Q&A: What Would You Do with $43 Million to Fight Racism?

with John McWhorter

Ibram X Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University raised around $43 million (estimates vary), and there’s very little to show for it. The Center has produced almost no meaningful research in that time, despite the outlandish funding at its disposal. In the Q&A from October of last year, a viewer asked John and I what we would do with that kind of money, if our goal was ending racism. I responded that I would actually do what Kendi merely claimed to do: start a center for the rigorous study of race in America, one staffed by elite scholars and promising grad students from across the social sciences.

John’s answer takes a different approach. He would use the money to fund a film taking place in 1966 that would dramatize the seismic shift in black political thought that occurred around that time. We don’t live in the world Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned, despite his monumental achievements. Today, the ideas of Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver hold sway over the political imagination of left-progressive race activists, and we’re all the poorer for it. John’s film would show that, when the integrationist ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement started giving way to the separatist ambitions of the Black Power Movement, an entire mode of political thought came into being that is, in many ways, responsible for the racial divisions we see today.

Now that’s a movie I’d watch. But both John and I admit that there’s no way today’s Hollywood would ever greenlight it. A film suggesting that white racism isn’t primarily responsible for present-day black suffering, that expanding welfare benefits may have been a net negative for black America, and that African Americans are better off when we’re held to the same standards as everyone else would be too hot to touch. Even actors, directors, and producers who might secretly agree with those ideas would fear that saying so in public would destroy their careers.

Whether we like it or not, entertainment shapes the way Americans think about history, politics, and social change. Biopics are part of the canonization process. Documentaries and small, independently funded films may counter our entrenched cultural narratives, but they simply don’t have Hollywood’s reach, which means that stories like the one John imagines stay confined to big books that few people actually read. There are exceptions, but very few of them. Still, if any entrepreneurial producer out there has $43 million to spare, I’m sure John would be happy to take your call.

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GLENN LOURY: All right, this is Carina. Short question: “John, if someone gave you $43 million to fight racism, how would you spend it?”

For anybody who doesn't know, that's a reference to Ibram X. Kendi's Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, which has been in the news of late, which has been very successful at raising money.

I don't know where the 43 million number comes from, but let's just go with that for the time being. He's been successful. He got a $10 million gift from the guy Jack Dorsey, the Twitter guy, and he's raised other money. The Rockefeller Foundation dumped a ton of money on him and whatnot. And the claim of the stories of late is that not much has come from that money, and we're asked what would we do with $43 million to fight racism.

I'll go first. I haven't got a clue. I have no idea. I mean, I can tell you what I'd like to do. You know me. I would like to create a center where the best and most interesting and most provocative and deep-thinking and learned students of the subject could gather together. Some of them I'd hope to recruit to the faculty of the university by being able to offer departments funds to underwrite the appointments of senior members who would be members of the history department or the sociology department or the political science or psychology or economics department, but who would also be principles in my center. They'd be half-time teaching, half-time researchers. They'd have their own research programs. I wouldn't have to figure out what they were researching, because they would already be leaders in their respective fields.

I'd try to combine that kind of initiative with the overall strategy for growth and improvement of the university. The psychology department is looking for a person who specializes in this, the history department for someone who specializes in that. I'd develop relationships with my colleagues in those departments and try to enrich the faculty and so forth by bringing people around.

Another thing I do is to try to develop programs for students and colleagues who are interested in the general subject of race and racial inequality. Speakers series, postdoctoral fellowships for young scholars who are just completing their dissertations and trying to convert them into books who could come in and work on that thing. A vital center of churning, people stimulating each other, sitting around the seminar room listening to somebody's early draft of their chapter and critiquing it, and so on. That's among the things that I'd like to do.

I would have, in so doing—that is, building and strengthening the faculty of my university with allies who are working on the same problem from different perspectives brought to the faculty, enhancing the quality of pedagogy at the university by developing programs that would attract and help to support students who were getting their PhDs, and so forth and so on. I'd have no illusion that what I was doing was going to solve the problem of racism, because I don't think a university is going to “solve” the problem of racism or racial inequality. You could enrich the the flow of ideas and deepen the understanding that we have in our respective disciplines about about the issue.

And that's how I’d try to make my contribution. $43 million would be a real good start on that program. That's an endowment. If you only spent five percent of it every year, what would that be? That'd be $2,150,000 a year, and that could support a lot of faculty allies and a lot of postdoctoral fellows and a lot of invitations to visitors from around the world to come in and lecture at your university.

I think I could be very happily ensconced in such a circumstance. What do you think, John?

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JOHN MCWHORTER: I would put that money into making a movie. Spike Lee would do it well, but it would be against his ideology. I would like there to be a movie about what happened to black thought in 1966. I wish more people understood how we got from integrationist to separatist, how we got to the idea that, for black people, we have to question what standards are and that just showing up is excellence and all of that. That's so normal now. We've got, depending on how you count it, three generations of people who think of that as normal. If black people come up, you have to reserve judgment. Only so much can be expected of us. And maybe there's a black way of doing things that's better than the white way. But that's new, and it's easy to miss it now unless you're very old or you're a history buff.

There should be a 1966 movie with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, turning against white people. That should be shown, with Stokely Carmichael deciding that. Somebody playing John Lewis kind of caught in the middle of all of this. Bayard Rustin should be in it.¹ Francis Piven and Richard Cloward, the white sociologists promulgating the National Welfare Rights Organization should be in it, and getting people onto the rolls on purpose. Viola Davis and people like that should be playing the women who are treated that way. And there should be a really great soundtrack, because of how black music sounded at the time. That would be part of it.

You've got the afros and the dashikis but also the older civil rights guard with the cat eyeglasses and the suits and the cigarettes being kind of pushed aside. There would have to be—and I don't mean me—a careful speech coach, because in this film I would like it to be seen that there was a way of speaking that many black people had that would sound very white today to a lot of people, and people like that were taken seriously. I want Bayard Rustin to talk like him. He should not be played by Samuel Jackson.

BAYARD RUSTIN: We call for a non-violent uprising, with people sitting, standing, being arrested, white and black together. Am I supposed to go back to Harlem and tell the people they have to wait until the Vietnam War is over before money can be got? You know, I think we have to put up a political fight for it. I do not believe the war in Vietnam is more important than eradicating poverty, and I think history will reveal that.

I think that it would be too late to have Du Bois, and I don't want to pull it back to 1963. It should be 1966, but maybe flash back. And so you have people like that. You have A. Philip Randolph. And I want to show the change. I want to show what happened that year. And of course, Glenn, I know it's not like all of a sudden in April of that year, the world changed. A lot started changing right around that time. I want to make a movie, because most people don't want to read a history book, but most people do want to see a movie. But that movie will never get made.

I think Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. That's a three year span. It's a very critical period. Vietnam War and so forth. Black Power. Your former colleague at Columbia, Charles Hamilton. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, their book, Black Power. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice. Let's not forget the Black Panther Party.

Yeah, the Panthers have to be in this. We've seen them, but to really show what was going on and with compelling actors. Both the bad side and the good side of the Panthers. But to really show what that was like.

So you think a movie could change the world?

Not change the world any more than the institute that you're talking about would, but it would be a handy reference point. Too many of the film reference points are, “Slavery was bad. Racism is bad. Racism is still there.” Well, you know what? We've learned that there is an, I guess you're going to have to call it, a black conservative perspective—but really I think it's just a black centrist perspective—that is not shown as much.

You have people questioning certain things. You have the Tyler Austin Harper kind of film. I'm not knocking it, but you can question. There are those things. But I would like a film that really just straight-out shows something went wrong in 1966, that a person might argue that despite the seductiveness of what people looked like and how people started talking and what their music was like, something went wrong. It wasn't all cool. And that's what I would like to see. It's just something I think about sometimes.

You're reminding me of our interview with Shelby Steele, the writer, and Eli Steele, his son the filmmaker, and our discussion of their documentary. It's not a feature film, but I thought it was actually very well done. What Killed Michael Brown?, about the events in Ferguson, Missouri and the backdrop to what was going on in the political philosophy of African America that led to the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And it goes into some of what you're talking about, about the welfare stuff and the liberal attitudes and whatnot that fail to notice the deleterious developments within the social structure of African American communities that helped to generate the events in Ferguson. It's got I don't know how many viewers, but a small fraction of the viewers of a feature film with a $43 million budget and with A-list. talent.

Except they'd never let you make it. Those studios would never produce it. The talent that you need to act in the film would fear for their own reputations, not be willing to play the parts that your scriptwriter would have written for them.

Most of them wouldn't play it.

It's just an impossibility. It's just a cultural impossibility. And that's too bad.

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1. It so happens that Rustin, a biopic of Bayard Rustin, was released on Netflix in November. While the Barack and Michelle Obama-produced film about Rustin might not be the one that John would make, it's not a bad start