Jon Wiener:   From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: a special feature: Rachel Kushner reports on the world of Nostalgia Drag Racing, where people have made machines – with their hands.  But first: when workers fight the corporations, sometimes they win big victories- Harold Meyerson has our report, in a minute.
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Now it’s time for news of the class struggle in America, and for that we turn to Harold Meyerson – he’s editor at large of The American Prospect. Harold welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: always good to be here, Jon.

JW: Today there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news in Los Angeles is that the city council just raised the minimum wage for 23,000 hotel and restaurant workers starting in July 2028 to $30 an hour. What’s that about and how did that happen?

HM: Well, July 2028 is when the Olympics will come to Los Angeles, and tourists from all over the world will flock to the city. This in effect factors in the fact that, among other things, hotels will be having special non-discounted rates for their rooms during this period and this guarantees a certain equitability in the prosperity that the Olympics will bring to Los Angeles.

JW: I can remember when our demand was to “Fight for 15.” This is huge progress.

HM: Well, it is, and it’s emblematic of the fact that we’re beginning to get sectoral raises in California. At the state level, we have had a raise for both fast food workers and for hospital service sector workers that are in excess of the statewide minimum wage, which is now, given the cost of living increases, about $16 an hour. The flip side of this is that the ballot measure, Prop 32, I believe it was, on the California ballot this November, which would’ve raised the statewide minimum wage to $18 an hour, narrowly failed in part because the institutions, the unions, and their allies that normally campaign for this, thought it was already being surpassed in many ways, that in and of itself it wasn’t a very large wage, and they had other bigger fish to fry.

If you want to know where California unions were walking precincts in this election, you should look to the handful of Congressional districts in California where the race was closed, three of which the Democrats took from the Republicans. And you should look to Arizona and Nevada, where California unions that normally walk precincts in California were walking precincts in those states, both for Kamala Harris and for the Democratic Senate candidates who won in both states.

JW: So that’s the news from Los Angeles. There’s more good news from Wisconsin where a court has overturned a notorious law that prohibited collective bargaining by public employee unions. Now more than 200,000 workers in Wisconsin, mostly public school teachers, or at least many of them are public school teachers, have regained the right for their union to bargain. This was something called Act 10 that was passed in 2011, 13 years ago. Tell us about that.

HM: This was an initiative of Scott Walker, at that point the newly elected far-right Governor of Wisconsin, who simply hated unions and understood that public sector unions are under the jurisdiction of states, whereas private sector unions are under the jurisdiction of federal law, the National Labor Relations Act, and noting that they had quite reasonably opposed his campaign and those of his fellow Republicans. He decided to effectively negate collective bargaining for every public sector employee in Wisconsin. Not just teachers, but everyone except the police and firefighters because their unions often supported Republicans. And so that was the raison d’etre for what proved to be a pretty Draconian law.

JW: The law did permit a very narrow band of negotiations. Public sector unions were allowed to negotiate for higher wages as long as the wage increases did not exceed inflation. No other issues. Now, why would other issues beyond wages be important to workers? Let’s start with teachers.

HM: Yeah. Well, other issues include class sizes and working hours and the extent of what the new law allowed did not include issues like health insurance and other benefits that are crucial to one’s existence in America these days.

JW: Now, I understand that after Wisconsin passed this law, several other Republican states passed similar legislation, Iowa in 2017, Florida in 2023. What’s going to happen in Wisconsin now is the Republicans, of course, will appeal this to the State Supreme Court. The State Supreme Court now is controlled by Liberals four to three, but one of the Liberal justices is retiring now, which means before this case will get to the State Supreme Court. So there’s going to be an election for a new Justice in April. The unions and their democratic allies will be supporting Susan Crawford, currently a local judge in Wisconsin, and the Republicans are running a guy named Brad Schimel, famous as a former State Attorney General elected statewide twice, a nationally prominent opponent of organized labor.

You may recall there was an election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023 when Liberals gained control for the first time in 15 years. The candidate there, we all had to learn how to pronounce her name, Janet Protasiewicz. She got 55% of the vote, a really impressive of victory for Wisconsin Democrats. That election was about abortion rights. This one will be about labor rights. Democrats are hoping they can do it again, but it’s going to be a big fight.

HM: It is. On the other hand, Democrats have been winning statewide in Wisconsin. The Governor, Tony Evans, is a Democrat. Tammy Baldwin was reelected Senator just this past November. It’s the gerrymandering of the legislature, which Republicans did when they were electing statewide officials that have given the Republicans power in Wisconsin. So if the state behaves electorally along the lines that it has done so recently, I think the Democrat has a decent chance of winning that Supreme Court seat.

JW: One more piece of good news. Biden’s Federal Trade Commission won a victory in a Portland court. After a three-week trial, a judge ruled against the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons supermarkets. Now why is that a big deal?

HM: Well, it’s a big deal at a time when Americans are complaining about the price of food in supermarkets, and this would further have concentrated the market, which is one reason why the FTC won in this case. The case is also interesting because the FTC’s suit took cognizance of the fact that this would also have a negative effect on supermarket employees, and the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents supermarket employees, was an active participant in opposing this merger. So win for the FTC, win for the union, win-win, as they say.

JW: So our good news was a city victory, a state victory, and a national victory. Now we come to the bad news part, the NLRB. You have some bad news about the NLRB.

HM: Well, the Chair of the current NLRB, Lauren McFerrin, had been re-nominated by President Biden to continue chairing that body, which as is customary, has a three-two majority for the President’s party. And all the Democrats voted to reconfirm her except the dynamic duo of Manchin and Sinema, who ended up voting no and then that doomed her continued tenure. This means that Donald Trump will be able almost immediately to appoint her successor and turn what had been the single most pro-worker NLRB arguably since Harry Truman, I guess, into the anti-union crusades that business wants to wage against workers. And so this was a very impactful vote.

JW: Manchin and Sinema will be leaving Congress in about two weeks. Why do you think they would make this one of their final acts of their career in politics?

HM: Well, they have a history of voting against workers. They voted, both of them, doomed the Pro Act, which would’ve made it easier for workers to form unions and to have it be less of a dangerous move on their parts because they can be fired under the current state of labor law by their employers for being pro-union because the penalties are so negligible. They voted against the confirmation of David Weil as the Deputy Secretary for Wage and Hour Enforcement. They have a major history of voting against workers’ rights. And I can add that this is not exactly the issue that even demagogic Republicans run on when they run. It’s not like these are killer votes on election day. They just side with big business.

JW: And I assume they will be generously rewarded in whatever they choose to do next in their careers.

HM: It’s certainly worth following.

JW: So Manchin will be replaced by a Republican in the next Senate seated on January 3rd. Kyrsten Sinema will be replaced by a Democrat. The Republicans, just to remember, will have 53 Senators. So it will take four Republicans voting along with the Democrats to reject a Trump proposal. And we’re already getting a sense of which Republican Senators could possibly be thorns in Trump’s side. Here’s my list. Mitch McConnell, not running again. We know he hates Donald Trump. Two Republicans facing significant challenges for reelection who have stood up to Trump in the past, Susan Collins of Maine, she’s up in two years, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, up in four years. Both of them voted to impeach Trump. I believe both of them refused to endorse Trump for President this year. So they have been pretty independent of Trump and might be again.

There’s one more current Senator who voted to impeach Trump, who’s remains in the Senate, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. And there’s one more Republican I never heard of who refused to endorse Trump this year, Todd Young of Indiana. I looked him up. He was elected in 2016, reelected in ’22. Very independent guy. Refused to endorse Trump for President this year, which puts him in the same league as Collins and Murkowski. So that’s four. What do you think of my four?

HM: I would say three are solid, Collins and Murkowski and old Mitch McConnell. The others we’re not sure about. You might add Thom Tillis to that list, Senator from North Carolina who has only narrowly won his seat and he’s up for reelection in two years. And there’s no question that North Carolina, having elected a Democratic Governor and a bunch of statewide Democratic officials in just this past November is a swing state. And so I would say we should watch Thom Tillis as well.

JW: And there’s one other, well, actually there’s two others, but one in particular, there’s two people leaving the Senate. One to become the Vice President, J.D. Vance, one probably to become his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio from Florida. Empty Senate seats are filled by the Governors of those states making appointments. So it’s very important who are the two people who get appointed in those states, both of which have Republican governors. Let’s start with Ohio. The Governor of Ohio is Mike DeWine. Remind us about his politics in relation to Trump’s?

HM: Well, DeWine is one of the last of the old breed of Republicans who really doesn’t share a lot of the Trumpian demagogy and the issues that Trump raises in his characteristically demagogic rants. So I have pondered exactly the kind of Republican that DeWine would appoint. I mean, if he really wants to upset the apple cart, he could appoint John Kasich, a former Republican statewide official who ran against Trump in the 2016 primary, you should forgive the expression, from the left, at least from a traditional Republican position. So DeWine could also increase by one the number of Republicans who are not MAGA-philes.

JW: And there’s a few other relevant facts about DeWine. He’s term limited as Governor and his term will probably end in 2027, so there’s no chance of retaliating against him by running a Trump ally against him. He was a sharp critic of Trump’s January 6th actions. He defended the one Ohio GOP Republican who voted to impeach Trump. And more recently, how quickly we forget, DeWine criticized Trump pretty sharply over the claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets — in Springfield, Ohio. So this gives us some hope that Mike DeWine might appoint an independent Republican to replace J.D. Vance, and that would be tremendously significant.  Let’s also just not forget DeWine won his last election by 20 points. So he’s a very successful guy in his career.
Florida has the other open Senate seat, assuming Marco Rubio gets confirmed to Secretary of State. His replacement will be appointed by Ron DeSantis. What can you tell us about Ron DeSantis’ possible appointments?

HM: Well, it would appear that the front-runner is none other than Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. And that gets us into the Amy Wilentz part of this broadcast since DeWine has been possibly floated in case some of Trump’s nominees don’t make it.

JW: Pete Hegseth.

HM: Yes, for Defense Secretary. Clearly, DeSantis has an interest at the moment in not offending Donald Trump. And so I think it’s pretty clear that Lara Trump has to be viewed as the front-runner to succeed Marco Rubio.

JW: Finally, one word about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nightmare nominee for Secretary of Defense. Trump seems to be pulling out all the stops or at least putting a lot of leverage into pressuring Republicans to vote for him. So he seems a little more likely to be confirmed this week than he did a couple of weeks ago. Remarkably, Pete Hegseth in his book says he wants to fire all the Generals if he becomes Secretary of Defense because they’re all woke. We find ourselves in the position of saying, “Don’t fire all the Generals.” So you and I have been activists for 50 years. We’ve never before really made our demand, “Don’t fire all the Generals.”

HM: No, this is new for us. And if we want to delve into history, when Stalin did this in the years preceding the Nazis invading Russia, it did not have good consequences. So I think we can learn from history here that firing Generals just left, right, and center may not be that great an idea.

JW: Lessons for Trump from Joe Stalin. Harold Myerson — read him at prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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JW: Now it’s time to talk about nostalgia hot rods and drag racing. Last summer, while Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went to the Formula 1 races in Miami, Rachel Kushner and her son, Remy, went to the Nostalgia Hot Rod Drag Races in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Rachel, of course, is an award-winning novelist. Her work has been translated into 27 languages, including the unforgettable books, The Flamethrowers, and this year, Creation Lake, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. We talked about it here a few months ago. Rachel, welcome back.

Rachel Kushner: Thank you so much, Jon.

JW: The cover of your book, The Hard Crowd, is a photo of you in front of a ’64 Ford Galaxie 500. What’s the story of your relationship to classic cars?

RK: I got into classic cars, I guess around the time I sort of got out of riding motorcycles very intensely, and maybe sort of re-centered my interests on cars a little bit at that time. And this particular car that I pose in front of, it’s true, on the cover of that book–that photo shoot was not my idea. It was a New York Times journalist who sort of placed me there.

JW: Okay.

RK: And then, people later said, “Oh, were you reprising Joan Didion’s famous photo in front of her Corvette Stingray?,” and I said, “No, not at all.” The thought never occurred to me. Moreover, no shade on Didion at all, but she was posing in front of a brand new car. So I don’t know what the equivalent would be. Maybe posing in front of a Tesla.  But posing in front of a 50-year-old car that you drive daily is just a different kind of thing.

I bought that car in the early ’90s. I’ve now had it for 40 years. And I’m not sure if the relationship is causal between the fact that I got some money from the Guggenheim Foundation and the fact that my paint job was redone in a very high quality way with multiple coats of lacquer, including a pearl finish on the top and a rainbow flake in the body paint.

JW: Nice.

RK: I don’t know if there’s any relationship to the Guggenheim Foundation.
It wasn’t until my son got into historic classic cars that I sort of saw how surface my own relationship is, which is not to discount it. It’s a type of relationship. But a person who wants to learn how to refashion things, to figure out, “There’s latent power here. How can I access it?,” that’s a different kind of relationship to the hot rod than what I myself have had, and my son has gone headlng into that.

JW: Yeah, you call yourself ‘an enthusiast’ for classic cars, but your son, you say, is ‘a gearhead.’

RK: By the time he was 15, my son had already been working on and regularly maintaining my ’64 Ford, and then he wanted a car of his own. There wasn’t a lot of money for that. He was going to have to buy a real fixer-upper, which he did — on Facebook Marketplace, purchased this ’69 Dodge Dart, and by the time he got his license on his 16th birthday, he’d already completely rebuilt the car, which barely ran when he bought it.  He had to redo all the electrical. The steering basically collapsed — like there was no relationship between the steering wheel and the front wheels. I mean, harrowing things, and he had to rebuild the front end all by himself.
And he said there was a moment when he had the car up on blocks and had jacked it up and had taken the front end apart and was staring at the bare rails, thinking, “There’s no way out of this except to proceed just step-by-step and teach myself how to do this.” And he converted the brakes from drum to disc brakes, and from there, he was sort of off, and that was just the beginning.  And one thing led to another.

JW: I looked up my old high school, Central High in St. Paul. They still teach auto mechanics.  But I gather from your piece in Harper’s that Remy’s school does not.  And you say that at his school, the other kids are not interested in his car. Who at school is interested?

RK: Yeah, the security guards. A lot of whom are former cops, and they’re like, “Dude, ’69 Dart. All right.”
My own high school had a very active auto shop when I was a student there in the 1980’s. That auto shop closed in the ’90s, and from what I understand has been reopened as a kind of pilot program for the San Francisco Unified School District, and I think it’s been fairly successful.

One of the things that I researched and talked to people about quite a lot while writing this article, which was basically a year of my life, well-spent by the way, it was such a rewarding experience to just be out there in America, talking to people, talking to young people outside of Bakersfield, where this track, Famoso, hosts a lot of the really significant annual Nostalgia nitro events. There’s a program between the Bakersfield Community College and some of the Top Fuel teams to bring people in their automotive mechanics program and teach them how to work on Top Fuel cars. And I ask people, “Are there jobs in this industry for these people?” And everybody said that service departments all over America are understaffed because they don’t have qualified applicants. So someone who’s looking to work with their hands maybe can have a quite decent career, working on cars.

JW: I always thought drag racing was boring. The cars all look the same, they go fast in a straight line for a few seconds.  But you say Nostalgia Drag Racing, as opposed to contemporary professional drag racing, has been what you call “an extreme counterculture of people trying out bold and crazy experiments to denature and re-nature machines.” Tell us about that.

RK: I know what you mean about drag racing. I didn’t know that much about it myself. I mean, I realized maybe I’d never actually gone, until I went a little over a year ago to a Nostalgias event at Famoso, outside Bakersfield, and was completely taken with the exotic feel of the event, the variety of machines that people were running from the 1930’s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, the sense of camaraderie of people with know-how, doing things with their hands, and there’s just a whole world of folk knowledge among those who participate in these events that I was very charmed by, very impressed by.

JW: You say “there are no knuckleheads at the Nostalgia drag strip.” Please explain.

RK: The stakes and risks in Nostalgia Drag Racing are pretty extreme. I mean, it’s not known who exactly decided and when it was a good idea to put Nitromethane, originally formulated, as I understand it, as a dry cleaning solvent, who decided, “Let’s put that into internal combustion motors and see what happens.” I mean, it turns out that you get many, many times more power with this fuel, which was not formulated originally as a fuel, but it’s a monopropellant, meaning it contains its own oxygen. But putting nitromethane into motors is very high consequence. If you don’t get spark to a single cylinder head, as I explained in the piece, the engine can explode.

So you have to know what you are doing if you’re going to run these kinds of machines. And at every level in the open pits, meaning anyone can walk through and talk to the people working on a vehicle, at every level of Nostalgia events, you find very knowledgeable, very capable people who take their own and others’ lives and safety extremely seriously. You cannot show up to a Nostalgia event unprepared, overconfident, not knowing what you’re doing. You cannot show up hung over, not ready, et cetera. There’s too much risk.

But in terms of knuckleheadery, there’s something else about Nostalgia Drag Racing that really charmed me, which is that people exhibit social care, one person to the next. It’s truly a world that’s about community, and anyone who is curious to learn, who wants to know more, who’s there to interact is invited into the pits. If you are thirsty, you are offered water. If you are tired and need to get out of the sun, you are offered shade and a chair. If you are hungry, there is a sandwich or some barbecue for you.

If you want to get behind the wheel during the cackle hour and feel what it’s like to sit behind a huge engine running nitromethane, someone can make that happen for you as well. So the lack of knuckleheadery is also about people and a kind of decency and friendliness that I found in that world and was very impressed by.

JW: My biggest worry, reading your report, was that the people are actually Trumpers. Are they?

RK: Probably yes. But the thing is, Jon, people are too busy making common cause over something interesting, challenging, that brings people together, and is quite specific. They are too busy and engaged doing that to bother with the abstractions of the sphere of national politics. So if you brought up Trump, they might say, “Hey, love the guy, voting for him. He shoots from the hip, says what he means.”  But it never comes up, because everybody is focused on this immediate world in front of them, rather than some way in which you’re meant to define yourself at the voting booth.

I interviewed this guy “Slim Jim” Hoogerhyde, who is a world land speed record holder with electric vehicles, and I know him from San Francisco in the ’90s. He’s a bit more to the left than you would typically find in this world, and he says, “We have a rule in our pits: no politics.” I don’t think everybody has that rule, but it’s just a natural-enough thing to avoid with people, and in a way, I found that quite meaningful — because frankly, I knew that Trump was coming, and for eight months, I was out there in America, going to all different kinds of hot-rodding and Nostalgia Drag Racing events, and my instinct was to stay close to people over loves that we can share, and not think about divisions that were on the horizon.

JW: Another question about the people at the track: Are they mostly white?

RK: Drag racing and the NHRA, the National Hot Rod Association, may be the most diverse sport in America –for a number of reasons.  But just visually on site, going to these events. If you go in California to the large event at Famoso, it is not mostly white. There are a lot of Latino racers, there’s a lot of Black drag racers. And Black racers have a long and significant history in the NHRA. It’s always been a very inclusive sport.

I got a wonderful quote from this guy, Brian Lohnes.  He’s an NHRA announcer, considered to be the voice of the NHRA, and he said, “The diversity of drag racing, the inclusiveness of it is what fascinates me most about the sport.”

JW: And any women in drag racing these days? My wife was a big fan of Shirley Cha-Cha Muldowney in her day.

RK: Right. Yeah, Shirley Muldowney is like, she’s still kicking. She does make an appearance at events here and there, but more importantly, she pioneered and led the way for a lot of other women who came after her, and the sport has fundamentally changed — because it is considered, I think technically to be called an assisted sport, meaning you compete with the car and not with your body itself. Women compete at the very top level of big-time corporate NHRA and also in Nostalgia Drag Racing. There are a lot of women drivers, but there are also women crew chiefs, women working in the pits, women building motors, and so that part of it is also quite diverse. It is gender diverse, to be sure.

JW: What did people at the track think about you?

RK: I never felt even a shred of sexism at the drag races. People, they just treat you with so much respect and decency.  And if you want to learn and you ask questions, they’re there to teach you. But I think that people also, they were interested in the idea that somebody wanted to write about their subculture for a readership and audience that may not already know much about drag racing. And I would explain, “Oh, Harper’s, it’s not the Hagerty magazine,” which I love because I get Hagerty classic car insurance, so I read it when it comes in the mail. The thing is that people can surprise you out there in America. And what’s most important to me, regardless of subject, is to remain able to be surprised.

JW: This fuel called Nitro–I understand Timothy McVeigh posed as a drag racing enthusiast and purchased three drums of Nitro at a National Hot Rod Association event in Texas. Then what happened?

RK: Yeah, I didn’t know about that until after went to Bowling Green for the Nostalgia Nationals, or while I was at Bowling Green, I was talking to a security guard there, and he just mentioned casually that Homeland Security guards the Nitromethane fuel that they deliver to each pit. It comes in these 55 gallon drums. I just thought, “Oh, okay, interesting, Homeland Security.”
And then while I was writing the piece, I discovered that Timothy McVeigh had used Nitromethane to build his bomb, among the other ingredients, to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Ever since, there have been controls over the Nitro, and DHS keeps a close eye on who’s using it and why, and it is guarded.

JW: There is one member of the House of Representatives who runs a car repair shop in Washington State, a woman and a Democrat–Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. She was just re-elected. And one of the issues that she ran on was the right to repair. She introduced the bill in Congress to guarantee people a right to repair their own stuff by requiring manufacturers, and quoting from the bill she introduced, “to facilitate diagnosis, maintenance, or repair by offering documentation, parts, and tools to any owner or to any service and repair facility, on fair and reasonable terms,” for many years, even after the product is no longer on the market.
Now this is especially aimed at cellphones. People want to be able to open their own iPhones and replace the batteries.  But it applies to dozens, hundreds of things, and I think this is probably a problem you are familiar with that Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is addressing here. I noticed that California, just a couple of months ago, passed a Right To Repair bill, and several other states have done the same.

RK: Yes, and I think that this legislation is not just legislation, it has profound philosophical implications–a cultural shift, and a shift in manufacturing, where we have basically been de-skilled without our own consent. A lot of what we buy, we don’t have the ability to fix ourselves, and the deeper problem with this is that people become used to it. They become used to buying the thing, and it breaks, and you throw it away, and you buy a new one. And it’s not just a problem for a landfill, it’s a problem for the person’s deeper relationship to objects, vis-a-vis, what I talk about in the piece as possession. Possession to me means that you are able to take the thing apart and put it back together.

Do you know the philosopher, Matthew Crawford, who wrote this book, Shop Class as Soulcraft? He’s a sort of University of Chicago person, and he has this argument in his second book, Why We Drive, about how there’s now “a hood under the hood” of the vehicle. And I think that some of this legislation is pushback against that, to remove that second hood and give people back the agency to tinker. It’s not just about saving money on the device, it’s about living in a certain way and about having a weekend where you are engaging in what the magazine, Popular Mechanics, used to provide articles about, a sense of having some control over your own environment and the things you buy.

JW: We started out with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump at the F1 races in Miami. A Formula 1 car these days cost at least, I am told, $12 million. What did Remy’s car — you said that’s a ’69 Dodge Dart with a great big engine. What did that cost?

RK: $8,000.

JW: And an F1 team involves, I read, at least 300 people. How big is a team at the Nostalgia Drag Racing in Bowling Green?

RK: Well, the really big teams, it’s probably about 30 people, but that’s the really high-end pro team. At the lower end, it’s usually one family. It’s usually one family, and sometimes the mother is the driver.

JW: You say you spent eight months or a year working on this report on Nostalgia Drag Racing, and you told me that was, your words, “a life-changing experience.” Do you want to say anything more about that?

RK: Yeah, it really was. I think part of it is what I was saying about how I knew Trump was coming. I really wanted to stay close to people, and we kept meeting people at events who, what they would say to us would kind of allow an inkling we had of why we felt this world mattered, and why we were engaged in this year-long project, my son and I together. He was my research assistant. I would think to myself, “Am I romanticizing to say drag racing is really about bringing people together?,” and then I would meet a guy …

I met this guy named Greg Adams at Eagle Field Drags outside of Fresno, and I was asking Greg about how they got involved and how he feels about things, and at one point he said to me, “The thing about this world is that it turns me toward other people instead of away from them.” 

And so I would have these encounters. I met a guy at Eagle Field, he was basically the only Black person there. That’s not a very racially diverse environment. And I started asking him basically like, “What’s the story with you, and what is it like being here?”  And he said, “Oh, this is hillbilly, for sure.” He had this very funny way of putting things.  And then I started to talk to him about his own history, growing up hot-rodding in the classic California city of Stockton, and he said, “I have friends to this day, from that time in my life, and I was able to cross the color line and to go into no-go zones in Stockton because I shared hot-rodding with people.” And this was a time when the city was completely segregated racially. And so learning stories like that about people, it gave me a very positive view of what’s phenomenally interesting, and beautiful, and wonderful about life in the United States.

JW: Rachel Kushner wrote about the world of Nostalgia Drag Racing for the December issue of Harper’s. Rachel, special thanks for this one.

RK: Always a pleasure, Jon. Thank you.