Anti-Racism and the Disciplines Podcast

Brian T. Edwards: 
You're listening to Anti-Racism in the Disciplines, the podcast that explores the complex histories of the liberal arts in order to reimagine their future.

I'm your host, Brian Edwards, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University.

In this episode, we'll talk about economics, featuring our guest, Gary Hoover, Professor of Economics and Executive Director of the Murphy Institute at Tulane University.

Dr. Hoover's research focuses on economics, race, and public policy. Since 2012, he's been co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession in the most important organization in the field, the American Economic Association. He is also the founding editor of the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy.

Welcome, Dr. Hoover.

So, let’s start by talking about the field of economics, just as it emerges as a field. Its own origin stories and the history of the field that we now refer to as economics is confusing to a lot of people, or at least ambiguous. When do you kind of start to see a field of economics emerging?

Gary Hoover: 
Well, when you think about it—economics—people naturally assume that what you’re talking about is money. They say, “oh, so I see that you’re a money person.” But that’s incorrect. Economics actually deals with scarcity, and what you’re concerned about is you’ve got people with unlimited wants, but they’ve got limited resources. So, then we’ve got to make some decisions, we’ve got to make some decisions about allocation of resources given that people have these unlimited wants, but we have limited resources. We apply economics to a range of areas, one of them being financial economics, as we call it. But there are also topics like environmental economics, health economics, tax economics. You will find that anywhere that there is scarcity—meaning that we just don’t have enough to go around and we have to make decisions—that’s where economics plays a role. And that’s how it started, going all the way back to thinking about farmers having to make decisions about where and when they were going to use their limited resources. What they were doing was what we now call agricultural economics. So, it’s been around forever. When people are making choices about their time and making allocative choices about the time that they have available to them and the things that they want to do, they probably don’t know it, but they’re using economics even then.

Edwards: 
So, when people say in conversation that someone is being economical or economic in [the] sense of frugality or something, that is related then, in a sense, then, to the field of economics, you’re saying?

Hoover: 
Absolutely, because what you’re doing is, you’re trying to say, “what’s the best use of the limited time that I have or limited resources that I have, given that I have to make these choices, I have to be as efficient as possible?” So, for instance, you know, one of the examples I have used in class is: I need to heat my house, and what I could do is burn violins, and that would indeed heat my house. Is that the most efficient use of wood and resources? No, it’s not. I’d do much better using some firewood. But it’s a choice I could make, and so, economics deals with what is the most efficient choice necessary to achieve a goal.

Edwards: 
So, as a professor of economics in a department of economics, how important to you or to other economists is the history of the field itself? I mean, if you look back, like, I mean all the way even back to Adam Smith, you know, and the eighteenth-century Wealth of Nations is sometimes referred to as a founding or early text in that field. Does that matter to economics today, its own history as a discipline?

Hoover: 
It should. Unfortunately for us, it doesn’t as much as it did at one point. As we’ve become more mathematical in our field, we’ve lost some of the underpinnings. But for those of us who care, we get a much better understanding of what we’re doing now and why we’re doing what we’re doing now when we think more about our beginnings. We have to remember—and this is what Adam Smith was trying to drive home—was that, look, we’re talking about people here, and every time we’re talking about economics, what you’re talking about is human decision-making. And we should not lose sight of the fact that when we’re talking about this nation or we’re talking about the resources, we’re talking about the people in that nation and the resources that [are] available to those people. And so, when we get to where we’re just running computer models, and we lose sight of the fact that every time that blip happens on the screen, that’s impacting hundreds and thousands, maybe millions of people, we’ve lost something as a discipline. After all, we are a social science.

Edwards: 
Yeah, actually, that was one of my questions for you.

Hoover: 
Sure.

Edwards: 
Why do we consider economics a social science? When I look at departments of economics, sometimes I see them grouped in the social sciences, as we do here at Tulane; sometimes I see them in a business school; I know there's a relationship between math and economics. So, economics as a social science, how does that emerge?

Hoover: 
It came from our beginnings, right, as you were just talking about before. What we’re concerned about is human behavior, and how do humans respond to limited resources but unlimited wants? That’s the allocative decision that we were concerned with. We were concerned about the bettering of humankind, and how could we use economics to do that? Once we lost that, and we just started thinking about running our models to make them work, we lost something. We wanted to know initially, “hm, why is it that people, society, why is it that when the prices of goods went up, people start buying less of that good?” That was our [beginning], when we came up with the law of demand that said that when the prices of a good went up, the demand for it—by who? By consumers, by people— went down.

Edwards: 
A conversation that we’ve been having in this series is that a number of the disciplines in the liberal arts that we think of as very solid and permanent or long-lasting, or that students might think of as eternal, in fact emerge in the eighteenth, nineteenth century, and start to get codified at those moments. Which, of course, it turns out, or we know, is also a moment during which, you know, colonialism is very rampant in the world, and the subjugation of peoples in other parts of the globe is at least simultaneous if not connected. What’s your sense of, you know, of that layered kind of history as economics starts to become developed as a discipline?

Hoover: 
You know, our problem is that in graduate economics at least, when I was still a student, I took the economic history courses, and that’s becoming less and less common, that people take economics history courses. In fact, I took economic history from a Nobel prize winner, Douglass North, who won the Nobel prize for economics for his work around economic history where he said institutions matter, the institutions that frame our economic thinking matter. So, the topics that you brought up about colonialism and the other things helped to frame how economics was thought of. He didn't put it in those terms, but if you broadened it and took it one step further, that’s what he meant when he was saying these things. And what he then would say is that economics is versatile enough to expand and grow as we increased our understanding of what institutions meant, what institutions did to societies and to certain groups of peoples.

Edwards: 
So, in excavating kind of the social aspects of economics as a social science—doing it kind of purposefully because for students at least, or people who come to the field as novices, there’s an abstractness to the field, or there seems to be an abstractness to the field, where it seems as if it’s nonhuman and kind of mathematical and so on—you’ve said that from the way that economics is often taught to students in the United States, whether via textbooks or introductory courses, is problematic from the very start in the way that it frames race and the human. Could you expand a little bit on that or explain?

Hoover: 
Well, let's take a step back. Part of the problem was that in the study of human behavior, economists needed to start building models, and to build models, we needed simplifying assumptions. The same way, if you think about making a model airplane, right, you can’t just take an enormous airplane and then just shrink it down. You have to make some simplifying assumptions to make this thing work. And that’s what we did, because we wanted our models to work. The problem was that we modeled out some real aspects of human behavior such as racism and discrimination, and what we said was, one of the things that we are going to use in economics as a guiding principle is that individuals will always want to maximize their own utility—in other terms, utility being another word for happiness or joy. Firms will have one goal in mind: firms will only want to maximize profits. That’s our assumption. Individuals want to maximize their utility, or happiness; firms want to maximize their profits. Therefore, racism, discrimination, all of these things that create what we call frictions, will not exist. Why? Because they will interfere with profits and utility maximization. We were dead in the water from that point on. When we assumed something that was quite obvious and was there to be seen, and instead of embracing it, we said, “well, it can’t be there, right, it goes against our fundamental guiding principles”—we were dead in the water from that point on. And only now are economists starting to come to grips with the fact that, you know, those guiding principles that we started with, that an individual will put profit above their own, you know, race-based preferences—we were never right on that.

Edwards: 
And when is that moment happening? Is that a moment of the codification of the discipline? You know, the move from the eighteenth century, kind of Adam Smith model?

Hoover: 
Actually, it stated with the math, right. So, if you read Adam Smith, there's no math in it. He actually was part philosopher, right, he was a philosopher and an economist. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century when we started really using mathematics, and that's when we started to need to make the models solvable. And once we needed to make the models solvable, we started coming up with some of these assumptions. These assumptions made our math work out better and they were pretty, but they didn’t necessarily reflect—and that’s what I think, going back to your questions, I think that’s what students are picking up on. Yes, these are pretty models, but they seem to be rather abstract. They don’t seem to capture what I’m seeing. And that’s how we lost a generation of students of color. When a student of color comes up to a faculty member and says, you know, “I want to study discrimination in the housing market,” and the faculty member says, “oh, that’s already been done, we’ve already modeled that out.” Then, they’re going to just go to a different discipline, such as sociology or political science, where they embrace these differences still. And that’s what happened. So, we lost two—at least a generation if not two.

Edwards: 
Now, this is totally fascinating, right? So, what we’re saying then: we go from a late eighteenth-century, you know, political economy model that’s more philosophical, whether it’s the Smith tradition or the French contemporaries of his, into a period in the United States before the Civil War, antebellum period, when economics starts to emerge kind of within the liberal arts but not very systematic, right?

Hoover: 
Right. And you would think of it more along the lines of economics and moral philosophy or something along [those] lines, and then it broke out and became its own distinct discipline.

Edwards: 
Now, so if the very attempt to be more mathematical or more systematic is emerging—what’s the period of time where we’re talking about? Mid-century. So, as economic textbooks start to be written and produced for the college classroom of the post-World War II university, right? Of course, when the expansion of the social sciences for any number of reasons, the expansion of the educational range of students in the United States after the G.I. Bill, for example—textbook publishing of economics is a big thing. I remember lugging my economics textbooks around in college, and it being very kind of bold and probably a picture of a globe on it for macro, I forget. You know, how does that process then continue into the textbooks themselves?

Hoover: 
It’s a pretty interesting thing that’s going on, because at the same time that mathematics is infiltrating economics, the computing power is increasing enormously after World War II. So, those two created the perfect storm to where now we could go back and look at historical data of things like GDP, and then we could use mathematics and statistics to start drawing correlations and to start drawing covariances, and saying, “hey, you know what? Let's look at what happens to the economy.” And we’re able to start testing some of those theories, which up to that point, you know, if you think about it, had been more theories of what would happen. We were able to start using empirical techniques, and they got better because we had the mathematical sophistication, and now we had the computing power to do it. We—we lost our way, in my opinion.

Edwards: 
So, that’s really interesting. So, when you talk about how to go back and to undo some of those errors in the abstraction of the human, as you’re saying, in terms of the division between utility and economic profit, let’s say, is there something from the eighteenth or earlier nineteenth century model of economics that we could be bringing back, as part of the…?

Hoover: 
Well, part of the problem goes back to the profession itself in that our profession was highly exclusionary at [that] point. And so, when we talked about human behavior, we weren’t talking about the [gamut] of human behavior, which included people of color—it didn’t even include women. So, we came up with these models that just said “here’s what men will do when faced with this.” So, we started out rather primitively and we did not expand, right? We did not see. It took us a long time to see the value of working from home. Because then, we used to have these models, and I would read these models, to where it would say, you know, “women add nothing to the household,” even though they were the ones who stayed at home, raised children, and brought to the household an entire half of household production, which we totally eliminated and we erased. It’s only been in the last forty years that we’ve recognized, and now we’ve got actually whole areas called economics of the household, where we’re studying it, and now we have to go back and revisit all of the things that were said before because they were all wrong, right?

Edwards: 
So, in this kind of post-World War II—

Hoover: 
No, no, this came much later. So, even after World War II, we still discounted women and people of color.

Edwards: 
Right. So, in that moment after World War II, when economics starts to codify itself more, make this mathematical turn, is it the conditions of the racism and the kind of sexism of the post-war 1940s and 1950s that get embedded into this move?

Hoover: 
Absolutely, and it cost us. It cost us dearly. When we had a chance right then, you know, was that 70 years or more ago now? We had a chance back then to really hit our stride as a discipline. The discipline lost its chance.

Edwards: 
Alright, so take me then from that moment of the 40s and 50s through the Civil Rights era and the turn, right? Then, these abstract terms such as the market, you know, kind of come in. And, you know, this wonderful work that I’ve read in intellectual and cultural history that talks about the abstraction of the term “the market” as it emerges, really, in the 70s and 80s as one of these fractured terms, yeah.

Hoover: 
Yeah, you know, it’s an interesting point in that—and I[’m going to] take you someplace that you didn’t ask about, but I[’m going to] bring it back. Between the period 1920 and 1970, there [were] only about 45 Black economists that existed on the planet Earth. In 1968, the American Economic Association will not recognize a group of Black economists who wanted to have a committee within the American Economic Association. So, they met in a hotel room, and they founded their own committee. They called themselves the Caucus of Black Economists. The reason I bring that up is they wanted to ask the very questions that are being asked today. So, I think that in some small way, this group of five Black economics pushed the bigger American Economic Association to start thinking more inclusively. At that same time, not long after, the American Economic Association acknowledges and creates something called the Committee of the Study of Women in the Economics Profession. Those two together, as you had more people of color entering the profession, right around the 70s, and you had women taking a more prominent role in the profession, isn’t it interesting then that you start getting a [broader] view? Which wasn’t what you really asked, but I don’t think it’s any accident that those events tie together.

Edwards: 
It gets right to the heart of the matter, and something that we’re exploring in, really, all of these episodes in this podcast is the relationship between the people who are in—studying, teaching—a discipline and its relationship to the history of the discipline and the rules that have been formed. So, this is one of the most tangible examples of how that intersection plays out. Take us forward with those two groups and what they do back to the study. When do you see the effect on “mainstream” teaching of economics and where you would look for it?

Hoover: 
It was slow. It was slow. It took about, even if you look in the 70s, it took another three or four decades as we really start to see the impact. And first it started with women actually, before it really took up with people of color. It started with women, and women said, “hey, you know, your models of the household are incomplete when we’re talking about labor economics.” And going back to your point, we always said, “well, labor happens in the market”—the labor market. There’s a market for labor where firms demand people to work. Women said, “no, you’re missing out on a vital component here when you’re thinking about the labor force participation or the lack thereof of women because they’re in the household providing a valuable service,” right? What if you had to go out and pay someone to take care of your children, to do the things that are happening? So, they’re pushing hard on this. In the mid-70s, the first Black man, Sir Arthur Lewis, wins the Nobel prize in economics. Watershed moment. There was no denying his work was just fabulous.

Edwards: 
And what was his work focusing on?

Hoover: 
Actually, he was doing stuff around monetary economics. He wasn’t doing work necessarily that had anything to do with race or gender, but he was so prominent that he couldn’t be ignored, even given the nature of his work. It was just that good. And that took us off to the races and to where we are today, to where it’s much more acknowledged.

Edwards: 
So, let me ask you an economics question about economics: what are the costs of racism to economics that were talking about, these structural examples that you’re giving…?

Hoover: 
Well, the main problem has been that our numbers continue to be low when it comes to diversity. When you tell a student who believes that racism, discrimination exist, that they don’t exist in these models, they don’t exist in this class—then, the student heads back out of the door and heads to other disciplines that open them up. That’s been our problem. Even going back to my days as a graduate student, I was told, “look, what you want to do is ‘real economics,’ get your degree and then, once you’ve established yourself, you can go off and do some of these tangential things on race and gender.” Where I would say, “no, this is the type of work I want to do” and I stuck with it, and today, a student is much more likely to be told, “sure that’s fine,” right? “I will find a way to help you do this type of work.”

Edwards: 
You wrote a really important and influential article with Amanda Bayer and Ebonya Washington that came out in 2020 in the Journal of Economics Perspectives that’s got a great title, it says a lot: “How You Can Work to Increase the Presence and Improve the Experience of Black, Latinx, and Native American People in the Economics Profession.” And could you talk to us about how we can work to increase the presence and improve that experience of minorities in the discipline, in economics in academia in particular?

Hoover: 
Well, one of the things we need to do is to begin to listen, not only to what people of color say are their interests but also their lived experiences. That just doesn't happen, to where in class someone would be able to say, “look, my lived experience is that this has happened to me, so I know that this is real,” despite the fact that the professor might say “well, you know, that’s not in any model I’ve ever seen,” or “that is a tangent, a one-off—that’s not pure economics.” When you don’t listen to people, they’re going to go to where they can be listened to. Another thing we encourage people to do in that article is to open up their networks. What we find in economics is that I don’t get invited to conferences because I don’t know anybody. I don’t get invited to seminars—but you do. So, use your network to enhance the opportunities for me. Those types of things matter to economists of color, that we don’t have. For instance, in graduate school, what we found is that students further up on the chain—well, fifth-year student, fourth- or fifth-year students—leave notes for their peers who come after them. So, a fifth-year student will say, “here’s all my exams, here are all my notes, here’s everything I have from when I was a first-year student.” Right? “Who do I give those to? I give those to students I know or who are in my network.” When I was a graduate student, I didn’t have anybody, I didn’t know anybody who had even gone to graduate school. And so, I had to rough it all out on my own when my peers were getting help that they didn't even think, “well, this would be helpful for that person over there, too.” Those types of things matter. I was never included in study groups. In fact, I’d been there for almost a year before I knew that there were study groups. Those types of differences matter.

Edwards: 
So, following the two paths of racism, or racialized, kind of, behaviors in the discipline: one is the sort of structures that have emerged in terms of the codification of the field; and the other, these [kinds] of practices that result from or continue to keep the presence of minority graduate students in the field, right? Let me ask you this, then, in following the title of our episode, “Anti-Racism in Economics”: to you, what does anti-racism mean in economics? What would anti-racist work look like in the field?

Hoover: 
It’s quite simple, right? All we’d have to do in economics is—surprise, surprise—actually use economics. We have an answer, and what we know in economics is this: incentives matter. So therefore, if I incentivize people to engage in human behavior—which is the thing we started out by talking about—people respond to incentives. Therefore, if I go to an economics department and I say, “look, your diversity efforts look pretty poor, so therefore, I’m going to take resources away from you until you can show and demonstrate that your diversity efforts matter.” Immediately, economists respond to incentives, and they find that, “hm, I need my resources to do my work, so therefore, I will engage in these activities.” We teach that every day to our students, and yet, in economics, when we say, “hm, it’s time for us to think about diversity,” the first thing we do is we say, “well, I haven't a clue in the world,” when you just taught a bunch of freshmen that incentives matter.

Also, one of the things I’ve been stressing, I’ve always stressed, was that in the academic model, what do we evaluate our people on right now? Teaching, research, and service, right? Or you might call research “scholarship.” If we cared about teaching, we’d say, “here is what we want to see out of your teaching portfolio. If you don’t attain certain standards, then you’re not going to be a teacher here at this academic institution.” The same thing with scholarship. Within our discipline, you have to have so many publications, peer-reviewed, and they have to be of a certain quality. You want to hang around here? That has to be the case.

However, we don’t have that for diversity. That should be the fourth pillar. To me, it should be teaching, research, service, and diversity. You put that in as a fourth pillar and say to people, “from now on, you want to hang around this academic institution,” you introduce that fourth pillar and say that “here are the metrics I’m looking to have met for you to achieve tenure here.” Surprise, surprise: people respond to incentives, and as such, they will use the economic model to say, “well, if this is what is necessary for me to hang around this academic institution, then I’m going to do it.” That’s exactly what we do for the other three, and we do for the other three because we say that those matter to us. We say that teaching matters. Of course! We’re an academic institution, we’re here to service young minds. We know that peer review informs our teaching, so there should be some amount of scholarship, and service is just necessary for the department, for the academic institution. But we don’t have that for anything approaching diversity, especially not in economics departments.

Edwards: 
What, if any, have been the ramifications of the 2020 protests that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the discipline of economics? Have you seen tangible discussions or measurable differences since those protests?

Hoover: 
I have. One of the things is, because I am the co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession, I’ve had textbook companies reach out to me and say, you know, “look, what we want to do is we want to be more inclusive in our textbooks, but we don’t know how. So, what do you think about this idea? And what do you think about that idea?” And some ideas I would say, “okay, that’s horrid. Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever say that again.” And “that idea is a great idea.” For instance, inside of textbooks, they’ll run these small profiles and they’ll profile a prominent economist. Someone like an Adam Smith or even a Paul Samuelson. One of the things they said was, “can you give us a list of people of color economists because we actually don’t know where to go.” And I was able to give them the resources so that now textbooks actually say, “hey,” you know, “young undergraduate student of color, here is someone who looks exactly like you. Here’s their profile in the profession and how they got to where they are.” That was a great step that came out of those protests. So, steps like that have happened.

Another thing we were able to do was—I talked about networks. Departments would come to me and say, “you know, we’ve never invited for an academic seminar a person of color, because we don’t know any.” What we put together was a database and we said, “hey, you’re looking to invite a person of color to give an academic seminar. Go to this database. Here are over 600 who have signed up voluntarily and want to be invited to an academic seminar.” We found that it’s expanded even beyond that, because everyone’s using that database now. National funding and granting agencies who want to have evaluations of projects have said, “let's go to that database. Let's get someone of color to take a look at this proposal for funding, because,” as I just said before, “we just totally exclude them and said ‘how will this impact the white male?’ And maybe we can get a different perspective that we’re missing.” So, those types of things would have been unheard of 10 years ago and they're taking place today.

Edwards: 
This is great. I think this is great. I want to thank you for this really inspiring and important conversation, Hoov, and for taking the time to talk to us about anti-racism and economics.

If you liked this podcast, help us spread the word. Tell your friends, teachers, or students, or share it on social media. And let us know how you are contributing to anti-racist scholarship and teaching at our website liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Host: Brian T. Edwards 
Executive Producer: Gabriela Garcia Mayes 
Music: Cory Diane 
Production Assistant: Maggie Green 
Special Thanks: Billy Saas

How to cite this episode:

APA: Edwards, B. T. (Host). (2023, March 21). Anti-Racism and Economics (No. 1) [Audio podcast episode]. In Anti-Racism and the Disciplines. Tulane University School of Liberal Arts. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Chicago (Author-Date): Edwards, Brian T., host. 2023. “Anti-Racism and Economics.” Episode 1 in Anti-Racism and the Disciplines. Produced by Gabriela Garcia Mayes. Podcast, MP3 audio, 33:40. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Chicago (Notes and Bibliography): Edwards, Brian T., host. “Anti-Racism and Economics.” Episode 1 in Anti-Racism and the Disciplines. Produced by Gabriela Garcia Mayes. March 21, 2023. Podcast. MP3 audio, 33:40. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Harvard: Edwards, Brian T. (2023) “Anti-Racism and Economics,” Anti-Racism and the Disciplines, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts. March 21. Available at https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast [Accessed Date].

MLA 9: Edwards, Brian T., host. “Anti-Racism and Economics.” Anti-Racism and the Disciplines, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, 21 Mar. 2023. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Brian T. Edwards: 
You're listening to Anti-Racism in the Disciplines, the podcast that explores the complex histories of the liberal arts in order to reimagine their future.

I'm your host, Brian Edwards, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University.

In this episode, we'll talk about communication studies, featuring our guest Sarah J. Jackson, Presidential Associate Professor in Communication and Co-Director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jackson is an expert in Black and feminist media and activism. Her research focuses on how marginalized groups use and are represented by media, journalism, and technology. As a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she is working on a third book about the power and innovation of African American media makers in the twenty-first century.

Welcome, Dr. Jackson.

Sarah J. Jackson: 
Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Edwards: 
I've been enjoying talking to scholars in the different disciplines about their work, and also how their work emerges from the disciplinary formation. And communication studies is one of the more intriguing disciplines in this series because, in some ways, it’s one of the oldest disciplines, and then it’s also a much more twentieth-century discipline than some of the others we’ve been talking about. So, when you come to communication studies, I mean, how do you think of this field as a discipline?

Jackson: 
Yeah. It's a great question, and as you sort of suggested, it’s a little bit more complicated than it sounds. Many of the field’s brightest thinkers have struggled to delineate the disciplinary boundaries of the field, because it's a very interdisciplinary field that draws on both old areas like rhetoric, for example, and new areas like public policy and policy science, for example. But at its core, communication studies is the study of how and to what end the various forms of communication form and shape our lives, culture, and society.

Edwards: 
It's interesting being the dean of a school of liberal arts because we have students who are often attracted to the field, to our department of communication, or communication studies, media, and may think it is one thing [but] that it turns out to be another once they get more deeply in it. I mean, one of the things that we often think is that technologies of communication that start to appear in the world in the nineteenth century in a much more vivid way start to enter the conversation that turns it a different way.

Jackson: 
Yeah, that is a big force for the contemporary founding of what I would say is the field for communication studies. You know, scholars in largely the West were really thinking about the ways that societies and cultures and communities were being changed, were being broadened, were being expanded, were being limited by new technologies, by media. And in some cases, they were very concerned that these technologies and media would have a negative effect on the world. But the discipline of communication studies, it's not the study of technology. That's not what communication studies is. Communication studies is the study of all forms of communication. And so, when we think about society and how societies and cultures form, the idea was that communication reflected culture, that it was sort of a chicken and an egg, it both created and reflected at the same time. And so, a lot of studies of communication, whether that is presidential speeches, right, which are a form of oral communication, or whether that is TV news, which is a form of technologically mediated communication, are thinking about how those forms of communication are shaping the ways in which we think about society. So, really, a core to the field is the idea that communication can change the way that we think, and if you change the way you think you can essentially change people's behavior, right? You can shape culture; you can shape norms.

Edwards: 
So how, given that history or that way of understanding the recent history of the field, how exactly does race structure communication studies?

Jackson: 
Yeah, this is a great question. So, race structures communication studies in some of the same ways that race structures every field, you know? But I'll say a few things. First, there's the obvious privileging of Eurocentric and Western modes of knowledge that have largely been traced to the Enlightenment and thinking that has arisen from the Enlightenment. So, for example, in the field of communication, we draw a lot of early theorizing around the idea of the public from [John] Dewey, and more recently from Jürgen Habermas, and of course, Dewey and Habermas are thinking or in context of Western societies. And so, even on the critical side, the theorists were coming out of Germany, the Birmingham School, which is big in our in our field, it comes out of the United Kingdom. And so, like most of Western academic epistemologies, the field has ignored the majority of people in the world essentially, despite the fact that—and I'm thinking now specifically of African and Asian cultures, but obviously others—that these cultures have complex ideas to describe some of the same concepts that are very core to the field of communication, like the public, right? They had complex ideas and norms to delimit interpersonal communication, to develop collective politics long before the West presumed to be authorities on these ideas. So in part, the field of communication studies reflects that general, what I would say is a larger Western bias in academia that really deprives us of non-Western, non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge.

Second, there are of course, the ways that communities and people of color have been erased within much of the core theorizing of the field of communication. And the example I always use is that Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, of public sphere theory has become very, very core to our field in thinking about ideas of the public and ideas of public opinion, ideas of public politics and public deliberation. But that theory itself presumed a sort of inclusive form of deliberation and debate that simply didn't account for the structural exclusion of people of color, of women, of poor people. And so, the idea of the public sphere never really existed as it was proposed because of all of these structural exclusions. And so, scholars like Nancy Fraser, who's a feminist scholar, Catherine Squires, who's a Black feminist scholar, and others have pointed out in their work on counterpublics this critique of Habermas. But something that we see in the field is that the field, at least the center of the field, sort of continues to privilege the Habermasian idea of the public sphere above those critiques of it. So, you see Habermas continuing to be cited at a much higher rate. And you could say the same for many theories and theorists across the field where these original sort of normative Eurocentric frameworks that really excluded large populations of people, or didn't take into consideration the way that so-called democracy was actually being felt and enacted in ways that excluded huge swaths of people are being centered as the norm, or as normative ideals, or goals to study or to seek without sort of taking these critiques from the margins into account. And so, obviously, that has affected our ability as a field to develop necessary epistemologies for understanding the world around us, because we're really not taking into account these critiques with the same weight as we should.

Edwards: 
And that, what you're saying, goes right to the heart of the field of communication there, if an ideal—

Jackson: 
Yeah, I mean, that's just one example. There are plenty of other theories that, you know, you could do a similar breakdown of. But part of my point is that the critiques exist, right? The scholars at the margins, the Black scholars, the women scholars, then and now, we're saying, “hey, wait a minute, there are other ways in which civil society is constructed from the margins that are more inclusive, that might expand our democracy, that might give us more useful tools to understand contemporarily something, for example, like polarization.” But yet, that work is often at the margins of the field where this preference for these sort of normative Eurocentric theories is offered instead.

There's a third thing I would add in terms of how race shapes the field, which is that the first two things I mentioned—the sort of general Western and Eurocentric bias of the field, and the reliance on the exclusion of theoretical frameworks that come from the margins—both of those things really structured the administration of our field, and by the administration of the field I mean who gets hired, how students in graduate and PhD programs get trained. And so, for example, in 2018, this article was published in the flagship journal of our field called “#CommunicationSoWhite,” an article by Paula Chakravartty¹, who's at NYU and her co-authors, where they actually looked at publications over time in the highest ranked journals in our field, and found that these journals routinely omit scholars of color and scholarship on issues of race. And likewise, in a study of doctoral programs that I did with Paula, we found that most PhD programs in communication studies also sort of exclude critical theories of race or decoloniality in their pedagogy despite the fact, by the way, that some of the field’s most influential thinkers were committed to those projects.

So, for example, Stuart Hall is one of, I think, what many people would consider one of the fathers of least the cultural and critical side of the field of communication studies. And of course, Stuart Hall was Jamaican-born, self-identified as a post-colonial subject, and wrote at length about race, about nationalism, about coloniality. And yet, one of the things that we found in our study was that when Stuart Hall is assigned in communication PhD programs, it's often his piece on encoding/decoding,² about media consumption, which is one of the only pieces he wrote that isn't exclusively about race. That is a sign. And so, his writing and his thinking about the relationship between race and communication and culture often isn't what is being assigned, even as he is sort of foundational to the field. And so, that's an example of some of the administrative ways that this acts out.

And of course, that means that many communication scholars haven't been trained to or encouraged to carefully engage with questions of race and power. It often leaves a vacuum in classrooms when students want to talk about those things, right? And when hiring committees look at potential candidates or when admissions committees look at future graduate students, certain areas that have been excluded continue to be treated as if like, “oh, are these really part of our fields,” right? Even though they are and should be.

Edwards: 
In an essay that you published a couple of years ago about Black Lives Matter and journalism, you have this kind of personal aside, and you say: “Like potentially many people in this room”—because I guess you're giving this as a talk—“I had initially hoped to work as a professional journalist, and in fact did a little of that at various points in my life. I ended up going the academic route because it turned out I was more interested in the question of interrogating the power of stories, and the power of journalism, and who gets to tell those stories and whose voices are included in terms of shaping culture and politics.”³ I like that. I like it very much. I'm sure it resonates with students as well as other academics. If you maybe could say something, a little bit about moving between journalism and the desire to be a journalist or not, and then what you see the possibilities are in what you call the academic route.

Jackson: 
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you asked this question, because one of the things we didn't talk about when we were talking about the newer origins of the field is that journalism studies is a big part of it, right? I mean, of course, communication studies covers all kinds of media, not just journalism. But folks who critically analyze and think about the power of journalism in our society are a very central and core part of the field, in part because journalistic practice and journalism as a practice very much is core to the idea of the public, that this is the information we all share, and that we can sort of develop identities, we can develop politics, we can develop things to deliberate about or not to deliberate about based on the news, right? And so that becomes really central to the field.

And yeah, when I was younger, when I was an undergrad, I thought that I might want to be a journalist. I majored in broadcast journalism, and I did a little, you know, here and there, I never was officially, you know, a full-time journalist. But I had enough experiences in the journalism space that, at the time, I wouldn't have been able to name exactly what was happening, but what I realized later, in retrospect, is that many of those were experiences around bias, right? Where I was seeing this one story get privileged over another story, or one person's version of authority being privileged over another person's authority.

A great example of that that has really come to be apparent in recent years in journalism is the way in which journalists, for the vast majority of history and I would say still today, but maybe a little lesser, assume that a police officer's version of events is the accurate one, as opposed to, you know, witnesses who saw it happen, or a person who was there. They are given a type of authority. And those types of observations, when I was young, really made me want to ask more questions about media and power, and really turned me towards studying it, because something like assuming that one person and/or one category of people are deserving of more [preferential] treatment or authority by journalists has caused a lot of problems in this country quite, quite briefly. And not just, you know, in that case, but in many different cases. You know, there are a lot of wonderful communication scholars who also worked at various points in their life much more seriously than I did as professional journalists. And they're wonderful to have in our field, because they really have the ability to think through some of these questions about how the industry norms of journalism and how the role of journalism impacts our everyday lives.

Edwards: 
So, the rise of digital technology has made what we used to call alternative journalism—or in the other conversation, counterpublics—much more accessible, right? You know, it's easier to have access to a range of voices should she or he want to access them. And at certain moments, I kind of look around at different perspectives when I'm trying to see how different people are reporting the same story. But on the other hand, we know this, the term filter bubble, that the same technologies that have made more accessible to us different forms of journalism, or different voices, are also involved in filtering what we see more in a different way. So, is this the right time to be having this conversation? Or is it a more and more perilous time to be having the conversation about access to different voices and different approaches?

Jackson: 
Yeah, there [are] so many directions here that we could go. It's such a dense question. But you know, one of the things that I think people really have to be cautious about in our field is technological determinism. And what I mean by that is that there was this moment when the Internet became more or less ubiquitous in the West, where there was this technological optimism where people said, “now you can get all the information you want about the whole world, everybody can say their piece, and you can get alternative points of views, and you can ‘do your own research,’” and you know, like all these things, and it was supposed to be this positive thing.

But partially what that didn't account for was that power still exists. Whether the Internet exists or not, social power, social structures still exist. And so, for a long time, there was a digital divide; there were inequalities about who could and couldn't access the internet. And of course, there are still the economics of the media in which just because somebody has a blog or writes something doesn't actually mean anyone will ever read or write it. It's often people who are already in elite positions who have access to sort of the largest sounding boards, even within new technology.

Now, that said, I would also warn people away from the digital pessimism, because there was this other take that was that the Internet was going to bring down democracy, and that, you know, it was terrible in all these ways. And in some ways, it has made it easier for us to see things like hate speech, see things like extremist groups, be exposed to some of the more sort of terrible, I would say, undercurrents of our society. But I always remind people: those things actually existed also before the internet, right? We are a country where racism and sexism and homophobia and all these other things were very core to much of our politics and culture long before we were able to more easily see that online.

And so, really, there is a middle ground, which is the fact that it is the case—and that’s something we write about in #HashtagActivism⁴ —that ordinary people have been able to extend the sorts of counter-publicity that they always had, right? African Americans had the Black press; women had the feminist press. They had technologies, they had media that they were producing to reflect some of the ingroup and enclave politics that were happening behind the scenes and were being ignored in the mainstream. And the Internet has, of course, made those things more visible and easier for outgroup members to see. And so, now there is this sort of heyday of Twitter—I think it might be over, to be quite honest with you—where you could go online, and you could see these conversations coming out of publics that you weren't a part of, and you could actually learn and maybe engage and ask questions and be introduced to new sets of politics that you might not otherwise be introduced to, in a more easy, easeful way than, you know, in real life having to go to a community organizing meeting or, like, try a new church or something like that. And that, of course, has been a good thing.

I wrote an editorial for the New York Times called "Twitter Made Us Better,"⁵ and I wrote it in a time when everyone was talking about how Twitter made us worse. And I was like, “I still think Twitter made us better.” But of course, it is also the case that people have used the Internet, just like they use technology in any other time, to further misinformation, to further disinformation, to further polarize and separate people, to, you know, stoke flames of difference. It's a tool, right? I always say the technology itself isn't good or bad, but it's that human beings do good and bad things with technologies, and they really always have.

Edwards: 
You've written several pieces in the last couple of years on Black Lives Matter in a variety of approaches to [help] us understand Black Lives Matter in what you call “#HashtaghActivism” or in this kind of media landscape. So, you've produced a lot of different work there. How should we think of Black Lives Matter in this context?

Jackson: 
Yeah. So, one of the most important things that I always say is: I want people to understand that social movements don't just happen because of a hashtag and don't just happen because of technology, that every social movement that has happened throughout history happens because of conditions on the ground, it happens because of organizing, it happens because of communities coming together, even if the first time you learn about it is because of a hashtag.

And so, one of the things that I think is really important to remember about the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is that it really helped bring attention, and it helped what we would say in social movement studies is promulgate the message of ongoing racial injustice, and really helped to shore up solidarity against that, which is a wonderful thing. But it also reflects narratives and discourse that have been coming out of what I call counterpublics and coming out of social movements for a long time. And so, people have been on the ground organizing against police violence in Black communities, and have been working to try to dismantle systems of racial profiling and other forms of America's racial caste system long before the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter existed.

But what the internet has introduced in something like a shorthand, like a hashtag, like #BlackLivesMatter, even like #MeToo has introduced, is essentially a new type of megaphone where this stuff that was happening that maybe wasn't being treated as newsworthy, that maybe was being ignored because it was happening to nondominant communities, that part of the everyday experience of some people in this country can suddenly be yelled to more people, to many people. And because of that, it becomes newsworthy, it becomes something that people are paying attention to. And, you know, the brilliance, of course of a hashtag is that it's just one short phrase that often can encapsulate a larger history, the larger goals, the larger demands of offline social movement, and so essentially becomes one form of publicity for a larger social movement.

Edwards: 
This is really great. And for people haven't been thinking of it this way before, understand the hashtag itself as, like you say, as a megaphone, but as a form of technology or a tool within, you know, a social media technology that amplifies. So, how has then more broadly social media changed the racial justice struggle?

Jackson: 
You know, I feel like my answer here might be a little disappointing, which is that social media has changed the racial justice struggle in that more people across larger geographies can be exposed to arguments for racial justice at a rate that we've never seen ever before. And that's hugely significant. And so, more people across the world or across the nation, regardless of the neighborhood they live in, or the school they went to or didn't go to, can be exposed to these ideas about racism, about structural inequality, about white supremacy, and take part in or even just watch these conversations play out at a scale that we've never seen. And this is hugely, hugely significant for something called consciousness-raising, which is, you know, where folks come to understand the world around them better, and sort of come to terms with the issues that communities are trying to change or that social movements are trying to face.

So, in that way, I would say that social media has been hugely significant because certainly it has allowed for the circulation of things that have fundamentally rocked us as a nation. The video of George Floyd being murdered was largely circulated online before it was ever circulated on the news, and there have been many other similar cases to that. And that sort of public outreach that resulted made it a newsworthy story, made it into something that evoked national protests, and that I think we can fairly say has really changed the tenor and type of public discourse over the past few years. So, in that way, I would say, you know, it's been hugely, hugely important. As somebody who in addition to being a communication scholar, I'm also a social movements scholar, I always have to say, now that said, folks on the ground in these communities have been fighting this fight for a long time. They've often been being ignored. And that is the thing that in some ways, social media has made less the case, is it's harder to ignore these issues, it's harder to ignore the folks who have been yelling, “hey, look, racial profiling is an issue,” “these unjust police stops are an issue,” etc., etc.

But I don't know that in terms of the longer scope—and I really think people should see it as a longer scope. I often say Black Lives Matter is just one iteration of the longer Black freedom struggle in America. And if you think about that struggle as starting with the effort to abolish slavery, in which Black people were telling their own stories through things like slave narratives; and then you think about the civil rights struggle, where again Black people were telling their own stories through media that they were making until the mainstream would pay attention and listen, in each of those cases. I think the contemporary moment isn't that dissimilar, that folks are still advancing that struggle, and they're using the technologies and the communication methods available to them to get the mainstream to pay attention.

Edwards: 
Back to the discipline of communication studies, and we're talking about the 2020 protests that followed George Floyd's murder. Have you seen yet any changes or conversations in the field or discipline itself of communication studies in the last couple of years or on the horizon?

Jackson: 
Yeah, absolutely. And I would say actually a lot of them started before the 2020 moment. I think a lot of those conversations started during the Trump presidency. And so, there were many scholars in the field who for a long time, you know, most of them are scholars of color, feminist scholars, were asking for the field to examine some of those, like, issues that I mentioned earlier that create entrenched forms of racism in the field. So, there had been work on that in our professional organizations for a long time, but certainly it came to a head, I would say in the last five to six years. The article I mentioned, the “#CommunicationSoWhite” study—which was first a hashtag on Twitter, and then they used the hashtag for this study to show the underrepresentation of research and researchers from communities of color in the field—came out in 2018. So certainly, though the uprisings in 2020 have further pushed that forward, I think the unrepentant racism that we saw coming out of the Trump administration also pushed that forward and served as a wakeup call for some of the folks in the field who had maybe previously ignored conversations about race in the field.

And so, I think for one, our professional organizations—the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, and there [are], you know, a dozen more that I won't bore people by rattling off—but I think a lot of these professional associations have made more public commitments to dismantling forms of exclusion in sort of their structures. And some, not all, but some of the journals, the flagship journals in the field have made similar public commitments. I mean, we'll have a better sense if these commitments, you know, result in action and what happens in the years to come in in the future.

And I do think that some of those scholars I mentioned who were previously being ignored, who had been asking critical questions about race and colonialism and whiteness in the field and things like that are being drawn increasingly towards the center. Now, again, I say these things, to some extent, I mean, certainly not fully, we haven't seen a 360, and I think that would take a lot more than the sort of smaller efforts that we're seeing. But I do certainly hope that these trends continue, that these conversations continue, and I think there has been an increased amount of space for them. I think it’ll be a matter of whether or not we maintain that.

Edwards: 
So, what does anti-racism mean in communication studies? I mean, what would anti-racist work look like in the discipline?

Jackson: 
You know, I think the main thing it means is getting comfortable doing a lot harder work in the field than just so-called diversity work. It's more than the superficial, representational sort of political conversations. It means communications scholars really need to educate themselves about histories of race and racism and incorporate theory and ideas and epistemologies that have really critically engaged not just with race and racism in the United States, but across the globe, because we're a global field.

And so, of course, self-examination is a part of this. But I really think institutions acting structurally, is a big part of this as well. And I think a lot about the phrase “anti-racism” and how it's become popularized post-2020, and the ways that it's been circulated in media, and I actually fear that it has been watered down and sort of turned into something that people feel like, “oh, I can read a book, and then, you know, I've solved the problem,” rather than it being an action.

The first time I ever encountered the term anti-racism was through Angela Davis's work. And you know, Angela Davis is, of course, a preeminent scholar. But she also, you know, was a Black Panther, she went to prison for her radical beliefs, she helped break Black freedom fighters out of prison. She's an anti-capitalist, she's a socialist and abolitionist. And so, I think, for scholars or for institutions, whether in the field of communication or the academy more [generally], to think about what it truly means to be anti-racist, it probably means being abolitionist and working to dismantle class exploitation. And there are some things that are difficult there because universities are deeply tied to the prison industrial complex, and they’re primary spaces for enforcing class differences, as are the fields.

And so, I'm not sure that my field of communication studies or really any field, quite honestly, is entirely ready for that. But I hope that at the very least, we can start to treat these ideas that at previous times were dismissed as too radical as valid entry points into developing our pedagogies, developing our epistemologies. And that that will be part of pushing past this idea that just being aware that racism was a problem was enough, but actually creating action so that at the very least there's an active process of eliminating racism in our organizational structures and practices across the field. That would be something, I think I would certainly embrace more conversations about how to do that.

Edwards: 
Sarah, thank you so much for a really engaging conversation and all the work that you're doing and your scholarship and your teaching. It's really inspiring to have this conversation.

Jackson: 
Yeah, thanks for doing this.

If you liked this podcast, help us spread the word. Tell your friends, teachers, or students, or share it on social media. And let us know how you are contributing to anti-racist scholarship and teaching at our website, liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Host: Brian T. Edwards 
Executive Producer: Gabriela Garcia Mayes 
Music: Cory Diane 
Production Assistant: Maggie Green 
Special Thanks: Billy Saas

How to cite this episode:

APA: Edwards, B. T. (Host). (2023, March 21). Anti-Racism and Communication Studies (No. 2) [Audio podcast episode]. In Anti-Racism and the Disciplines. Tulane University School of Liberal Arts. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Chicago (Author-Date): Edwards, Brian T., host. 2023. “Anti-Racism and Communication Studies.” Episode 2 in Anti-Racism and the Disciplines. Produced by Gabriela Garcia Mayes. Podcast, MP3 audio, 31:20. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Chicago (Notes and Bibliography): Edwards, Brian T., host. “Anti-Racism and Communication Studies.” Episode 2 in Anti-Racism and the Disciplines. Produced by Gabriela Garcia Mayes. March 21, 2023. Podcast. MP3 audio, 31:20. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.

Harvard: Edwards, Brian T. (2023) “Anti-Racism and Communication Studies,” Anti-Racism and the Disciplines, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts. March 21. Available at https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast [Accessed Date].

MLA 9: Edwards, Brian T., host. “Anti-Racism and Communication Studies.” Anti-Racism and the Disciplines, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, 21 Mar. 2023. https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/antiracismandthedisciplinespodcast.