 Okay, we're back, we're live with History Lens, and we have the presenter of History Lens, John David Ann of HPU, and we have Peter Hoffenberg, with whom, what? Yes, you agree with that, don't you, John? How do you spell that, Jay? HPU, and we have Peter Hoffenberg, history professor at UH, what a combo. And we're going to talk today about the protest, the historical perspective of the protest, where they've come from, you know, the ancestry, if you will, what they are now, what they reflect, what they imply. So exciting. Let's see, who's older? Emotionally or chronologically? I guess that means you, Peter. Why don't you begin and just sort of frame the issue for us. Okay, more than happy to. Hi, John, good to see you. Hey, Peter, hey, Jay, I'm sorry to be on the show. The way I understood from what you talked to John and myself about, was to try to provide a larger historical focus on why, why now, why where. I think who is protesting is interesting. And in doing so, be able to say, yes, some things are similar, but they're also new things. I mean, historians sometimes go overboard in trying to find everything new, right, in order to get published. And sometimes they go overboard and say, well, nothing is new. It's a pretty good example for John and myself to chat about both being the case. There are some novelties and certainly as this is evidence of social media, right, which we can't forget, it's instrumental. So that would be my perspective. And John is a superb American historian who knows a lot about Japan. So I'm hoping that I can bring in some European perspective, particularly Western European. And then everybody is always quoting Gandhi. So perhaps some interest in the British Empire and hope you're ready to do that. Yeah, protest against colonialism. Anyhow, I'm looking forward to it. I always enjoy chatting with both you guys. And I hope one day it's over a cup of coffee in person and maybe a big, strong sandwich. Oh, there you go. Oh, it should be soon. John, how do you, how do you see this unfolding? Yes. What is your concept of the scope of it? New York Times headline last week that quoted a poll, actually two separate polls, very good quality polls that were done that said that over 70 percent of Americans now believe that racism is a big, not just a problem, but a big problem in this country. And that is, in fact, 26 percent more than these same polls in 2015. So there's been a dramatic shift. I think that's maybe the biggest difference of this time is this kind of ground shifting movement towards acceptance of this culture of racism that we've had for ever since the country was found before the country was founded. But so I think it's important to recognize that we're at this moment where change, I think, is more possible now because of that, because there's this big number now out there. So yeah. Well, really, one question that comes out of that is, is there data to suggest that racism got worse in the past four or five years, or is it just that people were not aware of it? And the poll changes because of these events that have happened, these inappropriate killings that have happened, or is it somewhere in the middle? I don't have a clear feeling that it's significantly different. I think there were killings five years ago, too. But for some reason, the thing has come alive now. Why? So it's a big question. Go ahead. I think a couple possible answers. One is always expectations, that the understanding is that these things should not happen. So if you turn on the television in 1962 or 1963, you were shocked about the dogs in Bull Connor, but something in the back of your head said, well, you know, this is not acceptable, but this is sort of the way things are. And I think now we've come to the point of view that we have expectations, ironically, because the governmental system is being dismantled. We have expectations that government should be different. So I think part of it is expectations. Part of it is how we're going to define racism. In other words, we've hit, for some people, a glass ceiling. So I think it's a different kind of racism. So for example, you find among the protesters, the children and grandchildren of Jim Crow, parents, grandparents, folks who were at work in the basement, who are now, you know, middle management, now attorneys, but they've hit a glass ceiling. So all the statistics suggest that African-American family wealth, home ownership, stocks, et cetera, even for those who have jobs, which I think the Hawaii audience could appreciate, right? People who work two or three jobs here just to hold on to a house. That is a common situation. So I think part is expectations. You know, this really just should not happen. It's 2020. Well, but you see how much more refined that is. Right. I mean, in fact, the starting event was a killing. And now you open it up. You take, you turn the rock over and it's not just about killings and lynchings. It's not just about violence on the highways. It's about the whole universe of relationship between one part of the community and the other. This is serious now. Yeah. I mean, the social fabric is gone. I mean, I look at this as a social as much as that a political problem. ID has fallen apart. Yeah. America is burning. Is America is literally burning? Well, it's, maybe it should burn, you know. I don't mean that I support the looting and the violence, but... That's A.G. Barr is right behind you right now. He's behind your door. He's coming through your window. The thing is, we have a long history of actually more extreme measures coupled with more moderate measures that actually in the long run actually worked to solve some of these problems. So, the other thing I think is that Black Lives Matter, right? This organization didn't exist 10 years ago. They came out of the Obama era where, as Peter said, you have these higher expectations and then the higher expectations aren't being, you know, aren't driving. They're driving some success, but there's also a lot of people being left behind. And then you have the emergence of this organization. You know, it's youthful. It's focused on Black issues and it's seen as a kind of entitlement, right? At that point, it's like, well, it's just for Blacks. And then you have... What is it though, John? What is this organization? I mean, it was, I remember reading in the paper how the management only wanted to have African-Americans in this organization. They were shooting other races actually in their board of directors. I thought that was interesting. The other thing is that 10 days ago, very few people, far fewer people knew about it than now, it has gained enormous traction through this. But if you say emerging, you know, where is Martin Luther King? Is there a leader here? Is there somebody gonna talk to the press and step out? Is there somebody gonna, you know, go on Congress and make demands? I don't see that. Is it real? Is it lasting? Is it effective? Is it leadership? Ooh, Jay, geez. Those are good protest questions right there. Excellent questions. And the parallel you could suggest is, and particularly since you reference MLK Jr., is the effort for many, many years in this country to get a poor people's movement. And I look at Black Lives Matter, if you wanna find an analogy in a social and political movement, I find it much more in the desire, the goal, the ambition, and really the failure to have a poor people's movement, which comes back to the range and other movements. And if you ask, is there a leadership or a structure? Well, the Black community is going through what a lot of communities go through, which is a generational shift in institutions. So if this were Martin Luther King Jr.'s day, it's not just a matter of Black Lives Matter, it'd be a matter of the Black clergy and the Black churches. And they were central, absolutely central to the civil rights movement. And you can see they're playing a role, but they're playing a little bit of a role from behind into the side. I mean, Reverend Al Sharpton doesn't represent Christianity. He represents Reverend Al Sharpton, okay? And Jesse Jackson represented Jesse Jackson, but you don't have, you don't have the religious leadership. And I'm not saying whether that's a good or bad thing, but as a historian, and I defer to John for American history, so I was an outsider looking at American history, but interest in social movements. The church ever since the era of slavery has played a critical role. And in a way, Black Lives Matter is a religious institution in all the good ways, but it doesn't have the structure of a church, but it has a theology. Why now? Well, I think in good part also, because let's remember, if you have a cell phone in Newark and the cell phone in Boise and the cell phone in San Francisco, you can organize in ways which, I mean, 19th century telegraph seemed to be wonderful, but comparable to the telegraph and comparable to railway, I mean, you had to get on a railway car to get anywhere. I mean, these days, ironically, I mean, if the quarantine were being held, right? If the quarantine were still in place, it'd be a really interesting dynamic, right? Yeah, but what happened though, there's the rapidity at which it went from city to city, you jumped around the country in a matter of moments. You could also, a lot of examples. If the focal point is policing, and again, I'm just saying as somebody analyzing it, because I think the problem is much deeper than racism, we can get to it. I think racism is a symptom, not a cause. Well, we should get to it, because we're hebophrenic, all of us. Right, but if we just looked at policing, right? Well, and you look at the communities, each of them actually has a grievance. You don't have to go to Hollywood movies to know the LA police department has been corrupt for 120 years, right? Chicago has always had problems. New York is, so if you look at these places, it does also make some sense if policing is the most direct, like Gandhi would say, all right, the salt tax is the most direct. So I'm going to focus on that, and look what, salt affects everybody. I don't even get voted in the north. It's a common denominator. But I think that's- Most crowds, most of those people, black or white, have had bad experiences with the police, and they're biting back. But you know, one thing is it to me, and I really would like you guys to opine on it, is that we live in a time of stress and anxiety, of confusion, uncertainty, and fear, as really never before in my lifetime. And it's because of the COVID, it's because of the president, it's because of the failure of government, it's because that maybe the failure of the media to be able to deliver an accurate statement of what's going on, we're in such a negative transition. That has got to be part, don't you think, John? Of the reason those crowds go into the street. Yeah, so yeah, of course, that's part of this, but let's delve a little deeper because we can talk about those protests as being a product of all these things, but the protests have a lot more meaning than COVID or than people feeling cooped up or feeling frustrated about a political system that, I mean, okay, the frustration over a political system that doesn't serve them is pretty big right now. I wouldn't say it's that, I've seen it higher than this in American history, of course, we had a civil war. Frustration was immense at that point. But Jay, so Peter really brought up something that I thought was quite interesting, this question of why no poor people's movement in the history of the United States. And I mean, that's kind of overarching. There is actually a poor people's movement right now led by William Barber, who is a pastor out of, you know, he's out of Georgia someplace. Right, and having small examples of that, right. So you have that, but what's interesting, and maybe, you know, Jay, we've talked about American exceptionalism, what might be more exceptional about American history, at least compared to Europe, is that the United States have had a plantation slave system. So when you think about the development of radicalism in this country, it doesn't develop as strongly on a class-based issue. Why? Because actually the underclass is the under race. It's the slaves. Race and class are conflated together by those who either believe in this system or critique the system. It's called, in the 19th century, it's called heron folk democracy. It's everybody's equal except for blacks who are the mud silk, who are underneath society, they underpin society, and therefore, this is at least a theory. This was a theory put forth in the 1930s by a scholar, that because of this system, the widespread system of plantation slavery and four million slaves, and then so what you have is an underclass, which is always trot upon and fears for their lives. It's very difficult to organize on a poor people's campaign when you could be lynched for looking wrong at other poor people. So there is a moment actually in the late 19th century where a kind of poor people's campaign takes place. It's the populist movement. It's called the Farmers Alliance and tenant farmers both white and black organized together for a short period of time. And Jay and I were talking about this in the last history lens and the powers that be respond so brutally to this. They wipe it out quite frankly and what's interesting is they exchange race for class. At that moment, Tom Watson, who is the leader of this poor people's campaign, makes a deal with the devil. It says, you know what? I'm gonna fight for class issues, but I'm gonna condemn the black race. I'm gonna cut them out of it. And he succeeds to the point where he becomes Senator of the United States from Georgia and becomes a very powerful man. So it's this really awful tragedy, but that might be part of what has gone on in this country and that's why it might be different from Europe in that Europe had a stronger kind of social class structure and the development of Marxism in the courts of social. All that said, John, I think it's clear that race has been built into this country from 400 years ago, race division, racial prejudice, all that. And the question is whether we can ever get away from that, whether we can ever correct it, whether we can ever reach a more egalitarian society. It's not clear to me. It's not clear that these protests are gonna achieve that. I mean, do you feel these protests have within them the political power, the power of the people, the power of right to actually achieve a result or are we gonna go back to the way it was maybe slightly modified, but not corrected? Jay, Jay, you want it all. I mean, there is no such thing as utopia, Jay. I hate to break it to you. No, there wasn't then and there isn't now, but Peter, let's go to what John was talking about about Europe because Europe here is resonant. It's hard to say whether Europe has contributed some historical influence into these protests, but certainly Europe has been resonant about them after they started, and in fact, having their own protests in any city. So let me step back just for a second and John and I would be glad to come back and have this conversation. I think we need a very serious conversation of the relationship between slavery and American history and serfdom and European history, because serfdom and slavery in the year 1795, 95% of the world was held in unfree labor. Most of that unfree labor were not slaves. In fact, most of those unfree labor were serfs or indentured servants. So I think there's some important historical work that needs to be done, and you could slide into serfdom, ethnicity and religion rather than race. And that came from Europe? That came very much from Europe. So whereas Europeans outlawed slavery, whereas they practiced it of course overseas, but slavery as an institutionalized system of unfree labor, it persists in the Soviet Union in Russia until 1917. It wasn't, and that's one of the reasons that the revolution had some traction, including in the countryside. So John and I knew, I think that's a whole conversation. Okay, but I'm interested. The Polish does make a difference there, right? Holyonic revolutions get rid of serfdom in a lot of places. Sure, in certain places, and it's replaced by what Europeans would call wage slavery, right? So, I mean, the question of, the question is not really equality in a way, Jay. It's a spectrum, and if there's unfree labor on one side, what's gonna replace it? And it's never been replaced by entirely free labor. Part of the historical problem is philosophically, if you hold slavery up to be the antithesis, then anything else seems fine. Okay, that's a different conversation. I wasn't saying that. But it gets to this because the long tradition of protest in Europe has to at least go back at least to the significant peasant rebellions of the 16th and 17th century, at least. And so Europeans have a very long tradition of both rebellion and counter-rebellion, right? Repression, et cetera, written into every legal code across Europe. Religion played a very significant role, right? Just as the Bible could be used to justify slavery abolition, the New York Old Testament could be justified for rebellion or not. So when Europeans look out, right? They see a long tradition in France, they look at 1968, et cetera, but that's a long-winded Hoppenbergian way of getting to your real question, which is why Europe now, right? That's really what, okay. And I think there's several answers, and I certainly don't have a monopoly on them by any means at all. So let me just throw a few of them out, okay? Europe itself has been going through its own social and political crisis. We may not see that in the form of racism as here, but certainly states that have been advocating against immigrants, particularly immigrants from Northern Africa, lower parts of the Mediterranean, Asia, those are tinged with racism without a doubt. Brexit in part was tinged with racism, not the only reason. So race is an issue there. John's absolutely right. It's not institutionalized through slavery, but one could say it was institutionalized through imperialism, right? That the forms of racial oppression for Europeans were practiced until the 30s or 40s overseas. A.J.P. Taylor, the great contrarian historian was once asked, where are the British fascists? And the fascist movement in Britain was pretty small, run by a vegetarian, just in case anybody's listening. Ah, I know it comes out. And likes to meet, go ahead and eat meat. And A.J.P. Taylor said, that's easy, all the fascists are overseas. And Orwell would have agreed as well. So race is an issue for the Europeans. There are tremendous problems in the European Union, as far as money, as far as refugees. There's a fraying of European culture, certainly as well. And what we said beforehand, and I don't want viewers to take this incorrectly. So let me be sharper than I usually am, because I'm usually not very sharp. We can be surprised, whether we like it or not, about the influence of what happens in America. You don't have to be a flag waiver or flag burner to recognize that most of the world thinks of what happens in China as being the same as happened in the Qing dynasty. They don't really look at China any differently. Most people look at the Chinese Communist Party as most recent imperial party. All right, they look at Putin as a return of Stalin or the Czar's. They are actually shocked when America acts like a bunch of idiots. They're shocked by that. We saw that we were all young enough, even back then to recognize in the late 60s and early 70s, as we talked about before, there were tremendous numbers of anti-U.S. imperialism riots against U.S. participation in Vietnam. There were other issues as well. Civil rights in Northern Ireland, whether East and West Germany should be reunited. So in a way, and I'm not arguing about American exceptionalism, right? I'm arguing about the unintended burden of being a great power. People look, and I think that folks are. Would you agree with me though that you can have that phenomenon, but if these things continue to happen, it erodes. It erodes the view of the world about America. If we continue to do silly things, after a while, we're not gonna be held in the same esteem. We're not gonna have the same. It's a little bit of a Tom Paine issue here, because it's a question whether Europeans look at the American government and states, or whether Americans look at European people and society. And remember, Tom Paine differentiated them. There's a state and government, even in democracy, even if we so said, the government and the government are the same. Tom Paine would have argued they're not the same. So the danger to me in allowing the average policeman, and there are exceptions, of course, but to have the average policeman do something, right? Not even seen as an instrument in the state, or if two guys get in a truck and run down somebody, that's actually in a way much more damaging to Europe's view of America as whatever the president does. The government and the state are one thing. Well, I think he's doing a fine job damaging America. Well, I didn't want to make this partisan. I'm just, as I said, the president, okay? Because some of your viewers don't want, are not listening for Professor Hoffman's response. So, actually, they don't care about that. Let's switch to Asia, because we're running out of time. So John has written and thought about the relationship of modernization, I guess, of modernity in Asia. And now we have, in Asia, we have protests also that's resonant with what's happening in the U.S. In countries where there are very few African-Americans, but why is that? What are they thinking? Where are they coming from? Well, it could be other reasons that are the same in the United States. COVID, embarrassment over an idiot in the White House. You know, it's a little... It's a little, it's a little, I'm way past that, actually. Right. I think we can agree, actually, I think we can agree on the IQ level. I think we can agree on that. Single digits. Yeah. Maybe it's probably a fair description. So, I think, Jay, that the protestors sense something dramatically different. Okay, I think that this is why these protests have spread so far and wide. And there's, I think there's a sense, it's what Peter said about the ordinariness of the racism that I think caught, it touched a big nerve in this country. I mean, I'll be honest with you, I was hesitant to watch that video and I didn't watch it for a couple of weeks and now I finally saw it. And oh my God, this guy looks so ordinary, this cop. He's a bouncer. He's a former bouncer at a club. When I left him, he looked like any of my neighbors down the block. So... Maybe you should consider moving to another neighborhood. Well, I did. So I think there's part of it is this sense like, God, that could be me. There's something so arbitrary about it. And the thing is, what we don't understand is that arbitrariness was actually part of the segregationist system. I know, we call it a system, but the system was based upon white rightness. Okay, and the fact that white people were right even when they didn't make any sense. And this is why when Thurgood Marshall went into the South and prosecuted cases, he won them so easily because these white sheriffs and these white prosecutors thought, well, the fact that there's a black man who's a defendant, he's gonna lose. Obviously we've got a white jury. We don't have to make an argument because we're right because we're white. So I do think this, the kind of ordinariness has touched a nerve internationally as well as... Are we doing it on time, Jake? Well, I wanted to turn to you, Peter. We only have a little time left. And I wanted to ask you, have we had enough exchange here, enough interaction on these points for you to make a kind of assimilation, a kind of, you know, a summary of it? Where have we gone? I have a different one, and that's what I wanted. And John and I, again, John, we should come back and do this again. It's fun. Let me go back to the point that I made at the beginning which I think that racism is both a cause and a symptom. And I think that deeper pathology of the United States is a pathology of violence. When Attorney General Barr quotes an NFL strategy to clear the streets, he used the phrase, flood the zone. That's an NFL strategy, flood the zone. When we have that kind of linguistic ease going back and forth, when we have excessive gun ownership, excessive domestic abuse, there is simply too much violence built into the American DNA. And what makes America different is that that violence is equated with freedom. In Europe, violence is not equated with freedom. It may be equated with a political ideology. It might be equated with a chess match, but Americans have a sickness. And it's a sickness that goes back really before slavery. Jolani Cobb was here at Honolulu, wonderful journalist, brilliant guy, but he and I had a fundamental disagreement. This story begins with the annihilation of Native Americans. It doesn't begin with slavery. It begins with red people should be killed and black people should be works to death. And they're really two sides of the same coin. I'm not sure whether it's racism back then or not. Racism is a modern concept, but the notion that violence is acceptable, that violence is a form of personal liberty and personal freedom is really an American pathology. It's a sickness. I'm gonna leave it for the next time. We don't have time to go into it in greater detail, but just one thing comes to mind, I would like to ask you, and that is looking for a solution. Isn't the solution in good leadership? In other words, if somebody gets out there and says, however they wanna frame it psychologically, you can't do that. We don't permit that. We are going to stop you from doing that. But what are you not going to permit, which in America, somebody doesn't respond and say. Inappropriate by personal liberty. We have taken, this country's taking the notion. You can't do it. You cannot do it. We're not gonna let you do it. Okay, but John, let's come back to this. How are you going to articulate the public interest? Let me take on to Peter's point, which I think is, I mean, I don't know about pathology, but certainly it's a country that was born in violence. And it was, some of it was violence on the part of patriots against British leadership. So this is the interesting thing about the protests is the involvement of looting and violence is like, okay, can we really draw that line so strongly between the two or do we have to say in American history, it has this legacy of protest and violence and certainly authorities using violence to subjugate people. So I think this, the violence, I think the violence of the... There's a different kind of violence in that, I mean, you can't pick a country across the world in which nationalism wasn't born in the crucible of violence. Right. True, okay. Or any significant movement. But it's the pathology of the United States to think that violence is an exercise of personal liberty. That's unusual. It's what Richard Hofstetter referred to as the paranoid style of politics, in which the Second Amendment has become this icon for these groups that have their own safety zones for guns now. Right, but that's part of it, but it's also the idea of... No, I think that's the root of it. Well, you say that violence is an expression of liberty. Yeah. What I get out is the other side of that is that liberty allows violence. Well, we have a constitution that permits all kinds of conduct, including violent conduct. And then we have a criminal process that may not really prosecute the violence as it should. And if I were a strong leader, and I don't want to be a strong leader, but if I were Tito, for example, back in the day in Europe, I would say we're not going to do that. You can't do that. And if you don't agree with the guy across the street, well, just muzzle it, man. You can't do violence. We are going to stop you from doing violence. Right, that may be a fundamental difference between the former Yugoslavia of the United States. It's more difficult here, right? And it's difficult when the institutions, I mean, all the talk about Adam Smith and Fremark and all that, Adam Smith said that equality, livable life, decent society, all required working institutions. And that's another problem with the police. When the police do something, a lot of people do things, but that's an example of the public safety institutions. So in certain ways, we haven't, and this is this book that I'm writing actually called Liberty and Power, America, Protest in American History. I'm going to deal with this issue of this question of how Liberty has been pursued in this country and how many times Liberty has been defined as something which happens to individuals, but not communities, how it's been defined in sometimes in opposition to power, but certainly we've seen many examples in the history of the country of how Liberty has been, has been defined as the exact opposite of power. It has been something which has become really distorted. In fact, I would argue that this is something that's happened actually fairly recently within the last two generations, where even historians have abandoned the idea that Liberty and Power can live together, and all of a sudden it's just Liberty. It's just this enlightenment idea of Liberty and the individual pursuing Liberty. And so- Let's defund the police. We'll have a lot of Liberty. Well, actually, that's another subject, yeah. Sorry, and you guys were out of time. I don't know what to say. I love this conversation. I love the interaction. I love your comments. I'm so stimulated by it. And what I hate is, what I hate is, it has to end. So let's do it again. Okay, let's do it again, all right? John, you've read Foner on Freedom, right? Yeah, probably a long time would be longer. I guess that would be a good thing to charge you. All right, that's Peter Hoffenberg, a history professor at the University of Hawaii, and John Deveden, history. The history guys get together, I love it. We will do it again. We will, all right. Don't leave town and wash your hands. Yeah, I'm going on lots of flights. Oh, yeah. Going to Paris.