INTERVIEW: How can America work to ensure more equality and justice on a day-to-day level?
KUNZRU: I think there’s a lot of meaningless signaling. I don’t give a damn if a brand blacks out its IG. The real work is conducted through simple and rather concrete things. Who gets paid? Who gets credit? Who gets heard? Who is in the room? We can all look around in our work and social lives and ask if there are people missing. And if there are, we can take steps to find out where they are and bring them in.
INTERVIEW: Do you think protests are effective tools for changing the system? How does it make a difference in the long term?
KUNZRU: There are limits to protest, of course. I remember in 2004, after so many of us had gone on to the street to protest the invasion of Iraq, feeling so disheartened that it happened anyway, and that it was exactly as bad as we’d warned, in exactly the way we’d predicted. We’re still living with the consequences of the failure of our leaders to acknowledge that protest. But the protests following the murder of George Floyd are producing change. Look at the bans on chokeholds and the critical look at police budgets. The protests have also exposed the raw edges of the power structure. For now, at least, those who govern us do so by our consent. By coming out on to the street and being disruptive, we remind our representatives that they serve at our pleasure, not the other way round. These communal experiences—which are, of course, also a massive release from the tension of Covid, and sadly probably a vector for its future spread—remind us that we are powerful. They are a “time of chance,” in the ancient Greek sense of kairos, a moment in which we can remake the future, seizing the opportunity to change.