and now i am absolutely thrilled to present tonight's speakers. steven thrasher is the inaugural daniel h. rensburg chair of social justice and reporting and an assistant professor of journalism at northwestern university. thrasher has worked as a writer at large at the guardian, staff writer at the village voice and facility here for the npr storycorps project. his articles are regularly in the new york times, buzzfeed news, the nation, the atlantic and elsewhere. tonight, he's in conversation by victor ray the f wendell miller, associate professor, the departments of sociology, criminology and african-american studies at the university of iowa. a nonresident fellow in governance studies at the brookings institution and a card center fellow at harvard kennedy school right across the street. tonight they have joined us for a discussion of stephen's book, the viral underclass, a compelling and humane into how race, class, gender and sexuality combine to help some survive while others do not, which klein calls at once precise and sweeping, rigorous and inviting. i will end with final praise from michael eric dyson, who writes, stephen has written the book. we urgently need his analysis of the underclass should be required reading for everyone concerned with transforming unequal access to health care. in a world where pandemic heightens the brutality of inequality. we so excited to be hosting this event. please join me in welcoming and victor ray. thank you so much for that incredibly kind introduction and thank you to everyone who's here. there are people from all different parts of my life from oxnard, california, parents of friends, my aunt judy, people that i know from twitter, people who know and respect victor. and i could not more pleased to get to read with victor ray. there's a part in your book where you talk about finding an intellectual home while you're reading and understanding what critical race theory is. and that's one of the things i felt when i connected with you and when i started reading your work and talking and thinking with you that, i'd found an intellectual home and a brother. so i'm just so honored to be here. and we decided to mix things up little bit format wise. we're both to read a little bit from each other's books to get us started. then we'll go into our conversation. we don't know exactly. the other is going to read so well. you know, we'll keep it interesting so victor ray this book is also on sale. the cash register. and i'm just going to read a little bit the preface where he's explaining how he understood critical race theory as i was introduced to critical race theory as an undergrad at vassar college, when i transferred there from the borough of manhattan community college. contrary to the idea of as radicalizing institutions my introduction to critical race theory was more confirmation than revelation, i enrolled at bmc right after 911, when like many new yorkers, i reevaluate my life. bmc was just blocks away from the world trade center, and the college had lost students during the attack. when i started taking classes on february 22, the college served broad swath of new yorkers and students all over the world. i became involved in student government and, anti-racist organizing, doing things like testifying at city hall against tuition increases. for some of new york's students, after after two years, i moved to vassar, a small arts college in upstate new york. the contrast between these two schools with intense and it was unclear to me that they were preparing people for different places and the social hierarchy. despite the glaring resource differences between these schools. i watched administrators at both u similar tactics avoid meeting anti-racist student demands for things that racial justice activists have been fighting for since the 1960s. my personal history primer to understand critical race theory because i had witnessed the highly variable received by my family members of different hues because i am often right as white. i heard the ways white people. i heard the ways white people thinking they were alone sometimes spoke about people of color. these interactions, the relatively subdued, nonetheless harmful racism that's in american culture. like asking if i felt safe living near black people or quote jokes about the supposed inferiority of black culture or language. sometimes these comments included more racism, like being told black folks a fancy car must be drug dealers. or when a white vassar student suggested that the cultural center for students of color should be down and replaced with whites, only parking. scholars documented differences in whites than in whites. talk about race in public and private, considerably more animus than casual racism employed in what they call the white backstage. when i read the fundamental critical theory article, whiteness is property which use passing as a launchpad. explore america's history of racial plunder. i knew i had found an intellectual home home. so. thank you so much for the invitation to be here and i'm going to read it when we talk about what we were going to do. one of the things you said was to try and highlight, think about connections between our books. so i'm going to read a section that i think connects some of the concerns across our books on may 25th, 2020. a white minneapolis police officer named chauvin violently pressed his knee into the neck of a black man named george floyd, crushing him into the ground for some 8 minutes and 46 seconds. this ended life at just 46 years of age, about 30 years younger than the average age a white man like chauvin might expect to live in the united states. floyd's fatal encounter with the police began after was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. the store clerk had effectively been deputized as an enforcer of currency law. and even though he to pay for the counterfeit bill, he compelled by his manager to call the police way, which would lead to floyd being executed by the state of minnesota without so much as a trial. but long before a jury would take up the unusual step of convicting chauvin murder, which happens in only about one of every 2000 police killings, an autopsy revealed another floyd might have prematurely died, though it got only passing in the news at the time. george died with sars-cov in two antibodies in his system. this meant he had recently contracted the virus that was the leading cause of death in youth in the united states that summer, especially among black men. when we find viruses, we are going to find them residing among people who are plagued by many painful lethal manifestations of racism. before his gruesome death. floyd had endured a difficult life marked by racism at various turns. he had served several jail terms. one where the sole accusation him came from a police officer was later charged with falsifying evidence and murder. floyd had done itinerant work as a truck driver and guard once working security at a homeless shelter. and in 2020, he had already lost one part time job driving for a minor crash. then he had lost his other time security job at a club close by the covid 19 pandemic. the cops came for him that fateful day in may because he was poor and using counterfeit money either out of desperation or maybe fitting a backdrop unwittingly because someone else had passed the phony bill onto him. but if he'd survived his arrest, he might have gone to jail. where he still might have died, though perhaps more slowly or out of it, out of view of a camera like sandra bland, the black woman who had died in a holding cell after being arrested in texas in 2015. or might have gotten out of jail only to die of covid 19, as so many black people did that month or given that his girlfriend would later testify how they both from addiction. he might have survived his arrest and covid 19 only later to die of of a drug overdose. we will never know what might happened with george floyd, because derek chauvin calmly murdered him. what i do know for sure, though is that throughout his life, floyd was repeatedly plagued by the vector of racism and in one way or another, racism racism was going to get him. thank you so much, victor. so there's a lot there's a lot to talk about between the two of our books and one of the things that. i've thought about most with your book on critical race theory is the way that i think we also decided we will try to explain, major. we tried to do we do in this walk up makes we would try to explain the major themes of our books because we get asked so often what is critical race theory, what is an idea, what is a viral underclass? so to me, what done in this book is help world understand what critical race theory and the ways that shows how a quote unquote colorblind society is still very much shaped by by race and the ways that the law itself produces different produces racial disparities in ways that have very specific for different people of different races. and i think that that intersects with a viral underclass a lot in the ways that certain kinds health are created through laws and through american society. but i also think that critical theory is talking about laws where race isn't explicitly said. but you also lay out the history when laws also did expressly call out race and the idea of a viral underclass begins in a way with thinking laws that explicitly target people living with hiv, which is an immutable characteristic. and a lot of laws don't explicitly bring that up. but did originally originally bring up race in lots of ways in the united states? in very explicit ways, absolutely. this one. yeah. okay. so first, no no, no. yeah, it's okay. there we go. so first, before i to explain the viral underclass, i just want to thank you again for having me. and conversation and say that thank you for writing this book. right. like it is a beautiful, deeply compassionate and brilliant book. and so i think, you know, i would describe the viral underclass as a of connections i'm a sociologist, so i would say kind related to the social determinants of but the way that viruses incarceration anti queer and bigotry citizen and capitalism create sort of disadvantages that make it more likely that some in our society are going to be exposed to viruses and make us all less safe because we sets society up in that way. right. i was really moved by by the connections that you draw between. folks who are american society often treats us disposed of. so yeah, i'll stop there with what i think the viral in your crassness. i think you got a get a pretty good summation of it there. i thought maybe could start talking about so as i was starting to say the phrase viral comes from an activist named sean stroup. and he was talking about the ways that hiv is criminalized and people can be prosecuted for transmitting hiv and be trans and be sent life or prison potentially. and he used it originally a very specific legal sense to describe the ways that people living with hiv are just living under a different set of laws and other people and. usually in the united states we don't have laws that explicitly are around just one immutable characteristic. and so he said, you know, people hiv positive and they live under these laws, but then you also have infants that are born with hiv. they become positive during pregnancy. and so they're always living under the set laws where they can get prosecuted for something that people living with hiv cannot. and so that's creating like a very, very different class of people. so i, i think i'm going to relate this here to something i write about in the book. right? and that's the history anti-miscegenation laws or laws that banned people of, different racial groups from having kids. right. and i know that this is something that you wrote about, too. you talk about sort of your interest. well, you know, we're both families who those laws would banned our very birth. right. and so i think there is a long history of laws in the united states that target those characters either explicitly or imply because we think about sort of the laws, the current laws around incarceration and the differential enforcement of those laws that led to things like the like george murder. we can think about you know, the letter the law versus the spirit in enforcement the law and how that creates racial inequality and the viral underclass. so both of us are pretty active on twitter. that's how we know many of you and you wrote something on twitter about this this week, that critical race theory is showing the ways that law a role in creating difference in racial discrimination. and oftentimes, people will complain about it in a way that's making the point of critical race theory. right. like they're they're complaining about a law or something that's happening in a way that they're showing your point. so one of the things that i write about in the book and i have written on twitter, too, is one of the things that really crushed reading about sort of the national backlash to critical race theory. is it developed as a set of theories to explain how race worked in the law and argued very explicitly that structural racism is in the law. right. and then like banning structural banning about structural racism is a kind structural racism. right. like there actually reinforcing the point. i mean doesn't sort of win in the legal domain, but you're like, i'm kind of like, yeah, that's that's what we meant right? like you're doing it very explicitly again in a way that for a long was was more overt, right? so a long history in critical race of folks talking about colorblindness the law and because of the kinds of structures that you highlight, the viral underclass that that sort of colorblind can still lead to greatly unequal. yeah. i feel like we're we're really intersecting in the way that the laws will address things that no longer explicitly stated. and i think that hiv criminalization is, of course, you know, it's discriminatory. long homophobic lines and lines of disability but it's very racialized anywhere in the world that laws exist. they're overwhelmingly disparately impacting black people in canada, black people are 3% of the population and they're 60% of these prosecutions. there are countries in the netherlands where all they have few of them, but all the prosecutions are north african immigrants. so in way i think this is a way that you can continue to have a law against miscegenation or against race. johnson's case, the majority of the people who are testify against him were white and they felt like so much in that trial of everything and all the anxiety around it was about interracial desire and interracial sex and the law became a thing that that hiv law becomes way to sort of keep enacting that american anxiety about those things without having to say race. i think i think you're right. mean, the only thing i would add and this comes through like very clearly in your book is that we've set up american society in such a in which black folks are more likely to contract hiv. right. and we've also set up society in such a way in which we are more likely to punish them for contracting hiv. right. and so there's a kind of double burden there. and i think, you know, it's very clear that the same thing happened with covid 19. yeah, definitely. and i wonder if you could about. i love how you say in the introduction as well, you learn that race was a social construction that helped explain the peculiar history shaping my racial identity. spoiler that history shaped your racial identity to. and one of the and yeah i'll let you explain first and i'll talk about how that in second you know i think one of the things that race gets talked about in the united states and in a lot scholarship is race is something that people of color have and it's not necessarily something that white folks have to and i think it's better to think of race not as an individual identity, but as a structural system of distribution about who gets what in our society. and a system, a set of social relationships that tell us who can be overpoliced, who can be exposed to viruses, right? who can be exposed to dangerous working conditions in the pandemic while, those of us who have, you know, certain don't have to be exposed or who can be exposed to those things. right. and i think you know one of privileges, like some folks considered a bad word. now, i still think it has some usefulness like one of the privileges of whiteness is to go through the world and into not recognize that you're the beneficiary of this unequal distribution system. right. so that's what i mean. it's sort of spoiler. it to the white readers who may thought not thought about this before. right. like, if you haven't thought about this, you also implicated in sort of the projects of the united states and the globe. and when what i thought about in my book was the ways that viruses are, these features that help us see various systems that happen so they can help us see that the way that systemic happens and we can see the different ways that viruses, hiv and covid affect different races. but they but they can also help us have this class analysis and why i was very happy i could get a commercial publisher to let me have rants about capitalism was that, you know, viruses big they help us to have a certain kind of class consciousness and i hope that my i hope that my writing like yours is like i'm trying to reach a broad audience, things that we get to learn in graduate school. so about marxist theory, but i think that viruses like help very clearly see where classes happening. and the united states. and one of the concepts from, you know, from marxism, false consciousness is a way to to to understand how people will see themselves through the eyes of the ruling class and sort aspire to be part of the ruling class in united states, where, like so many think that we will someday become billionaires. and i think viruses help to see the ways that we are, where we're not likely to become billionaires, but we're actually much more likely to become part of underclass, like whether or not people are in the underclass now in the states where we don't have universal health care and we have all kinds of medical debt and student debt. it's very easy for people to fall into the fall into like lower rungs of class. and i think that that kind of intersects with some of the ways that you're thinking about. everybody has a race and everybody has a class, and i think we're like the middle class in the us or the even people who aren't in the middle class but are meant to think that they're in the middle, are meant to think that they're in the middle class, won't see their own class status and hope that my book can help people like see their class status and see their relationships. people in other classes. i, i mean, i, i think it the class aspects of book and the capitalism and as you say, like they come through very clearly. i was also surprised that a commercial publisher allowed that, but sort of sold what this this another that you do in the book that loved was you you make this connection between virus is structural racism homophobia, transphobia and national borders right and you talk about how viruses sort of make us question borders and and show that we're all connected, show that those borders are also social construction. those are sort of social fictions that we enforce violence on. and then i also thought you showed that like even though virus is sort of the logic that you lay out of these viruses showing how dissolving borders between us. right? even interpersonal borders through transmission. but states respond oftentimes by doubling down with the logic of borders right. and i wondered if you could, you know, we think about what the trump administration did and the biden administration followed up with terms of like closing down immigration and using it to deport folks and, you know, all of the sort of xenophobia around china that was stirred up. i wondered if you could talk about sort of that contradiction between the logic of viruses that you lay out and then sort of the logic of states and borders in response to that. sure. so, you know, borders are fictions and like there's certain truth to fictions. and i think you write about this very well in your book about how money is a social construct. i mean, money is just a piece of cotton paper, but has all this there are all these meanings around it that make it have power and. i think there's something very similar about borders. i had first encountered understand like viruses and borders and a couple of ways. one was becoming aware that the united states did not allow people hiv to come into the country until the until the obama administration and the george w bush had started the process. but then capital 29, 2010. so for three decades, people with hiv could not come into the united states, even though parts of the united have higher rates of hiv than any other country in the world. and this idea that, like somehow the viruses are outside of the country and they pose a danger the us. of course there's lots of virus circulating the country. the other kind of more dramatic way which i write about in the book, was that the history was to understand history of guantanamo bay, and i'll just ask for a volunteer essay. do not anyone has actually read the book yet? anyone who's not read the book, can you venture a guess where when guantanamo bay was activated as an infinite site of detention? professor melnick, right after 911, incorrect american studies. professor. but that's what almost everyone says so almost. yeah what i thought before. so where, you know, that's where most people became aware of it. but it was actually activated about ten years before when a group when hundreds, thousands of haitian refugees were trying to flee the coup and we still have lots of instability in haiti. and they're trying just flee this coup. and they were on boats heading to florida and the us coast guard intercepted and they and the united did not want them to get foot on land. they would be able to make asylum claims. so said where do we where can we send them? we control them, but they don't have access to us. that's when they put them to guantanamo bay. the entire architecture of that prison system is predicated these haitian refugees and at the time us performed the largest known hiv testing on population. and then they sterilize every person without their or consent who was hiv positive. so this is only know in the past few decades and the idea that the us was thinking possibly these people could win court cases and eventually come into the us and if they do, we don't want them bringing hiv with them. so borders are like used to justify these really draconian processes. and then of course we started seeing happen with the covid 19 virus and there are benefit like i won't pretend that there are not there are benefits to staying in place when you have, you know, like a very when you have a virus that is easily transmitted but of course, the virus was already inside the united states and i was quite you know, the trump administration was extremely xenophobic. but the biden or the biden campaign, which was still at the time running against sanders and warren and everyone else, put out a really xenophobic ad as saying trump that, you know, 40,000 chinese people are asian people into the united states. and this is where i think viruses sort of on the interpersonal level give us a map of what we have to do much more broadly throughout the world that we're all you know we're wearing masks we're like trying to take care of one another because understand some of this fiction is not true, that we are not sort of discrete individual with no connection to each other. we're sharing this biological material. can go between us. when it does it, it changes our dna, it changes who we are and collectively, we're taking decisions. take care of one another. it's not just that you do you approach and it's something that we have to share. and i feel about international borders. viruses are not like they don't understand what a hard border of a country and the u.s. particularly will get into these these senses of denial that something is happening as it's happening here. we still are deporting people on an expedited under title 42 under the guise migrants carry viruses. and so we need to be able to expel out of the country as quickly as possible. and that's still happening even as the has more virus than any other country the world. you know, more deaths, more transmissions than any other country of the world by far are happening here. and so this is happening inside our borders while we we're having this fiction that it's not happening outside of it. and i guess the last thing i'll say interpersonally, we're doing things right here to try keep the virus from moving and. nations should be doing this as well. and us is very much at its peril for not doing. i spent almost every gay man i know the majority of this summer checking my body obsessive leave for potential monkeypox, trying to get monkeypox vaccinated, helping other people get and you know and that virus is now in more than 100 countries around the world but when you look back i think people know that the that the us was not in a good position in terms surveillance around the coronavirus. but the same is true with monkeypox. there was a nigerian doctor five years ago who saw that an unusual outbreak, saw this virus, looks it's change. it looks like it's maybe moving sexually now amongst men who have sex with men ask for money internationally to study this more and was completely denied and the us has kind of no to that. there's still to my knowledge no monkeypox vaccines have made it to the african at this point in time and. so like the virus this show the interpersonally we are not as discrete as we'd like to think, but also like across countries, we have to work with one another to be able to to be able to like live in better relationship with them. yeah. so i'm going to depart from my notes here because you, you reminded me of something in my book about the history of eugenics, right. and i write about sort of this campaigns of black women against black women, against native americans, against puerto women that happened, you know, throughout the 20th century. but i also that, you know, something i didn't write about but you you reminded me is that a lot of was discussed explicitly in terms of a kind of racial right, a kind of fear that, you know, folks like me were tainted. right. even if you could pass white, you were you were tainted with blackness. and that was a danger. the body politic and that meant something very sort of scary for whiteness as property and for, you know, the sort of legitimacy so that that logic of contagion i think is can be marshaled for some really horrible. yeah yeah i definitely saw a connection there as well and the relationship i think that they're not good things this pandemic but there are ways that that new possibilities have become have come in front of us and i think that the political consciousness around what act up did and what aids activists have done and people have worked with viruses for a long time. it's much more it's more publicly known and more people are working with these ideas. and i also that the sort of history between racism, abortion and queer ness and is coming into a clearer focus. people are understanding that these attacks on trans people are course horrific for trans people on their own terms. and i don't i mean, i sort of get into these conceptually in the book many of the things that are worse now happened after i finished writing it. but when the state florida has the don't case don't say gay bill or arkansas ends trans affirming for for minors and florida effectively has also banned it for poor adults because they've made it so that you can't use medicaid money get trans care those things that are effectively state opening up their bodies to viruses right like when people can't get access to health and when they are not able to get their medicine safely through a doctor with sterile and have to get it instead. on the contrary marquette it's much more likely they're going to hepatitis or hiv or or other things of that nature. and so of course, it's horrible for people that front just just themselves, but also for heterosexual and cisgender people and people of all races, the ways of the state are the way that various states are limiting access to gender. for me, care is like all being turned towards reproductive care. you know, it's already happening with more. so i think for in terms of stopping pregnancy, but of course it's going to start moving into things that affect people of all genders. well, and so i think solidarity around this is is a that's come out of this pandemic as more people have understood the ways that our fates are connected to each other. okay. i think that leads a bit into my next question for you, if that's okay. so critical race theory often uses personal from folks at the bottom of various hierarchies to sort of illustrate larger patterns and. you discuss yourself in relation your sources in the book quite a bit and i wondered if you wanted to talk about how your personal history either or got in the way of. what i think is sort of the remarkable solidarity you showed with folks throughout writing this, i think you you know, when i started writing book, i didn't think it was going to i knew i wanted be some combination of personal reporting, a little bit of memoir and kind scholarly writing and thinking. i didn't think the mix would be as much. thank you. i don't think the mix would be as and part of that is because i got a very good edit on chapter that where friends said i think you're hiding who you're really writing here and encouraged me to as a of mine who's deceased it was very hard to write about them but i'm glad that i did. and then the other was i i write about the death of my editor, maude hart, who i did not know. i did not know was going to die. and i ended writing very personally about him and also about my friend alice wong, who who is alive and just got to see her last week so that part of that became much more personal than i was expecting and something i wanted to do sort of for an obsession. i have and i know some of us share this in this room. i to have a way to critically think about journalism and the ways that we are encouraged to think about objectivity and, subjectivity. and this, of course, appeals to this applies to other sciences, social sciences as well. but journalism is is really bad at the mainstream media level about reinforcing idea of who is who is neutral, who is objective. there's really bad, i would say coverage around this around john fetterman campaign in which the coverage very ablest and also around the proud boys appearance. it just happened the university when penn state you know the ways media is writing about it and the university are talking about it are reinforced in that the others like sort of this the chat detach neutrality and i wanted to write in this book about viruses in an intimate ways because viruses happen like in very intimate exchanges and this trial that i followed for years was very about how viruses moved in intimate ways. i wanted to have like a queer orientation around it to say different ways to write and relate to sources. but i also just like wanted to acknowledge i knew people because i think, i believe that, you know, the experts i talk about, they're all wonderful. but, you know, if i if wasn't, if i was friends with someone else, i might talk to them as well, and that does not negate, like our relationship, their brilliance. but i do think the reader has a right to know that as they're thinking about it. and i get very frustrated in a lot of mainstream media where they act detached and, you know, every unnamed source that you read in washington post or axios or politico or whatever, they have a relationship with that. reporter like i have a very they have a very thought out strategic with that reporter. and the reporter has it with them as well. they just pretend like it doesn't exist and the reader doesn't to think about that. so i wanted give the reader an opportunity, think about that, but also to acknowledge that really amazing learning and knowledge is produced in intimate ways. and certainly i've been the beneficiary, you know, as a gay person and all of us who are vaccinated been the beneficiaries of the work that act up did, that aids activists and queer activists in the seventies, eighties, nineties, they changed the way that medicine was made so that vaccine didn't take ten years to make. it took a year to make. so we're all beneficiary of that. but so much of their knowledge and the ways they were in the world was on their queer relationships and what they learned in those queer relationships with people who they were reporting and doing research around, who they loved, you know, the editor who one one of the editors who brought me up the most, you know, had lost his lover of years to aids in the in the early 1990s. and he's then gone on to produce some of the important work about hiv and aids many people have who are affected by it. so i wanted to acknowledge that in the way that was putting the book together and it comes through. i also have another question. so early on in the pandemic, and i think until quite black and latino were dying at much higher rates because americans set up to expose them despite recently. right. but recently there have been a couple of reports i saw this week saying now that white americans are actually dying at higher rates. so i think in some ways you anticipated this in your book, not directly, but you wrote about myth of white immunity and i wanted to hear what what that myth is and how does it make things harder for the viral underclass. so, yeah, there's research on this now there was bad writing about this couple of months ago that wasn't sort of taking into account age distribution because a lot of like black people just don't on average live as long so they were not living into the range of where covid was most deadly. but now age adjusted there's a flip that's happened. so across the length of the pandemic in the united states. of course, it's affected black and latinx people more, but something didn't happen that many people protected. black people were not particularly adverse to getting vaccines. it was more about getting access to them. so there are actually vaccinated slightly higher rates. and then there is this that i think of as the myth of white immunity. michael johnson like most of his, this young man, was prosecuted for hiv transmission. most of his sex partners were white. and from having been in that courtroom, read the transcripts endlessly. it's a very strange dynamic to, me, that they thought that they could have sex without any form of protection and nothing would happen. you know, they could just say, are you clean or? not ask anything and assume that everything would fine. and, you know, sex has consequences people get pregnant through sex, sexual transmission infections happen. there's nothing to be ashamed about. but it's like it's a reality and it was interesting to me that they would assume that nothing would happen. and so i started thinking about sort of the ways that that whiteness is immune is a myth. i mean, there are built in health disparity is on a macro level, but on a micro level, it's not necessarily going, you know, the risk might be different, but the actual results not guaranteed. and all forms immunity, viral immunity. you know, the of our bodies, but also political they have limits like they're not absolute and of the ways that you make the best of your immunity is to like encounter thing that you're immune against as infrequently as possible. that's why we still have so much wrong with covid. there's just too much virus circulating. and so i thought about how, you know, whiteness itself. it's, it's that it's totally immune it's a myth. and jonathan metzl wrote the foreword to my book in his book, dying of whiteness, he talks about the ways it's often white blocks that have stopped medicaid and, poor states under the both of not wanting. as you write about in your book with the pools not wanting black people to get a public benefit but also thinking like this is not going affect me and the history of the history of anti-vax sentiment in the united states is very much steeped in white supremacy and able, as it comes from upper class white parents in malibu and california who imported it from england via baywatch. actress jenny mccarthy. all methods thinking like my genes are so superior my children are so naturally superior that they don't need this thing. and so i think they have this myth that they're like that they're totally to the world that puts them at risk. and so i think that there's something that we're seeing now with as well that there was a period of time where white people were getting out, much less once they understood that politically, they kind of cared less and were taking fewer precautions and. now we're at a position where they are going know they're getting more and so that's self-defeating. yeah. all right. i do want to open it up to timewise. yes, we are ready for your questions for either one of us. or. yes. hey, thanks. something that's been on my mind a lot is i. how much of us who grew up with hiv before, for example, prep and the messaging that we got about safety and is with the, you know, the the johnson case i am has shaped some of us have engaged with the pandemic with covid 19. on a personal level. and i'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about situating in context our personal response is the lessons that we took from that, whether they were the right lessons or there was some unlearning that we need to doing in relation to, for example responding to hiv as death. right. because there was a time when it really feel that way and then there was a time when it became clear that that was no longer scientifically true about hiv in ways that it may have. like ten years before. am and i think a transition that we're kind of grappling with as that feeds into what you were just talking. so i'm wondering if you could say more about that. sure, i think so. we're always learning or hopefully we're always learning and unlearning from past lessons that sociologists will attest we are shaped by these social forces. and i think, you know, i think that is the man we have a sense of humility like they change or our understanding of them changes. certainly with monkey pox it was to move one way for 70 years and now it's moving a different way. and so you have to kind of have an open mind about and a sense of humility. and i think, as thinkers and theorists, i think i also want to have a sense of humility about sort of the limits of usefulness of theory. so, like, i do believe in my own in the viral underclass and in my book. and i think that there these things as social factors that move across different pandemics but the particulars of the viruses are important. and that's where i think a sense humility is helpful because hiv behaves in certain ways and we've grown to understand it then when you have covid there's an inclination to think of them in same way. so you know for example i have been involved in many conversations around this with the past three epidemic hiv, covid and monkey pox. when hiv was first hitting in new york, there was this move close all the bathhouses and gay saunas. and that was largely a mistake because were actually sites of education. you could give people condoms there are ways that you could get people tested it was a different thing covid happened like the act of being together was the danger not explicitly bathhouses, but also to movie theaters and workplaces and everywhere else. and so there was a sort of a sense in some gay quarters of, no, this is making the same mistake again, where we had to step and say, maybe this is a different and then the thing happened with monkey pox. pox is very much shaped by your understanding covid. so people thought it was like this airborne illness in a way, because we were all shaped by the experience of covid it's good that we have this about it. and i think had we i was very frustrated if we'd had enough pox vaccines. people have gotten very quickly because we'd been socialized to do this in a way we hadn't before or hadn't. so we're always like being shaped by the last thing and hopefully lessons from it and building new things. but i just think it's also it's important to like be humble about, the particulars of what's happening not, not relitigate, that's not appropriate for. the next, the next stage. yes. so first of all, just a lot of gratitude for this opportunity to hear the two of you in conversation, because it's just i haven't read the books, but the the space between your two books just seems like incredibly fertile ground. thank you. there's actually no space between like is a publisher on the same day. and they're often put in bookstores next to each other. but thank you. so i just want to invite you to build on the opportunity because as you were both speaking, i was thinking of various kind of sub topics circling in our culture. now that it seems like your two books are really perfectly poised together to speak to you, and the one that came to my mind most was this very benighted conversation we're having about learning loss in schools. and i just wondered if you could sort of toss that around a little bit and and see if you could frame prima for force. and if not, learning loss, are there other sort of areas you think we could sort of bring your templates to bear on? i can start if you want, but think you have valuable things to say. i mean, i'll be brief. so i'm i'm a sociologist and like i think and i'm an educator. so obviously you like let me just preface this by saying, like, i think, education is one of the most important things in the world, right. that being said, i think like keeping people alive is more important or right. and so that of my my bias towards keeping alive and i would say i think learning loss is serious because we've set up an arbitrary set of standardized tests that determine people's lives and penalize them for not behaving in a really sort of constrained sense of what it means to learn. i think we're in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic that a normal child or adult or person might be focused on some other things, and that we have the resources to direct our attention and our focus on kids learning in a different way, like you were talking about sort of opportunities. you know, nothing is good about the pandemic but it does allow us to rethink certain things and i think a focus determining people's long term success through sort of rote standardized tests is one thing that like we could we could seriously rethink. i agree the kids could know they could learn later they could learn the idea that you have to be learning in a certain way to get ahead is something that we have to reevaluate. i saw a tweet said, you know, they're learning loss learning compared to, what, five years ago, that world doesn't exist anymore. like this is not the same world. and i think being an orphan, it creates a huge amount of learning loss. and i think that they're learning i mean, they're learning all kinds of things about. the world politically. i thought of your book when i started seeing the criminalization of trying to take care creeping in and the way that when the cdc from a ten day window to a five day window for needing to stay after being positive without testing out that led to all these legal consequences so people can work at jobs their job can reprimand them days 678. it's happened with kids as well the parents want to keep them home. they're still testing positive. they say six, seven, eight, nine. and now truancy law can kick in. they could be like we we i mean we kept our child home for like for a long time. and then we learned, oh, we actually, might we might run abreast of this truancy law here. so yeah, that's where like law comes together with the and a good way. any other questions. yes. oh i've try to take a different tack. i mean how have you discussed these matters? how can i say to some degree, you use language that this sort of these external forces that that the result in these in these harms or what have you. but i guess well, precisely for the moment. but we're in the midst of an election. we saw all kinds of forces at play. it seems to me your populations, for a variety of reasons, which are which are driven by fear, mistrust, disappointment, resentment, heavy strand of racism and lots of other stuff is there any way you can connect the disquiet that you have with whatever conversation one might be able to get? engage? i mean, that conversation broadly, politically with any segment so those populations, you don't need all of them. but it seems to me ultimately if we're going to get resist what seems to be coming, we need to move some of those populations coming so you. my book is like looking lot more past electoral and looking at things that happen regardless of who wins so that's not really the focus what i'm looking at. but i do think that i do think that people not give up on who they perceive to be the other side. so to come to something that's changed, i finished the book. two states have completely decriminalized their hiv laws. illinois, where i live, and texas, missouri also reform them quite significantly. where my case was with a completely know top to bottom red government. so i don't think that we have to give up on on people we see as being on the other side and when you pull apart certain things rather than look at the whole package, you find that they're very popular. it's like child tax, tax credit. you support unemployment like, generous unemployment. like these are things that people appreciate and like student debt relief, somebody we both know works on a lot and there are lots of things that actually quite popular and i think it's i think it's unfortunate that democrats run away from a lot of these things that are extremely popular. you know 70% of people support medicare for all. you know, this is not. and a majority a majority of republican voters support. but the problem is actually not sort of the electorate. the problem is the class of the democratic party and the whole leadership of the republican. yeah, i mean, wouldn't disagree with that. i would say, you know, in my book i, i make it clear not that i think that there are some people that i can't, but there are some people that are in bad faith and not going to spend a whole lot of time, argue ing with folks who are acting in bad faith. i think it's a waste of time and i think it's a waste of resources and and also, like, i'll be clear like the leaders of the sort of critical race theory, moral panic that like convinced me to write this book in the first place. it's not me saying they're acting in bad faith. they have said, we're misread critical race theory in the public for political gain, basically. right so, like, i'm not trying to argue with those folks, but like i did write a book to try and demystify some of what they're doing and try to make it plain for folks to say that like, look, you're being lied to. you can disagree with anything, write in this book. like obviously, but like you should at least know what it is. you least like get it on its own terms and disagree it honestly, rather than sort, you know, listen to billionaires and folks from sort of right think tanks who are doing this actually to implement policies that will ultimately harm you, that will privatize schools. right. that and i'll say one last thing. if you ask you know if you if you look at a lot of media reports, they're like there's this huge controversy over teaching rates in schools for parents. there actually, if you if you ask parents, the majority of parents across racial groups are in support of teaching their kids about the history of race and racism. the history of slavery, those things they recognize that like kids should learn facts like pretty basic thing, right? if ask them, should your kids learn about critical race theory, then it gets murky because folks have misrepresented what that is and what it means in such a way for like certain kinds of political gain right. so i'll leave it there. we have time for one last question. yes. thank you so much for this discussion. i when i think about like the history of hiv aids organizing in the united states, and sometimes i think about the period in history where there were only kind of certain cities that you could get access to forms of care and entire geographies, even within border within the united states or just of people there were marked for death in a lot of ways or jurisdictions were like resources coming in, resisting forms of education that could save people's lives. so i'm really curious about the idea of like place even within a border. you touched on it with sort of international stuff, but even intra border. how are you thinking about the viral underclass as a like a framework or a concept with our collective experience of covid as a intersects with the place? well, there are there are like there have been moving places. it so like i was in new york in the of 2020 and that was like the epicenter of epicenter. then we keep seeing it moved to different it feels like every town gets their to deal with it at one point or another. and then what what i think is very applicable to the history of aids, you see after there, people start to the epidemic of 1981, 82, 83, 1996. they're drugs that can save everybody, should die of aids anymore, even though three quarters of a million people, three quarters of a million people do every year because don't get the medicine. and what you saw very quickly after that in the late night, mid nineties, late nineties as well was among social networks who got, you know, the medications, the rates went down some of thing similar happened that definitely happening and almost mirrored way with monkeypox that we saw like the people who got the monkey pox vaccine it's moving of their communities. those who didn't get it. it's still circulating. and so that's much about place like you can see in cities where these things are happening. and with covid, because it's so casual, not as clean and more cleanly cut, but what i think is quite similar to what happened with aids is we're going to see like very different survival rates and those and that's what's moving around the country. you can see places where, you know, it's going to be the same maps in manhattan. i don't know. sorry, i apologize. i don't know boston well. but, you know, there are parts of manhattan where there people are going to get covered. a lot and some of them will get long-covid, but they're also going to get packs a of and they also in the end they're going to be able to work from home, you know, if they're sick and rest whatever and their rates as a group are going to be sort of at one place and then less likely like the parts of the city where people still get hiv or people still get aids. and die from aids. like those are the places where people are structurally more likely going to still be dying from covid. so that's kind of how i think about places like us sort of where i'd like to end, although i want you to chime in too, but i have this really i write about the activists alice wong in nine who's just a wonderful thinker and disability activist, and i got the chance to meet her in in san francisco last week and have she served me tea outside, even though she can no longer really eat, she now has a tracheotomy and so she she speaks through text, through typing, but she takes a lot of pleasure in serving food to other people. and it was a really beautiful and wonderful experience. it was in my conversations with her that i really understood the the huge of of cars, of congregate care settings as a place of places where people are forced to be against their. well, so that applies to prisons, but that also applies to nursing homes. one in every ten people in the united states, a nursing home, died of covid that first year. and then it also applies to people who are younger and disabled and these congregate care settings where one in every 12 died, even some of them were much younger. and she's she's also written about this publicly, like seeing everything in her life right now is trying to push her into congregate care. i mean, she has her parents as caregivers. she has other caregivers. but the financial pressure and the logistical pressure gets more and more and more and everything. trying to push her into a congregate care setting. and so that's why i find an abolition framework is really helpful understanding not just creating a world that doesn't have prisons anymore, that doesn't have a need for prisons because people get their needs met. but also imagining a world where who are disabled can have the kind of care they need to be around their loved ones in their family, that people course, you know, who have covid or hiv or monkeypox get all the care that they need and ways they don't have to end up in like a congregate that could be very dangerous. so that's one of the ways i'm thinking about place. do you have anything you'd like to add or do? what do you actually have to give me? one last big question. oh what do you what do you think of abolition and does it address sex with critical race theory? so that's great question. i have a piece coming out in the new republic on on the us 2050. i was invited to write in a couple of weeks in the november issue, and i tried to imagine sort of an abolitionist future, they said. and so i'll talk about the piece for a minute. they ask me to if i wanted to write this piece, and i i my my impulse is usually to go grim right leg. i, i'm in sociology and i think so i had professor at grad school that said sociology. the study of things that suck and so, you know, i'm often like thinking about really horrible things and i was like, i was reading your book. i'm like, i'm tired of thinking about that so often or like i the importance of it, but i want to think about something that's like a little more hopeful. and so what would it look like? what are the kinds of steps it would take to get to a society that had at least around you know, i was thinking about prisons, but the kind of care that you're talking about, right, in which people's were met and we didn't to social problems with you know create more george floyd's or creating more of violence on communities that we've inflicted a whole bunch of violence on. well thank you victor and thank you to the harvard bookstore. buy on critical race theory. this is by the viral class. this is a book with a lot of love in it. and you are my book publishing brother another publisher and and i'm so grateful to you and thank you all for being with us tonight.
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