“White Americans Need to Understand That Their Interests Coincide with Black People’s Interests”

01/21/21 • 33 min

In a conversation with Professor Brian Lowery, Dr. Spencer Crew, professor of history and art history at George Mason University joins Dr. Clayborne Carson, professor emeritus of history at Stanford and the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, to discuss the role history plays in our identity as a country. Historical statues and monuments, the men say, tell very different narratives depending on who gets to tell the story.

“Many statues were created after the Civil War, at a time when Jim Crow was being implemented in the South,” says Carson. “Efforts to create these memorials were specifically designed to say, ‘You may think that things have changed since the Civil War, but we’re here to remind you that things haven’t changed.’”

This is Leadership for Society: The Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by Brian Lowery, senior associate dean for academic affairs at Stanford GSB, that focuses on the most pressing issues of today. In this season of the podcast, Lowery explores the role of race in society, how race interacts with structures of power, and how systemic racism manifests itself in day-to-day business and policy decisions.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Previous Episode

“Never Mistake Presence for Power”

Economic and social inequalities between white and Black people gained global attention again this year. In this podcast episode, Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change — the largest online racial justice organization driven by more than 7.2 million members — spoke on the global racial reckoning of 2020 and how his nonprofit is working to fix the systems and structures that have hurt, harmed, and held the Black community back.

In a conversation with Professor Brian Lowery, Robinson discusses the importance of technology in channeling activism and why it’s important to create long-term infrastructure to harness people’s energy in productive ways. And he warns, in an age of social media, to not mistake visibility and awareness for the ability to change the system.

This is Leadership for Society: The Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by Brian Lowery, senior associate dean for academic affairs at Stanford GSB, that focuses on the most pressing issues of today. In this season of the podcast, Lowery explores the role of race in society, how race interacts with structures of power, and how systemic racism manifests itself in day-to-day business and policy decisions.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Next Episode

“Books, Articles, and Documentaries Will Help Us Understand This Country’s Divide.”

Stories tell us who we are and help us understand others. They also suggest who we can be, if we overcome the ongoing divides in this country. In this podcast episode, Professor Brian Lowery sits down with American journalist and publishing executive Dana Canedy, dubbed by the New York Times as “one of the most powerful Black women in the literary world” who is “poised to alter the culture and the divisions she leads and shape the landscape.”

In this conversation, Lowery and Canedy touch on the difference between living a story and telling a story authentically. Canedy shares her goals of giving publishing contracts to voices often unheard, always aiming, she says, “to engage people in conversations that enrich our understanding of one another, foster real communications” and eventually lead to policy change.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.