Shaping Collective Memory: Hajar Yazdiha
November 2nd, 2023
”Advancing the colorblind cause actually means denying the continued existence of racism.”
Hajar Yazdiha is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and the author of The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. We discuss the role of collective memory in the myth-making of American exceptionalism.
Collective memory is the way that we remember history and that becomes central to our idea of who we are as a people. It’s a process of storytelling and the most central stories to who we are as a people. The civil rights movement has become one of the central collective memories in America's story of both who it is and who it wants to be. However, careful examination of the record reveals that the civil rights movement was a political project that was meant to actually dismantle multicultural democracy. Further, as the collective memory of Dr. King became sanitized and whitewashed, his legacy carried a lot of moral legitimacy, and his moral symbolic authority became ripe for manipulation.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Hajar Yazdiha
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Hajar Yazdiha Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] 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.
Myth-making in America is very powerful. It's perhaps the essential ingredient for the enduring idea of American exceptionalism, our claim that we are the beacon of democracy, and even the greatest country in the world, the chosen land of the free. Collective memory is a central part of myth-making and of shaping our identity as Americans. The big question before us today is whether we can make a multiracial democracy a reality.
And to look at the role of collective memory in this pursuit, we're joined by Hajar Yazdiha. She is an assistant professor of sociology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and the author of The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Welcome, Hajar, and thank you for joining us.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:01:16] Thank you so much for having me. Mila, I'm really excited to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:19] Oh thank you. In your book, you examine how the memory of the civil rights movement is used across various social movements today. And I thought we should start with defining collective memory. What is collective memory and how is it made? Yeah.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:01:35] Thank you so much for asking that. I think it's really common that we think of collective memory as the same thing as history, and it's really by dissecting just what the distinction is between the two, that I think we can better understand why these revisionist histories take place, why they take hold. I think of collective memory in relationship to history as the way the history gets remembered. So if history is the kind of record of the past and it is an academic enterprise, you look for multiple sources of evidence, you triangulate. The difference is that collective memory is the way that we remember this history. It's the way that it becomes central to our idea of
who we are as a people. And so it's fundamentally a process of storytelling that gets made through cultural and social and political processes. And I think one of the keys here is that the stories that are more central to who we are as a people are the ones that really have the most power in our collective conception of the past, the way that we explain who we are in comparison to other countries, to other people. And so the civil rights movement has become one of the central collective memories in America's story of who it is and also who it wants to be.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:52] Right. So as a result of that, of course, there are many different strands of collective memory about the civil rights movement and many misuses among them. But in your mind, who is true to form? What are the movements today that you think embody the spirit and purpose of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:03:14] It's a complex question, because part of the story of collective memory is that it gets taken up in all sorts of different ways by different communities. You might think, for example, about the black community's relationship to civil rights memory, where it's not just a thing that happened in the past, it's a thing that happened to their family members. Right? It lives on in their community stories, in their churches, in their tellings of who they are in this country. So when I think about the real legacies of the civil rights movement, I look to their direct lineage. And I think we see that in the current Black freedom struggle. That's just a continuation of all of these past struggles. So one of the manifestations is Black Lives Matter. And of course, the irony -- the thing that I talk about a lot in the book -- is that Dr. King's words, you know, civil rights memory through this mythology, actually gets weaponized against Black Lives Matter. People will look to Black Lives Matter and say, "oh, you know what? Dr. King would not approve of your strategies. He was nonviolent. He would not shut down a highway." And of course, when we look at history, these are the very things that he and the civil rights movement did. It's that kind of gap that prevents us from understanding how those legacies have lived on and take shape through a lot of the movements that we see and perhaps criticize today.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:27] I want to dig a little bit deeper here on the legacy of the civil rights movement and how it relates to the Black Lives Matter movement. What is the direct line and how do you connect the two?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:04:39] Black Lives Matter itself is a movement that draws specifically on the foundational history of black struggle in the United States, which precedes the civil rights movement proper. We often think of the civil rights movement as something that begins in the 50s, but historians have shown that there was a much longer struggle. It dates way back to the founding. There were the slave revolts. There were also the struggles after reconstruction. And so there is a real through line when we actually understand how the history progresses, the fact that events in history are not moments that just end. And then we start anew. That they are always building on, there's always these sort of conjunctural moments that become really pivotal for what comes next. So the way I see the connection is one that sort of historical piece where they're directly building on the strategies, the narratives, the struggles that are unresolved, but also picking up the unresolved strands, the unfinished dreams, and also the unsung sheroes, the queer people. You know, it's not lost on me that the civil rights movement centralizes in its mythology, Black men, specifically Martin Luther King Jr, as if he was not propped up by this whole swath of people, including a queer man -- Bayard Rustin, as if he wasn't propped up by women like Ella Baker. You know, thinking about his own wife, Coretta Scott King, who was a civil rights activist in her own right, who very bravely spoke out against Vietnam before he even did. So. I think part of the trajectory of Black Lives Matter as a continuation of this legacy is one where they're really trying to rewrite that history, to actually pick up the pieces that were conveniently left out, and then to use that remade collective memory to forge a more intersectional future that's really global in nature. It's not just centered on the United States. And so when we go back and we think about the last year of King's life, we think about how he was really fighting the triple evils of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation. So he was really taking on a kind of anti-capitalist stance. We see Black Lives Matter taking on those very struggles as well. So I really think part of it is about, for one, kind of looking back at the history to understand how they're creating that continuation, but then to trying to understand how they're trying to build and fill in the gaps where perhaps they existed before.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:56] Well, it's good that you mention the totality of Dr. King's work towards the end of his life, because of course, that's not really how we remember him today. And you just explained how collective memories are not fixed, right? And that they are also mechanisms of the powerful to reshape the narrative and make us remember things differently than they actually were. So in this context, of course, I'm
thinking about the common way we think of the civil rights movement today as something that frames racism as a product of the past, and that racism is basically over. So how did Ronald Reagan's support for the commemoration of Martin Luther King Day sanitize and vacate, as you describe it, the memory of Dr. King?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:07:49] Yeah, this was one of the big findings for me. You know, I started writing the book thinking that a lot of the misuses of Dr. King and civil rights memory in present day were really a story about the backlash that comes out of the Obama era. So that was the story that I anticipated telling. And as I was digging in and doing the research, the story just kept going further and further back until it landed on the making of the King national holiday. And I describe this as the real institutionalization of the collective memory of civil rights and of Martin Luther King Jr. And I think one of the big surprises was that the ideological debates that shaped the making of the King holiday, the very idea that so many were opposed to it. I want to remind listeners that in Dr. King's last year of his life, 75% of Americans opposed him. They disliked this man. Many, in fact, hated him. They thought he was a communist. They thought he was a troublemaker. They thought he was anti-American. And so the making of the King holiday wasn't a kind of natural progression that comes out of his killing for sort of these unjust reasons. It is something that is debated in Congress. Coretta Scott King is fighting for it year after year. And so finally, it culminates in a lot of political pressure. So Ronald Reagan is opposed to it. He doesn't like King. He doesn't like civil rights. He's all about state rights that really preserve an individual's right to discriminate. And when he finally succumbs to this political pressure and realizes that he can actually woo some white moderates to his side by agreeing to sign the King holiday into law, he also realizes that he's going to do it in a very specific way. And so what was really fascinating for me was finding these letters that had been written behind closed doors, where he had these political allies who were just really angry at him. They were thinking, what are you doing? Like, we hate this guy. Why are we going to commemorate him? Why are we going to have a national holiday and spend taxpayer dollars on him? And what happens is, Reagan says, "rest assured, we're going to commemorate a very specific version of Dr. King. We're going to remember him as a story of American exceptionalism, a story of colorblindness achieved." And so there's no longer racism, as Reagan says in his speech, you know, he has lifted the great burden of racism from this country. And so, as you said, Mila, now racism is over. And he becomes used as a sort of symbol, a tool of the neoliberal market. Right? It's a free
market where anyone can succeed, anyone can pull themselves up from their bootstraps. And through his presidency, Reagan invokes King time and again to actually roll back civil rights because he uses him as a symbol of how Americans can achieve anything. If Dr. King could do it, then you can too. So this is really the story that begins what I describe as this sort of fracturing of collective memory, where you have these two branches. One is really rooted in a deep, grounded understanding of black communities that racism has not ended. And in fact, with King, it is now about to be exacerbated and sort of started anew. But also this other branch, which is the one that becomes co-opted by not just right wing folks, but also progressive movements that mean well, but that potentially don't understand that advancing the colorblind cause actually means denying the continued existence of racism.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:03] Yeah, well, from there it flows logically to how the right -- truly the right, you know, not just well-meaning progressives -- has co-opted the civil rights movement for its view, and I'm quoting you now that "white Christian conservatives are the new oppressed minorities under multicultural democracy." It's like a sleight of hand. Tell us how this works.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:11:27] I describe it as a kind of Trojan horse. So Dr. King becomes this Trojan horse where you can package all of your anti Kingian causes in his body, in his words, in his symbolic nature. I call him a kind of moral cloak that legitimizes a cause. And so you see him invoked in all sorts of different ways. And so for right wing figures that are building on the legacy that Reagan has started, but that honestly preceded Reagan, because we could go back to the reactions to the civil rights movement as its gains were being made. There were many Americans who felt like desegregation, for example, voting rights, were actually going to take something from them. They felt like this was a moment in which they were being victimized. They were aggrieved. This was a threat to their own conception of self, of nation. And so that through line is really critical, too, because I do think it helps explain how, as King moved to the center of collective memory, as he became sanitized and whitewashed and sort of central to the idea of who the United States believes that they are, he became a symbol that was really ripe for the taking. And so for right wing members who understood that King carried a lot of moral legitimacy, he carried a lot of public recognition, and was this kind of moral symbolic authority, that they could use him to advance these anti King causes. This is everything from the Christian right using him to
oppose LGBTQ rights to gun rights activists, for example, call themselves the new Rosa Parks. This also goes on to thinking about the repeal of affirmative action in present day, and even going back a decade, that Abigail Fisher case. This is a case where King's words get used to describe the civil rights gains, like affirmative action, as a form of reverse racism, and so weaponizing the past against itself. And I think the danger is that it's created this fragmentation of social reality. We so often think about the question as one of political polarization. And one of the arguments that I really want to advance is that it's much more than polarization. It is a complete dissection of our social reality. We are living on different planets in terms of how we understand our present state of affairs.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:39] I agree, of course, that we are living in these parallel universes, if you will. But why is that dangerous to democracy? Because I think sometimes we understand "this is so uncomfortable. We're so unhappy. We can't have conversations with old friends," depending on who you are, you know? But like, why is this so bad? Because I think the reaction among many people is to just dig deeper on their side.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:14:05] Yeah, that's the question that keeps me up at night, Mila. There's always a process of erasure that goes into the making of memory. There's no way we're ever going to remember everything that happened. It's part of our social psychological makeup that we're going to try to remember the parts that feel good, that make sense. So there is a part of the erasure of Dr. King's radical legacy that tracks. Right. Like it kind of makes sense when you think about it through that lens. The problem, though, is when you see it as the political project that it was. When you actually look at the record and you trace these misuses as I did over 40 years, you come to understand that that political project is one that is meant to actually dismantle multicultural democracy. So it's not just this question of, "well, why can't we all get along?" You know, in the famous words of Rodney King, this is a question of why can't we even get on the same page in terms of understanding democracy as a valuable social good, as something that connects us in a shared goal, even if we don't agree about the sort of nitty gritty of where we should go from here. I think the big question is, do we all agree that every American citizen is part of the populace? And I think that's the real question, because the dismantling of multicultural democracy very firmly indicates that, no, in fact, Black and brown, Indigenous Americans are not understood to be part of the American populace. And limiting their rights, stripping them back is the
way that some folks want to preserve their understanding of who the nation should be, which is not, in fact, a democratic project.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:40] Yes, it is not, in fact, a democratic project. I feel like this conversation would not be complete without a deeper dive into the willful ignorance that we encounter all around us. For example, what you just said that this is not a democratic project. People think about it as sort of like, "well, we can agree to disagree, and I can believe what I want to believe, and you can believe what you want to believe." And I was just wondering, like why that persists. And you quote Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance and how it perpetuates our cultural divide. Tell us a little bit more about that. Why do people keep doing this? Why are people willfully ignoring the evidence?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:16:22] For me, as I was writing the book and trying to kind of put these analytic pieces together, I was drawing on the histories of Black Thought. I was drawing on sociology and political science, social psychology, memory studies just all across the board, trying to draw from so many different strands of theory and studies and thinking to try to make sense of this very question, which is why we continue to live so willfully in a state of ignorance, in a state of intentional unknowing. And I want to be really clear that the way that Charles W. Mills talks about an epistemology of ignorance is not about how educated you are, right? It's actually very true that many who are kind of at the forefront of creating this epistemology of ignorance are highly educated from the most elite universities in the land. They have all the credentials. And so it's not a story about education and how much you know. I think it is a story about the preservation of power and disrupting our status quo. Disrupting the way things have always been done can be a deeply uncomfortable project, and for many, a very scary project. I think that's really what we saw with the civil rights gains and the fundamental restructuring of social relations in this country, a sort of legal framework around which you no longer could do or even say particular things. I think that because that restructured the system of status and of power, there is this perception of threat that arises. One of the things I always say to my students on the first day of class is I tell them that they're going to learn things that don't line up with their individual experiences. At times, they will feel defensive. They may feel angry. They may feel hurt because the social reality just simply doesn't line up with what they've experienced, what the people in their lives have experienced. Part of it is about holding those two truths in tension,
which is that on the one hand, you can have an individual experience that feels really difficult. This is always the kind of experience, for example, of poor white people who really just reject the notion that they have any kind of privilege in this country because they've lived really hard lives. You can hold that in tension with the reality that if you scale up at the societal level, the patterns do show us that systems of power do exist, that it is unequally distributed, and that it's very real whether or not it feels real in your personal life. And I think that that's part of the complexity that makes it difficult to pop the culture of ignorance. But the piece that's the harder pill to swallow for me, as somebody who really believes in the power of the people, is that the structures are really strong. The sort of 0.1% at the top that controls the narrative that has placed us in this situation of positioning us against one another, making us think that one another are the enemy. They are really good at pitting us against one another and maintaining that story and that culture of ignorance, because without it they would not exist. They are the ones under the actual threat and they know it. So it's really partly about the story of how the ignorance gets made, but then also how it gets maintained, and how it's so difficult to eradicate.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:37] Mm hmm. Well, this is a great, great answer that really lays out why it's so difficult to dislodge ourselves of the illusion, you know, that we want to keep being ignorant because it's very uncomfortable. I mean, Dr. King died for it, basically. And so if everyday people think, "oh, I'm going to be this kind of person" -- who wants to do that?
Mila Atmos: [00:20:01] We're taking a quick break to share about a podcast that should be right up your alley, called Best of the Left. Best of the Left is unlike anything else out there because it's all about curation rather than creation. Jay Tomlinson has been producing the show since its inception, and uses his years of experience to shape each episode in ways that dive deeper and bring out more details on topics than is usually possible from a single source. Each episode focuses like a laser on a different topic, allowing deeper coverage than any one show is capable of. With a deep catalog of episodes, Best of the Left has effectively created an archive of the progressive movement over the past decade and a half. The power of curation is in the bringing together of a variety of voices that, combined, become greater than the sum of their parts. The show doesn't just curate news and opinion, but also activism. So listeners can turn information into effective advocacy. For instance, the show recently covered
something that I've been curious about the wellness economy and the deepening alienation being felt in response to consumerism in place of community. But if you only have time for one episode, make it their milestone 1500th show, in which Jay sets aside his normal curation format and instead lays out as many of the smartest ideas he's had or come across in all his years of thinking deeply about politics. It's definitely worth your time. As you'd expect, you can follow Best of the Left anywhere you get your podcasts.
And now let's return to my conversation with Hajar Yazdiha.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:49] You also point to systems, right. So systems are very difficult to change. But so what's it going to take? What's it going to take to change us as a society, as a population? Education alone is not going to do it. You mentioned that and I totally agree. I'm surrounded by well-educated people from elite universities and they continue to have these odd beliefs.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:22:11] Yeah, that's one of the tough messages for me to share, because I am a professor. And so I'm a professor who's saying education is not enough. I do want to be really clear, though, that formal education is not enough, as in reading books, learning things, is not enough. Critical education, on the other hand, I see as essential. And the distinction there is that critical education is the sociological imagination that I just described when I talked about my students. It's the one that helps you connect your personal experience, what you're reading in a book to a larger context, to understand the sociohistorical forces that shaped it, to understand that it's always a kind of back and forth between your personal biography and the larger structures around you. And so it's not just the idea that structures control everything, and we have no agency. There's nothing we could possibly do in this world that would matter. It's the idea that once you can understand how knowledge is created and that there's always a project behind knowledge, right? You have to think about who does this knowledge serve. What is the project here that inspired the knowledge in the first place? When you start asking some of those deeper questions, it unsettles the very foundations of the ground that you walk on. And again, that can be really uncomfortable and unsettling at first. But I say this as somebody who is in the journey, who has been doing this for some time. You find strength in it. If you're interested in trying to improve the world, if you're interested in trying to even improve the small neighborhoods where
you live, even your own family, then that does have to begin with the critical education that really takes history seriously.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:49] Well. So let's talk about where we go from here. Because what you also study is how groups develop strategies to resist, contest, and manifest alternative futures. And to set the table, you argue that we have not yet had a true racial reckoning, and that, of course, is about taking action. So what would a racial reckoning in this country look like to you?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:24:17] I really draw on the the work, and it's a fabulous op ed by Victor Ray and Hakim Jefferson that came out in the the wake, maybe a year after the George Floyd racial uprisings in 2020. And they write that America has never really had a true racial reckoning. It's the idea that a real reckoning involves atoning, actually truth telling about the past. And that is not something that's happened, because even the gains of the civil rights movement were ones that came without any recognition of what had actually happened in the past. They were sort of legal and cultural Band-Aids. And when you think about it like a festering wound that you put a Band-Aid over, well, what you really need is antibiotics to get to the root of the problem. Right. And so that's, I think, for me, the idea of the racial reckoning, the one that -- I'll be honest -- I don't think will happen at a national level in our lifetime. And I think part of that is because of the culture of ignorance, a sheer unwillingness to actually think seriously about the truth of history. If you think, for example, about the reaction to the 1619 Project, that was one that was met with such ferocious reactionary violence. Frankly, if you think about what happened to Nikole Hannah-Jones and people coming after her and the idea that you could cherry pick these small little historical inaccuracies and kind of throw the whole project out and say that there's no truth to this.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:49] I wanted to turn here also to the #MeToo movement, because you point to the #MeToo movement as a kind of reckoning. How so? And how can that movement inform our action going forward?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:26:03] Yeah, that's for me, one of the more hopeful chapters in the book that comes after several that look at kind of internal reckonings within, for example, the LGBTQ movement, the immigrant rights movement, the Muslim rights movement. These are movements that are progressive in nature, but that have histories
of anti-Blackness that each of the movements has had to reckon with over time. And so I come to a chapter where I think about what reconciliation might look like and how #MeToo emerges in the wake of Black Lives Matter, and how it's grappling with a context that's now taking anti-Blackness seriously. That's placing the continued struggle for Black freedom at the forefront of political consciousness, and specifically the fact that #MeToo is a movement that is started by a black woman, and it started to address the harms and unequal violence and unequal recourse that is distributed to Black and poor and trans women. So the fact that Alyssa Milano, a white woman, comes out and is really the forefront of #MeToo and within two days has had to reckon with the fact that Tarana Burke, a Black woman, is the one who started the movement; that there is this outcry and that she decides that this is a way that this kind of white feminist movement can grapple with its history of anti-Blackness, of excluding Black women, of building white feminism on the backs of Black men. I think this is a moment where the movement realizes they can't move toward an intersectional future. Intersectionality is not just a buzzword. It's not just kind of this performative piece that we see playing out at, for example, the Women's March, where you see you've got your Muslim woman up there, you've got your Black woman, your Latin, Latina woman. For the movement, the #MeToo movement, it's like this moment where there's a lot of hope that perhaps they can actually sit and repair harms. And it's not just about putting a Black woman as its face. It's about really thinking about the history of feminism, the history of the gains of women in this country as one that really owes a lot to black women. So that's a chapter where I think about what those efforts look like. And part of it, for example, is lifting up Anita Hill and how she was ignored. Nobody listened to her. It's lifting up the Black women who are the very basis of sexual harassment laws that we call on today. And I leave it as an open question of, will this truly forge a genuine solidarity, a genuine way for white women to grapple with how their gains in this country, even as outsized recipients of affirmative action? Is it an opportunity to think about how that's been built on the backs of Black Americans? So that's one thing that I continue to think about. And, you know, I end with this moment where the head of #MeToo, becomes a Black woman, and we're sitting and thinking about what will the future look like, what does it look like to actually forge these intersectional futures where justice is truly equally distributed? And Mila, I mean, I would love to hear what you think about it, because this is really one of the things that, again, keeps me up at night. I just I wonder about the limits of solidarity politics and then where we might go from here.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:21] Well, first I want to say, of course, the #MeToo movement is very powerful and the future is yet to be written, so we don't really know what's going to happen. You know, I've been doing this podcast for over five years now, and I have come to the conclusion that we really need a systems change, but I don't really see how we're going to get there. And this idea that it's kind of up to the individual to make change feels very small. You know, it feels like you want to give up and throw in the towel. But I do know that when people act together collectively, they can make differences. And so, for example, we just had Jocelyn Simonson on, she wrote a book about everyday people basically changing the outcomes in mass incarceration because they banded together. So I have great hope that we can do that. But I don't know if everybody will do that. And and I really think that it's going to take more than just 1 or 2 more percent of us. You know, I don't really know what it's going to take, honestly, because we're recording this conversation in the beginning of the war in Israel and the Gaza Strip. And I just kind of feel like there's very little room for imagination, that there could be a different kind of outcome than the ones that we have been seeing over and over. And when I think about the world as a system, a global system of humans, that's even more depressing. But, you know, we are a hopeful podcast. And I do know that if we band together, we can make a difference. But it's going to be a lifelong struggle, and we may not be alive to see the fruit of our labor. And so I think that's the thing that keeps me going, that maybe in the future life will be better. I mean, I'm confident that if you keep going, life will be better. But I don't know because I don't think I'm going to be around for something that's significantly different than where we are living today; how we're living today.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:31:27] I share your hope, though, and I think for me, that was one of the big takeaways from doing this study, was that the histories of Black struggle are ones that are based on a blind faith, right? A faith that things could be different, a persistence to keep trying and keep going in the face of all odds, of all setbacks. A deep knowledge that social progress is not linear and that we are often going backwards, but that these small gains will build, and that they do something beyond the sort of trajectory that we see in front of us. So I share that both sense of melancholy with you, particularly because of the moment we're in with the war. But I also share your sense of great hope, and I really do think that part of it is that commitment to a future that we haven't seen yet, but that very well could be. And so believing that that's possible is part of the project of expanding our political will and our political imagination to try to create
something anew. And I listened to that Jocelyn Simonson episode and I absolutely loved it. I thought it was such a great case of really thinking creatively, and it's the creativity that's so often missing from our political conversations.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:42] Yeah. Hear. Hear. Well, so we are all about building our civic action tool kit, as we say, on Future hindsight. And thank you for listening to the episode, by the way. I really appreciate that. So given that this is a systems problem that requires a systems solution, what are two things an everyday person can do to inspire a change in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:33:03] Oh yeah I love this question. Okay. So I'm going to give you three only because my acronym has three letters. And listeners can just take two out of the three. Just pick two. So the acronym is ARC. A R C. And it's based on the Martin Luther King quote that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. So the A is for advocate. And I really think this is something that everyday people should be doing, especially in the wake of these book bans. In the wake of these bans on racial history and racial education, we really need to advocate for a good critical education in our schools, our universities, and against these legislation. The school boards that are trying to shut it down, that are trying to prevent us from learning our deep histories and understanding them. The R is for relate, and relate means both relate to our history, which goes back to my my big argument for making the kind of local reckonings a thing, right? Making them the spaces where we dig into the past and relate to the very places that we live, and the people that live around us. But relate also means to build community with one another. Building community is really the space where change happens. That's really where we build these small fractals of change just in our day-to-day relationships, developing these deep bonds and trust with one another. And then the C is for create because I really think the creativity is missing. I think we should sit together and dream together. And it's not foolish or silly. It's actually quite political and radical to sit and think beyond the boundaries of what we've been given. And so in your day-to-day lives, even if creation just means cooking together, gardening together, come together and create together, because I do think that it builds that sort of sense of consciousness, a connection to something beyond ourselves, and then a commitment to creating a better world.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:01] Love all of this advice here. So as we're closing out our conversation today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:35:11] Oh, my students. I think Gen Z is fabulous. So they are the most inspiring and hopeful generation because they have been dealt a horrible hand by us. I think this is a terrible economy for them. They are dealt just all of the kind of evils of technology, the repression that comes in every form, and they are dreaming big. I think there are many among us who are very quick to kind of jump to pragmatism and say, well, how are you going to do that? You know, that's not possible. I think the Gen Z dreams are the ones that could very well save us. So I think that's really where the hope lies. It's just giving them the space to do their thing.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:51] Hear, hear. Well, Hajar, thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on.
Hajar Yazdiha: [00:35:58] Likewise. Thank you so much.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:01] Hajar Yazdiha is an assistant professor of sociology at USC Dornsife and author of The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Bernard Harcourt, who was our first ever guest on the podcast back in 2018. He's professor of law and political science at Columbia University and will be discussing his latest book, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory. It's a case for cooperation democracy.
Bernard Harcourt: [00:36:41] One of the most remarkable things about co-ops is that they are self-governing. They are democratic through and through. Now, the idea here is that basically in a worker owned cooperative, the workers have to democratically self- govern. It's almost a training ground in democratic culture.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:06] That's next time on Future Hindsight. Did you know we have a YouTube channel? Seriously! We do. And actually quite a lot of people listen to the show there. If that's you, Hello! If not, you'll find punchy episode clips, full interviews, and more. Subscribe at youtube.com/FutureHindsight.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:37:42] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.