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In New York City, where John lives, Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week shut down any remaining doubts about his political influence, when all three of the candidates he endorsed in the Democratic congressional primaries—Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—won their races, virtually guaranteeing them victories in the general. John professes unease with Chevalier, whose sometimes strident anti-American and anti-Zionist rhetoric he can’t quite take seriously. Is that what she really thinks? If so, why would she join a government whose legitimacy she questions?

Good questions. But whatever the answers, I think the recent crop of left-wing candidates and officials shows signs of an upheaval in the Democratic Party. We’ve seen it twice in the last two decades on the other side, with the Tea Party and then MAGA reconfiguring the Republican Party and pushing it further to right. There’s no reason the same thing can’t happen to the Democrats, with an insurgent left wing powered by dissatisfaction with centrist, aging, and ineffective leadership.

The recent trial of Karmelo Anthony, the now-nineteen-year-old Texas resident convicted of stabbing seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf to death, returned a 35-year sentence, with an opportunity for parole at 17.5 years. Anthony is black and Metcalf was white, facts that have, predictably, affected the discourse around the crime, the trial, and the sentence. John describes the circumstances surrounding the stabbing, and I won’t recount them here, except to say that it should be clear that Anthony is responsible for Metcalf’s death, and the conviction was justified.

The question is why. Why did Anthony refuse to leave when told—apparently correctly—that he should not have been where he was? Why did Anthony respond to a shove with deadly force? As expected, some people are calling this an example of African-descended people’s inherent depravity, an explanation neither John nor I accept. If there is an answer, it may well be cultural. In an extended X post, John takes up Thomas Sowell’s thinking on the matter, which traces patterns of black masculine aggression back to slavery, where, Sowell claims, blacks acquired from Northern English, Scottish, and Irish immigrant laborers the practice of “forcefully” projecting their masculinity when encountering a perceived threat.

Sowell’s idea seems plausible, though it is not definitive. It posits a theory of the pattern’s origin, but it doesn’t explain the patterns’ apparent continuity up through the present. Grand narratives such as Sowell’s are a great help in tracing out the broad strokes of social development. But I think, in this case, looking back to the nineteenth century may obscure more than it illuminates. Many of Anthony’s defenders and detractors are treating this as a “racial incident,” either because they believe Anthony’s race had something to do with the length of his sentence or because they believe his race had something to do with his decision to stab Metcalf.

In my view, none of that supplies sufficient evidence for viewing this as a “racial incident,” much less one that is best explained by the conditions of eighteenth-century Ulster, Ireland. The discourse surrounding the stabbing is indeed racially tinged, but that only demonstrates that the best way to turn something into a “racial incident” is to treat it as though it already was one. It’s a dangerous form of question-begging, and in any case, it ignores what is surely more pertinent information, such as Anthony’s personality and past, his upbringing and social environment. To treat all of that as mere detail cluttering our view of a supposedly essential truth about race risks abstracting away the material circumstances of any incident—a crime or anything else—involving blacks and whites. It turns everything from microaggressions to riots into scenes in a grand racial drama, in which there are clear heroes and villains.

Life is rarely that simple. Make no mistake, Karmelo Anthony is the guilty party. He alone bears responsibility for Metcalf’s death. While his sentence is long, it is not clear to me that it is too long. In the decade-and-a-half before his parole hearing, he’ll have the chance to demonstrate remorse and to reform himself. I hope to God he does, and not only for his sake. I believe that change is possible—for him, and for all of us. I believe that none of us, in our idiosyncrasies and particularities, are quite reducible to the narratives that describe our past, no matter how compelling they are. I have to believe this. To believe otherwise is to fall prey to fatalism, which virtually guarantees that what must change will not. I may not quite be “the master of my fate,” as the poem says, but neither am I its slave.

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On Friday, June 16, I had two guests, each with a new book. The first was Harvey Mansfield, who came on to discuss his latest, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears. The second was Robert Wright, who got me started in the podcast business almost twenty years ago. His new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, argues that we should take AI seriously as an epochal technological development. As Bob sees it, AI doomers, while sometimes hyperbolic, shouldn’t be ignored. There are real risks to this technology if its growth is not managed carefully. But if we do manage to turn AI toward the common good of humanity, it could change the way humans relate to each other and to the universe, bringing about more peace and advancements that will benefit all.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Following the path to AI prosperity rather than stumbling into dystopia will require coordination on a global scale, including an agreement among the nations with leading AI companies to slow development. That sounds like a dealbreaker, but Bob points out that we recently came very close to an analogous global agreement on minimum corporate taxes, until the U.S. scuttled it at the last minute. If AI will one day be capable of recursive self-improvement—gaining speed and functionality with no human intervention required—we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the future will become harder to predict. Better to get governments, AI companies, and researchers on the same page now, so that we can understand what it is we’re creating and what it is capable of, rather than roll the dice and let LLMs (and those who would use them maliciously) take the lead.

Given how quickly we’ve integrated AI into seemingly every aspect of our lives, it can pay to step back and consider how quickly it’s happened. Scenarios once confined to science fiction novels—like the development of artificial consciousness—are now actual dilemmas we have to confront. With wars and regional conflicts flaring up around the planet, the prospect of coordination seems highly improbably anytime soon. But perhaps it is another one of those science fiction scenarios: purely hypothetical, until it’s upon us.

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Summer is just about here, so I’m going to take a break and relax a little. I’m taking tomorrow (June 19) and next Friday (June 26) off, so there will be no livestreams on those dates. The team will, however, continue to release podcast episodes on Mondays. We’ll be back to our regular live schedule soon. See you then!

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Of course, you can only comment and view the stream if you’re a full subscriber. So if you’re not yet a full subscriber, and you want to put your question to us, now is the perfect time to become one. For only $6/month (great deal) or $50/year (incredible deal), you’ll get access to all things Q&A, along with our archives, weekly livestreams and recordings thereof, and other exclusive content. We at TGS are almost entirely subscriber-supported. Without your contributions, we cannot keep doing the show, the livestreams, or anything else. So if you’re able, throw a few bucks in the hat. You’ll be happy you did.

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The eminent political philosopher Harvey Mansfield entered Harvard University as a freshman in 1949. With a few interruptions for fellowships, military service, and a stint at UC-Berkeley, that affiliation lasted until 2023, when he retired from teaching in Harvard’s government department. I can say with confidence that no one currently alive is better positioned to comment on the changes that institution has undergone over the last three-quarters of a century. In that span of time, institutional change is inevitable. But as Harvey’s new book—Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears—not all of those changes have been positive.

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As Harvey says in this conversation, recorded during last Friday’s livestream, Harvard has become “an instrument of the left,” where it was once an institution dedicated to truth. Its motto, “Veritas,” has been unofficially abandoned in favor of “Mobilitas,” or change, and specifically a change that favors equality over all other values.

Equality as a political value is indispensable to true democracy. But Harvard’s mission, to educate and prepare future generations of leaders and innovators, is inherently inegalitarian. Where elite institutions are concerned, that is a good thing. Admission to Harvard once served as evidence of a young person’s extraordinary talent and intelligence, which were required in order to meet the school’s demanding standards. Those attributes are not distributed evenly across the population, and Harvard has trumpeted the lengths to which it goes to find and admit students who possess them. To be sure, legacy admissions, class, and influence compromised those standards. But while those factors can tilt admissions committees, from the first day of class on, it was on the students to succeed through their own efforts.

As Harvey reports, that is no longer true, and it hasn’t been for some time. He sees affirmative action and rampant grade inflation as evidence that an overbearing political emphasis on equality—sparked in the 1960s and now consuming Harvard and most other “highly selective” schools—has made the pursuit of truth in the classroom a virtual impossibility. The number of students graduating with 4.0 GPAs has ballooned into a crisis, as a recent report from Harvard documents. The Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court case demonstrated that efforts to increase “diversity” through affirmative action have created racially discriminatory admissions processes that favor “underrepresented” minorities to the exclusion of more qualified but “overrepresented” members of other identity categories.

As Where Harvard Went Wrong documents, Harvey has been warning of the corrosive effects of such policies for decades, and he’s made little progress. It’s no small irony that things began changing at practically the moment of his retirement. It takes more pressure than one professor can apply to reform an institution like Harvard, but I think Harvey can claim at least a small sliver of credit for sounding the alarm early. Maybe if Harvard had listened back then, the embarrassment and tumult of the last few years—from a loss at the Supreme Court to Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony to the Trump administration’s aggressive interventions—could have been avoided. Harvard prides itself on producing leaders, and it likewise thinks of itself as a leader to the nation’s other universities. It has failed in that role. But as we’re seeing, it’s not too late to turn things around.

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In the first half of the show, I’ll be speaking with political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, one of the most influential American conservative intellectuals of the last century. He is the author of many, many books on topics ranging from Machiavelli to manliness. He spent over six decades teaching at Harvard University, where he also earned his bachelor’s and doctorate. I don’t have the numbers, but I imagine he must hold one of the longest active affiliations with that school of anyone currently living, or indeed in Harvard’s 390-year history. So he is well-positioned to write of the changes he’s observed there from the 1950s to the 2020s. The title of his latest book, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears, will give you a taste of its contents and his thoughts about the course the university has taken. But I think the book and our conversation will be of interest to far more readers than those concerned—perhaps too concerned—with what goes on in what is arguably the country’s most prestigious institution.

In the second half of the show, Robert Wright returns to talk about another new book, his latest, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. The God Test does double duty as both an engagingly written primer on large language models (the drivers of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Claude) and a theory as to where this new technology may be taking us as a species. The ambitious thinking that made books like Nonzero and The Evolution of God such vital contributions to our search for our place on Earth and in the universe is present in force here, as Bob outlines the existential and transcendental stakes of the AI revolution. I’ve spent a lot of time working with AI myself. While I’ve often stood in awe (an important term in The God Test) of the ever-increasing power of LLMs, I’ve also, like most people, found myself wondering about the consequences of this new technology. Whether you’re a true believer, a doomer, or something in between, I can guarantee that Bob will offer an interpretation of our situation you haven’t heard before.

So join me tomorrow, Friday, June 12 at 1:00 P.M. EDT for a show unlike any you’ve ever seen. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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The American university system is one of this country’s crowning achievements. The sheer number of reality-shifting innovations produced within the American academy, from new technologies to new ideas, cannot be calculated, as is the economic value generated by all of that innovation.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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One the university’s greatest achievements is its role in cultivating a well-educated populace, which has helped to create and maintain a public capable of navigating an increasingly complex world and engaging in informed democratic deliberation. But American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Michael Poliakoff and many others worry that the democratic engine of the university is stalling out. Students graduate with little knowledge of the country’s bedrock principles, its essential documents and texts, or the key events and figures that shaped the nation we’ve inherited. Faculty too often frame the U.S. as, first and foremost, a perpetrator of great crimes, rather than a place striving to fulfill its democratic and small-L liberal ideals, even as it commits errors (some of them terrible) and struggles through its contradictions.

In this conversation, Michael talks with me about the problems he sees hindering the university’s mission, from inflated salaries for presidents to the failure to provide civic education to ideological imbalance among the faculty. In ACTA’s new Broadside for the Nation, the organization lays out a plan that involves trustees taking a stronger hand in university governance in order to restore democratic values to an institution that sorely needs them and to implement required courses in civics for all students. The plan is sure to get pushback from faculty, who see trustee involvement in hiring and the formation of educational programs and curricula as an infringement on their turf. But as Michael sees it, there’s a greater infringement already underway, as the Trump administration uses the power of the federal government to force reforms on schools from without. Better to have reform come from within, in the shape of greater oversight from those truly invested in the health and well-being of their universities.

I think ACTA’s recommendations, if they’re implemented properly and preserve the tenets of academic freedom, could go a long way toward restoring trust in our universities, which is at an all-time low. Some will have a problem with the pride of place ACTA gives to patriotism in its recommendations, seeing it as an edict in favor of vulgar nationalism. But true patriotism includes the right and responsibility to criticize the country when it falls short of its ideals, when it is compromised by malign influence, and when it betrays its citizens’ interests. As long as that conception of patriotism holds sway, one that has an interest in the success of the United States without excusing its failures, I’m all for it.

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Stan asks whether the country would react differently than it did in 2020 if there was another George-Floyd-type incident tomorrow. In the chat, Chris asks John to clarify a feature of Black English. TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill presents a clip of an actor reciting the prologue to Romeo and Juliet with a Southern drawl and asks John if it bears any resemblance to what an Elizabethan accent would have sounded like. Robert Redd and Clifton Roscoe have some comments about respectability politics. And finally, Yan Shen points out that, while tolerance for black grievance has decreased, tolerance for white grievance has increased.

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It’s too big and multivalent a problem for any one person or institution, even the federal government, to address on its own. The organization ACTA—the American Council of Trustees and Alumni—is doing its part by issuing A Broadside for the Nation, a sweeping plan to kickstart civics education in America. On the first half of tomorrow’s show—Friday, June 5th at 1:00 P.M. EDT—ACTA president Michael Poliakoff will join me to discuss the sometimes shocking gaps in student knowledge about basic American civics and history the Broadside hopes to fill. A major element of ACTA’s plan involves reintroducing patriotism into American curricula. They believes that education ought to involve baseline endorsement of American ideals and principles, which should serve as a basis for getting students to think about both American failures and successes.

That’s going to be a controversial position for some, but Michael and ACTA aren’t spouting jingoistic propaganda. That’s why I’ve endorsed the Broadside. We ought to be confident enough in ourselves to teach, for example, that while the contradiction of slavery brutalized millions and threatened to undo the nation entirely, we overcame it by adhering to the democratic principles articulated in the Declaration and the Constitution, not by abandoning them.

In the second half, I’ll be talking through a handful of timely topics with my staff, Nikita Petrov, Robert Patton-Spruill, and Mark Sussman. There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions in the chat. So if you’ve got something on your mind that relates to the discussion, there’s a good chance we can address it.

So join us tomorrow, Friday, June 5th at 1:00 P.M. EDT for what’s going to be a fantastic show. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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Last Friday on the livestream, John and I addressed the mini-controversy surrounding Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. Some online critics—Elon Musk being the most prominent—have taken issue with Nolan’s decision to cast a dark-skinned woman as the legendarily beautiful Spartan. In this clip, John and I talk about race-conscious casting and ask when or whether we’ll reach the point where race is simply not considered a relevant factor in casting. Will we one day see an Asian actor play Barack Obama or Nina Simone in a biopic? It’s difficult to imagine that happening today, tomorrow, or any time in the near future. But as the continuing relevance of The Odyssey shows us, great art lasts.

This is a clip from my latest livestream. If you want to watch the full version, become a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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When political fault lines slip, and the texture and rhythm of life seems to change daily, one must cling to whatever truths one can: the sun rises in the East, water is wet, John McWhorter is working on a new book. Every time he announces he’s writing a new one, I’m surprised, even though I shouldn’t be. How can a person maintain that level of production? We kick off the latest installment of our ongoing conversation with a discussion of John’s current book-in-progress—which is about dialects of English in America—and how he manages to get so much done in a given day.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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From there we go on to a casting controversy that’s being drummed up over social media. Lupita Nyong’o will portray Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, to be released next month. Some, including Elon Musk, have a big problem with it. Nyong’o is a dark-skinned woman, while the Greeks at the time of The Odyssey’s composition and initial oral circulation were not black. In the mind of Musk and others, Nyong’o’s casting constitutes an offense against the West and a cynical Oscar play, rather than a routine casting decision. As John sees things, we’re currently at a stage where, for understandable reasons, it is more acceptable for a black actor to portray a character written for a white actor than the other way around. But he believes that, ideally, we would develop into a society in which anyone can play any role, and race would be a relatively inconsequential factor in casting decisions, like eye color.

April’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais will likely dramatically change how states with significant black populations redistrict. This will effectively nullify a key provision in the Voting Rights Act, and opponents of the decision argue that it will disenfranchise black voters. John and I are probably going to take some heat for arguing that it is time for that provision to go. It was designed to prevent black disenfranchisement at the very end of Jim Crow. At the time of its passage, it was certainly necessary. But we’ve been debating its ongoing necessity for decades now—I recall to John watching Lani Guinier and Abigail Thernstrom engage in such a debate in the late 80’s or early 90s. I don’t know if Abigail was right then, but she’s right now. Hakeem Jeffries has urged black athletes playing for Southern schools to refuse to play until something is done, but I seriously doubt any of these young people will put their burgeoning careers in jeopardy over this issue. And even if they did, I doubt it would accomplish what Jeffries hopes it would.

And we wrap up the first hour of the stream with a discussion of “teen takeovers” in Chicago. Dozens of teenagers—most of them black—were arrested over Memorial Day weekend after gatherings got out of control. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has, in the past, refused to give police the authority to impose emergency curfews. To him, this is about the constitutional right to assembly and the pernicious effects of systemic racism. He needs to wake up. We’re talking about a tiny minority of a minority causing problems that have outsized effects. If parents cannot or will not keep their kids in line, someone has to. Given how rowdy and dangerous some of those gatherings have become, that someone is going to be the police. We’re not talking about a constitutional crisis, here. We’re talking about basic public order and safety. Brandon Johnson needs to chill out.

We go on to talk about many more topics during the Q&A in the second half of the stream. I’ll make that available later this week. Of course, only full subscribers will be able to watch it! So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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There’s lots to discuss in the news. Last month’s Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais severely restricted section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, freeing up legislators to redraw districts in a way that may have the effect of weakening the black vote in Southern states and, some believe, making it much more difficult for black legislators to win elections. Opponents of section 2 argue that, while it may have been necessary to counteract the lingering effects of Jim Crow, its time is long past gone. Advocates for section 2 argue that it is still necessary in order to maintain the enfranchisement of black voters in Southern states.

The great Robert Woodson passed away on May 19. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement and spent the rest of his life working with and within black communities, as an individual and through his foundation, the Woodson Center, to improve the lives of his people. He was an unapologetic critic of government programs that, as he saw it, fostered dependency and undermined the capacities of those they claimed to help. Bob believed deep in his bones that African Americans are every bit as intelligent, capable, and self-sufficient as anyone else in this country. As evidence, he often pointed to the many black businesses and communities that managed to thrive even under Jim Crow. Bob was also a friend of mine, and John and I will spend some time paying tribute to a great man.

The weather is warming up and “teen takeovers” are, unfortunately, back in the news. Over fifty teens, most of them black, were arrested in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, during rowdy public disturbances. The city has so far seemed either unable or unwilling to put in place measures—like last-minute curfews—to tamp down the chaos. I recently made the case (again!) for the value of respectability politics. This is exactly why they’re so badly needed.

And finally, we’ll be taking questions submitted by our Substack subscribers, the topics of which may include the unevenly distributed cultural cache of racial identity, a racial casting controversy over Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, who can lay claim to which parts of the “Western tradition,” respectability politics, “getting over race,” and the anxieties that come along with new parenthood.

So join us tomorrow, Friday, May 29 at 1:00 P.M. EDT for what’s going to be a fantastic show. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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Last Friday, I had the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov on the livestream. His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, distills his perspective on the path that led from the formation of the Jewish State to the current situation in that country, with an emphasis on Gaza and the West Bank. How, Omer asks, could a nation that has offered safe haven to so many of its own people have presided over the expulsion, killing, and persecution of another people?

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Omer’s book offers an impassioned and rigorous account of legal, political, and religious contradictions present since Israel’s founding. Those internal tensions have led, Omer argues, to belligerence in the occupied territories and the slow waning of democratic practices within its own government. Reading Omer’s book feels like watching an extraordinarily accomplished scholar marshaling a lifetime of learning and experience to try to explain the inexplicable to himself. For all its clarity, it also communicates an emotional ambivalence, as he struggles to come to terms with his own disappointment with his homeland.

I find myself in a delicate situation. I’m neither a Jew nor an Israeli, and I’m no expert on Israel’s internal politics and self-understanding. I often find myself asking if it’s my place to comment on what I see of Israel in the news. Omer’s personal investment in Israel—he was born there, served in combat with the IDF, and began his career there—and his knowledge of the nation’s history provide a way into what can seem to non-Israelis like an impossibly complex situation, where subtle distinctions between one position and another can have outsized consequences.

Not everyone will agree with Omer’s analysis, or indeed that something has gone “wrong” in Israel at all. But with the news flooded with grandstanding and virtue signaling, it can sometimes be difficult to separate serious, informed criticism from rank punditry. Even if you find yourself opposed to Omer, his expertise and intelligence cannot be dismissed. So I humbly recommend this episode both to those seeking to understand and to those interested in the strongest version of the opposing view. It’s not an easy conversation. But then, this is The Glenn Show. We don’t do “easy.”

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I first spoke at length with Omer in January 2024, when I had him on the show to give me his expert opinion on the IDF campaign in Gaza. I was taken aback by the high civilian casualty rates, the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, and the reports of abuse of Palestinian prisoners. I wanted to know if things were as bad as they appeared. Omer didn’t provide much comfort, but he wasn’t wrong.

Since then, we’ve become friends. He’s an invaluable advisor on the intricacies of domestic Israeli politics and the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Omer was born on a kibbutz, the son of a native of Mandatory Palestine and a Polish immigrant. He grew up in Tel Aviv. He served in the IDF during the Yom Kippur War and had postings in the West Bank and Gaza, before earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Tel Aviv and his doctorate at Oxford. Israel is his homeland as much as it is anybody’s, and his latest book is an attempt to explain—to himself as much as the reader—how the place that nurtured him could, at the same time, have nurtured the political malignancy that occupies influential parts of its government and society.

So join me tomorrow, Friday, May 22 at 1:00 P.M. EDT, for what is sure to be an informative, engaging, and not in the least controversial episode of The Glenn Show. These are hard conversations to have, especially, I imagine, for Omer. But that’s what TGS is for.

Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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Of course, you can only comment and view the stream if you’re a full subscriber. So if you’re not yet a full subscriber, and you want to put your question to us, now is the perfect time to become one. For only $6/month (great deal) or $50/year (incredible deal), you’ll get access to all things Q&A, along with our archives, weekly livestreams and recordings thereof, and other exclusive content. We at TGS are almost entirely subscriber-supported. Without your contributions, we cannot keep doing the show, the livestreams, or anything else. So if you’re able, throw a few bucks in the hat. You’ll be happy you did.

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Last Friday, I had the actor and writer Clifton Duncan on the livestream to talk about the conundrum of the artist in an age of political polarization. As some of you know, he’s currently working on a one man show about the life and work of Thomas Sowell, a topic very dear to me. In fact, the last time I saw Clifton in person was at October’s conference, “The Sowell Legacy,” which I co-organized. (I’m currently co-editing a collection of talks from that event, and I’ll be sure to let you know when we have a publication date.)

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Besides his theatrical work, he also writes essays about art, politics, and identity for his Substack, The State of the Arts. A few of his most recent pieces caught my attention, so I thought I’d invite him back for another conversation.

What struck me most about talking with Clifton and reading his writing is the narrow channel he’s trying to navigate. On the one hand, as he says in this conversation, he doesn’t think art should avoid politics or that artists should shy away from expressing their political views in their work. Plenty of “timeless” art was created in response to political events, and there is no reason why today’s artists should feel compelled to do any different.

On the other hand, politics can become a problem for art and artists when ideological fealty takes precedence over craft. I think Clifton is arguing not for a specific political vision that would include art but for the value of art in itself and for art’s unique ability to explore and communicate universal human experiences through portrayals of the specific and singular. When a society fails to value that, it risks falling into philistinism and forgetting a crucial aspect of its humanity.

Clifton, for one, is on a crusade against philistinism. While I may not have his knowledge of craft, or his commitment to the artist’s life, I’m happy to serve as an ambassador for that mission.

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Yesterday, my editor Mark Sussman and I published a critical exchange (now out from behind the paywall) about my recent essay on respectability politics, a debate that emerged from a conversation about minstrelsy, of all things. Despite the length of the exchange, Mark and I still have a lot to talk about, and we’ll be devoting a portion of the show to that discussion.

If there is time left, we’ll turn our attention to some hot topics, which may include the Supreme Court’s extraordinarily consequential decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Nicholas Kristof’s harrowing New York Times report on allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, Robert Kagan’s Atlantic piece declaring Iran’s strategic victory over the U.S. all but accomplished, and Zeynep Tufekci’s warnings about overly optimistic assessments of hantavirus’s communicability.

So tune in tomorrow, May 15 at 1:00 P.M. EDT. You won’t want to miss it. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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Also, we wanted to include more images and video, but we’re pushing length and data constraints as it is. We’ll have some more prepared for the livestream.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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Dear Glenn,

In a staff meeting ahead of the April 3, 2026 livestream, Rob and I were trying to convince you to watch Druski’s Nascar video (which you ultimately did), when the topic of minstrelsy came up. We talked a bit about the video as a kind of response to the minstrel show, an ironic, race-flipped commentary on social stereotypes, and you reminded me of Nathan Huggins’s chapter on minstrelsy in his classic book Harlem Renaissance (1971). I hadn’t cracked that book in many years. In fact, I’d entirely forgotten about the minstrelsy chapter. When I revisited it, I was pleasantly surprised by how penetrating and perceptive his analysis remains, 55 years after it was first published.

What surprised me most, though, was not the chapter’s applicability to Druski’s video but to your own recent defense of respectability politics, “Respectability Politics and the Moral Ecology of Freedom.” Huggins locates the maintenance of respectability at the core of the minstrel show’s popularity, at first during its codification in the 1840s, then again after the Civil War, until it mostly petered out in the first decades of the twentieth century. But examples can be found in theater, film, and television as late as the 1970s. In the United Kingdom, the BBC’s popular The Black and White Minstrel Show almost made it to the ‘80s—it was canceled in 1978, after a 20-year run. Though the minstrel show was created by white men and the performers were initially white, their faces blackened and made up with grotesquely exaggerated features, some black performers eventually took up the practice. As Huggins notes, there were no viable avenues for the creation of black theater for a black audience at the time. Black performers had to take work where they could find it.

Huggins describes the minstrel character in the following way:

The theatrical darky was childlike; he could be duped into the most idiotic and foolish schemes; but like a child, too, innocence would protect him and turn the tables on the schemers. His songs were vulgar and his stories the most gross and broad; his jokes were often on himself, his wife or woman. Lazy, he was slow of movement, or when he displayed a quickness of wit it was generally in flight from work or ghosts. Nevertheless, he was unrestrained in enthusiasm for music—for athletic and rhythmical dance. Likewise, he was insatiable in his bodily appetites; his songs and tales about food would make one think him all mouth, gullet, and stomach. Indeed, performers gave themselves grotesque lips, creating the illusion of cavernous mouths. The stage Negro went into ecstasy over succulent foods—pork, chicken, watermelon—“lip-smacking,” “mouth-watering.”

The minstrel was, Huggins writes, “patently the antithesis of the Protestant Ethic.” In his view, that is no way incidental to the minstrel show’s popularity with white audiences. He counterposes the theatrical type of the minstrel to that of the Franklinian American. The theatrical form that would become the minstrel show developed alongside the moral, individualistic, entrepreneurial model of American success. The terms of that success are as familiar today as they were in 1971, as they were to readers of Horatio Alger in the 1870s, and as they were to Northern minstrel show audiences in the 1840s. As relayed by Huggins, those terms these include,

[...] industry (dedicated work in some useful calling), order (decorum, good manners, the avoidance of excess in emotions and all other things), cleanliness (the honoring of one’s own body and possessions but also the deference to the good taste and sensibility of others), punctuality (industry and order combined for efficiency and in deference to the opinion of others), frugality (negatively, not wasting, but positively, accumulating by deferring present consumption for future benefits).

The most significant item for Huggins, though, is sexual continence—abstinence, not mere moderation. That value lines up with all the others, in the sense that it indicates the demands of both public morality and a kind of personal thrift. Abstinence preserves the reputations of young men and women and spares them the shame of having children out of wedlock while enabling them to save energy and attention, which is to be spent only when it can be most useful (when economic opportunity presents itself). It should not be frittered away on seduction and sexual exertion.

Abstinence, as the exemplar of all other “American values,” is key to Huggins’s account of the minstrel show’s popularity and the role it plays in the public imagination. The need to instill and reinforce these behaviors—to “cultivate respectability,” as you might put it, Glenn—implies what we all know to be true: effort, discipline, and social reinforcement are required to stop us from shirking our work, blowing our money on entertainment instead of saving it, showing up to appointments whenever we feel like it (if at all), saying exactly what we’re thinking instead of observing decorum, and sleeping with whomever we want, whatever the consequences.

In Huggins’s view, the minstrel show served as an outlet for those repressed desires, a way to both preserve and disavow what was least acceptable and most sought by ostensibly upright white audiences. “Could the fantasies of such men,” Huggins writes, “have been other than the loose and undisciplined creatures of appetite—Sambo, Jim Crow, Jim Dandy?” As Eric Lott has written, minstrel shows “coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure.” According to Huggins, the minstrel show character was designed, from its garish clothing to its enormous eyes and mouth to its physical appetites and sexual licentiousness to its very racial otherness, “to achieve the effect of character and personality antithetical to respectable taste and manners” (emphasis added).

We could further explore, with Huggins, Lott, and many other scholars, the cultural and material origins of the anxieties on display in the minstrel show. But the most important point, for my purposes, is the nearly ritualistic role that minstrelsy plays in what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process.” Minstrelsy abetted that process in America by providing a screen—the grotesque image of the “darky”—onto which white audiences could project all that was “antithetical to respectable taste and manners.”

The minstrel show is hardly the only theatrical form that served that purpose—the use of drama to both purge and enjoy perceived social contaminants in the service of legitimating the dominant order goes back to the Greeks. It likely has even deeper roots in our psyches. But the choice to use the image of the black man to satisfy the unmet and unmentionable desires produced by the demands of respectability surely matters in America, where the color line’s sharp legal and social divisions produced two antipodal categories of person, whatever the finer distinctions within each category. Once such a line is established, the terms of transgression—symbolic or otherwise—become much clearer. I can only choose to cross a line if I know which side of it I’m already on. I can only make a point by breaking a rule if I understand the rule and its meaning. I can only commit miscegenation—a word invented in 1864, far postdating the advent of the minstrel show—in a society that treats racial categories as so real that they can be violated.

The minstrel show provided a way for white audiences to float over the line from the respectable world to the world of appetites, carnal satisfactions, and unrestrained expression without actually touching down. And the vehicle for that trip—the symbolic hot-air balloon—was the distorted image of the black man, invested with all that was desired but unutterable, made a figure of fun and humiliation as a way to both enjoy and disavow the pleasures white audiences imagined he, as “all that is antithetical to respectable taste and manners,” uncomplicatedly enjoyed.

In short, Huggins suggests that minstrelsy allowed repressed whites to objectify and project the desires, appetites, and parts of themselves they could not express socially onto a figure located well outside the precincts of respectable society: the black man. They could then relish in the performance’s excesses while keeping them at bay with mockery. The minstrel show was less an expression of outright repulsion than a platform from which white audiences could see and hear the ambivalence of their relation to blacks—feared and desired, admired and disdained, subordinated and idealized—played out before them.

If you asked a nineteenth-century, white audience member if they agreed with that description, they would likely stare at you with incomprehension. After all, none of them had access to the Freudian concepts that underpin Huggins’s analysis. I would also guess that, even if they had some conscious inkling of what was going on, that they were imputing their own unspeakable desires to a figure it was already acceptable to mock, it would not behoove them to admit it. That would entail admitting what it was most crucial to deny: that they had these desires in the first place, that they would indulge them if not for the social consequences, and that—most disturbingly—those desires formed a basis for deep commonality, even kinship, with black men (at least in the way black men were imagined by these audiences). Beneath the leering blackface mask was the face of a white man much like themselves. And perhaps, if they could remove the mask of white respectability that disguised their true nature, they would find a black face staring back at them in the mirror.

The minstrel show is long gone, but the structures of respectability and disavowal it dramatized are all around us. Often, they are just as uncomfortable to contemplate as the minstrel show itself. The modern-day discourse of respectability politics is a case in point. I have few concerns about the stated goals of respectability advocates—who is going to argue that we shouldn’t welcome less crime, less disorder, and more prosperity in any community, no matter the race or class of its members? And even though I have my own point of view, I’m not even that interested in the policies and practices that respectability advocates like you, Glenn, recommend. Finding the right balance of carrots and sticks, formal and informal network-building and social capital acquisition, figuring out how to make the police a help rather than a hindrance, educational policy, and so on—I leave all that to the social scientists, policy wonks, and activists.

What interests me are respectability advocates’ reasons for getting involved in the debate in the first place. I don’t think those reasons are uniform. At the risk of destroying my own reputation, I’ll say that I can actually understand where Bill Cosby was coming from in the infamous “pound cake” speech. I don’t agree with the framing or sympathize with the tone, but I can well understand how a dedicated civil rights advocate and successful entertainer (who also did some other stuff) would see it as his job to promote the public morality that formed an important plank in the civil rights movement to the next generation. And I can understand his anger at seeing what he viewed as the promise of the civil rights movement undermined not only by white racists but also by the perceived failure of that younger generation of black people to abide by the standard his arm of the civil rights movement cultivated. Cosby charged that young black people were too promiscuous, committed too many crimes, dressed in an unbecoming way, and so on. If they were shot by police during the commission of even a petty crime, the first question to ask was why they were doing the crime in the first place. That seems harsh, to say the least, but he was far from the only one who felt that way.

Cosby has been fully delegitimized as a spokesman for respectability, given the sexual assault charges. There’s hypocrisy, and then there’s that. But his general position on respectability has persisted. While the proposed remedies vary in both emphasis and sophistication, the basic critique doesn’t. Black critics like you, Glenn, still see the sort of problems Cosby groused about (which others have called pathological) as basic roadblocks to two distinct but related goals: success and respectability. “Success” is material (more educational achievement, more stable families, more upward mobility, more wealth, more political power). I can’t find fault with your conception of respectability as individual and collective self-command, an autonomous commitment to living with dignity and honor. That is a noble goal in itself, as it requires us to attend to the interior processes and impulses that drive us, and to ask ourselves the important questions: Who am I? How should I live? What are my responsibilities to others? What is my relationship to my own desires and ambitions?

That’s one side of respectability. It points inward, to the individual and her community. And as you rightly point out, the tenets of respectability aren’t necessarily imposed on the black community from without. There is a long tradition of black Americans promoting and exemplifying respectability among themselves. But the other side of respectability points outward, toward the reputation and standing of the minority community in the eyes of the majority. Acquiring respectability necessarily entails, along with self-respect and the respect of the community, accord with a broader, less easily definable category of values, behaviors, and sensibilities esteemed (or at least paid lip service to) by society at large. But the relationship between the inward-directed pursuit of respectability and its outward appearance to the social body is not as direct as it may seem.

In your essay, Glenn, you make an ingenious attempt to “materialize” the abstract notion of the minority group’s public standing, treating minority group reputation as a “public good,” like clean air or a public park. The problem with a public good is that rational individuals can use it in ways that are advantageous to them but harmful to the asset. Say my friends and I have a picnic in Central Park. We enjoy ourselves, but when we’re ready to leave, we realize that the nearest trash can is in the opposite direction of the exit. Rather than waste our own time hauling our garbage to the can, we dump it on the grass. We know that’s wrong, but it’s easier and more fun and a more efficient use of our time to head straight to the nearest bar for happy hour instead of cleaning up. Meanwhile, we’ve left behind an eyesore that makes Central Park less enjoyable for everyone else, one that a taxpayer-funded park employee will have to clean up. Penalties (like littering fines) and norms (like “leave no trace” principles) may try to restrain us, but it’s unlikely we’ll be caught by the park service, and none of us really care that strangers whom we’ll never see again are scowling at us. (In reality, I always clean up after myself, so don’t come at me in the comments.)

You’re suggesting that minority group reputation works essentially the same way. The vast majority of minority group members behave respectably, maintaining both their personal reputation and that of the group. But when a tiny minority within the minority breaks the law, spends their days hanging on the corner instead of going to school, produces multiple out-of-wedlock children, and so on, they despoil the group’s reputation. Part of the cost of personal disrepute is assumed by the group. Their personal lack of respectability is imputed to the group.

There’s an asymmetry in the “group reputation as public asset” comparison you make. Reputation is observer-dependent in a way that clean air and parks and the status of other public goods are not. I can analyze the particulate content in the air and say with some confidence that the nearby smelting plant has something to do with the pollution. I can observe the trash-strewn park on a Sunday evening and conclude that some people are misusing the asset. We can argue about what kind of particulate counts are acceptable, how much trash is too much trash, but that won’t change the underlying fact, that the asset has been, to some degree, devalued.

In the case of reputation, the damage done by an individual to the group’s reputation will depend on a host of other considerations, like narrative framing and existing bias. If someone cuts me off in traffic, and the driver happens to be black, I may say to myself, “What an asshole.” Or I may say, “Of course he’s black. Black people drive like assholes.” In the former case, where I don’t think race is relevant, minority reputation doesn’t suffer. In the latter case, minority reputation does suffer, if only in a very small way. Extrapolate outward, and we’ll find an incalculable number of interactions, observations, correlations, stray thoughts, anecdotes, news reports, and so on occurring in the lives and minds of observers, all of them subject to a host of interpretive and emotional filters, frames, and lenses, and all of them theoretically coalescing into the aggregate “public good” of minority group reputation, which now appears far less material than at first glance.

Not only is the reputation-as-public-asset theory observer-dependent, it is wholly observer-dependent. You write, “The standing of ‘Black Americans’ in wider society is not owned by any single individual; it is a collective asset shared by millions of people who may never meet one another. Like clean air or nation defense, it is something from which all members benefit whether or not they personally contribute to producing it.” Intentionally or not, there’s a little rhetorical legerdemain happening here, because the matter of ownership gets slippery once we accept that the asset is observer-dependent. Every American benefits from national defense (clean air is a different story), but perceptions of what constitutes adequate defense are not the same as what actually constitutes adequate defense.

The “standing of ‘Black Americans’” may be “a collective asset shared by millions,” but the Black Americans to whom it applies do not determine its value. They act in ways that may enhance or damage its value, but “standing” is in the eye of the beholder. I may attempt to act nobly in order to increase my standing in your eyes, but whether my standing actually does increase depends upon how you perceive my actions. For example, if you know that I am acting nobly only to increase my standing with you, you may be inclined to downgrade me further, believing that my self-interest poisons the act’s nobility. Or perhaps you’ll be impressed by the effort I’ve expended to impress you, rather than by my nobility, and your esteem for me will rise, but only because I’ve acknowledged my inferiority and paid tribute to your superiority. Or perhaps I truly am acting nobly because I believe it is the right thing to do, but you believe that I’m merely trying to curry favor with you.

If, as a society, we decide, for example, that clean air is the number one priority, we can take extreme measures to control and enhance it. If we decide we absolutely must have clean air at any cost, we can ban gas-powered cars, shutter coal plants and other polluters, mandate the conversion of power grids to solar and nuclear, and levy crushing taxes and fines on fossil fuel companies. But however I may try to affect my standing in your eyes, I can’t determine it. While the minority group may attempt to enhance its reputation’s value, it cannot determine it.

The argument on behalf of certain intra-group norms—obey the law, finish school, delay parenthood until you attain such and such markers of stability—seems almost self-evidently correct to me. Again, who is going to say those are bad ideas? Likewise, the practical value of respectability via self-command, the specifically black tradition of same, and so on—hard to argue with. What doesn’t make sense is the confusion between intra-group reputational norms—“If you get arrested, you’re going to look stupid, not cool, in front of your friends”—and the negative externalities you describe as the result of violating those norms. Intra-group enforcement may constrain some or even most norm-violation, but the negative externalities that result from norm-violation don’t apply (or don’t apply most relevantly) to the community’s perception of itself. They apply to the majority group’s perception of the minority group.

Here, black respectability advocates run up against something uncomfortable. The basic argument looks something like this: “Goddammit, will you all stop playing into every negative stereotype about black people? It’s bad enough in itself, because you’re messing up your communities and your own lives. But it’s also bad for respectable black people like me, who get called in to comment every time a bunch of teenagers run rampant through the streets of Chicago or wherever else. Because I know what my white viewers and readers are thinking. They’re thinking, ‘Look what your people are doing out there, dancing on cop cars and looting and whatever else.’ I don’t like it any more than they do, but I’ve got to bear the burden of the negative externalities you’ve imposed on our collective reputation. I can’t just wash my hands of you miscreants, because no matter what I do, I’m going to be affiliated with you in the mind of the public, as will every other person with our shared ancestry. I want to help you, because I want better for you. But I also want better for me. So we’ve got to figure this out, for all of our sake.”

Again, I understand perfectly well why you or anybody would feel this way. Every member of a minority group sometimes feels that way about other members who seem to be actively trying to confirm negative stereotypes. (I’m not even going to get into what some of my fellow Jews are up to right now.) And I understand, too, your frustration with colleagues who act as though calls for respectability themselves are the problem, which I don’t have space to address here. Suffice it to say, it’s problematic.

But isn’t the root of the issue, Glenn, that you see members of your minority group behaving in ways “antithetical to respectable taste and manners”? Through your eyes, I imagine the reaction is something like, “Yeah, and they have got to stop! While the consequences fall hardest on them and their communities, all black people are affected.”

You can’t unload your stake in the public good of collective black reputation. It’s bound to who you are, your self-conception as a black man, a black intellectual, and the inheritor of a black tradition. Accordingly, you can no more easily divest yourself of the public good than you can step outside of your own mind, body, and soul, just as I can’t simply declare that I’m no longer Jewish because I’m disgusted with some of my people. Not even conversion to Christianity could take the Jew out of me. So it makes perfect sense to me that you see such urgency in arguing on behalf of respectability politics for your people.

I wonder whether all respectability advocates see things from that perspective, where the stakes are both social and intimate. The particular perspectives of white advocates for respectability politics within black communities must vary. I have no doubt that many of them speak from genuine concern. But most respectability politics that understands itself in those terms emanates from right-of-center. And the tenor of conservative media—when it comes to stories about economically troubled, black, urban communities—generally does not come across as “concerned” so much as “angry, frightened, and hostile.” We could add to that the recent revitalization of “just asking questions”-type “race realism” from popular commentators like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, who seem to regard black people as, on the whole, inherently violent and cognitively inferior.

Some of the data about black crime rates and intra-group victimization are dispiriting and can’t be hand-waved away. But that does not explain why they’re such a propulsive element of the conservative media. The obvious answer would be the long tail of the left’s post-George Floyd equivocations about race and crime rates. Even if we’re past the seismic upheaval of the George Floyd Summer, its aftershocks persist, if only because conservative media saw mainstream and left-leaning outlets reaping the financial benefits of covering events in their way and sought to scoop up profits from an underserved market and keep them coming for as long as possible. (Before you call that reading too cynical, please consider that we’re talking about the likes of the New York Times opinion page and the Daily Wire here.)

The true appeal of these stories, I think, lives a couple feet below the brain. For along with the standard hypocritical howling about “left-wing media bias” in reporting on race and crime came a rather extreme vision of black urban life, full of drive-by shootings, brutal beatings, “no-go zones,” fatherless children, and so on. These problems existed and still exist, but the question was why they became the primary representation of black life in certain quarters. What satisfactions do these harrowing images and lurid stories offer? What psychological and emotional needs do they serve? What does infinitely looping video of the horror-show ghetto offer to the suburbanite scrolling through his phone late at night, far away from any place that violence could touch him?

Stories and images portraying present-day black life as “all that is antithetical to respectable taste and manners” offered something beyond mere information. I think it provided a return, in the midst of the traumatic reorganization of American life and politics we were then (and still are) undergoing, to basic American assurances about who stands on which side of the line distinguishing respectability from its opposite.

In other words, the minstrel show is long gone, but the structures of respectability and disavowal it dramatized remain with us. They are reshaped, stretched, and contorted, but still legible as basic organizing dynamics, transposed from a wildly popular nineteenth-century theatrical form onto today’s hegemonic leisure activity: looking at the internet and getting mad.

We are unlikely to see an actual blackface performance today, unless it is ironized by a black artist (Spike Lee’s Bamboozled) or used to demonstrate a white character’s idiocy (Mad Men, “My Old Kentucky Home”). But, to return to Huggins’s analysis, the minstrel show’s function as a kind of release valve for desires repressed by the need for respectability, and the grotesque image of the black man that served as that release’s vehicle, is still in operation. That is why I think there is a meaningful difference between the imperative you feel, Glenn, to promote respectability politics, and that of some others, who have turned a basically unobjectionable and widely employed set of normative guidelines to other uses.

The post-George Floyd shakeup provided a screen, this time a literal one, that permitted fantasies about crossing the line between those two antipodal American categories to take new shape. After all, in the year of the pandemic lockdown, all we had were screens. Ideas like the Great Replacement, murmurings about race war and civil war, “race science,” and other paranoid racial fantasies rushed from the grimy back alleys of obscure message boards and white supremacist mailing lists to which they were largely confined and into the respectable precincts of cable news, popular livestreams and podcasts, and the White House. They’re now mainstream, almost unremarkable fodder for tiresome “debates” between objectively stupid influencers who make seven-figure incomes peddling rancid chum to teens and twenty-somethings desperate for a sense of order in a world that becomes more frightening, inhospitable, and unnavigable every day.

Even granting the persistence of minstrel logic in the twenty-first century, we’re left with a nagging question. With the nineteenth century’s white striver class’s most central repressed desire—unrestrained sexuality—now thoroughly integrated into respectable American life, what taboo remains to fantasize about? What line is left to transgress?

Violence.

If minstrel logic provides a way to understand the social function of, to paraphrase George Fredrickson, the black image in the respectable mind (another banger from 1971), then we should seek out the taboos most vigorously disavowed by those who promote them as the essence of the other, the key to understanding him. It would be a little tendentious on my part to claim there is something inherently racial about American conceptions of violence, either as racial expression or racial projection. Most of us would acknowledge that violence has always been a part of human experience, always and everywhere, in one form or another. Nor would most us deny that, at times, we’ve all had violent fantasies, most of which involve visiting great pain on strangers who’ve offended us in petty ways, like talking too loudly during a concert, for example. (If you happened to be at Market Hotel in Bushwick last Sunday night, you know exactly the tall, obnoxious couple I’m referring to. Get a room!)

But as our discourse becomes more violent, as violence creeps into our everyday speech not as metaphor but as basic descriptor of the only “solution” to seemingly insoluble problems, as we’ve seen spectacular eruptions of public violence from the handful of George Floyd protests that devolved into street fights, beatings, arson, and looting to the January 6th riot, and as the rhetoric of our elected officials employs violent imagery so often one wonders how serious they are about it, the basic function of respectable society—to substitute civil debate and the political process for violence—would seem to be short-circuiting.

Glenn, I know this is a concern of yours. The language of civil war, of race war, speaks to a frustration with very real failures of democratic institutions and collective will. But it also has a particular character, and I wonder if its racial dimension, the inflamed mutterings about “those people” who, if they aren’t brought to heel, will soon turn their native aggression on “us,” doesn’t speak to a desire that threatens to breach the confines of respectability. Projecting the desire to be rid of the problem once and for all across the line, putting it in the gaping maw of spectral thugs eyeing the offramp to the ‘burbs, is indeed something to worry over, even if those who are doing it, like their nineteenth-century forebears, aren’t quite aware they’re doing it. And even if they were, could they say it in their own voices? Or do they (I? You? We?) still require the black mask to see what we are, however distorted, however darkly?

All the best from your buddy,

Mark

Mark,

Your letter is a hell of a piece—provocative, elegantly written, and intellectually serious. I appreciate you taking the time to wrestle with my essay so deeply, and especially for leaning into my reference to Nathan Huggins. I hadn’t revisited that minstrelsy chapter in decades. You’re right: it holds up remarkably well. The way he frames the minstrel show as a ritual of projection and disavowal, a theatrical safety valve for the very appetites that respectable Protestant striving had to repress, is penetrating. The grotesque “theatrical darky” as the embodied antithesis of Franklinian self-command—lazy, libidinous, impulsive, vulgar—let white audiences enjoy the forbidden while reinforcing the civilizing line. I see why that framework seduced you as a lens on today’s respectability debates.

Your letter impressed me, as I’m sure it will impress our Substack readership. I accept a good bit of the structural parallel you draw. There is something ritualistic and voyeuristic in how certain corners of conservative media (and the internet more broadly) feast on stories of urban disorder, fatherlessness, and street crime. The lurid loops of looting or “no-go zones” can function like updated minstrel routines: they horrify and reassure at the same time, confirming the audience’s own distance from the chaos while providing a screen for anxieties about decline, violence, and social breakdown. And yes, the post-George Floyd period—with its institutional failures, crime spikes, and cultural convulsions—supercharged that dynamic. Some of it is profit-driven chum; some of it channels genuine panic. You’re not wrong to notice and to dwell on the psychic undercurrents.

But I part ways with you on how far this minstrel logic explains my project or the broader tradition of Black respectability politics. The core of what I’m arguing for in my essay, “Respectability Politics and the Moral Ecology of Freedom,” is not a performance for the white gaze. It’s a hard-headed recognition of agency and empirical reality in the service of Black human flourishing. The behaviors we call “respectable”—finishing school, obeying the law, forming stable two-parent families, working consistently, delaying gratification—aren’t alien impositions or concessions to observers. They are time-tested pathways out of poverty and dysfunction for any group. Black Americans have invoked them from Douglass and Washington through Du Bois, King, and yes, even Cosby (before his personal disgrace delegitimized him). These voices spoke first and foremost to us Black folk, because the costs of their absence fall heaviest on Black kids, Black families, and Black neighborhoods.

The social science data remain stubborn. Homicide rates, victimization rates, out-of-wedlock birth rates, academic achievement gaps—these aren’t media inventions or projections. They are measurable patterns with devastating human consequences, disproportionately borne by the very communities we both care about. When I talk about a group’s reputation as a “public good,” I’m not denying its observer-dependence. (Though what you have to say about this is interesting and important.) You’re right that standing is in the eye of the beholder, filtered through bias, narrative, and selective attention. But that doesn’t make the underlying behaviors irrelevant. A reputation damaged by observable patterns of disorder makes everyday life harder for millions of respectable Black people—in hiring, lending, policing, schooling, and simple social trust. The asymmetry you note is real and painful: we Blacks do get asked to answer for the worst actors in ways that feel unfair. Yet pretending the patterns don’t exist, or that they’re solely the product of external forces —as do many on the left who insist that structural racism is the root of all evil—helps no one. That denialism, especially in the years after 2020, was its own powerful form of disavowal with, I would imagine, its own psycho-political roots.

You wonder about motives on the right. Fair enough. But let’s turn the mirror around. The left’s long reluctance to confront cultural and behavioral factors—its embrace of “systemic racism” as near-total explanation, its equivocations on crime, its discomfort with fatherhood and personal responsibility—also serves psychic needs. It preserves a flattering moral narrative, externalizes blame, and sustains political coalitions. Which is to say, both sides have their minstrel logics if we push the psychoanalytic frame hard enough. I prefer to stay grounded in the social sciences and the moral ecology of freedom: that is, I want to focus on what actually helps people build decent lives.
I don’t deny that some respectability talk gets co-opted into racial resentment or voyeurism. But the tradition I stand in—from the “talented tenth” to the Black church to today’s quiet strivers raising kids against the odds—is fundamentally about self-command and collective uplift, not soothing white anxieties. Every immigrant group that climbed (Irish, Italians, Jews, Asians) had reformers who preached the same disciplines against their own underclasses. The tension between appetite and restraint—that is, the problem of self-command—is human, not a peculiarity of American racial theater.

Mark, we’ve been at this a long time. We both want fewer dead Black kids, stronger Black families, and more Black Americans living with dignity and prosperity. If the Huggins lens forces us to examine the emotional temperature of these conversations, I’m all for it. But the data, the history of Black advocacy, and the lived experience of ordinary people trying to do right by their children come first. The minstrel show is gone. The challenges of freedom, order, self-government and the maintenance of civilization remain.

Looking forward to hashing this out on the show. Should be a good one.

Your buddy,
Glenn

Last week, I wanted to take a short break from the topics we’ve been discussing regularly—Iran, Gaza, Trump, and so on—and cast my sight close to home. As the domestic and global political landscapes shift, and some of my views shift along with them, I’ve found myself searching for patches of stability. What makes me what I am? What remains consistent and essential as chaos and uncertainty rearrange our social and political order?

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.

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One answer to those questions has been family. I am blessed with five children and six grandchildren, and another on the way. I have been blessed with my wife, LaJuan, when the death of my second wife, Linda Datcher Loury, had me contemplating the possibility of old age without companionship.

With this in mind, I asked my son, Glenn Loury II, to join me for another of our occasional recorded conversations. Here, we explore how families grow and change, how the meaning of relationships—parents and children, partners, siblings—changes as time goes on. We discuss how our regular reading group with his brother Nehemiah helps us to keep Linda’s memory alive, our excitement about the upcoming birth of Nehemiah’s first child, our relationships with our partners, and how I’m dealing with my retirement from teaching. Readers of my memoir, Late Admissions, can view this episode as a kind of update to the story. And Glenn II is also a fantastic writer in his own right. I highly recommend picking up any (or all!) of his books, which you can find here.

I won’t say my relationships with my children have been easy. We are all still working together to repair issues that go back decades. But, my God, am I grateful that I have them around to remind me of what’s most important.

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In the second half of the show, we’ll keep the family theme going with a live conversation between me and my wife, the lovely LaJuan Loury, and TGS contributor Robert Patton-Spruill and his wife, Patti Moreno. Rob and Patti are partners in all things: life, business, and art. We’ll kick off this conversation with their latest of many projects, a music video for their song “Emptiness Reigns.” Regular TGS viewers may recall that Rob first entered the show’s orbit when he called in to defend landlords and ended up in debate with LaJuan. While we’re all good friends, we have some fairly sharp political differences between us—let’s see what comes to the surface!

So tune in tomorrow, Friday, May 8 at 11:00 A.M. EDT and join the family fun. Of course, only full subscribers can watch the stream. So if you’re not one already, please consider becoming a full subscriber. Your support is more important now than ever, and I want you to have access to every minute of The Glenn Show. You can also watch it through YouTube’s membership program—so if you want to do it that way, make sure you’re subscribed to my channel. Please consider signing up to ensure you keep getting the best we have to offer.

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