(soft music)
- If we look at refugees in particular,
how does race play into the refugee crisis
that's affecting the world, globally right now?
- A big part of it is even how we decide who is a refugee
and who isn't, and under what circumstances.
In the Unites States, domestically we'd use the term
refugee for people who we actually want to take care of
as opposed to people we don't.
So after Hurricane Katrina there we're people who
we called refugees when they were looking for food,
and then, they were white,
and then the black folk we called looters,
when they were looking for food in the same water.
Globally, some times the term refugee,
becomes a way to think about,
who's vulnerable and who's not.
Who's worthy of protection and who's not.
So, if someone is from Russia,
we can say okay these people need our help.
Then there are ways that darker hued refugees
will say well do they share our values, are we safe?
Are they a security threat?
Even none of the evidence suggests they are,
race often, shapes, colors even how we talk about
who they are and what they deserve.
- To that effect then are there deemable good refugees,
and bad refugees, and immigrants,
and what do we mean when we use those terms very loosely?
Language is so important here.
- Absolutely.
I mean in my political imagination,
I'd say there's no such thing as a good or a bad refugee
you're just a refugee.
And you're a refugee because of a set of processes
that are always outside of your sphere of control.
To me the idea of good and bad
or acceptable or unacceptable isn't the right framework.
Unfortunately, we either use that language explicitly
or we smuggle it in through other means
when we talk about the process.
So for example, we talk about people
who will be burdens on our economy.
Oh we can't let them in they'll be a burden,
we can't let these Mexicans in to the Unites States
they'll be a burden on our economy.
They'll steal the jobs.
You know, this becomes the language we use,
to really say they're not the right kind of immigrants.
In France, we'll say well what do
we do with these Nigerians.
I don't know will they disrupt our way of life?
What does that mean, it means are they going to change
or Eurocentric, white supremacists, Christian centered
norms of how the world should operate.
- But to be fair, to push back a little bit on that,
if we just let everybody in,
because they don't like where they live or they think
that where they live isn't good enough.
Then that is an abstract, object,
all in everyone in policy, and that is unsustainable.
I don't care if you're Europe, or America,
or the global North.
- Agreed.
- So the idea the idea of good and bad refugees
might be idea logic and troubling.
But in reality we need it.
- Well, you don't need a distinction between good and bad,
you just need sustainable policies.
You could make the case that
they're all worthy of getting in,
but we don't have a sustainable framework for letting
every single person in the world through the border.
But we can't stop there,
and the problem is we often use that
as an excuse to do nothing.
But what do we do about it,
if we say every person from Syria can't come here.
Right, which again, they're not trying to,
they go to Lebanon,
I mean there are a million places they go other than here.
But Syrian who wants to come here,
we can't let in fine, but what will we do to create
some kind of refuge for them somewhere?
What can we do to readdress the policies of the in Syria?
And we've had opportunities to.
When we've literally, whether it's changing the red line.
Whether it's giving a hands off approach.
Whether it's in other decades actually funding the project.
There are things that we've done to create that,
so now we have to do things work to undo that.
- But this idea, I mean like, of collective guilt,
that Americans should feel for what happened in America
during slavery or what Europeans should feel
of what happened in the 20th century
with the two world wars and set a phobia.
We cannot use those excuses to justify
an open border policy now, we just can't.
That concept itself inherently wrong, surely.
- I agree, that's why I wouldn't make that argument.
For me, it's not about guilt, it about responsibility.
- But why are Germans more inherently responsible than
say the Turks, Turkey or Lenanon,
or Jordan or places like that.
I think it's an ethical responsibility,
not just a historical one.
Although I do think they are linked.
And one is those who have more should do more,
because they have more.
Do I think that the United States, or the UK,
should play a larger role, yes.
Partly because of the historical record, to be sure.
But also, because there are more resources,
because there's more space,
and they have a more direct impact on policy.
- What is the problem with calling somebody
illegal or an alien?
- For me it's, there's a philosophical argument.
I think, the idea of the nation's state
itself is very problematic.
And when we refer to people as legal versus illegal?
And alien, and all these sorts of languages,
it reinforces something that I think that we should be
profitizing and that is the idea
of the nations state itself.
The other thing often times,
is that when it comes to the question of refugees,
it's very easy to loose sight of their humanity.
It's very easy to loose sight of their identity as people.
And when you begin to refer to people as alien,
which for people doesn't necessarily speak to the most
literal meaning of the term,
but rather literally something foreign.
Something outside of our social universe,
and our social sphere.
When we refer to people as illegals as opposed to humans,
it becomes very easy to deploy policies,
and actions against them that are unconscionable.
It's easy to throw them away, they become nobody.
- Now you talk a lot about nobodies, in your work.
What is a nobody, who's a nobody?
- I use the word nobody in my work to talk about
people who have been rendered marginal,
or disposable by society.
The way that they get treated through
the criminal justice system.
Through the way we police.
Through the educational processes that we undergo.
And even through, well the refugee crisis.
There are certain people whose lives simply aren't
assigned the same value as others.
And they get rendered as nobody.
And in our society, when people are rendered nobody,
we don't have to invest in them.
We can just throw them away.
You know, why give someone drug treatment,
if we can put them in a prison?
Why invest in schools,
if we can just say we have a dropout problem.
And we let them fend for themselves on the street.
This way of framing people,
really speaks to the moment we're in in the 21st century.
Language is key.
Again, the use of particular terms
can spotlight someone's humanity,
their worthiness, the need to invest in them,
or it can make them disposable.
And so it's very important for us to use language
that is humanizing and that invokes possibility.
- How important and crucial,
is the role of the media when it come to framing
incredibly important and seismic debates, like for example,
the Black Lives Matter movement, or the refugee crisis.
- It tells us what stories matter,
and what stories don't.
Just by what gets covered.
We have sense of whose life is worth covering.
And then within the coverage,
it helps us understand the terms of debate.
We can decide what's worth fighting for and what's not.
What's changeable and what's not.
The media framing, in many ways limits,
it can expand possibilities,
but it often limits possibilities,
for how we can understand something.
- The politicization of refugees,
like the top lines you read in tabloid newspapers,
or in social commentaries, or on cable news.
That politicization of the refugee crisis,
I has a lot of effects,
and I just wanted to get your thoughts on what that was.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of effects because
it makes them a political football,
rather than a site of investment.
And a site of urgency, at the humanitarian level.
It becomes a question of, well,
Donald Trump's against it so I have to be for it.
And when we frame things in that way,
as political issues rather than substance of human issues,
I think it gets into very dangerous territory,
because often times the choices the choices we're making
about whether or not to embrace a policy or not,
aren't informed by the economic or social
or cultural climate but by a very particular agenda,
in a nation state.
And that can't be the driving force anymore.
- One of the things that I find really interesting,
in the work that you've done
on the otherness that you speak a lot about,
is this idea of linking violence, intolerance,
otherness to specific groups.
And that language seems to be pervasive,
so whether we're talking about,
Nigerian economic migrants coming to Europe.
Or Syrians, or my home country Afghanistan,
people coming to us new.
Or Salvadorians, Venezuelans coming into America.
They all seem to be intolerant,
have a completely different way of life to us,
and are violent, and almost the same language
is used when we're talking about Black Lives Matter.
Or momentum or progressive groups.
Where is this coming from and how do we battle that?
- I think there's two things,
it think one there is a deeply rooted fear of otherness.
Of black and brown people in particular.
Other kinds of otherness matter too,
like muslimness even if you're a white muslim.
Right, there's still something about that thing.
But I would argue it's because they're linking you
to black and brown people.
- Right.
- And I think there's a deep seeded fear of that.
And so that fear almost makes it impossible
to see our humanity.
And so whether it's a movement that asserts that
black lives matter, something which shouldn't not
be really that controversial.
Black lives matter, right?
Or whether it's a social policy,
that says we need to provide food
to people who are hungry,
or shelter to people who are homeless.
Because we have it.
Becomes something that people just aren't easy with
because they want to know what's next.
But I think there's broader, more over arching
problem with white supremacy.
And I think people want to hold on to whiteness.
There's a wonderful book, classic book written in 1935
by W.E.B. Dubois.
And he's talking about the reconstruction period
after slavery, and he asks the question,
why would a white worker not want to end slavery?
If you're a white worker,
you should want slavery to end too.
Because if there's a slave then clearly
you're never gonna get the right wage,
because of someone who's doing it for nothing.
Unfortunately, he said the white worker
sides with the planter,
the bosses, the managerial class.
He said not because it makes economic sense,
but because they accumulate what he called
the physic wages of whiteness.
Almost whiteness is a kind of property.
I wanna hold on to whiteness and close ranks around that,
rather than my own economic interests.
If you can get people to do that during slavery,
if you can get people to do that
when they vote Bush or Trump.
If you can get people to constantly imagine that their lot
is should be cast with their race,
rather than their actual material realities,
you can get people to do anything.
And that's where we are right now.
- Marc Lamont Hill thank you so much for joining us.
- It's a pleasure.
(giggles)