The Exchanges

Q Where do you think, where do you think that came from? What, why it was, you know, what, why did that have to be that way?

A Well, it didn't have to be that way. Um, and part of what my book is doing is really juxtaposing my, um, American experience with my father's growing up in the thirties and forties, um, in the segregated South and having a very different black experience, but not having the experience of, um, attempting to emulate the, the guys in the street. That was actually not considered, um, racially authentic or, or, or what you need to do. And the, the sense of, An oppositional identity. That's more of a post civil rights, um, and, and hip hop era, um, adaptation that happened to the culture. And that was like, so my book is in many ways, you know, I'm trying to explore why my generation was in some ways sabotaging ourselves, even as some of the exterior external obstacles that my father generation faced had been removed.

AI assessment note: “An oppositional identity. That's more of a post civil rights, um, and, and hip hop era”

Q It's been 10 years. Has that changed your view on the U.S. and its role in the world at all? How do you see the U.S. differently?

A Yeah, I mean, I, I missed some exciting years in the U.S. I come back and forth a lot, but yeah, the, I think that, you know, the sad thing to say from, from Europe, and I, I spent a bit of time in Germany too, America's lost some shine from, from the overseas point of view, and it's a less, Um, reliable partner, and, and the world seems dangerous, and there might be a war, um, very close to a lot of our, um, Western European neighbors, and they don't know, if you look what happened in Afghanistan this summer, they don't always know who's gonna keep the world safe for them, from their perspective. They don't know that half the country will accept the person who's elected as a legitimate leader, and they don't know if the next president will reverse all of the Things that they thought they could trust from the previous president.

AI assessment note: “America's lost some shine from, from the overseas point of view, and it's a less”

Q Does this stuff just move based on like this, like cultural force that's really hard for anyone to affect or are there certain ways that allies or people inside the culture could steer it in a more positive way? Like how, like how, how does this get better?

A Well, in some ways it has gotten better. And, you know, I think like, so part of what I was arguing in that book is that, you know, uh, symbols really matter, uh, ideas matter, images matter, what you see as possible in the world matters. And I think that, you know, it didn't change all of the problems that we have in society, obviously, but the image and the example of Barack Obama, um, I do think transformed, um, I don't think it's too much to say that it transformed, to an extent, blackness in America and made and normalized certain ideas and destigmatized other ideas in a way that was very liberating, freeing. Also, hip-hop culture got a lot more successful, and you got a lot more examples of different ways of being in the culture, and so this kind of narrow stereotype wasn't the, wasn't the only thing.

AI assessment note: “symbols really matter, uh, ideas matter, images matter, what you see as possible”

Q Should we be measuring disparate impact at all? Is that, is that like a dumb idea for the most part, or how do we think about it?

A No, I mean, I think that there are ways to do it that don't reify race. So you can talk about, you know, so in France they don't, for example, and this is not a perfect society, but they don't measure race. So they don't actually, everyone's just a French citizen. So you can't actually do affirmative action based on race in France because no one knows, but they can do it, like sometimes they can help people from certain zip codes Because actually, it's not that being biologically descended from people from Morocco makes you necessarily in need of a hand up in France. They're actually quite wealthy Moroccans in France. But being from certain zip codes, if you want to help.

AI assessment note: “I think that there are ways to do it that don't reify race.”

Q How do we fix this with Europe? I mean, it's not going to be a fast thing, but what do we have to do?

A I think we have to get our own house in order. I think you can't really be a good ally so long as your own house is constantly burning, and we have a crisis here, man. I mean, and it's, it goes way beyond, um, partisan politics. We have, we have, you know, a crisis of legitimacy. So many Americans don't believe that the political system, uh, is legitimate, not even is, is reflecting their, their goals, but Is legitimate. I think that the possibility for violence is, is, is, is not zero. Is, is, is crazy. And that was not how it felt when I left America in 2011. You know, that's like the before times. You know, people didn't, people voted Republican or voted Democrat. Barack Obama was not everybody's choice for president, but.

AI assessment note: “I think we have to get our own house in order.”

Q Should they make sure that if they're teaching critical race there, they're also teaching what smart people think who disagree with it then? Or would that be like the, or I think

A that on the level of free expression that parents should Get involved in their schools and make compelling cases about, you know, what's wrong with the curriculum and, and, and convince, uh, teachers what's flawed in critical race theory. But the idea that there's a ban that, that always, that, that, that opens up a can of worms that I think people don't fully understand that once you get into the business of banning certain ideas on the basis of, you know, cause some of these laws are written in such a way that anything that makes someone feel uncomfortable, Something so vague, first of all, it can't really stand up in court, but if it could, you're not always going to be in power and things that you think of as uncomfortable will not always be the, the, the ideas that are targeted. So you open up a kind of way of regulating thought that I think is very counterproductive.

AI assessment note: “parents should Get involved in their schools and make compelling cases”