2021-10-21 LIVE from NYPL The Crime Without A Name: Barrett Holmes Pitner with Lewis R. Gordon >> Soriya Chum: Hi there. My name is Soriya and I'm a part of the team that brings you LIVE from NYPL. Welcome, and thanks so much for joining us. I am so honored to introduce our speakers for today's program. With us, we have Barrett Holmes Pitner, a writer, filmmaker, and journalist who's written for The Daily Beast, The Guardian and elsewhere. Barrett is also the founder of The Sustainable Culture Lab. Joining Barrett in conversation is Dr. Lewis Gordon, a Professor and the Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. Lewis has written numerous books, including the forthcoming Fear of Black Consciousness, which comes out next year. Lewis will be speaking with Barrett about The Crime without A Name, Barrett's new book, which follows his journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. It's a fascinating blend of personal narrative and philosophical inquiry. And I can't wait for you to learn more about it in just a bit. You can borrow The Crime Without a Name for free with your NYPL library card. Or if you don't have a card quite yet, and you live in New York State, you can apply for one so that way you can check out the book. We're also selling the book online through the libraries shop. All proceeds go to benefit The New York Public Library. We'll be sharing the links to get the book in the chat. Those links can also be found on the event page at nypl.org/live. We have so many exciting programs coming up at LIVE from NYPL. Next Tuesday, National Book Foundation awarded authors join us to discuss the next chapter of the NYC living, writing, and reading. Also, next week, historian Alex von Tunzelmann joins us, and she will be discussing with Paul Farber, Director of The Monument Fund, the rise and fall of 12 controversial statues from around the world. We also have a conversation coming up on the future of New York after the mayoral election. And that's just a small sample of the many amazing programs that we have lined up. So we hope that you'll tune in again. These programs are made possible thanks to the generosity of folks like you. So please consider supporting the library however you can. Before I turn it over to tonight's speakers, a couple of housekeeping items I'd like to share. Firstly, the library values your privacy. So in the spirit of transparency, there are a couple of things we'd like for you to know even though the video and chat are on an NYPL.org page, they are hosted by YouTube. So, by participating in the chat, you might be sharing data about yourself which the library does not control. For more details, you can visit our FAQ page along with Google's privacy policy and the library's privacy policy, which can all be found on the event page. Barrett would be glad to answer your questions about his book. You can send them any time using the chat Google form or by emailing us at publicprograms@nypl.org. Barrett will get to as many questions as time allows at the end of the program. Real-time captions are available for tonight's program. You can click on the closed caption button or use a stream text link shared in the reminder email and chat for a live transcript. Now without further ado, I would love to welcome Barrett Holmes Pitner and Lewis Gordon to our virtual stage. >> Lewis Gordon: Ah, thank you very much. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. So I begin with wuneekeesuq. For those in the audience wondering what wuneekeesuq means, it's Wampanoag for hello or good day. And I'm in New England. And the very fact that I'm staying in New England connects to the thesis of this book, because we should think through the many communities that were massacred or taken away from here. Not far from me is King Philip's Drive. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Oh, wow. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah, which relates to your book in a variety of ways, but as we know, wuneekeesuq, there were the Wampanoags welcoming these people, the pilgrims, with wuneekeesuq, took care of them, treated them with hospitality, treated them as human beings. But unfortunately, as we know, the kindness was not reciprocated. I will add shalom, hotep, assalamu alaikum, and also to everybody it's just simply good evening and I hope you're all keeping safe and well. So to begin, I want to say mazel tov, congratulations to you Barrett for this wonderful book, but double congratulations, because you also have your first child. So I know for a point you probably were able to make the joke I used to make when my wife was pregnant, I would say everything is at press [brief laughter] so. But that said, let's kick things off with, I know not many people in the audience may have already know what the book is about. So before we get into the conversation with what we'd like to say, perhaps you'd like to say just very briefly what your book is about. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. So I'll be as brief as I can, because it's complicated and there's lots of nuances to what the book is about. But in a nutshell, it focuses on this word ethnocide; the word ethnocide means the destruction of culture while keeping people. The word was coined in 1944, by Raphael Lemkin who also coined the word genocide at the same time. His vision initially was that the words would be interchangeable. But over time, genocide became the word that we all know that has revolutionized the world and help make the world a safer place. And ethnocide was forgotten, largely forgotten. What I do with my book as I've applied this framework, this definition of ethnocide is destroying people's culture while keeping the people to the transatlantic slave trade, because that's explicitly what the objective of that was. And now this gives America and the colonized world a language to describe the particular type of atrocity that happened during the transatlantic slave trade and how the normalization and continuation of this atrocity into chattel slavery and the societal structures of our society has still, was like a foundational component of our society, and it still manifests in a multitude of ways in the present. >> Lewis Gordon: Well done. Well -- >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: I did my best. [ Laughter ] >> Lewis Gordon: Well, the first thing I like to say, I had to put my cards on the table, I love your book. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Thank you. >> Lewis Gordon: I really enjoyed your book. I joined your book to the point where I put down some notes, because I decided I'm going to write a piece on your book. And which is, you know, these days, you know, even though I tend to write a lot, I've been slowed up a little bit from, I already mentioned, long COVID. But nevertheless, it's one of these things where when a lot of people ask me about a book I just finished called Fear of Black Consciousness, which was already mentioned is coming out in January, when I'm asked why did you write this book, I said, because I'm sick and tired of all these misrepresentations of Black people in these issues. There is a kind of market, a kind of commodity, a kind of sale for the misrepresentations that create certain cliches. And not only that, there's just a profound level of damage or to put it bluntly, and I love that you put it bluntly in the book, lies, lies, lies. But you know, so when I saw your book, you know, I start to read it and I was like -- it moved me to the point where let me just read out loud just something that I just wrote. I wrote, "This is a refreshing text to read." So that already says a lot, doesn't it? >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. >> Lewis Gordon: It is a clearly stated thesis, is informative on every page and at no moment patronizes the reader. It is philosophically rich without being abstruse. And it is transdisciplinary. Let me explain what I mean by that, which is that you see, so many people are trying to show that they have a philosophical bona fides and whatever the disciplinary thing is that they're not talking to people, you know what I'm saying? And so there's a failure to communicate. And you don't do that. Its transdisciplinary, because you're not trying to prove what you are, you're trying to deal with the problem. And so you ended up bringing together history, journalism, law, linguistics, literature, philosophy, political economy, and sociology, and more. And additionally, given the focus on words, and words are important part about this book, I had expected at first for it to be -- its philosophical leanings to be primarily linguistics. But instead, I found a wonderful exemplification of ecumenical philosophy in which existentialism, in this case, Black existentialism, and its dialectical elements came to the fore. In short, I'm delighted to be able to add this book to my bibliography of Black existential writings and more to the studies I will conduct and teach in this area. So that's just me writing to myself, but I just thought, yeah, let me share it with you. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: I love that. I absolutely love it. And it means a lot because my degrees are in political science and journalism. And I've just always been a person who's been fascinated by philosophy, but didn't like the lanes, in many ways, like you had to be like pretty rigid in your disciplines. And so for years and years, I just read philosophy, just read, read, read, and it became how I talk and interact with people as I tried to be a better person at, you know, at an individual and hopefully collective level. And so to be able to put something out there philosophically, that's not a rigid and within like the construct of academia, I knew it was a risk. But this is how I see the world and navigate through it. And most of my friends are just regular people. You know, one of my best friends is a carpenter from Ohio and he calls me up and wants to know what happened in the news. And I have to talk about existentialism to him to explain various things. And so this is just how I kind of navigate. So I'm glad that someone of your stature really appreciates it. >> Lewis Gordon: And look, it may sound a little bad for me to say this, but I said it publicly in other contexts, most professional philosophers are not philosophers in a nutshell. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. >> Lewis Gordon: And that's because -- >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Go ahead. Go ahead. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah, professional scholars, they don't do philosophy, you know? Philosophy speaks to the world. It communicates with people. Philosophy is above all committed to truth and reality. And that connects to your book in a variety of ways. So I was going to read another point I said, and I figure you might want to say something about it. The organizing theme or word of the book, as you just mentioned, is ethnocide, right, coined by Raphael Lemkin, who also coined genocide. Now, we've benefited greatly from Lemkin's refusal to accept the official legal position of his times, right, and the slaughtering of Armenians. And this is very important, right? Because I mean, here is this Polish Jewish man, and he's dealing with an issue about -- he's studying law and the official position in law, international law at the time, right. When he's talking about the slaughtering of Armenians in Turkey is that under international laws of sovereignty, a country could do whatever it pleases to its people. You know, and, and a lot of people don't really get it. Today, we speak like people always were outraged about genocide, knew about it. But in a way, talking about Lemkin brings right to the force the importance of language, because you know what I mean, there's a way today we talk about genocide. So maybe you want to riff on that. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Well, I'd say one of the things that most people that I interact with talk about are aware of genocide. They imagine that this word has been around for a really long time. And when I found out through my research and work, trying to create this word ethnocide, that it was created in 1944, I remember that kind of like blowing my mind at the time. Where and that made me think of the power of language, where when you know, when you learn a new word, you start applying that word to times that existed before that word existed. And so like, the Armenian genocide is a great example, because when that slaughter happened, the word genocide didn't exist. So they called it something completely different. There was the whole bunch, you know, it was just, you know, something that the Turkish, that the Ottomans could do. It was just normal life. That's how you could exist. And there wasn't a word that existed that could say that that was bad. And so for him to be able to tell people that what happened to the Armenians, but also what was happening to the Jewish people during World War II, he recognized a linguistic vacuum. And that vacuum was just in like the everyday discourse, because he, as an immigrant to the U.S., as he fled the Nazis, he was talking to politicians and military officials. So he had to have a word that resonated with them, but also the lawyer, he needed to have a word that could work with like the language of the law, not even just domestic law, but international law. And so Lemkin is a fascinating fellow, because he spoke so many languages. He had traveled the world. So he understood the impact of language. And so then he created the word genocide and then ethnocide. And now we apply the word genocide to events that happened before the word was invented. And so now we call it the Armenian genocide, because Lemkin created that word 20 some odd years later. And like, that's just a wild thing that we need to think about when we examine the impact, the importance of language. And so when it comes to ethnocide, we have a word, I feel that we can define something that happened, started hundreds of years ago and manifestations of it still happened today. And we now have the power to use that word to describe these eras in time. But at the same time, we should make sure that we remember that the people at that time didn't have the language. And what they probably had was the language to say that this atrocity was a totally acceptable, good thing. And that's something we really need to be aware of when we think about the impact of words and how words can change society in a dramatic fashion. And so that's in many ways what the book is about. And at the same time, when you recognize that your society lacks the language to discuss a foundational component of the society, that is going to indicate that you may need a whole plethora of words to then articulate the new direction you're trying to do that's counter to what you've always done, because there wasn't a need no one, or no one recognized the need to make the language to counter a destructive norm. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. You know, one of the cool things I wanted -- there's so many elements about this book that I loved, but one of the things I love about this book is connected to what I said earlier, because you're not trying to prove yourself as being located in a philosophical camp or school. That gives you room. You're part of a tradition actually of writers like all the way back, not only Fanon, Fenan [assumed spelling], all the way through Du Bois, many others, Anna Julia Cooper, where the cause of your concern for the problem, and you're bringing all these resources to it. You're also inventing some rather interesting things. So I'll give an example of what I mean, right? We're talking about words; we're talking about language, right? But your analysis also brings out how certain approaches to the study of language and words are in league with ethnocide, right? So, for instance, the dominant American approach and philosophy is Anglo-analytical philosophy. Now, think about that. It's called Anglo-analytical philosophy, right? And that carries with it the baggage in which it tends to be very nominalist or very reductive with words. Its approach, in other words, mirrors the kind of isolated individualism you talk about or the atomism? >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yep. >> Lewis Gordon: But the opposite of this is a relational community-based social approach to language, right, and words. In other words, you're, in this text, really interested in the communicability of words, right? And the communicability is key, because the communicability, once you're talking about communication, communicability, there must be an "other," you see what I'm saying? Not "other" in a sense of degraded, but another human being. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yep. >> Lewis Gordon: And once we begin to think in those terms, one of the things that really struck me, right, is that you do it, but you also bring it out in the existential relationship to language and words, and you point out their social situatedness, their communicability, their practice, and their capacity to build or destroy sociality. So there is power in words, power to empower, but also power to disempower. And so in a way, tell me if I'm off. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: No, you're right on the money. I know how I look at it from my, like, you know, individual -- not individual, but my own perspective, because I'm just articulating how I've navigated and seeing things in a way that I think can help other people. So it's not about me. Like, I didn't write this book so that I can feel like I'm special or people say that I'm special. Like this book exists because I hope it helps other people. You know, I'm just me. But when it comes to language, you've realized -- like, as I'm talking, my hands are going all over the place, but I'm not saying in my brain, move your hands like this. So at a personal level, I don't need like an excess of language to do things I can feel, I can know my intent. And so language is fun, but when I started having conversations in my head about something, that's anticipating that I'm going to have a conversation with another person. And if that person is say a good friend, I also know that that person, even if I say something that's not precise, they'll say, "I know Barrett, I know what he meant to say." And I get some leeway with how accurate I need to be. But as I talk to more and more people, there's a required precision and what I say. And this speaks about the importance of language, where I don't need language to talk to myself. I need language to talk to other people so that we can hopefully see the same thing, or they can understand what I'm seeing or what I'm saying or what I've experienced. And that's why language is so vital. And if you live in a divided society, such as an ethnocidal one like the U.S., then it becomes a linguistic battle where the "other" is not an "other" that you're trying to communicate with, it's an "other" that you're trying to exploit or dehumanize for some sort of monetary or, you know, status gain. Therefore, the discourse that we encourage is not one about communicating. It's one about power dynamics and manipulating words in order to stay on top and not creating like a discourse, a conversation based on good faith and the authenticity of the language in which you speak. And so this book, in many ways, was me finding the best way I could to articulate what I communicate to myself that didn't require language to communicate that. But now when I try to communicate it to other people, it became pretty evident that American English lacked those words. So I had to go to other places to find those words. And then the word ethnocide articulated, why those words didn't exist, because when you live in a divided society, there is no emphasis on creating a language for you to equitably communicate to people because that would destroy the social fabric of this perpetual division and exploitation. >> Lewis Gordon: Sure. In fact, one of the things I love in the book is that you do specify, you say American English. Many people in the U.S. don't realize that there is a thing called American English versus Canadian English versus South African English versus Australian English. But it's a lot connected to it like the point I just made about those philosophers, they believe that they're completely separate of their environment. And they don't realize that just as American English has, in its production, certain conceptions of who counts as people and who does not, their deployment of it as a form of universal language or an intrinsically legitimate one produces some of those problems. But one of the things I want to do is get into some of the conversations of some of the fun down, and as we say, roll-up our sleeves stuff, that's in the book. Okay? >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: All right. >> Lewis Gordon: So one of the things that, for instance, you know, in the book, there's something you say that again, one of the things you do that's wonderful is you don't have an analogical other, you're talking to real others. And one of the things that is rather interesting is that you're also dealing with their capacity to evade reality. In fact, when many people ask me, because I do a lot of things, I say, what's your work about? I say, oh, I look at human beings' relationship to reality and the unfortunate ways they have -- they've been deploying or evading it. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. [ Laughter ] >> Lewis Gordon: And so one of the things is what's interesting is, you know, this notion of pristine intent. And I love the quote in reference to George W. Bush on page 46, where, I mean, it's not his quote, this is yours. You said, you just put it right out there, good intent does not make a good person, right? And you know, and we should bear in mind that neither Bush, Rumsfeld, or Cheney, ever admitted wrongdoing, right? And they never apologized for the destruction they produced. And similarly, we've seen a repeat; neither has Trump and his cohorts. And you state this well on pages 75 to 76 in which Trump is lying is actually emblematic of his very supposedly American authenticity. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, 100%. So you know, I guess to -- so I went to college in Greenville, South Carolina, and I grew up around conservatives most of my life. And I talk about this in the book. And so the amount of conservatives I grew up with were very, very nice people. And then at some point you started having a serious conversation and you find out that like, if their ideas were acted upon, my life would be worse, but I know that they don't have the desire to make my life worse. They just have beliefs that they think are good and they are completely disconnected from the impact of their actions. That's just not a thing that is you know, if it goes wrong, it's because like some mistake happened along the way, but like foundationally, the idea is sound. And so when George Bush became president, you know, there was a person, you could see, I genuinely believe he woke up and wanted to do what he thought was good for America as a whole. I don't think he tried to be a selfish person that only cared about himself or whatever. But his philosophy, how he saw the world and the way in which he thought he could make good in the world was a total disaster. And we all could predict that it would be, just based on the principles. So he's a bad person, but he didn't have bad intent. He just did bad things. And most people, if you do bad things that makes you a bad person. But in America, we try to have this discourse where like, you're bad if you have bad intent and we judge people, whether they're good or bad, completely disconnected from reality. We judge them being good or bad based on our perception of why they did their actions. So we perceive that we think this person had good intent, he is a good person. If we perceive that somebody else had bad intent, they're a bad person. And as African American in the South, people would perceive me and just add bad intent to almost anything I would do. And I know that's completely arbitrary and disconnected from reality. And that's so much of our society. And that's, you know, if you have to come up with justifications to divide people and sustain division and exploit people, you're going to have these types of ideas where the people who are harming other people, encourage everyone to have a logic that allows them to be irresponsible and not punished for doing wrong things. And you know, this is what happens with George W. Bush. And if you look at Donald Trump, the fact that he can get away with lying emboldens his base, because they also want to become empowered and capable of being irresponsible in perpetuity. They want to be able to lie their way to the top and not get punished, because people have some sort of desire to not want to see them get punished, or they want to have a desire to envision that they wanted to do good and we should judge them based on how we perceive they perceived their actions, opposed to what their actual actions were and the impact on reality and -- >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah, no, I mean, that's it. But there's this additional thing that, I mean, you didn't put it in these terms, but your analysis leads to it. You see, because you see, even though Bush may claim good intent, a lot of these people may claim good intent, you point out though an interesting logic in the very notion of how they use American. And that logic, right, has implicit in it several things. The logic has something that would make you and me intrinsically illicit. In other words, we are a kind of illegal or wrong appearance. But the second thing that's in there that is rather striking is that part of whiteness is a form of license. Okay? And by that, in other words, the philosophical view license is different from say freedom, because license requires the ability to be able to act without responsibility. You could do whatever you want. And that comes out in the book in a rather powerful way, because having the license card, in other words, the more Trump can transgress, the more he is sub-textually saying claim real whiteness. In other words, real whiteness is to be able to do whatever you hell you want. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yep. And in the book I use the Hegel's master-slave dialectic to articulate this dynamic of American life, where clearly this language is easy to like apply to the chattel slavery, you know, racial divisions, inequality of ethnocide and the foundation of America. You know, we have that. And so with Hegel, the master slave dialectic, there's a master and a slave. And the dynamic is that the master is, when everything goes right, he's the smartest. When everything goes wrong, it's the slave's fault. So the master has all the power and none of the responsibility. The slave, they have to do all the work. So if everything goes great, the master is a genius and the slave, you know, it's irrelevant. When everything goes wrong, the slave is lazy. And so they have all of the responsibility and none of the power. And so in the Hegelian dialectic, he theorized that over time, due to the fact that the enslaved person has to -- you know, it could be European surf, you know, a subjugated person has to engage in work. They have to do things, whether they like it or not. It forces them to get an awareness of themselves, an acute awareness of the environment in which they live, how much they dislike and what they are capable of withstanding and doing. And in doing so they become stronger. They become more aware, more capable than the master whose existence is dependent on the slave being good at work. And so -- >> Lewis Gordon: And no, I was just saying, and you do this really beautifully in your discussion of Waiting for Godot. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Oh yeah. >> Lewis Gordon: What's interesting is there's so much discussion of this play, but you remind people, yo, yo, yo, there's a character called Lucky. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. Everyone forgets about that Lucky exists, which is so ethnocidal. It just speaks to like the dynamic of even when we get European or any sort of information, there's like an unspoken whitewashing where the emphasis is on the dilemmas of the White or, you know, the empowered characters. There's, you know, not clearly like races in Waiting for Godot, and no one focuses on Lucky. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: And Lucky is the enslaved person of Pozzo. And also this is fascinating. A lot of people call Pozzo Patso [phonetic], but in waiting for Godot, as Vladimir and Estragon are learning their names, I believe its Vladimir says when Pozzo is saying his name, Vladimir responds, "Bozo?" And he's like, "No, Pozzo." And so like, clearly there's a joke in there that Beckett put in there that this guy is a bozo, and that his name rhymes with bozo, because he went in and said botso [phonetic] like a botso is not a thing. And so even in our understanding of Pozzo, our language distances him from being a bozo, even though like it's in the play that it's like indistinguishable, like it's one word off between him being a bozo, which is another example of like the just unspoken whitewashing of this play that's regarded as one of the best in the 20th and 21st century, you know. And so anyways, Lucky is the enslaved person in the play. And you know, one of the pinnacle moments of the play is when Lucky has the opportunity to speak. And when he speaks, he utters gibberish. They're not sentences, they're just random utterances of stuff maybe that if you, you know, overheard people speaking and tried to formulate sentences, it would look like this. But the importance is, is that those words mattered to him. Pozzo, Vladimir, and Estragon wrestled him to the ground and forced him to stop thinking and stop speaking. And the fact that it required a fight shows that his words mattered. And the fact that we don't understand the words of the oppressed is like an indictment on our society. And that's part of what that's saying. And I think this is the dynamic of many African Americans and many Black people within the colonized world, in that we have to fight for the opportunity to speak our truth. And when we do it, there's a high likelihood that they won't understand what we're saying. But the fact that we're saying anything is going to encourage a lot of people to try to stop us from talking. And that's something we have to surmount, and it's very much like a Sisyphean struggle. [ Laughter ] >> Lewis Gordon: But you also bring up in effect an interesting critique of the dialectics of recognition, because you see the thing is so long as it's a question of appearing in a way that's licit to them, his gibberish. But of course, as you point out beautifully in the book, when we speak to each other, when -- >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: But there's that. >> Lewis Gordon: Your book is a wonderful critique of the Afro pessimists, actually, because ultimately Black life exists among black people all the time. But if we set as the condition of our existence, appearance to White people, then all is lost, because literally, Lucky has a rope on his neck, he's in a deuce. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Mm-hmm, all the time. >> Lewis Gordon: And there are people who talk about Godot and don't talk about Lucky. But it's a question, a curious question that came to me in the analysis of Waiting for Godot. This gives us an opportunity to talk about it. It's a play with a bunch of dudes. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. >> Lewis Gordon: What would happen if it were either women, or it was a mixture of males, and let's just say, anatomically males and females? The reason I would say that because I don't want to presuppose that they have to be gendered in a conservative way. It's interesting what that would do because you see meaning and so forth will shift from the simple question of meeting, into other questions of whether to procreate or not, whether to continue beyond that generation. And I was curious of your thought about that, what would females bring into this story? >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: So I guess the answer is like for Beckett, he didn't give anyone an answer about what this means and why they're acting in a particular way. You know, the fact that it's all men, if we changed it to all women or made it like, you know gender diverse, you could have the exact same people. It's just that I think the audience might derive a different meaning from the same actions. Like, I thought about that if we mess with the racial dynamics of it, what would people think then? You know, there might be -- if we change the racial dynamics and Lucky was a White person and everybody else was a Black person, the complete perception of the play could be completely different. People might really think it's a horrible, horrible play that needs to be banned and never taught again. Like, that's -- and it could be the exact same lines, the exact same thing. And so you know, I think that the point of that play is it's just a mirror on the absurdity of modern life and the brushing over inequalities and the pursuit of nothing while perceiving that nothing to be everything, while you actually do nothing. And that means different things to different people as the viewer, but it's perfectly likely that someone, regardless of gender or race or religion, would be exactly the same, because we're only looking at them for two days. So on the third day, maybe it might be something that happens to do with the procreation, but the plane never gets there. Maybe on day three, you know, Vladimir gets bored and kills Estragon there's like, there you go. We don't know. It's only two days. >> Lewis Gordon: Well, what's great about it, of course, is that you bring in the analysis of existentialism and the whole question of the forms of commitment to meaning that ultimately, in other words, that that would require a form of performance through which meaning is actually made. We're going to have the other members of the audience bringing questions too, but I just want to just make some remarks and then you can talk and we go into the audience. But I was curious, because we're in an age of neo and postmodern fascism, not only with Trump and the GOP, but it's mirrored in many other countries as well, that are not American. And your analysis is about what is specifically American ethnocide, right? So this raises some questions about whether those countries lack the proper language too. The other thing that struck me is to what extent is this problem of function, of a rise of Euro modern colonialism of which America is a species. And I raised this, because of your great analysis of [foreign language], which is the Dutch term, right? And we're only here for an hour, so we can't get to all the details [brief laughter]. But the thing that struck me about it, right, a lot of people don't know this, is that the Scandinavian states and all the way through to the Dutch had vast empires. They were the ones running the slave trade, and the Brits were basically pirates who took it from them. And that's why there's a New Zealand, which, you know -- or why there was a South Africa. They were doing all these things. But in an interesting way, and this is what I'm thinking, what's interesting is losing their empire enabled an opportunity for the Dutch to actually be more creative on how to become in effect. And you have great statistical data on this of much better society of people. You know, in other words, the United States is a country in which the attitude is if the United States is not dominating the world with his ethnocidal activity, it's the end of the world. But what every other country knows is life goes on after colonialism. Life goes on after all of this stuff. Okay? I love your discussion of Toulouse [inaudible]. I'm also a professor -- I was professor of euro-philosophy at Toulouse, so I know exactly about the stuff you're talking about Toulouse. But again, the audience, it will take too long; they wouldn't know what we're talking about. So that's why you and I have to continue the conversation. [ Multiple Speakers ] >> Lewis Gordon: But one of the things that is very crucial is how you use [foreign language], right, the German term. And, you know the killing of -- because yeah, it's very difficult to explain to people in English what Geist [phonetic] is. But there's a lot we can talk about there. But the main thing, the main thing is that there is -- what a lot of people want is eat their cake and have it too. They want to know if they could become better but maintain the colonial language. But I think the Dutch example gives a clue that you can't get better maintaining colonial language. You have to lose it. It has to be taken from you. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yep. So I guess what I'd say for the Dutch and for Europe as a whole is every European country that had access to water, tried to engage in colonization at some point. And at various degrees, they've recognized the error of their ways. I'd say, I think that's, you know, and that recognizing it many times is due to like losing battles and having to confront defeat and whatnot. But the Dutch are a great example in that geographically, the precarious environment that is the Netherlands required them to have a very efficient way of using their land, because they could see a future where it disappeared. So they couldn't waste anything. They had to be very efficient. It's essentially that they've had an existential crisis for about a thousand years, because the North Sea could wipe them away. So like, what we have right now is we think about climate change and how it could wipe everything off, the Dutch, due to being in a swamp essentially, have had these thoughts since like a thousand, you know, for about a thousand years. That's really profound. And it means that they have like a plethora of languages, of words that encourage them to work communally to sustain their environment, because they know how imperative it is. Where they get complacent, a storm could come and kill thousands of people. I think that attachment to place and like an awareness of where you are and the need to preserve and sustain your environment is key. And real quick, before we go to the people, the word [foreign language], I actually coined that word. Most of the words in this book that I coined, I let people know, but [foreign language], I left that like a little secret, because German is such a constructive language that when you talk to German people, they just encourage you to put a word together and just see if people accept it, if it makes sense. And if it does, then that becomes a word. It's not as, you know -- there's not a stigma like there is an English word it's like, who gave you the authority to do that, and you had to explain yourself. With German it's, if this makes sense, you put it together, we got it, that's a word. And so I didn't feel the need to tell people, I made that word, but [foreign language] the destruction of soul. And when you kill people's culture, you are killing the soul of the people. And that soul is also the intelligence, the mind, the spirit, its complex. And [foreign language] speaks to how ethnocide, for the longest time, has tried to kill the soul of people of color. And that's why so many times when people of color make things, we use the word soul to articulate our empowerment. Our food has soul in it. Our music has soul in it. The things we do have soul in it. So we've always, without the awareness, have cultivated a language for countering the [foreign language] that has been inflicted upon us for hundreds of years. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. [ Foreign Language ] I really love the word. And one of the reasons that -- you know what -- >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, we got people ask questions, I believe, if they're questions. We have -- >> Lewis Gordon: They said not yet. But one of the things that's great about that, that's what I meant when I said that you have a great a great juxtaposition to the kind of upper pessimists line, because you see, what you point out when you say that part about soul and about Geist is that Black life is about life. It's not about death. We face death, but even when you read Douglas, I mean, Douglas said it beautifully in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglas. He said, you know, the enslavers were terrified of graveyards, because ultimately their logic, their logic was such as they know that their actions were not redeemable. And there's a way, in other words, that they were not about life. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: You know, I guess the key thing, and this is why I think the Dutch provide a great foundation, this is why I connected it, is like they're a culture of people who had to stare death in the face. That death just came from the environment itself. And having to confront that allowed them to create a pretty unique culture in Europe that in many ways has been one of the more enlightening, you know, like the Northern Renaissance in many ways, emanated from the Netherlands. And as people of color, we've had to confront that specter of death that comes from ethnocide and oppressive people with a White essence. But that doesn't define us. What defines us is the desire to strive and live and try to transcend the specter, the looming specter of death. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah, I was so delighted that you went there. Whenever I give my lectures on existentialism, I often talk about, for instance, in Denmark that, you know, it's a similar thing about dealing with the North Sea and Sweden, et cetera. But we have a question. The question is, what do you think are some ways to prevent ethnocide? And are there good examples of these countermeasures working? >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. So I talk about this near the end of the book, because once you recognize how prevalent ethnocide is, you have to give people hope and some structures on how they can counter that and, you know, proactively live good lives. And so the term I use is ethnogenesis, or cultural-naissance, where you have to birth culture. If you live in a place that works to kill culture, you have to actually do stuff that creates or births culture. And a good example that I use is the Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, where this was an indigenous practice that for thousands of years, indigenous people in the Americas have been remembering their departed ancestors and using this as something that strengthens their culture and sustains their culture year after year, where death isn't something that you fear per se, but it's something that you remember the people who were gone, who have left so that you can use their spirit, their Geist, to empower you in the future to birth and create culture. Now, a key thing here is you look at an ethnocidal place like the U.S. we don't have traditions like that. There's no narrative for that. And the indigenous practices of Africans that were similar to that have been destroyed, because there's a desire to destroy that culture. And so what I've been doing, and I actually have a festival called the Altars Festival that will happen on October 29th, where I get a diverse array of Americans to make altars so that we can create a new shared culture where we can collectively remember that diverse histories of all of the people that we interact with, because it's so common that you will interact with someone who is Asian, or, you know, from various parts of Asia, African, European, indigenous. And there'll be your friend, but you won't know the history and the culture that has enriched them and made them who they are today. And this practice of having to make altars to cope with the trauma of some of that erasure, but also to celebrate the culture itself, actually enriches everyone who participates in it. And if you do it in a diverse way, that can help create a new culture, create a new equitable culture that America has long strive to have. And so that's one example, but a key thing here is if you have the right words, it makes it easy for you to imagine new actions that you can take to transcend the problematic norm, that you didn't have the language to precisely say why it was problematic. And so with language and philosophy, if you give people the right words and the right philosophical foundation, you also empower people to have a better chance at envisioning how to make a better future. So the goal of the book isn't for me to give people a precise rubric of like you do one, two, three, four and this is how everything gets better. It's if you know how to say the right things, and think the right things, and articulate precisely why things are wrong, it makes it easier for people to come up with ideas that were previously inconceivable to consistently make things better. And that's the idea. And so like this Altars Festival that we do, it's an annual, and we do it every single year. And collectively, that will hopefully make society better. But people that participate with it, they always come with an idea that I didn't come up with, because they get the philosophy, they get the language, and they get to apply wisdom and knowledge that I didn't have. And now we collectively make stuff that's even better than I imagined. >> Lewis Gordon: Well, you know, that question also brings up another element of your argument; because you do point out that there is a symbiotic relationship between whiteness and ethnocidal activity. And what that is, is that the logic of whiteness is supposed to be the sloughing off or the getting rid of culture actually in order to become part of this economy that actually puts a profit before people. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Right. >> Lewis Gordon: And so there are a lot of people who say, you know, they want to become White. But the problem with that is that -- but you point out that White isn't actually a culture. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Great. >> Lewis Gordon: And so yeah. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. So, you know, this is one of the things we -- if you start and examine our language, you recognize the meaninglessness of a lot of the words that we use that we envision have a particular meeting that doesn't exist. And so when you think of most people throughout the world, the identity, the name they use to define themselves in their community has an attachment to place. You know, like a Swedish person is from an area that they call Sweden, and the culture that they have, and the language they speak comes from that place. You know, China, the list continues just everywhere. White isn't a place. White is an idea that people, when they left Europe, came up with so that they could sustain a European way of life while they are not in Europe at all and so the threat to their whiteness became everything around them, including the people that they forcibly brought from Africa. And so if you can't have a culture where people are collectively working together in a shared place, and that place defines the people, and instead you have a dynamic where one group of people say we're going to live in this place and just exploit anything and everything around it for profit, so that we can sustain a European appearance, that's the opposite of what we've considered culture to be. And it's perverse in that in America we use that as the word for culture. And so this creates a really troubling dynamic, where we have a word that basically means bad, but the word we use to say bad, that word is called good. You know, like the opposite of culture, we call it culture. And then people, unbeknownst to themselves, engage in doing bad things as they try to become good people. And that's a problem, but -- >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. It's great how you do that to the analysis of bad faith or [foreign language]. But we're running short of time, but that would be another conversation. But for the listeners, the philosophical view of it is not a lie to others. It's lying to yourself. And a lot of, unfortunately, the way White America sees its legitimacy is based on lies. I mean, the truth of the matter is, and it is a form of -- surprisingly, you talked about narcissism, but it's a narcissistic rage to keep whiteness, but there's a question about -- >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: And that's why Trump can rise to the top, because if a culture in many ways is based on lies and enriching yourself from believing a lie and professing lies to see someone like him, lie his way to the White House, that's empowering for so many people who this ethnocidal White identity is what empowers them, not an identity of like equitably sharing and meeting people and, you know, embracing just like existence. You know, that's how he can rise to the top. But I think we have one more question. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. The question is, are there certain events that inspired you to introduce this new word? What made you write this book? Also with this new word, what are you trying to achieve? >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: So great question. I say the first impetus was I became an opinion writer at The Daily Beast, and I would write columns and I would try to talk about race and culture from my perspective. And I could see that people would like my articles, but they weren't getting like the complex idea that I was trying to articulate. And so this was perplexing. And so through a series of columns, I would try to say the same thing in different ways to see which resonated, because that's the job of a writer, to see what resonates with the audience while still being true to what you're trying to say. And after months, and months, and months, it never clicked. And at some point, I was like; I can't find the right words. Maybe the right word doesn't exist. Maybe I should see if I can make it. And so I then spent a good chunk of time looking at Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes to try to put together a word that conveyed what I felt, I had been trying to say for months. And that word was ethnocide. And then, you know, the floodgates kind of opened from there. You find Lemkin, you tell people and they say, well, ethnocide, this is a great word, but now I'm sad, because I see it everywhere and I feel bad. What's the word that exists to counter that? Oh I need to have this word. And next you know, people would have all these questions about ethnocide and I felt an obligation to make sure I could answer these questions to the best of my ability. And that brought in a lot of existential ideas and stuff that I was already familiar with. And so that's kind of how it came into be. It was more like me trying to just articulate inequalities and how I saw America's division, where I didn't see it along the racial divide, because I grew up -- like, there's a great part in this book at the end of the prologue, where I say I grew up with a lot of White friends and they were great people. And I'm still friends with a lot of them to this day. But there'd always be that moment where they'd say something like, "Barrett, you're White like us," and I would cringe at that, because I'm not White like them. And I have no desire to be White like them. I'm Black, and you're White, and we should be able to be friends. And I shouldn't accept and shouldn't be me becoming like you. Acceptance should be me being me, and you being you, and we're people. But they didn't have the language to compliment their Black friend. They really wanted to say that I was a great person, and the language they had to say that I was a great person, was erasing my blackness and bestowing whiteness upon me. And that's a very profound problem, where people don't have the words to give people of color compliments when they want to, and when you know that they're a good person. And so that's part of it, where I saw it as a cultural problem, because these people were of the White race, that color didn't make them good or bad, but the culture never gave them the language to adequately say how much they appreciated their Black friend. And that's a pretty profound problem. >> Lewis Gordon: We have a third question and we only have three minutes, so I'll just read it and then we will end. I was wondering, the question is, I was wondering if you connect ethnocide to conspiratorial movements, that is, QAnon, in the book, or think it would apply well. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: So no, I don't spend a lot of time talking about QAnon in the book. I do spend a decent amount time talking about Donald Trump and the impact that that Trump has. He has a clear -- like a Frankenstein's monster of ethnocide, where it's like almost cartoonish how ethnocidal he is in every way. And so you can see how QAnon would derive from that. But essentially if there's a mass of people who are trying to empower themselves and control society by making lies the narrative, then QAnon clearly fits into that mix. And Trump showed the prevalence of that and how America is really susceptible to lies being the norm. And we don't have the language to articulate how problematic that is or to devise counters to it, to prevent it from happening. >> Lewis Gordon: Great. You also just, just very briefly, also point out the dangerous of what happens when a society makes essence proceed existence. Because you point out also it's to a point where there's such an attachment to an essence that it could lead to the jeopardizing of life, as we're seeing. You know, a year ago, we were saying, "Man, if we only had a vaccine." Now we've got a vaccine, and there are people who have linked their identity in such a way to an essence that is actually jeopardizing life, human life at least. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: If you look at the vaccine, the people that are not getting vaccinated, many of them have a clear belief that their genetics are greater than existence, and they were above this deadly pathogen that even if they got it, they would just naturally beat it. They don't need vaccines and that the people that say they do are weak liars, that aren't as good as their supreme essence. And by and large, these are a lot of White Americans. It's a clear narrative where they value their essence of being a supreme White person who is above all the horrors or problems of the world. And they do that to their dying day, as they catch a disease that kills them in like two to three weeks. >> Lewis Gordon: Yeah. And it's that way in Brazil with Bolsonaro's too. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Well, Brazil is very ethnocidal. >> Lewis Gordon: Very ethnocidal. Well, thank you, Barrett Holmes Pitner. Thank you so much. This was a delight. It's very short, but as I said, the moment I read this book, I said, this is a brother I want to just keep speaking with. So thank you, Barrett Holmes Pitner, and thank you to the audience, thank you to the New York Public Library, and simply put, to all of you out there. I know we ended on that note about existence and the question of the pandemic. So keep safe, keep healthy and despite -- and yo, yo get the vaccine. But beyond that, beyond that, also find moments of joy, because remember, you're human beings and as long as you have that, there's possibility. So thank you. >> Barrett Holmes Pitner: Thanks for having me. I had a lot of joy doing this. >> Female Speaker: Thank you for joining us. 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