Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Am I Racist?" with Stan Grant

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"Am I Racist?" with Stan Grant · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans! Welcome to the show that goes where others don't. The show that rejects
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  partisan squabbling and tribal groupthink. I'm Josh Zips. I'm your humble warrior princess,
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  hunting down the world's most fascinating minds to wrestle with one provocative question each week.
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  Much of modern culture and politics and media is tailor-made, especially social media.
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  Tailor made to pander to what we already believe and distort what we don't, to reinforce our
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  biases and exaggerate our differences. But change doesn't happen in an echo chain.
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  It's time to leave the mental comfort zone, to flex our mind,
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  and step on some landmines. It's time to have uncomfortable conversations.
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  Today on the show, an almost perfect guest on an almost perfect topic at an almost perfect time
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  for our first episode. And I only say almost perfect because nothing's entirely perfect on
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  this fallen or young lads and lassies were all a bit grubby. And that's sort of the purpose
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  of this show. Point that out to have a little bit of intellectual humility and to avoid the
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  kind of purity tests and the self certainty that has become so commonplace in our conversations
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  with each other. I want to wrestle towards something better. I want to have a time out from having
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  to choose between two poles in culture with right-wing blowhards on one side and on the other side
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  a rag-tag bunch of cancel culture outrage peddlers. I want neither of them. I want to reach across the
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  aisle and share a cigarette in No Man's Land on Christmas Day or not a cigarette and that's
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  probably politically incorrect as well. Can we share something else? Can we share a how about a
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  vegan bowl, vegan quinoa bowl, vegan quinoa, kombucha bowl? Did they have those at Passiondale?
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  Did they have those at the psalm? I digress. Look, the point is that on almost every hot button issue
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  these days, I do feel we are expected to choose between one of two sets of predefined opinions.
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  And a huge amount of the conversation that goes on in the media, not just social media but
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  conventional media and politics too, sounds like people reciting scripts essentially of what they
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  know they're supposed to say. It's amazing to me that if I know, for example, what you think about
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  climate change, let's say I find out that you're a climate denier. Then I can tell you with some
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  certainty what you probably believe about corporate tax rates and the monarchy and police brutality
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  and whether we should teach Shakespeare in schools and whether we should prescribe hormone
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  blockers to transgender teenagers. I mean, how is that possible? What kind of intellectual
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  conformism are we allowing ourselves to be subjugated to? If I know all of the things you believe
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  about these completely disparate, different unrelated topics, simply because you exist within one
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  silo. This is the show that bursts the silos. This is the show that exists to have bullshit free
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  conversations and breathe a breath of fresh air into all the things that are going on in the world
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  that seem intractable and that seem difficult to discuss. In coming weeks, we'll be talking about
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  all kinds of things from economic fairness to ethnic diversity, to the coronavirus, to the lockdown,
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  to social media, to the news, to the MeToo movement, to the war on drugs, to sexuality, to
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  indigency, ah, blah, blah, blah, lots. But let's kick things off with an easy subject, an
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  uncontroversial subject, a subject that couldn't possibly get me into any trouble. Let's talk about race.
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  Since late May, when the video went viral at horrifying video of a black man George Floyd being
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  killed by a cop kneeling on his neck, protests have swept the world, a re-evaluation, re-examination
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  of our relationship towards white privilege and towards depictions of people of color in the media
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  has taken place, episodes of faulty towers have been pulled, episodes of 30 rock have been pulled.
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  We're at a moment in which we're thinking things through, but we're not thinking things through
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  very carefully, I don't think. There's an expectation that you will have one of two points of view.
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  On the one side, you're allowed to say that we live in an irredeemably white supremacist society
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  that sees no problem in crushing the life out of black and indigenous bodies, and so it's time for
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  white people to shut up so that we can cancel everyone who isn't quite up to speed with the program.
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  And on the other side, there are people who loudly proclaim that racism is not a big problem
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  in society, that the whole thing is a bit of a storm in a teak up, and that the real reason why
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  police kill and imprison more people of color is because they interact with more people of color,
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  because people of color commit more crimes. So the status quo is basically fine and protestors should
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  get over it. What a horrible pair of propositions to have to choose between. So I say don't.
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  Stan Grant is arguably the world's most influential indigenous Australian. He was a familiar face
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  all over the world as a senior international correspondent for CNN for many years.
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  If you were ever in the habit of traveling abroad and you turn on a hotel TV, you'd always see his
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  face in Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong or Beijing. He won Australia's big television award, a logi
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  back in the 90s for his current affairs program, Real Life, and he helped launch Australia's national
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  indigenous television channel. He recently made a hit film about the racist demonization of an
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  indigenous football superstar. It was called the Australian Dream and at one Australian Academy
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  of Cinema and Television Arts Award. In fact, he's got such cred in Australia that last year,
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  the Prime Minister asked him to run for Parliament, but Stan turned him down. He's now a commentator
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  on indigenous and world affairs and the perfect mind to guide us through the thicket of uncertainties
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  and ambiguities and contradictions that lie in the No Man's Land, that lie in the Grey Zone,
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  that lie between the two obvious partisan storylines about race, colonization, police brutality,
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  and Black Lives Matter. My uncomfortable question today is simple.
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  M.I. racist. We started off chatting about a new book, Stan's writing, so let's just pick up
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  the conversation right there. Follow this show on Twitter at Uncomfy Convose. That's Uncomfy
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  with a Y. Convose. Give us a rating and a review right now, so the iTunes algorithm knows to
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  promote us and enjoy this uncomfortable conversation with Stan Grant.
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  Yeah, you're asked down in the queue. Yeah, you're asked down in the queue.
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  Yes, keep on writing. It's a beautiful book. And when you come to a roadblock,
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  you've got to write your way through the roadblock. Yeah, you can't think your way through it.
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  That's right. Sit down, you've got to keep going.
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  You've got to keep going. And it doesn't matter if you don't write anything,
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  as long as you do your four hours or two hours or whatever, you sit in the chair.
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  You can sit there. And I'm pretty good and journalism gives you a discipline and a focus.
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  I can very comfortably put down 2,000 words in a morning that I would be happy to have published.
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  So they've written and edited. But some days, I can get 6, 7,000 down when you hit a vein.
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  I can do that, but they're all awful. Yeah, I like the adage that all writing is actually
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  rewriting. Don't worry about making the first draft out of good. As long as you just get something
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  down on the page and then you make it good later. Yes, but you've got to get it down and catch
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  the thoughts. The other thing about writing too is that when follow, follow your instinct,
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  because there are times you sit down and go, look, I want to say this and you're moving in a certain
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  direction. But then you reach a point where you know, you know, take a left turn. And even though
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  the left turn may lead you down a whole lot of rabbit holes. But if you don't do it,
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  if it feels right, go there. If you try to stay on your path, if you say, no, I've got to finish this,
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  if you see it as a linear process, it's not going to work. You've got to go, when the moment hits,
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  like I was writing a story, I was outside bin Laden's house after he was killed. Not yesterday,
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  this is a pass. Yeah, after he was killed. So I'm there right next day. And in a butterbat. So I'm
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  there. I'm outside bin Laden's house. And there's a great story I wanted to tell about it,
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  an encounter that I had outside his house with a Pakistani guy. Great story. I'm trying to get to that
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  story. And I hit this point where bin Laden's there. He's been killed the night before. I get this
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  point where the last, you know, the middle of the last images of him and he's he's wrapped in a
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  bloody blanket and he's sort of huddled around a video recorder and he looks old and he looks sick.
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  And it's not the, you know, the Jesus figure with the collection of that we all grew. So he used to.
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  They always end up that way. Saddam Hussein and all of the bunkers, you know, and Hitler and the
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  bunker. They're all pathetic in the end because they're the Wizard of Oz. They're a little man
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  behind a big, big microphone. But he, yeah. So I'm at that point. And I wanted to get to this story
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  and I thought, fuck, I can't do it now. Now I've opened this door. I've got to go. And the next
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  line that I fell under the page that just demanded to be written was that he was a man whose own
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  movement had moved past him. And, and I had to go. I had to go at that point to one of his disciples,
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  Abu Musab al-Zakawi, who had gone from Afghanistan back to Iraq and in the fall of Saddam had started
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  al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was al-Qaeda 2.0 and it was a much more brutal iteration. It was-
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  And it became ISIS essentially.
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  It was the bridge from al-Qaeda to ISIS where bin Laden thought we can't- all of this starting
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  with the Muslim brother was moving towards the caliphate and restoring the caliphate.
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  But the caliphate was in the future and bin Laden thought, no, we have to work our way to that.
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  Hit the far enemy of the US, bring them in here. When they're in here, we can grind them into
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  the dirt. We can hit the near enemy, the Islam apostates, and then we can get to the caliphate.
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  And Zakawi comes in and goes, no, the caliphate is now. And he says, and bin Laden says, stop stop
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  slaughtering Muslims. And Zakawi is no. I'm going to slaughter as many share as I can.
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  Then I want a Muslim. I want a sectarian war. Exactly. I want a sectarian war.
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  And out of a sectarian war, we will build the new caliphate. And, and so I had to go to Zakawi.
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  And I didn't want you because I had this great story to tell. But once I went to Zakawi,
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  I then had to explain all of this. I had to explain where we get to ISIS. And when I
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  done that, I came back to about a bit and it worked. Well, I'm glad it works because your brain
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  sounds a bit like my brain in that you open a little time. Yes, you open a kind of surprise.
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  All of a sudden, the universe implodes on itself. And like, and the same time continuum fractures,
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  you're falling down a rabbit hole. Yes. And all of a sudden, there's so much stuff. So much stuff.
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  When I get to that point, the reason why I'm a bad writer or a good writer when I'm at it to do it,
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  but a bad writer in terms of being able to do it, is that when I actually, when I get there,
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  I'm so confronted by the virus, the normity of everything I want to say that I seize up. But it
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  seems like you can find a way to target because I've got a thread. And the thread throughout the
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  entire book and the thread that connected this was the thread of identity. It was all identity.
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  All of this is identity. Islamism is identity. All of this, you know. And so, and interestingly,
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  where it led me when I went down that rabbit hole, when I went to Zakawi, because China was
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  the beginning of my book. And it's the thread that runs through the book. It led me back to China
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  because Zakawi's manual, his strategy for warfare was a book written by a guy called Abu Bakar Naji
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  in 2004 called the management of savagery. The management of savagery wise, you create a place
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  of savagery. And out of savagery, you create order. And who wrote the playbook? Mao Zedong.
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  So the playbook of Zakawi came from the same playbook of Mao of how to fight an asymmetrical
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  warfare. I mean, it's also an ancient revolutionary idea. I've been able to turn it all down.
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  A series raised it to the ground. Yeah, sure. And Paul Pot came up with it again.
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  In the sevenies only. But I was able to go directly back to Mao. I thought, fuck off,
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  I've squared the circle. Well, while we're talking about revolutionary
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  fervor, since let's just make this the whole beginning of the podcast, that's fine. I don't
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  need to do a formal introduction. I'll just bring it in at some point. Because I think this is
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  an interesting way into, you know, we wanted to talk about race, about white supremacy, about
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  Indigenous rights. But it's all fits all. Exactly. Since your new book is essentially going to
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  be about, we were just talking about the book that stands trying to finish about the ways in which
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  I suppose extremists fracture off the liberal order into spirals of their own craziness.
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  How do you relate that back to the moment that we find ourselves in?
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  You know, I like to have a philosophical framework to do anything. You know, without a
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  philosophical framework, I think you were just, you're making it up. And there's no coherence.
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  The problem with philosophy, of course, is that it's ultimately a bloodless exercise.
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  It reduces everything to an intellectual exercise and sometimes tries to impose
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  some sort of ideological order or over events. And events are not easily contained in human
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  beings are entirely, you know, unpredictable. But essentially, what ideology does is that ideology
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  takes contradiction and turns it into difference. I think that's a very Hegelian idea. You know,
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  Hegel, of course, is the great historian of history, the philosopher of history, rather.
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  And he saw history as an endless quest for freedom and recognition. And that was a generative
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  process. And over the arc of human history, it is you move towards an absolute spirit, a final
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  state, if you like, where master and slave no longer have to define themselves in opposition.
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  They are freed from that oppositional relationship. And the identity no longer ceases to matter.
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  You enter into some other order. Marx thought that was communism and Francis Fukuyama thought that
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  was, you know, the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War. But essentially, when you
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  take contradiction and you turn it into difference, you form your tribes, you know, you go to war.
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  People make a mistake with Hegel, because they think it's as a synthesis, an idea of
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  the Hegelian synthesis that you start out with a thesis. I am me, you are you, we meet. That is the
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  antithesis in a sense, because now we bring our contradictions to each other. And we form something
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  new out of that, which is a synthesis. It's not really true. He believed that it was a constant
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  generative process beginning again and again and again and again. And again, it was the eternal
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  contradiction that is the driving forces. But it would ratchet upwards all the time. I mean,
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  it reminds me a little bit of Barack Obama's famous line that, you know, there'll be setbacks
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  all the time in the long run. What does he say? The art justice. The art of history bends towards
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  justice that you're going to have. Which I don't necessarily believe. It's one of those things
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  that sound so true. It's like people who say, you know, George Santiana, who said that those who do
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  not, those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. No, no, no, no, no,
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  because I've been in many parts of the world where those who remember the past absolutely
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  repented. They prosecute it endlessly. The grievance of history is the iron in the blood of toxic
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  identity. Well, okay, let's bring that to the to the current moment. Yeah, this is where we need
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  to sit be. Yeah. So help me. Let's start with America versus Australia, right? I think we can
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  talk in abstract terms about the racial problems that we're seeing in the United States and the racial
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  history, the racist history of Australia. But what do you see as the similarities between the
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  protests in the United States and Australia's reckoning? From a 30,000 foot view and then I'll
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  drill down into the specifics is that we are seeing the limits, testing the limits,
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  is better wife saying it, testing the limits of liberal democracy. You know, the liberal democratic
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  experiment, the Emanuel Kant idea of perpetual peace in a cosmopolitan order, is the ability to
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  govern over diversity. That's the nub of this. That we can establish a neutral political order
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  in which all people find representation and recognition and that we bring our difference to
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  the public square and we set aside those things for a common purpose and that essentially the
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  center holds. That's, you know, democracy relies on the consent of the minority, the consent of
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  the loser. We don't tear everything up because we don't get the result we want at the ballot box
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  because broadly the institutions of government serve us well. When the soft guard rails of democracy,
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  when the institutions of democracy cease to function or we cease to believe in them when freedom
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  of the press, the rule of law, the role of the state is seen in some way as illegitimate,
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  then you have a crisis. America has been here before. If you go back to the 1960s, of course,
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  and the race riots of the 1960s and what's in places like that, America had seen a terrible
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  spate of assassinations, the Kennedy brothers. I mean, people do forget about that. Imagine the
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  president of the United States being assassinated, and then his brother, who was the attorney general,
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  who was running the president. And the voice of civil rights, Martin Luther King, and then Malcolm X,
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  Malcolm X killed, and add to that you're at war in Vietnam. And you're in a cold war,
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  stand off with a nuclear-armed state in the Soviet Empire. So we've been here before,
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  but the difference I think is that even in the dark days of the 1960s, the legitimacy of the
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  American experiment was not necessarily in question. But in question by whom? See, as you say that,
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  and as you say things like when institutions cease to function, I hear Black Lives Matter activists
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  and indigenous Australian activists saying, well, you mean when they cease to function,
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  they have never functioned. They've never functioned for us. They've never worked for us.
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  Well, look, in the 50s, you might have thought that they were functioning. Yes.
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  But there was a whole class of people who were disenfranchised, dispossessed,
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  they were going to throw laws all over the South. That's true.
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  Aborigines weren't even regarded as citizens of this country. That's true. So that was a fiction,
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  and now the activists are saying we're busting through that fiction. And liberalism and democracy
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  is always a promise of tomorrow. So there's always that sense that we're moving towards something.
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  It's a progressive idea. And the paradox of that is that you can have that both things can be true.
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  That on the one hand, we could have indigenous people who are not fully recognized as citizens.
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  And then in 1967, we can have an extraordinary referendum where almost 100% of people say,
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  that's wrong. We can have a system where Black people and you know, have Jim Crow laws or,
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  you know, but then you have people who fight against that and triumph over that.
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  You can have Barack Obama become president of the United States. And Black Lives Matter
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  form on his watch. I think it's a mistake again if we don't reconcile ourselves to the contradiction.
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  Because that contradiction is the energy I think that drives so much of this. And we rub up against
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  that. I think what we've seen post-Cold War, this is the long way around, but getting to the,
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  to the trying to land here somewhere is that, is the post-Cold War end of history, Francis
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  Fukuyama idea, the triumph of liberal democracy, the end of the standoff with the Soviet Union,
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  is that that ballast that it held the world in place, that that tension between communism and
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  capitalist liberal democracy, of course, ended. And people know, it wasn't as if we, we entered this
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  golden age of liberalism where all difference was dissolved. And we are free to live as fully
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  functioning, fully recognized individuals in a utopian liberal state. We actually still had a
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  desire and a need to belong. Our history still spoke to us. The sense of identity was still strong.
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  What do you replace that with? And I think we've seen post-89, post-91, the end of the Soviet Union
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  arise of the politics of identity and tribalism around identity. And it feeds on historical grievance.
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  And when justice is denied or justice is seen not to be delivered, you have these deep, deep fractures.
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  And of course, the strongest identity of all, the dominant identity in the West, is white
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  identity, white Christian identity. You know, liberalism was transported in the cargo of empire
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  in colonization. This is built into the fabric of these societies, along with the suppression
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  and the oppression of people of color. You know, colonization here, dispossession here,
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  massacre of indigenous people, exclusion segregation, the United States, people brought in
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  chains whipped. You know, I mean, this is built into the fabric of it. And when you get to a point
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  where particularly with Donald Trump, although this preceded Donald Trump, you have a crisis of
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  legitimacy in the presidency. And someone who does not seek to govern with the better angels
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  of their nature, who does not seek to establish some form of broad civic unity. But in fact,
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  governs from division and takes power from division. Then you have this collapse and people
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  that tribalism intensifies. But this is interesting. So let's go back to what you regard as being
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  a mischaracterization of haggle, the cartoon cover version of haggle because someone comes up
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  with a proposition. Other people push back against that proposition and create an alternative.
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  They're too fused to get into a new proposition that some utopian gets pushed back on and then you
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  ratchet yourself up without a bomber. Well, without the war in Iraq, you probably don't get a bomber.
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  Without a bomber, you probably don't get Trump. So when you talk about identity and the default
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  identity has been the white male identity, that's certainly been true for thousands of years
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  up until probably the 70s or 80s. And at some point during the course of my youth, I feel like
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  that identity became self-conscious about itself, rightly so, aware of its own privilege.
• 23:47
  But without giving up power. In what sense?
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  Aware of privilege, but challenging that privilege within the prism of its own power.
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  I don't think that whiteness ever relinquish power to reconcile with its history or its racism.
• 24:06
  That's interesting. So it's on one level, it didn't relinquish its power because the majority
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  of people of parliamentarians and CEOs are still whiteness. And the institutions run and govern.
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  On another level, it is impossible to talk about your identity as a white person, the way that
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  people of color are permitted to talk about their identity as color. You can't be proud of being
• 24:27
  white. But you don't have to be. That's a good point. If a white person dies in custody, it's not
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  necessarily your problem. If a black person dies in custody is absolutely my problem. And I don't
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  have a choice in the matter either because our history has framed it that way. Our identities have
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  been formed that way. I have white ancestry, but my family has never been judged by the measure
• 24:50
  of its whiteness. We've been judged by the measure of our blackness. And when my father was
• 24:56
  getting the shit kicked out of him by police as a young man in Redfern, they weren't kicking a
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  man who had an Irish great grandfather. We have to care. When a black person dies in custody,
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  I have to have an answer. I'm compelled to answer it. I'm compelled to solve it. And I'm
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  compelled to do so in a way that does not make white people feel uncomfortable. I mean, I couldn't
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  give a fuck about white people feeling uncomfortable, but I do want to change if they are uncomfortable.
• 25:28
  That's true. That's true. Yes, right. Yes. You've got to have people on board. You're going to
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  have people feeling like they're all interested in the mission. 67, 1967. We see that as a triumph
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  of recognition of Aboriginal rights. It really wasn't. Australia was voting for itself. The jingle
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  was vote yes for our originies. They want to be Australians too. We're still going to vote against
• 25:50
  Australia. So it wasn't vote yes for our originies. There are distinct people with a unique history
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  who are here. First, you screwed them over and took their land, poisoned their waterholes,
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  killed them and took their children. Now we're going to start recognizing their rights. It was vote
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  yes for our originies. They want to be just like you. I often make the analogy here to the success
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  of the gay rights movement over the recent decades that this is probably the fastest turnaround
• 26:14
  in public opinion towards any civil rights movement on record. And I mean, just 20 years ago,
• 26:22
  it was considered not just wrong, but evil to be gay by large majorities of the population.
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  And now they can get married and have kids. And that was achieved. What a conservative idea?
• 26:35
  Exactly. They want to be just like you. Exactly. That was so I often make the point,
• 26:41
  how was that achieved? It wasn't achieved by saying, fuck you straight people. Fuck you and your
• 26:47
  straights plain to me. No, it's like, I want to have a husband or whatever. It was a children
• 26:54
  and a mortgage. We're queer. We want all the same things you do. We want a job. We want a family.
• 27:00
  We want a spouse. We want a little bit of cock, but that's fine. You know, the framing of it was
• 27:05
  normality. And you know what? Look at the pushback to this moment. I read and I have to say,
• 27:13
  I enjoy reading this. The Australian newspaper, which people see as a sort of
• 27:18
  Murdoch based to the right, white Christian, white civilisation or sort of, you know, newspaper,
• 27:27
  I enjoy reading it. I enjoy reading it because it challenges me at tests on my ideas. And I find
• 27:32
  common ground often. And with the paradox of this and the maddening thing of this for me,
• 27:38
  is that I will read some of the more sort of, you know, to the right,
• 27:44
  classically liberal writers who will say things like, we should live in a world where race
• 27:50
  doesn't matter. Where we're free of those things. In a liberal society, the individual counts.
• 27:56
  And we don't privilege the group over the individual. And philosophically, I'm on board with that
• 28:02
  idea. That's on down with that. I think I've traveled the world. I've seen the worst of the world.
• 28:07
  And liberal democracy is a chance of, is a universal idea that gives us a chance to govern over
• 28:14
  diversity in a way that creates pathways to civic unity and peace. And I, I've seen that happen
• 28:19
  around the world. And I believe that idea. But their framework is always like, we are centered.
• 28:27
  We are white. We are powerful. We control the institutions of government. We control the media.
• 28:33
  We write the articles. And now we can say things like, what are you doing with all this identity
• 28:38
  politics? It's really bad for liberalism. Well, isn't the biggest identity of all the white
• 28:43
  identity that created the political power structures that you now benefit from and use to lecture us
• 28:50
  about how we are tearing down the walls of Western civilization? I mean, if, if liberal,
• 28:56
  it's like these people stopped reading at John Locke and John Stuart Mill.
• 29:02
  I mean, let me go into bat for the idea that you should stop reading at John Locke and John
• 29:07
  Stuart Mill in some respect that you can round out your idea about the way that the applicability
• 29:13
  of liberalism and the hypocrisy of its proponents without feeling that we should grow out of
• 29:20
  liberal ideals into something else, which I think is a lot of what's going on at the moment
• 29:24
  among young people, especially, I say, just so that I'm not misunderstood as being sort of a white
• 29:29
  supremacist here, especially among white young white lefties who are actually, I think, in some
• 29:36
  respects, the most confused about identity politics and the most sensorial about what you're supposed
• 29:43
  to believe, the most bigoted about other beliefs, the most fragile when they hear opinions that they
• 29:50
  don't, you know, as most likely to claim as John Stuart Mill. As John Stuart Mill said,
• 29:54
  mislabeled them. He who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that, right?
• 29:58
  Yes, exactly. So that's, and as James Baldwin has a line by love, which is no one's more dangerous
• 30:06
  than he who imagines himself pure and harsh, his purity by definition is unassailable.
• 30:11
  Yeah, and he also said no one is more dangerous than who thinks he is white, because white
• 30:17
  is only created as black is created. It's in the eye of the holder and the eye of the holder was
• 30:23
  blue. And there's a real white savior thing going on among my young white lefty colleagues
• 30:27
  that I find unseemly. A lot of my friends in the States do as well. It's like, let me help lift you
• 30:33
  up, you're of heart behind a person of color who none of whom do anything wrong. We, the white
• 30:39
  men, can be on your side and we're going to be marching alongside you and getting all of our
• 30:43
  social media brownie points for participating in this display. And I think, you know, for me,
• 30:50
  the great thing about liberalism is that it is an eternal struggle of the soul.
• 30:55
  We are constantly challenging ourselves. You know, you can have a nation founded on the idea
• 31:00
  of equality in a declaration of independence signed by slaveholders. You can have a movement,
• 31:09
  you know, an idea that that is linked to colonization and empire, but also carries within
• 31:15
  the dream of emancipation. This is, I like, again, that contradiction, that energy that comes from
• 31:22
  that. And I think that if you read people who have 20th century liberal thinkers like John Rawls
• 31:32
  and, you know, the idea of a society based on a veil of ignorance, you know, where you come to
• 31:37
  without any of the preconditions of your privilege and you, you are forming a society blind to whether
• 31:43
  you may be male, female, white, black. This is here, this is Rawls's thought experiment, where
• 31:48
  you just like, you know, in terms of what society you would want. Yeah. Just imagine the original
• 31:52
  position that's important. Yeah, randomly. The original position. There was also a secondary
• 31:57
  position. And that is that if there is going to be inequalities, if there is going to be
• 32:03
  difference, it must serve those people who are the least advantaged. And that was an interesting
• 32:10
  sort of idea, a really complicated idea to unravel because that made me, for instance,
• 32:15
  it's good to have a lot of rich people because rich people are going to pay more taxes.
• 32:19
  Therefore those taxes will go to the poor people and proportionally the poor people will be
• 32:23
  better off. So, you know, the liberalism is constantly trying to find ways to govern over
• 32:29
  that level of diversity, inequality, difference. And I think that's a really good thing. But when I
• 32:37
  hear people who I should be able to find common cause with fellow liberals, and I'll put myself
• 32:43
  into that category, fellow liberals who then want to hit me over their head with their whiteness,
• 32:50
  who want to stand there in their full white glory, knowing that liberalism was written by white
• 32:56
  people, for white people, and transported by white people around the world that took our land
• 33:01
  and enslaved us. And then what would it tell us just get on board? It doesn't work that way.
• 33:07
  And Charles Mills is a fantastic Caribbean, Black Caribbean political philosopher,
• 33:14
  wrote a book called White Rights Black Rongs. And this idea that what we need to do is we need
• 33:24
  to go back and redeem our history to make liberalism work. You can't just say to people buy into
• 33:30
  this idea when there is this idea comes with no thought of reparations, no thought of acknowledgement
• 33:37
  of the past, no attempt to redeem that, no attempt to incorporate within a liberal democracy,
• 33:43
  the acknowledgement and recognition that within that democracy there are contested and contending
• 33:48
  ideas of rights and ethical claims to rights that demand greater innovation than a one-size-fits-all,
• 33:56
  white-dominated narrative that we should all conform to some neutrality. That isn't the way
• 34:01
  liberalism works, that's actually a repudiation of the generative nature of liberalism.
• 34:07
  So we're in this sort of critical moment, I think, where there's a rear-guard action
• 34:12
  from white people who feel as if this is all a plot to tear down the walls of white civilization,
• 34:17
  that the minorities are going to replace them and the United States confronts this browning of
• 34:21
  America. There's demographic shift that is part of this. At the same time as you have people on the
• 34:28
  other side who are going, we come from a really screwed up history and our identity is formed out
• 34:33
  of our exclusion, our segregation and the denial of our rights. And that carries within it as well,
• 34:38
  the germ of its own tyranny because you find people who inhabit those identities who, in an
• 34:44
  ideological sense, don't see their own contradictions and impose sea contradiction as difference.
• 34:49
  For instance, they'll sit there and say, a black identity comes at the exclusion of all
• 34:54
  whiteness, but we all have white ancestry, all of us, to some degree. Black people have a black
• 35:00
  ancestry to some degree. If we can't navigate that, if we can't embrace and reconcile ourselves
• 35:07
  to those own contradictions, you end up with this certainty, the idea of identity certainty,
• 35:13
  which pits people against each other and then people impose those orthodoxies. And if you don't
• 35:17
  agree, for instance, if you're a black person in the States and you go, yeah, maybe black lives matter,
• 35:23
  I understand the need to fight against oppression and police brutality, but some of the other ideas
• 35:28
  I'm not on board with and I'm actually someone who wants to break away from identity-based movements.
• 35:33
  You're out of the club. You're out of the club. You're out of the club. You're out of the club. You're
• 35:36
  out of the club. You're out of the club. You're out of the club. I have a couple of friends.
• 35:38
  One of my good friends in New York, Camille Foster, first time I met him, I was interviewing him on
• 35:44
  Half-Post Live and he, in the green room, I mentioned something about his being black and he was
• 35:49
  like, I'm not black. Wow. Okay. And we then subsequently went out for drinks and had a long
• 35:55
  conversation about what he means by that. And he means that he doesn't buy into... By the
• 36:00
  re-identities. Yeah, identities. Thomas Chaddett and Williams. He's got a great book.
• 36:05
  Yeah, it's got two great memoirs. He's an African-American writer who lives in Paris and so has a
• 36:11
  perspective on race relations in the United States from point of view. Back to a white woman who had
• 36:15
  a child who was, you know, seemingly white kids looked like Swedish girls. Yeah. Again,
• 36:23
  see, I run up against problems with that too because there isn't... There is a power structure
• 36:31
  involved here where I may be able to embrace a cosmopolitanism and a multiracialism because
• 36:38
  that is my privilege now as a solidly middle class even beyond that, you know, individual who's
• 36:45
  travelled the world and, you know, has investment property and traveled, goes overseas holidays and
• 36:50
  sends their kids to private schools and it, you know, enjoys all of the privileges of that.
• 36:54
  I may be from that vantage point of privilege be able to embrace this cosmopolitanism and think
• 36:58
  constructively about post-racialism as much as I sort of bristle against some of those ideas
• 37:04
  because they carry their own orthodoxies. I can embrace that from a privileged position,
• 37:09
  but that doesn't shift the fundamental power imbalance that means with all my, you know, white
• 37:16
  seeming privilege, I can walk down the street and I can do this any day of the week in Sydney
• 37:22
  and walk past my blood, my family, cousins of mine in the street with their hand out,
• 37:30
  begging for money because of an inherent system that locks them out of so much of this. A lot of
• 37:37
  cards had to form my way to get to the position that I'm in. Members of my own family die tragically
• 37:45
  don't have those opportunities. I think in this rush to embrace an idea of being liberated
• 37:51
  from the idea of race can sometimes come at the acquiescence or an apathy towards a power
• 37:59
  structure that still needs to be challenged. That is true, but I would argue that that power
• 38:05
  structure is fundamentally an economic, one of economic justice and that it cleaves along racial
• 38:10
  lines because of the historical abuse of Indigenous people in Australia and, well, I was going to say
• 38:15
  end of African Americans, but also what about the Indigenous people in America who because we were
• 38:19
  not even part of the conversation, nobody even gives up. I'll come to that in the
• 38:23
  Americans because I've got an interesting take on that. We should all want justice for people
• 38:29
  who have their hand out on the street regardless of their race, which is not to diminish the fact
• 38:36
  that certain races are represented at the bottom. I do get that, except in the case of Indigenous
• 38:42
  people, and you can make this case a different way to African Americans, although you can probably
• 38:47
  argue that the trajectory of social mobility amongst African Americans may be greater and certainly
• 38:53
  greater than Native Americans too, and there are reasons for that. You can make that case a pure
• 39:00
  sort of economic case, but what often puts people in that position is not the same. A white
• 39:07
  person can transcend a particular class and get access to the socio-economic uplift and the
• 39:14
  changes that that brings. But not necessarily. I know it's ways of white people who don't.
• 39:22
  Oh no, they don't. They don't. They don't. They don't. But they're not going to carry,
• 39:28
  I just said to you before, if they through dint of hard work and good fortune were able to enjoy
• 39:34
  that sort of social and economic progression, they're not going to necessarily then carry all the
• 39:39
  history of white people with them. They're not going to have to care for white person dies in
• 39:43
  custody, as I said before. For us, I can sit here today with all of the privilege that I have,
• 39:51
  but I can tell you, the way my sons, with all of their privilege, are spoken to by police when
• 39:58
  they're with their cousins, it is appalling. Appalling. When the cameras aren't on, when they turn
• 40:06
  to them and say, you're fucking scum. You're just like your uncles, you're just like your fathers,
• 40:12
  won't be long to be coming for you, to talk them in the street, to have their bags taken off and
• 40:17
  tipped up and thrown all over the ground on suspicion of carrying drugs. And at any moment,
• 40:23
  they could escalate and that is not, and yet they're solidly middle class boys, private school boys,
• 40:31
  race is something that you don't get to be means tested out of.
• 40:36
  I mean, that is a flagrant abuse of police power essentially and racially motivated.
• 40:41
  Yes, absolutely. And the only counter to not wanting to imbue that with identity politics is that
• 40:52
  if you can make the issue for the broader middle Australia or middle America about one of police
• 40:59
  overreach, police abuse, the man coming down on you, then you're probably likely to get buy-in
• 41:05
  and that brings us all about right back to where we started. The thing that attracts me to
• 41:11
  the, I would love to be released from my history. I spend my entire life every waking minute thinking
• 41:21
  about, reading about, writing about how they held, do I break the chains of this history.
• 41:28
  Why is it not a choice, Stan? Coming back to Tom, so you mentioned Thomas James and Williams,
• 41:32
  who we both know, I'll get him on the podcast at some point. He makes the point that, for example,
• 41:38
  living in France, he's frequently not seen as black either.
• 41:42
  He's frequently not seen as black.
• 41:43
  He's American identity is actually more prominent in fact.
• 41:44
  There's the American identity and when he's going through an airport, he gets mistaken for
• 41:50
  a North African. So there are a lot of, you know, black. I've been harassed in Israel constantly
• 41:57
  because they say, even my poor Australian passport out, no, you're not Australian, you must be an
• 42:02
  Arab. Well, exactly. And then, you know, I have Asian Australian friends who will enter the United
• 42:06
  States and the customs agent at the airport at LAX will say, where are you from? And they'll say,
• 42:11
  say, Australia, and they'll say, no, where are you really from? Yeah, yeah. And I wonder,
• 42:15
  my grandparents are from China. And to the point that he's, is it a choice?
• 42:19
  So hang on, let me just finish, finish that thought. He says, yes, I understand the point
• 42:24
  that we don't get to choose our own identities because the world will impose them on us,
• 42:28
  but we get to choose how we respond to the world imposing an identity on us. And I could just
• 42:32
  roll over and say, okay, if people mistake me for being a North African, then I guess I'll just have
• 42:37
  to go along with being a North African. But I don't feel like a North African. I don't want to be a
• 42:41
  North African. I have no affiliation with North Africa. So I want to push back against it. And
• 42:46
  similarly, he feels he can say, yes, the world treats me like an African American when I'm in America.
• 42:52
  That doesn't mean I have to imbue my identity with African American. Yes, I can choose to rebel against
• 42:58
  that. But you can also fight it if I want it, but you can also choose to do it. You can. But
• 43:03
  you should be able to, you can't choose not to, and I, and I reject, and I reject that narrative.
• 43:09
  But I think Thomas Chaderson Williams and others can go too far the other way and say, well,
• 43:14
  if I can do it, why aren't you doing it too? You should be able to embrace a black American identity
• 43:19
  without fear of having that identity challenged, scrutinized, dismissed, diminished, or being beaten
• 43:24
  to the shit out of because of that identity as well. I mean, people will always say to me, but
• 43:29
  you're not like the others. Or look, look, you've been successful. What does that imply?
• 43:34
  There's something wrong with the others who the hell they are, my family, that somehow because
• 43:42
  you have some economic success, therefore you are now, you transcend race and that that is a virtue
• 43:50
  that I should embrace the fact that I can transcend race because that's good. I mean, that's not a
• 43:55
  virtue. Is it not a virtue to be able to transcend identity? No, I think, I think our principle
• 44:00
  is to be homo sapient. I don't, well, and I think you're absolutely right about that, but,
• 44:06
  but that's an a historical, you know, idea. History has created otherwise. We can't just wash away
• 44:12
  thousands of years of what God has here. And the I sometimes wonder whether we make it more difficult
• 44:19
  than it needs to be. Well, the fundamental principle is that all people who makes it more difficult
• 44:24
  though, well, an interlocking network of who control white conservatives on the one hand, and
• 44:32
  probably white liberals on the other hand, who controls the power of who are both who are both
• 44:36
  these are not it. This is not a narrative we wrote. No, that's right. This is not a story we go
• 44:40
  we go to right. We respond and react to that. And I guarantee you, you know, I will get much more
• 44:48
  applause from the people that I actually have a philosophical affinity with. If I stand there
• 44:55
  and prostrate myself in front of their neutrality and their liberalism and disavow all ideas of
• 45:02
  race and let go of the hold of history. And then I walk out on the street and I'll see one of my
• 45:08
  cousins or I will go home and I will see the physical scars on my father who will not go out and
• 45:16
  have a meal in a restaurant because he knows what shit he might get who actually has then I can't
• 45:25
  I could count on one hand the number of times we have gone out for a meal and sometimes we'll say
• 45:29
  to that, let's go downtown and have dinner. Oh, let's just have dinner here because he doesn't
• 45:33
  know what the hell is going to happen. The smart ass comment, the slide look, you know, and maybe
• 45:39
  Josh, maybe nothing happens. Maybe nothing happens a hundred times out of you know 99 times out of
• 45:45
  a hundred. And then it does. What happens to someone else you know and and all of that
• 45:53
  enlightenment, all of that liberalism in that moment dissolves in the face of the brutality of our
• 46:01
  history. And that's what we struggle with. And that's my struggle that someone like Janet
• 46:08
  Orbrickson at the Australian or Greg Sheridan people that I read and I want to get on board with
• 46:13
  and I get quiet because I know that they don't have that. And they'll often say these are
• 46:20
  conservative columnists at the Murdock Broadsheet. And then they'll say things like, you know,
• 46:25
  but look at the Irish and maybe they have Irish ancestry or in Greg's case. And you know,
• 46:29
  that that Finney and grievance that we get to, you know, we should move on from that. Yeah, but
• 46:35
  you're living in Australia. Yeah. Would you be saying that in Ireland? You see the Australian
• 46:40
  experience or would you be saying that in a country where the Irish are consistently shat on?
• 46:44
  Shat on. And you know, the England in the 80s. And if it was and if it was your father,
• 46:49
  if it was your father, whose ribs and jaw was broken by police, if it's your father, your father.
• 46:58
  But isn't the job twofold then Stan want the one hand for white people to take a zero tolerance
• 47:04
  attitude towards the conduct of other white racists when they shout a slur at your dad? And then
• 47:10
  secondly, secondly, and this is the controversial bit for people like your dad and yourself to find
• 47:16
  a way and the decouple the race that the the racism of the current bad apples because 2020 I do not
• 47:22
  believe that Australia and the United States are virulently racist countries. There are racists
• 47:27
  in them, but it is our choice to interpret the slurs of the one percent as being evidence of
• 47:34
  historical white supremacy versus decades. I would invert that because I think we I think we do
• 47:39
  that more successfully than white people do it. I think we actually carry that load more
• 47:46
  honorably and with greater dignity than white people do. Well, white people don't have to suffer
• 47:51
  no they don't and even even from their liberalism where they will even when they denounce I've
• 47:58
  been reading this in the press where they denounce unequivocally what happened to George Floyd
• 48:04
  and quickly there's a pivot to a but quickly there's a pivot to these black people out there
• 48:10
  protesting it's you know this is not a law of equivalence here you know and we my father who
• 48:19
  would have every right to absolutely reject anything to do with white Australia has done
• 48:28
  nothing but reach out and try to make it better. He saved his language,
• 48:33
  his vocabulary language wrote his the barrage dictionary started teaching it in schools not
• 48:38
  not so we could have it but white people could have it too and they could feel part of this country
• 48:44
  you know Aboriginal people we are not blowing up buildings we are not killing people in the streets
• 48:52
  African-Americans are not blowing up buildings they are not assassinating presidents white people
• 49:00
  are assassinating black people white people have assassinated white presidents I mean we we are not
• 49:07
  doing this I would argue that we are absolutely reaching out to liberalism we are absolutely
• 49:14
  trying to unshackle the chains of that past I don't think white Australia or white America
• 49:20
  meets us in the middle at all I think they sit there from a position of inherent privilege
• 49:26
  knowing full well that the power structures that are created by their history still serve them
• 49:32
  better than us until them that all we need to do is come across to the other side
• 49:37
  we you know reconciliation in Australia for instance we have to bring the energy to that
• 49:44
  we do that we we we organise the marches we get that you know we we go out and we spend the
• 49:50
  intellectual and emotional energy of going to white people and saying listen maybe we need to
• 49:57
  do it this way have you ever thought about this have you we're carrying such an enormous load
• 50:02
  I think we do it and I think we're struggling to do it and and me I mean I spend all of my time
• 50:10
  trying to un-pick this because I think I think identity left to fester in the wounds of history
• 50:17
  is one of the most toxic things in our world but we don't get to fix that unless the people who have
• 50:25
  established the power and benefited from the power actually started his mantle let themselves without
• 50:31
  just sitting there and saying there's nothing wrong on our side what you need to do is come across
• 50:35
  here and enjoy all that we've got on the question of who's rioting and who's being mature and who's
• 50:40
  not I want to take a listen to a video that really touched me of it's an African American woman in
• 50:47
  New York and in New York they have these at the public phone booths they have charging stations
• 50:52
  when people who are homeless or who don't have electricity can charge their devices and it's a
• 50:56
  real lifeline and one of these had been smashed up on the street on her street corner by young white
• 51:04
  you know anti-racists who are out protesting in favor of black lives matter in this majority
• 51:10
  minority people of color neighborhood and she went off at them take a listen to this
• 51:22
  who rely on that as a charging station and what what will it even work now for the sake of what
• 51:33
  so you can go back home to your f**king comfort sit in your house and think that you did some f**king
• 51:41
  work today there are people out here who work in these bodegas who are security officers who are
• 51:50
  maybe not to send in some slavery but came over here as immigrants to do their jobs
• 51:56
  so great everybody and you created an unsafe goddamn environment and I am tired of it
• 52:05
  though you want to f**king do something make sure you register to vote
• 52:09
  don't start at a goddamn fire and you better pass it on to all your f**king friends
• 52:15
  you take out of our f**king neighborhood and you take this f**king to the corporation
• 52:21
  you take it to Wall Street but you don't f**king come on this block period this is a f**king neighborhood
• 52:29
  what immigrants and you can treat it as such
• 52:35
  the angry voice of black liberalism she's saying listen buy in you want to make change you make
• 52:46
  change you want to tear this down you understand what you're tearing down and you understand what
• 52:50
  you're doing to the capacity to build the alliance is necessary to make the change that's a that's
• 52:55
  a powerful statement and the people she was talking to were overwhelming me what weren't they
• 52:59
  this is the white people you were talking about and they're awkwardly standing there that I
• 53:02
  don't know what to make of this because the moral clarity is something they can't possibly
• 53:06
  muster what we what here's the thing in the narrative around this the reason why I completely
• 53:11
  accept everything that you were saying before we played that clip and I will just add to it that
• 53:17
  the only jigsaw piece that it misses is that there is that I worry about white people being pushed
• 53:23
  away by the sense that there are things that can't be said and something that she was just talking
• 53:28
  about there is something that a white person can't really say in a matter of the moment which is
• 53:32
  don't burn shit they can say it but they will be cast as a racist if they do say it that's right
• 53:40
  she can't practice you can't say unless you're on Fox News or something she want to be invited to
• 53:45
  I and it's and it's important and that's also that's also something that maybe someone from
• 53:50
  Black Lives Matter won't say right and and and and this is the problem that I have with even
• 53:57
  liberating movements of identity is that they come with their own orthodoxy and conformity
• 54:04
  and their own tyranny and that is the tyranny of ideas the tyranny of that conformity and if you
• 54:10
  don't adhere to that then you are out of it you're out of the club and and and and that's that's
• 54:15
  the struggle now how do we get to a point and the utopian idea that we started out with which is
• 54:23
  the capacity of liberalism together and over identity it needs to it needs to it needs to be
• 54:28
  accountable to its history in a meaningful way it needs to dismantle the institutions of that power
• 54:36
  not so that we end up with some tokenistic certain numbers and quotas of different people but
• 54:41
  that fundamentally the institutions themselves reflect reflect the society and that people find
• 54:48
  themselves both represented in and recognized by you know this is the this is the hard work of
• 54:53
  liberalism the problem that Josh and this is a bigger problem than what we're seeing on the streets
• 54:58
  there and and here is that I fear that liberalism as a project reaches its limits much sooner than
• 55:09
  authoritarianism and I think the capacity of liberalism to be corrupted by authoritarianism and
• 55:15
  by authoritarians and despots is what is weakening liberalism around the world freedom house now
• 55:22
  counts 13 straight years of declining freedom and declining democracy we know that now people
• 55:28
  they've picked to all barn and hungry openly talk about an illiberal democracy we know that
• 55:32
  Donald Trump has weakened the soft guard rails of American democracy rule of law the independence
• 55:38
  judiciary the freedom of the media and these things weaken the state of our democracy and the
• 55:46
  big difference now to say the 1960s when there were similar issues or 1990s when there were riots
• 55:53
  in in LA after Rodney King other crises of liberalism is that there is a viable powerful
• 56:03
  authoritarian alternative that we have not seen not in the Soviet empire which which but now
• 56:10
  in the Chinese you know in the rise of China a rapidly advancing middle income big economic power
• 56:20
  unashamedly authoritarian that offers up a different model of authoritarian capitalism that
• 56:27
  other countries in the world are now starting to emulate and the challenge of that authoritarianism
• 56:32
  comes at a time when our own democracy is hitting the limits of its capacity to govern over
• 56:38
  diversity and its capacity to reconcile and redeem itself from its history i mean that is a
• 56:44
  really tough question it's extremely dangerous and one of the reasons why our democracies are
• 56:48
  hitting those limits is not just because of the allura of Chinese authoritarianism but because of
• 56:53
  the other authoritarian great authoritarian power of the 20th century managing its decline
• 57:01
  i.e. Russia by throwing sand into the gears of democracy all over the world with a very
• 57:07
  aggressive and well-funded campaign to sow chaos and confusion using social media and this is
• 57:14
  a whole other conversation and I have other episodes of the podcast devoted to the question
• 57:17
  of social media and what's doing to our minds and to that democracy but I think it's extremely
• 57:22
  perilous moment when a majority of Americans for example get their news from their Facebook
• 57:28
  feed which can be tweaked and micromanaged and astroturfed as they say in other words funding
• 57:34
  phony grassroots organizations that seem like there i mean we know for example that since March
• 57:39
  the Russians have been funding pro black lives matter Facebook groups and also anti black lives
• 57:45
  member racist groups to ratchet up and and extremify you know this message from both sides this
• 57:50
  is the management of savagery this is the this is what al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS and others
• 57:56
  employ which is create a place of savagery to pit sides against each other and out of that chaos
• 58:02
  to impose your order that that that that that's that's a rule book that that's a playbook right
• 58:07
  and you know technologies another fascinating aspect of this because technology in a hagelian sense
• 58:15
  has the capacity to deliver us to a point beyond actually at the end of history
• 58:21
  beyond contradiction the capacity of technology to create a neutrality even in a human being
• 58:29
  a biologically enhanced human being or an artificial intelligence that isn't born out of our
• 58:34
  history or our biology i mean technology could be the hagelian end of history but but interestingly
• 58:42
  as well just as hagel's ideas of the the the the the engine of history creating an absolute state
• 58:48
  gave rise to communism the the advance of technology is also the greatest tool of authoritarianism
• 58:54
  the capacity of china to monitor its people and do rank people according to their social
• 59:00
  you know their social mark there's you know they give people a number um how how much you conform
• 59:05
  to the authoritarian state and as you say Russia with its capacity to middle in in our own affairs
• 59:11
  this is a really really pivotal point of our history and and to bring it back to to earth with
• 59:17
  what we're seeing and what directly relates to me is that i find myself trying to think myself
• 59:25
  through these things philosophically trying to arrive at a point where we can forget our history as
• 59:32
  David reef would have said in that wonderful book you know in praise of forgetting the idea that
• 59:36
  we can not just remember our past to not to not repeat it but not remember it too well so that we
• 59:43
  don't repeat it to to free ourselves from that by building a stronger liberalism and a stronger
• 59:49
  democracy i find myself at this point and i also find myself trying to think my way through
• 59:56
  the maze of identity politics that i think is not a strong foundation for justice it cannot be
• 1:00:02
  a strong foundation for justice and yet there is a point at which all of my logic and reason
• 1:00:10
  deserts me the capacity to think yourself through a feeling the capacity to think yourself
• 1:00:18
  through racism fails in the face of the random nature of it and the personal impact of it the
• 1:00:26
  capacity that's what that one person an Aboriginal person who dies in police custody is me
• 1:00:34
  it is me they are me they are my history i'm formed out of that that is my side whether i want to
• 1:00:41
  choose it or not and people will force me to choose it and then and then you know that that
• 1:00:47
  ability to think yourself through something that is visceral is i think the the real nub of the
• 1:00:54
  crisis of dealing with identity politics the logic of those who sit on the you know with all
• 1:01:02
  the privilege of liberalism whether it be the sort of white people who sit there and tell us that
• 1:01:07
  we need to embrace a king dream beyond color and based on character which king was not really saying
• 1:01:14
  he was saying we don't cease to be black he says you cease to judge us for being black or
• 1:01:18
  Thomas Chatterton Williams personal choice of being able to live in a post racial world that
• 1:01:24
  fails in the face of the visceral impact of the George Floyd video it fails in the face of the
• 1:01:31
  not of the knowledge that what happens to these people has happened to my family and it's
• 1:01:36
  happening now to my family and could happen to me all your speaking you're speaking descriptively
• 1:01:43
  is it a prescriptive normative claim you're making as well that it ought to fail that that no
• 1:01:49
  emotions towards a viral video of someone being murdered or to overwrite that assessment of the
• 1:01:55
  data no it should not and i think that indicates what is a fundamental failure of liberalism in
• 1:02:02
  that in that creating a space for neutrality you also create the on the space for the ongoing
• 1:02:10
  denial of your history and i think until we can reconcile and resolve those things in a meaningful
• 1:02:17
  way not in a march across the bridge and an apology or or taking a knee wonderful gestures as they
• 1:02:25
  may be and wonderful moments of solidarity as they may be but in the institutions of a society
• 1:02:31
  that allow us to feel as if we are recognised and represented within the institutions of that
• 1:02:37
  society what does that look like in practice it it looks like a society where white
• 1:02:42
  the those are hate using the word white privilege because i know it is unlocks a whole lot of
• 1:02:46
  other things you can be a deeply under privileged white person um but but structurally if we can't
• 1:02:54
  find innovative mechanisms that are consistent with our liberalism to be able to unpick that and
• 1:03:02
  increase the level of recognition and representation we're going to have a crisis of legitimacy
• 1:03:07
  and let me put that into really concrete uh a concrete example the Uluru statement from the heart
• 1:03:14
  rejected on the basis that somehow this was an illiberal idea that we were putting race into a
• 1:03:20
  constitution that we were creating a body that would only be representative of one sector of
• 1:03:26
  the population ergo this was difference based on race that narrow reading of liberalism and
• 1:03:34
  the rejection of that goes to the the nub of what's wrong with our liberalism now and the essence
• 1:03:40
  of the white privilege of liberalism is that aboriginal people who have emerged out of a history where
• 1:03:47
  we were excluded from Australia's liberal experiment um we're worked against us we're saying
• 1:03:56
  here in the foundation document of the nation the basis of how our society is governed we can
• 1:04:04
  attach our aspirations our dreams our hopes to narrow that that divide that liberalism that works
• 1:04:12
  for others can work for us now the idea that liberalism cannot embrace group identity because
• 1:04:20
  that is antithetical to individualism is dumb it is narrow it is lazy thinking yeah I don't
• 1:04:28
  understand why you wouldn't just adopt the statement from the heart and why you wouldn't acknowledge
• 1:04:33
  indigenous Australians in the in the constitution and why you wouldn't have an advisory voice
• 1:04:38
  because it goes to the fundamental question of recognition and representation that is needed to
• 1:04:42
  transcend those things but if it was an author I mean so the concern what the conservatives say about
• 1:04:46
  having uh who opposed having a voice to parliament is why should we have a third chamber of
• 1:04:51
  parliament who which is just for indigenous Australians and we know that it didn't have that
• 1:04:55
  matter but it wasn't but it didn't have that matter I mean it's it's only an advisory body that
• 1:04:59
  can be rotten it can be ridden rushed over if the parliament wants to anyway then where's the
• 1:05:04
  harm in having people and people chime in and remember Justin back to my point where I think we do
• 1:05:08
  much more heavy lifting when it comes to resuscitating and rehabilitating our liberalism then
• 1:05:13
  then white liberals do um this was an inherently conservative idea yeah this was saying we believe
• 1:05:21
  in liberalism we don't reject it we want to be part of the institutions make us part of it yeah
• 1:05:25
  and and and isn't when we are all recognised in some way in the many layers of our identity
• 1:05:33
  via our group associations I mean if there was a law passed today that would discriminate against
• 1:05:40
  Catholics then Catholics as a group would have a right to seek redress and to seek protection of
• 1:05:47
  their rights as a group it doesn't mean that you are only Catholic it doesn't mean that that is
• 1:05:52
  the only thing that is your part of your identity in the same way that I sit here as someone who has
• 1:05:57
  layers of their identity and who have multiple identities but part of the formative identity
• 1:06:03
  that I have is being an indigenous person formed out of that history now there is an argument that in
• 1:06:09
  acknowledging recognizing the role of that group and the rights of that group which by the way
• 1:06:14
  is already recognised within our liberalism the highest court in the land has already acknowledged
• 1:06:19
  that there are rights inherent in being first nations peoples with things like native title the
• 1:06:25
  marbo decision these things already exist at law what we are looking for is a political architecture
• 1:06:32
  that can give some shape to those rights that already exist at law in a way that is utterly
• 1:06:38
  consistent with our liberalism so if and that frees me yeah I get a chance to breathe I get a
• 1:06:44
  chance to say you know what if we have continued deaths in custody if we have continued police
• 1:06:50
  brutality there is a mechanism by which we can influence the outcome of policy to change that
• 1:06:56
  in a way that is consistent with our governance and our liberalism it ceases at that point to be
• 1:07:01
  just my problem and ceases to become a structural institutional problem that belongs to Australia that
• 1:07:06
  all of us are accountable for can we just pause on deaths in custody because you've raised it
• 1:07:10
  a couple of times but when we bumped into each other at the coffee shop at the ABC last week
• 1:07:15
  you actually said something interesting which I didn't know which was that there are no more
• 1:07:19
  indigenous deaths in custody per capita than there are white deaths per custody well percentage
• 1:07:24
  wise taken overall this is one of the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in
• 1:07:28
  custody that the that the percentage rate of white people dying or non-aboriginal people dying
• 1:07:32
  police custody was roughly the same as the number of Aboriginal people but we're so grossly
• 1:07:38
  overrepresented yeah so it depends whether you look at the population as a whole yeah here's but
• 1:07:43
  but you know if white people percentage of their population we're imprisoned at the rate of
• 1:07:49
  our population we are imprisoned at 10 times the rate of our of our percentage of our population
• 1:07:56
  it's catastrophic and we're having 200 million Australians yeah yeah yeah two million two million
• 1:08:02
  yeah no I mean and the I mean the other thing is when you look at juvenile detention for example
• 1:08:07
  I mean in the I think half of all ten of all young people who are incarcerated are indigenous
• 1:08:12
  in the Northern territory 97% amazing so so and and and then we're a small pop and then
• 1:08:19
  let's get back to the other thing too because we are a small population and we are so grossly
• 1:08:23
  overrepresented and there are structural there are structural reasons for that sentencing laws
• 1:08:29
  the the things that people are sentenced for three strike laws in different parts of the country
• 1:08:34
  I mean people who are in jail for unpaid fines people who in jail for crimes of just abject poverty
• 1:08:41
  people who are in jail for drug crimes who have drug and alcohol addictions I mean all of these
• 1:08:46
  things that we can resolve in very different ways the lack of representation you know isolation
• 1:08:52
  all of these things that that affect us the other thing is we're 3% of the population and we're
• 1:08:57
  almost a third of the third of the prison population so if someone dies in custody there's a big
• 1:09:03
  chance that I know them or know someone who knows them right it is it is close to home so again
• 1:09:12
  a statistic is not a measurement of what the impact of these things are on a society and we also
• 1:09:20
  need to resist a simplistic interpretation of the statistics and I think one of the one of the
• 1:09:26
  risks that that comes about from arguing that the disparity in incarceration is exclusively a
• 1:09:32
  result of racism is that then white conservatives whether they're allowed to say it publicly or not
• 1:09:38
  we'll think to themselves yeah but what about the disparity in the crime right once you racialize
• 1:09:44
  it then you think then it invites an invidious kind of comparison where people go well okay some of
• 1:09:49
  those people are are incarcerated for the reasons that you just articulated petty crime things that
• 1:09:54
  you know they really shouldn't be in there for and they're in there for really bad crimes which
• 1:09:59
  are committed disproportionately against their own people yeah so the these things are incredibly
• 1:10:05
  complex I mean that Aboriginal women of 30 times more likely to suffer domestic violence I mean
• 1:10:10
  that's happening in our homes in our communities we we have to take ownership of that we can't
• 1:10:14
  walk away from that and and these things you know I'm I'm low to just wash these things away with
• 1:10:22
  sort of colonization and history um I come out of that and I'm not doing that and my father came
• 1:10:28
  out of that and he doesn't do that and you know this is not this is not who we are this is and it's
• 1:10:34
  also not cultural because it's not who we are but we all know that crime and stress these things
• 1:10:43
  don't exist in a vacuum we know that people who are more likely to die at the hands of others are
• 1:10:48
  living in often very stressed communities deeply you know communities that are deeply poor and
• 1:10:54
  disadvantaged and all of these things that crush in on people and create toxic environments that
• 1:11:00
  manifest themselves in this sort of in this sort of crime all of these things need need to be
• 1:11:05
  considered I mean we don't solve these things in a day I doubt these things and these big questions
• 1:11:11
  would be resolved in my lifetime or even my children's lifetime but I but I fundamentally believe
• 1:11:20
  that liberalism and liberal democracy and its capacity and its universality and its capacity to
• 1:11:27
  govern over difference is and diversity is is a dream worth pursuing in the face of the alternative
• 1:11:36
  authoritarianism I do believe that it is weakened by an identity politics that wants to frame
• 1:11:44
  everything from a vantage point of grievance and history I believe that too but I also believe
• 1:11:52
  that if we don't look at who holds that power and has created that if we don't look at what is
• 1:11:57
  generated those identity political movements then we're not going to resolve these things either
• 1:12:04
  no and it strikes me that the conversations are taking place on both sides in a very limited
• 1:12:09
  scope yeah there is not a lot of talking across the aisle and being upfront about having not
• 1:12:14
  even a lot of comfortable conversations yeah and not even a lot of talk within your own group about
• 1:12:18
  having these things I mean I you know I put my neck out a lot by trying to by trying to have
• 1:12:24
  these conversations amongst my I always imagine you having one foot on a boat and another foot on
• 1:12:30
  another boat in a river and you're trying to strike you trying not to fall in the lake but to do
• 1:12:34
  otherwise would be intellectually dishonest that's the fashion of the day stamping intellectually
• 1:12:39
  and you know it's interesting too when when we look at something like Obama who shall be still
• 1:12:48
  you know black American conservative who who who often writes very penetrating things and things
• 1:12:53
  that make me think sometimes I disagree but he wrote a great article about Obama when he was
• 1:12:59
  campaigning for the presidency and called him a bound man that he was a man who
• 1:13:05
  looked to make history as the first black president but the deal was he could never talk about
• 1:13:11
  being black and remember whenever Obama raised race issues he gets slammed and he didn't raise
• 1:13:18
  them very often and he backed away from them very very quickly Henry Lewis Gates was an interesting
• 1:13:23
  example wasn't that the friend of his and professor who was arrested by breaking into his own
• 1:13:28
  home because he left his keys behind and and Obama came out very forcefully got slapped down
• 1:13:32
  really quickly and then thought let's get the cop and Henry Lewis Gates again and have a beer and
• 1:13:37
  just shake hands um he's you know there is deep unease amongst black Americans about he's
• 1:13:43
  he's the way they dealt with these things in the well in hindsight now there is yeah but I mean
• 1:13:49
  would any of the people who regard him as being naive have the ability to become president of the
• 1:13:54
  United States you see this is the thing and he actually enacted the most revolutionary really
• 1:14:01
  probably the most influential civil rights triumph since the 1960s and it was in the face of
• 1:14:08
  enormous opposition and now increasingly increasingly dismissive attitudes from young people
• 1:14:14
  in the United States who think that he was just a naive boomer who wanted to reach across the aisle
• 1:14:18
  who didn't understand the reality that African Americans now have it worse than ever I mean this
• 1:14:23
  is a part of the so talking about these silos of narratives where people are talking to each other
• 1:14:27
  within them and never across them and never rich and cross there are these shibboleths that you
• 1:14:32
  sort of have to believe now to be anti-racist which are things like I mean they're basically things
• 1:14:39
  that are concocted by critical race theory classes in universities and then people graduate and
• 1:14:43
  think that they're they're which I've never been yeah so it's things like we live in a white
• 1:14:47
  supremacist society we are structurally iridimably racist there is no point in in
• 1:14:53
  no I was basically nihilist basically saying whites are always going to fuck you and there's
• 1:14:58
  and and even so if you're a white person the only thing you can do is shut up
• 1:15:03
  sound listen get school understand your white privilege stop being fragile stop white
• 1:15:09
  explaining things don't have an opinion don't engage in this debate what we need you to do is like
• 1:15:15
  here's let me listen to something yeah and in many respects in the states now kneel physically
• 1:15:22
  kneel physically take a knee in front of me as I stand up doing the black power salute here's
• 1:15:27
  this is audio of of one of the rallies one of the protests and they start trying to get the
• 1:15:35
  the african americans up to the front and push all the white people who are marching with them
• 1:15:41
  to the back and around the side so the white people will be at the brunt of the police brutality
• 1:15:46
  rather than the black people I kind of thought the point of civil rights was that you don't
• 1:16:04
  go to the back of the bus and that everybody is supposed to be equal if they are well josh you know
• 1:16:09
  when you take contradiction and turn it into difference when you know the contradiction should be
• 1:16:13
  the black and white can stand together against these things but when you create when you turn
• 1:16:16
  contradiction to difference you go to the back um this is the poison I think of all of these things
• 1:16:22
  and the but I think there's also a danger in taking those moments and normalizing those
• 1:16:29
  I like their represent laying those over yet you know what most people in america are not protesting
• 1:16:36
  protest is also not an indication of change remember the the the huge protests in Australia during
• 1:16:41
  the Iraq war condemning the Iraq war and john how it got reelected with an increased majority
• 1:16:46
  in the Vietnam war the Vietnam moratoriums the the government of the day was returned with increased
• 1:16:50
  majority um don't I I think there's a danger sometimes in overlaying these things and seeing
• 1:16:56
  things that are not necessarily there and certainly not necessarily representative um I think
• 1:17:02
  the broad majority of people black white at whatever um are looking for ways and this has been
• 1:17:10
  my experience looking for ways to reach across that divide to find common ground to rehabilitate
• 1:17:17
  our liberalism to allow it to be record to to to have greater representation and recognition
• 1:17:24
  I think that hard work is being done and I would argue that the hard work is done primarily by the
• 1:17:30
  out by us by our side I think I think we do the heavy lifting in this I think those incidents can
• 1:17:37
  can can be can muddy those waters a little bit yeah I would agree with that if it weren't for
• 1:17:43
  the predominance of that narrative it's a narrative and mainstream academia mainstream elite
• 1:17:49
  institutions it's a narrative so like in the New York Times this week uh there's a there's a
• 1:17:56
  an op-ed uh you know this is the paper of record this is this is the opinion page of the most
• 1:18:01
  important publication arguably in uh in liberal america and it's entitled I don't need love texts
• 1:18:07
  from my white friends I need them to fight anti blackness and it's uh by an African American guy
• 1:18:12
  who's got a book coming out and it the first line of it is my book is coming out in a few months and
• 1:18:17
  I don't know if I'm going to be alive to see it because I'm a black man yeah now that's norm that's
• 1:18:21
  the norm that is the establishment norm if you don't if you object to that if you say hey I'm
• 1:18:25
  what are you talking about you're a black man so you think you're going to die within the next
• 1:18:28
  two or three months and if you're publishing a book a black man without some privilege you know
• 1:18:33
  yeah with with some privilege rather I mean he has I mean I can't say that without I will be accused
• 1:18:38
  of being essentially a white supremacist and this is and this is this is these are dangerous fault
• 1:18:42
  lines you see and and again coming back to the heavy lifting that we have to do this is my lot in
• 1:18:49
  life right I mean I I am trying to think my way through something as visceral I mean I feel
• 1:18:56
  like it shouldn't fall on your shoulders I mean this well it does it does a person who who
• 1:19:03
  works as tirelessly as I can to ensure that everybody has opportunity equally and that everybody is
• 1:19:09
  able to fulfill their lives and I want to use conversations to help people to think about the
• 1:19:15
  ways in which that's achievable I guess the next question is I mean I sort of tweet by I don't
• 1:19:24
  know if you know Zay Jalani is a journalist he's from Georgia and he works for the intercept now
• 1:19:29
  so he's very left-wing I mean this is Glenn Greenwald's news outlet and he tweeted what if promoting
• 1:19:36
  a narrative that minorities are victims of various forces out of their control is actually dehumanizing
• 1:19:41
  and he wrote a piece in tablet about that and that is the interesting thing that's good thinking
• 1:19:46
  yeah that's the interesting thing for me like how do I engage in the fight for justice and anti-racism
• 1:19:52
  without becoming co-opted by hand-ranging performative left-wing whites who want to be
• 1:20:00
  saviors and who want to exclude any people of color who don't conform to their critical race
• 1:20:06
  theory ideas as being uncle Tom's like I don't want a bar of them but but but don't think we
• 1:20:11
  can't do that don't think we can't do that I mean we're having this conversation there are conversations
• 1:20:16
  going on across America right now in various ways there are there are town hall meetings there
• 1:20:21
  are little leagues there are people having coffee there are you know they these conversations are
• 1:20:26
  happening a dominant media driven narrative is not necessarily the story of the age but but
• 1:20:35
  narrative is is is important because it does it does lay over us a story that creates the parameters
• 1:20:43
  for the debate and and I worry about that all the time and I'm you know I am constantly in a battle
• 1:20:50
  with these things within myself looking for ways to be productive and constructive looking to take
• 1:20:56
  ideas that align with my own but then challenging where those ideas come from challenging the people
• 1:21:03
  who are speaking those ideas to maybe address the privilege that they have and and you know trying
• 1:21:10
  to open up that space it's not easy to be you know and I don't even like using broad terms like
• 1:21:19
  you say black I mean I'm black in Australia but if I go to America or I'm a Latino or something
• 1:21:25
  you know what I mean I mean funnily enough when we're in the States my boys you know you walk down
• 1:21:30
  the street and you'll get a different reaction to different boys my middle boy looks like a sort
• 1:21:34
  of a sort of lightest in African-American you know very you know fatalities features and he's
• 1:21:39
  his care and he's and and black American guys are walk by and you know give him a night you know
• 1:21:43
  so a little bit of recognition my my youngest son walks into any restaurant in America and people
• 1:21:48
  speak to him in Spanish people stop him in the street and speak to him speak to him speak to him
• 1:21:51
  he's a Mexican he went and played basketball over there and he went down to the border of Mexico
• 1:21:56
  and there's an all Mexican team he was playing with he came up to him start speaking in Spanish and
• 1:22:00
  then said and said you know hang on what you're not and then asking what he was doing with all the
• 1:22:05
  gringos yeah so so so you're constantly so but but those sort of broad based things that but but but
• 1:22:11
  speaking as a person who is a one of a bit of phrase a black liberal to put a foot in each boat
• 1:22:18
  to try to to steer those boats to sure to try to have those conversations I cringe at the
• 1:22:24
  performative aspects of identity I cringe at the the sort of orthodoxy of identity the tyranny
• 1:22:31
  of ideas the I that this sort of thing that ties you to one essentialized view of what you are
• 1:22:37
  that privileges one thing above above another whether it's sexuality gender race you know in an
• 1:22:43
  ideal world philosophically I am right there with those things but I navigate those ideas with the
• 1:22:49
  weight of my history on my back you know absolutely but I mean and my family in front of me yes exactly
• 1:22:55
  looking at the face of this the weird thing about that essentialized view that you're talking about
• 1:23:00
  is it we perceive it as being intrinsic and unchanging but in actual fact the taboos surrounding it
• 1:23:08
  and the conversations and narratives that you're supposed to understand it existing in are changing
• 1:23:13
  and updating all the time so this sort of brings us to like the cancel culture component of things
• 1:23:18
  you know Justin Trudeau the Canadian Prime Minister was almost lost his his job because he had
• 1:23:23
  these photos come out when he was in his early years he's been down with us all you know exactly
• 1:23:27
  he's supposed to be the the white night on a horse you know the night on the white horse and he comes
• 1:23:33
  out having put on blackface yeah now blackface was always understood I mean as long as I've been
• 1:23:39
  around I've understood that the Al Jolson style of blackface that is that is explicitly intended
• 1:23:44
  to hark back to the the period that where you were ridiculing African-Americans African-Americans couldn't
• 1:23:50
  play in these places so why people put the face on to play African-Americans who playing in a place
• 1:23:56
  that they couldn't play yeah and it was incredibly demeaning and humiliating and it's
• 1:23:59
  important and you know you rubbed it rubbed into the wound of got very real and present oppression
• 1:24:07
  that was that was going on so that is incredibly tasteless to do the question of whether or not
• 1:24:12
  it's okay for example to impersonate Michael Jackson at a Halloween party by putting on boot
• 1:24:18
  polish on your face is something that now is considered maybe Michael Jackson not the best example
• 1:24:22
  well okay maybe not probably which we which Michael you know let's let's let's you know pick
• 1:24:29
  yeah you know you want to go as a bomber to a fancy dress um the idea that that is a fireable
• 1:24:35
  offense that's fairly new yeah I don't think that that was a norm when I was in high school and
• 1:24:41
  in the 90s and and again a one-size-fits-all categorization of these events the same with the
• 1:24:47
  N word right I got in a hot water last year because it emerged that some years ago in New York when
• 1:24:52
  I was doing my old podcast I was shooting the breeze with African-American friends who hate the phrase
• 1:24:58
  the N word right right right the existence of the actual word yes and we made a conscious policy
• 1:25:04
  sometimes it would need to be heard right in this drunken environment of of a podcast at a bar in
• 1:25:09
  Brooklyn to just be saying the word and talking about like what is it about this word what is it
• 1:25:14
  you know why is it definitely who can say it when can you say it and this got dug up by a media
• 1:25:19
  commentator in the in the Australian press uh and so there was not then this article about you
• 1:25:25
  know ABC presenter you know in hot water over use of the N word totally taking out of context
• 1:25:31
  totally taking out of context but context doesn't matter no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
• 1:25:34
  the magical word like those magical syllables were said even though it was in the context of
• 1:25:40
  this is a horrendous word should never be used against anybody and you know a lot of the feedback
• 1:25:46
  that I got not just on Twitter but even in emails from people at the ABC uh was um completely
• 1:25:56
  certain that I had just been sort of looking for an excuse to use that because deep down
• 1:26:02
  I'm really racist and I just love using that word and I came out of that experience thinking
• 1:26:08
  well hang on this is something that has been evolving over the course of our lives it was
• 1:26:12
  different I mean I don't want to say a naive but I wouldn't record that podcast today
• 1:26:18
  because I do think there's been an updating of the taboo gradually over the course of the past
• 1:26:22
  five to ten years and I it's and there's no recognition of that there's no recognition that
• 1:26:28
  you know the conversation that we're having now we may have trodden on landmines that in ten years
• 1:26:33
  yeah yeah we'll be fireable for me I don't know whether or not we've said black where we should have
• 1:26:37
  been saying African American whether we've you know it's entirely possible in 15 years time someone
• 1:26:41
  want to get me five having this conversation it's a really it's again just going back to this
• 1:26:46
  thing of trying to think your way through something that's visceral um I I get that and and I get
• 1:26:53
  that in the context of that conversation and the boundaries that were set within that conversation by
• 1:26:58
  the people who were you were having that conversation with that that was an acceptable use of that
• 1:27:03
  word I mean if you're quoting James Baldwin um and who used the word liberally to affect
• 1:27:10
  if you want to literally quote Baldwin and you used that word could you do that um no what you
• 1:27:15
  said I don't think you're allowed to make those mouth noises yeah and and and and I again
• 1:27:21
  I understand where that's taking us and I understand the difficulties are doing this but then we
• 1:27:26
  tell you a little story of how these of how you're you can't think your way through these things
• 1:27:34
  I was at a party uh and there was a well-known media person who's I would consider a friend and
• 1:27:41
  I would not consider to be racist at all who is telling me a story about a relative and
• 1:27:51
  and how the relative used to use a particularly pejorative term about aboriginal people
• 1:27:59
  and was sort of making the point was oh what a terrible racism was you know he used to say this
• 1:28:06
  the moment that word was said even in the context of relaying to me how of this person thought
• 1:28:14
  that was appalling and how bad the uncle was for doing this the moment that word was said
• 1:28:21
  I felt like I felt sick it was a visceral reaction to something that you know if I think my way
• 1:28:29
  through it I shouldn't have but I was right back to when I was a kid and that was said I was
• 1:28:37
  right back to when my father picked me up from school once and I was walking out with a group of
• 1:28:42
  boys who I considered my friends who said is that your father and then laughed
• 1:28:49
  even the use of the word within the social setting that it was with a friend who thought that they
• 1:28:56
  were on comfortable ground with me relaying a story that they were appalled by the use of the word
• 1:29:05
  itself just made me feel sick and and I went away and then I couldn't forget about it for the
• 1:29:13
  rest of the day I couldn't forget about it and driving home I told my wife Tracy about it and I said
• 1:29:17
  I really don't know what to do with this and I don't know whether to go back and make and raise
• 1:29:21
  this again in the end I just let it slide because I didn't want to have that I didn't want to make
• 1:29:27
  that person feel bad either and but the use of these words even within a context in which
• 1:29:35
  they appear to be acceptable or at least you've created the parameters for a discussion where
• 1:29:42
  that word might be legitimately used it still can someone else hearing it can just be made to feel
• 1:29:51
  sick it's hard to think your way through this stuff you know that's what I keep saying I
• 1:29:56
  my my guide through all of these things is philosophy I that is the those are the thing I turn to
• 1:30:03
  constantly it's what I read it's what I look for ways of navigating this through thought
• 1:30:10
  and logic and reason and rationality but the thing about racism is it is not those things it's
• 1:30:17
  it's childhood you know a manual can't once said about you know being being tied to an eternal
• 1:30:25
  minority and what he meant by that minority being childhood that we need to break the bonds of
• 1:30:31
  that childhood to enter into a world of cosmopolitanism where we'd not defined by those things
• 1:30:37
  and I'm there at the other end of that I'm in the cosmopolitan perpetual peace world
• 1:30:42
  but the minute someone says that I'm still chained by my minority my childhood I think if there
• 1:30:48
  were an agreement to a datant where we could say all right here's the list of words and I'll
• 1:30:54
  let's say and because I think there is a utility in an increasing amount of conversational taboo I
• 1:31:00
  mean I think it's a good thing that you can't tell racist jokes in the office anymore I think
• 1:31:04
  it's a good thing that you can't look at a female coworker and go cool yeah yeah it's on her like
• 1:31:09
  I mean these are all good things I mean I we want to you just go back and read any newspaper article
• 1:31:15
  from the 1920s yeah and the level of flagrant racism and sexism yeah is gob's predatory behind
• 1:31:22
  and it's way better it's a way better world for me too it's a way better world for for Black Lives Matter
• 1:31:29
  and we're in a world for us we're all yeah we're a bit of for that to have got us but here's the
• 1:31:34
  thing I think we need we need to feel like the sands aren't constantly shifting and that there
• 1:31:41
  isn't a subtext of gotcha about the whole thing where you're you're doing what I call outrage
• 1:31:48
  archaeology where you're essentially hunting through through people's language and people's histories
• 1:31:54
  and people's works to try to isolate the most outrageous or egregious thing so that you can
• 1:31:59
  de-platform Winston Churchill and a whole bunch of other people for being racists rather than
• 1:32:04
  judging them in the context of their their time so I'm perfectly happy to say let's not use that
• 1:32:09
  slur against indigenous Australians even if we're talking about how bad it is but I want to know
• 1:32:14
  that in five years or ten years we won't have turned that all on its head so it'll be a whole
• 1:32:18
  bunch of different things I think it's okay that the the sands shift I think it's good that we
• 1:32:23
  confront but I but it's it's the prosecution of it we should be able to have the conversations
• 1:32:29
  without the prosecution and I think I think that's that's that's what's critical but again this
• 1:32:34
  comes back to the idea of the tyranny of thought that you impose an ideology on top of this
• 1:32:43
  and the the the antidote to this is our is our liberalism it is the capacity to disagree
• 1:32:53
  ethically it is the capacity to be able to speak freely without that level of prosecution
• 1:32:59
  of everything you say and to meet offensive ideas with better ideas you know this is
• 1:33:06
  but every time you know from my point of view it'd be a much easier for me to be a liberal who was
• 1:33:14
  white because I wouldn't have to unpack the baggies that liberalism came with I wouldn't have to say
• 1:33:19
  that Emmanuel Cairn the great philosopher of the Enlightenment who wrote what is enlightenment
• 1:33:25
  that's what he wrote he gave it its name who who wrote that also said horrible things about
• 1:33:33
  about African people that Hegel who gave us an idea of the of the end of the driving forces of
• 1:33:43
  history and the power of freedom and recognition also is someone who believed that history only
• 1:33:51
  began in Europe I have to unpack that I have to work my way through that you know and I have to
• 1:33:59
  work my way through that knowing that that is not just an intellectual exercise that those ideas
• 1:34:06
  imported here took lives took the lives of my family and continue today to be felt in the
• 1:34:14
  early deaths of my family and the imprisonment rates of people in my family I know that that
• 1:34:20
  might be harder intellectual and emotional worth but it gives you an enormous it's a big bone
• 1:34:26
  you better you but it also permits you it grants you standing to essentially say whatever the
• 1:34:30
  fuck you want and I have to but I have to demand it I have to own it and I have to be very
• 1:34:41
  careful with the way that I construct it in a way that I am always walking through that
• 1:34:48
  mind field that I don't want to diminish or dismiss the suffering of my own people I don't
• 1:34:55
  want to get to a position where I can diminish the ongoing impact of racism by appealing to a
• 1:35:01
  post racial liberal utopia but at the same time I don't want to perpetuate essentialised ideas
• 1:35:10
  of identity that turn toxic and divide us into our tribes and fail to find a civic unity beyond
• 1:35:17
  difference this is this is the big work of my life and I didn't ask for it you know I was put
• 1:35:24
  there to navigate it from the moment that I left my family and went to university and found
• 1:35:30
  myself in an environment where I was the only one or there are a handful of other Aboriginal people
• 1:35:35
  I had to learn how to eat with white people I had to learn what it was like to understand their
• 1:35:40
  jokes I had to understand that I was alone and they were they were many I went overseas and I
• 1:35:47
  reported the world and I saw the rise of toxic identity in all of its forms the way that historical
• 1:35:54
  grievance is used as Nietzsche said the man of resentment who constantly returns to the open wound
• 1:36:01
  not to heal the wounds of the past but to draw more vengeance from it I've seen how that is twisted
• 1:36:08
  and turned into toxic identities that kill I've seen authoritarianism built around the endless
• 1:36:16
  prosecution and grievance of history China Xi Jinping never forget the 100 years of humiliation
• 1:36:22
  by foreign powers don't think about the white devil did to us ISIS don't forget the end of the
• 1:36:27
  caliphate the caliphate collapsed you know the Ottoman Empire collapsed because we strayed from
• 1:36:31
  Islam we were so weak look at these white people what they do to us look at the west what they
• 1:36:36
  do to us we need to recapture that a fundamentalists seventh century Islam that will save us from the
• 1:36:41
  evils of the west you know to navigate those fault lines to try to understand that world to bring
• 1:36:48
  it back to my own world to try to look to myself and free myself from the chains of history and to
• 1:36:54
  try to bring the intellectual work to rehabilitate liberalism and to make common cause with my fellow
• 1:37:01
  liberals who don't share my history and can't possibly understand what it is like to live the life
• 1:37:08
  that I've lived and see the history that I've had and then to talk to my own family who have
• 1:37:11
  every reason to reject liberalism as an oppressive idea that kills them and puts them in jail
• 1:37:17
  that's the path I have to walk and but to do anything other would be would be an abdication of
• 1:37:23
  the responsibility that I have and a failure of of of intellect you've got to be able to do it
• 1:37:30
  you've got to bring yourself to it and look what white people I think can do when you step up to
• 1:37:36
  the intellectual plate and you reject a failure of intellect is to ensure that they don't have a
• 1:37:42
  failure of empathy at the same time because when you say that no one can appreciate the experience
• 1:37:47
  emotionally that you and your people have gone through that's true it's also true that most
• 1:37:53
  people have had glimpses most people have had glimpses I've had the moment where I'm walking
• 1:37:58
  through the East Village of New York holding hands with my boyfriend and someone walks past go
• 1:38:02
  faggot yeah yeah and you don't know if you're going to get your head bitten in I've had moments
• 1:38:07
  I've seen my grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor try to deal with her fear and
• 1:38:13
  impression of what it means to be a Jew and that's part of you world and that's all part of me
• 1:38:17
  those words are used they have a visceral impact on you yeah yeah scream out Jew at me or something
• 1:38:24
  so with all most of us I mean there's a certain class of people who haven't perhaps the
• 1:38:29
  highly privileged wasp private school types perhaps but I think got their own demon probably I
• 1:38:34
  think I think place is important where it happens is important one of the things that I found
• 1:38:40
  incredibly liberating was when I lived overseas because I didn't have to meet white people
• 1:38:45
  with the weight of our history yeah they didn't so and that's the same with African-American
• 1:38:49
  street American Australia or France yeah I mean Baldwin went to France why he said because I don't
• 1:38:56
  want to be a Negro little owner Negro writer right I don't want not because I'm not going to be
• 1:39:01
  black but I'm not going to be your black person and and and I found it incredibly liberating now
• 1:39:07
  in the same way your experience of your Judaism and your heritage is going to be different if you were
• 1:39:13
  in Europe now with a rise of antisemitism and a rise of a far right wing politics that look at you
• 1:39:21
  and can do damage to you that context changes you see Australia it's quite a remarkable experiment
• 1:39:28
  in the sense it's it's a haven from history we've created a society where people can come here
• 1:39:36
  and Shia don't have to kill Sunni and Catholic doesn't have to kill Protestant
• 1:39:41
  and Macedonian doesn't have to hate Greek and Armenian doesn't have to hate Turk and now
• 1:39:47
  do we put aside those do we still not carry those stories yes we do but there is a way of
• 1:39:53
  wearing your history more loosely here yeah that people who come here can breathe from you know
• 1:39:59
  they can shake off those shackles tell us what you were saying about forgetting about their being
• 1:40:03
  a virtue in a certain there is absolutely a virtue in that but what happened here happened here
• 1:40:10
  for us you know I drive on this land I walk on this land where it happened my family is here we
• 1:40:17
  could only be formed here it is different for me here then if I were somewhere as far as an
• 1:40:22
  American right now I could have a philosophical discussion about race and liberalism and how we
• 1:40:27
  free ourselves and how we do these things I could do that because I have a measure of
• 1:40:32
  detachment from the lived experience but an African American can't necessarily do that yeah I
• 1:40:36
  Barmer can't even do that he's been president of the United States Thomas Chadleton Williams
• 1:40:40
  can write the book that he writes and have those thoughts that he has in France I wonder if back in
• 1:40:46
  America where a cop pulls him over and anything could go horribly wrong or his father or his brother
• 1:40:54
  or whether that's necessarily going to be the same case you know so the context in place matters
• 1:41:02
  but the dream the ideal of being in a place where you can free yourself from that history where
• 1:41:10
  the essentialized idea of race or sexuality or gender is not the defining idea of who you are
• 1:41:17
  where we bring those things to the marketplace and to the public square with with a measure of
• 1:41:22
  recognition and representation that gives us faith in the institutions of that society the ability
• 1:41:28
  to govern over that diversity the ability to rehabilitate liberalism from its history this is a shared
• 1:41:35
  project on the extremes where people sit there and tell you give it all up to get about it get over it
• 1:41:42
  or you know to hell with you you're irredeemably racist we're never going to get anywhere I don't
• 1:41:46
  believe that that's actually what defines us I don't think that's where most people live no I think
• 1:41:51
  the narrative the media the media needs conflict so it pulls those two contending narratives
• 1:41:59
  together it brings them to the center and it lets them go at it but underneath that I mean that
• 1:42:04
  near times are there it is firmly placed on one side but underneath that I think we are we are
• 1:42:11
  meeting each other and finding our way and we're navigating this and we're having these discussions
• 1:42:15
  I mean my my wife is is you know ostensibly a white Australian she also has Chinese ancestry
• 1:42:22
  but you know ostensibly that's her life and that's how she's different it doesn't we love each other
• 1:42:28
  and and we share a life together and we build that life around the things that that we share in
• 1:42:34
  common but there are times when we rub up against that where she can't where she will say something
• 1:42:39
  that she cannot possibly know is going to upset me or there'll be an assumption or members of her
• 1:42:47
  family will make comments that I have to deal with um but we do that because we love each other
• 1:42:53
  and because we come to that in good faith and I'm not going to sit there and say that's it I'm out
• 1:42:58
  you're done you're a racist I'm out of here um because that's the problem with our society
• 1:43:05
  if we cannot come to this with a measure of love and kindness and understanding if we you know
• 1:43:12
  if if we all carry the weight of this and commit to this idea of what liberalism can be
• 1:43:21
  knowing for well that liberalism you know carries the weight of its own history and its own baggage
• 1:43:26
  but in a world where we are seeing a recession of democracy where liberalism is dying from the
• 1:43:35
  outside and being from the inside and being attacked from the outside where there is absolutely a
• 1:43:41
  viable authoritarian alternative um this is if we don't get this done the consequences are
• 1:43:49
  potentially catastrophic and I don't think we understand that I think we've lived with the
• 1:43:53
  long piece for so long that we don't think that nations can fall we don't think that borders can
• 1:43:58
  be redrawn we don't think that we can have catastrophic global conflict and we can we can wrap it
• 1:44:04
  up on this point but just to add a button to your point about the the authoritarian uh model of
• 1:44:11
  China being something that we have to pay heed to I just saw a series of quotes that were there
• 1:44:17
  were there were three passages and three quotes within each of the three passages about uh white
• 1:44:25
  people being overrun by Muslim invaders and so on one of the quotes was from the Christchurch
• 1:44:31
  shooter in each column another one was from the Norwegian uh white supremacist shooter
• 1:44:36
  brevic uh brevic uh I try not to say any names because I want to give them credit uh and the other
• 1:44:42
  was from victor or bun the leader of hungry and they were indistinguishable uh wow and so we're
• 1:44:48
  talking about authoritarianism yes let's keep our eye on China oh no it was also keeping
• 1:44:53
  our society on far right leaders on people who dabble in authoritarian far left authoritarian
• 1:44:59
  authoritarianism as well but um yeah I would I would just say that the the the danger for those of us
• 1:45:06
  who care about justice who care about social justice and economic justice about justice for
• 1:45:11
  for people of color for minorities and for everybody it's imperative that we as you say
• 1:45:16
  get it right in a way that comes out with good faith and with a big heart towards people who
• 1:45:22
  didn't who weren't weren't quite on the bandwagon like there's a whole narrative around race that
• 1:45:26
  comes out of university where if you're a bloke who's working on the farm in outback Western Australia
• 1:45:32
  you might actually not be racist at all in terms of not believing that there's anything wrong with
• 1:45:37
  people of other races you might be the most big-hearted person uh I've ever met you might
• 1:45:42
  take in indigenous kids and you might nonetheless talk about race in a way that sounds flagrantly
• 1:45:48
  racist to someone who to a white lefty who's graduated from a cultural studies class and we have to
• 1:45:54
  have I think a little bit of um of compassion well now they're also into your thoughts because now
• 1:45:59
  it can be unconscious and you don't even have to think it or know that's right no one you think
• 1:46:03
  yes that's right so when I was getting to all races regardless of whether or not I'm racist you
• 1:46:07
  know and and yeah you're right and so just to finish that thought my concern is that if we don't
• 1:46:12
  get that if we don't if we don't speak about the importance of social justice and economic justice
• 1:46:17
  in ways that land with middle Australia and middle America we're gonna get that's what fuels
• 1:46:22
  Trump that's what fuels all barn and you know the the white conservatives are gonna come to a point
• 1:46:28
  where they say how come identity politics is okay for everybody else but not for us I think that's
• 1:46:33
  part of what we're gonna say not not realizing that they've probably had uh the most powerful
• 1:46:39
  form of identity politics all their lives um being white but you're not gonna harang them into that
• 1:46:44
  no no no no you're not and and and and just and just to take that point to finish up on it too is
• 1:46:50
  this is the challenge for us I think as well and if I take the all the restatement from the hard
• 1:46:56
  as a as a high point of Australian liberalism which I believe it is um then the ability to turn
• 1:47:04
  that into action the ability to prosecute a case that other people can get on board and support
• 1:47:10
  is not by saying that people need to be hit over there with their racism they need to be reeducated
• 1:47:16
  um you're saying to a country that uh believes and has every right to believe is virtuous
• 1:47:26
  a virtuous democracy you're saying to them that you are essentially morally reprehensible
• 1:47:31
  and that only through going through a process of moral reeducation uh and and atoning for your
• 1:47:37
  past then you will support this initiative uh you know that can't be the narrative the narrative
• 1:47:45
  has to be this is a liberal idea that that joins us to what has been the successful project of
• 1:47:55
  Australian liberalism that that underpins what is already a robust and vigorous democracy and
• 1:48:01
  brings our voices to that democracy in a way that strengthens all of us that a morally virtuous
• 1:48:08
  nation can in fact apply itself to the difficult task of rehabilitating its liberalism and atoning
• 1:48:15
  for its history that narrative that marries the all the restatements aspirations to a foundation
• 1:48:22
  of liberalism I think is one that is absolutely necessary to be able to build the support to make
• 1:48:28
  that a reality but a divisive narrative of identity politics that hits people over their head
• 1:48:35
  with this stuff we know what the result is going to be it's Trump right we know we see what happens
• 1:48:40
  that's that's the real politics of these things let's hope that we can revisit this in five years
• 1:48:46
  and say it was all we got it right and we're on the right we're on the right five years might be too soon
• 1:48:51
  we're called up ten stand ground great to talk to you yeah great thank you