Ep. 29 – The Descent of Democracy and the Promise of African American History: A Conversation with Dr. Khalil Muhammad

[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. Ah, podcast on the intersection of racial justice, public policy, current events and world affairs. I am very, very excited to be speaking with Dr Khalil Gibran. Mohammed was a dear friend and one of the foremost scholars of race and democracy in the world. Dr. Mohamed is professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Dr. Mohamed is the author of Really, a groundbreaking book that’s now considered a classic The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime and the Making of Modern America, which has just been re published by Harvard. 10th anniversary addition with a new preface. Khalil, Welcome to racing democracy.

[0:01:27 Khalil] Thank you, Dr Joseph. It’s a really treat to be here at the University of Texas at Austin.

[0:01:32 Peniel] You know, I want to talk to you about so many things. But I would be remiss without mentioning that Kal Ill was part of really an extraordinary project. Um, that The New York Times convened Hannah Nicole Jones the 16 19 project about racial slavery in American democracy, going all the way back to Jamestown, Virginia, 16. 19 to the present. And Khalil wrote this really beautiful essay about race and the sugar trade, and you go down to, um, arrived Arabi, Louisiana Domino sugars shall met refinery there, and you really uncover the brutal truth about, um, sugar, slavery and capitalism going all the way back to the 17th century. But how those those power relations continue to echo today. So I want us to start there and then make our way back up to the present. But why did the history of racial slavery and its connection to sugar manufacturing but also this exploitation of black bodies resonate with you so much? And you also connect this to the criminal justice system and plantations? And where Angola, Louisiana’s a plantation where prisoners, predominantly African American African Americans actually continue the work of their their ancestors in a different context?

[0:03:12 Khalil] Yeah, yeah, I know the assignment was really challenging in some ways, because, as you and I know, we have a number of amazing colleagues who are slavery experts. And so for me, part of it was to approach this like, unvested gated journalist, trying to learn the significance of this commodity that fundamentally transformed the world.

[0:03:36 Peniel] And how so,

[0:03:37 Khalil] Yeah, because first of all, white people wouldn’t be in the Western Hemisphere, but for for sugar. The brutal fact is that Aziz everyone no, Christopher Columbus comes in 14 92 in search of gold. Instead, on his second voyage, he brings a couple of cane stalks with him from the canary in Missouri Islands, which were part of the Spanish and Portuguese empire and plants them in South America and unleashes what amounts to half a millennia of exploitation. The truth is that sugar had already been shaping the world starting in India really Papa, New Guinea. But starting then in India and then Arab traders established sugar plantations in the Mediterranean. But because it’s a crop that needs semitropical, um, climate and needs tremendous labor, it was Columbus bringing those cane stocks. That was the impetus for what we now call today White gold. It was gangbusters in terms of its economic footprint. So it drove the entire Atlantic slave trade economy before we even get to the British North American experience

[0:04:51 Peniel] and so sugar when reading your essay, I was really very interested because I usually think of this is cotton is cotton is saying and you know, you give all the statistics and the data and sugar really was this huge commodity that that provides one of the engines for this global capitalism. But certainly American capital.

[0:05:12 Khalil] Yeah, absolutely. So the way to think about it is because the 16 19 project pushes the origin story of of American history back from the revolutionary period to the colonial era. Um, it’s centralizes slavery. As the economic engine that financed essentially wealth creation in the United States. It gave political meaning to the very notion of liberty and freedom. And of course, all of that intimacy between the enslaved Africans and European settler colonists created ah, hybrid culture. So the the conceit, or the focus of the sugar article, was to say, Well, the truth is, white people were here long before 17 76. They were here before 16 19. They had already created sugar Islands from in Barbados, Jamaica, Cuba, Guyana, Brazil was a major sugar and still today is one of the leading producers of sugar. So it’s impossible to understand European settlement conquest, the indigenous genocide that experience even before 16 19. But then, the point is that today Americans consume more sugar than any other country in the world. And what this reporting taught me to some degrees that black people have always been on the short end of a cane stalk from from from that early history to the present, from what I call from the plantation to the president of black people are still suffering overwhelmingly from the health effects and the impact of sugar.

[0:06:50 Peniel] And you write down here. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster. Um, and I want you to discuss that both in the past and the present.

[0:07:01 Khalil] Yeah, so the thing is coming back to the point of cotton. Cotton takes off essentially in the 19th century, but of course, between say, 16 19 when the first Africans arrived, there’s tobacco cultivation. There’s indigo, there’s rice and then there’s still cotton But cotton doesn’t become a major export for the United States until the 19th century as a result of Eli Witten Whitney’s cotton gin. So the impact of sugar is one that basically shows how you could not, um, you could not place the broader economic context of how America’s trade function. So given an example, every one of two ships they came into the New York City Harbour in the early 18th century was carrying either slaves or sugar and exporting from the United States were sending out flower ah, shipbuilding materials. In other words, even before Americans themselves were cultivating sugar. Here in the United States, which really doesn’t take off until the 19th century, Sugar was driving a global economy off which New York as a finance capital, was building up. Its resource is people were making money. So one quick example from the article, if we think about the built environment, is a reflection of what’s important to us. New York Wall Street was built by slaves, but its most important church, Trinity Church, which was on the West Side, was the tallest physical structure of lower Manhattan. Guess what was even taller than Trinity? The sugar warehouses that were on the East Side of Manhattan. So the centrality of sugar to understanding even how the United States began to build up before we get to cotton is what’s so important to this story

[0:08:55 Peniel] and you really? In the story, I was surprised that the number of revolts and rebellions by enslaved African Americans, including ones that I hadn’t heard of what one that happens in 18 11. I heard of Nat Turner Heard of Gabriel Prosser, But you really look at you, juxtapose the actual brutality that was utilised to cultivate enforced African American labor. And you juxtapose that against this sort of mythology of happy Negroes. Andi sort of mint juleps, Um, in this sea Peotone version of of the South.

[0:09:31 Khalil] Yeah. So the thing about different from cotton again sugar was far more brutal. Ah, form of cultivation. So in a

[0:09:41 Peniel] way, I was that

[0:09:42 Khalil] well, it’s it’s because, first of all, it’s a very difficult crop. Toe wheeled eso, while cotton is tough to pick, sugar is a massive crop. I mean, it can grow to 12 feet tall and advise that I mean that sugar cane, the actual plant itself can grow to 12 feet tall. So you know the process essentially is you’ve gotta plant this cane. Then you’ve got a weed it to make sure that we don’t take over because it’s essentially a grass. And then because cane knives which essentially are machetes, are constantly being wielded to harvest the crop, people are, you know, in danger constantly. How do you weed the crop? You have to set fires in the field so people are subject to fires. And then probably the most significant aspect of king cultivation was that it harvest time. You have to clear acres and acres of cane from the field, but you have to do it within 24 to 48 hours because otherwise the juice inside, which is the white gold of the plant will will will rot. It will be no good. And once you get it to the mill, there’s these massive rollers. I mean, you know, part of the reporting on this and study of its Solomon Northup describes in his own memoir, 12 Years a slave. How Children are used in the process of getting the cane stalk into these mills, where these massive rollers, a rolling you know, people were losing limbs doing this work so that they kept a machete near the near the rollers so that if your arm got caught as it was being fed into the machine, they cut it off. So the average length of mortality it is estimated was as low as seven years for person working on a cane plantation. And that was true in Jamaica, as it was true in Louisiana. And so, unlike cottons, sugar was just farm or dangerous, And what that meant was the danger of sugar, um, enabled the kind of organizing in protection of enslaved people that, as you well know, contributed to, uh, transforming the entire Western Hemisphere, starting with Haiti and its revolt. Those air sugar workers, those were sugar rebels. And so that kind of, um, expansion of democracy by way of a resistance to slavery. Ah, and sugar slavery and particularly carried over into the United States with this, you know, incredible slave uprising in 18 11 called the German coast uprising to reflect a part of the southern Louisiana along the Mississippi River where Germans had had been prominent in European settlement. But ultimately, in 18 11 group of enslaved workers set out in a Liberation Army to free themselves in New Orleans. The estimates run as few as 100 to 500. They were caught pretty quickly. Federal troops were deployed and at least 100 were executed, which is twice the number executed in that Turner’s rebellion, which took place nearly 20 years later. What so telling about this event is that it’s nearly been redacted from the historical record and one of the speculations for why it’s been redacted from the historical record. Historians think it is truly the largest slave uprising in North America is the redaction because it showed the capacity of enslaved workers to come together and throw off the yoke of slavery. And so while Nat Turner may or may not have heard of this uprising, the point was that Haiti had clearly set in motion the capacity of black people to free themselves. These folks did it. The estimates that there were actual former Haitian enslave workers who were brought to the Louisiana from that period were in this rebellion. I mean, it was it was a very scary enterprise for for white Americans.

[0:13:27 Peniel] Yeah, and somebody who’s proud Haitian American. I think that, um it’s extraordinary because I think that’s spot on your analysis because there was so much fear and loathing of Haiti. Thomas Jefferson starts the first embargo of a revolutionary nation. We think about the Cuban and Bart embargo. There’s a Haitian embargo and they’re really fearful. And you talk about, uh, to Santa Lucia. But you talk about John Jack, Gasoline and and in the Force and the violence that it took. Teoh turn that colony of enslaved Africans into, ah, Republic of free women and men. They were very, very fearful. I want toe jump forward a bit last thing on this article and then get a condemnation and really wider, um, subject matter. Um, the Carcel state you’ve written so brilliantly about really the word Jin’s of mass incarceration and connected to crime statistics. Eugenics. What happened to African Americans in the late 19th early 20th century? I’m in sort of the incipient creation of the Carcel State. I was very, very intrigued by the connection between the car surreal state of this period and sugar cultivation and how that continues in tow into our own time.

[0:14:47 Khalil] Well, part of the brilliance of this whole 16 19 project was to say, You hear these things that are part of our daily lives, But most of us have no idea that they connect to the past. And so obviously sugar is is, you know, we’re sitting here drinking. I have a little honey and Mike, not refined sugar. It didn’t come from a cane plantation, but it is a, you know, a form of sugar. So that was the point. But they did this with healthcare. They did this with our political institutions. And, of course, Bryan Stevenson even himself makes a connection to the Carcel stated mass incarceration in the piece. So what’s interesting is when you when you assume that these things have no connection, what you find is that in Louisiana, slavery was I’m sorry, sugar. Slavery was the economic engine. Louisiana was the second richest state in the antebellum period. There was more banking, finance capital running through New Orleans because of the size of the slave market. Then then in New York City or Massachusetts. So this is a big deal. And of course, what would we see? We would see the line blower between the scale of a plantation operation during the antebellum period to the scale of incipient, as you say, Carcelle State that wants to essentially re inscribe a form of slavery to those workers, the whole point of the convict leasing and chain gang regime that that occurs after slavery was to control black labour. It wasn’t necessarily to incapacitate in the way that mass incarceration today puts people in prison, and that’s it. It was to say, If you don’t play by these unfair rules where we are economically exploiting you like we did it slavery, you’re gonna end up behind a prison wall. And so that’s exactly what happened. Angola was was a large sugar plantation that was purchased by the state of Louisiana in 1901 Today it is the largest maximum security prison and current operation in the nation. And guess what? Black folks are still cultivating slave crops, including sugar on that plantation as part of the slave labor that they do. The 13th Amendment, as we know, still allows for slavery in the United States as punishment for a crime, and they’re selling the syrup that is processed from the sugar cultivation in the prison gift shop. It’s remarkable.

[0:17:06 Peniel] Now. I want it. I want toe pivot, but continue to explore because I think one of the things that your work is done here in 16 19 project and just your own scholarship in your engagement in public history, which I want to talk about, is really link these things that we usually think are not connected. Slavery, capitalism, democracy, incarceration. Sometimes Michelle Alexander has called this the new Jim Crow, and I think the new Jim Crow’s beyond just about mass incarceration. It’s really every aspect of American society American democracy, our institutions top to bottom, bottom to top. So I want I want to talk about your role Visa vee the condemnation of blackness 10 years ago, and this is a really, really big book in lot of ways. I think me and Dr Mohammed are of the same generation, and I’ve said this to other people. I could say on air I think of this book. The condemnation of blackness. The kind of book that when I was in graduate school was reminiscent of this book was both Robin Kelly’s I’m Hammer and Hoe, which was about black communists in Alabama during the Great Depression and sort of showed how there was this grassroots insurgency, oppositional strategies, critiques of capitalism. But also Thompson grooves the origins of the urban crisis because these were books that were so singular that even if people had talked about that subject matter before, these books really crystallized and distill the argument. But really not just scholarly audiences, but for mass audiences, right? The ton of people read the condemnation of blackness alongside of Michelle Alexander’s best selling the new Jim Crow. So I want to talk about your role in really transforming the historiography of not just mass incarceration but the connection race, democracy, citizenship in the 19th 20th and 21st centuries.

[0:18:59 Khalil] Yeah, so I mean, I really appreciate the that, uh, Ponyo because, as you well know, you know all of us, the larger profession, particularly of scholars who are focused on race and questions of democracy and citizenship. You know, we’re a big group, um, and and on the community that we represent largely still marginalized within the academy. And so I don’t take for granted that anything I did or anyone else that I did would make a difference in the larger currents of American scholarship. But in this case, you know, I was interested in this topic at a time when I mean, I’ve told you this before. I would go to conferences. Everyone was doing black freedom studies. And it’s not to say black Freedom Studies is still like the dominant field of America 20 century American history. But amongst our peers, a lot of people were doing great work. I was going to conferences and no one was coming to my panels. So I stopped going. But that was before someone like Michelle Alexander had helped to turn the national conversation. And if you think about that work that were came out literally one year, ah, before mine January or so in 2009 mine came out January of 2010. And that was of course, also before Tana HAC Coats began writing in making all of these connections for a general audience through Hiss Blawg on the Atlantic and then later through his reparation case for reparations. And so, you know, it’s also, as you well know, you were doing PBS news hour programs in the moment of Obama’s emergence. And so there was all this headedness about post racialism, and it’s heading this about turning the corner on history. So much so that as I was putting the final touches on this because, like we’ve actually changed the title, you know it should no longer be the condemnation of blackness. Race crime in the making of modern urban Americans to be the combination of blackness before the election of Barack Obama thing. Because this idea that no one’s going to care about this history. Ah, and yet the truth is that the state of affairs off having the largest prison population by any historical, measured by per capita rates by comparisons internationally by expenditures 2.3 million people at its height, seven million people under some form of criminal justice supervision. Ah, radical reversal in the demographics where 70% of white Americans had been locked up in some prison cell in 19 seventies to 70% black and brown by the turn of the 20th century. All of a sudden, the need and search for an origin story, um, became a big part of the national conversation. And so I got lucky. Man e. I think you’re being too

[0:21:41 Peniel] modest, but tell us about that origin story, cause this has a new preface that’s really specifically written public engagement so that students, whether they were undergraduate or high school students in addition to graduate students and scholars, can see an encapsulated, synthesized argument. What is the argument behind the condemnation of blackness?

[0:22:01 Khalil] Yes, I basically make three really important interventions. One is that the story of what happened in the 20th century Northern City is very important to understanding the origins of mass incarceration. As important is understanding the emergence of convict leasing and chain gains in the Jim Crow South, A lot of people had looked at the Jim Crow South almost. I don’t want to overstate the case. Very, very few people had looked at the black experience in the great migration north up to the present, and so that intervention exposed that the narrative, the discursive terrain, the ideas about black people were not in the language of white supremacy. They were in the language of crime statistics. It was the every day, the vocation of this notion that will black people are dangerous. You can’t live in the neighborhood near them. They’re migrants are more prone to acts of violence And so it was through this emergent statistical discourse that I was able to see that people who often self identified as liberals and progressives in the early 20th century the 1919 tens etcetera were essentially it building the argument that is part of our present, which is that I’m not a racist. But black people have a crime problem. I’m not a racist, but stop and frisk is good for black people. I’m not a racist, but there so many black people in prison today because of the bad decisions they make that was happening at the turn of the 20th century. And so if there’s a problem there, because if most of us could look back on the turn of 20th century, even in these big Northern cities and say, Well, things obviously weren’t entirely fair mean we can’t assume that all those Irish police officers were post racial and not, you know, showing bias and racism towards African Americans. Um, then all of a sudden, now the statistical argument starts to look a little shaky, and so I want to close the gap between that passed critique of those crime statistics and are present acceptance of them. You don’t get to a mayor. Michael Bloomberg, defending 12 years of stop and frisk in the biggest bluest city in America who is now running for president, defending stop and frisk, which is fundamentally now we know of racist project of discrimination and a flawed 12 and a far went to the second point was to say OK, even if we took at face value that African Americans did have a crime and violence problem, that they were on average, more likely to engage in property crimes and crimes against people. Then what are we to do about it? And all of a sudden you look at the story of European immigrants of Irish and Italians in some of these same big cities and the response to their crime and their violence, the response to their inequality in their segregation, their own immigrant ghettoes was to actually invest in those communities to change the narrative about them, to essentially see violence and crime in those communities as a symptom of economic inequality and as a progressive air that’s the progressive era as a symptom of neglect. And so what I wanted to offer was not just a counter narrative, but an actual proof that in our own country the evidence of crime and violence, even when it’s accurate, right? Even if you remove the innocents claim and say some of these people are actually guilty, the solution is not, by definition mawr policing and more prisons or chain gangs and convict leases, punishment or punishment in general that in fact, you can invest in these communities because you see them as part of the nation state. You see them their citizenship as essential to the health and welfare of the nation. And so that was a big, big part of analysis. The third analysis was really a kind of what we would call epistemological one, which is I began to call into question the way that the history of social science itself is implicated in re if I ng and reinforcing racism in our democracy

[0:26:10 Peniel] and for our for our listeners, a pissed, um, ology is just basically the philosophical foundations of knowledge and knowledge production.

[0:26:17 Khalil] That’s right. So

[0:26:18 Peniel] Dr Mohammed does a huge intervention in the sense of saying all these studies, all this scholarship on this topic is inherently intrinsically flawed.

[0:26:29 Khalil] That’s right, because the thing about crime statistics is there, they seem to be easily measured, and so the reason why people even today gesture or evoke them or just bring them up. You know, people constantly say, with the numbers speak for themselves that the rates of crime and violence in Chicago, you know, I’m not making that up. Those air, the fax. So the point is like, Oh, we assume that even things we call fax are not a product of political decisions and power. So give two quick examples. We used to know, for example, I say this all the time. Like how many Irish Americans in Austin, Texas, committed armed robbery last year? Or Italian Americans? Nobody knows, because our state government doesn’t keep track of white ethnicity as a measure of criminality. But it used to, and not only did they used to, it used to do so in such an important way that it was justification for closing the borders to the Italian and Irish in the 19 twenties. So that’s a an example of things we think are fax are actually political choices, and often in the interest of denying people’s full citizenship rights, the current example, would be the current Trump administration, in its first and second attempts to get a Muslim, Ban, was calling for the federal government to create a news crime category of the statistical surveillance for foreign nationals because it wanted to prove the case that Muslim immigrants were more likely to engage in crime when, by every other evidence, we know that immigrants are less likely to commit crime, so that intervention essentially made the case that social sciences too reliant on things that can easily measure to make truth claims about how we should use our resource is, though perhaps the other example, which I think is really important in this moment is early arguments for the use of crime. Statistics gave way to what we would call Jim Crow education the separate but equal logic that black people don’t deserve the same quality Education in America was partly based on crime statistics, and the argument essentially was well, if black people keep committing so much crime than schools aren’t making the difference, why should we invest in their education if you look today? There is still arguments and evidence by economists who are measuring various schools and their effectiveness and educating African reckon Children on whether the crime rates are going up or going down. So the correlation or the association between whether a school is doing well and how much crime is in that community is a legacy of this past. I joke to my Harvard students, and I say, You know, if we were to try to quantify the economic and social impact of the crimes of Harvard alumni, members of the white elite who, whether it’s housing crises, whether its participation in the slave trade, whether it’s political choices that they have made and substantiate it stop and frisk, for example, was partly invented at the Harvard Kennedy School, where I currently work, we could quantify economically devastating toll on our democracy in terms of how many people lost their rights to vote, how many people’s homes were lost in their economic foothold on America was stripped and pulled from underneath them by legitimate financial transactions. That’s a simple way of saying we have no idea how many crimes have been committed by Harvard alumni because nobody’s counting.

[0:30:21 Peniel] That’s a great point to pivot to the present. Um, I think your work does so much brilliant illumination for the way in which we live now in terms of show us an origin story of a present of real racial division, certainly a present of riel recruitments, of white supremacy both as a national political project but also as a cultural project. When we think about the smears against Colin Kaepernick, we think about the smears against young African American women and men who have been shot and killed by the police. Whether it’s Corrine Gains or Travon Martin. Um, I want us look for a way forward a Z we as we were going to conclude. But I want us toe because I think that easily The best thing I’ve seen in my time my lifetime is a scholar, Um, is how we’ve gotten deeper into this story, you know, really, with the help of work like yourselves, like yourself. But also the 16 19 project, the work of you know, so many different scholars and activists and organizers. We actually have a much more sophisticated I would argue the most sophisticated understanding that we’ve ever had about the connection between race, slavery, capitalism, American history, things that Dr King Malcolm X, Ella Baker didn’t have, even though I think they felt Fannie Lou Hamer. So what can we do? What’s the way forward now? Utilising this evidence and Marshall and it’s getting New York Times. You’re part of a project that has been read by millions of people globally. So what can we do?

[0:32:00 Khalil] You know, it’s a great It’s a great question, and I’m smiling as you’re talking cause I’m going to give the both hand response. So on one hand, I think we’ll start with the bad news so we can end in this podcast on a good note. Okay, so the bad news is that if we think about climate change, we can. We can acknowledge that a decade of scientific research has built the capacity for us to measure, um ice cap melt in the Arctic Weaken measure all over the country, rising sea levels. And we know now based on scientific consensus, that releasing carbon into the atmosphere has been a primary driver of climate change. And so the solution to that is rolling back our carbon emissions and beginning to prepare for a turn of the fuel sources so that we can cut back on greenhouse emissions. All of that is what I think of is an analogous example of what you just described, which is from the time of 1968 when Dr King and Ella Baker were at their height to 50 years later, you and I represent two generations removed of people who’ve been able to not only study and learn from that movement, but been able to deepen and enhance the quote unquote scientific understanding of race in our society. Visa vee, Higher education. So the solution is the same for us. We have the same political problem. We have the evidence, we have the academic consensus. But we have to continue to do the work to move the political in the advocacy Nido to educate our students so that they treat this as the scientific problem that it iss one of the most compelling things that Dr King said in his last book. And I know you know, cause you have just written an amazing book, The Sword and the Shield. The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, out this April. You know this from his last book, which is is a doctor King not only recognize that the legislative achievements of the civil rights movement were not enough. Just like Obama’s climate policy or the Paris Accords was not enough, why wasn’t enough? Because even if you get a policy on the book, some one will come along and say, Why are we doing this? This is un American. This is a bad idea. So Dr King recognized that the problem wasn’t simply changing the law. The problem was that racism was a cancer on American society, and Americans kept turning away from recognizing that cancer as something it had to focus on. He used the word scientifically, he said. We have to fight it frontally. And so I think of our work today with the same point of view. I think of African American history as a kind of social vaccination that can immunize our population particular. Our youngest citizens, both native born and newcomer alike, who will be exposed to this story, going back to the founding of this country, going back even further to the capacity of human beings, to exploit each other in the name of economic progress. If we teach our Children these histories starting in kindergarten by the time they get to college. It won’t be new information I’m teaching. Folks in at Harvard University in the Kennedy School have never heard of most of these histories and then become very angry that they’re in their twenties and thirties, and they feel like they’ve been missing miseducated. And in fact, they have been miseducated so to come full circle. The solution to this problem, Pernille, is that you and I, and so many others have to continue to build infrastructure so that the science of racism becomes conventional wisdom in our society, that we helped to make people smarter and that we ultimately strengthen our democracy because by the time of five year old becomes a 25 year old becomes a 35 year old who might or might not want to run for president. That person will respect climate change. That person will respect the civil liberties and human rights of people, whether they’re here in the United States or in other parts of the globe. And maybe, just maybe, we can imagine a way of organizing are limited. Resource is of which capitalism has said that we should all be greedy and therefore out of our own greed. We will build a better society. Just maybe we can imagine a different way of organizing our economies so that we treat each other better.

[0:36:31 Peniel] All right, we’re gonna end on that note. Dr Khalil Gibran Mohammad. We’re talking optimistically about the way in which we can talk about our racial history but also moved towards a scientific understanding of, I guess, both racism, but also anti racism. Because the work that you do, um, eyes really about anti racism and sort of trying to infuse that in our public policy but political culture, but also our civil and civic discourse. You do so much wonderful public history work both as the former director of the Schomburg Center, Ondas now professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Dr. Mohammed has edited issues of the journal American History. He’s written extensively for The New York Times, the New York or Washington Post. Um, and he is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime and the Making of Modern America, which is out from Harvard University. Just published again, and you only get your book published a couple of times. People. It’s really a classic. In a new addition with the new prefaced 10th anniversary addition, Um, Ca will thank you for joining us here at race and democracy was a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. 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.