#217 — The New Religion of Anti-Racism
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 11 minutes
Words per Minute
176.19614
Summary
John McWhorter is a linguist, writer, and host of the podcast Lexicon Valley. He's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a regular contributor to the New York Times. In this episode, he joins me to talk about his new religion of anti-racism in America, identity politics, and why he doesn't want to be a writer anymore. He also talks about why he decided to go back to writing, and what it means to be an essayist, even if it's not what you thought it was going to be. And he explains why he thinks it's a good thing that he's not a writer any more, even though he's been writing for a long time. And, as always, thank you to Glenn Lowry for the live zoom call experiment, and for being a great guest on the podcast. If you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at Samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. No questions asked! You'll need to subscribe to The Making Sense Podcast to get access to full episodes of the show, and access to the full archive of all the episodes available on Sam Harris' website, wherever you get your news and notes, to keep up to date with the latest episodes of Making Sense, and to receive the latest updates on what's going on in the Making Sense. You can't ask for it, can't you? . Sam Harris: This episode was produced and edited by Sam Harris, and this episode was originally published in The New York Magazine, and it was produced with the help of his good friend and good friend, Glenn Lowry, who was kind enough to send us a copy of the final draft of this episode of the episode for us to make sure it's as good as possible, so we can be sure you'll get the full audio quality and it's worth the full version of the whole thing. Thanks again, thanks again for listening to the audio quality, and you'll be the first to hear it on the final product, we'll be getting it out in time for the podcast next week. , and we'll make sure you're getting it on all of that, right here on the next episode. -- Sam Harris -- Thank you, Mr. John Mcwhorter -- -- and we're looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Transcript
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If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.
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There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
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And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast.
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So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at samharris.org to request a free
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Last week we ran an experiment with a live Zoom call.
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I was too busy Zooming, but I'm told it ran off the rails in some ways, but to the amusement
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And my surprise guest for that conversation was Glenn Lowry, who always makes sense.
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Anyway, that was fun, and I think we'll continue doing that periodically.
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And these conversations will not be released on any other platform.
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Part of the point for me is to have them be totally informal and ephemeral.
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So, this is one of those situations where you're either there at the time or not.
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But that seems like the best use of the format.
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John is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
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He's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and he hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley.
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Anyway, as you'll hear, I'm quite excited to get John finally on my podcast, and he did
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The man is a fount of good sense on the topic at hand, which is what he calls the new religion
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We talk about how conceptions of racism have changed over the years, and now the ubiquitous
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We talk about the internal contradictions within identity politics.
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We talk about the strange willingness among progressives to lose the 2020 election.
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We discuss racism as the all-purpose explanation for racial inequality in America.
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As you know, and I think other people know as well, there's been a standing invitation to
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I have long celebrated your contributions to our public conversation.
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What finally changed your attitude toward doing this?
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Well, you know, it's really, it's pretty mundane, I think, to an extent that would surprise some
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What I most enjoy doing is sitting in a chair and either reading a book or writing.
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And there's a part of me that always thinks that what I'm supposed to be is a writer.
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And I've been doing this for about 20 years now, this race commentary.
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And I've slowly seen that it's gotten to the point that you have to deal with the spoken
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word, that to really be part of the conversation, you can't just write anymore.
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And I'm always a little bit behind when it comes to technological things in general, and
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also the fact that I really do, I am so happy to be here right now.
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But for me, writing is more fun than talking because you have more control over it.
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So for a very long time, I've thought of podcasts, even though I do one of my own, as kind of the
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I figure my writing will stand in for me better than anything that I could say off the cuff.
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But I've come to realize that podcasts now occupy the place that writing did a long time
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And if I'm not going to do podcasts other than my own, then I might as well not be trying
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So I'm trying to change my ways, and especially in the case of people like you who do this so
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There's a part of me that really just wants to be sitting in a chair with my nose in a book.
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Yeah, yeah, well, I can certainly echo that in my case.
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I think I'm just a little bit ahead of you in having this epiphany.
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I mean, if the goal is to actually reach people and alter the currency of good and bad ideas,
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diminishing the latter, you just have to go where the minds are.
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And it's just, you know, we just reached so many more people this way.
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And one of the background facts to this conversation is you are, as a writer, working on a book that
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I don't know of another example in my lifetime of knowing someone is busily scribbling and
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knowing the truly oppressive need to take delivery of this manuscript out in the world.
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It was just to give, not to give more away than you want to in this conversation, but
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you're working on a book that is, I'm hoping, and you've telegraphed a little bit on this
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point, will be the argument we're waiting for against what you've called the new religion
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And how's it going and how's it feeling to be writing, you know, as the flames of moral
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confusion crest the hills and begin descending upon our sleepy little hamlet?
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I don't think I've ever been asked how a book I was writing was going.
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But the truth of the matter is that I feel no pressure.
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If anything, it's coming out as if it was driven by some kind of water pressure, like
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I am on fire with this one, and I can barely keep ahead of the news in terms of what I'm
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writing about and why it upsets me and why I think people need to hear what I have to
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I know there are going to be people who hate me for this, but I have got to write this
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And so, yeah, chapter five fell out of me last week, and that's the fifth of six chapters,
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And really, this book is just going to get across that this critical race theory-infused
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way of looking at things, where people who are like Mitt Romney are on top, and everybody
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else is laboring on the bottom like slave oarsmen in some ship a very long time ago, and that
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our notion of identity has to be about defining ourselves against the white hegemon and the
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idea that we're supposed to go back to thinking of ourselves as stamped by what our racial membership
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is in exactly the way that old-time Southerners wished that Black people would.
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The whole dialogue is something that enlightened people are going to have to learn how to stand
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down if we're not going to go over a certain precipice.
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And I try to get across in the book, and this is something that I hope people won't miss,
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that there's no point in viewing the people who I'm calling the elect.
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For me, it's the elect, because they do think of themselves as elect in that way.
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It doesn't make any sense to see them as monsters, to say that they're coming for your kids,
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which they are, but to say that they're coming for your kids is not to imply that they're
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trying to do some kind of harm, that they have frowns on their faces.
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They really do think of themselves as ahead of the curve.
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They think of themselves as bringing a kind of good news, and that's with a capital G and a
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We have to realize that there's no point in trying to have conversations with people of
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those politics, of that philosophy, along the lines of saying that they need to understand
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There's no point in saying to them, why can't you be open to other opinions?
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That makes as much sense as trying to teach a fundamentalist Christian that they shouldn't
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There is no point in engaging with people of these kinds of politics.
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What we have to do is work around them so that we can go on forging progressivism of the
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kind that we thought could bear fruit and what that means.
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And this is the final chapter, and it's going to actually be the toughest one, because I
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want it to be constructive rather than destructive, is that we've got to learn how to stand up
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And it can't only be the occasional weird person like you or me who doesn't mind an argument
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and for some reason doesn't mind when people yell at them.
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Everybody's going to have to learn that you stand up to this sort of person, you tell them
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that you are not going to agree with them, and that includes that you do not think of yourself
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And then this is something that is going to be a major adjustment.
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And goodness, we've had to make a lot of adjustments this year.
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But I think it's important that people learn how to make an adjustment, which is that they're
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going to get called a white supremacist, for example.
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You're going to get called a dirty name by a person who's usually educated and or very
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articulate, and they're going to call it to you loudly.
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They're going to say it again, and they're going to spread it on Twitter.
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We have to realize that that can happen without the sky falling in.
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And I'm gathering examples of people who actually have the nerve to stand up to it, who keep
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their jobs, who watch progressivism continuing to happen.
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Because if we don't do this, we're going to see our institutions taken over by this perversion
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of what progressivism is, by people who genuinely think of themselves as doing good.
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But we can't be scared of being called a racist to such an extent that we let all of this utterly
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misguided, under-thought-out, manipulative nonsense shape what we thought of as intellection,
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Yeah, well, I should remind people of your background as a linguist, because it's relevant
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here, because this trend we are opposing, in so many cases, seems to have language on
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And I can only imagine that you as a linguist must be amazed at some of the clever, if not
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albeit cynical, moves made with language here, and the kinds of people who get taken in by
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So there's a few examples I have in my head here.
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One recently on Twitter, you may have noticed that Joyce Carol Oates, the quite famous, accomplished,
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well-regarded fiction writer, lacking any irony or self-awareness, wrote on Twitter the other
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So there could be nothing wrong with this group, simply because of how they had branded themselves.
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And I think there, you and Steve Pinker should probably show up at her house for an intervention.
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But even more widespread is the effectiveness of the branding of Black Lives Matter, right?
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As though, I mean, it has this exact same pretense of being morally unassailable.
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To say any word of criticism about Black Lives Matter as an organization or as a movement or,
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you know, with respect to its tactics or, you know, extreme positions held by some of
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its loosely affiliated members, to utter anything other than mere assent to the branding is to
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be on the back foot trying to argue that you're not racist.
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So I mean, just what has been your linguistic ride through this morass in the last few months?
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Well, you know, I wish that I could talk about dynamic and frightening synergy between the
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use of language and the ideology here in question.
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But to tell you the truth, I think that a lot of it really is just a matter of what people's
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Now, to an extent, people are seduced into thinking these are valid notions because of,
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You know, intersectionality is a pretty cool word.
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If you don't want to, say, tear things down, or if you want to feel like you're doing something
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constructive by teaching people to walk around feeling guilty about their privilege, then saying
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I think it's satisfying because dismantle and structure are biggish words, and they've
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And that kind of holds a lot of people off because you are, and this is the main thing,
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Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 80s, we have this massive psychosocial revolution
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in this country, unprecedented in the history of the human species.
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And that is that the typical person comes to think of it as a horrible thing to be called
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a racist, practically like being called a pedophile.
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It doesn't mean that their minds are completely swept of all possible racist feeling.
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And it's at the point where people even under 50 are beginning to forget how new that was.
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But once you've got everybody in that place, now here comes something a few beats later
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where what it threatens you with is you being tarred as a racist in public.
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That wouldn't have been processed as such a threat in even 1980.
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A lot of people would have just said, basically, if you think I'm a racist, fuck you.
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And we think of that person when we look back and we think of them as callous and they would
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But now, ordinary people, the ordinary good person is so scared that they will do things
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And so one of them is that you don't say anything about what can be put under that umbrella of
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And it's not necessarily that people don't, in some part of their mind, understand that
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They would rather avoid being called a name than make sociopolitical sense.
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And part of why it gets up my nose, as Mrs. Slocum used to say in Are You Being Served,
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the British sitcom, part of what gets up my nose is that it's condescending.
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What any white person who is paying court to this sort of thing is doing is saying Black
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So I will say anything that I need to say to keep these people from embarrassing me
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And if it doesn't make any sense, well, Black people kind of don't, do they?
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I'll bet some people in their bedrooms are saying that when Black people can't hear.
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And yet we're not supposed to talk about that either.
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But I don't think, and Sam, we may differ on this, we may not.
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I think very few of these people are thinking to themselves, we are going to take power and
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we're going to do it by manipulating language and by playing with people's minds.
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I think these people are quite sincere, and that's what makes it harder.
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It's almost harder to have to hurt somebody's feelings when they genuinely think that they're
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But unfortunately, the people in this case who think they're giving us a present are, you
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I think more of them are, if they're white, they're hell-bent on feeling good about themselves
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as not racist, and they'll let that trump sense.
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If you're a Black person who subscribes to this sort of thing, you have been tricked by
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this sort of person and a lot that was going on before into thinking that what makes you
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significant and what makes you special is your victim status rather than you as yourself.
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That's understandable, given Black people's history, that you might need to reach a little
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further than some people to find a sense of well-being and significance and security.
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But that means, in this case, that a lot of people think that the most interesting thing
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about themselves is what they suffer in terms of what people who aren't them are or maybe
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So all of this is just a complete mess, but no one is malevolent in these cases.
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We're dealing with people who are tragically misled.
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I think on the cynicism point, maybe I'm putting the line between good and bad faith
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I guess, so let's just, I want to plunge into a conversation about racism here and, you know,
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what it means as a term, what it should mean, and just how the mission creep of the concept
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To step back for a second, the reason why I want to talk about this is I'm really worried
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about this trend we're speaking about, about the capture of our institutions and our language
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I mean, I've referred to it as the cult of wokeness.
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You're talking about the new religion of anti-racism.
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There's a kind of moral extortion going on and, you know, it's a Stockholm syndrome.
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And I mean, all of these, you know, analogies seem apt.
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One, I'm worried, you know, in the near term that it will be the thing that gets Trump reelected.
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And I, you know, I put myself in second position to, I think, no one in my desire to see Trump's
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But I really do think that, you know, this will be why we get four more years of the Orange
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But beyond that, a much longer term concern is that I think it is doing and will do damage
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And it'll do precisely the damage that I think it's pretending to expose in many cases.
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And the analogy that came to mind recently, I was on someone else's podcast and I just
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I mean, what I feel like is happening over the course of many months is analogous to what
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happened, you know, on a single ghastly afternoon when the OJ verdict was delivered, right?
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When you saw, you know, those of us who are, you know, old enough remember this, as I assume
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We saw on, you know, split screen on, you know, every television in the country, we saw
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this, these opposing reactions to a single, you know, moment and to see, and so when white
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America, you know, I mean, obviously there were exceptions in both camps, no doubt, but
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the general experience was of white America seeing black America erupt in jubilation over
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And this is where, this is why I use the term cynical here, because it's not that you can't
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explain that reaction in terms of, you know, all the terrible inequality and grievance that
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I mean, we have the history of white and black America to explain that moment.
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But within the frame of that trial and that verdict and that moment, there was something
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cynical about it because I think it was widely understood, if not universally understood,
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And everyone knew it and everyone knew that everyone else knew it.
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And so there was no sense that all of these black faces that were, you know, tearful in joy
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over the outcome here thought that this man hadn't nearly decapitated his wife and a stranger,
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They were playing a very different game that had nothing to do with truth or justice in
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this case or putting an actual murderer behind bars or setting an innocent man free.
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And so that's where the, maybe cynicism isn't the right rubric here, but it's a lack of purchase
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And it's, you know, again, the analogy has to change a little bit to cover the phenomenon
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we're talking about now, but it's the dishonesty and bad faith, the notion that you need to
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break a lot of eggs to make this equity omelet.
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And so, yeah, there's a lot of people who we know really aren't racist who are going
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to go down for this because, you know, it's just, this is what, this is the way we have
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And so, anyway, I put that to you as an analogy, but I mean, that, that's the, I feel like that,
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the spirit of that dissociation from honest conversation about facts.
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I mean, so I guess the, the, the frame here would be there's something like a default position
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now in polite society, you know, at the New York times at, you know, in, in universities,
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in corporations that every disparity, every significant disparity we're seeing between white and black
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America, whether it's violent crime or educational outcomes or employment, you know, how many
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The only way to explain those disparities is either white racism or institutional racism or systemic racism
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And to think about anything else is to essentially volunteer to be cast as yet another racist who doesn't
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get it, or, you know, you had another, you know, troglodyte, another Archie Bunker character who
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And there's a commensurate just attempt to deprogram our whole society along those lines.
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And then, you know, we have the, this cast of characters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo
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spreading really the, the, the doctrine of a new religion to, you know, to people who are avid to pay for it.
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That's where I'm placing the cynicism in this movement.
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And you touch on, you touch on very important points.
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One of them is something that you see that can be really confounding, which is that the central
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members of this elect group are willing to hold onto this ideology, even if it means losing
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And that's one of many things that shows that this isn't about politics.
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We are like Romans watching the birth of Christianity.
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I genuinely think, hmm, within my lifetime, I have watched a really influential new religion
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And that's why, so, for example, Mark Lilla's book from a few years ago, where he said that we
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need to tamp down identity politics with the purpose of getting this moron out of office,
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that a certain kind of person basically circled the wagons and called him all kinds of names,
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including white supremacists, because he wasn't with the gospel.
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And it's the same way now, where what is most important is to talk about institutional racism
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and call the requisite people white supremacists, and to really, really annoy as many people as
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possible, regardless of whether it could mean that we have another four years of that narcissistic,
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insouciant simpleton as the person running this country.
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They really have a different sense of ranking than anybody would, except if it was a religion.
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And what you're talking about otherwise comes down to what really is the keystone problem of the
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whole way that we're being urged to see the race problem.
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And that is this idea that any problem that black people have, any kind of lag, is due to racism.
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And it's partly, you talk about language, partly because of the way the use of the term racism
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I don't think anybody was pulling the term along in order to throw up some kind of smokescreen.
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But racism starts as Archie Bunker and his personal bigotry.
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And then starting in the 1960s, it comes to refer not to active racism, but to results of racist
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behavior or even just racism, meaning that black people are behind in some way, such that you can
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say that the society is racist in that disparity by analogy with what racism originally was.
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But our new idea is indeed what you're mentioning that, say, Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo say,
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which is that if black people lag behind, then it's racist.
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And with Kendi in particular, you can feel him holding back the indignation because he
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really feels that if this isn't perfectly obvious, then I don't know what isn't.
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And the fact that I have to write a book saying this or two books saying this is an indication
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Although, of course, now we're getting into this extremely protean sense of what racism
00:26:41.980
But the problem with all of this is that the racism in cases like this, whatever we want
00:26:48.680
the term to mean, gets to be so abstract, so difficult to perceive that if it is racism,
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we're talking about such a Rube Goldberg game of mousetrap, that there's no way that you
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could meaningfully convince any dominant segment of any public of normal people that this made
00:27:08.120
And so, for example, you know, every summer, the number of teenage and 20-something black
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boys in distressed communities who are killing each other goes way up.
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And we haven't wanted to talk about it, but that's been including in the wake of the murder
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We've been talking about George Floyd and lately various other men who have suffered really
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And in the meantime, black men have been killing each other with abandon in city after city across
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It has nothing to do with any kind of inherent depravity of the boys and men in question.
00:27:50.400
And if you're going to call it being about racism, if you're going to talk about not having
00:27:54.280
fathers, if you're going to talk about the fact that the war on drugs was created partly
00:27:59.560
with black criminals in mind 50 years ago, all of that is so indirect at this point that
00:28:07.300
to just hold your hands out and say that the reason they're doing that is racism in the
00:28:11.740
way that, for example, a Kendi would, it's just a vast oversimplification.
00:28:16.480
Once again, white people are being told that it's okay to pretend that when race issues come
00:28:21.480
up, you let your IQ go down about 50 points because apparently black people's IQs are just
00:28:29.220
I can understand a lot of people's good intentions here.
00:28:33.060
To be honest, I don't think that Kendi or D'Angelo quite understand the matter beyond
00:28:39.080
I think, to put it most politely, I think neither one of them quite understand that these issues
00:28:44.200
would be worth a kind of sustained sort of engagement.
00:28:48.440
They don't realize how complex these things are, partly because although they wouldn't
00:28:52.220
use the word, they're under the influence of a religion.
00:28:55.460
How complicated is the Bible supposed to be beyond the world of theologians?
00:28:59.120
But they're not thinking about it all that hard.
00:29:01.040
But this is the proposition that will never work.
00:29:04.320
Irish people, Jewish people, there are certain people listening to me now who are just sitting
00:29:08.080
at the edge of their seats waiting to say, but they were white.
00:29:14.700
There were Irish people, there were Jewish people, there were Italian people, and they
00:29:20.840
And well, they became white and they did it without there being any grand psychosocial revolution
00:29:28.500
Now, the idea has always been, well, it wasn't fair to expect black people to do that.
00:29:34.760
And that's why we had a civil rights revolution that gave us a real boost.
00:29:39.300
And nobody can deny that we did get a real boost in the 60s and early 70s.
00:29:44.100
There are all sorts of things in place that allow that.
00:29:48.260
There's a further psychosocial revolution in terms of how the country thinks about racism.
00:29:53.660
But the idea is somehow that it's only going to go that far because since we're brown, the
00:30:02.820
And therefore, this is what white people who are on the fence, and I think white people
00:30:07.740
even who wouldn't call themselves on the fence, but deep down when they're having a drink,
00:30:12.440
think about, is that black people are always waiting for the rules to be different for us.
00:30:16.640
There's this idea that everybody else just had to claw their way, and that with black
00:30:21.080
people, even though there was a civil rights revolution, still not enough.
00:30:26.740
Now we have people with lots of letters after their names who can put that sort of thing
00:30:33.700
I don't think they're doing it on purpose, but intersectionality is one way of doing it.
00:30:38.380
People like Ibram Kendi's idea that we recast what we think of as intelligence and make
00:30:43.440
it things like, quote unquote, desire to know, that's from one of his books.
00:30:48.040
The whole notion that we recast what we think of as talent, the idea that we're going to
00:30:52.180
reform the subject of STEM and change how we think of physics, et cetera, that mathematics
00:31:01.340
What all of this translates into is for black people, the rules have to be different.
00:31:05.960
And it's at the point where it's understandable that they will be.
00:31:08.880
This whole new ideology is based on an idea that we're going to teach a significant number
00:31:14.660
of people in the United States to have so creative, so transformative a view of how human affairs
00:31:22.520
could go in this great nation that change could actually happen.
00:31:28.820
Part of the reason that I find all of this so disturbing is because they're poor black
00:31:33.780
And people who consider themselves to be speaking for them are sitting around in rooms, putting
00:31:38.760
their hands up in the air and saying that they understand their white privilege, and
00:31:42.640
teaching black people to think that their main role in society is to be the people who they
00:31:47.840
should be grateful that white people consider themselves privileged over.
00:31:51.760
And now we have people who are trying to teach this to our children, sometimes with actual
00:31:56.960
And in the meantime, Donald Trump gets reelected.
00:32:04.620
But I say again, these people don't know what they're doing.
00:32:09.400
They think that they're giving us the good news.
00:32:12.020
But we just have to realize that those smiles on their faces are deceptive, and we can't
00:32:21.200
But there are so many ways to notice that its complexity has to exceed at every point the
00:32:30.740
simple diagnosis that it's white racism or, you know, systemic racism that is not yet fully
00:32:37.720
rectified because white people simply don't care enough about it that explains all of these
00:32:43.800
Because, I mean, just two things that occurred to me as I was listening to you.
00:32:48.320
When you think about the variable of race, and you notice that there are some communities
00:32:54.760
like African immigrants, you know, Nigerian immigrants who succeed disproportionately, you
00:33:03.760
They're among the most successful people in our society.
00:33:07.480
White racism should be cutting against them in the same way, right?
00:33:12.420
So if really, if it were that pernicious, if we just had racists in all these companies
00:33:17.260
in Silicon Valley who just don't want black people in the office, it would show up there
00:33:23.520
And this is a point that Coleman Hughes has made in various contexts.
00:33:29.060
And then there's also the fact that if you take the problem of, you know, violence that
00:33:33.180
you referenced in a city like Chicago, that you can, you really can set your watch by,
00:33:39.460
and you can know the color of people's skin in advance.
00:33:46.040
If you tell me that, you know, 30 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago, you know,
00:33:51.140
I could make money all day betting that they were non-white, right?
00:33:56.220
So to obfuscate that fact is, as, you know, virtually everyone left of center is inclined
00:34:02.700
to do at this moment, is really kind of sanity straining and totally unproductive.
00:34:07.760
But when you ask what a non-racist who would want nothing more than to solve that problem
00:34:17.100
If we could just, you know, with all of our goodwill of non-racism or anti-racism, come
00:34:21.660
in there and fix the problem, what would that solution look like?
00:34:25.220
It's not, whatever the solution is, it's not a matter of just making sure that everyone
00:34:31.260
within a thousand miles of Chicago is no longer racist, right?
00:34:35.800
I mean, there we have a cultural problem there that is being expressed that needs some remedy
00:34:41.180
and people need to be given somehow a totally different aspiration that has something to
00:34:48.380
do with getting educated and something to do with integrating in polite society.
00:34:52.980
You know, it's an interesting thing, and I'm glad you brought up Nigerians, because, you know,
00:35:06.260
there's a little bit more to the story that I was mentioning, which was that it used to be said
00:35:10.760
that, well, white people are only going to let black people get so far.
00:35:13.800
Then after about 1990, we started having a high level of African immigrants to this country,
00:35:19.460
not to mention Caribbean ones who've been coming before. And it's become painfully clear that
00:35:23.660
these are people who are often subject to exactly the same kinds of racism. It's not that racism
00:35:28.720
doesn't exist, but they thrive. They make the best of the least. Now, people who speak for black
00:35:36.920
people, black ones and fellow travelers, have a standing response to that, which is that those
00:35:41.560
people have what's called immigrant pluck, and it's not fair to expect native-born black people to have
00:35:46.960
it. And, you know, one answer to that question is, why? You know, what group in the history of the
00:35:53.660
human species has ever had a motto of, yes, we can't? That's what that is. The idea is that you're
00:36:00.280
supposed to be proud of saying, no, we can't be expected to have that kind of pluck. What that is,
00:36:04.740
is self-hating. And it's interesting, because there's a grand old tradition of calling someone
00:36:09.920
like me self-hating. Apparently, I lack confidence. Apparently, I wish I were white. Well, you know what?
00:36:15.440
I'm afraid not. And the truth is that from behind my eyes, I see people who are willing to settle
00:36:21.080
for this weak vision of what black people are supposed to be as the ones who don't
00:36:25.740
like themselves inside, which is part of why I almost never get really angry at them. I think
00:36:30.180
to myself, if you don't like yourself, then of course you're going to settle for this. And of
00:36:33.540
course, you're going to get mad if somebody like me who does comes along and says that you need to
00:36:37.780
buck up. I understand that anger. But yeah, the other problem is that we're not allowed to talk about
00:36:43.360
that all human groups have negative cultural traits, and that being a descendant of African
00:36:48.760
slaves at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st doesn't somehow make that
00:36:53.900
untrue. And so instead of talking about the cultural problem, there's this assumption that
00:36:58.700
you're saying that there's something biologically depraved about black people, and you must have your
00:37:04.340
wrist smacked about that. But yes, the question becomes, what racism would you withdraw to solve a
00:37:11.540
problem? And so for example, a lot of why black guys are killing each other in cities is based on
00:37:17.820
things that trace back, often maybe two or three steps, but trace back to the war on drugs. So one
00:37:23.840
solution might be to fight tooth and nail against that ridiculous war on drugs, because its effect would
00:37:30.000
be, when you withdrew that, that things in the inner city would be quite different, because there would
00:37:35.280
be no drug turf to fight over. There would be no tempting black market if you went to a lousy
00:37:41.340
school and had a lousy life to use to keep the wolf from the door. If there were no way of making half
00:37:47.820
a living selling drugs. And notice, folks, I said half a living. I know the factoid that none of them
00:37:52.400
get rich except the occasional person. But still, it keeps the wolf from the door. If that weren't
00:37:57.660
possible, then the same men would go find legal work and claw their way up from the bottom. And it's
00:38:03.180
not fair that they have to, but that would be better than getting killed or going to prison for a very
00:38:07.060
long time and leaving children to recapitulate their lives because their dads weren't there.
00:38:11.320
Let's face it, it would be better. But you don't talk about that too much. Now, many of the people
00:38:16.380
will say, well, yes, we need to talk about that too. But why is it that their favorite topic is just
00:38:20.420
to get rid of quote unquote racism with the idea that protesters about what happened to George Floyd
00:38:26.580
actually putting their bodies on the ground, white protesters, and bowing down to black people
00:38:31.660
standing up there above them, is somehow more important or is even a necessary preliminary?
00:38:39.080
All of this energy that people are putting into, for example, putting out statements that their
00:38:44.920
organization is going to fight white supremacy, and the organization is like a school of nursing,
00:38:50.340
the organization is a school of music theory, it's a math department, all of these profoundly racist
00:38:57.360
places. Why is any of that necessary when really all that energy could go into getting rid of a
00:39:03.240
war on drugs that would solve probably about 65% of the problems that most ail us? You don't talk
00:39:08.460
about it because we're talking about a religion. It's not because the people are dumb, it's not
00:39:12.400
because they're crazy, it's not because they're mean. And not to push this too hard, I don't think
00:39:17.380
it's that they're cynics. It's that they are pious. They have taken on a way of thinking that means
00:39:24.580
that you sequester a part of your brain for thoughts and responses that are not based on logic. And we
00:39:31.740
can't say that that's crazy, because most of the world's human beings are religious.
00:39:36.280
Yeah, yeah. No, I totally follow you there. I mean, I tend to think of it as a cult, but the difference
00:39:42.960
between a cult and a religion is just numbers of subscribers. So as it grows, it certainly could
00:39:49.520
have the shape of a new religion. Let's talk about how to move forward. I mean, just what would a sane
00:39:56.280
path through the wilderness look like? And how we should think about identity and just what the goal
00:40:06.800
is. I mean, in my mind, the goal is something like a colorblind society. I mean, so that to truly
00:40:14.600
overcome racism would not be to arrive in some future where more and more of us are passionate
00:40:21.940
anti-racists. It would be to arrive in a future where we could never dream, really, that skin color
00:40:28.660
could have moral or political significance, right? I mean, just as is the case with hair color today.
00:40:34.860
I mean, no one is trying to figure out how many, you know, blondes or brunettes or redheads are
00:40:40.760
in various positions in society. And for good reason, nobody cares. And if we perversely started
00:40:47.440
caring about that, right, and started advertising our grievances with respect to hair color, it would
00:40:53.880
have taken a significant step away from basic human sanity. And so we have to recover sanity somehow
00:41:01.480
with this variable of race. I mean, just to give a little context here, anyone who's been listening
00:41:06.360
to my podcast for a while knows that, and who knows anything about my views about, you know,
00:41:11.680
the nature of the mind and the nature of the self, knows that I don't think a person should even,
00:41:19.440
at the end of the day, identify with the face that he or she sees in the mirror each day. Like,
00:41:24.840
that is not the proper locus of one's self-concept. But, you know, how much less should one identify
00:41:32.180
with a group of people, you know, most of whom will be strangers forever, who just happen to
00:41:37.660
superficially resemble the face you see in the mirror each day? I mean, it just seems completely
00:41:42.560
nuts to think of oneself in those terms in any kind of ongoing way. And the idea that I would spend
00:41:49.780
any part of today thinking about my whiteness or feeling solidarity with other white people, because
00:41:55.920
we share some skin tone. In the midst of my life, that would be synonymous with me suffering some
00:42:02.500
kind of brain damage. It would be a kind of illness of the mind. And yet, what is being advertised to us
00:42:08.820
from all quarters is that group identity, and again, this, you know, within the wokeness,
00:42:14.680
this extends beyond race, this covers sexuality and gender and other variables, but there's a primacy
00:42:21.980
of group identity that is, apparently, there's no vision any longer of getting beyond, right? It's
00:42:29.340
just, but as much as I want to get beyond it, it's, that's not to say that I believe I'm colorblind
00:42:35.880
now, right? Because that is actually, I mean, it strikes me as impossible as long as one is aware
00:42:43.580
of statistics. I mean, so for instance, what I just said about being able to predict who is committing,
00:42:48.320
you know, all of these crimes in Chicago, right? The fact that I know these background facts about
00:42:53.960
the, you know, just the, the identities of, of people, you know, who are committing robberies and
00:42:58.800
other violent crimes gives me a certain expectation. I mean, I, I'm very surprised to hear it when it
00:43:05.120
turns out to be a Hasidic Jew, and I'm not at all surprised when I hear it's yet another black man who's
00:43:12.520
guilty of, you know, whatever the crime is. And so it's just that, that sort of background expectation
00:43:17.320
which violates any principle of colorblindness now. And I guess the, the, the flip side of it
00:43:23.800
for me, I mean, recently I remember I was watching one of these SpaceX launches and when they went to
00:43:31.560
the kind of the press conference side of things, one of the people on the panel was a black woman who
00:43:36.520
was one of the rocket scientists, you know, she was an engineer of some kind. So, you know, the reality
00:43:42.200
of that situation for me is, you know, I'm watching that and it, it made me inordinately happy
00:43:48.520
to see a black woman rocket scientist. And so, and, and the only way to understand that,
00:43:53.420
you know, psychological change in me is two things are going on. One is I have some, you know,
00:43:59.680
though I never thought about it up until that moment, I had some background, you know, statistical
00:44:04.400
belief that it was fairly uncommon for a black person, much less a black woman to be a rocket
00:44:12.140
scientist. But in addition to that, there's a deeply positive, albeit not at all colorblind
00:44:19.740
emotion, which is I'm overjoyed to see a black woman rocket scientist. I mean, like that, I want
00:44:25.620
there to be more black women in those roles. And, you know, conversely, I want there to be fewer
00:44:30.700
black men in the role of yet another booked suspect for a robbery or a homicide in a major
00:44:37.240
American city. So just the mere awareness of the statistics kind of overrides any aspiration for
00:44:45.080
being truly colorblind at moments like these. But that failure of colorblindness cannot be the same
00:44:51.520
thing as racism, right? Because what I want is all of these good outcomes and, you know, more good
00:44:58.220
outcomes and fewer bad outcomes for black people in either case. And beyond all of that, what I want
00:45:05.260
more than anything is to get to a society where I wouldn't even be tempted to notice the color of a
00:45:12.160
person's skin, whether they're a rocket scientist or a criminal, right? Because it just, it would make
00:45:16.640
no sense to notice it because I didn't notice their hair color either, right? It's just, it's like,
00:45:21.340
and so the question is, how do we get there? So, but it does strike me that there's this,
00:45:26.560
this transitional period where colorblindness isn't quite the prescription. And I guess,
00:45:33.780
I guess the question of, you know, affirmative action, you know, lands right in here. It's like,
00:45:37.960
what is the right policy to be implementing given that, you know, I think the goal really is to get
00:45:46.040
beyond any kind of politics of identity in the end. Yeah, that's what we were supposed to want,
00:45:53.460
and that's become unfashionable. And there are reasons for it. It's interesting. If you could,
00:46:01.060
um, go into a graduate seminar in a humanities department on just about any subject, and you
00:46:09.000
could, you know, hook up wires to every student after they had, you know, signed a certain protocol,
00:46:15.340
making sure that everything's okay, knowing that nothing unpleasant was going to happen to them,
00:46:18.620
put some wires on everybody, EKG or something like that, and then just get up in front of the class
00:46:23.620
and say identity. And you could watch people's blood pressure go up a little bit, and you could
00:46:28.100
probably measure, if you did a quick blood test, endorphins going through their veins. There's this
00:46:33.680
notion that what it really has to be about is identity. And what I mean by that is that these
00:46:40.200
days we're taught that the enlightened black person centers their sense of self on their relationship
00:46:48.200
to what white people are doing or not doing. And so what exactly is your identity? And your identity
00:46:57.740
has to be caught up in this idea of not being white, and also being in eternal complaint about
00:47:04.800
what white people are doing or not doing. That is considered the advanced thing. That is higher
00:47:11.700
reasoning. That is the equivalent in this religion to having faith in Jesus. And so if that's what
00:47:18.860
you're doing, then the idea that we're going to get past race is inconvenient, because for that kind of
00:47:23.360
person. And unfortunately, that kind of person is common. For that kind of person, if you're not
00:47:29.040
thinking of yourself as colored, so to speak, you don't have anywhere to grab onto. To even think of
00:47:35.400
the idea of a colorblind America is to imagine an America in which you cannot imagine just where you
00:47:41.820
would fit in. What we're dealing with is ultimately what happens to homo sapiens when groups get larger
00:47:46.780
than about 150 people where nobody has to wonder what they are. With white elect, in this case, a lot of it
00:47:53.160
is that you want to have a sense of purpose. And if it can't be that you're just somebody's brother
00:47:57.980
and somebody's son, and you marry somebody, and all of you go out and you hunt whales or something
00:48:02.580
like that, you don't have any existential crisis. Once you're in a large modern society, you want to
00:48:08.220
have a sense of what you are good for, what's your purpose. It can be hard to find that. It is not
00:48:14.320
natural to wish to be an individual, and yet that is what modernity forces upon us. So one thing that you
00:48:20.000
can be is this crusader where you're battling racism. But that means, especially with the way
00:48:24.660
it's being put these days, that you must think of yourself as this evil white person who's always
00:48:29.560
going to be racist no matter how many good things you do for black people, and you feel good about
00:48:33.920
being able to say that about yourself. If you couldn't say it, then who exactly are you? And it's
00:48:39.800
wrong to suppose that any of these people on either side, the white side or the black side, and of course
00:48:44.120
that's a vast oversimplification, but it's not that anybody's trying to make money, it's not that anybody's
00:48:48.880
trying to have power. If anything, it's part of the self-definition of the elect to think of
00:48:53.360
themselves as not having power. It's just, it's what makes you feel like a person. And so what we
00:49:00.840
have is a situation where here is the black female rocket scientist, and I'm sure that the typical
00:49:07.760
elect person applauds that in a kind of perfunctory way, but what they want is for it to be made easier for
00:49:15.040
black people to become rocket scientists by getting rid of all of the really tough math. And I'm not
00:49:21.100
exaggerating. You can actually hear people saying these sorts of things as I have walking next to
00:49:25.740
them. You can read people saying things like this. There are tenured and hot shot black professors who
00:49:31.580
stand up in front of august bodies of people saying that it's racist to expect black scholars to be
00:49:37.580
mathematically competent, and I'm not exaggerating. And so the idea is that if we're going to have a
00:49:42.500
colorblind society, it's going to have to be one where how we do rocket science is changed, or that
00:49:48.140
you can become a rocket scientist without learning a lot of the things that until now it's been thought
00:49:52.980
of as absolutely necessary and even defining for a rocket scientist to know. And that's really
00:49:59.480
dangerous stuff. Again, partly because it's horrifically condescending. If the idea were that you could be a
00:50:06.260
rocket scientist by not doing the things that rocket scientists are supposed to do, everybody would know the
00:50:11.360
ones that had not done the things that you're supposed to do, and everybody would be reinforced and
00:50:15.660
thinking there was something wrong with black people, which the elect wouldn't mind. It's not that
00:50:19.560
they're going for it, but they wouldn't mind because that would give them further fuel for talking about
00:50:23.760
how indelibly racist society is. But yes, ultimately we want to get past these distinctions. And yet my
00:50:31.540
friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, whenever he tries to talk about how we need to start moving back
00:50:37.620
towards the colorblindness that we see people in black and white newsreels singing of, well, he gets
00:50:44.200
roasted as some kind of Uncle Tom or he's a white supremacist. And of course, Sam, we have to talk
00:50:50.440
about the fact that for a lot of people, the instant answer here is the cops. So for many people, the idea
00:50:56.440
is that, for example, my identity must be focused on how I am not white because of what happened to George
00:51:05.060
Floyd. Now the problem there is that with OJ, I had a whole kind of buildings roman about that. I was
00:51:12.340
disgusted watching those black students on TV cheering when it was painfully obvious what OJ Simpson
00:51:17.720
had done. It took me a while to fully get that, yes, everybody knew what he did. It was painfully
00:51:25.560
obvious and I couldn't stand listening to people pretend not to know at the time because I like to
00:51:29.560
have all the ducks in a row. But it was seen as a vigilante justice against a genuine terrorism that
00:51:37.240
the LA cops had exerted against particularly black people in Los Angeles. And there was a similar
00:51:43.420
feeling across the United States for reasons which statistically made sense then. And even if they
00:51:49.400
didn't make sense exactly in 1997, people's sense of how the world works for them is not going to change
00:51:55.200
instantly because of gradual sea changes over time. So nowadays, I see that the OJ Simpson performance
00:52:02.840
art had a certain understandability. It disappointed me a lot. In my first book about race, Losing the
00:52:10.240
Race, I'm still white hot about people's willful refusal to understand the real facts on that case.
00:52:17.300
Now I kind of get it, but goodness, it's been a while. OJ was, was that? 1994. So here we are,
00:52:24.240
26 years later, there are people who weren't born then who have two or three kids and real jobs. It was
00:52:30.280
a very long time ago. And at this point, we're in one of the most challenging situations that I have
00:52:37.960
ever known in terms of how we move forward, which is that if you look at the statistics, it is quite
00:52:45.560
clear that the idea that cops even subconsciously kill black people out of racist animus or even subtle
00:52:53.920
racist bias is simply insupportable. It just, it doesn't work. And I was somebody who thought that
00:53:00.580
that was true until about four years ago. And I was in a conversation with my sparring partner,
00:53:05.760
Brown University economist and black man, Glenn Lowry, where he and I were arguing about this.
00:53:10.940
And I said, Glenn, you'd have to prove to me that this sort of thing happens to white people.
00:53:15.340
And not only does it happen to white people, but there are further arguments that make it clear that
00:53:19.420
even if black men are killed disproportionately to their numbers, then unfortunate facts about who
00:53:27.900
commits the most crimes, including homicides, not to mention just factoring poverty and how that
00:53:33.280
affects interactions with cops, whether you're white, Latino, or black, makes it clear that the
00:53:38.960
simple idea that's so intuitive that George Floyd died because of the color of his skin simply doesn't
00:53:46.720
go through. And yet, Sam, what does worry me is that we are at a point where because of the religion
00:53:51.540
and its imperatives, you can't get that across to a critical mass of people. I have watched people
00:53:59.260
much smarter than me presented with the very simple facts who simply can't hear them. And these are
00:54:05.600
people who are usually rather even temporal people who get upset. This really presses a button.
00:54:12.000
And so, unfortunately, a lot of the people who identify as X, Y, or Z and seem to be going directly
00:54:20.560
against what Martin Luther King was calling for would say that they're doing it because the cops killed
00:54:26.180
George Floyd because he was black and that kind of thing keeps happening. And as long as that's what
00:54:31.160
they know, and as long as they won't listen to what the truth is about black men and the cops, which is that
00:54:36.820
the cops are a serious problem in this country, but that when it comes to who they kill,
00:54:41.160
the data simply doesn't support that black men are being killed because cops are racist against
00:54:47.340
them. We can't really get anywhere. That's the hardest thing about this, the cops.
00:54:53.600
Interesting. Yeah. So as most people listening will recall, I did a podcast in the immediate aftermath
00:55:02.180
of the George Floyd killing, I believe it was titled, Can We Pull Back from the Brink?, which was a
00:55:08.080
solo podcast. As I said at the time, I consciously resisted the impulse to bring on someone like
00:55:14.060
yourself to sort of to midwife that conversation because I just felt like the idea that I couldn't
00:55:20.260
say what I thought needed to be said on my own as a white guy was pernicious and worth not capitulating
00:55:28.360
to. So I did it solo and got a lot of support and also a lot of criticism. People can't shake the
00:55:37.300
feeling that a white person shouldn't be saying these things very much along the lines of what
00:55:42.840
you just said. I know you read the transcript of that podcast. I'm wondering, is there anything
00:55:48.320
you think I got wrong or is there any place, is there any daylight between us on this issue?
00:55:53.900
You know, Sam, the honest truth is what you said on that podcast was all spun gold as far
00:56:02.940
as I'm concerned. In terms of bravery, I was struck by your mentioning something that even
00:56:08.360
I have hesitated to ever say anything about because of the nature of the situation, which
00:56:13.680
is that really, you know, if the cops, you know, grab you and they want you to do something,
00:56:19.500
you need to let them do it. The idea that you're being some kind of hero to resist, that you're
00:56:26.480
supposed to think about the cosmic sociopolitics and kind of flip the bird at the cops or do worse
00:56:34.300
and that that ends up creating a lot of these problems. Frankly, as people say, there is some of
00:56:40.940
that. And I do think that ideally we would say one way that some of these things wouldn't happen
00:56:47.360
is don't resist the police. You know, basically just do what they say. And as you said, put in
00:56:54.600
your objections later after the heat of the moment has passed. If you feel that you've been stopped
00:56:58.940
unfairly, if you feel that something has gone wrong, you can lodge the complaint. These days,
00:57:05.100
there are more channels for getting your complaint out than there used to be. Social media means that
00:57:09.380
you can basically have your say and possibly have it picked up much more easily than you could have
00:57:14.860
in, say, 1974. But not then. None of the walking away, none of the yelling and screaming, none of
00:57:22.900
the spitting, etc. And I feel like, you know, I'm black and I can't say that because I feel like a lot
00:57:30.220
of people feel that these people are having their say in a society that is dedicatedly set against the
00:57:37.380
well-being of black people and black men in particular. And I just feel like many people
00:57:43.480
simply couldn't hear that. There's a part of them that feels like this resistance of arrest in cases
00:57:49.580
like this is a kind of new form of civil rights. And I sensed that I could cut through that even less
00:57:58.020
likely than I could make people understand that a George Floyd who was white, such as Tony Timpa,
00:58:04.180
four years before him, very similar situation, could have been killed under the same indefensible
00:58:10.080
conditions. So it's a tough one. But no, what you said, I stand behind you. You were correct. And I
00:58:16.040
thought to myself, it's kind of sad that you're not allowed to make this kind of logical sense
00:58:21.380
when talking about these issues because so much of it has been encrusted in what's thought of as
00:58:28.600
higher reasoning, but is really a kind of performance art that serves more to make people
00:58:36.880
feel secure in themselves within the structure of elect religion than to prevent bad things from
00:58:44.280
happening to people. And so, for example, George Floyd, take away the war on drugs and the cops would
00:58:50.680
have much less reason to patrol disadvantaged black communities. And many negative interactions,
00:58:57.120
that's not what happened to be happening with George Floyd, but many negative interactions
00:59:01.540
wouldn't happen simply by virtue of that. There's an educational crisis with kids that disproportionately
00:59:09.780
affects disadvantaged black kids, which has to do with how reading is taught. And to be very quick
00:59:16.440
about it, reading should be taught by teaching kids how to sound out words. You'd think that was the
00:59:20.300
most natural thing in the world. But there are other reading philosophies where you teach kids to
00:59:24.720
recognize words as whole pieces because English spelling is weird, and you let them do that instead
00:59:31.180
of, frankly, learning how to read. You and I probably learned by reading chunks, and that's because we are
00:59:37.540
middle-class, readaholic kinds of people. But for kids who come from not book-lined homes, from kids who
00:59:44.220
come from places where most communication is oral rather than on the page, you need to be taught the good
00:59:50.380
old-fashioned way. It's surprising how that does not happen for a great many black kids who really
00:59:56.940
need it. And once you're just an okay reader, you're never going to be all that great in school, and you
01:00:02.000
can't make the most of, say, a moderate, although not great school because you weren't taught how to read
01:00:07.240
right. I have seen this happen. And finally, there needs to be free, easy access to long-term acting
01:00:17.660
contraceptives that are reversible, but for five years make it so that you can do family planning
01:00:24.520
without having to work too hard. Way too many births of children are accidental. And if a lower-income mom
01:00:32.640
does not want to have kids until she's gotten on her feet, a way to avoid the kinds of accidents that happen
01:00:38.280
to almost anybody in the course of life is to have these contraceptives be available to as many women as
01:00:45.440
possible. And this would, of course, cover black as well as Latino and white women. Women of that
01:00:50.600
demographic in all colors have been shown in studies to like these. No talk about eugenics is appropriate
01:00:55.720
here. It's just about being able to plan your family without thinking too hard and without so many
01:01:02.140
births being accidents, especially if you're somebody who would prefer not to interrupt the
01:01:07.240
growth of a child once it's started. Yes, I'm talking about abortion. If you don't want to have an
01:01:11.480
abortion, great. But the larks, as they're called, make it so that you don't end up having to deal
01:01:16.640
with those choices. If you did those three things, just those three, it would solve so many problems
01:01:23.000
for black people who need help. And all three of those things would go a good 80% of the way
01:01:29.840
towards solving the problems we're talking about, regardless of how Derek Chauvin, or however you
01:01:35.300
pronounce his name, feels about black people in his heart of hearts. However privileged white people
01:01:41.480
are or aren't, it would really put black America back on its feet. But we're not supposed to think
01:01:47.040
about anything so proactive, because those aren't religious thoughts. We're supposed to think about
01:01:52.400
things that are more emotional, things that are more interpersonal, things that make you feel like
01:01:57.120
you've got the Lord in you. And that's where you get books like, books like white fragility. That's
01:02:03.140
where you get books like how to be an anti-racist. And oh my goodness gracious, that's where you get
01:02:08.320
how to raise an anti-racist baby. Which means that my children, five and eight, are going to have
01:02:14.340
teachers. This is what scares me to my socks. My kids are going to run into this, and I'm trying to
01:02:19.780
think of what I'm going to do about it. They're going to be these teachers with shining eyes,
01:02:24.840
not cynics, shining eyes, teaching my biracial daughters that they need to primarily think of
01:02:31.920
themselves as black girls who are going to suffer racism at the hands of their white classmates.
01:02:39.380
And I say, no, no, no, no, no. But I'm afraid that we're getting to the point where there's no school
01:02:45.440
that I could put them in where I could keep them from that, and I don't have time to homeschool.
01:02:49.860
That's what's worrying me. But we need a real race sociopolitics that's about getting out on the
01:02:56.180
ground and doing real things. And instead, we are engaging in a kind of charismatic navel gazing,
01:03:01.640
and I think that we really need to get past it. I'm in precisely that same position with respect to
01:03:09.060
the education of my daughters, and it's amazing to witness. I think you just have to, at the
01:03:15.880
appropriate moment, have the conversation with them to inoculate them against the brainwashing that's
01:03:21.580
coming, or that has already started. But it's a fascinating thing to try to navigate. I want to
01:03:27.340
linger on this issue of the police videos, because they have such an outsized effect on
01:03:36.020
everything that's happening here. I mean, there's, you know, comparatively very few of them that have
01:03:40.860
been, you know, widely seen. We really are talking about something like a dozen or two dozen videos
01:03:48.420
that have defined this moment culturally. Now, no doubt there are thousands upon thousands of them
01:03:54.740
available. I've watched, you know, many more than dozens. The thing that I just want to reiterate
01:04:01.220
about these videos is that they're very hard to understand, much less understand dispassionately,
01:04:08.040
right? I mean, these are functioning, as you say, they have a religious significance. I mean,
01:04:13.800
these are, you know, held up as icons in, you know, orthodox Christianity. I mean, it's like,
01:04:20.040
this is the moral core of the religion, the injustice that is patently obvious here within
01:04:26.620
the frame of this phone. And yet they're functioning, to my eye, much more like a kind of pornography
01:04:33.400
of grievance and distrust of institutions. And again, they're just reliably misunderstood by even
01:04:42.340
very well-intentioned people who are not implicated at all in the video. You know, it's just, you know,
01:04:48.820
my mother can't understand these videos. She reflexively sees everything that Ibram Kendi would
01:04:55.400
want her to see in, you know, naively coming to one of these videos. So, I mean, the thing to point
01:05:00.580
out is that for every video you've seen, whether it's the George Floyd video or, you know, Eric Garner or
01:05:06.940
any of these other ones, I mean, one, there are differences among them that are incredibly
01:05:12.640
important, right? I mean, just for anyone who understands, you know, violence and what
01:05:16.540
cops can do and should do to protect themselves and the public once things start running off the
01:05:22.680
rails, all of these videos are highly non-analogous with one another. And yet that is virtually never
01:05:29.280
acknowledged. And, you know, the cases where we don't have video, but where we know something about
01:05:33.520
what happened, like the Michael Brown case, just totally unlike these other cases. Each is,
01:05:39.160
the dissimilarities need to be noticed. But then there are, for every video you want to fasten on
01:05:44.640
as emblematic of the problem of racism and police violence, you just have to know that there are other
01:05:51.380
videos where all the relevant variables are reversed, where the skin color of all participants,
01:05:57.120
you know, cops and victims are reversed, right? You just swap that all out, you know,
01:06:02.280
and you can find that video. And one thing that largely goes unacknowledged is there are videos
01:06:09.200
where the thing that the cops are most worried about suddenly getting shot in the face by the person
01:06:17.240
who until a moment before showed no sign of being armed, you know, those videos are there to be seen
01:06:24.080
too, right? So the thing that explains how spun up the cops often are in these circumstances where
01:06:30.000
they're shouting commands and going increasingly berserk in the presence of a non-compliant
01:06:36.640
person. One, it so often speaks to their lack of training. You know, they simply don't have all
01:06:42.400
the tools they need to non-violently control somebody. We're speaking now on a day, the day after
01:06:49.080
a video that's, you know, especially disturbing has circulated, which makes many of these points for me.
01:06:55.600
Again, there's a video out of Tulsa, I believe, of a white person being pulled over where the cops,
01:07:03.560
two cops are attempting to make an arrest. And it's not clear from at least the version I saw,
01:07:08.480
which now has several million views. I saw it on Twitter. It's not clear how this all started.
01:07:14.320
You know, I mean, I'm sure this person was driving like a maniac or you don't know why the cops are so
01:07:19.740
spun up. But, you know, once they're engaging him in the car, they are, you know, getting ready to
01:07:24.580
tase him and they do and it doesn't work. And again, tasers often don't work. Then they begin
01:07:30.600
pepper spraying him. The guy just refuses to get arrested. He does not want to come out of the car.
01:07:35.440
They're trying to pull him out of the car. They don't have the skills to physically do this well,
01:07:39.740
where they can keep themselves safe and actually immobilize him. So they're yanking on him every which
01:07:45.440
way and shooting him with, you know, with pepper spray. And the guy's complaining about the
01:07:49.900
injustice of this all. And, you know, he's, he's innocent and, you know, this is a violation of
01:07:54.140
his rights. And why are you doing this? And, you know, had he been black, you know, up until the
01:07:58.440
final frames of this video, this would be yet another case of, you know, monstrous misbehavior
01:08:04.800
on the part of cops. I would have heard of it by now. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know,
01:08:08.580
the sovereign citizen lunatic cult in white society, I'm sure it also is emblematic of,
01:08:16.120
you know, the overreach of state violence. But what happens at the end of this video is this guy
01:08:22.020
is wearing a t-shirt and shorts. I don't think it's even clear where he pulls the gun from. I
01:08:27.880
think it probably was on in his waistband. You know, he might've retrieved it from his car as he
01:08:32.520
was being pulled out. But up until the last moment where you think, okay, well, I'm not sure why they're
01:08:36.660
tasing him and spraying him with pepper spray. But, you know, the cops are really freaked out.
01:08:42.500
And this guy, they're just not successfully arresting this guy. He's got his cell phone in
01:08:47.320
one hand. And the next thing you know, both cops are shot. I think one has died. I'm not sure about
01:08:54.420
the state of the other. And every cop knows on an hourly basis that this is a possibility every
01:09:03.480
single time they have an encounter with a member of the public. It is absolutely obvious from the
01:09:09.240
cop's eye view of the world that it is very hard to tell who the bad guys are. And we live in a
01:09:15.400
society awash with guns. And so you owe it to yourself. If you're someone who has been successfully
01:09:21.800
propagandized by the Black Lives Matter take on all the famous videos, you need to see a few videos
01:09:29.860
like this one from Tulsa to know what cops are dealing with. This is a traffic stop. And, you know,
01:09:37.060
you get to watch two cops, you know, at least one cop be executed because of it. And, you know,
01:09:43.540
that's the complete conversation about this. And so, yeah, I mean, the punchline is whatever you're
01:09:48.680
being arrested for, it doesn't matter that you know you're innocent. You have to follow directions
01:09:55.380
so as to minimize the possibility that the cop is going to feel that something you're doing with
01:10:00.560
your hands is presenting such an intolerable risk to his safety or her safety that they have to,
01:10:07.580
you know, draw their gun and point it at your head. And now you're risking, you know, being killed for
01:10:13.100
no good reason. Yeah. So often it's about somebody who reaches. And it's clear that the cops are really,
01:10:21.500
really, really afraid of somebody reaching for a gun and killing them. And I would have to assume that
01:10:26.380
they're not afraid of that for no reason. And yet there seems to be a notion out there that that's
01:10:31.220
something that the cops are only afraid of when it's a black person. And it leads me to something
01:10:36.280
that I've come to realize over the years about these cop cases. And I should say, and I think it's
01:10:41.580
very important for me to say this, I was not thinking this way until about four years ago. I had the BLM
01:10:47.340
thought about this. Many people who don't like me don't know that in my books, I have written about
01:10:52.860
this. I have a whole essay about the police and profiling. I knew this was the one thing that that
01:10:59.040
justified the way people like this think, as opposed to, frankly, everything else about being black.
01:11:04.480
But the thing about this is that whenever you see a video such as, you know, the ones that we've seen
01:11:11.040
now from Minneapolis and Kenosha, you know, there seems to be a new one about every week
01:11:16.040
these days. It's first of all, you have to think, is there a plan to be a plan?
01:11:20.780
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