This is Democracy – Episode 6: Race and Democracy in America Today

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Introduction with many voices: This is Democracy- a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.
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Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of “This is Democracy”. We’re here today to talk about one of the most important issues and one of the most present issues in our society today. The intersection between race and democracy. And we have an individual who’s a good friend and colleague and it’s safe to say that one of the most important people writing and thinking about these issues in the United States today. This is my colleague Professor Peniel Joseph. Good to have you here Peniel.
Peniel: Thanks for having me Jeremi.
Jeremi: Before we turn to Peniel and our discussion of race and democracy we have a poem of course from Zachary. Zachary what’s your poem entitled today?
Zachary: “Vicksburg to Montgomery to Chapel Hill”.
Jeremi: Oh wow, sounds like it’s going to cover a lot of ground.
Zachary: Yeah.
Jeremi: Okay go ahead.
Zachary: “At night along an Alabama freeway with road signs and history blurred into an image of the road ahead. After crossing the bridge at sunset in the Selma lit by headlights, driving to the capital through the darkness. Early afternoon the car with the news on, radio humming I wondered if America would ever find a freeway? If there would always be people weeping kids, below party and capital. If you could ever turn the news off and go to sleep, taking a road trip through the south is an endless strip of Waffle Houses and McDonald’s. Looking for the sign that finally says “Welcome to Maryland.” You don’t forget. I walk through the old church and the bus stop waves to me after breakfast and the hot sun drags me up to a white marbled building with the dome as high as a five story building. You laugh and you cry, but in a somewhere far from everywhere, a child not allowed to be touched will never sing again Old MacDonald and his mother. And people more proud and married to the land they have never been allowed to touch was told that they have no way home. I sit in the car through Atlanta traffic with my pale skin and I laugh to the music forgetting my own mothers and fathers who play in boat never once waffled over the little houses. And then the South Carolina sunset, I forget my own vow to the land that took my fathers and mothers vows. And I don’t remember the same people in cages because they happen to be brown. And the next day I cannot believe that slaves were tortured just outside of this town and North Carolina, Virginia come and go, but Alabama, Mississippi they went slow.”
Jeremi: That’s heavy Zachary. What is the poem about?
Zachary: It’s about a road trip we took this summer from Vicksburg to Montgomery to Chapel Hill.
Jeremi: And what about the road trip?
Zachary: And seeing all the sort of Civil Rights and historical places but also like hearing the news and trying to connect it to current events. Things like that.
Jeremi: Right, right. Well that’s a perfect place for us to start with Peniel Joseph here. Peniel, so many of us lived through the election of Barack Obama. Many of our listeners were young children then, but this seemed to many and you’ve written about this better than anyone else. This seemed to many like the beginnings of a post-racial America. Why didn’t that happen?
Peniel: Well I think it didn’t happen because race was too deeply embedded in all our democratic institutions. Probably more so than we thought. In way we’ve historically looked and I think Zachary’s beautiful poem sort of attest to this. We’ve looked to symbols and signs for racial progress right. So when you have the first African American anything whether it’s a CEO, Professor at Harvard University, or University of Texas, Heman Sweatt, you know the first Black student at the law school. You say hey this is an example of racial progress. Things are getting better and that seems a logical assumption. So by the time Obama was elected we say hey, that’s really basically the last barrier that we’ve seen symbolically. We’ve never had a Black president. What that didn’t really place into context was how deeply embedded institutional racism is in terms of institutions. So when we think about the new racism post-Jim Crowe, post-Civil Rights, it has less to do with signs that say “Colored” and “White.” It has more to do with basically outcomes right? Where are people? When you go to the top schools, when you go to the top neighborhoods in America. The top corporations. Universities, Silicon Valley. Are those places not just diverse, but do you find Black Americans in those places?
Jeremi: Right, Austin would be another example. Austin is one of the most segregated cities in the U.S.
Peniel: Absolutely. So in the aftermath of his election, people got very, very excited. We had this beautiful First Family. But underneath that when we think about our citizenry. When we think about institutions of criminal justice for example, mass incarceration. We think about residential segregation, public school segregation. Austin is a place where if you’re white, your kids probably aren’t going to school with Black kids right? So those are all these different ways that you know racial segregation, Jim Crowe, racism still exist and thrive even in the age of Obama.
Jeremi: Right, and I mean the statistics are eye opening on this. As you know better than anyone else and as you’ve written. I mean if you look at mass incarceration the incredibly high number of African American males in prison higher than the number in college for example. Many citizens would say today especially older citizens, they’d say “Well we’re less racist. We don’t say the things. We don’t use the N word. We don’t visibly and personally discriminate.” So how do we explain the changes and what appear to be personal attitudes but yet the existence of continual institutional racism?
Peniel: Well one thing I’ll interject Jeremi. That statistic, there are more African Americans who are in college than in prison there’s a few scholars who don’t work and just looking at the statistic. But it’s certainly a large number, it’s a large number of African Americans who are incarcerated. When we think about where we’re at in terms of post-Civil Rights and post–these social movements. In a lot of ways, a movement like Black Lives Matter is an example of a continuation of that struggle in a way that juxtaposes with Obama’s rise. So in 2015, we had Ferguson and Baltimore–2014 and 2015, blow up in terms of whether you want to call them riots or urban rebellions or civil disturbances. What was remarkable was that the president wasn’t Lyndon Johnson, it was Barack Obama and he was saying many of the same things Lyndon Johnson said. He was saying look, we have to have law and order. We have to have a peaceful society. Yes, injustice is bad, but you can’t counter man injustice with looting and with violence. But at the lower frequencies. Like Ralph Ellison talked about the lower frequencies of African American life. What you saw in Ferguson in 2015 which was really remarkable was not only an African American city under siege by police who were illegally giving people warrants and harassing and surveilling them but you saw real poverty. You saw real real entrenched poverty. The kind of poverty that Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. spent their lives trying to address. But you saw it in 2015, juxtaposed against the Black president. Cell phones, rapid technology. What I found really fascinating with Ferguson and really heartbreaking, was less the violence than when you saw CNN and Fox News and MSNBC interview young people, teenagers in Ferguson. Some of them were missing teeth. You saw the lack of nutrition. These were people on the ground and we think about American civil society all of us who have children, we have healthcare, we have access, those of us who are professors at UT, right? And you saw that their living in another country so for them when Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson came down to Ferguson, they were actually booed, Jeremi. They were booed by Black people, right. And you think why were these young people booing them. It’s because they heard a narrative of success of the Civil Rights movement. They heard a narrative of you know John Lewis, Andrew Young, so many different people, Oprah Winfrey, who are hugely successful. And that narrative is true but it’s incomplete. That’s what I would say. So when we think about racial progress, Obama is absolutely an example of racial progress. When we think about the country, we have absolutely progressed in certain quarters when we think about racial justice. We have vast swathes who are living in a racial wilderness that we refuse to talk about.
Jeremi: And in a certain way it’s like Michael Harrington’s other America of the early 60s. Right it’s an America we don’t see. We fly over it. We feel we’re connected to other elites and we miss this other world around us. It’s certainly true in Austin, Texas where you can never go to the east side and never see what’s happening there. How is Black Lives Matter addressing this? You’ve been one of the most eloquent exponents of Black Lives Matter and also you’ve historicized the movement so how should we think about Black Lives Matter?
Peniel: I think the BLM movement is a social movement. A very important social movement. And they’re really practicing what the legal scholar, Kimberly Crenshaw calls intersectionality. And that’s really a big word to talk about identity in a nuanced way.
Jeremi: We use it in our podcast too actually. We introduced the podcast inspired by that. Go ahead.
Peniel: And when we think about intersectionality it’s really how we live our lives. It’s race, place, geography, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and all these things impact us in different ways so you can be somebody who’s African American, Jewish, Muslim you know transgender, young, somebody who’s not able bodied. All those things impact us. So what’s intriguing about Black Lives Matter is that it implicitly has a critique of the conventional and traditional Civil Rights struggle. And that critique is that that movement was not expansive enough. Where are the gay people? Where are the people on the margins? And what Black Lives Matter does is two things. It makes an argument that the criminal justice system represents a gateway to multiple systems of oppression in the United States. So criminal justice system whether we’re talking about high bail. Whether we’re talking about disparate sentencing for Black and White criminals. Whether we’re talking about the fees that prisoners have to pay even after they’re incarcerated.
Jeremi: For soap.
Peniel: For soap and different things. Whether we’re talking about no access to housing and no access to food stamps or check the box if you have a felony conviction–they’re saying it’s a gateway to multiple systems of oppression that are connected to public schools. They’re connected to what we used to call housing projects. They’re connected to residential segregation. So that’s one argument. The second is that when we think about social justice in the United States, we have to think about the most marginalized communities. We can’t just say that we’re trying to liberate or free Black straight males or the usual cast of characters. We have to think about who are the most marginal people in our society and from that perspective we’re looking at LGBTQ communities. They’re looking at communities that are HIV positive. They’re looking at communities that live in environmental toxic areas. What’s interesting about the Black community and Latino community is that they are more likely to live in environmentally toxic neighborhoods. Black and Latino children have higher rates of asthma for instance. And not exercise induced asthma. We’re saying asthma because you you’re living in areas that are unclean and unsafe. Unlike Hyde Park and Rosedale.
Jeremi: Right, right.
Peniel: You know Austin, Texas right? So BLM has been great and they have a policy agenda. They have a comprehensive policy agenda state by state about what grassroots communities can do to try to end racial injustice. And they link racial injustice to issues of immigration. They link racial injustice to issues of sexual assault and domestic violence when we think about the Me Too movement. They link racial injustice to gun violence when we think about the march for our lives. We think about intersectional, one of the most exciting things that’s happening right now in 2018 are so many different movements are seeing the commonalities that we share. Because you can talk about a particular struggle like the Black freedom struggle or the Jewish freedom struggle but all those struggles are what–trying to get to a universal truth.
Jeremi: Right, right. It sounds like such a powerful movement and a movement that has so many idealistic qualities to it. Why are there so many people who seem frightened by it?
Peniel: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it really calls into mind, our narrative and you write narratives beautifully. You talk about whether it’s presidential history, whether it’s the Cold War or international relations and really all of our stories our lives as historians and even public policy experts. People want a story. People have a story of their lives. Zach has a story, you have a story, Alison, Natalie, we all have a story. And so part of our story of the Civil Rights movement and this doesn’t mean it’s historically accurate. But the story of the Civil Rights movement is that we embrace racial justice as a nation. And we should be proud of ourselves. We embraced Martin Luther King Jr. We embrace sit in demonstrators. The President of the United States said we shall overcome March 15th, 1965. We signed Civil Rights acts, we signed voting rights acts. The truth is more complicated. We were frightened of let’s not even say Malcolm X, were frightened as a nation of Martin Luther King Jr, because even though he was a proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience, he was trying to coerce us and trying to persuade us into doing something racial justice that we had never done before.
Jeremi: He was a radical.
Peniel: He was a radical. Yeah, King is a radical. He’s just a non-violent radical which I think sometimes people in their heads, they conflate. They say can you be a radical or a revolutionary if you’re non-violent? The answer is absolutely yes. You look at Gandhi, you look at Nelson Mandela, you look at King. Those are all people who were political revolutionaries but who are non-violent. So when we think about Black Lives Matter and in a lot of ways it’s stoked up fear. It’s stoked up fear that this is a movement that’s not only trying to criticize the United States, but there’s an assault on privilege when we think about Black Lives Matter. Because when we think about racial justice, sometimes people say well we’re not going to have to sacrifice anything for racial justice or gender justice or economic justice. As you and I know friend, that’s not true. We’re going to have to sacrifice certain kinds of privileges, certain kinds of male privileges, certain kinds of skin color privileges, certain kinds of economic privileges that we’ve all normalized.
Jeremi: Right and so this is probably one of the reasons that there’s a lot of controversy around affirmative action. Right.
Peniel: Absolutely.
Jeremi: Because in a sense people have been asked to open doors to universities and other areas.
Peniel: Corporate boards.
Jeremi: Right.
Peniel: Yeah, city councils. You know you think about Alison Halter on the city council you’re saying that usually historically we’ve had city councils that are all male, all white. Absolutely, affirmative action is about saying that the privilege has to be spread and people really push back against that. Especially elites. Elites love the fact that they have power and they’re uncomfortable with sharing that power.
Jeremi: Of course, of course. And we often think that we deserve the power we have when it’s not always true.
Peniel: Absolutely.
Jeremi: A point that comes to me from a lot of students of minority backgrounds like myself is often well I’m the only one in the room and it’s very hard for me to participate in the discussion with other students or it’s very hard for me to raise a criticism when I’m the only one. What do you say to students like that? How do you give students the confidence to do what you do so well? To in a collegial way speak up and speak with authority.
Peniel: Well I’d say one of the lessons I’ve learned is to speak your truth. And when you think about students, you’re always wanting them to use facts to use data, to use what they’ve read but also they have to use their personal experience. All of us have a personal experience and part of that leads us to our story. Because everything we’re doing in class is about a story. We’re narrating a story of our lives, of our existence, of American history, of American politics, how did we get to this point today. And so students of color and students coming from backgrounds that are non-majority backgrounds they have to speak their truth and I think sometimes that can be uncomfortable but we have to be willing to speak truth the power, and have these courageous conversations and give people an alternative view, because some of the times when you’re the only person in the room, your point of view is the one that’s most sorely needed. We know this. I mean teaching at the LBJ School. Teaching in the history department, these are places that are not going to be as diverse as we might like and so our perspective of saying hey, let’s look at this another way when we think about the curriculum, when we think about the students, when we think about campus climate. We have real things to say that a lot of times our colleagues are just unaware of. A lot of times our colleagues, so we talked about one thing would be great to talk about when we think about this conversation on race is passive versus active racism. A lot of our colleagues and when we think about the United States of America, certainly there’s active racism. A lot of it is passive too. Where people are just not thinking about justice in this way or representing other people in this way because they sort of normalize their own existence and in certain ways we all do. The house we live in, the neighborhood we live in, our children, our children’s friends. We normalize it, we say hey my children are excellent. They’re hugely intelligent.
Jeremi: Everyone thinks their children are above average right?
Peniel: Yeah, they’re ambitious, they’re great people, they’re kind. So we normalize it and we can’t think of a family that’s dysfunctional. And so when we think about the United States of America, we’ve normalized a certain way in which we get along in terms of race relations and a lot of times we don’t think about talking about other points of view. So when we get those other points of view, it’s really important and if you can be in those spaces, and part of being in those spaces is not only providing an alternative point of view but opening up those spaces to other people of color, not being a gatekeeper. I mean obviously this is something that you’ve done your whole career is that you don’t want to be the only person, Stanford, Yale, UT, Wisconsin–these are hugely elite spaces but you’re saying hey let’s bring other voices here and really shake this place up in a good way.
Jeremi: But it’s a real challenge as you and I have experienced and as I’m sure many of our listeners I’m sure are experiencing throughout their careers because when you’re given access often times there are rules of the game you’re asked to play by. And to some extent when you’re the first person on the board or the first person in the club, you can’t say I want to tear it all down, because there’s nothing left. But on the other hand you don’t want to become someone’s who’s actually contributing to the passive racism. And we’ve all seen that happen too.
Peniel: Absolutely, you don’t want to become complacent. If you’re one of the first you want to open it up but absolutely you want to open it up in a way where you’re persuading and you’re getting people to go along with you and that goes back to what we talked about with the Civil Rights movement. By the end of the heroic period of the Civil Rights movement that I call ’54 to you could say ’65, but really by the end of that period, we’ve all convinced ourselves that there’s a narrative of social justice and a consensus around racial justice that when we think about Black Lives Matter, in a way Black Lives Matter disrupts that consensus because it’s saying look we haven’t come as far as we all thought and we need to move in different ways. I think that shook everyone. I think it shook Barack Obama. It shook people on both sides of the political divide.
Jeremi: Yeah, it shook me.
Peniel: Yeah, people didn’t realize that this kind of suffering was really happening. Again, we are the wealthiest country in the world, we are the country that can do the most for justice and human rights in the world. We’re the country that you know built up when we think about World War II the largest industrial run up in really five years and world history right? So we can do anything we put our mind to. We put the first man on the moon right? And so we can tackle racial justice and inequality, but we are uncomfortable doing so and a lot of times we push back in really harsh ways against those who try to prick our conscience.
Jeremi: How do you–if I can ask a personal question, how do you remain so positive? One of the things I love about you Peniel is that you see the horror, you look into the abyss, but you remain optimistic and positive and I sometimes worry that in the age of Trump, a lot of our citizens are losing that. There’s a despondence you often hear in people. Explain to us where your optimism comes from and why we should all remain optimistic.
Peniel: Oh yeah, I think my optimism comes from my mother. You know my mother is a Haitian, she was a hospital worker. She’s retired now, 79 years old. But she certainly was my first history teacher and I think it’s my mom but also history. It’s my daughter right. It’s all these things. History I think shows us that at its best, American democracy works. I think history shows us in terms of social justice movements whether it’s the labor movement or women’s suffrage or environmentalism, Latino and farmworkers movements that social justice can not only survive in America, it can thrive in America and it can transform things. So my belief in American democracy is connected to Martin Luther King Jr. I’m working on a book on King and Malcolm X now and Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and these are folks who were you know referencing Zach’s poem, they were in Mississippi, they were in Alabama, they were in Vicksburg. They were in all these places and they really tried to transform American small deed democracy for everyone. And people we think about our soldiers and our military and our servicemen who’ve done extraordinary things for this country and continue to do so and who have bled for democracy. Activists have bled for democracy right here in Austin, TX. That’s what gets me excited.
Jeremi: And they are today.
Peniel: They are today and so I think yeah, I’m absolutely optimistic. I think we have a lot of problems. I think that BLM and these other social movements have shown us the depth and the breadth of that problem. I think we don’t right now have a political officials that are as good as our nation is but all of that can be changed and transformed.
Jeremi: So my final question to you for now, I so enjoyed talking to you Peniel about this. I love having you has a colleague and I’ll know we’ll have you on many many more times because these are such important issues. But for right now at least I think it would be helpful for us to close with this sort of advice you’ve been giving to students to activists. I know lots of people come to you for advice because of your historical perspective and your optimism. What should our listeners who want and go out and make a difference today and don’t know where to start. What should they be doing?
Peniel: Yeah, the thing that I give is three points. And that’s educate, organize, and agitate. So educate yourself and others about these issues. There’s great books to read whether it’s the new Jim Crowe by Michelle Alexander Jim Former Jr. Pulitzer Prize winning “Locking up our own.”
Jeremi: Or your own fantastic biography of Stokely Carmichael that I noticed Spike Lee used in his movie.
Peniel: Yeah so there’s different films, there’s different ways to educate yourself. Organize, organize study groups. Organize in your community, join organizations that are talking about social justice but that are also talking about intersectionality. Agitate, you’ve got to stand up. I mean the young women and young boys and men who are out there are our future so you’ve got to agitate, but you’re going to agitate in way that’s respectful. And so organize, educate, agitate and you’re never going to feel cynical if you do that because you’re going to be in the game. And obviously is a part of this but voting is the tip of the spear when we think about civic engagement and activism. So we all have to vote, we all have to register our children to vote. We have to take our children into the voting booths with us so that they know and get comfortable with voting. Folks like Zach and Natalie and we’re raising this next generation but we have to be optimistic and we have to be optimistic for our children. If our children and you can see how well your children have turned out which is brilliant. They take from you and Allison just like Aya take from me. They take from our example. Our children see us as engaged and thoughtful and happy and optimistic they’re going to be those citizens so that’s why we have to be optimistic.
Jeremi: It’s so powerful because what you’re saying is also historically grounded. We know it works. If A. Philip Randolph were here it’s exactly what he would say. The great organizer of African American labor in the early 20th century and the person really organized the March on Washington. And Martin Luther King would say the same thing. The history really does offer optimism. Zachary what do you think? Are you going to educate, organize and agitate?
Zachary: Sure.
Jeremi: How are you doing that?
Zachary: I’m trying to stay engaged in politics but also it’s easy to get caught up in the normal routines.
Jeremi: So how to do you get yourself from getting caught up in the normal routines?
Zachary: I read and a write and I talk to my friends about issues like this.
Jeremi: That’s great.
Peniel: I think that poem is a great example. I think that poem is terrific and I think that poem is an example of being that engaged and hopefully you’ve shared that poem with a lot of people, with your classmates, your friends. You know on social media too because I think that’s terrific.
Jeremi: And what I’m always impressed with Zachary with you and with Peniel and with so many of the wonderful people I get so see every day is how this is part of our lives. This is not something we say okay, a few hours a day we’re going to think about this. This is part of what we do every day.
Peniel: Oh no absolutely. I mean it’s [00:25:51] it’s a way of living. And when I was listening to that poem I was like hey this is like some great historic classic.
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You know who’s this? Who’s this? Is this Giovanni? And Zachary is just pulling them out, this is great.
Jeremi: And this is one of the points of our show that democracy is about the poetry of our lives. And what you do so well and you also Zachary is that you bring a racial awareness to the poetry of our lives. There are no easy answers. You haven’t offered any civil solutions but we do know that a passive racism in particular lingers when we’re complacent as you’ve said so well, Peniel. And works like Zachary’s poem and your scholarship in teaching raise our awareness and allow us to do better. And so in the end I think democracy is about this continuing dialogue, this continuing poetry. And so today, I think we’ve accomplished a lot and we have much more to do as we think about these issues. Thank you for joining us. This is Democracy.
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Speaker 8: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 9: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lunkey and you can find his music at HarrisonLunkey.com.
Speaker 10: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.
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