THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.199 - GARY YOUNGE

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Adam talks with British journalist and author Gary Younge about gun violence in America, identity politics and 'Uncle Toms'.Conversation recorded face to face in London, 17th November, 2022Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSBOOK TRUSTDISPATCHES FROM THE DIASPORA by Gary Younge - 2023 (PRE ORDER FROM FABER)GARY'S WEBSITE (including articles, book reviews, Twitter feed etc.)GARY YOUNGE DESTROYS AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE - 2022 (YOUTUBE)GARY YOUNGE ON MARTIN LUTHER KING'S SPEECH - 2013 (THE GUARDIAN)THE WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here.

I'm out here in the Norfolk countryside, walking with my best dog friend, Rosie Buxton. She's on good form, aren't you you Rosie? I'm sniffing grass. Yes it is a really nice day out here. It could be summer if it wasn't quite so cold. Having said that it is a stark contrast to this time last week when it was icy. So I'm grateful to be out here in the second half of November 2022. In fact, today, as I record this, it is Joe Cornish's birthday. Birthday time. It's birthday time. It's time for your birthday today corn balls he is 35 doesn't look a day over 15 and i wish him a very happy birthday sorry i didn't get you a present

but i expended all my present giving energy on the Christmas podcast, which is just a few days away now. This episode of the podcast, today's episode, is kind of a serious chat. Not very festive buckles, you might be thinking. Well, maybe, even though I do think it's a good conversation. But also, you've got a bumper helping of Christmas waffle nonsense coming down the chimney on Christmas morning. So without further ado, let me tell you a bit about my guest for podcast number 199. The British author, broadcaster, former editor-at-large for the Guardian newspaper and current visiting professor at London's South Bank University,

Gary Young. Young facts! Gary was born in 1969 in Hertfordshire to Barbadian parents and grew up in Stevenage. Stevenage. When he was 17, he went to Kasala, Sudan, with Project Trust to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school. On his return, he attended Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where he studied French and Russian. In his final year at university, he was awarded a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at City

University and started working at The Guardian in 1993. In 1996, he was awarded the Lawrence Stern Fellowship, which sends a young British journalist to work at the Washington Post newspaper in the US. After several years of reporting from all over Europe, Africa, America and the Caribbean, Gary was appointed the Guardian's US correspondent in 2003, writing first from New York, then Chicago, for the next 12 years. In 2015, he returned to London with his wife and two children, where he became the Guardian's editor-at-large, a position he held until 2020 when he accepted a post as Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. As well as writing for the New York Review of Books, Granter, GQ, the Financial

Times and the New Statesman and making several radio and TV documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit, Gary is the author of five books. No Place Like Home, A Black Britain's Journey Through the Deep South was published in 1999. Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States was published in 2006. Who Are We and Should It Matter in the 21st Century was originally published in 2011. The Speech, the story behind Martin Luther King's dream, was published in 2013. And Another Day in the Death of America, a chronicle of ten short lives, was originally published in 2016. His sixth book is being published next year, 2023, and it is called Dispatches from the Diaspora, from Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter. It's a collection of

articles that Gary has written about the African diaspora and issues of race and racism in the Caribbean, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and across Europe, as well as Britain and the United States. Sierra Leone and across Europe as well as Britain and the United States. My conversation with Gary was recorded face to face in London in mid-November of this year 2022 and we talked about Gary's formative political experiences as a 15 year old caught between the wrath of revolutionary workers and his mum. We talked about why Paris was the most racist city Gary ever lived in, and why, by contrast, he was embraced in Leningrad. And in the course of talking about Gary's excellent book about identity politics, Who Are We? and Should It Matter in the 21st Century, I asked him about a book he mentions in there, which is called The American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms, which sets out to rate well-known black Americans

according to the degree the authors think they've been co-opted by white society. In fact, we didn't end up talking about the book itself very much, but about the concept of being an Uncle Tom, how it started and how it still endures in various forms. But we began by talking about Gary's book Another Day in the Death of America, in which Gary writes about gun violence via the lives of 10 American children shot and killed on a randomly chosen date, Saturday 23rd November 2013. I really recommend that book, but there's also a link in the description to a great YouTube

video which despite the slightly clickbaity title Gary Young destroys America's gun culture is really an excellent and well illustrated well put together argument for gun control put together by Double Down News and delivered with characteristic compassion and rationality by Gary. Back at the end to say goodbye but right now with Gary Young. Here we go. Let's have a ramble chat We'll focus first on this Then concentrate on that Come on, let's chew the fat And have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat

And find your talking hat Yes, yes, yes La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la My book came out probably about six weeks before Trump's election victory. Yeah. And it was just a very... In Britain, when you talked about it,

when I talked about it, it would be like, well... It's not a partisan issue in Britain, you know, guns. People generally have the same view. Yeah. You know, what would you want everybody carrying around one of those lethal weapons for whereas in america and particularly on radio because there is a kind of extra dynamic

where they don't know i'm black you know but they would uh the gun people would come on and they would um they would say these things it was just kind of unsustainable, you know, and weird, you know. If you just took a few cities out of America, if you took out, you know, I'd say, which cities do you want to take out? You know, and it'd be like Chicago, Detroit, because in the gun world's mind, this is entirely racialized phenomenon. Right. So those are the cities that are unfairly skewing the numbers because gun violence is so out of control. Yeah, and if you took these cities out, and I'd say, well, if you take out Chicago,

where are you going to get your blues from? Where are you going to get your deep dish pizza from? Like, if you take out Detroit, where are you going to get your cars from? Where are you going to get motor for? You can't just imagine a country without certain cities because it's inconvenient for your argument. They are in America. And then, you know, if you compare us to Brazil, and I'd be like, well, when do you compare yourself to Brazil?

You know, when does that happen? And then the kind of nutty, you know, it's not guns that kill people. It's people that kill people. You know, I'd be like, yeah, okay. It's not toasters that make toast. It's people that make toast. You know, but toasters exist to make toast, don't they? Yeah.

And guns exist to kill people, you know. Yeah. The same arguments keep sort of popping up again and again. Occasionally I get drawn into YouTube rabbit holes of watching gun control debates and then looking at the comments underneath. And it's almost always the same sort of things. I was going to ask if it was okay to run a few of those by you.

Oh, yeah, go ahead. All right. So, yeah, I'm going to play the part of the gun control opponent using a few of the arguments that I've read in comment sections and heard on podcasts and things like that. Advance apologies to any opponents of gun control listening, because I'm not going to do a great job on your behalf, but I'll do my best. So practical question about reducing the number of guns,

if you had tougher gun control laws. Say they decide to get rid of the guns. How are they going to manage to take hundreds of millions of guns already circulating around America back? Surely the criminals are not going to hand their guns in. And that's a good question. That is one of the better questions about how do you practically do this. And for that, the only suggestion I have is to look at places where it's been done.

So in Australia, after the shootings in Tasmania, they did a massive buyback and an amnesty, and they pulled the guns back in. Now, if we were to apply that logic to other areas of American society, then I would say, what the hell are you doing building a wall on your border? Do you honestly think that's going to stop migrants coming into your country? Well, no, but you're going to build a wall because you think that, you know,

well, we have to do something, we have to protect our borders and blah, blah, blah. I don't think that's a very good idea. I don't think that's the way to do it. But if your response to an urgent social need is it's too hard and the bad people will carry on being bad well then that will lead to anarchy you have the most militarized country in the world so i reckon you could do it if that's what you wanted to do. And given the rates of incarceration, the people that make these arguments, they didn't complain, you know,

when people were saying, you're going to ban marijuana. How on earth do you think you're going to ban marijuana? That's not really going to work, is it? And yet, you know, they locked up how many hundreds of thousands of millions of people. So this is not an argument that is applied elsewhere. And this particular thing, guns, more than marijuana, more than the war, more than immigration, there's a proven connection between

this and a massive death rate, which is unlike anything else anywhere in the Western world. So there's an urgency. And what is that death rate at the moment? Is Brazil number one in shooting deaths in the world? You know what? I honestly don't know where is number one. I know that in the OECD countries, in the Western countries,

America is number one. Yeah. By quite a long way. When I did my book, seven kids every day. So the book is about all the kids that are shot dead in one day. Yeah. When I did the book, kids and teens, so nought to 19. When I did the book, it was seven was the average.

Now I think it's about 12. Really? It's gone up that much? Every day. Yeah. And it's a reliable statistic. So when I did my book, I picked a random day. And so long as you pick a Friday, Saturday, because more kids die at the weekend, you know they're going to die. You don't know where, you don't know who, but you know that somebody's number's going to come up. And if it's in the summer, then it's even worse. Here's another gun control opponent question. Mass shooting deaths involve criminals. Roughly

80 to 85% of shooting deaths every year involve criminals shooting each other or people defending themselves from criminals. Is that an actual question? I suppose people are sort of implying there that, well, there's a lot of shootings, but it's mainly criminals who are being taken out of the equation. Right. I mean, first of all, it's not true. The statistic isn't true. More than half, most people who are shot by guns kill themselves. So that's the first thing. Accidentally or by suicide?

Well, they're counted as suicides. Okay. So, yeah, more than half are suicides. Yeah. Which really begs the question, if you made it harder for someone to commit suicide successfully, would they necessarily, when you put a gun to your head that's not a cry for help you know once you pull the trigger you you know it will get the job done so there's not much chance for kind of further reflection there in other places where

you don't have that access to lethal weaponry many people who try to commit suicide can then, with decent mental health support, kind of go on to lead kind of better lives and to live. So that's the first thing. Secondly, criminals are people too. Like the fact that they're criminals or that they have a criminal record which is different to i mean to reduce someone to one act particularly in a country where it's very difficult to get legal support where you people plea bargain out even if you know they didn't necessarily do things it's not like the American legal system and the American criminal justice system is one that we want to rely on for whether people deserve to live or die, right?

The definition of what is a criminal in America is racialized and is understood in certain socioeconomic terms. And bullets don't necessarily simply seek like once once a bullet goes out it can go anywhere so when you talk in the book about the whole idea of you know the thing that people say when there is a school shooting people are particularly and rightly upset by the idea of children and innocent children the word innocent is used and you say that it sort of throws up the idea that

some people are more deserving of being shot than others yeah and and that yeah so and i'd forgotten that this started with the kind of mass shootings which most people don't die through mass shootings. You know, that's why the book deals with a random day. And in any kind of given random day, most of the shootings aren't mass shootings. They're the spectacle that attracts the media attention. But yes, this notion of the worthy victim and the unworthy victim, it goes really deep. Every single African-American parent I spoke to thought that their kid might get shot. One of them said, well, I didn't think it would be him.

I thought it would be his brother. But, you know, the guy I knew just said, you're not doing your job as an-american parent if you think your kid can't get shot but then the other thing is that they all felt the need to talk about why their kids shouldn't have been shot they felt the need to defend their dead child's honor he wasn't in a gang he didn't hang out of the corner he was was always in by 10. He was awful. Like, your kid shouldn't be shot. And, of course, your kid shouldn't be in a gang. But, like, there are a certain number of mistakes that you are kind of expected to make as a young person.

But some young people don't have that margin of error and just by having a friend who you know is on the wrong side of town or just literally living in a place is enough to leave you dead um to what degree do you like where do you stand on the whole idea of the way that Gunzog portrayed in entertainment, films, TV, video games, etc.? Because that's obviously a whole conversation that is easily captured by conservative ways of thinking about the world. I think it's a problem. I don't think it's the problem. I think it's a problem. I don't think it's the problem because I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly,

but my guess is the penetration of PS4s and whatever the other consoles are that are really big are as great probably in Britain and elsewhere in the Western world as they are in America. And yet we don't have the gun violence that they do. And it is a problem, obviously, because it glamorizes. It sort of normalizes it. That's what I always think.

It's like the thing I wang on about is... You wang on. I'm a massive wanger. You wang on. I'm a massive wanger. But, you know, I think evidently people are OK with the idea that things they see portrayed in the media have an effect. Right. People, most people have come to agree that that's a thing. Whereas I think most people used to say immediately when there were conversations about violence in movies or whatever, were like you know sane people are able to separate that kind of thing from real life whereas that doesn't seem to be the case when you're talking about attitudes to women or minorities or smoking or any of these things that now people are careful to portray in a responsible way because they appreciate that it does have an effect in the real world really people's attitudes are important to the extent that now before the Beatles get back doc there's warnings about you know you're going to see smoking Beatles in this thing and watch out

so evidently things do have an effect but that doesn't seem to apply to the way that guns are portrayed or the way that it's taken as read that it's, you know, you've got a guy with a gun. He's going to sort things out. It's exciting. I appreciate that, you know, people can pass the difference between fantasy and a story and reality. But these things do have a cumulative effect on people's attitudes yeah i mean they do i have no doubt that if guns were as freely available as they were as they are in america and britain britain you know would have a serious problem on his hands and that that would be part of it. But what one can't do is establish a causal link

or even a contextual link between that and gun violence unless you take into account the accessibility of the gun to start with. So we had not long been back, me, my wife, and I've got two kids. My son would have been eight at the time, and my daughter was two. We were at a friend's house in Derbyshire, rural Derbyshire. My wife is American, and I don't know that I would have had this policy were it not for her, but, like, no guns.

No guns as toys. I think I would have been slacker. Although I think I might have got there after a while from living in America. But America's the only place where I had kids. And she was like, no, guns aren't toys. So if my son was given a present, I don't know, some Lego thing,

and it had guns in it, he'd be like, okay, we'll just take the guns off. But of course when he goes somewhere else, different parents, different rules, and of course when you try and enforce these rules as soon as he goes somewhere else, and everyone goes awesome, guns, I can't play with these at home.

So we're in Derbyshire, we've just returned from America after 12 years, so I lived in America for 12 years as the Guardian's US correspondent. We've come back to Britain to live and we are visiting some friends in Derbyshire. And these friends, their kid has guns to play with.

And at a certain point, he and my son go running out of the house with guns. And me and my wife look at each other. I mean, there was a case of a boy, Tamar Rice, in Cleveland, I think, who was playing with a gun. With a toy gun. With a toy gun. Someone calls the cops, said, look, there's a kid.

I think it's a toy gun, but he's kind of freaking people out in the park. Cops just rolled up and shot him like a oh my goodness when was that this would have been it was before I left

so probably 2015 2014 oh man just shot him shot him dead oh yeah

and and then people were like what kind of parent lets their kids play with a toy gun? And it's like, no, you know, no. Our kids just run out with the toy gun. And we look at each other, sort of like who can get to him fastest?

And I said, it's all right, actually said it's all right actually it's all right nobody here has a gun and nobody here thinks it's a real gun so we're just going to have the conversation with him when he comes back because we will have the conversation with him we did but that's when you realize that you've been carrying this thing around with you. Because the kids' parents, the other, my son's friend, they didn't think, oh, my God. And so, you know, I just remember not long after just thinking, yeah, like I've been internalizing this anxiety, which I didn't, I mean, he was eight. I wasn't thinking, you know, I hope he doesn't get shot on the way to school or at school because he's eight. You know, when that's, you think, I worry about that when he's 15.

You know, but actually you are carrying around with you the whole time. And I just thought, Jesus, I've got detox, man, that's, you see, I worry about that when he's 15. You know, but actually you are carrying around with you the whole time. And I just thought, Jesus, I've got detox. I mean, that's awful. Yeah. How was the process of talking to the people involved with the deaths of their children in the course of writing the book? It was, it was delicate. Yeah. You know, I had to be careful how I approached them. I kept thinking, if my kid had been shot dead,

would I want to talk to someone? You know, I don't know. And so I had a process where I would arrive. I'd try and find an address, and I would send a letter. And the letter would say, I'm sorry for your loss, I read about it, and I want to talk to you about your son. I know how he died, but I'd like to know how he lived.

Who was he? What did he like to do? What did you love about him what irritated you about him and i know i can't bring him back to life but you know i'm i'm a writer and i want to honor his life on the page and that this is the project i'm doing um would you talk to me and if they agreed to speak to me i would would speak to them. It usually didn't last more than about 45 minutes or an hour. I talked to them about their child and, you know, the night it happened, but also kind of what they were like, and quite often they had little boxes of things that they'd saved.

Yeah, that was very heartbreaking, the memory boxes. Yeah, very kind of, and that would usually be for about an hour after which you could tell they were kind of tapped out yeah and then i would say that i depending on how this went for you i'd like to come back and when i come back i'd love it if you could introduce me to kind of other people who knew them so yeah that was the process it's quite slow but it's necessarily slow how was your mental health in the whole process of putting it together it must have been it's very sad to read it must have been very difficult to have those conversations and meet those people. You know, at the risk of sounding pathological, this is already a dangerous way to start a sentence, right?

You're a journalist, so you have to have some sort of, it's a bit like being a doctor, I guess. You can't invest in the reality, the emotional reality of every single situation, otherwise it's not practical. Well, there is that, but there was also an investment that I had quite early on in these stories that meant that because so few, so few being one or two, really made the papers beyond, oh, this kid died. That was kind of it.

And actually kind of it might be these kids got shot and it knocked out the electricity. We don't know how long the electricity is going to be on. Most of the story is about the electricity, not about the kids being shot. So not extensively reported. not about the kids being shot. So not extensively reported. And I was kind of like, I was on a mission to tell these stories. And in a sense, the mission sort of was my investment.

Do you know what I mean? So when I reached someone who could tell me something, I would get really excited. And when I found... Of course I knew the whole time that this child had died. And my defence would be that I wouldn't have been able to actually... If I was being pathological and just driven by the story and so on, the conversations wouldn't have drawn out the things that they did.

And I was on a mission to tell these stories, these children's stories. And the last one that I found kin for was a boy in Houston, Edwin, who I was told by one of his teachers, well, he's undocumented, so they don't want to be found. Turned out Edwin was not, his mum was, but Edwin wasn't because he was born in America. But I was like, the idea that this kid might be undocumented in life

and not documented in my book, in death was kind of more than I could bear. I really did go the extra mile. I actually flew to Houston and just kept asking around, you know. And then I did find, his mum was so pleased to see me as it turned out. And so I think that mitigated the emotional toll. It could just be I'm a defective person.

That is also true. My wife has some theories about that. But listening to the 911 calls, like in America, you can have access to the, here would be the 999 calls. That was very emotional. And actually the toughest one was a boy called Samuel Brightman in Dallas. And he, in the 911 call, the operator is saying to his mum, is he conscious?

And she says, I think so. Samuel, are you conscious? And you hear him go, yeah, yeah. And that really, I was like, oh, my God, he's alive. I'd become so accustomed to the children being dead, this was this one... ..just very kind of... It was like, oh, my God, he's alive right now.

Like, I'm listening to him be alive. And then his mum telling the story, I said to his mum, when did you find out that he was dead? mum when did you find out that he was dead and she said well I was following the ambulance and at a certain point they turned off Yeah. So it's not that there weren't moments. Sure. But like I said, I was... I remember saying to my wife, I don't care if nobody reads this. I just feel now like I have to do it. And that was quite early on.

What's the way forward? Do you have any sense of how things will go in order for the situation to improve? What needs to be done in the short term for the situation to improve in practical terms? I feel like... It feels totally impossible. You just sort of think,

nothing really seems to make a difference. No, the appalling magnitude of the school shooting and Valdé. So I feel that something's already changed. In 2012, I was covering the presidential election, and I went down to Florida to see Obama speak in Naples, Florida. And the night before, I kid his name, I've forgotten, went into a cinema in Aurora, Colorado,

when Batman Returns is on, and shot it up. And Obama comes to the podium, and the news of that had seeped out that morning and Obama must have arrived late that night and so he comes to the platform and he does what every president has done even Clinton with Columbine who knows what's in Mender's hearts

who can understand this evil we will all hug our children a bit closer tonight today is not a day for politics can understand this even more. We will all hug our children a bit closer tonight. Today is not a day for politics. I'm thinking, I disagree. I think today would be a very good day for politics. Like, you know, are you ever going to talk about this? And then Sandy Hook happens. He's no longer running for president. He's won. And then he does intervene. And he says, we have to have this conversation. The conversation that he's avoided for the past four years.

We have to have this conversation. And this is unacceptable. No other country has this. And it begins a process of intervention. And there is a, I think it's Lyndon Crosby, who's a Tory kind of the Tory kind of guru

consultant has this phrase you can't fatten the pig on market day which I think is a pretty good phrase like and this was so you've avoided this conversation for how long?

And then you start this conversation. So we shouldn't be surprised if the first time after Sandy Hook, when they try and get gun control legislation, even though Sandy Hook has all the necessary components, it's Connecticut, they are small kids, they are white kids. The shooter is mentally ill. He's not been released on some furlough programme. It's all there.

And you still don't get any legislation. And people say, understandably, if it didn't happen under Sandy Hook, when's it going to happen? But I understandably, well, if it didn't happen under San Diego, when's it going to happen? But I'm thinking, well, if you hadn't had the conversation for 30 years, why do you think it would happen immediately now? And in the same way that I think,

and that's what I thought about Brexit, you've avoided conversations about immigration pretty much since 1962. Or you've succumbed to the worst conversations about immigration since then, because you thought there was nothing in it. Or then the Brexit conversation happens, and people are talking about immigration, and suddenly you want to have this

conversation? Well, that's not going to work. And there has been, that's ten years ago, Sally Hook, almost exactly, it was in December, I think. Democrats are kind of now, in the polity, they are more hardcore about kind of gun control. They're more strident.

So it's not like nothing has happened. But there is one other thing that's a problem, which is that the people who want guns want them more than the people who don't want guns don't want them. The polls show they're more likely to write letters to their congresspeople, they're more likely to sign a petition, they're more likely to raise money, they're more likely to vote on it. Whereas there isn't really a national united gun control movement. And the way that the gun control movement, the kind of rhetoric it tends to use,

is one of protecting our communities from predators who would harm us, which is kind of not really going to fly in the African-American community where people are understood to be predators you know and so um the biggest hope i had was the kids after the shooting in florida yeah they had that big demonstration they were completely uncompromising they were they were strident kind of gobby, determined, super articulate, quite sophisticated kids. And that was the most hopeful thing that I had seen. And of course, if you've got 12 kids getting shot dead every day, then clearly it's just every day it's moving too slow. You and I are quite similar ages.

Are we? Yeah, I think so. I'm 53. Yeah, so you're January 69, aren't you? Yeah. I'm June. Ah. So we grew up in the UK in the 80s. Yeah, so you're January 69, aren't you? Yeah. I'm June. Ah. So we grew up in the UK in the 80s.

Yeah. But I have a feeling we had quite different childhoods. Really? Where did you grow up? Well, I grew up in London and South Wales. Right. It sounds like you had different childhoods if you grew up in London and South Wales. Yeah, that's true.

It was quite stark, the contrast between city life and then suddenly being in the middle of nowhere where my dad wanted to be but then he'd bugger off he was a writer as well but it was nice anyway meanwhile you are growing up in stevenage and by the time you were 15 so this stuff i gleaned from who Are We? How Identity Politics Took Over the World, which begins with you talking about your childhood. I love that section. I love the book. It's great, man. It's like I think it's the best writing on identity politics that I've read. Oh, thank you. Because there's a lot of it, right? There's a lot of people weighing in because it's a very emotive topic.

And it's transformed so many things in the last few years. I wanted to talk to you about some of that stuff in the book. But before then, just about your growing up and stuff, which is such a fascinating contrast to my own childhood. By 15, you're politically active, joining the socialist workers. Not the socialist workers, no. Because socialist workers are actually kind of quite sane, certainly relative to the bit I joined the Workers' Revolutionary Party.

Okay. They were bonkers. In what ways? Well, you have to imagine that their thing is that kind of the revolution is going to happen any moment. We're in a revolutionary situation. It's going to happen any moment. We're in a revolutionary situation. It's going to happen any moment. Which during the minor strike,

even in my 15-year-old sort of little brain, was still kind of like, well, yeah, the state is kind of being involved. And it seemed... They were holding out for a general strike. They were holding out for a general strike. And it kind of, you know, it didn't seem completely ludicrous.

But then there would be things like you go to this meeting that ends up lasting five hours and you're completely bored and it's in Clapham and you live in Stevenage. It's already a bit dodgy and you're, you know, you're already going to be much later. And so you want to go and just call your mum and say, I'm going to be late. And they say, no, you can't leave.

And I say, I need to call my mum. No, no, no. All of these phones around here, they're all bugged. The state's bugged them all. I'm like, I don't care if the state knows that I'm calling my mum to tell her I'm going to be late. That's not a big deal. And the more I think about this now,

the more I think what an irresponsible the more I think what irresponsible bunch of gates they were I Was doing an a-level I Did French at night school? So do me say they were two years early and I applied because I was a I was raised I took myself very seriously and I applied for time off party work So that I could revise for my A-level. And they said no. Now, if you imagine that the revolution is going to happen tomorrow, then fine.

Like, it's 1917, it's a winter palace, and you're like, oh, I'll be along, but, you know, I've got my A-level tomorrow. No, you don't, because there'll be no A-levels. But it's not 1917, and the miners have already gone back to work, and I've got an A-level to do. And they're like, no. At that stage, I can either keep going to these meetings and have my mum lose her shit. Or I can fall out with them.

My mum's much more scary than they are. So I'm like, no. No, I've got to do this. And then they start saying, oh, maybe you're a police informer. Oh, no, no, I've got to do this. And then they start, you know, saying, oh, maybe you're a police informer. Oh, no way. Yeah, so it started getting really weird. And then they sent people round after you left.

Yeah, and each kind of, I was like, fuck you. Yeah. You know. And in one year, I got all the experience that I needed not to do that again, not to know that politics is not about acting out that just saying the most radical thing is different from being radical that kind of because they would be like we want a general strike they only want 24-hour strike you know what's wrong

with them and they want you know and it was these kind of maximalist positions and all of that so it was a very valuable if intense experience that like having it at 16 and i managed to get out of it right and i've remained politically active uh on the left so it didn't scar me for life yeah you didn't go the other way yeah so um yeah but it was proper weird. How did you end up in Paris again? I studied French and Russian. That was the degree that I did in a university. I studied to be a translator. And you were in Edinburgh studying there? Yeah, a four-year course, and you do five, six months in Paris

and five, six months in what was then Leningrad. And how did you come to be living in the fancy part of Paris? Whereabouts was it that you ended up? I was on the 5th arrondissement, just by the Pantheon. Yeah. Just up from the Jardin de Luxembourg. Because looking for flats, people would say, visite de quelle origine, monsieur?

You know, basically, what colour are you? Or they didn't, and if you said, oh, Angliontier, I would say. This is Caribbean Brit. Oh, oh, Anglian T.E., I would say, this is Caribbean Brit. Oh, yeah, no. See, we did have a flat, but we don't, you know, and the flat would disappear. Or they didn't ask you, and you travel halfway across the country

in your one presentable piece of clothing, and then they would see you, and they'd be like, oh, no, no. So I put a little note in the English church thinking England, and I was thinking England, although to me England and Britain were synonymous, which I know they're not, but they know what black and British can mean. And I don't know what's going on. I mean, all I know that's going on here is racism. So black British student, seeking accommodation,

one and a half years teaching English experience. And I give the number of my youth hostel. This very, well, this old Etonian, if he's out there, I would love to see him again, Charles Tattam. He said he saw it and that God spoke to him and he set about, unbeknown to me, Charles Tattum. He said he saw it and that God spoke to him and he set about unbeknown to me, finding me a place.

And the place was with a French, I feel that she was like the Kate Adie of her moment, but in French radio. So her name was Annie d'Aubenton and she worked for France Inter, which was like, kind of like French World Service, sort of. But her area of expertise was Eastern Europe. And this was 1990, 1991.

So Eastern Europe was the ballgame. And I was teaching her English. And I had a room in her flat. And I would teach her like two and a half hours a day. And I would say to her, you know, so what did you do today? Or today I interviewed Mr. Gorbachev. We talked about the possibilities for Perestroika after the war. You know, I was like, Jesus, man, I want a piece of that. And that's how I got really into the idea of becoming a journalist.

Right. The flip side of that was I was in a fancy part of town with plaits and tracksuit trousers and a big loopy earring and i didn't make sense to any crs they're the kind of they were like the equivalent of what was the spg in britain like the kind of more militarized police not just regular police just like gits and they would stop me usually kind of particularly in the morning like certain times of day there are a lot of tourists around there and so on but like in the morning I'll be out for my baguette and my kind of you know paper or in the evening when I'll

be coming home and they'll be like you what are you. Or in the evening when I'd be coming home, and they'd be like, you, what are you doing here? I'd be like, well, I'm staying around the corner. What are you doing staying around the corner? Well, that's where I stay. So I would get stopped and searched about three or four times a week. I got beaten up by the cops in the metro. How did that happen?

I mean, you know, I was sitting on a train with a couple of fellow students. These cops came on. They dragged me out of the train, slammed me against the wall, start, like, you know... Frisking you.

Frisking me. And I'm like, what have I, and anytime I did anything, like, obviously I wasn't trying to fight him, but I, you know, I haven't done anything.

I don't know what, I don't know, be like, shut up, you know, whack. And then it was like, right,

you can go. Hmm. Have you been back to Paris recently? Actually, I was back there, um, last week. Yeah.

I mean, I'm 53 53-year-old considerably portly gentleman without plaits or a very loopy earring who doesn't go out at 11 o'clock at night. And, you know, if I did, if I was somewhere and I needed to get somewhere that was a distance, I'd probably take a cab. So, you know... It's a different city for you. Yeah, different rules apply.

But it was the most intense racial experience I've ever had. And, you know, I've had some racial experiences. Yeah, and then you talk in the book as well about the contrast between that and then going somewhere superficially much more hardcore. Yeah. So I go to Leningrad then to do the second bit. And I'm staying with a Jewish mum and her son, who's about nine. about nine and so I'm you know I'm in St Petersburg in this moment and this moment is very weird because it's clear that the Soviet Union it won't be for long and there is a veneration of the West and I get caught up in this veneration. There is also a kind of animus towards Africans, Asians,

anyone who looks like they've been sucking on the teeth of the Soviet Union because they are understood to be part of this past folly of solidarity and so on. Somehow, which is about cultural presentation, people look at me and they see that I am Western. They think I'm American. They don't think I'm British. But they don't think I'm African. And that distinction means that instead of being hostile, they become craven. They think I've got money. Only time in my life anybody looked at me and thought,

I bet he's rich. Nobody's ever done that before. So I had to vouch. In Paris, if I went out with, I didn't really know any other students, but if I went out with white people to like a nightclub, they would have to vouch for me. They're very clear colour bars in Paris

and they're kind of not particularly subtle about it. In Leningrad, it's almost the opposite. I would have to vouch for the white people because they could have been Russian, but I couldn't have been Russian. So I'd be like, you know, if we went into a hotel or a velouté bar or a velouté, I'd be like, yeah, they're with me, it's all right.

So you take that whole year together. It was a very weird year. Yeah. It's a great section of the book towards the beginning. Political correctness, Gary. Oh, dear, oh, dear. It's gone mad, hasn't it? Well, they call it woke now.

They don't call it political. You don't hear so much about political correctness. The terminology, are you good at just adapting to new terminology and rolling with it? Or do you ever find yourself just thinking, oh, fuck it, Al. I'm losing track. Well, no, I do lose track. And what I generally find is that it's usually the same track. Yeah.

Right. Woke is a version of political correctness. That term, which was once adopted by people who wanted to do good things, and then it's taken by people who want to dismiss good things and turned into an insult in some way. And they are both kind of, you know... So there used to be a talk about, like, we don't want politically correct policing.

And that meant we don't care if you stop and search for black people. We don't want you to think about racism while you're policing. And now they would call it woke policing, you know. I remember doing an exercise at the Guardian of looking at all the things that politically correct or political correctness have been used for in the last month. And it was like British Airways tail fins, electric cars, you know, certain kinds of shortbread. And it's like so I mean, it loses its value. You know, and it's like, so, I mean, it loses its value. And what they're trying to do, I think, is say, it's actually people very upset because they're losing a certain kind of battle, actually. And the battle is about sensitivity.

We should be less sensitive. That is their argument. Yeah. Or they just feel bent out of shape by being told off or being made to feel irrelevant. The thing about being bent out of shape for being told off, actually, I kind of understand that. I do. I think that kind of people can get hung up on the word rather than the spirit.

on the word rather than the spirit and it's actually very possible to have the best spoken most articulate racists in the world where you just know not to say certain things but you still do them and so the thing about kind of them I think there are ways to have this conversation that sometimes that are better than others. And actually, lots of people just want to carry on saying it, whatever it is, or doing it. And then I think you have the right to do that. You know, you don't have the right to do everything. But if you want to say racist stuff, you can.

I can't stop you. Your problem is when I say that's racist and actually it's the same right you've got the right to be offensive and i've got the right to be offended but you think i shouldn't have the right to be offended you think i don't have the right to call you on it and so you're not free from the consequences of your speech. And that's kind of what people want. They want to be able to say things and for there to be no comeback. Yeah. And that's not plausible.

So, you know, when you see these things come around, and I always say, you know, someone uses woke or cancel culture or culture. I say, so I don't understand that term. What do you mean? What are you? It's like politically correct policing. Can you just tell me what that sounds like a slogan? What is it in the policing that you don't want to happen?

And then we can talk about that. Because political correctness is becoming to mean whatever you want it to mean so long as you don't like it. Yeah, yeah. A sentence that stood out to me in the book was, everyone has the right to call themselves whatever they want. We should respect that. We should honour self-definition, not to humour the subject, but because it's infinitely preferable

to allowing anyone to be defined by others. So I thought that was a good core statement about like what's at stake here yeah and self-identification has been one of the flash points for a lot of so-called woke and you know these conversations about identity politics over the last few years and i've seen more than one comedian kind of characterize it as like, oh, it's a bit bonkers all this. Oh, I'm going to identify as a kettle. I wish to be treated accordingly.

Yeah. Yeah, and I kind of, you know, there's always that thing, isn't there, where people say, well, what if people want to marry a dog? You know, when you expand the notion of marriage to include gay people and i think why don't we worry about it when somebody comes up and wants to marry a dog yeah nobody wants to marry a dog so that's not a thing is it what kind of dogs you know is there something you want to tell me or um I don't care if someone's black white or yellow with green spots

and I think there are no people who are yellow with green spots so why don't we just deal with the problems that we have rather than you making up problems you go ahead like marry a cow the worry seems to be oh if you go for this idea of self identification

and you indulge that then people will take the piss. You know, when people are talking about race and people are talking about gender particularly. And they think, well, people are going to self-identify in bad faith in order to gain some sort of advantage. That seems to be the worry. Yeah, and I'll be honest with you. When I wrote the book, issues around trans and gender weren't as explosive and combustible as they are now. So even the term self-identification, which now at the moment people immediately move to kind of gender or kind of quite quickly move to gender and trans. It wasn't the issue then that it was now. And I wasn't even thinking about that. I still sit with that notion, which is because then the next thing I say is and whatever you call yourself has to make sense for it to be a social identity if it's just you i can call myself anything i want

but if it's to be a social identity then the social nature of it means that other people have to recognize it for what it is but there is this there was a there was a thing in one of the chapters which was about gatekeepers, and I used this example of Israel and trying to define who is Jewish and not, and how the definition keeps changing. And the guy I speak to in Israel, whose job is to kind of help people establish their Jewish identity to kind of be on reasonable doubt, which is no small thing in Israel to be considered Jewish or not. And he said, the thing is, for years, you didn't have people banging on the door saying,

I would like to be Jewish, like you were Jewish or you weren't. And it wasn't the kind of identity that people thought, well, there's real advantage to being considered Jewish. Whereas now, partly because of the benefits that you might get if you're a citizen of Israel, for example, but maybe other things, I don't know. Like there are benefits to being defined as Jewish. And so then that has to be kind of policed in a different way. I mean, that's what was kind of interesting about the Dolezal case in America,

which also hadn't happened when I'd written the book. But like passing is a kind of banal part of American racial life, that there were people who would pass as being another race. But they all passed one way. You pass from being black to white. That's what passing meant, that light-skinned black people could, if they cut themselves off from their family,

live lives as white people. The idea of people passing the other way just hadn't really occurred. It's like, what do you do that for? What's the benefit of that? Yeah, yeah. You talk in the Gatekeepers chapter about the American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms.

Oh, yeah. A book that was written, the full title is Being a Review of History, Antics and Attitudes of Handkerchief Heads, Aunt Jemima's Head Negroes in Charge and House Negroes Against the Freedom Aims of the Black Race. And it's by Richard Lawrence and James Lowe. It was published in 2002. And what's the deal with this book?

Is it like a spoof? I haven't read this book. No, I mean, it's not easy to come by. I happened to be interviewing... I was in LA interviewing Minister farrakhan for the bbc and we went to interview some sort of offshoots of the nation of islam i was also at the time writing a piece peace for the Guardian in defense of Uncle Tom, who I finally read the book and was like, you know, Uncle Tom is actually a pretty decent guy.

This is Harriet Beecher Stowe's book. Yeah. From 18, like the mid-1800s. It was from the Civil War, yeah. It was kind of just before the Civil War. Credited with me in kind of an important factor in... Very important, yeah. It was like Lenin's favourite book as a child. You know, it was kind of...

It was a... Yeah, in kind of challenging the notion of... Well, challenging slavery, you know, at a very delicate point. And in a range of ways, the book is deeply problematic. But Uncle Tom is this... She was a white woman. She was, yeah.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is a white woman and kind of, you know, she likes her mulattoes tragic. She kind of, there's really only a few options. You either run or you die or you submit. Do you know what I mean? The idea of kind of, you know, self-organization, overthrowing slavery

and that kind of stuff doesn't come into it. So it's not a particularly militant book. But Tom is this guy who, when he's told, I will promote you if you whip her, he says, no, I can't do that. I'd rather die. And he does die.

And he, when the slaves say to him, two of the slaves say, we're running, come with us, he says, no, no, I'm not going to run with you. That doesn't seem right to me, which is like bonkers, I think, although it depends on whether you get caught or not, as to how bonkers it is. But then when he's asked, where did they go, he knows, and he says, i'm not going to tell you

and that's why he dies he gets whipped to death because he refuses to tell this brutal overseer where the slaves have gone and um uh reading this book i was like there's that quote from karl marx that religion is the opium of the people which is the only bit people know but the next bit is but it's the sigh of the oppressed in a heartless world and that for Tolman is religion and is it's like um he has this kind of core sense of decency which is he's never going to be a revolutionary he's never going to be a revolutionary. He's never going to be a militant. But he would also give his life for a cause or for a principle. So I wrote this essay in defense of Uncle Tom saying we actually have to rescue the character from the book. It was for the 200th anniversary of the book. Would it be the 200th?

150th anniversary of the book. So the book must have come out sometime around like 1850, 1851, something like that. Yeah, 1853. There you go, close enough. That you have to protect Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe, but also this phrase, you're an Uncle Tom, which is a de-blacking. Yeah, it basically means someone who is just trying to... Ingratiate themselves to the white world.

And most cultures have a term like that. The Irish call them West Brits. You know, people who want to get in with the Brits. And so people who assign to an identity a set of values, and if you don't believe in those values, then you're cast out of the tribe. You're not good enough. And this runs in a range of ways, you know.

A black man who can't dance. Do you know what I mean? An Irishman who doesn't know this song. And it's a deeply reactionary, it's the first step to fundamentalism, actually. I am and therefore I do. You know, because you are this, you must think this. Anybody who doesn't think this...

Is a traitor. Is a traitor. And we see it play out, actually, in a range of ways with the, you know, Quasi-Quarteng or James Cleverley or these kind of black Tories. And people say, well, how can you be a black Tory? You know, how is that possible? It's like, well, I don't agree with them politically, but the idea that free market economics is the preserve of white people is a bit bonkers. And the idea, you know, when the people are, but they're doing so much damage to black people.

And it's like, did you hear about Rwanda? Like they were all black. Like this is, you know, we have to have a much more sophisticated understanding of how the world works than just thinking that because someone looks like you that they're going to act in your interest if that was true then margaret thatcher wouldn't have done over the minors who were overwhelmingly white it doesn't work like that and so i think it's deeply reactionary whenever it comes from even if it's targeted at people who i disagree with i feel like we disagree with them for what they do, not who they are.

And, you know, when people say, you know, how could someone who's been through X then do Y? And it's like sometimes people do that because they've been through X, because they've been kind of deeply traumatized. But let's concentrate on Y. Let's concentrate on what they do rather than who they are. on why let's concentrate on what they do rather than who they are and i i hold that principle very firmly you know and so the book who are we um how identity politics take over the world the kind of core principle of that book is that identity is an indispensable place to start and a terrible place to finish in anything, in politics, in, you know. We start with a story.

We start with a constellation of influences. But then it's up to us to take them somewhere as free human beings and to apply them to the world as we see it and to do what we think is right. apply them to the world as we see it and to do what we think is right and the idea that everybody's going to do the same thing because they look the same or worship the same deity or it's not just absurd it's wrong wait this is an advert for squarespace Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics, and I don't want to stop.

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So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace Yes Continue Rosie Hey How you, dog legs? Dog legs? I didn't mean to call you dog legs there. Hope you don't mind. I don't mind. I have dog legs. Yeah.

Oh, you are so beautiful to me see this is good hard-hitting um dog chat from a middle-aged man you don't get that on the rest is politics anyway welcome back podcats that was gary young talking to me there you'll find a link in the description to gary's website which includes articles that gary has written descriptions of his books and reviews there's gary's twitter feed there all sorts of other bits and pieces it's a good nicely put together website don't forget his book his book Dispatches from the Diaspora, from Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter, a collection of articles about the African diaspora

and issues of race and racism, is out next year, 2023. There's also a link to that YouTube video I mentioned in the introduction, Gary Young Destroys America's Gun Culture. It's really well put together, that video, and a very thorough and well-argued case for gun control. Also in today's description, you will find a link to Book Trust, the UK's largest children's reading charity, and they are hoping that you might be able to help with their hashtag Just One Book campaign. If you are in a position to make a donation of £10, it will enable Book Trust to send a special book parcel to a child who is vulnerable or in care across England, Wales and Northern Ireland this Christmas. This year Book Trust are determined to reach 16,000 children. Half of the parcels will be

sent to children in care and the other half will be given out through community food banks to children in families facing challenging circumstances. You'll find the link for Book Trust where you can make a donation at the top of the links in the description of this podcast. OK, that's pretty much it for today. I'm going to get back, get this edited and uploaded

and then carry on working on the Christmas podcast so I have it ready for you for Christmas morning. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support and conversation editing on this episode thanks seamus much appreciated thanks also to

helen green she does the artwork for this podcast thank you helen thanks to acast and all who work there for their continued support but a special thank you goes out to you for downloading this listening right to the end a hug sure everyone needs a flipping hug don't they especially now come on oh and hey i love you Oh, and hey, I love you. Bye! Bye. ស្រូវាប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ Thank you.