The Science Salon Podcast, I'm your host, Michael Schirmer. I'm recording this on Wednesday, December 16th.

We'll post this on the last week of 2020, the most momentous year probably of my life,

and probably within at least half a century going back and I thought for this one I would do a reading of an essay I wrote called The After Time, The Future of Civilization

after COVID-19, which was published in this journal, the American Scholar.

The one that was published in here is shorter version

that I'm going to read here. By the way you notice the cover story is not COVID but

the problem with whiteness so let me make a few comments before I do

this reading about race in America. This is the other big momentous movement of 20 was the Black Lives Matter movement.

And I've addressed this just briefly.

I had one episode on the subject of race in America when I had Shelby Steele on the podcast last month.

So you can look that up in our archives.

He has a new book out called Shame and then a documentary on what really killed Michael Brown.

But he's more famously known for the author of this book, The Content of Our Character, which I read

in 1990 when it came out and that was a game changer for me and many of the issues he

brings up there are still with us actually even worse in many cases. He's a

conservative black commentator and commentator and scholar, as he's characterized as a black conservative,

like that needs qualification, which is still, I think,

part of the problem.

And so I haven't written anything extensive on race

since the Black Lives Matter movement began in part because I haven't had time to read a lot of the literature so I've

started to read some of the books that are on the New York Times bestseller list.

For example I just read Isabel Wiltinson's book Cast and Ibrahim X Kandy's book Cast and Ebrum X Kennedy's book How to be an Anti-Racist.

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