A deep look at political loss

Democracy is sometimes described as "a system where political parties lose elections." That's true but doesn't capture the deeper feelings of grief and grievance associated with political loss. We dive into those emotions this week with Juliet Hooker, the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University and author of Black Grief, White Grievance: The Politics of Loss.

Hooker argues that whites as a group are accustomed to winning and feel a sense of grievance when they need to give up political power. Conversely, Black people are expected to be political heroes in the face of grief that comes from setbacks on the road to racial justice.  These two forces, black grief and white grievance, have been at the heart of American politics for centuries and remain so today.

Black grief, Hooker argues, is exemplified by current protests against police violence—the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege.

This is a very thought-provoking book and conversation about some of the most important issues in American democracy.

‍Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.

Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Juliet Hooker, who is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University, and the author of a new book called Black Grief, White Grievance. And it's interesting to note that Juliet is a professor of political science, but she's actually a political theorist, by by training, and she describes herself that way, both in the book and in this interview.

Jenna Spinelle
And the subtitle of her book is all about the politics of loss, which is something that we've talked about on this show before, listeners may remember our conversation with Jim Piazza is all about what happens and the consequences when elected officials don't accept the result of an election. We'll link that in the show notes if you want to go back and listen to that. But Juliet really framed this idea of loss in a slightly different way, maybe taking a step back, which is one of the things she says that, you know, political theory is good for helping us do.

Michael Berkman
We've talked about the failure to accept loss, the failure to concede a defeat, which we've argued at various times on the show, but in particular, in that podcast with Piazza that it's a bad thing for democracy, when losers don't concede an election. And, and it's bad because it often leads to violence, as it did here on January 6. But what's so interesting to me about this book, and really, eye opening is the way that it asks us to take a step back and think about loss more generally, in terms of democratic politics, and the role that it plays in democratic politics.

Candis Watts Smith
So she does the work of asking us to think about it more generally, but also more specifically, and so far as all sorts of people lose, right? I mean, if democracy is about being ruled sometimes and being the ruler and other times, that means that at some point, you're going to be on the losing team. And what she does is, you know, sometimes Democrats lose, sometimes Republicans lose, you know, whatever, like, sometimes there's a policy that you want, you get it, sometimes you don't. But then there's also in what she focuses on here is a racial component, where if we think about political losses, not just in terms of policy, but also about symbols about people, and about, you know, she focuses, especially on life, or even anticipatory losses, right. So there, she kind of she does the work of zooming in on the types of political losses that are unevenly distributed across racial groups. And when we dive in to the types of losses that groups may be more likely to encounter, then we realize that it's really important for us to not engage in false equivalency, that you know, a loss of your idea about what about how the world should work where like your group is in power, is not the same kind of loss, and doesn't produce the same kind of grief as losing a human person, that is someone who is in your group, and could just as well be a stand in for yourself and your life is lost at let's say, due to state sanctioned violence.

Michael Berkman
Anticipatory loss, is one of many really neat phrases that she uses in the book I'd never really thought about before. But, you know, take the great replacement theory, right, his way of understanding this notion of anticipatory loss, we hear a lot about this great replacement theory. It's a fear that Fox News talks about a great deal and and so it's this idea that immigrants are coming into this country will register eventually to vote as Democrats, leading to these anticipated losses for current white residents of the United States. And so therefore, something has to be done now, in anticipation of this loss that they haven't even experienced yet, and may very well not experience it's kind of it's something they're anticipating. It's something they're imagining, but it's not necessarily anything real. And it plays into this distinction that Candice was getting at that she's arguing that white and black people have experienced a loss differently. And that for whites, it's often it's what she calls white grievance.

Candis Watts Smith
And grief is the other thing that she notes is that there is also greater attention paid to grievance to white grievance over things that have not even happened, and probably never will and diminishes black grief over things that have happened, and that there is a pattern of behavior or systemic in systematic patterns, which then people will say like, well, you know, is it that big of a deal? Right? There's ways in which we gloss over those issues to focus on. We gloss over black grief, to elevate and to assuage white grievance. So we might think about, for example, the response of all lives matter to Black Lives Matter, right, you know, as a political theorist, which we'll talk more about, I think, for me, and I hope that as folks are listening, that what they'll hear is words and labels put on phenomena that they see but can't quite maybe put their finger on. And so there she does really beautiful work of helping us to have a common language around the phenomenon that we see. And the other thing that I think that she brings in the spoken or hear more is that like, we'll get so think about what should be and what could be.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, that's right. So as you may have gathered, this is a bit of a deep book and a thought provoking book, and I hope, a thought provoking conversation as well. So let's go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle
Juliet Hooker, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Juliet Hooker
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jenna Spinelle
So I would like to start to help orient our listeners to your work and the perspective that you come from. I'd like to talk for a minute about political theory as a discipline. Many of the guests on our show are political scientists, they talk about public opinion data and, you know, research studies that they've done. But political theory is quite different. So for our listeners who are not in the academy, I wonder if you could orient us a bit to the discipline and the lens, or the perspective that it gives you for the questions that you address in your work.

Juliet Hooker
Yeah, that's a really good place to start. Because political theorists, I mean, we don't do the kind of heavily empirical work that maybe some of your other academic guests do, but the thing that we do is look at normative questions. Right? So if social science is about causality, it's about, you know, describing the effects of, you know, various kinds of policies. One of the questions that we get to ask this political theorist is, is this a good policy? Why should we do this? Who is being if a group is being left out? Is the policy still just? Or how would we justify it as legitimate if there are some people who aren't benefiting? So I think that's one of the big differences with political theory, that we don't have to kind of take the view from nowhere, because we are asking these kind of normative questions. And one of the big questions that has animated political theory, from the beginning is this question of, you know, how should we arrange our societies for, you know, the maximum benefit of all, which means, you know, like, what type of political regime is most effective for having people participate for having people's needs met? And so I think one of the things that we as a field have always been centrally concerned with and debated is, you know, kind of the effectiveness of democracy, what type of democracy we should be committed to, or we're trying to pursue, you know, how do we think about the question of political participation as a public good that all citizens are entitled to?

Jenna Spinelle
And, you know, democracy has been described as a system in which parties lose elections. But that, again, seems like a very simplistic definition, given the idea of loss or the ideas of loss that you grapple with in your book. I wonder if you could talk more about that some of the kind of deeper ways that, you know, maybe that simplistic definition of a system of that parties lose elections doesn't quite get at it? Yeah, of course.

Juliet Hooker
So that definition, I think is a very institutional one in the sense that it's looking at, okay, what are the kind of institutional things that need to happen, but it's focusing on one dimension, which would be electoral politics, I think, in political theory, there is a kind of a broader, if you will, understanding of democracy where democracy isn't just about what about electoral politics, and it's not just about political parties. It's about how citizens participate in self government. Right? This is the sort of classic definition of democracy and So part of the, you know, the things that we, you know that I think we also need to think about beyond the sort of functioning of political parties is our citizens engaged, they feel like they can shape the outcomes of policy debates, who, you know, who gets to participate? Because maybe some people do, right? And some people much less so and how do we talk about a country being democratic, when there are perhaps huge disparities in access to participation and being able to influence policy debates? And so I think beyond this question of, you know, the rotation of who's in power, there's the whole question of responsiveness of whether people can actually participate, who's allowed to feel and act like a full citizen? And who is it?

Jenna Spinelle
And so given what you just said, Where does the idea of loss come into the picture?

Juliet Hooker
Yeah, so loss, of course, is central to democracy as you as the definition that you pointed to noted. And in my book, and black grief, white greement, I talk about loss as central to democracy, which is actually a different way of thinking about democracy than the one that most political theorists tend to focus on, because political theory tends to focus on democracy is being about empowerment, right about, you know, citizen engagement and civic participation. And instead, I focus in the book on this idea that democracy is centrally about loss, right? Because you can't always win, right? You have to lose some times. And so that means that as an individual citizen, your experience of democracy is as much about losing as it is about winning, and maybe even more so right? How many times have we all not gone and voted for our candidate and maybe canvass and try to persuade people and then they lose, and you're still upset. And this happens all the time. And we have to learn how to deal with this. And I followed Daniel Allen, in thinking that this experience is essential to democracy as the ones that we tend to focus on which are this like empowerment, engagement, participation.

Jenna Spinelle
It's also important to point out to sit with the loss and kind of be in it, not just move right on to the next thing, or try to turn loss in to virtue, which you mentioned, Daniel Allen, kind of she and many others before her have argued, so how did you arrive at that piece of it thinking through the, you know, intellectual tradition that might underlie that part of it, this idea of a reckoning with loss and maybe feelings of grief that come with it? Yeah.

Juliet Hooker
So I draw in my work in this book, in particular macrophyte grievance on African American political thought. And I argue that African American political thought, is anti nostalgic, is an emptiness, stylistic tradition, right? You can't look back the past eras as the sort of, you know, high point of democracy or of racial justice, if you're an African American thinker, because, you know, they were, in fact, usually worse. And so there's the sense in which folks, I think have to can engage in that kind of nostalgia, but they also can't be naive about the possibility, you know, of securing racial justice, immediately, they're very aware of the kind of backlash that follows moments of racial progress in the United States. And so part of what I argue in the book is that when we look at their work, what they point us towards is this kind of, they point us towards being more comfortable, let's say with contingency with the idea that we don't know if we're going to win, but we need to keep working towards our goals anyway. But at the same time, you know, there is a tendency in the tradition, to say that the way to make sense of one's loss is to go from grief to grievance to go from grief to activism. And part of what I'm trying to argue in the book is that, actually, we need to sit with loss, that that immediate sense that you need to move from grief to activism, comes at a cost. And it doesn't allow black people to, you know, to experience their full humanity because you have to immediately become this activist on behalf of racial justice, when you suffered these tremendous losses. And so, that led me to thinking about, you know, how the response to loss needs to be to sit with loss, and at the same time also for white citizens who haven't had to deal with loss as much as the are ugly who've been accustomed to winning as a group right to be the dominant group in power, that they also need to learn to sit with loss because they have not had to do that.

Jenna Spinelle
Right. And and in fact, you right that some of the white grievance comes from anticipatory loss. Can you explain to us what that is and how it factors into this picture?

Juliet Hooker
Absolutely. So I use the notion of anticipatory loss to talk about the ways in which white grievances often mobilize in response to these changes that are yet to come, but that are nevertheless being assumed to be apocalyptic scenarios of white subordination. Right and subjugation. So, you know, I don't know if you remember, but right after Obama was elected, and during his presidency, there would be these segments on Fox News about, you know, young boy, white boy gets beat up on a school bus by black classmates. And it was all part of this whole narrative of how we were in this, you know, we were being oppressed by, you know, this dominant, radical Black couple. And this, I think, points to the way in which, you know, to the ways in which white grievance often is responding to these anticipatory losses that haven't happened, right. And so they are imagining equality, as subjugation, right, so experiencing changes towards greater racial equality as then becoming oppressed. And so if you look in and I say, this is anticipatory, because of course, Obama was a pretty mainstream Democrat, he governed like, you know, a lot of Democratic presidents, it wasn't, there was no whole scale transformation in the US political system. In fact, Trump was elected right after he left office. So this sense that this had somehow become this nation that was, you know, ruled by black people, points to what I mean by this kind of this notion of anticipatory loss, that there's this imagined apocalyptic change that's going to happen and people are mobilizing in the present, as if that has already occurred. Yeah,

Jenna Spinelle
I found that to be such an interesting point as I was reading the book, because often this is framed as a nostalgia thing, and you certainly talk about nostalgia, too. But this notion of anticipatory loss is like the other side of that coin. In some ways, it's imagining something laying hasn't happened yet, while at the same time holding on to this idea that might not have ever existed in the first place, either. It's like imagined on both fronts.

Juliet Hooker
Absolutely. Right. So, you know, make America great again, right is the classic example of this kind of nostalgic, this work of kind of nostalgia, of saying, you know, there is a moment in which there was less conflict, or there was or we were in our rightful place, and we want to go back to that. But there's also a sense of imagination of what the future might be, if you think about the ways in which people are talking about great replacement theory, right. And this idea that the US is undergoing these demographic changes that are going to mean that there will be that not just that, let's say, whites might become a demographic minority, but that that will mean that they are suddenly, right, an oppressed minority, which is a different thing. You can be a demographic minority, and that doesn't mean that you're somehow you know, subordinated oppressed, marginalized. But that's how it's interpreted. And so that's why you get these narratives about, you know, immigrant invasions, for example, this idea that, you know, and we also don't know what demographic change will mean, right? It's not as if, you know, we know how people are going to vote based solely on what their racial or ethnic identity is. So it's really this. You know, one of the things that I think is really important to understand about white grievance is that it you know, that people can respond to something with grievance when it is real or imagine, but just because it's not real, doesn't mean that it's not potent. It's not able to mobilize people politically in tremendous ways.

Jenna Spinelle
I want to come back to the black grief side of things. You write a lot in the book about Martin Luther King and the civil rights era and that movement and characterize it I forget if this is your characterization, or someone you're quoting, but the line that I wrote down was exemplary citizenship in the face. have unequal bargains. And so I wonder how that period of time continues to kind of hang over the reckoning with black grief and maybe inhibit some of that imagine Ettore thinking that you call for? Absolutely.

Juliet Hooker
So I think we have a romantic, you know, we've developed this kind of romantic account of the civil rights movement where we forget how difficult and contentious and contested it was. And so we have this notion that there were these heroic civil rights protesters who are supremely civil, right, they were well dressed and well spoken, and they withstood the violence against them without retaliating. And this transformed the broader white public who was watching this happen. But in fact, right, this was a much more complicated set of events, people didn't, weren't just magically transformed, as soon as those as MLK himself, you know, pretty despairingly noted, as soon as the civil rights laws were signed into law, people began to undercut them and try to have them just be not be able to be enforced. And moreover, as he said, you know, having voting rights is like the bare minimum, right? It's not like that suddenly achieved racial equality. And so I think part of the way in which that era functions is that it's now used to constrain black protesters, right? So it's like, Oh, you are not following this model that was so successful in the 1950s, and 60s. And so you must be making a mistake or your way of protesting isn't legitimate. And I think one of the things that's really important to keep in mind about that is that, you know, when the debate becomes about, are you protesting and right in the right way, what gets lost is what are people protesting about? What is happening with the actual substance of the things that they're seeking to change? And instead, we become fixated on? Or are they presenting their grievance in just the right way, so that I will be able to listen to it.

Jenna Spinelle
And yeah, that cycle of grief and grievance just starts all over again. So you also talk about the ways in which liberal democracy is not set up to fully deal with the injustice is in our society? I wonder if you could talk more about that? And then if that is the case, like if not that, then what I guess then you know, where do Where do things go from there?

Juliet Hooker
So this is a this is a very good question. I think my critique of certain accounts of liberal democracy comes out most in the chapter in the book, where I look at the history of black protests, and I place the movement for black lives in that context. And part of what, you know, what I'm arguing in that chapter is this idea is that there is a way in which her account of liberal democracy kind of ends up fetishizing civility, right is a good and so you get these, the result of that is that we focus on process, we focus on procedures, and we don't focus as much on outcomes or in substance. So you get, for example, and this will probably, you know, get me in trouble with some of your other guests. But you know, for example, think about something like polarization, which is a big, obviously a big theme and work on democracy. And people often say polarization is a bad thing, right? There's all these like polarization is the problem, we're too polarized. But the fact of the matter is, at every moment in which progress towards racial equality has been achieved, polarization was necessary because people disagreed. And so when you focus only on polarization, what you're missing is this question of you can have less disagreement, but people could be agreeing as they were in the 1950s, Democrats and Republicans on maintaining these segregated racially segregated structures. So that's one example to me of one of the ways in which the focus in some ways on procedural ism in liberal democracy makes it difficult for us to think about these substantive questions that are actually central to what democracy should be.

Jenna Spinelle
Several of our guests recently on the show have been talking about the need to bring class into this discussion. You know, the movement for justice and stronger democracy that truly does serve everyone. You can't talk about that without bringing class into it not merely race alone. No, that is certainly an important part of it. I wonder how you might think about the idea of class and class struggles and class solidarity within the framework of black grief and white grievance?

Juliet Hooker
So this is, again, a really important question, I would say there are two ways in which I think about class in the book, one of them is in regard to how we think about what gains have been made by black people and other people of color in the United States. So one of the things that I point to is that, of course, while there has been progress relative to prior historical eras, it is the case that the gap between white and black wealth between disparities and kind of economic prosperity are continue to be enormous and in fact, are wider in some ways than they were maybe a couple of decades ago. And so this points to we do need to think about race and class simultaneously, right? So expanding economic inequality is a huge problem for us democracy, but it's also playing out in particular ways. When we think about about it in terms of race, and that's an important thing to pay attention to. The other another way in which I think about class in the book is to isn't how I think about white grievance, right. So often, when we talk about for racially resentful whites, people tend to focus on the white working class, and to say that this is a response to material losses, right, that are the result of changes in the economy. And one of the things that I I point to is that while there is undoubtedly been material losses suffered by the white working class, it's also important to realize that white grievance transcends right isn't that just confined to the white working class that you have wealthy whites, we're also participating right in this rhetoric and feeling aggrieved in certain ways. And also, that it is often these symbolic losses, these things that aren't really about, let's say, profound material changes, that are what people are being mobilized by, right. So, you know, think about how upset so many people were about, you know, things like the 1619 project, or the, you know, the critical race theory, panic. And these aren't motivated by, you know, some big change in how wealth is distributed in the US. These are literally about how we're teaching history, and what people are learning in school. And so I think we need to pay attention to the ways in which these symbolic losses are really also motivating people.

Jenna Spinelle
And so Juliet, as we bring things to a close here, you end the book with the question of what else we can imagine for ourselves in the world. And, you know, my first thought, when I read that was sunrise and Afrofuturism, and spaces, the place and that sort of thing, perhaps that's part of it. But more recently, I thought about this notion of pleasure activism and, you know, self care as an act of social justice or an act of resistance. Is that the kind of thing that maybe comes to mind or fits with that question? Or are there other examples that you've seen of people or groups who are already doing this work?

Juliet Hooker
I think what I'm trying to say there are two things. One is, I use this distinction in conclusion of the book between salvaging and repair, to describe this, right, which is this idea that often we think about us democracy as essentially healthy. And we just need to fix the little things that are wrong, right, the way you call a repairman when your plumbing isn't working. But that actually limits the way in which we can see the problems that are actually plaguing us democracy, which, let's say, predate Donald Trump, right, that have to do with structural issues, like know, the way that you know, things like the Electoral College, the Senate, you know, the Supreme Court, all these institutions that have shown themselves really much less robust and much to be much more anti majoritarian and to the point of becoming extremely problematic, and so part of when I you know, I, I say we need to move away from the language of repair to salvaging which is you know, when you take things you know, from a wreck and you repurpose them and create something new is to say, let's be expansive in how we think about this moment of crisis. Because I really think you know, it's a really critical moment for us democracy, let it be an opportunity to think expansively about how we could truly make the US a full democracy in ways that it hasn't been. Let's not just be like, oh, you know, let's do these kinds of cosmetic changes, we often write, I think, think about politics as being about winning. And part of what I want to say is that, you know, we need to think about democracy as also being about losing that maybe being a good loser as a central to being a good democratic citizen, when you have lost legitimately unfairly, as you know, going out and participating and trying to get your candidate or your position to win. And I think that's particularly important because I think in the current moment, white grievance and the way in which it's being mobilized to get people to say, you know, if I can't win through these democratic means I'm willing to dispense with democracy is really one of the greatest threats to us democracy right now.

Jenna Spinelle
Well, Juliet, I know this book, I'll be coming back to it's one of those you read it several times to absorb everything and all the good work that you do. We'll link to it in the show notes. I hope our listeners will check it out. And thank you so much for joining us today.

Juliet Hooker
Thank you for having me.

Candis Watts Smith
Thank you, Jenna, for that really good conversation with Juliet. One of the things I think is worth noting that kind of was like bread crumbs throughout the conversation is actually the many times that we see white grievance show up, even in fairly recent history. So the backlash of reconstruction Yes. backlash of civil rights. Yes. Earlier, Michael mentioned about the unite the right rally. And this kind of notion of the replacement theory, or actually, you talked about replacement theory, but I thought about the unite the right rally, where folks were literally saying, you know, Jews will not replace us, right. This is one of those moments of white grievance. And in contrast to the way that we see black grief show up, which is pretty consistent, and usually about the exact same thing every time, which is usually around police violence, but even then, that is a stand in for other types of state violence in any quality. So I just, I really appreciated this conversation and this book, because what it does is to help us to categorize and to make sense of this pattern that we see again, and again and again, and what it means for the quality of our democracy.

Michael Berkman
Yeah that's so true. You know, we spent a lot of times over the last since 2016, with aggrieved white people in diners, and right, they became a real focus. For so much of the media, we have to understand the grievances of these people to understand what happened. And I feel like this book allows you to kind of look at that with a different lens, and with a very different sort of perspective by saying, Okay, well, let's take this white grievance and put it next to what blacks have, have had to endure in terms of their grief over it very extended period of time. And, and it does make much of what they're talking about seem kind of trivial, right, like the Colin Kaepernick that that just the uproar about his protest, which I think also gets to another great term that she had in this book, right, was this fetish fetishization of civility, there is a certain acceptable way in which you can express your grief and loss.

Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, so that I think that point also revealed a kind of double bind that black folks find themselves in. So on the one hand, she knows, like, you know, around this kind of romanticization of the civil rights movement, that you know, these well dressed, beautiful high school and college kids, peacefully, you know, March in the street, and all of the things like we can all say all of the things and Martin Luther King had a dream. That was a colorblind dream, like we can go on and on. And so one of the kinds of binds, that reveals itself is that black folks must respond to a horse and a polite way. And even when they respond in a polite way, like Colin Kaepernick did, that is still then considered offensive. So there's this one kind of way that like you must respond in a certain kind of way, which then obscures what the issue is. Anyway. then the other bind that she knows is the kind of automatic expectation of protest in the face of experiencing a loss that Emmett Till's mother did it. And so must now Trayvon Martin's mother and Tamir Rice parents and the child of Philando, you know, get steel, and so on and so forth. Right that then people are expected to show up in these public ways, and do the work of making everything better or pushing everyone forward. The other thing that you noted earlier that I just want to press on a little bit is about the aggrieved white folks and diners. And I think what I find really fascinating about that conversation is also about the diner part, right? That's a class component. And there's always this kind of constant focus on poor white folks, lower income white folks, folks in small towns that are shrinking, that are doing the work of making the United States a more regressive country. And data show that this group was more likely, you know, people who were in places that are in shrinking counts are more likely to vote for Trump, that, you know, even my own research shows that people who had more racial resentment and just kind of a lack of understanding of institutional racism, we're more likely to vote for Trump. But it really this like that conversation really does obscure the role that well to do and wealthy white folks have in these contemporary shows of white grievance.

Michael Berkman

This is a kind of misrepresentation of the of the MAGA kind of coalition that the media has been complicit in from the beginning. You know, you pointed out on the extreme where some people arrived by private plane, but even just you know, as you read through all the people that have been convicted, I mean, these are people that had jobs, or the guy who worked in the State Department or worked in the National Security Council, at one point, was recently convicted. But it's true of the maca coalition in general. I mean, the lowest income voters voted for Hillary Clinton, and they voted for Joe Biden, what I think is often kind of confused when people are trying to understand this is that it is true that the Republican Party and Maggie in particular people without a college education, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have money. It just means that they don't have a college education most. Right, many of them are above that median income.

Candis Watts Smith
So I thought that that point on the issue of class also does the work of really highlighting the false equivalency that one would make about white grievance and black grief, because it's folks who are just fine. Who are who are upset about the 1619 project. Yeah, yeah. And that their books in a library? Yeah, that they're kind of anxieties. And their fears are ones to be paid attention to, even at the rate of, you know, diminishing focus on the lot, the loss of real lives, the loss of things that are that are at higher stake. And so I think that that conversation about class really, I think solidifies the, like the, it's, I don't want to I'm trying to use the word, a fancier word for stupid, trivial, trivial, relatively trivial problems that people are talking about, in comparison to the very real problems of police violence, of mass incarceration of an unequal criminal legal system of increasingly segregated schools have and I, you know, we could go on and on, right, that when we put it in context, that way, we can see that we fall into a really dangerous false equivalency, when we, you know, want to assuage the grievances around masking and 1619. And books in the public library.

Michael Berkman
I have nothing I could add to that as really nice encapsulation of much of the book. Well, thank you for joining us. This was a terrific discussion around a really fascinating book. It is a great read on Michael Berkman.

Candis Watts Smith

And I'm Candis Watts Smith. For Democracy Works, thanks for listening.

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