 In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted around the country. Some of these have turned violent and resulted in injuries to citizens and police, as well as looting and other forms of property damage. Cities have implemented curfews and other restrictions on movement, further stoking tensions due to the coronavirus lockdown, the start of summer, and a 15 percent unemployment rate. The last time the nation faced this level of social unrest was 1968, the year that Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. To help us make sense of the current moment and figure out where it could lead, I spoke with Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasso, who has studied how protests of the 1960s affected public opinion, social discourse, and voting patterns. Will today's protests make policing reform more or less likely? Is it possible that violence in the streets will boost Donald Trump's re-election chances just as events in 1968 helped put Richard Nixon in the White House? Wasso's research also looks at the nature of police misconduct, analyzing whether headline-grabbing incidents such as the horrific killings of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are the result of a few bad apples or a systemic problem with law enforcement in minority communities. I spoke with Wasso, who is currently in Los Angeles via Zoom. Omar Wasso, thanks for talking to me. Thank you for having me. Can you outline your findings about protest violence and political outcomes? Sure. So the big picture is that a lot of research suggested that protests should have little to no effect in politics. A bunch of people go out on the street, they make some noise, it doesn't matter. Elites dominate politics. And what I found consistent with some other research on protests is that, in fact, protests are influential. And my work in particular finds that protests are influential through the effect they have on media. And so protests shape what the media talk about and what the media talk about in turn influences public opinion. And that then shapes what people in Congress are doing or what kind of legislation gets passed or, in fact, as you mentioned, who might win a presidency. Let's get to the presidential election. I read down the red, and obviously this is wild speculation of the type that academics never want to indulge in, but I'm going to force you to. But you were looking at the period between 1960 to 1972. And before we get into what you found there, is there a difference in the way media back then is very different from media now? Do you worry at all about the relevance of your research? Not for explaining what happened, but what might be going on now? It's a really good question, and I think there are some really important differences and also some important similarities. So why don't I go through some of the differences first? So clearly there are way more media now than there were in the past. And not just that, but it's much more fragmented, right? So every one of us has our own distinct social media feed that is going to be unique and give us a different vantage point on the same event, let alone hundreds of events around the country. We also have a kind of intimacy that comes from people's cell phone footage. And so where the power of a single image in the 1960s that was conveyed on a newspaper might have brought you there to a degree, I still don't think that's as powerful as sitting, watching George Floyd be killed before your own eyes. I mean, the sort of the anger and rage and grief that that triggers when you see a man crying for his mother as a cop has his knee and his neck. Like that's a kind of visceral, intimate, powerful, terrifying, direct experience of media that was only partly conveyed in the past. Right, because even when we were able to see very stark images, dogs being set loose on protesters and things like that, oftentimes it was either a still image or we didn't see it at all because the networks weren't really showing that kind of brutality. Yeah, I mean, one, just given that we have a little bit of extra time to kind of go into some of these details, one of the remarkable things about Bloody Sunday is that there is a national documentary about the Nuremberg Trials that's playing on television. And they cut into, you know, sort of a story about Nazi war crimes to footage in Selma of people like Representative John Lewis being beaten brutally by police and vigilantes. And so that contrast in that moment was exceedingly powerful and there's good evidence that it really did shock the conscience of the nation and for a lot of people made them realize that, you know, what's going on in the South is not normal politics. This is unacceptable. And I think there are moments that are in the past that are that visceral. But I think what's different now is the way in which there are things that black people have been saying for a long time, police engage in abusive behavior in our communities and now people can see it for themselves in a way that really maybe began with the video of the beating of Rodney King but has become much more a part of our common lived experience. And I suspect has played a role in making particularly white liberals more attuned to black concerns about racial equality. One similarity, though, I think between the 1960s and now is that the media tend to rely on some fairly common scripts or narratives for how stories get told. And one of those is a kind of a right script or a kind of a justice narrative. And another is more of a crime script. And what we're seeing, what we saw in the 60s was that nonviolent protests, particularly nonviolent protests, met with state repression, with vigilante violence were much more likely to be presented as a kind of redress of grievances as a demonstration as a march, as a call for civil rights. So a nonviolent protest today produced a headline about civil rights tomorrow. Whereas when protesters engaged in violence, that predicted a headline about riots tomorrow, a headline that was much more likely to focus on crime and disorder, and public opinion moves very closely with that. So when the newspapers are talking about civil rights, civil rights becomes the most important problem in public opinion surveys. And when newspapers are heavily covering crime and riots, crime and riots become the thing that is the most important problem. And so the tactics that are employed by protesters can really make a powerful impact on how the media tell the story, which in turn shapes public opinion. And I think that's still likely to be quite true today. In the 60s, and especially coming out of the civil rights movement, it seems as if, and this might be an artifact, both of my not understanding it fully, but also looking backwards, that civil rights marches were kind of scripted. They were organized. The people who participated in them were taught passive resistance and kind of like, don't fight back, et cetera. Today's protests all over the country seem to be much less organized. Does that factor into this at all? Or did the 60s protesters know what they were doing in a way that it doesn't necessarily seem clear that what's going on today is under anybody's control? I think that's right, that there's a lot of the protests in the 60s that escalated to violence started out as organized, nonviolent, civil disobedience. But when people are enraged about a police killing or some aspect of state violence, it can be very hard to sustain that level of order and focus, particularly if the nonviolent protests which were successful, in part, employed producing lots and lots of images of state violence, of police killings. And so once people are kind of seeing that imagery and getting angry becomes much harder to kind of, I think, to do that very disciplined, as you said, passive resistance that took training that takes incredible perseverance to sort of let somebody hit you and not hit back. But there's another dimension to what you're saying, which is, I think, even more true today, which is that part of what's powerful about cell phones and the internet and the variety of communications technologies is it makes the transaction costs for coordinating a large-scale gathering much, much lower than they would have been in the 60s. And so it's now possible for somebody via Twitter or Facebook to kind of say, we're meeting at this location, and that solves the coordination problem. And suddenly in a very spontaneous and not coordinated in the we trained, we knew what we were getting into sort of way, that makes it possible for there to be this kind of explosion of activity that lacks a center and any kind of coherent agenda or organizer. Of course, there are organizers involved in these events, and there are organizers who have a long history doing work. But they're just sort of one constituency in this kind of explosion of activity. And to be clear, most of these protests have been peaceful, but there are many constituencies, and you're exactly right. It's much less centrally organized. One of the, I was going to say weird, that is quite right. One of the kind of disturbing discoveries of your research is really that the best outcomes from a kind of civil rights perspective were when protesters were nonviolent and the state police law enforcement were violent. Is that accurate? And why did that, why do you think that helps push civil rights forward? Yeah, that's a good summary. And let me step back and sort of set up one part of why that, the logic of that. And so initially, nonviolent protesters in the South were getting attention. But as one reporter said, of a very large protest in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, if there's no conflict, if there's no violence, this is a boring story. What I want is blood and guts. That's what makes a story. And what the leaders of the nonviolent civil rights movement figured out was that what really generated national press was when there was state repression that was excessive. And that partly was useful because it got the press's attention and generated national media. It also was really important because a lot of white moderates who might have had some awareness of a sense of racial, that Jim Crow was this kind of, that blacks were second class citizens in the South, but it didn't really, it didn't move them politically. They could view a nonviolent protest as something that was normal politics. Look, the system's working. It was only when there was an excess of state repression, when there was this kind of brutal, as you mentioned, sicken dogs on young people, fire hoses on young people. In that context, it's very hard for the kind of disengage or maybe even hostile white moderate outside of the country to say, hey, it's working OK. The system is normal politics. So the strategic use of violence where protesters were the object of violence both shocked the conscience of the country into saying, OK, wait, that's a little beyond what we're comfortable with and got the media to become very engaged. What was the role, and I'm thinking of Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail where that's addressed to white moderates who are saying, you got to wait. You got to wait. The system is working. And he gestures towards, if you don't deal with me, with a peaceful person who's willing to work through the system but is going to push the issue, you're going to have to deal with violent elements in the kind of Black Civil Rights Movement, Black Panthers or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council and Committee. Is that kind of dynamic at play here, do you think? Because is there a sense that we, as a country, we need to deal with this peacefully otherwise? There is a set of groups, whether it's Antifa or something else, that's going to cause many more problems. Yeah, so I think that's sometimes called a radical flank hypothesis. The idea is if there's a kind of a threatening, more extreme group that makes the moderates more attractive to negotiate with. And I think broadly that's plausible, and I don't think there's any reason to doubt that those dynamics are at play in any kind of negotiation. In the early part of the 1960s, certainly Malcolm X is a presence, but the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers haven't really come onto the scene when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, when the 65 Voting Rights Act was passed. And the big wave of violent protest activity comes after 65, right? So really the biggest high-profile violent protest is in Watts, and that comes just after the Voting Rights Act. So I think it's very reasonable to say that, in fact, the threat of violent resistance, while certainly always a part of, I think, white leaders' consciousness, is not the thing that's driving the passage of the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act. I think it's much what I look when I see in my public opinion data is the more people are engaging in nonviolent protest, the more public opinion changes, and both with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, within a year those laws get enacted. And so moving public opinion, growing the coalition of people in favor of those changes, moved politics. In the later period, there is some evidence that violence did, in fact, produce certain kinds of benefits for black communities. But I also find, in addition to those benefits, that violence probably contributed to a growing of the law and order coalition that really was pushing for more repressive policies, too. Can you talk a bit about 1968 in the article that you wrote that comes up, and you basically say that because of violent behavior by protesters or fear of that by white voters, they tipped into the Republican camp. Richard, it's kind of hard to, I guess, recover this history, at least in a common sense. But Nixon, it was a three-way race with Nixon Humphrey and George Wallace, who was an explicit segregationist. Nixon got in with a plurality of votes, not a majority by any stretch. How did, what were the events that made people, made whites scared that they ended up going into the Republican camp and letting Nixon eke out of victory? Yeah, so I think just to put this, you framed it all really well. And I just want to take one step even further back and say, let's start with Goldwater, who ran on law and order, and lost, and lost badly. And so there's a puzzle that was one of the things that motivated my research, which really begins with where did law and order come from? How did mass incarceration become? What is it about what happened in the late 60s and 70s that seemed to lay the groundwork for this hockey stick increase in incarceration in this country? And the puzzle is, why did law and order fail for Goldwater but work for Nixon? And there's even one more dimension to that. Ronald Reagan runs on law and order for the governorship of California in 1966. And so he wins substantially. And so law and order isn't working in 64. It is working in 66. It is working in 68. And if can I complicate or throw in another log on the fire which is that Nixon did pretty well among African-Americans in 1960 when he was running against Kennedy. I mean, he went to get like 25, 30% or something like that. I mean, it was substantially higher than any Republican has gotten since. Yeah. Well, so that's a really important point. And let me try to braid it together with two ideas. So one is that, why does Reagan beat the incumbent Pat Brown, who had been quite popular? There's evidence in my research and others that there's a strong shift among a certain subset of Democrats away from the Democratic Party following the Watts uprising in 1965. So law and order becomes a winning strategy following Watts. And then in 67 and 68, there are very large violent protests. And to be clear, while what we're seeing now is quite dramatic compared to what was happening in the 60s, these are still relatively modest events. I don't want to minimize any particular injury, death, building going up in flames. But in Watts, there were something like 3,000 incidents of arson. So just a totally different scale of unrest. And so that pushes these issues. And again, the media is covering this. There is very dramatic footage. And that means that what we see in public opinion is that issues of crime and riots are moving up in the summer, down in the winter, up in the summer, down in the winter, as we build up to 1968. And so the public opinion data looks very consistent with the story about the public is responding to what's happening on the ground. The violent protest is driving a concern about crime and riots are the most important problem in America. And the other issue that you brought up, which is a really important one, is basically in 1964, the Democrats, in 1960, it's not clear which party is the party of African-American interest. The Republican Party is actually more liberal than the Democratic Party on a civil rights bill that's introduced before 64. But basically, with 64, with Johnson leading the charge on the party side and the pressure from activists with things like the March on Washington in 63, the Democrats become the party of civil rights. The Democrats split from the Southern Democratic wing, which was segregationist, and becomes the party aligned with African-American interests. And in that shift, suddenly Nixon, who might have been more progressive on race, has a, you know, there's a kind of realignment of the parties where one is the party of black interest and one is the party, essentially over time, becomes the party of a certain class of white interests. And that means that law and order, which is not explicitly racial, but it's kind of coded language that translates as, you know, I'm gonna keep those outgroups in control. And so the combination of the Civil Rights Act and the, you know, unrest on the ground sort of produces this competition overrace in our party system. And the Democratic Party is, you know, doesn't have, the Republicans really own the issue of law and order then for the next 50 or 60 years. You know, kind of flash forwarding to contemporary America. Donald Trump in 2016 ran as a law and order candidate. I mean, he used that phrase, harking back at least to the Nixon. In the current context, I mean, it seems like Trump is very much, you know, he's anti-protest, and he equates any kind of protest with rioting, and that type of thing. Does that mean, you know, and then you have Joe Biden, who weirdly, you know, has been part of the American political establishment for 50 years, played big roles in things like ramping up the drug war, crime bills that put a lot of black people in particular in jail. He's walked back some of his, what used to be his legislative accomplishments. Is there a clear, you know, like, is there a clear sense of where any of this goes in the 2020 election? Yeah, that's a really important question. I think there are a couple of things that are predictable and a bunch of things that are super unpredictable. And in the kind of predictable scenario, right, we know we've just seen Trump will almost always play to his base and has very little interest in trying to, you know, bridge divides. His just first instinct consistently is to kind of turn up the volume on division. And we're seeing that right now. Although it's also bizarre in a way that he did better with African-Americans and Latinos than either Mitt Romney or John McCain. So it, you know, I mean, he's still below double digits, but. Yeah, I mean, he might have done 9% without America. Yeah, like 7%. And I think to be clear, there's a certain kind of, in particular, man who appreciates a kind of macho candidate and that has a lot of appeal. These sort of, there's some evidence that we've seen a kind of sorting of the parties on a taste for what, in political science, is called authoritarianism. What you think of as, you know, sort of a more traditional social order, more patriarchal, more, you know, there's sort of a black and white view of the world. And so if you're an African-American who has those kind of authoritarian tendencies, Trump may be very appealing. But that's still a very small percentage overall. But you're right, it's a higher number among Latinos. And I think the big picture, though, is that Trump is, you know, has already run on law and order. It, depending on how the next few weeks and summer play out, it may or may not continue to be really salient come November, but if it does, it's almost certain that that's going to be a core part of his message because his entire campaign going back to his first address was, you know, there are these criminal elements, you know, maybe they're Mexican, but later they're, you know, blacks in cities, and I alone can fix it, right? And so he's the strong man. And so I think that's, you know, that's a fairly, it doesn't take, it doesn't take a lot of research to say that to a conservative, you know, safe prediction. But what I think is unpredictable is he's the incumbent. And in some cases, it might mean that he is associated with the disorder. And so there may be people who, you know, like some of what he has to offer, but feel like he's actually more of a chaos agent than a source of stability. And the key thing that I see in my research that I think is still at play today is in the earlier era, and I think this is hard for people to really wrap their heads around, there are people who are open to racial equality, right? Like Johnson wins in a landslide in 1964, and there's a lot going on there, there's Kennedy's assassination, but the civil rights bill has passed. And there's a democratic coalition of white moderates and white liberals and African-Americans that holds, right? So it's not just the 64 Civil Rights Act that splinters the democratic coalition. And I think that there's, so the key idea is there are white moderates who are, you know, they don't prioritize racial equality, but they're not opposed to it necessarily, but they do care about order. And so they're kind of adjudicating between a party that they might like some things about and has racial equality as a core plank and a party that says, I'm gonna really fight for order. And those white moderates can really play a critical role in tipping an election. And I find that that, you know, it's mid-Atlantic states and mid-Western states that are the ones that potentially tip in 1968. That's quite similar to what happened in 2016, where the states in play, you know, are Wisconsin and Ohio and Michigan. And so I think it's likely that in 2020, even though whites on average are much more concerned about racial equality, that there are going to be these swing voters who, you know, are sympathetic to block concerns and care about order and are gonna be pulled between Biden and Trump and the kinds of narratives that come out of these protest movements, the kind of narratives that come from the two candidates are really gonna help those folks align with one camp or another. And I don't know quite how that's gonna play out. Yeah, and it's interesting to realize too, you know, the first big explosion of this round of protests come out of Minneapolis, which is a mid-Western state but unreliably democratic and kind of liberal, but then also kind of mid-Western conservative places like Louisville, Kentucky, which is kind of the South, but not really, really heartland. Can I ask, this is a kind of orthogonal, I guess, to this question of, you know, when we look at 1968 versus now in, I would say, and correct me if you disagree with this, in most ways the country is unrecognizable in terms of race relations, in terms of equality, not just for African Americans, but for women, sexual orientation is not an issue. It was unspeakable in 1968. It's less and less of an issue if it's one at all today. How do we talk about progress along racial lines that is incomplete or is still problematic? Because one of the things that was kind of remarkable about this, the event with George Floyd or the killing of him, even versus Ferguson, is that nobody was really defending the police actions here. Nobody, you know, you really search, even people like Trump are not saying that he deserved to die or he caused his death. Everybody is saying this is wrong. How do we account for that without saying, okay, so we really don't have to do reform? So it's a really good question. And I think the way I think about this is a kind of tale of Tustitti's story, that following the, you know, essentially the breaking of Jim Crow, a really remarkable act of insurgency by African Americans to overturn an oppressive regime. Following that movement, we have both enormous progress for African Americans in particular, and for, call it the bottom, you know, 40% of African Americans, a really terrible, in some cases, even worse situation. And so we have to be able to hold that kind of dual path at the same time. And so on the progress side, you know, you've got an enormous opening up of opportunity, educational employment, housing, I mean, just a real flourishing of the black middle class in a way that is really important to recognize and to appreciate and reflects absolutely progress in America. And at the same time, and this is part of what took me back to school, and you know, when we're talking about issues of mass incarceration and criminal justice, right, we have the rise of the war on drugs. We have this massive hockey stick increase in incarceration and all sorts of other kinds of really devastating social and economic effects in the black community in particular. So, you know, employment opportunities as part of deindustrialization become much tougher and there are any number of other sorts of, you know, sort of kinds of social dislocation that are happening, particularly for that bottom 40%. And I think part of what is so important about what happened with George Floyd, and to be clear again, exactly as you said it, the police killing of George Floyd is that it really focuses our attention on one of the core issues that has been a source of trauma over the last half century, which is that criminal justice has been just a profoundly unequal and a profoundly brutal system for African-Americans and that that is affecting the bottom 40% much more than for African-Americans, the top 50%. I'm not saying that there aren't lots of folks, you know, my former advisor, Henry Louis Gates, getting arrested in his own home. You know, I'm not saying those things don't happen, but it's way more devastating for the people who get kind of trapped in a criminal justice system that just does not let people go and kind of constraints all of their life chances. And so that's how I think of the, you know, has there been progress, enormous progress, particularly on the things you're talking about, the kind of social liberalism stuff, but on a bunch of material wellbeing, and in particular, in kind of terms of liberty, right? The number of people who are locked in cages, we have not made progress. Right. And you know, that was part of, I think, what came out of the Ferguson moment there of recognizing how many levels of kind of social control through fines and other types of policing, which definitely just disproportionately affected and screwed over black communities there was. That was invisible to a lot of people. Yeah, that's right. And so there was a kind of, essentially taxation through fees. So, you know, the state was funding its activities by, you know, petty fines that would accrue and could be devastating. And I just think when I was reading about that moment, I was thinking about a ticket I got for speeding. And I was going the same speed as everybody else. I got, you know, it was the end of the month. It was clear they had a quota. I got picked and I was so angry. I didn't pay it for, you know, another whatever it was. I missed the deadline two times. And I just, I was screwing myself over, but I was so angry about the fee and the feeling of, you know, this wrongful kind of ticket that, you know, my way of protesting was in some ways to screw myself over by not paying it, right? But you could pay it. I mean, then that's the type of thing where, you know, it becomes a never ending sinkhole for people who don't have the, who can't pay it, right? That's right. And I'm coming to that with great privilege. So I ultimately paid it and my life is fine, but imagine if you couldn't pay it or imagine if there's this kind of like, you know, devastating accrual of all sorts of, you know, your grass isn't cut at the right height kind of stuff. That can be really maddening. And then you throw into that an unjust or like what people perceive to be an unjust killing and it's just, you know, it's a kind of tinder. And you're right that that was invisible and I think it's important on the progress side to note that as much as people might think the Black Lives Matter movement kind of petered out as Trump gained power or came to office, we've seen at the local level reform DAs in cities across the country when there have been changes in use of forced policies that have had material benefits for, you know, reducing the amount of police abuse that we observe. And so I think that's also less visible, but there really has been a reform movement that has made progress. And I suspect that even Trump is kind of operating in some ways in a new set of constraints where he might, you know, say Blue Lives Matter not Black Lives Matter, but he doesn't want to align himself with the guy who, you know, kills a man crying for his mother on camera. Yeah, in fact, I mean, he signed the first step act. He's done, he's made certain gestures towards criminal justice reform, which are actually historic. So, you know, and when you go back to like at the more local or state level, certain types of asset forfeiture laws have been changed and cash bail is being repealed in places which are all, you know, very positive developments. Let's talk a little bit about policing or reform of policing because that is kind of front and center. You know, one of the things that, you know, some of the protests, and I'm in New York City, I was along a protest yesterday that very quickly went from talking about George Floyd and other recent cases of violent death at the hands of law enforcement to, you know, attacking capitalism, writ large and all sorts of other types of things. But to go back to this, you know, primary issue of police reform, you've written on Twitter or you've talked about how people when they talk about reform, they tend to either say, we need like a complete systemic reform or we just need to pull the bad apples out. And you've stressed that in fact, you know, it's both and that, you know, getting rid of bad apples or recognizing who the bad players are in a system is a lot easier than we seem to believe. Could you talk a little bit about what's going on there and what your analysis shows? Yeah, this was really striking to me when I started looking into this a few years ago. So, you know, the bad apples rhetoric says, you know, most cops are okay, we just have some rogue actors, right? And the sort of system story says, you know, the whole thing is corrupt and you kind of need to have the cops are bad. And what was sort of surprising to me when I looked at some of the data is how disproportionate it is in terms of a very small percentage of cops generate a way disproportionate percentage of the civilian complaints. So in a place like Chicago, it was something like 1% of cops generate 25% of the civilian complaints. In New York, there were cops who had, you know, 20, 30, 50 civilian complaints who were still out on the street. And if you look at the pattern, the cop who shoots Laquan McDonald in Chicago had something like 17 complaints against him. The guy who choke holds Eric Garner and, you know, as he's screaming, I can't breathe, had, I think it was like 12 complaints against him. There are, and so, and the person who killed George Floyd had a pattern of abuse. And so, if you are thinking about this, you know, the bad apples versus systems question, what became very clear to me is, in fact, the modal police officer, you know, I think in New York, was something like 40% have zero complaints against them, right? So, in fact, there are a lot of cops. And I'm, you know, whether you are pro or anti-cop or that's even the wrong frame, like it's clear that there are some cops who are doing way more harm than others. And getting those cops off the street would do a lot of good, right? Eric Garner would be alive, Laquan McDonald. What are the obstacles? What are the obstacles to, you know, when you have such a small percentage of cops causing so many of the complaints, you know, what are the obstacles to pulling them out of the system? Yeah, well, I mean, I think this speaks to the need to kind of focus on both systems and individuals, right? And that clearly there's a systemic failure, which is the, you know, like these cops engaged in repeated abuse aren't being sanctioned in any sufficient way, fired, you know, put on a desk job, demoted in some way that sends a signal to everyone else. That, you know, that's out of, that's off bounds, right? And so that's the systemic part of the failure. Is that part of the question I ask is that like, is that a union thing? Is that a solid area, like a thin blue line type of thing? Or do you have a sense what's causing that? I think part of what's remarkable about this issue is it's actually terrible for cops, right? Having a cop who knees a man to death on his neck is terrible for cops. And if you were, you know, a kind of rational police union, you would be interested in getting the rogue actors out of your, you know, out of your profession. And I think in a lot of contexts, there's it's a thin blue line. It's a kind of, you know, a level of solidarity that defends almost every kind of action by police. And in fact, if the police unions, if the police, you know, kind of, you know, the mayors and governors who oversee these institutions, if they were much tougher on that one to 2%, we could potentially be reducing the level of abuse, you know, 25%, right? And that really matters. Another example of this that's kind of, you know, getting that worst officer out, Tamir Rice, right? A child playing with a toy gun shot by a cop who had been fired by another police station, police force because he was deemed as unfit and then hired by the force that ultimately in which he shot Tamir Rice, right? And so again and again, the people engaging in these kinds of egregious abuse have this pattern. And the other thing I think, coming back to your question about why doesn't it change, and I think in some ways, focusing on the system change is really hard. That's like a big kind of pot to boil. And part of what I was arguing in one piece I wrote for The Root is that it's, you know, part of what you want as a movement is cases that put the opposition on their heels, right? And so a cop in New York who has 51 complaints against him, that's really hard to defend. And that's a really good place to be if you're trying to push for reform and accountability for police. And so my argument was partly, there's a material benefit, right? You might have fewer of these kinds of abuses, but it's also rhetorically very powerful to focus on these extreme cases that while maybe only 1% still matter enormously in terms of the quality of life for black communities. You know, final question, how do you feel, you know, about the next three, four, five, six months? This is, you know, we have the COVID lockdown, we have massive unemployment, we have, you know, hot weather, warm weather, good weather coming out, you know, and now like, you know, one of the most intense convulsions of, you know, of a number of overlapping issues, you know, that are causing real disruption and ferment. You know, what are you thinking? You know, are we gonna get through this or is it gonna get a lot worse? So let me enter in kind of a couple of parts. So I think the pessimistic part of me says, I don't have much optimism that there's going to be any kind of rapid change on criminal justice issues. I think that's a long, slow fight that for which there is real progress, you know, decriminalization of marijuana, you know, these DAs getting elected. There is real progress on criminal justice issues, but the apparatus is so vast that it's gonna take a long time to try and make headway on that. And so I fear for our country and as much as there will be more of these horrible police killing of unarmed black people caught on camera for years to come. And that's a terrible thing and I wish I had more optimism about that. But on a more encouraging note, I think in the 60s, there was a sense of the whole social fabric was coming undone. So we had Martin Luther King assassinated to Kennedy's assassinated. The world was just, you know, a level of social unrest. Yes, what happened this past weekend was dramatic, but again, in the 60s, you're talking about, you know, thousands of instances of arson in a place like Detroit, National Guard comes in, shoots 15,000 rounds of ammunition, 34 people die. I mean, it's a level of like low grade civil unrest that looks like a civil war or something kind of akin to that. And this is not at all at that level, at least at this stage. And so I also feel like there's some reason to think that we're moving through this in a way that's likely to not kind of tear the fabric entirely. But I think the really big question that's not specifically about Trump or the unrest is that our kind of our democratic institutions are in some ways being challenged. And so, you know, can we maintain a kind of core commitment to both things like, you know, civil rights and civil liberties and voting and voting rights? And I worry about democratic erosion in this country. So I was trying to find the optimistic note. Yeah, yeah, you know, I was gonna say. That was not it. But I guess it's a more peaceful period. And I think that that stability is good for, you know, for progress. Well, it's odd because, you know, when Trump gave his inaugural speech where he was talking about American carnage and he was describing in America, you know, that was bleeding, you know, from street crime that maybe existed in the 70s, but certainly wasn't anything common. But by the same token, when you go back to the late 60s, the level, the amounts of trust and confidence in the government and other institutions of authority was much, much higher than it is now. So it's kind of, you know, there's much less crime, but there's also much less confidence. I don't know where that leads. Well, I think, you know, we are at the frontier of a challenge that I don't think has been fully appreciated, which is that, and it goes back to your point about, you know, between 60 and 64, what changes, we're trying to build a multiracial democracy and that turns out to be an exceedingly difficult thing and that a bunch of countries that have multi-ethnic states converge to not really being democracies, they kind of become ethno-nationalist authoritarian states. There are examples like Canada that kind of embrace being multi-ethnic states. I mean, I think we're in the middle of this convulsion where part of Trump's appeal is he's saying, no, no, I'm gonna reassert the old social order, right, make America great again with whites and Christians on top and, and there's a kind of counter-mobilization, which to be clear, you know, Trump didn't get a majority of the vote and young people have not much love for Trump. And so, so I think that the transition that we're in the middle of is bumpy. One reason to think that there may be a large constituency in the future for a peaceful, free, multi-ethnic democracy is, in fact, in the social unrest, is a call for enough of the state violence, right? It's not a call for, you know, crush the ethnic minorities. And so, I have some confidence that we're moving in the right direction in terms of building this kind of prosperous, peaceful, multi-ethnic society, but there's still a lot of inequality and a lot of state violence against, in particular, black and Latino people. And so, you know, the point is, in that transition, things are really bumpy. And I think we're in the transition now, but I also have some optimism that we're moving towards a period where the ethno-nationalist contingent no longer has a winning national coalition. Can I, you know, you came into my view, where I first learned about you through both my predecessor at Breeze and Virginia Postural, but through your website, Black Planet. You were part, you always struck me as you were on places like MSNBC, if I'm not mistaken, but you were kind of an avatar of a techno-utopian or techno-optimist moment where one thing that was kind of fantastic about the late 90s, and I realized part of this is just old manism on my part, but that we had gotten to a point where we could be more individualized in every aspect of our lives, you know, in our commercial lives and how we could order things, how we could monogram things, but also on our identities, I mean, on the most meaningful expressions of ourselves that we were no longer just seeing each other in terms of black and white or male or female or East Coast, West Coast, whatever, everything became much more nuanced and complicated in a good way. Did that, you know, like, I mean, that isn't how we're talking anymore. We're talking in the most kind of brute terms of ethnic identity or tribalism, whether it's racial, ethnic or political. Is there any way back to that earlier kind of glimpse of a different future that was not scornful of identity, but rather, you know, it was like, let's, instead of being one of two things, let's be one of 10 or, you know, 10 or 20 things. Yeah, so I think the, you know, Virginia Postrelle once said to me that nature abhors a void as it relates to politics. And so she was always skeptical of the kind of more anarchist schools of thought because to her mind, into that void was gonna come some, you know, more, had probably authoritarian power. And we might think about something similar with identity where people have a deep need to feel kind of rooted in community and in a sense of, you know, peoplehood. And that doesn't mean it's not mutually exclusive with what you said about I can be, you know, black and into anime and, you know, somebody who likes to, you know, I don't know, ride a motorcycle. But I think there's just a profoundly human need for connection and those connections often have a kind of, you know, they're rooted in history of groups that we kind of ascribe meaning to. And I say all of that to say that, like, I, you know, you come to California where I am right now and I remember talking to a friend of mine who teaches at a high school here. We were, you know, the school was 90% Latino. And so in a school that's 90% Latino, there are Latino Goths and Latino skatepunks and Latino, you know, rockers. And it's like, yeah, that heterogeneity is there, but it's not uncoupled from them also feeling very rooted in, you know, like the Mexican-American community in LA or something, right? And I think it's possible for both to exist, but it's also requires something like California where some of those cleavages aren't the organizing cleavages by which kind of power operates, right? And right now, if you're, you know, if you feel like you're being overpoliced as an African-American, then it's sort of, your side hobbies aren't gonna be the thing you mobilize around. And conversely, if you're, you know, a white evangelical Christian who says, I am angry about, you know, transgender bathrooms and same-sex marriage and, you know, Me Too and Black Lives Matter, you feel like your, you know, values are under assault and it becomes important to you to kind of mobilize with the people who share those values to try and assert, you know, your power. And so I think we're in a bit of a shakeout where those axes really matter in terms of who has power and how laws get made, but they also might fade to agree with time. I think the slightly more concerning version of it is research that suggests we are moving into a world where essentially party becomes the overarching identity and that might mean that, in fact, going back to Virginia's idea about, you know, nature abhors a void, I mean, clearly not her phrase, but when I was talking to her, that it may be that there isn't actually a kind of more atomic state for humans that we're always going to be tending towards and agglomeration and that, you know, quirky editors who have a rebellious streak, you know, you're in the, what I think of, like my father, the Groucho Marx Club, like you would not join any club that would have you as a member, but that's not typical. Yeah, the idea that, you know, the limit of my identity is gonna be either Republican or Democratic. God, you know, that's very depressing. And I hate to end on that note, but Omar Wasaw, I want to, we'll leave it here. Thanks so much, Princeton University, political scientists. You can find contact information in the text field for this interview. Omar, thank you so much for talking. Thank you, Nick, really appreciate it.