#182 — Unlearning Race
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Summary
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of two memoirs: "Losing My Cool" and "Self-Portrait in Black and White Unlearning Race," and he has written for the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and other journals. In this episode, we talk about the reality and politics of race, and cover many aspects of that question, from his unique point of view as someone who is both the product of an interracial marriage and in one himself. His take on the topic is fascinating and quite refreshing, and now I bring you thomas chatterton Williams, to discuss the question of race and identity through the prism of his own personal experience and how he views it through the lens of his marriage to his mixed-race daughter. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who is interested in race, class, culture, identity, and marriage, or who wants to learn how to deal with the questions of race as a writer and a parent, and how to navigate the challenges that come with interracial relationships. Thanks for listening to the Making Sense Podcast, and as always, thank you for joining me in the making sense community. -Sam Harris. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We now have our own ad-free version of Making Sense, which is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, and paperback, and hardcover, and also on Audible. If you want to become a supporter of the podcast, use coupon "Making Sense" for $5 or $10 or more, you get 10% off your first month, you'll get 20% off the entire month, plus an additional 3 months free shipping, plus I'll get an ad discount when you sign up for 7 days of the course gets 24 months of a year, plus a discount of $50 or a maximum of 7 months, plus you get 7 months of free shipping and 7 months get a discount, plus they'll get a complimentary ad-plan, plus 7 other options, I'm going to get a 2 months of the last week's ad-only promo code "making sense of $5,000, plus all that gets you a chance to get $10, plus $5 gets a maximum discount, and they get 7 days, and I'll receive an ad-less version of the ad-proofed copy of the entire course gets you access to the podcast is $50, and you'll also get $5 of the whole thing, plus the discount is $10 gets $5 will get $4 of the other option, and there's also a discount?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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a free account and we grant 100 of those requests no questions asked okay no housekeeping today
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jumping right into it today i'm speaking with thomas chatterton williams thomas is the author
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of two memoirs the first is losing my cool and the second the book under discussion is self-portrait
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in black and white unlearning race and thomas is a wonderful writer he has written for the new york
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times magazine harper's the london review of books and other journals and here we talk about the reality
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and politics of race and cover many aspects of that question from his unique point of view as
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someone who is both the product of an interracial marriage and in one himself anyway his take on the
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topic is fascinating and quite refreshing and now i bring you thomas chatterton williams
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i am here with thomas chatterton williams thomas thanks for joining me thanks for having me i have
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to say that my french mother-in-law is going to be extremely impressed she's a huge fan of your
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meditation practice but she doesn't even know that you do this other work oh nice well that's that's
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probably as it should be oh that's great so yeah i feel like i i know her a bit from your book
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you've written a um a wonderful memoir self-portrait in black and white unlearning race and uh i think
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we'll just we'll use that as the focus of our discussion before we we dive in how do you summarize
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your career thus far as a writer and your interests what have you tended to focus on sure i studied
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philosophy in undergrad and and then i got a master's degree in cultural reporting and
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criticism in the journalism department of nyu and i came out of grad school with a kind of coming of
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age memoir i was working on called losing my cool and i thought that that would just be the only
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memoir i'd ever write and you know i started writing magazine journalism and essays and criticism
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literary criticism but here i am with a second memoir and i've kind of maybe i've put myself on a
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track to become a serial memoirist without having meant to but i kind of i always write about race and
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class and culture and identity through the prism of personal experience i try to use my own personal
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experience to get at something something larger yeah well you have a happily a very i guess it's it's
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fairly unique personal experience which allows you to dissect the strands of what's perhaps at least
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perceived to be the most prevailing social problem of our time and it's been that way for a long time
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perhaps i'm speaking somewhat provincially as an american but the problem of race and everyone's
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reaction to it and it's you know the legacy of it how old are you thomas i'm 38 right so you're 38 and
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you've written your second memoir which is which to my father's chagrin yeah which is hilarious
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but appropriate because it's it's a great book and and has a lot to offer it by way of informing our
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discussion as our listeners are about to discover so perhaps summarize how you view your own racial
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identity of how you viewed it that's obviously an evolving self-concept which you talk about a lot in
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the book but how have you come to this question and perhaps summarize the dynamics of of your marriage
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and fatherhood because there's some surprises i guess i'll tee it up for you by saying that you at
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one point published an op-ed arguing essentially for the the durability of of race in your case and the
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the unequivocal fact that your children will be black no matter what else might be true about them
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how has your thinking along those lines been revised yeah that's right i mean i grew up i was born in
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1981 i grew up in the suburbs of new jersey in the 80s and 90s my father is a black man from the
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segregated south from texas he was born in 1937 so he's really old enough to be my grandfather
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and he's a sociologist by training and my mother is a white blonde-haired blue-eyed daughter of
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evangelical christians from southern california so i grew up in a mixed race household in new jersey
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but very much with a black identity and with the understanding from both of my parents that
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we were a black household and that there's really no such thing as being partially white that you're
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you're either white or you're not because whiteness is a kind of constructed identity but it's very real
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in the world we'd have to learn to move through so people wouldn't perceive us as as white and we'd need
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to you know understand ourselves as as black in this racialized world and you know and embrace it
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not just accept it but embrace it and it wasn't even until the year 2000 when i got to college that
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you could even check more than one box on the census so i didn't really think of myself as mixed i didn't
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know a lot of people i didn't meet anybody who defined themselves as biracial until i got to college
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even though i knew black people of all variety of skin tones and hair textures but no one no one who
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would define themselves as something other than black and is that true regardless of someone's
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appearance i mean if someone no matter how fair-skinned someone is in the end and no matter
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how much they quote pass or can pass for white that you in your experience people don't take the
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other side of that identity and say that they're white or they say that they're biracial or mixed race
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well there's a couple things that had been my experience but also things were changing already
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in the culture so i came up i sometimes think that i'm probably the last generation for which the the
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logic of the one drop rule of hypodescent that a single drop of black blood necessitates that you
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are only black that that really kind of is compelling on the you know it really makes sense out of
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something other than like a kind of solidarity level that makes sense on a scientific level or something
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like that i i didn't really question that on a biological level for most of my life i don't
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think that that's where the culture is exactly anymore i think that we're a lot more familiarized
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with mixedness than we were when i was a kid certainly but i never met i never met so-called black
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people like my children so i i don't know if in the culture that i grew up in to answer your question
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i don't know if my daughter and son would be perceived or would have a plausible route to self-identify
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as black appearing as they do right i mean so it's like if for instance you had and we're kind of
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giving away the the punchline here in terms of your own experience of fatherhood but if you had looked
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like your children do you think your father would have been as adamant in in defining your identity as
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black my father's an interesting guy so he i have wonderful recollections he's still alive i have
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wonderful memories of you know him saying with a straight face to me that my mother's not white
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she's light-skinned because she's got black consciousness you know so my father could kind
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of probably he probably could wrap his mind around my kids being black because one of the first things
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he said to me when he came to paris when my daughter marlo was born six years ago he held her and i said
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well you know she doesn't really look so so black does she and he said she's just a palomino you know
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i went to school on the sacred segregated side of town with you know with more than one person who was
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colored similarly so this is nothing new in the black community he said so i think he actually could
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he could deal with it he could accept it he could integrate that into his understanding of blackness but
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i don't think that as soon as anyone stepped outside of the house that that would be how the world
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would accept us or perceive us i think that there would be an enormous amount of pushback were you
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to look like these children and to walk out into the world kind of proclaiming the the sense of
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yourself that i advocated in the new york times a year before my daughter was born in the op-ed you
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were referring to right okay so so uh fast forward to your own marriage and progeny yeah so i lived 30
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years of um kind of unexamined life from a racial perspective i accepted that great harm was done
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through the imposition of racial identity and the construction of blackness and whiteness but that
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you know it was how the world was and you know and and it was really nothing to push back against and
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in fact it was there was a kind of moral duty i felt for mixed race blacks to adhere to a kind of
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racial essentialism because i felt that people who could break away if they broke away from a
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historically oppressed group it would weaken the group so there was a kind of moral reasoning that
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i tried to lay out in this op-ed but in retrospect i realized that that op-ed was really written to
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convince an audience of one and that that audience was myself because i was already married to a woman
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who was colored very much the way my mom is and i was i think on some level understanding that i would
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very likely have children who would not read as black to anyone but but me so but you know i even
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convinced my wife this is not really a very european way of seeing things uh europeans who grew up in
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societies that never had slavery within their national borders don't have this idea of the one drop rule
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you know alexander dumas was a much you know these we're using these words unscientifically but he was
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a blacker looking guy than my children are but you know that was his identity wasn't defined that way
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the way that it would be in america you know wb du bois was certainly someone who was heavily descended
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from europe you know we have a history of very very european looking people just defining themselves as
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blacks that we don't have here in europe but i prevailed upon my wife to kind of accept this
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this way of seeing things and so for the next nine months after she got pregnant we just accepted that
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we were going to have black children and be a black family kind of reproducing the identity that i grew
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up with in my household but when my daughter was when i was standing in the delivery room and the doctor
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started calling out i can see the head she said she described it as a tête d'orée which is you know i was
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sluggish it was the middle of the night but i realized she's saying that there's a golden head
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protruding and when my daughter you know opened her eyes and was out and in our arms i realized that
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whatever i thought i knew about race she was she was shaking it to the core she kind of thrust what i
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call the fiction of race into my consciousness for the first time her physical presence in my life
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made me question these categories in a way that my own kind of contradictory childhood upbringing
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never forced you know me to think through the same way yeah yeah well the the variable of nationality is
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incredibly important here the difference between how this all looks in america as an american and how
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it looks in europe given the different histories it's huge and so it's almost like when you're
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insisting to your wife that your unborn kids will be black and the revealed inaccuracy if not absurdity
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of that when they come out looking swedish really swedish yeah yeah black and african-american are used
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as synonyms in in america right it doesn't it's ridiculous to use african-american outside of america
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right but it's almost like you were you were insisting you know our kids are going to be african-american
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the american view of the durability of race that's right which doesn't have the same logic in europe
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and there's also this level of confusion that exists in america which is i what i was doing
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actually without realizing it was i was conflating something biological with something ethnic with
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something cultural with something based on a you know a tradition and a loyalty to to a historical
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oppression all of these things were combined in my mind with a very abstract
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color category that actually doesn't apply to most so-called african-americans actual skin tone
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yeah so but the skin tone issue is is the the variable here because had your your daughter come
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out looking black you would never have discovered the conversation that you're having on the other side
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of this experience right you just was okay well my kids are black just like i thought they would be
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i wonder even if she didn't have blue eyes and really blonde hair if i would have been you know i
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wonder it doesn't make me question the the fundamental discovery or the or the truth as i see it now but it
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makes me wonder if i would have just i hope that you don't have to actually see racial categories fall
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apart in your own intimate life for these kind of insights to really feel compelling i would i would
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like to think that i could have arrived at the conclusion but i'm just not sure that i was the
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person that would get there without being prompted this way well my own experience of the the power of
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america and american history is it's been brought home to me in in many contexts but the place where i
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i first discovered it and where it's still most vivid to me is when i when i'm with my friend ayan
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hersey ali do you know ayan i've never met her right so ayan is somali for for those who don't know
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her and you know she looks somali so she's you know to look at her she's more or less as black as
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anyone but she's somali she's not african-american she's you know she lived in europe she's incredibly
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cosmopolitan speaks half a dozen languages and she's never had the african-american experience
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she lives in america now so maybe she's belatedly getting a taste of it but the reality is is that
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she doesn't think of herself as black the way most african-americans think of themselves as black
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and she manages to communicate that lack of identity just you know it's coming out of her pores
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right so when you're you're when you're with her there's something that's not happening for her
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that is communicated right it's like she just does not see the world in those terms and the conversation
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doesn't even have to be about race it may never touch race but i realized to my surprise that it
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basically never occurs to me that she's black apart from the fact that it's useful to talk about
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her experience in conversations like this right it's like i mean i know that a racist would view
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her as black you know white supremacists would view her as black and and many anti-racists would
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view her as black too they would say that she she yeah whether she likes it or not whether she has
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different experiences or not in america she is confronted with white supremacy in the same way
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that other black bodies are that's that's kind of what can unite racist and anti-racist actually is
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this kind of yeah essentialist exactly i mean and that's and that's something that i've complained
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about a lot on this podcast and i'm sure i'll complain about it here is that the only people who
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are fixated on the on the significance of race and its and its permanence as white supremacists are
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are the are the you know the irretrievably woke on the left who insists that this is a concept we're
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never going to get beyond right but in the presence of someone like ayan you feel yourself to be beyond
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it you feel yourself to be living in a post-racial world because of how she's living and and it's just
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it's so clear that it's clear to me and it seems to be clear to you from what i've read that the goal
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has to be to get to a post-racial society yeah yeah as long as you racism really creates race
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racism is a way of seeing it's it's a perceptive error as the philosopher adrian piper points out
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and i'm really fond of quoting her on that because the imposition of this perceptive error doesn't allow
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me to interact with you or engage with you as an individual there is all kinds of history and
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stereotypes and myths that kind of come between me and you so as long as we code people into into
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racial categories that's going to necessarily imply all types of value judgments and hierarchical
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implications so we have to find a way to get beyond this i'm not so naive as to think that
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you know my book is going to you just buy my book and and and suddenly we solve the problem of race and
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we get to a post-racial world i don't even know that i um i think that word that term has been
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irredeemably corrupted post-racial now people can't say that in an unironic way on the left i mean it's
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it it's just obviously ridiculous on the left and it's been spat out so many times that you actually
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can't reclaim that that is it is a useful phrase probably not but you know i want to stay with the
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idea of someone like ian hercelli a little bit because this is actually something that i think makes
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a lot of sense are you are you familiar with like ados american descendants of slavery this this kind of
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hashtag movement that's become popularized on twitter no what's the kind of grassroots movement
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descendants of american slaves who advocate for understanding american descendants of slavery as
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as a distinct ethnic group and that monolithic blackness actually doesn't make sense because a
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woman like ian hercelli or nigerian immigrants that come into america to conceive of them as having the
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same experience and facing the same hurdles is demonstrably false and also these groups don't
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nigerian immigrants for example are that's one of the most successful ethnic groups in america but when
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it all gets talked about as blackness as though it's interchangeable i think uh i mean the the disadvantage
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of race in american society is specific it's not to say that it doesn't exist anywhere else and that
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there are variants of this in in completely different cultures but it's specific to the american experience
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and and slavery is the the founding sin which is we're still paying for in a wide variety of ways
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politically and and economically so and this is something you you do touch in your book that
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that the problem of race and and social disparities there is is is mingled with the problem of class
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and teasing those apart is difficult absolutely i mean that's why how can a program at harvard or
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someplace that's supposed to you know how can an affirmative action slot for someone who's undergone
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slavery in america how can that how can a nigerian immigrant be swapped into that because they don't
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there's nothing genetic about whatever that program is supposed to repair there's something that happened
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to a specific group of people in a specific places at a specific time so for me the one of the main
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problems of moving through the world with racial language and categorizing people into abstract color
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categories is that it it just obfuscates all of these complex things that make us who we are and that
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impact our lives yeah yeah yeah you you make one move in the book and it's it's not clear how fully
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you make it to me so i want to talk about this but you you seek to undermine the concept of race
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rather completely as as a fiction i mean at one point you just call it a fiction and and you say that
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it's a social construct it's not a biological one and you know that's in some ways that's true in some
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ways it's not true though and and it's and i feel like you're you're making a potentially dangerous
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move in in disavowing any relevant biology here because it's not an accident that you can know
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something about a person's ancestry based on just looking at them right i mean i can i can look at
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someone whose ancestors spent the last thousand years in china and say that person looks chinese
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to me and i'd never be tempted to say that he looks like he came from norway and so that's obviously
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that's just the surface level then there's you talk about susceptibility to various diseases and
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any other trait that would have a genetic explanation in in whole or in part so there is a
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biological story here around race it's just it doesn't align with the social construct in every
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case and in in certain cases it completely breaks apart so that you know for instance the place where
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there's the most genetic diversity at this moment on earth is on the continent of africa right so if
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you're if you're going to take the the white racist view of africa we'll just you know everybody's
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black obviously but that doesn't track the actual historical isolation of various populations and the
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genetic diversity that's there and but the the reality is is that genetic diversity does produce
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consequences that people can find interesting whether it's in susceptibility to disease or various
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traits and i think the the place we need to get to in transcending race is not to deny that these
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biological facts exist and may yet surprise us is to deny that they have any political significance
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for us i mean we just don't we shouldn't care about any of these things rather than commit ourselves
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in advance to remaining unaware of them or denying that they exist well there's a few things that i
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would say to that the first is that first of all like with things like diseases like sickle cell is
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often brought up as like a black disease but in fact it seems that that's a disease that groups that
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are the populations that are exposed to malaria develop and you can find many greeks who develop
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sickle cell traits and the idea that it is inherently black disease doesn't really hold up to scrutiny
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but i do in the book quote david reich the harvard geneticist whose op-ed um really impacted my thinking
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his op-ed in the new york times a few years ago where he basically just cautioned us all to have a lot of
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humility because the only thing that's probably guaranteed with the increasing knowledge that we're
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getting in the field of genetics is is that we're going to find out a lot of things that surprise us
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and a lot of what we think we know now as a fact can be overturned so i take that seriously but what
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we talk about when we talk about population groups is not exactly the same thing as what we talk about
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when we talk about black and white yeah i don't understand and i've never seen somebody or heard
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somebody encountered somebody explain to me where a white person stops and a black person starts and i think
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these things get very tangled up in a place like america because the average african american the
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average black american however you define that group has something like 20 to 25 percent uh western
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european usually anglo-saxon genetic makeup and there are millions and millions of white americans walking
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around who have no idea and until recently wouldn't be able to know that they have sometimes significant
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african west african dna and then because that's the whole history of rape and passing and lots of
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different things that have happened in this society in another time you know people colored like my
00:25:01.180
children they might choose to hide the fact that they have a black grandfather and just move into
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white society that happened many times we are a mongrel nation we're a mongrel society what leon
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weaseltier said that really means a lot to me is that you know the achievement of america wasn't to
00:25:17.720
create a multicultural society it was to create the multicultural individual i take that seriously i
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i struggle to understand how we can ever find a definition of racial groups and divisions that
00:25:29.940
is coherent enough to make sense because i was really thinking about all these things in the
00:25:35.280
conversation that you had with charles murray and i find that it's really important to when we think
00:25:41.300
about these things does this population group have on average a different iq than this population group
00:25:47.540
on average first of all what are the bounds of the population group and second of all i understand
00:25:52.280
your point which is how does that affect the individual we live our lives as individuals i don't
00:25:57.280
understand what it means to be dumped into or not dumped but lumped into some enormous group like
00:26:04.760
monolithic whiteness what links a white anglo-saxon protestant with a sicilian or a spaniard or for that
00:26:13.040
matter with somebody who comes from the caucasus mountain regions what what does it mean to say
00:26:17.020
that these are all whites yeah it defies i don't understand what how do we define these groups how do
00:26:23.380
we then compare these groups and also how do we take these measures like intelligence and we've never
00:26:29.100
even lived in a world where we really have seen what parity looks like so i these things kind of to
00:26:35.520
your point what's the purpose yes but also even if there were a purpose show me first how we can
00:26:41.000
measure these things right well so there's a lot in that i agree with i think the the definitions
00:26:47.860
of these things are the concepts like race where's the bright line between a white person and a black
00:26:53.600
person in america there may not be one right i mean in my view booker has over 50 percent european
00:26:59.720
ancestry right okay you know what i mean so and then and then there's just you know in the case of
00:27:05.080
someone like yourself or someone like uh booker or 60 percent uh so-called western northern european
00:27:12.080
ancestry right and so barack obama there seems to be it's an interesting social choice to decide to
00:27:19.440
call yourself black or decide to call yourself white or or mixed race and it seems to me to be a deeply
00:27:26.580
uninteresting and and probably politically toxic project to try to give a genetic answer to the
00:27:35.980
question of of self-identity in those cases but it's also very arbitrary where we decide where do groups
00:27:43.520
start and stop i mean cheddar man 10 000 years ago and living in what's now the united kingdom had blue
00:27:50.560
eyes and and and black skin i mean these groups are fungible people are fungible we will continue to
00:27:56.660
change and mix so the idea that we can just like take a freeze frame of how people look today in groups
00:28:03.600
that we've been calling white black asian which is a very vague term you know that the people will
00:28:10.260
always be like this i mean we've only been saying people have been like this for four or five hundred
00:28:15.320
years i i mean i have actually i've eaten at restaurants i've drunk at taverns in europe that
00:28:21.280
are continuously operating i've slept in a hotel in weimar that's much older than the concept of
00:28:26.380
of race and the way that we think of it today you know yeah no i totally agree but it's one thing to
00:28:33.840
acknowledge all of those facts it's another to doubt whether there are differences between groups
00:28:43.160
however we define them and that those differences can be in the wrong hands can be made to seem to
00:28:50.500
matter and and sure so the only response to that that i hear many people advocating for is to deny
00:28:57.520
that such difference that is coherent to allege that such differences exist or that they could
00:29:02.540
conceivably matter and i just think that that's a that's a fear-based counsel of of ignorance of
00:29:09.800
certain facts i mean just to take it to take it in a politically uncharged case before this
00:29:16.200
conversation i've been reading your book i you know you're encountering that these the issue of
00:29:20.700
you just you know what your ancestral background is and you talk about your you know having looked at
00:29:24.920
the various websites 23andme and ancestry.com and i realized i had a an account at 23andme and so
00:29:30.480
you know literally like an hour ago i i checked my ancestry and there's a few things to observe about
00:29:37.140
this first i'm i'm 51 ashkenazi and 32 british irish i think six percent french and then there
00:29:47.100
was some other like nine percent you know northern european so it was i knew the gist of this but i
00:29:53.200
mean one thing that's interesting is that you know i've had these data for what at least a decade i mean
00:29:59.240
i think i i subscribed to 23andme the moment it was born right so it was that could be 15 years i don't
00:30:05.080
remember i find these facts about myself so utterly uninteresting that i i have never you know i'm sure
00:30:14.400
i checked 10 years ago and i knew i mean i knew i was you know half ashkenazi and and you know the
00:30:19.520
rest you know european in some sense but these are facts about me that have no relevance at all and i you
00:30:26.080
know i have an aunt who is obsessed with ancestry and she's constantly trying to get me to take an
00:30:33.220
interest in this and i just have i've never had even if i could meet these people in person i wouldn't
00:30:39.320
be interested right like the truth is i don't even much want to talk to this particular aunt right so
00:30:44.520
it's like on some level this is all an expression of my quote white privilege right like i haven't had
00:30:51.780
to take an interest in any of this i mean this is like i'm just imagining a criticism that someone
00:30:56.580
could allege this is not how i see myself there's nothing about my pedigree that is part of my identity
00:31:04.400
and so from this point of view of just being totally uninterested in my race i see certain potential facts
00:31:14.140
as both true undoubtedly true and there to be found and totally unthreatening so for instance you know
00:31:22.800
apparently i've got 32 british and irish dna i am sure that if you tested every person on earth you
00:31:31.260
got the the total population of people who have more than 30 british and irish dna you could find
00:31:38.900
a dozen invidious comparisons to make between them and people with a different genotype right so
00:31:46.680
if we finally you know find the gene for being a jerk you know we're going to have more of it than
00:31:53.460
the swedes say or the the nigerians or i mean there's going to be a difference that can be spun as
00:32:00.740
as ugly and it has absolutely no relevance to me as an individual and it need have no relevance to our
00:32:08.980
politics and yet but it would seem frankly crazy for me to say there is no there there biologically
00:32:15.960
there's no possible line of inquiry that could turn up something that is true there because you know
00:32:22.640
we're all homo sapiens and there's just there are no important differences among us that's something
00:32:28.260
that i'm not afraid of if you were to find the the the smoking gun tomorrow that proves that um
00:32:35.760
east asians are slightly smarter than than anglo-saxons and that uh you know that the comparison works
00:32:42.400
against other groups favor when compared to anglo-saxons i would i would if you if you show
00:32:47.820
me how that's provable i'll accept that and i also understand that that has nothing to do with
00:32:53.300
how i move through the world i'm an individual and sharing genetic ancestry with lebron james
00:33:00.620
has done nothing for my basketball game unfortunately i wish it did you know i've never understood
00:33:06.580
i've never really understood having enormous pride with with your ethnic or um or so-called racial group
00:33:14.820
or even with your you know your nation in certain ways and i've never understood having shame for these
00:33:19.100
for these histories and um and deeds that have been done to and by people you're supposedly related
00:33:27.200
to i mean human life is unequal there's enormous inequality within a four-person household it isn't
00:33:34.400
hard for me to believe at all that there's enormous inequality writ large the idea that everybody is
00:33:39.720
exactly the same would frankly be unappealing to me there's a genetic component to this inequality
00:33:45.400
but there's also just a circumstantial component to this inequality i mean the fact that you know if
00:33:50.780
you have a a best friend who got into a car accident you know in childhood and and has some
00:33:57.080
deficit as a result you're now among the privileged of people who were spared car accidents at crucial
00:34:03.580
moments right and sure you know there's no fine-grained equality of circumstance ever right and so what
00:34:11.840
we we've seized upon certain course variables as the crucial ones and i mean the goal has got to be
00:34:20.840
to correct for disparities in luck i mean you know privileged by another name as much as we can
00:34:28.580
economically and educationally and you know just as a matter of opportunity and so and that political
00:34:34.500
commitment is the only the only assertion of equality that i think we need to conserve all of our
00:34:42.600
our ethics here i tend to agree with you but i do think that there's something particularly insidious
00:34:50.080
with insisting and i'm not saying that you do but in the discourse as it proceeds from both the racist
00:34:56.840
and the anti-racist kind of advocate there's something that is there's harm done to society when we insist
00:35:03.220
that these color categories are real are meaningful and that you can fit people into these boxes i think
00:35:08.720
that the term for me is what glenn lowry called transcendent humanism i mean life is lived on the
00:35:13.840
individual level we have to have values and ways of belonging to each other that unite us not blood and skin
00:35:19.260
and these kinds of ideas that have caused such human suffering over the past half millennium you know
00:35:25.580
i i really think that um you can't redeem the language i think we need a new language you can't
00:35:31.460
these these terms black white not only are they so vague and they fail to capture life as it's lived on
00:35:38.040
the individual level but they actually we don't describe our reality our language produces our reality too
00:35:43.520
so these terms produce the racism that's inherent in them that comes from this kind of collision of
00:35:48.180
africa and europe through the slave trade and i think that you know i think that it's really
00:35:53.200
important that the language be much more precise than the ways that we speak about race allowed for
00:35:58.720
yeah well i i 100 agree with you there so my conception of a a post-racial future is one in which
00:36:07.220
this notion of being black or white is so uninteresting that you would it would never occur to you to
00:36:14.760
to mention this about another person or yourself because there's there's virtually no circumstance
00:36:21.080
in which it's relevant i think that has to be the goal that has to be the end point that we want to get
00:36:25.960
to and i've been pretty surprised and dismayed that that is not an end point that is shared with many
00:36:32.000
increasingly prominent voices on the left so i made that same point last fall at bard during a conference
00:36:41.180
where ibram x kendi was speaking you know he made i forget exactly what he said but he he alluded to
00:36:48.620
this idea of a kind of post-racial future where you know you're how you look tells me as little as
00:36:55.680
possible about who you are he said that that was the actually the white supremacist the racist fantasy
00:37:00.380
that race go away and that all inequalities become camouflaged and baked into the system and i said you
00:37:06.680
know respectfully i think that's not at all the white supremacist fantasy the white the real racist
00:37:12.180
fantasy is everybody is in a separate box and and kept far away from each other you know in my reporting
00:37:19.160
with the french far right with these thinkers that had influenced richard spencer and some of these
00:37:25.200
alt-right guys alan de benoit and people like this i wrote a long piece on this kind of thinking in in
00:37:31.140
france for the new yorker a couple years ago these guys tell you straight up that they certainly don't want
00:37:35.800
a post-racial future they they want energized senses of of racial identity they want people to be
00:37:42.920
hyper aware of their whiteness and they want those white people to be segregated and kept away from
00:37:47.760
mixing there's a depressing element when you realize that that you're you're fighting kind of on two sides
00:37:54.500
you're fighting you're fighting on on the left and the right to kind of carve out a space to just
00:37:59.380
have an individual existence that's not defined by a racial essentialism yeah well you you mentioned
00:38:06.760
kendi but you also you write about tanhasi coats in the book and i mean this is something that i've
00:38:12.880
struggled with because on one level it's very tempting to try to have a conversation with coats
00:38:19.380
he's he's held up as a as a secular saint on the left and his his wisdom and prescriptiveness around
00:38:27.220
race as an issue is just assumed to be more or less perfect from the the crowd who reads the kinds
00:38:36.060
of journalism i read you know the atlantic readers and the people who would go to the aspen ideas
00:38:40.640
festival or to ted the man can do no wrong and yet to my eye he is a kind of pornographer of race
00:38:51.140
right he's a he's a good writer but he's somebody who is trafficking if you'd like to continue
00:39:01.620
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