Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

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This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

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One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

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But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

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We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

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So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.

The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.

White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.

Joanne Harris, a bestselling novelist, recently wrote a blog post entitled “White feminists, I’m looking at you”. Harris describes white feminists as “women who ‘don’t see’ race, and who think that counts as a virtue” and are “quite happy to see women abused, as long as those women are different from their own privileged circle of friends”.

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She argues that white women are too defensive when they get accused of racism: “I get it. It’s easier to focus on the words and what they mean, rather than the reason they were used in the first place. So stop thinking about the words, and think about what you did, instead. Consider whether you said or did something that was harmful.”

But whether something is harmful in the first place surely depends on the meaning of words and the content of what was said? Otherwise, what justification would there be for saying the thing was harmful?

Harris’s blog insists that her white female readers should be thoughtless. Instead of reflecting on the situation at hand, they should simply listen to their critics. In short, she wants them to acquiesce to any charge of racism levelled against them: “This isn’t about you”, she states. “No-one cares why you caused harm. All that matters is that you did.”

But is it true that no one cares why someone caused harm? If someone who is, in general, an intelligent and lovely person caused me harm, I would be especially curious to know why they did. And conversely, if I caused someone harm, I would want to know how. But then again, I’m not a white woman; passivity is not for me.

Apart from being an exercise in incoherent pontificating, and a text that instructs a group of women to fulfil archaic gender roles, Harris’s blog is also narcissistic. If no one should care why a white feminist caused harm to a group of people, why should anyone care what a white feminist like herself has to say about any of this?

In principle, Harris is encouraging greater tolerance. She says that white women are not perfect, and that she includes herself in this: “White feminists, I’m looking at you. White feminists, I’m looking at me.” But this ostentatious meekness presupposes that everyone apart from white feminists will be acting in good faith: if white feminists are not perfect, why should we assume everyone else is? In truth, no one is perfect.

But if you only insist on the imperfections of one group of people, that provides the perfect backdrop for the Kafka Trap. Whatever they do will always be judged by a harsher set of standards.

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In her blog, Harris is perhaps referring to Kate Clanchy, a writer and teacher who was recently denounced on Goodreads and Twitter for the way she described some of her students in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Three writers in particular — Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh — condemned the book for its use of racist language and the hurt this has caused people of colour. Clanchy described one student as having “chocolate-coloured skin” and another as possessing “almond-shaped eyes”. Clanchygate, as these things often do, descended into chaos. Those three critics of Clanchy unpardonably received racist abuse and trolling on Twitter.

Before this summer, I only knew Clanchy as a teacher on Twitter who shared viral poems of her students. When I first heard about the incident, I was gently bemused by it. The first real shock came when Picador, Clanchy’s publisher, announced she would be rewriting sections of the book. Something was not right here — the book was only published two years ago, not fifty or even twenty, and it would have been read by countless people at the publishing firm.

I don’t think the publishing industry is staffed by people who are indifferent to racial prejudice. So what could have gone wrong? The novelist Amanda Craig, a defender of Clanchy, suggested on Twitter that the book would have benefitted from sensitivity readers — people of colour who are paid by publishing companies to ensure any description of ethnic minority people is not offensive.

But the problem with sensitivity readers is that people of colour are not the same: what is offensive to one black or Asian person is perfectly fine to another. It assumes that there is a correct line on such matters, and only a select elite of people of colour can establish it. But I don’t want a clerisy of ethnic minority people to shape what I read; I want editors to do their job and ensure the book is as good as it could be.

An example of a person of colour who was not offended by the descriptions in Clanchy’s book is one of her former students: Shukria Rezaei. Writing in the Times, Rezaei pointed out that “in the book, she describes one of her pupils as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’. Critics labelled this description patronising, insulting, offensive, colonialist and racist. This upset me. I am that girl with the almond eyes. I did not find it offensive”.

She added that “almond eyes” is “a term that I have often used in my own poems. My almond-shaped eyes are at the core of my Hazara identity”. In other words: context matters. And in reading both the testimony of her former students and the book for myself, I came to the conclusion that the imputation of racism made by Clanchy’s online detractors was unjustified.

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Clanchy entered Rezaei — and many of her other students —into poetry competitions; Rezaei had just immigrated from Pakistan (but her family is originally from Afghanistan) and didn’t speak good English. Clanchy found Rezaei funding to stay in school for an extra year because her immigration status was unsettled. And Clanchy found Rezaei scholarships and helped with her university applications.

Rezaei is not the only young person of colour Clanchy has helped. In her Times article, she quotes Asima Qayyum, another former student of Clanchy’s, who says:

“Kate gave us platforms we never expected. She fought for us to be in rooms and places we had never been welcomed in before and made sure people heard what we had to say. I know first-hand how cruel and completely unacceptable racism is in any form, and from my experiences it’s not something I’ve ever associated with Kate. I just want people to know and hear from a student who has worked with Kate for almost ten years that my experience with her has impacted my life in so many positive ways it’s unimaginable.”

In a recently published open letter to The Bookseller, a group of Clanchy’s former students characterised by what they call “multicultural diversity”, describe their personal experiences of Clanchy as one of “unequivocal care and support, always, for us as poets and as people”. On the topic of whether Clanchy is exploiting them, they say: “Kate’s promotion of our poems does not take away our agency: we do not speak through Kate, and she does not presume to speak for us”.

If the claim of “listen to people of colour” is meaningful then it needs to include voices such as Clancy’s former students in any estimation of her. Yet all too often “listen to people of colour” means listen to a select group of people of colour, take their word for writ, and suspend your critical faculties: what else can help explain how a publishing company that hitherto passionately supported an Orwell-prize winning book can acquiesce after an online backlash?

Some may argue that Clanchy is guilty of a type of white saviourism: the privileged English teacher condescending to refugee students. This would be a cynical distortion of what is evidently a generous woman trying to do her best to encourage marginalised young people to thrive. Some of the descriptions of her students in the book did make me cringe a bit, but reading the entire book did not leave me with the impression of a racist. Quite the opposite. Clanchy is genuinely enthused by living in a multiracial England.

Yet the Kafka Trap enables an English teacher who has gone out of her way to help refugee students thrive to become paralysed by the accusation of racism. Any further response from her would be used as evidence against her.

Joanne Harris addressed her piece to white women, but the Kafka Trap has severe implications for anyone who believes there is an important distinction to be made between clumsy writing and racial prejudice. Between imperfect women (and remember, no person can be perfect) and people complicit with racism. And between those of us who believe in tolerance and those whose minds have been degraded by a politics that speaks the language of compassion but is in practice vindictive.

But it was also rather timely; in the past weeks, Classics has endured quite a hammering. At the beginning of the month, Dan-el Padilla Peralta — a Dominican-born, New York-raised professor of Classics at Princeton — gave an explosive interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he expressed his desire to do away with “Classics” as a term and “explode the canon”, on the basis of it being appropriated by xenophobes and white-supremacists. For Padilla, it’s an endemic problem: “The production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of Classics.”

What does this mean in practice? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of Classics at Stanford University who was also interviewed for the NYTM piece, we should simply get “get rid of” Classics altogether: “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field”. Which may seem like an odd thing for a Classicist to say, but it’s a view that’s becoming increasingly widespread, and even institutionalised. Already, some departments in the US have embedded Classics within courses such as “Ancient Mediterranean Studies”. (Such rethinks are, of course, unlikely to be a universal solution; Gormley, for one, is particularly upset about the British Museum’s supposed fixation with the Mediterranean.)

Tensions over the value and ethics of studying Classics have been simmering for some years. Indeed, it is hard to think of another subject that has required its devotees to defend their field of study with such frequency. We’re told that it’s the study of useless “dead languages”; that it’s the preserve of public schoolboys, such as our Pericles-loving Prime Minister; even worse, that it needs to burn because it’s an inspiration for far-Right extremists in the US.

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The latest battle over Classics is a culmination of all the above. The fact that it remains a relatively marginal and unstudied subject in the educational system has made it an easy target in today’s culture wars. It means, for example, that Classics can be dismissed as simply the “history of Greece and Rome” — even though North Africa, Asia Minor, Gaul, the Russian steppe and many other territories also form part of it.

This cognitive blindness is made all the more peculiar when you consider how broadminded and enquiring Herodotus, Tacitus and many ancient historians could be about their fellow citizens. Although they were mostly interested in questions of national identity, when they did write on matters such as skin colour, they tended to do so with more curiosity than judgement, attempting — albeit mostly without success — to explain difference through factors such as climate and geography.

This meant that for Herodotus, the Ethiopians were dark-skinned on account of their proximity to the sun, while the inhabitants of colder territories were paler as they were further away from it. For Tacitus, the climate of Germany was such as to render its people naturally resistant to cold and hunger. It’s all nonsense, of course. But as Padilla himself has conceded, the Greeks and Romans “would have not really understood our racial categories”. One could be a Roman regardless of where you originated or what you looked like.

More importantly, these sources constitute the classicist’s raw materials; they are what lie at the heart of Classics as a field. Why is it, then, that in the debate that is now raging over the future of the subject and its right to exist, they barely get a look in? One would have thought that the actual texts and archaeological finds used by classicists today would be the first things to be considered in any reappraisal of the subject.

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Those who wish to banish Classics instead emphasise what has been done with these sources. They point to entitled Grand Tourists trundling over the ancient sites and pocketing things at will; to the likes of Winckelmann, the German art historian who idealised the whiteness of ancient statues despite the fact that they were once painted in bright hues; to the tendency of today’s far-Right to draw upon Classical imagery. Meanwhile, under the Third Reich the writings of Plato and others were mined and distorted so that they would appear to endorse Nazi eugenics.

But such a history of Classics, one which highlights only the ways the discipline has been used to incite racism and prejudice, is strikingly selective. Indeed, if the main argument against Classics resides, as it appears to, in its development as a discipline and reception in the modern world — more than in the ancient material itself — then the other side of this journey ought to be told, too. For example, it would be easier to refute claims of Classics’s Eurocentrism if attention were paid to things such the transmission of texts; if it wasn’t for the scholars of places such as Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, who painstakingly translated and copied ancient manuscripts, the corpus of literature studied by classicists today would be considerably poorer.

More importantly, for every account of the abuse of classical material, there is another of inspiration. Take the growth in recent decades of “Classical Reception”, a relatively new field through which classicists engage with ancient material through the lens of more contemporary writers and artists. This specialism has helped to broaden the horizon of Classics by revealing some of the positive or at least enriching ways antiquity has permeated the modern world. The works of writers who have drawn legitimately and powerfully on ancient sources — whether it’s William Shakespeare, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka – surely form a more meaningful aspect of the story of Classics than the misquotations extremists upload to online forum. Even Antony Gormley’s engagement with the classical tradition has inspired a number of academic papers in this area.

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If anything, the abuse of Classics ought to be used as an argument for saving it. For the alternative, abandoning it, would be to hand it over to those very groups Padilla and others identify as ransacking it. The field does not deserve to be razed because of the way it has been tended in certain quarters. If a study of Classics teaches us anything, it is how much easier it is to knock down than rebuild. As the so-called Liberators of Rome discovered to their regret, assassinating Julius Caesar, rather than what came after, was the easy part. Demolish Classics — and then what?

No one is denying that aspects of the ancient world and its reception are ugly — this is true of all cultures and periods — but that is no reason to abandon Classics itself. There is no call to study the ancient material through the eyes of Nazis. The arguments of Winckelmann can be read to be disregarded. The so-called Classics of white supremacist organisations such as Identity Evropa can be disregarded — they do not deserve the airtime.

The current climate, in which individuals cherry-pick classical quotations to their own ends, ought to be a summons to the original sources that form the heart of Classics. They ought to provide the impetus to return to Classics’ roots, to read old texts anew with our own eyes, to look at art that crossed the globe knowing no borders, to read legitimate engagements with the classical past, to think for ourselves. As Heraclitus wrote: “our eyes are more accurate witnesses than our ears”. So let’s not be afraid of using them.