CASBS Director Margaret Levi moderates a conversation exploring the prospects for progress on racial justice in the U.S. with Lawrence D. Bobo, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Claude Steele
Social Science for a World in Crisis Series
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Is the challenge of achieving racial justice today as deep and intractable a problem as ever? Or do current circumstances provide grounds for optimism? Today on Human-Centered, another episode in our series Social Science for a World in Crisis. This episode, which originally webcast March 18th, 2021, is titled America's Black-White Divide: Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Forward. And it features panelists Lawrence Bobo, Dean of Social Science and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, and a CASBS Fellow in '88 to '89 and again in 2007 to '08. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, both at Harvard. He was a CASBS Fellow in 2007 to '08. Claude Steele, the Lucille Stern Professor in the Social Sciences Emeritus at Stanford University, a CASBS Fellow in 1994 to '95, and the CASBS director from 2005 to '09. He's currently also a CASBS faculty fellow. Moderating the conversation is Margaret Levi, the Sarah Miller McCune Director of CASBS. Should we regard the Trump years as akin to the fall of Reconstruction? And given the current trends, what should we expect for the course of Black-white relations over the next decade or two? We'll get the perspective from three distinguished scholars and longtime friends: who together discuss these questions frequently. They consider the issues and offer insights on the prospects for progress and enduring change that will help us realize a more just and equitable society in our time. Let's hear their thoughts on America's Black-White Divide: Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Forward.
Margaret Levi: Hello, I'm Margaret Levi, and I am the director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and a professor of political science at Stanford. And I want to welcome you all to the 13th episode of the CASBS webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. Today's conversation, as you know, is on America's Black-White Divide: Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Forward. A topic to which the panel has brought incredible cross-disciplinary expertise and insight. I want to acknowledge the co-sponsors for this episode: African and African American Studies at Stanford, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. All four of us on your screen are former CASBS fellows and members of the CASBS board, and Claude is one of my predecessors as CASBS director. He was also my colleague at the University of Washington many, many years ago. I should also add that all four of us are proud members of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, so we want to thank you for your co-sponsorship. Let me quickly introduce our esteemed guests so we can jump into the discussion. Lawrence Bobo, Larry, is Dean of Social Science and the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Skip, is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, both at Harvard. Claude Steele is the Lucy Stern Professor in the Social Sciences emeritus at Stanford. Larry, Skip, and Claude are long-term friends. They're going to each give a few minutes of opening remarks, and then we'll literally start the conversation, which I will pepper with questions from all of you out there in the audience. So let's begin. What we're going to start with is really thinking about Reconstruction and Jim Crow as its aftermath and the extent to which informs what's happening today and how we think about our current issues of the racial divide. We're going to just go in alphabetical order by last name. So, Larry, why don't we start with you?
Lawrence D. Bobo: Oh, sure. Well, thank you so much, Margaret, for inviting us to be a part of this discussion, and I look forward to it being a very lively exchange. Let me just quickly say my piece only indirectly engaged the Reconstruction era. What I want to draw from the Reconstruction era is the, I think, unequivocal lesson that progress or change with regard to race and racial status and relations in the US does not simply move in one direction. It's not as if we are on some inexorable path to steady improvement and the full integration of African Americans. As I, as I'm sure Skip, who has in recent years greatly deepened his expertise in this arena, will explain, the degree to which African Americans were enjoying political integration, economic opportunity, freedom of movement in society following the Civil War was in many respects extraordinary. But by 1900, and certainly by 1910, that progress had all but disappeared. And I want to talk about the ways in which— and I'm sure part of what inspires this discussion for all of us is that we are currently living in a moment that is incredibly fraught and divisive still along the axis of Black-white relations, from the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to innumerable others, to, to just dreadful white nationalist march on the national capital on January 6th, that we have a problem to wrestle with here. As I look across the scholarly and intellectual landscape, and even as I look at everyday lay discourse, it seems to me it's useful to think of people as falling into one of three big clumps. One of those you could think of as folks who are really committed racial pessimists. Who believe that America was founded on racism and is intractably wedded to racism, and that it's really a naive, if not profoundly quixotic, hope to think that we'll ever get beyond it. At the other end of the pole are what I would call the committed optimists, and at its extreme are those who claim racism has essentially been thoroughly defeated in the US. And that we're all wasting energy on a problem that's been effectively solved. And we know names like Dinesh D'Souza that we could associate that with, and to a degree, though he might have said so tongue-in-cheek, former Stanford linguist John McWhorter. I myself am in a middle range, a kind of big ambivalent middle, where I might call myself a guarded optimist about the path of— pessimist, I think. Very guarded optimist, that we've seen real, meaningful, tangible change. Quickly, just for example, a 4- to 5-fold increase in the size of the affluent segment of, of the Black population since the late '60s. Uh, enormous transformations in racial attitudes, which I know we'll get to, um, and talk about later. Not merely a two-term African-American president of the United States, But Blacks in leadership roles in institutions across America that were literally unimaginable even when I was in college, which wasn't all that long ago. So I'm going to defend my ground as a guarded optimist. But I guess the catch I want to add there, I'm going to also do it as an empiricist. As someone committed to social science data and research and what the strongest evidence from those quarters can tell us. That's my opening remark.
Margaret Levi: Thank you, Larry. Skip.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: Thank you so much, Margaret. It's great to be back at the Center and to be with my two amigos, with whom I used to hang out when I was a fellow at the Center and one of the best years of my life. I made a documentary about Reconstruction and wrote a book about it because I didn't really know that much about it. People ask me all the time, why are you— why do you make a documentary about this? Why do you make a documentary about that? It's a way of going back to graduate school. You know, we start off with a vague idea, and then we spend 2 years full immersion research, and then we make the film, and then I write the book after the fact to match the film. And I was fascinated about Reconstruction, but I didn't really know that much about it. What do we know about Reconstruction? Well, first of all, I don't know about you, Margaret, or Claude, or Larry, but I wasn't taught anything about Reconstruction when I was in school except one thing, that Negroes had been given too much power too quickly and they had squandered it, that it was an embarrassment. It was a blight in the history of democracy and that it had to be taken away. W.E.B. Du Bois, in fact, wrote one of his classics— classic works, Black Reconstruction, in 1935 to refute all of the aspersions that have been cast on Black people in the era of our people's greatest 12 years of freedom between 1865 and 1877. And then the— then that power was taken away. And then a narrative was constructed starting in the 1890s that valorized the Lost Cause myth. And that's when we see those Confederate monuments being built. Those are the grand core relatives of a heinous narrative that was created at our ancestors' expense. Du Bois summed up Reconstruction beautifully when he said, and I quote, "The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, and then moved back again towards slavery." So we know Reconstruction unfolded between 1865 and 1877, and it ended with the Hayes-Tilden compromise. And some of us that may also know that during that period, 16 Black men were elected to Congress, 14 to the House, 2 to the Senate. 3 of those happened to have been ministers. Uh, Eric Foner, who's my dear friend and chief consultant on the series, like the king of Reconstruction, Du Bois's, uh, heir, points out that in this period, 2,000 Black men were appointed or elected to public office, 243 of whom were Black ministers, something I'm going to come back to, I hope, in this discussion. And then that was taken away. And we know during this period, ratification of the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th Amendment occurred. 13th was ratified on December 6th, 1865. Most people now know because of my friend David DuVernay's fabulous documentary, that that was what ultimately abolished slavery. It wasn't the Emancipation— the Emancipation Occupation, I started to say— the Emancipation Proclamation, which is how we were raised to think. It was ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished the institution of slavery. In the same month, the Ku Klux Klan was founded. The first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan. Keep that thought in mind about parallel lines in the history of race relations in America. Then in 1868, the 14th Amendment, and we all know so much about the 14th Amendment because it's been used for— the Equal Protection Clause has been used for such a wide variety of purposes, including women rights, women's rights, among many other rights. And then the, um, and it established birthright citizenship. Um, I asked my students, did it ever occur to them, um, that America is one of the 33 nations in the world— we can fact-check that, but I think it's 33— that has birthright citizenship? Why? Because the Dred Scott decision in 1857 said the founders never had these people in mind to be citizens, never ever, under Chief Justice Taney. And so, the abolitionists and the ex-abolitionists at this point had to figure out how do you make these people citizens, right? So, birthright citizenship. They were born here. This is enormously more complicated than I'm putting in my short time, but that was one of the principal aspects of the 14th Amendment. And actually, birthright citizenship had been established in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which is still on the books. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 passed over Andrew Johnson's veto, established birthright citizenship and said Black people should have the same rights as everybody else. And then in 1870, the voting rights— well, the Black men got the right to vote with the 15th Amendment ratified in 1870. But here's what most of us don't know. In 1867, there were— the Reconstruction Acts were passed, and one of those Reconstruction Acts, again over Andrew Johnson's veto, and the Reconstruction Acts carved the defeated Confederate states, 10 of them because of Tennessee, into 5 military districts and required them to hold elections for new constitutional conventions. Which wouldn't be legitimate unless Black men were given the right to vote. Now hold that in mind. And also, they had to ratify the 14th Amendment. Black men, Margaret, could only vote— you know, we romanticize the North and freedom, there were no slaves in the North. Black men, until the ratification of the 15th Amendment, could only vote in 5 of the 6 New England states. They couldn't vote in Connecticut until the 15th was ratified. And in New York, only if they satisfied a $250 property requirement. However, because of the Reconstruction Act in 1867, Black men in the former Confederacy were given the right to vote. And so I think of the summer of 1867— remember, this is 3 years before the 15th Amendment— Those formerly enslaved Black men and free Black people, because there was considered considerable free Black population in the South, counterintuitively. There were more free Black people living in the slave states when the Civil War broke out than living in the North. Those Black men were given the right to vote in the summer of 1867. And guess what? They registered to vote, 80%. Of all Black men in those 10 former Confederate states registered to vote. And in the general election of 1868, guess what? They voted. Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency overwhelmingly in the Electoral College, but he only won the popular vote by just over 300,000 votes. 500,000 Black men had cast their votes for Ulysses S. Grant. Black men, in effect, had elected a president of the United States. And in the state of South Carolina, they had elected a majority House of Representatives. And we— so the second most shocking fact to me, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana were majority Black states. And Florida, Alabama, and Georgia were almost majority Black states. So this represented almost like a mini Black republic because of the power of the ballot. And that was the beginning of the end of Reconstruction. Nobody thought that these Black men— remember, overwhelmingly illiterate because it was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read and write throughout the South— nobody thought that they would actually vote and take it seriously. And Black women played a crucial role in getting Black men, especially through the churches, to register to vote in that great Freedom Summer. Of— yeah, of 1867. And so they had to do something about that. So then thus began a reign of terrorism. There were 8 major massacres of Black people between 1866 and 1876. The rise of groups like the KKK, the Red Shirts, the White League. Massacres in Memphis, New Orleans, Camilla, Meridian, Colfax, Cochata, Vicksburg, and Hamburg. Slavery had ended, but cotton still needed to be harvested. Cotton remained the leading export crop in the United States through the 1930s. So the need for cheap labor in the cotton industry led to sharecropping, to peonage, to vagrancy acts that allowed so-called idle Black men to be imprisoned and sentenced to work on a chain gang. So they could be put back in the cotton fields. So to make a long story short, by 1890, the South had risen again. And each of the former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, it's called the Mississippi Plan, had new state constitutional conventions. And they wiped out all those Reconstruction constitutional— Reconstruction constitutions. And these new constitutions disenfranchised African American males through literacy tests and poll taxes. Now, you want to know how effective that was? Well, in Louisiana, which as I said was a majority Black state, there were 130,000 Black men registered to vote when the state instituted its new constitution in 1898. By 1904, that number had fallen, been stripped, been reduced to precisely 1,342. In 6 years, they had been disenfranchised. And then simultaneously, there was a narrative that I mentioned that was created. And the genius of that, the architect, was the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. He was like an evil genius. Her name was Mildred Lewis Rutherford. This is the first social media war in the, in the United States. And she published a book that I made my graduate students in my English department course read. It was called The Measuring Rod. I want to give you 3 quotes. This was sent to librarians and the teachers, and it was a guide for them to use to decide whether to use an account of the Civil War Reconstruction, either to purchase it or to use it in their classroom. And these are three of her key tenets: reject a book that says the South fought the Civil War to hold her slaves, reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust, reject a book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln. Her common core was the Lost Cause. Then finally, Thomas Dixon, whom you know, one of the most racist novelists in the history of the world, published a book in 1902 called The Leopard Spots. And then he published The Klansman, which became the basis of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. We tend to think of Birth of a Nation as being about the Civil War. It wasn't. It was about Reconstruction. And that's where the trope of Gus the rapist is formulated. And in it, In The Leopard Spots in 1902, he said the worst thing about the history of the South wasn't the Civil War. It was what happened 2 years later in that very summer of 1867 when Black men were given the right to vote. He said it was an assault against the history of civilization and white supremacy. and it had to be obliterated. And so they obliterated the right to vote.
Margaret Levi: That was incredible. I'm gonna stop you there so we give Claude a chance to speak, but you have made me feel better about one thing, which is that I was actually raised with the Du Bois version of Reconstruction and that the South had risen again and somehow really won the Civil War and put Black people down. So some of us I actually learned a little bit of the truth there as a youth.
Lawrence D. Bobo: You got a very special education.
Margaret Levi: I did.
Lawrence D. Bobo: Not what most people got.
Margaret Levi: I understand that. I'm thanking them right now. Claude.
Claude Steele: Wow, that is such powerful history. I hate to try to compete with that. And I think Skip's show on PBS on Reconstruction is one of the most important broadcasts of recent times because it brings to light such an unrecognized appreciated history, and it has such reach into the present moment. And we've been through a period that's probably a thin version of that with the Obama presidency followed by the Trump presidency and the rise again of a lot of white nationalism and activity along those lines. So I could listen to you for a long time on this and the details, even the specifics of the voter suppression and the role that plays in this struggle is, you know, kind of, it comes into view vaguely in the present moment, but to recognize it's been there all along is so powerful. That's been the chief strategy. Well, I'm sort of trying to join Larry in some guarded optimism, and I've got a sort of working theory about how in this particular moment, the post-George the Floyd moment, let's call it the post-Trump moment, although that may be too optimistic, that is there reason for optimism with regard to racial progress in light of all that lesson that we just heard about? So I'm going to argue, I'm making a— this is a working hypothesis. I'm not completely convinced myself, but yet, but it's— I can make the hypothesis, so I'll make it. Helped to get us started. I want to argue that maybe there is a paradigm shift going on in what it means to be a decent American, a good American, that that may be something going on, that there's a chink in the bulwark of prejudices and blindnesses that have for so long supported and justified hegemony and racial inequalities. And that there's a chink in that now in this George Floyd, post-Trump moment. And I want to point to some changes in vocabulary that I think reflect this, and it strikes me as a person of a given age that may reflect something. Not long ago, if you used the term white supremacy or white privilege, there wouldn't be outrage. It would be beyond outrage. It would just be dismissal. It's like, what do you— You can't say that. You can't talk like that. It would be ruled out of order in the standing paradigm of just a few years ago. I could put a number on it, maybe 3, 4, or 5 years ago. And now you also can't use certain vocabulary that you could use then. You can't say things like all lives matter and I'm just colorblind. And expect that those terms will sort of exonerate you from any responsibility for racial inequality and the like. And I do think the image of George Floyd being so mercilessly murdered just puts in the— in everybody's face the reality that African Americans have suffered and continue to suffer profoundly unjust treatment in the United States. It's structural, it's institutionalized, it's not just a matter of our own individual prejudices, our own individual efforts to clear our hearts and minds of prejudice. There's an order here, an organization of society that is instrumental in sustaining that, and that you can't just say you're a good, decent American If you say, get up in the morning, do a gut check, and say, I'm colorblind. That's not the end of your responsibility for the situation as it has revealed itself in these recent months, really. That won't— that doesn't quite ring right as sufficient. One has to go beyond that to be a decent American. One has to redress these inequalities. There has to be proactivity of some sort on our parts as individuals that is required of a good American, of a decent American. Okay, that's the paradigm shift I want to point to. I'm not in denial about the Trump world as a world that really vigorously resists this shift. In paradigm. It's deeply threatening to them. But I almost take that resistance as proof that the paradigm is shifting in this direction. The idea that it could shift away from a simple kind of bystander's standard of decency, a colorblindness standard of decency, that it could shift away from that toward pressing people to be more responsible for racial inequality that it could make that shift without there being a resistance is kind of hard to believe. And I can go back to a little bit of history here to find an analogy for that. I'm more of an amateur historian than my colleague here, but if I think back in my lifetime to the civil rights movement in the early '60s, there was a big change as the movement moved on and it moved toward those triumphant civil rights acts, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act itself, the housing legislation, these big things that really changed America almost more than anything since the Civil War that changed America, those acts of that decade. The period leading up to that, the struggle, the dogs in the street, the fire hoses, the Selma bridges, a lot similar to the George Floyd moment. They brought America into a consciousness and the vocabulary shifted. Before that time, I fully remember this, you could use the word nigger in the Senate, on the floor of the Senate. Strom Thurmond, Bilbo, those Southern Democrats did that. You could use that language and it would be of no occasion whatsoever. After that, you couldn't do that, and you had to say that you were colored blind. And in the period before that, the Civil Rights Acts essentially overturned apartheid. And before that part, apartheid was overturned, you didn't have to— you could acknowledge being a racist, being prejudiced, not like them. You could, you could talk in a very different way. That shifted, uh, and I, I, I And it was like the current shift I'm trying to point to. It too was resisted with violence, church bombings, murders, assassinations. The nation really flipped over that. But it moved on. History did move on in that way. And that's what I'm trying to maybe point to as an inherent —renorming process that in this moment we may be renorming our society as to what is moral and decent, a standard of decency with regard to racial inequality. And it may extend everybody's sense of personal responsibility in ways that hasn't happened before. So that's the argument that I'm trying to You know, I'm trying to believe.
Lawrence D. Bobo: Can I ask you a question, Claude? Can I ask you a question?
Claude Steele: Yeah, let's go. Yeah, let's go.
Lawrence D. Bobo: So, um, as you know, I certainly accept a huge portion of what you just, uh, put on the table, and I agree with you on that vocabulary change. It is, uh, to invoke the phrase white supremacy, I think you're right, as recently as 3 years ago in most even intellectual circles would have been a conversation stopper. Someone would have said, have they lost their mind? You know, it's so disconnected from polite discourse. And I would say almost the same thing. I was astonished. I guess it's 4 years ago now in the 2016 presidential debates when all the candidates actually used the phrase mass incarceration. I mean, who knew that that would make its way into mainstream discourse, but it has, and it reframes the whole issue of having a real punitive law and order state. But I guess part of what I want to ask is, and you, you touch upon it to some degree, how is that accomplished and how deep does it really cut to begin to change the vocabulary? And the part where I might challenge you is that claim that, that, that people wake up with some sense of a more proactive obligation to be, to use a currently popular label, anti-racist, right? Right. To not merely declare, I don't see race, but, but to be among the vanguard of those actively undoing active racial bias and inequality. Can I just add to that question for a minute?
Margaret Levi: And then we have a bunch of questions here too, and I'll get to skip. Which is, you know, you're talking about personal responsibility, Claude, and all of you. And I think it would be helpful to elaborate what that might mean in practice. And I think that builds on what Larry was asking. But Skip, you wanted to get in there and I don't want to—
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: Well, I wasn't going to use this expression, but I think what I want to address is structural responsibility. The Americans think, you know, with the Peace Corps, the people in the so-called, what we used to call the Third World, the developing world, they just don't, they're not smart enough. So we send a bunch of college kids over there, we tell them everything's going to be fine. The same with reforming inner city schools. We just get some well-educated kids to go in there, go around the teachers union, everything is going to be fine. And we know that these problems of systemic racism, the structural, the social problems that stem from systemic racism are systemic from problems in the structure. And that people of goodwill, you know, making large donations, which is good, individually, and since we're in Silicon Valley, many of my friends have done really wonderful things with their wealth. And many of my friends who run foundations or on boards of foundations have done the same thing. But we have a tendency to think that we can change— we meaning Americans— that we can address any problem through an act of will. And an act of will, being a good person, reallocating resources. And in the short term, and we have a short attention span, that's another aspect, in America. So we're going to put a trillion dollars up in here, we're going to let people hit us with proposals, and we're just going to flood this problem, we're going to drown the problem with money. So I am worried. In fact, what I would like to see— I was mentioning this to Claude and Lara— if we go back to the previous historical period to use as an example to this one, It would be, as Claude said, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of '64, the Voting Rights Act, but more importantly, the murder of Martin Luther King and the aftermath, the rebellions in all the cities. And then what did that lead to? Affirmative action, right? The birth of Black studies. And as Larry said, since that terrible day, the quadrupling at least of the size of the Black upper middle class because of affirmative action and the doubling, as I understand it, of the Black middle class. And Martin Luther King was warned by Bayard Rustin that so much of what we're doing is ironically going to benefit the old Black middle class rather than to have profound structural economic implications. And so what I'm asking Professor Bobo and Professor Steele is how do you compare this moment With that moment, that moment after Dr. King— King is killed April '68. I hit the campus at Yale 1969. And you guys have your own stories. The only reason I got into Yale with Linda Darling-Hammonds right there at Stanford, who was in my class, and Sheila Jackson Lee, and even Ben Carson, was that Yale took in 96 Black people. And then 3 years before, they had taken in 6. And we are the new Black middle class or upper middle class. How systematic was that change, Claude? And how does it compare to now?
Margaret Levi: We have two different questions on the table right now, just to be clear. So the first question really has to do with the question of personal responsibility and how we go forward in being proactive. In terms of being anti-racist. The second question has to do with the structural basis of racism. And there's actually a third question here.
Claude Steele: Before we do that, let me, let me answer the first two. We get three, it's going to be hard. But I think the first—
Lawrence D. Bobo: yeah, I think—
Margaret Levi: answer the first two, and then I want to come back to the last one that Skip put on the table and is also in the question.
Claude Steele: What I want to say is, I, when I said personal response, that the paradigm shift has deepened a sense of responsibility. It's also made us aware of a kind of new accountability to, that we're exposed to, to be a decent American, a good American. And I think there is the individual level where that really means something. And I see in my life space a lot of people struggling with that at this moment. Book clubs springing up all over the place have been good for all of us in that sense. And talk invitations. And so there's a, there's a real effort which, which does happen in ways like that, that we know. But I also see it as institutional, and then institutional institutions now have a new accountability, and they can't exist with patch-on kind of programs like many of the affirmative action programs were, just kind of, we'll just do this, we'll give you a kind of, uh, some— we'll give you the sandbox to play in, but you're not gonna— we don't have to really change the structure of these institutions or of society in general. And I would like to believe— this is again a working idea— that the broader society is beginning to understand that, that as Skip was saying, it is structural. The society has been organized around race since the Old World met the New World. As a system for allocating rewards, opportunities, and it's in every aspect of life. You look at the life of somebody like George Floyd, born in a low-income— as an African American, low-income Black neighborhood. High unemployment rates, overburdened family, terrible schools, harsh punishment in those schools, harsh punishment outside those schools, poor access to healthcare. These are conditions of life that derive from the racial organization in history. Of our society. And to say that I'm colorblind, yet I'm going to tolerate all of that structural inequality is going to seem unseemly and immoral. Increasingly, as a moral standard, I don't know how much weight that will mean. I don't know whether compared to the progress made in the late '60s, this will be somehow better or somehow more thoroughgoing and toward inching toward an integrated, genuinely integrated society. I don't know for sure, but I do feel that there is this new accountability to a broader set of outcomes that you just can't hold. It's not just about you anymore. I see this in the corporate world a little. I certainly see it in the academic world. I think our enterprises in the academic world are taken more seriously than they were in the— late '60s. I think these things are different. They give me some—
Margaret Levi: Claude, let me interrupt with a question from Jennifer Richeson here, which is speaking to some of this. She's wondering if you're— and this is really to all of you— she's wondering if your paradigm shift is more of a bifurcation. What if it means to be an American as someone who is more tolerant for some but is decidedly the opposite for many, many others? Indeed, this seems to be what is currently being contested in this moment and one reason for our national divide. And that's really to all of you, but—
Claude Steele: Well, that is a profoundly important question that I have as a wide open question. When I say paradigm shift, that's motivated reasoning. That's— I want to see that. As something that will win in history. I do remind myself that we won that election and we won the election in Georgia. And that gives me some— there's going to be this struggle. And so I agree with Jen that I don't think the paradigm is evenly distributed throughout the population by any means. But it may have the— it may have the momentum at this particular moment that it moves things forward. And when you look at history, that's about the best you can hope for. So when I say optimism, I characterize it as something like that. I wouldn't blame you.
Lawrence D. Bobo: This is part of what I was trying to get at with my question of whether, for you— and I now understand your point about the vocabulary better— It's more of a symbol of some other more deeply rooted, potentially systemic changes that are taking place, which is part of what I wanted to get at, and part of which I think is rooted in a changing power distribution. For good or ill, Professor Gates, people like you who made it into Yale and are now in the academy at different points, PBS at different points, circulating in different circles change the conversation that many powerful people are having. And they're part of that calculus of a changed accountability that Claude is talking about. So that, that quadrupling of, of the size, the size of a Black elite, that expansion of a Black middle class in an era where we've kind of institutionalized diversity activity throughout the corporate world creates a different kind of leverage that existed at the point of King's assassination in '68. Now, his assassination did occasion the Civil Rights Act of '68, the first big housing discrimination law at the federal level, but it was a weak bill compared to the '64 Civil Rights Act and absolutely as compared to the Voting Rights Act. it did not have anything approaching the enforcement mechanisms that, that those other two pieces of legislation did, so that it could never have the kind of reorganizing effect on the organization of society that those earlier enactments did. So part of what I want to draw from what Claude is saying and about this moment, though, is that I hope we are right, that you are right about the momentum of the moment, but that is in part about struggle, it's in part about mobilization, it's heavily about power, that people have to get out there and exercise that power to keep the system moving in that direction. Because there are plenty of forces fighting the other way. Here I am, sadly, I would say, in this wonderfully in many respects, but sadly deep blue state of Massachusetts, living in the People's Republic of Cambridge. And I have to say, I dropped off my little dog at doggy daycare the other day, and a guy drove by me in a huge blue pickup truck with a sign waving off the side, uh, that, that, you know, was the size of one of those big Trump flags, and it said "Blue Lives Matter." Now here's a guy driving around Cambridge, Massachusetts And I don't think he wakes up each day and is worried about whether or not he's colorblind. I have strong reasons to suspect he was not colorblind, you know.
Claude Steele: He hadn't even gotten there yet. And I see those parades in the streets of San Francisco, those pickup truck parades.
Margaret Levi: Me too. And in Seattle even.
Lawrence D. Bobo: So my point, it's an ongoing struggle, but it is in many respects about power. And to go back to Jen's important question, I hope it's not about replacing one oppressed outsider with another if we do get on this road toward, you know, scratching away at the edifice of systematic racial oppression.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: What I was trying to suggest by going back to the paradigm shift that happened after the end of the civil rights movement, really, which is the day Martin Luther King was killed, And the changes that ensued, which led to major— I mean, to say that the Black upper middle class quadrupled, that's a big deal. I mean, I'm not trying to minimize that, or the Black middle class doubled. But it didn't— or affirmative action, integrating historically white colleges, universities like Stanford and University of Michigan and Yale, et cetera, et cetera.
Claude Steele: We were the first wave of all that.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: Yeah, we were the wave. But what I'm worried about, what I'm concerned about, what I'm questioning is how do we keep this momentum, this change of discourse, this manifestation of individual concern, how do we keep it from not being short-circuited, Claude and Larry? That's what I'm saying. And last night, Margaret and I'll finish quickly. Last night, the three of us were talking in preparation And I said, I would like to see a foundation really look around the corner and say, okay, we're going to study all the money we've invested in social programs since George Floyd, or in the last couple years. And we're going to see what has worked, or what is working, and what isn't. So that we can begin to scale up these things. Because again, we are addressing the manifestation of systemic racism. And you can't just change that because you got a big heart and a big checkbook. It really— I am— what I want to see naively, and Larry knows this because we team taught a course, and I hope we will be again soon, naively as a non-economist, I call it the curve of class. I want the curve of class for people of color to look like the same as a curve of class for white people. You know, I want the percentage of Black people in the middle class to be the same as the percentage of Black White people in the middle class. How do we get there? I asked our friend Glenn Hutchins, and I know he won't mind being quoted. Larry and I, we were having a conversation, and I said, how much? He said, this is what you have to do. This is what you have to do. I go, how much? He said, $10 trillion. $10 trillion at least. I want to see— that is my ultimate goal, the percentage of Black people in each of the classes to equal the same as white people. How do we get there? And I don't think anyone's figured that out yet.
Margaret Levi: Another piece of that story that is coming up in the questions as well is the backlash we're experiencing right now, the voter suppression.
Claude Steele: I think we're in for— having said all, described my attempt and Larry's attempt at optimism, I think we would also admit that in the years ahead, Everything would suggest they're going to be tense and full of conflict, and this is going to be a rough road ahead. Ugly. Yeah, it will be. I take that as a sign of progress, that that is because there is something that they're resisting, and they're resisting the loss of the value their identity has had in this society all along. And to lose that, you know, you look at Trump voters and wonder, well, they're Why don't they unite with other people who share their economic and so on interests? No, they're being threatened.
Lawrence D. Bobo: The threat is that they're going to give up a racial advantage.
Claude Steele: Right. And that's a big deal to walk away from that.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: Well, one of those terms that people can say now and not walk— hear and not walk out of the room is white skin privilege. Yeah. And it's true. Now people commonly talk about that. And the 70-plus million people who voted for Donald Trump— I don't want to generalize. They're not all the same. But one of the principal motivations for the affection of and loyalty to Donald Trump is the romanticization, the nostalgia for white skin privilege, without a doubt. Yeah. And Georgia, I was about to say, as Ray Charles, to quote Ray Charles, Georgia on my mind. Georgia is— what happened in Georgia has flipped a lot of people out on the left joyously to turn Georgia Reverend Ralph Warnock from Ebenezer Baptist Church sitting in the Senate. People can't believe that. And they go, you know what else they said? That ain't never going to happen again. Well, I'm not sure.
Lawrence D. Bobo: And here's the point, to get down to the detail of some of what I was arguing about, why this is about continuous mobilization and the distribution of power in a way. You're going to have to be in this contest to win it. Basically, and that part of what we have, I believe, seen happen here, you know, is not just a brave, articulate, dynamic, charismatic individual like Stacey Abrams say, you know, we're not going out like this. We're not going to let this guy keep all these people out of the voting rolls. We're going to mobilize and make sure the next time an election comes around, we have found a way to get people registered. We found a way to get them to the voting booth. We got them a message and candidates they were ready to vote for. So part of that power issue is the creation of a kind of grassroots dynamic that really is seriously engaged in that project, which is what it took to turn Georgia. It wasn't just that they had a governor who had insulted Black folks. That's not what did it. What did it was a whole lot of organized, mobilized, systematic activity on the ground. And part of what I think I do have optimism about is that we do have a new generation of young folks coming up, young folks of color and young white folks of like mind, progressive as well, who are further along on this vocabulary transformation curve than are any of us gray-haired individuals, and they are far less tolerant of these old ways of accepting disadvantage, exclusion, denigration. This is very much, as anybody in a university setting knows, a kind of in-your-face moment for a lot of young folks on college campuses. So I'm— at one level, I'm very hopeful that that's going to continue, and in fact historically, from an historical vantage point, from my view, it was enormously important that Trump not be reelected. You cannot have that voice of ignorance and intolerance as the President of the United States coming from the White House, influencing the socialization of millions of young Americans. It is a depressing fact about this recent election that young white voters still by a majority voted for Trump. So there's real work to be done here.
Margaret Levi: This is a good time to bring in several comments and questions that are in the— from the audience, which you've largely been talking about Black Americans. And Larry, you just raised more generally people of color. But if you think about whether it be the Reconstruction or the post-Reconstruction era, Or whether you think about now, we live in a very diverse country. So what about other peoples of color and what kinds of multiethnic, multiracial— this is coming from Peter Gorovitch and Mary Murphy, your student, Claude, and our friend, among others.
Lawrence D. Bobo: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's enormously important. And I'll draw attention to a very important book by my friend, Manuel Pastor at the University of Southern California, States of Resistance, where he says— and his message for me, I have to confess, Manuel, is a little more optimistic than I'm ready to be. But basically he says, look, what the nation is going through right now, California went through 20 years ago. That we had Pete Wilson as a governor who got reelected by running anti-welfare, anti-affirmative action, anti-immigrant platform. He gets reelected as governor of the state of California by running against Blacks and Mexicans and doing anything to integrate them into the middle class. Okay, that, that was the basic campaign. And that coming out of those years, Prop 187, the Regental decision on no affirmative action in the UC system, Minority communities, particularly at the grassroots level, got the message that they needed to get together to turn this back. And it has taken a lot of work at the grassroots level, but California did that. You now look at California the way most politicians look at Massachusetts, that it is a totally reliably Democratic state, right? He's extending the argument to say that that grassroots mobilization, development of coalition politics, it doesn't mean that all the frictions are gone, it doesn't mean that everyone agrees on every single issue, but this moment of intense anxiety and frustration, if California is any model for us, can be defeated by a rainbow coalition. In point of fact, I think we've already seen it, and when mainstream political parties like the Democrats step away from it, they lose. This is my optimistic message, especially to my friend Professor Gates, about the Obama coalition. That is exactly what the Obama coalition was. White progressives, a hypermajority of the Black vote, and strong two-thirds majorities of the Asian and Latino votes. That's what got him elected in '08. It's what saved him in 2012. And frankly, it is literally what pushed Joe Biden over the top in the end. There was a mistake in 2016. There's too much waffling. I don't want to go into the detail or get into personalities here, but took their eye off the prize, their eye off the ball.
Claude Steele: I do, I do. I would, I would support that. I just inject here that I do think that that other groups of color have been in a more ambivalent situation than African Americans in the sense that should we go, should we try to assimilate and get and become, you know, like the Irish, white, or should we tie bundles with those, with the civil rights movement and all that kind of thing? What should, I think there's been greater ambivalence there. Over the decades. And I think that is— that too might be beginning to shift, that the— with this paradigm shift, with all the pressures that we're talking about, that a rainbow coalition may be more viable going forward. This is again a note of optimism, but it may be more viable going forward than it has been to date.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: I just wanted to add a footnote. Let's not— let us not forget that precisely as Black rights were being rolled back in Reconstruction, what exclusion act was passed? The first one in the history of the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. So that white supremacy was rearing its ugly head and looking around for other kind of victims of color and not just Black people. But for the record, since this is being recorded, I am an Afro-optimist. There are not just two optimists in this room. There are three. But I'm from West Virginia, man. I know that. I just don't want this moment to be squandered, Larry and Claude. I don't want it to be a feel-good kumbaya moment. And sometimes I feel it's like that. Sometimes, well, if we get— I have a list of the right words we're not supposed to say. If we could just get enough money for social justice programs.
Claude Steele: That's frustrating. One thing I'd say at the level, one implication of this line of argument at the level of individual behavior maybe is who do you, you look at as to who you can trust, not who can perform that they've never been prejudiced, never had a, and so many people confuse the, the moral accountability here, that they have never been ever prejudiced, what, and that they can cancel somebody who shows even a glimmer of prejudice. That is what proves you're on the right side of history. But I, I think it's the, it's the person that looks at the financing that goes on in their school districts and the, the patterns of teacher assignment, who gets the most experienced teachers, that attaches their focus, their focuses there their concern on real concrete structural things that affect these inequalities, that drive these inequalities, the riggings of our society and its institutions that continue to drive these things, and take a responsibility for that. I'll use an example in my own discipline. You could say that I'm colorblind, I have no responsibility for integrating my science, my subfield, for bringing people from different backgrounds in, even though I acknowledge the argument that that might help the discipline have more perspectives and do more interesting work. Uh, but my personal responsibility goes only as far as to not be discriminatory. Uh, but I can use all of the standard apparatus and strings and riggings to wind up with exactly the same kind of exclusive class of incoming students as I always had. That I think needs to be seen as part— as a new accountability. You— the responsibility goes farther. You have to make the work that you do, the discipline, the science, science interesting, and connect it to the, to the lives of people so that, so that you— that's part of your responsibility too. It isn't just enough to be I'm getting a little soapbox here about this, but you— because it is something that's rubbed my craw for decades about how you can walk away from that responsibility while reifying and saying you do it on the basis of, you know, a pure academic motive of some sort of pure— that no, we have to extend our sense of personal response responsibility to bring in people and to make what we do attractive and interesting and tie it to their life interests and consider that part of what we do. That's how, for example, an education opportunity needs— an educational institution needs to pick up those kind of chops, that kind of thinking to develop in that direction. Anyway, soapbox, I'm off for a while.
Margaret Levi: Oh, I have a million questions here to ask, and we'll— I'll only ask a few of them. Um, trying to pick out which one makes the most sense right now, but one of them that came across the transom is from Ken Pruitt, who's really asking a social science question here. I'll just read you what he wrote. Um, slavery was evil, as was the treatment of indigenous people by white colonization. Evil is not a social science concept, though it is in the humanities. Would social science have given us more traction on centuries of evil treatment of the so-called inferior races if the concept had been available? Can the social sciences measure the evilness of racism? Would that even help us eradicate it?
Lawrence D. Bobo: Any thoughts on that? That's a tough, that's a tough question. Thank you, Ken. Um, let me say, and this is probably for both, uh, me and Claude, as the short answer, yes. As students of racial prejudice, we've always thought of prejudice as a notion that, that could be made the subject of systematic empirical research, and you sought that knowledge in part to reduce prejudice because embedded in that idea was a set of normative presumptions that we were better off in a world without prejudice or with less prejudice. That it was wrong to engage people on the basis of an erroneous belief. That if we're really rational, if we're upholding a norm of rationality in our conduct, it should be based on good information, accurate information, appropriate information, not some categorical stereotype notion. Similarly, if we are to— it was characterized that prejudice had kind of three normative failures embedded in it. A second one was kind of a failure of what might be called empathy or human-heartedness, the sense that we all really want to be treated in certain ways, and it is just in some sense normatively wrong to treat others in a way that we would not ourselves expect to be treated, with dignity and even-handedness and an acknowledgment of our common humanity. And then kind of thirdly, a kind of norm of even-handedness, that we're going to be treated fairly, that there's going to be some equitable basis on which we interact and interchange with each other so that you don't engage in racial discrimination, right? You don't act in a biased manner against people. So at one level, yeah, I think social science can do a lot here. And this kind of brings me to part of what I think may be a feature of Ken's question, and that is kind of, to state it more aggressively, how do we check the excesses of the moment of cancel culture? How do we check the idea of insisting on being deeply punitive to people who have uttered a word that we've classified as evil, even if it's not a reflection of who they are and what they're doing. As Skip will tell you, I made the mistake of reading a headline in our Teen Talk course one day. I was trying to show that liberal Democrats were part of building mass incarceration, and I put up a slide from a Newsweek magazine article on presidential candidate Bill Clinton going back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of mentally retarded Black man. And I said the word retarded. Ooh, I did not quite at that moment realize that the word had been banned. And students had enough knowledge of me and respect that I wasn't denounced. One student came up to me and said very politely, Professor Bobo, you know you shouldn't use that word anymore. And so they, you know, they evened me out. But I think that's a feature of the question he's asking. Is that this moment of chinks in the vocabulary of a change in our norms and sensibilities is also producing some very worrisome excesses of reaction. But on the short-term thing, can the social sciences engage such phenomena in productive ways? Yes, I think so.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: Well, if I can say just very quickly, Ken, first of all, good friend, want to say hi. But I think we need to account also for the fact that the history of the social sciences has been replete with racism itself. Oh, yeah. I mean, the greatest African American humanist is also the greatest African American social scientist, one of the founders of American sociology. But you wouldn't know that in the history of sociology. And I mean, the man couldn't even get a job, he couldn't even get a decent outside the historical Black colleges, of course. And he couldn't get any adequate funding for studies which, had they been funded and completed, could have changed the history of race relations in this country. So social science has a lot to answer for in terms of the racism embedded in its own history and discourse.
Lawrence D. Bobo: Oh, no doubt. And in fact, early, early sociology was about rationalizing racism. By and large. It was done by Southern apologists for slavery.
Claude Steele: I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think social science, it's in, it's in. You do it, the average, uh, uh, you know, regression model research on race puts race in as a factor, a causal factor, and then you start hypothesizing about characteristics of the group that could be responsible for the outcome you found in the, in the research. So it's structured to put you in an observer's role and to alienate you from the experience of the people you're trying to explain. How do they see the world? That's obscured by that, that, that perspective. And that, that problem alone saturates the social sciences with regard to race. And, and if it weren't for African Americans, there would hardly be any social sciences. It's so— studying them is so central and so so much research attention has been directed there. But so I do think as a social scientist and as a person with an unconditional commitment to be— to social science, I still have to say that we have some deep thinking to do about the role we play. There's never— there's a line of thinking in African American literature Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, that say, well, how did the social sciences— how can they explain the amazing art that this particular group has produced? That they wind up portraying the group so unidimensionally that that kind of thing, some of the greatest literature of the 20th century, the greatest art, the great— not to speak of music— that it would have no— they have no way of explaining that. It's obscured, that reality.
Lawrence D. Bobo: So I think as social scientists, they call it Claude, they call it Margaret.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: And Larry, as Larry knows, Albert Murray coined one of the most brilliant expressions about, uh, this phenomenon that we're discussing. He calls it the social science fiction monster.
Claude Steele: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's true. I think it's visible to the three of us because we're— our group is on the receiving end of so much of that.
Lawrence D. Bobo: Yep. No, no. And so you get books like, I think it's Alain Locke's introductory essay to The New Negro, where he talks about sociologists going out to count the number of Black bastards, you know, and that's his way of saying we are going to essayists, to poets, to novelists to, you know, recover the humanity of these people because the social sciences have clearly blown it.
Margaret Levi: Well, you've given us a great charge for the social sciences, which is a great way to begin to wind down our discussion of, you know, a CASBS web series on social science in a world in crisis, and maybe it's social science in crisis in a world in crisis.
Claude Steele: Well, we need to think, we need to think, you know, as I say, I love, I find the social sciences personally thrilling. The power of systematic empirical investigation is thrilling, but we have, we should look in our own house.
Margaret Levi: Absolutely. I'm going to give you each a minute or two for a closing remark, and then I think we'll say goodbye to our nearly 400 members of the audience. And thank you. But shall we go in reverse order? Claude, you want to start? And then Skip, if you can be short. And then Larry. Let's let Skip finish.
Lawrence D. Bobo: He'll be great. OK. He'll be great.
Claude Steele: He'll tell it all. Larry, and then Skip. OK, we're going in reverse order.
Lawrence D. Bobo: I'm going to make this up as I go along.
Claude Steele: I mean, I do have this guarded, highly conditional optimism, and it probably requires getting yourself to about 50,000 feet over the situation and history and seeing things in process and that for every action there is going to be a reaction. You can't take the reaction as defeat, you just have to take it as the normal course of change, and that you, as Larry was saying, you have to keep the pressure on. That's— that you, you can't get into a frame of mind where you think that change will happen just by reason or by information. And I, I have to say, it seems like to me it happens when there's pressure of a political sort. And so, uh, I wish it weren't that way. And it— that kind of pressure and change can use information and, and the like to change in a much more constructive, effective way. But we do have to recognize the importance of activism and pressure as part of the change process in a large democratic society like this. So I could go on, but I'll stop.
Lawrence D. Bobo: Yeah, I think I'll pick up where Claude is, that I'm going to stand on my kind of guarded optimist ground here. There's serious struggles left. There's a deeply rooted systemic problem of racism in American society, racism that affects material opportunities in life, racism that affects the dynamics of our political parties, political institutions, and the enjoyment of real basic citizenship rights. And obviously racism in, in our culture, our very mindsets, the national vocabulary. I mean, as Skip was outlining it, The daughters of, of the Confederacy won the intellectual battle for the hearts and souls of Americans. And we're in, ironically, in a moment right now of finally rolling back that narrative as the predominant American understanding of the racial divide and of our own history. And so it will be an ongoing struggle, but I think the The potential makings of a formidable, durable transformation are there. There's no guarantee that it will prevail as we watch what's happening in states like Georgia and Alabama and probably the Carolinas too and other places that are vigorously pursuing voters and boldly open out in public view pursuing voter suppression activities that really ought to be unthinkable much less the subject of open public debate, we have to worry and be conscious and engaged. Otherwise, we will slip back. Otherwise, the occasional notes of pessimism that my dear friend and next-door neighbor was voicing a short while ago may come to pass. But I think we can do better, and we're all going to work on bending the arc of the moral universe here, and we're not going to let it set its own course. We got to reach up and pull it toward justice. That'll take some effort. Oh, two beautiful statements.
Henery Louis Gates, Jr.: Um, Margaret, I just made a documentary about the Black church, and if you watch it, you realize Black preachers can't even say good morning unless they take 20 minutes. So that is a tradition in which I, I'm operating. But since you have the stopwatch, Margaret, Let me end my comments by saying, history repeats itself, ladies and gentlemen, but only if we let it.
Claude Steele: There you go.
Margaret Levi: There you go. Fabulous. That was fabulous. Okay. A really big thanks to all three of you. This was a remarkable conversation, as we knew it would be, and we are really grateful for you giving us your time and your thoughts. And your insights and your knowledge and your clarion call to move forward and keep acting and bend that moral arc of history to justice. And again, I want to thank this event's co-sponsors, the African and American Studies Program at Stanford, soon to be department, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. And a heads up, details about the next episodes in the CASBS series, Social Science for a World in Crisis, and how to learn more about the series is coming in your screen in just a few seconds. So thanks again to the panel, really, really thank you. And thanks to everyone, the many of you who joined us today.
Narrator: That was Lawrence Bobo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Claude Steele, and Margaret Levi discussing America's Black-White Divide: Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Forward. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. We've got more CASBS Live events coming to the Human Centered feed. And more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at the center. So be sure you're subscribed in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.