American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I’ve dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax perhaps and standards too slack, because Johnny and Janey often couldn’t or wouldn’t read a book, though they sure could text, tweet, take selfies, and make videos. Oh, wait a sec, that’s not what you meant by “soft,” is it? You meant soft as in “soft target” in the context of mass school shootings, the most recent being in Uvalde,… Read more
A layperson’s overview of pain channels and how painkillers interefere with them.
Former Harvard professor says Trump has the morality of a serial killer — but that doesn’t render him insane
It’s a paradox worthy of Joseph Heller’s classic 1961 novel, Catch-22. Donald Trump’s deeply problematic state of mind made him unfit to be president in 2017. He got elected anyway, and now that same mental impairment, several legal experts say, may disqualify him from being held accountable for the crimes he committed in the Oval Office.
The brazenness of Trump’s insistence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he won the 2020 election is a continuing theme for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, which held its fourth public hearing on Tuesday. “The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on this body politic,” said Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California. True enough.
But what if Trump believes his election lies? Writing in Politico, Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, says that Bill Barr’s statement to the January 6 committee that Trump was “detached from reality” about the election “might be his best defense against a possible criminal prosecution” for conspiring to overturn it. “The key,” Daniel L. Zelenko, another former federal prosecutor, told The New York Times, “is having contemporaneous evidence that he was saying that he knew the election was not stolen but tried to stay in power anyway.” Daniel Richman, a third former federal prosecutor and a professor of law at Columbia, writes in Lawfare: “Delusional pigheadedness is indeed a defense.”
It seems strange that discussion of Trump’s legal exposure should focus on this obstacle, rather than on the much larger one that no president has ever been tried for crimes committed while in office. Legal objections to such prosecutions may be spurious, but that doesn’t mean Attorney General Merrick Garland relishes the prospect of a prosecution that would invite constitutional challenge and rally Trump’s base to the 2024 Republican nominee—possibly Trump himself. Of all the reasons why Trump won’t likely be held legally accountable for his attempted coup, that’s the biggest.
But setting such practicalities aside, I can’t accept what Richman calls “the difficulty of a trip into the head of someone who has had a troubled relationship with expertise, precedent, and reality.” I’m not a former prosecutor, nor even a lawyer, and Richman is a very smart one. (I knew him in college. Hi, Danny!) Still, this deference strikes me as grossly misapplied to someone whose head I was forced to live inside—whose head we all were forced to live inside— for four very stressful years.
The argument against holding legally accountable a person with Trump’s feeble purchase on reality turns on the question of mens rea, or “guilty mind.” Does Trump believe his own lies? If he does, he lacks mens rea. To nail Trump, you need to prove that he didn’t really think he won the election or that he didn’t really think saying, for instance, “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” as we learned Tuesday he said to a Georgia elections investigator named Frances Watson—whom he never should have been speaking to in the first place—constituted a directive to commit voter fraud. I’m not yet prepared to believe no evidence exists that Trump acknowledged privately that he did lose the election, because Trump is no paragon of consistency. He uses words not to convey truth but to make things happen, and sometimes what he wants to happen is that this or that reasonable-seeming person be mollified with a reasonable-sounding remark. (This is something I learned about Trump—perhaps you did, too— while we lived inside that head of his.) Maybe Trump made one such mollifying remark to some reasonable-seeming person from whom we haven’t yet heard.
But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Trump really does lack mens rea. He seems these days to be working overtime to demonstrate he does. That means, among other things, that Trump’s Cabinet ought to have invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office. Early in the administration, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said he thought Trump was suffering from early stage dementia, according to Ira Rosen, a former producer for 60 Minutes, and tried to enlist Republican donor Robert Mercer to urge the removal process along. Like later internal discussions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, this one went nowhere. Two efforts to impeach Trump also failed, even though Congress needn’t consider a president’s state of mind to remove them from office.
In both instances, the problem was that Trump’s mens rea deficit was contagious. First congressional Republicans caught it, including Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, who previously had denounced Trump as “a pathological liar” (Cruz), whom “we should have basically kicked … out of the party” (Graham). Next came Trump voters, who in 2016 harbored few illusions about whether their man was “honest and trustworthy” (more than 20 percent conceded he was not). Over time, Trump supporters adopted a more favorable view. Despite the ample opportunities his presidency gave them to learn how very dishonest he really was, by 2020 only 14 percent of Trump voters conceded that Trump was not “honest and trustworthy.” Does Trump say Biden was not elected president legitimately? Then 70 percent of Republican voters agree. An entire political party accepts Trump’s alternative reality. If Trump is delusional, then so are all those voters. You can’t diagnose all of them. We don’t have enough Thorazine!
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine applying mens rea to the bloodiest tyrants of modern history. Did they possess guilty minds? Not so’s you could tell. It wouldn’t be very difficult for a defense lawyer to demonstrate that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, who between them murdered about 65 million people, suffered from severe mental illness that prevented them from feeling guilt about their butchery. Now imagine going back in time and putting these three in the dock at Nuremberg or the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Would any such proceeding even consider that delusional pigheadedness shields them from the consequences of their crimes? “When Herr Hitler said the Jews were ‘a race-tuberculosis of the peoples’ and must therefore be eliminated, he was stating his sincere, albeit erroneous, opinion.” Merely imagining such talk feels obscene.
Granted, Trump was not a mass murderer; he merely tried and failed to pull off a coup d’état. That makes him much less of a problem than the twentieth century’s big three monsters. (I’ve long been persuaded by arguments that the head of state whose character mostresembledthat of Trump was Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.) But Trump’s small stature in the annals of tyranny also makes him, may it please the court, less obviously deranged for the purposes of our proceeding.
Trump has, perhaps, an innate ability, derived from extreme narcissism, to believe anything he wants to believe. But how different, really, does that make him from many other successful people in business? Does mens rea render America’s entire executive class unprosecutable? If so, we’ve got a bigger problem than I thought.
Trump may be a sociopath, but I can name several others in the upper reaches of corporate America who share his belief in the malleability of truth. So, probably, can you. With enough lawyers, Trump believes, you can create whatever reality you want. This, I’ve often been told, is an approach that’s widely shared within the upper reaches of the real estate industry. Trump is not impaired. He’s just a rich asshole who believes what he wants because he can. For heaven’s sake, don’t make that a reason not to put him on trial.
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As more truths about Donald Trump and his attempted coup come out, I fear there will be more irrational anger and threats from people who cannot bear the truth.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
As the January 6 hearings restarted today after the long weekend, I was thinking about the weird, psychotic fear that has overtaken millions of Americans. I include in those millions people who are near and dear to me, friends I have known for years who now seem to speak a different language, a kind of Fox-infused, Gish Galloping, “what-about” patois that makes no sense even if you slow it down or add punctuation.
Such conversations are just part of life in divided America now. We live in a democracy, and there’s no law (nor should there be) against the willing suffocation of one’s own brain cells with television and the internet. But living in an alternate reality is unhealthy—and dangerous, as I realized yet again while watching the January 6 committee hearings and listening to the stories of Republicans, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describing the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution.
And the threats don’t stop with political figures; families are now in the crosshairs. Representative Adam Kinzinger, for example, tweeted Monday about a letter he received in which the writer threatened not only to kill him, but to kill his wife and infant son.
There have always been unstable people in America, and they have always done frightening things. But there seem to be a lot more of them now. Some of them are genuinely dangerous, but many more are just rage-drunk nihilists who will threaten any public figures targeted by their preferred television hosts or websites, regardless of party or policy.
The more I think about it—and I spent years researching such problems while writing a book about democracy—the more I think that such people are less angry than they are terrified.
Many of you will respond: Of course they’re terrified. They’re scared of demographic change, of cultural shifts, of being looked down upon for being older and uneducated in an increasingly young and educated world.
All true. But I think there’s more to it.
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.
These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice.
This therapy works for as long as the patient is glued to the television or computer screen. The moment someone like Bowers or Kinzinger or Liz Cheney appears and attacks the lie, the anxiety and embarrassment rise like reflux in the throat, and it must be stopped, even if it means threatening to kill the messenger.
No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.
In the film adaptation of the Cold War epic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré’s fictional British intelligence officer George Smiley describes his opposite number, the Soviet spymaster Karla. Smiley knows Karla can be beaten, he says, because Karla “is a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
What this means, I regret to say, is that there will be more threats, and more violence, because there will be more truth. It’s going to be a long summer.
In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers—in the halcyon days when we thought it was just for sharing pictures of the grandkids and ruining marriages.
That’s it for today. If you’re a fan of John le Carré (who died in 2020) or are new to his canon, I have a recommendation for you: Do not start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Instead, read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold from 1963, and then read his 1990 The Secret Pilgrim, which was a kind of valedictory farewell from Smiley as he recounts his entire career to a group of young spies in training. Perfect summer books, both of them.
P.S.: If you’ve seen an Atlantic headline about “the heroism of Biden’s bike fall” circulating on social media, it’s not real. It seems to be a parody of this edition of The Atlantic Daily—and if so, it’s a pretty good one—but The Atlantic did not actually publish this.
— Tom
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
Until a few decades ago, most Democrats did not hate Republicans, and most Republicans did not hate Democrats. Very few Americans thought the policies of the other side were a threat to the country or worried about their child marrying a spouse who belonged to a different political party.
All of that has changed. A 2016 survey found that 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans would now balk at their child’s marrying a supporter of a different political party. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the Pew Research Center reported that roughly nine out of 10 supporters of Joe Biden and of Donald Trump alike were convinced that a victory by their opponent would cause “lasting harm” to the United States.
As someone who lived in many countries—including Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom—before coming to the United States, I have long had the sense that American levels of partisan animosity were exceptionally high. Although I’d seen animosity between left and right in other nations, their hatred never felt so personal or intense as in the U.S.
A study just published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace confirms that impression. Drawing on the Variety of Democracies (V-Dem) data set,published by an independent research institute in Sweden that covers 202 countries and goes back more than two centuries, its authors assess to what degree each country suffers from “pernicious” levels of partisan polarization. Do their citizens have such hostile views of opponents that they’re willing to act in ways that put democracy itself at risk?
The authors’ conclusion is startling: No established democracy in recent history has been as deeply polarized as the U.S. “For the United States,” Jennifer McCoy, the lead author of the study and a political-science professor at Georgia State University, told me in an interview, “I am very pessimistic.”
On virtually every continent, supporters of rival political camps are more likely to interact in hostile ways than they did a few decades ago. According to the Carnegie study, “us versus them polarization” has been increasing since 2005. McCoy and her colleagues don’t try to explain the causes, though the rise of social media is obviously a contributing factor.
As near-universal as political polarization has become, it is more pronounced in some places than in others. On a five-point scale, with 0 indicating a country with very little partisan polarization and 4 indicating a country with extreme polarization, both the U.S. and the rest of the world, on average, displayed only a modest degree of polarization at the turn of the millennium: They each scored about a 2.0. By 2020, the world average had increased significantly, to a score of about 2.4. But in the United States, polarization accelerated much more sharply, growing to a score of 3.8.
Among countries whose political institutions have been relatively stable, the pace and extent of American polarization is an eye-popping outlier. “Very few countries classified as full liberal democracies have ever reached pernicious levels,” the study’s authors write. “The United States stands out today as the only wealthy Western democracy with persistent levels of pernicious polarization.” When I spoke by phone with McCoy, she was even more categorical: “The situation of the United States is unique.”
To live in a country where political disagreements turn into personal vendettas is no fun, but a growing body of research reveals more systemic effects. Pernicious polarization makes good-faith efforts to tackle social problems such as public-health crises harder and bad-faith efforts to turn them into political gain easier. At worst, an erosion of trust in democratic norms and political institutions can end up as political violence and civil war.
The fundamental premise of democracy is that citizens agree to be ruled by whoever wins an election. But if many citizens come to believe that letting the other side rule poses a threat to their well-being, even their lives, they may no longer be willing to accept the outcome of an election they lose. This makes it easier for demagogues to attract fervent supporters, and even to turn them against a country’s political institutions. The January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol is just such a symptom of the malaise.
We might hope that the history of other nations would offer clues to how the U.S. could get its polarization under control. The past century has yielded notable cases of “depolarization,” from Italy in the 1980s to Rwanda in the early 2000s. In Italy, escalating political violence from both the far left and the far right had threatened to tear the country apart, but leaders from rival political parties eventually united against terrorism, and that enabled the country to weather the crisis. In 1990s Rwanda, Hutus murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in an orgy of genocidal violence, yet the country has achieved a modicum of national reconciliation and managed to keep the peace (though at the price of Paul Kagame’s autocratic leadership). Do examples like these contain any useful lessons for the U.S.?
Unfortunately, the data in the Carnegie study do not offer much cause for optimism. About half of the time a country experienced serious polarization since 1900, mutual distrust and hatred turned into a permanent condition. Although political tensions waxed and waned, these countries never fell below the level of pernicious polarization for any extended period. And many countries never recovered. Once pernicious polarization has set in, it stays.
That leaves the other half of cases. Those don’t offer much hope, either. Many of the supposed success stories saw either a relapse into dangerous levels of polarization or merely a moderate degree of depolarization. And when a country did manage to depolarize in a lasting way, a major political disaster seemed needed to force it: a civil war, a cruel dictatorship, or a struggle for independence. Only after overcoming such dire turmoil did these countries escape their vicious cycles. “The prevalence of systemic shocks in bringing about depolarization,” the study’s authors note, “was especially striking.”
That no such systemic shock has struck the U.S. in modern history would seem to bode ill for American prospects of depolarization. But do things really have to fall apart before we can put them back together?
The state of America’s union is especially fractious, true, but our predicament may not be quite as dire as it seems. The limitations of the Carnegie study itself illustrate why we should take predictions of doom with a grain of salt.
The survey’s polarization data are ambitious in scope—aggregating 120 years of historical information about a large number of countries—but the methodology behind them is more modest. The V-Dem data set used in the Carnegie study relies on asking a group of from five to seven country experts a single question about any given nation: “To what extent is society divided into mutually antagonistic camps in which political differences affect social relationships beyond political discussions?” If the experts answer that this is the case to a “noticeable extent,” with supporters of opposing camps “more likely to interact in a hostile than friendly manner,” this counts as a 3, on a scale of 0 to 4. That score is enough to qualify as “pernicious polarization.” What’s more, this assessment is highly retrospective: How polarized America was in, say, 1935, or in 1968, or in 1999 is a judgment made by a handful of social scientists only recently. Quantifying polarization like this is susceptible to distortion in two ways: presentism and provincialism.
Experts evaluating how polarized America has been in the past century might remember every detail of a shouting match with a Trumpy uncle at last year’s Thanksgiving, but they cannot possibly have such a visceral feel for political divisions in, say, the 1910s, however much they’ve read about the period. That risks presentism. With their personal experience of partisan conflict and the shrill tone on social media top of mind, they may overestimate how much partisan hatred there is today and underestimate how much partisan hatred there was in the past.
“Expert surveys are subjective,” McCoy admitted when I put this concern to her. “There is no way of getting around that.”
What’s more, these experts will surely have different cultural assumptions about what constitutes a hostile political interaction. This—the danger of provincialism—makes comparisons among countries more difficult. In America, what is salient is how much nastier and more aggressive political discourse has become in recent decades. But in a society that recently experienced civil war, what may be more salient is that people are now willing to disagree about politics without killing one another. That perceptual gap between what counts here and what counts there could lead experts to assess a comparatively peaceful country that has become more sharply divided, like the U.S., as more polarized than a war-ravaged country that is somewhat less divided than it used to be.
In many of the countries that have experienced pernicious polarization, partisan political identity aligns almost perfectly with visible markers of ethnic or religious identity. In Lebanon and Kenya, for example, it is enough to see or hear a person’s name to know which way they’re likely to vote. When polarization spikes in these places, supporters and opponents of a political candidate don’t just yell at each other; they withdraw from all social cooperation, and their animosity grows vengeful and deadly.
“If you work for the Croat Catholic fire department,” Eboo Patel, a prominent interfaith leader, writes about Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, “you don’t respond to the burning buildings of Bosnian Muslims, even if you happen to be closer. And if you work for the Bosnian Muslim fire department, you let the flames engulf Croat Catholic homes.”
America’s polarization clearly differs from the Bosnian example—which experts actually scored as significantly lower than the United States’ (at 3.2 out of 4)—in two crucial ways. First, the overlap between partisan polarization and divisions of race, class, or religion is at best imperfect in the U.S. Although demographic patterns do offer clues to the likelihood of people’s support for Democrats or Republicans, a significant number of Latino Americans vote for the Republican Party and a lot of white Americans vote for the Democratic Party. Second, in many spheres of American life—including the workplace and Little League games—people put aside political differences or may not even be aware of them. And the local fire department does not ask for your voter registration before deciding whether to put out your house fire.
Perhaps America is not so much uniquely polarized as polarized in a unique way. Fifty years ago, out-group hatred in the United States primarily involved race and religion: Protestants against Catholics, Christians against Jews, and, of course, white people against Black people. Most Americans did not care whether their children married someone from a different political party, but they were horrified to learn that their child was planning to “marry out.”
Today, the number of Americans who oppose interracial marriage has fallen from well over nine in 10 in 1960 to far less than one in 10. And as the rapid increase in the number of interracial babies shows, this is not just a matter of people’s telling pollsters what they want to hear. In contrast to the dynamic in other deeply polarized societies, the division in America between opposing political camps revolves less around demographics and more around ideology.
A host of recent social-science studies backs this up. In one experiment, a sample of Americans was asked to award scholarships to fictitious high-school students. Presented with a candidate’s résumé suggesting that the applicant was of a different racial group from theirs, the subjects engaged in surprisingly little discrimination. (In fact, Americans of European descent tended to favor, not discriminate against, African American candidates.) But presented with a résumé that suggested the applicant had a different political-party affiliation from theirs, the subjects had a strong tendency toward bias: When choosing between similarly qualified scholarship candidates, four out of five Democrats and Republicans favored an applicant who belonged to the same political party.
Even as American politics got nastier in recent years, the overlap between ethnic identity and partisan polarization has actually continued to weaken. Trump was competitive in the 2020 election in part because he significantly increased his 2016 share of the vote among Black, Asian-American, and especially Latino voters. And Biden won appreciably more white voters than Hillary Clinton did. In other words, a voter’s racial identity was much less predictive of voting behavior in 2020 than it was in 2016.
Jennifer McCoy affirmed this, when I asked her about the difference between the United States and other perniciously polarized democracies: “Unlike many other polarized democracies, we are not a tribal country based on ethnicity … The key identity is party, not race or religion.”
America’s uniqueness could allow a more hopeful story than the headline findings of the Carnegie report might suggest. If polarization is mainly a matter of partisan political identities, the problem may be easier to solve than divisions based on ethnic or religious sectarianism.
One approach that could alleviate polarization in the U.S. is institutional reform. Right now, many congressional districts are gerrymandered, shielding incumbents from competitive primaries while making them hostage to the extremist portion of their base. Some states have attenuated this problem by taking districting out of party control. But other measures, such as adopting the single transferable vote or creating multimember districts, could also shift political incentives away from polarization.
California has already adopted a small-seeming—and thus realistic—innovation. In so-called jungle primaries, candidates from all parties compete in the election’s first round; then the top two finishers face off in the second-round general election. As a result, moderates with cross-party appeal get a fighting chance at being elected. If this can work in deep-blue states like California, it can work in deep-red states like Alabama.
Soothsayers of doom are in demand for a reason. American partisan polarization has, without a doubt, reached a perilous level. But America’s comparative competence at managing its ethnic and religious diversity, which has so far ensured that partisan political identities do not neatly map onto demographic ones, could be a saving grace.
We urgently need visionary leaders and institutional reforms that can lower the stakes of political competition. Imagining what a depolarization of American politics would look like is not too difficult. The only problem is that America’s political partisans may already hate one another too much to take the steps necessary to avoid catastrophe.
Physician Haider Warraich explores the science and history of pain in new book “Song of Our Scars”
“The fact that millions of people share…so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.” – Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955. Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst who escaped Nazi Germany to live in the U.S., More
“There are times when I want to scream out: “F*** this entire indifferent, hypocritical and violent world!’” So writes philosopher George Yancy in a recent piece for Truthout entitled “If the State of the World Makes You Want to Scream, You’re Not Alone.” From endless militarism and war profiteering to climate chaos and the reactionary right’s attacks on democracy and civil rights, the most natural response to the compounding crises we face today is to be filled with rage. In this installment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Yancy about the necessity of feeling the fullness of that rage—not suppressing it with theoretical abstraction or false calls for civility—and then channeling that rage into collective action.
Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday and Thursday on TRNN.
Pre-Production/Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Stephen Frank
TRANSCRIPT
Marc Steiner:“Fuck this entire indifferent, hypocritical, and violent world!” That’s how philosopher George Yancy opens his article in Truthout. Let me just say he has stars instead of the word. The article’s called “If the State of the World Makes You Want to Scream, You’re Not Alone.” And I think that’s a sentiment many of us feel, given what we face with the rise of the right wing, the war in Ukraine, the ineptness of Democrats here in the United States to resist or blunt the right, to witnessing the pervasive racism that plagues this nation and the world. I’m Marc Steiner, welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. It’s good to have you all with us.
Dr. Yancy’s article in Truthout, “If the State of the World Makes You Want to Scream, You’re Not Alone,” and others like “Anti-Black Racism is Global. So Must be the Movement to End it.” Are really connected. George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College, he’s the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, a White!; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America, and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher. And welcome back, George, it’s been a while since we’ve talked and it’s good to have you on the air with us again.
George Yancy: Yes, it has. I appreciate it very much.
Marc Steiner: You know, I was thinking about the title of the article. This is often a sentiment that creeps into my brain and soul. It feels as if sometimes the forces of history and life are just a raid against us. I’d like to hear how you kind of came to the need to write this article and what it just says about the state we’re in.
George Yancy: Yeah, sure. It took me a while, actually, to write that piece. It had what was going on in Ukraine, in fact, even the death of – The killing, I should say, of George Floyd, having that knee on his neck for over nine minutes. COVID-19, all of that had sort of constituted a kind of confluence. And so there was this immediate influx, a kind of gestalt-like, overwhelming feeling of rage. And by the time I decided to read a little more of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who talks about the prophet’s word as a scream in the night, and the idea that what we have failed to do is to be outraged by the existential gravity of the problems that we face. I think then I could actually articulate the piece.
And the reason that I started out with the expletives, the F-word there, is because it, for me, embodied that sense of heaviness, that sense of dread and catastrophe that was hard to find a proper grammar. So I felt that that expletive would do it for me. And the idea of screaming suggests the sense in which we are outraged, the sense in which we can’t even clearly and with ease communicate these issues, the idea of abstract thought or abstract thinking or abstract discourse is always already too late. There is the emotive and affective dimension, because of the existential hell that we find ourselves in, such that perhaps what we need to do is scream. So what it was, it was a delay. It was a delay of my waiting and waiting, and yet feeling these incredible emotions, this sense of crying, this sense of lamentation. And I felt that I needed to say something, and that’s how it poured out of me.
Marc Steiner: And so you write about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his daughter Susannah said that he couldn’t pray because, “Whenever I open the prayer book, I see before me images of children burning from napalm.” So as I read that and thought about the title of what you wrote and thought about the despair people feel, what do you think has changed? In the sense that when Heschel said that, it wasn’t like, I can’t handle this anymore, I got to go, I can’t even look at it anymore. His response was, I may not be able to pray, but I’m going to act, whether it was against the war or whether it was walking with Martin Luther King, and he, to change the world, for tikkun olam, to repair the world. Has something changed?
George Yancy: I don’t think so, actually. I mean, Heschel was writing at a time when, of course, he’s taking on the kind of white supremacy that Martin Luther King is fighting against. So he’s right there on the forefront, thinking about and feeling with Martin Luther King, and of course against the war as well, which of course, Martin Luther King got into trouble for doing so. In fact, Martin Luther King was very unpopular during that period because there were individuals who said, even Black folk who said, look, arguing, trying to consolidate civil rights is one thing, but you now have stepped beyond, as it were, your calling, when you called into question something like the Vietnam War. And I think that sense of malaise has not changed. If anything, I’d want to say there’s a way in which the subtlety and the insidiousness, and yet at the same time the re-expression of unabashed white supremacy and war. None of those things are new to us, but there’s a level of intensity. There’s a feeling that we should have been done with this a long time ago.
So there’s this case in which there’s the recursive nature of this violence, the recursive nature of white supremacy. And I think you’re right about Heschel. I think in the end, what Heschel was saying is that what we need to do is get out and engage in a form of political praxis. But what I’m interested in is the way in which – I was going to call him Hegel for a moment – The way in which… Well, you see, because Heschel’s a brilliant philosopher.
Marc Steiner: Right? Exactly. No, I understand.
George Yancy: The way in which Heschel is saying, I can’t pray because when I open the prayerbook, I see children being bombed with napalm. That captures, for me, the weight. So that, for an example, when I’m teaching, when I’m teaching a text, my question is, how do we go on? How do we read? How do we engage in formal academia with all of its abstraction and preoccupation with abstraction and with theory – By the way, which theory comes from the term theōros, which means spectator – How do we continue to be spectators, and not cultivate this sense of outrage, the sense that we can’t read the prayer book. The Bible’s not sufficient. The Quran is not sufficient. That we can’t remain in the mosques, we can’t remain in the temples. And there’s something about that. It says that, and for Heschel, as with King, I would argue that both of them see that the importance of transforming society is a cooperative enterprise with a divide. I mean, in essence, that’s kind of what they’re arguing.
It’s not human beings who will bring about the transformation of society without being in cooperation with a divine being, and it’s not a divine being that will, alone, do this. So it’s a joint process. It’s a co-creative process. But again, what Heschel does, there’s this kind of existentialist dimension to Heschel, where he places so much weight on us. Where if, for an example, he says, all of us are responsible, or few of us are guilty, but all of us are responsible. So I wanted to capture in that piece, let’s call it the use of the F-word piece. I wanted to capture that sense in which we all have to rise to the occasion, to really articulate and to define what it means to be really responsible. For an example, Susan Sontag says when we’re looking at images, for an example, although she’s not alive, she would say, when we look at images from Ukraine, there’s a way in which we can look at those images and we can show sympathy. But sympathy itself tricks us into assuming that we’re innocent, that somehow we are detached.
We are disarticulated from the violence that’s happening in Ukraine, when in fact we’re not. In fact, sympathy, counterintuitively, can render us impotent, and in some sense apathetic, because what we should be focusing on is, how is it that we can make a difference? And again, that brings us back to Heschel. What he sees in the prayerbook is the horrifying, catastrophic images of children burning. What I see when I read an abstract philosophical text is George Floyd crying and screaming for his mother, calling for his mother, or I see him saying I can’t breathe. Or I think about the way in which Ukrainian women are being raped by Russian soldiers. I think about the body pieces, the way in which corpses are lying in the streets, and the streets are becoming sites of putrefaction.
And hence, back to death, the immediacy and the importance of death. I think that what Heschel’s doing, I think that what King was doing, I think that what I’m trying to do in that piece is really to raise a level, not just of critical consciousness, but to open up our hearts to, in some sense, create what I would call an un-suturing of our hearts, so that we can feel more and be motivated by the gravitas of that feeling, the feeling that we can’t go on unless there’s a radical transformation in the way in which we’ve been living.
Marc Steiner: And I wonder if, when you, and others, and many of us want to say we want to scream, given what the world is facing, something seems to me to have changed drastically over the last 50 years. Where the left has been diminished, where the right is really on the rise, where racism, even though there was this flourish of change in 1960s and ’70s, that the deeply embedded racism that we see has erupted again in response, I think, to everything that was pushed forward. It was like, if you think about the Reconstruction period here in the United States, when there was this real attempt on parts of some to build a multiracial democracy. And of course, that was an anathema to many in the South, white people in the South, and it erupted and destroyed everything that was built. The same thing, that dynamic seems to be happening again. So when I read that title, that’s where it took me politically. Why are we there, and what does that mean? How would you approach that?
George Yancy: Sure. I think that, one, I would think about Robin Kelley, the brilliant historian.
Marc Steiner: Oh yeah.
George Yancy: Who actually talks about sort of three Reconstructions, one of which, of course, happened after 1877 – Well, it actually ended in 1877. And then around the ’50s and ’60s, let’s call it the second Reconstruction. But then he talks about a third Reconstruction that’s necessary. And he sees that as having great potentiality in this moment. So he, take for an example, the argument against policing and defunding the police. He says, look, it’s not the case that we need better jails. It’s not the case that we need better prisons or better policing. He argues that we have, along with others, is that we have to do away with the logics of policing and the logics of prisons. And of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t give attention to individuals who engage in violent acts. It doesn’t mean that we throw law out of the window.
Rather, we understand the society with greater compassion, and we understand the mechanisms, the systemic mechanisms that underwrite the American polity, whether we’re talking about criminalization, questions of racism, whether we’re talking about questions of the opioid crisis. There’s a certain kind of compassion that we have failed in terms of seeing the world.
So what Robin Kelley is saying, I think, is something quite radical. He’s saying that what we’ve done is that we have allowed society to go on too long without looking at it through a critical lens that is capable of taking us to this radically new place, such that we’re able to transgress both, I think, the left and the right. The Republicans and the Democrats. That we have to really rethink the human. Rethink the anthropos, and to rethink that with a level of passion so that we can all develop a kind of common discourse to understand the ways in which all of us mutually suffer in the structures that we’ve created. So that it’s no longer zero sum logics, where some win and some game gain, which is precisely, of course, the logics that both Democrats and Republicans are playing according to. So he’s suggesting something far more radical, something far more inclusive, and yet critical.
Marc Steiner: So all the things you’ve written over the years, I’ve read a lot of what you’ve written over the years, and I think of you, in some ways, as a practical, pragmatic, applied philosopher. You think about how the world should be.
George Yancy: Yes.
Marc Steiner: So given what you just said, what form does that take? I mean, if you are… Let me come back to what I said earlier, because I think this is part of what we’re facing in the world today. Is that because of the failures – In many ways out of the West – To better people’s lives, is a rise of the right. And it’s very powerful. And the left, which for most part was born of, not just Marx, but also of humanism and more, has been diminished in many ways. And you’re seeing right now with what’s happening in Ukraine, where people with both the right and the left are split over what to do about Ukraine, what does it really mean? Should I support Russia or should I pull for Ukrainians? And you see that happening in both spectrums. So what form do you think that takes, both humanly and politically?
George Yancy: Yeah, look, I think that for me, when I think of left-like thinkers, I think of Robin Kelley, I think of the left bell hooks, I mean the late bell hooks, of course, the left bell hooks, I think of Cornel West, I think of other figures. And what I see, in their paradigmatic way of thinking about the world, is really rethinking limited ideological boundaries. So I think the right is living in a world that is upended precisely by its contradictions, precisely by the fact that its notion of what it is has been completely transformed in the light of someone like the strongman narcissist Donald Trump. So it seems to me that, for the most part, conservatives will sell their souls as long as they get more votes. And as long as they get more votes, meaning as long as there’s a populous figure who is capable of confusing the truth from lies, and lies from truth.
So I think what we’ve got is simply the investment in how to gain more power. So that’s, it seems to me, the teleological basis upon which the Republican Party moves. That’s its raison d’être. But at the same time, of course, Democrats are beholden to Wall Street. Democrats are beholden to money and to wealth. So there’s a way in which I would argue – And I don’t, by the way, I’ve never publicly referred to myself as a leftist. But how I do think about myself is in terms of this radical way of thinking about hesed, the Hebrew term hesed, which means loving kindness. And I see that working in Cornel’s work, and namely in West’s work, in Robin’s work, in bell hooks, to name three of them.
There’s a way in which they’re really thinking about how caritas, or how agape, can transform the way in which we’re thinking about, let’s say, take Ukraine. For the moment, what am I learning? I mean, all of us are learning things like what javelins are. We’re learning. I’ve had a military lesson in the last few weeks. But that’s what we’re learning about. We’re hearing, it’s important to support them militarily. And despite the fact that we don’t really hear a critical discourse about the way in which Bush Sr. said that we wouldn’t move another inch in terms of NATO vis a vis Eastern Europe. So it seems to me there are contradictions as well. But for me, I think that the real discussion is, how do we talk about what it means to show loving kindness? What does it mean to lay down the sort of geopolitical, socially constructed distinctions that we have created?
And that keeps us all imprisoned. So for me, and while this is certainly utopic, and in that entomological sense, it does not exist. But I mean, what would it look like for a politician, for an example, to build their platform on something like hesed, on loving kindness, what would that look like? What are the radical material implications of that kind of frank speech, that kind of parrhesia, that kind of courageous speech. So I’m being less political here and looking at something perhaps beyond the political. And for me, that which is beyond the political is that which holds us all together in this incredible way in which we are all haptically connected, the way in which we’re all touching, based on the fact that we’re all part of this larger ecosystem that implicates all of us. So it goes back to King’s notion of all of us being part of this larger network.
It goes back to John Dunn, the argument where, the statement that one doesn’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And this is what I wanted to communicate in this piece. I want to be able to identify not only with the Ukrainians that are being slaughtered, massacred, but how do we identify with those Russian soldiers themselves who are part of a system, a totalitarian system, where they too are forced to engage in brutal acts of murder? So it seems to me that I want to raise the question of violence, and the question of political divisiveness, and the question of air spaces – Which, again, is a bizarre notion that countries can own air spaces – And I want to liberate that discourse. I want to extricate that discourse from political ideology and talk about something like the power and radicality of love, what Heschel says when he says that, how can any of us, if we were really to take on the weight of the world’s suffering, how could any of us live in tranquility?
So there’s a way in which the left and the right bases itself upon a conception of time, as King would say, that is always waiting to happen. It is always the next thing that’s happening. And my sense is that what we need is a post-hope understanding of temporality that says that tomorrow is always too late, but today is the day that we scream. And by the way, when I say scream, I just don’t mean that sonically. I also mean that as an embodied form of resistance where we refuse to cooperate with the logics of the world, where we refuse to do politics in the way in which we’ve been doing it, where we demand more in terms of care and emphasis upon our very humanity.
Marc Steiner: So in some ways you’re saying we have to dig deeper in a different way if we’re going to address this. I’m thinking about the other article that you wrote, “Anti-Black Racism is Global. So Must be the Movement to End it.” And I want to envision that for a minute with you about what that means. And this quote you have in here, it really has stayed with me. And it is, you make this comment, “People feign a look of shock when I respond to the world that the world is like Mississippi, Mississippi just owns what it is.”
George Yancy: Mm. So is that what I said there?
Marc Steiner: Yeah. So tell me, in the face of that, in the face of the depth of racism, in the face of the depth of the kind of economic exploitation that happens, in these kinds of invasions the United States has taken part in, that Russia has taken part in across the globe. So tell me what kind of response that what you’re writing here would be, give us a sense of what that is.
George Yancy: Yeah. I think that what I’m saying is, what we have to do is, I’ll put it this way. Judith Butler says that – And it’s a fancy way, but it gets at what I’m saying – She says that we need to create an insurrection at the level of ontology itself. And ontology comes from ontos, which means the study of being. What we have to do is not to continue with the same approaches, the same logics that we’ve been approaching, whether, again, whether it’s left, whether it’s right. Whether it’s liberal, whether it’s conservative. I think that what we need to do is to rethink the very notion of, particularly the neoliberal conception of self, I think that we have to rethink the idea that autonomy, the very idea that we are separate from each other. The very idea that, again, going back to this notion of a zero sum logics, the very idea that we are these autonomous beings who live according to these artificial distinctions. I think that what we need is to place far more humanity on the fact that life, and all of us, are fundamentally precarious.
We’re fundamentally always being toward death, to use Heidegger’s term. There’s a way in which we have a very short period of time where all of us will be dead. And so there’s something about the impending doom of death, not just violent forms of death, but the fact that it’s part of our human condition. It seems to me that that ought to motivate the kinds of political discourse, if you will, that we engage in. The kinds of deflationary, I should say, political discourse that we engage in. I think that the language of hesed, I think the language of caritas, I think a figure like Heschel, who basically says, look, that we have lost this outrage, and that’s what he wants to bring back. And I’m not sure who’s outraged. It seems to me, as one Slovanian psychoanalyst and philosopher put it, she said that we would rather die than to be scared to death.
So I think that what we’ve failed to do is to be scared to death. To be scared to death, to have that push us as an impetus toward rethinking politics, toward reformulating the very discourse that we use, the very idea of thinking about approaches to ending, let’s say, the Ukraine war. I think that we need a language that attempts to transcend the old forms of balkanization that are already in place. Now, how you do that is going to be difficult because the discourse of love has very little priority, not only in the US, but in the world. So I think that what we have to do then is to cultivate a new generation of individuals who begin to create forms of alliance across those divisions, and where forms of strongmen and dictators, which is precisely what we may have in 2024 with the reelection, or so I claim, of Donald Trump.
Marc Steiner: So as a philosopher, if you were sitting with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or many of the other kinds of political, rising political figures in this country who are trying to think of a different world. And you are saying that you want to build this world of love, and you look at them in a very practical, philosophical way about how you might do that. What would you be advising them? Let’s say that all of a sudden you are in that position. What would you say?
George Yancy: Your questions are so daring. I love them. You can’t be completely abstract with you [Marc laughs], which is so important. I think part of the issue here is I’m trying to speak at a level that emphasizes my position while at the same time not having my discourse fall with any category that’s much easier to articulate. So I think that if I were speaking to her, I would say something like, what we need is we need to begin to emphasize courageous speech. So hints, parrhesia, which Foucault says that it is that very idea of bringing one’s self to the point of death, the very risk of the possibility of death. Personal death here, because of one’s own political praxis.
But I think that what’s important is for those who are more left of center to engage in a form of fearless speech, but also fearless listening. To be able to speak to those individuals who would automatically just try to erase them by a label called being leftist, which of course is a term that has been used and manipulated in such a way precisely to appeal to more white folk, I think, who are right of center. Or center, for that matter. So to use the term leftist to be Russian totalitarianism. I think that what we need is a way of introducing a radical sense to the right, to say that, look, there’s a way in which we have to come to terms with the history of this country.
I would say to her that it’s important that we open up the consciousness of these individuals such that they’re able to come to terms with the historical legacy of anti-Black racism, of the ways in which whiteness has continued to be a dominant force, to deal with issues around xenophobia, to deal with issues around a kind of political solipsism. But again, it’s hard. But I think, it seems to me, that place of embarkation has to be a place where one attempts to articulate a history that is able to be revealed to those who don’t agree with one’s own position, to see how they’re implicated in the very ideological positions that they take hold of.
So if you have politicians who have, as a backdrop, the Bible, then it seems to me that one has to engage in a form of imminent critique to emphasize that Palestinian figure known as Jesus who would argue that we have failed. We have failed precisely at the level of taking seriously who our neighbors are. I mean, how do we communicate with Putin that he is our neighbor? How do we communicate with Russians that they are our neighbors? Well, part of what we have to do is deconstruct the artificial walls that have already been put in place. What we have to do is somehow infiltrate those barriers, literally, that are blocking anything that’s contrary to the language, the lingua franca, of a party line kind of discourse. So, that kind of critical discourse is not even being communicated.
But again, I think that we need something far more humanistic that is far more global in terms of how we’re thinking about the way in which we’re all touching. And it seems to me that COVID-19 should have demonstrated that, but you don’t see that. You now see precisely a more neoliberal understanding of freedom, which says that what freedom looks like, it’s something I don’t want to do. It’s a negative freedom. I should not have to do X. It’s a kind of radical decisionism, which is really all about the self. It’s not the kind of responsible agency that, let’s say, a Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir would remind us of. There’s a kind of responsibility, a heavy weight that comes with the kind of decisions that we make, for an example, concerning wearing a mask. I mean, I saw the images of people on airplanes delightfully throwing, laughingly throwing their masks in the trash.
But it seems to me that that’s part of the problem, is that our understanding of freedom does not take into consideration the welfare of the other. But that’s precisely the basis of the US, is to precisely get us to think about ourselves in terms of atoms in the void, as neoliberal subjects, as entrepreneurs, where our happiness is really about what we do for ourselves rather than that happiness being inextricably linked, and indeed, our misery and our suffering precisely being linked to those others who suffer. So the language that I’m using, if I’m to avoid just sort of re-articulating a leftist position, or certainly not a right position, the language, it seems to me, is the language of someone… It’s a language of a kind of theology, a kind of a theology of love that is not a theological politics or political theology, which grounds itself in some perfunctory notion of God bless America, which absolutely means nothing at the end of the day, when in fact we’re prepared to leash all hell on those that we’ve already identified as our enemies.
Marc Steiner: When you look at the depth of racism in our world…
George Yancy: Yeah.
Marc Steiner: I always make this analogy, I say that antisemitism runs deep on the planet earth, and it’s probably 2000 years old. That modern anti-African racism is maybe at best 600, 700 years old, and it permeates the world and permeates human consciousness. When I look at the United States today, way beyond the US, but when I think about the United States today and the younger people in this country, people I’ve met across the globe, their mindset is changing. I think, in part, because of all the movements that have forced people to rethink what racism means and how deep it is. So take what you’ve been saying, because you write a great deal about race, obviously, and how what you’re seeing applies to that, how it applies to change that. Because that, to me is, when you joked about what I said earlier is because, when I was studying philosophy in college, I got into applied philosophy, that was just where my head was. Maybe it still is there.
George Yancy:Sure.
Marc Steiner: So the question is, let’s talk about how you talk about what you’re talking about and apply that to race and racism…
George Yancy: Sure.
Marc Steiner: And how you’ve got to deal with the depth of that. Because that is what’s rising the right, that’s what’s rising the most dangerous kind of thing that’s kind of a specter on our future, across the globe.
George Yancy: Sure. I think that, just to say something about philosophy, my entry into philosophy. There was a time when I thought about philosophy as Platonic and Aristotelian, which is to think about philosophy as a sight of wonder.
Marc Steiner: Right.
George Yancy: But because, for so many reasons, part of the reason being that I don’t know why I’m here, and by here, I mean, I don’t know why I’m here or why any of us are on this planet [crosstalk].
Marc Steiner: We’re in the same club.
George Yancy: Okay, good. And also because of the death of George Floyd, or the death of Alan Kurdi, or the death of Ukrainians, the death of Breonna Taylor, and also the backlash that I often experience when I’ve written pieces that are fairly provocative, but are attempting to… I wrote “Dear White America” in 2015, which I considered to be a letter of love, in which I received all kinds of hateful mail and was called the N-word probably over a hundred times. So for me now, philosophy is a sight of suffering, rather than just a sight of wonder. And I think that, from what I can tell, there are some who’ve argued that the way in which we think about anti-Black racism has not fundamentally changed. In fact, some would argue that it’s gotten worse.
My sense is that as long as white supremacy continues to exist – And by white supremacy I don’t mean those individuals who were in Charlottesville. It’s amazing when Anderson Cooper has his Black pundits on and they were talking about Charlottesville, and they were all agreeing that what was going on in Charlottesville with the Tiki torches and arguing and making these claims about blood and soil, Anderson Cooper could agree with his Black pundits that this is horrible. But no one at any point called into question Anderson Cooper’s whiteness. And so that, for me, I don’t rely on that tight bifurcation between good whites and bad whites, I think that distinction creates more trouble. And while I’m not claiming that white people that I know are card carrying Klan members, or part of the boogaloo movement, or the Proud Boys, I want to just make sure that we understand whiteness as a toxic framework.
To quote David Roediger, historian of critical whiteness studies, he says that it’s not the case that whiteness is only false and possessive. He says that whiteness is nothing more than possessive and false. So my argument is that, it seems to me that, as whiteness continues to grow, because it’s this multi-headed Hydra-like beast, if you cut off one head, it grows another. And this is sort of the logics of the 13th Amendment. Once you have said, okay, there will no longer be involuntary servitude, you then put into place Black Codes, so that no longer are Black people oppressed because of something called, that peculiar institution known as American slavery, they’re now oppressed under Black Codes. Under vagrancy.
Marc Steiner: Right.
George Yancy: Then they’re put in jail, and hence the whole prison leasing, convict leasing program that occurred. So in essence, you get a kind of neoslavery. So for me, I think that as long as whiteness continues to exist, not only in the form, let’s say, of a Donald Trump, but as long as that whiteness continues to exist in a form, let’s say, of an Anderson Cooper, where he continues to benefit from white privilege, white supremacy, white hegemony, and white power, it seems to me that the question of anti-Black racism will not go away. So my argument is a bit pessimistic. And as much as I argue that Black people are sort of at the bottom of the rung of society, in which there that place will always be occupied, so that when you think about the Irish, or the Italians, or even Jews who came to America, there’s a way in which they had an out. And what was that out? And that, by the way, is not to deny the horribleness of antisemitism, by no means.
Marc Steiner: Right, right. [inaudible].
George Yancy: But I think that we have to recognize the way in which whiteness, as it were an attribute of property, was able to be possessed by the Italians, the Irish, and Jews. And so we have to think about the ways in which Black people don’t have access to whiteness. Even if we have access to more wealth, nonetheless, we experienced over and over again these fundamental instances of either spectacular racism in the form of George Floyd, or these microaggressions where we’re told things like, I didn’t think you were Black because you were so articulate, or I didn’t know you were Black because you’re a philosopher. So, what am I saying then? What I’m saying is that I think that it’s important, particularly when you think about… And think about Black bodies in Ukraine, anti-Black racism is not just specific to the US. It’s global. I mean, it’s in China, it’s in Sweden, it’s in New Zealand, and it’s also in Israel, for an example, if you…
Marc Steiner: Absolutely.
George Yancy: If you read stories about the Ethiopian Jews, in terms of the ways in which they undergo forms of discrimination, it’s as if we’re reading something that happened right here in the United States. So I think that what we need, that what America needs to do is to come to terms with not just identifying Donald Trump as the epitome of racism, or those other right-wing conservative individuals, but I think we have to begin to critique and uncover the way in which whiteness as a habitual form of iterative practices continue to exist in this country. So for me, until we sort of reach a moment of what I would call, not just post-race US, but a post-whiteness US, I think then we can begin to rethink the ways in which Black forms of embodiment are indeed partaking of something called a robust sense of humanity.
Marc Steiner: Well, George Yancy, this has been a great conversation. I was going to try to conclude with what you wrote about the quote from Hiroshima, but I think…
George Yancy: Oh, please do. I don’t mind.
Marc Steiner: Well, I was…
George Yancy: It’s up to you.
Marc Steiner: What you said was so good. It’s so strong. But it was a quote, I think, to leave with, especially in terms of the threat of nuclear war that’s upon us in this conflict in Ukraine, which to me is what sets it apart from the horrendous genocides of Rwanda, or Cambodia, or many of the places I could mention, because of what it means worldwide in terms of what we face. And I just want people to feel this and see this as we let George go, this is a piece that George Yancy put in his article. It was written by someone who lived through the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima. And I think it’s something just to think about as we think about what we’re facing and what we have to do to not let it happen anywhere again worldwide.
“‘There were no air raid alarms on the morning of August 9, 1945. We had been hiding out in the local bomb shelter for several days, but one by one, people started to head home. My siblings and I played in front of the bomb shelter entrance, waiting to be picked up by our grandfather. Then, at 11:02 AM, the sky turned bright white. My siblings and I were knocked off our feet and violently slammed back into the bomb shelter. We had no idea what had happened. As we sat there shell-shocked and confused, heavily injured burn victims came stumbling into the bomb shelter en masse. Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. Many of the victims collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat were unbearable.’ Have we not learned from this great horror? For some, many, there seems to be no limit to their tolerance for existential devastation, unethical ineptitude, and Imperial lust.”
I’ll stop there. The last part was written by our guest, George Yancy. And George Yancy, thank you so much for joining us, it’s been a pleasure to have you. And I look forward to many more conversations as we’ve had in the past.
George Yancy: Yes. Thank you very much for having me.
Marc Steiner: Thank you. And I’m Marc Steiner, here for The Real News Network, here on The Marc Steiner Show. And let me thank Adam Coley, Kayla Rivara, Cameron Granadino, and Stephen Frank for making this show possible, making all this thing happen for all of us here. And please write to me at mss@therealnews.com. Let me know what you think, I’ll write you right back as soon as you write to me. So stay involved, keep listening, take care.
Review of Radical Political Economics, Ahead of Print.
