Why has America’s mood turned so sour? with Rafael Pi Roman on Journey TV Updated!

Rafael Pi Roman and Tony Carnes discuss the growing influence of intersectionality and woke ideology in society, with a focus on its impact on corporations, universities, and the media. Roman argues that while the movement may have started with good intentions, it has become increasingly divisive and intolerant. They share their personal experiences of living under authoritarian regimes and how the current woke movement resembles those environments, with a culture of fear and censorship. Fear is a general condition of our society affecting both the conservatives and liberals.

Both speakers discuss their personal experiences with grief and depression, and how their faith and community have helped them navigate these challenges. They also discuss the challenges faced by believers in the media, particularly in terms of free speech and diversity of opinion, and the need for young people to get involved in journalism.

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Partial transcript

T Carnes  00:07

Hi journeyers welcome back to A Journey through NYC religions Television. I’m Tony Carnes your host. 

In April of 2024, I was awakened a little past midnight with the news that students had taken over a building at Columbia and taken a few hostages, which they quickly released. Then the next morning, I got a call from the administration to say, don’t come in for your seminar on religion and the seminar on the social sciences, because we’re shutting down the campus. 

And I thought to myself, well, religion is so much at the heart of this controversy over Hamas versus Israel, on campus is probably right where I should be. But also, religion is not necessarily even popular by those who take some cause like the Hamas cause or the Palestinian cause. Many times people who take up causes won’t let religious people speak. They’re really only interested in the politics. 

This problem of the inability of people of faith to have a voice in the public square in the workplace has been a concern of ours from the very beginning. And I heard that there is a broadcaster, really a great broadcaster that had broadcast with channel 13, WNBC, WNYC, and Univision, and that he had come to the conclusion that we’re in a social crisis, where it is very hard for people of faith to have their voice be heard. His name is Rafael Pi Roman. And we’re really glad to have him because he does such great work and thoughtful work. Welcome to the program, Rafael.

Rafael Pi Roman  02:04

Tony, thank you for those kind words, too,

T Carnes  02:07

I’m just gonna throw you in the pot here. People say that there is sort of a sour mood in the public, so that people no longer feel they have to treat each other with respect or talk to each other. How do you think we got here? And what is causing it?

Rafael Pi Roman 02:29
I think how we got here is also how we got to the situation that you were in at Columbia. And I think, and I interpreted as religious in this sense, which I think that the basis of it is intersectionality, which I believe is, in effect, an extremely rigid, unforgiving religion.

T Carnes 02:29
What is intersectionality?

Rafael Pi Roman 02:55
Intersectionality is the ideology that came out of the universities, The popular term, I suppose, is woke, woke-ism.

Without boring you with all its complexities, it divides people into levels of oppression.

At the least oppressed, of course, is White people, privileged White people. And it goes down from there. I think it is at the heart of what happened at Columbia, what people are calling a rebirth of anti-semitism, and I fear that it is. But it’s different from the anti-semitism that existed in Germany in the 1930s. There, the Jews were looked at as subhuman, because they weren’t white.

Now, they are the enemy, at least the Zionists, the Israel Jews–which unfortunately bleeds out to all Jews, from what I’ve seen– because they are White, because they are at the top of the hierarchy. And in this intersectionality, they’re the white colonial oppressors of people of color, the Palestinians.

I think it’s a false ideology. It’s a false image of what’s happening there. But I think in large part we’ve got where we are– the sour mood, the divisions, the separations among people, because of this ideology, which I first encountered at an Ivy League school in 2015. And it gave me chills. I knew at that moment, I knew it was going to spread out. I didn’t know it was going to spread out so fast. And so overwhelmingly.

T Carnes 04:55
We have a professor at Columbia, a linguist, who calls this woke religion in a book by that title. John McWhorter.

Rafael Pi Roman 05:02
Of course, yes, I know him.

T Carnes 05:04
And I’m wondering when you went down there to Princeton what happened?

Rafael Pi Roman 05:12
You know, I’m Cuban. I spent some years in Cuba, under the revolution. And my one day in Princeton in 2015 was the closest thing–I’ve had many experiences since, but that was the first time that I felt in this country like I did when I was a kid in Cuba under the Castro regime, It was a fear, you know, where people were afraid of each other, afraid of saying the wrong thing. We’re afraid of being ostracized, what now they call cancel. I mean, people, everyday common language, when people accidentally used it in that environment, they were stopped. They were yelled at, they were told, don’t use that term use. They were inventing a language.

T Carnes 06:03
Did they yell at you?

Rafael Pi Roman 06:05
No, I, because I, I pick up, you know, a fast learner. Whoa, let me see, I can’t say that. I can’t say this. So I tried to say the least amount possible. I gave my presentation.

T Carnes 06:17
It is sort of like playing one of those old-fashioned video games where the ball goes back and forth, and you try to avoid all the stops.

Rafael Pi Roman 06:27
I have to say I dodged every bullet, every dodgeball!

T Carnes 06:34
That is a religious background university. Did you sense that they were very religious?

Rafael Pi Roman 06:40
In the sense that I mentioned earlier, there is a religious element to them.

One of the things I did in my previous life, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I was an organizer for Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. It was an organization that was created to organize poor working people and communities where they existed: Black, White, Hispanic. I was able to do this in Jacksonville, I was able to bring together African Americans who had pictures of Martin Luther King on their wall and poor working whites who probably, I don’t know, had been a one point Wallace supporters. My idea was that from my Catholic background, my Christian background, this was the reform, this was the world we wanted to create.