SPEAKER_00: Pushkin.
SPEAKER_01: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about
SPEAKER_02: humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here.
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SPEAKER_00: Hey Revisionist History listeners, it's Malcolm. To tide you over until Season 6 debuts on June 24th, I wanted to share a recent conversation I had with the newest member of our Pushkin family, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. Honestly, he needs no introduction. At 34, he was the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction. That was in 2016 for his book, Stamped from the Beginning. It is, as the subtitle says, a definitive history of racist ideas in America. Dr. Kendi's next book, which I'm sure you've all heard of, How to be an Antiracist, is a brilliant look at how we dismantle the structures that racism creates. Through his lens, we can see how to stop settling for a broken system and help build a world a more just, equitable world. Ibram Kendi continues that conversation with his new podcast, which is the first co-production between Pushkin and iHeartRadio. In Be Antiracist, he interviews public figures like Julian Castro, Jamel Hill, Don Lemon, the author Heather C. McGee, and prison abolitionist Mariam Kaba. I confess, I'm a little intimidated by this incredible guest list and Dr. Kendi's bona fides, but he and I sat down recently and had a wonderful time. Okay, so here's our conversation. Stick around till the end for a sneak preview of his new show, Be Antiracist. You can listen to the first episode right now in the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. There's the man. Hey, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. First of all, just welcome to the family. Pushkin's a family. Yes, I'm excited, Malcolm.
SPEAKER_04: You've put together an incredible group of thinkers. It's still obviously a challenge for me thinking about how to translate into this new medium, but you're a pro now and I'm sure you could probably tell me better than anyone.
SPEAKER_00: I think you're going to enjoy it. It's really fun. You and I both write books. You write a book and then like years pass and it appears. In this business, you do something, it can be out the next day. It can be out the same day. Just that's so fantastic, that kind of fast feedback loop. And it's just a different way to reach people. What was your thinking in wanting to do a podcast? I think precisely what you just stated in terms of a different way of reaching people.
SPEAKER_04: And I know that there are certainly many people who still pursue books to really get them to think differently or understand the world. But I see more and more people turning to podcasts to do the same thing. And so recognizing that I decided to jump on the deep end and see what happens, even though I don't know how to swim.
SPEAKER_00: Who do you want to reach? That's the question I think about a lot.
SPEAKER_04: My best answer is I want to reach people who are open-minded. Open-minded about really understanding how race and racism operate. You present a persuasive argument, you present evidence. They're willing to reflect on that information and potentially reflect on their own views. Whether they exist in this polarized environment in which we're extremely defensive is not something I know, but that's really the guidepost for me.
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you, this is my favorite story on this very topic. I was in a coffee shop in a fancy neighborhood in Houston. Don't ask me why I was in a fancy neighborhood in Houston. I was. A woman pulls up in a Range Rover with a full-on Houston society matron, right? Jewels, the whole nine yards. Comes in, sees me, comes over to me and says, you're Malcolm Gladwell? I say, yes. She goes, I listen to everything you do and read all of your books and I disagree with everything you say. And I was like, you know what? That makes me feel good. Makes me feel really good. To your point about open-mindedness, she was open-minded. And my hope someday maybe she'll agree with me. You know, we'll get there. We're not there yet. But the woman with the jewels in the Range Rover had the whatever it is to keep listening to somebody who she disagree with. Good for her. I think we give up too easily on the question of bridging divisions in this country. Sometimes I hear people on both sides and I think they despair that you can ever have a conversation with someone on the other side. And I actually think maybe you won't win them over, but you can totally have the conversation and you can plant some little seed and maybe that seed grows into something someday. And also it cuts both ways. Like I live upstate New York and whenever I go to the airport, there are these cops who on their spare time, they drive people to the airport. I always get driven to the airport, but it's like, there's a police officer. He's super interesting. Like I don't know a lot of cops personally. He doesn't know my ideological perspective or read any of my books, but he just talks about what it's like to be a cop. And I learned something from him and he learned something from me. It's actually an insanely useful exercise for all of us. And also kind of fun to hear about the world from his perspective. What always surprises me, you know, I have a data point of like three, there are three cops. When they're not in the public eye and it's a low stakes conversation, you find you agree with them way more. And I really think there's something here where the way in which we engage in conversations with people is dictating their response. That's why even in the recent piece I did for the Atlantic, I was trying to separate
SPEAKER_04: the conversation about individual officers from the institution of policing, because to the larger point, I think that we don't really recognize the capacity that people have to change. I have actually gotten some criticism because I consistently offer people that ability to change. And even talking about being anti-racist, I've talked about it as a journey. And in that journey, people are going to make mistakes, meaning people are going to say things and do things that are racist, but we have to recognize that person who is trying. Part of it for me is just as a student of history, there's just been so many improbable who transformed themselves. I mean, even Malcolm X, the other great Malcolm. Wow, come on. Where he went from as a teenager, somebody incarcerated, to who he became and even who he became as this voice of the nation of Islam, which had this sort of anti-white philosophy. And then he discarded that philosophy, called it racist, then said to the world, I'm going to be different and I'm going to judge people not based on the color of their skin. People can change, but for whatever reason, we don't take those lessons from history, whether white or black people, as guideposts. I got really interested in Robert E. Lee, one of the principal generals in the Confederate
SPEAKER_00: Army. But the last couple of years of his life, it starts to get really interesting. He starts to put his credibility on the line on behalf of Reconstruction. Now you can argue, does he redeem himself in our eyes completely? I have no idea. I'm not a historian of Robert E. Lee. But to your point about movement, he's in a different place at the end of his life than he was when he signs up with the Confederate Army at the beginning of the Civil War. And I think you're right. I think we have to give people room to grow. Otherwise all of these exercises are pointless.
SPEAKER_04: I think it's also important for us to distinguish individuals and their capacity to change. From institutions and from structures. Oftentimes when we believe people can't change, we also believe nations can't change, or humanity can't change, or structures can't change. And people and structures and nations are malleable. I mean, that's what makes humanity distinct, that we can change. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: And police departments can change. Yes. I'm very interested in your Atlantic piece because I have returned in my writing to police and law enforcement stuff again and again. I mean, do you remember the Amadou Diallo case in New York City, who was an African immigrant who was shot 32 times, did a chapter on that in my book Blink in 2004. That was the thing that kind of plunged me into this issue. And I've been coming back. If you write about police shootings in this country, you have a lot to write about. I've always thought that it's not a problem that will be with us forever. I've always had some kind of optimism that we can figure out a way through this.
SPEAKER_00: Now, maybe I'm naive. I did think the change would come quicker. I certainly thought you would have seen something more dramatic after Michael Brown and Ferguson. But I would have thought after Diallo you would have seen something, and that was in 2002 or 2003. But just because it takes longer than it should doesn't mean it's never going to happen. There seems to be this common idea that if only people would have been more compliant,
SPEAKER_04: then there would have been a different outcome. They would not have died. It's easy for us to sort of blame the person who died. What we have been told, there is a tremendous amount of violent crime in this country. And the cause of that violent crime, we have been told directly and indirectly, are those people. And so therefore, in order to protect the nation from these people, we need massive policing forces because those black people in their neighborhoods are dangerous. And it creates this sort of cycle that then leads to American policing costing more than every other national military in the world, except the US military and the Chinese military. At the same time, there are nations with less crime and less police. Why can't we recognize that, generally speaking, people commit crimes out of deprivation and poverty and unemployment? Why can't we realize that there are these larger structural forces that have led to this police violence that we're not addressing that we need to focus on?
SPEAKER_00: That discussion about compliance, that idea that the responsibility for any of these bad outcomes in police stops falls on the person being stopped, not the person doing the stopping. I was reminded of my favorite hobby horse, which is school suspensions. School suspensions are disproportionately passed out to particularly black boys. So two kids with the same offense, one white, one black, the black kid is way, way, way more likely to be suspended for that. We also know that suspensions have huge collateral consequences, that there's not a stitch of available social science evidence to suggest that any good comes out of a suspension. To the contrary, it seems like it's worse. So why do we keep doing them? Well, we keep doing them for the same reason that you're talking about, that we think if a child misbehaves, then it's their responsibility to comply with the rules, or we will cast them out of the school, as opposed to saying, actually, the reason we have teachers and principals is to cope with the varieties of behavior. Why else would we have schools if we didn't think schools were civilizing agents? It's always baffled me, as long as I've looked at these black-white differentials, that that's an easy argument to make when the kid's white and a really hard argument to make when the kid's black.
SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing with police stops, two sets of rules.
SPEAKER_04: I think so. And part of it is this larger narrative of racist ideas that fundamentally cause us to not recognize these larger practices or forces. So not asking, would the teacher have suspended that student if that student would have been white? Would the teacher have asked that student, what's wrong? As opposed to, okay, that's a misbehaving student, and therefore I need to respond with force, i.e. suspension. In the case of police interactions, there have been times in which I'm headed for an interview or something, or I'm headed for something extremely timely, which I have to be there on time, and I get pulled over by the police, and then I'm agitated. But then I know that if I show that agitation, that it's going to be read in a particular way by the officer, which is then going to justify any sort of force or anything that he does to me, when in reality, if I'm agitated and I'm white and I say that, it's just understood, oh, of course, this person's agitated because they were headed for an interview. There's nothing else. They don't feel personally as if they were slighted or disrespected because there's that human connection of, I understand that. I think we have to figure out a way to reestablish, particularly across racial lines, that human connection because that's what we all are.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah. This is a question I've had in the back of my mind for a while, and you're the perfect person to answer it, which is, I feel like people are using the word racist too liberally, and it's undercutting its power and importance. They're using it to describe things that are dumb or awkward or unfortunate that aren't actually racist. When we actually do have something that actually does fit the definition, the word has been cheapened. Some sports podcaster who I like made some stupid joke. Someone called it racist. I was like, you know, what happened to George Floyd is racism. Exclusionary zoning is racism. Segregation is racism. That was a stupid joke. Is it a mistake to use the same word to describe two things that have dramatically different impacts on the world, intentions, origins, history? Do we lose sight of what we're talking about?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is a question that I've struggled with.
SPEAKER_04: Some people say, I think everything is racist. No, I actually don't think everything is racist. I only think an idea is racist if someone is connoting that a particular racial group is inferior or superior. I only think a policy is racist if it's leading to or growing a racial inequity or injustice. What I think is important that I think can help is if we develop as a human community, a shared and consistent definition of the term racist. So what we currently have is so many different definitions, many of which don't align.
SPEAKER_04: And that's why I even had to be an anti-racist. I wanted to anchor every chapter on definitions because I just think us having common definitions would allow us to only use the term when it's applicable. And I certainly do think the term is used when it's not applicable, but I also think it's not used when it is applicable. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: That makes sense to me. I like that idea of developing a richer and more meaningful vocabulary around things that we find offensive for various reasons. And there's a difference between something that is merely tasteless and something that is harmful and dangerous and deeply bigoted.
SPEAKER_04: Racism is almost like cancer. And I always go back to that analogy, particularly as someone who's battled cancer in which cancer is widespread. There is multiple stages of cancer, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four. And there's this understanding that stage four is lethal. It's dangerous. It can kill you. Stage one, it's more of something if you don't get a handle on it quickly, it can become lethal and dangerous. So even having this understood gradation that, let's say if we do call that lighter thing racist, but it's understood that it's not stage four. Yeah, stage one. It then allows us to speak about and distinguish both. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Well, all of this suggests to me, Ibram, that this show you're doing is going to be both fascinating and also really useful in the world that we're living in right now. And I want to formally, once again, welcome you to the Pushkin family. I am delighted you're doing this and I'm looking forward to the many great conversations you'll have on the show.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you so much Malcolm. And of course I admire your work and I'm so glad to be a part of the Pushkin family. No, bring it on.
SPEAKER_00: And now here's a sneak preview of Be Anti-Racist.
SPEAKER_04: Welcome to Be Anti-Racist, an action podcast where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, how to free humanity through the unity of anti-racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti-racist power and policy. On Be Anti-Racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible and how to bring into being what modern humans have never known, a just and equitable world. You ready? Let's roll.
SPEAKER_03: In the 1930s and 40s, the United States went on a nationwide building boom of public amenities funded by tax dollars, which in Montgomery, Alabama, included the Oak Park Pool, except the Oak Park Pool was for whites only. When a federal court finally deemed this unconstitutional, the reaction of the town council was swift. They would drain the public pool rather than let Black families swim too.
SPEAKER_04: Heather McGee is an expert in economic and social policy and the author of the bestselling book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather explodes one of the greatest racial myths that white people lose as people of color gain. She shows that as racism wins, we all lose. Heather is one of America's sharpest thinkers, the former president of the inequality focused think tank, Demos, and has drafted legislation, testified before Congress and contributed regularly to new shows, including NBC's Meet the Press. She now chairs the Board of Color of Change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization. I sat down with Heather McGee recently to learn how by investing in each other, we can all achieve better jobs, better health, better democracy, better schools, better neighborhoods for our kids, and so much more. Heather, it's truly an honor to speak with you. Your book, The Sum of Us, is the type of book that I learned from that I think many Americans and many people around the world can learn from. I wrote this book because I felt like we were missing something.
SPEAKER_03: In the great pursuit of a society, it should be to have progress, to have people have less want and more joy, people to have more of the fruits of economic progress and technological progress and for our problems to be solved generation after generation. It felt like that progress was slowing down slash reversing.
SPEAKER_04: When some Americans imagine the transformation of this country, they imagine that they're going to lose if we actually create an equitable and just anti-racist America. It seems, as you've written, that that's based on a zero-sum myth.
SPEAKER_03: I left a career in economic policy to go out on this quixotic journey in some ways to find the answer to the question of why can't we seem to have nice things and what are the roots of our dysfunction? It's there that I came upon this paradigm of the zero-sum. It's a term that means there's no such thing as mutual progress. When you have people who are in a competition with one another, if team A scores one more point, team B scores one less point, the points will always add up to zero, positive on one side, negative on the other. Progress for team A has to come at the expense of team B. There's a limited or fixed pie. That idea resonated so deeply with me.
SPEAKER_03: It gave a name and a description to something I'd sensed my whole life, this fear that when white supremacy falls, that the world will become one that white people should fear. Therefore, racism is really great for white people, really terrible for people of color. Their self-interest is in preserving racism at all costs. It's the at all costs piece that really felt so important for me to lay out. What are the costs of racism to our entire society? What exactly is the price white people are willing to pay to keep the system as it has been? Once I started looking, the list just kept growing. That made it clear to me that we have these self-interested elites packaging, marketing, selling this zero sum lie to most white Americans. They're doing it for their own profit. Our side, when we only talk about racism as something that's good for white people, are kind of helping out a little bit. My provocation, the agitation that made me feel like, okay, maybe I do have something to add to this conversation was, we haven't told the full story of what it has cost this entire country.
SPEAKER_04: You were specifically writing about white folks who think that they're going to lose. But as a man of color reading it, I also think men of color too have bought into this myth of the zero sum. And I think that as they've seen women of color organizing and advocating and in some cases rising, they too have felt threatened as if they're losing. But back to white folks, this is what I've been saying, and I want to know whether I'm just wrong, that white Americans typically compare their lot to people of color. And so in other words, if their school has more resources, in a way their child's school is almost like a first-class school, they're like, whoa, if we create equity, then I'm going to be back in coach. I don't want that. I'm going to lose. My kid's going to lose. But it seems to me that white Americans should be assessing themselves from other white people in the Western world. And when they make that comparison, that's when they can see actually what they don't have, how they're in coach. That's right.
SPEAKER_03: And in fact, maybe in other societies in the Western world, everybody's just in first class. There's no little curtain that the flight attendant moves over. Everyone gets food. Everyone has a leg room. Everybody gets to bring a bag. This really comes from and is a feature of how brutally hierarchical our society is. In the first chapter of The Sum of Us, I go back in our history to the beginning to find out where this zero-sum worldview and this lie came from, whose interest it served, and why it reanimated generation after generation. And as it turns out, it was created as a way to discipline white Europeans in the colonial era to be satisfied with their lot in a society where wealth was still quite concentrated and where because of chattel slavery and the plantation economy, there actually wasn't a lot of room. A white person who was not a plantation owner, their labor wasn't needed in the Southern economy. Right? Like, what do we need you for? Right? This myth of white supremacy was sold to white masses so that they could have, of course, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, the psychological wages of whiteness rather than material wages. And those psychological wages were knowing always that in a deeply unequal economy, they could nonetheless count on being more than and better than Black people.
