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Ken Stern (Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate) joins Amna and Jeff to discuss these urgent questions: Are campuses hotbeds of antisemitism? How do we define antisemitism in the first place? Is there a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? How have colleges handled the student protests around Gaza? Why are so many higher education institutions facing Title VI lawsuits? What counts as a “hostile” campus environment? How should we educate students about the Israel/Palestine conflict? Show Notes* International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism* Kenneth Marcus, director of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, explains why universities and colleges should adopt the IHRA definition* Ken Stern, bio (Bard; Wikipedia); see also this New Yorker profile* Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (University of Toronto Press, 2020)* Bard College Center for the Study of Hate* On quotas for Jewish students in higher education, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton* Stern complements Wesleyan President Michael Roth for how he handled student protests—see Roth's New York Times op-ed from the fall of 2024, “I'm a College President, and I Hope My Campus Is Even More Political This Year”* Here is the poll that Stern mentions about how Jewish and Muslim students understand the phrase “from the river to the sea”* full text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including Title VI* 2004 “Dear Colleague” Letter on Title VI and Title IX Religious Discrimination in Schools and Colleges from the Office of Civil Rights * On how the Office of Civil Rights currently defines a “hostile environment,” see this 2023 “Dear Colleague” Letter on Shared Ancestry * Donald J. Trump, Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, December 11, 2019* Here is the op-ed where Jared Kushner declares that “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”: “President Trump Is Defending Jewish Students,” New York Times, December 11, 2019* Donald J. Trump, Executive Order on Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, January 29, 2025. See also this White House “Fact Sheet” and Len Gutkin's dispatch on the E.O. in the Chronicle of Higher Education* The U.S. Department of Education maintains a list of pending Title VI cases here* Crimson coverage of Harvard's decision to adopt the IHRA definition available here and here* on publishing Mein Kampf in Germany in 2016 for the first time since World War II, see coverage in the Guardian here and here * On how Whitefish, Montana responded to a proposed march by white supremacists in 2016/17, see this New York Times article, “How a Small Town Silenced a Neo-Nazi Hate Campaign” * We have written several pieces on student activism and the War in Gaza—see:* “Colleges Are Cracking Down on Free Speech in the Name of ‘Inclusion'”* “Student Activism is Integral to the Mission of Academe” &* “Campus Protests Don't Undermine the College Mission”* The Chronicle of Higher Education has had some great coverage of the debates surrounding the IHRA definition; see here, here and here * on “hate speech” laws, see Nadine Strossen's superb 2018 book, HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship* On the perils of confusing criticism of a government with attacks against a particular nationality, ethnicity or race, see this Chronicle Review piece about the censorship of a Chinese artist at George Washington University in 2022* For a data-driven analysis of the state of antisemitism in the U.S. on campuses and beyond, see this piece by Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Our friend and colleague Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has a new book out. And it's a tour-de-force. We Have Never Been Woke is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the economic, political and cultural divides between the haves and the have-nots in the United States. We were delighted to host Musa for a book talk on the Carleton campus last month. He spoke with Amna in front a packed house. This is episode 2. Episode 1 is available here. Show Notes* On the limitations of diversity training, see this piece from Musa, “Diversity is Important. Diversity-Related Training is Terrible.” Also see this piece we wrote in Inside Higher Ed, “Don't Mistake Training for Education.” And this short, animated explainer video we made, “Training is Performative. Education is Transformative”* Georgetown philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote the book on elite capture; here's a précis in the Boston Review. And this piece by Táíwò, published in The Philosopher, is also worth reading: “Being-In-The-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference”* Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites by Mitchell Stevens is arguably the best book ever written on how the many advantages of the rich and well-off accumulate in the race to get into the most prestigious schools* On the incentives for students of color to highlight their trauma in college admissions essays, this NYT piece is excellent, “When I Applied to College, I Didn't Want to ‘Sell My Pain.'” On “racial gamification” in college admissions, see Tyler Austin Harper, “I Teach at an Elite College. Here's a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions”* College essays are more strongly correlated with social class than SAT scores. See this journal article by A.J. Alvero et al.* On the question of whether college admissions tests drive or reflect social inequalities, see this Banished episode (“Should More Colleges Drop the SAT and ACT?”) and this article in Inside Higher Ed (“Tests are not the source of inequities in American society”)* On the test-optional debate, see this article from the New York Times, this study from Dartmouth College and these comments from the MIT Dean of Admissions* Bertrand Cooper, “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?” (Current Affairs, May/June 2021)* Matt Taibbi discussed the controversy surrounding former Intercept journalist Lee Fang here This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Our friend and colleague Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has a new book out. And it's a tour-de-force. We Have Never Been Woke is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the economic, political and cultural divides between the haves and the have-nots in the United States. We were delighted to host Musa for a book talk on the Carleton campus last month. He spoke with Amna in front a packed house. Here are some of the highlights. More to come in our next episode in about a week's time. Show Notes* Musa's personal website * Follow Musa on twitter here, bluesky here* We Have Never Been Woke has attracted widespread attention and acclaim in the media; see, for example, these articles in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Yorker & The Washington Post This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to PEN America's Jeremy Young about what a second Trump administration holds in store for higher education. It was an informative—and sobering—conversation. Over the next four years, we should be prepared for a tsunami of ideologically-driven threats to academic freedom, campus free expression and the basic integrity of higher education. If you would rather read than listen, there is a transcript attached below. Show NotesPEN America's *Educational Censorship* page is a terrific resourceOn Christopher Rufo, see Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory,” New Yorker, June 18, 2021 and Michael Kruse, “DeSantis' Culture Warrior: ‘We Are Now Over the Walls,'” Politico, March 24, 2023. For Rufo's take on critical race theory, in his own words, see this YouTube video. Here is the full text of Executive Order 13950, which became the template for most of the anti-CRT (or “divisive concepts”) laws passed in red states. On the Stop WOKE Act, the marquee anti-CRT law signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, check out these two Banished episodes:The Sunshine State Descends into Darkness (Again)Will Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" Hold Up in Court?Jeffrey Sachs and Jeremy Young predict the future: “For Federal Censorship of Higher Ed, Here's What Could Happen in 2025” (PEN America, January 2, 2025)For more on the phenomenon of “jawboning,” see this page from FIRE and this page from the Knight First Amendment Institute On “anticipatory obedience,” see this excerpt from Timothy Snyder's 2017 book, On Tyranny On legislative challenges to campus DEI, see the Chronicle of Higher Education DEI Legislation Tracker. (We are quite skeptical of many conventional DEI efforts but state bans are a cure that is far worse than the disease )For a deeper dive on accreditation, see Eric Kelderman, “Trump's Vision for College Accreditation Could Shake Up the Sector” (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 2024)On Title VI investigations by the Office of Civil Rights, see Zach Montague, “Campus Protest Investigations Hang Over Schools as New Academic Year Begins” (New York Times, October 5, 2024)Here is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Kenneth Stern, one of the definition's main authors, explains why he is concerned it is being used to promote campus censorshipOn the prospect of a much heftier endowment tax for the country's wealthiest institutions, see Phillip Levine, “How Trump Could Devastate Our Top Colleges' Finances” (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13, 2025). Levine addresses the normative question—should college endowments be taxed?—here. TranscriptJeff: So, we're looking forward to a second Trump administration.Jeremy: Are we looking forward to a second Trump administration?Amna: No…towards.Jeff: We are anticipating…I personally am dreading a second Trump administration.Amna: This is Banished and I'm Amna Khalid, along with my colleague Jeff Snyder. Jeff and I were delighted to have the chance to catch up with PEN America's Jeremy Young at the recent American Historical Association conference in New York City. He's one of the most informed and astute analysts of government driven censorship in higher education today. We started by asking him to tell us a little about PEN America.Jeremy: PEN America is a 102 year old organization that exists at the intersection of literature and human rights. It is one of 140 PEN centers around the world which are in a loose network of PEN Centers governed by PEN International. PEN America's mission is to celebrate literature and defend the freedoms that make it possible, of which two of the foremost are academic freedom and freedom of expression.Amna: And what's your specific role?Jeremy: I am the Director of State and Higher Education Policy at PEN America, which means that I oversee our Freedom to Learn program, which leads actions and responses to educational censorship legislation, largely from the state governments, but also from the federal government. Things like DEI bans, critical race theory restrictions, and various other types of restrictions on faculty governance and university autonomy.Amna: We're eager to hear your predictions on what the higher ed sector should be bracing for with the second Trump administration. But first, Jeremy, could you please remind us of the nature of the attacks against higher education during Trump 1.0?Jeremy: In the summer and fall of 2020, this really happened late in the first Trump administration, there was a national panic around critical race theory, and this was created by Chris Rufo and some others really as a response, a backlash, if you will, against the George Floyd protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, the popularity of the 1619 Project, and so on, this sort of moment of racial reckoning. And so Rufo and others (Rufo is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute) decided to use this term critical race theory, which of course is an academic term with a particular set of meanings but to, as he put it, decodify and recodify it, essentially weaponize it to mean things that weren't all that connected to the actual theory of critical race theory and were really just a sort of catchall for criticisms of DEI and other race-based pedagogies and ideas. And so Rufo was able to convince president Trump to issue an executive order 13950 called Race and Sex Stereotyping that laid out a list of nine divisive concepts which bore some passing resemblance to critical race theory, but really were vague, and general, and banned all sorts of practices related to race, gender, and identity, and ideas related to race, gender, and identity that were unclear and difficult to interpret. Originally, this was a restriction aimed solely at trainings in government agencies…the executive order never went into effect. It was stayed by a court and repealed on the first day of the Biden administration. But that language of the divisive concepts then began to appear in state legislatures aimed now squarely at education. At first, at K-12 institutions primarily, and over time, higher education became more and more of the target.In 2023, we started to see a shift toward sort of broad spectrum attacks on higher education, moving away from some of the direct speech restrictions of the critical race theory bans, in part because of court cases that had gone adversely for those restrictions, and instead restricting broad swaths of university governance, including DEI offices, the ability of a university to manage diversity work on its own as a sort of shared governance function, tenure restrictions on faculty governance, restrictions on curriculum, which I think are going to be very prominent in 2025.Amna: You mentioned backlash to the 2020 racial reckoning as a key factor driving the anti-CRT movement. Can you say something more about where this opposition to CRT and now DEI is coming from?Jeremy: I think that there are several causes that are inseparable from one another. I think there are people who actually do want to restrict those particular ideas on campus, who want to advance a sort of triumphalist Western canon narrative of America as the victor, and they're just very opposed to any discussions that paint the United States in any way that is not hyper-patriotic and perfect. There's absolutely some racism, some sexism, some, some discrimination, discriminatory bias that's involved.I also think that there is a real desire to simply crush university power that I think comes out of the educational realignment that we have seen over the last 10 years. Kamala Harris won college educated Americans by 14 points, and four years ago, Joe Biden won them by four, and prior to the 2016 election, there was essentially no difference between the parties, really, at any time in American history on the axis of college education. There is now a sense I think among some conservative forces that instead of the long-time conservative project of reforming universities, having more viewpoint diversity, think of the Koch Centers in various institutions. Instead they're a place where liberals go to get educated, so we should just crush them, right? So I think that's part of it. It's just the goal of taking away universities' autonomy on everything is a key component.And the third component is political gain. And that is the one that has fluctuated the most over this period. Glenn Youngkin won a come from behind victory running on criticizing critical race theory in K-12 schools. And Steve Bannon said in 2021, I think about critical race theory and I see 50 new House seats in the midterm elections. Now, when that didn't happen, I think it began to become clear that these attacks are not as salient as they were thought to be. I think in 2023 and 2024, there was a real move away from that, especially with, also with the collapse of the DeSantis presidential campaign, which was built entirely around this idea of him being, fighting the war on woke. There was a sense that, maybe you still want to do these things, but now it's going to be quiet, it's going to be stealth mode, because there's no political gain to be gotten from having a big press release around this, around the Stop WOKE Act. But the other two motivations, the motivation of restricting certain ideas about race; and the motivation of smashing the power of higher education, those have remained constant.Jeff: Very succinct and helpful. Thank you. You and your colleague Jeffrey Sachs recently wrote an informative and sobering piece about Trump's plans for higher ed in 2025 and beyond. Maybe you could tell us a little about your key predictions. The first one you mention is jawboning. What is jawboning and why should we be worried about it?Jeremy: Jawboning, put simply, is when government officials, instead of passing a law requiring someone who isn't a government official to do something, they simply browbeat or bully or threaten them into doing it. In some ways you can look at the congressional hearings as a form of jawbonings or making threats against presidents at Columbia and Harvard and so on. But the classic example is actually what we're seeing at the state level where lawmakers are simply going to university presidents and say, saying, okay, we're not going to pass a DEI ban or a curriculum restriction. We're going to simply request that you make one on your own or we'll cut your funding. Or we'll pass one next year that's worse than anything you could imagine. It's a very intimate form of censorship, right? It takes restrictions out of the legislative process where they can be challenged at a hearing; out of the judicial process where they can be challenged on constitutional grounds; and every single one of these bills has at least some constitutional infirmities. And instead makes it just a threat, right? We're gonna cut your budget. What are you gonna do about that? It's a very difficult position for presidents to be in because they don't have a lot of leverage.Jeff: I think it was Yale historian Timothy Snyder who coined the term anticipatory obedience.  He said it was a dynamic that's often seen under conditions of rising authoritarianism. So you've got individuals and groups that start to make concessions they think will appease the powers that be. Is there a connection here to jawboning?Jeremy: Yes, so we talk about over compliance and pre-compliance. We're not going to comply with the letter of the law, we're going to comply with the spirit of the law. There is a law in Alabama that passed in 2024 that restricts some elements of DEI, but does not actually ban outright the DEI offices. And every university in Alabama has treated it as though it is an outright ban. And that's significant, in particular, because of the nature of these laws. You know, you go look at a set of statutes in a state legislature or the federal government, what you'll notice is that most laws are very precise. Think about traffic laws. What are you allowed to do on the road? It's very specific. You can drive this many miles an hour this particular way. There's no room for interpretation. There's no room for judgment because the goal is to make you comply with the law. These laws are intentionally vague. They ban broad swaths of ideas which are never defined in the laws.What does it mean to say, for instance, one of the divisive concepts, to say that you're not allowed to say that the United States is fundamentally racist. What does that mean? It doesn't say in the law what that means. It's left up to your interpretation, which means whoever is going to enforce that law gets to decide whether you violate it. That is actually a constitutional violation. It's against the 14th Amendment. And while the courts have found all sorts of infirmities with these laws, that's the one they've found the most consistency. Not freedom of speech, not racial discrimination but vagueness. So over-complying with a vague law is, it's difficult to avoid because these laws lend themselves to over-compliance because they're so vague. But it's also vitally important to avoid doing that.The other thing that we see is pre-compliance, which is just imagining that the legislature is going to pass a law but then whether or not they do it. We intervened with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, one of the seven accrediting bodies because they were basically enacting what a restriction in Project 2025 that would have forbidden them to have a DEI standard for universities they accredit. And just doing it preemptively.It's not clear whether the education department is able to pass that restriction without legislation. And it's not clear whether legislation or the regulation would survive a court challenge. And they're just saying we'll just take it out. That's pre-compliance. You don't want to do that. And what we argued successfully, is that, again, even if you don't think an accreditor should have a DEI standard, we don't take a position on that. The worst time to get rid of your DEI standard is one month before a new administration that's promised to ban it tells you to. That's the moment when you put up your back and say, no, we're not going to comply with this.Jeff: Jeremy, tell us a little bit more about the new Trump administration's plans to disrupt the conventional work of accreditors.Jeremy: So higher education institutions are accredited by one of seven accrediting bodies, six of which have historically served certain regions, but now under new federal regulations the university can work with any of the seven accreditors. But they still tend to be concentrated in regions.Accreditation is really the only thing that separates a real substantive university from a diploma mill; and the way that accreditation is enforced, is that the Department of Education will only provide federal student financial aid, which 55 percent of all students receive, to schools that it recognizes as legitimate accreditors, which currently is those seven institutional accreditors. They are private or nonprofit organizations. They're run by academics. They have their pluses and minuses, but they are pretty much the guarantor of institutional quality in higher education. And if you look at Project 2025, everything that they say they want to do to higher education is focused on accreditation. They have identified these accreditors as the soft underbelly of higher education. And the simplest thing that they want to do and that they probably will at least try to do is to ban accreditors from having DEI standards, of which six of the seven currently do.But they really want to go further. What they really want to do is to undermine the system of accreditation itself by allowing any jurisdiction, any state, to either charter its own accreditor or serve as its own accreditor. So Ron DeSantis could become the accreditor for all universities in Florida. And now instead of those universities having DEI offices, he can say you cannot be accredited in the state of Florida unless you've banned DEI and basically instituted a classical curriculum, a Hillsdale style classical curriculum. It's a little more complicated than project 2025 makes it sound. Our analysis is that while they may attempt to do it through regulatory action, the process of negotiated rulemaking in the Department of Education is sufficiently complex that it would probably stop them from doing it and so that probably means that they need legislation to change the Higher Education Act, which would be subject to a filibuster.So this is something that we will be watching to see if they try to do it administratively. It may not be possible. And we'll also be watching if they try to slip it into one of those reconciliation bills that are being proposed that would be able to go through without a filibuster.Jeff: So that's how the accreditation system might be weaponized. You and Sacks also identify Title VI enforcement by the Office of Civil Rights as a key area of concern. Maybe we can break this down into its component parts. What is the Office of Civil Rights and what's Title VI?Jeremy: Sure. So the Office of Civil Rights is an office within the Department of Education that ensures that educational institutions meet the requirements of the various civil rights laws. It covers Title VI funding, which is funding that is tied to financial aid for universities, and it makes sure that institutions that are receiving federal financial aid are following these civil rights protections. It is an office does good work and we have a good relationship with the office.We have some concerns about the way that the Biden administration has been investigating and enforcing agreements with universities around antisemitism. We expect things to get far worse in the new administration. We expect that any university that has any sort of protest or any faculty member who expresses pro-Palestinian views is going to be investigated and sanctioned by the Office of Civil Rights. We expect they're going to launch lawsuits. They're going to really go after universities. So it is an office that is going to be used in some really aggressive ways to restrict speech on campus.Jeff: In terms of restricting speech, you and Sachs are especially worried about the trend on the part of colleges and universities, not to mention states and the federal government, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Why is this so concerning to you both?Jeremy: So the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism is a very interesting document. It starts with a description that is quite thoughtful and then it gives a list of examples of things that could be forms of antisemitism or could accompany antisemitism, and that list includes things like singling out the state of Israel for special criticism that other states are not singled out for that do engage in the same actions or just you know criticizing Zionism, things like that. Which in the context of what that definition was designed for yes, sometimes when you see those statements, it's worth perking your ears up and asking, is this accompanying antisemitism or not?What the laws are doing, and this comes from a model bill that the Goldwater Institute wrote in 2016, and it's now being suffused into all these federal and state policies, is to take those examples of possible antisemitism and change it from possible to definite antisemitism. So anytime you criticize the state of Israel, it's antisemitism. And then writing that into law, saying that universities have to treat this as any instance of this broad definition of antisemitism as hate speech or as a form of harassment. The author of that definition, Kenneth Stern has repeatedly said that it is not designed to be used in that way. In fact, he said it's unconstitutional to use it in that way. And yet that's what we're seeing. So that's the concern. It's not that you shouldn't have a definition of anti Semitism, although I will say our statutes tend not to define particular types of hate speech because it's too subjective, right? This is the reason that we have definitions like severe, pervasive, and targeted for harassment. You're looking at a pattern of behavior because each individual case is protected by free expression.Jeff: I understand that the Office of Civil Rights is currently conducting dozens of Title VI investigations stemming from campus protests over the war in Gaza. There are widespread allegations of antisemitism, many of which are accompanied by competing charges of Islamophobia. How do you think we should make sense of this?Jeremy: These are complex situations. Lots of universities are getting them wrong. Some universities are being overly censorious, some not enforcing harassment protections. And it's right and proper for OCR to investigate these things. The problem is that they are not always coming up with the right findings. That they're not always protecting free expression, balancing free expression adequately with the need to protect students from harassment. We're seeing universities implement draconian time, place and manner restrictions on speech. So just the fact that OCR and the Congress are making all these threatening noises about restricting speech leads a lot of universities to do the censor's work for them.Amna: Jeremy mentioned one other thing the new Trump administration has made ramblings about, which is ramping up the endowment tax on the country's wealthiest institutions. Please see an informative Chronicle of Higher Education article by Philip Levine, linked in the show notes.What all these attacks or interventions, depending on your point of view, have in common, is that they seek to undermine the autonomy of colleges and universities. Here's Jeremy.Jeremy: University autonomy is not a principle that is very widely understood in the United States. It's much more common in Europe where there's an autonomy index and all sorts of things as a way of protecting academic freedom. But it's a vital component of academic freedom. We think about academic freedom in the U.S. primarily as being the freedom of an individual faculty member to speak their mind or to engage in their research or teaching. But, in reality, that freedom can only be protected so long as the people overseeing it, the university administration, are free from the ideological control of the government. The key here is ideological control. We aren't saying that the government doesn't have a budgetary responsibility to oversee the university, or that there isn't a role for the government in community relations, or student success, or access and completion, or any of these things. But when it comes to ideas, what ideas can be present on a campus, whether it's in the classroom, whether it's in a DEI office, anywhere on campus, that is not the government's business, and it cannot be the government's business, or ultimately everyone on campus is simply going to be currying favor with whatever political party is in charge.Amna: Jeremy, this has been wonderful and you've been so kind to give us so much time. Thank you.Jeff: Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure.Amna: That was our conversation with Jeremy Young of PEN America on what Trump 2.0 portends for higher education. As of yesterday, Trump's second term has officially begun. Keep your eyes peeled and ears tuned for what's to come next. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to help us spread the word about Banished, and don't forget to comment and rate this show.Once again, this is Banished, and I'm Amna Khalid, along with Jeff Snyder. Until next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

We saw this clip of Columbia University History Professor Christopher Brown and wanted to share it far and wide. Dr. Brown delivered these remarks on Monday, April 20 at a faculty-led “Rally to Support our Students and Reclaim our University.” He was responding to two events: Columbia President Minouche Shafik's Congressional Testimony on April 17 and the arrest of more than 100 Columbia students the next day. Professor Brown focuses on what is happening at Columbia but his words serve as a powerful rejoinder to any and all:* grandstanding politicians, who have no real understanding or appreciation of the mission of higher education* timid academic leaders, who lack the wherewithal to stand up for faculty and make a case for the transcendent values of academic freedom and open inquiry Here is a transcript of Professor Brown's remarks:Good afternoon. I'm Christopher Brown, professor in the history department. This is the first time I've ever held a microphone at a protest of any kind. I'm not sure whether that's something to take pride in or not but I say it because this is not typical for me.I'm here because I am so concerned about what has happened at this university. With where we are now and with where we are going.Thursday, April 18, 2024 will be remembered as a shameful day in Columbia's history.The President's decision to send riot police to pick up peaceful protesters on our campus was unprecedented, unjustified, disproportionate, divisive and dangerous. We are fortunate. We don't know how fortunate we are. We are fortunate that no one was hurt.With that kind of show of force. With all those firearms, all it takes is one person to get nervous, a table to fall, a car or truck to backfire out on Amsterdam Avenue. Shots fired. The New York Police Department does not belong on this campus except in moments of extreme emergency.And that show of force was a sign of weakness. In trying to show that they meant business, what they showed was their incompetence.I want to say one other thing. And that's about the congressional testimony on Wednesday. And this is about academic freedom. It's also about Columbia.In three hours of testimony, the president of the university, to my mind, showed no pride in our institution. She said nothing meaningful about the virtues of this institution, of its people, of its faculty, of its staff, of its researchers--their dedication to excellence, their commitment to their students, the quality of the undergraduates and graduate students that we have here, the distinctive record of academic accomplishment and impact, the variety and rigor of the scholarship which is happening here today, the prospects for continued excellence. She didn't say anything about any of those things.She allowed slander of our institution to stand without rebuke. Soviet style education, no response. Intolerant bigots, no response. I know these folks and you know them too. That's not who we are and she should know that.There were members of Congress who wanted to decide who should be disciplined on this institution and how much, what should be taught, how it should be taught, who should teach, what academic department should exist and which should not, who should lose their leadership positions, who should be promoted, who should be fired.Those are academic questions. Those are not congressional questions.What is at stake? What is at stake is not just faculty governance. It's institutional independence. It's the sovereignty of Columbia University and every university like this one.The United States has the greatest colleges and universities in the world and that's why people come from around the world to study here, to research here and to teach here. That's our inheritance. The universities like this one. And we would be fools not to defend it in every corner from those who do not believe in the academic mission and the pursuit of academic excellence.So I have no confidence in her leadership. I'm speaking only for myself. I have no confidence in the president's leadership. With what she has said and with what she has not said; and with what she has done and what she has not done, she has forfeited the privilege to lead this great university. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

We recently appeared on "How Do We Fix It?", a wonderful podcast in search of constructive and practical ideas to address the many problems that plague our age. We had a fantastic time talking to the hosts Richard Davies and Jim Meigs about free speech, academic freedom and campus politics. We discussed DEI, Inc.—what the term means and why we think it's useful. And we argued that an ascendant discourse of harm is at the heart of today's threats to campus free expression, from the chilling effects of many DEI initiatives to the even chillier effects of anti-CRT legislation like Florida's Stop WOKE Act. Thank you to Richard and Jim for giving us their permission to post our discussion on Banished. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Celebrated as the bedrock of democracy, freedom of expression is often seen as an American or western value. Yet the concept has a rich and global history. In the spring of 2023 I offered a course on the global history of free expression. The course tracks the long and turbulent history of freedom of expression from ancient Athens and medieval Islamic societies to the Enlightenment and the drive for censorship in totalitarian and colonial societies. For the final assignment I asked students to write a letter to a person of their choosing reflecting on how their learning in class made them rethink the parameters of speech and expression in their own contexts. For the next few episodes I'll be featuring some of the student letters that deserve a wider audience.This episode features my former student, Aishwarya Varma, reading her letter to her friend Grace. Aishwarya graduated from Carleton College in 2023 and is now a software engineer at Target. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Worse than McCarthyism? In this episode of Banished, we explore the all-out assault on academic freedom in higher education in Florida. Turns out there's a long history of campus witch-hunts in the state. We spoke with Robert Cassenello (history professor at University of Central Florida), Paul Ortiz (history professor at the University of Florida), James Grossman (executive director of the American Historical Association) and Ellen Schrecker (professor emerita at Yeshiva University). Episode transcript available here. References & Links:* Will Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" Hold Up in Court?, Banished podcast episode, November 1, 2022. * Stacy Braukman, Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965, University Press of Florida, 2012. * Daniel Golden, “‘It's Making Us More Ignorant': Governor Ron DeSantis's anti-critical-race-theory legislation is already changing how professors in Florida teach,” Atlantic, January 3, 2023. * Karen L. Graves, And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, University of Illinois Press, 2009.* Josh Moody, “DeSantis Aims to Turn Public College Into ‘Hillsdale of the South,'” Inside Higher Ed, January 11, 2023.* Emma Pettit, “The Inquisition: State intrusion on higher ed is nothing new. Decades ago, Florida lawmakers tried to purge campus ‘immorality,'” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 11, 2022.* Pettit, “‘Private Little Hell': A Florida committee once hunted for gay people on Florida's campuses. Sixty years later, the effects linger,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2022. * Pettit, “A Florida University Is Quickly Assembling a List of Courses on Diversity. Why? DeSantis Asked,” January 3, 2023.* Victor Ray, “Florida Man Calls the Thought Police,” The Nation, January 11, 2022. * Christopher Rufo, "The Conservative Counter-Revolution Begins in the Universities,” YouTube, January 12, 2023. * Ellen Schrecker, “Yes, These Bills Are the New McCarthyism,” Academe Blog, September 12, 2021. * Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Oxford University Press, 1986. * Adam Steinbaugh, “Why Florida's betrayal of the First Amendment to ‘Stop WOKE' should concern everyone, including conservatives,” November 29, 2022.* Cathy Young, “Ron DeSantis, Chris Rufo, and the College Anti-Woke Makeover,” The Bulwark, January 16, 2023.* United Faculty of Florida website; UFF Collective Bargaining Agreement* “The Committee,” documentary film about the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee (or “Johns Committee”) * Florida HB 7 (aka the Stop WOKE Act)* Florida HB 233 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Banished returns with a special episode on the status of a lawsuit challenging Florida's “Stop WOKE Act.” To understand how this law threatens open inquiry and academic freedom, Amna talked to the two co-plaintiffs, University of South Florida history professor Adriana Novoa and University of South Florida senior Sam Rechek. For help with the legal arguments, Amna spoke with Adam Steinbaugh, attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Tucker Carlson claimed that tacos are American. Rick Bayless was attacked for appropriating Mexican cuisine. Jamie Oliver hired a team of cultural appropriation specialists to advise him when writing recipes, to make sure he didn’t run afoul of the new culinary orthodoxy.What’s going on in the restaurant world and at our dinner tables? Who exactly owns a cuisine, and why do we get so proprietary when it comes to food? On this week’s Banished, Amna Khalid talks with Constanza Ocampo-Raeder, professor of anthropology at Carleton College, about food, national cuisines and the politics of cultural appropriation.Note from Amna: Banished is taking an indefinite hiatus, but you can always continue to follow my thoughts on Twitter @AmnaUncensored, and my work at amnakhalid.com. Thank you for listening! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Amna Khalid talks with Laura Bates, Professor of English at Indiana State University and founder of Shakespeare in Shackles — a prison program for those in solitary confinement — about the Bard’s decline in the modern curriculum. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

One of the most popular musicals of all time, Grease seems to have fallen from grace. Most recently, two schools in Australia were planning to stage a joint production of the musical this year, but shelved it when students complained that the content of the musical was “offensive.”Why has the musical come under fire? Is it time to retire it? On this week’s Banished, Amna Khalid speaks with Scott Miller, founder and artistic director of New Line Theater, an alternative musical theater company in St. Louis. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Earlier this year, St. Olaf College’s Institute for Freedom and Community invited controversial bioethicist Peter Singer for a virtual conversation titled “The Point of View of the Universe.” This was an invitation in keeping with the mission of the institute, which is to explore “diverse ideas about politics, markets, and society” and “challenge presuppositions, question easy answers, and foster constructive dialogue.” Shortly after the event was announced, St. Olaf’s disability office sent out a campus-wide email, stating that it: “unequivocally reject[s] Peter Singer’s views on people with disabilities, which are harmful to our values, mission and ongoing efforts to provide an inclusive environment for our students, faculty and staff.”This week came news that the IFC’s director, Professor Edmund Santurri, would no longer helm the institute. His directorship had been rescinded. In today’s special episode, Amna Khalid speaks with Santurri about what exactly led to his termination. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

In fall 2021, the philosophy department at Rhodes College invited the bioethicist Peter Singer to speak to the school. A controversial and important figure, the New Yorker has called Singer the “world’s most influential living philosopher,” and in 2005, Time Magazine named him one of most influential people alive.But as one of the world’s foremost utilitarian philosophers, some of Singer’s positions have earned him detractors. In the build-up to his talk on “Pandemic Ethics,” several Rhodes students and faculty waged a campaign to have him disinvited on the grounds that “his reprehensible beliefs … deny the very humanity of people with disabilities.”At a time when other schools like MIT were cancelling speakers deemed problematic, the philosophy department at Rhodes stood firm. In today’s episode, host Amna Khalid speaks with department chair Rebecca Tuvel and professor Daniel Cullen about how and why they refused to disinvite Singer. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

In February 2020, The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, published a statement by more than two dozen scientists condemning the hypothesis that COVID-19 had leaked from a Chinese lab — effectively halting scientific inquiry along those lines. But a handful of researchers refused to rule out the so-called “lab-leak” theory and soon found themselves shunned and ostracized by their colleagues.Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and then-postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was one such researcher. This week on Banished, host Amna Khalid talks with Chan about the politicization of science.More from Booksmart Studios: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

If you’re a solver of crossword puzzles, you probably know that Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba. But that was just the beginning. Historians Peter Hicks and Rafe Blaufarb tell us the full story. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, was a regular writer for Scientific American for 18 years. With more than 200 monthy columns under his belt, he was hoping to match Stephen Jay Gould’s record run of 300 at Natural History and was due to hit his target within a few years. In December, 2018, however, he was abruptly let go.In this episode of Banished, Amna Khalid talks to Shermer about the souring of his relationship with SciAm, the importance of skepticism and the rise of censoriousness in recent years. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Badiucao is a Chinese political dissident and artist who self-exiled to Australia in 2009. In the buildup to the Beijing Olympics, he was catapulted into the limelight for a series of protest posters that at first glance seem like advertisements for the Games. On closer inspection, however, the images are a scathing visual commentary on the Chinese government’s human rights violations and the role of the Olympic Games in legitimizing the regime. In this episode of Banished, Amna Khalid speaks with Badiucao about his work, his activism and his life as a dissident. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Over the past five years or so, free speech — like so many other topics — has been weaponized for use in the culture wars. Far right media sources have embraced the free speech mantle, arguing that liberals and progressives who dominate higher education are silencing conservative voices. For many Republicans, “free speech” means having the right to express an opinion, regardless of how unfounded and unsubstantiated it may be. As a consequence, many on the left now incorrectly view free speech as a right-wing ideal.In this episode of Banished, Amna Khalid discusses the history and legacy of free speech with Jacob Mchangama, a Danish lawyer, human-rights advocate and author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, newly published by Basic Books. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Phillips has taught history at Collin College in Texas for the past 14 years, but after speaking out about the school’s anti-masking policy his contract was not renewed. Which makes him the fourth faculty member to lose his job there since Neil Matkin assumed the role of College President in 2015.Amna Khalid spoke with Phillips about what led to his firing, and about academic freedom more generally in American higher education. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

During her visit back to Pakistan in December, Banished host Amna Khalid spoke with Salima Hashimi — artist, curator, activist and former principal of the National College of Arts, the premier Art school of Pakistan. They discussed the state of free expression in Pakistan under the 11-year military regime of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who was a key ally of the United States in the Cold War; how things are now under a democratically elected government; and how she sees cancellation attempts to constrain free speech in the U.S. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

In the age of “cancel culture,” it comes as no surprise that the publishing industry is cowering before demands to remove “problematic” books. Dr. Seuss’s estate recently announced that it will no longer allow the publication and licensing of six of his books because of the racist and stereotypical imagery used for minority groups.Should these books no longer be published? Does a single stereotypical representation justify the pulling of a book? And who gets to decide? On this episode of Banished, Amna Khalid discusses Dr. Seuss’s life and legacy with Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Broadway-bound songsmith Frank Loesser wrote “Baby It’s Cold Outside” as a call-and-response duet for he and his wife to perform at parties. Several years later, the tune made its way into a movie and soon took the Christmas canon by storm. But is it a “rapey” relic of a bygone era that should be buried permanently in the winter snow? Amna Khalid investigates.Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.* TRANSCRIPT *MAN: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Do we have any more requests?WOMAN: Baby, It's Cold Outside!MAN: I think we can make that happen. Who wants to take the duet?AMNA KHALID: In the new Netflix rom-com Love Hard, Josh volunteers to sing a duet with his girlfriend — his pretend girlfriend, actually — Natalie:JOSH: Natalie and I got this one, Dad.KHALID: The two are out caroling with his family in snowy Lake Placid.NATALIE: Over my cold, dead, lifeless body. I am not singing that — that is like the sexual assault theme song.KHALID: Natalie refuses at first to sing that Christmas song, because, you know, it's that song — the one in which a man is possibly pressuring a woman into spending the night. But Josh has an idea.JOSH: Look, this is what we’re gonna do, okay? You just do your part. I will change my lyrics so the song doesn't sound so, uh, rapey. NATALIE: Fine, let's just get this over with.JOSH: Dad, hit it. 🎶NATALIE: I really can’t stayJOSH: No problem, there’s the doorNATALIE: I’ve got to go awayJOSH: I hear you, say no moreNATALIE: This evening has beenJOSH: Totally consensualNATALIE: So very niceJOSH: I hope you get home safe tonightKHALID: It's become fashionable in recent years to alter the lyrics of Baby, It's Cold Outside to make them less “rapey,” as the character Josh put it. Others have pushed back, however. The song, they claim, is about a desirous woman battling not the unwanted advances of her date but the unsolicited judgment of society.🎶LYNN GARLAND: I really can't stayFRANK LOESSER: But Baby, it's cold outsideGARLAND: I've got to go awayLOESSER: But Baby, it's cold outsideGARLAND: This evening has been —LOESSER: Been hoping that you'd drop inGARLAND: So very niceLOESSER: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceKHALID: I'm Amna Khalid. On this episode of Banished, The Bother with Baby.CHRIS WILLMAN: The song was written in 1944 as a song that Frank Loesser and his wife originally sang at a housewarming party.KHALID: Chris Willman is a longtime music journalist, currently at Variety.WILLMAN: Kind of like, the night’s about to end, we’re about to kick you out, and here’s a song about whether to stay or whether to go.KHALID: Wow, I would have loved to be at that party.WILLMAN: Oh, yeah. And apparently they performed it over a period of years to the point that, when it was licensed for a film in 1949, Frank Loesser’s wife resented it. She may have been joking, but she was resentful that it was no longer their private thing because they were such a hit on the party circuit with it.KHALID: The song existed in private for five years, sung only by Loesser and his wife Lynn Garland. The two made one of the very first recordings of the song, which we’re listening to now. 🎶LOESSER: Baby, make my conscious your guideGARLAND: I really can't stay LOESSER: Oh, Baby, don't hold outGARLAND AND LOESSER: Ah but it's cold outsideLOESSER/GARLAND in the clearKHALID: Baby was evocative of the holidays, it was redolent of cigarettes and booze and, yes, it was sexually suggestive.GARLAND: And it was our song.KHALID: That’s Lynn Garland from the documentary Heart and Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser:GARLAND: And we became the most desired guests at parties from coast to coast. And we never failed to slam.KHALID: Garland recalled once that, "Parties were built around our being the closing act.”🎶LOESSER: I thrill when you touch my handGARLAND: But don't you see? LOESSER: How can you do this thing to me?KHALID: It was merely the opening act, however, for the song itself. Baby was such a sensation at private gatherings that Loesser worked it into his score for the 1949 movie Neptune's Daughter. This would be the first time anyone heard the song outside of someone’s living room.WILLMAN: And when it went public in 1949 it kind of exploded. Immediately, people started covering it. My favorite version of the song, by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting. I think that was the biggest hit anyone had with it that year.🎶WHITING: I really can't stayMERCER:  But Baby, it's cold outsideWHITING: I've got to go awayMERCER: But Baby, it's cold outsideWHITING: This evening has beenMERCER: Been hoping that you'd drop inWHITING: So very niceMERCER: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceKHALID: No fewer than 10 separate recordings were made in 1949 alone. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Doris Day, Dinah Shore. They all put their stamp on the song, but the version you’re probably most familiar with is the one that Chris Willman prefers. The one you hear on adult contemporary radio stations every December, when they switch over to an all holiday format. The classic recording by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting.🎶WHITING: To break the spell MERCER: I'll take your hat, your hairs looks swellWHITING: I ought to say no, no, no sir MERCER: Mind if I move in closer?WILLMAN: I like it partly because it sounds like 1949. It really puts you in that era where these people are really playing out these roles. I think when people do modern versions it sounds kind of ridiculous because you don’t really buy it, that they have to go through this dance. It’s coming through the same radio where we hear all these incredibly sexually — not just suggestive but explicit songs — and so it’s hard to hear modern singers and still have that sense of reserve and that there are these restrictions on what they have to go through. And for some reason the sexual heat seems more intensified to me when it sounds like it’s happening in that era. Johnny Mercer sounds horny when he’s doing it.KHALID: Yeah!WILLMAN: And Margaret Whiting too. And then, you know, when you hear Willie Nelson and Norah Jones doing it, it’s just not the same.KHALID: And that’s precisely the question for many modern listeners of the song. It may be apparent that Mercer feels the “sexual heat” — but what about Margaret Whiting? Is she feeling it too? That all depends on how you choose to interpret the lyrics, or, in the case of Neptune’s Daughter, what you choose to see on the screen.🎶ESTHER WILLIAMS: I really can't stayRICARDO MONTALBAN: Baby, it's cold outsideWILLIAMS: I've got to go awayMONTALBAN: But Baby, it's cold outsideKHALID: In the 1949 movie, Ricardo Montalban repeatedly tugs at the arm of Esther Williams. He pulls her gently back onto the couch and even removes her hat and stole when she puts them on to leave. To 21st century sensibilities, this pas de deux can seem more predatory than playful. But that's not likely the way that audiences viewed it 70 plus years ago, when Baby won best original song at the 22nd Academy Awards.COLE PORTER: The winner is Frank Loser for “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” (Applause)KHALID: That was Cole Porter presenting Loesser with his one and only Oscar, for a song that stumbled from parlor to parlor on the party circuit, into the motion pictures and onto your Spotify holiday playlist. Or maybe you’ve deleted it from the playlist. Because it’s that song. Chris Willman.WILLMAN: And I never imagined it being controversial, in my naïvete. And then I remember going to an Aimee Mann Christmas show, sometime in the early 2000s I think. And she was having a dialogue onstage with a comedian, and they started talking about quote/unquote rapey the song was and why doesn’t anybody notice that — comically taking off on some of the more sort of, possibly predatorial aspects that people might pick up on in the song. And then all of a sudden in the late 2000s, this becomes a serious topic of debate. And that kind of shocked me, how seriously people were taking the idea that the song was quote-unquote “rapey.”REPORTER: A Bay-area radio station has now yanked the song from its airwaves.REPORTER: Well you won’t be hearing it on WDOK in Cleveland. The radio station’s decided to pull the song from their playlist.WOMAN: You know, it’s a sweet, flirty, fun holiday song.REPORTER: Is it a song about Christmas or creepy behavior? That’s the debate that has led radio station KOIT to ban a popular holiday tune from the airwaves.REPORTER: And you know what? It’s giving people yet another thing to disagree about.WILLMAN: Really in the late 2000s was when it reached peak controversy with radio stations suddenly banning it. The CBC said they were taking it off the air in Canada. There were stations in San Francisco and Denver and somewhere else that said we’re getting rid of the song. But certainly there were lots of serious essays being written too, from a feminist perspective, about how times have changed, people need to recognize that the song celebrates sexual coersion. And then there was the backlash to the backlash from people like me, saying: No, this song is not what you think it is or what you’ve come to believe it is. It’s actually very feminist, very sex-positive to use kind of a corny term.KHALID: According to Chris Willman and other fans of the song, it’s a mistake to interpret the song as if it were written today. Not only is that ahistorical, it’s simply incorrect. Simply put, the song doesn’t mean what many think it means.WILLMAN: People who read it as a date rape song would seize on things like What’s in this drink? As if the guy had placed a drug in her drink. Which is a very contemporary reading because nobody was talking about date rape drugs in 1949, and the, you know, real interpretation of the lyric is that it’s just a strong drink. But reading further into it, she’s trying to pass off the excuse for her own sexual desire onto these things like, “It must be the alcohol affecting me.” But she is the one saying maybe just a cigarette more or maybe half a drink more. It’s really about her putting up every excuse she can think of for why people might not think it was right that she spent the night. You know, one of the key lines to me is I ought to say no, no, no. She’s not saying I want to say no, no, no. It’s I ought to. Just in that word choice alone I think you understand where the song is coming from circa 1949, those expectations of society.🎶ELLA FITZGERALD: I really can't stayLOUIS JORDAN: But Baby, it's cold outsideFITZGERALD: I got to go awayJORDAN: But Baby, it's cold outsideKHALID: In the mid-1940s, the idea that a woman would desire casual sex was taboo. For her to say as much explicity would be deemed “prurient” by network censors, and so Loesser had no choice but to employ subtext. 🎶FITZGERALD: And father will be pacing the floorJORDAN: Listen to the fireplace roarKHALID: In the version you’re listening to now, also recorded in 1949, you hear Ella Fitzgerald chafing at the double standard, when her reputation as a Lady would be ruined if word got out that she stayed the night. Meanwhile, Louis Jordan is free to plead his case for a one-night stand.🎶BETTY CARTER: I really can't stay RAY CHARLES: Betty, it's cold outsideKHALID: Loesser uses musical counterpoint to underscore that Baby is more conversation than conquest. It’s a technique you may recall from his opening number to Guys and Dolls — but his mastery of it is evident in the brilliant 1961 recording of Baby by Ray Charles and Betty Carter. Here Carter emerges from the stifling hypocrisy of the 1950s onto the cusp of a more liberated decade. Both Charles and Carter are softly stepping onto each others’ toes as they negotiate their roles and desires.🎶CHARLES: Beautiful, please don’t hurry.CARTER: Well, maybe just a half a drink moreCHARLES: Why don’t you put some records on while I pour CARTER: The neighbors might thinkCHARLES: Betty, it’s bad out there CARTER: Say, what’s in this drink? CHARLES: No cabs to be had out thereKHALID: Carter is perhaps weary of having to pretend and — without her friends and family fretting and finger-wagging — might make known her own sexual appetite. That’s what Lady Gaga did when she and Joseph Gordon-Levitt gender swapped the parts back in 2013 on the Muppets Holiday Spectacular:🎶GORDON-LEVITT: I really can't stay GAGA:  But Baby, it's cold outsideGORDON-LEVITT: I've got to go away GAGA: But Baby, it's cold outsideGORDON-LEVITT: This evening has been GAGA: Been hoping that you'd drop inGORDON-LEVITT: So very nice GAGA: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceKHALID: But Gaga wasn’t the first woman to bare her libido in the song.WILLMAN: The woman who helped popularize the song, Zooey Deschanel in Elf, she’s part of a duo called She & Him. They introduced it into their repertoire when they made a Christmas album (and they’re doing a tour this year) where they did a role reversal on the song. I think that’s alright. I mean, there’s a tradition of doing a role reversal with the song that goes back to the original movie, Neptune’s Daughter, where first you see Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams doing it the way you know it. And then there’s a more comedic reprise where Red Skelton and I believe Betty Garrett do it and she’s virtually attacking him to the point that it almost seems really predatorial in that regard.🎶SKELTON: I really can't stay GARRETT:  But Baby it's cold outsideSKELTON: I've got to go away GARRETT: But Baby it's cold outsideSKELTON: This evening has been GARRETT: Been hoping that you'd drop inSKELTON: So very nice GARRETT: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceWILLMAN: But then to hear Zooey Deschanel say that the only way they could do the song on their Christmas tour was to do the role reversal … made me kind of sad.KHALID: For those who find Baby creepy, a role reversal, it turns out, is not the only way to perform the song. I said at the beginning that it’s become fashionable in recent years to simply rewrite the song. In 2016, Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski performed their updated lyrics on the Minnesota radio station The Current.🎶LIZA: I really can't stayLEMANSKI: Baby I'm fine with thatLIZA: I've got to go away LEMANSKI: Baby I'm cool with thatLIZA: This evening has been LEMANSKI: Been hoping that you get home safeLIZA: So very nice LEMANSKI: I'm glad you had a real good timeLIZA: My mother will start to worry LEMANSKI: Call her so she knows you are comingLIZA: Father will be pacing the floor LEMANSKI: Better get your car a-hummingLIZA: So really I'd better scurry LEMANSKI: Take your time.LIZA: Should I use the front or back door?LEMANSKI: Which one are you pulling towards more?KHALID: The video of this performance has been viewed well over a million times on YouTube alone. And that romantic comedy Love Hard — the one in which Josh changes the lyrics to make them less “rapey” — that’s been showing up on lists of the year’s best Christmas movies.🎶NATALIE: Or maybe just a half a drink more.JOSH: Slow down, that’s quite a pour. NATALIE: The neighbors might think JOSH: Just my old friend Troy NATALIE: Say what's in this drink? JOSH: It’s just Lemon La CroixNATALIE: I wish I knew how JOSH: To take a hint? NATALIE: To break the spell JOSH: Do you know how to spell farewell? NATALIE: I ought to say no, no, no. JOSH: I’ll call you an Uber, they’re close. NATALIE: At least I can say I tried. JOSH: I feel like you’re not trying at all. NATALIE: I really can’t stay.JOSH: Well, maybe just go out. NATALIE: But Baby, it’s cold outside. JOSH: But Baby, just go outside. KHALID: Some of these rewritten versions are admittedly clever and funny, but I confessed to Chris Willman that the controversy took me quite by surprise.KHALID: And in part, I should say, it’s because of where I come from. You know, I come from Pakistan and I’ve grown up with Bollywood films — Bollywood films of the 70s and 80s — and, in that time period, any kind of explicit reference to sex or a sexual encounter or desire was, of course, not considered socially acceptable. Hence all these songs in Bollywood films. That’s their purpose, it’s to be suggestive. And this trope of one of them saying stay — usually the guy — and the girl saying No I must go because look at what the world will say if I stay is so commonplace in Bollywood. Have we gone to the other extreme where we’ve lost the sense of what constitutes romance and by overemphasizing the need for explicit consent and reading everything through that lens?WILLMAN: Well it’s funny, that comes up when people have done rewritten lyrics, where they’re emphasizing consent. And I think initially that was done  satirically, like at every turn the guy is saying, Well, yeah, maybe you should go … Get outta here, I’ll … sure, I’ll call Uber. And I thought that was a funny take on it, but then you see people seriously rewriting it. And first off the song is hilarious. Let’s just say that. It’s a comedic song. And when you’re gonna take the comedy out of it, along with the dance of seduction or agreement or whatever is happening and say, Would you sign this contract please? There’s not much of a song at that point. You know, it’s such a masterpiece, really, of songwriting — the way the rhyme scheme happens between the two different parts simultaneously back and forth, you know it’s very sophisticated as a duet. To take all that away and say that nothing is important about the rhymes, or the themes or the general tone of the song is really to lose the point.🎶“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1949) in DanishWILLMAN: You know, it holds such a unique place in the Christmas canon, even though it’s not a Christmas song, because it is flirty and racy and you just hear so much Christmas music that is not really about romance. Or if it is, it's extremely schmaltzy. To hear two people come on who are suddenly expressing real feelings in these very funny and literate lyrics, there’s nothing else on the radio like it. There’s nothing that funny or that sexy in the Christmas music canon, and so even the people that think they should be offended by it can’t bring themselves to get rid of it.KHALID: And that’s perhaps the song’s single greatest contradiction. Why hold onto it at all if we have to censor it? And yet there it is, year after year. More than 450 covers of the song and counting. Role reversals and rewrites and translations, including this Danish language recording that is among the very oldest, from 1949.If you liked what you heard today, help us spread the word and support our work at Booksmart Studios. Become a paying subscriber and you will get access to full interviews, bonus segments, written columns and more.Don’t forget to rate what you've heard here today on whichever platform you listen on and leave a comment so we know what you think. Our success here at Booksmart depends as much on you as on us.Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And I, as always, am Amna Khalid.CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this piece, the singer of the duet with Ray Charles was misidentified as Betty Page. The actual singer was Betty Carter. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, Harvard announced it will extend its test-optional admissions policy for at least another four years. The stated reason is that the pandemic has reduced access to test sites — but this decision has added grist to the test-elimination mill. The movement to do away with standardized testing is predicated on the idea that tests are culturally and racially biased, and that they don’t reflect the true abilities of students. Some even refer to them as proxies for privilege.On this episode of Banished, Amna Khalid discusses testing and meritocracy with Jeff Snyder, associate professor of educational studies at Carleton College. Snyder argues that scrapping admissions tests won’t make a dent in two of the biggest advantages held by more affluent students: legacy status and athletic skills. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Author and professor Ashley Hope Pérez gained prominence for her novel Out of Darkness, which explores themes of segregation, love and family against the backdrop of the 1937 New London School explosion. The book won rave reviews from critics and the Américas Award from the Library of Congress, but has recently become embroiled in controversy after calls to ban it from school libraries. Today on Banished, host Amna Khalid speaks with Pérez about the firestorm surrounding her book, and the rise in concerted efforts from a certain part of the political spectrum to censor literature that might highlight the troubling history of gender and race relations in the United States. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Scapegoating particular communities during an epidemic — be it tuberculosis, HIV or COVID-19 — is nothing new. Outbreaks of disease are often accompanied by the demonizing of some portion of humanity that is supposedly the source of the contagion. They are to blame.Must it be this way? Why do we feel the need to point the finger at each other when threatened like this — even when the threat is ultimately not from people but from viruses or bacteria? And what does this sort of blanket indictment during a health crisis have in common with cancel culture? Host Amna Khalid discusses these pressing issues with Nicholas Christakis, the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, and the author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, now out in paperback.TRANSCRIPTDONALD TRUMP: Covid-19 — that name gets further and further away from China, as opposed to calling it the “Chinese virus.” [Cheers]...it’s got all different names: Wuhan…...Chinese virus......Kung flu, yes. [Cheers] Kung flu...AMNA KHALID: That was former president Donald Trump taking every opportunity to suggest that the coronavirus was spread by China — rather than by American apathy and incompetence. Of course, scapegoating particular communities during an epidemic — be it tuberculosis, HIV or Covid — is nothing new. Outbreaks of disease are often accompanied by the demonizing of some portion of humanity that is supposedly the source of the contagion. They are to blame.Must it be this way? Why do we feel the need to point the finger at each other when threatened like this — even when the threat is ultimately not from people but from viruses or bacteria? And what does this sort of blanket indictment during a health crisis have in common with cancel culture?Joining me to talk about the connection is Nicholas Christakis, the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering education at Yale University. A sociologist and a physician, Christakis directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale and is the author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. He is also a keen critic of cancel culture, especially as it's playing out on college campuses.Nicholas, thanks for being here.NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS: Thank you so much for having me.KHALID: We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Some people think we're towards the end of it, but I believe you describe it as towards the end of the beginning of the pandemic, which I, as an historian of medicine, would very much agree with having studied how epidemics play out. But shortly after we were hit by COVID, you wrote a most phenomenal book called Apollo's Arrow, and I was struck by how quickly you were able to put together what you were seeing, both of how the virus was progressing and the kinds of ways in which it was impacting our society. So can you tell me a little bit about what led you to write that book?CHRISTAKIS: What happened was I had a long standing collaboration with some Chinese scientists. We had been studying phone data that tracks people's social interactions and their movements, doing a bunch of research on different topics. And it dawned on us in January of 2020 we could use that data to study the spread of the virus. And we scrambled, beginning January 15th, to write a paper that was eventually published in April in the journal Nature about how the flow of people through Wuhan perfectly predicted the timing, intensity, and location of the epidemic throughout China through the end of February. So as a result of this, I was paying attention to this virus very early on. And as a result of that, became aware of the fact that on January 24th the Chinese promulgated regulations that required 930 million people to stay at home. In other words, the Chinese saw in the virus an enemy of sufficient magnitude that they basically detonated a social nuclear weapon to stop it. And this really got my attention. Of course, I knew the history of epidemic disease having studied that. And I was following what Chinese, and soon after, Italian scientists were putting online. It was very clear to me this was going to be a serious epidemic. And meanwhile, our public discourse was very minimalizing. The president of the United States was saying it'll go away, which is ridiculous. Any expert knew that was false. So I began to send out Twitter threads with sort of basic EPI 101 information about here's what happens with respiratory pandemics. Here's what's going to unfold and so on. And to my amazement, several of those went viral. I think there was a hunger in the United States for sort of basic scientific information about respiratory pandemics. By the middle of March, I began to redirect all the efforts of my lab towards the pandemic — or most of the efforts, not all — March the 15th, I started writing the book and it was due July the 15th, four months later. That was Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. And the reason I was able to write the book so swiftly, I think, is that so much is known about respiratory pandemics. I mean, the thing to understand is that this experience so many of us are having and this way we've come to live right now, which feels so alien and unnatural, is not. Plagues are not new to our species. They're just new to us. We think this is crazy — what's happening — but that's ridiculous. Humans have been interacting with pandemic disease for centuries. I mean, they're in the Bible. They're in the Iliad. The canonical work of Western fiction begins with a plague. They’re in Shakespeare. They’re in Cervantes. This is a part of the human experience. And there is therefore expertise — both human experience and in our religious traditions, in our literary traditions and also scientific expertise, as you mentioned, in medical historians, in epidemiologists. People know. We know about these things. Therefore, pretty much everything that has happened, almost without exception, has been foreseeable.KHALID: So, as I was reading the book, Nicholas — and for our listeners, I should mention that the paperback version of the book has just come out with a new preface. And if you're listening to this episode, you should go out and get a version because there are substantive differences, I think, between the hardback and the paperback. But I want to go back to the book itself. And when I was reading it, what I was struck by was how you explain these really complicated, scientific things in a very accessible fashion. But to my heart, what speaks to me is how you bring precisely what you mentioned — the history of how humans have coped with pandemics — into the frame. Because in our own lifetimes, we've been fortunate in that we have not seen anything of this scale. We've seen, you know, the SARS-1. We've seen a few other — Ebola. But, particularly in the U.S., we've been pretty insulated, I'd say, compared to other historical times. And I just found it fascinating how you were able to weave that into a discussion of what's happening right now. One of the things that I do when I'm teaching my history of medicine course is I tell my students that historians are interested in epidemics precisely because they reveal the fault lines of society. It's like that pressure point where everything that is papering over differences kind of evaporates and you can see what's going on. And we saw that happen this time too. Particular communities get scapegoated. Can you say a little bit about that? I mean, we've heard our prior president talk about the virus as a “China virus,” as “kung flu.” There is demonization of certain peoples.CHRISTAKIS: One of the things that's so interesting about plagues is that they have a biological and epidemiological existence, but, as you're pointing out, they also have a sociological existence. They bring with them certain psychological, economic, and sociological impacts, which are pretty much invariant. For example, plagues are a time of denial and lies. We see denial and lies for thousands of years. People have said that we have accounts from bubonic plague outbreaks from, you know, 1500 years ago where observers say it's crazy. There's all this superstition around what's happening, you know. Or the emergence of quacks, you know, who sell nostrums to cure the plague that even people in real time observe doesn't work, for example. So the emergence of lies and denial is typical. Fear is typical. Grief — the grief making power of plagues, sort of depression. Marcus Aurelius writes about a plague in Rome, about how worse even than the deaths was the kind of sense of depression that had settled over the city. All of these things that we're experiencing on a psychosocial plane are things that have been observed with plagues in the past. And as you're highlighting, one further such thing is this notion of blame, because during times of plague, it is stereotypic to blame others. During, for example, the bubonic plague, the Jews were blamed, right? There was an ascendant antisemitism. Countless Jews in many cities were burned at the stake or buried alive, blamed wrongly — of course — for the plague. During HIV, for example, gays were blamed or Haitians were blamed or IV drug users were blamed. And during this epidemic, we've seen that Asians are blamed or migrants are blamed. Part of the reason, I think, psychodynamically we are so eager and willing to blame others is that the alternatives are more frightening. So another alternative is that the plague is the workings of an implacable God, right? That God is bringing annihilation to us, right? That's scary. Or another alternative is that the plague is the inexorable workings of the natural world. Well that's frightening too. Whereas if you imagine that human agency is responsible, that some other humans are causing the plague, then you might imagine, in a soothing sort of way, that human agency might cause the plague to remit, that there's something we can do to stop it. But even within the category of blame — this issue of who gets blamed and why do we blame certain other groups of humans? On the one hand, there have been voices that have said kill the other. The other is responsible. There have also always been voices that have said no, that's not the case. For example, even during the first outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1340s, Pope Clement VI, during this wave of anti-Semitism, in an astonishing set of statements for a sitting pope — by the way, he comported himself remarkably humanely during this whole episode, taking great personal risk, having real sorrow and sympathy for the plight of human beings — he observed, just very logically, he goes, it couldn't possibly be the Jews that are responsible because they're also dying. You know, just very basic reasoning, you know, like the plague is killing everyone. Why would the Jews be doing this to themselves? Or Saint Cyprian — and I'll just read this — people have often said, well, why wouldn't the emergence of a common threat — like a plague is like a shared enemy — why wouldn't it bind human beings together? So here is an observation by Saint Cyprian. During the third century of the common era, there was another plague in Rome. Rome was about a million people in those days, which is astonishing. 5,000 people a day were dying, and Saint Cyprian said, “It disturbs some that this mortality is common to us with others; and yet what is there in this world which is not common to us with others...So long as we are here in the world, we are associated with the human race in fleshly equality.” This idea that we're all together in this, facing this common threat, we shouldn't allow ourselves to be divided by these superficial differences, this tension between no, there shouldn't be a bright line between us and them, or yes, there should be a bright line between us and them is also an ancient feature of plagues.KHALID: I'm loving the fact that you're drawing out this tension because I think this tension is at the heart of how we deal with pandemics. You've got these two forces contending with each other. At one level, you've got people — even during the Black Death — who believed that this is a curse from God for not caring for the poor. But coming back to the implications of scapegoating and essentially, you know, for banishing people — people have been banished during times of pandemics and for chronic illnesses as well. There is the idea of “leper” colonies and people who were sent away who were suffering from leprosy. And it was not just a physical death that they were sent towards, but there is very distinctly a social death that takes place. Can you comment and reflect on that a little bit in light of what's happening today as well?CHRISTAKIS: If you think about it, short of killing someone or maiming them, ostracizing them is a very powerful sanction. Ostracism comes from the Greek word ostrakon, which means little shards of pottery that they would write someone's name in to ostracize. Or there are many traditional societies where a witchdoctor, a traditional healer, might sort of identify who is the person who is responsible for the woes in our group, and that person would be cast out. Or sailors' accounts, you know, of why a ship has suffered a calamity, and it must be because this person on our ship is bad, that person would be flung overboard, for example. So there are many, many ways in which this idea of purging a group of an individual might somehow represent a kind of catharsis. And be, by the way, a very serious sanction to the person that was sent out, whether guilty or innocent. Many of the examples I just gave are innocent people being sacrificed for the benefits of the group. Sometimes they are guilty parties and we don't want to execute them, but let's say we'll banish them, which was a bad, bad sanction in old days. Now, the reason it's such a bad sanction is that we are actually social animals. It is very vulnerable to be on your own. To be cast out of a group and to have to survive on your own elicits a lot of very serious anxieties in human beings because, in our ancestral past, to be on your own was risky. So banishment, whether as a punishment for a bona fide crime or as a kind of immoral, I would say, act of purification — I mean, you see this in, for example, in the Cultural Revolution, you know where people were picked from a group and everyone else got to feel good because they cast out this person. This is a perverse reflection of a very fundamental human fear and even a human tendency.KHALID: Yeah, there is a kind of in-group and outgroup, right? This kind of tribalism that suddenly can get very starkly reinforced.CHRISTAKIS: We see that also, by the way, in the suboptimal way our country has responded to the pandemic. So, for example, in my view, we have needlessly politicized things like mask wearing and vaccination. I think it's wonderful that we live in a plural democracy. We have a range of political beliefs about all kinds of topics. And we resolve our differences how? Not by force of arms, we vote. That's what we do in our society. We vote to resolve our differences. And I would rather live in the kind of heterogeneous political pluralism than in a political monoculture. So I like the fact that we have a civilized way — to the extent possible — of resolving our differences, which is terrific. But this idea that you're going to signal your political affiliation by whether you choose to get vaccinated or not is really dumb. The vaccine should be seen as a kind of technocratic, apolitical tool. If people wanted to politicize whether you got Moderna or Pfizer, I think that would still be stupid. But if they want to politicize whether you get a vaccine at all, I mean, I think that's just not only illogical but self-injurious.KHALID: We've talked about this tension and this tribalism that is present, but I would argue that the coronavirus or a disease is a historical agent in its own right in that it acts and causes change in a way that exacerbates existing tendencies and sometimes even sows the seeds — it's not just exacerbation — but sometimes even sows the seeds of new kinds of rifts within society. How would you respond to that?CHRISTAKIS: Anything that puts stress on a society, whether a war or a famine or a natural disaster like a major earthquake or a plague highlights divisions or stresses in a society. It can also elicit wonderful qualities. There's a whole literature on the communities that form in the wake of disaster, for example. So, when people are flung out of a city and they're living in a camp and how they help each other out, you know. There are, of course, criminals and thieves and others who take advantage of the situation, but people tend to bond together in these types of things. I think that the virus struck us at a particularly vulnerable moment from the point of view of the intellectual fabric of our society. So there were a number of macro trends that were happening. First of all, we were at century level highs of economic inequality. We had historically very high levels of political polarization, which political scientists have documented. Those were in the background. In addition, we had a kind of anti-elitism — partly reflecting that inequality — and swept up in that anti-elitism was a kind of anti-scientism. Scientists were seen as just another kind of elite that was feeding at the public trough, which is kind of, in my view, a wrong way to see scientists. It's like seeing judges as an elite. You know, like the judges are feeding at the public trough because they're paid by our taxes. Well no, we don't see judges as a constituency, right? We don't see judges as an interest group. Some people have come to see scientists that way. And we also, as a nation, seem to have lost the capacity for nuance, right? Like we had these conversations in which everything is black or white or you’re with me or you're against me, again reflecting the kind of politicization of so many of our disagreements, as you just said. So all of these things were happening in our society when the virus struck. And I think it really exploited that. I think many more thousands of Americans died because we were unable as a nation to come together, and, by the way, in my view, with the previous administration, were poorly led at the level of the White House. We were not well led. You could have come and you could have said, you know, the American people are being attacked by this external virus. We need to come together to rebuff this. We need to work together as a nation. There's a kind of appeal — almost a jingoistic appeal — that could have been made that I think would have been appealing to the right and the left politically that could have worked. I do fault the White House, but there were Democratic governors who also did a lousy job — and mayors. But the White House is the White House, right? I think the inability of the White House to organize an effective national response is sort of the flip side of the unwillingness of much of the citizenry to face up to the unpleasant reality. The plague struck and exploited or exacerbated a variety of ongoing problems in our society.KHALID: When you wrote your book and the hardcover came out, at that point, the lab leak theory was really pooh-poohed and wasn't really something that was being considered as a possibility. And between that and your next edition, people are thinking differently about it or new evidence has come to light. Could you reflect on where you stand right now on that?CHRISTAKIS: People early on were saying that there was no evidence that this was an engineered bioweapon. I think those people advancing that theory were seen as a little bit of like conspiracy theorists. When you make extraordinary claims, you need to have some evidence for the claim. Many people acknowledge that it was possible that this was a leak from a lab, but they thought — and I was one of them — that it was more likely that this was a zoonotic leap rather than a lab leak. So one theory is that this was a virus that was brought back from the wild into the laboratory for study and then inadvertently leaked. And that is, by the way, still possible. We don't have good evidence one way or the other. And certainly, Chinese secrecy about this raises suspicions. The other idea is that there was some unobserved natural leap from a bat to a human probably in sort of the second half of 2019. And that theory, I think, is still more likely, partly because we know there are many such zoonotic leaps. You mentioned some. Ebola is a zoonotic leap. SARS-1 in 2003 was a zoonotic leap. Influenza is a zoonotic leap. Zika virus, hantavirus, HIV. All of these things we've all lived through, these are all zoonotic leaps, well documented zoonotic leaps. It happens and it's happening increasingly. In fact, there's some evidence that the zoonotic leaps are happening increasingly partly because of climate change, if you can believe it. So there's a deep connection between climate change and pandemic disease. And so, I still think that is probably what happened in this case, but I can't be sure. There's no reason to politicize this. We'll go wherever the evidence leads us. I mean, I don't have a political dog in this fight.KHALID: But this is the part that's interesting, right? Like you said, we can wait for the evidence, but there is this tendency, again, to go down that blame route, to try and see it as maliciously intentioned and something that has a conspiracy behind it. With HIV, in your book, you were reflecting on how the gay population got scapegoated and you said it just so happens that the virus settles in a particular community and that is the one that gets stigmatized. It's not necessarily inherently anything about that community. Another kind of parallel movement in our society, particularly American society, where cancelations are on the rise, where somehow there is this fear of contagion of ideas, and therefore we can't even bear to listen to anyone who holds a viewpoint that is contrary to us, and we must banish them. You know, we must cancel them. It's happening all around us, but it's happening in institutions of higher education which should be the places where we slow down, take a step back, and like you said, wait for the evidence and think things through. But that's not what's going on. Do you see similar dynamics in our social ways of dealing with difference?CHRISTAKIS: You know, the contagion of ideas can be modeled in ways similar to the contagion of germs. And my laboratory has done a lot of work on spreading processes and social networks. We've developed a lot of data sets and mathematical models and ideas that are highly relevant to understanding such phenomena. On the issue of silencing one's opponents, the desire to silence one’s opponents is a very primitive and ancient desire as well. But I think it's a weak desire. You know, if you're so confident in the integrity and validity of your ideas, win the battle of ideas. Argue. Bring evidence and data and rhetoric and logic to the field of battle and win. It's only people who lack confidence, in my view, who actually secretly suspect that maybe their ideas are not valid, that seek to silence their opponents, to prevent their opponents from speaking.And we see this on the right and on the left. For example, on the right they don't want to fund gun research, gun epidemiology research. Why would you not want to fund basic research on how guns kill people? Well, maybe you're afraid that if we find such evidence, it might lead to new policies that you disagree with. And rather than winning the battle of ideas and arguing about the policies, you're like, well, let's just suppress the evidence. Same with climate change. On the left, things having to do with gender, the biological reality of sex, for example. People would rather suppress such evidence or contort such evidence rather than engage with the evidence in a very, you know, mature way and recognize the subtleties and the nuance in any of these topics. Or in behavior, genetics is another topic that the left doesn't want to explore — you know, the role of genetics in human behavior. This is weak minded, in my view. I would rather have a full airing of people's ideas. And I would rather try to create institutions in our societies like universities, which are special places for such airing. And incidentally, as James Mill famously said, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of it.”Your ideas get stronger when you test them against opponents. Why — when you fight in martial arts, why do you bow to your opponent? You're grateful to your opponent for giving you an opportunity to perfect your own skills. You couldn't do that without an opponent, right? It's the same in intellectual battle — you need to test your ideas. Whether it's scientific claims about the world or philosophical stances about the world, I think they get better in the crucible of contention. And so, this is why I am gravely concerned that there are many topics which have become taboo on university campuses, on the left and on the right. It's below a great nation like ours, and it's below our best universities to fall prey to such desires, to create a culture of censorship. What happens typically is that someone is cast out. Like someone is identified for like a minor delict and is cast out, and that has a real silencing effect on everyone else. People are oh, better not discuss that topic. The costs are too high of discussing that topic, and it's dropped.KHALID: Yeah, this is an excellent point, and I've actually had a few people push back and say well, you know, there’re not that many professors who've been canceled recently, if you count the numbers compared to the proportion. It's not about the actual numbers of people who are being canceled, but those who are subsequently silenced and who are self-censoring for fear of being canceled. There is this parallel of the fear that we're facing with the pandemic and this fear that is now being cultivated through these kinds of cancelations and scapegoating of people.CHRISTAKIS: I may bungle this example, and there may be listeners of yours who know more about it. But my understanding of training to become a SEAL — you know, an elite warrior — is that there is an exercise early on in that training where they throw all the men and women into the water and there's a little raft and everyone has been issued like a little tripod and you start treading water. And they tell them all, you will all tread water until one of you climbs up onto this raft and sets up their little tripod and rings the bell and gives up. Then we'll let the rest of you out of the water. And these soldiers tread water for 24 hours until finally one person gives up. So the SEAL — the trainers are willing to sacrifice one guy early on for the benefits of solidarity that accrue to everyone else, where everyone else feels we made it. We're good material. It's us. You know, we are now us because we have symbolically cast out a member of our erstwhile community. People get this kind of free zone, this kind of sense of solidarity by sacrificing someone. And many of these cases of cancelation that we have seen have this element. There's a case at the Yale Law School right now where a Native American student who's politically on the right sent out, innocently — we now have on record that he was unaware that his lighthearted party invitation could be seen by some other people as having racist connotations. He referred to having a party at his “trap house.” This is a slang I was previously unfamiliar with, but if you look it up, it's been used by many people with nonracial connotations for quite a long time now. Its primary definition does not have racial connotations. He mentioned the foodstuffs that would be available, which included apple pie and fried chicken at this event. Turns out he didn't even pick the fried chicken. It was a convenient fast food store near their house. One of his roommates had made that selection. He sends out an announcement, and nine people at Yale Law School — primarily African Americans — were so offended by this that they reported him to some deans who then called the student in and tried to engineer an apology from him. And then the student was denounced by this body within the university that his email was racist and pejorative, even though on record — we now have audiotapes of the conversation. It was clear he had no idea. And they told him they believed him that he had no idea. Nevertheless, they denounced him. And then everyone is circling the wagons now, reading his actions in the most uncharitable way. To me, this seems like a situation in which they're trying to cast out an innocent person in order to make themselves feel better and build group solidarity and police the margins of acceptable discourse. All of which is wrong, in my view.KHALID: You know, the irony is that this is happening at a law school, which is all about teaching students how to pass out evidence, how to think through who is responsible, and how you hold them responsible. And also, one of the key elements of legal schooling is to learn there is the action but then there is the intention. And you cannot discount the intention. The intention is what makes the difference between the verdict for manslaughter versus murder. CHRISTAKIS: Yes.KHALID: Somehow that has been completely erased from our conversation right now.CHRISTAKIS: There was no due process. There was no right to confront your accusers. It was so unlawyerly from start to finish, as far as I can tell, ignoring some of these philosophical elements that are so important in our jurisprudence. It's embarrassing. And furthermore, some of the students claim that this party invitation from this guy was physically harmful to them, they claimed, in a kind of histrionic language that I think needs to be called for what it is. They use the term “never again,” which is a phrase we usually use when talking about genocide. We say genocide should never happen again. These are very extreme statements, really unwarranted in this type of a situation. The uncharitable reading, the witch hunt mentality, the over involvement of administrators in business they really shouldn't be involving themselves in, the attempts at forced apology — you know, they drafted an apology note for him to sign and then threatened him with reporting him to the bar if he didn't sign it. There's so many elements of this case that are just shameful.KHALID: The parallels are really striking between how communities and pandemics are scapegoated and how people, right now, for their speech are being ostracized and being blamed. And the implications — what we were talking about earlier about a social death — are very real because these kinds of cancelations and attacks and censorship have implications for people's lives in very real ways.CHRISTAKIS: Just imagine being widely reviled. I mean, it's one thing if you are a murderer and you're widely reviled. Imagine if you're not. There was a case at Dartmouth a few years ago of a chair of a department of psychology who was wrongly accused of being complicit — falsely and wrongly accused of being complicit in sexual harassment done by other professors. And he was rejected by the local community. People would see him in the grocery store and take it upon themselves to denounce him. And this man eventually took his own life. I mean, this is appalling. It is extremely painful to be cast out of a community. And it is not a light sanction to impose, especially unjustly. This is not a civilized way to act, in my view. I think there are better ways to handle the stumbles that people sometimes make around many hot button issues in our society. And I would especially like to see us do better at our best universities.KHALID: Thank you, Nicholas. I feel like that's a good way to converge the two conversations. Thank you so much for joining us today.CHRISTAKIS: Amna, thank you so much for having me. KHALID: Nicholas Christakis is a physician, a professor at Yale, and author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live — which is now out in paperback. It’s a book I highlighly recommend to all Banished listeners. My conversation with Christakis, as you heard, called to mind the protocol for casting out those suffering from leprosy in Medieval England. Here is an excerpt from a set  of instructions used by the diocese at Salisbury for banishing a “leper” —  in the parlance of the time:The priest casts earth on each of his feet saying “Be thou dead to the world, but alive again unto God.” Then the priest must lead him from the church to his house as a dead man, chanting libre me Domine, in such ways that the sick man is covered with a black cloth. Then when he comes into the open fields … he ends by imposing prohibitions on him in the following manner:I forbid you to ever enter churches or go into a market or a mill or in any assemblies of people.I forbid you henceforth to go out without your leper’s dress, that you may be recognised by others; and you must not go outside your house unshod.I forbid you henceforth to eat or drink in any company except that of lepers.I would encourage you to heed the advice of Nicholas Christakis and imagine being reviled by many thousands of people for some perceived transgression. Really sit with that for a while and then ask yourself: Are the judgements of Medieval clergy so different from those of Twitter mobs or university administrators today? Is one social death really less painful than another? Less barbaric? Less, oh, I don’t know, medieval? Please support the work we do at Booksmart Studios by becoming a paying subscriber, and get access to full interviews, bonus segments, and more.Don’t forget to rate and share what you've heard here today on whichever platform you listen on and leave a comment so we know what you think. Our success here at Booksmart depends as much on you as on us.Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And I, as always, am Amna Khalid. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

If you’ve been listening to Banished, you’ll recall that in just a few short months we’ve talked about attempts to abolish artwork, to repudiate literature and even to eliminate entire curricula throughout the United States. But you may wonder, as I sometimes still do, why me? Why am I, Amna Khalid, pulled toward these topics, compelled by what we casually call “cancel culture”?And so, dear listeners, it feels like the right time to step back — to give you a sense of who I am and why I am deeply disturbed by the censorship and intolerance now thriving in the West. For this week’s episode, I will read aloud from a letter that I wrote earlier this year, to a loved one with whom I grew up in Pakistan. I hope that I leave you with a better understanding of why this show, why Banished and why me.Mani,My darling, darling Mani. What a ways the two of us have come. From the long, lazy days of Ammi’s home-cooked meals and family chatter, with all of us huddled together on her bed in Islamabad, to where we are now: you in the endless grey that runs through your years in Britain, now visible in the hairs on your face; and I enduring my tenth Minnesota winter.We’ve taken to our new homes — quite seamlessly and effortlessly for the most part. You’ve internalized the sorry-reflex of the Brits and I, as you point out every chance you get, have inadvertently started mimicking the rhotic accent of the Midwest that grates on you so much. And though we never dare to speak of the oceans of losses that we have buried deep within us, you and I both know there is much that we have left behind. The dewy mornings of fall, the warmth of the winter sun, the oppressive dry heat of the summer months and the intensity of the monsoon rains punctuated by days of stifling humidity that would only let up with the next downpour — and the cycle would begin once again.But that was not the suffocation that you and I ran away from. Our escape, if you will, was from a different kind of claustrophobia. You being gay and unable to live freely in your fullness and write in ways that challenged reigning orthodoxies; and me — then a young woman with too many ideas, hungry for intellectual stimulation, challenging all norms and limitations. Flamboyant and outspoken, we flirted with the idea of crossing the line of what was acceptable, but only in our small social circles of other misfits like you and me.For me, the closing in of the walls came into focus for the first time that fateful evening in February 1989. I remember we could hear the mob outside the American Cultural Center which was miles away from our house. You turned on the tv and we watched it happen — the riots protesting Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The streets were teaming with thousands of zealots after Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie — the atmosphere was chilling. I was only 10 then but the gravity of the situation wasn’t lost on me. In the following months we sat night after night watching riots ripple across the globe, for Rushdie had committed blasphemy — (certain) Muslims were offended and their offense was translating into terror and violence.It was only in the wake of the Rushdie affair that I fully came to appreciate the expansiveness of the notion of blasphemy and the legal infrastructure within Pakistan that gave it teeth. I started reading the newspaper and, of course, it was all too apparent for anyone to see, even to a ten year old, how these blasphemy laws — perverted in their very criminalization of speech to begin with — became a tool for repressing and dispossessing non-muslims. How these developments gave license to the outright targeting of minority groups hit home for me a year later when my friend Asha’s neighbor, an Ahmadi, was shot in his own driveway by a group of vigilantes. As I cast my mind back I can see my dumbstruck eleven-year-old self, holding Asha’s hand in school the next day -- both of us terror-stricken as she recounted how she and her father heard the shots, ran out and then helped load her neighbor’s bleeding body in their car only to have him declared dead when they got to the hospital.It was around then that I consciously started paying attention to the politics of the times: the misogyny entrenched in the Zina Ordinance that resulted in rape victims becoming criminally liable for offenses against them; the systematic purging of progressive teachers and professors; the ideological tyranny that shaped the curriculum in public schools and universities; media censorship and the erosion of democratic institutions across the board.Remember when all women newscasters were told they had to cover their heads? And when dance performances were categorized as “obscenity”? Oh and that time when we were walking to Jinnah Market for ice-cream and this man came up to me and told me that I should wear a dupatta? We were both so stunned and frightened that we said “yes” and walked on, neither one of us daring to even comment to each other on the absurdity of what had happened. And how can I forget! The time when some low-ranking mullah declared a fatwa against you for walking into your classroom with a cup of tea in the middle of Ramadan when you were teaching English to 7th graders. You always were absent-minded. That was close — a lucky escape for you that no major media outlet picked it up.It’s not that I hadn’t felt the suffocation before that. The fateful marriage of religious dogma and political ideology under Zia’s dictatorship birthed the ‘blasphemous mindset’ that permeated all aspects of our lives. I remember in school each time I voiced my inquisitiveness, disapproval awaited me. There was the Pakistan Studies class when I asked about the role of Muslims in the killings of Hindus and Sikhs during the Partition of India; I was shut down and told, “It was they who started the killing, not us.” Once, I dared to wonder out loud if we would have been better off in a joint India and Miss Nosheen gave me a look that sends shivers down my spine even today as I recall it in my mind’s eye. At the next parent teacher meeting my “report card” said: “Amna is intelligent but she asks disruptive questions in class.” And then there was the Islamiat class. Now that’s a boundary that even I knew not to cross — I learned early on, head down and no questions. Genuine, probing questions about Islamic history were actively discouraged. Banish the thought of even a mild challenge to the indoctrination the curriculum engendered.It wasn’t much better in college for me either. You left in 1993 for the greener pastures of Britain to pursue your MA, but I was still in the thick of finding my way out. I was hoping, naively, that going to a private college would give me the freedom I so desperately craved. In some ways it did, but only because I got savvier at navigating the obstacles. It didn’t take me long to see the shallowness of the seemingly liberal atmosphere of the school. Yes of course, I had inspirational teachers like Khurram, Hasan and Ali, who opened a whole new world for me intellectually — but there was a darker side to it all. While a handful of us were looking to these professors to widen our horizons, a number of other professors were recruiting students into the Tablighi Jamaat. Remember Zain, who was dating my friend Maryam? One day, out of the blue some students invited him for Tablighi sessions at Raiwind. And then one fine morning, Maryam came crying to my dorm room: “He broke up with me — he says dating is anti-Islamic.” And sure enough, two days later he’d changed his entire persona. Just like that, Zain went from being the cool guy who sported stonewash jeans and U2 t-shirts, to growing a beard, wearing shalwar kameez and refusing to make eye contact with women, let alone shaking their hands. And you know what Mani, he wasn’t the only one. It happened to many — much like dominoes falling. From one day to the next another one fell.I don’t think I ever told you what happened to Asim. Yes, the same Asim whose painting you bought a few years ago. Once in a gender studies class he said something about the unfairness of Islamic law and he was hauled before the college’s disciplinary committee to “educate” him. They almost suspended him for a term but he somehow managed to stay on. And Tahseen, the Pakistani-American professor teaching the course — she was the idealistic sort who returned from the US in the hopes of “giving back” — well, she ended up being forced out by the administration. Teaching Judith Butler in Pakistan — that was her “crime.” At the end of that semester when she told us she’d decided to move back to the US, I offered to help her pack her office. She and I, we both sat on her office floor taping boxes heavy with books, much like our hearts with sadness.But Mani, as always, I digress. Where was I? Ah yes, the Rushdie affair and what that meant to us. Back then the way the West came to Rushdie’s rescue and scoffed at offense as a rationale for limiting expression was an unexpected comfort. Britain provided police protection for Rushdie and even broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. Imagine that! To live in a place where no one stops you from dressing the way you wanted; no vigilantes telling you what you can or cannot say; where asking questions in class is rewarded not punished; a place where there is no thought police; where the state protects your right to express yourself even if it sours foreign relations — heaven! Just imagining it was delicious and yes, oh so blasphemous!Now that I cast my mind back it was around then that you and I started dreaming of possibilities elsewhere. We looked to the West and we were tempted — tempted by the promise of freedom. It wasn’t really the freedom to dress how we wanted or to drink openly. It was the freedom to think and speak freely, the freedom to explore ideas and know that we could dare to go wherever they led us. You took off for England and made a new home there; and I true to being the youngest who pushed the limits just a little bit more, followed a few years later but was still restless. Sure enough, after 8 years at Oxford I needed to move on. My adventure of teaching in South Africa lasted two years and I got itchy feet again. And here I am today, in the belly of the beast so to speak — the country that prides itself on free speech as a constitutional right. You couldn’t go wrong — teaching at a small liberal arts college in the US. A place where at last I could be fully free. And what better place than the academy to revel in the freedom to think! I was in heaven; the heaven that I had dreamed of.But as of late I find myself wondering, am I really? With more than half the states introducing bills that ban  what they construe  as critical race theory in schools, the specter of state censorship is beginning to make an appearance here too. The threat to academic freedom from right wing political forces has proliferated At two universities governing boards interfered with the selection of university presidents in order to install political allies; there was donor meddling in UNC’s denial of tenure to Nicole Hannah Jones, of the 1619 project fame; and just last week the University of Florida, a public school mind you, banned three professors from serving as expert witnesses in a lawsuit challenging a state law that limits how residents can vote. Who would’ve thought this could happen in America. When did I first see cracks in my romance with the freedom of the academy in the West? I'd say probably five years into my time in the US. Our college was considering instituting a “bias response team” and out of sheer curiosity I decided to go to the town hall. What are these teams you ask — they are committees of administrators, students and possibly faculty to assess “bias” complaints, which could be filed if anyone or any group of people on campus were offended by anything said or done by others. The case is investigated and the offending party potentially sanctioned. As I sat there listening to this proposal which seemed to me a softer version of speech control, I could feel the hairs on the back on my neck standing. I had a creeping sense that unwritten rules for regulating thinking and speech were rearing their heads in the US too. Couched in terms of being sensitive to others, they reeked of the kind of ideological authoritarianism and the “blasphemy mindset” that you and I thought we’d left behind. Did we move halfway across the world only to find ourselves trapped in another cage?Surely, no educational institution in the West would entertain a move that would chill speech on campus and was deeply anti-intellectual! But lo and behold — as I started looking into it Mani, these teams were mushrooming on campuses across the country. And sure enough, these teams are stifling speech.It’s not just college campuses Mani; the authority of “offense” now reigns supreme. It’s everywhere — even art is not protected. In the spring of 2019 I read a news report about how activists clamoring to have the most stunning murals by Arnatoff erased because of his depiction of colonial occupation, the death of Native Americans and slavery. Some even vowed that they will not rest until these murals were permanently destroyed — all because they supposedly offend and “traumatize” indigenous and African American peoples. It chills me to the bone to think of the dogma that is taking root here. I know you’re going to say, it’s just one incident. But — last summer I heard that students at the University of Kentucky are protesting the Rice O’Hanlon murals on their campus. And students at the Vermont Law School are clamoring to cover The Underground Railroad, Vermont and the Fugitive Slave -- murals made expressly to recognize Black Americans and Vermont abolitionists involved in helping enslaved people who escaped from the South. Why? Because they believe that such painful reminders of slavery should not be in a public setting. No matter the artist was intending to subvert the dominant tropes of manifest destiny by placing Native Americans, African Americans and even working class revolutionaries at the center of these paintings. The contagion of intolerance spreads fast I suppose. What have things come to? As if there is a predetermined way of interpreting art! As if Native Americans or African Americans have a singular sensibility! Reminds me of how people here like to box Muslims — as if all 2 billion of “us” are the same! Oh how I tire here of the likes of Sam Harris who portray every Muslim woman who comes to the West as an Ayan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim who has successfully escaped the shackles of Islamic regimes. How people simplify things, seduced by the narrative of the West saving Muslim women from the “cruelties” of Islam. The other day someone said to me, “How fortunate you must feel that you are no longer in Pakistan! I take it you don’t see yourself as Muslim?” My response: “I’m only an ex-Muslim in Pakistan; in the US I am always a Muslim — and by choice.” I left him standing there, baffled. Fortunate. Yes, that’s what we thought we were when we first came to our new homes. Few can see the warp and woof of loss and grief that’s woven into the very fabric of our fortunes. Even I did not fully realize the granularity and texture of the heartbreak that our freedom entailed. The sadness of leaving family behind, though always present, only struck me in its fullness when I decided to make my own. I remember telling daddy on the phone that I was pregnant — his boundless joy traversed the thousands of miles between us and spilled out on this end of the telephone. As I clumsily navigated both the flutters of excitement and backbreaking pains of my growing belly, I ached for the mother-daughter intimacy that so many of our cousins back home took for granted when they had their first borns. I wished Ammi could be there to hold my hand and guide me into motherhood. But it was daddy’s unexpected death just a couple of months after Ravi’s birth — the rush of unbridled grief of losing a parent colliding with the limitless and exhilarating joy of becoming one — that’s what drove home to me the immeasurability of the cost of leaving home. How much we have surrendered just to speak and think freely!Here I go digressing again. Back to the tyranny of “social justice” as they call it — what a perversion of the term. Of course I know all about  the horrors of racism and sexism — how could I not. As a postcolonial subject growing up with the vile legacy of colonialism that infects so much in Pakistan, and later  a woman navigating a society suffused with violent patriarchy I do understand! But the “social justice” of the West strikes me now as anti-social and no longer just. This will truly pain you, Mani, but there’s even a movement to read literature through a “social justice” lens. Turns out the literary canon is “for white people, by white people and about white people.” Shakespeare’s stature in the canon is reduced to “white supremacy and colonization.” Why then did I find myself both despising and feeling for Shylock when he asks for a pound of flesh and loses his case? Why then did Hamlet’s soliloquy speak to me in moments of existential crises back in Pakistan? What’s more, universities are closing Classics departments; professors from within the field themselves are asking for its demolition because white supremacy is believed to “reside in the very marrow of the classics.” I tell you Mani, even words have lost their meaning — “white supremacy,” “racism” —they no longer mean what they used to.I worry for Ravi and Sahil too. I know, I know they are only 9 and 6. But Mani, there are primers for teachers out there — mind you they are well regarded by many — on how to “dismantle racism” in math instruction. They preach that a focus on the right answer and asking students to “show their work” are manifestations of “white supremacy culture.” Just a couple of months ago Dr. Seuss’s estate announced that six of his books will no longer be published because of their “hurtful and wrong” racial representations. And sure enough a whole slew of local libraries are now busy pulling them off their shelves. But David Pilkey is the epitome — yes, Pilkey of Captain Underpants fame, he canceled one of his own books in anticipation of possible offense-- a preemptive strike of sorts (Americans seem to be good at those). In his note of retraction, he regrets the “passive stereotypes and racism” that were “harmful to everyone.” It’s surreal — happenings from a dystopian novel.Ah what a long way you and I have come from a country where writers were canceled by diktat of blasphemy. And yet, have we really? Here I am in a country that I call home where authors no longer have to be sanctioned by others; they cancel themselves. And you are in a country where school teachers are fired for offending Muslim sensibilities for showing cartoons of Mohammad in a class on religion and free expression. Oh the irony that this should be happening in Britain, the very country that provided refuge to Rushdie in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair. The West, once that shining beacon of freedom for us, seems a lot less lustrous from where we sit now. Censorship predicated on offense, once seen as the hallmark of “backward” cultures of the third world, appears to be a virtue of progressive thinking today.Sometimes I wonder Mani, maybe we were the real blasphemous ones for daring to hope and imagine that heaven could in fact be a place on earth. And now, perhaps this is our atonement — for what can be heavier than the weight of disillusionment?Your sad and despondent Amna This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Dorian Abbot, associate professor of geophysical sciences at University of Chicago, was invited to give the prestigious Carlson Lecture at MIT this month. He was going to speak about the insights gained from studying Earth’s climate and how those insights have been used to predict which planets outside the solar system might be habitable. But, following an outcry about his political views about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses — a topic that had nothing to do with what he was going to talk about — MIT cancelled the lecture. Amna Khalid talks to Professor Abbot about what happened and what this says about academic freedom in American higher education today. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

This is the second in our occasional series on Rethinking the Canon. Is there value in reading the classics at a time when they are increasingly viewed as unrepresentative texts that don’t speak to the diverse experiences of modern students? This week Amna talks with Roosevelt Montás, senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. FULL TRANSCRIPTAMNA KHALID: A liberal education is one that takes the complicated condition of human freedom seriously, and addresses itself to its dilemmas and to the urgency of its lived experience. To think and reason through these kinds of questions is to learn to live with them in an honest and ongoing way.That was an excerpt from Roosevelt Montás’s book, “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” Roosevelt Montás, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a teenager, is now a senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He specializes in antebellum American literature and intellectual history. He’s also spent 10 years as the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia, teaching and running what is often called the “Great Books” program.I started our conversation by asking him if he could give our listeners a sense of what motivated him to write so passionately about Great Books.ROOSEVELT MONTÁS: The book is a meditation on my experience of liberal education and an argument about why liberal education based on the study of Great Books matters today. I draw on my own biographical, personal experience of encountering the Great Books as an undergraduate, but also on my experience teaching them and encountering the kind of struggles and challenges of organizing undergraduate, general education around the study of books that are often old and often don't speak directly to the issues that are most salient in people's daily, lived experience. So, the book tries to take in my personal, intellectual, institutional experience and put it all together into an argument about why reading these books seriously with undergraduates matters today.KHALID: Let's peel back what this term “Western canon” means. One of the things that I have found a little disturbing of late is how quickly people will jump to calling something “white supremacy” or just “white” for that matter. And if we look at the Greco-Roman tradition, how in the Mediterranean region these ideas were coming from different places. Once you start looking to the historical roots of these ideas, my understanding as a historian is that it complicates the notion of even what is considered white. Can you speak a little bit about what is loosely referred to as the Western tradition and Western canon and where the roots of some of the key traditions lie?MONTÁS: So, you know, “Western” — I remember when I first began to encounter that term, “Western,” when I went to college — I would always say, you know, west of what? KHALID: (Laughs)MONTÁS: When you name a direction, it only makes sense from a particular point of view. So, west of what? But often people use “Western” synonymously with “European.” When you think about the Western canon, you're not thinking about a European canon. Obviously, some very, very important roots of what came to be the texts that we associate with the Western canon lie in the ancient Mediterranean, in the — what we now call the Middle East, biblical texts in North Africa. One of the central figures I deal with in my book and one of the thinkers that has been most influential in modern development is St. Augustine. You might hear the name St. Augustine and not realize that we're talking about a North African, Berber man, who turns out to be the towering intellect in the Christian tradition and in Western philosophy, a major major figure. And of course, you have the biblical texts that originate in a matrix of oral traditions that are not by any stretch European, although they do end up having a very powerful influence in Europe. So when we think about the West, we should not be thinking narrowly, geographically. I like to think about it as including the lands and peoples and cultures and traditions around the Mediterranean Sea. That loose tradition ends up, first of all, leaving a textual record, leaving a genealogy of text and debates that we can trace today. And we're very fortunate and lucky that we can have access to those texts. Then there's a second term about “canon.” Again, you can understand why people resist the idea of canon, why people resist the idea that there is a set of text that is handed down to you from on high by some intellectual or traditional cultural authority that says these are the essential texts, this is what matters. But if I can quote an old friend of mine, who said about the Literature Humanities syllabus at Columbia's first year requirement — this is this kind of a Great Books course that all first years take, and it's been around for over 80 years now, this course. Every year you read about 25 books in it, but over the course of the history of the course, there have been like 150 or so books that have, at one time or another, been in the list. So he says that if Literature Humanities teachers teach us a canon, it's a loose canon. KHALID: (Laughs)MONTÁS: So, I think we should think of the canon as a loose canon. That is, it's not a fixed, unalterable list, but rather a pretty large and permeable collection of text and conversations. And sometimes we discover new text. Sometimes we reinterpret text. Sometimes texts that we have ignored for a while regain a new prominence and a new relevance. So it's always something that's under revision. It's always under construction. You know, even if what you want to do is understand the roots of male domination, or if you want to understand the roots of elite exploitation of the proletariat, if you want to understand the root of racial subjugation, that's the place to look, both for the traditions that have sustained those morally objectionable practices, but also for the discourses that have challenged those — you know, human rights and justice and liberation. All of those also find their roots in that tradition of contestation, that tradition of debate. You know, the reason why we read Aristotle is not because he was the student of Plato and he celebrates Plato. The reason we read Aristotle is because he disagreed and refuted Plato so profoundly. It is a tradition of debate and dispute, contestation, it is not a tradition of parroting an orthodoxy.KHALID: It makes me reflect on my own experience growing up in Pakistan and much of what I read was what is seen as the Western canon. And like you said, it is a lightning rod when you're first introduced to it and the idea of how central that was in the process of colonization. It can elicit a response, which is almost a rejection. But upon further exploration, what stood out to me was that, embodied within the canon, is this tension, right? This tension of what constitutes an orthodoxy and what then overturns it and how this relationship is dynamic, that it's constantly moving. You know, I like to think of the canon as like an organism. It's alive. MONTÁS: Yeah.KHALID: It's constantly dynamic and it's developing. It's got several limbs which jut out, and some get chopped off and then get reattached. And it's kind of an octopus of sorts. And you talk about that in your book, you talk about how you worked in the Great Books course to include Gandhi and how you worked with students on Gandhi. Can you reflect a little bit on that process of including what would count as non-Western writers within the canon?MONTÁS: Yeah, Gandhi is a great example, and I've argued that Gandhi belonged in a course that's ostensibly a Western course, and that Gandhi holds a special place in that because Gandhi is kind of a bridge figure. Gandhi is someone who is rooted in an ancient, venerable, profound, philosophical, ethical, spiritual tradition that is quite alien to the premises that organized the Western philosophical, ethical approach. Yet, Gandhi is deeply versed, deeply influenced, and a masterful deployer of lots of things that you find in the Western tradition. And you know, he was the first to acknowledge the influence of people like Ruskin and Thoreau and Tolstoy and Jesus. Gandhi is this great, voracious intellect and ethical thinker. So, I began to read Gandhi on my own kind of after graduate school as part of my own curiosity and my own sense of what is there in other ancient traditions? What light on the contemporary world can those ancient texts throw? So, Gandhi was really special in this way because he was a kind of hinge between something I knew and understood quite well and this other thing. Then I began teaching it. I said, I wonder how this would work in the classroom, how we would work with students who have now spent two years reading the so-called “Western classics.” How would it work for us to think about Gandhi, both in the context of that tradition we have seen, but also for the ways in which he is coming at questions we have been dealing with for a long time from an entirely different perspective? And it worked really, really well in the classroom. Students often felt like I did when I read them on my own, that Gandhi enriched their understanding of their own tradition in a powerful way, and that it opened up this other way of thinking, this other ethical universe. Enough people had good experiences with it that we made a proposal — let's make this a mandatory part of the curriculum. So Gandhi's been there maybe 10 years now. And it's an example of this thing where we don't read the Western canon because it's Western. You know, we don't read these texts because they're somehow ours and therefore better than others. No, we read these texts because they matter. We read these texts because they're genuinely useful in our understanding of the contemporary world. It's a trite thing to say, but often overlooked that the present emerges from the past. That's just the way it works. The present comes from, is organically linked with, the past. The past is therefore very much worth our attention.KHALID: So Roosevelt, let me ask you this question, which is, what makes a classic text? When does a text become something that is worthy of being called a classic?MONTÁS: That is such a good question, and one that has inspired a lot of thought and writing, and I know several books that are dedicated to answering this question, and I've been part of many faculty conversations on this question. And I even know of one instance in which a school that wanted to put together a course on classics came up with a set of criteria  in which every book got a score. Criteria 1 from 1 to 5  and then criteria 2  from 1 to 5. And then when you tally them up and you get a raw score of the class — and this is how they decided and — KHALID: —  the height of neoliberalism.MONTÁS: Exactly. Fine, if that's what you're going to do, fine. But one thing you can say about a classic book is that it's a book that has the capacity to speak to many different kinds of people in many different kinds of historical circumstances. Generation after generation have found them to be illuminating, have found  them to be relevant, have found them to be meaningful. That speaks to a quality in the book, or could be a statue, could be a painting, could be any kind of human expression, but it speaks to some quality that transcends the historical conditions of its creation. Plato is meaningful to me, not because he was like an Athenian aristocrat in a turbulent period in Greece. I don't care about that, doesn't mean anything to me. There's something else that Plato gets at that does mean something to me as a Dominican immigrant in New York in the 21st century, a kind of gesture towards universality, connecting and illuminating something that is fundamental to the human experience that I have and the human experience that Plato had. That empirically proven capacity to speak to many people across different time periods, across differing historical circumstances is one of the characteristics of a classic. It does mean that it's much easier to tell if an old book meets this criterion than a new book, right? And I don't think we are good at figuring out what will be the texts from today that are going to continue to be relevant and speak to people in that unimaginable future. There is also their complexity. They’re multivocal. They have this ideological and human complexity to them that makes them resistant to ideological takeover. You can't just deploy them as tools of indoctrination. They also tend to be demanding and to reward effort. That is, they are rich in a way that you can chew them, you can discuss them, you can think about them and they keep giving. Having said all that, you could not come up with a list of, these are it, these are the classics. I think that category is one that one is always reassessing, one is always rethinking. And that's OK. I don't think we need to have an investment in a particular set of texts as being the ones.KHALID: So, there are a couple of things that are coming to my mind, actually, as you're speaking about this, which is, the conversation about what makes a classic, the ability to speak to several generations and across identity markers in a particular time. Somehow, as you're talking about it (and I don't know why I haven't thought about this before), but it's kind of a no-brainer that these are texts that are produced out of moments of cultural contact, cultural clashes, cultural exchange, right? You talk about Gandhi. Even Gandhi — people like to think about him as this Hindu, ascetic figure, but his intellectual development is deeply informed, like you said, by the Western tradition and a deep reading of key Western thinkers, while also incorporating Eastern philosophy. What stands out in terms of classics is that they're often born out of this need to contend with different cultural influences. Can you speak more to that?MONTÁS: The way that the human mind works is by pollination and cross-pollination, and great moments of cultural transformation are always the product of incorporating the new, incorporating what is alien, incorporating what challenges preconceived paradigms. You know, you might add that as another characteristic of classics, right? That they're often texts that are produced in the crux of large conflicts. The writer couldn't sleep well, and you may not be able to sleep well after you read them. They're somehow contending with and incorporating newness into a new way of seeing the world. You can’t have great literature without conflict, and you can't have great philosophy without argument. One thinks of Hegel's notion that history and thought proceeds through this agonistic context between one proposition and its opposite and then finding a synthesis, finding a way — a larger understanding that incorporates without negating, incorporates both, incorporates the opposition. There may be an instructive lesson there in the so-called “Canon Wars,” and I wouldn't be the first one to point out that one way to approach it is to teach the war, is to teach the conflict. You know, people are fighting over what should we teach? That itself becoming an object of instruction. Let's look at why we fight over these texts. What is it in them? And that, of course, means that we have to read the texts, but it also means that sometimes we read the texts in order to refute them. We certainly cannot refute Plato if we don't read Plato. Though I have read many an undergraduate paper that tries to do that.KHALID: Well, you know the crunch of time and the deadline can produce great genius. So we're right now getting to the heart of what troubles me these days. I find so much of the push for diversity — which I'm in favor of. I think contending with difference, engaging with difference is a useful exercise and one that we should push our students to do. But then we're in this moment where I find that the push for diversity is simultaneously pushing out these texts that are produced out of precisely that kind of deep conflict and deep contention with difference. And so it's doing a disservice to these students to not read them. But how do we talk to people when they fundamentally disagree with the very basis of what we consider knowledge?MONTÁS: This worries me a lot too: this, I think, facile rejection of the tradition because it's not representative because, you know, it doesn't have my voices in it, it doesn't have any Dominicans in it. The facile rejection of the tradition simply on identitarian grounds. And along with that comes this intellectually condescending attitude that says that, say, young people today who come from a diversity of backgrounds can only relate to texts in which they find these particular aspects of their identity that in our cultural moment are marginalized. Only through those can they connect authentically with a text. It is such an epistemologically reductive, almost violent, assumption to make. Sure, those aspects will speak very powerfully to them. But those aspects are not the only ones in their identity that matter and that matter to them. And in fact, those aspects only gain significance in the context of a broader humanity, in the context of a broader commonality. There is a kind of pernicious logic that says in order to acknowledge and honor and recognize our diversity, we have to reject the canon, we have to not read that and instead read this other thing. In fact, what we need to do is to read both. What we need to understand is that the canon now incorporates diversity. The canon now reflects a different set of voices, a different set of concerns, a different historical consciousness. And that has to be part of what we study. And we then study the canon because it is the antecedent. It is the ground from which this new thing emerges. It is the ground from which our concern and valuing of diversity emerges. It is the ground from which our tools with which we fight for social justice and equality emerge. The idea that we all deserve a voice in the conversation, that idea itself emerges from this tradition. When people are arguing for a diversification of the canon, they're often actually arguing for a presentist view of the canon. That is, they're actually arguing for us to merely read or study a material that has been produced in the last 60 or 70 years, and it's just not sufficient for a full education.KHALID: Well, I mean, I couldn't agree more. As an historian, I feel like, in part, we are at this moment where we have an inability to appreciate these texts precisely because we've stopped valuing history and engaging with history. And then you also lose the ability to appreciate what you can gain from it, from studying it. MONTÁS: Yeah. Yeah.KHALID: And so, you do get into a very present-focused way of interpreting the world, which also becomes more and more literal-minded because you lose the appreciation of context for understanding something. All you know is the present context, and you evaluate everything by it. Roosevelt, what are some of the books that have spoken to you, perhaps even early on in your experience of coming to the U.S.? What were the texts that spoke to you and why?MONTÁS: When I came to the United States, it was into the seventh grade and I didn't speak English. So I went into the New York City public school system and did two years in bilingual education with a heavy focus on English as a second language, but taking my subjects in Spanish.  History and science and math were in Spanish. By the time I was a sophomore, my English was barely good enough to read a grown up book in English. And I found, outside of my house in Queens, next door neighbors were throwing away a bunch of books. Among them, I picked up a collection called The Last Days of Socrates. It had Socratic dialogues: “The Apology,” the “Phaedo,” the “Crito.” Dialogues that deal with the last days of Socrates’ life, including his defense before an Athenian jury. That book was really profoundly transformative for me. And one of the things that it opened for me was a way of understanding myself in this broader context. See, I was aware of the kind of cultural deprivation — that I was poor. We didn't speak English. We didn't have education. They don't understand the world, the grown-ups around me. So I was conscious of this kind of poverty that extended beyond material poverty, which I absolutely was experiencing as well. Reading Socrates and Plato just gave me this window into a kind of wealth, a kind of dignity, a kind of identity that was not dependent on my material resources, a kind of value. Another text that I discuss at some length is St. Augustine, and in particular, the text that I read as a first year at Columbia, The Confessions, which is a spiritual autobiography where Augustine tells the story of how he became a Christian — of how he, through philosophy, came to a kind of higher conception of life and of the ultimate good that for him led him to Christianity. And I encountered that book at a time where I was myself grappling with questions of faith, with meaning, with: Is there a God? Is there evil? Why is there evil? What am I? Am I a Christian, am I what? And St. Augustine was the first believer I had met who was also a serious intellectual. And those two things in my mind could not coexist before. You were either a rational materialist or you were a blind-faith believer. So, he was the first time where I saw an intellectual inquiry with integrity into questions of faith. Interestingly, you know, I didn't walk away from Augustine converted to Christianity like he did, but I walked away from Augustine converted to the life of the mind. These are texts that were utterly meaningful to me, that in some ways set the course of my life. And they were not texts that dealt with the particularity of my experience. On the contrary, they were texts that dealt with the universality of my experience. The texts that really made the difference were these texts that allowed me to connect to something bigger, deeper, longer, older than my own experience and that in some way cut my experience down to size rather than enlarge it.KHALID: I love the way you spoke about how it kind of cut you down to size. So much of the discourse today is about navel gazing and making us bigger than who we are. But so much of our meaning making is, I think, generative when we see ourselves as part of a tradition or part of a bigger whole, as opposed to seeing ourself as the whole. I can imagine a sophomore in high school who is not very comfortable with English finding this text of Socrates’ last days. That could not have been an easy or a comfortable read. I assume it would be difficult. It took you a while to engage and contend with, and it probably also produced lots of moments of discomfort. And one of the things you said earlier about what qualifies as a classic is that the text is rewarding. MONTÁS: Yeah.KHALID: Perhaps, if I'm not mistaken, you're referring to persisting through the discomfort it makes you feel at various levels and then finding it to be worthwhile.MONTÁS: One of the revelations was that as hard as it was — as hard as it was to read it in English — it was not beyond me. There were ideas there that made sense to me. And even as a sophomore in high school, I felt the miracle of that. I felt the extraordinariness of that: that this thing that is high culture and complex philosophy and stands as some kind of pinnacle of cultural prestige, this is no big deal. I can read this. This is not beyond me. So this is a text that I teach every summer. I teach high school students who come from low income families and hope to be the first one in their families to attend college. Every summer, I teach a course for students in that demographic, and this is one of the texts I teach them. And it's something I see happening to them every single year where they are awakened to the fact that these ancient texts actually speak to them. These ancient texts are actually accessible to them. They actually have things to tell them, and they have things to respond. They are not beyond them. Another thing that it did for me was open a set of inquiries, made me ask questions, made me look things up. The things that were impenetrable to me turned out to actually be doors and windows through which I would travel. I've experienced it and I see it happening every year when I teach these high school students this text and texts like it.KHALID: Thank you so much. It was wonderful to have this conversation with you. Thank you for joining us.MONTÁS: Thank you, Amna. KHALID: If you like what you heard today and want more thought provoking content, please become a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get transcripts, full interviews, and bonus segments. And before I sign off, I have a request: Please comment, rate, and share what you've heard here today. Our success here at Booksmart depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And I am Amna Khalid. Bye now. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

“Critical Race Theory,” also known as CRT, is a phrase that has become shorthand for just about any classroom instruction on racism, past or present. But what is this fight really about? What are these anti-CRT bills aiming to accomplish, and how will they affect schooling in the US? Amna Khalid discusses the rise of anti-CRT bills with Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy; Acadia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs; and former president of the ACLU, Professor Emerita Nadine Strossen of New York Law School.SPEAKER 1: Critical race theory is teaching that white people are bad.SPEAKER 2: We’re demonizing white people for being born.SPEAKER 1: This theory was never meant to be brought into grade schools, high schools at all. It’s actually taught in the collegiate atmosphere.SPEAKER 2: These are systemic things. Ignoring it perpetuates the problem. By acknowledging it, we can find solutions and we can address the problems and the inequality that exists in our country. SPEAKER 3: You gonna deliberately teach kids: “This white kid right here got it better than you because he’s white”? You gonna purposely tell a white kid, “Oh, well, black people were all down and suppressed”? How do I have two medical degrees and I’m sitting here oppressed? [cheers] How did I get that? [cheers]AMNA KHALID: Most parents of young schoolchildren are familiar with the stories--third graders in California are given an assignment: rank yourselves by power and privilege based on your racial identity. Parents in North Carolina say middle schoolers are forced to apologize in class to their peers for their privilege. In an elementary school in Manhattan, children are sorted by race for mandatory training. In some Buffalo schools, students are taught that all white people are guilty of implicit racial bias. Sometime towards the end of last year, parents and politicians freaked out, mostly conservatives, who see all this as a kind of liberal indoctrination of our youth. In at least 26 states around the country, Republican legislators have introduced what are now called anti-CRT bills. CRT stands for critical race theory, a phrase that has become shorthand for just about any classroom instruction on racism, past or present. But what is this fight really about? What are these bills aiming to accomplish and how will they affect schooling in the US? I spoke to three experts about the rise of anti-CRT bills. First is Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, who says that although CRT was coined decades ago as a purely legal, academic term, it has now all but lost its original meaning. RANDALL KENNEDY: Now, if I'm in a seminar at my law school and we're talking about critical race theory, I'm thinking about a community of people, a community of thought that has its origins in the 1980s, that believes that liberal legalism was inadequate to get us to a state of racial justice. They’re people who believe that mere anti-discrimination would not suffice to redress the terrible injuries of racial oppression. Something much more activist, something much more deep-seated, had to be done to get us to where we needed to go. On the other hand, if we're just talking about on the street, if we're talking about television, if we're talking about radio today, for many people, especially for its most vocal critics, critical race theory is anything that they don't like that has to do with race. It's an open category and it's more of a slogan than anything else. KHALID: Let's move a little bit away from its origins and from the academic context and think about what it's come to mean today, particularly when we're referring to these anti-CRT bills. We've seen a rise in bills that have been drafted across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states, where there is an attempt to banish, if you will, what they call teaching of critical race theory, particularly at the K-12 level. Now, as someone who is a scholar, a legal scholar, can powers that be do that? Is it legally sanctioned to stipulate what K-12 curriculum should be or is it in contravention of the First Amendment? KENNEDY: It can be done. It's a well-known tenet of American practice that public primary and secondary schooling is largely under the control of local political forces. It's deemed to be perfectly proper for primary and secondary schools, for instance, to inculcate patriotism. You know, that's viewed as uncontroversial. Of course you're going to inculcate patriotism. Of course you're going to inculcate various attitudes that the ascendant political forces in your jurisdiction want to be taught in schools and nourished and lauded. We want our youngsters to know about the Founding Fathers and the greatness of American democracy, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you can do all of that, I mean, that's inculcation. This is another type of inculcation, or it's saying what we don't want taught. Well, you can do that. You can, for instance, have a school system in which you say, “We're going to banish the teaching of racist ideas.” And in fact, that's what some of these people, you know, are saying right now. They're terming critical race theory itself as a type of racism. And they're saying, “We don't want that taught.” Can that be done? Yeah, that can largely be done at the K-12 level. Yes. KHALID: There's nothing that prevents that kind of move from being undertaken.KENNEDY: That's right. It’s a political question. Basically from kindergarten to 12th grade, what you're taught in school is largely under the control of the local school board, the city school board, the county school board. It's a matter of local democratic politics. And so, it's a political struggle. KHALID:  OK, so, Randy, now I'm going to ask you to take off your legal scholar hat and put on your hat of an educator who is concerned with how we train our students to think. So with that hat on, I'd like you to tell us, are you in support of anti-CRT legislation? KENNEDY: I'm appalled by it. In my view, what's going on is the latest iteration of a phenomenon that we have seen over and over and over again. In my view, this is analogous to what happened in the 1950s: the panic over communism, the panic over socialism. You'll note that those two words often find themselves in close proximity to critical race theory. People say, you know, “Critical race theory is Marxism. Critical race theory is socialism.” There's a long history of stigmatizing ideas that are dissident, especially ideas that are critical of the status quo. There's a long history of stigmatizing such ideas as communistic or socialistic or Marxist. And that's what's going on today. The courts, I don't think, are going to be our salvation. I think our salvation is going to be public opinion. And you asked me, “Well, you know, what should people be thinking?” People should be thinking, “How do I want my children to be trained?” I would think that people would want children to be critical thinkers, would want children to be introduced to all sorts of ideas, including ideas that they don't like, trained in such a way that children can have a critical, skeptical stance toward a wide range of ideas. That, it seems to me, is what we should want in our public schools. And we cannot have that if certain ideas are banished. Let the teachers introduce things that are called critical race theory and let's talk about it: “What do you think of this? How should this be assessed?” The art of assessment is what we should be inculcating in our history and in our social studies and in our civics classes. And we can't do that if we are in a panic and banish ideas that we think we don't like. KHALID: According to Randall Kennedy, critical race theory in 2021 means something very different from what its original proponents intended. Nowadays, the term is loaded. It is political. It means everything and says almost nothing about what is actually being taught in schools. But it's the term that we're stuck with for the time being. The more immediate question then becomes, what are these anti-CRT bills trying to achieve? Jeffrey Sachs teaches Middle Eastern politics at Acadia University in Canada and has been closely following the various legislation.JEFFREY SACHS: These efforts focus their attention on preventing K-12, and in some cases, public universities and colleges from engaging in certain kinds of speech in the classroom, assigning certain kinds of materials, and also, in some instances, preventing the kinds of trainings that schools can require teachers or staff to undergo as part of their jobs. And really, the long and short of it is that this is an attempt to prevent teachers from being trained in or discussing certain ideas that conservatives really hate. KHALID: And what are those ideas? SACHS: The list fluctuates. They tend to focus on things like the idea that one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex, or the idea that somebody, by virtue of their race or sex, is guilty or should feel shame on that basis. I don't think there are many people out there--I certainly, I hope not--who think that a person should feel shame or guilt on account of their race or sex. So, the ideas that are being targeted for censorship by these laws, many of them, when they're presented, they sound like a reasonable law. But when you kind of really drill down into how these laws are being written, you discover very quickly that they're far more sweeping and in some cases, far more sloppily drafted than probably they should be. And they would inevitably sweep up and censor all kinds of speech or classroom content that we want to have included, that we want to have protected. This is really a case where the politics of the issue, I think, are so powerful and the momentum is so great that legislators aren't really thinking clearly or if they are thinking clearly, they have malign intent because the result is laws that really are going to do a lot of damage to both K-12 and higher ed. KHALID: It may be constitutional in the K-12 context, yet that doesn't make it okay, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't come with a set of both anticipated and unanticipated consequences. There's nothing wrong in saying that teaching divisive concepts, which say things like, “If you're from a particular race you’re inherently superior or inferior,” is wrong, and we don't want that happening in our schools. Yet, the issue becomes very nebulous when we begin to think about definitions, what constitutes a divisive concept becomes contentious. SACHS: So, a good example is the law recently passed in Tennessee, which reads that a public school authority or public charter school shall not include or promote the following concepts as part of a course of instruction, and also that they may not use any supplemental instructional materials that include or promote the following concepts. And then it lists an array of concepts similar to the ones I described earlier. Now, the problem here is that there are all kinds of sound pedagogical reasons why a teacher might wish to include a concept in a course, even a very controversial concept. So an example might be that the teacher wishes to include a primary source written by an author who lived 100, 200, 300 years ago, at a time when certain kinds of divisive concepts were common currency. It might be useful, for instance, for the purposes of discussing historic discrimination or present-day discrimination for a teacher to cite a document that contains a divisive concept. If you pass a law, as Tennessee has, saying that teachers may not include such material in the course, then you are robbing students of their ability to confront and think intelligently about these ideas--ideas that they're bound to encounter at some point in their everyday lives. It should be the jobs of teachers to introduce concepts, no matter how divisive, so long as they do so in a responsible, neutral, and objective way. These laws, in many cases, do not draw that distinction. Instead, they ban any inclusion of these ideas. Tennessee’s is a good example. It bans the mere inclusion of these ideas, even if included objectively and discussed neutrally. That kind of sloppy drafting, if indeed it is sloppy and not intentional, is, I think, a real ticking time bomb. KHALID: The irony is that those who are pushing these laws are the ones who, until very recently, supported a president who was making precisely the kinds of speeches where certain groups were being seen as inferior and which would be very much part of your civics education if you were trying to engage in an educational discussion about democracy in America. SACHS: Absolutely. I mean, under this law, there's many Trump speeches that I'm sure would be ineligible for inclusion in a Tennessee classroom. Setting aside my own opinions about Donald Trump, I think that there is very valid pedagogical reasons for why a civics teacher might want to include a speech by the president of the United States. It's just a no brainer to me. Whether they mean to or not--and I always try to give legislators the benefit of the doubt, but whether they mean to or not, this law, which is currently on the books in Tennessee, would forbid the inclusion of a speech by the president. That seems to me to be insane.KHALID: But hang on, Jeff. People in favor of these bills often point out that teaching at the K-12 level is already highly regulated. Take creationism. You can't make that part of the science curriculum. And for the most part, people are okay with that. So what's wrong with banning CRT then, if that's something we want to keep out of the classroom? SACHS: There's a good reason why this is not a good analogy, because the fact of the matter is we do not ban creationism from public schools, right? We ban the promotion of creationism. We ban, under the Establishment Clause--jurisprudence--Teachers may not promote the idea that the earth or the cosmos was created by a deity. However, teachers are free to discuss that idea. And in fact, they have to if they're going to discuss things like Greek and Roman mythology or Dante's Divine Comedy. So there has to be room in our law and in our jurisprudence to allow people to discuss the idea of creationism so long as they do so in a neutral and objective way. We should extend that same basic courtesy and framework to critical race theory and its attendant ideas. So, people should be allowed in the classroom to discuss the idea that black people are inherently superior or inferior to white people, if only for the reason that that idea pops up in important documents and important conversations throughout history and in the present day. A teacher would be failing in his or her duty if they did not prepare students for the eventuality that they will encounter that idea outside the classroom. People should also be able to discuss the concepts of critical race theory without saying critical race theory is the truth. KHALID: Jeffrey, I'm going to actually move the conversation to discuss a different context, which might help elucidate some of the issues that we would face in the US. And it's one that I feel you're well-equipped to comment on. So, I come from Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very different society, one that has been looked upon in the US as a society that is backwards. And one of the key issues is we have blasphemy laws, which prevent the discussion of anything that insults Muhammad. Now, what constitutes a blasphemy is the issue over here. And in colleges and universities, I remember growing up not being able to ask genuinely inquisitive questions because they were being shut down because they were seen as blasphemous. So, for instance, Mohammad does X, Y, and Z and a single question like, “Well, why was this the best option?” or “Why did he choose to do this?” would be met with such irate censure from the teacher, who clearly did not want to go there for reasons that this could have implications should this be reported outside of class. And I feel like the US discussion about bills about CRT would benefit immensely--we could elucidate the ill effects of these if we just look a little beyond our shores to see what's going on in other countries. You study the Middle East. SACHS: That's such a fascinating comparison. And I think it really does kind of cast a bit of relief, what you're talking about. There's a famous case from the early 1990s in Egypt where something similar to what you're describing happened, where a university professor--of course, academic freedom is severely circumscribed in Egypt then and now. And in the early 1990s, this university professor described the Koran as a historical creation, that it reflected the events of its time and is not necessarily a universal and eternal document the way kind of orthodox Islamic theology presents it to be. For this, for engaging and considering this kind of critical view of the Koran, he was fired. He was prosecuted. He was declared by the courts to be an apostate, and his marriage to his wife, who, at least according to the courts, was still a Muslim in good standing, was annulled, and the two of them had to actually flee the country. Now, that's a very famous and thankfully, at least, a very extreme example, even in the context of Egypt, where these issues can be so sensitive. But it definitely highlights the idea that the moment you fail to draw a distinction between the discussion of an idea and its promotion, then you are robbing teachers and students of the opportunity to confront and critically consider certain ideas. So, while I don't think we in the United States or Canada or wherever face a similar kind of punishment if we run afoul of these anti-CRT laws, the threat is there and the self-censorship will be too. So, there we will definitely see in America teachers (and frankly, in many cases professors as well, because academic freedom is only as powerful under the law as the people who enforce it), at all levels, we will see a kind of self-censorship and a kind of terror in many cases of running afoul of these texts. KHALID: As Jeffrey Sachs suggests, many of these bills do not make a distinction between explaining an idea and endorsing it. But that's just one problem with how these bills are drafted. Nadine Strossen is professor emerita at New York Law School and former president of the ACLU. She takes issue with the way these bills invoke the concept of divisiveness. NADINE STROSSEN: The concept of divisiveness is being bandied about as if it is inherently negative. And that is very dangerous because divisiveness applies to ideas that people disagree with, right? Any time somebody says something controversial or provocative or unpopular, one of the stigmatizing accusations is, “Oh, you're engaging in divisiveness.” Or if you say something critical of government policy or, heaven forbid, of school policy--“Oh, don't be so divisive.” Well, what's the opposite of divisiveness? It's uniformity. It's homogeneity. It's conformity. And that's the opposite of the critical thinking toward which I think we should be striving if we are to educate our young citizens. And interestingly enough, in the Supreme Court's most recent student free speech case from the summer of 2021, the Mahanoy case, the Supreme Court actually said that the school itself has an interest in making sure that students have the right to engage in unpopular expression. That could be, in other words, divisive expression. And not only that the students have that right, but the school even has a duty to teach students the importance of exercising and defending unpopular speech in particular. And that would certainly apply to divisive speech. Now, I also want to go back to the 1969 Tinker case where Mary Beth Tinker and a number of other students wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, at a time when the war was still very popular, when critics of the war were very unpopular, were assumed to be traitors to the United States and unpatriotic. And it was very upsetting expression because many parents and siblings of these school kids and teachers were off fighting and dying in Vietnam. A recent alum of the school had recently been killed in Vietnam. So this was very divisive emotionally as well as politically. And the school cited those concerns in saying, “Well, that's disruption and we can't have that in the public schools.” And the Supreme Court said, “No, no, no, no, no. Freedom for ideas, especially about matters of public affairs”--That's true for CRT, deals with matters of public affairs--“is critically important. If we were to say that the mere fact that speech can be divisive or upsetting, either personally or politically, that that's not a basis for allowing it to be protected, then we are teaching the wrong lessons about citizenship to these future voters and future leaders of our country.”KHALID: I'm actually really glad that you brought that up, because I think one of the hallmarks of democracy is precisely to not just allow for or tolerate, but to actually foster dissent, to create spaces where dissent is possible. As an educator, what I see happening with these bills is that they reek of an authoritarianism which is trying to produce the kind of conformity that fundamentally hollows out democratic institutions. And it's terrifying. When the public school system is destroyed is when you begin to see the downfall of a society. And it troubles me deeply. STROSSEN: You know, without free thinking and critically thinking and debating and discussing citizens, our democracy is going to crumble because it depends on we, the people, to wield our sovereign power. We can't do that in an informed, meaningful way unless we have nurtured and respected dissent.KHALID: I want to end with Professor Randall Kennedy, who believes that there is a direct line between laws that stifle open inquiry and the very health of our civic society. KENNEDY: The quality of our education is intimately tied up with the quality of our democracy. All of the leading theorists of democracy have talked about the importance of public education. They are bound up with one another. K-12 is the foundation of our educational system. What happens in K-12, tremendously important. In a democracy, if the people rule, it's very important for the people to make decisions about our health, about the use of military force, about all of the things that are significant. Well, if you have a lot of ignorance out there, if you have, out there, people who have not been trained to make wise assessments, if you have, out there, masses of people who really don't have the ability to separate disinformation from good, useful information, the fanciful from the realistic, well, a society that's governed by a badly educated populace is a society on its way down, which is why, you know, the struggle over the schools is so important. KHALID: As a mother of two young boys, I, too, am deeply invested in how racism is addressed in our schools. I definitely don't want my kids coming home and saying things like, “Mama, we were told today that white people are oppressing us.” That's not what I would consider an education. But if legislation is not the answer, and I firmly believe that it's not, then what can parents do to protest indoctrination in schools? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue. You can leave a written comment on BooksmartStudios.org or email a voice memo to banished@booksmartstudios.org.If you like what you heard today and want more exclusive content, including access to my extended conversation with Nadine Strossen and an exclusive discussion with Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of FIRE and coauthor of Coddling of the American Mind, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get transcripts, extended interviews, and bonus segments. Also, check out my sister podcasts by Booksmart Studios: John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley and Bob Garfield's Bully Pulpit. Please comment and help us spread the word. The success of Booksmart and the impact of our work depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And as always, I am Amna Khalid. Cheerio. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Is there value in reading the classics at a time when they are increasingly viewed as tools of oppression and white supremacy? Do they speak to non-white students? Dr. Anika Prather, founder and principal of the Living Water School in Maryland and lecturer at Howard University in DC talks to Amna Khalid about the deep history of the significance of classics for Black Americans.Click here for the full-length, subscriber-only interview. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

What does it mean to be woke? Has the word problematic become problematic? Lexicon Valley’s John McWhorter talks to Amna Khalid about the fraught vocabulary of modern censorship. * FULL TRANSCRIPT *AMNA KHALID: From Booksmart Studios, this is Banished. And I’m Amna Khalid.NEWSCASTER: Republicans are always denouncing so-called “cancel culture.”BBC GUEST 1: I think that nobody should lose their job because of what they believe in. I think that’s the issue—BBC GUEST 2: —but that’s what “cancel culture” is!POLITICIAN: “Cancel culture” is eroding the very foundation of who we are as an American people.NEWSCASTER 1: He’s woke.NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke.NEWSCASTER 3: Now you’re woke but you’re like me woke!NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke to the woke.FOX NEWS GUEST: So we’re woke, and we have to say woke.NEWSCASTER: Wait, so we’re both woke? You and I are both woke?FOX NEWS GUEST: Yeah, I think we’re woke!NEWSCASTER: Who’s the woker of the two, would you say?AK: “Woke” and “cancel culture” are now two terms that are now so much a part of our consciousness, that it feels like they’ve been around forever. But the reality is that they exploded only a few years ago. Like many of our most fraught cultural terms, they evolved over time, jumping from one community to another, shifting slightly in meaning or nuance. Along the way, they get weaponized, fall in and out of favor and even get canceled themselves — in other words, they are linguistically fascinating.Who better to dig into the lexicon of Banished, than John McWhorter, the host of Lexicon Valley here on Booksmart Studios, and an esteemed professor of linguistics at Columbia University. If you’ve never heard his show, it’s an endlessly entertaining deep-dive into everything that makes language so enthralling. I started our conversation by asking him about the word woke, which I first heard in hip-hop lyrics. JOHN McWHORTER: Well, woke actually goes back further than many people would think. It's actually first documented in the early 60s and it was a Black slang. What it meant was politically aware of certain realities that operate largely below the surface, but have a determinative effect on, for example, the Black American condition. And so you might think, if you were you or me, that woke is about 10 years old. But actually people were saying it on the Black street long before that. It did not leave the Black street. Then, in roughly the 2000-teens, it jumped the rails and started being used by a certain kind of politically aware white person on the left. And what it meant at first in the general culture was somebody who understands certain basic leftist analysises of the world. What it really was, was a substitute for a term that had worn out. It replaced politically correct, which, if you're just old enough now, you can remember was used without irony back in the late 70s and early 80s. And what it meant was that you have a basic understanding of liberal/leftist realities. Then it became PC. PCstarted being used as a slur to ridicule the kind of person who used that kind of ideology as a bludgeon in a smug kind of way. And so you couldn't say politically correct without making somebody laugh by, say, 2010. Really, you couldn't do it by about 1990. And so woke replaced that. As recently as 2018, I was on a TV show—STEPHEN COLBERT (crowd cheering): My next guest tonight is a professor at Columbia University, who hosts one of my favorite podcasts.JM: —talking about how woke was taking on a certain pejorative flavor.JM ON COLBERT: When I learned it, it was still just the coolest thing: You are woke to the complexities of society and how injustice really happens. It was cool — it smelled like, roughly, marijuana and lavender. It was that kind of word. And about two seconds later, a certain kind of person started sneering: Oh, is that person woke?People from a certain side of the political spectrum are throwing at other people the idea being that you’re a smug person who thinks that your views are the ones that come from on high. That has happened during the time, roughly, that a certain person has become president, and about six months before that. I’ve found it fascinating. Woke will be all but unusable in ten years.JM: Now, I would say that it has it. It's 2021, woke is now a word that is very much in quotation marks. Nobody would use woke in common parlance to mean that you understand the politics of Ta-Nahisi Coates. Now woke is used to make fun of people of a certain kind of leftist political persuasion who are beyond reasonable address. And so what's happened is that it has become a pejorative word, which happens to words all over the language, all over languages all the time. And so random example, reduce. Reduce used to mean to lead back to, and it could lead back to something good, something bad, something large, something small. You could reduce something to its former glory 500 years ago. That meant just take it back. Now, you could also reduce something to its former misery. It's the misery meaning that ended up taking over, that pejorative meaning. That happens a lot in language, more than what's called amelioration for reasons that we need not get into. But words tend to putrefy, essentially, and that is what happened with woke very quickly in this decade and the last one, partly because the internet makes these things come around and go around faster.AK: If I'm hearing this right, you're saying woke was part of the Black vernacular and it had a particular political valence which has been taken over and turned around, and now it's become a derogatory term almost to call someone woke.JM: Exactly.AK: Nobody would say I am woke as a matter of pride. Do you see a movement to reclaim it as a positive?JM: I can imagine doing kind of linguistic science fiction and writing about the reclaiming of the word, because that does happen with slurs. There's an example that I could give that I don't even need to. We all know. So pretend I talked about that for five minutes — but the term woke, I don't see that happening. For example, you didn't see people saying, yes, I'm a PC and I'm proud of it. People ran away from it and created something new. In 2021, it's too early to say what the new term is going to be, but I can guarantee you that by 2030 there'll be something else which starts meaning something very specific. It may emerge from Black culture and it will be generalized to mean that you've got the proper The Nation politics. I don't think it's going to happen with woke, partly because it's so imprinted now as a way of making fun of somebody. It's just at the point where if somebody said Yes, I am woke, it sounds trivial, it sounds like you don't have your own ideas and you're just looking for something to put on a T-shirt. So I think what we need to do is start listening for what the new term is going to be. These things emerge spontaneously. Nobody's going to create it on Madison Avenue, but it will certainly happen.AK: Is there a particular moment you can point to when you think woke started taking on a pejorative valence? Was it a very purposeful appropriation by the right to discredit a particular kind of social justice awareness or social consciousness, or did it emerge out of an organic movement?JM: Of course, the right started making fun of wokeness, and to me that's 2017, 2018. Where woke became a joke, and that was an unintentional rhyme, was last summer when even people on the left started ridiculing a particular kind of person. Wokebecame a joke in roughly June 2020. It was in the wake of the protests about George Floyd, during the quarantine at its worst, when a lot of people had very little to do and were very angry about it. It tended to focus these sorts of things. So yeah, I think we've seen that transition just over about the past year and change that woke is now unusable outside of quotation marks, just like a word like perky. You can't really say perky, you can only say perky in quotes.AK: There are words that are used by the Black community, if I can use that for a moment and make it a monolith, to communicate in ways that remains separate from and distinct from the use of language by white people. Of course, there's a history to this. There's the history of enslaved people using particular language to communicate, words to communicate, so that their masters, quote unquote, could not understand what was being said. To what extent do you think the fact that woke will not be reclaimed is actually a continuation of that trend where words that come from the Black vernacular, become mainstream, like cool, then subsequently get dropped by the Black community that almost prides itself on coming up with a new term that is exclusive.JM: We're not always aware of how subconscious the use of language generally is, especially when you're talking about at the level of a community. It's one thing to say that Black English represents the creativity of Black people and that when a term gets worn out, Black people make up a new term. That doesn't actually refer to a process that's been observed among human beings. The truth is that these terms tend to emerge spontaneously based on probabilistic processes. It isn't that, say, the teens are making up new slang to confuse their parents. I'm going to give you a term: diglossia. Most people in the world have two levels that they speak on, the high and the low. In America, it can be hard to quite imagine that unless you think about Black people. We’re a very boring country linguistically in many ways. But Black people have the high, the standard, the low, quote unquote, although there's nothing low about it, which is Black English. If something jumps from the low to the high, it's not that Black people think, well, now we must create something new. It's that the word no longer feels L, low, and all language is eternally creative in its own right. You need terms for things. And so next thing you know, a new term will be spontaneously invented because the old one wore out or it stopped being part of the L. It stopped feeling like us. And it's usually below the radar. Nobody could know that these things were going to happen. And then you wake up and you have some white guy playing hacky sack and using the term woke, who knew? But that means that it's no longer the guy in Chicago living in a Black neighborhood who uses that. He's going to have some other word he's using after a while.AK: So talk to me about cancel. Where does the term cancel come from and how has the meaning of that changed over time?JM: Well, cancel culture is a really messy term because it starts with the idea that a celebrity who produces some sort of product, writings or performance, recorded performance, is in bad odor and therefore they're going to be canceled like a TV show. And so that person's work is no longer going to be seen. They're no longer going to get hired. I think that the paradigm example would be Bill Cosby. He was cancellable. You can't hire him. You're no longer going to show the sitcom. It's no longer going to stream. I was at a store around when he was cancelled where they were literally giving away DVDs of the TV show for free. And I thought, wow, yeah, he's been canceled. And so that takes care of that. But terms are always generalizing in some way. They're ameliorating. They are pejorating. Something's going to happen to almost any term that's worth its salt. So now cancel culture is not so much about eliminating somebody from the public presence as just deciding that they are no longer fit for polite society, that we don't like them anymore. And so it's not that these people are going to go away. Our technology makes it so that it's pretty hard to cancel anybody completely anyway, but it just means that that person is a persona non grata, they are ostracized. So I think these days we're at this intermediate stage where somebody is determined as non grata, and spontaneously people say we're not trying to cancel you. And the question is, if they're not trying to cancel you, what are they doing? Because the cancelling no longer means that you don't exist. I'm not going to get specific, but about a year ago, it happened to me. I was canceled by a certain august body for, you know, reasons that people can guess. And I was told by the very nice person, we're not cancelling you. Well, of course not. You know, I've got all these writings out there, and it's not like I'm not going to be able to go to conferences and things like that. What I was subjected to was being told that I am unsavory in a very public way. That's the cancellation. So it no longer means what it means. But that's true of so much of language. Nobody’s being cancelled, but it just means that you are having a scarlet letter put upon you.AK: How is it different from censorship or censoring someone?JM: It's not. It's the same thing. Cancel culture is just a more vivid term. Censorship, you think more of the printed page. It doesn't sound as societal. So we say cancel culture because that sounds one, newer; two, meaner; three, less specific than censorship. I would call them different terms for the exact same thing.AK: So I’d push back over here a little bit and to my ear and from the way it's being used, I think about censorship as something that is associated — and I'm getting into the politics of these words now — it's associated with something that the right does.JM: Mm-hmm.AK: Whereas cancel culture is seen as something that is a product of this wokeperformative way of saying I adhere to certain social justice values. Am I correct in kind of thinking about it in this way? People ask me what Banished is about. They immediately assume it's about cancel culture and it is. But to my mind, I always jump in, then say and censorship, because it's not just about the kinds of eliminations that are coming from this left side of the spectrum. I'm interested in things that are being cut out left, right and center.JM: You're quite right. I hadn't thought about that. The person on the left who's accused of censorship is insulted. They feel like they're being accused of something that they're used to hurling at the other side. They often don't realize they're doing the same thing or they think that it's OK if the left does it because the left is right, correct basically. Yes, cancel culture is censorship from the left. Talk about subconscious. I never thought about this, and yet I've been using it in that way for a year.AK: Another term that I grew up in graduate school using quite regularly and without thinking of it as a “problem” is the term problematic. In fact, one of the ways in which you recognized someone was a graduate student over lunch was when they said I'd like to problematize that. So this is another term that has kind of migrated from a different area or different field into mainstream conversation and has come to mean something again politically. When did you first encounter the word, let's start there? And then when did you start noticing that it's beginning to take on a different meaning?JM: Problematic to me is exactly what you said. It's a graduate student in 1993 drinking their latte and talking about something that probably wouldn't interest most people who are not academics. It's the aughts where problematic becomes something someone's doing that the educated person is supposed to morally disapprove of. It seems to me that there's a certain euphemism in the word problematic, because what it usually is is a prelude to something being racist or sexist or fat shaming or something like that. But you start out calling it problematic with the implication that it's difficult, it's tricky, that you have to break something down — avoiding coming right out and being what used to be called a knee jerk liberal. Instead of just yelling it's racist, it’s sexist, I don't like it, you say, well, actually, it's kind of problematic because. I don't know who that person is, but I do, actually. And then, you know, the racism and the sexism is coming. Problematic now means blasphemous. Problematic means that you have sinned, that you're a heretic, that you should not have any Chardonnay and brie. But nobody wants to come right out and say that. We're too sophisticated to call people heretics. And so now often the way you call somebody a heretic is to say isn't he problematic? — that means that he's a witch.AK: OK, so now we're getting into really interesting territory where I'm beginning to think of the word blasphemy. I come from a country where blasphemy means what it literally means and has always meant and has consequences. Over here, blasphemy has taken on a different meaning. It's a way of ostracizing someone from any community and what the rules are specific to that community. What does that word mean today?JM: Well, to the extent that you have a certain kind of hyper woke person who has a religion, it's no longer an Abrahamic religion. It's not Christianity, it's not Judaism, it's not Islam. It's Electism. They have a sense that certain people are not to be tolerated for the same reason that a Christian or someone else would ban the heretic. That is what they call problematic, but really it's blasphemy. Today's blasphemy is not about God. Nobody thinks of it is taking the Lord's name in vain to say, oh, my God, anymore. That was old school blasphemy. But now I find the Middle Ages much easier to understand than I used to just, you know, going online and watching what happens to nice people all the time. That is today's blasphemy. I would almost teach a child blasphemy based on the sort of things that happened to Donald McNeil, Alison Roman, etc., as opposed to Galileo.AK: You've coined the term “the Elect” and we just referred to it. Who are you referring to as the Elect and how exactly are you, are you using that phrase?JM: The Elect is a term that I used to refer to a certain kind of person who has hard leftist views about the way things are supposed to go and feels that being mean to people is justifiable in the name of making the world safe for those views. And so it's not the woke, it's not the hyper woke, it's woke people who are mean, who are The Elect. It's the evangelical, prosecutorial woke. And so by The Elect, I mean the kinds of people who seek to get people fired, who support policies for Black people that hurt Black people but qualify as goodly because they are quote unquote anti-racist. For example, it is Elect to say if Black kids aren't good at standardized tests, then let's eliminate the test because it's racist rather than helping Black kids get better at tests, and that particular kind of thinking. The term is not original to me, but I find it very useful and I hope it settles in. The Elect.AK: I come from a society where freedom of expression is, doesn't exist. There are very strict parameters to what you can and cannot say.JM: You mean academia?AK (laughs): That is the society I inhabit now. That was good. I mean Pakistan. In fact, that's part of my disillusionment with academia. I didn't expect it, especially not in the West and not in the US where freedom of expression is supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. Censorship from the right is something that I'm familiar with. I can even understand those tendencies within the U.S. coming from a more authoritarian mindset, from the political right. To some degree I can get that. What I find troubling, deeply troubling, is that I'm finding that kind of censorship coming from the left. So, talk about cancel culture. And I've been playing around a lot with the notion of why this is the case. And I'm going to present to you a hypothesis and ask you to tell me what you think. After much contemplation, I thought, well, maybe it's a society that has had a lot of freedom, precisely because freedom of expression is enshrined as a constitutional right. When there is so much freedom, it must necessarily produce its own unfreedom to rail against. A concept cannot exist, similarly a practice cannot exist, if it doesn't have its antithesis or antichrist. I'm beginning to wrap my head around what I'm seeing happening, particularly in academia, as this is just freedom coming full circle.JM: Hm. I like that. I am inclined to think that there's something else involved and it's social media. I think if — it's impossible to imagine a world without it now — but if we really did go back to that time when there was just email and the whole world could not talk to itself, I think we wouldn't have this happening on the left because what it is, is a reign of terror. A lot of what goes on on the left in terms of these cancellations is based not on consensus, but on fear. People are really afraid of being called a dirty name. And so you don't speak against the minority of people who are coming over the hill with pitchforks. I think that has a lot to do with it. And what people are so afraid of really is being called a dirty thing on Twitter. It is mostly Twitter. It is mostly being called a racist. Nobody wants to be called a racist on Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram, but mostly Twitter. Fifteen years ago, if somebody didn't like something that I wrote or something that I said, they would write a letter and they would send it to my mailbox, or they would write an email to me. That's what people did, and you got used to it. Now that almost never happens. Almost nobody emails me and it's very easy to find my Columbia email. It barely ever happens because those same people, they feel the same way, they put it on Twitter where everybody can see it. That change happened in about 2012 and there's no going back from that. You can see that the impulse of a certain kind of person used to be: I wish I could tell the world that I hate this person, but instead I'm just going to send it to their email because that's the best I can do. That person now can write it in the sky and we're never going to be rid of that kind of person. So, yeah, you have a new era that started in the early 2000-teens.AK: OK, I'm going to turn the camera upon us as academics for a moment and say one of the problems that I have right now is the erosion of academic freedom on college campuses. And I think the people who are responsible for it at the end of the day are us. It's tenured professors. And I know you don't have tenure, but you're a person with enough authority.JM: Close enough.AK: Close enough, so forgive me for lumping you with us, but it's tenured professors who are not speaking up, both in terms of the excesses of the administration, which is increasingly bureaucratized and corporatized, and also in terms of the kind of wider trends of the adjunctification of the faculty itself, which is a deep threat to academic freedom. So I hold tenured academics responsible for that. And it's easy to bash social media for giving fillip to nasty trends. There are nasty people out there. There is a nastiness in all of us and perhaps we feel more comfortable airing it when we're not talking to someone face to face and we can put it out.JM: Exactly.AK: But there is also a niceness to all of us, or at least I desperately want to believe that, right? I really do, because if we don't, I feel like I begin to lose the will to live. What's the point, right? So why do we not use social media in a way that fights against the kind of natural tendencies that it brings out? To what degree can we repurpose that and fight cancel culture and fight this tendency to shut people up by actually reclaiming that space? Maybe we can't, but I'm interested in hearing what your thoughts are.JM: We have a moral duty as thinking people in this culture now. Fifty years ago, that duty was to understand that racism is not just calling dirty names, that sexism is not just calling dirty names, that you have to look inside of yourself. And I think practically everybody in this country learned how to do that through the 1970s to a degree that was stunning. And many people today would say that it wasn't important, but I think they either lack historical imagination or they're just not old enough to remember what things were like before. If you walked around in 1950 and talked to educated Americans about how they felt about women and how they felt about Black people, I think many people would be utterly stunned at the difference. Something happened between 1970 and 1980. Now, we have a similar thing that we need to do, which is to learn to not be so damned afraid of being called names on social media. A lot of people are clearly frightened to their socks of somebody saying something nasty to them and then being retweeted. And the truth is, it happens, it flares for a while and it goes away. And Twitter is not the world. Now, of course, some people feel that they don't want to risk their jobs, but I think for most people, it's just that they don't want to be called a dirty name and a dirty name today is you racist. And so they just hold back. And that means that the nasty guys in the schoolyard end up taking over. Even if you try to be nice on Twitter, there are some people — and they're not crazy, they're not trolls, they're not under a bridge; unfortunately, they're ordinary people who are probably very nice in real life — but people will be mean to you for being nice. You know, how dare you praise this? How dare you excuse that? That kind of person cannot be allowed to determine what Twitter is like, though. You just have to let them, you have to let them yell. And I really hope that part of the pendulum shift is that a critical mass of people will learn that you can be called a dirty name on social media, and you know the planet will keep spinning, your friends will keep liking you. It's hard to be yelled at. You get used to it. But I think we need to start learning how to get used to it more.AK: Where do you think the fear comes from? I understand the fear when it's coming from a threat to your livelihood.JM: Mm-hmm.AK: What is it? I'm trying to dig to the deep roots of what are we so bloody afraid of? I've been called many things in my life, sometimes been proud of the fact that I’ve been called many things in my life, which are not necessarily nice things. Being a — aterm that I absolutely detest, but I'll use at the moment — you know, a person of color, I say things that people don't expect a person of color to say. And so then I get labeled as someone who has false onsciousness or someone who's drunk the Kool-Aid and all kinds of things. What is it what is it that we're so scared of?JM: In a different world, you didn't want it to be said that you were godless. In this world, you don't want it to be said that you are a racist or that you are a sexist because that questions your very legitimacy as a human being. And I think you or me as people of color, we can say things about race and get called certain things. But there isn't as much of a sting, especially because, frankly, the charges are often so absurd. You know, like somebody telling me that I don't like myself. Frankly, yes, I do and everybody knows. You can tell. And I'm sure that you feel the same way. Whatever you're being called, it has nothing to do with you. But I will openly admit, I could not bear — and watch it happen now that I say this — I could not bear it getting around that I was a sexist. That's too much. If it got around that I had some sort of woman problem, that I didn't think women were men's equals, it would make me want to curl up in a corner and die. That would be more than I could risk, and I'm quite sure that I don't have that issue. But if somebody decided to start a campaign on Twitter and call me all sorts of things and distort things that I wrote, I would not be up for that. And so I can put myself in other people's place. They feel that way about race. They feel I just couldn't tolerate that. But, you know, if there were an epidemic of people being called sexist for no good reason, I would have to buck up, you know, if I had some skin in that game. And I think that's what has to happen with the racist charge within reason. You don't want to take advantage, but you can't let the people who spend their lives saying mean things on Twitter determine that entire forum because it could be used for such good. You're right. But everybody needs to get some, you see I want to say balls, but that's no good.THEME MUSIC UPAK: Well, I think this entire segment has to be edited out because otherwise you're going to be branded as sexist and we are going to have a campaign. And then you use the term balls, so you just gave …JM: Yeah, I’m, I’m gone.AK: You’re gone. (laughing)JM: Yeah.AK: Thank you John McWhorter for being with us today. This was a delightful conversation. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.JM: Thank you for having me Amna.AK: If you liked what you heard today, and want more exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get access to transcripts, extended interviews, and bonus segments.Before I sign off, I must remind you — I must implore you — to comment, rate, share what you've heard here today. And not just Banished, but the other Booksmart Studios shows like John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley and Bob Garfield’s Bully Pulpit. Both programs are stimulating and incisive in their analysis.So please share! The success of Booksmart, the impact of our work, depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. I am Amna Khalid. So long. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

We are approaching the 40th anniversary of The Color Purple, a novel that garnered critical acclaim, won Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and brought her sudden literary scrutiny. Both the book and its subsequent feature film adaptation elicited a flurry of criticism, frequently from within the Black community.Accused of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as inherently violent, Walker was viewed by some as a race traitor. And for reasons that include depictions of rape, incest, homosexuality, violence and explicit language, The Color Purple has consistently remained on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged and banned books over the years.Host Amna Khalid speaks with Ms. Walker about what it’s been like to experience a kind of “cancellation” repeatedly throughout her career.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *AMNA KHALID: We’re approaching the 40th anniversary of The Color Purple, the novel that earned Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first Black woman to receive the award. Shortly after, it was adapted into a feature film by Steven Spielberg, which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and 4 Golden Globes. The success of the book and then the film arguably made Alice Walker a household name.And yet it also opened her up to some of the harshest criticism of her career. For her use of a Black dialect, her portrayal of Black men and her depiction of same-sex love between women, Walker was excoriated from within the Black community. Many said she was trading in racist stereotypes of Black men as violent rapists. Ishmael Reed, an African American and another giant in the literary world, was incensed, almost personally offended, by Walker’s rendering of Black men in the novel: REED: You look at The Color Purple, you would think that the incest and all the people committing incest and committing rape are Black men. This is not true. Alice Walker said Black men are evil. She said they’re more evil than White men because White men are aware of their evil.AK: When the film was released in 1985, the Coalition Against Black Exploitation protested outside the premier in Los Angeles. Vernon Jarrett, an African American columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, was one of many who were critical of the movie’s portrayal of Black men:JARRETT: If it had been a story of Israel, would the Jews have permitted a movie to be made where every single male character was either a rapist, an incest perpetrator, a beast, or even dumb?AK: The fact that Walker had allowed Spielberg — a White, Jewish man — to adapt the novel for the big screen led many to view her as a race traitor. Here, speaking at the time, is Louis Farrakhan, Leader of the Nation of Islam:FARRAKHAN: He uses her, Whoopi Goldberg. She plays her part so well — I’m telling you — she may win an Oscar for that role. But not just because of her acting ability; but she wins an Oscar in the eyes of White folk because she aids in proving the point that the Black man is a dog. And as long as the Black man remains a dog, you cannot rise, therefore he cannot fall: The Color Purple. AK: Joining us now to discuss censorship, cancelation and the relationship between society and the artist is the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Ms. Walker, thank you so much for your time. ALICE WALKER: Absolutely. AK: The Color Purple and the response that you received to both the book and then the movie and the musical in many ways presaged for us the current moment that we're in and the kind of politics around cultural representation, around art and the role of art, and also around who gets to speak and who gets to tell the story, who does it belong to. And I cannot think of a better person to reflect on our moment today, when everyone is being canceled left, right and center, because there is this objection to how they're presenting things, I can't think of a better person than you to reflect on our moment in light of the experience that you had when The Color Purple came out. AW: Well, you know, it’s not a pleasant feeling to be attacked for expressing the truth of your life, basically. This is how I, at the time, wanted to share what I understood of reality. And it was actually surprising and in some ways shocking that people were so afraid of it, and I understood that that was part of it, that they were really afraid. They were afraid of their own feelings where women loving women are concerned. They were really afraid when I said the God of the Bible was not the one that was interesting to me. So, I just basically bore it and lived my life outside of a lot of the controversy which went on for years.AK: Can I ask you a little bit about some of the responses that you've received to your work and what were you not anticipating and that you were shocked to see?AW: I was surprised that people didn't understand the compassion I feel for Black men. It was so interesting, but then I realized that they didn't read the books and that helped. I said, “Oh, they didn't read them.” And I think that's true and that's unfortunate. AK: There seems to be the capacity in your characters to hold complexity, to simultaneously have done things which people might find morally reprehensible, but then also to be so much more than that.AW: I see them as very human, and I don't see them as different from any of the other men on the planet. I mean, the men who do bad things in my novels are the same men who do bad things in China. That's why when my book was published, I went to China, and it was a bestseller already. It was an underground bestseller. And I said to the people who invited me, “Well, why? How did this happen?” – Of course, they hadn’t told me they were selling it – And they said, “Well, it’s a very Chinese story.” And that has been true on every continent. It's been true everywhere we've sold this book, and that's why it's so long lasting. It's just people and how they behave given the structures that they've had to live under. AK: Ms. Walker, I'm originally from Pakistan and I first encountered your book while I was still there. And indeed, it has this way of speaking across boundaries, across barriers of race, because it's telling a story that is around us all and we see it. But there is a way in which I find that today's atmosphere, especially around judging who gets to speak and who gets to represent, is very focused, especially in the U.S., on race, almost exclusively on race to the detriment of class, gender and other ways in which oppression may be—through which they may be refracted. AW: I think that's deliberate. We have always been used as a scapegoat. We've always been used as the focus so that you don't notice all the other horrible things that are happening to you. You can always just say, “Oh, those poor Black people,” or, “Oh, those terrible Black people,” something about the Black people, and very often about the Black men, which is why the criticism that I was somehow hostile to Black men was just absurd. It's useful to the people who want to divide us, very useful. It was a way to actually divide Black men and Black women and it was a way to distract all the rest of the people on the planet from their disasters. So, they could all look at the Black people and say, “Oh my God, they're fighting again,” or, “She's saying this and they're saying that.” It’s a tactic. And I think most of us are used to it by now. AK: But what's interesting is that a lot of this response actually came from within the Black community. AW: Yeah. But what I'm saying is that that is what gets focused on by the mainstream. So, they would focus on that rather than on the fact that The Color Purpleis a theological work. It’s about God. I mean, it's about God, it's about do we believe this, that we've been force fed, or do we not? And if we don't, what is our sense of what God is? But if you spend all your time worrying about Black men and Black women fighting over whatever, you will never get to that subject, which is central. AK: It's also interesting to me that I see this huge contrast between how you tell your stories — right? – and what we're seeing today, which, like I said, not only focuses on race, but is extremely unforgiving. There is no room for people to be human. The expectation is that somehow we should all be superhuman, 100 percent pure.AW: It’s ridiculous. That makes me think of how they came down hard on Flannery O'Connor. Now, Flannery O'Connor was a racist most of her life, but she evolved. And if you take the position that people who are locked into racism or whatever and that they never evolve, then you just get rid of them and whatever they created, which means that you stunt yourself. You never grow yourself. That's the real issue here: that if you in your indignation, in your inability to allow other people to grow and to evolve, you will never grow and evolve yourself, there you’re stuck. So, you know, I recognize Flannery O'Connor was a racist. We lived across the highway from each other when I was a child. But I also grew up to read her work and to watch her evolve in her work. And that's all anybody can do. If you are brought up in a racist society or sexist society, all you can do basically is try to free yourself by any means necessary, by reading, by traveling, by listening, by thinking. That's what you do. And I think people who insist on—they took her name off of the building at some Catholic university in their rage that she wasn't perfect. But nobody is. And people are evolving. People can evolve. And if you don't give them that opportunity, all you're setting yourself up for is that nobody will give you the opportunity in the future. And I dread thinking about what will happen to these same people further along the line. AK: Where do you think it comes from: this unwillingness to allow change and evolution?AW: Fear. Many people on the planet now think of these as the last days. And most of the people who have been taught from the Bible that—that's what the Bible says: that there will be an end of times. And so many people see this time now as that end of time, and they are trying to, in a way, purify themselves by getting rid of what they see as the impure. Too bad, because the impure, quote, are often the people you need to teach you how to get through some of the roughest periods. And this is a rough one. AK: Earlier this year, Ms. Walker was invited to deliver a commencement address to the graduating class of Hudson Valley Community College in New York, but just days before the event the college suddenly withdrew the invitation. I asked her what happened.AW: Well, I was invited to this college in upstate New York, and I was ready to go. And I made a tape, like we’re doing. And then they decided that they didn't want me speaking to their graduating class. I mean, just a really frivolous charge: some book that I had on my nightstand was written by someone who was an anti-Semite, says, I guess, some anonymous person. And they canceled my talk to the students, which is terrible for the students. I mean, it hardly impacted me. I was, you know, sorry they missed my talk. But think of what that does to the students not to be able to hear from someone that they had wanted to hear from. I'm sure those students were the ones who decided they wanted to invite me to come and talk to them at their graduation. AK: Did they expressly say that it was this anonymous person who objected to a book?AW: Yeah, objected to a book that I had mentioned in The New York Times over a year ago. I mean, there was a flap then, too, because I was accused of being anti-Semitic myself, which is such an old trope. I mean, it's just ridiculous. I don't really spend a whole lot of time agonizing over any of this because people do have a right to their perceptions, but they twist things so that the world that we would like to have where people are feeling free and equal, that's not likely to happen with all of the canceling, all the cancelations. I just posted on my blog this morning, one of the most cancelled people on earth: Norman Finkelstein. And, you know, he's been called everything—as we say down South—but the child of God. And I think he's brilliant. What can we do about all of these things? We can continue to forward the thought and the action and the outrageousness and wonderfulness that we see. Like you're doing. I mean, this is what you do, this is how you move forward in the world what it is you would like to see. You know, more honesty, clarity, vision, not so much fragility and fear and backwardness, which is how I see a lot of this. It’s just backward. You can't really expect people or want people or hope for people not to know a reality that shaped them. AK: And where do you see things going if we keep going down this route?AW: Life has its own meaning, its own reason and its own reality. And so, this will play for a while, but it will not stand. I mean, even if it takes us all the way to, like, I don't know, Nazi Germany or some of the other horrible places that come to mind, we may well go through them, but there's something in the human spirit that just wants to know what happened. That's human. And we will always have that unless we're drugged into oblivion, which we might be, but, you know, until then, we will want to know. And that's one of the great things about being human beings: our curiosity. AK: What can we do at this moment to nurture that curiosity in the face of this onslaught of cancelation? I love what you're saying about curiosity and how that is so deeply hardwired into us. AW: Yeah, I mean, it's my guiding light. I mean, I'm curious. I want to know. And if my effort to know offends you, then just go somewhere else. Because, you know, I do have this right, it's innate. It's a human right to be curious. And I exercise that right as much as I can. And I love it and I don't intend to forsake it. AK: But I also sense hope in how you've presented it. You're convinced that this cannot last that long, that there is a way in which human curiosity will override these attempts to silence and to shut people down. AW: Human intelligence and curiosity. People really want to know. My books have been banned, they have been critiqued, a few of them have been burned, but I just trust that because I'm a human being that other human beings are more or less like me and they want to know. It’s just a natural thing that we have. And so, I never see this kind of activity as conclusive. Look at Germany, for instance. When you go to Germany now, people are still pretty much the way people are. They're reading, they're writing, they're going to school, they're riding bikes, they're living. In my opinion, it's possible that we need to go through this period to study it. I love study. And I think it would be really wonderful if more of us would just look at this as something to, if we have to, endure, something we will probably have to struggle to survive, but it's a lesson and we can get somewhere from there. AK: I love this angle that you're presenting, which is if we see this as a moment that is passing, much like those that have happened before, we can study it, and this is not that special. We as humans like to think we are in the most exceptional moment in history, which is so not the case. AW: I thought about this a long time, about what it actually means to be cancelled. What is the ultimate goal of cancelation? It’s interesting and it’ll help you understand economics in this world and in this country much better. You know, why people are poor and why people cancel people. A lot of it has to do with money, which is an angle that people often don't think about. They just think about something you said that people didn't like, something you wrote that they didn't want their children to see, blah blah blah, but actually it has a financial meaning. And that is something to be studied. AK: Could you say a little more about the financial meaning?AW: Well, cancellation, one of the underlying, or maybe the overlying — I mean, it’s very prominent actually — is that they hope to impoverish you. If they impoverish you, you are automatically canceled in your own agency, because what can you do? You have no money in a country where everything is money. And the example I give is of Billie Holiday, this recent movie where you can see what I'm talking about just really, really clearly. Why do they hound this woman to death, chain her to her hospital bed as she was dying? Why were they intent on not letting her have a cabaret card so she could make a living singing? She was a singer. OK? They wanted her to stop singing a particular song about lynching. She refused. And so, their response was basically to just kill her by making her poor or trying to make her poor, sick and all of that so that she couldn't function in society. And that is a real goal, and we should acknowledge it: that people who deal in cancelations of other people are deliberately trying to make them so poor, so impoverished, so weak that they have no agency in the culture. AK: It's ironic because it's all being done in the name of trying to give people agency, but what you're saying is that it's completely being undermined.AW: Give what people agency? They're not trying to give the cancelled people agency. They're trying to destroy their agency. I like very much when people remember that in this culture especially, but more and more in the world, it really is about who has the means to speak. I mean, if you're making four thousand dollars a semester or whatever as a subcontracted biology teacher or something, it's unlikely that you actually have the agency to speak, especially if you have children. So, the financial angle is really crucial for us to understand. And that is why some people, artists, especially in artists, for women and of color, but men who are of color and some poor White men artists, how you have to both do your work and also always consider how you're going to live. These are the parts of the structure of living in a racist, sexist, monetary society that you have to really analyze because otherwise it's always up here, it’s as if there's no foot, there's no foundation to the problem that you're discussing. AK: No, and indeed, the thrust of all these cancelations is precisely that: people are losing their jobs, people are losing their livelihoods, which then prevents them from—AW: —from speaking. It’s very cruel. And it says a lot about the culture that it would support this cruelty without acknowledging this part. You notice they will never really acknowledge that this is what they're doing.AK: Alice Walker, thank you so much. I appreciate how much time you have given. And before I go, may I just ask you one final thing, which is what do you see as the role of art in society? AW: A mirror. I read somewhere that art is the only mirror in which we can see our collective face. That's why we need it.AK: I’d like to conclude today’s episode by invoking the words of another great American writer, James Baldwin, on the role of the artist: “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. N'Dinga Gaba and Chris Mandra mixed the audio. A special thanks to Anika Jones for her help with this episode.This is Banished. I’m Amna Khalid.Further reading: Gifts of Spirit — Thoughts on Being Canceled by Alice Walker This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

In Episode One of Banished, we covered the controversy around Victor Arnautoff's murals, “Life of Washington” — a series of 13 paintings that cover the entrance and the hallway of George Washington High School in San Francisco. One of the voices in the episode was Professor Dewey Crumpler, an artist who was commissioned to paint so-called “response” murals to Arnautoff’s in the late 1960s when “Life of Washington” first became controversial. In this extended interview, Crumpler waxes lyrical not just about the mural controversy, but also about the place of art in society.“The most important place for young people to confront difficulty is in high school just before you get into the world,” Crumpler told us. “If it’s in the world, it’s for me. If it’s in the world, I have a right to know it. I have a right to experience it. And it’s my youth that helps prepare me for it, even though it will be problematic. That’s how we learn to overcome the difficulties.”Normally, extended guest interviews will only be available to paying subscribers, but we’re sharing this one with all of you to give you a taste of the kind of content you can expect if you subscribe to Booksmart Studios. * FULL TRANSCRIPT *KHALID: This is Banished, and I'm Amna Khalid. Welcome to a special subscriber-only episode of Banished. We're sharing this one with all of you to give you a taste of the kind of content we have in store for paying subscribers to Booksmart Studios. In Episode One, we covered the controversy around Victor Arnautoff's murals, Life of Washington, which is a series of 13 paintings that cover the entrance and the hallway of George Washington High School in San Francisco. These paintings, which were commissioned in the 1930s as part of the New Deal Art Initiative, have recently come under fire. Some people in the community see the imagery as offensive, even traumatizing. For example, one of the murals depicts a dead Native American lying face down on the ground as Washington's troops walk past in their pursuit of westward expansion. Another portrays enslaved African Americans picking cotton and working at Mount Vernon. Just recently, the school board voted to cover the murals with panels at a cost of three quarters of a million dollars. But the alumni association has fought back and filed a lawsuit to prevent this from happening. As part of my research for the story, I interviewed Professor Dewey Crumpler, an artist who was commissioned to paint so-called “response murals” to Arnautoff’s in the late 1960s when Life of Washington first became controversial. Professor Crumpler was only 19 when he painted his set of three murals titled Multiethnic Heritage, which depict the historic contributions and struggles of African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and other minority groups. Today, Professor Crumpler, who is based at the San Francisco Art Institute, integrates digital imagery, video, and traditional painting techniques to explore themes of globalization and the reduction of culture from a way of life to a mere commodity. Over the next 20 minutes, Professor Crumpler will discuss some of his other work, how he came to paint the response murals, and the importance of context in interpreting art. I had heard that Professor Crumpler saw those horrific photos of Emmett Till's brutalized body at a very young age. I began our conversation by asking him to reflect on that moment.CRUMPLER: Seeing that image of Emmett Till as a six-year-old was traumatizing. And some of the students at George Washington High School were traumatized by seeing that image of a Native American on the ground dead. I empathize completely with those students and felt their pain. And I use that example in relationship to how one comes to grips with difficulty and how important it is for young people to know that they have support, but that the world is complicated, and they will learn to cope. Now, it became more apparent to me that art, that creativity, could do something very important. And so, I understood at a very early age that this was what I wanted to do.KHALID: Could you tell us a little bit about how you identify as an artist? How would you describe who you are?CRUMPLER: Well, culturally I identify as a African American. I don't shy away from that hyphenated reality. I identify myself not as an artist, but as a maker. I think the term “artist” is a flying signifier that moves in any direction that the culture deems necessary at a given moment. But a maker, which is what I believe myself to be, is capable of moving in any direction that interests them spiritually and physically and cognitively to express themselves in the world. And since I was a small child, I believed firmly in that power, because the power of creativity is an extraordinary power. And it really is personal in the sense that it is a projection of my ideas and feelings into the world. I see the creative process as a real privilege and as a real calling. I take it deeply seriously. That's sort of how I see myself as a maker.KHALID: Let me pull you a little bit towards your container series. You've done a whole series of drawings and paintings and imagery that is depicting containers on ships. And as I was seeing some of those works, there was a lot about our current political moment, about movement of things and human beings that was speaking to me. May I ask you to elaborate on that?CRUMPLER: I'd come back from Europe for the first time, and I'd become engaged with tulips because I went to Amsterdam, and I went to the Keukenhof Gardens. And I didn't see them as flowers. I saw them as history, the history of how a flower could become a commodity and how that commodity could become as important as human beings. In fact, they were treated like human beings. They were cultivated for their qualities, and they were experimented on. And their biology changed to create French tulips and German tulips and all these different kinds of tulips. When I got a bit older, I was attracted to the piers in Oakland, California. And I spent years going around those piers, and I wondered one day: why was I paying so much attention to these piers, to this place? It was the water, and it was those ships. And those ships had containers on them. And those containers were full of different colors like those tulips. And those ships really signaled to me time. Because the containers had ridges and those ridges created shadows. And shadows automatically signified time. And because they were about a rhythmic relationship to time, I saw them as similar to what has happened through American history. You could take containers and drop them off anywhere in the world, and they would operate the same everywhere in the world. And I was thinking that this is very much a system that is organized to reinforce capitalism, just like the transportation of bodies after Prince Henry developed a relationship to the caravel, which made the caravel the most efficient vehicle on the seas and permitted those so-called “explorers” to move across the planet, putting down stakes of ownership so that they could reinforce capitalism. And that's why in all those paintings that I made about containers, they're not really about containers. The containers are really markers of Cortez landing on the shores of South America. And those containers and their shadows are about the past, not about the present. They look like the present, but they are about the same system that has existed all the way back to the Phoenicians.KHALID: Our conversation eventually turned to the subject of Arnautoff's murals and Professor Crumpler's own response murals that hang in George Washington High School in San Francisco. I asked him how he understood the sensibilities of the students back in the 1960s who first objected to these murals.CRUMPLER: Well, first of all, I was one of those students. I was not much older than them. They were seniors in high school, and I was moving into my second year at Arts and Crafts in Oakland. I had been making artwork that followed the civil rights movement. And remember also that the 1960s was the hot point of the Black Power movement. And the Black Power movement was about identity and about the acquisition of power, and power meant the knowledge of yourself as a Black person in a country that stripped you of your knowledge of self. When they made a statement that they wanted those murals changed and taken down, the district said they were not going to do this, the students protested, and that's when I became involved, because the students, several of which had seen my work, wanted me to make another mural. The board said no, because I had no proven skills, I was a kid. A week or two later, some ink was thrown on the mural and that made the board decide, “OK, we're going to let him do it.” I told the students that I would make the mural, and I would make a great mural equal to the mural in that other room. You know, the hubris of a young kid. And that I would only make the mural if they left that mural in place, because Arnautoff was trying to expose a history that should be told and understood, even though he knew that the imagery was not easy imagery.KHALID: If I'm remembering your quotation correctly, you said your murals make no sense if Arnautoff's murals are taken away. CRUMPLER: He wanted to tell a truth about the contradiction of a founding father who signed a document that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights.” He and those other signers of the great document, and it is a great document, while standing on the neck — while standing on the neck of African peoples who are under his boot, laying on the ground that belongs to the millions of Native Americans who also have died — shed blood fighting for their right to their space. So, I wanted to engage that idea of the founding, that idea of Native Americans, that idea of African Americans, that idea of Asians. I went to Mexico to learn mural painting. I had no doubt that I could paint that mural because my passion was in it. And I tried to create a worthy dialogue. But of course, once I had made that mural, the school board relaxed, and they didn't do what I said at the dedication they should do. You have to use those murals as teaching tools, and you have to put plaques next to them that explain them. Every generation is different. They confront new issues. And therefore, you have to give them information, otherwise they will misunderstand all the implications and symbolisms that are all over those murals. Whether it's Arnautoff or my mural in the future, unless something is done to explain them, to make them clear, this will crop up again. And censorship and cancel culture is all around us. That's why art has to be free to do its work, even though it can make individuals very upset and angry. It's a worthy subject, that an inanimate object can actually do something to a human being, can make a human being think, can make a human being angry. But the point is, you have to work your way through it. Working your way through it is the point of life itself.KHALID: So, Professor Crumpler, this is fascinating because what you're saying is that the school board reneged on its responsibility and promise, if I can say that, to contextualize these murals and to put up plaques explaining where they're coming from, which you had requested.CRUMPLER: Yes. Let me just say that the most important place for young people to confront difficulty is in high school, just before you get into the world. So, a young person seeing difficult imagery — that’s a perfect opportunity for teaching. OK, you're not going to read Huckleberry Finn because of some words. They're offensive. I was offended by them. But if it's in the world, it’s for me. If it's in the world, I have a right to it. I have a right to know it. I have a right to experience it. And it's my youth that helps prepare me for it, even though it will be problematic. That's how we learn to overcome the difficulties. But those murals have to be contextualized. When you are young, everything looks larger than it is. When I saw those murals in 1966, I was incensed by them, and they looked huge. When I came back to engage them, they were much smaller, and I had come to understand much profoundly why he used those images. In fact, one of the people who had been most vociferous about taking those walls down, once he, like me, had graduated from college, he apologized to me: “Mr. Crumpler, I really appreciate what you painted. I appreciate those murals greatly. But if I understood what Arnautoff was doing, I would have never done what we did.” He couldn't have come to that realization if I joined them and said, “Yes, let's tear this s**t down, and when we tear it down, I'll paint over every bit of it.”KHALID: Professor Crumpler, one final question, what would you say to those on the school board today who have voted to cover up Arnautoff’s murals?CRUMPLER: All great art tells difficult truths. And they are always confronted with people who speak against them. And then they become central to the expression of human liberty. Arnautoff was a frail person, he was not some kind of heroic giant. He was just a maker trying to demonstrate a contradiction. He used imagery that functioned in its time. But it's imagery based on a truth: that Native American lying on that ground, representing all of us who have struggled.KHALID: Since I spoke with Professor Crumpler, a court has ruled on the petition by the alumni association to keep the murals up. Just this week, a state judge found that the school board hadn't fully considered all the alternatives to covering the mural. So, for now, the murals stay up. Of course, the school board may still appeal the decision, which means that we may not have heard the last of this case. But the broader questions remain. What is the place of controversial art in society? How do we reckon with difficult historical truths? Can we find a way to acknowledge the pain that some may experience without completely whitewashing the past?If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to have access to more exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. You can learn more about this show and our other offerings by going to BooksmartStudios.org. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. N'Dinga Gaba and Chris Mandra mixed the audio.This is Banished. I’m Amna Khalid. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

In the mid-1930s, Russian-born muralist Victor Arnautoff was commissioned by the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project to paint a series of frescoes at sites around the San Francisco Bay Area. One of his more ambitious undertakings covered 1,600 square feet of wall space inside the lobby and stairwells of George Washington High School, depicting scenes from Washington’s life as a military leader and statesman. Parts of the work portray a slaughtered Native American and enslaved African-Americans, which Arnautoff — a Communist whose art was an outgrowth of his activism — deliberately foregrounded.Whatever his intentions at the time, Arnautoff is now at the center of a heated controversy among students, parents and community members, some of whom find the images traumatizing and want them “painted over” or removed. Host Amna Khalid spoke with those on both sides of the issue, equally passionate and resolute. She brings us the story.* FULL TRANSCRIPT* ALLISON COLLINS: A Native American that is dead on a wall and having people walk over him? That has cultural significance.DR. JOELY PROUDFIT: Enough is enough. Stop with the racism, stop with the dehumanization, stop with the genocidal artwork. Not in our public schools.COLLINS: That painful history is not something that needs to be consistently in children’s faces.JOHN LEARNED: Hey, as hard as those things are to look at, that's what really happened. There’s Indians that want to tell their history, they want people to know what happened.AMNA KHALID: This is a story of a painting — “Life of Washington,” by Russian artist Victor Arnautoff. It hangs on the walls of a high school in San Francisco. And I say walls because it’s actually 13 separate paintings covering 1600 square feet. It’s a series of vivid and sometimes violent vignettes from George Washington's life. The first panel is of Washington in his 20s. Later on, a scene from the French and Indian War. The Boston Tea Party. Winter at Valley Forge. Surrender at Yorktown.There are members of the community who find some of these images disturbing. Even traumatizing. One painting shows colonists walking past a Native American, dead on the ground. Another is of enslaved African-Americans on Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon. Many students want the murals ... gone.Of course, it’s not that simple. First, there’s a logistical problem: these are frescoes, which means they were applied directly onto the wet plaster of the walls. But the bigger problem is philosophical: Should we remove the art? Because there are just as many who want these frescoes to stay exactly where they are — where they’ve been since 1936 — forcing us to confront the atrocities of America’s founding for nearly a century. But do they really belong… in a high school?I’m Amna Khalid, and this is Banished.How do we reckon with painful reminders of past sins? What responsibility do we have to shield our children — or adults for that matter — from material that they find offensive? What do we do about paintings and ideas, even people, that we now find unacceptable? Do we just cancel them? What does that even mean? In the case of one high school in San Francisco, it might mean destroying art.TRACY BROWN: The mural depicts violence and triggers emotional trauma, creating an unsafe environment which may get in the way of student learning.  This mural has had no teaching significance ...AMY ANDERSON: The depiction of indigenous warriors attacking white soldiers, who stand with the arms raised in surrender, erases the reality that George Washingtion ordered all-out war without diplomacy against indigenous peoples.TRONG: This mural is not teaching students about the history of slavery and indigenous genocide under George Washington or other settlers. Instead it is teaching students to normalize violence and death of our Black and indigenous communities. Paint it down.AK: Those are the voices of parents and students pleading with the San Francisco school board to paint over the mural. On social media, the movement is called “hashtag paint it down.” One of the women you heard was Amy Anderson. She’s an indigenous mother whose son was in 10th grade at the time. Here she is, again before the school board, on the image of the dead warrior face down on the ground.ANDERSON: The size and placement of the deceased American Indian warrior creates in me a deep sadness for the millions of indigenous people who were killed by forced assimilation or all-out war. With the signers of the U.S. Constitution, George Washington stands beside the fallen warrior, but not a single eye is diverted in his direction. There is no remorse for his death. And students and staff who are rushing to beat the bell breeze past this every day.AK: In June, 2019, the school board voted to paint over the murals. The total cost, including a lengthy environmental impact review, would run to about three quarters of a million dollars.PROUDFIT: My name is Dr. Joely Proudfit. I am Luiseño Payómkawichum. I am the director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at Cal State San Marcos and the chair of the American Indian Studies Department at Cal State San Marcos.AK: Dr. Proudfit applauded the Board’s decision. She says the murals are from the perspective of European invaders, they are simply inaccurate and that they are dangerous.PROUDFIT: These false and harmful images do a number on our self-esteem and especially the self-esteem and the aspirations of our young people, especially our children. It reinforces negative stereotypes about non-native people. It keeps us in the past as a people that has been defeated or conquered in some capacity. It internalizes biases, stereotypes, misunderstandings, ignorance, furthers this notion of manifest destiny and colonization.AK: Interpreting art is obviously subjective. We could argue for years, and we have, over what these paintings are communicating. But perhaps a good place to start is with the artist himself. Do we have any idea of what Victor Arnautoff intended when he painted these murals?CHERNY: Arnautoff was living at a time when people on the left were very conscious of the oppression of people of color and wanted to dramatize that.AK: Robert Cherny is the author of Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.CHERNY: And you see that in the four largest murals, he is centering people who were often being either ignored or actively erased. You know, the French and Indian wars mural puts a Native American in the center, the Revolutionary War puts working people in the center, Mount Vernon plantation puts enslaved Black people in the center and the settlement of the West puts a dead Native American in the center.AK: In centering the dead Native American, Arnautoff is critiquing fellow artists of the time, who portrayed colonization as worthy, even laudable.CHERNY: The white settlers are always painted in a fashion that makes it clear that they are being celebrated by the artist, that the artist is celebrating the settlement of the West by white men and women who are taking over empty territory. Arnautoff is breaking with that pattern to show that the white settlers were moving into territory that they had acquired by war, that they had acquired by killing the original inhabitants.AK: If those were Arnautoff’s intentions when he painted these murals, they haven’t always been interpreted that way. They first became controversial back in the 1960s, when Black students at the school started demanding more positive representations of African-Americans on the walls.Now what’s interesting is that the solution at that time was not to cover the murals, but to add even more art. The school commissioned a young Black artist named Dewey Crumpler to paint response murals. He would depict the historic struggles of African Americans, Native Americans and other minorities. Crumpler still lives in the Bay Area, and remembers that when he took the job he had one condition.CRUMPLER: I would only make the mural if they left that mural in place because Arnautoff was trying to expose a history that should be told and understood, even though he knew that the imagery was not easy imagery. He wanted to tell a truth about the contradiction of a Founding Father who signed a document that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights.”He and those other signers of the Great Document, and it is a great document, while standing on the neck, while standing on the neck of African peoples who are under his boot, laying on the ground that belongs to the millions of Native Americans who also have died, shed blood, fighting for their right to their space.AK: There are certainly many Native Americans who agree with Dewey Crumpler that the murals are painful, but they are truthful and should remain. Robert Tamaka Bailey is a Choctaw elder who told me that these paintings are imbued with deep layers of symbolism and meaning. You just have to know where to look.BAILEY: And that’s the first thing that I saw in this one particular mural that had the dead native in it. If you looked in the bottom right hand corner, there's a chief that's sitting there handing a peace pipe over to a settler with his tomahawk behind the back of the settler. That’s the ways of the white man. What they did is they got us to lay our weapons down, came to us, try to make treaties, and then they took. They broke the treaty. What was pointed out to me later that I didn't notice was there's a tree right behind the chief, and if you looked at it, the branch is broken. Arnautoff was conveying there the broken treaties. And when I saw the images of the settlers stepping over the dead bodies of the native in gray — it's the only pictures of all of ’em that was not colored, it was in gray — I immediately thought, here's the gray area of what we're being taught about George Washington.AK: John Learned, of the Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is another Native elder who wants these murals to stay. He sees them as a unique opportunity to remember and to address history.LEARNED: Unfortunately, it was a dark time for American Indians and that, that mural really has an opportunity to tell the story. And I think it'd be great if they, if they added that to their curriculum there in, in California to talk about what the United States and the state of California and the eradication efforts that they took to wipe out American Indians. When you get rid of something, it's gone. It’s finished. You're not talking about it and this mural in California has an opportunity to talk about the history.AK: I asked Dr. Proudfit, the professor at Cal State, what she would say to those Native Americans who are in favor of keeping the murals.PROUDFIT: It's like saying, well, we talked to some African-American folks and you know what, they're OK with the N-word so we're gonna go ahead and use it. No, no, no. And let me tell you how disingenuous the people who want to keep up these murals have been. They have gone so far as to go out of state, find some Native Americans, or self-defined Native Americans that agree with keeping these murals up. But you know what they don't do? They don't listen to the very people whose lands they are on who are opposed to it. And while, yes, not all of us think exactly alike. The majority, and we have ample evidence, when our own national associations like the APA, like the ASA, like Illuminative, have done national surveys to find that these types of images are harmful to us, take our majority word for it. It is inappropriate and we would not allow for this type of racist antics and imagery for any other population.AK: I looked at the surveys that Dr. Proudfit cited. The images that Native Americans were asked about, and that many actually found harmful, were of sports Mascots and other caricatures. They had nothing at all to do with the kind of artistic renditions in the murals.The evidence that I did find of what some Native Americans think about Arnautoff’s murals was from February, 2021. A group of Native American leaders from across the country wrote to the school board protesting the decision to cover the murals. The paintings, they concluded, should be used as educational tools.Of course, there is also the argument that this kind of art simply does not belong on the walls of a high school. Again, Dr. Proudfit.PROUDFIT: This is a public school that should provide safe working and learning environments for all students, not simply just native students, but all students. And so these harmful effects, these stereotypical harmful toxic narratives hurt not only native students, but non-native students who are still learning or have yet to learn about the original nations and people of this land. We would not tolerate this for any other population. What if George Washington High School had images painted by someone who's trying to depict dead Jewish people at the hands of Nazis. Do you think that would be okay to have those images up in a public school?AK: But hang on. Isn’t that part of being a student — contending with deplorable, even distressing, truths? That’s how Dewey Crumpler sees it.CRUMPLER: Let me just say that the most important place for young people to confront difficulty is in high school, just before you get into the world. So a young person seeing difficult imagery, that's a perfect opportunity for teaching. Okay, you're not going to read Huckleberry Finn because of some words. They're offensive. I was offended by them. But, if it's in the world, it's for me. If it's in the world, I have a right to it. I have a right to know it. I have a right to experience it, and it's my youth that helps prepare me for it, even though it will be problematic. That's how we learn to overcome the difficulties.CHERNY: I think we can probably assume that Arnatouff wanted them to be a bit disturbed.AK: Robert Cherny, the author of the book about Arnautoff, says that Arnautoff was deliberate in placing the murals. He wanted them to be precisely where they are, in the lobby and stairwells of a public high school.CHERNY: He wanted them to confront the reality that the settlement of the West had come at an enormous cost to the original inhabitants of the West. He said that it was expansion by war and peace, that he wanted the students to confront the fact that they were living in a place that had been taken from the first people by force. I think that Arnautoff wanted them to be troubled by the image that he was presenting there. He wanted them to be disturbed, I don't think he was trying to traumatize them or offend them, he was trying to get them to think.AK: But what about the fact that now we're in different times, maybe if he was alive today, he'd be part of, you know, people on the left who are campaigning for the rights of people of color, and that's perhaps what he was doing then. But now we know the history. How would you respond to people who say: Well, this may have been all well and good and revolutionary and wonderful when he painted them, but we have moved on and we no longer need these murals.CHERNY: Well, do we ever need art at all? I mean, there's a really big question here. If we disagree with something in the past, do we just erase it and pretend it never happened? You know, that's what Arnautoff was in fact objecting to in the way he presented his art. He was objecting to the erasure of people of color. He was objecting to the erasure of slavery and genocide. And if we say that, okay, maybe his intent was okay, but his intent is irrelevant, and therefore we have to just erase him and his art. I find that really very troubling because we, we’re not learning from it in that case. To me, the purpose of art, any art, is to make you think. And if it is purely decorative, it's not art, it's decoration. And I think that if we are going to ban art that makes you think because someone might be offended by thinking about those topics, then, you know, our culture is going to be a very sad one, I'm afraid. I hope I never see that.AK: In 1935, the San Francisco Chronicle published an interview with Victor Arnautoff. He told the paper: “As I see it, the artist is a critic of society.” What Arnautoff could not have foreseen was that decades later, society would become a critic of the artist.The longer I think about this issue, the more I find myself wondering, why must the solution be reduced to only two options: cover the murals OR let them stay up? Can’t we come up with a more creative solution? How about keeping the murals up and contextualizing them? Well it turns out, Dewey Crumpler suggested exactly this decades ago when he painted his response murals. He asked the school board to put up explanatory plaques alongside Arnautoff’s artwork, much the way museums do.CRUMPLER: Every generation is different. They confront new issues, and therefore you have to give them information, otherwise they will misunderstand all the implications and symbolisms that are all over those murals. Whether it's Arnautoff or my mural in the future, unless something is done to explain them, to make them clear, this will crop up again.AK: As it stands, these murals are devoid of any signposts that tell us where we are and what they might mean.CRUMPLER: Those murals have to be contextualized. And when you are young, everything looks larger than it is. When I saw those murals in 1966, I was incensed by them and they looked huge. When I came back to engage them, they were much smaller. And I’d come to understand profoundly why he used those images. In fact, one of the people who had been most vociferous about taking those walls down, once he, like me, had graduated from college, he apologized to me: “Mr. Crumpler, I really appreciate what you painted. I appreciate those murals greatly, but if I understood what Arnautoff was doing, I would’ve never done what we did.”He couldn't have come to that realization if I had joined them and said, “Yes, let's tear this s**t down. And when we tear it down, I'll paint over every bit of it.” Because they would have been prepared to do that, but the foresight of the board, because they were not going to permit this painting to be destroyed. And it was very important to all those board members and people who had been trained in the notion and understanding of art. But this new cohort of people, they're not trained in the arts, they don't really have that same sense of the importance of an artistic work.I tried to create a worthy dialogue but of course, once I had made that mural, the school board relaxed and they didn't do what I said at the dedication they should do. You have to use those murals as teaching tools and you have to put plaques next to them that explain them.AK: To my mind, that is the smartest solution. High school, where children are becoming adults, isprecisely the place where they need to confront troubling ideas. I asked Dr. Proudfit whether contextualizing Arnautoff’s murals by putting up written explanations might be a way forward.PROUDFIT: A public high school is not the place for that conversation, we are not at that point and we are far from that point. And the analysis or the example you just gave of the promise that was made 50 years ago, 60 years ago, and that that promise has went unmet, American Indians know about broken promises. We're very familiar with broken promises. This is a safety issue. This is a health and wellness issue. Okay, so if that means you take those walls out and you put them in storage until, I don't know, 10, 20, 30, 40, whenever people want to get around to telling the truth, and telling the truth from all sides, then maybe they can be brought out and have that discussion. But I would make a point to say that public high schools are not that place because we don't have the capacity, the information, the people, the structure to have those conversations. And so while that's a noble and nice idea, we are so far from that. And no, we don't believe that that will happen given the 50 years of lies.AK: Mark Sanchez is a member of the San Francisco school board. He says that, sadly, Dr. Proudfit is right, that the school will likely never put up these plaques.SANCHEZ: I don't have a lot of faith that that will happen, even if that's what the board decided to do.AK: Why? You have faith that something that hasn't been removed for so long, has stayed on the walls, now there is faith that we can remove it. Why not have faith that we can actually use it and teach it, which is what an educational institution is about?SANCHEZ: Given the history of that school and the trajectory of what's happening at that school, I don't believe that they would be able to do that.AK: So, tell me, the school will actually be able to paint over these huge murals, but they won't be able to put up plaques contextualizing it.SANCHEZ: I don't believe that they would, no.AK: And why is that?SANCHEZ: Well, they've had how many decades to do that?AK: But is that a reason to destroy something then?SANCHEZ: I don't believe that the school has the wherewithal or the gumption to move in that direction, to use that piece of art as an educational tool.AK: It boggles the mind why the school board refuses to explain these murals, an initiative that would cost mere pennies compared to the three quarters of a million dollars needed to paint over the artwork. Why can’t these public school officials find a creative solution that simultaneously preserves the art, acknowledges hurt feelings and uses these murals as educational tools? I find myself wondering, is this controversy a symptom of something larger that plagues our society? Are our core values so fundamentally divergent that our differences can no longer be bridged?It’s easy to remove works of art when people are offended by them. At times, it can even feel like the humane thing to do. But we must ask ourselves: How does erasing depictions of our history truly help us?CRUMPLER: To me, to destroy Arnautoff's mural would be to destroy truth.AK: We still don’t know how this particular controversy will ultimately play out. The alumni association has a lawsuit pending to preserve these murals. What we do know is that there are countless other works of art, many in public places, awaiting their own public outcry. Once more, Dewey Crumpler.CRUMPLER: Censorship and cancel culture is all around us. That's why art has to be free to do its work, even though it can make individuals very upset and angry. It's a worthy subject that an inanimate object can actually do something to a human being, can make a human being think, can make a human being angry. But the point is you have to work your way through it. Working your way through it is the point of life itself.AK: Who gets a voice in the telling of a story and who gets left out? Why do certain words, ideas and even people get canceled? What does the use of such strategies to silence tell us about our times and our society? These are the issues we’ll be exploring throughout this year on Banished.If you’d like to see photographs of the “Life of Washington” murals and Dewey Crumpler’s response murals, visit our website BooksmartStudios.org. And if you’d like to hear more of our conversation with Dewey Crumpler and other exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios.I’d like to thank Lope Yap and Peta Cooper for all their help with today’s episode. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. N’Dinga Gaba and Chris Mandra mixed the audio. If you have any thoughts about today’s episode, please leave us a comment at BooksmartStudios.org.This is Banished. I’m Amna Khalid. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Until about a year or so ago, most of us felt understandably smug when measuring our modern selves next to our ancient ancestors. We are manifestly more advanced — scientifically, morally and, it can be said, rather literally, since we now know that the universe is expanding. We’ve clearly taken considerable steps along the misty path of improvement. Just look around!This rosy view of humanity as carried along by a steady current of progress is known among those in my profession as "whig history," after those who cast their lot with Britain's parliament, as opposed to its monarchy. And though it has long been ridiculed by historians, this whig view continues to inform a popular understanding of the passage of time.The past 18 months, however, have frustrated that reckoning. The pandemic, how little we knew about the virus and how poorly we managed its global spread, shook us out of our complacency. And the brutal murder of George Floyd made us question triumphalist narratives of American history that rely on giant leaps forward from our original sins. Painfully and conspicuously, we were reminded, history is not a linear jaunt toward enlightenment.In addition to the defiant dismissal of scientific consensus and the devaluing of Black lives, both with devastating consequences, there's another danger now lurking: We claim to have disavowed the vigilante justice of the posse and the lynch mob, only to embrace it on social media, in what many on the right decry as cancel culture. Never mind that the dreaded word — C-A-N-C-E-L-L-E-D — is wielded up and down the ideological spectrum with the thoughtfulness of a rubber stamp.What is most notable to me, as an historian, is the apparent tribalism that undergirds cancel culture and what it says about the fragility of our social fabric. We are living through an age of public denunciation in which people, objects, art and ideas are under knee-jerk attack. Calls to cancel — and the inevitable dog-piles that form as a result — are not based on careful consideration of evidence or context. They seem motivated by a desire to “perform” belonging, to zealously adopt the approved posture of a group and to be seen to be doing the “right” thing by others of your tribe. Resorting to a predetermined playbook is an indication of just how resistant we’ve become to the arduous, if ultimately rewarding, work of thinking. As the literary critic Alan Jacobs put it:[W]e suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?How, then, do we see our way past this scorched-earth policy to scrub out anything that conflicts with our own current orthodoxy? Or is it too late? Subscribe to Banished and join us as we attempt to answer these questions — with nuance, complexity and, yes, thinking.Please consider a paid subscription to Booksmart Studios! It’s only $7/month or $70/year and will get you extra podcast episodes, extended guest interviews and an opportunity to engage directly with our hosts. Plus, you’ll be supporting all of the work we do here at Booksmart.Banished is just one of at least three shows that we’ll launch during July and August. Others include:Bully Pulpit: A wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has been called “absolutely necessary” and “very brave.”Lexicon Valley: A close examination of language — its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate — from renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. A true polymath, McWhorter will analyze the words and phrases that dominate our discourse and make the headlines.And finally: As we craft the first season of Banished, we want to hear from you. What topics do you want us to tackle? Which voices do you want to hear from? Simply comment below, or tweet to us at @BooksmartSocial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Banished is about our reassessment of the many people, ideas, objects and even works of art that conflict with modern sensibilities. What can we learn about our present obsession with cancel culture by examining history, and what might it mean for freedom of expression?Amna Khalid is professor of history at Carleton College. Born in Pakistan, Amna earned an M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in History from Oxford University. Growing up under a series of military dictatorships, Amna has a strong interest in issues relating to censorship and free expression. She speaks frequently on academic freedom, free speech and campus politics at colleges and universities. Her essays and commentaries on these same issues have appeared in outlets such as the Conversation, Inside Higher Ed and the New Republic.Banished is coming this July!If you haven’t yet, please consider a paid subscription to Booksmart Studios! It’s only $7/month or $70/year and will get you extra podcast episodes, extended guest interviews and an opportunity to engage directly with our hosts. Plus, you’ll be supporting all of the work we do here at Booksmart.Banished is just one of at least three shows that we’ll launch this summer. Others include:Bully Pulpit: A wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has been called “absolutely necessary” and “very brave.”Lexicon Valley: A close examination of language — its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate — from renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. A true polymath, McWhorter will analyze the words and phrases that dominate our discourse and make the headlines.And finally: As we craft the first season of Banished, we want to hear from you. What topics do you want us to tackle? Which voices do you want to hear from? Simply comment below, or tweet to us at @BooksmartSocial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe