Betsy Leondar Wright – Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas
Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Two questions that seem simple on their face, but which invite a host of tangled responses. In this book, Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright offer a new way of understanding how inequalities persist by focusing on the individual judgment calls that lead us to decide what’s racist, what’s sexist, and what’s not. Racism and sexism often seem like optical illusions—with some people sure they see them and others sure they’re not there—but the lines that most consistently divide our decisions might surprise you. Indeed, white people’s views of what’s racist and sexist are increasingly up for grabs. As the largest racial group in the country and the group that occupies the most and the highest positions of power, what they decide is racist and sexist helps determine the contours of inequality. By asking white people—Southerners and Northerners, Republicans and Democrats, working-class and professional-middle-class, men and women—to decide whether specific interactions and institutions are racist, sexist, or not, Streib and Leondar-Wrighttake us on a journey through the decision-making processes of white people in America. By presenting them with a variety of scenarios, the authors are able to distinguish the responses as being characteristic of different patterns of reasoning. They produce a framework for understanding these patterns that invites us all to engage with each other in a new way, even on topics that might divide us. Although this is scholarly book, Betsy Leondar Wright’s warm personality fashions a conversation that is both enjoyable and memorable.
Carol Leonnig – I Alone Can Fix It – Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year
In the second half of the show we go back to an important conversation from July, 2021. The PR people at Penguin Books invited me to talk about, I Alone Can Fix It – Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. My initial reaction was, Oh, no! Not anther book about him! After five years, haven’t we exhausted that conversation? Then I was told the authors were Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, their earlier book was A Very Stable Genius, that was more than enough information to confirm this was a book we had to talk about. The acclaimed Washington Post reporters pull back the curtain on the handling of Covid-19, the re-election bid and its chaotic and violent aftermath. They tell the true story of what took place in Donald Trump’s White House during a disastrous 2020. What was really going on around the president, as the government failed to contain the coronavirus and over half a million Americans perished? Affable and informative Carol Leonnig answers my questions, including, “Who was influencing Trump after he refused to concede an election he had clearly lost and spread lies about election fraud?” and “Is there a real person behind the makeup and the hair?”.
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