Suburban Eastern Australia.

An environment that has over time evolved some extraordinarily

unique groups of homo sapiens.

But today we observe a small tribe akin to a group of mere cats that gather together

a top, a small mound to watch question and discuss the current events of their city,

their country, and their world at large.

Let's listen keenly and observe this group fondly known as the

Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove.

Hello and welcome to Your Listener.

Yes, the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove Podcast episode 382.

We're back this time a special episode.

I'm Trevor a K a, the Iron Fist.

With me sometimes with book reviews and other things.

Where he pushes back is Paul from Canberra.

How are you Paul?

Greetings from Nu Oil Country.

Pretty well.

Yourself?

I'm well, so well, dear listener, normally at this part of the podcast I say that

this is a podcast where we talk about news and politics and sex and religion and all

the things you're not supposed to talk about at a dinner party because we are

fearless debaters of dangerous topics.

But tonight, dear listener, we're entering the realm of talking

about racism and the history of it.

It's morphing into identity politics and other issues.

Cause we're doing a book review of Kenon Malick's book

called Not So Black and White.

So if you thought we covered dangerous topics before you ain't seen nothing yet.

I'm a bit concerned about this one.

Paul.

Yes.

I I feel like we are going to cover news, politics, sex, and religion Definitely.

And, you know, racism and more besides on this one, so, mm, definitely.

Yeah, I'm going to definitely whip this one straight off of YouTube because

I think it'll just send the algorithm crazy when it looks at the transcript.

You know, I was, I was preparing my notes for this Paul cuz I was, I

read the book a few weeks ago and I had some notes and then I was making

some more notes this afternoon.

I was dictating them into a Word document and as I was dictating, if

I mentioned the word negro word would not write the word and would just

do a series of star type symbols.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I I, I'm not surprised that a voice recognition is just going

to quietly edit that one out.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So, so that one has had me worried about the prospects of this recording

lasting on the YouTube channel.

Anyway, we'll see how we go.

And if you're in the chat room, say hello and make your comments.

So let me just minimize the screen so I can look at my notes.

So Paul I said I wanted this book, not so black and white.

And one of the reasons I wanted it, because it talks about race and identity,

and I think this is a good background warmup for subsequent discussions

about the voice and indigenous rights.

And so I don't know about you, but as I was reading it, I was constantly

referring back to that issue and the Australian experience about race and.

And how we think about race in this country in the context of the voice.

Yeah.

And I was going to ask you, because the book talks about, like, there's a lot

of discussion about the US experience of racism and how these issues have

played, played out, but it's, you know, there's obviously quite a bit different

to how Australia has experienced that.

And I was really kind of interested in your, where you saw those

contrasts and where and similarities.

Mm-hmm.

It is, you're right.

There was a fair bit of the African-American experience and

really not much about the Native American Indian experience.

In the book Canon Malach actually, actually, I tried to

find a pronunciation for him.

Some places they say Kenan Maek, some places Kenan Maek.

So I'm just not exactly sure what to do.

But Kenan Mallek himself was a Pakistani sort of ethnicity who grew up in the uk.

Mm-hmm.

So, but you're right, there is a fair amount of reference to sort of

the Black American experience, which doesn't have the land rights issue

attached to it like it does for Native Americans or indigenous Australians.

So that is sort of left out of the book that although property does come

into it, which we'll get to property rights, it wasn't mentioned of it

because I think there was also a quote in there from Abraham Lincoln who

imagined that, I'm kind of paraphrasing here, but the, the The idea the, the

logical result of the emancipation of the slaves was they would just go back

to Africa and colonize some bit of Africa really wasn't used in, in there.

Did you?

I didn't remember that quote, but it doesn't surprise me.

Some of the founding fathers of the Constitution and then, and sort of

leaders from previous eras had some fairly well racist ideas or notions

or things which were common for the time but would be outlandish today.

Yeah.

And, and I, because I think that one, like one of the themes that I saw

through the book was that question of.

Integration versus assimilation versus separation.

The different ideas about whether it was even possible for races

to live beside each other.

And I'm just wondering what, what you sort of thought out of, you know,

what you got out of that and where, how you sort of see that issue.

You know, by the end of it, by the end of the book, he was saying, for example,

the guy who came up with critical race theory was quite despairing about the

prospects of ever getting rid of racism.

And, and they were really saying that if you took that view, that racism

could never be abolished, then.

You ended up actually maybe I can find that little bit where where

it talks about you, you end up just going for performative results cuz

you've given up on substantive stuff.

So you look for numbers of indigenous people in positions of power and you

look for window dressing as opposed to substantive things because you've

given up on the substantive things.

Was, was kind of one of the arguments there.

So, I'll just give a little intro.

So, so the book purports to be the history of race from white

supremacy to identity politics.

And I think it does achieve that certainly runs through a history and I

think that's important, Paul, to look at how these things evolve is really

important when you're trying to answer.

Modern day questions, and we could look at that in terms of some other

topics that we've been talking about.

Like if you are looking at Russia and Ukraine, for example, and trying to come

to a decision about what's going on there and who's right and who's wrong, you have

to understand the creation of NATO and what has been happening over the last 50

to 70 years in relation to NATO and, and the changes that have happened there.

And you have to look at what's, yeah, happened with Ukrainian politics and

American interference, and you just can't look at the last two years

and, and give a comprehensive, have a comprehensive understanding of, of the

issue without that sort of background history and context to put it all in.

Same with you know, the current you know, conflicts.

Well beat up conflict with China and the Chinese response is going

to be so much heavier that they're not gonna be dominated by anybody

cuz they had a hundred years of that and they're not gonna do it anymore.

That's a really big thing to know about Chinese mentality in that one.

If you just examined the people and players of today without taking that

into account, you'd be losing context.

And yeah.

Even things like interest rates in the economy, like our current, the low

interest rates that we experienced until very recently, that's all a function

of what's happened in since the Great Depression in a, in a series of events.

And to get to those low interest rates, you really had to

appreciate all these things.

So my point is, it's good to have this background to understand where we're at.

And, and I mean that's a good example as well.

Like you've given a couple of really good examples there of how the politics

in a situation and how that's, that sort of is portrayed in the media.

I mean, you know, the, the China issue being a classic example for the people

that only read the Sydney Morning Herald and trust that to get their

news from, or you know, only watch nine they're probably looking at.

You know, thinking, well, it's perfectly obvious that China needs to be restrained

here if you're not looking at the history and the wider politics of it.

So I guess here especially with the sort of that issue of identity politics in

the book, do you think that is a kind of recent thing that misunderstands the past?

I think people have a really shallow understanding of where we're at

in terms of racism and identity.

Politics really shallow.

I have been looking at the commentary on the voice because I've wanted to when

I eventually do this episode, you know, quote people who are for the voice,

quote, people who are against the voice.

Discuss the ideas, and I find that the arguments on both sides are incredibly

shallow and really the people or the voice tend to be both sides, invariably shallow.

No talk of class.

I have not seen a single modern commentator talking about class.

And you know, I'm banging on about class as as an issue.

Nobody has mentioned it.

And, but when you look at this book and you look at the players involved from

Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, various other people who I hadn't heard of

before, Franz Fannon, a Mariama Baraka, a whole host of important characters who

were big in black Panther movement and black power and all that sort of stuff.

Talked a lot about class.

Yes.

And none of that is spoken about in this contemporary discussion about

indigenous matters that I've seen.

Cuz I tell you, I would've highlighted it and stuck into

my notes if I'd have seen it.

So I think the conversation's very shallow.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that, because I'd heard Noel Pearson's Boyer

lectures recently, which were about the voice, and very interesting to

hear the approach that he's taking, which in part is like a kind of, it's

a bad summary, but I, I would say that his view comes from the idea of.

The bringing back respect for the Aboriginal people and the aboriginal

culture in ways that he believes has been sort of systematically removed.

But also there's one where he talk, one boy lecture where he talks about

aiming for full employment and mm-hmm.

I have a bunch of problems with the idea of full employment, but the

interesting thing there is the, he talks about not just full employment

for Aboriginal people, but full employment for everyone that wants a job.

Whether they're, you know, white or black immigrant or native, you know, anything.

And that to me, I.

Seems to be about the class struggle of the working class versus the the employer

class, much more than it is about race.

Would you sort of Well, it is, and I would've thought this whole

voice discussion would've been a distraction from that issue.

I dunno how he would've tied in promoting the voice as being

anything to do with that topic.

I dunno how he could've brought the two in together.

I'd have to re-listen to the episode two.

We could have segue those two together.

I have no idea.

But I, I, the other aspect which I saw in the book there, and there's a whole

sort of chapter on the, the class, both sort of the, the working class and their,

there, there's that sort of contrast between the, the basket of deplorables

and the, the, the coastal elites.

And that, how did, how did that class struggle there, flow into the racism

that Kennon talks about in the book?

Well, Kenon makes the point that you never hear the expression, the

black working class you never hear.

The Muslim working class, working class is, is for whites and in, in discussion

the, the black ethnic groupings.

Discussed as if there is no class distinction amongst them.

That's what infuriates me.

This idea that they are all the same.

They all think the same.

Mm-hmm.

There is no class difference, that they're all suffering the same.

It frustrates the hell out of me.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

So I, I think there's a lack of recognition of that.

And I give the same example regularly of, you know, the Jonathan Thurston's

of the world not needing extra privileges or powers, cuz he's got

way more than what he should have.

The guy was responsible for a football stadium in, in Townsville, but even

people in Townsville didn't want.

I said, we don't need that.

We've already got a stadium that's big enough.

So, yeah, he's got a voice.

Don't worry about that.

Yeah.

But I guess I also wondered there.

Like I felt another theme in that struggle was I can't remember who said

it particularly, but the, the idea that the the white working class were

played off against the African-American working class as in, you know, the,

the white people need to be, the white working class, need to be afraid

of the African-Americans because they'll take your jobs kind of stuff.

Yes.

Yeah.

And that sort of fed into some of that racism.

Did you, where, how did you see that playing out in the book?

Mm, I didn't see that emphasized in the book.

In terms of the white working class historically.

I thought it was very interesting when he was talking about.

Indentured servants in America.

So, what he was saying at around page 65 actually was when the first

Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there.

They were English and their children were English.

Whiteness as an identity just like race had to be constructed.

So the people at that time didn't consider themselves white.

They thought themselves as English.

And that was in 1619.

And then by the end of the 17th century, American plantations were

worked mainly by African slave labor.

But in the initial decades there was a large European indentured

servant work, working there.

And basically the servants were cheaper than slaves and could be worked as hard.

Slaves were slaves for life, so could not be compelled to work harder by

threats of extended entrainment.

So, so yeah, there was a, okay, actually in the early days quite a large body

of white indentured servants who would get beaten and treated just as badly

as the black slaves in the initial sort of creation of the United States.

So, yeah, and he, he makes the point that just historically with

slavery, it wasn't a, a race issue.

And, and it race actually itself didn't come about until a more modern,

it's a more modern construction race.

People were defined by their community, their laws, their culture,

where they lived rather than by the color of their skin in sort of,

Pre-modern times was his argument.

Mm-hmm.

He gives different references to this and mm-hmm.

You know, black people had black slaves, white people had white slaves and a

variety of slaves and they were just poor, unfortunate in the community who

were in the slave class, no matter.

Yeah.

But they had the same color.

The color didn't come into it.

And, and I guess I, I was thinking as well cuz I've read a series of historical

fiction set in ancient Rome where of course slavery was perfectly standard

and, you know, there was just a slave class and if you are, you know, you

could free your slaves if you are, you know, decided to in your will.

But, And, you know, they were to be traded and sold and, and you could be you, you

know, you could be brought to punishment if you killed the slave, but only if

it was someone else's slave, because that would be destruction of property.

Hmm.

And no one particularly talks about those slaves being, you know, African

or from the captured Germanic tribes or anything other than just some of

them are better slaves than others.

Yes.

It was a completely colored, blind situation.

Yeah.

So, so slavery didn't arise because of of color.

It arose simply because of, that's where they managed to buy the cheap labor from.

If they'd have been white cheap labor in Africa, they would've

done the same thing and.

But what his argument is in this book is that you had the enlightenment and you

had these theories of universality and the equality of rights of men, but you

had at the same time, people preaching equality, but then practicing slavery.

Yeah.

And, and the argument in the book is that eventually what came about

was race became an excuse as to why these people weren't treated equally.

And yeah, it was, it was an excuse to soothe the, the and comfort people who

knew that they were in breach of a new moral code, but it was, they still wanted

them, the money and the cheap labor, and weren't prepared to leave up to

the practice that they were preaching.

Yeah, it, it's that sort of grand irony that I think starts out in chapter

one, talking about the Declaration of Independence, which literally

starts, you know, we believe that all men are created equal, and yet this

was already a slave owning colony.

And was, you know, even after the, the War of Independence would be

continuing slavery for quite some time.

So it wasn't an idea that we are fighting for equality of all of the people, right?

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Do, do you ever think, we'll, we'll be able to actually, you know, see

all men created equal, or is that always gonna kind of be ironic

now, ah, you know, like, look at Australia, it becomes a melting pot.

Really?

Hmm.

Of people eventually, people within a few generations have intermixed.

And you know, there was, there was angst and racism against the

Greeks and Italians, and then it was the Vietnamese and boat people.

And I think we can say with some confidence that in Australian society

today, those groups have, well, it's really integrated and are not suffering

from a racist sort of situation.

I mean, yes and no.

I, I agree with your original sort of thesis in that, that

racism takes a lot of time to.

True would, would take a lot of time to stamp out because it is

easy as a point of difference.

And all it needs is something like, you know, COVID coming out of China and all of

a sudden Chinese people are being treated with sus suspicion almost exactly like,

you know, they were on the gold fields.

Yeah.

But give it long enough and everyone will have a bit of

Chinese heritage in their family.

Somewhere in the same way that you know, people ended up having a gay

nephew or a, or a lesbian niece or something, and suddenly their

attitudes towards gay rights changed.

And, and you know, we're such a melting pot here that eventually

give it long enough if people will be mixed up enough that these

distinctions will just disappear.

It'll take while.

So either to answer your question Yes.

When there is a.

Such a mix up of people that we've forgotten that we're ever different.

Which, which is an interesting point because I, yeah, I think of then on the

other hand of people like Andrew Bolt who kind of want some kind of metric by

which Aboriginal people have some have their sort of aboriginality measured

and, you know, there are, there's a lot of debate in Tasmania about land claims

and cultural heritage from Tasmanian Aborigines who allegedly were completely

massacred except for the fact that many of them had married into white, or, you

know, been married into white families and became part of the, the culture there.

So I guess I, I wonder there, but he's not alone.

There are people within the indigenous community who would say the same thing.

Mm.

Because, you know, G s T and other monies gets distributed to the states

on a formula that increases that amount to states with the larger

proportion of indigenous people.

And what's been happening is that the indigenous population has been growing

rapidly in New South Wales and the a c t and other areas with funding,

therefore, going to those states and indigenous leaders saying, well,

hang on, we really need that funding going to the Northern Territory.

It's been drained away because of, of so many people now identifying

as indigenous in these states.

Which gets back to the, the issue, sorry, it's, it's.

Which gets back to the issue that it really is about are

these people suffering or not?

And the indigenous people are leaders in that situation by implication, are

saying there are indigenous people here in these states who are living

in urban populations who don't need it as much as some others do, living

in other states in remote areas.

One, one particular bug mere of mine is the remote indigenous

communities who are often not supplied with you know, reticulated power.

So they have to run diesel generators, which also put out fumes

and cost a lot of money to run.

And that's all taken away from the money going into the community because, you

know, That's it's treated as a cost and we should just be installing solar panels

and batteries and having done with it.

But anyway, that's another, that's another issue.

Mm-hmm.

I guess the, the hard part here, and I'm wondering whether this feeds into

the sort of identity part of identity politics, is that there, how you see

the book talk about racial identities that we now have and how, like, how,

how does, can Malach sort of resolve that question of the, you know, if,

if race is an invented construct, then why do, why are people identifying why?

Yeah, why are they so I guess he makes the point.

Yeah.

Why, why are they, why, why have they abandoned class in favor of identity?

Because you can be a, a solidarity around the issues of class and

or you could be a form solidarity around the issues of gender, race,

ethnicity, and things like this.

And people, I guess, looked at the, the black power, black Panther, the

black Rights Movement in the United States, which was seen in some ways

as successful and used as a template by other ethnic gender groups

as a way of getting things done.

And even in the UK you would get sort of ethnic groups.

Agitating for things revolving around the local IAM or other religious

institutions would become, well, even, even like there's a couple of anecdotes

that Kenan has in the introduction.

Talking about you know, Indian female workers in factories or like the

Pakistan League or I can't remember a couple of the names, which,

which were about almost unionizing.

Along that the lines of we are, you know, a racial group that's

being taken advantage of just as much as we are a class, right?

Mm-hmm.

I, I think people saw success in that black movement and therefore, and

it's, it's kind of, Easy because they couldn't imagine in America, for example,

taking on capitalism, which was, you know, if you were looking at worker's

rights and, and unionism and and, and the solidarity of the working class.

It was just getting battered relentlessly and indoctrinated in a propaganda program

where every American began to think they were just a temporarily unlucky

millionaire whose time would come.

Yeah.

And so, so he makes, I think the point that people looked at the success of

the, the black movement, which under Malcolm X for example was very much.

Black people have gotta do this for themselves to gain power,

don't turn the other cheek.

Violence is acceptable or necessary, et cetera.

But he also made some really interesting points that Malcolm X in particular

towards the end of his life had traveled.

He had left the nation of Islam and had converted to Sunni Islam.

Traveled to Saudi Arabia and did a lot of travel in Africa, and came across

a lot of white people who were of the strong belief that racism was a terrible

thing and needed to be overcome, and were very friendly towards him and they

were white and he hadn't seen it before.

And he began to see that he'd made a mistake in not embracing.

White people into his cause, into fighting against them.

And just one paragraph I'll read here.

Yeah, yeah.

After he's traveled, it made him rethink his ideas about race.

He met revolutionaries who were not black, but were as hostile to racism as he was.

Malcolm realized that he was alienating the people who were true revolutionaries.

And John Lewis, the chair of S n C C, dunno what that is, but recall

a conversation in which Malcolm X talked about the need to shift

our focus from race to class.

He said that was the root of our problems, not just in

America, but all over the world.

Unfortunately, in the decades following his murder, it was the old Malcolm

rather than the one he was becoming.

That it got remembered that got fixed as the real Malcolm X.

And just in terms of Martin Luther King on this topic, Martin Luther King

recognized too that equality meant more than simple civil and political rights.

What does it profit a man?

He asked to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he

doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee.

So he launched a Poor People's Campaign telling a reporter

We're dealing with class issues.

So people might think of Malcolm X especially, and Martin Luther King

as being excited on the black race.

But in fact, by the end of it, they had recognized it was a class issue.

Mm-hmm.

You know, anybody talk about that?

This is one of the most valuable things to come.

I had heard bits of these things in other articles, but it's one of the

more valuable things to come out of this book is, is some of the reflections

he's got on black leaders like that.

And I'll give you one more, which is it was good actually in

that this introduced me to some black leaders I hadn't heard of.

Amira Baraka, poet and critic, founder of the Black Arts Movement.

Shed his nationalism for Marxism in the 1970s.

He recognized the dangers of appropriating racial thinking,

even for the cause of equal rights.

He recognized to the importance of class in any struggle for equality.

He came to realize that simply having black faces in positions of

power did little to combat racism or empower working class blacks.

And there was one other character, Franz Fanon rejected the idea

of a singular black identity.

That's a slightly different topic.

So yeah, in terms of class, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Amira Baraka.

In discussions, when I talk to people and I say I'm more interested in

the class than race, I'm actually from the Malcolm X, Martin Luther

King and Amira Baraka School of.

Race relations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't call me a racist.

I, and I, this is, I guess, where I think some of that, the critical

race theory that I've understand, understood, comes from is in the

intersectionality between race and class.

That the, and gender and other attributes.

You know, the, the black working woman.

Suffers all of the sort of intersections of those problems.

Mm-hmm.

Not just one of them.

I in isolation.

And thank you to Event Horizon for saying the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee is the ncc.

Thank you.

Yeah.

That, that whole point about the like, you know, I felt very strongly with

that discussion about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, you know, very

interesting that they only met once.

They basically sort of shook hands, went on their way, ships in the night.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That, you know, it's interesting in part because I think Luther

King preached a lot more, not.

Tolerance of racism, but that hating the other person wasn't the solution.

And I always I I feel very strongly that you know that saying that he

had that hate, cannot drive out hate and only love can do that.

Is, you know, it's vital to remember when we've got so many causes that

we are invited to hate, right?

Mm-hmm.

But also on the other hand, the point that they make in the book was, is

that Malcolm X was also saying, but we can't keep relying on the white people.

To take our side, we actually have to fight the forces that are trying

to put us back in their place.

And those, those are some white people too.

Mm-hmm.

I'm, I'm interested where you see the, sort of the violence in that, you

know, peace versus love versus hate, peace versus violence in the, the o

the whole sort of history in the book.

What, how did you see that theme play out?

I didn't see a lot of it other than in the Malcolm X sort of scenario.

And I don't know.

I mean, while he turned towards concentrating on class at the

end, I dunno whether he was quite happy for the lower class to be

violent against the upper class.

I dunno, I didn't, it didn't go into that.

It's quite possible he was still happy to rely on violence.

But use it in a, a class based scenario rather than black versus

white scenario, so, mm-hmm.

Yeah, I didn't see much other sort of reference to, to violence as such, but

just on the critical race theory and the intersectionality and all that.

Mm-hmm.

Ken Mallek obviously critical of it and he talks of people in that critical

race theory, movement, I think as trying to find racism wherever they can.

Almost like somebody who's got a hammer.

Everything I see as a nail, and he was saying that, you know, the concept of

white privilege, a lot of the people in that movement were willing to ascribe

white privilege to all whites, and were right in that sense, equating.

Both Elon Musk and the cleaner in the Elon and the in the Tesla

factory, both were enjoying white privilege in a very simplistic manner.

Yeah.

In the critical race theory movement, finding racism where they could.

And he gave an interesting section on mass incarceration in the United States.

And so I'll read a little bit about that.

He says that mass incarceration would seem to be the classic

illustration of many of the themes at the heart of critical race theory.

A black man born in the late 1960s who dropped out of high school oh,

he said that is sort of offering some alternative thinking here.

A black man born in the 1960s who dropped out of high school has a 59% chance

of going to prison in his lifetime.

Whereas a black man who attended college is only a 5% chance.

Hmm.

That's interesting.

I hadn't seen statistics based on, on that before, or maybe I had,

but it's a good point to make.

That's a big difference.

A 59% chance versus a 5% chance both black one has gone to college and one hasn't.

Hmm.

And he says he quotes an analysis by this guy, Nathaniel Lewis for the People's

Project think tank, concluding that race is not a statistically significant

factor for many incarceration outcomes once class is adequately controlled for.

And what he's saying is what's risen dramatically since the seventies

is the incarceration rate amongst high school dropouts while a rate

amongst college graduates, whether they're black or white, has declined.

And And I'm just one more statistic.

2017, Clegg and Guzman suggests a white high school dropout was about

15 times more likely to be in prison than a black college graduate.

Hmm.

So, of course, the argument is, well, who's most likely to be a college

graduate is perhaps a white person.

But yeah, that, if you simplify to me to have the, I can't remember the

statistical fallacy, but if you're comparing very different selection

sizes, then the proportions or the percentages or the absolute numbers

are going to look quite different.

But either way, it's still, you know, I think this gets to your

point about class being a thank you.

It is the base rate fallacy.

Thank you, Joe.

The class is, it gets to your point about class being a much more differentiating

factor because things like education and did, did you complete high school?

You know, what kind of family did you grow up in?

Things like that have as a lot of effect on your class, whether

you are black or white right?

Or doesn't deny that race is a factor, but he's saying there are other factors

that need to be taken into account and and it, and it shouldn't be simplified.

There's complex.

Relationships going on here between race and education

and, and other factors at play.

So I had a look at some local statistics, Paul, on incarceration and education

found, this doesn't surprise me.

Trevor Australian Institute, health Welfare report of some sort.

So, big report somewhere at page 256.

I got that far into it

in Australia of prisoners.

1% have a bachelor degree, 4% have a diploma, 31% have a trade certificate.

56% have no non-school qualifications.

Only 19% of the prison population.

Finished year 12.

Wow.

The, and the interesting sort of anecdote that I've seen on this as well is that

the, if you look at the incarceration rates in Tasmania where there is a higher

proportion of high school dropout rate then it is, it is higher than states

that don't have, as, you know, don't have dropout rate, same education standard.

Yep.

But also that the population, as we know from what we said before about, you know,

from Tasmania, is that the population of the Aboriginal people is very, very

low compared to other jurisdictions.

So, I do think that it, it.

Yeah.

It's a, a big factor.

So I'll just give some other statistics.

Well, I was wondering there if do you think that's something that Ken

Malak is kind of overlooking the, the, because you sort of said before

he's, he didn't really look at race in English politics or in, and you know,

we know that from India and Pakistan, there are different races as well.

There are different racial groups.

It, it felt to me like he didn't really a, a address race, racism in other context.

And it, and so it's because you've got this quite clear differentiation

of, of skin colors in the us then it, it became a lot easier to just con

compare and contrast that example.

And he was, he just missed out on some of the subtlety.

Do you, do you feel like that feel like I've asked?

I think it was fair enough, wrong way around.

I think it was fair enough to concentrate on the US because he

probably wants to sell books in the us There's obviously excellent

statistics on this that are available.

He's, we are all familiar with the figures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

There's, you know, there's a size and a richness to the whole story there

that I think it was an appropriate place to, to, to deal with.

I don't, you know, the book would just get enormous if you were going

to enter into other jurisdictions and start talking about, you know, like I

would be interested, for example, in race and indigenous issues in South

America where I don't tend to hear of indigenous lands rights issues in South

America, even though I've got a keen interest in South America and it would

pique my interest if I heard something.

There's definitely, I've definitely heard like the Y Mamo and other native

Brazil, you know, native tribes in Brazil.

Mm-hmm.

You know, basically pushing against the, the sort of slash

and burn farming of the Amazon.

Yeah.

It, it's such a large mixed population where nearly.

Everyone has got a bit of native blood in them.

They're very mixed races there, I think.

But I get off, we're getting off topic there because I don't have enough detail

on it, but just I don't, I don't blame Malick for concentrating on America.

And I think, you know, what he does say about this incarceration is it's a

complex relationship and he says that the savagery of mass incarceration

in America reveals a complex relationship between race and class.

To suggest that is not to deny racism or to fall into the trap of

class reductionism, as some have claimed, it's simply not to wish

away the complexities of the world.

So I think he's just saying, and I think his criticism is of many of the players in

the critical race theory movement finding racism as the answer to everything and

white privilege being abundant no matter what the class is of the white person.

So, That's what he was sort of saying there.

But just to finish some statistics, cuz locally in Australia indigenous people,

29% of the prison population, even though they're three point something

percent, 3.3 of the general population.

The other thing of course is prison population, 90% are male males

only make up 50% of the population.

So there's a strong bias against males in prison.

Do we have a hear of special programs to specially designed

to keep men out of prison?

Paul, maybe they do.

We, we, we did, but the coalition cut them all.

Okay.

And adults without a degree, adults without a degree, are 72%

of the general population, but 99% of the prison population.

Hmm.

So it'd be simplistic to say, we'll make sure everyone's got a degree and they

won't end up in, you know, up in jail.

Or some high qualification or not male that'll reduce it by 50%, you know.

Well, I'm also shows there's factors involved in a complex.

Hmm.

I'm also kind of reminded of the Terry Pratchett quote that, you know, living

in living in a slum was sort of, Almost borderline criminal because it

was just so hard to make an existence any other way, but criminality.

But if you owned a slum, you'd got, all you got was invited to the best parties.

Right.

And, and where is this from?

From a book in Terry Pratchett.

Okay.

Fairly sure it was, it's one of the guards series, the vibe series.

But anyway the, the thing I'm thinking about here is the number of ca cases of

high profile well-educated people going to the courts and then being given lenient

sentences because, you know, it might hurt their career in future, whereas

people who don't have the education.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm just, I'm kind of trying to skip over race here.

But the, the, the lower classes, well, they just, we, we've

gotta throw the book at them.

Yep.

And so I'm really, I, I wonder here if part of the reason we don't, you know,

another reason that that statistic is as high for, you know, not jailing

people with degrees is that judges with degrees also favor, you know, allowing

people, you know, people who look like them with degrees from going through,

you know, worse sentencing possibly.

Yes.

All sorts of inherent biases are at play.

No doubt.

No doubt.

So there's one other aspect that he touched on in this book

that I just wanted to go to.

Yeah.

In case you weren't going to, and this was about property.

Hmm.

And so, Adam Smith, famous economist, invisible Hand.

The needs of property for him compelled restrictions on equality because we had

at this time these notions of universal rights of, of men that were all equal.

And we had the practice where they weren't.

Hmm.

And in fact, the people who had wealth and power were not really wanting to share it

if they possibly could get away with it.

So Adam Smith, strangely unlike today, Hmm.

Adam Smith helped them out by saying that the needs of property

compelled restrictions on equality.

But Jean Jacque Russo Russo demanded that the needs of equality demanded

restrictions on property rights.

And he said the first man who having enclosed a piece of ground thought

of saying, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him

was the true founder of civil society.

How many crimes, wars and murders, how much misery and horror the human race

would've been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the

ditch and cried out to his fellow men?

Beware of listening to this imposter.

You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone

and the earth itself belongs to no one.

So that was Russo.

And then the Scottish Juris.

George Wallace was unequivocal in his condemnation of slavery and his

anti-slavery Radicalism came more easily to him because of his unusual

lack of respect for private property.

Property that bane of human Felicity Wallace wrote Must necessarily be

banished out of the world before a utopia can be established.

So we had the theory of universality with the enlightenment.

We had the practice not living up to it.

We had.

Intellectuals like Adam Smith justifying inequality, the needs

of property and capitalism.

But we had others who were ready to go the whole hog on equality.

Hmm.

Often because they had no respect for private ownership of property.

And I find the property argument interesting because one of my problems

with the voice debate is a lot of the commentary is that indigenous people

have been here for 440,000 years.

It's really an argument of, well, from their point of view, we

were here first, so it's ours.

Hmm.

And that's seen as a good argument.

And I don't like the argument of we were here first.

I don't think it's a good argument in the same way that yeah, I, I think

it's a very, very poor argument and it seems to be accepted as a good one.

And people like Russo and George Wallace would say it's not a good argument for

anyone to claim property in a special way.

But then you'd agree with the pervasive idea across aboriginal

cultures that they belong to the land and it is not the other way around.

The, this, the, you know, the, the land the places belongs to

no one and people existed on it.

I dunno that all indigenous people accept that way of thinking about land rights.

I would, would you say a majority did?

I'd have to look closely at the wording of the America Macata statement and others.

But because to me, I think it's an important to distinction between

the sort of the, the history of we were here first mm-hmm.

Versus the the, the Colonial property rights argument

about here we were here first.

You know, the, the, the, the, the only way that the colonists were essentially

able to justify themselves was by de just deciding that there was no prior owner.

Because at that point, as you say, you know, Russo says, Someone had enclosed

a plot of land and said, well, this is mine and you people should keep

off it because I want it for myself.

Mm-hmm.

I see that as a different form of being there to the aboriginal idea of simply

being a part of the land, land being part of its history, being attached to it.

But, you know, let, let me read some of the comments I've been hearing.

So, Osmos, Samarius Greek commentator whether you're a Greek born Australian,

an Indian migrant Australian, a young Arabic Australian, we all have two homes,

the one that houses us, and the one which we identify as our ancestral home.

Most of us are in this country because of some form of

dispossession, be it economic, cultural, religious, or political.

The land that has given us this incredible second chance belongs

to a 43, 40,000 year old culture.

We respect their deep ancestral history.

We want to thank them for it so belongs to a culture and someone like Paul

Bonno, you would've heard of him.

Mm-hmm.

Can we get it?

The primary motivator, the voice is recognition of the injustice.

Meet it out to those who are bloodily dispossessed of the

land they owned for 60,000 years.

Still both people coming from the western ownership of property point of view.

Yeah.

And this is the advocates for the voice.

This is, yeah.

I'm just giving you the counter that I'll, it seems a traditional national I used as

creeping into this look in, in a type of, a type of special property rights that was

being envisioned by Rau in that certainly.

Unequal in that sense.

So, yeah, I guess I'm making the point.

And I guess for people who are interested in this topic by Malik's book and read

that section of what Adam Smith and Russo and and who was the other commentator?

George Wallace had to say they were very non-private property as part of

their push for equality and anti-racism.

Because the thing that really resonated to me when I sort of reading through that

was the, the modern sort of, I couldn't help but feel like the modern descendant

of that is the prosperity gospel.

The idea that that, you know, that from coming from Adams, that sort of, you know,

the,

the value of the property that I own implies a con

curtailment of the, the freedoms.

But, and, and therefore I should be allowed to acquire more of it.

Morphing into the kind of acquiring property is good and hard work and,

you know, diligent labor can achieve that of the sort of Protestantism.

And then into the.

Were they both justifications for an an unequal result?

One relying on God and the other one relying on a better overall economy.

Yeah.

Did, did you feel there was a sort of a, a progression at all in that?

No, I see them as just relying on two different convenient rationalizations

for doing what you want to do and and finding an uncomfortable result and

going, oh, how will I explain this?

Oh God.

Or well, it's worthwhile trickle down everyone benefits in the

end, it'll work out for all of us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I see them as two different sort of reasons for.

What, doing what you wanna do.

One of what, one of the things that I did wanted to a want to ask you about,

which we kind of touched on earlier and I was hoping to get back to was

in sort of talking about violence one of the things that you know, he, that

Malik ends with the Christchurch mosque attack and other similar attacks.

And, you know, it really ro made me think that terrorism I I is a, a force used to.

You know, it also like the, those people are committing acts of, of

terror in part to be able to say we've pushed back against them.

Right.

And the link lynchings and other, you know, beatings of slaves that

tried to run away and so forth.

And it, you know, seemed to me also to be a form of terrorism.

You know, it's, is a, you don't dare speak out or vote or do, you know, keep the,

the rights that you should have because, we'll, you know, we'll kill you if you do.

Did you honestly didn't see much, I didn't really see much

reference to violence in this.

I didn't, I didn't really.

Read much talk about the different groups resorting to violence as such, so Okay.

Sort of pick that up in, in the discussion about the Christchurch.

I can't remember that in the book to tell you the truth.

Okay.

I can't remember.

The Christchurch might have skipped in the, in the end of the 10th chapter.

Right.

Talking about, because you know, there's sort of discussion of the, the

white identity that kind of emerges out of a reaction against the Ah yes.

Black identity.

Yes.

And those that then comes into all of the stupid conspiracy theories

that mean that we have to, you know, white people need to fight back, which

is just another form of terrorism.

Yeah.

I kind of skipped over that chapter in my summary notes here, where

he talks about the emergence of.

Of, of white identity as a reaction to certain events.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, unfortunately I don't really have much notes on that.

So, yeah, he does, he does talk about that emergence of a white

identity as a reactionary thing.

Okay.

One, you know, I, I guess the key thing, and we can sort of in the next five to

10 minutes or 15 or whatever, just sort of wrap it up, but the, I think the key

thing that I enjoyed in it is, is people's misguided priorities and on Black Lives

Matter here he says many who have taken up the Black Lives Matter banner, like many

within the race consciousness movements.

Historically follows conflate the necessity of challenging racism with

the building of racial solidarity.

Pursuing the second makes achieving the first more difficult.

Hmm.

Even within America, there is no single identity or set of interests that bind

together all black people and only black people, still less all people of color.

To assume that there is only reinforces the power of the black elites and

diminishes the voices of black workers making it more difficult

to tackle the problems facing those at the sharp end of racism.

So I, and, and that's sort of part of the byline of this, of this book.

Where did I write in the notes?

It was yeah, it was that the more we despise racial thinking,

the more we clinging to it.

And people are.

Mm-hmm.

How do you mean?

People are objecting to racism by coalescing around race and using

that as their tool to fight racism.

Whereas they should be embracing an entire community.

Martin Luther King was getting white people to his marches

as much as black people.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is your traditional thought in opposition to Malcolm X.

And he was getting this, this is a ideological thing

that we should all embrace.

And it's actually harmful to the cause to make it a race based fight.

And I think that's a trap that people are falling into.

Con, conflating the necessity of challenging racism with the

building of racial solidarity.

It should be.

It should be broader than that, I think.

Mm-hmm.

How does that like I feel like there's an intersection there to the class argument.

There is where,

because it should be, should be more about where is the suffering,

where is the harm, where is the hurt, and where's the disadvantage?

And that should be colorblind.

And let's all look and try and address that as, as what the priority is.

I, I mean, I guess I, I have a slightly different take on that, but I, I'm

happy to put that aside to another day.

I, I think the, I agree with you that you know, it, the, and the interesting

thing about your formulation there is that you didn't need to say which class

we were going to deal with or help.

You just said, we need to identify the people that need our help.

It's evidently not the millionaires.

Right?

Well, we spoke about changes to superannuation laws that people with

over a certain million, millions of money, million dollars in SPR will lose

their percentage of a tax concession.

I'd put it to you under critical race theory, that that unfairly disadvantaged.

White elderly males, and we went, well, that's okay, because they need a bit

of disadvantaging added into the pot.

You know, it was a, that, that would've had a Yeah, but I feel like an unfair

effect on a small ethnic, on a particular ethnic and gender and age group.

But we were like, okay, that's all right.

In sometimes discrimination is okay, privilege away from people who have it,

rather than rather than removing something else from the people that don't have it.

It's, I, I guess my point is that we we're prepared to discriminate and

disadvantage, you know, take away these advantages where we see it's obviously

the right thing to do and it's about Color doesn't come into it, does it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just on the same point.

And I was, I was gonna sort of also touch on that idea because you touched

on it before that you know, there are, was it Clarence Thomas, the Supreme

Court Justice as in the us who's an African American man and you know, quite

happily, you know, an arch conservative and, you know, voting against seems to

be voting against the very same sex, sorry, the very racial marriage act that

allows him to be married to his wife.

It's hard to, you know, I can kind of imagine a whole class of

working white poor in the US that can hate him equally because he's

rich and you know, well educated.

He's a classic example of, you know, just having representation

isn't gonna change things.

Yeah.

For the people of color, for example.

So more and more we are seeing people from minority groups getting into

position of power and screwing over.

You know, if, if they happen to be a Tori conservative, they'll

happily screw over a form.

Yeah, yeah.

Working class certain, a certain senator from the Northern Territory Yeah.

Might be involved in this.

Exactly.

So just on this sort of idea as well.

Page 2 62, he says the inward looking binding politics of identity, The outward

looking, bridging politics of solidarity, the former mobilizes by emphasizing shared

membership of a particular identity, be that gender, sexuality, race, or nation.

The politics of solidarity also stresses the collective endeavor,

but views commonality as emerging, not from particular identities, but

out of the shared set of values and beliefs and the struggles to win

acceptance for those values and beliefs.

So that's a good description of the difference between the politics of

identity and the politics of solidarity.

But that's what he's saying.

I think it's well put and I know, which I prefer.

It's, it's hard though to see exactly where those differences are.

Sometimes it's easy.

You think So the people who talk about race and identity in my

people never talk about class.

It's easy to see.

It's either they spot 'em a mile away.

Okay?

Spot them a mile away.

I, what, what I guess I'm thinking of there is that the talking about

the identity is often an, an identity which involves those shared values,

those common, increasingly it doesn't.

Increasingly identity is these fixed notions of fixed characteristics

of your gender, your sexuality, your your race your color, and,

and not your ideological belief.

It's, it's rare for people to say, come on, we're all communists.

Let's band together under this ideological.

Banner that we've all decided to adopt as a, as a, as a theory of living?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because people are adopting solidarity because of, of fixed characteristics

and it's not healthy for them or for us.

And I'm kind of reminded of that meme that goes around with various captions of

sort of our two workers you know, white and a black, you know, man sort of with

hands locked together in solidarity.

They're not sort of fighting each other.

They're, you know, helping each other giving each other strength.

And, you know, you'd think that it would be easy to say, you know, workers unite.

You know, poor people unite.

But we keep on being divided off into, you know, single moms and,

you know, working single parents and the elderly and so forth.

Divide and divide and conquer.

It's, it's, you know, the oligarchs and the powerful don't

want people organizing together.

So we'll encourage movements like the whole beat up over trans people.

You know?

You think there was one in every street corner the way Yeah.

Is, is give it to it and it, it's just a beat up to keep people.

Part of it is to, to distract, to divide and to prevent people coalescing together.

I, I was wondering that about that as well, because.

There's a couple of times, I don't think he particularly used the phrase

moral panic in the book, but there's certainly sometimes where he talks

about the the things that, you know, black people or, you know, people of

different races, Chinese were, were accused of, you know, being dissolute

and drug addicts and, you know, perverted and all those sort of things.

And I guess I just wondered, feels like there's a also a sort of a, a a, a common

tool in that division strategy of is, is to sort of go for the moral panic.

You Yeah.

I mean, it, it, it happens.

Yeah.

It's again it's to the advantage of powerful people to keep less

powerful people fighting amongst themselves over, over issues so

that they don't band together.

And so I've got, yeah.

Yeah.

So I've got one final question.

Mm-hmm.

Because I feel like this was a book that you were hoping to read because it would

talk about a particular issue that you already knew you had strong opinions on.

So I'm wondering if what, what were the, what were the things that, where

you really found yourself thinking, oh, that's really changed my view of it.

Oh, look, to be honest, I don't think it's changed my view on, on anything.

I found it quite affirming of the things I already thought, because I've read

already a fair bit of Cannon Malick, okay.

Over the years in articles and books and things.

And so I've, and I really can't remember disagreeing with him much on these things.

I, I knew where he was gonna head with this one.

So, for me, I was just hoping it would present ideas and concepts and and

stuff that I could use in to further the arguments I already had in my head.

And I think it's achieved that, so, okay.

So yeah.

Yeah, I can't really, there were things that I just didn't quite know.

And really, it probably don't matter that much in terms of how much historically

racism really wasn't skin color based.

And it was, probably wasn't aware as much of that, but doesn't really matter.

It just not an important issue.

It's just interesting.

Certainly the stuff about Malcolm X is.

Has changed towards the end of his life I wasn't aware of.

And that was good to understand.

I think he's got a beautiful turn of phrase in a way of saying things like

he says here the question people ask themselves today is not so much in what

kind of society do I want to live as?

Who are we?

Who are we as become defined less by the kind of society they want to create than

by the history and heritage to which supposedly, supposedly they belong.

So, just a, there's good turn of phrase and a good way of saying things and

he's very much a class-based thinker, like just right at the beginning.

Now let me just find so, he says at the very beginning of the book that he grew up

with Paki bashing in the UK in the 1970s.

Mm-hmm.

So he was a victim of that racism.

The racism drew him into politics.

But learnt social justice is bigger than racism in a person's skin.

Color, ethnicity, or culture provides no guide as to the

validity of their political beliefs.

He realized shared values were more important than shared skin

color, ethnicity, or culture.

So, so I just find that really spot on and that's you know, when I'm talking

to people in life I, I just don't care about their fixed characteristics.

I'm interested in the things that they decide in terms of

ideologies and why they decide them.

That's what, that's what interests me.

So, so yeah, I'm sort of on board with Ken Malik so much, so I can't say he, okay.

No, but it's but it, and it is nice.

It is nice.

I, I agree with you on I'm, I'm getting a re a message saying I'm

trying to restore the connection.

So I dunno, I'm still coming through, but seems to be okay now.

I do think it's nice to have someone who's done the research that can

kind of confirm all of those things a bit like you know, reading the

Carbon club and seeing, yeah, okay.

There really was this group of people behind the scenes that were doing

all of this stuff that, you know, now makes sense of what we publicly saw.

I guess the, the, how this may, it's probably a, a tangent for another day.

Okay.

Another, another form of class to me is cast.

And.

You know, in, in Indian societies, but also in Arabic and in other, what we

might call the subcontinent societies.

There are these very distinct casts which kind of also say you are a laborer or,

you know, you are an untouchable, you should never be able to do anything.

And I really kind of wondered I found myself thinking this, I can't remember

how I was reminded of it, but it sort of, after I'd finished you know, thinking

that it, you know, for Indian people and for other, you know, other races

where there is a lot of different.

So there's a lot of different class variety in, in terms

of their, their money.

But also, and I mean even in the, you even see this in England in the upstairs,

downstairs of that idea that, you know, if you were born into a peasant family

or a servant family, the very, very best that you could ever hope for is to be

the, the head of the under servants.

Mm-hmm.

You know, you would never actually, as, you know, you could never even

aspire to have property, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Well, you couldn't aspire to choose an identity.

So in sort of the pre-modern world, you, you just, your identity was a given.

And it was only in the, it was based on the community that

you were ensconced in and.

You know, with the industrial revolution and the breakdown of community and then

with the coming of the Enlightenment, Malik explains the first time in

history as people became detached from their communities and a and

a prescribed identity, they, they started to have a choice of choosing

an identity, if you, you like, okay.

That they didn't have before.

Is, is that a substitute for class then in that struggle?

Well, I guess people have taken it that way.

That's the people have forgotten class and have just concentrated on identity.

They've, they've given up on class.

So, but I think it's coming back.

I, I think it's coming back.

Yeah.

I well, I don't particularly want to eat the rich because they're unusually fatty

and probably contains lots of toxins.

You know, but, but no, you know, the, the idea of the far, you know, that

we are in late stage capitalism is becoming more and more acknowledged.

And, you know, we're looking at riots in Paris that were quite substantial

over the, what's to do with the retirement age being increased.

But more and more people are gonna return to a class-based bite because

it's now becoming obvious that capitalism has reached its late stage

and something else is around the corner.

So it was hopeless before, and people resorted to the sanctuary

of a, of a, of a race based.

Bite.

But I think people can tell that there's something gonna happen, so.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Which might be a good place to finish off.

Yes.

On that.

Thank, thank you very much Trevor for allowing me to ask you all those questions

and interject with opinions of my own.

Very good.

So, you can look at the books that you think you might want for next month, Paul.

I will look at one that I have a look at my list.

List and see suggested one before and I'm trying to remember what it was.

I'll find, find it if you are willing to give it a go.

Well, I'll weigh it up.

I'm not gonna commit so after all That's right.

Like, like a United Nations rite of veto.

I'm I'll, I'll exercise as a major power whenever I feel like it.

So, alright.

We're dear listener.

Well thank you.

In the chat room for people there who stayed on and listened.

Hope you enjoyed that one as something a bit different.

I'll be back with Scott and Joe next week, the range of the

usual topics and bye for now.

Talk to you later.

And it's a good night from him.