 Well, I guess I've been instructed that I'm not supposed to moderate action. That's right. We decided early on that I'm going to let him hide his light under that particular bushel. We were very pleased that he agreed to do this and think of him as one of the participants in his conversations. No moderation. Well, I've always thought that moderation and defense of liberty is no... Well, I guess somebody's got to kick it off. Is that going to be you, Barbara? Well, I'll say a few words, and then Karen is going to do a real kick-off, but I wanted to say, first of all, thanks very much to everybody at the Brooklyn Museum who had a role in allowing us to do this here. This is a wonderful space to be in, and also thanks to the standard person who made it possible for us to do this, and especially thanks and appreciation to Adolf Reid. We pressed for him to be here, and we were honored and delighted when he agreed to do it because Adolf Reid has been, certainly he's been a teacher to us, and in fact, he's been a teacher probably to everybody in this room. Some of you may not know it because he's been at this work for such a long time that some of you have absorbed his ideas without even knowing where they came from. So, he's a teacher and a progenitor among many other things that we're very pleased with. This is a historic moment in that it is the second time in our careers that my sister and I have shared the platform. The result of the content of one of those presentations was a kind of script that's chapter two of our book, Gracecraft, Individual Stories and Collective History. And we decided on that, we decided to keep the stage directions more or less so that we have it as a dialogue. This is the second time, and we're in a conversation, so we're going to operate in the same way, although we don't have a script. So, we decided to claim for ourselves or take the risk, as the case may be, of going back and forth as we have done for many, many years in the work we've done separately often and coming together in periodic moments. So, we've given ourselves freedom to correct each other, change, extend and so forth as we did the plan ahead of time, but we want to have the informality of the exchange since this evening is called a conversation. Now, our subject, am I still supposed to keep going? Keep going until I interrupt you. Our subject is Racecraft, you've seen. Our subtitle is the Soul of Inequality in American Life and one of the reasons we're so thrilled to be with and offering this evening is that he's connected the general issue of inequality and what he calls the structured inequality of a particular political economy with issues that people shorthand as race and sometimes refer to as racism in some of their manifestations. Our purpose today and in the book is to talk, to advance to you a concept that we have developed over the years called Racecraft for reasons that will come out shortly. So, we'd like to start by identifying three things we expect to accomplish and what are in our general thesis as we go throughout this account of Racecraft and periodically, it's quite theoretical in places but periodically we want to insert stories and sometimes read from the text so you can see what it is we're talking about and why we've been able to stay on this subject for as many years as we have. Now, let me start with the thesis, the abiding point we're making throughout Barbara correctly. We rehearsed this part today and I kept going. Each time we rehearsed it, it came out a little different. Yes. Most Americans assume that the perception of human difference gives rise to racism. We say most Americans have got it backwards. It is that racism gives rise to the perception of human difference because you have to know who it is, who is the target of racism in the first place. So, we're doing that reversely. We're not going to be in the world of nature. We're going to be in the world of action. And now to the three points we want to make as we're going along the way and three areas of discussion that we want to announce ahead of time so you can locate yourself but we also don't insist on going linearly. These are not inherently linear phenomena. So there's one point to Barbara getting because we also weren't clear all the time which were the three. We had a moment of panic over someone. What was number three? I already doubt in any doubt that number one is that the phenomena we're talking about are social in nature. Racism is a social practice. We are not talking about individual attitudes or mental states of individuals. We're talking about social practice and we're talking about routine practice and many of the stories you tell in the book give examples of it so you can see it on the hoof in everyday life. If you need a shorthand for what racism is it is the practice of a double standard based on ancestry. It's not a state of mind, not prejudice, not hatred, not any of those things. It's a practice together with the ideological surroundings of the practice. Number two was racecraft is pervasive in everyday life and partly because it's pervasive it's also persuasive. That's two A. And two B is since we said pervasive and for that reason persuasive we insist that it involves everybody. Racecraft is not a cloud that stops and rains on people who are black or brown or whatever. It pervades US society, it pervades daily life. The third thing we want to say is that racecraft as we're going to try to exhibit it to you is intimately bound up with inequality in its other forms including economics and in fact so tightly intertwined that the two were almost indistrictable from one another and therefore it's very hard to develop a politics against inequality without being evidence for racism and very hard to have politics against racism that you can even hope will work without addressing equality. So those are the three points of our compass we don't have for we have three points of our compass that we want to start from. So maybe we should start by explaining a little bit more what we mean by racecraft because for most of you it's a new term you googled it a few months ago you've gotten stuff that you had to do with both racing. For those of you who don't take part in it or enjoy both racing in the term probably will suggest in which craft and we might have to suggest which craft and it shows it because it would suggest that analogy but we meant it to suggest that analogy not for the reason you might think it first. We don't regard it which craft we would rely on as a simple superstition by the contrary both of them draw on the faculties of human reason otherwise they could be the pervasive workers wisdom and they draw on it in analogous ways which craft and racecraft I'm almost quoting from the book now are imagined, added upon and reimagined the outcome is a belief that presents itself to the mind and imagination as a truth a vivid truth in societies where which craft prevails it produces evidence for its existence in everyday material it was sort of misfortunes that happened to people in everyday life props fail women is carried as a man is impotent a person is the center of the malicious gossip sort of things that happen in everyday life which craft comes out of those things and comes out of the effort to identify the culprits and polish them for Martin Luther not talking about Martin Luther King Martin Luther spoke in a matter of fact way about the devil moving his window yes, moving his window outside the window outside the window showing this never ending promises what about this is an everyday matter of fact thing the devil moved outside his window and he spoke of chasing away demons by farting on them and so paying attention to the fact that this isn't he wasn't delusional he wasn't an outlier in his society we argue in the book that which craft has no physical moving parts of its own and it doesn't need any that's what we say in the introduction it acquires moving parts that are perfectly adequate when a person acts upon the reality of it as Martin Luther did and by that rule which craft is constantly as we put it in the introduction dumping factitious evidence of its existence into the real world every time you go after the witch every time you know this real thing Luther says is that witches are able to steal milk from someone else's cow they don't have to approach the cow to do it they can use a handle some other way race craft operates in that same way in a sense that once you act on the belief that produces the evidence that's needed to sustain the belief for us just as for bi-harmonywers in witches daily life produces abundant evidence supporting a belief in race just think for example about all the things the media like to tabulate by race party perennials like teenage pregnancy novelties like there's one that Karen actually found on Wolf disproportionate representation on Twitter by black people under representation among blood donors so like witchcraft, racecraft is constantly churning out these pieces of evidence we see enough of those things tabulated by race and put it sooner it's a real thing to do it's probably a real thing to do in this room Sunday's New York Times actually adopted a new one rather I should say a fresh cameo appearance of one that is age old namely the super sex black adolescent I bet some of you saw the article that ran into the headline quote boys now enter puberty young women saw that boys now enter puberty younger studies suggest but it's unclear why and the article from many other things supply the following fact quote the new study also found that African-American boys began puberty earlier than whites and Hispanics a result of other studies have shown also replies to Afro-American African-American girls and by stroke and racecraft the researchers speculated didn't offer any evidence speculated no evidence that the difference quote is most likely driven by the role of genes in puberty now the article made clear that even the basic finding that is that the onset of puberty is earlier is furious since they also admitted that there are no comparable data from the earlier periods we can't even be sure if it's earlier how much earlier and so forth already the finding is furious the categories that the researchers use if you read that article are also genetic meanings African-American well that's bad enough but what about white? what about Hispanic? now I know there are people who think there's such a thing as a Hispanic genome but I don't say they'll see the devil moving outside the window but they might as well the study did not test factors that might affect the age of onset of puberty such as weight and diet environmental considerations health sensitive and so on so where is my question where apart from racefraft what the speculation have come from that the difference is most likely driven by the role of genes in puberty it's racefraft and as we develop in some way in the first chapter second chapter of the book genes now share with blood the status of a metaphor for race you don't believe me you watch just keep your eyes open the way it's used in puberty and tough and you'll see that the same way you can speak of person in social belonging by blood it's not as much affective as much Native American blood genes can now stand again in that way at some point we don't want to open this up to have a gene so in 730 now and we're going till 9 is that correct we have until 9 we don't know when the character will turn into a puberty well I guess I'll tell you one thing I was thinking racefraft is very interesting and of course persuasive I like the witchcraft analogy because they do function in the same way and I guess one thing you can think about is well to lay that out alongside the late very obscure Chinese American Marxist Harry Chang a way that Chang in the 1970s analogized race to Marxist characterization to fetish character money because they both work the same way that one knows that money isn't value and gold money isn't value but it stands in it objectifies value in the same way that race and not just race but to push the racecraft notion it's not to at all but I'm trying to think of race as a species of genus of discourses or ideologies of scripted hierarchy and by that is basically the same thing that you described in the definition of race that that is an ideology of national or essential difference based on what people supposedly are and what they supposedly do and I'm wondering whether it might be that focusing on this genus also helps to open up the critique of race and racecraft I say this especially from the standpoint of the early 21st century looking back on the way that racialist ideologies have evolved and who could not agree that you can't have race without racism that race is a narrative of racism but at various points in the book I've got to mark that I won't reach from now I want you guys to know one or the other or both note that you do point to the genus in the sense especially when you write about feudal society because what's at work here is that naturalized hierarchy that equilibrate and I know this sounds functionalist but that equilibrate social order is built on hierarchy by reading the hierarchy's intimation and race functions in that way in particular in capitalism in the west and I don't think you need to get into that I mean as we all know on which people imagine there's an abstract tension between the free and emancipated tendency in capitalism and the reality of the hierarchy on which it depends I think that's just a masturbatory of self-congratulation basically there's never been a commencement in capitalism human emancipation and the rest of this is always kind of the same thing but the reason I wonder that the reason I wonder that focusing on the genus would also be useful is that we're at a point now at the different points in the last 20 years where race like well I have two thoughts competing for a space that is a very small compartment in my head somebody has to wait let me see if I can get one out first well I'll try to do them one at a time two points one is that period you guys know too from roughly the last quarter of the 19th century is the apogee of the race idea in the history of the world more powerful more deeply consensually understood to shape destiny to explain whatever you want to explain to do this work of race rather than at any point prior to then for and one of the reasons that it's that its power has been is the sort of disenchantment of the witchcraft component of race as an ideology of the practice of the racecraft not its defeat by any means but disenchantment to the extent that struggles against it has kind of traumatized it in a way I think this genus of ascriptive ideologies works best as a focus which is the point in the link to witchcraft but to the extent that egalitarian forces have challenged them successfully or challenged official racist forces successfully by that in number two you can't find anybody really who self-proclares as a racist or at least not outside idol outside the bar no, that's not true but they everywhere well, no, but who self-proclares as as one might so we find ourselves chasing you know, Glenn back for instance trying to appropriate of the Martin Luther King junior they have seen King Junior and accusing Barack Obama of being a racist just as Ann Coulter and Sarah Cailin have accused the Democrats of being sexist right, so that just kind of um and this is another tension that I think you guys are grappling with is how to characterize of practice sex and discursive practices that presume the full understanding of naturalized difference that more or less lines up with the familiar race taxonomy yeah, I think that's I carry that even further to say that more people become familiar with supposed to be a scientific language to talk about these things the more they align it with the folk categories so genes become blood and genetic notice how when journalists speak of something that's genetic that's a synonym racial right, so here's the problem that we're going to be facing more and more in these latter-day versions of phrenology and eugenics there's more and more scrupulous effort or at least vestidious effort on the part of the scholars to make it clear that they are that they're dissociating the determinist plans that they're making from the familiar three to five NOAA originating race types, right and what happens is that to the extent that racism non-racism it becomes an axis according to which we debate the determinist ideologies they kind of link because it's possible to imagine in another class that can be disproportionately black and Latino but that doesn't matter so closely onto it that it would appear to be just the old racism that's repackaged and it could include other populations it could include some of these other biotermist categories and make it come back like a natural-worn criminal I guess they haven't discovered the gene for investment yet because plenty of evidence for it has been churned into everyday life you would think that there's an endowment by the creator of some of these people of an investment and criminality gene I call them one point virtual so-so theory who through all of this through all the time that the criminal gene was being looked for in Joss Weld's taken in penitentiaries in the 1980s the rest of the people were out there stealing right and wrong big scale going nowhere completely outside the penitentiary but outside the genetic study of dysfunction and so there's an issue of the language the language we use that only takes over part of the world part of the time which is why we insist on pervasive and persuasive and we want to carry the law if there's a genetics of criminality and sitting up in an undergrad with the class that don't know much yet and they start taking talking about people from inner city this and that hands should go up and say professor how are the classes semester I want you to tell me how that applies do you think we're still walking in the street and we're still less blind alright pervasive if there's a theory of criminality what's the word? euphemism that's huge genius border on the chemical then we ought the genetic swab should be put into more jobs I mean the research should be put into more jobs let's make sure that all of the places where we could be looking for the genetic causation of behavior are to be found and there's a list of that there's mass murder there's all sorts of things but racecraft says oh it's got to do with race people who are punitively differently constituted because it's genetically in every other way because they have dark skin well let's let's not say that if something is pervasive and persuasive to everybody that it's only to be seen in some part of the society part of the time so that's what I have to say on that and I would point out to make a response to a adult is that yes we have science has stepped back from its 19th century potentials but it is making large steps forward in 21st century work and late 20th century work that assumes the validity of the general way of thinking that those 19th century people brought and I'm going to bring this down to a story because everybody should know about the life of a book when it's becoming oppressive when it's becoming a monkey on your back it can't get away from your subject that's the time when your subject really comes after you now summer of 2010 I was minding my business in my own place having just a written part of what became a tour of racecraft that's chapter none of the book and I had talked about the blood as an element of the Nazi theorizing and blood as part of the disputes about segregation about the labeling of blood and during World War II and the outrage that we had in an emergency the collection of blood and storage of blood involved Jim Crow rituals keeping the blood in separate refrigerators from different donors keeping blood on separate shelves having separate bays for donors to come processing plasma and different batches on down the line it was like it was quasi-religious and it's attention to details of keeping things separate when everybody knew according to the science even then that human blood is basically the same and there's no justification for that the army sin is psychologically important even though there's no credible biological basis so I had worked through all of that and then in my own business I went to the door and here was a piece of mail from the Georgia Red Cross August 2010 addressed to people like my daughter who were attending colleges in the American University Center and invited students to come and donate blood in the upcoming Sickle Cell Anemia Awareness Month because African Americans have the best chance of survival best chance of survival is their language if they receive blood from other African Americans and I thought I would faint I thought this was gone so I went to I called out my sister I talked to my daughter who's a biology person and we all had our hair standing by they were on what we usually do and I went to the Red Cross headquarters and said what is going on what is your scientific basis for this and folks they had a scientific basis they had a 1990 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine and they had a 2008 journal published in the Journal of Transfusion where that's where I got the racial disparity in blood daughterhood point of place but the word from the from the New England Journal of Medicine argued a major case said people survived and so we looked into it closely to see what happened to the signs you want to take it from there little did I know that my daughter I mean my sister had seen this story as a times article in 1992 when it was first published they're sending this two decades old paper and to me my daughter said well we laugh at people who in science when people send antiquated paper you know something is tough but anyway go ahead those in this audience who are my students will recognize this episode because I've been using it in my annual what I call invention and race lecture because once curious once you look the evidence they have they don't have any evidence they found out that they claims that but I don't think they said that but no African American recipients of blood donations from white people were likely to show to develop antibodies to certain antigens in this white blood but as soon as you start examining it you find out that two thirds of their didn't have that didn't have that inaction so the way I used to put it to my sentence was they're looking at a population of African Americans a minority have sickle cell treatment and out of that a minority have sickle cell anemia and out of that minority will receive transfusions a minority showed development of these antibodies so I said we're talking about a minority of a minority showing these traits and then they call it a racial characteristic the best you can say is that it is an out characteristic but what we found when we went back to the New England Journal of Medicine and looked more closely we found that in some of the commentaries on the article they have already been told by people who went back through data this doesn't work and if you actually rework your data appropriately you will find that what you're seeing is the standard effect of mismatching not racial mismatching just mismatching and they lay back up they're sending it out what is it 20% and they still think it means something they think it means something because it has to mean something and that is one of the points we're making about Waysfield ultimately it doesn't matter so much whether they can fool what they're claiming there because blood matters even if you can't prove that it matters because blood is one of the indicators to face especially a California state initiative called the California Civil Rights Initiative that would have prohibited California from gathering data by race and I've read about this and I've heard about it for a while I love that this is stupid but to help them I found out that there were two exceptions one was law enforcement and the other was medical research so you could not design what precisely targeted the exact way and react to it then so I thought as my civic duty I would deal with to draft a not-better-based to the San Francisco product or the LA Times and Sacramento beers but I figured I could check first being a political person to make sure I didn't say anything that cut against the NAACCRI campaign and I was blown away I was stunned speechless and demoralized when I went to the opposition website and public health link and saw how this thing passes we wouldn't be able to get funding for the diseases that we get well so that eventually prompted what turned out to be an article instead of an op-ed but but when I was striking about this I was digging into the field one problem is it's very prosaic that it's a simple garbage-in garbage-out problem because data are collected in the public health area are collected by race but not really by class and I'll come back in a second what I mean by really in this context in fact I think it was Don Kamstack who let me to refresh me but somebody did a study of ten years or a thousand articles in the American Journal of Public Health that examined the use of race as a capo reference to race as category for sort of data and found was very, very common to use but only about a quarter of the time it did figure in the findings or even less quickly in the news but there's another dynamic that's at work and that has to do with what I mean by really what's often found in the studies of this work that sort of controls for blacks the controls are preposterous and maybe the most preposterous one of them all, which I guess fits is a study that led to the FDA's authorization of the first race-cargated drug in a history of the FDA which was the brain child or the or the love child, I guess the love child of the pharmaceutical industry and the association of black cardiologists because this is a study that reported to find this drug that hadn't been effective in general use and what was about to exhaust the R&D process magically it was found to work as a blood thinner for black men they say, well, how can it work on physiology of black men when there is no such thing as the physiology of black men but that takes us back to the race-cargated race-cargated and then when you look at the study I think how big the sample was but it was an all-black sample so that there were no non-black people and the control for class was a response to two questions how many years of school have you had and how do you feel about your prospects in life so as always this points to something else the changing balance of the relation between race and political economy because we've also seen as part of the successful challenge from underneath over the last half century plus two-thirds century the gradual emergence and more than gradual after in the 1960s multi-billion dollar political economy of race relations and then people so Merlin Chalpanyan who I already embarrassed in a moment and I have done some work and I am involved in a bigger project that examines the risk of disparities in scholarship because we are trying to figure out the disparity studies keep finding the disparity of often enough disparities are not at all surprising is there anybody in the room for instance who was genuinely surprised to learn that the economic impact of the downturn was rarer on people who were classified as black or Hispanic than it was in people who were classified as white is anybody in the room who is surprised to learn that about stop and frisk about drug enforcement about housing disparities if the finding is always the same and if you already know what the finding is before it is found and I admit that what we do in social sciences is we don't find what we are looking for so if you want a unicorn you can find that but so our question what's going on what's actually driving this what do people imagine that they are doing when they are doing this and announce with that kind of look at a particular satisfaction that quantitatively trained academics with I'm sorry they had to give an anecdote and I'll shut up after the anecdote but in the spring of 1985 I was at a one day meeting at the Joint Center for Political Studies a post-portum on a 1984 presidential election and the National Election Survey at the University of Michigan had just opened up this black sample and these two guys from the Michigan-David paper were drawn from that black from the analysis of that black sample and I swear this is no exaggeration I can do some witnesses if I had to but there was 25 page paper the first 23 and a half pages of which were about the regressions that they ran and why they ran and the regressions that they didn't run and why they didn't run and then there was either a half page of findings and a page of inclusion that they ran and the punchline of which was that this guy looked up and said that the only solid explanation they could find for black Americans supported Jesse Jackson in the prime of 1984 was a combination of strong positive affect towards Jackson and strong negative affect toward Monday and this paper it was a political scientist a woman's friend of mine about 10 years ago named Linda Faye Williams from Love Lady Texas she had that kind of texture she began her conversation you know this paper reminds me of the punchline of the punchline of the old joke what's the social scientist the punchline of the social scientist is somebody who spent $100,000 research grant from NSF to find out what drugs is in town and all they had to do was ask a cab driver but the disparity but there's something else what else is going on there and as I promised I'll shut up but I think what the disparity what the disparity industry points to is the extent to which it is now possible for race to become and racial ideology to what's what race is to become a form of cabinet for people who are able to operate under the label right the fact apparently the viral problem was that the patent was about to expire if they didn't find or claim to have found any use for it it would now have to happen to everybody so the box starts back and we just only have sarcastically we compare this with the book to the public calls a group of prison groups provide for the sale of illegal drugs inside the prison and they established how many groups were there to find there were five groups because the woods are technical woods the rasas who are made for in the United States by the Mexican descent the paesas were Mexican I forgot how they were made there for but there were two groups of woods one with skinheads and the other was Aryan Nation and so we have a place there where we talk about how they negotiate how they have created through an elaborate rules a microcosm of society outside suited to the means inside so you can only sell drugs to your own group at this point and the cheaper and better ones supposedly came from the paesas and rasas but since they can't go to court they can't sue the compulsory part comes from a beat down or a murder but this is a very fascinating story told by a Jewish person who found himself in a country of Illinois who had no place to sit in the child hall and he was going to lose his life if he didn't figure out supposed to sit in the wrong place he didn't know what was the right place he didn't have a right place to sit if he wasn't the Aryan Nation or the skinheads I wanted and he talks about their theories about Jews and then certainly the black people would have gotten into trouble the kid would have thought this is just about a white person he doesn't belong here not knowing that this guy is not a white person it was in a read section is quite fascinating but the end of it is that they created monopolies that are race based that are profitable markets that generate economic rents to those groups according to the monopoly and the guy goes on to explain the tactic far those are organized in the same way they have a microcosm of the society outside they have vehicles of enforcement different you don't stand in the corner if you break the segregation rules that is your life that was published in the year 2018 they are about so that's what happened it's not quite that they take what they find in the larger society because they have to make this up that's what you see going on they have to make it up although they may tell themselves in their minds that it was already there but they have to devise it here's a Jewish guy who is called finally you can sit at the white people's table after the white people after they have finished eating sounds like South Carolina in my teens went for a privileged member of a monopoly but I have to go back a little bit about the marketing of drugs and the industry I actually meant to bring a prop today and several times this morning I told myself don't forget to take the prop and I forgot it but it's a partner in which I bought a bottle of citricow which is a type of calcium supplement that my doctor ordered me to take some years ago I didn't obey the order for very long but I've saved the box because the back of the box says that this is meant for white and Asian women to guard against their risk for osteoporosis and I thought well what are you doing with your afro-american self the marketing is this where they put it on the box telling me don't buy it it's not just the last thing though it's people who believe it and one one fail to make is that we've seen the stories they tell they've downed really really detailed stories to be important because they show us where to look for a race craft when it's going on one of the ways to defeat a pestilence is sunshine and weariness and one of the ways to perpetuate it is to love it to be in the shadows and when it's in the shadows meaning the place where black people are everybody else can say it's pervasive amount of them it doesn't pervade the whole society and it's only their responsibility to fix whatever causes the consequences of a race craft to fall on them it is important to document the problems in everyday life and so we spent a lot of time finding stories and then as I told you the dance broke and we couldn't keep up with the number of stories after a while but perhaps we should share a couple of them before we end or maybe we can bring them up because I think we should let the audience know that's it Questions or comments? I wonder whether we can move to the second topic before we have a question I said there are three parts we weren't doing we couldn't do them linearly because they're interrelated but I find you'll notice that each one is going to give a least attention to inequality and a little bit of sense and maybe we should tell that story before we get to there's an illustrative story but I wanted to say that in everyday American people talk about race I think it's something that you find all around black people or else in certain circumstances it's Afro-Latinos or American Indians the illusion of racecraft actually moves white people offstage into those shadows that sisters talk about whenever race is offstage with a speaking part that is what makes racecraft such a potent support for class inequality it's just that it creates that shadow because racecraft tars working people across the board with the brush that racism uses for black people and Latinos and by doing so it provides in a way an argument in support of inequality that is more potent because it's not spoken because it's tested and it's in the shadows a British journalist who was covering the primaries of last spring gave an illustration of how it worked when a Republican candidate spoke of this mis-tweet stance as giving black people somebody else's money and he got applause from an audience in Suve City, Iowa in a county where there are nine times as many white as black users of food stamps so people doing the applauding some of them had to be people who were using food stamps but they couldn't actually see themselves as implicated but they did see the argument so inequality has gotten a big support from these people who are suffering from it and can you see how it's working in their instance another case and this one we cite in the book a white electrician in Martinsville, Ohio how food stamp users in intent to no doubt visualize that as Afro-American in such an attempt that he was ashamed to tell his parents that he needed to use food stamps now why did he need it was after the crash the recession he still had the job but this overtime had been taught so much that he didn't have enough money to support four children whose wife the fact that his own family had that sort of need did not soften his contempt of and he was traveling around with journalists and they looked out the window and they saw crowds of people at midnight who were using their food stamps and somebody was using them to shop and he pointed them out with contempt and he said you know when you see people out in the street why visit the cell what are they into he was out in the street at that time and he didn't think he was into anything unsavory but they had to be into something unsavory so the point is racism tagged those more white shoppers as people who were into something because they were out of work and racecraft concealed from him the truth that he and his men were not shoppers were out of the same equation of inequality I'm going to say that part of the point is especially strong I think I got to moderate the type type of question for you and this might be a nice way for the audience I know I know you and you at least by the implication are all entrenched in photos of the notion of whiteness and what whiteness studies so I'm wondering how I think I know the answer square what some people might think is a contradiction between the contention or the complaint really and it's a justified complaint that race full racialization is directed toward the non-white victims with the objection to the whiteness attack can I get a really short answer and my sister quoted somebody to this effect I think you're talking about and I know how far it can go but there is one person who said recently who said that I realize a woman who is quoted is saying I realize I go through much of my life not really having to think of myself as white and then I realize what a liberation I enjoy by comparison with other people she was talking to and you see what's deep about that is that she if she had not engaged in the political engagement or commitment she had done she would never have had to know that she was white or feel that she had that there was anything particular about it it's through engagement with other people that she said wait, come on there are many religions associated with being white but one of them is you have to constantly think of what you look like to other people and I think that the biggest one and the whiteness is a false equivalence in a word I wouldn't like to know many words I'm happy to work in the between 1996 and 2006 a documentary film called shared history in collaboration with a descendant of slaveholds in South Carolina some of you may know we are from South Carolina and her family's plantation backed up on Lemon Swamp which was the place our grandmother's father came from we knew about Lemon Swamp there was an area so she and I worked together and it was not simple and it it was a story to say how could we tell a shared history about South Carolina because their disparate stories passed down but how can we not tell we have to tell since people have been sitting side by side for two and a half centuries in South Carolina it's necessary to do it and so we worked through that problem you can see the film if you want but a week ago two weeks ago we went together to South Carolina to a condo in a gay community looking out over the sea and we're good friends now but we didn't sell consciously because I wanted her to see me negotiating dangerous space and I wanted to see her how she managed to dispel the problem of everything and it was quite something she kept saying look I don't want to go in the pool think of what the pool means to you she said I don't want to go in the pool I don't want to go in the sea front you go in the pool I said I'm going in the pool by myself or insulted or insulted and I just is one of those South Carolina names I might as well tell you she won't mind we always interested in public listening it's Felicia DeSoso and Furman so this woman said well we're just going to get them we're going to see what it all is and so we went she came to the pool and we saw there were people in happening and we broke into the conversation with them and it produced a world and after a while I saw that they didn't bite and she saw she didn't need to be there as a protector and I sat in the jacuzzi with this couple and talked for about an hour and she came back and then we shared the social experiment we had been doing and they were fascinated and I said well I knew South Carolina is possible is possible and it's frightening and it's legitimate I mean everybody understand what the symbolic meaning of a pool is and everybody knows how dangerous a game they can be at this point and I said hey this is Franklin Felicia your place frightens me so that was it we've done it and we decided that we're going to try to write together about this conversation we've been trying to have about the world and the background a background to that is a story that we tell in this book about another swimming pool into which a mixed group of children from a day entered outside Philadelphia outside Philadelphia it's not South Carolina and it led to an instant exodus of the white children until all of their mothers and it says like 2005 2009 2009 I'm sorry about the awkward situation earlier but I wanted to ask about this reversal of your thesis so now we're saying that racism gives rise to questioning the numbers between race and I've never actually heard something about it and we find racism as a double standard and I want to know where does that actual racism arise we're not saying that it's derived from the question of the difference between one person if not from the differences well I have there are a couple of stories that are very illustrative maybe I should tell them a story about the kind of women should I tell them who they are who they are tell them a couple okay take a distant distance away there is a travel story a travel book published in 2007 about somebody who toured southwestern France and it was reviewed in the nation I know about it through that review in the person in southwestern France and lots and lots of churches and this person that was struck by the fact that there were these teensy doors on the side of churches often what was that and the author found that these doors were constructed for a despised people because the middle ages called the catwalk C-H-E-O-T-S and the reviewer became fascinated with the catwalk well they have to enter the church by the desmond entrance it's small not because they were small but because they had to bow down before they could stand up they had to accept communion from the end of a long stick they had to sit in the designated part of the church they were prohibited to marry outside their group they could not go barefoot they could not draw water at the same places as everybody else I thought water fountains but there we are in other words we have something that act they had to wear the signature that identified them and often it was a goose's foot so you could see the dried up foot maybe there was a characteristic smell as well now I said to myself these are traits these are traits of ritual conduct and segregated society that sound like the US South in the 20th century while I was amazed and then the reviewer went on to say we don't know much about the cargo they have disappeared now she said the mystery of the cargo is that they have no distinguishing features and I said she has illustrated our pieces in racecraft the cargo had no distinguishing features that's why they had to wear the goose foot that's why they had to sit apart that's why all those other things existed otherwise you wouldn't know who was cargo and who was not but the thing I want to say to you is that they knew how to do it but again this is where we're talking about the middle ages long before they could stand a difference rules differentiating rituals they did with that where everybody looked more or less alike down the ages of Europe and so when it started happening to black people it's not because they were black it wasn't enough that they were black they did the same rituals of separation so you see we don't need that that is part of the illusion and part of the illusion in teaching about this there always has to be physical difference like that pathetic reviewer all the other things was in her face that different physical difference doesn't exist isn't necessary that might exist but it isn't necessary to have racist phenomena on the foot when I know how the cat goes escape their situation just to add to that I don't know what Barbara feels and I wouldn't try to produce an experiment because I always mess it up but a punchline in the experiment is this that human populations are different human beings, human individuals differ in many many ways height, body build and this goes back to the folk character of this racism we know that racism exists because we know that racism exists and we know that racism exists because it's part of our folk reality so in that sense and in some circles thank god we're not in Chicago because we probably get strong opponents but it was enslavement that made black people not that black people were made to be slaves yes I would like to go back to the issue of disparity which was raised during the conversation and the reason I wanted to do that is because who are as valuable as the conceptual framework of race trap is in comparison to witch trap I also think it has its limits and it comes from one of the comments that was made about shining light on the everyday perceived aspect of how race operates I think there's value in that there's no question about that in fact we can probably call the audience some examples that we've lived with however I think that when you start to think about a political project particularly for the left political project for the left in terms of keeping in mind that race trap operates on the everyday lives of people how do we build, how do we craft a political movement so not only to shine light on it but also to talk about the political economy of racism what it stems from and what we need to do in terms of organizing we can speak to that it's also best part to speak to that well God help us then no I'm not going to talk about this in the background I need to say something I think this should be read class notes in the last few days that there has to be a sense of who all is concerned with disparities and who all because that's the who all who have to lose the politics and I think that the depiction of racecraft as pervasive and encompassing creates a way of posing things that happen in such a way that they allow people who could not ordinarily be in conversation about their practical requirements in today's conjuncture that have that conversation a sort of the territory I was on with my friend Senator Slaveholder the conditions under which we can have a conversation require awareness of the things that prevent us from having a conversation the conditions that make it possible for a man to be on a food stance and think it's a racial thing are conditions that are politically consequential because he's in the same boat but we can address the politics where it needs to be a way of of getting people together who would not otherwise be if we're talking about black theory but a concrete project to get this or that necessary thing done in which everybody has an interest and I think I can imagine I don't know that whether that was a total lump head or not the electrician but somebody who said look we have to this company that took my hours off short my jobs and deal with that issue all those people who are concerned and it may not be able to be taken up that way it may have to be taken up with they treat us with so much disrespect when we go together our food stamps is disgusting we're all Americans and find ways to identify what's common experience because we all understand and speak race craft very well for the United States we in fact the canvassing in my neighborhood in Virginia we figured out how to vote to the white neighborhoods where people are Republican against their own interests and at least start talking for them show up there and so I think there's it's relevant language that's legitimate for talking about inequality and they have to take up the space of that absence and otherwise it will constantly be identified with the shiftless people versus the hard working white people see what I'm saying I hope it doesn't sound dreamlike but it is about speaking we share a common language of English most of us we also have a common experience which we can speak of more clearly if we understand what mobilizes and that's why we use so many examples because not everybody even those scientists who do that nonsense I think will begin to pause if an undergraduate with a red race craft and sees that table that has listed here's the numbers for black population and here are the numbers for the non-black population I've seen that in 2012 this year statistics that are biological relevance done on black and non-black as a comparison if somebody I think I'm saying that people are used to getting away spot free with that and being paid out of public purpose to do that reactionary research if we can get students to stand up and say what's non-black yeah but do you have to cast the geno the non-black geno well listen I asked a question at Duke University in the geography seminar and people stopped and made tracks and then they began to talk in tongues as my father said you couldn't understand you could hear the talking but you couldn't understand what they're saying they're so used to non-black that they don't see what's weird about it and actually when I went back to that article that was in the New England Journal of Medicine they too have a sample of non-black so this has been slivered along the back side of our life and it needs to be we can air mine so we can begin to have politics that takes into comfortable reality yeah just I think it's actually on target the only thing I would add is that it's also linked to South Carolina which reminds me of South Carolina questions you guys asked me but I spent two or three years in the middle part of the last decade pretty much an organized project down there and I was struck a mind-finger struck me is that when you talk to working people about in the context of art about politics which means harnessing the politics what would be fine is that you know working people pretty much express concerns about the same stuff and they don't even ask about you know the so-called hot question about the issues that are supposed to divide blacks and whites and when we started down there it was like a couple of years after the two or three years after the flag controversy what I learned was that the component of this was trying to think about creating a electoral alternative was that the Democratic Party of South Carolina doesn't authorize black people to run in districts that are between 40 and 65 percent black those are defined as black interest districts are only those that are more than 65 percent black and that just kind of stopped me my question but you can understand the logic if you want black or white Democrats to be in the party then because of the way that electoral politics with collusion on both sides which is crucial has come to be the fall by for oration divide in South Carolina because the Republicans and the Democrats don't disappoint any people except which you know it's kind of like national politics except you know how which people are on which contract lists or what about the order of the names of some contract kickback lists pay off lists but what that means though is that there's no so politics then people understand the politics in the electoral realm on the side of both Democrats and Republicans black and white is all about race and that's the only thing that it's about right and I mean everybody understands the coded language and the stocking issues well there stands right big government and then when one of the white Democrats does get elected in one of these Black Pinterest districts then of course the concern is to make sure that they don't switch and become the Republicans once they become comfortable which is the norm but just think about this and then kind of you know this I think speaks directly to the problem of the political project right now Karen I think you're relevant the thing is that in so far that well we don't have help from our allies and by our allies I mean you know the liberals when was the last time that a Democrat candidate to National Office actually tried to address the working class or tried to identify himself or herself with a clearly doubly redistributive program I can't remember I'm not so doubtful enough to vote I can't think of it and I didn't do it to do what we got when we left that and more and more and especially since the Clintonism wing of the party won and was able to dissolve the DLC into the DNC what we've got is is that ethnic interest group ethnic slash interest group politics right that that's actively directed away from trying to pursue the counter strategy that you can lay out right to an alternation between symbolic and expressive active in one hand bearing witness to some injustice or the election cycle where everybody understands that well yeah this is just about getting this marginally less stinky bastard elected but I'm over the other so there's not even much space for us to think about pursuing politics but as you applied your question and you may click on the answer I think that's how we've got to go other yes not better than you right there oh sorry thank you for your ideas I have two questions but before I ask them I just want to try a summary to make sure I understand what you're saying by race grab it seems that what you're saying when you use the term race grab is that the logic of racism is circular is that what you mean that's part of it and that you can't explain anything that is otherwise you can't explain anything that's held as an expression of race in quotes without using racist language or racist terms to explain it as racial you can only end up when you start only end up when you start and circular alright thank you the two questions are this I understand that racism is the practice of a double standard based on ancestry do you mean ancestry in a different way than national ancestry for example I'm Hungarian and I am a Hungarian ancestry so if I don't like Swiss people are you saying that that's racism? the first question and the same question is that Francis Bresswell a psychiatrist racism is a conglomeration of defensive practices that white people have massed over time to prevent what she calls white genetic annihilation and what she means by that is to put it a certain way if you shake up the population of the planet enough without boundaries, economic, physical etc. given enough time the planet because most people, most human beings are brown females so racism is basically a whole set of fences, psychological industrial, economic, etc. to keep white people a phenotype of white people for being wiped out over millennia so I was wondering what you think about that idea as well as clarifying that idea of ancestry well I can start with the first one I'm not sure I'm going to tackle Dr. Bresswell's I thought I'd heard the last one a long time ago but let me clarify this about ancestry because I'm sure everybody in this room understands that ancestry itself is not a demonstrable category some years ago I read about a fellow who who said that he became an advert of genealogy when he was 13 and they were about so wiped about at the time when his parents said we value your Aunt Fanny whatever her name was she asked her genealogy because she'll tell you everything you need to know about that Bresswell's Aunt Fanny went and they did the family tree and it took weeks I know what people do when they do that but they looked into all of his background and he said in one moment that was almost an epiphany and Aunt Fanny said look there and she pointed somewhere on the family tree she said that shows to Sean and he spent several years feeling very touched about that oh my goodness I'm descended from Sean until he went to college and took a statistics course where in one little lesson the guy was talking about very large numbers and he used as one of his examples numbers for the your ancestors you know how fast those numbers get very large I said the number couldn't be that large if there weren't a lot of overlap going on back there somewhere so then he said in almost these words so that means that probably everybody who's alive on the planet today is descended from Sean ancestry is arbitrary so when I talk about a double standard based on ancestry we even know that nobody can impose such a thing on the basis of a rule that is scientific and consistent some of your ancestors always have to be left out of it we quote a statistic that the anthropologist Sethan Pamy gave that he estimated that there are probably more white Americans with African ancestry than there are black Americans with African ancestry that's because whatever people say and however they may attribute this is my ancestry and not that you know you have two parents who keeps going up to you eventually you get to Sean so when I say that all I mean is that it's a standard that's supposed to represent ancestry and we were discussing here some of the ways that's marked out because it's not obvious but that standard that double standard becomes a practice around which ideological assumptions that we characterize as spacecraft are built as to whether you like another people who are hungry or something else we started out by saying this doesn't have anything to do with individual preferences with dislikes it doesn't have anything to do with states of mind it's social practices and social practices are not something that an individual can do alone so whether you like or don't like this group of people or not is a really good point nobody could create slavery by their actions for one individual so we're talking about something that's collective I'm going to let somebody else handle Dr. Wilson I'm going to say a couple things one is you know I got into this as a research area and a lot of the research stuff mainly because of two incidents that occurred in the early 1990s on two different IBB campuses in the span of three months in each case I was at a seminar with a group of very distinguished colleagues much more distinguished than I from the law school we don't get much more distinguished than that and the philosophy department and the political department first was at Yale and I had two birds with the same conversation first at Yale and then at Brown and the conversation at Brown because I was at Brown because they were contemplating starting ethnic studies program and it brought me to do a seminar with colleagues and the conversation went like this so I'm wondering what's the difference between race and ethnicity so in each case I said well, it's kind of like this you can imagine like a continuum of okayness and if you're at Brown zero of okay you have neither race nor ethnicity if you're kind of okay but not if you're really and in each case there was a classroom of colleagues it was like well but there's got to be something more than that and the next thing I knew we had taken a turn got in the way of that machine it was all this craft like natural affinities right so and in fact I even used the Hungarian exam I said so I'm not Hungarian but I'm Polish and you are Polish I can somehow smell this we can smell this and we can bond and it just wouldn't let it go because they thought they had to do something so I said okay there's something really big with respect to Dr. Wells we actually overlapped on faculty for a year at the very beginning of my career I mean here's the problem you know this is a it's an internally consistent story that you tell us but it's like a version of the Jaguars story right it's a historical story in the sense that it presumes the existence of precisely what it is that she is trying to explain she assumes whiteness and it's a psychoanalytic story too which is in this context and I know I'm not as hard on that stuff sometimes I think I am but in a case like this psychoanalysis is great for bad but but so she presumes so she takes the contemporary racial tax item of the early 20th century which as John Jonathan Marx often points out is really like one version of the biblical story of Noah and his kids like him and the others like they say about Catholics but so so I'm not that clear about the story but she but she takes this tax item and reads it back onto laughing right into the history of the world and it doesn't take into account the the recency with which notions of race and as a metric or a discourse of human difference and even the greater recency with which this standard 3-5 group commonly based taxonomy that is the foundation of our folk understanding of race actually came into existence so the period that she was talking about which is you know rough is basically the period of the Transmining Slave Trade the category didn't exist I mean most people in Europe didn't think of themselves as white people and by the way just since I got a bug up in my self now I'll just go and put this one out here too there's a cultural studies version of the Yaakov story too and it's racism emerged from notions of capital or otherness in the Enlightenment and presumably a road over here behind the Mayflower and what was implanted in the New World I always need to think about what would the Skidgate scale about you know the signifying monkey like an Asian guy swam from that from Cuba but the mullies are origin stories and they're stories they're stories in the same way that the Bible is a story in the same way that the signifying monkey is a story so I would conclude that the problem with Dr. Welsing on talent is that it's well it's like false but that was true in a black American political thought for a long time I had a cultural national ideology in the early 70's and it just had so much crap in it that I started caring and I had just cut the Welsing press theory of color confrontation of black studies of that black scholar piece off the syllabus when I picked up the New Haven register I found out that Francis Crest Welsing was giving the Martin Luther King Day address that's not a sponsored by the Black Student Alliance at Yale, so I had to dig the damn syllabus out of the address and have to go into the basement I wasn't going to say anything about her but let me just say this because it tags on to what Adolf said apart from the fact that these categories that she being told are based on categories you also have to ask yourself if there's a mechanism here, when is the mechanism how to work do you have something in built in you programmed into you that recognizes and tries to preserve these categories that are recent developments in human history and it makes me think and I'm sorry to put it this way but it makes me think of a few other big brands and I circulate the dog circuits more than one talked to me about their dog's preference for other dogs on the same breed so what could the biological mechanism possibly be for a dog to recognize a breed that is wholly the product of human manipulation and about which the dog doesn't know but that's a question that's a question whether the dog knows what you just asked is a question it's not a conclusion which is the question what is the mechanism by which a dog will recognize another dog of his breed and preference that's a question but there's no what's the answer my answer is that the dog does not recognize another breed because it's not a biological fact there's no such thing who was the chief francis well saying may say that if you just made it random what the truth is if dogs made it random you'd end up with a generic dog and it wouldn't have anything to do with the breeds it doesn't have anything to do with the breeds now we're the ones who do that and to think that the dog understands it is to me analogous to thinking that there's two different beings that makes us want to preserve a biological status that our biology doesn't have anything well you know just to push that a little more too I mean think of it like the way that race science at the moment when race science had its moment basically its average it was never possible to find a population to find a population that cluster around the characteristics that were said to define the race so what to do what to do well what the race scientists did was create ideal types create taxonomy in their and then take the ideal type of an Alsatian say to the real people living in Alsat and measure them for the extent of their putative deviation from this high totally idealized construct that was just the chapter I'm working on now that when you say race you might as well say or raise to respect the science you might as well say Sasquatch right you have the same thing right if you go looking for Sasquatch because you know Sasquatch it is there why because that's what the folk ideology is that's what you know because you know and this is the same and race is exactly the same you know same as Sasquatch and I mentioned that in my chapter because if you saw it in the 20s and 30s and we see it again in fact I can't know where exactly so I think it's close to the end of the race graph you guys mentioned that you know the trope among the latter day race science is that you know when somebody calls foul at having you know now the fashion is epigenesis which is just one over the marketing risk here but but when somebody raises concerns about the biodeterminist protocols basically and looking for every time there's a new innovation or a new technique or a new particle or a new discovery about bits of DNA junky DNA now is being rewritten by it there's a group of scholars that say okay now let's let's see if there's a racial difference right and the reason that they this underscore is the extent to which to race is an ideological and ontological commitment because the task of presumption is well it's true that we couldn't find race differences before but that's probably just because a matter of instruments weren't good enough and so you know now we can maybe find them and then people like us will eject and then the response is you're trying to stand in the way of science and so no I think the Sasquatch substitution is quite quite effective you know like if you spend all this damn research money but if you're going to find the Sasquatch then people would have problems I have a colleague who in the beginning of this semester he's done this more than once and this is his teaching really over Middle Eastern if that's his specialty and he teaches a course on Africa and he knows this and he's come certainly like ideas about it so he starts by giving something that it's his way it's his reductio art of servant but he does it straight faced and he tells them every society has a plum constant and the plum constant is a measure and he tells all the factors that go into calculating this plum constant which is a measure of civilization and there's a hierarchy and some have a higher plum constant than others and he develops this for maybe a third to a half of a lecture and then at some point he pauses and then he looks at them and he's like you know people are writing this down just so it weren't nonsense this is nonsense you might be so beautiful well he told me that he had to stop doing it because one year a student got very upset more than one and said well why believe in the plum constant how can you say that it's nonsense there is a plum constant A even used repeated the word and said how can you do this so my friend decided don't do things because they can't already they understood or they can't understand now I want to when I first got the pen I thought I would teach I would share with you the instruction second but third foundation so I have a third class so it's done well sorry