Race plays a fundamental role in naturalizing social, political, and economic inequalities in the United States. Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes are here with a primer on, and insightful analyses of, The 1619 Project launched by the New York Times in August 2019, The 1776 Report commissioned by Donald Trump and released in January 2021, and recent and ongoing attacks on critical race theory in the US.
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It's not enough to say that people who have an authoritarian right wing vision of the American nation are simply racist.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:So I I think the kind of debates that you're charting out, kind of nationally are actually touching the ground in pretty localized ways around things like curriculum and what kind of curriculum allows us to get our heads around the current conditions and what space we have actually to offer some critique of the dominant liberal narrative of kind of steady, multicultural inclusion.
Narrator:Race plays a fundamental role in naturalizing social, political, and economic inequalities in The United States. As Dan Martinez Hossein and Joe Lowndes note in their book Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Race and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity, racial subordination is an enduring feature of US political history, and it continually changes in response to shifting economic and political conditions. In the country today, there is an intensification of racialized aggression against people of color not seen since a massive resistance to the civil rights movement in the mid twentieth century. While these conditions would seem to provide an extraordinary opportunity for those committed to a vision of economic redistribution and anti racism, in our politics and in our thinking, it seems we inevitably collapse back into a class race divide when engaging with the politics of precarity with which we are faced. Dan and Joe are here today with a primer on and insightful analyses of the 1619 project launched by the New York Times in August 2019, the 1776 report commissioned by Donald Trump and released in January 2021, and recent and ongoing attacks on critical race theory in The United States.
Narrator:This conversation was recorded in July 2021.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Alright. Hi, Joe.
Joseph Lowndes:Good morning, Dan.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:I know you well. I've known you for a long time, but, the folks listening to this podcast, may not. So, tell us about yourself, Joe.
Joseph Lowndes:I am a, professor of political science at the University of Oregon. My work over time has addressed mainly US politics, but not only. I've studied the rise of the, political right. I also study and write about institutional and party politics as well as racial politics.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:I'll just say quickly to introduce myself. I teach in the ethnicity, race, and migration program at Yale. I write about, social movements, anti racism, anti racism in, education in particular. Joe and I were formerly colleagues at the University of Oregon in ethnic studies and political science, and that's where we started working on this book, Producers, Parasites, and Patriots. Today, we're gonna talk about, the 1776 report, the attacks on critical race theory, how that has to do with a kind of this question of a dynamic and really very rapidly changing sense of how conservatism operates.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Joe, I wonder if we could start, like, maybe talking about the book and the kinds of questions you were interested in and we were interested in bringing to, Producers, Parasites and Patriots, and and what we were noticing at the time in the last ten years about the ways that racial politics seem to be shifting.
Joseph Lowndes:Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. In some ways, there were there were two kinds of questions. One of them was kind of a always complicated and always kind of shifting politics of race and class in The United States and the ways in which these two phenomena, I guess, interact, interrelate, are coconstituted, and yet are always, having to be renovated and reshaped to meet new political realities.
Joseph Lowndes:On the left, particularly in The US Left, I think also among scholars of race, there are very lively questions about how to think about class in the context of a, a settler and white supremacist country. And, you know, and I think those are many fruitful debates and discussions and many not fruitful debates and discussions. But I think we were trying to get a little bit of a handle on that for ourselves. And the other thing is that related to that were some surprising things that we were noticing on the landscape. Now in this moment when we, you know, when The US is in its age of most kind of economic inequality, really ever.
Joseph Lowndes:Right? The the scholars call the second gilded age, but it's really something more than a than the second gilded age insofar as the gap in wealth between the richest Americans and everyone else is bigger than it ever has been. And we're partly concerned about how that disrupts, destabilizes, and shifts, political ground institutionally, discursively from movements to parties to individual identifications. And so, within that, with with the kind of the understanding that destabilized class politics and always reshifting race politics, you're going to see some, movement and change over time. One of the things we noticed was that the white workers in public sector unions, on the one hand and kind of the the the white poor, particularly in large swaths of exurban and rural America that were no longer flourishing, were no longer protected, were no longer had their whiteness as a form of indemnification.
Joseph Lowndes:So two things we noticed. One, the conservatives were beginning to attack these poor whites as if they were no longer part of the club of whiteness. And in in using new racial language to talk about poor whites either in Appalachia or elsewhere, which was interesting to us to see what happens when white people are falling off the bottom. Do their their former allies seek to keep them in, or do they let them drop out and then accuse them and blame them for their own inability to flourish? And the other one with with public sector unions, it was a a moment when there were real attacks on public sector unions across the board.
Joseph Lowndes:Many of these racialized attacks on, government workers, but these were attacks that hit a lot of white workers as as well as black and Latino workers. So we were kind of interested and see how that the the curiousness of and the it's kind of scrambling of both political and racial codes that allow these new kinds of attacks to, because that was that was one part of the book. The other half of it was to look at the ways in which the right from the Republican Party on rightward to the far right, militia movement, alt right, etcetera, was oddly recruiting people of color and using anti racist discourse and using, black and brown identity as generative forms of far right articulation.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:So, you know, it was really on the one hand trying to keep these, you know, somewhat contradictory ideas that there continues to be a dominant racial order, absolutely marked by white supremacy, by the exploitation of Black and Brown workers, that that has not changed. And at the same time, because of these intense forms of economic inequality and precarity, we were seeing new justifications, regimes, descriptions, and accounts that help to kind of shore up that inequality. This might be a way for us to start talking about the 1776 report, which came out, as, most folks will remember, in early January, Trump's last days in office. All of its kind of credited authors were pretty, unapologetic self identified conservatives, folks on the right. It was meant to be a kind of response in some ways, a rhetorical response at least, to the 1619 project produced by the New York Times, a few years earlier, which argued that to understand The United States' national formation, we couldn't just go back to the nation's founding in 1776, we had to look to 1619 and the start of a system of race based slavery and anti blackness to really understand the nation's formation.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:This took on kind of new political significance in the fall when a kind of journalist named Christopher Rufo, launched the first in a salvo of attacks against, critical race theory, arguing that critical race theory had somehow now come to define and capture government trainings, all kinds of indoctrinations, diversity work, etcetera. So, Joe, I thought we could work through a little bit about what's the kind of dominant account you've been hearing to explain this recent explosion in both kind of conservative panics and political spectacles over anti racist education in general, perhaps critical race theory in particular. What's the kind of dominant interpretation that you've been hearing about this?
Joseph Lowndes:Well, the dominant liberal interpretation, let's say, is that it's an attempt at, you know, censorship of, a more full education for Americans, be they school children or people in higher education of the the real roots of, the American political system forged in in slavery. And I think, you know, part of it is this is this is an idea that's reactionary. It comes from the right that, of course, every good liberal knows that you must talk about slavery, and every good liberal knows that you must talk about forms of disparity and discrimination and, you know, should embrace new modes of of thinking of a pluralist America, a diverse America. And I think so it's it's almost as if from the from the liberal side, what you get is a desire for a fuller origin story and a fuller sense of both American original sin and American, redemptive promise. I think that that's those are the kind of the two sides of it.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. And and there's some truths to this. Right? That the both the attack and the 1776 report, you know, should just be understood, you know, primarily through a lens of kind of like censorship. That really what's at stake is to kind of prohibit, outlaw, or stigmatize all discussions about race, about racism and racial subordination, and to kind of rob critics of racial inequality and segregation of any kind of language in which to address it.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:But part of what you're saying is it's not quite as simple as that because there's actually an admission of kind of some language to talk about race. And it's the language of, you know, what others have called civic nationalism, which is to acknowledge that indeed there have been some, episodes of racial domination. They acknowledge slavery. They may acknowledge even examples of colonialism. But the argument is that the civic bonds that kind of hold the nation together have withstood that and indeed the kind of anti racist mover sensibility should be to uphold those civic bonds.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:So and to have the discussions about racism and slavery and abolition within the acceptable boundaries of civic nationalism. It's what we read. It's almost what every school kid reads in their US History book today. So rather than a kind of full out prohibition, it's instead a a kind of insistence that these discussions can only take place within the boundaries of, civic nationalism and American exceptionalism.
Joseph Lowndes:Yeah. I think that's that's right. And so I guess for us, really, in some ways, the question is what that kind of response or reaction to the attack on the 1619 project or more broadly the attack on critical race theory or education around race and slavery, or as you said, or at the boundaries of settler colonialism. What does that limit, or what does that leave out, or how are we constrained by that kind of language? Who is left uncriticized in, you know, in in the couching it that way?
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. I mean, I think part of what this seeks to render as, illegitimate or I mean, this is where the I think the language of patriotism really courses through all of it is that any kind of structural critiques, I mean and really, here's the interesting thing for me, Joe, is that it's a critique of liberalism that actually seems to most outrage and liberal institutions and liberal norms and laws that is actually what's the kind of greatest offense to if you, you know, kind of unpack the seventeen seventy six project, which is that the kind of dominant laws, kind of legal infrastructure, the sets of anti discrimination laws that have been put into place. I mean, that's what's venerated in the 1776 report. It's the, capacity of these prevailing institutions to actually deal with these conflicts. So I think there's just a really interesting kind of genealogy here because, I I mean, as you know, critical race theory emerges in the legal academy in the eighties and nineties actually as a critique, less about racial conservatism and really more about liberal institutions and the prevailing set of anti discrimination laws and why twenty years after their passage, they proved so limited in addressing underlying patterns of segregation and inequality.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:So here you have, you know, primarily scholars on the left, scholars of color, critiquing liberal institutions. And now we have these folks on the right rallying to actually defend the liberal institutions, you know, from this more kind of radical critique. And so that's part part of what I think is, you know, disorienting at least for me is, you know, the the critique from the right here is actually not about, like, western chauvinism or exceptionalism. That's not the language we're hearing this. It's a it's a critique of liberal institutions, and I think that's where some interesting politics seem to be unfolding.
Joseph Lowndes:Mhmm. Mhmm. Wait. So when you say that the seventeen seventy six project seeks to criticize liberal that it they themselves are criticizing liberal institutions.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Well well, I think that it's the seventeen six project and the critics of critical race theory that actually are defending this project of, you know, what we you know, what others have called civic nationalism, which is that the prevailing sets of legal institutions, anti discrimination laws, etcetera, are kind of most capable of addressing the, you know, continued effects and endurance of racial inequality. So it's not that they're all together saying no discussion should take place about race, about segregation, about legacies of slavery, etcetera. They're arguing that those discussions should only happen within the norms of kind of US exceptionalism and, liberal rulemaking. And I think the the reaction is in part to to to critics of those liberal institutions, which is what critical race theory and broadly a a more kind of foundational approach to anti racist work. It's a skepticism about those laws, about anti discrimination laws, about the markets, about these other liberal norms for actually being able to address racial inequality.
Joseph Lowndes:That's actually kind of an interesting territory here. So on the one hand, the, seventeen seventy six project seeks to I mean, I it's as I read it, the sixteen nineteen project sought to say, look. There are stained origins of the of The United States founding, and that there are problematic elements that we would find in the American Revolution, that we would find in the constitution, that we would find in the early developmental years of the republic, which both were found partly on or built and extended forms of white supremacy in ways that are, now still within the American political system.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. And I'll just just to add to that. That's right. And endure in all of these ways, right, in the structure of housing markets and transportation systems, in popular culture, in education and the curriculum, that they're kind of not just they're both baked in, but, constantly evolving and saturate all of these institutions. They're not, you know, and as critical race theorists would say, they're not aberrational.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:They're not irregular or exceptional. They're kind of, central and constitutive of the way these institutions are organized.
Joseph Lowndes:Mhmm. Mhmm. That's exactly right. And the seventy seventy six project wants to say, look. The possibilities of, a more expansive project of egalitarianism and of, an inclusive civic nationalism are what's really, in the so called DNA of our of our founding and constitution.
Joseph Lowndes:And that this that the system itself is capacious enough to render these and attacks on, American origins. I guess what it feels like to me a little bit is that you've got defenders of the sixteen nineteen project saying, look. We have to face some real problematic origins here as a way of thinking through ongoing and evolving, and as you say, new forms of, racial inegalitarianism. We could say that the seventeen seventy six project or really kind of the right more broadly these days want to say what you're saying what you're what you're attacking is American innocence. What you're attacking is an idea that America was something else besides having, at its moment of founding, visions of freedom and egalitarianism and democracy, in its sights.
Joseph Lowndes:That and this is the thing. For the right, it feels like what they are unable to bear is this attack on American innocence and attack on the founding. For defenders of 1619, what it seems like is it is kind of a sense of we're not calling to for guilt and blame. We're calling for, a responsible politics going forward to forge some other path. But I it feels like that is kind of like a debate within civic nationalism, a debate within kind of American identity, a debate within and among people who themselves want to claim different visions of American identity.
Joseph Lowndes:Right? That may leave out a lot of things altogether. I mean, it might be if you were to push, you know, some of the logic of critical race theory and some of the logic of 1619 further, it might be to say, what is left to defend, or what do we wanna say about, this this American project that we seek to to recover. Right? I mean, the problem is on the one hand, there's a question about institutions and public policies.
Joseph Lowndes:On the other hand, there's something about nation and culture. Right? I mean, what if there had been imagine a 1492 project. Right? Just say that, like, the the very the very foundings of The US nation, that is itself such an extraordinary genocidal crime that what are we seeking to defend, or what are we seeking to redeem, or what kind of set of promises?
Joseph Lowndes:Would you hear often from defenders of 1619 is to say, we want to have America not as a not not as something that was perfect at the founding, but as a promise at the founding. Right? So those are the two sides. Whether it was whether it was immaculate conception or, whether it was original sin, but there's ways in which the the two sides of that, that's kinda, like, two rival origin stories, you know, might limit our ability to think more deeply about, the ways in which liberals are themselves continually reproducing and enlisted in the reproducing of of ongoing racial projects.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. So I I think you're you're kind of suggesting this is actually a differing accounts of redemption, right, and of American redemption and, like, which one will prevail. And it's true that, you know, the essays Nicole Hannah Jones, the kind of lead essay in the sixteen nineteen project. The argument is that African Americans have, you know, long nurtured and practiced and articulated the most robust forms of democracy, but as you're suggesting, American democracy. So one that it still imagines that the nation is the ideal and most kind of effective container to harbor, right, all of our best dreams about care and life and survival and kinship.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Mhmm. And then, of course, that comes at the expense. It just comes to the expense of long standing black political critiques of the nation also as a site of militarism, of violence, of imperialism, and that it's kind of, you know, the the forms of inequality and violence and exploitation even internally are also baked in. That's not redeemable in any kind of sense. So, there's a way that they're both kind of competing for that same sense of, like, who is the, like, ethical and moral interpreter of the, you know, a certain kind of, like, redemptive vision of the nation.
Joseph Lowndes:Yes. That's exactly right. And here's the thing, I think where our analysis that we try to develop in our book, I feel like, matters here in part because, you you know, you'll see, the the people who attack the 1619 project, people who are attacking critical race theory, people who are attacking more broadly a new and very open anti racist moment over you know, say, you know, we give the the mark the periods of it with the sixteen nineteen project, the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the development of, Christopher Rufo's attack on critical race theory. You know, the people who are, involved in the attack on an emergent black politics are are accused of by liberals often as being like, that's fascism. That's authoritarianism.
Joseph Lowndes:That's, you know, that's that's where we see it. Radical black politics has always said, like, there was already it's always been fascist or it's always been authoritarian. It's always been built in. So then for I think for the analysis in our book, partly is what we noticed is that it's not enough to say that people who have an authoritarian right wing vision of the American nation are simply racist, and those who want, you know, a more liberal version are simply anti racist. What partly, what we see is that the anti CRT people continually want to enlist and put on the forefront black people and brown people who are also critical of critical race theory, you know, also critical of 1619, who who want to redeem a vision of the American nation and of the founders and of the constitution and of the American revolution.
Joseph Lowndes:You see it over and over again. And there's something that that criticism has deep appeal to the 1776 folks because they see that as built in. They don't see themselves as racist. They see themselves as as, having a a version of, like, 1776 anti racism. And the thing is, liberals who wanna see themselves on the other side, it's almost like a a mirrored opposite.
Joseph Lowndes:Liberals who wanna see themselves as as, you know, fully anti racist may themselves be implicated in all forms of racial exclusion, racial stratification, and everything else. And so I I think partly what we're trying to analyze this book is the ways in which the the codes that we wanna use, the comfortable codes around race and identity and politics get scrambled, as we begin to think about capitalism, the authoritarian state, and the political right. And I and that puts us in different kind of territory and demands of us maybe a a different kind of or or to recover a different kind of critique.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. I think, you know and, certainly, this has, like, very material effects. So, like, rhetorically, you know, the kind of contention that the 1776 project and the attacks on CRT are, exclusively done in the name of censorship of a kind of, like, nineteenth century white revanchist, lost cause narrative. I mean, though those elements clearly are coursing through all of this. So it's it's not that it has nothing to do with it.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:The problem is, and I think you're getting it, is if we only understand it as that project, the this kind of effort to, like, rebuild and defend, a white Christian nation from any forms of critique and attack, we miss the ways actually that the right is actually quite conversant in the language of liberal norms, civic nationalism, a certain kind of pluralism and inclusion, that it's not simply about an acting a kind of like, white ethno state. And in fact, that's always been a kind of, relatively in The US minor note of right wing racial projects, even white supremacist racial projects. And if we underestimate their kind of capacity to work through the language of racial liberalism, of inclusion, of civic belonging and membership, you know, the critique in response will just it won't be, like, sophisticated enough to account for what's, you know, these developments on the right.
Joseph Lowndes:Yeah. I think that's exactly right. And I and I think sometimes people who wanna defend sixteen nineteen or critical race theory will claim only the most modest ground for it by saying, look. We're only trying to say that this must also be part of the teaching of American history. We're only trying to say that, we need diversity, equity, and inclusion in our corporate practices, in in in trainings of managers.
Joseph Lowndes:And the the the problem is claiming that most modest ground is almost to give the game away entirely to the other side. It's to say that, look. We're just calling for a a form of American civic nationalism that takes these things into account. As opposed to saying, going the other direction with it and saying, yes. 1619 actually means that, you know, we we have to rethink, and problematize the entire project of American nation building and of capitalism and, you know, which which goes, obviously, as we know, hand in hand with with both slavery and land theft and genocide.
Joseph Lowndes:That that's all those are things that are deeply wrapped up together. So we actually, what is demanded of this moment is and what, you know, at its heart, sixteen nineteen does is push forward that and open up very uncomfortable and very radical questions. Same as you said with critical race theory at its origins that it really is it was to say, like, look. The American political system was forged, you know, at a at a moment of when slavery, was intact. And so what we have is a a set of institutions and a set of institutional, actions, which will always reproduce it.
Joseph Lowndes:So for instance, the Supreme Court can now gut the final few ailing elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by partly claiming an anti racist language around it. Right? They can deny the possibility of a full franchise just using the constitution and federalism. In the words of chief justice John Roberts, the best way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating by race. And and there there you have it.
Joseph Lowndes:And it leaves us with very few tools, you know, if we if we accept the ground of American institutions, if we accept the constitution, if we accept the role of the supreme court, and we accept the American nation. So that's, I think, partly what I think you and I were trying to get at in our earlier conversations of, like, what this means to actually ask questions about, you know, what kind of critique and then what kind of politics are required. And it's partly what we saw on the streets all summer with Black Lives Matter. Right? It was the, you know, the the emergent radical demands around abolition of police, around a new politics of mutual aid and care, around decentralized struggles, local struggles, militant struggles, direct democratic spontaneous struggles, which which give us a, you know, a a very different valence on how to defeat the racists in a way.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. Absolutely. And and the kind of that the larger imperative is about building institutions and structures and relations outside of the, you know, all the dominant forms that it's not simply about being incorporated into the dominant forms because those dominant forms are always gonna cause people harm, always gonna, be rooted in incarceration and violence. And so, as you said, there were these kind of moments, you know, that were especially alert and alive and kind of generated through the protests that, new conditions, new structures were possible. I mean, the one other, you know, example I wanna add to this is, in Connecticut where I am, as in many states, there's been discussions about the need to diversify the k through 12 curriculum in general and in high school level, kind of the high school history and social studies curriculum in particular.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:So, we have a law that's calling for a new that's gonna require a new elective in black and Latino studies. And the interesting debate over that here hasn't really been as much like, is it acceptable or not to teach it, but it's what the contours and politics of a course like that would entail. On the one hand, there's a set of folks that really want it to be a course about contributions to the nation that's kind of group based. So, African Americans would be kind of, like, set off as a group, and then we would chart across history their contributions, and then Latinos as a kind of separate population group and talk about their contributions. And in contrast to that, you know, there's been student organizers, educators, and others that say, no.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Really, what we need is a course about racism and the harms and violence associated with it and its ongoing legacies in ways that actually wouldn't separate, African Americans and Latinos into discrete groups because those histories are constantly converging and co constitutive. And it would actually be a course about structure.
Joseph Lowndes:Mhmm. It would
Daniel Martinez HoSang:be a course about the structural inheritances and everyday practices of these forms of inequality. So I I think that the, you know, the kind of debates that you're charting out, kind of nationally are actually touching the ground in in in pretty localized ways around things like curriculum and and what kind of curriculum allows us to get our heads around the current conditions and what space we have actually to offer some critique of the dominant liberal narrative of kind of steady, multicultural inclusion.
Joseph Lowndes:That's so interesting and such a perfect example because what you you point to is that if students demand instead of a a curriculum about forms of inclusion and forms of kind of, collective group heroism in the building of the American story, by starting with and anchoring it in harms, in forms of oppression, in racism. What that allows is actually, as as you just said, a structural critique, you know, a a a way in to having a much clearer picture of of how institutions and structures reproduce forms of racial violence. And so it's it's really it's the most, intellectually responsible way to go about it, not not as a form of of moralizing or, you know, baiting or or guilting, but to say that, like, yes, we have to start with harms racial oppression because that actually generates and opens up the possibility of really thinking through what these problems are. It's really interesting because I yeah. Think about, you know, pulling that the lens back larger from, the Connecticut example you just gave.
Joseph Lowndes:It's as if, you know, on the one side, 1776 offers a vision that says, look. The founding was had embedded within it brilliant visions of future democracy and egalitarianism and freedom. Black and brown people can be incorporated into that great story from that was, you know, that was started by our visionary founders, and we move forward with that in, a redemptive vision of the country. The conclusion of the our book, yours and my book, was to really invert that and say, if we start on the other side and look at the struggles by people of color in The United States, what you get is a possibility of including white people into that project, but into a project that is as broadly visionary, that is that it comes from the insights from Harriet Tubman, from Frederick Douglass, from Du Bois, from the Combahee River Collective, from Audre Lorde. The the struggles of people of color, the, politics of queer black feminism, offer us a vision that other people can be incorporated into as well, that really give us rich and egalitarian possibilities and visions and ways forward.
Joseph Lowndes:So it's kinda like 1776 says, let's start with the founding and incorporate people of color into it, and it's all good. A black radical analysis or other, adjacent analysis would be to say, let's start with forms of oppression, exploitation, violence, and exclusion, and build out a, a visionary politics from there. The problem with liberal critics of 1776 is they're a little bit closer to the 1776 side. They they are they are offering a softer version of seventeen seventy six without going all the way into the critique, I think.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:I I I think that's right. And and the effects of some of these recent debates about that is actually to if if we can think about, you know, both the body of work, you describe as critical race theory and 1619 as having a kind of a range, right, of politics. Some that are more structural and kind of radical in their aspirations, other that are more use the idiom of civic nationalism, that the effect of this fight has actually been to bring many, many people much more into the kind of civic nationals liberal fold, where what's at stake seems to be, you know, pretty bland milk toast, right? Principles of liberalism, freedom of speech, inclusion, belonging, that kind of drops out the far more radical critiques you're describing about militarism, how it harms, you know, all of us, the forms of predation that are connected with market economies. So in this kind of strange way, as the, seventeen seventy six projects kind of, announced their defense of, American liberalism and exceptionalism.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:It's kind of, created this kind of gravity that pulls in what could be more radical critics of that project into actually defending its very norms, and to, kind of asserting that they're actually the true and authentic and genuine interpreters of those ideals.
Joseph Lowndes:Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. And that puts them on strong footing, I think, as we've seen. I mean, many people thought when Chris Rufo first goes on, I guess it was Tucker Carlson and and, you know, lays out this whole conspiracy theory around critical race theory that's kind of rich in the tradition of American conspiracy theorizing and, you know, anti communism and antisemitism and everything else.
Joseph Lowndes:Trump soon signs executive order banning diversity trainings in in the federal government and then, creates the seventeen seventy six project. It is a moment that, you know, I think a lot of people thought, you know, this was not gonna last that long. It was so kooky. And once Trump left office, it was going to, you know, surely die out because there was just it it seemed so desperate and so extreme in his way. But then it really had legs, and it really it it just caught on like wildfire in fights at local school boards and state legislatures and all over the country.
Joseph Lowndes:And I think it's because this 7076 project as, you know, as idiotic as that report is when you read it, and there's, like, not one historian involved in its development, it has a certain kind of ideological power, which also is appealing to many white moderates or liberals as well. And that's the thing. They they really have the upper hand in this because they're calling for a kind of there's a like, what's, you know, what's wrong with kind of an inclusive, American civic nationalism? What what's so wrong with that? Why do we, you know, why would we have to, do any more than that?
Joseph Lowndes:And part of it, I think, is I think that mostly kind of, like, their deep American racial resentments and fears and desires for innocence as James Baldwin put it. They get they got really triggered and fired up by this. But, also, they were able to claim ground that is is not just on the right, but really, like, that most of America accepts.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. And and I think what's this is, and and it relates to one last, you know, area I hope we can discuss, which is, so on the one hand, this seems like part of a, really a long standing project to associate a kind of radical democratic anti racism with a kind of revenge fantasy in which these kind of newly energized, political formations will take out their anger and frustration and resentment on the innocent white populace. And in that sense, really trades in a certain kind of fear of, like, guilt, shame, and humiliation. That if this radical project takes root, they're coming after you and they're not just coming after you materially, they wanna humiliate you. So rather than following, you know, the argument you said about a kind of, the way a black feminist politics actually leads to, you know, radical and unprecedented forms of democratic inclusion that their actually aspiration is only to humiliate and degrade.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:And that's why people who think of themselves as white should be on guard because at stake is your humiliation. And I wanted to, Joe, get your thoughts about I mean, we talked, you know, in the book about how humiliation and shame was actually, at the center of so much of Trump's discourse, the way he addressed supporters. We're not winning at anything anymore. This is the kind of age of our humiliation as a way to fire people up. So, what are your thoughts about that and about the ways that, this kind of right wing response to anti racism as there's nothing in it for you, and in fact, the only outcome of this is gonna be your degradation.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:They wanna degrade you, as a way to, again, kind of generate profound anger and antipathy against these projects because people so feel like their very being is what's gonna be come under attack.
Joseph Lowndes:Yeah. I mean, as you say it, you know, the the, you know, Trump's whole project being one of describing his base as as one of humiliated losers, which he did over and over, particularly in 02/2016. It it almost feels like the extraordinary pleasure that, the right has in attacking, critical race theory is it's almost sadomasochistic, right, if you were to be psychoanalytic about it. That there's something about the pleasure of this humiliation that that's that's going on here at the at the heart of this, that people are being told, yes yes. You are going to be exposed and found guilty, and you're going to be humiliated through shame for what you've done.
Joseph Lowndes:You know, so many people, particularly on the on the right are so, you know, saturated in this kind of, I would say, discourse, but it's really like an affective environment of humiliation that they're just they're just ready for that. And easy then to nurture fantasies of, yes. They're as you said, they're coming for you too. This is going to be every school board is going to put things into place that are gonna make it so that your child feels humiliated and your child feels, shame and and and self hatred. I mean, there's different things going on here in terms of, like the the attack on critical race theory is is so broad and has so many different elements that work, but that certainly is is is one of them.
Joseph Lowndes:What's being played on here and, yes, it is this the worst fears and the worst sense of of people who already feel hammered and humiliated by neoliberalism, hammered and humiliated by the state. They don't want any more of that, and they see themselves often, I think white people see themselves in the visions of the humiliations that they see people of color experiencing. So, you know, that's gotta be part of in this sense, as opposed to the idea that, like, actually, maybe trying to work out or critique of how kind of the origins of white supremacy and class rule can open up new articulations and new possibilities and new expressions of freedom and new forms of resistance and new forms of solidarity and coalition building and new visions of alternative polities for white folks as well. It's kinda like what I think they they hope to put in place in the fact that if we think of the Black Lives Matter movement as having brought millions of white people into the streets as well in a black led movement in every little town in Hamlet as well as every major city in the country to respond by saying, don't follow that vision.
Joseph Lowndes:That vision's only gonna humiliate you. I know you see freedom there. There. I know you see solidarity there. I know you see other possibilities there.
Joseph Lowndes:But if you go there, these people are only gonna destroy you. And think about, you know, the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties that, you know, a biracial, you know, populist movement in the South results in the institution of Jim Crow. There are elites who do not wanna see whites joining the struggles of people of color or abandoning elements of their whiteness there. And so that it's it's a key to making sure that that, a more radical vision doesn't happen.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Yeah. I I was thinking precisely that that it's precisely the way Reconstruction and its most, radical and kind of inclusive multiracial commitments get stigmatized and ultimately defeated such that, you know, ultimately the white populace or a large section of it is told that it's like it actually is your whiteness that will offer you, some kind of currency and status and these other visions have nothing to offer you. And to represent them, therefore, is radical, destructive, beyond the pale, you know, has been so central into populist movements in the early twentieth century, to the most radical forms of multiracial organizing, labor organizing during the New Deal, to the, you know, upsurge in kind of civil and human rights work and international work in the 1960s. So in that sense, it feels very much a piece of that genealogy of how to stigmatize a certain kind of, anti racist, multiracial tradition and to undermine, in particular, white support for it. And, you know, we think about, you know, the attacks on voting rights but also on union rights that we absolutely label as racially targeted and discriminatory.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Think of all the, you know, new wave of voting rights happening. It's true. You know, their profound impact will be on Black and Brown voters. You know, that also obviously despoils any sense of democratic participation for large numbers of people. Yes.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Right? Imagining that an excess of democracy and popular participation is somehow bad for our, you know, shared kind of democratic aspirations. I mean, that has profoundly devastating effects on everyone's, like, sense of what's possible. So, I, you know, I I think, again, what we're seeing here is, like, how does do folks on the right kind of build support for projects that continually violate and alienate, you know, large numbers of their own, base and constituency and that that's part of the complex politics we're seeing here?
Joseph Lowndes:Dan, thanks. This is so fun talking to you, and I I love exploring these issues with you as usual.
Daniel Martinez HoSang:Thanks, Joe. Yeah. I lots of insights I'm kind of getting my head around from this conversation and, you know, like, always as a reminder about the kind of need to face the hard stuff, the complexities, the things we don't quite, know and understand. If we're to develop a kind of politics and, an approach that really has the capacity to respond to the profound, profound challenges, we're facing at the moment. So really appreciate being in conversation with you, Joe.