History of Black Thought: Chris Lebron
FEBRUARY 24, 2022
"The greatest tragedy of America is how petty the cause for our failure."
Chris Lebron is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea. We discuss the nature of racial disadvantage, the opportunity for love to deliver equality and fairness, and the risks of racial marginalization to the future of American democracy.
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Understanding Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter stands as a movement to demand and secure Black humanity. Being a leader-full movement makes it less susceptible to disruption and has de-centered Black patriarchy. Its broad and deep inclusivity has also widened our consciousness beyond historical notions of Blackness. However, the lack of a clear leader also poses challenges in national messaging about the movement.
Love, Equality, and Fairness
Looking back at the history of Black thought in America, we see the shortcomings in our understanding of racism. Simply knowing that racism is wrong is not enough to break away from the everyday segregation our society faces. This moral immaturity continues to exist today, especially in the form of performative activism and fickle support of social movements. Combatting this kind of immaturity requires building a stronger sense of filial love across different communities.
Moral and Affective Ideas
Ideas can be powerful, but it’s the affective nature of an idea that determines its power. It’s clear that racial inequality results in an uneven distribution of wealth. Some would say that it is unfair. However, describing this reality as unfair removes the emotional punch that racial inequality actually results in the devastation of families, leading to anguish and despair. These two ideas are not interchangeable.
FIND OUT MORE:
Chris Lebron is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in political philosophy, social theory, the philosophy of race, and democratic ethics. His first book, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice In Our Time (OUP 2013) won the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize. His second book The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea (OUP 2017) offers a brief intellectual history of the black lives matter social movement.
Lebron is the winner of the 2018 Hiett Prize In The Humanities, which recognizes a “career devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.” In addition to his scholarly publications, he has been an active public intellectual, writing numerous times for The New York Times's philosophy column, The Stone, Boston Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Billboard Magazine.
You can follow Chris on Twitter @lebron_chris
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Chris Lebron
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Produced By: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Chris Lebron Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Novo for supporting Future Hindsight. Fortune favors the bold, the strong, the brave. For your business to break out of anything holding you back, you need business checking that's as brave as you are. Introducing Novo business checking. Sign up for your free business checking account right now at novo.co/Hopeful.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:28] 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. A decade later, the details remain at once shocking and mundane, still shocking in their casual, everyday all-American familiarity. A bag of Skittles and a bottle of Arizona iced tea, a teenager in a hoodie on his way back from the 7-Eleven. It's a decade almost to the day since 17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Ten years since the birth of Black Lives Matter. Ten years of grief and protest. Rather than taking big ideas and turning them into action items, today, we're talking to a guest who examines activism and social movements to render visible the intellectual architecture that undergirds them. Chris Lebron is Associate Professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in political philosophy, social theory, the philosophy of race and democratic ethics. His first book, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time, won the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory 1st Book Prize. His second book, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, offers a brief intellectual history of the Black Lives Matter movement. Chris, thank you for joining us.
Chris Lebron: [00:02:08] Thank you so much for having me on, Mila. I really appreciate it.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:10] So when you reflect on the ten years of Black Lives Matter, what is top of mind for you today?
Chris Lebron: [00:02:16] Two things side by side. One, I would say a kind of hopefulness for America, but also a kind of worry, a hopefulness insofar as Black Lives Matter comes at the back end of a few centuries of disregard for black humanity. And it displays a certain kind of indomitable will among Black and brown people to fight for
their place at the seat of this table we call American democracy. But the worry is on the back end of three centuries, Black folks still have to have indomitable will to fight for the seat at this table that we call American democracy, especially in the immediate aftermath and during which we had a president who was just unabashedly racist and had displayed many sympathies with white supremacy. And in fact, his presidency lands in the middle of that movement. That's something that's very concerning.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:16] Well, as you said, Black people continue to have to fight to have a seat at the table, and you argue that we need a refreshed radical Black politics to balance the scales of justice. So how does the BLM movement further that goal?
Chris Lebron: [00:03:31] So this kind of thing may not be popular to say. I'm not entirely sure it actually fulfills that goal, but that's my view of things to the extent that it does, I think that the way it has structured itself to be, as it names itself, a leader full organization means that it has been able to kind of spread far and wide in American civic life and civic action. And it makes the movement -- I don't say organization because there is no Black Lives Matter organization, as it were. I mean, there there is no one singular organization -- but allows the movement to be less susceptible to disruption by things that have happened historically in other movements, assassinations, destabilization, slandering, co-optation. When a movement is decentralized and again, as they say, leader full, then you have the possibility for a robust platform that sidesteps the sort of counter tactics of dominant powers. And that in a way can be radical. Finding a way to nullify or preempt the kind of disruptions that have befell the Panthers. You know, if you've seen the recent Fred Hampton movie. This was kind of par for the course for Black organizations. So one aspect of the radicalness, I think, is simply organizing such a way to preempt that. I think another aspect that's radical is the fact that, to its credit, it has basically de-centered Black patriarchy and the idea of the singular Black man who's going to lead the people over the horizon. There's been a kind of both deep and broad inclusiveness in the group, and I think that's not something to be taken lightly. And the radicalness of it is simply the idea that the notions of Blackness, the notions of identity have been widened past the historical norms such that Black trans individuals are no longer a kind of invisible and just kind of subsumed as an afterthought of Black rights that are seen as something separate from their rights. And I think that's a deeply important move that they make.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:36] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's really excellent to point that out that really it has broadened the way that we conceive of Black lives in the, in the public, right, that there are many, many voices. So in your view, if Black Lives Matter doesn't further the goal to the fullest extent possible, what's missing?
Chris Lebron: [00:05:58] So even as I say that there is something radical in the idea of this decentralization, I remain of the opinion that a successful social movement needs identifiable leaders. I say that first and foremost, acknowledging that those leaders don't have to be straight Black men. I'm fully down with the idea of tearing down the patriarchy. I'm all for it, but for better and for worse, America is a nation of brands. We're a nation of personalities, as we've seen with our presidential elections. We're a nation of spokespersons and again, that's for better or for worse. But that's who we are. And we, our memories work best, our way of thinking about society, work best, and we're able to attach ideas to a personality. They serve as kind of a shortcut. They keep those ideas fresh in our mind. They keep them powerful. They keep those ideas motivated. And one effect of a leader full movement. Some people say as a leaderless movement. The one effect of that is you have something like the recent presidential elections, and at no point was there a prominent voice on a national stage speaking on behalf of the movement, which I find just incredible because here we have one overt racist in debate with another older white guy with his own problematic racial past, and there's no one there from the movement that can represent its beliefs or principles. And you know, these folks can talk to me all they want about how it's important that they act locally. And I think that's great. But national recognition and national messaging is an important aspect of American efficacy. And so I think that absence in the movement, I think that's to its great detriment.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:41] Mm hmm. There's something to be said about the shorthand with a leader that we associate with an idea and a philosophy that we can immediately grasp and think, yes, we understand what this person stands for and why we want to follow this leader or that movement, by extension. So thinking about your book The Making of Black Lives Matter, you wrote it in 2017. What would be different if you were writing it today?
Chris Lebron: [00:08:08] Interesting. So it just so happens, I'm actually working on the second edition, which is expanded and the expanded content actually moves into the
Black Power era. I'm focusing on Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis. The reason why I wanted to make that move is because precisely the question you just asked about the radical nature of the movement. That conversation can't be complete without understanding why the Black Power era happened, and the reason why it happened was because there was a kind of impatience with the way leaders like King were moving. And I think King was more radical than he's often given credit for in the popular imagination. But nonetheless, from the perspective of another generation, King was still trying to compromise and get to the table and be reasonable with people that were still showing themselves to be completely unreasonable. And then you had Malcolm on the side who was talking about by any means necessary, and he toned down that militant aspect. But something about that militant aspect seemed appropriate to the next generation of movement leaders. And I think that that background of simmering irritation and impatience was largely missing from the book. And so this chapter addresses that by showing that the story doesn't end gloriously with Martin Luther King and James Baldwin in all their intellectual, beautiful prose and ethical thinking. There are a lot of people who're still thinking, "no, these people need to step to the side and let us step in and really show these white folks that they can't mess with us, that the police cannot mess with us." And so being able to come back to it and add this last chapter is a way of addressing that absence in the book.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:54] It's currently Black History Month, February and -- Chris Lebron: [00:09:58] The shortest month of the year --
Mila Atmos: [00:10:00] 28 days, 28 days. Well, so I'm struck by this moment we find ourselves in when books are being banned and school boards are becoming the sites of pitched battles over what history may be taught. So why is learning history -- and I'm including the history of ideas under that umbrella -- Why is learning our history so important?
Chris Lebron: [00:10:24] So let me invoke to people that that are in the book as it stands, Audre Lorde, who was partially famous, maybe infamous for spelling America with the lowercase a. She thought we were an immature people, an immature nation. We just had not reached a place where we had become the advanced civilization we claimed we were. Then say someone like James Baldwin, who constantly criticized
white Americans for not knowing their history and for being innocent on account of it. But when he meant innocent, he didn't mean morally innocent. He meant innocent the way children are innocent. They just don't know their points collectively were that, and not just their two points. This is a common idea in Black thought. But, when people don't know their history, they have no way of really understanding their present. And when you can't really make sense of your present, you also don't have a clear path to your future. And all that sounds just a bit cliche, but the seriousness of it is, is that speaking of Black history in the space of American democracy, allows us to really understand not just things that happened. I think this is the important point. It allows us to understand who and what we are, what kind of a place we are. We're faced with both our successes, but also our atrocities, we're able to cut short the kind of celebratory dance we do as Americans as having already achieved our greatness, which is the kind of dis- ingenuity of someone like Trump saying, Make America great again.
Chris Lebron: [00:11:52] Lots of Black folks are standing around going, "When was it great the first time?" You know, James Baldwin, he said, "I love this country more than anyone else, which is what allows me to criticize it more than anyone else." And so the idea is that history allows us to be able to incisively and carefully take stock of the character of the nation so that we can grow into greatness, so that we can try to achieve our promise. And this is where radical politics steps in. It's actually whether we even can, and it is on the table that America might simply not be capable of achieving the promise it sets out for itself, at least not on behalf of Black and brown people. And I think that's where the terrain of both anxiety and hope kind of coexist. Is that that plausible possibility that maybe we just not don't ever get there, but maybe we can't. Hopefully we can. But it is possible that we can't.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:47] It's totally possible, that we cannot. You know, I came here as a teenager. I came to the United States in 10th grade. And so for me, American democracy is something that I find so fascinating because I think the structure is so sound. And yet the practice appears not to be. So talking about the promise of American democracy. Before we get there, I have a question about sort of how can I say this like, in this context, what is the American tragedy?
Chris Lebron: [00:13:18] Hmm. I think [00:13:19] the greatest tragedy of America is how petty the cause for our failure, but how massive its actual impact is. [00:13:28] And
when I say that, I mean, America's failures are all on account of a group of people who were too insecure in their own humanity, such that the need for absolute subjugation to another group, they found to be necessary. When you ask me what is the basis of white supremacy and its aftermath? I mean, people can give all kinds of answers about the economic interest and kind of the sociology of power and all that is absolutely true. But when we think about why people do the things they do is to be able to tell themselves a certain kind of story afterwards. And when you think about the millions gone over the hundreds of years, when you think about the current state of inner cities, all founded on the notion that one group was too insecure in their humanity to allow another group to stand as their equal. That's both petty and deeply, deeply sad. And think about the potentiality of America all resting on the redemption of that group, which was sorely put to test during the last presidential term. And we came out of it very, very shaky. I think that's the tragedy of America right there.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:41] Hmm. So if you think about it in that way, what's holding us back? Why? Why aren't we fulfilling our democracy's potential and being as great as we could be?
Chris Lebron: [00:14:52] So one thing that that seems to be true about American society generally is a sense of triumphalism. We're already either where we're supposed to be or actually really close. We're right there. And when I think about the kind of landscape of American society, I think there are two things that are troubling for people concerned about race. One is clearly white supremacy or people who are overt racists. And people always kind of give me a little bit of a look when I say this, but there's something refreshing about these people, and that is that they are honest. They tell me what they think of me, and they are clear with themselves about what their beliefs are. In this regard, even though they are morally odious people, they're not confused. They don't seek to deceive me. And there is something in that that allows me to deal with people, even if it's to cast them away. The problematic group are the other group of white Americans, the Liberals. Again, I turn to James Baldwin, who will talk about, you know, how old white folks in a room would congratulate themselves on him having gotten to the room. I've seen this in my own life. I've seen this in my own career. [00:16:07] There's a kind of moral immaturity begotten by the claim of being morally wise that to simply be able to know the right principles e.g. racism is wrong, that that alone somehow gets a lot of Americans to where they need to be. Yet you see how
segregated their lives remain. You see the problematic attitude they have towards, let's say, service workers. You see the performative ways in which they support social movements and the fickle way, you only need to look at the immediate aftermath of George Floyd. [00:16:45] Incredible outpouring of white support. I mean, the civil rights movement would have loved to have these kind of numbers if they had like a business manager, right? Then those people just disappeared. And there are many folks, including myself, who have who think that incident doesn't even get the kind of white turnout it gets if people aren't at home bored out of their minds from COVID? And that sounds really cynical. But the public opinion soured on the Black Lives Matter movement less than two months. I mean, it went from, you know, a majority of people were backing it to, you know, increasingly maybe not so much. Then you had all the protests in places like Oregon, kind of co-opted by white liberals, who all of a sudden it was about the ways, you know, that they were unhappy with the way the protests were going. And then, you know, reports of some of them kind of co-opting actual movements where there have been Black leaders.
Chris Lebron: [00:17:36] I only mentioned these as as kind of examples where I think there's a very large contingent of white Americans who are very convinced that their simply intellectually affirming the wrongness of racism somehow makes them not complicit in racism. And this is the group that worries me the most because there is a deception involved, a kind of lying to themselves and a kind of lying to me. But we seem inextricably linked precisely because that other group, they definitely won't have anything to do with us. And so this other group has a kind of a sway over how we can live. So we're doing this kind of odd dance where we think we're in this together. But when push comes to shove, they retreat to their suburbs quite easily. They retreat to, I have a black friend. You know, they retreat to having a private conversation with a colleague saying, You know, I think you were right in that meeting. Then how come you didn't say anything? You were there. I was there. Why are you telling me in private? And this sort of thing.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:36] I have so many thoughts here, but one of them is that it's actually very difficult to go through this self reflection to see where you really stand, what you really believe, and I think that's a very uncomfortable process for most people. And I think in truth, most people don't know how to do it. I mean, I think that is intellectually, conceptually, emotionally, morally a very difficult exercise to say, where do
I stand? What do I want to do? You know, do I have the courage to say out loud in the meeting that I only dare say post-meeting face-to-face one-on-one? You know, I think that takes the kind of courage that most people frankly lack, or they don't even know that they lack it to, you know, to Baldwin's point that they're innocent. They just have no idea, actually.
Chris Lebron: [00:19:33] Yeah, exactly right. Yes.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:34] It's actually quite painful to watch because, like you said, it's very sad that after two months the support dissipated. One of the questions I have about that, I actually think, is that a lot of people don't really understand what Black Lives Matter is about. Like what are the demands of Black Lives Matter?
Chris Lebron: [00:19:53] And I think this speaks to the earlier point about, you know, when you have a leader full movement without a spokesperson. Look. Again, as kind of superficially American as it can be, the Sunday morning talk show rounds are really important. You know, that's when you have a majority of everyday Americans getting at least some of their information about what's happening in the world. And so it's hard to blame people not involved directly or especially attuned for not being clear on what the movement is about. So, for example, one common thought is that the movement is simply about abolishing the police and or responding to police abuse. Well, that's not really true. [00:20:33] The movement is fundamentally about securing Black humanity, [00:20:37] but that's across a range of concerns. And of course, police abuse is prominent among them because how frequently it results in murder. But a lot of the organizations are also trying to do what the Panthers were doing in the 60s, and that is trying to think about the kind of local economic situation in their areas, for example. They're trying to think about what it means to enhance the idea of public services, what it means for history to be taught properly in the schools. And so it is difficult to blame some folks for being confused. But in knowing more about the movement, then you get the idea that it isn't simply about, you know, the next police shooting or the next police choking. [00:21:22] It's really about the kind of more robust civic infrastructure America needs to fully recognize the humanity of Black and brown folks across all their identities, [00:21:32] sexually, gender, et cetera.
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Mila Atmos: [00:24:13] Well, so in your book, you talked about some pretty big ideas, and I also wanted to bring in some of the big feelings that you discussed, like love and anger, both of which are incredibly important in your work. And I'm interested in hearing from you where these feelings fit in with the big ideas.
Chris Lebron: [00:24:32] So this is a great question. These notions of love and anger have sat alongside the notions of democratic theorizing and the notions of justice all
throughout the thread of the history of Black thought. These notions only get pulled apart in contemporary non-Black thought. So in my field of political philosophy, you have a tradition that's very dominant called analytic liberalism. And it's all about thinking about notions of what counts as fairness, for example. Of course, the prominent work in this field is John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Incidentally, the theory depends on a number of things that can be really astonishing, and primary among them is is that the book is undergirded by a thought experiment in which we become ignorant of our identity, our historical positioning, the particular histories of our societies, our class interests. And from forgetting all of these things, we're meant to theorize what counts as pure fairness. Now this in and of itself is not an illegitimate sort of question. What raises the suspicions is the kind of thing that raised the late theorist and philosopher Charles Mills' hackles. And that is when that becomes the predominant way of a whole discipline, pursuing questions of human equality, who gets seen and who doesn't get seen, which problems count? But not only which problems, but also the inflection of those problems. [00:26:00] It is one thing to say that racial inequality results in an uneven distribution of wealth. It is an entire other thing to say that racial inequality results in a devastation of families that leads to anguish and despair. Right? And those two ideas are not interchangeable. You cannot just say, "Oh, when we speak about that, we'll just call that unfairness." We cannot do that. And I mentioned all that because the history of Black thought and Black art has, with very, very few exceptions, always been to keep moral ideas close to affective ideas. [00:26:35] We find that from the historical and traditional point of view, it strikes us as remarkably odd that anyone would try, especially when thinking about things like injustice. But there it is.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:47] Yeah, those are definitely not interchangeable. So one of the things that you wrote about in the book is that love delivers what democracy promises: equality and fairness. How do you define love and how can it get us to equality and fairness?
Chris Lebron: [00:27:04] So one of the things that's discussed in the book is this notion of filial love rather than erotic love. This is a distinction made by the ancient Greeks and carried forward in moral thinking. But in filial love, you have notions like kinship, and this way we're speaking not strictly people are family, but thinking about people who are attached to you and to whom you are attached. And so when I think about the idea of love, especially in this particular way, it's about a certain kind of recognition of others as
having the very live potential claim on my affective and moral attention. This is what I think it means to love people is to be able to display to them that they are foremost in your mind and not out of self-interest, but because from your perspective, there is something about them that requires you attending to them and sometimes preemptively and before they may even know that they need the attending themselves. I mean, that is often we feel most loved is when a person sees us in distress, and comes to our aid without us even having to ask, right. Or, when we're happy and a person wants to share that happiness. Just because you're happy, it makes them happy.
Chris Lebron: [00:28:18] But what on earth does that have to do with democracy? I mean, you think a democracy of a couple of ways. One way to think about democracy is that it's simply a procedure for aggregating opinions that result in formal outcomes, as displayed by who gets into office. Ok. Sure. Right. Sure. Go with that if that works for you. But one thing even those people will quickly find is that when they leave the voting booth, they have to walk the street among others. They have to go to work among others. And in having to share the civic spaces, of course, we cannot be close to everyone. But it's an odd human life to be close to no one. Yet there are people who advocate for democratic life in which "I am my island," and it's always strikes me as a kind of convenient conception because if one really thinks about democracy in that way, then we can never really owe anyone else anything. What at least I mean and, you know, the thinkers before me mean when we speak about what it means to love and then it's that connection to democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:18] Right, right. Well, you talking about love in action in democracy is reminding me of solidarity, as expressed by one of our guests in December, Manuel Pastor, when he was talking about solidarity economics and about a fundamental shift in our thinking about how to live together in society. And in some ways we already know how to do it. We already know instinctually that we're going to have to help our neighbor. If I see my neighbor on the street and he has fallen, I'm going to help him no matter what, but like you said, to conceive of it in the larger picture with voting and stepping out of the voting booth and suddenly being like, "Well, now we're among each other and we don't know how we're going to achieve our goals" is a little bit different. It's so abstract. I think that's one of the reasons we have a collective action problem because it's so difficult to put the two together. You know, how my one vote is really going to make a difference, although of course, I know that it does. But in real life, it
doesn't feel that way. So sometimes it feels like all is lost, right? But giving up isn't really an option. One of the things that I've heard you describe is the unrelenting tension between hoping for a better America and the tragedies it unendingly imposes upon us. So how do we reconcile ourselves with that? How do you reconcile yourself with that?
Chris Lebron: [00:30:39] So we talked about the tragedy earlier, and it's actually an idea that's becoming more prominent in my work. And there's this way in which the American project, almost only because it's the American project, is destined for greatness and possibly even for a kind of perfection. Very, very sublime in this way. But when I think about the idea of tragedy, tragedy isn't only about sad things happening. The more fundamental aspect of a tragic sensibility is actually being able to keep two things in view at once. And that is the possibility of success and a potentiality of failure for reasons quite beyond our control. And this leads to a certain kind of pragmatics, and that is [00:31:21] of the things in our control, what is best to do and how can we best do it? [00:31:27] And I think as simple as those two questions are, they're the whole game for any good society, any good society. But I think especially with a nation like ours that has to be a part of it, and I should say this can lead to different kinds of outcomes. One outcome it could lead to is one in which you have like a convergence of key public figures, whether it be in Congress and or just in public life generally, who are able to pull together different strands of American thinking.
Chris Lebron: [00:31:58] But here's another way in which our tragic thinking can yield a fruitful result. People have long thought that integration is, by default, the most preferred and to be desired outcome of American life. I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced of that. And I'm less convinced as I get older. And one reason why I get less convinced as I get older is because as I've lived, I've lived in poor neighborhoods. I've lived in upper middle class neighborhoods. I've went to the public schools and I've taught in the elite schools. And one thing you begin to see is that wherever Black and brown folk seem to go, the better we do, the more exceptional we are, statistically. I'm at Johns Hopkins University. In the year 2017, I became their first brown tenured philosopher, which I don't know how that's possible. I remain the only one here. Maybe that changes, but the fact that I can still just count as one is just amazing, and I just use myself as an example. I'm not alone in the academy in this way, being the one person in a particular department. And so part of what I think of when I think about the idea of tragedy and this idea that maybe integration isn't the ideal, I also look at Afrocentric schools and how well the initial data
show these students do both in terms of their self-esteem, but also their performance. Then look at the black kids and the integrated schools, and they're not doing so good. And so at some point we have to start thinking: tragically, it's time to switch up the structure here. We've given this other thing a shot and maybe we're being taught a very real empirical lesson that as ideationally preferable as integration might be, America might not just be ready. So we have to do something for ourselves in order to keep ourselves protected and healthy until everyone catches up with us. And I think that's a tragic idea also. But all the same, it could be a very positive idea. So this is one of those things where I think the tragedy isn't only about it ends with misfortune, but the key thing is, again, understanding the limits and then doing as best you can with what is in your control and knowing you might fail for reasons beyond your control, but you're still trying to act as intelligently as possible.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:15] What you said just now reminds me of a conversation we just had with Neil Roberts talking about the distinction between getting free and living free and how we maybe need to think differently about the way that we're living. Maybe we need to have segregated schools because that serves the children better and it gives them a better education and it gives them better self-esteem to, you know, what James Baldwin was saying that they're not being fed these ideas of how other people think about them, but how they themselves conceive of themselves. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Chris Lebron: [00:34:50] That that somebody like Bernie Sanders almost had a shot; that someone like AOC is raising holy hell and doing so effectively and her and her colleagues -- I refused to call them to squad. Her like-minded colleagues have actually had some success in pushing the Democratic Party. I don't think a whole lot of success and not far enough. But these sorts of things give me hope the idea that somebody like Trump is quite literally embodied in this visage of desperation and, how to put it best, and lumbering towards power, being utterly clumsy in their use of power. Somebody like Trump can be utterly terrifying. But it's also a way in which somebody like Trump is a caricature of himself and those who are like him, people who think that their ideas still matter when they don't, save when they happen to have access to the levers of power. You know, it remains the case that the majority of the country thinks that these people are just wrong. I still also think that the last election was entirely too close for comfort, given what we had seen. That for me, all things considered, that was a razor's edge
victory for a better side of things. All the same, the fact that somebody like Trump only gets one session that that gives me some hope that I do think that there is a younger generation that seems razor focused on a wider set of ethical vocabulary. So for them, it isn't only about fairness and equality of goods. But for them things like identity and mutual care and self care matter. I think if this generation can put off the cynicism of adulthood long enough, that comes with, you know, hitting middle age. If they can hold on to that long enough and make that the new norm, that makes me hopeful. It all depends on a lot of contingencies that you couldn't get me to bet money on.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:49] Well, this is a great segue to my next question then. Like, what are two things that everyday people could be doing as regular citizens to get closer to fulfilling the promise of democracy, of American democracy?
Chris Lebron: [00:37:02] I'm going to say two things one very concrete and then one abstract, then mushy. But it's a thing, I think. So the first is very concrete is go to your local bookstore or library and get a bunch of history books and do some reading and read a lot of Black novels. A lot of Black written novels. Get a sense for the affective texture of Black Life, which is hard to get just, you know, watching, you know, contemporary music videos or something. Like, read the history and read a lot of Black fiction. It's educational, and it gives you a kind of emotional insight as to not only that these things matter, but why they do. The second thing, which is mushier, but all the same is, is what we spoke about earlier, and that is to be courageous. And I've been doing what I've been doing for 14 years and every academic year I get, you know, students who, you know, they want to be on the right side. They want to go into the world and be change agents. And I don't mean to in any way belittle that. But it's a very grandiose sense of impacting the world. And I tell them, if you want to start an NGO, by all means, go ahead. But swinging for the fences does two things. It gives one a sense of having done, taking out a large part of the problem, while actually having some distance from it.
Chris Lebron: [00:38:20] You start your NGO and you deputize people and you spend some money on school programs and you've done a good deed for a day. That's wonderful. What I want to know is what I asked earlier, and that is, "how have you comported yourself to the Black or brown person right next to you who can use your help, who needs your ear, who could use your care, or use your love?" And that
requires a certain kind of courage -- that intimacy. All intimacy requires courage, and that's what I think we need more of, not to displace any other efforts, of course. Like people really do need economic goods. So am I trying to say, "Hey, we can live on love, but you don't have enough food to eat, don't worry about that." No, I mean, we really need economic justice, but that often displaces the smaller, courageous moments that are actually the kind of fundamentals of our society, the kind of thing that keeps us connected to people, the kind of thing that doesn't allow our public opinion to be changed by the fact that "pandemic is over. I'm back to work, get these people off the street. They're causing traffic." Like, I mean, I, you know, so yeah, those are my two things.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:23] Excellent. Thank you very much for being on Future Hindsight. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your insights with us. Chris Lebron is Associate Professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in political philosophy, social theory, the philosophy of race, and democratic ethics.
Chris Lebron: [00:39:41] Thank you.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:47] Next time on Future Hindsight, I'll be joined by Danielle Allen. She's a MacArthur Genius fellow, an author, a professor of political theory at Harvard, and did groundbreaking work on the pandemic response in Massachusetts, some of which was taken up at the federal level. She has some incredibly smart ideas about how we get through all this together, what we should be learning from the tough times of COVID, and how state government is key to tackling some of our most fundamental challenges.
Danielle Allen: [00:40:15] The heart of where our challenge lies in this country is truly at the state level. We have this sort of idea it's at the federal level because we're watching all this paralysis, this polarized politics, and the like. But the truth of the matter is the basic building blocks of healthy communities: housing, health, education, justice. The core responsibilities for all of them lie at the state level. So I had a real kind of profound reorientation in my COVID work, sort of away from federal politics and to state politics.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:45] That's next time on Future Hindsight. To hear all the latest on the show, you can follow us on Twitter @futur_hindsight. Also, our DMs are open. We'd love to hear from you. Anything from what your civic engagement toolkits look like to suggestions for guests. Our Twitter handle again is @futur_hindsight. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sarah Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
Chris Lebron: [00:41:24] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.