Rosie Hancock  0:07 
Hi everyone, I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia. Welcome to Uncommon Sense, where we take a concept or idea that's doing the rounds in popular culture, whose meaning we, maybe, might take for granted, and we try to unpick it sociologically. You probably know the drill by now, and if you don't, welcome.

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:24 
Yep and I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau city, Quebec, and we come to you from the Sociological Review Foundation. And, as always, we always say it, but we do believe that sociology is for everyone and not only that, I guess we'd say it's positively good for you, like sociology won't give you rose tinted glasses or a quick fix, but it is going to help you to understand yourself and your position in the world, I suppose, in turn, kind of get a bit of perspective on things like social relations, power, institutions and so on.

Rosie Hancock  0:54 
Today, we're taking on a big subject: free speech. This is something that is just so Uncommon Sense. Like, we all think we know what it means, but do we really? So, you know, Alexis getting ready for today's show got me thinking about actually this show itself, and how we talk about it with our producer, Alice. Like when you work on a podcast, you get to see how speech is actually produced and kind of constructed, as a sociologist would put it, how what looks like a free flowing reflection or conversation often actually isn't. And that's a reminder, I guess, that what we call free speech is always caveated, constructed, edited in certain ways, not through software, but by social norms and constraints. So perhaps we might end up picking that analogy up as we go but, you know, you get the idea.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:49 
And today we're joined by Aaron Winter, who is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Race and Anti-racism at Lancaster uni. So his work is focused on the far right, looking at racism, historical change, mainstreaming and terrorism, and his books include Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream, with Aurelien Mondon. Hey, hi Aaron.

Aaron Winter  1:49 
Hi, nice to be here.

Rosie Hancock  1:52 
Alright, Aaron, so our team has been chatting ahead of this show, and thought that rather than ask you to define free speech right off the bat – because, you know, in a way, that's what this whole show is going to be about – we're going to offer up our own definition, and, you know, we'll see how that fares as we go along. So the one that we've come up with, here we go, free speech is the act of freely stating what you genuinely believe and want to express without the threat of state repression or prohibition, and with that action – speaking freely – guaranteed by the state. And I want to emphasise here the state – and this is definitely me in our conversations, being like – because I think it's often thought that free speech means you can say whatever you like without social sanction or repercussions, like this seems to be like a popular idea, but to me, that's a whole different thing. We might have time to, like, pick some of this up but anyway, you know, it seems immediately clear that we're dealing with a term that is actually very political, right, freedom. So I want to start by asking you, what's actually sociological about studying free speech? I started off my kind of higher education in political philosophy, and for me freedom, like that term freedom, takes me to like those political philosophy guys, right? Mill, Voltaire, Kant.

Aaron Winter  3:37 
Yes. And I actually also started my career, academic career, as a political philosopher and the topic of free speech brings out one of the reasons I may have left and moved towards sociology. I think the first place to start is actually where you began. The idea of what we say and what we can say being both a reflection of and constrained or informed by our social relations, social power, where we sit in that society or power structure, is one reason to look at free speech. Related to this is the way in which free speech has become a sociological or social phenomenon in itself, something that is highly politicised, something which is invoked in a wide variety of contexts, but one that becomes a catch-all for anything you may want to articulate or fight back against. And in that sense, free speech is a carrier – and I'm relating this to my research, in particular – a carrier or a framing mechanism for reactionary, both speech and backlashes. And for me, what's most sociological about it is the way in which it is evoked, almost in the absence of an understanding of the structural reality and inequalities amongst people who may or may not have the right or ability to speak or be heard.

Alexis Hieu Truong  5:07 
Well, making that link you just said with your your own work, I guess some people listening might, may think like, why is this guy talking about free speech when he specialises in racism and the far right? Right, can you talk a bit on, to that point and, like, what do you do research wise, and how do you do it?

Aaron Winter  5:25  
Well, to go back to the, my reasons for moving from politics and political science and political philosophy to sociology, one of the things that occurred to me is that I was always been interested in the relationship between freedoms and constraints and power, and that occurs within political science and political philosophy. I found there was an interesting tension going on. One is political philosophy was often great, dead, white men, who had power, speaking in the abstract about the best, the best society we can live in, what we ought to do, what we ought not to do. It was almost a course in sort of elite management. And then in political science, there was also this emphasis on how the state, or those elite actors who were able to run for and be elected into office, would manage social freedoms and constraints and our rights. So I was partly interested in this because of the way in which racism, in particular, was being discussed within these. And this goes back to the idea of dead, white men as well about who they were speaking about and for. I mean, were women of colour included in this? And I found myself increasingly focused on not only racist speech and the sort of the ideas about racial progress, but the idea that you can't say something anymore and we need to, and that extreme ideas, or unacceptable ideas, are the test of our freedoms, of a society's freedom – something I patently disagree with – but also found free speech being used as a vehicle to justify racism, oppression, inequality and injustice under the auspices of freedom. And so that was, that was my starting point. Go off a number of years later, I mean, even the past decade, free speech has become an absolute sort of weaponised and operationalised trope within both far right, mainstream right and liberal centrist circles, all coordinated in different ways and on different platforms to, I guess, furnish or push a backlash against progress and against the right of people to speak and to act and to actually enjoy all the freedoms they are allegedly promised.

Rosie Hancock  8:03  
So I'm curious, you've kind of tracked a, like, some historical progress here, right? It seems like you're saying free speech has always been maybe an issue with the far right, but that that's really picked up in the last ten, ten-ish years. Do you think that, I'm curious whether you think that, tech might play a role in this now?

Aaron Winter  8:23  
It has come up a lot. I think it's always been a bit of a trope, particularly I would say in the post-60s period. And I think part of the reason for this is because the idea of freedom of speech for a traditionally authoritarian far right, an authoritarian right, would seem kind of counterintuitive or contradictory. I think what you're seeing, and this was the focus of my PhD, was the idea that social change was translated to be the perceived reversal of fortunes or reversal of power for those traditionally in charge. And again, so the you start to see white and male victimisation narratives, and the way in which you can articulate, particularly in an American context, being oppressed when you've previously had privilege and power was the inability to speak, because action was not really an issue because you had entitlements. But the, the idea was that you somehow were not allowed to say something you used to be able to say, you couldn't previously be proud of being white and all this kind of rhetoric. And so actually, freedom of speech as a liberal kind of idea perfectly articulates a reversal of power and opportunity symbolically, as well as in a context where you have, you know, the First Amendment in the US. And I think that also makes the US context quite different than other contexts, including the Canadian one and I'm from Canada originally. But the idea that it's about freedom also becomes a way of rebranding the far right as something that is oppressed and operates in the order of liberation and rights, as opposed to repression, suppression and authoritarianism. Now, what we've seen in recent years is the evoking it in ways that make, that allow the right to say the left is fascist, illiberal and all these kind of things, but also then showing its own authoritarianism when it does get in charge or in power. And I think to go back to the issue of the First Amendment, we see figures like Elon Musk talking about free speech on Twitter, or then X, we see Trump and Trump supporters talking about the ability to say what's on your mind, to say what you really think, which is one of the reasons they may admire him. And this ends up, in a way, allowing a sort of movement, a far right movement, to get mainstream but then also, once in power, enact authoritarian measures such as the repression of DEI, diversity, equality and inclusion advocacy as well as policies. But the issue of AI, or in the issue of tech more generally, I think it's become a theatre for this debate. But I don't think it's limited to it. I think there's been so much, it's absorbed so much of the energy about sort of who can say what, who gets cancelled! But I think that for the most part, what you're seeing about the argument of free speech is, am I being allowed to speak at universities, am I allowed to speak on television, am I allowed to post my YouTube videos? So tech is there, and maybe it helps bring together disparate constituencies or communities who may want this, but, at the same time, it operates well beyond those boundaries. If you don't mind, just to return to the First Amendment part, it is the right to free speech without government interference. And I think you're really, really seeing right now the government interference is okay when it applies to those on the left or those who challenge right wing principles.

Rosie Hancock  12:21 
Yeah, I'm gonna read out the First Amendment, because there might be, people might not be totally familiar with it. So from the US Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances". So that is the famous amendment, which you've just been referring to.

Alexis Hieu Truong  12:50  
Aaron, just to jump in, could you give us maybe a brief definition of what far right is for you?

Aaron Winter  12:58  
I would say that it is, it is one of the challenges and I think, slightly, obsessions of researchers in the field. We often see it used to describe or identify, I guess, a family or a range of movements, organisations and actors that are kind of, they may have different ideologies and identities and tactics, but they're organised around often racist, nationalist, anti-democratic and authoritarian beliefs or objectives. Now that nationalism may actually be civilisational or cultural, articulated in cultural terms as well across different nations or blocs in the world, but they, they, as I noted, they can be different types of movements. You can have everything from political parties to subcultures, to violent paramilitaries and terrorists, street activists and governments. I use it as an umbrella term. Some people use populist radical right, some use extremist or extreme right, some use nativist fascist. I tend to use far right as an umbrella term, but may differentiate internally to that.

Alexis Hieu Truong  14:02 
So, in recent years – it's kind of a bit of a jump here but – like in recent years in philosophy, social sciences, political science and so on, like people like Miranda Fricker and, and José Medina have worked on developing a language, a kind of new language, to talk about like people's voices, right, and understanding people's experiences and so on. So, epistemic injustice, epistemic resistance and so on. I was kind of wondering, on the research methods side, like certain approaches kind of aim to give a voice, right, both in academia but also in journalism, and they can sometimes actually rest on troubling assumptions about free speech. I was wondering if you could reflect a bit on that and perhaps say a bit more about your own work and your own methods?

Aaron Winter  14:49 
My research, when I when I started working on the far right, the issue of speech and power came up almost immediately, because I was dealing particularly with movements that had reacted to Civil Rights as well as American government prosecutions and investigations into the Ku Klux Klan and other organisations by turning against the government. And that's partly why free speech was an issue, about their interference with their beliefs and ideas and speech acts. But one of the things that was really big at that time was a sort of a pop culture version of ethnography. There was the ethnographic turn within sociology, and people going sort of to do observation or participant observation in communities, often disenfranchised communities, progressive communities or vulnerable communities. But I was looking at, I guess, armed neo-Nazis effectively and – sorry, on top of that, you also had, it was the era of the Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson documentaries where TV presenters were going to, like, meet neo-Nazis and charm them and make fun of them covertly with their great intelligence. And I was resisting this for several reasons. One is because I belong to one of the target groups of neo-Nazis. They're armed, I'm not. I also worry that a lot of these, both popular and even academic ethnographies, were giving a voice, giving a platform to the grievances of these actors. If you move forward to sort of more recent years, we've seen again and again and again the way in which academic studies and media interviews and representations of the far right and of particularly white working class communities who are assumed to be both racist and potentially far right, give legitimacy to a sort of white working class left behind grievance narrative that has been used time and time again by politicians to justify reactionary policies about immigration, for example. But it has also encouraged the far right. It has legitimised, these ideas have been seen as the voice of the people. And when you sync up those kind of interviews, those, that kind of platforming with public opinion surveys, as well as ingrained narratives about the grievance of, grievances of white men, it becomes part and parcel of the mainstreaming of the far right. Now, I didn't want to, as a researcher, take part in that. What I did instead, and at the time of my PhD, was I looked at the narratives, ideologies, texts of the far right to see how they articulated their changing ideologies. And I've been asked time and time again how, in the context of radicalisation and extremism, I don't talk to existing far right actors or former far right actors. And what I've noticed, and this goes back to the point you were making when you asked the question, was, consistently, I'm seeing studies about racism and misogyny and transphobia, interviewing, you know, panels with academics, and then perpetrators, potential perpetrators or former perpetrators who do not represent both either the experiences of the targeted or give room to that. And so my feeling is, is that my research plays a role not only in emphasising the need to platform and engage with those who are targeted by these movements – state racism, as well as far right racism – but also challenge these narratives and challenge the platforming of reaction and racism in ways that can legitimise and mainstream it.

Rosie Hancock  18:37  
I know that in your own work, and we're going to put some of these in the show notes, you've highlighted some fallacies that I think link really well to this idea of, you know, not wanting to platform these ideas. And, you know, one of these fallacies is the idea that debate, of kind of, you know, we can debate whatever, and that is always going to be a good means of education. Or, similarly, the idea that just airing or being exposed to diverse and dangerous ideas can help to breed proper critical thinking. So could you tell us a bit more about that?

Aaron Winter  19:09 
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, one of the reasons for not platforming these actors in my own research is also because they don't need a platform. They keep on getting it. And one of the ways in which they get it is under the auspices of free speech, another is the idea of debate. And I find debate quite an interesting one, because it's often mistaken for democracy, where you have these two polarised ideas or two – you know, whereas in politics, I think we have two ideas that are fairly similar in fighting out for the same constituency – but you also have these false polarisation between debates, and you air these ideas, and then one wins, allegedly! And the thing is, is that they often ignore the nuance of ideas and positions, but they also treat say fascism and anti-fascism, racism and anti-racism, you know, as equal and equally righteous, equally – but we know in society, it's often the fascist and the racist which are given much more power and credibility, often under the assumption or, or allegation that they are repressed or censored ideas, which is nonsense! But what ends up happening is you end up allowing these voices, these ideas, to be spoken again and again and again in ways that perpetuate the harm that those who are targeted face when they have to listen to it again and again and again. And the other reason why it's so problematic is, I don't think, firstly, like, I mean, there has been a call for, like, you know, universities and education, educational institutions to operate this way, because this is how we learn best. That's just not true. That's, that's not how education works. That's not how learning works. But also it can cause harm to those students who are affected by it and the harm seen by someone who belongs to a vulnerable community or identity group versus someone who, kind of like feels hurt if they can't express their racism and fascism are not equal. Absolutely not.

Rosie Hancock  21:15  
I mean, you know, I think sort of related to this idea, you know, we refer to an earlier question as provocative Aaron, and it kind of occurs to me that there's also maybe a certain social currency – certainly for some people, at least – in being seen to be provocative or controversial, like somehow doing that is a proxy for intelligence or agency, like they've got control over their thoughts and their expression in a way that other people don't, or something. And I'm curious if you can reflect on that, like, I mean, is that, in a way, like a trope of kind of this right wing kind of discourse?

Aaron Winter  21:53 
I think it is, and I think how you've described it is absolutely accurate. I mean, it's really, I'm thinking when you're asking this also the amount of times I've been told if I disagree with someone, I should debate them, but also the amount of times I've been told that because I don't like something, I'm either a oversensitive snowflake or I have bought into the system or the machine and I can't see outside it and I'm just some sort of an automaton, because I bought into sort of a woke agenda, or something like that. But I'm also talking to someone who's repeating something that, like, you know, every influencer on social media says again and again and again, again. And you end up doing very much what, like I said about the free speech, is you reverse the order of power and, I guess, compliance. So if, if you're told the system is built around every single historically marginalised minority group and the left, well, then what you say, even if you're parroting like just, you know, hundreds of online influencers, your thought is original because it's a challenge to the, to the system that you've constructed. And therefore it gets not only currency, it becomes part and parcel of the brand of a sort of influencer or a wannabe influencer. It makes you feel like a hero or a martyr against the system, but it also becomes political – I guess – virtue, that you're able to challenge the system. And it's interesting the way in which that's done, as if there's some repercussion for saying this, as opposed to being disagreed with. They'll go, oh, you've disagreed with me. I'm now cancelled. See, I haven't gotten invitations to every single major television station! And it's like, first of all, why would anyone invite you? And no one's entitled to get onto TV or to get into a university to speak. And it's this construction of victimisation which is related explicitly, both directly as well as indirectly, in number of ways to that sort of left behind white male victimisation narrative, although in that sense class is often just left out of it. It's just, I'm not allowed to operate freely!

Alexis Hieu Truong  24:14  
The elements you're evoking really kind of paint a complex picture of what free speech is and kind of encompasses, and really get the idea that free speech is not about the, just like the act of saying something freely, right? There's a whole thing that, that is before-after. It's very like relational. And I guess part of what we've been talking about here is on how like speech gets valued and decoded differently depending on who's talking, in what arena and so on. Like, I have a colleague – Michèle Diotte – who worked on the participation of marginalised individuals and groups within court procedures, right? And what is like, what does it mean in terms of receiving, making the, people testimonies available, and then judges listening to it and hearing it in a way, right? So there's all this filtering also, but, yeah, so, so, I guess, kind of generally, what, what would be the, could you talk more about these processes and, like, what are the conditions for free speech?

Aaron Winter  25:20  
I think in a sense, and I think it's a really good question, that's fascinating research, and I think it points to some of the real issues that are going on, not the confected and ideological ones. But I think what's interesting is, is that free speech, it becomes this sort of like slightly floating kind of idea that people can take. It's quite owned by the right right now, but historically, in an American context, it was linked to the left wing Free Speech Movement. And what has happened, I think is quite interesting, is, is that there it was based largely on a systemic analysis, or structural analysis, of politics, the impact of sort of white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy on speech. This also emerges in the context of the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement, but also in the wake of McCarthyism. And what's happened since the right has started to take it back, or take it, there has been this, this idea that sort of some, many liberals – some centrist, some on the left – would say it used to be a left wing value, the left has abandoned us! Well, actually, the terms of politics have changed. And what has ended up happening, the, the advocates of free speech now or now actually participating or have enabled a new McCarthyism. And what's actually happened is, is that you have a lot of repression of any kind of articulation of an anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, anti-right wing, anti-capitalist ideas. And the response is authoritarianism, closing museum exhibitions on American history, banning books, you know, locking people up, deporting people in the US in particular. But that what I think the free speech thing does by being quite, even though it's historically specific, it floats around and it can be grabbed and operationalised. What it does conceal and distract from are the real, real experiences of people who don't have power, who may be subject to actual systems of power – like the legal system, criminal justice system – whose ideas, whose defences, whose experiences are not understood or listened to. They're not treated in ways that give them a platform, opportunity and access to power,

Rosie Hancock  27:56  
Returning to politics – and particularly sort of state politics, I guess here – we could also map it globally, and think of states where people really are not free to say much at all, like Russia or North Korea, for example. And I don't know if this is a silly point, but we, I feel like people in those like really repressive states would hear the three of us talking and say, wow, this is all – mind the pun – a bit academic. You know, like, we should be grateful for our lot in Australia, the UK, Canada, where we're speaking from today. What would you say to that?

Aaron Winter  28:31  
So in my work with Aurelien Mondon we have a notion of liberal versus illiberal racism, and it's based on the idea that racism in this sort of post-racial, colourblind era – that in the post-60s post, you know, 70s period is – that racism is, is defeated. It does occur in other countries, but it's only manifestation are people and actors and movements who are out of place and out of time with our beautiful liberal democratic system, and the far right is a symbol of that. Now, what that does is uses the far right as a proxy for racism and a distraction from all other forms of racism and inequality and injustice in that society. But it also means you create this equivalence between all groups that allows, you know, white people to say, well, now racism is against us, or men say, now sexism is against us, and this fuels a lot of the backlash in the sort of, the far right. But you also see the same thing with the, with, with other countries. The other thing, that other country is where they don't have rights. You should be happy with the mere, the mere rights you have! Well, the problem with that is, and there's many problems. One is it's very colonial and racist and Eurocentric, Euro-American-centric. It's why they called, you know, the January 6th insurrection, they said, oh, it's like Kristallnacht, the pogroms in Nazi occupied Europe or it's like a banana republic, because everyone knows America, there's no riots, racism or, or violence! But what you end up doing by doing that is saying you have to take your lot here, because you could be living in a way worse place, way worse place that we are also going to bomb. You know, it's, a sort of a construction of other places as illiberal and intolerant and in need of separation or interference and occupation in order to preserve our liberalism. And then what ends up happening is, is that you say, someone says something racist, and you're going, well, liberal values say you can say anything, because we have free speech here! And then you start to chip away at the claim to fame that you're so liberal and so progressive that racism doesn't exist anymore. And so I would not contest that other places have repression, censorship and terribly authoritarian government policies and practices. But that doesn't make what goes on in other places okay. And I reject the, I reject the distraction, the function of other people's repression or oppression as permission for your own contexts or systems, injustices. At the same time, we're also seeing like deportations, people being disappeared for protesting. I mean, we can see it in Britain, in, in Canada, in the United States. In Germany, the way in which the defence of Palestinian humanity and rights is being treated as extremist, is being treated as support for illiberalism. You know, it's a, it's an obviously injustice situation. And then what ends up happening is saying, you know, you're not allowed to protest here, particularly if you're on a visa and, if you do, think about, would you be able to say that in Gaza? And it's like, I'm not allowed to say it here! So you end up knowing inequalities between these different contexts and systems, but flattening, they get flattened out often through that comparison.

Alexis Hieu Truong  32:11 
So I guess what you're, what you're saying is it's really important to attend to, like, the structural inequalities within states, not just the ones also that are like between them. And I think that many of the examples that you were giving about like racism and this idea of like a crisis of a reversal of power can also, like, we can think about like feminism and like gender relations, right, and how there's kind of like this anti-feminist, like similar discourses. And while we're on the subject of politics, we've been talking today about like conditions and caveats around free speech. But to twist that slightly, I want to get your thoughts on how we should be wary of claims that speech has happened, like past tense, that they say, like people have spoken online or in a vote or some sort and like, you have this term from your book with Aurelien Mondon, reactionary democracy – and that's actually the title, right – can you help us to understand that in more detail?

Aaron Winter  33:13 
Yeah, no, absolutely. You have this idea – and this is something we've discussed already – about speech being repressed, the speech of certain groups with certain interests, something that often is at odds with our understanding of structural inequalities and the system of power we've got, over who's at the sharpest end and who's not, who has access who doesn't. And I should note, I mean, the desire to understand power and structures of inequality is partly why I became a sociologist, which is why this is very interesting and its absence is really important to me in these discussions. But the idea of reactionary democracy, I mean, it has a number of meanings, but one is the evoking democracy for reactionary interests and purposes. Such as, you know, the people have spoken, they want the border shut. People have spoken, they wanted Trump. And I think this is based on a complete fallacy of, you know, I guess the democratic will of the people, how elections map out across the population, who has access to voting, who doesn't, but also issues of representation, like who's represented. I mean, in Britain right now, we're talking about a system where there's like two major parties and a far right alternative – or constructed alternative – and all have literally the same idea around immigration, and no one wants to address structural inequalities. So, that's not a democratic choice. But if that's the only choices you're getting, anyone who wins is going to be the voice of the people, right? And I think this, I think this goes to the way in which reaction, racism and other such ideas are blamed firstly on the working class, then they're blamed on the people and this gives a mandate for often elites to perpetuate or perpetrate a sort of like a white male victim narrative that reinforces capitalist inequality and white supremacy. And I think one of the ways that we talk about how this is done is through what Aurelien calls, in his wider work as well, a populist hype, the idea that it represents these reactionary ideas as the will of the people, as populist – not fascist, not racist – but popular, popularist, populist. And the way in which this becomes the narrative that more parties need to be populist. And what that does is encourages, it blames these bad ideas and their, their, their implications – like recession, you know, or isolation – on the people, the working class, or the people. But there's not a free admission that these are actually racist, fascist and reactionary ideas that really harm people, people who don't get a voice, who aren't represented and who are, who are often dehumanised.

Rosie Hancock  36:08  
This has been such a great chat, Aaron and we are going to take a very quick break where our producer, Alice, is going to jump in. We'll be back in a moment to talk about someone who's given you some uncommon sense.

Alice Bloch  36:24 
Thanks for joining us with Aaron Winter to think about free speech today. Over at thesociologicalreview.org you'll find our show notes for this and our other shows, including our new mini series Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism. That's three audio essays on three crucial figures in the story of UK anti-racism, unpacking their ideas and how they speak to sociology too. So if you want to hear more on Ambalavaner Sivanandan (Siva), Gerlin Bean and Len Garrison, do check that out. And in the meantime, thanks as ever for following Uncommon Sense. We're almost midway through season four now, and so grateful to all of you who listen around the world. And if you're regular here, then, by now, you probably know the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're all about advancing public understanding of sociology. So we'd like to ask if you can please consider making a contribution to help us keep bringing this podcast to you. If so, just head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense, where you can make one off or repeat donations and directly support the making of Uncommon Sense. Every single one is really gratefully received. Any feedback, we're at Uncommon Sense at thesociological review.org. Thanks for listening.

Alexis Hieu Truong  37:49 
So Aaron, here's where we want to hear about someone who's given you uncommon sense, made you think differently. And today you want to nominate Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, can you introduce him for us?

Aaron Winter  38:03 
He's an American sociologist of race and racism. He's professor of sociology at Duke University and the previous president of the American Sociological Association. He's been a staunch public defender of and advocate for race scholarship and education. He's also the author of the books White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era, from 2001, and Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, two books which came out during my PhD and really had a huge influence on me.

Rosie Hancock  38:31 
So, I mean, could you go into a bit more detail about how he's influenced you? Because I know, you know, he shows us how racism and white supremacy and articulations of these kind of show up over time and change over time under different conditions, yeah?

Aaron Winter  38:47 
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think one of the things about my PhD was I – as I said before, I had moved from politics to sociology – but one of the things I was interested in was the way in which the far right had been treated in, in research both as a historical phenomenon that we had gotten past, or treated as an ongoing current threat which we need to monitor and counter. And a lot of that research is going on now that's totally presentist and really focused on the latest iteration or the latest threat. So I moved to sociology with a sort of a sideline in history, and I was interested in how the far right had changed, and doing a sort of, I guess, history of the immediate past. And Bonilla-Silva's work looked at the way in which racism had changed historically, and that's changing in its form, its articulations, how it's perceived and how racism and white supremacy are managed in and through periods of political, legal and economic as well as wider social change, as well as, I guess, real crises and perceived ones. So one of the things that Bonilla-Silva did was he looked particularly at the discursive and narrative strategies to which a society and system can minimise, displace responsibility for or even deny racism. But the way it can do, societies can do this in ways that, that maintain and reinforce racism and the status quo. I'm thinking particularly of his work on colourblind racism and what he calls sincere fictions. I really like the way he shows how different discourses and narratives, as well as articulations of racism and racism denial, operate and function simultaneously, or in different contexts for different needs and functions. This was a revelation after reading, I guess, too many analyses that give, that treat the far right as the only, I guess, iteration or articulation of racism in the contemporary period, or Jim Crow or Nazism – what me and Aurelien call illiberal racism – or give one explanation for how racism operates in society.

Alexis Hieu Truong  41:09 
So, like that seems like a very rich body of work, and I guess I'm wondering if you were to recommend a title, like one book, right, for, for someone who's brand new to this field, what would it be?

Aaron Winter  41:24 
Well, I'm sort of split on that, because I use Racism without Racists in my work, even just last week, and it's just a really, really important text, and I would highly recommend that. But I also really, really found White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era so important to my understanding of the far right and change that I can't not also recommend it.

Rosie Hancock  41:52 
Well, we'll let you get away with that, and we'll put both of them in our show notes. So Aaron, finally, before we go, we just want to ask you for a very quick tip on something non-academic that speaks to our theme today. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts there. It could be a TV show, a novel or a work of art.

Aaron Winter  42:11 
Oh, wow. I think I would say the first album, if we can still call it an album, by The Specials, which taught me as a teenager in Toronto during a skinhead revival about Britain, where I ended up, in the context of Thatcher's – what Stuart Hall calls – authoritarian populism, deindustrialisation and the effect and the way in which race and class were pitted against each other in ways that were both very, very damaging, which enabled and emboldened the far right and which was very culturally and politically productive for both the left and anti-racism and anti-fascism.

Rosie Hancock  43:01 
Thanks, Aaron. I mean, I, I really enjoyed that reflection from you, actually, and thinking about the importance of music, like to us, individually, in our political development, sociologically, all of it. So thank you very much for that, and it's been a real pleasure talking to you today.

Aaron Winter  43:19 
Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed it,

Alexis Hieu Truong  43:20 
And that is everything. I think we travelled quite a long way from the original definition of free speech that we put forward at the beginning, right? You can catch the show notes featuring everything we discussed by clicking through the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. Or, of course, scroll down in the app that you're using to hear this.

Rosie Hancock  43:43 
We're back next month, complicating an altogether different subject: childhood.

Alexis Hieu Truong  43:47 
Our producer was Alice Bloch, our sound engineer, David crackles. Thank you for listening, bye.

Rosie Hancock  43:53 
Bye.