I think the questions were scripted and intentionally specific. What do you think they were unaware of? It seems like the interviewer had a deep understanding of the works. Nothing wrong with asking a deep and detailed question,to which Powell can engage or glide past.

As an aside, I think a huge number of people think the liberal racism bit is spot on. As translated elsewhere in this thread, "erasing representation to avoid the discomfort of confronting racism" is a real phenomenon.

>>An interview only works if you're setting the stage for the interviewee, not for yourself.

Yeah, unless the interviewer is a big name in their own right (so not in this case), your aim is to let the subject shine and fade into the background. The quality of your questions is only judged by what answers they elicit.

Unless it's investigative in nature, even the best interviewers still don't take the spotlight.

Larry King, on his interview technique, said "The key of interviewing is listening. I hate interviewers who come with a long list of prepared questions, because they're going to depend on going from the fourth question to the fifth question without listening to the answer"

Though I can't say I blame the interviewer. If I spent that much time flipping through a thesaurus crafting my questions, I wouldn't want to divert from them either.

Yeah, but I assumed that the interview was done via email. I could be wrong.

Very true. The medium changes a lot with email interviews (interviewer sends all / many questions at once, rather than a back & forth), and would explain a lot of the behavior. Doesn't excuse a lack of understanding of the person he's interviewing and the types of questions that would give him something to stand on.

I saw some instances of there being responses / references to previous answers inside the interviewer's questions, though, which led me to believe otherwise.