Ep. 8 – The Political Philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr at 90: A Conversation with Dr. Brandon Terry

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship.

[0:00:21 Peniel] We’re very pleased to have Dr Brandon M. Terry here, who is an assistant professor of African and African American studies and social studies at Harvard University and really one of our foremost political theorists and political philosophers of the black experience, especially black intellectual thought in the 20th century, um, as it relates to the civil rights era. And Dr Terry Brandon has a brand new book out that’s a co edited anthology with Tommy Shelby, who’s also at Harvard University. Philosopher. Eminent to Shape a New World, essays on the political philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr and he is the guest editor of a recent issue of The Boston Review of Boston Review Forum. 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr So it’s very interesting to have you here. A start of Black History Month and this is the 90th birthday would have been the 90th birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and this is the 4/100 anniversary of 16 19 and 19 enslaved Africans coming to Jamestown colony of Virginia s. So there’s a very special Black History Month as well. And so my first question for you is really about your work and really this very, very important anthology and special issue on Martin Luther King Jr. Because I think there’s a lot of work that has been done on Dr King, but really less so, much less so on the political philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr And so I wanna I want to ask you about and talk to you about you know, what is the argument that you and, um, Tommy Shelby are making in this introduction? But also, when you think about Dr King and political philosophy and political theory and sort of the intellectual history of political thought, why is there a Lacuna? What has not been talked about? What has not been investigated in terms of Dr King because they know who he is is this icon, but less so in terms of as this political theorist, right?

[0:02:23 Brandon] Well, first, I just want to say, you know, it’s honored to be here on the podcast. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you. Uh, you know, I’ve learned so much from your work, and it’s been such an inspiration, I think for a lot of us who have come after, you know, waiting to the midnight hour and things like that to be able to write about black power with without apology on, to be able to say things like these air serious thinkers with ideas that you have to consider And they’re not just, um, you know, figures in your hackneyed narrative about the good sixties in the bad sixties, right? So, I mean, it’s honor to be here. And in terms of Dr King and political philosophy, I think you hit on exactly part of the problem. Uh, since Dr King’s death since the canonization of Dr King is one of the pantheon figures in American civil religion, he’s become a figure that, almost to an iodine to even be controversial, much less provoked a revolution of values he called for in life. I want you to explain to our listeners civil religion and an adult shores. So so with civil religion, I mean, they’re these figures that we treat almost a ziff, their icons and a kind of religious fashion, right? So when we tell the story of the Civil War, we often use the tropes off Christianity to describe our relationship to Abraham Lincoln as a society. He’s somebody who died for our original sinning of racism. And in his death, you know, the blood that he spilled was able to consecrate a new founding, which we overcame this defect and became who we always already were right. That’s the kind of mythology King has the same function for the second reconstruction. Um, we you know, I I sometimes will tell the story I was when I was in graduate school and I was trying to put together the prospectus and was saying, I want to write about the political philosophy of the civil rights movement. Ah, professor I talked to about it said, Well, what’s philosophically interesting about that? We know that racism is wrong and he was extremely helpful, you know, usually used like, Oh, man, this guy’s terrible or something. But actually, he helped crystallize to me What the problem Waas that with a figure like King, we use him. We treat him as somebody who was innocuous, that somebody who’s not controversial doesn’t say anything to challenge us. He’s, ah, figure who’s supposed to put you back in touch with Who you are, your heart, who we are as Americans. Almost a Gunnar Myrdal story about this is who you are deep inside. You just need a reminder. You need somebody who can put it rhetorically in the right way. Somebody who sacrificed can move you toe, act on your deepest commitments. And what I want to say is that if you go back to the books, if you go back to the sermons, if you go back to the speeches, he’s saying stuff that so far out of the American mainstream, even now that it should radically unsettle us. He’s not somebody that’s easily digestible.

[0:05:37 Peniel] And on that score, one of the things that you write in the introduction, which I wanted to really hit focus on, is you talk about you write quote the neglect of kings, well considered and wide ranging treatments of many important philosophical and political issues, including labor and welfare rights, economic inequality, poverty, look, love, just war theory, virtue, ethics, political theology, just a whole range. And then you say, not to mention citizenship, nonviolent civil disobedience. So I want you to tackle some of that in terms of what can King teach us when we think about him as a political theorist and philosopher. one of things I like about the introduction is that you all make an argument that it doesn’t matter if something that King wrote might have been ghostwritten or something that King wrote was because presidents have things that goes with big figures aren’t necessarily writing line for Werlein, but it still means that he’s he was still a scholar. He still was a thinker.

[0:06:42 Brandon] Still public philosopher. I mean, you know, again, if we treat the writings of statesmen as important repositories of wisdom or philosophical insight, and we should treat the writings of Dr King that way, uh, you know, another kind of interpretive thing is that, you know, our general view is that if you put his name on it, ah, he was willing to be associated with those views in the public sphere, those air views that he reflectively endorsed, and we know a lot more about Hiss, writings and almost any black figure of the 20th century, with the possible exception of Du Bois. I mean, we just have reams and reams of sermons, notes, ephemera, books s So I think We have a lot of insight into a witty, actually thinks that he’s remarkably consistent, partly because he’s not alive that long, right? I mean, people forget the doctor. King died at 39. He never saw a day of 40 right? He was younger than Malcolm Max. People forget not you, brother, but, uh, people forget that. And so he was a young man. He had remarkably stable views about most things on what was really fascinating about him. The thing and I’ve come to really appreciate is that we often at least in the scholarly community or activist communities there’s this. There’s this idea of King as being all about a kind of charismatic authority, right, that he sort of stands up in front of an audience. He’s mesmerizing and spellbinding with rhetoric, and he kind of, um almost bludgeons you into supporting him by just the force of his personality. And it’s jarring that that that scholars would be kind of subject to that view, given the fact that King wrote five books, right? I mean, he published five extended arguments about why he was doing what he was doing, why I needed to be done at that particular moment, responding to counter arguments against his positions, critiquing other positions out there in the public sphere. I mean, to me, it’s a model for the kind of work that activist communities could be producing, right? Or when they’re at their best, that they do produce, Right? If you’re asking, you know, the king would say that. I mean, if you’re asking someone to risk their life to lay it all on the line for a particular project, you old them some reasons you owe them responses to criticisms that they might have. And you told them in good faith, you owe them with sympathy and charity and critical insight. And King was remarkable that both the quality of the responses he produced and his persistence and trying to do that as part of his political project

[0:09:27 Peniel] I want to talk about specifically Nonviolence, especially right now, Nonviolence and I also want you to talk about citizenship. But in the age of black lives matter, because I look at black lives matter as a social movement that drew upon both kinky and thought philosophy, but also the black power movements, structural critique of racism and inequality. Um, so When you think about King what he theorized about Nonviolence, what was the power of kings theory ization about the utility of Nonviolence, for social movements for black people, especially in the wake of all this racial terror? And how could we use that now?

[0:10:05 Brandon] Oh, there’s I mean, Kings Insights on this question are just extraordinary. And, you know, I do encourage people if they pick up the volume to shape a new world to take a look at the essays from Martha Nussbaum, Essays from Karuna Mantegna, essays from Lionel McPherson. I mean people who apply those insights and develop those insights into all sorts of fascinating directions concerning political emotion concerning the the so called division between means and ends or even foreign policy questions. But what I’ll say here just just sort of briefly is that, you know, a couple of things stand out to me. So one is that for King, Nonviolence is not just a kind of moralist project. I think people often treat it as a kind of almost naive or ah, a naive fidelity to metaphysical commitments about you need to refrain from violence. King is very thoughtful about the relationship between means and ends and politics. If you want to achieve a society that looks something like a society of, um, you know, cooperation, mutual recognition between civic equals that live on in a kind of spirit of friendship, beloved commune, a beloved community than if you want to deepen it. If you want that right, you are going to need a politics that gets you to that end without creating forms of resentment. UH, forms of you know if and liberal philosophers often called kind of modus vivendi, where people accept a state of affairs just because they’re forced to right, they don’t have any better options. You don’t want to bludgeon people into accepting a compromise. You want people to affirm the social order. You want people to have civic equality that stable not one that’s only secured by brandishing arms at the slightest provocation on. So Cain thought about. He thought a lot about what kind of politics there are politics that, at least likely to produce the emotional, um, the emotional chaos that would undermine a stable society that we could really affirm. That would be one of justice, so part of Nonviolence about delivering that and really thinking seriously about the relation between means and ends. Partly Nonviolence is about one of things I’ve come to appreciate about his theory ization of it. Partly it’s about throwing off the expectations of oppressive classes, right? So oftentimes oppressors will think that the violence of humiliation they dispense out will bring back more of the same. And so you actually end up having a kind of overlapping group between people who are really, really committed to the oppression. And they’re people who are just afraid of retaliation for a history of oppression. And King thought you could kind of split those people that there were people whose fears you could actually dissolve or undermine by forms of politics that wouldn’t exacerbate the fear of revenge and retaliation, often in black power literature. You get this. You get this view that if we strike fear into the heart of the white public, they’re actually back down, or they’ll readjust the extent to which they’re willing to be committed to, ah, project of racial domination. But in reality, often with that does it just increase. The paranoia increased the willingness to, um Teoh, have ah, you know, eventually we will call front lash, right. A preemptive suppression in advance of any year, serious revolutionary project getting off the ground or any serious project of violence.

[0:14:02 Peniel] I want you to talk about citizenship, and I’m gonna ask you a question of black power. And then finally on this and we’re gonna wrap up, um, citizenship. Because, really, I’ve gained a lot of insights from your work in terms of citizenship and the civil rights movement. And in my my forthcoming book, I make an argument about Dr King and Black Radical citizenship and what he meant by citizenship in a tangible way. Poor people’s campaign, you know? What does he mean in terms of food, justice, housing, guaranteed income? So King is, in my mind a policy expert, too. You know, that’s something that people don’t give Dr King

[0:14:37 Brandon] or end of why we can’t wait for you. Manifest.

[0:14:42 Peniel] Absolutely. And he’s influenced by buyers rushed in age, a musty the black social gospel John John, Kenneth Galbraith, John Kenneth Galbraith and his son is a professor. Eso talk to me about King and citizenship and what we can get from King’s conception of citizenship. Both then but what’s the gap between that conception of citizenship and what we have now in 2019

[0:15:08 Brandon] uh, more like a canyon. Uh, so I’ll just say I say two things because I think you laid out a lot of it, so well, um, one is that King thought that it wasn’t enough to extend people formal rights and recognition. Right, If you didn’t have enough support to develop the capacities and resource is actually take advantage of your rights, your rights were essentially hollow. They didn’t mean much. Not meaningless, but pretty close. So if you’ve got, uh, the right to go into any, this is an example he would use all the time. If you got the right to go into any place of public accommodation and sit down, it doesn’t mean much if you’re so poor that you can’t order food, right? If you have the formal right to vote, it doesn’t mean much If your district has been so Jerry manned, erred, and the organization of the state government is such that your power is so liminal that you don’t actually have any real voice and democratic affairs. So he was. He was very adamant that we experiment with all sorts of public policy solutions to try to get what he called a kind of riel civic equality, one that wouldn’t treat people with contempt when it wouldn’t put people below other other figures in their society when it made sure that people had, you know, a sufficient level of material resource is at their disposal, one that didn’t have extraordinary wealth differentials, which he thought made it very, very difficult for people toe keep a sense of their dignity and keep a sense of their equal self worth. So citizenship for him was wrapped up in a much larger bundle of social protections. Uh, economic equality, those kinds of things. And he bakes those right into the rights concept. Now another piece. I think people are starting to understand that story more a piece that I think people really don’t understand. This extremely far from where we are right now is that King had what we and and political theory often called a kind of agonist IQ conception of citizenship, which means that it involves citizens interacting and arguing with each other and con testing their relations with each other in public and a lot of different domains. So What we’ve tended to do is if you have a dispute with somebody else, we try to channel those things into the judicial system, right? If you don’t like the way your landlord is treating you, weeds tell you to see your landlord. Now that puts enormous obstacles to the poor enacting the full range of their citizenship. I mean, if you try to sue a multimillion Nair landlord, you know, you see how that goes. And what King thought was that we needed me almost on a mile of labor unions, right? But in many different sectors of society, so that there should be tenets unions for people who rent that there should be welfare unions for people who are subject to the bureaucratic authority of welfare administrators that they would be able to organize together and address concerns about mistreatment. I mean, you saw that that case in New York, where the woman and the benefits office had been attacked by the police and they were trying to snatch the baby from her arms, right, that in a case like that, I only recourse is like now it’s a it’s a go fund me page and a lawsuit King wanted there to be a space for all sorts of women to be able to come together and men to come together and be able to say These are the ways I’m being treated, have a bargaining position of power with the welfare bureaucracy and co determined democratically better ways of exercising bureaucratic authority. The same thing with housing in Baltimore. There’s a There’s a recent cases. So one of the most horrifying cases I’ve heard of women and the housing projects who needed vital repairs, right plumbing, heating and the janitorial staff maintenance staff at the projects knew that these women had no power. And in order to get they’re things, you know, the repairs fixed. These men in the maintenance staff extracted sexual favors from the women in the public housing units so that in exchange for fixing your heating so that your Children wouldn’t go without heat, you know you have to perform this sex act on their basically assaulting, raping these women coursing these women for a thing that they’re totally entitled to. And these women have such low expectations about their ability to change any of that, and you understand why they’re not wrong. to have low expectations of accurate sense of things. Such a low expectation that they go along with it, right, that they are coerced into it, that they acquiesced to the coercion. Dr. King would see something like that and think, Yeah, you sue those people. That’s truly people got to get compensated for the suffering they’ve gone under. But how do you fix a problem like that? Long term and in perpetuity, you empower the people so that they’re coming together and unable to share those stories. And it’s not just happening to me. This is something that is a much broader pride problem. The whole housing community is gonna hold people accountable who do this, and we’re not gonna take that kind of exploitation of subjection. That’s a much broader vision of citizenship than I think Anybody right now is really articulating and certainly that we associate with Dr

[0:20:55 Peniel] King. I want to ask you about Dr King and Black Power, because in this anthology you have an essay on the problem space of black power and you look at a bunch of different thinkers. Everybody from Robert F. Williams, I’m Kwamie to raise Stokely Carmichael. Um, there were utilization of France phone on and sort of, you know, these theories of decolonization and sort of a restoration of a kind of humanity, but one that would be forged in some interpretations through violence and other interpretations. Not through that. I want to talk about King and Black power because I think King is very interesting in the sense that he marches alongside black power activists. Hey has a critique of them, but he never demonizes them. He’s very, very good friends with Stokely Carmichael later Kwamie Toray. And in a lot of ways, King comes to, um, in my mind, start to align with certain aspects of that movement, especially when we think about self determination, racial pride. He’s saying things like, You know, there even telling us in a dictionary that black is bad and all the white things were good. And so King sounds at times not not necessarily like some narrow nationalist but a kind of, um, certainly a black power cosmopolitan. I’m thinker and figure and activist. So talk to me about you know, what do you mean by the problems based of black power and what is King’s relationship to that problem? space.

[0:22:20 Brandon] Well, in many ways, the the idea of black power is representing a problem. Space builds on the kind of work you’ve done right. So I think for so many people, black power is, you know, a convenient foil. People want to explain it. They want to say, Well, look, it’s just about There’s a difference between the South in the northern ghettos or its a difference in generations, right? Or it’s a difference between people who have, ah, kind of, you know, the cold Christopher lash line, right, so that the civil rights movement in South, under Dr King had a spiritual discipline against resentment and black power. People lack that spiritual discipline for complicated reasons of their family upbringing or, you know, cultural contacts, and therefore they turned to the politics of revenge and resentment. I want to say again, I think building on so much of the work that you’ve done, I want to say that this is actually a wide ranging philosophical and political dispute about a whole range of issues, and to try to reduce it to something like temperament or geography, I mean, is offensive in a way. It takes these people as um, you know, silly characters and not as people seriously trying to wrestle with some of the greatest questions of our time there. People thinking about what do the poor have political agency and under what conditions? Uh, how should we think about the nature of culture? Cultural difference, right? Particularly under a culture industry where capitalism and commercialism a part of the story. How should we think about the role of Christian ideals in black American political and cultural life? Are they a problem? Do you need a Nietzschean critique of the influence of Christianity, or do you need some kind of rehabilitation of those ideas to meet the depth of the challenge of white supremacy? All of these things are on the table is such a fascinating way life or death struggle way. And we’re you know, we kind of just throw all that to the size of so my idea. The problem states that just really say, Look, let’s take these debates as a series of problems as problems at all hang together and realize that when people are writing at this moment, they’re trying to intervene. In particular debates that have really parameters and steaks and all sorts of interlocutors understand the parameters of the debate, and you even even go into, in your essay strong versus weak

[0:24:56 Peniel] arguments within that problem space. You’re taking them seriously. But you’re also being very, very critical, saying, like, you know, here’s Here’s where people have made a very effective argument but hears arguments that are better, less so.

[0:25:10 Brandon] I’m extremely critical. I mean, you know this. I’m extremely critical Lots and lots of goes on under the banner of black power. But we also have to be honest that there’s some real deep insights there, there, people who you know, I give you one example at the time, and this is a an inheritance from France for known. They’re all these thinkers will try to bring that the concept of colonialism into the United States, right and say, You know, the ghettos of Oakland are an internal colony, and what’s funny is that these people get mocked or dismissed. Actually, one of the first critical argue articles about the internal conversation thesis was written by Kamala Harris is Father was economist at Stanford. He wrote one of the big critiques of this

[0:25:52 Peniel] in the 19 seventies. Harris, the senator from California, has announced a presidential run.

[0:25:57 Brandon] I don’t know. She will take a stand on the colonization leases during the campaign, but her father assured the uh and so anyway, so you know, the people dismissed this idea. But actually, if you really dig into I mean there’s such fascinating ideas there about how do we think about the ghetto? Is a kind of territorial space space of exception where people can exploit with impunity where people can overcharge for certain goods based on the way that racial, different racial difference interacts with market desires, police brutality. And what is the role of the police in a community like that? All of these things that they’re getting at through the concept that we should revisit. I mean, it’s an It’s an important set of insights that still might matter for today. And so I say all of that just to say that, you know, when I when you treat that that you know, when you use the concept of a problem space for me, What it allows you to do is take the arguments more seriously. Map how people move in our distinctive within the space. So Huey Newton of the Black Panthers is not the same about as Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers. We’re not the same as Amiri Baraka. You’re trying to understand the differences between people instead of just saying You’re black power person and you’re not. And you get to put Martin Luther King and other figures like that really in the conversation because they were Martin Luther King really changed a lot of his ideas, change some of these embassies, but was also critical in some important ways. You get back to some fundamental debates about what matters for the legacy of black politics.

[0:27:37 Peniel] Now I wanna I wanna really close with a couple of questions. One. I’m looking at Your Boston Review Special issue and talk about Dr King, you know, 50 years later and this is a forum. And in your introduction to the Forum, at one point you write quote In King’s work, the point of philosophical reflection on racism is political. I tallis eyes, and here’s a quote from King. The prescription for the cure arrest with the accurate diagnosis of the disease having the right theoretical understanding of racism. One of the quote triple evils. Close quote of the United States, along with militarism and poverty is, in other words, ah, critical element of effective activism. So I wanna, you know, you get into King’s theory of racism, has three main components. Something that you explain that I want, you know, ask you. What do you mean by that? Its political and you italicize that. And then how can kings critique of the triple evils of militarism? Poverty, Racism, which is really king? Is this massive anti imperialist? He’s not just the radical King at that point. He’s the revolutionary King, even though it’s not nonviolent. And some people think that that’s a contradiction. But it’s not. It’s not, um, how can we use those insights today? Because I think when people look at King in the context of 2019 you think about black lives matter. But I also think about march for a large women’s march. Immigration DACA. I think about, you know, activists, environmental activism, all of it very, very capacious. So how can that insight that he’s fundamentally It’s a political philosophy That’s but that is political impact us now.

[0:29:23 Brandon] There’s actually really great debate now amongst environmental activists about the use of violence. They’re a bunch of environmental groups who are, or self proclaimed disciples of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Um, and they basically made the argument that the climate change, uh, problem has gone so far that the only way toe, you know, turn anyone to use violence. At this point, the only way to achieve that real ends of securing the Earth for posterity is violence. And so it’s, you know, these air debates that are live within many, many different segments off, you know, civil society. But, you know, when I when I wrote that one of the things I was trying to get out when I say the point of the point of philosophical reflection on racism for King is political is that there are trends in the academy and, um, civic life and cultural criticism, uh, that some people group under the term Afro pessimism, you may or may not find that useful. Um, sure, and and And that the general view there often is that no political project to defeat racism to undermine racial oppression, Richard domination is ever gonna be successful. Um, and they’ve got very, you know, depending who you talk to. Those various different views of why that is. But the fundamental thing is that they’ve got a kind of commitment to an ironic history that every attempt to try to change it ends up reconstituting the domination ends up bringing the domination back in a different form. You try toe, destroy slavery, you come back with slavery by another name, and it’s sharecropping. It’s constantly releasing Jim Crow. You destroyed Jim Crow. Then you get the new Jim Crow. Its mass incarceration is ghettoization, right? So they’ve got this view and you know that many of us were sympathetic toe parts of that. Right now, I’m not gonna deny the ghettoization is an enormous problem where something like that, but there’s a general view from this line that the fundamentals have not changed. They’re still the massive structure of domination. And politics is therefore not a reasonable response or judicious response or, ah, meaningful response to this problem. And therefore you might ask the question, Why are you writing about racism If you think this doesn’t actually do anything or change anything, why I keep writing about it and actually get me coats, for example, will give you a good reason I asked him this question when he visited Harvard. Um,

[0:32:04 Brandon] and he’s like, Well, got to prove something to myself, right? I wanted to prove something to myself about whether I was right or not. Eso is almost a kind of existentialist commitment to no will to truth, integrity. By staring into the abyss and being able to say what it is on. I want to distinguish what King is up to from that right. I don’t thinking thinks that King really thinks you can change these things. And there’s a question. Why does he think, given the evidence, Why does he think you can change him? And part of it is he’s got a different theory of racism For him, racism is one thing that’s really, really important. Congenital deformity. The United States, he says, but interacts with all of these different social processes. Technological innovation, cultural patterns, right things about masculinity sometimes writes about what, what, you know, Western settler colonial masculinity. He’s got a particular critique of interacting with all of these different things that can’t be reduced to anti black racism. And the interesting thing about that is that because those social processes air fundamentally following different lines of development. Their interaction causes unforeseen opportunities. They’re things that might happen that you don’t know because I mean, think about where we are now. Just in the last 10 15 years. Massive transformation in, um, computing power, massive transformation and in the quality of artificial intelligence, fundamental transformations in the cost and effectiveness of gene editing, fundamental transformations of social media, technology, amplification of voice. These things are going to create unprecedented opportunity, some good, some bad. But you have to have a fundamental for King. I think so. Much of the hope is like a epistemology. Humility thinks you just don’t know and what hope is in one way I run the hope line that he that he’s developed that he’s tryingto defend is that hope is kind of like a virtue epidemic virtue. It’s it’s about trying toe keep an eye out for opportunities as they arise to produce justice in the world. The pessimist because they’re so confident that those opportunities will never be there. It actually dulls your ability to discern an opportunity if you, if it were toe arise. If something were to change, you probably wouldn’t be able to see it because you so convinced yourself that no such thing will ever occur. Um, and I think King gives us lots of good reasons to think that’s not the case. You know, he lays out extensively in all the books about the relationship between political economy, technology, racism. But it’s all leading toward that view that the politics are always gonna be possible because they’re unforeseen opportunities for collective

[0:35:01 Peniel] action. All right, I think, um, I think we’ll we’ll close on that. But I’m gonna ask you just a, you know, briefly, um, you know where we at now? In terms of, you know, this is the 90th birthday of Dr King. Celebrations just continue to grow. We have a national African American history Museum we’ve got came from his imperial, um, someone somewhat levels, you know, we have real cause for racial optimism. At the same time, we’ve got huge cause for that, you know, even if we don’t call the Afro Pessimism, But but for some pessimistic feelings about racial justice, citizenship, equality, where we at now and how can king and what Waken king, you know, impact. You know, that movement for in that struggle for justice and citizenship.

[0:35:55 Brandon] Well, we’re on the precipice of some really difficult times. You know, um, I think coming out of the mid 20th century, many in the United States thought we were on an inexorable march toward, uh, mostly just stable liberal capitalist democracies that no longer looks true. Authoritarianism is rampant around the world. The European Union is a project seems on the precipice of collapse. European liberals are in retreat. The cost in, um, humanitarian crises and recrimination and suspicion of our military escapades for the last almost 20 years have been astronomical. Dummy looked at the cost for that are astronomical. And we haven’t even begun to really work through the ways in which that’s related to the resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, the opioid crisis and United States. So we’ve got some dark days ahead. I mean, there’s no question about it. The only question is, what are the resource is in our traditions to confront them adequately. Uh,

[0:37:10 Brandon] do we turn as people have turned in the past? You know, Ira Katznelson is great book. Do we turn? Embrace fascism, Authoritarianism as a way out of these difficult to use? Or do we try to defend what King called the Democratic spirit. Do we try to defend a project of racial equality, or do we retreat to the resurgence off new biology’s of racism? Right? I think if we don’t defend the dignity and significance of the most critical thinkers about tradition, if we don’t ask honest and serious questions about, um, the relationship between things like political economy, imperialism, racism and, of course, sexism, we don’t ask tough questions about the ways those interacted. Instead, just try to reduce one. You know all of those things toe toe one because it makes for great poetic flourish, right? Or it seems much simpler if we can kind of run the line that way, If we do, those things were lost. And so for me, you know, this is just a kind of small contribution to were saying, Look, I think there’s something important here, you know, maybe 10 years of hashing it out and arguing over it. It doesn’t stand up to the most sustained critical scrutiny. I doubt that, but maybe, but this is a opening salvo and trying to push that conversation forward with some different resources because we’re in desperate need of. The people need hope. They need better social theory. They need a sense of, uh, political possibility to be reopened and a few figures on the American scene with the kind of authority that could break through the morass. Like Dr Kean. So I’m frightened, but I’m hopeful in the same way. And I’m in the same way, I think. Dr. King Waas.

[0:39:04 Peniel] All right, we’re going to leave it there. Frightened but hopeful. This, uh, this was a great conversation. This reminds me of Dr King’s speech before the American Psychological Association in September of 1967. And he asked for the same things that Dr Terry is saying here. That Brandon saying here he wanted scholars to really investigate in terms of social theory, social science and, you know, laboratory Praxis. So this is this is really great. Thank you so much for having for being a guest on the show. It’s always get the same.

[0:39:34 Brandon] Always a pleasure

[0:39:35 Peniel] And he’s about to drop some science on some of our students and our LBJ community here at University of Texas. Austin. So this is This is great.

[0:39:44 Brandon] Thank you so much.

[0:39:46 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.