 That's wonderful word taping at the blue building and the guest of honor tonight is Yasha Monk who is a Johns Hopkins professor give a big hand for him And he's he's also the founder of a really interesting online platform magazine called persuasion and His latest book is the identity trap a story of ideas and power in our time And I don't know if anybody out there is an academic or an intellectual a couple people, you know Mildly raising their hands. One thing that's great about this book is that if you believe in ideas He really demonstrates and documents that they matter, which is kind of nice to hear, right? You should hope so for sometimes perhaps would be better if ideas mattered less than they do that's right, okay But Yasha Monk Thanks for coming out and let's start give me the elevator pitch of the identity trap well the elevator pitch is that You know there's a new set of ideas about race gender and sexual orientation That has become really influential over the last decade And in the public debate about it. I think there's this weird tension where on the right there's sometimes attacked as Destroying everything that's good and holy And sometimes people invoke terms like woke or critical race theory to talk about sensible things like recognizing But there's still discrimination and sexism and racism in our society or wanting to teach kids about the history of Injustices in the United States like slavery and then on on on the left and the mainstream among many of my friends and colleagues in Response there's the sort of suggestion that there's really nothing to see here that certainly to say your woke is just to You know be nice and sensible and then want to see reality and there's really you know The claim that the norms that organizations are run by in the United States of change is just it's just wrong And there's nothing ideologically new About what's happening on the left and so what I try to set out to do in this book is to actually Understand what I think is a genuinely novel ideology an ideology That has an intellectual history of its own that arose in Universities in the United States in other countries and that then through a series of interesting mechanisms came to have This powerful influence on our society and I think that those ideas deserve to be taken seriously And then critiqued and so that's what I do and the first part of the book I tell the the story of where these ideas come from in the Academy. Let's let's start with that You call this new set of ideas that have power that have you know kind of taken over But you're telling and I think by many people's you know certain the C-sweets of certain types of corporations certainly the Academy increasingly different parts of American life You call that the identity Synthesis can you describe? What is the identity synthesis? Yeah, so first of all, we just need a damn term to refer to this ideology, you know Like and you're you don't want to say are this is wokeness Yeah, all of those terms that we have are just very politically charged, right? So socialism some people love socialism Probably most people in this room don't like socialism, but we can all agree to call it socialism, right? We need a term so we can discuss in a serious and neutral way this body of ideas and woke is not gonna Do it because it makes you sound like you're an old man shouting in the clouds Okay, so I call you identity synthesis. You're age. I'm agist. I confess That's a dangerous place to be in contemporary America Last time I checked, you know, don't trust anybody under 80 seems to be Long list our gerontocracy So so I think look these ideas are Fundamentally concerned with a role that group identities do and should play in our society and they are a synthesis of different intellectual influences in particular post modernism post colonialism and critical race theory And so that's why I call it the identity synthesis though call it whatever you want Call it the thing if we can just have a word that allows us to have a serious conversation about this Let's let's start with those kind of three tributaries. How are you defining post-modernism in this context? Yeah, so and I know I'm dangerous ground here because Nick is a deeply paid up post-modernist So he's gonna he's gonna come at me from I go to all the meetings Yeah, from the from he's gonna come at me from the post-modernist center So look the first point to make about the intellectual history is that this is not cultural Marxism So that is, you know, basically very few people have tried to tell the story of these ideas and the ones who have are mostly Writing polemicists who've said this is cultural Marxism and I have various problems with that one of them is that Taking economic categories like social class out of Marxism is a little bit like saying you've taken the bat out of baseball It's just not very much left You're describing both the New York Yankees and the New York Mets And it's just wrong as a matter of intellectual history if you think of this as a form of cultural Marxism You're not gonna understand the themes that dominate our politics today So I think the starting point of this ideology lies specifically of Michel Foucault and Foucault is You know raised by people who have these grand theories about how the world works first the Higaelian Teacher of his and men and Marxist teacher of his but he rejects those grand narratives about the world including both liberalism and Marxism He makes the argument that our belief in any form of objective truth or our belief in any form of real progress is Illusionary we might think we treat the mentally ill or the criminals or other people better in 1950s France when we did a hundred or two hundred years ago That's all bunk. It turns out to be wrong, but the really influential point He makes is about the nature of Political power and what he says is that you know when we think of power when you ask, you know High school civics Student what power is they might say well sort of top-down, right? It's like there's the state and we pass some laws and then the police and the bureaucracy sort of implemented in some way Right. This is no power in the most important sense is we are exercising power right now on stage by the way We frame things by the way we talk about things right power is this discursive process Where everybody exercises power over each other and as a result to oppose power is to Recognize these discourses to critique them But you can never really make progress because the moment you've dismantled one discourse another one arises And that's going to be as oppressive as the one that went before I thank you for that and you also quote of course leotards very You know kind of foundational definition of postmodernism as incredulity toward meta narratives The one thing and I this isn't about postmodernism, but it's interesting to think about people like Foucault I've talked and written about this from a libertarian perspective when you look at his work Particularly in the 70s and 80s he got to a point where he was telling his students in Paris to read Mises and Hayek and to look at liberalism Etc. So it's interesting to think about him and also you know part of what you do in the book Which I think is really important is that you also talk about how these ideas have real credence when Foucault was critiquing the medicalization of everyday life and of society You know at the same time that somebody like Thomas Saas was doing here or the sociologist Irving Goffman It was a moment when people are like, you know what like psychiatry and Psychologizing everything maybe that's a means of social control. It's not just a you know like oh, you know Medical professionals want to help people sometimes. They're putting people away You can argue that it went too far or that itself was wrong But there was a compelling understanding of a lot of these big theories of history and you know in France in the 60s Marxism certainly maybe not liberalism, but it had it had failed, right? Yeah, and and I think you know my probably my My favorite section the entire book comes at the end of part one at the end of where I tell this intellectual history And it's called careful what you wish for because I think that Foucault has all of the tools To criticize the moment we're in today He says, you know, he's a homosexual or somebody who's gay in our terms He's a man who had sex with men He rejected that term because he thought it was too essentializing too simplifying Too constraining of a varieties of sexual experiences his most famous metaphor is that of a panopticon which he gets from James Mill the idea that an Efficient prison would be one which the guard stands in the middle in a watchtower And he might in theory be looking into any Prison cell at any one time and so as a result he can punish prisoners when he observes them breaking the law That's the punishment part, but most of the time they self discipline because they don't know whether they're being observed or not And so in anticipatory obedience, we don't go close to the line And I think that's a lot of what happens on social media today, right? So so so Foucault I think would have hated a lot about this political moment And then the story really is and and you know, we'll have to read the book to really find out the details of the story More precisely, you need to buy the book. Yeah, but by the right now Pause the podcast to get out your phone You're all allowed to get out your phone because we didn't we messed up and we don't have a bookseller tonight for this wonderful So that crowd but you can get out your phone and and buy the book right now Um, I agree with you that Foucault gives or postmodernism and particularly a kind of Foucault And allows us to critique many of the identities that are being pushed in the power dynamics Let's shift to the next big tributary, which is postcolonial theory and you talk about Edward Said New York's own Columbia's own What is postcolonialism and how does that move into the identity sense? So that's postcolonial scholars two of the most important ones both end up at Columbia Said and Gaiju Spivak and they have This dilemma because we're really attracted to postmodernism and poststructuralism in Foucault and Derrida and so on because they're giving them the tools to this mental Colonial discourses which justified the oppression of their countries, right? But they're horrified by the apolitical nature what they see is the apolitical nature of Foucault But the fact that they says there's no real progress to be made, right? All you can do is to critique those discourses when I had Noam Chomsky on my podcast He said when he met Foucault in a famous debate in the early 70s He was the most immoral not immoral the most immoral man I have ever met, right? And so they share something that is quiet so they go to work trying to repoliticize Foucault and there's two crucial moves crucial moves here The first is by Edward Said who says all right These discourses about the Orient help to explain how colonial power was exercised and continues to be exercised But the point is not just to recognize that the point is to invert those discourses What we want to do is to use discourse critique as a political tool for actually shifting power in the world And that becomes a model for a lot of how politics works today a lot of politics today is you know If you're a feminist you might fight for abortion rights and so on but you're also going to do a lot of politics by Celebrating or critiquing the Barbie movie by arguing what is or isn't problematic well And that's true across not just families right across a whole set of social movements That's a lot of how we do politics today that is Saeed's politicized form of discourse analysis that's his response to Foucault and he also and I think this is you know Incredibly meaningful that he talked about that Discourse is not just political discourse. It's it takes place at the cultural level and so you know And it's kind of most abstruse form the novels of Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters is Actually kind of softening the ground for a colonial a colonialist understanding of the other and making it okay to treat them in a particular way Which gives rise to endless Discussions of Barbie right as as a meaningful cultural phenomenon, which I gotta say I you know my background's in literary and cultural studies So I'm all for that but often in a way it is easy to make fun of it But of course it's turned out over the last ten years that those forms of politics are very effective So in a way the victory of this form of politics has been self-validating I think 15 years ago it would have been easy to sneer at it and said ha ha ha these people think we're gonna change the world by saying But this movie is problematic But but I think actually that has turned out to be quite a powerful way of doing politics So there's yeah, there's a reason why Vakalov Havo called his revel He named the peaceful revolution in Czechoslovakia after a rock band not after a political theorist, right? So the next step is a Gayatri Spivak and she's saying look so so so so it's been helpful, but there's still this problem that postmodernists have this Critique of identity categories and philosophically speaking I buy this philosophically speaking I agree that to say women have something in common is overly essentializing and wrong We should be skeptical about that But you know what Foucault and and and Delos really pissed me off when they had this interview where they say you know Intellectuals shouldn't speak for people anymore You know the workers can speak for themselves and speak because well that might be true of white workers in Paris We've had an education we're voting rights and so on it might not be true of the most Disadvantaged which was the subaltern in places like Kolkata in India where she's from Somebody's got to speak for them and I want to speak for them So how am I gonna do that and she comes up with this very paradoxical term called strategic essentialism We should look philosophically speaking the critique of essentialist identity categories is right But for strategic political purposes, we sometimes have to act as forward We're true and sometimes I choose there for not to be universalist but an essentialist that idea of strategic essentialism But she herself admits is paradoxical and that being super influential when you go to a progressive space today People will say well of course race is a social construct Something broadly speaking I think is right, right? It's not actually a biological reality But then they'll go on to say that for all intents and purposes We should think about race as being the absolute defining thing in society and we would want to continue to be in certain ways And we're gonna split you up into different groups depending on the color of your skin and so on that is strategic essentialism in a popularized perhaps vulgarized form in action and then critical race theory How does that fit into this? So then you have the application of these ideas to American law schools in a tradition called critical legal studies, which is Saying we used to think that Judges decide based on these fine points of doctrine, but a lot of it is their ideologies or their self-interest It's a kind of postmodern critique of the law and within that you start having people who say well, that's great but Critical legal studies itself has a big blind spot and that's race and So what does it look like when we have the same analysis on race and the key founder of this tradition is a man called Derek Bell Who does heroic work in the 1960s? working for the NAACP helping to desegregate schools throughout the American South but comes to think of that work as in many ways a mistake In some understandable ways you say some of the students You know who we argue on behalf of by the time that we win the court case They've graduated so then they don't get a benefit from the school being integrated and so on but he Embraces in his first big academic article A theory which acknowledges explicitly comes from segregationist senators Which is that all of those civil rights lawyers claim to argue for the clients But really they're serving to masters and the master they're really serving is that of the integrationist ideals that often don't help black people and So therefore we should reject Many of the universal Institutions of the United States from key parts of the Constitution to Brown versus Board of Education Perhaps separate but equal would actually have been better Because there's no way of overcoming racism in America because the country by the year 2000 briefly before Belt passes away still as racist as it ever was the only way we can make progress is to rip those institutions up and make how You're treated more explicitly depend on the kind of group of which you are a part and then Intersectionality is another part of critical race theory. Talk a bit about that. Yeah, so that's the last step Kimberley Crenshaw recognizes, you know At the beginning this idea of intersectionality is what in the social sciences, we know is an interaction effect It's simply the recognition that the discrimination you might experience as a black woman is not just an Arithmetic some of the discrimination faced by White women or black men it might go beyond that and she has some great examples of how there was the case in a general Motors factory in Michigan and so on And there was an important recognition And and also on a more kind of I don't want to say banal It's I'm being banal not Crenshaw the idea that we have Overlapping identities that don't fully define us but kind of stacked together or whatever, you know, we call ourselves You know Americans, you know, Brooklyn born Catholic Jewish, whatever that there's a kind of weird modern Bailey going on there Right where the mark the kind of straightforward interpretation of this is Again, what social scientists know is interaction effect or knowing that like it's not, you know Like you have multiple identities and they both help to determine who you are, right? And that makes sense what becomes of that idea and Crenshaw herself is somewhat critical of that It's not entirely to be blamed for this is a much more far-reaching set of ideas where you're saying look If you're at a different intersection of identities than me, then I really cannot fully understand you And therefore to have effective political action It's not a matter of me listening to you and us having solidarity and getting on the same page It's a matter of saying look, I don't reckon I don't understand you but you're more pressed than I am So I'm gonna defer to you in your judgment about what to do and that becomes a very common progressive theme And then the other idea is that since all forms of oppression are interlinked If you want to be in good standing fighting against a particular course You have to fight against all forms of oppression at the same time So you want to join a feminist organization? You also have to agree with its view on Housing against development and you also have to agree with its view on the Israel Palestine conflict You also have to agree with its view on trans issues and so on so forth. There's there's a fantastic moment in 2015 when Bernie Sanders was making a campaign stop. He was running for president in Seattle and Up to this point Bernie was like, you know He was a class warrior He believed that class was the most important category and he literally got up staged by a couple of black lives matter Activists who almost pushed him off the stage, but he retreated from the stage and then came out with a New improved agenda which through racial issues or black life matters concerns on top of the race And I always think of that when you talk about kind of seeding ground to the people who seem to have the moral high ground based on Oppression. Yeah, and so so so I think you know going back to how should we understand the history of these ideas I don't I just don't think cultural Marxism gives you very much about where we are today I think the ideas we've just talked through does give you a lot of what we are today Not every quote-unquote woke person not every progressive believes every single one of those ideas But together they constitute so many themes of our Left-wing politics today, right? So it's skepticism about Objective truth and universal values from Michelle Foucault a Embrace of his politicized form of discourse critique as the key way of doing politics from Said and Embrace of strategic essentialism which leads to things like the progressive separatism We see in schools of people being split into different groups on the basis of race that comes from Spivak the skepticism about our Ability to make any kind of progress the permanence of racism as Bell puts it and the embrace of these race sensitive public policies of equity Over equality that is downstream from Bell and then this interpretation of intersectionality as we really can't understand each other And so to make common course I have to defer to you if you're in the more oppressed group That I think helps to explain a lot of what's happened over the last 10 years Yeah, talk a little bit about what happened. How do you define? I mean you've sketched that out What are some of the concrete effects? You know say that we see in Corporations, you know, let's start with that. What yeah, how does this play out in in a big corporation? Well, let me give you a few examples You know what people go to usually on this topic as kind of cancel culture stuff and I've written about this I've written about Latino electrician in San Diego who was fired from his job in the summer of 2020 because somebody Falsely thought that his hand dangling out of his truck was the okay symbol Which somehow was a white supremacist symbol according to some idiots in 4chan and he lost his job was the best job He ever had so those stories are real and I worry about that. I worry about the fact that Sometimes I have lunch with friends or I have lunch with you know CEOs or Senators or important people and they say the kind of thing we've been saying this conversation And then they add of course I would never say this publicly and I worry about what that means for our country and for our trust in the institution So all of that is real but this is not a book about cancel culture It's not a book about those stories because I actually think this ideology often has much more Consequential impact. So let me give you two examples One is a lady I spoke to in researching for this book called Kyla Posey in african-american educator in the suburbs of atlanta Who wanted to request a particular teacher for her Daughter who was the believe in second grade And the principal said sure of course, I'm you over the name She did and then this was like, ah, well She kept deferring and saying what couldn't you teach choose a different teacher? Um and eventually Kyla Posey got annoyed and said look what's going on Why can't I have my my for the teacher that I think is right for my kid and the principal said well, that's not the black class Now you might think this is straight-up racism, you know segregation the american south this principal herself was a black woman and a progressive and she believed that for the right kind of Development of a child as a racial being she has to be in an environment with a lot of same-race people even if she's well integrated in her class That's not good enough. She's got to go to the class where the other black kids are right And and we see that take place in many different contexts, you know, we are recording this in new york city not far from here Um at art and school they they have embraced the idea that Kids should think of themselves as racial beings in order to Understand the world in the right way at at bank street school For kids on the upper west side of Manhattan. You take a different subway line up there They do racial affinity groups and they explicitly say not only that they want the black kids and latino kids to In the spirit of strategic essentialism have a form of ethnic solidarity, which is understandable at least They say the white kids need to own the european heritage need to define themselves more strongly as white europe of course is a historically unified continent As we're seeing right now, it's not like there's been any wars in europe recently Can I ask i mean, you know in the marxist libertarian? I'm not only You know, i'm very incoherent. I'm a libertarian. I'm a post-modernist and i'm prone to marxian and class analysis Is that a good thing that the Children of the elites in new york are being taught completely stupid things because it makes the rest of us And our kids who may not have quite the same number of advantages just outperform them in the real world Well, no because actually what it takes now to succeed in many elite institutions is to have been habituated into paying lip service to these ideas In an uncritical way You know my my students who I teach are wonderful students and they're very thoughtful But they do worry and hopkins down in baltimore. Yes, I did Yeah But they do worry and complain that some of the professors they have Um, you know, it's very clear that you have to agree with the politics in order to get a good grade So, you know, but the thing I really worry about go back to you know, bologna or whatever the first University was perhaps perhaps, you know, but but here's my real worry, which is that Everything I know from history and social science teaches me that How you define yourself is very context dependent There's many different ways of defining yourself But once you define yourself by a particular group and you see this again and again in social science experiment If I get my students to debate whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich The kids who think that a hot dog is a sandwich discriminate against the kids who think that a hot dog is not a sandwich So if you tell those kids We're going to put you in a white group and we're going to lecture you about white privilege and how bad white people are They might be uncomfortable and I don't care. They're uncomfortable. You can be uncomfortable sometimes in your education. That's fine But if you actually succeed in making them think the most important thing about me is that I'm white A few of them might become great Ibram ex candy style anti-racists who want to denounce white privilege Most of them are going to become white supremacists And that's actually my concern. Let's talk a little bit about your identity And then I want to talk about how we get out of this and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience You write at the beginning in the uh, it's not quite the first chapter But it's kind of the beginning you say all four of my grandparents were sent to prison for their communist beliefs during the 1920s or 30s It's an interesting boy would be proud that I'm a libertarian speak easy. Yeah, that's you know, so it's like this is progress Right, you know, thank you. Hagel But um, you know, you you were born in Germany you grew up there And then you came to the united states. Can you give us a quick capsule biography? And leave the sex stuff out. That's in that's in your book the identity trap. We don't need to go through that now all the details, um So, yeah, my I mean, you know, my my my ancestors went the wrong place at the wrong time for a large number of generations um, and My my grandparents were born in stettles and what today's ukraine um, and for understandable reasons they You know became communists because in their context that's The ideology that promised falsely as it turns out Uh, a form of solidarity across religious and other groups Right something where the workers of the world would unite and the fact that they were jewish and the neighbors were not wouldn't mean that They might suffer programs Um, they went prison in the 30s for advocating those beliefs survived the holocaust and the soviet union came back to Poland to help build up the communist regime and when lo and behold the communist regime turned on them And threw them out and through my parents were 18 20 Out as well. And so I ended up Growing up in in germany going to school. What year were you born 1982? Okay, so you you don't really remember You know pre fall of the wall No, I have a memory of a Berlin wall falling, but oddly I have a memory watching this on tv in a house that we didn't live in until I was Until after 1989. So it's clearly something's wrong. Well, it's all a simulation. So, you know, but that's bodor yard Not. Yeah, I think, you know, there was weird explosives at the wall. It was a what a hope So, how did you? You uh, how did you go from, you know that to Being who you are today? I I knew that I wanted to study outside of germany in part because I wanted an adventure internationally and part because you know, I England had better universities and I was attracted to that and part because growing up jewish in germany I experienced some of the social norms That I think later made me allergic to some of the stuff in the united states So, you know, when I was born in 1982 there's about 30 000 jews left in germany I don't know. It was a little bit more after 1989 1990, but most of the people I grew up with had never met a jew and so to them you know, I was the whole representation of Their complicated past and depending how they felt about the past they failed about me And so sometimes I got anti semitism and so on and that was unpleasant, but you could kind of deal with it I think it was screw you, you know, there's nothing wrong with me But I also got this really creepy phylo semitism a lot of the time where people tried to prove to me How much we love the jews Or like tell me that hebrew is a beautiful language At the time, you know, germans know beautiful languages, right? I mean, but compared to germans, surely hebrew is a beautiful language. Um At the time, this was a less controversial statement. They would tell me how much they love the movie the movies of woody allen Anyway, and so I think that's actually part of when I saw some similar norms and customs Entering the social space where I was in the states was suddenly rather than being the representative of victims I became the representative of perpetrators I thought I hated being treated in this way and I don't want to treat others Why did you come to the united states? I love new york. Yeah, and then I basically never fully. Hey, yes cheer for new york um And then I like came here and I did a year at columbia and I didn't take any classes I either just passed away. I didn't take any class of spivak. I guess I should have done um And then I ended up doing my phd at havert and teaching other places And I've always like half lived in new york, but I never actually had a professional reason to be new york What what do you like about new york? Um, I think a lot of What I loved at the time and still love is the crime It's it's a rent. It's a higher rent. Um They're quite magnificent. I saw a comedian the other day who said, you know, stop complaining about the higher rents You really have to do something about it. If you think the rents are too high go stab somebody If someone stabs me I wouldn't I wouldn't complain and say thank you for your service. Um But it is not my joke sadly And no, it's it's it's that I think in new york you you you you could at a certain time. You still can Not be defined by who you are. I think there's something about new york that celebrates Influences from all over the world and encourages people to be true to that to be proud of their cultural heritage And yet there are so many different ways in which cultures Meet I I guess what I'm saying and in the terms of one of the chapters in later part of the book Where I talk about this topic is that new york is the world capital of cultural appropriation, right? And I love that about it No, well, let's talk about that and And you know move into how do we get out of this situation or and I think a lot of people you talk in the book A lot of people are pessimists Certainly, you know people on the right have their own issues But people on the left are pessimists. They can't acknowledge progress on any level I think the right also does that in different ways Um, how do we get out of the kind of broad based cultural funk that we're in that, you know Cultural appropriation is everywhere and it's bad that identity is simultaneously completely protean And so we we're all borderline personalities But then we also have these essential fixed qualities that we means we can never communicate with one another Well, I think a lot of it is that we have to win the argument And and to win the argument you have to take the idea seriously and actually understand them And then argue against them, right? So I was joking about cultural appropriation But I think it's an important topic So I have so mostly we've talked about part one of the book was about the intellectual history in part two I explain how these ideas come to be powerful and then in part three I criticize the main applications to areas from free speech to raise sensitive public policies But let's take cultural appropriation as one example, right? There's come to be this general suspicion this general taboo About mutual cultural influence that there's something potentially dangerous and unjust About it and I get where that comes from because there's some examples of so-called cultural appropriation that were clearly unjust like White musicians stealing the songs of black musicians in the 50s and 60s when they couldn't have big careers The problem is that the term of cultural appropriation Fails to express what was wrong about that situation or how we could have had a remedy What was wrong is not this musical style gaining an influence and gaining a broader audience. That was beautiful What was wrong was the horrible discrimination Outright discrimination that those black musicians suffered which meant that they couldn't travel across the south perform in many concert halls Be signed by major record labels. That was that's what was unjust And that's what we should have done in order to remedy that tackle that problem. I give the example of a Fraternity party at Baylor University with Unpleasant name of sink or the drinker In which you had kids mostly white turn up some in ponchos and sombreros others in construction vests and maids outfits Now this was clearly offensive But according to the concept of cultural appropriation You can't actually pick out what philosophers call the wrong making feature Of this situation because from the perspective of cultural appropriation the kids who turned up in ponchos did something horrible But the kids who turned up in maids outfits didn't do anything wrong because the maids outfit is not part of mexican culture It's if anything I guess part of french culture. So they weren't appropriating the culture, right? That's clearly absurd What was wrong here is that the students were trying to send the message that latinos are less than That all the good for us to be maids or construction workers There was something to be poked fun at and so we should defend Mutual cultural influence as one of the beautiful things about new york is one of the beautiful things about America and not give in to this idea that there should be a general poll of suspicion On ways to influence each other culturally. How would you deal with that? You know, let's say you're a college administrator. Let's say everything goes wrong for you and you end up a college administrator And you're not allowed to leave the country and go back to germany or ukraine or I would I would rather be and please have I ever become a dean Quote this line back to me and you know, take me out in an alleyway and shoot me Um, I would rather be a general, you know, a regional manager of trader joes than the deeds are the dean of social sciences Speaking of cultural appropriation at least you can fire and hire people You know as a dean you have no power to anything. It's the worst and everybody hates you It's the worst job in the world in a in a pragmatic sense Like how do you deal with a situation like that if you you know on a college campus? Baylor is you know, it's a good school. It's a christian school. It's a baptist school How do you explain to people like maybe that's not the greatest idea? I mean, I think I don't know in this particular case It depends on the particular rules of the student handbook and so on. I assume that they didn't break any Technical rules. Um, I think that this is something that students can also Handle among themselves. I think it's perfectly appropriate that there would be some kind of social repercussions for the kids who took part in that But a lot of people tell me hey, you did something terrible Um, I'm not sure that uh, you know, this is something that the administration needs to get involved It's one of the strange things that students who claim to be rebels today The first act of rebellion is to call a college administrator That's not something that anybody in the 60s would afford you should do Right, but but but let me perhaps speak because I feel like I gave a slightly narrow answer to your question earlier You know, here's the here's the broadest level at which to argue against this ideology I talked you through some of the main themes of of the identity synthesis Um, but you can also step back and boil it down to what I think are its three main philosophical propositions and there was a number one that um The key prism to understand the world is uh race gender and sexual orientation That is the thing you always have to look at in any situation to understand what's going on Robin dianne if I may it's fascinating when I was in grad school studying literature From the late 80s to the mid 90s The prisms were race class and gender Everything was we're going to look at the race class and gender implications of stuff and it's fascinating class Kind of dropped out of that. Yeah, sometimes people pay lip service to it But when you talk look at what they actually pay attention to and actually talk about it's very very rare Nobody wants to the same is true of religion sometimes people say religion But religion only matters when it's correlated with race So religion matters in the muslim context in the united states because muslim people Buy in large and non-white in the united states, of course There are white muslims as well but that's sort of how it's seen right Um, but it doesn't matter in context where it's not correlated with a minority ethnic group Um, so that's number one, right? That's how you have to see the work number two is um Universal principles like the constitution the bill of rights like like the 14th amendment like uh Even some civil rights legislation Is actually meant to pull the wool over your eyes It is meant to make it easier to cloak and to justify the continuation Of various forms of racial sexual and so on dominance and discrimination And that is why america today is as homophobic as sexist as racist as Whatever is as it was in the past That's the second key claim and then the third claim is that therefore since we haven't made progress under these universal values You have to rip them up and substitute it with a regime where how we treat each other and how the state treats all of us Will always explicitly depend on the group of which we're apart. Now. I think there's a very good Philosophically liberal i'm going to say to bridge the space between u-libertarians and me squishy, you know center left liberal um There's a very good response to each of these claims And that response is number one That of course race gender and sexual orientation matter in some context Of course there's context where that's very important including in the united states today in general, but it is not the only Thing that matters instead of looking at the world with just one prism as marx's did just looking at class And now we're doing just with these kind of identity categories You have to let the situation teach you how to interpret it We shouldn't in the words of jonathan haidt be monomaniacal in how we perceive the world. Yes race gender sexual orientation matters Yes class matters. Yes religion matters. Yes our individual attributes matters how we act matters what our aspirations are matter You have to let the situation teach you robin de angelo the sort of worst popularizer of all of these ideas has once said that um Every time that a white person interrupts a black person. They're bringing the entire apparatus of White supremacy to bear on them That makes me think that robin de angelo doesn't have any black friends Because of course this can sometimes be true in certain contexts It was certainly true in the 19th century in all kinds of contexts But it's not true if your best friends will argue about politics and interrupt each other all the time when that's a sign of equality right secondly It is profoundly untrue that the universal liberal values. We've been talking about Have failed to allow us to make progress. You know fredrick douglas Called free speech with dread of tyrants Recognizing that allowed people to say awful things in his day But it also allowed abolitionists when they were very unpopular to fight for their ideals Yeah, he also gave a great speech What to the slave is the fourth of july but called the constitution a glorious freedom document He said you all are hypocrites sitting here celebrating the constitution Celebrating the declaration of independence saying isn't it lovely when there's slavery in our country? But he didn't say therefore rip up those values. He said so if you mean it live up to them This document is glorious. It hasn't become reality and in that sense Liberalism or libertarianism or whatever ism is a progressive creed right? We're not saying everything is great. We're saying we have the right principles now It's time to live up to them and the aspiration to live up to them From fredrick douglas to ebra ninken to martin newford king and others is part of what has allowed us to make progress And by the way, it's offensive to say we haven't made any progress not offensive to us wonderful americans living today But offensive to the americans in the past who've suffered much much worse Discrimination to say that americas as homophobic today is in the past is absurd when in the lifetime of eunuch and me Ellen the generous had to Leave her talk show because she admitted having a girlfriend Right, it's just absurd. And so now she was cancelled because she's a pain to work with That's probably that's you know of all the forms of cancellation being a pain to work with I feel like is a fair one There so what do we do? Well, we we we we double down on trying to live up to these values That is the the right response and that is what Uh, you know a huge swath of americans actually believe and that by the way is the philosophy that can Make you win against the genuinely dangerous Racists and far-right populists and so on who are a very very real threat in our politics today All right, we're gonna stop This is ben the reason interview with nicolasp I want to thank tonight's guest yasha monk The book is the identity trap a story of ideas and power in our time. Thanks so much. Thank you