I hopped on Friday’s livestream mere hours after my plane landed at Logan Airport. I took the red eye after spending a couple days out in Stanford, where I delivered a lecture on self-censorship at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. I’ll post the talk itself later this week. Despite feeling exhausted (does anybody ever actually sleep through a red eye?), I still had some leftover adrenaline from the lecture. In the first part of the conversation, I talk with TGS editor and writer Mark Sussman about the influence of Kenneth Arrow on the talk, why I think it’s important to analyze self-censorship as a value-neutral phenomenon, and how the audience reacted.
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In the second part of the stream, I was joined by Chloé Simone (formerly Valdary), a writer and the founder of Theory of Enchantment, for a conversation about race and identity in America and beyond. Chloé is a sui generis thinker and practitioner in these matters, and she’s quite a bit younger than I am, so I invited her on as both a valued commentator on race and a stakeholder. Whatever the future of race and identity hold, her generation will have to live with it in the decades to come.
In that segment of the livestream, after Chloé tells me how Donald Trump’s indiscriminate approach to rolling back DEI has damaged her business, we move on to the relationship between the spiritual and the social. Chloé believes that stereotyping emerges from a human tendency to project the faults we find in ourselves onto others, and her coaching practice involves helping people accept those flaws. Such a tendency may help explain the rise of right-wing identity politics—it’s a matter of mimetic behavior. In the past, Chloé has been a defender of the State of Israel, but she explains how a trip to Bethlehem helped her understand an important part of the Palestinian experience. She finds that willingness to understand the humanity of the other side lacking in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s plea for the Palestinians in The Message. We finish the conversation with some clarifying remarks on the future of race and the idea of racelessness.
