NPR: All-white group of historians invited to White House to talk about threats to democracy

Brett T. | 7:09 PM on September 06, 2022

We’re awfully tired of the “threat to democracy” line, and we’re not at all surprised that the Biden White House convened a group of historians to talk about threats to American democracy. Weeks later (they’re slow to catch up), NPR reports that the historians were all white, and it shows.

In early August, the White House invited a group of historians to talk about threats to American democracy.

But all of those experts were white — and it shows, critics say.https://t.co/adJJVR2wyy

— NPR (@NPR) September 6, 2022

THANK YOU.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 6, 2022

NPR reports:

Jelani Cobb, a New Yorker writer and the new dean of Columbia Journalism School, adds, “The formative experience around American authoritarianism has been the treatment of people of African descent and people of Indigenous descent.”

Cobb says the meeting missed the point.

If you don’t examine how democracy has died for people of color in this country, you might miss how freedom fades not in big bombastic moments, but in slow ongoing repression.

And if you exclude the voices of scholars and writers who understand an anti-democratic, fascist order as heritage, rather than an aberration, you might miss how democracy has before been pulled back from the brink.

“In having an all white room,” Cobb says. “you kind of replicate the kind of gaps in perspective that we’ve seen that have facilitated this problem in the first place.”

NPR: All-white group of historians invited to White House to talk about threats to democracy

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