Latest / The Real News Podcast / Steven Thrasher: Black Cops, Latino ICE agents, and the "Overseer Class"

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Steven Thrasher: Black Cops, Latino ICE agents, and the "Overseer Class" · The Real News Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: My name is Stephen Thrasher. I'm the author of The
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Overseer Class, and I'm the Daniel Remberg Chair of Social
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Justice and Reporting at Northwestern University, although I am suspended
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: from teaching and in exile for practicing social justice.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Well, doctor Thrasher, thank you so much for being here
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: and sitting down with me here in.
• 0:20
  Speaker 3: The Real News studio in Baltimore.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: It's real honor to finally get to meet you in
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: person and to talk with you about this really important
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: new book that you've written, The Overseer Class, and we're
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: going to talk about that and so much more. But
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: I want to ask if you could just kind of
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: hit us with the back of the cover description and
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: like overview of this book. You know, what is it
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: and why is it coming out now?
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: The Overseer Class is about people from marginalized backgrounds who
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: make their bones, that make their bread, not by helping
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: people like them, but by cracking their skulls sometimes. Literally
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: began as a book about black cops, and I do
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: write a lot about black cops in the book, but
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: it evolved into understanding how policing operates in different kinds
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: of institutions, and my naive disappointment at earlier points in
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: my career when I thought, is an academic or as
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: a journalist that black and sometimes black and gay, which
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: I am black and gay administrators might help people like me,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: and I realized a certain point, Oh no, they're there
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: to crack my skull and to keep people like me
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: in line. And so the book is hopefully helping people
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: who are being seduced into it understand it, but also
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: trying to give a language and a voice to people
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: who've experienced it. And, as a reader told me, because
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: I never understand what books are about to like hear
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: from readers, as a reader told me the other day,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: to help them understand the grief, the grief of what
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: it means to have somebody who thought was a mentor
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: and to realize that they're actually really there to put
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: their boot on your neck when you're trying to fly
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: too high.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: The thing that you're putting your finger on here, I think,
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: like really clearly is something that all of us can
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: understand and sense, even if we haven't had a language
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: to talk about it. Let's talk about language and like
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: class and why it's important to distinguish like a class
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: from just a group of people or you know, or
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: people in like a certain I don't know, like kind
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: of socioeconomic range. So who and what is the overseer class,
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: and like how does that fit into our existing conceptions
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: of like, Okay, we got a ruling class up here,
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: you got all these billionaires owning everything and YadA, YadA, YadA,
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: and we got the rest of us working people down here.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: In that class analysis, they are the people between the
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: two of us. We can think about managers in a
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: way I like to think in class dynamics, and I
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: don't mind that there is a tension, and I've gotten
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: some criticism. All helpful criticisms are critique about how I
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: am moving in the book between the personal and the class,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: and I think that there are ways that that intent
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: doesn't matter. You can have good intent, you can have
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: ill intent. The class dynamics are going to perpetuate themselves,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: but I do think we have some agency. And I've
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: certainly experienced disappointing decisions that some people have made. But
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: I think in class dynamics. I have a background in activism.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: I did a PhD in American studies, which I think
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: really should have been a PhD in anti American studies with.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Well, that's that's what Fox News says. It is might
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: as well be right.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: And my first book, I was really grateful I got
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: to call the viral underclass. I had met in an
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: HIV activist who's still alive. He actually just came to
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: my book launch. His name is Sean Strup. He's an
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: old school Act up activists, and he coined a term
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: called the viral underclass thinking about how and why people
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: who are living with HIV literally live under a separate
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: set of laws, and the extreme dynamic he used. We
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: kind of use different examples, but the extreme dynamic used
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: when he coined that term was that an infant born
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: with HIV is going to live under a different set
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: of laws for their whole life. And usually in the US,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: not always, but usually in the US, we don't actually
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: write the immutable characteristic into the law. We can see
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: how it plays out, but we usually don't say, if
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: you have black skin, if you have brown skin, this
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: is the law.
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: That was the case with HIV.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: If you're born with HIV, there are all these things
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: that you'd have to do throughout your life differently than
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: a person who didn't have HIV. And so I thought,
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: having understanding the class dynamics that in the US about
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: a million people, worldwide forty million people are living with
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: HIV is helpful to understand in a class dynamic, and
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: I was very grateful that he graciously allowed me to
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: use that phrase for my first book, because when I
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: was putting that book together, it had begun as a
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: book about the criminalization of HIV, which is still a
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: part of it. But I was trying to sell it
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: right as the COVID pandemic began, and so my wonderful
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: literary agent, Tanya McKennon and I started thinking about how
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: do we pivot this, and she had the idea, which
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: I think has been born out. And it's been really
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: nice hearing from people on this book tour what the
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: book is meant in them over time. That there would
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: be a lot of amnesia pretty quickly about COVID, and
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: that there would be some flash in the pan books
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: about the pandemic, but that hopefully I was coming from
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: kind of a theoretical background, she was the one that
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: picked the viral underclass as the idea for the book.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: You're laughing, No, I'm laughing because I'm like, yeah, one
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: of those books was mine, baby, you know, like I
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: did a book of ten interviews with workers around the
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: US during year one of COVID.
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: Who published it or books?
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: Yes, right, and I am incredibly proud of it, but like,
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: man did it sync? Like so like I'm just I'm
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: smiling because I'm identifying with your stories so much.
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: But please keep me well.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: I hope, especially after the so called AI bubble burst,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: that the point of books. I mean, even if we
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: say it sinks like a stone. I'm going through this
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: right now with a new book. That we're under pressure
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: with commercial publishing, We're under pressure for all kinds of media.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: But the real beauty of books is that they last
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: for time. And I do honestly believe that your book
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: and Molly Crabapple, who has beautiful new book out on
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: the Jewish Labor Bound.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Who designed the cover of my book, by the way,
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: I love you, Molly.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Molly's fantastic, and who did art for the Viral Underclass.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: You know, she did this amazing series of portraits of
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: people who are frontline workers working in COVID. I think
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: all of this is actually going to be really important
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: for future and part of what we do as writers
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: is actually not just right for our time is to
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: write across time. So as I developed a second book,
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: I started having ideas about black police and I was
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: reporting all over the country, including very briefly in Baltimore
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: after Freddy at the Uprise in response to the murder
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: of Freddie Gray, and I was reporting and Ferguson and
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: as and at the time Ferguson had a white mayor,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: an almost entirely white police force, police officers. Black people
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: could not become police officers because if you've even been arrested,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: you couldn't be a police officer. And effectively, the entire
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: black the entire black cop it wasn't not even charged,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: not even convicted, just arrested, and everyone had been arrested.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: So I started thinking about, you know, what it would
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: be like to have a more diverse police force. And
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: I st noticing black cops everywhere in the in the culture,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: in fiction and politics and news, and preparing for my
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: trip here to Baltimore. I do think one of the
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: first times, if not the first time, that I reported
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: on a high profile case that was not white officer
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: black victim was Freddy Gray. The six officers and a
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: mixed race. I think black, Latino and white, and that
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: was a very very different thing to wrestle with. So
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: I started thinking about black cops. And then personally, we'll
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: get into this a policing mentality that happened with in academia,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: with people who were overseeing me. I'm realizing that they
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: were over overseers and thinking about the line between overseers
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: on plantations two cops, but also thinking about the ways
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: that on plantations techniques of dealing with management developed that
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: also affect factories and modern workplaces and the overseer. If
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: we're thinking in a class dynamic, is there's the owner
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: of the plantation. We'll start with the plantation metaphor. And
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: I say this in almost every interviewer when I'm talking publicly,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: because it's something my agent who's a black woman, and
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: my editor is also a black woman, and I talked
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: about a lot. I am never saying that the modern
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: workplace is exactly the plantation, no right, but but quite literally,
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the move of overseeing labor and using a whip to
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: using the tools of industrialization actually does come from that process,
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: and those same techniques theoretically move through how overseers are rewarded,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: how workers are threatened even though it's not the physical
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: whip that's being used.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, techniques of control right are explored and expanded
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: and handed down over time.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to jump in a direction I haven't
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: really talked about in any interview yet, but it seems
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: like a natural place to begin. And then I will
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: go back into the plantation. But one of the TV
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: shows I write about my book that was my favorite
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: to write about with Severance, which I find such a
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: fascinating show, and if people are unfamiliar with the premise,
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: it's about a workplace where people have their outside lives
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: and when they go to work, their brain is severed.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: They go to work and they have no idea who
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: they are outside. When they're inside, they don't know who
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: they are outside. When they leave at the end of
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: the day, they don't know who they are what they
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: do work, And there are only no one else has
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: written about this to my knowledge, only two people that
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: can move between the severed floor and the rest of
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: the world with their full consciousness intact. It is a
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: black man played by Tremmel Tillman I believe his name is,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: and a white woman played by Patricia Arquette. They're the
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: only two that can move back and forth, and they
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: are overseers. They observe the people at work, and they
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: observe them at home, and they use their identity in
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: very intimate ways to get close to the families outside.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: They use engendered the white woman uses in gendered ways,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: the black man uses in racial ways. I think one
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: of the brilliant things about the depiction of race and
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: severance is none of it is written out. I don't
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: know if it's written out in the script, but it's
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: not written out in the text. It's completely in the
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: performance and really beautiful and really beautiful and interesting ways.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: And the black overseer, whose name is mister Milcheck, goes
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: up and tortures the black employee the most Dylan, and
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: one of the things he does is withhold the possibility
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: of food, and withhold the possibility of whether or not
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: he will be reconnected with his wife and kids. And
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: that is so much from plantation life, this threat of
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: breaking up your family, this threat of being able to
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: take things away. And here I don't feel embarrassed or
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: ashamed to say that using the threats of plantation life
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: are analogous to what happens in the modern workplace when
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: a manager has the power to say to somebody you
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: could be homeless. You know you will lose your livelihood,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: your access to food. You and your wife and kids
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: can be broken up. Your kids can end up with
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: CPS and being taken away from you. If you lose
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: your job. When that threat is there, you violate your parole.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: You violate your parole. You know you miss a paycheck,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: you lose your health insurance, you know your wife has cancer,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: your kids are sick. The same kind of power control
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: is there, and so the overseers. Now come back to
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: your original question. When we think of class dynamics, is
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: that there's the ruling class and they own the means
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: of production. Could be Jeff Bezos over Amazon, and you
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: could have a worker that needs to be busted like
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Chris Malls, who's union organizer, any of the union organizers
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: at Amazon. I write in the book about my experience
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: of visiting the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which is the
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: only plantation in the US at least last time I checked,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: that is dedicated as a museum of slavery. It's a
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: very very interesting space and when you. When I went there,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: my own family and my father's side goes back to
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: plantation life in Georgia. It is so frickin' hot the
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: day I went in June. I mean, I'm just I'm
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: just a sweating backas well.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: I'm a so cowboy like you. So I'm like, do
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: people live in this Like I can deal with one
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: hundred and ten degrees like dry heat, no problem.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: They want to live in it? Yeah, they lived in it.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: And you're walking through the sugar cane and I had
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: a really great, if graphic and disturbing, but really great
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: tour guide, you know, is explaining the sugar cane.
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: Run through it.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: It starts to cut your skin like, you know, like
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: a knife through a peach, and there's alligators and there's
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: snakes and it's so hot. Then they take you into
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: the big house, which has no air conditioning. It's preserved
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: as it was, but you immediately feel like you're going
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: forty degrees cooler because it has high ceilings completely surrounded
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: by trees, and you realize this mofo who owns this
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: house is not going out into the fields to make
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: sure people are chopping down the sugar cane he's not
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: going to do it, he's too hot. They will also
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: could all kill him if he went out there, and
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: so you need this person in between them, and that's
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: the role of the overseer. Historically, overseers were mostly landless
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: whites who lived around and were not enslaved. But we're
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: entirely dependent on, you know, the person who owned the
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: land around them. But sometimes they were black. Sometimes the
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: overseers had a black assistant who is called the driver,
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: and they would be the in between the people. And
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: sometimes overseers themselves were black. And there are some fictional
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: depictions that come up in films. The one I write
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: about the most in the book is Sidney Potier plays
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: one in a nineteen fifty seven movie called Band of
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Angels where Clark Gable is playing Ret Butler two point
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: zero and he's his overseer. And so those are the
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: people that are needed to be in between. And I
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: do think it, you know, I'm trying to think in
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: the book in responsible ways that not everyone who I'm
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: using this analogy to think about is necessarily an overseer.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: I don't think a black infantryman in the US military
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: is in any way in the same position as General Powell.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: You know, the Joint chief of Staff are eventually Secretary
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: of State or National Security Advisor Condaleza Rice. Like, they're
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: operating at different levels of power. But I think the
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: dynamic helps us understand how power and how capitalism is
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: maintained through intimate connection, and it preys on these relationships.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: I think that drivers who are enslaved have a very
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: I don't I don't think of them as culpable. I
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: think I think about them as critical. But they are
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: enslaved chattel like everybody else. They have no choice about
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: being there. And some of them, there's a historical record
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: of this purposefully become, purposely become overseers because they want
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: to practice harm reduction and try to protect people in
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: the community. But that's where personal intent doesn't matter, because
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: they're not allowed to do that. You know, even if
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: they're maybe one day they're able to keep one person
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: from getting hurt, they're.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: About like they're also incentivized to be even crueler, yeah,
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: than like a white person would be in their position.
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: They have proved their loyalty exactly. So that's where the
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: structure kicks in.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: It seems like like because you're you're talking about this
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: lineage that from the you know, anti bellum slave peereriod,
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: like like the real life functions of overseers in the
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: slave economy and the sort of historical evolution of that
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: to you know, the police, and you know, the sort
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: of contemporary police apparatus that we have in this country.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: So I guess my question is, like where where is
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: it important to draw the distinction that like the overseer class,
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: you know it when you see it, because they're there
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: to do X, and that differentiates them between like a
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: you know, you know, piece of shit middle manager who's
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: like acting like an overseer, but really he's just like,
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: you know, the assistant to the assistant manager at you know,
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: like the restaurant that I work at.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think I try to have some capassion.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: I've met readers that have more compassion than me. I've
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: met people angrier than me and less angry than me.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: But I try to have some compassion and thinking that
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: being an overseer is psychologically corrosive. And there's a brilliant
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: forgive me, I'm forgetting the name of the story, and
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: I said him in the book, he wrote a companion
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: to the two thousand and four PBS series about slavery
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: and writes about how.
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: It was psychological.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: It was psychologically isolating for drivers and black overseers because
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: they became suspect and hated by the community, and the
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: master had no you know, would maybe give them a
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: bit more food, but that food was based upon doing
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: all these evil things. So there's nothing happy about it.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: It's not a place that one should want to The
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: closest analogy I think of in the book is Jordan
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Peel's concept of a sunken place that's where they're ending up.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: I do think there are different hierarchical positions of people,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: and I think of four different archetypes in the book.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: I bounce off of a film scholar and Donald Bogo,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: who I took classes with the undergraduate ruts about Tom's coons, mulattoes, mammies,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: and bucks, has find five film archetypes, and in conversation
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: with those, I kind of developed four of my own
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: that are not just about film, that you can kind
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: of see throughout the world and make distinctions between them.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: So the first one is Uncle Tom's who I think
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Uncle Tom gets a bad rap in the future because
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: he's come to be seen as a sellout. But the
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: original Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel is actually
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: someone who sacrifices his life. He does not go out
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: in the party that is trying to find the escaped
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: runaway enslaved people, and when pressure to say where they went,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: he won't and he's beaten to death. So he's actually
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: quite the opposite. One of the most controversial things I
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: work through with my editor was actually writing about Aaron
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Bushnell is actually the most is the most mapped onto
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: person as an Uncle Tom. Now like somebody who literally
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: gave his life trying to protect other people.
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: That's where that type right.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: And I guess just you know, for anyone watching or listening,
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: remind them who Aaron Bushnell was.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Aaron Bushnell was an Air Force Air Force man. I'm
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: forgetting his rank, but he self emilated in front of
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: the Israeli embassy in February of twenty four trying to
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: stop the genocide in Gaza and said he was doing
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: this as an extreme active protest to try.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: To end the genocide.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: So you have your Uncle Tom's, you have your tokens,
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: which is a term that comes out of sociology from
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: business sociology from a sociologists name Elizabeth Moss Kanter and
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: her concept. It's originally a book called Men and Women
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: of the Corporation, and she's thinking about jobs where less
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: than fifteen percent of the people are women or different
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: kinds of people of color. But the idea of a
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: token is actually they don't have power. They're put in
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: a position without any ability to do anything. And I
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: think a lot of managers, a lot of managers are
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: put in this position. And I think that there I
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: do have some empathy or sympathy or I'm not sure,
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: I try to think about so there is something very
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: isolating and sad that in those positions they're loved by nobody.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: So if you're I worked at Barnes and Noble, and
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: I've been visiting Barnes and Nobles.
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah that was how old were was it? I was?
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: That was my team job. I was sixteen when I
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: got my first job.
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: Nice.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I worked at one in Fullerton back home
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: in Orange County, I worked at the one in Orange uh,
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: and then I worked in the one in University of Chicago,
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: Barnes and Noble bookstore, you.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: Know, so I think about that was the longest time
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: I worked in retail was not a union shop. But
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: if you are the store manager, you're like having to
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: give people schedules and whatnot. And in union shops you
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: might you're supervising people who are unionized and they're all
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: kind of together on the same page, and you're against them.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: You're also like not ever going to make any kind
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: of the money that the owner is making. And so
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: I think they're they're very much put in these token
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: roles because there's actually not often that much they can do.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: But then there are overseers, and overseers are people who
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: actually have power. You know, they do wield a lot
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: of power, and usually their choice with the power is
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: to do it on behalf of the people above them,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: to do it on behalf of the ruling class, and
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: to report the person taking a cigarette, or more significantly,
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: to try to fire the person who's union organizing. You know,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: I write in the book about something called erg's employee
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: resource groups, and I've addressed a couple, and those groups
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: are groups of people from marginalized backgrounds, black people, queer
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: people who work in corporations who get together as employees,
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: like many things in America have an incredibly noble origin,
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: and that has been totally co opted or largely co
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: opted by corporate structures. And I once gave addressed a
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: large corporation's gay group and black group and had a
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: very positive experience. But in the year since have seen
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: that the organizers of those groups, who also we're agitating
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: against the genocide and for unionization at this corporation have
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: been fired. And so like the person, they're not being
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: fired by the CEO of that company, They're being fired
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: by an overseer. And often the overseers to keep an
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: eye on those people might also be in the employee
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: resource group. They you know, because the employee resource group
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: might have very low employee, very low economic level employees
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: and higher and so you know, they can put a
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: black spy in there, which is the term I use
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: in a film series I'm curating about this, And you know,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: they can put a spy in there, and then that
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: person can put the cabation that And that's why I'm
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: trying to think in class dynamics, because there's nothing wrong
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: with employees getting together around these issues, but they can
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: and have largely been largely been co opted and turned
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: into spying operations there interceptors then reporting on how sometimes
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: they're very explicitly seeded into corporations to try to stop
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: unionization efforts.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: The interesting dynamic here is like how again, if like
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: when I when I still see and understand the world
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: in terms of class, you know, like you know, I
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: think when you're right, you're right, and Marx was right,
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: you know that, you know, the history of humanity is
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: the history of class struggle.
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: These aren't just sort of classes that exist out of nowhere, right,
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: they exist as the sort of product function and you know,
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: like an entire kind of structure for society that is
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: dominated by you know, the needs and wants of capital
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: against the needs and wants of.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: The rest of us.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Right, So you have that sort of dynamic shaping you know,
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: like history here in America in such a profound way,
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: you know, is like the laboratory of you know, like
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: capitalism in a sort of budding liberal democracy that then
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: gets eaten and overtaken by capitalism and turned into the
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: you know, monstrosity it's become today.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: But like you know, like the the.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: Within that dynamic, you know, like it's the classes are
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: there because you know, there's a tension, you know. There
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: there there's there's something that the ruling class is taking
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: from the working class, and there there's there's conditions that
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: working people are made to live in, toil under in
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: service of you know, their lords and masters, and you know,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: like yeah, enforced by you know, the the overseers you know,
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: at their factories, in their you know, universities, what have you.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: So I'm seeing how like in terms of the kind
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: of larger economy, you know, there are actual sort of
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: overseers that, like their job description might as well be
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: I need you to be an overseer for this, for
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: this company. I need you to be an overseer, you know,
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: like the the the Baltimore Police, you know, like hiring posters.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: It's like, hey, we need overseers, right.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: I mean those posters.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: So when New York is kind of my base in
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: the US now, even though I mostly live in Greece
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: or live wherever I'm sleeping that night these days, but
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: whenever I'm in New York, there are always hiring ads
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: for the occasionally for the NYPD, consistently for the Corrections Department.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: All nine all non white, you know, all non white people,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: looks like a United Colors.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: Of benaton Ad.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: And you know, if you look up the salaries they're
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: offering within five years far outpace teachers to be a
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: corrections officer. I've and I researched this when I was
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: writing the book the dynamics. The racial demographics of the
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: population on wrikers or any of the smaller jails that
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: they're getting ready to open around New York City are
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: eighty to eighty five percent black and brown. The corrections
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: officers are eighty to eighty five percent black and brown.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: So it is very much an overseer dynamic that they're
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: that they're advertising and relatively speaking paying well compared to
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: jobs that probably you and I would rather see resources
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: go into, like teacher.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: Or EMT.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: Right, And and you know, like obviously, as you're sort
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: of already saying implicitly, but like you know, let's make
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: it even more explicit, is that this isn't true for
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: like every type of overseer position that exists in the
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: year of Our Lord twenty twenty six today. But again,
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: like as I'm hearing you tell me if I'm wrong, like,
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: there there is still you know, a structure at work
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: that's been crafted by a history, a very racist history
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: that like still enforces kind of and and produces very
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: racist effects, like you know, you write about in the book,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: like the phenomenon of like why am I seeing black
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: cops everywhere? Right? You know? Why am I right now
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: seeing a bunch of Latinos behind those goddamn masks with
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: an ICE badge?
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: So yeah, the best demographic data available on ICE agents
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: puts them at a slim majority Latino Chicano about fifty
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: one to fifty two percent.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: I can see where the you're helping me, see where
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: the overseers that enforce, you know, like the existing kind
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: of order of things are in our economy. But I
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: also see the overseer mentality everywhere, and that, you know,
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: is I think a much bigger sort of social and
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: existential sickness that we have to deal with in this country.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: And I'm seeing it play out in all these goddamn
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: Latinos who are who are joining ICE right now. And
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: I can you know, I can sort of understand it
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: because I grew up in Orange County, California, like very
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: conservative and like very much the kind of you know,
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: would be Trumpian proto conservative who thought it was funny
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: to piss off like my liberal classmates and make like
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: you know, you know, jokes that push the boundaries of
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: of you know, decency and just like everyone you know,
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: made my white friends crack up, and and you know,
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: there was yeah, there was a cruelty in it, but
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: there was more than anything, just like a sort of
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: social politics, like you wanna as the as the brown guy,
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: buck the sort of stereotypes and sort of assert your
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: own agency and identity. It's like, I'm not you don't
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: know who I am just because of the color of
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: my skin. I can think differently than you might expect
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: me to. There's a lot of that stuff at play too.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: It's a it's a it's a struggle for people to
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: kind of like you know, I don't know, craft a
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: self that they can live with and and I think
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: for a lot of Latinos, like you're chasing acceptance from,
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: you know, the white culture and power structure. But more
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: than that, you're trying to chase like purchase on whiteness,
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: like like as if you get a claim a little
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: more of a claim on whiteness and the benefits of
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: of you know, like white dominant you know, power structures,
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: that you get to then sort of wheeld against others,
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: and that in turn sort of proves your deservingness. Like
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: you know, again, I can envision a past where like,
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: if life hadn't gone the way it was, I would
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: have stayed a conservative, you know, Mexican American kid who like, yeah,
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: like thought that was totally fine and was encouraging other
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: people to do it.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: And it's very seductive. And that's part of why I'm
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: trying to use a class dynamic. And I I try
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: to cancel myself or make myself available for cancelation. Not
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: that I haven't been other ways. In thinking one about
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: how I criticize the New York Times all the time,
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: I blast them on social media all the time. I
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: also would have loved for them to have reviewed my book,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: and they did it. And then I realized, like, why
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: do I feel that way? You know, why do I
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: want acceptance from this place that I'm boycotting the opinion
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: page and I'm you know, leading letter campaigns against their
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: trans coverage and their Gaza coverage, and yet there's this way.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: And I start with the book with three epigraphs, once
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: by my Rock kise Lehman, who's I think of as
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: one of the great leaders of American letters. Right now,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: he writes this quote about like, we know these places
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: hate us, we know that they cannot see us, that
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: they're white supremacist, and yet we still want to get chosen.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: And some of that's personal interrogation, some of that structural,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: because you're also drawn to where the opportunities are, right, Like,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: I know that there is a purchase on whiteness, and
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: there's a purchase on the market that you know, if
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: you get, you know, if you get these certain things,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: maybe you're gonna get to keep doing your work.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's also a fifty thousand dollars signing bonus, you know,
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: like for ice right now.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: Right So I admit in this book like I once
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: applied to be an NYPD cop, which I think, to me,
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: that's the big reveal of this book. And I cannot
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: imagine myself being a cop now. I couldn't really have
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: imagined it even then. But when I look back at
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: why did I do it, it's because I had other opportunities,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Like I wasn't getting I'd gone to film school. Film
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: work is hard to get in the best of circumstances.
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: There was the year I got out.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: I worked for about a year, but then there was
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: a big kind of union busting move to Canada, uh
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: and I tried to get into teaching fellowships. I didn't
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: get those. Eventually applied to be in the cops. And
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: I found when I was doing historical sociological research that
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: many people became cops not because they necessarily wanted to,
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: it was a job. And so I do think that
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: there is a more question about joining ICE. And I
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: know there are many people who would never do so,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: even people, even Latinos, who are incredibly.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: Poor, you know, or.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: Don't have other opportunities. But I do think the right
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: has much and this is this is shameful, It's embarrassing.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: The writer is a better sense of jobs programs. If
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: you get canceled for something. On the right, they will
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: find you a job, they will promote you, they'll give
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: you money. And on the left there's really nothing for you.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: I'm you know, I'm very much now, as I write
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: about in great length in the book. I don't want
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: to go into detail here, but you know, I'm basically
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: blacklisted from academia. I'm one of many professors and students
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: who've been pushed at on my job, still drawing a paycheck,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: a huge amount of it's gone to lawyers and psychiatrists
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: the last couple of years. But I've not been allowed
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: to teach for two years, and I doubt I will
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: probably work in academia again. And I'm having a hard
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: time finding work in the formal economy at all. And
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: I know many people in this position, and there's just
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: nothing for us. And I was hosted at Pilson Community
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: Books in Chicago, fantastic bookstore co op, and one of
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: the co op leaders we had crossed paths at New
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: York barely. They finished their PhD kind of as I
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: was arriving, but they spent a year working in Florida,
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: and we're purged. There was this anti critical race theory
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: hysteria that happened. At least that I know of, one
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: hundred professors lost their jobs.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: I've talked to some of them.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: And I don't think any of them got work, you know,
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: or very very few of them.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: And so there was Tom Altman at Texas, him here
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: at the Real News, like I've spoken with, you know,
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: students at the University of Michigan, you know who were
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: you know, surveilled and followed by like private security hired
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: by the university, students grad students, like homes raided by
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: the FBI. We've had maf Mood Khalil's one of his
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: lawyers on this like network. Like, I don't think people understand,
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: you know, like just what the hell is happening in
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: the world of higher education right now? And this is
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: actually a perfect bridge to to I think sort of
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: talking about that because I wanted to ask if you
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: could talk more about why you were blacklisted, because you know,
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: we covered the student you know, encampment movement here. You know,
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: I talked to a bunch of students from different encampments, right,
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, like people who watch this network, you know,
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: like are going to be interested in this story. But
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: it also, you know, really shows a lot of what
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: we've been talking about, right, and a lot of like
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: the way the overseer class exists in the world of
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: higher education today. Sure, so I wanted to ask you,
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: doctor Stephen Thrasher, you know, like why you are effectively
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: blacklisted from academia today and what happened at Northwestern well too.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: Right before I get in to that, just to close
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: up on the ice element, people have to work doing something,
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: and so if the only jobs available are things like ice,
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: people are going to draw. That's why prison abolitionists fight
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: for moving.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: Resources away from police.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: My Northwestern story really begins at NYU, and people can
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: can learn much more detail about the gory parts.
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: Of all of this in my book.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: But when I was a graduate student, I was asked
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: to give the graduation speech at m YU for the
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: PhD students by a mentor of mine who was a
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: black gay man. He was on my PhD committee and
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: recently become the dean. And all this shit went down
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: between the time I was asked and when it actually
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: happened around students protesting around Israel and why you would
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: open up a campus in Israel. My departments that we
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: wouldn't participate because we knew that the many scholars will
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: not be allowed to go to conferences or whatnot. There,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: student government took a BDS resolution, or grad student union
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: took a BDS resolution. Student government tried to honor JVP
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: and SJP.
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: That blew up.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: So people assumed I would address it, and I did,
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: and I did not put the remarks in my speech.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: I added a few sentences off the cuff and that
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: brought the hammer down on my head. And the person
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: to do it was, you know, was a black gay
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: man named Phil Harper, and he had warned me casually
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: it just a couple of days before not to talk
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: about Israel out of the blue, and so that to
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: me was peak behind the curtain. And I can't speak
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: to his intent. I don't know why he did it exactly.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: I'm putting in all the lawyerly language, but that was
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: such a shaking moment for me when he brought up
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: not to talk about Israel. I was like, oh, I
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: thought you were here to help me, and I realized
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: you are here to make sure somebody like me like
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: doesn't do certain things. And this is spiraled way out
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: of control. I'm sure your readers have seen this, but
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: I will mention one example, two examples from NYU since
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: then in twenty forty I'm sorry. In twenty twenty five,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: another black transgudent talked about Israel and their graduation remarks
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: and they were not given their diploma. Their name was
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Logan Rosos, and I think they were actually far more
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: brave than I was as a student because they had
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: seen two years of a year or two years of
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: this already happening and still use their moment to talk about.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: So NYU has now made no graduations, they all have
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: re recorded. Nobody can talk live anymore. And then we've
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: seen this happen at multiple universities. They canceled when at
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Rutgers the professor talked about it. At Michigan they punished him.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: And it's happening again and again and again. So that's
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: kind of the background. But I really, I think I
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: really understood the overseer position through that experience where I
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: was even before I was sort of punished publicly and
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: all of that, and this dean published a letter about me,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: and why you published a letter that he wrote about
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: me online for anyone in the world to see. I
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: started to really understand that this was an overseer dynamic
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: because they were trying to make me. They're trying to
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: stop what I could potentially say. Then I hoped when
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: I went to Northwestern that there was a black provost
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: and a black dean of the journalism school, that those
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: people might help me.
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: They would not.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: They were also that started to become clear to me
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: before I arrived in the situation that they were also
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: there to make sure that I didn't get out of line.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: And so when the student I had fits and starts
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: of good times at Northwestern, but was widely championed by
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: the university because I was very good at my job
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: and I also happened to be developing and then write
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: this book, The Overseer Class. I'm sorry, the Viral Underclass.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: That's what happens when you name your books too close
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: to each other. I wrote The Viral Underclass, and I
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: went out on behalf of the university about COVID. I
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: was parts of Cook County, New York City, national and
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: international response teams around the COVID pandemic and again around
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: the IMPOS epidemic. And I started to have some overseer
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: vibes when the university kept sending me out to talk
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: about stuff. And then when EMPOS came out, which was
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: it's an orthopox virus that has had many outbreaks in
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: Africa that the world hasn't that the world outside of
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: the ten fifteen countries effected haven't given much of a
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: shit about. But when it started to move around the world,
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: of course there was more interest. It was almost exclusively
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: happening amongst men of sex with men, and this is
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: something I felt no shamer embarrassment about as a gay
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: man myself, but also as a social epidemiologist. And so
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: my university first was sending me out to do stuff,
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: and I helped organize a I helped organize a vaccination clinic.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: I could immediately see that there were really discriminatory things
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: that were happening. For instance, employees could get time off
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: to go get a COVID vaccine, they could not to
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: get an impox vaccine. And then with you know, I
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: was part of a symposium where we outlined quite clearly
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: why we thought this should be treated as a sexually
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: transmit infection. All the evidence was there, Really the evidence
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: shows that it was happening around unprotected anal intercourse. And
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: then the university was like, no, no, it's we don't
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: want to say anything about sexuality. We're just going to
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: say you get it from close contact, which was one incorrect.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: Two creates all this panic because it creates the conditions
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: for when say a straight roommate could be like, oh
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: my god, I have a gay roommate. I could get
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: empocs with them, and it's inaccurate. So I started they
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: started to distance themselves from me. Then, but then everything
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: happened with October seventh and the response to it. I
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: happened to be teaching a class called Sex and the
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: American Empire, Journalism and Frames of War. And it was
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: a class that was really a media analysis class, American
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: studies and journalism, Understanding the American Empire through these dynamics.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: How is the American Empire created through race and nationalism?
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: How does it happen with sexuality? How are these things policed?
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: So we would read you the Butler's Frames of War?
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: How to hide an Empire? We read and learned about
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: concepts like pinkwashing, homo nationalism, imperial feminism, the ways that
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: what I now would call overseer dynamics are played out,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: and how media covers them. And so October seventh happens
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: October ninth. I have planned, you know, six months in advance,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: years in advance, really, because I'd used the syllabus before.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: I had a planned three week study of chompskin hermit's
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: manufacturing consent. So even though I changed nothing in the
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: syllabus for the students, I knew that all of my
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: what I did as a journalism professor and an American
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: studies professor. I knew that, okay, like the media analysis
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about is what's unfolding, which
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: is what I would do in any news situation. So
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: I immediately started talking about the framing of the news
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: in the way that it was very explicitly. As our
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: mutual friend Adam H. Johnson, who I was in conversation
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: with and preceded me at red Emma's, you know, he's
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: documented in painstaking detail. You could see this quantifiably. I
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: was just showing the illustrations the second they came up,
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: and I started getting pushedback on that, and then eventually
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: the students went on, they started an encampment, and I
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: had seen by then how much violence was happening.
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: I'd started reporting.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: I'd gone back to Columbia where I did classes as
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: a grad student myself. I reported from there. I found
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: nothing was anti Semitic. This was a very multi faith,
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: multi faith, anti imperialist student movement. And I'd been quite
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: disturbed as I'd seen the amount of violence students were
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: encountering at other places, and so it kind of made
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: a pack to myself that if I'm in a position
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: to intercept between students and police. I will put my
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: body in that position. And then the students contacted our
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: faculty and Justice and Palestine group and asked for us
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: to ask for they're always to be a professor there.
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: We arranged that there always before.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: And I just happened to be on the first shift
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: because I wasn't teaching that morning when the shit hit
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: the fan. So I did stand between the students and
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: the cops. I got beat up for it, and I survived.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: It wasn't that bad at the time, and the students
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: had an encampment for five days. But then a few
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: weeks later, Congress called their President of the Hill and
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: Congressman Jim Banks showed my photo and demanded, you know,
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: why hadn't I been fired yet?
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: And then the shit really hit the fan.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're seeing this kind of thing, you know, like
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: just just turn higher ed into like in America, into
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: just something like completely different from what we imagined it
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: to be just a few years ago. And I guess
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: as two people who have like you know, occupied many
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: different positions in that higher ed structure and you you know,
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: achieving much higher positions in it. But like we've experienced
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: like the sort of overseer structure of Higher ED just
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: like American democracy itself, right, you know, the sort of
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: higher ed institution, you know, the of youre right, you
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: know forty years ago, you know, it doesn't exist anymore
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: like it is. It has been sort of eaten by
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: termites and refashion into something that was so susceptible to
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: you know, like an authoritarian crackdown like the one we're
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: seeing happening from Trump in the federal government now, right,
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: and this sort of like you know, relentless repressive pushback
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: against the Students for Palestine movement that you know, like
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: after those encampments, after those different forms of protests, and
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: you know, like all the organizing and that students have
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: been doing, faculty grad students over the course of the
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: unfolding genocide in Gaza since ever since October seventh, like
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: that has now been turned into a reality where you know,
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: students and everyone are being surveilled on campus all the time.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: There are cameras everywhere Columbia University. You got to go
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: through like an airport security system to get on the
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: dam grounds of the campus.
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: Now there's like a Pinkerton guard behind every bush.
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and so like I want to ask, like
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: again with like, with what you experience firsthand, you and
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: you know folks like like not just in this current
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: wave of repression against the the you know, Students for
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: Palestine and the you know, stop the Genocide in Palestine
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: movement in all its forms, but like even people like
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: Steven Salta, you know, like ten years ago, right, I mean,
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: like and the BDS movement preceding this, He got blacklisted
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: the way that you've been blacklisted. So I wanted to
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: shut up and ask, like, kind of where that power structure,
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: you know, like comes from in the context of today's
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: Higher ed and how it reproduces itself in sort of
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: like the culture and professional incentives of the people in
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: Higher Ed.
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: There were a lot of very dangerous things about the encampments,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: none of them physical, none of them about anti Semitism.
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: But I'm thinking about the words of the poet who's
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: most known for writing the poem if I Must Die,
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: And one of the things he said in a Democracy
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: Now interview shortly before he died, before he was killed,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: was that a lot of us are writers want to
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: have it both ways, we want to say, I mean,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: he was talking about the context of poets. But I
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: feel the same way as a journalists and say, poets
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: won't want to say, oh, it was just a poem.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Why are people coming after me? Is we have to
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: own that poems are dangerous, that the ideas that we
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: present are dangerous, and they have power. That's why they
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: want to suppress them. So the accountants were very dangerous,
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: and that they were creating a different framework. They were
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: tearing down walls. They write about the slot in the book.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: Even Samuel Jackson talked about talked about this when he
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: was understanding when he was a student protester in the
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixties that the universities want these divisions between the
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: communities and the inside and the outside. When I was
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: at Northwestern, the only five days I felt welcome on
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: that campus were the five days of the encoumpment. And
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: I met people who lived nearby who said they even
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: though Northwestern did not at the time have big fences around,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: anyone could walk on. They said, I met neighbors who
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: never dared walk on the campus before. So they're breaking
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: down they're breaking down the myth of anti Semitism by
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: showing that our entire encampment happened during Passover, there was
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: a satyr every night, you know, there was you know,
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: Muslims and Christians and Jews breaking bread together. So they're
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: breaking down this fiction. They're showing that there is a
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: that not only are students not the deviant idiots who
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: they like to pretend that they are, but that they
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: were wrestling with deeply spiritual ethical questions about their traditions
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: to think about how do we actually confront the American
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: war machine. And they exposed the financial structures of the
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: university in ways that hadn't been much in the public consciousness.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: The biggest, I think the biggest things that it showed
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: was that the line between public and private is a fiction.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: All of this shit has been ninety percent funded by
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: the federal government, and all of it has some level
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: of philanthropy, which public schools private schools, which effectively means
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: the government is financing it, but the philanthropists are calling
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: the shots and what's happening. And that's true at UC Berkeley,
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: and that's you know, which is a public university, And
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: that's true at the University of Southern California, which is
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: a private university. It's federal money pushing all of this
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: and it and these encountments really showed the depths and
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: the depravity of this relationship, and not in a theoretical way.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: At Northwestern, a previous board chair or one of the
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: big trustees had previously been a board share of General Dynamics.
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: General Dynamics makes the shells that go in the Israeli tanks.
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: This is a direct connection. And so we've learned and
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: the same thing is happening around so called AI you know,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: and other things that the donors are using these universities
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: as laboratories for their business interests. One of the things
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: that one of the things they're developing in the lab
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: is public opinion and wanting, you know.
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: People to think.
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: But also they're literally developing mit you know, in these
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: various stem schools, they're developing weapons, and they're using the
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: institutions to either launder their reputation or to frame the
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: terms of debate. Now, none of this is new, and
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: I try to be aware of presentism and where we
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: come in with our understanding, including my own, because we
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: encounter it in the era which we're alive. But one
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: of the things I'm writing about in the book is
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: using Ralph Ellison's invisible man who writes about a narrator
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: who goes to college and he gets kicked out, and
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: it happens because of an incident. It's an HBCU kind
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: of school. I'm forgetting. The novel comes out in the fifties,
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: I think, if I'm remembering correctly, probably the story of
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: the College Years is probably set in the thirties or forties,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: so about a century ago or so. But he's at
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: this college and a white trustee doesn't like what happens
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: and has the black president expel this not just expel
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: this young man, but secretly and nefariously ruin his life
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: life and make sure that he can never work again.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: And so I take Baldwin writes about this all the time.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: I take comfort in knowing this pain that I feel
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: right now, or that I see around me, actually has
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: a lot of historical precedent. And what the students. Part
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: of what was so dangerous for the students is they
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: are unraveling this entire fictional structure, that the trustees are
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: really deciding what students are learning, that punishment is offered
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: more than education, and that this threat is overseeing all
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: of our lives and shaping us with class dynamics and
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: showing us that to create a better society, we actually
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: have to undo fundamental ways that power works in this country.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: So the modern version of it, which I think the
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: students deserve enormous credit for this and one of the
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: easiest to demong things when their detractors will say, why
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: are they only asking me about this for Israel?
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: Now?
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: I read like I read dozens of these student demands
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: from universities around the world, and they all said, we
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: want we do not want our tuition money. We do
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: not want our funding to go to any weapons, not
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: just Israel. We don't want Raytheon, we don't want Boeing.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: We do not think this relationship should exist with war making.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: And that relationship goes back a long time. And so
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: that was one of the reasons why the hammer came
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: down so hard on them on us, because I'm doing
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: that relationship would really fundamentally alter power dynamics, not just
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: in the United States but throughout the world.
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know, we only have a few minutes
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: left here, and I wanted to sort of kind of
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: build on that and ask, you know, sort of what
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: comes next for Steven Thrasher, But also you know, like
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: what comes next for us now that we've got this book,
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: you know, like with more of an understanding of you know,
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: who the overseers are in our lives and like knowing
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: that you know they're they're people in positions of power
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: who need with names and addresses. Right that we need
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: to understand is like power wielders who are making active
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: decisions against our interests, and that at the same time,
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: there are structures at work that matter much more than
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: the personality of the person holding the position that we're
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: talking about. I wanted to ask if you if we
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: could sort of end on that point of of what
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: can we do with this in our lives now? And
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: you know, what does that look like from academia to
• 52:47
  Speaker 2: you know, the the you know, person who's considering joining
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: the police, uh, to you know, the person who doesn't
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: know what to do but they know they need a
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: paycheck and a job.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know what comes next for Steve and Thrasher exactly,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: because this is going to be a pretty big moment
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: of transitional What people take away from the book, I actually,
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: frankly think is not really any of my business. I mean,
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: I put the book into the world and then it's
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: up to readers to see what they want to do
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: with it. I try to share vulnerability about myself and
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: about some of the overseers that I've encountered, not just
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: to center myself, but to try to create some well,
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: to create some vulnerability, and also to try to shake
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: up the power dynamics a little bit, because one of
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: the ways that overseers act in our lives, and I
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: know we've talked about this before, is that there's this
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: expected silence, that you're going to have this fealty and
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: see yourself as subservient to these people.
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: Who will never be spoken.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: They'll name our names if they'll name our names when
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: they fire us. They'll name our names in the US Congress,
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: they'll name our names in the press. They will smear,
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: you know, in all kinds of ways, but they expect
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: us not to say what happened to them. So they
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: only kind of directive I would give that I hope
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: people take out of this book, and I'm also.
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: Just curious to hear what they do.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: Is that the beginning of dealing with any problem is
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: to name it. And I don't hope this book will
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: solve it. I just hope that it helps people name it.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: I've already gotten and I'm very humbled and honored by this.
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: I've already gotten responses from people who've told me like
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: they feel healing and a sense of dealing.
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: With the grief of the situation.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: Just seeing somebody else name what happened to them that
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: they felt was unspeakable has been healing to them. So
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: I'm grateful for that. And I don't want to give
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: away the ending of the book, but I do really
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: center towards the end and wearing the shirt in their
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: honor Palestinian journalists, and I think that they have just
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: taught They've taught me so much as a journalist, and
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: I think they've with the ultimate sacrifice their own lives,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: they've shown how powerful what journalism can be, how powerful
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: it can be, what it can do in ways that
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: really speak to us as a profession. But I think
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: they actually offer a fundamentally different vision of what it
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: means to engage with society and to be a responsible
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: pillar of society. So that I kind of offer at
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: the end is my take on my particular journey through
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: academia and journalism and thinking about what are other ways
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: of being? But I am very optimistic, and I've gotten
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: some good feedback already that more than telling people what
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: to think in my book, I'm hoping I'm just answering
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: questions that I hope I'm raising questions that help them
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: interrogate their own journeys and think about the structure and
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: think about other ways of being in the institutions they
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: find themselves.
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: Well, and let's just do like two minutes of over
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: time here to kind of like bring that back down
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: to kind of the lived out level, you know, you
• 55:59
  Speaker 2: sort of admit the big reveal that you know, you're like, yeah,
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: there was a time in your life where you know,
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: circumstances were such that like you were trying to be
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: a cop, you know, and like I empathized with that,
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: not because I've ever wanted or tried to be a cop,
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: not that you wanted to but had to, but like,
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: I know what that feels like, because that's why, why
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: and how I ended up, you know, working twelve thirteen
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: hour days as a temp in like warehouses and factories
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: in southern California during the Great Recession. While we were
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: you know, our family was losing our house and like
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: everything was getting worse for us while Obama and the
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: media and everyone you know was telling us that the
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: economy was back and getting better, and so like in
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: that period, you know where I had nowhere else to go,
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: you know but the temp agency at you know, three
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: point thirty in the morning and hope that I would
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: get an assignment that I could keep for weeks or
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: days or months or longer.
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: I worked at this one particular warehouse in the city
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: of Industry that, like I had driven past on the
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: freeway many many times and just hadn't noticed it. They're
• 57:15
  Speaker 2: these big beige buildings festooning the freeways that just sort
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: of fade into the foreground when you're driving around back home,
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: and you know, like it was a very brutal, exploitative, hot,
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: awful place, like you know, most warehouses are.
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: You know, like they.
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: Use mostly tempts to because they could fire you and
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: just send you home at the drop of a hat.
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: They don't got to pay nothing, you know, like towards
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: your benefits or what have you. But there was always
• 57:47
  Speaker 2: this sort of dynamic between the eighty percent of us
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: who were temps the twenty percent who you know were
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: actually working there full time. The managers on the floor
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: of the warehouse and then the people in the front office. Anyway,
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: point being is that in that warehouse I was being
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: groomed at some point for being a manager. And my manager,
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: who was you know, Latina, an army vet, single mom,
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: you know, not a bad person overall, but she was
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: like trying to grow me to be management. And there
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: was one day where we had a big batch of
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: new Tempson because we had a massive shipment we had
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: to meet. We didn't meet it. A lot of mistakes
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: were made, YadA YadA, YadA. So you know, at the
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: end of the day, the manager is just fuming. She
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: comes to me and you know, she says, I want
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: you to tell me which one of the attempts slowed
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: us down the most so I can fire them. And
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: I was like, I can't do that, and I'd like,
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: you know, I think about my name Maximilian. It comes
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: from Saint Maximilian Colby, who sacrificed himself for a stranger
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: in Auschwitz, and I'm.
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: Like, my ain't.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: Steven was the martyr who went up to the religious
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: authorities and said you were betraying the spirit of God
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: and was stoned to death as the first time, right.
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: So sometimes it's like just so on the nose man,
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: And but like I'm I'm sitting there like trying to
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: kind of you know, you know, I'm like, do I
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: martyr myself?
• 59:17
  Speaker 3: Do I just say take me, or like I'll work late.
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: And the manager's saying she doesn't give a shit, Like
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: I offered to work late, and she's like no, like
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: she's gonna do it. She just wants to teach me
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: a lesson think back to like the cruelty of that,
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: like the cruelty that you're being inducted into to become
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: one of these overseers, like and the lesson she thought
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: she was teaching me. And so I try to like
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: pick the person who I think will suffer the least.
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: And then the manager calls her over in front of everyone,
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: that calls everyone together and fires like calls her to
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: the center, fires her in front of everyone. Like just
• 59:52
  Speaker 2: the theater of cruelty that I had been become a
• 59:56
  Speaker 2: part of, and the self hatred that you know, I
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 2: still have from that, and the pain that it all
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: is causing us to inflict on each other. And I
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: think we also have to accept the reality that a
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: lot of us are put in these kinds of positions daily,
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: and and like that we we incur those moral injuries,
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: whether it's rolling your window up when you're passing a
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: homeless person, you know, or you know, just saying nothing
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: when you see something wrong happening because you're you're running late,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: because you're you know, dropping off an uber you know, delivery.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: Like all again, Like, I guess the last thing I'll
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: say is that, you know, like to to, I think
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: about my our fallen brother Michael Brooks's axiom, right that
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: you got to be kind with people and be ruthless
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: to systems. So I guess like I wanted to ask
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: if you could sort of talk about that to wrap
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: us up by way of sort of you know, telling
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: people like that that you know that this doesn't mean
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: that every person who wears a badge as an awful person, right,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: This doesn't mean you're an awful person if you have
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: a job that makes you do shitty things. But like
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: you can be part of kind of changing this awful
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: system that does awful things to us and makes awful people.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: Out of us.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: The writer Susan up now for your entre. Pronounce her
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: last name. She's Australian Palestinian who clapped back at Mom
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: Donnie Susan Appolawa, who talked about how he had been
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: pushed to denounce her, and she gave him a very
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: very sweet and also completely burying fifteen minute response, very
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: much couched in being a South Asian auntie responding to him.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: And one of the things she said was, if you
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: are not careful, they're just going to keep siphoning off
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: a little bit of your soul at a time until
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: you don't know what's happening.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: And that happens.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: And I try to think as much as my life
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: totally changed on Daring Meadow, which is where the encampment
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: was at Northwestern, I tried to think that that was
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: also a divine moment for me because it's a blessing.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: You don't often get exactly the paradigm in front of
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: you where you know you have to make the decision.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: And I've turned a lot to spirituality for an ongoing
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: exploration for me, but particularly during the last couple of years.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: But it actually a Buddhist teacher named Adia Ashanti talking
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: about John the Baptist and the moment of divinity coming
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: down where you know that your journey is on a
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: different path because you're opening yourself up to what the
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: Holy Spirit is. Holy Spirit is, I mean the language
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: comes from Christianity, it can speak to any tradition, but
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: the idea of you are now, you are opening to
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: what you know is true. And I think one of
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: the things that overseers do that is so nefarious is
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: it tries to bifurcate people inside of themselves from turning
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: away from what they know is true. You know that
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: you're not supposed to be firing somebody. You know that
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: that woman is going to go home and not be
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: able to and have to tell her children, I don't
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: know how we're going to have food next week. It's
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: putting you in that position. And the person could do
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: it without the spectacular cruelty. But the point of pulling
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: you into that is actually to siphon a bit of
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: yourself off and to try to make you more cruel.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: And so I knew for me, the the impetus to
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: put me in a position where I basically would have
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: to say, I'm going to stand by and watch my
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: students get beaten up by somebody. All of this is
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: ludicrous to me after going through Title nine training and
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: all of it. The idea that other some university employees
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: can beat up the students and touch their genitals and
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: heads and kick them and whatever is completely ludicrous, also
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: because we had to go through mandatory by standard intervention
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: as well. But I knew in that moment like I cannot,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: and I feel very grateful that my parents and my
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: ancestors other professors had already seen do it in the
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: few days before I knew, like, if I'm in that position,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: that's where I have to be. And that's a blessing.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: Even if you know even this, even if it's the
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: consequences are difficult, that's a blessing to have lived with
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: the guilt of saying I stood by and watched that happen.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: That would have been damnation. And so I hope that
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: my book and sharing my own story helps people think
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: about when they see these dynamics and the moments where
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: we are actually given the grace to make a decision,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: because there are all kinds of structural things to happen,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: and I don't know whether my sacrificing my career or whatever,
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: whether that will actually create structural change. I do know
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: from other people, including a woman that cried with me
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: on the line when she came to get a book signed,
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: who also lost their job. I do know that when
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: we stand up for what we know is right, it
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: is meaningful to other people, and that there is healing
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: and grace that can happen in that. But I hope
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: that the book, if nothing else, helps people understand this
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: as a class dynamic. I do agree with the late
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: Michael Brooks that we should be kind to people. But
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: part of the kindness to people is actually saying no
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: to people who are hurting them. And I hope that
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: my actor of kindness, you're not wanting to humiliate this worker.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: That's a kindness.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: And sometimes we have the moments to protect the kind
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: people from the metaphorical or literal whip, and I hope
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: that the book helps people think about the ways that
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: we can do that sometimes