We pried Andy away from doomscrolling 45 to bring you this late-night episode of semi-coherent thoughts on the American regime, post-wet market theories of Covid-19, and listener queries on class.
0:00 – What is, even, anything? The big, maskless T has Covid, as does everyone around him. We talk conspiracies and sad, middling fantasies of functioning government. Is it time to give up on electoral politics? Will there ever be another Bernie?
28:30 – Twitter warrior and coronavirus prophet Zeynep Tufekci is out with a provocative new piece at The Atlantic. We reminisce about the bad old days at the start of this podcast, which we nearly christened “Pangolin Power Hour.” What does it mean for Covid-19 to be an “overdispersed pathogen”? Who is Pareto, and why does nationalized health care matter?
55:40 – We address a composite (brilliant! erudite!) listener question about class and class cosplay. Why do upper-class wokesters downplay their families’ money? Do upper- vs. upper-middle-class distinctions even matter in elite spaces? Should our class backgrounds influence our career choices or social politics? And why do we tell and retell Asian American immigrant tales of overcoming? Thanks to Janis Jin, @Soledad_Kyrie, and Lisa.
And thanks to all of you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your friends and enemies to subscribe.
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This week: the class politics of the Netflix K-drama “Itaewon Class” (이태원 클라쓰), success and failure in leftist utopias, and “slouchy Asian” fashion.
0:00 – Happy Birthday, Mama Kang! Plus: Tammy introduces Andy and Jay to Eileen Fisher.
6:10 – Jay binge-watches (the notably progressive!) “Itaewon Class,” which Tammy inhaled long ago; Andy makes plans to catch up, and offers his commentary anyway. Why do so many K-/Asian dramas reflect the same theme of capitalist overcoming? Is chaebol / keiretsu resentment baked into all contemporary cultural production (and mass protest)? Why are the protagonists so often middle-class instead of working-class? Other shows mentioned: “Terrace House,” “My Mister” (나의 아저씨), “Dear My Friends” (디어 마이 프렌즈).
32:35 – We discuss Wes Enzinna’s recent piece in Harper’s, “The Sanctuary,” about a group of abolitionists who transform a Minneapolis hotel into a mutual-aid encampment after George Floyd’s murder:
In the end, the fight fizzled out, but I wondered what Steve or anyone else would have done if the violence had escalated even further, as it was clear the volunteers didn’t have the ability or willpower to intervene….
So, no, it wasn’t that the fight showed that we needed the police, or that the abolitionists were naïve idealists—they didn’t want a thousand Sheratons, they wanted a world in which no Sheratons were necessary—but it did show that the abolitionists weren’t yet sure what to do when the actions of some threatened the well-being of others.
What do recent attempts at utopia reveal about young people’s attachment to, or abandonment of, the welfare state and organized politics/Politics? Also: Jay’s time at Standing Rock and his Avakian-loving friend at Revolution Books, Andy’s critique of critiques of corruption, Tammy’s dream of an unemployed people’s union, and a collective boost for a candidate for Oakland City Council: Carroll Fife, of Moms 4 Housing.
Big thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com), and please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)! Get all your comrades to subscribe, too.
Finally, don’t miss Andy’s webinar, tomorrow night (September 30, 7-830P EDT), with the Critical China Scholars group: “China’s Rural Capitalism: Land, Labor, and Environment.”
This week, a longer-than-we-intended show about the TikTok saga, Chinese/US hegemony, and nationalist traps. We also respond to a few of your brilliant emails and DMs.
0:00 – Jay explains his obsession with the history of Jonestown, and we toss around a few theories of left (and right) millenarianisms.
5:30 – After all Trump’s blather about security, TikTok, USA looks to be headed toward Oracle and Wal-Mart, with no promises of Internet liberty. Plus: will $5 billion from the deal somehow fund “The 1776 Project” aka Patriot Education aka Uncritical Race Theory?
14:10 – Enter the American splinternet? Or is that what we’ve been surfing all along? We ask why the past couple generations of US leftists seem so local in their thinking. Is a new kind of internationalist organizing possible?
34:20 – Our humble (and not-so-humble) takes on listener comments and questions:
1) How to support Chinese international students in this xenophobic age? And what to make of parents on conservative WeChat? Bonus: the surprising demographics of GOP Asian America. (Thanks, Elaine!)
3) What does it mean to “organize,” and do upper-class people have any right to get involved in labor struggles? (감사합니다, Ollie!)
4) Is ethnic studies a force for good in politics, or does it just produce diversity aesthetics? (Salamat, Jael!)
ありがとう for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com), and do reach out any time via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)! Get all your friends to subscribe, too.
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Whither memory: Guantanamo W. Bush paints over his legacy.
Hello from the future!
Inspired (triggered?) by last week’s commemorations of 9/11, we get a bit contemplative. How will future generations remember (or suppress) the events of the Trump era, especially the mass death of Covid-19? We discuss state-sanctioned memory in the US and China, how Trump has effectively rehabilitated George W. Bush, and Paul Krugman’s tweet threads (1, 2) about 9/11 and Islamophobia. We conclude with a listener question about how a “corporate Asian” should be.
0:00 – Yet another 9/11 anniversary provokes an imagined retrospective of the Trump era. How will we remember, or try to forget, these years under 45? Andy compares Chinese and US history and how state-sanctioned political narratives have domesticated personal memory and trauma. Tammy and Jay disagree over how we remember the 1960s, and we wonder how the explosive protest movements of 2020 will go down in history: will they be reduced to aesthetic commodity? Bonus: plugs for W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers.
47:38 – Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman got in trouble for Twitterasing/ retconning the Bush administration’s Islamophobic policies and wars in the Middle East as genteel by comparison to Trump. Do his arguments have any merit? Plus, Jay previews his libretto for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s forthcoming coronavirus musical (coming to Broadway in 2026), and we examine the absurd unreliability of hate crimes statistics (tsk tsk, Krugman) in the context of anti-Asian violence.
1:19:05 – TTSG listener Gestational Yuppie asks how Asian Americans should deal with their guilt for outwardly working corporate jobs while inwardly harboring leftist politics, leading all three hosts to do some soul-searching.
Thank you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com)! Please reach out via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your friends to subscribe.
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3:20 – Did Jessica Krug respond to market incentives for minstrelsy? Do white people feel the need to justify their interest in non-white/Eurocentric fields? Should Andy start using his Chinese name to gain more cred in the academy? Bonus: Jay and Tammy place bets on the number of “academic Dolezals.”
49:40 – First, the cast of Mulan was doing takedowns of the Hong Kong democracy movement. Now, journalist Isaac Stone Fish reports that the production did business in Xinjiang, the site of Chinese internment camps and widespread abuse of Uyghur minority groups (see Andy and Tammy’s interview with Darren Byler). How do we feel about the human-rights strategy of “naming and shaming”? Is the American critique too selective? Frightening reveal: Andy 同志 goes tankie/CCP plant.
And support us by subscribing and evangelizing to your friends! You can reach us any time via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com).
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This week, we talk protest and death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, and consider what to make of the longstanding, but local, street confrontations between the far right and “Antifa.” We then turn to the recent NBA players’ boycott(?) / strike(?) / demonstration(?): What does it mean, in labor terms? Why do we get so excited about bajillionaire athletes’ activism? (Check out what Jay wrote in NYRB and Andy, in n+1.)
0:37 – Inspired by the Milwaukee Bucks’ one-day work stoppage, professors plan a #ScholarStrike and labor unions… sign a petition. Which side are we on?
9:27 – Following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a white supremacist killed BLM protesters in Wisconsin, and a white supremacist was killed in Oregon. Is there any reason to fear a Trumpian militia war? What does the filmic replay of Patriot Prayer vs. Antifa do to our collective perception?
25:36 – The NBA, MLB, MLS, Naomi Osaka… a labor uprising or just scattered disaffection? We lit-crit our way through what’s been called a wildcat strike, making stops for the “NBA state media,” LeBron’s Obama-style-school-reform diplomacy, praise of teachers’ unions and old-school boycotts, unpaid college athletes, and the question of whether sports can carry progressive “revolution.”
Comments, questions, criticisms always welcome! Reach out via @TTSGpod or timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. And get your friends to subscribe to our Substack!
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Today we’re presenting a conversation between myself (Andy) and my college friend Merlin Chowkwanyun, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
For years I’ve peppered Merlin with questions about how to understand the never-ending debate over “race versus class” in the US -- for instance, this New York Times piece from two weeks ago -- a subject that he’s studied for years.
We focus on a critique of “racial disparity” discourse that he has written about several times, co-authored with the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (University of Pennsylvania). Across discussions of public health, economics, and policing (for instance, their NEJM paper on Covid-19 disparities this spring), they argue that we too often view “race” as a natural and absolute trait, and “racism” as a question of primordial individual prejudice. Racial thinking, they argue, is in fact inseparable from an analysis of the dynamics of economics and class. “Race” as ideology is certainly real, but we should not mistake it as natural.
2:34 -- How did Merlin, a Thai-Chinese-American from the Asian SoCal suburbs find himself studying a primarily “black-white” story of race and racism in US history? Why not Asian American studies? How do his students make sense of the “black-white binary”?
18:20 -- We’ve all memorized the mantra “race is a social construct,” but Merlin argues that many old-fashioned nineteenth-century beliefs in the biological reality of race remain in circulation today, even among good liberals (think about the craze for 23andMe).
22:15 -- We touch on a recent New York Times article on the “race versus class” debate within the US left. Merlin has collaborated with Adolph Reed Jr. on several articles, but rather than take sides, we discuss their basic criticism of mainstream social science and its simplistic presentation of “racial disparities,” which often wind up stuck in individualized, psychologized notions of prejudice divorced from broader dynamics. Nate Silver-style quantitative regression analysis has helped reify “race” and “class” as static and natural variables of human existence.
30:40 -- Merlin and Reed’s co-authored articles on racial disparity reporting, both for Covid-19 and more generally. How did they come together to co-author these articles? Why is it dangerous to harp on “racial disparity” in a vacuum?
48:20 -- Missing from most discussions of “racial disparity” are the specific political-economic dynamics of capitalism. Specifically, modern “race” ideology originated in efforts to legitimize, justify, and naturalize slavery and Jim Crow in US history.
(In short: it’s not that white planters, because they were motivated by the racist ideas in their heads, therefore set up the slavery system; rather, because they profited off slavery and sought to defend it, planters then naturalized “race” as a scientific ideology.)
At stake today is this: a primordial account of racism (viz., “everyone’s just born a little racist”) is one that does not challenge the inequities of capitalism and is thus easily embraced by ultra-rich institutions and corporations.
57:20 -- Merlin warns (Andy) against going too far with “the Marxism” and reducing everything to capitalism. But also a warning against “white fragility”-style characterizations of 400 years of continuous white supremacy.
1:01:20 -- Is this historical and economic account of “racism” useful for comparative thinking, both with and beyond the black-white binary? For instance, understanding ethnic and racialized hatred between Dominicans and Haitians, or, further away, can “racial capitalism” be applied to understand China today? Asian American history? What about anti-Semitism?
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As summer winds down and election season begins to heat up, we reflect on the political prospects of Asian America and the mess that is the Democratic Party. We discuss AOC’s speech at the DNC last week as evidence that the party has lost the thread. We then examine Trump’s WeChat ban and the many uses of this Chinese super app. This leads to a concluding conversation about whether first- and second- (and third-...) generation Asian Americans could trend rightward as part of a racial realignment in both parties.
0:00 – An update on the start of school, the wildfires in northern California, and failed Covid policies.
10:40 – Who said it best? We debate the messaging of the Democrats during last week’s convention and whether the speech by the party’s rising star (and TTSG favorite), AOC, captured the urgency of the moment. Are accusations of elitism fair? Or just bad faith? Also, debater Jay makes his return and recites his own version of a convention speech in an effort to get AOC’s attention.
26:05 – Why WeChat? The Trump administration’s ban on TikTok may claim, as a collateral casualty, the messaging-payment-social-media super app WeChat. The administration doesn’t seem to understand what the app is used for, but it’s clear that a WeChat ban would hurt hundreds of millions of Chinese in China and abroad—and tank iPhone sales in China.
While free-speech concerns are well founded, we consider how WeChat and other Asian apps have been used to organize right-wing diasporic activism, including anti-affirmative-action drives. We revisit Jay’s interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen about first-generation immigrant conservatism—and “Four Prisons,” an essay by Glenn Omatsu, on the rightward turn of earlier Asian activists. (Thanks to listener Naomi Hirahara.)
43:20 – Are we gonna go neocon? Jay worries that, on account of the weird politics around standardized testing and affirmative action, Asian Americans will become more conservative and eventually vote Republican. Is the conservative critique of the Democrats correct: that identity politics have superseded a universal economic focus? Have both parties engaged in a Black/white culture war that leaves many Asians and Latinos bereft? (Caveat: not the Bernie-crats!) Tammy argues that the debate over immigration policy will give the Democrats an edge in the foreseeable future.
Feel free to contact us with comments and questions at @TTSGPod or timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, and please share and subscribe!
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We’re very excited to have Pulitzer Prize winner and Macarthur Genius Grant recipient Viet Thanh Nguyen on the show. There was a lot to discuss and a lengthy conversation that I (Jay) found absolutely fascinating about the role of academia, especially during a time of national protests. A lot of history in this one as well — if you didn’t know about AAPA and Third World Liberation Front, there’s a short primer at the beginning of the episode.
1:05 - A conversation about the promise of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a student movement that started at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley in the late sixties and promised an inclusive, solidarity-based activism rooted in anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. The TWLF fight resulted ethnic studies programs across California and Viet talks about being an ethnic studies student at Cal in the early 90s and gives an assessment of what has happened over the past forty or so years since the establishment of the TWLF and the AAPA (Asian American Political Alliance).
19:00 - Have Ethnic Studies programs been effective in producing radical thinkers and progressive students? We talk about the early demands of the TWLF, which included a separate school within a school with its own faculty search committee and admissions office.
50:00 - a lengthy discussion about where the focal point of the Asian American identity should lie. Should we talk about immigration and the immigrant experience as much as we do? Or should we think more about where we came from and the effects of American imperialism across Asia? Can Filipinos, Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and others find common fighting ground in a renewal of “third world” logic? Or are those efforts nullified by the presence of an upwardly mobile, assimilation-driven class of Asian-Americans?
Thanks for listening!
Jay, Tammy, and Andy
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In a late-Sunday-night mega-recording session, we discuss the big news of the past week: Kamala Harris, the first major vice presidential candidate who’s Black, Asian American, and a woman. Commentators have tried to pick apart her identity from countless angles: Is she Black enough? Indian enough? Caribbean enough? An Asian-immigrant icon? In other words, the kind of juicy s**t you KNOW your podcast hosts are ALL ABOUT.
0:44 – Our promise to improve TTSG’s audio quality is followed by a recording glitch
1:20 – Updates on Tammy’s temporary life in Montana, Andy’s teaching by Zoom, and Jay’s love of nonstop road trips
9:40 – Who is Kamala Harris?
17:28 – Identity, Act 1: Kamala the politician: Is she a cop? Is she malleable, or does she have a motivating ideology? Also: Jay and Andy award her 30 speaker points for last year’s debates.
26:42 – Identity, Act 2: Is she a second-generation immigrant? Will her familial ties to Jamaica and India (and, briefly, Zambia) matter to West Indian and Asian voters? What can we glean from her strategic and rhetorical uses of immigrantness?
35:30 – “Two or more races”: Why are we so bad at talking about mixed-race identity? Do hapas have privilege because they’re hot?
42:05 – Identity, Act 3: Is she Black? Jamelle Bouie wrote last week that, “because of heritage, upbringing and the realities of American racism, Harris calls herself Black and is also understood as Black by people within and outside the Black community.” ADOS adherents disagree. Is Blackness a matter of choice? Is Blackness international or American?
51:45 – Choice and reparative policies
The Kamala announcement was followed by the DOJ’s accusation that Yale discriminates against white and Asian applicants. Is anti-Asian discrimination like anti-Black discrimination, or is any similarity negated by the apparent fact that Asians “chose” to come to the US? We dissect this concept of choice, which leads us to a theory of Asian identity that’s less about what we have in common than why we’re here in the first place.
1:26:10 – Save the mail!!
A look at the US Postal Service, which has one of the largest, most racially diverse, unionized workforces in the country. It is also a paragon of the types of universal, social-welfare services we should defend vigorously. We unpack the November election theories and distinguish them from troubling long-term trends toward privatization, racist dog whistles, and exploitation by Amazon. Bonus: Tammy achieves her dream of discussing Bureau of Labor Statistics data and the USPS in one segment.
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