Monica Miller and Christopher Driscoll Engage in Impolite Conversation with John L. Jackson, Jr.

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 8:10 pm by Guest Contributor

Monica Miller and Christopher Driscoll Engage in Impolite Conversation with John L. Jackson, Jr. 2015-04-29T20:10:54-05:00 Guest Contributor

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In the first installment in this new series, Conversations in Black, Miller and Driscoll talk to John L. Jackson, Jr. about his new book with Cora Daniels, Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion.

MM/CD: Impolite Conversations is an issues-driven dialogue between you and journalist Cora Daniels, both of you friends since high school. Could you tell us a bit about how the project came together, and how it took specific shape as this series of “impolite conversations?”

JJ: Ever since Cora and I were in high school, Brooklyn Tech in New York City, we’ve been threatening to write something together. Back then, I’m not sure we thought that it would be a bona fide book of any kind, but we knew we wanted to be in critical conversation with one another as thinkers and would-be writers. I went to Howard in DC. She went to Yale in New Haven. I came back to New York to study anthropology at Columbia and to produce 16mm films at just about the same time that she returned to NYC, also set up shop at Columbia (in the Journalism School), and continued to enhance her skills as a news reporter. Jump-cut to a couple of years ago, and we were still fantasizing about some kind of writerly collaboration, threatening to craft something together. We’ve both had the opportunity to write other things. Cora has written some books. I’ve written some. We’d read each other’s work, of course. And we still couldn’t clear space to actually commit to concretizing what some kind of co-written piece might look like. We never got beyond the dinner party mentions, always in passing, ever-wistfully.

So, we finally said either we do this, or we stop talking about it. So we finally brainstormed a bit about the idea, and things just started to come together. I consider our book a kind of soft provocation, a Swiftian spoof on the very notion of “public dialogues.” It is also a commentary on the devolving nature of public discourse today. Some of that devolution is linked to impoverished understandings of political correctness, which I talked about in my book Racial Paranoia. Political Correctness is least effective, I think, when it is imagined as an endgame in and of itself and not merely a potential starting block, a means to an entirely different finish line: creating a safe space for as many people as possible to feel like they have a legitimate and recognized role in a civic discourse that will necessarily be uncomfortable — for everyone. Cora and I thought that we’d use our essays in Impolite Conversations (some of them personal, some of them polemical) to talk about things we knew would be unpopular (and even somewhat controversial or embarrassing), but we wanted to do that with the “good faith” goal of modeling a form of discursive honesty that we hoped could help to reboot popular discussions and debates about the future of American society.

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