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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, in end of the year Brian Lehrer Show editorial board segment on the Year in Hate and how to reverse the trend. Our editorial board segments, if you don't know, are when we bring together a few deep and nuanced thinkers about an issue or problem in society. Our last editorial board segment had three guests on congestion pricing for driving in New York City. Today, it's the Year in Hate as 2022 is ending with various records we would rather not see being broken.

Just last week, for example, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Human Rights Commission there released the number 620 hate crimes, a record since they started officially counting in LA decades ago. Crimes targeting Black residents of LA on the basis of identity spiked the most, 34%, compared to last year. Even last year, according to the LA Blade, while Black residents only make up 9% of the county's population, they comprised 46% of hate crime victims. That's in LA. In New York, the headlines this week include a hate crime arrest after the alleged perpetrator shot a man and his son with a BB gun outside a kosher market on Staten Island.

It was one incident in November widely seen because it was caught on video, but in a month when the NYPD reported more than a doubling of anti-Semitic hate crimes compared to November last year, 45 anti-Semitic crimes recorded in the city in just the one month. You know about the mass shootings motivated by hate at an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs this year, in a supermarket in a largely Black neighborhood of Buffalo, and others. We could frame this conversation as the year in domestic terrorism as another way in. The group Stop AAPI Hate, which works to reduce hate crimes against the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, reported in March of this year that since the pandemic began in 2020, there have been more than 11,000 reported acts of anti-AAPI hate in this country.

Then there's Twitter where a team of Montclair State researchers tracked a massive jump in what they categorized as hate speech just after Elon Musk took control of the platform recently. There was Donald Trump's dinner with white supremacist, and Trump fan, Nick Fuentes, few weeks before Trump called for terminating the constitution. That obviously could be a show in itself. Of course, I could go on with specific overt incidents and numbers that you already know about or won't surprise you, but what about hate that's not so explicit, expressed not in slogans like "Jews will not replace us," but more in terms such as parents' rights or religious liberty.

In this conversation, we'll try to go deeper. Why now? Election season, January 6th reverberation still, pandemic reverberation still, the Immigration Act of 1965, and is the way out of this downward spiral more direct, like an explicit anti-hate solidarity, or does it have to address other underlying issues? Oh, by the way, is there a Year in Love to report on too? Our three special guests are Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton's African-American studies department and author of books including Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own and An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion.

Some of you know he is also an MSNBC contributor and often appears on Meet the Press on Sundays. He also produced a six-part American history podcast this year called History Is Us, or you can read it History Is US. Also, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah on West 30th Street in Manhattan, which calls itself an LGBTQ+ synagogue for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Just this week, Rabbi Kleinbaum was ranked the fifth most influential faith leader. I don't know how they distinguish fifth from the sixth or the fourth, but fifth most influential faith leader in New York by the news organization City & State.

Among many other things, she is a Biden appointee to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. And Jay Caspian Kang, staff writer for The New Yorker, author of his memoir called The Loneliest Americans. He is also an Emmy-nominated documentary film director. His new film, American Son, will premiere next year as part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series. It's an honor to have the three of you together. Welcome back all of you, Eddie, Jay, Sharon to WNYC. Hi.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Thank you so much, so happy to be here with all of you.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Hi, it's a pleasure.

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Can we go around the horn first and just get each of your takes on whether you think the actual amount of hate or the feeling of license to express it actually grew in 2022, or if people are just talking about it or counting it more? Eddie Glaude, would you begin with some shorter-term thoughts just on how we might think of this year?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Sure. I think this year is an extension of the storm. Underneath all of this are anxieties and panic around the shifting demographics of the country and what it might mean for those who believe that they're losing their footing. We have been experiencing, in some ways, this growing storm. It's strengthening as the reality that the browning of America is not something in the distant future, but actually present. This year is just an extension of last year. It seems to me, being a country boy from the Gulf Coast, the tail of the storm is still coming.

Brian Lehrer: Mississippi if I remember correctly, right?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Indeed, Brian, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Let me challenge you on one little aspect of that.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like the progression that's unstoppable, as America changes demographically, there's going to be the backlash, but the LA statistics, for example, that I was looking at, cited 2013 as a low in hate crimes there in the decades that they've been keeping those stats in LA, and they've been creeping up ever since. It's not just a straight line to more diversity is going to yield more white hate, is it?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: No. Obviously, there are other factors. Since 2008, we've seen an intensification of not just simply hate crimes, but the tensions around racial diversity in the country. That is with the election of Barack Obama. Then, of course, the backlash to the Obama presidency was the Trump presidency. It's almost an accelerant here. What you have is some systemic problem in the body of American politics, then exaggerated like giving a diabetic a dose of sugar and everything just gets out of whack since Trump's election. You're right to say it's not a straight line, but I think underneath it there are factors, the consistent thread, the through line is I believe the demographic reality of the changing nature of the country.

Brian Lehrer: Jay, will you pick it up from there? Anti-Asian hate is certainly in other people's awareness more since the pandemic began. How would you characterize 2022 on that or any kind of hate?

Jay Caspian Kang: I think that when you try and judge things by the number of hate crimes, it's sometimes difficult because those statistics are famously unreliable and sort of dependent on how police departments report to the FBI, and then what the FBI decides to do with that. Yes, I do think that it's undeniable that at least from somebody who is observing, and this is any person who watches the news or goes on social media or anything like that, that it appears that there's just a lot more overt acts of violence, and I think those are the ones that concern people the most.

Now, in terms of whether people say things online, or whether or not some sort of charlatan gets a big platform and says a lot of things, I think those things are a little bit more constant in America and have been constant for the past 20 years, but I do agree with Professor Glaude. I'm sorry, I'll call him professor Glaude just because I was-- I don't know if you remember, but professor Glaude was one of my first professors when I was a freshman in college in 1998.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Oh, my goodness, Jay.

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, Bowdoin College. It was a religion seminar that you taught.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Oh my God.

Jay Caspian Kang: It was very inspiring to me. For my first paper, you gave me a C-, and I think I deserved it. It stuck in my head ever since. [unintelligible 00:09:36]

Brian Lehrer: Oh, if only you had artificial intelligence to write your papers for you.

Jay Caspian Kang: [laughs] No, I think he would have seen through that. I agree that a lot of this is anxiety about what the country will be. I don't think it's this one-way street where it is just white people trying to figure out, oh, what is in this multi-ethnic country that people are coming into. I think that every group in America is actually trying to recalibrate and rethink things through. I think part of the way in which they think things through and the reason why these crimes get so much attention and have much political, I guess energy around them is first because obviously, people respond to violence. Also, I think it's because it's become the way in which people process their place in America.

I think that's certainly true for Asian Americans. It's really just how accepted will we be here. I think that as that conversation happens, that acts of violence that might have also happened in the past, now take on a new political valency.

Brian Lehrer: Now I want to take Eddie Glaude's freshman religion course.

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Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Me too.

Jay Caspian Kang: Oh, man, it was great.

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Eddie Glaude Jr.: Oh, Jay, you're making me feel old, man.

Brian Lehrer: We will turn instead to the professional religion practitioner in the group, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum. Same question for you, representing here from an intersectional standpoint, Jews, and women, and sexual, and gender minorities, but go as broad as you want to on this particular Year in Hate.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: I think as you indicated when you began the show, there's a lot of nuance here. There is no simple diagnosis, and there's no simple prescription, but there are, I think, a lot of trends that are significant now. I agree also that statistics are hard to gather, but in terms of anti-Semitism, and again, those statistics are hard, the ADL does, since 1979, mark the officially reported signs of anti-Semitism. Since 1979, 2021, and 2022, are absolutely the highest in that statistical marker. I would say there are a few things that are feeding all of this.

First of all, anti-Semitism is nothing new, anti-LGBT hatred is nothing new. There are Jews of color who experience racism, anti-Semitism, and who are queer themselves. There's a lot of factors, but I want to also position the United States in a global place right now in which there is a tsunami of hate happening all over the world. We have certain features here that are, I think, somewhat unique to America, but not entirely so. Yascha Mounk, the great philosopher, has talked about this is the first time in history where there's been this experiment within multi-ethnic democracy to the extent that America is that multi-ethnic democracy.

It's a question how well we'll be able to work through the challenges of it. I think we see since exactly that description of the Obama-Trump transition, the experience of my community living here in New York City has been absolutely a rise in a feeling of insecurity, and unsafety as Jews and as LGBT folks, and those who are Jews of color as well. I also think we have to add guns into the mix right now. There is no adjective that's big enough to describe what the access to guns in America, in this moment in time, in this moment in history, has done to take--

We've always had hate in this country, of course, but this kind of access to guns, and the ability to enact a level of violence is really new in this country on this particular moment. I do think we are experiencing that trend, that building storm. I also want to just say, and I'll talk later about that if we get there, is that I also think there's been an explosion of love. The reactions I've experienced, have matched some of that hatred with profound and beautiful love.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about that. I said I was going to ask you if there's a backlash to the backlash as a Year in Love in addition to the Year in Hate. You want to go deeper into it, Sharon?

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Sure, if you want me to do that. There's a few examples, but I've been deeply moved by the ways here in New York City, which is where I am, of course, located and know the best, the responses of trying to build coalitions to respond to the hate. When there was this anti-Asian explosion in response to Trump's identifying Chinese people being responsible for the virus, we had this multi-religious turnout in lower Manhattan of all different kinds of people to express our rejection of that. In 2016, when Trump was elected, and again, the division of the year is a little hard to just analyze separately, the Friday after Trump was elected, I woke up that morning thinking as a lesbian, as a Jew, as a white person in America, I felt horrified about what was to come.

I thought to myself, "What does a Muslim American feel given that Trump's entire campaign began with that escalator dissent, with a speech that was anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant?" That Friday morning, I went with a few members of my community to a mosque at the Islamic Center of NYU, and we stood outside the mosque with a few signs that said, "Jewish New Yorkers love our Muslim neighbors." As people walked up to go to Friday Jumaa prayers, we could see that at first, they were afraid we were there protesting them and riding on the hate that Trump was expressing.

When they saw the signs and we had red roses to distribute hugs and kisses, I was invited by the Imam to come into the prayer service to speak to the community. Every single Friday, until the pandemic shut us down, members of my community stood in front of that mosque and said, "Jewish New Yorkers love our Muslim neighbors."

Brian Lehrer: Hate actually presents other opportunities for love. Eddie, do you want to conti--

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: It's the showing-up issue. I just want one last thing about that, and I'll stop, is that and then in 2018, when the massacre took place in the Pittsburgh synagogue, immediately, Muslims from that mosque reached out to me. We had so many Muslims in front of our synagogue that Friday night protecting us, throwing love around us, that we didn't have enough room for all of those who showed up.

Brian Lehrer: The massacre at the Pittsburgh synagogue, as I understand that incident, was motivated by the fact that that particular synagogue was helping to settle Muslim immigrants in the United States.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Yes, exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Eddie Glaude is there a Year in Love to document along with the Year in Hate?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Of course. I think there's, we're in a moment where a new America is struggling to be born, where we're trying to figure out how to be together with each other differently in light of the over a million of our fellows dead from a pandemic that didn't care whether you were Black, or white, or Jewish, or Muslim, poor or rich, although it disproportionately hit some of our population. There's this sense that there are those who are clinging to an old world where some people are valued more than others because of the color of their skin.

There are those who are trying to imagine a different world and those views are colliding right in front of us. When we use the shorthand of a moment of love, an age of love, a response of love in response to the hate, it's a shorthand for on-the-ground, close-to-the-ground efforts on the part of Americans to figure out how we're going to be together. That's happening every single day in this country. We saw the juxtaposition almost in stock form, Brian, on January 6th, when you had forces attack the Capitol, and a day later, what was the election of the first Jew and the first African American from Georgia were certified, two worlds colliding almost at once.

It seems to me that it's always the case that the loud racist are loud. They're quite loud, they scream at the top of their lungs. The hard work close to the ground often happens under the radar, especially with a media ecosystem that is drawn to the spectacular, to the dramatic as it were. There are efforts on the ground to found a new America and Rabbi Kleinbaum is just one example. She's a heroic and extraordinary example of that work.

Brian Lehrer: Jay Caspian Kang, do you want to keep going on this?

Jay Caspian Kang: Oh, sure. I think it's important to remember that very recently there are millions of people protesting on the streets of cities across America and around the world. To try and just say that this is the proud boys or patriot front, and here's a video on social media that shows them acting in a hateful manner, or here's 40 people in the state who are doing this type of thing, it does deserve a type of rejoinder, I think, or at least a rebuttal that there are these instances where people come out and they do things that I at least would characterize out of love and compassion, and that they in a lot of ways are actually much bigger scale.

I don't think that that means that things are not scary right now. Certainly, I think that I am much more at a state of alert just personally than I've been in my life. Despite some of what I said before about some skepticism about some of these numbers, I think a lot of people feel that way. At the same time, it's never really quite been clear that there are people who are out there who are willing to sacrifice quite a bit to try and bring about the world that they want. Their efforts shouldn't be just drowned out because of fear.

Brian Lehrer: We don't report when the planes don't crash, we only report when they do.

Jay Caspian Kang: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I guess maybe it's the same thing with human behavior. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the Year in Hate, and as you've been hearing in the last few minutes, to some degree, the Year in Love, with Jay Caspian Kang from The New Yorker, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum from Congregation- sorry, I lost it- Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan and Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. from Princeton. Listeners, you are invited too. Help us report this end of your story on this edition of The Brian Lehrer Show editorial board.

Have you experienced more hate personally in your life as a target this year, or in public expressions?

Have you felt more hate this year? True confessions about that, anyone, the hate that you feel in your heart? Any experiences, observations, proposed cures for hate in America? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Yes, you can also talk about the opposite, the Year in Love. 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Rabbi, were you trying to get in there?

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Yes, sorry. If I may say one other thing about what I think is escalating in a way that really reflects that storm, that gathering storm that we could have seen from 2008, maybe or 2016 is the role that the Republican Party is playing in, not only shielding, but actually amplifying voices of hate. That is simply breathtaking. It's not just that real serious anti-Semites absolutely expressive anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, and horrific people are being dined in wined by Donald Trump, but somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at a fundraiser for Fuentes recently, and not a peep out of the Republican leadership.

She is going to be reinstated into positions of leadership in the House of Representatives, a woman who continues to express really vile hate. This is an elected leader who is in a position of great power. I think we're not just seeing it in the street, we're not just seeing it in local levels, but the highest elected officials and representatives of one of the parties of the United States is horrific. This party is really speaking words of fascism, and we have to be able to call it out and stand up to it. That's one of the lessons, of course, that we have learned through history, what happens when we don't.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Jay, and Sharon, and Eddie, and your calls, till the end of the hour. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue to talk about the Year in Hate, and to some degree, a corresponding Year in Love with Eddie Glaude from Princeton, Rabbi Shannon Kleinbaum from Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, and Jay Caspian Kang from The New Yorker. Before we take some phone calls, Jay, I read your New York Times newsletter in September that cited four drivers of American politics these days as the financial crisis of 2008, Trump's election in 2016, 10 years of Black Lives Matter, and the police murder of George Floyd, and per your own family story and underreported, as you asserted, the Immigration Act of 1965. Maybe the pandemic should be in there too.

Jay Caspian Kang: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think the financial crisis or the great recession are still underlying factors today?

Jay Caspian Kang: Oh, I think that underlying a lot of what's happening, what Eddie was talking about, and what I was discussing was that there's a lot of anxiety around, and I think the pandemic accelerated that, and that if you take a very charitable look at some of what's happening in terms of people really turning rightward or turning in a reactionary direction, that if you look around some of their towns, if you read something like Sam Quinones' book Dreamland, or if you read some of these other accounts of what's happening in middle America, to argue that there is no economic destruction there, to say that that young people these days, even in metropolitan areas aren't feeling a type of desperation, I think that you're missing a lot of the story.

There is great economic desperation right now. There is a sense of, how is this country going to treat me, and do I have a future. Do my children have a future? I don't know. It's something that I think about too, being relatively privileged. I think about it myself, and that that accelerates everything that when you have a sense where young people, middle-class people, working-class people don't really feel like they have any purchase in the future, then I think that a type of reactionary politics is inevitable.

Brian Lehrer: On the Immigration Act of 1965, which we've actually talked about a lot on this show over the years, as having just changed the trajectory of American demographics because it opened the door so much, you cite Tucker Carlson on Fox, calling the Immigration Act of '65 the worst attack on our democracy in 160 years. He wants to preserve a white European descent, American majority, obviously, but I think you were reacting to his framing of looser immigration laws as not just bad policy from his point of view, but the fact that he put it as an attack on democracy. Is that reference important in that context?

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, I think so because I think that what he is arguing, what some of his, I guess, intellectual forebears would argue, is that what the Democratic Party wants to do is they want to collect people of color, new immigrants, they want to bring in as many people who are not white Christians as possible, and that they feel like those people will vote for democratic by default almost. I think that's what he means now, but that just isn't true as we've seen. I don't know if you spend any time in any type of immigrant enclave, whether Latina or Asian, you will find that many of those people are not progressive Democrats.

That they are not voting that way. For a while, I think they did, and now it's all over the place, and there are swings every single election. There are many editorials written by people like me, who try and make great sense out of all of this, but I think that the end, if you take 30,000 feet in-the-air view of it, it's, I think that the idea that even if you accept every single one of Tucker Carlson's terms on this type of discussion, the idea that this is resulting in anything is just false. If you start to interrogate any of the terms, of course, then you start to think basically, what he is trying to do is preserve a dominance of one type of person, and that anything that is a threat to that is obviously going to be called a threat to democracy [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Eddie, you want to keep going on that?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Yes. Brian, I think it's important to think about this in relation to the broader context of hate. This is an element, as Jay brilliantly just laid out, of replacement theory. There's a sense in which, who's driving this? This is the globalist, a Jewish Cabal, who's funding this effort to replace white folk. We heard that out of the mouth of the man who attacked Lifetree Synagogue in Pittsburgh. We have to see the kind of connections that [unintelligible 00:29:08].

Brian Lehrer: It's Charlottesville. I think people misunderstood, "Jews will not replace us," that chant in Charlottesville because Jews are just like 2% of the American population. It's not like we're going to become a country of 60% Jews. It's, Jews are pro-immigration, and that's how they're going to replace us. Right?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Absolutely. Then you have to think about this. Now they want to get rid of the Immigration Act of 1965 and go back to what? The Immigration Act of 1924, right?

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Right.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Remember what that period is all about, it's a period of heightened nativism, a period of heightened hate, of anti-Semitism, and the like. We're having, history is echoing here. What did Mark Twain say? It might not repeat, but it damn sure rhymes, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We're already planning a 100-year retrospective on the Immigration Act of 1924 when we hit 2024 in a year and a month. That's when my family snuck in under the wire at Ellis Island before they closed that door in the Immigration Act of 1924. Those are two such big posts in American history that, Jay and Eddie, you're right to focus on, Immigration Act closing doors in '24, opening doors in '65. Let's take a phone call. Shalom on Staten Island. Shalom, Shalom.

Shalom: Hello, hi, and then when I leave you can say shalom again, which is one of the greatest words in the Hebrew language.

Brian Lehrer: That's correct.

Shalom: Anyway, I want to report on both, the hate and the love because I'm an Orthodox Jew. As the most hated group in America is Jews, and the most hated group of Jews are Orthodox Jews, who are the most recognizable in Brooklyn and wherever else there's lots of Orthodox Jews, there are daily beatings, hats being knocked off. Couple days ago, where I live, there was someone that drove by and shot a couple, a father and a son, with a BB gun. It's daily, it's happening. It's usually underreported in the media, but it's just the way it is, and it's been getting worse.

I personally can't pinpoint a political reason for it because the people who are doing it are typically not white nationalists or not white nationalists. It's everybody. It's usually young people who, either they're bored, and Jews are easy to pick on, and the most recognizable group of Jews are Orthodox Jews, but I want to focus, because, honestly, hate exists and hate will continue to exist, on the love aspect. I remember when the Dallas synagogue was attacked by a person with a gun, came in in the middle of service on Sabbath, it wasn't a religious synagogue.

I remember after the Sabbath ended, I was on Twitter, and a couple of Orthodox friends of mine and I, we made a, I don't know what the official term is, a Twitter Space or something, where Jews, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox, together recited Psalms one after another, with one of my friends saying the Hebrew words for it, and then everyone repeating it back and forth, back and forth until we got the great news that the rabbi has thrown a chair at the assailant, and they ran out. I remember the feeling of elation when that happened.

It was like, we all came together. If we would meet each other in the street, maybe we would say Shabbat Shalom to each other, maybe not. Maybe we're all over the country, wherever, but at that moment, we knew that we were together.

Brian Lehrer: All right, nice. Shalom, thank you very much, and shalom, Shalom. Rabbi Kleinbaum, do you want to reflect on that at all? Did we lose Sharon Kleinbaum? I think maybe we did, so I'm going to go on to another caller. Mabel in Trenton, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mabel.

Mabel: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I just explained to your screener that I live in Trenton, and a lot of people always put down Trenton as being a dangerous place than other cities. They were repaving the streets in downtown Trenton, and I get around on a bus because I need to use an electric scooter. They had redirected the bus stops, and I had to find another bus stop in that area, but I couldn't get up the sidewalk because the street was much lower than the curb. I started to freak out because the cars were coming towards me, and I couldn't get up on the sidewalk.

This young Black man walking toward me, he saw that I was distressed, and he asked me what was wrong. I told him, and he goes, "It's okay, relax, I'll help you get up there." He did, he lifted up the front of my scooter and got me on the sidewalk, and he just walked away, didn't wait for a thank-you or nothing. I look like a white woman. For all he knew, I could be Republican, I could be whatever, but that didn't occur to him. He saw a person who was in need, and he stopped to help. I think a lot of people are that way, but we're being gaslighted by the Right to believe that the people out there, we're all hateful, and we're all murderers. It's really very disturbing to see that happening today.

Brian Lehrer: Mabel, thank you for that story. Arturo in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC. That's Ridgewood, New Jersey, not Ridgewood, Queens in this case. Hi, Arturo.

Arturo: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much, and good morning to you and your guests. Thank you so much for this conversation. I don't know all of your guests very well. Dr. Glaude just a little bit. My son is an '11 graduate from Princeton University, and I've attended a number of the events that Dr. Glaude has hosted. I'm so appreciative for this conversation. I'm the incoming senior pastor at the Emmanuel Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey, which is a welcoming and affirming church. Welcoming and affirming of all people, gender, sexual orientation, race, and culture.

We have a platform that was already in place but really took on new steam after the murder of George Floyd, the Community Peace and Justice Network. We created this online seminar where I had the good fortune of leading this once a month and facilitating conversations centered around race and hatred. In fact, your colleague, Jami Floyd, was one of our phenomenal guests during this time. I'm also an adjunct professor at William Paterson University, so I get to live in both of those communities. I use, obviously, the resources that are available to one as a theologian, as a pastor, as a college instructor as well.

Rabbi Kleinbaum, when she was talking about love, really took me right to Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis's book Fierce Love, where she really lays out some approaches to how we can do a much better job at really loving each other. My question for your guests, and maybe this is particular to Dr. Glaude, I'll let you all decide, I see that the white evangelical nationalists in our country are really largely responsible for driving a great deal of this hatred, even as it may appear covert at times. I'm very concerned that, both in faith communities and on college campuses, there are folks who sometimes struggle with critical thinking.

I'm wondering if you can unpack that for us a little bit, address the role that white evangelical nationalists are playing right now, and how do we go about really helping folks to better understand exactly what is happening so that we can live out that love. Thank you so very much.

Brian Lehrer: Arturo, that is such a great call and such a great question. Please call us again, Arturo. Yes, Eddie, I think about this. If Jesus was about love, how can Jesus be used as frequently as he seems to be, in the pursuit of hate?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: You can go all the way back to Frederick Douglass, the slave auction block was right next to the church steeple. American Christendom has always been shadowed by the contradictions at the heart of the country, where the splits within American Christendom foreshadowed the Civil War. Methodist South, Methodist North, Southern Baptists, much of that is over the issue of slavery. When we think about how segmented the Sunday church hour is, how segregated it is, it's a reflection of how Christian gospel has been, in so many ways, colored by certain noxious views about who's valued, who's God's chosen people, and the like.

I think part of the story around white Christian nationalism has everything to do with the relationship between a certain kind of religious rite in the '80s, early '80s, late '70s, and the increasing interrelationship between that particular constituency, and the Republican Party, and its ongoing radicalization. We have to begin to tell a story about white Christian nationalism and how intimately connected it has been and continues to be with a political party in the country. Of course, I just gave you a hint at the historical backdrop to that.

I also need to say this, though, Brian, it's important that faith communities who disagree with white Christian nationalists be more aggressive in how they argue with these folk. When we tend to think of evangelicalism, we forget that Bishop Barber is an evangelical.

He's organizing on the basis of a certain interpretation of the gospel. We need to think about more progressive voices, whether they're within the Muslim community, the Jewish community, the Christian community, being more, how can I put, more active and challenging these particular interpretations of religious traditions that nestle up so closely with the fascism that we're seeing today.

Brian Lehrer: As we begin to run out of time, and Rabbi Kleinbaum, we have your line connected again.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Sorry about that. I'm back in, yes

Brian Lehrer: A straight white cisgender male, and especially many who vote Republican since you both cited the Republican Party as the home for some of the worst, might ask, "What about me? Everyone else seems to get coverage for being hated, and sure, that's real, but don't a lot of people hate me or us just for being white, and straight, and sis, and male at this point?" I don't feel like this person might say, "I have much power anymore," since this often gets framed in power terms. Is there any way to include me and not just make the worst assumptions about me too, or ask things of me if we're going to make progress on all these things? We have a minute.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: I want to say the world that I want to be a part of creating is a world in which everyone is an active part of building a world of justice and peace for everyone. There is no one left behind. It's an issue of creating a system of values. Listen, Christian anti-Judaism comes hundreds of years before America was founded. There are reasons that you could say that Jews should not want to work with Christians. You could argue that Nazism is a culmination of thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism. The point is, we have to find ways to build deep coalitions not because of a shared experience of hate, but because of a shared vision of love.

Everybody can be part of creating that vision of love. I don't think that we should focus on what we have to offer the world as Jews because of anti-Semites or as LGBT people because of anti-gay people. We have positive things to create in the world that every single human being created in the image of God is a part of creating that world.

Brian Lehrer: Jay, you get the last word as a plug, if you want the opportunity. I see a new film, American Son will premiere in '23 as part of the ESPN 30 for 30 series. 15 seconds. Is it a sports story?

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes. It's about Michael Chang and the 1989 French Open, which was played at the exact same time as the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. It's really just about how a 17-year-old kid who was born in the United States and was constantly asked about this world event that people were like, "You're Chinese American, what do you think about Tiananmen?" That moment, and then, of course, this amazing match that he had with Ivan Lendl, in which he had cramps and broke down during the event.

Brian Lehrer: Can't wait to see it.

Jay Caspian Kang: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Jay Caspian Kang, Eddie Glaude, Sharon Kleinbaum, thank you for spending so much time and going so deep with us. This was really special.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: Thank you so much, everybody.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Thank you.

Jay Caspian Kang: Thank you.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum: May 2023 be a better year.

 

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