Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the jacket and show. I'm Jen Pan, here with Paul Prescott. Paul, what are we getting up to today?

Uh, all things academia. No, this is my favorite thing to talk about. There's a lot not going on. So this is this is going to be a pretty academic episode. Uh, we're having on Naveira Majemdar, who is a professor at John J College at CUNY.

Um, her new book is out from Verso. It's called a world in a grain of sand, postcolonial literature and radical universalism, a bit of a mouthful, but I promise it has implications for kind of the broader left.

Um, I think one of the things that I'm very excited to ask Naveira about is the relationship between certain trends that rise in the academy and the types of politics that we on the left find ourselves kind of enmeshed in.

Um, so definitely stay tuned for that. Naveira will be on a little bit later. I think that's going to be a great conversation.

Um, for now, uh, I wanted to, so, so one of the things we're going to talk to Naveira about again is kind of this idea of cultural essentialism, right?

Um, and how it sort of appears in postcolonial theory, um, how it appears, uh, in, in various forms on the left. Um, and I think that one interesting example that I've seen a lot recently is a document called white supremacy culture.

Uh, this is, uh, from the workbook or from like a diversity training book called dismantling racism, a workbook for social change groups by two diversity trainers, Kenneth Jones and Tima Okan.

And the reason I'm bringing this, this, uh, text up is because it's really been everywhere since the racial reckoning began in 2020, right?

Um, and, and I want to say for my own, you know, for my own background, I was actually first exposed to this text a few years ago, uh, when I was working at a progressive nonprofit.

And at the time, uh, I was like, this is one of the worst things I've ever read. Like it's truly an awful text, but, and, and I complained to friends about it afterwards, you know, after I was sort of exposed to it at work.

But I also thought at the time, well, this is just a niche professional activist thing. Like don't, like don't get all worked out. It's, it's, you know, nobody takes this stuff seriously.

Okay, so fast forward to 2020. Like I said, this text is appearing everywhere. Um, and, and I'll get into some of the places where I think it's been sort of most prevalent in a little bit.

Uh, but first I want to read just the opening paragraph from this text, which kind of lays out what the, what it is that these two authors are trying to do.

So they write, this is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify.

The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being proactively named or chosen by the group.

They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. So I think it's now worth going through a few of those characteristics and then Paul, I definitely want to get your take on some of them.

But, but here's the list of white supremacy culture characteristics. So it includes things like perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word.

Uh, we see here power hoarding objectivity, uh, right to comfort. Um, and, you know, I think because this text is now so widespread, it has come under fire.

I think, you know, from a lot of conservatives and people on the right to be honest, who really take issue with the idea that say perfectionism is a trait of whiteness, right?

And, you know, if you are to read the document white supremacy culture in like total bad faith, it does seem like they're arguing at times that like perfectionism is a trait of whiteness or like writing is like something that like, you know, white people do.

I mean, that's if you really, if you really want to, um, I don't know, like take the text at his absolute worst.

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