Elliot Williams
speaker
222 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 16 Jan
Elliot Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
To many, certainly to black politicians and many white columnists, the big one being Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, saw the racial dynamics of the case as unmistakable.
No one, and I would challenge everybody to think this, like of any story, just flip the races of the participants.
And if a black man had left four white teenagers bleeding out in a subway, fled to New Hampshire and hid,
uh then turned himself in and come back gone on trial and been acquitted like there would be armageddon around that around that story and i just think you know nobody's calling you racist for saying that it's just it is a reality of just how we all see um polarizing issues of criminal justice the racial dynamics are just unmistakable and i make that clear throughout the book
Of course.
of course no well well one it's a far more enjoyable story than i would have thought uh just sort of to read and relive um sort of getting in the minds because it's about burning bits but it's not really it's not right yeah that's what bernard that's what uh freud would say right sometimes a story about a subway vigilante isn't a story about a subway vigilante it's about sort of america and sort of the biases we hold and but also just issues that we grapple with today i would
I would say that people will come away knowing that the people, places, and things that we thought we knew and that we caricatured are just are not as simple as we might've thought.
Like Bernard Goetz, whom I interviewed for the book, as the New Yorker said in their review of it, they said that he does not come off sympathetically in my interview, but at least comes out as three-dimensional.
And I sort of talk through like what's in this guy's head.
It's all over the place.
But what, you know, Burn Against is just far more complex than I would have thought from anything I'd read as a kid.
These young men who were reduced to just criminal histories at the time were far more complex beings with needs and wants and desires and fears than the world would have wanted to let on.
And I think...
New York City in all of its flaws in the 1980s was far more complex than people maybe would have given it credit for.
And I just think the book is an entertaining and engaging look into complexity of the lives we all live through a story that we thought we knew really well.
Giuliani.
Oh, Giuliani.
Yeah, I think one, wait a second, Al Sharpton only weighs 155 pounds now and wears suits all the time.
What?
You know, he cut off the conch and he's sort of a, you know, a cable television host.
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