Teju Cole on Blackface and Valeria Luiselli on the Border Crisis

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2019

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When depictions of Virginia politicians in blackface surfaced this month, the New Yorker contributor Teju Cole was unsurprised. “A white man of a certain age in the U.S.,” he reflects, “is found to have done something racist in his past; well, yes.” As a photographer and photo critic, he is acutely aware that a photograph captures the thinnest sliver of time, half a second or much less. So any photograph of a man in blackface—or in any other offensive image—always indicates that “there’s a lot more where that came from.” And Valeria Luiselli, a writer born in Mexico, struggles to depict the experiences of children arriving alone at the southern border, in circumstances unimaginably different from her own border crossings as the daughter of a diplomat.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	Teju Cole is a novelist and an essayist who writes widely about photography and many aspects of the culture we live in.
0:19.7	He's the author of Blind Spot and many other
0:21.7	books. Last week, Cole joined me to talk for reasons that are pretty obvious about the history and the
0:27.6	meaning of Blackface. I tell you, I've got to ask, what went through your mind when you first saw the
0:33.8	photo that everybody's been talking about, the governor of Virginia, either in blackface
0:39.1	in a photograph of his medical school yearbook or his admission that at one time he had dressed
0:45.6	up in blackface in the 80s. Right. Well, I think like many of us, I received that information
0:53.7	and kind of a second or third hand. What I mean is that
0:57.0	I was already seen commentary about it before we even understand what the facts of the case are.
1:03.4	In this case, the facts were not clear at all. And since Ralph Northam kept changing his story, it wasn't actually clear what kind of
1:14.6	responsibility we were talking about here. Was he the one in the picture? It wasn't clear at all.
1:22.1	The only strange thing about seeing this particular little thing explode was how unsurprising it was.
1:30.7	What do you mean about that?
1:32.5	What I mean is that a white man of a certain age in the U.S. is found to have done something racist in their past.
1:51.1	Well, yes, this is a racist country. And we seem to think that each time it happens, it's somebody who is a bit of a, it's a unicorn. But the only thing
1:56.9	that happened here is that it was caught. Do you think he should resign?
2:07.8	It sounds terrible to say so, but I actually don't care what he does one way or the other.
2:13.3	What I'm interested in is what kind of conversation is possible out of an incident like this. That is not the same old groundhog day. Because what I really see here is that it was bad to do what he did.
2:25.2	And it was bad for his attorney general to also be in blackface.
2:30.7	But how far does that badness go?
	...

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