 All right, I think we will get started. Good afternoon, thank you all for coming. Thanks, C-SPAN, for coming. My name is Mark Schmidt. I'm the Director of the Political Reform Program here at New America. And all I want to do is welcome you to this discussion on race and solidarity in the United States. And the future of solidarity is a way of thinking about race. This discussion was organized by Ted Johnson, who's been a fellow in our National Fellows Program, and also a fellow in the Political Reform Program. His work on the complexity of black voting behavior and political attitudes has been eye-opening to me and tremendously important. He's now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, which is an organization that, as you can see, we, the signs here, it's occasionally here. We often do things in partnership with the Brennan Center, which is a wonderful organization. And Ted's bringing a bit of a non-legal, beyond legal, I guess you'd say, scope of analysis to their work and continuing, hopefully, to work in partnership with us. So I'm just going to thank you again for coming. Turn it over to Ted, who will introduce the panel, and get us started. Thank you all. OK, so thank you all for coming. This is a topic that originated in my book project that I started here at New America, that I'm continuing at Brennan. Around the question, it started really about whether the solidarity we see in black America that expresses itself most noticeably in presidential elections and in the uniform way that black Americans vote. I wondered if there was something in the solidarity that we see in black America that the nation could take a lesson from and try to create a solidarity that can bridge the gap that we see when it comes to race. So the panel here today stems from a basic question that I asked myself early on and a question that I've come to learn many have asked before me, naturally. And is solidarity the thing that can save us? Is it the thing that can help the US address its race problem? I don't know the answer to that. I hope that there is such a thing as a national solidarity that can bind us one to another. It's certainly when you hear most presidents speak, they sort of call them the American civil religion. There's this idea that there are ideas and principles that bind us together. And there are rituals we go through together to solidify this bond. And as President Obama has said, like many presidents before him, America is the only country founded on an idea. And so if we are all Americans who subscribe to this larger idea, certainly there must be some way for us to identify some measure of solidarity that we can all get behind. So the question we'll tackle a little bit today is a multiracial version of the black solidarity that sort of piqued my interest. Is that possible? And what we do know is that race has proven to be an instrument that's been put to use to divide us. Is it possible that we can create, establish a solidarity that can unify us despite the racial issues the country has faced? So one thing is certain, though, is that we need some solution. I was looking at a few polls before coming on the stage. And in 2009, I saw this poll from NBC in the Wall Street Journal. That said, in 2009, the month Obama took office, 77% of Americans thought that race relations were good in this country. This was the post-racial Obama era that we all welcomed. And soon learned was not a real thing. Just last summer, this poll was taken again, and 74% of Americans think race relations in this country are bad. And so we've done a 180 on our view of race relations. Lots of reasons for that. We'll talk a little bit about that. But the question of solidarity, national solidarity, political solidarity, can it get us back to a place where Americans feel a bond of kinship one to another based on the idea alone? If you look at the state of race relations today, there's no shortage of cause for concern. If you look at the debate around immigration, the Muslim travel ban, if you look around conversations about black nations in the Caribbean or in Sub-Saharan Africa, race relations are not getting better. And the rhetoric around race relations seems to be a bit more pitched over the last year or so. And so at the heart of my question is, without solidarity, is it possible for us to close the gap when it comes to racial disparities? Is it possible for us to improve race relations? My sense is, even if we did everything possible, for example, let's say we passed a huge federal reparations bill, my sense is that if we don't feel a bond of kinship to another, the money sent to descendants of slaves would just be a really creative incentive for the industries, banking, and otherwise to find ways to get that money out of people's hands. There would be a mechanism for one of the most creative, innovative financial instruments to figure out how to transfer that wealth back out of black America to other places. This is not a question of policy, in my view. This is a question of how we view one another. It's a question of who gets to be American and do we see the American-ness in each other, despite class, despite race, despite gender, et cetera. So that's what we'll talk about today. To push this conversation forward, I've got three experts on the panel who I'm lucky said yes to the invitation. First we have Juliette Hooker there on my far right. Juliette Hooker is a professor of political science at Brown University. She's a political theorist specializing in racial justice, multiculturalism, Latin American political thought, black political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. She's the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity, which is the book that's become a good friend on my nightstand, and theorizing race in the America's Douglas Sarmiento Du Bois, I'm sorry, and Vaskin Salos. Her current research project examines the politics of loss, aspects of which have appeared in a couple of journal articles discussing black protest and white grievance and black lives matter and the paradoxes of US black politics. Next to her we have Tahima Lopez Buñasi. She's an assistant professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. Her research is grounded in the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States with specializations in racial attitudes and ideologies. Dr. Lopez Buñasi is completing a book manuscript breaking the contract, racial renegades in the politics of whiteness, and this project examines the role of perceptions of white privilege on the racial attitudes and political preferences of white Americans. She's co-authoring a second book with Candice Watt-Smith entitled Stay Woke, which treats the 21st century movement for black lives as a teachable moment about contemporary American racism and the politics of resistance. Stay Woke is under contract with NYU Press and will hopefully be out by year's end. And then closest to me we have Carol Bell, who is an assistant professor at the Communication Studies at Northeastern University. Her research explores the relationship between nontraditional news sources, including entertainment media and social political attitudes and public opinion. She's particularly interested in the role of communications and social change related to group identities, including race, gender, and sexuality. In focusing on these areas, her goal is to understand how mediated communication influences and can potentially help to eliminate traditional social divisions. Dr. Bell's professional experience spans media and marketing. She's worked for eight years in interactive and direct marketing and interactive media development, working with Fortune 100 clients on strategy and campaign execution and with agency management on new business development. And so what we'll do is, we'll first start with Professor Hooker and allow her a chance to give some remarks and then we'll move to Professor Lopez Buñasi and then Professor Bell. Then we'll go into a moderated discussion about race, identity, America, and the politics of solidarity. And then we'll open it up to the audience for questions before wrapping up. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you, Ted, for the invitation and for organizing this panel and to New America for hosting us. And thanks to all of you for taking time from your afternoon for coming and being part of this event. So I wanna say a little bit about how in my work I understand the relationship between race and solidarity and also what I mean when I talk about solidarity and how we should understand what this has to do with democracy and why it's so important to cultivate. So one of the premises, right, for people writing about democracy for good reason is that political solidarity is necessary for democracy to function. And the reason for this is because democracies are diverse, right? Citizens need to be able to come together to see themselves as a mesh in relations of mutual obligation with strangers. So sitting in DC, we might not know the people in Utah face to face, but because we see ourselves as being part of the same political community, we can understand that we have relations of mutual obligation with them. And so the premise of, or the idea that I grapple with in my book which came out in 2009 that Ted was referring to, Race and the Politics of Solidarity, is that we have written about, or in political science, we have analyzed political solidarity as if it were something that exists or is something that we are working towards. Without thinking enough about the ways in which that solidarity is shaped by race, fundamentally. And so I'm gonna say a little bit now about what I mean by solidarity and then talk about why I think it is indebtably shaped by race. So what do I mean when I talk about solidarity? So often when we think about solidarity, we might think about it right as a concept that emerges from labor unions on the left and the idea of right, solid realistic relations. We might also think about solidarity. Often people think about it as empathy or sympathy, feeling the pain of others. But in my view, and I think in the view of people who write about solidarity in the context of politics, solidarity is not simply empathy. And it can't be just empathy because or sympathy, it's not just an emotion. It is an ethical orientation that moves us to action. And one example of this, right, is think about the recent very tragic events in Parkland and the shooting there, right? One, it would be what, it's one thing to say, you know, thoughts and prayers are with those people. And it's another thing to say, you know, I may not have been in that situation, but I understand that this is a problem and I'm moved by what happened and I am going to organize to make sure that it doesn't happen again, right? So for me, solidarity is not simply feeling the pain of others or feeling sympathy or empathy, but rather being moved to action, right? As a result of identifying with the pain and suffering of others, even if it's something that is not happening to me. So another way of thinking about this, right, is in the United States, right? People who support, for example, single people who don't have children but support education policy because they think education is important to the well-being of the community as a whole, even though they themselves may not have school children and may not have, you know, that sort of direct stake in that particular policy area. So that's what I mean when I talk about solidarity and the way in which I think Ted is thinking about it when he convoked us for this discussion. And one of the core arguments in my work and in this book was that political solidarity is continues even in what, right, in an era in which we no longer have legally mandated discrimination or race continues so that political solidarity, even in this moment, continues to be shaped by race. So that decisions about who merits care and concern as a fellow citizen are mediated by whether we see those persons as like us. And race is key to whether we see them as being like us, right? So it's more difficult for us to see the pain and suffering of those we see as racial others. And so one way to think about this, right, is to think about, for examples, many people have pointed out, right, that the response to the devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico where citizens have been left without power, without food for months and months, that if that had been happening, let's say, in New York City or someplace that was closer in the imagination in whatever way that it would not have been able to happen. And there's a reason why when people say, how can this be happening to American citizens, right, they're not invoking a kind of larger human community, they're invoking the obligations that citizens of the same political community are supposed to have towards each other even when they're very, they're separated by vast distance, right? So we may not all have gone to Puerto Rico, we may not know any Puerto Ricans, but by the fact that we are part of the same community, we are supposed to have relations of obligations to war them and have care and concern for what is happening to them. So in the book, I developed this concept of racialized solidarity to talk about the way in which I think race shapes solidarity. So instead of functioning in this ideal way that I just described, instead I think that because of racism, the pain and suffering and its legacy, the pain and suffering of non-whites is often rendered invisible or when it's visible, it's seen as less deserving of empathy or redress than that of whites. And here I'm using whites as kind of the dominant group in this case in the United States. So then racialized solidarity then for me refers to the way embodied racial difference that is when we look at other people and we see somebody who is different from us or when we hear them speak and they have an accent or we see something that makes them not like us results in differential care and concern towards their pain and suffering. And this leads then to differences in policy, right? Because if we are able to say in some way these people are not American or they're less or they're foreign in some way or they're somehow undeserving, then we're not moved to support policies that take their needs into account. And so this is the way in which I argue this racialized solidarity shapes our political preferences and the kinds of policies that we enact as a community. And what I wanna say, I wanna end by my remarks, introductory remarks, by reflecting a little bit on where we are today versus where we were when I published this book. So this is the case with academics. You spend a lot of years working on a book. It finally comes out and you don't control the historical context in which it comes out. My book was published in January 2009. Barack Obama had just been elected president. We were in this moment where everybody thought that the legacy of racism had been overcome. We were in this post-racial moment. And there was a sense in which the argument didn't make sense to a lot of people, right? The argument that race continued to shape whether we saw each other as fellow citizens and the extent to which we thought that we had mutual obligations towards each other didn't seem to make sense at a moment when it seemed like the racial fault lines of the past were being bridged, right? By the election of the first and only non-white president. Now, I don't think it's certainly not coincidental that in 2018, the argument of the book seems much more relevant. And that of course is because the backlash that followed Obama's election, of course, which was heavily shaped by race in many ways and was deeply racist, I think uncovered the fact that we hadn't in fact transcended those racial fault lines of the past. And of course this was followed by the resurgence of outspoken white nationalism in the past year and incidents such as Charlottesville and other acts of white terrorists, such as the bombing or the Dylan Roos murder of nine church goers in South Carolina. So these expressions of resurgent white nationalism and in some cases of nativism, attacks on foreigners, I think make it no longer possible to deny that race remains a major factor shaping contemporary politics and policy in the United States and in particular the way in which we think about who are the people to whom we have relations of mutual obligation too. So I'm gonna leave it at that, thank you. Good afternoon everybody. I'd like to thank Ted Johnson for organizing this panel and for writing me to participate. Thank you to New America for hosting this event and thank you all for coming on a really warm Washington, D.C. day. To help kick off our discussion, I'd like, there we go. To help kick off our discussion, I'd like to get us thinking about the opportunity for white Americans to help bridge the racial divide. We've seen important changes in our society since the Civil Rights Movement, but still we continue to fall short in realizing our egalitarian potential. A multitude of studies indicate that white people continue to have better life chances relative to people of color. Even when we compare white individuals to those who are similarly situated on the other side of the color line, be it an educational attainment or home ownership, we see that whites tend to land higher paying jobs and accrue more wealth. Being white doesn't make someone immune to hardship, but it can serve as a valuable asset. When it comes to bridging gaps in life chances, I believe a crucial question to ask is how do white Americans see the society that they live in? Do they understand themselves to be relatively advantaged? Do they think that we're living in a country where everyone has a fair shake, regardless of their color? Or possibly do whites see themselves as the new underdog where being white is a liability? It's life in the whip at the will of white Americans to close the racial gap has something to do with whether they believe there is a gap and which side of the gap they fall on. Just weeks before the Iowa Caucus in 2016, I conducted a national study of color blindness and race consciousness. The study included over 900 whites and more than 300 black participants. I asked them to think about the worth of whiteness in the following domains of American life. Jobs, education, one's interactions with the law enforcement and the kinds of treatment that one receives when participating in our economy as consumers of goods and services. What I learned is that whites evaluate their status differently depending on the context. I also found that whites who believe the group is advantaged relative to blacks are significantly more likely to support policies aimed at reducing racial inequality. Let's take, for example, employment. I asked, in general, who do you think has a better chance of getting a job or promotion? Whites, blacks, or do whites and blacks have about an equal chance of getting a job or promotion? What we see is that the majority of whites, 50%, believe there's an equal chance in landing this job. About a third of whites think that their racial group is advantaged. And not to be overlooked, almost 10% of white people believe that blacks have an edge when it comes to the world of the job market. I wanted to see whether one's understanding of white life chances relative to blacks had anything to do with their attitudes regarding work-related policies. Indeed, it does. Whites who believe that their racial group has an advantage are more likely to support laws protecting racial minorities against racial discrimination and they are also more likely to support affirmative action. What we see here, to read the graph here, is when whites think that their group is privileged in some way, they have a 91% probability of supporting a policy such as one that would protect minorities from discrimination in the workplace. I asked two different types of questions about affirmative action and in either case, we see that the majority, slight, a slight majority of whites who believe that their group is advantaged are more likely to support affirmative action in comparison to those who believe that there's a level playing field between whites and blacks and certainly more also than those who perceive white disadvantage. Affirmative action has never enjoyed great support among whites, but when one perceives white privilege, they're more inclined to get behind the policy. Interestingly, we should note that when affirmative action is framed as a way for making up for past discrimination, we find more support from whites who believe their group is at a disadvantage than when we ask the same question but we say it's for the purposes of diversifying the workplace. So maybe we can keep that in mind and come back to that later. Let's also look at the question of education, a similar question. In general, who do you think has more access to good schools? Whites, blacks, who do you think that whites and blacks have equal access? Again, what we see that there's a bare majority of whites who think that whites have an edge here, that's different than the last question, but not far behind are those who give a more colorblind answer. Again, comparing whites who give a race conscious answer, one in which they believe that their group is privileged, those who answer that question that way rather than colorblind, they seem to give more support to an increase of funds for schools in black and Latino neighborhoods, particularly for early education programs such as preschool. They're also more supportive of disseminating college scholarships to black and Latino youth. To round out a look at other domains, we see that when whites are asked who they think has a better chance of being treated fairly by the police, we see that the highest percentage of whites who are reporting a privilege. This has got to be because of what we've seen in the news, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought attention to in these streaming videos over and over again of police brutality, right? Which is not new, but the advent of social media, the smartphone is just disseminating this information in a way that for most people, we can't deny that something's going on even though in courts, not everybody's being brought to justice and for that we should be upset. But when we look at the realm of experiencing good customer service, which is something that we all in one way or another engage in, it's not perhaps as consequential as to how you interact with the police or getting a job. Most whites seem to think that we're doing pretty good. 65% believe that there's an equal chance of being treated well, getting good service when one goes out to a dining restaurant, right? Or going to a store. Each one of these four measures predicts support for a miller to an egalitarian racial policies. Although the proportion of whites who report racial privilege fluctuates over context, when taken together, about 20% of white Americans believe it is beneficial to be white in all four of those domains of American life. Domains of American life that are rather racialized, not just because of the way that we perceive what's going on, but because of studies over and over again showing that there is a difference in the way that people are treated. I like to think of this fifth of the white population as being woke-ish, okay? They will report their group's racial benefits and they will favor policies that work to bring about greater equality and effectively undermine their own racial privilege. They have important foundational components to help usher a more just America, but solidarity requires more than beliefs and preferences. It requires commitment and will. I believe we are seeing evidence of this spirit and this progressive political energy mounting in the Trump presidency. Based on what I've seen in experimental studies as well as anecdotally, I also believe there's room for ideological movement among the remaining 80% of white Americans. In order to access or rather, in order to accomplish such a shift, we need a full-throated and accessible challenge to the dominant colorblind narrative. One where historical and contemporary forms of white racial dominance will be treated in earnest and with nuance. Thank you. I look forward to the next panelist comments. Thank you, that was great. I would like to thank Ted Johnson, of course, and also the Brennan Center and the New American Foundation for this invitation and the opportunity to speak to all of you and I really appreciate your coming. It's high of 73 today, I really appreciated that. I love to be outside, so I know you have that choice. Okay, so I'd like to address the connections between political communication, social identity, and political psychology. And by that, I mean that how American elites and American citizens talk about politics, reflects how they think and feel about society and the place of different groups within that, including both the social groups to which they belong and those that they see as the other, as the outsiders. That largely symbolic discourse and that thinking shapes political behavior. It shapes the policies and politicians that we support and those that we oppose. Media discourse and media framing should be seen as one component of that, although an important component. So I see two themes related to national identity as dominating our political discourse right now and therefore also the American psyche in this moment. So first, as we've heard many times, we have America's changing demographics, right? The much discussed idea that America is changing rapidly and that white Americans will soon be outnumbered, right? So that is framed, first of all, as a problem. The second theme is closely related to that and it's that white Americans sense that they are under threat, that they will lose dominance, that they'll lose status and their place in American society. The way that the media frame certain public policy issues associating both societal problems and their potential solutions with particular racial groups both reflects and contributes to that sense of threat. It pits different groups against one another in competition. This media framing certainly helps to exacerbate divisions but it was not created in a vacuum. If you look at the 1990s, Bill Clinton, for example, talked about how progress, how every single advancement that has been made has been made on the backs of white men. So politicians play upon and exploit existing divisions and fairs to mobilize specific groups of voters and they define what it means to be American implicitly but also now explicit terms as well. So I'll point to two examples that illustrate the real world consequences of the racialization of political issues. So first, we know from Gillan's work investigating why Americans hate welfare, that the racialization of poverty in which poverty is visualized and personified in the media as black and brown, that this depresses support for social safety net programs like welfare. Recent ethnographic research by Kathleen Kramer also supports this finding. Her multi-year study of whites in rural Wisconsin showed that white residents of that state felt deep resentment towards the government in large part because they believed that the government spending didn't go to people like them and that it instead disproportionately benefited other people, undeserving people, people who do not work hard and who live in cities. And these people are again envisioned as being black largely. So the economic anxiety that was often discussed in 2016 is not in competition with the faces that it was largely about race, but rather it's inextricably intertwined with racial resentment. Many white Americans really do feel as though they are forgotten people. And that of course made them right for a figure like Donald Trump who promised redemption and restoration of their status in society. So the second example of how racialization affects public policy preferences is research, comes from research that has shown that communicating the idea that are blacks are disproportionately involved in and incarcerated for crime. Reinforces existing prejudice and can actually sometimes encourage support amongst whites for more punitive sentencing laws like the three strikes law and mandatory minutes. So media representations matter because they spread and they reinforce these corrosive and ultimately divisive beliefs about who's affected by centrally important issues that should matter to everyone. And these faulty assumptions have serious consequences. As Lind argues, to the extent the problems are seen as affecting others, they will not be seen as relevant by the dominant group. So images matter because they shape public opinion, they shape public policy preferences and they also shape election outcomes. Beyond specific policies, the media also add to the perception amongst whites that minority groups actually already comprise a much larger percentage of the American population than they actually do. So in reality, for example, African Americans are 12% of the American population. In survey research, however, whites have often estimated that it's more than 30% or double that. And they get this idea largely from the overrepresentation of African Americans in the media, in particular in news about crime and in sports, actually. So this further exacerbates the sense of threat that whites already feel. At the same time, I think it's really important to contextualize the current racialization of political discourse as an ever-present and long-standing element in American social identity. So that's been true even though it's arguably more visceral and more visible in our political rhetoric right now. Social identity theory holds that political cohesion is closely connected to group identification, meaning a strong psychological connection and attachment to a group and a sense that your fate and success are connected to the fate of the group as a whole. This can be activated by political context, by particular events, by the media, and by that growing sense of threat. So how can we have political cohesion when Americans have not thought of themselves as having a shared fate and shared values? When most Americans self-concept, their image of themselves does not and of the country does not and has not included large chunks of its citizenry. One of the reasons Puerto Rico becomes less relevant is because so many Americans don't even realize that Puerto Ricans are American. It's not just a feeling, it's also a lack of knowledge. So the media's racialization of issues like poverty, social welfare, immigration, and crime works within the constraints of America's existing political psychology and its sense of, or historic lack of, an inclusive collective identity. Political rhetoric, verbal and visual are vehicles that media, candidates, and public officials use in the social construction or framing of societal problems and keeping with their own world views. But again, I don't think that is created in the vacuum. So thinking about our ideas, what does the phrase all American conjure up, right? How has it historically been visualized? How have an American president or first lady been conceptualized? If you think about it, you come to see a narrowness not just in mass media, but also in how individuals think about and speak about their leaders and themselves through social media at rallies that we saw in 2016 in public events and perhaps most importantly when we study how Americans speak to each other in their own homes. Finally, so the conflicts between American ideals and the realities of race has always posed a problem for unifying American national identity and for social cohesion. The election of Donald Trump, someone who was seen as manifesting racial conflict and resentment in a much more explicit terms than we were used to, revealed that the struggle over American identity has really come to a head in reaction to change. It's in reaction to those changing demographics, but also symbolically, as Juliette said, it's also a reaction to, in a backlash to the presidency of Barack Obama, which accelerated and catalyzed these divisions. And we know this, right? Not just from our own sense, but from some research. An article, for example, and books that have shown that there was actually a return of what is called old fashioned racism during the Obama presidency. So we have these two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who have shown a light on the competition and the vacillation that exists between two narratives about America. One narrative America, or as Bill O'Reilly calls it, traditional America, is by definition Christian, patriarchal, heterosexual, and white. That is the natural order of things in this narrative. In this version of America, unity can only flow from culturally uniformity and multiculturalism is an inherent threat and an impediment to a strong national identity. Beyond documented or outsiders, aliens, not inheritors of the American dream. And citizens must be protected from outsiders, right? Through Muslim brand or through a wall. And that all those who challenge and also be protected from those who would challenge that traditional national identity. This is the America that screams, I want my country back and that we need to make America great again. In the other narrative, the one repeatedly referenced in almost every one of Barack Obama's speeches, starting with his 2004 keynote at the DNC, the one in which he declared that there was not a black America and a white America or a blue America and a red America, that there was only the United States of America. That vision is inclusive and egalitarian with regard to race, but also gender, religion, and sexuality, right? It posits that diversity can be a strength. And that now, later in the presidency, he also posited that those who were born in other countries and came here as children or adults can be legitimate inheritors of the American dream. As Biller Riley's version of America, of traditional America gave way to Barack Obama's vision of America in the media and in political rhetoric. On the left, the people privileged within the existing system felt increasingly under siege. All right, they felt that their version of America was slipping away. So in closing, I just want to say that I don't think, of course, that cohesion is impossible actually. I don't think it is impossible in a multiracial democracy, but it is obviously very challenging, given the struggle between groups that is reflected in these two competing narratives. Nonetheless, actually both of these narratives contain paths to national solidarity. The first, the one supported by Biller Riley and conservative writer David Brooks, and sometimes even given lip service by Donald Trump, rejects multiculturalism. It denigrates the idea that all cultures should be embraced, decries identity politics, right? And says America doesn't need to change. Instead, solidarity requires the submission of many groups to the dominant culture. So some outside of that traditional paradigm are invited to participate in this America as long as they uphold rather than challenging existing hierarchies and norms. Marco Rubio, Ty Cruz, and Fox News would lead us down that path. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton are considered public enemies number one in this version, but also football prayers who call attention to inequality. The other narrative, the one espoused by and symbolized in the figure of the first black president, a multiracial president, tells us that solidarity entails relinquishing cultural, political, and economic dominance residing within one group. It says that we must make change in order to realize the promise of America. So which path will we choose? That's the billion dollar question. I do not know the answer to that one. All right, so I do want to leave time for questions, but I have to follow up a little bit with some of what was said and some of the work you've done. One of the things that struck me, Juliet, about one of your most recent pieces was how you contrasted the way people experience loss and what that communicates to the world at large. If we think about what happened in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown and how protests, riots, and sort of these confrontations with an armed police force, that played out on our screens and then we saw how Charleston reacted to the killing of nine church members, which was more prayerful and forgiving. And the reaction of the nation to those two very different reactions to loss tells us something, it seems to me, about how solidarity is racialized and how the experience of loss contributes to the larger discussion about how we feel empathy or solidarity with other cultures. So can you talk a little bit about that phenomenon of loss and how the display of it tells us something about who we are and who we identify with? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the things that is at stake there is that, and it has to do with the point that Carol made in her remarks about the terms of inclusion. So if you think about that famous James Baldwin line about the price of the ticket, and of course he's talking there about the ways in which white identity is distorted by racism rather than what is required of non-white people to become full citizens. But the interesting thing about this question is I think that there are certain reactions to loss that are acceptable and others that are not. So Ferguson, the reaction was rage, right? It was anger. And of course we know, right? So in some ways, of course, anger at a horrible event at an injustice is a totally understandable reaction. But there isn't, I think, in our current understanding of who gets to display anger who gets to react to loss by being angry, that is not an option that will generate sympathy, right? So one of the critiques of Ferguson was precisely that, okay, the anger may have been justified but it was counterproductive because you're never going to generate white empathy by reacting in that way. And instead you should react in the way that people in the civil rights movement did in the 60s or in the example of the folks in Charleston and this was a striking thing, right? When folks the day after their relatives had been murdered were being asked, do you forgive the shooter? And in what context does that make sense, right? And even if your particular religious convictions say that this is what you should do, it's somehow an interesting expectation, right? That you would simply forgive this really terrible act. So I think part of what's going on there is that we need to think about the differential public sympathy that's generated by different kinds of losses, right? So think about all of the think pieces that have come out about the Trump voters and how we need to understand them and how we need to think about how they're suffering loss and economic anxiety and this is why they're voting for Trump or think about the sort of trying to understand the folks who are drawn to kind of these new neo-nazi organizations or whatever, right? That's a particular kind of reaction to this perceived loss that's very different from the reaction to the people in Ferguson who are saying, this terrible thing happened and I'm angry about it. And so I think we have different standards for whose loss we can understand and what range of reactions we think are permissible to those losses. That's a really interesting point that after Trump was elected, we endeavor to understand the people that elected him, but after Obama was elected, it wasn't like people were scouring black communities trying to figure out why'd you vote for the black guy. It was understood, you voted for the black guy because it was black and he was a Democrat. So you're right, just the amount of interest in what moved people is different in between those two elections. And so Tehima, you talked about color blindness and color consciousness. So sort of following up on Juliet's point, is policy required to be color blind in order for it to be acceptable or is color conscious policy the only way we have any hope of closing gaps in racial experiences. I mean, it seems to me, even Barack Obama said, it was policy where the rising tide lifts all boats. And politicians on both sides are quick to quote Martin Luther King about, we don't care about the color of the skin, but content of your character, that seems to speak to color blindness, but I'm not so sure, what's your sense? Actually, I am sure, but I would like to hear your answer. So I mean, what we saw in the Johnson administration and the Nixon administration, at least for part of it, was real support actually for race conscious policies, right? I mean, Nixon was at some point in time an advocate of affirmative action. And we saw the Supreme Court also back that up rather strongly for a period. And I think this was also in the idea that these policies do lift numerous boats, not just the boats of a pupil of color, right? And then there's a significant attrition in support around these matters as I think whites start to, agreed whites, not all, start to articulate their great dissatisfaction with this, a loss of status and privilege, the idea that their children are being forced to integrate in schools and that that's not what they signed up for when they moved to this neighborhood. And so I think race conscious policies are rather important. I think there needs to be an articulation of race when drafting policies. Certainly colorblind policies have had all kinds of racially disparate effects such as the New Deal, right? That when you allow, when you write into legislation that funds are supposed to be an opportunity supposed to be disseminated at the local level and you give that instruction to the local level to do, then they will carry out the will of the local level, which sometimes is a rather hostile type of politics, right? So even you can't find anywhere in the New Deal policies words like blacks and whites, but the impact, the GI Bill, same kind of thing, there's a disparate impact. So whether you want to put actual racial labels into policies or not, I think what's more important is how it's drafted, how it's carried out. And if we're really gonna do this right, we absolutely need to take race into consideration. And let's be honest with ourselves and let's talk about poor white people. Why? Let's do that. White people need to be talked about in various ways, they're not all the same. And so the idea that I agree with Juliette when she's talking about this kind of, let's shine some light on the forgotten whites. Well certainly, but they haven't been articulated as white and poor. They possibly have been articulated as poor. And so now people are fascinated with this idea of like, oh they're white and poor, is that a different type of poverty? Let's talk about that. And certainly we should, right? We should do that. But we should also talk about the way that poverty is racialized and gendered and all kinds of number of things. Right, and so Carol, this like rolls right into your area. Racializing policy often determines whether or not that policy ever sees the light of day or not. We can look at Obamacare and when people were asked the polls have shown, when they are shown the different elements that are in Obamacare, they liked them. And when the policies talked about as a whole as the Affordable Care Act, they liked it. But they hate Obamacare. There's a professor out of UC Irvine, Michael Tesler who's done studies that, he showed one group of people a dog, a picture of a Portuguese water dog. John F. Kennedy had this dog and President Obama had this dog. But depending on who he told the respondents who the dog belonged to, that, the level of cuteness of that dog to them differed. Whereas even though it was the same picture of the same dog, Obama's dog somehow was less cute than Kennedy's dog. Again, this has nothing to do with policy, nothing to do with dogs. It has everything to do with, once you stick a race onto something, how it's suddenly devalued. And politicians have known this for some time. So is it possible to talk about color conscious policy, racialized policy and still get it passed? Or is the only way to get good policy passes is to talk about it in a colorblind fashion? Well I think I agree with what you said because I think that we have to be conscious about the disparate impacts of policy but perhaps not really focus so much on the labels and on who it benefits in as much of a public sort of elevated way. Because that does tend to invoke and activate that racial resentment. So I actually also referenced the Michael Tesler research that was the research that talked about the return of old-fashioned racism, right? Not just to people's attitudes but also to their voting behavior, right? So I sometimes think of it as sort of having a reverse-minded touch in that everything Barack Obama types that was associated with his name, right, would suffer in the eyes of some people. And so I never have referred to anything as Obamacare, never. And I tell my students, you know, put the benefit in the name, don't put the person because when you put the person in the name then you're really asking people how they feel about that person. So don't personalize it and also deprive, right, them of the opportunity of understanding why they should support this, should support this bill. So I would say that I think, you know, unless we have some way of radically changing these underlying beliefs and attitudes and feelings, then I think we have to work within the existing context and do things to diffuse and not necessarily sort of activate and exacerbate existing resentments. And I think that we've seen, you know, as soon as we sort of got rid of Barack Obama, you know, we've seen that Affordable Care Act and also, you know, because it was being threatened. We've seen the popularity of the Affordable Care Act really increase, right, substantially. So I think that you have, we have to stop associating policy so much with race. I do think that that's a really important component and to your point about poverty, you know, I've often thought that I can't imagine what it would be like to be a poor white person in America in which you are invisible, you know, the media pretends as though you truly do not exist, both in terms of the news media and in terms of entertainment media, right? The only whites that are on television in entertainment media predominantly are upper middle class at minimum, right? And I could list on one hand the shows that now attempt to depict working class, you know, white working class Americans. They're few and far between. So I do think that that helps also exacerbate the resentments. Okay, I do want to move to questions a little bit, but I would like each of your takes on really the fundamental, you know, is it possible for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, democratic republic to exist? Have we seen it in the world, you know, in Latin America or other places and places where it's failed, what's the cause of it? You know, I'm a retired military guy, so I tend to think like America's big enough for all of us and the principles are good enough for all of us to get behind and to want to create the country our founders produced and we've fallen short of that unquestionably, so how do we close the gap? Is it possible, and are there examples that we can learn from either in the positive or the negative on what could we possibly do to sort of bridge the gap, the racial gap between Americans? For a second, because you mentioned the military. And when we look, you know, and at the social psychology literature, one of the ways that prejudice is reduced is when you can really create that sense that's missing of that shared fate. So when people come together around a common goal, right, and when that cohesion is really sanctioned by the authorities, right, when they're in working in concert rather than in competition, then that does tend to reduce prejudice, right? So intergroup contact doesn't always reduce prejudice. Sometimes it can make it worse, but intergroup contact that's accompanied by equal status, working towards a common goal, having that equal status and cohesion be really endorsed by authority, I think you see all of these requirements in the military at certain stages, and you do see people working together and who seem to have more of a common kinship than we do in the general population. So I think, you want to go ahead? What I would say to that is that I think we have to be really careful about not presupposing that there's one answer that will work the same way in different contexts, right? So if we look at Latin America, for example, there you've had in many countries these ideologies of racial democracy that have argued that there's no racism even though there are existing racial disparities and that people are all equal citizens. And those ideologies have been used in multiple ways. So on the one hand they function and some have argued as forms of colorblind racism, right? So you don't acknowledge racism and then the people who are accused of being racist are the people who say, hey, but look, there's still racial disparities and then they become the people who are threatening national unity by bringing up, bringing race into a discussion where it doesn't belong. On the other hand, those ideologies have also been used by people to say, hey, this is your official claim, but this area shows that there is discrimination or racism happening. You need to live up to your ideals. So I think we have to be aware that these discourses function in multiple ways. And what I would say about the US right now is I think, as Tama mentioned, I think there is cause for hope in the fact that I think many people, many whites have been activated to oppose what they see as the resurgence in support for white supremacy. And if you think about the people who have protested, who have joined protests, people like Heather Haier in Charlottesville, right? People who did have come out and said, this is not my vision for what the country should be. At the same time, I think there's still a lot of reluctance in some quarters to recognize that racism is the major problem. And I think we see this in the people who are involved in some of these debates about, oh, it's economic anxiety, oh, it's tribalism, it's all of these other things, and it's not racism. And I think it's wrong to think about it as an either or question, right? And as long as we don't recognize that racism is bound up in whatever this other explanation that you're putting forward is, we're not gonna be able to solve the problem. When I'm agreeing with both of you, actually, I'm also thinking that we need to have a real reckoning, a real reckoning about how we got to where we are. I think we need to have a reckoning about exploitation of people on the basis of their race, of their gender, certainly of their class. I think there needs to be a real reckoning about who did build this country and on whose backs that was. And that was on forced chattel slavery, black labor, right? It was on the backs of all kinds of immigrants, people who even at some point became white, and that's a whole nother discussion. We should have that discussion, right? Because if we're actually gonna beat in solidarity for one another, we need to know what we're coming together around. So the idea of like being in concert, yeah, certainly we do. We actually have quite a bit to gain from working together rather than against one another. And we've seen kinds of peaks and valleys around solidarity, I've been reading some more about the Reconstruction period, which is fascinating. A kind of like, oh my gosh, we could have, and then, and then, right, this thing slips away because there's a real, really, there's a lack of will in the part of white Americans who are both, at the time, Republican and Democrat. And then we see, in the 1930s, a real resurgence of a kind of a unity that's articulated around kind of a socialist, communist, right, kind of language, but union language. It's also, you know, there are people who are functioning in a capitalist society who also like, yeah, we could get down with a little bit of this, you know, equal pay, like let's recognize people as workers. I think we need to have a reckoning if we're gonna really have long-standing solidarity, and it could be very scary, but we're not going anywhere. We gotta deal with this. So I think that's where I stand for that, yeah. Okay, we'll go to questions. We'll go here first and here second, so. A mic's coming for you there. Yeah. Please do, in order to get the most amount of questions in, please keep questions direct and then same for our response. Hi, I'm Kevin Malshine. I, that really leads to the question of is it too late to have a truth and reconciliation commission kind of convening so that these things get out on the table where you have descendants of the victims of a system of slavery and descendants of, you know, even if you're talking about immigrants, you know, my ancestors were bricklayers and, you know, the Irish were treated in a certain way, but the scope of a truth and reconciliation commission just is, maybe makes it just completely burdensome and you couldn't have, you couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel of putting all of this suffering out on the table. Yeah. What do you guys think, truth and reconciliation? Is that a viable step? It's been done and I know at least one place in Greensboro, North Carolina and fairly recently. And it seems to have been a good thing. I mean, a hard thing, but a good thing and that there was a compassion and forgiveness in places that I don't think people anticipated, but I think that that would be something that needs to be done probably on local levels, that it's gonna be successful. But not just reckoning our past, but also like talking about what are we doing right now that replicates more deeply and trenches these inequalities. Is it even possible for people of color to also write to make things difficult for other people of color and colorism, right? The idea that maybe darker skinned people of color are treated differently than lighter skinned people. That is empirically shown to be the case, right? So I think that to have some kind of truth and reconciliation doesn't necessarily to be historical, but I mean, ongoing. So I believe that that's possible, sure. Yes, right here on the front. Here, Madeline Cornell University. Thank you so very much for a great conversation. I'd be curious, and some of the comments you've made were sort of taking us in this direction, but I'd be curious to note what the panel believes the potential of using an explicit class identity and seeking class solidarity as an approach to begin to see the shared humanity between the, and shared interests between the Trump white voters and people of color, so to speak, and to be able to achieve some solidarity on that level, not racialize it, and through that approach, perhaps devaluing some of the racial identity that is polarizing the country. So my take on that, unless you want to go ahead, is that I think the problem is that we can't separate class from race. I think we, I think part of what we need to grapple with, I mean, I think absolutely as a strategy, I think the ideal is to get, for example, poor and working class and, you know, barely middle class white and non-white people, you know, working together, seeing that they have shared interests, absolutely. But I think what we also have to reckon with is the fact that for many working class whites, the way that they have experienced, you know, economic quote-unquote success is by measuring their distance from non-white people and to the extent that both poor whites and poor and working class non-whites are suffering in the, you know, current economic configuration, the problem is who are they ascribing as the cause of that suffering too. And as long as it's, you know, it's this other, the foreigner, the immigrant who's coming to take your jobs or it's the fact that you're suffering economic anxiety and therefore you need to reclaim some kind of lost dominance, that's incompatible, I think, with a kind of notion of shared interest. And so I think simply arguing for a kind of focusing only on class is not gonna get at that feeling, right? At those, at the ways in which class is experienced in some ways through race, right? So I think we need to do both would be my answer. I would definitely agree with that. I think it's really important to recognize that class solidarity is important and I do think it can be achieved, but we can also have racial denial. That shouldn't be a requirement for achieving class solidarity, right? So the awareness of how class is intersected with race needs, I think, to be part of that, right? It's not going to be helpful if we subscribe to what John Robert says in the Supreme Court that the way to stop discriminating is to stop talking about race. Like that's not going to work. This is part of the argument for not needing the voting rights protections and the approval, right? For Southern states to not have to have approval when they change some of those voting laws. That has been really disastrous. That's why we are in the midst of so many legal fights in places like North Carolina right now, right? So we've seen what happens when we sort of retreat to just color blindness. So I think we have to be able to come together across class. And I do think that part of the definition of sort of the threat rather than being each other can be exploitative capitalism, right? You don't have to believe in socialism to understand that the way capitalism is functioned now, the way tax reform, if you want to call it that, is functioning really disadvantages working class people. So focusing on that is, you know, can bring class solidarity, but I just don't want to do that at the expense of racial denial. Really quickly, I think Robin Kelly's work has spoke speaks well to the potential to be, you know, in the socialist communist leanings that we're kind of talking about, right? And solidarity around work and class identity that race and class were being articulated rather well in certain parts of the United States in the 1930s, that black communists in the south were articulating this axes, right? At the axes of racism and classism. And that they were also able to articulate their belief in God, so that not necessarily, being a communist means being an atheist, that perhaps that kind of brand or strand of socialism or perhaps communism is both native born, it's indigenous to the United States, and it doesn't necessarily have to look like something that we've seen overseas, but that, you know, can be reckoning with our own particularities and around racism. I think that that's possible. It's been done before it can be done again. Yeah, I would just add that the, a lot of times, like for example, W.B. Du Bois was, he turned to communism towards the end of his life, but these were things, this was a turn to a system, it was almost like I can't achieve a quality in this current configuration. Is there a way to enforce equality in a different one? And so we've looked toward other systems to do so, but I think sort of where I began is fundamentally, if racism is kind of, if we've not dealt with that problem, no matter what system you put in place, it begins to affect everything. And so democracies tend to be a good thing, and capitalism, when properly regulated, can be a good thing, but if we don't account for the racial divisions in the country, no matter which system we implement, we end up recreating something that's undesirable. We've got just the two or three minutes, so any sort of parting words, I am a hopeless optimist, I actually do believe that the nation can find a way towards the sort of national and political solidarity. I don't know what the path looks like, but I believe it's within the capacity of being an American for us to achieve it, and I think that the nation that does figure it out will leave a legacy for posterity and for humanity of a system of government that's inclusive that's worlds never seen before. So any final thoughts before we wrap up here? All head nods, so yes, it will happen. I love it. I'm also an eternal optimist, and I've seen in my own life, people who bind their lives to one another will go the distance for each other, and we're further from that because we live segregated lifestyles, and at times even more and more for their part. So to the extent that people are greeting one another, knowing one another, and loving one another, and really testing their capacity for compassion, I think that we can get somewhere. I know that sounds maybe a little hokey for some people, but I think that compassion is hard work, and if we want to do real hard work, we need to love each other and be interested in one another's lives and see each other as being in some kind of similar boat. And yeah, I believe that's possible. I know people who do this. I've seen people's lives change because they care enough to do hard work to say, gosh, am I benefiting from some kind of systemic privilege? Am I benefiting from something that I should not be benefiting from, and that's wrong and we should do something about that? I've seen people do that, and that gives me hope. So one thing that I've been thinking about is the role of education in this. And right now I think the educational system in many places is at odds with us achieving any sort of solidarity because this summer we saw this fight over how the Confederacy should be thought of. And if we're not teaching, if high school students don't have any sense of America's history with slavery or of reconstruction, right? Or of the Confederacy and why the Civil War happened, right? And if we're revising the narrative to really leave out important components, if they don't even learn about the civil rights movement and we know from research that all of these things are in flux and really problematic that there is a retrenchment, right? Like a specific effort to pull back on this idea on knowledge of slavery and civil rights and so on. There's such an effort from textbooks to the AP exams to say that we've been concentrating too much on what America did wrong in the past and I don't wanna see more questions about genocide or about slavery, right? And those changes have been implemented, right? So we're going backwards in terms of people having an awareness of our history and why inequality exists. So I really think more attention to the educational system, right? Not just to the media but also to what we're teaching, how we're socializing children. I think that that is a really important component of it. So I'm gonna take your question in a different direction and just say that the thing that gives me hope is that I think we have the resources to think about these questions. So I think, and this is very appropriate in the context of Black History Month, but if we look, for example, at these traditions of thought, like black political thought, where you have these thinkers who have wrestled the question of how do you think about the problem of the white working class? Du Bois does that in black reconstruction, right? We have the sources for thinking about how do we grapple with the United States in a sort of realistic way as this country that on the one hand has these ideals that it has never lived up to and how do we try to think about it nevertheless? Many African-American thinkers still have this very interesting relationship with the United States where some of them are very critical of it even as they wanna hold on to the idea of it. Others are more pessimistic about the possibilities, but so I think what gives me hope is that I think we have the resources in terms of we have thinkers and texts and traditions that can help us think through the current moment. And like Carol said, if we turn to those and we value them rather than marginalizing them, I think that's one way forward. All right, so thank you very much to all of you for coming out. I appreciate you and it was a great conversation. Thanks for your questions and interest.