The "Right Kind" of Black Person: Erec Smith on prescriptive racism.

The Unspeakable Podcast

This episode is with one of our guest speakers at The Unspeakeasy retreat in Chicago. If you’re interested in going, learn more here.

This week Meghan welcomes returning guest Erec Smith. He is an academic whose area of scholarship is Rhetoric, but he also writes and speaks frequently about the state of race politics in America, particularly the perils (and uses) of DEI. In this conversation, they talk about the concept of prescriptive racism, which Erec wrote about in a recent Boston Globe column, and ask whether the emergence of the concept of microaggressions has resulted mainly in people steering clear of one another.

They also discuss what’s happened on college campuses since Erec was on the podcast a year ago, including the ouster of college presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and U Penn’s Liz Magill over free speech policies. He also discusses what he was like as a college student carrying around a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and how he would have felt if he’d been told that he was living under the thumb of white supremacy.

Erec will be a guest speaker at the first-ever Unspeakeasy coed retreat in Chicago on June 4-5. We’ll also be joined by recent Unspeakable guests Nadine Strossen and Lisa Selin Davis. To find out about that go to theunspeakeasy.com.)

Make sure you listen all the way to the end, so you can hear an excerpt from Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist from the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q. (Probably not coming to a high school theater near you.)

GUEST BIO

Erec Smith is a professor of rhetoric at York College of PA, a research scholar at the Cato Insitute, and a co-founder and an editor at Free Black Thought.

Read Erec’s recent Boston Globe column on prescriptive racism.

Listen to the last time he was on the podcast.

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