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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics,

power and prejudices. This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential

election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined here on a very wet London rainy day by Eric Kaufman, who is,

let's get this right, Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre

for Heteralock Social Science at the University of Buckingham, and Eric is also the author of several

books, including this latest one, which is called Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural

Revolution. It's an excellent book, and I thoroughly recommend it to all spectator

TV viewers. Eric, congratulations on the book, first of all. Thank you, Freddie. It's great to be here.

Did this take you longer than your previous efforts? No, I would say it took a little, not quite as long,

but, you know, I did my last book, God, I guess that's 2018 now, so that's six years ago. Yeah. And the previous

one was 2010, eight years before then. So what tends to happen is I'll tend to do research

and let these ideas marinate for a while and then I'll pull it all together. So by the time

I actually write the book, it doesn't take that long because it's more matter of pulling things

together and just, you know, writing every

day. But I couldn't sit down and write that book tomorrow. Because I also, because it's a very

comprehensive effort, more than an effort and achievement, because you've managed to sort of address

the causes, the intellectual causes of what we call wokeery,

...