My guest this week is the sociologist Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, author of many books, including one that deeply influenced my thinking on race, incarceration, and the justice system, Juror’s Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality. But Ben didn’t come here to talk about race, even though we do end up discussing it near the end of the episode. Rather, he came to talk about October 7, anti-Israel protests, and the tension between opposing political radicalism and free speech.
Ben worries that, with so much of the political discourse focused on Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the protests against them, we’ve lost sight of the horror of the October 7 attacks. Yet, he says, we can’t ignore the IDF’s excesses and the scores of thousands of people killed and injured in Gaza. We debate where calls for Palestinian rights shade into calls for Israel’s destruction and whether opposing the BDS movement requires the stifling of free speech. We wrap up with discussion of Late Admissions and Ben’s work on incarceration, which includes teaching students in maximum security prisons.
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2:29 Have we already forgotten the horror of October 7?
9:22 Ben: We can’t ignore the loss of innocent life in Gaza
13:58 “From the river to the sea” and “all lives matter”
22:00 Celebrating the deaths of Israelis
26:31 Drawing the line at BDS
33:05 Glenn: If you want free speech, prepare to be uncomfortable
37:44 Columbia University administrators put on leave after allegedly antisemitic text messages
41:41 How Glenn discovered Benjamin’s work
47:40 The social meaning of race
51:01 The invitation to empathy in Late Admissions
59:02 Benjamin’s work with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program
Recorded July 10, 2024
Links and Readings
Benjamin’s book, Juror’s Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality
Benjamin’s book, Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison
Benjamin’s book, Disposable Heroes: The Betrayal of African American Veterans
Glenn’s conversation with Omer Bartov
Glenn’s book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Glenn’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
Erving Goffman’s book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
Erving Goffman’s book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
Coleman Hughes’s book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
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