- I just want to say thank you for what you're doing.

- [Peniel] Oh, thank you.

- Because there's risk in what you're doing.

The information you're sharing needs to get out.

Your books need to be studied in colleges.

And I'm just grateful, and I'm of the same mind.

I'm nobody.

I just really, really appreciate- - No, you're somebody.

- You are somebody.

- You're somebody.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

- So can you, (audience applauding) reflect on this?

You're the Founding Director of the Center for Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs here at UT Austin.

You led a similar institution named the same at Tufts University before coming to the University of Texas.

You understand the challenges in academia right now?

- Oh, absolutely.

- Telling these stories.

So I appreciated the thought and the question, but say a word, reflect a little bit on today versus, say, 10 years ago, you kind of, how you approach this work.

- Yeah, I approach the work the same way that I did 10 years ago.

But certainly we've seen a transformation in how the work is received from a decade ago.

And when we think about book banning, book banning is the height of what used to be called cancellation, right?

So people were saying there was a cancel culture in the United States.

And they were saying that it was on the left and progressives canceling people on Twitter or social media for past sins or misunderstandings.

But the real cancel culture is revoking people's right to read the fullness of American history, right?

And the real cancel culture is saying that it's illegal to try to create a more inclusive society, right?

And remember because of how we were founded in terms of the United States of America as an exclusive society, we've always been behind the curve in terms of promoting equality, right?

We're not very good at it because we were founded as an exclusive society.

Women couldn't vote, white women couldn't vote till 1920.

Black women for the most part, couldn't vote till after 1965.

For most of our history, we had no Americans with Disabilities Act.

For most of our history, we didn't have the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Even the '65 Voting Rights Act, the most powerful version of it is only from 1975 to 2013.

Because even though Congress passed a 25-year extension in 1982 and then in 2007, the Roberts Court, instead of playing balls and strikes, chose to legislate from the bench and just end that, right?

So when we think about like who we are, and that's why I say, Evan, I think empirically I can prove this, you'll just have to read the book, the book's the argument, (audience laughing) there was a 50-year racial justice consensus.

And that's how... And what's so interesting about the multiracial democracy, it doesn't just give us Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.

It gives us Hillary Clinton, it gives us Bill Clinton.

White people, white people benefit from civil rights.

White people benefit from civil rights.

Muslims and Jews and disabled people benefit from civil rights.

This is not just protection from one group, even though at the core of our country, the groups that have been sort of the most assailed are indigenous people and black people and others, right?

But once you do civil rights and have multiracial democracy, it expands the field for everyone.

- Ma'am.

(audience applauding) - You might have talked a little bit about what I'm thinking.

If you look at '63, it seems like things were much clearer of how bad it was for people.

That things were so much, you had the segregation, you had, and I'm not good with words, but if you look at now, like you said, we had 50 years of good things, and a lot of good things have happened.

So how do you compare where we are now to where we were in '63?

I mean, in the sense of that, we don't have those horrible law.

I mean, not yet, yet, but.

- You know, I would say that the progress always is for specific groups.

So I would say that those of us who are professors, especially at a university like UT or elite universities, you're a beneficiary of that progress.

But like it said, it really is, America can be two or more things simultaneously, and often is.

So the juxtaposition of the 50 years of progress is mass incarceration.

The juxtaposition is the fact that in '73 women had more reproductive rights and justice than in 2025.

You see?

So it really depends.

So for those of us who are able to come to PBS and "Overheard" and listen to Evan and this fabulous space, we are the beneficiaries of the March on Washington.

We are the beneficiaries of people who risked it all, Bloody Sunday and Freedom Summer, right?

We are the beneficiaries of allies who were black and white and Jewish and Hispanic and Asian, who marched all together, including there's a bunch of disabled folks who marched.

And when we think about tho those, and indigenous folks.

So when we think about where we're at today, for some of us, we are in an extraordinarily privileged position from 1963.

For others, it's very, very similar.

Great example is, this is the 20th anniversary of Katrina, Hurricane Katrina.

And I was on news shows and everything when this happened because CNN and other places were calling American citizens who happened to be black, refugees, and they were calling them everything but the children of God that they are.

And I was having to explain to people historically how even though there was a Civil Rights Act, even though, yes, there have been some African Americans who graduated from LSU and Tulane and did great things, there are folks who generationally remained impoverished.

Right?

And it's not through, we don't fix that by pathologizing them and saying it's their own behavior, it's their fault, right?

We fix it by saying we're gonna create institutions that recognize their dignity and give them real opportunities, right?

That's how we fix it.

So when we think about Katrina, even 20 years and we saw all these black people in the Superdome just being left behind, we see that, wow, for those folks.

And remember, Katrina happens three years before we elect Obama.

So these are juxtapositions.

They're not aberrations, they're juxtapositions.

- Good.

- Well, also like our prison system with no AC.

- Right?

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Mass incarceration.

Absolutely.

- Good point.

Mrs. Richard, you'll have the last question.

- Thank you.

Several years ago, the LBJ Foundation had a series of discussions with leaders in Austin basically about inclusion and what it meant.

And I want you to address what I think is the distortion of what DEI has become today.

- Yeah.

- In terms of how it's being articulated?

Yes- - Well, also it's being blamed for everything.

That plane crash, that helicopter over Reagan airport, DEI.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Right, like everything is DEI that you don't like, it's all because of DEI.

- Yeah, so I think- - Whereas I wanna just point out, people who look like me have been advanced professionally for years.

No one said boo about that.

- No.

- But anybody who sees you in the position you are in automatically assumes you didn't get here on the basis of merit.

That's the implicit argument being made against DEI.

- Yeah, no, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think one thing we have to remember is that that idea that African Americans, at times women and other historically marginalized groups are inherently unqualified, it predates Affirmative Action, it predates DEI.

And I think when we think about DEI, DEI was something that came into being because Affirmative Action was challenged in the courts.

And by the Bakke decision, Justice Blackmun says that, you know, diversity can be part of these admissions processes, but it can't be with specific goals and timetables to recruit certain kinds of students, in this case, black students.

So what what, especially universities did, less corporate America, is they reconstituted and they started to do diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And this is, you know, starts at multiculturalism in the '80s and '90s.

And even then, people like Alan Bloom were very angry about this, you know, Yale University, very imminent literary professor.

And they were upset that people wanted to include Tony Morrison and James Baldwin in the Great Cannons, the great books, because from their perspective, those people were not qualified.

They were unqualified.

The greatest literature in the world happened to just be written by white men over a series of centuries.

You know?

And so when we think about this, this is, we've been battling this for a long time, right?

Dinesh D'Souza, there became a whole conservative aperture for this when I was coming up.

This is over 30 years ago, right?

And so by the 21st century, all you found was that a lot of universities, because Affirmative Action kept getting narrower and narrower in scope with a series of decisions, including University of Texas, but I'm thinking Bollinger versus Michigan and all these decisions, they still wanted to have some kind of inclusion.

Sometimes all the inclusion meant was having diverse pictures in your catalog.

And really, the number of black students at the school were on the catalog, right?

Just to give you an example, right?

But over time, what the very far right, 'cause this is different from the right in '63 in certain ways, although there was a very far right then too.

But the far right mainstream just has made diversity, equity, inclusion mean unqualified students and professionals gain access to things that they don't deserve, right?

- Right.

- This is the furthest thing from the truth, but that narrative sticks because, especially because we are in a post-consensus period.

And this is what I mean by post-consensus.

One thing, and I didn't get a chance to say this during our taping, is that so much of American history since the Civil War revolves around a narrative war between forces that are believers in multiracial democracy, and I would include people like Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy in this, and Lincoln in this, Frederick Douglass, others, and forces who are in opposition to multiracial democracy.

And sometimes we can call them reconstructionist forces versus redemption is forces, right?

What's so extraordinary about '63 and the 50-year racial justice consensus that I argue is that in '63 for the first time in American history, and it's really the last time, so we'll see what happens, the forces of reconstruction win the narrative war.

It doesn't mean they win everything.

People- - [Evan] And they don't win permanently.

- They don't win permanently.

They don't win permanently, but they do win.

And you get the idea that rhetorically the United States is saying, yes, racial justice is a good thing domestically and globally.

And what we've seen in the last- - [Evan] However long.

Right.

- Is that when you stop saying that, even though during the 50 years where we said it, there was contradictions, there was hypocrisy.

Not every president meant it, not every justice department enforced voting rights and civil rights like others, but just the rhetoric, the consensus was extraordinarily important.

because that's how democracies thrive.

- Yeah.

- Right?

And so we are in a post-consensus period, and that's why you're hearing people and you're able to legislate anti-DEI and book banning in, I don't know, 30 states, 35 states, right?

And you're taking us back to a pre-civil war American geography where you had fugitive slave laws, where you knew where you couldn't go, where you had sundown towns.

That's what you're finding being not just re-litigating, but re-instigated and re-institutionalized.

The thing that people who are in those states where this is not being passed, but also those of us who are in the states, where they are have to do, and people did this during this time too, is one, speak truth to power publicly and as often as you can if you're able to, right?

Many people are unable to, so then you become the voice for people who are unable to, right?

So that's one.

The second part is think about coalitions.

What we don't do enough, including in Austin, is think about the way in which other people's issues actually impact our own, right?

And that includes immigrants, that includes Jewish folks in Austin, that includes Muslims here.

That includes the disabled, right?

It includes for us to think to ourselves that if they're attacking trans people, it's an attack on us, even if we don't have a trans person in our family.

The reason we do this is because we're thinking empathetically about human dignity and we're saying either we all count or none of us counts.

- Right.

Yeah.

Well, amazing the conversation.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) Peniel Joseph.

Thank you all for coming.

We'll see you soon.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- I thought you did great.