Bari Weiss vs. Anderson Cooper: Both Are Overseers. Here's Why. (ft. Steven Thrasher)

**Katelyn Burns** (0:00)
This is the ultimate battle of the gay media overseers. Bari Weiss versus Anderson Cooper. I just wanted to say that.

**Christine Grimaldi** (0:07)
Oh, yeah.

**Steven Thrasher** (0:10)
Yeah, I had quite thought of that. If you kind of go one level up, there's so many bad gays as well as Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. We're all over the place.

**Christine Grimaldi** (0:21)
We talked about Sam Altman on the podcast.

**Katelyn Burns** (0:22)
Yeah, we had a talk about him a while back.

**Christine Grimaldi** (0:25)
So Kate, today we're going to be talking about media overseers. Do you know what that is?

**Katelyn Burns** (0:31)
What is that?

**Christine Grimaldi** (0:32)
Those are people in the media who assert power by sacrificing others in order to benefit themselves. Often they can be a historic first, like the first gay or the first black bureau chief or editor in chief or something like that.

**Katelyn Burns** (0:47)
But what happens when two media overseers lock horns with each other?

**Christine Grimaldi** (0:53)
That's what we're going to find out.

**Katelyn Burns** (0:55)
So who are we canceling today?

**Christine Grimaldi** (0:57)
The Media Overseer Class.

**Katelyn Burns** (0:58)
Ooh, and we have a great guest for this one.

**Christine Grimaldi** (1:02)
He's amazing.

**Katelyn Burns** (1:03)
Hey everyone, I'm Katelyn Burns.

**Christine Grimaldi** (1:05)
And I'm Christine Grimaldi.

**Katelyn Burns** (1:06)
And you're listening to Cancel Me Daddy.

**Christine Grimaldi** (1:10)
The show where we take a closer look at all the panic around cancel culture.

**Katelyn Burns** (1:14)
With thoughtful analysis.

**Christine Grimaldi** (1:16)
And verbal shitposting.

**Katelyn Burns** (1:19)
Christine, we have a great guest today.

**Christine Grimaldi** (1:21)
We sure do.

**Katelyn Burns** (1:23)
We have Steven Thrasher, who we've actually been trying to get on the show for a while.

**Christine Grimaldi** (1:29)
Yeah. He's so smart and so great.

**Katelyn Burns** (1:31)
Like months ago, we talked about getting him on the show. And then we were so pleased when he reached out about his book, The Overseer Class. And there's a whole section in the book about how these overseers and the various like class of people from marginalized communities operate within the media, which I don't know about you, but sounds like a heck of a Cancel Me Daddy episode. So let's get into it.
Steven, welcome to Cancel Me Daddy.

**Steven Thrasher** (2:06)
I am extremely happy to be here.

**Christine Grimaldi** (2:09)
We all used to follow each other in what is now the bad place.

**Steven Thrasher** (2:13)
I've been having this experience as I've been out on book tour of seeing people come up in Instagram, a medium I don't particularly like using, but it's one of the ones to use now. Realizing, oh yeah, that's somebody. It's like when you go from elementary school to junior high or junior high to high school.
That's happened on Blue Sky a lot, but I'm finding it now again on Instagram. It's nice to meet both mutuals, I know from the old place and to virtually meet.

**Katelyn Burns** (2:39)
I used to say that I did not have a face for Instagram. I had a voice for podcasting, but now we're on YouTube, so I can't even say that.

**Christine Grimaldi** (2:48)
I just wear my rotating series of Bruce Springsteen T-shirts. Hello, audience.

**Katelyn Burns** (2:53)
So, Steven, you wrote a terrific book, and we want to get into a little bit about that. We have wanted to have you on the show for a long time. But tell our audience a little bit about what your book is.

**Steven Thrasher** (3:07)
My book is called The Overseer Class, A Manifesto, and it began as a book about black cops, and that's still a big part of it, including the beautiful cover made by an artist named Jamal Barber, who almost brought me to tears when he brought me a copy of the artwork itself when I was at Caris Books in Atlanta. It began for me in thinking about the ways that people from marginalized backgrounds can amass their power, not by helping other people like them, but actually by hurting people like them and policing people like them.
It began about black cops, but I started thinking about what are the ways that people from marginalized backgrounds act as police and as gatekeepers within institutions that basically re-perpetuate the power dynamics of those institutions that don't bring more people like them to the table, but actually keep them out.
I'm so surprised, this happened with both my books, I didn't really know what they were about until I started hearing from people what they were about. I've traveled around, one person very succinctly told me, your first book was about the viral underclass, was about the abused, and this one's about the abusers, which I hadn't realized, but it sort of is. Then I just started thinking about what are the different domains, the different structures that we see in society, and the major ways I came to thinking about the book were thinking about black police officers, particularly after I was a reporter in Ferguson and had reported on many instances of white police officers killing black people, but then realizing I was seeing black cops everywhere, and seeing gay cops everywhere. Something I thought about preparing for this podcast was, I remember getting a press release, I think I was at The Guardian at the time, that Disney was having its first ever out LGBTQ character in a Pixar movie, and it was going to be voiced by Lena Waithe, who is playing a cop, a LGBTQ one-eyed Cyclops cop. And so this was even coming into the animated domain. And I started then really thinking about it anew on experiences when I began writing the book that I'd had at New York University when I was a graduate student and graduating around the issue of Palestine. And then of course, everything that's happened to me at Northwestern since and thinking about the roles of, first I was thinking about police and then I really started thinking about overseers, this job that originated on plantations and was primarily done by white people. But not always, they were often helped by what was called a black driver. Sometimes the overseers themselves were black. And so I started thinking about how the intimate work of supervising the work of enslaved black workers, that overseers could do much better or more efficiently than the white master of plantation could, who's not going to be out in the fields himself. It's too hot and it's too much work. But the intimacy, the relationship between the people, how that was cultivated on plantations, how that then transferred to factories with industrialization, and versions of it morphed into modern corporations is based on an intimacy, a perceived shared characteristic between the oppressed and the oppressors. And I really started reflecting on how I've experienced that in media, but particularly in academia.