#265 — The Religion of Anti-Racism
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with John Mcwarder about his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Betrayed Black America. This was the book he was just beginning to work on when he was hired by The New York Times as a columnist, and it's a book about how the social justice narrative on the left has become a new religion, and how this faith has taken over our institutions, and what to do about it. In this episode we get into his thesis, and his thesis is a thesis about how social justice has become the new religion and how it has taken control of our institutions and what can be done about it? We also talk about his thesis on how the left is becoming a religion and what we can do about this, and why we should be worried about it, and about what it means for the future of our political discourse and the way we live in the 21st century, and the role of social justice as a religion, as a tool for social justice, and as a vehicle for social change, and a means to fight against it. This is the book that the world has been waiting for, and has been in the hands of a man who has been working on it for a long time, and who is one of the most important voices on this topic, and he is here to bring it to life. John is a voice on the front lines of the left, and in the streets, and on social media, and also on the airwaves, and radio, and is a writer, and so much more. Please consider becoming a supporter of the making sense podcast by becoming a member of the Making Sense Podcast. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one of our sponsors, a supporter, a patron of the podcast, a fellow patron of Making Sense, a friend of the show, a good friend of making sense, and subscribe to the Making sense Podcast, and consider subscribing to the podcast. Make sense. You'll get access to a special bonus episode of Making sense: to access full episodes of the Podcast, a chance to access more episodes of The Making Sense and much more! making sense in future episodes on the podcast making sense of what we do you'll get to hear more of what's going on in the future, and you'll need to subscribe to your favorite podcatcher, and listen to it, too you'll know that you'll be making sense?
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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today i'm speaking with john mcwarder john teaches linguistics american studies and music history at
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columbia university and he is also a new contributor at the new york times and he's
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also a contributing editor at the atlantic and the host of the language podcast lexicon valley
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his writing has appeared everywhere and he's the author of over 20 books but most importantly
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he has written a new book titled woke racism how a new religion has betrayed black america this was
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the book he was just beginning to work on last time we spoke and in today's episode we get into his
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thesis we talk about how the social justice narrative on the left has become a new religion and how this
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faith has taken over our institutions and what to do about it anyway those of you who know him know
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that john is one of our most important voices on this topic and those of you who don't yet know him
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are in for a treat and now i bring you john mcwarder
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i am back with john mcwarder john thanks for joining me again my pleasure so a lot has happened
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since we last spoke i guess the first thing i just want to touch in passing is that you
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have been hired as a columnist for the new york times which i'm sure it was not a surprise to you
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but it was a very pleasant surprise to many of us and it really is a a measure of how highly esteemed
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you are that so many people viewed it as the the single event that arrested the gray lady's slide
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into the abyss or uh postponed her her suicide it's quite wonderful to see is it a fig leaf for um
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further unrepentant sinning on their part or is it the sign of some kind of real course correction
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well you know i actually was quite surprised because i am much less targeted and ambitious
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than i think a lot of people have reason to know and the last thing i expected when we spoke or even
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10 seconds before i got their email was that the new york times would ever want me on a regular basis
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and i haven't been you know i haven't been blackballed by them in any way i've had you know plenty of
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things to write for them but i never thought that anything would be regular and as far as
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i can see the truth is that the more you dig into those hideous things that happened at the times
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particularly in 2020 as with all of these things with what the people i call the elect it's not the
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majority feeling at the times it's a certain cadre of people who exert a disproportionate effect because
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everybody's afraid of being called names yeah and i think that that was going on a lot at the times and
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that then there was a kind of a a reckoning that's my sense of it and so i think that it's not just me
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i think other things will be happening and perhaps some of this is that we're coming out of the pandemic
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and that none of us saw the extremity that was coming but yeah i was quite surprised it isn't
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something that i cultivated and i did not walk around thinking of myself as times material and it's
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been a it's been quite a challenge but you know better than being bored yeah well it's great to see and
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um i i just wish you the best of luck there thank you we certainly need the times and uh we need
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you to have as um prominent a platform as you can find and that's certainly one of the best
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remaining in journalism and you know also i want to inject very quickly that i have not felt at all
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muzzled by the time some people ask nor when i say something leftish am i trying to cater to them
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as people on social media seem to think i'm just saying the things that i really believe and so far
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i have no tales to tell it's all been working out very nicely right well if your new book is any
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indication you are as yet uh un muzzled so i should announce this book properly this is a book that
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that i think we probably discussed uh in our last podcast because you were beginning to write it then
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yeah yeah and this is the book that the world has been waiting for this is the book that can be
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really taken in hand like a hammer and hurled at the increasingly grotesque edifice of moral
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confusion that is now looming over everything and the that book is woke racism how a new religion has
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betrayed black america and i i must say i really i just got the book and i read it over the last two
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days it's a book that can certainly be comfortably read in a day or two good which is really a strength
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that i i'm happy you did not write a 500 page book yeah exactly yeah you you i think you kept our
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friend stephen pinker at some distance during this process because his books are uh with his 500 page
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book famously doorstoppish but um let's start with this claim to be confronting a religion which is
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it's a framing that some people will chafe at and i want to read something you say about midway through
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the book which frames this nicely america's sense of what it is to be intellectual moral or artistic
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what it is to educate a child what it is to foster justice what it is to express oneself properly and
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what it is to be a nation is being refounded upon a religion and i really don't think that overstates it
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and so i want us to deal at the outset with any concern that really you're you're this you're
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strawmanning the situation or exaggerating it there's one more thing you say a few paragraphs down
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the problem is is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities the adherence of this
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religion true to the very nature of religion cannot be reasoned with they are in this sense
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medievals with lattes so um which is certainly amusing so this
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two claims here there's the claim that um we're dealing with a religion with all of the
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the invidious irrationality implied i mean so one problem with this framing possibly is that so many
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people think religion is a good thing and a necessary thing and so what's wrong with having a religion and
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so this is not really the sense in which you're using it it's all of the the unreasoning dogmatic
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intolerant and the fake meaning derived of of living in that way that you um that you're targeting here
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but you're also saying that because it has gotten to this point because it is in fact so uncoupled from
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real processes of reasoning these people can't be argued with and that we just simply have to
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figure out how to get around them and so that's kind of a twin claim that i want you to address at the
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outset because it's going to bump some people yeah it's um it's a really interesting thing because
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i think a lot of people are under the impression that the question we're supposed to be asking is how
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can we reason with the kind of person who comes from the hyper woke left and is asking us to do things
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that don't make any sense and even possibly hurt people how can we make them open to diversities of
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opinion how can we make them see that their ideas aren't the only legitimate ones in terms of our
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general discourse and my claim really is and this is not me beating my chest this is not me speaking
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from frustration it's me thinking very calmly people cannot be reasoned with on for example race
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when it comes to issues like that and i mean white people as much as black people and the truth is
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woke racism is written mainly to white people this is one where i'm going to make white people mad as
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opposed to black people because they are the ones who are falling for this sort of thing and thinking
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of it as good but you can't reason with people on race with these issues any more than you can
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convince somebody that jesus doesn't love them if they've come to believe that i think we waste
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energy supposing that quoting john stewart mill at these people and hoping we can have some sort of
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situation where we meet them halfway it's simply not possible and i've tried to speak to enough of
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these people i've observed them there's nothing to be done and so the issue is how do we exist
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gracefully among them how do we keep them from making us dance to their tune they they won't
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change the world is going to be imperfect in that regard as in so very many others the religious point
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is going to irritate a lot of people and i can understand that because for one i am an atheist and
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that seems to have gotten around and i do have a certain impatience with religious belief and that seems to have
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gotten around and i think people can smell it on me but the truth is it is more than ideology or it's
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very usefully referred to as something other than ideology this is something different from people
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who wouldn't let go of revering stalin in upper west side living rooms in the 1930s and 40s and it's
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partly because of just the almost eerie formal parallels between the way these people think
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and fundamentalist christianity right down to the original sin and the white privilege being so
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similar and also there is the fervency of it there's the sense that if you don't agree it's not
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that you're going to argue with somebody over your martini that was you know the stalinists back in the
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30s and 40s lillian hellman yelling up into your face that was one thing it's another thing though
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for people to treat people who don't think like them on these issues as heretics and feel that they
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can't be in the same room with them that they need to lose their jobs that people need to be
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defenestrated for not going along with the ideology that is what we associate with one of the seamiest
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and saddest aspects of religion i actually think okay maybe if it were a religion that really were
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uplifting black people and people were doing this for reasons that didn't always follow logic from a
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to b to c but it worked okay that'd be fine the problem is that this is a shitty religion it's a really
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unfortunate religion that we're seeing emerge and the people in question genuinely don't know it
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we have to know it yeah yeah i've been using the term cult to convey all of the denigration of of
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this style of of uh thinking and organizing without confusing anyone who for whom the term religion would
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would be positively valenced but i mean the one thing that cult loses because you know cult is just
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for virtually everyone is intrinsically pejorative what it loses that religion captures is the one the
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fact that this isn't this is now so widespread that it really is you know though it is a minority of
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true believers we're talking about a lot of people it's a very large cult uh or a small religion and
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there is something we'll talk about the various flavors of insincerity that can be found here but
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there is something sincere and pure about the psychological effect of being galvanized in this
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way i mean people are really finding purpose in just throwing over everything in subservience to this
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new catechism it feels good you can see that it's giving them endorphins it's giving them a sense of
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purpose it gives them a sense of being ahead of the curve don't we all like that it gives them a sense
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of belonging you have a crowd of people who think in this way it's a minority of people but that means
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that you have a sense of being special and there's a glow about these people in many cases the religious
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part captures that cult sounds menacing cult and you're thinking of something that went on in
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guiana whereas with this you see people who are truly glowing with the idea that they understand
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that racism exists and that they're going to show that they understand that racism exists and they're
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also a little afraid of somebody who would accuse them of not knowing that racism exists and so there's
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just this warm shining glow and in the meantime they're throwing black people under the bus in
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countless ways but it doesn't matter to them because the point of this religion is very specifically
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to question power differentials never mind doing anything about them you question power
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differentials and specifically when it comes to race you show that you know that racism didn't
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end in 1966 period stop and that's just not enough that is not worthy of the legacy of the civil rights
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movements that actually created change in lives for real people yeah and this is the one of the
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paradoxes here it's not enough it's in some ways completely ineffectual in fact it doesn't even
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pretend to try to achieve anything and and trying to be pragmatic is denigrated as i think i think the
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term is solutionism white yeah but on the other hand it is altogether too much in every other respect i
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mean it's exaggerating the problem wherever it in fact finds it and pretends to find it in places
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where it doesn't exist and is making scapegoats of people who really are guilty of nothing but just
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nothing beyond in many cases being slightly tone deaf or just out of step with these new
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norms of thought crime yeah it's um it is a dismaying thing because i get the feeling it's partly a symptom
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of modernity where things were really truly horrible for black people nobody could afford
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to massage their sense of victimhood the way black people are encouraged to the way white people are
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now encouraging us to do it would have felt inhuman for white people to do it and it would have felt
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truly you know discouraging and dehumanizing for black people to do it you didn't exaggerate about
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what was already so bad only when things get to the point that they're not perfect but people are doing
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pretty darn well and that is certainly the case on race for just about everybody in this country over
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the past five decades only then can you develop a recreational victimization complex where you
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exaggerate to the degree that we all of us now this is not just black people this is america the
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educated america is taught to exaggerate that can only happen when things are pretty good which means
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that there's an awful lot of mendacity going on and what bothers me is that part of this mendacity is due to
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how easy it is to be part of this religion and i know partly because when i was a teenager back in
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the 70s and you know you have insecurities when you're a teenager you're trying to get a sense of
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yourself you're trying to show off for in my case you know showing off for girls etc you you you reach
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for things and it will surprise many people to know that i had a little spell where i was calling people
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and things racist just because it felt good because it would get a jump out of people because i felt
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like i was kind of ahead of the curve because i'd been told by other people that's what i was supposed
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to do it felt like it made me feel like i belonged it gave me a way of dismissing things that i sometimes
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found challenging if i hadn't done something well enough to get the top spot it was very easy for me
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to say it was because of racism rather than just that you know maybe i just wasn't as good at it as
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that white guy down there that was that was easy and it was something that i was doing because i
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wasn't quite sure of myself i see grown-ups doing this and i think to myself what i was doing was
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rather recreational it was therapeutic it wasn't real i grew out of it and i think a lot of people
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grow out of it but we're being encouraged now to think of that state that larval state in one
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psychology as something that you're supposed to stop at or return to as if to be an adult about
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such things specifically race and specifically after about 1966 is somehow a regression or a mistake
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or something that needs to be undone i don't think so i don't like being told that we're supposed to be
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immature and that's what a lot of this is okay so what would you say is the core tenet or tenets of
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this new religion the core tenet and of course as with you know many group movements it's not that
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everybody could recite this chapter and verse but the core tenet is battling power differentials
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must be the core of all intellectual artistic and moral endeavor and those who are not committed
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to that being the core focus must be barred from public presence that is the basic idea and many
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people if confronted with that who are part of this religion would be perplexed that anybody would
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question it they would think oh yeah of course we're going to battle the perniciousness of
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disproportionate power but the problem is that is one of maybe about 200 things that a human being
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can be concerned with in this world we do need to watch out for power if i weren't speaking colorfully
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i'd say it's maybe one of about 10 things the idea that it should be at the very center of an entire
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academic career or the entire curriculum of a private school or basically everything that blue america has
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talked about since roughly june 2020 that's a very fragile conceit and frankly it's not advanced i think a
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lot of its perpetrators think that this is advanced thinking that we're taking things to a new level when
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really what this is is dumbing us all down it's turning our eyes away from things that are equally
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urgent not to mention just equally interesting i really worry about younger people today growing up
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within this an atmosphere where true curiosity is discouraged in favor of this religious pursuit
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disguised by the use of words like intersectionality and hegemony and social justice it's really returning us
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to roughly 1250 in france you know what an intellectual was then there were only certain things you could
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intellect about you feel almost sorry for thomas aquinas for example because you wish that he could open up
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more with all of that brilliance we're now back to that except because it's called
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intersectionality it's supposed to be sophisticated yeah and there's so many
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contradictions at the heart of this so for instance let me just just take this claim about power
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there's so many contexts now where power has effectively been flipped so to be a cisgendered white
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guy is not to have the power of status and the leverage of persuasion i mean what in what you know i i was
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recently at a conference and uh was speaking to a um someone who worked for a very prominent media tech
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property that i won't name but she was high up at the organization and she said to me you know actually
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confided in me under the brackets of confidentiality that um you know her son was graduating college and
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the the idea of of hiring him or anyone like him at this company now was unthinkable i mean just that
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the the kid would have to be the next claude shannon to be considered right she opened she openly said
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this to you privately she openly said this to me privately and openly said that this could not be
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divulged in any way that could reveal who or what i'm talking about and i would allege i'm sure i've said
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something similar in previous podcasts that there's probably not this will sound like hyperbole but i would
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bet a fair amount of money that it isn't there's probably not a single desirable organization in
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this country now you know company educational institution non-profit where a black applicant
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to be a student or to be an employee would be at a disadvantage now given equivalent qualifications
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a black applicant would be positively advantaged and in in the top 10 percent of every organization
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and this is this extend this to media journalism that's safe to say everywhere yeah yeah i can't
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think of any exception to the definitely and the thing is it's funny i don't consider myself a
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conservative but i find myself yearning for roughly 2010 these days it's not as if this new version
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of equity where a white male is truly disadvantaged it's not a matter of the controversy over affirmative
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action 25 and 30 years ago where you can prove that white people weren't really disadvantaged but
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it really is the case that a white boy is going to be severely disadvantaged on the job market just
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because he is not a pretty color and hiring him is not anti-racist that is something new and i think
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really we had gotten to the point before say june 2020 where any civilized person any civilized
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organization had its eye out for people who were not white men that message seemed to have gotten
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through to a major point to the point that you know some white men were already complaining but what
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we're doing now is going back to what in 1966 was called tokenism that was considered one of the
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naziest things you could say about a hiring policy that it was tokenism now suddenly that's archaic and
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if you ask people what the difference is between now and the tokenism that they talked about on all
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in the family in the jeffersons well they look over your shoulder and they tell you it's complicated but
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it's not we're going back to tokenism if there aren't enough black people for example qualified for
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a certain activity or a certain endeavor then the idea is to qualify more black people for it which will
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involve waiting a generation until they exist and are ready to get jobs it also requires acknowledging
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as i don't think any multicultural group of humans ever have until now that they're different cultural
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predilections that it might be that there just aren't that many black people who want to play the
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bassoon i would suspect that there aren't that doesn't mean that there aren't some but probably there are
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very few black people who grow up thinking i'm going to take up this peculiar heavy expensive
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instrument that nobody seems to want to hear anyway i actually like the bassoon very much
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but no now we're supposed to say that if there are very few black bassoonists then it's because it's
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there's racism and that people don't like black people or black people don't have the resources to
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become bassoonists it might be that if black people had all the resources in the world they might not
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choose that instrument or to avoid the cartoonishness of that example they might not be as interested
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in classical music as for example many east asian immigrants kids are they might not be as interested
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yes there will be some black oboists but maybe not very many and that there's nothing wrong with that
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there's no room for acknowledging different cultural predilections i.e. diversity in our current
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discussion and all of this is dumb dumb logic it's a person coming along with a 10 year old's vision of
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how things are supposed to go but because they'll call you a racist on twitter if you don't agree with
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them you just bow down to their biddings this is not the way a mature society is supposed to operate
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we're going backwards it's frightening isn't it okay well let's push into even more fraught territory
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than classical music because obviously the disparities that people will ascribe to racism
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systemic and otherwise exist more or less everywhere in our society and
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it's um again there's so many contradictions and sources of confusion here to to untangle you know
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first the caveat that perhaps i should have issued at the beginning although you know it truly should be
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superfluous the caveat is obviously we are coming from a history of you know truly odious racism that
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cannot be denied and it is not in the lifetime of any person listening to this podcast where that has
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been effectively denied by sane educated people right i mean we are we're climbing out of the darkness
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but we have climbed quite a ways and there's a source of confusion here that you point out in the book
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in various places which is really worth highlighting which is to say that even if it's quite clear
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that a current problem is due to racism in the past you can draw a straight line between whatever it is
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redlining and you know disparities in wealth between the white and black community say it doesn't mean
00:25:45.980
that the persistence of that problem in this case wealth inequality is due to racism in the present
00:25:53.740
right so it's just kind of the origin story and the and the current conditions of maintenance
00:25:58.900
that are easily confused and this relates to crime it relates to disparities in education
00:26:03.760
health disparities in health care or attitudes you know toward receiving health care right so you can
00:26:11.720
you can draw a line from the tuskegee experiments to a certain attitude toward doctors and and the
00:26:19.220
medical establishment which you know in the in the aftermath of tuskegee would be quite understandable
00:26:23.820
which persists to this day but it doesn't mean that current attitudes that one can find in the black
00:26:30.700
community let's say toward vaccination is due to actual racist policies or people in the medical
00:26:38.680
establishment today that part is worth sorting out but what would you say to someone that and this is
00:26:48.200
also something you address in the book what would you say to someone at this point in the conversation
00:26:52.760
would want to pull the brakes and say listen this is a tempest in a teacup this is something that's
00:26:57.340
happening on college campuses this is something that concerns overeducated people like yourselves
00:27:01.960
you know a white guy like me just doesn't like to be inconvenienced in having to pick his words
00:27:07.040
carefully in conversations like this or in or in any other context it's in some sense this is all a
00:27:13.440
species of white privilege or elitism and what should really be addressed is the looming problem
00:27:20.320
on the other side of the circus here which is real racism a real burgeoning movement of something like
00:27:29.140
white supremacy you know in the aftermath of trump we've got q anon and we've got people storming the
00:27:35.440
capitol but we don't have our priorities straight yeah that's um an interesting thing that i've heard from
00:27:41.140
many people and the answer to that is what institutions are those people taking over and i've
00:27:45.180
noticed that there is a debate team trick where people then pretend that the question is what
00:27:49.160
institutions are people of conservative politics taking over and of course you could talk about a
00:27:53.540
little thing called the supreme court etc but the issue is what about these people you know with their
00:27:58.500
fists bared and their confederate flags you know running up the steps what institutions are they taking
00:28:04.460
over there are more such people than there were 10 minutes ago yes social media has a way of taking care
00:28:10.360
of that but what are they spreading their tendrils into because what's going on on the left is that
00:28:17.300
entire institutions of learning and thinking and justice and art are being turned completely upside down and
00:28:25.080
the idea that that doesn't matter that that's just a bunch of white men complaining is anti-intellectual
00:28:31.240
it's no nothing and it frankly is a symptom of the traditional anti-intellectualism of america i think
00:28:40.440
nobody in france at least publicly would ask that question if institutions were being threatened in
00:28:46.680
that way and then there was also say you know le pen and his friends on the right these things do matter
00:28:52.100
and as far as the whole systemic racism argument the idea that if you see a disparity it's due to racism
00:29:00.740
that you apply the sentence it's racism is extremely elementary and until about 10 minutes ago it was
00:29:08.920
something that you heard from a kind of fringe left professor or community activist and you always
00:29:17.300
knew that it was a little bit it was kind of a bloviation you didn't take it completely seriously
00:29:23.100
and i think this was true of a great many people black and white including people left of center
00:29:28.180
everybody has always known what a grievous oversimplification that is of the way a society
00:29:33.840
works and yet when it comes to race we're encouraged especially today to pretend that that makes sense
00:29:39.580
and to anoint the people who put it forth as brilliant i remember back in way back in 2010 for
00:29:46.940
example i remember talking to a black reporter this person was not and is not especially famous if i
00:29:54.380
said the person's name it wouldn't help and i'm not going to give the name but we were talking about
00:29:58.600
racism and she was not a fan of mine she had been assigned to interview me but i could tell that she
00:30:03.580
you know thought of me as this this reactionary right winger as a lot of people like her tended to
00:30:09.780
think back then more than they do now but we're keeping everything civil and at one point i asked her so
00:30:15.720
what is your evidence that racism is this hideous scar running through our society right now to the
00:30:22.620
extent that you're implying yes racism exists but what i want you to really tell me what you're
00:30:27.680
talking about and what she said and how calmly she said it was what really struck me she said well i live
00:30:33.500
in um a disadvantaged black neighborhood and there's a school in it where almost every kid who goes there
00:30:41.020
is white or south asian and it's one of these elite public schools where you have to take a test
00:30:46.740
to get in etc and because for historical circumstances it happens to be in what is now
00:30:51.020
surroundingly a mostly brown neighborhood mostly black neighborhood she said all the white kids i see
00:30:56.960
the white kids going in there every day and i just say that's racism you know it's racism okay but
00:31:02.240
the sentence it is racism implies that she thinks that the reason is some sort of racism going on now
00:31:09.500
and i guess if you pumped her which i didn't bother to because it makes people too angry she would say
00:31:13.560
that there's some sort of subtle racism on the part of white teachers that keeps black kids from doing
00:31:18.760
well but never mind that those black kids have had mostly black and latino teachers for generations and
00:31:24.160
even if they didn't what exactly is this subtle racism that would keep somebody from being able
00:31:29.180
to take a test well and if you ask that question people's eyes just roll now the reason that so
00:31:34.900
many white kids are going to that school and the surrounding black kids are going to crummy public
00:31:38.900
schools elsewhere in the neighborhood can be traced to aspects of racism that trace all the way back
00:31:44.020
to the civil war certainly but those are things that happened almost all in the past and therefore you
00:31:50.560
can't stamp out that racism now many of the people who talk this way if i say this will say oh yeah we know
00:31:56.640
but they don't act like they know because they say it's racism pretending that english is a language
00:32:02.160
that doesn't have tense you're supposed to look at that school and say it's racism that caused that
00:32:08.460
which creates a whole different set of responses that one might have other than standing there with a
00:32:13.420
baleful expression and saying that is racism as if there's some racism that we need to battle right now
00:32:19.320
the only reason that you allow that kind of lapse in logic that you would otherwise apply
00:32:24.100
these are people who are quite capable of thinking from a to b to c is because it feels good to adopt
00:32:30.280
that view of things and therefore fashion yourself as having a certain insight but it's not insight
00:32:35.860
nothing is that elementary that we actually value that actually gives you a challenge why in the world
00:32:41.780
are we accepting this notion that when it comes to black social history and only that topic
00:32:46.740
everything is as easy as abc it's really infantilizing and yet we're supposed to think of it
00:32:53.560
as fierceness and sophistication it's a tragedy that's going on right now so what are we to think
00:33:00.540
about affirmative action you know there's really two forms of affirmative action that only one goes
00:33:06.520
by that name but there is a there's a lowering of standards that you point out with respect to what
00:33:12.980
passes as as intellectual products at this moment if your skin is of the right color or if you're
00:33:21.820
you know from the right victimized identity group right so you can be flagrantly irrational
00:33:28.200
and really contemptuous of reason explicitly so and get applauded for it if you're you know someone
00:33:37.460
like ibram kendi i don't know i don't know if you've ever saw kendi asked to define racism i think
00:33:43.300
he was at the aspen ideas i tweeted i tweeted that out because i consider that to be an emblematic
00:33:49.100
minute of our times yeah yeah i mean so i i can only imagine what have would have happened to me
00:33:54.560
had i been on that stage asked to define anything having performed in that way it's just you would
00:34:00.960
have been eviscerated it's just unthinkable and yet this is in that crowd it's almost a a spiritual
00:34:08.220
accomplishment to be able to be satisfied with that kind of literally it's not even pablum you
00:34:14.880
know it's it's not even tautology it's just it really is just a a fuck you to the standards of
00:34:21.700
argumentation that would would be applied to anyone else so it you know it should be infuriating to
00:34:27.620
people that it has this much leverage in our culture now it's impossible to exaggerate we in
00:34:37.100
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