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Farhan Samanani

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-06-15
most recent: 2022-06-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And I think that's a really powerful gesture for thinking about how do we secure rights and how do we secure the different needs of different communities and different groups who are going to face different struggles, who are going to need different things. But on the other hand, how do we do it in a way that sort of also allows us to build a more just society at a bigger scale? And through those threads of interdependence and interconnectivity.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm saying is there needs to be a thread of interdependency that runs through that freedom, runs through that autonomy, and ties us to one another. Because otherwise, the risk is that we lose the ability to sort of build things together to understand one another, that we take our identities and our own experience, the sort of be-all and end-all of the world, right? And we turn it inward. And that's when I think you do start to see difference starting to disintegrate communities, starting to disintegrate civic life is if we lose that threat of connectivity that can run between differences. But again, one of these great lessons from Kelburn that I learned was that there were organizations who were basically building forms of community and building sort of forms of togetherness that did both, right? That sort of insisted on telling a particular story that was going to resonate the most with a particular”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, if we have a single story that we tell about ourselves, that story is always going to have an outside. It's always going to create an other who doesn't belong, an other who is sort of somehow lesser by the terms of that story. But at the same time, if we just let it become the case that we each have the sort of right to tell our own stories about ourselves, that we sort of let a thousand flowers bloom, the risk is that we become disconnected. In some ways, this is the prevailing approach that we're seeing in our modern society is that the ways in which we fought for equality, the ways in which we fought for sort of rights for different groups who've sort of been marginalized historically, has been to allow them to tell their own story. It's been for the right of self-definition, for freedom, for autonomy. And these things are valuable, and I'm not saying that they're not, but”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really is a sort of rich and generative part of the human experience, right? It's not something we're getting away from. But on the other hand, we have that process of learning and growing and becoming in common. And so even where we might come from different starting points, part of our humanity is always the ability to become otherwise. And that's what can kind of connect this. And that's again part of the argument of the book is how we have tools for coming together for bridging differences, for developing new forms of understanding, for developing new ways of caring and connecting and fighting for one another based on our capacity to learn and grow and empathize and tell stories throughout our lives and not just from early childhood.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People talk about nature versus nurture, but I would say nurture is our nature, right? Our nature is to become different in relation to specific cultural environments, right? And so what that teaches us about difference is that on the one hand, it's inescapable facet of human existence, that we are always going to grow and develop into different sorts of people with different perspectives, different values, different orientations towards the world based on how we are raised, what is familiar to us, what is safe to us, what is desirable or what makes sense in terms of those early experiences, and then how we continue to sort of learn and grow from the world as we go throughout our lives. And so, you know, models of sort of dealing with difference that sort of seek to just insist on commonality miss the ways in which different”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas I think, you know, if you grow up with the sense that racial differences are somehow more naturalized, even if you don't have ill intent, I think those injustices, you know, they become part of the background noise of your life, right? And so a lot of people who mean well might still lack the sort of, especially the emotional resources, but maybe also sort of the meaningful resources to really respond to those as forceful a way.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In stories like this, where you see people sort of no longer taking racial difference for granted, it's not that they become colorblind and somehow ignore the injustices in society, but that's when they encounter those injustices, they resonate as injustice, right? If your starting point is these distinctions ought not to matter, and then suddenly you realize that they do, that is going to be an upsetting experience. And rightly so. And that's a very different sort of basis for building connection, building solidarity than you would have if you start from taking these sorts of racial categories for granted and then try to evict them. I think there's a lot of power actually in the ways in which we can kind of naturalize ways of seeing beyond it and then reintroducing the problem.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Racial difference. And the other story I tell in the book is this community cafe that's on the sustade in Kilburn where I lived that really was a space where people are coming together from all sorts of backgrounds. And it was really especially favored by mothers because it was on a Friday afternoon. So if you're sort of on parental leave, you're not working with your young child, you know, it's a nice place to drop in in the community center where it was held. It was right after a sort of parenting group. And so lots of people's kids would effectively sort of grow up in this cafe space where there was a little play area and place for all the kids to run around all the parents. Think the category of race, even despite the sort of broader condition of racism that might exist. And I think what's really powerful is.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally disregards anything we would imagine as race, right? Connected sort of heritage or place of origin or physical features or anything like that, right? However, you imagine race in Nayaka aren't having it. So absolutely, you know, there are ways of race, as we understand it in its weak of institutionalized, it coming not to matter. And then, you know, you look at Western societies and as you say, you know, race matters in large part because we've institutionalized it, because we've made it the basis for sort of allocating rights, privileges, all these subtle but very important ways and sort of we've really shaped Western history in meaningful ways based on race. But even then, I think what's interesting is race can also matter, come not to matter despite racism, right? So what's really interesting to me are these moments where people start pushing beyond these sorts of inherited logics.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so I'll give you a sort of faraway example and I'll give you a close by example. One of the groups I talk about in the book are the Nayakab or a hunter-gatherer people who are in India who sort of live in the forest. And they have this view effectively that the world is made up of relatives. And the thing that matters in determining whether or not you are related is not sort of how you look the color of your skin, the shape of your physical features, whatever it might be, but it's whether or not you're present. As long as you're there and you're taking part in social light, you are a kid. You're related. And they sort of attribute this sort of related status not only to other people, but to animals and to spirits as well. So it's sort of, you know, the world is one kind of great big kind of network of relations based on presence. And that's definitely a view that”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, playing these ideas off of each other, right? And so respecting the ways and acknowledging the ways in which people feel grounded, feel rooted in the world, people draw strength, people draw meanings from the cultural traditions that they hold to from the sort of perspectives that they've inherited, from things that they take for granted because you grew up in a certain environment. All of it really is a fundamental part of the human experience. But so is the knowledge that that could change. You know, so is the fact that we are always kind of becoming new people. And so again, it's about finding a space in between holding to this really fixed, inflexible notion of identity and a totally fluid one. And instead playing sort of fixity and fluidity off one another.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Record of human diversity that's out there because people are playing with identity all the time. And people are also playing with it in ways where they often don't consider difference as the sort of oppositional category. They consider difference as something sort of sacred and invigorating to society or just as something that almost doesn't exist, that everybody has the potential to become part of us, right? So there's all this variability and flexibility on the one hand as to how we think about INB. And then on the other hand, that same anthropological record tells us that identity becomes, as you say, deadly serious, right? And so we kill and die in the name of our nations or the name of our social groups. We sort of really take identity to heart. And again, I think it's not about committing to one view or another that identity is totally fluid or identity is sort of totally fixed and essential.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, this is another place where we can draw a lot of interesting insight from anthropology, right? Because what anthropology teaches us on the one hand is that identity is this hugely flexible thing, right? So if you look at different cultural groups across history and across kind of the world, you see all these forms of fluidity and flexibility, right? Groups assimilate one another all the time. They sort of swap members around. People change ethnicity, right? And not in a sort of Rachel Dolazal faking it way, right? But in a sort of, you know, we've adopted children from this other neighboring cultural group and we've raised them as our own. And now we, you know, they truly, we truly believe and they truly believe themselves to be of us. And so all the sorts of things that we might say about identity as sort of, you know, in our blood and sort of carry through dissent or carry through sort of these uniform fundamental cultures, none of that holds up when you look at the”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we owe to now not sort of not what we owe in terms of past harms, but it's about what we owe to future generations, right? And it's about us quite potentially giving up something in the here and now so that there can be a livable planet 100 years from now. And we're not going to see the benefits from that, but we need a political logic that's not just about, you know, is that actually a fair trade-off for me as a person? That's not fair, right? I'm going to be dead. But we need a political logic that sees things as a common project, that sees my fate tied to the fate of others and to the fate of people in the future and values that sort of interconnection, interdependency in its own right, not necessarily based on a logic of equality and fair chances, right? And I think that sort of civic Republican logic is essential for those sorts of projects. And we're falling short in part because we're not building that sense of interdependency interconnection.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is a great principle, but then you have to do the arithmetic. And sometimes the arithmetic is you have some poor white people whose ancestors might well have benefited, but that money's been spent or that money never reached certain communities. And that might even be true at a societal level that the sort of benefits that occure to sort of most citizens from those colonial legacies are no longer sort of equal to what a fair level of reparations would be. And so the logic of equality, it would be fair to take from these people to give to other people might not get you all the way there with reparations. What you actually need is a sort of logic of solidarity, a logic of being together as a common project. And that's what the Civic Republican tradition gives you. And climate change is similar, right?”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think there's some of our most pressing political issues that we face today. We're not going to get very far unless we sort of reincorporate that sort of civic republic lens. And so I bring up two examples in the book that are worth talking about. One, which is reparations around sort of the legacies of colonialism or slavery, and the other which is climate change, which might seem like odd bad fellows to put together, right? What's going on both of those is there are issues where the logic of equality that sort of so central to liberalism falls short. So if you look at reparations, the argument is that the sort of white majority groups in places like America or Britain have benefited from the historical exploitation of sort of communities of color. And so”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Republicanism leaves you sort of open to this sort of vulnerability of the mass, your rights are always being negotiated, your inclusion is always being negotiated, and that can leave you quite vulnerable. Liberalism offers you this guarantee of rights and that can be quite useful. And vice versa, where liberalism has these sorts of very stark forms of inclusion, belonging, and even if dividing humanity, republicanism can open things up a little bit more and help you sort of find new ways of coming together. And so I think the book is really making a plea for playing those traditions off of one another, not sort of as opposed, but as complementary.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And so I'm trying to walk a really fine line in the book because, you know, historically these two traditions of democracy have often been opposed to one another, right? And you see civic republicanism playing out more as a sort of political logic, more within sort of civil society community groups. And you see liberalism really playing out in sort of state politics, right? The ways in which rights are kind of upheld by the force of the law and written into law and so on. But these are often seen as clashing. And I'm trying to take an approach that's sensitive to the limits of each of them, but that also suggests, again, not because I think so, but because you can see people in Kilbury doing this sort of tremendously creative thing. I'm trying to suggest that there's actually ways of bringing them together and playing the sort of strengths of each other off against the other to correct the weaknesses as it is, right? So we're”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Orders that it comes with, but because it's a very pragmatic solution to sort of exclusion and to the sort of daily struggles that people are facing, they said, no, look, we need rights that are not up for negotiation.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing we are doing is what we have in common. So it's a lot more flexible and creative in that way. But what it doesn't do very well, and this comes back to some of the discussion of identity politics, is because commonality, because the basis for your illusion in democracy, because of the basis of your ability to make claims on others is always being negotiated, it's always up for grabs. It's a pretty poor way of assuring rights. And so the history of Again, civil rights movements and other movements for equality has been in some ways a turn a little bit away from the civic republican tradition and towards the sort of liberal tradition because it's a sort of more ironclad guarantee of rights, more ironclad guarantee of inclusion. Not necessarily because they're bought into that whole framework for how you define human difference and this sort of stark.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then Civic Republicanism is this sort of almost opposing tradition that has its roots just like liberalism kind of all the way back with the ancient Greeks, but really treats not only politics but human difference and human commonality as something much more negotiated and much more fluid, right? So rather than saying we can only come together on the basis of what we have in common, we can only participate in democracy on the basis of what we have in common, that commonality already needs to be established. Civic republicanism says by acting together, by being together, we will discover what we have in common and by acting together and by being together, that commonality might transform. And that commonality might not, you know, that it can sort of take on a whole bunch of different forms. It doesn't have to be sort of some common human assets. It might just be a common social or political project. It might be sort of, you know,”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then everything else is allowed to differ, but it's allowed to differ as a private matter, right? So if you have a different religion than me, if you have different values, if you want to do something different with your life, that's valid, but it's valid as a private matter. You can use it to make a claim on me as a citizen. The only things you can use to make a claim on me are the things that we have in common, right? Our capacity for reason, our capacity to dignity, whatever it is, right? And so then those commonalities become incredibly loaded. And a lot of the history of social struggle over the sort of past 100, 150 years has been about expanding that liberal framework. It's about being say, no, no, no, look, you know, women are rational and they deserve the vote and they don't belong just in the private sphere. It's about saying civil rights, right? That like equal protection under the law for minorities in order to have equal opportunities, equal dignity, right? It's about that equality, about holding something in common, right?”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, in the book, I'm interested in how these political traditions basically work as frameworks for imagining indifference. And liberalism, as I was saying, really imagines difference in terms of these sorts of core essences, right? So there's something that we have to have in common for politics to work.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Emotional people who act on the basis of sort of care and connection and family and kinship, or who sort of kind of can't put everything into sort of these quantitative figures might look less rational to your way of judging, right? And so then suddenly, not only does rationality have an outside, but it actually falls under threat from that outside, right? So now the basis for our sort of democratic social life, which is rationality, let's say, is suddenly threatened by anybody who gets labeled as irrational, right?”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer to this became well, we can trust our fellow citizens and we can sort of derive rights and obligations because we have something in common, right? And that was sort of the high level answer. And then people sort of debated what that thing in common was. Some people said it was sort of rationality. Some people said, you know, Adam Smith was a sort of famous Stefan Market said it was a very sort of economic sort of rationality and people picked up on that. Other people more recently have argued it's a form of human dignity. But whatever it was, it was the idea that some essence, some commonality was what held the polity together. And that's all well and good to say, you know, in the abstract, okay, we're all rational, right? But then you have to define what rationality looks like. You can't get away from having to define it. And as soon as you do those categories end up with an outside, right? So now suddenly, you know, for example, if your model of rationality is the merchant, people who sort of think in very calculative ways, then people who might look more”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at the history. Sort of how democracy developed and specifically liberal democracy, right? That's really the template for our sort of modern day system. And I use liberalism sort of in the sense not of kind of left or right that it gets used today. I don't mean the liberal Democrats in the UK, but sort of liberalism is a sort of philosophy that puts a lot of emphasis on sort of individual freedom that sort of draws a line between public and private spheres. puts politics only sort of into the public sphere right the roots of that were all about identifying forms of human commonality right so democracy emerged at a time where society was getting bigger and more complicated and people were sort of stressing pulling up their hair over how do we do politics with strangers right how do we be accountable and oh rights and derive obligations with people we've never met right um and the sort of philosophy”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think this is again the beauty of anthropology, right? Is that you don't have to have a sort of neat answer because you pay attention in some ways to the complexity of day-to-day life. And so in some ways, yes, in some ways no, right? There are these stories that are so dominant, so institutionalized and hard to escape in some ways about difference being a fact that I think almost everybody I talk to reproduce them in certain ways, but what I'm equally interested in are the sorts of openings and the gaps where people don't do that, where they move beyond it, where they find ways of connecting, right? And I think part of the challenge is, though, that when people try to build stuff, the models that they have for building ways of coming together themselves often produce this idea, right? So this comes back to exactly what you said, right? It's very institutionalized and it's very institutionalized in the structure, I think, of our democracy. And what do I mean by that?”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That treats difference as this threat. And so it creates a sort of increasingly volatile situation when you bring those things together. And so a lot of what the book is trying to do is on the one hand trace how that story developed and again how it got embedded in the way in which we approach democracy, but also equally give weight to that alternative story that it's not a threat to really shine the spotlight on these stories of people finding ways of coming together, connecting, reworking identity, building things with their difference rather than against it.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think what I say in the book is we are coming into contact with difference more and more, right? Media is becoming increasingly diversified, but also we have this great freedom in how we live now where we can really shape our lifestyles according to all these sorts of global trajectories and connections. So it's really possible to sort of be a billion different sorts of people and to come into contact with a million different sorts of people, right? differences become a facet of the everyday experience in this way. But then I think what happens is this becomes sort of volatile because we have this older story. And I really do treat it as a story that difference is a threat. So on the one hand, these encounters with difference are an everyday reality. And on the other hand, we have this way of thinking that isn't just sort of culturally embedded, but again, part of the argument of the book is it's embedded in our sort of democratic structures.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These days, because we don't appreciate that history. And that makes it also hard to sort of actually bring people back on board because then we're not working to redress the sort of roots of that wariness.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's this long, long history of sort of waiting for the gains of quality of freedom to be realized a lot of these communities. And so in some ways that valorization of your own identity, you know, this desire to be sort of self-sufficient as a community, even this sort of anthropologist might call it fetishization of your identity, right? So you take it as the be-all and end-all of the world. You say, I use the story from a young black guy white who sort of talks about not wanting to date anybody who isn't black because he finds the experience sort of alienating and just assumes in advance that there's no possibility of connection with sort of people from other backgrounds. And so he does all these sorts of anti-racist sort of things on the one hand and kind of reproduces the sort of very racially divided narrative on the other, right, where you can't connect intimately, especially across these boundaries. But that sort of thinking, that sort of putting all the weight.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into sort of bigger social movements and called on to sort of testify to their pain and speak about their experience and sort of be a part of the coalition. And then when it comes time to sort of dividing the spoils, they always sort of end up on the outside or sort of on the bottom rung of things, right? So there's this sort of 200 year history of the chapter is titled waiting.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a really interesting question So survival is definitely a part of it. And I think another kind of argument I make in the book is looking at what sometimes gets branded as identity politics, right? Which I think that label often gets used in a very dismissive way. And what I try to do is tell a story that's really about survival, right? That marginalized groups and I focus on sort of racialized minorities. touch on sort of women and sexual minorities as well. If these sorts of groups are in some ways turning inwards, if they're saying, you know, we don't want to collaborate, if they're becoming warrier of kind of broad coalitions, a lot of that actually comes from a sort of 100 to 200 to 400 year history, if you sort of want to go back to the beginning of slavery, where these groups have been sort of incorporated.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how do we approach minority groups or migrants as categories? And somehow those everyday connections don't necessarily work to undermine those sort of more categorical ideas that we might take on. At the same time, those categorical ideas might not sort of adhere to those everyday relationships. So to get the politics of sort of diversity and difference right, it kind of plays out on both those levels. And when we talk about that doubleness, the sort of welcome home but also go away kind of phenomenon that you see in a lot of British politics. Some of that doubleness is about these different forms of politics, right? That our stories don't map onto our relationships or vice versa.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of interjections from his closest friend do very little to change this, right? And so on the one hand, they have these sorts of personal relationships. And every time, you know, for the white British guy, every time he has somebody who he does actually connect with or does actually get along with, he just sort of carves them out of the narrative. Oh, I don't mean him. I don't mean you. The classic, I'm not racist. I have black friends sort of thing, which is this sort of incredibly frustrating excuse on the one hand. But on the other hand, When you look at how people live is often true, right? People have real, sincere, like meaningful friendships and connections, sometimes even build families with people or these sorts of lifelong collaborations with whom they sort of also have kind of discriminatory views. And so what's happening there is, you know, there's a politics of personal connection. There's the politics of how people build relationships and collaborations on day-to-day basis. And then on the other hand, there's the politics of storytelling.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the level of the sort of stories we tell about our societies, who we are, who we could be, who belongs, who doesn't. And it's perfectly possible to sort of get one of these forms of politics, right, and the other one wrong, right? So I tell a story in one of the chapters of these two guys in Kilburn, you know, and you're kind of classic, like working class leaders kind of improvising and sort of trying to figure out where the next opportunity is going to come from and fingers in every pie, sort of hustlers, one who comes from a Caribbean background and the other who's white British. And they're not just sort of quite close friends, but they're also, you know, there's almost an intimacy to the relationship. They really implicitly trust one another. They collaborate with sort of a minimum of words in some ways because they have such a tight-knit relationship. And yet, you know, the white British guy is basically very xenophobic. He's got a sort of hardline anti-immigrant politics and all these sort of”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cheap labor, basically, right? So there is an argument, and I think it's very credible that the sort of double story of inclusion and exclusion has fed really into the economic exploitation and precariousness that a lot of migrant communities faced historically, but also today in the UK. But I also don't think that's the whole story. Because I think the other thing that goes on, again, if you look at everyday lives and connections in places like Kilburn, is that people are fundamentally talented and open about how they come together, you know, but these politics play out in different ways. So part of the argument that I made from the book is that kind of the politics of diversity plays out at two levels. It plays out at the level of sort of face-to-face connections, communities, civil society, you know, the sort of local organizations that people build together, the chats that they have at the school gate or on the streets. Personal connections. And then they play out.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think it's a layered thing, right? Something that a lot of scholars of that migrant history and of race in Britain have argued. And I think I find fairly convincing is that part of that kind of double message, inclusion and exclusion, it's a great way to get cheap labor, right? Because if you're bringing over migrants, you know, and you're saying on the one hand, they have an important role to play in society. And on the other hand, but they pose a social threat, then it sort of justifies leaving them out a little bit from the welfare state and leaving them out a little bit from the job market, just allowing a little bit of sort of free reign for the discrimination that keeps people out of certain industries and desperate for jobs. And that was sort of justified for decades in the post-World War era, that discrimination was sort of a private civil right. And so we couldn't possibly infringe on people's ability to hire who they want or stuff like that. And that made for...”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, had some sort of basis in reality. And it took them 14 years to find a way of effectively justifying immigration legislation who were their own citizens or their own subjects based on the sort of cooked up narrative of social disruption. And so in part, what the book tries to do is it tries to trace that story as to how we've come, especially in the post-world war era, to think of differences as a threat, right? How we've sort of cooked up the story as it is, right? But on the other hand, it traces that sort of welcome home, right? It traces how from the get-go people have had these sorts of diverse, creative ways of rethinking what it means to belong, what it needs to come together, what it needs to be at home. And what means to be British as well?”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If the Empire Wind Rush is because it was sort of an unplanned migration as a way, the government panicked. And before the passengers had even sort of made it to shore, government ministers were labeling this as an incursion. I mean, that word is a literal part, right? It's an incursion. And they spent basically the next sort of 14 years until 1962, where they passed the first serious piece of immigration legislation trying to prove that migrants from the colonies and the Commonwealth were a social problem. So this was decided before anybody sat put on shore. It was decided that migrants were going to be a social disruption, that they were going to compete for jobs, that they were going to erode communities. And then what happened is the government sort of deployed police men with sort of watchdog duties aggressively into these communities. They commissioned report after report after report trying to show that the social problem that they already sort of knew was a thing.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That existed in Jamaica at the time, the UK was the motherland. And this was, people were taught to feel a sort of sense of belonging and connection to the UK. And not only that, but they possessed, in effect, equal citizenship. So legally on paper, they had the same sorts of rights and entitlements as people born in the mainland UK. So it really was the motherland, right? And so the Empire Windbrush arrives and the London Evening Standard charters a plane with a banner flying behind it saying, welcome home. And they run that same headline, welcome home as their sort of front page headline that day. And that's one story of the Windbrush is it's a story of sort of home made in the sort of transnational way biodiverse people who sort of, you know, feel a sense of belonging and connection to a place that they haven't visited yet. But believe and believe with people in the UK that they can build something together. And that's one story. And then the other story.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. DVD special features And so the two stories of the Empire Wind Rush. So we talk about the Windrush endlessly. It's the sort of the ship that inaugurated the kind of era of post-war migration, right? And in that post-war era, the British state, as you say, and British employers recruited very heavily from the current colonies and former colonies in the Commonwealth to sort of help rebuild, right, to staff the NHS and public transportation and heavy industry. The Windrush was of that. So the windrush was a ship that was leaving from Jamaica that had a whole bunch of unsold seats. And some Jamaican entrepreneurs basically set out and said, hey, you know, cheap tickets, come try and make your new life in the UK because they have need for labor, right? So it was really an entrepreneurial exercise. And a lot of people took it up because, you know, in the colonial education,”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, one way I like to think of this book is sort of it's the two stories of the Empire Windrush. And this isn't in the book, actually. So this is some bonus content for you and your listeners, really.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Narrative Who has the right sort of science, right? And that breakdown on the one hand often does get mapped especially onto sort of migrants and minorities and racialized groups. But on the other hand, that breakdown, that sort of proliferation of differences in lifestyles and forms of knowledge in all these sorts of things that don't just relate to migration is a broader source of anxiety. And so the book isn't just about challenging the stories that we tell about migration or diversity or race, but actually challenging the stories that we tell about difference more generally about political difference, about social difference, whether that's class or it's again profession or lifestyle or anything like that, and really looking at how people build and creative, productive ways with those forms of difference rather than sort of having them divide them apart.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was absolutely that difference that connected people, or that sort of people saw in that difference a sort of creative resource for remaking their lives, right? Especially migrants, but not only migrants. And I think the other thing that was really worth learning from Kilburn was the way in which difference in that sense could be a resource, right? So when we talk about migration and diversity within society today, often what we end up doing is we map a load of different contemporary anxieties onto sort of the category of the migrant or the category of the minority. And some of those anxieties have to do with the place of social difference more broadly in society so that we worry that our communities are fragmenting, that families sort of, you know, lost the meaning that it once had, that people are sort of living all these diverse lifestyles that our politics are fragmenting, right? That we can't agree about anything anymore. And increasingly, that we can't even agree about reality, right? Who's telling the truth? Who has the right sort of...”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think when you think where the UK has untold stories, where the UK has sort of untapped wisdom. One of the places you might look are in these sorts of diversifying neighborhoods. Rapid social change, high turnover of people, people coming from all over the world. They're often painted as sites of anxiety, right? Sites of Sides of social upheaval, the places we debate about in the news, right? There's the places people sort of wring their hands about. We pull endlessly is Britain becoming too diverse? Is it eroding solidarity for the welfare state? Is immigration sort of out of control, right? Maybe we can learn something different if we just look at how people Actually, live that as a reality, live in these very diverse places. Come to sort of live their lives by ways of connecting, find ways”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of vastly might differ from your own. And what I like to do as an anthropologist is sort of take that perspective of taking a difference very seriously, taking everyday experience very seriously. Almost flipping the lens 180 degrees and using that as a way of looking at British society. And I think that's first of all essential to getting over that colonial heritage is say, If these ways of looking matter, they better matter for everybody. Also, that there's all these unexplored. Of forms of wisdom and different ways of living and sort of stories that were not telling on a sort of grand scale that we can find even within the sort of nooks and crannies of our own societies. And so that's the sort of anthropology I like to do.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll start by telling you a little bit more about anthropology, which we said. It used to be this very colonial discipline, right? In the context of the British Empire, it was about going out. Sort of studying the people who the Brits were colonizing Often with intent to better understand how to sort of govern those societies, right? And so it was interested in difference, but it was interested in difference in this very instrumental way Throughout that process, anthropologists sort of Immerse themselves in these societies and got people. Of had all these sorts of destabilizing world shaking lessons. That sort of upended the very possibility of thinking in that kind of colonial ways. That, like I said, you recognize the sort of fundamental humanity and others' experiences, no matter how”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understandings that that behavior conveys the stuff that's around us, all these things are cultural, and all these things shape our ways of seeing and knowing and being in a fundamental way. We couldn't be human without internalizing some of this stuff and what we learn from that.”
2022-06-15 · Intelligence Squared · How To Live With Each Other, with Farhan Samanani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT