Fabio Rojas is the chair of Indiana University’s Sociology Department. He’s the author of From Black Power to Black Studies, Party in the Streets (with Michael Heaney), and Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue (with Charlotta Stern). He Substacks for Temple of Sociology. More importantly, Fab was best man at my wedding — and he’s been my dear friend since 1990.
Fab and I have been arguing about culture for as long as I can remember. I’m classical, and he’s jazz. But Fab also personally illustrates much of what I’ve been claiming about culture for decades. The son of a Colombian ex-priest and a poor woman from Costa Rica, Fab is nevertheless 90% as American as apple pie.
In this conversation, Fab and I don’t just talk about my new You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition. We talk about his truly unique immigrant experience. We talk about global travel. And we talk about assimilation. If you’ve never liked a sociologist before, you’re going to like Fab. And if you’ve never learned from a sociologist before, you’re going to learn from Fab.
Enjoy!
