Guest
Nico Slate
Nico Slate is a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, which he wrote while completing his PhD at Harvard University. Nico is the founder of the Bajaj Lab for Rural Development, which helps document and support the Bajaj Foundation’s efforts to create a model of rural development for India and the world, as well as SocialChange101.org, a free online educational resource and youth workshop series for students of social change.
Intro
Global Partners for Development proudly presents: What Do You Understand? A deep dive into the many facets of philanthropy and development. We will have conversations about what really works and what really doesn’t. Do we know yet how to solve poverty? Are big ideas the answer or do we need to look for small grassroots solutions? Experts in their field will discuss an aspect of their work that they understand particularly well. We will delve into how their work addresses global inequity with an honest conversation about impact.
Let’s talk about big bets, innovation, social enterprises, large-scale humanitarian aid, and the fixation on ending things or solving humanity’s greatest problems and the issues that arise while tackling it all. I am your host Ria Pullin, and my co-host is the Executive Director of Global Partners for Development, Daniel Casanova.
Ria
And our guest today is Nico slate. Nico is an author, a historian, and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the founder and director of the Bajaj Rural Development Lab and SocialChang101.org. Hi Nico! Thanks for joining us.
Nico
Thank you so much for having me.
Ria
Alrighty, so, let’s just jump in here.
I would love to know just a little bit more about you, a little bit of your background and how you came to be where you are right now as an author, as a historian.
Nico
Absolutely. Well, the first thing I’ll say is that like many people, my path has been long and windy, and I will try not to bore you with the long version.
I will say that I never expected in my life to be a historian. I didn’t take a single history class in college when—it wasn’t until I was teaching high school English, trying to figure out what to do with my life that several people said, Hey, you know what? You really interested in social movements, you’re interested in how the world has changed, but you also have this really strong interest in the humanities. You love literature, you love ideas. You know, maybe history might work for you as a way to think about how people change the world and the ideas that they produce in the process and my goodness, it really turned out to be true for me.
I, when I applied for grad school, I had no idea if I would like it and now I’ve been a historian or an aspiring one, I should say for over a decade and I still love it.
Ria
That’s awesome, and what specific part of history are you drawn to?
Nico
I’m drawn to anyone in the past that tried to create sustainable social change and what gets me really excited is when I see people linking their own efforts to make the world better with others who are fighting, perhaps even sometimes very different battles in very different parts of the world, but my specific research looks at connections between the American civil rights movement and struggles against racism, imperialism, and cast and India.
And the one piece of this that’s widely known as the influence of Mahatma Gandhi on Martin Luther king, and the civil rights movement more broadly, and what I try to do in my research is look at a larger cast of characters and a larger range of connections between these two massive efforts at social change, the fight against racism in the US, and the struggle for freedom.
Daniel
Wow. You’re so well-spoken Nico. You must say that a lot, you want to say that a lot, you must’ve thought about it.
Nico
I have thought about these things quite a bit. It doesn’t mean I have the answers yet. In fact, one of my favorite things about being a historian of social movements is that the people that tended to change the world are the kind of people that are never satisfied with one answer.
They’re the kind of people—Gandhi was this way, Martin Luther King was this way and many lesser-known heroes of the past, were hungry for the questions they wanted to know, how can we make things better? And they would fight and fight and fight to change things, but never were they satisfied, and that, that sounds like a bad thing to say, oh no, someone was never satisfied, but no, it’s important because if you think about, for example, something like the civil rights movement in the US or the struggle for India’s independence, we can hold these up and celebrate these as achievements, right?
Yes, we passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Yes, the British left India in 1947, but if you actually look at these struggles, they were about so much more than that, and there’s no way we can say, for example, that we’re living Martin Luther King’s dream, we’re nowhere near there.
We have so much, so much that we still have to do, and similarly in India, the promise of what Gandhi fought for has yet to be. So anyway, to cycle back. I think I—I do have ready answers for these questions, but it doesn’t mean I’m satisfied. I want to keep pushing, which is one of the reasons I’m so excited to speak with you both.
Daniel
Yeah, I—I’m so, I’m cur—I mean, to really get into things, Ria and I were talking before, like what to asked you, and I think like, I’m curious how you see the difference between the current movements now, like BLM, women’s rights, even things that are going on in India right now with the caste system and you know, how they differ from those movements.
I have strong opinions about it. So, I’ll say them, but I’m curious to put you on the spot first so that I can be like, you’re wrong. No, I’m kidding.
Nico
I’m excited, I’m excited to hear your opinions. And if, if I could, I would force you to tell me them first, but I I’ll, I’ll boldly dive in and say that, but firstly, I do see a lot of similarities.
One of the key similarities I see is in the hunger for what you might call intersectional solidarities and by that I just mean efforts to build bridges between different kinds of movements, right? People fighting against racism, people fighting against sexism, people fighting for the rights of LGBTQ communities.
Uh, people concerned about climate change. There are a lot of activists out in our world who are thinking broadly and thinking about the way these different injustices intersect and overlap and that’s something that has long been true in social movements. It’s, it’s one of the things I most admire about many of the figures that I study.
A potential difference that I see is that in the 1920s, thirties, forties, and even to some degree in the fifties, there was a huge part of the world that was fighting against European imperialism. Much of Asia and Africa had been colonized by Europe and that effort created opportunities for solidarity that don’t exist anymore and that saddens me sometimes.
If you think about, for example, ties between India and the struggle against racism in the US, in the 1930s, you had the most prominent, uh, figures in the independent struggle, not just Gandhi, but also Nehru, and then, you know, I could give you a dozen other key figures that are lesser known in the US who are at the peak of their influence within India’s independence movement and fundamentally see their struggle as bound up with the struggle against racism, more broadly across the world.
So, there’s this profound internationalism built into the movement, and that really took a hit as a result of decolonization. So as all these countries become independent, one of the things that happens is that their rulers become for better or worse, more preoccupied with domestic concerns and to the degree that their focus on international issues often end up doing so from very, uh, nation centered perspectives and so, you know, you don’t get the same kinds of solidarity.
I mean, I remember when, when, uh, Barack Obama was just elected president, the first foreign leader he hosted at the white house, if I remember correctly, it was Monroe and Singh, the prime minister of India and there was this effort at returning to these old linkages between the freedom struggles in India and freedom struggles in the US but it’s not the same as at once. Uh, and I think there is a hunger among many people across the world to try to rebuild some of those kinds of transnational solidarities.
But I think it’s harder in our current global context.
Ria
Yeah, and it’s uh, about, like, the effectiveness: Do you think it was more effective, ‘cause back then, you know, there were the boycotts or the sit-ins and, um, n—now I feel like I mostly see marches, marches for all of those things, but do you think anything is actually being done when there aren’t hits to businesses or different areas of, you know, transportation?
You know, I feel like I don’t see those kinds of hits like they did back in the civil rights movement. Do you see that correlation as well?
Nico
That’s a really great question. I will certainly say that there were certain protests that seems so incredibly focused on the injustice at hand and I think the best example are the sit-ins, right, that started in February of 1960.
You have, you know, four African-American college freshmen who sit down at, uh, Woolworths, North Carolina and this movement just spreads like wildfire and you ended up with thousands of people, many of them, young people from across racial lines, from across different parts of the country, all using their bodies to demonstrate the injustice that they’re fighting against and it’s hard to look at that and say, ah, I wish it was as easy to dramatize the injustices that we’re facing in our world today.
And, and, and in many cases it’s not and—but I think one thing that strikes me is that even at the time, during the sit-in, there were a lot of figures that were concerned that the ease of dramatizing the injustice of a whites only sign in a cafe would actually mislead the movement into focusing too much on those kinds of discrimination and not enough on the deeper forms of inequity that are bound up on things like residential segregation, uh, income, inequality, educational inequality, all of these other issues that are still with us today, right?
We still have a tremendous wealth gap. We still have profoundly segregated cities. You still have huge disparities in access to education and health and it’s harder to use something like a sit-in to dramatize those. I mean, you can try, but it’s, it’s, it’s just harder, right?
Ria
Right.
Nico
Uh, but I, I get some hope, I mean, maybe you could flip this around and see it as an—for despair, but for me, I actually see it as hopeful that I can go back and read someone like Ella Baker, the great African-American civil rights activist and leader who, you know, in the middle of the city and says, wait a minute, friends, we’re not just doing this so that we get a seat in that cafe, because just having the right to sit at a cafe and buy a hamburger, that’s not going to fundamentally transform society, and that’s what we need to do.
So, the question of efficacy for me to say it a different way is bound up with the question of goals and I think it is true that today many activists are pursuing really difficult goals, really big sweeping goals and that means it’s harder to create protests that will, uh, create change immediately, but I do have a hope that, uh, even something like a march, which yes, to some degree, we’re all imbued to them because we we’ve seen so many of them, but I still think it can shift the conversation.
It can shift the way people think, it can generate more momentum if it’s, especially if it’s tied in with a variety of different forms of change. I’ve long been an advocate of combining street protests, which by the way, I always feel tremendously uncomfortable in. It doesn’t fit my own personality very well. I mean, I study them, right?
But I see the advantage of combining street protests with lobbying with, with electoral activism, getting people to register, to vote, getting people to vote, getting better elected officials with, um, awareness campaigns, writing op-eds, getting things in the news with grassroots educational campaigns, right?
I mean, all of these things, they work together and if we’re going to really shift the needle in important ways on these difficult issues, we’re going to need it all, I think.
Daniel
Yeah, um, so to keep going with Ria’s question, um, I—I, I’m like I, in one way I want to think that we keep the things keep giving better and we live in the, you know, the most wonderful times of all human history and then I’m also like, oh things were better in the past like, Bill Russell was the best center ever, you know? Um, but—
Nico
I don’t know man, Karim Abdul—aren’t you from LA?
Daniel
I’m from—Karim’s great, Karim,like, I see—
Nico
Karim Abdul-Jabbar
Daniel
On my perfect team he might be playing the four not the five.
Nico
Uh, okay, well I’ll give you that maybe.
Daniel
I’m teasing you. It’s all good. Um, and I might play Bill Russel at the three. Uh, no, no. Anyway, um, but no, I think that I, I think there’s a quality piece. I feel like, while thinkers like you, I think have gotten better and more refined in thinking about how we want to have social change happen in the world. I think that it’s also watered down because the people that are participating in the mass public are able to do so in such a fleeting way, right?
Like there are a lot of like, by engaging online or like sending emails or participating in social media and so my fear about those things or what I feel like happens is they’re really empty. Like if I’m the bad guy, big corporation, whoever that, or the bad part of the government we’re trying to change, I’m just like, go ahead, let them like flail around and send emails and click shit and you know, at the end of the day, people are just gonna forget, and then I can keep moving on with my agenda and they got to like, get their rocks off and I think that I would say a similar thing I see happening in the Indian government that’s really parallel to the U S in the same way.
It’s like, there’s just this mega force that’s moving forward. That’s really hard to move. So then when I look at those original movements, I think, I don’t know. I think maybe the people following Gandhi and Martin Luther king Jr. Were more powerful in the way that they actually were engaging with the physical world and not with this, not with ideas. So, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m curious what you think. Am I wrong?
Nico
I don’t think, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong. I would say that, uh, there’s a, there’s a, uh, a great short article by Malcolm Gladwell that came out. I don’t know, honestly, maybe 10 years ago, it was in the New Yorker where he looks at, uh, the power of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, uh, the most important student-led civil rights organization, and he compares it to contemporary more tech driven forms of activism. You know, the use of social media in the, in the, um, Arab spring, for example.
Daniel
Yeah.
Nico
And, and his argument is very similar to yours that the civil rights movement and SNCC activism was driven by people who were consistently willing to risk their lives on the streets and had to build these very strong ties with each other, because otherwise there wasn’t anything that they were going to be able to do. Whereas today there’s all these forms of cheap activism, slacktivism, whatever you want to call it, where people can just click feel like they did something good and then move on.
And if all we’re doing is trying to take over Twitter, is that really going to shift the balance of power? I get that line of concern and I can understand it. I think though that it’s good to kind of try to piece apart what it is that we really find lacking, because certainly in the past, people were also concerned about controlling ideas, controlling the flow of information.
And I’d say today, you know, people involved in Black Lives Matter or any of the other ongoing social movements in this country or in India or anywhere in the world. There’s a lot of savvy folks who are willing to take great risks to try to actually change things on the ground. I think that, uh, perhaps the biggest difference isn’t actually, even in those that are actively committed to the movement and more a question of those who are bystanders to it, and how they might be engaged or not engaged.
But even there, if you look at the civil rights movement and you look at, right, the vast majority of white people, are either hostile to Martin Luther King and the movement, or to the degree that they’re supportive they’re incredibly. And, you know, perhaps at the most, they might be willing to send in, uh, a letter to their congressman or whatnot, but the movement is really driven by a minority within a minority that’s willing to, to fight, to create change, and yet change happened.
And I do think that in our world today, even though there are dangers to people feeling like all they have to do is click this or click that, my own view is that often that kind of , uh, engagement through Twitter or social media or, uh, you know, online forms of activism that it can pull people in, right? and get them engaged and then get them to show up.
And we’re seeing this in dangerous ways too, right? I mean, we’re seeing lots of really terrible, terrifying instances where people get pulled in through online chat groups and then show up on the streets, ready to take power, right.
Daniel
Yeah
Nico
And so, I think, you know, we can clearly see that ours is not a world where people are only engaging online.
I mean, we’re seeing the power of the internet and of social media to move people to take dangerous action. It’s not always in the direction that we would want it to be.
Ria
Yeah.
Nico
Uh, but I, I. You know, when I interact with young people, and it’s my favorite part of my job, is I get to spend a lot of time with college students and high school students.
I meet a lot of people that, in just say the last four or five years, are so much more engaged by the world and by, uh, the contemporary politics than I certainly was, right, when I was their age in the late 1990s. I think that the rapid pace of change in this country in many parts of the world and the level of threats from things like climate change, it’s so striking that that people are tuning in more and getting more involved and finding ways to participate. So, there goes my hope again, I’m a hopeful person.
Ria
I like that.
Nico
But I, yeah, I do think, I do think there’s reasons to believe that we can, we can work together to make this world what it can be.
Ria
Yeah. The younger generation really like energizes me. These like 12, 13-year-olds who can take over on Tik Tok and buy up all of, you know, Trump’s rally tickets.
Like, how in the world? They are so, they are energizing to me and their fight for climate change and all of that, where I think what they’re doing, like when I was 13, I was definitely just watching MTV. I don’t think I was, like, out on the streets.
Nico
Yeah.
Ria
Protesting the climate change, but in that kind of same vein, so like that kind of age range, so, the three of us, we all have young, young kids. I have a four and an eight-year-old. How old are your kids Nico?
Nico
Just turned six and will be eight.
Ria
Okay, and how old are your kids Daniel?
Daniel
Uh, seven, nine and eleven.
Ria
Yeah. So, this age right now, because of all of the news, that’s on TV with all of the marches and, you know, all of the news about George Floyd and all of that, it was very complex because I had the news on a lot, and it was, how do we talk about race and racial injustices?
How do we bring that up to kids in a way that doesn’t sound so intimidating, so scary? I just, what, what is a way that you speak to your own kids about race?
Nico
Yeah, it’s such a good question. I’ll say a couple of things. First is that, uh, I, and I expect most parents listening this will resonate. It’s just that every, every parent is different.
Every child is different. I don’t think that there’s any wisdom that will necessarily apply in every situation. Uh, in my case, uh, I’ve had several opportunities to engage issues of race and racism, whether, because of the uniqueness of my family, I had an older brother who passed away whose father was from Africa.
And, uh, so race was an important issue in my family growing up and talking to my kids about their uncle Peter necessitates talking about race and even racism because of the impact that it had on his life. Uh, but also just small, everyday kinds of things. They’re old enough now that they’re more attuned and can, and can, and can be made more attuned to the injustices of our world and also to the beautiful diversity and, and variety of human existence.
So, and I guess this would be my second general point. So, my first general point is just there. It’s dangerous to think of these as general points cause everyone’s unique and then the second general point is that I, I do think that as an educator in general, you get a lot more when you seize, uh, you know, teachable moments, uh, forgive me for using a cliche, but you know, if you sit kids down, even my kids, I don’t know, maybe your kids are better.
My kids are both like, you know, six and eight, but they’re already teenagers. I don’t know how that happened. They can tell when I’m trying to get them to learn something and they’re immediately, right. I mean, they’re just like, boom, shackles up. They’re not, they’re not going for it, but if it comes out of, uh, some kind of a, uh, of an experience, right.
And I, and I’ll, I’ll give you one. I mean, there’s, I can think of several, but one, we belong to a community center, gym slash pool that is in a historically African American neighborhood. Most of the folks that work there and use the facility are African American and, uh, when I took the kids to swim there, maybe I don’t know, six months, six months, three months ago or so, there was a African-American woman, very friendly woman who was at the reception desk.
And she had really strikingly blonde hair and, um, I don’t know enough about hair. I don’t even know enough about my own hair, so I can’t really explain, but the kids, um, one of them said loudly, something like, you know: is that a wig? Or something, and they didn’t mean it in any way as an insult, they think wigs are really interesting and cool, but they’re not savvy enough to know that many people a: are just sensitive about their hair.
B: there’s a long, long tradition of clueless white people commenting on, uh, you know, African American folks’ hair and that’s, it’s just a bad idea in general, right, and they don’t know that. And they also don’t know that there’s a whole issue surrounding wigs. So, there’s all this knowledge they don’t have.
And the woman, again, she’s super, super nice woman, but she also clearly, and she said to him, I can remember exactly what she said, but she said something like, um, you know, first she was just like, “no, it’s not and you really shouldn’t ask,” or something like, something of that sort. And, I was embarrassed of course, as a parent.
Um, and especially, you know, as a white parent, I’m embarrassed and, and, and yet I also immediately saw this as, okay, well, here’s an opportunity to talk to them about the fact that, uh, you know, there are a lot of differences between how people look in their hair and their skin color, and that, uh, it’s perfectly natural and normal to notice these things.
And there are even ways that we can ask about them respectfully, but we have to recognize that people can be sensitive to these things and part of the reason, and this is where it becomes a larger conversation, and part of the reason is because uh, there’s a long history of unfairness, and my kids, I’m sure your kids are this way too.
They’re big on fairness right now. I mean, my goodness, like if we’re doing cookies, they have to have exactly the same kind of cookie, has to be exactly the same size. You know, they’re going to like weigh them, you know, they, they believe fairness. And so, talking about how it’s just not fair that people are still to this day treated differently because of how they look in this country.
And so anyway, connecting that to their own experience, I think is really powerful. They’re learning about it in school, you know, their school, they’re learning about Rosa Parks, and they learn about Martin Luther King and they’re, they’re learning a variety of things and as a historian, um, overall, I’m happy with what they’re learning at school, but I’m also very aware that, uh, you know, it’s easy for people to learn the superficial history and not to really bring it home and apply it in their lives. And one way to do that is to look for opportunities where it becomes a lived experience for them.
Ria
Right. I know we had an instance because back when school was at home and I could hear everything that was happening that was being taught, they were talking about Rosa Parks and all of that.
And I, my kids are mixed race. My husband is Chinese American and I am Filipino and I have darker skin and my daughter has lighter skin and my son has much darker skin than her. So, she turned around and asked me, she says, mommy, I have daddy’s light-skin but Marshall has your dark skin does that mean someone’s going to treat him worse?
And I was, at that moment I was like, oh boy! And that’s like, when you’re, I just would love to ask you when we are confronted with these questions where these are just children being inquisitive, and this is her being worried about her little brother. Um, what would you have told her? I honestly don’t remember what I said because I was kind of shocked and because I grew up kind of having issues with my own skin color.
Nico
Yeah
Ria
Um, I just. I, I was blown away and it’s like, what would you say to her at that moment?
Daniel
Sucks to be Marshall.
Nico
That’s—that’s a really hard question to answer.
Ria
I know, what would you say?
Nico
Well, I think you want, I think I would want simultaneously to be honest, but also be comforting, and that’s a really hard thing. I mean, and just think about again, um, I’m white, you know, my kids are both white.
I grew up with African-American brother, had African-American stepfather. I’m very aware that my own situation as a parent, although there’s, there are some, there are some challenges to teaching white kids about race. It’s dramatically easier than say raising a dark-skinned child in a country where that’s still a dangerous thing, you know?
And I think about my mom raising my brother and having to think about, okay, well, how do I prepare a young black man to be proud of who he is? To not see it as a bad thing, that he is who he is and yet also to recognize that it could be dangerous for him to be who he is, that he has to be more careful when for example, police officer pulls him over.
Right? Um, he has to think about how he’s going to be perceived as a, as a person of color and I, again, I don’t, I don’t have any easy answers for you. That’s, that’s really hard because you’d want your child to know well, people with darker skin can be discriminated against, and they are discriminate against this country and that’s something that you might have to do with in your life.
But I also want you to know that we’re going to do everything we can to make you safe, and we’re doing everything we can to make this country a safer, and more fair, and more equitable place.
Ria
I love that Nico
Nico
Yeah, well, again, I, I think it’s been really hard for you.
Daniel
I hope so.
Ria
Yeah
Daniel
Um, we don’t want to keep you forever cause I imagine you have nice things to do, but, um, like.
Nico
Well, this has already been a pleasure.
Daniel
Oh no, I have so much stuff I’d want to keep talking with you about, but for another time, next time I’m in Pittsburgh or whatever. So, but I mean, I think that part of us doing this, I wanted to talk, I think that people, so you spend a lot of time thinking about your projects and the books you’re writing or the things that you’re teaching and so I’m just curious about what do you feel like, you know really well?
And you joked with me that was just your kids, but, um, I think, I feel like, you know, I feel as a like citizen of the world, that’s fair for me to ask academics, like, what do you know really well?
Because you’re spending a lot of time studying something. So what, what do you think—have you thought, did you think about that?
Nico
I did think about it, and I was like, look, I mean, I said earlier in our conversation that the people that I studied, that people that I see as heroic are kinds of people that are never satisfied with one answer.
So, I wouldn’t say that I know anything well in, in the, in the, if we define knowing something well as being satisfied. But I would say that I spent a lot of time grappling with what it means to create a better world through non-violent means and the kinds of questions we debated earlier, are street marches ineffective in our context, can people still create linkages across national borders that will actually change real things on the ground.
Uh, how are we supposed to teach young people to think about race and racism in a way that will equip them to fight for justice while also hopefully imagining a world where we’re beyond the kinds of divisions that we’re facing now. These are all things I’ve grappled with a lot. I, I still hesitate to say that I know any of these things well, because I don’t think these kinds of questions lend themselves to that kind of confidence.
But I would say that I’m always eager to talk about them and talk about how we are to use nonviolent means to try to create a better world.
Ria
That’s great, and then to end, what is something that you’re working on right now that you’re particularly excited about?
Nico
Oh, great question. Uh, so one of my current projects is about the Highlander Folk School, which if you’re not familiar with it to anyone listening, Google it. It’s one of the most remarkable institutions that is often not taught in the history of civil rights in this country.
So, integrated school that operated in Tennessee. Rosa Parks went there three months before she sat down on the bus in Montgomery. Every major civil rights activist went, pretty much every major civil rights activist went through Highlander and one of the great things about Highlander is that they recorded all of their workshops.
So, they’re these hundred, a hundred hours or so of incredible audio recordings of civil rights activists talking about their goals, their methods, their struggles and I spent the last couple of years listening to these tapes and thinking with them about their approach to things and I’m at the point now where I’m starting to write up what we can learn from these tapes about—here’s my million dollar question, that I’ll leave you all with is, um, as to what degree does the truth set us free?
Or put differently, uh, is being on the side of the truth uh, a guarantee that you’ll ultimately win the struggle? Uh because I I’d like to think that the civil rights movement achieved so much in part because the people fighting for it had truth on their side, but I’m a re—I’m enough of a realist to be aware that the truth doesn’t always win, at least in the short term.
Uh, and so one of the things I really want to grapple with, with this book is the relationship between truth and power. Um, how did the pursuit of truth and knowledge equip and empower people in the civil rights movement? And what can that tell us about our own struggles for truth and justice in the world today?
Ria
That’s fantastic. I feel like that can go in so many realms right now with all of misinformation and what people believe is the truth. You know, because I feel like there are people who believe that what they believe is the truth, so.
Nico
Yeah, oh yeah, very true.
Ria
Oh, Nico. Thank you so much. This conversation was really helpful to me, just as a human and a parent. So, thank you. I think it’s going to be really helpful to so many other listeners.
Daniel
Yeah
Nico
My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity, I really enjoyed it.
Daniel
Miss you, man.
Nico
I miss you too.
Daniel
It’s nice to hear you talk. What a, what a pleasure, really. Really, so.
Nico
Likewise, man, likewise. Let’s, let’s have another conversation and then let’s, you know, meet up soon. Uh, you know, you’ve, you’ve been here a couple of times. We need to make it to Northern California. It’s been too long man.
Daniel
Yeah, well, I’ll, you know, if you make it out of here, happy to host you, so.
Nico
Alright, I will take you up on that. I will.
Daniel
Yeah, yeah. It’s good, it’s good. Well, go, go hang out with kids or whatever you do.
Nico
All right. Will do. Take care friends. Have a good day.
Ria
Bye, thank you Nico.
Nico Bye-bye
Discussion
Daniel
Yeah, we need, so, we have the advantage of having hindsight to talk about things that we maybe didn’t think about while—while we were interviewing them. So, for Nico, I, I would, I would have liked to talk to him about is, he, first he totally slighted me when I was like, this is what I think about the effectiveness of, like, things, then he was like, oh no, Daniel, you know, he’s like, he’s like—
Ria
He’s like “You’re great!”
Daniel
Malcolm Gladwell already wrote that dumb essay with your opinion in it, and, but he was very polite. And then I, but I was, but what I wanted to talk with him about, but it would be like, I agree, but I think that the, the, the right has been more effective at doing it than the left. Like right now, I think we live in a space where like, so the, the time-sensitive thing would be like the truckers in Canada.
Ria
I was just going to say that.
Daniel
Right? And like, and then so, but I think that meanwhile, where I think my thesis is true is I think the left has gone out and been in streets and done things, but it’s lacked the actual, literal contact with the real world that is that the left has gotten really good at like January 6th or the truckers, or like them right now, like, infiltrating all like the volunteer voting, counting position.
Like they’re just way more—and so that’s where I think like, yes, people are using that old technology, but I, in my opinion, the right people aren’t.
Ria
Correct.
Daniel
Yeah.
Ria
But even the—the ones on the right who are having the January six or the truckers, what are they actually achieving though?
Because then, you know, Trudeau comes down and uses his power to go against it. Or, you know, January 6th, the commission with all of the information coming about, about who was involved.
Daniel
Yeah.
Ria
Was anything actually changed? Like Joe Biden is still the president, like it.
Daniel
True.
Ria
The truckers moved and now—
Daniel
Yeah
Ria
—it’s back to open. So, yes, the right is, has been more effective. I see—what you’re saying is like touching the real world.
Daniel
Yeah.
Ria
But nothing was done in the, they didn’t get to their end point.
Daniel
Yeah. True. Or no, we don’t know. I mean, yeah, yeah. No, but it’ll—it’ll be interesting to see, like, it would be interesting to see, like what’s going to happen with January 6th.
Like how effective was that? It was close, right? Like, theoretically people would be like, the pun is, like, “oh yeah you know, we almost had a coup or like there are those things.” But yeah, also, what really happened is those people got arrested.
Ria
But do you think anything will change when there’s such a division between our political parties?
I feel like it’s just here and here and there’s not a lot of in the middle of actually getting things done.
Daniel
Well, yeah, I meant, you know, I don’t know. I, I, I have my own personal hopes about that stuff. I think that. I think on both sides, and really we’re just talking about like Democrats and Republicans, I think in both sides, there’s already a division among them, right?
Ria
Yes
Daniel
Like there are these really liberal side of the Democrats that are socialist-like, right, and then on the Republican side, they’re like, it started with tea party people, and now there’s all the Trump supporters and all that. Like, there is a divide there I can see on the Republican side, right. There’s going to be this split where hop—like maybe there’s a new Republican that’s more moderate and similar on the democratic side, maybe there’s this Democrat thing. I don’t, I don’t know, I mean.
Ria
I think that’s what you’re saying, where the right is actually making changes. Um, because you know, they, when it comes to social justice and all of that, the right is making laws where they can’t teach specific things about black history.
Daniel
Yeah
Ria
That is actually happening.
Daniel
Or the transgender stuff that’s happening in Texas.
Ria
Yeah, or Don’t Say Gay, or whatever. It’s like,
Daniel
But that’s real stuff in the world.
Ria
That’s real stuff happening
Daniel
Yeah, yeah.
Ria
What does the left need to do to do the reversal, I guess?
Daniel
Yeah. I mean, I think we need, you know, people need to be more, I, I, they need to be, I think one of the, I’m stumbling. No, we need to stop having dialogue and actually think more about beating them.
And cause, I think that’s what the, that’s what the left does. I’m sorry, that’s what the right does that’s so effective right now.
Ria
Yes.
Daniel
They’re—they don’t care about having dialogue with the left.
Ria
Right?
Daniel
They just want to win. The left on the other hand, when I speak to a lot of my peers, they’ll be like, oh, well we need to have these dialogues, we need to understand why this is happening. And I think really, and I’m not, Nico could say this. I’m sure someone else thinking this in a much smarter way than me. We just need to beat them, like, we don’t need to have necessarily those dialogues, like great for us, if we’re good and being like, oh, we can find this middle ground or we can understand what’s happening.
Good to understand but at the end we need to be more practical about how do we actually beat them in the real world? How do we get our people elected?
Ria
Right.
Daniel
How do we make the changes in laws where we just beat them? Cause you know what, they’re not making good decisions for our country.
Ria
Right, especially when President Trump had three justices on the court that completely swayed things that could turn us back to, you know, women’s rights being taken away and all, and how much more.
Daniel
Look what a lib—
Ria
What can, what can change though?
Daniel
Ria look at what a liberal pinko podcast we started.
Ria
I’m trying not to be. Do you see how I’m trying not to be? You say “we,” I say the left and right.
Daniel
Okay, alright.
Ria
Well Daniel, it was a good conversation. I think it’s, I think it’s something that people do need to talk about and I know dialogue isn’t enough is what you’re saying, but I think it is a conversation that needs to be had and what can actually be done.
Daniel
Yeah
Ria
So, thank you.
Outro
At Global Partners for Development, our mission is to advance community-led initiatives that improve education and public health and East Africa. We envision a world in which every East African community has the capacity to implement dynamic, sustainable solutions to the challenges they face to learn more visit GPFD.org.
