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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I’m here today with my friend, governing board member of INET and Detroit alumni like myself, Mr. John Powell… Or Dr. John Powell. How are you doing John?
John Powell:
Good. How are you doing, Rob? It’s nice to talk to you.
Rob Johnson:
It’s nice to talk with you also, as always. We’ve made an episode before, as we were right at the starting gates to this podcast. But I thought here is the close of 2020. One of these… How do I say? Unfortunately, in some ways, a very memorable year. But hopefully, we can learn from it and unmask some certain things that were, changes overdue, and strike a new path forward. Maybe not immediately with the pandemic lockdown, but in the not too distant future. And we have a new administration coming in, and a whole lot of… How do you say? A whole lot of burdens on the agenda of transformations that need to be made in relation to climate, and community, and education, and everything else.
Rob Johnson:
But I’m curious, what do you see in… If you look at this year, what did you learn, and what does it inspire you to want to do to make things better in the future?
John Powell:
Well, Rob, like you said it’s been a very, very difficult year. I mean, just a number of body blows, one after another with… I remember in January before we got to the end of January, there had already been two or three major things that happened. It’s like, wow, the year just got off to a bang. And then the pandemic. And of course then in California where I am, the fires, and then George Floyd, and then it just never ended. And I think for a lot of people is, have we hit rock bottom? And people begin to think, “There’s no such thing as rock bottom.”
John Powell:
So I think what happened in the country, what happened in the world, really demonstrated how ill prepared, how structurally and even culturally, we were not prepared to deal with the pandemic, even though we’ve had some signs that we’re going to be facing a pandemic. I think one hope was that… People always say, what would take to bring us together would be some outside attack, like Martians or a pandemic. Well, we got the latter, maybe we’ll get Martians next year. But in a sense was a missed opportunity. Because while it was something that affects all of us, and in a sense you could say a common enemy. Although even that, I think is a little bit problematic as we’re thinking about the pandemic.
John Powell:
We have to massage, we have to curate it, we have to talk about it. But if we could imagine, instead of turning on each other, turning toward each other in fighting this common threat that all of us are facing, instead again, we turned on each other. And it wasn’t just natural, although it was building on a lot of racial and other kind of resentment in the country. It also was led by big money, by big politics, and by the white house. With Trump out of the white house, there’s a chance that some of that could turn a corner.
John Powell:
We have a vaccine now. But over 70 million people, 73 million and counting voted for Trump. And there’s a lot of stuff about, we need to understand Trump voters. I think we have to understand each other. But understand that is not a one way street and there’s some pretty pernicious things that we have to deal with as well in terms of the mean spiritedness that people either embraced or gauge on for. I mean, as this administration winds down, he’s trying to kill as many people on death row as possible.
John Powell:
He’s trying to open up the Arctic, even though we’re talking about icebergs the size of Delaware breaking and floating out. And he’s saying, “Let’s do as much destruction as we can. Let’s open up all the national forest for mining,” even though we don’t have an energy shortage. “Let’s make it hard for people to be counted. So let’s do the census, so we don’t count immigrants. I mean, people still stick with that. In some ways it’s not sticking with issues, I think it’s actually sticking with Trump and what he represents, which is an ideological and ontological shift of America being only for essentially a certain kind of person, largely white and Christian.
Rob Johnson:
I saw an article today by a gentleman named Dan Siegel, and it was all about what he thought played a role. He said white supremacy is the only plausible explanation for the 2020 election results. Just simply back of the envelope, I sampled some of his data. Trump one 58% of the white vote, 55% of white women, and Biden won 71% of the nonwhite vote. Among college educated white men, Trump won 51 to 48, then he won among white men without college degrees by 70 to 28. Trump’s success was very strong among evangelicals or the born again Christians. They make up about 28% of the electorate and he won 76% of that vote.
Rob Johnson:
And then just as a broader array, 69% of voters say that racism is an important problem in America. And of those 69%, they supported Biden by 68 to 30. But the voters who believed that racism is not a problem, that’s a 31%, supported Trump by 84 to 14. And I guess I’ll start right at the end, John. The question I would ask is when they say they believe racism is a minor problem and they support Trump 84 to 14, are they masking a racial attitude by saying it’s not important? Because given all of the data, it appears that racism is something that Trump found the flames of and seem to correlate with the results quite a lot.
John Powell:
Well, I think that’s right, Rob. I think there’s some complexities. So to begin with, in a sense you could say the news about white supporting Trump is not really new news. I mean, he has a slight bump over other Republican running for president. But as we know, Johnson was the last presidential candidate for the Democratic party that took the majority of white votes. And in that sense you could say… And it’s even more stark, because the South was solidly Democratic because of the hostility and tipity toward the Republican party, and Lincoln and the civil war, the South for the next 100 years was solidly democratic, and rapidly anti-Republican.
John Powell:
And then after the civil rights amendment and heard of the civil rights movement, the South flipped and became the heart of the Republican party. So even though they intimidate toward the Republican party, the willingness to align themselves with the party that they hated in favor of keeping or clawing back any progress the blacks have may, was palpable. And there was a book called The South Shall Rise Again. And in a sense, it’s not just the South, it was the whole country. So in that sense, we’ve been on this projector for a long time. We’ve never as a country really embraced the notion of being a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country in practice.
John Powell:
We’ve tried to do it in words, and there’d been some exceptions. But as a country, whenever we try to actually expand the we to include all people, there’s a white lash that keeps coming back over and over again. And then the centrist position becomes we have to accommodate quite anxiety, which I’m not opposed to in some theoretical passion, but the accommodated can’t mean on the backs of blacks and Latinos and people who are considered outside. So in some sense, Trump is a deeper expression of that, and even a more explicit expression, because he ran on a more explicit racial terms, but is also part of a larger American legacy.
John Powell:
The other thing I would say is that I think race is really important. Racism is something slightly different. And I think we conflate the two. And also think when we talk about race largely in this country, people think about people of color or black people. And so even though saying that 31% who don’t think race is important, I think what many of them are saying is that discrimination against blacks or given the largest movement in our history, Black Lives Matter is not legitimate. But many of those same people, if you said, is there a reason for white resentment, they would say yes.
John Powell:
So in that sense, there’s a growing salience and importance of white identity, but people are not yet calling it race. And in fact, some politicians, some of whom I like, and some of whom I don’t, but they have this constant reframe that we have to avoid identity politics, and instead focus on large universal issues like the working class. When they say the working class, they actually mean the white working class. They’re actually stepping back to an identity politics, but it’s in favor of a certain group as opposed to another group. So I do think race identity is extremely important. And in that, racism and even white supremacy and anti-black racism, but I also think it speaks up with some other things.
John Powell:
I don’t think there’s a single thing. I think the economy, and race, and racism, and immigration, and all these things are interrelated. But there are some stories that we’d like to avoid. At least in theory, we’re much more comfortable talking about class than we are talking about race in the country.
Rob Johnson:
I guess, I’m not real familiar. And I’m curious, what role does education play in healing us from these racial divides or has the potential to be a healing force?
John Powell:
Well, certainly education is important. I mean, there are different ways of thinking about what’s the injury and what’s the heal, and how do we heal. And part of the thing is that, a lot of the ways we think about healing is basically settling the score. And some people would say the score has already been setup. And what’s the score? The score is, a country that’s founded upon the taking of land from native Americans, and the bodies of black people, and the mistreatment of Asians for much of it’s history. That’s the American history. That’s our history, not black history, it’s not native American history, it’s not Chinese history. This is what our history is what our country is founded on.
John Powell:
And by most accounts, Americans considered the greatest president in US history to be Lincoln. Lincoln was very keenly aware of that. He was also aware that there’s some really wonderful speeches that would make people think he’s Bernie Sanders. He’s talking about the danger of corporations, the danger of concentration of wealth and money, he talked about… He feared that more than he feared the Southern army. So they’re combination of those things, but they’re going to relate it. And so education, which really only started at the civil war. Education in the country is probably done to play a substantial role, but it has to be more than educating for jobs.
John Powell:
Sometimes we think of education really as trade schools. Whereas Jefferson, in spite of his quibbles, [inaudible 00:14:28] about education is making people into citizens. A citizen from their perspective meant, you have the ability to take someone else’s perspective, you have the ability to empathize. It’s not something that you’re born into. We actually have to be truly educated about. We’re not educating that today. We think of education as technical skills so you can get job in the new economy, not unimportant. But the most important threat to the United States and the world is not lack of technology, is not we don’t have the right app or the right iPhone. It’s that we actually turn against each other, all the resources that we have.
John Powell:
So education matters, and so does geography. The fact that the country is segmented largely in terms of Trump supporters are very isolated from Biden or Bernie supporters, physical. So we sorted ourselves out. Some people talk about rural versus urban. Again, overstated. But it is true that we don’t physically have contact with each other. And so it makes it easier. You don’t have physically contact, you don’t have good education. And maybe I’m not doing the job that I was designed to do. And so creates this possibility for us to live in alternate realities. And those alternate realities are really hostile toward each other. And we have to figure out a way of bridging that on multiple levels.
Rob Johnson:
And how do you see… In 2020, not only did we see what you might call the glaring deficiencies in the health care system in the United States, but the disproportionate burden that people of color experience. In other words, the healthcare system does better for affluent people and for white people than it does for people of color, according to the COVID statistics.
John Powell:
That the way we sort people, actually racialized the people. Now, what that means is that, when something happens like the virus, is moving through that structure. Anything move through that structure, it’s going to be amplified by the structure. So early on at the [inaudible 00:17:45] Institute, which I direct, we noticed that people were saying, including Governor Cuomo, that the virus was a great equalizer. And I’m saying no, that’s a nice proposition, but it’s highly wrong, because it’s going to move through a system. And the system is not going to all of a sudden change. And so it’s going to amplify all of the inequities, all of the structural problems that are there, people who don’t have money for housing, and for black people and other people of color, native Americans, Latinos now in California in the farm worker communities, is just being devastated.
John Powell:
Well, you look at their structure. Most of them live in 10 men houses or group houses. Can’t easily distance six feet apart. In terms of washing your hands, you have to walk as far as a mile to wash your hands for shared bathroom. Everything is out of place, the hospitals are not there, so everything that… All the tools that we think of in terms of either stopping the spread or fighting the pirates are not as available structurally across the country for marginalized communities. What does it mean to be marginal?
John Powell:
It means you don’t have access to things that people who are not marginal have. Who are the people who are not marginal? They’re generally well-educated, more disproportionately white, more disproportionately urban than other people. So we shouldn’t be surprised that really it’s like shining a flashlight through a filter. And then you see all of the things on the filter in the shadow, in the projection. Yes, they’re there. They’re not in the flashlight, they’re in the filter. And so these structures… But I will say even as they debate as to how to distribute the vaccine, and I’m not saying there’s a simple way. But I’m hardened a little bit that they’re now talking about equity. They’re saying, “How do we be fair?” And in the sense, they’re starting to recognize that people are not situated the same, and it’s not because of the pigment in their skin, it’s not because of the genes. It’s because of the way structures and race interact in the United States and the world.
John Powell:
And so you have to pay attention to those structures. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a racist Bill Connor behind the distribution of those inequalities. Once they’re in place, if we’re on automatic pilot, they reproduce. If we’re going to address them, we have to be deliberate, because that’s what structures do. Structures are forms of obituated practices that we no longer have to think about. They are on automatic control.
Rob Johnson:
I guess, if you were to… How do I say? Potentially quite feasible, but let’s just call it a fantasy for tonight. If you were appointed Azar inside of the incoming Biden administration, what steps would you lay out to try to heal this country related to health climate infrastructure, education, anything that comes to your mind?
John Powell:
Well, what I would propose, and maybe we can propose this without being Azars. What I propose is, how do we actually move forward where we all have a bright share future? How do we expand the we? In order to do that, first of all, we have to really listen to people. Because a lot of times, again, people’s differences, even political differences, are really reflecting others structural differences. And so, I’ve seen a cartoon about four people carrying someone on their shoulder and they’re saying that the people doing the carrying half a mile was a long walk, for the person riding, is a piece of cake. So some of us are writing or more or less writing, and some of us are carrying.
John Powell:
And so our differences are not simply personal, they’re structural, and then they’re massaged by our leaders. So one of the things I would do would be really clear, not just in words, but also in practice of saying, we’re not going to leave anyone behind. This is a future for all of us, and this is going to be reflected in our program. That’s my sweet spot, when I talk about creating a world where we all belong due to practice of targeted universalism, which requires us to look at how people are situated differently, and then say it allows us to talk about race without talking about genes. It allows us to talk about society where we all go forward.
John Powell:
And I will say, it’s not symmetrical. I think Trump and many of his supporters deliberately trying to tear the country down. They’re deliberately trying to start a succession, they’re deliberately saying they don’t want to be related to people that consider the other. The people who are not in support of that vision, people who associate themselves with progressive and social justice advocates, and I associated myself with that as well, I think we have to be very clear that we’re not trying to just build a world for ourselves, we’re not trying to build the world for just people of color, we’re not trying to build a world just for people who are progressive.
John Powell:
We’re trying to co-create a world where everyone belongs, including those who don’t agree with us. And that means not just a different story, but a different set of practices. So for example, there’s a big fight in the Biden administration about who would be the secretary of agriculture. Will it be people in the city, will it be an urbananite, a person who’s conscious of lack of food in the city, food deserts, homeless lines, or will it be a person from the rural area, who will be aware of terrorists, be aware of farmers actually not making money, be aware of land being [inaudible 00:24:12]. Well, it needs to be both.
John Powell:
Now the person maybe one person, but you can say, first of all, it’s a bureau with thousands of people. But you could say, you can make a clear, open words and in practice that we’re going to take care of both of these issues, and they’re not the same. And so we’ll need different strategies and we’re going to listen to people from those different strategies, and we’re going to bring them together. And their charge is going to be, yes. How do you take care of your community, your immediate community, but then, how do you also take care of a large community? You’re charge as part of this collective we is not just to take care of your group or to define the group narrowly while you focus on your group, make sure they’re not left out, how do you also include others who you don’t always see in your group.
John Powell:
So it seems to me that’s the orientation. And that orientation should show up over and over and over again, whether we’re talking about education, whether we’re talking about school, when we’re talking about healthcare, whether you’re talking about [inaudible 00:25:15] we do, just be happy to compete or proceed as narrow inadequate resources, scarce resources. And that creates more anxiety, and more fighting, more polarization. So we’re saying to that in that situation, the future is not all of us, there’s going to be winners and losers, and then people fight to be winners, not to be losers.
Rob Johnson:
As I listened to you, I’m reminded, I used to teach a course with Serene Jones at the Union Theological Seminary, and we called it economics in theology or means and ends. But one of the key pillars that the students, these were graduate students, at the time of occupy Wall Street, looking for a direction forward. And one of the key pillars that they really reacted positively to was an exercise that a Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King conducted, called a freedom budget for all Americans. And I remember reading about it, learning about it in conjunction with the students, because it was so as you said, we’re not going out to… Dr. King was very explicit, “I’m not going out to something for the black community. I’m going out to do something for human beings that we all should experience.” And obviously this was intertwined with his concern about excessive militarism, racism and materialism, particularly in the context of the Vietnam war.
Rob Johnson:
It wasn’t much beyond that time before… How would I say? Dr. King gave his famous time to break the silence beyond Vietnam speech. But I thought it was quite brilliant that they weren’t creating what you might call a special [fips 00:27:24] for a subset of society. They were saying, we should all have access to, what I’ll call, the baseline platform for a meaningful life. I don’t know. It was very inspiring and very wholesome. It resonated in my mind as I was listening to you, that you’re coming from that same perspective.
John Powell:
I’m definitely influenced by Dr. King. And the ideas are, you could say an update of his ideas, update of Einstein’s ideas, up-to-date of Aristotle’s ideas, people looked at how do you actually construct a healthy society? I frequently talk about this using slightly different words, but very similar concepts. Of one, how do you get everyone to a place where they can fully participate and fully enjoy what society has to offer. But two, also recognizing that people are not situated the same. So what the mistake we made in this country, we made a couple of victims. One was just the assumption that equality means treat everybody the same. A concept of equality in the west comes largely from Aristotle, probably influenced also by native people.
John Powell:
But Aristotle talked about fairness requires you to treat people who’s situated within the same, the same. That’s equality. But then it also requires you to treat people situated differently, differently. He called that geometric equality. We got the first part of it, let’s treat everybody the same, but we missed the second part of it. Aristotle’s given us 2000 years ago saying no. He was actually describing what I called targeted universalism. And so, when you say we’re going to do something special for people who are living in Detroit and dying at three times the rate of other people, it’s not because they’re black, it’s because they’re situated differently, because of the way the structures work.
John Powell:
When we say that we’re going to do something different in terms of getting water out to reservations and in the farm communities, we’re not doing that because are Latinos or because people are native people, it’s only because they’re situated differently. And so it’s not just the practice, it’s also with understanding and communicating. And again, and this is one of the rubs. We’re also saying we’re not indifferent to how whites are situated. As [inaudible 00:30:01], sometimes we talk about race, we assume that whites already have everything they need, clearly they don’t.
John Powell:
We oftentimes engage in what’s sometimes is referred to as oppositional politics. You have to be against you in order to be for me. And while I’m not totally against opposition politics… I just read an article about post opposition, how do we actually go beyond that and say to people, everyone has a place, potentially has a place? That might mean a different tax structure, the corporations. It might even be a different governance structured corporation, but it’s not anti-corporate. It’s saying how do we create a world and society [inaudible 00:30:40] people in society? We use all the instruments and ingenuity that we can in terms of technology, in terms of mass media, in terms of corporations, but it have to serve the people and have to serve all the people.
Rob Johnson:
So, right now, if you were to, how would I say, want to shake people out of a cynicism, there’s a certain cynicism that many people have towards the Democratic party. The elite meritocracy quick criticisms are put forward frequently. But if you were in the Biden administration, in the first 100 days, what do you do so that we all feel that we’re on a different path, relative to where we’ve been traveling the last four years? And I’m saying that not to just be on a different path. I’m saying it’s the equivalent of a stun gun of changing your perceptions so that you do not want to go back to that other path. It’s a healing change in trajectory.
John Powell:
Well, what I would say to the Biden administration and for all of us really, certainly for funders, that we should be lifting up and amplifying and creating capacities for people to tell their stories and to bridge. So how do we begin to, in a curated way… It’s already happening. How do we begin to actually notice it and lift it up and fund it, support it. So New York as we know is going through a major thing of trying to rethink at schools. But, again, I was a little disturbed with the language, because they talked about redistributing the resources at the school. And that creates, again, this idea of scarcity and we’re fighting over it.
John Powell:
So we have to take something from one group to give to another group, but that usually doesn’t work. You’re creating tension. Because even the group that’s relatively well off, oftentimes feel like they’re just barely treading water with that. So I would create those possibilities. I would invite people in, and they may not come. Because people are benefiting from this, some people are benefiting from this certain system, especially some of the leads. So when you say to them, “You know what, we’re going to start shifting from oil, but you’re going to do it so that there’s a soft landing. We want you to participate in that.” And we’ll just [inaudible 00:33:26] a call, we’ll help subsidize that soft landing, but we got to get there. Now. They may say no, they may say yes, that’s up to them. But at least we made the offer.
John Powell:
And so can we create spaces? Because it’s funny. I mean, the planet doesn’t belong to the oil barons, it doesn’t belong to the social justice folks, it doesn’t belong to the white supremacists. It’s our planet, all of our planet. It belongs to us and we belong to it. And how do you actually begin to do that? So I would actually look for people from different walks of life, from different boards, different institution, and creating space where they can really come together and chat with, one, exemplifying this conversation, just to really talk to each other. And in some cases that would produce really profound different solutions, some cases they are not.
John Powell:
But even if we begin to talk to each other in a serious way, not just to win, that would be very different. The last thing is that, the world’s not done with us yet. Whether the vaccine is effective or not, and I necessarily hope it is, and I hope people take it. I hope it’s safe, we’re not going back to before all this. The world is changing. The world is already changing. We are already getting behind, if you will. And so we really need to think about how do we collectively shape our collective future. And here’s the thing I would say, Rob, there’s some deal-breakers. One deal breaker non-negotiable in my mind is that, all human life counts.
John Powell:
I also believe we’re all profoundly interconnected, not always fairly, but we’re also interconnected, that we share this planet, that it belongs to all of us. And that both the resources and the pain needs to be fairly distributed. And that’s the conversation we’re going to have. And I would have some early examples of that, or put some resources behind in different communities. And so I might deliberately state something. So talk about rural and urban being concrete example. There’s a huge opiate problem [inaudible 00:35:50] the whole country that’s situated in rural America, but there’s also other drug issues in urban areas.
John Powell:
Why not link them? Don’t pick a winner and loser. We say 2 million Americans are killing themselves with drugs and suicide. We don’t care if they’re in rural Georgia or one was urban area in the country. We care about them. And we recognize, again, they’re situated differently, but there’s some commonality, they’re both dealing with pain, they’re both dealing with drugs, and maybe bring them together so they can actually see each other. They’re not [inaudible 00:36:25] of each other. When you [inaudible 00:36:29] someone and you flag them to become one thing, you don’t see their multiplicity. So I create space and find some of that work and then look it up, and we’ll make mistakes, but I think that’s the only way forward together.
Rob Johnson:
Do you see a way of, what you might call quickly healing the polarization? The story I often hear is that Trump did something very interesting, which was, he called out both parties. People forget he beat 15 Republicans before he beat Hillary Clinton. And the mantra, if you will, was the system is rigged. And everybody rose up to that. I remember going back to Detroit, where you and I come from, and people were telling me that he came right after the Republican convention and he gave a speech to the Detroit Economic Club two days after he got the nomination and scolded the management for having lost so many jobs in Detroit at the big three auto companies.
Rob Johnson:
And even people I know who worked there as the executive said, “Boy, this is a different fish, this guy.” But after he’d been in power and had done the tax reform and the deregulation of the fossil fuel industry and so forth, it looked like what they call a seduced and abandoned. He didn’t engage or go into a policy realm, which we might say was part of the healing. And to keep his coalition together, he appeared to resort to an inflamed identity politics. And that was well underway before the pandemic. I think it became more desperate even in the context of his feeling like his ship was sinking. But what kind of things… You’ve talked about, we’re all in this together notion, putting resources behind it. But are there words to which you might call dissolve the divide? Are there things that people should read or are there things that people should practice to help us move irreversibly away from that, how would I say, inciting of polarity that we’ve just been through?
John Powell:
Well, the answer is, I think there’s some… As you know, Rob, we live in stories. We don’t just interact with the world, we interact through a vision that we have of the world. And the stories, the dominant stories, and there’s more than one, that we trade on right now, it’s not working. And so Trump traded on one story of a small, basically white national we. And even in this campaign, he was attacking Mexicans immigrants. He had this weird affinity for Russia, but this real obsession over China. And Rob, you and I have been to China together and I’m not a big fan of their system. But to me to, [inaudible 00:39:57] a smack of irrational over the top and racism. And I think Americans were too quick to buy into it. He didn’t just attack China, he attacked Europe, he attacked Germany, he attacked England.
John Powell:
He was railing about anyone who was in his way. Yes, he did say some things about, we should protect you, and so did Bernie. But Trump’s was laced with racism. Because besides that we should protect you, he then very quickly said, and those people, whether it be blacks or Mexicans or immigrants from the Caribbean, from the ship over countries, those are the bad people we need to protect you from. So it wasn’t just economic popularism. He from the very beginning, when he’s on the campaign trail, was laced with sexism and racism. His groups were much too willing to overlook. And some of the people came out and supported him, like KKK, they weren’t supporting him just because of his economic policy, they were supporting him because of this racism.
John Powell:
And frankly, conservative white brothers and sisters were two willing, not because of, in spite of they’re too willing to overlook that, they were too willing to say okay. Now remember, white resentment towards blacks doing okay or better and blacks aren’t doing great, has been around the way before Trump. What Trump said is that you should be resentful. You should be pissed at those people. So he may have identified the problem, but the solution was polarization and hate. And it’s hard to separate those things for Trump. But Bernie had a very similar message and it wasn’t so much polarization and hate, and it didn’t do quite as well. So I think that we have to talk to those issues. But you have to actually talk to people in such a way… In terms of healing, I will say two things. One, right now a lot of Trump supporters believe their lives have been stolen. They’re in the midst of doubling down or fight. Some of them talking about succeeding. I hear with people, you can’t force people to participate in healing.
John Powell:
People have to come to that on their own accord. You can create space, you can create an [inaudible 00:42:30] branch, you can create a bridge, but you can’t force people to do it. We need healing, not just among Trump supporters, we need healing within the Democratic party. There’s a fight between the left and the center, there’s a fight between the left and the left, there’s a fight between the center and the center, breaking and polarizing all over. And so I would actually start with people who really do… And there’s some data that suggests that 70% plus of Americans want to see some healing. Those aren’t necessarily political elites, they’re not necessarily people who are organized. Again, I said this earlier, it’s not symmetrical, but a lot of us who are political activists, we also skew really healing. We have a narrow view of power. We just think of winning and losing, and that’s not good enough.
John Powell:
We can’t win and the path where America is left out. And also we have to actually really be political dominance of supremacy. Not just white supremacy, not just white dominance, but all kinds of dominance. We have to challenge that. We have to actually tell a story, but we actually are in cooperation. And that’d be some competition. How did we learn to really cooperate with each other? Not just in the United States, but around the world. And right now we don’t have that. And so maybe if we offered that to Europe, maybe if offer that to China, maybe they would take it, maybe not. But right now we’re not offering. Instead, what we’re selling is that we, the United States, has to be the most dominant country in the world and other parts of the world, [inaudible 00:44:09] China is threatening that. That we, basically like Christian Americans, have the dominant culture in the world and all other cultures are [inaudible 00:44:17].
John Powell:
So we have to really challenge dominance. When we challenge that, we’re not trying to supplant and say, “We’re going to take your dominance and replace it by ours.” Is that no, we’re talking about something completely different. We want to participate in what that is. So it is a different story. And there’ll be some people who will get it and move on quickly, who want to, and there’ll be some who will oppose it. And we’ll learn as we go forward.
Rob Johnson:
Well, John, one of the casualties of this year 2020, is you and I didn’t get to travel to France with people like Connel West in public and others to hold the conference at the home of James Baldwin in honor of his thinking. And I’m curious… Obviously, we still couldn’t travel. We talked about doing something remote, which I think we might only do in the coming month. I’m curious what you think, how would I say, the insight of the person James Baldwin illuminates for the challenges that we face now.
John Powell:
Well, in my perspective, James Baldwin is not only a profound teacher, he’s also someone who’s from the future. Because he described the future that we all need to aspire to. In my book I used him a lot because of his quotes. There’s a new article I’ll show you, and maybe [inaudible 00:46:07] to read. It’s called it Baldwin in Buddhism, Denial of death, White Supremacy, and the Promise of Racial Justice. So, he’s right there. I mean, some of us are just now starting to think about Buddhism and race. And Baldwin was thinking about that decades ago. It’s also interesting because at some [inaudible 00:46:33] one would say Baldwin has as much reasons to be wounded, as to be cynical, as to be turned off as anyone.
John Powell:
And the next thing he goes, he’s not perfect, but he rejected those things. He was not only at times mistreated by the white communities, but sometimes mistreated by the straight community, sometimes mistreated by the literary community. And yet he remained the beacon of hope. He left the country for a little while, brokenhearted. But he came back to help not just himself, but others. So I think the way he lived his life and his writing is just profound. When we talk about someone who has a [inaudible 00:47:18] on the future, you call him a prophet. James Baldwin is poetic literary, philosophical, spiritual person. We will do well to spend some time looking at the future through James Baldwin’s eyes.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, I think when you said Baldwin in Buddhism, I think there are two books that I read this year that had more impact on me than any other. The first was by a Buddhist woman named Pema Chodron, called When Things Fall Apart. And it was about one’s frame of mind and how to be constructive amidst the fear and the anxiety that engulfs you. And the second, much later in the year was from a man that Martin Luther King nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. His name is Thích Nhất Hạnh. He’s a Vietnamese Buddhist. The name of that book was Fear. And when I came out of that book, there was one thing that resonated with me more than anything else. I reached out to some of my friends who are practitioners of meditation and spiritual discipline, and that was what they called Sangha, S-A-N-G-H-A.
Rob Johnson:
And unlike my preconception of meditation, where you go sit by yourself quietly and go inward. What Thích Nhất Hạnh up home said was that, ultimately, after you’ve developed these practices of mindfulness and what he calls loving kindness, a Sangha is a group. And you do walking meditation together, you do quiet or seated in a room, but together and share with each other because that in his mind was the way you inoculate yourself from fear, by feeling the connection and belonging to community. And when I heard you referring to Baldwin in relation to Buddhism, I find myself very curious.
John Powell:
Well, I sent you the article, and I think you’ll appreciate it. And we live in a world where fear is rampant, but so is hope. So we talked a lot about the split and about the challenges facing us. We’re also at a time in the country where many more Americans are talking about anti-black racism, or white Americans from all walks of life, from generals in the army, to fortune 500 companies, to black activists, queer and straight taken to the streets, calling for something bigger. So we should not just focus on this underbelly, there’s a light there. There’s a crack in this armor, and our job is to turn that crack into a hole, and then take it down altogether. And part of it will be walking into directly the ones.
John Powell:
So even though there’s things to be concerned about, if not afraid of, there’s also things to be hopeful of. And how do we make sure that without having in our heads in the sand, we don’t become crippled with fear. And part of it is the stories we live, and part of it is a meditative practice. In my mind one of the things that one… Potentially, one benefit of meditation is that it allows you to have a bigger plate, so you can have more stuff on your plate. Some people think is wiping your plate clean. In my perspective is not wiping it clean. It’s getting a bigger plate. And so you can hold fear, you can hold hope, you can hold pain, you can hold joy, you can hold the multiple aspects of yourself in the world with a certain kind of grace and possibly the love. I think this was called upon us to be [inaudible 00:51:46] even if we work, to have joy and ease in some of these challenges.
Rob Johnson:
So we have a bunch of a very large number of young scholars now with INET’s Young Scholars Initiative. And I’m curious as to… I think their numbers are approaching or a little over 16,000. If you could prescribe three things for them to read, to help them through 2021, what would they be?
John Powell:
I’m not sure. But here’s some things that might be on my list. I think I would put on the list some of [inaudible 00:52:47]. I think I would include some work by Thích Nhất Hạnh. He has one book called Love. Depending on what they are… Also I love Isabel Wilkinson new book, although I’m not sure I completely agree with it, [inaudible 00:53:13]. I’m trying to think and grasp of something that’s a little more future oriented. Because while I think it’s important to get to the future by stepping through the present, but I think often times we step on the present and end up falling into the past. And so I don’t want to… I’m not one of those people who, the past is present, but we have to get to the future. We have to be able to imagine something different and better. And I’m trying to think of a book I’ve read recently, but nothing that comes to mind that invites that kind of future. I’ll look, but I’ll send it to you. Maybe you could suggest to me what that book is.
Rob Johnson:
For me, I don’t know. I’m always tempted because of the way his music affects me to suggest to people read a book called Coltrane On Coltrane. The John Coltrane’s… It’s very interesting. I did a webinar this past year with a physicist, who wrote a book called the Jazz of Physics, and he was from Trinidad. Because professor Alexander from Brown University, he wrote in his book about how much John Coltrane understood about the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. And he was a child prodigy who came to New York and went on to be a professor of physics at Brown University in quite highly regarded prestigious post-doc. Before that he took up playing the saxophone and learn music, how would I say, in the aftermath of becoming a masterful physicist. But it was amazing to me to hear about his sense, which you might call versatility and interactiveness between heart and mind.
Rob Johnson:
And there was a book that I just embarked on reading by a woman named Sarah Blondin who’s from Britain. Well, she lives in British Columbia with her husband and children. It’s called Heart Minded. And it’s about how the mind… We’re talking about a time of acute fear. Sometimes a scientific inquiry can be exploring, can be uncovering, and illuminating. But sometimes the mind performs as an anesthetic to insulate you from painful thought or to anesthetize your fears. And what Sarah talks about, there’s something like 19 meditations associated with the book, is how to break out of thinking that mind like the scientist is the right way into, what you might call get back into the poetic spirit, which was somewhat less armored, somewhat less defensive to help you evolve.
Rob Johnson:
And in the context of reading that book, I read another book recently called Radical Acceptance by a woman named Tara Brock, who’s a Buddhist trained in psychotherapy. And Tara Brock’s book was essentially about in acutely uncomfortable circumstances, learning how to accept what is, even if you don’t want to accept it, meaning allowing it to persist in your life. But recognizing what it is that causes you discomfort, allows you to start to move beyond that discomfort by what she calls the combination of compassion and attention, attention to understand where you are and compassion with yourself, with other people, some people who provoke you, so that you can maintain a sense of balance and move beyond it. And I guess, John, being a social scientist economists, those sound like funny recommendations from me, but I see so many people traumatized this year, that people like Thích Nhất Hạnh, like Pema Chodron, like Sarah Blondin, and like this Tara Brock, I think they’re getting into a process which helps us be constructive members of the community and in some ways not burn ourselves out in the process of striving amidst all this anxiety.
John Powell:
Well, I’m going to give you three more books. And by the time these young scholars read all these books they won’t be young anymore. But anyway, one of them is called The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler.
Rob Johnson:
Okay.
John Powell:
The second one is called Down to Earth. Let me see if I can pull up the [inaudible 00:59:12] to look for. He’s a French writer, quite beautiful. Let me see if I can think of the third one now. I know. A Buddhist history of the West by Loy.
Rob Johnson:
Loy.
John Powell:
Yeah.
Rob Johnson:
I used to teach that at the Union theological Seminary, because the last chapter was called The Religion of Markets. Yeah, that’s a great book. And I’ve seen him lecture at Union Theological Seminary as well. That’s a great suggestion.
John Powell:
He’s a scholar and a practitioner. So he’s not just things that he hasn’t live. He’s not just living things, he actually thinks about it. He spent about 20 years as a scholar in Japan.
Rob Johnson:
Excellent. Well, I’m going to have to create a list associated with this conversation. We’ll create a list of links and so forth, so people can, go to the website, or we can create a little memo for the Young Scholars Initiative and they can track down these different sources of emotional and intellectual nourishment that we’re presenting.
John Powell:
They’re part of this program, we’re lucky to have them.
John Powell:
Well, that’s mutual. And now I have learned a lot from you, just in the hard place is just to say brother from another mother. So I appreciate and love [inaudible 01:01:40] and the work you’re doing, but also the person you are. So thank you.
Rob Johnson:
We’re developing some momentum here. You got your final thoughts, but we can come back together and keep building on this reading list for [crosstalk 01:01:56].
John Powell:
I’d like to see you. So yes, let’s keep it going.
Rob Johnson:
Good. We’ll keep it on. Anyway, any last thoughts before we sign off?
Rob Johnson:
Well, I’ll finish with a joke. There was a famous Oracle who played baseball named Yogi Berra. And his son, Dale, was a baseball manager. And one day at a press conference, as he was ascending up the steps after a press conference, somebody said, “Well, Dale, aren’t you going to say something like your father?” And he looked out at the audience and he said, “The similarities between me and my father are different,” which led you to believe instantly that he was Yogi Berra’s son. Anyway, John, thanks very much.
Rob Johnson:
We’ll talk again in the coming year as we see things unfold, and I look forward to working with you.
John Powell:
Same here.
Rob Johnson:
Happy holidays and best to you and your family.
John Powell:
Same here. Have a nice transition.
Rob Johnson:
And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
