Socialists Study Social Studies

Right-wingers have attacked public schools for decades as training grounds for future “woke” Marxists. Our guests Kevin, Mie, and Sudip turn that on its head with their new study, identifying what they’ve termed “social justice nationalism," a pedagogy that avoids class analysis and a real critique of power, and isolates social activism and politics from collective action. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:10

Hi comrades, and welcome to CLASS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC. My name is Michaela, and I'm the current chair of NPEC and a member of North New Jersey DSA. Before we dive in, a reminder that CLASS is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter using the provided links. And we want to call all DSA members' attention to the opening of applications to the National Political Education Commission, which is now an open body for any and all socialist educators, writers, researchers, and trainers to join us in shaping political education for the future. We're aiming for a big, diverse body, so we want to especially encourage non-men and comrades of color to join NPEC now to start in the fall. The application, with more details and contact info, is linked in the show notes. Something I noticed when I started to teach college in the 2010s was the use of the term classism or describing specific actions, events, books, or people as classist. For example, a course I commonly teach on science fiction and the good society that's popular the first years, we would be discussing a near future system of production where all human workers are minutely controlled by robots. And a student, often one really concerned with social justice, would call what was happening classist. Because it had to do with work and workers, the identification of the oppressed as classed was a discrete category like sexism or racism. To be fair, I think the use of the word was meant to express an injustice of a serious and fundamental kind, but I was surprised at how readily the phrase came to their tongues and was agreed to, that class antagonism was akin to the immoral mistreatment or discrimination of individuals or groups by others, not really about the necessary exploitation of a capitalist system, much less historical struggle or social transformation. I admit I'd only heard the word classist as invective hurled by social justice people on the internet before that, so I lazily assumed the word emerged from social media until I read the article we're discussing today by our three guests. It taught me that social justice concepts employed across civic education in middle and high school systematically de-emphasizes critical thinking about social relations, class in particular, and dehistoricizes them in favor of choice discourse, individual activism, and surface-level democratic rhetoric. The authors call this pedagogical project social justice nationalism. Kevin is an associate professor of black studies and education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Mia is an assistant professor of politics at Bard College, and Sudeep is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers. And their article is called Making the Case for Political Education: a Critical Discourse of Undergraduate Civic Education in Social Studies Education and Political Science Readers, published in March in New Political Science. Welcome, Kevin, Mia, and Sudeep.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_05 3:25

Hi, thanks for having us. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Hi, thanks again for having us too.

SPEAKER_04 3:30

Yeah, well, thank you so much. I really appreciated um getting a chance to read this article and discuss it with you. Um, as I mentioned in my introduction, I'm also an educator and I have received students who have been um immersed really in like, you know, this sort of social studies or civic education uh curriculum from various, you know, places in all over the country and have noticed some patterns that I I found to be pretty interesting, but I didn't kind of put it together that this is all from this particular site or not all from, but like primarily like around this. And I found it to be incredibly enlightening. So really excited to talk to you. Um, but the first question is for uh first guests on the show. And we always ask, how and why did you become a socialist? And if you are part of DSA, how did you decide to join?

SPEAKER_05 4:23

Sure. Uh, so I grew up a liberal, although I didn't have the language of liberalism really to describe my own ideology. And I didn't become a socialist until pretty late in life when I was um in a PhD program at Yale University, and I got involved in unionizing my workplace. That experience um really helped me to develop a political analysis uh that centered the way that capitalism shapes the political economy of our society and of the university and the possibilities for democracy uh within the academy. My exposure to organizing through that experience also was really important for my development as a socialist. I had previously actually interned for Organizing for America, which was the Obama administration's attempt to develop a community organizing project, and I found it to be a very confusing and kind of disillusioning experience. And so then when I was exposed to a left-wing tradition of labor organizing, my theory of social change changed in a way that um that predisposed me to socialism. And then I joined DSA around the same time in 2016 with the big, you know, wave of millennials who joined DSA in response to the first Trump administration and also the Bernie campaign. Uh, and I um joined what was then the Central Connecticut chapter of DSA. And currently I live and work in the Hudson Valley in New York, and I am a member of the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of DSA and a co-chair of our Palestine Liberation Working Group.

SPEAKER_04 6:18

Great. And also notably a former member and hopefully maybe future member of National Political Education Committee. Um, you know, one of the OGs, in fact. I think I I recruited you.

SPEAKER_05 6:30

Um I don't think I'm an OG, but you do.

SPEAKER_04 6:33

Well, you're not you're not from the first the first wave, but you're from like the first couple of terms. Um left your imprint for sure. People miss you there. Um, Sideep, you wanna uh give your round?

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Sure. Um I had uh a similar sort of trajectory in terms of Obama, well, in terms of the Obama years being very disappointing. So that sort of accelerated my need for an alternative. But I did grow up in a peak Leninist family, actually. So my family comes from uh West Bengal, India. They've had, at least at that point when they arrived in the United States, they were still uh rule ruling sounds really weird, but they had been winning elections consecutively for some decades. It's the CPIM, the Communist Party of India, Marxists. There's a there's a Communist Party of India uh that was uh older, but this one split off uh in the 50s. So that became the ruling party. Uh it still exists in West Bengal, it's been very suppressed, actually, um, and had been also ruling Kerala, India, which is in the South. But my family comes from that background. So growing up, I always had some uh funny interactions with my parents about that stuff. So for instance, if my dad got, I don't I think like instances where I'd bring home homework about uh League of Nations or self-determination, he would look at it and say, uh Lenin said that or something. So I had some of that in my background. Um but they're also very liberal to Mier's point. I grew up technically between the two of those kind of worlds, it's kind of blurred the lines. Um, but I had that understanding, so I didn't fear communism. Um, but what really got me into DSA was not just 2016, but 2018 when AOC ran. Um, because I was a little bit hesitant at first. Uh I didn't know a lot about DSA, and obviously at that time DSA had finally grown from a lot of you know smaller chapters to now what it is now with tens of thousands of members.

SPEAKER_04 8:37

107,000, I think, is the last account.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yeah, so it's grown really exponentially, which brings a lot of like good things and also some issues that we have to sort of deal with, but that also is part of like how fast it's grown, which is a good thing. Um, but uh I joined in 2018 around that time because of AOC. Obviously, now I have a lot of issues with her. Um, but I've still remained a DSA member. I was co-chair of the Central Jersey chapter for a few years. Uh I was running the poly ed at that same time. I was co-chair of that. I was the leader of that actually. Uh a lot of people dripped in and out. Um, and then I'm currently a Philly DSA member. I'm part of the Red Star caucus, and I don't know why my Jersey accent came out for that. And also I'm also uh I'm also um part of the DSA editorial board. So I'm the managing editor of Socialist Forum right now. It's been great, it's been fun, and I'm still happy to be part of this org.

SPEAKER_04 9:32

That's awesome. Yeah. Um, Kevin.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Hey, so I'm the outlier here. Uh I am not a DSA member.

SPEAKER_04 9:39

You are a fellow traveler, and we love our fellow travelers, don't we, folks?

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Um, thank you. Uh so uh I I grew up uh similarly like in a in a household that was liberal. I wouldn't have used that word either to describe like my parents' uh kind of like political orientation. Uh though my parents were very critical of white folks and like you know, experienced all kinds of like problems on on the job and you know, last uh people hired, first fired. Uh, you know, there was a a a kind of like a discourse that was like in my house. It was very clearly like pointing out like how uh how precarious uh work uh would be for my uh for uh black folks. And my my parents wanted to instill in us in a lot of ways uh like the values of like uh hard work and like you know uh you know being twice working twice as hard uh to be you know a couple of steps behind just because we knew uh or they knew that you know racism would ultimately meet us uh when we got to the labor market. Um and so that was that was kind of like a a part of like how I grew up that like I guess like uh provided an entryway uh for me to move beyond like a liberal sort of understanding of politics. It wasn't really until I got to my PhD program. Um it's really interesting, Mia. You said that too, that my PhD program. And it's unfortunate, like when you're to like I mean, I'm I was trained in a PhD program. I'm actually a faculty in the same program that I got uh my PhD in. Um and uh, you know, there is uh absolutely um in education and as a field, um an embrace of critical politics, there's a lot of uh uh discourse around social change and education as a vehicle for social change, but a lot of it is rooted in uh kind of like postmodern um framework. Um, and I wasn't aware of that. And so, like, as I'm like quote unquote, you know, becoming more radical, uh there are people who were actual Marxists who were uh like kind of like criticizing my framework, like who were like really like pushing back on like the way I was uh talking about issues. Um I had a really good friend in uh not in my program, but was but they were also getting a PhD at the time who was organizing with the union and who um you know just had like a stronger uh foundation um in her politics. Uh she really became like instrumental in helping me to see past like some of the postmodern ways in which like I was thinking about the world. Um and uh it set me uh on a course to reading and you know, uh want to say it was probably like the most like radicalizing thing I read at that point. Um uh Black Awakening in Capitalist America by Robert Allen. Um and that was uh a pivotal turning point for me, like helped really expose liberalism for what it is, um, the limitations of nationalism, uh nationalism that doesn't include uh uh a sort of uh critical um framework uh for getting at capitalism. And then I'm also uh kind of like started studying the Panthers, right? And I think that that you know gave me like I guess kind of like a basic framework for moving beyond liberalism at that point.

SPEAKER_04 13:19

Yeah. So that's how you kind of became aware, like it was kind of like a a class consciousness explosion in a way, of like just being like, this is how everything came together. So you come by you come by this article really honestly then.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I and I'm not even sure if I would say an explosion. I kind of it was kind of like a steady creep toward like radicalism. Um, and I mean, even you know, even like when once you've been like so deeply uh like trained and socialized in like liberal postmodern like uh frameworks, it's hard to uh sort of catch your set, like to catch, you know, where like certain um ideas are coming from uh when you uh sort of embrace uh like a particular view of the world. And so like, you know, I guess maybe that's not even the way to put it. Like I think you I started to realize that some of the ideas that I uh was holding about my my own um life in politics were were really inadequate for explaining like what was happening um um to me. Um and there was a you know a way that like as a graduate student, like many of us are like really poor. Um and that wasn't, you know, and if you just have a race framework, right, to to think about like being, you know, like your feelings of alienation as a grad student, it it often it it misses uh what's really fundamentally a sort of class exploitation experience. Um and I think we we were able to uh some of us I think who were um being moved toward the left were able to uh kind of reach for Marxism and and find some um find some clarity in it to help understand our experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:08

Yeah. I mean the records has also like a well-established uh graduate student union. And um, like Mia, I also became socialist or an organized socialist through union organizing when I was organizing at Cornell um and like put together that exploitation piece. Um, you know, while the university was trying to tell us that we were privileged, you know, we, you know, had this up these opportunities to learn, blah, blah, blah. We realized that our labor was actually what was keeping the university going. And if we were to stop, then it would all be game over for, you know, what they were trying to do. It really um helped me put together the theory and the practice praxis, as they say, but also helped me realize kind of my own missteps before with the theory that I had just been, you know, sort of given as true. For example, Foucault, you can't get outside of power, it's all diffuse, blah, blah, blah. It helps, you know, it's like, you know, losing yourself in that. To be honest with you, there's still some things about Foucault we can use, but you kind of have to, I think, have a political analysis. And, you know, we're all Marxists here to realize what it is you can take or leave and not just um, you know, take what your advisor tells you as sacrosanct or something, um, or what your favorite teacher tells you. And I think that's really kind of maybe a meta-level of this article because we're talking specifically about how people are educated in their formative years, but we're lifelong learners, right? Like, you know, we're always learning and developing our political analyses and how we kind of receive this um sort of normative framework of, you know, either capitalism is inevitable or, you know, individuals have uh it in their agency specifically to kind of shape social change the way that they feel like without any um, you know, kind of collective action, I think is like really key here. But I know that um we want to get into the sort of the method and like the research. It sounds like Kevin, you also like as a, you know, I think black studies and education, very sort of like, you know, not narrow, but like a sort of like um heavily uh you know historicized section of you know, sort of this whole endeavor of like pedagogy and and education. Can you talk a little bit more about the work that you do in this? Like maybe expand a little bit, and then we'll ask Mia and Sudeep as well about their work areas.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

Yeah, you yeah, you mean like my my research? Yeah, your research, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so uh, you know, this is it's funny because I just had to submit my materials for Tang in and give me a chance to kind of like think about what I have been doing up until this point. Um, because I don't think it was absolutely clear to me if I were to say, like, well, you know, this is the kind of you know work that I do. Uh, but in in general, like I'm I am studying black education and political ideology uh through the lens of political economy. Um, and I am uh uh by and large, like looking at like black schools and communities as places where politics are happening and where there are hidden dimensions of political economy that are sort of shaping um what's happening in those places, um, and uh sort of surfacing the tensions that come up there, uh, even when they oftentimes operate under really opaque frameworks that don't give uh uh don't bring political economy into view, right? And so uh that my my work is largely about kind of exposing those hidden dimensions of political economy and then really uh providing an alternative framework to make politics really front and center um in issues that are happening that like appear relatively apolitical in schools and communities. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Uh yeah, so in poli sci, most of my focus is on uh seeking out the potentialities and at least growing the the body of research in poli sci having to do with the political alignment or misalignment between people of color. So in focal science there is a growing amount of research on this topic, but still not enough. So so typically, even to the day, uh and Mie can speak to this a little bit too, because I think she's seen this where um a lot of the research still does this like white or non-white binary when it comes to discussing politics. And sometimes white, black, or white, Latino, usually Asian Americans are slumped in as other, uh, along with you know people who are mixed race or biracial, which doesn't make sense because it's very different categories. But uh so my dissertation, for example, is a qualitative in-depth relies on qualitative in-depth interviews of people in and around Jersey City, because Jersey City is a very quote unquote majority minority area, even though I hate that term, but it's essentially the US is returning to its pre-colonial roots finally.

SPEAKER_04 20:22

Um I live in Union City, which is 80% Latino.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 20:28

I live in I live in a uh the house was owned by an Italian American, so we like to say that we're actually doing reverse gentrification by moving into an Italian house.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

That is really fun. I mean, yeah, I mean, some of them move into the other suburbs, I guess, but uh that's pretty funny. Yeah, Union is also very Cuban American, but yeah, that whole region is very interesting to me. I grew up in Jersey, I grew up in Queens, that's where I'm born and raised. Uh, but I grew up in central Jersey, so I've always been interested in these questions for a lot of reasons. One of which is also how do we create these coalitions we need for power? And a lot of those discussions need to happen on the quote unquote non-white side. So again, in political science, there's a sort of tendency to think, well, there's racism, so these groups will just manifest. But I obviously think there's a lot more nuance there, especially on the ground level, when it comes to places like Jersey City, where you have a multitude of Democrats, and you might have some instances of people of color having a multitude of options to go with their real heart, as opposed to the national question, which is usually like pitting a Democrat who's awful against someone who's a fascist like Trump. So therefore you see these kind of like people of color sliding one way versus the other sometimes. Um but yeah, the question that we're asking in this uh project that also drew me to this project, and Kevin was the one to reach out to me, and then we also reached out to Mie about it, has a lot to do with, again, my own research. Because even though I'm attacking this question of coalition building, it's through the perspective of of course, I'm looking for data, but I'm also through the perspective of someone like Claudia Jones, who was a Marxist Lannist. Because again, as you kind of referenced in Foucault, there's also another issue where there's a huge emphasis on difference. If there's any difference, it gets emphasized to suggest there's no universal language. So my project is not necessarily to be totally against that because it I have to find the data, but I am finding the data with my interviews already being done and I'm writing it. That a political economy needs to be part of our reasoning as to like what to expect that African Americans, Asians, and Latinos would talk about. Because many of them in my research said housing, even if on other issues they differ, right? So again, the political economy stuff, like like Kevin said magnificently, is part of that lens. And that was really missing, to be honest with you, in how I was politically taught in academia. Not so much with my family. My family, my dad would always mention working class stuff, but like Kevin, also racism plays a big role. So there's another interesting element of why I was a little bit hesitant with DSA at first. But in academia, I was taught opposite. I was actually taught to emphasize difference to a to a certain extreme degree and to suggest that there is no universal language.

SPEAKER_05 23:15

So I think listening to everyone talk about their journeys to socialism, I was reflecting on the fact that I think for all of us, um we were all academics, and there was some experience of like a contradiction between the way the academic frameworks that we were given to think about politics and our actual experiences of politics. Um that was that very much that contradiction is really at the heart of my research because that experience of trying to unionize my workplace in grad school completely changed my research trajectory. I I totally rewrote my perspective, my dissertation perspective in my third year to a, to a, from like a history of political thought project to a project that's really about, I would say I'm new to this language, I'm trying it out, but kind of like the phenomenology of political of left political organizing. Um, and I think part of what I experienced as a grad student was that um many of I was organizing democratic theorists, like people who professionally think about democracy, and many of them felt that the practices of organizing that we were engaged with in our union were intrinsically undemocratic because they involved trying to change people, right? Like trying to change people's minds and doing so by trying to engage them in kind of a collective. Um, and there were certainly undemocratic aspects of the union that I was a part of. Um, but that that that kind of experience really led me to think about like, well, what is the concept of democracy that my field is premised on? And why is there actually like nothing about organizing in this whole um in this whole discipline? Um, and so then I wrote a dissertation that is about, well, now it's become a book that's really about um the relationship between self-emancipation and organizing. Um and, you know, often we think about we use words like self-emancipation or self-self-organization, self-activity to invoke a kind of like um spontaneous process of like unleashing an oppressed self that is that is like sort of bounded and stable and um and um not in flux. Um but in fact, the process of organizing, if we take seriously the idea that we are shaped as political subjects by our circumstances, right, including our participation in oppressive institutions, um, has to involve changing ourselves, right? We have to change as, you know, into new political subjects from within oppressive conditions. Um, and so I'm kind of trying to think of that as like a fundamental antinomy or kind of paradox of organizing, and then um, and then try to, I try to argue that actually many of the most intractable and kind of explosive controversies in left political organizing, including debates about leadership, like whether the organizer is a leader or a facilitator, debates about like manipulation, what distinguishes organizing from manipulation. Um, these are these kind of stem from this underlying antinomy of self-emancipation. Um, and I and I think about organizers as political theorists. And then my book really tries to engage the way that canonical um American 20th and 21st century organizers have encountered um these problems and controversies and the resolutions that they've um articulated through their practice.

SPEAKER_04 26:57

Well, I would like to talk more about that for sure. Because it sounds um, it sounds like, I mean, we already know that we've been through, you know, maybe a little bit of a similar journey, having gone through that thing that we went through, which was, you know, trying to organize our colleagues, many of whom um didn't want to have their minds changed, in fact. Um, but we were trying to win a union. I guess um, you know, what I'm hearing also in common, and and Mia, you sort of touched on this, I think, a little at the beginning of what you were saying, is that everyone is engaging in a critique of their fields, um, you know, throughout like your research. And what this article does is take that critique of the field, both education and political science, and kind of um create a sort of, I would call it a hermeneutic, um, because you're using like sort of this keyword conception. I don't know if your fields have a different term for that, but that's the the word that kind of came to mind. But it also is a a collective project you guys wrote together. So um maybe you could talk a little bit. Um you talked about it a second ago, Sudeep, about how you sort of got interested in it. It was kind of a hook with like very related to like what you were already looking at. But how did the article start and how did you decide to write it together? Like what were your experiences as well with your own teaching? Maybe if you've taught, I mean, I know Mia, you teach because you teach at BARD, and there's a lot of teaching going on at BARD. Um, and then you know, Kevin, you're a professor. I don't know, Sue Deep, if you've um had a chance to teach undergraduates and if there's any resonance there, but also want to talk about your methods. So maybe first short, like just how did you how did you all meet each other and how did you decide to write this? And then maybe like what were any experiences you've had that made you think, oh, this needs to be like I've noticed this, or maybe if you didn't notice it, you like heard anecdotally or something. Mia, go ahead. You can start this one.

SPEAKER_05 28:56

Sure. Well, Kevin and I met through the podcast the dig during the pandemic, um, because Dan Denver, the host of the podcast. Um and a friend, um, friend and comrade uh of mine um uh mentioned in the past. I think he mentioned something I had said actually, I think, about this like paradoxical connectivity. Um and um on an episode, and then Kevin, I think, wrote again with like connecting the end. And then we had some great conversations, we assume, during the pandemic about our research. And then I think Kevin and Sudeep really developed the idea for this article. Um, and then Rob invited me in, and I was really excited to participate in research with both of them, first of all, because I really admired their work, um, and also because um my own experience in political sciences that they alluded to had really led me to a critique of specifically the concept of democracy that I think is really hegemonic, both in uh democratic theory scholarship, but also in the teaching of political science and of civic education in particular.

SPEAKER_04 30:10

Yeah, anything to add to that for either of you guys?

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Yeah, I'll just say quickly because I it meeting Mia was was absolutely the way she described that was uh really important for me at that moment because I was working on my book. Well, I was working on an edited volume and working on my sole author book at that time. Um, and both of them sort of raised questions that align with the like kind of like fundamental premise of this article. Um, but uh Mia had uh this really dope article in um uh what is what is the uh journal, Mia?

SPEAKER_05 30:48

The Ella Baker one.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 30:50

Um American Political Science.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

American Political Science, yeah, which has actually become like a really um anchoring piece in um my book in its uh second chapter. But uh I think I had for a while been disillusioned with like the frameworks uh that I was trained, like I mentioned before, that I was trained uh with and I was trained by folks who were social studies educators. Um and so there was a part of me, especially like during the years while I was in grad school, Michael Brown, you know, murder. There's you know, uh all kinds of like discourse happening um around Black Lives Matter, uh had encounters with um, you know, several texts, uh Keonga Taylor's uh Black Lives Matter, the Black Liberation, uh, that were really helping me to develop a critique of, I think, some of the most common and um accessible um ways of sort of understanding that moment um and uh the kind of like liberal nationalist politics that were developing. Uh and you know, it's also the like very uh, you know, classic big big L liberal stuff that was coming up in MP on on NPR that was uh, you know, critiquing rioting, right? Like as a uh, you know, black folks rioting in in Ferguson and things like that. Um and so those things have sort of been the impetus for my book, uh the uh edited uh collection, uh The Promise of Youth, Youth Anti-Citizenship, you know, kind of like you know, social studies uh has uh given us, or education rather has given us some ways to think about citizenship and good citizenship that fundamentally misalign with some of the things that I'm seeing in the street right now. Um and people are actually, you know, destroying property. Uh and that's a and and and you know the things that I'm hearing on the radio and I'm and I'm in the ways that people are talking about it in the uh halls of academia um are saying, like, well, this is backwards and this doesn't make any sense, this is ridiculous. But I have a different perspective. Um and then I was also participating in um, so my dissertation project uh was uh something called youth participatory. I was doing something called youth participatory action research. Uh and par is I'm sure you're familiar with participatory action research. Uh PAR with youth is sort of grounded in uh understanding of frere that prioritizes uh student-centered learning. Um and uh what is often missed, however, is uh the uh the importance of political education um in that work. Um and what what becomes sort of central is the teacher's posture of like, you know, stepping to the back, being a peer uh in the classroom, and like uh sort of kind of like dis dismantling the hierarchy in the classroom. And Mia and I had kind of bonded over this uh, you know, some of the challenges I was having with this framework and like talking about like, you know, the the kind of like uh the kind of like uh fear of indoctrination that I think undergirds like the issue, like excuse me, the way that they frame um my part. Um and so like all at the confluence of all of these like projects and sort of like the ways I'm thinking, I'm sort of like understanding like what's happening in the world and like you know, the the the limitations of the frameworks that I had been given, all of that is like really producing like in me like the need for more like uh I I wanted like a a conceptual boost and an empirical boost to kind of support the argument that I was making. Um and uh you know that this this project became a vehicle to do that. And so my my uh you know, my friend, uh my good friend Martina uh introduced me to Sudeep, um, who was uh already like someone who I had uh been aware of uh reading some of his work in press, uh, but uh had not been connected to him formally. And uh Sudeep and I just hit it off and we started thinking about like the thing that I was raising um that I you know just mentioned, and uh started to get we started to get the work on like what was like the the I kind of like the the sort of basic framework for this uh for this project and uh reached a point in uh in the writing and thought like, hey, like this, you know, I I was thinking, you know, Mia, uh who you know, I was building this relationship with would be a great addition to this. Um and so she uh you know we reached out to her and she was super amenable and like we just really became like really cl we we got really close really quick. Uh we we ended up uh you know just really uh loving doing this work. Um but yeah, I think I think that's that's my version of the story. I don't know if I have to do that.

SPEAKER_04 35:43

CDP, you've been interpolated, so why don't you go ahead and uh finish us out here and then we'll talk. I'd love to hear also more about your thoughts about the method you used, um, you know, because it was explained in the article as a kind of compilation, but you also met each other via like sort of these like more social and organizing, you know, circles, even though, you know, are podcasts organizing? I don't know, maybe the jury's out on that. But nonetheless, um, yeah, but Sudeep, go ahead. And then if you want to talk about method, I'd love to hear about that.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Yeah. So um, so I've I've written, so I do teach. I've been teaching, like I'm wrapping up my disc dissertations. I've been teaching a lot of classes around uh US Empire, uh Marxist uh theory, race and ethnicity, and Asian American history and politics. So, and those are important to me because the way I would teach it has changed a little bit in terms of how to formulate what I think students are missing from other classes around these subjects. Uh, there is sometimes a tendency or a conversation around race, gender, sexuality, however meaningful, that is still quite restrictive. Um, for instance, you're not going to hear a lot about people like Claudia Jones, who are quite instructive in terms of our history as people of color, who are quite radical, and she was a Marxist-Leninist from the 40s and 50s, and then she was deported to the UK. Uh, fun fact, she was not deported back to the Caribbean because they feared if she returned to uh, I think Trinidad, even though she was there as a little girl, she would actually be very, very she would crew she would be amazing at organizing people against the British. So they actually feared her that much. So they took her to uh the UK, where the British Communist Party was was really uh racist and sexist towards her. Um and she made uh Carnival, which is the biggest, second biggest carnival in the entire world, second to what happens in the Caribbean. So she's really dope. But um, but yeah, just really quickly, uh, I do a lot of also um public-facing work, which also does not get as this is also interesting, it doesn't get as respected in the fields, to be honest. Uh uh being able to write public-facing work is usually not seen as work, I have to be honest with you. So when Kevin reached out to me, it was quite validating. Um, so I really appreciate him doing that. Uh he just said, uh, dude, I like your work. Uh it was more formal than that. Uh but uh and I was like, oh shit. Like we already knew each other on Facebook. I knew of him through Ulsa Martina, and uh it was great. We just vibed. And when Mier came on the project, it was uh it was very interesting. Like all of our chemistry is just sort of worked. We I think we are all coming from a similar level of frustration on several levels, having to do with again, we're all interested in revolutionary thought, but what's positive as revolutionary is quite demeaning to that tradition, in my experience. And to your Foucault comment, and Kevin might laugh at this, I I hate Foucault. Um, I think he is a horrible person and a horrible theorist, and I think you can get a lot from other people because he was also terribly wrong on so many things, even in discipline and punishment. I know his whole evolution on prisons was quite inaccurate. Um, so I kind of hate his guts because in all the freaking classes I took, and I know this is PG PG 13, there would be so much critique about Marx, you know, as a man or as a white guy or something. But then there'd be like Foucault, who was this like white French guy who was like, power is everywhere, power is in your pinky, power is in your mind. A working class person is as powerful as a what is power? It's like, bro, we don't have power. And that's the that's the breaking point for me, was Foucault. So thank you, Foucault, for both not being around and also for pushing me in that direction. So I just wanted to add that really quickly.

SPEAKER_04 39:30

I can't stand that man's controversy abounds. Incredible. Yeah, I think it's it's funny because I remember when I, you know, we're sort of compelled to read Foucault if you're in any kind of humanities, any kind of soft science, quote unquote soft science, social science, or whatever. And I remember uh seeing some statistic that said Foucault was the most cited uh scholar in all social science research or or whatever. And that kind of blew my mind because I thought this is not accessible, you know, this is this is not clear. But then I realized as I developed politically, part of what this is is also obfuscating, right? This is also about, and I I do think, you know, I know Sudeep, you hate the guy, whatever, but I do think that what Foucault, he was an anti-Marxist, but he was also writing from a position of the Cold War, um, you know, and also this there were some people who were Marxists who were actually trying to hide it. What he did was also, I think, to go a little conspiracy brain here, capitalizing on the fact that there was an anti-Marx, there's an anti-communist current, you know, like sort of emanating everywhere, you know, sort of post-68, right? Like this was like a symptom of a kind of um failure, but also a symptom of academic fear. And actually, what you said, Kevin, about how teachers kind of digging into this fray method and standing back, fearing indoctrination, I think part of that is also fearing that you will be called an indoctrinator, right? That like educators themselves are considered to be a kind of enemy unless proven otherwise. And like all of these different kinds of coded ways that people talk about this stuff. I mean, I'm from, you know, an English, I double-majored in English and political science and undergrad, but then, you know, did my PhD in English. And it was about like sort of like interdisciplinary like law and society sort of stuff. Foucault is everywhere in that, and so is Derrida, and so is all of that. Um, only recently has Marxism been even allowed to really be given anything other than like a dismissal. I remember one time I in grad school I said, you know, this needs a Marxist framework to my advisor. She laughed at me. We were clearly not well matched. Like, no, I didn't like really read that until like pretty, pretty late, you know, and I was just like, well, I guess I'm stuck. But like she laughed as though it were like, I can't believe you would ever even like deign to say something like that. Like it was automatically um dismissed. And that was before I even like became kind of a hardcore, you know, like died in the wool Marxist, you know. It was just like this could benefit from this, and it was considered to be off the table genuinely from some who sank themselves deeply into the kind of Yale School of Theory, um, you know, hermeneutic method that was kind of more on the pomo side, as you, you know, kind of brought up. But then Foucault just being this like central figure of anything goes so long as you are, you know, acknowledge that you can't get outside of power or what have you.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Absolutely. No, I just really briefly, I was just gonna say, like, I think I think that's absolutely right. I was gonna say that you can imprint on Foucault so many things because the other because of lack of clarity. And so it becomes a useful tool for graduate students who are sort of navigating their way through trying to understand theory. Foucault provides like a wide berth for you to uh sort of like attach your own sort of political theory to it, uh, and then you know, say that's Foucault, right? Um, and so that's the you know, there's a there's it's a way that like it lends itself to sophistry, and I and I and I appreciate you naming that because uh graduate students are actually absolutely pulled toward Foucault and away from Marxism. And I teach uh uh our PhD students um an introduction course on um critical social theory in ed. And I I am actively trying to get them away from Foucault, even as they're like, but we love him.

SPEAKER_05 43:51

I guess this I guess we know what our next article is about.

SPEAKER_04 43:55

Yeah, next several articles, because you mentioned in here you're gonna write a second article, and now they're Maybe a third in the works.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

I just add really quick, just about I know I'm kind of joking, but I'm not because I just wrote down Heidegger. Like there is something going on in our in our field that has a lot to do with what's mentioned in the piece. Because we're still what our research project is literally methodology. We look over several readers that are meant to teach us how to teach the students, usually undergrads. That's the main focus of our civic education. Exactly, civic education, and that's why we and we were interested in the subject from what we're all explaining because we saw little seeds of it, little nuggets here and there. So we ourselves wanted to see if that's really consistent. And it kind of was, which we'll get into, I'm sure. But I just want to add there is more room for Heidegger, more room for fascist aligned thinkers, too. So this project is not really just about taking on uh it's true pronged. Our project is really trying to take on uh two sides of the coin. One is the liberal side that is quite anti-Marxist and also yearning for an alternative speech. So that's why also in the readers, you'll see they mention Marx. So they're kind of like in their own contradiction, because they realize, I guess, mentally uh that they're reaching a wall and how liberalism can be sort of salvaged. But then the other side is this other element of you can mention Heidegger, you can mention Nietzsche, but if you mention Marx or you take Marx seriously, and not just Marx, but the Marxist tradition Claudio Jones, Lenin, uh various other thinkers, George Jackson, Asada Shakur, if you mention these people, you are definitely touching a Ron Herb. And then the third category, which we talk about at the end of the piece, which we'll get into, is US Empire. There is no conversation about US Empire. None. It's it's I think it's completely missing from any social justice analysis. And that's kind of uh one of the some of the reasons we wanted to do the project to whether or not test for if this is something that we're just seeing individually, or is this something really seen in some of the readers are actually organizing or encouraging educators to teach civic education in this way?

SPEAKER_04 46:07

Yeah. Teaching teachers how to um, you know, if you're not explicitly doing Foucault, you're kind of um, and I I think what you said, imprinting uh the normative framework into these, like, oh, well, this is interesting, like encouraging people to ask these questions, but always leading kind of back to individual choices, these kinds of um very state and like you know, stagnant forms of um democracy within the institutions that are considered to be, you know, relevant or or proper, um, and not, you know, really developing people's conceptions of change collectively, right? Or change like in these other avenues besides like the ballot box. And I wanna, I I do want to get into um the content here because one of the things that really drew me in um was the it's a it's a history I've heard before, but like the sort of anti-communist and cold war history of the social studies movement, because that's complicated by what had been um the progressive fight and the civil civil rights movement fight for high quality public education preparing students for democratic participation. For example, that's what the landmark case, Brown versus Board of Education, is supposedly kind of pointing towards, right? That you need to have um non-discrimination and um total integration of schools no more separate but equal because these are all democratic participants. So there's a lot of contradiction there. And I did notice that Derek Bell is cited in the work, and it's you know, Derek Bell is a huge person for me when I was doing my own research, in part because um his field critique of law um was also about this idea of um really only the benefits flowing from, you know, sort of the white side of the equation. How does this benefit, you know, sort of like white hegemony? I always like to say that Bell was probably a crypto-Marxist. Um people get shocked by that, but but a big part of what he talks about, right, is the faces at the bottom of the well and the way in which race is used to um, you know, essentially split the working class, which you mention in your own article here. I'm sure it's a very big part of all of your all's research. Um, it can't really be avoided. But I would like to talk about this the politics of this contradiction and like kind of what you see, because in a lot of ways, what we're talking about when we're criticizing sort of social studies or civic education is criticizing something that comes out of a progressive kind of impetus, right? Like, and also this is in the context of heavy critique and an attack on public education and um especially things that are considered quote unquote woke, or they mislabel it, they call it Marxist because you're saying this is not Marxist at all. This is in fact anti-Marxist, but it's it's kind of like uh a political quandary here. Like to the extent that we're we're actually all educators and interested in kind of getting at least some progressive or socialist thinking into the the minds of students to allow them to be able to become, you know, true political agents, right? Like, how do we how do we deal with that? I mean, I would like to hear what you think. This is not really a worked-out theory, it's just kind of more what comes out of your article because the study you guys do with the, you know, kind of six readers, you point out there are these patterns of pointing everyone back towards kind of the idea of good citizenship, democracy as um not collective, but rather, you know, kind of limited to individual choice and avoiding some topics altogether, or couching them in the past, right? Like couching any kind of like movement activism as like the past, as though, and and maybe you could speak about that too, um, and and kind of foreclosing the idea that this could be the future, right? That instead what we have is a liberal democracy and everyone should participate in it in their participatory way, which whatever that that happens to be, mostly just voting, right? Or like maybe making a good consumer choice. So altogether, like, you know, what's what were your you know, sort of thought processes about this? Because what are we gonna do? Throw away social studies, you know? Instead, you say political education, but how is that going to be received? You know, like how tell me about how is this gonna happen?

SPEAKER_00 50:54

I I can start uh unless either of you wanna talk. Uh yeah, sure. I'll start then. Um, yeah, I mean, uh, you know, here's what I'll say. Like, I I think literature in social studies ed is actually like quite expansive. Um and and even before I get there, like I'll say, like, I I'm under no illusions about like, you know, the institutions that we that we work for, uh, these like capitalist like uh sort of uh universities are gonna be interested in replacing uh this kind of hegemonic civic education framework with something that interrogates capitalism. But I do think it's important to raise the contradiction. Um and I think expose like what we've we expose in the text is that like what has been sort of operating clandestinely as like uh a neutral, politically neutral uh sort of framework for teaching about society and uh and and and political issues is actually not at all um neutral in it in it and it uh orients us toward a particular kind of like domesticated action. But what I'll say is I think uh, you know, people in social studies, and I and this is I'm gonna give some credit, people study how teachers teach, how they conceptualize issues, how you know they teach about issues, um and are usually reflecting on learning outcomes with students that like point to like the civic and political implications, right? And so social studies hasn't been avoiding this, uh, but like I said before, there's a there's a quite heavy like postmodern influence. Um, and you know, it's even like this sort of deeply theoretical work uh that raises ontological questions uh about issues in social studies ed uh and uh how we train uh folks uh is really couched in this framework around like that like embraces civic education. Um and so what we're doing in this this work is actually not super far removed from the kinds of work that folks have been doing in the field for a while. Um, you know, in the field we've been interrogating epistemology, uh practice of social studies, teacher ed. Um, and to the field's credit, it's really like pushed civic education to be more justice-oriented, you know, more intersectional, uh, you know, critical of white supremacy and patriarchy. Um but you know, what we do here that I think stands in like sharp contrast, uh, is that we read civic education specifically through the lens of Marxism. And so we're we're asking, even uh when it's at its most critical edge of conceptualization, what does it miss? What is it what is it obscure? Uh, you know, what what does it misrepresent about politics, particularly within the heart of global capital? Um and so it's civic education in some ways has evolved past the politically neutral neutrality uh, you know, on some issues and embraces like calls to racial justice reform and women's rights and immigrant rights or whatever. Um, it even sometimes embraces protest politics as a viable tactic to respond to inequalities. Uh but conceptually, civic education is never open to seriously critiquing capitalism or the contradiction of capitalist democracy. Uh it's not it's not seriously open to like radically restoring like sovereignty to indigenous people or building power for the working class. Um, understanding that even at its most critical edge, the project of civic education is engineering a commitment to progressive reform that's divorced from a critique of capitalism and the veneer of capitalist democracy as a vehicle for racial progress. And so it's a it's ultimately, you know, a tool for white supremacy and capitalism in that respect.

SPEAKER_05 54:33

Um I agree with all of that. Uh Michaela, I think your question is really good about the kind of contradiction or potential contradiction that the article points to. Um, we started working on this article and really like I think finished the article before the escalation of the current like right-wing fascist movement against DEI and everything it's associated with. Um, and when this all sort of blew up, I was kind of thinking, like, hmm, is now the moment for a critique of us. But I actually think it is um it because I think that the article provides a way of understanding how we got to this situation, right? Um if if I like I'm against the attack on DEI, as I assume we probably all are, right? Like it's important diversity, equity, and inclusion are important values to try to uphold in um in education. Um, we should teach about race, we should teach about um disability, we should teach about, you know, feminism and um gender equality, et cetera. But I think that DEI as a framework really bears the seeds of its own undoing. Um, if all we are if our analysis of racism and inequality is basically limited to the interpersonal and to also kind of essentialist assumptions about identity, then I think we're not equipped to actually redress racism and other forms of inequality in the academy or in society. Um and also we're then very susceptible to to kind of right-wing attacks on hip ho of like hypocrisy and insincerity um in the in the academy. Um and so, you know, you mentioned Michaela, the fact that that um, you know, Trump uh and his um supporters will sort of equate Marxism with liberal identity politics. And I think that's really interesting and instructive for the left, right? The fact that they can do that, that they can collapse Marxism and identity liberal identity politics, um, I think suggests that the that that socialists and the left have not done a great job of articulating the difference and offering an alternative to liberal identity politics. Um and um so you know, in terms of like what we should do, what can be done, um I think that students, you know, I think that we should have DEI initiatives. I think that's or maybe we, you know, reframed. And I think that students should also learn about the legal framework of the United States. Like I think students should know what the Constitution says, right? You should learn about um, you know, the the history of its of its formation and amendments, et cetera. But also as part of that education, students should be thinking about who the constitution was designed to serve, right? Like what interests is it fundamentally organized around? Um, what are the limitations of the our of the legal framework of this society? Um, why do we have the oldest constitution in the world that seems to be um kind of impossible to change? And what kind of power do um our students actually have access to, right? What kind of power in pursuing social change do working class people actually have access to, right? I think if we teach them that their power is principally or exclusively in within the political system and through the vote, uh like I think that that is doing them a great disservice. And I also think that it's disillusioning to students. I think they understand that that's not real power. Um, and I think they um understand that a kind of like nostalgic framework for thinking about civic education, the constitution, American politics is completely inadequate to making sense of the current moment.

SPEAKER_01 58:48

Yeah. Um I just want to so in the paper we did something that was quite simple but ended up with actually rather complex results. So for example, what we did was we go we went through six readers and we looked at key terms, um, including terms are usually like racism, white supremacy, uh sexism, and then we also added terms about labor unions and capitalism. And that's how we configured our results because what we found was there has been, rightfully so, an increase of focus on racism, uh sexism. Interesting enough, just want to add this really there, but but there wasn't any specifics also there. Like there wasn't a discussion about white supremacy. I think that terminology was almost missing from all the readers, except for one time when it was referring to Jewish folks. So it seemingly kind of gave the impression that the only group who are impacted by white supremacy are people who are Jewish, which was also quite odd. Um, but then on the political economy side, we found just a mishmash of things. So we did find uh, at least in the political science side, a discussion of global economy, but there was few discussions about global economy, and I'm doing um uh quotes here, uh, in relation to capitalism, which is part of the global economy. So this is where the results we found were quite complex. So, like what Kevin said, civic education in this day is not being taught as neutral, but it is being taught in a way that's still quite counter-insurgent or counter-revolutionary. And I think to what Nie is saying, and also part of what I'm thinking too, and all of us are thinking, is that in this project, what we're showing is you have two sides again of the same coin. You have a more conservative, right, right leaning, is putting it lightly, right, very right-wing version of civic education that hopes to say things like hierarchies, like uh racial and sexual hierarchy is good, it's natural. Um, you know, should you don't mention black or brown or Asian or woman in your research projects? Um, but then what we are also seeing is the other side of that coin, which is you can mention some of that, but there is a tipping point to how you want to describe these movements. Because what's interesting, we also saw uh terms like settler colonialism being mentioned, but they were also in reference to places abroad. So there was one part of some one of the readers that said New Zealand is settler colonial. So there was no mention of that to the United States, but it was to New Zealand. And interestingly enough, it was reduced to what Mia say to an interpersonal dynamic. So settler colonialism is now referred in these some of these readers, uh, but they still were saying to the educator, see it as discrimination.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:39

That's interesting because New Zealand also has some of the best rights for Native people. Right. Like it's yeah, so it's it's both like so far removed from the United States, but also just like historically so distinct.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:53

Exactly. And yeah, with the Maori people, and also it was just interesting exactly how they picked that place because there might be some more like students who are Maori in these classes because it's all about how the teachers should investigate these things in the classroom as well. But again, it was interpersonal. Like settler colonialism, you can address it not through land, not through anything material, but through maybe people getting to know each other, which is part of a step, but it's not the totality. So those are some of the complexities. So we're not saying that there isn't politics behind civic education anymore. It's just a certain kind of politics that's quite uh anti-material.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:31

Well, something really interesting that's coming to mind here too is that like the collapse of um the framework of race conscious admissions and affirmative action um the last couple of years, like I teach those cases, those um, you know, from Baki through like, you know, the Texas cases through the most recent ones with the SFFA. And one thing that needs to be kind of noted is that diversity became in some way more materialized with the Baki case. Um, this is from 1977, when they decided actually this will be good for people going into the job market to have diversity in education because they'll have encountered all these people from different places. And since colleges were, you know, now it's much more common for people to go to college, but in the 70s it was, you know, quarter of the population or so. These are going to be the managers, they're gonna be the leaders in the military, they're gonna be all of these different leaders in and captains of industry, supposedly. So therefore, to have diversity also means that they'll be better at this, they'll be better at managing people or commanding people, because that's what you know, people were thought of like, you know, if you're a college graduate, then you're going to be going into something that where you're going to be in charge of workers or, you know, some some uh version of worker. Um, and what's interesting to me about the you know contradictions and the things that you guys are sort of teasing out is that the education that people get is kind of like very much in in a training almost of like how you get along with other people, like in a what we would call a multiracial democracy, but for them it's more kind of like the field of humanity, kind of like, you know, like these encounters that you might end up finding uh applicable to your own like sort of self-development. Right. Yeah, etiquette or like a kind of like, oh, well, you know, if someone disagrees with you, like how do you know, how would you deal with it? You know, do you wouldn't want to like know how to like question or debate. Instead, you would just want to be tolerant or accepting on the basis of kind of these um, you know, watch words of don't be racist, don't be sexist or what have you. And I'm, you know, we're we're at an hour here. I think we could like probably talk about that entire thing like all together for another hour if we wanted to. Um, but I do think that in the the realm of what's possible, right? Like what is possible, what this application of political education could be, um, a power analysis of like how people really do relate to each other, it was broken open by the ease by which um DEI was able to be dismantled, right? And also the fact that you didn't see any corporations that supposedly were getting the benefits of all of this diversity being kind of like filtered up through the education system, fighting back um very hard on you know the fact that this was supposedly to the benefit of greater society. I I could I should just say that for a while I've been thinking, and I presented at a Lawn Society conference a a few years ago about writing a longer article about decommodifying. diversity. You know, that that is like a like so a socialist view of diversity should be about, you know, this is about like human flourishing and the human experience.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:13

And please go ahead and diversity, democracy, like they're all socialism because they've been so associated with capitalist imperialism. And that's a huge problem. Like what it would have like to have an active divide meaning activity and program.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:34

Yeah. Something you said at the socialism conference, um, which was I thought really great because we, you know, it was kind of under this idea of like, is there a socialist humanism that we can like retrieve? And you're like, humanism is actually kind of like a problematic word in you know politics, you know, like anthropocentrism or like this kind of like human-centered thing, obviously then there's this automatic or at least we're used to an automatic kind of exclusion, like who gets counted or something like that. But I think that this what you're just saying goes right along with that, which is what would it mean to have socialist diversity that isn't just a rehash of the stuff that has been taken away from us? What would it mean to actually transform this concept or to look back to some of our, you know, our socialist um you know forefathers, for example, uh Dewey wrote about diversity in education a long time ago, but he's been completely like washed out. And it's um you know I'm I'm excited to think about that stuff, but it does kind of like hit on like the what is to be done question, I think, pretty hard.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:42

So to say like the so this is the thing like for us for me at least for this project it's it is about questioning that approach but it's also about exposing how these institutions and how some people who teach in these institutions have not saying they weren't sincere but in some instances like at least with the administrations right at various universities how quickly they've given up on these fights to Trump just exposing they never cared. Because I'll say personally as a person of color following the George Floyd death and then the protest there was a little bit of a moment in political science of diversity and pushing for that even more. But even then it was quite calculating in my view and also very precarious to use a Kevin's term for something else. Like it was very obvious to me that some of it was just about like there were there were terms like I support but for instance I just want to say like the framing would be like this. So instead of I mean you can still say decolonize the syllabus which is important but something I kept bringing up to a lot of my peers many of them white was what we're doing is not just decolonizing. What we're doing is actually providing real history like for instance like how do you talk about the expansion of the Supreme Court without talking about the expansion of stealing of land because a lot of the Supreme Court cases had a lot to in the early decades having to do with justifying these weird uh uh uh you know relationships and contradictions between the US proper and these so-called independent nations which then were also meant to be dependent basically colonized so that was a big part of the Supreme Court so for those people liberals or conservatives who teach law in that way they're not teaching law they're teaching lies. What what we're trying to suggest and what we're trying to say that what we would like to see is a real history which is tending towards materialism and socialism but nonetheless is a reality. So those are those are the type of examples I would see in terms of framing and reframing. And then about what to do um I personally don't think this article really contends with that because that would be a whole other article what it what I would suggest to anyone is a still join an org to talk about this with more people if you're an educator. So be part of your union grad or late your faculty. But also just be the be one of those people just aware of what's what your students are bringing into the classroom. That's the other thing like if someone was to read this and they're like a colleague of mine, I would just like for them to just know and be like, oh interesting I didn't realize this is some of what they might bring into the classroom with me. And I think that's just the small end version of what a person can quote unquote do. But until we have like a revolutionary party and until we have organic intellectuals mixing it up relationally with these parties I think it's still going to be a tough swap for any one individual to sort of contend with what does it do what does it do question um of like revolutionizing the academy um we we are all teachers you know and hopefully every a lot of people who are hopefully a lot of uh teachers will read our article and um and it is you know I'm thinking about these pedagogical choices all the time right like how am I how am I positioning myself um in the classroom?

SPEAKER_05 1:11:28

Like am I actually um you know kind of centering power and power analysis in the way that I teach about politics, you know? And I think that you know pedagogically like we're all you know able to make choices about um about you know what what kind of history we teach to Sadi's point, what conceptions of democracy we offer students, right? Like do we present or do we just you know we can very easily um it's almost very difficult not to default to an understanding of democracy as synonymous with the American political system and America as synonymous with democracy. And I think that's that that concept of democracy does so much ideological work that is rarely interrogated. So even just like framing to students like what is meant by democracy in this context and what do you think of that? Like that's I've done that and it's been like very illuminating and interesting um I think we have a responsibility as educators not to set our students up for political disillusionment and apathy because if we lie to them or if we you know if we give them these kind of like nostalgic and dishonest you know representations of our history and of you know the kind of um foundations of the American political system, they will understand that that is you know I think it's to the point about DEI, it's like very disillusioning I think to a lot of our students to see the way that the universities and other institutions have completely backed off of those commitments. And I think it makes them feel like disillusioned with themselves as well and with the kind of you know commitments and that they espoused you know in 2020 or 2021. And something I've found myself saying to students is like well it's very painful to believe something and not to be able to enact it right in the world. And that can lead us to the can to just abandon the belief or the commitment right or the analysis. But that's not that's not you know that's not the only way to go right um but then they need tools for actually understanding how could we change society? Like how could we actually redress structural racism um and inequality um in order for them not to just become politically apathetic.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:03

Yeah. I what I just want to say something because I I'm and I'm uh at the risk of like bringing us back to something we've already covered in the uh some of what uh I think and actually think this is important so I'll just say it I I don't think that the civic education that readers at least in the social studies field uh is engaged in or at least trying to socialize students uh pre-service students to embrace is is actually like the kind of like banal like stuff that like some of the some of the older like uh readers might have uh embraced it's not like just saying like hey go vote and be a good person I think it's actually doing something a bit more insidious and I think what that that thing is is uh something that like all of us have spoken to at this point is doing this really uh interesting sometimes partial sometimes you know uh uh some sometimes critical uh uh a sort of conceptualization of like problems in the society so for instance you might see um you know uh a uh a reader discuss something like undocumented citizen uh undocumented folks' rights and and injustices they experience right and I think that's like that that's an interesting thing right in it in it and it positions the reader to be uh uh uh the the reader as in the the text uh to be like uh sort of embraced as like a sort of progressive text the the sleight of hand though is that what it what it often does encourages you to do like and so it embraces like a sort of critical take on these things but the sleight of hand is that it encourages you to think about these issues as disconnected from um political economy and to understand not just uh in and even if it like so yes it it it does ask folks to sort of think about like what their own sort of individual level of participation will be uh you know around uh these issues but it but it also it also you know the one reader uh I think the 2021 social studies reader uh which I think had an sort of uh an explicitly um you know uh critical framing I can't remember the title of that one um but it it was it was like you know uh it it it you know was encouraging about like protest politics right and so like there there are these like really interesting ways that like these readers are asking people to do more than the banal like sort of civic participation stuff but it's but it's always disconnect it's it is never for asking them to question the uh structural the structures and relationships to uh our our relationship to to uh labor our relationship to capital our relationship to uh capitalist democracy all of those things are off the table for for question and critique and so you the the the most you can do is think about like you know why these things are problems and to get together with some people and like express your grievance about these issues and then that is and that's that's it right and that's that's sort of like where we're that's those are the tools we're sort of left with to sort of think about like our way out of these things. So it's it's it it it does this really good job of like and I think I see this with my students um and I teach mostly like PhD and EDD students there is they they are really bereft of of of an of an analysis of social change that doesn't include like that that that isn't like super individualist um you know like teachers who are like you know I'm just gonna go in a classroom and I'm gonna teach these issues uh that we're talking about in class and I'm like yeah that's great and I think I think that that's actually wonderful but like what what does it look like for you to organize with your your teacher peers to do so like to to sort of make a structural intervention or what does it look like for you to organize with the community and the students to sort of impose like you know to build power to impose uh a curriculum and impose like a mandate around teaching some of these things like that's that's what I'm what I'm trying to get you to do. And I think civic education does not offer young people uh a framework to think about things in that way because it's it's it's always asking them to participate in the in the in the sort of given democratic process uh as it exists.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:23

Yeah and I think the issue thing you're saying just reminds me of the sort of Solinsky method of community organizing where everything is around like people's one issue. Like what is the issue that you care about and are going to invest yourself in rather than making these issues actionable and organizing around them. Instead it's about advocacy right like or like the most you can do is advocacy. And I was just going to say Kevin that it's interesting you mentioned 2021 reader having this part where it says protest is good because they would have been missing completely if they had not put that in there because the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter happened the year before. And I remember when that happened and it was you know during the pandemic everyone was like what can we teach in order to address this right and I actually started teaching a course that I'd already had been thinking about called police power that sort of related both to COVID as well as you know the protests that were happening and it was you know through a Marxist critique of power but also kind of like a survey course about the concept of police power in the United States. But everyone was like looking to be like, oh this will be popular. This will be the thing that like hooks the students. And I think that for political education what we want to do is um give people the tools to be able to essentially create participation within their own development and education and consciousness rather than just being like entertained or otherwise you know kind of like ah yes I have just inculcated some knowledge into myself and now I have built myself, right? It's more kind of like what does it do to actually give people the ability to um participate deeply in their own education and part of this is about asking questions that then get people in connection with each other, right? To um think about like who could I talk to about this who'd be who want to make this issue actionable with me and actually like work on it together and like make it into something more to try to change things, right? Because I think that what you say in your article is about like social change, but there's no content given, right? It's like the individual it's up to the individual to like figure out like what their limit is for social change. And usually it's like voting maybe going to a protest um you know maybe getting an internship at like you know uh some like washperger or like you know one of the perks or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:56

What it I do think they give some actionable items but it's very messy and muddled. So like the disconnect part that Kevin talked about is the is really very intentional right so you kind of have to piece things together a lot. And obviously the main thing is to say to student because they do mention right wing populism in the other reader as being the problem then it sort of disappears from the rest of the text so they are they're trying to touch things to make them seem relevant. So I think these readers also reflect a lot of the contradictions of our fields and the contradictions are emerging from class contradictions racial but also empire I I keep relating because for for instance um and actually going because I want to say something about Palestine but before that political education's purpose is about yes um getting people actionable but it's also like I kind of mentioned before it's about teaching clarity like actual stuff like I want all of us to position ourselves as the real people who know what people need to know. Because even if like at the end of our article we talked about briefly what a political education program would look like and we do say that even if you're a student who's not a Marxist, this is not just meant for everyone who's a Marxist obviously we'd prefer if everyone was but let's say you are a student involved in just getting your rent reduced the way that civic education would position that in the American context is to lobby your politician your city council to go to New Brunswick City Council. What we are saying is that that's not objectively true. Objectively you would need to go to or you need to know who your enemy is and your enemy is not just the politician it's the developers behind them who may have other sessions during the week that you're not part of so even if your if your mindset's not revolutionary you still need to know thy enemy right you need to know the the the the actual political landscape and civic education however meaningful the people are because I'm not arguing again that they're insincere it's not it's not giving the right clarity to students to really activate even on the liberal end what they need to do. So advocacy to your point they're actually teaching their students to advocate for sure but even on the smaller things they need to advocate for they're giving them the wrong analysis. Like even if you care about racial discrimination which I do you're not going to get far just by lobbying the administration of a university without realizing that administration is also beholden to other interests. So that's kind of what I think political education should be doing which is clarifying the actual political landscape that people are in.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:37

Yeah. And I just I think it's a form of in in it it's a form of diseducation or miseducation. I think what we're talking about with political education is actually the kind of work that we need to do to overcome the propagandized forms of education about our society that civic education inheres uh most of the time young people who are talking about like uh how to change things in it in at least in my our uh in my classes uh are like have a really limited framework for thinking about change and and it's not at all a an accident or a coincidence right I mean you know every every semester everyone has this dramatic awakening they had no idea there were banana wars they have no idea that that you know United Fruit Company existed uh and it still exists as Chiquita Banana and you know is uh responsible for some of like the the most horrific uh uh um you know uh uh crimes against humanity in uh Latin America and these are and and these are people who have been in the field teaching as social studies educators or it's teaching uh um elementary school students uh for for decades right and so and so there is there is also an a an a a matter that like naming accurately like what we're up against not just uh like a like a sort of uh a banal or uh uh uh toothless form of uh of education about society it's actually one that is depoliticizes and is asking people to be more domesticated in their in their um engagement with like the the the you know horrific things that like happen under capitalism colon colonialism yeah I think domesticated is a an a great word because part of this is also turning students into obedient participants in capitalism um since we're all college level educators you know what we see often are students who have aspirations to you know not be part of the quote unquote middle class which we know doesn't exist right but also to not be you know somebody who who's who's precarious right like who who who wants to like have a life and and everything and I think that what what you were saying um about the insidiousness of of this and and and it's also like let's be let's be frank they're struggling to get it past the censors you know it's not like these books can just like be put out and you know with uh with the message when they're being put through you know it's a it's a whole industry you know textbooks are a whole industry and um they're responsive right to like the market and they're trying to sell to as many uh schools as they can and all and all of that but as educators you know when we're thinking about what could we do to also um supplement these things with some you know some synthesis right like what what are the kinds of things that we can kind of pull out because you know one of my um adjectives I describe myself as I'm an eclectic Marxist you know like I don't just deny the worth of like you know lots of theory um because it doesn't happen to be Marxist or maybe it's an anti-Marxist but part of the skill one of the key skills I would say maybe the the ultimate skill is teaching students how to do synthesis without then becoming relativist right like without then becoming you know kind of what you said Mia is disillusioned but I would say even like disillusionment can sometimes lead to radicalism, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:27:20

If you're like if you really hit rock bottom but disillusionment can also just get to like oh well I guess I can't do anything and like I'm just gonna follow along now. Yeah. Anyway it was an excellent article and um I just wanted to ask before we wrap up is there anything that you can suggest on um what you'd recommend to people listening if they'd like to learn more that's not about the article or something that is more accessible if you're not part of an um an academic community that you would say like you know kind of hits on some of these ideas?

SPEAKER_05 1:27:52

I would say read's new book. I was gonna say just out with with um uh university University of what's it called, Kevin? Oh yeah, go for it, Kevin. You entered me.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:09

Yeah, this is this is not a video podcast, but uh I guess this is activism, youth political education, and free market common sets.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:16

Excellent, excellent. We'll put a link to that in the the show notes. Um, but anything else um that folks should read?

SPEAKER_05 1:28:23

You could also read Sudeep's or listen all read and listen to Sudeep's um public-facing work, but lots of really excellent podcast interviews that touch on a lot of the themes of the article.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:39

Sudeep has too many to list.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:42

Yeah, I guess. Um I'm trying to think. Well, I'm also I just wanted to bring up one last thing to be annoying, which is related to the book. I know this is not a video podcast, but uh I would recommend, because this is also free, Ghassan Khanafani's uh The Revolution of 36 to 39 in Palestine. Um the I just want to add the thing about this article that's important is because we were correct on this one very fundamental thing, which was kind of wave through. Uh regardless of the era, whether it's been pre or post-Trump, there isn't any discussion about a US empire. I I keep repeating that. And the main contradiction I've seen with my students is Palestine. So a lot of my students are coming to class feeling a little bit confused because they're seeing all the images of people being burnt alive, killed by the Israelis and the Zionists, but then no one brings it up, which is its own form of weird gaslighting and psychosis that's created for them. And they tell me that because I asked, I have I have been taking more of a insistent approach, let's say, on really naming the names, meaning like this is wrong, this is a genocide, blah, blah, blah. There's no two sides to it. Like to your point, there's no relativism. But I do often offer them articles about how to get how we got here. I go through the UN website, things are seen as objective. But I just want to say, in our in our article, we mentioned how US empire is not named ever. The only time there's any discussion about empire, it's always like China, bizarrely, which is bullshit. And then when it comes to Palestine, you can find exactly what we're describing in this article with us today, which is progressive or liberal, except for Palestine. We have a genocide going on, but I have all my students keep saying there's no one else in a lot of the departments having to do with social science, bringing up anything. And when Ukraine was invaded, I remember distinctly political scientists rushing to now name the name of colonialism. And so I want to refer to Ghassan Khanafani because he was a co-founder of PFLP. He was assassinated by the Israelis along with his niece, who I think was 17 years old, and he has a lot of amazing work, which is actually quite accessible. Um, so one of it is the revolution of 36 to 39. And I just wanted to mention that because I still feel suffocated. Like I am always paranoid teaching about Palestine because I feel like that's the that's the other red line that's kind of intimated in art. It's dangerous, and it's dangerous for those of us of color, all of whom are here talking about it. Mia, Kevin, and I like we do feel a sense of like people will also assume things about us off rip, which kind of weirdly pushes us to that decision-making part. But there's a lot of people of color, white and people of color, who've not broached this issue. And I think it's uh it also tells you again how civic education is a lie. If you don't talk about Palestine, you are lying to your students and you're preparing them for a future in which they're just gonna be, to Nier's point, quite confused and dispassionate because internally they know something is going on, but they're being told to not care. And then finally, one of my students did bring up Epstein. A lot of my students did bring up Epstein a lot. And again, I asked them, do people bring it up? And they say no, and then they tell me like it just feels weird. Yeah, so reality is sorted.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:58

I mean, that's part of it too. It's like it's like a really gross and sorted thing to talk about, and students also um might not know how to talk about it in terms of uh political ruling class connected to capital because it is like obviously very creepy, conspira like conspiracy laden and all of this stuff. And I would say if I were a teenager who has not been prepared well to kind of like interrogate these things, I would feel embarrassed and like un and and like feel like I'm like, how do I talk about this without sounding like some kind of pervert?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:35

You know, yeah. I bring it up because one of my students, I was asking them something to do with just general politics, and one of them brought it up and said, she said, how it just reinforced what she was thinking and how it just made her mind basically melt because it was just so, like you said, sorted. But also the language of power in politics, it's there, attempted. Like I'm talking about social science. If you're in STEM, you know, whatever. Do I this is also just my take on STEM. God, you know, God bless you. You're great. STEM is amazing. They're they're the only field that matters, apparently. So anyway, so just whatever. Just like, you know, God bless, not a chef's kiss. But all I'm saying is that they bring it up because there's a tension between the reality of what they're living and a tension between what they're supposed to be thinking. And one last thing. We're also pushing against the idea of lived experience to Kevin and Nia's earlier point of view about Freire, F that. There's always been revolutionaries who said you need to read. I'm sorry, as a person of color, there is a ceiling to what I knew. I I was an Obama person because I was saying, okay, I elect somebody, he's gonna do the thing, and he also knows about Hindus and Muslim folks, which I'm growing up. I learned through reading, this is an recycled process of trying to get us away from other alternatives. So reading is important, lived experience, Kukodian logic is limited on purpose. Not everything you learn is gonna come from your personal conviction. You're gonna have to read and learn collectively and go to amazing professors like Kevin and Mie, who are going to, you know, give you stuff that's difficult, and that's okay. Yeah, and me, which I'm just gonna be ranting about Foucault every single class, like Foucault, whatever, or Heidegger. But I'm just saying, me, Kevin and Mie are amazing scholars, and that's the other thing. Like, this is about scholarship, and we're losing that with these sort of civic education trainings as well. Sorry, I just couldn't help myself with that.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:31

I just want to add one thing. I am Sudeep. Um reading is fundamental.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:36

Let's be let's be totally clear. This is a reading yes podcast.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:40

Yeah, we have to we have to learn and we have to change um in order to have um, you know, have have uh be equipped to, you know, to actually try to um make this society less depraved. Um but I wanted to just also add as a recommendation, yeah, to Sidip's point about Palestine and its the effect on students of the silence, silence and silencing around Palestine and the academy, um, to democra to the point concept of democracy. I mean, I've been I've been teaching this like um required class at BARD that's all about like American democracy, which is why I'm talking so much about American democracy. But what a contradiction that they're living through, right? There's like over there has been for a very long time overwhelming, you know, public support for a ceasefire, and yet the genocide continues with our tax dollars, right? Um, the war in on Iran is compl is not popular at all with any part of the American public, and yet it continues unabated. And so, you know, if we we have it's just like you said about like being speaking the truth, right? Like speaking to reality, right? Like that in what what concept of democracy do you need to have to call this society a democracy while those things are happening, right? There is no alignment between there's a this is like a 2014 study that I keep citing, but I wish they would do it again so it could be more um more credible. But there was this study by two um in Perspectives on Politics by two uh like Princeton political scientists about the relationship between people's policy preferences and policy outcomes in the United States. And they found that there's no correlation between ordinary people's policy preferences and policy outcomes from Congress, but there is a positive correlation between elite policy preferences and policy outcomes, right? So it's just like, you know, when we're talking about democracy, like let's start there, right? Um, and on that point, one reading suggestion, Jodie Dean's like pretty old book, um, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Um, it's very provocative. I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to figure out what I think about democracy.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:49

Well, it's Jody Dean. She's provocative.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:51

And I love that. I love that about her. But the chapter on democracy, I think, is like the best thing I've read, really kind of um um interrogating the meaning of democracy and posing the question of like, is this a recoverable concept, given the ends to which it's been put specifically by US imperialism? So I think that that's just a great um place to start in thinking um critically about the discourse of uh political science and civic education.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:21

Yeah, on that, and just to sort of wrap things up, I also think the point you made about the fact that policy outcomes and policy preferences are so far apart, this should actually be very encouraging for socialists because while we're constantly being told people will not accept socialism, people won't no, that's actually not true because working class people have an interest, right? Like they have a very a set of very um clear common interests and um you know political priorities that are uh denied to them, um, both through the education that they they are are served up, right, through through the schools, as you guys like it sort of um pull out, and also through these kinds of you know, uh media machinations. And and the thing is, is that a lot of us, you know, who are both organizers and educators, I find that my organizing and my educating go hand in hand and they kind of like play off of each other and learn from each other, right? I've become a better organizer because of my uh the fact that I'm an educator and vice versa. And so much of this is also about pulling people closer to the truth, even if it takes longer than one conversation, and it certainly isn't necessarily the case that you can just tell somebody something and they believe it. But part of this is also about giving people the agency or showing people how they can, how they can gain the agency to question the world that they live in and direct it towards their interests and those of other people and finding commonality in others, which is, I think, part of this diversity, you know, like what it could mean to have a sort of socialist reclamation of diversity. It's like, what is the difference between diversity and just celebrating difference? Well, diversity is also about the world we actually live in. The fact that this is the world we really live in. Not, you know, people are not uniform, right? People do not have, you know, are not monoliths, uh, racial groups are not monoliths, women are not monoliths, these people, you know, we're not monoliths. What we are, though, are people who have the power of language. We have the power of communication, we have the power of of being part of a society, right? And how do we, how do we shape that? Um, being honest with each other, really. Like I found that in organizing and in in education, students and people who are just on the doors appreciate it when you are direct with them and you're not trying to manipulate them, right? And they're you're not trying to politics them, right? And you're speaking to their interests. And I think that this is, you know, this has been a great conversation just about like what that looks like from uh an education point of view, from like what it really means to provide a comprehensive and and uh grounded civic education that directs people towards like what do you really think about this, right? Like what like what and what are the ways that you feel empowered and not disillusioned? So we'll end it there. And I just want to thank all of you, Mia, Sudeep, and Kevin, for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:28

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:29

Thank you so much for having us.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:31

This was really um interesting and yeah, um a useful conversation for me.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:37

Thanks as always to our guests and our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put this all together. Class is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media. But the best way to find out what our committee is up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. And if you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. Okay, until next time, solidarity.