Lara Bazelon — Parents, Children, and Systemic Racism

The Glenn Show

Glenn Loury

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2021

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Above you’ll find my conversation with University of San Francisco law professor Lara Bazelon. She specializes in criminal law and has won exoneration for wrongfully convicted incarcerated people. We discuss systemic racism in the criminal justice system and debate the pros and cons of various reform efforts. We go into the details of Yutico Briley’s wrongful conviction case in which Lara and her sister Emily were involved (you can read Emily’s piece about it here). Then we shift gears and discuss the challenges of writing fiction. We talk about Lara’s absorbing new novel A Good Mother and my memoir-in-progress. These are pretty deep waters, as we reflect on how our writing has forced us to confront some hard questions about our roles as professionals and parents.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts! Let me know in the comments!

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0:00 How Glenn and Lara each approach systemic racism

6:46 Lara: The Yutico Briley case exposes the roots of systemic racism

17:32 Trying to understand the equities and inequities of crime and punishment

28:20 The differing perspectives on justice involved in the Briley case

34:44 Are progressive criminal justice policies having an impact?

46:16 Lara's new novel, A Good Mother

54:37 Glenn and Lara's experiences of parenthood

1:01:08 Why Glenn really left Harvard's economics department

1:05:16 Glenn's rocky road as a father

Links

Bari Weiss’ forum on systemic racism

Glenn’s book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values

Glenn’s “intellectual obituary” of James Q. Wilson

Lara’s novel, A Good Mother

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, Laura.
0:05.0	Hello, Glenn.
0:07.0	How are you?
0:08.0	I'm good. How are you?
0:10.0	I'm excellent. Thank you. I'm Glenn Lowry, the Glenn show here.
0:14.0	GlennLowry.substake.com and at blog.hears.tv.
0:17.0	And I'm with Laura Baselon. Do I say your name correctly?
0:20.0	You did.
0:21.0	Laura Baselon, who's a law professor at the San Francisco University of San Francisco School of Law.
0:28.0	And I am welcome her to the glacial. So I'm very happy to be talking with you, Laura.
0:35.0	I'm really honored to be here and I've been thinking a lot about talking to you.
0:39.0	We are having this conversation because of Sam Harris, I think, because both you and I were invited to contribute a comment by Barry Wise at her substack about systemic racism, which we did do.
0:53.0	And in the Twitter or some other discussion about the thing.
0:57.0	Sam says, you should have her on your show because you wrote, you know, yes, systemic, I'm not going to try to say what you wrote, but you wrote, yeah, systemic racism.
1:06.0	Exactly. Let me tell you about systemic racism. And I wrote.
1:10.0	I think systemic racism really, you know, so we were coming at fairly different things. And I think Sam thought, and I think I thought, I think, and you thought that it would be good for us to talk about it. So that's why we're here.
1:27.0	Sure is, as I recall correctly, your kind of top line about it was systemic racism is a bludgeon and a bluff.
1:35.0	And in a way, I think you wrote it sort of condescending to the people that it's actually trying to lift up. And then my perspective was using a concrete example of a recent client that I had to talk about sort of what had happened to him and how to me, it was representative of the system operating in a racist way.
1:55.0	So we're definitely coming at it from different perspectives. I'm coming at it from kind of like a concrete. This is what it's like litigating on the ground perspective.
2:03.0	And you're coming at it. I think for more of a, this is my life experience. This is what I've read. This is what I've thought about and written. And this is kind of what I see from a 10,000 foot view.
2:16.0	Yeah, I don't like that. I don't like, I don't like being put up at 10,000 feet. I'm going to try to defend myself. Let me say where I'm coming at it. I'm coming at it from an exasperation with the rhetoric, which I think is unresponsive to the condition.
2:29.0	The rhetoric is black victimization, systemic racism. It is a kind of the structure is so messed up that, of course, we've got black failure. And I'm saying people have choices.
	...

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