This is Democracy – Episode 96: Race and Coronavirus

Announcers: This is Democracy. A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we have the great opportunity to talk with one of the most important scholars writing about the history of race in America, and it’s contemporary reverberations. My friend and colleague and frequent visitor on our podcast, Dr. Peniel Joseph. Peniel is the Barbara Jordan chair for Ethics and Values at the University of Texas. He’s a professor in the LBJ School and the Department of History. He’s also the founding director of the Center for Race and Study of Democracy. Peniel, thanks for joining us again.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Thanks for having me, Jeremi.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Peniel just published a blockbuster book that has been widely reviewed with very positive, positive words in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and various other places: “The Sword and the Shield, the Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Junior.” We will be talking to Peniel about this book and particularly its relevance for democracy today in the United States. But before we do that, we have, of course, a Zachary series poem. What’s the title of your poem today Zachary?

Zachary: “Since ’65.”

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, let’s hear it.

Zachary: Since ’65. Memphis, it was 1968, the janitors were striking for their rights, the reverend came to conquer hate, and found on his balcony some unspoken American truth, and he saw the panoramic view of history, the bullet of the irate. New York in three years before it was ’65, the disillusioned minister came down in the ballroom, son of the sufferer of KKK crosses, suffering the slave descendants’ philosophical drive, and he came on the ballroom stage to some understanding of how long it would take for the slave descendant to thrive. Chicago, it was 55 years through then, and the virus came creeping in among the abandoned factories. Black Chicagoans, under the spring sun, fell to the universal enemy of men, and they came from their dying wish beds to see an apparition of the time we would spend waiting for change, sighed and died wondering when. New York, and time had toiled out a few more weeks, the police came and arrested 40 New Yorkers, a score and 15 were Black Americans, no Wall Street shake, and as they stood there, waiting in jail, they remembered how hard it is to get to the promised land from Jordan’s peaks. Georgia, and it was 55 years, two days from when bullets through the minister tore. A man went for a jog and was gunned down in the street. A man went for a jog, hunted like a wild boar. As America watched him bleed till he was no longer alive anymore, I hope we recognize something in his face, the same look as before.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: What is your poem about Zachary?

Zachary: My poem is really about the struggle for justice in America. Going from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X to modern issues about race and the Coronavirus, and among other issues.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Peniel, Zachary’s poem really points to continuities, ways in which our society has not improved. Is that a theme in your book as well?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. I think there obviously has been racial progress, but I think when we think about racial progress, I think we’ve tended to think about it in a linear way. It’s a linear narrative in the context of the post-war period, Rosa Parks, all the way through Barack Obama. And I think instead, we should probably think about racial progress not just only as something that occurs in fits and starts, but something that is not linear and something that is not felt equally by the entire society.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Do you think that that’s something that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would have expected to see? Or would they be surprised at that continuity?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: You know, I don’t think they would have been surprised. I think King is going to evolve into a more sophisticated understanding of the way in which racial progress and really democracy works in the United States and globally. And I think with Malcolm, Malcolm’s coming from a different background. He had always been skeptical of American democracy, in large part because of experiencing racial trauma at the age of six, losing his father, and then really a few years later, having his mother placed in a psychiatric institution for really most of the rest of Malcolm’s adult life. Shortly before his death, he visits her and sees her. But he’s experienced racial trauma. He was in prison for almost seven years so he really understands what Ralph Ellison called “the lower frequencies of African-American life,” but also of American democracy in a way that I think it takes King a while — And again, it makes sense. King is the son of a black upper-middle class, petty bourgeois ministers who run one of the biggest black churches in the United States, Ebenezer Baptist Church. He goes to Morehouse College at 15. He’s really a young prince in that patriarchal black society of Atlanta, Georgia in the 1940s. And so, he understands aspects of racism, but it’s going to take him experience to understand what the depth and breadth of racial injustice, what that means in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: One of the real strengths of your wonderful book, Peniel, is how you show in a sense, Doctor King and Malcolm X coming together around a deeper critique of the economic and structural elements of American society. What do you think were the common areas of agreement they shared in their critique of the sources of American racism?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of commonality. I think Malcolm X’s talk of black dignity starts to converge with Martin Luther King Junior’s discussion of black citizenship. For Malcolm, dignity was an end of racial oppression and end of the most obvious signs of Jim Crow racism in the criminal justice system poverty. But also an end to the way in which Africa was marginalized on the world global stage and the third world as well. For King, citizenship is both an end of racial oppression, but the positive appearance of income and the end of racial segregation, and healthcare, and a decent place to live. What’s interesting is that for both of them, especially in the context of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, they both come to see and converge on this idea of citizenship and dignity. Going hand in hand, that you need both, Malcolm comes to realize that you need to grapple with institutions within American democracy, and you see it in that speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” And King comes to realize that this idea of dignity and self-determination, and really this idea of identity can be used in an expansive way, and that is something that is narrowing the movement or people’s goals or ambitions.

Zachary: How do we see these similar themes of injustice, and two-steps forward one-step back, the non-linear progress of American racial justice? How do we see those themes manifested today as the world battles the coronavirus?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Well, I think we see those themes all around us just in light of the health disparities that we’ve seen nationally. We look at the COVID-19 different racial data trackers. African Americans, with the data that’s been released so far, disproportionately dying from COVID-19. In places that Martin Luther King Jr. marched like Albany, Georgia — where locals pronounce it “Al-benny,” Georgia — we’ve got 125 deaths from COVID. You’ve had over 1500 African-Americans who are diagnosed with COVID-19. Other places like Richmond, Virginia there was a point where only African-Americans had been diagnosed with COVID-19. Then we think about the public-facing workers and employees in health care, in the criminal justice system, in supermarkets, grocery stores, delivery systems, who are disproportionately black. So when we think about COVID-19, it certainly has amplified already existing racial disparities along all socioeconomic corridors.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: One of the really powerful points you make in your book, Peniel, is to remind us of what a touch-stone Vietnam was for both Malcolm and Martin. The ways in which the Vietnam War became a window through which you could see racial injustice. The number of African-Americans who were put into combat positions and died at much higher rates. Do you see a similar phenomenon with the pandemic? Is coronavirus shedding or spotlighting the way in which these long existing disparities have created, in a sense, separate worlds for African-Americans and non African-American citizens?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Absolutely. I think we see with COVID-19 the result of what happens when you have a society that’s segregated along racial and economic lines. So you’re going to have these archipelagos of safety and security where people are thriving, they’re able to work from home, they’re able to have their kids homeschooled, where things are business as usual except for the lack of social interaction, and others where people are really bereft where you have children who don’t have access to food, who don’t have access to fresh food and nutritious food. Parents who have to still somehow find a way to go out there and work. The data shows us that its 20 percent of African-Americans have jobs where they can telecommute from home. So that means eight out of ten do not. When we think about 30 million people who have filed for unemployment, the high point of black unemployment is both during the Great Recession and also during 1983 of the first Reagan administration where it hit 20 percent. So we don’t have the data yet as how many of those 30 million are African-American. But I would bet that disproportionately the numbers are going to be African-American. So when we think about COVID-19, what it’s really done, and Vietnam did the same thing that Dr. King talked about materialism, racism, and militarism as converging to really eliminate our illusions about American exceptionalism, about racial progress, about democracy. I think the pandemic has done that in really remarkable ways that we’re not going to understand fully until we both study and get more information. But just anecdotally, we’ve seen all around the country just disproportionate black death. I might add what we’re seeing around the country in terms of the pandemic as well, is this convergence between social distancing and police brutality and law enforcement. Because law enforcement, just like in the 1960s, which was really the tip of the spear in terms of institutions that marginalized the African-Americans. You’re seeing the same thing where African-Americans are being brutalized and brutally arrested for not properly social distancing in the eyes of law enforcement and whites who are doing the same thing are not harassed, or beaten, or arrested, or stopped. So it’s been really, really remarkable and I think the criminal justice system is connected here in big ways. We saw it with both Malcolm and Martin. Martin was implicated in the criminal justice system in terms of being arrested, starting in 1956 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and really facing a series of arrests throughout his whole career. Malcolm X was implicated in criminal justice system having spent seven years in prison and then really becoming somebody who was interested in helping eliminate, what we think of as, a system of mass incarceration now.

Zachary: How have we also, in this pandemic, seen a disparity in where attention has gone to where people are suffering, and how resources have been directed by governments and by the media?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: I think the attention has definitely been unequal. We’ve definitely been more interested in stories of white survivors or victims of the pandemic, even though the victims are disproportionately African-American. In terms of resources, African-Americans have had less access to PPE, protective equipment. They’ve had less access to government intervention, including when we think about the stimulus that was passed in the aftermath of the pandemic of getting small business loans. Historically, black colleges and universities who have less money and less endowments than their white counterparts have really struggled to get resources of the online technology so that they can continue to provide their students adequate education. Some of this is along partisan lines in terms of red versus blue states. So blue states, they’re typically Democratic with Democratic Governors, have had a much harder time accessing federal resources. And both Governor Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California have remarked on that even as they’ve tried to diplomatically still gain favor of the federal government so they can get resources for their residents. So, this is both — There’s a racial partisanship and there’s also just a political partisanship that fuse in a way that’s very, very negative for black Americans.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes, I was thinking about that, Peniel. As we’re reading about the ways in which certain political actors are using a white lady who owned a salon in Dallas as this  symbol of the victimization of people during the shutdown. But yet, there’s no discussion of the large numbers of African-Americans and Latinos and others who have suffered from COVID. At the same time, also the number of them, who don’t have a choice whether to go to work or not. It does seem as if the imagery that’s used reflects the racism as much as we’ve ever seen before in our society.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Yes, absolutely. These narratives really connect with this 1960s and what Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. Malcolm often talked about the media and how powerful the media was in shaping narratives about race and racial justice and citizenship inequality. That power has grown even though it’s been offset by social media where people can re-imagine these existing narratives. So I think that mainstream corporate media, and this goes whether you’re talking about Fox News, or CNN, or MSNBC has felt much more comfortable chronicling and narrating COVID, really from a largely white sort of middle America perspective. So on some levels, they have every night a bunch of largely white scientists, even though there are African-American scientists and scientists of color who are narrating events and telling us what’s happening — And every now and then, they’ll have as a human interest side, a white victim of COVID, even though disproportionately the victims of COVID are African-American or Latinx. We’re hearing reports of outbreaks Native American and Indigenous reservations. So you really have to go to social media and alternative media, which has been good. There’s been really good narratives of what’s happening to the African-American community, but you’re thinking about social media and you’re thinking about certain journalists who are covering this for The New Yorker and for Vox, and for the Atlantic Monthly. Sometimes something gets in the New York Times, but something by Jamelle Bouie or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, different African-American activists, Ibram Kendi. But for the most part, this has been definitely a one-sided perspective and view on this pandemic that’s really a racial pandemic and a racialized pandemic.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Great. One of the things that comes through so strongly in your book, Peniel, is how effective and savvy both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were in using the media and turning the narrative to their favor. Are there figures out there today doing that? If so, where should we be looking at them? Who are the contemporary echoes of Martin and Malcolm today?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Yeah, I believe they were absolutely hugely effective in transforming the narrative about what was the actual terrain of racial justice. I think that both of them are affected in globalizing that terrain. For Malcolm, it means traveling to the Middle East and spending half the year in 1964 in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. And for King, it’s traveling to Ghana, traveling to India, traveling to Oslo, and Scandinavia, traveling to Europe to share this story as well. I’d say in terms of the contemporary period, you’ve got people like William J. Barber in North Carolina and the Moral Mondays movement. You’ve got the Black Lives Matter movement and Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi. And these different black women who are self-identified, radical queer black feminists who are bending the curve. You’ve got a range of different actors we can absolutely look for that are providing alternative narratives for what’s happening with COVID-19. We have public intellectuals. Everybody from Khalil Muhammad to Michael Eric Dyson, Sherrilyn Ifill, who’s head of NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, is very important voice. Vanita Gupta is a very important voice, former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Obama Justice Department. So we do have voices and we have some online movement, TV, and other voices online, but the mainstream voices have been woefully inadequate in terms of examining who’s suffering the most. Really, what does that suffering tell us about this country? On that score, I would say even the presumptive democratic candidate, Joe Biden, former Vice President, United States has been largely silent, in a way, toward this time period. You would have thought that a Democratic presumptive presidential candidate would have grabbed this crisis by the throat and really presented an alternative. But I think for the most part, we haven’t seen as robust a response on that score as we might have liked.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Why is that? I mean, many have made the same criticism of Barack Obama as well. Why have we not seen more of the Malcolm X, Martin Luther King radicalism from these figures who speak to these communities and rely on these communities for political support.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: I think that it has a lot to do with the transformation globally. When you think about globalization, the hive, the rise of neoliberalism, even amongst those people were activists. So we all lived in an age of what some scholars will call racial capitalism, others might call monopoly capitalism, but this age where we see further privatization and commodification of everything. Even when we think about globalization, the positives of globalization are many, but then it becomes, how many people have access to the positives of globalization?

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: So I think one of the things we’re seeing is that because that access is so uneven, when we think about those who in another generation would have actively spoke truth to power, now they are connected to powerful institutions that provide them resources as long as they stay within constrained limits. I think the power of Martin Luther King Junior, the power of Malcolm X, was that they weren’t constrained as social justice leaders and social movement leaders by any specific organizations that they owed their livelihood to. So Malcolm X could leave the Nation of Islam, and still — It was difficult, but still be able to survive. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior is connected to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he was always going to be able to survive because he did not have a think tank paying his salary or a university or anything. So from that perspective, they could speak truth to power in more powerful ways than I think some of the really truly brilliant people we have around, but who aren’t quite as courageous in saying that this has to be changed and transformed. I think that in some ways it shows a lack of optimism. Because I think the thing about King and Malcolm X that people don’t talk about is that they had a lot of optimism. They had a lot of optimism, including Malcolm X, because they felt that the world needed to be changed, the United States needed to be changed dramatically. But they felt that that change could come if enough people were organized, if enough people were told a narrative that fit their life story and their truths within that narrative, that change would come. I think in a lot of ways, we’ve lost some of that optimism, even though I don’t think we should.

Zachary: It seems lately, in recent years, that public attention to racial injustice seems to jump from one incident to another whenever there’s sort of an outbreak of violence like we saw in Georgia recently, but how do we make sure that the narrative of racial injustice in America stays on the public consciousness and doesn’t disappear?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: That’s an excellent question. I think that the way in which we do that is we center racial justice at the core of our narrative of American citizenship. Even if you want to say you want to create this new narrative of American exceptionalism, where America is this exceptional country because racial justice is at the core of who we are. When we think about what we do, I agree that people have had very scattershot attention to race because we don’t think of it as being at the core of who we are. But really, race shapes citizenship, it shapes dignity, it shapes our childcare, eldercare, food justice, food insecurity, homelessness, health care. So if we center that, and even when we think about these movements that we’ve seen, whether it’s for a Green New Deal or Medicare for All, a lot of times race becomes an afterthought. If we center race, and this pursuit of racial justice, and really a pursuit of anti-racist public policies, then I think we’re going to be on much better footing because we will have all been engaged in that conversation. I think that there’s precedent for this. I think we understand certain aspects of American history now more than we did in the past. That might even include what happens to Native Americans, or the Holocaust, or Japanese internment, because we’re willing to talk about that more. So if we center racial slavery, like the 1619 Project is trying to do at New York Times, which just won the Pulitzer Prize, that helps us continue the conversation because we don’t feel as a nation uncomfortable with that conversation and it becomes part of who we are. Even though we might disagree. We might disagree on, hey, what are the solutions for this predicament, but at least we’re all talking about it.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I think one of the great contributions of your book is just that, Peniel, you’ve centered the story we had, not really around Martin Luther King and Malcolm X alone, but around the challenges, but also the optimistic possibilities that race offers for American democracy. As you said before, the optimism that these two men bring in their actions and their rhetoric and how they come together in a radical optimism about the ways in which America could be so much better. Shining a light on the shortcomings and encouraging a striving to improve. I know it’s what you bring to your teaching and to your work as a scholar and an activist yourself. I’ve learned so much as your colleague and friend over the years. I wonder if you might talk about that a bit more because one of the points of each of our podcast is to provide historical background for our audience, but also inspiration, especially for young listeners moving forward. How do you see your students taking this knowledge you share with them and using it today?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Yeah, I think we have to be optimistic. I think that part of what we can do, and the optimism is that in the past we have faced big problems and big challenges. Whether you’re talking about the Civil War and Reconstruction, or you’re talking about World War I and the Second World War and the Great Depression, the Heroic period, the Civil Rights Movement, Financial Panics, there’s so much. So one, we have to say that there are times that the nation has come together to try to re-imagine citizenship democracy successfully. In those successes whether you are saying Women’s Rights to Vote in 1920, the Voting Rights Act of ’65, or Immigration Reform in ’65 really resound and redound and reverberate all the way up until the present.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: So when it comes to our students and my students, I think what I’m trying to do is want to arm them with the narratives of what happened, a narrative of this country and its history. Then really connect that narrative to the contemporary, like we’re doing now with COVID-19 and saying that this information that you have now is arming you for social impact, along whatever disciplinary or interests you have. We’ve got students who are interested in the law, or entrepreneurship, or health care, or non-profits, or international development, or grass from social justice activism, whatever they want to do. Being a teacher, there’s so much. So if you have this information and this knowledge, you’re going to be much better able to have impact and really bend the curve. I mean, we start with trying to ameliorate these inequities that we see.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: But our ultimate goal, Jeremi, is really to eradicate this, deliver a world where we don’t have racism and we have anti-racist policies. Those anti-racist policies dovetail with policies that are antisexes, that are anti-homophobia, that cultivate and value religious freedom. Those are game-changing ideals. But I think we can definitely operationalize those if we believe and we organize, we study, we converse, but we organize for social impact.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: The history allows us to understand what social impact really means in our world today, right?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Absolutely, and that means everything from policy transformation to students who are armed with new knowledge to entrepreneurs who actually want to change the world and build wealth, but they want to build wealth for a higher purpose in terms of social equity. So all those things are right there for the taking. I think this COVID-19 is a huge disaster and catastrophe, but it’s also an unbelievable opportunity for those of us who are interested in this and for the entire world. That’s where the optimism should come in. Viewing this time period as an opportunity to have the deep and lasting social transformation that would make this world a better place, a more just place, a more equitable place.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So Zachary, does this resonate with you and your generation? Do you see this history of race, which is often very difficult and very uncomfortable, as Peniel has pointed out. Do you see it, though, as also inspiring your generation to improve and pursue what Peniel described so eloquently as a world of greater social justice and possibility?

Zachary: I definitely think that social justice and racial justice are things that young people and people in my generation are much more comfortable with. I think it’s a thing we just accepted as fact. But I think that the problem now is that a lot of people believe that the Civil Rights Movement ended racial injustice in America. We have to stop teaching it that way. We need to make sure that young people are aware of how racial injustice is very lasting in American history and today.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I think one of the Peniel’s points is that this terrible COVID crisis points that out to people. I mean, most famously, Chief Justice John Roberts, a number of years ago in the Supreme Court decision overturning point of the Voting Rights Act so that we didn’t need affirmative action because we had already solved those problems. Peniel, I would guess that you would argue that what we’re seeing today is overwhelming evidence that judgment by the Chief Justice is historically mistaken, correct?

Dr. Peniel Joseph: Absolutely. He said similar things both in Shelby v. Holder and in the Parents versus Teachers, Parents United case, which really further prevent schools from being racially integrated, even school districts that want racial integration. Certainly, with the Voting Rights Act saying that we had solved these problems before. So yeah, absolutely we have not. This COVID-19 pandemic amplifies these problems. There’s going to be much more suffering. People are predicting unemployment rates that rival, or it might even surpass, that of the Great Depression. So we have a lot of work to do really on the scale of the Second World War for the 21st century. The optimism comes in the fact that democracy is still the best political system on the planet, and if we can get deep democracy that’s connected to racial justice and really having a vision of citizenship that’s connected to our highest moral and ethical values, that means we can finally start to solve these problems in a permanent way and a substantive way that’ll impact our children, but more importantly, our grandchildren, our great, great grandchildren, of subsequent generations.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, I think, Peniel, your work –Not just your most recent book that I hope everyone reads, “The Sword and The Shield,” but your work on the Black Power Movement, your work on Barack Obama, your work on so many other figures — highlights how significant the critique of racial injustice is for the pursuit of our democratic ideals. It’s not that these critiques undermine those ideals, they actually strengthen and reinforce them as we go forward. That’s the optimism that underpins your work and that’s how your work, I think, can inspire all of us to work harder in these moments and to see a brighter future. Thank you for sharing your scholarship and your insights with us, Peniel, today.

Dr. Peniel Joseph: You are very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: My hearted pleasure. Thank you, Zachary, as always for your poem and your questions and your optimism, Zachary. Thank you to all of our guests for joining us today, and I hope everyone goes out to read “The Sword and The Shield” by Peniel Joseph. Thank you for listening to “This is Democracy.”

Announcer 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Announcer 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harissonlemke.com.

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