#134 — Beyond the Politics of Race
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Summary
Coleman Hughes is a writer and editor at Quillette, an online magazine that focuses on the intersection of philosophy and race. In this episode, he joins me to discuss his writing on race and identity politics, and why it s important to have a conversation about race in the 21st century, especially in a world where identity politics are so deeply embedded in the culture, and where it s so difficult to talk about it honestly and openly. We also talk about what it means to be a critic of identity politics and identity, and how identity politics affect the way we think about race, and the ways in which identity politics shape our understanding of the world. And, of course, we talk about race. This is the kind of conversation I ve been wanting to have about race for quite some time, and I m here to bring it to you in this episode of the Making Sense Podcast with my guest, Coleman Hughes, who is still an undergraduate at Columbia, majoring in philosophy. Thanks to Coleman for coming on the podcast, and for being brave enough to take the time to come on the show and talk about something that s so divisive and controversial. We don t run ads, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of our listeners. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming one of our supporters. You re gonna love what we re doing here, and you re gonna get a whole lot more than you think you ve ever heard of! - Sam Harris, MA, MAing Sense, a podcasting podcast by Sam Harris The Making Sense podcast by The New York Times bestselling author and host of the making sense podcast by the New York Review, and much more! Thanks for listening, and thanks for listening and supporting the podcast! - To find a list of our sponsorships, go to makingsense.org/themakingsensepodcast Thank you, Sam Harris and I hope you re having a good time! Music: "Good Morning, Myself, My Dear Friend" by The Good Lord and I'll See You Soon, My Brother and I'm Coming Soon, by The Bad Lord, by Mr. John Gray -- by John McDart & The Good Lady (featuring the Good Lord (and I'll Come Back Soon, I'll Be Back, Too Soon, by You'll Hear You, Too Much, by My Brother & I'll Figure Out How To Talk About That, Too Good By Me)
Transcript
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Well, this is the kind of conversation I've been wanting to have about race for quite some
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At the end of these two hours, I think you'll recognize that you haven't heard people talk
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about race this way in a mainstream forum, and there's a reason for that, because this
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Now, as I made clear at the beginning, I'm sure there are other ways of interpreting some
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of the data we cite on economics or crime, for instance, and I'm aware that there are other
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sides to many of these points, but all you've heard in the mainstream media are the other
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sides, and often the most tendentious and sanctimonious and bullying versions.
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There isn't orthodoxy on the issue of race, and it's taboo to question it, and it's growing
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increasingly clear that the orthodoxy is leading us in the wrong direction.
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Now, after the atrocious podcast I did with Ezra Klein, and all of the poison I wound up
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drinking online in the aftermath, I realized that I had a choice.
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I could avoid the issue of race entirely, or I could continue to speak about it honestly.
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I've made my choice, apparently, because this is an important issue.
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In fact, it's one of the most important issues we have, because it is so divisive.
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So I've been wanting to have a discussion like this for months, and I found the person
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who could best walk me through this minefield quite by accident, and in a somewhat unlikely
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As you'll hear, Coleman is still an undergraduate at Columbia, majoring in philosophy.
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However, he's written some extraordinarily brave and well-reasoned pieces in the online magazine
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So I brought him here to discuss his writing, and I also made sure he would be invited to
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the conference we're doing at Lincoln Center in New York in November.
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Anyway, I really appreciate that Coleman has had the courage to tackle the subject head-on.
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I felt like I was talking to a person from the future, or at least one possible future,
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a future where there's no such thing as identity politics, and people of goodwill can just talk
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about social problems without feeling like they're walking a tightrope.
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But in this world, in the year 2018, we're still on that tightrope.
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And throughout this conversation, you'll hear me periodically look down and marvel at how far
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And the truth is, I expect a fair amount of malice to be directed at both me and Coleman
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I used to be operating under the delusion that that was avoidable.
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So, without further delay, I offer you Coleman Hughes.
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So, let's get into your background for a minute, because, you know, I actually don't know anything
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about it, and it may be relevant to this conversation.
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This is something that I have remarked on on social media, and as have others.
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You are still an undergraduate at Columbia, which, given the quality of your writing, is
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What are you studying, and how did you get where you are now?
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Actually, it took me a little while to get there.
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Right out of college, I went to a music conservatory.
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And I ended up leaving after around a semester when I had a death in the family and took about
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a year and a half off and then started college properly at Columbia when I was about 20.
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So, I'm 22, and I have two more years to go with my philosophy degree there.
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I think that was initially what got me into it.
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Books by Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained.
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I remember reading that and thinking that philosophy was something that was interesting enough for me to do for four years.
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Yeah, well, so this is—the irony here is that we probably won't talk at all about the philosophy of mind,
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And, you know, this is going to be a conversation that is framed by the path that we have both taken here,
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that is a path that I've continued to think about as the path of opportunity costs.
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Because, you know, the place where you're currently making your mark and where your voice is being recognized as indispensable
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is on a topic that I think you probably find intrinsically boring, or at least not among the most interesting.
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And because you're having to endlessly spell out arguments that probably, in most cases, shouldn't even have to be made.
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And yet it's absolutely vital that you make them, given how incentivized people are to remain confused on some extremely important topics.
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And I've done this in a similar way with respect to religion and the conflict between reason and faith and science and religion.
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And I consider almost everything I've written in that area to be a kind of opportunity cost.
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And it seems to me you're probably doing a similar thing on race.
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But again, it's very important that you do it because, you know, you have written these four articles in Quillette.
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Which I'll kind of treat as a single text for the purposes of this conversation.
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And they're among the best things I've read on the topic of race and the problem of identity politics now.
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And I mean, this is all very much of the moment, post-Trump.
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And it's just amazing to have you, again, as an undergraduate, making sense like this.
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And so before we dive in, there may be a few caveats and warnings to issue.
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But just one question by way of background is, how much pushback have you gotten for your views?
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So I guess I should spell out what may or may not be obvious for anyone coming to this conversation.
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My mother's Puerto Rican, but most people saw her and assumed she was black.
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So have you gotten a lot of pushback for what you've written?
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I've gotten a lot of pushback on Twitter, especially for the most recent one.
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The first few were, you know, there was good comments, bad comments.
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But this last one, it was like nine to one negative comments.
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I've gotten some pushback in real life from people who disagree with me.
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But I always find disagreements in real life face-to-face tend to go much better than on Twitter or wherever else online.
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And I think I noticed it more for the last one as well.
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But, you know, if the pushback I get for retweeting you is any indication, I think what you're doing is highly controversial.
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I mean, and it's the pushback I get just crystallizes the problem for me.
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So in my world, when I retweeted your last article, you know, I was sincerely praising a person who I had never met, whose writing I admire.
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And yet on planet left, you know, I was uttering racist dog whistles and, you know, probably worse, promoting an Uncle Tom who, for some reason, is producing highly cogent arguments that a white supremacist like myself finds useful.
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Well, this is the problem, because if in my world, retweeting the article of an African-American that I agree with, that I think is amazingly well written, is further testimony to my racial bias, there's just no way to dig out from there.
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And yet there is a slight irony here, because the color of your skin is relevant to this conversation, because only someone with the color of your skin could do what you're doing right now.
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And so a white guy can't be writing the articles that you're writing now.
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I mean, the purpose of this conversation is to figure out how to get to some possible future where all of us can talk about race and try to find some way forward that doesn't leave any of us open for just this reflexive smearing and character assassination that's coming from predominantly the left here.
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And the other irony here is that when you actually poll black people and ask them what they believe on any given topic, whether it's racial preferences or the influence of rap on society, you sometimes find astonishing results, which would be astonishing to some people, right?
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You know, we can get into these polls, but for example, Gallup did a poll in 2016, that found that over 50% of black people said that race should play absolutely no role in college admissions, the clear majority.
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Another poll back in 2008, found that 71% of black people said that rap was a bad influence on society.
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And I'm sure if you disaggregated that by age, you would find my grandparents' generation virtually unanimously hating rap and my dads being lukewarm and then my generation being a little more positive.
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But nonetheless, none of these views can be racist if the majority of black people hold them, right?
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And it's like, when I go to my family reunion, there is plenty of disagreement on all of these topics.
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There's clearly a way in which decrying and rehearsing the history of racism has become a sort of sacred value in the black community.
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But, you know, poll results show that there's plenty of room for disagreement here just among black people.
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And it can't possibly be racist for white people to happen to have the same views as many black people.
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Just one big picture caveat before we dive in, and we'll start there with opinion in the black community.
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But we'll cite statistics at various points of the sort that you just cited.
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And let's just acknowledge at the outset that many things here are debatable.
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I mean, we can cite data that can be, I'm sure, counterposed by other data.
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We might interpret data in ways that are open to criticism.
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But the reason why I'm having this conversation is that, you know, one thing seems to me to be not debatable.
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And it's that if we want to get to a colorblind society, at some point,
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and this would be a society where people are actually judged by the contents of their characters,
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Clearly, the path forward at some point has to be characterized by caring less and less about it.
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And that's why identity politics seems like such a dead end to me.
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But I think we have to acknowledge that, you know, one of the downsides of our having this conversation now
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is that you and I are both guaranteed to be smeared by the left for allegedly having an agenda that's bad for black people.
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Now, I don't know why you would have such an agenda.
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I know why I would be accused of having it because I'm not black.
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But we should just acknowledge that this is, I mean, we're having this conversation because we think it's important to have.
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And we're trying to find a path forward that's good for everyone, black people included.
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And we have a vision of what that future would need to look like.
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And the path forward, you know, you and I haven't spoken yet, but I can only assume based on having read what you've written,
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we both agree that the path forward can't be this continual shattering of the political landscape into competing victim narratives.
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So anyway, that's just, I'll flag the masochistic pain we're walking into at the outset.
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And then let's jump in where you just started, this diversity of opinion in the black community,
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which, frankly, those poll results were surprising to me.
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I mean, I was poised to agree with everything you were writing.
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But I'm amazed to know that on many of these questions, like the question of whether affirmative action, you know, to get into college is good,
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you can find a majority of black people who think, no, you shouldn't be considering race at that level.
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Yeah, well, there's a framing effect here, too.
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So if you ask the question, do you support affirmative action, and you ask it that way,
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you'll get majority support among black people.
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And if I'm not mistaken, you'll get a slight majority among white people, too.
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But if you ask, if you just phrase it a different way, which is to say, if you just give a straightforward definition of what affirmative action entails,
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you get minority support among blacks, which is to say, majority dissenting, right?
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So the 2016 poll I just cited, I think the way they phrased it is race, ethnicity, quote,
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should not be a factor at all in the college admissions process.
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So that seems to me an utterly clear definition of what affirmative action is.
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But if you just ask, there's a poll like one year earlier or one year later, I can't remember,
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that just asks it as affirmative action and gets a totally different result,
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which suggests to me that affirmative action has a kind of political halo around it,
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where when you actually drill into the details of what that is, most people are uncomfortable with it.
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Indeed, most black people are uncomfortable with it.
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But when you just package it under the political label affirmative action, it becomes unchallengeable.
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There's this phenomenon of black conservatism that is surprising to people
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and is just regularly ignored in the mainstream media.
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First of all, how would you describe yourself politically?
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Did you consider yourself a conservative or not?
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I've only ever considered myself either a liberal or a centrist.
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I'm fairly sure if I had been old enough to vote, I would have voted for Obama twice.
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It's just the way I see it on the topic of race, the political spectrum is like a frame shift,
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three notches to the left, where what would otherwise be a reasonable center-left opinion
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What would otherwise be a pretty reasonable centrist opinion tends to read far right.
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So no, no, I don't think of myself as a conservative, but I'm certain that I've already been labeled
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that way and I don't invest too much in any of these labels, so I'm not going to fight it
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There's that frame shift and the people who are regularly described as conservatives or
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even gateway drugs to the alt-right in my world, including myself, are almost uniformly
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I mean, there's this whole intellectual dark web idea that has recently been popularized.
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There's probably one true conservative in that whole group of people, and yet we are
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described as far right by many people on the left.
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But this phenomenon of black conservatism, to some degree, is mingled with the religiosity
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in the black community, because the black community tends to be more religious than the white.
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Yeah, I cite this poll in one of my pieces from, I want to say his name is Theodore Johnson.
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He found that, well, 47% of blacks identified as liberal, 45% identified as conservative,
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And my sense is that that conservatism is more of a social conservatism.
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Like you mentioned, blacks are disproportionately religious, and on many social issues would tend
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to be more in line with a center-right perspective.
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And Johnson's opinion about why it is that blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democrat, despite being
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evenly split between liberal and conservative, is that there is a sense that the Democratic
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Party is the party that stands up for civil rights.
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It could be as simple as the fact that Lyndon Johnson happened to be president during the
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My gut tells me it's also just the fact that if you put a true neo-Nazi in front of me and
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just ask me to bet on who he voted for in the last election, I could win money all day
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And that proximity to the truly racist fringe of the Republican Party at least seems to sully
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that whole half of the political spectrum as far as many black people are concerned.
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And also the fact that there is, on many issues, not all that much difference between the two
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So it's interesting that it comes back to this issue, which you dissect out very much
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in the spirit of an academic philosopher, that it is at minimum strange to accuse a white
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person of racism for holding views that on any given poll, a majority of black people can
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I'm looking at this one passage in your article where you say, for example, if a white person
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were to say, I don't think racism holds poorly educated blacks back, it would mark them on
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the left as woefully ignorant of systemic injustice, if not downright racist.
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But a 2016 Pew poll found that 60% of blacks without college degrees said that their race
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If a white person were to say that rap music is a bad influence on society, it might mark them
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as subconsciously prejudiced in the minds of many on the left.
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But according to a 2008 Pew poll, 71% of black people agreed with this statement.
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So again, I mean, it's possible to hold, I guess, any view, however correct, for the wrong
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But the litmus test for racism can't be holding any of these views, which leads me to ask,
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When can we be sure we're correctly diagnosing it in other people?
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One perspective on that is to take what I perceive to be a linguist's perspective and say,
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every word evolves over time, and language is a bottom-up distributed phenomenon that we
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So if it just is the case that people nowadays want to define racism as something black people
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by definition can't participate in, then who are we to say that that definition is wrong,
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Because words are only what they mean to people at a given time.
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But then there's another perspective that would say, listen, we need this word racism to
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I have met, I have people in my extended family that I could only describe as black rednecks
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in the same way that white people have white rednecks, right?
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Just people with, usually older, with just totally retrograde views about how you view other races.
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So I just, it seems silly and a little bit condescending to suggest that black people can't possibly
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Although, you know, I'll grant that if you define it that way, then it's just a circular
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But, you know, I guess racism is defined as, in my view, the belief that kind of essentialist
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characterization of a whole population of people who happen to share ancestry that holds that
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they're inferior, unfit for friendship and relationships, and just unfit to co-mingle with
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What would you consider to be white racism with respect to blacks?
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I guess on some level, you have to go by somebody's behavior.
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So if somebody walks up to me on the street and calls me the N-word in a tone that makes
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it totally clear that they are denigrating me, that person's obviously racist.
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And there's just no reason to mince words about it.
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But if someone, you know, if someone behaves in a way that I find objectionable, but hasn't
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said anything racist, I think people tend to make these kind of subconscious claims about
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And instead of attacking what you say, they impute motives onto you.
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I guess it's just behavior that is clearly racially skewed.
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I mean, you could look at an instance like the Starbucks fiasco recently, where two black
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men were arrested for going into a Starbucks, not paying for anything, asking to use the bathroom.
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The fact that the worker at Starbucks called the cops on them, it just seemed too quick to
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So it's hard to actually be agnostic because the incentives are just to have an opinion,
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If you go out on Twitter and you say, well, I don't know.
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I actually don't have an opinion on whether that was racist.
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Then you'll be accused of equivocating about racism, downplaying it.
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I think in many instances, it's just wiser to actually be agnostic until you know the
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With respect to that case, I simply don't know enough of the details.
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I mean, so much of this is based on people's behavior and just the kind of crime that has
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been suffered in that neighborhood and, you know, the awareness of all the people involved.
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I mean, I don't know who the barista was and, you know, how street smart they were.
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So you can imagine two extremes where it's just straight up racism based on the conscious
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racial prejudice of the person working at Starbucks.
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Or it could have been a totally plausible judgment call based on a thousand cues that are very
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difficult to describe consciously but which, at a glance, people can take in, you know, when they're
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And there's just no generic solve for all those situations.
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And it's not even the case that skin color is never relevant.
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You know, race is never relevant in those situations.
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We'll talk about crime in the black community at a certain point and no doubt receive some
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But, you know, there are many cases where being a white guy looking a certain way should put other
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people on their guard for a higher possibility of crime.
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And, you know, the example I've used before, which is by no means far-fetched, is, I mean,
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if you see a couple of, you know, white guys with shaven heads and the appropriate tattoos
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standing in the parking lot of a black church, right, those guys suddenly become very interesting
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because of their race and because of their haircuts merely to be standing where they're standing
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To tell anyone, you know, who's working in a store or, you know, just living their lives
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that they can't use those kinds of intuitions, which are driven bottom-up by the statistical
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reality of crime in our world, it's enforcing a kind of dangerous stupidity on people.
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And yet, given the environment, I'm sure we're there where people are feeling like they can't
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act on intuitions, which in the moment can be totally valid.
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I think the brain is a pattern-finding machine, and it is a highly politically incorrect pattern-finding
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And if it, if in your personal experience, you find statistical regularities with regard
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to what types of people look a certain way and how they tend to behave, you will form a
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kind of, you know, a kind of alarm in certain situations, whether you want to or not.
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And there have been some interesting cases where, for instance, Black people have themselves
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admitted to, you know, if they live in a certain high crime area, let's say, where they just
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notice that the people who tend to commit crime tend to look a certain way, right?
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Let's just stipulate that in this particular area, that is the case statistically, right?
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You could, if you heard someone had just committed a robbery in this particular city, you could
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win money betting that that person was Black over someone who was just betting by chance.
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And just like, we could just say a hundred years ago, you could have said the same about
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You could have won money all day if you heard that there had been a murder betting that that
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person was Irish, for example, rather than German, American.
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So these trends change over time, but it's nevertheless true that we tend to form impressions and biases
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in situations not based completely out of thin air, although some stereotypes are totally out
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So there have been instances where prominent Black leaders have admitted to, you know, having
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If you're walking in a certain neighborhood at a certain time.
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Jesse Jackson, there's that famous Jesse Jackson quote, which is among the more honest
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And there was also virtually the same quote by a former president of Spelman University,
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Spelman College, whose name I'm blanking on, who said virtually the same thing.
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No, I don't remember it off the top of my head.
00:28:54.640
But the thrust of it was that essentially I sometimes fear Black men.
00:29:00.040
Yeah, I don't have it verbatim, but the gist of it was, this is the Jesse Jackson quote.
00:29:07.020
I'm sick of walking down the street at night, hearing footsteps behind me, feeling the fear,
00:29:14.160
you know, the feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck and turning around and seeing
00:29:23.700
And I'm sure he got a fair amount of pain for having said that.
00:29:26.980
But I mean, the reality of, I mean, maybe we should just touch on the reality of crime
00:29:31.240
in the black community just so that we don't sound delusional here.
00:29:34.820
But the statistics on black on black violence, which is almost the totality of the crime problem
00:29:42.840
there, in large measure, is the totality of the crime problem in many urban areas that
00:29:50.520
I can pull up those specifically, but do you have some stats off the top of your head?
00:29:55.640
Yeah, I have the FBI crime data here, just the national data.
00:30:00.180
I think the latest year for which it's available, 52% of homicides were committed by blacks.
00:30:07.760
And that number has been relatively stable over the past two decades.
00:30:12.360
It's hovered right around half, basically every year.
00:30:22.200
So it's a problem perpetrated primarily by black people and specifically black men and
00:30:28.460
specifically young black men, and also suffered disproportionately by young black men.
00:30:34.040
For instance, there is data from the CDC that shows that if you look at black men ages 15
00:30:43.200
to 34, the number one cause of death is homicide.
00:30:47.500
And even that slightly understates it, because you might say, I'm sure the majority of that
00:30:52.560
is in the younger half of that age distribution.
00:30:55.760
But it's actually the case that if you disaggregate it, if you just go from 15 to 19, number one cause
00:31:01.860
of death is homicide, you know, 20 to 24, still the number one cause, 25 to 34, still the number
00:31:09.080
And that's a fact that can't be said about any other combination of age and ethnicity.
00:31:15.620
And I think the important thing to keep in mind here is that among the things that governments
00:31:21.180
do well, lowering crime rates actually happens to be one of them.
00:31:25.280
So there's every reason to believe that this could come down given the right policies.
00:31:36.540
Like I said, the rate of crime commission among the Irish used to be five times higher than the
00:31:46.140
Likewise with the Italians, it was maybe three times higher.
00:31:48.520
And so we know certain ethnic groups have committed lots of crime in the past.
00:31:55.780
And we know that those crime rates can be brought down with effective policing, with more policing
00:32:03.820
And obviously the whole challenge is how do we get there?
00:32:07.740
But it's going to be very hard to get there if we can't even mention the statistics that describe
00:32:13.520
Well, yeah, and they're actually a little arithmetic makes them look a little bit worse, specifically
00:32:19.820
for young black men, because African-Americans make up about 14 percent of the population.
00:32:26.000
And as you say, they commit and suffer at least half the homicides.
00:32:30.880
But virtually all of this falls to men rather than women.
00:32:35.540
We're really talking about, you know, seven percent of the population committing, you know, half
00:32:40.840
the murder is against, you know, largely the same seven percent of the population.
00:32:46.060
And when you see the crime statistics in a city like Chicago, the level of violent crime
00:32:52.400
that makes America an outlier at the moment is largely driven by that phenomenon.
00:32:58.480
And most people believe, at least on the left, that part of the problem is that now there's
00:33:05.780
this epidemic of police violence against young black men.
00:33:09.880
We can touch on to what degree that's true or not.
00:33:12.960
But the net result of that is that many people think that there's simply too much police focus
00:33:22.220
Whereas, I think you cite this book in one of your articles.
00:33:28.000
Jill Liovi, and that's how I've been pronouncing it.
00:33:31.640
I remember Glenn Lowry recommended that book to me, and, you know, her argument was that
00:33:36.620
what you actually find in, certainly in urban, you know, gang-ridden areas in America, in
00:33:44.960
the black community, is that it's a failure of policing.
00:33:52.240
And we're talking about the consequences of the worst crimes virtually never getting solved
00:33:57.640
and murderers walking free, and everyone knows they walk free.
00:34:02.040
And so you get this unwillingness of anyone in the community to cooperate with the judicial
00:34:07.420
system to put the most dangerous people behind bars.
00:34:10.840
And then you get this over-prosecution of petty crime, which is, you know, obviously terrible
00:34:15.940
for any community and has been especially bad for the black community.
00:34:20.360
I mean, as you say, it's very hard to argue that just less police attention is the solution
00:34:31.600
If an alien from Mars came to Earth and studied the past 10,000 years of human history with
00:34:37.840
regard to homicide rates specifically, they would find the homicide rate in South Central
00:34:43.060
Los Angeles and inner city Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans, they would find that to
00:34:48.600
be the norm, and they would find the homicide rate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or other
00:34:55.100
places where it's extremely low to be the exception to the rule.
00:34:58.460
They would find that to be the phenomenon to be explained.
00:35:02.020
I take Steven Pinker's line in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that much of the way this is
00:35:07.860
explained is the state monopoly on violence, which is the police coming into town.
00:35:14.700
The stereotype is of the sheriff coming into town, and that's a true stereotype, right?
00:35:18.600
Homicide and retributive violence is just something that young men tend to do everywhere on Earth
00:35:25.660
until they can no longer get away with it because there's a police force that punishes crime,
00:35:31.980
specifically violent crime, swiftly and effectively and reliably.
00:35:36.840
What's happened throughout history is that we have to remember eugenics was a totally mainstream
00:35:42.600
progressive orthodoxy in the first half of the 20th century.
00:35:46.820
So the attitude towards policing Black communities was essentially to let them kill each other
00:35:52.260
as an almost a form of population control, right?
00:35:56.100
So what happens there is that a culture of honor is allowed to survive, whereas white communities
00:36:01.860
got the benefit of more reliable policing where Black people, if someone kills someone and
00:36:08.820
you're their brother, now you have to retaliate or else, you know, you lose face and there's
00:36:16.480
just a never-ending cycle of retributive violence.
00:36:22.080
I mean, I remember reading some racist material of the time that, yeah, I mean, just, you know,
00:36:27.380
let them all kill each other was essentially the view of the white community with respect to
00:36:33.560
And, yeah, it's one of these painful ironies that the left is getting this part wrong to
00:36:44.200
It's not that, again, this is what's so toxic about this topic.
00:36:49.000
To even discuss the disparity in the crime problem is controversial.
00:36:57.320
Your motives are impugned to even touch this topic.
00:37:03.120
And yet, how could you possibly improve life for people in the Black community if you weren't
00:37:15.760
Like I said, there's no reason to suppose that it has to continue on this way.
00:37:19.680
If we just assume that in the year 2050, the crime rate has continued to drop, because it
00:37:28.000
has been dropping, especially in the 90s, it dropped precipitously.
00:37:35.860
It certainly isn't not mentioning the statistics at all.
00:37:40.960
And on the charge of racism, is it racist to notice in FBI data that whites are more likely
00:37:47.940
to drive drunk than Blacks and more likely to violate public drunkenness laws?
00:37:54.760
I mean, you know, there could be a hundred different reasons why that's the case.
00:37:57.760
And that could be an interesting research question.
00:38:01.060
But if it's not racist to mention statistical disparities that seem to be unflattering towards
00:38:11.020
You know, how can mentioning the same kinds of facts when they're the other way be racist?
00:38:15.600
Well, so we'll talk about the origins of these problems and then the path forward.
00:38:22.560
And the interesting thing is that understanding the origins may not actually indicate the path
00:38:28.020
forward, or in many cases may be irrelevant to finding the appropriate path forward.
00:38:33.440
And this will be interesting and controversial.
00:38:36.040
But there are two paragraphs you wrote in one of your pieces that summarize the political
00:38:42.720
dynamic here that worries me, and I just want to read those two to kind of frame this part of the
00:38:49.680
Given America's brutal history of white racism, it is understandable that the pendulum of racial
00:38:55.160
double standards has swung in the opposite direction.
00:38:58.000
Indeed, it is a testament to our laudable, if naive, desire to fix history.
00:39:02.360
But the status quo cannot be maintained indefinitely.
00:39:06.340
Cracks in the reparations mindset are beginning to show themselves.
00:39:09.340
And this is me now, the reparations mindset being the idea that because racist policies
00:39:14.520
and systemic racism has created this problem, the remedy must come in some form of reparations
00:39:22.120
from the government or policies or the white community to fix the damage here.
00:39:28.500
Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special
00:39:33.020
dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow.
00:39:39.940
Asian students are noticing that applying to elite colleges is an uphill battle for them
00:39:44.080
and are understandably fighting for basic fairness and admission standards.
00:39:48.280
The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore,
00:39:52.940
even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traitors.
00:39:57.040
As these cracks widen, the far left responds by doubling down on the radical strain of black
00:40:02.440
identity politics that caused the problems to begin with.
00:40:05.460
And the far right responds with its own toxic strain of white identity politics.
00:40:10.100
Stale grievances are dredged up from history and used to justify double standards that create fresh grievances in turn.
00:40:16.160
And beneath all of this lies the tacit claim that blacks are uniquely constrained by history
00:40:20.720
in a way that Jewish Americans, East Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and countless other historically
00:40:28.240
In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves, academics, journalists,
00:40:33.020
activists, politicians, and concerned citizens alike, if we are on a path towards a thriving
00:40:38.100
multi-ethnic democracy or a balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism.
00:40:43.080
That just captures our moment perfectly, in my view.
00:40:48.060
It's just, you and I are all too aware of what's happening on the other side of this conversation,
00:40:55.220
this ridiculous and retrograde eruption of white identity politics,
00:41:01.560
and, you know, in the sharpest case, white male identity politics.
00:41:05.980
And it's easy to see this, an amplification in other forms of identity politics to be thought
00:41:14.360
on the left to be the only possible response to this.
00:41:17.400
But again, coming back to the basic fact, if we want to get to a society where everyone
00:41:24.800
is treated as an individual capable of taking any opportunity they can take, at what point
00:41:32.800
do you start treating people as individuals rather than as symbolic representatives of
00:41:41.800
One point I would say there is, I totally agree that the identity politics of the left
00:41:48.020
can affect an equal and opposite identity politics on the right.
00:41:54.680
If you look at someone like Jared Taylor, for example, who, I don't know exactly how to describe
00:42:00.180
him, but I think white identitarian, perhaps white nationalist, if you just look at the
00:42:05.780
argument he makes, basically his entire argument is, listen, look what black people get to do.
00:42:12.800
They get to organize around the variable of race politically.
00:42:16.200
They'll say things like, you know, the black congressional caucus vets every bill that goes through
00:42:22.140
Congress, not for its effect on America, but for its effect on black specifically.
00:42:26.980
And then he'll just make the next logical leap.
00:42:30.280
Why are white people the only one who don't get to do this?
00:42:33.200
Now, that argument is based on a false premise, namely that identity really matters.
00:42:39.640
But once you grant that false premise, the rest of the argument is pretty sound.
00:42:44.880
And that's not good because then it's likely to be compelling to some number of young white men.
00:42:51.820
The other point you bring up is a point about history and blame, right?
00:42:57.600
So if you take a white murderer and a black murderer, they just hold everything constant
00:43:05.380
They've done, they've committed the same heinous crime.
00:43:09.120
The attitude demonstrated towards the white murderer is not the kind of argument generally
00:43:14.920
that, you know, someone like you might make about free will, which is to say they're not
00:43:19.820
responsible for their genes, nor are they responsible for their upbringing.
00:43:23.740
Just put all the mixture of causes that led them to offend in a box.
00:43:29.020
You couldn't pull out a single one and say they really caused this, right?
00:43:32.600
That's as true of white people as it is of black people.
00:43:36.520
The problem, I mean, all of that's true, but it's just impossible to actually have a criminal
00:43:44.200
justice system that is constantly operating in that frame.
00:43:48.500
We have to at least entertain the pretense of things like blame and praise just to get
00:43:54.700
around in life, even if they're not deeply true, I would argue.
00:43:58.640
And at the very least, whatever attitude we take towards free will and blame, it has to
00:44:04.180
You can't just invoke slavery and Jim Crow to exonerate the behavior of a black person
00:44:11.500
who is causing, wreaking havoc on the innocent black people around him or her and not invoke
00:44:20.740
It's like the reason we blame people in the first place, it can't be deeply predicated on
00:44:26.220
the fact that everyone is deeply responsible for who they are because nobody is.
00:44:30.100
We just need to be able to blame people in order to make society work.
00:44:36.200
Yeah, and they're just these obvious comparisons, which, again, are radioactive to even make.
00:44:43.500
At one point in one of your articles, you say, you know, Jewish people don't get to hate
00:44:48.980
German people and get praised for it because of what the German people's grandparents did to
00:44:56.280
This is one of these disparities that you point out where, in the work of an author like Ta-Nehisi
00:45:01.580
Coates, you can see expressions of what would be recognized to be racism in anyone else.
00:45:12.120
Let's table that for a second because I think we probably need to talk about Coates in a minute.
00:45:16.240
But to stay on this larger point, you write about something you call the racism treadmill.
00:45:23.360
The racism treadmill is essentially a pair of two beliefs that, in my view, virtually ensure
00:45:31.840
that many progressives will never admit, so long as they have these two beliefs, that
00:45:36.780
substantial progress has been made on the axis of racism in America.
00:45:42.900
The first belief is that whenever you see a statistical disparity between Blacks and whites, it's valid
00:45:50.980
to reflexively assume that racial discrimination, whether it's systemic or overt, is the cause
00:45:59.000
of that disparity rather than the hundred or so other things that can be the cause of disparities.
00:46:06.260
So, I'll just take two quick examples to make this vivid.
00:46:11.860
One is the fact that in the year 1952, there were four different Southern states in which
00:46:19.060
Black school teachers had higher salaries than white school teachers.
00:46:23.040
That's fairly astonishing if you believe that politics and the racial biases of politics
00:46:30.580
determine every outcome in the economy, but economies are extremely complex, and there can be a lot
00:46:37.360
of racism in the political sphere, but just bizarre trends with regard to supply and demand
00:46:44.520
and various other economic forces can make it so that there is some disparity that can't possibly
00:46:51.200
be explained by racism, because in this case, it favors Blacks, right?
00:46:54.860
Another example is if you just go to Wikipedia and look up household income by ethnic group,
00:47:01.880
you'll find facts like for every dollar earned by the average white American of Russian descent
00:47:09.160
or by the median white household of Russian descent, the median white household of French descent
00:47:17.140
So, both of those households would just be viewed as white at this point and probably would view
00:47:23.440
themselves as white, and you wouldn't be able to pick them apart, and yet you have the kind of
00:47:28.980
disparity that, if it were between Blacks and whites, would be presented in the pages of the New York
00:47:35.360
Times and other respected outlets and reflexively ascribed to racism. And there are literally all kinds
00:47:43.540
of disparities of this kind between different Black ethnic groups. You compare Nigerians to Jamaicans to
00:47:49.660
Haitians to African Americans. You find all kinds of disparities that are never talked about or rarely
00:47:56.260
talked about because they're too deflationary of the idea that every statistical disparity can be
00:48:06.140
And the second belief, which is closely related to the first, is just that every culture is identical
00:48:14.380
in the patterns of behavior that are encouraged, in the values that are inculcated, in the kind of
00:48:21.860
social incentive structure that leads people to behave one way rather than another, and that there are no
00:48:28.760
relevant differences to talk about. There are no differences that could possibly explain disparities.
00:48:33.780
I mean, there's just no reason to believe that that's true. And I'm sure we'll get more into
00:48:39.200
that. But once you put those two beliefs together, then you're in a situation where we're going to
00:48:45.280
continue to have statistical disparities until the end of time. It's rarer to find, I mean, I actually
00:48:52.040
don't know of a single example in which you take two ethnic groups, and by every metric, they are close,
00:48:59.080
whether it's crime commission or income, or whatever it is, even if they're of the same race.
00:49:05.720
So the idea that we should expect parity across the board in the absence of discrimination,
00:49:11.800
all the evidence suggests the opposite. Which is not to say discrimination can never cause
00:49:17.600
disparities. It's only to say that you can't assume that. It's just an empirical question.
00:49:21.700
So, you know, insofar as these two beliefs are ascendant, then people will never recognize
00:49:28.360
progress, no matter how much progress happens, because we'll still have disparities, and those
00:49:33.000
disparities will still seem to prove that racism is a major force in society.
00:49:39.220
Yeah, well, so let's talk about Black culture here, and the degree to which it may play a role.
00:49:46.280
Because, again, there are many disparities which are accidental.
00:49:53.540
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00:49:58.900
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