The problem is is that the way that elites have tended to define racial problems is the way they define pretty much all social problems which is as problems of manners and problems of mind, right? In other words, if you read Robin De Angelo's book, which was the best selling book of 2020, which is incredible, it is an instruction manual for viewing racism as

fundamentally being

about people being nice to each other

or thinking nice things about each other.

And that's always been the wrong way

to think about racism.

But what we want to think about in terms of race

and racial inequality and racial justice is the actual material conditions under which people live.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Shamonk.

My guest today is Freddie de Boer.

Freddie is a leftist social critic who is the author of the cult of Smart which he was on the

podcast talking about a number of years ago as well as how elites aid the Social Justice Movement, which was published last fall.

Freddie and I talked about the main thesis of his book, the idea that the social justice movement was in some ways a

grassroots affair that was eaten and taken over by social elites. We talked both about what it means for elites to control

a social justice movement like that and whether there really was something like an

organic grassroots movement that was taken over in that kind of way

and what would actually mean to have genuinely radical politics about those issues,

whether Freddie as he sometimes says, is indeed a radical about those issues,

or whether we ultimately agree on a set of relatively moderate center-left-ish reforms.

This conversation is part of a series we've been doing at persuasion with the Civil Discourse

Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and the Alpha Vining Davis Foundation.

Thank you so much for being a long time listener to the good fight. As you know,

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