Episode 51: Racialized Organizations, Politics, (and Sports) with Victor Ray

(upbeat music) - Hi friends and welcome to episode 51 of the End of Sport Podcast. My name is Nathan Coleman-Mam and I'm here today with Derek Silva, Hey Derek. - Hey Nathan. - And Johanna Melis, hi Johanna. - Hi everyone. - So folks, I'm really excited to share the interview we have today with sociologist, critical race theorist Victor Ray, who is actually not a sports focused scholar and that's okay as far as I'm concerned because Victor has incredible insight on the ways in which race operates in our societies and that goes for sports. That's the point. It goes for sports too and we don't always have to have a sport centric perspective if we wanna sort of theorize a phenomenon like racialized organizations. In fact, we can think about that more broadly and then think about how it applies in the context of sport and that's kind of what we're trying to accomplish here. And again, for me, this is one of the most interesting conversations we've had. So I can't wait to share it with you. But there were a couple of other things we wanna share with you as well because we have been doing some more work trying to combat the just disgraceful world of college football that we are as you all well know we are continuing to sort of wage war with this summer and fall. And in that vein, we have a couple of other pieces that came out last week, one in the baffler where we tell you very plainly how we feel about it all. And one in Time Magazine where we again, talked to some athletes and tried to disclose the perspective that we just aren't seeing in the mainstream media, which is chock full of that we wanna play movement and athletes consenting and like just everyone, Ra Ra football, we always wanna shine a light on the fact that there are a lot of stories that don't get told because it's very dangerous for players to tell the truth about how they feel of it being forced to play football during a pandemic. And so we've been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak with some of those players privately and they've shared with us their fears and the challenges they've been confronting the summer and fall and that's what we've tried to share with everyone in these pieces. So we'd really appreciate it if you check them out and if you share them because folks like the bottom line is we cannot be subjecting unpaid, unrepresented athletic workers to a pandemic that inflicts not only the possibility of death but certainly long term complications that we really have, we have no idea what this is gonna look like in five years but we have plenty of evidence to suggest that people are gonna be suffering long term from their experiences with COVID and it's just not acceptable that we subject athletes to these conditions. And as always, if you appreciate what we're doing, please let us know, rate, review and subscribe to our podcast. Shout out at us at Instagram or Twitter where our handles are at end of sport for both platforms. Let us know what you're liking about the podcast, let us know if something really resonates you or if it connects with your own work and your teaching. We really, really love to hear about how people are using our work. We wanna know that what we're doing is useful and that we're not sort of just kind of shouting at the three of us and sort of whoever our guest is at every episode. Also, you can email us at the end of [email protected]. We also have an amazing website that Derek very kindly put together for us that can be found at www.theendofsport.com and we really hope that you enjoy this wonderful show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Victor Ray is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. His influential work on race and organizations has appeared in scholarly journals such as the American Sociological Review, American Behavioral Scientist, annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Contexts, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Sociological Theory. Just a few there for you. His public scholarship appears in venues as well such as the Washington Post, Newsweek and Boston Review. Victor, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. - Thank you. We're happy to be here. - Listen, so the first thing we want to ask you like we ask everyone, how are you surviving 2020 in Iowa City, Iowa? - I do not have coronavirus and I am employed. Everyone of my family is healthy. And my immediate family is healthy. So I am doing okay. - Fair enough, I think that's a totally understandable answer. Absolutely. All right, we have so much to talk about today. And we're gonna kind of cover a lot of different ground. This is I think a slightly unusual episode for us because we're not just talking sports. We're gonna talk sports, but there are a lot of other things we want to talk to Victor about as well, including I hope in the back half of the episode today, a little bit of ground around the election and US politics, given that that is what so many of us are thinking about right now. And we're also gonna talk a lot about race, racism, critical race theory and organizational theory. So some academic subjects, 'cause that is Victor's area of expertise. And I think that his really fascinating insights there, give us a lot to think about then when we apply those concepts in the context of sport. So that's what we really want to accomplish here today. So let's start with the fundamentals of racism and organizational theory and Victor's critical intervention of bringing those both together. Before we get to that though, into Victor's specific intervention around racialized organizations, I think it's probably really useful for our listeners to hear a little bit about the sort of foundation of understanding what actually organizational theory is in a nutshell, and also the core tenets of critical race theory, which has become one of the sort of bogeymen of our time along with cultural Marxism. And whatever else. So Victor, could you just lay out for us sort of, what is critical race theory and what is organizational theory? - Okay. So both of these fields, I just wanna start by saying both these fields are pretty big. So whatever I say is gonna be necessarily condensed. But critical race theory is a body of scholarship that arose to explain why the gains of the civil rights movement had stalled and in some cases reversed. A group of legal scholars, including Derek Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw and Richard Delgado got together, and they came up with some propositions to explain why the civil rights gains had stalled. And so some of those propositions were things like racism is structural and embedded in the law. Racial progress is not automatic. Race is a social construction and intersectionality and that people of color are capable of explaining what they've experienced or their own experiences with race and racism in the US. Organizational theory is a body of scholarship that tries to explain how organization arrives, how organizations arise, what organizations do and how they shape society. It's pretty central to sociology. People study all kinds of things, everything from what it takes to form an organization, how people interact in different kinds of organizations, and why organizations that do similar things start to look the same. And as far as critical race theory becoming a cultural boogie man, I think that's because the current administration is threatened by accurate descriptions of racial reality. Critical race theory tries to explain the causes and consequences of racial inequality. And I think it's pretty clear that this administration has used and stoked racial tension as a sort of explicit strategy, both to divide people to get votes to rally their base for a whole bunch of different reasons. So I think accurately describing that is threatening to the administration in the same way that accurately describing their response to the coronavirus or their response to global warming is threatening to the administration. It accurately describes a reality that they use to sort of entrench their power and that they fear accurate descriptions of how they're using that power could undermine it. So yeah, I also think that we need to contextualize the sort of attacks on critical race theory as part of a longer movement of folks who are opposed broadly to racial inequality. And this is just an extension of that. This is not necessarily something new. We're definitely going to be a great day. going to, I think, get to the current administration in the sort of second half of this episode. And I really am looking forward to getting your thoughts on the sort of current administration's role in a variety of these issues. But I'd like to turn to your recently public, well, relatively recently published and groundbreaking article, "A Theory of Racialized Organizations." That was, came out last year, I believe, in ASR in the American Sociological Review. In it, you, quote, and I'm quoting now, you challenge the implicit whiteness of organizational theory, which sort of espouses this veneer of neutrality, of no longer quoting. It sort of espouses this veneer of neutrality to promote in-group-based interest, and argues that racial inequality is, quote, not merely in organizations, but of them. And I thought as a sociologist that this was particularly powerful of a statement. And I'd like to have you walk our listeners through and describe what you mean by this. In other words, how are organizations, racial structures? And what does it mean to say, quote, "I define race not as a thing, but as a relationship between persons mediated through things"? OK, there's a lot in that question, and I'm going to try and get through it all, OK? So when I say that race is not merely in organizations, but of them, I mean that in the US, racialized social relationships shape the likelihood of starting an organization, the likelihood that an organization is going to survive, who's likely to get a job or become a member of an organization where a person is likely to end up in an organizational hierarchy and how organizations distribute resources. So for instance, this is not in my paper, but I'm drawing on the work of some folks who recently did a report in high-country news. And I was shocked by this report, but it shows how large portions of the American higher educational system are built on proceeds from stolen land. And so they did this report on the Moral Act, and the Moral Act took land from Native Americans, and it sold it to fund the endowments for land-grant universities all over the US, including places like MIT, the University of Massachusetts, Iowa State. And so this is a clear transfer of wealth from Native Americans to fund the American higher educational system in ways that are still being played out today. So there was a shift of resources that was based on the exploitation of Native Americans. And if you look at the contemporary demographics of these schools, Native Americans by and large still are not benefiting from this huge shift of resources. We could say similar things about the many Ivy League schools and other schools that were built on proceeds from slavery. So Brown University, Yale, Harvard, all have deep ties to racialized slavery. And again, if you look at the demographics from those schools, the organization-- parts of the organization were built on deeply unequal racialized relations, that still-- you can still see in the structure of how the organization is run. And in the case of the land grant, some of those universities still hold parcels of land that they received under the land grant, that they have not yet sold. And some of them still have parts of their endowment that are direct proceeds from this. So these are relations that are not by any means history, or not by any means not impacting how organizations function today, right? Organizations-- these organizations were dependent upon it. I also think when I say that it's all of organizations, not just in organizations, lots of organizations are highly segregated. And when you look at the distribution of jobs within integrated organizations, people of color still remain clustered at the bottom. Patricia Hill Collins has this quote, in a 1992 paper, I believe it is, in which she says that if you look at many mainstream organizations in the US right now, their organizational charts still looks like the organizational chart of the Antebellum Plantation. And so when I say that something is structural, I'm talking about the connection between ideas of culture, racialized ideas about culture, who belongs in which jobs, who's capable of leading an organization, and who's capable of cleaning up an organization. And although these relations have transformed somewhat dramatically, they're still over the course of US history. They're still fundamental continuities, like the ones that Patricia Hill Collins points out about most organizational charts looking like the organizational charts of an Antebellum Plantation. And so that's what I mean when I say that it's a structure is that it is a resilient, longstanding pattern that we can point out that connects ideas about culture and real material resources over the long run. And that those are often bigger than any individual racist or individual person who is even quite profoundly anti-racist in an organization, right? That those relationships are bigger often than what one person can do. I also think there's ways that many organizations prey on people of color, so things like subprime loans. And I think all of this, I use all of this in the paper to argue that organizations are not race neutral, right? So if we go back to the distinction between being in an organization or of an organization, when we think about in an organization, I often think about sort of the standard stock photo of diversity, if you were to Google diversity and Google image diversity, and you come up with a stock photo of people of different races. That's important, organizations should be diverse, but I think that that erases the kinds of entrenched power hierarchies that are important to me and that organizations use to function. And organizations also legitimate those power hierarchies that make them seem natural. But I also think a diversity program not necessarily intentionally, but they show an implicit assumption that organizations are white, because the diversity program is taking compensatory action to deal with that long standing structure. I often think that they're taking compensatory action in a way that may not be effective, right, or is not necessarily getting to the heart of the structure, but it is at least an implicit recognition of the racialized nature or the unmarked whiteness of a lot of organizations, right? - Derek asked the question, but I was really curious to hear about that. So that was an absolutely fascinating response. And you didn't leave anything out because you really covered such an incredible range. But I was just really curious about, 'cause I know, as someone really interested in the work of Marx and how we can think about racial capitalism and the intersection between race and capitalism, your play on Marx with I define race not as a thing, but as a relationship between persons mediated through things. I think it is an amazing line. I would love to hear you meditate that on that just a little bit. - Yeah. I'm really glad you picked up on that line. So the, if we go back for just a second, when I said the tenets of critical race theory, one of the main tenets of critical race theory is that race is a social construction. When you hear people say this, and I would just add, it is widely understood among geneticists and social scientists that race is not a valid biological category, although yeah, I'll just leave it at that. So when you hear that race is a social construction, people often take that to mean that race isn't real. And I think it's real in the sense that if we attribute meaning and act on the belief that it's real, that we can measure actual outcomes. So when I say that race is a social relationship between persons mediated through things, what I'm trying to get at is how is race social constructed? It's constructed through access to resources. It's constructed through ideas about who we can exploit, who is exploitable, who is expendable, who should be in a medial position in an organization and who should be the CEO. And if we think about, you know, there's a large problem. body of scholarship on the historical rise of the modern idea of race. And I'm not going to summarize all of that scholarship here, but I will argue that the consensus in that scholarship is that race arose as a modern category of group differentiation as a justification for slavery and colonialism. Right? So who gets what? Who has access to resources? Who's resources can be taken like under the moral act and used to generate all kinds of resources whose benefits then aren't transferred back to that group? So that's what I mean by its a social relationship between persons mediated through things is that race is lately I've been thinking about it as race is an alibi for a crime in progress. Right? Race allows people a ready excuse for differential treatment that it's then often blames the very people it is treating differently for the outcomes they are experiencing. Right? So you can there's a lot of ways to think of this, but one way to think of this is segregated schooling and underfunded schooling. So we segregate people based on arbitrary racial categories, then at the end of a certain and we provide them we as American society broadly speaking. We provide them a whole range of lesser quality resources in terms of teachers in terms of per pupil spending in terms of access to books and technology and then at the end of that 12 years that they're in school we measure them through a set of standardized tests that are biased in various ways and we project sort of their long term outcomes based on that. Right? And there's this whole whole body of scholarship that blames in eight characteristics of the group of people that have just been segregated and treated differently for the outcomes of that process. Right? And so to me race is not biological, it's social and it's about who gets what? Wow, thank you so much for just really laying all that out for us both in terms of explaining this really excellent quote from your article, but also just really explaining like as the historian on the podcast, I really appreciate your kind of historical understanding as connected to sort of Langerie universities, which I need to read more about personally, but also sort of how the US and basically the West sort of like how our university structure and sort of culture and academy is built upon racism and like dispossession of land. Just like you said, but also like this book that I finally read Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Walder this year just really lays out like how plantations' labor was so, so connected to like raising money for but also creating universities. And I think you're doing a great job of sort of connecting that to present day circumstances because I think for a lot of people that's it's hard for people to kind of make that leap, but I think the way you've tied it so well to organizational theory that really that really makes a lot of sense. Well, I think you know what one of the things that organizational theory is about is how organizations survive over time, right? And I think and there's this idea and organizational theory that I need to write about this. I have not written about this very much, but there's this idea of organizational in organizational theory of imprinting. And that is that an organization is imprinted and carries characteristics of the sort of broader social environment in which it formed. And I think if we look at land grant universities, right, you can you can see that imprinting in the demographics and who gets the benefits. But I don't think organizational theory has dealt with how organizations are racially imprinted by the broader environment. And that's one place I am kind of I kind of want to go in future work to talk about that. But yeah, I do think the history of organizations, I don't actually think you can talk about race in American sociology. You can talk about race in American sociology without reading a lot of history. I just don't think it's possible. - Well, I am definitely inclined to agree with that. But I, but I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. - I think I agree, but I'm joined, I can't agree with you really. - And so I guess what we'd like to do it, and maybe this is edging a bit into sort of this future work that you are talking about, which Tom's fascinating is, is so could you talk a little bit about how organizations transform and change to protect whiteness and systemic racism? In other words, in your view, how do racialize organizations adapt in ways that promote, produce, and reproduce racial inequality? - So there's a number of ways that I can answer this question. I think what I'll do here is talk about audit studies and racial discrimination and what audit studies show. So, and I'm not, yeah, I can, I can do this. So audit studies are a branch or a method in sociology to measure racial discrimination. And I believe it was the National Academies of Science called them the gold standard of measuring discrimination. And what these typically do is they'll send equally matched black and white or white in Latino or black, white in Latino and Asian folks out to apply for jobs, to get seated in a restaurant, to get a hotel room, to get on a bus. There was a reason one with people trying to get on a bus for free. And these, I tell my students, these always find the same thing. They always find kind of rampant discrimination against people of color. There was a good one, there was a good one not that long ago, good meaning. The findings were terrible, but a well done study on Airbnb showing discrimination against black renters on Airbnb. And so these studies show that discrimination in businesses or in organizations doesn't necessarily rely on the old kind of Jim Crow signs that would say we're not hiring black folks, we're not, you know, you don't need that. That subtle kinds of discrimination can be just as if not more effective in upholding the, in upholding sort of white supremacy with a small w in organizations, right? So like not explicit white supremacists in the sense of the clan or the alt-right, but white supremacy in the sense of control of organizational resources and access to jobs without any of the more blatant blatant exclusion, right? So that's one way. Another way is a lot of organizations, you know, I think some of this depends on what we say by integration, what we mean when we say integration. So both there's research on schooling from folks like Karen Lacey and Amanda Lewis and John Diamond that looks at how schools transformed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. And some schools did integrate and then in response to integration, they had internal tracking, right? And so what that means is many more white students end up in honors and AP courses, black students end up in regular or special education courses and you replicate internally the kinds of between organizations segregation that occurred under Jim Crow, right? So you developed a new system with very similar outcomes and if you take sort of a blunt measure of the school, you're gonna say that's an integrated school. Black and white kids are going to get, going to school together, it's great, right? We've solved the problem. There's, you know, sharing Collins has work, also showing a similar process with diversity, diversity management in corporations. A lot of corporations in response to the Civil Rights Movement would hire folks, hired folks of color into positions that were cordoned off, you know, they were diversity HR positions. So they were cordoned off from the main functions of the organization and it meant that if you were on the diversity track, your ability to move up in the organization was very, very constrained relative to other folks who came in on tracks for, I mean, forgive this sort of blunt language, but the real work of the organization, right? So I think there's a number of, ways that organizations have shifted or can shift. I mean, then, you know, you have smaller ways like changing the requirements for a job that could, you know, differentiate benefit one group over another. So I think there's a lot of ways that organizations can or do shift in ways that maintain white dominance, but don't run afoul of the law, right? Yeah. So here's the thing. I think our listeners at this point can see why Victor is our guest on the show today, because this is just really an absolute masterful discussion of so much that I think we all need to be thinking about no matter what our area of focus. And it's, I think, self-evident that at this point that there are so many lessons to be gleaned in the world of sport when we sort of think about racialized organizations in the way that Victor's laying out. Now, I don't want to provide a caveat just for Victor's sake. Victor is an absolute authority on this subject. Sport is not his area. So we are putting him on the spot here, but you can see why we're doing that because who else would we want to have a conversation like this with? But I want to say it to be fair because Victor is not claiming, and no one's claiming that he's a sports expert, but I think he has things to tell us that are really valuable about sport from the standpoint that he's laid out. So we're going to segue now into that sort of sporting conversation. And so what I want to ask you Victor is how might you connect in this discussion we've been having about racialized organizations with the sporting world? How might sports how can we think about sports organizations as racialized organizations? And I'm sort of thinking just in terms of some kind of concrete examples, you know, I'm thinking about the NBA and its franchises and the way they responded to player strikes over racial inequality this year. About the NFL and its response to Colin Kaepernick, both before this year, when of course they've entirely blackballed him and expelled him from the league and done everything to destroy his career. And then suddenly after the summer's uprisings, you know, a lot of lip service being paid, although, you know, newsflash, he still doesn't have a job in the NFL. You know, and there's there are all sorts of other issues, including the Dirt of Black coaches in the NFL. The racialized exploitation of athletes in predominantly white institutions of higher education, you know, the list goes on and on and there's nothing no one area I'm asking you to focus on, but I'm just curious sort of how you might think about sport then as a site of racialized organizations. There's a whole bunch of ways. Again, I want to I want to start with a caveat that I am not sports is not my area. I actually had a section on sport in a really really early draft of this paper and one of my friends who writes about sport was like take it out. But I will actually start with there. I will actually start by talking about their recent paper, that colleague that was Stephen Floyd and he and Ray Shanray recently published a paper in American sociology in American Journal of Sociology that looks at announcers at NCAA tournaments and shows that the announcers. I'm giving a sort of a broad gloss of the paper, but it shows that the announcers are more likely to depending on the skin tone of the player, more likely to describe light skinned players as brilliant and words attached to intelligence and skill. The darker skinned players are more likely to be described with animalistic beastial words. There's one way that we think about just athleticism and the separation between physical and mental that is mapped on, I think, broadly to organizations and how labor is portrayed in organizations. You talked about NFL and I think if we think about coaching in the d'Earth of Black coaches in the NFL, I think that this can be tied to that separation between who we think of in organizations as leaders and as able to control and corral and get other people to follow them and who we think of as workers and who should be controlled and corralled and following others. I think if you look at who supports playing college players, there is a huge racial disparity in there that I think is again tied to who's labor is exploitable and who believes that people should be paid for their labor. I think also, there's broad cultural stereotypes that are mapped on to sport quite frequently. I think the reaction to Capernick's protests says a lot about again who is considered who has the right to protest, who has the right to protest labor conditions, and who has the right to protest for their full humanity. So following up just a little bit here, we're recording this in late October 2020, sort of just days away from a contentious presidential election on the heels of these massive and powerful social rebellions and social upheaval against government tyranny across the board, really, but particularly in the United States. And importantly for us, this is sort of in the midst of all of this has been the summer of mobilization amongst athletic laborers. When you alluded to this, yourself as well, this is from the powerful mobilization that we saw in the WNBA and in the NBA to college football players fighting for much more say in their working conditions. From your perspective, and I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit. Like again, I know you're not a sociologist of sport, but I'd like to get your thoughts as an organizational theorist. What have these movements meant for you? How do you see these sort of broad labor movements playing out in sports as we go past the election and into the new year? It's funny because if there's anything that I pay attention to in sports, it's these kinds of movements. I went into grad school thinking I was going to do social movements. That's what I wanted to study. And at the end of my my ords paper, I. Well actually, kind of all through the paper, I talk about movements. I think movements have done more to change the distribution of resources in organizations than probably anything else. And so when I see these movements, it gives me a lot of hope. One, because of the influence they can have in other areas of life. Two, because anytime workers exercise their power to get more of it, I think that is a broad good. So I think I also think, especially the college students here, I'm thinking of the students a few years ago at Mizu when they said they weren't going to play and the president stepped down shortly thereafter if I'm correct. I think. Okay, I think the that college players especially have an immense amount of power. And they don't. by and large haven't been using it. And so when I see the movements of college students that were happening this year about playing conditions and about playing under COVID-19, or when I saw those movements at Mizu, it makes me hopeful because they can shift. Central to my work is about how organizations distribute resources by race. And especially college football, college sports is a really clear example of the unequal distribution of these resources by race. And so when I see students fight for that for a better distribution of those resources or a more equal distribution of those resources, it makes me really hopeful. And then I think, you know, when I see that tied to, you know, I've seen some estimates that say that the broader Black Lives Matter movement is now the largest social movement in US history. That stuff makes me hopeful, right? When you see this happening in a whole bunch of different areas, and I would also I also say that I think there was a reason, and I say this in the paper, there was a reason that the iconic, really iconic movements of the civil rights movement, like the Montgomery bus boycott or the World's sit-ins, they manipulated organizational resources, right? And they made people think differently about those organizational resources. And their clever manipulation of organizational resources through the organization filtered up to the state and forced states to change laws that altered the sort of racial conditions of the whole country. And obviously, movements are contingent, and I have no idea where these movements are going to go if we talk about the election in a minute. You know, I'm pretty pessimistic about that, but the movements themselves give me hope. All right, I'm optimistic about the movements. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just been, I'm really appreciative of your explanation of kind of how you solve them using the resources available to them. And sort of what we've done with sort of people we've interviewed on the podcast and some of our public pieces is kind of explore the constraints under which they're working in, right? And that the sort of reasons why they have not always kind of united and kind of advocated for their own interests and kind of what hamper them to be able to do that. Though of course, as we, I think we talked about this with Rick Westhead last week, you know, we're totally not, we're not sort of sure where it's going to go because then the football season started and if players did not bout, then they needed to continue playing, which is sort of another level of the constraints that they're working with them. Yeah. And you know, sort of related to that, you know, so in light of all that you said about the social movement, BLM and kind of this athlete activism, what do you make of the Marriott statements of solidarity released by all the sports teams and the leaders within them, the white coaches, et cetera, and sort of how do you see these statements fit in within the theory of racialized organizations? Okay. So I want to be optimistic about statements of solidarity, but what I, in my theory, there's this longstanding theory in organizational theory about decoupling. And that's that the sort of short gloss on this theory is that organizations have to, you know, please outside constituencies that may or may not be customers, but, you know, it, so we can think here of nice, you know, protest against, nice labor relations for, you know, drying on, on global South labor and not paying them, right? And so, Nike came up with a whole series, I mean, they still rely on global South labor, but they came up with a whole series of sort of public relations statements to gloss over that in certain ways. And I think these statements of solidarity are, are that right? They're a public relations move that is decoupled from the daily practices of an organization. And so what I mean by that is these, these, they're not alleviating the conditions of exploitation of the people working for them. And that, to me, is what solidarity would look like, right? Solidarity doesn't necessarily start with, you know, believing people outside of your organization's lives matter. It starts with treating the people that you have like direct control and power over as if they're lives matter. And so I have been, yeah, really pessimistic about the statements of solidarity, you know, the Washington football team was one of the first ones to put out a, I don't know if they were one of the first, excuse me, they put out a statement of solidarity. And I was just like, what are you talking about? Like your entire business model is based on, on like branding a racial slur and to come out and use, you know, they've since changed the name. But have they paid reparations or, you know, like redistributed the resources of the profits they've made for years of like selling racism. And so I guess that's how these statements of solidarity fit my, fit the theory of racialized organizations. I know that there are some, actually, I know more about businesses that aren't sports teams that have done more material things. But yeah, I'm not sure what teams have done real material differences, you know, move beyond statements to make real material differences. Yeah. Well, that's, that's almost, I want to kind of almost try to theorize this because I love how you put that. Like what solidarity essentially has to be something material, right? It's not just this, let's level of appearance, right? Or PR as you put it. Yeah. Is it possible within neoliberalism, like within the logic of the neoliberal corporation? Is a solidarity statement, like this is what I mean to be, I mean, I want to be, I'm trying to be theoretical, right? As obviously like in practice, they can put out a document that they call a solidarity statement. And we all agree that that's not what I'm talking about here. But I mean, like in terms of the definition you gave us, which is much more compelling, right? This idea that solidarity is something material that has to actually transform within the organization and change the experiences of people's lives and what they have access to in terms of resources and opportunities and access within the logic of neoliberalism is a solidarity statement from a corporation even possible at all? Or does it just contradict the entire project? So this is interesting. And I've been grappling with this a lot based on some of the responses to my paper. And part of what I think, and I think the larger movement around prison abolition or a lot of the critiques I'm seeing of diversity and inclusion in critiques I myself have made. I am not exempt from this, right? But I think I have been having this trouble dealing with the contradiction between fundamental transformation and harm reduction. So I go to work every day and I would like to not be harassed at work. And under the current system, I have to go to work every day, right? And so to me, making a worker's life easier under the system can be a form of harm reduction, maybe not solid, maybe solidarity is not the word I would use there, but it can be a form of harm reduction that I don't think we should minimize unless we're willing to say that we think people should be working under really bad conditions. So I do think that that's important. Do I think that that will get to the type of social relations I personally and my politics would like to see? Absolutely not at all. Again this is a place that I'm like trying to think about with my work right now and writing, trying to write my way through because I don't have a good answer to it. But I, you know, I'm thinking here of Wendy Brown's work on what, so Wendy Brown's work on asking for civil rights from the state when the state is often the person pressing various groups. And so anytime you ask the state for those rights, you're actually legitimating your oppression. You're saying the state is a legitimate force. And so I'm thinking of a lot of the work and a lot of the activism around corporations and around diversity as a similar process. So I did my dissertation on race and gender in the military and I looked at people who were complaining about harassment in the military and I found that whether it was race, gender or mental health that when they went to the military, the military typically punished them worse, right? So the military had these programs. They were supposedly there to alleviate the problem. But when people access those programs, they ended up ostracized or kicked out of the military. And I think what I found, I didn't know Brown's work at all at this time. But I think what I found fits very clearly with Brown's work is that how can you go to the very play unless you're organized? So I would say this is different if you're in a unit. And everyone can withdraw their labor and risks destroying the organization. That is a different thing. But as an individual, if you as an individual go and access these or ask for these rights, oftentimes things are going to get worse for you rather than better. And so yeah, I think I guess the short answer is harm reduction is important. It's not going to get us to where we need to be or where I think we need to be. Yeah, that's a terrific way of framing it. And I actually think that you're seeing this really similarly to the way we are right now. And before I get into that, I actually want to just say about Wendy Brad that there's I've just been listening to a terrific new episode of the Dig podcast with Daniel Denver with Wendy Brown that just came out this week. And it's absolutely fabulous. So for anyone that's sort of interested in following up on this aspect of the conversation, I think that's probably a great place to turn. But what I wanted to say in terms of what you were suggesting about harm, I like to love how you put that, the harm reduction versus kind of abolition if you want to put in those terms. Yeah, that's exactly what we have been grappling with in the context of college football, right? Because we have been making the claim in a lot of our public work recently. Our vanishing point, much like you're describing Victor, our vanishing point is actually abolition, right? It's at the abolition of football and college football. But those are really difficult things to contemplate, not just from the standpoint of just like the cultural imagination in this country and people's investment in this thing that is football. But also because of the structural conditions that make football important in people's lives, right? Like we be remiss to ignore the fact that people have sacrificed sometimes by the time they get to college literally 13 years of head injury. Yeah. In order to get access to this thing that is otherwise denied to them in the society precisely because of structural racism. And so to then just shut the door on that and say, well, no, you can't have football. But of course, we're not actually ameliorating any of those other conditions in American society. Then you're just taking away what is actually a rational avenue of opportunity, even though it is an incredibly harmful and destructive one. But it's a reasonable thing for people to pursue when there are so many other forms of constraint upon their lives. So you can't actually think about the abolition of football without thinking about a form of reparations for all of that harm that we're talking about here. And so it's a much larger project is one trying to say in exactly the way that you're describing this is a much larger project, right? You can have this vanishing point. There's something different than what you're looking for. But like in the day to day, that means that if we're talking about college football during the pandemic or at any other time, it is a harm reduction question, right? It's like, yeah, let's talk about how these athletes can unionize not because I think football is something that I ultimately want them to be doing, but I want good things for them for these players, right? I want their health and safety and well-being. And in this moment, that organization that they can do together, that Missouri example, you brought up, that's the hope for making their lives at least a bit better now. And that matters. Yeah, yeah, I think that I think that that yeah, like I said, I've been struggling with it. I don't know the answer, but I I don't think people should work in bad conditions on a day to day basis. And it's it's weird when I see people like seemingly not supporting that. Yeah, so we've we've been talking about a lot of these things that are sort of adjacent to just like the political climate that we're in right now. So I'd like to to segue into specifically talking a little bit of politics now. And I'd like to start off with a question that I've sort of been grappling with and thinking about for the last month or so. And that is like what the hell is going on with the current administrations assault on critical race theory. And it's not just rhetorical. It's it's an actual tangible war on critical race theory. And it has an impact on anti-racist work at public institutions across the country. And as a Canadian, I would say even it has a less manifest impact, but an impact on anti-racist work being done at institutions even here. So can you walk us through the president's recent executive order and what that means? Okay, I'm going to start with a caveat that I am not a lawyer. Although I read the executive order and I know how some organizations have responded. And I wrote a piece in the Washington post about the executive order. But we're going to be linking that piece for sure. So people definitely should check out a piece of Victor Rowe. Yes. Okay, so the so I think the assault on critical race theory. Why now? I'm not sure. It's the the although I would say that like there's a whole group of public or semi-public intellectuals that have been sort of lobbying bad faith, misunderstanding, critiques at critical race theory for quite a while. I know I would say on both the left and the right, although the right or in definitely some centrist too. The critiques are often from my read like not so I said they're bad faith, but they really misrepresent what critical race theory is. They can flate a lot of different traditions. So critical race theory is by no means the only tradition of race scholarship or even race scholarship that examines race critically. So there's a group of scholars who make a distinction between critical race theory that arose out of the legal movement and what they call race critical theory that arose from sort of the black radical tradition that folks yeah that you know folks like anyway I don't need to get into that debate. So I kind of the one thing I do want to get into one thing because you've got you just peak my interest too much here. Can you spend a moment on the left the what you consider to be the bad faith left critiques of critical race theory that's what I'm most interested in. So I think the bad faith less critiques of critical race theory argue that it's identity politics or argue that it is in some way like not you know doesn't pay close enough attention to class and this is always like really strange to me because if you look at sort of just the trajectory of like the concept of intersectionality or the trajectory of critical race theory as a whole. So the trajectory of intersectionality from the Colby River collective statement they say literally in that statement they're like we agree with Marx. Like that is literally the sentence and they're like but Marx you know and Marxist the Marxist left in some ways downplays the importance of race and structuring social relations or if you look at you know Kimberly Crenshaw or Richard Elgato's discussion of the genesis of critical race theory critical race theory got its foothold in the academy by being connected to the class crits who were a group of leftist scholars talking about the ways that class relations structured us law right and they sort of created this opening for critical race theorists and provided space at their meetings and like this group of folks is still going on like they they had a meeting when I was at the University of Tennessee and at the law school at the University of Tennessee and I went to the meeting and so so the idea that critical race theory like downplays or or ignores classes just kind of weird to me I and so so that's where I think those those critiques on the left come from on the right they just typically like I actually think on the right I usually describe it as they describe any idea about race that they don't like as critical race theory and you know it could be the white privilege it could be I mean diversity trainings came from like industrial management like not from critical race theory so I don't understand how and of course there are probably diversity trainings that use an idea like structural racism from critical race theory in the training but like diversity trainings in critical race theory are just not the same thing they don't have those are the good ones right those are the good diversity trainings yeah so like they're not they're not they're not the same thing and so I don't know why it's come about right now other than you know it's election time it's been building in part of the broader discourse for a while [BLANK_AUDIO] And now the impact is important. So the broad reading, so some universities have stopped all diversity trading. And my reading of the executive order, and again, I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the executive order was there is a cutout for class instruction. So if you are, so like I am teaching a class on critical race theory this semester, if you are in my class, my read of the executive order means I did not have to change what I was teaching, right? But it does mean folks are scared. I've seen reports of people being disinvited from talks and trainings. I've seen people being asked to rewrite their talks and trainings, and I've seen universities pausing, halting, yeah, stopping their trainings. Now I have my critiques of the trainings, right? The trainings, in many cases, there's good empirical research showing that a lot of the trainings are ineffective and a lot of the trainings, a lot of universities are a lot of corporations don't use the trainings that have sort of proven impact at diversifying. But to me, there's a different, there's sort of a different worry here. Less about the effectiveness of the trainings and more about what it means when the federal government shuts down an entire area of research-based speech, how they're framing it, whether I think they're getting the research right or not, through an executive order. What that means for its chilling effect on free speech, what that means for the funding of these organizations because they tied it to federal funding and like every school almost gets some share of federal funding, they tied it to federal funding. So what it means for speech, what it means for funding and what it means for a general chilling effect on what people are willing to say and do. - Yeah, absolutely. I'm really glad that you pointed out kind of how you nuanced it, right? That it's your point about how even though these trainings don't do what we would hope that they would do the whole idea that this executive order is really shutting down the conversation and kind of essentially trying to negate all of the work, all of the research, but also the work that people have done to implement these policies and the hopes of like some semblance and sort of a culture change. So I'm really glad that you sort of nuanced that for us. And you know, to kind of talk a bit more about the sort of contemporary or the, you know, current electoral moment, how do you kind of, how do I say, how do you kind of explain or kind of understand what's going on with the election and prospects for potential anti-racist work? In other words, share with us some of your invites, your insights about how this election, election cycle has played out and what it reveals about the racist dynamics of the US. - Oh, that's a big question. So critical race theory tends to be like pretty, pretty pessimistic because it's looking at sort of how structural racism changes and maintains itself rather than, you know, there's a, there's, I've written sort of critiques of like progress in social, racial progress in social science with a number of people. And I think, so looking, so I said earlier that, you know, by summer ports, the Black Lives Matter protests this summer were some of the largest on record. And, you know, it's according to some people the largest social movement that's happened in the US. If you look at, there's some survey research now showing strangely that there are some, that like majorities of white people actually, in some cases more white folks than Black folks say that structural racism is like a fundamental problem in the US from surveys this summer. So, you know, those are kind of historically unprecedented things. But what worries me about it is this research from Fabio Rojas and his colleague, whose name I'm forgetting, forgive me, on the collapse of the anti-war movement when Obama was elected. And their argument is that the anti-war movement was a highly partisan movement. And although Obama continued or expanded the wars in certain ways, that because he was part of, you know, for lack of a better term, I know that there are like many, many factions on the left, but part of the team, that the larger movement could no longer get people into the streets. What I worry is that, you'll see a similar thing if Biden is elected. Is that people will say, ah, we got rid of Trump, just like racism was over once Obama was elected, racism is over again, and we can go back to not worrying about this. So, that being said, things will be much worse under Trump. And again, if we go back to the distinction between harm reduction and fundamental change, under Trump, I think the tendencies we've seen towards sort of an explicit embrace of, you know, open white nationalism and the kinds of policies that they, have implemented at the border, the, the kinds of, not just pro-police, but pro-police violence policies that they have supported, will only increase under a Trump presidency. I can't see why they would, they would decelerate or, you know, lay off, because I can't see why. I think also things like the profound level of attempted and successful voter suppression will also increase, right? And so, yeah, so this is all speculative. I have no idea what's actually going to happen, but, yeah, I'll leave it at that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Of course, we're all speculating here. What else could we be doing? But, yeah, you pointed to some interesting dynamics, because I mean, I certainly do not disagree with you about the very, very, you know, frightening prospects of another Trump regime and new Trump hand data of any kind. Yeah, I can only see it going really dark places in this context. So, you know, I can only echo what you said. The one that's for me is more interesting to interrogate actually is the sort of Biden position, because your analogy to Obama is very interesting. And I think it makes sense, except here's what I'm wondering, in this case of Obama, Obama was the left-ish, I would say, hand data of primary, well, you know, at the time though, here's the thing. In retrospect, an issue underlining the Ish part, but at the time, underlining the left part, right? I mean, that's why that movement was so powerful and that's why people got off the streets, because it seemed like they had accomplished, like mission accomplished, right? To quote the bush, but it seemed like you actually had elected the candidate that was gonna do what you wanted, so you didn't need to be in the streets anymore, because you would put that person in the corridor's power. What seems maybe to be different to me in this moment is that we've just gone through X, and I mean, it's really weird, because we've also, we went through an incredibly contentious primary for the Democratic Party, that was then interrupted by a global pandemic. So it's like, it's really weird to reflect on now, I don't know how people kind of, and then we've had the summer of uprising, right? So like we feel kind of distant from that primary moment, but certainly in that primary moment, I mean Biden felt like the right neoliberal edge of the Democratic Party, right? And now I think it was really clear to a lot of the people, the very people who have been in the streets all summer, I don't think most of those people, in the way that they may have, those same people who had transported them back in time, that have seen Obama as a really helpful figure, I'm not really, I mean, like Biden is just the best of two bad alternatives, and one alternative is horrifically bad. So Biden does seem good-ish in that context, but I mean, he doesn't seem like the figure who's going to accomplish the sort of structural change that I think a lot of people, especially young people. And that goes back to what you were talking about earlier in terms of where your optimism is, right, from this sort of social-- Yeah, yeah. it. Young people understand that something dramatic has to change when it comes to climate, when it comes to racism, when it comes to capitalism. Like we basically have to turn the whole thing over and no one thinks that Biden's going to do that. I don't think there's any illusion whatsoever. So my optimism in this moment, if there is any, is that I think that like Biden gets Trump out, which is good, but Biden also frankly is, I think, going to push people right back out in the streets. Not immediately, but because it's going to become clear right away that he's going to be imposing a neoliberal austerity that's going to do nothing to address racism, capitalism, or climate change. And people are desperate at this point and they understand that they can't just wait him out. I mean, I hope you're right. I think some of the dynamics that you outlined there are definitely different than they were under Obama. And I think some of them, some of the dynamics that you're talking about are actually driven by disillusionment with Obama not being what people thought he was going to be. And so, yeah, I mean, I hope you're right. Yeah, because the alternative is not great. You know, I mean, I guess I'm just like, you were saying earlier, I'm just not at all convinced that in the event that Biden gets elected, which I'm not hopeful for that. I don't know, maybe I'm just kind of defending my, my defending myself in case Trump gets re-elected because last time, which is so shocking, but I'm just, there's very little evidence to kind of show that there's going to be a culture change after if Biden were to get elected. Like the whole like, you know, vote Biden, vote at racism. Like, that's not going to happen for all the reasons that you laid out for us, right? It's not necessarily about the people that are in power. It's of the organization off the government. It's not just in it. It's of it. Do you think the, do you have a prediction for this election? Obviously, this means not that we're, you know, I mean, we're not Nate Silver over here who make a, we don't make a fortune wrongly predicting presidential politics, but I think that if he can get away with that, then we can at least just take a stab at predicting what happens. What do you think? I really don't. I have a kind of like, I feel like I didn't have a prediction for the last election either. Like I, in the sense that I was, I was just not hopeful. And maybe that is a reflection of the choices we have. But yeah, I don't have a prediction, but I like, I hope we don't have four more years of Trump. I mean, just the, I mean, just the literal pull of death under his coronavirus handling is like, when would this possibly end if he's in charge for another four years? So I don't, yeah, I'm, I'm hopeful that it won't be him. I think I might speak for everyone on the show when I say we are, I think, all hopeful for that here on the end of sport, because certainly the atrocities that have happened over the past four years and accelerated during the pandemic have been a little bit much. And I think I am also a little bit hesitant to think that if we no longer have Trump, we also have this sort of changed society. I think that's not going to happen. And we're going to start, or we're going to see many of the same things we've been seeing for the past four years under a Biden administration too, just not as, um, potently dangerous and infectious as the Trump administration. So Victor, I would like to just thank you so much for coming on the show, for providing your brilliant, brilliant thoughts and talking about your work. It's been super awesome. So just thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for the invitation and I really enjoyed it. 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