- Most Americans want to see the United States as a bastion of liberal democracy, but today's guest is a columnist whose work exposes the illiberal elements in American society, including white supremacy, banning books, and vigilantism, he's Michael Paul Williams, this week on Story In The Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to, Story In the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, - And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- Since 2013, even before we produced this program, Salve Regina University has honored talented individuals who tell stories that matter.

We had to take a year off because of the pandemic, but recently we named the 2021 Pell Center prize winner for Story In The Public Square.

Michael Paul Williams, a Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Richmond Times Dispatch, Michael welcome.

- Thank you for having me.

- 2021 Was a tremendous year for you personally.

Congratulations on all fronts.

We'll talk about that in a moment, but let's take a step back.

And in 1992, you became the first black columnist at your hometown newspaper, the Richmond Times Dispatch, what drew you to journalism in the first place?

- Well, senior year college, I figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

And it's less dramatic than what you just described.

I wanted to be a sports writer, loved sports, loved to write, figured this would be a nice way to make a living and do something that I would love doing without even being paid for it.

But having met someone who wrote for Sports Illustrated, I was told that I needed a couple of years of hard news experience.

And once I got at that hard news thing, I never turned back.

- When you made the leap from sports to hard news and then the leap from reporter to columnist, what were those transitions like?

- Well, I'd been covering hard news for a decade.

The last beat I had was Richmond City Government.

And it was at a time when our sister paper, the Richmond News Leader was going out of business and our two staffs were being merged.

And we were essentially told reapply for our jobs.

And I saw it as an opportunity.

And that's when I went to my editor at the time and said, we function in a city that is majority black, but there are no black opinion writers.

And this is something that has to change.

And if I want to do this job, but if you don't have me doing it, you need to find someone who will, and they did.

- Is the work as a columnist though, materially different than what you were doing as a reporter?

How do those two different existences in a newsroom align?

- Oh, it was, it was so liberating.

I feel like I didn't find myself as a journalist until I became an opinion writer and it's not for everyone.

But at some point in this profession, I felt like I wanted to make a difference as far as diversity, as far as race, as far as some of the issues that have plagued the industry historically.

And that's harder to do covering a beat.

And it's easier.

I feel like to have influence as an opinion writer, obviously our beat reporters have tremendous influence.

They get laws changed.

They do all sorts of enormous things, but just for me personally, this proved to be the move.

- So when we honored you with the Pell prize, we noted that your columns don't merely tell stories.

They do that of course, but they tell stories that matter.

And is that something that is in your mind deliberately intentionally when you set out to write a column?

And then maybe you can also talk about what you decide to write about when you write a column, how you choose your topics?

- Yes, that's some, I never thought of it that way, but that's a good point.

When I went into column writing, I felt like it should be substantial.

It should be something that made a difference.

I took my role as the first African-American to have the privilege of writing my opinions very seriously.

And given the history of our newspaper, very significant, I could not fool around.

I had to try to make a difference and I approached my topic seriously, and believe it or not, I'm viewed as a pretty humorous guy.

I can make people laugh, but especially at the beginning, I didn't feel terribly comfortable projecting that part of myself into my writing.

I was gravely serious because I felt like it was gravely serious work.

Over the years I've lightened up a little bit.

- So you won a Pulitzer prize for commentary this year, which of course is an exceedingly high honor.

And the committee cited you.

And I'm gonna read this now for a quote, "Penetrating in historically insightful columns "that guided Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy, "through the painful and complicated process "of dismantling the city's monuments to white supremacy."

What is the status now of Confederate statues in Richmond?

Are they all down or what's the status?

- There are a few that are still up.

They're like kudzu in Richmond.

- [G. Wayne Miller] Now see that is funny.

- You have a lot of work to remove all the Confederate statues and monuments.

There is a monument to AP Hill, that it's complicated to remove that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is he's buried beneath the statue.

That is the last remaining very visible statue that the city has a modicum of control over.

I think there's a smaller Confederate monument memorial at one of the courthouses in the city.

There's several Confederate monuments at Capitol Square that remain, those are under state control.

There's a statue of Stonewall Jackson.

There's one to Hunter Holmes McGuire who was a Confederate surgeon and eugenicist, I might add.

And there was a former Virginia Governor, William Extra Billy Smith, who's also a Confederate.

So they're still there.

The general assembly will ultimately decide their fate, but it's, you know, and the pedestals remain, the pedestals, they're in pedestal collection mode right now, they're putting out request for proposals to remove the pedestals and they've started on the Lee statue.

It's they still leave their mark.

They've been removed, but they've not totally been eradicated from the landscape.

- Michael, you wrote about the Lee Pedestal recently because there are some who contend that the graffiti that now graces that pedestal, I think grace is the right word, but the graffiti that graces that pedestal now has been called some of the most important protest art since the end of the second World War.

So tell us about the debate about what to do with these pedestals.

- Yeah, I think, I think some police officers would take issue with the word grace.

(male laughing) If you.

- That's a fair point.

- If you've seen it, if you seen some of the subject matter on the pedestals, it's not suitable for family viewing, and I'm gonna assume this is family viewing.

Early on during the protest, as that pedestal was remade with the graffiti and the light shows were projected upon the pedestal with freedom fighters, like Frederick Douglas and so forth.

And so on, Harriet Tubman.

People really became attached to it.

They were proud that they had reclaimed this space.

They had made it a Memorial to police violence with all sorts of figures, far beyond Richmond, who had been victimized by police, they had a public garden out there.

They had a basketball court.

It became a totally different space than it was.

And the thing you have to understand about Monument Avenue is that for most of its history, it was an exclusive space.

It was designed to be an exclusive space, a whites only real estate development, even in my lifetime, it felt unwelcoming.

And this was a totally different Monument Avenue that had been created around this particular pedestal.

And I started hearing folks say, I want it to stay.

There were others who just were ready to for all of it to go.

But yeah, it's a point of some contention right now.

I never realistically believed that they would keep the pedestal there, but there are some people feel like this is a tragic waste of opportunity to make a real statement about racial equality in Richmond.

- So these statues and pedestals are not unique to Richmond, certainly, and not unique to Virginia and two summers ago, in one of your columns, you wrote that these monuments perpetuate a racist ideology that still plagues our nation.

And that is so true.

Can you expound on that a little bit, how this is not simply a Richmond or Virginia issue and not even just a South issue.

- We still live the civil war.

We still live the failure of reconstruction.

I use the word failure, not lightly because it didn't so much fail is it was, the rug was yanked from under it.

America decided to abandon what would have been an enormous step forward in equality, racial equality, and democracy.

One that was taking root, one in which the formerly enslaved were holding political office and running businesses.

It was a remarkable thing to witness, and it was suppressed often violently.

And we live with that legacy, the rejection of the idea that all men are created equal.

That's etched into our founding document.

And that plays us to this very moment, through the insurrection where you saw the Confederate flag flown in the US Capitol, it has never made sense that we have elevated agents of treason fighting to preserve enslavement as national heroes in places like the US capital, on the streets of our cities, even cities and states that were not part of the Confederacy.

It's an ideology we have to reject wholeheartedly if we're gonna move forward as a nation.

It is dragging us down a little way as we speak.

- So how do we move forward?

We're so highly politicized on many, many issues, not simply what we're talking about here, how do we move forward as a nation?

- Well I just.

- If I had the answer to that.

That'd be the oval office.

- It's, on that point, I just want to sort of emphasize a little bit about Wayne is saying there, because it's not just that there's a legacy of white supremacy.

There certainly is, but it almost seems like there are some political actors in the United States today who want to use white supremacy for political gain.

So that's just my own little soapbox moment, but.

- That's agreed, agreed.

And that's not a new phenomenon.

Race has been the ultimate instrument of people in power to keep people who should have common cause divided and at each other's throats and over issues that are liberally non-existent, like critical race theory.

We're a nation of grotesque inequalities that transcend race, the economic inequality, wealth inequality, inequality of healthcare, inequality in our criminal justice system.

And, these issues do not just effect people of color.

This pandemic, I keep hearing lately that the pandemic is taking its heaviest toll in localities that voted for Donald Trump, significantly so, so this is literally killing us and, we've got to figure it out.

And this isn't, this is an old playbook.

I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how people who did not own human beings and who actually were hurt by the system of slavery economically, you're white scratch farmers in the South, were convinced that this was a cause that they should take up.

So we've got to start, it's simply a matter of acting in our self-interest instead of acting against it.

But the idea of white privilege is a powerful drug, and politicians very cynically are using it for their own gain on behalf of a stage of capitalism that has really become rapacious.

We've you know, and a lot of this is controlled by the power of language and narrative and propaganda, let's face it.

I don't know how to convince people to act in their self-interest when race has proved to be such a blinding topic in America, but the nation's very survival as a functioning democracy depends on it.

- Michael, you mentioned white privilege.

You and I have also talked over the last couple of months a few times, and we've talked a little bit about white fragility and in the summer of 2021, you wrote a column about your, well, about that dynamic.

And I think critical race theory's role in the politics of your state of Virginia, but you began by recounting your arrival at a white parochial school in 1964, and the attacks you faced.

Your lead, and I'm gonna quote you here, was, "As a six year old child.

"I had no protective coating shielding my tender feelings "from racist barbs."

Tell us what you were responding to and explain that for our audience in the context of 2021.

- Yeah, the idea that white school children need to be protected is itself a manifestation of white privilege and systemic racism because students of color have no, never had such protections.

When I was a six year old going off to a parochial school and an overwhelmingly white parochial school.

I remember my parents inviting another couple over and their son, who was also gonna be enrolled in that school.

And as a six year old, I got the message.

I didn't know much, but I got the message.

Keith and I were supposed to look out for each other because we were going into a space that may not be welcoming to us.

And yeah, the poem, I cited the poem that I heard very early on in that school, In 1964, my father went to war.

He pulled the trigger and shot the N word.

And that was the end of the war.

This is 1964, we're at war in Asia.

But that poem tells you who the real enemy was.

And the enemy was domestic, kids, young kids of color have to navigate that every day and they still have to navigate it.

And the house they navigate, academic curriculum that has been hostile toward them in both what it teaches and what it does not, the idea that there's too much black history in the teaching of American history is ludicrous to this day.

In my school days, into my high school days, there were still textbooks in Virginia that taught that the enslaved were content.

This is the 1970s.

We still spend precious little time exploring the true history of systemic racism in this country.

And what I'm hearing are the spasms of people who just don't want to hear it.

And they are being coddled.

This is being used as yet another wedge issue.

It's not going to make their kids smarter and it's not gonna help the country.

- And I would contend and not content.

I can stay authoritatively that this is true throughout this country.

We're having, in some areas, even in New England and Rhode Island, that same quote unquote debate.

I wanted to ask you, what kind of reaction do you get to your columns?

And you could probably talk for half an hour about that, but can you sort of break it down into pro meaning people who read and go right on, and then con, people who read and say the opposite, and how do you handle that, the reaction from readers?

Because certainly you've got a lot of readers.

- Well, I mean, obviously to be a reporter, a journalist in general, an opinion writer, specifically, you have to have a thick skin.

I have my say, my feeling is the readers get to have theirs, I'm not gonna argue back and forth with anyone who has a different take.

I get a lot of nastiness.

I'm told I'm a hater, that I'm the real racist.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I got that one.

I wouldn't need to work anymore.

That I hate white people because of the views that I articulate.

You know, and of course I have people who are extremely supportive readers who are extremely supportive.

Some of the most gratifying responses Tweet me winning awards has been folks who've congratulated me and said, I don't always agree with you, or even, I don't often agree with you, but I like the way you write and congratulations on your honor.

And we have to get back to that as a country, we have to get back to a point where people can have different viewpoints and not feel like the person who has a different opinion is an enemy, that's what's dragging us down.

Even the politicians are acting that way.

What's going on in Congress is ludicrous and unsupportable, Congress persons, you know, 20 cartoons and which they killed their political, you know, the person on the opposite side of the political spectrum, harassing people in the halls of Congress, it's juvenile.

And some of it strays into my thinking borderline criminal.

That's got to stop.

What sort of behavior are they modeling?

They're worried about their kids.

What kind of behavior are they modeling?

They're acting crazy.

So, you just, as far as the real haters, the people who like write in everyday or post beneath my columns, what an idiot I am.

I call them my base.

They read the paper every day.

They keep us in business.

So I can't hate them.

It's just, we, if we can get to a point where we can reader disagree, I think we'll go a long way toward salvaging our body politic.

- Michael, you wrote a column recently about efforts to ban books in some Virginia counties, Henrico County, pulling from its high school libraries.

The book, Out Of Darkness, by Ashley Hope Perez, about a teenage romance between a black boy and a Mexican girl in the 1930s, Texas, and New Kent county public schools removing from its middle school library, Elizabeth Acevedo's, The Poet X, winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, among others.

And in another Virginia county, Spotsylvania, a school board member urging the burning of books, what's going on here?

- Well, and the York County Board of Supervisors was talking about essentially defunding that county's schools, and I think they're walking it back from best I can understand since then, but that's a horrible specter to massive resistance.

And the decision by Prince Edward County from 1959 to 64 to no longer fund its public schools.

Back then, it was about keeping black kids out of the classroom, now it's about keeping black history out of the classroom and which is American history, it's.

The irony about where we are as a nation is we have constituents who screamed socialism at the idea that everyone should have healthcare, but they're embracing insurrectionists, they're embracing want to be authoritarians.

And when you talk about banning books and burning books.

That's straight out of the Nazi playbook.

That's totalitarian.

These are not American ideals, or not what we think of as American, but we are willingly going down this course and it's appalling.

And it seems like the Make America Great Again, has become the unmaking of America into something that resembles what we historically have opposed, we've got to wake up.

It makes no sense.

- So 2022 will be the midterm elections.

And then two years after that we'll have presidential election.

What role do you foresee race playing in the midterm, starting in the midterms.

And again, granted, there are contests all over the country and it will vary region by region and race by race.

But what role do you foresee race playing and what role should race play?

- [Jim] We got about a minute and a half left, Michael.

- Okay, well, I believe in speaking, honestly, and we have one political party that's gone off the rails.

Republican party has apparently concluded that it can not win elections fairly given the demographics and which is silly because they won in Virginia.

And the demographics were not on their side and best I can tell there was no wide scale cheating or anything in Virginia, but they won, but they went into a panic after the presidential elections, stoked by Donald Trump.

And they are through gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts, try, and the removal of honest election officials.

Many of them Republican, they are trying to game the system.

So this cannot be allowed to happen because it seems like this is a party in thrall of a cheater.

And if the midterms empower that segment of the political spectrum, we're, democracy could go into a death spiral.

- That is unfortunately where we need to leave it.

He's Pulitzer prize winner, Health Center prize winner, Michael Paul Williams, with the Richmond Times Dispatch, his work's important.

You want to check it out, that's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about Store In The Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit PellCenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time, for more Story In The Public Square.

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