Making Sense - Sam Harris - #336 — The Roots of Identity Politics

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.820 Today I'm speaking with Yasha Malk.

00:00:49.960 Yasha is a writer and academic, known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis

00:00:57.780 of liberal democracy.

00:00:59.960 He was born in Germany and holds a degree in history from Cambridge and a Ph.D. in government

00:01:06.860 from Harvard.

00:01:08.340 He is currently a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins and the founder of

00:01:12.920 the digital magazine Persuasion.

00:01:15.300 He's also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,

00:01:20.420 and host of the Good Fight podcast.

00:01:22.700 His most recent book is The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time.

00:01:29.560 And that is what we discuss.

00:01:31.500 We talk about the origins of identity politics, his concept of the identity synthesis, skepticism

00:01:37.720 as to whether or not any of these ideas are a problem, racial segregation in schools, the

00:01:43.460 ideological changes that have occurred on college campuses, the contributions of Michel Foucault

00:01:49.440 and post-modernism, the rejection of universalism and objectivity, Derek Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw,

00:01:57.740 the imagined permanence of racism, the indoctrination of children, intersectionality, white privilege,

00:02:05.460 institutional racism, equity versus equality, racial preferences during the COVID pandemic,

00:02:12.080 the asymmetric advantages of authoritarianism, class and elitism, affirmative action, media coverage,

00:02:19.420 coverage of crime and violence, social media and the business model of mainstream journalism,

00:02:24.320 and other topics.

00:02:26.580 Anyway, I hope you find this conversation as useful and as clarifying as I did.

00:02:32.420 And now I bring you Yasha Mauck.

00:02:40.520 I am here with Yasha Mauck.

00:02:42.520 Yasha, thanks for joining me.

00:02:44.220 Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, Sam.

00:02:45.820 So you are a repeat guest on the podcast, but perhaps remind people what you're doing.

00:02:51.680 How do you summarize your place on the intellectual landscape these days?

00:02:57.720 Well, you know, I think similarly to you, which is to say that I am, you know, a critic of some of

00:03:05.340 the assumptions that have come to dominate our mainstream institutions.

00:03:10.760 But I also keep a very clear distance from some of the more knee-jerk and reactionary elements on the

00:03:18.300 right, so it can be a slightly lonely life.

00:03:20.800 But I like to say that I'm a democracy crisis hipster.

00:03:23.440 I'm somebody who started to worry about the crisis of democracy before it was cool.

00:03:28.080 I wrote a number of books and countless articles about the threat of right-wing populism and some

00:03:34.700 other things, forms of populism. But the latest book is really my most ambitious attempt to make

00:03:39.800 sense of the ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation that have come to be so influential

00:03:45.820 in universities and nonprofits and politics and increasingly the corporate world over the last

00:03:52.800 10 years. And that's called The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time. And it's just

00:03:58.060 I want to focus on the book. I'm very grateful that you have written it. It's really, you have

00:04:04.640 finally produced the book that tells the story of how things have gotten so crazy, especially on the

00:04:10.160 left side of our politics. But summarize your current work in a little bit more detail. So where are you

00:04:17.960 in academia now? And also remind people about Persuasion and your own very fine podcast.

00:04:24.600 Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I'm a professor of a practice of international affairs at

00:04:30.600 Johns Hopkins University. I'm a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I write for The

00:04:37.100 Atlantic. I've actually become a publisher of a German magazine called Die Zeit recently. And in the

00:04:44.820 summer of 2020, I founded a magazine at a community called Persuasion, which really is trying to stand up

00:04:50.860 for philosophically liberal ideals like free speech against the threats from the right,

00:04:56.220 but also some of the ways in which we're being undermined in a lot of more progressive and left

00:05:00.540 leaning spaces. So, you know, if you're interested in that, please come and join our list at persuasion.community

00:05:07.340 or subscribe to my podcast called The Good Fight, which has only the best guests such as Sam about half a

00:05:14.080 year ago.

00:05:15.080 Yeah, and it is a great podcast. I regularly catch it. Okay, so let's talk about the book. It's, again,

00:05:21.380 the book is The Identity Trap, just out now, I believe, at the point we will be releasing this.

00:05:27.440 And we will track through it, but by no means exhaust the points of interest in it. You describe

00:05:34.860 the core phenomenon that we're going to talk about as the identity synthesis. What is the identity

00:05:41.420 synthesis? Yeah, so first of all, you know, we just need a damn name to refer to this ideology with.

00:05:49.100 You know, Freddie DeBoer has this point, just tell me what to call the ideology and I'll happily

00:05:53.160 call it that. And that's different from other ideologies, right? Some people love socialism,

00:05:58.620 some people hate socialism, but both of those sets of people can agree to call it socialism,

00:06:02.620 even if they might have disagreements about, you know, whether socialism is to blame for how horribly

00:06:07.280 wrong Venezuela has gone recently, right? With this ideology, we're in this really strange moment

00:06:12.120 where a set of new ideas about the role that identity should play in our lives, in our society,

00:06:20.380 in our politics, have come to exert tremendous influence, and we don't have a name for this

00:06:26.040 ideology that is generally accepted. So I call it the identity synthesis, because as I tried to show

00:06:32.600 in the first part of the book, they really are an amalgam of different ideas that originate in the

00:06:42.300 intellectual life of the second half of the 20th century. My story starts with Michel Foucault and

00:06:49.040 the postmodernist and later more broadly poststructuralist tradition in post-war France. It then goes to the

00:06:56.220 post-colonialists who are trying to think about the kinds of ideas that can help to liberate people

00:07:03.060 in what they call the third world in the 70s and 80s. And then it really takes shape in American law

00:07:10.720 schools under the banner of critical race theory. So this is not a form of cultural Marxism, as some

00:07:16.420 people want to say. You don't understand it by simply starting with Marxism, taking class out and

00:07:21.620 putting culture in. It has its own intellectual history that we really need to understand

00:07:26.720 to chronicle where these ideas are coming from and how they operate today.

00:07:31.900 Well, I want to talk about the history here. I think it's fascinating, and it's something that I

00:07:36.640 actually have not talked about on the podcast, though I have wailed and gnashed my teeth a lot

00:07:42.040 about what I generally refer to as wokeness or identitarian politics on the left. But before we

00:07:50.840 dive in to start, what would you say to someone who denies that any of this is a problem? I mean,

00:07:59.440 there are very smart people on the left, and they're not necessarily academics or activists,

00:08:04.580 for whom the first response to the discussion we're about to have will be more or less to accuse

00:08:10.400 us of having been taken in by right-wing propaganda. I mean, they'll insist that social

00:08:16.320 injustice is still all too real. And that's a point that you and I, I think, would be fairly

00:08:21.960 quick to concede. Yes, absolutely. Right? I mean, we're not denying that social injustice is entirely

00:08:27.560 behind us. We're not denying that inequality isn't a problem, etc. But this imagined critic of ours, who,

00:08:36.140 again, is all too real, would say that beyond any shame-faced acknowledgement we might make

00:08:42.880 that racism and inequality are problems, anything else we say is probably motivated by our own

00:08:51.120 bigotry or, at a minimum, it's just an expression of clueless white privilege. So, I mean, all this

00:08:57.900 talk about wokeness being a problem is essentially a Trumpist hallucination. And for instance, I just

00:09:04.100 heard this morning the comedian and podcaster Mark Maron say this. And I don't know Mark, but I like him,

00:09:12.680 I like his podcast. He's certainly left of me politically, although I consider myself very much a

00:09:18.800 creature of the left. But, I mean, this is where he is. I mean, he said explicitly this, this is more or less

00:09:23.800 verbatim. He said that the only real issues of the day are fascism and climate change. And all this talk

00:09:31.200 about wokeness and cancel culture and censorship is just a distraction. What would you say to that?

00:09:37.460 Yeah, so I think there's a few different forms in which that argument comes. The first is to say

00:09:43.660 that there's really nothing new about these ideas, that all that wokeness is, is wanting to be honest

00:09:48.280 and upfront about the injustice that persists today or something like that. You know, that often comes

00:09:54.180 with a claim that it's impossible to define something like wokeness or something like critical

00:09:59.460 race theory. And I think it's true that a lot of the people who rail against wokeness and critical

00:10:03.320 race theory all day long on Twitter wouldn't be able to define it and call anything that might

00:10:08.180 be reasonable or anything that's in any way progressive woke in an undiscriminating way.

00:10:13.120 And that then has tempted the defenders of this ideology, you know, MSNBC and sometimes the big

00:10:18.920 newspapers and so on to claim, well, you know, all that woke is, is wanting kids in the South to learn

00:10:23.320 about the history of slavery or something like that. You know, that, to that, I would say that when you

00:10:28.680 actually go through the intellectual history, as I think we will in a moment, you just recognize

00:10:33.320 that that is profoundly wrong, that the founders of critical race theory, for example, were explicit

00:10:40.560 opponents of the civil rights movement. But somebody like Derek Bell, you know, marked we shall

00:10:46.480 overcome what you call the theme song of the civil rights movement and said that we need to move beyond

00:10:51.060 what he calls the defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement. For somebody like

00:10:56.600 Kimberly Crenshaw, you know, the fundamental tenets of CRT are, what she says, fundamentally at odds

00:11:03.960 with the politics of somebody like Barack Obama. So there is just a new set of ideas here that as

00:11:10.900 people interested in intellectual and cultural life, we should take seriously. So that's the first

00:11:14.920 thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that part of a complaint or part of this pushback

00:11:20.640 is to say, well, look, when people complain about cancel culture, for example, they're just afraid of a

00:11:26.320 healthy consequence culture. They, you know, either just want to go around, you know, using the n-word

00:11:33.040 or something like that, or they just, you know, are making a mountain out of molehills when people

00:11:40.220 sort of get the deserved consequences for, you know, morally bad action. I try very hard in the book

00:11:48.520 to respond to that by not telling many of those stories, which we all have heard at this point,

00:11:55.420 but by telling stories where these questions really matter in terms of what our society looks like.

00:12:00.980 Stories, for example, about teachers at many of the most elite private schools throughout the

00:12:06.580 country, now coming to classrooms in the first or second grade, and separating children out by their

00:12:14.200 racial identities, saying if you're black, you go over there, if you're Latino, you go over there,

00:12:19.080 if you're Asian, you go over there. And by the way, if you're white, you go over there. And that I

00:12:23.500 think, and we can get into that in more detail later, it's just not a good way of building a

00:12:27.980 cooperative community or a healthy country, in part because it encourages the zero-sum conflict,

00:12:33.960 and in part because it's really naive about what it's going to do to the white kids, right? The idea

00:12:37.980 here is that they're going to become, you know, I mean, they're supposed to embrace the race,

00:12:42.440 see themselves as racial beings, embrace the whiteness, and then the idea is that they're

00:12:47.560 going to fight against the privileges of white people. Everything in social psychology and history

00:12:51.600 suggests that the opposite is going to happen, that when you tell seven-year-olds the most important

00:12:55.780 thing about who they are is that they're white, they're going to fight on behalf of the interests

00:12:59.340 of whites, and that's the kind of politics that you and I both abhor. And so, you know, and then

00:13:05.860 thirdly, the question is whether or not this has negative consequences, right? Whether this is just

00:13:11.740 trying to build a better world, and here I think there often is a temptation to say, hey,

00:13:17.500 the problem with these ideas is that it's really well-intentioned people who are fighting against

00:13:21.800 things like racism and sexism and homophobia and injustice, and sometimes they just go a little

00:13:27.720 bit too far. And then the response is, what do you mean going too far? How can you go too far in the

00:13:32.100 fight against racism, right? And here I think it's really important to really explain what those ideas

00:13:37.620 are in order to make clear to people, this is not going too far. It may be motivated by genuine

00:13:42.800 injustices. The people who believe in these ideas may genuinely be wanting to build a better world,

00:13:48.120 but they're in fact pulling us in the wrong direction. They're in fact pulling us to a society

00:13:53.900 in which everybody will profoundly and perennially be defined by the groups into which they are born

00:14:01.580 in ways that will make it much harder to understand each other, to treat each other fairly, to build

00:14:06.520 thriving communities and stable democracies.

00:14:10.760 Yeah, I think you've just planted a flag at really the heart of the problem here, where even though we

00:14:17.920 can agree that injustice and racism and various forms of inequality, wealth inequality, academic

00:14:24.340 inequality with respect to crime and violence, etc. All of these are social ills that good people

00:14:32.100 should want to correct. The proffered remedy here is exactly the wrong one. And in fact, it perversely

00:14:39.420 ramifies the very disorder it's pretending to target. And so we'll get into the logic of that

00:14:46.940 in the moment, but I want to stick with the history. I think probably the best place to start

00:14:50.820 are the universities, particularly elite universities in America. More or less all of my time

00:14:57.980 at a university preceded the changes you talk about in the book. I mean, when I was a freshman at

00:15:03.800 Stanford, everyone had to take a Western civilization track. And I was among, I think, the last classes

00:15:10.820 that got a standard great books seminar out of that year without being told that they were reading

00:15:16.780 too many dead white men. And I do recall that, I think it was two years later, Jesse Jackson led a

00:15:24.020 march on the campus with, you know, hundreds of students chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has

00:15:30.060 got to go. And I remember that making national news, but I also remember not paying much attention to it.

00:15:36.980 The curriculum was then changed at Stanford, I think, two years later in 1989. But then I got, you know,

00:15:43.660 I have a kind of a weird backstory. And so I got to sample campus culture quite a bit later because I

00:15:49.480 took a full decade off between what would have been my, what was my sophomore and what would have

00:15:55.120 been my junior year. And so I went back to Stanford in 98. And the only thing I witnessed at that point

00:16:03.200 that seems a bellwether of the kinds of changes we're going to talk about is that I attended a lecture

00:16:08.920 by Jacques Derrida, along with thousands of other students. And I was quite amazed at what was passing

00:16:15.680 for philosophical insight in that room. And I remember looking around thinking, what the fuck

00:16:21.380 is going on here? I mean, I just, I could not believe the mouth noises this man was making. And it was a

00:16:26.600 kind of a, a watershed moment for me intellectually, because I was a student of Richard Rorty at that

00:16:31.600 point. And I was basically devouring every course he was teaching. And Rorty had clearly invited Derrida

00:16:38.200 and introduced him on the stage with great fanfare. And then I was the first and perhaps only

00:16:45.420 student to walk out of that lecture. And I mean, it was almost in the spirit of intellectual protest.

00:16:51.600 And I literally, I was quite happy to be visibly seen to have walked out of the lecture. And I

00:16:57.060 literally had to crawl over the bodies of the credulous postmodernists in the making, because the

00:17:03.280 aisles were filled with, with students just sitting on the floor in violation of every possible fire

00:17:08.520 code. And that was honestly the first and last thing I noticed happening on campus. And I don't

00:17:15.260 think I knew anything else was happening until I saw footage of Nicholas Christakis getting heckled in

00:17:22.060 the, by a mob in the quad at Yale. I think I was like 16 years later, you know, around Halloween of

00:17:28.820 2015. So I went completely to sleep on this issue for, you know, more than a decade and really didn't

00:17:36.940 understand what I was noticing stirring when I was on a campus. But you've been on a campus for quite

00:17:42.480 some time and continuously. When did you first notice the change? And just how did you first

00:17:48.580 intersect with this as an issue? So first of all, let me just say that that fight over a course like

00:17:53.580 Western Civ is, I think, a great little microcosm of how part of a core of a critique has some amount

00:18:02.020 of value, but the solution that the adherents of the identity trap then choose is, I think, the wrong

00:18:11.660 one. So I think, you know, in part because students at these universities now have origins in many more

00:18:18.020 parts of the world. And in part, because that actually is the universe of where interesting work has been

00:18:22.440 done in human history, it would make a lot of sense to enrich that kind of canon with the writings of

00:18:29.700 Confucius and the writings of Ibn al-Khatib and the writings of all kinds of really interesting thinkers from

00:18:35.180 other parts of the world. And to fight for that would have been a perfectly appropriate movement. But instead, the

00:18:41.300 slogan was Western Civ has got to go, right? It wasn't, let's also have a class on these other things, or let's enrich this

00:18:46.440 class with a broader set of readings. Let's reform it in ways that make it a better starting point for a

00:18:52.260 truly global conversation. So say, let's get rid of these ideas because they're exclusionary in this

00:18:57.060 kind of way. And that, I think, pre-shadows in interesting ways the debate today about what are

00:19:01.300 the right solutions to all kinds of social ills. You know, I would say similarly to you that I had

00:19:08.900 two moments when I started to be aware of these ideas. One is in the classroom. So one is, like you,

00:19:20.620 you know, coming across many of those very postmodern ideas, or later coming across sort of elements of

00:19:27.100 critical race theory, seeing that people are aware, insisting in certain academic contexts,

00:19:32.140 on seeing something exclusively through the lens of race or gender and sexual orientation,

00:19:40.860 that they had become, had come to have a kind of monomaniacal view, in the same way in which

00:19:46.700 Marxists used to just think about social class and used to try as hard as they could to squeeze any

00:19:52.740 historical event into the lens of social class, even if it doesn't really make sense. I started to see in

00:19:58.040 many academic disciplines an attempt to squeeze everything into race or sexual orientation or

00:20:03.420 gender, even when it didn't really seem to have anything to do with that. But like you, I sort of

00:20:08.340 thought, well, you know, academia, I mean, 19-year-olds always have terrible ideas. I had my plenty, you know,

00:20:14.320 my share of terrible ideas when I was 19. And academics always like overly broad, complicated theories,

00:20:19.980 most of which don't really seem to have a real impact on the world. This is not going to have any real

00:20:25.900 life applications. And I started changing my mind about that, in a sense, when I stumbled across a

00:20:33.980 website, I think perhaps late in 2014 or early in 2015, called everydayfeminism.com. And that was the

00:20:42.660 first time that I saw many of these ideas distilled in a sort of BuzzFeed viral form, in a more popularized,

00:20:50.380 in a more vulgarized version for a mass audience. And I thought, wow, actually, in this sense,

00:20:55.900 these ideas might be able to have a real influence. I have a couple of the headlines that I stumbled

00:21:02.160 across here. One is, four thoughts for your yoga teacher who thinks cultural appropriation is fun.

00:21:08.980 You call it professionalism, I call it oppression in a three-piece suit. Six ways to respond to sexist

00:21:15.100 microaggressions in everyday conversations. And my favorite, so you're a breast man, here are three

00:21:20.560 reasons that could be sexist. Now, to be clear, I think this is a popularized version of ideas that are

00:21:25.560 more subtle than that. But that's the first time when I was like, oh, this has sort of escaped the

00:21:29.540 lab and is out in the wild.

00:21:33.280 Okay, so how did we get here? I mean, you really trace the origins of this quite methodically in

00:21:41.320 your book. And you take us on a tour through Marxism and postmodernism and postcolonialism.

00:21:50.500 I think we should probably talk, however, briefly about some of the key figures here,

00:21:56.140 like Foucault and Edward Said. And then we'll get into critical race theory and intersectionality,

00:22:02.400 Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw, you've already mentioned. And then we'll just deal with some

00:22:06.540 of the concepts that this style of thinking have rendered fairly indelible in our public conversation

00:22:13.360 now. Things like white privilege and structural and systemic and institutional racism. Those are

00:22:20.740 all synonyms, as far as I know. So we'll just get into the content. But let's start with the origin

00:22:28.140 story. How did we get here?

00:22:30.620 Yeah, so the common conservative story about this is that it's just a form of cultural Marxism. You

00:22:36.020 take out class and put in these identity categories into Marxism. That's how you get there. I think

00:22:41.760 that's a profound mistake. It really can't explain the actual intellectual history of this. And it

00:22:46.680 can't explain the themes that are so prominent today. So where the story starts in my mind is with

00:22:53.520 Michel Foucault. And Foucault is a critic of what he calls grand narratives, these kind of attempts to

00:23:01.960 structure our understanding of the world through a particular set of conceptual prisms. One of the

00:23:09.600 grand narratives that he was opposing was precisely Marxism. He thought this idea to try and understand

00:23:15.060 all of world history through class struggle and then to predict the kind of revolution that that'll lead to

00:23:20.500 and to imagine what the society that comes after the revolution might lead to, that is all naive and is going

00:23:26.260 to lead to disaster. But he also rejected the grand narratives of liberalism. He said, you know,

00:23:32.740 that structural account of what human nature is and how we seek freedom and the kind of institutions

00:23:37.240 that can preserve inside it, that is just as fraudulent. And so that pushed him towards a really deep

00:23:42.000 skepticism towards any forms or any claims to universal truth and even to basic identity categories,

00:23:50.180 interestingly. So even though Foucault was, in our terminology, gay or homosexual,

00:23:55.400 he refused those labels. He thought that they were overly constraining of the variety of sexual

00:24:02.240 experiences that people have in the world. The second important contribution he makes is that he

00:24:10.000 really changes how we think about political power. So, you know, you ask a smart high schooler,

00:24:18.920 how does political power work? And they'll tell you something about, you know, the president having a lot of

00:24:24.600 power and being the commander in chief or there being laws that are promulgated by Congress or something

00:24:29.380 like that, right? It's some top-down model. What Foucault is saying is, no, power actually inheres in the kind

00:24:36.260 of discourses that really dominate our culture. You know, this podcast to Foucault is an exercise of power that

00:24:47.040 imposes categories on people and constrains them in the kind of moves that they can make that helps to render

00:24:54.040 them unfree. And Foucault, as a result, becomes a little bit apolitical. And Noam Chomsky has said

00:25:03.140 that he's the most amoral, not immoral, but amoral person he's ever met. Because to Foucault, you know,

00:25:08.460 you destroy or you challenge one kind of discourse that might give you a moment of freedom, but the new

00:25:13.380 discourse is going to end up being just as constraining. So the funny story that I tell is

00:25:18.160 that I will lay out in the conversation, I lay out in much more detail in the book, how sort of step

00:25:23.800 by step, this is the impetus that leads to the creation of the identity trap. But I think Foucault

00:25:29.780 himself would be quite disturbed by what became of his ideas, by the naive way we think about identity

00:25:38.260 today. And by the way, frankly, in which things like social media exert that kind of discourse of

00:25:43.420 control over people, I think he would actually be quite perturbed by how his ideas have ended up

00:25:48.880 playing out in the world. Yeah, well, so the core contribution, I think the postmodernists made here,

00:25:56.320 and this is something you spell out in the book, and it really is the seed of, you know, the corruption

00:26:02.680 of the intellectual and ethical and political norms here that follows, is this rejection in principle

00:26:11.740 of universalism, universalist values, universalist epistemology. I mean, any truth claim we make about

00:26:19.760 anything, scientific or otherwise, is at bottom an expression of power. It's just the ruination of

00:26:27.360 epistemology, as far as I can tell. And it's, you know, all we have are texts and interpretations

00:26:32.160 thereof, and there's no grounding of human knowledge in anything but the assertion of power

00:26:39.140 over others. And that's, you know, that while there are a fair number of turnings of the wheel

00:26:45.080 since Foucault, as you point out, and Foucault wouldn't necessarily recognize what has become of

00:26:50.300 his thinking in modern hands, there's this basic skepticism about the possibility of universalism

00:26:59.240 of any kind. And there's this celebration of the shattering of society into this perpetual

00:27:08.360 identitarian contest where you have, you know, and we'll talk about some of the concepts here that

00:27:14.320 enshrine this thinking, something like, you know, standpoint epistemology, and we'll get there in a

00:27:18.820 minute. But is that how you see Foucault's contribution or the contribution of the postmodernists

00:27:24.540 in general?

00:27:25.700 Yes, I think there's sort of one and a half contributions that they make to the core themes

00:27:30.680 of the identity synthesis today. So the first, exactly as you're pointing out, is this profound

00:27:36.920 skepticism of objectivity, of a deep embrace of a subjective reading of the world, the idea of

00:27:47.040 my truth that stands equivalent to your truth, and there's no neutral way of being an arbiter

00:27:53.920 between those two things. And the political implications of that, that, you know, phrases

00:27:58.100 like, you know, all men are equal, you know, are just ideological claptrap, because they can have

00:28:06.000 no objective foundation, or applicability, that just the grand narrative we use to flatter ourselves

00:28:12.340 into thinking that we have a more humane society, or that we have something to live up to, right.

00:28:17.920 So that's the direct contribution. And then there's the indirect contribution, which starts to take us

00:28:22.680 to the postcolonial project. Now, this is a set of thinkers, at a time in the 50s and 60s, where,

00:28:29.860 you know, decades or centuries of colonial exploitation are finally coming to an end. And many countries around

00:28:36.280 the world have to think, all right, on what kind of set of ideas and principles are we going to

00:28:42.180 found our nations? And they're quite skeptical, or deeply skeptical of a kind of Western set of ideas

00:28:48.080 that they see as tainted with colonialism. So that's a basic background. And somebody like

00:28:54.560 Edward Said, Palestinian American, who has roots in Palestine, grows up in Egypt, and then in New England,

00:29:03.500 becomes a professor at Columbia University, uses the tools of discourse critique that Foucault

00:29:12.040 has inspired in him. In fact, Foucault is the first thinker he mentions positively in his most famous

00:29:18.080 book, Orientalism, and just about the only thinker he mentions positively in that book. So he says, look,

00:29:23.620 perhaps these tools can help us to understand how the Orientalist discourse in the West, the way that

00:29:30.320 the West has thought about the East has helped to inspire, to defend, to create a fig leaf for its

00:29:39.700 domination of those countries. But then he says, we need to go a step further, whereas Foucault is sort

00:29:46.220 of quietist, ultimately says one discourse is as bad as another. He says, no, one discourse is not as bad

00:29:51.700 as another. The whole point here is to change the discourse in such a way that countries in the East

00:29:58.220 and people in the East have more agency, and perhaps to invert the kind of discourse that we had

00:30:03.180 earlier. So it becomes a politicized form of discourse analysis or politicized form of discourse

00:30:10.180 critique. And that, I think, is a second theme, one that has its roots in Foucault, but really comes to

00:30:16.240 fruition with Said, that helps to explain a core theme of these ideas today. That what it is to do

00:30:23.960 politics today in many contexts is not to, you know, campaign for a political candidate or to

00:30:30.460 argue for a particular kind of law. It is to deconstruct a public discourse. It is to critique

00:30:38.220 or problematize, my least favorite word, to find problematic some way that we talk about the world.

00:30:45.300 It is to engage in a kind of cultural criticism, right? Like today, we interpret as naturally political

00:30:52.300 or as a natural form of activist politics, you know, celebrating or critiquing or debating about

00:30:58.920 the Barbie movie. And that, I think, comes in many important ways from Said's response to Foucault.

00:31:09.100 I just had a memory when you were talking about the transition from Foucault to Said around this

00:31:15.280 issue of there being no such thing as objective knowledge without politics. It's all just politics

00:31:21.120 at bottom. There was one other landmark in my pilgrim's progress into this issue that I should

00:31:26.640 have recalled, which was I was in a journal club when I was getting my PhD in neuroscience at UCLA

00:31:33.140 and was quite blindsided by a criticism of some paper we were reading, you know, some neuroscience paper

00:31:44.160 that I think it was actually a guest professor brought in and she launched into a feminist slash

00:31:54.480 post-colonialist critique of really science in principle. And I remember it being just a truly

00:32:04.280 lacerating hour of really kind of failures of, ultimately of failures of politeness on the part

00:32:11.980 of many people there to try to embrace these views. I mean, it was just so crazy-making.

00:32:17.860 Anyway, so I should have known something was up. That was later. That was more like 2007 or 6 or so.

00:32:27.840 So the post-colonialism, obviously, you know, there are many critical things to be said about

00:32:32.880 the history of Western predation on what we now call the developing world. So, you know, colonialism is

00:32:41.540 not a happy story, although, you know, there are certainly local examples where you can't quite

00:32:48.200 claim it was universally bad in every case, you know, watching the British try to get the Indians

00:32:55.620 to stop practicing sati, the burning of a widow on the pyre of her husband. I mean, that's not all bad.

00:33:04.980 But no one wants to defend that history without caveat. How do we get to critical race theory and

00:33:15.420 intersectionality from here?

00:33:18.400 Yeah, so there's one more key step that I think we have to chronicle. And that is the thought of

00:33:27.420 Gayatri Spivak, who's also a post-colonial scholar, grown up in Kolkata, in Bengal, in West India,

00:33:35.640 also comes to teach at Columbia University as a literary critic. She also is deeply steeped in

00:33:41.020 postmodern thought. She makes her name as a translator and editor of some of the key

00:33:45.960 post-structuralist texts. And so she agrees with one position that people like Foucault held,

00:33:53.880 which really seems to be fundamentally at odds with where we arrived at, where we got to at the

00:33:58.460 end. And that is the idea that we should be skeptical about these essentialist claims about

00:34:03.800 identity. Skeptical about the idea that somehow if you're a member of some group, like a racial group

00:34:10.000 or a different kind of group, perhaps, that just gives us some essential knowledge about who you

00:34:15.480 are, that some essential characteristics of yours are going to turn on your membership in that kind of

00:34:20.660 group. So she buys, as a good postmodernist, post-structuralist, the critique of essentialist

00:34:27.320 accounts of identity. But she is also perturbed by a conversation that Michel Foucault has with

00:34:37.280 Deleuze, I believe, in which they say, you know, it's really time to stop. And you can see how that's

00:34:42.700 a critique of Marxism. It's time for the intellectuals to stop being the avant-garde that speaks on behalf of

00:34:49.340 these identity groups. We shouldn't be speaking on behalf of proletarians in Paris. They can speak

00:34:53.380 for themselves. And Spivak reads this, and she says, well, hang on a second, you know, what she

00:34:59.820 calls the subaltern, the most oppressed people, the least, you know, resourceful people, the people

00:35:05.220 who have the least access to education and other things in the streets of Calcutta, they can't speak

00:35:10.280 for themselves. They simply don't have the standing and the tools that perhaps a white worker in Paris

00:35:16.080 might have. Somebody has to speak for them. And so she comes to say, well, perhaps in order to be

00:35:22.680 able to speak for them and use the identity categories we need to do that, we should, for

00:35:28.280 strategic purposes, adopt an essentialist account of identity. So she coins this term in an interview

00:35:37.140 of strategic essentialism. Yes, philosophically, we should reject essentialism. But in practice,

00:35:43.060 for strategic purposes, we should act as though those objections didn't exist. And that means

00:35:51.200 encouraging people to define themselves by these groups into which we're born in order to be able

00:35:57.860 to fight against various forms of injustice. In a line that today might get her in trouble in

00:36:02.900 progressive circles, she says, look, perhaps there's no essential nature to what a woman is.

00:36:07.320 But for strategic purposes, let's just define a woman as having a clitoris and move on and be able

00:36:11.760 to do feminist politics. So Spivak really inspires another...

00:36:16.780 Although I would point out, I can't remember if you make this point in the book anywhere, but

00:36:20.460 there is a tension, maybe even incoherence around some of these ideas on the left currently,

00:36:29.080 where you'll have it said that race, for instance, is nothing but a social construct. And yet,

00:36:36.140 there's still an assertion of essentialism with respect to identity around race, right?

00:36:42.960 This is exactly what I was about to say, Sam, and this is exactly where it comes from. That is an

00:36:47.500 applied form of strategic essentialism. And we've all heard it. Race is a social construct,

00:36:51.900 right? Forget about race. It's complete, terrible fiction. But we're going to go on to talk about the

00:36:57.180 world as though race was the only salient category. And in fact, we're going to encourage children to

00:37:03.420 define themselves by the race. One of the most influential consultancy companies that

00:37:09.200 consults elite private schools in their curricula is called Embrace Race. And one of the things they

00:37:15.100 say is race is a social construct. And then they say the goal of a good education is to get students

00:37:20.240 to see themselves as racial beings. That internal contradiction, and Spivak admits that it's a

00:37:26.420 contradiction, comes straight from this post-colonial idea of strategic essentialism.

00:37:31.480 Hmm. Okay. Well, now the knot gets tighter. What about critical race theory?

00:37:39.260 So that's the next step. Now we go firmly to the world of the United States. I mean,

00:37:45.220 Saeed and Spivak have teached in the United States, but the concern in many ways is with

00:37:48.940 the Middle East or with South Asia, respectively. Now we arrive at American law schools,

00:37:55.760 had a set of thinkers who at first start out in critical legal studies, which is basically

00:38:00.540 postmodernism meets the American law school. And you think that that tradition doesn't talk enough

00:38:05.840 about race. So they want, you know, to use those postmodernist tools and legal analysis

00:38:11.680 to understand the role of race in the United States better. And the really founding figure in this

00:38:17.380 is an African-American lawyer and civil rights activist initially, and then scholar, called Derek

00:38:24.900 Bell. Bell in the 1960s, does heroic work, working for the NAACP, helping to desegregate schools and

00:38:32.260 businesses and other institutions through the American South and beyond. But he starts to think

00:38:37.860 in this work that this might be a mistake. He starts to say, perhaps the segregationist senators who kept

00:38:47.780 complaining that civil rights lawyers are just imposing their ideology of desegregation and

00:38:54.040 aren't really speaking for the views and the interests of their clients, perhaps there's something to

00:39:00.920 that. Now, there's a little bit of a basis for that, which is reasonable. You know, Bell has some

00:39:05.300 clients who are fighting to desegregate schools, but by the time that they win in that case, those kids

00:39:10.520 have graduated. So they never got the benefit of the desegregated schools. Some of the new schools

00:39:16.080 really don't have many resources, and the schools deteriorate, and so people don't have great

00:39:21.860 educational opportunities. So there's a rational basis for what he says, but the conclusion to

00:39:27.920 which he jumps is really very radical and really very extreme. He starts to say that, first of all,

00:39:35.300 Brown versus Board of Education was not a way of living up to the ideals of the Constitution. It was not a way

00:39:41.900 of working through the contradictions of American life to live up to a grander ideal. It was only

00:39:48.460 pursued because it was in the interest of whites. Some constellation of things had changed. They wanted

00:39:52.900 to, you know, compete with the Soviet Union ideologically, and they wanted to develop the

00:39:56.720 Sun Belt and whatever else. And so really, it was just in the interest of whites to do this. And

00:40:01.540 secondly, perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps, you know, the NAACP should afford for better segregated

00:40:06.500 schools rather than try to integrate those schools. And so here you see really the, you know, along with

00:40:14.660 some of the things that Foucault had said, the key rejection of integration, the key rejection of the

00:40:21.860 idea that what we need to do is to live up to our universal principles, to be aware of a way that they

00:40:26.620 might exclude people and improve the country, form an ever more perfect union by fighting against

00:40:32.120 those injustices. No, no, no, no. The point of all of these ideals is to pull the wool over people's

00:40:37.120 eyes, to perpetuate discrimination, to make any progress, we have to get rid of it, and really

00:40:42.820 make how we treat people explicitly depend on the kind of group to which they belong. The second strain

00:40:51.000 in Bell's thought is the thesis of what he calls the permanence of racism. According to him, when he

00:40:57.080 passed away in the 2000s, America was still as racist as it had been in 1950 or 1850. So really,

00:41:04.680 there's no progress to be had unless we have a radical revolution that just gets rid of our

00:41:09.820 entire legal and political structure. Let me just jump in here, because I think it's worth lingering

00:41:16.200 on this point of segregation, because I think it would be shocking to most people who are not

00:41:23.140 paying attention to this issue closely, or people like someone like Mark Maron, who I mentioned at

00:41:29.280 the beginning here, who imagine that these are all just right-wing talking points. These are coming out

00:41:35.520 of this like Ron DeSantis boilerplate that is focused on a couple of weird stories, you know, out of Florida

00:41:44.620 or some other spot that don't represent any trend that we need to take seriously. And yet, and I don't

00:41:54.580 know if you have a sense of how widespread this practice is, but the idea that anywhere in America,

00:42:01.380 a teacher is sitting down second graders and insisting that they become excruciatingly conscious

00:42:08.740 of racial difference. I mean, that is just, at this point in history, that is just, it's not only

00:42:14.680 child abuse, it's an abuse of society. I mean, it's a deliberate rending of the social fabric. It is so

00:42:22.120 wrongheaded that I think most people hearing it, most people on the left, just will doubt that these

00:42:30.100 stories are true, that anyone is actually doing this.

00:42:34.140 Yeah, so there's two points here, right? The first is that, and we touched on that a little

00:42:38.300 bit earlier, you know, this idea that all that wokeness, all that critical race theory is, you

00:42:42.120 know, critical race theory, well, it's just wanting to think critically about the role that race plays

00:42:45.500 in American society, and surely race plays a big role in American society, and we should be aware of

00:42:49.700 that. No, no, no, no, no. If you define critical race theory that way, you would offend the people who

00:42:56.120 initiated it, right? Derek Bell couldn't have been more explicit that he wanted to reject the defunct racial

00:43:02.620 equality ideology of the civil rights movement, right? Kimberley Crenshaw couldn't have been more

00:43:07.620 explicit about the fact that he thought that Barack Obama was fundamentally at odds with the basic

00:43:13.140 tenets of critical race theory. So we're talking here about an ideology, which, by the way, I think

00:43:18.620 is smart and thoughtful. I think these are serious writers and theorists. I enjoyed reading them in

00:43:24.620 many ways. They are just fundamentally at odds with my vision of what would make for a better society

00:43:30.620 in how we can create thriving, diverse democracies. And then the other question is, you know, how much,

00:43:35.720 how far has that gone in actually being applied across the United States? And again, I do think

00:43:42.360 that these, you know, when people claim, well, you know, I mean, CIT is a graduate level theory. It's

00:43:48.620 not being read in elementary school classrooms. Well, of course, first graders aren't sitting down to

00:43:54.380 read Derek Bell or to read Gayatri Spivak or to read Kimberly Crenshaw. And they wouldn't understand

00:44:00.620 them if they did as first graders. But this idea that to raise the right racial consciousness and

00:44:09.380 prepare people for the right kind of political activism, you should get them to embrace race,

00:44:14.820 even for white students to embrace the whiteness. And that that is the preamble to having the right

00:44:20.440 racial consciousness that will allow you to make political progress with a few other steps and so

00:44:25.000 on. But does very much root in these ideas that I describe in the book. And yes, you see that

00:44:31.620 very strongly in private schools, which have fewer legal constraints. You see it increasingly even in

00:44:39.320 public schools. So there's a public school in Evanston that offers separate math classes for students who

00:44:45.220 identify as black. There's recently an elementary school in Oakland that organized a

00:44:50.280 playdate exclusively for non-white students. And these ideas are fashionable. You know, one of the

00:44:56.620 stories I tell in the book is of Kyla Posey, a African American educator who lives in the suburbs of

00:45:04.260 Atlanta, who has two little girls. And she asked whether she could request a classroom teacher for her

00:45:11.000 kids. The school had allowed her to do that in the past and said, sure. She put in her request. And the

00:45:16.700 principal of the school kept stalling, kept sort of trying to put it off. And eventually, Kyla Posey

00:45:22.480 said, look, what's going on here? Why won't you let me have my choice? And the principal said, well,

00:45:28.040 I'm sorry, but the school, you know, the class you requested, that's not the black class. Now, you might

00:45:33.440 think this is a story about straight up racial segregation in the South of a straight up right-wing

00:45:38.840 racist. But the principal of the school is herself black. And she's a progressive who says that she

00:45:46.880 suffered because in the private school she went to as a child, there weren't enough black kids. And so

00:45:50.940 she wants all of the black kids to be in a strongly black environment. And so she thinks that all of the

00:45:57.060 black kids in this elementary school have to go to the black class, even if her parents don't want to do

00:46:01.060 that. You know, this is rooted in a really influential book by an educator called Beverly

00:46:08.920 Tatum, you know, who was the president of Spelman College, which educates a lot of teachers, right? I

00:46:16.300 mean, these are not fringe ideas at this point. They are the fashionable, in some ways, the dominant

00:46:21.600 theories in schools of education in a lot of the progressive educational world.

00:46:27.520 Yeah. I mean, one problem we have rhetorically here is that many of these stories are, you know,

00:46:35.120 catnip for people on the right. I mean, they are the, it's the single issue. I mean, this and,

00:46:40.560 you know, the trans stories are, you know, you just get fused into a, the single issue of the problem

00:46:47.880 of wokeness on the right. And the mainstream media, for the most part, ignores them. And you just have

00:46:56.200 one story, I remember a story now, I forgot where it was reported, but I think this happened in,

00:47:01.720 in Las Vegas, but it was a, basically an Onion article, you know, and of which there have been

00:47:07.720 hundreds where, you know, a girl is in her public school is being brought into some quasi-Maoist

00:47:17.400 struggle session around race and told that she benefits from white privilege and she has to be

00:47:24.540 aware of this at all times. And, you know, her, her mother wound up complaining and it got some

00:47:30.460 media attention because the family was literally homeless, right? This is a homeless girl who was

00:47:37.060 being hectored about how much white privilege she has. It's completely insane. It's not to say that

00:47:42.940 white privilege isn't a thing. I mean, we can talk about the reality of it insofar as it, it still

00:47:48.640 exists. But, you know, historically, there's no question it has been a real variable in society.

00:47:55.000 But, I mean, it's just, it's so psychologically obtuse to think that the way to ameliorate

00:48:03.640 the problem of inequality, the problem of racism, the problem of tribalism, the problem of spurious

00:48:09.920 notions of human difference on the basis of superficial characteristics like skin color,

00:48:14.940 the way to deal with this is to take children who are not born racists or, you know, racially

00:48:22.620 conscious and to problematize the variable of race for them at the soonest opportunity. The real issue

00:48:30.740 is that, as I think you've spelled out clearly here, but we should reiterate it, critical race theory and

00:48:36.340 its attendant ideas explicitly repudiate the vision of racial harmony espoused by what most liberals

00:48:46.740 would recognize as the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King's notion of judging people by the

00:48:53.380 content of their character, not the color of their skin, that is not the goal of this way of thinking

00:48:59.620 about race. Yeah, two thoughts. One is that, by definition, anybody who is in a position to

00:49:06.740 lecture others about privilege is probably going to be more privileged. Again, that doesn't mean that

00:49:13.440 there isn't an underlying reality where white people have certain advantages in the United States,

00:49:18.320 and certainly historically have had those advantages. But just by definition, who are you going to hear

00:49:22.640 about white privilege, it's going to be a well-paid educator or DEI consultant or some talking head on CNN.

00:49:30.720 And on average, the person who's receiving that message is always going to be less privileged than that

00:49:35.640 person. So there's just a real situational problem where people are continually put in this position where

00:49:40.660 they look at somebody who they know in all kinds of ways, has a better life than them, probably has a higher

00:49:45.360 salary than them, and so on. It's telling them about how privileged they are. And so it's not always as extreme as

00:49:50.980 this particular example you outlined, but that's just always going to be, you know, a basic problem

00:49:56.600 of communication for this theory. You know, the deeper point here is that, you know, there's a really

00:50:01.560 deep literature in social psychology about how you can overcome prejudice, about how you can inspire

00:50:09.220 trust among members of groups that have historically been in conflict with each other, and that's called

00:50:14.260 intergroup contact theory. And there's been, I mean, thousands, literally thousands of studies

00:50:19.480 demonstrating that these forms of intergroup contact can have a very positive effect. But we also

00:50:24.220 know something about the conditions under which those effects are likely to accrue. And those are

00:50:28.800 when people in that situation are equal. They don't have to be equal in society as a whole, but in that

00:50:33.660 situation, in that context, they're equals. It's when they have a common goal, when we're fighting for

00:50:39.480 something together. And it's when the, you know, background society, the background institutions and

00:50:45.000 authority figures encouraging them to get along. What's the paradigmatic case of that? Being on a sports team

00:50:51.540 together, right? You are equal members of a sports team, you're trying to win over the other people, and your

00:50:57.760 coach tells you, no beef, right? We got to hold together in order to win. That's when often people come to trust

00:51:04.100 each other. And then, you know, after the game, they can have a conversation and they can open up about

00:51:09.080 forms of experience, you know, discrimination or injustice they may have experienced. That's how you

00:51:12.840 build trust. A lot of the pedagogical practices that we have today are directly designed to do the

00:51:20.180 opposite. And we're giving up on many of the kinds of traditions that facilitated those exchanges in

00:51:25.840 American society. You know, as a European, I'm always slightly shocked by this weird, cruel, and unusual

00:51:30.880 habit you have of making first years in college literally live in the same room with somebody they

00:51:35.920 don't know. But that doesn't really happen in Europe very much. But it used to be that those were

00:51:42.660 randomly allocated, or perhaps people even tried to choose roommates that were very different from

00:51:48.900 them. Some colleges did that. Today, you either have students come in and they found somebody they

00:51:54.440 like on, you know, social media or some kind of local meetup, and that person is much more likely to be

00:51:59.040 similar to them. Or you even have lots and lots and lots of elite universities build racially separate

00:52:05.240 dorms for African Americans and sometimes for Hispanics, encouraging incoming students to take

00:52:11.920 rooms in those spaces. So we're really just systematically, as a society, rather than encouraging

00:52:17.720 people to have those forms of communication, discouraging that and encouraging to see each other

00:52:23.300 as potential enemies to be hyper-attuned to any kind of bad formulations that might be a form of

00:52:30.640 microaggression. In many universities, rather than saying you expect it to get along, you now have

00:52:34.900 anonymous tip lines to report perceived microaggressions. That is the opposite of what the literature tells

00:52:43.380 us we need to do to facilitate those meaningful exchanges.

00:52:46.980 Okay, well, I want to talk about the role that elites have played here, but I think there's a few

00:52:55.300 terms we should define before we hit that part of the conversation. So I last left you with the

00:53:03.860 contributions of mostly Derek Bell, insisting that racism is permanent. We've mentioned Kimberly Crenshaw.

00:53:10.980 Well, let's talk about her concept of intersectionality, because many people will have heard it and

00:53:16.180 perhaps have some false associations with the term. What is intersectionality?

00:53:20.900 Well, it's hard to say what intersectionality is, because there's intersectionality as Crenshaw

00:53:26.020 described it, and then there's what's become of that term in our discourse. So let me tell you both

00:53:30.740 of those. You know, when she first writes about intersectionality, she's basically describing what

00:53:35.460 in social science we would know as an interaction effect, right? So if I go out without an umbrella,

00:53:42.500 but it doesn't rain, I don't get wet. If I go out and it is raining, but I have an umbrella,

00:53:48.100 I don't get wet. If I go out and it's raining and I don't have an umbrella, I might get drenched,

00:53:52.260 right? So there's interactions of different factors that can have a very, very different kind of outcome.

00:53:58.260 What Kimberly Crenshaw shows in quite a convincing way by using a lawsuit about workers at a factory

00:54:05.940 in Michigan, I believe, in the General Motors factory, is that that factory had refused to

00:54:13.700 hire black men for a while, and then it started hiring them, and it had refused to hire white

00:54:17.540 women for a while, and then it started hiring them. But it didn't start to hire any black women until

00:54:21.940 much later. And when there was a recession, they used a first-in-first-out system, and so they fired

00:54:27.140 all of the black women that were there. And when they sued, saying, hey, because there's past

00:54:31.460 discrimination, we now have these disadvantages that goes against civil rights legislation,

00:54:36.420 the judge said, well, the only protected categories we have is women or black people.

00:54:43.060 Women aren't being discriminated against, black people aren't being discriminated against,

00:54:46.820 so tough luck. And Crenshaw rightly says, well, that's an affront to our sense of justice.

00:54:52.500 You know, the disadvantages that black women experience aren't just a sum of what white

00:54:59.140 women experience or what black women experience. In this particular case, they were differently

00:55:02.980 situated, and the kind of disadvantage they suffered because of that interaction effect or

00:55:09.060 because of that intersectionality goes beyond that. That, I think, is a helpful concept that helped

00:55:14.180 to redress some problem in America, a real problem in American law. Since then, people have sort of run

00:55:20.980 with that concept in two ways that I think are much more troubling. The first is that intersectionality

00:55:27.460 has now come to merge with the theory of standpoint epistemology to say, look, if you stand at a

00:55:33.220 different intersection of identities than I do, you know, if you're a Latina woman, I'm a Jewish guy,

00:55:41.140 we really can't understand each other. And because we really can't understand each other, rather than

00:55:46.100 trying to have conversation and building solidarity with each other on that basis, I just have to defer

00:55:50.420 to your political claims, right? Don't even talk to me about those things. You're never going to

00:55:54.660 understand me. Just defer to my point of view. And that, I think, is a very damaging political idea.

00:56:01.540 I mean, in some contexts, intersectionality has come to mean that because all these different forms of

00:56:06.020 oppression are supposedly related. In order to be in good standing and fighting against one of those

00:56:11.220 ideas, you have to fight against all of those ideas at the same time. And so in order to be

00:56:18.420 allowed to join a feminist group, you also have to take on a particular kind of view about racism and

00:56:24.100 a particular kind of view about the Israel-Palestine conflict and a particular kind of view about trans

00:56:28.260 issues. So the litmus test for joining these organizations becomes really high. And if you disagree with

00:56:34.020 any one of those topics, you sort of get run out. Neither of those ideas are what Crenshaw's

00:56:39.780 sort of seminal articles would have defined as intersectionality. But that is what has become of

00:56:44.420 that term in public discourse. And so just to go over very quickly, you know, you took these six or

00:56:49.700 seven themes together, and that really gets you the identity synthesis. Rejection of truth in Foucault,

00:56:57.220 the politicized form of discourse analysis in Said, the embrace of strategic essentialism in Spivak.

00:57:04.660 The rejection of universalism of the civil rights movements, ideology of

00:57:11.860 integration, and the belief in the permanence of racism and other forms of bigotry in Bell.

00:57:17.140 And then finally, these two interpretations of intersectionality as we won't really understand

00:57:22.260 each other if we're in different intersections of identity and therefore to fight against oppression.

00:57:26.820 I can't just be fighting against the cause that I care about. I have to sign up to your views,

00:57:31.620 your ideas about what it is to fight against oppression as well.

00:57:35.460 Hmm. Yeah, it's been interesting to notice the places where the intersectional arithmetic doesn't

00:57:44.340 quite work out. And this has been especially clear on trans issues where the very concept of trans rights

00:57:52.180 has been in tension with gay rights and the rights of women in some obvious ways and ways that are still

00:58:00.100 taboo to talk about. But let's bring a couple of other terms here into the conversation and

00:58:06.420 define them, or at least describe how you think about them. How do you think about

00:58:13.460 white privilege and the related concept of structural or systemic or institutional racism?

00:58:22.340 Yeah, so I think that some of those concepts can be useful or helpful in specific contexts if they

00:58:32.500 are, if they coexist with all the concepts. And if you don't become sort of monomaniacal in seeing

00:58:40.820 everything in the world through the prism that you prefer, right? So let's take a concept like structural

00:58:47.860 racism. There certainly are societies where some form of structural racism persists, though it's

00:58:53.940 certainly true for much of American history and in some sense it continues to be true today. The core

00:59:01.140 of that idea is that one kind of form of racism of racist discrimination is a set of first personal

00:59:08.500 beliefs about the evil or the inferiority of some other group, right? To say that there's something

00:59:15.540 bad about homosexuals, for example. We think they're immoral and they, you know, should be

00:59:21.140 shunned in society. But then you might have forms of structural homophobia in a society where perhaps

00:59:28.580 most people no longer are homophobic in that way. But, you know, do you want to be seen with a friend

00:59:34.420 who's gay and perhaps people think that you're gay? You know, perhaps that takes a little bit of

00:59:39.700 courage and a lot of people don't have that courage. When I was in high school, I think that was still

00:59:44.020 probably the case in the context of my high school, for example. Or perhaps there's, you know, to advance

00:59:48.900 at work, you really have to be able to bring a partner and you're not welcome to bring a same-sex

00:59:54.660 partner. And so even for nobody in your particular workplace might hate gay people, that's going to

00:59:59.060 make it harder for you to advance, right? So I think it's helpful to say, hey, not all forms of bigotry

01:00:03.380 have to have this first personal, I hate these people element. It can inhere in those kind of

01:00:08.820 structures. The problem becomes when two things happen. The first is that you insist on seeing

01:00:16.500 every social ill through the prism of identity, even when something else is going on. In France,

01:00:22.180 I think often people only see social class and they don't realize that some of the seeming inequalities

01:00:28.580 of social class are actually driven by race. In America, many social scientists publish articles

01:00:33.860 in which they only control for race and not for social class. And so then you're going to say

01:00:38.020 that something is caused by structural racism, which might actually in part be caused by those

01:00:43.980 kind of class boundaries. And then the other problem becomes when you don't want to enrich the older

01:00:49.140 concept with a new concept, but you want to supplant it. So you say, hey, the only kind of racism that

01:00:56.260 exists is structural. We don't have to care at all about people's first personal views. And so

01:01:03.060 a black person cannot be racist against a Jewish person. Because structurally, Jewish people have

01:01:10.420 supposedly more power in the United States than black people. And so if you have somebody who's black

01:01:15.620 going on a killing spree of Orthodox Jews, it happened in Jersey City, that cannot be racist. You're making

01:01:21.700 a misunderstanding if you think that's racist, because only structural racism is true racism. Much of the

01:01:28.500 media class has embraced that definition of racism. And when it simply becomes incapable of explaining

01:01:34.820 the motivations of somebody like that murderer, and Jersey City becomes...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 27, 2023

#336 — The Roots of Identity Politics

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