those COVID or subsidies that were supporting things like childcare go up. For two reasons. One I remember reading something some liberal was bemoaning different identity here but like why has the percentage of women in the workforce like not continually raised? I wonder, and I'm like, well, I can answer this question for you in 35 seconds.

Speaker 1: 1:45:19

Women often have children and if you are a single mom, or even a mom in a family of where you have a stay at home partner or, excuse me, or a partner at all who is not a stay at home partner, you are probably looking to reduce your childcare cost, because even when you had the subsidies from the federal government back during, lowering the price a little bit, it was still like $1,000 a month in most markets per one child for childcare. I don't get two children and you're already out of the making. Anything profitable from working might as well be a stay at home parent until your kids are old enough to go to public school, if they still exist by that time, anyway. So I just remember that hitting me and then I was like. My next thought was I wonder how this is going to affect, like Black and Latin community, because there are a whole lot of people employed in that sector. So I was just like huh, I wonder if this is about to be another. I'm not sure it's going to lead to unemployment because, like fuck, we don't have enough people to do anything now, but it does seem like it's going to create bigger gaps and increase costs, because it just seems like it might be a cost spiral and that might, over time, be quite bad. I don't know.

Speaker 1: 1:46:53

And so that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about, about what's going to affect a lot of people in the African-American economy as all these COVID era subsidies are over, and where is that money going to come from? And the other thing is tied into that and tied into indebtedness, and I know this does play into some unfortunate stereotypes that we should push against, but it is still statistically true that there are working single mothers are a slightly larger percentage of the black population than a lot of other populations. How is this going to affect them when there's so much more childcare costs and we don't seem to be going back to the last key kid era of my youth? So I don't know, I really don't know.

Speaker 1: 1:47:49

I think the obvious thing that we can see is it's going to be kind of bad, but I don't know that we know what all the effects are. Thank you so much. It's really nice to kind of tie these issues of race and class back together so people can try and do what intersectionality promised to do but somehow never actually does, which is like weigh them together. I know there are people who do add class to their intersexual matriarchs, but they usually do so.

Speaker 2: 1:48:25

I'm like really they treat classes in identity, which is weird to me oh because they're all identity.

Speaker 1: 1:48:32

That's a whole different. The month that I'm releasing this is going to be the month of November, and that is the month that I am doing a bunch of stuff in memorial for the vampire cast piece, which I helped publish a decade ago, but also kind of for me to wrestle with the death of Mark Fisher and I might piss some people off in it. By the time that this comes out I'll know if I have, but one of the things that I struggle with with Fisher is actually his response to the identity problem was also deposit class as an identity and not as something that you do and for reasons that make sense. It has to do with cultural habitats and the way that cultural habitats even affects your relationship to depression.

Speaker 1: 1:49:24

This is all of Mark's whole project in a lot of ways, but in a way that, when we talk about this stuff in political, economic terms, really doesn't help, and I think there's a whole lot of the response to identity politics that is rightly class driven. That ends up, however, taking class and turning it into an identity and not a role of which you are inhabiting at a given time. And, like I said, I don't want people to not think that. We both know habitats does matter, but you and I aren't blue collar anymore if we ever were. Like it's just true. Just because I grew up the son of a mechanic and a waitress turned nurse does not mean that I am still a blue collar worker.

Speaker 2: 1:50:16

Yeah. So I'll just say one thing. I know we're kind of going along, but there's a really good piece by his sociologist named Rogers Rubecker, and he has an article. Well, he has a broader book that's like a collection of articles called I think it's called Ethnicity Without Groups, but he has one article in that book called Race as Cognition and I think probably be applied to class too, and what he argues is that we need to stop thinking about race as an identity and rather think about it as a way that people cognitively understand the spaces that they inhabit, and that can be done through other social networks that they're embedded in.

Speaker 2: 1:51:01

But part of the reason we should do that, as opposed to thinking about this as an identity, because that identity tends to run into the same problems of verification and all those other things, and so I find that a useful way to think about it, like race as cognition, and I think that can probably be applied to class too. It's a way of like orienting your mind to think about your own position as somebody who is a laborer, but that doesn't mean you have to. To me, like the whole identity framework tends to lead to partisanship, which once you get to partisanship, it's almost impossible to have any type of coherent set of politics, and so I think that's the way we should be going, versus the identity.

Speaker 1: 1:51:47

I'm going to not go into the long tirade I have as of the way that I think partisanship today is not about actual politics.

Speaker 1: 1:51:59

It's about affinity groups, which itself is an extension of informal kinship relations that are nearly semi-conscious level. And because you want to get into deep tier of barn stuff, that's the barn stuff where I start talking about stuff that Marx doesn't talk about, like why how we address people and how we think about that cognitively, both as class solidarity. But one of the reasons why I oppose like Robin D'Angelo stuff so incredibly much is not because I think we should be race blind, but there is a way in which I should not approach people of color as something that is inherently that I'm going to be inherently antagonistic around because then I'm going to exclude them and it's actually going to make it harder to get them into affinity groups where they, like in our current society as it's currently structured, could possibly benefit. And so to me it actually has a perverse incentive to that, because it just doesn't admit how much these informal networks drive the way we move within a workplace, within the class, and we get advantages within the class, not between them. And like shutting people out of that racially is a disaster for bridging that, except through weird state interventions and top-down stuff which breeds resentment and furthers the cycle, and that's something that I think a lot about, and so thank you for bringing that up, because that's a good point to end on.

Speaker 1: 1:53:44

Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find your stuff, jared?

Speaker 2: 1:53:48

Yeah, so if you are still in the hill hole that is Twitter, you can find me there, but I'm currently working on my book project. It's not out yet. Fingers crossed it will be fairly. I don't know how soon. It is soon, but I have some articles. If you go on my website it's just, I think, jaredkclementsweeblycom I have a link to the article that we talked about earlier, which is called From Freedom Now the Black Lives Matter, retrieving King and Randolph to Theorize White Anti-Racism. So obviously I'm engaging a lot of MLK and A Philip Randolphs understanding of anti-racism. They were thinking about it compared to now. So, yeah, look out there. I published on different outlibrations and so you can just Google me.

Speaker 1: 1:54:34

You'll find me All right yeah, all right, thank you very good. Yeah, thank you again and those. I will link your page in the show notes and we are