Making Sense - Sam Harris - #353

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.320 Okay, a little housekeeping here. How shall I put this? Well, for those of you who heard my

00:00:53.540 previous episode with Rory Stewart, this might come as a bit of a surprise. I thought that was

00:01:00.120 a great conversation, as did many of you, as did really everyone, as far as I can tell.

00:01:06.960 I'll remind you, Rory is a fascinating person who spent something like 20 months walking across

00:01:13.500 the Middle East, and wrote a book about his travels in Afghanistan in particular. He has wide experience

00:01:21.960 in the Muslim world, served in Iraq for the British Civil Service. And we talked about many things in

00:01:29.520 this podcast, and touched on my concerns about jihadism fairly briefly. We spoke for about an hour

00:01:37.800 in 20 minutes, and maybe it was 20 minutes of that conversation that we focused on jihadism.

00:01:46.100 The general focus was on just the failures of nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, and

00:01:51.960 the unraveling of the rules-based international order. We spoke about Brexit, and how odious partisan

00:02:00.800 politics have become, there were many other topics. And what was notable is that we basically agreed

00:02:08.240 about everything except we had a clear difference of emphasis. I tend to emphasize the ideological

00:02:15.760 origins of certain types of violence. I'm very concerned about extreme religious beliefs and how

00:02:23.060 they're motivating. And yet, of course, I acknowledge that there are other sources of human conflict,

00:02:27.820 tribalism, nationalism, sociopathy, etc. And in the context of our conversation, Rory was emphasizing

00:02:36.580 the importance of nationalism, which he thinks is a bigger variable, even in the history of our

00:02:42.020 conflicts in the Muslim world. Now, that is certainly debatable, but in our conversation, he wasn't denying

00:02:49.800 the importance of religious ideology, and I wasn't denying the importance of nationalism. If we were

00:02:56.160 disagreeing at all, it was simply a matter of how much we weighted each of those variables. So anyway,

00:03:02.760 I thought it was a great conversation, but someone surfaced some remarks that Rory made on his own

00:03:08.440 podcast later that week. Rory is speaking here with Homsa Youssef, who is a Muslim Scottish politician

00:03:18.100 who served as First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party.

00:03:22.980 And I'm otherwise unfamiliar with Homsa, but you'll hear some of his remarks for context.

00:03:30.580 One of the things that I've noticed recently, particularly since October the 7th, is an increase

00:03:35.700 in people making stereotypical comments about Muslims. I mean, I just did an interview with an

00:03:42.340 American podcast, a guy called Sam Harris, who was hammering me for nearly an hour saying,

00:03:46.140 yes, but surely, Rory, you have to admit there's a connection between Muslims and suicide bombers and

00:03:50.580 Muslims and terrorists. He just wouldn't let it go. And I wondered, is that something that you've

00:03:57.200 experienced? And is it something that's getting better, getting worse? How does our society deal

00:04:02.160 with it?

00:04:02.580 I think it's getting worse. Maybe it comes in cycles. But I remember, for me, 9-11 was such

00:04:12.140 a seminal moment for me, and that might sound a bit kind of selfish, coming thousands of

00:04:16.160 miles away and affected and killed so many thousands of Americans. But for me, it was a

00:04:20.580 day I'll always remember when 9-11 took place on a Tuesday, I think. And coming back from school

00:04:25.040 and school bus home, the radio was on and you could kind of hear what was going on. And the

00:04:28.960 driver was telling us to shout because he was trying to listen to what was going on.

00:04:32.580 I went home and saw all the scenes as you guys would have seen in the terrible, tragic

00:04:36.300 and terror attack that took place.

00:04:38.580 And then the next day, I remember going to school and sitting in form class. And the same

00:04:42.680 two guys I used to sit beside every single morning and we would talk about the things

00:04:46.320 that teenage boys talk about, mainly in my case Celtic, a football club I loved. And they

00:04:51.180 were bombarding me, not with any maliciousness, bombarding me with questions I had no idea the answer

00:04:55.620 to. You know, why do Muslims hate America? Do you know who was behind it? What was it all

00:04:59.780 about? I'm sitting there going, I don't have a clue, right? And so for me, and then of course

00:05:05.940 all the Islamophobia that followed post 9-11. But I have to say my position as first minister

00:05:11.380 and even perhaps before then, there is definitely still a deep-rooted systemic and endemic Islamophobia

00:05:19.460 in this country. And Scotland is absolutely not immune to that.

00:05:24.620 What is really disappointing about this is that there's really no way around the fact

00:05:32.080 that Rory is painting me as a bigot here, or at least somebody whose politics and ethics

00:05:42.020 are compromised by a lack of understanding about what's really going on in the Muslim world.

00:05:50.100 I don't think I'm being especially thin-skinned to perceive this as defamatory in some sense.

00:05:57.860 One of the reasons why I bring this up is that I looked on Reddit where this got surfaced and

00:06:03.220 many people are now speculating that our conversation must have gone on for much longer

00:06:08.580 than is indicated by the audio that I aired, right? I must have been badgering him for

00:06:13.140 quite some time and then presented an abbreviated version of our conversation. That's not what

00:06:19.540 happened at all. So you listen to our conversation, you are hearing every word we spoke to one another,

00:06:24.820 with the exception of possibly some sidebar conversation about, you know, setting up our

00:06:30.540 microphones or something that would cut from every interview. Anyway, I've since reached out to

00:06:36.760 Rory, and he was quite gracious and I think embarrassed. He's agreed to come back on the

00:06:44.840 podcast and do a post-mortem on this. I'm pretty sure I know what happened here and I'm reasonably

00:06:53.160 confident we can have a conversation that will be useful and who knows, maybe even fun. So you can

00:07:00.360 look for that in the coming weeks. As for other misunderstandings and misrepresentations that seem

00:07:08.440 very unlikely to be rectified through conversation, someone pointed out another one of those to me

00:07:14.680 this week. Apparently, my former friend Elon Musk is bashing me again on the social media platform that

00:07:22.440 he owns, X, and on the basis of yet another clip of a podcast appearance of mine that has been produced

00:07:29.560 by yet another right-wing troll. This is what seems to happen every time now. I go on someone else's

00:07:37.080 podcast, people look for clips that can be exported from that appearance that are misleading as to what I

00:07:43.800 believe and what I was saying in context. Sometimes, as in this case, it's pretty clear the clip isn't even

00:07:50.600 saying what they claim it is, but they have titled their post something profoundly misleading. In any

00:07:57.160 case, there was a clip from my appearance on the David Pakman show where I seem to be talking about

00:08:05.240 the crisis at the southern border of the U.S. and worrying that someone like Tucker Carlson could

00:08:12.680 exaggerate the gravity of the problem and thereby undermine Biden's chances of being re-elected.

00:08:18.600 And the whole thing got framed as me being skeptical that there was even a problem at the southern

00:08:25.480 border. Of course, the chaos there is now a major concern of everyone right of center and many of us

00:08:32.120 left of center. So, Elon's response to this clip in front of millions of people was that Sam Harris's

00:08:41.320 mind has turned to goo. Now, the irony here is that I think Elon and I have exactly the same view of the

00:08:49.400 southern border. I view it as a political and social emergency and a scandal and I have long been

00:08:57.800 concerned that this is the issue that will deliver us a second Trump presidency. So, I am not at all inclined

00:09:09.320 to minimize the significance of the problem there. However, in this case, I am actually grateful for

00:09:16.520 this instance of misrepresentation because it has finally convinced me that I can no longer care

00:09:24.840 about this sort of thing. It's now so clear that social media has become a hallucination machine.

00:09:33.160 There's no way to prevent this. No one is taking the time to find out what was really said in context.

00:09:40.920 There's just nothing to respond to here. So, um, I suppose this is an epiphany I could have had and

00:09:48.520 perhaps should have had many years ago because I've been complaining for 20 years about people

00:09:54.520 misrepresenting my views even before the advent of social media. It's the thing that has driven me

00:10:03.160 most crazy, really. But in this case, the misrepresentation is so ridiculous because,

00:10:11.480 again, Elon and I actually agree about what's happening at the southern border that, um, something

00:10:18.120 has snapped for me and I just simply can't care about this anymore. It's quite a relief. So my pledge

00:10:26.280 to you and to myself is that I'm not going to complain about this anymore. I'm not going to notice

00:10:32.600 this sort of thing anymore. And the truth is, I think this epiphany should extend to what just happened

00:10:40.520 with Rory as well, right? I mean, the reason for me to do a podcast with Rory about this is I think

00:10:48.200 his confusion here is so well subscribed and he is or should be so knowledgeable about the terrain here,

00:10:58.040 right? I mean, this is somebody who knows much more about the Muslim world in many respects than I do.

00:11:03.960 There's no question about that. So I just didn't want to leave it untouched because if there's any

00:11:08.440 possibility of someone revealing my ignorance about anything relevant here, surely it's somebody

00:11:16.200 like Rory who could do that. And given how much I have focused on Islam in the past and given how

00:11:24.280 culpable I feel it is for so many of the world's problems, it would seem irresponsible for me not to

00:11:31.320 revisit this topic with Rory. But in general, I think, even there, I should forget about

00:11:39.960 misrepresentations and misunderstandings. We are now just careening into a world of deep fakes and the

00:11:48.840 most malignant distortions of everyone's public persona. So now I think I should just reconcile

00:11:56.760 myself to the idea that anyone who cares about what I think will listen to what I say in one of my own

00:12:04.280 channels at some appropriate length. And beyond that, there's nothing I can do. In fact, another example

00:12:12.200 just crossed my desk. And this proves that there's basically nothing I can do to successfully take other

00:12:18.360 people's feet out of my mouth. I saw a clip of Constantine Kissin and Tom Bilyeu in conversation

00:12:28.040 on Tom's podcast about me. And they were talking about my cancellation effectively on the right and my

00:12:36.760 views about Trump and COVID. And the amazing thing is I've been on both of their podcasts largely for the

00:12:46.440 purpose of clarifying my views about Trump and COVID. And both of them are totally confused about what I

00:12:55.560 think on both of those topics. I mean, these are both very smart guys who are clearly well disposed toward

00:13:05.640 me. I like them and they like me. And they're still completely confused about what I think on these two

00:13:14.520 topics. And I have spent hours on each of their podcasts clarifying what I think. It is fucking

00:13:23.000 hopeless. I'm embarrassed that it has taken me this long to realize it. But I mean, this is now my new

00:13:29.720 religion. I simply cannot care what other people think I think. I just have to put my stuff out there

00:13:39.240 and move on. And that's what I will be doing on this podcast. Okay. And now for today's podcast.

00:13:49.560 Today, I'm speaking with Coleman Hughes. Coleman is a writer and podcast host and musician. He's

00:13:57.640 written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The Spectator,

00:14:03.720 City Journal, and elsewhere. He's currently a contributing writer at the Free Press and an

00:14:09.400 analyst for CNN. He also has a Substack newsletter titled Coleman's Corner and a podcast, Conversations

00:14:17.160 with Coleman. And most relevantly, a new book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind

00:14:23.240 America. And that is the topic of today's conversation. We talk about race and racism.

00:14:29.880 We discuss the ideal of colorblindness and what that means, race and crime, Coleman's experience

00:14:38.680 at TED, which you heard me discuss previously with Chris Anderson, the concept of Latinx,

00:14:46.040 the confusion of the elites, Ibram X Kendi, affirmative action, class differences, poverty, single-parent

00:14:54.360 families, the death of George Floyd and the trial of Derek Chauvin, Candace Owens, Christopher Ruffo,

00:15:01.400 guilt by association, John McWhorter, Glenn Lowry, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow,

00:15:08.600 the difference between various immigrant communities, evidence of discrimination,

00:15:13.800 the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and other topics. As always, it was great to speak with Coleman.

00:15:20.040 And now I bring you Coleman Hughes.

00:15:29.160 I am here with Coleman Hughes. Coleman, thanks for joining me again.

00:15:33.080 Great to be on again.

00:15:33.880 So you have a new book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.

00:15:40.600 And I must sheepishly confess that I have not read your book, though I appear to have blurbed it.

00:15:46.840 Just for the record here, I had to declare blurb bankruptcy some years ago, and so I don't blurb

00:15:54.440 books anymore, but occasionally I can blurb the writer of that book, which is what I did in your case.

00:15:59.880 But normally I would have read the book before we do a podcast, but I didn't get a physical copy.

00:16:05.800 I blame no one for this but the universe. And I know you sent me a PDF, but I just,

00:16:10.440 I spend so much time in front of screens, I just cannot read a book as a PDF. So the advantage to

00:16:16.120 this is that there is a silver lining. We can really take it from the top and you can roll

00:16:21.240 out your argument for a naive listener, which I'll pretend to be, because you and I have talked about

00:16:27.800 these issues before and obviously we've thought a lot about them. But every listener to this podcast

00:16:32.440 knows that I am a huge Coleman Hughes fan. I've made no secret of that. And I think in my blurb

00:16:39.080 for the book, I say something about, it's like you're a person from the future. You're the person

00:16:43.720 who's come back from the future and born witness to what a sane future with respect to the variable

00:16:50.520 of race actually looks like. And that's always how you've seemed to me. So let's just jump in.

00:16:55.640 What is your basic argument in the book?

00:17:00.280 Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for breaking your rule on blurbs for me. I'm honored. And

00:17:05.720 in any event, a book is really just an occasion to talk about the topic in many ways. So yeah,

00:17:12.760 my basic argument in this book is we have this idea of colorblindness with respect to race,

00:17:20.440 which I define as treating people without regard to race, really making your best effort to treat

00:17:27.800 the individuals in your lives without regard to their race when it matters, and to get race as a

00:17:35.320 category out of public policy, to get rid of public policies that use race as a factor in determining

00:17:43.560 how to distribute goods, services, aid, and so forth. And the second half of that is more controversial

00:17:52.360 for people than the first half. And the reason this idea needs rescuing at all, because it was once

00:18:01.080 the consensus view of American liberals, at least there was a brief moment in the 60s,

00:18:08.200 on the ringing rhetoric of Martin Luther King and the spirit of the civil rights movement where

00:18:15.000 enough people that mattered came together and agreed that colorblindness was the goal. And so

00:18:22.680 many people agreed on it at that point that you even had a book like Black Power, which was the

00:18:27.720 manifesto of the movement by the same name in the late 60s, even acknowledged as a caveat that

00:18:34.200 colorblindness was the ultimate goal worth pursuing, and just disagreed on how we get there.

00:18:42.120 In the intervening years, you've seen more and more people actually just abandon colorblindness,

00:18:48.040 even as an ultimate goal, to the point where when I set out to do research for this book,

00:18:53.080 just as a test, I googled colorblindness race, so as to distinguish it from the visual condition.

00:18:59.080 And nine out of ten articles I got were articles telling me why colorblindness is wrong. It's,

00:19:06.600 in the worst case, a Trojan horse for white supremacy, or in the best case, naive. And the

00:19:12.440 tenth article was a Wikipedia page. So something has happened in 50 years where the view that

00:19:20.840 colorblindness is wrong and evil, which used to be confined to critical race theory, has become

00:19:27.160 sort of the norm on the left. And to be fair, I think proponents of the idea of colorblindness

00:19:34.520 have made themselves an easy target with the phrase, quote, I don't see color, which is really a

00:19:42.520 common refrain and a common point of mockery among the critics of colorblindness, because

00:19:48.680 it's obviously not true. We do see color. We all see color. And at a deeper level, we, at least adults,

00:19:58.760 we all see color. I think, you know, there are actually kids or people from other cultures can

00:20:04.840 be something close to colorblind in the ways that matter. But most American adults are not colorblind.

00:20:11.880 When I walk into a room, you notice that I'm not white. When you, Sam, walk into a room,

00:20:16.840 people notice that you are. What's more, we are all probably capable of racial bias.

00:20:24.200 Clever psychologists can put us in experiments and, you know, show us, in some cases, to be

00:20:29.720 racially biased. And in situations where race strongly correlates with something that matters,

00:20:36.040 I think almost all of us are capable of racial bias. So that's not what I mean when I say colorblindness,

00:20:43.560 and I don't think it's what people should mean when they say colorblindness. So I think we should

00:20:48.120 abandon this misleading phrase that's too easy of a target, we don't see color, and instead say what

00:20:54.120 we mean, which is, I try my best to treat people without regard to race in my personal life, and I

00:21:00.200 think race should be left out of public policy. That's the basic thesis of the book.

00:21:05.240 Yeah. Well, maybe we can cycle on that last point again, because I think it's interesting

00:21:11.880 psychologically and ethically. Because I'm definitely guilty of saying something close to

00:21:18.680 I don't see color, or that I aspire to not see color, or something like that, or I think we shouldn't

00:21:24.040 see color. But it's not a matter of seeing so much as it is caring about, right? It's like the analogy I

00:21:30.200 keep using to the consternation of many of my progressive critics is to hair color, or to eye

00:21:36.600 color. Now, of course, I see hair color, and I see eye color, but they're not politically or ethically

00:21:43.160 salient, really ever, right? So I just simply don't care how many blondes did or didn't get into Harvard

00:21:50.040 this year. And I don't think we as a society should care. And the only reason why we would care is if we

00:21:55.560 had a history of discrimination against blonde people, and we were tracking that, because there

00:22:00.120 was some historical injustice that we felt we need to rectify. And of course, that is the case with

00:22:05.080 skin color. But when I imagine a truly sane future, which you, again, you appear to inhabit for me,

00:22:13.480 I imagine a future where skin color has become like hair color or eye color, which is to say that it's

00:22:19.720 an obvious, you know, surface feature around which people differ. But those differences simply don't

00:22:26.520 matter. And even if we celebrate them, they don't matter. I mean, there are people who have especially

00:22:32.280 beautiful hair or eyes, and the color is part of that. And we might even talk about how amazing,

00:22:41.160 you know, their hair and eyes look. And you can say the same thing for a person's skin,

00:22:46.600 right? I mean, there are people who have just astonishing skin, you know, black or white or,

00:22:51.640 or, you know, other. And it could be the actual topic of conversation, but it has no political or

00:22:59.000 ethical weight. And it would be insane to think that it should. And so that's the, the color blindness,

00:23:05.480 you know, I would advocate is, is something around that by analogy to hair color and eye color.

00:23:11.400 Is there anything about that that strikes you as wrong?

00:23:15.400 So you gave a caveat that, you know, unless we had a history of discrimination against a particular

00:23:22.120 group of people, I think that I have the same caveat in my book, and we can talk about sort of

00:23:28.680 what my vision for, for addressing that looks like. So I would echo that caveat, and I would add one more.

00:23:36.040 You know, unlike the case in eye color or hair color, there are cultural differences that track

00:23:44.680 racial groups. We live in a multicultural society, a multicultural country, which if anything means

00:23:50.680 that there are multiple cultures. So I would consider black Americans, for example, to be a subculture of

00:23:59.320 Americans, which are a broader culture. And in my effort and desire to be colorblind, right,

00:24:06.600 to support colorblindness, both at the level of public policy and in my personal life, I don't

00:24:12.360 think that that requires me to be cultureblind in the sense that, say, you are a black person that's

00:24:19.080 grown up your whole life very attached to black culture. You love the food that black people cook.

00:24:25.320 You love the movies that black people make. You love the music that comes culturally from

00:24:32.040 black Americans. And you have a special attachment to it that you don't quite have to every other

00:24:38.040 culture, that you don't have to, say, you know, Serbian culture. Am I telling you that you can't feel

00:24:45.080 that attachment or that you can't even preferentially consume and be among the culture that is familiar to

00:24:53.160 you? Absolutely not. And that's not what I mean by colorblindness. What I picture is kind of a

00:24:59.320 firewall between that kind of cultural affinity and our conversations about public policy and ethics and

00:25:08.040 right and wrong. When we're talking about right and wrong, improving human flourishing, crafting public

00:25:13.880 policy, one leaves those things to the extent you can at the door. And I say that because it's a

00:25:22.040 common objection to the colorblindness argument. Yeah, I would echo that. I mean, I have a special

00:25:29.000 attachment to Indian culture, for instance. I'm a huge fan of it, notwithstanding all the insanity that

00:25:35.560 one can find in India. But it's my favorite food, it's among my favorite music, it's just I've spent a

00:25:42.040 fair amount of time there. I love so much about it. And I would never assume anyone, much less Indians,

00:25:50.920 should give that up. Right. So it's that part of the diversity assertion that diversity makes

00:25:56.680 everything better is I fully agree with. You know, I want great Indian restaurants in every city in

00:26:01.480 America. And I rely on Indian immigrants to provide those restaurants for the most part. And so it is with so

00:26:08.280 much, so much else we all love to one or another degree about cultural difference. So yeah, so

00:26:15.000 colorblindness of the sort that we're, you know, we're indicating by shorthand with that phrase that

00:26:20.600 can fully embrace a kind of xenophile relationship to cultural diversity. I mean, but it's a little bit like

00:26:29.160 that where this tips over into identity politics, I think, can be understood by analogy to

00:26:35.960 what it is to be a sports fan. There are a lot of people who really love sports. They become huge fans

00:26:44.280 of one team or one athlete or another. And all of that is incredibly fun and amusing and improves life

00:26:53.720 until it tips over into a kind of fanaticism that is really toxic. So toxic that you have, you know,

00:27:01.800 soccer players who, in the worst case, commit an own goal in a big match and they wind up getting

00:27:07.080 murdered by their fans, you know, back in, you know, Latin America or somewhere that really cares

00:27:12.280 too much about that particular sport. It's hard to specify with a bright line, but there is clearly a

00:27:19.000 line between the fun of diversity and the still caring about difference that adds spice to life

00:27:27.080 and tipping over into political factionalism that is, um, obviously distorting our politics and making

00:27:35.800 it morally unworkable. So I don't know if you like that analogy or not, but that's another,

00:27:40.840 another shortcut I have in thinking about this issue. No, I actually, uh, in, in my book, I think,

00:27:47.560 rather in my book, I talk a little bit about sports too. There is a difference between two close

00:27:54.200 friends making, even making racial jokes about one another that both find funny, but neither

00:28:00.840 take seriously. And on the other hand, two people, you know, coming to blows in a conversation because

00:28:09.080 people of your race could never understand me, right? Those are both instances of quote unquote,

00:28:14.040 caring about race in the abstract, but we, we know the difference between them when we see them.

00:28:20.200 One is actually a healthy expression, a kind of, um, release valve for the racial differences

00:28:27.880 we all notice. And one, as your analogy says, it carries what can be benign to an unhealthy extreme.

00:28:36.040 Now my book, I, I, I talk about a similar racial analogy when I, I bring up this video that Morgan

00:28:43.080 Freeman famously participated in with Mike Wallace. I'm sure that you've seen, I'm sure many people have

00:28:49.720 seen it where, you know, Morgan Freeman essentially says, look, this is how we're going to get past

00:28:55.880 race. I'm going to stop calling you a white man. And I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black

00:29:00.760 man. I'm going to call you Mike, and you're going to call me Morgan. And it's a very powerful interview,

00:29:08.200 uh, if you haven't seen it, but what it puts forth is kind of a testable hypothesis in a way.

00:29:14.760 If we want fewer and fewer racist thoughts and feelings and toxic race-based thoughts and feelings

00:29:24.120 to abound in our society, should we talk about race more and more, or should we talk about race

00:29:29.880 less and less? And by analogy, I, I imagine that say for whatever reason, we have a goal of reducing

00:29:38.920 the amount of animosity between New York Yankee fans and Boston Red Sox fans, which is a very tall

00:29:46.040 task. Let's say for whatever reason, we want to accomplish this. Would the thing to do be to

00:29:54.440 raise people from age zero to care about baseball as much as possible, right? Let's say we educate

00:30:01.720 every child about the rules of baseball in kindergarten. We substitute every exercise

00:30:08.040 in gym that used to be, say, dodgeball or kickball, and we make it baseball every time. And we just crank

00:30:15.320 up to 12 the amount that people know about and care about baseball. Would this have the effect of

00:30:24.440 amplifying the amount of animosity between New York fans and Boston fans, or would it tamp down on it

00:30:32.120 because everyone is so educated about baseball? It's at least not obvious to me, is what I'm saying.

00:30:39.240 It's not obvious to me that the way towards better race relations between races of people is to raise

00:30:47.160 the salience of racial identity from as young an age as possible. And this has been the implicit and

00:30:56.280 at times explicit belief of progressive race ideas. I'm thinking of Robin DiAngelo, her book White

00:31:04.200 Fragility. I'm thinking of just this past week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a school in San

00:31:10.360 Francisco has been paying an organization called Woke Kindergarten to come into a school of mostly

00:31:16.760 Spanish-speaking kids and teach them about white supremacy as their math and reading scores have

00:31:22.920 declined. So it's not obvious to me that Morgan Freeman is wrong in that we should dial down our

00:31:33.080 somewhat obsessive talk about racial identity and sort of confine it to the real racism. I have no

00:31:39.960 problem and I'm strongly in favor of talking about real racism that exists and I give examples in my

00:31:47.720 book, but I think a lot of what we end up talking about when we talk about race are either fake examples

00:31:55.080 of racism or just kind of toxic race-based discussion that sort of stereotypes whole groups of people and

00:32:06.120 does not deal with actual examples of racism. Yeah, well, I want to get into some of those issues and

00:32:13.320 the difference between race and class and how we should think about dealing with inequality in our

00:32:18.920 society, even inequality that is highly correlated with race still. But what about those cases, just to

00:32:26.040 close the loop on colorblindness as a goal, what about the inconvenient cases where

00:32:32.520 one's awareness of racial difference is made all too rational because of different, you know, base

00:32:41.320 rate effects with respect to crime and other variables, right? So there are definitely situations where

00:32:48.760 a person's race is a relevant piece of information in judging whether or not something anomalous and

00:32:59.800 potentially dangerous is likely to happen, right? I mean, this is a, it lands one way when you have

00:33:06.040 a white guy like me saying that it land, it landed differently when Jesse Jackson, I don't know when

00:33:11.640 this was, this might've been in the nineties, that is somewhere around the peak of crime in America.

00:33:17.160 He said, you know what I, I forget what context he was in, but he said to some audience,

00:33:21.640 I'll tell you what I'm sick of, I'm sick of, you know, walking down the street, uh, at night, hearing

00:33:27.480 footsteps behind me, turning and seeing that it's a white guy and feeling relief, right?

00:33:34.840 And that was an all too honest confession of a, a fairly, um, uh, horrific disparity in the,

00:33:43.000 in the rate of crime in the black versus white community. And if, in case people are not in

00:33:49.480 touch with these statistics, this is still true. Although in the nineties, this was worse. And

00:33:55.160 most of this crime is, you know, most crime is intraracial. I mean, most black people are victimized

00:34:02.680 by other black people. Most white people are victimized by the white people. There's some

00:34:06.520 differences there that are worth talking about, but still it's mostly a matter of crime in the

00:34:11.760 black community is mostly black on black crime. And it certainly was then. What do you do with the

00:34:16.900 inconvenient fact that it is in fact true that in certain situations, just to, you know, you see

00:34:22.440 black people in a place where, you know, there are not that many black people living and you know

00:34:28.000 that most crime in that, you know, now, now I'm not talking about violent crime so much as the other

00:34:32.460 crime, you know, that most crime is in fact committed by black people in those, in, in, in that part of

00:34:37.820 the city. It suddenly becomes relevant that you're seeing four black guys in a car driving on a street.

00:34:43.480 They almost certainly don't live on. And this is true in many major cities in America. And it's

00:34:49.200 relevant for the police eye view of that situation, right? And this is profiling by another name.

00:34:54.240 And conversely, it would be relevant to see, you know, four white guys with shaved heads in a

00:35:01.080 parking lot outside of black church, right? Like you would, you would immediately wonder what are

00:35:06.140 those guys doing here? And you wouldn't be insane to wonder that given the pattern of criminality we

00:35:13.420 know exists in, in certain contexts. So I just, I give you that, um, uh, none too softball to deal

00:35:20.200 with. Yeah. So take my feet out of my mouth. Okay. Um, so look, I, I've, I've lived in New York city for

00:35:27.920 nine years now, and I've lived in many different neighborhoods, some less nice than others.

00:35:38.220 I check the NYPD statistics as a matter of professional responsibility and someone who

00:35:45.680 thinks and talks about these issues. And I also take, I ride the subway. I have eyes. Like I said,

00:35:53.900 a commitment to colorblindness doesn't mean that I don't see race. It doesn't mean I don't notice

00:35:58.400 patterns. And when, when there are patterns as strong as some of the racial crime patterns are in

00:36:05.760 many American cities, it is inevitable that your brain is going to recognize those patterns, whether

00:36:13.400 or not you want it to. Now, some people are more or less honest about this. I think you've chosen the

00:36:20.060 path of being honest about this in line with your overall position on lying. Other people choose the

00:36:27.040 path of denying the facts, which is understandable given how uncomfortable the facts are. And then a

00:36:35.620 third group of people takes the route of focusing monomaniacally on those facts and, uh, you know,

00:36:44.580 posting nothing but videos of black people committing crime, you know, on Twitter. That latter path,

00:36:51.400 I think, is toxic and needlessly divisive. The path of simply not talking about it, while it might be

00:37:00.900 right at Thanksgiving dinner, I don't think that it's right as a general orientation for our public

00:37:07.160 conversation about race. I think that journalists have to be able to look at facts. So in New York

00:37:14.280 City, basically the entire time that I've lived here, it has been the case that over 90% of shootings

00:37:21.180 are committed by blacks and Hispanics. 95% in some years.

00:37:27.620 So what is it like to be a New York City cop that responds to these shootings? By the way,

00:37:33.260 the majority of such cops are themselves of color. What that experience is like is if it isn't clear

00:37:41.100 from the first month of your being a New York City cop, it is clear by the first three or four months

00:37:48.820 that every, almost every time you get a call about a shooting, a 911 call, you'll make money all day

00:37:55.620 betting that the person was not white or not Asian. That is an impossible fact not to notice even for

00:38:02.660 someone as committed to the end goal of colorblindness as one could possibly be. Now, I don't view that as

00:38:10.720 refuting the goal of colorblindness in general. I view that as having two implications. One is it shows

00:38:18.800 how wrong things have to go for the general rule of thumb of colorblindness to be violated. You really

00:38:29.200 have to be in situations where violence and life and death and catching felons, where the stakes are

00:38:39.320 that high as opposed to, say, meeting a friend of a friend for the first time in a coffee shop, which is

00:38:45.300 how most of us, you know, most of us, I think, listening to this, are lucky enough to live most of our lives in

00:38:52.340 lower-stakes situations where there's no need to violate the principle of colorblindness. And then secondly, it

00:39:01.780 impresses upon me the urgency of actually addressing crime and getting crime under control, of not letting crime

00:39:11.060 spike. I can tell you every single black person I know that lived in New York City in the 80s or 90s

00:39:17.840 says that as a black man in that time, you couldn't catch a cab. But nowadays, it's gotten better.

00:39:25.180 The other thing everyone who's lived in New York City says is that crime was terrible in the 90s,

00:39:31.380 everyone got mugged and carried muggers' money around, and then Giuliani came and it just all went away.

00:39:37.380 My strong suspicion is that those two things are not correlated. In other words, if we care about

00:39:43.880 reducing racism against black people, there is almost no better way to do that than to actually

00:39:51.280 address crime. Because when crime comes down, the proverbial cab driver and cop and so forth,

00:39:58.700 who are in those high-stakes situations where they can't help but discriminate, there will be less

00:40:04.920 of an urge for them to do that. So, you know, the hard example here just impresses upon me

00:40:11.060 not the fact that colorblindness should be jettisoned, but the fact that A, we should really

00:40:16.380 pay attention to crime as a component of fighting racism, and impresses upon me how high the stakes

00:40:23.480 have to be in order for us to jettison it in the first place.

00:40:26.640 Well, finally, on the topic of colorblindness, I mean, I know you on your own podcast and elsewhere

00:40:32.520 have done a fairly full post-mortem on your experience at TED, where you gave a talk on the

00:40:40.380 topic of colorblindness and received a fair amount of pushback, and I think you probably heard my

00:40:45.480 conversation with Chris Anderson about that. So I don't know how much you want to be debriefed on

00:40:50.560 your experience here, and we can touch it as fully or as superficially as you want, but, you know,

00:40:56.980 I didn't go so deep with Chris apart from just exposing what seemed to me to be the core of the

00:41:06.900 issue, which he more or less admitted, which he said it was a fairly amazing disclosure. I mean,

00:41:14.080 he didn't seem to treat it with the astonishment that I think it deserves, which is when he admitted

00:41:19.320 that you could never have been invited to TED just a few short years ago, right, which is tantamount

00:41:24.980 to saying that, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. could not have given a TED Talk a few years ago,

00:41:29.380 given the level of, you know, ideological capture of the organization along the lines of that we're

00:41:36.540 talking about. Feel free to say anything you want about your experience or my conversation with

00:41:41.480 Chris, but that, you know, you were talking to, you know, a very high status audience about the

00:41:48.060 virtues of maintaining colorblindness as the goal of our racial politics, and it provoked a fairly

00:41:56.940 hysterical response, which was really, in my view, pathological on its face. Not really the—it

00:42:04.240 doesn't testify to a mere difference of opinion on these issues. It testifies to a kind of brokenness

00:42:11.380 of certain people and certain cultural attitude, which is, you know, I think I told Chris, I mean,

00:42:19.540 you gave one of the most anodyne talks imaginable, not anodyne as in boring, but just anodyne as in

00:42:27.340 non-threatening, given it's, you know, your thesis, and yet people perceived it to have really

00:42:35.080 precipitated a kind of moral emergency, you know, in the room when you gave it. So that's—

00:42:41.120 Yeah. Yeah. So if people want the detailed version, they can read my account of it at the

00:42:46.140 free press. I'll just make a few comments. One, yeah, I agree with you. It was anodyne,

00:42:53.740 and it was non-threatening, and I was non-threatening, and I was friendly to people the

00:42:59.920 whole week, and I was—I actually literally, you know, had a conversation and hugged it out

00:43:05.600 with one of the people that was upset with the TED Talk afterward, because I just, for whatever

00:43:11.680 reason, I have a lot of patience for people that are emotionally upset by what I say. And so I was

00:43:21.380 willing to go every extra mile to get people to understand that I wasn't, quote-unquote, attacking

00:43:28.400 their existence. But there were some people at TED, a very small minority, it should be said,

00:43:35.880 that have the philosophy of safetyism, wherein what I was saying wasn't just something they

00:43:41.940 strongly disagreed with. It made them feel, quote-unquote, unsafe. And once something makes

00:43:49.000 you feel unsafe, then, you know, then I have to be removed, essentially, right? It's a very

00:43:55.240 powerful bargaining tactic if you're an employee, because then there's, like, implications for

00:44:02.960 hostile workplace environment and things like that, when really all I did was, you know, gently

00:44:08.640 give my perspective that, you know, 98% of the people in the room, you know, went down pretty

00:44:16.280 smooth with them. People of all colors, by the way, you know, people were coming up to me afterwards,

00:44:21.180 not just white people, as the stereotype might, you might think, but black people, Hispanic people,

00:44:28.140 and so forth.

00:44:28.980 But just to give that, just to remind people of the context here, it is pretty amazing for Chris

00:44:35.920 to have told me that you could not have been invited a couple of years prior. You know, his

00:44:41.700 perception of the organization and perhaps his misperception of his audience suggested to him

00:44:47.200 that you were an edgy speaker, and really, all you were arguing for was, you know, as you said at the

00:44:53.780 top here, what was the consensus, the moral consensus view during the civil rights movement?

00:45:00.640 Yes, that's true. I mean, right down to Martin Luther King's recommendation in his book,

00:45:06.380 Why We Can't Wait, for a broad class-based anti-poverty program that would benefit the black

00:45:12.320 and white poor alike. So I was really just giving a pretty straightforward Martin Luther

00:45:18.740 King updated for the 21st century. It was nothing new, nothing original, just something I feel

00:45:26.420 passionate about, and I think people have forgotten. And when I agree with him, I actually take it for

00:45:31.940 granted as almost obvious that I couldn't have given that talk two years ago, for instance, because

00:45:38.020 the so-called racial reckoning around the summer of 2020 and its aftermath was still reverberating

00:45:45.020 too strongly through elite institutions. I would have been received as just, you know, even further

00:45:51.520 outside the realm of acceptable opinion. But, you know, I think this underscores the huge difference

00:45:57.500 between the elite and the non-elite in general. I think most non-elites that listen to that TED

00:46:05.060 talk. I appreciate you saying it's not boring, but I think many would have found it boring because

00:46:10.440 it's common sense. It's common sense, that's right. And it's only not common sense to the kinds of

00:46:17.780 people that think Latinx is what Hispanic people want to be called. And I use that example, I should

00:46:23.780 flesh it out a little bit more, because it encapsulates the divide between the elite and the

00:46:29.080 non-elite better than any other single issue, I think. I'm half Puerto Rican and grew up spending

00:46:34.920 a lot of time with the Puerto Rican half of my family, many of whom didn't speak English in the

00:46:40.340 older generation. And so when around 2014 and 2015, I got to college and people, I started seeing this

00:46:48.900 term Latinx. It was very bizarre because I'd never heard it before. And I figured having grown up

00:46:55.240 constantly around my Puerto Rican family members, I'd have heard of it if it were in use. And then

00:47:01.060 secondly, it just seemed like a bizarre anglicization because Spanish doesn't actually operate in a way

00:47:07.700 that makes a word like Latinx even make sense, theoretically. So when people started using it

00:47:13.140 at Columbia, most of whom had no Hispanic family, this struck me as very odd intuitively, because in

00:47:21.180 that particular case, I was fairly in touch with what, how a working class Hispanic person would

00:47:26.460 speak. Now, when Pew finally did research on this and found that some 96%, 95 or 6%, if memory serves,

00:47:37.000 of Hispanic people either had never heard of the word or didn't like it, that struck me as intuitively

00:47:42.440 obvious. Now, Latinx is an issue because I happen to have that background, I happen to have intuitions

00:47:49.180 that were more in line with reality. But in most other ways, I could be as clueless and elite as

00:47:54.760 anyone. I grew up upper middle class. I went from a very nice public school to a very nice private

00:48:01.840 school to Juilliard and then Columbia University. I'm as elite virtually as anyone could be on most

00:48:09.160 issues. And to sit back and reflect on how thick the bubble of eliteness can be, it's like you can

00:48:17.040 pierce it 20 times and it can still have an effect in terms of just the difference between the norms

00:48:22.620 and culture of elites and the norms and culture of everyone else. And the TED example is just another

00:48:28.680 example of that. What I said is only controversial to a group of people who have really, I think,

00:48:34.380 forgotten or don't work hard enough to understand how unique and elite their set of values are.

00:48:42.700 Well, I mean, I should just say, if it wasn't obvious, it was certainly obvious in my conversation

00:48:47.720 with Chris, but I should make it obvious here. I really greatly admire Chris, but I've always viewed

00:48:54.420 him as a kind of canary in the coal mine for these kinds of issues. I mean, I think I told him, I viewed

00:49:00.240 him as someone who was a bit of a hostage of his organization and suffering from, by turns,

00:49:06.320 you know, Stockholm syndrome or, you know, some other condition where he can't quite recognize how

00:49:12.980 aberrant the elites have become on certain issues. And, you know, I say this as someone who considers

00:49:21.400 himself embedded very much in that same bubble, you know, with you and Chris and the very people who

00:49:27.760 were reacting badly to your talk. And I've run into this issue with Chris around issues of, you know,

00:49:35.660 around radical Islam and the allegations of Islamophobia, et cetera. And so we've gone around

00:49:42.640 that track a bunch. And I just think we have to be honest about what's really happening in the world

00:49:47.900 and honest about how clear the ethical and political goals are or should be. And I think,

00:49:56.860 I mean, here's a landmark we really shouldn't lose sight of. And yet certain people are working to

00:50:02.380 guide us in a very different direction. I mean, the landmark is as MLK had it and as you have

00:50:10.060 dusted it off, getting to a world where superficial differences simply don't matter. And we care about

00:50:16.960 the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin, to use MLK's line. That just seems

00:50:22.520 so obviously good. And yet many people are arguing, explicitly arguing that that's a false goal. It's

00:50:30.340 not just that there's a different way to reach that goal. I do take it as prima facie absurd to think

00:50:37.360 that we're going to care more and more about race as a way of caring less and less about it,

00:50:42.300 as you pointed out. But we have a few characters who are quite celebrated in elitist circles at places

00:50:53.020 like TED or at the Aspen Ideas Festival. And I think none has been as damaging to the conversation

00:51:01.240 from my point of view as Ibram X. Kendi. I know you have offered to debate him. Has he ever responded

00:51:08.580 to those offers to debate? No, he hasn't. He said in a few of his lectures that I've misrepresented his

00:51:18.000 views. And so a debate between us would be him constantly sort of correcting my straw men. But

00:51:27.140 to my knowledge, he's never given an example of me misrepresenting his views. And I would hope a

00:51:34.300 debate would be a great forum for him to make clear what my misrepresentation alleged. But I think I

00:51:43.980 just want to pick up a little bit on what you said about Chris too. And I want to make that clear too,

00:51:48.460 because I like Chris. I continue to like Chris. I think he is in a tough position, it seems, maybe

00:51:56.440 straddling between values he seems to share with me and the reality of his employees' feelings.

00:52:03.340 Hmm. Not sure how I would navigate that. And I'm not, you know, in charge of a big organization like

00:52:09.420 that. Frankly, I think that my TED debacle unleashed a wave of repressed anger at TED among people that,

00:52:20.380 you know, used to love TED, but for one or another reason, because of some aspect of woke capture,

00:52:27.280 either don't go to TED anymore, or just don't like it anymore. And I think my debacle became,

00:52:33.620 like, released pent-up anger of years. And I think he, that was quite unpleasant, but it can also be

00:52:44.660 an opportunity for him to course-correct. And I know he's invited Barry Weiss and Bill Ackman

00:52:50.480 and other people that might upset the same kinds of people that were upset with me.

00:52:54.720 Yeah, I think they, I think they're a bunch of TED fellows have, have resigned because of those

00:52:59.520 invitations. Yeah. Which might be a good thing. Yeah. But it's, again, it's worth reiterating,

00:53:04.700 literally like high 90 percentile of the audience appeared to be totally fine. Whether or not they

00:53:10.220 agreed with everything I said, they were not triggered, right? Like TED's audience is actually

00:53:17.520 way more open to, I think, all of these ideas than they might be stereotyped by people unfamiliar. It's

00:53:26.360 really the heckler's veto. It's a very small percentage of people that punch above their weight

00:53:32.440 and ought to be ignored. So where does DEI come into this? I'm not sure anyone listening to this

00:53:41.420 podcast thinks the ideological capture of our institutions has been exaggerated anymore. I mean,

00:53:46.880 we're now having this conversation in the aftermath of those disastrous hearings before Congress where

00:53:52.940 you had the presidents of, of Harvard and MIT and Penn unable to spell out what was wrong with

00:53:59.720 advocating for genocide against the Jews while having just, you know, merely, you know, weeks and months

00:54:07.080 prior defenestrated people for not admiring DEI policies or, or admitting that there are only two

00:54:15.840 biological sexes, et cetera. So we, we know that there's a fair amount of moral confusion in our

00:54:21.200 universities and that DEI has something to do with it, but it was up until that moment, it was still

00:54:27.460 very common to hear that all this concern about wokeism or identitarian moral confusion or DEI

00:54:36.500 overreach. All of this, it's just, it's just pure Republican hyperbole, right? It just, it's just not

00:54:42.660 a problem. It's just, it's exaggerated and it's, uh, I'm not detecting that anymore. So I mean, perhaps

00:54:50.060 you have a better sense of if there are any shades of skepticism on that point still remaining. What's

00:54:55.860 your sense of what DEI has done? And do you think the pendulum is in the process of swinging back

00:55:03.220 across all of our institutions? And now I'm thinking of, you know, major corporations and

00:55:08.960 universities and media properties. And, um, where do you think it should swing back to?

00:55:16.860 Yeah. So the original idea and the benign idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion,

00:55:22.760 the idea that say someone like my dad, a black man in corporate America would have meant by DEI

00:55:32.500 and say the nineties is like, say you're a boss of a company.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 11, 2024

#353 — Race & Reason

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