Ep. 11 – Race, Civil Rights, and the Changing Political Futures of American Cities: A Conversation with Dr. Thomas Sugrue

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. Welcome to race and democracy. And on today’s show, we are talking to one of the premier historians in America, Thomas Sugrue, professor of history and social and cultural analysis at N. Y u, author of the classic The Origins of the Urban Crisis and many, many other books. We’re gonna be really talking to him today about race, civil rights, public policy and really the changing shape demographically in America and how that’s going to shape the political futures of race and democracy in the United States and globally. So, Tom, welcome.

[0:00:59 Thomas] Thanks. It’s great to be here. Peniel,

[0:01:01 Peniel] Uh, I have to tell the audience that, um, Thompson grew is one of my intellectual heroes. He’s somebody who I met for the first time 26 years ago in graduate school. He was already ah, very, very important assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania, writing all kinds of wonderful articles about urban crisis, the civil rights movement, public policy, uh, social justice activism. Um, and then he came out with this book, the origins of the Urban Crisis. I wanted first talk about the origins of the urban crisis. That book is a standard for not only graduate students in the fields of history, but really multiple fields of public policy of urban studies of American politics. Um, sociology, anthropology. Uh, what inspired you to write that book? Um and did you think that book would have such a enormous impact? Intellectually? Both then and I would argue even more. So now we think about the origins of the urban crisis and the long view of African American history in American history. And even as people talk about capitalism and race right now, you were talking about capitalism and raised in that book and very, very explicit ways. I wanna talk about the origins of the urban crisis and its its impact on you and the field of just race and democracy and politics.

[0:02:32 Thomas] Well, you certainly can’t predict as an author whether your book is gonna have an impact or whether you’re gonna be howling into the void. Ah, but I did my best to write it in a way that would speak to multiple audiences from undergraduates learning about modern American history to policymakers, to social scientists but I wrote it. I’m at a moment when scholars, especially in the social sciences, were interested in questions of race and of the so called urban underclass of urban poverty and where two, pretty candidly ah, lot of the scholarship was flawed, problematic, impoverished in its analytical frameworks. And so I, as a graduate student, encountered the work of um Charles Murray, the conservative pundit who wrote the book Losing Ground, which argued that the cause of urban poverty in United States was a welfare system that created perverse incentives that sapped people’s will, toe work and and treated dependency. Black people? Definitely. Ah and, ah, when I was in my first year of graduate school, a major work, the Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson, then University of Chicago sociologist, came out who attempted to create a synthesis between arguments about behavior and family as being the cause of African American poverty and changes the industrial economy. Um, those scholars, most of them, um, tended to focus on a pretty small period of time. The 19 sixties and 19 seventies, it was the great society in the war on poverty that sapped well. Pharaoh was accept the will to work. It was expansion of welfare, or it was the urban uprisings of the 19 sixties. Or it was the rise of affirmative action that Wilson argued, created a two tiered African American world of the black middle class prospering in a working class left behind. They weren’t very historical. And so I decided as a historian, to go deeper, to go further back, to really try to make sense out of what happened to American cities and why racial inequality was such a constitutive part of urban life in the United States in that period. And I decided I needed to do it by going to a place on Detroit Wow, which conveniently happened to be my birthplace. Ah was a place that seemed to embody many of these transformations. It was a city that was booming in the Second World War. It was the nation’s arsenal of democracy. It was a magnet for African American immigrants from around the world. Uh, I’m African American migrants and immigrants from around the world. It was, ah, the land of hope and opportunity. But by the 19 sixties, it had become the symbol of the American urban crisis. Ah ah place bitterly divided by racial conflict. A place that witnessed one of the most intense uprisings on the summer of 1967. A place where, um, poverty on unemployment were increasingly commonplace. So what happened? What happened to this place? It seemed an ideal case study for me and it Waas. I went in with some preconceptions, as we all do when we begin our projects. I was gonna focus on deindustrialization on the collapse of the economy and its long term consequences. But I found a story that was really a lot more interesting and complicated and unexpected. Um, I began looking at the records of civil rights organizations and city agencies charged with dealing with questions of race. And I found Ah, a mostly for gotten history of grassroots white resistance to African American migration, to the movement of African Americans into formerly white sections of the city. Ah, movement that played out, uh, in riot of attacks by whites on the first African American families to move into their neighborhoods, but also played out in city politics. Detroit was a new deal city. It was a democratic city. It was a liberal city. But white voters were voting for candidates who were opposed to civil rights, who were opposed to the desegregation of public education who were opposed to, ah, placing affordable on public housing projects in racially mixed or predominately white sections of the city. And so I found this deep undercurrent of racial conflict that played out poisonous Lee in the city.

[0:07:07 Peniel] And when you think about that racial conflict that you write about in the origins of the urban crisis in terms of temporao ality in the time I think way before there was this thesis of a long civil rights movement, the origins of the urban crisis really allows that to unfold. Where you see the civil rights movement that is happening in the 19 thirties forties. Great Depression, Freedom Surges of the 19 forties. That is talking about many of the same issues that Dr King is talking about in that student nonviolent coordinating committees talking about. But they’re talking about it in a different time period during during the Second World War. And it’s fascinating to see and also this sort of massive white resistance that predates the Brown Um Supreme Court desegregation decision,

[0:07:55 Thomas] one of the conventional explanations for American politics was that, um, we were marching forward toward racial progress, right, that whites were beginning to open their hearts and embrace the ideals of racial equality and racial integration. And that, um, it was only when you had the the so called urban riots and the rise of black power and of identity politics in the sixties and seventies and beyond that whites were alienated and rushed away from the ah, the from liberalism and civil rights to the embrace of the Republican Party. And, the Detroit story told was, was a very different one. It was a one of fighting African American gains at every step of the way. Fighting against the inclusion of African Americans in the workplace during the Second World War through hate strikes that is, whites refusing to work if an African American were brought into their section of a plant fighting the movement of African Americans into their neighborhoods, arguing that racial mixing was on American right, the kind of language that we associate with the Deep South and the Herb Jim Crow. It was justice, powerful in pronounced and just as effective in Detroit as it was in Birmingham or Montgomery Yes, there weren’t lynchings in Detroit, for the most part, and there were plenty of acts of violence. But African Americans faced steady, forceful, well organized white resistance from the grassroots up to the highest levels of elected office in that period.

[0:09:30 Peniel] Yeah, and a lot of ways your book anticipates, um, both some of the work by Ira Katznelson in terms of when affirmative action was white and, um, about the new deal. But also, Richard Rothstein is the color of law. Um, the whole different fields of scholarship started to look at what you had examined in the origins of the urban crisis. Sometimes in a in a national way. Um, in terms of institutional racism, racism via public policy, massive white resistance Ah, I want toe talk about, um from the origins of the urban crisis to sweet land of liberty. And really, that book is a massive, really new history of the civil rights movement and that reframes the civil rights historiography. Ah, one it shifts are are are geography to the north and you look at where African Americans were in the five most populous northern states and you can list them for us to think it’s New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Um, maybe intriguing in Illinois, Michigan, Illinois, Um, and you, you you look at the time frame starting in the 19 thirties and 19 forties and how you extended all the way into the 19 seventies and eighties. And how, when we think about the civil rights movement and that long civil rights struggles, how the North paralleled what was happening in the South, there wasn’t just one part of this country that was invested in Jim Crow. Racial segregation. And what are some of the lessons we learn when we shift the gaze away from Mississippi, away from Alabama, away from Martin with the King Jr and you? You look at tenants Rights Organizer’s You look at Paul’s uber and desegregation in New Jersey and New York and other places you really look at these explosive fights that it ties made national headlines, but we don’t remember it. We think about our national narrative of the heroic civil rights struggle.

[0:11:24 Thomas] Um, there’s long been, ah, a narrative of Southern exceptionalism, right that the South is the place where the peculiar institution and its poisonous legacy shaped everyday life and shaped politics. and that somehow the North was a refuge. Ah, place where the everyday indignities of racial segregation and Jim Crow weren’t real. My first book on Detroit made it very clear that systematic racial segregation, systematic racial disadvantage or advantage for whites in the workplace in the housing market, um, were part of everyday life. This was a region that was marked from the beginning by racial injustice and racial inequality. And so, in many ways, sweet Land of Liberty is a sequel. It’s a sequel that takes it to the regional stage. Not just about Detroit. Detroit figures in the book, of course, but ah, but I write about the whole swath of cities and suburbs and even small towns in the largest states with the largest African American populations of North. Um, and why Uncovered is a n’importe sequel to Origins, because I’m not just writing it as I didn’t origins about the system. I’m now writing about how people challenge the system from the grassroots, threw protests, but also through working through the legislative process, working through the ballot box, working through the courts, and all of these were taking place simultaneously beginning in the 19 twenties, grassroots activists in northern states. For example, we’re challenging Jim Crow in hotels, in restaurants, in public parks and pools just 10 or 15 years before the famous challenges to Jim Challenges to Jim Crow in the South. In fact, many of the activists who cut their teeth challenging segregated restaurants and swimming pools and places like New York and Chicago and Cleveland Goto work with and provide advice to their Southern counterparts, who in the 19 fifties and 19 sixties are challenging lunch, counter segregation and movie theater, segregation and restaurant segregation in the South.

[0:13:44 Peniel] And that’s a circuit of ideas and flow that we never usually think that.

[0:13:47 Thomas] No, we don’t think it all about a circuit of ideas and flow. But if you think about racial in equality and civil rights as being a national issue, not just a regional issue, then of course, there people who are learning from each other, who are sharing ideas, who are sharing strategies and you see that I found a really important story. It’s not a chapter in my book, but it runs like a black thread throughout the entire narrative. The African American press, nationally organized civil rights groups all provided a conduit for people and for ideas to circulate. So, folks in Norfolk, Virginia, we’re learning about what was happening in Baltimore and what was happening in New York. Because the Afro American, based in Baltimore, the newspaper, circulated up and down the coast. The Pittsburgh Courier, uh, one of most influential African American newspapers. I’m had additions in Detroit and additions in Philadelphia. In addition in New York, and so the so you could, as an African American reader of the black press, learn about a protest against a segregated movie theater in Cincinnati in your local African American newspaper in Harlem. Um, ideas get exchanged. People learn from what other people are doing. They learn strategies. The civil rights organization. The N W. C. P. The largest mass membership African American organization. Other than a church in the religious nomination, it had about 600,000 members at its peak had a magazine that circulated all of its local branches and chapters. Local branches and chapters could do what they wanted to have a lot of autonomy, but they also learned what was happening in other places

[0:15:25 Peniel] and began to crisis.

[0:15:26 Thomas] Yeah, the crisis, The crisis allowed branches of the N, W, C. P in New Jersey and branches in Mississippi to learn from each other to share ideas. Ah, and to be inspired by and moved by what their counterparts were doing in different parts of the country. Those ideas circulated on the printed page, and they became the basis of, um, strategizing of planning protests of planning litigation.

[0:15:49 Peniel] I want to ask you about the second half of origins and then move on to some other topics in the second half. You really look at black radicals and you talk about Clarence Fournier. You talk about Jesse Gray. You talk about all these different in certain ways thes political radicals who were talking about bread and butter issues. So they weren’t on some level. They’re black radicals who want to change the system, but they’re actually devoted to housing there, devoted to tenants rights. They’re devoted to very sort of specific basic things that we can all feel and touch when you think about sweet land of liberty. What new information in a new conceptualization of both black power and black political radicalism? Um, did you glean from that? Because when I read that book. I see that you’re looking at how black rattles radicals could be very pragmatic. And actually we’re trying to transform American democracy even at times when they had rhetoric that was anti democratic or critiques of democracy. We were Marxist or feminist, or what have you

[0:16:52 Thomas] are our traditional histories of sole rights and black power? Arrest on false distinctions, binaries between segregation and integration between civil rights and black power between Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm Right, these binaries really obscure so much. What I found all over the place was that the vast majority of grassroots activists or even regional or national leaders, were pragmatic. That is, they were willing to adapt, depending on the circumstances to ah adapt. Their rhetoric changed their strategies. And so you mentioned Paul’s uber. Paul’s uber is one of these wonderful unknown figures. I mean, who is known at the time but mostly been forgotten by historians. He’s disappeared from historical record. He was ah, lawyer who got involved in school integration cases in New Rochelle, New York, and Englewood, New Jersey, and Harlem, and he was calling for racial integration, ostensibly a moderate mainstream civil rights goal. But he forged alliances with groups like the Nation of Islam. Uh, members of the Nation of Islam came to march with former members of the Congress of Racial Equality had been on Freedom Rides in the Englewood movement in Englewood, New Jersey, demanding the racial integration of schools. Whoa, right. This does not fit into our conventional. It’s either one thing or it’s the other folks were pragmatic or think about maybe the most famous civil rights activist other than the Reverend King in this period. Rosa Parks, uh, who is famous for her role in the Montgomery bus boycott when she lives in Detroit. She is involved in the labour strand of the civil rights movement, where civil rights activists in the organized labor working closely together. But then she allies herself with black power. We don’t think about, um, Rosa Parks. Standing with a clenched fist. We think of her is the sweet woman who wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus because she was tired. Well, gosh, For most African American activists, the goal was to get dignity to get results. And if that meant allying yourself with black power advocates, so be it. If it meant using the rhetoric. Ah, of, ah, of of race pride as a way of challenging school segregation and calling for integration. If it worked, it worked. And so so many activists refused to be confined to any single identity. And so it’s at pragmatic side, particularly the issues of how people live on an everyday basis. Jim Crow didn’t just manifest itself in cross burnings and acts of racial violence and race hatred. It manifest itself most powerfully in the everyday injustices that people faced being stopped and harassed by the police for for the crime of walking down a sidewalk in a white neighborhood, um, of moving into a formerly white ah neighborhood of not taking a job that had been perceived as whites only. Ah, these are the sorts of everyday realities that folks struggle to try to improve and toe and to mend. And ah, so we need to think about folks emphasis on the not just on the means, but on the ends and the ends were quality education. The ends were decent housing the ends were jobs that paid well and that we’re secure, right? These aren’t, um, hugely lofty ideals. There the stuff of people’s everyday lives of their everyday existence, and I found that we’re covering that those threads of activism. Not just the activists who were good in front of a camera, not just the ones who were great at playing the media or using powerful, sometimes political language to rouse the masses, but the folks who were quietly involved in doing the door knocking and the ah, the seeing through long meetings and community organization halls and in churches. They’re the folks whose histories are essential to understanding why the civil rights movement was a movement. Why the black power movement was a movement, not just, um, some charismatic ah, people playing to a camera.

[0:21:08 Peniel] Now you’ve written about Barack Obama, and I know you wrote a whole book on it on him, not even past what I ask you about Obama and Urban policy and get into, um, immigration. Azzawi conclude you wrote a terrific chapter, a decent sized urban policy in the Julian Zelizer Anthology, the presidency of Barack Obama. First historical assessment. I want you to talk about that chapter about on some levels. When I read the idea of urban policy, I always think of black folks you know, I think about racial segregation cause I’m not thinking of urban policy is just maybe pro gentrification, even though I think a lot of urban policy is once you talk about Obama and urban policy and really what happened during the eight years of Obama in this context of urban policy? Education inequality, right? Um uh and really that as a backdrop for a discussion of diversity and inclusion of after this? But because when I think about Obama as a community organizer, I think people were very excited about when you read dreams from my father. He talks about being in Chicago, Altgeld Gardens on the west Side of Chicago, and he’s at those community meetings he’s before black lives matter and after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So it seemed like this would be a president really would doing amazing things when it came to urban policy, but it didn’t quite shape up to be that

[0:22:40 Thomas] right. I mean, Obama was maybe the first urban president of the United States has had in about 100 years. Um, that is someone who spent his entire adult life time pretty much living in big cities and Chicago was formative for him politically, intellectually, Um, not just his work as a community organizer, but his living in Chicago in the 19 nineties, working as a lawyer, running for electoral office, becoming a state senator in Illinois. All of that was part of his urban trajectory. And so there was enormous hope. Ah, in 2008 and early 2009 when Obama came to office, that he would be a president who had put the long neglected issues of infrastructure of jobs, of systematic segregation and discrimination. Um, of housing front and center in his administration’s domestic politics and some early signs look favorable. He created a White House office of Urban affairs, something that the White House hadn’t had since the Carter administration in the in the 19 seventies. But a couple of things happened along the way. Some in Obama’s control, some not, For one, um, issue of of cities fell to the wayside. Azaz. The president put health care to the front of his agenda. It should be, said Justin decide. Health care is an issue that has really significant implications for cities, because hospitals and health care in general are one of the biggest employment sectors in cities and are also enormously important employment sector for African Americans and other people of color. Um, so there were urban implications and implications for for race. But there were secondary, um, Obama faced intense opposition within his own party, but especially from the increasingly vocal and powerful and obstructionist Republican Party to even the mildest and most un controversial of domestic policies. And that opposition intensified after 2010 when Republicans took control ah of Congress after the midterm elections. And so Obama faced significant external obstacles to unearth an agenda. Republicans began to cry out that Obama was a radical who was attempting to impose this, um, urban agenda and a way to snuff out suburbia and to restrict people’s choice and and to drain tax dollars into the cesspool of cities. And even though most of what he proposed was very modest in its aspirations, and it’s it’s budgetary costs, Republicans, in other words, for a long time had made a lot of political hay out of conflating urban issues and, um, race, especially African Americans, and using that as, ah wedge politically, and they continue to do that with a great deal of effectiveness in the Obama administration. That said, Obama was very much a creature of Democratic centrist politics in the 19 nineties and the two thousands. His urban policy focused on modest public private partnerships that called for using the federal government to broker deals with foundations and nonprofits and with corporate donors to accomplish relatively minor changes to support, for example, of the construction of charter schools or, um, the creation of mixed income, low rise housing developments in cities projects weren’t very big in scale or, frankly, very big and ambition. And one could say both. This was, ah, sign of the limits of the Democratic Party’s urban vision in the euro that Obama came of age in. Ah, but also, um, maybe all he could do, given that the winds of opposition from the Tea Party and from the Republican right, we’re so fierce that anything even, you know, a little bit substantial in terms of ERM, policy would have been snuffed immediately by Congress.

[0:26:47 Peniel] Is that when we think about where we’re at now, um, post Obama in this era of increasing racial nationalism, Um, but also increasing demographic changes, We think about immigration and you’ve written. You’ve edited a recent book on immigration, call immigration and metropolitan revitalisation in the United States. And, um, I want us to really grapple with that. I mean your whole you know, intellectual and scholarly career has been dealing with sort of race, social justice, but also economic and political transformations both at a local, regional, national and global scale. And I think with this book, you truly bring all that together. So when we think about immigration and we think about things like diversity, inclusion, inequality, you know, where are we at right now and where? What are the political futures that that we may see?

[0:27:48 Thomas] That’s a great question. Well, the color of America has changed. A Zeman E have commented as a result of immigration policies that open the door for newcomers from Latin America, from Asia and to a lesser but still significant extent from Africa. Um, not to mention the Middle East on date on other parts of the world. Um, we have a rhetoric around immigration, especially the anti immigration rhetoric that is 100 plus years old, that immigrants are dangerous un American outsiders who are gonna similar able who will not become a part of the mainstream that will take jobs away from deserving white Americans. Um, and not be loyal to the United States? Um, they’re dangerous. They’re a menace. There are threat. Ah, and then we have the reality of immigration to United States, which is that immigration has played a really critical role in the transformation of metropolitan economies. Ah, most cities, ah, major cities United States between 19 92,010 gained population. And there’s a lot of talk about how young white people and empty nesters air moving in but white whites, well to do whites moving to cities or a drop in the bucket. The vast, uh, majority of the increase in population and cities came from immigrants coming in, often moving to places that had suffered depopulation in disinvestment on and, um, in the process, transforming urban space, um, revitalising commercial districts, bringing energy to markets, attracting investment and and benefiting residents of all backgrounds of cities. If you go to, uh, African American neighborhoods where there had been massive disinvestment for decades, you’ll find neighborhood stores run by Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Dominicans. Uh, you also find, um I love going to ethnic neighborhoods from walking around and exploring. One of my favorite places to shop is a is a pan Asian supermarket in Philadelphia, and what’s interesting about the Pan Asian supermarket is you go in and the clientele of the market is Asian but also African American and also Latino. In fact, they’ve started a whole section of of Caribbean food products of mangoes and plantains and things that you don’t find in, uh, a mangoes you confined in Asia. But a lot of things you wouldn’t find in a conventional Asian grocery store because they realize that they’re there. They’re providing, um, consumer goods that are of demand. Teoh folks across from the racial ethnic spectrum. Um, immigration has also been wrongly associated with a rise in crime. And as we show in server s a show in this book, areas with immigration, significant others immigration have experienced a decline in crime, and that decline in crime has benefited every segment of the urban population whites, African Americans and immigrants themselves. And so what we try to do in this book is to is to, um, talk about the challenges of the influx of immigrants, particularly to suburban communities and majority of immigrants are living in suburbs today, where school districts and public officials are simply not capable of dealing with this influx of outsiders speaking different languages, they freak out. They really don’t know how to manage non English speaking Children in schools. They’re struggling. But at the same time the ways in which that influx of immigrants has changed housing markets changed, Ah, consumer markets on business districts and transformed labour markets mostly to the benefit of of of residents, regardless of their background. So we’re trying to debunk a lot of the miss while still being why clear eyed about the challenges that immigration poses.

[0:31:52 Peniel] And when we think about diversity and inclusion time in the 21st century, how can that be connected to, um, justice and citizenship and equality?

[0:32:02 Thomas] Well, we’re a diverse country, more diverse, and we’ve been, ah, maybe ever. But we’re also ah, country that needs more than diversity. We have to think about the ways in which, um, uh, inequalities by race, by ethnicity and by class remain profoundly unresolved. Unresolved. Some 60 or 70 years after the civil rights movement took to the streets demanding change right we have not completed the tasks of providing well paying jobs on a nondiscriminatory basis of economic security. We have not solved the problem of profound racial and ethnic and equities in public education. In fact, our schools have grown more segregated in less equal over the last 30 or 40 years. So there are a lot of unfinished goals from the civil rights struggle. If we simply, um, kind of rest on the hope that somehow the changing of America’s color and the growing diversity of the population is gonna inevitably lead to a shift in politics. In the solution of these, these these problems were deluded. Um, we need to organize. We need to build unlikely coalitions across racial and ethnic divisions. We need to come up with solutions that challenge head on the problems of racial inequality and housing and education and in the workplace. And, ah, not simply assumed that somehow we’re gonna be on inevitable forward march of progress. Fortunately or unfortunately, in the last few years, we’ve seen very clearly that, um, we can regress that the arc of justice can veer off course. Ah, not just ah you know, in a in a positive direction. And so we need to think about ways to to severe that arc back toward the path of justice again.

[0:33:56 Peniel] My final question is one about optimism. Are you optimistic about some kind of social transformation? The midterm elections? A lot of people came out. Seems like, uh, we are in a period of time where people are very politically active and politically engaged, including certain marginalized communities and communities of color, especially communities color led by black women, Latin X women who are coming out to the polls. They’re registering people to the polls there, organizing on their own, and not just for yearly elections in federal elections, but just doing all kinds of important and innovative things in places like Philadelphia in Austin, Texas, all over the country. So are you. Are you optimistic about, um, change for the better change that’s producing mawr Equality and more justice?

[0:34:46 Thomas] Ah, I am, Ah, as a friend of mine, says an optimist with an insurance policy. I I think right now there is a Nen enormous amount of ferment of grassroots activism on the ground that’s super exciting. Cities were during the civil rights era word during the black power era, um, and ar today real crucibles of creative activism. There’s more going on and more hope for change going on at the grassroots that we’ve seen in a very long time, and that gives me optimism. But, ah, countering that optimism are long term forces that are still militating against, um, the success of those organizations, the powerful the rich are more segregated and in many respects more effective at working the system to guarantee their interest than they ever have been. Um, um, they profit from predatory lending from, um from housing policies that that disadvantage working people in people of color. Um, they profit from the inequitable distribution of educational and public resource in the United States. Um, they’re unwilling to pay for it in the form of taxes, and so we face really, really intense headwinds. But what I will say is what we see going on in New York. The effort to challenge the public subsidies of one of the richest corporations in the world the rise of insurgent candidates challenging hidebound politicians and at the City Council level at the school district level. Ah, for State House in Congress. Ah, these air super, um, heartening for those of us who care about justice in the United States today. Um, but we can’t sit back and and coast the struggle is gonna be a hard fought won. And the forces, um, dedicated to maintaining the status quo are powerful, well funded, well organized, and, ah, are gonna take a lot of creative challenges from a lot of places to change.

[0:37:02 Peniel] All right. Thank you. Um, this has been a real treat.

[0:37:05 Thomas] Thank you. A

[0:37:05 Peniel] great discussion. Thompson grew professor of history and social and cultural announces at N Y u. And really one of the foremost experts on race and democracy. Public policy in the United States, in the world. Thank you.

[0:37:20 Thomas] Thank you.

[0:37:21 Peniel] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.