"The Myths of Whiteness" - Why? Radio episode with guest David Mura

7:51PM Aug 13, 2023

Speakers:

Announcer

Jack Russell Weinstein

David Mura

Keywords:

people

black

whiteness

white

slavery

talking

story

racism

blackness

america

history

knowledge

police

race

epistemology

society

rules

david

belief

weinstein

This transcript has been autogenerated and may contain errors, do not cite without verifying accuracy. To do so, click on the first word of the section you wish to cite and listen to the audio while reading the text. If you find errors, please email us at whyradioshow@und.edu. Please include the episode name and time stamp where the error is found. Thank you.Why philosophical discussions about everyday life is produced by the Institute for philosophy and public life, a division of the University of North Dakota's college of arts and sciences. Visit us online at why radio show.org

The original episode can be found here: https://wp.me/p8pYQY-k6t

Why philosophical discussions about everyday life is produced by the Institute for philosophy and public life, a division of the University of North Dakota's college of arts and sciences. Visit us online at why radio show.org

Hi, I'm Jack Russell Weinstein. Welcome to why philosophical discussions about everyday life. Today we're exploring the myths of whiteness with David Moura. 2300 years ago, when Aristotle first organized the science of logic, he focused on syllogisms three line arguments that share universal patterns of inference. Famously, he told us that all men are mortal Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. The power of this example is not what it tells us about Socrates, but that it describes logic in terms of universality. Take away the particulars, and you get a formula that works in every context, all ARB CSA, therefore, CSB replace the letters with well defined terms. And you get a valid argument every time math is the language of logic. The idea became that human rationality could be reduced to a chain of micro inferences. It's dinnertime, so I can eat food or hamburgers, food so I can eat a hamburger. Nighttime is for sleep, post dinner is nighttime, therefore post dinner is for sleep and so forth. One argument linked to the next over and over again, the more complicated the thought process, the more argument patterns one uses. The problem is this misrepresents how humans actually think. We don't make judgments based on contextless inferences. We embed our decisions in meaning. Aristotle chose Socrates because Socrates was an idealized figure, all philosophers would know. I picked hamburgers as an illustration, because they're the closest thing to an official food America has. Human rationality is narrative and structure. It's not discrete puzzle pieces. Take the following statement. A black man was pulled over by a white police officer. There is no formal difference between that statement and Socrates as a man, they're both forms of ASB. But the Socrates example makes us feel learned and the other makes us tense. We know that blackness and whiteness refer to cultural and political identities, not actual colors. We also know that there's a history of conflict, violence and tragedy surrounding traffic stops with black drivers. And we know that such incidences have been flashpoints for political unrest. We know these things, because the mere assertion that a black man is pulled over by a white police officer is a one sentence story embedded in a larger 400 year history. And, if we're being honest, will also admit that if the next line of the story is, and it all turned out fine, it would be an unexpected twist. We expect such an encounter to go badly because situations are only comprehensible in the context of a well established pattern. Analogous to, but substituting for logic. Socrates is more tap mortality may be well defined, but the A, B and C's of race are not nearly as clear. Why? Because we know what blackness means. But we don't know what whiteness is. Historically, the United States subscribe to the one drop rule, the belief that anyone who had any blackness in their ancestry was also black. We claim not to use this anymore, but we do use phrases like half or a quarter black, the terms are different, the idea is the same. Consider also that we as a country are becoming more comfortable with men identifying as women or vice versa, but are vehemently opposed to a white person identifying as black or vice versa. Race is more immutable than sex and gender blackness is inescapable. But we still don't know what whiteness is. It may mean being English or Italian or Irish, a colonizer and aristocrat are a trust one baby. But these are not sufficient conditions. They're examples, not definitions. Some people define white as the bearer of a certain kind of privilege. But this confuses who someone is with the consequence of being who they are. People are not white because they have privilege. They have privilege because they're white. Defining whiteness is an art not a science, and an act of interpreting the stories the world carries on its back. Considering these stories is what we'll do on today's show. Our guests will take us on a journey from Thomas Jefferson to Philando Castile, from the philosophy of Hegel to the movie honestok. We're going to examine to quote the title of his book, The stories that whiteness tells itself. Stories that reveal the shallowness of Aristotle's syllogism there is no mathematical logic of race. There is nothing necessary about it. Whiteness is contingent to construct of history, the consequence of culture, power, and countless decisions that could have been otherwise. But just because race is illogical, doesn't mean it can be dismissed to wave away such discussions because they make no sense is to ignore how our lives actually work. To be race blind, is in this day and age to be irrational. Instead, we need new stories to replace the old ones to explore what we have perverted and to define whiteness in a way that eradicates it. That's what we'll try to do today. It will make some people uncomfortable and others angry, but so be it. It is hard to jettison our stories, especially when so many continually benefit from their being retold. But it is our burden nonetheless. And now our guest David Mira is a memoirist, essayist, novelist, poet, critic, playwright and performance artist. He's the author of numerous books and collections. Most recently, the stories whiteness tells itself racial myths and our American narratives. David, welcome to why.

Thank you for having me.

To our listeners. If you'd like to participate, please share your favorite moments from the show and tag us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook tick tock is on the way, our handle is always at why radio show rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform so others can find the show and listen to all 15 years worth of episodes for free, as well as our sister show philosophical currents at our website, why Radio show.org. And as always, this show can only happen with your support. We exist solely on listener contributions. So click donate in the upper right hand corner of our website to make your tax deductible donation through the University of North Dakota alumni foundation portal. All right, so with the business out of the way, David, ye radio has had half a dozen episodes on race. But their titles all have words like black or minority in the title. This is also true of most of the books I've read about race, your book, and this episode starts with whiteness. What do we gain by making whiteness, the main focus rather than blackness or race itself.

First of all, what we get is we understand then that it is white people who created the concepts of whiteness and blackness. And when I say whiteness is an ideology, what I mean is, it's a set of rules, practices, beliefs, ideas, which govern and determine how white people in this society think of themselves. And think of black people. Or think about other people of color. And some of these rules are very conscious, and you see them. For instance, you know, some white kid who invites a black kid to their birthday party may be told by their relatives, we don't invite people like that to our birthday parties or family gatherings. That's a rule of whiteness. But these rules are much deeper than we realize they penetrate to the level of how we avail valuate knowledge. One rule of whiteness is white knowledge is always valid, objective, true and official. So White knowledge is always valid, objective to an official, and black knowledge is always invalid, subjective, false or suspicious, and unofficial, unless white people decree otherwise. Now, this evaluation of knowledge, which is the practice of whiteness, we can see manifestations of it in accounts in court in our political system, in how we tell histories, who determines how we tell histories, who determines the rules of society. And yet, at many levels, these rules are unconscious, and people don't even realize that they are acting according to them. You know, for instance, the definition of racism that most people use is the definition concocted mainly by white people. And this definition emphasizes individual action. It says that something is racist as somebody actively discriminates, hates, dislikes, spots, prejudice or thoughts about somebody of another race. But this can only happen if the person actually admits that the reason why they're doing it is racist. So you can Have an action which may discriminate against black voters. But then you say, well, this this action was not motivated by racial animus or desired racially discriminate. It's just because we wanted to say create representative districts which adequately represent Alabama.

Okay, David, I want to interrupt you for a second, I apologize, you have given us so much, you've already given a procedure of the book, and I want to, I want to take a step back and move through all of that stuff, because it's tough. So the very first thing that you said, was that whiteness, and that racism is an ideology. And I want to unpack that for a second, because what someone is going to say, is, look, I'm allowed to have an opinion that white people are superior to black people, I'm allowed to have that belief. But if you call it an ideology, it's not really a belief. It's much more than that, right? The claim that white people are superior to black people, whatever that might mean. That's 1000 opinions in one, right? That's history, that story, what do you talk a little bit about what it means for this to be an ideology.

It's an ideology. First of all, because it structures the way the society works. It's not simply belief, a belief could be like Mickey Mantle was the greatest baseball player of the 1950s. That simply doesn't structure our society. But the belief that white knowledge is always valid, true, objective and official. And black knowledge is always invalid. Subjective, untrue, are suspicious and official rules throughout society. It rules our interactions in our education system, in our justice system, in our political system, in business, in what's printed in the newspapers, so this one belief about knowledge, right? Structures, in many ways, everything in American society. And it is structured our history and it is structured the way we tell that history. And who gets to tell that history.

I wonder if you would give us an example of how this works, because what we're talking about here is what philosophers called epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, how we acquire knowledge and what the limits of knowledge are. And in your book, you make the claim that there's a white epistemology and black epistemology. And this runs counter to the long tradition of studying knowledge, right, someone like John Locke would say, human beings are all the same, and we acquire knowledge through our senses, or someone like Descartes would say, we acquire knowledge by using reasoning. This, this idea that different people, or different types of people or categories of people would have different ways of knowing and ways of learning would seem really foreign to them. So what does it mean that there's a white way of knowing and a black way of knowing and that the White Way of Knowing becomes the default, the standard and the determiner of truth? What does that mean?

Well, let's take Governor Ron DeSantis, who banned the African American Studies, AP history. And he said that that course was lacking in educational value. Now, that course was created by African American writers and scholars. DeSantis is not an African American writer noisey, an African American scholar, nor does he have a PhD in history. But he felt perfectly fine in saying this course lacked educational value. Now, he doesn't have to have any qualifications of the African American PhD professors who created this course. All the STB is white, and he can say this course is invalid. Now, the way we don't want to connect this to our history is what happens when the Africans were enslaved and brought to America. They were forbidden from teaching their languages. They were forbidden from teaching their cultures. They were forbidden from teaching their histories. What is DeSantis doing? He is forbidding African American writers and African American scholars from teaching their own history and culture. And yet we don't see the link between that and the practice of slave owners because we have naturalized whiteness and don't actually under standards work as a new ideology.

Is it fair response to say, Okay, fine, but DeSantis is a boob and he's politically motivated, and he's just trying to out Trump Trump. Right? Why isn't that dismissing his claims? As I don't know, opportunistic rhetoric.

Yes, but all of history of America is determined by opportunistic rhetoric around race. I mean, the creation of the myth of the Lost Cause where the antebellum South was this ideal peaceful place where slaves were absolutely happy, and white people ruled over them with a benevolent hand. And everything was hunky dory until the war of Northern aggression. And this loss narrative of the Lost Cause was created during the period after, during and after reconstruction. And it maintained that the real cause of the Civil War was not slavery, but states rights in northern regression. Now, that became not only the belief of the South, once you you have, for instance, the movie Gone With the Wind, it became a belief of the North to. And so this belief, actual belief about history, which is distorting history is something which is ingrained into the culture and any effort to root it out. Which is what happens when black people begin to tell their own narratives, their own perspectives about history, is something which is determined really fought for not just on an individual basis by somebody like DeSantis, but on a systemic basis. In other words, Senator Tom Cotton is in Klockner law, which says, which forbids any federal funds from being used to teach the your con 1619 project, which argues that the initiation of slavery was one of the founding principles and rules setting the practice for how race would be determined in American history. Now, when cotton says, as he said that slavery was a

necessary evil. Who was he talking to? He's talking to white people.

A black person who believes that slavery was a necessary evil. What's more, the historian David Ellis has argued that it would have been cheaper, and more economically productive, to have enslaved white poor people in the poor houses and in the prisons. But what was determined was even though it's more economically viable, it would destroy the power of whiteness, to unify white people, and use whiteness as a tool of social rule, and social cohesion.

So the goal of slavery wasn't simply to advance the economy, the goal of slavery was to create a kind of national unity around whiteness, and because of that, enslaving other white people would never serve the purpose.

Yes, and it was also a way of keeping the white working class from rebelling against their conditions. The first white working class rebellion in America was Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. It was a white working class rebellion. And immediately after that, the elite whites instituted a sort of made official the category of racial categories of whiteness, and blackness. And they offered this privilege of being white to the white working classes to say, look at, you should stop rebellion, because we're all white people together, and we're superior to black people. And we're making this official now. And this should play cake, your desires to rebel against the economic structures which have made us the elites, and the rich, and you the working class. And this lie to America's working class, has continued throughout our history and continues on into the present, we will offer you the reward of being white, if you will cite against your own interests against the interest of black people and other people of color.

Thinking of DeSantis and thinking of this, this this notion of eradicating black history, it creates what you call the obligation of being a psychic Sherpa that the white people don't carry the history with them. And so now it's it It's the black responsibility to carry it and assert at all. I wonder if you talk a little bit about that. And how this also explains what someone like DeSantis is doing or what someone like cotton is doing what is a psychic Sherpa? And why is it an obligation that in itself is oppressive?

Well, there are racial incidents and conditions which shaped our history. Slavery was one of those conditions, the establishment of the Jim Crow South was one of those conditions. Now, when we begin to actually tell the true story of America, in terms of its racial history, what white people do is they say, Why are you bringing it up? It was so long ago. And really, you're just exaggerating for how bad it is. And in actuality, white people don't even say what you're bringing up. They say the problem is not that white people have to use black people through our history. But the actual problem is that black people keep remembering this history and telling it to us white people, which somehow abuses us. Now, you can see this manifestation of this everywhere. It's it's like moms for liberty, that conservative parent organization who wants to ban the story of Ruby Bridges. Ruby Bridges was a six year old black girl who desegregated a Norlin school in 1960. And Ruby Bridges had to walk through a crowd of angry spitting during white people with signs yelling at her to go home and not to go to the school. Now moms for Liberty says, Oh, this will disturb and make our white children feel bad. Okay, and we can't do that. Now, that's a lie. One of the reasons why it's a lie is my children, I have white back, when I read the book, they didn't feel bad, they felt angry. They felt an identification with Ruby Bridges. They felt admiration for her courage and her fight for social justice. And indeed, that has shaped how they want to live their lives. And that is exactly what what moms for Liberty don't want to happen. They're actually less afraid of their children being hurt by the story of Ruby Bridges than they are, by their children be inspired by Ruby Bridges, and identifying with a six year old, young black girl who had the courage to desegregate a New Orleans school in 1960. Now when white people say, Yeah, but let's talk about slavery. Slavery was so far in the past, what does it have to do with the present? Okay, now, we know there are vast racial disparities in the healthcare system. Among those disparities is the fact that black people receive half as much pain medication for the same conditions as white people, they receive it less often than white people for the same conditions. Okay, that's just a statistically proven fact. In 2016, there was a study of 222 white medical students who were surveyed about their attitudes towards their profession. And nearly half of these white medical students profess some sort of belief that black people felt less physical pain than white people. Now, you can see why this belief that black people feel less physical pain than white people might factor into the fact that black people who receive half as much pain medication for the same conditions. But what does this have to do with slavery? David? Well, Thomas Jefferson was a leading the the ologists of slavery. In his time, he was a brilliant man, brilliant writer, he could write very well. And he argued that whites were superior to blacks intelligence, and intelligence in aesthetics and spirituality. And that blacks were more suited to slavery because they felt less physical pain than white people. So this idea of a Jefferson promulgated in the late 1700s and early 1800s, is now there in half of the 222 white medical students in 2016. And that idea in is infecting the minds of those white medical students, which then makes them less prone to give pain medication to black people because they believe in black people feel less physical pain than white people.

This is a good place to stop because we need to take a break. When we come back. We're going to continue this sense of connection with the past and I also want to talk about Philando. Castile and the experience of his girlfriend, because I think this will return us to this idea of white knowledge and black knowledge that will help clarify some of the things you're talking about. You are listening to David Mira and Jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life We'll be back right after this.

The Institute for philosophy and public life bridges the gap between academic philosophy and the general public. Its mission is to cultivate discussion between philosophy professionals, and others who have an interest in the subject regardless of experience or credentials. Visit us on the web at philosophy and public life.org. The Institute for philosophy and public life because there is no ivory tower.

Your back with why philosophical discussion with everyday life. I'm your host, Jack Russell Weinstein, we're talking with David Mira about the stories that whiteness tells itself. We're trying to unpack the very complicated idea that there is a black epistemology and a wide epistemology or in other words, black Americans have to have a different kind of knowledge and carry a different kind of knowledge that white Americans are unwilling or unable to carry with themselves. And you were talking before the break about Thomas Jefferson. And one of the things in the book, which I think is tremendously interesting that I had actually never read before, was that when Thomas Jefferson had five children with Sally Hennings, he kept those five children as slaves, that he didn't treat them like his children that that he treated them like the property because they were the product of this, what we would now call mixed race. I don't want to say relationship. They were his progeny. And yet, because they were black, they were still property. And this notion of what a black person is capable of how to treat black people is a continuity from Jefferson on to today's day. Now, that doesn't change the fact that he wrote some incredibly important things that has guided the United States. It is just what it is. Now. One of the things that you do in the book is that you connect this history to the experience of recent events, including falando Castile, and the experience of his girlfriend when Castile was killed, Would you remind us of the story, and then talk about the way that his girlfriend and I forget her name, and I apologize, his girlfriend had to be both the victim and the person in control at the same time. Would you talk about that a little bit?

Yes. So Geronimo Jonas, who's the officer stop plan to steal mainly because in the few days before two black males with dreadlocks had robbed a convenience store. So he thought cleanser could steal might be one of these men because he was a black man with dreadlocks. So he stops because steel because steel wants to show him that he has tells him he has a gun. And he has a permit for guns reaching for the permit and his license. And uns panics and shoots and what eventually kills falando Casteel. Now, in the car, we're not two black males. It was Flandre Chris Steele and his girlfriend, I think, remember named Diamond Phillips and his girlfriend's four year old daughter was in the backseat. So this was clearly not to black males and dreadlocks, right? Your nurse is freaking out. You can hear this on on the tape. Right? And damn it cuz his girlfriend is taping this on her phone. And one of the reasons why she's taping it is she knows that in the epistemology of whiteness. Her word as a black woman against the police will inevitably soon be seen to suspect and unofficial. What is remarkable about this is how calm she is In the face of the fact that her boyfriend has just been shot and murdered, and that your Nez is freaking out over the pack that he shot. Philander Castile is clearly not calm. And she must remain calm, because she knows that if officer your Nez freaks out anymore, he may end up shooting her or her daughter. And so she is thinking, not just about herself not just about plan because stealer boyfriend, not just about her daughter, but she is aware of how white people are going to receive this incident. She is aware of how white people are going to construct a narrative around this incident. And she is recording this in order to counter that narrative. Because she knows that white people will not believe her oral tale. Her words, they will only believe the evidence that is on the phone.

So she is in this horrendous position where the police officer is not required to have any empathy. The police officer is not required to enter into the perspective of the victims or the suspects or whatever word you want to include here, the police officer is freaking out and only experiences the world from his point of view. The girlfriend has to be both black and white. At the same time, she has to both experience this as a victim and try to deal with the fact that at the time, her boyfriend is bleeding to death, and protect her daughter and protect herself. But in order to do this, she has to be black and white. At the same time, she has to figure out what she can do in order to get white people to believe her and in order to control the police officer. And this is one of the central components of what you're calling black epistemology. In the book, what you're saying is a white person only experiences the world and only has to experience the world from the perspective of whiteness, but the burden of being a black person in the world, or at least in the United States. But I think this is true in many other places as well, is you have to be black and white at the same time. In order to manage your own experience and the possible experience of whiteness. In order to save your life in order to put up with the burdens of the danger, you're at the same time. And so whiteness is exclusionary and blackness is for lack of a better term, pluralistic, am I getting this right?

Yes, yes. And this goes back to slavery. Right? The master, the white master believes I'm superior, I'm supposed to be in control, I am the definition of human, you are the definition of non human. Right. That's all I need to know. And I need to know that you fear me that you will do what I say. Now, the black person who is enslaved, understands that the white man's definition, the white masters definition of who he is, and who they are, is false. And that the real truth is, I be enslaved African. And Justice human is you, the white master. But I cannot reveal this knowledge to you. Because if I reveal this knowledge to you, you will punish me or kill me. So I have to act as if I believe that you are the master, as if I believe that I am less than human, as if I believed that I should be a slave in order to manipulate you in order to keep me from being punished or worked harder, or having something happened to me and my relatives in order to ensure my son as much as I can. My own safety and my own sense of freedom. But I cannot reveal to you that I know that what you were saying about yourself and me is an absolute lie. And so I have to know how the white master thinks in order to be able to survive. I have to know how the white master thinks of himself. I have to know that he thinks that he is human that I am not that he thinks he is superior to me than I am not. And I have to hide from him. Any belief that counters his belief in himself. So my this is what the boys talked about WB Dubois and the souls of color folks when he says black people have a double consciousness in order to survive in this society black people have to understand how white people think. White people don't have to understand how black people think they run things.

This sounds for lack of a more sophisticated response, exhausting. This sounds so burdensome that it makes one wonder how someone can function with this kind of weight on their shoulders every single day, every single minute. Is that I don't know, for, again, lack of a more sophisticated question. Is that a common complaint that the black experience in the United States is exhausting?

Yes, it is absolutely exhausting. And it is exhausting both on the level of dealing with the constant racism around one with a constant threat of police with the constant worry about the state of and safety of your your children, your relatives, and any encounter with police. But it's also exhausting. If you're Brock Obama, and you understand that you cannot talk honestly about race, then you cannot even talk about race. You're supposedly the most powerful person in the world. But you can't talk honestly how you feel about race. So if the most important black person in the world cannot talk honestly about race? What does that mean for the rest of black people?

Another example of the way this becomes burdensome is Ferguson, Missouri. Now, we know that Ferguson was a flashpoint of of, again, the words you use are really important here a riot and uprising, a protest, something like that. But one of the things that you point out in the book is that the triggers of the violence are not necessarily the cause of the violence, that sometimes people are going to react to an incident, but they're going to react based on long standing, anger, and that one of the things that motivated the unrest in Ferguson, was that the Ferguson Police Department didn't have a budget, that all of the money that the Ferguson Police had for their salaries for their equipment for everything was based entirely on traffic tickets, and court fines. And so black people, which Ferguson is almost entirely a black community, black people were constantly being stopped just to pay the police officer salaries. And so they are being oppressed in order to give the police officers their money, and the police officers have an inherent conflict of interest. Now, I wonder if you talk about that for a second. But also, this is really important, because one of the pieces that people don't talk about in the Philando Castile example is that he was repeatedly stopped over and over again that he had 52 traffic stops, half of which were thrown out of court for what gets called driving while black. So this is yet another example of which the black experience is funding the white experience without empathy. Would you talk a little bit about this? And how this two is the legacy of history and the legacy of slavery by a different name?

Yes, well, planted to steal his mother actually says it was more like 80 times in 10 years that he was stopped by the police, but some of them were recorded in official police records. So anyways, it's scoped by official records. He was stopped at the five times by the police in 10 years. If I speak in front of a wide audience. I ask how many times you've been stopped by the police in the last 10 years, I get the 15 there's generally no white people in the audience raising their hand. So his experience of driving on the road while Black was entirely different from many of the white people in the audience I'm speaking to in Ferguson. As you mentioned, the police had an incentive to do more and more ticketing because it funded their salary and funded the police. And so they were actually more like a marauding brand of brigands who were extracting money from the black community of Ferguson. And so the black community is reacting, not simply to the unjust death of Michael Brown, but two years of exploitation, two years of being arrested driving by black years of a justice system, which kept them in jail, oftentimes because they could not afford to pay the fines, and then they incurred more fines because they could not afford to pay the first fines, and then they had more fights. So this years of oppression by essentially what it was a band of brigands raiding the community was what triggered, ultimately, the reaction of the community to Michael Brown's death. It was years of oppression. And so, when these things are rough people think, oh, you know, George Floyd happened because George Floyd was, you know, wastefully and tragically and murdered. Right. But people have been complaining about the Minneapolis Police Department and its racism for years. And they're examples that I mean, and we never think about the effect of this thing on blankets. We don't. After George Floyd was killed, there was a letter to the editor in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and it was written by a seventh grade teacher in the black north side. And she had a class which was 95%, black. And she wrote about how she asked her seventh grade class, to write an essay about what America means to me. She said, almost 100% of her seventh grade students wrote about police harassment and police brutality. That was their definition of what America means to them. And she said, you know, these kids, they're smart, they're curious, they're funny, they're intelligent, the, they're friendly, I love them. And this is what they have to deal with, in seventh grade. And so when moms for Liberty says Don't tell our white children, these damaging stories of Ruby Bridges disaggregating, the school as six year old black girls, desegregate the school, they are clearly not worried about the damage being done to black kids, or to black parents, who know that they must, at a certain point, tell their children, narratives of police brutality and police harassment. And they can't think like this is going to, you know, make my son or daughter scared, this is going to upset them. Because I have to tell these stories in order to make sure they understand how to deal with the police, so they don't become another philanthropist steal another George Floyd. Now moms for Liberty doesn't care about these black children or their fragility. And that's how, you know they're racist.

I said something in passing that people who are attentive may bristle at and I'd like you to sort of check my language for a second. I said that what people were experiencing in Ferguson was Slavery by Another Name. Now, that was my words, not yours. And one of the things that that I was thinking about, as I was saying, it was the way in which the circumstances from slavery to today have remained consistent, but the names themselves have changed. I wonder if you would talk a little bit about that talk about the the shift from slaves to apprentices talking about the shift to today? How is it? Am I exaggerating? When I say itself?

You're not exaggerating? Because because the common belief among white people is that the story of America is one of racial progress. And so they talked about the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th 14th and 15th amendment. They talked about the passage of the Civil Rights laws in the early 60s. And the idea was, after each of these periods, everything was fine. Now, if you deal with human nature, this is ridiculous. It's not like after the Civil War, all the white slave owners when Oh, Jesus, yeah, what black people are equal, and they should have as much rights as we do. And slavery was wrong. No, the reaction of the white population to any advance by African Americans or other people of color has always been, by generally a majority of white people a concerted effort to reestablish the previous condition. What the white slave owners in the white South understood after the Emancipation Proclamation after the Civil War, is they could not imprison or enslaved black people in called slavery. So they had apprentices. Now Black people didn't have anywhere to work. So they had to work on white property. So till they entered into apprenticeships, where they owed the white plantation owner money to be able to work on the plantation, they instituted indentured servitude, where the black people could only buy goods from the white plantation owner, and therefore were perpetually in debt to the white plantation or, and therefore did not have the rights of a normal citizen. They instituted the black codes, which are essentially laws, which said that any black person who was not literally that means actually working for a white person that that moment could be arrested. And they could be arrested not just by the police or authorities, but by any white person. Now, that's how you get the Karen's of today, who feel like, Hey, I'm not a policeman, but I can call the police and, you know, black people for barbecuing in Oakland, because I don't like black people bargain view in the park. But the thing is that when they did these, they had to hide they couldn't call it slavery. They could institute the practices of slavery so that once you have these black codes, which imprisoned over 100,000 black people, then they were in the prison system, and they could be lent out to slave labor. And no one would go on, Geez, you're really instituting slavery again. Now, the same thing happens, you know, when you think of the civil rights laws, which supposedly desegregated the schools in the south, well, what did white people do, they established private schools, they established Christian schools, which were segregated because they were private. And in various parts of the south, the school systems are almost or even more segregated than they were back in the 1960s. And so there's always this effort to reestablish the racial, oppressive status quo by white people, when there are legal advancements made by black people and push by some progressive white people. And so the conditions don't actually change as much as people think these laws make the changes. And eventually, what happened out of the Reconstruction period was the creation of the Jim Crow South. And when South Africa wanted to establish apartheid, they went, Hey, we don't have to make this all up. It's already there in the American South, we can just copy them.

So part of what you're doing philosophically, is you're moving away from this discussion of black epistemology, to a discussion of black ontology. Now, ontology is another big philosophical word, right? And what it means technically is it's the study of existence, the study of being. But what does ontology mean, in this context? And why is black ontology different than white ontology?

Okay, when we go back to slavery, when we're talking about ontology, we're also talking about categories of being right.

So White, what does that mean? What does that mean category of being.

So whiteness was a category being, it was a way to categorize the population. If you were white, you were human. If you were black, you were not human. If you were white, as a human being, you could be a citizen. If you were black, you were not humans. So you were not a citizen. If you're white, you could own property. If you're black, you could not own property, because you were not human, not a citizen. You could be property, and owned by white people. But you could not own property yourself. Know, when violence is done to a white person, it can only be done by the law. If the person breaks a law, or under a declaration of war. Because blacks were non human, none of those rules apply to black people. And violence could be done to black people, without justification, without rule, any rules of law without a declaration of war. Now, if you look, it's that simple rule about what separates white people from black people look at almost any violent police encounter. And imagine that happening

to say, Donald Trump being stopped by the police. That would never happen to Donald Trump. That would never happen to your white grandmother.

They live in a very different category and that category as defined by who, what rights, how white people are to be regarded, and how black people are to be regarded and treated.

And then having had

people may not even be aware, consciously that they're looking at these things like this. Right? Then you may be a person who absolutely consciously goes, I believe in equality, I believe in democracy, I believe all people are equal. But that doesn't mean you actually act without racial bias. That doesn't mean you don't act with racial bias in the way you think about the world.

You have a fascinating example about this in the book for most very surprising place. You talk about the movie honestok Steven Spielberg's movie about the slave rebellion, and you compare how the movie starts with how the novelization starts. Could you quickly summarize the difference between the two and explain how that illustrates this categorization of what it means to be black property and what it means to be a white subject? And how the novelization challenges that and the movie does not?

Yeah, I happened to be really good friends with Alex Payne, who wrote the novelization of the film script, Thomas died. Now in the beginning of that film, you see the Africans in chains during this ship, the Spanish slave ship, they break their chains, and they start to kill the Spanish sailors. Now, there are no subtitles. So when the Africans are talking, the audience, the American audience doesn't understand what they're saying. Spielberg easily could have put subtitles, but he doesn't. Their first act is a violent act of violence against the white person. Right, they kill the Spanish sailors to take over the ship. Now, you don't actually know looking into this film, you know, you actually know because you know what the story is about. But from the film itself, it doesn't tell you whether these are prisoners or slaves. And eventually, the Africans thinking that the Spanish are sailing to Africa, they end up the Spanish tricked them and sail them to America, where it must be decided whether they're free people or slaves. Now, my friend, Alex Payne, who is a novelist, looked at this beginning he goes, You know, I know I have to use the whole film script. So I have to use this thing, but I'm not going to start my novel there. So he starts a novel in Africa. And sin k is sleeping with his wife and child. So he's not some black man and change. He is a man who's a husband, he has a family, he has a village, he has a culture. He wakes up he feels uneasy. And eventually what happens is a lion comes in attacks the village and sinky kills the lion saves the village. So his first act is a act of a hero saving his village. He's not unintelligible because Alex occupies in case consciousness. Right? And he tries to tell the novel and the story as much as possible from the viewpoint of Cinco de and not the character played by Matthew McDonough. He who is the center of the film Thomas Don, and his goal is to enlist John Quincy Adams to help him argue the case in front of the court. But Alex's novel starts with a completely different plot. The hero is not Matthew McConaughey, the young lawyer, the heroes sink, and sink his goal is to return to his wife and child. It's a different story. It's an African American story, not a white liberal Savior story. The other thing is by starting in Africa, sinkings blackness has no meaning. You know, when Dubois asked what does it feel to be a problem, you know, about black people, thinking his blackness is not a problem in Africa. It's not a question.

Would you explain what that means that blackness is not a problem in Africa. Just there was

no category of whiteness and blackness. He's just the person. The his society doesn't think about white people. His society has no categories of whiteness and blackness is just him and his family and his village. And he doesn't have to go to white people to help determine whether he's a free man or a slave. It's not up to white people to decide who he is. He decides his people decide. And there's no point at which his knowledge of himself can ever be questioned by white people. But Spielberg must start the movie, in the ontology in the categories of blackness and whiteness. because that's the only way you can think about race. Alex could imagine a society where his blackness has no reference to whiteness. And does is in his in its fate is not determined by white people, his humaneness is not determined by way. It's a different story.

And so we have this, this connection back to the things we were talking about before, where as well meaning and as good of a storyteller as Spielberg is, he is playing the part of the police officer in the falando Casteel example, right, because he can only see the story from the white perspective and he doesn't, he tries to be empathetic, he tries to tell a very, very sympathetic story. But he can't do it from the black perspective because that white epistemology is so limited. Whereas the novelization, which is written from an African American perspective, can enter both that black perspective and the white perspective can bring in the movie, from the white perspective, but also add the black perspective. So the ontology and the epistemology work hand in hand, they're not separate categories, you need one to have the other right, you need.

Part of the reason why I wrote this book is to show people they think racism is simple. It's not. They think racism is only there on the surface of society, not in the deep ways we think about our identity, not in the deep ways we think about the way we think about knowledge, or who is reliable, who is trustworthy, not deep ways we think of what violence means in different situations. And so it is this attempt to simplify racism, which is also part of the way the white American guests likes, people of color, and going, what you're seeing what you're feeling, it doesn't exist. If you ask most white politicians today, they would say racism is a minimal thing, or isn't a problem at all. Now, that's not what you would hear from people of color. But then our view of American society is not considered true or official. It's only, you know, white politicians and white people who believe that they are more discriminated against than any people of color. And so the white supremacy in our society is also a white supremacy of knowledge. And this is despite the fact that at every moment, in our racial history, the majority of white Americans have been wrong about the issues of race. And the majority of white, black politics, black people, that black politics, black, ordinary black folk has been right. And yet white America has never turned to black Americans said, you know, we got it wrong, every single point in our racial history a new guys were right. Maybe we should listen to you in the present. That never happens. And that's how you know, we still live in a society where white knowledge is deemed supreme.

Now, this is not just destructive to the black experience. There's something that's destructive to white people as well, when you're talking about James Baldwin, you make this comment in the book that when the oppressor believes his own lies, spirituality is lost. What does this mean? And what kind of spirituality are you talking to? What gets lost in the white experience when they are the oppressors?

One thing that gets lost is there's so much energy spent in denying the truth. So much energy spent in closing up one's ears and eyes to the truth. So much energy spent in anger, hatred, and fear. Now, black America has much more reason to fear of white America than white America has to fear black America. But if you think about the rhetoric in our political moment, the fear is coming from the white right. And it is because you hear a difference. And this is so you know, the other thing I hate about racism is so stupid. It's just stupid. It's a waste of human resources. You know, I'm a third generation Japanese American. I recently wrote narrated a documentary about the Japanese American military intelligence service soldiers in World War Two. That's the beginning of World War Two. America understood. We have white people speak Italian We have white people speak German, we can use them in the battlefield in Europe. But we don't have any white people who speak Japanese, what the hell are we going to do? And so, even though they had imprisoned the Japanese American population on the West Coast, including my parents at 11, and 15, they had to go into the camps and go, does anybody speak Japanese here? Can we test you? Because we need your abilities. And so the reason why I made the documentary is because these men studied at Fort Snelling in Minnesota. And they went out to serve as battlefield translators guides, interrogators, translators of captured messages and documents. And MacArthur's chief of intelligence general Willoughby, said that these Japanese American linguists shortened the war in the Pacific, like two years, and saved a million American lives. And many of these men did this service, even while they were recruited, while being imprisoned by the United States government, why their families were imprisoned by the United States government. So as I tell people, audiences, there are racist and anti immigrant, white Americans walking around today, who would not be alive without the effort of these Japanese American linguists. And yet these people rail against diversity and spirit.

So Where then is that lost spirituality? Okay, so it's stupid. It's counterproductive? It's unjust. What is the spirituality that you're talking about what gets lost when the oppressor believes their own lies,

they become weaker. Ultimately, it is a weakness, it is a sense of guilt. And, you know, one of the things in the book at the end, I say, you know, the way white people should deal with racism is really outlined by Helen Kubler Ross in her book on death and dying, and the process of denial that people go through and confronting their own mortality. And, and the process is she says, five stages one is denial, than anger than bargaining than grief than acceptance. So at the stage of light be let certainly be aware of this. There is no racism in America, or even white people are more discriminated against than than people of color. The second level is anger. Okay, there's racism. Why are you bringing this up? You know, we had a perfectly fine country until you bring up these charges of racism were perfectly fine city until you started protesting about the police. We had a perfectly fine community or business until you started talking about racial incidents. It's you who's causing the problem. Then it's bargaining. Okay, there. Okay. admit there's racism, but it's just a few bad apples, isn't it? No, it's Chris rockin said, would you want to fly in an airplane that had a few bad apples as pilots? Would you want to be operated on a surgery department that had a few bad apples? But of course not, you don't get these vast statistics of racial disparities simply by the act a few bad individuals. It is systemic. And then there's grief and the grief sometimes this legitimate, like Oh, my God, how people other people have suffered, how the people we've repressed have suffered. With sometimes it's like, grief for like, I thought I was okay. Or the question is like, am I a good person? And as I always say, I don't speak about this to make people feel bad, guilty and shameful. I don't believe that's the way you change. I believe you change through knowledge and love. And so the question isn't, whether you're good or bad person is a white person. The question is, do you actually see the proof in front of you that racism exists in this society? I don't know you, I don't know whether you're good or bad person. That's not the question. And finally, there's acceptance. And when Acceptance comes of the issues of racism and the extent of racism, this is this society, a sense of calm and actually spiritual peace comes over one. Because it is the acceptance of the truth of our society of our history. And then it's, what are we going to do about it? And all this energy spent denying can be spent now and constructing a better society and making sure that everybody who comes to the table can be honored and their abilities recognized, because that really is the greatness of America. The greatness of America is not that You know, we should return to being an all white nation, we should return to what America used to be. That isn't the reason why this society has been so successful. And it's never been. It is because we have said that anybody from anywhere can come here and be an American. And that was shown by those Japanese American soldiers during World War Two. It's been shown by the fact that over and over again, the conscious of America, the racial conscience of America has been black America. You can't even think about American culture without thinking of the contributions of African Americans. American music wouldn't even exist as it is without it. So it's this fear of difference rather than the celebration of difference and understanding that is far more creative, far more powerful, far more liberating, far more celebratory than this insistence on whiteness, which I said is stupid, wasteful. And as a way of bamboozling the white working class into thinking that the people who run the society actually care about you.

There's, there's an optimism in your double consciousness that I think we should call attention to here. Because in the midst of these horrible, terrible stories, you're talking about the glory of the future of America. And you're able to bring forth the thing that the white founders tried to establish with the recognition that that can't be established unless you eradicate this whiteness unless you abandon whiteness. And so I guess the question that I would like to end with is following the pattern that you just described? Is it realistic? Do you have a sense of real possibility that there can be healing, reconciliation, forward movement? Or are we just lost and this is a quagmire we're not going to get out of without such profound structural changes that it might end up being the dissolution of society? Can you find hope and optimism in the process of the articulation of these stories of whiteness?

Yes, I think your description of where we are now is thoroughly accurate. And I can't predict the future any more than anybody else can. What I do have is a sense of hope, for America for the principles of equality, freedom and democracy. As I say, in my book, America started with the pursuit of the goal of equality, freedom and democracy. But it also started with the goal of white supremacy, and white people maintaining power over any people of color. Now, these two goals are obviously contradictory, and cannot exist together. But if we remain true to the first goal, right, I think we can get somewhere. And the reason why I have this belief, is in part because I'm an artist. And as a cultural critic, Jeff Chang says, What do artists do, they see the unseen. They hear the unheard, they tell the untold. And by doing that, by creating art, which moves people, with the stories of people with the language of people with a conscience system experience of other people, and celebrating that it changes political consciousness. And that, in a way is why the right is so afraid. That's why the moms for liberty is so afraid of their eight year old kids reading the story of Ruby Bridges. Because of they actually read that they actually be inspired by Ruby purchase, they may actually identify with Ruby Bridges, they may actually think of Ruby Bridges as a fellow human being who should be celebrated. And they will descend Denta phi would being white, or racism and so that is a constant possibility because that's culture comes, you know, in the end, you know, it's pushed by creativity and creativity cannot come from ignoring the truth.

It's also why the very same people who want to defund this history Be and erase the blackness in the United States also want to defund arts and literature in the humanities, right? Because this, this ability to see other options, this ability to see the world as it might be, if you fund that justice, equality, celebration of diversity, it's the natural result, it has to come. Because you have to see the world through not just your eyes, but other eyes, you're creating something from nothing. And that's part of what we have to do we have to create justice from the complete lack thereof. So I really want to emphasize this last bit that your role as an artist is it's not tertiary, it's central.

Yes, I absolutely believe that art is central to changing people's minds and it changes people's minds by making them feel, making them feel the humanity of a Ruby Bridges, making them feel the humanity of Nicola, the young girl in the bluest died young black girl who thinks that her life will be better if she has blue eyes like white people. It It is there in the stories that I am moved by, by all sorts of different writers that I have thought or that I have learned from. And so all of that is beauty. And it is part of trying to get people to understand that you open yourselves up to this beauty. You open yourselves up to the people who are different than you. You will be a better, a stronger, a more resilient person yourself, and also more loving. Unfortunately, we're in this place like Russell Moore, who's a evangelical who is is in many ways departed from the officials of southern evangelicalism has talked about how pastors have come up to him and said, I preach on the Sermon on the Mount. You know, bless it are deplore, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And my parishioners came up to me and said, Where did you get those liberal talking points? God

I, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop us here because that is an entirely different conversation and one that goes us into into depths of, of pessimism. That is, that is, that is beyond what I believe to do on my radio. But David, thank you so much for joining us on why this has been fascinating. It's been difficult. It's been revelatory. It's been a real challenge. I just want to thank you for your work and for your time.

Well, thank you for having me. And thank you for your well thought out questions and the way that you read my book, I really appreciate it.

It was my pleasure. And it's something that I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. You are listening to Jack Russell Weinstein and David Mara on why philosophical discussion about everyday life. I'll be back with a few more thoughts right after this.

Visit IPP ELLs blog P QED philosophical questions every day. For more philosophical discussions of everyday life. Comment on the entries and share your points of view with an ever growing community of professional and amateur philosophers. You can access the blog and view more information on our schedule our broadcasts and the Y radio store at www dot philosophy and public life.org.

You're back with why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host Jack Russell Weinstein, we were talking with David Mira about the myths and stories that whiteness tells itself. This was this was a hard one. Right? This was this. This was a difficult one because in addition to just hearing the rough stories and the terrible things that people have to go through, there is always this sense that there's a finger pointing at me there's a finger pointing at you if you're a white listener, there's a sense of shame and guilt all of which David predicted as he described the process to get through at the end. But I'd like to point out something and really important about the discussion, and that is that almost everything we talked about was structural in nature. Almost everything we talked about is the way the society worked. And the institution works and the history works. David was not pointed to any one individual and saying you, you're racist. What he was saying is that we all exist in racist structures. And what we are responsible for is not the past and the things that brought us here, but rather, the way we encounter it and the way we encounter the future. That's the responsibility that we bear. That's the finger that's pointing to all of us. What do we do now? Once we have the knowledge, what do we do now I am not responsible for slavery, you are not responsible for slavery. I am responsible for recognizing that there is knowledge that there is experience, that my job is not to shut people down, but to open up to listen, to change to try to enter into a different imagination, the point that he made over and over and over again, that white epistemology is exclusionary, that the white experience is only seeing itself that is not a condemnation for all eternity. There is no reason why we can't change that and make our personal epistemology. pluralistic, diverse, how do you do that? You look at art. You read the right novels, you see the right movies, you talk to the right people, you listen, you communicate, you experiment, you say the wrong things around people who you are safe with, and correct yourself. That's where the finger points. This is not an excuse to blame, to shame, to make people feel bad. This is an opportunity to use philosophy, to use art, to use history, to use everyday experience, to get us to learn new skills that make our lives richer, that make our opportunities more to make our lives fuller. That's what it means to restore our spirituality. That's what it means to have a flexible epistemology. We live in a structurally racist society because we live under a brutal history. We can't change the past, we can change the future. With all of that set. If you've been listening to this episode on Sunday evening on Prairie Public, please know that a longer version with almost 30 more minutes of discussion is available online as a podcast. Visit why radio show.org To listen or subscribe for free. For everyone else. Rate us on iTunes and Spotify to help spread the word about the show. Follow us on all the usual social networks our handle is at why radio show and please help us continue broadcasting by making your tax deductible donation at y radio show.org Click donate in the upper right hand corner or go to you Andy's alumni donation portal we exist solely on the money you provide. Thank you yet again to my guest, David Mira, the folks at Prairie Public especially skip wood are long suffering engineer I'm Jack Russell Weinstein signing off for why radio thanks for listening as always, it's an honor to be with you.

Why is funded by the Institute for philosophy and public life? Prairie Public Broadcasting in the University of North Dakota is College of Arts and Sciences and Division of Research and Economic Development. Skip what is our studio engineer. The music is written and performed by Mark Weinstein and can be found on his album Louis soul. For more of his music, visit jazz flute weinstein.com or myspace.com/mark Weinstein philosophy is everywhere you make it and we hope we've inspired you with our discussion today. Remember, as we say at the institute, there is no ivory tower