Black people can be racist, after all. (Antisemitic, too.)
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Summary
A unique aspect of the controversies surrounding Kanye West and Kyrie Irving is that they are two influential Black men accused of anti-Semitism, shining a light on historical and present-day dynamics between Black and Jewish communities. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Wilfred Reilly to discuss whether Americans have drifted away from the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr., and what the controversies involving Kanye and Irving reveal about the problem of Anti-Semitism.
Transcript
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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners,
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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An international conversation about anti-Semitism
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of rapper Kanye West and NBA player Kyrie Irving.
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A unique aspect of the controversies surrounding West and Irving
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shining a light on historical and present-day dynamics
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that anti-Semitism hurts black people and Jews.
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which blacks have the greatest stake in destroying.
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Today, I'm joined by Dr. Wilfred Reilly to discuss whether Americans have drifted away
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and what the controversies involving Kanye West and Kyrie Irving reveal
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Dr. Reilly is an assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University
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Hopefully, I'm outside my house here in Kentucky,
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so hopefully there won't be any noise in the background,
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It's an important and, frankly, I think a difficult conversation
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for a lot of people to have with the right, I think, nuance and consideration.
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I know you spent a lot of time thinking about race relations,
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challenges around different racial communities,
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understanding one another and their experiences in American society.
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So I think you're an excellent person to kind of weigh in on this.
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And I think maybe a good place to start with you, Dr. Reilly,
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is just your initial reaction to what West and Irving sort of said on social media
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So for listeners who might not be keeping tabs on what's been going on,
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West initially started a lot of this drama on Twitter,
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tweeting he was going to go death con three on Jewish people after Mark Zuckerberg.
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I mean, he accused Mark Zuckerberg in particular of banning him from Instagram.
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And then Kyrie Irving's controversy began when he tweeted a link to what is widely considered
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You know, they've suffered professionally, their personal relationships.
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What did you make of, I guess, the initial social media uproar?
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And did the backlash against West and Irving surprise you at all?
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So first of all, I mean, I saw the comments, I'm a hip-hop guy,
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I'm going to go death con three on Jewish people or them Jews or something like that.
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And then the next day, he just went on with this.
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I mean, at one point, he said that Adidas couldn't cancel him for being anti-Semitic.
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You know, Adidas, obviously, is a German company, a lot of Jewish executives.
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He did an interview with Piers Morgan, where at one point he got up from the chair and threatened to storm away.
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I mean, so it was just sort of like, this is more of this foolishness from a celebrity, I guess, would be the initial reaction.
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Kyrie, I'm not even really sure Kyrie Irving did anything per se.
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He shared the documentary, Hebrews to Negroes, which is pretty racist, pretty anti-Semitic.
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But, I mean, it's the sort of thing that you, it wouldn't be unusual to see a black man,
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or for that matter, a religious white guy drop online, a la, what do you think about this?
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But, so my first reaction was, well, this is dumb.
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The question really is not whether Kanye's remarks were highly intelligent,
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or whether there's something to be said for Hebrews to Negroes.
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I mean, there's, as we both know as black men, there's a bunch of, not even anti-Semitism,
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but bizarre almost mythology in the black community.
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I mean, we were the Egyptians, we were the first Jews, we discovered fire, this kind of thing.
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So, I mean, the question isn't whether this sort of stuff is valid.
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It's, it's sort of what the response to it was.
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I mean, like, at one point, Kanye West said something like,
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well, if you criticize certain groups in the USA, and I mean, he prominently included Jews in that,
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there's going to be an enormous backlash, and you're going to get canceled.
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And I don't, I don't really think what happened proved him wrong.
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The question is, is that, is there any validity to that?
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You raise a really interesting point that I want to dig into with you here
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about sort of the cultural aspect of this within black communities,
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I think for a lot of people, they're unaware of some of the history around,
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you know, the black Hebrew Israelites group that you might see sort of in Harlem,
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or in Canada, you might see them near the Eaton Center in Dundas Square in Toronto,
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who, you know, say that black people are the quote, unquote, real Jews.
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Certainly, Louis Farrakhan promoted this idea a lot through the Nation of Islam,
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And both Kanye West and Kyrie Irving sort of alluded to that same way of thinking
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Kanye said he could not be an anti-Semite because blacks are Jews.
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Kyrie Irving said he could not be anti-Semitic if he knows who he really is.
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I mean, is that a big part of why someone as, you know,
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with so much to lose, like Kanye West, with so much to lose,
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is that they maybe are coming from a different cultural standpoint
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where saying things like that aren't necessarily as controversial
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Well, I think as a guy who, you know, plays basketball,
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if I want to do something other than have a baldy, so on.
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And, I mean, I think that there's a lot of subtext in the black community,
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just like I assume there is in southern quote-unquote redneck communities,
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that's kind of working class, that's under the waterline,
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that people sort of tolerate and don't pay a lot of attention to.
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Um, these kind of conspiracy theories aren't all that wild.
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I mean, arguing with kind of a right-wing white guy online,
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and that refers to the tendency of a lot of black men
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to say that virtually everything historically involved black people.
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ancient Egypt, ancient Israel, so on down the line.
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But, I mean, Minister Farrakhan himself is a prime example
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I mean, you know, as I understand the Nation of Islam's kind of creation myth,
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they believe that all other races were bred out of black people
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by a lunatic, big-headed scientist called Jakob
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and bred the weakest, most deformed, most crippled black people together.
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All people this time were black, by the way, according to him.
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and then he finally wound up with the brown race,
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And then he bred the most weak, crippled, bizarre,
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And, you know, the most perverse, weak, money-grubbing red people together
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And then, finally, after 200 years of breeding,
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the weakest of all these racial groups that focus on Asians,
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you know, the thing from the snows, the white man.
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And, I mean, the Nation of Islam has something like 60,000 dues-paying members.
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I mean, they have an accredited university, Muhammad University,
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you know, a full-time fighting force, the fruit of Islam.
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five or six mildly socially maladjusted lawyers
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And, to some extent, it may be the natural residue
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But it's not infrequent that a celebrity will kind of dip into this
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because it's just what they hear in the barbershop.
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A lot of times, the person doing it has a white partner.
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But Professor Griff from Public Enemy on to, like, a primetime show.
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And Professor Griff started talking about, like,
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the mythological significance of the number nine
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and how, again, black people were the first Jews and the first humans.
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Like, this is certainly more prevalent than any equivalent kind of racism
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on the white side of the fence when it gets to almost this religious level.
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So I think Kanye and Kyrie kind of thought of themselves as sharing hidden knowledge
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and weren't quite aware of the backlash this would get from ordinary people
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that identify as Christians or that oppose anti-Semitism and so on down the line.
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It's interesting because, you know, there's certainly a part of this
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that is just unearthing some of the modes of thinking,
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some of the cultural narratives that, as you said, sort of exist under the surface.
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And there are moments, you know, especially in hip-hop,
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You mentioned sort of Nick Cannon and his podcast, for example.
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One of the most popular songs of the year, the DJ Khaled song God Did,
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Jay-Z makes reference to Louis Farrakhan in his verse.
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It's sort of interesting when people gravitate to it and focus on it
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because, for example, Jay-Z's not been criticized in any mainstream outlet
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that I'm aware of for making reference to Louis Farrakhan,
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despite the fact that he is certainly a lightning rod,
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a firebrand type of personality, and I think for good reason.
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Why do you think Kanye and Kyrie in particular, at this moment, received this attention?
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Is it random or is there something going on right now?
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Is there something about those two men in particular
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that would sort of get this reaction from people in ways that maybe other moments
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where some of these cultural narratives come up aren't getting the attention?
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Well, I mean, I think to some extent we've seen the great races fighting for 10 or 12 years.
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Not 10 or 12 years, that's an exaggeration, but four or five Black Lives Matter.
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I mean, sometimes literally in the street, as in Kenosha, people are very sensitive about race.
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Another thing, of course, is just the size of the platform.
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I mean, like, they're all kind of throwaway lines in rap songs.
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I mean, I think that it's a Jay-Z and R. Kelly song, I think, where one of them says,
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and for my young girls, pee-pee, which might be a reference to some of the things
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that were, you know, going on in the music business at that time
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I mean, you know, but it's just, you know, nobody knew exactly what they were talking about.
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And, you know, I still don't know exactly what they're talking about.
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If you go on national television, or you go on these platforms that these people now have,
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where Kanye West has, oh, I mean, a hundred million followers between Twitter and Instagram,
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I mean, you're not talking about a throwaway line in the chorus of a rap song anymore
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that no one can exactly trace the provenance of.
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these people are taking to very high-profile platforms,
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or you're talking about the highest level of social media,
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So I think it just became a situation that couldn't be avoided.
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I mean, I've talked to Jewish executives about this situation,
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and I think a lot of them would have preferred,
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not that there's a coordinated group of Jews in the country,
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but a lot of people in a situation like that would have preferred to avoid it.
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Like, I don't think Adidas wanted to eat the cost of every pair of Yeezys they had left on the shelf.
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you know, and by Jews, I mean the leadership of Adidas,
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it's going to be very, very hard to keep that individual, you know, on the payroll.
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You know, and a lot of people don't understand.
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because across platforms, I'm over 100,000 social media followers.
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I mean, you're followed by, not just by your friends,
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but by trolls, by people that dislike you, by political opponents.
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The moment you say something, that's going to be screenshot,
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I'm going to say all this stuff about the Jews,
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I mean, at that point, a million people had seen those comments.
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So, I think there's another element to this that's very interesting,
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which is, and I'm curious if you agree with me on this or not,
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there's been this focus on race, as you mentioned,
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whether that's the influence of ideologies like critical race theory,
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or just sort of the trendy race politics of Black Lives Matter,
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and a lot of folks would hear that as a mainstream opinion,
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that Black people do have the capacity to be racist,
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and that we're somehow going back to a more old-school definition of racism,
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rather than being simply just systems and statistics and disparities
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and all the ways in which it's become more political and theoretical,
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I mean, the whole Black people can't be racist thing
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is just a stupid word game from the field of sociology.
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I mean, like, if you're debating one of these guys,
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well, we can be prejudiced in positions of individual power.
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what at the time were all the dictionary definitions of racism,
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bias against an individual on the basis of race,
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And I pointed out that by this standard definition,
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which all the professions agreed on for centuries,
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And I noted how in some of the classic papers on race,
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Snyderman and Carmine's developing the first List experiment, for example,
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racism was defined quite simply as a dislike of blacks or whites or whatever.
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So the idea that racism is prejudice plus power is something,
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it's not based on, like, new knowledge that we discovered.
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You know, it's something that came out of the field of qualitative sociology
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you know, right down the hallway from those guys as an excuse.
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Because people at that point were starting to look at the Panthers.
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I mean, they were starting to look at kind of the post-Garveyist.
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They were starting to look at SNCC and the student radicals.
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But, I mean, there had been centuries of ethnic conflict in the USA
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And this is kind of embarrassing if you're on the left,
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if you're sort of the equivalent of a woke white girl
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So the strategy, as I understand it, was simply to say,
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well, that's not real racism because those people don't have power.
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So even if they're robbers or rapists, they can't be actual bigots.
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But as that example illustrates, this never made a lot of sense.
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But almost all human interactions are individual.
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So if you say, well, the average black person at the mean
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I mean, there's still some slight differences in income and so on.
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But, I mean, if you do look at income, you'd find that 42 or 46
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or whatever percent of black people have more money
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So there's no logical reason that the guy in that situation
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couldn't discriminate against a poor white person.
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I mean, I'm a tenured professor at a major state university.
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and, you know, obviously KSU community, I'm not threatening to do that,
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but I don't think it'd be especially difficult.
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You know, those are mostly white Kentucky guys.
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So the argument that, first of all, it's a bit racist to argue
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But the argument that there's not individual power
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And the argument that if you're talking about the gunman
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or the rapist or whatever, racism takes individual conventional power.
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They were made up as excuses for heightened levels of black racism.
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And again, obviously most black people aren't rapists or robbers or whatever,
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you have the power of life and death over a Chinese-American, let's say, victim.
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kind of the whole liberal sociological position overall.
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like when people like Dr. Ibram Kendi are asked,
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And they say, well, it's an affirmative action program
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You know, the solution to discrimination in the past
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I'm not trying to misrepresent the guy's ideas.
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But I think that a lot of people are going to look at that and say,
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So people are getting a little sick and tired of this.
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I do think we're back to the point where people are going to say,
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also is that to some extent they picked the wrong group.
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but that are very sensitive to prejudice in society
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and that have all these institutions designed to repel it.
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Like, you're going to get criticized if you talk about Jews.
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but if you were, if Eminem were to step forward and say,
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frankly, a lot of black mothers don't take good care of their kids
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you know, Marshall Mathers would be fighting off cancellation.
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He might win or he might lose, but within a day.
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So there are groups that have kind of these protective antibodies,
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so you've got what you'd call an interaction term,
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people are also just sick and tired of racist stuff.
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So it was a bad time for those comments for a lot of reasons.
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We'll be back with more full comment in just a moment.
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I opened up the podcast quoting Martin Luther King from 1967,
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where he identified a common struggle that Jews and blacks in America
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And certainly there's a lot of history of black and Jewish communities
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working together to improve life for everybody in the United States.
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with the comments that Kanye West and Kyrie Irving are making today,
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is partially the product of American society failing to acknowledge progress,
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that if American society really celebrated all the gains that have been made,
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I think it would be very hard to see Jews and blacks
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as not having a similar struggle and a shared interest.
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And yet it seems like there's been a move away from that perspective,
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wanting to separate people on the basis of skin color a bit more,
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but is something that when you go again to the basketball court
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that is just intuitively obvious to most people.
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I would go so far as to say that modern American society
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there's some secondary bias that can be measured in a laboratory.
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I read an interesting paper recently about whether my home,
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because I'm in an interracial couple and I'm in the South,
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but whether my appraisal level each year might change a little more slowly
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de jure segregation was outlawed even in the South in 1954.
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most of the North and integrated in the 1910s, 1920s.
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which makes racial discrimination civilly and often criminally illegal,
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We've had pro-minority affirmative action since 1967.
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you have about a 200 point SAT boost applying to a top college.
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there's no doubt that the USA is a society that's not only made progress,
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if you take a first year English speaking immigrant from a good Ghanaian university
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and a first year English speaking immigrant from a good Irish university and drop them off in Brooklyn,
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are they going to have pretty similar life outcomes?
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if you look at the top 10 highest income earning groups in the United States,
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and even I was surprised by this when I wrote my book Taboo,
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there are over a hundred thousand Filipino Americans.
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You almost always have some black or partially black groups like South Africans or Nigerians that crack that list.
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the essential reality that we've made a lot of progress and today are barely prejudiced at all beyond the individual level.
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I think that there's a concerted effort to teach people the opposite to some extent.
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something I've often said is that the most dangerous time for an activist movement or the most challenging time is after it wins.
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have speculated that one thing they could have done is sort of keep a skeleton crew in place,
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be damned ready to fight any attempts to roll back progress,
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there's not that much for you to do because you won.
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But what we've seen is that this infrastructure that was put in place,
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which has a well-invested endowment of a little over $400 million.
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So you get this weird situation where you have all these fields,
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talking constantly about how the USA is a racist hellhole.
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And what you've seen is something you referenced earlier,
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is just genetically based dislike of another person.
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people now are trying to define it in sort of a myriad of ways.
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his argument would be that any system that produces disparate outcomes across racial groups is racist.
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And this allows the activists to claim forever that the country is racist.
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So if your definition of racism is not everyone performing absolutely,
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But the problem is that what you're calling out 90% of the time isn't racism.
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but virtually none of it would be racist in the historical sense.
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and to anyone you talk to outside of media and academia,
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And there's a weird barrier to acknowledging that progress,
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which coincidentally is probably resulting in more racism.
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I know a lot of white guys that are frankly getting sick of this,
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where as absolute anti-racist with Puerto Rican girlfriends,
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they're constantly told they're bigots for things like asking people,
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but Kanye and Kyrie found themselves in this whole firestorm.
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And that wasn't helped by the fact that it'd say some stupid things.
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I want to ask you about a sort of practical consequence of what you're
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observing in terms of the redefinition of racism and the way we sort of
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So there has been over the last few years increases in,
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hate crimes towards Hasidic Jews in New York city.
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Armin Risen in tablet magazine wrote about this.
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And he suggested that one of the reasons why the government of New York city is
00:29:41.120
the spike in hate crimes as seriously as they ought to is because the majority of
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And the narrative around hate crimes doesn't really include the possibility of a Jew being
00:29:58.380
Typically the hate crime narrative is the kind of right wing white male,
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the overwhelming majority of the alleged perpetrators in New York are either black or Hispanic and
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pitting Jews against various other minority groups threatens to re agitate problems that
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many in the Jewish and surrounding communities hope no longer exist.
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And the article gives mention to the crown Heights riot in 1991.
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where he refers to New York city as high me town.
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Do you think we've gotten to a point where it's harder to talk about what's happening in real life
00:30:55.240
So you've got to take that into account when you read the book,
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but wrote an entire book called mugged where she talked about all these amazing racial stories.
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decorated men was almost beaten to death inside a black Muslim mosque.
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And the story was essentially hushed up outside of the New York press and it vanished.
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hate hoaxes that you would expect to be regionally,
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that essentially never became stories nationally because they don't fit the prevalent racial narrative in the USA,
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very much is white guy and black guy clashing with white guy getting the better of it.
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this is something that's been going on for a long time.
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I look at interracial crime because at the time,
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there was a constant national focus on interracial acts of violence.
00:31:51.560
if you remember the terrible Dylan roof shooting,
00:32:04.560
so I was interested in what the actual breakdowns of crime along racial lines are.
00:32:09.100
And what I found out first is that the entire focus on this is just the media getting clicks.
00:32:18.000
Blacks make up 13% of the American population made up either 12 or 14%.
00:32:24.380
I don't want to misstate of the people that violently attacked whites.
00:32:28.040
there was no epidemic of interracial crime in the first place.
00:32:33.200
I believe your current husband or your ex-wife.
00:32:39.280
But if you want to talk about interracial crime,
00:32:50.480
we've actually seen the trend being angry young members of this minority group that suffered in the past,
00:33:02.280
it's often some white nutcase that's read the crime stats and that snaps and thinks he's Roland Martel
00:33:08.240
and goes and shoots up a mosque or a black church or something like that.
00:33:15.520
It's not a national problem in the first place,
00:33:17.180
but it does cut heavily minority against white.
00:33:23.780
But what we see is the media presenting the story very,
00:33:29.600
And because I'm a long talker to kind of get to the point,
00:33:31.600
do I think that happened with the violence against Jews?
00:33:35.660
And we've seen that more recently with Stop Asian Hate,
00:33:39.420
So we were supposed to have an entire year kind of dedicated to absolutely preventing these criminal attacks
00:33:49.840
I don't like to take internet videos too seriously,
00:33:52.740
but like every couple of days there was something just crazy.
00:33:58.280
an Asian elder being tossed in front of a trade,
00:34:07.080
You started seeing these multicolored marches around stopping Asian hate.
00:34:26.540
the majority of these attackers were people of color.
00:34:32.000
If you look at the Beru of Justice Statistics report for 2019,
00:34:39.360
but only 24.5% of the attackers of Asians were white.
00:34:47.180
And those numbers might seem proportionate until you realize that even in big cities,
00:35:10.280
if you watch Law & Order or any of these police detective shows,
00:35:13.540
it's just amazing to see how many white defendants they can make up in the Bronx.
00:35:20.720
he's a member of a Proud Boys-like group that drove down here specifically for the purpose of,
00:35:26.060
the reality is that anyone attacking a young Lebanese female storekeeper in the Bronx
00:35:42.880
Like a guy with a machete broke into an in-home shul,
00:35:45.900
where a group of Jews were holding a worship service and I think killed several people.
00:36:00.640
there's an extreme reluctance to discuss actual patterns of crime in the USA and in Canada.
00:36:08.540
the black crime rate in the USA is about twice the white crime rate.
00:36:13.060
But there's a feeling that just discussing this will bring up like old school historic white racism.
00:36:31.920
this also ties into the network of people that are focused on prosecuting,
00:36:41.800
a lot of actual bias as it actually exists falls into the gaps.
00:36:46.260
There's not an organization designed to protect,
00:36:57.640
It seems to me that the ideal place that we sort of collectively,
00:37:04.820
is one where all people are held accountable for their beliefs and their actions,
00:37:10.960
regardless of what they look like or where they come from.
00:37:13.680
But also that people who are willing to make amends and take responsibility for their mistakes are given a pathway to repentance and sort of redemption.
00:37:24.580
That's what I think an ideal society looks like.
00:37:28.460
I think we're going to see something like that with Kyrie Irving's situation where he has apologized.
00:37:38.020
He'll be back to playing basketball in Brooklyn.
00:37:40.040
I don't know if Kanye West is going to be given the chance for redemption or if frankly he's going to seek it out.
00:37:48.120
I do think we've seen an example of accountability to some degree.
00:37:52.500
Do you think that there is some sort of positive outcome that can come from the blowback against West and Irving?
00:38:03.240
which I think is what pretty much every sane person,
00:38:05.720
certainly any sane person raised in the Christian or Muslim tradition would think.
00:38:11.880
if you do something like make a racist slur against countrymen,
00:38:16.860
it's expected that you apologize and you're going to,
00:38:20.800
You're going to be out of the public square for a couple of months,
00:38:24.860
you're not talking about actual neo-Nazis here or something like that.
00:38:41.300
but as a religion that has no idea of mercy or redemption.
00:38:46.000
you have these same concepts of some things just can't be done,
00:39:08.020
And you frequently see these stories about like hip hop,
00:39:12.860
singing along with rap songs on a team bus and being like cut from the team
00:39:26.640
including the fact that they're black and they're rich,
00:39:29.100
Irving certainly and West maybe will be kind of extended that olive branch
00:40:19.100
I've been in vehicular reps where I could have been killed.
00:40:21.920
I'm not trying to present myself as having had a fascinatingly adventurous life.
00:40:30.740
when people say offensive things on social media,
00:40:37.840
that thing that guy said on Twitter was mildly offensive.
00:40:56.660
one of the things that I noted was that he didn't,
00:41:04.640
meaning like my debating opponents better get ready
00:41:09.580
He wasn't actually threatening the lives of Jewish people.
00:41:16.160
and there was very little prospect of kind of a redemptive process.
00:41:20.040
I think both those brothers should be given a chance to,
00:41:25.520
And that's the case for almost all of this stuff.
00:41:29.920
but if some college girl says my nigga to her best friend,
00:41:33.620
you suspend her for a week and then you go on with life.
00:41:37.620
There's not necessarily some traumatic lesson to be learned from these stories.
00:41:43.800
Kyrie Irving posted a mildly racist documentary that you can buy in barbershops around the hood everywhere in the country,
00:41:55.640
they bench him for five games and then that's it.
00:41:58.580
I don't think most of these stories are stories.
00:42:02.840
I also think there's an element of sociopathic status seeking to this.
00:42:07.120
Like when you look at a lot of the professions where this is very common,
00:42:10.560
where you get the pack feeding mobs like journalism,
00:42:17.780
And where there's normally a lot of entrenched dead weight on that ladder in front of you.
00:42:22.560
And a lot of these allegations that somebody did X and needs to be canceled strike me as just ways to remove those obstacles.
00:42:39.300
One of her colleagues made a joke that was like,
00:42:53.720
this is the kind of workplace that I'm forced to exist in.
00:43:03.560
She starts calling out everyone who liked the joke.
00:43:06.440
can you believe that so-and-so clicked like on this?
00:43:11.420
maybe you two should just go to lunch and make up.
00:43:13.340
Can you believe I'm being asked to go on a date with my abuser?
00:43:26.760
the point of that is not that some post-college woman is offended by the idea that she might be bisexual.
00:43:38.280
you're setting a new standard for what's forbidden that will advantage your group over your rivals.
00:43:46.100
I don't think anyone that's ever been shot at in the military,
00:43:58.980
I don't think are actually horrified by this stuff.
00:44:01.180
I think we're caught up in the middle of a social game right now where people seek advantage by doing this crap.
00:44:07.440
And to the extent that people have the power position where they can at least ask to be allowed to apologize.
00:44:13.920
I could care less what Kyrie Irving thinks about the historical origins of black people.
00:44:20.200
I'm interested in why he can't seem to get along with his teammates.
00:44:35.080
You can't talk about available in bookstores everywhere.
00:44:43.400
This episode was produced by Andre Proulx with theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:44:51.100
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00:44:57.620
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00:45:00.900
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