Rogers Smith on the Campbell Conversations

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Issues of race are once again front and center in this November's presidential election. My guest today on the Campbell Conversations has coauthored a new book arguing that the lines of division on this topic have been changing in important ways. Rogers Smith is a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And the title of his book, written with Desmond King at Oxford University is, "America's New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair". Rogers, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you.

Rogers Smith: Great to be here, Grant.

GR: Well, thanks for making the time. And let me just start with a very basic question about the book. You know, to me, the racial battle lines feel pretty familiar in a lot of ways. So explain how they have changed, do you think.

RS: It's important to understand that throughout American history, there have always been dominant racial issues that have defined different eras. Slavery versus anti-slavery, pro-Jim Crow segregation versus anti-segregation. But those divisions were resolved, at least as a matter of law, in the 1960’s with the civil rights laws that ushered us into a new era of racial politics in which conservatives no longer championed racial segregation. But they did insist that we should embrace colorblind public policies, some out of a sincere conviction that this is what our principles should be, others because they recognize that colorblind policies were a barrier to something conservatives had always feared. Just because whites had committed injustices against blacks and other people of color throughout US history, conservatives feared that there would be a push to privileged people of color over whites, and so they urged colorblind public policies to prevent that. Now, many liberals felt that we needed race conscious policies to integrate all of America's institutions. And the battle between conservative, colorblind positions and liberal positions championing race conscious measures like affirmative action and majority minority representative districts, that went on through the late 20th century and into the early 21st century. Now something has changed. Our argument is that conservatives over the last couple of decades, especially perceive the left as more militant, seeking not just integration of American institutions, but more radical transformations. And so they don't talk about colorblindness very much. They talk about the they do sometimes in litigation, but their political discourse is about the need to protect more traditionalist, conservative Americans, especially white Christian Americans, against what they see as a radical left. And on the left, it is true that many civil rights champions came to feel that integration into existing American institutions wasn't enough. There was too much systemic racism in American institutions, and they needed more dramatic repair to achieve racial equity in one way or another. And so, instead of colorblind versus race conscious measures, we see the modern debates as a battle between those who want to protect traditionalist Americans against those who want to repair the systemic racism they see in American institutions. And that's a much more polarized clash.

GR: Right. Yeah, no, it does sound that way. So when you say repair, I immediately think of reparations. And that's something that you talk about. And obviously reparations have become a pretty loaded term. You just say there's very polarized debate over this. When we talk about reparations, what exactly are we talking about?

RS: Well, one of the findings of the book is that we're talking about something different than we did historically. I should note that in polls, most Americans oppose reparations. And that's why many champions