Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. There's no more pressing question facing the
Speaker 1: United States today, or really at any time, than the
Speaker 1: relationship between race, crime and incarceration. Today, one in every
Speaker 1: three young African American men is locked up. That's a
Speaker 1: moral crisis, and it's one that has troubled leaders in
Speaker 1: the United States, white and black for most of the
Speaker 1: last century and a half. To talk about this crucial question,
Speaker 1: I'm joined by Khalil Jiubran Muhammad. He's professor of history,
Speaker 1: race and public Policy at Harvard and he's the author
Speaker 1: of a deeply insightful and prize winning book called Condemning Blackness.
Speaker 1: He's one of the leading thinkers in the United States
Speaker 1: on the deep causes and potential solutions to what he
Speaker 1: sometimes calls the carceral state, the state that puts people
Speaker 1: in prison. Khalil, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Glad to be here. So, Khalil, you're a historian. Your
Speaker 1: major book really a field changing book that came out
Speaker 1: almost a decade ago. Not quite No, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a good thing. I mean, when you transform a field,
Speaker 1: you know, it takes time for it to spread to everybody.
Speaker 1: The book's called The Condemnation of Blackness, Race Crime, and
Speaker 1: the Making of Modern Urban America. You showed in the
Speaker 1: book that this phenomenon of white people in the white
Speaker 1: power structure thinking of African Americans as criminals to be imprisoned,
Speaker 1: goes back way beyond that period. That there is no
Speaker 1: idyllic picture of nineteen fifties and sixties. The idyllic picture
Speaker 1: never existed in fact at all. With respect of these questions,
Speaker 1: you take us back to the period immediately after reconstruction
Speaker 1: or the failed reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about your core story there,
Speaker 1: about what fundamentally didn't happen after the end of slavery. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the easiest way to think about the origin story
Speaker 1: is that for most of the last fifty years, Americans
Speaker 1: have been thinking about a racism in our criminal justice
Speaker 1: past that ran through Southern lynch mobs and convictly sing.
Speaker 1: And if you sort of pull the average white American
Speaker 1: on the street, they would say, yeah, that was a
Speaker 1: bad time in American history, even the Marchicket. Anyone to
Speaker 1: speak in favor of lynching today. Yeah, Like even the
Speaker 1: most red meat Republican you know is proud of the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement and it uses that moment and it
Speaker 1: is precisely a break point to say that in everything
Speaker 1: that happens now is about individual responsibility. But it turns out,
Speaker 1: because of the work that many historians have done looking
Speaker 1: at the South in particular, we know that that was
Speaker 1: an era when the criminal justice system did the work
Speaker 1: that chattle slavery once did. So people who had been
Speaker 1: enslaved and forced to use their labor on behalf of
Speaker 1: white slaveholders get arrested for petty or significant crimes, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: They get put into chain gangs or prisons, and those
Speaker 1: become the kind of second rebirth, as it were, of slavery, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to use that metaphor. But more particularly their labor and
Speaker 1: their new civil rights, in particularly the right to vote,
Speaker 1: become contested to reign for their own autonomy as economic beings.
Speaker 1: Like do you actually get to own land and negotiate
Speaker 1: contracts that are mutually beneficial or at least fair to you?
Speaker 1: They answer kind of is no, because the more that
Speaker 1: you demand an autonomy and agency as a black Southerner
Speaker 1: one step out of slavery, the more likely you were
Speaker 1: to face the wrath of white property owners, which essentially
Speaker 1: was regulated by the criminal justice system. They just simply
Speaker 1: called the sheriff and say this person is a vagrant,
Speaker 1: arrest them, and then you might be subject to a
Speaker 1: sheriff's auction and sold back to the same person you
Speaker 1: were just negotiating a labor contract with as now a
Speaker 1: convict who has to work off their fine, and you
Speaker 1: might never work off that fine. So a really important
Speaker 1: part of that story that I think is not known
Speaker 1: to a lot of people who do understand that there
Speaker 1: was an era of segregation and Jim Crow laws that
Speaker 1: followed the failure of reconstruction is the component that involved
Speaker 1: taking African Americans who wanted to assert their rights that
Speaker 1: they in theory had and literally imprisoning them and through imprisonment,
Speaker 1: returning their labor to white landholders, to the white power
Speaker 1: structure of the South. That's right, And even something like
Speaker 1: felony disenfranchisement laws, which we just saw in Florida for example,
Speaker 1: come down out off the books, were born in this
Speaker 1: era as a way of again controlling the political autonomy
Speaker 1: of the black population that then was voting for the
Speaker 1: Republican Party and very much opposed to a lot of
Speaker 1: the most extreme forms of white supremacy that we're entrined
Speaker 1: in the Democratic Party of the One Party South. So
Speaker 1: there's no moment to your point, your initial point, in
Speaker 1: the post slavery period, when the notion of black criminality
Speaker 1: and the function of criminal justice are not deeply invested
Speaker 1: in controlling black freedom. So that's a story about Southern
Speaker 1: white control of mostly Southern African Americans. Not only is
Speaker 1: people's labor only momentarily given back to them an in theory,
Speaker 1: and then taken away from them through the criminal justice system,
Speaker 1: and I put them in quotation marks, but even the
Speaker 1: right to vote is then taken away on the theory
Speaker 1: that if you've been committed of a crime, you no
Speaker 1: longer have the right to vote. But your book is
Speaker 1: also really importantly a Northern story, a story about the
Speaker 1: part of the country where people like to tell themselves,
Speaker 1: or white people they like to tell themselves, well, that
Speaker 1: never happened. Jim Crowe did not exist in the Northern States.
Speaker 1: Tell us about what happens, especially as African Americans in
Speaker 1: larger and larger numbers begin to come north for jobs
Speaker 1: as part of the Great Migration. Yeah. So the reason
Speaker 1: why that backstory is so important is because it produced
Speaker 1: what I like to say, an artifact. And that artifact,
Speaker 1: that thing that came as a result of all this contestation,
Speaker 1: in all this criminalization of black Southerners, was a national
Speaker 1: census that pointed out that African Americans, who were only
Speaker 1: twelve percent of the general population, with thirty percent of
Speaker 1: the nation's prisoners. And so all of a sudden, overnight,
Speaker 1: you have this subjective fact, an actual fact that looks
Speaker 1: like black people have a crime problem because they're nearly
Speaker 1: three times overrepresented in the national prison statistics. And the
Speaker 1: question is what do we make of this? Why is
Speaker 1: this important? So let's really dig into this question of
Speaker 1: the census of eighteen ninety. You know, I'm one of
Speaker 1: those people who I've always been interested in American history,
Speaker 1: but when someone says the word census, my eyes usually
Speaker 1: glaze over. And reading your book, I was really hit
Speaker 1: that much like the upcoming census, which is much in
Speaker 1: the news because of the possible consequences of a citizenship question,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court, in fact is going to weigh in
Speaker 1: on this sometime in the before at the end of June.
Speaker 1: I guess, much like the current census, which has real weight,
Speaker 1: real political controversy associated with it, the eighteen ninety census,
Speaker 1: which I myself had never heard of before. I don't
Speaker 1: think any of my great grandparents were in the country
Speaker 1: for that census, so I never bothered to look it up,
Speaker 1: really had a transformative effect on the way first scholars
Speaker 1: and the the general public thought about race and crime
Speaker 1: in America. So you mentioned this statistical result of the
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety census, disproportionate in theory representation of African Americans
Speaker 1: in prison right, African Americans twelve percent of the population,
Speaker 1: I think you said, and thirty percent nations prisoners. What
Speaker 1: was really going on there? There's there's a whole steep
Speaker 1: story here. Give us the essence of it. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: essence is that eighteen ninety was a perfect generational cohort moment.
Speaker 1: This is twenty five years after the end of slavery,
Speaker 1: and a lot of demographers, a lot of journalists, a
Speaker 1: lot of vested interest wanted to see how we're black
Speaker 1: people faring on their own. If you think of all
Speaker 1: the craziness that took place for wild eyed, radical white
Speaker 1: abolitionists to literally lay their bodies on the line in
Speaker 1: defense of black humanity for those who believed it. Others
Speaker 1: had other reasons. But nevertheless, if you take John Brown
Speaker 1: did exist, that's right, John Brown did so. If you
Speaker 1: take the purest motive of the abolitionist, they essentially argued
Speaker 1: that black people were no different than white people. And
Speaker 1: if you listen to Brian Stevenson today who says, we
Speaker 1: won the Civil War, but we would lost the narrative battle.
Speaker 1: In many ways, those wild eyed abolitionists lost the narrative
Speaker 1: addle eventually, because as soon as the eighteen ninety census
Speaker 1: came out, people look to that senses to then judge
Speaker 1: the health and welfare the fitness of the black population.
Speaker 1: They said, hey, well, sure, someone born in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: six is now twenty five years old later, they're an adult.
Speaker 1: How are they faring. Oh, it looks like a third
Speaker 1: of the population of black people are now in prison
Speaker 1: as opposed to landowners or business owners, in other words,
Speaker 1: showing their productive capacity making a real contribution to America.
Speaker 1: And what that did is mask it masked all of
Speaker 1: that history on the ground that was happening that made
Speaker 1: those statistics virtually irrelevant. And I can just think off
Speaker 1: the top of my head, and you write about this
Speaker 1: a greater length in your book. Of things that would
Speaker 1: make those statistics highly misleading, even assuming they're correct, one
Speaker 1: that you talked about is length of prison sentence. How
Speaker 1: did that work? Yeah, Well, if as is true today,
Speaker 1: if Abrican Americans are serving longer time for the same crime,
Speaker 1: they're more likely to be in prison on the day
Speaker 1: a census, because the census is just a literal snapshot.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be on one day, that's right, And
Speaker 1: so that's just one example. Or if a population over
Speaker 1: indexes for men, then their expected crime rates or in
Speaker 1: this case incarceration rate is expected to hire. Or if
Speaker 1: a population over index is for being young. So all
Speaker 1: those facts, and what about arrests, what about probability of
Speaker 1: being arrested? Well, every probably being convicted. You can imagine
Speaker 1: point after a point, every decision point within the criminal
Speaker 1: justice system, from police contact, to prosecution and to sentencing
Speaker 1: were all evident points for absolute discrimination being directed against
Speaker 1: black people. Now, the reason this has such an impact
Speaker 1: is partly that it's eighteen ninety and that's a kind
Speaker 1: of perfect storm moment for the birth of the American
Speaker 1: obsession with data with numbers, where we think the data
Speaker 1: say it, it must be true. I sometimes say that
Speaker 1: the words that make me most unhappy in English language
Speaker 1: are the words the three little words. The data shows
Speaker 1: that's right. So what was it about that moment that
Speaker 1: made people especially prime to say, well, hey, it's in
Speaker 1: the data, it must be true. Well, this is where
Speaker 1: your question about the North really matters, because one story
Speaker 1: of this period, in particularly the end of reconstruction, which
Speaker 1: happened with a presidential compromise in the election of the
Speaker 1: contested election of eighteen seventy seven, where miraculously Florida first
Speaker 1: shows up as a controversial state. Yeah, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a very strange one. The whole eighteen seventy six the election,
Speaker 1: Just in case you're wondering, the election was a tie,
Speaker 1: and then they figured it out by a very very
Speaker 1: complicated and strange political process with a special commission with
Speaker 1: Supreme Court justices and all kinds of shenanigans, and it
Speaker 1: ended up with Rutherford B. Hayes the first president ever
Speaker 1: to graduate from Harvard Law School. Not very memorable becoming
Speaker 1: president United State's. Luckily, our second president, Barack Obama did
Speaker 1: a little better for us. But go on, So going
Speaker 1: with your point. So this was an exhausting process, and
Speaker 1: one manifestation of this was what you might call racial fatigue.
Speaker 1: The North was kind of tired of the race problem,
Speaker 1: tired of dealing with Southerners, tired of worrying about black people,
Speaker 1: and so they sort of took their they firearms, and
Speaker 1: took their tanks and their presence and pulled out of
Speaker 1: the South. And so reconstruction ends and the North turns
Speaker 1: to the business of industrialization, leaving black people essentially on
Speaker 1: their own. And as a consequence, that was just the
Speaker 1: beginning of a process of what we call national reconciliation.
Speaker 1: It was a process where the South sort of began
Speaker 1: to rewrite the narrative of the Civil War first period,
Speaker 1: when monuments start to go up to celebrate the Confederacy
Speaker 1: and the North is kind of tired. We began to
Speaker 1: see early writings by Northern scholars that began to shift
Speaker 1: the conversation away from Southern racism to black pathology. And
Speaker 1: it's that moment where the North begins to articulate its
Speaker 1: own understanding of black people's inferiority, and mostly for them,
Speaker 1: it's a kind of temporal thing. It's like, well, of course,
Speaker 1: since they were slaves, now for now they need time
Speaker 1: to what they would often say, work out their own salvation.
Speaker 1: And they turned to crime statistics to kind of justify
Speaker 1: what we might recognize today as a post racial logic.
Speaker 1: And in their moment, the post racial logic was where
Speaker 1: what you mean by post racial? Yeah, well, what I
Speaker 1: mean is that to identify black people as more criminal,
Speaker 1: as more illiterate, as less capable of self governance for
Speaker 1: them in the eighteen nineties turn of the twentieth century
Speaker 1: was not understood to be racist. It was objective. It
Speaker 1: was historical because it was less racist than the old
Speaker 1: pre Civil War idea that African records are just inferior,
Speaker 1: Black people are just inferior. So then compared to that,
Speaker 1: it's post racial to say, what's not the black people
Speaker 1: are inferior, they just tend to be criminal. Yes, in
Speaker 1: a nutshell, because it still sounds I mean us now now,
Speaker 1: it still sounds completely racist. So it sounds weird. Don't
Speaker 1: think if it is post racial. Well, but you're saying
Speaker 1: it's a different form of racist. It's a different form
Speaker 1: of racism. But this is why the story of this
Speaker 1: early period matters so much to us today, because if
Speaker 1: we miss that logic, if we miss an understanding that
Speaker 1: for and I write a lot about liberals, if we
Speaker 1: miss that, what they're saying is it's not in their blood.
Speaker 1: It's not that they're incapable. They just need more opportunities,
Speaker 1: they need more education, they need more time to build
Speaker 1: their families so that they can adopt our values. And
Speaker 1: once they have all of this, they'll be able to
Speaker 1: participate fully. So it was a recipe for eventual inclusion
Speaker 1: and acceptance and full assimilation. But it was predicated on
Speaker 1: what essentially the South was saying, which is that these
Speaker 1: people are insufferable. If you've been high and mighty and
Speaker 1: taking the high horse and being righteous, self righteous about
Speaker 1: the North being free of slavery stain in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: will wait till they show up at your doorstep, wait
Speaker 1: till they move to your neighborhood. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: not a perfect comparison at all. But one interesting way
Speaker 1: to think about this for a contemporary comparison is the
Speaker 1: US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan to rebuild, and indeed
Speaker 1: reconstruct we even use that same word, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: societies that we had invaded, that the United States had
Speaker 1: invaded by creating new social norms, new social dynamics, and
Speaker 1: the US. I'm not saying this is the reason that
Speaker 1: the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan anymore than it
Speaker 1: was the original cause of the Civil War to liberate
Speaker 1: African Americans. It wasn't the original cause of the war
Speaker 1: for at least, you know, most of the advocates of
Speaker 1: the war. But at some point, just like the North
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies got as you said, fatigued or
Speaker 1: tired of the effort, you know, the United States gave
Speaker 1: up on its reconstruction efforts in Iraq and afghan Aniston.
Speaker 1: And now in the United States, to some degree you
Speaker 1: have a rise of anti Muslim sentiment, and in Europe
Speaker 1: you have a lot of increased anti Muslim sentiment. As
Speaker 1: people say, well, those people quote unquote, you know, that's
Speaker 1: just what they're like, quote unquote, we can't fundamentally make
Speaker 1: a change, and then that enables a kind of blame.
Speaker 1: And at least in Europe, the analogy is that you
Speaker 1: have lots of immigrants from the Middle East, a bit
Speaker 1: like African Americans migrating north from the South, and you
Speaker 1: have a big public fight about whether the new immigrants
Speaker 1: can be assimilated into the norms of the society. That's right,
Speaker 1: and who's responsible, I mean, who bears the burden? Becomes
Speaker 1: the kind of question that Europe is answering now around
Speaker 1: refugees and immigration from North Africa and from the Middle East.
Speaker 1: And that was essentially the same question Northerners said. Look,
Speaker 1: we fought a civil war, we supported reconstruction, we pass
Speaker 1: civil rights legislation, and now we have to deal with
Speaker 1: these people who are backwards and uncouth, and who bring
Speaker 1: diseases and inferior education. And the point is that the
Speaker 1: justification for what we would recognize today as Northern racism
Speaker 1: was crime statistics, illiteracy rates, illegitimacy rates, the whole package
Speaker 1: of disparity data that held whiteness as a norm against blackness.
Speaker 1: To say this is not about racism, this is about
Speaker 1: their inferiority and the numbers, that's exactly, or they would
Speaker 1: say the numbers speak for themselves. So you say, a
Speaker 1: fascinating thing in your book about this because you point
Speaker 1: out that exactly the same time that this is happening,
Speaker 1: you have South European, Italian, East European Jewish and Slavic immigrants.
Speaker 1: You had had Irish American immigrants over the previous fifty
Speaker 1: years who were still working out their issues, who we're
Speaker 1: still working out their issues, who still have high crime rates,
Speaker 1: who still are captured by a range of statistical measures.
Speaker 1: The most famous is that Eastern European Jews were ranked
Speaker 1: by the early inventors the IQ test as the lowest
Speaker 1: IQ group and were therefore you know, that was a
Speaker 1: reason to exclude them. And yet you point out there's
Speaker 1: a somehow a difference between how white thought leaders think
Speaker 1: about the crime, the backwardness, the limitations of these new
Speaker 1: immigrants who were not quite white but call them Whiteish
Speaker 1: and African American migrants. Yeah. To me, that's the most
Speaker 1: fascinating finding from this book. I mean, it's the thing
Speaker 1: that surprised me. It's not something I went looking for,
Speaker 1: nor did I expect to see it. It is amazing
Speaker 1: to watch some of the same criminologists, some of the
Speaker 1: same demographers, as you call them, white thought leaders, who
Speaker 1: are looking at Irish, Italian, and New York Jewish crime
Speaker 1: statistics through the roof. By comparison to their native born
Speaker 1: American counterparts, they have disproportionate crime rates across the board
Speaker 1: in many instances. And for one group of Americans prominent
Speaker 1: to be sure, called them eugenicists, called them social darwiness.
Speaker 1: These were people who believe that they were biologically inferior,
Speaker 1: as you've already described, and shouldn't be in the country,
Speaker 1: and we're advocating for closing the borders to it and
Speaker 1: successfully did. Yeah, that happened. That happened in nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, for the first time, we
Speaker 1: see this eruption of progressive activists and reformers, people who
Speaker 1: were we would recognize today as modern liberals, who believe
Speaker 1: that government had a role, that antidiscrimination was a core value,
Speaker 1: and they went to great lengths to push back against
Speaker 1: the eugenic tide. And they did it. Here is the irony.
Speaker 1: They did it on the basis of crime statistics. They
Speaker 1: read the crime statistics or interpreted them amongst the Irish,
Speaker 1: the Italians, the polls as evidence ass sdemic economic inequality.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what that means updated to today.
Speaker 1: You know, here you have these wealth, you know, well
Speaker 1: intentioned people who say, well, you know, these immigrants will
Speaker 1: get over it. But African Americans, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: they're not so convinced we'll get over it. In fact,
Speaker 1: they start to imagine that there's some inherent criminality in
Speaker 1: African American culture, or maybe it's in the experience of
Speaker 1: slavery initially, or you know, they're not using racialized language,
Speaker 1: but they're still saying that it's unsolvable. How do you
Speaker 1: see that played out today in the context of observers
Speaker 1: of ongoing disparities in incarceration rates for Whites and African Americans. Well,
Speaker 1: the most obvious way is that there is no racialized
Speaker 1: language to describe white criminality today. I mean, I can
Speaker 1: use the term as a descriptor, but we have there's
Speaker 1: no conversation about it. The closest thing that we have
Speaker 1: to it is what has been defined as the opioid
Speaker 1: or heroin crisis, and before that the meth crisis, which
Speaker 1: breaking bad made more prominent and famous. But these crises
Speaker 1: among white Americans that include criminality, include violence, and obviously
Speaker 1: include drug addiction, are not understood to be a reflection
Speaker 1: of white people. They're generally understood to be some kind
Speaker 1: of public health crisis, often localized to particular kinds of communities,
Speaker 1: and for the most part, the nation respond to them
Speaker 1: with a sense that we have to do something about this.
Speaker 1: We have to find the origin of the problem in
Speaker 1: the community, in the environment, and something that's happening. So,
Speaker 1: of course big farmers paying a heavy price for prescription
Speaker 1: drug overdoses, but it's treated as an isolated problem though
Speaker 1: blame big Pharma. It's treated and I think of it
Speaker 1: as the battle of the TV shows. It's breaking bad
Speaker 1: show that's almost exactly the same astorical moment the Wire,
Speaker 1: which is just a brilliant show in many many ways,
Speaker 1: but one of its themes is the depressing impossibility. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's an overstatement of reform. The show shows
Speaker 1: people trying to reform, but it keeps on showing a
Speaker 1: series of failures. So it's different, and it's thought of
Speaker 1: as systemic, and there's a kind of okay, not sure
Speaker 1: what to do next theme, And it's also I mean,
Speaker 1: it leads to a number of the kind of productive
Speaker 1: conversations that progressives had a hundred years ago, they begin
Speaker 1: to have these conversations about, well, what's in the water,
Speaker 1: And I mean that metaphorically, so what's in our society
Speaker 1: that produces this level of alienation. One of the same people,
Speaker 1: Fredrick Hoffman, who sort of put in circulation this idea
Speaker 1: of black criminality time to crime stistics, was virtually a socialist.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was certainly in community with other socialists
Speaker 1: who were very clear about if we have high rates
Speaker 1: of crime and suicide and mental illness, then it is
Speaker 1: a reflection of something wrong in our society. But you
Speaker 1: hear those questions today, I mean, as you're saying, we
Speaker 1: don't really hear that about No one says white society
Speaker 1: is broken because of the opioid epidemic. People do say
Speaker 1: African American society is broken in some way because of
Speaker 1: ongoing rates of criminality. What conversation would you prefer to
Speaker 1: have us engage in, Well, the most the easiest way
Speaker 1: to say is we should be having the same public
Speaker 1: health conversation about rates of violence and drugs and property
Speaker 1: related crimes in the black community as we started in
Speaker 1: the progressive era and continue to have in the opioid era.
Speaker 1: In other words, there's a positive lesson there in the
Speaker 1: way they did it better. At one time, they did
Speaker 1: it much better. The other thing is the disparity between
Speaker 1: poverty and crime in rural white America is also a
Speaker 1: disparity of invisibility. There's a disconnect between the fact that
Speaker 1: where poverty over indexes as a cause of crime. So
Speaker 1: if you're poor, you're more likely to be involved in crime,
Speaker 1: no matter what you're rased. That's right, And therefore, if
Speaker 1: it's happening in rural wide America, there's no media markets
Speaker 1: to speak of, and certainly none that show up on
Speaker 1: our television sets. And there is a level of political
Speaker 1: accountability at the local level that has always been broken
Speaker 1: for the black community. So to be very clear, if
Speaker 1: I'm a local sheriff and I'm elected and twenty percent
Speaker 1: of my town is engaging in criminal activity or of
Speaker 1: one form or another, it is not in my political
Speaker 1: interest to lock up everybody. I can, yep, but I
Speaker 1: actually can lock up everybody in the town who's got
Speaker 1: an okioddiction or or is not only was involved in
Speaker 1: producing the stuff, were distributing it, or who is a
Speaker 1: serial robber or burglar. I mean, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: little name it, rename it. But you can do that
Speaker 1: in the black community. Not only can you do it
Speaker 1: in the black community, but you're likely if you're a prosecutor,
Speaker 1: to go on to higher office. If you're a judge,
Speaker 1: you're likely to be promoted at every level of the
Speaker 1: professional incentive structure within criminal justice picking off black people.
Speaker 1: But why is that true even in districts which have
Speaker 1: majority of African American voters. Because what you said is true. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean James Forman Junior, his really interesting book argues
Speaker 1: that some African American community leaders played some role in
Speaker 1: welcoming some of the higher punishments for crime and some
Speaker 1: of the policies now very much criticized policies of the
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties. Yeah, and I wrote a real book.
Speaker 1: The book very well, and I love the argument. So
Speaker 1: there's a fine distinction to be made for some subset
Speaker 1: of law and order black types or black types who
Speaker 1: are law and order advocates for thinking they were actually
Speaker 1: delivering a civil rights justice to black black people, that
Speaker 1: black people deserve police accountability and justice and safety in
Speaker 1: their community just like others. So fortunately the face of
Speaker 1: it is a good argument. Foreman does a great job
Speaker 1: of that. The harder argument that Foreman doesn't extend into
Speaker 1: too much is that black people have imbibed these views
Speaker 1: as well. And the degree to which African Americans imagined
Speaker 1: that punitiveness some subset of them imagine the punitiveness was
Speaker 1: the only natural response to crime in the community, is
Speaker 1: itself a reflection of segregated thought and policymaking, which has
Speaker 1: always had this particular conversation more or less policing, more
Speaker 1: or less prisons. But white people were getting a whole
Speaker 1: different level of options. They were getting very different options
Speaker 1: in their community, and their political leadership could do so.
Speaker 1: The third option I would say to answer your question
Speaker 1: is that no matter how many black people are in
Speaker 1: charge at the municipal level, they're still accountable to some
Speaker 1: kind of white economic or political community. And if they
Speaker 1: have aspirations for moving from being a mayor of a
Speaker 1: community to being a governor or a congressperson, then they're
Speaker 1: even more accountable to thinking about what will the decisions
Speaker 1: I make here now, how will that impact me later? Right,
Speaker 1: Corey Booker is the mayor of Newark. But Corey knew
Speaker 1: perfectly well when he was mayor of new Work that
Speaker 1: was not going to be the last job he held,
Speaker 1: that's right. And Corey Senator and he was going to
Speaker 1: run for president and yeah, And Booker's Police Department under
Speaker 1: Gary McCarthy, who was a former NYPD a senior official
Speaker 1: who went on to Chicago, ended up under a consent
Speaker 1: decree for systemic racial profiling. Fascinating, fascinating and not without
Speaker 1: its troubling side. In fact, Gary McCarthy, just to put
Speaker 1: a finer note on it, who was running Booker's Police department,
Speaker 1: was in charge of Chicago's police department when the Laquam
Speaker 1: McDonald cover up took place and lost his job over it.
Speaker 1: So there's just, in a nutshell, an example where black
Speaker 1: political leadership has not been sufficient to addressing these problems
Speaker 1: in terms of a social response or a collective response.
Speaker 1: You can also see, in relation to an NYPD origin
Speaker 1: that you mentioned there, that the modern version of the
Speaker 1: statistical argument is the so called comstat model, the idea
Speaker 1: according to which statistics are the magic, the special sauce
Speaker 1: they will enable police to handle urban crime by flooding
Speaker 1: the zone in areas where there's been crime. The core
Speaker 1: criticism there is that it drives a structure of racial profiling,
Speaker 1: which vastly increases arrests of African Americans, especially of young man.
Speaker 1: Your book actually has a kind of prehistory, the origin
Speaker 1: story of racial profiling itself. You want to tell us
Speaker 1: about that, Yeah, so. So. One of the ways in
Speaker 1: which the evolution of this early statistical discourse, starting with
Speaker 1: the census metastasizes in the North is that everyone begins
Speaker 1: to bake in racial crime statistics into their reporting, their
Speaker 1: municipal reporting, for example, and what we begin to see
Speaker 1: as a collapsing everything comes from somewhere. We think cops
Speaker 1: are always using the statistics that actually that was born somewhere. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what we saw, for example, when there were a
Speaker 1: lot of Europeans and their future was still under indetermined.
Speaker 1: European immigrants, you could pull out a police and your
Speaker 1: report and see arrest categories robbery, battery, assault, and it
Speaker 1: would say Russian, Scandinavian, German, Italian, sold and so forth.
Speaker 1: It looked like an Excel spreadsheet, you know, in print.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen thirties, most local statistics were reduced to
Speaker 1: white black other and the federal government reduced them to white, black, Indian, Mexican, Japanese, other.
Speaker 1: So essentially, blackness became kind of the most dominant signifier
Speaker 1: of deviation from a norm, which was a white norm.
Speaker 1: Didn't really matter what white people were doing, And in
Speaker 1: that sense, the agencies of law began to focus explicitly,
Speaker 1: both because the statistics told them to do so, but
Speaker 1: also because they were controlling white spaces in the way
Speaker 1: that we've had a conversation more recently about hashtag living
Speaker 1: while Black. So they were helping on the front lines
Speaker 1: of a kind of surveillance of black communities, ensuring that
Speaker 1: black people would not move into white neighborhoods if there
Speaker 1: were competition over jobs or business ownership. The police were
Speaker 1: often enforcers, and there was tremendous corruption to boot with
Speaker 1: all of this, and that early story which shows up
Speaker 1: in letters to the NAACP complaining about systemic harassment by
Speaker 1: white police officers or observing it on the street, It
Speaker 1: shows up in the first Blue Ribbon Commission, which grew
Speaker 1: out of a race ride in Chicago in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: The commission found evidence that there was systemic racial profiling,
Speaker 1: quoted criminal justice officials, all of whom were white, saying, yes,
Speaker 1: it is true if we see a black suspect, we
Speaker 1: will stop and arrest them. If we see a white
Speaker 1: one will just keep an eye on them to see
Speaker 1: if they do something in the future. The results of
Speaker 1: this incredible commission led the authors to say racial crime
Speaker 1: statistics are unreliable and should not be used because they
Speaker 1: do more harm than good. They confuse. So we've been
Speaker 1: down this road. We've been down this road before, and
Speaker 1: there's a kind of sixthical thing. So that actually leads
Speaker 1: me to a question about what should we do about
Speaker 1: this problem. One of the responses that you hear a
Speaker 1: lot today is we need fundamental change, and that comes
Speaker 1: in a moderate form and in a more radical form,
Speaker 1: so to me. An example of the more moderate form
Speaker 1: is a new initiative which has gone a lot of publicity,
Speaker 1: mostly because of Jay Z's involvement in it, to limit
Speaker 1: or maybe do away with supervised forms of release, probation
Speaker 1: or parole that have the effect of putting formerly in
Speaker 1: prison people are in some cases people who didn't go
Speaker 1: to prison at all under kind of constant states surveillance,
Speaker 1: with the risk that if they violate the terms of
Speaker 1: their supervised release, boom, they can go right back to prison.
Speaker 1: The more radical form, which from the moment is still
Speaker 1: heard mostly among activists and on university campuses, is the
Speaker 1: call for genuine abolition, where abolition is the abolition of
Speaker 1: prison altogether. So maybe let's take those in turn. What
Speaker 1: do you think about the let's change supervised release what
Speaker 1: I'm calling the moderate version of big scale reform. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm all for it. I mean, there's no legitimate
Speaker 1: basis to critique that suggestion for the most part, because
Speaker 1: in some states, the vast majority of new admits are
Speaker 1: supervised released of recommitments. So people who are caught for
Speaker 1: technical violations of parole improbation are the vast majority people
Speaker 1: who are then readmitted to prison or admitted to prison
Speaker 1: at all. In some states it is actually the majority
Speaker 1: of new emits because because the system has been churning
Speaker 1: for so long, there's a vast population. There's something like
Speaker 1: seven million people in our country who are under some
Speaker 1: form of criminal justice supervision has compared to only two
Speaker 1: point two million one point four million are in prison
Speaker 1: the rest and only right only. So so yes, that's
Speaker 1: for some states that would be a huge reduction in
Speaker 1: new admits to say, you know what, they serve their
Speaker 1: time they've been released, they're done. They can't. And the
Speaker 1: most obvious reasons for this is because the reasons to
Speaker 1: trip people up are very much baked into the social
Speaker 1: hierarchies that exist in our community. Which is to say
Speaker 1: that people who are already overly surveiled because they live
Speaker 1: more public lives in urban cities are much more likely
Speaker 1: to get caught having a brusque in a brown paper
Speaker 1: bag because they don't have a nice living room to
Speaker 1: have it right, or even a joint. I mean, the
Speaker 1: God forbid that we still think that somehow, you know,
Speaker 1: you can question someone's moral fitness because they had a joint.
Speaker 1: But yet prosecutors and probation officers will still say, you know,
Speaker 1: this is what Rick Scott, as governor Florida, was still
Speaker 1: doing when he was just a year ago, saying, you know,
Speaker 1: you had that joint, you shouldn't have done it. You
Speaker 1: don't get your right to vote. So what about you said,
Speaker 1: there isn't really a rational counterargument in the way you
Speaker 1: just presented it. You've convinced me. But my question is,
Speaker 1: isn't there at least a possibility that if supervised forms
Speaker 1: of release were eliminated that there would be a public
Speaker 1: push for longer sentencing. I mean, isn't it the case
Speaker 1: that lots of people that are on supervised release would
Speaker 1: otherwise be incarcerated. Well, I think that we have to
Speaker 1: separate out what reformers and scholars are saying about the
Speaker 1: mechanics of decarceration from the popular appetite for retributive justice. Yep.
Speaker 1: And that's a big problem, and that is not addressed
Speaker 1: by supervised released, right, the mechanics of a legislative fix
Speaker 1: that said, this is one way to get as significant reductions.
Speaker 1: And the other problem is, well, what happens if one
Speaker 1: of those people who would have been on supervisor released
Speaker 1: does something terrible and the public says, lock them up.
Speaker 1: But it's sort of it's sort of dealt with in
Speaker 1: the following sense, in the sense that it's an escape valve.
Speaker 1: So you have people who are in the system, you know,
Speaker 1: prosecutors and police officials and prison officials who know that
Speaker 1: there's just too many people in the system, and then
Speaker 1: you have a public saying lock them up, lock them up.
Speaker 1: So then there's a kind of secret pact among the
Speaker 1: people who run for elected office saying, well, we're locking
Speaker 1: them up, We're giving people log sentences, but then in
Speaker 1: fact they are being released to be a supervised release.
Speaker 1: Take away the supervised release you're taking away. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not a very attractive method of dealing with their problem.
Speaker 1: But isn't it, in some structural sense a way that
Speaker 1: elected officials have tried to reduce the effects of the
Speaker 1: public's long run, you know, apparently insatiable desire to have
Speaker 1: at least a symbol of strong crime response. Well, I
Speaker 1: think we should harst the public a little bit more so.
Speaker 1: There are some publics who genuinely think that we've gone
Speaker 1: way overboard with sentencing period and have been advocating for
Speaker 1: and calling for rejection of all kinds of mandatory minimals,
Speaker 1: particularly at the state level, which we're not addressed by
Speaker 1: the first step back. I think the other aspect of this,
Speaker 1: when it comes to thinking about various forms of supervisor release,
Speaker 1: people are calling for alternatives to incarceration, which might include
Speaker 1: electronic monitoring. So that's not even about release at the
Speaker 1: point of the shortening of a sentence. That is actually
Speaker 1: a disposition that the person never goes instead of and
Speaker 1: a lot of us and I would express concern here too,
Speaker 1: is we may be trading on one form of a
Speaker 1: punitive system for another, because now it's like, oh well,
Speaker 1: we don't even have to spend money on these people.
Speaker 1: We'll just have a wrinkle bracelet on everybody, even people
Speaker 1: who through plea bargaining, we just figure so we have
Speaker 1: one way to answer. This is what jay Z and
Speaker 1: others are calling for. Are not addressing the cultural roots.
Speaker 1: I don't addrest. It's a it's a it's a band aid,
Speaker 1: it's a fix. So what about them the people who
Speaker 1: claim and La Davis most famously, but lots of other
Speaker 1: people are on board for something it's not a band aid,
Speaker 1: namely abolition of prisons altogether. To me, this is an
Speaker 1: issue that hasn't yet fully penetrated. Certainly, it's it's making
Speaker 1: inroads in the African American public. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: penetrated the average white person's consciousness yet, except on campuses.
Speaker 1: What's your what's your view on it? When I first
Speaker 1: heard about it, you know a few years ago, I
Speaker 1: thought to myself, this is utopianism. Now I'm not so sure. Well,
Speaker 1: this is where the two things we just talked about
Speaker 1: may intersect in an odd way. So I would agree
Speaker 1: with you that African Americans are may over index, you know,
Speaker 1: just in terms of the activist community. But I would
Speaker 1: not I would not suggest, going back to Foreman's work
Speaker 1: and the you know, deeper roots of how black people
Speaker 1: have understood punitiveness as a civil rights project itself, say
Speaker 1: that they're all all on board either, but especially in
Speaker 1: communities that feel their closest to the kind of gun
Speaker 1: violence that does happen. I didn't mean to suggest that.
Speaker 1: I just meant that if you pull the average African
Speaker 1: American and maybe the people ever heard of the idea
Speaker 1: of abolition, not that they're on board with it, but
Speaker 1: they might have at least heard of it. I think
Speaker 1: I'm waitfuless not even so clear that's true. I'll take
Speaker 1: that one, and I think that it begs the larger
Speaker 1: question of how radical are our imaginations? Because to me,
Speaker 1: the most generative aspect, well, how radical should they be?
Speaker 1: I mean, press they should, they should be. They should
Speaker 1: be as radical as ending prison because the first prison
Speaker 1: that was built in Philadelphia, in Eastern State Penitentiary at
Speaker 1: the top of the nineteenth century, failed and it failed
Speaker 1: by the standards of the people who built it, and
Speaker 1: they wanted to rehabilitate people and they couldn't. Well, it
Speaker 1: wasn't even that they wanted to rehabilitate people and they couldn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't about a recidivism problem. It was about a
Speaker 1: brutality problem that people who genuinely thought that a prison
Speaker 1: could be a place for penitence in isolation, so that
Speaker 1: a person could be reborn, were object to systemic abuse
Speaker 1: by the people by their jailers, and the very construction
Speaker 1: of the prison, while they thought it was going to
Speaker 1: bring people closure to God, turned out to produce insanity.
Speaker 1: We've never solved that problem, and in fact, in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century we doubled down on solitary confinement because we
Speaker 1: believed it was the best, the best way to manage
Speaker 1: the prison population, which grew and grew and grew, and
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough room to do this. So we've failed
Speaker 1: by every generation, by every standard that the people who
Speaker 1: were innovating thought was the best next best thing to
Speaker 1: do to meet our own goals and expectations. So this
Speaker 1: may be an example of where going deep into the
Speaker 1: history can actually change your perspective on it. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think that prisons all you've ever had. Then
Speaker 1: you think, well, we're stuck with it. But in fact,
Speaker 1: there were other mechanisms of addressing crime before prisons, and
Speaker 1: prisons were invented at a certain moment, and when those
Speaker 1: other methods were thought out to work, they got rid
Speaker 1: of those, And maybe it's now time to think about
Speaker 1: getting rid of prisons. So then the obvious next question
Speaker 1: is what are those alternatives? I mean, the options from
Speaker 1: before now seem to us unimaginably brutal, sort of in
Speaker 1: the way that maybe in the future people will think
Speaker 1: of prison as having been just inherently not just the
Speaker 1: conditions that currently exist, but inherently fundamentally brutal. But you know,
Speaker 1: we're not going to go back to chopping off people's hands.
Speaker 1: And you know, we don't believe in transport. Maybe we
Speaker 1: would transport people to Australia if we could, but we
Speaker 1: don't have so many places that are obvious sources or locations.
Speaker 1: So what are the kinds of options that are credible today? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to shout out a colleague of mine's work.
Speaker 1: Her name is Daniel Serich. He runs an organization in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn called Common Justice, and she's written a book called
Speaker 1: Until We Reckon, And the most important point of this
Speaker 1: book is that if we think about the problem of
Speaker 1: harm and violence, especially as a recipe for shame and accountability,
Speaker 1: in other words, that people who have done something terrible
Speaker 1: to someone feel shame, and people who have been victimized
Speaker 1: by violence often feel shame, and that prison itself is
Speaker 1: a shame factory. So prison's not working if if we could, well,
Speaker 1: why because it's made for shame. I buy that interpretation
Speaker 1: of it right on. A theory that shame will work
Speaker 1: is the argument that it's shaming but failing to work.
Speaker 1: It's shaming and producing violence and makes more violence. It
Speaker 1: makes more violence, and that people who are exposed to violence,
Speaker 1: according to epidemiologists, are more likely to convince by So
Speaker 1: the very thing that we use as punishment is a
Speaker 1: violence producer. And so her work is the first and
Speaker 1: most significant effort for an alternative to violent offenders. So
Speaker 1: one one line of defensive response this would be to say, well,
Speaker 1: that's true, prison doesn't fix people, and in fact, it
Speaker 1: does make people worse off. But you know, the last
Speaker 1: fallback of a scoundrel who's got no alternative institutional option
Speaker 1: is to say well, at least people who are in
Speaker 1: prison aren't commending violence on people outside of the prison.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a kind of sad last defense, but
Speaker 1: it is out there as a possible defense, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's even heard among people who live in communities that
Speaker 1: are most likely to be affected by violent offenders. So
Speaker 1: then think of it this way. So while the single
Speaker 1: individual who is being incarcerated for violence may be incapacitated
Speaker 1: by the experience of incarceration, that individual can't hurt anybody
Speaker 1: outside of prisoners, right, is touching someone who's coming home tomorrow.
Speaker 1: In some way, shape or form. They share the same
Speaker 1: social ecology, So you may not as that are breeding
Speaker 1: ground for more violence, right for the person who now
Speaker 1: has been exposed to you, who are not being treated
Speaker 1: for your violence, who have no mechanism to actually seek
Speaker 1: forgiveness or redemption through the means of being in community
Speaker 1: with the person who you did harm to. The other
Speaker 1: point that she makes is that individuals who have been
Speaker 1: harmed are now subject themselves to committing violence, and they
Speaker 1: don't get the opportunity for accountability from the wrongdoer that
Speaker 1: they need. So it becomes a vicious cycle where the
Speaker 1: people who have been armed, are more likely later on
Speaker 1: to become violence perpetrators, and the violence perpetrators are in
Speaker 1: an institution that produces violence and sends people home back
Speaker 1: every day. Now, I am not one to both use
Speaker 1: kind of the language of damage imagery to reinforce these
Speaker 1: notions where I don't want to live anywhere near these
Speaker 1: people because they sound like they've got a lot of issues,
Speaker 1: and you also use them. You also use the metaphor
Speaker 1: of epidemiology, that's right, or the discipline of epidemiology, which
Speaker 1: is of course comes from infectious diseases. That's the word epidemics.
Speaker 1: That's also a that's a I mean fraud nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a terrifying and I think worrisome image to use.
Speaker 1: It implies that criminality is catching in some way, which
Speaker 1: might be our own up to date version of the
Speaker 1: old idea that there's something inherent in people's qualities. So
Speaker 1: one way we have to wrestle with this, and this
Speaker 1: is a conundrum that I haven't solved yet. Just in
Speaker 1: describing these mechanisms is what we keep coming back to
Speaker 1: is prison is not helping. And so one way that
Speaker 1: she just this work and is proving the work in
Speaker 1: the work that she does daily is people are being
Speaker 1: remanded to her care, and that includes people who have
Speaker 1: committed violence. And just so your listeners know, the vast
Speaker 1: majority of people in prison are not murderers. Fifty four
Speaker 1: percent are convicted for what is considered a violent crime,
Speaker 1: which is robbery. And so this is not necessarily about
Speaker 1: people who just are schizophrenic or psychopaths who just go
Speaker 1: out and kill people. This is often related to their poverty.
Speaker 1: So to solve this problem for her and the work
Speaker 1: that she does means that outside of the prison system,
Speaker 1: we can actually achieve two things. We can help people
Speaker 1: who have done harm find their voice of accountability which
Speaker 1: makes them feel better, and the victim of it can
Speaker 1: feel better so that they can move on with their
Speaker 1: lives as well. So there you break that cycle. There's
Speaker 1: something scary, though, to me, at least underneath that description,
Speaker 1: because you made what I think is an incontrovertible point
Speaker 1: that if there is a root cause that we can
Speaker 1: identify and associate with crime, it's poverty. That implies that
Speaker 1: unless something can be fundamentally done about the structure of
Speaker 1: poverty in the United States, and particularly the racialized structure
Speaker 1: of poverty, there won't be a solution to the problem
Speaker 1: of crime. Most broadly, is that a fair interpretation of
Speaker 1: what you just said? Oh? Absolutely, so, you know, don't
Speaker 1: get me started on the root causes argument that have
Speaker 1: mostly been dismissed as you know, too hard in this country,
Speaker 1: and we need to reclaim and I think having conversations
Speaker 1: about new deals, whether they're green or otherwise, you know,
Speaker 1: is a step in the right direction. But I also
Speaker 1: want to be clear that we also know what decarcerated
Speaker 1: communities look like. They can look around and see them.
Speaker 1: They look like those rural communities that we've already talked about,
Speaker 1: and they look like affluent suburbs. And if we put
Speaker 1: this sounds like oh there he goes again, like if
Speaker 1: you put a police officer on every corner of a
Speaker 1: college campus, you know, the place would be, you know,
Speaker 1: full of X felans. Well, we might be dismissive of
Speaker 1: the thought of that, but it's true. And the degree
Speaker 1: to which we're watching in the Trump era, men of
Speaker 1: affluence and wealth and connections have the kind of lawyering
Speaker 1: that turns on levels of evidence that the vast majority
Speaker 1: of indigent defendants in this country never even come close
Speaker 1: to being able to argue, and even if they argue
Speaker 1: them successfully, if they go before a judge are not
Speaker 1: likely to win the case, and if they go before
Speaker 1: a jury are also not likely to win the case.
Speaker 1: Tells us a lot about the moral corruption and bankruptcy
Speaker 1: of our entire system that, as Brian Stephenson says to quote,
Speaker 1: if you're rich and guilty, you're more likely to go
Speaker 1: free then if you're poor and innocent. Khaliljubran Mohammed, thank
Speaker 1: you for taking us deep into the prehistory and looking
Speaker 1: us looking with us into the future. Thank you very much,
Speaker 1: great to be here. We have the tendency to think
Speaker 1: that the problems of racing incarceration are pretty new problems.
Speaker 1: Maybe they go back to the nineteen sixties, we think,
Speaker 1: or maybe they're even more recent. Maybe they have to
Speaker 1: do with the crackdown on crime in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: and the rise of stop and frisk policing. But listening
Speaker 1: to Khalil made me realize that's just not the way
Speaker 1: it is. He traces the problem of race and incarceration
Speaker 1: being closely linked all the way back to eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: and even maybe before then, to the very moment when
Speaker 1: slavery went away and was replaced almost immediately by segregation
Speaker 1: as the main mechanism of establishing racial control over black
Speaker 1: people in the United States. That's a devastating thought, and
Speaker 1: it makes you worry about whether America's DNA is so
Speaker 1: fundamentally racist that we can't fix the problem of race
Speaker 1: and incarceration. And I think it helps explain why it
Speaker 1: is that so many serious thought leaders in this area,
Speaker 1: people like Khalil, have begun to argue for the most
Speaker 1: radical possible solution to the problem, namely the abolition of prisons.
Speaker 1: Not sure I'm there myself quite yet, but it's really
Speaker 1: clear to me that I and the most of us
Speaker 1: need to be thinking pretty darn hard about whether that's
Speaker 1: the way to go. Deep Background is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Geancott, with engineering
Speaker 1: by Jason Gambrel and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon.
Speaker 1: Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background