The further you are from power, the more you see: Gary Younge about:reader?url=https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/intervie...

thehindu.com

Meera Srinivasan February 27, 2020 00:15 IST Updated:

February 27, 2020 01:58 IST
28-35 minutes

The award-winning British journalist

and author talks of politics, journalism
and the politics of journalism

Gary Younge, who served as The Guardian’s

editor-at-large and long-time U.S. correspondent,
left the newspaper recently, after 26 years as a
staff writer and 20 years as a columnist. His
political commentary, grounded in his reporting
experiences, has offered readers world over clarity
and perspective on both key global developments

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and their local manifestations, while zooming into

oppression and exploitation in those societies. The
award-winning British journalist and author has
now taken up a teaching assignment at
Manchester University as Professor of Sociology.
In an interview over Skype, Mr. Younge spoke on
politics, journalism and the politics of journalism.

When you look back at your reporting

trail what would you say were the most
valuable lessons professionally and
personally?

Personally, one was to always try and add value

somehow. On election night in 2008 with [Barack]
Obama, [I thought] why go to Grant Park [Chicago,
U.S.]. Everybody else is there. What am I going to
add at Grant Park? Whereas if I go to a bar in the
South Side, a black area, where there are no
cameras, then maybe I can add something. So, I
went to a bar the night before. I found a guy, and I
went and voted with him the next day.
I watched the results come out and I saw how

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emotional he was. He was a telecommunications

guy – and it was when he was explaining his vote
that he started crying.
In the bar I sat next to this woman who didn’t
believe it was going to be possible [for Obama to
win] because she thought America was too racist. I
saw some scales fall off her eyes as the night went
on. And then I remember this woman said, ‘My
man is coming home, he is in Afghanistan’. And I
thought, no he’s not. Obama is supporting that war.
You saw the beginnings of this fantasy about
Obama, about what he would and wouldn’t do,
without really listening to what he was saying. I
don’t think I would have gotten all of that in Grant
Park. And in any case, the further you are from
power, the more you see.
If you travel with Obama’s entourage or Tony
Blair’s entourage, you don’t really see anything. I
travelled with Tony Blair in 2001 just for a week and
I didn’t see anything, because you’re being taken
from place to place to see what they tell you to see
and the story is going on somewhere else, really.

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This particular story is really not so interesting, it’s

not what I came to journalism to do. There was a
lesson about how people experience these things
as opposed to the meta story of the politician, the
election and so on.
Sometimes the things that aren’t stories should be
stories, and the news agenda is skewed towards
power and the powerful. Also, the people in the
newsroom think if it’s not happening to them, it is
not news in the same way.
There is this phrase in journalism, ‘When a dog
bites a man, that is not a story; when a man bites a
dog, that’s a story’. And I understand that. But
sometimes you have to ask yourself: who owns
these dogs, and why do they keep biting people,
why do the same people keep getting bitten?
One of the other things was learning that there is
news in what appears to be banal. And that often
what is banal for the people who create news is
deeply traumatic for large numbers of people. And
so, I try to find ways to make what people think
they know new and different.

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Long before ‘intersectionality’ became

a buzz word, race and class were
recurring themes in your writings. You
especially emphasise inequality cutting
across races — a politics that, in your
latest column, you credit your mother
for exposing you to. How has class as a
framework helped you think and write?

I grew up around white people, working class white

people. My introduction to politics was really
though Marx and Trotsky, not through Malcolm X
and Amiri Baraka. That came later.
On a personal level, there was this wrestling with
some people saying it’s about class and others
saying it’s about race and thinking, well, I exist as a
working-class black man. Those two things don’t
stand in contradiction. I need to find a place where
those two things can work together, intellectually
and socially, where nobody’s asking me to put one
of those things at the door.

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And I would say, although I am less fluent in the

language of this, there was also gender there. I
remember as a young man, meaning 16-17,
thinking of feminism as something that posh white
ladies did. And I found them annoying, when they
were saying, ‘you are part of the problem’. I was
like, ‘no you are a massive problem, and I see no
kinship with you’.
And then when I taught in Sudan for a year when I
was 17, I did my reading. I read Women,
Resistance and Revolution by Sheila Rowbotham.
It was all about gender, class and how they interact
and intersect. Almost straight after, I read The
Color Purple, which is not a massively polemical
book but still, the penny dropped.
Well, yes, of course, either everybody is free, or
nobody is free. You can’t have socialism without
feminism, you can’t have socialism without ending
racism, none of this stuff makes sense unless you
include identity in it. The people who try to pit one
against the other are not going to understand.
And on ways in which my understanding of class

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really informed my writing — I could think of a few

direct examples. My first big assignment was the
first election in South Africa. I was watching and
just thinking, so what’s going to change for these
people, the poorest people, the people in the
townships and who’s going to make out like a
bandit here.
Coming back a few years later, I saw this
realignment of white capital and black politics
coming together at a certain level. There was
always a black bourgeoisie there, but it wasn’t
moneyed. Seeing it now get money, seeing this
rapid transformation of a handful of people — it
was inevitable and likely — I felt that this is a way
to understand what has happened here. It [South
Africa] had reached a certain level of democracy
which is not in any way incompatible with massive
inequality. That contradiction, given that there was
a mass movement, will assert itself — and it has
and is.
Similarly, with Obama, I can understand the
symbolic value of a black president, but the

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substantial value will be contingent on the degree

to which black people improve, which they didn’t
really. The gap between black and white grew.
When you have to deal with the contradictions in
class and the politics of that, you see that
sometimes working-class people support things
that aren’t in their material interests because they
have other interests.
I remember making a lot of people angry writing
about Brexit and saying you can’t just say that
people are being tricked because they don’t vote
for their material interests, they have other
interests. I may not like those interests. I am
relatively well off and whenever I vote for a Left-
wing party, I vote against my material interest
because it’s something else that I want. We
shouldn’t think that working-class people are any
different. And then, we have to unpick what those
interests are.
In Obama’s case, it was a lot of black people — for
them the symbolism may not have been enough
materially, but it was something. Similarly, there are

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people who think abortion is more important than

anything else, or that the tiny sliver of racial
privilege they have is more important than whether
they lose or win, or other people get richer. In
Britain, it’s mostly about white people who think
‘my sense of being British and Britain being
independent are more important than whether this
factory closes down, because this is not my factory
anyway’.
A class analysis doesn’t necessarily simplify things.
It can complicate in some ways, and clarify in
others.
Whenever I see people talk about race or gender
or sexual orientation or religion, any of those things
without a class analysis, I see what they are saying
run into the ground really quickly in terms of
anything other than a form of fundamentalism
really. And I’m against all fundamentalisms you
know, of race, class, colour, religion and nation.

Whether in the U.S., U.K., or South

Asia, the politics of hate based on

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identity is on the rise. What could the

media do in such times?

Well, the first thing they could do is not make it

worse, which in Britain a lot of the media do. And a
lot of the media are also fomenting this politics.
The media’s role is to inform and tell the truth. I
don’t believe in objectivity. I think it’s a farcical
notion. Stories demand choices, so it’s not
objectivity it’s fairness, clearly.
But there is a responsibility if you are in the media
to explain why there are no jobs. And there is no
plausible explanation for the economic collapse
that involves immigrants and refugees. They did
not cause the collapse. Misinformation and
disinformation help breed and caffeinate this
‘enemy’ and polarisation. No sane, engaged,
respectable, responsible, plausible reporting would
lead you to a notion that poor people, immigrants,
migrants and refugees caused the economic
collapse. And so, if you do that, you’re contributing
to them.

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I think the media has a job to do in terms of

insisting on people’s humanity — not restoring their
humanity because humanity never went away —
but the media stripped people off their humanity.
Ultimately, we have to stop thinking of the media as
being outside politics and society. I am not sure
that we can separate the media from the politics
and say how does the media remedy the politics,
because they are symbiotic. But I do think that if
the media followed some basic precepts about
factual reporting, curiosity, not ‘I know why that
happened but why did that happen’, we would be in
a different place.

You have reported extensively from the

U.S. (2003-15) and the U.K. From
Donald Trump’s election to Brexit, the
last few years have witnessed major
political shifts in these two Western
democracies. Did you see them
coming?

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No, I didn’t. I didn’t think that Trump would be the

nominee. I thought he could win but didn’t think he
would. I thought Brexit could happen, but I didn’t
think it would. I try not to make predictions in my
work anyway, because I think journalists are far
better at describing than predicting. Our job is not
to foresee the future, it is to make sense of the
present. Maybe thereby having a sense of what
might happen.
I did see some of the things that made them
possible. During the Blair years I did see a
disaffection, a disinterest, with politics. There was a
lower turnout, and people were alienated. I didn’t
know exactly where that would go, but I knew that
it was not going to go anywhere good.
While in America, I saw the rise of [George W.]
Bush and the war, and the collapse of the war. And
there were these moments, like with Obama’s
campaign, when you saw how much desire for
change there was, but then he was a completely
inadequate vessel, that was always clear to me. I
didn’t know where the disappointment in him would

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go among white people, but I knew it had to go

somewhere.
I do remember seeing in 2008 the Sarah Palin
phenomenon — it was really a precursor to Trump,
it was beginning of the cohering of all of that — and
thinking that could get really ugly and dangerous.
I did think white people are about to become a
numerical minority in this country and they are not
going to take that sitting down. I wondered how
that would pan out.
The other thing was the completely inadequate
neo-liberal social democratic response. Hillary
[Clinton] was the worst possible candidate you can
put up against Trump. When somebody said ‘Make
America Great Again’, she said, ‘America is great
already’. But there were all these people in poverty,
whose wages hadn’t increased in the last 40 years.
And when she was asked how much she got paid,
or why she took so much money from Goldman
Sachs, she said because that’s what they offered.
Similarly, in Britain, during the Brexit campaign,
their campaign was like: ‘If you’re going to vote for

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Brexit, that’s because you’re stupid’. And people

said: ‘Well then, I’m not going to vote for you if you
think I’m stupid’. When they did vote for Brexit, they
said, ‘You’re too stupid to know what you think’.
And people said: ‘In what world do you know my
interests better than me? And why do you keep
calling me stupid?’
In both cases, the social democratic wing of neo-
liberalism had reached such levels of arrogance
and disconnection that in hindsight there was going
to be some sort of very fundamental reactionary
response. And this was it.

In the summer of 2017, you travelled

across the States — from Maine to
Mississippi — to find out what ordinary
Americans were thinking at that time. In
2019, you went on a journey in search
of the American Left. Based on these
travels, how do you view the ongoing
U.S. presidential race and the
resistance to the politics that Trump
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represents?

There has been considerable resistance. The

resistance has grown. There have been these
movements — ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Me Too’,
‘Extinction Rebellion’ in Britain, ‘Anti-Fracking’,
‘Occupy Wall Street’ — they burn very brightly, and
then they fade. And another movement comes
along. They do good things, they raise
consciousness, but they’re not really movements in
the traditional sense. Occupy Wall Street was
closer to that.
But it’s not like if you go to Chicago, there’s a Black
Lives Matter office, or officer. They have no
institutions to sustain them through the lean times.
Not everything about the Civil Rights Movement
was a march or a demonstration, there was
organising, there were letters to be sent, there
were structures.

The Unions were very actively involved,

weren’t they?

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Yes, at the least the union leadership was during

the civil rights era. Quite often lower down the
union hierarchy they were quite resistant to the
hiring of black workers. But yes, people forget that
in 1963, it was a march for jobs and freedom. And
we don’t have much of a union movement any
more. Current ‘movements’ explode, and then they
fade. They are caffeinated by social media. They
fast-break.
And that produced some of the biggest
demonstrations we have ever seen and yet the
weakest of, or almost non-existent, actual
movements. America has had four of its five big
demonstrations during the last three, four years
since Trump was elected. And still the primary
vehicle for resisting or opposing Trump remains the
Democratic Party which I believe is inadequate for
the task. It is dominated by corporate interests. Its
energies are almost entirely electoral, so nothing
that impedes on the next election will be
entertained.
Whereas that’s not how Trump came through.

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Trump came through thanks to the Tea Party, came

through a series of defeats actually, but each one
raising the consciousness of a certain group of
people.
This is true in Britain as well. If you look at Nigel
Farage, the head of Brexit, who never won an
election in Britain — he won in the European
election but in the British election he never even
came close — and yet was able to transform our
relationship to the European Union and our politics
arguably.
In a way more people are involved on the Left
politically than they have been for a long time. I
covered the 2016 election from Muncie in Indiana.
And when I went back a year later everybody who I
spoke to who was a liberal was doing something
that they have never done before, or more than
they have ever done before. Saying, ‘I have to... I
have to... I can’t just let this [happen]’. And yet
while there is resistance, there is no movement.
There is this inability to cohere the resistance and
find a home for it that isn’t hostage to electoralism,

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to corporate interests and to co-option.

I am still grateful for the resistance there is. Who’d
have thought Bernie Sanders will be anywhere
close? Or Elizabeth Warren, who’d have been
unthinkable, for years and two months ago. No one
would have thought it was possible and here we
are with a man who calls himself a socialist. In
whatever way he is going to disappoint us later,
here he is, and he is leading. So long as we are
looking for this through the Democratic Party, we
will be disappointed, it would be compromised.
That is not a problem, everything gets
compromised in a movement. But it will be
compromised in ways which make it far less useful.

The media world, in the last two

decades, had some dramatic moments
around the sensational revelations by
whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks, Edward
Snowden and the Panama Papers. How
did those impact the practise of
journalism and how the media is

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perceived?

I am just thinking of them all. On the one hand, it

has shown the power that the media can have, in
terms of exposure, making changes. It has also
shown the frailty — well look what happened to
Edward Snowden, look what happened to Julian
Assange — he is a far more complicated figure —
still look what has happened to him. Panama
Papers and things like that are slightly separate
because there was no one individual who could be
highlighted, scapegoated and targeted.
But it’s not Watergate. It’s something or somebody
going ‘boom! there you go’. In that sense, the
challenge for news organisations is in terms of
fortitude. Someone’s giving you these things, do
you have the wherewithal, bravery and resources
to print them and stand by them? Do you have the
capacity to convey them as stories? Quite often
with these stories, people can get overwhelmed
with the process, without really showing people
why they matter.

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If there has been a criticism of some of those

stories, it has been the inability to explicitly insist
on their relevance to the ordinary person, which I
don’t think is difficult but it is a challenge. And quite
often with this journalism people can just get
wrapped up in the ‘you know what we’ve got’, and
not ‘what this means’.

Given that independent newsrooms

world over are thinking hard about their
resources, how does the future of
sound reportage and storytelling look
to you?

It is going to be hard. It is hard. The kind of

reporting that I’m interested in takes time. You can’t
just walk up to someone with a microphone or
notebook and say, ‘what’s going on?’ It takes time
to get them to trust you, investigations take time,
mounting a legal defence takes time, so you need
resources. That is always compromising, where
your resources come from.

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Advertising models are breaking down. And the

fact that advertising models are breaking down is a
worry, but I think it’s also an opportunity. Maybe
soon for many outlets it is not going to matter what
advertisers think, so we can liberate ourselves from
that, but people still need to be paid.
Almost antithetically to our Left-wing selves we are
going to have to become more engaged
consumers. And if you like something, you have to
think about how you support it because that is the
only model ultimately that is going to work. I do
think it is sustainable and that it would demand us
doing better work. Work that you can point to and
say, ‘if you want it, you got to pay for it’, and getting
people into the mindset that it is not free and that
they have a responsibility. At the moment, that is
the only way I see us continuing with an
independent media. I’m not against commercial
interventions in the media, I just think we have to
be careful about whose terms it is on.

In one of your columns on the British

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media, you observed that 21st century

journalists act not as critical
interlocutors but convenient conduits.
Arguably, the observation could be
applied to many other contexts,
including India. What drives these
actions that appear to range from
silence and self-censorship – in
contexts where there is fear - to
subservience and wilful alignment with
the establishment/ruling class?

As you illustrated, it is different in different places. I

am quite sympathetic to journalists who think they
are going to get killed unless they do a certain
thing, or get out of journalism, but I get that.
In Britain and I think much of the West there are
two things – first of all, there is access. If I do this,
they will keep talking to me. What is the price of
this access? But even tied to that, in a way I think
that it was less true before, they are essentially of

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the same class.

In Britain, the percentage of columnists who went
to private schools and Oxford or Cambridge is
higher than it is in the House of Lords. Then you
have this group of people who know each other,
even if they don’t personally know each other. Not
necessary electorally, but socially they have the
same interests. Where did you go skiing? I went
skiing there. Where did your son go to school? My
son goes to school there. Where did you study, I
studied there. Then there is a kind of collusion. It is
all informal, none of it is stated, none of it is written
down, none of it is probably even recognised. And
yet all of this is fully very clear if you’re on the
outside.
So when there are these ruptures — and this is as
true for Trump as it was for Jeremy Corbyn in
Britain — then they kind of band together, and the
journalists become like political actors and as
gatekeepers and they become affronted personally
by the presence of these interlopers who have
been selected by the great unwashed. And they

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find it much more cozy, comfortable to be in these

much smaller cliques that represent quite a narrow
band of political ideology.
In this period of polarisation, you have this kind of
clumping at the centre and this disdain for the
margins, which is not even political opposition to —
it is as well — but it is like, ‘where did you people
come from; this is our house’. I see that quite a lot.
In Britain with [Jeremy] Corbyn to even claim that
this is something that we should try and
understand, not support necessarily but
understand, and lo and behold, if you said ‘actually
I think some of this is good, and he has a point’, it
really casts you out of polite company.
So it was a very peculiar few years, the last few
years, where, even though overwhelming numbers
of the Labour party supported him, and even
though in 2017 Labour did get a higher vote share
and gain seats, way better than anybody expected,
in 2019 they didn’t, it was still considered a kind of
a form of idiocy that was career damaging. And
who wants to damage their career?

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When you have the generation which in its

formative years saw the Soviet Union collapse,
capitalism is the only thing, the only game in town,
[Francis] Fukuyama’s End of History — everything
else is childish, and romantic and utopian and
ridiculous.
Any opposition to the neo-liberal project is folly.
Nobody stamps this on your hand, nobody makes
you sign a paper but if you want to go on, this is
the way to think. Stop talking about socialism,
that’s what silly people’s talk about, it’s finished, it’s
gone. They lost.
This is the world these people grew up in and it has
collapsed. It collapsed with the crisis and they have
really struggled to get their bearings since then.
And that is how they become stenographers
[putting out] whatever the last powerful person said
to them, so long as their power is in some way
connected to the neoliberal project.

Social media has changed the media

landscape in ways that many of us

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didn’t imagine. There is a common

refrain that social media has made
journalists instant, armchair
commentators while rigorous, old-
fashioned reporting is on the decline.
How do you view the relationship
between journalists and social media?

I generally use social media to post my stories and

insights. Four years ago, when I was covering the
caucuses in Iowa I live-tweeted what I was seeing.
I thought most people aren’t going to get to the
caucus. And most of this is not going to go in a
piece, so I thought it would be interesting.
I try not to reply to people... people I don’t know, or
don’t care about. And whenever I violate that rule, I
usually regret it. I don’t think Twitter is the real
world. It is a part of the world, but it is not the
world. And I worry, quite a lot actually, about
younger journalists, activist-journalists for whom it
is their world.
Similarly, you get these stories about a Twitter

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storm. I think, well, did it rain anywhere else or was

it just a storm on Twitter? And it is very alluring. I
understand that people can build big followings, big
profiles, and I would never say don’t do it. I use it
sparingly.
Facebook I mostly use because I have a diasporic
family who can see my kids grow up. And if I have
a piece up, I put it, or if I want a book
recommendation or I’m looking for something. But I
see mostly younger journalists get into furious
battles and I want to tell them, read a book, take a
break, go on holiday. This is taking up too much
time and too much energy. You are using it as a
proxy for the world. The world doesn’t need a
proxy, there is the world so go out.

If you were to give one, crucial tip to

journalists, what would that be?

Always be curious. However smart you are, you

don’t know the answer to the question you have
asked until you’ve gone and looked for it. And
some things you assume are often wrong. And

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even if they are right, they may not be right for the
reasons that you thought they were. So, go and
find out if you can.
Quite often I have seen something and thought,
‘typical’ and it has not been typical at all and not
always in ways that I wanted.
I did a story about a school in Mississippi, where
everything was split – there was a black principal,
and a white principal. A black cheer leaders’ team,
a white cheer leaders’ team, black year and white
year – I just thought that’s crazy, that is stupid and
of course it is in a way but then when I got there, I
found out why. It was that when desegregation
happened, in order to make sure that the white kids
would go to the school, they said, look, we’ll keep
separate things, so it won’t just be a black school.
It is not great, but it is better than what happened
elsewhere, which is that white kids just moved
somewhere else. They said we’ll keep this
transitional phase. Then, the area changed
demographically, and the black people were in the
minority. And then, the white people said, let’s get

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away with this black principal and white principal,

and black people said no, it was good enough for
you, why should we not have protection. This is still
a racist place and while you’re in the majority, you
feel none of this is necessary. Well, some of this is
necessary, and that doesn’t necessarily mean I
think it was a good idea, but it wasn’t just stupid
which is what I thought it was.
Another example. I thought Corbyn was this
enormous rise in Left-wing energy. It was in a way.
But not in the way I had imagined. I went to these
rallies and it really wasn’t. It was just people saying
I think we have to get back to more of what we
were and that I think that Labour should be more
for the working person. I went to three rallies and
socialism was mentioned once. Neoliberal
globalisation wasn’t mentioned at all. It was far
more tame than I thought it was.
I remember covering the tea party in the States,
2010 in Las Vegas. I was trying to find some
people to go out canvassing with from the Tea
Party and I couldn’t find anyone. That was a

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revelation that the Tea Party didn’t exist. It’s just a

name for a range of right-wing people and groups
who hated Obama but it is actually not an
organisation. They have the same problem as we
do in terms of Black Lives Matter. And all of those
things come from a sense of curiosity where you
think you know something and then you don’t.

Perhaps an odd question to someone

who has told so many powerful stories.
Is there one story that has stayed with
you and that you carry all the time?

There is, actually. Claudette Colvin. In 2000, I

wrote a piece. When I wrote my first book about
the deep south I kept coming up with this name of
this girl who was kicked off a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, before Rosa Parks, who they decided
not to hold up as a symbol because she got
pregnant and she was 15.
Any good book on the civil rights era and
Montgomery would mention her, but none of them
that I read at that time would give you more than a

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paragraph about her. I was like, who is this, what

happened here? When I was travelling through the
deep south I asked around and I got a number of a
cousin. She had left the town and I called the
cousin, and this went on for months. Eventually I
got Claudette’s number and she was in the Bronx. I
went and I interviewed her.
It is this shocking story of this young girl who is
smart and politically active. She is the one, she is
kicked off the bus, she pleads not guilty, she has
been involved in the NAACP [National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People], she has
letters from all over the country from people saying,
‘thank you, you are so brave’, and then they just
drop her. And then, the Rosa Parks story is told in
this very American, neoliberal individualistic way —
the cross winds of history met at that bus stop at
that time. It shows that one person can change the
world, and she is just a little old lady who was tired.
The story actually denigrates her because she was
a political activist, doing work for a long time. She
didn’t believe in non-violence, she was more

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Malcom X than Martin Luther King, so it denigrated

Rosa Parks and obliterated Claudette.
It is partly a story about Claudette and this young,
smart, dark-skinned woman who gets pregnant,
she is not married, and has to leave town because
she has taken on the power structure and nobody
is supporting her. It is also about how we
understand history as individuals and as someone
sprinkling magic dust at a certain point.
That is the story I am proudest of because I found
her. Since then they have been children’s books
and bigger books, but at the time, there hadn’t
been a lot of work, she wasn’t easy to find. It
comes back to the original question you asked. I
felt that I was adding value. Here is a story you
don’t know. It tells you quite a bit about how we
understand the world. And introduces you to this
woman, who you might not have heard of
otherwise.

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