Alex Wagner

Well, it's great to get some time from you to talk about the state of the world.

I guess I want to start, Professor Gray, Roxanne, with the article that you wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the myth of civility in American politics.

Maybe you can start by explaining what civility is in your estimation and why it's a fantasy.

When you talk about the people who believe in the possibility of civility at this moment, are they sort of more simply put, just people who don't understand oppression and haven't experienced it firsthand?

Yeah, it's like they're so threatened by criticism that they have to take the TV shows off the air.

They're so threatened by criticism in the form of the judicial system that they need to shutter the law firms or threaten them with lawsuits themselves.

They have to threaten the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and they have to excise the language from the history books and the textbooks.

And it's all to defend their delicate sensibilities around, you know, feeling threatened about both their history, their present and their future.

I guess when you talk about incivility, I want to get to the essence of that because in the piece, in the Times, you say it's the refusal to surrender to hatred.

What do you say to people who believe that incivility as a concept is the promotion of violence?

Can I use, you mentioned in the piece, you use historical examples of the Freedom Riders in the 1960s.

And I think so much about nonviolent civil protest as being sort of born in that era.

And you write in the piece, all of the protest, all of their protest was civil and nonviolent.

Nonviolence didn't mean passivity.

It was a strategy intended to reveal the brutal contrast

between the tactics of the oppressor and the experiences of the oppressed.

Nonviolent civil protest was met with rank incivility, which is to say the hypocritical way in which we presently understand civility and incivility is nothing new.

So help me understand it through the lens of this moment where you're saying don't ask us to be civil.

Do you think that the work of those freedom fighters and those civil rights activists in the 1960s sort of in the gate of civility was the wrong strategy?

I guess I'm trying to square what happened before in that context with what you're talking about now.