 Okay, everybody. So welcome to our talk today. My name is Christian Pies. I'm an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies Department, and I am the convener or director of the speaker series where Professor Cynthia Young will be speaking today. So let me, I'm going to give a little introduction to both the talks and then to Professor Cynthia Young. I'll take a few minutes. We'll go about it slowly just so that we're not overwhelmed at the beginning of this talk. So first of all, the race, ethnicity and immigration colloquium invites speakers from the Berkeley campus and other institutions to share research touching on various aspects of race, ethnicity and immigration. And this REI colloquium is situated under the Institute of governmental studies. One important theme explored by the colloquium is the changing shape of ethnic politics in the country. A second closely related theme is the impact of immigration on the nation and on California's political and economic life. You can read up a little bit more on the colloquium on the website. We'll be sharing that on the chat box. And just to say that we're thrilled that you're with us, we hope to have lectures that are pertinent to our society, and that offer us ways out of the current predicaments that we often find ourselves in. These colloquia are open to all members of the campus community. This lecture is being co-sponsored by the Center of Race and Gender, and by the Comparative Ethnic Studies Program in the Ethnic Studies Department. And if you have not already looked at their websites, please do so. They have fantastic speakers as well. So today's speaker is Professor Cynthia Young, a professor whose work I have read for many years now and whose work I have been building or in conversation with in my classes and in my own work. So I am incredibly thrilled that you're with us today. Professor Young is an associate professor of African American Studies in English, and then the head of the Department of African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. This is her first book titled So Power, Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of the U.S. Third World Left. And here it is. And you'll see that mine is a used copy. So if you don't already have this, I suggest that you do go ahead and get it. It looks at the influence of the Third World anti-colonialism on activists, writers, and filmmakers of color in the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her fellowships from the Ford and Mellon foundations and rightfully so. She is the author of articles, reviews, and short essays, all of which are listed on her website. She's also recently be co-edited with Min Sun, a forum for American quarterly entitled Whiteness, Redefine, or Redux. Her current manuscript, Terror Wars-Culture Wars, raised popular culture and the civil rights legacy of 9-11, considers the contours of popular culture and contemporary discourse in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Her particular interests are the questions of black citizenship and immigrant exclusion. She considers a range of texts in order to decipher how African Americans are being re-inscribed as ideal citizens in contrast to new Asian, Arab, Latino, and Latina immigrants who are positioned as inherently suspicious and inassimilable. Her project has been supported by the fellowship at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. For today's talk, titled Shock Jocks, The Radical Right and the Roots of Trumpism, Professor Young will examine the deeper roots of Trumpism's xenophobia and white supremacy, arguing that President Trump benefited from a wave of white fear and anger, rather than originating it. By replacing the origins of her current U.S. culture of intolerance and fear back to the 9-11 and the election of President Obama, this talk considers the role of Shock Jocks, the Tea Party, and the Radical Right groups in fueling white hatred and fear. I know that you're all here. If it's possible, please do the little clappy thing so that Professor Young knows that we are thrilled to have her, that she's speaking to us from Pennsylvania, but that her work speaks to us out here in California. So with that, and they further ado, Professor Young, the screen is yours. Thank you. Hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today and thanks goes to Christian Pice and UC Berkeley's race, ethnicity and immigration colloquium for inviting me to speak. And endless gratitude goes to Megan Collins for patiently shepherding me through the logistics that made this possible. Can I have slide one please. I was having some trouble sharing so we have to tag team this. In August 2010, Glenn Beck was on a roll with a popular Fox News show, a syndicated radio show and multiple New York Times bestselling books. Beck was writing a high tide of right wing conservatism. For months, Beck had been hyping his restoring honor rally, which was to be held at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr. I have a dream speech. Initially, Beck denied that he'd chosen the date to correspond with the famous March on Washington, explicitly pitching the rally as political. But as the data approached, Beck switched tack embracing what he previously dismissed as coincidence. He began to speak of the rally in general terms as an event to reaffirm faith hope and charity, the values that made America great. As the rally drew closer, Beck warmed his theme describing the rally as a product of quote divine providence unquote with exalted goals. Quote, we are the people of the civil rights movement, he said in one radio monologue, we are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights justice equal justice, we are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. The same man who a year ago had accused President Obama of being a racist with a quote deep seated hatred for white people was now claiming the mantle of civil rights. The same commentator who was the public face of the Tea Party, a group condemned by the NAACP in a July 2010 resolution for having racist elements was now positioning himself as the protector and inheritor of civil rights. So the question is how do we get here. Over the next 45 minutes, I hope to answer that question, describing how Beck facilitated by right wing media, the Tea Party and right wing militias created the toxic cultural muck out of which President Trump and Trump is emerged. Trump campaigned on and popularized the sentiment that the US way of life and white men have been forced into a defensive crouch by liberalism feminism socialism or communism, or simply the mainstream media. White fortunes were declining while undocumented immigrants and black lives matter activists were thriving. But before there was a President Trump, there was a Glenn Beck, who sounded many of Trump's themes well before insurrection became part of our political lexicon. The difference is that in the first decade of the 2000s, Beck felt the need to couch his racism and xenophobia in civil rights era, hence the claiming of Martin Luther King Jr's mantle, a manure that has since been adopted by the right wing movement writ large. In 2015 at a summit hosted by the Koch Brothers that included Senators Corey Gardner, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, Tim Scott and Dan Sullivan, Charles Koch said, Look at the American Revolution, the anti slavery movement, the women's suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, Koch said, all of these struck a moral chord with the American people, they all sought to overcome injustice. And we too are seeking to write injustices that are holding our country back. This from the man who's funded the John Birch Society, voter suppression efforts, union busting, and other activities that disproportionately impact black Americans. Drawing such equivalences demonstrates just how ordinary the yoking together of white victimhood, racism, xenophobia and the civil rights legacy has become. Glembach's rise coincided with and was facilitated by the 911 attacks. Obama's subsequent election, heralded in those days as evidence that the US was quote post racial unquote, fueled the rise of the Tea Party and so called patriot groups, constituency is forged by anti black racism xenophobia and an abiding sense of white victimhood. These elements define Trumpism and the contemporary Republican Party for that matter, which has been captured by its millionaire circus Barker. It's customary to read the right wings freedom talk currently prominent in its opposition to vaccine mandates as a way of linking themselves to the founding fathers. But I want to suggest over the next 45 minutes that freedom has also been central to right wing discourse because of its powerful link to the civil rights era. Then, in the civil rights era freedom was a synecdoche for human rights, electoral participation and end to state violence against black and brown people. Now, freedom is a way of casting virulent racism and nativism and rhetoric associated with anti racism. This I contend was a central home hallmark of 21st century radical discourse until Trump shed its civil rights gloss to show its naked white supremacy. Next slide please. There we go. This talk consists of three parts, as you can see here in part one identified the 911 attacks as a seminal event that made available again to white Americans the language of victimhood. Part two looks at the armed radical right and the Tea Party, describing how racism and nativist sentiments stoked their growing popularity, reflecting and spreading white fears of being swamped in quotes by racial and ethnic hordes. And part three focuses on the rise of Glenn Beck and his use of civil rights rhetoric to advance a racist xenophobic anti immigrant cultural and political agenda. That rhetoric made more palatable sentiments that since the 1970s white people covertly held more pet more palatable. This civil rights gloss repurposed that movement's legacy to forward an agenda it odds with human rights and humane immigration and asylum policies and in fact diametrically opposed to the freedom dreams that animated the civil rights movement. This rhetorical narrative strategy made Republican politicians and the white people who elected them increasingly more comfortable saying the quiet part out loud. In the first decades of the 21st century, the 911 attacks and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan laid the foundation for resurgence in US imperial ambitions. They also laid the groundwork for resurgence and white anxiety, both because 911 was a highly symbolic and devastating attack, but also because that same decade, including the start included the start of two never ending wars. The 2000 2000 2007 2008 global financial crisis, and then the election of the first black president. The costly and bloody imperial wars in the global financial crisis accelerated ever widening racial, economic, political health and educational gaps. Those gaps combined with significant cultural shifts have hastened the remaking of white identity as uniquely vulnerable and victimized in the 21st century. Next slide please. Central to this white racial formation where the September 11 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. It was accurately visual in nature, and covered by a 24 seven new cycle 911 or rather the media's coverage of it laid the groundwork in which the myth of a uniquely imperiled white identity could take hold. US media, and this I'm talking here about left right and center depicted 911 as a traumatic and world redefining event. It was described as a senseless apolitical act, one that inexplicably targeted innocent Americans. The telegenic nature of the World Trade Center attacks burned images of the collapsing towers and an asphalt ground zero into a generation's collective consciousness. Next slide please. The narrativizing of the 911 dead as blameless victims and heroic first responders. And on the other hand the demonizing of the terrorists is fanatical Muslims who hated America quote, because of its freedoms unquote ushered in the reframing the reframing of the US as a homeland rather than a nation. My specialty is 20th and 21st century history but I don't believe that homeland was ever used as a term prior to 911 I haven't found any examples of it. It is a term that is broadly used in Israel and there's a very close connection between Israel and the US after this attack. That was sort of cemented the trauma in terms of using the term homeland. It's meant to signify that the trauma was at once personal, a home invasion and collective we were all targets now. The US failure to locate the attacks within the global context of US imperialism obscured the fact that populations in the Middle East and elsewhere are more vulnerable to sudden death and violent displacement because of US foreign policy, then we in the US have ever been unspoken and disavowed was even the possibility that US foreign policy might have created the conditions in which al-Qaeda could emerge. Once immediately after the attacks critiques of the US and attempts to connect 911 to US foreign policy were deemed unpatriotic, immoral and even reason for termination. For instance, black arts poet and Mary Baraka, who is then poet laureate of New Jersey was asked in September 2002 to resign after reading his poem someone somebody blew up America at a literary festival. This convenient highly orchestrated media common sense forged a new take on an old American exceptionalism representing 911 as a unique collective wound, one that required a quote, therapeutic patriotism unquote and a war on terror to preserve the nation standing as a preeminent symbol of democracy and freedom in the world. The idea that radical Islamic terrorism targeted US culture, not US policies or politics and I think that's a really important distinction hold on to because so much of the war on terror rhetoric reduces motivations of terrorists in the Arab world to them just hating our freedoms and hating that we have McDonald's and just they just don't really engage with the kind of political side of these groups at all. The idea that radical Islamic Islamic terrorism targeted US culture, not US policies, enabled the surface invocation of the US is tolerant to multiculturalism. So President George W Bush praised Muslim Americans in the wake of 911, while also allowing white people to believe that they were targeted for who they were quintessential Americans where the civil rights movement demonstrated that white rights and privileges, access to federally subsidized housing, public education and public parks came at the expense of black people 911 allowed white Americans to reimagine themselves as collective victims of global terror, irrational hatred and religious persecution. 911 became a powerful way for whites to lay claim to victimhood at a historical moment when that had largely been foreclosed to them. So after 911, a public value survey conducted by the Public Religious Research Institute, captured altered views on racism in quote real targets. Next slide please. So you can see that sort of based on party affiliation. And I'm sorry I'm looking at two screens, just to make it easier for myself. And then based on so based on party also based on identity. There's a growing sense amongst whites and amongst Republicans and certainly amongst tea party that discrimination against whites is now a bigger problem as minority, not as big a problem as minority group discrimination. And of course the people who most subscribe to this view are Fox News viewers. This culturally magnified sense of white vulnerability coincided with a rapidly changing demographic context that threatened to make whites of European descent a statistical minority by mid century. Faced with this whites across the political spectrum showed themselves, and they still do to be susceptible to a defensive white racism. For example, a 2014 study, next slide please, published by social psychologist Marine Craig and Jennifer Richardson, found that a nationally representative sample of white Americans exhibited in quotes pro white and racially biased attitudes when made aware of the nations shifting racial demographics, the greater the perceived threat to white privilege and power, the larger the spike in racist sentiment toward all racial minorities, even towards those groups and this is sort of key, such as Asians and black Americans who had nothing to do with the changing demographic. As you can see from the slide, you know the questions they ask are pretty kind of straightforward. So people pretty straightforwardly clearly sort of made their views known and it very much broke out along black and white lines next slide please. The other thing that's interesting is that even when they assuaged status threat fear so even when they did various things to reassure white people that they weren't going to lose status. They actually shift at all their sense of anxiety. Next slide please. Part two, the radical right rises. One indicator of this increasingly defensive stance on the part of white people was a historic rise in hate groups. In 2011 Southern Poverty Law Center report estimated that active hate groups had risen from 602 and 2000 to over 1000 and 2011. Next slide please. So this is just this goes all the way to 2015 as you can see. It just kind of gives you a sense of sort of the peak years I hope that you can see that 2011 2012 starts to dip in 2013 then rises again in 2015 and peaks yet again during Trump's administration. What began as 884 active groups at the end of the George W Bush presidency was up to 2018 by the end of Obama's first term. Participation in hate groups dipped a bit in the intervening years until peaking again in the middle of the Trump presidency. And in 2018. Importantly what seemed like an unprecedented spike. Next slide please. At the end of the presidency of George W Bush has now become the floor. Oh wait, I might be out of sequence. Can you go to the next slide. I feel like there's one. That's the one I wanted. Thank you. Active US hate groups have never again gone below 800. Whereas, you know you saw at the beginning they were much lower than that. So now I need to go back to that hate map. Just to give you, if you go to the Southern poverty law centers hate map you can find your state, as well as a breakdown of groups that are active there and you can search. It's sort of a fascinating tool I kind of go down a rabbit hole when I go to it. I found out, or I guess I was reminded because I did know this that Pennsylvania my home state is number three in the nation with 36 active groups. So it's, it's larger than any of its neighboring, any of its neighboring states, but it's also the third largest in the country behind only Texas in California. Next slide please, or two slides I guess. All right, researchers attribute this historic increase in hate groups to the growing presence of a radical right dominated by patriot groups, most of which are militias. And here I'm going to stop and define my terms patriot groups is sort of umbrella term for anti government conspiracy minded groups of three sort of main types militias the largest segment about which I'll say more in a minute. And this is the United States protest movement, a 1960s era movement of people who believe that federal state and local taxes are unconstitutional. And three, the sovereign citizen movement and this one I don't even pretend to understand what they're saying but they believe that the US government was infiltrated in 1860 and thus seek to become sovereign and declare themselves loyal to the pre 1860 US government. 1903 is a belief, as I said that the federal government has been infiltrated and is no longer legitimate. Militias dominate the so called patriot movement. They emerged in 1993 after federal agents in Waco, Texas killed members of the branch Davidians religious group. This really took off however after Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, injuring hundreds and killing 168 people, many of them children from the building's daycare center. McVeigh was an army that and a member of a radical survivalist group in Michigan. Like their fellow patriots malicious harbor anti government sentiments and subscribe to conspiracy theories, which they say motivate them to conduct military style training. And so these are members are police officers active duty or military veterans. Okay, so I wanted to show this picture just to give you a sense of how well armed they are but also how organized they are, and then just to show you how much power they have to actually, you know, at at rifle point, I suppose, undocumented immigrants, until border patrol gets there so they very much work with border control in in the instances where they're patrolling the US Mexico border. Though they emerged in the Midwest, their members are best known for sending armed patrols to the US Mexico border. Well, not all patriots are white supremacists. In addition, by pock, there's little doubt that militia members are equal opportunity racists who devote much of their energy to opposing immigration reform and harassing desperate migrants crossing the border. It's also worth noting that the border between militias and other patriot group, patriot groups can be quite porous as groups didn't dip in and out of extremism as you can imagine the membership and the activities are quite volatile. They didn't necessarily last, and they kind of dip in and out of more violent or extreme behavior. One more slide please. As it did with all hate groups. Now go back one sorry, I'm slightly out of order, the election of President Obama revived a dying movement with the number of groups skyrocketing from 149 and 2008 to 512 512 and 2009. In the year 2011 patriot groups had more than doubled to 1274. Though they are responsible for an increasing number of terrorist attacks on US soil, and this is periodically gotten mainstream media attention and then it just kind of gets dropped. The real story here is not so much the expansion of the radical right, as it is the mainstreaming of it over the 20 years since 911. In the 2020 SPLC extremism report, the authors note that Kyle written house a mod Arbery's murderers and the capital insurrectionists are all indications of the fact that more and more white Americans are willing to embrace extreme tactics in the face of what they see as a threat to white hegemony. And several surveys have shown that a majority of Republicans don't believe that President Trump lost the election, which is obviously you know that kind of conspiracy theory is obviously feeling more and more extreme tactics, as we've seen. So this mainstreaming of extremism is precisely what Trump exploited and continue to stoke during his presidency. Next slide please. Another vehicle for the mainstreaming of racism and xenophobia was the Tea Party movement, which is widely credited with unleashing quote a politics of anger, unquote, founded in the Bush era to protest tax policy and bailout programs that were put in place in response to the 2008 economic crash, the Tea Party gained momentum after President Obama's inauguration. The Tea Party movement consisted of six primary organizations, Freedom Works Tea Party, Resist Net, Tea Party Nation 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express. Next slide please. The Tea Party years were and still are grassroots organizers who don't really belong to any formal organization, though they bring the Tea Party perspective to a host of issues, including immigration, school curricula city budgetary policies and appropriate use of force by police officers. In 2010, all but Freedom Works the most mainstream and least grassroots of this network had so called birthers and prominent leadership positions. But in birther ranks, when Tea Party analysis rightly insists, and abiding obsession with President Obama's birth certificate is often a stand in for the belief that the first black president is not a quotes real American. And I'll just remind you here that President Trump spearheaded the birther movement urging President Obama to release his long form birth certificate to prove his birthplace was indeed polite. To one degree or another the Tea Party has been a haven for racists and nativists forging ties with various right wing entities. Resist Net has been a hub for Islamophobes and birthers 1776 Tea Party was linked to the Minutemen project which is a militia group and anti anti immigrant movement. While the Tea Party Patriots are closely aligned with militias and Christian nationalists, which is, I feel sort of the, the most recent term that we use for white supremacists. The Tea Party Express has fought numerous charges of racism and part based on the actions and deeds of a vowed anti semi and white supremacist Mark Williams who was the group's first chair person. Tea Party Nation a Tennessee based group has also made alliances with birthers are also made alliances with birthers Christian nationalists white separatists and nativists, though it is also publicly opposed abortion gay life and anything that allegedly opposes Christian rights and actually did attend a couple of these Tea Party rallies. When Sarah Palin was speaking at them. And you could see that it was just this like hodgepodge of incoherent ideas and and very often there were signs that said, this isn't about race, right next to like a depiction of Obama as a monkey on somebody or you would see people sort of saying things like keep the government off of my social security or stuff like that. Or like government is tyranny if they touch my Medicare, those kinds of things. So it's just like a really strange mix of folks. And also lots of selling of racist memorabilia. You know it was like a tent revival in a lot of ways, with kind of racist accessories, I guess. So, Devin Burkhardt and Leonard Zeskin authors of Tea Party nationalism contend. Next slide please, that the Tea Party has provided platforms to anti semites racist and bigots hardcore white nationalist militia members and other extremists have been attracted to these looking for potential recruits and hoping to push white protesters towards a more self conscious and ideological white supremacy. It may be a diffuse and varied network but Tea Party here seem to be ideologically consistent in their racism and xenophobia, whether they see themselves as challenging mainstream Republicans are opting out of the political mainstream It's difficult to say that even this distinction holds, since Trump's presidential campaign was popular with mainstream Republicans and white nationalists, as reported by Evan Asnos in the New Yorker. At its height the Tea Party's primary target was the first black president. Without a doubt Khalifa Sena wrote in an opinion piece, Obama's election was a transformative moment for white people, contributing to a feeling of white disenfranchisement. Researchers Christopher Parker and Matthew Beretto argue that Tea Party is fervently believed that President Obama was out to destroy their country and undermine its founding values. And by this they didn't mean racism and settler colonialism. The president's blackness clearly upended some white people's sense of who can properly represent us power. So focused irrational in intense was the Tea Party's Obama phobia that disapproval of Obama was the strongest independent variable driving Tea Party identification in a 2013 study. Despite all their talk of the federal debt and fiscal responsibility respondents demonstrated more VM and anti Obama sentiments and they did fiscally conservative sentiment. If the Tea Party was motivated by a particular dislike of President Obama, that feeling was bolstered by an abiding racial animus and inability in Baratunde Thurston's words to allow black people quote to be that which they are, that is fully enfranchised citizens. The respondents in Parker and Beretto's longitudinal study of the Tea Party expressed expressed significant if coded anti black racism and antipathy toward the immigrants though they carefully avoided using overtly racist language. Opposition to immigrants from Central and South America or antipathy toward African Americans is not about race Tea Partyers claim, but rather stems from their belief sometimes implied sometimes directly stated that both groups issue hard work and loyalty to an imagined national community. However, a 2013 study indicated that along with social conservatism, anti minority attitudes were the most reliable predictor predictor of Tea Party affiliation. Tea Party supporters oppose welfare and other social programs that they identify with minorities because they undercut so called American values of thrift and hard work, even though the largest group racial group on welfare is white people. By going familiarly familiar culturally racist tropes, Tea Parties and Tea Partyers in one study disguised their racial resentment in quote terms of more symbolic philosophical complaints about black culture, unquote, as lacking in industriousness and ambition black Americans these respondents contended have developed a dependency on the federal government. Taking the colorblind racism described in Bonilla Sylvils classic racism without racist to a new level, many Tea Partyers not only denied the existence of structural racism, but also see a quote playing field tilted away from them. Researchers Christopher Parker and Matthew Beretto right quote we believe that people are driven to support the Tea Party from the anxiety they feel as they perceive the America they know the country they love slipping away. Threatened by the rapidly changing face of what they believe is the quote real America, a heterosexual Christian middle class, mostly male white country, unquote. Next slide please, you can see the fruit of this belief in a 2020 public value survey so this is information I got in 2021. But it's about 2020 it's the public value survey by PRRI. And in it, Tea Partyers claim that the US was post racial simply facilitated did not Tea Partyers claims that the US was post racial simply facilitated denials of structural inequality and articulations of anti black racism and nativism as a Trump, Trump presidency bore out and so here you can see that there's I asked them about sentiment that the country is turning into something they don't recognize. And they saw along race lines that the Democrats, BIPOC people tended to and you know, more democratic liberal whites tended to celebrate the fact that the US has become a more diverse nation. And conservatives were mostly Republicans, and even to the right of them bemoaned the fact that they had somehow been kind of pushed out of an America that sort of made sense to them. And for Tea Party supporters race and religion are inextricably are inextricably bound up in US nationhood, the quote real America is a flexible signifier that can seem to include non white citizens, even as the very definition of what constitutes the real America is racially and religiously coded. And I should say that I went to march it was called the March on Washington for jobs and freedom, I believe. In 2017 it was to oppose immigration reform. That was then a bipartisan effort, and they had several prominent black speakers, one of whom was also a speaker at the Capitol insurrection. And, you know, their claim was basically immigrants are trying to jump the line right that black people haven't gotten what they deserve and so why should anybody else, you know, benefit, who wasn't you know born here who wasn't enslaved here etc. And this, you know, incredibly cynical deployment of some black activists by these anti immigrant entities to kind of make it seem as if this isn't about race at all. The other thing that was really visible at that was one of the reasons that the anti immigrant movement really likes to focus on is car accidents, where an undocumented person kills or badly injures a citizen. And so there were a few of those people who are black and they're these big kind of I thought macabre. You know, photos of their loved one, and then a bunch of kind of hate filled rhetoric about how we need to close the borders. Participation in tea party events bolstered white identification through quote, assertions of national decline and the embrace of libertarian ideology unquote, tea party years have often presented themselves as untainted by racism, even as their whiteness is the ideal form of indeed identical to US identity and citizenship. While it may be the case that the tea party drew a white race conscious if not always overtly racist contingent, it also represented broader trends in our political and cultural formation. Based solely on membership numbers the tea party was always a fringe element, but several 2010 opinion polls showed that between 14 to 16% of the adult population supported them. The Gallup poll showed that roughly one in four Republicans supported the tea party and nearly 45 million Americans consider themselves to be tea party sympathizers. The tea party represents a significant, and it did then and I still think it does because they were also prominent during Trump's campaigns to campaigns. They represent a significant and increasingly vocal white middle class constituency, even if it's official membership numbers do not reflect that water. I've been arguing thus far that 911 the impending minorization of white people and the election of the first black president have provided the building blocks for conservative white identity that sees itself as traumatized and under siege. If this white identity sees itself or as already or in danger of becoming disenfranchised, they see the nation as similarly imperiled subject to terrorism besieged by undocumented immigrants and experiencing a precipitous moral decline, brought on by the people called European American values and more is in one sense these claims are nothing new conservative social movements have long perpetuated the belief that their constituents were in danger of losing status and privileges if certain threats to the body politic, sometimes capitalist immigrants freed slaves were not effectively contain the policy positions endorsed by tea party conservatives are also nothing new. Barely 15 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, during the Reagan era, the right was already arguing that federal oversight and enforcement of civil rights law was no longer necessary. The notion of post race rhetoric to the already toxic narrative cocktail of undeserving black people and an imperiled white nation has however facilitate the articulation of the extremely toxic white racial identity. The deployment of a racialized post race discourse has made the turn to civil rights rhetoric simultaneously unfortunate and utterly predictable. In the rough groups around the world have long adopted civil rights rhetoric to advance their own social justice fights. It's increasingly common for right wing groups to use the same language to advance nativist racially coded agendas of their own analyzing websites fundraising letter of speeches advertisements and editorials researchers Leo melzer and Reese found that US English use for short, the largest English only organization in the US have utilized civil rights rhetoric highlighting model versus nightmare since the early 2000s Spanish speaking immigrants according to use seek to tear down the shared cultural fabric of the US use in its view as waging a defensive campaign to stop those who were the US of its model read white male conservative citizens. But rather than seeing this move is wholly disingenuous, it's perhaps more productive to see it as a reflection of the fact that the civil rights movement has provided the primary lingua franca for most US social and political rights since the 1960s. The language of equality freedom and justice is so compellingly articulated by civil rights activists has been adapted by everyone from pro life activists to animal rights groups to convey the purportedly unassailable positions central to this appropriation is Martin Luther King Jr himself. King is easily the most recognizable symbol of the civil rights movement, even by those born decade after the movements decline and if the civil rights movement is covered in Secondary education, you know, King is going to be mentioned during the one day that that happens. His politics have been reduced out of nonviolent protest and desegregation, while more radical aspects of his legacy, such as the poor people's campaign and his opposition to war on Vietnam have been discarded. In this final section, I'll demonstrate why linking Dr. King's legacy to a nativist and often racist political agenda is effective. And in the early 21st century, it was a necessary step in promoting racist views. In focusing on Glenn Beck's deployment of 911 and Martin Luther King Jr. I analyze the contours of a form of whiteness that is distinct from, and yet foundational to the one embodied in Trumpism. This whiteness is defensive, it's premised upon a sense of profound injury, but it's also offensive and pugnacious, based upon a sense of white entitlement fueled by anti black racism, Islamophobia and nativism. Next slide please. So part three, a circus clown enters the mainstream. This is Glenn Beck today he sort of looks like Colonel Sanders. But that's not what he looked like in the period I'm talking about. So that's the next slide. By the time Glenn Beck framed his 2010 restoring honor rally as a civil rights rally. Next slide please. He'd established himself as a prominent spokesperson for the Tea Party and the religious right. Next slide. Beck's ability to forge a media empire around his persona as a man with homes fund real American values was aided by impeccable timing huckster instincts and candy showmanship back was originally a drive time FM radio DJ in several smaller small markets before he landed at Tampa's WFLA 90970 in the waning days of 1999. A few months after Beck arrived at clear channels WFLA, the Gore versus Bush election crisis happened and Beck had rearing side seats, narrating the ins and outs of the recount from his Tampa perched. The earlier in his career back had been a libertarian who supported abortion rights and drug decriminalization with Gordie Bush he emerged as a religious conservative. He'd recently at that point converted to Mormonism. And then he subsequently became a right wing commentator. So successful was his right word turned the clear channel decided to take back national in September 2001. His first day on XM satellite radio with September 10, where Beck did wrist on Johnny Cochran and frequent target quote race war Lord Jesse Jackson, using one of his dialect selected black voices, a feature of his stick since his earliest days in radio. In another bit back pretended to claim responsibility for the lynching of African American James bird bird, who had recently been chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death by white supremacists and Jasper Texas so this is what passed for, you know, humor and back content on September 10. And more often than not bex radio slot showcased his anti black racism in the guise of humor, and then planes hit the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, a once in a lifetime opportunity for Beck. On September 11 back opened every hour of his show with the playing of the Star Spangled Banner punctuating listener calls with his own copious tears. So this is kind of a, you know, there's all these memes and he's really well known for crying, essentially, at the end of the hat. Working the phones like a radio televangelist back filled the airwaves with frequencies to God and country and angry diet tribes against various nations. The man and me back to clear would love to drop a nuke on Pakistan if they had anything to do with it. Another caller prompted this, let them see the fury of the United States when it's fully unleashed you think we have enemies now wait until we take out Libya Afghanistan So you can see it's like just, you know, scattershot attacks on various nations, often ones with large Muslim populations, upping the ante even further back finally landed on this, any country with ties to bin Laden, I wouldn't mind turning into a giant glowing parking lot. So that kind of really inflammatory rhetoric is very much the shock jock and back and it's also very, you know, common in his stick. Becks tough talk and on air crime lasted for literally months with back shuttling back and forth between the two for dramatic effect. And I'll just note here that Kyle written houses trial testimony was a masterclass in the use of white male tears to advance a white nationalist and extremist agenda. Dr. Laura Slesinger refused to alter her personal advice format to satisfy the public's desire for terrorism talk clear channel offered at stations, the Glenn Beck show is an alternative. And as he had with wishy gore back use the attacks in the subsequent war and terror to reinvent himself yet again, this time as a spokesperson for the Bush administration. He staged a series of pro war rallies for America from March through May of 2003, featuring traditional country music appearances by veterans and their families and jumbo tron video messages from President Bush himself. And always, always the rallies concluded with back taking the stage to deliver a mashup of his greatest hits on the heels of those rallies back published his first nonfiction book the real America messages from the heart and heartland. Pitched as a pan to time to a time when God country and small town values reign supreme, the introduction the introduction describes the real America as a place in the heart, a home to which we all need to return. In that fictive world back admits it's aspirational neighbors care about and protect one another into this middle American utopia for the first time that I found back inserts Martin Luther King Jr. It's not to decry racism but rather to argue that quote political correctness unquote threatens to destroy a king's legacy. Bec writes, Martin Luther King's dream will come true in the real America, a color blind society, but without political correctness. Unfortunately, King's dream has been perverted and twisted by so many white and black alike. That's barely recognizable today. In the real America, we will know that white men aren't racist. One man can be racist black men aren't lazy. One man can be lazy and racism is not an American problem. It's a human problem. Individual prejudice exists, but structural racism does not. This contention is exactly why back and so many white conservatives frequently invoke King's famous content of our character line from his I have a dream speech. The rest of King's March on Washington speech, the line I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character can be interpreted to suggest that society should only judge on an individual a historical basis. Context and disparities be the historical political economic or racial need not be taken into consideration and to do so is to commit the sin against which King allegedly warned and I should say at the Tea Party rallies there were also sometimes placards with King's face on it. This deployment of King produces a distorted inaccurate cardboard cutout version of him as an activist concerned with individual not group progress as a man concerned with changing hearts and minds rather than structures of white supremacy. After invoking King in the name of political incorrectness, Beck harkens back to the mythic quote evening of September 11 quote, one without violence without sorrow without morning I don't understand the without sorrow or morning part but just as back would contend when he launched his September 12 movement at the end of the year, Beck asserted that in the days after 911 the country was united in its care and concern for one another. His imaginary unity is bolstered by the image of the ideal citizen, you can guess what that looks like. And it also depends upon its other that is to say, non white and to point out that hate crimes against those presumed in Muslim proliferated in the days after the attacks. I'll stop here and say that in the same way that attacks on Asian Americans were peaking at a time when Trump was claiming this kind of white victim hood that's sort of parallel to what's happening in the early days after 911. Point out that hate crimes against those presumed to be Muslim proliferated in the days after the attacks, or that the US state detained hundreds of immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries in the wake of 911 was irrelevant back because they were not part of his imagined community. A false image of individual black moral rectitude and white unity is cemented paradoxically through a critique of black and Middle Eastern communities. The imaginary moment of white unification depends upon a paradoxical sense of profound injury and a belief in US military might and imperial destiny is impenetrable and unstoppable. Beck's real America was governed by care and concern for one's neighbors and homespun wisdom of an imagined role mirror middle America that only existed because of indigenous genocide slave labor and indentured servitude. What makes Beck's vision resonate is this image of domestic harmony paired with an unabashed vision of US global domination. Beck's real America's Janus faced warm and selectively welcoming on the domestic front, but harsh and unrelenting on the international one. The morally unassailable symbol of nonviolent anti racism, then linking King to 911, not only allowed back to associate the injuries of 911 with those of anti black racism, but it also enabled him to justify violent imperial responses to that injury. It enabled the production of a mythical post 911 moment where we were all united behind the specter of us power, which was always coded as productive of national community, rather than destructive of other communities and nations. Beck's imagined community, however, was and still is highly selective excluding Hollywood political correctness communism which he says is disguised as liberalism, or the tolerance of sexually sexuality related but specified ungodly practices, all of which he decries. Beck's rapid ascent in the first decade of the 21st century from unknown radio DJ to celebrated commentator on Fox News has been well documented as has this close affiliation with the Tea Party for whom he was an unofficial spokesman. What is received relatively little attention is the way in which that ascent is a telling marker of a turn to a post racial reactionary form of white identity that's dependent upon appropriating elements of civil rights history and narrating 911 as a world historic form of attack on white American values. In addition to deploying the real America trope back is used others from the Tea Party playbook he was an early Obama hater. He declared himself at various times to be a radical. Oh sorry, he used other he was an early Obama hater, declaring Obama to be at various times a radical socialist or Marxist a quote radical black nationalist and someone quote out to settle old racial scores with new social justice. Back on many occasions described the Obama administration as the incarnation of evil. No more so no more so than during his months long campaign in 2009 to get Van Jones the President's newly appointed special advisor and green jobs fire. The campaign was largely responsible for joins Jones resigned over controversial comments he had made years earlier. As in the real America in the 2000s back most often wielded Martin Luther King Jr as a cudgel to bash bad black men and black activists. Becks gloss for post 1968 cultural form is the term political correctness which he says muzzles conservatives by mistakenly calling them races sexist homophobic or nativist. Supposedly, exiled from the realm of popular rhetoric and thought our community of in quotes disenfranchised white people for whom back claims to speak. Typically, back did does so by deploying rhetoric usually associated with blackness to represent whiteness. According to journalist Dana Milbank in his first year on Fox News in 2009 back invoked slavery enslaved some 200 times, and it was not to describe the historic wrongs against African descended peoples. Instead back argued Obama was the engine of white enslavement. I think this president Obama is moving quickly moving all of us quickly into slavery. He's enslaving our children with a debt that they can never repay he once said. On September 12 2009 when back held a rally to celebrate the ousting of Jones from the White House, one protesters sign said, Obama's plan equals white slavery, a not infrequent tea party motto. Back is also compared prosecuting white collar crime as akin to pre civil rights Jim Crow laws in quotes, African Americans have long understood dual justice one set of laws for whites and one for blacks. Now, according to back vengeance and vigilante ism was creating a dual system of justice for corporate executives in back world riches, the new poor white is the new black. Next slide please. 2009 was also the year that Beck founded his nine 12 project designed he said to bring us back to the day after 911 when unity rained. And again, I'm not, I'm not going to read this because I feel like we're short on time but it's it's more kind of obsessing about how we were so united right after 911. And how it united us across race and religious lines. He said that the 912 project was based upon these nine principles. Number one is America's good. And then on number seven is I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to government government cannot force me to be charitable. The project also emphasize 12 values including honesty humility charity thrift, all staples of Christian Sunday School primers. The principles and values were once said to be universal while being pointedly partisan tea party or swelled the ranks of the various 912 chapters and 912ers have frequently attended tea party rallies calling for smaller government and less taxation. This is not surprising since Beck announced the project right on the heels of tea party September 12 2009 March on Washington. And then widely from 60,000 to over 1 million attendees the march was undoubtedly a show of strength by a movement that had previously been seen as marginal if not wholly irrelevant. In October 2009 the 912 project fall dub that rally was smaller ones to protest so called liberal media bias in front of local TV stations around the country. Describing that event dub can you hear us now back once again deployed the language of inclusion community and acceptance to attack those who allegedly questioned his right wing celebration, a small government individual responsibility and return to so called traditional American values. The 912 project and we're storing on a rally held in its name really sought to revive a mythically simpler time as I've argued, as back claimed in his may 2620 2010 show quote this is going to be a moment that you'll never be able to paint people haters racist none of it. This is the moment quite honestly that I think we've reclaimed the civil rights movement has been so distorted so turned upside down. It's an abomination. Since back cited Bertha Lewis's participation in a protest against Arizona's racist SB 1070 law, Lewis a black woman was the former CEO and chief organizer of the nonprofit network acorn, the association of community organizations for reform now, which was expanded in March 2010 after right wing media activists taped low level acorn workers appearing to encourage welfare fraud, the result resulting controversy fueled by back who played the tapes on endless loop, and repeatedly interviewed James O'Keefe the conservative who released the audio and video tapes led to federal and private defunding of acorn and its eventual demise. Lewis and the other protesters saying we shall overcome as they were being arrested, something that supposedly outraged back he railed how dare you. So here they are singing we shall overcome. We're not even talking about the rule of law and we're not talking about equal rights civil rights we're talking about modern day slavery. And that is exactly what illegal day immigration is modern day slavery. Now, while sick this isn't it's not doesn't make sense. We're not going well. Now while we're not going to talk about the issues of illegal immigration or anything that's happening in Washington because we must repair honor and integrity and on the first. I tell you right now, we are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights movement. He asked attendees to leave their political signs at home, his listeners knew the score. They knew exactly who their enemies were, because back had been identifying them for the years and months leading up to the rally, President Obama Van Jones worth of Lewis Jesse Jackson Al Sharpton, etc. Attaching Martin Luther King Junior's legacy to his agenda was at once a non sensible and brilliant media stunt back got mainstream media coverage and raise the ire of civil rights leaders including Al Sharpton who held account demonstration. And during the anti and is in his linking of himself to King in April of 2010 back interviewed Dr. King's niece and a staunch pro life anti gay marriage activist, Alveda King. The two discussed the 10 point nonviolent pledge, which King wrote 1963 and back went on to analyze over several broadcasts in the following weeks and I think there was some talk of, if you joined 912 that you had to like, I don't know say the pledge or you know, sign off on the edge. I don't know how that was supposed to work but it was certainly something that he advertised. At a public event in that same month he read the pledge to his audience saying it would shape the 912 projects next phase, and he continued to, you know, to recite it at rallies. Finally he tried it out for his August 2015 restoring unity never again is now all lives matter march so that it's like restoring unity slash never again is now slash all lives matter march and rally held in Birmingham, Alabama, in partnership with black pastor Jim low. This time back claimed to be mounting a movement of reconciliation, one designed to heal the racial wounds cause not by rampant state violent waged against black and brown bodies, but by the black lives matter movements protests against that racialized violence. The march began just a block from the 16th Street Baptist Church where four black girls were killed by a clan bomb, and the rally featured speakers including Alveda King and pastor Rafael Cruz father of presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who back then later endorsed. One white marcher said he was there to heal a racial divide that had been caused by people who are supposed to be the non racist people. If you pay attention they're the ones promoting all this stuff. One could point out that Bex talk of making the Middle East a glowing parking lot or comparing Obama to Hitler was hardly civil or non violent discourse, affirming the right of law freely, but why bother. Bex use of King's pledge only makes sense if one believes that the urgent struggle of the 21st century is to liberate straight white men. In Bex world, ridiculous as it may seem to anyone who knows much about US history, then not all that progressive Obama agenda was every bit as life threatening and dehumanizing as was Jim Crow segregation. On the actual day of the 2010 restoring honor rally Alveda King spoke as did former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, both praised King Lincoln and founding fathers, advocating return to God that would fix much of Wales Washington. Bex also introduced members of the black robe regiment and group of religious leaders imams rabbis and clergy committed to teaching the US's constitutional principles to their congregants. But in a date of order to God and country Bex still managed to plug his political agenda suggesting that Dr King himself would have stood against big government and lower taxes. The fact that little in King's biography supported such claims didn't matter, since few in the audience of older white men and women knew the history and a better than he did. In this case scenario rallyers had spent the civil rights years blind to the plight of African Americans. At worst they in their kin were active defending the racial status quo. If many of Bex on air stances made him what Charles blow called the anti King. It didn't matter to the enthusiastic crowd he addressed. Later that night on Fox News back extended his efforts to restore America's honor by questioning President Obama's moral character and religious faith. It's not what that Obama's religion is other than it's not Muslim is not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it unquote. This rhetoric was consistent with Bex earlier assertions that even if Obama was not foreign born, as further suggested, he was quote hiding something fundamental about his identity something foreign, un-American, perhaps having to do with Kenya or Karl Marx or both. To dismiss Bex invocation of King is simply another trick in his media arsenal, but that would be to fail to see him as a symptom of a larger trend in white discourse that bore fruit in the 2016 election and may do so again in 2024. Recall that during the 2016 presidential campaign, Ben Carson Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz all leaned into xenophobic Islamophobic and racist rhetoric, even as they asserted that their rise was thanks to the reality of equal rights, by the civil rights movements. They also used a defanged inaccurate vision of the civil rights movement to bash the Black Lives Matter movement as the cause of an ongoing racial divide, rather than a response to it. Meanwhile, the right and left wing media have generally failed to interrogate ongoing examples of white racial militancy disguised as a struggle for group rights. In January 2016 in Oregon Wildlife Preserve was the site of an armed siege by anti-government militia forces led by Aiman Bundy, the son of Cliven Bundy, who successfully won an armed standoff in 2014 with the Bureau of Land Management and local law enforcement over his failure to pay a decade's worth of raising fees. Until his arrest in February 2016 Bundy was still grazing his cattle on public land free of charge, presumably pondering as he did in one 2014 press conference where the Black people were better off as slaves. The white conservative appropriation of civil rights rhetoric has facilitated the long march of white supremacy, while diluting the ongoing force of the civil rights movements structural critique of US domestic and foreign policy. And it threatens to make King a US icon without content, a historical remnant of a gone and forgotten racial past. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor young for such a wonderful talk. We have approximately 20 minutes available to a Q&A. This is, there's a lot to be thinking about and I'm guessing that our participants questions to ask. There's a Q&A box where you can put your questions and we'll bring them up. And then we'll we can address them. I wanted to get it started, but just asking you, if you can share a bit on the trajectory that brought you to this topic, and to this research. This is striking to me, given so power and your, your focus on artistic production on progressive youth culture and social movements and the relationship to anti colonial movements outside the United States. So I'm really struck by this. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about how you've. So, I mean, part of what I should say, and I should have corrected you I am no longer the Department head of African American Studies finally, but I have done a lot of administration over the last sort of decade, or more. And so that means that the book that I thought I was going to write in a few years has been elongated over a long period. So initially I was very interested in popular cultures and the impact of 9-11 on it. But then as I started, you know, as time went on and I started noticing different sort of things, I began to see a trajectory that, you know, really is over the first 20 years of the century. And that's partly what happened. You know, at the time I started working on him, you know, Beck was a huge figure. He's not anymore he like tries to make himself relevant in various ways but he has his own like network, and he's he's very, you know, he's very marginalized, but you know, he, he was someone who it felt really needed to like dig into a little bit. And then just as I was doing that work, I started coming across more and more indications of radical right wing extremism, and I started to just notice that there are all these investigations of so called Islamic terrorists, none of which produced convictions. And yet there were these kind of armed movements of white men, and that seemed to elicit no concern on the part of law enforcement, and just, you know, kind of business as usual. And so that just that kind of paradox made me think a lot more about, you know, how imperialism and racism come together in the US. So it ends up being a lot of this because a lot more about, you know, sort of white and mainstream discourse in a way that my first book was not. I have a second question to ask, and then we'll turn to the Q&A. And so if you do have questions, please do put them up on the Q&A and then we'll go through them. We have about four right now. And so as we compile them or we'll turn to them. But the one of the things that really struck me was the question, the quote that you, that you read from Glenn Beck quote the man in me, like the man in me wants to bomb, right, the Middle East in reaction to 9-11. And I was wondering if you can share with us a bit more on your read on the gender expression of these figures, right? And you're referencing a lot of white men, but it seems to me like some of their politics are in part not only an attempt at, it doesn't seem, it's like white victimhood, but it also seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's like male victimhood. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah, that is absolutely right. Yeah, there's no question that that's true as well. And I think Beck is particularly interesting because he, before 9-11 even happened, he did lots of performances in drag, right, in vocal drag, right, where he's playing a woman instead of a man playing someone black instead of white, you know, etc. But it's clear that once 9-11 happens, there's this kind of vacillating between these two extremes of like, you know, absolute toxic masculine aggression, right, and then this kind of like sensitive wounded tear filled, you know, other extreme. So I mean, I think you're absolutely right about that. And, you know, another version of this paper could absolutely talk about masculinity as the lens through which so much of this gets articulated as a way of thinking about why the excess Hollywood tape had no purchase, right? And then you think about how normalized the kind of behavior was that Trump engaged in by his supporters, you know, it's just, you know, what people do in the locker room or men do in the locker room, right. So I mean, another version of this paper could absolutely do that, just as I think another version could talk specifically and only about anti-immigration politics, you know, and really center that I mean part of the reason why the tea party takes off is that, once Obama's elected, all of the anti-immigrant lobbying efforts move out of Washington. They're like, well, we're not going to be successful in these next four years. And so they all go local, right, they all go, they are spread out through other states and start doing this local work. And that's where you get this melange of, you know, xenophobia, nativism, racism, right, you know, it's like this cauldron of, you know, hatred, I guess. So yeah, there's definitely different kinds of slices on it for sure. I think you're really right. Thank you. Let's go to the Q&A. Very first question is, I don't discount the role of white angst and white supremacy, but what are the alliances with and fusing with gun rights extremists? I don't, I mean, you're absolutely right. There's no way of thinking about this that doesn't also lead to thinking about the veneration of the Second Amendment and the kind of what I think is insane lack of restriction on guns that, you know, separates us from every other overdeveloped nation. So, you know, there's just no question that you're right about that. I just didn't see in my research that as a kind of central theme, it was more just a casually accepted theme, right, like, of course, you're going to have, you know, as many guns as you could possibly carry of course you're going to parade around with those guns on the border. But you're certainly right, but it's absolutely, you know, linked to gun rights extremism. Thank you. There's a second question. While the right is hugely responsible. Do you agree that the left has some role as we have watched and participated in the large income inequality and the loss of jobs in the heartland. So I guess what I would say. Go ahead. I guess I'm assuming. I guess. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. All right. I guess what I would say about that is, I think there's a difference between the kind of pro capital politics and the pro capitalism politics that both parties share, absolutely. Democrats have a nicely night a slightly nicer gloss on it. They believe in the welfare state to some extent and Republicans allegedly don't accept when it comes to very wealthy white men. I guess I would say that in terms of in terms of really forwarding a nakedly white supremacist racist agenda. I think that that lies more at the feet of the, the right than the left. Now I think you could vote the left for all sorts of things. Not even the left just the Democrats for their inability to really play power politics for the ways in which again and again they get punk, punked by the Republicans, like there's lots you could say about the Democrats is not much better and really not as well. But I don't think this particular strain of political discourse and extremism can really be laid at their door. Thank you. This one is in some ways related to this question. Does it seem correct to say that many right wing provocateurs really believe that they're punching up and not punching down when they attacked or derived LGBTQ feminist and anti racist targets. That they believe sincerely or that they think the reins of power are now in the hands, not of corporations and wops, but of academics and people of color. How do they come to this odd perception of who has the power. In some ways, you know, do you agree that this is a perception that actually exists among the populations that you're studying. Yeah, I mean, I guess what I would say is, I take them at their deeds and not their words. So I think they're punching their equal opportunity punchers they're punching up they're punching down. They can read all around in the sense of they, like I can read economic reports they can read health disparity reports they can read all the things that show them that BIPOC are not uniquely in franchised and well off. They know that. I think it's much more about the cultural war that they're waging and the ways in which certain. Well, once Roe v. Wade is overturned, which I think is eminent. They're not going to have that in the same way as an issue. So, you know, critical race theory, which is just another way of getting at anti black racism from a slightly different vantage point because I don't think most people who say they oppose it even know what it is. So, I guess I would say that it's it's about a culture war that they're waging. And this kind of populism this full populism I guess that pretends that it is in the interest of the working people, but instead, you know, continues to propagate policies that don't actually benefit the working people. You know, and that can also be said for Democrats it's not like we've done such in Democrats have done such a great job at, you know, eradicating inequality, but I think you have to say that just looking at the response to the pandemic. I think that the right has been forced into the function forced into aid to people and you know eviction more terms and those kinds of things in a way that the Democrats seem more comfortable with, you know, forging ahead with those kinds of things. So, I think it's really more about cultural politics than it is that they actually believe, you know, that I am uniquely powerful in the world or something. The final question that we have here. I think you in some ways have answered it but do you think that some people have different levels of ability for critical thinking, or is it a symptom structural oppression that fosters lack of critical thinking, which also serves the perpetuation structural oppressions. And for this person, the question emerged from the idea that tea partyers felt that they lost United States that made sense to them, quote unquote, the inability to make sense of structural oppression, even in their own thinking so in some sense, the person is wondering whether or not there's an incapacity among the population at play. So I mean, I think that's, I think that's a really important question. And I think there are a lot of ways you could answer it so you could talk about the defunding public schools and the impact that that has on education, you know, broadly speaking, you could talk about the privatization of education and the impact that that has on critical thinking because if you are getting to college when you finally start thinking critically, then you know that's a lot of wasted opportunity let's just put it that way. So I think that's some of what's going on. I think to put it very bluntly racism works best when it is invisible to the people who don't, who aren't its targets. That's the way I guess I would put that, you know, that's precisely why segregation is so very effective. Right, because when you have no interaction with people of different backgrounds, then you make up all sorts of stories in your head about what they do what they like that they're good parents that they're bad parents you know whatever it is. And that's, and from your vantage point, you know, if you apply for a job and you're a white person and you get it, you don't see the kind of racial and gender privilege, if you're a man that has made that possible, because it's always been there. So I think some of it is also just that the system is working the way it's designed to work which is to be invisible to people who want its targets, and to make a structural critique of inequality, very, very difficult to mount, because it's invisible but also because it seems overwhelming. Right, people are going about the day to day business of raising families and working and going to school and doing all the things that they're doing. And, you know, most people don't sit around abstractly thinking about, they don't have the luxury of sitting around abstractly thinking about these kinds of issues, particularly if they don't pertain to them. So a lot of what the first book was about was the fact that these were organic intellectuals right these were people who looked around, looked around at their conditions, and could see they were being exploited. They didn't need to read Marx, to know that they could see they were being exploited they could also see that collective power, kind of leveled the playing field in terms of dealing with their employers. Again, they didn't need to go to labor and employment relations school to find that out they, they actually and they could see the link between the fact that they made so little money, and the fact that their kids were in crummy schools and the fact that they lived in terrible public housing right they could see the connection between those things. And so I think it's also partly that you, you make history from where you're standing right you, you make sense of your world from your vantage point. You know in some ways you're kind of thrust into being a critical thinker, when you are, you know the most oppressed I see this all the time with my kids, where they will just watch something or see something and they understand because they have grown up in this soup of anti black racism. So making things about your first book, however, was also about the attempts by these organic intellectuals to see difference and to see other people in other conditions and try to attend to the differences as opposed to absorb the people in their language or to claim the mantle of their freedom projects as their own so for instance the Cuban revolution right in the back. So I'm in this case, it seems to me like part of what the person is asking is that, is there almost an incapacity to see different. You know, one can one can live in a particular soup right of anti blackness but also observe the conditions of others as you're describing here. You know we have seven minutes and I was hoping we have students on this on this on this series and I was wondering if you can share with us how now that you've been quote unquote liberated from some of the administrative right. Where do you see your research going, how do you see it developing into the second book. What are your plans. Moving forward. Yeah, so I have one more chapter to write of the book out of which this talk emerged. And that's going to be on Obama and actually foreign policy so it's going to talk a lot about drone politics, and his terrible anti immigration politics and how to sort of make sense of that at the same time as he was so linked to the realization of the civil rights stream. So that's that's that chapter. But then I think I'm going to play a little bit more like this book was very, you know, intense it's very disturbing it's very difficult labor. So the next book is going to be, or the next work I don't know if it'll end up being a book is going to be on the 1980s and black American and black British culture, particularly film and the kind of rise of British cultural studies. I've been interested in that for a long time so that's sort of one one series of things and the other is a collection of essays on African diasporic cultural production, and that is the first piece of that is something I've written on at The Montiques, which is a film by Mati Diaz, who is Senegalese and French, and it's about the migration politics about, you know, people setting out in desperate circumstances in rickety boats who don't make it and how how the people they leave behind to deal with that. So that's, that's the next work. Once this is sort of off my plate. But yeah so back so in a way back more to my roots in the sense of, you know, film, music, literature, you know I've kind of gotten pretty far away from being, I mean I am a cultural historian in this book but not so much a literary or cultural analyst in the same way. And I sort of miss it. Yeah, I can imagine right to make it in a different direction. Do you have any advice for graduate students or undergraduate students who are doing their research or beginning research, especially on topics that deal with overt racism. Psygny. A lot of these topics that are that can wear on on the person. So I think it's important to have, you know, things that take you away from the work right and that's that's true no matter what the work is. But you know, I give myself permission to enjoy, you know, anti terrorist TV shows, even though I have really well well worn and full blown critiques of them. You know, I think it's important to be able to kind of shut it off a little bit at times and just enjoy the things you enjoy whatever that might be. So I think that that's one thing I think it's important to have support networks. I think that's another kind of work, because that can also be really helpful and that's a great thing about graduate school is that you have this cohort of people who are going through the same things you are, and interested in many of the same ideas and themes and thinkers that you are. So I think that's another thing is to really make community in graduate school which is harder to do than it was as an undergraduate, I think, because you're not in big classes and you know all the things that that we sort of know distinguish So I guess those are the main things I think that the first book I wrote was very much a kind of exploration of the civil rights movement and transnational activism from the perspective of what kind of world people imagined right like what was the world they wanted to build. A critique of the world they were in, sure, but it also allowed them to make various kinds of solidaries, alliances, critiques in a way that was ultimately somewhat liberating to them. And that's, I think something that you have to sort of constantly at least think about as maybe the other side of the project that you're that you're doing. So it's like, you know, on the one hand you're thinking a lot about misogyny, for example, well, it's also an opportunity for you to think about the things that have emerged in response to it, right, and how those things have sustained generations of people who've been combating the same things. So I think that I mean that was really helpful for me to be reminded of when Trump was elected, because you know you talk to historians you talk to people who live through Jim Crow it's like this is nothing new, like we've been here before and we're still here and they're not, you know, until they are again and then we fight the same battles again. So, I guess that's, that's the perspective that I've tried to keep even when I've been doing really kind of grueling maddening work is that there is a different world that people are fighting for there is a different space that people and have that there are ways to inhabit those spaces, even amidst the kind of unbelievable oppression that you know we're currently living with. Thank you so much Professor young think we're a time. Thank you for your wonderful talk. Thank you for, thank you for your questions for sharing your research with us. This, and I wanted this is again, the race, ethnicity and immigration colloquium I forget with the Institute of Graduate Institute of governmental studies at Berkeley, and we are being sponsored by the ethnic studies department and the Center for race and ethnic race and gender. It is being recorded so be available to those of you who would like to watch it again. I want to thank Megan Collins, the tech wizard right that helped out both of the presentation and with getting this thing going and I'm very much a lot of great academic and I feel like I want to create an organization for anti technology professors. But not for her we wouldn't have this. With that, we will please join our listserv or I don't know, I think we have a listserv or just go to our website and join whatever it is that we have. Well, we have three more speakers next for next semester, all of whom are going to have wonderful talks on questions of race, ethnicity and immigration and so with that. Thank you and we'll end the talk now. Okay, thank you for this reunion. Thank you.