iO Tillett Wright on the American experiment
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“I feel like America was an experiment that right now is yielding really hideous, ugly results". In the days after the US election, Lilah explores how divided the US is with artist and activist iO Tillett Wright. iO created the hit true-crime podcast The Ballad of Billy Balls. He just finished a ten-year project travelling to all 50 states to photograph 10,000 queer Americans and has a unique lens on America. They discuss the election, how Americans were taught to hate, the dangers of groupthink, the ebb and flow of the fight for queer rights, this generation’s fight for civil rights and what effective activism looks like.
iO's projects:
–Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America
–iO's Ted Talk, 50 Shades of Gay
–A conversation between iO and King Princess (Interview Magazine)
iO's recommendations:
–Rabbit Hole podcast, from the New York Times
–The Social Dilemma is on Netflix (here's an FT interview with its director, Jeff Orlowski)
–Swindled, a podcast about white-collar crime & corporate greed
–A General Theory of Love: a book about the science of human emotions and biological psychiatry
Ahead of our next episode, three pieces by Simon Schama:
–The two Americas: LBJ, MLK and what the dramas of 1965 can teach a polarised nation
–Simon Schama: History is better served by putting the Men in Stone in museums
–Plague Time: Simon Schama on what history tells us
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, you're listening to Culture Call, the Life and Arts podcast from the Financial Times. |
| 0:06.3 | I'm Lila Raptopoulos, an editor in New York, coming up on today's show. |
| 0:11.4 | This is the culture that we live in now where people are told you're red and you're blue, |
| 0:16.4 | and that means that you believe all of this and you believe all of that. And, oh, by the way, |
| 0:20.5 | you hate each other. And most of the time I think if you really dug in with people and |
| 0:26.3 | you ask them do you actually believe that gay people are deserving of less |
| 0:30.8 | rights do you actually believe that all black people are criminals do you |
| 0:35.1 | actually believe that immigrants should have their babies separated and taken away? |
| 0:39.3 | No, right? |
| 0:41.3 | But somehow you end up out there in your F-150 with the American flag flying off the back of your truck, |
| 0:47.3 | slamming other cars off the road to harass a Biden-Harris bus. |
| 0:51.3 | It's a very quick leap from casual, passive support to violent support. |
| 1:04.5 | Welcome to episode three in our special season of Culture Call. As you may know, this season we're |
| 1:10.4 | doing something a bit different. |
| 1:12.0 | First of all, my co-host, Griselda Murray Brown, is on maternity leave. And also, you may have |
| 1:17.0 | noticed that the world is in flux. And we have a unique chance right now to reimagine. So I'm |
| 1:23.6 | inviting cultural thinkers and FT colleagues on to do some of that reimagining with me. |
| 1:28.2 | And I'm going to be honest with you, I have been anticipating this episode for months |
| 1:31.9 | because I knew this would be a turning point. |
| 1:34.9 | I knew that from October through December, there was going to be the time before the election |
| 1:39.8 | and there was going to be the time after. |
| 1:42.5 | Welcome to the time after. |
... |
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