transcript for old proj

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 long after the death of freud the couch remains the key symbol of psychoanalysis an invitation to reveal everything the black lives matter movement taking place under a black president black attorney general and black homeland security cabinet secretary that's when it started under that official black power with a neo-liberal order that cannot deliver protection for poor and working-class black folk i'm not talking about the black bourgeoisie now i'm talking about the black poor and working folk or president who can assassinate american citizens with no due process in the new york times the washington post none of the pundits none of the critics none of the the liberal writers can say a mumbling word for the most part authentic leftist what was totally absent in him was what i called with some so-called politically correct people this opportunist side of political correctness you know without seeing the deeper roots and so on quite often sorry political correctness can work in a way which reinforces certain prejudices and so on and so on i have many brothers black friends who are very sensitive to this they very intelligently perceive patronizing condescending attitude in obeying politically correct rules and so on and so on and he was an authentic race he frequently says that racism is a problem for white people to solve it's not a problem for other groups to solve and uh certainly what we know about psychology research and prejudice shows that prejudice is pretty widespread there is uh prejudice basically in every community now of course she would return by redefining the concept of racism by saying no it's no no racism is power plus prejudice but even that conception is very very thin in that power is very contextual uh for instance if you live in like a majority black city where like the mayor the police chief all the city council members are black like i'm thinking about where i grew up atlanta like outside atlanta uh it's very very difficult to say oh you know it's still the whites are behind everything like no they aren't like black people can make choices they are political and moral and social agents right it's not as though there's only one variety of this but i would say that the sort of essentialist thinking is a fundamental component of the anti-racist project that thinking about people even if you're going to allow them some degree of individual autonomy at the end of the day they're always black people they're always white people and as a result there are certain characteristics that they simply cannot avoid and can't escape and certain things about themselves that perhaps they cannot undo and in that very way um i i that is what i find most disconcerting about the present moment and about these the prevalence of these ideas um and i i think ultimately it's the thing that makes it the most dangerous as well there is something inherently valuable about us being able to relate to one another as individuals and about us being able to understand that when we talk about things like privilege and power that the circumstance in the context matters and that it is i going around brooklyn having recently returned here while you know still on lockdown in some respects i'm struck by the black live matter posters that i see all over the place by the people who scrawled it on the masks that they're wearing on their faces and sharpie and on their t-shirts because they apparently can't get enough paraphernalia i i said there's something that you know struck me yesterday i i appreciate that everyone wants to do good that they want to be seen as a part of a solution to a problem i i bristle at the the lack of thoughtfulness that's going into this project though and i i am someone who has not ever felt um in his adult life particularly conscious about his appearance in that respect you know i'm sufficiently handsome that i don't have to think about it but i find myself walking around brooklyn now and i can it's almost it's palpable like this sense that people are aware of my appearance and are perhaps making all sorts of assumptions about the privilege they enjoy and that i don't and it's it's a bit infuriating because it couldn't be further from the truth think about all the [ __ ] you could get away with just crazy most often talking about rethinking freedom of quality and justice making making it stronger making it more encompassing making it more substantial less abstract and less exclusionary so that's that that doesn't strike me as a of a as a particularism like oh here are all these identities they're struggling for their particular interests they're taking away from the common good they're taking away from a universal framework they're taking away from a larger sense of politics no i think it is the larger sense of politics that's being uh identified as exclusionary and there's a call for a re-articulation of those basic principles so they are justice projects freedom projects and equality projects um and when we dismiss them as identity projects we were clinging to an older ideal and not looking at the exclusions it has made the effacements on which it has proceeded and um and we're holding to a status quo that actually does need to be radically challenged now i have one other point as part of my introductory remarks and that's the following the largest most influential and dangerous version of identity politics that we are living with in this world is white supremacy that is an identity politics that is the defense of whiteness that is the defense of whiteness as superior the defense of whiteness as the norm as that which doesn't even need to be marked as part of the norm and the the neo-fascist trends we are seeing the hypernationalism we're seeing the border violence the border closing the border violence that we're seeing throughout europe these are these are racist projects of states that are very often promising to uh their people a restoration of white supremacy a defense of white supremacy against racial and ethnic and religious uh diversity and so i think um that we often uh imagine that identity politics is a fragmenting process that the left is responsible for or that has happened inside the left um but actually the largest and most uh most noxious most uh most destructive one is is white identity politics which which takes the form of asserting white supremacy either explicitly or implicitly and we need to get wiser about how that's happening and how we might oppose it so i i i just think she's presented such a thin view of the world and i think one one of you had brought this up that there is a chance that a lot of this will backfire and actually maybe make even white people more prejudice there's actually a lot of research on diversity trainings on on kind of anti-bias anti-prejudice training and i'm thinking about one paper in particular it's called ironic effects of anti-prejudice messages it's by lisa legalt and her team she's at clarkson university and what she did is she gave out brochures and she gave out questionnaires to different groups of participants one group of brochures and questioners like they basically they had messaging that was designed around telling you about how diversity is positive how there are benefits for you how you like being around people with other cultures and she found that those were pretty effective uh but then another one was kind of the deangelo type stuff which was talking about how racism is your problem how it's a shame how you should feel guilty and actually when she gave those to people it was actually worse they had they actually uh became more prejudiced than than people who hadn't gotten any kind of uh treatment or experiment uh it actually backfired to give people this messaging that they're like inherently guilty that there's something wrong with them they should feel ashamed that they need to repent like this type of messaging generally does backfire and i i i have a feeling that a lot of people who are reading this book they might be doing it for social you know propriety they might be trying to portray a certain image by owning it by not speaking up but what we're really talking about is people's hearts and minds and in their heart and their mind they may actually becoming more prejudiced because they feel like they're being targeted or singled out uh because a very complex problem has been made very narrow right i'm wondering if you guys are seeing that where effectively people who are high income are still voting a lot of times for right leaning parties but people who are high education are now oftentimes voting for left-leaning parties we can throw the latest paper that you all just published up there on the screen the title here is brahman left versus merchant right changing political cleavages in 21 western democracies between 1948 and 2020 the dynamic that you point to is basically you know both sides of the political spectrum being controlled by different sets of elites and people with lower educational levels concentrating more and more on the right side of the political spectrum just dig into some of the data and what you found in the 1950s and 60s social democratic and affiliated parties so including the democratic party in the u.s used to be supported very strongly by low income and lower educated voters while conservative parties used to gather more support from high income and higher educated voters and in the past 50 60 years well income does continue to determine high support for right-wing parties in general meanwhile the effect of education has completely reversed the educational divide has followed the striking reversal and today higher educated higher educated voters are much more likely to vote for the left and so this leads to a separation between what we propose to call the brahmin left a sort of intellectual elite educated left and a sort of still high-income merchant rights i'm just not sure identity politics is the term that can describe those struggles and i i also think that it's a way of not listening it's like call it identity politics and then you don't have to listen because you've got your category already you put it in that category you don't have to listen to what folks are saying yeah so that worries me it's sad but unfortunately a lot of times our demands aren't really met unless we have really serious asks or we generate these larger conversations um unfortunately people usually don't listen to us when we're being reasonable so um i think it's really to make a statement that this sort of thing happens weekly that asian americans are always a punch line and so i think we're just trying to make a point that people will be held accountable the next time they do these sort of things i was gonna say that i feel like it's incredibly patronizing for you to paint these questions this way especially as a white man i don't expect you to be able to understand what people of color are actually saying oh this import from america gender that's that's that's what's destroying us that's destroying our lives but really but how do we think about that intersection and i think we need a more textured analysis i don't think we can go back to this is the real oppression and all this is secondary it's like no no we've got we've got to have like gramsci in mind here you know what's the articulation how do we describe it and the left has failed because we on the left have been unable to put forward a vision that seizes the imagination and hearts minds and souls of people i agree unable to have institutional capacity for that vision yeah you do it you're the one we look to cornell you do it you don't owe anybody anything if i got paid for all of my emotional labor i'd have like a lot of money man [ __ ] is bad right now it is just it is it is bad and it is getting worse and one thing i'm also concerned about in terms of backlash like i'm deeply concerned about that this is this could be a moment for actual white supremacists for actual white nationalists which i do not i don't want to overstate the threat of white nationalists i don't think that we like they're clearly white nationalism exists but i do not think they are in any danger of dating cultural power at this moment that said i don't think that it's a good idea to make a bunch of white people feel resentful because of the way they were born i don't think that's a good idea that's just i don't think it's a good idea it's a [ __ ] recruiting tool right there and i also don't think it's a good idea to make black people reevaluate or evaluate every interaction that they have through the lens of race you know so like at one point d'angelo apologized to her co-facilitator who was a black woman because she interrupted her and this was an act of white supremacy and this idea that every time there's any sort of slight or any any i don't know any sort of i don't know any slight between like a white person as anything to a black person or any person of color that that means it's necessarily racist i think that's really dangerous because i don't want to live in a world where all black people think that if i like don't see like if i cut them off in traffic that's a racial aggression well i think uh and speaking to what camel's point was earlier that perhaps he does have non-white people in his social circle who are starting to talk like this yeah uh if you come at this from my point of view which is that like raises a social picture it really doesn't define anything about anybody but something that does actually impact people's social networks right like if you're in a particular social network and you have to do certain things to get ahead you're going to start doing them and i think that if this has become a huge professional class thing if fortune 500 companies are promoting this book if they're offering trainings billing melinda gates foundation hired deangelo to do things unilever d'angelo do things these i think there's plenty of incentives if you're a non-white person to start saying well your colleagues are racist uh this is a white supremacist structure that i'm in uh et cetera et cetera because it'll lead to deference to you like you'll actually get powers and privileges in your workplace and you start going along with it even if you know even if at first you think it's wrong uh you know as often sinclair said you know anything that a man's paycheck relies on you know it's much easier to get them to believe it and i think that if you lay out those kind of perverse incentives both white people and non-white people will go along and it has nothing to do with the fact that their skin is white or not white it's just the social network that they're in and and that if that becomes the way to promote yourself but then if in that network i think tons of people will get involved in it for that reason uh i can think of numerous friends i'm not going to name names or people i worked with in kind of the ngo journalism industrial complex who had very moderate politics when i worked with them we thought i was like a crazy quasi-communist radical or whatever right and i see their writing now around these topics and so much of it just comes across as like they're going with a crowd who is making this the way uh to advance your career like you will go to the top of the charts if you just nod your head and say yeah deangelo is correct about everything ibrahim kennedy is correct about everything it has kind of come somehow very quickly without a whole lot of public consent because i think most americans don't really think this way at this point uh is somehow become the establishment the cultural establishment very very quickly in ways that i can't really remember any other cultural shifts that happen this quickly at this level yeah i have no i have no there's nothing that i can think of nothing in my lifetime certainly nothing from a historical standpoint that i can i can think of that that rivals it there's there's one there's one thought that i'd like to share it's um my favorite uh passage from james baldwin and it's perhaps the one that i think is the the least well known perhaps maybe most overlooked um and also most essential passage from the fire next time and it's when he describes the gates of paranoia um and he talks about how black people being in this unique position of having always had historically you know white people be this evil malevolent force in their lives risk having the gates of paranoia close on them which is to say as you were describing katie in every single interaction they could find ways to imagine that what's happening here is some sort of malevolent racist plot and that they can find that it happens in in every imaginable circumstance and they no longer find themselves even attempting to differentiate between something that is real and something that is imagined and that they find themselves doing that and don't even realize that this process has taken hold and it has long been my contention and concern that to the extent blackness is a thing from a cultural standpoint one of in my experience the the most consistent features of black identity is a sense that there is this specter of oppression in society that there is in fact already a baseline of sort of racial paranoia that exists there and it it manifests itself in a lot of different ways the prevalence of conspiracy theories um the the general suspicion of white people in various professional settings as some studies have pointed to specif specifically in the context of health care in some instances that is a dangerous circumstance and one that i do worry about getting worse and it's really amongst the principal reasons why i found myself personally rejecting any sort of racial identification at all because it wasn't something that i wanted to be a part of and it was certainly something that is is taught and is pretty universal and i you know as as late as you know being in in college had found myself um thinking about the world in that way and it is a it's a massive cognitive load to try to labor under in a professional setting to be at work and to feel as though you're constantly under threat on account of your blackness to to be trying to be successful in academia and to worry about that i it is a burden that will necessarily have a deleterious impact on your ability to be successful and there are a lot of reasons to respond to it by reinforcing that dynamic um if everyone else around you similarly has these contentions to sort of buy into you know a theory that race is what explains some circumstance without thinking about it it's it's incredibly dangerous and then you don't have to listen because you've got your category already you put it in that category you don't have to listen to what folks are saying or you don't have to listen to what folks are saying or you don't have to listen to what folks are saying then movements adopt identity politics and intersectional ideologies contra-intersectional ideologies in ways that render them subversive they become in effect insurgencies in very extreme cases they deteriorate into domestic terrorism but even in the more benign cases these homegrown grassroots movements they tend to become very very aggressive exclusionary identity oriented a hermetic schizoid closed in defiant consumations there's an attack on authority and if you're thinking well this is a this list sounds like a psychopath you're right this is the list of traits of a psychopath these identity politics groups these victimhood centered groups tend to become psychopathic as an integral dynamic not related on particular individuals as members of the group or particular individuals as leaders the dynamic of a group is psychopathy they develop collective psychopathy very often often victimhood groups also tend to compensate for their sense of innate inferiority and for the humiliation of having been a victim they tend to compensate with grandiosity so in the narcissistic abuse movement today we have empaths empaths are angels they can do nothing wrong they are wonderful people they are amazing they are perfect they are in other words narcissists so grandiosity and psychopathy tend to evolve naturally as an emergent phenomenon in victimhood centered social justice movement movements long before they are hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths actually narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to these movements owing to their increasing narcissistic and psychopathic profile and so then we have the tendency for victimhood which is this new construct we have these studies that show you know psychopaths analysis as active members not only leaders and the whole thing deteriorates into demonizing mudslinging partisanship aggression in extreme cases recently not so extreme and not so rare even violence now there's a big difference between left leaning victimhood movements right leaning victim movements and neutral movements an example of a neutral movement would be the narcissistic abuse movement because it incorporates people with leftist views people will write his views and so on it's centered around the injustice done to victims of narcissistic abuse by narcissists and psychopaths it is it is undergoing the very same process it had become more and more grandiose and it had been taken over by psychopathic and narcissistic con artists and scammers all these online coaches and experts and so on but still it is neutral in the political sense left leaning left leaning victimhood centered movements tend to focus on entitlement and grandiosity they compensate with grandiosity entitlement and they are fantastic in nature for example they seek to rewrite history counterfactually so women are doing this in the feminist movement they are rewriting the history of the world as though it had been centered around women when actually women had always been since the agricultural revolution marginal in world affairs blacks have african african-american studies departments where they rewrite history to render blacks the builders of the nation and the greatest contributors to science and literature which is utter sheer unmitigated counterfactual monsters so there is grandiose compensation innocent deep sense of entitlement these are two main features of narcissism because they lead to a lack of empathy and if you talk to blacks in any setting with any conviction members of these movements or not they have become much less empathic they sound very narcissistic i must say and i'm sure i'll get a million comments about this this element so this is the left-leaning movements entitlement grandiosity the right-leaning movements combine two different to other psychological traits conspiracism which is the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories as organizing and explanatory principles conspiracism coupled with grandiosity for example white supremacy coupled with schizoid tendencies the wish to be left alone small government no taxation no foreign no adventures in foreign lands america first so the right leaning movements they tend to be more conspiracy minded they tend to be more more monkish more with they have centered around withdrawal around avoidance much less around the title they're afraid of entitlement actually because they translate entitlement to bigger government more intrusive government nanny state big that big big brother 1984 or william things so their conspiracism actually prevents right-wing movements from becoming fully narcissistic because they deny the element of entitlement but they have a pronounced lack of empathy much bigger than in the left victimhood centered movements and they are much more psychopathic in the sense that they are much less averse to using aggression they are much more defiant they are much more consumacious they detest authority clean the swamp drain the swamp in washington so they are more psychopathic to summarize the left is narcissistic entitled in gradius it's centered around victimhood and translates victimhood into claims on society claim they claim rights they claim money reparations for slavery the or reparations for the holocaust they claim so it's more entitlement-oriented and what can i get out of it and the right-wing groups entitlement groups are less they are not exactly victimhood groups they are victims of conspiracies but not victims of society or systemic because they are mostly white right-wing groups are mostly white they belong to the majority they are less likely to present themselves as victims they may be victims of impersonal forces such as globalization or the collapse of manufacturing in the united states or auto automation or whatever but they are more focused on withdrawing avoidance and using power where necessary to protect rights for example gun rights in the middle we have the neutral movements the social the justice movements they're not social justice movement they are individual justice movements like the narcissistic abuse movement and these movements in the middle they have the worst of both worlds actually they have entitlement they have grandiosity but they also have defiance consumaciousness um and conspiracy conspiracy oriented paranoia this is the picture when narcissists and psychopaths observe these groups what they see is a gold mine it's a new pathological narcissistic space they can thrive in these settings they can become leaders they can become media figures they can obtain artistic supplies they can make money they can have sex with followers and fans it's fun it's great it's a playground it's a haunt it's a pub and so narcissists and psychopaths flock into these movements and because of their particular personality structure narcissists know how to be charming narcissists verbalize much better than the average population many narcissists and psychopaths are highly intelligent and all of them are goal oriented they are reckless they are callous they are disempathic they are relentless so they rise to the top they become the leaders of these of these movements and this is how all these movements end if you're going to do research in indigenous communities you're going to have to build that relationship ahead of time and it can take a long time even in my own community where i am from it took us two years to get our our community survey off the ground because we needed to build those relationships we needed to repair some of the damage that research had done my own sister my own adopted sister refused to get involved with the research even though our our board had approved or that the local had approved the research but really but how do we think about that intersection and i think we need a more textured analysis i don't think we can go back to this is the real oppression and all this is secondary it's like no no we've got we've got to have like gramsci in mind here siding with both this later lukacs and the al fazer who is harshly critical of uh gramsci in what is to be done um that i would argue that essentially you know what has happened in terms of the trajectory of western marxism is that starting with the young lucas the lukach of specifically history and class consciousness as well as the grantee of the prison notebooks and also the course of marxism and philosophy there's actually this interesting uh uh uh set of tensions and the very origins of this of the trajectory of 20th century european marxism you know including what's then you know led up to certain things that are part of our current situation um that you know can be seen in terms of issues having to do with concerns over economism um and with it you know uh uh hand-wringing about various kinds of reductionism and if you look at within the young luke himself you can you can see attention in history and class consciousness um you know between you know on the one hand the what the you know lucot shares with the other founding figures of western marxism especially caution and uh gronchi uh the rejection of any kind of crudely reductive economism again whether of second international or stalinist varieties um but of course not styling quite yet since 1923. um but uh uh at the same time of course the most famous chapter of history and class consciousness um is the one on reification uh and of course what is the lesson of reification a la lucas whatever later self-critical uh uh caveats he attaches to it after 1923 well it's that you know what starts at the level of the economy in terms of the commodity form doesn't stay there that it basically spreads out and colonizes it in a sense reduces all of the rest of social reality under capitalism uh you know to this this form of alienating you know thingification fading and that we get uh you know and that with reification we get the emphasis on the fact that indeed capitalism is objectively reductionistic in terms of how it operates um and so that would seem to call for instead of worrying about historical materialism as a theory first and foremost of capitalist society and its history um that it would seem as though you'd be worried about having an anti-reductive historical materialism while at the same time acknowledging that capitalism itself is really objectively in and of itself reductionistic and economically reductionistic um that indicates that there's a bit of a problematic tension there um and that you know here i can't help but think of so in 2004 um on the daily show this is now very dated reference um but you know back when uh george w bush's iraq war started to take a turn for the significantly worse in terms of of bush's plans and purposes um the uh correspondent rob cordrey in dialogue with jon stewart as the then host of this program um was playing a reporter who was covering the iraq war and who at one point says to stuart um you see john you know what we what we're currently struggling with in reporting on the war here is that uh you know the facts themselves are biased that the facts of the war are showing an alarming anti-bush bias right and i would say that in a certain way too like apropos you know capitalism it said well you know it's not that you know a reductionistic theory is necessarily wrong when what you're dealing with is a reality that in and of itself is actually reductionistic is that you know capitalism itself has this very reductionistic agenda um and it you know a theory that insists on being anti-reductive and rejects economism entirely um is likely to be in certain very problematic ways out of step with its target object of inquiry and to me one of the real ironies is starting with with the young blue koch and coloring a lot of western marxism is that they end up being anti-reductive where they should be reductive namely in terms of a historical materialist theorization of an object namely capitalist society that is itself inherently reductionistic in its very reality i mean here i'd almost call for a notion of real reduction to you know complement the sewn rectal notion of real abstraction um and then it is reductive where it should be anti-reductive namely in starting with the young blue touch the repudiation of anything along the lines of engels's dialectics of nature and with that essentially ceding all of of of non-human nature to the explanatory jurisdiction of non-dialectical uh you know scientific approaches you