Yascha Mounk – The Identity Trap
The Glenn Show
Glenn Loury
4.8 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2023
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
0:35 A quick announcement
1:46 What led Yascha to write about identity
6:22 An intellectual history of “identity synthesis”
12:15 What’s so bad about “strategic essentialism”?
19:15 From postmodernism to post-civil rights
28:45 The three key claims of identity synthesis
36:02 What led up to the summer of 2020?
45:51 The hermetically sealed ideology of Kendi and DiAngelo
50:45 Yascha’s defense of universalism
Recorded October 3, 2023
Links and Readings
Yascha’s new book, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
Michel Foucault’s book, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Edward Said’s book, Orientalism
Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Glenn’s debate with Kmele Foster, Shelby Steele, Robert Woodson, and Reihan Salam
Karen and Barbara Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Tommie Shelby’s book, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault’s 1971 debate on Dutch television
Derrick Bell’s book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
Mahalia Jackson singing “We Shall Overcome”
Roy D’Andrade’s article, “Moral Models in Anthropology”
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Transcript
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| 0:50.0 | I am sorry to report that the regularly scheduled bi-weekly conversation involving John |
| 0:59.3 | McWhorter and myself, which was due to air today, will not, in fact, be able to air. |
| 1:06.0 | Johns a little bit under the weather. |
| 1:07.6 | We've had to postpone that conversation by one week. |
| 1:10.9 | We'll be back a week from today with the bi-weekly conversation and we'll continue on every other week from there. |
| 1:22.0 | We were going to talk with Tyler Austin Harper of Bates College and Daniel Besner of the University of Washington |
| 1:32.9 | about free speech issues in the midst of the conflict |
| 1:36.9 | in the Middle East. |
| 1:38.7 | And that crew, all four of us will be back next week |
| 1:41.9 | for that conversation. |
| 1:43.0 | This week, instead of Glenn and John, |
| 1:46.2 | I'm going to interview Yasha Monk of Johns Hopkins University |
| 1:49.9 | about his new book. |
| 1:51.4 | So thanks for tuning in this week. See you next week and every week here at the |
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