I request that Glenn and John co-author “An ethnocentric balance” about the sweet spot in the middle. On Yiddish; I heard that it is 90% German. A book from my bookshelf that I read and recommend is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.
On incarceration; (a): Up to 15% of population incarcerated during height of Gulags in USSR in 1953-ish. (b): I am disappointed in my own kind - behavioral scientists who have not yet succeeded at discovering how to maximize the rehabilitation effect of prison so as to shorten sentence duration. In SF, a man almost killed a 92-year old woman on the street while he was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. Perhaps a loud audio alert that repeats - “Call police because I belong at home.”
I am partway through the discussion on the pathway not taken. I agree with Glenn about the role of culture. And the “culture of activism” has a role. Yesterday, my Christian sister informed me that a Safeway store in SF is closing. Which one? The one on Geary near a lot of housing projects. The Safeway owner or CEO sent a letter to my mayor stating that frequent theft and personal safety of shoppers and employees was a serious problem. Local community leaders cannot understand why Safeway doesn’t tolerate continued theft and personal safety issues due to criminal activity. Years before Covid, my ex-boyfriend went to the ER after a hit and run at that Safeway parking lot. The mayor responded “I am saddened by Safeway’s departure.” If Mayor Breed were honest, she would say “I am the reason for Safeway’s departure. I allowed DEI directors to break public safety.” Mayor Breed should set an example for other mayors by terminating the harmful DEI program before she leaves office.
Great episode in general. Ironically my favorite part was the Yiddish section. As an Orthodox Jew who lived in the Catskills for two years I'm absolutely tickled that John was in the midst of a bungalow colony with a bunch of hasidic women pushing baby carriages.
I generally agree with Glenn's point regarding nothing wrong with focusing on your community. I will say there a difference between hasidic insulation and black racial essentialism. The hasidim are protecting a lifestyle based on ideology, not the color of their skin. That being said: blacks focused on helping the black community, great; blacks being focused on their skin color (and the skin color of others) not so much.
Hey John and Glenn, great episode. Glenn, I make cornbread "dressing," which is the Southern variation of "stuffing." (Southerners are far too civilized to eat anything that comes out of a turkey's a** :P
Regarding Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), I know James Earl Ray to have killed King's body, but I always believed Carmichael to have assassinated King's spirit. He NEVER relented from his radical Marxists beliefs.
Additionally, I take slight issue with John saying the seventies were a depressing time for the Civil Rights Movement. Although socially and economically things may have been bad, culturally that was a different story. The seventies had its own version of a Racial Reckoning when Black Culture moved into the mainstream: There was Soul Train (one of my mom's favorite shows back in North Carolina); Soul and Funk music like the Spinners (one of my favorite groups); Roots both the book and miniseries; the musical The Wiz; and shows like Good Times and The Jeffersons.
Finally, you and John skirted around the one aspect of the Black Power/Panther Movement that links it to Black Lives Matter, and that is race pride. I have mentioned this so many times in the Discussion and Q&A sections of your podcast, fans of the Glenn Show are probably tired of reading about it, but here is a synthesized version one last time. White Supremacy and what I call Black Sanctity are race ideologies. They share many defining characteristics, but the main three are: 1. Anti-Capitalism 2. Rejection of America's Founding Principles 3. Weaponization of the Law (white supremacy overtly through Jim Crow Laws; black sanctity subversively through Critical Race Theory in Law Studies.) White Supremacy began as a form of racial hierarchy while Black Sanctity was more about race preservation (today, White Supremacist groups focus more on race preservation while Black Sanctity is about elevating Blackness to positions of power.) More than anything, they are ideologies steeped in race pride. So while I do agree with John that there is a little "coolness" and "performative" aspects to Black Power/Black Panthers, the real driver behind these movements (including Black Lives Matter) is an intrinsic devotion to race pride. Maybe I'm wrong about this, so I welcome anyone's thoughts who may disagree.
I don't feel I'm in a position to disagree, but I might shade a point (or two) a bit? My take was that John was distinguishing the Civil Rights Movement from what was going on in culture (there was also the Mod Squad and Barney Collier in Mission Impossible, and of course Uhura). But perhaps more to the point (on the cultural front) is the nature of the Black Culture that was becoming mainstream in the 70s and the changes in cultural perceptions of the African-American communit[ies]. Glenn has talked about these issues often (as well he should!) and the point I'm thinking about is: between say 1890 and 1975, what did it mean to be Black in America, within the African-American communities and within the country as a whole? Obviously, there is no one answer, but there were prominent African-Americans throughout this period from Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Dubois, MLK Jr, John Lewis and the other civil rights leaders mentioned in this episode to Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Hank Arron, Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, James Baldwin, Sydney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr, Louis Armstrong along with innumerable other musicians and... I've probably overdone it.
My question would be: how did any of these individuals, alone or in aggregate (within their particular era or overall) exemplify "Blackness" in the US and/or the African-American communities and how do they differ from what "Black identity" was in the 70s, especially as that relates "Black Power" (or maybe those specific cultural traits in which pride is taken to support same)? For it seems there was a cultural shift in the late 60s and 70s toward a particular subset of African-American culture that became broadly applied African-Americans as an identity, and which was difficult to resist (as John discussed).
I'm being far from profound here (and mostly parroting those much better informed) but it occurs to me that the mainstreaming of Black Culture that occurred in the 70s (the examples noted) was allied to this shift; that the "Blackness" then portrayed in popular culture was unlike what came before and, to some degree, facilitated what would come after. As a concrete example, I'd point to Roots, which provided a foundational "origin story" at the expense of historical accuracy that suited the shifting identity.
I've pursued this topic to this point to ask if the shift from the early Civil Rights' Movement paradigm of focusing in achievement and "the content of our character" and which seemed to be notably pluralistic to the later "alibi paradigm" required a more unified (at least in public) belief system? That is, when "racism" becomes adopted as a unifying principle and useful alibi, does it also tend to compel a greater degree of conformity to a specific set of values?
Putting it another way (I guess): if racism, while acknowledged and resisted, had not been taken as an alibi -- had the path not taken for Black Activism been taken -- what would it mean to be Black in the US today?
Revisiting the entire black experience since the late 1960s through the lens of the black power movement captivating the country and many cities across the US, banding with socialists, and predictably ruining everything it touched is a worthwhile endeavor for any documentarian or academic. It devastated so much but continues to be "cool" and unfairly affiliated with the meaningful work of the civil rights movement.
Thomas Sowell referenced a quote to the effect (paraphrasing) that the benefits that accrue to someone based on their accomplishments are transitory, as those accomplishments must be continually reinforced (that is: don't rest on your laurels), but give someone an alibi and they are set for life (in that the alibi need only be cited, as long as it remains believable).
What he (Sowell) was getting at (as John also pointed out), is that the shift in the civil rights movement in the late 60s relieved the movement of the onerous task of pursuing accomplishments to further their aims by supplying an alibi that could be asserted through performative acts and which legitimized rejecting the "turn the other cheek" approach in favor of a more militant approach, thus "solving" two issues at once; I think it's easy to see how seductive this was, especially at the time.
Without descending into who did what and why, the stasis John mentions has been politically useful to certain elites who benefit from a nearly unified voting block; this unification being supported by the sense of alienation engendered by the nature of alibi (racism) and maintained by the stasis itself, as social groups tend to integrate into the mainstream of their larger society as their material circumstances improve (I think Glenn would agree with this?). So the alibi approach dovetails nicely with the aims of various actors, including socialists, by making Black activism performative, rather than focused on accomplishment and thus creating politically useful stasis.
It is not necessary to assume this was the result of conscious effort in high places (those debates can be had elsewhere) because a combination of self-interest on the part of some actors and a temptation to take the easier (performative) road while pushing back against past abuses through a more militant stance on the part civil rights movement as a whole would naturally produce the same result.
I suppose I've reiterated the obvious here -- as expressed by Glenn, John, and others -- but until the alibi is sufficiently discredited (rendered "uncool") more meaningful advancement on a broad scale will continue to be impeded. Perhaps that is beginning to happen?
(This doesn't address what Thomas Sowell calls counterproductive cultural issues, but perhaps those are also addressed by discrediting the alibi? From the historical perspective, those counterproductive cultural issues disappeared in fairly short order in the places they originated; I would be interested to see a social history exploring how that came about in comparison to their continued persistence in the US.)
John wrote two books on your very point—Losing the Race and Winning the Race. Sowell rightfully asks: why were black families so much better during the first half of the 20th century? It wasn’t because there was less racism. But if you only read James Baldwin you would have to conclude that blacks are the helpless victims of racism. I am confounded and confused by John’s heroes and villains.
I have a copy of "Winning the Race," but I am chagrined to say that it has not yet made it to the top of my TBR pile. I recall Sowell presenting some thoughts on the reasons for the progress of former slaves and their descendants prior to the full flowering of the Civil Rights' movement (I am unequal to the task of recapitulating them), and I believe he argued that in important ways, the Civil Rights' movement of the early 60s was a more of a result of that progress than a cause of progress, perhaps especially as progress became stymied in the late 60s and early 70s (speaking under correction here).
I find John and Glenn's observations here quite interesting (as an aside, I grew up 20 mins from Oakland/Berkeley during the heyday of the Black Panthers and I'd forgotten about the breakfast thing -- if indeed I heard about it -- what I do recall is them going around handing out copies of Mao's Little Red Book) and find John's idea of an alternate history novel on how things might have gone differently in the 70s intriguing -- not something I could ever even begin to contemplate, but notions of what would have to have changed, when and where and by whom could be very illuminating. (One might start with the assassinations of MLK Jr and/or RFK failing? Rolling back the clock to preserve JFK and deny LBJ the presidency is probably too easy. But I digress...)
I've always been a bit obsessed with documentaries and news programs along with history from that tumultuous era of a rise in black power through the late sixties, entrenchment in the 1970s, and full scale horrific results of those efforts in the 1980s. Many say crips and bloods were the "Bastards of the Party" but across the entire urban landscape from Baltimore to Philly to St. Louis the co-opting of the civil rights movement was successful and destructive.
Go the Hezakiah News page on YouTube and watch the exposes on Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, etc. It's nothing but raise-fisted charlatans making demands under the false banner of morality without any call for the behaviors that Glen would endorse in the "development" narrative. Stokely Carmichael might be a national figure but these types were crawling all over would-be working class black communities. They became part of city government and lead their constituency to despair. As John said, they never accomplished anything productive other than to demoralize the population, destroy mostly functional institutions, and line their own pockets. It's so sad to see everyone fall for this knowing what it lead to.
These terrible men and women were not only supported by white elites, but lionized as freedom fighters. This is the alternate narrative that would be worth exploring...not the 1619 project.
This is a fascinating conversation and there is so that could be said, but I'm going to limit myself (for now) to the paradox mentioned at the end, because -- and maybe I'm naive -- I've never thought of that as a paradox. I've never thought of myself as "multicultural"; I'm a product of my upbringing which emphasized two things: adherence to a set of beliefs and behaviors that reflect that culture and unbounded intellectual curiosity. The second wasn't (and isn't) thought to be in conflict with the first.
The first might be seen as a type of insularity[?], but I'd distinguish between insularity and bunker mentality, in that a culture can be held strongly and closely without being rejectionist. It can become the latter, in which case it becomes toxic tribalism. But I think being part of a tribe is a good thing because the tyranny of choice John mentions is very real, especially among young people. The problem is (for any number of reasons) being intolerant of (afraid of, envious of, etc) other tribes.
So (as I see it) no paradox in the sense of a logical inconsistency; instead, a part of human nature that leads some people to act intolerantly (in the broad sense).
Wow. Glenn makes cornbread stuffing. I'm willing to believe it is indeed legendary. I'm not quite Glenn's age but I've been making cornbread stuff for just over 40 years. The thing is, I've never written down a recipe -- I have to puzzle it out every time. I'd give a lot to compare notes with Glenn.
While the preparations are indeed epic, I'm not sure I quite agree with John with the eating part being anticlimactic? To me, it feels more like the culmination -- even a kind of extended rapture -- but then I love eating as much as I love cooking, and our holiday dinners lasted at least 3 hours before the cloth was drawn, as they once said. (The resulting food coma lasted much, much longer.)
As much as I may disagree with John’s politics, it was John, not Glenn who helped shape my political awakening and views on race through his landmark Losing the Race. I was in college and it was like a lightbulb went off. What a great book.
This is a very good episode, congratulatiuons to both gentlemen. Take away John's TDS and he is well balanced, knowledgeable and deep. Both described excellent Thanks-Giving day's, a good sign. Blacks who don't like white people are a particular problem, and vice-sersa.
As controversial as John might be regarding Trump, John has so much to offer in other areas. I learned a new word from this episode- “stasis”. He mentioned it a few times describing what happened, or what did not happen after 1966. It seems that there will always be a faction of black culture that lives like it’s a century ago. You have to think a certain way while living in a bubble. It gives you status amongst your black peers. John reiterates it again while speaking about the documentary he was a part of, or was not really included in. Nor was Glenn Loury or Clarence Thomas.
All of this reminds me of the black kids in grade school and high school. You have to be black in a certain way. But the problem is that it limits you. The modern world just keeps developing, but then you are stuck on symbols from the past.
Now you're going to give us that stuffing recipe, John!
I request that Glenn and John co-author “An ethnocentric balance” about the sweet spot in the middle. On Yiddish; I heard that it is 90% German. A book from my bookshelf that I read and recommend is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.
On incarceration; (a): Up to 15% of population incarcerated during height of Gulags in USSR in 1953-ish. (b): I am disappointed in my own kind - behavioral scientists who have not yet succeeded at discovering how to maximize the rehabilitation effect of prison so as to shorten sentence duration. In SF, a man almost killed a 92-year old woman on the street while he was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. Perhaps a loud audio alert that repeats - “Call police because I belong at home.”
I am partway through the discussion on the pathway not taken. I agree with Glenn about the role of culture. And the “culture of activism” has a role. Yesterday, my Christian sister informed me that a Safeway store in SF is closing. Which one? The one on Geary near a lot of housing projects. The Safeway owner or CEO sent a letter to my mayor stating that frequent theft and personal safety of shoppers and employees was a serious problem. Local community leaders cannot understand why Safeway doesn’t tolerate continued theft and personal safety issues due to criminal activity. Years before Covid, my ex-boyfriend went to the ER after a hit and run at that Safeway parking lot. The mayor responded “I am saddened by Safeway’s departure.” If Mayor Breed were honest, she would say “I am the reason for Safeway’s departure. I allowed DEI directors to break public safety.” Mayor Breed should set an example for other mayors by terminating the harmful DEI program before she leaves office.
Great episode in general. Ironically my favorite part was the Yiddish section. As an Orthodox Jew who lived in the Catskills for two years I'm absolutely tickled that John was in the midst of a bungalow colony with a bunch of hasidic women pushing baby carriages.
I generally agree with Glenn's point regarding nothing wrong with focusing on your community. I will say there a difference between hasidic insulation and black racial essentialism. The hasidim are protecting a lifestyle based on ideology, not the color of their skin. That being said: blacks focused on helping the black community, great; blacks being focused on their skin color (and the skin color of others) not so much.
Hey John and Glenn, great episode. Glenn, I make cornbread "dressing," which is the Southern variation of "stuffing." (Southerners are far too civilized to eat anything that comes out of a turkey's a** :P
Regarding Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), I know James Earl Ray to have killed King's body, but I always believed Carmichael to have assassinated King's spirit. He NEVER relented from his radical Marxists beliefs.
Additionally, I take slight issue with John saying the seventies were a depressing time for the Civil Rights Movement. Although socially and economically things may have been bad, culturally that was a different story. The seventies had its own version of a Racial Reckoning when Black Culture moved into the mainstream: There was Soul Train (one of my mom's favorite shows back in North Carolina); Soul and Funk music like the Spinners (one of my favorite groups); Roots both the book and miniseries; the musical The Wiz; and shows like Good Times and The Jeffersons.
Finally, you and John skirted around the one aspect of the Black Power/Panther Movement that links it to Black Lives Matter, and that is race pride. I have mentioned this so many times in the Discussion and Q&A sections of your podcast, fans of the Glenn Show are probably tired of reading about it, but here is a synthesized version one last time. White Supremacy and what I call Black Sanctity are race ideologies. They share many defining characteristics, but the main three are: 1. Anti-Capitalism 2. Rejection of America's Founding Principles 3. Weaponization of the Law (white supremacy overtly through Jim Crow Laws; black sanctity subversively through Critical Race Theory in Law Studies.) White Supremacy began as a form of racial hierarchy while Black Sanctity was more about race preservation (today, White Supremacist groups focus more on race preservation while Black Sanctity is about elevating Blackness to positions of power.) More than anything, they are ideologies steeped in race pride. So while I do agree with John that there is a little "coolness" and "performative" aspects to Black Power/Black Panthers, the real driver behind these movements (including Black Lives Matter) is an intrinsic devotion to race pride. Maybe I'm wrong about this, so I welcome anyone's thoughts who may disagree.
I don't feel I'm in a position to disagree, but I might shade a point (or two) a bit? My take was that John was distinguishing the Civil Rights Movement from what was going on in culture (there was also the Mod Squad and Barney Collier in Mission Impossible, and of course Uhura). But perhaps more to the point (on the cultural front) is the nature of the Black Culture that was becoming mainstream in the 70s and the changes in cultural perceptions of the African-American communit[ies]. Glenn has talked about these issues often (as well he should!) and the point I'm thinking about is: between say 1890 and 1975, what did it mean to be Black in America, within the African-American communities and within the country as a whole? Obviously, there is no one answer, but there were prominent African-Americans throughout this period from Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Dubois, MLK Jr, John Lewis and the other civil rights leaders mentioned in this episode to Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Hank Arron, Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, James Baldwin, Sydney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr, Louis Armstrong along with innumerable other musicians and... I've probably overdone it.
My question would be: how did any of these individuals, alone or in aggregate (within their particular era or overall) exemplify "Blackness" in the US and/or the African-American communities and how do they differ from what "Black identity" was in the 70s, especially as that relates "Black Power" (or maybe those specific cultural traits in which pride is taken to support same)? For it seems there was a cultural shift in the late 60s and 70s toward a particular subset of African-American culture that became broadly applied African-Americans as an identity, and which was difficult to resist (as John discussed).
I'm being far from profound here (and mostly parroting those much better informed) but it occurs to me that the mainstreaming of Black Culture that occurred in the 70s (the examples noted) was allied to this shift; that the "Blackness" then portrayed in popular culture was unlike what came before and, to some degree, facilitated what would come after. As a concrete example, I'd point to Roots, which provided a foundational "origin story" at the expense of historical accuracy that suited the shifting identity.
I've pursued this topic to this point to ask if the shift from the early Civil Rights' Movement paradigm of focusing in achievement and "the content of our character" and which seemed to be notably pluralistic to the later "alibi paradigm" required a more unified (at least in public) belief system? That is, when "racism" becomes adopted as a unifying principle and useful alibi, does it also tend to compel a greater degree of conformity to a specific set of values?
Putting it another way (I guess): if racism, while acknowledged and resisted, had not been taken as an alibi -- had the path not taken for Black Activism been taken -- what would it mean to be Black in the US today?
A great episode!
Revisiting the entire black experience since the late 1960s through the lens of the black power movement captivating the country and many cities across the US, banding with socialists, and predictably ruining everything it touched is a worthwhile endeavor for any documentarian or academic. It devastated so much but continues to be "cool" and unfairly affiliated with the meaningful work of the civil rights movement.
Thomas Sowell referenced a quote to the effect (paraphrasing) that the benefits that accrue to someone based on their accomplishments are transitory, as those accomplishments must be continually reinforced (that is: don't rest on your laurels), but give someone an alibi and they are set for life (in that the alibi need only be cited, as long as it remains believable).
What he (Sowell) was getting at (as John also pointed out), is that the shift in the civil rights movement in the late 60s relieved the movement of the onerous task of pursuing accomplishments to further their aims by supplying an alibi that could be asserted through performative acts and which legitimized rejecting the "turn the other cheek" approach in favor of a more militant approach, thus "solving" two issues at once; I think it's easy to see how seductive this was, especially at the time.
Without descending into who did what and why, the stasis John mentions has been politically useful to certain elites who benefit from a nearly unified voting block; this unification being supported by the sense of alienation engendered by the nature of alibi (racism) and maintained by the stasis itself, as social groups tend to integrate into the mainstream of their larger society as their material circumstances improve (I think Glenn would agree with this?). So the alibi approach dovetails nicely with the aims of various actors, including socialists, by making Black activism performative, rather than focused on accomplishment and thus creating politically useful stasis.
It is not necessary to assume this was the result of conscious effort in high places (those debates can be had elsewhere) because a combination of self-interest on the part of some actors and a temptation to take the easier (performative) road while pushing back against past abuses through a more militant stance on the part civil rights movement as a whole would naturally produce the same result.
I suppose I've reiterated the obvious here -- as expressed by Glenn, John, and others -- but until the alibi is sufficiently discredited (rendered "uncool") more meaningful advancement on a broad scale will continue to be impeded. Perhaps that is beginning to happen?
(This doesn't address what Thomas Sowell calls counterproductive cultural issues, but perhaps those are also addressed by discrediting the alibi? From the historical perspective, those counterproductive cultural issues disappeared in fairly short order in the places they originated; I would be interested to see a social history exploring how that came about in comparison to their continued persistence in the US.)
John wrote two books on your very point—Losing the Race and Winning the Race. Sowell rightfully asks: why were black families so much better during the first half of the 20th century? It wasn’t because there was less racism. But if you only read James Baldwin you would have to conclude that blacks are the helpless victims of racism. I am confounded and confused by John’s heroes and villains.
I have a copy of "Winning the Race," but I am chagrined to say that it has not yet made it to the top of my TBR pile. I recall Sowell presenting some thoughts on the reasons for the progress of former slaves and their descendants prior to the full flowering of the Civil Rights' movement (I am unequal to the task of recapitulating them), and I believe he argued that in important ways, the Civil Rights' movement of the early 60s was a more of a result of that progress than a cause of progress, perhaps especially as progress became stymied in the late 60s and early 70s (speaking under correction here).
I find John and Glenn's observations here quite interesting (as an aside, I grew up 20 mins from Oakland/Berkeley during the heyday of the Black Panthers and I'd forgotten about the breakfast thing -- if indeed I heard about it -- what I do recall is them going around handing out copies of Mao's Little Red Book) and find John's idea of an alternate history novel on how things might have gone differently in the 70s intriguing -- not something I could ever even begin to contemplate, but notions of what would have to have changed, when and where and by whom could be very illuminating. (One might start with the assassinations of MLK Jr and/or RFK failing? Rolling back the clock to preserve JFK and deny LBJ the presidency is probably too easy. But I digress...)
I've always been a bit obsessed with documentaries and news programs along with history from that tumultuous era of a rise in black power through the late sixties, entrenchment in the 1970s, and full scale horrific results of those efforts in the 1980s. Many say crips and bloods were the "Bastards of the Party" but across the entire urban landscape from Baltimore to Philly to St. Louis the co-opting of the civil rights movement was successful and destructive.
Go the Hezakiah News page on YouTube and watch the exposes on Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, etc. It's nothing but raise-fisted charlatans making demands under the false banner of morality without any call for the behaviors that Glen would endorse in the "development" narrative. Stokely Carmichael might be a national figure but these types were crawling all over would-be working class black communities. They became part of city government and lead their constituency to despair. As John said, they never accomplished anything productive other than to demoralize the population, destroy mostly functional institutions, and line their own pockets. It's so sad to see everyone fall for this knowing what it lead to.
These terrible men and women were not only supported by white elites, but lionized as freedom fighters. This is the alternate narrative that would be worth exploring...not the 1619 project.
This is a fascinating conversation and there is so that could be said, but I'm going to limit myself (for now) to the paradox mentioned at the end, because -- and maybe I'm naive -- I've never thought of that as a paradox. I've never thought of myself as "multicultural"; I'm a product of my upbringing which emphasized two things: adherence to a set of beliefs and behaviors that reflect that culture and unbounded intellectual curiosity. The second wasn't (and isn't) thought to be in conflict with the first.
The first might be seen as a type of insularity[?], but I'd distinguish between insularity and bunker mentality, in that a culture can be held strongly and closely without being rejectionist. It can become the latter, in which case it becomes toxic tribalism. But I think being part of a tribe is a good thing because the tyranny of choice John mentions is very real, especially among young people. The problem is (for any number of reasons) being intolerant of (afraid of, envious of, etc) other tribes.
So (as I see it) no paradox in the sense of a logical inconsistency; instead, a part of human nature that leads some people to act intolerantly (in the broad sense).
Wow. Glenn makes cornbread stuffing. I'm willing to believe it is indeed legendary. I'm not quite Glenn's age but I've been making cornbread stuff for just over 40 years. The thing is, I've never written down a recipe -- I have to puzzle it out every time. I'd give a lot to compare notes with Glenn.
While the preparations are indeed epic, I'm not sure I quite agree with John with the eating part being anticlimactic? To me, it feels more like the culmination -- even a kind of extended rapture -- but then I love eating as much as I love cooking, and our holiday dinners lasted at least 3 hours before the cloth was drawn, as they once said. (The resulting food coma lasted much, much longer.)
Great episode (even the parts not food related).
As much as I may disagree with John’s politics, it was John, not Glenn who helped shape my political awakening and views on race through his landmark Losing the Race. I was in college and it was like a lightbulb went off. What a great book.
This is a very good episode, congratulatiuons to both gentlemen. Take away John's TDS and he is well balanced, knowledgeable and deep. Both described excellent Thanks-Giving day's, a good sign. Blacks who don't like white people are a particular problem, and vice-sersa.
"Fists, Status, and Stasis"
As controversial as John might be regarding Trump, John has so much to offer in other areas. I learned a new word from this episode- “stasis”. He mentioned it a few times describing what happened, or what did not happen after 1966. It seems that there will always be a faction of black culture that lives like it’s a century ago. You have to think a certain way while living in a bubble. It gives you status amongst your black peers. John reiterates it again while speaking about the documentary he was a part of, or was not really included in. Nor was Glenn Loury or Clarence Thomas.
All of this reminds me of the black kids in grade school and high school. You have to be black in a certain way. But the problem is that it limits you. The modern world just keeps developing, but then you are stuck on symbols from the past.
Feel free to agree or disagree.