Briahna, a lawyer and political consultant who served as press secretary for Bernie Sanders, co-hosts the superb podcast Bad Faith. I start our enjoyable convo with a simple question: how can we best facilitate the flourishing of black America? I’m trying to reach out and engage more people I have disagreements with, to see where we might have common ground. I’m immensely grateful to Briahna for coming on.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two excerpts of my conversation with Briahna — on the extent to which culture plays a role in poverty, and on the causes behind the sky-high murder rates of young African-American men — head over to our YouTube page.

After listening to last week’s episode with Antonio García Martínez, a reader writes:

While I agree with you on most topics, I have never been able to grasp the logic of your position on immigration. In your conversation with Martínez, you explained that the core reason you support more limited immigration is for the purpose of maintaining the cultural status quo. For you, it doesn’t seem to ultimately be about economics or logistics or crime, just aesthetics.

My question is, why do you think that as an individual person you have any right to decide “what London culturally feels like,” or something similar? Why should your aesthetic preferences about cities have meaningful implications for public policy? And furthermore, what about those of us who enjoy having a few really culturally diverse cities in the world like London and New York? Do we get any say about it?

First off, it’s not aesthetics. I’m not even sure what you mean by that. It’s simply about not creating such massive and sudden demographic change that it threatens the cohesion and common identity of a nation-state. It’s about slowing migration, to encourage social stability and some measure of cultural continuity, not stopping it altogether. And of course I don’t decide. Voters do. And in such a situation, big multicultural cities are not threatened at all.

Next up, a perennial dissent:

I am sure you have heard this before, but I think that the experiences of African Americans cannot be compared to other immigrants. I believe you give short shrift to the ongoing experience and sensibilities of black people in the US. While it is true, as you pointed out in your conversation with Mr. Martínez, that slavery and discrimination were not created in the US, it held a special place, which I believe you minimize.

In my lifetime I have seen the tail end of Jim Crow, the redlining, the mistreatment of Black students in schools, the unwillingness of academic departments to come to grips with the longstanding double standards towards Black applicants and faculty. I was alive, although somewhat young, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and during the backlash, the creation of “private” white schools. The Civil Rights Movement occurred when I was an adult. Anti-miscegenation laws were ended when I was an adult as well. I was alive when the Voting Rights Act was passed, and when it was gutted recently because Chief Justice Roberts thinks that discrimination in access to voting no longer exists.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.  

We need to consider the experiences of Black people who have this as part of their memories, and of their parents’ and grandparents’ memories. The effect of the experiences of Jews in Nazi Germany on their children and grandchildren are taken seriously, more seriously than the effect of slavery and the brutal experiences that lasted well into the present on the minds and sensibilities of Blacks. 

Discrimination is not over. There is ample empirical evidence that Blacks are still not treated equally, even though less unequally than in the past. But it seems like there is a real desire for them to forget their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences and even their own, and act as if they do not matter.

I know you know all this, and I know you take it seriously, but I do think that the way you have discussed this history, and the ongoing effects of this history, has been dismissive. I do hope that you find merit in my argument and will examine how you have presented this in your past discussions.

I do see a great deal of merit in what you are saying. The African-American experience in this country is indeed unique in its historic enmeshment with evil. The question is how we respond to that inheritance. And I think the woke left’s insistence that history can never be overcome, that the US needs to be dismantled for liberation to arrive, and that African Americans are uniquely incapable of agency because of “white supremacy,” to be unhelpful, if not downright counter-productive. You can acknowledge deeply the victimhood, without being defined by it. This is not a new tension: it has engaged black America for centuries. I think the current emphasis is off — and that we need more empowerment, and less victimhood.

Another reader thinks all the debate over critical race theory is rarified and unnecessary:

I have enjoyed your writing for years, and though I’m not a full subscriber, I get your Dish emails. Your style is excellent, thoughts insightful, and I generally agree with your positions. What has disappointed me lately is your focus on CRT and gender issues.

I don’t disagree with your position on these issues, but I disagree with the amount of focus you are putting on them. If this were truly an existential threat to America, maybe it would be worth being the sole issue worth covering. But unlike you, I don’t see it as a menace, because I disagree with your evidence that it is taking over America and the Democratic party. It may be that Biden has swung left since being elected, and that he has either tacitly or actively begun promoting CRT and sex-doesn’t-exist policies. But remember that most voters didn’t know he would do that. He won the Democratic primary by a large margin.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, I like to point out to people, were two of the very few candidates who didn’t put their preferred pronouns on their social media profiles. People like Julian Castro, who complained that National Women’s Month was insufficiently celebratory of trans women, didn’t even register to voters. The woke crowd candidates got nowhere. Running on “white people are the problem” got zero votes in the Democratic primary.

Sanders, while far to the left on economic issues, and who came in second, is hardly the champion of this postmodernist thought. His campaigns have been built on the assumption that racial and gender issues hardly matter and that economic concerns unite people across all backgrounds — a strategy that was highly successful. Meanwhile, Uncle Joe ran on being a moderate, folksy, bipartisan, soul-of-America healer-in-chief. Whatever these politicians are doing now, the vast majority of Democratic voters had no interest in this postmodernist, CRT nonsense, and indicated as much with their votes.

You complain that the elites give too much credence to CRT and the like, yet you do the same thing. You are giving it so much air time. Why? Most people don’t care. I live in Oakland, CA. Almost everyone I know votes Democratic. And you know what? Not one has anyone ever brought up critical theory. We don’t sit around self-flagellating ourselves over our whiteness or straightness or what-have-you. I rarely even talk about this with my politics-obsessed friends who live in DC from when I used to live there. So how are you and I getting such different impressions?

The reason I think you perceive this as so prevalent is because of social media. You probably spend a lot of time on Twitter. And if you don’t, the other elites you hang out with or hear about or interact with, do. This has created such a warped perspective of the world. I am very confident that if you spent less time online, and more time talking to average people (people who pay attention to politics every four years and know more “The Bachelor” contestants than sitting senators), or even time talking to people who care about politics but don’t live in a certain political and media milieu, you’d find that this isn't as relevant as you think.

I’m sorry but the adoption of critical race theory by every major cultural and media institution, government at all levels, and corporate America, is a big deal even if many people are unaware of what’s going on. A generation of kids is being taught that liberal democracy is oppressive and must be dismantled, that the central meaning of their own country is persecution of the non-white, that white people are all vehicles of white supremacy, even when they are trying not to be, and so on. That’s a huge deal. Ideas matter.

From a reader on the ground, in the classroom:

I am a great fan of the Dish who, living in a bright-blue suburb of Boston, has found your columns very helpful over the past couple of years. It is very disorienting to observe so many of my friends shifting left without being aware of it, and feeling left out and isolated when my discomfort about the Successor Ideology is ridiculed. But lately, like you, I have felt that people are beginning to recalibrate their outrage, much to my relief.