Calvin Baker, A MORE PERFECT REUNION: Race, Integration, and the Future of America

[1:24]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zoe Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Calvin Baker is the author of A More Race, Integration, and the Future of America. Calvin is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Naming the Once Two Heroes, Dominion, and Grace, and has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Leipzig, Germany. Welcome, Calvin. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss A More Perfect Reunion, Race Integration,

[2:28]Calvin Baker: and the Future of America. Thank you for having me, Susan. Pleasure to be here. Great.

[2:32]Zibby Owens: So obviously, the title, we get a glimpse as to what this book is about. But for those who have not read the rest of it, could you give a more of a synopsis about what's what's in this book, and why did you feel it was so important to write? So

[2:46]Calvin Baker: the central thesis of the book is that we talk about race in a very performative way, and we've been talking about race in a very performative way for a long time, and America Americans perform a theater of racial awakening. Now they've been performing this awakening since the revolutionary era, since the, right, the great awakening, the generation leading into the revolution, when we have a race problem and right, and it sort of gets shunted aside for these bigger concerns, like what are we gonna do if we have an England problem too, what are you gonna do about that? And then the civil war, right? But the right, the the constitution points a direct line to the civil war. And during the civil war, and then we can go back to that later, we have a race problem. And then the civil rights moment. And my theory is that what we really have is an integration problem because race is own race is construction. We all know that. And right, there's only so much you can talk about it, and it raises the will, but what's really fundamentally broken is that the society remains segregated. And the real problem, the real fear, even for the early abolitionists, was how do you integrate these folks into the rest of society that has massive prejudices against them? And so that's what I wanted to talk about. And that's why I think we're still encountering now, even as we talk about race, the real question, the harder question, the frightening question is, well, how do you take apart these structures of racism? And do that, you have to integrate people. Great. That's a

[4:40]Zibby Owens: long way go. No. There's so much to go into with that. And even from the book, but I wanted to just back up and get a little more information about you. I know that you had taught at Yale, which I went to by the way. So yeah, go yell, whatever. Although I did took almost no English classes, even though I thought I wanted to be an English major. What? I know. I just there were all these prerequisites, like one twenty nine, one twenty seven, I don't know, whatever all those courses Major English poets. Yeah. Major English poets and all that stuff. And I just like was no. I don't know. Because I ended up taking all psychology classes and reading for fun on the side. You missed the best part of Yale, Zvi. I probably did. Yeah. You know, it was all based on this one bad class, one time freshman year. Who knows what my life would have been like? I don't know.

[5:25]Calvin Baker: You might be a a book podcaster.

[5:29]Zibby Owens: Actually, that's not true. I did take a conflict class about Different thing. Proust and, you know, all the Madeleines and all that stuff. Anyway but not English. Okay. Take us back and give me more of a picture of, like, your background and your novel writing and all of that and so that we have more context of this book. Oh, that's a that's a lot. How far back do wanna go? Honestly, all the way. Go as far back as you want. Where are you from? Where were you born? I was born in Chicago.

[5:56]Calvin Baker: I am in the seventies and growing up at the sense that things were changing. I talked to my grandparents about race, and they saw the world through this very racialized lens, because they live very racialized lives. And my life, my early life, a black family, I went to integrated schools or mixed schools and had the sense that things were changing and had a real impatience with some of the, both the racialized structures I hear, you know, in fact, like for my family, but also in the political side, and frankly in curriculums. And when I went to a school that would let me not take a core curriculum, I didn't go to Yale because they had a core curriculum. And I sometime, I guess it was sometime around senior of college, or of high school, I became very, very interested in trying to locate myself. And I went to a super traditional high school, at that time it was an independent school, but it was very conservative in its curriculum. If they could have taught us in Latin, they would have. And I wanted to locate my own concerns, myself as a Black person, in the literature and the histories of this country, but also the West, because we know that the forces of migration, the forces of movement around the world that we inhabit started 500 ago. Mean, started before that. Like, we can go back to the Renaissance world, we won't do that because it's early in the morning. But in the modern world, beginning with the age of exploration, beginning in, right, the slave trade and European settlement and all of these things. So much had been erased. And I was concerned with filling in my history, and that entailed a journey that was rebellious for the time. Right? So I was an English major, but I was an English major kicking and screaming. One of my professors told me I was the best student of my generation. This was twenty years after the fact, but because when I was there, everyone wanted to kill me. They didn't know what to do with me. And because I was asking all these really difficult questions, these really challenging questions, and I was asking myself as well. And that my led first book, Naming the New World. And it was a novel about consciousness in my mind and the ways that specifically, African consciousness changes in the journey to America. So it begins in pre contact Africa and ends in contemporary America. I'm really concerned with these questions, how is one changed, right, by these movements? And of course, this is, I think most Americans can relate to this because you have these ancestral stories and, right, my grandparents or great grandparents were German, but I'm not German anymore, I'm something different. And I mean, a part of me or I can claim this German ist, I can claim this Italian ist, I can claim this Russian ist, but I'm different. And so that question of change, because we think of blackness as so monolithic and static, That led to my second book, which was called Once Two Heroes. It's about World War II because then I have these questions about violence and European violence and violence in the collective unconsciousness of the North Atlantic, of America and of Europe, and these sort of what I saw at the time, these twin mirrors of the Holocaust and the slave trade, and right, and I mean, you can, if if you study these things, I study these things, you can, right, you see there are all these parallels that are rising from, well, what Frederick Douglass called the white book of libel, but it's really, it's a group of slanders and slurs that invented once and are applied and reapplied to whoever the dominant group chooses. Right? Like, these folks aren't that creative. There's a there's a there's a single playbook. I mean, you can go you can see the same things applied to the Armenians. You can see it's like the same, like, they're this, they're that, they're like, they're lazy or they're right, they're like either really lazy or over sex or sexless. It just goes like one or two ways and it's like dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And so that was the second book. The third book I went to write about America, qua America. So I wrote this book set in the pre revolutionary period about a free black family, one of whom fights in the revolution. This is, I mean, this was a phenomena after the the House of Burgess in the seventeenth century, the Virginia House of Burgess passes a law because slavery at first is such a nebulous state in America, right, we forget that it's a thing that must be constructed. We always think, oh, it's always been, you know, people sat around and they thought about how you build this. And one of the early moves they make, because, right, the presence of free Blacks threatens the claims of slavery, right, a thriving free Black community, you can't say these people are this and this and this and this, Right? And so the Virginia House of Burgess banishes free Blacks from the then colony. And, I mean, they're creating all these Black laws, like you right, like the child of an enslaved woman has to be enslaved because there's all this, like, race mix, I'm gonna use a crude term, going on. Right, you've got all these thorny problems because humanity is complex, history is complex. We got to simplify this. We have to And so we're going to build this thing called slavery in which all of these Africans we claim are inferior and supposed to be subordinate to us, we need to be kept in their place so that we can keep making money. And because free labor, who can resist that? And so it's illegal for a free black man to live in the colony of Virginia. Dominion's about a man who's emancipated on the he's indentured and sort of finishes his term near the beginning of the time that law is passed. And so America being America, he sets out West, which then goes to what would become North Carolina. And Virginia was massive. Virginia splits three times, essentially, first Virginia into the Carolinas, and then Carolina North and South. And all these splits are happening around questions that we recognize today of religion, of commerce. Are we going to be a society of, right, are we going to be Anglican? Are we going to be what we call now evangelical? Are we going to be a society of corporate agriculture? Are we going to be a society of small businesses? So these are some of the intersecting questions that are already playing out then, and this is why historians say things rhyme, and dominions about this family settling the land, going through the struggles that you go to, and like subsequent generations, of course, have different relationships, one of whom fights in the war. And I imagined it, in my mind then, as a sort of Aeneid like story. And Aeneid why Aeneid? Because Aeneid

[13:58]Zibby Owens: See, now we're going back to the same class at Yale. This is like, can't I'm get away from telling you, these Yale English teachers, I don't know what it is. Always back to the classics. Anyway Everything goes back to I mean, you know, there's a

[14:10]Calvin Baker: there's a reason they're fundamental. We can all we can all relate to them. But the the canny thing or the uncanny thing about Virgil as I read him is he's writing this myth of Rome at a time of collapse, or it's the beginning of the collapse of splintering. And so he's writing this myth from a position of knowing as opposed to naivete. And that fascinated me. Wanted to the myth of America is always a legal myth. It's always a naive myth. And so the question is, what if you shift that and you're writing from a position of knowing, right, which all that we know now, you to account for. And that became fascinating to me. Right. Like, the fact of free blacks in early America, the facts of these proto arguments that continue to shape us around race, around around capitalism, around religion. So that was just those those catnip to my brain then. And eventually but all of this is right. One the through lines of this work is I wanted to center a Black consciousness in all of these works because if you read most literature has a single use for Black writing and Black writers. Like, tell us of your struggle, Tell us of your of your suffering, of your pain. And of course, blackness is larger than that. Black people are all people are larger than that. And I wanted to write from a position that wasn't marginalized, that wasn't performing myself for or the black self for white consumption. So now I will teach you about race. Well, you know about race. You grew up in this country. How could you not grow about race? Right? And you know, even if you only know the boundaries of race, the lines of race, racial segregate, like all of these things that are And I began to talk about these things directly in a more perfect reunion. And one of the things I talk about is the way that our built environment is segregated. Right now, like our mental environments, our mental landscapes are our epistemological systems. I shouldn't use that word this early in the morning, but right, the things that we know, but also where we live, how we live, where we go to school. You, and what I remember having an experience of being in New Haven and which I love by the way, and truly a special place. But walking to that, I had a late class, and after that class, I just want to sort of, like, decompress in nice weather, and I'd walk to the train. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. And people would, you can't walk to the train. Yeah.

[17:20]Zibby Owens: You can't you I would like to take my car out to drive to the train to pick people up, FYI. Before it got broken into. And then, yeah. Oh. New Haven. Anyway.

[17:33]Calvin Baker: We'll come back to that. I remember we'll come back. I remember visiting. I went to I went to high school in the University of Chicago campus. When I was applying to colleges, I was like, Oh, look, I was visiting Yale, I was like, Oh, look, a big prestigious wealthy university in the middle of a black ghetto. Like, I don't that. I've experienced that already. But as professor, like, oh, and at first I sort of was like, oh, I'd say, you're not afraid of black people, Calvin. And I'd start, and so like, I just walked to the train station, but it was, I realized that my trip from my neighborhood in Brooklyn to that campus was moving from one bubble to another bubble. So moving from a space that was like racially exclusive, I mean, it was Brooklyn, so it wasn't to the same degree, but when you get on the train and you come to this other space that was, and again, like Yale isn't monoracial, but, you know, it's constructed in similar ways. Like, oh, and there are all of these opprobrium against the other, right? And it is, you can say it's class, but really it's race. And I thought, oh, we do that everywhere. The suburbs are that kind of construction. Corporations are that kind of construction. Schools are that kind of construction. And so it's not a thing when we talk about systemic racism, it's not something we made once and we're still like, yo, we're under the weight of what a bunch of people did back in the eighteenth century. Something we recreate every day. And right, we say subtly, don't go over there. Don't read that. Don't watch that. Don't listen to that. Don't talk to that person. And so it goes on all the time. And it's a matter of recreating not only the I mean, the race line, yes, but really segregation. And that's what I wanted to explore. And this is the subtle part of the book. There are all of these spaces we tell ourselves are integrated, and this is what I really wanted to dive into, right? Sort of piercing the veil, or what John Adams called the fig leaf, of liberalism. And we have all of these spaces that we tell ourselves are integrated, and they're not. They're working by a muddier formula. And so, in the book, we look at American politics, right? So we Shakespeare look because I couldn't resist myself. We look at Othello and we and I wanted to look at something that wasn't racially inscribed in ways that are familiar to us and also ways that are. So, all the slurs that Iago is using to exact his revenge or his jealousy upon Othello are proto slurs that we continue to know. But in Shakespeare, race isn't constructed. They're like, they're gradations of skin color and sort of hair texture, but there's not race. And because you're coming out of a sort of Renaissance world and everything's really just kind of fascinating. You're like, Oh, wow. They have people over here and they do things this way and people are in but it had like, you don't have these institutions of race yet. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[23:27]Calvin Baker: Great. And so it's why Do you want to talk about Othello?

[23:33]Zibby Owens: Killing me.

[23:36]Calvin Baker: So it's why the marriage between Othello and Desimone is found out and protestation, right, she lied to her father and there is no permission. They petitioned the prince, it's like, he lied, he tricked me, and Desimona tells her story and the prince says, You would win my daughter too. And so that's it, right? So you don't have this like official, like these categories of race and they use like inscribed prejudices. And I want you to look at that because that's the same, that's happening at the same time in England that America is being built. So it happens the same time the first colonies are discovered here. And I wanted to look at the England that we were coming out of. We look at the revolutionary generations, we look at the civil war, but we look at American culture too. Because I wanted to go not just chronologically, sort of front to back, but also up and down society. So we look at sport, we look at, which we tell ourselves, is this fashion of integration, right? It's just your ability on the field. And I talk about Colin Kaepernick. I don't have to give lie to that because he subverts that story. I talk about music and specifically hip hop, the way that it's performed, the way that it's consumed, Right? You're like, Oh, it's Black form or it begins as a Black form, but really, it needs white faces to gain acceptance. And then it needs to perform itself for whiteness to remain popular. So and I look at film and television and write some popular shows. We look at This Is Us. We look at Atlanta, which I love. And we look at, right, some of the history of films. So looking at our pop culture and these spaces that we say, Well, we're all present. And they're giving us Right. There's a myth of multiculturalism, of plurality that we now is meant to mean liberals embrace that isn't really so, or it's only so under very narrowly controlled circumstances. Right? So I'm going to, like, I'm going to make this myth, and it's a myth that we all aspire to, right, because it's enriching and it sounds like a Supreme Court brief. When I think of, you asked about my life, I think about, think about integration and personal. You're like, I wouldn't know some of my best friends fifty years ago or we wouldn't right. Or or a hundred years ago, wouldn't it never would have happened. So things it becomes that person, like, what does a world after the race line look like? It looks like one opportunity, yes, but also affinity. And we don't choose our friends because, hey, they're just like us. Like you're everything is proximal, right? And you become friends with those people, those persons around you with whom you have things in common. And that is that's a privilege in this society because we're you're like, what a richer world would it be on the other side of that? And I think we have this nascent idea of that as liberals. We aspire to it, but only just so. And, you know, a joke I've been making recently is, like, in another context, Yeah, people are down Barack and Michelle, but not quite yet with Uncle Jeremiah because he's Like, Oh, wait, wait, that's a it's a little too black. It's a little too much. It's a little too real. And there are all of these things that we want to not hear and not know, and we look the current moment of protest of uprising, which I think is the fourth significant moment of racial awakening in American history. I mean, I think it's right now. I think there's the revolutionary war. I think there's a civil war. I think there's a civil rights movement. And I think there's now. I think there's something really profound going on now. And if it sustained really transformative and perhaps the last time for such transformation in a more or less civil way. But it's predicated upon documentary evidence of things that black folks have known all the time, white people didn't want to accept or grapple with because it punctures the veil of American ego. And this is, again, liberals. Right? This is because if you are if you're a liberal white person, you're probably living an immigrant narrative. My like, my parents or grandparents or great or it's the three generation story. So my great grandparents or my great great grandparents came over and they came from they came from Germany after all the, like, text ile mills shut down, everybody was unemployed and broke. They came from they came from from, you know, like, the Yiddish belt between Germany and Eastern Russia when, right, pogroms, holocaust, whole slew of stuff, like we can take back to like the Napoleonic Wars, they come back and I wanna come back to that because

[29:14]Zibby Owens: We there's a only have like two more minutes. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. We're gonna keep coming back to, like, a 100 things. Zippy, you have to stop me. 67 podcasts in a row to get to all of your thoughts. I feel terrible.

[29:28]Calvin Baker: I mean, they tell me this. I should be succinct. I'm not being succinct. I'm just you're you're sitting there. We're just, like, talking. Well, I'm interested. I mean, I don't wanna cut you off because I'm very interested in everything you have to say. But But this is a podcast. This is a this is a this is a podcast. Not like to listen to podcasts. So

[29:45]Zibby Owens: we'll have to do it in installments.

[29:48]Calvin Baker: Okay. I should be more interesting. More interesting. It's just people only have so much time to listen no matter how interesting it is. So, but if you're white liberal, you're like, you have the Smith that like, my family came from, right, came from nowhere, and through hard work, they thrived in America. Beneath that, they're behind that. There are all these federal programs, right? Like we know about like mortgage assistance, the GI bill, all these things from which black Americans are specifically excluded as right, and that was the condition of these social programs passing. You can't include black people. I mean, this includes like parts of social security and the ways it was administrated. And so you've read, so this is like when I say it wasn't created once when we, like, built this thing called slavery, it's been recreated every generation. And with the, like, the tension of awakening, recreation, and we're going through that right now, by the way, right? Like we're awakening, we know about police brutality, we know about systemic racism, and on the other side, you've got people fighting tooth and nail to hold on to white supremacy, to hold on to a colonial myth and mentality, and really like your pundits, Oh, it's about class, about this, about, it's about whiteness. Pure and simple. And because it's become so deep in the identity and the psyche and people are like, what would I be if I gave this up? And they don't know. And they're threatened by it. And so, tooth and nail. Well, we were Americans, but if it means that we might not have white power, let's strip folks voting rights. Right? Let's strip people of legal protection. So that's, that's when I say the challenge isn't really knowing about race and racial awakening. It's really integrating all of these institutions because that's the only way you deconstruct it. Amazing.

[31:59]Zibby Owens: Thank you. Well, Calvin, we will come back to more at some point in our lives, but for now, a more perfect reunion, Calvin Baker. Synopsis Thank you, Zvi. Right. Have a great day. That was awesome. Thank you. You too. Thank you. Okay. Bye bye.

[32:38]Zibby Owens: and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.