Freedom and Racism: Neil Roberts
FEBRUARY 17, 2022
“I have hope even when there might be reasons to be hopeless.”
Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion at Williams College. He’s working on a new book titled How To Live Free in an Age of Pessimism. We discuss the legacy of Charles Mills’ scholarship on the racial contract, freedom, and transforming society from the bottom up.
Thanks to Native for supporting Future Hindsight! Get 20% off your first purchase by visiting nativedeo.com/hopeful or using promo code HOPEFUL at checkout.
Racial Contract
White supremacy has shaped modern society in ways that may not be immediately obvious. Charles Mills proposes in the Racial Contract that we’ve operated under the assumption that rights belong to whites and are theirs to give away. By changing our conceptions about the racial contract and, in turn, racism, we can work towards constructing a new approach towards living free in our democracy.
Living Free
Living free isn’t simply the lack of enslavement. In our world, social and political orders are constantly changing, creating new dynamics of subjugation. If we choose to think of freedom outside of the context of enslavement, then living free requires the individual to grow a sense of awareness of their surroundings and the political system they exist in. For example, suffrage is a hallmark of a democratic and free society.
Positive and Negative Freedoms
Positive notions of freedom are about the visions of freedom that are desired in a body politic, such as autonomy or plurality. They also include public policy, legislation, and constitutions. Negative notions of freedom are about non-interference and non-domination. One example is mask mandates, which is considered by some to be an interference of freedom.
FIND OUT MORE:
Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion at Williams College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with a specialization in political theory. Roberts is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors. His present writings deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concept of freedom. His most recent book is A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (The University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Roberts was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19 and, since July 2018, he has served as the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies. His next book is How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism.
You can follow Neil on Twitter @neildsroberts.
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Neil Roberts
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Produced By: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
-
Neil Roberts Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Native for supporting Future Hindsight. Native make safe, simple, effective products that people use every day with trusted ingredients and trusted performance. Get 20% off your first purchase by visiting Nativedeo.com/hopeful or using promo code hopeful at checkout.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. Sometimes things just don't work out -- or you're just too late with an idea. Back in the summer of 2021, as we were planning our season on the social contract, we knew we really wanted to talk to Charles Mills. Mills was a titan of political thought, described as the Black Socrates, best known for his 1997 book The Racial Contract. Mills interrogated Western liberalism and philosophical tradition, especially social contract theory, as being based on the assumption of white supremacy. The assumption that rights belong to whites and are theirs to give away, or not. Here's the first sentence of The Racial Contract: "White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today." Mills's work is so vital to any discussion of the social contract today, but sadly, Charles Mills passed away in September of last year. And as we pored over the obituaries and articles In Memoriam, we came across this week's guest, Neil Roberts. He's a mentee of Mills and we're delighted to welcome him to the show to talk about Mills's work, but also about his own work. Neil Roberts is a professor of Africana Studies and faculty affiliate in political science and religion at Williams College. He's working on a book right now, How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism. Thank you for joining us.
Neil Roberts: [00:02:07] And thank you very much for having me and also for those tuning in to this episode.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:14] So I thought we would start with Charles Mills and what he identifies as the Euro-American racial contract, the assumption that rights belong to whites to give away. Can you help us give a kind of Charles Mills 101, on The Racial Contract?
Neil Roberts: [00:02:28] Absolutely. First, not only thank you for having me, but also for allowing us to start our conversation with the work of Charles Mills, and I'm not assuming that everyone tuning in is familiar with Mills' work. Charles Mills was an extremely important 20th and 21st century philosopher. Many don't know that even though Mills is known as a philosopher, he actually was trained in physics. He actually never took philosophy courses really before going to graduate school. But he's most well-known for, as you mentioned, his book in the 1990s entitled The Racial Contract. And so one of the long standing interests of Mills is how do we understand the idea of race and also, by extension, notions of racism? And in my words, not his words. I believe Charles Mills is very interested in trying to explore particularly racism, not as a form of prejudice or stereotype. We see this in the western tradition of American political thought that suggests that there are notions such as freedom and democracy and equality, and when there might be issues such as racial injustice or racial inequality. Oftentimes that's explained as simply an aberration from an otherwise sound theory and set of principles. And so Mills wants to suggest that if we are to understand race but also racism, we actually have to go to the founding of modernity and the period of 1492, as Mills and also the Jamaican compatriot Sylvia Winter suggests that moment in which Columbus and crew arrive and what we now call the Bahamas October 12th 1492, and it's at that point that notions of race and racial difference from Mills and Winter and others really begins. And Mills became particularly interested in the social contract tradition.
Neil Roberts: [00:04:15] And so I know you've done an entire series on the social contract, but just in terms of Mills 101, we also need to know social contract tradition 101. Social contract tradition in Western political thought has really been understood as a primarily liberal tradition, usually thought to begin with Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan in 1651 and then other important thinkers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant as the so-called heyday, and then the resuscitation in the 20th century with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971. But all throughout this tradition, there are certain things that are common in these different thinkers and those who have adopt it. One, the idea of the state of nature, the idea that humans are born in some type of original state. For Hobbes, that was a very bellicose state. Those who have ever seen the show Lost, right? And then you have other articulations of the social contract that don't believe that humans in the state of nature or more kind of bellicose and wild. For Rousseau, the state of nature was something good. It was when humans
started interacting with one another that things so-called went bad. And ultimately, the question becomes "How do individuals and the societies that she, he, and they live in, what type of social arrangement could be for the benefit of one another and for the society as a whole?" Mills was very interested in this tradition, but he was particularly troubled even in the resuscitation of that tradition with the work of John Rawls in 1971, because he says, all throughout that tradition, there had been little to no attention to notions of race and racism.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:47] So that's a great refresher on the social contract tradition. So when Charles Mills looked at that tradition, what did he see? What prompted him to write his most well-known book, The Racial Contract?
Neil Roberts: [00:05:59] In The Racial Contract, Mills is making an argument that, in fact, the foundational political system -- let's be clear: not prejudice. The foundational political system of the modern period starting in 1492, most notably since then in settler colonial states, but not exclusively those, has been, in his view, the system of white supremacy, not as a prejudice, but as a political system. For Mills, he wants us to talk about white supremacy as we would talk about libertarianism or conservatism or other types of political systems. And only then, if we understand white supremacy as a political system, can we then think about ways in which to overturn that system or change social arrangements. One more point for the opening kind of 101. Returning to the work of John Rawls is that Mill's critique of Rawls was not simply to jettison this liberal arrangement, but his view was that Rawls had this famous notion he called the kind of the original position, that if each of us were behind the veil of ignorance. I always say, if you were to put blindfolds on and we're at a table and you didn't know who you were going to be when the blindfold came off in a system, whether you were going to be the most powerful, the most privileged, the most fortunate, or individual at the bottom of the social system, what type of world do we want to live in before we take the blindfolds off? That would be the benefit of not just ourselves, but each other.
Neil Roberts: [00:07:24] And Mills' problem with Rawls is that he had this wonderful system and he never talked about, according to Mills, never talked about the issue of race, white supremacy as foundational to it because Rawls said his project was a project of ideal theory that is something abstracted away from the real world. Mills said he actually doesn't want to jettison Rawlsian thinking. He says he wants to take up what
Rawls called non-ideal theory. The theory that is the world as it really is. Now again, my words, not not Mills. You know, so in The Matrix trilogy -- there's a recent movie that was a reboot of it, the fourth, which wasn't particularly good -- but nonetheless, The Matrix was this idea right, that you're living in this kind of fantasy world. Which pill do you want? Do you want to take one pill that's going to allow you keep living in La La Land? I would call that ideal theory, according to Rawls. Or do you take the second pill, that I would call non-ideal theory, which is the world that we really are and unfortunately, the world that we really are might have a lot of inequality, racism, injustice. But Mills was a believer as in the kind of characters in The Matrix who believed in Neo and others that that the social arrangement could be changed.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:32] And where does Charles Mills work sit within that liberal tradition that you've been talking us through. Where does it fit in?
Neil Roberts: [00:08:38] I think knowing The Racial Contract, but Charles Mills his entire work, his last major book, Black Rights / White Wrongs, a critique of racial liberalism, was actually trying to build upon that earlier work what he called racial liberalism. That liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls has been a de-racialized liberalism. So if we were actually in a non-ideal world, the world as it is from 1492 to the present, if we were to take race and racism seriously, we could try and offset that. And I think it's a brilliant system. I'll end with one of the questions that I posed to Mills over the years who, as you are right, has been a mentor. But something that he was not able to explain is that even in The Racial Contract, the one social contract thinker in the Western tradition that Mills cited himself with the closest was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who turned out to not be a liberal, right. Rousseau was a Republican small R, and this is not just nerdy academic talk. This is actually very central because the general discussions of Western political thought is that liberalism small L in its different arrangements was hegemonic up until the 19th century, went out of favor until the late 20th century, and then returned with the work of Rawls and others in its different forms in the '80s that would be refashioned in the U.S. and the U.K. under neoliberalism, right? But that in fact, republicanism small R was not only central to thinkers like Rousseau, but even in Black political thought in the 19th century, the century in which you get different forms of abolitionism, not only in the U.S. but also in the Caribbean, Latin America, and other places. So I would just invite us to think that Mills' biggest legacy is having us think that traditions like the social contract tradition can be more than just thought experiments.
But actually, it can be windows into thinking about the world in which we live and that we do have the possibility to change it, that we shouldn't be pessimistic, and I have a feeling we're going to come back to pessimism in a little bit. But this idea, it's not just that The Racial Contract addressed race and racism, it was also a bigger question about what does it mean to think about the world as it is and not merely abstractly. And what does it mean to then set up the terms for its transformation, even if a brilliant work such as Mills might have some kind of questions in terms of even the tradition that he was very essentially staked in in some sense, trying to recuperate and extend.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:02] We'll be back with Neil in a moment. But first, I want to tell you about Native, a personal care products company without any dirty secrets. I'm someone who takes personal care seriously. For example, I use sunscreen every day rain or shine, and even when I don't leave my house. So I want to make sure I understand the ingredients in the products I use every day. Native has fewer, simpler ingredients, so you know everything that it's made of their sunscreen only features one active ingredient: non-nano zinc oxide. Also, it offers SPF 30 protection without leaving white residue or greasiness. So it's both safe and effective. I'm a fan of their deodorant, too, which is aluminum free and made of ingredients you've heard of, like coconut oil and shea butter. In fact, their coconut and vanilla scented deodorant has been a customer favorite for years. Native is now on a mission to overhaul your entire hygiene routine. They also make body wash bar, soap, toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner. This year up your personal hygiene routine with Native. Go to nativedeo.com/hopeful or use promo code hopeful at checkout and get 20% off your first order. That's Native d e o.com/opeful or use promo code hopeful at checkout for a 20% off your first order. I'm talking to Neil Roberts, professor of Africana Studies and faculty affiliate in political science and religion at Williams College.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:34] So let me talk about sort of like the limits of liberalism, I think this brings us to your work. What is living free in an age of pessimism? Like what does that mean, in the context of how we have just, you know, approached the subject and the work that you're doing?
Neil Roberts: [00:12:50] That's great. Thank you. So I've spent a great deal of time trying to think about how we get free. How to Live Free in the Age of Pessimism, latest book, which which I'll get to in a moment, is it's much more geared towards how do we
live free and especially how do we live in a world when we might not be living our respective views of the free life? But to some of my earlier works: in 2015, I wrote a book called Freedom as Marronage, which is in the camp of thinking about how do we get free? The genesis of it, I took a step back and tried to think about, "Well, how what might we think about the tradition of freedom in the West, particularly after 1492 and and even perhaps before?" And so I suggest in the contours of Western political thought, including antiquity, we can think of freedom in really two ways. One, we can call negative notions of freedom. And the second, positive notions of freedom. So I should say negative and positive, these are not ethical relations. This is not bad and good, right? But negative notions of freedom, such as non interference and freedom, such as non domination on the one hand, both of those traditions the liberal and the Republican small L small R, they tell us a lot about the world we don't want to live in. They tell us very little about the world we want to live in. The positive tradition in the Western thought that I call are notions, such as autonomy or going to Rousseau, the general will or, as Hannah Arendt talked about, plurality and others.
Neil Roberts: [00:14:14] What are the types of constitutions we want in our society? What is the vision of the body politic that we want? What are the legislative kind of initiatives that we want to have enacted? These notions of positive notions of freedom tell us a lot, a lot about a great deal about the world that we want to live in. They actually tell us very little about the world that we wish to kind of exit from. And so my earlier work with Freedom as Marronage and then in between that in my current work proposed us to look into the tradition of the Caribbean, particularly this notion called marronage. It's a French word, m-a-r-r-o-n-a-g-e, that transports as flight. It's a noun that has the effect of a verb. Historically, it referred to an issue Spanish fuel cattle and what is now contemporary Dominican Republic and Haiti, who then would flee to the mountains in the hills, subsequently to enslaved Africans fleeing plantation slavery. But ultimately, whether it was individual runaways or collectivity is essentially creating communities within a larger state. The regime of enslavement, the regime of slavery, was not overturned. But I ask us all "What if we were to think about freedom as the flight from different forms of enslavement?" Whether you're talking about individual runaways like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs or Harriet Tubman at a certain point? On the one hand, or these grand marronage communities, such as Jamaican maroons within a larger state, but for me, I think about what I call sociogenic marronage.
Neil Roberts: [00:15:43] What does it mean? This is the only time you hear me say trickle down anything. I call it trickle down freedom. The idea of freedom emanates from some type of higher sovereign power, whether that's a political leader or a deity or deities filtering down to a mass that our freedom cannot be understood unless it's mediated through some type of higher power. And then the one that I consider the most suggestive what I call sociogenic marronage, from the bottom up. What does it mean for everyday people to transform the entire nature of a society from the bottom up? I have a penchant for revolutionary politics. I suggest that these notions of marronage, trickle down freedom, were the bottom up transformation of a society. These visions are occurring all at the same time so that for some people or even an individual at a different moment of time, one view of the free life might seem more ideal to someone than the other. But what I can say undoubtedly is what unites all of them is this belief that freedom in terms of enslavement is not something that you kind of necessarily transcend forever. Social and political orders can change, and there can be new masters and new slaves. So the question becomes, if we think about slavery and freedom is relational, then what does it mean to live in a society in which individuals and groups can not exist in a condition of enslavement, but if he or she or they were to exist in that condition, what would it mean to come to a consciousness of one's relationship within the social order? And what can we do about it? So shifting, trying to articulate in how to live free in an age of pessimism, I think for all of us, I think that the COVID 19 pandemic has kind of amplified many things, but it wasn't just with COVID. For the last decade, you know, I've been very interested in notions of pessimism, mainly because I was being asked whether it's at talks or in the classroom or podcasts or others. They said, Neil, you seem like a pretty upbeat person, but I have to tell you, I just don't necessarily have the belief system that you do with regards to certain issues facing higher education, certain issues facing, as social scientists will say, the Gini coefficient, the measure of inequality around the world in the United States, especially in the wake of the election of 2016. And even with regards to the kind of presidential and and then state and local elections in 2020, the increased polarization of American society. And believe it or not, in preparation for our discussion today, I was relooking at something in Mills' Black Rights / White Wrongs in the chapter that I mentioned where he was doing the retrospective on The Racial Contract and several times in the chapter, he says, "I'm pessimistic about what I thought was going to be the ability to transform the field of philosophy with regards to race and racism."
Neil Roberts: [00:18:41] And so even though Mills was not considered an Afro pessimist, even he who I thought was, you know, somewhat upbeat as myself, we see pessimistic or pessimism kind of littered in written or verbal discourse, so I wanted to actually dig deeper. This next book is really a deep dive to say what is pessimism? That's the first thing. Whatever pessimism is, it's not the same as either skepticism or nihilism. Whatever pessimism is, what would it mean to not only explain it, but then trying to have a response to individuals and groups who are adopting a certain version of pessimism and then at least try and convince you and others to say that we shouldn't adopt a pessimistic framework. So what does that mean? What does that look like to try and think about going back to freedom again, not at this point getting free. What does it mean to kind of focus on everyday living? What are our experiences in the world and what might I be able to offer to others to at least think about understanding why we may be pessimistic and have reasons to but suggesting another road. But I think really the hinge to understand how to live free in the age of pessimism, we have to first try and think about what I see as these still prevalent ways of thinking about freedom in the modern period, particularly in the Western tradition.
Neil Roberts: [00:20:00] To suggest that it's not one or the other, it's not a negative or positive conception, but it's a relational one, we need to be able to think about not only the type of societies that we don't want to live in, but also what are the societies that we do. Because if we think about policy issues from masking, should you wear masks, right? This is a hot button issue, to this day, right? Should there be masking in schools, restaurants, public life? What is the idea? I don't want to mask! In one category. How can we articulate that? That is a classic garden variety notion of freedom as noninterference, right? I don't want the government or the state or the school board to tell me what to do with my own being. You guys follow? I don't want them to tell me what to do, but at the same time, still there are these positive notions of freedom in terms of legislation that are still kind of going on. I really want us to, on the one hand, get a grasp of things that really have far too often been understood as prejudice versus saying there's actually a long standing explanation. It gets framed as some type of 21st century agonism and antagonism between groups when in fact, there's a long kind of philosophical tradition to talk about interference, noninterference, non domination, autonomy, all of these notions. But but that we need a kind of a framework to bring it together. But I want to get less abstract. I wanted to be able to with this newest book to
walk us through some contemporary case studies to really make this more tangible to everyday folks.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:32] Right, right, so let me get this straight, if I understood you. It sounds to me that what you're explaining is that you want to illustrate to us a concrete way in which we can assert our in real life experience freedom in our every day, as opposed to sort of conceptually, philosophically, something we read in a book. And so in this context, if I got it right, I wanted to ask you about our political imagination. You know, and about political tactics, you know, how do we actually implement the things that we desire to assert the freedom that we have in this constricted environment?
Neil Roberts: [00:22:15] Yeah, so it's a wonderful question, and I'm actually really glad that you said the word tactic. But I actually don't want us to lose the philosophical background to how we understand the idea of freedom. In fact, I'm really inviting anyone who wishes to be a part of this conversation to actually really explore these intellectual traditions. But you're exactly right. There still needs to be more work to demonstrate why these intellectual traditions have contemporary, an everyday kind of relevance. So one of the things that is missing in our current moment is, I wouldn't say political imagination. There's a lot of political imagination and not enough tactical. How does one move from stating an ideal and then trying to actually have this manifest in terms of party politics? I will start there in the U.S., the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. There are definitely reasons to suggest that the tactics of at least one of the parties has been particularly effective in trying to think about what are a certain set of issues, what are certain sort of tactics and how are those going to be implemented from the federal all the way down to the kind of local level? And then another party which has myriad tactics, right? There are certain positions that kind of unify them, but that there are various tactics and that has led to, I think in the current moment, some frustrating votes that have come and gone.
Neil Roberts: [00:23:38] So at the most concrete level, kind of three issues. The third cuts across the first two. The first is voting rights. The second is critical race theory. And the third is kind of federalism. And so in terms of tactically. At least in my estimation, for a long time, for many people talking about federalism, that is what is the difference between different legislation or activities that occur at the federal or state level compared to, let's say, the state level, compared to also then county, compared to then
even one specific district. Federalism for many people at best was kind of federal government compared to state government? And that's it. Whereas what we have seen, I would say in the last decade, amplified in the last five years, in the case of voting rights the last 30 years, is that we have a series of important topics that are actually getting debated and legislated at all of these differing levels. But much of the body politic is focusing on the federal level. So either, what is the nature, what is kind of Congress doing on these issues or the nature of the Supreme Court? And that's understandable. But in fact, those who particularly are trying to challenge existing jurisprudence and laws on a series of issues have actually for the last 20 to 30 years, been actually starting at local levels and they've gone in the reverse.
Neil Roberts: [00:25:03] They've gone in the reverse from the local level all the way up to the Supreme Court because it's made its way through. So tactically, and I think this is particularly has been something that the Republican Party has been tactically very good at the Democratic Party not has not done as effectively, is how do we actually think about these issues and how do we think of the free life competing ideals of what does the free life mean? But if there are those of us and I'll put myself in this category who believed that the suffrage, the right to vote, is a hallmark not only of a democratic society but of a free society. If there are those of us like myself who believe, as Charles Mills tried to continue to tell us that issues of race and racism came into being in the 1492 period, many of which the afterlives are still with us, then issues such as what has been talked about as critical race theory, especially in K-12 education, really is talking about American history, right? How do we actually talk about the history of race and racism and enslavement in American history? We see this most with the debate regarding the 1619 project that Nikole Hannah-Jones and collaborators brought into being.
Neil Roberts: [00:26:24] I thought initially could be a healthy debate about what is the so-called origin story of modern America, not the Indigenous communities that were here before the colonists. But if the story of what is now called the United States, should it be 1776 or should it be 1619, when, as Hannah-Jones and others have said and Lerone Bennett before that, there's 20 or so enslaved Africans who then arrived in Port Comfort and initiated the Transatlantic slave trade manifest in what is now the United States. That discussion is a healthy one. But what has morphed into a debate around the 1619 project has morphed into a discussion about critical race theory, which in the
academy was something particular to law schools, right? And the law. But whenever now one hears these debates about critical race theory, I think it's very easy to say get rid of the critical and get rid of the theory and say this, these are debates about race. I think that's an easy 101. I invite your listeners to prove me wrong. When you hear debates or videos or any council meetings or legislators hear critical race theory, get rid of the critical, get rid of the theory. And I will wager that in fact, what we're talking about is the debate about how do we discuss race and racism and its connection to history.
Neil Roberts: [00:27:42] So at its most elementary level, what can individuals do listening about What are the texts that should be taught? Parents, guardians, students themselves can actually be a part of these conversations. Because of the pandemic, a lot of discussions have also now gone on to Zoom and Google Meet in certain kind of virtual spheres. So attending the school board meetings used to be very difficult when a school board, the school board meeting is occurring at 7 p.m. Eastern Time and you have to work, then that would prevent one from even attending now with the Zoom world. One can actually even participate. What I'm getting at is that I am not discounting the importance of the federal government. I'm not discounting the importance of the Supreme Court. I'm not discounting the importance of state governments. But there are issues with regards to the most pressing issues facing us in America. The the critical race theory discussion. I mentioned kind of the question of mask mandates. How should schools respond? Should still be open or not? What is the public health nature? Voting rights. You know who has the suffrage? These are all issues that individuals and groups can actually kind of do.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:50] Right, right. Well, so I feel like there are two things you know, I always ask people What are two things that you can do to build your civic action toolkit, and you have just mentioned two things, one is that we need to go and participate in school board meetings. I think that's very good advice. Get in there, talk about what your children are learning, or not. And the other one is to stop thinking that you're powerless and that you know, you make, you make your move. You, you engage in the issues. You vote. So I have just two more questions. And the first one is normally normally what I do is I ask people what makes them hopeful, but I'm going to ask you something else first, because we're talking about pessimism, and it is: Is being hopeful, a good thing? Because Hannah Arendt, of course, argues that hope could be bad because then it prevents us from really seeing the world as it is. This is what we've been
discussing today. So what do you think is being hopeful a bad thing? And then finally, what makes you hopeful?
Neil Roberts: [00:29:48] Yeah. So I would answer kind of Arendt with something that W.E.B. Dubois, the kind of Great Barrington polymath thinker, wrote in the early 20th century. So Dubois had this saying he was reflecting on the tragic passing of his first born son, Burkhardt, who only lived shy of two years old. And and so when reflecting, Dubois had said, and I think this could be a response to a figure like Hannah Arendt, where Dubois said, I have hope, but it's not so much purely hopeful. I have hope, even when there might be reasons to be hopeless, that my conception of hope is not one devoid of the realities that we are living. In Dubois' case, what does it mean to lose your first-born child for reasons that were beyond the control of the parents? But he was also thinking about what would Burkhardt have wanted the world to be, right. A world that at moment in the United States that was in the height of Jim Crow. What would his son, that didn't live beyond that tender age, still would have wanted. So I think the first is to imagine hope that is not really separated from the kind of the structural realities that we're in. And then what makes me hopeful? I'm seeing with my niece, my own children and others who have been fortunate to encounter teaching or just meeting, is that for better or worse, young people, certainly compared to myself, who I thought I was fairly politically engaged at an early level, but not in the way young people are, are engaged. Even in terms of mediums, there's different debates about, you know, how even undergraduates or those in high school, how much are they reading full book length text versus others. But young people are reading in the media age much more broadly than we all were of a certain age much more broadly. They're listening to podcast. They're viewing, they're looking at things on lectures and others, even though you know the lengths and amounts might vary. They're they're being exposed in a much broader sense. And so what makes me particularly hopeful is that, or rather have hope, is that I am seeing in real time a generation of young people who have a conception of what the social contract means, not merely abstractly, but that they have an investment and that in many regards we're learning, I'm learning, for instance, from my niece and my own children, parents and adults and guardians. You know, we still might have wisdom or views that they need to hear that might not be the same, but also I honestly think we just need to to listen to them more. And if we actually listen to them more, then these questions, not just about, you know, go read this book about, Oh, why is voting, for instance, important. You know, having young people say, Well, why did they care? In
my oldest son's lifetime as an eighth grader, he has consciousness, deep consciousness of not only Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. He has consciousness about Donald Trump, Mike Pence. He was born in 2008. He has consciousness of the Obama administration. How is it that 13, almost 14 year old has a political sensibility not merely fashioned by their parents? Not that I want to give up on those of a certain age in different positions of power and authority. But in my view, that is how questions such as the social contract within a society are going to be in non-ideal terms, right? That is how transformation of the society and the perpetuation of the best elements of a society are going to happen.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:35] Well, thank you very much for not giving up on us old people, you know, but I'm with you, I'm with you. We have a lot to learn from our kids and our youth, and I agree that our children are are very widely read. I have a 12th grader and last year he read Foucault. I was like, Wow, you know, awesome. I did not read Foucault in 11th grade. But it's it's incredibly inspiring what young people are really doing in order to get engaged and get informed in a way that we just didn't do, I think in the 80s and 90s.
Neil Roberts: [00:34:07] Yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:08] Anyway, well, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you so much. Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and faculty affiliate in political science and religion at Williams College. Thank you for joining us.
Neil Roberts: [00:34:18] And thank you for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:23] Next time on Future Hindsight. 10 years on from the murder of Trayvon Martin, we're going to be looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and the ideas that drive it. I'll be speaking to the Black philosopher Chris LeBron, whose work aims, in his words, to clarify the nature of racial disadvantage from the perspective of being a minority, as well as the threat racial marginalization poses to the future of American democracy given both its deep past and tragic present. Food for thought for Black History Month or any month for that matter. Next time on future hindsight! This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:35:14] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.