 Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Thomas Sugru, a professor of history at New York University, and the author of a number of extraordinary books, particularly The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which I believe was something that Princeton University decided was one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. He also wrote a very profound preface to John Hersey's Algiers Motel Incident, which was featured in Catherine Bigelow's movie on Detroit. And he's also written books about W. E. B. Du Bois. He's written a book on the forgotten struggle of civil rights in the North called Sweet Land of Liberty, Not Even Past, Barack Obama and the Burden of Race, and more recently, co-authored a book called These United States, The Making of a Nation, 1890 to the Present. Tom, thanks for joining me today. Thanks, Rob. It's great to be here. Well, it feels like a home game talking to a fellow Detroiter, no matter what electronic distance separates us. But we're convening here on the 25th of June, 2020, amidst a pandemic, amidst the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, and the notion that we can't breathe, or that a number of African American people's lives have been brutally sacrificed. There is a broad range of protests, and there are huge bailouts going on. And I'm just curious, as someone who's been a fan and really learned a tremendous amount from your, which I might call explaining where I grew up to me, meaning I could feel the cauldron, but you did a tremendous job of organizing in your origins of the urban crisis book. And I'm reaching out to you today because we got to organize what's going on now. How does it differ from 1968 as you wrote a National Geographic and the Washington Post? What are you seeing that you like? What are you seeing that you don't like? What are you going to suggest that we can do to generate the kind of republic we would like to pass on to our children? Well, those are big questions, Rob. But let me say that we are in an extraordinary moment right now. Having been trapped here in the city for going on for months now because of the coronavirus epidemic, but especially because we have seen an unprecedented wave of protests in the United States, indeed globally now, sparked by the death of George Floyd, but building on and responding to problems with really deep roots in our society and in our history. We haven't seen protests of this magnitude since the 1960s. We haven't seen protests with the kinds of crowds and the diversity of participation ever in American history. And I think looking onto the scenario now, I think we're at an inflection point, a moment where there may be pretty significant changes in both politics and people's political ideology and consciousness and maybe even the direction of our country. That's optimistic, but I haven't seen anything like this in my lifetime and it's been really extraordinary to be a witness to what is certainly going to go down as one of the most consequential years in our history. You wrote, I mentioned in the introduction, articles about how 2020 is not 1968. And you have to look further back to see what I saw, historic correlations. Can you describe to me from your perspective what that entails or what it is you're teaching your readers? Yeah, so a lot of commentators have reached into the grab bag of history to draw historical analogies between what's happening now and what happened in the past. And of all the easily accessible analogies, 1968 was the first and still is the most common one to pull out of the bag. Why? Well, you know, it was an incredibly tumultuous year marked by massive protests, campus takeovers around the country. The assassination of two major figures, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. It was a moment when the political scenario was incredibly fraught, you know, culminating in the extraordinary marches outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And a lot of folks look back and said, wow, we're at that kind of moment again. And many drew an analogy between what was happening in 68 and today saying Donald Trump is going to position himself to be the new Richard Nixon. He's going to look out onto mass protests and acts of property vandalism on the part of protesters and say, we need to bring back a new regime of law and order. We need to restore discipline to America's streets. We need to put down these protests with force. And that's exactly what he did. But the analogy pretty much falls apart after that because we're not in 1968 and Richard Nixon and Donald Trump for some superficial commonalities are pretty different political creatures. And most importantly, the nature of the protests in the street today are quite different than they were in 1968. Perhaps the biggest difference that I've noticed is that protests in the street in 1968 tended to reflect the deep racial segregation in American society. Anti-war protests and campus protests which were numbered in the hundreds in 1968 were overwhelmingly white except for at historically black colleges like say Jackson State or Howard. On the other hand, civil rights and black power protests in 1968 and especially the uprisings that happened in the days after the Reverend King was assassinated were led by African-Americans and tended to occur in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. And what we've seen this year is right from the get-go protests against the murder of an African-American man, George Floyd, led by African-Americans, but joined by incredibly diverse crowds, whites, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and parts of the country, Native Americans, reflecting a way in which this moment is resonating far more widely than just one community. And I think that's to me the most decisive difference between 1968 and 2020. When you look back and you look at the buildup in Detroit, you talked about, I remember just kind of a synopsis of my reading of your book years ago, more than 100% of the job loss, which was something like between 47 and 68, something like 130,000 jobs were lost, but more than 130,000 were lost by African-Americans. We saw an increasingly aggressive police force. I remember what they called stress force. It was a kind of clandestine, it was almost like a vigilante law enforcement stop. What was it? Stop the robberies in Joy Safe Streets was the acronym. And the physical intimidation, the physical violence, the now famous Algiers Motel incident. What do you, like if you were saying we're heading towards Tumult, what's the story you would tell analogous to Detroit about what built us to this place? And this place where what you might call white people don't want to be a member of a republic that is acting in such an inhumane way either. Well, there are a lot of factors that play up to what's happening. But I think over the last 50 years, there's been a lot of talk not borne out by everyday reality that we've entered a post-racial America that the civil rights era is finally over. And that's how it culminated with the election of Barack Obama as our first African-American president in 2008, a kind of a national sense of triumph that at last we finally overcome. But again and again, evidence from the brutal treatment of African-Americans by the police to hard data on income and wealth gaps between whites and African-Americans to the intensification of segregation in public education and this persistence of segregation in the housing market. All of these point to a reality that is the United States hasn't overcome. There's a lot of overcoming still to do. The changes that were unleashed by the 1960s by the civil rights movement and the black power struggle didn't all result in progress toward a better future. The arc of justice bent off course, you could say, when it comes especially to whites and African-Americans, but also other immigrant groups that have come to the United States. So all of those are the deep context for what happened in the streets over the last month or so. But I think the issue that sparked most of the uprisings including Detroit in 1967 and that sparked most of the 2020 protests as well was incidents of police brutality towards African-Americans. That was a spark behind the hundreds of uprisings in the America streets in the 1960s and it's a reminder that there's still a big, big unresolved issue when it comes to policing in the United States. One that many respects was worsened after the 1960s because of the dramatic expansion of mass incarceration because of the militarization of the police beginning in the 60s and intensifying in more recent years. All of those have exacerbated the still ongoing problem of police brutality, police violence in the United States. There's one factor that matters a lot today and I think has played a key role in galvanizing protests and legitimizing protests against George Floyd's murder, for example, in 2020. And that is social media. In the 1960s, African-Americans knew a lot about police harassment because of their own personal experience or the experience of members of their family or friends. They knew about it because police harassment was covered by the African-American press pretty extensively. But white Americans blithely went along pretty much unaware of the everyday nature of police violence and police harassment. Today, it's a different story with the 24 hour news cycle, but especially with social media where incidents get recorded on people's phones and then appear on Twitter and in people's news feeds instantaneously. So it's really hard to avert your eyes from or remain ignorant of what's happening in the United States today in a way that was easier to avert your eyes in 1967 or 1968. And I think that the role of the internet and social media in particular is going to go down as one of the key factors in changing the terms of discussion today. Oh, yeah. I mean, that eight minute and 46 seconds was so profoundly demoralizing. And we, how I say, if we all had the courage to look at it, it was right there for all of us to see. And there was not something you could explain as justified in any way, shape, or form. And I do think, as you described that that window of social media, and the idea that there are not elite institutions mediating between what actually happens and what we're allowed to see has changed the political dynamic, a great deal. And I think of just, you know, some of the images that circulated around social media, you know, some which broke into the mainstream media like the, the elderly white man in Buffalo being pushed over by the, by the police and fracturing his skull right That wouldn't have made it outside of Buffalo, it probably wouldn't have been recorded in the 1960s, or an image of an African American man in Erie, Pennsylvania, kneeling on the sidewalk and being aggressively pushed to the ground by a police officer. And then sort of in my, all over my Twitter feed after it happened and really in 1967 or 1968, an incident happening in Erie or even an incident happening in a media center like New York or Chicago would go totally unknown, except for in the case of, in the case of, you know, a reporter or a photo journalist being on the scene at the time. And that's profound. That really changes how people understand what's happening. It makes it immediate. It makes it visceral. And it, it, it makes people angry. And it spreads widely, virally, in a way that I think really significant political consequences. It must be interesting to be a university professor and teaching when your students walk in and sit down and you know they've seen all these things. Made it, it, I think it, it even shapes, which I call the consciousness of what curriculum to offer. What kind of things you have to explain? What kind of questions matter? And I know a lot of professors who were not, you know, maybe it's just a generational thing, but not very tuned in to social media. And then all of a sudden, their students were talking about all kinds of things and they'd invest in tweet deck and Instagram and start following and it changed, it changed the shape of their lives as, as teachers, not just as observers, or as citizens. Absolutely. I'm going to be teaching a course that I've taught from my entire career on America in the 1960s. I'm going to be teaching that in the fall. And the fixies remain relevant in so many ways, but this year, when so many of my students will have actually experienced being part of a mass social movement, will have experienced the constant barrage of images of the police clashing with protesters. It's going to be a lot more immediate for them than it's been for past generations of students for whom that was just something that, that mom and dad or grandpa and grandma did, but you know, it seems, seems so far away in the past and, and I don't think that's going to be the case now. My students, I mean, I have one student who was at a protest in the Bronx, who one of my advisees who was in a nonviolent protest, it was kettled by the police kettling is when you have two flanks of police coming from either side and essentially trapping the protesters in the middle, and then blasting them with pepper spray or using clubs and he got clubbed and he was arrested and he got put into a paddy wagon and hauled off with a bunch of other protesters to to a police station. He'd never experienced anything like that before in his life. It was it was a totally new experience and I'm going to have students next fall who are going to have had those experiences themselves and are going to bring a totally different vantage point into the classroom. And it's going to be exciting, I think for me intellectually and and challenging as well to to help think about the connections between past and present in my classes. Yeah. Well, you're the kind of guy that's up for that challenge. I think some other people might be filled with dread. But I don't know. It's, it's fascinating. Now, tell me a little bit about the most recent book you wrote about. I can't remember your co-authors name. It started with my book with Linda Gilmore. Yeah, yeah, these United States, the making of a nation 1892, I guess, 2015. What was what was in that? That's not one that I've read. Well, what Glenda Gilmore and I do in that book is to offer a kind of a sweeping overview of modern American history. But we're interested in doing kind of in a way what we've been talking about in analyzing and interpreting the 2020 protests to think about telling a sweeping big picture synthetic history of the United States, one that tries to cover everything. You know, I mean, not not in a list like manner, but tries to tell a coherent story of modern America, but to do it, putting the bottom up and the top down together or thinking about the relationship of ordinary Americans and social movements to high politics and policymaking. Right. History often kind of devised into two categories. There are the kind of more traditional political and biographical historians who tell the top down story. History is a march through the Presidencies from, you know, from the founding fathers all the way up to Donald Trump. And it's a story of Congress and it's a story of decisions made in Washington. And that's an important history to tell. But my perspective in both writing and teaching history for my entire career has been, we need to look at the ways in which grassroots movements and ordinary people shape the direction of politics. The political debate and of policy. And the other way around, we also have to be attentive to the ways that politics, the law, the courts, Congress, state government's mayors from the top down shape and constrain the options that are available to citizens. And so that history, in other words, is really one that tries to bring together the voices of ordinary people with the stories of high level policymakers. And so, I mean, an example, right. So one, my chapter on the 1970s, which of course deals with Richard Nixon and Watergate and Ford and the pardoning of Nixon and Jimmy Carter and the change politics of the Democratic Party begins with a story of a guy called John Book Koshanka. Koshanka is a steelworker. And I tell the story about how his world, the world of steelworkers where you passed down your work from father to son was changed by the shifts in politics and economics in the 1960s and 1970s. And so I look at the world from his from his eyes and then move up to the world that shaped his son, the world of young people being drafted into the Vietnam War, the world of stagflation of economic travails that had their origins internationally in the oil shocks and the new austerity measures that were being implemented in national capitals, right? So I really try, in other words, to think about the connections between big picture policies and political and economic changes and everyday people. And the book is full of those kinds of connections. And I think it's, I think it's, it's essential to how I think about history. And so when we think about the 2020 protests, looping back around, if I were to write the next chapter of this book, I would say we need to think about 2020 as emerging in the era of Donald Trump, the protests that we see on the streets are as much about Trump as they are about George Floyd, but also protests that are changing the nature of national politics. I mean, Trump's popularity rating is plummeted as a result of people taking to the streets and pointing to the hypocrisies and inadequacies of federal policy. And so we always need to think about that tension between grassroots and national. So how you and I both, or each I should say, live in the United States, we look at our politics. You'd written a book about Barack Obama and race that I remember reading, I don't know, maybe I read it about 2011. I think it was something called not even past Barack Obama and the burden of race. And I guess I'm kind of saying you're bringing to the surface a lot of this energy. But I've seen in what some call a plutocracy or I've seen a political system that is not particularly broadly representative be quite resilient. And we have President Trump now who many people have found a profound allergy to. But what can be done by the young people, the organizers, the people who have given you hope to, how would I call, impart non transient effective change. How can we transform this country? What institutional reforms do we have to push for? I would start with William Barber and voter suppression, resisting voter suppression, protesting that, but what do you see? I know you've written a lot about housing reform and I remember, I think John Paul, our mutual friend told me you were working on a study of what was it, how real estate development has changed over time. But I'm curious, private sector, public sector, governance, what institutional transformations are needed so that the wave of energy that has encouraging elements can be realized in effective change. Yeah, that's that's a great set of questions. You know, I would begin with an angle that I take in writing about and teaching about American history generally, which is that while the superficial we learned it in high school view of American history is that United States is the, you know, the embodiment of democracy, the nation of liberty and freedom. Our history shows a constant struggle between democracy and anti democracy between ordinary citizens and their needs and those of what you call the plutocracy. And this contest is an ongoing one. It's not one that we ever have ever resolved and we're unlikely to resolve now. But the the contest involves shifting power and and fostering democracy. And that requires not just thinking about protests in the streets, which are necessary but not sufficient to accomplish political change, but thinking about how we march on the institutions, how we change the laws, the political structures, the, the taken for that shape and limit the opportunities for so many Americans today. You mentioned voting, that's crucial. Voting rights is in American history have never been full and universal in the ways that they have been in other places in the world. I mean, look, for most of American history, a majority of the population didn't even have the right to vote women, African Americans, and newcomers to the United States. And, you know, still by the standards of most of the world, we have a appallingly low levels of political participation, which aren't as many would have it as a result of ordinary voters apathy. There's some of that, of course, but because our institutions are designed to make it hard for people to vote hard for people to engage in direct political participation, right, we have our elections on a work a workday, right, and most of the country, you know, presidential elections around Tuesday people got to take the day off of work or rushed to polling places in the morning and go away at night. We've got laws that are making increasingly difficult for for people to register. We have systematic efforts to close down polling places around the country, particularly in places with large working class populations or populations of people of color. We don't require voting, like some countries do that have really high rates of political participation. We don't have a culture that encourages voting, and we have elected officials who are happy to keep it that way, because their interests are best served by keeping people away from the ballot box rather than having them show up and exercise their their rights. And so that's one political institution that we really need to change. The United States has also, you know, got a complicated set of governmental institutions from the federal to the state to the local and at different moments in the American past, we fought for change at different levels. And I think actually hardening in recent years, there's been a lot of grassroots activism at the local level and particularly in cities that have become real places of exciting political mobilization. And policy innovation. And one of the things that gives me hope is that a lot of activists, including those in many of the marches around the George Floyd murder, have been saying, City Hall, we need to begin enacting reforms here and now. We need to be changing the police at the local governmental level, right, also pushing for change at the higher levels but recognizing that some of the most innovative policies happen at the ground. And there are lots of points of leverage that that protesters and folks who want to make change can have with local governments. And so that's that's an area where I see the necessity of change happening. But also, I think some real possibilities. And then we've seen a wave of insurgent candidates in in recent years, and that mobilization I think is also really critical for opening up possibilities for longer term political change for a long time. The right wing in the United States was brilliant at mobilizing at the grassroots level. You know, in the 60s when they were in the political desert when Barry Goldwater was getting walloped in the 1964 election, the right was winning races for city council races for school boards, races for state representatives around the country and building a grassroots infrastructure that they were eventually able to turn into a national juggernaut. And for a long time, the left didn't do that it distrusted formal politics it stayed on the outside on the margins. And in recent years, you've got, especially young people in cities like Philadelphia, which has elected a couple of democratic socialists to the state house and to city council, who are who are realizing that working through the institutions and building that infrastructure is the first step towards more systemic change. And so I see 2020 is maybe putting those issues even more front and center on the table of younger activists with the possibility of significant change over time. I remember reading an article you wrote a while back about, I think it was, it was about the arts. It was about, I guess I'll call it superheroes in the arts. And it was something about more public enemies needed Okay. What do you see in the arts today? Where is the uptake? Who are the, where's the vanguard that resonates with the truth that we all need to come to recognize? Wow, that is a big question. And, you know, I have to say, as a white guy in his late 50s, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a world out there that is becoming less and less familiar to me and so I dare not speak for the extraordinary confusion of different artistic expression that my kids and my step kids listen to. But what I can say is that many of these younger activists are influenced by all sorts of currents in and in, you know, from from K-pop, still vital after 25, 30 years of being major cultural forces to K-pop. I mean, who would know that popular Korean music would be a vehicle for galvanizing certain segments of the electorate including some of these kids who ticket bombed Donald Trump's Tulsa rally buying all sorts of, or signing up for all sorts of tickets at this rally, you know, through a musical subculture that, you know, I only know about because I have a teenage son. And so I think we're seeing a lot of, a lot of real, you know, creativity on the ground that's helping to create political consciousness. But this is an old theme, right? In the 1960s, folk singers also helped to create a political consciousness around the war, around rights, around changing practices of gender and sexuality. So I, you know, I think this is a long current in social movements in the United States, but it's one that we're seeing and I think in all sorts of interesting ways today, even what many of us, you know, geezers, I would call myself, don't quite understand, TikTok, right, where you watch these little snippets of people's dance moves in little tiny videos that last for eight or 10 or 15 seconds. These are now becoming a way for people to convey political ideas to express opposition to the system and to mobilize. And I think we're seeing a brand new frontier. And right now, my task is mostly to put my ear to the ground and listen to my students listen to my, my, my kids and their friends and try to figure out exactly what's happening, rather than trying to prescribe it from the top down. Well, I, I'll nominate the man they call Childish Gambino as a as a prescient force here. Oh, yeah. Brilliant. His video last year. Just, I think it was called something like America. His, his name is Donald Glover. And he's had a television series or, I guess an online series, but his, I think it was called America video was just overpowering. And this is America was the name of it. And I think that his, his awareness. And I'm sure there are many, many more that that I'm not often exposed to. I've been a little bit. I guess because of my family's propensity, my father played jazz piano. I've been listening to a more, what am I calling agitated jazz. But what I always felt was that jazz music had this cerebral intensity, you know, bebop and complexity and so it was almost like a demonstration of the mental acumen that deserved respect from the white community who would cherish a Mozart or Beethoven, but you pop a Coltrane or a Charlie Parker in there and the complexity of their playing and harmonics and insight or Ornette Coleman and what they called fire music. I don't know. It still lights my fire at this, at this point in time. But I, I'm of the mind that just like when weather systems clash at a front, we get lightning bolts and thunderstorms. This storm related to the pandemic is going to produce some tremendous artists. I mean, the blues came out of the false consciousness, citing my old mentor and friend, James, the late James Cone at Union Theological Seminary, where he said the spirituals are about when you're in chains and you're praying for the afterlife. But the blues are about when you're allegedly free in the Jim Crow area, but you're not free and you're a defiance in code in the here and now. And I think things are now more explicit than the blues because people aren't necessarily in the clubs at the face in a gun. But I do think I do think that what you might call the injustice that produced the blues as a way of not accepting life, but rebelling against it, maintaining your dignity. I think we're going to see an analog to that now. And I don't know, I just, I look at healthcare systems. And I think we just have to reclassify the services that matter as being, which you might call something that all human beings should have access to and stop playing these commodity games with each and everything as though how I say justice is based on the thickness of your wallet. Absolutely. And I would say one current that seems very strong right now in the popular culture of protests as well as the political demands of protesters is a deep, deep skepticism about market based solutions. I mean, think about the protesters who have been out in numbers on the streets. By all accounts from observation and from surveys, most of them are young. They're high school and college students, they're people in their 20s or early 30s. There are, of course, people of different generations out there, older generations as well. But these are people who have come of age in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession and global economic crisis. They have come up in a moment when austerity has gutted some of our most vital public institutions. They have come of age shouldering enormous college debts for those who've gone to college. They've come of age in a labor market where, especially for folks with fewer skills, wages are stagnant or going down. And they're now living through the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depression. And so no surprise that when they see institutions of all sorts failing around them and see an economy that is demonstrably unjust, but not just unjust in the abstract, it's affecting them directly. It's no surprise that that outrage is expressing itself in all sorts of ways, from the streets to political movements to protest to literature to the rise of new left-wing magazines. I mean, all over the place, we see growing discontent at some of the most fundamental economic institutions of our society. And that's not going away anytime soon, at least not until we started addressing the root causes of the inequitable distribution of healthcare exacerbated and made highly visible during the COVID crisis. And so we're looking for the skyrocketing costs for housing in so many of our cities that makes it really hard for younger people not making that much money for immigrants, for folks working in the service sector to even have a decent standard of living. But we're, I think, looking at a crisis. It's not just about police violence, but it's also about the failure of some of our most essential political and economic institutions. My son in his early 30s came to me and he said, Dad, I've just gotten out of college. I'm in New York City. And I don't know anyone who can afford, based on our income, health insurance, automobile insurance and rent at the same time. And these are young people who are well educated, who are part of what you might call circle of opportunity. And as time went on, as I got to know more people that they called millennials and they worked with us at INET, I could sense that the younger generation was not buying into the package, especially if they didn't have mom and dad's assistance financially at the starting gate. That's people who are very close to the top of the, we might call ladder of opportunity or the rungs in the ladder are there. When I look at the pandemic, Tom, I just, I shake my head because there are people who are forced to be dangerous in order to survive, eat, have a shelter and so forth. And we're not taking care of them. We're taking care of large scale private equity firms and banks. And I just, I feel like the fuel to the fire just keeps growing. Absolutely. I was out about a week ago when there was a march through lower Manhattan going down across canal by the Holland Tunnel up 6th Avenue. And traffic was stopped. A lot of people were waiting for the tunnels and a lot were delivery trucks and most of the delivery trucks doing that vital service of getting all the food and goods to those of us in the city who need it right now. A lot of them were people of color. And we didn't hear the kind of angry honking that you hear when traffic gets stopped in New York. Instead, a lot of the cars and delivery trucks were honking in unison with the chance of the protesters. And I saw six or seven truck drivers in one stretch of canal near 6th Avenue, putting their fists out their windows and solidarity with the protests. Right. These are the folks who are living precariously who are doing the essential work to keep food and goods coming to us. They're the folks who are being devastated by the effects of COVID. And they're the ones who I think have the most reason to be angry at this particular moment. The fact that COVID has swept through places like Queens full of immigrants or the heavily Latino suburban communities in places like New Jersey and Long Island. Where folks are working as hospital orderlies, they're working in delivering food, they're working in warehouses that are processing the vast amount of stuff that's still going through places like Amazon and FedEx. These are the folks that are being underpaid and are bearing the burden of so many of the dislocations of this particular social, economic and political moment. Well, Tom, like I've said, I've learned a tremendous amount from you over time. And 22 years ago, you wrote a preface to John Hersey's Algier Motel incident. I think it was a reissue of a book that was written in 68. And at the end of your preface, you're talking about a criminal justice system was deeply corrupt and white advocates of law and order hailed the decisions. The Police Officers Association leader Carl Purcell discounted charges of police brutality and the Algiers Motel incident, as you said, was a graphic reminder of two versions of justice. You concluded by saying, from the infamous 1930s era trial of the Scottsboro boys to the hasty acquittal of the murders of Emmett Till and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, African Americans have chafed against the injustice of the American judicial system, the profound distrust that many blacks continue to feel toward the police and toward the court system reflected in the cases of Rodney King, OJ Simpson, and in the angry anti-police lyrics of gangster rap. And it's a legacy of the unresolved issues that John Hersey so powerfully documented. At the end, Hersey's story of three white police officers and three dead black men is an American tragedy of power inequality justice, a tragedy whose consequences continue to poison race relations in America today. Well, as I listened to my own mind reading that this morning, I felt like you carried the ball from John Hersey to me and to us in 22 years ago. You're writing about something that's essentially been hiding in plain sight. Maybe Detroit brought it to the surface. But I want to read to you a short poem by Lawrence Joseph. It's called shouting at no one. It's a poet from Detroit, always for smokestacks burning bones somewhere, tears that won't stop everywhere blood becomes flesh that wants to say something. It's not me shouting at no one in Cadillac Square. It's God roaring inside me, afraid to be alone. Your work, while forcing us to look at some uncomfortable aspects of who we are as a nation, at least for me, has always taught me that I'm not alone. And it's people like you and like John Powell that give me the faith to continue to try to illuminate these things and correct these things and not become despondent or reside. So I want to thank you for being here today and thank you for all the work you do. And I hope whether we're talking Detroit or whether we're talking America or the world that you'll come back and join me at some future time, where we can continue the discussion. But for now, thank you very much. Absolutely, Rob. Thank you very much and thanks for those those powerful words. I do my work with a hope that it will someday become irrelevant, but happy that it's continued to help us to understand where we are and maybe give us a roadmap to what kind of future we want. So thank you so much. Well, if we get to the point where they no longer matter. I'll buy you a Stroh's beer of earners ginger ale, whatever your preference. And the crucible of Detroit will have helped us both with awareness and resolve. And we can be grateful for our upbringing in that unusual way. But thanks again, Tom. Thank you, Rob. We'll talk to you. We'll talk again soon and check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.